"Slate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... siliceous rocks are of organic origin. In the second group are the so-called Argillaceous (Lat. argilla, clay) Rocks, which contain a larger or smaller amount of clay or hydrated silicate of alumina in their composition. Under this head come clays, shales, marls, marl-slate, clay-slates, and most flags ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... be," he replied cheerfully, "unless we have bad luck. Of course, I have had professional advice as to all the details. The thing has been thought out step by step, almost scientifically. Slate is a marvellous fellow, and I think he has gathered up every loose end. Makes one realise how easy crime would be if one went into it unflurried and with a clear conscience.—Tell me, by the by, was it by accident that you ...
— The Profiteers • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... sight of the melancholy songster. Seated in a corner of the cave, with his massive head on his fore-paws, the picture of dejection, was the most enormous creature they had ever seen or dreamed about. He was rather like an elephant, but much more immense and without a trunk: a huge, ungainly, slate-coloured animal. ...
— The Flamp, The Ameliorator, and The Schoolboy's Apprentice • E. V. Lucas
... went down a be-flagged and sunlit Trafalgar Road together. Janet was wearing still another white dress, and Hilda, to her marked relief, had abandoned black for a slate-coloured frock made by a dressmaker in Bleakridge. It was Mrs. Orgreave herself who had first counselled Hilda, if she hated black, as she said she did, to abandon black. The entire family ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... that winter, both the teachers wished to attend an examination at Seir, and asked them if they would be diligent during their absence. "O, yes," was the reply, "if you will only let us write composition." The following was found on the slate of Nazloo, ...
— Woman And Her Saviour In Persia • A Returned Missionary
... Don Urbano's side to a man, beat the tables with their glasses; Baldassare had to surrender at discretion. The bargain, finally struck, was written out by an obliging notary on the scoring-slate. In the name of the holy and undivided Trinity it was declared to all men living and to be born, that Baldassare Dardicozzo, merchant of Verona, was obliged to pay to the reverend father in God, Urbano, curate of Santa Toscana ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... not picture forth their joy. On, on, we are riding with the doctor. Once more we are at his own door. Hastily he enters, and takes up the slate containing the list of calls during his absence. At half a dozen places his presence is ...
— Friends and Neighbors - or Two Ways of Living in the World • Anonymous
... and with cheers. Daisy ran and got her slate for the recording seckitary, who thereupon (after first inscribing the names of the office bearers in a shaky print) began to draw a wonderful picture of a ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne
... reflections of distant rockets would shudder and fade across the pale blue; incessantly, from every corner of the world, came the screaming rattle of carts, a sound like many pencils drawn across a gigantic slate—and always the dust rose and fell in webs and curtains of filmy gold, under the ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... a clean slate. If she's the sort you want to marry, and not a prude, she'll understand, not at first, but after she ...
— The Street of Seven Stars • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... Statues of nymphs, who must have seen the boyhood of the late king, secreted under tree ivy their gloominess and mutilations. At the end of an alley, the sloughs of which were covered with snow, stood a castle of stone and brick, as morose as the one of Madrid, which, oddly covered by a high slate roof, looked like the castle of the Sleeping Beauty in ...
— The Queen Pedauque • Anatole France
... after his interview with the vicar, speechless. He had endeavoured to say something to her, but his tongue refused its office; his mind was, however, it was evident, unimpaired. He looked up with a pained expression, and tried to show that he wished to write; but when a slate was brought him, his fingers were unable to hold the pencil Clara had immediately sent off for the doctor, and was now endeavouring, by chafing her father's hands, to restore ...
— Clara Maynard - The True and the False - A Tale of the Times • W.H.G. Kingston
... urging her to have help in, and not to tire herself out. But curiously, he never noted the pink print any more than if it had been dull slate. That had not been his pa's way; and it was not his way. But he was good to her. What more ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... Miss Peecher; cherry-cheeked and tuneful of voice. A little pincushion, a little hussie, a little book, a little work-box, a little set of tables and weights and measures, and a little woman all in one. She could write a little essay on any subject exactly a slate long, and strictly according to rule. If Mr. Bradley Headstone had proposed marriage to her, she would certainly have replied 'yes,' for she loved him;" but Mr. Headstone did not love Miss Peecher—he ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... that he need not trouble to help elect himself a delegate, Harwood had been drawn sharply into the preliminary skirmish at the primaries. He had thought it wise to cultivate the acquaintance of the men who ruled his own county even though his name had been written large upon the Bassett slate. ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... parent stem from which they are an offshoot. Thus, the young of our robins have speckled breasts, betraying their thrush kinship. And the young junco shows, in its striped appearance of breast and back, and the lateral white quills in the tail, its kinship to the grass finch or vesper sparrow. The slate-color soon obliterates most of these signs, but the white quills remain. It has departed from the nesting-habits of its forbears. The vesper sparrow nests upon the ground in the open fields, but the junco chooses a mossy bank or tussock by the roadside, or in the ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs
... has its enormous advantage, but it carries with it its corresponding defect. With the mind so crammed with other people's goods, how can you have room for any fresh manufactures of your own? A great memory is, I think, often fatal to originality, in spite of Scott and some other exceptions. The slate must be clear before you put your own writing upon it. When did Johnson ever discover an original thought, when did he ever reach forward into the future, or throw any fresh light upon those enigmas with which mankind ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... one example of this immortal great genius and incurably indolent painter; it was a Knight of Malta, a Templar kneeling in prayer. The picture was painted on slate, and in its unfaded color and its finish was immeasurably finer than ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... by a good train, is the ancient city of M——, upon a great pinnacle of basalt, girt with a triple road running sideways up its shoulder like a scarf. And at the top there is a castle—not a square castle like Windsor, but a castle all slate gables and high peaks with gilt weathercocks flashing bravely—the castle of St Elizabeth of Hungary. It has the disadvantage of being in Prussia; and it is always disagreeable to go into that country; but it is very old and there are many double-spired churches and ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford
... over the greater part of the northern continent, some indeed being found also in great numbers in South America. These are the turkey vulture, the black vulture, the little rusty-crowned falcon, the pigeon hawk, slate-coloured hawk, red-tailed buzzard, American horned owl, little American owl, and five other species of falcons. The perchers ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... and I realized it acutely. Figures never would arrange themselves in my brain in proper order; I am by no means sound even on the multiplication table; and the only dates that ever fixed themselves in my memory are 1492 and 1776. The very sight of a slate and pencil gave me a nervous headache, and as I had lately been told that idiots always failed in calculation, I considered myself but a few removes from idiocy. My answering that advertisement was a proof of it; and here I was, hundreds of miles from any familiar sight, going to teach ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... shelf he took down a tattered arithmetic and a slate and pencil, and, going out of doors, flung himself down on the cliff and opened the arithmetic well ...
— Robert Coverdale's Struggle - Or, On The Wave Of Success • Horatio, Jr. Alger
... Pen (to enclose) barcxirkauxi, enfermi. Pen (sheep fold) sxafejo. Pen-name pseuxdonomo. Penal puna. Penal servitude punlaboro. Penalty puno, monpuno. Penance, to do pentofari. Penance puno. Penchant inklino—emo. Pencil (lead) krajono. Pencil (slate) grifelo. Pendant pendajxo. Pendulum pendolo. Penetrate penetri. Penetrable penetrebla. Penetration akra sento. Penholder plumingo. Peninsula duoninsulo. Penitence pento. Penitent, a konfesanto. Penitent ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... Death: no triumph: no defeat: Only an empty pail, a slate rubbed clean, A merciful putting away ...
— A Treasury of War Poetry - British and American Poems of the World War 1914-1917 • Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by George Herbert Clarke
... by accident in the Osiris temenos. The soil was so wet that the bones were mostly dissolved; and only fragments of the skull, crushed under an inverted slate bowl, were preserved. The head had been laid upon a sandstone corn-grinder. Around the sides of the tomb were over two dozen jars of pottery, most of them large. And near the body were sixteen stone vases and bowls. Some of ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 12 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... the little town of Kirkby-Malhouse, harsh and forbidding are the fells upon which it stands. It stretches in a single line of grey-stone, slate-roofed houses, dotted down the furze-clad ...
— Danger! and Other Stories • Arthur Conan Doyle
... hum of childish voices inside prompt the passer-by to look in. He sees a room, empty of furniture, and lit only by the open door. The school-master, a veritable Moses in appearance, is squatted on his haunches in the centre, and around him squat his pupils. Each has his slate before him, and repeats his lesson with monotonous chant, keeping his body moving backward and forward as if he were rowing hard the whole time against stream. The school-master's whip is of sufficient length to reach every boy around him, and now and then, without rising from his seat, ...
— Harper's Young People, February 24, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... There were fifteen boys and thirteen girls. When the roll was called and the number marked down on a slate in front of the school, the Master said, "First class ...
— The Irish Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... the time of his life there that winter. Not that old Zack misbehaved; on the contrary, he was a model of studiousness and was very anxious to learn. But education went hard with him at first; he was more than a week in learning his letters and sat by the hour, making them on a slate, muttering them aloud, sometimes vehemently, with painful groans. M and W gave him constant trouble; and so did B and R. He grew so wrathful over his mistakes at times that he thumped the desk with his fist, and once he hurled his primer at ...
— A Busy Year at the Old Squire's • Charles Asbury Stephens
... weakness, of course. In less than a week a regular system of torments was inaugurated, full of the most diabolical malice and ingenuity. The exercises of the conspirators varied from day to day, but consisted mainly of foot-scraping, solos on the slate-pencil, (making it screech on the slate,) falling of heavy books, attacks of coughing, banging of desk-lids, boot-creaking, with sounds as of drawing a cork from time to time, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... Charlestown on our way and getting up to the railway tunnel where Clery's Division is encamped. The Boer scoundrels have blown down both ends of the tunnel, blocking up the egress, and putting a dead horse at each end! We found also a deep boring they had made over the top of the nek through the slate with the object of reaching the roof of the tunnel and exploding it; but this having failed, from our friends not getting deep enough, the damage is insignificant and the rail will be cleared by the Engineers within a few days. We rode along the top of Laing's Nek and looked at the trench, ...
— With the Naval Brigade in Natal (1899-1900) - Journal of Active Service • Charles Richard Newdigate Burne
... lodgings, where he began to pack. Adrienne had written that she and her mother and Wilfred Horton were sailing for Naples, and commanded him, unless he were too busy, to meet their steamer. Within two hours, he was bound for Lucerne to cross the Italian frontier by the slate-blue waters of Lake Maggiore. ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... still bitter and interferes sadly with one's enjoyment. All through the valley, up the creek by which we leave it, past the twin lakes on the low summit, the wind grows in force, and when we leave Slate Creek for the present and make a "portage" over a mountain shoulder to strike the creek again much lower down, the wind has risen to a gale that overturns the toboggans and makes the men fight for their ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... the slate-colored snowbird starts up before me and chirps sharply. His protest when thus disturbed is almost metallic in its sharpness. He breeds here, and is not esteemed a snowbird at all, as he disappears at the near approach of winter, and returns again in ...
— In the Catskills • John Burroughs
... years it's taken to make you were wiped off the slate,' says Mr. Van. 'However, I'll have to ...
— Blister Jones • John Taintor Foote
... weather again, and the weather was more promising than generous. It continued to promise all day without exactly explaining what its promise was, and without achieving any special fulfilment. Fine silver lines of sunlight were ruled at a steep angle across a grey slate view. ...
— Living Alone • Stella Benson
... parlour, Sidney and Master Tom were therein, seated on two stools, and casting up division sums on their respective slates—a point of education to which Mr. Morton attended with great care. As soon as his father's back was turned, Master Tom's eyes wandered from the slate to the muffin, as it leered at him from the slop-basin. Never did Pythian sibyl, seated above the bubbling spring, utter more oracular eloquence to her priest, than did that muffin—at least the parts of it yet extant—utter to the fascinated senses of Master Tom. First he sighed; then he moved ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... understand that, she must not speak, for the slightest effort to do so always brought on a fit of coughing which threatened a hemorrhage, of which she could not endure many more. But they had brought her a little slate, on which she sometimes wrote her requests, though that, too, was an effort. Pointing now to the slate, she wrote, while her ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes
... she was eventually forced to dig them up again. She put tombstones at the heads of the graves, made of slates from the roof of a tumble-down shed, and carefully wrote names, dates, and epitaphs upon them in slate pencil, being greatly distressed when the inscriptions were invariably obliterated by ...
— The Manor House School • Angela Brazil
... too pleasant of school to be thinking, Its tasks this bright day I should hate; Much better I'd like the fresh air to be drinking, Than puzzle o'er book and o'er slate. ...
— Our Gift • Teachers of the School Street Universalist Sunday School, Boston
... performed various experiments upon patients afflicted with different complaints,—the patients supposing that the real five-guinea Tractors were employed. Strange to relate, he obtained equally wonderful effects with Tractors of lead and of wood; with nails, pieces of bone, slate pencil, and tobacco-pipe. Dr. Alderson employed sham Tractors made of wood, and produced such effects upon five patients that they returned solemn thanks in church for their cures. A single specimen of these cases may stand for all ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... moment ago, as it seemed to me, I had been gazing upward at the stars and listening to the dear, minute sounds of peace; and in another the great gray slate was clean, and every bone of me set in plaster of Paris, and sniping beginning between pickets with the day. It was an occasional crack, not a constant crackle, but the whistle of a bullet as it passed us by, or a tiny transitory flame ...
— Raffles - Further Adventures of the Amateur Cracksman • E. W. Hornung
... a virgin continent, a clean slate upon which to write what we will. And what are we writing? What is our intellectual life? I came to the far West, which I had been taught by novelists and poets to think of as a place of freedom. I came, because I like freedom; I am staying because I like ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... relative. Originally he was a dog produced by mating the old-fashioned black and white with the Greyhound. But the Greyhound type, which was formerly very marked, can scarcely be discerned to-day. Still, it is not infrequent that a throw-back is discovered in a litter producing perhaps a slate-coloured, a pure, white, or a jet black individual, or that an otherwise perfect smooth Collie should betray the heavy ears or the eye of a Greyhound. At one time this breed of dog was much cultivated in Scotland, but nowadays the breeding of smooths is almost wholly confined ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton
... broke away a huge splinter, leaving a gap and glimpse of the dark window-pane inside. The room within was entirely unlighted, so that for the first few seconds the window seemed a dead and opaque surface, as dark as a strip of slate. Then came a realization which, though in a sense gradual, made us step back and catch our breath. Two large dim human eyes were so close to us that the window itself seemed suddenly to be a mask. A pale human face was pressed against the glass within, and with increased distinctness, with the ...
— The Club of Queer Trades • G. K. Chesterton
... It had been a busy day at the university—old faces and new faces, all the exuberance of a new start, the enthusiasm for a clean slate—students anxious to make some particular class—how well he knew it all! Who was in his laboratory? Who working with his old things? To whom was coming the joy he had thought would be his? What man ...
— The Glory Of The Conquered • Susan Glaspell
... like Parson's, only the mouth was so full that it was hard to say for certain. "Jolly good dough-nuts these; have another, Bosher, you've only had four. I say, Cusack, where did you catch these prime herrings? Best I've tasted since I came here. Afraid your slate's a little damaged; awfully sorry, you ought to keep a toasting-fork—ha! ha!" and a chorus of laughter greeted the sally. Cusack groaned ...
— The Willoughby Captains • Talbot Baines Reed
... took off his eyeglasses, rubbed them, and put them on again. Then he looked very hard at the little girl at the end of the furthest form, who was hanging her head and industriously biting a slate pencil. ...
— An Australian Lassie • Lilian Turner
... what they wanted. For sixpence they bought a cardboard box that had come all the way from Japan and contained a whole family of dolls—father, mother and four children of different sizes. A box of paints, threepence: a sixpenny tea service, a threepenny drawing slate, and ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... The skimped delaine was sadly rusty,—Miss Wimple very poor. The profits of the Hendrik Athenaeum and Circulating Library accrued in slow and slender pittances. A package of envelopes now and then, a few lead pencils, a box of steel pens, a slate pencil to a school-boy, were all its sales. Almost the last regular customer had seceded to the "Hendrik Book Bazaar and Periodical Emporium,"—a pert rival, that, with multifarious new-fangled tricks of attractiveness, flashed its plate-glass eyes and turned up its gilded nose at ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... the blue bag where he kept his dinner, he produced a fragment of slate, an arithmetic, and a pencil. Proceeding to put down a sum with solemn and earnest demeanour, he began to add it up aloud: "Six and two is eight—and four is twelve—and two is fourteen—and four is eighteen." Here he ...
— The Story of an African Farm • (AKA Ralph Iron) Olive Schreiner
... Whitehall Street recently, he met a little colored boy carrying a slate and a number of books. Some words passed between them, but their exact purport will probably never be known. They were unpleasant, for the attention of a wandering policeman was called to the matter by hearing ...
— Uncle Remus • Joel Chandler Harris
... we could have sat for hours, nourishing the calm and solemn thoughts we had just brought from the quiet corner of the churchyard where we had sat by Wordsworth's grave. It was growing dark, but we could just read on the plain slate head-stone the sole ...
— A Brief Memoir with Portions of the Diary, Letters, and Other Remains, - of Eliza Southall, Late of Birmingham, England • Eliza Southall
... our prisoner slept on till after the sun was up, and we were busy in marking out the ground for our slate hut, and making preparations for cutting down the nearest trees with which to build it. More than once I looked at his countenance while he slept, and called my wife to look at him. We were both convinced that ...
— Peter Biddulph - The Story of an Australian Settler • W.H.G. Kingston
... Committee shall present a slate of officers on the first day of the Annual Meeting and the election shall take place at the closing session. Nominations for any office may be presented from the floor at the time the slate is presented ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Forty-Second Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... several miles along the banks of the Juniata, which is a very fine river. The scenery is romantic, and is much beautified by a large growth of magnificent pines. The Alleghany ridge is composed chiefly of sand-stone, clay-slate, and lime-stone-slate, sand-stone ...
— A Ramble of Six Thousand Miles through the United States of America • S. A. Ferrall
... time he could not choose but admire her more and more. He wished with all his heart in those moments that he could throw his position and his party overboard, and go to her with a clean slate, and say: ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... myself to a man I had never laid my eyes on." And Henley saw that she was blushing. "I'd give my right arm, and do my work with my left, to wipe that off my slate forever." ...
— Dixie Hart • Will N. Harben
... the shore and thought them diamonds, climbed the steep promontory, drank at the spring near the top, looked abroad on the wooded slopes beyond the little river, waded through the tall grass of the meadow, found a quarry of slate, and gathered scales of a yellow mineral which glistened like gold, then returned to their boats, crossed to the south shore of the St. Lawrence, and, languid with the heat, rested in the shade of forests laced ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... little wind just then and presently the tug was close alongside, pitching her bows out of the slow swell, while a great mass of timber wonderfully chained together surged along astern, the dim, slate-green sea washing over it. A shapeless oil-skinned figure stood outside her pilot-house, balancing itself against the heave of the bridge, which ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss
... convenient word with a meaning easily adaptable to all sorts of explanations; but if there were no bounds and no end to this explaining by suggestion, we might as well rub out from our suggested slate of life, with a suggested sponge, the whole beautiful world of clear and eternal realities. No, the Christ of Lucia and my mother was no suggested fancy, but ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... experience had wiped the slate so clean of all the years of multiplications and additions of resentment and mortification, that the thought of facing his father did not stir his dull indifference to the whole dreary matter. When Simmons saw him coming up the garden ...
— The Awakening of Helena Richie • Margaret Deland
... with eyes closed, or half opened, when let alone. It distressed me a good deal; and I felt relieved, though somewhat shocked, when B——— put an end to its misery by squeezing its head and throwing it out of the window. They were of a slate-color, and might, I suppose, have been able to shift for themselves.—The other day a little yellow bird flew into one of the empty rooms, of which there are half a dozen on the lower floor, and could not find his way out again, flying at the glass of the windows, instead of at ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... again. Luckily, the first heap she came to was open, so, picking out a good big turnip, she went on till she came to the churchyard wall, and sat down there to eat it. The village looked more desolate than usual. The slate roofs of the cottages were still wet with the rain that had fallen in the night, and a cold wind moaned in the yew-trees. There were only a few snowdrops out, and for once the sexton was not to be seen, but a heap of earth at the far corner of the churchyard showed a newly-dug grave. Jane ...
— The Weans at Rowallan • Kathleen Fitzpatrick
... a churchyard, an ancient, grass-grown burying ground, with slate gravestones and weather-worn tombs. There were a few new stones, gleaming white and conspicuous, but only a few. Galusha's trained eye, trained by his unusual pastime of college days, saw at once ...
— Galusha the Magnificent • Joseph C. Lincoln
... been to church, and am not depressed - a great step. I was at that beautiful church my PETIT POEME EN PROSE was about. It is a little cruciform place, with heavy cornices and string course to match, and a steep slate roof. The small kirkyard is full of old grave-stones. One of a Frenchman from Dunkerque - I suppose he died prisoner in the military prison hard by - and one, the most pathetic memorial I ever saw, a poor school-slate, in a wooden frame, with the inscription cut into it evidently ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... with his slate and pencil to demonstrate to us that, no matter who wrote it, or by what external authority it is commended, the Pentateuch is so full of arithmetical errors, and of impossible narratives, in its accounts of common affairs, as well as in its miraculous stories, that not only is it ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... sunk on his doorstep on coming home at dusk, and sat with speculative eyes on the pale western sky, while his wife sat judicially, quite filling with her heated bulk a large rocking-chair, placed for greater coolness in front of the step, in the middle of the slate walk. ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... soul, took courage from the warmth of her welcome. His heart beat high with a hope which no ordinary mundane affairs could have inspired. All the ill-fate behind him was wiped off the slate. The world shone radiant before eyes, which, at such times, are mercifully blinded to realities. An Almighty Providence sees that every man shall live to the full such moments as were his just then. It is in the great balance ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... twilight when we got up the anchor, and steamed away from Aden; and as the evening set in a bevy of birds were singularly attracted to the Kashgar. They were quite as much land as water-birds, and were fully twice as large as robins, of a mingled white and slate color. So persistent were these birds, and being perhaps a little confused by the surrounding darkness, together with the blinding lights of the ship, that they permitted themselves to be caught and handled. When thrown into the air ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... street of a village in the North Country. The cluster of gray stone houses nestled beneath the scarred face of a crag, and, because mining operations had lately been suspended and work was scarce just then, pale-faced men in moleskin lounged about the slate-slab doorsteps. Above the village, and beyond the summit of the crag, the mouth of a tunnel formed a black blot on the sunlit slopes of sheep-cropped grass stretching up to the heather, which gave place ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... soil must be similar to that of the rock from which it was formed; and, consequently, if we know the chemical character of the rock, we can tell whether the soil formed from it can be brought under profitable cultivation. Thus feldspar, on being pulverized, yields potash; talcose slate yields magnesia; marls yield ...
— The Elements of Agriculture - A Book for Young Farmers, with Questions Prepared for the Use of Schools • George E. Waring
... at learning, but respecting him for a generous, honest nature. Only one narrow, domineering fellow, the Latin master, bullied him and made the blue eyes mad with shame and rage. There was a horrid scene, when the boy laid open the master's head with a slate, and then things went on as before. The teacher got little sympathy. But Brangwen winced and could not bear to think of the deed, not even long after, when he ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... and he said them with a kind of a smile, like he was happy and didn't give a damn to live. Then the little life he had left went out. The orderly looked at his watch, and then wrote the time on a slate after Benny's regimental number and the word: "died." This was about all the epitaph he got, though we buried him properly in the morning and gave him the usual send- off. Then his effects was auctioned off in front ...
— Love, The Fiddler • Lloyd Osbourne
... o' their own pockets, we've got to make 'em officers of the company an' give'em control of it. Of course, our secretary is in to stay; that's part of his pay for the land he gives; but except as to him, gentlemen, there'll have to be a new slate. ...
— John March, Southerner • George W. Cable
... greately go inn for subdued ratt-color, milde mouse-tints, temperate tea-caddy tones, moderate mode—dyes, gentyll gray—shades, tranquill drabb—tinges, temperate tawny, calm graye, sober ashie, pacifyed slate, mitigated dun, lenientlie dingie, and blandlie cinereous chromattics, since shee hadd a Quakir grandmother on the one syde, ande is too superblie proude on the other, 'to make a pecocke of hirselfe,' as shee wyll telle you whann thatt yee be spattered with the water ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... balls. The tin soldiers rustled about in their box, for they wanted to join the games, but they could not get the lid off. The nut-crackers turned somersaults, and the pencil scribbled nonsense on the slate. ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... had left her unsatisfied, for she had given her cake to Rie Blauvelt in return for a splendid Northern Spy, and had munched the apple and eaten her two sandwiches wishing all the time for more. Leaving the work on her slate unfinished, she had dived into the depths of her home-made satchel and discovered two crumbs of molasses cake. That was an hour ago. School had closed at three o'clock to-day because it was Friday ...
— Miss Prudence - A Story of Two Girls' Lives. • Jennie Maria (Drinkwater) Conklin
... Annecy; and at my feet the lake, dappled with rosy tints by the floating rays of the setting sun. One single image filled for me the immensity of this horizon; it rose from the chalets where we had met; from the doctor's garden, the pointed slate roof of whose house I could recognize above the smoke of the town; from the fig-trees of the little castle of Bon-Port at the bottom of the opposite creek; from the chestnut-trees on the hill of Tresserves; from the woods ...
— Raphael - Pages Of The Book Of Life At Twenty • Alphonse de Lamartine
... had scarcely begun to touch the eaves and roofs, spread out more freely in the little Piazza del Ayuntamiento, bringing out of the shadows the ugly front of the Archbishop's Palace, and the towers of the municipal buildings capped with black slate, a sombre erection of the time ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... barely touches them, and the spirit writing begins. Sometimes the slates are held on the head or shoulders of the visitor. At one of his seances at Oakland, it is said that he held the slates for thirty-five persons within two hours, and obtained for each a slate full of writing in answers to questions placed between the slates. At a public seance in Santa Cruz, following a lecture, folded ballots were sent up by the audience and the answers were sometimes written on closed slates and sometimes ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, September 1887 - Volume 1, Number 8 • Various
... its varieties: the body, its upper part gray or black or yellow according to the upper soil and herbs, heather, bent, moss, &c.; the belly and feet, red or tan or light fawn, according to the nature of the deep soil, be it ochrey, ferruginous, light clay, or comminuted mica slate. And wonderfullest of all, the DOTS of TAN above the eyes—and who has not noticed and wondered as to the philosophy of them?—I saw made by the two fore feet, wet and clayey, being put briskly up to his eyes as he sneezed that genetic, vivifying sneeze, and leaving ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... The ball had entered behind, and had come out close to the bone. Chris believed that he could walk, but thought it best to affect not to be able to do so. The wound had bled very little, and the two holes were no larger than would be made by an ordinary slate-pencil. Sankey had been hit just below the shoulder. The ball had in his case also gone right through, and from the position of the two holes it was evident that it must have passed through the bone. The Boers bandaged the wounds, and told them to lie down under the shade ...
— With Buller in Natal - A Born Leader • G. A. Henty
... this kind of army life. Here comes Langston now." He needn't have made that announcement. Mrs. Cranston was watching, waiting for him, and she glanced quickly to see where Miss Loomis was. That young lady, however, never looked up from the slate whereon Louis's hieroglyphics were in mad arithmetical tangle, even when she heard Langston's courteous greeting to the lady of the house and his inquiries for the captain, and heard them without evidence of any ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... severities of their lot for his sake. He parted with all his followers except O'Neil. Donald Macleod shed tears on bidding him farewell. Macleod was taken prisoner a few days afterwards in Benbecula, by Lieutenant Allan Macdonald, of Knock, in Slate, in the island of Skye. He was put on board the Furnace,[279] and brought down to the cabin before General Campbell, who examined him minutely. The General asked him "if he had been along with the ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume III. • Mrs. Thomson
... having pulled off the ear of two boys, one in his presence, and one in mine. John Butcher, whose father then lived at Westcombe, was one of them, and he[11] has reminded me also of Griffiths having taken a very thick heavy slate, and with both hands broken it over the head of Dr. now Sir —— Gibbs, of Bath, physician to the late Queen, who very fortunately had a thicker scull than boys in general, or he would in all probability have fractured it. It ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 1 • Henry Hunt
... the same duties in life. To get a realistic notion, let every man who has a wife ask himself how he would relish being told by her, "I have an engagement with John Smith to-night to see about fixing up a slate to get Mrs. Jones nominated for sheriff," and being left to go his own way while she goes with Smith. If that wouldn't make hell in the household in one act we don't know what would, yet this is merely one little trivial episode of what this ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... not found his place in it. He was employed as City Editor of the New York Herald—a position which had not then developed the importance which attaches to it to-day—and his duties consisted mainly of making out the "slate" for the staff of reporters, and doing such reportorial work as it was the province and habit of the City Editor to perform. This afforded little scope for a man of Mr. Croly's latent power; and his dissatisfaction and desire to find a new field was the cause of ...
— Memories of Jane Cunningham Croly, "Jenny June" • Various
... face of the Caribbean, leaving death and destruction in their wake—and there were indications that a change of weather was impending. The rainy season had long set in, and skies overcast by great masses of slate-blue cloud surcharged with rain and electricity were no new thing to the Nonsuch's crew, but the aspect of the sky on this particular day was of an altogether different character. It had begun with a paling of the brilliant ...
— The Cruise of the Nonsuch Buccaneer • Harry Collingwood
... clad rather shabbily (but, as it seemed, more owing to his mother's carelessness than his father's poverty), in a blue apron, very wide and short trousers, shoes somewhat out at the toes, and a chip hat, with the frizzles of his curly hair sticking through its crevices. A book and a small slate, under his arm, indicated that he was on his way to school. He stared at Hepzibah a moment, as an elder customer than himself would have been likely enough to do, not knowing what to make of the tragic attitude and queer scowl wherewith ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... hadn't the least idea it wasn't Gruffy. However, the best of it is to come," said Salisbury, pausing a moment to recover the mirth which the recollection produced:—"He was stirring up a concoction of cold tea, ink and water, slate-pencil dust, sugar, mustard, and salt, when I thought" (Salisbury's voice trembled violently) "that I heard a step I ought to know, and I had hardly time to get completely behind the door when it was widely opened, and in walked ...
— Louis' School Days - A Story for Boys • E. J. May
... row of English elms. The gray squirrels were out looking for their breakfasts, and one of them came toward us in light, soft, intermittent leaps, until he was close to the rail of the burial ground. He was on a grave with a broad blue slate-stone at its head, and a shrub growing on it. The stone said this was the grave of a young man who was the son of an honorable gentleman, and who died a hundred years ago and more. Oh, yes, died—with a small triangular mark in one breast, and another smaller opposite, in his back, where another ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... the Russian dominions eastward nearly to Frazer River. The pipes of the Bobeen, and also of the Clalam Indians, occupying the neighboring Vancouver's Island, are carved with the utmost elaborateness and in the most singular and grotesque devices, from a soft blue clay-stone or slate. Their form is in part determined by the material, which is only procurable in thin slabs, so that the sculptures, wrought on both sides, present a sort of double bas-relief. From this, singular and grotesque groups are carved without any apparent reference to the ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... empty as an eggshell from which the yolk had been sucked. Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston suffered alike, and worthy ship owners had to leave off counting their losses upon their fingers and take to the slate to keep the ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard I. Pyle
... the Hangman, what a change of scene—the square-blocked sandstone cliffs dip suddenly under dark slate-beds, fantastically bent and broken by primeval earthquakes. Wooded combes, and craggy ridges of rich pasture-land, wander and slope towards a labyrinth of bush-fringed coves, black isolated tide-rocks, and land-locked ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... resort; whose bathing began early in the morning and whose flirting continued far into the night, with forenoon and afternoon dawdling and dozing on the pebbles. At one end of the Terrace rose a prodigious headland, whose slope was scaled over with broken slate, like some mammoth heaving from the deep and showing an elephantine hide of bluish gray. At the other end was the Amusement Pier, with the co- educational college, which is part of the University of Wales, and with divers hotels. Somewhat behind and beyond ...
— Seven English Cities • W. D. Howells
... yet discovered is iron. It abounds in every part of the country, and is in some places purer than in any other part of the world. Coals are found in many places of the best quality. There is also abundance of slate, limestone and granite, though not in the immediate vicinity of Port Jackson. Sand-stone, quartz, and freestone are ...
— Statistical, Historical and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales and its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen's Land • William Charles Wentworth
... whole school," she said, fiercely—"master, mistress, and all—and yet I am kept sitting over a, b, c, like a baby. I get so sick of it that sometimes I answer wrong by way of novelty. Then I have to hold out my hand for the rod. To-day I drew Portia and Shylock on my slate, and forgot to finish my ...
— The Late Miss Hollingford • Rosa Mulholland
... gasping for breath. The neighbor's house, not forty paces across the street, was invisible. I remember the sensation it gave me, as I struggled to find its outlines, of a world washed out, like the figures I washed out on my slate. As I trudged, half frightened, into the road, and the fog closed about me, it seemed to my childish superstition like a horde of long-imprisoned ghosts let loose and angry. The distant sound of the coach, which I could not ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... work, putting her new domain in order. Some of the pasture she grubbed up for spring sowings, the rest she drained by cutting a new channel from the Kent Ditch to the White Kemp Sewer. She re-roofed the barns with slate, and painted and re-tiled the dwelling-house. This last she decided to let to some family of gentlepeople, while herself keeping on the farm and the barns. The dwelling-house of Little Ansdore, though more flat and spreading, was in every way superior to ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... the room where the Raymounts were one by one assembling to break their fast, was discolored and dark, whether with age or smoke it would have needed more than a glance to say. The reds had grown brown, and the blues a dirty slate-color, while an impression of drab was prevalent. But the fire was burning as if it had been at it all night and was glorying in having at length routed the darkness; and in the middle of the table on the white cloth, stood a shallow piece of red pottery full of crocuses, the ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... looked up quickly, and as quickly rose to his feet. And with one glance into slate-gray eyes behind long black lashes—eyes filled with awed, worshipful gratitude to him—his heart rose in his breast and all but flitted out upon ...
— Blue-grass and Broadway • Maria Thompson Daviess
... pleasant one. Through a mishap, I arrived on Saturday night, instead of in the morning; and, being unwilling to disturb Mrs. Severance at so late an hour, went first to a hotel. But what trials I had there! No one could understand me; until at last I wrote on a slate my own name and Mrs. Severance's, with the words, "A carriage," and "To-morrow." From this the people inferred that I wished to stay at the hotel all night, and to have a carriage to take me to Mrs. Severance's the next day; as was the case. A waiter took my carpet-bag and conducted ...
— A Practical Illustration of Woman's Right to Labor - A Letter from Marie E. Zakrzewska, M.D. Late of Berlin, Prussia • Marie E. Zakrzewska
... a small, fair man with scanty hair, a clean-shaven face, a rather feminine cast of features, a broad forehead, slate-grey eyes, and a narrow, lipless mouth which revealed very fine white teeth when he spoke. It was a colorless face and challenged no attention; but it was a face that served as an excellent canvas, and few professional actors had ever surpassed Peter in the art of ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts
... object altogether majestical, the cedar performed a practical office whereby it earned Iglesias' gratitude. For its dark interposing bulk effectually shut off the view of an aggressively new rawly red steam laundry, with shiny slate roofs and a huge smoke-belching chimney to it, which, to the convulsive disgust of the gentility of the eastern side of Trimmer's Green, had had the unpardonable impertinence to get itself erected in an adjacent street. ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... the school from the outside what materials do you see that the builders have used? Where have they needed stone, slate, glass, tin, ...
— Where We Live - A Home Geography • Emilie Van Beil Jacobs
... smooth rounded tops. During a tramp of some miles over a muddy way, composed of argillaceous clay and black pebbles, I observed fragments of quartz and granite. Several specimens containing iron pyrites were also found. The cliffs in the vicinity of our landing are composed of slate, and the land over which I travelled seemed almost as barren as a macadamized road; but on searching closely several species of hyperborean plants were found, such as saxifrages, anemones, grasses, lichens and mushrooms. The mosses and lichens were but feebly developed, and the phanerogamous ...
— The First Landing on Wrangel Island - With Some Remarks on the Northern Inhabitants • Irving C. Rosse
... bedside. It is the first act he notices, and he clearly derives pleasure from it. After vainly trying to make himself understood in speech, he makes signs for a pencil. So inexpressively that they cannot at first understand him; it is his old housekeeper who makes out what he wants and brings in a slate. ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... greenery, almost met together. Under their branches she made her way, to where the lane opened out to a grassy square, on which stood a tiny whitewashed cottage. The thatch reached low over the door, and its one window no bigger than a child's slate. There were no signs of life, but Sara did not hesitate to raise the wooden latch and open the door, ...
— Garthowen - A Story of a Welsh Homestead • Allen Raine
... being all bone-battered on the rock, Yielded; and Gareth sent him to the King, 'Myself when I return will plead for thee.' 'Lead, and I follow.' Quietly she led. 'Hath not the good wind, damsel, changed again?' 'Nay, not a point: nor art thou victor here. There lies a ridge of slate across the ford; His horse thereon stumbled—ay, for ...
— Idylls of the King • Alfred, Lord Tennyson
... procession of her daughter's funeral. A man of triple functions, the bell-ringer, beadle, and grave-digger of the parish, had dug a grave in the half-acre cemetery behind the church,—a church well known, a classic church, with a square tower and pointed roof covered with slate, supported on the outside by strong corner buttresses. Behind the apse of the chancel, lay the cemetery, enclosed with a dilapidated wall,—a little field full of hillocks; no marble monuments, ...
— Ferragus • Honore de Balzac
... the Quarries, with convicts at work. They make elaborate motions with picks at white rocks, and thus dig out considerable black slate. SILAS has become a Warden, no one knows how. The convicts sing and enjoy themselves, with the exception of ARNOLD, who evidently finds prison life too gay and frivolous. Mrs. ARMITAGE, who has become a fashionable lady—no one knows how-enters ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 13, June 25, 1870 • Various
... notice the peculiarity of my assistant's manner, as it might involve awkward explanations, I closed the door of his prison with an authoritative bang, that shook the slate outside it, and strode with hasty steps down the village street. There was no occasion for hurry, the business I had on hand was not of a kind to demand it, and had been pending a reasonable time; nor would any more haste on my part be lively to advance it much, but would rather verify the old ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 2, No 6, December 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... reprehensible for the Hebrew magicians to play the same trick? It was prestidigitation for all concerned—only the side of the children of Israel was espoused in the recital. Therefore, do not talk of black or white magic. There is only one true magic. And it is not slate-writing, toe-joint snapping, fortune-telling, or the vending of charms. Magic, too, is an art—like other arts. This is forgotten by the majority of its practitioners. Hence the sordid vulgarity of the average mind-reader and humbugging ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... former trees, there trembles a snowy gauze where blossom buds are breaking. Higher yet, dark plowed fields, with hedges whereon grow straight elms, cover the undulations of a great hill even to its windy crest, and below, at the water line, lies Newlyn—a village of gray stone and blue, with slate roofs now shining silver-bright under morning sunlight and easterly wind. Smoke softens every outline; red-brick walls and tanned sails bring warmth and color through the blue vapor of many chimneys; a sun-flash glitters at this point and that, denoting here a conservatory, there a ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... an' a half-bad luck to ye, Discobolus!" said Long Jack. "I'm murderin' meself to fill your pockuts. Slate ut for a bad catch. The Portugee has ...
— "Captains Courageous" • Rudyard Kipling
... registered on a diagram. The average limit of the normal field of vision is 90 mm. on the temporal side, 55 mm. on the nasal side, 55 mm. above and 60 mm. below (see Fig. 42). If a suitable instrument is not available, a series of concentric circles may be traced on a slate and the patient placed at a certain distance with one eye covered. The examiner then touches the different points of the circles with his hand and asks the patient whether he can see it when his eye is fixed on the central point. In this way the various points limiting the ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero
... fire that Woodbridge had experienced in years. By the time the firemen reached the scene the whole west end of the building was enveloped in flames and a section of the slate roof had already caved in. From every window long tongues of red flames darted out like hideous serpents' tongues. Great sparks shot skyward as sections of the west wall crumbled and fell into the red hot caldron ...
— The Boy Scout Fire Fighters • Irving Crump
... the hotel, and that we mustn't bother ourselves about it for she wasn't going to; Anitra and she had run this road too many times when they were children. That is all I have to tell of my intercourse with these ladies prior to our appearance at the hotel. I think it right for me to clear the slate, Ransom. Who knows what we may wish to write upon ...
— The Chief Legatee • Anna Katharine Green
... Karakoram, or rather upon a "hip" of the Roof of the World. Skardu, on the left bank, was an independent capital down to 1840, and its aspect is still stormy in a political as in a climatic sense. The land looks like a petrified storm, the waves of granite and slate dotted sporadically with huts and microscopic bits of culture. Only in a few of the deep valleys is Nature less inhospitable. The glaciers descend to an altitude of 13,500 feet, with an upward extent of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... though not less fertile internally, is externally inept and is called madness. Ineptitude is something which language needs to shake off. Better surrender altogether some verbal categories and start again, in that respect, with a clean slate, than persist in any line of development that alienates thought from reality. The language of birds is excellent in its way, and those ancient sages who are reported to have understood it very likely had merely ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... offers a quite anomalous case; the head of the female is pure white, and her back is redder than that of the male; the head of the male is of a rich dark bronzed colour, and his back is clothed with finely pencilled slate- coloured feathers, so that altogether he may be considered as the more beautiful of the two. He is larger and more pugnacious than the female, and does not sit on the eggs. So that in all these respects this species comes under ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... i.e., A stucco box, with two bay-windows, a slate roof, and a romantic or aristocratic name—"Killiecrankie," "Glaramara," or ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, April 12, 1890 • Various
... Facing them was a great cavernous cleft in the rocks, tinted with a curious violet hue intermingled with bronze,—and in the strong sunlight these colors flashed with the brilliancy of jewels, reflecting themselves in the pale slate-colored sea. By Errington's orders the yacht slackened speed, and glided along with an almost noiseless motion,—and they were silent, listening to the dash and drip of water that fell invisibly from the toppling crags that frowned above, while the breathless heat and stillness of the air added ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... Navigation Company—familiarly, the L.L.S.N. Co.—lay opposite on her right, while leftward, across the water, she could trace, as far as the grape-vine would allow, the boundary of the Botanical Gardens and get a sight of the white stone and grey slate end ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... do as much good there as a lawyer. And when I should be grown quite an old man, and you an old woman, so as not to be long apart, I might die happy enough in my bed, and leave you all crying around me. A slate gravestone would suit me as well as a marble one—with just my name and age, and a verse of a hymn, and something to let people know that I lived an honest man and ...
— The Great Stone Face - And Other Tales Of The White Mountains • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... fade core gore lute five trade glide tone pole live plate wore cope lobe tore crave drive tube lane hive spore pride wipe bide save globe stove slate pore rave snipe snore mere flake cove stone spine store stole cave flame blade mute wide stale grove crime stake hone mete grape shave skate mine wake smite grime spike more wave white stride brake score slope drone spade spoke fume strife twine shape snake wade slime strive whale strike slave mode ...
— The Beacon Second Reader • James H. Fassett
... white crochet silk, two skeins of ombre scarlet ditto, in long shades, three skeins of slate-colour, and one of bright scarlet. Two ounces of transparent white beads, rather larger than seed beads, four strings of gold, the same size, and a hank of steel to match. For the garnitures (which must be entirely of bright ...
— The Ladies' Work-Book - Containing Instructions In Knitting, Crochet, Point-Lace, etc. • Unknown
... in 1483, died in 1546; his father a slate-cutter: studied at Magdeburg and Erfurt; against the wishes of his family, became a monk; went to Rome in 1510; published on the church door at Wittenburg in 1517 his thesis against the sale of indulgences; summoned to Rome, he refused to go and published further attacks upon the Church; excommunicated ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various
... to the room in which he kept his school-books—almost the only articles of property which the boy possessed. Here they found nothing suspicious. All was even in the best possible order—not a very wonderful fact, seeing a few books and a slate were the only things there besides the papers ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... paint the pictures constantly opening on the view as I rode along. Forest clad mountains rose on every side with huge cliffs peering grimly out. Sometimes these cliffs overhung the road and occasionally a great slab of slate projected sufficiently to furnish shelter for a family. In one place a farmer had taken advantage of this and made his stable under a rock. A great slab of shaly slate projected so that he had a roof some fifty feet long and ten or fifteen wide. My mind went back eighteen ...
— The American Missionary, October, 1890, Vol. XLIV., No. 10 • Various
... they went up into the air!" answered the caretaker. "One moment they were on the breaker sorting slate and stuff of that kind out of the stream of coal which was pouring down upon them, and the next moment ...
— Boy Scouts in the Coal Caverns • Major Archibald Lee Fletcher
... post of observation. Evening slowly fell. The sky was growing grayish-black, a tint that blended with the slate-colored sea. To those on the bank, the sound of the men about to die came softly across the water. There was a sail far out. Between the strand and the touba where Koupriane watched, was a ridge, a window, which, however, did not hide ...
— The Secret of the Night • Gaston Leroux
... are also spending their winter in the South. The great mass of our bird population has left us until warmer weather shall bring back to us once more our feathered friends. It is true that we are south to the snowbirds or juncos, and their little slate-colored bodies, with their light breasts and their white on each side of the tail, make our bare hedge rows brighter by their presence. A few of our birds like the song sparrow and the cardinal are hidden ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker
... days Madame Raquin preserved the use of her hands. She could write on a slate, and in this way asked for what she required; then the hands withered, and it became impossible for her to raise them or hold a pencil. From that moment her eyes were her only language, and it was necessary for her niece to guess what she desired. The ...
— Therese Raquin • Emile Zola
... thistle-head piled its down-silk grey: Scarce the stony lizard sucked hollows in his flanks: Thick on spots of umbrage our drowsed flocks lay. Sudden bowed the chestnuts beneath a wind unheard, Lengthened ran the grasses, the sky grew slate: Then amid a swift flight of winged seed white as curd, Clear of limb a Youth smote the master's gate. God! of whom music And song and blood are pure, The day is never darkened ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... from the shade and shelter it affords; and it should contain at least two apartments, besides a cool place for storing away butter. One of the apartments, in which the milk is placed to deposit cream, or to ripen for churning, is usually surrounded by shelves of marble or slate, on which the milk-dishes rest; but it will be found a better plan to have a large square or round table of stone in the centre, with a water-tight ledge all round it, in which water may remain in hot weather, or, if some attempt at the ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... these methods arrest the bleeding the nostril must be plugged. A piece of clean cotton cloth, about five inches square, should be pushed gently but firmly into the nostril with a slender cylinder of wood about as large as a slate pencil and blunt on the end. This substitute for a probe is pressed against the center of the cloth, which folds about the stick like a closed umbrella, and the cotton is pressed into the nostril in a backward and ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume II (of VI) • Various
... nearly two hundred feet in length, and would have made three respectable churches, standing in line, with their sharp gables to the front, the bold wings connected with the bolder centre by habitable curtains or colonnades, in which panels of slate or grained stone made an attic story above the lines of windows, and lintels and sills of the same stone, with high keystones, capped every window in the many-sided surface of the whole stately block, all built of brick brought over in vessels ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... now, alas! only the outward and visible sign of all she had been and of all that she had lost. Behind her the snow-white wall of the house, sparkling in the red rays of the setting sun; at her feet only the white slate of the stoep. And well enough I knew that under the proud Empire flag many a widow as young and as heart-broken as this Dutch girl would watch the sun go down as hopelessly as she, and I could not help the thought which sprang to my soul—God's bitter curse rest on the ...
— Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa (1899-1900) - Letters from the Front • A. G. Hales
... grapes in his hands, and untie his brown-paper parcel of bread and meat, and munch it slowly, surrounded by a little crowd of sparrows. Over the green turf little fountains spread the trickling web of their soft rain. Round-eyed, slate-blue pigeons cooed in a sunlit tree. And all about him was the perpetual hum of Paris, the roar of the carriages, the surging sea of footsteps, the familiar street-cries, the gay distant whistle of a china-mender, a navvy's hammer ringing out on the cobblestones, the noble music of a fountain—all ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... left my bed a little later than usual and, coming downstairs to my room, leant back on a bolster, one leg resting over the other knee. There, with a slate on my chest, I began to write a poem to the accompaniment of the morning breeze and the singing birds. I was getting along splendidly—a smile playing over my lips, my eyes half closed, my head swaying to the rhythm, the thing I hummed gradually taking ...
— Glimpses of Bengal • Sir Rabindranath Tagore |
