"Serpentine" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... perhaps close to the train, near hills, on which the live oaks spread big, ebon-emerald umbrellas, serpentine endlessly into the distance. On the other side, far hills, bathed in an amethystine mist, invade the horizon. Between stretches the flat green field of the valley, gashed with tawny streaks that are roads and dotted with soft, silvery bunches ...
— The Native Son • Inez Haynes Irwin
... discovered that his best friend was making love to her, in spite of his free-love principles, he was very seriously annoyed. When he presently abandoned her, feeling a spiritual affinity in another direction, she drowned herself in the Serpentine: and his second wife needed all her natural sweetness and all her inherited philosophy to reconcile her to the waves of Platonic enthusiasm for other ladies which periodically swept the too sensitive heart of her husband. Free love would ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... emerged from the last mountain pass and found itself upon a sloping, grassy plateau on the western slope of the Andes, with the limitless Pacific stretching away into the infinite distance, and the perils and hardships of the journey were at an end; for thenceforward the road wound its serpentine way downward through a series of ravines that, wild and savage enough at first, gradually widened out into gentle, grassy, tree-clad slopes that led down to the sandy plains which lie between the lower spurs of the ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... Mompava, about sixteen miles to the northward of Pontiana, and the second port belonging to the sultan. The river is shallow, narrow, extremely serpentine, and constantly running down with great rapidity. The country around is a paradise in comparison with Pontiana. It is upon an elevated site, and, wherever the eye reaches, it is clear of jungle, and of fine rich mold, susceptible of the highest ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... Many silicates containing magnesium are known and some of them are important substances. Serpentine, asbestos, talc, and meerschaum are ...
— An Elementary Study of Chemistry • William McPherson
... girlhood under the wide sunshine in the prairie grass, how her little playhouse had sat where the new dining-room now stood, how her dolls used to litter the narrow porch that grew into the winding, serpentine veranda that belted the house, how she read his books, how she went about with him on his daily rounds, and how she had suddenly bloomed into a womanhood that made him feel shy and abashed in her presence. He wondered where it was upon the way that he had lost clasp of her hand: where did ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... side of you rise high ranges of beautifully wooded hills; here and there a cottage peeps out among the trees, the winding path that leads to it being now lost to sight in the thick foliage, now visible again as a thin serpentine line of soft grey. Midway on the slopes appear the gardens of Looe, built up the acclivity on stone terraces one above another; thus displaying the veritable garden architecture of the mountains of Palestine magically transplanted to the side ...
— Rambles Beyond Railways; - or, Notes in Cornwall taken A-foot • Wilkie Collins
... that most of his landscape backgrounds are views in Hertfordshire. And when he preferred the more sober delights of the Row—not the same Row we now scamper along from Hyde Park Corner, but the old one along by the Serpentine, and, for a time, in Kensington Gardens—his tall graceful figure always attracted attention; and when he mounted his pony, which he called "Red Mullett," people who recognised him would turn and remark that Mr. Punch had come out for ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... room, awaiting the announcement of dinner. An almost imperceptible frown gathered between his brows, however, as his eyes rested upon Marian Barber, who was wearing a fearfully and wonderfully made gown of gold-colored silk, covered with spangles, that gave her a serpentine effect, and made her look ten years older than ...
— Grace Harlowe's Senior Year at High School - or The Parting of the Ways • Jessie Graham Flower
... a picture called "The Vampire." It was smaller than most and shown by a curious pale light. A fair young girl was lying in a deep sleep on a curtained bed, and hovering, crawling over her with a deadly, serpentine grace, was a white figure wrapped in a veiling garment that might have been a shroud. Out of white cerements showed a trail of yellow hair and a face alabaster white, save for the lips that were blood red—an intent face with a kind of ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... ceiling, about the floor, about the casually distributed chairs. I had a queer feeling that whenever I wasn't looking at them straight they went askew, and moved about, and played a noiseless puss-in-the-corner behind my back. And the cornice had a serpentine design with masks—masks altogether too expressive ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... of jasper, agate, chalcedony, serpentine, nephrite, steatite, quartz, crystal, glass, jade (white and green), and chrysoprase. Mention is also made of rakan, but the meaning of the term is obscure. Probably it ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... roll back on itself by the convulsions of the earth. On the other side hung a black and dreadful cloud, bursting with fiery and serpentine vapors. Naught was heard in the darkness but the shrieks of women, the screams of children, and the frenzied cries of men calling for children, for wives, for parents,—all lifting hands to the gods, ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... colours and composition; one series being white, and composed of carbonate of lime—whilst the laminae of the second series alternate with the preceding, are green in colour, and are found by chemical analysis to consist of some silicate, generally serpentine or the closely-related "loganite." In some instances, however, all the laminae are calcareous, the concentric arrangement still remaining visible in consequence of the fact that the laminae are composed alternately of lighter ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... he has any sense he will just duck you in the Serpentine and make you apologise. Personally I consider myself anything but a baby, and far superior to any of the ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... circumstance, as we had to pass a terribly rocky and stony road. We were obliged to scramble up and down the mountainous side of a valley, as the valley itself was completely occupied by the irregular course of the river Badin, which wound in a serpentine direction from side to side. Pomegranates and oleanders grew in the valley, wild vines twined themselves round the shrubs and trees, and larches covered ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... instance, than the view from Greenwich Park by the observatory? Don't you know that beautiful clump of Scotch firs in the foreground, and then the glimpse of the river through the trees? And then there is that lovely part by Queen Elizabeth's oak. The view in Hyde Park, too, over the Serpentine, how exquisite that is on a summer afternoon, with the Westminster towers standing up in a golden haze. Or Kensington Gardens in the autumn, when the leaves are turning, and there is blue mist in the background ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... with a face of agonized attachment and devotion. Rawdon himself trembled, and his face grew purple behind his dyed mustachios. Only old Briggs was moved in the other carriage, and cast her great eyes nervously towards her old friends. Miss Crawley's bonnet was resolutely turned towards the Serpentine. Mrs. Bute happened to be in ecstasies with the poodle, and was calling him a little darling, and a sweet little zoggy, and a pretty pet. The carriages moved on, each ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... in his usual felicitous terms, thanking Lord Raa for this further proof of his great liberality of mind in helping a Catholic charity, and particularly mentioning the beautiful and accomplished Madame Lier, who had charmed all eyes and won all hearts by her serpentine dances, and to whom the Church in Ellan would always be indebted for the handsome sum which had been the result of her disinterested efforts ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... remaining country. At every step, the ground, although very strong, yielded, as it threatening to give way. Towards the centre of the moor there was an elevation surrounded with bushes. This was the source of the silvery water that took its serpentine course along the moor, and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... daughters, beldames worn with time, Three, each swan-shapen, single-toothed, and all Peering thro' shared endowment of one eye; Never on them doth the sun shed his rays, Never falls radiance of the midnight moon. But, hard by these, their sisters, clad with wings, Serpentine-curled, dwell, loathed of mortal men,— The Gorgons!—he of men who looks on them Shall gasp away his life. Of such fell guard I bid thee to beware. Now, mark my words When I another sight of terror ...
— Suppliant Maidens and Other Plays • AEschylus
... characters, thus: [Greek: ROGERIOS RAEX].[a] The Renaissance has invaded this church too, and flowery inlaid marbles with gilded scroll balconies (it is a nuns' church) mingle with the bold discs and oblong panels of porphyry and green serpentine. In the nave of the small church sat in comfortable arm-chairs two monks, one black, one white, leaning their ears to gilded grates and receiving the confessions of the sisterhood. The paschal candlestick stood in front of the high altar,—Ascension-Day not being past; but ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... be not taken till these two undermine it, the walls will stand till they fall of themselves. O thou great thunder-darter of Olympus, forget that thou art Jove, the king of gods, and, Mercury, lose all the serpentine craft of thy caduceus, if ye take not that little little less-than-little wit from them that they have! which short-arm'd ignorance itself knows is so abundant scarce, it will not in circumvention deliver a fly from a spider without drawing ...
— The History of Troilus and Cressida • William Shakespeare [Craig edition]
... being nearly alike) were made on tracing paper placed over the glass-plates after they had been varnished; and they are as exact as possible considering the nature of the margins (Fig. 18). They suffice to show that there was some lateral, almost serpentine movement, and that the tips in their downward course pressed with unequal force on the plates, as [page 29] the tracks varied in breadth. The more perfectly serpentine tracks made by the radicles of Phaseolus multiflorus and ...
— The Power of Movement in Plants • Charles Darwin
... whispered Archie hoarsely, for the great serpentine trunk glided completely round Peter and drew him close up to the hole, raising him from the ground, so that he hung three or four feet above the ...
— Trapped by Malays - A Tale of Bayonet and Kris • George Manville Fenn
... close-grown by constant clipping. The species best suited for this treatment are E. Mediterranea, E. arborea, and E. codonoides. Of the more humble-growing species, E. vagans (the Cornish Heath) will grow easily in most gardens, though in its native habitat it is confined to the serpentine formation; nor must we omit E. herbacea, which also will grow anywhere, and, if clipped yearly after flowering, will make a most beautiful border to any flower-bed; or it may be used more extensively, as it is at Doddington Park, in Gloucestershire ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... place, situate in an oasis in the wilderness, or rather in what is already the beginning of a new country—the mere mounds of tufo turning into high slopes, and a few trees (it is odd how they immediately give a soul to this soulless desert), leafless at present, serpentine along the greener grass. And there, with the russet of an oakwood behind, rises a square huddle of buildings, a tall brick watch-tower, battlemented and corbelled in the midst, and a great bay-tree at each corner. On the tower, immediately below the battlements, is the inscription, ...
— The Spirit of Rome • Vernon Lee
... Adiesen appeared at his own door laden with blocks of serpentine, fragments of lichen, moss, seaweed, and shells. Yaspard followed him into a little room which was doing duty as a study until the Den was restored to order, and as the scientist put down his treasures the lad said—in a trembling voice, be it confessed—"I want to tell you ...
— Viking Boys • Jessie Margaret Edmondston Saxby
... was before, as if the thousand baggage camels had never existed." Yet it is traversed in several directions, and if you strain your eyes from these heights you can detect certain dusky lines that crawl in serpentine movement across the melancholy waste—caravan tracks to ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... centuries ago by the monks of Monte Oliveto. These pious men understood little of engineering, of the art of throwing bridges across ravines. Their road simply followed the course pointed out by nature, winding in serpentine folds through the labyrinth of chasms ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... seated on the back of the book, with one knee bent and one leg hanging down—somewhat in the attitude of the amazons of Hyde Park or the Bois de Boulogne on horseback. She was so small that her swinging foot did not reach the table, over which the trail of her dress extended in a serpentine line. But her face and figure were those of an adult. The fulness of her corsage and the roundness of her waist could leave no doubt of that, even for an old savant like myself. I will venture to add that she was very handsome, with a proud mien; ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... to her finger-tips. Gyp had yelled with the others, so had Ginny Cox, who had come back into the room. What fun it was all going to be. Dana King was leading the boys in a serpentine march through the building; out in the hall the line broke to force in a laughing, remonstrating carpenter. Jerry heard their ...
— Highacres • Jane Abbott
... new-born light from heaven. The white chalkstone glitters from afar; the light grey feldspar assumes a warm flesh tint; the limestone becomes straw color; the crystals of hornblende flash like fire-flies; and the veins of white quartz, running with their nodules of serpentine and chlorite through the dark clay-slate, gleam as do ...
— Life of Schamyl - And Narrative of the Circassian War of Independence Against Russia • John Milton Mackie
... white houses. The clatter of hoofs, And the music of wandering bands, up the walls Of the steep hanging hill, at remote intervals Reached them, cross'd by the sound of the clacking of whips, And here and there, faintly, through serpentine slips Of verdant rose-gardens deep-sheltered with screens Of airy acacias and dark evergreens, They could mark the white dresses and catch the light songs Of the lovely Parisians that wander'd in throngs, Led by Laughter ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith
... Jackie's socks or hemming pocket handkerchiefs, so she was frequently delayed till evening; and in the mildness of the summer twilight, with some fresh disappointment lying heavy on her heart, she made her way from the Marble Arch round the barren Serpentine into Piccadilly, with its stream of light ...
— Esther Waters • George Moore
... builders owed the peach-bloom colours of their columned aisles. Carrara provided the Pisans with mellow marble for their Baptistery and Cathedral; Monte Ferrato supplied Pistoja and Prato with green serpentine; while the pietra serena of the Apennines added austerity to the interior of Florentine buildings. Again, in other instances, we detect the influence of commerce or of conquest. The intercourse of Venice with Alexandria determined the unique architecture ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... she looked perhaps a little worn, and certainly thinner than when I had seen her last. But these were trifles. It is not easy to describe the sense of relief and pleasure that I felt—after having been accustomed to the sleepy eyes and serpentine graces of Madame Fontaine—when I looked again at the lithe active figure and the bright well-opened gray eyes of my dear ...
— Jezebel • Wilkie Collins
... earth to sky, vanishing utterly as soon as they reached the dark of the sky. They were interlaced one with another, making a great column, and I saw their limbs and huge bodies melting in and out of each other, forming this serpentine line that bent and swayed and twisted spirally with the contortions of the wind-tossed trees. They were nude, fluid shapes, passing up the bushes, within the leaves almost—rising up in a living column into the heavens. Their faces I never could see. Unceasingly they ...
— The Willows • Algernon Blackwood
... of the devious and serpentine paths by which love finds the way to its ends. It had not occurred to him to approach her with those secret tones and stolen looks which speak for themselves. She answered with the straightforward directness of which he had ...
— Heart and Science - A Story of the Present Time • Wilkie Collins
... incomparable beauty. Despite the vulgarity of the comparison, the purest ivory alone can give an idea of the dazzling whiteness of her polished satin skin, of a texture so fresh and so firm, that some drops of water, collected and still remaining about the roots of her hair from the bath, rolled in serpentine lines over her shoulders, like pearls, or beads, of crystal, over ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... would not touch a dice-box again, and she'll keep her word, Strong, and dissolve partnership, if I go on. I wish I had three hundred a year, and was away. At a German watering-place you can do devilish well with three hundred a year. But my habits are so d——reckless: I wish I was in the Serpentine. I wish I was dead, by Gad, I wish I was. I wish I had never touched those confounded bones. I had such a run of luck last night, with five for the main, and seven to five all night, until those ruffians wanted to pay me with Altamont's ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... or rather many things of which the Management may, and should be proud. A capital troupe of Bicyclists, a Spanish Dancer and singer—whose gestures to the multitude are more intelligible than her language—a graceful, serpentine dancer, and "a very peculiar American Comedian"—all these are a part of the programme. But the best item in this liberal bill of fare is Round the Town, a characteristic Ballet, in five tableaux. The composers of this pleasing piece are Madame KATTI ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, October 8, 1892 • Various
... trunks and patterned on the carpet beneath. Hollies gleamed green against the brown background, and in an open space of bare beech trees the littered ground was already pricked with the new green of the wild hyacinth. Now and again the rounded hills gave glimpses of the far Normandy plain across the serpentine river, then would as suddenly close in on them again until the car seemed to dart between the advancing battalions of the forest as though to escape capture. At length, in one such place, they leaped forward up a short rise, then rushed swiftly downhill, swung round a corner, ...
— Simon Called Peter • Robert Keable
... George Eliot has quite surpassed herself, and in all literature there is no delineation of a character surpassing this. One of her critics says there is no character in her novels "more subtly devised or more consistently developed. His serpentine beauty, his winning graciousness, his aesthetic refinement, his masculine energy of intellect, his insinuating affectionateness, with his selfish love of pleasure and his cowardly recoil from pain, ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... village, it is evident that something unusual is going on; they pass people moving in the same direction, with eager and expectant faces, to one of whom Mr. Webster ventures these questions: Can his serpentine majesty be seen to-day? and where to the best advantage? Receiving satisfactory replies, the coachman is ordered to drive to the old wind-mill, where they arrive in a few moments,—from the shady side of this quaint structure, whose merrily revolving sails were at their usual work, a large ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, January 1886 - Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 1, January, 1886 • Various
... desperation by any of these heavy swells. When he talks of "my friend, the Duke of Bayswater," ask him, in a quiet tone, where he last met the Duchess. If he says Hyde-Park (meaning the Earl of) is an honest good fellow, enquire whether he prefers Lady Mary or Lady Seraphina Serpentine. This drops him like a shot—he can't get ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... two feet long may be called a toy ship, but it is a toy that can teach much to an Admiral, and I should not like to have as my comrade on a voyage the man of forty who can pass the Serpentine without a glance at the little ragged urchin there, who is half in the water himself while he reaches with a twig his tiny lugger after its long voyage across the lake among ducks, and row-boats, ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor
... carpet, a venerable Turk. Some slaves were near him, one of whom, at a little distance, was playing on a rude lyre; in the master's left hand was a volume of Arabian poetry, and he held in his right the serpentine tube of his narghileh, or Syrian pipe. When he beheld me, he saluted me with all the dignity of the Orient, pressing his hand to his heart, but not rising. I apologised for my intrusion; but he welcomed me with serene cordiality, and invited me to share his carpet and ...
— Sketches • Benjamin Disraeli
... you may hear one of the cottage women telling her children to let the ants alone and not tease them, for 'thaay be God's creeturs.' Or possibly the pastor himself may be overheard discoursing to a bullet-headed woman, with one finger on the palm of his other hand, 'That's their serpentine way; that's their subtlety; that's their casuistry; which arguments you may imagine to refer, as your fancy pleases, to the village curate, or the tonsured priest of the monastery over the hill. For the ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... well known to need description here. It is a dagger or poignard with a blade varying in length from six inches to two feet. This blade is not invariably wavy, or serpentine, as often supposed, but is sometimes quite straight. It is always sharp on both edges and is fashioned from iron imported from Singapore, by Brunai artificers. Great taste is displayed in the handle, which is often of delicately carved ivory and gold, and just below the attachment of ...
— British Borneo - Sketches of Brunai, Sarawak, Labuan, and North Borneo • W. H. Treacher
... vertical strokes (No. 2, p. 177[f096b]). A pattern of two elements, again, may be formed in a still more simple way by linear contrast, as in No. 3, where the pyramidal trees are formed by a continuous serpentine stroke of the pen terminating in a spiral stem. The diagonal arrangement of the trees produces a chequer, the intervals of which can be varied by the contrasting ...
— Line and Form (1900) • Walter Crane
... has rendered the rude hill which, covered chiefly with evergreens, overlooks Spa, a succession of beautiful promenades. Serpentine walks are led through its thickets, agreeable surprises are prepared for the stranger, and all the better points of view are ornamented by seats and summer-houses. One of these places was covered by a ...
— A Residence in France - With An Excursion Up The Rhine, And A Second Visit To Switzerland • J. Fenimore Cooper
... Lycius, he succumbs to the serpentine grace of Lamia; or as Porphyro, hidden in the silence, watches ...
— A Day with Keats • May (Clarissa Gillington) Byron
... the art of inlaying, would furnish you with exquisite examples; its sculpture is indeed the most perfect which was ever produced by the Gothic schools; but, besides this rich sculpture, all its flat surfaces are inlaid with colored stones, much being done with a green serpentine, which forms the greater part of the coast of Genoa. You have, I believe, large beds of this rock in Scotland, and other stones besides, peculiarly Scottish, calculated to form as noble a school of ...
— Lectures on Architecture and Painting - Delivered at Edinburgh in November 1853 • John Ruskin
... Then there was much bustle and some irritation in the dressing-room and the tuning up of the orchestra outside. The knock came again. "Curtain up, please." The door was thrown open, the three ladies swept out—the tall one in tights, the little one in a serpentine skirt, the plump one in some fancy costume—and Glory was left to gather up the fragments, to listen to the orchestra, which was now in full power, to think of ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... and reproach at the Yellowstone between the California partisans and the Stanford fanatics. A California graduate, his companion along the cocktail route, recognized him; immediately, he was riding shoulder high. His bearers broke for the sidewalk, and down Market Street he went, a blue-and-gold serpentine dancing behind him. There was his first Jinks at the Bohemian club—an impromptu affair, thrown in between the revelling Christmas Jinks in the clubhouse and the formally artistic Midsummer High Jinks in the Russian River Grove. ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... bellows through gaping jaws. Piang's spear silenced the menacing crocodile, and the party hurried on. A taloetook (owl) wailed his melancholy koekh-koekh, and the mournful sound seemed to draw the handful of men closer together. Through the jungle the river wound its serpentine way; dense growths crowded the bank and leaned far out over the stream. Trailing vines and hanging ferns brushed the occupants of the canoe, and in fear they avoided contact with them, so often did ...
— The Adventures of Piang the Moro Jungle Boy - A Book for Young and Old • Florence Partello Stuart
... friendly, counsels of submission; others to tempt, or insult. The most prominent of the latter, and the most odious to the imprisoned and insulated 'Nous', is Hermes, the impersonation of interest with the entrancing and serpentine 'Caduceus', and, as interest or motives intervening between the reason and its immediate self-determinations, with the antipathies to the [Greek: nomos autonomos]. The Hermes impersonates the eloquence of cupidity, ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... good "going." Coming out of the ravine the configuration changed. A jumbled mass of precipitous hills and canyons confronted her. She drove the dogs to an elevated point and looked before her. The great serpentine river came to view, clearly outlined by its wooded banks, and no more than two miles distant. On the near side of the river ran ...
— Colorado Jim • George Goodchild
... sundered the ice field told them of their danger; then Ootah's heart chilled, his teeth were set chattering; but he thought of Annadoah and the grim need of food, and he gripped the upstander of his sled more determinedly. When the moon again unclosed its pearly sheen over the ice, the serpentine chasms moved their tortuous backs and writhed about them, the icy hummocks billowed, and the glittering ice-peaked horizon swam in a dizzy circle of ...
— The Eternal Maiden • T. Everett Harre
... lay about her, the mountain walls iridescent with snow in sunshine, the river gleaming with its curious, rapid, serpentine life, in all the peaceful death of winter; everything was as it always had been. Her mind refused to accept the possibility of her living under other conditions with as irresistible and final a certainty as if she had been called upon to believe she ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... the human family. Not only does the mighty ocean obey this wonderful influence in the ebb and flow of its tides, but the Earth, as she rotates upon her axis, obeys this mighty power and manifests in her depths and heights in her serpentine movement about the Sun. ...
— Within the Temple of Isis • Belle M. Wagner
... did so, and ordered the porter up to the house. The magnificent avenue was a serpentine one, and our friends had barely time to get out of sight of the lodge, by a turn in it, when they heard the voices of the pursuers, hallooing for the porter, and ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... Ethiopian Highland. Around were high and jagged hills, their sides black with the Saj [7] and Somali pine [8], and their upper brows veiled with a thin growth of cactus. Beneath was a deep valley, in the midst of which ran a serpentine of shining waters, the gladdest spectacle we had yet witnessed: further in front, masses of hill rose abruptly from shady valleys, encircled on the far horizon by a straight blue line of ground, resembling ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... the rise overlooking the Serpentine, where, in full lamp-light, black against the silver water, sat a couple who never moved, the woman's face buried on the man's neck—a single form, like a carved emblem ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... said. All peered around. None saw anything but the upstanding roots, the forest jumble, the misty serpentine lianas. None heard any sound but their own hoarse breathing, the solemn drip of water, the insect hum, and the occasional melancholy notes of birds. The place seemed bare of life. Yet upon McKay came again ...
— The Pathless Trail • Arthur O. (Arthur Olney) Friel
... open valley studded with groups of astounding trees which were all scarlet and gold. Mountains, deep-green, purple, pale-violet, framed the valley, and through its midst was flung a bright blue necklace of long lakes and serpentine rivers. In the nearest and largest lake, towering castles of white cloud came continuously and went. Very far off, browsing among lily pads, Mr. Cotter could see a cow moose and her calf. And, high over his head, there ...
— If You Touch Them They Vanish • Gouverneur Morris
... want to see London, you must come here on a fine summer day in June, at about four o'clock, and you will gaze on the finest and gayest equipages of England. A very pretty piece of water is in this park, which is called "the Serpentine River." The best skating of London is to be seen here, we are told, in hard winters. The entrance from Piccadilly is by a fine threefold arch. Here is the great Achilles of bronze, in honor of Wellington, made out of the cannon which the duke captured in Spain. St. James's and the Green Park: ...
— Young Americans Abroad - Vacation in Europe: Travels in England, France, Holland, - Belgium, Prussia and Switzerland • Various
... sleeves rolled up above his yellow, sinewy forearms, now tossed his pigtail, serpentine, across his shoulder and touched it with his fingers, an odd, ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... deserted. The thick white dust upon it looked ghastly at their feet. Now they could hear the faint and regular murmur of the oily sea by which the fishermen's boats were drawn up, and discern, far away on the right, the serpentine ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... acquaintance I have discovered that he takes a hint with extraordinary slowness. To bring it home to him with the right mixture of tact and insistence that Araby needs his immediate presence—alone—may well tax the most serpentine of minds." ...
— Once on a Time • A. A. Milne
... similarity of all that I had seen in this amphibious little village to the buildings and landscapes on Chinese platters and tea-pots; but here I found the similarity complete; for I was told that these gardens were modeled upon Van Bramm's description of those of Yuen min Yuen, in China. Here were serpentine walks, with trellised borders; winding canals, with fanciful Chinese bridges; flower-beds resembling huge baskets, with the flower of "love lies bleeding" falling over to the ground. But mostly had the fancy of Mynheer Broekker been displayed about a stagnant ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... coloring—erythema iris; or a more or less extensive patch may spread with a sharply-defined border, the older part tending to fade—erythema marginatum; or several rings may coalesce, with a disappearance of the coalescing parts, and serpentine ...
— Essentials of Diseases of the Skin • Henry Weightman Stelwagon
... one's face meets mine, But the house is narrow, the place is bleak Where, outside, rain and wind combine With a furtive ear, if I strive to speak, With a hostile eye at my flushing cheek, 10 With a malice that marks each word, each sign! O enemy sly and serpentine, Uncoil thee from the waking man! Do I hold the Past Thus firm and fast 15 Yet doubt if the Future hold I can? This path so soft to pace shall lead Through the magic of May to herself indeed! Or narrow if needs the house must be, Outside are the storms and strangers; we— ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... though poor and desolate, is by no means sterile. No tracts of black bog, no impassable morasses, no miles of rocks and boulders, but a fairly good grazing country, with here and there, at long intervals, a white cottage. The engine slows at one point, where the rails are twisted into serpentine convolutions by yesterday's tropical heat. Both sides are considerably displaced, but they still bear the right relation to each other, and the faithful machine, sniffing and picking her way carefully, glides safely over the contorted path. A short tunnel, with sides of solid ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... "You dear little tree! How nice of you to be here. But you almost want taking care of." Then the tree was forgotten, and the Hellenic beauty reigned over her spirit, as she gazed upon the immense pastoral bounded by mountains and the sea; a green wilderness threaded by a serpentine river of silver—a far-flung river which lingered on its way, journeying hither and thither, making great curves as if it loved the wilderness and wished to know it well, to know all of it before being merged irrevocably with ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... sang, the skies were clear and clean We bowled along a road that curved a spine Superbly sinuous and serpentine Thro' silent symphonies of summer green. Sudden the Forth came on us—sad of mien, No cloud to colour it, no breeze to line: A sheet of dark, dull glass, without a sign Of life or death, two spits of sand between. Water and sky merged blank in mist together, ...
— Poems by William Ernest Henley • William Ernest Henley
... also walking. Melbury would have overtaken him, but at that moment Fitzpiers turned in through a gate to one of the rambling drives among the trees at this side of the wood, which led to nowhere in particular, and the beauty of whose serpentine curves was the only justification of their existence. Felice almost simultaneously trotted down the lane towards the timber-dealer, in a little basket-carriage which she sometimes drove about the estate, unaccompanied ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... furrowed and the fall is rapid; irrigation is consequently difficult and navigation impossible. The course of the Iskr is remarkable: rising in the Rilska Planina, the river descends into the basin of Samakov, passing thence through a serpentine defile into the plateau of Sofia, where in ancient times it formed a lake; it now forces its way through the Balkans by the picturesque gorge of Iskretz. Somewhat similarly the Deli, or "Wild," Kamchik breaks the central chain of the Balkans near their eastern ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... gray shadows, and change every moment with every aspect of the heavens, every alteration of light or color in the sky. Afar, the skyey spaces themselves seem to be full of buildings; near, wind the serpentine curves of waving trees and ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac
... which they passed abruptly, more than once, from poverty-stricken scenes of moderate mirth to abodes of sickness and desolation, Tom and Matilda, by means of 'bus and cab, at last found themselves in the neighbourhood of the Serpentine. ...
— The Coxswain's Bride - also, Jack Frost and Sons; and, A Double Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... and shine, you tripe-hounds!" ... Broken dreams on a smelly, straw-stuffed pillow and lumpy straw-stuffed pallet, dreams of "Circle and cha-a-a-a-a-a-a-nge" "On the Fore-hand, Right About" "Right Pass, Shoulder Out" "Serpentine" "Order Lance" "Trail Lance" "Right Front Thrust" (for the front rank of the Queen's Greys carry lances); dreams of riding wild mad horses to unfathomable ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... the altar and, being of stone treated in a graceful Gothic manner, is an ornament much more in good taste than the hideous mahogany or oaken serpentine atrocities which ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... follow whose significance is lost in a serpentine rhetoric. They hint at nights of critical terrors. During the writing of them Mallare was engaged in a desperate pursuit of himself. He was escaping. He perceived his thoughts racing from his grasp like Maenads down a tangled slope. The dread of finding ...
— Fantazius Mallare - A Mysterious Oath • Ben Hecht
... the ocean—such is the Ortach rock. The Ortach, all of a piece, rises up in a straight line to eighty feet above the angry beating of the waves. Waves and ships break against it. An immovable cube, it plunges its rectilinear planes apeak into the numberless serpentine curves ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... most unpopular man in England, except in Devonshire, where everybody doted on him. He was "a man of desperate fortunes," and he did not shrink from violent methods. In studying his life we are amused, we are almost scandalised, at his snake-like quality. He moves with serpentine undulations, and the beautiful hard head is lifted from ambush to strike the unsuspecting enemy at sight. With his protestations, his volubility, his torrent of excuses, his evasive pertinacity, Sir Walter Raleigh is the very opposite of the "strong silent" type of soldier which the nineteenth ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... them. They see at the beginning of their lives how that life must necessarily end, and trot with a quiet, contented, and unaltered pace down their long, straight, and shaded avenue; while we, with anxious solicitude, and restless hurry, watch the quick turnings of our serpentine walk; which still presents, either to sight or expectation, some changes of variety in the ever-shifting prospect, till the unthought-of, unexpected end comes suddenly upon us, and finishes at once the fluctuating ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... forth in state, and, placing himself at a spot where he presumed he should be heard, raised his voice, and, in an authoritative tone, commanded the refractory animals to quit his estates. Not one dared to refuse; and great was the rustling, and hissing, and sliding, and coiling as the serpentine nation prepared to demenager, much against their inclination no doubt, but forced, by a power they could not withstand, to obey. None of these creatures interrupted our route, although there has long ceased to be a lord at Puy Taille, and we arrived before ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... himself,' he deemed it prudent to make a precipitate retreat. And the upshot of the matter was, that a lawyer's letter came next day, and an action was commenced next week; and that Mr. Augustus Cooper, after walking twice to the Serpentine for the purpose of drowning himself, and coming twice back without doing it, made a confidante of his mother, who compromised the matter with twenty pounds from the till: which made twenty pounds four shillings and sixpence paid to Signor Billsmethi, exclusive of treats and pumps. ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... was created when all three larval types—serpent, eagle-lion, and antelope-fish—were blended to form a monster with bird's feet and wings, a lion's forelimbs and head, the fish's scales, the antelope's horns, and a more or less serpentine form of trunk and tail, and sometimes also of head. Repeated substitution of parts of other animals, such as the spiral horn of Amen's ram, a deer's antlers, and the elephant's head, led to endless variation in the ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... night of the 22nd of February a very singular spectacle was got up on the Serpentine. Late in the evening a fine "brass band," attended by near a thousand torchbearers, suddenly marched on to the ice on the ornamental water in Kensington Gardens, and struck up popular airs; as by a signal, large ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... dislike those who can move with a free stride and unlifted arms—but Dick had no earthly desire to go to the Parks. Once and only once since Maisie had shut her door he had gone there under Alf's charge. Alf forgot him and fished for minnows in the Serpentine with some companions. After half an hour's waiting Dick, almost weeping with rage and wrath, caught a passer-by, who introduced him to a friendly policeman, who led him to a four-wheeler opposite the Albert Hall. He never told Mr. Beeton ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... of these were girls, pretty mulattoes, and two young, bright-colored negro men as their partners. To rather slow music they went through with a rhythmic dance, in which their figures swayed to and fro, chiefly from the waist, a gliding serpentine dance, evidently copied from the slaves of Martinique, and brought to New York by the French families. And then, to Peter's great delight, came the event of the evening, in his eyes,—the dance of Miranda with her new admirer from ...
— An Unwilling Maid • Jeanie Gould Lincoln
... South America, Egypt and other parts of Africa, India, China and Japan are the fields of operation of these atrocious men and serpentine women. ...
— Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls - War on the White Slave Trade • Various
... same. At last, at a sharp turn of one of these rocky eminences, they perceived an enormous cloud of white vapor rising up like smoke from the earth, and twisting itself as it rose, in swaying, serpentine folds, as though some giant spirit-hand were shaking it to and fro like a long flowing veil in the air. ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... a sort of blindness, occasioned by a disease of the cornea. Neither are they exempt from some other diseases. The most common of which is the tetter, or ring-worm, that seems to affect almost one half of them, and leaves whitish serpentine marks every where behind it. But this is of less consequence than another disease which is very frequent, and appears on every part of the body in large broad ulcers, with thick white edges, discharging a clear thin matter, some of which had a very virulent appearance, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 15 (of 18) • Robert Kerr
... Christmas is close at hand, and promises to be a bitterly cold one. The ice has formed smooth and black across the Serpentine, and a number of people are walking along by its banks, looking forward to some grand skating if the frost does but hold two days longer. The sky is blue, and the sun shining brightly; the wind is fresh and keen; it is just the day when people ...
— Captain Bayley's Heir: - A Tale of the Gold Fields of California • G. A. Henty
... this fourfold arrangement, not suggested by any natural grouping of the stars, should have come about by accident; it must have been intentional. For some reason, the equator, the colure, the zenith and the poles were all marked out by these serpentine or draconic forms. The unmapped space gives us a clue only to the date and latitude of the designing of the most southerly constellations. We now see that a number of the northern hold positions which were specially significant under the same conditions, indicating that they were designed at about ...
— The Astronomy of the Bible - An Elementary Commentary on the Astronomical References - of Holy Scripture • E. Walter Maunder
... rather than seated on the easy chair; everything from the curves of his smooth limbs to the coils of his silvered hair suggesting the circles of a serpent more than the straight limbs of a man—the unmistakable, splendid serpentine gentleman we had seen walking in North London, his eyes shining ...
— The Club of Queer Trades • G. K. Chesterton
... have fallen as leaves by the storms in their season thinned, Since northward the war-ships of Spain came sheer up the way of the south-west wind: Where the citadel cliffs of England are flanked with bastions of serpentine, Far off to the windward loomed their hulls, an hundred and twenty-nine, All filled full of the war, full-fraught with battle and charged with bale; Then store-ships weighted with cannon; and all were an hundred and fifty ...
— Poems and Ballads (Third Series) - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne—Vol. III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... calm of the speaker, sometimes showing itself in an unusually deep guttural, sometimes in an unusually serpentine sibilant, lurked the frenzy of hatred which in the past had revealed itself occasionally in wild outbursts. Momentarily I expected such an outburst now, but it did ...
— The Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... curtain of the mist is falling, the point of vision soars again, and there is afforded a brief glimpse of what is doing far away on the other side. From all parts of Europe long and sinister black files are crawling hitherward in serpentine lines, like slowworms through grass. They are the advancing armies of the Allies. ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... with the granitic syenite of Schooley's mountain, distant at least forty miles. Others had no known type nearer than Connecticut, in the opposite direction, while the gneiss and mica slate of the island of New-York, with their various embedded minerals, the serpentine and many of the magnesian minerals of Hoboken, with sandstone and trap of the Pallisadoc range, were distinctly recognisable. In this great excavation, where a region of a mile square was wholly removed, to a depth, in many places, ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... out that in two years from the turning of the first sod four wide pools, covering in all one hundred acres of ground, were ready to be filled, and at the end of 1898 the ground was metamorphosed into the largest area of water in the London district, with the exception of the Serpentine. ...
— The Naturalist on the Thames • C. J. Cornish
... months of this sort of thing. I came to London for pleasure and I have suffered slavery ever since. I hadn't been in town two days when looking over the Serpentine Bridge I beheld a man struggling in the water. I was weak enough to rescue him, and he immediately proved so oppressively grateful that I have never been able to escape from his clutches from that day to this. I would have gone back to Bristol long ago, but there's my dear little Lottie Blithers ...
— Three Hats - A Farcical Comedy in Three Acts • Alfred Debrun
... two erratic blocks of porphyry—I believe there are three—in Cornwall, lying one on serpentine, one, I think, on slate, which—so I was always informed as a boy—were the stones which St. Kevern threw after St. Just when the latter stole his host's chalice and paten, and ran away with them to the Land's End. Why not? Before ...
— Scientific Essays and Lectures • Charles Kingsley
... was small, her enthusiasm great—and evidently she believed in Harriet's faithlessness—so that love added to the impatience of youth, which could not foresee the dreadful future. Without doubt, could they both have imagined the scene by the Serpentine three years later, they would have shrunk from the action which was a strong link in the ...
— Mrs. Shelley • Lucy M. Rossetti
... gilt, and Alpha and Omega, within ox-eyes, on either side. In the south wall in front of the vestry is a lancet-shaped doorway, and, west of it, an arcade of two lancet apertures, supported by four columns of serpentine. Within the vestry is a two-light lancet window; and let into the eastern wall is a small slab, having four grotesque figures, one blowing a kind of bagpipe, the others dancing. This is said to have been ...
— A History of Horncastle - from the earliest period to the present time • James Conway Walter
... it variously. The kingfisher plumps bodily down on the minnow from an overhanging perch; the solan goose, soaring, plunges from a "pernicious height"; the heron, high on its stilts, darts out a long and serpentine neck; the diver, with similar beak and neck, but different legs, pursues the fleeing shoals under water; to the swift and slippery fish all are ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)
... connect the town with the lower world. The modern carriage road runs from the Messina gate, and, quickly dropping behind the northern spur, winds in great serpentine loops between the Campo Santo below and old wayside tombs, Roman and Arabic, above, until it slowly opens on the southern outlook, and, after two miles of tortuous courses above the lovely coves, comes out on the main road ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... which, if they be first espied they leese their life; but if they prevent, they endanger. So that we are much beholden to Machiavel and others, that write what men do, and not what they ought to do. For it is not possible to join serpentine wisdom with the columbine innocency, except men know exactly all the conditions of the serpent; his baseness and going upon his belly, his volubility and lubricity, his envy and sting, and the rest—that is, all forms ...
— The Advancement of Learning • Francis Bacon
... torrent of flames; the Acharusian fen is dreadful for its stench and filth: nor does Charon, the ferryman, who wafts souls over, occasion any less horror; Cerberus, the triple-headed dog, stands ready with open mouths to receive them; and the Furies shake at them their serpentine locks. ...
— Roman Antiquities, and Ancient Mythology - For Classical Schools (2nd ed) • Charles K. Dillaway
... learns, in a compendium, what others labour at in a divided piece and endless volume.' And again, 'There is another way of God's providence full of meanders and labyrinths and obscure methods: that serpentine and crooked line: that cryptic and involved method of His providence which I have ever admired. Surely there are in every man's life certain rubs, and doublings, and wrenches, which, well examined, do prove the pure hand of God. And to be true, and to ...
— Sir Thomas Browne and his 'Religio Medici' - an Appreciation • Alexander Whyte
... "Serpentine; and that white vein running through is soapstone. Ah! now we shall get to know a little about what ...
— Menhardoc • George Manville Fenn
... the Portage, the distance by land is about seventy miles; by water, it is not less than a hundred and thirty, so serpentine is the course of the river through the low swampy prairies which stretch over a great portion of this part ...
— Wau-bun - The Early Day in the Northwest • Juliette Augusta Magill Kinzie
... quite clearly recognised; but, indeed, the brighter stars scattered along it form a stream recognisable with the naked eye, and have long since been regarded by astronomers as such, forming the stars of the Serpent and the Crown, or a serpentine streak followed by a loop of stars shaped like a coronet. Now the Milky Way, and the outlying streams of stars connected with it, seem to form a region of the stellar universe where fashioning processes are still at work. As Sir W. Herschel long since pointed ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... recognise this at once, she knew that the perfect assurance of her pronunciation would make it seem that she understood every word, but soon these feelings gave way to the sense half grasped of the serpentine path winding and mounting through a wood, of a glimpse of a distant valley, of flocks and villages, and of her unity with Fraulein and Minna seeing and feeling all these things together. She finished the passage—Fraulein quietly commended her reading ...
— Pointed Roofs - Pilgrimage, Volume 1 • Dorothy Richardson
... situated on the seashore, at the southern end of Norfolk. The river Yare follows a serpentine course, and falls into the sea at the village of Gorleston, a short distance from ...
— A Yacht Voyage Round England • W.H.G. Kingston
... actual experience has taught us!—this is precisely what she did not do. When the horrible apparition first rose in her very face, as it were, a momentary weakness caught her and she clung to the sash for support. Then the wonderful fire of the malignant eyes, green, serpentine, opalescent, with the wave-like flux of a glowworm's light seen under a glass, riveted her attention. She had ceased to tremble. Our fear of death varies with our desire for life. Dulled by a great grief, she did not so very much care what became of her. The future's burden was heavy, ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy
... together with an arrow, cooking before a cheerful fire, while a male and female cannibal in modern attire, the gentleman being clad in a blue coat and white trousers, and the lady in a deep red pelisse with a parasol of the same, were approaching the meal with hungry eyes, up a serpentine gravel path leading thereunto. A decidedly indelicate young gentleman, in a pair of wings and nothing else, was depicted as superintending the cooking; a representation of the spire of the church ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... lake in any of the parks in the north; some people say it is nearly as big as the Serpentine. I don't know, for I have never been in London. In summer-time hundreds of men come and sail boats— quite great big boats—from side to side. It looks so pretty to see all the white sails floating ...
— The Fortunes of the Farrells • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... and whirled and mounted and fell like the illumined filmy skirts of some invisible Titanic serpentine dancer, madly pirouetting across a carpet of stars. Then suddenly it all fell into a dull ember-glow and flashed out. The ragged moon dropped out of the southwestern sky. In the chill of the night, gray, dense fog wraiths crawled ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... the platform were hung long matchlocks, fire-arms of various sorts, with spears and swords. These swivel guns are called lelahs, and are generally of brass. The klewang is a sort of hanger, or short sword. Their most formidable and favourite weapon is the kriss—a short dagger of a serpentine form. Each vessel had a square red flag at its foremast head, and a long pennant aft. The Illanon pirates wear a large sword, with a handle to be grasped by two hands. They dress, when going into battle, with chain, ...
— Mark Seaworth • William H.G. Kingston
... He crossed the Serpentine, stretching like a phantom lake, rose and slate-colored, through the Peter Pan haunted glades of Kensington Gardens. Then he emerged from the Victoria Gate and found himself ringing a bell and being admitted by a butler, who relieved him of his coat and hat ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... became aware of certain suspicious-looking movements of the long grass, about a hundred yards distant, suggestive of the presence of an animal of some kind approaching the antelope cautiously along a sort of wavering, serpentine course. When I first discovered this movement the creature that caused it was at such a distance that it was completely concealed among the long grass, even from the elevation which I occupied; but a minute later I was able to catch occasional glimpses ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... 7. The Serpentine is a lovely lake, and there is a drowned forest at the bottom of it. If you peer over the edge you can see the trees all growing upside down, and they say that at night there are also drowned ...
— Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens • J. M. Barrie
... their limousines and coupons and factories and vast estates. But Mr. Lee himself, who is a millionaire and landed proprietor of ideas, is equally the slave of his thronging words. They cluster about him like barnacles, nobly and picturesquely impeding his progress. He is a Laocoon wrestling with serpentine sentences. He ought to be ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... again, and this time the whole of the otter's head was visible as it swam up-stream. The animal was flagging, and on reaching shoaler water it sprang out altogether now and then, rising and falling in the stronger stream with a curious serpentine motion. In fact, as head and body bent in the same sinuous curves, it looked less like an animal than a plunging fish. The men guarding the rapid stood ready with their poles, and more were wading and splashing up both sides of the pool. ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss
... Service axe—the wolf thing tracking the red stain of the outlaws' trail along the base of the sand bank out across the ash colored silt sands. He watched it pausing, where the wind had eddied the dust in serpentine lines over the tracks, sniffing the air, loping across the break, and on out again at a run, nose down to earth: a blot against the sky; the burned out sulphur sky above an earth of embers and ashes. Was it a mirage; ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... atmospheres or more by direct heating. The flanges of the tubing are provided with a cut-off of angle iron identical with that of the tube, D. By means of this arrangement the cocks and the flanges, E, permit of communication between the serpentine tubing, R, and the boiler being interrupted; while the heat developed by the fire-place, F, causes an active circulation in both ...
— Scientific American Suppl. No. 299 • Various
... when the supply of hot water can be drawn from a separate boiler. When, however, it is necessary to work at the boil, then the vat must be fitted with a steam coil. This is best laid along the bottom in a serpentine form. Above the pipe should be an open lattice-work bottom, which, while it permits the free circulation of boiling water in the vat, prevents the material being dyed from coming in contact with the ...
— The Dyeing of Woollen Fabrics • Franklin Beech
... assertion of Nietzsche: "We believe that severity, violence, slavery, danger in the street and in the heart, secrecy, stoicism, tempter's art and devilry of every kind, everything wicked, tyrannical, predatory and serpentine in man, serves as well for the elevation of the human species as its opposite."[220] To ignore altogether the affirmation of that opposing morality, it may be, would be to breed a race of weaklings, fatally doomed to succumb helplessly to ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... is generally vertical. Its characteristic is an undulating serpentine waviness. Little or no distinction is made between barred or looped letters. There are no rounded shoulders to the m and n and the word minnie would be written by five small u's. In round-bodied letters like a, d, g, the circle is rarely completed, but is left open, ...
— The Detection of Forgery • Douglas Blackburn
... out with the lark. Afternoon Fireworks on the Stock Exchange. Hippopotamus-washing in the Serpentine commences. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99., August 2, 1890. • Various
... time to begin though now, and he took the line and laid it out in a serpentine fashion upon the carpet, so that there should be no kinks in the way; and then the next thing was to fasten one end tightly so that he could safely ...
— Quicksilver - The Boy With No Skid To His Wheel • George Manville Fenn
... the Cathedral of Monreale. Its bronze doors were wrought by smiths of Trani and Pisa. Its walls were incrusted with the mosaics of Constantinople. The woodwork of its roof, and the emblazoned patterns in porphyry and serpentine and glass and smalto, which cover its whole surface, were designed by Oriental decorators. Norman sculptors added their dog-tooth and chevron to the mouldings of its porches; Greeks, Frenchmen, and Arabs may have tried their skill in turn upon the multitudinous ornaments ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... a receipte for one Laste and a half of Serpentine powder broughte into her Ma{ties} Store and debenter made by Painter for the same as made of forraigne Peeter the xiiij{th} of Julie 1576, the which I will prooue vnto yo{r} Ho that yt was her Ma{ties} owen powder brought from Windso{r} Castell the verie same ...
— The Palace of Pleasure, Volume 1 • William Painter
... to a dark serpentine line that lay like a dead snake upon the lighted surface of the road. Jules grunted in token of comprehension. Liane Delorme breathlessly ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... appearance. The Maidan is very reminiscent of Hyde Park, though almost double its size. There is one spot, where the Gothic spire of the cathedral emerges from a mass of greenery, with a large sheet of water in the foreground, which recalls exactly the view over Bayswater from the bridge spanning the Serpentine. ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... Constructive Crime, a crime which the revengeful, or the purchased judge distils out of an honest or a doubtful deed, in the alembic he has made out of the law broken up and recast by him for that purpose, twisted, drawn out, and coiled up in serpentine and labyrinthine folds. For as the sweet juices of the grape, the peach, the apple, pear, or plumb may be fermented, and then distilled into the most deadly intoxicating draught to madden man and infuriate woman, so by the sophistry of a State's Attorney and a Court ...
— The Trial of Theodore Parker • Theodore Parker
... garden. To a Norwegian both might have been objects of curiosity; and of use, by exciting to the comparison which leads to improvement. But whilst I gazed, I was employed in restoring the place to nature, or taste, by giving it the character of the surrounding scene. Serpentine walks, and flowering-shrubs, looked trifling in a grand recess of the rooks, shaded by towering pines. Groves of smaller trees might have been sheltered under them, which would have melted into the landscape, displaying only the art which ...
— Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark • Mary Wollstonecraft
... to notice on the continent beyond the groups of railways included under the above four systems. The Dutch have given a curious serpentine line of railway, about 150 miles in length, from Rotterdam through Schiedam, Delft, The Hague, Leyden, Haarlem, Amsterdam, and Utrecht, to Arnhem—an economical mode of linking most of the chief towns together. Holstein, the recent ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 452 - Volume 18, New Series, August 28, 1852 • Various
... silver, and tin,[145] that has been employed in embroidery. It has the remarkable quality of indestructibility by fire. Asbestos linen can be cleansed by fire instead of water.[146] It is a soapy crystal, found in veins of serpentine and cipolino in Cyprus, and other Greek islands. Pliny says it was woven for the funeral obsequies of monarchs, as it preserved the ashes apart, being itself unharmed by the fires of cremation. There are several fragments existing, found in ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... female principle or the emblem of water. The third symbol indicates the destroyer, the reformer or the renewer, (the uniter of the two) and thus the preserver or perpetuater eternally renewing itself. The universality of serpentine worship (or Phallic adoration) is attested by emblematic sculptures or architecture ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... beyond the natural points of the river's mouth. They operate to remove the place of deposition further out, and into deeper water. Bars, however, act as breakwaters in most instances, and consequently secure smooth water within them. The deposit in all curvilinear or serpentine rivers will always be found at the point opposite to the curve into which the ebb strikes and rebounds, deepening the hollow and depositing on the tongue. Therefore if it be deemed advisable to change the position of a bar, it may be in some cases aided by works projected on the last curve ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... hit the centipede right in the middle of its head, but instead of glancing off harmlessly as before, it struck home to the creature's brain. Then with a convulsive shudder the serpentine body stopped moving, and the fiery light of its great eyes and hundred feet darkened to a dull glare like the sunset of a stormy day, and then went out in blackness. A great darkness now overspread the heavens, the thunder ...
— Japanese Fairy Tales • Yei Theodora Ozaki
... man of this character is always open, though in a moderate and calm degree, to the duties and ties of life. He will always do something to serve his friend, his brother, or the man whose father pulled his father out of the Serpentine. Affect with him no varnish; exert no artifice in attempting to obtain his assistance. Candidly state your wish for such or such a service, sensibly state your pretensions, modestly hint at your gratitude. So may you deceive him once, ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... so with evident good-will. The whip flashed in the air with a serpentine swing, and went off like a pistol. The dogs yelled in alarm, and, springing away at full speed, were soon lost among the hummocks ...
— Red Rooney - The Last of the Crew • R.M. Ballantyne
... course a collection of masterpieces; they jostle each other in their splendour, they perhaps even, in their merciless multitude, rather fatigue our admiration. The Uffizi is almost as fine a show, and together with that long serpentine artery which crosses the Arno and connects them, making you ask yourself, whichever way you take it, what goal can be grand enough to crown such a journey, they form the great central treasure-chamber of the town. But I have been neglecting ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... force which moves in a serpentine or curved path. It is the universal life-principle which everywhere manifests itself in Nature. This force includes in itself the two great forces of attraction and repulsion. Electricity and magnetism are ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... away among the mountains, to a width of something like thirty yards, flowing silently past, and going to waste. Irregular areas of lignum, hundreds of acres in extent, and eight or ten feet in height, representing swamps; and long, serpentine reaches of the same, but higher in growth, indicating billabongs of the river. The river itself fringed, and the adjacent low ground dotted, with swamp box, river coolibah, and red-gum—the latter small and stunted in comparison with the giants of its species on the Murray ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... hall, Lady Bearwarden's pale, astonished face was seen looking over the banisters. Dorothea, too, creeping down-stairs, with some vague idea of escaping from this friendly refuge, and finding her way back, perhaps, to the cool shining Serpentine, came full upon the group at the moment when Jim was laid tenderly down by his bearers, and the policeman whispered audibly to his comrade that, even if the doctor were in the next street now, ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... aisle of the Choir. A little further southward is a monument erected over the grave of Dr. Mill, Canon of Ely, and Regius Professor of Hebrew in the University of Cambridge, who died in 1853. It is an altar tomb of serpentine and alabaster, ornamented with marble mosaic and polished stones, bearing a recumbent effigy of Dr. Mill in his robes; at the feet are two kneeling figures, one an oriental character, and the other a student; the figure is in copper and was formed by the electrotype process. It was ...
— Ely Cathedral • Anonymous
... them under a thick and almost impenetrable veil of fiction. They say that Hercules engaged in combat with the God of that river, who immediately transformed himself into a serpent, by which was probably meant merely the serpentine windings of its course. Next they say, that the God changed himself into a bull, under which allegorical form they refer to the rapid and impetuous overflowing of its banks, ever rushing onwards, bearing down everything in its ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... ways made in consequence of the intervening by-hills.... Everywhere there are caves, and their mouths are often so small that only one man can creep through at a time; the approaches to them are so serpentine, that he who is pursued may escape from his pursuer, and step into such a small opening, of which there are frequently three or four beside each other, before his pursuer is aware of it. Hence, if any one should hide himself there, it is exceedingly difficult, ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg
... Hebron, the rounded top of Scopus where Titus camped with his Roman legions, the flattened peak of Frank Mountain. Bethlehem is not visible; but there is the tiny village of Bethphage, and the first roof of Bethany peeping over the ridge, and the Inn of the Good Samaritan in a red cut of the long serpentine road to Jericho. The dark range of Gilead and Moab seems like a huge wall of lapis-lazuli beyond the furrowed, wrinkled, yellowish clay-hills and the wide gray trench of the Jordan Valley, wherein the river marks its crooked path with a line of deep green. The hundreds ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... female figure appeared in the far distance, on the broad avenue that leads direct from the Serpentine. She was young and graceful in form; but she walked with a quick step, with her eyes looking down, like one who regarded neither youth nor grace. Curiously enough, this downcast look gave to her fair face a modest, ...
— Fighting the Flames • R.M. Ballantyne
... entwine, intwine^; twist, coil, roll; wrinkle, curl, crisp, twill; frizzle; crimp, crape, indent, scollop^, scallop, wring, intort^; contort; wreathe &c (cross) 219. Adj. convoluted; winding, twisted &c v.; tortile^, tortive^; wavy; undated, undulatory; circling, snaky, snake-like, serpentine; serpent, anguill^, vermiform; vermicular; mazy, tortuous, sinuous, flexuous, anfractuous^, reclivate^, rivulose^, scolecoid^; sigmoid, sigmoidal [Geom.]; spiriferous^, spiroid^; involved, intricate, complicated, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... scollop[obs3], scallop, wring, intort[obs3]; contort; wreathe &c. (cross) 219. Adj. convoluted; winding, twisted &c. v.; tortile[obs3], tortive|; wavy; undated, undulatory; circling, snaky, snake-like, serpentine; serpent, anguill[obs3], vermiform; vermicular; mazy, tortuous, sinuous, flexuous, anfractuous[obs3], reclivate[obs3], rivulose[obs3], scolecoid[obs3]; sigmoid, sigmoidal[Geom]; spiriferous[obs3], spiroid[obs3]; involved, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... and at such times the wail is renewed, and their bodies lacerated as at the interment. At Boga Lake, I saw a grave with a very neat hut of reeds made over it, surmounted by netting, and having a long curious serpentine double trench, of a few inches deep, surrounding it; possibly it might have been the burial place of the native mentioned by Major Mitchell, as having been shot by his black, ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... fences, and oblige him to leap from the top of his banks and to land all fours, instead of extending himself and letting himself down gently. In swimming it obliges him to keep his whole head and neck out of water; I very nearly drowned a horse in this way in the Serpentine. ...
— Hints on Horsemanship, to a Nephew and Niece - or, Common Sense and Common Errors in Common Riding • George Greenwood
... she walked in the flock, sometimes with this one, sometimes with that, that the fresh night air was producing staggerings and serpentine courses among the men who had partaken too freely; some of the more careless women also were wandering in their gait—to wit, a dark virago, Car Darch, dubbed Queen of Spades, till lately a favourite of d'Urberville's; Nancy, her sister, nicknamed the Queen of Diamonds; and ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... sea, Until she slept, and saw the sea in dreams. Except in stormy nights, when all was dark, And the wild tempest swept with slanting wing Against her refuge; and the heavy spray Shot through the doorway serpentine cold arms To seize the fore-doomed morsel of the sea: Then she slept never; and she would have died, But that she evermore was stung to life By new sea-terrors. Sometimes the sea-gull With clanging pinions darted through the arch, And flapped them round her face; sometimes ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... understanding her friend's motives, crept in a serpentine fashion to the hillock, where she soon found Whitewing— to the intense but unexpressed joy of ...
— The Prairie Chief • R.M. Ballantyne
... was this feat, it was far less so than a young man's performance of the ophicleide, a serpentine instrument that coiled round and about its player, and when breathed into persuasively gave forth prodigious brassy sounds that resembled the night-noises of beasts of prey. This item roused the Indian god from his umbilical contemplations, and as the young ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... familiar with the Styrian-Carinthian highway through the valley of the Drau does not know what one of the good old Austrian imperial highroads in the good old days might undertake. Hop-up-and-down is its behavior, with snake-like humps, like a jumping polecat. Serpentine windings? Don't exist there. Straight as an arrow it heedlessly goes over mountain after mountain, down to the Drau and up again to airy heights, and any motorist who is slightly in a hurry will make a miniature ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... talking betweenwhiles in the night's grave undertones. Her trouble was too overmastering; it had seized her too mysteriously, coming on her solitariness without warning in the first watch of the night, like a spark crackling serpentine along dry leaves to sudden flame. A thought of Nevil and a ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... "full-dress" of a modern gentleman, and therein antic through the "Lancers," and he would simply be ridiculous,—which is all I allege against Thomas, Richard, and Henry, Esq. A woman's dancing is gliding, swaying, serpentine. A man's is jerks, hops, convulsions, and acute angles. The woman is light, airy, indistinctly defined: airy movements are in keeping. The man is sombre in hue, grave in tone, distinctly outlined; and nothing is more incongruous, to my thinking, than this dancing, well ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... that is, we sported a broad-pennant, or bougee, at the main, in token that we carried a Commodore—the highest rank of officers recognised in the American navy. The bougee is not to be confounded with the long pennant or coach-whip, a tapering serpentine streamer worn by ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... and towards Ferdinand the bigot, his holiness the Pope, and the venerable institution of the holy Inquisition. Alas! poor old John Bull! though art in thy dotage, with thy thousand ships in the great salt ocean; and thy half a dozen victorious ones in the Serpentine River, alias the splendid gutter, dug out in Hyde Park, for the amusement of British children six feet high! Can the world wonder that AMERICA, in her present age of chivalry, should knock over these doating old fellows, and make them the derision ...
— A Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts, 2nd ed. • Benjamin Waterhouse
... SCHOOLROOM.—When played in the schoolroom, the game starts with all of the players ready to march, the first part of the game, in which they are recruited, being omitted. The class should march in serpentine form up one aisle and down the next, etc., instead of encircling a row of seats. There should be for a large class from one to six less seats than the number of players. For instance, one seat should be counted out in each row or each alternate row. The seat that is not in play ...
— Games for the Playground, Home, School and Gymnasium • Jessie H. Bancroft
... read such a book as this of Whately's,—so informed and leavened as it is by an elegant taste,—I am most painfully impressed by the shortcomings of very much which is called good landscape-gardening with us. As if serpentine walks, and glimpses of elaborated turf-ground, and dots of exotic evergreens in little circlets of spaded earth, compassed at all those broad effects which a good designer should keep in mind! We are gorged with ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... at last, he hastened towards the Basilica by the narrow serpentine path which climbs the hill; while his companion again plunged into the mob, to return to his ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... has been already mentioned as the bass of the obsolete zinken or wooden cornets, straight or curved, with cupped mouthpiece. It gained its serpentine form from the facility given thereby to the player to cover the six holes with his fingers. In course of time keys were added to it, and when changed into a bassoon shape its name changed to the Russian bass horn or basson Russe. ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 819 - Volume XXXII, Number 819. Issue Date September 12, 1891 • Various |
