"Tapered" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a very small edition of the giant devilfish or octopus. It has ten tentacles, a tapered body about ten inches long, and is armed with the usual defensive ink-sac, by means of which it squirts a cloud of black fluid at a pursuing enemy, ...
— The Harbor of Doubt • Frank Williams
... admired its light and elegant proportions and the taste with which it was fitted up. The benches were covered with cushions, and its long streamer was of silk. On one of the cushion's lay a lady's glove, of delicate size and shape, with beautifully tapered fingers. I instantly seized it and thrust it in my bosom; it seemed a match for the fairy footstep that ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... side, lifting their soft heads into the sky. Little else was to be seen. Here and there, a little further off, the lighter green of an oak shewed itself, or the tufts of a yellow pine; but near at hand the cedars held the ground, thick pyramids or cones of green, from the very soil, smooth and tapered as if a shears had been there; but only nature had managed it. They hid all else that they could; but the grey rocks peeped under, and peeped through, and here and there broke their ranks with a huge wall or ledge of granite, ...
— Hills of the Shatemuc • Susan Warner
... did not grow dull. He kept his golden touch and his impotent dollars piled higher and higher. The pile must have mocked Isabel Markley, for it could bring her nothing that she wanted. She stopped trying to give big parties and receptions. Her social efforts tapered down to little dinners for the new people in town. But as the dinner hour grew near she raged—so the servants said—whenever the telephone rang, and in the end she had to give up ...
— In Our Town • William Allen White
... encouraging him and yelling something else he couldn't understand; pointing skyward. And then he saw it; the Nomad, with its sleek, tapered cylinder of a body nosing down toward them with the silvery aura of its propulsive energy gleaming like a beacon of hope against the dull clouds of the satellite of terror. And there was something else: one of the ovoids of Titan, clinging there to the vessel's hull ...
— Creatures of Vibration • Harl Vincent
... mention of the herrings hanging in the mesh, for last year I only put in inch mesh which upon examination you'll soon perceive. Therefore, sir, I entreat the honour of a line whether or not the two above three-quarters mesh seines answer the purpose. I have tapered them away at the ends to ...
— The Bounty of the Chesapeake - Fishing in Colonial Virginia • James Wharton
... played nearly the same game in regard to wages, and with the same results. We are now furnished with advices from the island down to the 19th of December 1838. At the latter date the panic making papers had tapered down their complainings to a very faint whisper, and withal expressing more hope than fears. As the fruit of what they had already done we are told by one of them, the Barbadian, that the unfavourable news carried home by the packets after the emancipation ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... answered, fingering it carelessly; "it is in reality a sort of air-gun, with a wonderful compression, and a most ingenious silencer; quite as deadly, they say, as any firearm ever invented. It ejects a cylindrically-shaped bullet, tapered down almost to the fineness of a needle. Now," he added, with a faint smile and a rapid glance round the room, "if only one dared—" he turned in his chair, and I saw the thing steal out below his cuff, "one could free the ...
— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... a little withered old man, who, for their money, dearly sells the sailors deliriums and death. Abominable are the tumblers into which he pours his poison. Though true cylinders without —within, the villanous green goggling glasses deceitfully tapered downwards to a cheating bottom. Parallel meridians rudely pecked into the glass, surround these footpads' goblets. Fill to this mark, and your charge is but a penny; to this a penny more; and so on to the full glass —the Cape Horn measure, which you ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... smooth, round, delicately tapered shaft, mostly without limbs, and colored rich purplish-brown, usually enlivened with tufts of yellow lichen. At the top of this magnificent bole, long, curving branches sweep gracefully outward and downward, sometimes forming a palm-like crown, but ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir
... Viking raids into Europe tapered off following the adoption of Christianity by King Olav TRYGGVASON in 994. Conversion of the Norwegian kingdom occurred over the next several decades. In 1397, Norway was absorbed into a union with Denmark that was to last for more than four centuries. In 1814, Norwegians resisted the ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... tacked in place, being spaced amidships as shown in Fig. 4; then the points where they cross the bow and stern and all the moulds are marked, and notches one inch by one-fourth of an inch cut to receive them, the edges of the bow and stern being tapered off at the same time to half an inch; then all the parts are placed in position again, and fastened with one-inch screws, except where the keelson joins the bow, stern, and moulds, where one inch and a half screws are used. Each screw is dipped in ...
— Harper's Young People, April 27, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... his mouth to sound a warning, but something in Rathburn's gaze and posture held him silent. Rathburn's body was tense; his gaze was glued to the doorway; his right hand with its slim, brown, tapered fingers, hung above the gun at ...
— The Coyote - A Western Story • James Roberts
... the scout, with the tips of his tapered fingers trembling on an empty table, straining forward and staring into the stranger's face; "no, Jack Ramsey has not been here; and if what you say be true—he sleeps alone in yonder fastness. Alas, poor Ramsey!—Ah knew 'im well"; and he sank on a ...
— The Last Spike - And Other Railroad Stories • Cy Warman
... fissures and fragments, both perpendicularly and horizontally, and was almost mathematically divided into pieces or squares, or unequal cubes, simply placed upon one another, like masons' work without mortar. The lower strata of these divisions were large, the upper tapered to pieces not much larger than a brick, at least they seemed so from a distance. The whole appearance of this singular mount was grand and awful, and I could not but reflect upon the time when these colossal ridges were all at once rocking in the convulsive tremblings of some mighty volcanic ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... its frontal it bore two horns, which pointed toward its back. One of them was taken to Manila. It was covered with its skin or hide, but had no hair or scales. It was white, and twenty feet long. Where it joined the head it was as thick as the thigh, and gradually tapered proportionally to the tip. It was somewhat curved and not very round; and to all appearances, quite solid. It caused great ...
— History of the Philippine Islands Vols 1 and 2 • Antonio de Morga
... woodpecker; and the Cayenne woodpecker. The third case contains the African and American ground woodpeckers; and the Wrynecks of Africa, Europe, and India. The chief food of the wrynecks consists of ants, which they pick up with their delicately tapered tongues. ...
— How to See the British Museum in Four Visits • W. Blanchard Jerrold
... palpable astonishment of Mike, who could not help regarding me as one from whom fortune met the most ungrateful returns. At every new turn of the road he would endeavor to attract my attention by the objects around,—no white-turreted chateau, no tapered spire in the distance, escaped him; he kept up a constant ripple of half-muttered praise and censure upon all he saw, and instituted unceasing comparisons between the country and his own, in which, I am ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... little anxious lest they should have lost something of their cunning. He did not know that mechanical faculty, for fine work as well as rough, goes in general with square-pointed fingers. Delicately tapered fingers, whatever they may indicate in the way of artistic invention, are not the fingers of the painter or the sculptor. The finest fingers of the tapering kind I have ever seen, were those of a distinguished chemist ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... chapel, a meeting-house, and also a place of worship for those who belonged to the Methodist connection, It was nearly half a mile long, lay nearly due north and south, and ran up an elevation or slight hill, and down again on the other side, where it tapered away into a string of cabins. It is scarcely necessary to say that it contained a main street, three or four with less pretensions, together with a tribe of those vile alleys which consist of a double row of beggarly cabins, or huts, facing each other, and lying so closely, that a tall man might ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... of lace, with a fringe of bugles, projecting into eight points so as to form a star of drapery, hanging from the points of the flowery star in the dome. The spaces between the angles were filled with masses of stalactites, dropping one below the other, till they tapered into the plain square sides of ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... aeroplane's specifications. It is necessary to make sure that the spars are horizontal when the aeroplane is in flying position and the tail unsupported as explained above under the heading of Fuselage. If the spars are tapered, then make sure that their centre ...
— The Aeroplane Speaks - Fifth Edition • H. Barber
... full thickness at the beginning of the blade, but should be well tapered off along the blade, so as to be quite thin at its middle, where it ends. It should have its full breadth across the breadth of the blade. The blade itself may be shaved ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls - Volume VIII, No 25: May 21, 1887 • Various
... such cultured taste, and that was the size of the ladies' waists. Of all that I measured not one was less than thirty inches in circumference, and it was rare to meet with one that small. At first I thought a waist that tapered from the arm pits would be an added beauty, if only these ladies would be taught how to acquire it. But I lived long enough among them to look upon a tapering waist as a disgusting deformity. They considered a large waist a mark of beauty, as it gave a greater ...
— Mizora: A Prophecy - A MSS. Found Among the Private Papers of the Princess Vera Zarovitch • Mary E. Bradley
... attired as a mountaineer. His hat tapered to the top, and was crowned by a single heron feather. Hussars might have envied him his moustaches. From his right side protruded a couteau de chasse; and his legs were not a little set off by the tight-laced boots, which, coming up some way beyond the ancle, displayed his calf ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... this machine the characters required for printing were indented in the edges of a series of narrow brass bands, each band containing a full alphabet, and hanging, with spacers, side by side in the machine. The bands tapered in thickness from top to bottom, the characters being arranged upon them in the order of the width-space which they occupied. By touching the keys of a keyboard similar to a typewriter, the bands dropped successively, bringing the characters required into line ...
— The Building of a Book • Various
... Tolstoy and the comfort the harvest fields are said to have once brought to Luther when, much perturbed by many theological difficulties, he suddenly forgot them all in a gush of gratitude for mere bread, exclaiming, "How it stands, that golden yellow corn, on its fine tapered stem; the meek earth, at God's kind bidding, has produced it once again!" At least the toiling poor had this comfort of bread labor, and perhaps it did not matter that they gained it unknowingly and painfully, if only they walked in the path of labor. In the ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... strength of a perfectly tempered spring will always remain the same, whether in winter or summer, never losing its elasticity. The best of tempering, however, is useless in a spring badly formed or clumsily tapered. ...
— Camp Life in the Woods and the Tricks of Trapping and Trap Making • William Hamilton Gibson
... fly-fishing; but I can give a few hints that may be conducive to practical success, as well with trout as with less noble fish, In fly-fishing, one serviceable four-ounce rod is enough; and a plain click reel, of small size, is just as satisfactory as a more costly affair. Twenty yards of tapered, waterproof line, with a six-foot leader, and a cost of two flies, complete the rig, and will be found sufficient. In common with most fly-fishers, I have mostly thrown a cast of three flies, but have found two just as ...
— Woodcraft • George W. Sears
... suppose those snags were 900 feet high. Still they were a very fine show. They stood boldly out by themselves, and made a fascinatingly odd spectacle. But there was nothing about their appearance to suggest the heads of a hydra. They looked like a row of lofty slabs with their upper ends tapered to the shape of a carving-knife point; in fact, the early voyager, ignorant of their great height, might have mistaken them for a rusty old rank of piles that had sagged this way and that ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... was rather like a narrow flounder—long, tapered, and oval in cross-section—but it showed none of the exterior markings one might expect of either a living thing or of a spaceship. With one exception, the smooth, ...
— Anything You Can Do ... • Gordon Randall Garrett
... All at once it flashed on me where I was: and so terrible was the knowledge, that a cold sweat brake forth all over me. I had heard of the horrible prison in the Bishop of Lincoln's Palace of Woburn, called Little Ease [Note 1], which tapered down to a point, wherein a man might neither stand, nor sit, nor lie. Somewhat like despair came over me. Were they about to leave me to lie here and die of hunger? I shouted, and my voice came back to me with a mocking echo. I held my breath to listen, and I ...
— Robin Tremain - A Story of the Marian Persecution • Emily Sarah Holt
... brutality. He was, as I have said, an enormous man, of prodigious bodily strength, heavy, yet of good proportions. Of his face one gathered the impression of a blazing furnace. His cheeks and nose were of a vivid red, and still more fiery was the hair, now hidden 'neath his morion, and the beard that tapered to a dagger's point. His very eyes kept tune with the red harmony of his ferocious countenance, for the whites were ever bloodshot as a drunkard's—which, with no want of ...
— The Shame of Motley • Raphael Sabatini
... uniform like a girl in her stays, and wearing, well over one ear, a flat black wax-cloth cap like the "Boots" of an English hotel. His preposterously long moustache, which was drawn out stiff and straight, and tapered away indefinitely to each side till it finished off in a single thread so thin that it was impossible to say where it ended, seemed to weigh upon the corners of his mouth and form a deep furrow ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... last year we had six new Norwegian sledges twelve feet long, brought down by the ship, with tapered runners of hickory which were 33/4 inches broad in the fore part and 21/4 inches only at the stern. I believe that this was an idea of Scott, who considered that the broad runner in front would press down a path for the tapered part which followed, ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... surrounded them with passionate whispering, anxious solicitude, throbbing jealousy. And when they departed, the old burial-ground seemed to groan. Those weeds, in which their entangled feet often stumbled on sultry nights, were fingers, tapered by tomb life, that sprang up from the earth to detain them and cast them into each other's arms. That pungent and penetrating odour exhaled by the broken stems was the fertilising perfume, the mighty quintessence of life which is slowly elaborated in the grave, and intoxicates the lovers ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... And all round the lower part of the trunk, thin, slab-like buttresses of bark, perfectly smooth, and radiating from a common centre, projected along the ground for at least two yards. From below, these natural props tapered upward until gradually blended with the trunk itself. There were signs of the wild cattle having sheltered themselves behind them. Zeke called this the canoe tree; as in old times it supplied the navies of the Kings of Tahiti. For canoe building, the woods is still ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... the deck of the Ajax was one of surpassing beauty and interest. The bright moonbeams rested on the waters, and left a silvery track upon the waves. Ahead and astern, the lofty masts of the squadron tapered darkly towards the sky, whilst the outline of every rope and spar was sharply defined against the clear blue vault of heaven. Every man in the ship, from the commander to the youngest boy, could feel and understand this natural beauty; but there were many on board the squadron ...
— Narratives of Shipwrecks of the Royal Navy; between 1793 and 1849 • William O. S. Gilly
... well-tempered lameness. The girls have a rich blood color in their swarthy cheeks, and some of them are really pretty, though always in a lumpish, domestic-animal style. The hands and feet are singularly small; the fingers short, but nicely tapered. Take hold of the hand, and you are struck with its cetacean feel. It is not flabby, but has a peculiar blubber-like, elastic compressibility, and seems not quite ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... rose, took the red-headed man's own "tump-line," a leather strap about twelve feet long, which tapered from the middle to both ends, tied this firmly round the angry live mummy, and left him ...
— Old Man Savarin and Other Stories • Edward William Thomson
... who always had a little money to lend to the other fellows, though they had their funds from home. It was now Pretty who came to him for the advance of cash enough to buy a walking-stick of the following superb description: a thoroughly even, straight-grained bit of hickory-wood, tapered like a billiard-cue, an inch and a half thick at the butt and three fourths of an inch thick at the point, the butt carrying a knob of silver, ...
— The Dozen from Lakerim • Rupert Hughes
... the morning of the fourth day, and lo! at the first leap of the sun of that day the flame of the Identical abated in its fierceness, and it dwindled and darkened, and tapered and flickered feebly, descending from its altitude in the heavens and through the ceiling of the Hall, and lay down to sleep among the intricate lengths and frizzled convolutions and undulating weights flowing from Shagpat, an undistinguished ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... wilderness alone, transfigured in the lights of the declining day, might well have satisfied the eye. A red sun was just touching the horizon. Its beams and the blue shadows that divided them lay level, miles long, athwart the glassy stream and its green and gray forests and tapered and vanished in a low eastern haze. The tints of autumn already prevailed along the shores, and the indolent waters mirrored the reversed images of the two islands in outlines clearer than their own and from bank to bank took on in enriched hues the many colors of ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... exist and these widely dispersed in London, Berlin, Carlsruhe, Munich, Athens, and Mycenae itself. In the decoration of this facade rosettes and running spirals played a conspicuous part, and on either side of the doorway stood a column which tapered downwards and was ornamented with spirals arranged in zigzag bands. This downward-tapering column, so unlike the columns of classic times, seems to have been in common use in Mycenaean architecture. Inside the ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell
... and pale. The muffled sunlight gleamed like gold tissue through grey gauze, and the beech alleys tapered away to a blue haze blent of sky and forest. It was one of those elusive days when the familiar forms of things seem about to dissolve ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... into the wood, we met with one of them which was nineteen feet eight inches in the girt, at the height of six feet above the ground: Having a quadrant with me, I measured its height from the root to the first branch, and found it to be eighty-nine feet: It was as straight as an arrow, and tapered but very little in proportion to its height; so that I judged there were three hundred and fifty-six feet of solid timber in it, exclusive of the branches. As we advanced, we saw many others that were still larger; we cut down a young one, and the wood proved heavy and solid, not fit for masts, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... desecrated the true religion were worse in the eyes of Maieddine than the foolish faith of Christians, who, at least, were not backsliders. He would not even point out to Victoria the strange minaret of the Abadite mosque at Berryan, which tapered like a brown obelisk against the shimmering sky, for to him its very existence ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... or 7 feet long, with one end tapered and half rounded, on 2 or 4 legs of such length as to bring the end against the workman's chest, ...
— Home Taxidermy for Pleasure and Profit • Albert B. Farnham
... which struck us was a Japanese boat which came alongside, both from her model and the neat way in which she was put together. Her bows were very sharp, she had great beam, and she tapered slightly towards the stern. She was built of pine wood, and varnished without any paint. Her crew, almost naked, stood aft, and sculled her along instead of rowing, at a very great rate. The official personages she brought off sat in the fore-part; one of them, armed with two swords, a mark of ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston
... extension-table, but the spare leaves had been removed, and it was reduced to a circle. A mellow western light from that portion of the sky unswathed in clouds streamed through the window, and did duty as a lamp. The cloth was white, and tapered down in soft folds at the corners; a pleasant profusion of sparkling china and silver, and of savory eatables, filled the circumference of the board, leaving just space enough to operate in, and no more. In the centre of the table, and perceptible ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... bay, and the talk tapered off desultorily to a final "So-long, see yuh later." Lone rode on, careful not to look back. So she was Brit Hunter's girl! Lone whistled softly to himself while he studied this new angle of the problem,—for a problem he was beginning to consider it. She was Brit Hunter's ...
— Sawtooth Ranch • B. M. Bower
... enhanced the sober yet genial decorum of his bearing. His slightly pontifical air seemed an assurance against ill-timed levity. His cheeks were still fat and smooth shaven, but, like many of the successful men of Benham, he now wore a chin beard—a thick tuft of hair which in his case tapered so that it bore some resemblance to the beard of a goat, and gave a rough-and-ready aspect to his appearance suggestive alike of smart, solid worth and an absence of dandified tendencies. Mr. Parsons had a thicker beard of the same character, which ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... species of Janthina, the float of which, instead of being nearly round and extending over the shell on each side, was spread like a spiral fold from the shell; the breadth of this fold was 0.45 inch, close to the mouth of the shell, and it gradually tapered off to a point, its length being 3.6 inches. This float being curved round like the tail of an animal, the whole thing bore the appearance of being a sort of snake, of which the shell was the head; the sailors ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 2 (of 2) • George Grey
... that is called the swallow-tail butterfly, because each of its wings tapered to a point, something like the tail of a swallow. We will call the butterfly, Miss Swallow-tail, and now let us see what ...
— New National Fourth Reader • Charles J. Barnes and J. Marshall Hawkes
... seemed less impregnable now, for upon two sides at least, the cliffs rose sheer from the gorge until they were joined by the heavy buttresses which tapered gracefully until they joined the walls of the crenelated towers and bastions. In the center of the mass of buildings rose the square solid mass of the keep, with its crenelated roof and small windows commanding every portion of the space enclosed ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... lowest of the Underground Fields, and was an hundred miles from side to side, every way; and above it there were three hundred and six fields, each one less in area than that beneath; and in this wise they tapered, until the topmost field which lay direct beneath the lowermost floor of the Great Redoubt, was but four ...
— The Night Land • William Hope Hodgson
... a set of huge cylinders, from which, probably, had come the highly expansive gas that had snuffed out the crews of the two dirigibles. But there were other things—strange, monstrous. One of them, the tapered tube of metal that angled up to the hut's ceiling, its base a mass of wheels and dials and tubing, was evidently the weapon of the ray that had struck ...
— Raiders Invisible • Desmond Winter Hall
... and found a piece he had cut in making the tube. It was perfectly round, ideal for the purpose. He sliced off the inner side where it tapered to a cone, then, working only by eye estimate, cut out a hole in which the wedge of fission material would fit. He wasn't off by a thirty-second of an inch. Skillful application of the torch melted the thorium around the ...
— Rip Foster Rides the Gray Planet • Blake Savage |
