"Shrunken" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the films of age, through the films of coming death, and through the gathering darkness, old Hagar saw and knew, and with a scream of joy her shrunken arms wound themselves convulsively around the maiden's neck, drawing her nearer, and nearer still, until the shriveled lips touched the cheek of her who did not turn away, but returned that ...
— Maggie Miller • Mary J. Holmes
... connection between the Stevensons and M'Gregors. Alas! your invitation is to me a mere derision. My chances of visiting Heaven are about as valid as my chances of visiting Monreith. Though I should like well to see you, shrunken into a cottage, a literary Lord of Ravenscraig. I suppose it is the inevitable doom of all those who dabble in Scotch soil; but really your fate is the more blessed. I cannot conceive anything more grateful to me, ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... hadn't a notion where it was, save vaguely that it was somewhere in Italy; and, my poor father being dead, there was no one I could ask. Then, wandering in these parts a month ago, I stumbled upon it, and recognized it. Though shrunken a good deal in size, to be sure, it was still recognizable, and as ...
— My Friend Prospero • Henry Harland
... so very far wrong in calling it a hole. It was damp, dirty, and ill-smelling, even to the woman who was accustomed to it; to Charlotte it was horrible beyond words. For a time, the light was so faint she could distinguish nothing, then on some straw in a corner she saw a man. He was shrunken, and wasted, and dying, and Charlotte, prepared as she was for a great change, could never have recognized him. His wife, taking Charlotte's hand in hers, ...
— How It All Came Round • L. T. Meade
... at all; it was like a statue carven in ivory by the hand of a Praxiteles. There was nothing of that horrible shrinkage which death seems to effect in a moment. There was none of the wrinkled toughness which seems to be a leading characteristic of most mummies. There was not the shrunken attenuation of a body dried in the sand, as I had seen before in museums. All the pores of the body seemed to have been preserved in some wonderful way. The flesh was full and round, as in a living person; and the skin ...
— The Jewel of Seven Stars • Bram Stoker
... where the waters ran in shadow and escaped reflections, the river revealed a bed of ruddy brown and rich amber. This harmonious colouring proceeded from the pebbly bottom, where a medley of warm agate tones spread and shimmered, like some far-reaching mosaic beneath the crystal. Above Teign's shrunken current extended oak and ash, while her banks bore splendid concourse of the wild water-loving dwellers in that happy valley. Meadowsweet nodded creamy crests; hemlock and fool's parsley and seeding willow-herb ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... contempt of them, so that he fell to speaking of them as necessities instead of luxuries. He juggled figures, and thought nothing of four of them in a row. We looked at our five-thousand-dollar salary, so strangely shrunken and thin now, and even as we looked we saw that the method of the unctuous, anxious stranger had ...
— Personality Plus - Some Experiences of Emma McChesney and Her Son, Jock • Edna Ferber
... be expanded, with God as its guest, illimitably, but which without God shrinks and shrivels until every vestige of the Divine is gone, and God's image is left without God's Spirit. One cannot call what is left a soul; it is a shrunken, useless organ, a capacity sentenced to death by disuse, which droops as a withered hand by the side, and cumbers nature like a rotted branch. Nature has her revenge upon neglect as well as upon extravagance. Misuse, with her, is as mortal ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... now to have shrunken again in stature—to have become crumpled up like a man run over. Indeed, as he lay he seemed actually to be melting, so continuously was his ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... one dress owned by her mother beside her working one, and the shrunken little figure looked pathetically absurd in its ample proportions. It was much too long for her, of course, but her mother pinned up the skirt. Good old Peggotty Winters, the apple-woman, who lived in the back room, had lent her warm shawl for the occasion, ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. V, August, 1878, No 10. - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... For my sake the fruit forbidden? Must your light like mine be hidden, 480 Your young life like mine be wasted, Undone in mine undoing, And ruined in my ruin, Thirsty, cankered, goblin-ridden?'— She clung about her sister, Kissed and kissed and kissed her: Tears once again Refreshed her shrunken eyes, Dropping like rain After long sultry drouth; 490 Shaking with aguish fear, and pain, She kissed and kissed her with ...
— Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems • Christina Rossetti
... same barren rock wherein I had sat the day I discovered this cataract; now as I viewed this rock I was struck by its grotesque shape and then, all at once, I saw it was hatefully like to a shrivelled head—there were the fleshless jaws, the shrunken nose and great, hollow eye-socket. And now even as I stared at the thing my companion spied it also, for I felt her hand on my arm and saw her stand to view it wide-eyed. So we, speaking no word, stared upon this shape, ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... smiling and held out her hand with the cordial hospitality which she had inherited with the family portraits and the good old name. She wore this morning a dress of cheap black calico, shrunken from many washings, and beneath the scant sleeves Carraway saw her thin red wrists, which looked as if they had been soaking in harsh soapsuds. Except for a certain ease of manner which she had not lost in the drudgery of her life, she might have been sister to the toilworn slattern he ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... Turks. It is said that the city once numbered a population of four hundred thousand; but her sceptre has passed from her grasp, now, her ships and her armies are gone, her commerce is dead. Her battle-flags bear the mold and the dust of centuries, her marts are deserted, she has shrunken far within her crumbling walls, and her great population has diminished to twenty thousand souls. She has but one thing left to boast of, and that is not much, viz: she is the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... are old enough, sir, to know your own mind. You should have prepared me for this. You will excuse me a moment." Chad rose and the Major walked toward the door, his step not very steady, and his shoulders a bit shrunken—his back, somehow, ...
— The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come • John Fox
... each other in silence. Sorell, after a few gay words, had left them together. Radowitz held her hand in his own left. The other was bandaged and supported on a pillow. "When she got used to the golden light filtering through the plane leaves, she saw that he was pale and shrunken, that his eyes were more living and blue than ever, and his hair more like the burnished halo of some Florentine or Siennese saint. Yet the whole aspect was of something stricken. She felt a foreboding, a terror, of which she knew she ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... a relative of the Hautvilles, an uncle on the mother's side, old and broken, scarcely able to find his feeble way on his shrunken legs through the snow; but, with the instinct of gossip, the sharp nose for his neighbors' affairs, still alert in him, he had arisen at dawn to canvass the village, and had come thither at first, since he anticipated that he might ...
— Madelon - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... of the mountain, I found a dead ox the Jayhawkers had left, as no camp could be made here for lack of water and grass, the meat could not be saved. I found the body of the animal badly shrunken, but in condition, as far as putrefaction was concerned, as perfect as when alive. A big gash had been cut in the ham clear to the bone and the sun had dried the flesh in this. I was so awful hungry that I took my sheath knife and cut a big ...
— Death Valley in '49 • William Lewis Manly
... could believe, upon looking at this little ball, hanging on its fragile stem, and resembling both in color and shape a shrunken poppy-head, or some of the acorn tribe, what magical results could arise from merely wetting its surface—yet ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... rectangularity of the room in which you are standing. Simultaneously he makes measurements giving the same numerical results; for his foot-rule shrinks and curves in the exact proportion to give the true number of feet when he measures his shrunken and distorted rear wall. No measurement you can apply will prove you in the right, nor him in the wrong. Indeed he is likely to retort upon you that it is your room which is distorted, for he can show that in spite of all its nightmare aspects his ...
— Four-Dimensional Vistas • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... charge had blown in the top of the skull. The shrunken yellow face wore the gaunt eager look of one who had died the slow death of starvation. It seemed to be trying to get at them to ...
— A Maid of the Silver Sea • John Oxenham
... through which the guests were admitted. Presently the Duke and Duchess emerged from his Highness's closet. They were followed by Prince Ferrante, supported by his governor and his dwarf, and robed in a silken dressing-gown which hung in voluminous folds about his little shrunken body. Their Highnesses seated themselves in two armchairs in front of the court, and the little prince reclined beside ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... written, because we are sure that the granting of our wishes is His will. We know about the one that 'if we ask anything according to His will, He heareth us.' That may seem to be a very poor and shrunken kind of hope to give a man, that if his prayer is in conformity with the previous determination of the divine will, it will be answered. But it availed for the joyful confidence of that Apostle who saw deepest into the conditions ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... more emotional. One received, at a first meeting with him, the sensation rather of coming into contact with a man of heart than with a man of brains. Maurice felt the change at once, and was surprised by it. Outwardly the novelist was greatly altered. His tall frame was shrunken and slightly bent. The face was pale and drawn, the eyes were sunken, the large-boned body was frightfully thin and looked uncertain when it moved. As Maurice gazed he realized that this man had been to the door of death, almost over the threshold ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... Nicolas was obtaining some consolation from the third. Robin showed himself neither violent in his actions nor arrogant in his thoughts. He had not the sturdy, ruddy appearance of Maxime; nor the grave, audacious manner of Sulpice. Small, thin, yellow, lined, and shrunken, of humble, obsequious and reverential bearing, he devoted himself to assisting the Bishop and clergy, helping the clerks to keep the accounts of the episcopal revenues, and making complicated calculations with the assistance of balls threaded on rods; he even multiplied and divided ...
— The Miracle Of The Great St. Nicolas - 1920 • Anatole France
... him. That single fact struck him perhaps more deeply than any; it connected itself with many of physiological fancies; it was the parent of many thoughts and plans of his after-life. Here and there he could distinguish a half sentence. An old shrunken man opposite him was drawing figures in the spilt beer with his pipestem, and discoursing of the glorious times before the great war, 'when there was more food than there were mouths, and more work than there hands.' 'Poor human nature,' thought Lancelot, as he tried to follow ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... staring fixedly at the distance of the sea. He looked amazingly older than when I had last talked with him. His figure was shrunken, and his face rose thin and white out of a heavy fur overcoat and a large blue muffler. In his eyes there was such a sadness, such an infinite regret, such a profound weariness as can only be seen in the eyes of the senile. ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett
... sun-bleached dust, the pathway winds Before me; dust is on the shrunken grass, And on the trees beneath whose boughs I pass; Frail screen against the Hunter of the sky, Who, glaring on me with his lidless eye, While mounting with his dog-star high and higher Ambushed ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... Marteau, the elder, complying with Count Robert's dying wish, had taken the young Countess Laure across the channel, and had quietly left her in her uncle's care, he himself coming back to act as steward or agent for the remaining acres of the shrunken Aumenier domain; for the Marquis, having chosen a course and walked in it for so many years, was not minded even for the sake of being once more the lord of Aumenier to go back to France, since the return involved the recognition of the ...
— The Eagle of the Empire - A Story of Waterloo • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... cause to sting. She hurried onward through the wood, unconscious how rapidly or how far her heedless course extended. She sprang across gaps at which she would another time have shuddered; she clambered over fallen trees, penetrated thickets of tangled brier, and followed up the shrunken beds of streams, till suddenly the wood grew thin again, and she emerged upon an open space,—a long lawn, where the grass grew rank and tall as in deserted graveyards, and on which the afternoon sunshine lay with most ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... outside, with a cloth in her hand, pretending to dust the carved door-case. She frowned a stare of enquiry over her shrunken arm on me, as I passed. Milly, who had been on the watch, ran and met me. We heard my uncle's voice, as I shut the door, calling Dudley. He had been waiting, probably, in the adjoining room. I hurried into my chamber, with Milly at my side, and there my ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... luxuriance of vegetation is determined, among other things, by the supply of rain. A profusion of water gives to South America its amazing forests; a want inflicts on Australia its shadeless trees, with their shrunken and pointed leaves. With the diminished moisture the green gardens of France are replaced in Gobi by ligneous plants covered with a gray down. Physical circumstances control the vegetable as well ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... bade us remain all night. Up to this time we wore buckskin trousers. I went out hunting and the rain came down in torrents and my trousers got drenched. They stretched so long I cut them off so I could walk. When they dried they had shrunken above my knees. At this place we met Mr. Dent, a brother-in-law of General Grant. With him also was a Mr. Vantine. When these men saw the unfortunate condition we were in, they gave us each a pair of overalls and a hat. So we were once more a little more civilized and passable. ...
— Sixty Years of California Song • Margaret Blake-Alverson
... life. Here is a place warm to the touch and the first and most important operation in restoring the suspended animation, is to send this vital warmth forth from where it still feebly simmers, coursing once more through the body's shrunken channels. This is accomplished by shaving the crown and applying thereto a succession of piping hot pancakes. The tongue has been curved back over the entrance to the throat. You reach into the mouth and with a ...
— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis
... his appearance shocked her. His eyes were hollow, his tall form looked meager and shrunken. He was growing to be an old man. She ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... he never thought to be a recluse, the road was paved, so to speak; and when the dying hermit of Gouda blessed the citadel of Solitude, where he had fought the good fight and won it, and invited him to take up the breast-plate of faith that now fell off his own shrunken body, Clement said within himself: "Heaven itself led my foot hither to this end." It struck him, too, as no small coincidence that his patron, St. Bavon, was a hermit, and an austere one, a ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... to walk without a stick. At Kingston, too, his draft on New York was finally honored. He was able to creep out to Constant Spring, to buy new clothes, to ride in a carriage when he chose, to eat a white man's food again. The shrunken body under the flaccid skin slowly took on some semblance of its former ponderosity, the watery eyes slowly lost their dead and ...
— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer
... for he was almost always there—a bent, shrunken little man, white-haired, leaning heavily upon his cane, asking questions in a thin piping voice, and straining his dim eyes forever toward the unsounded waters, from whence the idol of his heart ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... The shrunken face of the good man kindled visibly, and he clasped his hands with force. A silence ensued, during which the others looked at him, the Greek through tears. ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... thoughts are gone, She nothing sees—no sight but one! The maid, devoid of guile and sin, I know not how, in fearful wise, 600 So deeply had she drunken in That look, those shrunken serpent eyes, That all her features were resigned To this sole image in her mind: And passively did imitate 605 That look of dull and treacherous hate! And thus she stood, in dizzy trance, Still picturing that look askance With forced unconscious sympathy ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... third day a light air sprung up, and we watched the islands gradually retire into the distance. Next morning they were faint and shrunken, and by midday they were gone. The wind was the commencement of the north-east trades. On the next day (Thursday, October 27, lat. 27 degrees 40 minutes) the cook was boiling some fat in a large saucepan, when the bottom burnt through and the fat fell ...
— A First Year in Canterbury Settlement • Samuel Butler
... languid convalescence, till at last she was able to sit in an easy-chair on the piazza. This she would do by the hour, with a sad, apathetic look on her thin face. She was greatly changed, her old rounded outlines had shrunken and she looked frail enough for the winds to blow away. The old, fearless, spirited look in her blue eyes had departed utterly, leaving only an expression of settled sadness, varied by an anxious, expectant ...
— Miss Lou • E. P. Roe
... and rowing men. The Surrey bank from Putney Bridge up stream is a string of club houses, boat houses, and little wooden buildings that do duty for both, and here, on sloping banks sometimes washed by brimming tides, sometimes broad and flat by a shrunken stream on which no racing boat will set its dainty keel, London gathers on March afternoons to wait for the return of the practising crews, and to watch the blue-scarved oarsmen in and out of the boathouses and the balcony windows. There is somewhere an air of the sea-side about that stretch ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... long time trying to screw himself up to walk along the jagged six-inch edge of rock between cliff and torrent into which the path has shrunken, to the sagging plank ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... door that was shrunken and warped from the heat till it barely held together, and there was no measure to the tenderness ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... entire days, now, we have not been anxious about Mrs. Clemens (unberufen). After 20 months of bed-ridden solitude and bodily misery she all of a sudden ceases to be a pallid shrunken shadow, and looks bright and young and pretty. She remains what she always was, the most wonderful creature of fortitude, patience, endurance and recuperative power that ever was. But ah, dear, it won't last; this fiendish malady will play new ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... went, Miss Eunice awoke to the disagreeable fact that her plans had become shrunken and contracted, that a certain something had curdled her spontaneity, and that her ardor had flown out at some crevice and had left her with the dry husk ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 6 • Various
... damp wind out of a long-closed vault, the door of which has accidentally been set, ajar—here comes Miss Hepzibah Pyncheon! Forth she steps into the dusky, time-darkened passage; a tall figure, clad in black silk, with a long and shrunken waist, feeling her way towards the stairs like a near-sighted person, as in truth ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... his indignant back. When he had filled out certain forms at his desk he shoved a pen into the silent consumptive's fingers and showed him crossly where to make his mark. At a signal from his bent forefinger a negro trusty came forward and took the pardoned man away and helped him put his shrunken limbs into a suit of the prison-made slops, of cheap, black shoddy, with the taint of a jail thick and heavy on it. A deputy warden thrust into Dugmore's hands a railroad ticket and the five dollars that the law requires shall be given to a freed felon. He took them without a word and, ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... steadily at the smallish figure of his old friend, not shrunken into the chair as usual now, but sitting upright and looking straight at him with a strange look he had ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston
... herbs, the surprising bigness of the chimney, the mysteries hidden in the worm-eaten chests, the almost saintly charm of the long-unused spinning-wheels, crumbling mementos of the patient industry of former generations, or the shine of the stars through the chinks in the shrunken boards, the old garret and all its associations are among the "long, long thoughts." I sometimes doubt whether the modern conveniences we are so fond of proclaiming are really an equivalent to the rising generation ...
— Homes And How To Make Them • Eugene Gardner
... hearse-plumes; I find in them a peculiar individuality and likeness to humankind. There is the chubby babe, six feet high; the fast-growing 'hobbedehoy;' the adult, bending away from you like a man, or, woman-like, inclining towards you; there is the bald, shrunken senior; and, lastly, appears death, lean and ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... the forces aligned against him marked time. When again he took the field he must take it in a realm of altered and shrunken boundaries, and the roll-call of his allies would show many missing—and many gone over to the foe. But greater than all these things was the change in himself. The cloyed wolf who had gorged too ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... Vaucluse order) rather than an effort of human, or even of Roman labor. It is the biggest thing at Orange—it is bigger than all Orange put together—and its permanent massiveness makes light of the shrunken city. The face it presents to the town—the top of it garnished with two rows of brackets, perforated with holes to receive the staves of the "velarium"—bears the traces of more than one tier of ornamental arches; tho how these flat arches were applied, or incrusted, ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... the reading began again. (In almost the moment the door had closed behind her, Split could be heard flying down the outside steps two at a time. That he was sorely tried, Madigan's voice showed plainly, and his shrunken audience looked apprehensively at one another). "'Six days passed thus and only the citadel was left. It was a steep rock in the middle of the town; a temple of the god of healing crowned the summit.' The god of healing, Cecilia," he put in, with a contempt that mantled the perfectionist's check ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... overwhelming. Madame Panpan's skill and untiring perseverance grew to be, as other resources failed, the main, and for many, many months, the whole support of the family. Then came a time when the winter had passed away, and the spring was already in its full, and still Panpan lay helpless in bed with shrunken limbs and hollow, pallid cheeks,—and then ...
— A Tramp's Wallet - stored by an English goldsmith during his wanderings in Germany and France • William Duthie
... was dressed in a suit of butternut, which had become very much shrunken, from exposure to all kinds of weather. His coat sleeves did not reach far below his elbows, and there was a considerable space between the bottom of his breeches and the top of his shoes. He was as "thin as a rail," and ...
— The Expressman and the Detective • Allan Pinkerton
... wool is an animal product. As such it tends to be shrunken and hardened by (1) heat, ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Household Management • Ministry of Education
... gable-end to the street. The Glasgow minister took his staff and went out to visit him. As he passed down the street he noted every change with a start, marvelling chiefly at the lowness of the houses and the shrunken dimensions of the Town Hall, once to him ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... nearly as much water as the Upper Mississippi. At that time there were several other tributaries of no mean size, such as the Des Moines, which filled valleys, one or two miles wide, but now represented only by shrunken streams. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 384, May 12, 1883 • Various
... my surmises were partially correct; the canvas was rotted, in a measure, and the bags were fastened to the flues. The dust had been put up in buckskin bags, first, and these had been put into shot-sacks; the buckskin was shrunken but intact. I took a good look around, before I dared take the treasure into the sunlight; but the coast was clear, and inside of an hour they were locked in my clothes-box, and the cover was on the kettle again and I was pumping her ...
— Danger Signals • John A. Hill and Jasper Ewing Brady
... another curious giant disease in which the hands, feet, and jaws enlarge enormously, known as acromegaly. It also pours into the blood a secretion which has a powerful effect upon both the circulation and the respiration. It is found shrunken and wasted in dwarfs. Some years ago it was suggested by my distinguished friend, the late Dr. Harrison Allen, and myself, that some of the extraordinary dwarfing and growth-retarding effects of adenoids might be due to a reflex influence exerted on ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... as startled as if he had happened upon something dead. On the floor was a man—a man whose back was bent rounding, and whose arms and legs were hugged up against his abdomen and chest. Torso and limbs were alike, frightfully shrunken; the hands, mere claws. Lounsbury could not see the face. But the hair was uncovered, and it was the hair that made him "goose-flesh" from head to heel. It was white—not the white of old age, with glancing tints of ...
— The Plow-Woman • Eleanor Gates
... like the mouth of a very young baby. His eyes glazed with his terror; his cheeks had in that one minute assumed a pale, purplish hue, on which the deep lines and darker veins stood out like a network laid over his shrunken skin. He sat up in bed—he who had not lifted his head for a week—and stayed rigid so for a few beating moments. Then he fell back, crumpled up amid the pillows. Nicky had flung the dog outside, and came to bend over him, casting a watchful ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... while a man might count fifty, so that eye and mind grew expectant—the great statesman, the People's Minister at length appeared. For the stooping figure that moved to a chair only by virtue of a servant's arm, and seemed the taller for its feebleness, for dragging legs and shrunken, frame and features sharpened by illness and darkened by the great peruke it was the Earl's fashion to wear, he was in a degree prepared. But for the languid expression of the face that had been so eloquent, for the lacklustre eyes and the dulness ...
— The Castle Inn • Stanley John Weyman
... and how terrible the shock, as they now looked upon his prostrate form, meagre, shrunken, and almost lifeless! Instead of the full, dark eyes that had beamed mirthfully and lovingly for so many years, there was an unnatural contraction of the pupils which rendered them almost invisible. His once healthful complexion was now livid, or rather ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... amused for a while at playing Cinderella, soon wearied of the hearthside role, and welcomed the Fairy Godmother in the shape of any magician powerful enough to turn the shrunken pumpkin back again into the golden coach. The mere fact of growing richer at a time when most people's investments are shrinking, is calculated to attract envious attention; and according to Wall ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... blade caught upon the jawbone, and at each effort it drove the sharp point of the upper knife deeper towards its brain. Moreover, so good was the steel, and so firm were the hide bindings of the handles, shrunken as they were with the wet, that nothing ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard
... stupidity, and they looked as though they had never experienced a joyous moment in their lives; but they were active and muscular, and soon showed that they thoroughly understood how to use their clumsy tools to the best advantage. They were led by and worked under the directorship of a lean, shrunken, withered old grey-haired hag of superlative ugliness, who did no work herself, but went constantly back and forth along the line of workers, bearing in her hand a long thin pliant rattan, which she did not hesitate ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... by Blackman from the Pyramid Texts "the libations are said to be the actual fluids that have issued from the corpse". In the next four quotations "a different notion is introduced. It is not the deceased's own exudations that are to revive his shrunken frame but those of a divine body, the [god's fluid][42] that came from the corpse of Osiris himself, the juices that dissolved from his decaying flesh, which are communicated to the dead sacrament-wise under the form of ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... during the same short truce, Miss Slowboy insinuated herself into a spencer of a fashion so surprising and ingenious, that it had no connection with herself, or anything else in the universe, but was a shrunken, dog's-eared, independent fact, pursuing its lonely course without the least regard to anybody. By this time, the Baby, being all alive again, was invested, by the united efforts of Mrs. Peerybingle and Miss Slowboy, ...
— The Cricket on the Hearth • Charles Dickens
... forth, are among the humblest; and the less imposing titles of Jenkins, Walker, Thomson, Barker, Solomons, &c., are completely laid aside. There is something imposing in this, and it is an excellent apology for shabbiness into the bargain. A shrunken, faded coat, a decayed hat, a patched and soiled pair of trousers—nay, even a very dirty shirt (and none of these appearances are very uncommon among the members of the corps dramatique), may be worn for the purpose ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... well and strong again, I told myself, bitterly. If it were not for those blue shadows under his eyes, and the shrunken muscles, and the withered skin, I could leave him to live his life as he saw fit. But he was as dependent as a child, and as capricious. What was the end to be? I asked myself. Where was it ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... peeped to see my own boy-visage closing the far vista below, seems to be still in use for the new edifice. Passing on a little farther, I came to a brook, which, I remember, the old man's son and I dammed up, so that it almost overflowed the road. The stream has strangely shrunken now; it is a mere ditch, indeed, and almost a dry one. Going a little farther, I came to a graveyard by the roadside,—not apparently a public graveyard, but the resting-place of a family or two, with half a dozen gravestones. On two marble stones, standing ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various
... endured now for more than thirty years. Ben Westerveld still walked with a light, quick step—for his years. The stocky, broad-shouldered figure was a little shrunken. He was as neat and clean at fifty-five as he had been at twenty-five-a habit that, on a farm, is fraught with difficulties. The community knew and respected him. He was a man of standing. When he drove into town on a bright winter morning, in his big ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber
... in the socket, and shrunken the eyeballs shone, As withdrawn from a vision of deeds it were shame to see. "Now, now, grim henchman, what is't with thee?" Brake Maclean, and his wrath rose red as a ...
— Select Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... where the sunlight fell agreeably and looked off over the valley. A shrunken river ran below—a mere thread of life through its own stony skeleton—a mockery of what it once had been before the white-hided things on two legs had cut the forests from the hills and killed its cool mossy sources in their channels. The crushers of pulp and the sawyers of logs had done ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... have penned me here, you have starved me, stunted me, crushed me—I sit shivering and staring at my own piteousness! Why, I can not even be angry any more—I am too shrunken, too impotent for that! And was it my fault? Have I not fought till ...
— The Journal of Arthur Stirling - "The Valley of the Shadow" • Upton Sinclair
... working like a galley-slave, so Rose told Jack, with the familiarity that was now justifiable in one who was almost of the family, and that Eddy had told her, with much disgust of demeanor, that its financing had eaten pretty deeply into his mother's shrunken means. Rose made no open denunciation; she, no more than anyone else, could guess from Jack's silence what his feeling about Imogen might really be. But she was sure that he was well over her, and that, above all, he was one of the elect ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... the control room. They looked silently out across this strange, dead world, thinking how much it must have been like Earth. It was dead now, and frozen forever. The low hills that stretched out beneath them were dimly lighted by the weak rays of a shrunken sun. Three hundred million miles away, it glowed so weakly that this world received only a little more heat than it might have received from a small ...
— Islands of Space • John W Campbell
... prayin' they'll do, an' I been carryin' stuff an' pettin' him up best I knowed for a week," said Abram, as he knelt, and cupped his shrunken hands, while Maria guided the wheat from her apron into them. "I'll scatter it along the top rail, an' they'll be after it in fifteen minutes. Thank you, Maria. 'T was good o' you to ...
— The Song of the Cardinal • Gene Stratton-Porter
... said Ezra, putting his lamb on the ground and showing Naomi its pitifully shrunken limb. In naming it "Three Legs" Ezra was following the custom of the shepherds who called their charges by any peculiarity they might possess, such as "Black Ear" or "Long Tail." "I mean to make a little wagon and teach Three Legs to draw it. And if he is not able to do that, I ...
— Christmas Light • Ethel Calvert Phillips
... westward, where it lost itself among another cluster of hills. Its sides sloped smoothly down to the banks of a small but deeply bedded river, which, though a stream of considerable volume during the winter, was now so drought-shrunken as at intervals to ripple over its rocky bottom, filling the valley with pleasant murmurings, audible from the tops of the hills around. The slopes, for a mile above and below, were nearly bare of trees, being covered instead with a luxuriant growth of blue-grass, ...
— Burl • Morrison Heady
... Even with the help of the mounted skeletons and restorations, they are somewhat unreal and shadowy beings in the minds of most of us. But this "dinosaur mummy" sprawling on his back and covered with shrunken skin—a real specimen, not restored in any part—brings home the reality of this ancient world even as the mummy of an ancient Egyptian brings home to us the reality of the world of the Pharaohs. The description of this unique skeleton by Professor ...
— Dinosaurs - With Special Reference to the American Museum Collections • William Diller Matthew
... of the organism. The waxy tones were in all the visible parts of her flesh. The neck and shoulders explained by their blanched paleness the wasted arms, flung forward and crossed upon the table. Her feet seemed enervated, shrunken from illness. Her night-gown came only to her knees and showed the flaccid muscles, the blue veins, the impoverished flesh of the legs. The cold, to which she paid no heed, turned her lips violet, and a sad smile, drawing up the corners of a sensitive mouth, showed teeth that were white as ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... ten paces, which, after first giving notice that he "didn't ripre-sent nobody," he proceeded to do, taking a dozen or more gigantic strides, and hastily retired again behind the safe bulwark of Jeff's back. As he stood there in his shrunken condition, he about as much resembled the pompous and arrogant duellist of a half-hour previous as a wet and bedraggled turkey does the strutting, gobbling cock of the flock. The Major, with an objurgation at him for stepping "as if he had on ...
— "George Washington's" Last Duel - 1891 • Thomas Nelson Page
... the fields and footpaths, by day and by night, and that is why I have never put myself into the charge of the many wheeled creatures that move on the rails and gone back thither, lest I might find the trees look small, and the elms mere switches, and the fields shrunken, and the brooks dry, and no voice anywhere. Nothing but my own ghost to meet me by every hedge. I fear lest I should find myself more dead than all the rest And verily I wish, could it be without injury to others, that the sand of the desert would rise and roll over ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... through his inflamed imagination like spectres on the Brocken, may be seen to-day in the Musee de la Revolution at Paris, shrunken to their true proportions—a dreary procession, indeed, of dreamers, madmen, quacks and felons! How can that be called a 'Great Revolution,' of which it is recorded that before it had filled the brief orbit of a decade, ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... will take the lower limb, whether there is lameness, soreness, gouty, rheumatic, neuralgic, swollen, shrunken, feverish, cold, smooth and glassy, sores, ulcers, erysipelas, milkleg, varicose veins, or any defect that the patient may complain of, who is the only reliable book or being of symptomatology. For convenience ...
— Philosophy of Osteopathy • Andrew T. Still
... no agent; for the man that previously ran the post had made away with himself; "because of the rigours of the place," said the assistant, who still remained; though the Toyaats, by their fires, had another version. The assistant was a shrunken-shouldered, hollow-chested man, with a cadaverous face and cavernous cheeks that his sparse black beard could not hide. He coughed much, as though consumption gripped his lungs, while his eyes had that mad, fevered light common to consumptives in the last stage. Pentley was ...
— The Faith of Men • Jack London
... usually busy quarter. Old Martha was not working. A basket of corn was on the floor by her side, and out in the yard the poultry were beginning to clamour a protest of overdue feeding-time. But Martha sat huddled in a shrunken bunch on the window seat, looking out with her dim old eyes as though she saw something stranger than ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki
... Very small and shrunken did she look when he took her out at the door leading to rooms over a stationer's shop. The sisters were somewhat better off than formerly, though good old Miss Ray was half ashamed of it, since it ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... head, bare and weird in the dusky light. A low moaning wind swept across the flat meadow land, and tossed those rugged branches hither and thither against the dark gray sky. They looked like the ghostly arms of shrunken and withered giants, beckoning Robert to his uncle's house. They looked like threatening phantoms in the chill winter twilight, gesticulating to him to hasten upon his journey. The long avenue so bright and pleasant when the perfumed limes scattered their light bloom upon the pathway, ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... thrill and quicken everywhere with new impulses which transform it into springing grass and overflowing flowers. The rivers are at their best: strong and clear and musical, the turbulence of early floods departed, the languor of later droughts not yet appearing. The shrunken woods expand; the stringent, sparkling wintry stars grow mild and liquid, shining with a tremulous and tender light; the whole world seems larger, happier, more full of untold, untried possibilities. The air vibrates with wordless promises, calls, messages, beckonings; and fairy-tales ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke
... was three foot high, a skeleton stretched over with brown-burnt leather. The other was an un-canine looking dog-sized beast, so full of burrs and thorns that it might have been a porcupine. It was a nightmare replica of a shrunken mule. ...
— Sodom and Gomorrah, Texas • Raphael Aloysius Lafferty
... clear eyes, like those of a hawk. His mother had been an Isbel. Gordon, too, was related to Jean's family, though distantly. He resembled an industrious miner more than a prosperous cattleman. Blue was the most striking of the visitors, as he was the most noted. A little, shrunken gray-eyed man, with years of cowboy written all over him, he looked the quiet, easy, cool, and deadly Texan he was reputed to be. Blue's Texas record was shady, and was seldom alluded to, as unfavorable comment had turned out to be hazardous. He was the only one of the group who ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey
... hope flickers, however forlornly. She gazed dully at the unconscious breathing form of the man who had been friend, and companion, and lover, during five years of youth too vigorous and hopeful to be warped by uneven fortune. It was wasted by disease; the face was shrunken; the night-garment hung loosely about a body which had never been disfigured by flesh, but had been muscular with exercise and full-blooded with health. She was glad that the body was changed; glad that its beauty, too, had gone some other-where than into the coffin. ...
— The Bell in the Fog and Other Stories • Gertrude Atherton
... downstairs and I was told how she had passed away. A few hours before she died she had asked for a silk thread; for thirty years, before sleeping, she always passed one between her beautiful teeth. Her poor arms were shrunken to the very bone and were not larger than a little child's. Haggard and over-worn, she was lifted up, and the silk was given to her and the glass was held before her; but her eyes were glazed with death, and she fell back exhausted. Then her breathing grew thicker, ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... the sledge-hammer blows of Tom Sayers, just for diversion. His constitution must have been superb, for even in his decrepitude he was good to look upon: five feet ten, fine body, slightly given to rotundity, legs a little shrunken in the shanks, but giving unmistakable signs of what they had been ("not lost, but gone before," as he would say of them), hands and feet aristocratic in form and well cared for, and a fine head set on broad shoulders. His ...
— The Fat of the Land - The Story of an American Farm • John Williams Streeter
... binding threads and with cutting pliers cut off all projecting pins and wires, leaving what part of them is covered by the feathers. Brush any clay from the eyes and if the lids have shrunken away from them as they do usually, coat a bit of black thread with glue and with a setting needle place between ...
— Home Taxidermy for Pleasure and Profit • Albert B. Farnham
... but headed directly for the gap and, as it neared, Vye saw that its brown coat was roughed with patches of white froth, while more dripped from the pale pink tongue protruding from its open jaws, and its shrunken sides heaved. ...
— Star Hunter • Andre Alice Norton
... Bombay a complete wreck, with shrunken, tottering frame, sunken eyes, and a voice that had lost its sonority. "It is written," said his friends, "that your days are numbered, take our advice and go home to die." They carried him to his ship, "The Elisa," ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... table, inlaid with mother-of-pearl which, in places, had broken away and left behind it a number of yellow grooves (stuffed with putty), lay a pile of finely written manuscript, an overturned marble press (turning green), an ancient book in a leather cover with red edges, a lemon dried and shrunken to the dimensions of a hazelnut, the broken arm of a chair, a tumbler containing the dregs of some liquid and three flies (the whole covered over with a sheet of notepaper), a pile of rags, two ink-encrusted pens, and a yellow toothpick with which the master of the house had picked his teeth ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... slim, shrunken body and her hands were almost transparent, so white was her skin. Her gown was gray, and she wore a white kerchief crossed on her bosom like a Quakeress. Her fine muslin cap had the narrow plain border ...
— A Little Girl in Old New York • Amanda Millie Douglas
... cigarette from a gold case, he struck a light, and, after a whiff or two, lay back and, closing his eyes on the stir and confusion, gave himself up to painful reflections. His shrunken self-esteem, like a feathered thing exposed to wet weather, was clamoring for a sunny spot in which to expand to natural proportions. Had he been able to remain at home, the unending chorus of feminine praise would soon have ...
— The Honorable Percival • Alice Hegan Rice
... tried something quite different. At daybreak of the 12th the whole fleet stood into Gabarus Bay, a large open roadstead running west from the little Louisbourg peninsula. The Provincials eyed the fortress eagerly. It looked mean, squat, and shrunken in the dim grey light of early dawn. But it looked hard enough, for all that. Its alarm bells began to ring. Its signal cannon fired. And all the people who had been living outside hurried in behind ...
— The Great Fortress - A Chronicle of Louisbourg 1720-1760 • William Wood
... intimate knowledge of Washington officialdom served him in both these precarious fields of endeavour. The liquor he drank—whenever and wherever he could get it—had bloated his face out of all wholesome contour and had given to his stomach, a chronic distention, but had depleted his frame and shrunken his limbs so that physically he was that common enough type of the hopeless alcoholic—a meagre rack of a man burdened amidships by ...
— The Thunders of Silence • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... dragon a delightful beast, with a remarkable eye for the picturesque, judging from the way in which he had arranged the remains of his victims; and she was sorry for him, dragged into the market-place, so pitifully shrunken, beaten, and mortified was he. She wanted to live in all the mediaeval castles of the picture-backgrounds, and was of opinion that the basilisk's real intentions had been misunderstood by the general public of his day. "I should love to have such a comic, trotty beast to lead about ...
— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... upon the bleeding hearts blossoming in flowers of the morning, and the torchlight revelry of pride shrunken to ashes. ...
— Fruit-Gathering • Rabindranath Tagore
... closely crowded together and confluent; the hypothallus a thin white granulose layer of lime, scarcely broader than the plasmodiocarp. The outer calcareous layer of the wall white, distinct, very fragile and easily shelling off; the inner membrane much shrunken and withdrawn from the outer coat, rugulose, cinereous, with a dense closely-adherent layer of granules of lime. The columella a thin alutaceous, granulose-roughened layer, extending along the base of the plasmodiocarp. Capillitium of threads short and very slender, ...
— The Myxomycetes of the Miami Valley, Ohio • A. P. Morgan
... throughout endeavoured to render the Sense and the Words of my Author as closely as the English Language and the Restraints of Metre would allow, and for this Purpose I have not shrunken either from sacrificing Elegance to Faithfulness (for no Translator is at liberty to misrepresent his Author and make an old Saxon Bard speak the Language of a modern Petit Matre) or from uniting English Words to express important ...
— The Translations of Beowulf - A Critical Biography • Chauncey Brewster Tinker
... his coronation robes. He was a fine figure of a man. His flowing wig descended majestically to his broad shoulders and his shapely leg, thrust forth, dominated a world. But on the reverse, a pimply shrunken figure emerged from the bath. Shortly after publication they had a revolution ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam
... corroded, like the Jebel el-Safr of Maghir Shu'ayb. The walls still standing form a long room running north-south; and the two adjoining closets set off to the north-east and south-east. This sadly shrunken upper settlement covers the remnant of the rocky plateau to the east: there are also traces of building on the southern slopes. Ruined heaps of the usual material, gypsum, dot and line the short broad valley to the north, which ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... emphatically against his way of filling every gap in his arrangements by wedging into it his League of Nations. "Can we harbor any illusion as to the net worth of the League of Nations when the revised text of the Covenant reveals it shrunken to the merest shadow, incapable of thought, will, action, or justice?... Too often have we made sacrifices to the Wilsonian doctrine."[215] ... Another press organ compared Fiume to the Saar Valley and sympathized with Italy, who, relying ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... there was a perfect moon, looking so extraordinarily large that it made everything its light fell upon seem small; the heat was tempered by a soft west wind, and the wind was laden with the odors of the early harvest. The hills, the vale of the Arno, the shrunken river, the domes of Florence, were vaguely effaced by the dense moonshine; they looked as if they were melting out of sight like an exorcised vision. Rowland had found the two ladies alone at the villa, and he had sat with them for an hour. He felt absolutely hushed by the solemn ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... colliery on the other side of the slope, were dripping also with raindrops. The road, flinty and light grey in colour, was greasy with repellent-looking mud—there were puddles even in the asphalt-covered pathway which he trod. On either side of him stretched the shrunken, unpastoral-looking fields of an industrial neighbourhood. The town-village which stretched up the hillside before him presented scarcely a single redeeming feature. The small, grey stone houses, hard and unadorned, were interrupted at intervals by rows of brand-new, ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... familiar and unfamiliar, embellish the speeches. Personality, vital personality, counts for so much in the orator of the market place. The speaker must be alive to his audience, he must convince by his presence no less than by his arguments. And Mr. Burns is so obviously alive. He warms the shrunken, anaemic vitality of followers, and overpowers the protests of enemies by sheer force ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton
... he saw! Exhaustion, helplessness, sorrow, physical injury, and moral defeat, were written in every line of the poor drawn face and shrunken form. The brow was furrowed, the breathing hard, the mouth dry and bloodless. Upon the mind of the new-comer, possessed as it was with the image of what David Grieve had been two short months before, the effect of the ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Stripped late of their green sheaths, Grapes, red-purple, Their berries Dripping with wine, Pomegranates already broken, And shrunken figs And quinces untouched, I bring ...
— The Second Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... whispered and murmured before they sat down in the pews and bent their pale foreheads in prayer in their shrunken hands. ...
— Invisible Links • Selma Lagerlof
... that which had conducted him to the cave. Upon entering, he beheld, scattered about the floor, a great many little children, quite as ugly and misshapen as the parents. Here lay one with a large leg and a little one, a full arm and a shrunken one, one-handed, or one-footed, or one-eyed. One had no hair: one was completely enveloped in it—in truth, the shapes were most various and singular. But all were not thus. Upon a bench, upon one side of the cave, sat a very little maiden—ye ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 2 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... to transmit to us paintings of his person, or at least of his face, from the time of his youth up to that of shrunken old age. He was a man at once robust and delicate. His broad and slightly rounded forehead presented a development that indicated a powerful imagination. His eyes were small, deep-set, bright, intelligent, and full of fire. His hair, of a warm color bordering on red and curling ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... top of which he saw the filthy monster glaring at him with bloodshot eyes. Enda poised his spear and hurled it against his enemy. It entered between the monster's eyes, and from the wound the blood flowed down like a black torrent and dyed the plain, and the shrunken carcass slipped down the front of the rocks and disappeared beneath the sand. Enda once more ascended the rock, and without meeting or seeing anything he passed over the stony waste, and at last he came to a leafy wood. He had not ...
— The Golden Spears - And Other Fairy Tales • Edmund Leamy
... that if he died to-night his soul would not stay with his body upon the hilltop. He wondered, somewhat grimly, what it would do when so much that had clothed it round—pride of life, love of pleasure, desire, ambition—should be plucked away. Poor soul! Surely it would feel itself something shrunken, stripped of warmth, shiveringly bare to all the winds of heaven. The radiance of the moon usurped the sky, but behind that veil of light the invisible and multitudinous stars were shining. Beyond those stars were other stars, beyond those yet others; on and on went the stars, ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... not suffered in the exchange, Master Droop?" said Bacon, reproachfully. "In very truth, I were not worse found had I shrunken one half within mine ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... held up her hands in astonishment at their shrunken garments; but her relief from the anxiety she had felt concerning what had befallen them during the gale was so great that she was ...
— By England's Aid or The Freeing of the Netherlands (1585-1604) • G.A. Henty
... shrunken resources, Miss Myrover and her mother were able to hold up their heads without embarrassment for some years after the close of the war. But when things were adjusted to the changed conditions, and the stream of ...
— The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, and - Selected Essays • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... came from the other room and presented for inspection his drawing of the seamen dead in the rigging of the wreck, a company of grizzly and horrible figures, bony-fingered, shrunken and with awful eyes. " Hum," said Coleman, after a prolonged study, " that's all right. That's good, Jimmie. But you'd better work 'em up around the eyes a little more." The office boy was deploying in the distance, waiting for ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... painting, "The Nuptials of Venus and Vulcan," her own youthful face smiled down, her husband having for a whim instructed the painter to depict the goddess in her likeness. It smiled down now on a little shrunken lady huddled deep in an easy-chair. Only her dark eyes kept some of their old expressiveness, and her voice an echo of ...
— Shining Ferry • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... cried in a tone of daze. In two strides he had left Amber and was kneeling by Rutton's side. The most cursory examination, however, sufficed to resolve his every doubt: the hanging head and arms, the livid face with its staring yet sightless eyes, the shrunken figure seeming so pitifully slight and unsubstantial in comparison with its accustomed strong and virile poise, ...
— The Bronze Bell • Louis Joseph Vance
... well enough to believe that. It would be the old question of revolt against the edifice men have built. You thought you could storm it, and it would capitulate; but when the winter rigours came, when passion died and self got shrunken to a meagre thing, you would seek the shelter of even ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... adjusted; her rouge and powder were artistically laid on, her eyebrows elaborately pointed, and in so far she looked as she always looked when visible to anyone but her maid. But her figure wanted bracing up, so to speak, and looked shrunken and shrivelled in the old cashmere dressing-robe, from which at that early hour she had not emerged. Her fingers—long, lean and yellow—were decorated with some half-dozen valuable rings. Increasing years had not tended to make her hands steadier than Janet remembered them as being when she last ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 4, April, 1891 • Various
... sometimes strange people, were there. We had no cosy talk; often she was too weak to do more than pat my hand; her loud and almost constant cough terrified and harassed me. I felt, as I stood, awkwardly and shyly, by her high bed, that I had shrunken into a very small and insignificant figure, that she was floating out of my reach, that all things, but I knew not what nor how, were corning to an end. She herself was not herself; her head, that used to be held so erect, now rolled or sank upon the pillow; ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... teeth that I had ever seen on any one. Had it not been that her expression was honest and good natured and her manner bright and intelligent, I should have recoiled before the yellow tusks of eye-teeth, and the blackened stumps and shrunken gums revealed to me every time she spoke. She wore a print dress made neatly enough which was very clean, and a black crape ruff round her sallow neck. The shop was small but clean and at the back I saw, a kind ...
— Crowded Out! and Other Sketches • Susie F. Harrison
... not for me even to guess. A good woman who suffers is altogether beyond man's reckoning. To such heights of self-sacrifice we cannot rise. It crushes us; it ought to crush us on to our knees. For us who saw Nanny, infirm, shrunken, and so weary, yet a type of the noblest womanhood, suffering for years, and misunderstood her to the end, what expiation can there be? I do not want to storm at the man who made her life so burdensome. Too many years have ...
— A Window in Thrums • J. M. Barrie
... filled her leisure with the ruminant joy of unchecked tenderness. Her blooming full-pulsed youth stood there in a moral imprisonment which made itself one with the chill, colorless, narrowed landscape, with the shrunken furniture, the never-read books, and the ghostly stag in a pale fantastic world that seemed to ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... Street where people failed, but throughout the city, where the engine of play had exhausted the forces of all. The city's huge garment was too large for it; miles of empty stores, hotels, flat-buildings, showed its shrunken state. Tens of thousands of human beings, lured to the festive city by abnormal wages, had been left stranded, without food or a right to shelter ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... her professional toilet. When she emerged to lay a worn strip of carpet on the rough cobbles of the street, she presented a pathetic figure in the gold of the afternoon sun. She was old and wrinkled; the rouge would no longer stick to the sunken cheeks; the wrinkles were become clefts; the shrunken but still muscular legs were clad in a pair of tights, a very caricature of the silken webs that must once have encased the poor old creature's limbs, for these were knitted of the coarse thread the commonest peasant uses for the rough field stocking. ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... not afraid of the physical difficulties that must yet be grappled with. Rocks and trees could be moved so long as the men were paid and fed. Still the fight was not over and their courage was tried when they carried the line along the moraine by a shrunken glacier and across a broken range. At length, one evening, Jim took Carrie up a hill and when they reached the top indicated a river that ...
— Partners of the Out-Trail • Harold Bindloss
... feebly groped her way to her sister's side, and throwing her shrunken arms about her, tried to win her back to consciousness by childishly calling her ...
— A Lover in Homespun - And Other Stories • F. Clifford Smith
... lifted into it again, for another three or four days' respite, to flounder it out of shape again, while every fresh furrow was a historical record of some shifting posture, some uneasy turning, some seeking for a little ease; and the shrunken skin scarce told a truer story than ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... flannel nightie that was shrunken in th' wash, In spots th' blue has ran inter th' white; But I've seen him in it, sleepy, when I tucked th' covers in, An' kissed him, soft, an took away th' light. Jus' a li'l flannel nightie, hangin' empty on a hook, As if it was ashamed—or in disgrace— ...
— Cross Roads • Margaret E. Sangster
... checked herself, for her habitually decorous master stood before her in his night shirt, barefooted, and laughed loud and merrily, clapping himself boisterously on his wasted ribs and on the shrunken thighs that carried his thin body. The precise widow was very much upset, she was also horrified at the insolent answer which,—she knew not how,—had just passed her lips. She endeavored to find some words of excuse but they were not necessary, for the Court apothecary called out, "Magnificent! ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... are? Mercy to goodness!" (this on beholding my shrunken costume) "Glory be to God you're not drownded! and your mother worritin' her heart out! So it's ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... and Graham's regiments were ordered out on what was deemed but a minor reconnoissance; and the friends, rested and strong, started in high spirits with their sadly shrunken forces. But they knew that the remaining handfuls were worth more than full ranks of untrained, unseasoned men. All grow callous, if not indifferent, to the vicissitudes of war; and while they missed regretfully many familiar faces, the thought ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe
... each other, and we are going to be married, and go away. I thank you, Senora, for all you have done for me; I am sure you will be a great deal happier when I am away;" and Ramona looked wistfully, with no shade of resentment, into the Senora's dark, shrunken face. "You have been very good to do so much for a girl you did not love. Thank you for the bread and milk last night. Perhaps I can go away with Alessandro to-day. I do not know what he will wish. We had ...
— Ramona • Helen Hunt Jackson
... his cassock free from my fingers. My embrace had been fervid, and his cassock was rumpled, and his scant hair was stringing wildly from under his skullcap. But shrunken and tumbled as he was, he was impressive. With some men, if you disarrange their outer habit, you lower their inner dignity as well. It was not so ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... shoulder, the great deep swell from waist to throat were gone. She had grown thinner and, in consequence, seemed unusually, almost unnaturally tall. Her neck was slender, the outline of her full lips and round chin was a little sharp; her arms, those wonderful, beautiful arms of hers, were a little shrunken. But her eyes were as wide open as always, rimmed as ever by the thin, intensely black line of the lashes and her brown, fragrant hair was still thick, still, at times, glittered and coruscated in the sun. When she spoke, it was with the old-time velvety ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... lost some of the freshness it had when it first came to our keeping, thank God! thank God! it is not dead, it lives! and can be revived. It wants more moisture; sprinkle tear-drops of penitence upon its shrunken foliage; let the springs of our sympathy once more flow over it; let us ask God to give us the "upper and the nether springs," that His love and ours may flow out in one united stream; let us come ...
— Little Abe - Or, The Bishop of Berry Brow • F. Jewell
... a large house, formerly a house of state, lives Mr. Tulkinghorn. It is let off in sets of chambers now, and in those shrunken fragments of its greatness, lawyers lie like maggots in nuts. But its roomy staircases, passages, and antechambers still remain; and even its painted ceilings, where Allegory, in Roman helmet and celestial linen, sprawls ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... help us to a proper understanding of the food question to consider right here what causes old age, or, rather, the physical signs of bodily infirmity that almost invariably accompany it. We are all familiar with the wrinkled body surface, the shrunken limbs and the stiffness of joints that particularly affect the aged, and are so accustomed to regard these outward manifestations of infirmity as inevitable, that few stop to inquire whether it is natural that this should be so. Undoubtedly, these are ...
— The Royal Road to Health • Chas. A. Tyrrell
... by this venture and was forced to take a partner in his old restaurant, and finally gave up his share and went beyond the city limits and opened the Pompeiian Garden, on the San Mateo road, and there with his heroic little wife tried to rebuild his shrunken fortunes, leaving the historic restaurant with its string of black cats and its memorable pictures on the walls to less skilled hands. He struggled against hard times and at the time of this writing he, ...
— Bohemian San Francisco - Its restaurants and their most famous recipes—The elegant art of dining. • Clarence E. Edwords
... ways and her merry heart, that someone was always planning to stay up at night, to be near her. But she did not like to be watched, especially when she felt the bad time of waning coming on; so her ladies-in-waiting had to be very careful. When the moon waned she became shrunken and pale and bent, like an old, old woman, worn out with sorrow. Only her golden hair and her blue eyes remained unchanged, and this gave her a terribly strange look. At last, as the moon disappeared, ...
— How to Tell Stories to Children - And Some Stories to Tell • Sara Cone Bryant
... Pontefract Castle, and in a short time their heads were cut off there. Another of the late king's friends was Lord Hastings; and as he sat at the council table in the Tower of London, with the other lords, Richard came in, and showing his own lean, shrunken arm, declared that Lord Hastings had bewitched him, and made it so. The other lords began to say the if he done so it was horrible. But Richard would listen to no ifs, and said he would not dine till Hasting's head was off. And his ...
— Young Folks' History of England • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of his tragedy there seemed little change in him. There was the same quirk at the corner of the mouth, the same humour in the strong face, not so ruddy now; and strangely enough the eyes were neither guarded by spectacles, nor were they shrunken, glazed, or diseased, so ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Alick, glancing down at his useless, shrunken limbs. But this time there was no anger in ...
— The Old Castle and Other Stories • Anonymous
... eighteen months. There was no fire, though the weather was cold; both children were wrapped in some poor shawls and tippets, as a substitute. Their clothing was not so warm, however, but that their noses looked red and pinched, and their small figures shrunken, as the boy walked up and down, nursing and hushing the child with ...
— Ten Girls from Dickens • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... move in the bright lamp-light, she saw the mouth open. Horrified, she looked away. Her eyes fell upon the squatting savages—their heads were all turned towards her, she was sure that she could see their shrunken chests heave as they took breath to utter that terrible cry again and again; even the fallen body of the African stirred on the floor, not five paces from her. Would their shrieking never stop? All of them—every ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... let us have a light!" cried Mr. Fenton, speaking for the first time since his entrance. "These moonbeams are horrible; see how they cling to the bodies as if they delighted in lighting up these wasted and shrunken forms." ...
— Agatha Webb • Anna Katharine Green
... and save for the excruciating pain caused by the shrunken muscles when she moved, was as sound as a bell, and likely to live to a ripe old age, slave to her whilom servant, who sat on his heels, inhaling the fumes of the jewel-encrusted nargileh which his heart had ...
— The Hawk of Egypt • Joan Conquest
... holidays. But the poor students came in such numbers that there were not enough rich families to provide for all, so that some of them suffered privation. You could pick out a poor student in a crowd, by his pale face and shrunken form. ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... had issued, a moment or two later, a man upon a bicycle, who was also coming towards him. Hamel was scarcely conscious of this secondary figure. His eyes were fixed upon the strange personage now rapidly approaching him. There was something which seemed scarcely human in that shrunken fragment of body, the pale face with its waving white hair, the strange expression with which he was being regarded. The little vehicle came to a standstill only a few feet away. Mr. Fentolin leaned forward. His ...
— The Vanished Messenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... allusion to himself, he sat very still for some time, then he spread out his wasted hands, and gazed on them, and on his shrunken limbs. "Good," said he, laughing low; "these hands were too large and rude for handling the delicate webs of my own mechanism, and these strong limbs ran away with me. If I had been a sickly, puny fellow, perhaps my mind would have ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... for she found no words in which to tell him that it was his affair. Her hands clasped tightly in her lap, her eyes downcast, she seemed shrunken together, ...
— Amabel Channice • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... were for Dorothy, for the Church, and for Gilbert's memory; Eric Gill's monument, the biography, the permanence of his own writing. She survived him little more than two years. Near the end, from the face of a dying woman shrunken with pain, we still could see those "great heavenly eyes that seem to make the truth at the heart of things almost too terribly simple and naked for ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... fairly caught your breath from the intensity of the shock. The cheeks were hollow; the lips were ever parted to make more easy the simple act of breathing, the pallor of the face was more than that of mere weakness—there was a yellowish hue of both skin and eye-whites. The shrunken claw-like hands that offered greeting, the shrunken thighs, the increased girth of body which had so deceived your first glance, all bespoke mortal illness to even the untrained eye—advanced cirrhosis of the liver, ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll
... banks of a little river so shrunken by the suns of summer that it seems fast passing into a tradition, but swollen by the autumnal rains with an Italian suddenness of passion till the massy bridge shudders under the impatient heap of ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... easily regained when lost as you seem to imagine, my friend," exclaimed a pompous but rather weak voice. Joe looked up. It was Mr Hazlit, whose bloodless countenance and shrunken condition had become more apparent than ever after he had been enabled to reclothe himself in the garments ...
— Under the Waves - Diving in Deep Waters • R M Ballantyne
... softly, so that he might not disturb poor David. The warper sat on by the fire, his head sunk miserably in his shoulders. The vehemence had passed out of him; you would have hesitated to believe that such a listless, shrunken man could have been vehement that same year. It is a hardy proof of his faith in Tommy that he did not even think it worth while to look up when, by and by, the parlour door opened and the doctor came in for his hat. Elspeth ...
— Tommy and Grizel • J.M. Barrie
... the old wife turned over or lay quiescent in the place where they put her when they folded her tired old hands upon her shrunken breast, it is indisputable that the new one eased the pangs of many a hungry day in that bountiful meal. And Joe's face glowed from the fires of it, and his eyes sparkled in the satisfaction ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... attired with some pretension, in a doublet of purple velvet with sleeves of a lighter color. His short, full trousers were garnished at the knee with immense roses; his shrunken nether limbs were cased in silken hose of a pale lavender hue, and silver buckles fastened the tufted purple ribbons on his shoes. On his breast was the red cross of St. James—patent of nobility; had it not been for that and his fine attire he might have passed for a blear-eyed ...
— Margaret Tudor - A Romance of Old St. Augustine • Annie T. Colcock
... dined there. He had acquired a real affection for Mrs. Ferguson, who resembled a burgomaster's wife in her evening gowns and jewels, and whose simple social ambitions had been gratified beyond her dreams. Her heart had not shrunken in the process, nor had she forgotten her somewhat heterogeneous acquaintances in the southern part of the city. And it was true that when Gertrude Constable had nearly died of appendicitis, it was on this lady's ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill |
