"Dwindle" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... task of implanting Western ideals in the Eastern mind rose before me when I thought of Armour's doing it—how they would dwindle in the process, and how he must go on handling them and looking at them withered and shrunken for twenty-odd years. I understood—there was enough left in me to understand—Armour's terrified escape. ...
— The Pool in the Desert • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... should not reduce me to distress," John Adams confides to his Diary in December; and adds naively that he was just on the point of winning a reputation and a competence "when this execrable project was set on foot for my ruin as well as that of my country." Men who saw their incomes dwindle were easily disposed to think that the cessation of business was an admission of the legitimacy of the law, a kind of betrayal of the cause. And it was to counteract the influence of lukewarm conservatives, men who were content to "turn and shift, to luff up, and bear away," that those who regarded ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... repositories of learning; but the time must inevitably come when this order is transformed into the deadliest enemy of the civilization which it has brought into being. The power of the spiritual oligarchy rests upon superstitious terrors which dwindle before advancing enlightenment; hence the clergy have become reactionary, have sought to stifle the spirit of free inquiry, and have used the schools which they have builded as instruments to keep alive unreasoning prejudice, ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... I don't think much of it," I answered. "The summer is coming on. You are losing all your coughs and colds and sore throats. Every practice must dwindle ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
... height, to tower unhumanly tall above the cringing wretch he confronted. His eyes narrowed into red points that bored into the other's eyes, and plunged like daggers into his heart and mind. Before that glance, like a vivisectionist's knife, Jake wilted; he seemed to shrink, dwindle, collapse. And with a growing, cold, awful horror, a suspicion so hideous that his mind revolted from it, Peter Champneys stood staring from one black face ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... nights of poetic imagery. This is especially true of the prayers used to win the love of a woman or to destroy the life of an enemy, in which we find such expressions as—"Now your soul fades away—your spirit shall grow less and dwindle away, never to reappear;" "Let her be completely veiled in loneliness—O Black Spider, may you hold her soul in your web, so that it may never get through the meshes;" and the final declaration of the lover, "Your soul has come ...
— The Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees • James Mooney
... just breaking when the black Jaguar reached the vicinity of the blaze. The fire, replenished throughout the hours of darkness, had guided him unerringly on his way; but with the coming of dawn it had been allowed to dwindle down until nothing remained but a bed of embers and even these died when the ...
— The Black Phantom • Leo Edward Miller
... tire of watching it, thinking that it could not be spared from the landscape. It lies only three miles from the curving end of the promontory, and is about twenty miles due south of Naples. In this atmosphere distances dwindle. The nearest land, to the northwest, is the larger island of Ischia, distant nearly as far as Naples; yet Capri has the effect of being anchored off the bay to guard the entrance. It is really a rock, three miles and a half long, rising straight out of the water, eight hundred ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... medical, and especially surgical, science—that, if you like, for us all, is "the question of the hour!" And what a question! of what surpassing importance, in the presence of which all other "questions" whatever dwindle into mere academic triviality. For just as the ancient State was wounded to the heart through the death of her healthy sons in the field, just so slowly, just so silently, is the modern receiving deadly hurt by the botching and tinkering of her unhealthy children. The ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
... by George Smith, p. 36. Here again, as with the Manus and 10 Prajapatis and the 10 Sephiroths in the Book of Numbers— they dwindle down to ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... the ground in sober recognition of my error. "Forgive me the heat of my zeal," I protested. "I diminish, I dwindle, I wither. Unless your pity forgives me, I shall evaporate ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... went in silence through thick brushwood down towards the broad river-bed. The stones of it glared like the sands of Africa; Fornovo baked under the sun all white and black; between us was this broad plain of parched shingle and rocks that could, in a night, become one enormous river, or dwindle to a chain of stagnant ponds. To-day some seven narrow streams wandered in the expanse, and again they seemed so easy to cross that again I wondered at the need ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... reduction of numbers in such a case may lead to the total defeat of the few that are left, and the best endeavours of a dwindling remnant may be wholly nugatory. There is needed a sense of community and solidarity, without which the assurance necessary to the work is bound to falter and dwindle out; and there is also needed a degree of popular countenance, not to be had by isolated individuals engaged in an unconventional pursuit of things that are neither to be classed as spendthrift decorum nor as merchantable goods. In this connection ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... now they dwindle, Whirling with the whirling spindle. Twist ye, twine ye! even so Mingle human ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... personal uncalculated affection, and to an easing of a sharp heartache he had tried valiantly to hide from his father. Aymer never questioned him on the past, never even alluded to it. Partly because he hoped the memory of it would dwindle from the boy's mind, and partly for his own sake. But Christopher did not forget. There were few days when he did not contrast the old times with the new, and gaze for a moment across the big gulf that separated ...
— Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker • Marguerite Bryant
... vegetarians are shock-headed, ample-bearded men, and I have heard the Ancestor was vegetarian. Or it may be, I sometimes fancy, a kind of inherent disposition on the part of your human animal to dwindle. That came back in my memory vividly as I looked at the long rows of Sceptics, typical Advanced people, and marked their glistening crania. I recalled other losses. Here is Humanity, thought I, growing ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... perishing things is not to perfection, but to perdition; and it needs no inspiration to tell that man's loftiest towers, and strongest cities, and proudest empires will come to ruin; or that the most polished, powerful, and populous nations of antiquity will dwindle down into Turks, Moors, and Egyptians. Here is a fact of awful omen. Death reigns in this world of ours; death moral, social, political, and physical, has ever trampled upon man, proud man, learned man, civilized man, ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... at Baalbec is the foundation platform upon which the temples stand. Even the colossal fabrics of Ancient Egypt dwindle before this superhuman masonry. The platform itself, 1,000 feet long, and averaging twenty feet in height, suggests a vast mass of stones, but when you come to examine the single blocks of which it is composed, you are crushed with ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... and the plain ends; the hillsides rise and the river-bottoms dwindle away in the distance: such is the feeling that one experiences as he climbs these vine-clad slopes from either the Rhone, the Loire, or the Seine valleys, and here it is that the imaginary line is drawn between the vins ordinaires and ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... that Neshevna and Lenyard stood. The young man, weary with vigils, his face furrowed by curiosity, regarded the city below them as it lay swimming in the waves of a sinking sun. He saw the crosses of La Trinite as molten copper, then dusk and dwindle in the shadows. The twilight seemed to prefigure the fading of the human race. Neshevna walked with this dreamer to the rear of the theatre—the theatre of the Tarnhelm, that was to darken all civilization. He asked for Illowski, but she did ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... not terrible to me, is at all times particular distasteful. My house-deaths have generally been periodical, recurring after seven years, but this last is premature by half that time. Cut off in the flower of Colebrook. The Middletonian stream and all its echoes mourn. Even minnows dwindle. A parvis fiunt MINIMI. I fear to invite Mrs. Hood to our new mansion, lest she envy it and rote us. But when we are fairly in, I hope she will come and try it. I heard she and you were made uncomfortable by some unworthy to ...
— Charles Lamb • Walter Jerrold
... George—I hope I may be pardoned by the importance and interest of the subject for pointing it out—is curiously formed. His head is unusually large, and his broad shoulders and deep chest admirably match his quite noble head; but below the waist he appears to dwindle away, his legs seeming to bend under the weight of his body, so that he waddles rather than walks, moving with a rolling gait which is rather like a seaman's. He is, indeed, a giant mounted on ...
— The Mirrors of Downing Street - Some Political Reflections by a Gentleman with a Duster • Harold Begbie
... on the part of the seeker. Mrs. Sikes, whose work had chiefly been dressmaking and plain sewing, found the new field of labor quite irksome. The money realized from the sale of her property she must not let dwindle away too swiftly; her husband was helpless, and she must work, and the children must work. She found the North a place where a day's work meant a day's work in full; there was no let up; the pound of flesh ...
— Hanover; Or The Persecution of the Lowly - A Story of the Wilmington Massacre. • David Bryant Fulton
... mind talk much together. And both of them often gain by the interchange. Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than in the one where they sprang up. That which was a weed in one intelligence becomes a flower in the other. A flower, on the other hand, may dwindle down to a mere weed by the same change. Healthy growths may become poisonous by falling upon the wrong mental soil, and what seemed a night-shade in one mind unfold as ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... Messrs. Scarr and Jopp soon explained the mistake fallen into by Hodgkinson as to the identity of Landsborough's Herbert and his own Mulligan. It will be remembered that in the central districts, the watersheds are so low and the size of the rivers so uncertain, that to find a watercourse dwindle away into nothing in one mile, and expand into a river the next is not at all surprising, so that to leave the head of a river and come on to another running in the same direction, it would appear quite feasible that it was the ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... group of men in authority who surrounded her. She stood firm; she was a rock in the angry ocean; with her alone was safety, comfort, life. And so it was that hope dawned at Scutari. The reign of chaos and old night began to dwindle; order came upon the scene, and common sense, and forethought, and decision, radiating out from the little room off the great gallery in the Barrack Hospital where, day and night, the Lady Superintendent was at her task. Progress might be slow, but ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... immoral practices to acquire power, can only act in a manner indirectly prejudicial to the public prosperity. But if the representative of the executive descends into the lists, the cares of government dwindle into second-rate importance, and the success of his election is his first concern. All laws and negotiations are then to him nothing more than electioneering schemes; places become the reward of services rendered, not to the nation, but to its chief; and the ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al
... birth to land upon your sphere. And while we had enough of our own particular electrical food to last us for a million of your years, and enough power to guide Xlarbti to other universes, we had exhausted all the remaining energy of our entire universe. And when we finally left it to dwindle behind us in the black abysses of space, we left it, a dead cinder, devoid of life, vitiated of activity, and utterly lacking in cosmic forces, a universe ...
— Raiders of the Universes • Donald Wandrei
... god,' said the priest sternly. 'I also can do magic. I can make a waxen image of you, and I can say words which, as the wax image melts before the fire, will make you dwindle away and at ...
— The Story of the Amulet • E. Nesbit
... we that these puny elves Shoot into giants?—we may thank ourselves: Fools that we are, like Israel's fools of yore, The calf ourselves have fashion'd we adore. But let true Reason once resume her reign, This god shall dwindle to a calf again. Founded on arts which shun the face of day, By the same arts they still maintain their sway. Wrapp'd in mysterious secrecy they rise, 110 And, as they are unknown, are safe and wise. At whomsoever aim'd, howe'er severe, The ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... pound ten," said Grannie. "I looked at the purse this morning. One pound ten, and sevenpence ha'penny in coppers; that's all. That wouldn't be a bad sum if there was anythink more coming in; but seeing as ther' aint, it is uncommon likely to dwindle, look at it ...
— Good Luck • L. T. Meade
... as unconnected with the new emotion, indifferent, now assume importance. A look, a tone of the voice, a pressure of the hand, are events to dream about and feast upon. In the presence of the beloved object all things else are either unheeded or dwindle into comparative insignificance. ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... home!—the very wave, Rolling in strength and beauty, leaps on high, As if rejoicing on thy beach to die! My loved—my father-land! thy faults to me Are as the specks which men at noontide see Upon the blinding sun, and dwindle pale Beneath thy virtue's and thy glory's veil. Land of my birth! where'er thy sons may roam, Their pride—their boast—their ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume XXIV. • Revised by Alexander Leighton
... good Lord of Douglas," answered the Prince; "I did but smile to think how your princely retinue would dwindle if every thief were dealt with as ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... time that all these stirring events were taking place and just before Magruder, with McLaw's and Walker's divisions, was either quietly lying in front of Richmond watching the army of McClellan dwindle away, leaving by transports down the James and up the Potomac, or was marching at a killing gait to overtake their comrades under Lee to share with them their trials, their battles and their victories in Maryland. Lee could not leave the Capital with all his force so long as there was a semblance ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... on taking all the parcels, and the crowd, having jumped to the conclusion that he was the young woman's husband began to dwindle away, one of the jokers remarking 'It's all over!' in a loud voice ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... even granting that William Hogarth's "monster Caricatura" is thus omnivorous and omnipresent, does he tower aloft in some countries and under some conditions to the majesty of a new art, and in others dwindle down to ...
— The Eighteenth Century in English Caricature • Selwyn Brinton
... of service, instead of being filled up at the bottom, and the vacancies among the officers filled from the best noncommissioned officers and men, the habit was to raise new regiments, with new colonels, captains, and men, leaving the old and experienced battalions to dwindle away into mere skeleton organizations. I believe with the volunteers this matter was left to the States exclusively, and I remember that Wisconsin kept her regiments filled with recruits, whereas other States generally filled their quotas by new regiments, and the result was that ...
— The Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman, Complete • William T. Sherman
... present hour of failure and impediment, an interest and consideration to which, in its full usefulness and vigour, it had not presumed to aspire. Therefore Dominic Iglesias held calmly on his way, seeing the circle of his occupations, pleasures, and activities dwindle and decrease, yet maintaining not only his serenity of mind, but his accustomed self-respecting outward refinement of bearing and habit. To meet death with a gracious stoicism, well-dressed and standing upright, is, rightly considered, a very fine art, reflecting ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... back to us. "God bless YOU and good-bye!" They were carried into the enveloping night. We stared after them down the road; watching the lantern on the tail-board of the cart diminish; watching it dim and dwindle to a point of gray;—listening until the hoof-beats of the heavy Norman grew fainter than the rustle of the branch that rose above the wall beside us. But it is bad luck to strain eyes and ears to the very last when friends are parting, because ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington
... then a nightingale) is dim, And the loud shriek of sage Minerva's fowl Rattles around me her discordant hymn: Old portraits from old walls upon me scowl— I wish to heaven they would not look so grim; The dying embers dwindle in the grate— I think too that I ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... will doubt that I shall remain happy? Fortune would have a hard time if she undertook to shatter my happiness. Take this or that one from my treasured children; but when would the number of them dwindle to the sickly two of Latona? Away with your sacrifices! Take the laurel out of your hair. Go back to your homes and let me never see ...
— Famous Tales of Fact and Fancy - Myths and Legends of the Nations of the World Retold for Boys and Girls • Various
... It is because these events can be particularized and described that they assume proportions beyond their real importance, but when compared with the colossal advances made by the state during the period covering them, they dwindle into mere points of educational experience, to be guarded against in the future, while the many blessings showered upon the state, consisting of the health and wealth imparting sunshine, the refreshing and fructifying rains and dews of heaven, which, like the smiles ...
— The History of Minnesota and Tales of the Frontier • Charles E. Flandrau
... and labor that saved me, perhaps. At all events, here I am, alive and well, to-night. I sometimes liken myself to a tree that I know of. It was a small fir tree in a friend's garden. For some reason, it began to pine and dwindle and turn red. My friend's husband insisted on cutting it down, as unsightly; but this she objected to, until all the leaves were dry and faded, and the tree apparently dead. Still she asked for it to ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor
... moment, but he mustn't let Mirabelle get the bit in her teeth, and run away with him. As soon as ever she got him on record as favouring the sort of legislation which she herself wanted, Mr. Mix's power was going to dwindle. And Mr. Mix adored his power, and he hated to think of losing it ...
— Rope • Holworthy Hall
... extreme southwestern corner of the State the railroads do not come; the vacant spaces grow between the country roads, and the cities dwindle down to half-deserted crossroads hamlets. Here the surface of the map is covered up with the tortuous wrinkles of the hills. It is a beautiful but useless place. As far as you can see, low, unformed lumps of mountains lie jumbled aimlessly together between the ragged sky lines, or little ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... were thought for a moment in Germany that the Socialists could come into real power, their vote and the number of their representatives in the Reichstag would dwindle away in ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... easily triumphed. Why not be practical, and become master of a situation which one had not made, and could not alter, instead of being overwhelmed by it? Needless to say, I did not mention the conversation to Mr. Watling, nor did he dwindle in my estimation. These necessary transactions did not interfere in any way with his personal relationships, and his days were filled with kindnesses. And was not Mr. Ripon, the junior partner, one ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... times this headland was lit by a bonfire beacon, kept burning at night; and there is a story that a Government packet, passing in the days of our French wars, noticing that the sleepy watchman had allowed the fire to dwindle to a mere smoulder, discharged a cannon-ball at the spot to arouse the neglectful watcher. It must be remembered that the Lizard is rendered doubly perilous by a sea-covered stack of rocks lying to the southward. ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... insensibly from the monarchy to democracy by the practice of constitutional fictions,—what detestable reasons all those are! No! no! let us never enlighten the people with false daylight. Principles dwindle and pale in your constitutional cellar. No illegitimacy, no compromise, no grant from the king to the people. In all such grants there is an Article 14. By the side of the hand which gives there is the claw which snatches ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... feeling cheated. He had the uncomfortable sensation that comes to men who grandly contemplate mountains and . . . see them dwindle to mole-hills. The apparently outrageous had shown itself in explanation nothing so out-of-the-way after all. He seized upon the single point in Jill's behavior that still ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... be united in one body? Or were there such discordant elements, that they who held to the Apostolic Faith and Order would be thrust out? Was there vitality enough in the Church in Connecticut to live and grow? Or, when they who composed it then were gone, would it dwindle and die out? No man could have answered those questions then; God has answered them since. And as we run back along the story of the years that have written out the answer which we read this day, we come at last to that day, so truly memorable, and to ...
— Report Of Commemorative Services With The Sermons And Addresses At The Seabury Centenary, 1883-1885. • Diocese Of Connecticut
... jeweller's with four brooches for Flower to present to the bridesmaids. Mrs. Tipping had chosen them, and it did not take the hapless skipper long to arrive at the conclusion that she was far fonder of bridesmaids than he was. His stock of money was beginning to dwindle, and the purchase of a second wedding suit within a month was beginning to tell even upon ...
— A Master Of Craft • W. W. Jacobs
... accomplish it? How small and insignificant he felt, and how utterly worthless! How he seemed to dwindle into nothing beside the great work that he was called to do! And yet how anxious he was to do it well! How he longed to be like his father David, a true shepherd to his people! How his heart yearned over ...
— Little Folks (July 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... is a source of loquacity only with yourselves: when it is started by men, young ladies dwindle into mere listeners. Simpering listeners, I confess; but it is only with one another that you ...
— Cecilia Volume 1 • Frances Burney
... its navigation and fleet—let Wales have its navigation and fleet—let Ireland have its navigation and fleet—let those four of the constituent parts of the British empire be under four independent governments, and it is easy to perceive how soon they would each dwindle into comparative insignificance. Apply these facts to our own case. Leave America divided into thirteen or, if you please, into three or four independent governments—what armies could they raise and pay—what fleets could they ever ...
— The Federalist Papers
... very well known, and still prevails among the lower orders in this country. The disastrous consequence to be apprehended from noncompliance with this strange custom is not (as before stated) that the bees will desert the hive, but that they will dwindle and die. The manner of communicating the intelligence to the little community, with due form and ceremony, is this: to take the key of the house, and knock with it three times against the hive, telling the inmates, at the same time, that their master or mistress, &c., (as ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 332, September 20, 1828 • Various
... strength, now acts as a bar to the member's escape; wherefore the President, his two counselors, the twelve apostles and others at the head of Mormon affairs, insist upon it as a best, if not an only, Church protection. Without polygamy the Mormon membership would dwindle until Mormonism had utterly died out. The Mormon heads think so, and preserve polygamy as a means ...
— The Mormon Menace - The Confessions of John Doyle Lee, Danite • John Doyle Lee
... of your garden ground, no smallest plant that grows in it; make no foolish pretence nor fond mistake in the fancy that you are ready to forget it, and so subject it to the frightful consequences of half-measures. The plant that is watered to-day and forgotten to-morrow must dwindle or decay. The plant that looks for no help but from Nature itself measures its strength at once, and either dies and is re-created or grows into a great tree whose boughs fill the sky. But make no mistake like the religionists and some philosophers; ...
— Light On The Path and Through the Gates of Gold • Mabel Collins
... filled in human affairs. The modest assurance, the happy boldness, the extemporaneous logic, all that 'led but to the grave,' exist, like the images of departed actors, only in the recollection of those who witnessed them, till memory shall fade into tradition, and tradition dwindle down to a name." (Supplement to Vacation Rambles, p. 115.) The eagerness with which the talents of Sir William Follett were sought, forcibly illustrates the truth of a remark, made to me in the course of some friendly advice, by one who may be ranked among the most brilliant advocates who ...
— Minnesota and Dacotah • C.C. Andrews
... and permanently established government. Nor does it seem possible, even in the event of Bombay taking the ascendance as the capital of British India, that the proud City of Palaces shall upon that account dwindle and sink into decay. Stranger things, and even more melancholy destinies, have befallen the mighty Babylons of the earth; but with all its faults of situation and of climate, I should at least, for one, regret ...
— Notes of an Overland Journey Through France and Egypt to Bombay • Miss Emma Roberts
... something, which "they should not willingly let die." However inferiour to the heroes who were born in better ages, he might still be great among his contemporaries, with the hope of growing every day greater in the dwindle of posterity. He might still be a giant among the pygmies, the one-eyed ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... big fellow who helped Mrs. Bal out of the blue car (also big, in proportion to the size of the owner and his fortune) was Morgan P. Bennett of New York, the Tin Trust millionaire. Somerled's puny horde of millions dwindle into humble insignificance beside Morgan Bennett's pile. If Somerled has made two millions out of his mines and successful speculations, and a few extra thousands out of his pictures, M. P. Bennett has made twenty millions out of tin—and unlimited cheek. He is so big that his ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... thy lips enkindle With their love the breath between them; And thy smiles before they dwindle Make the cold air fire; then screen them In those looks, where whoso gazes Faints, ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... fleets of them one day, Du Mesne," replied John Law. "'Tis a roadway fit for a nation. Ah, Du Mesne! our St. Lawrence, our New France—they dwindle when compared to ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough
... when I tell you that thrift of time will repay you in after life with a usury of profit beyond your most sanguine dreams, and that waste of it will make you dwindle alike in intellectual and moral stature beyond ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... honest way so that it came quickly to his hand; because the five hundred pounds must be preserved intact for eventual use. That was the great point. With the entire five hundred one felt a substance at one's back; but it seemed to him that should he let it dwindle to four-fifty or even four-eighty, all the efficiency would be gone out of the money, as though there were some magic power in the round figure. But what sort ...
— End of the Tether • Joseph Conrad
... which covers many a weakness. As a rule we have neither the time nor the desire to look beneath it, and so it is that commonly we accept people on their own valuation. Here the outward show is nothing, it is the inward purpose that counts. So the 'gods' dwindle and the humble supplant them. ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... to live," he wrote Samuel J. May, "and the more I see the desirableness of living; yet certainly not in this frail body, but just as it shall please the dear Father of us all." One by one he saw the little band of which he was leader dwindle as now one and now another dropped by the way. And it was he or Mr. Phillips, or both, who spoke the last loving words over their coffins. As the little band passed on to the unseen country, a new joy awoke in the soul of ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... your strong imagination turn The great wheel backward, until Troy unburn, And then unbuild, and seven Troys below Rise out of death, and dwindle, and outflow, Till all have passed, and none has yet been there: Back, ever back. Our birds still crossed the air; Beyond our myriad changing generations Still built, unchanged, their known inhabitations. A million years before Atlantis was Our lark sprang from some hollow ...
— Georgian Poetry 1918-19 • Various
... I not fallen away vilely since this last action? do I not bate? do I not dwindle? Why, my skin hangs about me like an old lady's loose gown; I am withered like an old apple-John. Well, I'll repent, and that suddenly, while I am in some liking; I shall be out of heart shortly, and then I shall have no strength to repent. An I have ...
— King Henry IV, The First Part • William Shakespeare [Hudson edition]
... this body will have to have the power of transferring territory from one state to another, when it is persuaded that adequate grounds exist for such a transference. Friends of peace will make a mistake if they unduly glorify the status quo. Some nations grow, while others dwindle; the population of an area may change its character by emigration and immigration. There is no good reason why states should resent changes in their boundaries under such conditions, and if no international authority has power to make changes of this kind, ...
— Political Ideals • Bertrand Russell
... I desire your opinion, Whether I may not lawfully play the inquisition upon her, make use of a little force, and put her to the rack and the torture, only to convince her, she has really fine limbs, without spoiling or distorting them. I expect your directions, ere I proceed to dwindle and fall away with despair; which at present I don't think advisable, because, if she should recant, she may then hate me perhaps in the other extreme for my tenuity. ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift
... done more than kill persons, he has caused men's minds to dwindle, he has withered the heart of the citizen. One must belong to the race of the invincible and the indomitable, to persevere now in the rugged path of renunciation and of duty. An indescribable gangrene of ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... clutching at her heart. Her life, she reflected, had held, until recently, but little of happiness. The long, weary days of poverty, when her husband, incapacitated by a paralytic stroke, had seen his savings slowly dwindle away; the death of her son, and then that of Mr. Morton himself passed before her mental vision. Only Ruth had been left to her, and in the girl's happiness and success lay Mrs. Morton's whole life and being. Now, that things had at last taken a turn, and the future seemed clear and assured ...
— The Film of Fear • Arnold Fredericks
... abundantly recompens'd the Want of Flesh and other luxurious Meats, which shortened their Lives so many hundred Years; the [87][Greek: makro-biote-a] of the Patriarchs, which was an Emblem of Eternity as it were (after the new Concession) beginning to dwindle to a little Span, a Nothing ...
— Acetaria: A Discourse of Sallets • John Evelyn
... of time, that has made so many musicians recede from us and dwindle, has brought Berlioz the closer to us and shown him great. The age in which he lived, the decades that followed his death, found him unsubstantial enough. They recognized in him only the projector of gigantic edifices, ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... towing massive loads, were accelerating slowest, with the ex-gridiron twins riding the rigging. But their rings would dwindle to star specks before ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... now brimful, evidently filled by the recent rain, which had not been heavy enough to fill the lagoon. Here we camped for two days, which we could ill afford, as already we had to cut down our rations, and before long our meals would dwindle to one instead of two a day. Godfrey's sickness necessitated a delay—he suffered from such fearful pains in his head, poor fellow! Often after a day's march he would collapse, and lie prone with his head nearly bursting from pain. ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie
... great one. No country could be stationary without becoming stagnant, or restrict its natural progress without inviting its decay. It was so in all human affairs; it was so even in ordinary business. Every man of business knew that if his enterprise ceased to grow bigger, it soon began to dwindle down; and so a country must grow greater or else must slide away to weakness, until at last it would be despised. Now the Government proposed to spend 50,000l. at Quebec; 50,000l., he repeated, ...
— Canada and the States • Edward William Watkin
... Upon her wedding-day, Must tell her Bees the story, Or else they'll fly away. Fly away—die away— Dwindle down and leave you! But if you don't deceive your Bees, Your Bees will not ...
— Songs from Books • Rudyard Kipling
... they blow, All the quarters that they know I' the shipman's card. I will drain him dry as hay: Sleep shall neither night nor day Hang upon his pent-house lid; He shall live a man forbid: Weary seven-nights nine times nine Shall he dwindle, peak, and pine: Though his bark cannot be lost, Yet it shall be ...
— Macbeth • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... Mountains, and you are constantly meeting joyous, bounding streams, flowing rapidly forth from each ravine and coursing to the arid plain; but follow them a few miles and they begin to diminish in volume, and, unless intercepted by a copious river, often dwindle to nothing. The Republican fork of the Kansas or Kaw River, after a course of some thirty to fifty miles, sinks suddenly into its bed, which thence for twenty miles exhibits nothing but a waste of yellow sand. Of course there are seasons when this bed is covered with water throughout; ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... breeding combs in the hive become one putrid mass, with an exception, perhaps, of one in ten, twenty or a hundred, that may perfect a bee. Thus the increase of bees is not enough to replace the old ones that are continually dying off. It is plain, therefore, that this stock must soon dwindle down to a very small family. Now let a scarcity of honey occur in the fields, this poor stock cannot be properly guarded, and is easily plundered of its contents by the others. Honey is taken that is in ...
— Mysteries of Bee-keeping Explained • M. Quinby
... the Irish Nationalists who formed the branch of the confederacy regenerated under Colonel Roberts; and Kelly, who, for various reasons, was unwilling to accept the new regime, saw his adherents dwindle away, until at length he found himself all but discarded by the Fenian circles in Dublin. Then he crossed over to Manchester, where he arrived but a few weeks previous to the date of ...
— The Dock and the Scaffold • Unknown
... was in sight, and the caravan quickened its pace. After half an hour the town appeared no nearer, but seemed, on the contrary, to grow more distant, to dwindle in size, and to sink out of sight. After another half hour, it had disappeared, and the ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... coming up, bent to whisper a word in his ear, and the communication caused a sudden change in Mr. Lavington's expression. His face was naturally so colourless that it seemed not so much to pale as to fade, to dwindle and recede into something blurred and blotted-out. He half rose, sat down again and sent a ...
— The Triumph Of Night - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... at one of the broad glassy pools that seemed to lie right and left. Once the faint track I was following headed straight towards one of these apparent sheets of water, and I was even meditating a bathe, but, lo! when I was a hundred yards or so off, it began to dwindle and disappear, and I found nothing but the same endless stretch of grass, burnt up by ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... single policeman could keep his eye on each thoroughfare from one end to the other. The structures were of rough material hastily put together, and among the debris are to be found portions of older buildings, stehe, and fragments of statues. The town began to dwindle after the Pharaoh had taken possession of his sepulchre; it was abandoned during the XIIIth dynasty, and its ruins were entombed in the sand which the wind heaped over them. The city which Amenemhait III. had connected with his tomb maintained, on the ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 2 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... and changing groups of spectators in front of Bench 65 did not dwindle. Indeed, as the morning went on, they increased. People kept coming back to the bench and bringing others with them. Some of these people whispered together. Some merely stared and went away. Some asked Ferris carefully worded questions, to which the shyly happy mountaineer ...
— His Dog • Albert Payson Terhune
... power, had been habituated to assert. But if we make ourselves too little for the sphere of our duty, if, on the contrary, we do not stretch and expand our minds to the compass of their object, be well assured that everything about us will dwindle by degrees, until at length our concerns are shrunk to the dimensions of our minds. It is not a predilection to mean, sordid, home-bred cares that will avert the consequences of a false estimation of our interest, or prevent the shameful dilapidation into which a great empire must fall by mean ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... subtle immorality," I sighed, "is well-nigh over. Already the augurs of the pen begin to wink as they fable of a race of men who are evilly scintillant in talk and gracefully erotic. We know that this, alas, cannot be, and that in real life our peccadilloes dwindle into dreary vistas of divorce cases and the police-court, and that crime has lost its splendour. We sin very carelessly—sordidly, at times,—and artistic wickedness is rare. It is a pity; life was once a scarlet volume scattered with misty-coated demons; it is now a yellow journal, wherein our ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... his tabernacle. Yes, the day shall yet come when the intercourse between cities shall be chiefly for purposes of religious improvement—when combinations for political intrigue, or mercantile speculation, which now waken such intensity of interest in our cities, shall dwindle to their comparative nothingness; and when the world's redemption shall assume its proper magnitude; and all be stimulated to more holy devotedness, and more heavenly effort. Oh, what a day, when all our increasing facilities of intercourse with the land, and with ...
— The National Preacher, Vol. 2. No. 6., Nov. 1827 - Or Original Monthly Sermons from Living Ministers • William Patton
... fine fellows who clung so tenaciously to that square mile of crags and cliffs. The great spirit of cheery optimism, the light-hearted, careless good fellowship, and the muscle and grit of the invaders looked lightly at all this. Regiments might dwindle sadly from dysentery and shrapnel, the water-supply might be short and brackish, the flies might be getting more persistent; but reinforcements would come some day soon, the British at Cape Helles would get Achi Baba, and soon ...
— The Tale of a Trooper • Clutha N. Mackenzie
... began to dwindle and the shadows to encroach with a dominion of somberness over the room. It seemed to the figure in the bed as he struggled against rising tides of torpor and exhaustion that his own resolution was waning with the firelight and that the murk of death approached ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... observed soon after the house is built bad dreams will plague the dwellers therein, toothache (dreaded for mystic reasons) will torture them, and the evil influence from the north will cause them all kinds of bodily ill; the flocks will dwindle, ill luck will come, ghosts will haunt the place, and the house will ...
— Navaho Houses, pages 469-518 • Cosmos Mindeleff
... be of the same race. But when you looked at the eyes that sparkled out like a beetle's from each side of his hooked nose, you saw at once that he inherited all the fiery spirit of his forefathers. In fact, a Frenchman's spirit never exhales, however his body may dwindle. It rather rarefies, and grows more inflammable, as the earthly particles diminish; and I have seen valor enough in a little fiery-hearted French dwarf, to have ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... whatever reason, fear and shrink from the presence of ghosts. Conceive how this must tell upon the nerves in islands where the number of the dead already so far exceeds that of the living, and the dead multiply and the living dwindle at so swift a rate. Conceive how the remnant huddles about the embers of the fire of life; even as old Red Indians, deserted on the march and in the snow, the kindly tribe all gone, the last flame expiring, and the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... is intersected by high continuations or spurs, but north and westwards those plateaux assume more the real aspect of continuous high plains. There is a gradual descent to the west; from occasional hilly ranges those dwindle to kopjes, and to still less elevated "randjes" occurring in clusters more and more apart, until yet further westwards one gets to the merely undulating sterile approaches of the Karoo and the plains around and beyond Kimberley, which merge ...
— Origin of the Anglo-Boer War Revealed (2nd ed.) - The Conspiracy of the 19th Century Unmasked • C. H. Thomas
... England clergy found their congregations dwindle away daily; and Penn being young, handsome, and of a graceful stature, the court as well as the city ladies flocked very devoutly to his meeting. The patriarch, George Fox, hearing of his great reputation, ...
— Letters on England • Voltaire
... by an annalist whose pages glow with the new outburst of patriotic feeling. Matthew Paris is the greatest, as he in reality is the last, of our monastic historians. The school of St. Alban's survived indeed till a far later time, but its writers dwindle into mere annalists whose view is bounded by the abbey precincts and whose work is as colourless as it is jejune. In Matthew the breadth and precision of the narrative, the copiousness of his information on ...
— History of the English People, Volume II (of 8) - The Charter, 1216-1307; The Parliament, 1307-1400 • John Richard Green
... should I give up that much of you that is mine? If she could take it—But she cannot take it. If I let you go—you will do nothing. All this ambition, all these interests will dwindle and die, and she will not mind. She will not understand. She will think that she still has you. Why should she covet what she cannot possess? Why should she be given the thing that is ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells
... be a long time before he would dare smoke a cigar again, and his supply of cigarettes was destined to dwindle down to nothing before that day. But he did not ...
— King—of the Khyber Rifles • Talbot Mundy
... precedent. Nothing can be so contemptible as the persons or so foolish as the understandings of these hobgoblins. Ariel's speech is one continued impertinence. After he has talked to them of black omens and dire disasters that threaten his heroine, those bugbears dwindle to the breaking a piece of china, to staining a petticoat, the losing a fan, or a bottle of sal volatile—and what makes Ariel's speech more ridiculous is the place where it is spoken, on the sails and cordage of Belinda's barge." And then he compares the Sylphs ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... fetters, or rather tried to dance; in front of Trench Ibrahim maintained his guard; and beside Trench there lay in the House of Stone, in the town beyond the world, a man who one night had sailed out of Dublin Bay, past the riding lanterns of the yachts, and had seen Bray, that fairyland of lights, dwindle to a golden blot. To think of the sea and the salt wind, the sparkle of light as the water split at the ship's bows, the illuminated deck, perhaps the sound of a bell telling the hour, and the cool dim night about and above, ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason
... are just such as may be looked for in the waste places of the earth—temporary shelter for wayfarers whose homes are under their hats. The thin stream of civilization that trickles off into the wilderness, following the iron track, makes puddles now and again. Some of these dwindle away soon enough—or perhaps not quite soon enough; some of them increase ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains to Alaska • Charles Warren Stoddard
... flashes struck from midnights, there are fire-flames noon-days kindle, Whereby piled-up honors perish, whereby swollen ambitions dwindle, While just this or that poor impulse, which for once had play unstifled, Seems the sole work of a life-time that away the ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... her furs, and for once unconscious of her own beauty, so dissatisfied was she with the part she had played in the great tragedy. Somehow her parts seemed always to dwindle ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... and, since the tides flow to a considerable distance up all the rivers, the water of these is in many parts of the district brackish and unfit for use; besides which, in the summer-time, the smaller streams become dry, or dwindle down into mere chains of ponds, barely sufficient to supply ...
— Australia, its history and present condition • William Pridden
... morning, as wet and sad as any other, when Stewart and Fanny, seated in the back of an ambulance, their feet overhanging the edge, watched the black hut dwindle upon the road, and wondered how any one had lived ...
— The Happy Foreigner • Enid Bagnold
... source of heat. In an improperly constructed or improperly run brooder the chicks go through a varying process of chilling, sweating and struggling when they should be sleeping, and the result is puny chicks that dwindle and die. ...
— The Dollar Hen • Milo M. Hastings
... Mountains," or "the gentleman from the Pacific," or "the gentleman from Patagonia," but "the gentleman from the North Pole," and also "the gentleman from the South Pole;" and the poor original thirteen states would dwindle into comparative insignificance as ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy
... about my Studies, which, I think, are likely to dwindle away too. I have not turned to Persian since the Spring; but shall one day look back to it: and renew my attack on the 'Seven Castles,' if that be the name. I found the Jami MS. at Rushmere: and there left it for the present: as the other Poem will be enough for me for my first onslaught. I ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... last number of the Biography,[10] they are Archbishop Hamilton, Sir William Hamilton, Dr Robert Henry, Edward Henryson, J. Bonaventura Hepburn, Roger Hog, John Holybush, and Henry Home of Kames.... The gooseberries appear to dwindle as they ripen. I am afraid few will remain for you, but you will find a sufficient number where you are. I intend to walk to Dunkeld, and to take two days. Al. Smith may come a bit with us.... All my little stock of news is exhausted. Pray remember me to my grand-aunt, Mrs ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... our Gospels cannot in any case necessarily indicate their existence ... It is unnecessary to add that, in proportion as we remove from Apostolic times without positive evidence of the existence and authenticity of our Gospels, so does the value of their testimony dwindle away. Indeed, requiring, as we do, clear, direct and irrefragable evidence of the integrity, authenticity, and historical character of these Gospels, doubt or obscurity on these points must inevitably be fatal to them as sufficient testimony—if they could, ...
— A Reply to Dr. Lightfoot's Essays • Walter R. Cassels
... clear. My impression, when I saw it first, was that it was as large as the man had been, and that it was, in some way, standing up on end, the legs towards me. But, the moment it came in view, it began to dwindle, and that so rapidly that, in a couple of seconds at most, a little heap of drapery was lying on the floor, on which was a truly astonishing example of the coleoptera. It appeared to be a beetle. It was, perhaps, ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... the cot. Why meet we there no wolf Save those huge-limbed? Because weak wolf-cubs die. 'Tis thus with man; 'tis thus with all things strong:— Rise higher on thy northern hills, my Pine! That Southern Palm shall dwindle. House stone-walled— Ye shall not have it! Temples cedar-roofed— Ye shall not build them! Where the Temple stands The City gathers. Cities ye shall spurn: Live in the woods; live singly, winning each, Hunter or fisher by blue lakes, his prey: Abhor the gilded shrine: the God Unknown In such ...
— Legends of the Saxon Saints • Aubrey de Vere
... suit the surrounding conditions. In the tropical region, so rich in bird life of all kinds, in forest, marsh, and savanna, they are everywhere abundant—food is plentiful there; but when we go to higher elevations avd cold sterile deserts, where their companion families of the tropics dwindle away and disappear, the creepers are still present, for they are evidently able to exist where other kinds would starve. On the stony plateaus of the Andes, and on the most barren spots in Patagonia, where no other bird is seen, there are small species of Synallaxis, which, ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... it would be frightening in more ways than one. But I see what you mean. There might be a sense of peace, but the minds and bodies which had been vibrating with the stir of power would feel that the soul had gone out of things, and they would dwindle too." ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Matthew on the street, and been gratified with his deferential bow. His bulk, to which, as a rotund lady, she had taken an antipathy, seemed to dwindle down as it was looked at. Matthew, whose ideal was a delicate woman with observable shoulder blades, had also, by repeated sights of Mrs. Frump, become reconciled to her ample proportions. Meantime, they had heard much, incidentally, of each ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... works, like the beginning and purpose of his intimacy with Elisa, are always large, comprehensive, and idealistic, but they always, even in his most important work, Merlin, dwindle to petty details of actuality. His significance for the present age does not so much rest on his objective achievement, as on some of his qualities which prevented achievement. He was perhaps the most considerable ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... were he either plunged into a deeper abyss, or taken up unchanged to his former abode of glory. This, in part at least, the monk of Whitby discerned; but it was reserved for Milton to embody it in that tremendous figure which has since continued to dwindle all the efforts of art, and to haunt, like a ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... with the rest, I saw the commerce dwindle, High-bosomed, sturdy vessels take the main And leave us, with the morning in their faces, Never to come to any port again. Slowly an ominous and pregnant silence Grew deep upon the wharves ...
— Carolina Chansons - Legends of the Low Country • DuBose Heyward and Hervey Allen
... Cholme, "can no longer afford to pass by one of her most brilliant sons. In the light of his magnificent achievement, the daring of a Peary, the nerve of a Shackleton, the indomitable persistence of a Marconi, dwindle and fade. We do not hesitate to say that since the capture of Gibraltar, the Empire has secured no such chance for consolidating her paramountcy in Europe. The present is no time for hesitation or delay. Mr. Carville is master of the situation. By ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... open again, replace each other, and ramify in innumerable branches over the surface of the soil, spreading life and fertility on all sides. As the land rises towards the south, this web contracts and is less confused, while black mould and cultivation alike dwindle, and the fawn-coloured line of the desert comes into sight. The Libyan and Arabian hills appear above the plain, draw nearer to each other, and gradually shut in the horizon until it seems as though they would unite. And there the ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... accident. "You stopped the horses, didn't you?" Hilda said, and the speculation in her eyes was concerned with the extent to which a muscular system might dwindle, in that climate, under ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... ask you, Dwindle," Jones said to his clerkish aide, "where, in this worldful of specialists, am I going to find someone with a well-rounded education? Much less one who'll take a chance on a ...
— Master of None • Lloyd Neil Goble
... smoke came thundering upon the lovers. Dazed, they felt the yellow bar of carriage-windows brush in vibration across their faces. The ground and the air rocked. Then Siegmund turned his head to watch the red and the green lights in the rear of the train swiftly dwindle on the darkness. Still watching the distance where the train ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... well here explain, though somewhat out of order, a peculiarity in reference to the roots of this species: it dies down in early autumn, and the crown seems to retire within the ball of its roots, which are a matted mass of fibres, and not only does it seem to retire, but also to dwindle, so that anyone, with a suspicion, who might be seeking for the vital part, might easily be misled by such appearances, which are further added to by the fact that the species does not start into growth until a late date compared with others of the genus. So peculiar are the ...
— Hardy Perennials and Old Fashioned Flowers - Describing the Most Desirable Plants, for Borders, - Rockeries, and Shrubberies. • John Wood
... satisfied that my father had found the merchant's conversation attractive. It seemed to give me some excuse for my breach of Miss Peckham's golden rule. Moreover, little troubles and offences which seemed mountains at Bellevue Cottage were apt to dwindle into very surmountable molehills with my larger-minded parents. I was comparatively at ease again. My father had evidently seen nothing unusual in my conduct, so I hoped that it had not been conspicuous. Possibly I might never meet Mr. Smith any more. I rather hoped ...
— Mrs. Overtheway's Remembrances • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... gifts undeniably, but he was young and could wait. This was a taking argument with the legislators, many of whom had grown gray in the party service, and Lyons's managers felt confident that the support accorded to this tribune of the people would dwindle to very small proportions when the time came ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... which they devoted to our Revolution. These books he grouped according to the amount of information they gave about Pitt and Burke and English sympathy with us in our quarrel with George III. These groups are five in number, and dwindle down from group one, "Textbooks which deal fully with the grievances of the colonists, give an account of general political conditions in England prior to the American Revolution, and give credit to prominent Englishmen for the services ...
— A Straight Deal - or The Ancient Grudge • Owen Wister
... would seem to have especial reference to the maintenance of the same numeric proportions in all times, that, while a Class is represented by few types, those types are wonderfully rich and varied, but in proportion as other expressions of the same structure are introduced, the first dwindle, and, if they do not entirely disappear, become at least ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... had stood; the cause may lie in the exterminating wars carried on between the several savage tribes, leaving, occasionally, no vestige of once powerful nations and villages. Have we not seen in our day a once warlike and princely race—the Hurons— dwindle down, through successive decay, to what now ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... are past. The noble prey, too persistently and mercilessly pursued, has retired northward, and hidden among the icebergs. Now, when a ship's crew win a cargo, they win it from the clutches of eternal frost. It seems certain that the fishery will dwindle, year after year, until, at last, only a few adventurers will linger near the pole, to watch for the rare game that once furnished light for the civilized world. All this is very unpleasant for New Bedford; but are we to have no more oil? Is nature ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... have their peculiar tastes. Cut off the supply of phosphate of lime from a field of corn, and it will not grow. You can easily do this by planting the same land with corn for three or four successive years, and your crop will dwindle away to nothing, unless you supply the ground every year with as much of the mineral as the corn takes away from it. All plants have the power of selecting from the soil the materials necessary to their growth; and if they do not find them in the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... unfolding! Two hands have come floating From no one sees where; 410 Place a bucket of vodka, A large pile of bread On the magic white napkin, And dwindle away. ...
— Who Can Be Happy And Free In Russia? • Nicholas Nekrassov
... its sign in the narrow, tightly-closed form of the body of the letters a, d, g, o, q, the a and o often being merely a narrow v. The general tendency of the writing is to compression, the final strokes being very short. When very marked, the letters dwindle into an indistinct unformed condition. The substitution of dashes ...
— The Detection of Forgery • Douglas Blackburn
... father of Sindbad was taken to Almighty Allah, much wealth came to the possession of his son; but soon did it dwindle in boon companionship, for the city of Baghdad is sweet to the youthful. Then did Sindbad bethink him how he might restore his fortune, saying to himself: "Three things are better than other three; the day of death is better than the day of birth, a live dog ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol. I • Various
... tadpole swims as a fish does—by the movement, side-ways, of its tail. For the unassisted eye, and still more for the microscope, what spectacle can be more marvelous than the gradual process of change by which this tiny fish becomes a reptile? Legs bud; the fish-like gills dwindle by a vital process of absorption; the fish-like air-bladder becomes transmuted, as by a miracle, into the celled structure of lungs; the tail grows daily shorter, not broken off, but absorbed; the heart adds to its cells; the fish becomes a reptile as the ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... MS., a great favorite of mine. There are excellent things otherwise, as must be when he says them: one of the most radiant of benevolences with one of the most refined of intellects! How the paper seems to dwindle as I would fain talk on more. I have performed a great exploit, ridden on a donkey five miles deep into the mountains to an almost inaccessible volcanic ground not far from the stars. Robert on horseback, and Wilson and the nurse (with baby) on other donkeys; guides, of course. We set off ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... sinecures in the State. They make their student-years but a pretext for a life of rough debauchery, from which they issue with a bought diploma; and, in many cases, satiated and disgusted with their own lives, they dwindle down into the timeserving reactionaries, the worst enemies of free development, because they themselves have abused in youth the little ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... of expanding, diminished in a marked degree. British farmers of long experience look back to 1874 as the last of the really good years, and consider that the palmy days of British agriculture began to dwindle at about that time. The shadow of the approaching depression had already fallen upon the land before the year 1875 had run its course, and the outlook became ominous as the decade of the 'seventies neared its close. One memorable ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... the reason? Tell us, Muses and Graces, what can it be? Is it the conservative power of sea fogs and coal smoke—the same cause that keeps the turf green, and makes the holly and ivy flourish? How comes it that our married ladies dwindle, fade, and grow thin—that their noses incline to sharpness, and their elbows to angularity, just at the time of life when their island sisters round out into a comfortable and becoming amplitude and fulness? If it is the fog and the sea ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... loss o' a place I am on the point o' leavin' for the hame o' a' hames—the dwellin' o' a' the loves, withoot the dim memory or foresicht o' which—I'm thinkin' they maun be aboot the same thing—we could never hae lo'ed this auld place as we du, an' whaur, ance I'm in, a'thing doon here maun dwindle ootworthied by reason o' the glory that excelleth—I dinna mean the glory o' pearls an' gowd, or even o' licht, but the glory o' love an' trowth. But gien I've ever had onything to ca' an ambition, Cosmo, it has been that my son should be ane o' the wise, wi' faith to believe ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... undertook to think about it," said Thorndyke. "I never reject a case off-hand unless it is obviously fishy. It is surprising how difficulties, and even impossibilities, dwindle if you look at them attentively. My experience has taught me that the most unlikely case is, at least, worth ...
— The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman
... of the drunkard, for the drink difficulty lies at the root of everything. Nine-tenths of our poverty, squalor, vice, and crime spring from this poisonous tap-root. Many of our social evils, which overshadow the land like so many upas trees, would dwindle away and die if they were not constantly watered with strong drink. There is universal agreement on that point; in fact, the agreement as to the evils of intemperance is almost as universal as the conviction that politicians ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... will be some time before he is unable to get what he wants, at a price. However splendid and vital the new movement may be, it will not, I fancy, unaided, kill the business of picture-making. The trade will dwindle; but I suspect it will survive until there is no one who can afford ostentatious upholstery, until the only purchasers are those who willingly make sacrifices for the joy of ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... preventing the Protestant boys dressing up the figure on the first of July, and walking round it. That was the death-blow of the Orange party, your hanner; they never recovered it, but began to despond and dwindle, and I with them; for there was scarcely any demand for Orange tunes. Then Dan O'Connell arose with his emancipation and repale cries, and then instead of Orange processions and walkings, there were Papist processions and mobs, which made me afraid to stir out, lest knowing me for an Orange ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... lad quenched the rush, And cried, "Bring a gorse-bush, And under the caldron now kindle!"— But the Miller cried, "Nay! Give over, I pray!"— For his courage began fast to dwindle. ...
— The Baron's Yule Feast: A Christmas Rhyme • Thomas Cooper
... well that garb becomes her poor parents' circumstances!—And how would they look upon me, thought I to myself, when they should come to be threadbare and worn out? And how should I look, even if I could purchase homespun clothes, to dwindle into them one by one, as I got them?—May be, an old silk gown, and a linsey-woolsey petticoat, and the like. So, thought I, I had better get myself at once equipped in the dress that will become my condition; and though it may look but poor to what I have been ...
— Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded • Samuel Richardson
... disappointment, it is in itself disappointment; it is not what it expected to be; and it finds nothing which confronts it quite, if at all, responsive to the inward vision. The greatest, the loveliest things in the world lose their iridescence or dwindle before it. The old come to things measurably prepared to see them as they are, take them for what they are worth; but the young are the prey of impassioned prepossessions which can never ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells |
