"Imperceptible" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of argillaceous beds, which intervene between the two coal-seams. This same displacement has also been traced downward more than 150 feet below the metal coal, but it grows continually less and less until it becomes imperceptible. ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... will take notice that there is movement here—of the heart, of the lungs, of the stomach—faint, imperceptible under ordinary circumstances, ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve
... the temperature had changed, and in the cooler air the almost imperceptible melting of the snow had ...
— How to Cook Husbands • Elizabeth Strong Worthington
... also seemed to have remained cold and indifferent. At times her great eyes rested on Camille and fixedly gazed at him with sovereign calm. On such occasions her lips alone made almost imperceptible little motions. Nothing could be read on her expressionless countenance, which an inexorable will always maintained gentle and attentive. Therese became grave when the conversation turned to her marriage, contenting herself with approving all that Madame Raquin said by a sign of the ...
— Therese Raquin • Emile Zola
... functionary, and went away without seeing that gentleman's almost imperceptible shrug as he ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... O'Dwyer, as he combined an Irish jig and a Red River reel. He had not noticed Me-Casto, but Latimer and Danvers exchanged glances. Just then Pine Coulee looked wistfully toward the opening door. Burroughs, ever watchful, caught a glimpse of Me-Casto as his lips gave an almost imperceptible signal to Pine Coulee. The trader's anger was quick; his discretion slight. He struck the ...
— A Man of Two Countries • Alice Harriman
... imperceptible odor will become perceptible in a small inclosure, such as a closed carriage. The ghost of gasoline rising from a lady's glove might be sweeter to the man riding beside her than all the scents of Arcady in spring. It depends ...
— The Turmoil - A Novel • Booth Tarkington
... an infantile infatuation for him, and would cease crying or go to sleep peacefully if only he could gather a clump of Septimus's hair in his tiny fingers. He missed a thousand gossamer trifles—each one so imperceptible, all added together so significant. He was not in the least cosy and comfortable with his old villain of ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... came into vogue again, but only for a season; for, as his wealth and popularity augmented, that title, by imperceptible stages, grew up into "Judge;" indeed' it bade fair to swell into "General" bye and bye. All strangers of consequence who visited the village gravitated to the Hawkins Mansion and became ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... signals in a jargon which to a layman would have been unintelligible, illustrating them by certain almost imperceptible shiftings of the fingers or changes in the position of his hand, so slight as to thwart discovery. Through it all the girl stood by and followed his every word and motion with eager attention. She needed no explanation ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... as though success would crown his efforts almost at the outset, for in 1858, the laying of a cable was completed, and for some days, messages were sent from one continent to the other. Then the signals began to grow fainter and fainter, until they became imperceptible, supposedly from the water of the ocean ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson
... replaced it in her purse, together with the ticket, and left the shop without a word; while the tricky pawnbroker looked after her, a smile of cunning triumph wreathing his coarse lips, as he gleefully washed his hands, behind the counter, with "invisible soap in imperceptible water." ...
— The Masked Bridal • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... host, we found, was entrusted with the privilege of showing the castle by the Count de Muy, in whose family he had been a servant; and he accordingly accompanied us in our visit thither. On gaining the level of the terrace, we found the wind, which had been imperceptible in the town, blowing with such force, as to account for[18] Mad. de Sevigne's fears lest her daughter should be carried away from her "belle terrasse" by the force of the Bise. Persons travelling to the south of France for the sake ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... musical abilities. I spent half an hour the morning after our arrival in turning out the national airs of Russia. Molostoff amused himself by circulating his cap before an invisible audience and collecting imperceptible coin. While dancing to one of my liveliest airs he upset a flower pot, and the crash that followed brought our concert to a close. Two sides of the large room were entirely bordered with horticultural productions, some of them six or eight ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... in its curved and imperceptible fall, the sun sank low, and from glowing white changed to a dull red without rays and without heat, as if about to go out suddenly, stricken to death by the touch of that gloom brooding over a crowd ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... trust, a multi-millionaire banker, a financial Magnate known throughout the civilized world as the most rapacious miser on record. This man has repeatedly shown that he has no regard for honesty of purpose, and his moral appreciation is imperceptible. To recount the deeds of cunning, of fraud, of gigantic robbery that he has committed in his relentless quest for wealth, would be to retell the story of wrecked railroads, enormously profitable bond ...
— The Transgressors - Story of a Great Sin • Francis A. Adams
... the forest, and formed the bed of one of those wild, dark, and thickly wooded ravines so common in America. As it neared the Detroit, however, the abruptness of its banks was so considerably lessened, as to render the approach to it on the town side over an almost imperceptible slope. Within a few yards of its mouth, as we have already observed in our introductory chapter, a rude but strong wooden bridge, over which lay the high road, had been constructed by the French; and from the centre of this, all the circuit ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... piece of bark revealed to us two scorpions with enormous bellies, and heads so small as to be almost imperceptible; all they did was to stiffen out their tails, which are composed of six divisions, the last terminating in ...
— Adventures of a Young Naturalist • Lucien Biart
... in the offer, Natasha," replied Colston, flushing with pleasure and glancing towards Radna the while. Radna answered with an almost imperceptible sign of consent, and Colston went on: "If it were ...
— The Angel of the Revolution - A Tale of the Coming Terror • George Griffith
... think the snow covered by a very fine dust, but if your eyes are good, and you place your face within eighteen or twenty inches of the snow, you can easily discern the snow flea. Although so small as to be almost imperceptible to the naked eye, yet they are most active, jumping from twelve ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls - Volume XIII, No. 51: November 12, 1892 • Various
... open the door wider, he worked through the narrow aperture, inch by inch, stopping every few seconds for fear that the rustle of his shirt against the jamb might be overheard. At length, by almost imperceptible movements, he succeeded in gaining the head of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... is spiritual. Descending from Jehovah the Lord, and passing through the angelic heavens, the Divine (in itself ineffable and imperceptible) became level with the perception of angels and finally the perception of man. Hence the Word has a spiritual sense, which is within the natural, just as the soul is in the body, or as thought is in ...
— The Gist of Swedenborg • Emanuel Swedenborg
... him!" thought Brice, as they sat down to dinner. Two or three of the village girls waited upon them, and in the open doorway sat a vision of loveliness, arrayed in yellow muslin, and directing the movements of the girls by almost imperceptible motions ...
— The Ebbing Of The Tide - South Sea Stories - 1896 • Louis Becke
... into profound night, only broken by the blue and sulphurous flashes which darted from the pitchy cloud. Soon the thick rain of thin, light ashes, almost imperceptible to the touch, fell upon the land. Then quickly succeeded shower of small pumice stones and heavier ashes, and emitting stifling eruptic fumes. After a time the sounds of approaching torrent were ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... twelve to fourteen hundred francs per year. He then compared the situation of mill-hands paid in proportion to the prices obtained by their employers with that of laborers who receive fixed wages, and found that the difference is almost imperceptible. This result might easily have been foreseen. Economic phenomena obey laws as abstract and immutable as those of numbers: it is only privilege, fraud, and absolutism ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... score of beauty between the crystal and the shell, let us say once more, is imperceptible. But fix attention for a moment, not upon their appearance, but upon their possibilities, upon their relation to the future, and upon their place in evolution. The crystal has reached its ultimate stage of development. It can never be more beautiful ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... grating. They pick themselves up and begin again. The sky is superb; the weather is hot, calm and propitious for those in search of the Lizard crushed beside the footpath. Perhaps the effluvia of the gamy tit-bit have reached them, coming from afar, imperceptible to any other sense than that of the Sexton-beetles. So my Necrophori are fain ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... something auroral even about the mantelpiece—a little like diplomatists using a common tongue native to neither of them. Perhaps Alicia drew the conventions round her with the greater fluency; Hilda had more to cover, but was less particular about it. The only thing she was bent upon making imperceptible was her sense of the comedy of Miss Livingstone's effort to receive her as if she had been anybody else. Alicia was hardly aware of what she wanted to conceal, unless it was her impression that Miss Howe's dress was cut a trifle too low in the neck, that she was almost too effective in that ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... experience of the flux and vanity of natural things on which Plato himself had built his heaven of ideas, persuaded him that reality and substantiality, in any eulogistic sense, must belong rather to the imperceptible and eternal. Only that which is never an object of sense or experience can be the root and principle of experience and sense. Only the invisible and changeless can be the substance of a moving show. God could now be apprehended and believed ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... would lose her breath in the fear and pleasure of it. She could not understand it. And then it would disappear as strangely as it had come. There was never another sound. Hardly more than a faint buzzing, an imperceptible resonance, fainter and fainter, in the blue air. Only she knew that it was yonder, on the other side of the mountain, and thither she must go, go as soon as possible: for there lay happiness. Ah! If only she could ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... was unequally matched with an adversary whose natural dialectical ability had been tempered and sharpened in many campaigns. There is noticeable, too, on the American side, a labored effort at acuteness of discrimination, an adroitness to exaggerate shades of difference practically imperceptible, and an aptitude to give and take offence, not so evident under the preceding Administration. These suggest irresistibly the absence, over Madison the President, of a moderating hand, which had been held over Madison the ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... had admired across the table during dinner. He did not like her, and he thought now of the young girls he would meet if he accepted her invitation. Lady Seveley was a shadow; and when the shadow defined itself he saw the slight wrinkling of the skin about the eyes, the almost imperceptible looseness of the flesh about the chin; but, worse to him than these physical changes, were the hard measured phrases in which there is knowledge of the savour and worth of life. He unpacked his portmanteau, ...
— Spring Days • George Moore
... box, Machin!" Robert Brindley greeted the alderman with an almost imperceptible wink. Edward Henry had encountered this wink once or twice before; he could not decide precisely what it meant; it was apt to make him reflective. He did not dislike Robert Brindley, his habit was not to dislike people; he admitted Brindley to be a clever architect, though he objected to ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... two characteristic aspects of one and the same world. These perfectly interpenetrate the one the other, if we may help ourselves with the language of space. Each is everywhere present. Furthermore, these actions of reason and aspects of world shade into one another by imperceptible degrees. Almost all functionings of reason have something of the qualities of both. However, when all is said, it was of greatest worth to have had these two opposite poles of thought brought clearly to mind. The dogmatists, in the ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... Rhamda glanced, then back again; and a quick satisfied smile came to his mouth. He gave an almost imperceptible nod. And, keeping his gaze fixed upon her eyes, he ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... satisfactory pace, probably because Bucephalus, the fat pony, objected to the enthusiasm of our send-off. When we reached the road he dropped into an amble so gentle that we decided that he had really been running away in the drive. Next, taking advantage of an almost imperceptible upward slope, he began to walk. Haynes clucked at him and flapped the reins, but this had no effect beyond steering Bucephalus into ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 12, 1917 • Various
... universe are bound by the universal law of cause and effect. The effect is visible or perceptible, while the cause is invisible or imperceptible. The falling of an apple from a tree is the effect of a certain invisible force called gravitation. Although the force cannot be perceived by the senses, its expression is visible. All perceptible phenomena are but the various expressions of different ...
— Reincarnation • Swami Abhedananda
... dim and shadowy in the creeping dusk when Winston sat on a redwood stringer near the head of his partly-finished bridge. There was no sound from the hollow behind him but the faint gurgle of the creek, and the almost imperceptible vibration of countless minute wings. The birches which climbed the slope to it wound away sinuously, a black wall on either hand, and the prairie lying gray and still stretched back into the silence in front ...
— Winston of the Prairie • Harold Bindloss
... the Yankee's face moved; he preserved the grave and solemn appearance of a man to whom a sacred trust has been confided, and who is fully penetrated with the importance of his mission. Once or twice, however, I observed him give a keen but almost imperceptible glance around him, as if to observe the effect of his ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... that distant objects seemed much nearer from the distinctness with which their outlines were revealed. The road was a magnificent one,—broad, well paved, well graded,—and though for some miles it was steadily ascending, yet the ascent was made by such an easy slope, that it was really imperceptible; and they bowled along as easily and as merrily as if on level ground. Moreover, the scenery around was of the most attractive character. They were among the mountains; and though there were no snow-clad summits, and no lofty peaks lost amid the ...
— Among the Brigands • James de Mille
... how slow and almost imperceptible has been the development of this nature! How gently and gradually the expanding influences, human and divine, have been let in upon its latent faculties! See with what delicate fostering the petals of love, faith, and hope were taught to open, little by little, their ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... only experiences no fear, but who even expects the event in question, however unexpected it may be. His lips wore a smile as he watched the masked man, and had the guests not been so preoccupied with the two principal actors in this scene, they might have remarked the almost imperceptible sign exchanged between the eyes of the bandit and the young noble, and transmitted instantly by the ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... meeting was interrupted by a doctor looking in to prescribe for Miss Carden's cold. The said cold was imperceptible to vulgar eyes, but Grace had detected it, and had written to her friend, Dr. Amboyne, to come and make it as imperceptible to ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... is now imperceptible and permanent, now periodical and violent; it depends upon the course which property takes. In a country where the property is pretty evenly distributed, and where little business is done,—the rights and claims of each being balanced by those of others,—the power of invasion is destroyed. ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... policy. He was on the point of saying something himself, to make the chance which he had determined to give her still better, when the servant announced another visitor. The duchess, on hearing the name—it was that of an Italian prince—gave a little imperceptible pout, and said to Newman, rapidly: "I beg you to remain; I desire this visit to be short." Newman said to himself, at this, that Madame d'Outreville intended, after all, that they should discuss ...
— The American • Henry James
... Estlin justly observes, "we have not yet in any great degree experienced, as the mental habits of those who hold it in speculation were in general formed, before they had adopted their present principles, by the imperceptible influence of that religion which they now traduce."[19] Perhaps the nearest approach to a state of prevailing Atheism which has ever been exhibited in the history of the world, is to be found in France at the era of the first Revolution, when Christianity was publicly abjured, and the goddess ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... as the doctor said had to be done. Mrs. Meredith had been very kind during her illness, had often been to the house. They kept from her of course all knowledge of what Marguerite had disclosed in her delirium. So when Marguerite by imperceptible degrees grew stronger, Mrs. Meredith begged that she might be moved out to the country for the change and the coolness and the quiet; and the doctors availed themselves of this plan as a solution of their ...
— The Mettle of the Pasture • James Lane Allen
... all of us, and seem to be something more than shrewd or lucky guesses, may be referred to the same power which we find, in the case just quoted, more perfectly developed. Nothing supernatural, but a natural gift, imperceptible to us in its familiar, moderate, and healthy exercise, brought first under our notice when some deranged adjustment of the mind has suffered it to grow into excess—to be, if we may call ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... nowhere more so than in the west of Cornwall. To have an object in view, yet be unable to advance it by any exertions of his own, was to him a source of constant irritation. He was wearied with the imperceptible growth of his crops, and complained that he made his eyes ache by watching their daily progress. He was not likely to excel in occupations so entirely uncongenial. The old people in the neighbourhood of Treverry speak with wonder of the fearlessness he displayed on different occasions, but ...
— The Life of Admiral Viscount Exmouth • Edward Osler
... course of things appears sufficiently armed, and made capable of all the effects that Heaven usually directs by a contagion. Among these causes and effects, this of the secret conveyance of infection, imperceptible and unavoidable, is more than sufficient to execute the fierceness of divine vengeance, without putting it upon supernaturals ...
— History of the Plague in London • Daniel Defoe
... wants to picture a poplar; or, having looked into a poultry-yard, wishes to call up a picture of a hen, experiences a difficulty—his different memories rise up. The experiment becomes a cause of effacement; the images canceling one another decline to a state of imperceptible tendencies which their likeness and unlikeness prevent from predominating. Images become blunted by their collision just as do ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... solar system, these wonderful objects have had a new interest for astronomers; and a comparison of orbits has often identified the return of a comet, and led to the detection of an elliptic orbit where the difference from a parabola was imperceptible in the small portion of the orbit visible to us. A remarkable case in point was the comet of 1556, of whose identity with the comet of 1264 there could be little doubt. Hind wanted to compute the orbit more exactly than Halley had done. He knew that observations ...
— History of Astronomy • George Forbes
... to my mind only an elaboration of Descartes' 'I think, therefore I am.' I am, presupposes that I have been, and will be. If you can't destroy one drop of water, you can't destroy me. If you drop the water on red-hot iron, it instantly becomes an imperceptible mist, the mere ghost of itself, but it will ultimately become fluid again. It seems to me that the scientific fact gives a sound basis for the ...
— The Master-Knot of Human Fate • Ellis Meredith
... good to Billy. Day by day, his strength was coming back to him, slowly and by almost imperceptible stages, it is true; but by looking back from month to month, they could see his steady progress. In his better days, he could walk about the rooms now, and even this slight advance had put ...
— Teddy: Her Book - A Story of Sweet Sixteen • Anna Chapin Ray
... matter I should be glad to remand to the psychologist, who will have work enough to do if he comes to inquire into such mysteries. One can never be certain just how the English take us, or how much, or whether they take us at all. Oftenest I was inclined to think that we were imperceptible to them, or that, when we were perceptible, they were aware of us as Swedenborg says the most celestial angels are aware of evil spirits, merely as something angular. Americans were distressful to their consciousness, they did ...
— Seven English Cities • W. D. Howells
... reply, but made an almost imperceptible motion to the sergeant of the force. The latter, and a private, quietly dismounted, produced a pair of handcuffs, and before Mr. Regan had recovered from his surprise, a sharp click was heard, and he was a prisoner, both wrists being confined by a ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... indefinitely in indistinct planes, ripple like shadows, and the wind playfully designs huge arabesques on their surfaces. The sea lies far away, so far, in fact, that its roar cannot be heard, though we could distinguish a sort of vague, aerial, imperceptible murmur, like the voice of the solitude, which perhaps was only the effect produced by ...
— Over Strand and Field • Gustave Flaubert
... sense, they signify a revolt from the purely intellectual view of man's nature; a recognition of the instincts and the passions, a vague intimation of sympathy between man and the world around him,—in one word, the sense of mystery. The narrower and the broader meanings pass into one another by imperceptible shades. They are affected by the well-known historic conditions for romantic feeling in the different European countries. The common factor, of course, is the man with the romantic world set in his heart. It is Gautier with ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... which the past became again and again the present. Evolution, on the contrary, prefers to begin with the distant past, to postulate formations, even if they have left no traces, and to speak of those almost imperceptible changes by which the postulated past became the perceptible present, as not only necessary, but as real. Perhaps the difference is of no importance, but the historical method seems certainly the more accurate, and the more satisfactory from a ...
— My Autobiography - A Fragment • F. Max Mueller
... uplifted arm alone, but the pose of the man, the something about his whole being, which bespoke the spirit within him, and which was really the gesture. In less positive or striking degrees of action, the body movement will, of course, be very slight, at times almost imperceptible, but the principle always holds, and should be from the first taught. In gesture, the bodily man acts as ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... contact is scarcely noticeable, we divine it rather than see it. It would have been profane to insist upon it, it would have been cruel not to have made us believe in it. All Rubens's furtive sensitiveness is in this imperceptible contact that says so many things, respects them all, and makes ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... have been here the air has been phenomenally still. One can go outside, as we do frequently, to feed the birds and squirrels without hats and not feel a hair stirred. Even when the snow was on the ground we never felt the cold, owing to the absence of wind, and the thaw has been imperceptible. Snow is still on the hills. I have several times thrown open my bedroom window about dawn for an hour to familiarise myself with the outside noises. There is nothing human within a quarter of a mile. (N.B.—The others, who are ...
— The Alleged Haunting of B—— House • Various
... which, in the course of ages, men and beasts have made in the dry sand. Far in front the sky-line danced in the heat. The sand around was strewn with greyish stones; everything was grey, grey-red or grey-yellow. Here and there was a plant of a pale green, with an imperceptible flower, and the long necks of the camels bent and ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... the death-stricken old man lay quietly in the torpor of mental and bodily exhaustion, with an imperceptible pulse and breath that grew fainter and fainter except when a long, deep and irregular inspiration seemed to prelude the ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... of accent in his voice—an almost imperceptible drawl, such as might remain in the speech of an American who had travelled widely and rubbed shoulders with all sorts and ...
— The Grell Mystery • Frank Froest
... Kinloch really loved the girl, with such love as she had to bestow; and if her manner had been latterly abstracted or harsh, it was from preoccupation. She was soon satisfied that the suspicion she dreaded had not found place in the girl's mind. Leading the way by imperceptible approaches, she spoke in her softest tones of her joy at Hugh's altered manners, her hopes of his future, and especially of her desire to have him leave the navy and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... here the child of poverty often has the advantage of the child of wealth. There are few things in the poverty-stricken home too good for him to play with; in its narrow quarters, he becomes, perforce, a part of all domestic activity. He learns the uses of household utensils, and his play merges by imperceptible degrees ...
— Study of Child Life • Marion Foster Washburne
... town did not, as now, fade by imperceptible degrees into the country. No long avenues of villas, embowered in lilacs and laburnum, extended from the great source of wealth and civilization almost to the boundaries of Middlesex, and far into the heart of Kent and Surrey." In short, ...
— Interludes - being Two Essays, a Story, and Some Verses • Horace Smith
... Rodaines had played with stacked cards, and so far every hand had been theirs. Fairchild's credit, and his standing, was ruined. He had been stamped by the coroner's jury as the son of a murderer, and that mark must remain upon him until it could be cleared by forces now imperceptible to Fairchild. His partner was under bond, accused of four crimes. The Rodaines had won a victory, perhaps greater than they knew. They had succeeded in soiling the reputations of the two men they called enemies, damaging ...
— The Cross-Cut • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... seemed like some happy soul sunning itself in the light of its own thoughts. Its power was so tranquil and even, that it was only a critic who could perceive how much force and vigor were necessary to sustain the wing that floated aloft with so imperceptible an effort. There was no one faculty predominating tyrannically over the others; all seemed proportioned in the felicitous symmetry of a nature rounded, integral, and complete. And when the work was closed, it left behind it a tender warmth that played around the heart of the reader, ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... jurisprudence are not likely to look upon these "natural modes" of acquisition as possessing, at first sight, either much speculative or much practical interest. The wild animal which is snared or killed by the hunter, the soil which is added to our field by the imperceptible deposits of a river, the tree which strikes its roots into our ground, are each said by the Roman lawyers to be acquired by us naturally. The older jurisconsults had doubtless observed that such acquisitions were universally sanctioned ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... end and no beginning. Each event is the product of an infinite series of causes, the starting-point of an infinite series of effects. Language and thought, government and manners, transform themselves by imperceptible degrees; with the result that every age is an age of transition, not fully intelligible unless regarded as the child of a past and the parent of a future. Even so the species of the animal and vegetable kingdoms shade off one into another until, if we only ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis
... think it worth the bowing and the smirking?" she asked, looking past him with innocent eyes. She made an imperceptible little movement toward him as if she expected him to whisper. She was of that school. But he was not. His was not the sort of mind to conceive any thought that required whispering. Some persons in fact went so far as to say that he was hopelessly dull, that he had no subtlety of thought, no brightness, ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... human beings. In old times he would have been exposed as soon as he came into the world; and to expose him would have been a kindness. From his birth a blight was on his body and on his mind. With difficulty his almost imperceptible spark of life had been screened and fanned into a dim and flickering flame. His childhood, except when he could be rocked and sung into sickly sleep, was one long piteous wail. Until he was ten years old his days were passed on the laps of women; ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... was busy organizing my notes in the lounge, when the captain opened the door and appeared. I bowed to him. He gave me an almost imperceptible bow in return, without saying a word to me. I resumed my work, hoping he might give me some explanation of the previous afternoon's events. He did nothing of the sort. I stared at him. His face looked ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... case. Beds in greenhouses should always be made up of manure that has been well prepared beforehand out of doors or in a shed, and as it is brought into the greenhouse it should at once be built solidly into the beds. Then very little steam will arise from the beds; in fact, it will be imperceptible ...
— Mushrooms: how to grow them - a practical treatise on mushroom culture for profit and pleasure • William Falconer
... let the soldiers tell their own tale. She went into the room where Josephine was reading to the baroness and Dr. Aubertin; she sat quietly down; but at the first opportunity made Josephine one of those imperceptible signals which women, and above all, sisters, have reduced to so subtle a system. This done, she went carelessly out: and Josephine in due course followed her, and ...
— White Lies • Charles Reade
... 1697, the silent forests about the little village of Exeter felt an almost imperceptible stir of life, for through it there stealthily crept an Indian chief, followed by one and then another of his frightful band. Each dressed in tawny skins like the creatures of the wood and with adornment of feathers from the very birds, ...
— Some Three Hundred Years Ago • Edith Gilman Brewster
... Mr. Montross, who nodded. Mr. Cray, also, made an almost imperceptible sign of concurrence. Magnelius Grandcourt, the sixty-year enfant terrible of the company, dreaded for his impulsive outbursts—though the effect of these outbursts was always very carefully considered before-hand—stepped jauntily across the floor, ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... while it lasted, thought it would prove; and now that my years are over I know to have been so. To the anxious, nervous, exciting, irritating tenor of my London life succeeded the calm, equable, and all but imperceptible control of my dear friend, whose influence over her children, the result of her wisdom in dealing with them, no less than of their own amiable dispositions, was absolute. In considering Mrs. Henry Siddons's character, when years had modified its first impression upon my own, my estimate ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... the rules were established by the House, he always moved to strike out this one. Year after year his motion was voted down, but year after year he renewed it with invincible perseverance. The majorities against him began to dwindle till they became almost imperceptible; in 1842 it was a majority of four; in 1843, of three; in 1844 the struggle was protracted for weeks, and Mr. Adams all but carried the day. It was evident that victory was not far off, and a kind fate (p. 306) had destined him to live not only ...
— John Quincy Adams - American Statesmen Series • John. T. Morse
... father had had his breakfast, he told him what he had discovered during the dark hours. The laird listened with the light of a smile, not the smile itself, upon his face, and made no answer; but Cosmo could see by the all but imperceptible motion of his lips that he ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... something there that I should know about, but which was so minute or remote that the impression did not come through. I stood there puzzled at my own reluctance to leave until something satisfied that almost imperceptible impression. ...
— Highways in Hiding • George Oliver Smith
... mum,' and indeed after scraping the dish all round with his knife and carrying the choice brown morsels to his mouth, and after taking such a scientific pull at the stone bottle that, by degrees almost imperceptible to the sight, his head went farther and farther back until he lay nearly at his full length upon the ground, this gentleman declared himself quite disengaged, and came forth from ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... individual is a slow process. The education of a family, of a community, or of a state is slower still. The education of a nation or of a race is so slow that its progress is difficult of measurement. Indeed, the movement of the race as a whole is so imperceptible that it leaves room for debate as to whether humanity is ...
— Rural Life and the Rural School • Joseph Kennedy
... from within, but from without, that this transformation in the spirit of England has been effected; not only from within by the work of a Sidney, a Gibbon, but from without by the influence, imperceptible yet sure, of the faiths and creeds of the Oriental peoples she conquers. The work of the Arabists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, such men as the Pocockes,[8] father and son, Ockley and Sale, supplements ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... here quite imperceptible. During the whole time of our stay, Reaumur's thermometer stood between ...
— A New Voyage Round the World in the Years 1823, 24, 25, and 26. Vol. 1 • Otto von Kotzebue
... employed in medicine. It has removed ignorance and national prejudices, and tended most materially to the diffusion of political and religious knowledge. The natural philosopher knows, that whatever affects, in the smallest degree, the remotest body in the universe, acts, though to us in an imperceptible manner, on every other body. So commerce acts; but its action is not momentary; its impulses, once begun, continue with augmented force. And it appears to us no absurd or extravagant expectation, that ...
— Robert Kerr's General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 18 • William Stevenson
... which pretty well supplied the place of heresy as a sharpener of hatred and an awakener of indefinable suspicion. Scepticism had been born into the world, almost more hateful than heresy, because it had the manners of good society and contented itself with a smile, a shrug, an almost imperceptible lift of the eyebrow,—a kind of reasoning especially exasperating to disputants of the old school, who still cared about victory, even when they did not about the ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... in all His doings, and in all, and through all, and over all.... All day, glimpses from the other world, floating motes from that inner transcendental life, have been floating across me.... Have you not felt that your real soul was imperceptible to your mental vision, except at a few hallowed moments? That in everyday life the mind, looking at itself, sees only the brute intellect, grinding and working, not the Divine particle, which is life and immortality, and on which the Spirit of God most probably works, as being most cognate ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... by suppuration, commonly met with in the fingers, less frequently in the toes. The point of infection is often trivial—a pin-prick, a puncture caused by a splinter of wood, a scratch, or even an imperceptible ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... whispered the young doctor in charge, as we paused at the door. "I want you to notice his face and his cough. His pulse seems very weak, almost imperceptible at times. The stethoscope reveals subcrepitant sounds all over his lungs. It's like bronchitis ...
— The Treasure-Train • Arthur B. Reeve
... the motion of it; for att every pulse, as it openeth, you may see it, and immediately againe, it shutteth in such sort, as it is not to be discerned. From this red specke, after a while there will streame out, a number of litle (almost imperceptible) red veines. Att the end of some of which, in time there will be gathered together, a knotte of matter which by litle and litle, will take the forme of a head; and you will ere long beginne to discerne eyes and a beake in it. All this while the first red spott of blood, groweth bigger ...
— Medical Investigation in Seventeenth Century England - Papers Read at a Clark Library Seminar, October 14, 1967 • Charles W. Bodemer
... not quickly, but little by little, and grain by grain. The desolate feeling with which I went abroad, deepened and widened hourly. At first it was a heavy sense of loss and sorrow, wherein I could distinguish little else. By imperceptible degrees, it became a hopeless consciousness of all that I had lost—love, friendship, interest; of all that had been shattered—my first trust, my first affection, the whole airy castle of my life; of all that remained—a ruined blank and waste, lying wide around me, unbroken, ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... the Emergency Hospital ambulance, on the afternoon of November 10th, with a history of having been run over by a hose-cart of the District Fire Department. The boy was in a state of extreme shock, having a weak, almost imperceptible pulse; his respirations were shallow and rapid, and his temperature subnormal. There were no signs of external injury about his thoracic cavity and no fracture of the ribs could be detected, although carefully searched for; there was marked emphysema; the neck and ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... his sabre. The same severe proscription he extended to every sort of furniture, or decorations of art, which sheltered even in the bosom of camps those habits of effeminate luxury—so apt in all great empires to steal by imperceptible steps from the voluptuous palace to the soldier's tent—following in the equipage of great leading officers, or of subalterns highly connected. There was at that time a practice prevailing, in the great standing camps on the several frontiers and at all the military stations, of renewing ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... and down as though to weigh the object, but the movement must be as imperceptible as possible. These little movements should diminish as the capacity and attention for perceiving the weight of the object becomes more acute and the exercise will be perfectly performed when the child comes to perceive the ...
— Dr. Montessori's Own Handbook • Maria Montessori
... recollected that for the last two weeks he had been deprived of various little attentions which for eighteen months had made life sweet to him. Now, as the nature of narrow minds induces them to study trifles, Birotteau plunged suddenly into deep meditation on these four circumstances, imperceptible in their meaning to others, but to him indicative of four catastrophes. The total loss of his happiness was evidently foreshadowed in the neglect to place his slipppers, in Marianne's falsehood about the fire, in the unusual removal of his candlestick to the table of the antechamber, and in ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... hymn in church. But he could accompany; he could improvise; he could modulate; he could transpose any simple air. The ease and readiness with which he did all this made less obvious—indeed, almost imperceptible—his fundamental unwillingness to abandon himself before others (especially if members of his own circle) to any manifestation that might be taxed with even a remote emotionalism. And yet, at that very time, he was ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller
... no sooner his foot within his master's apartment, than he found every object in harmony with his own disposition. The colours finely ground, and ranged in the neatest boxes, the pencils so delicate as to be almost imperceptible, the varnish in elegant phials, the easel just where it ought to be, filled him with agreeable sensations, and exalted ideas of his master's merit. Gerard Dow on his side was equally pleased, when he saw him moving about with all due circumspection, ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... was a hooded hawk. They were apparently waiting for somebody. In front, the Prince of Wales, being of an active turn of mind, was amusing himself by making his horse prance and curvet all about the green, and levelling invisible lances at imperceptible foes—to the intense ...
— The White Rose of Langley - A Story of the Olden Time • Emily Sarah Holt
... light lasts," he ordered, setting off over the rocks. The others followed close. Now sidling along knife-like ledges, now clinging by fingers and toes to almost imperceptible projections, they made their way across the face of the steep, and gained the mouth of the gallery. It was spacious, and easy to traverse, its floor sloping upwards somewhat steeply. They plunged into it with confidence. ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... others, the memory and understanding into itself, and concentrated them in LOVE;—not but that they still subsisted, but their operations were in a manner imperceptible and passive. They were no longer stopped or retarded by the multiplicity, but collected and united in one. So the rising of the sun does not extinguish the stars, but overpowers and absorbs them in the luster of ...
— The Autobiography of Madame Guyon • Jeanne Marie Bouvier de La Motte Guyon
... from the despoilers of beauty, but as from the vaunt-couriers of dissolution. In rosy youth, while yet the brow is alabaster-veined with Heaven's own tint, and the dark tresses turn golden in the sun, the lapse of time is imperceptible as the throbbing of a heart at ease. "So like, so very like, is day to day,"—one primrose scarce more like another. Whoever saw their first grey hairs, or marked the crow-feet at the angle of their eyes, without a sigh or a tear, a momentous ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 17, No. 483., Saturday, April 2, 1831 • Various
... day, however, for a final visit, and the day after to see them away, without any apparent breach in the confidence and friendship with which they regarded each other. There might be, perhaps, a faint almost imperceptible difference in Chatty, a little dignity like that which her mother had discovered in her, something that was not altogether the simple girl, younger than her years, whom Mrs. Warrender had brought to town. On the very last morning of all, Dick had also a look which was not very easy to be ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... there were the names of doctors whom he had heard of as celebrated men—one for the chest, another for the liver, another for the skin, another for the eyes; but, among all these famous men, who was the man best able to cope with the mysterious wasting away, the gradual, almost imperceptible ebbing of that one dear life which Valentine wanted ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... guaranty of a decent society, has been neglected; it was not disregarded by any conscious process, but the headlong events that have followed since the fifteenth century have steadily distorted our judgment and confused our standards of value even to reversal. By an imperceptible process other matters have come to engage our interest and control our action, until at last we are confronted by the nemesis of our own unwisdom, and we entertain the threat of a dissolving civilization just because ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... the hill, every spar, brick and beam, carried its bristle of gold. At her own head's imperceptible movement flashes came and went between the ribs of the Bishop's Palace. The sentry by the tunnel stood between the upper and the underground:—with his left eye he could watch the lights that strung back into the hollow hill, with his right, the smiling and winking of the stars ...
— The Happy Foreigner • Enid Bagnold
... body of men, viewed at that distance, is so small as almost to be imperceptible to the eye of an observer at rest. How much more difficult it is to distinguish a movement if the observer is ...
— Aeroplanes • J. S. Zerbe***
... marshes to his right and left cold mists arose and closed about him. A fine, imperceptible rain fell in the dark, and great drops gathered on his hair and clothes. His heart beat slowly, and a numbness crept through all his limbs. Then, looking up, two merry wisp lights came dancing. He lifted his head to look ...
— The Story of an African Farm • (AKA Ralph Iron) Olive Schreiner
... strong planes still holding it on its forward course. So gentle was the fall that it was almost imperceptible; but presently the distant earth below could be seen; and then ...
— The boy Allies at Liege • Clair W. Hayes
... last, the King received from Pere Tellier the final benediction of the Company, as one of its members; that Pere Tellier made the King offer up prayers, partly heard, of a kind to leave no doubt of the matter; and that he had given him the robe, or the almost imperceptible sign, as it were, a sort of scapulary, which was found upon him. To conclude, the majority of those who approached the King in his last moments attributed his penitence to the artifices and persuasions of the Jesuits, who, for temporal interests, deceive ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... record unless its history is well known, and unless it has been in the hands of responsible persons. The measurements of antler spread can be considered authentic only when the skull is intact. If the skull is split an almost imperceptible paring of the skull bones at the joint would suffice to drop the antlers either laterally out of their proper plane, or else pitch the main beam backward. By either of these devices a couple of inches can be gained on each side, making a ...
— American Big Game in Its Haunts • Various
... part of them with Count Daru. It was then only that he admitted the danger of his situation. "From Wilna to Moscow, what submission, what point of support, of rest, or of retreat, marked his power? It was a vast, bare, and desert field of battle, in which his diminished army was imperceptible, insulated, and, as it were, lost in the horrors of an immense void. In this country of foreign manners and religion he had not conquered a single individual: he was, in fact, master only of the ground on which he stood. That which he had just ...
— The Two Great Retreats of History • George Grote
... most inimitable manner, the gradual progress from the first origin. "He gives", as Lessing says, "a living picture of all the most minute and secret artifices by which a feeling steals into our souls; of all the imperceptible advantages which it there gains; of all the stratagems by which every other passion is made subservient to it, till it becomes the sole tyrant of our desires and our aversions." Of all poets, perhaps, he alone has pourtrayed the mental diseases,—melancholy, ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... when at night a warmer darkness fell from the sky where no moon was visible, a change began. She felt it, but it was so slight, so almost imperceptible, she feared that she might have been mistaken in the little sound she heard, which seemed unlike the usual noises she knew so well. She held her breath, as the sound seemed very long in returning. At last it came again, louder ...
— The Dream • Emile Zola
... faults. They say that Ignorance (Avidya) is the soul. Acts constitute the seed that is placed in that soil. Desire is the water that causes that seed to grow, in this way they explain rebirth. They maintain that that ignorance being ingrained in an imperceptible way, one mortal body being destroyed, another starts up immediately from it; and that when it is burnt by the aid of knowledge, the destruction of existence itself follows or the person attains to what is called Nirvana. This opinion also is erroneous. [This is the doctrine ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... being thus requested by the great sages, whose thoughts were profound, saluted them all with reverence and gave them a comprehensive answer, saying: Be it heard! This universe existed only in the first divine idea yet unexpanded, as if involved in darkness, imperceptible, undefinable, undiscoverable by reason, and undiscovered by revelation, as if it were wholly immersed in sleep; then the sole, self-existing power, himself undiscovered, but making this world discernible, with five elements and ...
— The Christian Foundation, February, 1880
... of nearly all deductive reasoning the handwriting expert becomes sensitive to slight suggestions. If called upon, as he sometimes is, to explain to others how and why one of these slight and almost imperceptible signs fit in with his theory, he fails. Therefore the cautious expert, like a good judge, is careful in giving reasons for his judgment only to cite ...
— The Detection of Forgery • Douglas Blackburn
... something coming to us from my mother's fortune; the interest of this my father was to receive during our absence. This consideration did not present itself to him directly, nor did it stand in the way of his doing his duty; it had, however, a silent, and to himself imperceptible, influence, and at times slackened his zeal, which, unacted upon by this, would have been carried much farther. This, I think, was the reason, that, having traced me as far as Annecy, he did not follow me ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... of the lameness will vary with the rapidity of the gait, and with the character of the road upon which the animal is made to travel. For instance, many animals in which the lameness is imperceptible at a walk become 'dead' lame at a fast trot. It is sufficiently explained when one remembers the greater movements of expansion and contraction of the posterior parts of the wall brought about by the increase in the rate of progression. The same animal, too, will go distinctly ...
— Diseases of the Horse's Foot • Harry Caulton Reeks
... valley below bathed in autumn, the glistening rivers half spent with the long summer drought, and the green slopes rolling upward into crest after crest of ascending pines. At times a drifting haze, always imperceptible from below, veiled the view; a chill wind blew through the vehicle, and made the steel sledge-runners that hung beneath the wagon, ready to be shipped under the useless wheels, an ominous provision. A few rude "stations," half blacksmith shops, half grocery, ...
— From Sand Hill to Pine • Bret Harte
... reference to visual as well as to audible or other sensations, I will understand that all I am entitled to, and all I can, without hopeless contradiction, postulate as real thing existing independently of my perception, is a transmutation of Energy. This energy is imperceptible, unextended, unfigured, yet it is by no means a mere logical or mental necessity or associative tendency. On the contrary, it is very real. It sustains my every act. By an imperative mental necessity I am obliged, by inference from my experiences as an active and percipient ...
— Essays Towards a Theory of Knowledge • Alexander Philip
... friend's brother scarcely spoke at all, and when he did his voice was so low that I had great difficulty in understanding him. When we asked him any question by gesticulating we had to listen most attentively to catch his reply, and I noticed that an almost imperceptible smile lighted up for an instant his stony face. I understood very soon that this man hated humanity, and that he avenged himself in his own way for ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... palpable wetness. Just how it displaced the air in its path, is something which I cannot with certainty say. Was it formed as a low layer somewhere over the lake and slowly pushed along by a gentle, imperceptible, fan-shaped current of air? Fan-shaped, I say; for, as we shall see, it travelled simultaneously south and north; and I must infer that in exactly the same way it travelled west. Or was it formed originally like a tremendous ...
— Over Prairie Trails • Frederick Philip Grove
... in the same moment a sickening vision of disappointment. He could not trust his mother's insight; she had seen what she wished to see. And yet—and yet, now the suggestion had been made to him, he remembered so many things, very slight things, like the stirring of the water by an imperceptible breeze, which seemed to him some confirmation of ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... these greater works, swarms the innumerable legion of satirical fabliaux and laughable tales. They, too, cross the sea, slight, imperceptible, wandering, thus continuing those migrations so difficult to trace, the laws of which learned men of all nations have vainly sought to discover. They follow all roads; nothing stops them. Pass the mountains and you will find them; ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... crystal summit ridges delighted us as did the changing waters in the path of the steamer. Following immediately upon the transparency preserved to a depth of some eighty feet, a blur passed over the surface. This changed by imperceptible degrees to a light green. The green, again, speedily deepened, shading into a light blue; and finally, in deepest water (where the Lake is all but fathomless), the color becomes so densely blue that we could not believe ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... change their opinion. The course of a great statesman resembles that of navigable rivers, avoiding immovable obstacles with noble bends of concession, seeking the broad levels of opinion on which men soonest settle and longest dwell, following and marking the almost imperceptible slopes of national tendency, yet always aiming at direct advances, always recruited from sources nearer heaven, and sometimes bursting open paths of progress and fruitful human commerce through what seem the eternal ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... conscious of each other's plans. Strangely enough, it was the REAL animal alone—their nameless dog—who now betrayed impatience and a certain human infirmity of temper. The concealment they were resigned to, the sufferings they mutely accepted, he alone resented! When certain scents or sounds, imperceptible to their senses, were blown across their path, he would, with bristling back, snarl himself into guttural and strangulated fury. Yet, in their apathy, even this would have passed them unnoticed, but that on the second night he disappeared suddenly, returning ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte
... speak with them." The respiration of the spirits of Mars was also communicated to me[ii], and it was perceived that it proceeded from the region of the chest towards the navel, and thence flowed upwards through the breast, with an imperceptible breathing (halitus) towards the mouth. From these facts, and also from other experiential proofs, it was made evident to me that they were of a celestial genius, consequently, that they were not unlike those who belonged to the Most Ancient ...
— Earths In Our Solar System Which Are Called Planets, and Earths In The Starry Heaven Their Inhabitants, And The Spirits And Angels There • Emanuel Swedenborg
... stopped him rather short. Anthony March had taken off the ill-fitting khaki blouse and the sleeves of his olive-drab uniform shirt were rolled up above the elbows. He was sitting sidewise on the piano bench, his left hand on the keyboard, his right making imperceptible changes in the tension of one of the strings. His implement, John's quick eye noticed, was not the long-handled L shaped affair he had always seen tuners use but a T shaped thing that put the tuner's hand exactly above ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... to imply," answered Allan, "that being an heiress renders the blemish imperceptible—no, it is her truly amiable disposition, her goodness, and engaging manners which makes her so beautiful to ...
— Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXII No. 4, April 1848 • Various
... Over this the long, salt grass is artfully arched, to conceal it from the view above; but this very circumstance enables the experienced egg-hunter to distinguish the spot at the distance of thirty or forty yards, though, imperceptible to a common eye. The eggs are of a pale clay color, sprinkled with small spots of dark red, and measure somewhat more than an inch and a half in length by an inch in breadth, being rather obtuse at the small end. These eggs are delicious eating, far surpassing ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 5 November 1848 • Various
... interior of the pile to one of the terraced roofs, or another slowly sank from sight, as if descending into the interior of the earthy heap. On the outside, beams leaned against it, and on them people went up and down, as if climbing ladders. Thin films of smoke quivered in the air from imperceptible flues. ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier
... smile was not always the same, but continually variable through the medium of earthly influences. The great slanting beam of sunshine was visible all the way down to the pavement, falling upon motes of dust, or a thin smoke of incense imperceptible in the shadow. Insects were playing to and fro in the beam, high up toward the opening. There is a wonderful charm in the naturalness of all this, and one might fancy a swarm of cherubs coming down through the opening and sporting in the broad ray, to gladden ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... man enough to deserve her; but that was beyond his magnanimity. The only way to bear it, for the present at least, was to leave the "other fellow" out of the question. He was glad he did not know his name. And all night long, as he watched the stars, their slow, imperceptible progress marked only by the intervening tree-twigs, Dorothy's face was fairly visible to him, her voice came to him distinct as an echo; her sweet, free nature unfolded itself to ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... ledge the going was harder. A steeper trail, in places nearly imperceptible, led between thick scrub and overhanging trees, thickly forested. In spots their twisted roots obscured the trail; in others the persistent growth had thrust aside rocks and dirt. We had to make our way through tangles of underbrush which ...
— The Planet Savers • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... individual particularly irresistible in the eyes of the fair. Readers of modern French fiction are aware that the heroes of those edifying tales invariably wear the mustache "hardiment retroussee," which habit doubtless adds a subtle charm to their singularly puerile and fatuous conversation imperceptible to ...
— Dross • Henry Seton Merriman
... speak," she said, stepping back a pace, and an almost imperceptible jar coming into her voice. Then she came close again. "The fault you will have to find with me is this, Jasper," she said, looking fully at him with her sweet eyes; "I shall love you, if anything, ...
— A Young Mutineer • Mrs. L. T. Meade
... a month later, about the end of September or the beginning of October. The season being still propitious, I was led to suppose that the young larvae must at once make a start and disperse, in order that each might seek to gain access, through some imperceptible fissure, to an Anthophora-cell. This presumption turned out to be entirely at fault. In the boxes in which I had placed the eggs laid by my captives, the young larvae, little black creatures at most a twenty-fifth of an inch long, did not move ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... next stopping-place, lies on the almost imperceptible watershed which separates the Herat valley from the Caspian Sea. This city, only a few months ago, was entirely destroyed by a severe earthquake. Under date of January 28, 1894, the American press reported: "The bodies of ten thousand victims of the awful disaster ...
— Across Asia on a Bicycle • Thomas Gaskell Allen and William Lewis Sachtleben
... grave bow with an almost imperceptible movement of the head, and for a moment they looked hard at ...
— Roden's Corner • Henry Seton Merriman
... night, at summer's close, when the dark blue of the sky was unusually deep and luminous, and the moon only a tender crescent of light, I lay on the grass in the darkness, under my favorite tree, an oak, among whose boughs the almost imperceptible moonbeams rioted. I was hidden by the shadows of a little grove just in front of me. The path passed between, about a couple of yards away. Every stroller seemed to have gone, and I had, I thought, the peace of the surroundings ...
— The Young Seigneur - Or, Nation-Making • Wilfrid Chateauclair
... what could Grant or Sherman have done, if it had not been for the thousands of brave privates who were content to do each their imperceptible little,—if it had not been for the poor, unnoticed, faithful, never-failing common soldiers, who did the work and bore the suffering? No one man saved our country, or could save it; nor could the men have saved it ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... of mountains bounding the Kachi to the westward is a continuous wall with imperceptible breaks only, and it bears the local names of Gindari, Takari, and Kirthar. Through this uniform rampart there are two notable rents or defiles, viz.: the Mulla opening opposite Gundana, leading to Kelat; and the Bolan entering near Dadur, leading to Quetta, Kandahar, ...
— Afghanistan and the Anglo-Russian Dispute • Theo. F. Rodenbough
... been as cold and proud as possible, if he had been assailed by coarse and direct flattery, was yet by no means steeled against the refined and almost imperceptible flattery of Emelie, who, with all her peculiar gifts of soul and understanding, made herself subordinate to him, in order to be enlightened and ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... an imperceptible opening is made. Streams rush down from the mountain to join the river; even raindrops lend their individually insignificant aid. All the forces of nature are subtly arrayed against the obstruction in the river channel. Suddenly, with the thunder of pent-up waters at last unleashed, the dam breaks, ...
— A Spinner in the Sun • Myrtle Reed
... emerged to a silent but violent struggle just ahead. The two men had been attacked by three others, and as he stared, the loquacious one went down. Instantly a huge figure of a man outlined against the light from a street-lamp, crouched over the prostrate form of the fallen man. Even in the imperceptible second before he started to run toward the group, Nikky saw that the silent one, unmolested, was ...
— Long Live the King • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... is forced into intense and unnatural life and bloom. Sometimes, the development is slow and almost imperceptible. Fed gently by the light and dews of heaven, the flower, at length, circles forth in perfected beauty. Here, the airy grace and playfulness of a Rosalind, or the purity and goodness of a Desdemona is developed; there, the intense, passionate ...
— Adele Dubois - A Story of the Lovely Miramichi Valley in New Brunswick • Mrs. William T. Savage
... beneath a margin of willows that droop into its bosom, and other trees, of deeper verdure than our own country can boast, inclining lovingly over it. On the Garden-side it is bordered by a shadowy, secluded grove, with winding paths among its boskiness, affording many a peep at the river's imperceptible lapse and tranquil gleam; and on the opposite shore stands the priory-church, with its church-yard ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 60, October 1862 • Various
... all, however, Preston was now securing more and more of a lead by almost imperceptible gains. Dave Darrin, in the bow seat of the war canoe, eyed the water interval between the two canoes with ...
— The High School Boys' Canoe Club • H. Irving Hancock |
