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More "Span" Quotes from Famous Books



... party being quickly organised under the indefatigable Jackson, the axe was called into use again and the remaining shrouds cut away, the fore and main-braces being passed round the stump of the foremast, which stood some twenty feet or so from the deck, in order to prevent the span from going adrift ...
— The White Squall - A Story of the Sargasso Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson

... of the vaulting. The spandrils throughout are relieved with trefoils and quatrefoils, deeply sunk and backed with Purbeck marble; and, on the whole, the contrast of light and shade, depth and projection, produces a very fine effect. The clerestory arches are of the same span, but each is divided into three smaller ones, the centre arch being higher than those on either side, in order to admit light through the windows behind, which are three lancet-shaped lights under one arch in the outer wall, and are, ...
— Ely Cathedral • Anonymous

... Eleatics he denies that the senses are an absolute test of truth. "For straitened are the powers that have been shed upon our frames, and many the frets that cross us and defeat our care, and short the span of unsatisfying existence wherein 'tis given us to see. Shortlived as a wreath of smoke men rise and fleet away, persuaded but of that alone which each has chanced to light upon, driven hither and thither, and vainly do they pray to find the whole. For this men may not see or hear or grasp ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall

... span as I've seen for a long time," said the elder Ben, as the children came trotting down the path hand in hand, with the four blue bows at the ends of their braids bobbing briskly up ...
— Under the Lilacs • Louisa May Alcott

... ends of the beam projected about thirty inches beyond the bridge at each side, and they supported braces which extended diagonally upward to the crossing ends of the spars. When this was done the temporary crosspiece above referred to was removed. As the span between the center cross beam and the banks was a little too long to provide a steady floor, a couple of intermediate cross beams were suspended from the inclined spars. The floor beams were then laid in place and covered with a ...
— The Scientific American Boy - The Camp at Willow Clump Island • A. Russell Bond

... stable,—not even values,—not even the concepts good and evil. He likens life unto a stream. But foot-bridges and railings span the stream, and they seem to stand firm. Many will be reminded of good and evil when they look upon these structures; for thus these same values stand over the stream of life, and life flows on beneath them and leaves them standing. When, however, winter comes and the stream gets frozen, many ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche

... dirl![77] Coffins stood round, like open presses, That shawed the dead in their last dresses; And by some devilish cantrip[78] slight, Each in its cauld hand held a light, By which heroic Tam was able To note upon the haly table A murderer's banes in gibbet airns;[79] Twa span-lang, wee unchristened bairns; A thief new-cutted frae a rape, Wi' his last gasp his gab[80] did gape; Five tomahawks, wi' bluid red-rusted; Five scimitars wi' murder crusted; A garter which a babe had ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various

... of being compelled to work. Ungka was in fact a baboon from the wilds of Sumatra. He had been caught young by a Malay lad, who sold him to Captain Van Deck. He was about two feet and a half high, and the span of his arms was four feet. His face was perfectly free from hair, except at the sides, where it grew like whiskers. It also rather projected over his forehead, but he had very little beard. His coat was jet black, as was the skin of his face. His hands ...
— Mark Seaworth • William H.G. Kingston

... roads. The neighbourhood seemed to breathe a tranquil prosperity. Red-cheeked emissaries of butcher, baker, and grocer, order-book in hand, knocked cheerily at kitchen doors, and went smiling away; the ponies they drove were well fed and frisky, their carts spick and span. The church of the parish, an imposing edifice, dated only from a few years ago, and had cost its noble founder a sum of money which any church-going parishioner would have named to you with proper awe. The population was largely female, and every shopkeeper who knew ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing

... flings himself upon its stream, and lives within its rhythm. The thesis which maintains the inevitable relativity of all human knowledge originates mainly from the metaphors employed to describe the act of knowledge. The subject occupies this point, the object that; how are we to span the distance? Our perceptory organs fill the interval; how are we to grasp anything but what reaches us in the receiver at the end ...
— A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson • Edouard le Roy

... grandfather, spick and span, clean shaved, hat brushed, white buckskin gloves, bamboo cane, brown great-coat, walking as upright and solemn as may be, having his lady ...
— The Second Funeral of Napoleon • William Makepeace Thackeray (AKA "Michael Angelo Titmarch")

... you, at least," he murmured as though to himself. He stood aside and waved a hand courteously, inviting us to pass. We crossed. At the base of the span one of ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt

... added to himself, as the professor was going down the stairs. "He is a span higher than I am, ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Italian • Various

... of the maidens tripped lightly down the span of the arch until near the very end, leaning over to observe the group below. She was exquisitely fair, dainty as a lily and graceful as a bough swaying in the breeze. "Why, it's Polychrome!" exclaimed Button-Bright in a voice of mingled wonder and delight. ...
— Sky Island - Being the further exciting adventures of Trot and Cap'n - Bill after their visit to the sea fairies • L. Frank Baum

... not. For life deals thus with Man; To die alone deceived or with the mass, Or disillusioned to complete his span. Thermopylae or Golgotha, all one, The young dead legions in the narrow pass; The stark black cross against the ...
— The Five Books of Youth • Robert Hillyer

... wrought for Right and Truth, For God and man, From the golden hours of bright-eyed youth, To life's mid-span?" ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans

... approve, And loudly boast discoveries not their own. Unnumbered accidents, and various ills, Attend thy pack, hang hovering o'er their heads, And point the way that leads to Death's dark cave. Short is their span; few at the date arrive Of ancient Argus in old Homer's song 180 So highly honoured: kind, sagacious brute! Not even Minerva's wisdom could conceal Thy much-loved master from thy nicer sense. Dying, his lord he owned, viewed him all o'er With eager eyes, then closed ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville

... a certain woman who did not pay due reverence to Mother Friday, but set to work on a distaff-ful of flax, combing and whirling it. She span away till dinner-time, then suddenly sleep fell upon her—such a deep sleep! And when she had gone to sleep, suddenly the door opened and in came Mother Friday, before the eyes of all who were there, clad in a white dress, and in such a rage! ...
— Russian Fairy Tales - A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore • W. R. S. Ralston

... agriculture are making increasing use of radioisotopes to improve manufacturing, testing, and crop-raising. Atomic energy has improved the ability of the healing professions to combat disease, and holds promise for an eventual increase in man's life span. ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various

... right to exist. We are getting free. We are thinking in every direction. We are investigating with the microscope and the telescope. We are digging into the earth and finding souvenirs of all the ages. We are finding out something about the laws of health and disease. We are adding years to the span of human life and we are making the world fit to live in. That is what we are doing, and every man that has an honest thought and expresses it, helps, and every man that tries to keep honest thought from being expressed is an obstruction and ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll

... who went to divide the property drove a span of mules out to the farm, but when he went to divide the seventeen into halves, thirds, and ninths he found it was impossible with live mules; mules not being very valuable, he unhitched one of his own, putting it with the other ...
— More Toasts • Marion Dix Mosher

... of black on the edge of the night sky? Were these the lofty arches of an immense bridge? What river did it span? Why was it broken down in parts? No, it was not a bridge, it was an ancient aqueduct. All around was the holy ground of the Campagna, and there, in the distance, the Albanian hills, and their peaks and the ...
— Dream Tales and Prose Poems • Ivan Turgenev

... with the duties behind the urn, and Ruth and Mollie in serge skirts and spick and span white blouses looked as fresh as paint, and a great many times as pretty. They were laughing and chatting with Victor Druce, who had donned Norfolk jacket and knickerbockers, and was quite the country gentleman both in appearance and in ...
— The Fortunes of the Farrells • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey

... of them," returned the Woodsman. "The nymph who cared for you as a mother seems now like a sister to you; by and by, when you grow old and gray, she will seem like a daughter. Yet another brief span and you will be but a memory, while ...
— The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus • L. Frank Baum

... days come back to me to-night Across the span of many happy years— Dreams, haunted by the music of the spheres, And glowing skies of gold and chrysolite. The world of science bursting on my sight, And words of wisdom falling on my ears, The rhythmic thought of poets, ...
— The Loom of Life • Cotton Noe

... An old and widowed man, Whose years had reached life's farthest, frailest span, And o'er whose head, as every moment flew, Eternity its dark'ning twilight threw, Lay in his silent chamber, dull and lone, Watching the midnight stars, as one by one They as slow, voiceless spirits glided past The window of his solitude, and cast Their pale light on his brow; ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume XXIV. • Revised by Alexander Leighton

... I was playing about indolently in the water, I heard the sound of hoofs and wheels on the bridge. I struck downstream and shouted, as the open spring wagon came into view on the middle span. They stopped the horse, and the two girls in the bottom of the cart stood up, steadying themselves by the shoulders of the two in front, so that they could see me better. They were charming up there, huddled together in the ...
— My Antonia • Willa Cather

... has a limited span and naught may avail to extend it. This is manifested by the impermanence of human beings. But yet whenever necessary I will hereafter make my appearance from time to time as a god, a sage, or a Buddha."—Last words of Shaka the Buddha, in ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis

... infinitely Edwards's inferiors in everything save lung-power, were spread with much din through many churches: pictures of an angry Moloch holding over the infernal fires the creatures whom he had predestined to rebel, and the statement that "hell is filled with infants not a span long," were among the choice oratorical outgrowths of this period. With these loud and lurid utterances went strivings after sacerdotal rule. The presbyter—"old priest writ large"—took high ground in all these villages: the simplest and most harmless amusements were denounced, ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White

... last scene; here Heavens appoint My pilgrimage's last mile; and my race, Idly yet quickly run, hath this last pace, My span's last inch, my minute's latest point, And gluttonous Death will instantly unjoint My body and soul, and I shall sleep a space: But my ever-waking part shall see that face Whose fear already shakes my every joint. Then as my soul to heaven, her first seat, takes flight, And ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan

... heart gave another great leap, as every boy's must on hearing that he is to see London for the first time. But here we all turned at a cry from Billy Priske, between whose planted ankles Master Fiennes had mischievously crept and was measuring the span between with extended thumb and little finger. My father stooped, haled him to his feet by the collar, and demanded ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine

... spotlessly clean apparition in blue without either waterproof or umbrella. I refer to Jane. She suddenly appeared, as I was passing The Ladies' Tea Association Rooms, walking in front of me. She looked just the same as when I last saw her—spick and span, and—dry. I repeat the word—dry—for that is what attracted my attention most. Despite the deluge, not a single raindrop touched her—the plumes on her toque were splendidly erect and curly, her shoe-buckles sparkled, her patent leathers were spotless, whilst the cloth of her coat ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell

... to be built in places where least expected, and sometimes the writer has been able to conveniently span the vein with an arch and avoid trouble; but where it cannot be conveniently arched over, it will be necessary to sheath pile for a trench and lay in broad sections of concrete until the space is crossed, the sheath piling being drawn and reset in sections as ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 497, July 11, 1885 • Various

... see 'em all down that man's throat." And says she, in still more bitter axents, "You will see four mules, and a span of horses, two buggies, a double sleigh, and three buffalo-robes. He has drinked 'em all up—and 2 horse-rakes, a cultivator, ...
— Sweet Cicely - Or Josiah Allen as a Politician • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)

... we travelled to Liverpool by the night mail, and how we embarked upon the steamer Gambia, it is unnecessary to relate in detail. Suffice it to say that within twenty-four hours of meeting the big negro we were safely on board the splendid mail-steamer where everything was spick and span. Kouaga had engaged a cabin for our exclusive use, and the captain himself had evidently ascertained that Omar was a person of importance, for in passing us on deck he paused to chat affably, and express a hope that we should find the voyage a ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux

... thought Roger, intending no disrespect. He loved his mother and appreciated her good qualities, but he saw the awful chasm between those two souls, which no ceremony of marriage could ever span. ...
— Flower of the Dusk • Myrtle Reed

... Unabridged makes these words almost synonymous, but 'era' usually connotes a span of time rather than a point in time. The {epoch} usage ...
— THE JARGON FILE, VERSION 2.9.10

... tweed caps they wore, they repacked their portmanteaus, watched a favourable opportunity, and slipped out of the hotel and proceeded to a quiet bye-street near the wharf. Here their macintoshes and veils disappeared into the river, and two spick and span young gentlemen emerged into the main thoroughfare again. The feeling was peculiar at first, but as no one appeared to take particular notice of them, they soon felt complete ...
— Australia Revenged • Boomerang

... really grown up, associating with men and doing a man's work. He had charge of the circulation—which is to say, he carried the papers. During the last year of the Mexican War, when a telegraph-wire found its way across the Mississippi to Hannibal—a long sagging span, that for some reason did not break of its own weight—he was given charge of the extras with news from the front; and the burning importance of his mission, the bringing of news hot from the field of battle, spurred him to endeavors ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine

... our mistakes is that we confuse life and lifetime, and construe life to mean the span of life. In this conception the unit of measurement is so large that our concept of life evaporates into a vague generalization. Life is too specific, too definite for that. The quality of life may better be measured and tested in one-hour periods of duration. When the clock strikes nine, ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson

... he to span the crocodile-infested waters? There was no canoe nearer than the Mosula village, and Paulvitch was none too sure that the Kincaid would still be at anchor in the river when he returned should he ...
— The Beasts of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... on, the sun glows and is gone, From span to span; The tides sweep scornfully the shore, as when The ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... Under this luminous span, or through it where the crossing gullies ran, Mary Anerley rode at leisure, allowing her pony to choose his pace. That privilege he had long secured, in right of age, and wisdom, and remarkable ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various

... half and the second half of Elizabeth's reign have not been deemed wide enough by the writer to justify separate treatment. The whole reign was a time when the superstition was gaining ground. Yet in the span of years from Reginald Scot to the death of Elizabeth there was enough of reaction to justify a differentiation of statistics. In both periods, and more particularly in the first, we may be sure that some of the records have been lost and that a ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein

... the unhygienic modes of living are undoubtedly greatly to shorten human life. Most other mammals live about five times the growing period. In man, this would mean that the normal life-span should be about a century and a quarter, an age which is now reached only in one case out ...
— How to Live - Rules for Healthful Living Based on Modern Science • Irving Fisher and Eugene Fisk

... desolation were very marked on the early afternoon of New Year's Eve which saw Varick striding up and down the deserted platform waiting for Dr. Panton, and Dr. Panton's inseparable companion, a big, ugly, intelligent spaniel called Span. ...
— From Out the Vasty Deep • Mrs. Belloc Lowndes

... removed from the old and narrow Bridge Street Station to the new palatial St. Enoch, and there a splendid set of offices was provided. This was another advantage much to my taste. St. Enoch was and is certainly a most handsome and commodious terminus. Originally it had one great roof of a single span, second only to that of St. Pancras Station. Other spans, not so great, have since been added, for the business of St. Enoch rapidly grew, and enlarged accommodation soon became necessary. In 1879 it had six long and spacious platforms, ...
— Fifty Years of Railway Life in England, Scotland and Ireland • Joseph Tatlow

... what have we not to undergo—to discover what water is, and to become capable of judging of Turner! It is a comfort, however, that he is likely to have but few judges. Graduate has courage to undergo any thing. Ariel was nothing in his ubiquity to him, though he put a span about the world in forty minutes; "but there was some apology for the public's not understanding this, for few people have had the opportunity of seeing the sea at such a time, and when they have, cannot face it. To hold by a ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various

... in the brief span of his administration. He was very tired. Almost his last words were, "Life is not worth living." Our public men need sympathy, not criticism. Macaulay, after all his brilliant career in Parliament, after being world-renowned ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage

... fish that had occurred in the neighborhood of Allahabad, India. It is said that the fish were of the chalwa species, about a span in length and a ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort

... crooked streets, the tall half-timbered houses with their many-dormered roofs, and there is the grey Minster, which has looked down on the city through all her fortunes. To the north lie the newer quarters of the town, spick and span, and to the south are great arsenals and barracks, guarded by a ...
— The Destroyer - A Tale of International Intrigue • Burton Egbert Stevenson

... Franklin stands preeminent in the interest which is aroused by a study of his character, his mind, and his career. One becomes attached to him, bids him farewell with regret, and feels that for such as he the longest span of life is all too short. Even though dead, he attracts a personal regard which renders easily intelligible the profound affection which so many men felt for him while living. It may be doubted whether any one man ever had so many, such constant, and such firm friends ...
— Benjamin Franklin • John Torrey Morse, Jr.

... the truth," he said, "you can spend your brief remaining span of life to better purpose than in a mad combat with one who has done you ...
— The Stowmarket Mystery - Or, A Legacy of Hate • Louis Tracy

... box down on the ground: it burst open with the shock, and out stepped a little old man. He was only one span high, but his beard was a span and a quarter long, and trailed ...
— Tales Of The Punjab • Flora Annie Steel

... glow came and stood in the air among the tamarinds, and there was nothing anywhere but luminous space and indolent stillness, and the wrangling and winging of crows. What persisted, then, under the span of the sky was the old India of rich traditions, and a thinking bullock beneath the yoke, jogging through the evening to his own place where the blue haze hid the little huts on the rim of the city, the real India, and the rest was fiction ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan

... days, how large the mind of man; A godlike force enclosed within a span! To climb the skies we spurn our nature's clog, And toil as Titans to ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle

... of those masters of violence, the princes and knights: it was what broke up the icefloes in that mighty deluge. Still, the chief aim of Christianity is not so much to make this life pleasant as to render us worthy of a better. It looks away over this span of time, over this fleeting dream, and seeks to lead us to eternal welfare. Its tendency is ethical in the highest sense of the word, a sense unknown in Europe till its advent; as I have shown you, by putting the morality and ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Religion, A Dialogue, Etc. • Arthur Schopenhauer

... private life, a condition of society implying so many discoveries and so long a practice in thought and handicraft, could not have been an early stage of existence. Long vistas are dimly visible into a past far vaster than the span as yet laid open to our view, and we long to pierce the tantalizing gloom. There, in that gloom, lurk the beginnings of the races whose high achievements we admire, emulate, and in many ways surpass; there, if we could but send a ray of light into the darkness of ages, ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin

... chin, behind the redoubtable Hercules. He had a bran-new hat on, a velvet-collared blue coat with metal buttons, that anywhere but in the searching glare and contrast of London might have passed for a spic-and-span new one; a small, striped, step-collared toilanette vest; and the aforesaid drab trousers, in the right-hand pocket of which his disengaged hand kept fishing up and slipping down an avalanche of silver, which made a pleasant ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees

... on the canal he met the consumptive man with the doll's face and the brimless hat coming towards him down the slope of the bridge with little steps, tightly buttoned into his chocolate overcoat, and holding his furled umbrella a span or two from him like a divining rod. It must be eleven, he thought, and peered into a dairy to see the time. The clock in the dairy told him that it was five minutes to five but, as he turned away, he heard a clock somewhere near him, but unseen, beating ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce

... considerable time after the tide had begun to flow, the artificers were occupied in removing the forge from the top of the building, to which the gangway or wooden bridge gave great facility; and, although it stretched or had a span of forty-two feet, its construction was extremely simple, while the road-way was perfectly firm and steady. In returning from this visit to the rock every one was pretty well soused in spray before reaching the tender at two o'clock p.m., ...
— Records of a Family of Engineers • Robert Louis Stevenson

... thousand cheerful omens give Hope of yet happier days, whose dawn is nigh: He who has tamed the elements, shall not live The slave of his own passions; he whose eye Unwinds the eternal dances of the sky, And in the abyss of brightness dares to span The sun's broad circle, rising yet more high, In God's magnificent works his will shall scan; And love and peace shall make their paradise ...
— The Growth of Thought - As Affecting the Progress of Society • William Withington

... is old and thou art young; the world is large and thou art small; Cease, atom of a moments span, To hold thyself ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton

... off. The longer she sat there the more that impression grew; he seemed so much and so naturally a part of the scene and one of the company. She was so emphatically not one of them, save by the merest accident and for an evening's span. The sense of difference and distance troubled her. She thought of Cecily alone at home, and grew more troubled still. She felt absurd too, because she had been trying to help Harry. If that had to be done, she supposed Lady Flora ...
— Tristram of Blent - An Episode in the Story of an Ancient House • Anthony Hope

... team hauling a cart laden with a printing press and a printer's outfit; following that are other ox teams hauling carts laden with tents and bedding, household goods, lumber, and provisions. A four-horse team hauling merchandise, and a span of mules hitched to a spring wagon come crashing up through the timber by the stream. Men and women are walking beside the oxen or the teams and are riding in the covered wagons. They are eagerly seeking something. It is the equality of opportunity that is supposed ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White

... indicates that a life membership in the society is almost an assurance that you will prolong your days. A list of deaths in the life membership roll published year by year would indicate that our life members are going to be with us far beyond the average span of human life. Since publishing a list of new life members in the February Horticulturist, there have been added to this life list five names: Tosten E. Dybdal, Elbow Lake, Minn.; Gust Carlson, Excelsior; A.N. Gray, Deerwood; ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various

... away. Eight or ten small boys—for by now the troupe had grown in number and in volume of noise—trailed along, keeping step with their elderly patron and advising him shrilly regarding the management of his refractory span. ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... but seen you my son's before I left the world! Yet, alas! our time here is so short that it matters little whether it be spent in joy or grief, provided it be spent in innocence and virtue. Mine has been a long life compared to many; but when I look back upon it, what a span it seems! And it is not the remembrance of its brightest days that are now a solace to my heart. Dearest Mary, if you live long, you will live to think of the sad hours you have given me, as the fairest, of perhaps, of many a happy ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier

... the span of the Coupee. How fervently he wished them three thousand—ay, three million! For every step accorded him a throb, and heart-throbs such as these are among ...
— Pearl of Pearl Island • John Oxenham

... land of generalities. I cannot tell you how often we have planned our arrival at the Monument: two nights ago, the 12th January, we had it all planned out, arrived in the lights and whirl of Waterloo, hailed a hansom, span up Waterloo Road, over the bridge, etc. etc., and hailed the Monument gate in triumph and with indescribable delight. My dear Custodian, I always think we are too sparing of assurances: Cordelia is only to be excused by Regan and Goneril in the same nursery; I wish to tell you that the longer ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson

... a whistle or drummin' a can, Seein' how far wi' his fingers can span: Breakin' a window wi' throwin' a stone, Then ligs it on Tommy, or Charley, or Jone; Mockin' a weaver when swingin' his spooils, Chief-engineer of a train made o' stooils; Last out o' bed, an' last in at neet— O! he's a imp ...
— Adventures and Recollections • Bill o'th' Hoylus End

... end as I began, as life begins and ends—with a woman. In a woman's arms we enter life; in a woman's arms we get the courage and strength to bear it; in a woman's arms we leave it. And as for the span between—the business, profession, career—how colorless, how meaningless it would ...
— The Plum Tree • David Graham Phillips

... plough, the loom, and the forge, are introduced on the banks of the Volga, the Oby, and the Lena; and the fiercest of the Tartar hordes have been taught to tremble and obey. The reign of independent Barbarism is now contracted to a narrow span; and the remnant of Calmucks or Uzbecks, whose forces may be almost numbered, cannot seriously excite the apprehensions of the great republic of Europe. [6000] Yet this apparent security should not tempt us to forget, that new enemies, and unknown dangers, may possibly arise ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon

... of one righteous man, The Church, our Zoar, shall abide, Till she abuse, so sore, her lengthened span, E'en Mercy's self her face must hide. Then, onward yet a step, thou hard-won soul; Though in the Church thou know thy place, The mountain farther lies—there seek thy goal, There breathe at large, ...
— The Christian Year • Rev. John Keble

... Man delved, and built, and span; Then wandered South and West The peoples Aryan, I journeyed in their van; The Semites, too, confessed,— From Beersheba to Dan,— ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various

... ended we could only judge by Boer movements. From Observation Hill I saw their ambulance waggons trekking heavy across the plain behind Rifleman's Ridge, then a bigger waggon, uncovered, drawn by a large span of oxen. There may have been a long gun in that waggon, its movements were so slow and cumbersome. Two ambulance waggons passed in the opposite direction, light and moving at ...
— Four Months Besieged - The Story of Ladysmith • H. H. S. Pearse

... that very reason, it may be half an eternity before the great circle of its scheme shall bring us the superabundant recompense for all these sorrows! But what the lover asked was such prompt consolation as might consist with the brief span of mortal life; the assurance of Hilda's present safety, and her restoration within that ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... though neither his profession nor his practice testify so much; he whose mind is possessed with prejudicate opinions against the truth, when convincing light is holden forth to him, looketh asquint, and therefore goeth awry; the pragmatical adiaphorist, with his span-broad faith and ell-broad conscience, doth no small harm—the poor pandect of his plagiary profession in matters of faith reckoneth little for all, and in matters of practice all for little. Shortly, if an expurgatory ...
— The Works of Mr. George Gillespie (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Gillespie

... in a former generation was changing to a public restaurant. A suspension bridge cobwebbed itself across the Schuylkill where that audacious arch used to leap the river at a single bound,—an arch of greater span, as they loved to tell us, than was ever before constructed. The Upper Ferry Bridge was to the Schuylkill what the Colossus was to the harbor of Rhodes. It had an air of dash about it which went far towards redeeming the dead level of respectable average which ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... personal touch, he had discouraged his agent and the farmers from coming to the conference, and passed the gate with the braced-up feeling of one who goes to an encounter. In that very spick-and-span farmyard ducks were swimming leisurely on the greenish pond, white pigeons strutting and preening on the eaves of the barn, and his keen eye noted that some tiles were out of order up there. Four o'clock! Ah, here was a fellow coming! And instinctively he crisped his hands ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... the suggestion of a home. The two brothers reentered the dug-out, and the men led their horses down to the creek for a drink. A span of poor old mules stood inside a wooden corral, a rickety wagon and a few rusty farming implements were scattered about, while over all the homestead was the blight of a ...
— Wells Brothers • Andy Adams

... into squares of 1 foot, so that there will be 8 feet between each column or pilaster, supposing we make them to stand on a square foot. Draw the first archway EKF facing us, and its inner semicircle gh, with also its thickness or depth of 1 foot. Draw the span of the archway EF, then central line PO to point of sight. Proceed to raise as many other arches as required at the given distances. The intersections of the central line with the chords mn, &c., will give the centres from which to ...
— The Theory and Practice of Perspective • George Adolphus Storey

... boughs; here you have all the fragrance of the briny ocean, mingling with the scent of a bank of violets, and wrapping the senses in Elysium; here you may never tire of an existence that presents never-ending charms, and that, in the full enjoyment of which, you may live far beyond the allotted span ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest

... feature is that of the mill floors, which should be laid on beams, generally of Southern pine, 12 x 14 inches, or two inches larger when required by unusual loads or longer span than twenty-two feet. These beams are placed from eight to ...
— The American Architect and Building News, Vol. 27, No. 733, January 11, 1890 • Various

... stairs with a lagging step. How brightly the afternoon sun had shone on Reggie, his fair, smooth hair, vivid necktie, the flower in his coat. How the brass harness had glittered, and Black Michael's satin coat had shone; how spick and span was Odgers, the groom, in his green and buff livery; what an air of wealth and well-being ...
— Mrs. Day's Daughters • Mary E. Mann

... have made no gain. It may be doubted if the professors, on the whole, rank quite so high to-day for originality and vigor of research as did their predecessors forty years ago. Wherein lies the secret, then, of this wonderful change wrought in the brief span of two generations, between 1770 and 1830, and amid the dire confusion of the great Revolution and the Napoleonic era? The change was twofold. It consisted, first, in allowing to the professor the free play of his individuality; second, in providing him with a properly ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various

... length, the western bay being the shorter. In the latter the arches which support its roof are, to the east and west, semicircular, while those to north and south are roughly elliptical, springing from the same level and rising to the same height as the semicircular arches, but being of shorter span. These elliptical arches extend to the outer walls of the church, thus partaking of the character of short ...
— Byzantine Churches in Constantinople - Their History and Architecture • Alexander Van Millingen

... the front room of the shanty. Four miles to the south, Ithaca, too, slept,—the wholesome sleep of a small country town, while Cayuga Lake gleamed and glistened in the moonlight, as if fairies were tumbling it with powdered fingers. Above both town and span of water, Cornell University loomed darkly on the hill, the natural skyline sharply cut by its towers ...
— The Secret of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White

... Hetty Freeman was known as one of the best housekeepers in Brewster, and no one had ever seen her looking other than "spick and span," as her husband often admiringly declared. Rose always said that she could tell just what part of the big house Aunt Hetty was in because she could hear her starched skirts rattle; and she realized that Anne's untidy appearance was a real trouble ...
— A Little Maid of Massachusetts Colony • Alice Turner Curtis

... colossal span of the mighty bridge; then for a little while Liberty towers above our passing,—seeming first to turn towards us, then to turn away from us, the solemn beauty of her passionless face of bronze. Tints brighten;—the heaven is growing a little ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn

... she is, and scorns to pass for more Well—be it so—let vile dissemblers hold Unenvied power, and boast their dear-bought gold; 340 Me neither power shall tempt, nor thirst of pelf, To flatter others, or deny myself; Might the whole world be placed within my span, I would not be that thing, that prudent man. What! cries Sir Pliant, would you then oppose Yourself, alone, against a host of foes? Let not conceit, and peevish lust to rail, Above all sense of interest prevail. Throw off, for shame! this petulance of ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill

... point on the route. One of the largest Customs stations in the province of Yuen-nan is here situated at the east end of a one-span suspension bridge, about one hundred and fifty feet in length. No ponies carrying loads are allowed to cross the bridge, the roads east of this being unfit for beasts of burden. There is then a fearful climb to a place called Teo-sha-kwan, ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle

... sails. The stars, each one, do seem to pause, affixed To the ethereal caverns, though they all Forever are in motion, rising out And thence revisiting their far descents When they have measured with their bodies bright The span of heaven. And likewise sun and moon Seem biding in a roadstead,—objects which, As plain fact proves, are really borne along. Between two mountains far away aloft From midst the whirl of waters open lies ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius

... your liver, that's the acid on a man, For it tries his hones, and seeks his marrow throngh. You have got the thought to comfort you that life is but a span, If Fritz squirts his loathly limelight ...
— 'Hello, Soldier!' - Khaki Verse • Edward Dyson

... Shakespeare (who died, of his own fruition, at the age of fifty-two, yet lived more than fifty thousand men, within his little span of life), when all the while I ought to be riding as hard as I can to Dulverton. But, to tell the truth, I could not ride hard, being held at every turn, and often without any turn at all, by the beauty ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore

... recommended by MR. G. SHADBOLT, both sides of the ass would be visible; both the boy's legs; and the drum would have two heads. This would be untrue, absurd, ridiculous, and quite as wonderful as Mr. Fenton's twelve-feet span ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 203, September 17, 1853 • Various

... determined to surround the hill and the river bank near it with a wall, so that it might never be possible for an enemy to destroy the mills, and crossing the river, to carry on operations with ease against the circuit-wall of the city. So they decided to span the river at this point with a bridge, and to attach it to the wall; and by building many houses in the district across the river they caused the stream of the Tiber to be in the middle of the city. So ...
— Procopius - History of the Wars, Books V. and VI. • Procopius

... house. Why, the best folks in town mostly does their own work; there's Mrs. Reid, so rich, just has a woman to do the charing; and Eelan—that's the beauty, you know—makes the pies and keeps the house spick-and-span. But you couldn't keep your own house clean, could you, sir?—let alone the meals; and you wouldn't live ...
— A Dozen Ways Of Love • Lily Dougall

... the board of health has been most commendable in this case. Beginning with a wager over the telephone that they would break quarantine in twenty-four hours, and ending with the attempt to span a twelve-foot gulf with a board, over which to cross to freedom, these shut-in society folk have shown characteristic disregard of the laws of the state. It is quite time to extend to the millionaire the same strictness that keeps the commuter at home for three weeks with the measles; that makes ...
— When a Man Marries • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... the dim lines of a road which ascended from the valley upon the further mountain, now scarcely visible because of the vegetation which grew luxuriantly on the hillsides, and he studied this approach to the castle most attentively—the straight reach of wall, built to span a branch of the gorge beyond, perhaps two hundred feet deep and six hundred wide. This was the main entrance to the castle, a narrow causeway, that terminated at the gate where he marked a drawbridge now raised, which hung by chains to the ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs

... left of Hovig after this span of time to be particularly offensive. The generator lay in a lower corner, half buried under other molded and unrecognizable debris. Dasinger uncovered it, feeling as if he were drowning in the invisible ...
— The Star Hyacinths • James H. Schmitz

... nothing can disturb me; and it is high time for me to be considering what I am to make of the remainder of my days. Too many of them have been wasted, too great a portion of my span has been sacrificed to vanities. One must not forget one is in a fair way to become a grandfather; it is plainly an urgent duty to reconcile oneself to that estate and cultivate its proper gravity and decorum. Yet a little ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance

... the form of the roof, all point to an origin in some southern forest-clad country, and strikingly corroborate the view derived from philology, that Greece was colonised from north-western India. But to erect columns and span them with huge blocks of stone, or marble, is not an act of reason, but one of pure unreasoning imitation. The arch is the only true and reasonable mode of covering over wide spaces with stone, and therefore, ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace

... with my partner at night talking of the start the next day, I began to feel not a fear but a certain respect for that narrow little path which was not an arm's span in width, but which was nearly eight hundred miles in length. "From this point, Burton, it is business. Our practice ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland

... and pure, should move O'er rifts of ruin deep and wide, When her hands should span with lasting love The chasms rent by ...
— Minnie's Sacrifice • Frances Ellen Watkins Harper

... Torley, and him they loved with an excess of tenderness and affection that could scarcely be blamed. The boy was handsome and manly, full of feeling, and possessed of great resolution and courage; all this, however, was ultimately of no avail in adding to the span of the poor youth's life. One day in the beginning of autumn, he overloaded himself with a log of fir which he had found in the moors; having laid it down to rest, he broke a blood-vessel in attempting to raise it to his shoulder the second time: he staggered home, related the accident as it had ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton

... on the old theory, recently developed before the Hellenic Society by Mr. JAY HAMBRIDGE, that certain formulae of proportions found in nature—notably in the normal ratio between a man's height and the span of his outstretched arms (2: [**square root] 5)—constituted the basis of symmetry in the art of the Greeks and, earlier, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. CLVIII, January 7, 1920 • Various

... and brass twinkle and wink in bright and shining splendour. The ropes of the traces—the last touch of pride in perfection this, surely—are scrubbed and whitened. The whole battery is as spick and span, as complete and immaculate, as if it were waiting to walk into the arena at the Naval and Military Tournament. Such scrupulous perfection on active service sounds perhaps unnecessary or even extravagant. But the teams, ...
— Between the Lines • Boyd Cable

... lay before them checkered off into squares by the irrigation ditches, level as a table. The long rows of cotton were five to ten inches high, and of a dark green colour. The stand on most of the fields was almost perfect. One Chinaman with a span of ...
— The Desert Fiddler • William H. Hamby

... increasing use of radioisotopes to improve manufacturing, testing, and crop-raising. Atomic energy has improved the ability of the healing professions to combat disease, and holds promise for an eventual increase in man's life span. ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Dwight D. Eisenhower • Dwight D. Eisenhower

... ridin' peaceful as could be to Spanish Falls. What do you mean by sayin' that, Jim Conley? But wait a minute! How does it happen that they were up near your dad's house? That certainly ain't on the road to Span—" ...
— Green Fancy • George Barr McCutcheon

... Lafontaine put on her kindliest smile as ushered in by the maid Mr. John C. Bedelle came magnificently into the room, spick and span, cool as the cucumber is credited to be at any temperature; an immaculate purple tie blooming under an unsullied collar, with only a slight pollen on the carefully-divided hair. How was she to know that, in five minutes, under the sting ...
— Skippy Bedelle - His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete - Man of the World • Owen Johnson

... Company. Here I got a fresh direction for Pilrig, my destination; and a little beyond, on the wayside, came by a gibbet and two men hanged in chains. They were dipped in tar, as the manner is; the wind span them, the chains clattered, and the birds hung about the uncanny jumping-jacks and cried. The sight coming on me suddenly, like an illustration of my fears, I could scarce be done with examining it and drinking in discomfort. And as I thus turned and turned about ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 11 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... rare August afternoon, were at the flag station to meet the "Wanderer"—the banker's private car, with a spick-and-span three-seated buckboard and a fast team of bays. Aboard the car were Alice and Margaret, Blakeman ...
— The Lady of Big Shanty • Frank Berkeley Smith

... always the whitest of doublets and a spotless apron, that denoted rather the miller, than the baker, he let bring, every morning about the hour that he expected Messer Geri and the ambassadors to pass by his door, a spick-and-span bucket of fresh and cool spring water, and a small Bolognese flagon of his good white wine, and two beakers that shone like silver, so bright were they: and there down he sat him, as they came by, and after hawking once or twice, fell a drinking ...
— The Decameron, Vol. II. • Giovanni Boccaccio

... Sophistry! in these behold the tools,[ca] The broken tools, that Tyrants cast away By myriads, when they dare to pave their way With human hearts—to what?—a dream alone. Can Despots compass aught that hails their sway?[cb] Or call with truth one span of earth their own, Save that wherein at last ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron

... fashionable life bore him far away from labour and thought. His work grew cold and colourless; and he betook himself with indifference to the reproduction of monotonous, well-worn forms. The eternally spick-and-span uniforms, and the so-to-speak buttoned-up faces of the government officials, soldiers, and statesmen, did not offer a wide field for his brush: it forgot how to render superb draperies and powerful emotion and passion. ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol

... short the span of human pride! Time flies, and hope's romantic schemes, are undone; Cosweller's coach, that carries four inside, Waits to take back the unwilling ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas

... officers who so love to see a ship kept spick and span clean; who institute vigorous search after the man who chances to drop the crumb of a biscuit on deck, when the ship is rolling in a sea-way; let all such swing their hammocks with the sailors; and they would soon get sick of this daily ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville

... are the empty hours. 'Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?' The hours when the mysterious sustaining and driving force is withdrawn, and a lassitude and despair comes over us like that of a deserted child: the hours when we feel we have reached the limit of service, when our brief span of usefulness is done. Had God brought him, John Hodder, to the height of the powers of his manhood only to abandon him, to cast him adrift on the face of the waters—led him to this great parish, with all its opportunities, only that ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... reached the house the front door was open, but nobody was to be seen. Bob and Jim, the two small boys, had not yet returned from seeing the gray span taken to the mill, and the women and girls had gone through ...
— Crowded Out o' Crofield - or, The Boy who made his Way • William O. Stoddard

... the Philosopher says (Phys. i, text. 37) that if from a finite magnitude a continual subtraction be made in the same quantity, it will at last be entirely destroyed, for instance if from any finite length I continue to subtract the length of a span. If, however, the subtraction be made each time in the same proportion, and not in the same quantity, it may go on indefinitely, as, for instance, if a quantity be halved, and one half be diminished by half, it will be possible to go on thus indefinitely, provided that what is subtracted in each ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas

... Polly, after the last scrap of the wonderful cake had disappeared, the dishes were cleared away, and Phronsie put to bed, and everything was spick-span once more, "I've just ...
— The Adventures of Joel Pepper • Margaret Sidney

... who survived him (living, I think, to be over ninety), was a woman of intellect and charm, and she retained her attractiveness to the end of her life. There are poets who are consumed early by their own fires, and others who are gently warmed by them beyond the common span of human existence, and Barry Cornwall was one of these, and transmitted his faculty, through sympathetic affection, to ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne

... the Eight Scholars spans the canal narrowly. On the gray stone of its arch are carvings in low relief, and the curve of its span is pleasing to the eye. No one knows how old is the Bridge ...
— Profiles from China • Eunice Tietjens

... of, and one that was known far and wide for its size and richness. Leaving his boy to work out of it a fortune for himself and his bride, the father retired to San Antonio, whither the friends and cronies of his early days were drifting. There he settled down and proceeded to finish his allotted span exactly as suited him best. The rancher's ideal of an agreeable old age comprised three important items—to wit, complete leisure, unlimited freedom of speech, and two pints of rye whisky daily. He enjoyed them all impartially, until, about a year before this story opens, he died ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach

... for I invented it myself.—Go to, sirrah, tell the king from me that, for his father's sake, Henry the Fifth, in whose time boys went to span-counter for French crowns, I am content he shall reign; but ...
— King Henry VI, Second Part • William Shakespeare [Rolfe edition]

... in whom he could confide to perform it with fidelity and courage, as it seemed next to an impossibility to go over from one island to the other in canoes, and yet there was no other resource. These canoes or boats are hollowed out of one single trunk, and are so shallow that the gunwale is not a span above water when they are loaded. Besides they must be tolerably large to perform that long passage, the small ones being more dangerous, and the largest too heavy and cumbrous ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. III. • Robert Kerr

... Palace is the Cathedral, built in the 11th cent., but repeatedly restored. The exterior and interior are of black and white marble in alternate bands. The faade consists of three large portals resting on spiral, plain, and twisted columns. The arch of the centre porch has an immense span, bordered by bold fascicled work, while over the doorway is the Martyrdom of St. Laurence in relief. In the interior there is a strange mixture of styles. The nave is separated from the aisles by sombre coloured pillars supporting pointed arches, over which runs a series of round-headed arches. ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black

... surreptitious pride that folks no longer eyed him with sly, amused, knowing smiles whenever he opened a newspaper. Perhaps some of their amusement had been the sight of a youngster struggling with a full-spread page, employing arms that did not quite make the span. But most of all he hated the condescending tolerance; their everlasting attitude that everything he did was "cute" like the little girl who decked herself out in mother's clothing from high heels and brassiere to evening gown, costume ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith

... literally, for there wasn't anything, at the time, to make me think of Cervantes. But I'd already noticed his hands, and I felt sure they weren't the hands of a laboring man. They were long and lean and finicky-fingered hands, the sort that could span an octave much better than they could hold a hayfork. And I decided to see him hoisted by his ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer

... heart alone a God proclaim! Blot revelation from the mind of man! Yea, let him not e'en Nature's features scan; There is within him a low voice, the same Throughout the varied scenes of being's span, That whispers, God. And doth not conscience speak Though sin its wildest force upon it wreak! Born with us—never dying—ever preaching Of right and wrong, with reference aye to Him— And doth not Hope, on toward the future reaching— The aspirations struggling ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various

... spick and span blue-checked bungalow apron, she stood at her window just as Dawn swept a brush of partially-hued color across the eastern horizon. Having had it in her mind when she went to bed the night before to arise early, she had of course awakened long before it was really time to get up ...
— Janice Day, The Young Homemaker • Helen Beecher Long

... And then, in the span of a few brief seconds, the hopes of both these men were shattered. The one forgot even his greed in the panic of terror—the other was plunged into total forgetfulness of the past by a jagged fragment of rock which gashed a deep cut upon ...
— Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... smiling fair, Spring from the couch of death to realms of air! Oh, thought accurst! that uncle, guardian, foe, Should join in one to strike the murderous blow. Ask we for tears from pity's sacred fount? "Forbear!" cries vengeance—"that is my account." There is a power—an eye whose light can span The dark-laid schemes of the vain tyrant, man. Lo! where it pierces through the shades of night, And all its hideous secrets start to light— In vain earth's puny conquerors heaven defy— Their kingdom's dust, and but ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various

... ye have thol'd the span,'" he said, leaning back wearily in the cab but taking care to give the conversation an abrupt turn before relapsing ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall

... close!" he was saying to himself, in that joy which was of his venturer's soul and knew not time or place. "Heart of my Life! What a close to a merry span!" ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe

... comes into existence without its own knowledge, and dies without its own consent, often against its own will. National life differs in no particular from individual, except in this, that it is spread over a longer span, but no nation can escape its inevitable term. Each, if its history be well considered, shows its time of infancy, its time of youth, its time of maturity, its time of decline, if its phases ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper

... turns of weal and woe Followed proud Tarquin still. Now right across proud Tarquin 365 A corpse was Julius laid; And Titus groaned with rage and grief, And at Valerius made. Valerius struck at Titus, And lopped off half his crest; 370 But Titus stabbed Valerius A span deep in the breast. Like a mast snapped by the tempest, Valerius reeled and fell. Ah! woe is me for the good house 375 That loves the people well! Then shouted loud the Latines; And with one rush they ...
— Narrative and Lyric Poems (first series) for use in the Lower School • O. J. Stevenson

... can get a room for the night in a vermin-infested lodging house, upon the additional payment of thirty cents. Now, this may seem exaggerated, but honestly, my boy, I have given you just about the course of action of these scientific philanthropic enterprises. They are spic and span as the quarterdeck ...
— Traffic in Souls - A Novel of Crime and Its Cure • Eustace Hale Ball

... had profoundly affected and strengthened her notion of remaining on the planet. Van Emmon, watching her narrowly, saw her give the room an appraising glance which meant, plain as day, "I'd like to keep this place in spick and span condition!" And another, not so easy to interpret: "I'd like to show these people a thing or two about designing houses!" And the geologist's heart ...
— The Lord of Death and the Queen of Life • Homer Eon Flint

... toward Mars. It reminds us that the world will not be the same for our children, or even for ourselves in a short span of years. The next man to stand here will look out on a scene different from our own, because ours is a time of change—rapid and fantastic change bearing the secrets of nature, multiplying the nations, placing in uncertain hands new weapons for mastery and destruction, shaking old values, and ...
— United States Presidents' Inaugural Speeches - From Washington to George W. Bush • Various

... twenty-fifth year—about three in the afternoon, by the clock, October Twenty-first, Eighteen Hundred Thirty-five. The day was Indian summer, warm and balmy. He sat there reading in the window of his office on Court Street, Boston, a spick-span new law-office, with four shelves of law-books bound in sheep, a green-covered table in the center, three armchairs, and on the wall a steel engraving ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard

... two stood fretfully debating, the door of the room again opened. There appeared an athletic, adventurous-looking officer in brilliant uniform who was smiling at something called after him from the antechamber. His blue coat was spick and span and very gay with double embroidery at the collar, coat-tails, and pockets. His white waistcoat and trousers were spotless; his netted sash of blue with its stars on the silver tassels had a look of studied elegance. The black three-cornered hat, broidered ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... the First gives an account of the dissection of two Raja's or Skates, and relates that the Author found in the bellies of these Fishes a Haddock of 11/2 span long, and a Sole, a Plaise, and nine middle-sized Sea crafishes; whereof not only the three former had their flesh, in the fishes stomack, turn'd into a fluid, and the Gristles or Bones into a soft substance, but the Crafishes had their shels comminuted ...
— Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society - Vol 1 - 1666 • Various

... were turned toward a lad who entered the room at that moment. It was Len Haley, attired in a brand new Christmas suit, and looking as spick and span as one could wish. ...
— Dorothy's Triumph • Evelyn Raymond

... a draught, good sir; its brevity Gives you and me our measures, and thereby Has docked your virtue to a tankard's span, And left of my ...
— Green Bays. Verses and Parodies • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... in London that have impressed us more than the fine, massive bridges which span the Thames, and are so crowded with foot passengers and carriages. Every boy who has read much has had his head full of notions about London Bridge; that is, old London Bridge, which was taken down about ...
— Young Americans Abroad - Vacation in Europe: Travels in England, France, Holland, - Belgium, Prussia and Switzerland • Various

... not be far out of the way when his master goes to dinner. Learn of him, you diminutive urchins, how to behave yourselves in your vocation: take not up your standings in a nut-tree, when you should be waiting on my lord's trencher. Shoot but a bit at butts; play but a span at points. Whatever you do, memento mori—remember to rise betimes ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various

... Note (2) is misleading; the reading of the 4to "flye-boat" is no doubt right. "Fly-boat" comes from Span. filibote, flibote—a fast-sailing vessel. The Dons hastily steer clear of ...
— Old English Plays, Vol. I - A Collection of Old English Plays • Various

... lies in the span of memory of "Aunt Ferebe" Rogers. The interviewers found her huddled by the fireside, all alone while her grandaughter worked on a WPA Project to make the living for them both. In spite of her ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Georgia Narratives, Part 3 • Works Projects Administration

... doublet, dyad, team, span, twain; twins. Associated Words: dual, duality, double, dualism, duplex, duplicate, duplication, bifarious, binary, dimidiate, dimidiation, duet, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming

... hot work, as the men of the 65th and Wheat's Tigers speedily found, crossing the wagon bridge over the Shenandoah! One span was all afire. The flooring burned their feet, flames licked the wooden sides of the structure, thick, choking smoke canopied the rafters. With musket butts the men beat away the planking, hurled into the flood below burning scantling and brand, and trampled the red out of the charring ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston

... time in years, but not enough of them," she said, irritated that I had asked her about her own span. I knew I shouldn't have said it. She had read her own future and found it wanting. "But death hovers close in it," she went on. "You know I don't get clear pictures, Lefty, just a feeling. Death is very, very close. ...
— The Right Time • Walter Bupp

... easy chair, smoking a cigar. He was a spare man of perhaps forty-five, with no intention of abandoning the pretensions to youth for many a year. In dress he was as spick and span as a tailor at the trade's annual convention. But he had evidently been "going some" for several days; the sour, worn, haggard face rising above his elegantly fitting collar suggested a moth-eaten jaguar that has been for weeks on ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips

... Candace, bobbing her own woolly head in a decided fashion. "Dear me! now I'm afraid I discomberated my turban, an' it's my spick an' span comp'ny one Mr. King give me for this yere berry occasion," and she put up both black hands to feel of it anxiously. Joel jumped to his feet and ran all around the big figure to get ...
— Five Little Peppers and their Friends • Margaret Sidney

... prayer, cringe to each ruler of the day. I care for Jove less than nothing; let him do, let him lord it for this brief span, e'en as he list, for not long shall he rule over the gods. But no more, for I descry Jove's courier close at hand, the menial of the new monarch: beyond all [doubt] he has come to announce ...
— Prometheus Bound and Seven Against Thebes • Aeschylus

... the others about him, and with a new vision saw them in the places they had occupied at home: father, husband, brother, son! His mind leapt the span of miles and looked in upon the anxious faces—hopeful, perhaps—of mothers, wives, sisters, daughters, who waited; and a new kinship sprang up within him for ...
— Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo Harris

... hitched to it, and beside him sat Mrs. Addcock in serene confidence in being driven by a man who could drive a bank and a post-office and a grocery. Mamie and Gertie Spain were spread out carefully on the back seat, with only one small masculine Spain for a wedge. The Buford buggy, all spick and span from its first spring washing and polishing, came next, with Mr. and Mrs. Buford cuddling together on the narrow seat. They were a bride and groom of very little over a year's standing, and the blue-blanketed ...
— The Golden Bird • Maria Thompson Daviess

... the Narcissus poeticus, massed together like packed figs; these, too, give out a pleasant perfume. But what strikes one most is the air of perfect repair and cleanliness of everything. No grimy walls, no soiled curtains, here; all is clean as a new pin, all is spick and span. The courtyard is shaded by orange trees covered with bloom, and the heavy odour of neroli pervades the place. Many of the last year's fruit have been left upon the trees for ornament, and hang in bright yellow clusters out of reach. A couple of widgeon sport upon the tank. ...
— A Ride to India across Persia and Baluchistan • Harry De Windt

... extensively patronised. The grazing was not nearly sufficient for the cattle, and from the first they must have suffered very much from want of nourishment. You will have heard of the fate of the eleven hundred head of oxen and the span of donkeys which we sent away from the camp in expectation of their reaching the Lower Tugela. They left us in charge of nineteen Kaffirs, but at the Inyezane they were attacked by a large body of Kaffirs. The natives in charge of the cattle decamped ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 1 (of 6) - From the Foundation of Cape Colony to the Boer Ultimatum - of 9th Oct. 1899 • Louis Creswicke

... Again the crash of glass, and again the dizzy ascent. Straight up the wall they crept, looking like human flies on the ceiling, and clinging as close, never resting, reaching one recess only to set out for the next; nearer and nearer in the race for life, until but a single span separated the foremost from the boy. And now the iron hook fell at his feet, and the fireman stood upon the step with the rescued lad in his arms, just as the pent-up flame burst lurid from the attic ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis

... the artist was surely right. His error lay in supposing that this age, more than any past or future one, is destined to see the tattered garments of Antiquity exchanged for a new suit, instead of gradually renewing themselves by patchwork; in applying his own little life-span as the measure of an interminable achievement; and, more than all, in fancying that it mattered anything to the great end in view whether he himself should contend for it or against it. Yet it was well ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... came on slowly toward him from the northward through the sage; the heads of the long-horned oxen swinging low from side to side before their heavy wooden yokes. The first span reached the solitary figure of the captain and went straight on south; the wagon rumbled by and Hunt knew by its passing that he must keep to the San ...
— When the West Was Young • Frederick R. Bechdolt

... as if the hour of death was fast approaching. "Here, then, (thought I,) after a short but ineffectual struggle, terminate all my hopes of being useful in my day and generation; here must the short span of my life come to an end." I cast (as I believed) a last look on the surrounding scene, and whilst I reflected on the awful change that was about to take place, this world with its enjoyments seemed to vanish from my recollection. ...
— Life and Travels of Mungo Park in Central Africa • Mungo Park

... an external, inhuman, unconscious process. Time is the frame of soul-life; outside this it has no existence. The entire cosmic process is the life-frame of the universal Soul, the Divine Logos. With this life we are vitally connected, however brief and unimportant the span and the task of an individual career may seem to us. If my particular life-meaning passes out of activity, it will be because the larger life, to which I belong, no longer needs that form of expression. My death, like my birth, will have a teleological ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge

... two fine stags not far from his camp almost as soon as he got there. He was within fifty yards of them as they were moving slowly in deep snow, and he killed them both; the best of these was a remarkably fine 10-pointer, length of horn 41 inches and span 38-1/2 inches. His wife spent an equal time in the same neighbourhood and ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne

... chime, prime time To go and see the Drury-Lane, Dane slain,— Or hear Othello's jealous doubt spout out,— Or Macbeth raving at that shade-made blade, Denying to his frantic clutch much touch;— Or else to see Ducrow with wide stride ride Four horses as no other man can span; Or in the small Olympic Pit, sit split Laughing at Liston, while you quiz his phiz. Anon Night comes, and with her wings brings things Such as, with his poetic tongue, Young sung; The gas up-blazes with its bright white light, And paralytic watchmen prowl, ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various

... South Central District was full of interest. Riding with Texas Joe in a light buckboard drawn by a span of lively broncos with El Capitan leading behind, she was as merry as a school-girl out for a long-talked-of holiday. The dark-faced old plainsman, whose iron will and marvelous endurance had brought his companions and the baby safely out of that land of ...
— The Winning of Barbara Worth • Harold B Wright

... of a correspondence with the stage Court of St. Germains; yonder mettle beauty sailed along on her high-heeled shoes to finish the night's triumph at an oyster supper in a den behind the Luckenbooths. And there again walked an imperial dowager, who still span her own linen and struck her serving-man with her ivory cane. Truly the old Edinburgh Assembly Rooms had their secrets, and contained exciting enough elements under their formal ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler

... stranger: life is—why therefore should not life be lengthened for a while? What are ten or twenty or fifty thousand years in the history of life? Why in ten thousand years scarce will the rain and storms lessen a mountain top by a span in thickness? In two thousand years these caves have not changed, nothing has changed but the beasts, and man, who is as the beasts. There is naught that is wonderful about the matter, couldst thou but understand. Life is wonderful, ay, but that it should be a little ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard

... went away from the Preston farm with the passengers going to Canada by the U.G. Railway The next morning I began the task of fitting yokes to my two span of heifers, and that afternoon, I gave Lily and Cherry their first lesson. I had had some experience in driving cattle on Mrs. Fogg's farm in Herkimer County, but I should have made a botch job of it if it had not been for Mr. Preston, ...
— Vandemark's Folly • Herbert Quick

... new, as one of the officers told Monsieur D. at Spa. Uniforms, boots, belts, saddles, bridles and even buttons—all new and spic and span for a triumphal entry into Paris. Each man carries two sets of buttons, one for field service (negligible) and the other, shining brass ones, for the ...
— Lige on the Line of March - An American Girl's Experiences When the Germans Came Through Belgium • Glenna Lindsley Bigelow

... gripped hands in a clasp of steel; for each of the four knew that these two unions were not passing fancies, lightly entered into and as lightly cast aside, but were true partnerships which would endure throughout the entire span of life. ...
— The Skylark of Space • Edward Elmer Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby

... his artist senses had been caught and tangled in its ebon sorcery. But down each side this broad brow was a rippling wave of gold, over each shoulder a heavy braid of gold that fell, straightened by its own weight, a span below the waist. The winds of the desert had roughened it and the bright threads made a nimbus about the head. Its glory overreached his senses and besieged his soul. Here ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller

... to sight in the distance, and his boat drifted further and further out upon the blue waters. Somehow, he knew not why, he felt unusually happy that morning; and he could not help wishing that, like the tortoise he set free the day before, he had thousands of years to live instead of his own short span of human life. ...
— Japanese Fairy Tales • Yei Theodora Ozaki

... his services in public, the more apparent is his devotion. It is a Roman-chariot-wheel idea, which degrades both the man and the woman in the eyes of the spectators. I wrote to Rachel, and said in the letter, "One horse in the span always does most of the pulling, you know, especially uphill." And Rachel wrote back, "Wouldn't I just like to drive this ...
— The Love Affairs of an Old Maid • Lilian Bell

... hour's ride by train. "Don't wait for me, Effi. I can't be back before midnight; it will probably be two o'clock or even later. But I'll not disturb you. Good-by, I'll see you in the morning." With that he climbed into the sleigh and away the Isabella-colored span flew through the city and across the country ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various

... the business. The shop wanted livening up with a coat of paint. He would put new shelves up, run a partition across, and dress the windows like the shops down town. In his eager thoughts he saw the dingy shop transformed under his touch, spick and span, alive with customers, who jostled one another as they passed in and out, the coin clinking merrily in ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone

... Yes—of course it will. Let me take the letter to show to my father. He will know what to do." She knew that her father's first thought might be to use the clue to catch the man, but she also knew he would not act upon it if his doing so was likely to shorten the span of life still left to old Maisie. "What was he like?" said she to ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan

... 1806 the choir was reduced, the transepts demolished, new and wider aisles built on each side of the nave, while the outer walls of the aisles were carried to such a height that the whole nave could be covered with a roof of one span, "thus totally eclipsing the beautiful windows in the nave, and covering up the handsome carved cornice of the nail-head quatrefoil description which ran under the eaves of the nave."[153] The cathedral was thus sadly deformed, but plans of restoration have been recently adopted, ...
— Scottish Cathedrals and Abbeys • Dugald Butler and Herbert Story

... according to the different Vedas, which they especially study. It is held that the ancient Rishis or saints, like the Jewish patriarchs, lived far beyond the ordinary span of existence, and hence had time to learn all the Vedas and their commentaries. But this was impossible for their shorter-lived descendants, and hence each Veda has been divided into a number of Shakhas or branches, and the ordinary Brahman only learns one Shakha of one Veda. Most Brahmans of the ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell

... Fanny expends herself in phrases that can only be justified by her romantic nature. Mary reserves a portion of your silk, not to be buried in (as the false nuncio asserts), but to make up spick and span into a bran-new gown to wear when you come. I am the same as when you knew me, almost to a surfeiting identity. This very night I am going to leave off tobacco! Surely there must be some other world in which this unconquerable purpose shall be realized. The soul hath not her generous aspirings ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb

... the right, Ye who cherish honor bright, Ye who worship love and light, Choose your side to-day. Succor Freedom, now you can, Voting for an honest man; Or you may from Slavery's span, Pick a ...
— The Liberty Minstrel • George W. Clark

... Annot loudly. "Give me a young girl who is industrious and honest. My Margot is better provided for than Laure Giraud was before her marriage; but her hands are not white, nor is her waist but a span around. She has too much work to do. She is not a tall, white, swaying creature who is too good to churn and tend the creatures who give her food. I have heard it said that Laure would have worked if her mother had permitted ...
— Mere Girauds Little Daughter • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... he had suffered enough already, poor devil! The result of loving for the last time, with no hope of possession, might fling him from Parnassus into the Inferno, where he would roast in unproductive torment for the rest of his mortal span. Even that might not be for long. He looked frail enough beside these fresh young English sportsmen, or even the high-coloured ...
— The Gorgeous Isle - A Romance; Scene: Nevis, B.W.I. 1842 • Gertrude Atherton

... the train; but each father drove his own family team. We little folk sat in the wagons with our dolls, watching the huge white-covered "prairie schooners" coming from Santa Fe to Independence for merchandise. We could hear them from afar, for the great wagons were drawn by four or five span of travel-worn horses or mules, and above the hames of each poor beast was an arch hung with from three to five clear-toned bells, that jingled merrily as their carriers moved along, guided by a happy-go-lucky driver, usually singing or whistling a gleeful tune. Both man and beast looked ...
— The Expedition of the Donner Party and its Tragic Fate • Eliza Poor Donner Houghton

... flights. On each landing she paused more for tears than for breath. At a rear door leading off the second landing she knocked softly, but with insistence. It opened to a slight crack, then immediately swung back full span. ...
— Every Soul Hath Its Song • Fannie Hurst

... very unlike their spick and span neighbours of Alsace, visited by me two years before. Why Catholic villages should be dirty and Protestant ones clean, I will not attempt to explain. Such, however, is the case. As we drove through the line of dung-heaps and liquid manure rising above what looked like barns, I was ill-prepared for ...
— East of Paris - Sketches in the Gatinais, Bourbonnais, and Champagne • Matilda Betham-Edwards

... there were indeed, frequent pauses during which the Indian's keen hearing was strained for an expected sound. After each such halt Pedro would resume his path, climbing over rocks which looked insurmountable and skirting others by ledges less than a span's width. Over this part of the canyon wall none of the Sobrante ranchmen had ever come; though below it, along a smoother portion, ran the flume that watered ...
— Jessica, the Heiress • Evelyn Raymond

... 2 A span is all that we can boast, An inch or two of time; Man is but vanity and dust In all his ...
— The Psalms of David - Imitated in the Language of The New Testament - And Applied to The Christian State and Worship • Isaac Watts

... basis of just time for a glimpse and a few sketches—how long it would take us to wander through the Riviera. Reserving March and April each year, we discovered that the allotted three score and ten, seeing that we had already come to half the span, would be inadequate. And there were other parts of the world! So we decided to see what we could, eschew the "day excursions," draw on the memories of former years, and let it go at that. Grande Corniche and Moyenne Corniche would be explored ...
— Riviera Towns • Herbert Adams Gibbons

... eastward from Indianapolis. I had made up my mind that Washington should be the objective point. For my main purpose—to secure the building of a memorial highway—Congress, I felt, would be a better field to work in than out on the hopelessly long stretch of the trail, where one man's span of life would certainly pass before the work could be accomplished. But I thought it well to make a campaign of education to get the work before the general public so that Congress might know about it. Therefore a route was laid out to occupy the time until the first of December, ...
— Ox-Team Days on the Oregon Trail • Ezra Meeker

... Females are too apt to be struck with Images of Beauty; and that the Passage where the Gentleman is said to span the Waist of Pamela with his Hand, is enough to ruin a ...
— Samuel Richardson's Introduction to Pamela • Samuel Richardson

... boring to be very thin, and the presence of the subway overhead caused some anxiety. The excavation was at first taken out to practically full width and timbered, but the rock became so treacherous that the heading was narrowed to a width sufficient for one tunnel only. With this span the rock in the roof held without timbering. As the masonry lining approached, sufficient trimming was done to permit the placing of the core-wall and one arch. Above the completed core-wall and brick arch the voids were filled solid with rubble ...
— Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, Vol. LXVIII, Sept. 1910 • James H. Brace and Francis Mason

... by with Granger as would a century with normal men, except that in the entire span of those hundred years there had been no summer. In them he had lived through and remembered every emotion which had ever come to him. His brain was confused with remembering, fevered with anguish of regret for things lost, which would never come again. ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson

... monster spirals of the hue of storm, with flaring sweeps at top and bottom that welded roof and floor into one terrific whole. Sheer from side to side stretched that portentous level cloud; it was a span of an epoch; and on either side it was rooted in those awful columns, seemingly alive, as though ready at any instant to suck up the earth ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint

... party and the Progressive movement were two things. The one was born on a day, lived a stirring, strenuous span of life, suffered its fatal wound, lingered on for a few more years, and received its coup de grace. The other sprang like a great river system from a multitude of sources, flowed onward by a hundred channels, always converging and uniting, until a single mighty stream emerged ...
— Theodore Roosevelt and His Times - A Chronicle of the Progressive Movement; Volume 47 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Harold Howland

... ridges were not all Dan had to show us. Twice in our thirty-five miles of the Roper—about ten miles apart—wide-spreading rocky arches completely span the river a foot or so beneath its surface, forming natural crossing-places; for at them the full volume of water takes what Dan called a "duck-under," leaving only smoothly flowing shallow streams, a couple of hundred yards wide, running over the rocky bridgeways. The first "duck-under" ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn

... outside the meetinghouse, for the girl seemed genuinely loved by all who knew her—too much loved, her companion thought, by certain spick-and-span young men of Brampton. But they ate the lunch Cynthia had brought, far from the crowd, under the trees by Coniston Water. It was she who proposed going to the base-ball game, and the painter stifled a sigh and acquiesced. Their way brought them ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... manner, taking care that posts on straps are in proper position relative to group in adjoining cell, so that cell connectors will span properly. Eveready batteries use a right and left hand strap for both positive and negatives, making it necessary to use only one length ...
— The Automobile Storage Battery - Its Care And Repair • O. A. Witte

... skirted a little cove where, hundreds of feet below, the fishermen sat before their tiny huts busily mending their nets. From that distance the boats drawn upon the sheltered beach seemed like mere toys. Then they would span a chasm on a narrow stone bridge, or plunge through an arch dividing the solid mountain. But ever the road returned in a brief space to the edge of the sea-cliff, and everywhere it was solid as the hills themselves, and seemingly ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces Abroad • Edith Van Dyne

... needs, occasionally, hardened him, as his earlier experiences had hardened him, toughened him for the struggles to come, brought to him that which is good for all youth—realization that life is not a mere span of days with sweets and comforts for the asking, but a time of struggle, a battle for supremacy, and it is only through the battle that one grows fit and ever more fit for the ...
— Bred of the Desert - A Horse and a Romance • Marcus Horton

... I wonder! Chick, look a-thar: them little stripes and stars. I heerd a feller onct, down to the store,— a dressy mister, span-new from the city— layin' the law down: "All this stars and stripes," says he, "and red and white and blue is rubbish, mere sentimental rot, spread-eagleism!" "I wan't' know!" says I. "In sixty-three, I knowed a lad, named ...
— The Atlantic Book of Modern Plays • Various

... to come and scrub; we pulled out pots and pans, stove-polish and dish-towels, napkins and odd stockings missed from the wash; we cleared every corner, and had every box and bottle washed; then we left everything below spick and span, so that it almost tempted us to stay even there, and sent for the sheet-iron man, and had the stove taken up stairs. We only carried up such lesser movables as we knew we should want; we left all the accumulation behind; we resolved to begin life anew, and feel our way, and ...
— We Girls: A Home Story • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney

... smothered, at least, in respectable mud, Where the divers of Bathos lie drowned in a heap, And Southey's last Pan has pillowed his sleep; That Felo de se who, half drunk with his Malmsey, Walked out of his depth and was lost in a calm sea, 10 Singing "Glory to God" in a spick and span stanza, The like (since Tom Sternhold ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron

... sweet memories are frequently nothing more or less than outbursts of hidden passion and attacks of sensual love. Seume is mistaken in his assertion that mysticism lies mainly in weakness of the nerves and colic—it lies a span deeper. ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden

... seemed to breathe a tranquil prosperity. Red-cheeked emissaries of butcher, baker, and grocer, order-book in hand, knocked cheerily at kitchen doors, and went smiling away; the ponies they drove were well fed and frisky, their carts spick and span. The church of the parish, an imposing edifice, dated only from a few years ago, and had cost its noble founder a sum of money which any church-going parishioner would have named to you with proper awe. The population was largely female, and every shopkeeper who knew ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing

... stone lions. At one end is a tunnel, 383 yds. long, constructed by Adam Clark in 1854, which pierces the castle hill and connects the quarter known as the Christinenstadt with the Danube. The other suspension bridge is the Schwurplatz bridge, completed in 1903, 56 ft. broad, with a span of 317 yds. The other bridges are the Margaret bridge, with a junction bridge towards the Margaret island, the Franz Joseph bridge, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various

... composed of valiant soldiers, it was ill commanded, and, therefore, unfit to meet such a master of war as Napoleon. Two battles were fought at Jena and Auerstadt, by which the Prussian power was overthrown; more than 50,000 men were slain. These battles were followed by the capture of Erfurt, Span-dau, Potsdam, Berlin, Luben, Stettin, Kuestrin, Hameln, Nienburg, and Magdeburg; and by victories over Prince Hohenlohe, near Prenzlow; and over the reserve army of Brucher, towards the lower Elbe. Within six weeks after the battle of Jena, all the country, from the Rhine to the other ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan

... and varied life," if the experience derived from it is to have expression in the drama, is only to have the richer resource in "remarks about morals." If this is perverted under any self- conscious notion of doing something spick-and-span new in the way of character and plot, alien to all the old conceptions, then we know our writers set themselves boldly at loggerheads with certain old-fashioned and yet older new-fashioned laws, which ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp

... man Who used to pilgrim to your gate, At whose smart step you grew elate, And rosed, as maidens can, For a brief span. ...
— Late Lyrics and Earlier • Thomas Hardy

... hurled after me a belaying pin and this, catching me on the thigh, staggered me so that I should have fallen but for the rail; so there clung I in a smother of sweat and blood while great moon and glittering stars span dizzily; but crouched before me on his hams, almost within arm's reach, was this accursed negro who gaped upon me with grinning teeth and rolled starting eyeballs, his breath coming in great, hoarse gasps. And I knew great ...
— Martin Conisby's Vengeance • Jeffery Farnol

... me. I can transport thee, O, to a paradise To which this Canaan is a darksome span. Beings shall welcome, serve thee, lovely as angels; The elemental powers shall stoop, the sea Disclose her wonders, and receive thy feet Into her sapphire chambers; orbed clouds Shall chariot thee from zone to zone, while earth, A dwindled, islet, floats beneath thee. Every Season ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin

... magnifies our activity: man is multiplied into the sum of all. This deed, this breath dilates to the proportions of Spirit, and upheaves the low roof of Time, which is no sky for the soul. Life becomes awful by its reaches: its span from zenith to nadir, by moral parallax. From gods we sound down to beasts and devils, from sky and fire to ice and mud. Here are the true and final spaces: in their startling contrast appears the grandeur of the moral ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various

... all the states I visited, I do not now remember a single instance of cruel treatment. Indeed, I remember of seeing but one nigger struck, during my whole journey. There was one instance. We were riding in the stage, pretty early one morning, and we met a black fellow, driving a span of horses, and a load (I think he said) of hay. The fellow turned out before we got to him, clean down into the ditch, as far as he could get. He knew, you see, what to depend on, if he did not give the road. ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society

... and took a key from a box. "I'll show you your locker," he said; and presently Bonbright, minus his coat, was incased in the uniform of a laborer. Spick and span and new it was, and gave him a singularly uncomfortable feeling because of this fact. He wanted it grimed and daubed like the overalls of the men he saw about him. A boyish impulse to smear it moved him—but he was ashamed to ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland

... never see another sunrise," he said to Fritz, as the latter walked up to him; "my span of life will be cut ...
— French and English - A Story of the Struggle in America • Evelyn Everett-Green

... each, elevated about 150 feet above high-water level, so that the largest ships may pass under. The proposed Roebling bridge over the East River, between New York and Brooklyn, is to have a single span of 1,600 feet. ...
— Scientific American, Vol. 17, No. 26 December 28, 1867 • Various

... feet. Along the broad, white road, with its rows of poplars on either side, came a troop of cent-gardes, spick and span in their brilliant uniforms, their cuirasses blazing in the sunlight, and immediately behind them rode the Emperor, accompanied by his staff, in a wide open space, followed by ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola

... supper, a pipe full of tobacco and a restful evening, however, restored him, especially as Shismakoff made his appearance all spick and span after his day's work on the water. The recital of his adventures with a school of whale in mid-ocean, and the capture of one of them, occupied a good share of the evening. Eyllen's father asked many questions relative to the subject. ...
— The Trail of a Sourdough - Life in Alaska • May Kellogg Sullivan

... side of the house was a great stone bridge, of lofty span, stretching across a little glen, in which ran a brown stream spotted with foam—the same that entered the frith beside the Seaton; not muddy, however, for though dark it was clear—its brown being a rich transparent ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald

... got a dense crowd huddled in panic and confusion between them and the shore. Now watch them narrowly. As each monstrous bill opens, the thin bones of the lower jaw stretch sideways to the breadth of a span by some curious mechanism not described in the books, and at the same time the shrunken bag expands into a deep, capacious net. Simultaneously the whole instrument is plunged into the struggling, silvery mass and comes up full. The side bones instantly contract ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)

... these sins, I am a saintly man, And live like other saints on prayer and praise, My long face longer, if life be a span, Than any two lives in ...
— Pipe and Pouch - The Smoker's Own Book of Poetry • Various

... Resembling in shape the beautiful buds of the lotus, these thy breast, O thou of fair eye-brows, are even as the whips of Kama that are urging me forward, O thou of sweet smiles. O damsel of slender waist, beholding that waist of thine marked with four wrinkles and measuring but a span, and slightly stooping forward because of the weight of thy breasts, and also looking on those graceful hips of thine broad as the banks of a river, the incurable fever of desire, O beauteous lady, afflicteth me sore. The flaming fire ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli

... think, if all the men in Paris should try to fit their fingers in those finger marks, there would be only two or three who could reach the extraordinary span of ...
— Through the Wall • Cleveland Moffett

... had lasted for an eon, he thought. He had a sense of the passage of an enormous span of time when he at last awoke. His vision was fuzzy, but there was no mistaking ...
— The Memory of Mars • Raymond F. Jones

... sense and spiritual truths together in a way that helps people for the span of life they live in this world, for the eternal life beyond. He never forgets the soul and its needs. That is his foremost thought. But he recognizes also that there is a body and that it lives ...
— Russell H. Conwell • Agnes Rush Burr

... falls that stately Cedar; while it stood That was the onely glory of the wood; Great Charles, thou earthly God, celestial man, Whose life, like others, though it were a span; Yet in that span, was comprehended more Than earth hath waters, or the ocean shore; Thy heavenly virtues, angels should rehearse, It is a theam too high for humane verse: Hee that would know thee right, then let him look Upon thy rare-incomparable book, And read it or'e; which if he ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, No. - 480, Saturday, March 12, 1831 • Various

... upon the building and beacon a considerable time after the tide had begun to flow, the artificers were occupied in removing the forge from the top of the building, to which the gangway or wooden bridge gave great facility; and, although it stretched or had a span of forty-two feet, its construction was extremely simple, while the road-way was perfectly firm and steady. In returning from this visit to the rock every one was pretty well soused in spray before reaching the tender at two o'clock p.m., ...
— Records of a Family of Engineers • Robert Louis Stevenson

... by the wheel team, six men in each wagon, and as they successively reached the other side of the channel the mules were unhitched, the pole of each wagon run under the hind axle of the one just in front, and the tailboards used so as to span the slight space between them. The plan worked well as long as the material lasted, but no other wagons than my twenty-five coming on the ground, the work stopped when the bridge was only half constructed. Informed of the delay and its cause, in sheer desperation I finished the bridge by taking ...
— The Memoirs of General Philip H. Sheridan, Vol. I., Part 3 • P. H. Sheridan

... did not alter his title. He was always spoken of as Ulf of Romsdal. He and his old enemy Haldor the Fierce speedily became fast friends; and so was it with their wives, Astrid and Herfrida, who also took mightily to each other. They span, and carded wool, and sewed together oftentimes, and discussed the affairs of Horlingdal, no doubt ...
— Erling the Bold • R.M. Ballantyne

... a little span as I've seen for a long time," said the elder Ben, as the children came trotting down the path hand in hand, with the four blue bows at the ends of their braids bobbing ...
— Under the Lilacs • Louisa May Alcott

... Jack, Rose and me. We children have been busy all our lives trying to get educated, so we could keep mother in luxury after a while. In the meantime, she had done with bare necessities, for the life-insurance father left wasn't large enough to take any liberty with. Mother has things spick and span. No palace could be more beautifully kept than our home, but the furnishing is ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various

... hose to the fire hydrant, and industriously washed, scrubbed, and holystoned the decks and cleaned paintwork for an hour, after which the planks were thoroughly squeegeed and dried. Then all hands went to work to polish brasswork until eight bells, by which time the ship looked as spick and span as if she had been kept under ...
— The First Mate - The Story of a Strange Cruise • Harry Collingwood

... days so divine, Around which the heart-strings all tenderly twine, When with sapling pole and a painted cork We fished up and down the old Hanging Fork— From the railroad bridge, with its single span, Clear down to the mill at Dawson's old dam— From early morn till the shades of night, And it made no difference if fish ...
— The Old Hanging Fork and Other Poems • George W. Doneghy

... rode up at a gallop. "Sorry I couldn't come before, but I was over at Thomson's borrowing a new trolling spoon," he said. "Jimmy's too slow for anything, and I had to look at a span of oxen he'd ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss

... he felt as if the deluge had come again, with some new and harrowing accompaniments, in which woman's rights and demands were prominent. Then, on the fifth, they rested from their labors in the clean, soap- charged atmosphere—walking gingerly over spick and span carpets, laying each book and paper demurely in place, and gazing, at a proper distance, through diamond-bright windows; and on the sixth ...
— Sara, a Princess • Fannie E. Newberry

... simplest, oldest thing in the way of news that there is, seemed to him never to have been told to anyone before—never, at least, to have been so wonderful. All the beauties of Cloom, of life, all the trouble his own short span had felt, all the future held, seemed to fall into place and be made worth while. This was what he had lived for without knowing it—not to make Cloom finer for himself, not to save his own soul or carve out a life for himself, but this—to make of himself this mysterious immortality. Always ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse

... then. He recked nought of minutes or hours, nought of day or of night. Subconsciously, he still paused often to make sure that the east lay straight before him; but the activities of his mind now were become focused on the ceaseless counting of the matches that measured his span of life. And, as one after another served his need of warmth in the kindling of a fire, so his high courage dwindled steadily, until, when but a single splinter of the precious wood was left him, he gave over the last pretense of bravery, ...
— The Wilderness Trail • Frank Williams

... not, like his fellows, bring to the decision the interests and apprehensions of a father. While those of you who have passed your prime must congratulate yourselves with the thought that the best part of your life was fortunate and that the brief span that remains will be cheered by the fame of the departed. For it is only the love of honour that never grows old; and honour it is, not gain, as some would have it, that rejoices the heart of ...
— The Wrack of the Storm • Maurice Maeterlinck

... must endeavour to grasp Michelangelo's work in the Sistine as a whole, although it was carried out at distant epochs of his life. For this reason I have thrown these sentences forward, in order to embrace a wide span of his artistic energy (from May 10, 1508, to perhaps December 1541). There is, to my mind, a unity of conception between the history depicted on the vault, the prophets and forecomers on the pendentives, the types selected for the spandrels, and the final spectacle of the day ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds

... Heaven, beckoning him onward to his native land in the north, there to avenge his father's death, to reconquer his realm, and to reign as the first truly Christian King of Norway. And yet as his vessel sailed on, plunging through the dashing foam, with her prow rising and falling within the wide span of that great rosy arch, strange doubts came over him, the old beliefs still lingered in his mind, and he began to think that perhaps his new learning was false, that Thor might after all be supreme in the world, and that ...
— Olaf the Glorious - A Story of the Viking Age • Robert Leighton

... him by a little span, Two eagle cousins, generous, reckless, free, Two Grenfells, lie, and my Boy is made man, One with ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse

... where freedom is, Where God is God, and man is man? Doth he not claim a broader span For the soul's love of home than this? Oh, yes! his fatherland must be As the blue heaven wide ...
— Eighth Reader • James Baldwin

... brevity of the individual span, seeing that the generations, the centuries, and the worlds themselves are but occupied forever with the ceaseless reproduction of the hymn of life, in all the hundred thousand modes and variations which make up the universal symphony? The motive is always the ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... writers as an essentially simian characteristic, especially in the case of the pygmy blacks of Central Africa. With the Aeta this characteristic is not so marked, yet 7 out of 8 males had a reach or span greater than the height. The proportion was not so large among the females, being only 2 in 3. The maximum span for males was 1,635 millimeters, for females 1,538 millimeters, but in neither case did the individuals ...
— Negritos of Zambales • William Allan Reed

... rushed into each other's arms and the two men silently gripped hands in a clasp of steel; for each of the four knew that these two unions were not passing fancies, lightly entered into and as lightly cast aside, but were true partnerships which would endure throughout the entire span of life. ...
— The Skylark of Space • Edward Elmer Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby

... ground and the walls. It was as if the overhanging earth had burst and hurled itself down. Part of the armor-plate of beams collapsed, enlarging the hole that already pierced the cavern. Another shock—another pulverized span fell in roaring destruction. The corpse of the great Red Cross sergeant went rolling against the wall like the trunk of a tree. All the timber in the long frame-work of the cave, those heavy black vertebrae, ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse

... not burned out the torch of that brilliant intellect at the early age of thirty-eight. What poems he might have written—he who did immortal work with all his drawbacks—had he kept his brain clear and his life sweet even for the short span of life allotted him! How high might he have soared in the years which he might have hoped from life, had he but moved at a slower pace, in those reckless years, the record of which is so painful to the great world of admiring and pitying friends, ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold

... Entraygues, and, as in the case of the one at Estaing, it is now used as a convent and school. The archaeologist will find perhaps more to interest him in the two thirteenth-century bridges which span the Lot and the Thuyere, both noble specimens of ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker

... tidy housekeeper. The floor was dirty—very dirty—and was never slicked up from one week's end to another. But then, Solomon didn't mind. He was used to it. Mrs. Otus was just like his own mother in that respect; and it might have worried him a great deal to have to keep things spick and span after the way he had been brought up. Why, the beautiful white eggshell he hatched out of was dirty when he pipped it, and never in all his growing-up days did he see his mother or father really clean house. So it is no wonder he was ...
— Bird Stories • Edith M. Patch

... influenced the swamp boy; who was fearful lest some harm befall the new-found friend who had become so dear to him, even though a span of a day would cover ...
— Chums in Dixie - or The Strange Cruise of a Motorboat • St. George Rathborne

... were at our work in the bush. Grannie was left alone. She had moved her wheel to the door to sit in the sunshine, where she could see the brightness of the trees and enjoy the calm that prevailed. How long she span we do not know. On Ailie's return she was startled at the sight of her bending over the wheel. She was dead. While stooping to join a broken thread God took her. Next day buried her on a rising bit of ground overlooking the pond. What a mother ...
— The Narrative of Gordon Sellar Who Emigrated to Canada in 1825 • Gordon Sellar

... nothing of Cary and his boat at the Inn, for we soon saw that both were far-and-away better than common, and we were selfish. Nor did the man himself seem to care for more patronage. He was always ready when we wished to go, and jumped from his spick-and-span deck to meet us with a smile that started us off in sunshine, no matter what the weather. And with my affection for the lovely, uneven coast and the seas that held it in their flashing fingers, grew my interest in the winning personality that seemed ...
— The Militants - Stories of Some Parsons, Soldiers, and Other Fighters in the World • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews

... for his opportunity; but Reddin was afraid to leave Hazel alone, in case she might see Sally; so September came and drew out its shining span of days, and still Vessons ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb

... fairy foot, as in the graceful waltz it glides, Our admiration equally divides. And proves, that of her many charms of form and voice, If one you had to choose, you could not make the choice. Their perfect harmony is like the arch's span; Displace one stone, you ...
— The History of Minnesota and Tales of the Frontier • Charles E. Flandrau

... one could be devilish awkward and even dangerous, hooked to a hair-trigger mind like his. What if something happens to the dog before his dependence or whatever can be broken? Dogs get run over, you know, and even their normal life span is short. Maybe we ought to try to break it up ... damn ...
— The Short Life • Francis Donovan

... the stream one after another by the wheel team, six men in each wagon, and as they successively reached the other side of the channel the mules were unhitched, the pole of each wagon run under the hind axle of the one just in front, and the tailboards used so as to span the slight space between them. The plan worked well as long as the material lasted, but no other wagons than my twenty-five coming on the ground, the work stopped when the bridge was only half constructed. Informed of ...
— The Memoirs of General Philip H. Sheridan, Vol. I., Part 3 • P. H. Sheridan

... lowest dregs of such a race would have been lawyers spending their span of life on this mysterious earth studying the long dusty records of dead and gone quarrels. We simians naturally admire a profession full of wrangle and chatter. But that is a monkeyish way of deciding disputes, not ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day

... seen anew, as in the main the accumulated production of dead-men's work. The life of one generation is short, and were it not for our human capacity to inherit the material and spiritual fruit of dead men's toil, to augment it a little in the brief span of our own lives, and to transmit it to posterity, the process of civilization would not be possible and our present estate would be that of aboriginal man. Civilization is a creature, its creator is the time-binding power of man. Animals have it not, ...
— Manhood of Humanity. • Alfred Korzybski

... happy in the nicknames they employ. None could be more apt than that of Bubbles. Some of them lasted for a week or a fortnight, and were no more heard of, while others could not even live out that short span of existence. Every evening produced new schemes, and every morning new projects. The highest of the aristocracy were as eager in this hot pursuit of gain as the most plodding jobber in Cornhill. The Prince of Wales became governor ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay

... I am a saintly man, And live like other saints on prayer and praise, My long face longer, if life be a span, Than any two ...
— Pipe and Pouch - The Smoker's Own Book of Poetry • Various

... the body. He remembered how he had looked at them with Valentia, and the group of boys and men that she had sketched. He remembered how they walked along, peeping into the houses, where everything was spick and span, as only a Dutch cottage can be, with old Delft plates hanging on the walls, and pots and pans of polished brass. And he looked over the sea to the island of Marken, with its masts crowded together, like a forest ...
— Orientations • William Somerset Maugham

... commend you, sir," protested Rufa. "You'll go to purgatory for wasting the indulgences. You know very well that for every idle word one must suffer forty days in fire, according to the curate; for every span of thread uselessly wasted, sixty days; and for every drop of water spilled, twenty. ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal

... stayed at home from business to escort the travellers to the train. The trunks were packed, and everything was in readiness for their departure. Marjorie herself, in a spick-and- span pink gingham dress, a tan-colored travelling cloak, and a broad-brimmed white straw hat, stood in the hall saying good-bye to the other children. She carried Puff in her arm, and the sleepy, indifferent kitten cared little whither ...
— Marjorie's Vacation • Carolyn Wells

... a man holding the centre span of a bridge of which every span on either side of him has ...
— Real Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis

... turned to the others about him, and with a new vision saw them in the places they had occupied at home: father, husband, brother, son! His mind leapt the span of miles and looked in upon the anxious faces—hopeful, perhaps—of mothers, wives, sisters, daughters, who waited; and a new kinship sprang up within him for ...
— Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo Harris

... 'There is nothing shabby or worn- out about it! It is entirely new,spick and span. Please, is my next lesson to go deeper than Prim's trunk, and take ...
— The Gold of Chickaree • Susan Warner

... these three had been leaders of men. All had grown old and gray in service. Calhoun was already broken in health and in a few months was to be borne from the political arena forever. Clay and Webster had but two more years in their allotted span. ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard

... Sir-ree! He hangs round me yet, like fever 'n' agur upon a ma'sh. But the critter I'm onto a'n't no dog-hoss, you may believe; he don't 'throw off' nor nothin', he don't. Him and his mate here a'n't easy matched. I fetched 'em up from below on spec, and you can hev the span for ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various

... What a span of life had been theirs who rested here! Their youth, perchance, had been spent amongst the crooked streets of some French village, streets lined by red-tiled houses and crossing limpid streams by quaint bridges. Death had overtaken them beside a monster tawny river of which ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... horse, and a buggy that was spick and span, and it was a pleasure to ride with him. He pulled up at the gate with a flourish, and told Pen to put his suit-case under the seat, and to ...
— The Flag • Homer Greene

... divided into sixteen compartments, which held silver reliquaries, and in the middle a small golden box, in which were two little finger-bones. In another was a small yellow piece of silk with blood-spots on it. The sacristan asserted that there were also twelve golden statuettes a span high, and some smaller silver vases; but all the reliquaries have disappeared except two, which have been preserved at Vienna since 1888. The more important of the two is an hexagonal box with an ogee-shaped lid and a little rosette on the apex; on the sides are repousse figures, the upper ...
— The Shores of the Adriatic - The Austrian Side, The Kuestenlande, Istria, and Dalmatia • F. Hamilton Jackson

... life; but that Sir Charles Grandison may be happy with the lady that is, and ought to be, dearest to his heart; and that your daughter may be enabled to rejoice in their felicity. What, my good sir, is this span of life, that a passenger through it should seek to overturn the interests of others to establish her own? And can the single life be a grievance? Can it be destitute of the noblest tendernesses? No, ...
— The History of Sir Charles Grandison, Volume 4 (of 7) • Samuel Richardson

... along—it might put years on to his life to have a pull at the oars. You remember that old sailor we saw in charge of the engine back there at the government tank? You saw how he had the engine?—clean and bright as a new pin—everything spick-and-span and shipshape, and his hut fixed up like a ship's cabin. I believe he thinks he's at sea half his time, and shoving her through it, instead of pumping muddy water out of a hole in the baking scrubs for starving stock. Or maybe he ...
— Children of the Bush • Henry Lawson

... chimera, chimaera; O. Fr. chamarre, Mod. Fr. simarre; Ital. zimarra; cf. Span. zamarra, a sheepskin coat; possibly derived ultimately from Gr. [Greek: cheimerios], "wintry," i.e. a winter overcoat), in modern English use the name of a garment worn as part of the ceremonial dress of Anglican bishops. It is a long sleeveless gown of silk or satin, open down the front, gathered ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various

... time the current of life had been frozen in him, not dried up and extinguished; therefore, taking his age to be fifty-five when the frost seized him, he would now be one hundred and three years old, having subsisted into this great span of time in fact, though confronting me with the aspect of an elderly man merely. Death ends time, but this man never had been dead, or surely it would not have been in the power of brandy and chafing and fire to arouse him; and though all the processes of nature had been checked ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell

... sound of reveille every young man sprang from his bed. Then followed hasty but orderly dressing and the making of the toilet. The cadet must be spick and span. ...
— Dick Prescott's First Year at West Point • H. Irving Hancock

... its size and richness. Leaving his boy to work out of it a fortune for himself and his bride, the father retired to San Antonio, whither the friends and cronies of his early days were drifting. There he settled down and proceeded to finish his allotted span exactly as suited him best. The rancher's ideal of an agreeable old age comprised three important items—to wit, complete leisure, unlimited freedom of speech, and two pints of rye whisky daily. He ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach

... charmed with this address that he ordered a little chair to be made, in order that Tom might sit upon his table, and also a palace of gold, a span high, with a door an inch wide, to live in. He also gave him a coach, drawn by six ...
— Childhood's Favorites and Fairy Stories - The Young Folks Treasury, Volume 1 • Various

... for them," Hallett said; "the fellows looked altogether too spick and span, when they marched in. It is just as well that they should get a little experience of the work we have been doing, for months. I saw them, as they marched in, look with astonishment at the state of ...
— Through Three Campaigns - A Story of Chitral, Tirah and Ashanti • G. A. Henty

... good, there is no bad, these be the whims of mortal will; What works me weal that call I good, what harms and hurts I hold as ill. They change with space, they shift with race, and in the veriest span of time, Each vice has worn a virtue's crown, all good been banned ...
— The Meaning of Good—A Dialogue • G. Lowes Dickinson

... vanilla or other flavouring, made into a cake, which is used for the manufacture of various forms of sweetmeat, or in making the beverage, also known as "chocolate," obtained by dissolving cakes of chocolate in boiling water or milk (see COCOA). The word came into Eng. through the Fr. chocolat or Span. chocolate from the Mex. chocolatl. According to the New English Dictionary (quoting R. Simeon, Dict. de la langue Nahuatl), this was "an article of food made of ... the seeds of cacao and of the tree pochotl ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various

... buffalo, that lives in the jungles of India. These are the buffaloes that have to live in herds just because they have to guard themselves from the tiger. Yet they are much bigger than all other kinds of buffaloes in the world. Many of them are more than ten feet long, and a span taller ...
— The Wonders of the Jungle - Book One • Prince Sarath Ghosh

... art the same thou wast, but I what I was not: I through the fire of love, unhappy die; But thee the sun with his warm rays revives; Thou burn'st in one, and I, in every place; Eros my fire, while thine Apollo gives. Predestined is the term of thy long life; Short span is mine, And menaced by a thousand ills. Nor do I know how I have lived, nor how shall live, Me does blind fate conduct; But thou wilt come again, ...
— The Heroic Enthusiasts,(1 of 2) (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno

... capitals stuck into the windows of a roofless castle, when the grey hue of age is wiped away from a building which has stood at least seven hundred years, and when the venerable fortress is made to look as spick and span as the last built range of shops at Paris. Among the endless pranks, at once grotesque and lamentable, played by the mania for restoration, surely the "restoration" of this venerable ruin is the most grotesque and lamentable of all. The municipality of ...
— Sketches of Travel in Normandy and Maine • Edward A. Freeman

... traces of coloring that might still be seen on the protected parts. In order that we might more fully realize their size, he suggested that we measure the circumference of one with our arms. It required six of us with outstretched arms to span one of ...
— A Trip to the Orient - The Story of a Mediterranean Cruise • Robert Urie Jacob

... princes and knights: it was what broke up the icefloes in that mighty deluge. Still, the chief aim of Christianity is not so much to make this life pleasant as to render us worthy of a better. It looks away over this span of time, over this fleeting dream, and seeks to lead us to eternal welfare. Its tendency is ethical in the highest sense of the word, a sense unknown in Europe till its advent; as I have shown you, by putting ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Religion, A Dialogue, Etc. • Arthur Schopenhauer

... to fill your morning bath; for the most part, besides, it soaks unseen through the moss; and yet for the sake of auld lang syne, and the figure of a certain GENIUS LOCI, I am condemned to linger awhile in fancy by its shores; and if the nymph (who cannot be above a span in stature) will but inspire my pen, I would gladly carry the ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson

... heavily, as if with a hand of lead, another line. "I must now at once . . ." The pen had spluttered, and that time he gave it up. There's nothing more; he had seen a broad gulf that neither eye nor voice could span. I can understand this. He was overwhelmed by the inexplicable; he was overwhelmed by his own personality—the gift of that destiny which he had done ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad

... while this doth last, May I never again drink wine; For how can a man, in his life of a span, Do anything better than dine? We'll dine and drink, and say if we think That anything better can be; And when we have dined, wish all mankind May dine as well ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury

... historians agree in relating that Porus was four cubits and a span high, and that when he was upon his elephant, which was of the largest size, his stature and bulk were so answerable, that he appeared to be proportionably mounted, as a horseman on his horse. This elephant, during the ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch

... in a clime where there is no fall or spring, simply drop their leaves when they are tired of keeping them on, and put out others when they feel like it? What, when you pretend that in the absence of serpents there are centipedes a span long, and spiders the bigness of bats, and mosquitoes that sweetly sing in the drowsing ear, but bite not; or that there are swamps but no streams, and in the marshes stand mangrove-trees whose branches ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... this time, when the glow came and stood in the air among the tamarinds, and there was nothing anywhere but luminous space and indolent stillness, and the wrangling and winging of crows. What persisted, then, under the span of the sky was the old India of rich traditions, and a thinking bullock beneath the yoke, jogging through the evening to his own place where the blue haze hid the little huts on the rim of the city, the real India, and the rest was fiction ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan

... quickly the signs of the wind and weather were effaced, until the great, square-set house was all as spick-and-span as though it had been erected yesterday. There were abundant signs that money was no consideration to General Heatherstone, and that it was not on the score of retrenchment that he had taken up his abode ...
— The Mystery of Cloomber • Arthur Conan Doyle

... an architect of Shrewsbury, was first employed to prepare a design of the intended structure, which is still preserved. Although Mr. Pritchard proposed to introduce cast-iron in the arch of the bridge, which was to be of 120 feet span, it was only as a sort of key, occupying but a few feet at the crown of the arch. This sparing use of cast iron indicates the timidity of the architect in dealing with the new material—his plan exhibiting a desire to effect a compromise between the tried and the untried in bridge-construction. ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles

... children of man! whose life is a span, Protracted with sorrow from day to day; Naked and featherless, feeble and querulous, Sickly, calamitous creatures of clay! Attend to the words of the sovereign birds, Immortal, illustrious lords of the air, Who survey from on high, with a merciful eye, Your struggles ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson

... and little arches for the little currents along the shallow shore. This, even without any prudential respect for the floods of the great current, he would do in simple economy of work and stone; for the smaller your arches are, the less material you want on their flanks. Two arches over the same span of river, supposing the butments are at the same depth, are cheaper than one, and that by a great deal; so that, where the current is shallow, the village mason makes his arches many and low; as the water gets deeper, and it becomes troublesome to build his piers up from the bottom, he throws ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin

... London that have impressed us more than the fine, massive bridges which span the Thames, and are so crowded with foot passengers and carriages. Every boy who has read much has had his head full of notions about London Bridge; that is, old London Bridge, which was taken down about thirty years ago. The old bridge ...
— Young Americans Abroad - Vacation in Europe: Travels in England, France, Holland, - Belgium, Prussia and Switzerland • Various

... gave all his mind to the game—for when the Squire played euchre he wanted to attend strictly to the business in hand. And in the span of time between dusk and supper the ...
— When Egypt Went Broke • Holman Day

... dike, and at the point of intersection of an intricate network of canals and waterways, there arose in the early Middle Ages a trading town, known in Flemish as Brugge, in French as Bruges (that is to say, The Bridge), from a primitive structure that here crossed the river. A number of bridges now span the sluggish streams. All of them open in the middle to admit ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various

... seasoned material, so that the panels shrunk and slipped out of the mouldings within two months and split from end to end, much to his disgust. Such a chariot was driven not with lines from a driver's box, but by liveried postillions riding on horseback, one horseman to each span. ...
— George Washington: Farmer • Paul Leland Haworth

... and, quite enraptured, he returned to his dull office routine. At three o'clock, spick and span, with a golden ring in his pocket, he presented himself at the ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie

... The time-span of mortal life is but one stage in the soul's career, separating the eternity that has preceded from the eternity that is to follow. And this mortal existence is one of the Father's great gifts to his spiritual children, affording them the opportunity of an untrammeled ...
— The Story of "Mormonism" • James E. Talmage

... stage of thought the ultimate causes of things are conceived to be personal beings, many in number and often discordant in character, who partake of the nature and even of the frailty of man, though their might is greater than his, and their life far exceeds the span of his ephemeral existence. Their sharply-marked individualities, their clear-cut outlines have not yet begun, under the powerful solvent of philosophy, to melt and coalesce into that single unknown substratum of phenomena which, according to ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer

... however, the conversation was absolutely unintelligible to her. She understood the words and phrases, and even some of the sentences, but as she had no clue to their drift, the effort to understand was like attempting to realize the span of a rainbow from a foot or two of it appearing now and then in different parts and vanishing again at once. It was chiefly Polwarth, often Wingfold, and now and then Drew that spoke, Rachel contributing only an occasional word. At ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald

... bulkily slender body was even more deceptive. Sutton, even when trained to his finest, would have outweighed him twenty pounds. Now that margin was nearer thirty, and added to that, he was inches less in height. He was shorter of neck, blocky, built close to the ground. And the span of his ankle was nearly as great ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans

... her sisters three, Within her pinions' span, And the crouching devil slunk away To join the ...
— Songs Of The Road • Arthur Conan Doyle

... as the printed regulations stuck on hackney carriages, whatsoever they may be. Yet, how cruelly just they are! I suppose that the finding of the ship's booty by that huge creature has given a new span of ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy

... and the act to him was as though he had condensed a thousand kisses into one. He walked slowly. This was a brief span into which to crowd a lifetime of love. In the middle of the brook he stopped—just a second, to mark the beginning of the end—and then went on again. When he set her down he was breathing heavily. She had become a bit self-conscious. Her cheeks ...
— The Seventh Noon • Frederick Orin Bartlett

... surprise awaited them. The allotted span of mortal life was quadrupled in that benign climate. Laudonniere's lieutenant, Ottigny, ranging the neighboring forest with a party of soldiers, met a troop of Indians who invited him to their dwellings. Mounted on the back of a stout savage, who plunged with ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various

... a great success. For a year and a half, for even more than that, he had lived the fullest and most consistent life of which he was capable; what proportion of the sons of men can look back on an equal span of time in their own existence and say the same ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing

... King alone. As we gaze on his work today its beauty is instinct with life, and the patient love that gave it birth seems to cling to it still. The white magic of the artist's holy hands has bridged the span of a ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox

... went to divide the property drove a span of mules out to the farm, but when he went to divide the seventeen into halves, thirds, and ninths he found it was impossible with live mules; mules not being very valuable, he unhitched one of his own, putting it with the other seventeen, making eighteen, when he proceeded to divide as ...
— More Toasts • Marion Dix Mosher

... when compared to the span of human life, expectant motherhood occupies, and realize the vastness of its influence upon the nature of the child, and through that nature ...
— A Woman of the World - Her Counsel to Other People's Sons and Daughters • Ella Wheeler Wilcox

... deprived her of days and weeks of happiness. Such a short span of joy had been allotted to her, and he had not allowed her to have even that. He had called her away. He dared not trust himself to write any word of sympathy. It seemed to him that to do so would be a hideous irony, and he sent the line in pencil ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens

... the girl. "The old chief's words explain everything, Nan. Professor Dahlgren has been here and gone. He lived a lifetime in the span of a few hours earth-time. Now it looks as if we were destined to follow in ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, October, 1930 • Various

... short span of a day, but for one whole year the charm of spring blossoms shall nestle ...
— Chitra - A Play in One Act • Rabindranath Tagore

... rolling smoke. Toppled fortunes may be rebuilt; lost reputation may be retrieved. There are new worlds to discover, to conquer, and to possess. What may not be achieved by genius and courage? What to undertake, what to dare and do! Shall he span the Ohio with a bridge, and dig a canal around the falls? Would he find success by settling in some rising city of the West, and resuming the practice of law? Or might he not reasonably hope to be returned to Congress from one of ...
— A Dream of Empire - Or, The House of Blennerhassett • William Henry Venable

... Subura, that thronged and unsavory Bowery of ancient Rome. Three street urchins were teasing and maltreating a rough coated, muddy little cur. Brinnaria called imperiously to her lictor to interfere. He was too far ahead to hear her. Her coachman had all he could do to control her mettlesome span of Spanish mares. She spoke to the boys and they laughed at her. Before she knew it she had flung open her carriage door, had leapt out, had cuffed soundly the ears of the three dumbfounded gamins, and was back among her cushions, ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White

... distance between them is still the distance between earth and heaven. "God is in heaven, and thou upon earth." Nor can the highest, purest, best of human reason, as in this wise and glorious king, bridge over that distance one span! "Fear thou God" is the sweetest comfort he can give,—the clearest counsel he can offer. Consider him again, I say, my brethren, in all his nobility, in all his elevation, in all ...
— Old Groans and New Songs - Being Meditations on the Book of Ecclesiastes • F. C. Jennings

... is almost an assurance that you will prolong your days. A list of deaths in the life membership roll published year by year would indicate that our life members are going to be with us far beyond the average span of human life. Since publishing a list of new life members in the February Horticulturist, there have been added to this life list five names: Tosten E. Dybdal, Elbow Lake, Minn.; Gust Carlson, Excelsior; A.N. Gray, Deerwood; ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various

... the Triumphal Arch supposed to have been erected in honour of Tiberius for his victory over Sacrovir and Floras, A.D. 21. It stands E. and W., is of a yellowish sandstone, 75 ft. high, 64 wide, 27 deep, and consists of 3 arches, of which the centre one has a span of 17 ft. and each of the other two a span of 10 ft. The soffits are ornamented with six-sided sculptured panels. By the side of each arch is a grooved Corinthian column. Over the small arches are sculptured ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black

... fear. The wheel and the lookout were alike deserted, and no sign of life could be discovered anywhere below. In the galley were the embers of a dead fire, and the table in the captain's cabin was spread out ready for a meal which had never been eaten. On deck everything was spick and span, and not the slightest evidence of a storm or any other disturbance could be found. The theory of a derelict was impossible. Apparently all had been well on board, and they had been sailing with good weather, when, without ...
— Great Pirate Stories • Various

... celebrated in Heimburg. The Knight of Ravensberg then called his castle Spanheim (Span being the German word for chip) in memory of the precious little relic. This name was later on corrupted ...
— Legends of the Rhine • Wilhelm Ruland

... way in rear—evidently someone had gone into a crevasse. We saw the rescue work going on, but had to wait half an hour for the party to come up, and got mighty cold. It appears that Lashly went down very suddenly, nearly dragging the crew with him. The sledge ran on and jammed the span so that the Alpine rope had to be got out and used to pull Lashly to the surface again. Lashly says the crevasse was 50 feet deep and 8 feet across, in form U, showing that the word 'unfathomable' can rarely be applied. Lashly is 44 to-day ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott

... first made man, Having a glass of blessing standing by, "Let us," said he, "pour on him all we can: Let the world's riches, which dispersed lie, Contract into a span." ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald

... heavily laden, carrying cameras, aneroids, a large prismatic compass, and three heavy bags of money slung to the belt round my waist, and did not feel up to the extra and useless exertion. Great arches with a span of over 80 metres were to be seen in the lower part of the western wall. To the south there was a huge spur of lava with the geometrical pattern upon its surface we had already observed elsewhere. In this particular case, too, it appeared to me that ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor

... power of the vertuous moon In her full light; O you sons of Earth, You only brood, unto whose happy birth Vertue was given, holding more of nature Than man her first born and most perfect creature, Let me adore you; you that only can Help or kill nature, drawing out that span Of life and breath even to the end of time; You that these hands did crop, long before prime Of day; give me your names, and next your hidden power. This is the Clote bearing a yellow flower, And this black Horehound, both are very good For sheep ...
— The Faithful Shepherdess - The Works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher (Vol. 2 of 10). • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher

... the front door when breakfast was over. Two darkies had been rubbing on it for an hour, and not a speck could be seen anywhere. There were two horses hitched to it this time, as fitted the occasion. A span of high-strung blacks, with white feet, and they gave the negro at their heads all he could do to keep them from going. They chafed their bits, and stamped, and fretted at the delay, their tiny feet eager to be speeding ...
— The Love Story of Abner Stone • Edwin Carlile Litsey

... last got a letter a span long after hoping so much for an answer that I lost patience; and I had good cause to do so before receiving yours at last. The German blockhead having said his say, now the Italian one begins. Lei ...
— The Letters of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, V.1. • Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

... with God to be, No void left craving, there of all possess'd, So, lady mine, to be with you makes blest, This brief frail span of mortal life to me. So fair as now ne'er yet was mine to see— If truth from eyes to heart be well express'd— Lovely and blessed spirit of my breast, Which levels all high hopes and wishes free. Nor would I more demand if less of ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch

... as I began, as life begins and ends—with a woman. In a woman's arms we enter life; in a woman's arms we get the courage and strength to bear it; in a woman's arms we leave it. And as for the span between—the business, profession, career—how colorless, how meaningless it would ...
— The Plum Tree • David Graham Phillips

... an ornate gilt vane, rising from the cluster of red roofs. Twenty years had weathered the raw of brick walls, and painted the tiling with all manner of orange and rusty-coloured lichens; yet the whole place was admirably spick and span, free of litter. Many cats, as Dickie noted, meditated in sunny corners, or prowled in the open with truly official composure. Over all stretched a square of bluest sky, crossed by a skein of homeward-wending rooks. While above the roofs, on either side the archway, ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet

... stone, flint, bone, bronze, iron, silver, and gold, which our ancestors used; the clay and bronze vessels which they employed in cooking and carrying their food; the handmills with which they ground their corn; the whorls and distaffs with which they span, and the stuff and garments spun by them, etc. etc. It is only by collecting, combining, and comparing all the individual instances of each antiquarian object of this kind—all ascertainable specimens, ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson

... an immense bow, nearly one hundred miles, from the lower to the upper Potomac. Our army, two to one, is on the span of the arc, and we do nothing. A French sergeant would be better ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski

... taper-moulded waist With a span of ribbon braced; And the swell of either breast, And the wide high-vaulted chest; And the neck so white and round, Little neck with brilliants bound; And the store of charms which shine Above, in lineaments divine, Crowded in a narrow space To complete the ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis

... my hopes. Then let me stroll through the bright hours as they pass, in my garden among my flowers, or I will mount the hill and sing my song, or weave my verse beside the limpid brook. Thus will I work out my allotted span, content with the appointments of Fate, my spirit free from care."* For him enjoyment and scarcely happiness is the thing. And although many of his word-pictures are not lacking in charm or colour, they have but little significance beyond them. They are essentially ...
— A Lute of Jade/Being Selections from the Classical Poets of China • L. Cranmer-Byng

... magnificent Description of the Creation form'd after the same manner in one of the Prophets, wherein he describes the Almighty Architect as measuring the Waters in the Hollow of his Hand, meting out the Heavens with his Span, comprehending the Dust of the Earth in a Measure, weighing the Mountains in Scales, and the Hills in a Balance. Another of them describing the Supreme Being in this great Work of Creation, represents him as laying the Foundations of the ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele

... Portug. and Span. hidropesia, Ital. idropisia, Lat. hydrops and hydropisis, Gr. [Greek: hydrops], derived from [Greek: hydor], water;) a corruption of hydropsy, an unnatural collection of water ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, June 1844 - Volume 23, Number 6 • Various

... in Laurenceburg, Indiana; designed ingenious boats for floating submerged ships; built with remarkable speed warships for the Federalists in 1861; constructed a steel bridge spanning the Mississippi at St. Louis, noteworthy for its central span of ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... or vault, and of the truss. The principle of the lintel is that of resistance to transverse strains, and appears in all construction in which a cross-piece or beam rests on two or more vertical supports. The arch or vault makes use of several pieces to span an opening between two supports. These pieces are in compression and exert lateral pressures or thrusts which are transmitted to the supports or abutments. The thrust must be resisted either by the massiveness ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin

... He lived to be the fifth Viscount Dunborough, a man neither much worse nor much better than his neighbours; and dying at a moderate age—in his bed, of gout in the stomach—escaped the misfortune which awaited some of his friends; who, living beyond the common span, found themselves shunned by a world which could find no worse to say of them than that they lived in their age as all men of fashion ...
— The Castle Inn • Stanley John Weyman

... the Snake, Horn, and Eagle people lived here (in Tusayan), but their corn grew only a span high, and when they sang for rain the cloud god sent only a thin mist. My people then lived in the distant Pa-lt Kw-bi in the South. There was a very bad old man there, who, when he met any one, ...
— A Study of Pueblo Architecture: Tusayan and Cibola • Victor Mindeleff and Cosmos Mindeleff

... mists of the years, For the men who have lifted the world to the stars! You will find it was never the sages or seers Who have healed human hearts from their terrible scars; They were those who from one vagrant week to the next In the garret or cellar lived life's little span, And whatever their thought or where ever their text, All the glory belongs ...
— Oklahoma Sunshine • Freeman E. (Freeman Edwin) Miller

... difficulties in the way, till Shenac, more harassed and unhappy than she had ever been before, offered to break the bargain and send back the wool. Her mother did not insist on this, however, and Shenac span on in the midst of her murmurings. Then Hamish took the mother away to visit her sister in the next township, and during their absence Shenac kept little Flora away from the school to do such little things ...
— Shenac's Work at Home • Margaret Murray Robertson

... been introduced by Councillor Rushton, he (Dr Weakling) had intended to propose that the wages of the Corporation workmen should be increased to the standard recognized by the Trades Unions. (Loud laughter.) It had been proved that the notoriously short lives of the working people—whose average span of life was about twenty years less than that of the well-to-do classes—their increasingly inferior physique, and the high rate of mortality amongst their children was caused by the wretched remuneration ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell

... No, he wasn't buying all that just yet—but if Maulbow was not lying, then the unseen stars were racing past, the mass of the galaxy beginning to slide by, eventually to be lost forever beyond a black distance no space drive could span. The matter simply had to be settled quickly. But Maulbow was also strained and impatient, and if his impatience could be increased a little more, he might start telling the things that really mattered, the things Gefty had to ...
— The Winds of Time • James H. Schmitz

... the Garden Magazine, says: "The best type of greenhouse for all-round purposes is unquestionably what is known as the even span—that is, a house in which the roof is in the form of an inverted V, so as to be exposed as much as possible to sunlight, and having the ridge-pole in the center. All other types of houses are modifications from the ...
— Three Acres and Liberty • Bolton Hall

... and then a curious decentralizing process took place. I ceased to be the point round which the world revolved, in my own consciousness. We all start our career as pivots, if I am not mistaken. The world span, and I, in my capacity of atomic part, span with it. I mean that this was a continuous, not an occasional state of consciousness. After that came ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird

... hue, And all the rose to one small spot withdrew, They call'd it hectic; 'twas a fiery flush, More fix'd and deeper than the maiden blush; His paler lips the pearly teeth disclosed, And lab'ring lungs the length'ning speech opposed. No more his span-girth shanks and quiv'ring thighs Upheld a body of the smaller size; But down he sank upon his dying bed, And gloomy crotchets fill'd his wandering head. 'Spite of my faith, all-saving faith,' he cried, 'I fear of worldly works the wicked pride; ...
— The Parish Register • George Crabbe

... numerous flocks Of pigeons, settling on the rocks, With their rich, restless wings, that gleam Variously in the crimson beam Of the warm west, as if inlaid With brilliants from the mine, or made Of tearless rainbows, such as span The unclouded skies of Peristan! And then, the mingling sounds that come Of shepherd's ancient reed, with hum Of the wild bees of Palestine, Banquetting through the flowery vales— And, Jordan, those sweet banks of thine, And woods, ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt

... streets of London as in ploughing the foaming ocean. Every tile over our heads contains a death within it as certain, if it were to fall upon us, as that occasioned by the angry surge which swallows us up in its wrath. I believe, after all, that as many sailors, in proportion, run out their allotted span as the rest of the world that are engaged in other apparently less dangerous professions; although it must be acknowledged that occasionally we do become food for fishes. "There is a tide in the affairs of men," says Shakespeare; but, certainly, of all the tides that ever interfered ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat

... farmers I hae muckle pride, But I mauna speak high when I 'm tellin' o't, How brawlie I strut on my shelty to ride, Wi' a sample to shew for the sellin' o't. In blue worset boots that my auld mither span, I 've aft been fu' vanty sin' I was a man, But now they 're flung by, and I 've bought cordivan, And my wifie ne'er grudged me ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various

... the porte-cochere. In the rays from the overhead lamp Mostyn saw Buckton alight and ascend the steps to the veranda. A half-smoked cigar cast into the shrubbery emitted a tiny shower of sparks. Mostyn saw the young man peering in at the window of the lighted drawing-room. He noted the spick-and-span appearance, the jaunty, satisfied air of expectancy, and his blood began to ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben

... otherwise badly mauled by English war correspondents, but you would never have suspected it. Bearded dragoons and Uhlans were still able to sit up and smoke big Hamburg cigars as they rode along, the horses looked fresh, the guns of the batteries were spick and span, the men seemed to have "morale" to spare; they looked as if they were just going for the first time—and not ...
— The New York Times Current History: the European War, February, 1915 • Various

... second good horse, and spurred toward home. Often did he look back, but without seeing any cause for increased alarm. As yet, however, the road had been level and winding, and therefore could not allow him to span much of it at a glance. After noon it ascended a high and lengthened hill surrounded by wastes of bog. As he gained the summit of this hill, and again looked back, a horseman appeared, sweeping to its foot. ...
— Stories by English Authors: Ireland • Various

... will see 'em all down that man's throat." And says she, in still more bitter axents, "You will see four mules, and a span of horses, two buggies, a double sleigh, and three buffalo-robes. He has drinked 'em all up—and 2 horse-rakes, ...
— Sweet Cicely - Or Josiah Allen as a Politician • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)

... whose tuneful and well-measured notes First taught our English music how to span Words with just note ...
— Purcell • John F. Runciman

... establishments and for large estates, where the grapery must be more or less ornamental, a span-roof house is rather better adapted to the grapery than a lean-to, especially if the house is not to be used for the production of grapes early in the season. On account of the exposure of the span-roof house on all sides, however, ...
— Manual of American Grape-Growing • U. P. Hedrick

... waiting for Edith, spick, span and debonair as always (although during the war he had discarded his buttonhole). He was occupied, as he usually was in his leisure time, not in playing the piano or composing, but—in making photograph frames! This was his hobby, and people often said that he took more pleasure in the carving, ...
— Love at Second Sight • Ada Leverson

... are capable of Cutting and Spreading, with one span of horses and driver, from ten to fifteen acres per day, of any kind of grass, heavy or light, wet or dry, lodged or standing, and do it as well as is done with a scythe by the ...
— The Elements of Agriculture - A Book for Young Farmers, with Questions Prepared for the Use of Schools • George E. Waring

... his foes behind, And snatches at the beam he first can find; Looks up, and leaps aloft at all the stretch, In hopes the helping hand of some kind friend to reach. But Turnus follow'd hard his hunted prey (His spear had almost reach'd him in the way, Short of his reins, and scarce a span behind) "Fool!" said the chief, "tho' fleeter than the wind, Couldst thou presume to scape, when I pursue?" He said, and downward by the feet he drew The trembling dastard; at the tug he falls; Vast ruins come along, rent from ...
— The Aeneid • Virgil

... unlike poetic hyperbole than the sum of actual miles marched to the men who trod them; and these very concrete miles were the gauge of the lapse of time. For just as "nail," and "span," and "foot," and "cubit," and "pace" were the early measures of small distance, so the average day's march was the early measure of long distance. The human frame, in its proportions and in its abilities, is sufficiently ...
— The Astronomy of the Bible - An Elementary Commentary on the Astronomical References - of Holy Scripture • E. Walter Maunder

... remained was the somber ridge of the forest. The way was pleasant through the solemn scented lane, with glimpses of dim country, the vague mystery of night overshadowing the woods and meadows. A warm wind blew gusts of odor from the meadowsweet by the brook, now and then bee and beetle span homeward through the air, booming a deep note as from a great organ far away, and from the verge of the wood came the "who-oo, who-oo, who-oo" of the owls, a wild strange sound that mingled with the whirr and rattle of the night-jar, deep in the bracken. The moon swam up through the films ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen

... feeling, was the basis of the home. Here the men and women dwelt in a promiscuity that through the ages went through an evolution which finally became the father-controlled monogamy of to-day. Here the women lived; here they span, sewed, built; here they started the arts, the handicrafts, and the religions. And from here the men went forth to fish and hunt and fight, grim males to whom a maiden was a thing to court and a wife a ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson

... and as Mauville watched that radiance, shifting and changing, her hair alight with mystic color, the passion that had prompted him to this end was stirred anew, dissipating any intrusive doubts. The veering and flickering sheen seemed but a web of entangling irradiation. A span of silence became an interminable period to her, with no sight of fresh horses nor sign of ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham

... my questions without passion, yet with truth, and in the language of simplicity! For beside me there lay but a man dead and a man drunken, while without the threshold there was stationed one who had far outlived her span of years. No matter, however. If not today, then tomorrow, should I find a fellow-creature with whom ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky

... history of his native town. With that history his life was thenceforth intimately united by offices of public trust, as Representative in Congress, State Senator, Mayor, and President of the University, to a period beyond the ordinary span of mortals. Even after he had passed ninety, he would not claim to be emeritus, but came forward to brace his townsmen with a courage and warm them with a fire younger than their own. The legend of Colonel ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various

... various ills Attend thy pack, hang hovering o'er their heads, And point the way that leads to death's dark cave. Short is their span, few at the date arrive Of ancient Argus, in old Homer's song ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt

... toward the evening of next day, a hurrying ocean greyhound overtook them in her race from New York toward the East, and the bunting talked out long sentences in the commercial code from the wire span between the Flamingo's masts. Fresh quartettes of flags flicked up on both steamers, were acknowledged, and were replaced by others; and when the liner drew up alongside, and stopped with reversed propellers, she had a loaded boat ready swung out in davits, which dropped ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne

... maidens tripped lightly down the span of the arch until near the very end, leaning over to observe the group below. She was exquisitely fair, dainty as a lily and graceful as a bough swaying in the breeze. "Why, it's Polychrome!" exclaimed Button-Bright in a voice of mingled wonder and delight. ...
— Sky Island - Being the further exciting adventures of Trot and Cap'n - Bill after their visit to the sea fairies • L. Frank Baum

... presents which he carried for the rajah from the king of Portugal. There were, six beds of fine Holland, with their pillows of the same, all wrought with gold embroidery. Two coverlets or carpets of unshorn crimson velvet, quilted all over, having three guards of cloth of gold, that in the middle a span in width, and the others two fingers broad. The bedstead was gilded all over, having curtains of crimson satin, fringed with cold thread. On putting off from his ship, all the fleet saluted him with their cannon; then the trumpets and drums sounded for a long time; after which ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. II • Robert Kerr

... would in a little time arrive at perfection. And Theophrastus is reported to have reproached nature at his death for giving to stags and crows so long a life, which was of no use to them, but allowing only so short a span to men, to whom length of days would have been of the greatest use; for if the life of man could have been lengthened, it would have been able to provide itself with all kinds of learning, and with arts in the greatest perfection. He lamented, therefore, that he was dying just when he had begun ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero

... garlands uplift for our liberties won. Oh sing in your gladness his echoing story, Whose sword swept for freedom the fields of the sun! Not with gold, nor with gems, But with evergreens vernal, And the banners of stars that the continent span, Crown, crown we the chief of the heroes eternal, Who lifted his sword for the ...
— Washington's Birthday • Various

... impossible, and scarcity was unknown. Food for the body and food for the mind were without price. It was owing to this that poverty was unknown to them, as well as disease. The absolute purity of all that they ate preserved an activity of vital power long exceeding our span of life. The length of their year, measured by the two seasons, was the same as ours, but the women who had marked a hundred of them in their lifetime, looked younger and fresher, and were more supple of limb than myself, yet I had barely passed ...
— Mizora: A Prophecy - A MSS. Found Among the Private Papers of the Princess Vera Zarovitch • Mary E. Bradley

... of Plato's literary skill, his really dramatic handling of a conversation, that one subject rises naturally out of another in the [236] course of it, that in the lengthy span of The Republic, though they are linked together after all with a true logical coherency, now justice, now the ideal state, now the analysis of the individual soul, or the nature of a true philosopher, ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater

... figured out—on the basis of just time for a glimpse and a few sketches—how long it would take us to wander through the Riviera. Reserving March and April each year, we discovered that the allotted three score and ten, seeing that we had already come to half the span, would be inadequate. And there were other parts of the world! So we decided to see what we could, eschew the "day excursions," draw on the memories of former years, and let it go at that. Grande Corniche and Moyenne Corniche would be explored afoot on sunny days and gray; shelter would ...
— Riviera Towns • Herbert Adams Gibbons

... towards that fearful gulf of darkness and foaming waters. As they neared the spot, Dot saw that the hunted animal was going to try and leap across to the other side. It seemed impossible that with one bound she could span that terrible place and reach the sedged morass beyond; and still more impossible that it should be done by the poor animal with heavy Dot in her pouch. Again Dot cried, "Oh! darling Kangaroo, leave me here, and ...
— Dot and the Kangaroo • Ethel C. Pedley

... line advanced faster than the centre, so that in a short time the birds formed a vast crescent, which stretched across a good-sized bay; and as the distance from one bird to another was measured exactly by the span of their wings, not a single fish could break through the circle of menacing beaks. Indeed, the pelicans enclosed the fish with their united wings in a regular line as close and compact as a trawl or drag-net. ...
— In the Wilds of Florida - A Tale of Warfare and Hunting • W.H.G. Kingston

... pure reason. Perchance this is true of certain moments, but they are rare and fleeting. It may have been in one such phase that I suddenly found myself eager for more than a glimpse of the great span of Antarctic coast lying nearest ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson

... the right), which is carried over a stone arch with an 80-foot span, the train crosses the mouth of the Croton River and intersects Croton Point. It was at the extremity of this peninsula that the British sloop-of-war "Vulture" anchored when she brought Andr['e] to visit ...
— The Greatest Highway in the World • Anonymous

... suppose, Was no great dandy in his clothes; Was seldom, save on Sundays, seen In calimanco, or nankeen; On anniversaries would try on A jerkin spick-span new from lion; Went bare for the most part, to be cool, And save the time of his Groom of the Stole; Besides, the smoke he had been in In Stygian gulf, had dyed his skin To a natural sable—a right hell-fit— That seem'd to careless ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb

... thousand blows come from the Archbishop's hand, The dozen peers are nothing short of that, With one accord join battle all the Franks. Pagans are slain by hundred, by thousand, Who flies not then, from death has no warrant, Will he or nill, foregoes the allotted span. The Franks have lost the foremost of their band, They'll see no more their fathers nor their clans, Nor Charlemagne, where in the pass he stands. Torment arose, right marvellous, in France, Tempest there ...
— The Song of Roland • Anonymous

... inheritance. At Yule every man should pay the king a meal of malt from every harvest steading, and a leg of a three-year old ox, which was called a friendly gift, together with a spand of butter; and every house-wife a rock full of unspun lint, as thick as one could span with the longest fingers of the hand. The bondes were bound to build all the houses the king required upon his farms. Of every seven males one should be taken for the service of war, and reckoning from the ...
— Heimskringla - The Chronicle of the Kings of Norway • Snorri Sturluson

... thy home; The ivory hilt of thy blade With gold is embossed and inlaid; Since for Babylon's host a great deed Thou didst work in their need, Slaying a warrior, an athlete of might, Royal, whose height Lacked of five cubits one span...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner

... to recommence;—the play Will be the last of seven, and spick-span new—' 'Tis usual here that number to present. A dilettante did the piece invent, And dilettanti will enact it too. Excuse me, gentlemen; to me's assign'd As dilettante ...
— Faust Part 1 • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

... is increased. The carrying of cheap freight will be the special province of the apparatus, and it will therefore be an object to secure the form of truck which will give, with the least expense, the greatest degree of rigidity over the longest stretch of span from one support to another. Some modification of the tubular principle will probably supply the most promising form for the purpose. The hope of this will be greatly enhanced through the recent advances in the art ...
— Twentieth Century Inventions - A Forecast • George Sutherland

... was not a'thegether sae great as they feared, and other folk thought for. The Whigs made an unco crawing what they wad do with their auld enemies, and in special wi' Sir Robert Redgauntlet. But there were ower mony great folks dipped in the same doings, to mak a spick and span new warld. So Parliament passed it a' ower easy; and Sir Robert, bating that he was held to hunting foxes instead of Covenanters, remained just the man he was. [The caution and moderation of King William ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott

... He lies, for I invented it myself.—Go to, sirrah, tell the king from me that, for his father's sake, Henry the Fifth, in whose time boys went to span-counter for French crowns, I am content he shall reign; but I'll be protector ...
— King Henry VI, Second Part • William Shakespeare [Rolfe edition]

... to the Watergate, Hard bound with hempen span, As though they held a lion there, And not a 'fenceless man. They set him high upon a cart— The hangman rode below— They drew his hands behind his back, And bared his noble brow. Then, as a hound ...
— Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers and Other Poems • W.E. Aytoun

... tuneful and well measur'd Song First taught our English Musick how to span Words with just note and accent,... To after age thou shalt be writ the man, That with smooth aire couldst humor ...
— Characters from 17th Century Histories and Chronicles • Various

... did not wear overalls, like Johnnie Green. But they did not seem to mind that. They knelt right down beside him in their spick-and-span velvet suits and stared ...
— The Tale of Buster Bumblebee • Arthur Scott Bailey

... those who combine prayer with study, need not fear necessary difference of result, from holding different views; the grand error is too loosely generalizing; a little circle suits our finite ken; we cannot, as yet, mentally span the universe. These crude and cursory remarks may serve to introduce a likely-looking idea to which my thoughts have given entertainment, and which, with others of a similar sort, were once to have come ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper

... thoughts upon them, have greatly supported me under all my afflictions. The one is the brevity of life even at its longest duration, which the wisest of men hath compared to the short dimension of a span. One of the Roman poets compares it to the duration of a race; and another, to the much shorter transition ...
— Amelia (Complete) • Henry Fielding

... and Mrs. Reed found it very pleasant. One afternoon late in March, Mr. Reed came home quite early, and carried his wife down into the dining-room. He had asked the Deans over to tea, and Doctor Joe. And there was the table, spick and span, the silver shining, the windows so clean you couldn't see there was any glass in them, the curtains fresh, the tablecloth ironed so that every flower and leaf in it stood out. There wasn't a ...
— A Little Girl of Long Ago • Amanda Millie Douglas

... way they keep the body in the house is this: They make a coffin first of a good span in thickness, very carefully joined and daintily painted. This they fill up with camphor and spices, to keep off corruption [stopping the joints with pitch and lime], and then they cover it with a fine cloth. Every day as long as the body is kept, they set a table before ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa

... are too apt to be struck with Images of Beauty; and that the Passage where the Gentleman is said to span the Waist of Pamela with his Hand, is enough to ruin a ...
— Samuel Richardson's Introduction to Pamela • Samuel Richardson

... mound we erected the other white cross to keep company with the first one, and tell its silent story to the passengers who flew past aboard swift trains, that two pitiful tragedies had been enacted at this lone section reservation within the short span of a few months. ...
— The Trail of the Tramp • A-No. 1 (AKA Leon Ray Livingston)

... and even a spice of danger when the rapids are reached. The last of these down stream, although insignificant when compared with the perilous falls up river, are sufficiently swift and voluminous to cause considerable anxiety to a nervous mind. The five granite pillars which here span the Yukon, at intervals of a few feet, from shore to shore, are known as the "Five Fingers," and here the steamer must be hauled up the falls through a narrow passage blasted out of a submerged rock. A steel hawser attached to a windlass above ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt

... yet (in 1268) conquered by the Tartars.[11] Like Venice, Kinsai stood upon lagoons of water and was intersected by innumerable canals. It was a hundred miles in circuit, not counting the suburbs which stretched round it, and there was not a span of ground which was not well peopled. It had twelve great gates, and each of the twelve quarters which lay within the gates was greater than the whole of Venice. Its main street was two hundred feet wide, and ran from end to end of the city, broken every four miles by a great square, ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power

... ardent heart, but most resign'd, Deep in the dreadful gloom, with pious heat, Amid the silence of her dark retreat, Address'd her God,—"Almighty power divine! 'Tis thine to raise, and to depress, is thine; With honour to light up the name unknown, Or to put out the lustre of a throne. In my short span both fortunes I have prov'd, And though with ill frail nature will be mov'd, I'll bear it well: (O strengthen me to bear!) And if my piety may claim thy care; If I remember'd, in youth's giddy heat, And tumult of a court, ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young

... monument is a peculiarly personal thing and appertains in a peculiar way to a particular time. And the circumstance that it has stood untouched by the passing years while everything around has changed, helps the imagination to span the interval. And the common headstone, the memorial of some dead and gone farmer or labourer who lived and died in the village hard by, is still more intimate and suggestive. The rustic, childish sculpture of the village mason and the artless doggerel ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman

... placed as it is over the Apsu, its size is dependent upon the latter. Its measurement from one end to the other cannot exceed the width of the Apsu, nor can it be any narrower. The ends of the earth span the great Apsu. The following line specifies the shape ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow

... common with God, mortality in common with men. Hence "for this purpose did He intervene, that having fulfilled the span of His mortality, He might from dead men make immortal—which He showed in Himself by rising again; and that He might confer beatitude on those who were deprived of it—for which reason He never forsook us." Wherefore He is "the good Mediator, Who reconciles enemies" (De ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas

... a most anomalous conjunction of words; old Arthur Gride and dark eyes and eyelashes, and lips that to look at is to long to kiss, and clustering hair that he wants to play with, and waists that he wants to span, and little feet that don't tread upon anything—old Arthur Gride and such things as these is more monstrous still; but old Arthur Gride marrying the daughter of a ruined "dashing man" in the Rules of ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens

... decide that it would be impossible to swim out with the cases and place these in such a situation that the explosion would damage the structure. They then moved quietly up to the spot where the end of the last span touched the level ground; it rested upon a solid wall built into the rock, and ran some forty feet above their heads. They were now just under where the Boers were sitting, could hear their voices, and see the glow of their fire. They were unable to make out the exact position ...
— With Buller in Natal - A Born Leader • G. A. Henty

... is the grettest ryvere of fressche water, that is in the world. For there, as it is most narow, it is more than a myle of brede. And thanne entren men azen into the lond of the grete Chane. That ryvere gothe thorghe the lond of Pigmaus: where that the folk ben of litylle stature, that ben but 3 span long: and thei ben right faire and gentylle, aftre here quantytees, bothe the men and the wommen. And thei maryen hem, whan thei ben half zere of age, and geten children. And thei lyven not, but 6 zeer or 7 at the moste. And he that lyvethe 8 zeer men holden him there righte passynge ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries - of the English Nation. v. 8 - Asia, Part I. • Richard Hakluyt

... saddened, older than they should be, And wiser than a lived-out span of years; One wonders what those self same faces would be, If they had never looked on pain—if tears Had never been their portion; if the morrow, Had never held the pallid ghost of care— Child faces, graven deep with worlds of sorrow, ...
— Cross Roads • Margaret E. Sangster

... intended to propose that the wages of the Corporation workmen should be increased to the standard recognized by the Trades Unions. (Loud laughter.) It had been proved that the notoriously short lives of the working people—whose average span of life was about twenty years less than that of the well-to-do classes—their increasingly inferior physique, and the high rate of mortality amongst their children was caused by the wretched remuneration they received for hard and tiring work, ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell

... not like a consuming fire into your bosom when hope has departed. Is not the Lord of the Sabbath the Creator of the sea as well as of the dry land? Know ye not that ye are now braving the wrath of him before whom the mighty ocean is a drop, and all space but a span? Will ye, then, glory in insulting his ordinances, and delight in profaning the day of holiness? Will ye draw down everlasting darkness on the Sabbath of your soul? When ye were but a youth, ye have listened ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume VI • Various

... without such a structure. You can hire logic, in the shape of a lawyer, to prove anything that you want to prove. You can buy treatises to show that Napoleon never lived, and that no battle of Bunker-hill was ever fought. The great minds are those with a wide span, that couple truths related to, but far removed from, each other. Logicians carry the surveyor's chain over the track of which these are the true explorers. I value a man mainly for his primary relations with truth, as I understand truth,—not for any secondary artifice ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various

... if this life is all there is to us, then, indeed, it is a pitiful failure. If our thoughts and longings are bounded by this little span of life, then there is no balance-sheet for mortality. The gift of life is then not worth the expense of ...
— The Wedge of Gold • C. C. Goodwin

... hurried forward. But they had tarried too long, for, not a hundred rods from their starting point, they came upon a broad, dark break in the floe, such a break as no draw-bridge of ice would ever span. ...
— The Blue Envelope • Roy J. Snell

... emerged from one of those crucial experiences of life, which, more than the turning of the earth upon its axis, serve to age a human being. For perhaps the first time in the brief span of his remembrance, he had scrutinized himself in the pitiless light of an intelligence higher than his own everyday consciousness; and the sight of that meaner self, striving to run to cover, had not been pleasant. Just why his late interview with Andrew Bolton ...
— An Alabaster Box • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Florence Morse Kingsley

... their backs up in the middle—span-worm lines, we may call them—are not to be commended for common use because some great poets have now and then admitted them. They have invaded some of our recent poetry as the canker-worms gather on our elms in June. Emerson has one or two of them here and there, but they never swarm on his ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes

... and I am not at all sure he is affected. I suppose it is the way he has been brought up. There is no saying what you might have been yourself if you had had nurses and people about you who always insisted on your turning out spick-and-span. Well, Easton, what have you been doing with yourself ...
— The Dash for Khartoum - A Tale of Nile Expedition • George Alfred Henty

... when I was sixteen. There was a girl staying there. Her hair was copper, and her flesh was pink and white. Her waist, you could span it. I saw her walking one ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore

... that roars where the rocket soars Is the song of the stellar flame; The dreams of Man and galactic span Are equal and much ...
— The Stoker and the Stars • Algirdas Jonas Budrys (AKA John A. Sentry)

... though they were many more in number, they had to submit themselves to the robbers, who took away everything from them, even the very clothes they wore, and gave to each only a small loin cloth a span in breadth and a ...
— The Junior Classics, Volume 1 • Willam Patten

... he added to himself, as the professor was going down the stairs. "He is a span higher than I am, that ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Italian • Various

... "a new cabin you shall have." And the old mart found one so spick-and-span that he hardly dare cross the floor for fear of soiling it. It would have pleased him greatly had his wife been contented, but she, good woman, did nothing ...
— The Junior Classics, Volume 1 • Willam Patten

... the end of its span, the fisheries came of age. Inequities were being ironed out, methods were being perfected, and planners were at work on ways of employing more and more of the fast-growing population in searching out and making available the bounty ...
— The Bounty of the Chesapeake - Fishing in Colonial Virginia • James Wharton

... origin of the enormous jaws, strong canines, prominent zygomae, and strongly developed orbital arches which he had so frequently remarked in criminals, for these peculiarities are common to carnivores and savages, who tear and devour raw flesh. Thus also it was easy to understand why the span of the arms in criminals so often exceeds the height, for this is a characteristic of apes, whose fore-limbs are used in walking and climbing. The other anomalies exhibited by criminals—the scanty beard as opposed to the general hairiness of the body, ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero

... grotto of the wave-worn shore, They passed the Tropic's red meridian o'er; Nor long the hours—they never paused o'er time, Unbroken by the clock's funereal chime,[391] Which deals the daily pittance of our span, 350 And points and mocks with iron laugh at man.[fn] What deemed they of the future or the past? The present, like a tyrant, held them fast: Their hour-glass was the sea-sand, and the tide, Like her smooth billow, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron

... except the emperor himself. Then the emperor's sons grew up. Ah, what princes they were! Three princes in one country, like three morning stars in the sky! Florea, the oldest, was a fathom tall, with shoulders more than four span broad. Costan was very different, short, strongly built, with a muscular arm and a stout fist. The third and youngest prince was named Petru—a tall, slender fellow, more like a girl than a boy. Petru did ...
— Roumanian Fairy Tales • Various

... save to make sweet faith bleed, And to defame God's laws. Oh! viler than the murderer or the thief Who slays the body and who robs the purse, Is he who strives to kill the mind's belief And rob it of its hope Of life beyond this little pain-filled span. God has no curse Quite dark enough to punish such a man, Who, seeing how souls grope And suffer in this world of mighty losses, And how hearts stagger on beneath life's crosses, Yet strives to rob them of their staff of faith And make them think dark death Ends all existence; ...
— Hello, Boys! • Ella Wheeler Wilcox

... blast— Proclaimed the desperate conflict o'er On that too long afflicted shore:[403] Up to the sky like rockets go 1030 All that mingled there below: Many a tall and goodly man, Scorched and shrivelled to a span, When he fell to earth again Like a cinder strewed the plain: Down the ashes shower like rain; Some fell in the gulf, which received the sprinkles With a thousand circling wrinkles; Some fell on the shore, but, far away, Scattered o'er the isthmus lay; 1040 Christian or Moslem, ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron

... low, dark, smutty brick houses and insignificant streets, settles down hopelessly into the dumps when the weather is bad. Even with the sun doing its best on the eternal cloud of smoke, it is dingy and gloomy enough, and so dirty, after spick-span, shining Paris. And there is a contrast in the matter of order and system; the lack of both in London is apparent. You detect it in public places, in crowds, in the streets. The "social evil" is ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... when he emerged from the room in his spick and span outfit, his hat set side-wise on his wet, newly combed hair, he stood up very straight, surveying himself as best he could from head to foot, and exclaimed,—"Gee! I feel just like George Washington." The bath and the new suit were a realization of ...
— The New Education - A Review of Progressive Educational Movements of the Day (1915) • Scott Nearing

... talk!" cried the boy, holding out his arm and trying to span his wrist with his fingers. "Look how thin ...
— Marcus: the Young Centurion • George Manville Fenn

... I inuented it my selfe. Go too Sirrah, tell the King from me, that for his Fathers sake Henry the fift, (in whose time, boyes went to Span-counter for French Crownes) I am content he shall raigne, but Ile be ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare

... making increasing use of radioisotopes to improve manufacturing, testing, and crop-raising. Atomic energy has improved the ability of the healing professions to combat disease, and holds promise for an eventual increase in man's life span. ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Dwight D. Eisenhower • Dwight D. Eisenhower

... time to fill your morning bath; for the most part, besides, it soaks unseen through the moss; and yet for the sake of auld lang syne, and the figure of a certain GENIUS LOCI, I am condemned to linger awhile in fancy by its shores; and if the nymph (who cannot be above a span in stature) will but inspire my pen, I would gladly carry ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson

... cried suddenly. He ran into the next room, and there stood Geppetto, grown years younger overnight, spick and span in his new clothes and gay as a lark in the morning. He was once more Mastro Geppetto, the wood carver, hard at work on a lovely picture frame, decorating it with flowers and leaves, and heads ...
— The Adventures of Pinocchio • C. Collodi—Pseudonym of Carlo Lorenzini

... which the place takes its name was the very deuce for wheeled transport. All is fair in "love and war." This being a creed very staunchly adhered to by the private soldier when campaigning, the mess-servants of the staff of the Cavalry Brigade saw fit in the early morning to steal a span[26] of mules which had strayed from the protection of their rightful owners. Now the Brigade state fourgon with a span of four mules was a big enterprise, and if treated gently might have ministered to the comfort of the staff ...
— On the Heels of De Wet • The Intelligence Officer

... corporation, viz.: Mr. Mayor, Mr. Alderman Smith, Mr. Alderman Deane, Mr. Alderman Gordon, William Weare, Samuel Munckley, John Merlott, John Crofts, Levy Ames, John Fisher Weare, Benjamin Loscombe, Philip Protheroe, Samuel Span, Joseph Smith, Richard Bright ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... the individual span, seeing that the generations, the centuries, and the worlds themselves are but occupied forever with the ceaseless reproduction of the hymn of life, in all the hundred thousand modes and variations which make up the universal symphony? The motive is always the same; the monad has but one ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... beautiful house he would have liked to keep the neighbourhood free from this essentially modern phase of river-life; but to Toni the gay little bungalows had a charm of their own. They were all specially spick and span just now, having been newly painted and garnished with flowers for the season; and Toni looked across the river with frank interest at the Cot, the Dinky House, the Mascot, and the rest of the tiny shanties. She liked the ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes

... politics, at that period; and it must be confessed that the natural philosophers have succeeded better than the constitution-makers. Paine's mechanical hobby was an iron bridge. A single arch, of four hundred feet span, and twenty feet in height from the chord-line, was to be thrown over the Schuylkill, near Philadelphia. The idea was suggested to him by a spider's web, a section of which the bridge resembled; and the principle he worked upon was, that the small segment of a large circle ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various

... in a place where a cat's right to live at all is contested every hour of the day, and where nine times nine lives would not cover a span of more than a few months at the most, as a rule. It had begun when Texas was little more than a kitten, and had wandered away one day from the warm kitchen fire, out into the shed, and from ...
— Baldy of Nome • Esther Birdsall Darling

... his axe, tried the lower margin of the head, found it was a trifle out of the true—that is, its under curve centred, not on the handle one span down, but half an inch out from the handle. A nail driven into the point of the axe-eye corrected this and the chiefs went forth to select a tree. A White Pine that measured roughly six inches through was soon found, and Sam was allowed to clear away the brush around it. Yan ...
— Two Little Savages • Ernest Thompson Seton

... they liked it well enough and fell in with his wish. He'd promised to eat his Christmas dinner along with them and Joey; but the pup was to come as a rare surprise next morning, and though Minnie Ford didn't much hold with a young dog about her spick and span home, she couldn't withstand the little silky creature, nor yet Teddy's wish to ...
— The Torch and Other Tales • Eden Phillpotts

... out, beyond, and see The far horizon's beckoning span! Faith in your God-known destiny! We are a part ...
— Fifty years & Other Poems • James Weldon Johnson

... my partner at night talking of the start the next day, I began to feel not a fear but a certain respect for that narrow little path which was not an arm's span in width, but which was nearly eight hundred miles in length. "From this point, Burton, it is business. Our practice ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland

... froze the ardent blood of Wallace. But the intrepid earl, descrying his friend on the ladder which might soon carry him to the summit of the battlement, exclaimed, "Forward! Let not my span of life stand between my country and this glorious day ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter

... right afar and over the great span. But they would not see in Spain, or not many would see, that the whole span must be taken. But I was not one to chide him, seeing that I, too, saw afar, and they would not see with me ...
— 1492 • Mary Johnston

... not alter his title. He was always spoken of as Ulf of Romsdal. He and his old enemy Haldor the Fierce speedily became fast friends; and so was it with their wives, Astrid and Herfrida, who also took mightily to each other. They span, and carded wool, and sewed together oftentimes, and discussed the affairs of Horlingdal, no doubt with mutual ...
— Erling the Bold • R.M. Ballantyne

... deep, is, however, its most attractive possession. The suspension-bridge, erected by the munificence of a citizen, spans this gorge at the height of two hundred and eighty-seven feet, and cost nearly $500,000. It is twelve hundred and twenty feet long, and has a single span of seven hundred and three feet crossing the ravine between St. Vincent's Rocks and the Leigh Woods. Alongside this gorge rises Brandon Hill, which Queen Elizabeth sold to two citizens of Bristol, who in turn sold it to the city, with a proviso that the corporation ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook

... Fisher was standing on one of the little bridges that span the gutterwide Oosbach, idly gazing into the water and wondering whether a good sized Rangely trout could swim the stream without personal inconvenience, when the porter of the Badischer Hof came ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various

... and completely blocking it lay a single span of an iron bridge. Although twisted and misshapen, it was still intact, the framework of its overhead truss-work retaining its cage-like shape. Behind it the logs had of course piled up in a jam, which, sinking ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White

... on the Surrey side Shall flaunt their gems and rare chinchillas To swell the local mummer's pride, And every bridge shall span the tide With ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, January 28, 1914 • Various

... state. For nearly forty years these three had been leaders of men. All had grown old and gray in service. Calhoun was already broken in health and in a few months was to be borne from the political arena forever. Clay and Webster had but two more years in their allotted span. ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard

... endeavour to grasp Michelangelo's work in the Sistine as a whole, although it was carried out at distant epochs of his life. For this reason I have thrown these sentences forward, in order to embrace a wide span of his artistic energy (from May 10, 1508, to perhaps December 1541). There is, to my mind, a unity of conception between the history depicted on the vault, the prophets and forecomers on the pendentives, the types selected for the spandrels, and ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds

... come to me in ten years, seemed now perfectly natural. I would return at once to that far off village where, for a brief hour, I had dwelt in a "Fool's Paradise," through which my way had lain but a brief span, and where I had passed, like the fabled bird, that "floats through Heaven, but ...
— Told in a French Garden - August, 1914 • Mildred Aldrich

... to its sacred page, Heaven still rebuilds thy span, Nor let the type grow pale with age, That first ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various

... in the stocks of trees, white fays do dwell, And span-long elves that dance about ...
— Wreaths of Friendship - A Gift for the Young • T. S. Arthur and F. C. Woodworth

... Mr. Reginald B. Span, in a most interesting article called "Some Glimpses of the Unseen," that appeared in the Occult Review for ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell

... answer: "It is best that thou shouldst perish, Let destruction overtake thee, There is ample room in Mana, Room for all the dead in Kalma, There the worthiest must slumber, There must rest the good and evil." Ilmarinen's wife made answer: "Ukko, thou O God in heaven, Span the strongest of thy cross-bows, Test the weapon by thy wisdom, Lay an arrow forged from copper, On the cross-bow of thy forging; Rightly aim thy flaming arrow, With thy magic hurl the missile, Shoot this wizard through the vitals, Pierce the heart of Kullerwoinen ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.

... laid thee moons ago, who knows In what Dead Yesterday her shades repose; To some election turn thy waning span And rain ...
— Reginald • Saki

... garniture of the heavens, uninterrupted, from that majestic height, was suddenly revealed. True, it was a November night, but unusually clear and vivid; the stars seemed to burn rather than shine, so piercing was their effulgence. The vast track of the milky way appeared to span the dark and level platform, like the bow of some triumphal arch. They seemed to stand on a huge circle, black, bare,—its verge unapproachable, contrasting deeply with the encompassing splendour. ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby

... Reincarnation teaches gradual progress from lower to higher, through ages until the individual reaches perfection. It holds that each individual will become perfect like Jesus or Buddha or like the Father in heaven and manifest divinity either in this life or in some other. One span of life is too short for developing one's powers to perfection. If you should try to train an idiot to become a great artist or a philosopher, would you ever succeed in your attempt to make him so during his lifetime? No. And will you punish ...
— Reincarnation • Swami Abhedananda

... repetitions at the Alcazar at Tours,—but there! This individual was like the originals, yet unlike,—he was less gaudy, and a good deal dingier, than his Gallic prototypes are apt to be. Then he wore a burnoose,—the yellow, grimy-looking article of the Arab of the Soudan, not the spick and span Arab of the boulevard. Chief difference of all, his face was clean shaven,—and whoever saw an Algerian of Paris whose chiefest glory was not his well-trimmed moustache ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh

... moment's thought convinced me that, though there might be a little risk, there was no paralyzing danger. I had forgotten the narrowness of the gully through which alone we could gain the cliffs. From the open span of beach where we were now standing, there was no chance of leaving the caves except as we had come to them, by a boat; for on each side a crag ran like a spur into the water. The comparatively open space permitted the tide to lap in quietly, ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton

... first half and the second half of Elizabeth's reign have not been deemed wide enough by the writer to justify separate treatment. The whole reign was a time when the superstition was gaining ground. Yet in the span of years from Reginald Scot to the death of Elizabeth there was enough of reaction to justify a differentiation of statistics. In both periods, and more particularly in the first, we may be sure ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein

... slack surfaces of cheek and chin. In the interval between the hair and the face, Mr Holroyd should have a good supper downstairs with Foljambe and the cook. And tomorrow morning, when he met Hermy and Ursy, Georgie would be just as spick and span and young as ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson

... Eight Scholars spans the canal narrowly. On the gray stone of its arch are carvings in low relief, and the curve of its span is pleasing to the eye. No one knows how old is the ...
— Profiles from China • Eunice Tietjens

... and suck it, the green sugar cane, Whatever is sweet is costly and vain; He'll cut you a joint as long as a span, And charge two piastres. ...
— The Women of the Arabs • Henry Harris Jessup

... His perspective has steadily lengthened with the looking years. The object has been getting bigger and bigger to his eyes. He is getting off as far as possible within his earthly span. At last he feels that he has approximately gotten the range. And with the deep glow of his heart gleaming up out of his eyes, he picks up a freshly-sharpened quill to tell ...
— Quiet Talks about Jesus • S. D. Gordon

... never requires fuel, and always goes along at sixty miles an hour. Suppose we commence by employing it to gauge the size of our own planet, the earth. Let us send it on a trip around the equator, the span of which is about 24,000 miles. At its sixty-miles-an-hour rate of going, this journey will take nearly 17 days. Next let us send it from the earth to the moon. This distance, 240,000 miles, being ten times as great as the last, will of course take ten ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage

... three thousand miles from their homes for the maintenance of the Empire is to envisage the most startling of historical paradoxes. That old, bad time seems as unsubstantial as a dream; this seems the only reality; and yet the two periods are separated only by the span of a not very long human life. {163} The truth is that in those days there were no Canadians. There were French on the banks of the St Lawrence, but their political horizon was bounded by the parish limits. Their most renowned leader had no vision but of an independent ...
— The Winning of Popular Government - A Chronicle of the Union of 1841 • Archibald Macmechan

... stream one after another by the wheel team, six men in each wagon, and as they successively reached the other side of the channel the mules were unhitched, the pole of each wagon run under the hind axle of the one just in front, and the tailboards used so as to span the slight space between them. The plan worked well as long as the material lasted, but no other wagons than my twenty-five coming on the ground, the work stopped when the bridge was only half constructed. Informed of the delay ...
— The Memoirs of General Philip H. Sheridan, Vol. I., Part 3 • P. H. Sheridan

... look as spick and span as a nice little Queen of Sheba. Now don't slide down the banisters, or do anything hoydenish. Try to behave ...
— Marjorie's New Friend • Carolyn Wells

... awa', nichts and mornin's, Come ooks, years, a' time's clan; Ye're walcome ayont a' scornin': Tak me till him as fest as ye can. Come awa', nichts an' mornin's, Ye are wings o' a michty span! ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald

... could not be expanded. Friday must be spent at home. This was Wednesday, already three-quarters spent; but there was the coming night and the whole of Thursday. But Friday morning imperatively required that the traveller should be found back at home again. The whole span, the irreducible maximum, not to be stretched by any contrivance beyond about thirty hours. Something could be done, but not much. As I thought of the strict and narrow limits, it seemed that these were some precious golden hours, and never to recur ...
— A Day's Tour • Percy Fitzgerald

... itself, though it is a natural thing, comes direct from God's hand; and all that you can do, with all your carking cares, and laborious days, and sleepless nights, is but to adorn a little more beautifully or a little less beautifully, the allotted span—but to feed a little more delicately or a little less delicately, the body which God has given you. What is the use of being careful for food and raiment, when down below these necessities there lies the awful ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren

... I'll put a ring around the date. It's the first time you've condescended to pay me a compliment in a year. You men are the limit. You take it as a matter of course that a girl should be neat and spick and span. If she wasn't you'd notice it soon enough. It's easy for a girl like this Miss Burnaby. I don't suppose she ever did a day's work or anything useful in her life. She orders her clothes from the best places, and gets them fitted and sent home, and that's all there is to it. But how about ...
— Desert Conquest - or, Precious Waters • A. M. Chisholm

... stronger far, still remained standing. But even from that distance Stern could quite plainly see, without the telescope, that the Williamsburg Bridge had "buckled" downward and that the farther span of the Blackwell's Island Bridge was ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England

... could she be at peace with the love within her—love of something that was not self, of something that seemed vaguer than God, as if it had entered into God and made him Love—unless she mounted upwards during her little span of life. Again, as before in this land, in the first sunset, on the tower, on the minaret of the mosque of Sidi-Zerzour, Nature spoke to her intimate words of inspiration, laid upon her the hands of healing, giving her powers she surely had not known or conceived ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens

... distance to the rear. About midway between house and barn was a deep well, worked with a windlass and chain. During the preceding season a young orchard had been planted out in the space intervening between the house and the road. Everything about the place was kept in spick and span order. The tenant was fairly successful in his farming operations, and appeared to be holding his own with the world around him. He paid his rent promptly, and was on excellent terms with his landlord. He was, in fact, rather popular with his ...
— The Gerrard Street Mystery and Other Weird Tales • John Charles Dent

... was promised land and other things when dey was freed, and some wasn't promised nothin'. Some got land and a span of mules, and some didn't get nothin'. No suh, my daddy didn't farm none at first after he was freed because he didn't have no money to buy land, but he done odd jobs here and there till he come to Arkansas seven or eight years ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Arkansas Narratives Part 3 • Works Projects Administration

... of divine light is totally eclipsed, by being surrounded with about forty families of paupers, crouded almost within the compass of a giant's span, which amply furnish the congregation with noise, smoak, dirt and dispute. If the place itself is the road to heaven, the stranger would imagine, that the road to the place led to something worse: The words, Strait is the gate, ...
— An History of Birmingham (1783) • William Hutton

... was waiting for Edith, spick, span and debonair as always (although during the war he had discarded his buttonhole). He was occupied, as he usually was in his leisure time, not in playing the piano or composing, but—in making photograph frames! This was his hobby, and people often said that he took more pleasure ...
— Love at Second Sight • Ada Leverson

... seemed as though he were hesitating whether he would say a word more to this Major who in India talked of twenty-one years as a long span of time. But there was no one else to whom he could confide his fears. If Dewes was not brilliant, he was at all events all ...
— The Broken Road • A. E. W. Mason

... from the "Troy Town Band," saluting the winner with "See the Conquering Hero Comes," the second boat with strains consecrated to first and second prize-winners in Troy harbour since days beyond the span of living memory, even as all races start to the less classical but none the less immemorial air of "Off She goes to Wallop ...
— Hocken and Hunken • A. T. Quiller-Couch

... good Can spring from mutual slaughter! Lo, I hate Triumph and domination, wealth and ease, Thus sadly won! Aho! what victory Can bring delight, Govinda! what rich spoils Could profit; what rule recompense; what span Of life itself seem sweet, bought with such blood? Seeing that these stand here, ready to die, For whose sake life was fair, and pleasure pleased, And power grew precious:-grandsires, sires, and sons, ...
— The Bhagavad-Gita • Sir Edwin Arnold

... be nothing other, are to me but as the hundred Scalps in a Chactaw wigwam. The blind Plugson: he was a Captain of Industry, born member of the Ultimate genuine Aristocracy of this Universe, could he have known it! These thousand men that span and toiled round him, they were a regiment whom he had enlisted, man by man; to make war on a very genuine enemy: Bareness of back, and disobedient Cotton-fibre, which will not, unless forced to it, consent to cover bare backs. Here is a most genuine ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle

... been comparatively little change in human structure or human interest in historical times. It is a popular view that moral and cultural views and interests have superseded our animal instincts; but the cultural period is only a span in comparison with prehistoric times and the prehuman period of life, and it seems probable that types of psychic reaction were once for all developed and fixed; and while objects of attention and interest in different historical ...
— Sex and Society • William I. Thomas

... to earth's contracted span Thy goodness let me bound, Or think Thee Lord alone of man, ...
— Essay on Man - Moral Essays and Satires • Alexander Pope

... the evenings and doze and muse on all manner of things. When it blew hard, and the door below stood open, all kinds of eerie sounds moaned up through the floor and from out the walls, and the Morgenbladet near the door was rent in strips a span long. ...
— Hunger • Knut Hamsun

... she continued, "will span its waist, or trunk, and this seems a very good reason for calling it little. Another name for this tree is poplar birch, because the triangular-shaped leaves, which taper to a very long, slender point, have a habit of trembling like those ...
— Among the Trees at Elmridge • Ella Rodman Church

... steep and hot, as stony and glaring, as I have ever climbed. Up and up I went for half an hour, seeing nothing but the banks and hedges on either hand; every turn in the road I thought was the last span that would bring me out on the hill-tops, and every turn of the road showed me another. But at last I stood above Brendon, and before me spread the moors, brown and purple in the sunlight, and the little old grey church of Brendon just below me, in a slight ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland

... figure. In general Nimes is poor; its only treasures are its Roman remains, which are of the first order. The new French fashions prevail in many of its streets; the old houses are paltry, and the good houses are new; while beside my hotel rose a big spick-and-span church, which had the oddest air of having been intended for Brooklyn or Cleveland. It is true that this church looked out on a square completely French—a square of a fine modern disposition, flanked on one side by a classical palais de justice embellished with trees and parapets ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James

... struck Manuel as quite pleasant. Everything was in its proper place, relatively spick and span; the hand of a methodical, neat person ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja

... no more, when we have done our span."— "Well, then, for Christ," thou answerest, "who can care? From sin, which Heaven records not, why forbear? Live we like brutes our life without ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold

... and crowd of children on the avenue! No wonder, for there is a pretty barouche, to which is harnessed a large ostrich, which marches up and down, drawing its load as easily as if it were a span of goats or a Shetland ...
— Harper's Young People, September 28, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various

... so, though they were many more in number, they had to submit themselves to the robbers, who took away everything from them, even the very clothes they wore, and gave to each only a small loin-cloth a span in breadth ...
— Indian Fairy Tales • Collected by Joseph Jacobs

... ago the Snake, Horn, and Eagle people lived here (in Tusayan), but their corn grew only a span high, and when they sang for rain the cloud god sent only a thin mist. My people then lived in the distant Pa-lt Kw-bi in the South. There was a very bad old man there, who, when he met any one, would spit ...
— A Study of Pueblo Architecture: Tusayan and Cibola • Victor Mindeleff and Cosmos Mindeleff

... used in the sense of several; as, a couple of horses, mules, birds, trees, houses, etc. The use of the word couple is not only limited to two, but to two that may be coupled or yoked together. A man and wife are spoken of as a couple. We speak of a span of horses, a yoke of oxen, a brace of ducks, ...
— Slips of Speech • John H. Bechtel

... western mouth and half the way back again. On went that unwieldy car of triumph, bearing a freight of eager faces behind its windows, and carrying a crowd of sitters, precariously clustered wherever a perch could be found on its swaying roof, under the verdant span of the arches and the flow of ...
— Uppingham by the Sea - a Narrative of the Year at Borth • John Henry Skrine

... for investments. It would be no trouble at all to drive Mr. March back from the apothecary's and make him acquainted with Mr. Bulger. Was Mr. March fond of horses? Good! Bulger owned the fastest span in the city, and drove them every ...
— John March, Southerner • George W. Cable

... depot, he consented to their demand; consequently they brought the Bible, and he took his oath 'that he could make a living there, but could not get it.' The Democratic 'bull-dozers,' who had sworn they would hang him if they ever caught him, took his span of horses, wagon, three cows, and his crop of cotton, corn, sugar-cane, and potatoes (all matured), and gave his wife money with which to pay the fare for herself and seven children, the twenty-five miles on the cars to meet her husband. The colored men were told 'that if they would be ...
— A Woman's Life-Work - Labors and Experiences • Laura S. Haviland

... take things better, Before life pleasures wholly flee. The deuce! thy head and all that's in it, Hands, feet and ——— are thine; What I enjoy with zest each minute, Is surely not the less mine? If I've six horses in my span, Is it not mine, their every power? I fly along as an undoubted man, On four and twenty legs the road I scour. Cheer up, then! let all thinking be, And out into the world with me! I tell thee, friend, a speculating churl Is like a beast, some ...
— Faust • Goethe

... and at study That ankle white I span, Its sandal slim, its lacings trim,— A fay ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various

... by the rebel fugitives. While crossing this bridge all pack animals over one to a company, were taken and appropriated to other use, for by general order only one was allowed to a company, but in spite of orders the boys would cling to their mules, one company having sometimes several span. These creatures were a great help to us in carrying our heavy plunder. On the march from Milledgeville to Sandersville the command was for the first time molested seriously by the cavalry of the enemy. About these ...
— History of the Eighty-sixth Regiment, Illinois Volunteer Infantry, during its term of service • John R. Kinnear

... so charmed with this address that he ordered a little chair to be made, in order that Tom might sit upon his table, and also a palace of gold, a span high, with a door an inch wide, to live in. He also gave him a coach, ...
— Childhood's Favorites and Fairy Stories - The Young Folks Treasury, Volume 1 • Various

... fading; he had heard the last sleepy twitter of the birds; he had seen one star, two and three, come out; before his steadfast, brooding stare the trees had slowly lost their green for the somber shade of night. And now it was indeed night; that hushed and awe-inspiring span of gloom when worlds most sin; when men and women do their sobbing; do their yielding; count ...
— Sunlight Patch • Credo Fitch Harris

... England. With Catherine de Medici a thirteen-inch waist measurement was considered the standard of fashion, while a thick waist was an abomination. No lady could consider her figure of proper shape unless she could span her waist with her two hands. To produce this result a strong rigid corset was worn night and day until the waist was laced down to the required size. Then over this corset was placed the steel apparatus shown in the illustration on next page. This corset-cover reached from the ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols

... in his hard grip, and holding it out at arm's length he saw that its point was but a span's ...
— The Thirsty Sword • Robert Leighton

... beard his fingers touched, Lo! the silent man of death Grasp'd the hilt, and drew Tizona Full a span from out the sheath!" Ancient ...
— Legends of the Middle Ages - Narrated with Special Reference to Literature and Art • H.A. Guerber

... believe you could drag them away from Gretchen with nine span of horses. But if you want to see them, put on your hat and come along; they're out somewhere ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... the north as if to span the oceans by reaching to its neighbours on the east and west, tapering between vast oceans far to the south where the nearest land is in the little-known Antarctic regions, roughly presents the triangular outline that is to be expected from tetrahedral ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... scarcely help believing that he could do so, if he was not afraid of being compelled to work. Ungka was in fact a baboon from the wilds of Sumatra. He had been caught young by a Malay lad, who sold him to Captain Van Deck. He was about two feet and a half high, and the span of his arms was four feet. His face was perfectly free from hair, except at the sides, where it grew like whiskers. It also rather projected over his forehead, but he had very little beard. His coat was jet black, as was the ...
— Mark Seaworth • William H.G. Kingston

... to the edge of the coffin leapt the most gigantic spider which he had ever seen in his life! It had a body as big as a man's fist, jet black, with hairy legs like the legs of a crab and a span of a foot ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer

... for his kid and thinks here's a chance to make some big money. He looks at the little patient and says yes, he can cure him, sure; but it'll be a hard job and he can't undertake it unless Pete comes through with forty dollars and his span of mules. But Pete ain't got forty dollars or forty cents, and the Kulanche doctor has got to the mules already, having a lien on 'em ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson

... hostess, despite her rapid evolutions among the flowers, despite her rubbing against the walls of the galleries when she enters to take shelter and, above all, despite the brushing which she must often give herself with her feet to dust herself and keep spick and span. Hence no doubt the need for that curious apparatus which no standing or moving upon ordinary surfaces could explain, as was said above, when we were wondering what the shifting, swaying, dangerous body might be on which the larva would ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre

... him to the Watergate{B} Hard bound with hempen span, As though they held a lion there, And not a fenceless man. They set him high upon a cart— The hangman rode below— They drew his hands behind his back, And bared his lordly brow. Then, as a hound is slipp'd from leash, They cheer'd the common throng, And blew the note with yell and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various

... in solemn rows, And not a child is seen; The blinds are drawn, the doors are shut, The walks are span and clean. ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf; a Practical Plan of Character Building, Volume I (of 17) - Fun and Thought for Little Folk • Various

... which had never come to me in ten years, seemed now perfectly natural. I would return at once to that far off village where, for a brief hour, I had dwelt in a "Fool's Paradise," through which my way had lain but a brief span, and where I had passed, like the fabled bird, that "floats through Heaven, but ...
— Told in a French Garden - August, 1914 • Mildred Aldrich

... was now all to rights—"spick and span," Mrs. MacCall said—and Saturday was given up to preparing for the coming school term. It was the last day of ...
— The Corner House Girls at School • Grace Brooks Hill

... story, as in the life which it pictures, some slight change of scene and some little passage of time are inevitable. Thus in any short story there is usually a slight hiatus of thought, due to these causes, which must be bridged over. The tyro will span the chasm by means of stars or some such arbitrary signs, but the master will calmly ignore such gaps and preserve the unity of his narrative so deftly that even the lines of the dovetailing will be ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett

... feet between each column or pilaster, supposing we make them to stand on a square foot. Draw the first archway EKF facing us, and its inner semicircle gh, with also its thickness or depth of 1 foot. Draw the span of the archway EF, then central line PO to point of sight. Proceed to raise as many other arches as required at the given distances. The intersections of the central line with the chords mn, &c., will give the centres from which to ...
— The Theory and Practice of Perspective • George Adolphus Storey

... old friend; and on it a dainty porringer, filled with cuttings of fragrant sweetbriar. This was some womanly conceit, I said to myself; and then I laughed, though the laugh set a pair of wolf's jaws at work on my shoulder. For you must know that I had lived the full half of King David's span of three-score and ten years, and more, and what womanly softness had fallen to my lot had been well ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde

... bring out a basin from under the bed and placing it on a chair, he found towel and soap and busied himself with washing up. His toilet completed, he took a clean shirt from a bundle on one of the neatly arranged shelves and donned the garment. A few more touches, and, spick-and-span, clean and very soldierly looking, he descended to the ground floor. A glance into the mess-room showed him that the noon meal was not yet ready, so be sauntered to the doorway, remaining just inside out of the ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys with Pershing's Troops - Dick Prescott at Grips with the Boche • H. Irving Hancock

... the family, tokens of the testator's remembrance,—even the horses to his carriage, and the dogs that fed from his menials' table, were not forgotten, but were to be set apart from work, and maintained in indolence during their remaining span of life. The will was concluded: I could not believe my senses; not a word was said as a reason for giving ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... started back as soon as Mr. W—— returned saying that Pai-ku-li would come. We listened for the sound of his horse's feet, for we had planned to ride across the river, one at a time, behind Pai-ku-li, but he did not overtake us, and we waited at the river nearly half an hour. One span of the bridge remained, and as we stood on it waiting, listening to the flapping of the cocoanut fronds in the night wind and the hoarse murmuring and occasional roar of the ocean, I thought of that ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various

... she, after the mountain fashion, behind. And after this fashion I saw them at sunset next day pass over the bridge and into the mouth of the Gap whence they came. Through this Gap come strange people and strange tales from the Kentucky hills. Over it, sometimes, is the span of a rainbow. ...
— 'Hell fer Sartain' and Other Stories • John Fox, Jr.

... stones. In this chair is placed an idol, also of gold, embowered in roses and flowers. On one side of this chair, on the dais below, stands a head-dress; this also is made in the same manner; it is upright and as high as a span, the top is rounded, it is all full of pearls and rubies and all other precious stones, and on the top of it is a pearl as large as a nut, which is not quite round. On the other side is an anklet for the foot made in the same fashion; it is another state jewel, and is ...
— A Forgotten Empire: Vijayanagar; A Contribution to the History of India • Robert Sewell

... the eastern down. As they were emerging, they saw on the left hand an extraordinarily spick and span red bungalow. The low roof of dusky red sloped down towards the coolest green lawn, that was edged and ornamented with scarlet, and yellow, and ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence

... simply to the temporary requirements of the transition from the second to the third epoch of civilisation. In the future the centres of civilisation will have to be sought in proximity to the equator; while those countries which, during the last centuries—a short span of time—have held up the banner of human progress will gradually lose their ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka

... and gold, which our ancestors used; the clay and bronze vessels which they employed in cooking and carrying their food; the handmills with which they ground their corn; the whorls and distaffs with which they span, and the stuff and garments spun by them, etc. etc. It is only by collecting, combining, and comparing all the individual instances of each antiquarian object of this kind—all ascertainable specimens, for example, of our Scottish stone celts and knives; all ascertainable specimens ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson

... cherished ones! Hushed is our civic glee. The Voters, they have played the fool About the L.C.C. Oh, Turtle, dear—at table— Oh, Griffin, spick and span, I hear the Civic Fathers say Here ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, March 19, 1892 • Various

... delicate lace, so shaped with consummate skill that, though the snowy folds seemed to lie loosely within the girdle that confined them at the waist, no part of the effect of the round elastic slimness of the waist was lost; open at the neck, from a point about a span beneath the collar-bone, it allowed the whole of the noble white column of the grandly-formed throat to be visible from its base above the bosom to the opening out of the exquisite lines about the nape of the neck into the tapering ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope

... God hath not made free;" and Almeria gently ventured to explain the hopes of larger span which enable the soul that can soar upon their wings to disregard the limitations ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli

... interviews between herself and certain heathen goddesses, though it is true that, almost with her next breath, these she qualified or contradicted. Also, she had suggested that her life had been prolonged far beyond our mortal span, for hundreds and hundreds of years, indeed; which, as Euclid says, is absurd, and had pretended to supernatural powers, which is still more absurd. Moreover, by a clever use of some hypnotic or ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard

... Owles, Wee heare! and croaking Night-Crowes in the aire! Greene-bellied Snakes! blew fire-drakes in the skie! And giddie Flitter-mice, with lether wings! The scalie Beetles, with their habergeons, That make a humming Murmur as they flie! There, in the stocks of trees, white Faies doe dwell, And span-long Elves, that dance about a poole, With each a little Changeling, in their armes! The airie spirits play with falling starres, And mount the Sphere of fire, to kisse the Moone! While, shee sitts ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg

... half the white folks. They jine the church, and then they think they done got a title deed to one of them houses up in heaven (that nobody ever built) sure enough. Goin' straight thar, as fast as a span of race-horses can carry 'em. Ki! Won't they be disappointed, some on 'em, and Miss Matilda 'long the rest, when she drives up, hosses all a reekin' sweat, and spects to walk straight into the best room, but is told to go to the kitchen and turn hoe-cakes for us niggers, who are eatin' at ...
— 'Lena Rivers • Mary J. Holmes

... woman about seventy years of age. He had communicated with Mr Clayton's church for many years. He was now poor, and had retired from the metropolis, to the hut, for the advantage of purer air, and in the hope of prolonging the short span within which his earthly life had been brought. To this humble habitation I ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various

... excited crowd of men near the broken cage cars of the traveling menagerie. Down in the gully that was here crossed by the narrow span of the railroad trestle, there was a thick jungle of saplings and brush out of which a few taller trees rose, their spreading limbs almost touching the sides ...
— Ruth Fielding on Cliff Island - The Old Hunter's Treasure Box • Alice Emerson

... the game amounted to, at the end of a man's short span! What a senseless repetition it seemed—the same old comedies, the same old tragedies, the same old bits of generosity, and greed, of weakness, hope, and despair! Except for a warm little heartful of love—ah love! He paused at that and laughed, unmirthfully. ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels

... the stairs by Irish Mary, who wasn't Irish Mary any more, but a Force whose orders were obeyed. In the curved drive outside the Hollywood Hotel the little Jap was stowing the last of the bags into the great blue car whose length from nose to tail seemed to span the hotel frontage. At the wheel, rigid, sat a ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber

... they had tarried too long, for, not a hundred rods from their starting point, they came upon a broad, dark break in the floe, such a break as no draw-bridge of ice would ever span. ...
— The Blue Envelope • Roy J. Snell

... these books of mine, as faithful to life as I could make them, have also been touched here and there by the staff of beauty. Otherwise their day will be short indeed; and I should wish for them a day a little longer at least than my day and span. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... at home from business to escort the travellers to the train. The trunks were packed, and everything was in readiness for their departure. Marjorie herself, in a spick-and- span pink gingham dress, a tan-colored travelling cloak, and a broad-brimmed white straw hat, stood in the hall saying good-bye to the other children. She carried Puff in her arm, and the sleepy, indifferent kitten cared little whither she ...
— Marjorie's Vacation • Carolyn Wells

... are of the nature of a digression. The passage about the a@ngush/th/amatra was explained on the ground that the human heart is of the size of a span; the question may then be asked whether also such individuals as belong to other classes than mankind, more particularly the Gods, are capable of the knowledge of Brahman: a question finally answered in the affirmative.—This discussion leads in its turn to several other digressions, among ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sankaracarya - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 1 • George Thibaut

... something to be clean, even if you can't be president." She was not at all alarmed by Dorry's recent reaction in favor of personal adornment. He came down pretty soon, very spick and span in his best suit, and asked her to fasten the blue ribbon under his collar, which she did most obligingly; though he was very particular as to the size of the bows and length of the ends, and made her tie and retie more than once. She had just arranged it to ...
— What Katy Did At School • Susan Coolidge

... fathoms below the surface has to be fished, and this demands the service of picked men, divers possessing the highest vitality. Several divers collapse every season through toiling at unusual depths, and two or three pay the penalty of death. Most divers, however, live to as full a span as ...
— East of Suez - Ceylon, India, China and Japan • Frederic Courtland Penfield

... of thy blade With gold is embossed and inlaid; Since for Babylon's host a great deed Thou didst work in their need, Slaying a warrior, an athlete of might, Royal, whose height Lacked of five cubits one span— A terrible man. ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner

... heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament showeth his handiwork. Our solar system, with its harmonies, is seen now as but one passing case of a certain sort of moving equilibrium in the heavens, realized by a local accident in an appalling wilderness of worlds where no life can exist. In a span of time which as a cosmic interval will count but as an hour, it will have ceased to be. The Darwinian notion of chance production, and subsequent destruction, speedy or deferred, applies to the largest as well as to the smallest facts. It is impossible, in the present ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James

... little space. The time of the supremacy of Christ cometh surely, and that is all eternity! Which will you do—please yourself for an hour, or be pleased by the will of God through all time? Love is in the hands of the Lord; you can not consign it longer than the little span of your life to ...
— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller

... twenty feet a half-spent bullet thudded against the cliff face at his elbow. Another grazed his side. At least one of the distant Apaches had turned about and was making uncomfortably close shots at the climber. Lennon stopped short. A bullet struck less than a span above his head. He hurried on up by ...
— Bloom of Cactus • Robert Ames Bennet

... springs of water trickling down the rock-face, green with draperies of the hart's-tongue and common polypody ferns; and emerged again into warmth upon a curve of the hillside facing southward down the coombe, and almost close under the second span of the viaduct, where the tall trestles plunged down among the tree-tops like gigantic stilts, and the railway left earth and spun itself across the chasm like a line of gossamer, its criss-crossed timbers so delicately pencilled against ...
— Merry-Garden and Other Stories • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... the current of untold centuries rolling onwards, wave after wave, in its turbid course. They have marked the rise and the fall of empires, the vicissitudes of fortune, the illusory hopes, the vain fears, and the insatiable desires of successive generations of men, whose brief span of existence has been that of a moment compared with the centuries that have looked down from their summits. But unlike the Pyramids, whose mysteries are partially unveiled, they give no note by which their age ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester

... legs were scarce a shathmont's length, And thick and thimber was his thigh; Between his brows there was a span, And between his shoulders ...
— Ballads of Mystery and Miracle and Fyttes of Mirth - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - Second Series • Frank Sidgwick

... herself to a high gate[FN94] and retired and span her web there and dwelt therein in peace, giving thanks to the Almighty, who had made this dwelling-place easy to her and had set her in safety from noxious reptiles. On this wise she abode a long while, still giving thanks to Allah for her ease and regular supply of daily bread, ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton

... rest borne about by faint breaths of wind, waved to and fro, seeking other attachment elsewhere. Some threads reached from tufts of grass to little hummocks or to the twigs which form the boles of elm trees. Others still, with less ambitious span, went only from one blade of grass to another or united the thorns of whin bushes. The lower air, near the earth, was full of these threads. They formed an indescribably delicate net cast right over the fields and hills. I used to see them glistening, rainbow coloured when the sun rays struck them. ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham

... somewhat, she felt sure, beyond Margaret's comprehension. She lived on dry crusts for many a day to sanction her extravagance in purchasing several books, one after the other, suited to the little maiden's taste. Margaret was delighted to receive them, and while Janet sat and span she read them aloud to her, and amply rewarded was the kind nurse for her self-denial. Not dreaming that Margaret could possibly educate herself, she still continued turning in her mind how that desirable ...
— Janet McLaren - The Faithful Nurse • W.H.G. Kingston

... ankle would turn before you got half way there. If you must go,—and I believe I would,—Tim will git a rig from the livery. Here, Tim," she called, as she heard him whistling in the woodshed, "run to Miller's and git a carriage and a span, quick as you can,—a good one, too," she added, as the possibility grew upon her that Eloise might belong to the Cromptons, and if so, ought to ...
— The Cromptons • Mary J. Holmes

... the pace getting quicker, even in my short span! Still, the uniqueness of Jesus of Nazareth and His influence over the nineteen ...
— Seen and Unseen • E. Katharine Bates

... apiece, but in China there has recently come a forward movement. A fund of twenty million dollars is to be spent in constructing a national system of telephone and telegraph. Peking is now pointing with wonder and delight to a new exchange, spick and span, with a couple of ten-thousand-wire switchboards. Others are being built in Canton, Hankow, and Tien-Tsin. Ultimately, the telephone will flourish in China, as it has done in the Chinese quarter in San Francisco. The Empress of China, after the siege ...
— The History of the Telephone • Herbert N. Casson

... dissatisfaction with all visible church-forms, and of yearning quest after unattainable truth, for which the name Seekerism was invented by himself or others. Though he did not propose that preaching should be abandoned, he had gradually settled in a notion which he thus expresses: "In the poor small span of my life, I desired to have been a diligent and constant observer, and have been myself many ways engaged, in city, in country, in court, in schools, in universities, in churches, in Old and New England, and yet cannot, in the holy ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson

... the old Newgate where Penn lay imprisoned is left; a spic-and- span new Newgate, still in process of building, replaces it, but there is enough left for a monument to him who was brave in such a different way from his brave father, and was great far beyond the worldly greatness which the admiral hoped his comely, courtly son would achieve. It ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells

... wooden frame. 7, Side-board standards, forming framework of sides (on the inside, a few of these sometimes project a few inches above the top rail to support the side-boards). 9, Securing rings for the ends of the spread chains, two of which span the bed to give extra support to the sides ...
— Conestoga Wagons in Braddock's Campaign, 1755 • Don H. Berkebile

... shield and, shouting, plies Whitefire with both arms. Mord gives before him, then rushes and smites; Eric leaps aside. Again he rushes and lo! Brighteyes has dropped his point, and it stands a full span through the back of Mord, and instantly that ...
— Eric Brighteyes • H. Rider Haggard

... travellers see from the railway. Of the smaller racecourses few can be prettier; the long flank of a green hill, the white pavilion under dark pines, and the curving course picked out with fresh painted railings and green canvas—it is as spick and span as a lawn. Either in the summer, for the Eclipse Stakes, or in the spring for the steeplechases, most of the great English racehorses go to Sandown. Bendigo won the Eclipse Stakes of L10,000 for Mr. Hedworth Barclay in 1886—the first time any horse won so huge a stake. Bendigo is surely ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker

... had ascended perceptibly, though how far I had no means of ascertaining. There was another stoppage, the German sat with the instrument still in his hand, and his eye fixed on the body of the woman, which, from the continued whirling of the water, span round and round, as if it had been placed upon a pivot. After looking thus for a few moments, he started suddenly, then reaching up his hand, seized wildly another flask that hung near him, drained it ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume III • Various

... tempt you to be unfaithful to your choice. Tempt you to be of two minds, to turn aside, to turn back. For, so surely as you do, you will find the hell of disappointment, the hell of failure and regret, waiting wide-mouthed to swallow you, and whatever span of life may remain to ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet

... atmosphere. Their little bodies are as busy as their voices; they are all a constant flutter and restlessness. Even when two or three retreat to a tree-top to hold council, they wag their tails and heads all the time with the irrepressible activity of their nature, which perhaps renders their brief span of life in reality as long as the patriarchal age of sluggish man. The blackbirds, three species of which consort together, are the noisiest of all our feathered citizens. Great companies of them—more ...
— Buds and Bird Voices (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... with that old brute of a lawyer, and I certainly had a notion of carrying things with a high hand. But it wore off somehow on the road; and the first family I called on, I went in, as I tell you, with the best possible intentions. Oh, dear, dear! there was the same spick-and-span reception-room for me to wait in, with the neat conservatory beyond, which I saw again and again and again at every other house I went to afterward. There was the same choice selection of books for me to look at—a religious book, a book about the Duke ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins

... Here she comes," laughed Archie pointing toward the stairs down which a demure, spick and span, duck-clothed young lady was making her way with all the ...
— A Dixie School Girl • Gabrielle E. Jackson

... of Shrewsbury, was first employed to prepare a design of the intended structure, which is still preserved. Although Mr. Pritchard proposed to introduce cast-iron in the arch of the bridge, which was to be of 120 feet span, it was only as a sort of key, occupying but a few feet at the crown of the arch. This sparing use of cast iron indicates the timidity of the architect in dealing with the new material—his plan exhibiting a desire to effect a compromise between the tried and the untried ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles

... showed mercy unto him so that he became a solace for many men. And in after times the God of creation, Redeemer of men, changed his name, and he was called Saint Paul, and of the teachers of 505 the law no one of all those, or man or woman born into the world, was ever better than he beneath the span of the heavens, even though upon the hill he bade crush Stephen, ...
— The Elene of Cynewulf • Cynewulf

... rounded back on our way to the Arrow head ranch house. Five miles up the narrowing valley we could see its outposts and its smoke. Far below us the spick-and-span buildings of deserted Broadmoor glittered newly, demanding that I be told more of them. Yet for the five-mile ride I added, as I thought, no item to my slender stock. Instead, when we had descended from the bench and were again in fields ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson

... of a wagon, and he looked and saw a very spick-and-span new wagon, painted red, with yellow and black stripes on it, and the wheels were flashing in the sun ...
— The Doers • William John Hopkins

... God for his escape. He was religiously grateful for the aid which Providence had rendered him, and when he thought how near he had stood to the brink of destruction, he realized how narrow the span between the Here and the Hereafter. And the moral of his reflections was, that if he stood so near to the open gate of death, he ought always to live wisely and well, and ever be prepared to pass the portals ...
— The Soldier Boy; or, Tom Somers in the Army - A Story of the Great Rebellion • Oliver Optic

... projecting brow, And fixed an infant's span above The budding flowers, peeped forth the nest, The prettiest ...
— The Children's Garland from the Best Poets • Various

... after his hot journey, instinctively they turned their steps to the excavation. Things had certainly advanced greatly during Michael's absence. The deep shaft was almost cleared of rubbish; the site was tidied up and in spick-and-span order. ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer

... manageable steamer; and, meeting with 600 fathoms of water when twenty-five miles from land, the cable ran out so fast that a tangled skein came up out of the hold, and the line had to be severed. Having only 150 miles on board to span the whole distance of 140 miles, he grappled the lost cable near the shore, raised it, and 'under-run' or passed it over the ship, for some twenty miles, then cut it, leaving the seaward end on the bottom. He then spliced the ship's cable to the shoreward ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro

... of buildings is that in which the semicircular arch is introduced into construction, and used either together with the beam, or, as mostly happened, instead of the beam, to span the openings (Fig. 2). This use of the arch began with the Assyrians, and it reappeared in the works of the early Etruscans. The round-arched series of styles embraces the buildings of the Romans from their earliest beginnings ...
— Architecture - Classic and Early Christian • Thomas Roger Smith

... a day or an hour will bring forth. For many years one may be permitted to move on "the even tenor of his way," without anything of momentous import occurring to mark the passage of his little span of time as it sweeps him onward to eternity. At another period of life, events, it may be of the most startling and abidingly impressive nature, are crowded into a few months or weeks, or even days. So it was now with our travellers on the African river. When they reached the spot where they ...
— The Red Eric • R.M. Ballantyne

... strong social instinct, the herd feeling, was the basis of the home. Here the men and women dwelt in a promiscuity that through the ages went through an evolution which finally became the father-controlled monogamy of to-day. Here the women lived; here they span, sewed, built; here they started the arts, the handicrafts, and the religions. And from here the men went forth to fish and hunt and fight, grim males to whom a maiden was a thing to court and a wife a thing ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson

... this should be the place. Whose heere? Speake hoa. No answer? What is this? Tymon is dead, who hath out-stretcht his span, Some Beast reade this; There do's not liue a Man. Dead sure, and this his Graue, what's on this Tomb, I cannot read: the Charracter Ile take with wax, Our Captaine hath in euery Figure skill; An ag'd Interpreter, though yong in dayes: Before proud ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare

... pray that we won't give her anything old. I want it spick, span, new; and to be absolutely up-to-date." Alexia took her chin out of her hand, and sat up decidedly. "The idea of matching up those mouldy old portraits!—and that house just ...
— Five Little Peppers at School • Margaret Sidney

... his mouth, therewith he helpeth vp his Master or keeper, therewith he ouerthroweth trees. Beside his two great tusks, he hath on euery side of his mouth foure teeth, wherewith he eateth and grindeth his meate: either of these teeth are almost a span in length, as they grow along in the iaw, and are about two inches in height, and almost as much in thicknesse. The tuskes of the male are greater then of the female: his tongue is very litle, and ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of - The English Nation, Vol. 11 • Richard Hakluyt

... with the centuries. There are the narrow crooked streets, the tall half-timbered houses with their many-dormered roofs, and there is the grey Minster, which has looked down on the city through all her fortunes. To the north lie the newer quarters of the town, spick and span, and to the south are great arsenals and barracks, ...
— The Destroyer - A Tale of International Intrigue • Burton Egbert Stevenson

... diminished to seventeen. The readers of Voltaire will remember that in The Man with the Forty Ecus his "geometer" gives it as twenty-two or twenty-three years for Paris, and contrives to reduce this brief span to practically two or three years of active, enjoyable life,—ten years off the twenty-three for the period of youthful immaturity, ten more for the decline of old age, sleep, ...
— Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 1 • William Walton

... in making preparations for the great holiday. The fatted pig has been killed, as a matter of course, and Christmas pies, mince pies, and many other good things made from it in readiness for the feast. The house has been thoroughly cleaned, and all made 'spick and span.' The lads of the house, with those of their neighbours, have been learning their parts, and getting ready their dresses for the 'Christmas guising,' and the household daily talk is full flavoured ...
— A Righte Merrie Christmasse - The Story of Christ-Tide • John Ashton

... speak more truly," he replied, "the union of two souls in heaven, into an eternal oneness. Yes, that was the subject, and it always interests me deeply. Our life here is but a span, and our brief union shadowed by care, pain, sickness, and the never-dying fear of parting. The sky of our being is not unclouded long. And therefore I cannot believe that the blessedness of married love dies forever ...
— The Allen House - or Twenty Years Ago and Now • T. S. Arthur

... three converging roads to Rome. Three triumphal arches span them where they debouch on a square at the gate of the city. Looking north through the arches one can see the campagna threaded by the three long dusty tracks. On the east and west sides of the square are long stone benches. An old beggar ...
— Androcles and the Lion • George Bernard Shaw

... brought up by Marilla Cuthbert, and felt that she could gad shoreward with a clear conscience. Many and delightful had been her shore rambles, sometimes with Gilbert, sometimes with Captain Jim, sometimes alone with her own thoughts and new, poignantly-sweet dreams that were beginning to span life with their rainbows. She loved the gentle, misty harbor shore and the silvery, wind-haunted sand shore, but best of all she loved the rock shore, with its cliffs and caves and piles of surf-worn boulders, and its coves where the pebbles ...
— Anne's House of Dreams • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... Buckingham Gate stands the entrance to a desert of mud, on which the young Arabs—shoeless, stockingless—are disporting themselves. It is low water, and the river steamers keep towards the middle arches of Waterloo. Up aloft the Hungerford Suspension rears itself in mid air, and that spick-and-span new bridge, across which trains run now ceaselessly, has not yet been projected. It is a bright spring day. The sunshine falls upon the buildings on the Surrey side, and lights them with a picturesque beauty to which they have not the slightest title. A barge, laden with hay, is lying ...
— The Uninhabited House • Mrs. J. H. Riddell

... a shrug, "I hope, for my part, you never can! I can see it now as it would be if you had your way—spick and span in odious, glaring freshness, insulting the gray old ocean. The only respectable buildings in America are those which the owner is too ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin

... beauties. The painting from which this engraving was taken was the work of Theodore Lane, who, although his work is limited to the short space of five or six years, seems to call for special mention by virtue of his tragic ending, the short span allotted to his life and labours, and the superiority of his talent and genius to those of many of his contemporaries. Lane was literally a comic artist of the nineteenth century, having been born at Isleworth in ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt

... little span as I've seen for a long time," said the elder Ben, as the children came trotting down the path hand in hand, with the four blue bows at the ends of their braids bobbing briskly up ...
— Under the Lilacs • Louisa May Alcott

... train which is capable of running anywhere, never stops, never requires fuel, and always goes along at sixty miles an hour. Suppose we commence by employing it to gauge the size of our own planet, the earth. Let us send it on a trip around the equator, the span of which is about 24,000 miles. At its sixty-miles-an-hour rate of going, this journey will take nearly 17 days. Next let us send it from the earth to the moon. This distance, 240,000 miles, being ten ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage

... Gottschalk to the last scene of his musical triumphs, for the span of his career was about to close over him. Rio Janeiro, the capital of Brazil, gave Gottschalk an ardent reception, which made this city properly the culmination of his toils and triumphs. Gottschalk wrote that his performances created such a furore that boxes ...
— Great Violinists And Pianists • George T. Ferris

... cloth, for which they offered in exchange peltries and quite gray skins. They also desired to buy swords and spears, but Karlsefni and Snorri forbade this. In exchange for perfect unsullied skins, the Skrellings would take red stuff a span in length, which they would bind around their heads. So their trade went on for a time, until Karlsefni and his people began to grow short of cloth, when they divided it into such narrow pieces, that it was not ...
— The Northmen, Columbus and Cabot, 985-1503 • Various

... hitherto followed up in our reasonings from the phenomena of lifeless matter through those of living matter here comes suddenly to an end. The chasm between unconscious life and thought is deep and impassable, and no transitional phenomena can be found by which, as by a bridge, we may span it over[6].' ...
— Mind and Motion and Monism • George John Romanes

... command of a regiment, "the last Mormon war" broke out, which culminated in the siege and evacuation of Nauvoo. Passing westward into No-man's-land, the Mormons became eventually the founders of one of the Territories by which Douglas sought to span ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson

... in relating that Porus was four cubits and a span high, and that when he was upon his elephant, which was of the largest size, his stature and bulk were so answerable, that he appeared to be proportionably mounted, as a horseman on his horse. This elephant, during the whole battle, gave many singular ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough

... like the finest bronze. In any mass of abandoned masonry there is not a quiet corner, not a hole the size of one's finger, in which the Segestria does not set up house. Her web is a widely flaring funnel, whose open end, at most a span across, lies spread upon the surface of the wall, where it is held in place by radiating threads. This conical surface is continued by a tube which runs into a hole in the wall. At the end is the dining-room to which the Spider retires to devour ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre

... that," Cumshaw said, between puffs at his pipe. It was one of those neat little affairs with a round bowl, a spick-and-span pipe that had burnt an even color and that shone as brightly as the day he bought it. My pipe was a sorrier article; it was battered and blackened, and one side of the bowl was down beneath the level of the other, showing that it had been lighted oftener with a blazing brand ...
— The Lost Valley • J. M. Walsh

... behind the hogshead, where The watchful spider spied and span; They sighed to see the wine that ran A crimson ...
— The Fairy Changeling and Other Poems • Dora Sigerson

... in bereavement—all bereavement is but a half parting; there is no real parting except for those who survive, and the longest earthly life is but a span. Whatever the future may be, the past will be ours forever, and that means our punishment and our reward and reunion with those we loved. It is a happy phrase, that which closes the career of Sardonyx. It has become as universal ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier

... tried again, scrawling heavily, as if with a hand of lead, another line. "I must now at once . . ." The pen had spluttered, and that time he gave it up. There's nothing more; he had seen a broad gulf that neither eye nor voice could span. I can understand this. He was overwhelmed by the inexplicable; he was overwhelmed by his own personality—the gift of that destiny which he had done his best ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad

... clear, and more vivid, and others fade away, become indistinct and disappear, but all that goes on in the content of consciousness and the spectator, consciousness itself, simply becomes aware of those changes. Consciousness has also in itself no special span, ideas appear or disappear not because consciousness expands or narrows itself but because the causal conditions awaken or suppress ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg

... municpium; an inscription records the restoration of the walls, forum, harbour, &c., by Constantius A.D. 354. A little way outside the town to the E. is a well-preserved Roman bridge nearly 500 ft. long and 11 1/2 ft. wide, with IO arches, each with a span of 37 ft. It belonged to the coast road and is now known as Ponte Lungo. To the S. of the town is a conspicuous monument, 27 ft. high, in the form of a rectangular pillar, resembling a tomb; but as there ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... do I see that all knowledge is vain; That Science finds Error still keep in her train; That Imposture or Darkness, with Doubt and Surmise, Will mislead, will perplex, and then baffle the wise, Who often, when labours have shorten'd their span, Declare—not to know—is the province ...
— Poems • Matilda Betham

... buys a new horse, in a general way, is in a great hurry to try him. There is sumthin' very takin' in a new thing. A new watch, a new coat, no, I reckon it's best to except a new spic and span coat (for it's too glossy, and it don't set easy, till it's worn awhile, and perhaps I might say a new saddle, for it looks as if you warn't used to ridin', except when you went to Meetin' of a Sabbaday, and kept ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton

... support it stretch like the strands of a monster spider-web from the tops of two towers, each two hundred and seventy-six feet high and standing one thousand five hundred and ninety-five feet apart. The above is the length of the central span; the two other spans, from the land to the towers, are each nine hundred and thirty feet long in addition. The roadway, one hundred and thirty-five feet above the river, is divided into five parts. The two outside ones are for vehicles, the ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various

... contrasted with pur new-fangled method of making girls either lay-figures for millinery, jewellery, and frizzled false hair, or else—far more horrible still—social hermaphrodites, who storm the posts that have been assigned to men ever since that venerable and sacred time when 'Adam delved and Eve span,' and who, forsaking holy home haunts, wage war against nature on account of the mistake made in their sex, and clamour for the 'hallowed inalienable right' to jostle and be jostled at the polls; to brawl in the market place, and ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson

... accidents and various ills Attend thy pack, hang hovering o'er their heads, And point the way that leads to death's dark cave. Short is their span, few at the date arrive Of ancient Argus, in old Homer's song ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt

... inestimable boon to all traffickers between Constance, Ulm, and Augsburg, and would attract many travellers who were scared away by the evil fame of the Debateable Ford. Master Moritz looked at the stone of the mountain, pronounced it excellent material, and already sketched the span of the arches with a view to winter torrents. As to the site, the best was on the firm ground above the ford; but here only one side was Adlerstein, while on the other Ebbo claimed both banks, and it was probable that an equally sound foundation could be obtained, only with more ...
— The Dove in the Eagle's Nest • Charlotte M. Yonge

... "mere historism." The Past has rolled its meaning down to the Present: the Past mingled with the content of the Present is at each point of its course something other than it was before.[22] But in any case this aspect of the Past as presented by Eucken shows that human life requires a great span of time which has already run in order to create its ideals and to be raised from the triviality of the mere moment. Goethe perceived the importance of ...
— An Interpretation of Rudolf Eucken's Philosophy • W. Tudor Jones

... this grotto of the wave-worn shore, They passed the Tropic's red meridian o'er; Nor long the hours—they never paused o'er time, Unbroken by the clock's funereal chime,[391] Which deals the daily pittance of our span, 350 And points and mocks with iron laugh at man.[fn] What deemed they of the future or the past? The present, like a tyrant, held them fast: Their hour-glass was the sea-sand, and the tide, Like her smooth billow, saw their moments glide Their clock the ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron

... him literally, for there wasn't anything, at the time, to make me think of Cervantes. But I'd already noticed his hands, and I felt sure they weren't the hands of a laboring man. They were long and lean and finicky-fingered hands, the sort that could span an octave much better than they could hold a hayfork. And I decided to see him hoisted by ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer

... his schoolmates. Little misses dressed in fine style, in dainty ruffled frocks and necklaces and bright hair-ribbons, tripped gracefully in and advanced to meet Mrs. Morris, quite like grown ladies in their manners. Behind them came several boys, spick and span in fresh white linen waists and silk neckties ...
— Dickey Downy - The Autobiography of a Bird • Virginia Sharpe Patterson

... up to them with Prudy; "did you ever before see a span of horses with a dog running ...
— Little Folks Astray • Sophia May (Rebecca Sophia Clarke)

... mother when he was three nights old?" The Eagle said, "I have been here for a great space of time, and when I first came hither, there was a rock here from the top of which I pecked at the stars every evening; and it has crumbled away, and now it is not so much as a span high. All that time I have been here, and I have never heard of the man for whom you inquire, except once when I went in search of food as far as Llyn Llyw. And when I came there, I struck my talons into a salmon, thinking he would serve me as food for a long ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch

... megalomaniac ambitions of the Federal Governments of the UEESR and the UPREA, respectively, and that the different peoples of what you unblushingly call your "autonomous" republics have no ambitions except, on a rapidly diminishing order of probability, to live out their natural span ...
— Operation R.S.V.P. • Henry Beam Piper

... of radioisotopes to improve manufacturing, testing, and crop-raising. Atomic energy has improved the ability of the healing professions to combat disease, and holds promise for an eventual increase in man's life span. ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various

... that on some hour Coquetting soft 'twixt sun and shower, He stooped and broke a daisy-flower With heart of tiny span, And bore it as a lover's dower Across the ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various

... that rainbow span, O'er dim Crane-neck was bended; One bright foot touched the eastern hills, ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier

... a span of oxen at Pretoria," said Marnham. "Why not go and fetch them here, or if you don't like to leave Mr. Anscombe, send your driver ...
— Finished • H. Rider Haggard

... Island and the mainland of Australia. The island was searched for wreckage with little result. One piece of timber was found which, it was conjectured, might have been deck timber, and a plank was found, three feet long and one span broad. The nails in the wreckage were very rusty. The search for shipwrecked sailors on the adjacent mainland was unsuccessful. On the 20th and on the 31st of December, and on the 1st of January, 1697, ...
— Essays on early ornithology and kindred subjects • James R. McClymont

... platforms of the intermediate stations will be formed simply by the widening of the span corresponding to the station. Access to these platforms will be had by stairs running up from the edge of the sidewalk. The passengers will make their exit by means of corresponding stairs on the opposite side. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 488, May 9, 1885 • Various

... their text, 'You know at present that Vaisvanara Self, tell us that,' &c., and further on, 'But he who meditates on the Vaisvanara Self as a span long,' &c. (Ch. Up. V, 11, 6; 18, 1). The doubt here arises whether that Vaisvanara Self can be made out to be the highest Self or not. The Purvapakshin maintains the latter alternative. For, he says, the word Vaisvanara is used in the sacred texts in four different senses. It denotes in the ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut

... days as it were a span long: and mine age is even as nothing in respect of thee; and verily every man ...
— The Book of Common Prayer - and The Scottish Liturgy • Church of England

... life-long truth He lives again, as good men can, Redoubling his allotted span With memories ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey

... beads of his rosary; and he remembered. He cast a glance at his pack. Could he carry it again? He caught up his rosary. Should he put this aside? He was young; there were long years before him. He had suffered half the span of a man's life; need he ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath

... follow her down the companion-ladder. "Wife thinks as much of the Maggy-and would, I believe in my soul, cry her life out if anything happened till her: wife's a good body aboard a ship, and can take a trick at the wheel just as well as Harry Span the mate." Skipper Splitwater leads the way into a little dingy cabin, a partition running athwart ships dividing it into two apartments; the former being where Skipper Hardweather "sleeps his crew" and cooks his mess, the sternmost where he receives his friends. This latter place, ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams

... all the Countries to do't, And do our selves Pleasure and Profit to boot; For one that is crack'd in the Country before, In London will make a spick and span Whore. ...
— Wit and Mirth: or Pills to Purge Melancholy, Vol. 5 of 6 • Various

... as one of the officers told Monsieur D. at Spa. Uniforms, boots, belts, saddles, bridles and even buttons—all new and spic and span for a triumphal entry into Paris. Each man carries two sets of buttons, one for field service (negligible) and the other, shining brass ones, for the ...
— Lige on the Line of March - An American Girl's Experiences When the Germans Came Through Belgium • Glenna Lindsley Bigelow

... throng, I hear their wild song, And echo its truthful strain. The power of man, that limitless span Of ocean, ...
— The Song of the Exile—A Canadian Epic • Wilfred S. Skeats

... she saw the King's son gazing in at her, she blushed red all over, cast down her eyes and span on. Whether the thread was quite as even as usual I really cannot say, but she went on spinning till the King's son had ridden off. Then she stepped to the window and opened the lattice, saying, 'The room is so hot,' but she looked after him as long as she could ...
— The Green Fairy Book • Various

... was short, and was compressed within a space of less than thirty-four years. It terminated in the moment of victory on the Plains of Abraham. But, brief as was his earthly span, few lives of any length have accomplished so much; and his death was so glorious that it should scarcely have been regretted, even by his nearest and dearest, what he did is known to us. What he might have done if his life had been spared, can only be conjectured; but he possessed all the qualifications ...
— Canadian Notabilities, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent

... hundred Thousand-pound Notes, if there be nothing other, are to me but as the hundred Scalps in a Chactaw wigwam. The blind Plugson: he was a Captain of Industry, born member of the Ultimate genuine Aristocracy of this Universe, could he have known it! These thousand men that span and toiled round him, they were a regiment whom he had enlisted, man by man; to make war on a very genuine enemy: Bareness of back, and disobedient Cotton-fibre, which will not, unless forced to it, consent to cover bare backs. Here is a most genuine enemy; ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle

... butterflies, fluttering through the mazes of old Stadacona escorting a bride; let us listen to W. D. Howells in the WEDDING JOURNEY. "Nothing, I think, more enforces the illusion of Southern Europe in Quebec than the Sunday-night promenading on the Durham (now Dufferin) Terrace. This is the ample span on the brow of the cliff to the left of the Citadel, the noblest and most commanding position in the whole city, which was formerly occupied by the old Castle of St. Louis, where dwelt the brave Count ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine

... they use so many legs while crawling? How many joints are there to the body? Note the short fine hair all over the body which gives it the appearance of green velvet. What color is the head? How does the caterpillar feed? Write a brief description of the worm. Do not mistake it for the cabbage span-worm which is also green, but which walks ...
— An Elementary Study of Insects • Leonard Haseman

... the architrave, the frieze, the fillets, the cantelevers, the form of the roof, all point to an origin in some southern forest-clad country, and strikingly corroborate the view derived from philology, that Greece was colonised from north-western India. But to erect columns and span them with huge blocks of stone, or marble, is not an act of reason, but one of pure unreasoning imitation. The arch is the only true and reasonable mode of covering over wide spaces with stone, and therefore, ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace

... lady. "My story threads need gentle handling, and sometimes people seize them roughly and tear and soil them, and then of course they are no longer pretty. But listen now. What will you have? The first in the wheel is a very, very old fairy story. I span it for your great-great-grandmothers; shall I spin it again ...
— The Tapestry Room - A Child's Romance • Mrs. Molesworth

... triumph. There is no gloom in God's universe except what we make ourselves. The skies sparkle with possibilities, calling you into their glowing fields of power and service. Get passion into your chilled soul. Master fate. Span the universe. Hurl forth the thunderbolts of your energy and the mountains of difficulty will be cast into the sea. Take your place in the sun. Stop reviling God by saying you are a worm of the dust, a miserable sinner, and that there is no ...
— Supreme Personality • Delmer Eugene Croft

... from the contusions he had received in falling on the slippery rocks. The old black mare which I rode, though a sorry hack, looked worse than I had ever seen her before, and even the youthful and light-heeled and -hearted Diaway hung his head, and one could almost span him round the flanks. The miserable appearance of the animals was caused as much by want of food as want of water, for they have scarcely eaten a mouthful since we left the pass; indeed, all they had seen to ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles

... make in the effect produced on us by visible nature. In this silent solitary place, with the walled field which was once Calleva Atrebatum at my feet, I yet have a sense of satisfaction, of security, never felt in a land that had no historic past. The knowledge that my individual life is but a span, a breath; that in a little while I too must wither and mingle like one of those fallen yellow leaves with the mould, does not grieve me. I know it and yet disbelieve it; for am I not here alive, where men have inhabited for thousands ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson

... into great (olds, some of the folds a score or more of miles in span. Deep fissures were opened in the earth's crust," like the fiords or great rock-cracks which accompanied the Diluvial or Drift Age. "Rocks were consolidated; and over some parts sandstones and shales ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly

... legs raised from off the leaf, rigid and immovable. For three days he grew yellower and yellower. Then his skin split down his back, and he successfully accomplished his first moult. In his short span he passed through many changes, but never one ...
— "Wee Tim'rous Beasties" - Studies of Animal life and Character • Douglas English

... I'll tell you—it was in his twenty-fifth year—about three in the afternoon, by the clock, October Twenty-first, Eighteen Hundred Thirty-five. The day was Indian summer, warm and balmy. He sat there reading in the window of his office on Court Street, Boston, a spick-span new law-office, with four shelves of law-books bound in sheep, a green-covered table in the center, three armchairs, and on the wall a steel engraving of "Washington Crossing ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard

... likely that many new discoveries will be made about Tintoretto's life. It was an open and above-board one, and there is practically no time during its span that we are not able to account for, and to say where he was living and how he was occupied. The son of a dyer, a member of one of the powerful guilds of Venice, the "little dyer," il tentoretto, appears as an enthusiastic boy, keen to learn his chosen ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps

... it appears in certain familiar old engravings; the new embankment and the gardens that separate it from the main thoroughfare have taken something from its beauty, but it still possesses many attractions, and among them a look of age which contrasts agreeably with the spic-and-span newness of neighbouring places. I found Rossetti's house, No. 16, answering in external appearances to the frank description he gave of it. It stands about mid-way between the Chelsea pier and the new redbrick ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine

... and up to eleven o'clock the fierce cannonade was ceaseless. How the action had ended we could only judge by Boer movements. From Observation Hill I saw their ambulance waggons trekking heavy across the plain behind Rifleman's Ridge, then a bigger waggon, uncovered, drawn by a large span of oxen. There may have been a long gun in that waggon, its movements were so slow and cumbersome. Two ambulance waggons passed in the opposite direction, light and moving ...
— Four Months Besieged - The Story of Ladysmith • H. H. S. Pearse

... were right, as far as they went. Everything is good... as long as it is unpossessed. Satiety and possession are Death's horses; they run in span. ...
— When God Laughs and Other Stories • Jack London

... closely united as now. Every new railway is a muscle of iron knitting together the joints of the Union, and no other nation has a railway service equal to that of America. Railways span the continent from New York to the Golden Gate. The traveler retires to rest in the North and wakes up in the sunny South. And still he can journey on in his own country, under the American flag, day after day, if he wishes, toward the setting sun, unvexed ...
— The Land We Live In - The Story of Our Country • Henry Mann

... patience. I'd long wanted—an' I'd come far—t' see my godson. But bein' a bachelor-man I held my tongue for a bit: for, thinks I, they're washin' an' curlin' the child, an' they'll fetch un in when they're ready t' do so, all spick-an'-span an' polished like a door-knob, an' crowin', too, the little rooster! 'Twas a fair sight to see Mary Mull smilin' beyond the tea-pot. 'Twas good t' see what she had provided. Cod's-tongues an' bacon—with ...
— Harbor Tales Down North - With an Appreciation by Wilfred T. Grenfell, M.D. • Norman Duncan

... sovereignty which criticises intellect, art, talent, fame, virtue, absurdity, and even truth; whoever has occupied that tribune erected by his own hands, fulfilled the functions of that magistracy to which he is self-appointed,—in short, whosoever has been, for however brief a span, that proxy of public opinion, looks upon himself when remanded to private life as an exile, and the moment a chance is offered to him puts out an eager hand to ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac

... and experiment to reality. American industry and agriculture are making increasing use of radioisotopes to improve manufacturing, testing, and crop-raising. Atomic energy has improved the ability of the healing professions to combat disease, and holds promise for an eventual increase in man's life span. ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various

... holding when the ardor of conception was over. I swear to you that death alone—and I believe that nothing is further aloof—shall prevent my giving this country to Russia before five years have passed, and within another brief span the trade of China and Japan. It is a glorious destiny for a man—one man!—to pass into history as the Russian of his century who has done most to add to the extent and the wealth and the power of his empire! Does that sound vainglorious, and ...
— Rezanov • Gertrude Atherton

... of difference between them, praised, and made a hole, in her fresh-baked rolls, her nicely browned, fried potatoes, her clear, crinkled rashers, assuring her it gave one an appetite merely to sit down in a room so shiningly clean and spick and span, she was supremely happy. And Dickie was happy too, and blessed the exercise, the food, and the society of these simple persons, which, after his evil night, seemed to have restored to him his ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet

... lever down quickly and instantly release it to make a dot. A dash is equal to three dots; the space between the parts of the same letters is equal to a dot; that between two letters to three dots; and between two words to five dots. You must train your ear until the span of these intervals becomes unmistakable. When you get some skill and are ready to try out what you can do, you will find that there are several ways of getting wider practice. There are, for example, local clubs that ...
— Walter and the Wireless • Sara Ware Bassett

... had been a lawyer in Albany, State of New York, and as such had thriven well. He had thriven well as long as thrift and thriving on this earth had been allowed to him. But the Almighty had seen fit to shorten his span. ...
— The Courtship of Susan Bell • Anthony Trollope

... Point to-day, so that we can go there now whenever we can get the house ready. Then we shall have horses and vehicles more at our disposal; you may hear of our carriage and span yet, but I shall hate to leave here. This moon is lovely, and to-night the flats are covered with water by the full moon tide, and the sea looks as if ...
— Letters from Port Royal - Written at the Time of the Civil War (1862-1868) • Various

... spin with their hands, and brought that which they had spun' for the construction of the Tabernacle in the wilderness: and an old English proverb carries it still farther back to the time 'when Adam delved and Eve span.' But, at last, this time-honoured domestic manufacture is quite extinct amongst us—crushed by the power of steam, overborne by a countless host of spinning jennies, and I can only just remember some of its last struggles for existence in the ...
— Memoir of Jane Austen • James Edward Austen-Leigh

... also an agent for the British manufacturer, for he cited the names of those who sold Godfrey's Cordial in nearby towns. Even at that, this appeal, consisting merely of a list of illnesses, lacked the cleverness of contemporary English nostrum advertising. In the whole span of the Boston News-Letter, beginning in 1704, it was not until 1763 that a bookstore pulled out the stops with half a column of lively prose in behalf of Dr. Hill's four unpatented nostrums.[41] It seems a safe assumption that not only the medicines ...
— Old English Patent Medicines in America • George B. Griffenhagen

... were not all Dan had to show us. Twice in our thirty-five miles of the Roper—about ten miles apart—wide-spreading rocky arches completely span the river a foot or so beneath its surface, forming natural crossing-places; for at them the full volume of water takes what Dan called a "duck-under," leaving only smoothly flowing shallow streams, a couple of hundred yards wide, running over the rocky bridgeways. The first "duck-under" ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn

... water-proof outside-coat and a thick pea-jacket are a proper span for a roving trip. Don't forget that a couple of good blankets also go a long way toward a ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various

... things than Carlsbad by night from one of the many bridges which span the Tepl in its course through the town. If it is a starry night, the torrent glides swiftly away with an inverted firmament in its bosom, to which the lamps along its shores and in the houses on either side contribute a planetary ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... Falk, Harvey, Kolping, Hesse, Paulinus, Strauss, and Wolff give descriptions of tails. Blanchard says he saw a tail fully a span in length: and there is a description in 1690 of a man by the name of Emanuel Konig, a son of a doctor of laws who had a tail half a span long, which grew directly downward from the coccyx and was coiled on the perineum, causing much discomfort. Jacob describes a pouch ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould

... and all the stationary forms of nature struggling like an immense multitude fighting for life, the smaller and more agile climbing the sturdier, the weak and unassertive trampled to death underfoot on the dank, sunless ground. We crossed the now considerable river by a three-span bridge, and entered the banana country. English-speaking Negroes became numerous, and when we pulled in at the station of Quiragua, the collection of bamboo shanties I had expected was displaced by several new ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck

... covered with the most beautiful turf, except where a river, leaping from the higher plateau over the precipice, has chosen it for a bed. You must not suppose, however, that the disruption and land-slip of Thingvalla took place quite in the spick and span manner the section might lead you to imagine; in some places the rock has split asunder very unevenly, and the Hrafna Gja is altogether a very untidy rent, the sides having fallen in in many places, and almost filled up the ravine with ruins. On the other hand, in the Almanna ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)

... painting, elegantly, one of those natty pairs of boots in which he daily promenaded the Boulevards. A couple of pairs of tough buff gloves had been undergoing some pipe-claying operation under his hands; no man stepped out so spick and span, with a hat so nicely brushed, with a stiff cravat tied so neatly under a fat little red face, with a blue frock-coat so scrupulously fitted to a punchy little person, as Major British, about whom we have written these two pages. He stared rather hardly at my ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray

... sense of several; as, a couple of horses, mules, birds, trees, houses, etc. The use of the word couple is not only limited to two, but to two that may be coupled or yoked together. A man and wife are spoken of as a couple. We speak of a span of horses, a yoke of oxen, a brace of ducks, ...
— Slips of Speech • John H. Bechtel

... unaccustomed to arms or discipline knew not how to resist. On the approach of Porcallo the Indians were obliged to retire in their turn; yet killed that commanders horse with an arrow, which pierced through the saddle lap and penetrated a span deep into the horses body. All the forces were now landed, and marched about two leagues inland to a town belonging to the cacique Harrihiagua[149], who had fled to the mountains lest he should be called to account for his cruelty ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 5 • Robert Kerr

... all that too: but this wretched fellow Reaches no further than the empty name That serves to feed him; were he valiant, Or had but in him any noble nature That might hereafter promise him a good man, My cares were so much lighter, and my grave A span yet from me. ...
— A King, and No King • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher

... the frost, and it works so gently that it is not till after many years that its effect is perceptible. An old farmer will walk with you through his fields and say, "This wall I built at such and such a time, or the first year I came on the farm, or when I owned such and such a span of horses," indicating a period thirty, forty, or fifty years back. "This other, we built the summer so and so worked for me," and he relates some incident, or mishap, or comical adventures that the memory calls up. Every line ...
— In the Catskills • John Burroughs

... up, get up, thou leaden man! Thy track, to endless joy or pain, Yields but the model of a span: Yet burns out thy life's lamp in vain! One minute bounds thy bane or bliss; Then watch and ...
— Lyrics from the Song-Books of the Elizabethan Age • Various

... the gold combs out from her A span's length off her head; She sang this song of God's mother And of her bearing-bed. Mary most full of grace, Bring us to thy ...
— In The Yule-Log Glow—Book 3 - Christmas Poems from 'round the World • Various

... ones she could do nothing else for; it was a joy to think that He who hears prayer is equally present with all his people, and that though thousands of miles lie between the petitioner and the petitioned-for, the breath of prayer may span the distance and pour blessings on the far-off head. The burden of thoughts and affections gathered during the twenty-three hours, was laid down in the twenty-fourth; and Ellen could meet her friends at the breakfast-table ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Elizabeth Wetherell

... tailor, and the weaver, and the wheelwright, and the blacksmith,—but, hey presto! Master Warner set his imps a-churning, and turned ye out mail and tunic, worsted and wagon, kettle and pot, spick and span new, from his brewage of vapour and sea-coal. Oh, have I not heard enough of the sorcerer from my brother, who works in the Chepe for Master Stokton, the mercer!—and Master Stokton was one of the worshipful ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... a single life is seldom sufficient to allow within its span the full development of any new departure in art or science, and it cannot, therefore, be wondered at if Charles Green, though reviving and re-modelling the art of ballooning in our own country, even after an exceptionally long and successful ...
— The Dominion of the Air • J. M. Bacon

... good sir; its brevity Gives you and me our measures, and thereby Has docked your virtue to a tankard's span, And left of ...
— Green Bays. Verses and Parodies • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... when he was three nights old?" The Eagle said, "I have been here for a great space of time, and when I first came hither, there was a rock here from the top of which I pecked at the stars every evening; and it has crumbled away, and now it is not so much as a span high. All that time I have been here, and I have never heard of the man for whom you inquire, except once when I went in search of food as far as Llyn Llyw. And when I came there, I struck my talons into a salmon, thinking he would serve me as food for a long time. But he drew me into the water, ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch

... B. Span, in a most interesting article called "Some Glimpses of the Unseen," that appeared in the Occult Review for February, ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell

... Vaniman gave all his mind to the game—for when the Squire played euchre he wanted to attend strictly to the business in hand. And in the span of time between dusk and supper the ...
— When Egypt Went Broke • Holman Day

... ceased as the first stars appeared in the sky. With deep emotion we watched the tiny bluish flames appear, one after another. At that portentous moment they seemed to span the distance between us, isolated, condemned, lost, and our brothers of higher latitudes, who at that hour were rushing about their poor pleasures with delirious frenzy in cities where the whiteness of electric lamps came ...
— Atlantida • Pierre Benoit

... time. Having completed that sacrifice of theirs on the breast of that foremost of mountains. Himavat, the deities attached to the gift of earth a sixth part of the merit arising from their sacrifice. The man who makes a gift of even a span of earth (unto a Brahmana) with reverence and faith, has never to languish under any difficulty and has never to meet with any calamity. By making a gift of a house that keeps out cold, wind, and sun, and that stand upon a piece of clean land, the giver attains to ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli

... fatherly feeling or principle of right in that respect, he should be irritated by the little life so constantly interfering with his pleasure and so surely undermining Katy's health. For Katy did not improve, as Wilford hoped she might; and with his two hands he could almost span her slender waist, while the beautiful neck and shoulders, once his chiefest pride, were no longer worn uncovered, for Katy would not display her bones, whatever the fashion might be. In this dilemma Wilford sought his mother, and the result of that consultation brought ...
— Family Pride - Or, Purified by Suffering • Mary J. Holmes

... plot will be a perfect unit, for in the story, as in the life which it pictures, some slight change of scene and some little passage of time are inevitable. Thus in any short story there is usually a slight hiatus of thought, due to these causes, which must be bridged over. The tyro will span the chasm by means of stars or some such arbitrary signs, but the master will calmly ignore such gaps and preserve the unity of his narrative so deftly that even the lines of the dovetailing will be scarcely visible. Thus in "The Ambitious Guest" ( 9, 10) Hawthorne had need to indicate the passage ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett

... Laziness. If people knew that thirty minutes of a healthful regimen practiced daily would double the daily pleasure of living and add ten years to the span of life, nine out of ten would neglect it. And (b) thoughtlessness through faulty education; the primary function of mental culture being to teach people to think, analyze, and solve the problems of life, and cultivate the memory; ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman

... the blue and moonlit deep The song and oar of Adria's gondolier, By distance mellow'd, o'er the waters sweep; 'T is sweet to see the evening star appear; 'T is sweet to listen as the night-winds creep From leaf to leaf; 't is sweet to view on high The rainbow, based on ocean, span the sky. ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron

... still echoing amid these hills. There passes before you the shadow of Omnipotence; and a great voice seems to proclaim the Godhead of Him "who hath measured the waters in the hollow of his hand, and meted out heaven with the span, and comprehended the dust of the earth in a measure, and weighed the mountains in scales and ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie

... was then, indeed, that Father Ryan and all good men beheld the grand spectacle of the whole North coming to the rescue of the afflicted South with intense and sublime admiration. He then saw for certain the rainbow of peace span the heavens; and though his section was wailing under the hand of affliction, he yet took down his harp, which for years had hung on the weeping willows of his much-loved South, and, with renewed vigor and strength ...
— Poems: Patriotic, Religious, Miscellaneous • Abram J. Ryan, (Father Ryan)

... village three miles away, where several hundred cavalry were stationed. Advancing boldly, he drove in the pickets, and coming across a span of mules hitched to a cart, he tied the rope of the howitzer to the rear, lashed the animals to a gallop and went clattering into the village to the loud shouts of ...
— Dewey and Other Naval Commanders • Edward S. Ellis

... there are deciduous trees which, in a clime where there is no fall or spring, simply drop their leaves when they are tired of keeping them on, and put out others when they feel like it? What, when you pretend that in the absence of serpents there are centipedes a span long, and spiders the bigness of bats, and mosquitoes that sweetly sing in the drowsing ear, but bite not; or that there are swamps but no streams, and in the marshes stand mangrove-trees whose branches grow downward into the ooze, as if they wished to get back into ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... lecture and at study That ankle white I span, Its sandal slim, its lacings trim,— A fay I ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various

... drink water while this doth last, May I never again drink wine: For how can a man, in his life of a span, Do anything better than dine? Well dine and drink, and say if we think That anything better can be, And when we have dined, wish all mankind May dine as well as we. And though a good wish will fill no dish And brim no cup with sack, Yet thoughts will spring as the glasses ring, To ...
— Crotchet Castle • Thomas Love Peacock

... from him it leaped out of the darkness in an iridescent sheen: an arch a scant ten feet in height, and in span double the width of a big man's shoulders, woven across like a weaver's frame with ribbons of pale fire. But the ribbons were of steel—steel blades, sharp, bright, gleaming: a countless array of curved tulwars and crescent scimetars, broad jataghans, short and ugly kukurees, long kutars with ...
— The Bronze Bell • Louis Joseph Vance

... 'prentice to Mr. Howe.(913) All this you have heard; yet, like my cousin the Chronicle, I repeat what has been printed in every newspaper of the week, and then finish with one paragraph of spick and span. Alack! my postscript is not very fortunate: a convoy of twelve thousand men, etc. was going to the King of' Prussia, was attacked unexpectedly by five thousand Austrians, and cut entirely to pieces; provisions, ammunition, etc. all taken. The King instantly raised the siege, and retreated ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole

... tank to give equable bottom heat, will prove the most serviceable, as it will neither allow snow to lodge on the glass, nor suffer any serious decline of temperature during the prevalence of sharp frost and keen winds. For late autumn supply any kind of house will suffice, but best of all an airy span. A brick pit will answer every purpose from October to March with good management, and fermenting materials will afford the needful heat. In such cases trenches should be provided for occasional renewal of ...
— The Culture of Vegetables and Flowers From Seeds and Roots, 16th Edition • Sutton and Sons

... history of civilisation. The histories of medicine which exist are for the most part only fitted for the intellectual digestion of Dryasdust and his congeners. Of the men who made the discoveries which have saved incalculable numbers of human lives, and which have lengthened the span of human existence, there is often no record at all accessible to the general reader. Yet the story of these men's lives, of their struggles and of their triumphs, is not only interesting, but in the highest degree stimulating and educative. Many ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes

... sir," said Lee. "That was wrote up in Drumston church, I mind, and some other things alongside of it, which I could say by heart once on a time—all on black boards, with yellow letters. And also, I remember a spick and span new board, about how Anthony Hamlyn (that's Mr. Geoffry Hamlyn's father) 'repaired and beautified this church;' which meant that he built a handsome new pew for himself in the chancel. Lord, I think I see him asleep ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley

... to W. D. Howells in the WEDDING JOURNEY. "Nothing, I think, more enforces the illusion of Southern Europe in Quebec than the Sunday-night promenading on the Durham (now Dufferin) Terrace. This is the ample span on the brow of the cliff to the left of the Citadel, the noblest and most commanding position in the whole city, which was formerly occupied by the old Castle of St. Louis, where dwelt the brave Count Frontenac and his splendid successors of the French regime. ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine

... the first census of the village was taken in December, 1815, when the number of inhabitants was three hundred and thirty-one. The aqueduct which takes the Erie canal across the river forms a prominent object of interest to all travellers. It is of hewn stone, containing eleven arches of 50 feet span: its length is 800 feet, but a considerable part of each end is hidden from view by mills ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 20, No. 562, Saturday, August 18, 1832. • Various

... majestic height, was suddenly revealed. True, it was a November night, but unusually clear and vivid; the stars seemed to burn rather than shine, so piercing was their effulgence. The vast track of the milky way appeared to span the dark and level platform, like the bow of some triumphal arch. They seemed to stand on a huge circle, black, bare,—its verge unapproachable, contrasting deeply with the encompassing splendour. Proceeding onwards, a dark speck was visible, springing out abruptly ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby

... decks was spick and span, and young Horatio gazed with wondering admiration at the neatness of the white decks continually scraped and holystoned until they fairly glistened in the sun, at the imposing size and length of the long lines of black cannon, the special pride of every ...
— Historic Boyhoods • Rupert Sargent Holland

... cymbals and volcanically inundating melody; appeared to be struggling to achieve the thing that was his art. American life seemed to be calling for this music in order that its vastness, its madly affluent wealth and multiform power and transcontinental span, its loud, grandiose promise might attain something like ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld

... they went to church and begged God to give them a son. They even asked the witches in their town why God would not give them a child. The witches told them that they would have one after a year, but that when born he would be no longer than a span. ...
— Filipino Popular Tales • Dean S. Fansler

... of the wave-worn shore, They passed the Tropic's red meridian o'er; Nor long the hours—they never paused o'er time, Unbroken by the clock's funereal chime,[391] Which deals the daily pittance of our span, 350 And points and mocks with iron laugh at man.[fn] What deemed they of the future or the past? The present, like a tyrant, held them fast: Their hour-glass was the sea-sand, and the tide, Like her smooth billow, saw their moments glide ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron

... ever know, as I know in verity, of the greatness and reality and terror of the thing that I would tell plain to all; for we, with our puny span of recorded life must have great histories to tell, but the few bare details we know concerning years that are but a few thousands in all; and I must set out to you in the short pages of this my life there, a sufficiency of the life that had been, and the life that was, both within and without ...
— The Night Land • William Hope Hodgson

... found in stones; a bit of fractured slate, embedded among a mass of rounded pebbles, proves voluble with ideas of a kind almost too large for the mind of man to grasp. The eternity that hath passed is an ocean without a further shore, and a finite conception may in vain attempt to span it over. But from the beach, strewed with wrecks, on which we stand to contemplate it, we see far out towards the cloudy horizon, many a dim islet and many a pinnacled rock, the sepulchres of successive eras,—the monuments of consecutive creations: ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller

... ship," said Jack, after a careful examination of the papers. "As to speed, we should get twenty-three knots on a pinch. Her fighting equipment is excellent, everything is spick and span, and I was impressed with the officers and crew. Yes, she is ...
— The Boy Allies with the Victorious Fleets - The Fall of the German Navy • Robert L. Drake

... up the boat was clear of the rapid and sweeping on down with the swift, boiling current toward a dark bend. The Canonita was nowhere to be seen. No living thing was visible. The narrow black gorge rose in sombre majesty to the everlasting sky. What was a mere human life or two in the span of eternity? I was about preparing to climb up on the bottom of the boat when I perceived Jones clinging to the ring in the stern, and in another second the Major and Jack shot up alongside as if from a gun. The whole party had been kept together in a kind of ...
— A Canyon Voyage • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh

... water is, and to become capable of judging of Turner! It is a comfort, however, that he is likely to have but few judges. Graduate has courage to undergo any thing. Ariel was nothing in his ubiquity to him, though he put a span about the world in forty minutes; "but there was some apology for the public's not understanding this, for few people have had the opportunity of seeing the sea at such a time, and when they have, cannot face ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various

... soul! during the bright ardours of boyhood, when the present was all-sufficient in its own bliss, the past soon forgotten, and the future unfeared, what might have been thy lot, beloved Harry Wilton, had thy span of life been prolonged to this very day? Better—oh! far better was it for thee and thine that thou didst so early die; for it seemeth that a curse is on that lofty lineage; and that, with all their genius, accomplishments, and virtues, dishonour comes ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson

... by which she can get a room for the night in a vermin-infested lodging house, upon the additional payment of thirty cents. Now, this may seem exaggerated, but honestly, my boy, I have given you just about the course of action of these scientific philanthropic enterprises. They are spic and span as the ...
— Traffic in Souls - A Novel of Crime and Its Cure • Eustace Hale Ball

... the stage Court of St. Germains; yonder mettle beauty sailed along on her high-heeled shoes to finish the night's triumph at an oyster supper in a den behind the Luckenbooths. And there again walked an imperial dowager, who still span her own linen and struck her serving-man with her ivory cane. Truly the old Edinburgh Assembly Rooms had their secrets, and contained exciting enough elements ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler

... at ending of your span - As all must end—the world shall say, "His best he gave: he left us not A line that saints could wish to blot, For he was blameless, though a man, And though the poet, he ...
— New Collected Rhymes • Andrew Lang

... me that, though there might be a little risk, there was no paralyzing danger. I had forgotten the narrowness of the gully through which alone we could gain the cliffs. From the open span of beach where we were now standing, there was no chance of leaving the caves except as we had come to them, by a boat; for on each side a crag ran like a spur into the water. The comparatively open space permitted the tide to lap ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton

... are covered with tasteful country residences of the retired or wealthy Lyonnais, surrounded by gardens, arbors, shrubbery, &c. The general effect is good. At last, houses and quays begin to line and bridges to span the river, and we halt beside one of the quays and ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley

... pulled by a man who knows how to fight as well as to row—as indeed he must, for there is no room for mere landsmen on board a firkata. But if there be a fair wind off the land, there will be little rowing; the big lateen sail on her one mast will span the narrow waters between the African coast and the Balearic Isles, where a convenient look-out may be kept for Spanish galleons or perhaps an Italian polacca. Drawing little water, a small squadron of brigantines could be pushed up almost any creek, ...
— The Story of the Barbary Corsairs • Stanley Lane-Poole

... Aniline. Discovered 1826 (anil. Span. indigo). First prepared from indigo by means of caustic potash, found in coal, 1834. Manufactured on a large scale after Perkin's discovery of ...
— Vegetable Dyes - Being a Book of Recipes and Other Information Useful to the Dyer • Ethel M. Mairet

... was simple enough, but when it came to inspanning it was another matter. The Kaffir drivers alone knew where each span had to be placed, and there were only thirty-six Kaffirs left. But here the fact that every Boer is himself a handy conductor and driver of waggons told in our favour. Consequently we did not find it beyond ...
— Three Years' War • Christiaan Rudolf de Wet

... the simple fact being that, unless one goes for the express methodic purpose of measuring it (which no one ever does), all thought, save that of wonder and admiration, is lost the moment one's foot falls upon it. The span from cliff to cliff is probably something over 300 feet, while, from the dip of the path in Sark to the clearing of the rise in Little Sark, it ...
— Carette of Sark • John Oxenham

... pale. His child-like face looked suddenly old with his mental effort to grasp the other's meaning. In fact, he was a child—one of the little ones of the world—although he had lived the span of a man's life. Now one of the hardest problems of the elders of the world was presented to him. "You mean—" he ...
— The Copy-Cat and Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

... the poets of the modern world stands Goethe, chief of his own generation, challenging comparison with the greatest of all time. His literary activity embraces a span of nigh seventy years in a life of more than fourscore, beginning, significantly enough, with a poem on "Christ's Descent into Hell" (his earliest extant composition), and ending with Faust's—that is, Man's—ascent into heaven. The rank of a writer—his spiritual ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord

... the center of the room. He is faultlessly clad in a black suit, spick and span from top to toe). Here I am! (He ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various

... Atlantic— It drives me almost frantic, To watch the breakers breaking, and hear their dull, low roar!— My soul is winging madly; And my eyes are peering sadly, As I span the long, long distance from ...
— She and I, Volume 2 - A Love Story. A Life History. • John Conroy Hutcheson

... of the nature of a digression. The passage about the a@ngush/th/amatra was explained on the ground that the human heart is of the size of a span; the question may then be asked whether also such individuals as belong to other classes than mankind, more particularly the Gods, are capable of the knowledge of Brahman: a question finally answered in the affirmative.—This ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sankaracarya - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 1 • George Thibaut

... Fr. chamarre, Mod. Fr. simarre; Ital. zimarra; cf. Span. zamarra, a sheepskin coat; possibly derived ultimately from Gr. [Greek: cheimerios], "wintry," i.e. a winter overcoat), in modern English use the name of a garment worn as part of the ceremonial dress of Anglican bishops. It is a long sleeveless gown of silk or satin, open down the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various

... sickness, but old age that had struck him down. Up yonder, where his couch was placed, he was overshadowed as it were by continual night. A little spider, which, however, he could not see, busily and cheerfully span its web around him, as if it were weaving a little crape banner that should wave when the old man closed ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen

... the canal he met the consumptive man with the doll's face and the brimless hat coming towards him down the slope of the bridge with little steps, tightly buttoned into his chocolate overcoat, and holding his furled umbrella a span or two from him like a divining rod. It must be eleven, he thought, and peered into a dairy to see the time. The clock in the dairy told him that it was five minutes to five but, as he turned away, he heard a clock ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce

... a boisterous course; the year span round With giddy motion. But the time approached That brought with it a regular desire For calmer pleasures, when the winning forms 50 Of Nature were collaterally attached To every scheme of holiday delight And every boyish sport, less grateful ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth

... trained to his finest, would have outweighed him twenty pounds. Now that margin was nearer thirty, and added to that, he was inches less in height. He was shorter of neck, blocky, built close to the ground. And the span of his ankle was nearly as great ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans

... Mekin continued in overdrive, heading for Kandar. Each second it traversed a distance equal to the span of a solar system, out to its remotest planet. A heartbeat that would begin where a pulsing Cepheid, had it been possible to see, would have seemed at its greatest brilliance, and would end where the light from that same giant star ...
— Talents, Incorporated • William Fitzgerald Jenkins

... of finest sentiment in the hearts of those otherwise inclined, one turns away with a desire to repeat the wisdom of these pioneer planters and start a grove of his own. With what grander monument could one commemorate his little span on earth? ...
— Walnut Growing in Oregon • Various

... like molten liquid and the bridges which span it a dozen times or more between Notre Dame and the Pont de l'Aima were as white as snow, and unsubstantial as though they bridged the gulfs of dreams. Even the great blocks of stone and the balks of timber which lie on the mud banks ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs

... well-conditioned old gentleman of the city finds so inexpressibly delicious. When the summer is once, over, and while the cold weather prevails, they furnish another and quite new set of dainties. Then the span-long, ripe, 'salt' oyster is to be had for the raking of their more solidly-bottomed basins; and all along their more retired nooks and harbors, the gunner, by taking proper precautions, may bring to bag the somewhat 'sedgy' but still well-flavored black duck, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I., No. IV., April, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... marshes, how candid and simple and nothing-withholding and free Ye publish yourselves to the sky and offer yourselves to the sea! Tolerant plains, that suffer the sea and the rains and the sun, Ye spread and span like the catholic man who hath mightily won God out of knowledge and good out of infinite pain And sight out of blindness and purity ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly

... together. It is here that he gradually begins to acquire the habit of considering what are the conditions of wise social activity, its limits, its objects, its rewards, what is the capacity of collective achievement, and of what sort is the significance and purport of the little span of time that cuts off the yesterday of our society ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley

... athwart a grassy hill Outrun the winds that chase them, soon outran His teacher, and did teach with native skill Strange truths and new to that experienced man; So [?] they were friends, as few have ever been Who mark the extremes of life's discordant span. The words bracketed above, and in Fragment 5 of our text, are ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley

... same time, the "good" man is enjoying his blissful state, without limit, or end, or satiety! And the time of probation, during which the two worked out their future fate, was as a grain of sand as compared with the countless universes in space in all eternity—a relation which reduces the span of man's lifetime to almost absolutely NOTHING, mathematically considered. Think of ...
— Reincarnation and the Law of Karma - A Study of the Old-New World-Doctrine of Rebirth, and Spiritual Cause and Effect • William Walker Atkinson

... years back, one of these vehicles, drawn by a span of twelve oxen, was seen slowly wending its way to the south-west, in the direction of Natal. It was a loosely yet strongly built machine on four wheels, fourteen feet long and four wide, formed of well-seasoned stink wood, the joints and bolts working all ways, so that, ...
— Hendricks the Hunter - The Border Farm, a Tale of Zululand • W.H.G. Kingston

... Man of Business, then to make up an Estate, then to arrive at Honours, then to retire. Thus although the whole of Life is allowed by every one to be short, the several Divisions of it appear long and tedious. We are for lengthening our Span in general, but would fain contract the Parts of which it is composed. The Usurer would be very well satisfied to have all the Time annihilated that lies between the present Moment and next Quarter-day. The ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele

... the silence of her dark retreat, Address'd her God,—"Almighty power divine! 'Tis thine to raise, and to depress, is thine; With honour to light up the name unknown, Or to put out the lustre of a throne. In my short span both fortunes I have prov'd, And though with ill frail nature will be mov'd, I'll bear it well: (O strengthen me to bear!) And if my piety may claim thy care; If I remember'd, in youth's giddy heat, ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young

... intention of residing there during his sojourn in the country. It was not habitable, nor had it been so for years. The road by which he travelled lay near it, and he could not pass without looking upon the place where a long line of gallant ancestors had succeeded each other, lived their span, ...
— The Poor Scholar - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton

... remained for me to fall furiously and hopelessly in love with a creature from another world, of a species similar possibly, yet not identical with mine. A woman who was hatched from an egg, and whose span of life might cover a thousand years; whose people had strange customs and ideas; a woman whose hopes, whose pleasures, whose standards of virtue and of right and wrong might vary as greatly from mine as did those of the ...
— A Princess of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... toward horses. Being one of those lucky individuals who carries his office under his hat, I should have to take a typewriter and a load of books along. This put saddle-horses out of the running. Charmian suggested driving a span. She had faith in me; besides, she could drive a span herself. But when I thought of the many mountains to cross, and of crossing them for three months with a poor tired span, I vetoed the proposition and said we'd have to come back to gasolene after all. This she vetoed ...
— The Human Drift • Jack London

... mighty God, on feeble man, How few his hours, how short his span! Short from the cradle to the grave: Who can secure his vital breath Against the bold demands of death, With skill to fly, or power ...
— The Psalms of David - Imitated in the Language of The New Testament - And Applied to The Christian State and Worship • Isaac Watts

... Paul. There was a span of awkward silence. "Well," said he, with a wan smile, "we're facing, not a political, but a very unimportant party situation. Don't suppose I haven't a sense of proportion. I have. What for me is the end of the world is the unruffled ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke

... was once a certain woman who did not pay due reverence to Mother Friday, but set to work on a distaff-ful of flax, combing and whirling it. She span away till dinner-time, then suddenly sleep fell upon her—such a deep sleep! And when she had gone to sleep, suddenly the door opened and in came Mother Friday, before the eyes of all who were there, clad in a white dress, and in such a rage! And she went ...
— Russian Fairy Tales - A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore • W. R. S. Ralston

... Newton do we realise the temper of the early members of the Royal Society. In this tale of his other activities I have not forgotten The Closet Opened. Of all Digby's many interests the most constant and permanent was medicine. How to enlarge the span of man's life was a problem much meditated on in his age. We have seen how Descartes's mind ran on it; and in Bacon's Natural History there is reference to a 'book of the prolongation of life.' In spite of what is written on his Janssen hermit portrait—Saber ...
— The Closet of Sir Kenelm Digby Knight Opened • Kenelm Digby

... "that among all the church members in this city, I couldn't raise two hundred dollars fer such a cause. One of 'em said no, because he'd jes' bought a new span of carriage hosses. Huh! I told him he might ride to Hell behind fine bosses but he'd not feel any better when he got there. 'Nother said he'd jes' put five hundred dollars into the new lodge temple, and that he couldn't spend any more. I asked ...
— That Printer of Udell's • Harold Bell Wright

... Sally thought she would not altogether mind if he remained at sea for a time. He could save, and she could get on; and then they would both be happy, with a house somewhere, and a maid, and everything spick and span. No babies. Sally had taken that to heart, and she appreciated the value of old Perce's advice. A girl who wanted to get on did not need babies to drag her down. ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton

... of Indian women appeared, there were tracks of women, scores of them, plainly imprinted in the soil of the river-bank. Those slender impressions, scarcely a span in length, smoothly moulded in the mud, were not to be mistaken for the footsteps of an Indian squaw. There was not the wide divergence at the heels with the toes turned inward; neither was there ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid

... den, or nest, or home, If, like the lion, free to go;— If, like the eagle, wing'd to roam, We span the rock and breast the foam, Still watchful for the hour of doom, When, with the knell of thunder-boom, We bound upon ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various

... up all his little belongings and had bought a wagon and a span of oxen, which he kept ...
— A Dash from Diamond City • George Manville Fenn

... marriage contracts for definite periods. With the increased state of health, and the full span of life confronting every man, we must face the problem squarely. Now ...
— The Blue Germ • Martin Swayne

... both finitely and cosmically the initial numbing shock did register; and it may be assumed that he jolted rather horribly at the splintering bite of bone into brain. But who can say he did not reach a point-of-prescience, that his neuro-thalamics did not leap to span the eons, and gape in horror, in that precise and endless time just before his brains spewed in a gush of gray and ...
— The Beginning • Henry Hasse

... water's caress, Was the young bronze-orange leaf, That clung to the tree as a tress, Shooting lucid tendrils to wed With the vine-hook tree or pole, Like Arachne launched out on her thread. Then the maiden her dusky stole In the span of the black-starred zone, Gathered up for her footing fleet. As one that had toil of her own She followed the lines of wheat Tripping straight through the fields, green blades, To the groves of olive grey, Downy-grey, golden-tinged: and to glades Where the pear-blossom thickens the spray In a night, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... soopremacy, is in the midst of them strifes while I'm visitin' Florer. It's some two moons prior when one of 'em, which we'll call him the 'Astor Injun,' takes a heavy fall out of the opp'sition by goin' over to Cherryvale an' buyin' a sooperannuated two-seat Rockaway buggy. To this he hooks up a span of ponies, loads in his squaws, an' p'rades 'round from Pawhusky to Greyhoss—the same bein' a couple of Osage camps—an' tharby redooces the enemy— what we'll name the 'Vanderbilt Injuns'—to desp'ration. The Astor savage shorely has the call ...
— Wolfville Days • Alfred Henry Lewis

... is the belief of the Hidatsa Indians, as reported by Dr. Matthews, in the "Makadistati, or house of infants." This is described as "a cavern near Knife River, which, they supposed, extended far into the earth, but whose entrance was only a span wide. It was resorted to by the childless husband or the barren wife. There are those among them who imagine that in some way or other their children come from the Makadistati; and marks of contusion ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain

... heard him say to her; "but stay and watch with me. Thou mayst live twice the span of my life, and see nothing of human interest equal to this; and there may be revelations more. Let ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace

... leading literary illustrator of Great Britain, Carlyle—as of Victor Hugo in France—that not one of them is personally friendly or admirant toward America; indeed, quite the reverse. N'importe. That they (and more good minds than theirs) cannot span the vast revolutionary arch thrown by the United States over the centuries, fixed in the present, launched to the endless future; that they cannot stomach the high-life-below-stairs coloring all our poetic and genteel social status so far—the measureless viciousness ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman

... so charmed with this address, that he ordered a little chair to be made, in order that Tom might sit on his table, and also a palace of gold a span high, with a door an inch wide, for little Tom to live in. He also gave him a coach drawn by six small mice, This made the queen angry, because she had not a new coach too: therefore, resolving to ruin Tom, she complained to the king that ...
— The Fairy Book - The Best Popular Stories Selected and Rendered Anew • Dinah Maria Mulock (AKA Miss Mulock)

... hermit, Rama not only slew the ravaging monsters, but went on to take part in a tournament, where King Janak offered his daughter, Sita, in marriage to any archer who would span a bow he had obtained from Siva. On arriving at the place where this test was to be made, Rama saw the huge bow brought forth on a chariot drawn by five thousand men, and, although no one else had even been able to raise it, took it up ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber

... which her fingers could span; she tenderly smoothed his face as it lay gray against the pillows; then she caught up his hand and held it to her breast with a quick, ...
— Sandy • Alice Hegan Rice

... the agony of suspense which racked our souls during those six days? It seemed to us as though a life was being offered in sacrifice for the thousands which it was to contribute in saving. Across the span of thirteen years the memory of the last moments comes to me most vividly and thrilling, when the light of reason left his brain and shut out of his mind the torturing thought of the loving wife and daughter far away, and of the unborn ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86

... leaned back against a rock he was hit in the thigh by a ricochet that tore its way out, whirling like a circular saw, a span above where it entered. The wound was very nasty, being ripped twice the size made by an ordinary shot, and it bled profusely. Skinny crawled over and attended to it, making a tourniquet of his neckerchief and clumsily bandaging it with a strip torn ...
— Hopalong Cassidy's Rustler Round-Up - Bar-20 • Clarence Edward Mulford

... Mrs. Reed found it very pleasant. One afternoon late in March, Mr. Reed came home quite early, and carried his wife down into the dining-room. He had asked the Deans over to tea, and Doctor Joe. And there was the table, spick and span, the silver shining, the windows so clean you couldn't see there was any glass in them, the curtains fresh, the tablecloth ironed so that every flower and leaf in it stood out. There wasn't ...
— A Little Girl of Long Ago • Amanda Millie Douglas

... that the challenges we face are real. They are serious and they are many. They will not be met easily or in a short span of time, but know this America, THEY WILL BE ...
— Inaugural Presidential Address - Contributed Transcripts • Barack Hussein Obama

... extensively from Professor Lethaby's brilliant little book to give this independent testimony of the vastness of the influence exerted by Egypt during a span of nearly forty centuries in creating and developing the "matrix of civilization". Most of this wider dispersal abroad was effected by alien peoples, who transformed their gifts from Egypt before they handed ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith

... rest you. We'll get lunch at a tea-room, and shop all the afternoon. We'll go to a hotel for dinner, and stay all night. Then in the morning we can get up early, have our breakfast, and drive back here in time before the men come. Now isn't that perfectly spick-and-span for a plan?" ...
— Cloudy Jewel • Grace Livingston Hill

... thing I would like to say." He spoke without turning. "Man without Woman is not complete. They two are but one being, complete and life-giving. Love when it comes is the keystone of this brief span of Life of ours. They who have loved have tasted truly of the best that Life can give to them. And this is the great wrong of civilisation to-day, that it takes Love from most and leaves in us only a feverish, degrading Lust. It is ...
— The Workingman's Paradise - An Australian Labour Novel • John Miller

... unthinkable, but so are other things as well. Space is unthinkable, time is unthinkable, and so (as Herbert Spencer elaborately argued) is motion. In each of these is involved some self-contradiction, some gap which reason cannot span; and yet, as Kant said, unless we do assume them, rational action, and even thought itself, are impossible. If the difficulty, then, of conceiving human freedom is the only difficulty which religious ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock

... young wife towards her suffering, and sometimes not quite evenly-tempered partner, who, however, let me add, appeared to reciprocate truthfully her affection; all the more so, perhaps, that he knew their time together upon earth was already shrunk to a brief span. In my opinion, Ellen Irwin was a handsome, even an elegant young person: this, however, is in some degree a matter of taste. But no one could deny that the gentle kindness, the beaming compassion, that irradiated her features as she tended the fast-sinking invalid, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 434 - Volume 17, New Series, April 24, 1852 • Various

... lunch Frank had Toots harness a span of fast steppers, attach them to the double-seated surrey and bring the team ...
— Frank Merriwell's Son - A Chip Off the Old Block • Burt L. Standish

... a great serpent, the bigness of a date palm, came fleeing towards me in all haste, gliding along now to the right then to the left till she was close upon me, whilst her tongue lolled ground wards a span long and swept the dust as she went. She was pursued by a Dragon[FN324] who was not longer than two lances, and of slender build about the bulk of a spear and, although her terror lent her speed, and she kept wriggling from side ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton

... first great crash there ensued a moment's hesitation. Then a second span succumbed. There followed a series of minor chutes with short intervening silences. At last so long an interval of calm ensued that we plucked up courage to believe it all over. A single stone rolled ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White

... facing these points,—as nearly as a due regard to the positions of other buildings in the vicinity, and the general symmetry and apportionment of the grounds will permit. Each side of the roof will thus receive an equal amount of sun-light. For span-roofed Green-houses the rule is not so arbitrary, the glass not being lined with foliage, as in the case of graperies, the diffusion of light would not be materially obstructed. Under some circumstances, Green-houses may be placed east and west, as when a portion of the house is to be devoted to ...
— Woodward's Graperies and Horticultural Buildings • George E. Woodward

... merely ornamental; but the interior of St. Paul's is in many respects essentially different from its Roman model. In the Temple of Peace three arches cover the enormous length of over 250 feet, and seriously diminish the apparent size; in St. Paul's their span is less than half of this. Indeed, in this respect Wren adopted a via media between the Roman and the Anglo-Norman and Pointed. Old St. Paul's, for instance, contained twice as many arches in the same length as its successor, and Rochester still ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of St. Paul - An Account of the Old and New Buildings with a Short Historical Sketch • Arthur Dimock

... slab support a very heavy load by simple friction, for the slab was cracked close to the supports. In slabs, shear is seldom provided for in the steel reinforcement. It is only when beams begin to have a depth approximating one-tenth of the span that the shear in the concrete becomes excessive and provision is necessary in the steel reinforcement. Years ago, the writer recommended that, in such beams, some of the rods be curved up toward the ends of the span and anchored ...
— Some Mooted Questions in Reinforced Concrete Design • Edward Godfrey

... between the States of New York and New Jersey, the terminus of which in the city of New York shall not be below Sixty-sixth street. It contemplates the construction of a bridge upon piers placed in the river. No mention is made of a single span crossing the entire river, nor is there anything in the bill indicating that it was within the intention of the Congress that there should be a bridge built without piers. I am by no means certain that the Secretary of ...
— Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Volume 8, Section 2 (of 2): Grover Cleveland • Grover Cleveland

... Peter was born on January 27, 1815. She died the day before her ninety-sixth birthday, and this editorial, from The Baltimore Sun, gives a fine picture of the changes in the world in the years covered by the span of ...
— A Portrait of Old George Town • Grace Dunlop Ecker

... Streets on the Surrey side Shall flaunt their gems and rare chinchillas To swell the local mummer's pride, And every bridge shall span the tide With Arcadies of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, January 28, 1914 • Various

... Islanders departed, unsteadily, but still on their feet, leaving a demoralized ship behind them. And young MacTavish, who has seen a thing or two in his brief span, staggered to his berth, saying, 'My God! Is all Australia ...
— Three Elephant Power • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson









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