"Attenuated" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... or three of these young matrons now on board the packet excited my more than commiseration; attenuated in form, sallow-visaged, and fragile as the aspen, they appeared to shrink from the very breeze, to seek whose freshness they had journeyed so far. Two of them possessed the remains of positive beauty; their dark hair was of gossamer fineness, and their handsome eyes sparkled with that ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power
... peeped into a cupboard in which an overcoat surmounted by a felt hat hung from a peg like an attenuated suicide; he looked in all the corners and into the sitting-room, but no slippers ...
— The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman
... uttering the laborious ideas of his troubled mind with the somewhat painful pronunciation of the elocutionist (he makes chapell of Chapel); nor mark his languorous movements and the slow swaying action of the attenuated body; one cannot notice all this without feeling that in spite of his great courage and his iron tenacity of purpose, he is a little weary of the battle, and sometimes even perhaps conscious of a check for the cause which is far dearer to him ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... of the company at the end of the year showed beyond the peradventure of a doubt that the company had kept the faith, but it was left with a very attenuated surplus. Then business began to grow by leaps and bounds. The bread which had been cast upon the waters was returning and another problem now confronted the company - to protect the reserves on the rapidly increasing income. This required a ...
— The Spirit of 1906 • George W. Brooks
... stilled— That single rounded mound cracked lengthliwise And one came forth in grave-clothes. For a space He stood and gazed about him with a smile Superior; then laying off his shroud Disclosed his two attenuated legs Which, like parentheses, bent outwardly As by the weight of saintliness above, And so sprang upward and was lost to view Noting his headstone overthrown, I read: "Sacred to memory of George K. Fitch, Deacon and Editor—a ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... her long flannel night-dress, by the side of Miss Thusa, watching the rapid turning of her wheel, and the formation of the flaxen thread, as it glided out, a more and more attenuated filament, betwixt the dexterous fingers of ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... teaching of the catechism to small black slaves the chief end of existence. But the blood of the "most finished dancer of her day" still circulated beneath the old lady's gown and the religious life, and in her attenuated romances she forever held the sinner above the saint, unless, indeed, the sinner chanced to be of her own sex, when, probably, the book would never have reached her hands. For the purely masculine improprieties, her charity was as boundless as her innocence. She had even ...
— The Battle Ground • Ellen Glasgow
... to see an attenuated, sickly physique in our leading and best-bred families, the eye is mis-educated; we establish a false ideal for women, and become comparatively indifferent to a fine physique in men. Men do not marry with a view of founding or continuing a family name, and their sentiment ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... narrow prison quarters, it seemed like paradise, and Annie walked on air, so delighted was she to have him with her again. Yet there were still anxieties to cloud their happiness. The close confinement, with its attendant worry, had seriously undermined Howard's health. He was pale and attenuated, and so weak that he had several fainting spells. Much alarmed, Annie summoned Dr. Bernstein, who administered a tonic. There was nothing to cause anxiety, he said reassuringly. It was a natural reaction after what her husband ...
— The Third Degree - A Narrative of Metropolitan Life • Charles Klein and Arthur Hornblow
... Vigour? If the last, what species of vigour? What was that in the individual which gave it strength to stay? Whence came the reproductive power which was able to carry on the species under such terrible antagonism as the fact of death? If in the body, where was the common element between that attenuated invalid and my robust organization? If in the soul, between the suffering saint and the joyous man of the world, where again was ...
— The Gates Between • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... tree-ferns, principally on account of the cicatrices which were left at the junctions of the leaf-stalks with the stem, after the former had fallen off. No foliage had, however, been met with which was actually attached to the plants, and hence, when it was discovered that some of them had long attenuated leaves not at all like those possessed by ferns, geologists were compelled to abandon this classification of them, and even now no satisfactory reference to existing orders of them has been made, owing to their anomalous structure. The stems are fluted from ...
— The Story of a Piece of Coal - What It Is, Whence It Comes, and Whither It Goes • Edward A. Martin
... were grossly rich, you went to the big Hotel Metropole, opposite. If you were a person of fastidious tastes and an attenuated income, you felt the superior charm of the Cliff Hotel. The little house, the joy of its proprietor, was hidden in the privacy of its own beautiful grounds, having its back to the high road and its face to the open sea. ...
— The Immortal Moment - The Story of Kitty Tailleur • May Sinclair
... not easy and they do not pretend to be easy; a small chest of light-painted drawers before the window, with white china handles, upon which is a tiny looking-glass; and, occupying the entire remaining space, after allowing three square feet for the tenant, when he arrives, an attenuated four-legged table apparently home-made. The only ornament in the room is, suspended above the fireplace, a funeral card, framed in beer corks. As the corpse introduced by the ancient Egyptians into their banquets, it is hung there ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... Well! not done, perhaps, but begun; for if the bank is high enough to get exposed at low water, this pioneer mangrove grows. He has a wretched existence though. You have only got to look at his dwarfed attenuated form to see this. He gets joined by a few more bold spirits and they struggle on together, their network of roots stopping abundance of mud, and by good chance now and then a consignment of miscellaneous debris of palm leaves, or a floating tree-trunk, but they always die before they ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... Djangals or Bandra-Lokhs, the latter name signifying man-monkey, and thus associating itself with the tale of Rama, above alluded to. Like most of the Dravidian tribes, they live in great misery, and show every sign of their condition in their attenuated figures. One of this tribe measured by Rousselet was five feet in height. It may here be remarked that the stature of the Dravidian races exceeds that of the purer Negritos, a fact due, no doubt, to the influence of crossing. Farther south, ...
— A Philological Essay Concerning the Pygmies of the Ancients • Edward Tyson
... resembled them as much as a thin, light-yellow mulatto lad may resemble a big, stout, middle- aged white man. It was the exotic complexion and the slightness of his build which had put me off so completely. Now I saw in him unmistakably the Jacobus strain, weakened, attenuated, diluted as it were in a bucket of water—and I refrained from finishing my speech. I had intended to say: "Crack this brute's head for him." I still felt the conclusion to be sound. But it is no trifling responsibility to counsel parricide to any ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... and they build their plant houses with roofs of low pitch, affording scarcely room to stand upright within them. Their plants are thus brought near the glass, and they grow stocky and firm, presenting quite a different appearance from the attenuated specimens frequently met with in ...
— Woodward's Graperies and Horticultural Buildings • George E. Woodward
... from her now and again some coarse insult which she would hurl with a shriek of rage at her maid's vile memory. Night and day she was possessed by the same fever of malediction, and even in her dreams her attenuated limbs were ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... west points, and directed towards the zenith; in a few seconds these disappeared, and a complete circle was displayed, bounding the horizon at an elevation of fifteen degrees. There was a quick lateral motion in the attenuated beams of which this zone was composed. Its colour was a pale yellow, with an occasional tinge ...
— Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea, in the Years 1819-20-21-22, Volume 1 • John Franklin
... two matinees at the houses of Adelaide Kemble and Lord Falmouth—June 23 and July 7. They were very recherche, so it appears. Viardot-Garcia sang. The composer's face and frame were wasted by illness and Mr. Solomon spoke of his "long attenuated fingers." He made money and that was useful to him, for doctors' bills and living had taken up his savings. There was talk of his settling in London, but the climate, not to speak of the unmusical atmosphere, would have been fatal to him. Wagner succumbed to both, sturdy fighter ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... toe for the reception of this shoe that, with the shoe in position, there will still be maintained a tread that is normal. To our minds harm is far more likely to arise from a shoe of this class through the thinned iron heels of the shoe becoming attenuated under wear to the point of bending, and so inflicting an injury upon the ...
— Diseases of the Horse's Foot • Harry Caulton Reeks
... our atmosphere at which these delicate clouds are formed the temperature is too low, even in midsummer, for water to exist in the liquid state; and accordingly, the attenuated vapor from which they were condensed passed at once into a solid form. They consist, in fact, of tiny crystals of ice, not of little drops of water. If the precipitation has been hasty, the crystals will, though all small, be of many sizes jumbled ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 613, October 1, 1887 • Various
... a poor feeble attenuated hand, and, after a moment's pause, Philip Sheldon clasped it in his own muscular fingers. He did hesitate for just one instant before ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... great muddy boots, and looked at Herbert like a sort of natural curiosity, exclaiming that he only wanted a black cap and a pair of bands to be exactly like Bishop Bowater, a Caroline divine, with a meek, oval, spiritual face, and a great display of delicate attenuated fingers, the length of which had always been a doubt and marvel ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... a certain social stigma upon any man who has joined a prize-fighting gang," he conceded, "but the obloquy resulting from having been a gladiator has greatly attenuated amid the loose manners of our day. Nothing that becomes fashionable remains disgraceful. The social disgrace of it has greatly lessened as the thing has become more usual, and freemen who have been gladiators are rather acclaimed and sought after than condemned and shunned. ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... and laced me as I had never been laced before. The head trusty certainly demonstrated his ability. I tried to steal what little space I could. Little it was, for I had long since shed my flesh, while my muscles were attenuated to mere strings. I had neither the strength nor bulk to steal more than a little, and the little I stole I swear I managed by sheer expansion at the joints of the bones of my frame. And of this little I was ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... Attenuated to the last degree, he suffers all extremes of heat and cold, sleeps upon a bed of ashes, and sits moodily beneath the burning mid-day sun, lives on charity while scorning usually to ask for alms, and bears the reputation of a saint while reducing himself to ...
— Diary of a Pedestrian in Cashmere and Thibet • by William Henry Knight
... following morning a sad and thoughtful man. He was attenuated in appearance; one might almost say emaciated. I doubt whether his now grizzled looks had not palpably become more grey than on the preceding evening. At any rate he had aged materially. Years do not make a man old gradually and at an even pace. Look through ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... deeply affected. The Impossibility of quickly meeting them, made him very impatient; the Account of their Forces added to this Uneasiness; in fine, Joy, Grief, Hope and Fear, distracted his Heart, and the Shock of such opposite Motions was too strong for his attenuated Body. A violent Disorder seiz'd upon his whole Constitution, which was succeeded by such a Fever, whose first Symptoms ...
— The Amours of Zeokinizul, King of the Kofirans - Translated from the Arabic of the famous Traveller Krinelbol • Claude Prosper Jolyot de Crbillon
... that the archduke had fixed upon that very Sunday evening for a general assault upon the place. It was hopeless for the garrison to attempt to hold these outer forts, for they required a far larger number of soldiers than could be spared from the attenuated little army. Yet with those forts in the hands of the enemy there would be nothing left but to make the best and speediest terms that might be obtained. The situation was desperate. Sir Francis called ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... different motions or strains in the Ether (perhaps, as Lord Kelvin thought, in the form of vortices), that the different atoms of which matter is composed are, as suggested in View Three, apertures of different complexity of outline—namely, those points at which Ether is absent or its density attenuated. Have we not apparently here another example of Positive and Negative, the Invisible the Ether, as the Real, and the Visible, the Material Universe, as its Negative the Unreal, similar to our list of Positives and Negatives in View One? Ether itself cannot be explained by any of the known ...
— Science and the Infinite - or Through a Window in the Blank Wall • Sydney T. Klein
... beautiful, fenced around by mountains of every size and variety of appearance. Of course they are the same mountains you have been seeing all day, but seen from a different standpoint. The Eagle's Nest towers up like an attenuated pyramid, partly clothed with trees, and is grand enough and high enough for the eagles to build on its summit, which they do. Here were men stationed to wake the echoes with the bugle. As our boat swept round, ...
— The Letters of "Norah" on her Tour Through Ireland • Margaret Dixon McDougall
... disordered joints; and in place of the weighty and majestic, but boneless flukes, an utter blank! How vain and foolish, then, thought I, for timid untravelled man to try to comprehend aright this wondrous whale, by merely poring over his dead attenuated skeleton, stretched in this peaceful wood. no. only in the heart of quickest perils; only when within the eddyings of his angry flukes; only on the profound unbounded sea, can the fully invested whale be truly and livingly found out. But ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... able to afford good music-books, and in the attenuated list of subscribers to the first-edition Boyce you may see to this day, "The Rector and Foundation of Cullerne Minster (6 copies)." Mr Sharnall loved the great Boyce, with its parchment paper and largest of large margins. He loved the crisp sound of the leaves as he ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... plant was only about six inches in height, the leaves, four or five in number, were broader than those subsequently produced; their soft and but little-attenuated tips were not sensitive, and did not form hooks; nor did the stem then revolve. At this early period of growth, the plant can support itself; its climbing powers are not required, and consequently are not ...
— The Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants • Charles Darwin
... the other day, that I was not a critic. These attenuated volumes of poetry in fancy bindings open their covers at one like so many little unfledged birds, and one does so long to drop a worm in,—a worm in the shape of a kind word for the poor fledgling! But what a desperate ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... usually thin, with weak and flabby muscles. Their vital activities are at a low ebb and their magnetic envelopes (aura) are wasted and attenuated like their physical bodies. The red aura, which is created by the action of the purely animal functions and forces, is more or less deficient or entirely lacking. Such people have the tendency to become abnormally sensitive ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... sometimes thrown at us Americans that we love a title, and that we are not averse to the ornamentation of our names with pseudo and attenuated "Honorables" and "Colonels" and "Judge" and so on; and I am bound to admit the impeachment, for I blush at some of my be-colonelled and becaptained friends, and wonder at their rejoicing over such effeminate honorifics, especially those colonelcies born of clattering ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... the following morning a sad and thoughtful man. He was attenuated in appearance—one might almost say emaciated. I doubt whether his now grizzled locks had not palpably become more grey than on the preceding evening. At any rate he had aged materially. Years do not make a man old gradually and at an even pace. Look through the world and see if this ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... another "Divine Spouse," though mutilated and unfinished, is pleasing from its greater breadth of style, although such breadth is rarely found in the works of this school, which toned down, elongated, and attenuated the figure till it often lost in vigour what it gained in distinction. The one point in which the Saite artists made a real advance, was in the treatment of ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 8 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... wanting other indications of the good gentleman's having gone down in the world of late: for a great scarcity of furniture, and total absence of comfort, together with the disappearance of all such small moveables as spare clothes and linen, bespoke a state of extreme poverty; while the meagre and attenuated condition of Mr. Sikes himself would have fully confirmed these symptoms, if they had stood in any ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... junction of the Koosee with the Ganges. My boat was fastened to the shore near a slimy creek, that came oozing into the river from some dense jungle near. I was washing my hands and face on the bank, and the boatmen were fishing with a small hand-net, for our breakfast. Numbers of attenuated melancholy-looking paddy-birds were stalking solemnly and stiltedly along the bank, also fishing for theirs. I noticed one who was particularly greedy, with his long legs half immersed in the water, constantly darting out his long ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... have offered us a more formidable candidate for public favor than our old friends, the attenuated Monthlies. "The Undergraduate" has almost the dimensions of the "North American Review," and, like that, promises to visit us quarterly. It is the first fruit of a spirited and apparently well-matured plan set on foot by students in Yale College, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... been lying down, it seemed to him, but a few moments, when a tap at the door, to which he responded with a loud "come in," was followed by the entrance of a thin, pale, haggard-looking creature, her clothes soiled, and hanging loosely, and in tatters about her attenuated body. By the hand she held a little girl, from whose young face had faded every trace of childhood's happy expression. She, too, was thin and pale, and had a fixed, stony look, of hopeless suffering. They came up ...
— The Lights and Shadows of Real Life • T.S. Arthur
... otherwise resembled her only in the poise of her neck and an occasional gesture; she was fair and with a kind of ignoble and premeditated refinement in her speech and manner. She was dressed with the restraint of a prolonged and attenuated widowhood, in a rich and complicatedly quiet dress of mauve and grey. She was obviously a transitory visitor and not so much taking the opulence about her and particularly the great butler for granted as pointedly and persistently ignoring it in an effort to seem to take it for granted. The sister, ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... great maritime wars of the past, which continental strategists have so persistently excluded from their field of study. It presents the normal three phases—the initial offensive movement to seize the territorial object, the secondary phase, which forces an attenuated offensive on the enemy, and the final stage of pressure, in which there is a return to the offensive "according," as Jomini puts it, "to circumstances and your relative force in order to obtain the ...
— Some Principles of Maritime Strategy • Julian Stafford Corbett
... more at tentively, and found that I was not mistaken. Words cannot depict the anxiety with which I awaited the nearer approach of this mysterious object. Was it merely some inanimate substance, held in suspense in the attenuated atmosphere of the globule? or was it an animal endowed with vitality and motion? It approached, flitting behind the gauzy, colored veils of cloud-foliage, for seconds dimly revealed, then vanishing. At last the violet pennons that trailed ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... around and come back through the enemy, and when he started I moved to the front with the balance of the reserve, to put everything I had into the fight. This meant an inestimable advantage to the enemy in case of our defeat, but our own safety demanded the hazard. All along our attenuated line the fighting was now sharp, and the enemy's firing indicated such numerical strength that fear of disaster to Alger increased my anxiety terribly as the time set for his cheering arrived and no sound of ...
— The Memoirs of General Philip H. Sheridan, Vol. I., Part 2 • P. H. Sheridan
... shoulders, high, resolute features, a commanding figure garbed in aristocratic black, and not yet verging into the proportions of obesity,—take him for all in all, a very fine and favorable specimen of the solid men of Boston. And seen in contrast (oh! could he but have known it!) with the attenuated figure ...
— Little Classics, Volume 8 (of 18) - Mystery • Various
... was despaired of. Her husband, the shadow of his former self, never left her bedside. He had loved her well, with all his worldliness and pride. But now the crisis of the disease came on. Her life hung upon the most attenuated thread. The doctor gave them no hope ...
— May Brooke • Anna H. Dorsey
... the people. He craved and got the little man's release on parole. A fortnight later, as Dr. Sevier was sitting at the breakfast table, with the little rector at its opposite end, he all at once rose to his full attenuated height, with a frown and then a smile, and, tumbling the chair ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... spread over some three miles; while the concave front of the allies extended over double that space, and their left wing was separated from the centre by the stream and defile of Plauen. From his inner position he could therefore readily throw an overpowering mass on any part of their attenuated array. He prepared to do so against their wings. At those points everything promised success to his ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... exquisite, excellent, recherche, elegant, splendid, admirable, choice, select, attractive, delicate, subtle, minute, capillary, tenuous, thin, subtile, ethereal, attenuated, filmy, flimsy, gossamery, slender; comminuted, bolted, pulverized, impalpable, powdered. Antonyms: coarse, crude, unbolted, stout, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... bodily form as far as possible, and would cling to the notions suggested by dreams and waking hallucinations, while language, after its wont, would speak of the spirit as the umbra, the imago, the shadow, the breath, the attenuated replica of the body. Thus we find among all men, savage and civilized, a certain unsteadiness in their notion of spirit, whether created or divine—a continual tendency to corruption and anthropomorphism, due to the conflict between reason and imagination, ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... Frenchwoman would have dared what she had this night? The taxicab! She laughed. And this man was wax in the hands of any pretty woman who came along! So rumor had it. But she knew that rumor was only the attenuated ghost of Ananias, doomed forever to remain on earth for the propagation of inaccurate whispers. Wax! Why, she would have trusted herself in any situation with a man with those eyes and that angle of jaw. It was all very ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath
... he might be able to say to himself from time to time "She knows it NOW—even while I worry." It was a great comfort to him in general not to have left past things to be dragged to light and explained; not to have to produce at so late a stage anything not produced, or anything even veiled and attenuated, at the moment. She knew it now: that was what he said to himself to-night in relation to the fresh fact of Chad's acquaintance with the two ladies—not to speak of the fresher one of his own. Mrs. Newsome knew in other words that very night at Woollett that he himself knew Madame ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... of my blood and of my ink as he wants."(33) She did not have to give him any of her blood, and he did not accept much of her ink. She commenced publishing her celebrated Lettres a Marcie in Le Monde. We have already spoken of these letters, in order to show how George Sand gradually attenuated the ...
— George Sand, Some Aspects of Her Life and Writings • Rene Doumic
... even his wife in the spirit appealed to his spiritual aspirations. Many a woman has been deserted in this subtle manner by her minister husband. But I kept the fear of it to myself, never encouraging this attenuated form of piety in him by even opposing it. Meanwhile, I began to observe with very genuine admiration his heroism ...
— A Circuit Rider's Wife • Corra Harris
... does the strained intellect seek to overtake an ever-receding commencement, and toil to gain some adequate grasp of an apparently endless succession. A beginning there must have been, though we can never hope to fix its point. Even speculation droops her wings in the attenuated atmosphere of a past so remote, and the light of imagination is quenched in the darkness of a history so ancient. In time, as in space, the confines of the universe must ever remain concealed from us, and of the end we know no more than of the beginning. Inconceivable as is to us the lapse ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... inroads made upon its strength were rapidly repaired. The fever once conquered, in a week he was sufficiently convalescent to walk out, leaning on the arm of Gaston de Bois, or Ronald Walton. His gait was feeble, his form attenuated, his countenance had lost its ruddy glow,—the lines had sharpened until their youthful, healthful roundness was wholly obliterated; but the nervous, untranquil expression had passed away from his face, and the restless glancing from side to side had left his eyes. Through the stimulating ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... passenger was a half-breed woman nearing middle age, clad in a decent black print dress, and a black straw hat, under the brim of which depended a circlet of attenuated, grizzled curls. Her face, like that of all the natives in the presence of whites, expressed a blank, in her case a mysterious blank. She was silent and ubiquitous; whichever way they looked, there she was. Captain Jack had mentioned to Garth that her name ...
— Two on the Trail - A Story of the Far Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... countenance. Such a face would, with advancing age, become too bony, as fleshless as that of a knight errant. But at this stage of youth, with chin and cheek lightly covered with soft down, its latent harshness was attenuated by the charming softness of certain contours which had remained vague and childlike. His soft black eyes, still full of youth, also lent delicacy to his otherwise vigorous countenance. The young fellow would ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... them, Freda felt that her poor little face could never rival the inimitable reserves, the secure distinction of Miss Nethersole's. There was nothing, so to speak, to take hold of in Julia's dark, attenuated elegance; nothing that betrayed itself anywhere, from the slender brilliance of her deep-lidded, silent eyes, to her small flat chin, falling sheer from the immobile lower lip. Miss Nethersole's features and ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... S. writes one of his peculiar letters, in which the sentiments seem to be compressed, as if some species of finesse were at work—an attenuated worldly precaution which leads him perpetually to half conceal sentiment, purpose and acts, as if the operations and business of life were not ten times better effected by plain straightforwardness than by any other mode. He has, however, so long dealt with tricky fur-traders and dealers in interested ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... not a very wise youth, but he did know well enough, that, though big arms and legs are very good things, there is something besides size that goes to make a man; and he had heard stories of a fighting-man, called "The Spider," from his attenuated proportions, who was yet a terrible hitter in the ring, and had whipped many a big-limbed fellow, in and ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... his elbows propped on the table, his eyes fixed on the swaying waters outside, from which the moon gradually faded, leaving them to make a denser blackness in the night. As Pellerin read, this density of blackness—which never for a moment seemed inert or unalive—was attenuated by imperceptible degrees, till a greyish pallour replaced it; then the pallour breathed and brightened, and suddenly dawn ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... relative to an indignity that had been offered him by the rejection by the editor of a sporting periodical of a long treatise on eels, which, independently of the singularity of diction, had become so attenuated in the handling, as to have every appearance of filling three whole numbers of the work; and Mr. Jorrocks had determined to avenge the insult by turning author on his own account. The Yorkshireman, ever ready for amusement, cordially supported ...
— Jorrocks' Jaunts and Jollities • Robert Smith Surtees
... women and dead Christs. Wherever we may pass, this master-spirit of the Lombard style enthralls attention. His curious treatment of drapery, as though it were made of crumpled paper, and his trick of enhancing relief by sharp angles and attenuated limbs, do not detract from his peculiar charm. That is his way, very different from Donatello's, of attaining to the maximum of life and lightness in the stubborn vehicle of stone. Nor do all the riches of the choir—those multitudes of singing angels, those Ascensions ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... his dress. Although he could not have been less than eighteen or nineteen years old, and was tall for that age, he wore a skeleton suit, such as is usually put upon very little boys, and which, though most absurdly short in the arms and legs, was quite wide enough for his attenuated frame. In order that the lower part of his legs might be in perfect keeping with this singular dress, he had a very large pair of boots, originally made for tops, which might have been once worn by some stout farmer, but ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... millions of bulls, at length far away there appeared something terrible. I can only describe its appearance as that of an attenuated mountain on fire. When it drew nearer I perceived that it was more like a ballet-dancer whirling round and round upon her toes, or rather all the ballet-dancers in the world rolled into one and then multiplied a million ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... said the other, "and observe what is yet more worth your study;" and he pointed to the third bystander, whose face, sharp and attenuated, was bent with an absorbed, and, as it were, with a hungering attention over an old ...
— The Book-Hunter in London - Historical and Other Studies of Collectors and Collecting • William Roberts
... lovely day, and every feeling of my heart was consonant to the scene. Ascending a little eminence, I obtained an extensive view. The forest trees had lost their rich garb of mottled beauties, and their denuded limbs stretched out with attenuated delicacy, seemed to streak the distant horizon with darkened lines. On my right the winding Delaware lay stretched out in glassy beauty, and near me, glittering in the sunlight beyond, were a thousand gossamer webs that had survived ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various
... the flying elevator. This was so good, so extremely good, to be about to talk to Maury—who would be equally happy at seeing him. They would look at each other with a deep affection just behind their eyes which both would conceal beneath some attenuated raillery. Had it been summer they would have gone out together and indolently sipped two long Tom Collinses, as they wilted their collars and watched the faintly diverting round of some lazy August cabaret. But it was cold outside, with wind around the edges of the tall ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... governors be instructed to be guided in the future by the ukase of 1817, forbidding to stir up ritual murder cases "from prejudice only." While rejecting this prejudice in its full-fledged shape, the Tzar acknowledged it in part, in a somewhat attenuated form. ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... grasped his wrist tightly with one hand—and both feeble and attenuated was that poor wrist—the baronet, we say, grasped it, and in an instant had regained possession of the mask, which he deliberately replaced on his face, after which he seized the unfortunate young ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... reached the landing. Many were stove among the rocks, and others were overset; some of the men were dragged back by the surf and drowned; some lost their muskets, and were drenched to the skin: but the greater part got safe ashore. Among the foremost was seen the tall, attenuated form of Brigadier Wolfe, armed with nothing but a cane, as he leaped into the surf and climbed the crags with his soldiers. As they reached the top they formed in compact order, and attacked and carried with the bayonet the nearest French ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... as I could judge, but oh, how attenuated! Her lower limbs absolutely made no impression on the mattrass, to which her frame appeared to cling, giving a ghastly conspicuousness to the oedematoust swelling of her feet, and to her person, for, alas! She was in a way to have ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... challenged by either of the people most immediately interested in it." The State here did not sue to protect any North Carolina property rights nor to obtain support for deserted families. "I would not permit such an attenuated state interest to override the Full Faith and Credit Clause * * *" ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... style alone can keep literature alive is shown by literary history after Shakespeare. Just after him you have the "mellifluous poets" of the next period on the one hand, with style enough, but with such attenuated ideas that their work has died. Who knows Drayton or Brown or Wither? On the other hand, there came the metaphysicians with ideas in abundance, but not style, and their ...
— The Greatest English Classic A Study of the King James Version of • Cleland Boyd McAfee
... his thin arms above his head. Out of his eyes rained challenge, denunciation, anathema! Mutely he was hurling the curse of God's church. With the last ounce of his attenuated strength he was struggling for the voice which at this moment of supreme need had failed him. Over the body of the congregation, as the preacher halted, ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... he had known me at Dresden; a Baron de Wiedan, claiming Bohemia as his fatherland, who greeted me by saying that his friend the Comte St. Germain had arrived at the Etoile d'Orient, and had been enquiring after me; an attenuated-looking bravo who was introduced to me as the Chevalier de la Perine, whom I recognized at the first glance as the fellow called Talvis, who had robbed the Prince-Bishop of Presburg, who had lent me a hundred Louis the same day, and with whom I had fought ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... the case of a third medium, the substance of which puzzled the philosophers of ancient time and still continues to puzzle the scientists of the present. This is the ether, that attenuated fluid which fills all inter-stellar space and all space in masses and between molecules and atoms not otherwise occupied by gross matter. When a lamp is lit the light radiates from it in all directions in ...
— Marvels of Modern Science • Paul Severing
... evening at seven o'clock, just as I was going out to dine, I saw, a few yards away, a tall, broad-brimmed hat surmounting a head of lank white hair, a long neck throttled in a white neckcloth, a frock-coat flapping about a pair of attenuated legs. ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... a few minutes after Tiffles had left the room, and saw that gentleman and Philomela standing in the doorway. Tiffles appeared to be in the act of raising the lady's hand to kiss it; but, if that were his intention, he abandoned it on seeing Marcus, and shook the attenuated fingers instead. Then he coughed, and, saying "Good-night," went down the steps, as if he had not seen Marcus in the gloom. Miss Wilkeson coughed also (why do people always cough?), and, turning to her approaching ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... in power, a mistake of which everybody was convinced who observed how it filled the ear, and how distinctly every inflection was heard through the fullest harmony of the orchestra. The same clearness was observable in her pianissimo. When, in lier beautiful closes, she prolonged a tone, attenuated it by degrees, and falling gently upon the final note, the sound, though as ethereal as the sighing of a breeze, reached, like Mrs. Siddons's whisper in Lady Macbeth, every part of the immense theatre. Much of the effect of this unrivaled ...
— Great Singers, Second Series - Malibran To Titiens • George T. Ferris
... gently, as they entered the room aglow with the soft light produced by guttered jets, "here is a Luini bought last winter." It was "The Mystic Marriage of St. Catharine." He paused while she surveyed the rapt expression of the attenuated saint. "And here," he went on, "is my greatest find so far." They were before the crafty countenance of Caesar Borgia ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... long spells of immunity from foreign interference. Her people, defended by the Himalayan wall and the ocean, were free to develop their own scheme of national life; and world-forces which pierce the thickest crust of custom, reached them in attenuated volume. Their isolation ended when the sea was no longer a barrier; and for maritime nations it is but an extension of their territory. A third invasion began in the sixteenth century, and has continued till our own day. The ...
— Tales of Bengal • S. B. Banerjea
... according to all experience, that, if no interest were allowed, the deposits would be generally withdrawn for investment elsewhere; and thus another serious reduction would be made from the already attenuated amount of the Scottish bankers' profits. But besides the loss of profit on the small notes, there would be a further loss sustained by the necessity of keeping up a large stock of gold in the coffers of the bank. Hear Mr Thomson again ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... ships might approach; while in this nether world the middle of the Calabro-Sicilian strait was occupied by a condensation of vapour, (one could never profane them by the term of sea-mist or fog,) the most subtile and attenuated which ever came from the realms of cloud-compelling Jove. This fleecy tissue pursued its deliberate progress from coast to coast, like a cortege of cobwebs carrying a deputation from the power-looms of Arachne in Italy to the rival silk-looms at Catania. We ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLV. July, 1844. Vol. LVI. • Various
... gazed intently at the speaker, whose attenuated frame, venerable face, and long locks, aided by the hectic of enthusiasm that played beneath a glazed and deep-set eye, imparted a character that seemed to rise superior to human weakness. Bending his head in superstitious reverence, he turned gravely to those who, appearing to possess ...
— The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish • James Fenimore Cooper
... author of the play suddenly entered, and Lucien beheld M. du Bruel, a short, attenuated young man in an overcoat, a composite human blend of the jack-in-office, the owner ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... humbly crossed her attenuated hands upon her chest. "My children," she whispered. "How could I stay away from them? Have pity, Miss Carlyle! Don't reproach me. I am on my way to God, to answer for ...
— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood
... paeans to astronomy, because, as they said, it had proved the truth of Scripture. They had jumped to the conclusion that all nebula must be alike; that, if SOME are made up of systems of stars, ALL must be so made up; that none can be masses of attenuated gaseous ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... of her fierce features she ranged up her attenuated class, distributed the well-thumbed books—with a horn-book for little Luke Toy—and for two hours taught them with the same joyless severity under which their fathers and mothers had suffered. For spelling 'lamb' without the final b, Ivy Nancarrow ...
— Shining Ferry • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... to the darkness, they were pointed out, or were heard, or some filthy bundle of rags and straw was seen to move. Perhaps the poor children presented the most piteous and heart-rending spectacle. Many were too weak to stand, their little limbs attenuated, except where the frightful swellings had taken the place of previous emaciation. Every infantile expression had entirely departed; and, in some reason and intelligence had evidently flown. Many were remnants of families, crowded together in one cabin; orphaned little relatives taken in by the ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... its surface fleet upon fleet, argosy upon argosy. Masts to the right, masts to the left, masts in front, masts yonder above the warehouses; masts in among the streets as steeples appear amid roofs; masts across the river hung with drooping half-furled sails; masts afar down thin and attenuated, mere dark straight lines in the distance. They await in stillness ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... others tell me this, I regard it as a pose, or a poor joke. This person was manifestly sincere in his profession of faith. He did not care what he ate. He looked it. Were I afflicted with this peculiar ailment, this attenuated form of coprophagia, I should try to keep the hideous secret to myself. It is nothing to boast of. A man owes something to those traditions of our race which has helped to raise us above the level of the brute. Good taste in viands has been painfully ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... it seemed that the arc of fire became less sharply defined. It appeared to me to grow more attenuated, and I thought blackish streaks showed, occasionally. Presently, as I watched, the smooth onward-flow ceased; and I was able to perceive that there came a momentary, but regular, darkening of the world. This grew ...
— The House on the Borderland • William Hope Hodgson
... the invisible world and be seen and heard no more. The theory is something like this: Space is pervaded by luminiferous ether, which is a material thing—as much a substance as air or water, though almost infinitely more attenuated. All force, all forms of energy must be propagated in this; every process must take place in it which takes place at all. But let us suppose that cavities exist in this otherwise universal medium, as caverns exist ...
— Present at a Hanging and Other Ghost Stories • Ambrose Bierce
... marked forty-one thousand three hundred when I became aware that I could go no farther. Physically, the strain was not as yet greater than I could bear, but my machine had reached its limit. The attenuated air gave no firm support to the wings, and the least tilt developed into side-slip, while she seemed sluggish on her controls. Possibly, had the engine been at its best, another thousand feet might have been within our capacity, but it was still missfiring, and two out of the ten cylinders ...
— Danger! and Other Stories • Arthur Conan Doyle
... movements—something stronger than common sense. It was a stirring of the insatiable curiosity of the human being who has begun to be sexually interested in another. Though not exactly coarse-fibred, he was so far removed from anything attenuated as almost to be so. He only ...
— The Privet Hedge • J. E. Buckrose
... streamlet trickled its way over a bed of decayed vegetation often meandering through a dense growth of wiry reeds in a channel set well below the general level. Banks of attenuated grass and rank foliage lined its course, and the welcome sunlight poured down upon its water in sharp contrast with ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum
... alien—even through the heavy white robes—that moved with an odd hopping step that no human limb could manage, turned their paper-white, long, expressionless faces toward me for an instant, then were gone, on the trail of the mole-man. Beneath those robes must have been a body as attenuated as a skeleton, as different as an insect's from man's. Within those odd egg-shaped heads must have been a mind as alien to mine as an ...
— Valley of the Croen • Lee Tarbell
... excelled all other substances, because it is among the rarest or thinnest of the elements. It is, however, said by some, who are disposed to transcendentalize his doctrine, that he did not mean the common atmospheric air, but something more attenuated and warm; and since, in its purest state, it constitutes the most perfect intellect, inferior degrees of reason must be owing to an increase of its density and moisture. Upon such a principle, the whole earth ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... bribery was a trite, immaterial circumstance. The sole, penetrating question was whether it were a profitable project. If it were, no man of wealth hesitated in investing his money in its stock and in sharing its revenue. It could not be expected that he would feel moral objections, even the most attenuated, for the chances were that while he might not have been a party to the corrupt obtaining of this or that particular franchise, yet he was involved in the grants of other special endowments. Moreover, money making was not built on morality; its whole foundation and impetus lay in ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... The tangled and attenuated thread of German history from Charlemagne's time until now can not be unfolded here, but it makes one of the great chronicles in human history, with its Conrads and Henrys, its Maximilian, its Barbarossa, its Charles V., its Thirty Years' War, its great Frederick of Prussia, its struggle ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume V (of X) • Various
... combined with the still unexplained secrecy of my call, surprised me, and defied my powers of penetration. This lady had been dangerously ill for a month, during all which time no medical man had been called to her aid; and even now, when her body was attenuated, and her strength exhausted to the uttermost, professional assistance had been introduced into the house by stealth, as if it were against the laws to ameliorate human sufferings by curing diseases. This apparent ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 2 - Historical, Traditional, and Imaginative • Alexander Leighton
... single-women, but they are usually embittered by disappointment or by hope deferred,—angular, envious, busybodies in other women's matters; or they are comically odd, self-ridiculing, and unrestful; or, worst of all, they have become morally attenuated by a thwarted love or a long course of dismal and absurd self-sacrifice and are so resigned, colorless, and impassive, that, like Naaman, we are tempted to go away in a rage. But where shall we find another Clara,—beautiful, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... her, but he could not believe it was his mother. A visage at once haggard and bloated had supplanted that soft and rich countenance which had captivated so many. A robe concealed her attenuated frame; but the lustrous eyes were bleared and bloodshot, and the accents of the voice, which used to be at once melodious and a little drawling, hoarse, harsh, ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... there is but one course to be pursued. Abandon all thought of peace! Reject the overtures of Carthage! Reject them wholly and unconditionally! What? What? Give back to her a thousand able-bodied men, and receive in return this one, attenuated, war-worn, fever-wasted frame,—this weed, whitened in a dungeon's darkness, pale and sapless, which no kindness of the sun, no softness of the summer breeze, can ever restore to life and vigor? It must not, shall not be! Oh, were Regulus what he ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... Biblical inspiration being attenuated to almost vanishing point, there is nothing left but to appeal to the Church—not, indeed, to the Church of to-day, lost amid the mazes and intricacies of sects and schisms, but to that venerable fiction, "the undivided Church" of the ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... and had come round to assist somebody out on this. Was it a ghost, or was it a man? His cheeks were hollow and hectic, his eyes were glistening as with fever, his chest heaved. He had a fur boa wrapped round his neck, and his overcoat hung loosely on his tall, attenuated form, which seemed too weak to support itself, or to get down the ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood
... had some freedom (albeit limited) to rebel from intolerable authority and to form their own company.[13] This freedom, this choice, as Lord Chesterfield pointed out in his speech against the act, was severely attenuated in 1737, and was to remain so in varying degrees until the monopoly the act allowed was legislated dead in 1843. But it was a cartel between the managers that the players most feared, and there is evidence in the pamphlets growing out of the struggle of 1743 that ...
— The Case of Mrs. Clive • Catherine Clive
... supposed to be extinct. This lifeless appearance was heightened by the extreme sharpness of her features—especially the nose and chin,—and by the emaciation of her limbs, which was painfully distinct through her drapery. Her attenuated arms were crossed upon her breast; and her black brows and eyelashes contrasted fearfully with the livid whiteness of her skin. A few short, dark locks, escaping from beneath her head-dress, showed that her hair had been removed, and had only been recently ...
— Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth
... Siemens read a paper before the Royal Society in March 1882, on "A New Theory of the Sun". His views in many respects coincided with mine.* [footnote... Interstellar space, according to Dr. Siemens, is filled with attenuated matter, consisting of highly rarefied gaseous bodies— including hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, and aqueous vapour; that these gaseous compounds are capable of being dissociated by radiant solar energy while in a state of extreme attenuation; and that ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... riksdag, distracted by fierce party strife. Twice he endeavoured to free himself from the intolerable tutelage of the estates. The first occasion was in 1755 when, stimulated by his imperious consort Louisa Ulrica, sister of Frederick the Great, he tried to regain a portion of the attenuated prerogative, and nearly lost his throne in consequence. On the second occasion, under the guidance of his eldest son, the crown prince Gustavus, afterwards Gustavus III., he succeeded in overthrowing the tyrannous ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... of his former friends at Brook Farm still continued, though in a somewhat attenuated condition. From a long and appreciative letter sent him by Burrill Curtis, we make an extract, followed by Isaac's comments ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... is distinguished by its peculiarly long and attenuated head and face, terminating in a singular sharpness of the nose, and length of the muzzle or month. There are two results from this: the length of the mouth gives a longer grasp and secures the prey, but, as the nasal cavities and the cavity of the skull are ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... character and personal bias of the individual soul who is philosophizing. I suppose to a great many minds what we call "the universe" presents itself as a colossal circle, without any circumference, filled with an innumerable number of material objects floating in some thin attenuated ether. I suppose the centre of this circle with no circumference is generally assumed to be the "self" or "soul" of the ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... length of head, narrow and rounded at tip; face abruptly narrowed in front of eyes; muzzle long, narrow, cylindrical; lower jaw slightly projecting; eyes large; tongue very long, last third attenuated, covered with brush-like papillae; interfemoral membrane very narrow, especially at root of tail; fur reddish brown, ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... the window and blinked at the garden outside. His two younger sons appeared on their bicycles returning from some early expedition. He waved a hand of greeting. It was one of those summer mornings when attenuated mist seems to fill the very ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... eating and drinking copiously. If, however, the evaporation be somewhat less, phantasms appear, but distorted and without sequence; thus it happens in a case of fever. And if the evaporation be still more attenuated, the phantasms will have a certain sequence: thus especially does it happen towards the end of sleep in sober men and those who are gifted with a strong imagination. If the evaporation be very slight, ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... the plantations were deserted. It was dusk; there were no leaves as yet; the nightingales would not begin to sing for a fortnight; and "the Mother of the Months" was in her most attenuated phase—starved and bent to a mere bowed skeleton, which glided along behind the ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... spells and enchantments for the growth of leaves and blossoms, of grass and flowers and fruit, have lingered down to our own time in the shape of pastoral plays and popular merry-makings, is it not reasonable to suppose that they survived in less attenuated forms some two thousand years ago among the civilised peoples of antiquity? Or, to put it otherwise, is it not likely that in certain festivals of the ancients we may be able to detect the equivalents of our May Day, Whitsuntide, and Midsummer celebrations, ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... needlewoman, without choosing or discussing anything. Thus she did not amuse herself with those preparations that stimulate the tenderness of mothers, and so her affection was from the very outset, perhaps, to some extent attenuated. ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... everybody else's. Truman, Hay, and Cranston of the Eleventh and Pollock and Muncey of the Fortieth were the captains ordered to march forthwith. Before eight o'clock on Sunday morning the little column had swung sturdily away over the prairies, and Captain Devers, with his own attenuated troop and two companies of "doughboys," remained to guard the post and its supplies, and take care of the invalid colonel and the wives and children of the soldiers so summarily ordered ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... the new tunnel, followed by Captain Spade. If I could but follow them! If I could but breathe for awhile the bracing air of the Atlantic, of which the interior of Back Cup only receives attenuated puffs, so to speak. ...
— Facing the Flag • Jules Verne
... on our weather bow; and, as it got nearer, we could see that its bottom edge, which was attenuated to the proportions of a slender pillar of vapour, seemed to be united to the water, the sea, where it joined the surface, being greatly agitated, foaming up in columns of spray that were circled round and round and then drawn up in corkscrew fashion ...
— The White Squall - A Story of the Sargasso Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson
... ladies-of-honour—they seem like white clouds dreaming on a bank of scarlet poppies—and the long sad legs, clad in maroon-coloured breeches, is the Lord-Lieutenant, the teeth and the diamonds on his right is Her Excellency. And now a lingering survival of the terrible Droit de Seigneur—diminished and attenuated, but still circulating through our modern years—this ceremony, a pale ghost of its former self, is performed; and, having received a kiss on either cheek, the debutantes are free to seek their ...
— Muslin • George Moore
... been relating to Celia. Dario was a handsome man, of average height, slim and elegant. He wore a full beard, dark and carefully tended, and had the long face and pronounced nose of the Boccaneras, but the impoverishment of the family blood over a course of centuries had attenuated, softened as it were, any sharpness or ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... 1796, Jenner had vaccinated a child with cowpox and proved that a slight attack of one disease protected the body from a disease of an allied nature. An occasion equally famous in the history of medicine was a day in 1881, when Pasteur determined that a flock of sheep vaccinated with the attenuated virus of anthrax remained well, when every one of the unvaccinated infected from the same material had died. Meanwhile, from Pasteur's researches on fermentation and spontaneous generation, a transformation had been initiated ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler
... think how his loving vagaries had made him a maniac in the eyes of the world, and was proceeding to pursue his line of thought further, when a faint, sweet strain, the very ghost of sound, so remote and attenuated it seemed, struck upon his ear. His pulses stood still; he listened with parted lips and bated breath. The song flowed on—he waiting, listening, rising slowly and unconsciously from his recumbent ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... of the Highlanders, Long Lauchie was aptly described by his name. He was a tall, thin, attenuated man. Everything about him seemed to run to a point and vanish; his long, thin hands, his flimsy pointed beard, even his long nose and ears helped out his character. He rarely indulged in conversation, coming out of an habitual reverie only occasionally to make a remark. Nevertheless he was of a sociable ...
— The Silver Maple • Marian Keith
... slenderly as a stalk of wild oats, from the loins of Demosthenes De Grapion. A lone son following a lone son, and he another—it was sad to contemplate, in that colonial beginning of days, three generations of good, Gallic blood tripping jocundly along in attenuated Indian file. It made it no less pathetic to see that they were brilliant, gallant, much-loved, early epauletted fellows, who did not let twenty-one catch them without wives sealed with the authentic wedding kiss, nor allow twenty-two ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable
... he passed quite close to her, his attenuated shadow was cast at full length over her and she was filled ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... sat silent, not provokingly, as though to prolong his distress, but as if, in the attenuated phraseology he had taught her, it was difficult to find words robust enough to meet his challenge. It was the first time he had ever asked her to explain anything; and she had lived so long in dread of offering elucidations which were not wanted, that she seemed unable ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 1 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... upon the shattered remains of the old oak table, upon which Mark was leaning, his head resting between his long bony attenuated hands. The blow sent a hollow sound through the empty desolate apartment. The grey-haired man raised his eyes, without lifting his head, and surveyed his son with an expression of mocking triumph, but answered not a word. ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie
... heavily by, and some few weeks passed, ere Emmeline was sufficiently convalescent to leave her room, and then her pallid features and attenuated form were such constant and evident proofs of that mental as well as bodily fever, that Mrs. Hamilton could not look on her without pain. She was still inwardly restless and uneasy, though evidently struggling for cheerfulness, and ...
— The Mother's Recompense, Volume II. - A Sequel to Home Influence in Two Volumes • Grace Aguilar
... tenuity almost spiritual, we shall run upon Scylla while endeavoring to shun Charybdis. Light and heat come bound together from the sun, by the same path, and with the same velocity. Heat is therefore due also to an excitement of this attenuated medium. Yet this heat puts our atmosphere in motion, impels onward the waves of the sea, wafts our ships to distant climes, grinds our corn, and in various ways does the work of man. If we expose a mass of metal to the sun's rays for a single hour ...
— Outlines of a Mechanical Theory of Storms - Containing the True Law of Lunar Influence • T. Bassnett
... fill room 1. A very small percentage of them will strike the doorway or opening into room 2. In their turn these sound waves will be diffused all through room 2, and again but a small percentage of them will find access into room 3. The sound waves will by this time be so much attenuated that the voice of the man standing in room 1 will be lost. Any little tone, however, that may remain will become dissipated in room 3, and it will not be possible for a person standing in room 4 to hear ...
— The Recent Revolution in Organ Building - Being an Account of Modern Developments • George Laing Miller
... were on the subject; then her occasional exclamation of "Tremble, villain!" would escape her; and sometimes in the family circle, after sitting for a while in a state of abstraction, she would lift her attenuated hand armed with a knitting-needle or a ball of worsted, and assuming the action of poising a pistol, execute a smart click with her tongue, and say, ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover
... daughter, showing that in this art, as in all else, order cannot be dispensed with. There were things a tall person might wear, but which a short person might not, and the draperies which adorned a portly lady were but pitiable weeds when trailed by her attenuated sister. The effect of long thin lines in a fabric will make a short woman appear tall, while round, thick lines can reduce the altitude of people whose height is a trouble to be combated. She illustrated the usage of large and small checks and plaids and all the mazy interweaving of other cloths, ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... population. He says that Boston, meaning Massachusetts, could alone furnish four thousand fighting men, and that the four united colonies could count forty thousand souls. [ 1 ] These numbers may be challenged; but, at all events, the contrast was striking with the attenuated and suffering bands of priests, nuns, and fur-traders on the St. Lawrence. About twenty-one thousand persons had come from Old to New England, with the resolve of making it their home; and though this immigration had virtually ceased, the natural increase ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman
... amusement. If you say your wife or relations are dead, they replay coldly, "Il faut se consoler:" or if they visit you in an illness, "Il faut prendre patience." Or tell them you are ruined, and their features then become something more attenuated, the shoulders something more elevated, and a more commiserating tone confesses, "C'est bien mal beureux—Mai enfin que voulez vous?" ["It's unlucky, but what can be said in such cases?"] and in the same instant they ill ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... will probably have children taller than either, and mental imbecility is the usual attendant of extreme size. The union of persons prone to corpulency, of dwarfs, etc., would have parallel results; and so, likewise, of weakly and attenuated couples. The tall should marry the short, the corpulent the lean, the choleric the gentle, and so on, and the tendency to extremes in the parents will be corrected in ...
— The Ladies Book of Useful Information - Compiled from many sources • Anonymous
... the water bottle drained to the last drop, is the nurse's breast emptied of all its contents. I soften the meager remnant in water; then, keeping it still immersed, I blow into it through an extremely attenuated glass tube. The skin fills out, distends and resumes the shape of the larva, without there being an outlet anywhere for the compressed air. It is intact, therefore; it is free of any perforation, which would be forthwith revealed under the water by an escape of gas. And so, under the Anthrax' ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... imagination, in this third period, would return to the inclinations of the first period. This regressive metamorphosis—for I cannot style it otherwise—is rare but not without examples. Ordinarily the creative imagination, when it has passed its adult stage, becomes attenuated by slow atrophy without undergoing serious change of form. Nevertheless, I am able to cite the case of a well-known scholar who began with a taste for art, especially plastic art, went over rapidly to literature, ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... away from St. Domingo to his grave, and afterwards the thought of the remaining negroes came very faintly back. We read what Napoleon said of his own conduct in the matter; but with the abolitionist Miss Martineau on one side, and the doubtful Man of Destiny on the other, the pure fact grew very attenuated, and I am not now sure that I have seen it. The moment your curiosity is really aroused about an historical circumstance, the glasses through which you have been viewing so varied and wide a landscape become suddenly very opaque. History is a gallery of pictures so individually unexpressive ...
— Early Letters of George Wm. Curtis • G. W. Curtis, ed. George Willis Cooke
... part of the nature of things, they would have been established long ago beyond cavil. For there are few things which men have wished more eagerly to believe. It is no doubt just possible that among the vibrations of the fundamental ingredients of our world—those attenuated forms of matter which are said to be not even 'material,' there may be some which act as vehicles for psychical interchange. If such psychic waves exist, the discovery is wholly in favour of materialism. It would tend to rehabilitate those notions of spirit as the ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... moonlight entering by one of the holes to carry objects to eyes that would have pierced the deepest gloom. There is said to be no darkness in the world sufficient to conceal objects entirely; but here there was, in addition to the attenuated beam, the white dress of Ady, and the bed where Kalee lay. Janet had described it, and the table and the chair: what more than the bare walls was there to describe? Nothing. On that bed, covered by a thin white cloth, lay this Indian princess dead, with Ady hanging over her, and pulling ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Vol. XXIII. • Various
... and powdered hair usually mark the high tide of imaginative originality among this sort of people. So it was to be the inevitable Louis XVI fete—or as near to it as attenuated, artistic intelligence could manage, and they altered Duane's very clever and correct sketches to suit themselves, careless of anachronism, and sent the dainty water-colour drawings to town in order that those ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... the neck into which it has been forced. It is seldom that one hears a buyer ask to see the cork. The average buyer of champagne would not understand the cork's story. He is accustomed to large and bulging corks and if he were to see an attenuated specimen, of dark complexion and as hard as a piece of vulcanized rubber he would look at it with great suspicion and, doubtless, refuse the wine. But an experienced waiter will know his man and will bring him the ...
— The Onlooker, Volume 1, Part 2 • Various
... sterility, in spite of the woodlands so far down below, in spite of the attenuated grass on which they stood, inspired a profound sense of repugnance. To the mind of Bill Brudenell, at least, it was a land of hopelessness, a land of starvation ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum |
