"Debris" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... question as to how often manure should be removed in cities and towns, it should be borne in mind that when the larvae have finished feeding they will often leave the manure and pupate in the ground below or crawl some distance away to pupate in debris under boards or stones and the like. Hence the manure should be removed before the larvae reach the migratory stage; that is to say, removal is necessary every three days, and certainly not less frequently than ...
— The House Fly and How to Suppress It - U. S. Department of Agriculture Farmers' Bulletin No. 1408 • L. O. Howard and F. C. Bishopp
... on every side floes heaped up their debris on each other, and pinnacles forced into collision were ground into common ruin. Now shut out from view in darkness and storm, and now close at hand in the multitudinous shiftings of the ice, the immovable and gigantic buttresses of the ice-pool ...
— Adrift in the Ice-Fields • Charles W. Hall
... could be discerned a few flying fragments. The air was filled with Mardonalian warships. They were huge vessels, each mounting hundreds of guns, and the rain of high-explosive shells was rapidly reducing the great city to a wide-spread heap of debris. ...
— The Skylark of Space • Edward Elmer Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby
... a little rest by then," he went on to say, "for I've been in the machine night and day for longer than I care to think about. We're clearing away the debris of the fire, and ...
— Betty Gordon in the Land of Oil - The Farm That Was Worth a Fortune • Alice B. Emerson
... 5000 feet. But the traveller to any of the summer resorts in the mountains passes through a zone of lower hills interspersed sometimes with valleys or "duns." These consist of Tertiary sandstones, clays, and boulder conglomerates, the debris in fact which the Himalaya has dropped in the course of ages. To this group of hills and valleys the general name of Siwaliks is given. East of the Jhelam it includes the Nahan hills to the north of Ambala, the ...
— The Panjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir • Sir James McCrone Douie
... in 1885-90 In regard to these important excavations it must be remembered that in 480 and again in 479 the Acropolis was occupied by Persians belonging to Xerxes' invading army, who reduced the buildings and sculptures on that site to a heap of fire-blackened ruins This debris was used by the Athenians in the generation immediately following toward raising the general level of the summit of the Acropolis. All this material, after having been buried for some twenty three and a half centuries, has now been recovered. ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell
... Mill's study, the only thing that did not seem to have suffered any great damage was the table. Everything else looked rather off colour. The mantelpiece had been swept as bare as a bone, and its contents littered the floor. Trevor dived among the debris and retrieved the latest addition to his art gallery, the photograph of this year's first fifteen. It was a wreck. The glass was broken and the photograph itself slashed with a knife till most of the faces were unrecognisable. He picked up another treasure, last year's first eleven. Smashed glass ...
— The Gold Bat • P. G. Wodehouse
... Joan had swept her lap free of debris and was rising to her feet. Joan, for all her plumpness and infantile softness, had a certain deliberate dignity when she was put upon her mettle. She eyed her sister with a calm ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... crash of china as Bates dropped a tray of coffee cups. Silence succeeded the tragedy, during which they could hear the butler's muttered ejaculations of horror and distress as he bent to retrieve the debris. ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... and a few comrades were in a front line trench, "Jerry" placed a high explosive "plump in the middle of it." When S. recovered consciousness, he found himself half covered with dirt and debris of all kinds, and when he crawled out and brushed himself off, he saw that of all his comrades he alone survived, and that they were mangled and mutilated in a most gruesome way. "Pieces of my friends everywhere," is his terse account. He lay in the trench, not daring to move for hours, the bitterest ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... the most part empty. Others showed only fragments of broken pottery. Some had been broken in through their side walls or were open above and littered with the debris of their roofs. Lennon surmised the existence of several sealed ...
— Bloom of Cactus • Robert Ames Bennet
... and wounded men was completely destroyed. Several others were badly damaged, and the occupants, many of whom were desperately ill with dysentery, while helping their weaker comrades out of the debris were bespattered with bullets from the low-flying machines above. Little imagination is needed to picture what would have happened to the hospital in toto had a bomb hit the ...
— With Our Army in Palestine • Antony Bluett
... hear that? That's the old gentleman;" and then, as the voice of Mr. Mollett senior was heard abusing the car-driver, Miss O'Dwyer smoothed her apron, put her hands to her side hair, and removed the debris ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... jars and dashed them to pieces upon the tiled hearth in which the furnace rested. Test-tubes, flasks and retorts he shattered, and finally, raising the large glass case of orchids he dashed it down amid the debris of the other nameless and priceless ...
— The Golden Scorpion • Sax Rohmer
... mountains they are. Most of them have craters. A crater is like a cup, and generally has a little peak in the middle of it. This is the summit of a volcano, and when the volcano has burst up and vomited out floods of lava and debris, this has fallen down in a ring a little distance away from it, leaving a clear space next to the peak, so that, as the mountain ceases vomiting and the lava cools down, the ring hardens and forms a circular ridge. The craters on ...
— The Children's Book of Stars • G.E. Mitton
... popped off, leaving me to pick up the pieces. When I had collected the debris to some extent I went to my room and rang for Jeeves. He came in looking as if nothing had happened or was ever going to happen. He was the calmest thing ...
— A Wodehouse Miscellany - Articles & Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... do not know the studio he has now, Senora! It is a great room, with walls of black panels and a wide window in the slope of the roof. Here and there are statues in marble, suits of armor—the wreck and debris of dead ages. And in one corner hangs a picture which the world values, Senora. It is ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... catch something! You cast and cast, sometimes burying your hook in submerged debris and sometimes in tender portions of your own person. After a while you land a fish; but a fish in a boat is rarely so attractive as he was in a book. One of the drawbacks about a fish is that he becomes dead ...
— Cobb's Bill-of-Fare • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... superstition and brought in science; Luther gave religion, Gutenberg the printing-press, Calvin individualism, Michael Angelo art and the beautiful, Erasmus critical scholarship; and because the old world was filled with debris, and the new ideas needed room, Columbus gave the new world, offering what Emerson calls "the last opportunity of Providence for the human race." Surely this was a strategic moment in history, ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... likely to be arrested than the strange sweeping loop formed by the junction of the Alps and Apennines, and enclosing the great basin of Lombardy. This return of the mountain chain upon itself causes a vast difference in the character of the distribution of its debris on its opposite sides. The rock fragments and sediment which the torrents on the north side of the Alps bear into the plains are distributed over a vast extent of country, and, though here and ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... for in the waiting-room she could not fight off the conviction that the train would never arrive. When it came clanging in on grinding wheels and she clambered aboard, she knew that it would be wrecked, and the finding of her body in the debris, or its disappearance in the flames, would break poor Davidge's heart and leave her to the same ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... the point here turns not upon absolute identity so much as upon close resemblance. For those who, with Agassiz, doubt the specific identity in any of these cases, and those who say, with Pictet, that "the later tertiary deposits contain in general the debris of species very nearly related to those which still exist, belonging to the same genera, but specifically different," may also agree with Pictet, that the nearly-related species of successive faunas must or may have had "a material connection." ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... about for a place where he might purchase food. A near-by eating house had been completely wrecked, its floor a debris of broken crockery. Beyond, a baker's shop had been deserted, its window shattered but the interior intact. The shelves, however, had been swept bare of loaves. Elim searched behind the counters—nothing remained. But in walking ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... baggage where it was jammed among the debris, he had struck across the country with Rake for the few leagues that still lay between them and the city, and had entered Marseilles as weary foot travelers, before half the ruin on the rails had been seen by ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... penitentiary in the guise of common swindlers. A pioneer on the western plains, in the old days, riding homeward after several hours' absence, found his cabin a charred ruin, his property destroyed, his wife lying outraged with her throat cut, his children huddled among the debris with their brains dashed out. Sitting on his bronco, he contemplated the immeasurable horror of the catastrophe, and finally muttered, "This ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... of an hour later the two parties met near the stables, where the fire was now burning low. The roof had fallen in, and only some of the uprights were erect, with flicking flames licking them as they stood glowing above the mass of still blazing debris. ...
— A Final Reckoning - A Tale of Bush Life in Australia • G. A. Henty
... gorge of that chain. Below us, in the valley, I observed some prodigious trees growing close to a Hor (ravine), in which was running water, and the sides of the valley under the mountains being as usual a mass of debris of huge detached rocks, were thronged with villages, all strongly fortified with thick bamboo palisades. The whole country was a series of natural forts, ...
— The Albert N'Yanza, Great Basin of the Nile • Sir Samuel White Baker
... and achievement. They passed around the west end of Machinery hall and along the south side of it, then between the Agricultural annex and the stock pavilion. Here they emerged into what seemed to be the waste yard of the Exposition, debris of all kinds, beer houses, lunch rooms, hundreds of windmills flying in the breeze and heavily loaded cars, back of which could be seen bonfires of waste materials, these making a striking contrast to the white beauty and ...
— The Adventures of Uncle Jeremiah and Family at the Great Fair - Their Observations and Triumphs • Charles McCellan Stevens (AKA 'Quondam')
... to perceive that such distinguished men as signed this statement are frank enough to admit the extent of the religious revolution, and determined enough to take a hand in the clearing away of the debris that clutters the crumbling of all religious creeds. Yet it is only fair to point out that this statement contains nothing that would not be recognized by those intrepid atheists of the past, and little more than they urged in their time. I refer to those brilliant ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... hours the operation was complete, the once verdant and beautiful spot having been converted into an ugly patch of flat and fire-blackened soil, some fifty acres in extent, with two conspicuous outcrops of black rock protruding from the ashes and debris of ...
— The Castaways • Harry Collingwood
... had to wait. At the end of that period the quick ears of both caught the sound of some one coming from the direction of the ravine. They heard a horse's hoof striking upon loose shingle, and the rattling of the displaced pebbles. A debris of broken fragments filled the bottom of the ravine, brought there during rain-torrents. Over this ran the path. A ...
— The White Chief - A Legend of Northern Mexico • Mayne Reid
... done alone, and by yourself. The ground must be cleansed of debris, and the structure must ...
— The Heart of the New Thought • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... no wind, and their position was as that of a person who is under the curve of a waterfall. And here, because there was no wind to counteract it, the water was rushing toward what was left of the cove. It was like a rapid river flowing close to the shore and bearing upon its hurrying water the debris which had crashed down from that lonesome, ...
— Tom Slade's Double Dare • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... society that issues still trembling from the saturnalia of atheism and anarchy. . . . The literature of the present, the actual literature, is the expression, by way of anticipation, of that religious and monarchical society which will issue, doubtless, from the midst of so many ancient debris, of so many recent ruins. . . . If the literature of the great age of Louis XIV. had invoked Christianity in place of worshipping heathen gods . . . the triumph of the sophistical doctrines of the last century would have been ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... have the new house just where this one stands, but farther to the right. We can fill up the cellar with the debris, and have loads of earth brought in and make a kind of plateau, with it terrace all around it. We can make that plateau so lovely with shrubs, and flowers, and grass. I once saw one like what I have in mind, at a country ...
— Bessie's Fortune - A Novel • Mary J. Holmes
... trying to clear his mind of the wreckage that obstructed its working; for Miss Dwyer's refusal had come upon him as a sudden squall that carries away the masts and sails of a vessel and transforms it in a moment from a gallant bounding ship to a mere hulk drifting in an entangled mass of debris. Of course she had a perfect right to suit herself about the kind of a man she took for a husband, but he certainly had not thought she was such an utter coquette. If ever a woman gave a man reason to think himself as good as engaged, ...
— Deserted - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... in bank books and cheque counterfoils and burnt to save individual reputations; it sneaks along under a thousand pretences, it finds its molelike food and safety in the dirt; its outer forms remain for posterity, a huge debris of ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... a trench on the side of the hill in direct view of the German positions. The enemy partially occupied the ruined village of Cantigny not eight hundred yards away, but our glasses were unable to pick up the trace of a single person in the debris. French shells, arriving endlessly in the village, shot geysers of dust and wreckage skyward. It was from this village, several days later, that our infantry patrols brought in several prisoners, all of whom were suffering ...
— "And they thought we wouldn't fight" • Floyd Gibbons
... mean time, had not been idle. Hastily throwing off his clothing, he dived again and again into the deep pool, swimming to the bottom and groping about there. He brought up handfuls of sticks and small stones, and the debris of the water's bed. A dozen times he was unsuccessful—and then, at last, as he clung to the bank and opened his fist for the water to thin the mud and ooze that he had clutched, there lay the golden coin, bright and ...
— The Rival Campers Ashore - The Mystery of the Mill • Ruel Perley Smith
... explosion had aroused the inhabitants of a quiet suburban district, and on reaching the corner of —— Park whence the report emanated, the police had found, amid a motley debris of trees, bushes, and railings, the charred and shattered remains of a man. These, at the inquest, proved to have belonged to Augustin Myers, an obscure little French Anarchist, but despite the usual lengthy and unsatisfactory routine of police inquiries, ...
— A Girl Among the Anarchists • Isabel Meredith
... over broad faces of granite, where only weeds and saplings of mountain ash and thorn could find a foothold. The bottom was one vast litter of stone and fern, where foxgloves nodded above the masses of debris and wild things made their homes. Water fell over many a granite shelf and in the desolation ...
— The Red Redmaynes • Eden Phillpotts
... a law of Nature that whatever goes up debris, mixed with larger pieces of rock and clots of earth, descended on the scene of the explosion. Yet little of this flying stuff reached Dolph Gage and his companions, for they were up and running despite the mark that they ...
— The Young Engineers in Nevada • H. Irving Hancock
... It was pleasant to travel in after his painful experiences in the forest. He continued to follow the stream, though there was now little possibility of his finding anything to eat. The water had become sluggish and dark. The channel was choked with charred debris that had fallen into it when the forest had burned, and its shores were soft and muddy. After a time, when Baree stopped and looked about him, he could no longer see the green timber he had left. He was alone in that desolate wilderness of charred ...
— Baree, Son of Kazan • James Oliver Curwood
... collection, chiefly minus the lower wings, and with volunteer specimens of moth; but luckily some give leave to do what they please with them, so the magician is making composition animals with the debris." ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the way he "climbed out" was to get to cleaning something; that his thoughts freshened up when he had some new surface to put on an object. He meant that the order came to his chaos, and the influx of life began to cleanse away the litter of burned tissue and the debris of debauch. One cannot keep on thinking evil thoughts while he makes a floor or a gun or a field clean. The thing is well known in naval and military service where bodies of men are kept in order by continual polishing of brasses and decks and accoutrements. A queer, good ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... as the female searcher called herself, was an evil-visaged, corpulent old creature, with a sickly, soft, insinuating voice, and a greasy, familiar manner that was most offensive. They had given her the scrap of torn lace and the debris of the jet as a guide, with very particular directions to see if they corresponded with any ...
— The Rome Express • Arthur Griffiths
... study, and he laid the debris before me. I could understand his regarding it as of small importance when I looked at it, for the metal was almost black and the stones lustreless and dull. I rubbed one of them on my sleeve, however, ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... down from the wagon, and ran to the hole out of which the badger had come. From her seat she had spied a small, gray bit of fur in the debris lying about it, and guessed what it was. She reached the hole none too soon; for the dogs, having been drawn off their prey, were coming back, whining and limping and licking their chops. She caught up the little, half-drowned ...
— The Biography of a Prairie Girl • Eleanor Gates
... she whispered. "Something clinked! Ashes or wood won't make that sound. Oh, suppose it is the key!" She raked away again frantically, and hauled out a quantity of charred debris, but nothing even faintly resembling a key. When nothing more remained, she poked the fragments disgustedly, while ...
— The Boarded-Up House • Augusta Huiell Seaman
... cornices irretrievably destroyed, its great bell reduced to a shapeless mass of metal; whilst its general air of desolation was heightened by the fact that a few monuments, which had escaped destruction, rose abruptly from amidst the charred DEBRIS. ...
— Royalty Restored - or, London under Charles II. • J. Fitzgerald Molloy
... point it carried from three to six or eight feet of water, according to the bottom. A few logs were stranded along shore. Two or three more floated by, the forerunners of the drive. Bob could see where the highest water had flung debris among the bushes, and by that he knew that the stream must be ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... blew up trench "E1 left," held at the time by the 5th Lincolnshire Regiment. This regiment had many casualties, and the trench was of course destroyed, while several men were buried or half-buried in the debris, where they became a mark for German snipers. To rescue one of these, Lieut. Gosling, R.E., who was working in the G trenches, went across to E1, and with the utmost gallantry worked his way to the mine crater. Finding a soldier half buried, he started to dig him out, and had just completed ...
— The Fifth Leicestershire - A Record Of The 1/5th Battalion The Leicestershire Regiment, - T.F., During The War, 1914-1919. • J.D. Hills
... the Spaniards in Picardy; the sixteenth-century church of St. Nicolas with its quaint Byzantine Virgin of miracles: the statue of Faidherbe who beat back the German wave from Bapaume in 1871: all, all burned and battered, and mingled inextricably with debris of pitiful little homes, nobles' houses, rich shops and tiny boutiques, so that, when Bapaume rises from the dead, she will rise as ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... being assimilated and taken up into the new living structure. The Apostle's comparison distinctly marks these several changes as the one process of passing from death unto life. He saw in this wonderful provision of nature, the still more wonderful prevision of God. To his mind it was over the debris of the dead past that the living present is constantly marching towards a higher and more perfect life—the ultimate fruition and joy of an eternal home in the skies! And he saw that the two grand instrumentalities and co-accessory agencies to ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... of it will form a lawless interval between the abodes of civilized man, like the wastes of the ocean or the deserts of Arabia; and, like them, be subject to the depredations of the marauder. Here may spring up new and mongrel races, like new formations in geology, the amalgamation of the "debris" and "abrasions" of former races, civilized and savage; the remains of broken and almost extinguished tribes; the descendants of wandering hunters and trappers; of fugitives from the Spanish and American frontiers; of adventurers and desperadoes of ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving
... and the Nipe fell on through the Asteroid Belt without approaching any of the larger pieces of rock-and-metal. That he and his brother had originally elected to come into this system along its orbital plane had been a mixed blessing. To have come in at a different angle would have avoided all the debris—from planetary size on down—that is thickest in a star's equatorial plane, but it would also have meant a greater chance of missing a suitable planet unless too much reliance were placed on the already weakened power generators. As it was, the Nipe had been fortunate in being able to use the gravitational ...
— Anything You Can Do ... • Gordon Randall Garrett
... sudden lurch; once more a mighty green cliff of water came rushing up, bearing its tide of dead and debris; again Frohman started to say the speech that was to be his valedictory. He had hardly repeated the first three words—"Why fear death?"—when the group was engulfed and all sank beneath the ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... into the moldy, damp air of the tunnel, reached the corner, and there the passage turned and ended in a blank wall of raw dirt, with a little apron of fallen debris at the bottom of it. Ronicky Doone walked first, and, when he saw the passage obstructed in this manner, he whirled like a flash and fired at ...
— Ronicky Doone • Max Brand
... labour and without delay consumed the provisions provided for them. Then one by one they sauntered away down towards the stream. Malchus was the last to leave, and having seen that all his followers had preceded him, he, too, crossed the stream, paused a moment at a heap of debris from the mine, and picking up three or four pieces of rock about the size of his fist, rolled them in the corner of his garment, and holding this in one ...
— The Young Carthaginian - A Story of The Times of Hannibal • G.A. Henty
... and fields, spicy arbutus, blue liverwort, frail anemone, and the pretty white blossoms of the bloodroot. I launch out in slow rambles, discovering them. As I go along the roads I like to see the farmers' fires in patches, burning the dry brush, turf, debris. How the smoke crawls along, flat to the ground, slanting, slowly rising, reaching away, and at last dissipating. I like its acrid smell—whiffs just reaching ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... 1645—his forty-fifth birthday—Sir Hugh was forced to come to an agreement with the enemy, by which he honourably surrendered the castle three days later. It was a sad procession that wound its way down the steep pathway, littered with the debris of broken masonry: for many of Sir Hugh's officers and soldiers were in such a weak condition that they had to be carried out in sheets or helped along between two men, and the Parliamentary officer adds, rather tersely, that 'the rest were not very fit to march.' ...
— Yorkshire—Coast & Moorland Scenes • Gordon Home
... we spent the last hour of the ascent in crossing cinders and broken stones, arriving at last at the longed-for goal, the loftiest point of this huge volcano. The smoking crater presented the appearance of a hollow sulphurous semi-circle about 1200 feet wide and 300 feet deep, covered with the debris of pumice and other stones. The thermometer, which had marked five degrees at ten a.m., got broken through being placed on the ground where there was an escape of sulphuric vapour. There are upon the sides and in the crater numerous fumerolles ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... tube, constantly scanning the bottom. Now and then he saw various kinds of debris on the bottom, including abandoned beer cans and a section of newspaper that had not yet rotted away. Rubbish like this was to be expected in a harbor, he supposed, still it was as unattractive to a swimmer as junk along the ...
— The Wailing Octopus • Harold Leland Goodwin
... ordered out to do all that was possible to save the drowning Frenchmen. Among the first to jump into this boat were Bill Bowls and Ben Bolter. Bill took the bow oar, Ben the second, and in a few moments they were pulling cautiously amid the debris of the wreck, helping to haul on board such poor fellows as they could get hold of. The work was difficult, because comparative darkness followed the explosion, and as the fight was soon resumed, the thunder of heavy ...
— The Battle and the Breeze • R.M. Ballantyne
... and whining by, seeking out and endeavoring to silence the Allied artillery. Now and then one of these missiles would burst in the rear of the column, sending up a glare of flame and a cloud of dust and debris, but at what cost in life no ...
— The Flag • Homer Greene
... found in the lower part of the female abdomen on either side of the uterus, and connected to it by two sensitive tubes. There ripens in one of these bodies each month a human baby-seed, which finds its way to the uterus through the little fallopian tube and is apparently lost in the debris of cells and mucus which, with the accompanying hemorrhage go to make up the menstrual flow. This continues from puberty to menopause, each gland alternatingly ripening its ovum, only to lose it in the periodical phenomenon of menstruation, which ...
— The Mother and Her Child • William S. Sadler
... presence of copper. The foot wall is very well marked by a strip of whitish yellow clay about an inch in thickness. The rock on both sides of the lode is gold-bearing, and is evidently, as well as the real lode, formed of the debris of old quartz and granites. Talcose flakes are frequent, and in some places it seems to be clearly gneiss. Although with a small plant it might not be profitable to treat this, still with large ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... I made a day's tour with Marko to the Bojana. At the mouth of the river, which you know is the outlet of the Lake of Scutari, a large island has been formed by a stranded ship which sank there, and all the debris, logs, and other rubbish have formed a delta of some size upon the wreck. It abounds in game, and thither we journeyed one morning early, reaching it some few hours later by a small boat in which we ...
— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon
... experience of its garrison differed only in terrible details from Boncelles. Its final gun shot was fired by a man with his left hand, since the other had been severed. Apparently a shell exploded in its magazine, and blew up the whole fort. General Leman was discovered amid its debris, pinned beneath a huge beam. He was released by his own men. When taken to a trench, a German officer found that he was merely ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of 12) - The War Begins, Invasion of Belgium, Battle of the Marne • Francis J. Reynolds, Allen L. Churchill, and Francis Trevelyan
... old home, he related, he was awakened one night by the voice of his wife calling in agonized tones, "John! John!" precisely as she had cried to him through the smoke and steam and twisted debris at Ashtabula. He leaped from his bed, heard a mighty roar, saw a great light flash on his window, and the ...
— The Last Spike - And Other Railroad Stories • Cy Warman
... mortuum [Lat.], waste paper, dead letter; blunt tool. litter, rubbish, junk, lumber, odds and ends, cast-off clothes; button top; shoddy; rags, orts^, trash, refuse, sweepings, scourings, offscourings^, waste, rubble, debris, detritus; stubble, leavings; broken meat; dregs &c (dirt) 653; weeds, tares; rubbish heap, dust hole; rudera^, deads^. fruges consumere natus [Lat.] [Horace]. &c (drone) 683 V. be useless &c adj.; go a begging &c (redundant) 641; fail ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... impassable from mud, knee-deep in places, and from wash-outs on the mountain sides. I had been on crutches since the time of my fall in New Orleans, and had to be carried over places where it was not safe to cross on horseback. The roads were strewn with the debris of broken wagons and the carcasses of thousands of starved mules and horses. At Jasper, some ten or twelve miles from Bridgeport, there was a halt. General O. O. Howard had his headquarters there. ...
— Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, Complete • Ulysses S. Grant
... 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 attain any considerable height. Still even in death they collect. Their bare white stems remaining like a net gripped in the mud, ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... a quick step. Before the boys could think he strode up to Perkins and with a well-directed blow landed him in the sloppy debris of snow and mud, where the children had been making a pond. And before he could recover Ben was upon him, roused to his utmost. The boys were nearly of a size. They rolled over and over amid the plaudits of their companions, and Ben, who hated dirt and ...
— A Little Girl in Old New York • Amanda Millie Douglas
... the Matterhorn), to the Gandegg Hut, across moraine and glacier and to the Staffel Alp, over the green meadows. The Hoernli (9,490 feet high) is the ridge running out from the Matterhorn. It is reached by a stiff climb over rocks and a huge heap of fallen stones and debris. From it the view is similar to that from the Schwarzsee, but much finer, the Theodule Glacier being seen to great advantage. Above the Hoernli towers the Matterhorn, huge, fierce, frowning, threatening. Every few moments comes a heavy, muffled sound, as new showers of falling stones come down. ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume VI • Various
... lock and fired. The bullet ripped and tore and splintered. Again he placed his shoulder to the door and pushed. It gave a trifle, but still held. He must sacrifice another cartridge. He shot again and this time, as he threw his body full against the bolt, it gave. He fell in atop the debris, but instantly sprang to his feet and stumbled along the hall to the stairway. He mounted this three steps at a time. At the door to the study he was again checked—there was no light within and no voice to greet him. He called her name; the ensuing silence was ghastly in its suggestiveness. ...
— The Web of the Golden Spider • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... operations which he had begun almost immediately after landing; and the women busied themselves variously, some in preparing the mid-day meal, some in gathering fruits and roots for future use, and others in improving the internal arrangements of their various huts, or in clearing away the debris of the late feast. As for little Sally, she superintended generally the work of the home department, and when she tired of that, went further afield ...
— The Lonely Island - The Refuge of the Mutineers • R.M. Ballantyne
... of it indeed had been already sold, and workmen were busy packing in the great hall, amid a dusty litter of paper and straw. All the signs of normal life, which make the character of a house, had gone; what remained was only the debris of a once animated whole. Houses have their fate no less than books; and in the ears of its last Falloden possessor, the whole of the great many-dated fabric, from its fourteenth century foundations beneath the central tower, to the pseudo-Gothic with which Wyatt ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Hill, was missing. Later on a gruesome skeleton was found on the seashore not far from Observation Hill, and the wrecked portions of a boat, and to this may be added the discovery of a lifeboat, similar to their own, among debris on South river, fully ten miles inland, which must have come ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: The Tribesmen • Roger Finlay
... term, equivalent to the older word 'afforestation'. What is at once noteworthy and praiseworthy is that in Mr. Kipling's page it does not appear in italics. And in Mr. Pearsall Smith's book on the English language one admiring reader was pleased to find 'debris' also without italics, although with the retention of the French accent. Perhaps the time is not far distant when the best writers will cease to stigmatize a captured word with the italics which are a badge of ...
— Society for Pure English, Tract 5 - The Englishing of French Words; The Dialectal Words in Blunden's Poems • Society for Pure English
... sand. Yet, in time of flood, the whole of the flat country was submerged, and some of the large gum-trees growing on the banks held in their forks, thirty-five feet from the ground, great piles of dead wood and tangled debris that had been deposited there in a great flood of ...
— "Five-Head" Creek; and Fish Drugging In The Pacific - 1901 • Louis Becke
... by him in the course of legal proceedings, or to give him up amicable possession of what ought to have been—what should have been his—what he looked upon as his own. He came back, and sat down again over the fire, contemplating the debris of the fender, and turning all these miserable circumstances over in his mind. After remaining there till five o'clock, and having fortified himself with sundry glasses of wine, he formed his resolution. He would make one struggle more; he ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope
... poised, stationary, as it seemed, in mid-air, above the instant eruption, hung a mushroom cloud of smoke and dust, specked with fragments of riven wood and shattered concrete. Through the succeeding contrasted blackness the debris thudded upon the earth. With scarcely an interval followed a second shot, a third, a fourth. The air became alive with hurtling masses raining ...
— Desert Conquest - or, Precious Waters • A. M. Chisholm
... the rescue squad made it clear that the man was to be carried out, and Tom helped with this while Ned, using an axe, cleared away some debris to enable the door to be opened fully so the men could pass out carrying ...
— Tom Swift among the Fire Fighters - or, Battling with Flames from the Air • Victor Appleton
... one piece to another so that none should fall freely. Two sister-ships of the Kondal appeared as if by magic in answer to Dunark's call, and their attractors aided greatly in handling the unruly collection of wreckage. A few of the smaller sections and a shower of debris fell clear, however, in spite of all efforts, and their approach was heralded by a meteoric display unprecedented in that world ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... that the silt brought down by the fen rivers cannot, like that of the Forth and its neighbouring streams, get safe away to sea. From Flamborough Head, in Yorkshire, all down the Lincolnshire coast, the land is falling, falling for ever into the waves; and swept southward by tide and current, the debris turns into the Wash between Lincolnshire and Norfolk, there to repose, as in a ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... trying to swallow them. The refreshing breezes that fan them become a destructive blast. Yet, such is the fecundity of nature in these regions that a year after a tempest has swept over an island, if the debris be removed, not a trace of its passage is visible—the fields are as green as ever, the earth, the trees, and plants that were spared by the tempest double their productive powers as if to indemnify the afflicted inhabitants ...
— The History of Puerto Rico - From the Spanish Discovery to the American Occupation • R.A. Van Middeldyk
... what with the broken stairs, the debris-cumbered hallways, the lurking darkness which the torch could hardly hold back from swallowing them, they came to a clear understanding of ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... began the editorship of The Genius of Universal Emancipation, the American Convention, or national assembly of the old State societies for the abolition of slavery, fell into desuetude. It was as if Providence was clearing the debris of an old dispensation out of the way of the new one which his prophet was beginning to herald, as if guarding against all possibility of having the new wine, then soon to be pressed from the moral vintage of the nation, put into old bottles. The Hour for a new movement against ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... drinking spirits as before, and seemed hardly to have moved since we left. This plateau of Atotonilco el Grande, called for shortness Grande, is, like most of the high plains of Mexico, composed mostly of porphyry and obsidian, a valley filled up with debris from the surrounding mountains, which are all volcanic, embedded in reddish earth. The mountain-torrents—in which the water, so to speak, comes down all at once, not flowing in a steady stream all the year round as in England—have left evidences of their immense power in the ravines with ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor
... covered with nettles, thistles, and a few wiry dwarf larches of native growth; dust from the adjacent highway had invaded it, with a few scattered and torn handbills, waste paper, rags, empty provision cans, and other suburban debris. Yet it was the site of 'Lige Curtis's cabin, long since erased and forgotten. The bed of the old creek had receded; the last tules had been cleared away; the channel and embarcadero were half a mile from the bank and log whereon the pioneer of ...
— A First Family of Tasajara • Bret Harte
... from the presence of the pirates all need of watchfulness was over. The prisoners in the cave were provided with no implements but spades, whereas dynamite and crowbars would be necessary to force a way through the debris which choked the mouth of the tunnel. A looking over of the ground at the daily ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon
... say that. But I was goin' to break into another little cave if I'd got hold of that mattock. The mouth is under the debris that fell with the landslide. It was about where Uncle Pete said he hid his treasure box. Poor Uncle Pete! Losin' that box was what sent him off ...
— Ruth Fielding on Cliff Island - The Old Hunter's Treasure Box • Alice Emerson
... already called it—for purposes of trade with the unsophisticated Cubans; and I kept my can as a souvenir. I did not, however, keep it long; for, chancing to drop it upon the deck, the contents exploded with a distinct report, startling me not a little and covering my person with the debris. At the time I thought this experience was going to be altogether unique, but I discovered afterward that the same thing happened in a great ...
— From Yauco to Las Marias • Karl Stephen Herrman
... him, when suddenly a terrible noise was heard rising above the roar of the artillery; the second arch of the bridge was blown into the air, carrying with it all those who were standing on the fatal spot. The armies recoiled, and into the empty space between them fell like rain a debris of stones and human beings. But at this moment, when Moreau had succeeded in putting a momentary obstacle between himself and Melas, General Grenier's division arrived in disorder, after having been forced to evacuate Vaprio, pursued ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - VANINKA • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... to the ford it was daylight and the Crazy Woman was hurrying on as peacefully as if a frown had never ruffled its repose. Gnarled trees springing out of gashes along its tortuous channel showed, in the debris lodged against their flood-bared roots and mud-swept branches, the fury of the night, and the creek banks, scoured by many floods, revealed new and savage gaps in the morning sun; but Bradley made his crossing with the stage almost as uneventfully ...
— Laramie Holds the Range • Frank H. Spearman
... even if she had not overheard all that had been said. She rose from her enforced position of refuge with a look of relief, and came directly towards Carlton along the rough path that led through the debris on the top of the Acropolis. Carlton had thought, as he watched her sitting on the wall, with her chin resting on her hand, that she would make a beautiful companion picture to the one he had wished to paint of Miss Morris—the one girl standing upright, looking ...
— The Princess Aline • Richard Harding Davis
... friend, opening the volume, "is a manuscript which was contained in this case when I took it from among the debris of the crater. I should have told you that I found there what I believed to be fragments of human flesh and bone, but so crushed and mangled that I could form no positive conclusion. My next care was to ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... taking advantage of Mr. Stubbins's crouching position, she thrust him suddenly backward into the closet. The manoeuver was a brilliant one, for while Mr. Stubbins was unsteadily separating himself from the debris into which he had been cast, Lovey Mary slammed the door and locked it. Then she picked up Tommy and fled out of the house and ...
— Lovey Mary • Alice Hegan Rice
... the brawling Jihun under a roof of thatch, whose walls were represented by more or less upright wooden posts and debris; for Kagig would not permit anything to stand even for an hour that Turks could come and fortify. None of us believed that the repulse of that handful of Kurdish plunderers and the capture of a Turkish colonel would be the end of ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... seen, makes us feel like midgets. Standing close together the columns spring right into the clear sky, as there is no roof left. Not so very long ago they were covered up to the capitals in sand and debris. The poorer Egyptians had built their mud huts in and around them for generations, and when one hut crumbled away another was put up on the top of it, and thus the level of the accumulated earth grew higher and ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton
... prudent reserve. He lay full length on his silk divan, his feet touching Theos, who sat upright,—and, singing little snatches of song to himself, he pulled the vine-wreath from his tumbled fair locks as though he found it too weighty, and flung it on the ground among the other debris of the feast. Then folding his arms lazily behind his head, he stared straight and fixedly before him at Lysia, seeming to note every jewel on her dress, every curve of her body, every slight gesture of her hand, every faint, ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... where she had disappeared like a stone, while flying pieces of metal hurtled far and wide through the air. Several of the fragments clattered upon the Capella's deck as she swung round to avoid any possibility of fouling debris. Of the crew not a man was to be seen. Those who had not been killed by the shell-fire had been wiped out by the ...
— The Submarine Hunters - A Story of the Naval Patrol Work in the Great War • Percy F. Westerman
... of a saint rolled on like a snowball down a mountain side, gathering up into itself whatever lay in its path, fact or legend, appropriate or inappropriate—sometimes real jewels of genuine old tradition, sometimes the debris of the old creeds and legends of heathenism; and on, and on, till at length it reached the bottom, and was dashed in pieces ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... streams flow are a granite formation, very brightly colored, principally gray and red. The swiftly-flowing stream removes the debris, so that the clear water flows limpidly over this gorgeous coloring. In such a stream, where the natural enemies of the trout are the fish-hawk and the eagle, it is essential as a matter of protection that the fish should resemble the ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Fisheries • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... column of foam, thirty feet high, falls with a furious din, and its glaucous waves, heaped together in the deep ravine, dash against each other and are broken upon a line of fallen rocks. Other enormous rocks, debris of the same mountain, hang above the road, their squared heads crowned with brambles for hair; ranged in impregnable line, they seem to watch the torments of the Gave, which their brothers hold beneath themselves crusht ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various
... the result of discouragement, of cowardice, I may say, of the tearing-down process of the theological structure—built of debris from many ruins on which my conception of Christianity rested, I lost all faith. For many weeks I did not enter the church, as you yourself must know. Then, when I had given up all hope, through certain incidents and certain persona, a process of reconstruction began. In short, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... on its surface and in its interior, is thus seen to be extreme diversity both of form and structure, and this is further intensified by the varied texture, constitution, hardness, and density of the various rocks and debris of which it is composed. It is therefore not surprising that, with such a complex outer crust, we should nowhere find examples of those geometrical forms and almost world-wide straight lines that give such a remarkable, and as Mr. Lowell maintains, 'non-natural' character to the surface of Mars, ...
— Is Mars Habitable? • Alfred Russel Wallace
... the middle, and the whole mass of green iron, smoking coals, brass fittings, wheels, wood-work, and cushions all crumbled together and crashed down into the mine. We heard the rattle, rattle, rattle, as the debris struck against the walls, and then, quite a long time afterwards, there came a deep roar as the remains of the train struck the bottom. The boiler may have burst, for a sharp crash came after the roar, and then a dense cloud of steam ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... feet lower than the surface; a substratum of gravel, similar to that in the bed of the watercourse, appears in the bank; the pebbles, consisting chiefly of trap-rock, seemed to be the water-worn debris of the Liverpool range. The cattle and horses being at rest, we were occupied this day in making various observations with our instruments, trying the rate of the chronometer, etc. A thundercloud and a little rain afforded some relief ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 1 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... flyer while Cloud's right hand was in the air, shooting across the panel to turn on the Berg. The impact jerked the arm downward and sidewise, both bones of the forearm snapping as it struck the ledge. The second one, an instant later, broke his left leg. Then the debris ...
— The Vortex Blaster • Edward Elmer Smith
... this as she went to work, but just before she reached the village she saw a heap of rubbish by the side of the road and amongst the debris she noticed some tin cans which had been used for potted meat, fish and vegetables. There were different shapes, some large, some small, some high, ...
— Nobody's Girl - (En Famille) • Hector Malot
... beyond won and the British had their flank on high ground. Twice they were in Guillemont but could not remain, though as usual they kept some of their gains. It was a battle from dugout to dugout, from shelter to shelter of any kind burrowed in debris or in fields, with the British never ceasing here or elsewhere to continue their pressure. And the debris of a village had particular appeal; it yielded to the spade; ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... Frattura—yes, it is shattered. Vainly we tried to identify Ferdinando's abode among all that debris. The old man himself escaped the cataclysm, and now sells his wares in one of the miserable wooden shanties erected lower down. The mellow hermit at St. Egidio, of whom more on p. 171, has died; his place is taken by a worthless vagabond. Saint Domenico ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... bad," said Betty, picking her way between trunk trays and piles of miscellaneous debris to the door. "I think I shall stop on my way home and get a man to move my furniture ...
— Betty Wales Freshman • Edith K. Dunton
... our own— intellectual nights in which the patiently acquired learning of ages was lost. Petrifaction as in China, retrogression begotten of luxury as in Athens, submersion beneath an avalanche of human debris as in Rome, ignorance-breeding despoliation as in Ireland—these be the lions in the path of civilization. No race or nation of which we have any record has avoided a recrudescence of barbarism for an hundred generations. ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... height of several hundred feet. Then, if well aimed, it reaches the end of its upward journey directly over the enemy's line, and falls straight into his trench. There is a moment of silence, followed by a terrific explosion which throws dirt and debris high in the air. By this time every Tommy along the line is standing on the firing-bench, head and shoulders above the parapet, quite forgetting his own danger in his excitement, and shouting at ...
— Kitchener's Mob - Adventures of an American in the British Army • James Norman Hall
... and at the snowy peak too of Mount Olympus, which, with my taste for mountaineering, I had climbed but a short time previously. An interesting ascent it had been, first of all through that Eastern Switzerland around the pretty town of Broussa, and then over the snow and rocky debris to the summit, whence a matchless panorama is to be seen. The squadrons, one French and one English, forming a strong force of ships, were at that time on guard at the mouth of the Dardanelles. I went back to my duty in ours, which was ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... strange new world around her. Snoqualmie told her briefly that she must walk up the bank to the place where the canoe was to be launched again above the falls. She listened mutely, and started to go. But the way was steep and rocky; the bank was strewn with the debris of the ruined bridge; and she was unused to such exertion. Snoqualmie saw her stumble and almost fall. It moved him to a sudden and unwonted pity, and he sprang forward to help her. She pushed his hand from her as if it had been the touch of a serpent, and went on alone. His eyes flashed: ...
— The Bridge of the Gods - A Romance of Indian Oregon. 19th Edition. • Frederic Homer Balch
... glowed with unnatural brightness: curls were dishevelled and laurel crowns awry; the silken draperies on the couches had become tattered rags and the cushions were scattered all about the floor; debris of crystal vases littered the table and bunches of dying flowers were tossed about by ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... freed waters which had chafed in the great dam leaped forward, a monster river of churning white water and whirling debris, and like a live thing, wrathful, vengeful, was charging downward through the steep ravine. Hapgood had heard. They had seen his white face turned for an instant over his shoulder. And then his shriek rose high above the thunder of waters as he ran from the ...
— Under Handicap - A Novel • Jackson Gregory
... lattice-work at the base; the front has a panel with zigzag lines. The inscription on the front has puzzled paleographists. It has been read as Hebrew and as stating that it is the chair of S. Mark. A hole in the back and another in the side are thought to have perhaps held the debris of the wooden ...
— The Shores of the Adriatic - The Austrian Side, The Kuestenlande, Istria, and Dalmatia • F. Hamilton Jackson
... a stratum of consolidated sand above volcanic matter, Tome 4, p. 162. "Tant que j'ai parcouru le pied du cone, je n'ai vu qu'un terrain compose de ces debris, et cultive en vignes. Mais apres l'avoir depasse, j'ai trouve la coupe verticale d'une colline a couches pierreuses, si reguliers, que je les ai prises au premier coup d'oeil pour de la pierre a chaux. L'esprit de nitre m'a detrompe: c'est une pierre sableuse tres compacte, ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 2 (of 4) • James Hutton
... edge, you discover that it suddenly falls away with startling abruptness, sometimes in sheer descents of several hundred feet till the top of the ancient shale pile is reached (now covered deep with soil) and then dropping away more gradually with that lovely curve of debris. But nowhere is this Palisade-like wall continuous, and here is where the southern Cumberlands get their unique flavor. The descending water from the plateau top has eroded deep into the precipice every mile or even every half mile, ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... hamlets, large irregular circles of heavy, unwrought stones were observed in open fields, or near to some mounds of grass grown earth, perhaps covering the remains of former shrines. These seemed of the same character and called to mind the ancient debris which still exists at Stonehenge, and undoubtedly marked the spot of ancient sacrifice. Large flocks of goats tended by herdsmen were distributed over the plains, and so level is the country that the eye could make out these groups for miles away ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... employees in the building fished chairs, dry goods boxes and a quantity of other floating property from the flood. The debris swept down the main business street with such force that every ...
— The True Story of Our National Calamity of Flood, Fire and Tornado • Logan Marshall
... he in turn took his stand against the redoubtable champion. But Malvoisin, contrary to history as Patricia knew it, proved the most stubborn adversary of the three. The heralds had not properly cleared away the debris from the tilting-field, so when the Disinherited Knight forced Malvoisin back, Bois-Guilbert supported him from behind. Patricia had found the other two so yielding that she was unprepared for this unexpected defence, ...
— The Lever - A Novel • William Dana Orcutt
... the cliff, the party stopped. Marks of the storm were visible in one or two landslides and in a great amount of debris strewing the uncovered beach and rocks. Even large stones seemed to have ...
— The Spanish Chest • Edna A. Brown
... the party; we bathed in a pool which was deep under the high scaur, but sloped gradually from the grassy bank on the other side. Quiet and transparent as the Jed was, it one day came down with irresistible fury, red with the debris of the sandstone scaurs. There had been a thunderstorm in the hills up-stream, and as soon as the river began to rise, the people came out with pitchforks and hooks to catch the hayricks, sheaves of corn, drowned pigs, and other animals that came ...
— Personal Recollections, from Early Life to Old Age, of Mary Somerville • Mary Somerville
... Street, where a new dim vista opened up, he saw policemen, then firemen; then he heard the beat of a fire-engine, upon whose brass glinted the reflection of flames that were flickering in a gap between two buildings. A huge pile of debris encumbered the middle of the road. The vista was closed by a barricade, beyond which was a pressing crowd. "Stand clear there!" said a policeman to him roughly. "There's a wall going to fall there any minute." He walked off, hurrying with relief from the half-lit scene ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... last straw! She put the cat out, yowling but unharmed, and silently cleared away the debris. Then, when the bombardment was over, she put on her bonnet and went out. She came back an hour later, to find the Twins sitting, one on each side of their Father, holding his hands, and all three the picture ...
— The French Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... pulling off the loose bark from a decayed stump, several dry, flattened scales will fall out upon the snow among the debris of wood and dead leaves. Hold them close in the warm palm of your hand for a time and the dried bits will quiver, the sides partly separate, and behold! you have brought back to life a beautiful Euvanessa, or mourning-cloak butterfly. Lay it upon ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe
... my copy and had returned to the main room, nothing remained of the afternoon party save Boyd and Lana, whispering together by a window, and the black wench, Gusta, clearing away the debris of ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... could make out its narrowing continuation on into the mass of the mountain. They looked up and saw an ever dwindling space merging with darkness and finally lost in utter obscurity. Underfoot was debris, rocky soil worn away from the cliffs throughout the ages, here and there fallen slivers and scale of rock. Shadows moved somberly, misshapen and grotesque, like brooding spirits of evil stirring ...
— Daughter of the Sun - A Tale of Adventure • Jackson Gregory
... saw was a vast pillar of dust and smoke, rising into the sky above them. It spread before their dazed eyes, until it made night of everything about them. There was still a rain of lighter debris pattering down over the village; as they stared, and got their wits about them, remembering how things had looked before this, they realised that the shaft-house of Number One ...
— King Coal - A Novel • Upton Sinclair
... were traces of recent floods, roots washed bare and places where the swirling waters had heaped up their debris of sticks and mud-stained leaves. All along the damp ground the lowest branches of the trees, weighted with tangled moss, trailed, broken and bruised by the fierce rush of the current. The trees themselves seemed centuries old, bent ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross
... train laden with wounded wound its tortuous way through the theater of many a bloody recent rencounter, it set in motion a train of reflections which were by no means pleasing. The abandoned arms and accouterments; the debris of broken-down army wagons; the wrecks of caissons and gun-carriages; the bloated carcasses of once proud and sleek cavalry chargers; the mounds showing where the earth had been hastily shoveled over the forms ...
— Personal Recollections of a Cavalryman - With Custer's Michigan Cavalry Brigade in the Civil War • J. H. (James Harvey) Kidd
... half an hour in the two lower stories, I climbed a crooked flight of stone steps, half blocked up with debris from a shattered parapet above, and came out on the flat roof of the highest and largest of the three cubes that together make up the fortress. It was a spacious battlemented floor, of rectangular but irregular outline, having ...
— Campaigning in Cuba • George Kennan
... indentation of the fragments, examining the new damage done, claiming that some of the damage had been caused by previous explosions. And the Major was contemplating, with a paternal look, the large salon upset by this Neronian firework and strewn with the debris of the objects of Art. He came out first, declaring good- naturedly: "It ...
— Mademoiselle Fifi • Guy de Maupassant
... to where the warriors were collecting small fuel from between the fallen trees. One of them hauled a hollow maple log out of the debris and threw it to one side as being too heavy for a quick fire. Ward halted and rested a foot on it and bowed his head. Next he began tapping it with his tomahawk. His actions attracted the attention of the men, and Black ...
— A Virginia Scout • Hugh Pendexter
... all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of man's achievements must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins—all these things if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... out into the aisle and tried to crawl toward the end of the car, only to find it crushed into a shapeless mass and the way piled with debris. ...
— The One Woman • Thomas Dixon
... absorbed before these marvels of brush and pencil, scrutinizing each one in turn, his sense of repulsion for the debris on the floor gave way to a feeling of enthusiasm. Not only were the sketches far superior to any he had ever seen, but the way in which they were done and the uses of the several mediums were a revelation to him. It was only when Fog-horn Cranch's ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... wore a filthy blue dressing-gown and torn stockings thrust into streaky pink satin mules. Her face was sunken. She seemed to have but half as much hair as Babbitt remembered, and that half was stringy. She sat in a rocker amid a debris of candy-boxes and cheap magazines, and she sounded dolorous when she did not sound derisive. But Babbitt was ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... move around. The centrifugal force varied from point to point throughout the ship, and the corridors were cluttered with debris that seemed to move with a life of its own as each piece shifted slowly under the effects of the various forces working on it. And, as the various masses moved about, the rate of spin of the ship changed as the law of conservation ...
— The Highest Treason • Randall Garrett
... fisher-maiden herself—began the ascent. How she managed to obtain a footing he could not make out; for the path was no path, but merely a zig-zag track on the surface of the loose shingle—shingle so loose that he could see it yield to her every step, while the debris rolled away down to the bed of the burn. But still she fought her way upward, and at last she stood face to face with him, ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... the great sacrificial mound which formed the pyramid supporting the Aztec temple, together with the debris of the dismantled dwellings and temples generally belonging to the native race, the Spanish conquerers must have found ample material wherewith to fill up the many canals and small lakes which made of this ancient Aztec capital ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... men were killed during the building of this railway. Once a runaway engine crashed into a derrick car on the top of a bridge and the debris can be seen in the valley below to this day. Several Americans lost their lives in this one accident. It is quite remarkable, however, that there has not been a single accident where a life was lost since ...
— Birdseye Views of Far Lands • James T. Nichols
... all, carrying it by one leg. It was a gruesome horror, partly eaten by rats, swollen, abnormally heavy, one side flattened from lying so long upon the floor. He could hardly stand; each time he bent over it seemed as though his backbone was disjointing. After cleaning out the debris he began to sweep. The dust was fearful, choking, blinding, so thick that he could hardly see what he was about. By and by he dimly made out Geary's ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris
... at a distance of about eight feet from each other, with a plank laid across, in front of the fire, several upturned pails, and the drawers belonging to the dresser, formed the seating accommodation. The floor of the room was covered with all manner of debris, dust, dirt, fragments of old mortar and plaster. A sack containing cement was leaning against one of the walls, and a bucket containing some stale whitewash ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... fore-paws into a deep basin, the side of which was cleft two thirds of the way to its base. Through this break, which I saw to be an old one from the layers of green film lining it, the stream bubbled out and ran off among barren heaps of debris, to sink itself in the weeds of some stagnant pool. The head of the dog was thrust forward and rested upon the fore-paws as if the brute were sleeping; but its half-open eyes seemed to watch the approaches to the doorway in the wall. ...
— Earth's Enigmas - A Volume of Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... become the food of these shells. We do not find that the sand mixed with seaweed has been petrified, because the weed which was mingled with it has shrunk away, and this the Po shows us every day in the debris of ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci |
