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More "Tapered" Quotes from Famous Books



... saw, and saw no other for a while, was the handsomest ship I had ever set eyes on. A long low black schooner, with a narrow beading of white at deck level, and masts that tapered off into fishing-rods. She was pierced for six guns a-side, and a great tarpaulin cover on the forecastle and another astern hinted at something heavier there. Her lines and finish were so graceful that I felt sure she was French built, for English builders ever consider ...
— Carette of Sark • John Oxenham

... the revival of church Gothic and with the effort to make church music and ritual richer and more impressive. But, upon the whole, it was more intellectual than aesthetic, an affair of doctrine and church polity rather than of ecclesiology; while the later phase of ritualism into which it has tapered down appears to the profane to be largely a matter of upholstery, given over to people who concern themselves with the carving of lecterns and the embroidery of chasubles and altar cloths; with Lent lilies, antiphonal choirs, and what Carlyle calls the "singular ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers

... dried grass was suspended to show that it was strictly 'tabu.' Inside the house were three conical structures about seven or eight feet in height, and about ten or twelve feet in circumference at the bottom, and for about four feet from the ground, at which point they tapered off to a point at the top. These cages were made of the broad leaves of the pandanus-tree, sewn quite close together so that no light and little or no air could enter. On one side of each is an opening which is closed by a double door of ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer

... goddess, and celebrated in the spring. (Herodianus, i. 32, &c.) It was a tradition that the stone fell from the skies at Pessinus. There was another great stone in Syria (Herodianus, v. 5), in the temple of the Sun, which was worshipped: the stone was round in the lower part, and gradually tapered upwards; the colour was black, and the people Aida that it fell from heaven. It is probable that these stones were aerolites, the falling of which is often recorded in ancient writers, and now established beyond all doubt by repeated observation in modern times. (See Penny ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume II • Aubrey Stewart & George Long

... surface; head and body vermi-formed; digits and nails of the anterior extremities stronger; half way from the os calcis to the fingers hairy; fur of two sorts and abundant, but not lengthened, nor harsh, nor annulated; tail cylindrico-tapered, pointed, half the length of the animal." He goes on to add: "The anterior limbs are decidedly fossorial, and the hinder suited for walking in a sub-plantigrade manner; both wholly unfitted for ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale

... the toper regale in his tankard of ale, Or with alcohol moisten his thrapple, Only give me, I pray, a good pipe of soft clay, Nicely tapered and thin in the stapple; And I shall puff, puff, let who will say, "Enough!" No luxury else I'm in lack o', No malice I hoard 'gainst queen, prince, duke, or lord, While I pull at my pipe ...
— Pipe and Pouch - The Smoker's Own Book of Poetry • Various

... of placing the butt of one wale-plank nearly over the middle of the other; and the planks being broadest in the middle, and tapered to the ends, they resemble an anchor-stock, with which it is more in keeping than is the method called top-and-butt; also pursued in fishing spars, making ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth

... appearance; and their long, strong, naked wings hung down by their sides till they touched the ground: power and ferocity in the first rude draught, shorn of everything but its sinister ugliness. Another curious thing was the gradation of the young in size; they tapered down regularly from the first to the fifth, as if there had been, as probably there was, an interval of a day or ...
— Bird Stories from Burroughs - Sketches of Bird Life Taken from the Works of John Burroughs • John Burroughs

... As you walk on to this, the mansion closes the distant view between the woods with fine effect. The church has often been engraved, and is therefore tolerably familiar to the general reader. It consists of two barn-like structures, with tall roofs, set side by side, and the tower and finely tapered spire rising above them at the northwest corner. The church is ...
— Select Poems of Thomas Gray • Thomas Gray

... with a great deal to do breaking off the wards of a large key I had, and making it red-hot, I by degrees fashioned it into a kind of spindle, and therewith making holes quite round the bottom of my cart, in them I stuck up sticks about two feet high that I had tapered at the end to ...
— Life And Adventures Of Peter Wilkins, Vol. I. (of II.) • Robert Paltock

... religion were worse in the eyes of Maieddine than the foolish faith of Christians, who, at least, were not backsliders. He would not even point out to Victoria the strange minaret of the Abadite mosque at Berryan, which tapered like a brown obelisk against the shimmering sky, for to him its very ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... intelligent looking person; he had a long face, a curved nose, a broad forehead, tiny, sparkling eyes and a reddish beard that tapered to a ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja

... B, of an internally tapered or coned form, and C of an externally coned form, wound on an iron wire bundle, I. The action in Fig. 2 may be said to be analogous to that of a plain solenoid with its core, except that repulsion, and not attraction, is produced, while that of ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 601, July 9, 1887 • Various

... species of fish none of us had ever before seen, a fish about ten to sixteen inches long, slim, with fine scales and large fins. Their heads came down with a sudden curve to the mouth, and their bodies tapered off to a very small circumference just before the tail spread out. They were good to eat, and formed a welcome addition to our larder. We were all eager for something fresh, and when we saw a couple of deer run across the bluffs just before we reached our fourth camp, our hopes ...
— A Canyon Voyage • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh

... allowed to lie in place. Each year's accumulation of minerals and humus contributes to the better growth of the next year's grass. Initially, my grass had grown a little higher and a little thicker each year. But the steady increase in biomass production seems to have tapered off in the last couple of years. I suppose by now the soil's organic matter content probably has been restored and ...
— Organic Gardener's Composting • Steve Solomon

... with passionate whispering, anxious solicitude, throbbing jealousy. And when they departed, the old burial-ground seemed to groan. Those weeds, in which their entangled feet often stumbled on sultry nights, were fingers, tapered by tomb life, that sprang up from the earth to detain them and cast them into each other's arms. That pungent and penetrating odour exhaled by the broken stems was the fertilising perfume, the mighty ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola

... keeper," said Tom to himself, as he reeled out yard after yard of his tapered line, and with a gentle sweep dropped his collar of flies lightly on the water, each cast covering another five feet of the dimpling surface. "Good fellow, the keeper—don't mind telling a story against himself—can stand being laughed at—more than master can. Ah, there's the fish he saw sucking, ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes

... through the bog. It helped us to realize the horror of this woman's life when we saw the eagerness and joy with which she laid us on her husband's track. We left her standing upon the thin peninsula of firm, peaty soil which tapered out into the widespread bog. From the end of it a small wand planted here and there showed where the path zigzagged from tuft to tuft of rushes among those green-scummed pits and foul quagmires which barred the way to the stranger. Rank reeds and lush, slimy water-plants sent an odour ...
— Hound of the Baskervilles • Authur Conan Doyle

... As the term tapered to an end, things went from bad to worse with her; and since, besides, the parting with Evelyn was at the door, she was often to be seen with red-rimmed eyelids, which she did not even try ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson

... of the sides to be tapered, as is the side A, in Figure 138, and that the hole is not central, and both facts will be shown by the centre lines 1 and 2 in the figure. The measurement of face A would be marked from A to line B at each end, but the distance the hole ...
— Mechanical Drawing Self-Taught • Joshua Rose

... kind that is called the swallow-tail butterfly, because each of its wings tapered to a point, something like the tail of a swallow. We will call the butterfly, Miss Swallow-tail, and now let us see what ...
— New National Fourth Reader • Charles J. Barnes and J. Marshall Hawkes

... and since still no acknowledgment had come he strolled along the road himself. He came to a large white house. A flagpost tapered from its roof but no flag blew out its folds. There was a garden about the house, the trim well-ordered garden of the English folk with a lawn and banks of flowers, and a gardener with a hose was busy watering it. Thresk stopped before ...
— Witness For The Defense • A.E.W. Mason

... some mighty spirit of the night; and the sails, as the moon shone dimly through them, were as dark as if they had been tarpawlings. But when I walked forward and looked aft, what a beauteous change! Now each mast, with its gently swelling canvass, the higher sails decreasing in size, until they tapered away nearly to a point, though topsail, topgallant sail, royal and skysails, showed like towers of snow, and the cordage like silver threads, while each dark spar seemed to be of ebony, fished with ivory, as a flood of cold, pale, mild light streamed ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott

... centuries of Viking raids into Europe tapered off following the adoption of Christianity by King Olav TRYGGVASON in 994. Conversion of the Norwegian kingdom occurred over the next several decades. In 1397, Norway was absorbed into a union with Denmark ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency

... attracted our attention, was the very surprising size of the anthills, or nests. I measured one, the height of which was 13 feet, and width at the base 7 feet; from whence it tapered gradually to the apex. They are composed of a pale red earth; but how it is sufficiently tempered, I am unable to state; certain is it, that it has almost the consistence of mortar, and will bear the tread of a ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 1. • J Lort Stokes

... voice. He mounted without reply. As he had expected Daniel Culser was present, and rose to greet him negligently, from a lounging attitude on the sofa. His coat, cut back to the knees, was relentlessly tapered, the collar enormously rolled and revered, and a white Marseilles waistcoat bore black spots as large as a Bolivian half dollar; while a black scarf, it was called the Du Casses, fell in an avalanche of ruffles. He moved toward the door, fitting his coat carefully about his slim waist, ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer

... I did not think they were the seal, at least they appeared to me a very different animal from the seals to be met with on the coast of America and Newfoundland; for they have a short round head, but these creatures heads were long, and tapered to the nose; they had very long whiskers, and frequently raised themselves half the length of the body out of the water, to look round them, and often leaped entirely out; which I do not ever recollect to have seen the seal do: from these circumstances, ...
— An Historical Journal of the Transactions at Port Jackson and Norfolk Island • John Hunter

... knife, and is of pearly whiteness, more resembling cocoa-nut in appearance and texture than anything else I can compare it with. The interior cavity, containing the vital parts, terminates a little behind the large fins, where the cartilage was solid, to its tapered extremity, which is without a caudal fin. Within, and around the back part, lay the flesh, of a coarse fibrous texture, slightly salmon-coloured. The liver was such as to fill a common pail, and there ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various

... Tolstoy and the comfort the harvest fields are said to have once brought to Luther when, much perturbed by many theological difficulties, he suddenly forgot them all in a gush of gratitude for mere bread, exclaiming, "How it stands, that golden yellow corn, on its fine tapered stem; the meek earth, at God's kind bidding, has produced it once again!" At least the toiling poor had this comfort of bread labor, and perhaps it did not matter that they gained it unknowingly and painfully, if only they walked in the path of labor. In the exercise of ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams

... entire end of the room was occupied by a painting of a neck and neck finish in a race, and the artist had conceived the blooded racers as creatures with tremendous round hips and mighty-muscled shoulders, while the legs tapered to a faun-like delicacy. These animals were spread-eagled in the most amazing fashion, their fore-hoofs reaching beyond their noses and their rear hoofs striking out beyond the tips of the tails. The jockey in the ...
— The Night Horseman • Max Brand

... swamp forest tinged with their peculiar purple haze. Eastward the railroad's long causeway and telegraph-poles narrowed on the view through its wide axe-hewn lane in the overtowering swamp. New Orleans, sixty miles or more away, was in that direction. Westward, rails, causeway, and telegraph, tapered away again across the illimitable hidden quicksands of the "trembling prairie" till the green disguise of reeds and rushes closed in upon the attenuated line, and only a small notch in a far strip of woods showed where it still led on toward Texas. Behind the ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable

... conceal the slight chinks, and the boat might be examined in every possible way without any trace of this hiding-place being observed. The canoe was some eleven feet long, and nearly three feet in the beam; it tapered at either end, so that it might be propelled backwards or forwards without turning, and stem and stern (interchangeable definitions in this case) each rose a few inches higher than the general gunwale. ...
— After London - Wild England • Richard Jefferies

... same material which surrounds and supports the section. Of course the wood has to be specially treated to withstand the acid. A special non-corrosive terminal is used. A coned bolt draws the lug ends of adjacent cells together, fitting in a corresponding tapered hole in the lugs, and thus increasing the contact area. The positive and negative tapers being different, a cell cannot be connected up in ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... or pins of ivory, bone, or steel. The latter are most commonly used, and should have tapered points, without the least ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous

... the scout, with the tips of his tapered fingers trembling on an empty table, straining forward and staring into the stranger's face; "no, Jack Ramsey has not been here; and if what you say be true—he sleeps alone in yonder fastness. Alas, poor Ramsey!—Ah ...
— The Last Spike - And Other Railroad Stories • Cy Warman

... arm and walking down the hall, asking him to kiss her. At such times she often looked quite bright, keen, alert and amused. Towards the end she would give at times playful answers, such as "I came to-day," or "This is the Hall of Fame." This tapered off, so that by December, ...
— Benign Stupors - A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type • August Hoch

... beside them. An hundred miles deep lay the lowest of the Underground Fields, and was an hundred miles from side to side, every way; and above it there were three hundred and six fields, each one less in area than that beneath; and in this wise they tapered, until the topmost field which lay direct beneath the lowermost floor of the Great Redoubt, was ...
— The Night Land • William Hope Hodgson

... with her arms, and so did not see what happened then. A burning branch like a long, flaming dagger flew straight with the wind and lighted true as if flung by the hand of an enemy. A long, neatly tapered stack received it fairly, and Kent's cry brought Val's arms down, and her ...
— Lonesome Land • B. M. Bower

... Pelayo to the siege of Granada was likely to have a strong feeling on the subject of the sham chivalry of the romances. It gives a point, too, to what he says in more than one place about families that have once been great and have tapered away until they have come to nothing, like a pyramid. It was the case of ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

... their heads. The willows waved their feathery boughs in the sun and gleamed bright against the dark background of the pines. Migwan noted down the different contours of the trees, how the elms spread out wide at the top, how the pines tapered to a point, how the maples spread out irregularly. A flock of wild ducks passed them. In some places the banks of the river were honeycombed by the holes of bank swallows. A turtle, sitting on a half-sunken log, stretched his neck and looked after ...
— The Camp Fire Girls in the Maine Woods - Or, The Winnebagos Go Camping • Hildegard G. Frey

... cones bristled, pyramiding to the base of one tremendous spire that tapered up almost to the top of ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt

... a piece he had cut in making the tube. It was perfectly round, ideal for the purpose. He sliced off the inner side where it tapered to a cone, then, working only by eye estimate, cut out a hole in which the wedge of fission material would fit. He wasn't off by a thirty-second of an inch. Skillful application of the torch melted the thorium around the ...
— Rip Foster Rides the Gray Planet • Blake Savage

... marked the position of the brow, the nose, the mouth, and the chin; the horizontal line passed through the eyes, and was parallel to the mouth. The hands of youth were beautifully rounded, and the dimples given; the fingers were tapered, but the articulations were not generally indicated. In the male form the chest was high, arched, and prominent. In the female form, especially in that of goddesses and virgins, the form of the breasts is virginal in the extreme, since their beauty was generally made to consist ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy

... a rich blood color in their swarthy cheeks, and some of them are really pretty, though always in a lumpish, domestic-animal style. The hands and feet are singularly small; the fingers short, but nicely tapered. Take hold of the hand, and you are struck with its cetacean feel. It is not flabby, but has a peculiar blubber-like, elastic compressibility, and seems not ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various

... strong, scientifically tempered, and proportioned. The strength of a perfectly tempered spring will always remain the same, whether in winter or summer, never losing its elasticity. The best of tempering, however, is useless in a spring badly formed or clumsily tapered. ...
— Camp Life in the Woods and the Tricks of Trapping and Trap Making • William Hamilton Gibson

... guide-bearing (Fig. 6) is simply a sleeve flanged at one end, babbitted on the inside, and slightly tapered on the outside where it fits into the base. The flange is held securely in the base by eight 3/4-inch cap-screws. Between the cap-screw holes are eight holes tapped to 3/4-inch, and when it is desired to take the bearing down the cap-screws are taken out of the base and screwed into the ...
— Steam Turbines - A Book of Instruction for the Adjustment and Operation of - the Principal Types of this Class of Prime Movers • Hubert E. Collins

... still and pale. The muffled sunlight gleamed like gold tissue through grey gauze, and the beech alleys tapered away to a blue haze blent of sky and forest. It was one of those elusive days when the familiar forms of things seem about to dissolve in a ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton

... the line of the ceja for two or three miles they approached a spur of the cliff that ran out into the plain, and gradually tapered to a point, sinking lower as it receded from the Llano. It ended in a clump, or rather several clusters, of isolated rocks and boulders that stood near each other. The place was not timbered, but the dark rocks irregularly piled upon each other gave it a ...
— The White Chief - A Legend of Northern Mexico • Mayne Reid

... benches. There was no blanket on the bed, only a sheet and a heavy patchwork quilt. Ah, yes, there was something else, carefully laid upon the quilt. This was a linen bag without an opening, which, when spread out, tapered towards the ends. Had I not known something about the old-fashioned nightcap, I should have puzzled a long time before discovering what I was expected to do with this object. The matter is simple to those who know that the cap is formed by turning ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker

... being spaced amidships as shown in Fig. 4; then the points where they cross the bow and stern and all the moulds are marked, and notches one inch by one-fourth of an inch cut to receive them, the edges of the bow and stern being tapered off at the same time to half an inch; then all the parts are placed in position again, and fastened with one-inch screws, except where the keelson joins the bow, stern, and moulds, where one inch and a half screws are used. Each screw is dipped in white lead ...
— Harper's Young People, April 27, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various

... darkness of ages, where day and night were the same, where nothing changed but themselves, save the voice of the stream, which grew louder or softer according to the play of winds and sunshine and clouds upon the upper world. Some tapered to a fine point, others were like pendant bunches of grapes; all were of the whiteness of loaf-sugar. No tourists stricken with that deplorable mania for taking home souvenirs of everything, and ready to spoil any beauty to gratify their vanity or their acquisitiveness, ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker

... All covering should be sectional in form and large surfaces should be covered with blocks, except where such material would be difficult to install, in which case plastic material should be used. In the case of flanges the covering should be tapered back from the flange in order that the ...
— Steam, Its Generation and Use • Babcock & Wilcox Co.

... required for any special purpose, a large pine is felled, and the tapered, pointed top is cut off to a convenient length, the great spar being rejected and left to decay upon the ground. I have never seen pit-saws used, but as a rule, should a beam or stout plank be required, a whole ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker

... a metal tool of this kind, in which the entire frame is in one solid casting. The saw guide uprights are clamped in tapered sockets in the swivel arm and can be adjusted to hold the saw without play, and this will also counteract a saw that runs out of true, due to improper ...
— Carpentry for Boys • J. S. Zerbe

... cigarette from her tapered fingers into a little silver bowl upon a table at her side, then lightly touched the bell which stood there also. Its soft note answered to the bell in the ante-room; a white-robed Chinese servant silently descended the great staircase, his soft red slippers sinking ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer

... narrow that the sun seldom brightened the merry brook, made a deep cut in the rocks. The head of this valley tapered until the walls nearly met; it seemed to lose itself in the shade of fern-faced cliffs, shadowed as they were by fir trees leaning over the brink, as though to search for secrets of the ravine. So deep ...
— The Spirit of the Border - A Romance of the Early Settlers in the Ohio Valley • Zane Grey

... conducive to practical success, as well with trout as with less noble fish, In fly-fishing, one serviceable four-ounce rod is enough; and a plain click reel, of small size, is just as satisfactory as a more costly affair. Twenty yards of tapered, waterproof line, with a six-foot leader, and a cost of two flies, complete the rig, and will be found sufficient. In common with most fly-fishers, I have mostly thrown a cast of three flies, but have found two just as ...
— Woodcraft • George W. Sears

... by a centrifugal governor, thus throwing the stream on or off the buckets. The power of the wheel is consequently increased or diminished to meet the change of load, and a constant speed is maintained. When it is necessary to waste as little water as possible, a concentric tapered needle may be fitted inside the nozzle. When the nozzle is in its highest position the needle tip is withdrawn; as the nozzle sinks the needle protrudes, gradually decreasing the ...
— How it Works • Archibald Williams

... most remarkable part of the equipage. The handle was only sixteen inches in length, but the lash was twenty feet long, made of the toughest seal-skin, and as thick as a man's wrist near the handle, whence it tapered off to a fine point. The labour of using such a formidable weapon is so great that Esquimaux usually, when practicable, travel in couples, one sledge behind the other. The dogs of the last sledge follow mechanically and require no whip, and the riders change about ...
— The World of Ice • Robert Michael Ballantyne

... the day is almost as good for clear thinking as the early morning, especially if the day has not been overstrenuous and the activities have been gradually tapered off. ...
— Industrial Progress and Human Economics • James Hartness

... thereabouts the Mesa. High, precipitous, perpendicular, level, and dotted with farm-houses, this singular bit of land stretches several miles out southward to sea, bordered with a rocky beach, and tapered off into the wide ocean with Duxbury Reef—a dangerous rocky reef, curving down to the southward and almost always white with foam, save when the sea is calm, and then the great lazy green waves eddy noiselessly over the ...
— Stories by American Authors (Volume 4) • Constance Fenimore Woolson

... we met with one of them which was nineteen feet eight inches in the girt, at the height of six feet above the ground: Having a quadrant with me, I measured its height from the root to the first branch, and found it to be eighty-nine feet: It was as straight as an arrow, and tapered but very little in proportion to its height; so that I judged there were three hundred and fifty-six feet of solid timber in it, exclusive of the branches. As we advanced, we saw many others that were still larger; we cut down a young one, and the wood ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr

... our team. It was composed of three tiny Battak ponies. Two were brown, and one a piebald in which a dingy chestnut strove for mastery with a dingier white. No two ponies were the same in size. One was in the shafts; the other two were in traces alongside. They tapered in size from right to left—the piebald on the left. The giant of the group had a nasty temper, and when lashed, as he was frequently during the drive, vented his anger upon the patient brute doing the lion's share of the work in the shafts. ...
— Across the Equator - A Holiday Trip in Java • Thomas H. Reid

... animal. At its junction with the body was a huge protuberance, which the mate called the "bunch" of the neck; immediately behind this was the thickest part of the body, which, from this point, gradually tapered off to the tail, or "small." At this point was another protuberance, of a pyramidal form, called the "lump," with several other small elevations, denominated the "ridge." The end of the small was not thicker than the body of a man; it then expanded into ...
— The South Sea Whaler • W.H.G. Kingston

... kindness, the natives who accompanied us soon threw off all reserve, and in the afternoon assembled at the pool below the fall to take fish. They went very systematically to work, with short spears in their hands that tapered gradually to a point, and sank at once under water without splash or noise at a given signal from an elderly man. In a short time, one or two rose with the fish they had transfixed; the others remained ...
— Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia, Complete • Charles Sturt

... neither he nor any one else succeeded in formulating very definite reasons for the feeling. Kate was a beauty, and a beauty of a type undeniably orthodox and almost aristocratic. She was tall and slight, her nose was the least trifle arched, her fingers tapered, and so, it was believed, did her feet. Her hair was golden, her mouth was small, and her accomplishments considerable. From her childhood she had been considered clever, and had vindicated her reputation by gaining more than one certificate ...
— Father Stafford • Anthony Hope

... not pay, good fellow," said Haward negligently, his eyes upon a row of dangling objects. "Fetch me down yonder cane; 't is as delicately tapered and clouded as any at ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston

... the lights of the declining day, might well have satisfied the eye. A red sun was just touching the horizon. Its beams and the blue shadows that divided them lay level, miles long, athwart the glassy stream and its green and gray forests and tapered and vanished in a low eastern haze. The tints of autumn already prevailed along the shores, and the indolent waters mirrored the reversed images of the two islands in outlines clearer than their own and from bank to bank took on in enriched hues ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable

... They had a single genital fissure and the external organs of generation of a female. A little over three inches from the anus was a rudimentary limb with a movable articulation; it measured five inches in length and tapered to a fine point, being furnished with a distinct nail, and it contracted strongly to irritation. Marie, the left child, was of fair complexion and more strongly developed than Rosa. The sensations of hunger and thirst were not experienced at the same time, and one might ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould

... a German officer, a tall young man excessively slender and blonde, compressed into his uniform like a girl in her stays, and wearing, well over one ear, a flat black wax-cloth cap like the "Boots" of an English hotel. His preposterously long moustache, which was drawn out stiff and straight, and tapered away indefinitely to each side till it finished off in a single thread so thin that it was impossible to say where it ended, seemed to weigh upon the corners of his mouth and form a deep ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant

... is elongate and somewhat lance-shaped, widest at the central part and tapering to a point at the anterior end. The posterior end may be similarly tapered or rounded. The anterior end frequently proboscis-like, flat, and flexible, while the entire body is more or less elastic and contractile. The right side is flattened and alone provided with cilia, while the left side of the body proper ...
— Marine Protozoa from Woods Hole - Bulletin of the United States Fish Commission 21:415-468, 1901 • Gary N. Galkins

... the resistance made by the capillaries to the flow of blood, slip the large end of a common glass medicine-dropper into the outer end of the rubber tube. This dropper has one end tapered to a ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell

... ceremonials in the temples; and the beautiful amphora, a vase given as a prize at the great Greek festivals, and the progenitor of the silver cups we now give the winners in athletic games. This latter type of vase had two handles and frequently its base was tapered to a point in order that it might rest in a tripod, or be thrust into the earth. At the Louvre in Paris there is a very famous Greek amphora which I hope ...
— The Story of Porcelain • Sara Ware Bassett

... from the deck of the Ajax was one of surpassing beauty and interest. The bright moonbeams rested on the waters, and left a silvery track upon the waves. Ahead and astern, the lofty masts of the squadron tapered darkly towards the sky, whilst the outline of every rope and spar was sharply defined against the clear blue vault of heaven. Every man in the ship, from the commander to the youngest boy, could feel and ...
— Narratives of Shipwrecks of the Royal Navy; between 1793 and 1849 • William O. S. Gilly

... run tapered off at Squitty. September ushered in the annual coho run on its way to the spawning grounds. And the coho did not school along island shores, feeding upon tiny herring. Stray squadrons of coho might pass Squitty, but they did not linger in thousands ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair

... Gourdin. The two Gourdins, Robert and John Gaillard Keith, were dashing young fellows as I recollect them, belonging to Charleston, South Carolina. The "Southerners" were the reigning College elegans of that time, the merveilleux, the mirliflores, of their day. Their swallow-tail coats tapered to an arrow-point angle, and the prints of their little delicate calfskin boots in the snow were objects of great admiration to the village boys of the period. I cannot help wondering what brought Emerson and the showy, fascinating John Gourdin ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... ship was rather like a narrow flounder—long, tapered, and oval in cross-section—but it showed none of the exterior markings one might expect of either a living thing or a spaceship. With one exception, the smooth ...
— Anything You Can Do ... • Gordon Randall Garrett

... known as the "Band" machine. In this machine the characters required for printing were indented in the edges of a series of narrow brass bands, each band containing a full alphabet, and hanging, with spacers, side by side in the machine. The bands tapered in thickness from top to bottom, the characters being arranged upon them in the order of the width-space which they occupied. By touching the keys of a keyboard similar to a typewriter, the bands dropped successively, bringing the characters required into line at a given point; a casting ...
— The Building of a Book • Various

... and had well outgrown girlishness. She was of very slight build, looked indeed rather frail; but her face, though lacking colour, had the firmness of health. It was very broad at the forehead, and tapered down into narrowness; the eyes seemed set at an unusual distance from each other, though the nose was thin and of perfect form, its profile making but a slight angle away from the line of the brows. Her lips were large, but finely ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing

... not seen the bay, and the talk tapered off desultorily to a final "So-long, see yuh later." Lone rode on, careful not to look back. So she was Brit Hunter's girl! Lone whistled softly to himself while he studied this new angle of the problem,—for ...
— Sawtooth Ranch • B. M. Bower

... round, delicately tapered shaft, mostly without limbs, and colored rich purplish-brown, usually enlivened with tufts of yellow lichen. At the top of this magnificent bole, long, curving branches sweep gracefully outward and downward, sometimes forming a palm-like crown, but far more nobly impressive than ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir

... we first come across the Doric capital in Sicily and Greece, it is already far in advance of anything that had gone before it in Greece, and it is quite different from the columns of Egypt. In the Doric temple of Corinth (650-600 B. C.) the columns have already reached the type form, the tapered shaft with its entasis or slight convex curvature in outline, its massive solidity (the ratio is one of diameter to four and a quarter of height), and the bold parabolic curve of the echinus moulding under the abacus of its cap. In this form, the Doric ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various

... automatic furnace, which takes them cold at the back and feeds them through to the front, by which time they are at the correct temperature. The loose mandrel C is provided with a spigot on the lower end, which fits the hole in the differential-case hub. The upper end is tapered as shown and acts as a pilot for the ram D. The action of pushing on and quenching is similar to the action of the Gleason tempering machine, with the exception that water instead of oil is used as a quenching ...
— The Working of Steel - Annealing, Heat Treating and Hardening of Carbon and Alloy Steel • Fred H. Colvin

... fingering it carelessly; "it is in reality a sort of air-gun, with a wonderful compression, and a most ingenious silencer; quite as deadly, they say, as any firearm ever invented. It ejects a cylindrically-shaped bullet, tapered down almost to the fineness of a needle. Now," he added, with a faint smile and a rapid glance round the room, "if only one dared—" he turned in his chair, and I saw the thing steal out below his cuff, "one could free the child quite ...
— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... rope—the strands of the left under the strands of the right rope and vice versa—for two or three lays and then cut off projecting ends, after drawing all as tight as you can. If an extra-neat splice is desired the strands should be gradually tapered as you proceed, and in this way a splice but little larger than the original diameter of the rope will result. The only difficulty you will find in making this splice is in getting the strands to come together ...
— Knots, Splices and Rope Work • A. Hyatt Verrill

... "As ef that was all! Why, he's been goin' thar twice an' three times a week regular. Jest as he begun taperin' off with you he tapered on with her. I don't reckon you hardly remember when he come heer last, do you? Ab Lithicum's as big a fool as yore mother was in not callin' a halt. Jest let a man have a little property, an' be a peg or two higher as to family connections, an' he kin ride dry-shod over a whole community. ...
— Westerfelt • Will N. Harben

... is an artist, and as such is accustomed to use his eyes. The other day he saw a smartly dressed man whom he conceived to be a German spy, for, besides wearing an alien aspect, he carried a walking-stick which tapered suspiciously on the way down, and near the top of it was an obvious little catch. "A sword stick!" said the ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, September 23, 1914 • Various

... about two inches thick, about two feet wide and about three feet long, should be placed on a firm support, upon which it would rest solidly without any tendency to joggle. At its middle was bored a small circular depression, about the size of a man's thumb-nail and shallow. Into this was thrust the tapered end of a round rod of maple wood about as thick as a large man's thumb. The upper end of the rod fitted freely into a socket in a ball of maple wood of suitable size to be held in the left hand and pressed down so as to press the lower end ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White

... glance into the clear waters of the lake showed her what sweet blue eyes, what lustrous black locks, what rosy, dimpled cheeks were hers,—showed her that no lily could be fairer than her brow, her neck, and her lovely taper [Transcriber's note: tapered, tapering?] arms. Yet she knew also that this beauty was hers by no merit, or power of her own; that it was the gift of the good God, bestowed in kindness, though it brought her little happiness, poor girl. ...
— Stories and Legends of Travel and History, for Children • Grace Greenwood

... partially taken from Stevenson. The specimen we found had the margin revolute, it was 2 1/2 inches broad, and the stem 2 inches long. The flesh was white and the cap was turning a brownish color. The stem slightly tapered toward the base. The milk was scanty and peppery. Found in the beginning of August in the woods. ...
— Among the Mushrooms - A Guide For Beginners • Ellen M. Dallas and Caroline A. Burgin

... give the lady an idea of America. The conversation gradually tapered down until the entrance of a gentleman brought it to a close. Dick ...
— The Dodge Club - or, Italy in 1859 • James De Mille

... display was centered around a tapered brass tube—perhaps one of the barrels of an antique pair of fieldglasses. Wrapping it was a spiny brown tendril from which grew two sucker-like organs, shaped like acorn tops. One was firmly attached to the metal. The other had been pulled free, its ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun

... Australian gums; they tapered to the tops, the branches were pretty regular, and the boughs hung in shipshape fashion. There was not the Australian heat to twist the ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson

... the conversation along at such a swift pace that Molly did not have the chance to say what she had intended. She had always regarded that kind of talk with supreme contempt: praise that tapered into a sting. "It would have been more honest to have given the sting without the praise," she thought, "and less hypocritical ...
— Molly Brown's Senior Days • Nell Speed

... the population is engaged in farming and stock rearing, activities which generate almost half of the national income. The economy also depends heavily on exploitation of large uranium deposits. Uranium production grew rapidly in the mid-1970s, but tapered off in the early 1980s, when world prices declined. France is a major customer, while FRG, Japan, and Spain also make regular purchases. The depressed demand for uranium has contributed to an overall sluggishness in the ...
— The 1990 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency

... overshaded by tall trees, where, concealed among the reeds and bushes, lay the canoe. It could not, I should think, have measured more than three yards in length, by eighteen inches in breadth at the middle, whence it tapered at either end to a thin edge. It was made of birch bark scarcely a quarter of an inch thick; and its weight may be imagined when I say that the Indian lifted it from the ground with one hand and placed it in the water, at the same time handing ...
— Hudson Bay • R.M. Ballantyne

... The finely tapered fingers tangled themselves in the masses of thick, luxuriant hair which lay outspread all over and ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England

... round her back to me. Well, I took the hook in one hand, and the eye in the other; but arth and seas! my eyes fairly snapped again; I never see such a neck since I was raised. It sprung right out o' the breast and shoulder, full round, and then tapered up to the head like a swan's, and the complexion would beat the most delicate white and red rose that ever was seen. Lick, it made me all eyes! I jist stood stock still, I couldn't move a finger, if I was to die for it. 'What ails you, Sam,' says she, 'that you don't hook ...
— The Book of Anecdotes and Budget of Fun; • Various

... has a point and is called 'lance-shaped.' The 'oblong' is like the linear, the same size up and down, but it's much wider than the linear. The 'elliptical' is what the oblong would be if its ends were prettily tapered off. The apple tree has a leaf whose ellipse is so wide that it is called 'oval.' Can ...
— Ethel Morton's Enterprise • Mabell S.C. Smith

... dearly sells the sailors deliriums and death. Abominable are the tumblers into which he pours his poison. Though true cylinders without —within, the villanous green goggling glasses deceitfully tapered downwards to a cheating bottom. Parallel meridians rudely pecked into the glass, surround these footpads' goblets. Fill to this mark, and your charge is but a penny; to this a penny more; and so on to the full ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville

... and eight feet long, and upwards of six in circumference in the thickest part. The body was perfectly smooth, and of a lead colour. It tapered off towards the tail, which was flat, horizontal, and semicircular, without any appearance of hind limbs. The head was not large, though the mouth was, with fleshy lips somewhat like those of a cow. There were stiff bristles on ...
— On the Banks of the Amazon • W.H.G. Kingston

... black, and shaded with lustrous beards, set off their perfect teeth, white, small, and separated like those of a young dog. Their black eyes are soft or stern at will. They are usually of middle size, large-chested, as befits Arabs from the hills, with small heads and finely-tapered wrists and ankles. They are dressed in red, with a covering of two bornouses—a white one beneath, and a black one fastened over. Long iron spurs are attached to their boots of red morocco, which come up to the knee; for the Algerian Arab, a bare-legged animal when walking, is a booted ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various

... and many occasions. It was pike—caught, cleaned, opened, salted, and kept till wanted; a piece, being laid flat on a plate to be served, is cut in thin slices and spread on bread and butter by those who care to eat the luxury. At the bone it was red, and gradually tapered away to a white gelatinous-looking stuff. We never dared venture upon this choice raw dish. It had a particularly distasteful appearance. As there was no filbunke, made of sour unskimmed milk, which we had learnt to enjoy, we had to content ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie

... back, broad tilted loins, and thighs—all muscle—enabled her to carry Colonel Morgan's one hundred and eighty-five pounds as if he were a feather-weight. Her head was as beautiful as a "poet's dream"—is popularly supposed to be. Wide between the eyes, it tapered down, until her muzzle was small enough to have picked ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke

... were sometimes of great length, three feet or three feet six inches and more in the blade, and they were often beautifully finished, the work of the hilts being frequently both elaborate and costly. The blade itself, which was double-edged and inclined to be flat, tapered gradually from hilt to point, and was strengthened by a ridge running almost ...
— Broad-Sword and Single-Stick • R. G. Allanson-Winn

... of an elephant or mammoth; and the awful arm resembled a trunk, but was of incredible size. Moreover, it was covered with sucking mouths or disks. The creature apparently had four eyes ranged round the conical front of the head where it tapered into the trunk, and two of these were visible, huge, green, and deadly bright in the gleam of ...
— A Columbus of Space • Garrett P. Serviss

... further off, the lighter green of an oak shewed itself, or the tufts of a yellow pine; but near at hand the cedars held the ground, thick pyramids or cones of green, from the very soil, smooth and tapered as if a shears had been there; but only nature had managed it. They hid all else that they could; but the grey rocks peeped under, and peeped through, and here and there broke their ranks with a huge wall or ledge of ...
— Hills of the Shatemuc • Susan Warner

... the highest that can be produced on earth. If the German gun that bombarded Paris were loaded with a solid steel projectile of suitable dimensions, a muzzle velocity of 6,000 feet per second could be reached. Suppose this to be fired into a tapered hole in a great block of steel. The instantaneous pressure, according to Cook, would be about 7,000 tons per square inch, only 1/150000 of that possible through the collision of ...
— The New Heavens • George Ellery Hale

... of art, she had turned up over her head the back of the kerchief; so that it now framed becomingly her vivacious and yet pensive face. Her feet were gathered under her on the one side, and she leaned on her bare arm, which showed out strong and round, tapered to a slim wrist, and shimmered ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson

... Mohammedans allow all the beard to grow.... Very comely some of the women are in their close-clinging soft brief robes and tantalizing veils—a costume leaving shoulders, arms, and ankles bare. The dark arm is always tapered and rounded; the silver- circled ankle always elegantly knit to the light straight foot. Many slim girls, whether standing or walking or in repose, offer remarkable studies of grace; their attitude when erect always suggests lightness and suppleness, ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn

... the beginning. Now repeat the process of laying one thread with another, back and forth, until twenty are in the strand. But these must be so arranged that each is about half an inch shorter than the preceding, thus making the end of the strand tapered. ...
— Hunting with the Bow and Arrow • Saxton Pope

... lavender foliage stretched a glistening, scale-armored neck, as thick as a man's body at its thinnest point, which was just behind a tremendous-jawed crocodilian head. It tapered back for a distance of at least thirty feet, to merge into a body as big as that of a terrestial whale, that was supported ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various

... palpable astonishment of Mike, who could not help regarding me as one from whom fortune met the most ungrateful returns. At every new turn of the road he would endeavor to attract my attention by the objects around,—no white-turreted chateau, no tapered spire in the distance, escaped him; he kept up a constant ripple of half-muttered praise and censure upon all he saw, and instituted unceasing comparisons between the country and his own, in which, I am bound to say, Ireland rarely, if ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever

... the woods of Meudon, lounging lazily about, inhaling the fresh air, which inspired him with regretful memories of his country home. To give his fingers something to do he would cut switches, which he tapered and notched with marvelous figurings, and his steps gradually slackening he would come to a stop beside some ditch, his shako on the back of his head, while his eyes remained fixed on the knife with ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola

... proportions and the taste with which it was fitted up. The benches were covered with cushions, and its long streamer was of silk. On one of the cushion's lay a lady's glove, of delicate size and shape, with beautifully tapered fingers. I instantly seized it and thrust it in my bosom; it seemed a match for the fairy footstep ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving

... until nearly the last in order to get all the information possible as to the way the rest of the contestants played the game. A pole had been loaned to him, or rather a "peg," they called it, eight feet long, tapered so as to allow it to go through the brass ring for fully two ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in New Mexico • Frank Gee Patchin

... or 7 feet long, with one end tapered and half rounded, on 2 or 4 legs of such length as to bring the end against the workman's chest, makes ...
— Home Taxidermy for Pleasure and Profit • Albert B. Farnham

... main. The colors she had selected to wear accorded with the rest, showing little intricacy of taste. The two silks composing her dress were respectively the blue of a summer morning and the pink of a rose. From cushioned and dimpled shoulders the bodice tapered to as fine a waist as a Paris dressmaker had found possible to bring about in a woman who, despite a veritable yearning to look slender, cared also for freedom to breathe, and, as she said with a sigh, guessed she must make up her mind to be happy without looking like a toothpick. At the back ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall

... 13th August a little before noon we saw an island bearing about N.W. by N. In general it is high, but to the West and North West the mountain tapered down to a round point of moderate height. It abounds with wood, even the summits of the mountain are covered with trees. In the S.E. end there was the appearance of a harbour, and from that place the reef runs along the South side to the ...
— Voyage of H.M.S. Pandora - Despatched to Arrest the Mutineers of the 'Bounty' in the - South Seas, 1790-1791 • Edward Edwards

... his country for his country is the man for me. If you, being people of high quality and much respect, (I never judge men from what they seem on the outside, not I!) shall give me your confidence, I warrant you shall see I am no unscrupulous politician!" Here the throng sent up a loud cheer, and tapered it off with three tigers. "Ah! that is what I like," resumed the major; "I always did like the music of the Democracy. It sounds as if it was the free offering of hearts innocent, and not given to retrieve." "Intrigue," whispered Don Fernando, ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"

... motion, ascended in a spiral form towards the clouds. Some hailstones fell on board about this time, and the clouds looked exceedingly black and louring above us. Directly over the whirl-pool, if I may so call the agitated spot on the sea, a cloud gradually tapered into a long slender tube, which seemed to descend to meet the rising spiral, and soon united with it into a short column of a cylindrical form. We could distinctly observe the water hurled upwards with the greatest violence ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr

... dressed in comparison with those of France, and there are more spots of uncultivated ground. The plough here is made with a single handle, which is a beam twelve feet long, six inches in diameter below, and tapered to about two inches at the upper end. They use goads for the oxen, not whips. The first swallows I have seen are to-day. There is a wine called Gatina, made in the neighborhood of Vercelli, both red and ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson

... all round the lower part of the trunk, thin, slab-like buttresses of bark, perfectly smooth, and radiating from a common centre, projected along the ground for at least two yards. From below, these natural props tapered upward until gradually blended with the trunk itself. There were signs of the wild cattle having sheltered themselves behind them. Zeke called this the canoe tree; as in old times it supplied the navies of the Kings of Tahiti. ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville

... went, still down; half—two-thirds of the distance was done, then he looked again and saw the horror that lay before them. Already the bridge was narrow, barely the width of a small room; sixty yards further on it tapered to so fine a point that their stone would almost cover its breadth, and beneath it on either side yawned that unmeasured gulf wherein Nam was lost with the jewels. Nor was this all, for at its narrowest the ice band was broken ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard

... heavy; zygomatic arches widely spreading, heavy, squarish; braincase moderately ridged and angular; nasals wide anteriorly, lateral margins nearly parallel or converging evenly posteriorly, tapered abruptly at posterior ends which reach posteriorly beyond anterior plane of orbits; dorsal branches of premaxillae extending 0.5 to 1.2 mm. posterior to nasals; interorbital region moderately channeled, narrowly constricted near middle of frontal (instead ...
— A New Subspecies of Wood Rat (Neotoma mexicana) from Colorado • Robert B. Finley

... atmosphere, seemed only about a mile away. Beyond, on a gentle eminence, Coleshill was distinctly visible, and in the far distance the tower of St. Mary's Church at Coventry reared to the dim and hazy sky its exquisitely tapered and most ...
— Personal Recollections of Birmingham and Birmingham Men • E. Edwards

... a very small edition of the giant devilfish or octopus. It has ten tentacles, a tapered body about ten inches long, and is armed with the usual defensive ink-sac, by means of which it squirts a cloud of black fluid at a pursuing enemy, ...
— The Harbor of Doubt • Frank Williams

... admired its light and elegant proportions and the taste with which it was fitted up. The benches were covered with cushions, and its long streamer was of silk. On one of the cushion's lay a lady's glove, of delicate size and shape, with beautifully tapered fingers. I instantly seized it and thrust it in my bosom; it seemed a match for the fairy footstep that ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving

... side, lifting their soft heads into the sky. Little else was to be seen. Here and there, a little further off, the lighter green of an oak shewed itself, or the tufts of a yellow pine; but near at hand the cedars held the ground, thick pyramids or cones of green, from the very soil, smooth and tapered as if a shears had been there; but only nature had managed it. They hid all else that they could; but the grey rocks peeped under, and peeped through, and here and there broke their ranks with a huge wall or ledge of granite, ...
— Hills of the Shatemuc • Susan Warner

... did not grow dull. He kept his golden touch and his impotent dollars piled higher and higher. The pile must have mocked Isabel Markley, for it could bring her nothing that she wanted. She stopped trying to give big parties and receptions. Her social efforts tapered down to little dinners for the new people in town. But as the dinner hour grew near she raged—so the servants said—whenever the telephone rang, and in the end she had to give up ...
— In Our Town • William Allen White

... encouraging him and yelling something else he couldn't understand; pointing skyward. And then he saw it; the Nomad, with its sleek, tapered cylinder of a body nosing down toward them with the silvery aura of its propulsive energy gleaming like a beacon of hope against the dull clouds of the satellite of terror. And there was something else: one of the ovoids of Titan, clinging there to the vessel's hull ...
— Creatures of Vibration • Harl Vincent

... mention of the herrings hanging in the mesh, for last year I only put in inch mesh which upon examination you'll soon perceive. Therefore, sir, I entreat the honour of a line whether or not the two above three-quarters mesh seines answer the purpose. I have tapered them away at the ends to ...
— The Bounty of the Chesapeake - Fishing in Colonial Virginia • James Wharton

... played nearly the same game in regard to wages, and with the same results. We are now furnished with advices from the island down to the 19th of December 1838. At the latter date the panic making papers had tapered down their complainings to a very faint whisper, and withal expressing more hope than fears. As the fruit of what they had already done we are told by one of them, the Barbadian, that the unfavourable news carried home by the packets after the emancipation ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society

... answered, fingering it carelessly; "it is in reality a sort of air-gun, with a wonderful compression, and a most ingenious silencer; quite as deadly, they say, as any firearm ever invented. It ejects a cylindrically-shaped bullet, tapered down almost to the fineness of a needle. Now," he added, with a faint smile and a rapid glance round the room, "if only one dared—" he turned in his chair, and I saw the thing steal out below his cuff, "one could free the ...
— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... a little withered old man, who, for their money, dearly sells the sailors deliriums and death. Abominable are the tumblers into which he pours his poison. Though true cylinders without —within, the villanous green goggling glasses deceitfully tapered downwards to a cheating bottom. Parallel meridians rudely pecked into the glass, surround these footpads' goblets. Fill to this mark, and your charge is but a penny; to this a penny more; and so on to the full glass —the Cape Horn measure, which you ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville

... smooth, round, delicately tapered shaft, mostly without limbs, and colored rich purplish-brown, usually enlivened with tufts of yellow lichen. At the top of this magnificent bole, long, curving branches sweep gracefully outward and downward, sometimes forming a palm-like crown, but ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir

... Viking raids into Europe tapered off following the adoption of Christianity by King Olav TRYGGVASON in 994. Conversion of the Norwegian kingdom occurred over the next several decades. In 1397, Norway was absorbed into a union with Denmark that was to last for more than four centuries. In 1814, Norwegians resisted the ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency

... tacked in place, being spaced amidships as shown in Fig. 4; then the points where they cross the bow and stern and all the moulds are marked, and notches one inch by one-fourth of an inch cut to receive them, the edges of the bow and stern being tapered off at the same time to half an inch; then all the parts are placed in position again, and fastened with one-inch screws, except where the keelson joins the bow, stern, and moulds, where one inch and a half screws are used. Each screw is dipped in ...
— Harper's Young People, April 27, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various

... his mouth to sound a warning, but something in Rathburn's gaze and posture held him silent. Rathburn's body was tense; his gaze was glued to the doorway; his right hand with its slim, brown, tapered fingers, hung above the gun at ...
— The Coyote - A Western Story • James Roberts

... fissures and fragments, both perpendicularly and horizontally, and was almost mathematically divided into pieces or squares, or unequal cubes, simply placed upon one another, like masons' work without mortar. The lower strata of these divisions were large, the upper tapered to pieces not much larger than a brick, at least they seemed so from a distance. The whole appearance of this singular mount was grand and awful, and I could not but reflect upon the time when these colossal ridges were all at once rocking in the convulsive tremblings of some mighty volcanic ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles

... its frontal it bore two horns, which pointed toward its back. One of them was taken to Manila. It was covered with its skin or hide, but had no hair or scales. It was white, and twenty feet long. Where it joined the head it was as thick as the thigh, and gradually tapered proportionally to the tip. It was somewhat curved and not very round; and to all appearances, quite solid. It caused great ...
— History of the Philippine Islands Vols 1 and 2 • Antonio de Morga

... woodpecker; and the Cayenne woodpecker. The third case contains the African and American ground woodpeckers; and the Wrynecks of Africa, Europe, and India. The chief food of the wrynecks consists of ants, which they pick up with their delicately tapered tongues. ...
— How to See the British Museum in Four Visits • W. Blanchard Jerrold

... little anxious lest they should have lost something of their cunning. He did not know that mechanical faculty, for fine work as well as rough, goes in general with square-pointed fingers. Delicately tapered fingers, whatever they may indicate in the way of artistic invention, are not the fingers of the painter or the sculptor. The finest fingers of the tapering kind I have ever seen, were those of a distinguished chemist ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald

... chapel, a meeting-house, and also a place of worship for those who belonged to the Methodist connection, It was nearly half a mile long, lay nearly due north and south, and ran up an elevation or slight hill, and down again on the other side, where it tapered away into a string of cabins. It is scarcely necessary to say that it contained a main street, three or four with less pretensions, together with a tribe of those vile alleys which consist of a double row of beggarly cabins, or huts, facing each other, and lying so closely, that a tall man might ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton

... of lace, with a fringe of bugles, projecting into eight points so as to form a star of drapery, hanging from the points of the flowery star in the dome. The spaces between the angles were filled with masses of stalactites, dropping one below the other, till they tapered into the plain square sides of ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor

... aeroplane's specifications. It is necessary to make sure that the spars are horizontal when the aeroplane is in flying position and the tail unsupported as explained above under the heading of Fuselage. If the spars are tapered, then make sure that their centre ...
— The Aeroplane Speaks - Fifth Edition • H. Barber

... full thickness at the beginning of the blade, but should be well tapered off along the blade, so as to be quite thin at its middle, where it ends. It should have its full breadth across the breadth of the blade. The blade itself may be shaved ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls - Volume VIII, No 25: May 21, 1887 • Various

... such cultured taste, and that was the size of the ladies' waists. Of all that I measured not one was less than thirty inches in circumference, and it was rare to meet with one that small. At first I thought a waist that tapered from the arm pits would be an added beauty, if only these ladies would be taught how to acquire it. But I lived long enough among them to look upon a tapering waist as a disgusting deformity. They considered a large waist a mark of beauty, as it gave a greater ...
— Mizora: A Prophecy - A MSS. Found Among the Private Papers of the Princess Vera Zarovitch • Mary E. Bradley

... attired as a mountaineer. His hat tapered to the top, and was crowned by a single heron feather. Hussars might have envied him his moustaches. From his right side protruded a couteau de chasse; and his legs were not a little set off by the tight-laced boots, which, coming up some way beyond the ancle, displayed his calf ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman

... this machine the characters required for printing were indented in the edges of a series of narrow brass bands, each band containing a full alphabet, and hanging, with spacers, side by side in the machine. The bands tapered in thickness from top to bottom, the characters being arranged upon them in the order of the width-space which they occupied. By touching the keys of a keyboard similar to a typewriter, the bands dropped successively, bringing the characters required into line ...
— The Building of a Book • Various

... strength of a perfectly tempered spring will always remain the same, whether in winter or summer, never losing its elasticity. The best of tempering, however, is useless in a spring badly formed or clumsily tapered. ...
— Camp Life in the Woods and the Tricks of Trapping and Trap Making • William Hamilton Gibson

... fly-fishing; but I can give a few hints that may be conducive to practical success, as well with trout as with less noble fish, In fly-fishing, one serviceable four-ounce rod is enough; and a plain click reel, of small size, is just as satisfactory as a more costly affair. Twenty yards of tapered, waterproof line, with a six-foot leader, and a cost of two flies, complete the rig, and will be found sufficient. In common with most fly-fishers, I have mostly thrown a cast of three flies, but have found two just as ...
— Woodcraft • George W. Sears

... suppose those snags were 900 feet high. Still they were a very fine show. They stood boldly out by themselves, and made a fascinatingly odd spectacle. But there was nothing about their appearance to suggest the heads of a hydra. They looked like a row of lofty slabs with their upper ends tapered to the shape of a carving-knife point; in fact, the early voyager, ignorant of their great height, might have mistaken them for a rusty old rank of piles that had sagged this way and that ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... was rather like a narrow flounder—long, tapered, and oval in cross-section—but it showed none of the exterior markings one might expect of either a living thing or of a spaceship. With one exception, the smooth, ...
— Anything You Can Do ... • Gordon Randall Garrett

... All at once it flashed on me where I was: and so terrible was the knowledge, that a cold sweat brake forth all over me. I had heard of the horrible prison in the Bishop of Lincoln's Palace of Woburn, called Little Ease [Note 1], which tapered down to a point, wherein a man might neither stand, nor sit, nor lie. Somewhat like despair came over me. Were they about to leave me to lie here and die of hunger? I shouted, and my voice came back to me with a mocking echo. I held my breath to listen, and I ...
— Robin Tremain - A Story of the Marian Persecution • Emily Sarah Holt

... brutality. He was, as I have said, an enormous man, of prodigious bodily strength, heavy, yet of good proportions. Of his face one gathered the impression of a blazing furnace. His cheeks and nose were of a vivid red, and still more fiery was the hair, now hidden 'neath his morion, and the beard that tapered to a dagger's point. His very eyes kept tune with the red harmony of his ferocious countenance, for the whites were ever bloodshot as a drunkard's—which, with no want of ...
— The Shame of Motley • Raphael Sabatini

... uniform like a girl in her stays, and wearing, well over one ear, a flat black wax-cloth cap like the "Boots" of an English hotel. His preposterously long moustache, which was drawn out stiff and straight, and tapered away indefinitely to each side till it finished off in a single thread so thin that it was impossible to say where it ended, seemed to weigh upon the corners of his mouth and form a deep furrow ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant

... last year we had six new Norwegian sledges twelve feet long, brought down by the ship, with tapered runners of hickory which were 33/4 inches broad in the fore part and 21/4 inches only at the stern. I believe that this was an idea of Scott, who considered that the broad runner in front would press down a path for the tapered part which followed, ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard

... surrounded them with passionate whispering, anxious solicitude, throbbing jealousy. And when they departed, the old burial-ground seemed to groan. Those weeds, in which their entangled feet often stumbled on sultry nights, were fingers, tapered by tomb life, that sprang up from the earth to detain them and cast them into each other's arms. That pungent and penetrating odour exhaled by the broken stems was the fertilising perfume, the mighty quintessence of life which is slowly elaborated in the grave, and intoxicates the lovers ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola

... And all round the lower part of the trunk, thin, slab-like buttresses of bark, perfectly smooth, and radiating from a common centre, projected along the ground for at least two yards. From below, these natural props tapered upward until gradually blended with the trunk itself. There were signs of the wild cattle having sheltered themselves behind them. Zeke called this the canoe tree; as in old times it supplied the navies of the Kings of Tahiti. For canoe building, the woods is still ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville

... the deck of the Ajax was one of surpassing beauty and interest. The bright moonbeams rested on the waters, and left a silvery track upon the waves. Ahead and astern, the lofty masts of the squadron tapered darkly towards the sky, whilst the outline of every rope and spar was sharply defined against the clear blue vault of heaven. Every man in the ship, from the commander to the youngest boy, could feel and understand this natural beauty; but there were many on board the squadron ...
— Narratives of Shipwrecks of the Royal Navy; between 1793 and 1849 • William O. S. Gilly

... well-tempered lameness. The girls have a rich blood color in their swarthy cheeks, and some of them are really pretty, though always in a lumpish, domestic-animal style. The hands and feet are singularly small; the fingers short, but nicely tapered. Take hold of the hand, and you are struck with its cetacean feel. It is not flabby, but has a peculiar blubber-like, elastic compressibility, and seems not quite ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various

... rose, took the red-headed man's own "tump-line," a leather strap about twelve feet long, which tapered from the middle to both ends, tied this firmly round the angry live mummy, and left him ...
— Old Man Savarin and Other Stories • Edward William Thomson

... who always had a little money to lend to the other fellows, though they had their funds from home. It was now Pretty who came to him for the advance of cash enough to buy a walking-stick of the following superb description: a thoroughly even, straight-grained bit of hickory-wood, tapered like a billiard-cue, an inch and a half thick at the butt and three fourths of an inch thick at the point, the butt carrying a knob of silver, ...
— The Dozen from Lakerim • Rupert Hughes

... the morning of the fourth day, and lo! at the first leap of the sun of that day the flame of the Identical abated in its fierceness, and it dwindled and darkened, and tapered and flickered feebly, descending from its altitude in the heavens and through the ceiling of the Hall, and lay down to sleep among the intricate lengths and frizzled convolutions and undulating weights flowing from Shagpat, an undistinguished ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... wilderness alone, transfigured in the lights of the declining day, might well have satisfied the eye. A red sun was just touching the horizon. Its beams and the blue shadows that divided them lay level, miles long, athwart the glassy stream and its green and gray forests and tapered and vanished in a low eastern haze. The tints of autumn already prevailed along the shores, and the indolent waters mirrored the reversed images of the two islands in outlines clearer than their own and from bank to bank took on in enriched hues the many colors of ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable

... exist and these widely dispersed in London, Berlin, Carlsruhe, Munich, Athens, and Mycenae itself. In the decoration of this facade rosettes and running spirals played a conspicuous part, and on either side of the doorway stood a column which tapered downwards and was ornamented with spirals arranged in zigzag bands. This downward-tapering column, so unlike the columns of classic times, seems to have been in common use in Mycenaean architecture. Inside the ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell

... and pale. The muffled sunlight gleamed like gold tissue through grey gauze, and the beech alleys tapered away to a blue haze blent of sky and forest. It was one of those elusive days when the familiar forms of things seem about to dissolve ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton

... into the wood, we met with one of them which was nineteen feet eight inches in the girt, at the height of six feet above the ground: Having a quadrant with me, I measured its height from the root to the first branch, and found it to be eighty-nine feet: It was as straight as an arrow, and tapered but very little in proportion to its height; so that I judged there were three hundred and fifty-six feet of solid timber in it, exclusive of the branches. As we advanced, we saw many others that were still larger; we cut down a young one, and the wood proved heavy and solid, not fit for masts, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr

... desecrated the true religion were worse in the eyes of Maieddine than the foolish faith of Christians, who, at least, were not backsliders. He would not even point out to Victoria the strange minaret of the Abadite mosque at Berryan, which tapered like a brown obelisk against the shimmering sky, for to him its very existence ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... which struck us was a Japanese boat which came alongside, both from her model and the neat way in which she was put together. Her bows were very sharp, she had great beam, and she tapered slightly towards the stern. She was built of pine wood, and varnished without any paint. Her crew, almost naked, stood aft, and sculled her along instead of rowing, at a very great rate. The official personages she brought off sat in the fore-part; one of them, armed with two swords, a mark of ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston

... extension-table, but the spare leaves had been removed, and it was reduced to a circle. A mellow western light from that portion of the sky unswathed in clouds streamed through the window, and did duty as a lamp. The cloth was white, and tapered down in soft folds at the corners; a pleasant profusion of sparkling china and silver, and of savory eatables, filled the circumference of the board, leaving just space enough to operate in, and no more. In the centre of the table, and perceptible ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne

... bay, and the talk tapered off desultorily to a final "So-long, see yuh later." Lone rode on, careful not to look back. So she was Brit Hunter's girl! Lone whistled softly to himself while he studied this new angle of the problem,—for a problem he was beginning to consider it. She was Brit Hunter's ...
— Sawtooth Ranch • B. M. Bower

... enhanced the sober yet genial decorum of his bearing. His slightly pontifical air seemed an assurance against ill-timed levity. His cheeks were still fat and smooth shaven, but, like many of the successful men of Benham, he now wore a chin beard—a thick tuft of hair which in his case tapered so that it bore some resemblance to the beard of a goat, and gave a rough-and-ready aspect to his appearance suggestive alike of smart, solid worth and an absence of dandified tendencies. Mr. Parsons had a thicker beard of the same character, which ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant

... species of Janthina, the float of which, instead of being nearly round and extending over the shell on each side, was spread like a spiral fold from the shell; the breadth of this fold was 0.45 inch, close to the mouth of the shell, and it gradually tapered off to a point, its length being 3.6 inches. This float being curved round like the tail of an animal, the whole thing bore the appearance of being a sort of snake, of which the shell was the head; the sailors ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 2 (of 2) • George Grey

... that is called the swallow-tail butterfly, because each of its wings tapered to a point, something like the tail of a swallow. We will call the butterfly, Miss Swallow-tail, and now let us see what ...
— New National Fourth Reader • Charles J. Barnes and J. Marshall Hawkes

... seemed less impregnable now, for upon two sides at least, the cliffs rose sheer from the gorge until they were joined by the heavy buttresses which tapered gracefully until they joined the walls of the crenelated towers and bastions. In the center of the mass of buildings rose the square solid mass of the keep, with its crenelated roof and small windows commanding every portion of the space enclosed ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs

... lowest of the Underground Fields, and was an hundred miles from side to side, every way; and above it there were three hundred and six fields, each one less in area than that beneath; and in this wise they tapered, until the topmost field which lay direct beneath the lowermost floor of the Great Redoubt, was but four ...
— The Night Land • William Hope Hodgson

... a set of huge cylinders, from which, probably, had come the highly expansive gas that had snuffed out the crews of the two dirigibles. But there were other things—strange, monstrous. One of them, the tapered tube of metal that angled up to the hut's ceiling, its base a mass of wheels and dials and tubing, was evidently the weapon of the ray that had struck ...
— Raiders Invisible • Desmond Winter Hall

... and found a piece he had cut in making the tube. It was perfectly round, ideal for the purpose. He sliced off the inner side where it tapered to a cone, then, working only by eye estimate, cut out a hole in which the wedge of fission material would fit. He wasn't off by a thirty-second of an inch. Skillful application of the torch melted the thorium around the ...
— Rip Foster Rides the Gray Planet • Blake Savage









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