"Skim" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... white sauce. Season with salt and half a teaspoonful of moist sugar, boil for a quarter of an hour, adding more white stock if necessary, and stirring constantly. Put through a strainer into another saucepan, boil up again, skim, and use ...
— Twenty-four Little French Dinners and How to Cook and Serve Them • Cora Moore
... abandon an industrious and virtuous creature, whose only error was a too confident dependence on the youth and health she enjoyed. The birds, as they cleave with gay and agile wings the azure skies in spring, or skim lightly over the blooming fields, do they think of ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... from the waves which they shadow with their solemn forms, their costly fronts rich with the spoils of kingdoms, and softened with the magic of the midnight beam. The whole city too is poured forth for festival. The people lounge on the quays and cluster on the bridges; the light barks skim along in crowds, just touching the surface of the water, while their bright prows of polished iron gleam in the moonshine, and glitter in the rippling wave. Not a sound that is not graceful: the tinkle of guitars, the sighs of serenaders, and the responsive chorus of gondoliers. Now ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... sawdusty horses, which was never in any other place in the world, salutes my nose with painful distinctness. What do you think of my suddenly finding myself a swimmer? But I have really made the discovery, and skim about a little blue bay just below the town here, like a fish in high spirits. I hope to preserve my bathing-dress for your inspection and approval, or possibly to enrich your collection of Italian costumes on my return. Do you recollect Yarnold in "Masaniello"? I fear that I, unintentionally, ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 1 (of 3), 1833-1856 • Charles Dickens
... skim the air, When spooks and goblins climb the stair; When bats rush out with muffled wings, And now and then the door-bell rings; But just the funniest thing of all Is 'cause you can't ...
— Poems for Pale People - A Volume of Verse • Edwin C. Ranck
... discovery and research in its relation to the later empires that ruled at Babylon have produced results of literary rather than of historical importance. But we should exceed the space at our disposal if we attempted even to skim this fascinating field of study in which so much has recently been achieved. For it is time we turned once more to Egypt and directed our inquiry towards ascertaining what recent research has to tell us with regard to her inhabitants during the later periods ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, And Assyria In The Light Of Recent Discovery • L.W. King and H.R. Hall
... will take only to the limit of his capacity from any book set before him: he may get almost all from a book that contains but little, a good share of a book that contains much, but very little of a book that is far beyond the range of his experience. Granted the same book, one reader will barely skim its surface, another will gain a fair idea of the gist of it, a third will almost relive it with ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... while others go to the bottom, we only skim the surface; are despised by people of solid sense, of true honour, and superior talents; and shutting our eyes, move round and round, like so many blind mill-horses, in one narrow circle, while we imagine we have all the world to ...
— Clarissa, Volume 7 • Samuel Richardson
... to my presence of mind, as a beginning. I felt the words of my lessons slipping off, not one by one, or line by line, but by the entire page; I tried to lay hold of them; but they seemed, if I may so express it, to have put skates on, and to skim away from me with a smoothness ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... can ascend; if too cold, I can come down. Should there be a mountain, I can pass over it; a precipice, I can sweep across it; a river, I can sail beyond it; a storm, I can rise away above it; a torrent, I can skim it like a bird! I can advance without fatigue, I can halt without need of repose! I can soar above the nascent cities! I can speed onward with the rapidity of a tornado, sometimes at the loftiest heights, sometimes only a hundred feet above the soil, while the map of ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne
... Lavretsky lay down at night he took to bed with him a whole bundle of French newspapers, which had already lain unopened on his table for two or three weeks. He began carelessly to tear open their covers and to skim the contents of their columns, in which, for the matter of that, there was but little that was new. He was just on the point of throwing them aside, when he suddenly bounded out of bed as if something had stung him. In the feuilleton of one of the papers our former acquaintance, M. Jules, communicated ...
— Liza - "A nest of nobles" • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... little excursion from Gurgan Point to the harbour; the sea was luckily calm, but there was sufficient breeze to enable The Kittiwake to skim over the water like her sea-gull namesake. The girls, who by this time had grasped the depths of their friend's plot, enjoyed the situation immensely. They were actually having their coveted sail in the very company of the dear lady who had so ...
— Monitress Merle • Angela Brazil
... fought,— Outstrip'd the winds, in speed upon the plain, Flew o'er the fields, nor hurt the bearded grain: She swept the seas, and as she skim'd along, Her flying feet, unbath'd, ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber
... Monroes' for luncheon," Mrs. Dinsmore reminded her. "But Mr. Brockton is going to skim over most of the Berkshires first. I think you said you hadn't been in this part of the country ...
— Life at High Tide - Harper's Novelettes • Various
... board, set out, hit the road, get going, get underway. peg on, jog on, wag on, shuffle on; stir one's stumps; bend one's steps, bend one's course; make one's way, find one's way, wend one's way, pick one's way, pick one's way, thread one's way, plow one's way; slide, glide, coast, skim, skate; march in procession, file on, defile. go to, repair to, resort to, hie to, betake oneself to. Adj. traveling &c. v.; ambulatory, itinerant, peripatetic, roving, rambling, gadding, discursive, vagrant, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... guess they won't sink up to thar bodies. They may stumble an' throw us, but as we'll hit in soft mud it ain't likely to hurt us. It may rain hard, 'cause I see clouds heapin' up thar in the west. An' if it rains the cold may then freeze a skim of ice over the road, on which we could slip an' break our necks, hosses an' all. Then thar are some cliffs close to the road. If we was to slip on that thar skim of ice which we've reckoned might come, then mebbe we'd go over one of them cliffs and drop down a hundred ...
— The Guns of Shiloh • Joseph A. Altsheler
... structure of civilization with its city control of the hinterland, its products and inhabitants, enabled the city-centered oligarchy to accumulate and concentrate wealth and monopolize power, to skim the cream from the available milk, monopolize the cream, distribute the skimmed milk judiciously and thus perpetuate its ascendancy through generations and centuries. During periods of expansion civilized communities ...
— Civilization and Beyond - Learning From History • Scott Nearing
... had been accomplished, and they were once more speeding onward, as Tom touched the controls that started the motor working. All then was well, as far as they had gone. Apparently they could by successive stages descend close to the treetops, and skim along until some favorable open space showed, into which a skillful pilot would find it possible to drop ...
— Air Service Boys Over The Enemy's Lines - The German Spy's Secret • Charles Amory Beach
... do now is a little work in de garden. Dey say I is too ole ter work, so charity gives me a little ter go upon every week. For one weeks 'lowance o' sumptin' ter eat dey gives me, hold on, I will show you, dat beats guessin'. Here it is: 1/2 peck meal (corn meal), 2 lbs oat meal, 2 lb dry skim milk, and 1 lb plate meat. Dis is what I gits fer one week 'lowance. I can't work much, but de white folks gib me meals fur washin' de woodwork in dere houses, de white folks in Hayes's Bottom. What little I do, I does fer him. He gives me meals for workin'. De charity gives me about 80 ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States • Various
... is easy for the teacher to lay films of information on the surface of their minds. As they have capacious and fairly retentive memories, it is easy for the teacher, especially if he is a strict disciplinarian, to make his pupils retain the greater part of what they have been taught. To skim off and give back to the teacher (or examiner) portions of the floating films of information, is a knack which comes with practice, and which the average child easily acquires. The teacher will, of course, demand that his school shall be examined on ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... little work; carefully winnowing away the chaff of hypothesis, and discarding the tares of fable, which are too apt to spring up and choke the seeds of truth and wholesome knowledge. Had I been anxious to captivate the superficial throng, who skim like swallows over the surface of literature; or had I been anxious to commend my writings to the pampered palates of literary epicures, I might have availed myself of the obscurity that overshadows the infant years of our city, to introduce a ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... the shin, beef, which is full of nutriment, will have nearly one-half pound of meat on it. Take one pound of the scrag end of the neck of veal and four quarts of water. Wash the bones and add the cold water and bring slowly to a boil. Skim and then cover closely and cook for four hours. By this time the meat will have fallen from the bones. Strain and set aside to cool. Let stand ...
— Mrs. Wilson's Cook Book - Numerous New Recipes Based on Present Economic Conditions • Mary A. Wilson
... better not be puttin' notions inter their heads. Yer father wouldn't like it. Well Danny, me man, how goes it?" went on Mrs. Watson, as her latest born was eating his rather scanty supper. "It's not skim milk and dhry bread ye'd be havin', if you were her child this night, but taffy candy filled wid nuts and chunks o' cake as big as yer head." Whereupon Danny wailed dismally, and had to be taken from his chair and have the "Little Boy Blue" sung to him, before he could be induced to go ...
— Sowing Seeds in Danny • Nellie L. McClung
... a nice shepherd puppy. It is just as cunning as it can be. There is no school here that I can go to, so I study at home. We have eight cows. I can milk, and I can strain the milk and skim it too. One evening I skimmed ...
— Harper's Young People, June 15, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... don't read, I skim. Sometimes I canter through a dozen novels in a morning. I am disappointed, I confess, in all these works; I want to see more real knowledge of the world than they ever display. They tell us how Lord Arthur looked, and Lady Lucy dressed, and what was the colour of those curtains, and these ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... hills, when the rain-cloud is low and much broken, and the steady west wind fills all space with its strength,[B] the sun-gleams fly like golden vultures; they are flashes rather than shinings; the dark spaces and the dazzling race and skim along the acclivities, and dart and dip ...
— The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century - Two Lectures delivered at the London Institution February - 4th and 11th, 1884 • John Ruskin
... the streets, and jolted over the stones, and at length reach the wide and open country. The wheels skim over the hard and frosty ground; and the horses, bursting into a canter at a smart crack of the whip, step along the road as if the load behind them—coach, passengers, cod-fish, oyster-barrels, and all—were but a feather at their heels. They have descended a gentle slope, and enter upon ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... declared the young farmer to Mrs. Atterson. "But I believe the risk is worth taking. If we do get 'em good, we'll get 'em early and skim the cream of the ...
— Hiram The Young Farmer • Burbank L. Todd
... sparkling sea, is excessively difficult to navigate; its surf looks no more than champagne foam, but a thousand quicksands and shoals lie beneath: there are breakers ahead for more than half the dainty pleasure-boats that skim their hour upon it; and the foundered lie by millions, forgotten, five fathoms deep below. The only safe ballast upon it is gold dust; and if stress of weather come on you, it will swallow you without remorse. Trevenna had none of this ballast; he had ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... too much, we seek too oft; We know enough and should no more; And yet we skim through Fancy's lore, And look to ...
— A Nonsense Anthology • Collected by Carolyn Wells
... sunlight by the side of the yacht, when the porpoises flashed their shining black bodies out of the water and plunged in again as they raced with the swiftly moving vessel, when great flocks of flying-fish would rise into the air, skim high above the water, and then all fall back again with a patter as of big rain-drops, and the people on the deck of the Summer Shelter took off their heavy wraps and unbuttoned their coats, it was a happy company which ...
— Mrs. Cliff's Yacht • Frank R. Stockton
... opposite a spot where the jungle came close to the edge of the lagoon, being only separated by a smooth patch of sand. Here, too, were quite a flock of the maleo birds, scratching and searching for food, after the fashion of fowl; but as the boat stopped they took alarm, and seemed to skim over the sand, their feet striking the ground so rapidly ...
— Mother Carey's Chicken - Her Voyage to the Unknown Isle • George Manville Fenn
... has succeeded in stringing together some of the strangest things that ever saw the light. Suppose that some newspaper should give that item of news, don't you think folks would get the book, when it was published? and don't you think they would read it, or, at all events, skim it over, to see what kind of stuff Uncle Frank had been emptying out of his brain? ...
— Mike Marble - His Crotchets and Oddities. • Uncle Frank
... mills of the police gods, which grind not so slowly but ofttimes exceeding fine, were about done with their grinding; and as the last of the grist came through the hopper, the last of the afternoon sunlight came sifting in through the windows at the west, thin and pale as skim milk. One after another the culprits, patrolmen mainly, had been arraigned on charges preferred by a superior officer, who was usually a lieutenant or a captain, but once in a while an inspector, full-breasted ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... our clean collars on, Willie never went near Myra again that night. After all, he seemed to be a diluted kind of a skim-milk sort of a chap, and I never wondered that Joe Granberry ...
— Options • O. Henry
... of tourists. There had been a full pour of forenoon sunshine on the white dust of the street before our hotel, but the cold of the early morning, though it had not been too much for the birds that sang in the garden back of us, had left a skim of ice in damp spots, and now, in the late gray of the afternoon, the ice was visible and palpable underfoot in the Colosseum, where crowds of people wandered severally or collectively about in the half-frozen mud. They were, indeed, ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... fish are seen, that spring clear out of the water; and are preyed upon by terns and other birds; a few insects skim the surface; turtle and porpoises tumble along, all forming a very busy contrast to the lazy alligator, sunning his green and scaly back near the shore, with his ichthyosaurian snout raised high above the water. Birds are numerous, ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... surprising celerity. And at midnight a big freight canoe, loaded to the gunwale with an assortment of cheap knives and hatchets, bolts of gay-coloured cloth, and cheaper whiskey broke through the ever thickening skim of shore ice, and headed Northward under the personal direction of that master of ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... curdled milk they press and squeeze, And so they make it into cheese; The cream they skim and shake in churns, And then it soon ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole
... water, gliding along the huge plates of zinc, and flowing over the edges of the vast superposed basins. Then frosty weather seemed to turn these roofs into rigid ice, like the Norwegian bays over which skaters skim; while the warm June nights lulled them into deep sleep. One December night, on opening his window, he had seen them white with snow, so lustrously white that they lighted up the coppery sky. Unsullied by a single footstep, they then stretched out like the lonely plains of the Far North, ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... only a smattering of the secret of certain success if you just skim over the chapters, and skip whatever requires you to think hard in order to comprehend it all. But if you dig into the meaning of each sentence for the full idea, you will enrich yourself with constantly increasing power and skill in selling. So you ...
— Certain Success • Norval A. Hawkins
... up our sleeves and look after our cooking ourselves, and not insist that heaven should put itself out of the way to skim our soup. ...
— Monsieur, Madame and Bebe, Complete • Gustave Droz
... means, sir," resumed the latter, "you will gut my fish in a jiffy; permit me to recall that expression, with apologies for my freedom. I would say, you will, in a few minutes of your valuable existence, skim the cream ...
— Peg Woffington • Charles Reade
... their lawful owners. Meanwhile, I dashed forward whithersoever the horse took me. I remember, even amid my panic, what a delight it was to sit astride of so noble a beast, who seemed to scorn my weight, and skim the earth as lightly as if he carried a child. Had it been my own sorry nag I should long since have ...
— Sir Ludar - A Story of the Days of the Great Queen Bess • Talbot Baines Reed
... long illness is languid, passive, receptive of sweetness, but too weak to contain it. The tears well and fall as the dog barks in the hollow, the children skim after hoops, the country darkens and brightens. Beyond a veil it seems. Ah, but draw the veil thicker lest I faint with sweetness, Fanny Elmer sighed, as she sat on a bench in Judges Walk looking at Hampstead Garden Suburb. But the dog ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... finish off with; put on the pot, Bess, and skim the milk," added Becky, as she produced cups, mugs, and a queer little vase, to supply drinking vessels for ...
— An Old-fashioned Girl • Louisa May Alcott
... boiled and bubbled, and the Mouse King stood close beside the kettle—there was almost danger in it—and he put forth his tail, as the mice do in the dairy, when they skim the cream from a pan of milk, afterwards licking their creamy tails; but his tail only penetrated into the hot steam, and then he sprang ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... the hours flew along, Like swallows that skim o'er the flood; Like the sound of a beautiful song, That echoes ...
— The Humourous Story of Farmer Bumpkin's Lawsuit • Richard Harris
... the skaters, we who skim The surface of Life's solemn flood, And drive, with gladness in our blood, A daring ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... the Buckskin Horse was hitched to the surrey; and in the shafts of the buggy stood Hal the Red Roan. And that night the boys particularly wanted to ride behind Teddy. They liked to watch the black stripe that ran down his yellow back skim ahead of them over the road, just like a snake. And they liked the surrey, too. It had a fringe all around the top, and high mudguards, and a whip with a tassel and ribbon on it. But now that the great-aunts ...
— Half-Past Seven Stories • Robert Gordon Anderson
... follow the gale, and when it blows most heavily they are seen in greatest numbers. The colour is brown and white; the size about that of the swallow, whose motions oh the wing they resemble. They skim over the surface of the roughest sea, gliding up and down the undulations with astonishing swiftness. When they observe their prey, they descend flutteringly, and place the feet and the tips of the wings on the surface of ...
— A Ramble of Six Thousand Miles through the United States of America • S. A. Ferrall
... to the flat in Sparrow Street it was in time to get tea for the children. The little larder was becoming sadly bare; the Christmas feast was almost all eaten up, and Alison could only provide the children with very dry bread, and skim milk largely diluted ...
— Good Luck • L. T. Meade
... of which it is, in fact, the refined essence. Scott skims off the cream of his varied stores of popular tradition and antiquarian learning with strange facility; but he had tramped through many a long day's march, and pored over innumerable ballads and forgotten writers, before he had anything to skim. Had he not—if we may use the word without offence—been cramming all his life, and practising the art of story-telling every day he lived? Probably the most striking incidents of his books are in reality mere modifications of anecdotes which he had rehearsed a hundred times before, ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... across a bend of the valley are more of our trenches, with the German parapets 200 yards away beyond. And over these our shells are bursting, fired by guns on the slope of the hill beneath me; they whistle softly as they skim through the air over my head, and I hear the burst as they land. Further away to the west is one of the enemy's strongholds, and there bigger shells are bursting, throwing up clouds of black smoke and dust. These pass by with ...
— The New York Times Current History: the European War, February, 1915 • Various
... owd parson's lass. A little wench not much higher nor thy waist, an' wi' a bit o' a face loike skim-milk, but steady and full o' pluck as ...
— That Lass O' Lowrie's - 1877 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... none trust one o' them—not to sell a pound o' butter," said Rachel. "And by th' same token, Mrs Temperance, I mun be home to skim th' cream, or Charity'll take it off like a gaumless [stupid] lass as hoo [she] is. Hoo can do some things, well enough, ...
— It Might Have Been - The Story of the Gunpowder Plot • Emily Sarah Holt
... ord'nary folks. They need speshul food. You'll need to give 'em boiled milk plain or with pap, you kin git fancy crackers an' soak 'em. Then ther's beef-tea. Not jest ord'nary beef-tea. You want to take a boilin' o' bones, an' boil for three hours, an' then skim well. After that you might let it cool some, an' then you add flavorin'. Not too much, an' not too little, jest so's to make it elegant tastin'. Then you cook toasties to go with it, or give 'em crackers. Serve it to 'em hot, an' jest set around blowin' ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... is not of that sort; you cannot tell when you are to reverse him, only that you will have sometimes to do so. He does use the direct kind; The Rhetorician's Vade mecum and The Parasite are examples; the latter is also an example (unless a translator, who is condemned not to skip or skim, is an unfair judge) of how tiresome it may become. But who shall say how much of irony and how much of genuine feeling there is in the fine description of the philosophic State given in the Hermotimus (with its suggestions of Christian in The ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... cows, but he had the milk sent in from a hundred more, and exactly as they return the skim milk in Denmark, so they return it in Finland. By a careful process of autumn calving, the Finnish dairymen manage to have most milk in the winter, when they make butter, which they send seventy miles by sledge to the nearest railway train, to be borne hence to Hang, the ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... I will also skim but lightly over the days devoted to getting settled. I sent word to the office that I was ill—a fact which I could have sworn to if necessary, though for a sick man my activity was quite remarkable. ...
— The Van Dwellers - A Strenuous Quest for a Home • Albert Bigelow Paine
... brown, cut the meat in pieces, add this with all the juice it has drawn, to the chicken soup. Set on the back of the stove, and cook slowly all day. Set in a cold place, or on ice over night, and next morning after it is congealed, skim off every particle ...
— The International Jewish Cook Book • Florence Kreisler Greenbaum
... honour and glory of having made dwo mosd imbordand disgoveries, disgoveries of ingalgulable value do the worldt, disgoveries which will enable me do soar ad will indo the highesd regions of the embyrean, do skim the surface of the ocean, or do blunge do ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... took great delight in exercising Tommy and Patty (who were big enough to be trusted) in flighty and would often skim round the whole island with them before I could walk half through the wood. And she would teach them also to swim or sail, I know not which to call it, for sometimes you should see them dart out of the air as if they would fall on their faces into the lake, when coming near the surface they ...
— Life And Adventures Of Peter Wilkins, Vol. I. (of II.) • Robert Paltock
... new or wonderful constituent, and although individual feeders may have their own formulas, the general composition of the feed is common knowledge. The feed most commonly used consists of finely ground grain, mixed to a batter with buttermilk or sour skim-milk. The favorite grain for the purpose is oats finely ground and the hulls removed. Oats may be used as the sole grain, and is the only grain recommended as suitable to be fed alone. Corn is used, but ...
— The Dollar Hen • Milo M. Hastings
... gulls beat the air on tireless wings, or skim close to the water, intent upon their ceaseless search for food. Far out the lighthouse stands anchored to the rocks, the waves dashing against it, as if to tear it from its firm foundation. But it defies them all, and sends the cheery ...
— Byways Around San Francisco Bay • William E. Hutchinson
... my driver drop the skim-copter to the street when we got to Pennsylvania Avenue within a block of the building, and he skimmed to the outskirts of the crowd that was pressing around the entrance. There were four or five hundred people ...
— Tinker's Dam • Joseph Tinker
... high up in the air, when, holding the string with both hands, Benjamin dropped into the water upon his back, and at once began to skim the surface. Without an effort on his part, not so much as the moving of a muscle, the sailing kite pulled him along faster than his arms and feet could have done in the ...
— From Boyhood to Manhood • William M. Thayer
... while to freshen, has a weaker draught of this rancid and mawkish sentimentality. But having in those days missed (or failed over) Daniel, I thought it incumbent on me to gird myself up to its eight hundred pages. A more dismal book, even to skim, I have seldom taken up. The hero—a prig of the first water—marries one of those apparently only half-flesh-and-blood wives who, novelistically, never fail to go wrong. He cannot, in the then state of French law, divorce her, but ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... rapids we went. Two or three times I made up my mind that I was a goner, as the water piled up around me along over the falls; but somehow our very speed made our boat glance upward at such times, and skim along the surface like a duck. We went boundin' from hillock to hillock, on the mad waters, till we entered the broad lake and went skiving about again ...
— Wild Northern Scenes - Sporting Adventures with the Rifle and the Rod • S. H. Hammond
... water. Being at anchor, as I have said, in one of the deep creeks between the islands of Parana, as the evening drew to a close, one of these scissor-beaks suddenly appeared. The water was quite still, and many little fish were rising. The bird continued for a long time to skim the surface, flying in its wild and irregular manner up and down the narrow canal, now dark with the growing night and the shadows of the overhanging trees. At Montevideo, I observed that some large flocks during the day remained on the mud-banks at the head of the harbor, in the same manner ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... tell the truth I didn't miss it, so weary was I, and the weather so cold. But yesterday and today I enjoyed the chance to soap myself and souse. Next if there is mail (and I can always depend on my letter from you) I like to enjoy it and skim the newspaper. After that the rifle should be cleaned, even on such a day as this when I did not fire a shot, for the barrel has a habit of "sweating" which requires it to be cleaned out and oiled. And then hundreds ...
— At Plattsburg • Allen French
... dropped, whereupon it ceased to cry. Then I returned to watch and see what the two women would do next. The contents of the pan were already frizzling. Now and then it boiled over into the fire and the flames shot up all round it. Then the old woman would skim it carefully with a spoon. And all the time they were ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai
... the Thames, are the just resemblance of his Wit. You may observe how near the water they stoop! how many proffers they make to dip, and yet how seldom they touch it! and when they do, 'tis but the surface! they skim over it, but to catch a gnat, and then mount in the air ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... can get on their trail?" thought Larry, as he watched the houses skim by, and held himself in his seat, beside Grace, to avoid the jouncing and swaying caused by the ...
— Larry Dexter's Great Search - or, The Hunt for the Missing Millionaire • Howard R. Garis
... own house was as delightful as she could have wished. The day was fine and bright; the first skim of snow had fallen on Christmas Eve and made the world beautiful; the harbor ...
— Anne's House of Dreams • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... the draw-bridge flies, Just as it trembled on the rise; Nor lighter does the swallow skim Along the smooth lake's level brim; And when Lord Marmion reached his band He halts, and turns with clinched hand And shout of loud defiance pours, And shook his gauntlet at the towers. "Horse! horse!" the Douglas cried, ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... two flying coursers that strain, on the track, neck and neck, on the home-stretch, With nostrils distended, and mane froth-flecked, and the neck and the shoulders, Each urged to his best by the cry and the whip and the rein of his rider, Now they skim o'er the waters and fly, side by side, neck and neck, through the meadows. The blue heron flaps from the reeds, and away wings her course up the river; Straight and swift is her flight o'er the meads, but she hardly outstrips the canoemen. See! the voyageurs bend to their oars till the blue ...
— Legends of the Northwest • Hanford Lennox Gordon
... could see her, she led them forward at a swift pace, which astonished them both. She did not run, but she seemed to skim over the ground, and she took advantage of every bit of cover till they ...
— Frank Merriwell Down South • Burt L. Standish
... father answered, "because, you see, the tuna comes nearly straight up and down; he leaps, he doesn't skim." ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Fisheries • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... to skim the earth, to soar above the clouds, to bathe in the Elysian dew of the rainbow, and to inhale the balmy smells of nard and cassia, which the musky winds of the zephyr scatter through the ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... will discover to be a great deal tenderer and more delicate than any calf's liver you ever ate. There is this difference: a deer's liver should be parboiled in order to get rid of a green bitter scum that will rise to the surface and which you must skim off. ...
— The Mountains • Stewart Edward White
... are to be away up here, where we can skim along at the rate of thirty miles an hour easily, without half trying, and snap our fingers at all those things. I tell you, Frank, this aviation business is the greatest thing that ever came ...
— The Aeroplane Boys on the Wing - Aeroplane Chums in the Tropics • John Luther Langworthy
... dragon-fly, snake doctor or snake feeder? Every lover of the stream or pond has seen these miniature aeroplanes darting now here, now there but ever retracing their airy flight along the water's edge or dipping in a sudden nose dive to skim its very surface. At times it is seen to rest lazily, wings out-stretched, perched on some projecting reed or other object. But when approached how suddenly it "takes off" and is out of reach. The dragon-fly is an almost perfect model of the modern monoplane. ...
— An Elementary Study of Insects • Leonard Haseman
... hour of this, he had wearied and sought to save himself by abandoning the lynx's territory, so had struck across the open lake. But here the snow was too soft to bear him at all, and the lynx could still skim over. So it proved a fatal error. He was strong and brave. He fought at least another hour here before the much stronger, heavier lynx had done him to death. There was no justification. It was a clear case of tyrannical murder, ...
— Rolf In The Woods • Ernest Thompson Seton
... baking of scones; three pots of honey and one of rhubarb jam—she was aye famous for her rhubarb jam; a mutton ham, which you can't get for love or money in Glasgow; some home-made black puddings, and a wee skim-milk cheese. I doubt I'll have to take a cab ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... fact. When a storm is coming, Virgil also makes his swallows skim low about the lake, which agrees with the ...
— A Year in the Fields • John Burroughs
... Labour we mean us working men; and by Capital we mean those that derive benefit from us, take the cream off us and leave us the skim. ...
— Touch and Go • D. H. Lawrence
... and at eve we stand On long bare islands of yellow sand. And when the sun sinks slowly down, And the great rock-walls grow dark and brown, When the purple river rolls fast and dim, And the ivory Ibis starlike skim, Wing to wing ...
— Nonsense Books • Edward Lear
... dozen men are watching the fords of the Lodden, and a bullet in your back would probably be the first intimation of the presence of a party of skulkers. No, sirs, unless you can skim over the surface of this bog, and then scale Mount Tarrengower, your only place of safety is on this island. Trust ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... Waddler in Parker. She always talked so big that folks who didn't know her thought she must have millions of money; but when she came to giving, it was usu'ly skim milk or some of her ...
— The Lilac Lady • Ruth Alberta Brown
... short. But the handy man knows it simply as the Scooter. The first scooters were only forty feet long, the next were fifty-five, the last were seventy. Everything about them is made as light as possible; so that they can skim along in about two feet of water at an outside speed of nearly fifty (land) miles an hour. They are really the thinnest of racing shells fitted with the strongest of lightweight engines. They are all armed with depth charges, which are bombs that go off under water at whatever ...
— Flag and Fleet - How the British Navy Won the Freedom of the Seas • William Wood
... Gulf States, where it is very abundant; it is frequent in the Middle States, and only occasionally seen in New England. The wings are exceedingly long; they fly in close flocks, moving simultaneously. They seem to feed as they skim low over the water, the under-mandible grazing or cutting the surface, and thus taking in their food.—Vide Coues's Key to North American Birds, ...
— Voyages of Samuel de Champlain, Vol. 2 • Samuel de Champlain
... Bauer had authorised his father to close the contract on the patent for him Walter opened up his New York Daily for his usual skim over its contents. It was two o'clock. He had heard Bauer come up the stairs and go into his room and had not heard ...
— The High Calling • Charles M. Sheldon
... worked at hardest, and finished, but with less deliberation. He grew more and more careless toward the books he counted of little consequence, while he imagined himself growing more and more capable of getting at the heart of a book by skimming its pages. If to skim be ever a true faculty, it must come of long experience in the art of reading, and is not possible to a beginner. To skim and judge, is to wake from a doze and give ...
— Home Again • George MacDonald
... and goat-suckers dart from their lonely retreat and skim along the trees on the river's bank. The different kinds of frogs almost stun the ear with their hoarse and hollow-sounding croaking, while the owls and goat-suckers lament ...
— Wanderings In South America • Charles Waterton
... garcon, would skim over the polished boards to the newcomer, and, tendering the menu, would wait, pencil in hand, until the guest, after careful contemplation, selected his five plats from its ...
— A Versailles Christmas-Tide • Mary Stuart Boyd
... unakin to it. Still the promptness to laugh is an excellent progenitorial foundation for the wit to come in a people; and undoubtedly the diarial record of an imputed piece of wit is witness to the spouting of laughter. This should comfort us while we skim the sparkling passages of the 'Leaves.' When a nation has acknowledged that it is as yet but in the fisticuff stage of the art of condensing our purest sense to golden sentences, a readier appreciation will be extended to the gift: which is ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... milk dried into a kind of paste to carry with them; and when they need food they put this in water, and beat it up till it dissolves, and then drink it. [It is prepared in this way; they boil the milk, and when the rich part floats on the top they skim it into another vessel, and of that they make butter; for the milk will not become solid till this is removed. Then they put the milk in the sun to dry. And when they go on an expedition, every man takes some ten pounds of this dried milk with him. And of a ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... moment,—then it would belly out taut and full, and she would say, as calm as a summer's day, "It's synonymous with supererogation," or some godless long reptile of a word like that, and go placidly about and skim away on the next tack, perfectly comfortable, you know, and leave that stranger looking profane and embarrassed, and the initiated slatting the floor with their tails in unison and their faces transfigured with a ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... From the green sea up to my hidden source About Arcadian forests; and will shew The channels where my coolest waters flow Through mossy rocks; where, 'mid exuberant green, I roam in pleasant darkness, more unseen Than Saturn in his exile; where I brim Round flowery islands, and take thence a skim Of mealy sweets, which myriads of bees Buzz from their honied wings: and thou shouldst please Thyself to choose the richest, where we might 1001 Be incense-pillow'd every summer night. Doff all sad fears, thou white deliciousness, ...
— Endymion - A Poetic Romance • John Keats
... water off the sea, as practised at the mouths of the Rhone, the Nile, &c. The word is derived from the Dutch vlieten, to skim milk; it also means to float. ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... which took me up near a whole day, and clearing my house of good-for-nothings, I returned to reexamine my cheese, that was grown cold, and was now so dry and hard I could not get my teeth into it; upon which I was going to skim it away out of my grotto, saying, "Go, thou worthless!" (for I always spoke aloud my thoughts to myself)—I say I was just despatching it when I checked my hands, and as I could make no impression with my ...
— Life And Adventures Of Peter Wilkins, Vol. I. (of II.) • Robert Paltock
... dear Stephen, it is only those who half know a thing that write about it. Those who know it thoroughly don't take the trouble. All I know about women, or men either, is a mass of generalities. I plod along, and occasionally lift my eyes and skim the weltering surface of mankind lying between me and the horizon, as a ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... of the steamer stopped by where I was watching the flying fish fizz out of the blue-ink-like water, skim along for some distance, and drop in again, often, I believe, to be snapped up by some bigger fish; and he gave me a poke in the shoulder with one finger, so ...
— Through Forest and Stream - The Quest of the Quetzal • George Manville Fenn
... said our mother, 'what matters it whether the boon which Santa Claus brings be royal English cheddar or fromage de Bricquebec, Vermont sage, or Herkimer County skim-milk? We should be content with whatsoever Santa Glaus bestows, so long as it be cheese, disjoined from all traps whatsoever, unmixed with Paris green, and free from glass, strychnine, and other ...
— A Little Book of Profitable Tales • Eugene Field
... associations and quiet nobleness, decorated by the love of nature and letters, intimacies with poets, and with that especial touch of nature which always went to the heart of the Complete Angler, a love of fishing—for Vaughan was wont, at times, to skim the ...
— Gifts of Genius - A Miscellany of Prose and Poetry by American Authors • Various
... cirques of desolation, where masses of debris, slipped down from the heights, lie prone in Dantesque confusion. There are rock-doves and falcons fluttering about the sunny precipices; cliff-swallows build precarious habitations against the roof of yawning caverns; sandpipers and wagtails skim over the streamlet that glides in a smiling flood across reaches of yellow sand. The charm of water in the waste! This Seldja-brook is a true child of the sun; cold in the morning and evening hours, its restless little heart becomes tepid at midday ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... rivalries in love between Christian and Pagan champions; journeys through undiscovered lands and over untracked oceans; fantastic hyperboles of desire, ambition, jealousy, and rage, employed as motive passions. Enchanted forests; fairy ships that skim the waves without helm or pilot; lances endowed with supernatural virtues; charmed gardens of perpetual spring; dismal dungeons and glittering palaces, supply the furniture of this romance no less than of its predecessors. ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... Colonel broke the skim of ice, and, taking some of the water in his hand, poured powder from his flask into it and rubbed it on his face until he was the color of an Indian. Stepping back, he raised his sword high in the air, and, shouting the Shawanee war-whoop, took a flying leap up to his thighs in the ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... majority. At times, indeed, he had to restrain their zeal. In 1867, for instance, when they desired to take Baden alone into the new union,—the rest of South Germany being averse to entrance,—Bismarck was obliged to tell them that it would be a poor policy "to skim off the cream and let the rest of ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... stretch of level ground then, smooth and hard; and the horses as with common consent set out to gallop shoulder to shoulder in a wild, exhilarating skim across the plain. Talking was impossible. The man reflected that he was making great strides in experience, first a prayer and then a pledge, all in the wilderness. If any one had told him he was going into the West for this, he would have laughed ...
— The Girl from Montana • Grace Livingston Hill
... "Thin gruel and skim milk," she explained, pouring out a substance like paste into the soup plate, and handing ...
— Jimbo - A Fantasy • Algernon Blackwood
... poem; it is made up of many "short swallow-flights of song that dip their wings in tears and skim away." There are one hundred thirty separate songs in all, held together by the silken thread of love ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... it made them fatten more quickly; and where they bought up all the old rancid butter left over in the grocery stores of a continent, and "oxidized" it by a forced-air process, to take away the odor, rechurned it with skim milk, and sold it in bricks in the cities! Up to a year or two ago it had been the custom to kill horses in the yards—ostensibly for fertilizer; but after long agitation the newspapers had been able to make the public realize that ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... a small, speedy craft, sailing around the submarine. It seemed fairly to skim over the surface of the water, and cast the spray astern like a mist. It had come up unnoticed ...
— The Boy Volunteers with the Submarine Fleet • Kenneth Ward
... of half an hour did the boat skim the surface of the Golden Horn, the dip of the oars in the water and the rippling around the sharp prow alone breaking the solemn silence of the night. At length the skiff stopped, and the female slave took Alessandro's hand, whispering in a low tone, "I will serve as ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... to which she lent her name were organized so admirably that by the time the takings were handed over, they were indeed skim milk divested of all cream of human kindness. But as she often justly remarked, sentiment was to be deprecated. She was, in ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... dreams doth bring To the mind some restful thing, Breezes soft that rippling blow O'er ripe cornfields row by row, Murmuring rivers round whose brim Silvery sands the swallows skim, Or the drowsy circling sound Of old mill-wheels going round, Which with music steal the mind And the eyes ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various
... be calm? O winds blow free— Blow all my ships safe home to me. But if thou sendest some a-wrack To never more come sailing back, Send any—all, that skim the sea, But bring my ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... a small twenty-pound wheel—a pony-cart wheel in comparison to the big Swiss. There are two qualities: (a) Common, made of skim milk and cured in brine for a year; (b) Festive, full milk, steeped in brine with wine, plus white wine lees and pepper. The only cheese we know of that is ripened with ...
— The Complete Book of Cheese • Robert Carlton Brown
... scrap of bread in one of the pots; to which the cook made answer, "Brother, this is not a day on which hunger is to have any sway, thanks to the rich Camacho; get down and look about for a ladle and skim off a hen or two, and much ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... other sides, too, to Mr Rackstraw's character, but for the moment let him go as a multi-millionaire City man and Radical politician. Not that it is satisfactory; it is too mild. The Radical politics of other Radical politicians were as skim-milk to the Radical politics of Radical Politician Rackstraw. Where Mr Lloyd George referred to the House of Lords as blithering backwoodsmen and asinine anachronisms, Mr Rackstraw scorned to be so guarded in ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... us the 'snack' in a basket, and sixpence to buy milk with. She said any of the farms would let us have it, only most likely it would be skim. We thanked her politely, and she hurried us out of the front door as if we'd been chickens on ...
— The Wouldbegoods • E. Nesbit
... the stones he will not stumble, 560 Time nor toil shall make him humble; In the stall he will not stiffen, But be winged as a Griffin, Only flying with his feet: And will not such a voyage be sweet? Merrily! merrily! never unsound, Shall our bonny black horses skim over the ground! From the Alps to the Caucasus, ride we, or fly! For we'll leave them behind in the glance of an eye. [They mount their ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... rest The Alpine winds contend no more, But skim, like gulls, its dimpled breast, And sink to silence ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard
... Man's nod, And hating none for nothing, but his God: Foe to the Learn'd, the Virtuous, and the Sage, A Pimp in Youth, an Atheist in old Age: Now plung'd in Bawdry and substantial Lyes, Now dab'ling in ungodly Theories; But so, as Swallows skim the pleasing flood, Grows giddy, but ne'er drinks to do him good: Alike resolv'd to flatter, or to cheat, Nay worship Onions, if they cry, come eat: A foe to Faith, in Revelation blind, And impious much, as Dunces are ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte
... of it, Mr. Harley could see nothing, say nothing; his impulse was to be alone and collect himself. He felt as might one who has been staring at the sun. Storri's picture of an enterprise so vast that it proposed to set out the world like a mighty pan of milk, and skim the cream from two hemispheres, dazzled him and caused his wits to lose ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... continued to watch us skim across the bay and pull up alongside the yacht. As we climbed the ladder, he turned and hurried back the ...
— The Romance of Elaine • Arthur B. Reeve
... waxed paper which was in the lunch box Bert made a pretty good cup. Then when the thin skim of ice on top of the spring was broken, water could be dipped up, and every one had a nice drink. Flossie had two cupfuls, she ...
— The Bobbsey Twins at Home • Laura Lee Hope
... whales; sometimes great black masses rolling on the water, looking like a ship bottom upward, which some said were black-fish. Some fish seemed to be at play, and would jump ten feet or more out of the water. The flying fish would skim over the waves as the ship's wheels seemed to frighten them; and we went through a hundred acres of porpoises, all going the same way. The ship plowed right through them, but none seemed to get hurt by the wheels. Perhaps they were emigrants like ourselves in search ...
— Death Valley in '49 • William Lewis Manly
... woods to themselves; there was no sound at all except the occasional soft drop of melting snow. Once they stood quite still holding their breath to watch the squirrels skim from tree to tree as if they were weaving the measures of a mystic dance. If it hadn't been for the squirrels they might have been the only creatures alive in ...
— The Dark Tower • Phyllis Bottome
... leading European nations, had their last great exponent in Cotton Mather. Minor writers still indulge in these conceits, and find willing readers among the uneducated, the tired, and those who are bored when they are required to do more than skim the surface of things. John Seccomb, a Harvard graduate of 1728, the year in which Mather died, then gained fame from ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... the toiling hand of Care; The panting herds repose: Yet hark, how thro' the peopled air The busy murmur glows! The insect youth are on the wing, Eager to taste the honied spring And float amid the liquid noon: Some lightly o'er the current skim, Some show their gaily-gilded trim ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... dark clouds began to scud across the sky overhead, and the low mutterings of thunder came from the distance. It may have been the thunderings of nature, or of war—she did not heed them; her heart was filled with bitter, rebellious thoughts, and her flying feet seemed to skim over the road; nor did she check her hasty steps until she was about to enter her father's room. Mauer sat in his arm-chair, absorbed in thought. She threw herself down on her knees beside him, and flung her arms about his waist. Pressing her ...
— Sister Carmen • M. Corvus
... on the interesting doubt of a wrong reading; such men, in the spirit of pedantry, have refused to Lord Brougham the merit of profundity, while they allow that he possesses a sort of superficial knowledge of the classics; they say that he can gracefully skim the surface of the stream, but that its depths would overwhelm him. Now, while this may be true as regards the fact, we dissent from it as regards the inference. It is a question to be decided between the learned drones of a by-gone ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... the forest At the river stoop to drink, But from the rush of waters All panic-stricken shrink; And the mountain eagles sailing O'er the cataract's foaming brim Alarmed, on soaring pinions, Away, o'er Heaven's clouds skim. ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... a moment, Timid Hare got the snowshoes and left the tepee. For a moment she looked about her to see if any other little girl would like to join her in a skim over the fields. But all seemed busy at their games, and even now she was not enough at home with any one of them to ask them to leave their own play and go off with her, ...
— Timid Hare • Mary Hazelton Wade |
