"Close-packed" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... from the piano melted into a rippling prelude, and Winifred breathed easier when her friend began to sing. Her voice was sweet and excellently trained, and there was a deep stillness of appreciation when the clear notes thrilled through the close-packed hall. No one could doubt that the first part of the aria was a success, for half-subdued applause broke out when the voice sank into silence, and for a few moments the piano rippled on alone; but it seemed to Winifred that the look of tension was still in the singer's ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... Baluchistan. Immediately on the west of the Kaisargarh there towers the Shingarh Mountain, a geological repetition of the Kaisargarh ridge, black with pines towards the summit and crowned with crags of coral limestone. Beyond it are the grey outlines of the close-packed ridges which enclose the lower reaches of the Zhob and the Kundar. As they pass away southwards this grid-iron formation strikes with a gentle curve westwards, the narrow enclosed valleys widening out towards the sources of the rivers, where ages of denudation have worn down the folds ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... the disputed Oregon country.[106] The frail bonds which unite these lower societies to their soil are easily ruptured and the people themselves dislodged, while their land is appropriated by the intruder. But who could ever conceive of dislodging the Chinese or the close-packed millions of India? A modern state with a given population on a wide area is more vulnerable than another of like population more closely distributed; but the former has the advantage of a reserve territory for future growth.[107] This ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... now stood close-packed up against the slope of the trench, their faces as of stone, restrained, pale as chalk, with lipless mouths, each man's gun in position—a single beast of prey with a hundred eyes ...
— Men in War • Andreas Latzko
... felt like a thin sheet of velvet beneath which lies a close-packed layer of small shot. It was smooth to the touch at any one place, but to a finger passed along it, rough as a ...
— The Last Galley Impressions and Tales - Impressions and Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... at first an air of diminutiveness inferior to its fame in ancient and modern times. It rises up from the shore like a wedge, composed of a large mass of close-packed white houses, piled as thick on each other as they can stand; white-terraced roofs, and without windows, so the number of its inhabitants must be immense, in comparison to the ground the buildings occupy—not less, perhaps, than 30,000 men. ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... buttons. The highway below was jammed with geeks, and they were all stopped dead and staring upward, as though hypnotized by the lights. A second later, they had recovered and were shooting—not at the airjeep, but at the four globes of blazing magnesium. Then he had the close-packed mass of non-humanity in his sights; he tramped the pedal and began punching buttons. He still had four rockets left by the time the mob ...
— Uller Uprising • Henry Beam Piper, John D. Clark and John F. Carr
... in every twenty-four, night and day watching of their convoy, of their colleagues, of periscopes. (The prospect of collision with their close-packed convoy and themselves is a bad chance in itself.) On a destroyer convoying ships the officer of the deck has to stand with one eye to the compass ordering, say, two hundred changes of course in every hour. And one watch-officer ...
— The U-boat hunters • James B. Connolly
... eddying upon the stream that rushes to the grave. The sweeping outlines of life, that lay once before the vision,—rolling into wide billows of years, like easy lifts of a broad mountain-range,—now seem close-packed together as with a Titan hand, and you see only crowded, craggy heights,—like Alpine fastnesses,—parted with glaciers of grief, ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell
... in the whirl of the dance, except that the close-packed dancers hemmed them in a swaying mob; and once she fell back against ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... welcome given by the captain to his aide need not be recorded here. It was curt and lurid; it would serve as a sorry passport if proffered on his entry to another world; but the tragi-comedy of Watts's appearance among the close-packed gathering on the forecastle was forthwith blotted out of existence by a thing so amazing, so utterly unlooked for that during a couple of spellbound seconds not a man moved ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... an impatient throng. On a ledge above the entrance a man stood, a strip of silk extended in his finger-tips. Beneath, on either side, were gates. About him were series of ascending tiers, close-packed, and brilliant with multicolored robes and parasols. The sand of the track was very white: where the sunlight fell it had the glitter of broken glass. In the centre was a low wall; at one end were pillars and seven great balls of wood; at the other, seven dolphins, their tails in the air. The uproar ...
— Mary Magdalen • Edgar Saltus
... of the grey Atlantic; in teaming cities, where the pulse of life beats loud and strong, the Scotsman ever cherishes sweet, sad thoughts of the braes and burns about his Highland home; between the close-packed roofs of a London alley, the Italian immigrant sees the sunny skies and deep blue seas of his native land, the German pictures to himself the loveliness of the legend-haunted Rhineland, and the Scandinavian, closing his eyes and ears to the squalor ...
— George Borrow in East Anglia • William A. Dutt
... the noise of the world, straining until the dark-corded veins of his throat stood out sharply and perspiration gleamed on his bald forehead. As though his life depended upon the delivery of his great message he was explaining to that close-packed crowd that ...
— Great Possessions • David Grayson
... bestial barbarity. At home, he has seen inoffensive watering places bombarded by pirate craft which came up out of the sea like malignant wraiths and then fled away like panic-stricken window-smashers. He has seen Zeppelins hovering over close-packed working-class districts in industrial towns, raining indiscriminate destruction upon men, women, and children. In fact, he has seen things and suffered things that he never even dreamed of, and they ...
— Getting Together • Ian Hay
... Palmer, Cook & Company's and Naglee's banks it was the same. The human queue, which issued from the doors of Page, Bacon & Company, now reached around the corner. It was growing turbulent. Women tried to force themselves between the close-packed file and were repelled. One of these was Sherman's washwoman. She clutched his coat-tails as ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... galley, that officer replied to him, "Never fire your arquebus at the foe until you are so close at hand that his blood will leap into your face at the discharge." If we bear in mind such an instruction as this it will help us to picture that close-packed sanguinary conflict upon which the Mediterranean sun looked down on this day. Eight to one, all that could find room to get alongside of the Santa Ana, fought with the Knight and his followers. The issue was, of course, never in doubt for a moment. "Muertos y cansados" (Dead and deadbeat), ...
— Sea-Wolves of the Mediterranean • E. Hamilton Currey
... Allegro and the Penseroso. It is impossible to conceive that the mechanism of language can be brought to a more exquisite degree of perfection. These poems differ from others as ottar of roses differs from ordinary rose-water, the close-packed essence from the thin, diluted mixture. They are, indeed, not so much poems as collections of hints, from each of which the reader is to make out a poem for himself. Every epithet is a text ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... I followed came down between banks of wretched-looking working-men's houses, in close-packed rows on either side, and took upon itself the role of Swathinglea High Street, where, at a lamp and a pillar-box, the steam-trams began. So far that dirty hot way had been unusually quiet and empty, but beyond the corner, where the first group of beershops clustered, ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... those nameless vegetables the fruit of the nose-tree itself may be exposed for sale? And the interest is heightened with a chill of horror. Below, you hear, the cellars are alive with mystery; opium dens, where the smokers lie one above another, shelf above shelf, close-packed and grovelling in deadly stupor; the seats of unknown vices and cruelties, the prisons of unacknowledged slaves and the secret lazarettos ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... develop itself freely into a more or less rounded form. You must not even look at the tropic forests. For there, from the immense diversity of forms, twenty varieties of tree will grow beneath each other, forming a close-packed heap of boughs and leaves, from the ground to a hundred ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... ship, descended a noisome-smelling funnel by an iron staircase, and found ourselves on the troop-deck, very similar to that of the Montfort, only likely to be much more crowded; the same low ceiling, with cross-rafters for kit and hooks for hammocks, and close-packed tables on ...
— In the Ranks of the C.I.V. • Erskine Childers
... on the other side of the ravine from us as they had since the Fourth, except for such times as they had assaulted our position. The smoke of Ypres and all the close-packed villages of a thickly populated countryside rose ...
— The Escape of a Princess Pat • George Pearson
... who chanced to be near rescued the child, and succeeded in placing him in the hands of his mother. But the younger child, the Duke de Chartres, could nowhere be found. In vain the distracted mother called aloud for her child. The close-packed throng swayed to and fro, and her feeble voice was unheard in the deafening clamor. She was swept along by the flow of a torrent which it was impossible to resist. With exceeding difficulty her friends succeeded in forcing her into a house. ...
— Louis Philippe - Makers of History Series • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... Missions,—the chapel full of kneeling men and women; those who could not find room inside kneeling on the garden walks outside; Father Salvierderra, in gorgeous vestments, coming, at close of the services, slowly down the aisle, the close-packed rows of worshippers parting to right and left to let him through, all looking up eagerly for his blessing, women giving him offerings of fruit or flowers, and holding up their babies that he might lay his hands on their heads. No one ...
— Ramona • Helen Hunt Jackson
... the shape of a figure eight, two larger herds connected by a smaller, and were headed to the southward, moving slowly, grazing on the wheat stubble as they proceeded. But the number seemed incalculable. Hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of grey, rounded backs, all exactly alike, huddled, close-packed, alive, hid the earth from sight. It was no longer an aggregate of individuals. It was a mass—a compact, solid, slowly moving mass, huge, without form, like a thick-pressed growth of mushrooms, spreading out in all directions over the earth. From it there ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... wherever it can obtain a foothold, to an elevation of from 10,000 to 12,000 feet, where it dwarfs to a mass of crumpled, prostrate branches, covered with slender, upright shoots, each tipped with a short, close-packed tassel of leaves. The bark is smooth and purplish, in some places almost white. The fertile cones grow in rigid clusters upon the upper branches, dark chocolate in color while young, and bear beautiful pearly seeds about the ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir
... was all this to the clouded world we had left behind us, in yonder close-packed city, with its poverty, its misery, its sin, its injustice, its scramble for gold, its dark hates and terrible plots. But, I said to myself, while God permits man to wreck himself, he denies him ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... subdivisions of the city were termed, occupying floors or apartments of the tall old houses; walking abroad in the streets in grave attire, stiff hat, crimped ruff, and huge fan, and forming a society in themselves, close-packed, punctilious and dignified, rigidly devout but strictly censorious, and altogether as unlike their typical country folks of Paris as if they had belonged to a different nation. And the sourest and most severe of all were such as had lived farthest south, and personally suffered ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... beat rapidly, and she began to lag behind. She was soon pushed aside hard against a fence, and the close-packed crowd went streaming past her. She saw that there were many people, ...
— Mother • Maxim Gorky
... objurgations he slashed at protruding arms and hands, thrust his sword again and again through the port into that close-packed, weltering mass, until at last the shipwrights backed away the boat to escape the suction of ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... spray, the smoke of waters filled the air. Quite coolly the rivermen made their way ashore, their peavies held like balancing poles across their bodies. Under their feet the logs heaved, sank, ground together, tossed above the hurrying under-mass, tumultuous as a close-packed drove of wild horses. The rivermen rode them easily. For an appreciable time one man perched on a stable timber watching keenly ahead. Then quite coolly he leaped, made a dozen rapid zigzag steps forward, and stopped. The log he had quitted dropped sullenly from ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... Miller's manner, Judith galloped down toward the four corrals where the cows were milked. From a distance she saw that there were a number of men, ten or twelve of them, standing in a close-packed group. She wondered what it was that had drawn them from their work at this time of day; what that big, bull-voiced man was saying to them. She heard the muttering rumble of his words before the words themselves meant anything to her. A quick glance ...
— Judith of Blue Lake Ranch • Jackson Gregory
... London, took his sister-in-law there, driving old Major to the crossroads, where they met the stage-coach. He went outside, on the box-seat, and she in the dull and close-packed interior, where four persons and one small child had to make the best of their quarters for the six hours that the journey lasted. Tired, headachy, and dusty with March dust, at last Dora emerged, and was very glad ...
— The Carbonels • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the style; but left the thought, in an English Double-Dutched, far remoter than he found it from our understanding. The thought demands in English a vehicle crystal-clear; but Aeschylus in the Greek is not crystal-clear: so close-packed and vast are the ideas that there are lines on lines of which the best scholars can only conjecture the meaning.—In all this criticism, let me say, one is but saying what has been said before; echoing Professor Mahaffy; echoing Professor Gilbert Murray; ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... growths machinery of decentralisation may be evoked to undo in part at any rate the work of centralising machinery. In smaller towns, where the circumference bears a larger proportion to the mass, a spreading of the close-packed population over an expanded town-area will be more feasible, and will form the first step in that series of reforms which shall humanise the industrial town. The congestion of the poorer population of our towns, and the struggle for fresh air and elbow-room ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... space of minutes it would be infantry that passed, at the swinging lunge of German foot soldiers on a forced march. Now it would be cavalry, with accouterments jingling and horses scrouging in the close-packed ranks; else a battery of the viperish looking little rapid-fire guns, or a battery of heavier cannon, with cloth fittings over their ugly snouts, like muzzled dogs whose bark is bad and ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... snowballs. For snowballs, there could be no better target than red-coated sentinels standing erect and motionless at the post of duty; and it chanced that one of these individuals, stationed before the Customs House door, was pelted with the close-packed missiles. Being several times struck, he called for aid, the guard turned out, and a crowd gathered. One of the soldiers was presently knocked down, another was hit by a club, and at last six or seven shots were fired, with or without orders, ...
— The Eve of the Revolution - A Chronicle of the Breach with England, Volume 11 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Carl Becker
... their last act of anger and revenge on him, had it not been for a sudden change in that tide of ill fortune that now seemed to carry him forward to his doom. There came a sound of far-off cries, a distant clacking of hoofs, the clatter of steel, many shouts, entreaties and commands. The close-packed crowd which filled the open space in front of the hotel writhed, twisted, turned and would have sought to resolve itself into groups and individuals. Some cried out that the troops were coming. A detachment ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough
... Mayorunas, their first paroxysm of fury vented, now settled in cold hate to their work. On all sides their clubmen and spearmen were bludgeoning and stabbing at the close-packed Red Bones, leaping in, killing, springing back and onward with terrible efficiency. Beyond these a thin but deadly line of bowmen poured arrows in high-looping curves over the heads of the hand-to-hand combatants, ...
— The Pathless Trail • Arthur O. (Arthur Olney) Friel
... on a side road. The countryside that under a first look slept peacefully in the afternoon sunlight, that drowsed calmly in the easy quiet of an uneventful field and farm existence, proved under the closer searching look to be a teeming hive of activity, a close-packed camp of well-armed fighting men, a widespread net and chain of men and guns and horses. The peaceful countryside was overflowing with men and bristling with bayonets; every village was a crammed-full military cantonment, every barn stuffed with soldiers ...
— Action Front • Boyd Cable (Ernest Andrew Ewart)
... at once. That was mathematically impossible. But no human eye could detect the delay. Four close-packed flares of pure atomic fire sprang into being between the Platform and Earth. Each was brighter than the sun. For the fraction of an instant there was no night where night had fallen on the Earth. For thousands of ...
— Space Tug • Murray Leinster
... the Kuriles, the Bitter Seas, I come, And me men call the Home-Wind, for I bring the English home. Look—look well to your shipping! By the breath of my mad typhoon I swept your close-packed Praya and beached your best ...
— Poems Every Child Should Know - The What-Every-Child-Should-Know-Library • Various
... bird-headed officer, still swearing slightly, and carrying strops and aluminium boot-trees and weightless hair-brushes and hand-mirrors and pomade in his hands, resumed possession. Bert was put in with Kurt because there was nowhere else for him to lay his bandaged head in that close-packed vessel. He was to mess, he ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... spike switch points in the track so that they will not move, or place rocks or close-packed dirt between ...
— Simple Sabotage Field Manual • Strategic Services
... Street feeds Chicago. Into that close-packed thoroughfare come daily the fruits and vegetables that will supply a million tables. Ben had heard of it, vaguely, but had never attempted to find it. Now he stumbled upon it and, standing there, felt at home in Chicago for the first time in more than a year. He saw ruddy men walking about ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber
... a moment thoughtfully. Then she stepped to the tall show-case, pushed back the sliding glass door, and pointed to the rows of brilliant-hued petticoats that hung close-packed within. ...
— Roast Beef, Medium • Edna Ferber
... of large parts of the Galaxy must always have attracted attention, even from naked-eye observers, but the true star-clouds were first satisfactorily represented in Barnard's photographs. The resemblance to actual clouds is often startling. Some are close-packed and dense, like cumuli; some are wispy or mottled, like cirri. The rifts and modulations, as well as the general outlines, are the same as those of clouds of vapor or dust, and one notices also the characteristic thinning out at the ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss
... learned afterward how it happened. A block distant a hundred of our comrades had been holding a building. Across roofs and through buildings they made their way, till they found themselves looking down upon the close-packed soldiers. Then it ...
— The Iron Heel • Jack London
... poet was feeling only the indignity of the position, and the Heathen Journalist as trumpeter of his wrongs and avenger of the Muses had not occurred to him. He smoothed out the magic scrap, and was inside the suffocating, close-packed theatre before the disconcerted janitor could meet the new situation. Pinchas found the vacated journalistic chair in the stage-box; he was installed therein before the managerial ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... by as they sped along. Outside the villages the peasants' mastiffs dashed out to intercept the carriage and barked at the horses, while a fat spaniel, lying in the roadway, struggled reluctantly to its feet; the fowls scattered and fled; the geese in a close-packed band waddled slowly out of the way. The children, with their fresh morning faces, watched the company go by. It was a hot day and a cloudless sky. The parched earth was thirsting for rain. They alighted just outside Villejuif. ...
— The Gods are Athirst • Anatole France
... benches which were set out here in the open air as in the nave of a church. Nearly all these benches were already occupied by those sufferers who could sit down, while the vacant spaces were soon filled with litters and little vehicles whose wheels became entangled together, and on whose close-packed mattresses and pillows all sorts of diseases were gathered pell-mell. Immediately on arriving, the young priest had recognised the Vignerons seated with their sorry child Gustave in the middle of a bench, ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... finely peopled, but of cottages and cottage-like houses, 'messuages or tenements,' as a friend of mine calls such ignoble and nondescript dwellings, with inhabitants whose faces are as familiar to us as the flowers in our garden; a little world of our own, close-packed and insulated like ants in an ant-hill, or bees in a hive, or sheep in a fold, or nuns in a convent, or sailors in a ship; where we know every one, are known to every one, interested in every one, and authorised to hope that every one feels an interest in us. ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... them away from the palace on the beautiful hill—away from all the sights and sounds that were collected together there to delight the soul of man with both bodily and intellectual enjoyment— down into the city in the valley, among the close-packed habitations of common men, congregated there to labour, and just exist, ...
— Aunt Judy's Tales • Mrs Alfred Gatty
... our pistols, in case of an attack from a recovering panther, we started upon our butchering expedition. On our way we met with some fierce-looking jaguars, which we did not think prudent to attack, so we let them alone, and soon found occupation enough for our knives and tomahawks among a close-packed herd of wolves. ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat
... close-packed crowd doth hem him round, a tight, malodorous 'block' Of fustian men and women gross, of dry and dusty lock; His 'By your leaves' they heed no whit, ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... discovered the great truth that digging for treasure is the most thrilling and absorbing occupation known to man. Time ceased to be, and the weight of the damp and close-packed sand seemed, that of feathers. This temporary state of exaltation passed, to be sure, and the sand got very heavy, and my back ached, but still I dug. Crusoe watched proceedings interestedly at first, then wandered off on business of ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon
... pocked and pitted from innumerable collisions with dust particles, sped out and out. The close-packed suns of the central hub lay far behind. Here at the rim of the galaxy the stars lay scattered, separated by vast distances. A gaunt hollow-eyed figure sat in the observation bubble staring half-hopefully, half-despairingly at the unimaginable depths ...
— Faithfully Yours • Lou Tabakow
... hours the bison streamed by our island, dividing before and closing behind the insensate peak that alone had power to break their close-packed ranks. Then came an opening, a falling apart; slight as it was, we plunged into it with joy. Thereafter we were buffeted like chips in the swirling maw of a whirlpool; we fought our way rod by rod. Here an opening, and we shot ...
— Raw Gold - A Novel • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... side of the shelf-like mountain road rose the sharp hillside, clothed in close-packed, straight-rising redwoods; on the other the ground fell away so precipitously to the tiny thread of creek below that they looked down upon the water through the top branches of the trees. Years ago, when he had first entrusted her with the car, Peter had been somewhat concerned for Alix's ...
— Sisters • Kathleen Norris
... not a form in all this close-packed throng which had not a terrible irony in it, which was not in itself a symbol of some appetite or of some vice, for which women and men abjure ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... cathedral at Lustadt excitement was at fever heat. It lacked but two minutes of noon, and as yet no king had come to claim the crown. Rumors were running riot through the close-packed audience. ...
— The Mad King • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... thing! there are excuses to be made for her. Of late years her father has been a good deal out of work and in bad health; and then living in a close-packed part of London is trying to the temper. And she's a baby beginning to feel her feet, and beginning to feel herself getting on towards a woman. I am very sorry for her, poor child, but I don't know about keeping her with us. You don't want your whole ...
— Littlebourne Lock • F. Bayford Harrison
... panting to be free. The small patens of the beeches shone like green glass, and the pale spired chestnuts were candelabras on either side of the steep path. In the bright breathless glades of larches the willow-wrens sang softly, but with boundless vitality. On sunny slopes the hyacinths pushed out close-packed buds between their covering leaves; soon they would spread their grave blue like a prayer-carpet. Hazel, stooping in her old multi-coloured pinafore, her bare arms gleaming like the stripped trees, seemed to Edward as he came up the shady ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... among the close-packed faces for a sight of Rhoda. Rhoda was now standing up amid gathering hisses and outcries. Her eyes were bent on a particular box, across which a curtain was hastily being drawn. "My sister!" she sent out a voice of anguish, and remained with clasped hands and twisted eyebrows, looking ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... of a hawthorn hedge, which breathed forth an agreeable fragrance of honey and bitter almonds. In a slight hollow, where the soil received the water from a neighbouring spring, he stopped before a bush, whose twisted, close-packed branches were covered with gleaming, clean-cut leaves and white clusters ...
— The Miracle Of The Great St. Nicolas - 1920 • Anatole France
... span of brickwork, lost in darkness, incredibly vast and mysterious, with here and there emerging into faint light a slice of a dome or the slope of some architrave-like dogmas from impenetrable mystery. Before him lay the immense nave, thronged now with close-packed chairs in readiness for the midnight Mass, and they seemed to him as he looked with tired eyes, almost like the bent shoulders of an enormous crowd bowed in dead silence of adoration. But there was nothing yet to adore, except ...
— None Other Gods • Robert Hugh Benson
... the expedition buried under fathoms of foliage. Presently water appeared in the bottom, a good quantity; perhaps thirty or forty cubic feet, with pools and waterfalls. A tree that stands all along the banks here must be very fond of water; its roots lie close-packed down the stream, like hanks of guts, so as to make often a corrugated walk, each root ending in a blunt tuft of filaments, plainly to drink water. Twice there came in small tributaries from the left or western side—the whole plateau ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... harm; along this street and before the yawning doors of a great church whence a breath heavy with incense and burning wax issued to meet them. A portion of the congregation had heard the tumult and struggled out, and now stood close-packed on the steps under the double vault of the portal. Among them the Countess's eyes, as she rode by, a sturdy man- at-arms on either hand, caught and held one face. It was the face of a tall, lean man in dusty black; and though she did not know him she seemed to have an equal attraction ...
— Count Hannibal - A Romance of the Court of France • Stanley J. Weyman
... the close-packed circle behind him as if mere words were too weak things to do the question justice. And this time as he turned his eyes met squarely those of the gray-shirted figure that was staring straight back at him in a kind of fascination. For one disconcerted instant Judge Maynard wavered; he caught ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... a murder grim and great. From three different doors issued a line of Goths, whose helmets and mail-shirts made them invulnerable to the clumsy weapons of the mob, and began hewing their way right through the living mass, helpless from their close-packed array. True, they were but as one to ten; but what are ten curs before one lion?.... And the moon rose higher and higher, staring down ghastly and unmoved upon that doomed court of the furies, and still the bills and swords hewed on and on, and the ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... in soft brilliance over the land of Burmah. Its rays pierced the small slit windows in the cell of the fanatic An-we-lota, and lighted up the fierce faces of the dacoits and desperate men, who from time to time stealthily entered, until a close-packed band had collected. Near and far a message had reached these malcontents that an attack would be made on some of the British outposts scattered here and there over the newly conquered territory, and held by English officers and a brave ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... that his Highness, after the public banquet at the palace, was to proceed in state to the University; and the throng was thick about the palace gates and in the streets betwixt it and the Signoria. Here the square was close-packed, and every window choked with gazers, as the Duke's coach came in sight, escorted meagrely by his equerries and the half-dozen light-horse that preceded him. The small escort, and the marked absence of military display, perhaps disappointed ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... the court attended by her waiting-woman, who remained near the entrance, amid the close-packed crowd of lawyers and onlookers, while her mistress quietly followed the official who conducted her ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon |
