"Tapering" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... it was hove in, was made fast by a succession of selvagees, for which I will borrow the elaborate description of White Jacket, who tells us the name was applied by the seamen of his ship to one of the lieutenants: "It is a slender, tapering, unstranded piece of rope, prepared with much solicitude; peculiarly flexible; which wreathes and serpentines round the cable and messenger like an elegantly modelled garter-snake round the stalks of a vine." The messenger thus was appropriately named; ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... the rock-cut tombs of Beni-hasan, belonging to the Twelfth Dynasty, exhibit a feature which calls for mention. These tombs have been so made as to leave pillars of the living rock standing, both at the entrance and in the chapel. The simplest of these pillars are square in plan and somewhat tapering. Others, by the chamfering off of their edges, have been made eight-sided. A repetition of the process gave sixteen-sided pillars. The sixteen sides were then hollowed out (channeled). The result is illustrated by Fig. 6. It will be observed that the ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell
... quote another description, "divinely tall, with a figure of perfect symmetry, and a grace of dignity enhanced by the proud poise of the small Grecian head. Faultless also were the rounded arms and the hands, with their long, slender tapering fingers." ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... and solemn. 'Thenie was on hand early,—a jolly, ugly, good-hearted girl, who slyly dipped snuff and looked after her little bow-legged brother. When her mother could spare her, 'Tildy came,—a midnight beauty, with starry eyes and tapering limbs; and her brother, correspondingly homely. And then the big boys,—the hulking Lawrences; the lazy Neills, unfathered sons of mother and daughter; Hickman, with a stoop in ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... crevices and irregular surfaces of the block, but it was too large to hide in anything but a huge space. They saw before them its great bulk, bright red skin blotched with black, which rose and fell with the breathing of the reptile. Its long, powerful tail, tapering off from the fat, loathsome body, was curled around the ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science July 1930 • Various
... might pursue These cravings; when the fox-glove, one by one, Upwards through every stage of the tall stem, Had shed beside the public way its bells, 395 And stood of all dismantled, save the last Left at the tapering ladder's top, that seemed To bend as doth a slender blade of grass Tipped with a rain-drop, Fancy loved to seat, Beneath the plant despoiled, but crested still 400 With this last relic, soon itself to fall, Some vagrant mother, ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... closed by the grand blue wall, the Jebel el-Mazhafah. In places their precipices drop bluff to the sea; but the huge valley-mouths separating the two greater ridges, have vomited a quantity of sand, forming the tapering tongue and tip known as the "Little Shore." Turning to the east and the south-east we have for horizon the Wady el-Kharaj (El-Akhraj?), backed by its immense right bank of yellow gypsum, which dwarfs even the Rughmat ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... into one of the stalls, and fed him with fodder and corn in the ear, and came and leaned on the fence behind her. She was now crouched down beside the cow; he could see her brown, tapering arms and wrists against the cow's flank, and hear the milk as it ran into her tin pail with a sharp, intermittent sound. Above the back of the cow, of which she seemed a part in the thickening darkness, loomed ...
— Dixie Hart • Will N. Harben
... struck by the appearance of that hand. It was one of unusual beauty—the sort of hand that Titian or Vandyke loved to draw: long, finely-shaped, full of quiet power, and fuller, perhaps, of a subtle sort of refinement, which seems to express itself in the form of tapering fingers with filbert nails and a well-turned wrist. It was not the hand of a working-man, not even of a skilled artizan, whose hand is often delicately sensitive: it was a gentleman's hand, and as such it piqued ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... inexhaustible supply of firewood. Besides the trees I have mentioned, there is the xanthorea, or grass-tree, a plant which cannot be intelligibly described to those who have never seen it. The stem consists of a tough pithy substance, round which the leaves are formed. These, long and tapering like the rush, are four-sided, and extremely brittle; the base from which they shoot is broad and flat, about the size of a thumb-nail, and very resinous in substance. As the leaves decay annually, others are put forth above the bases of the old ones, which are thus pressed down by the new shoots, ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... parlour, the dining-room, the alluring shadows of the path along which would come M. Swann, the unconscious author of my sufferings, the hall through which I would journey to the first step of that staircase, so hard to climb, which constituted, all by itself, the tapering 'elevation' of an irregular pyramid; and, at the summit, my bedroom, with the little passage through whose glazed door Mamma would enter; in a word, seen always at the same evening hour, isolated from all its possible surroundings, detached and solitary against its ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... the island, the lagoon, and the encircling reef. The island, which, being dry, was of course the highest part of the atoll, measured about three and a quarter miles long, and was crescent-shaped, being about three-eighths of a mile wide in the middle, tapering off north and south in the form of the cusps of the crescent moon; and from the extremities of the two cusps there swept away the encircling reef which enclosed the lagoon in a very perfect natural breakwater, having the inevitable opening as nearly as might be in its middle, just ...
— Turned Adrift • Harry Collingwood
... out into it across the court, a figure shaped itself in the tapering perspective of bare lines: it looked a mere blot of deeper gray in the grayness, and for an instant, as it moved toward her, her heart thumped to ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 2 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... lawn, and enjoined him to cut it very close, adding, as a reason for the injunction, that one inch at the bottom was worth two at the top. Having finished his work much to her satisfaction, the old lady got out the whisky-bottle and a tapering wineglass, which she filled about half full; John suggested that it would be better to fill it up, slily adding, "Fill it up, mem, for it's no like the gress; an inch at the tap's ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... visited court rooms, jails and reformatories. Criminals were not new to her. But these men lacked utterly the markings of the average city criminal. Their eyes lacked the keen alertness, their fingers the slim tapering points of the professional crook. Suddenly, as she pondered, there came to her mind a paragraph from one of her ...
— Triple Spies • Roy J. Snell
... at anchor in the harbour, her tall, tapering masts and taut ropes clearly defined against the gray sky. Beyond the bright beacon light of the Ness, the sloping island of Graemsay could barely be distinguished from the deep purple mountains of Hoy, and along the line of the bay stood the gabled houses of the town, their dimly-lighted windows ...
— The Pilots of Pomona • Robert Leighton
... had always been a matter of mortification to Danny Meadow Mouse. All his cousins in the Mouse family and the Rat family have long, smooth, tapering tails, and they have always been a source of envy to Danny Meadow Mouse. He had felt his queer short tail to be a sort of disgrace. So when he would meet one of his cousins dancing down the Lone Little Path, with his long, slim, tapering tail behind him, Danny Meadow Mouse would slip out of ...
— Mother West Wind's Children • Thornton W. Burgess
... half an inch thick, and the stern-post, five-sixteenths of an inch, are sawed out, and tacked in place temporarily, and a wooden keel of the shape shown in Fig. 4 (marked "Lead Keel"), half an inch thick, tapering to five-sixteenths where it joins the stern-post, is fitted ...
— Harper's Young People, April 6, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... River throwing-stick (and we should include the Mackenzie River district) is a very primitive affair in the National Museum, being only a tapering flat stick of hard wood (Fig. 5). Marks 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 are wanting. The index-finger cavity is large and eccentric and furnishes a firm hold. The shaft-groove is a rambling shallow slit, not over half an inch wide. There is ...
— Throwing-sticks in the National Museum • Otis T. Mason
... Tomb of Agamemnon) was excavated in a hill, and consists of a long passage about 120 ft. by 21 ft. wide, with retaining walls of megalithic masonry on either side, terminating in a great entrance doorway. This doorway is flanked on either side by columns tapering downwards, and decorated with chevrons in a manner very similar to Norman work of the eleventh century, and apparently intended solely for ornament.[130] The entrance opened into a circular domed chamber about 48 ft. 6 in. in diameter, 45 ft. ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... of the ark of Noah was never such a boat as this. It would be impossible to convey in words a true idea of what the craft was like. Perhaps to take an ordinary boat, give it a square stern, a flat bottom without a keel, and straight sides tapering to a point at the bow, would give an approximate idea of what the thing actually was, and also ...
— The Empire Annual for Girls, 1911 • Various
... rise, and are stopped by the barriers. You then look down a strait, broad, and strongly paved road, lined with a double row of trees on each side. As the foliage was not thickly set, we could discern, through the delicately-clothed branches, the tapering spire of the CATHEDRAL, and the more picturesque tower of the ABBAYE ST. OUEN—with hanging gardens, and white houses, to the left—covering a richly cultivated ridge of hills, which sink as it were into the Boulevards, and which is ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume One • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... moreover, on the margin of the sea an ancient stone excellently sculptured after the Saracenic fashion; broad and square at the bottom, but tapering upward to the height that a crow generally flies, having on the top an image of gold, admirably cast in the shape of a man, standing erect, with a certain great key in his hand, which the Saracens say was to fall to the ground immediately after the birth of a King of Gaul, who would overrun ...
— Mediaeval Tales • Various
... nominally for this purpose, but really to furnish a banquet for the men alone. The ceremony is performed at irregular intervals of several years. A long hut, entered through a high door at one end and tapering away at the other, is built in a lonely part of the forest. It represents the monster which is to swallow the novices in its capacious jaws. The process of deglutition is represented as follows. In front of the entrance to the hut a scaffold is erected and a man mounts it. The novices are then led ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... quietly down and lighted up their pipes, the better to consider the bonnie ship. Long and low and dark was she, and though a frigate, the poop was not high enough to interfere with her taking lines of beauty. She carried splendid spars, and from their tapering height it was evident she was built either to fight or to chase a flying Frenchman. But her maintop-gallant masts were at present below, for the ship was not quite ready for sea. She seemed impatient enough, however, to get away. The wind ...
— As We Sweep Through The Deep • Gordon Stables
... shut her eyes, and her fingers clasped tightly together—beautiful long, tapering fingers, like those in Romney's pictures. When he stopped, her eyes opened slowly, and she gazed before her down towards that garden by the Red Mansion where her lifetime ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... though it is needless to say that he was not very conversant in such matters, yet from the frequency of his seeing Americans trading to Ireland, his eye had become sufficiently accustomed to their lofty and tapering spars, and peculiar smartness of rig, to satisfy him that the ship before him was of transatlantic build; nor was he wrong in ...
— Stories of Comedy • Various
... to the steady floating raft that had risen from beneath. (He was even interested to observe that these rigid rods were of telescopic design, and were elongated from their own interiors. One of them pushed forward once to within a foot of the windows; then the tapering end seemed to fall apart into two hooked ends, singularly like a lean finger and thumb with roughened surfaces. This, in its turn, rose out of sight, and he heard it slide along the roof overhead, till it caught some ...
— Dawn of All • Robert Hugh Benson
... which is likewise in use in the French navy, and that is the Whitehead torpedo. This consists of a metallic cylinder, tapering at each end, and containing not only a charge of gun cotton, but a compressed air engine which actuates two helices. It is, in fact, a small submarine vessel, which moves of itself in the direction toward which it has been launched, and at a depth that has been regulated beforehand ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 385, May 19, 1883 • Various
... therefore represents only a fraction of the age of the cave itself. About thirty feet west of the White Throne and against the wall, stands the next onyx attraction in the form of a beautiful fluted column nearly twenty feet high, tapering up from a base three feet in diameter, and known as the Spring Room Sentinel, because the Spring of Youth is just behind it although not directly connected with the Auditorium; it being the first chamber on the left in Total Depravity ...
— Cave Regions of the Ozarks and Black Hills • Luella Agnes Owen
... taken to weave all parts of the mat equally close and keep the edges perfectly straight; otherwise the mat when finished will be lop-sided, and consequently of no value. In weaving tapering grasses like tikug, which have ends of slightly different sizes, the opposite ends of the straws should be alternated. This prevents one edge of a mat from ...
— Philippine Mats - Philippine Craftsman Reprint Series No. 1 • Hugo H. Miller
... channels of masonry, earthen pipes, and leaden pipes. The latter were smaller, and more generally used; to them reference is here made. They were formed by bending plates of lead into a form, not cylindrical, but the section of which was oblong, and tapering towards the top like a pear. The description here given, though somewhat homely, is extremely natural, and, as frequent experience shows us, depicts the results when the soldering of a ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... trotted forward, his companions of the crew making way for him to pass, and then closing round again to examine the capture, which kept on raising its head a little and letting it fall back on the deck, after which a wave ran along the body right to the tail, which, instead of being round and tapering off, showed the creature's adaptability for an aqueous life by being flattened so that the end was something like ...
— Jack at Sea - All Work and no Play made him a Dull Boy • George Manville Fenn
... grandiflorum). Under favorable conditions the waxy, thin, white, or occasionally pink, strongly veined petals may exceed two inches; and in Michigan a monstrous form has been found. The broadly rhombic leaves, tapering to a point, and lacking petioles, are seated in the usual whorl of three, at the summit of the stem, which may attain a foot and a half in height; from the centre the decorative flower arises on ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... to mankind,' is no more than a cry of personal anguish. She has golden apples in her apron. She says of life: 'When I fail to cherish it in every fibre the fires within are waning,' and that drives like rain to the roots. She says of the world, generously, if with tapering idea: 'From the point of vision of the angels, this ugly monster, only half out of slime, must appear our one constant hero.' It can be read maliciously, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... before the town. The ship flew English colors and was a veritable floating palace. There are few crafts afloat even at this day that equal it in elegance. It had been built by the most skilful carpenters in the world at that time, and the long, tapering masts, the deck and bows were more of the modern style ...
— The Real America in Romance, Volume 6; A Century Too Soon (A Story - of Bacon's Rebellion) • John R. Musick
... tall figures came looming, ghostly-fashion, out of chaos, to take slow shape and form, to resolve themselves into tapering lodges, into hunched ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe
... heated until a spot the diameter of the tube to be sealed on has become red hot and begun to shrink. This is now gently blown out into a small bulb, as in a, Fig. 7, and it will be noted that this bulb will have walls tapering from the thick walls of the tube to a very thin wall at the top. The sides of this bulb, below the dotted line, are to form the small side tube to which the main side tube is to be sealed. The top of the bulb is now softened by directing a small flame directly upon it, and as soon ...
— Laboratory Manual of Glass-Blowing • Francis C. Frary
... oriental street, and it has no sidewalks. The crowd falls to either side. As the courier of the desert humps through the lane made open for him, his rider is seen smiling and happy. She knows she has a pretty foot, and that it is neatly clad in red shoes with tapering points and the most becoming of hosiery. She knows her figure is trim, and that her cheeks are bright and her eyes flashing. Applause follows her from the mosque to the temple of Luxor, and rolls back again as her beast turns for the ...
— The Adventures of Uncle Jeremiah and Family at the Great Fair - Their Observations and Triumphs • Charles McCellan Stevens (AKA 'Quondam')
... were peculiar hands for a fat man. They were tapering, slender, delicate, blue-veined, temperamental hands. At this moment, despite his purpling face, and his staring eyes, they were the most noticeable thing about him. His fingers clawed the empty air, quivering, vibrant, as though poised ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... The slides at many stations are nearly level with the ground, but ascend in opposite directions, till at the distance of a mile, where they end, they are 100 feet high. The cars are now made quite cylindrical, tapering off abruptly at the closed end. The outside is entirely of metal, very highly polished, and showing no projections except a flange on each side, two broad runners underneath, and a 40 foot rear flange or vane. The dimensions are usually—diameter ...
— The Dominion in 1983 • Ralph Centennius
... reddish-yellow; the extreme edge of the clypeus, the labrum and base of the mandibles ferruginous; the antennae reddish-yellow. Thorax: fulvo-hyaline, with a dark fuscous border at the apex; the knees, tibiae and tarsi reddish-yellow; the two latter spinose. Abdomen: gradually tapering to an acute point at the apex, the sixth segment ...
— Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society - Vol. 3 - Zoology • Various
... that has not cost the eyes out of somebody's head. She was a woman who loved to know that some one was ruining himself for her. She took an almost physical pleasure in the spending of money. And often her mind echoed the words of Hassan, when he looked across the Nile to the tapering mast of the Loulia and murmured, "Mahmoud Baroudi is rich! Mahmoud Baroudi is rich!" And she yearned to go, not only to Baroudi, but to his gold, and she remembered her fancy when she sat by the Nile, that the gleaming gold on the water was showered ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... or not in love, has obtained possession by a contract duly recorded at the registration office in heaven and on the rolls of the nation, of a young girl with long hair, with black liquid eyes, with small feet, with dainty tapering fingers, with red lips, with teeth of ivory, finely formed, trembling with life, tempting and plump, white as a lily, loaded with the most charming wealth of beauty. Her drooping eyelashes seem like the points ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac
... for one of these arrows he was not successful in getting one. The women manufacture enormous baskets, which I often saw them carrying on their backs when I met them in the forest. I was much struck with the cleverness of some of their fish-traps; these were long cone-like objects tapering to a point, the insides being lined with the extraordinary barb-covered stems of a rattan or climbing palm, and the thorns or barbs placed (pointing inwards) in such a way that the fish could get ...
— Wanderings Among South Sea Savages And in Borneo and the Philippines • H. Wilfrid Walker
... the truth, Have I merited woe at your tapering hands, Have you wilfully burst love's twining strands, And cast to the winds affection ...
— Armenian Literature • Anonymous
... they beat on the spear, as an accompaniment to their own voices in songs, that varied both as to time and measure, especially the latter; yet their voices, and the sounds produced from the rude instruments, which differed according to the place on which the tapering spear was struck, appeared to accord very well. Having engaged us a short time in this vocal performance, the court ladies made their appearance, and were received with shouts of the greatest applause. The musicians ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... have meant it—he is not a brute!" she cried, as she began to nervously clasp her hands and turn her wedding ring over and over again on her tapering finger, until it seemed a band of fire ...
— The One Woman • Thomas Dixon
... Vixen was a giantess, it may be as well to state that her height was five feet six, her waist twenty-two inches at most, her shoulders broad but finely sloping, her arms full and somewhat muscular, her hands not small, but exquisitely tapering, her foot long and narrow, her instep arched like an Arab's, and all her movements instinct with an untutored grace and dignity. She held her head higher than is common to women, and on that score was ...
— Vixen, Volume I. • M. E. Braddon
... days they saw large herds of buffalo, and the copses of timber appeared to contain elk and deer, "just below Cedar Island," adds the journal, "on a hill to the south, is the backbone of a fish, forty-five feet long, tapering towards the tail, and in a perfect state of petrifaction, fragments of which were collected and sent to Washington." This was not a fish, but the fossil remains of a reptile of one of the earliest ...
— First Across the Continent • Noah Brooks
... Aether currents will be congregated more in the equatorial regions of the earth than in any other part of the earth's surface. The further also they extend into space the less depth they will have, gradually tapering off, as shown in the illustration, where E represents the earth and B C the ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... steamer towering above them and her gay contours gradually making themselves seen, till she receded from the encounter, with the wheel at her stern pouring a cataract of yellow water from its blades. It was insurpassably picturesque always, and not the tapering masts or the swelling sails of any ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... most approved shape and marks of a good dairy cow are as follows: Head small, long, and narrow toward the muzzle; horns small, clear, bent, and placed at considerable distance from each other; eyes not large, but brisk and lively; neck slender and long, tapering toward the head, with a little loose skin below; shoulders and fore quarters light and thin; hind quarters large and broad; back straight, and joints slack and open; carcass deep in the rib; tail small and long, reaching to the heels; legs ...
— Cattle and Their Diseases • Robert Jennings
... Near to where the men were working, by the river's brink, there was a space of level ground, perhaps a hundred feet long, and tapering from half that breadth to a point. And this was simply crimson and purple with a countless host ...
— My Friend Prospero • Henry Harland
... tight sleeves of pink velvet, edged at the wrist by white frills, and a similar white frill finished the gown at the neck. His boots were black velvet, with white buttons; they were about a yard long, tapering to a point, and were tied up to the garter by silver chains, a pattern resembling a church window being cut through the upper portion of the boot. These very fashionable and most uncomfortable articles were known as cracowes, having come over from Germany with the late Queen Anne. In the young man's ...
— The White Rose of Langley - A Story of the Olden Time • Emily Sarah Holt
... with razor-like talons and sucking it up from two mouths, which lie one in the palm of each hand. They are equipped with a massive tail about six feet long, quite round where it joins the body, but tapering to a flat, thin blade toward the end, which trails at right angles to the ground. ...
— Thuvia, Maid of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... fish with the May-fly as soon as you can see to put the fly on the hook, the earlier you commence the better chance of large fish, especially if the water is clear, and very low, or even moderately so. In fishing with this fly, have your cast line light and strong, tapering gradually to the end, to which attach about three-quarters of a yard of fine round Gut, the best you can procure, on which tie your hook which must be at least a size larger than the Palmer hook; arm this hook with a strong pig's bristle, which must lay on the back of the hook, protruding a short ...
— The Teesdale Angler • R Lakeland
... breast, By the right nipple, Ajax struck; right through, From front to back, the brass-tipp'd spear was driv'n, Out through the shoulder; prone in dust he fell; As some tall poplar, grown in marshy mead, Smooth-stemm'd, with branches tapering tow'rd the head; Which with the biting axe the wheelwright fells, To bend the felloes of his well-built car; Sapless, beside the river, lies the tree; So lay the youthful Simoisius, felled By godlike Ajax' hand. At him, in turn, The son of Priam, Antiphus, encas'd In radiant armour, from amid the ...
— The Iliad • Homer
... pillars sacred to him with curious hieroglyphical inscriptions, which had the same name. They were very lofty, and narrow in comparison of their length; hence among the Greeks, who copied from the Egyptians, every thing gradually tapering to a point was styled Obelos, and Obeliscus. Ophel (Oph-El) was a name of the same purport: and I have shewn, that many sacred mounds, or Tapha, were thus denominated from the serpent Deity, to ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume II. (of VI.) • Jacob Bryant
... air, and almost filling the glade from end to end with her enormous length, was an object measuring no fewer than six hundred feet long, of cylindrical shape, sixty feet in diameter at her so-called "midship" section, and tapering away fore and aft by a series of finely curved lines, to the pointed extremities of the bow and stern. The bow portion of the structure was considerably longer and more sharply pointed than the after extremity, to which was attached, by a very ingeniously devised universal joint, in ...
— With Airship and Submarine - A Tale of Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... came to tell him that firing was to be heard behind a hill in face of the camp. He mounted a horse and rode up the slope, to find the company firing on a line of Zulus eight hundred paces away to their front. This line was about a thousand yards long, and shaped like a horn, tapering towards the point. It advanced slowly, taking shelter with great skill behind rocks, and opened a quite ineffective fire on the soldiers. Meanwhile the two guns were shelling the Zulu centre with great effect, the shells cutting lanes through their dense ranks, which closed up over the ...
— The True Story Book • Andrew Lang
... household drudge, sad at losing her lover, yet not so sad as she would have been had she really given, him her whole heart unconstrainedly; she shed a few tears as the vessel left the quay, then turning homewards she mentally counted the weeks which were to elapse ere she should again see the tapering masts of the "Glenalpine." She made her preparations for her wedding methodically and without excitement, and, following her suitor's instructions, bought furniture according to her taste for the little cottage he had ...
— The Mysteries of Montreal - Being Recollections of a Female Physician • Charlotte Fuhrer
... splint is detected by grasping the horse's leg with the fingers upon one side and the thumb upon the other, and tracing the inner and outer splint bones from their heads downward to their tapering extremities. Any actual enlargement will at once arrest the hand; any rising or irregularity will create suspicion and lead to close examination. Horses, especially young ones which have lately been put ...
— The Veterinarian • Chas. J. Korinek
... fields by the shore, death-messages given in charge to survivors, The hiss of the surgeon's knife, the gnawing teeth of his saw, Wheeze, cluck, swash of falling blood, short wild scream, and long, dull, tapering groan, These so, ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... cried Peter, springing up in a sitting position, to find it was daylight once more. "Oh, it's you, is it?" he cried, for there was a crackling by the door, and the great, tapering, serpent-like trunk of an elephant was waving to and fro and ...
— Trapped by Malays - A Tale of Bayonet and Kris • George Manville Fenn
... proved to be a pleasant one, and in a short time they found themselves at the docks, and saw the great ships ranging far and near, with their tapering masts pointing upwards to the cloudy sky. The Maid of Astolat lay close at hand, and as they went on board Dick appeared, his face black and grimy, but all aglow ...
— Aunt Judith - The Story of a Loving Life • Grace Beaumont
... close enough now so that they could discern its shape. Rick saw that it formed a rough crescent, running from north to south. It was about a mile long, perhaps a half mile wide at its greatest width, tapering to the horns of the crescent. He saw also that the color of the water changed gradually from the fathomless blue of the ocean to the green ...
— The Wailing Octopus • Harold Leland Goodwin
... a free and wonderful) air comes blowing on your face; you cross a ridge of snow; and lying before you (wholly unseen till then), towering up into the distant sky, is the vast range of Mont Blanc, with attendant mountains diminished by its majestic side into mere dwarfs tapering up into innumerable rude Gothic pinnacles; deserts of ice and snow; forests of firs on mountain sides, of no account at all in the enormous scene; villages down in the hollow, that you can shut out with a finger; waterfalls, avalanches, pyramids and towers of ice, torrents, ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... southern land lying stretched between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, upon the tapering base of North America, is a country whose name is fraught with colour and meaning. The romance of its history envelops it in an atmosphere of adventure whose charm even the prosaic years of the twentieth century have not entirely dispelled, and the magnetism ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... colossal work executed under great difficulties—to look at the surrounding landscape. Those who are interested in engineering may like to know the dimensions of this wall, which is two hundred feet long, thirty-five feet high, and ten feet thick at the base, tapering off to a thickness of five feet at the top, and is built of a fine limestone quarried from the railway cutting a little further out. The view from either of the ridges between which the town is built, is magnificent, mountain, valley, sea, and river contributing to the effect. From ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... would have been a most formidable creature in an attack. His forehead was broad, flat, and covered with fine soft hair; his eye was keen, his paws of great length, his sides and legs a woven mass of muscles and nerves, broad over the back and shoulders, slender and tapering towards the hind legs. But he had no scent. If such monstrous and powerful hounds were endowed with the scent of the terrier there would soon be an end ...
— The Man-Wolf and Other Tales • Emile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian
... poised the thimble on her second finger. Her fingers were small, white, and tapering. The thimble exactly fitted the narrow tip on ...
— Girls of the Forest • L. T. Meade
... devices going back, perhaps, much further than the legendary funnels through which Alexander the Great is said to have sent commands to his outlying forces. The improved Edison megaphone for long-distance work comprised two horns of wood or metal about six feet long, tapering from a diameter of two feet six inches at the mouth to a small aperture provided with ear-tubes. These converging horns or funnels, with a large speaking-trumpet in between them, are mounted on a tripod, and the ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... you've seen in the Zoo, only that instead of flippers they had regulation legs and feet, and also a tail. It was a tail worth having, too, and not merely intended for ornament. It was very thick at the base and tapering, something like a lizard's, and so powerful that one twist of it could drive its owner through ...
— Children of the Wild • Charles G. D. Roberts
... the column meet and form articulations that are held together by ligaments, and attached to their faces, borders and extremities are muscles and tendons. In the superior portion of the limb the muscles are heavy, tapering inferiorly, and terminating in the region of the foot in long tendons. Each limb is divided into four regions. The regions of the fore-limb are the shoulder, arm, forearm and forefoot. In the hind limb are the regions of the pelvis, haunch, thigh, leg and hind-foot. The feet in turn ...
— Common Diseases of Farm Animals • R. A. Craig, D. V. M.
... I am a manufactory of gunpowder in this quiet old-world Sabbath circle of dear good souls, with their stereotyped interjections, and orchestra of enthusiasms; their tapering delicacies: the rejoicing they have in their common agreement on all created things. To them it is restful. It spurs me to fly from rooms and chairs and beds and houses. I sleep hardly a couple of hours. Then into the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... of one of these gins when set produced a vivid impression that it was endowed with life. It exhibited the combined aspects of a shark, a crocodile, and a scorpion. Each tooth was in the form of a tapering spine, two and a quarter inches long, which, when the jaws were closed, stood in alternation from this side and from that. When they were open, the two halves formed a complete circle between two and three feet in diameter, the ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... marks the glow From those tapering lines of snow; Fondly o'er the sleeper bending His black hair with golden blending, In her soft and light caress, Cheek and ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... silver gauze, which, though hiding her countenance from recognition, nevertheless permitted sufficient of her beauties to be discerned to suggest the extreme elegance and loveliness of her lineaments. Advancing toward our hero, and extending to him a tapering hand as white as alabaster, the fingers encircled with a multitude of jeweled rings, ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard I. Pyle
... dull yellow colour, and sometimes bound, as in Arabia, with brass wire for ornament. Care is applied to make the rod straight, or the missile flies crooked: it is garnished with an iron button at the head, and a long thin tapering head of coarse bad iron [16], made at Berberah and other places by the Tomal. The length of the shaft may be four feet eight inches; the blade varies from twenty to twenty-six inches, and the whole weapon is about seven ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... of volunteers in the next year and was severely wounded at Antietam, after which he was made major-general and commanded the Twenty-third Army Corps in Burnside's campaign of East Tennessee.] He was a large man, of heavy frame; his face was broad, and his bald head, tapering high, gave a peculiar pyramidal appearance to his figure. He was systematic and accurate in administrative work, patient and insistent in bringing the young volunteer officers in his department into habits of order and good military form. His coolness tempered the impulsiveness ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V1 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... house and imagining a hundred explanations. I had never in my life heard wine divided into shut and open wine. I determined to acquire yet one more great experience, and going in I found a great number of tin cans, such as the French carry up water in, without covers, tapering to the top, and standing about three feet high; on these were pasted large printed labels, '30', '40', and '50', and they were brimming with wine. I spoke to the woman, and pointing at the tin ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... we have been describing took place, the Zoe was drawing rapidly in with the land. The breeze was fair to carry her close to the harbour's mouth, and then, having sufficient way on her, down came her two tapering lateen sails, and she glided up to her well-known anchorage. She was instantly surrounded with boats full of people, anxious to know what adventures she had met with during her brief cruise, and ...
— The Pirate of the Mediterranean - A Tale of the Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... with more than usual care on this particular Saturday afternoon. She wore a simply made house gown of heavy white cloth, that hung in rich folds about her exquisite figure, that might have seemed over-developed in a girl of eighteen, were it not for the long slender throat and tapering waist ...
— 'Way Down East - A Romance of New England Life • Joseph R. Grismer
... unoccupied—those that were close to each other. Now, what could two idle hands do, when one belonged to a man deeply in love, the other to a young woman who for some time had ill-treated her lover and exhausted her severity? Before the end of the first part, the long unoccupied, tapering fingers of the treble were imprisoned by those of the bass, without the least disturbance in the musical effect—and ...
— Gerfaut, Complete • Charles de Bernard
... conscious of this danger, build their nests of peculiar form, and of materials which are bad conductors of electricity, within which they are thoroughly protected. The nests of some are shaped like inverted cones, tapering to a fine point—that, as is supposed, the electricity which would destroy the delicate young ones, or the vitality of the eggs, may ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... dwellings seem to smile as if they had been built under softer skies; the waters sing their song, and patches of moss cover a stream over which hang graceful clusters of foliage. The horizon extends on one side into a tapering perspective of meadows, while on the other it rises abruptly and is enclosed by a wooded valley, the trees of which crowd together and form a ...
— Over Strand and Field • Gustave Flaubert
... was sure she thought a great deal of "measure", and approved of most things only up to a certain point. She was a woman of sixty, with a figure at once young and old-fashioned. Her fair faded tints, her quaint corseting, the passementerie on her tight-waisted dress, the velvet band on her tapering arm, made her resemble a "carte de visite" photograph of the middle sixties. One saw her, younger but no less invincibly lady-like, leaning on a chair with a fringed back, a curl in her neck, a locket on her tuckered bosom, toward the end of an embossed morocco album beginning ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... to examine the tree. It was an old oak. Well up its trunk a limb had broken or rotted away, and the resulting decay of the stub had made a hole in the tree itself. What instantly riveted the attention of the two boys was something black and tapering that projected from the hole and that slowly waved ...
— The Young Wireless Operator—As a Fire Patrol - The Story of a Young Wireless Amateur Who Made Good as a Fire Patrol • Lewis E. Theiss
... a microcosm to be disturbed. There it lay in the mind's eye, neat, compact, organized, traditional: the white church with tapering spire, the sober schoolhouse, the smithy of the ringing anvil, the corner grocery, the cluster of friendly houses; the venerable parson, the wise physician, the canny squire, the grasping landlord softened ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... day, when a broad, pearl-gray sky was powdering the motionless air with misty snow, the sisters sat together at their sewing in what had been known, since his accident, as Bressant's room. There was no stove; but a rustling, tapering fire was living its ardent, yellow, wavering life upon the brick hearth, and four or five logs of birch and elm were reddening and crackling into embers beneath its intangible intensity. It made a grateful contrast ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... you that father was a handsome man. He had large blue eyes, soft, silky, brown curls clustering around a magnificent brow, a set color in his cheeks, and a hand that the hardest field labor could not deprive of its beauty—long, tapering fingers, and pointed nails, such as novelists love to describe, but in real life are rarely seen outside of the most aristocratic families. His teeth were small, white and even, and at the time of his death, when eighty-seven years old, he had only lost one. His figure, though less than six ...
— The Story of a Summer - Or, Journal Leaves from Chappaqua • Cecilia Cleveland
... of Hertfordshire churches—rare elsewhere—is the narrow tapering fleche, or leaded spire; a feature almost wholly absent is the apse, which is, I believe, present only at Bengeo, Great Wymondley, ...
— Hertfordshire • Herbert W Tompkins
... might fancy himself to be in a balloon. On the occasion to which I refer the world beneath was virtually invisible in the moonless night. The blaze of the constellations overhead was astonishingly brilliant, yet amid all their magnificence my attention was immediately drawn to a great tapering light that sprang from the place on the horizon where the sun would rise later, and that seemed to be blown out over the stars like a long, luminous veil. It was the finest view of the Zodiacal light that I had ever enjoyed — thrilling in its strangeness — ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss
... ends, and it is the same with the decorations—exquisitely delicate waving traceries of vines and flora, gold on gold, inlay, or paint in delicate tones. All this gives to the Louis XV period supremacy over Louis XVI, whose round, grooved, tapering straight legs, one tires of more quickly, although fine gold and lovely paint make this type ...
— The Art of Interior Decoration • Grace Wood
... recognized what it was, and how deadly. It was an old Florentine misericordia, a long thin, triangular blade, a quarter of an inch wide at its greatest width, tapering to a needle-point, with a hilt of yellow ivory, the most deadly and fatal of all the daggers and poignards of the Middle Ages. The blade being sharp on three angles produced a wound that caused internal hemorrhage and which never healed—hence the name ...
— The Czar's Spy - The Mystery of a Silent Love • William Le Queux
... of the country is not particularly interesting. Dom and date palms are the principal trees, the latter having a single tapering stem, the former dividing into branches. The sycamore (Ficus sycamorus) is also tolerably common, as are several species of acacia. The acacia seyal, which furnishes the gum arable of commerce, is "a gnarled and thorny tree, somewhat like a solitary ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson
... it looks more like a walking-stick than a castle," said I, pointing up to the tall, tapering finger of broken stone that almost touched ...
— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... entire floor near the tapering top of the building, and as we walked slowly around the narrow steel balcony outside, a tremendous panorama unrolled down there before our eyes. We could see every part of the port below stretching away to the horizon, and through Dillon's powerful ...
— The Harbor • Ernest Poole
... "Well?" It would be all so like a wonderful story, a day of magic!... Martin Cosgrave sprang from the bench and went to the edge of the platform, staring down the long level road, with its two rails tapering almost together in the distance. Not a sign of a train. Would it never come in? Had anything happened the boat? He walked up and down with energy, holding the lapel of his coat, saying to himself, "I ...
— Waysiders • Seumas O'Kelly
... differ in different trees. They will come to realize that the difference in shape results from difference in length, direction, and arrangement of branches. They may notice that other evergreen trees resemble the pine in that the stems are all straight and extend as a gradually tapering shaft from the bottom to the top, that all have a more or less conical shape, and that the branches grow more or less straight out from the main stem, not slanting off as in the case of the ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Nature Study • Ontario Ministry of Education
... vestibule of her father's house let us photograph her for you. A slender maiden of seventeen, with cheeks of carnation; eyes that shine under lids not so broadly open as the Caucasian maiden's, but black and sparkling; very small hands with tapering fingers, and very small feet encased in white mitten-socks; her black hair glossy as polished jet, dressed in the style betokening virginity, and decked with a garland of blossoms. Her robe of pure white silk folds over her bosom from right to left, and is bound at the waist by the gold-embroidered ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... *The Pancreas* is a tapering and somewhat wedge-shaped gland, and is so situated that its larger extremity, or head, is encircled by the duodenum. From here the more slender portion extends across the abdominal cavity nearly parallel to and behind the lower part of the stomach. It has ...
— Physiology and Hygiene for Secondary Schools • Francis M. Walters, A.M.
... primitive note of the trumpet. After the blast had ended the echoes continued, retreating further and further from the point of observation, and finally dying away at great distances. The echoes were perfectly continuous as long as the sea was clear of ships, 'tapering' by imperceptible gradations into absolute silence. But when a ship happened to throw itself athwart the course of the sound, the echo from the broadside of the vessel was returned as a shock which rudely interrupted the continuity of ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... consoles us. Even when we firmly plant our feet upon the solid rocks, they seem to tremble like the mists of the sea from which they once slowly emerged. When the eye longs for the light, and the moon rises behind the firs, reflecting their tapering tops against the bright rock opposite, it appears to us like the dead hand of a clock which was once wound up, and will some day cease to strike. There is no retreat for the soul, which feels itself alone ...
— Memories • Max Muller
... than ever at this stranger whose every action seemed different from those of his fellow-men. She put her little foot slightly forward, and as he tied the string of her shoe she saw how slender was his hand, firm yet tapering down to the elegant finger-tips; the hand of a patrician even though he ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... Now-a-days, they are generally made either of canvas, or of a twilled sacking, and, when spread out, measure 4-1/2 feet by 3-1/2; but when lashed up, and ready for stowing away in the netting, they form long sacks, about as big as a man's body, but not tapering to ...
— The Lieutenant and Commander - Being Autobigraphical Sketches of His Own Career, from - Fragments of Voyages and Travels • Basil Hall
... noticed a roundness characteristic of the true Parisian woman,—self-willed, merry, well-informed, but inaccessible to vulgar seductions. Her hands, which were almost transparent, were hanging down at the end of each arm of her chair; the tapering fingers, slightly turned up at their points, showed nails like almonds, which caught the light. Adam smiled at his wife's impatience, and looked at her with a glance which two years of married life had not yet chilled. Already the little countess ...
— Paz - (La Fausse Maitresse) • Honore de Balzac
... down his soup-spoon, fondled the imperceptible moustache with his tapering fingers, and then broke once more into a cheerful expanse of smile which reminded me of nothing so much as of the village idiot. It spread over his face as the splash from a stone spreads over a mill-pond. 'Now that's a nice ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... or standard position; the southern end of South America includes all Patagonia, the southern extremity or point is Cape Horn. Tip has nearly the same meaning as extremity, but is said of small or slight and tapering objects; as, the tip of the finger; point in such connections is said of that which is drawn out to exceeding fineness or sharpness, as the point of a needle, a fork, or a sword; extremity is ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... darting to and fro in the air about us, and they said that many of these were starting or finishing journeys of hundreds of leagues in the air. Then I cried out as I saw a great shape coming nearer us in the air. It was many rods in length, tapering to a point at both ends, a vast ship sailing in the air! There were great cabins on its lower part and in them we glimpsed people gazing out, coming and going inside, dancing even! They told me that vast ships of the air like this sailed to and fro for thousands ...
— The Man Who Saw the Future • Edmond Hamilton
... neck, from a point about a span beneath the collar-bone, it allowed the whole of the noble white column of the grandly-formed throat to be visible from its base above the bosom to the opening out of the exquisite lines about the nape of the neck into the tapering swelling of the classically-shaped head. The exact arrangement of the shape of this opening of the dress, from the throat down to about a hand's-breadth above the girdle, was very carefully attended to; the lace-edged folds of the muslin being three or four times drawn a little more forward ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... succession of fresh sights, from the Turkish man-of-war that was of British build, to the low fishing-boat with its long graceful lateen sail, spread out upon its curved and tapering spar. ...
— Yussuf the Guide - The Mountain Bandits; Strange Adventure in Asia Minor • George Manville Fenn
... the readiest market, and is easiest procurable. But even in that there is the most unjustifiable wastefulness practised. I was among the lumberers once, and saw the way they square the white pine. You know that every tree is of course tapering in the trunk, narrower at the top than at the base; now, to square the log, the best timber of the lower part must be hewn away, to make it of equal dimensions with the upper part. I am not above the mark when I say that ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... neatly spliced together in the middle, and all painted a smooth, glistening, hopeful green. The line that hung from the tip of it was also green, but of a paler, more transparent colour, quite thick and stiff where it left the rod, but tapering down towards the end, as if it were twisted of strands of horse-hair, reduced in number, until, at the hook, there were but two hairs. And the hook—there was no disguise about that—it was an unabashed bait-hook, ...
— The Ruling Passion • Henry van Dyke
... story had excited our interest ever since the ship came into the port. He was a delicate, slender little fellow, with a beautiful pearly complexion, regular features; forehead as white as marble, black hair curling beautifully round it; tapering, delicate fingers; small feet, soft voice, gentle manners, and, in fact, every sign of having been well born and bred. At the same time there was something in his expression which showed a slight deficiency of ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... lateral upper edges. Dorsal tufts with one spine extremely long, equalling a segment and a half in length; the others very short. Spines all serrated. First cirrus not very short; rami nearly equal, with the four terminal segments of both tapering; all the basal segments much thicker, and thickly covered with bristles. Second cirrus (as well as the third in a less degree), with the anterior ramus thicker than the posterior ramus, and with all the lower segments in both rami thickly clothed with three or four longitudinal rows ...
— A Monograph on the Sub-class Cirripedia (Volume 1 of 2) - The Lepadidae; or, Pedunculated Cirripedes • Charles Darwin
... Paradise came a rushing sound. A sharp swerve of the horse was followed by an exasperating crackle, and, lo! the beloved fishing-rod was broken,—yes, broken, and that delicate, quivering, responsive, tapering end lay trailing in the dust which whirled in eddies around ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... they had reached the pagoda and leaped on the platform between the columns which supported the bulb-like roof crowned by its tapering spire. In the centre of the platform was a shrine. Jack ...
— Jack Haydon's Quest • John Finnemore
... legless, those of the Crane-fly group have well-developed hard heads, with biting mandibles, but in the House-fly section the larva is of the degraded vermiculiform type known as the maggot, not only legless, but without a definite head, the front end of the creature usually tapering to the mouth, where there are a pair of strong hooks, used for tearing up the food. A few examples of each of these types must suffice in the present brief survey. A few pages back (p. 66) reference was made to the production of galls on various ...
— The Life-Story of Insects • Geo. H. Carpenter
... tall and well-thewed lad for his age. His muscle fiber had drawn strength from the ax and the log-pole, but as yet it had not become heavy with decades of hard labor. He still stood slender and gracefully tapering from shoulders to waist and just now there was something trance-like in his earnestness which made wild prophecies seem almost inspired. The hard-headed father eyed ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... time, the town is sweet to see; full of fine maples—long avenues of green and gold. And in August, high in air, the beautiful and bountiful horse-chestnuts, candelabra-wise, proffer the passer-by their tapering upright cones of congregated blossoms. So omnipotent is art; which in many a district of New Bedford has superinduced bright terraces of flowers upon the barren refuse rocks thrown aside at ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... guard against any attempt at an outbreak among them. The canvas was all closely furled, so that we had an uninterrupted view of the sky from horizon to zenith, all around, toward the latter of which the delicate, tapering, naked spars pointed as steadily as the spires of a church. The boatswain, however, was eagerly directing Mendouca's attention toward small, dark object, broad on our starboard bow; and turning my gaze toward it, I made out a brig under her two topsails, jib, and trysail, with ...
— The Pirate Slaver - A Story of the West African Coast • Harry Collingwood
... adventure arrives. Telouchkine, provided with nothing more than a coil of ropes, ascends the spire in the interior to the last window. Here he looks down at the concourse of the people below, and up at the glittering "needle," as it is called, tapering far above his head. But his heart does not fail him; and stepping gravely out upon the window, ...
— Happy Days for Boys and Girls • Various
... the hand-writing compensated for the hands; and as she attached great importance to blood and race, that she did not live to read Byron's "thoroughbred and tapering fingers," or to be shocked by his theory that "the hand is almost the only sign of blood which aristocracy can generate." Her Bath friend appeals to a miniature (engraved for this work) by Roche, of Bath, taken when she was in her seventy-seventh year. Like Cromwell, ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi
... familiar to all, with strongly veined white wings, bearing three black spots, two on the upper and one on the lower wing, and dark coloring on the corner of the upper wings. The antennae, as with all butterflies, are clubbed at the extremity—unlike moths', which are tapering—and the large black staring eyes are the optical apparatus, containing, we are told, thousands of lenses, each a ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 508, September 26, 1885 • Various
... been a great sculptor, though his name is little known out of Nuremberg. Perhaps his finest work is in St. Lawrence Cathedral—the Sacramentshauslein, or the repository for the sacred wafer—a graceful tapering stone spire of florid Gothic open work, more than sixty feet high, which stands at the opening of the right transept. Its construction and decoration occupied the sculptor and his two apprentices no less than five years; and all that he received ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... redwood tree! And the redwood is more beautiful even than the stone-pine of Italy. Gray lavender in color, hard as though cut from stone, swelling at the base to an incredible bulk, shooting straight to an incredible height and tapering exquisitely as it soars, it drops not foliage but plumage. To walk in a redwood forest at night and to look up at the stars tangled in the tree-tops, to watch the moonlight sift through the masses of soft black-green feathers, down, ...
— The Californiacs • Inez Haynes Irwin
... parts of their country ploughs made entirely of wood, that is to say, ploughs with wooden shares, are seen. The foremost part of such a plough is cut to a point, and into a groove made for the purpose a section of tough oak is inserted, to serve as a share. It is held in place by the tapering of the groove, and some wedges or plugs. The share has naturally to be renewed quite frequently, but it serves its purpose where the ground is not stony. Later on, in Cusarare, Nararachic and other places, ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... there is the simplicity of genius. He gets a fine cotton fabric woven into the shape of a cylinder, with a tapering point. In its first stage it is about 2 inches in diameter; and after being coated with the composition, it is subjected to a strong heat. This has two effects—first, the cotton fiber is completely burned out, while the composition retains the shape of the woven surface on which it was moulded. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 601, July 9, 1887 • Various
... elaborate lobation which they exhibit in the Ammonites; whilst the siphuncle pierces the septa either in the centre or near it. In the Nautilus, however, the shell is coiled into a flat spiral; whereas in Orthoceras the shell is a straight, longer or shorter cone, tapering behind, and gradually expanding towards its mouth in front. The chief objections to the belief that the animal of the Orthoceras was essentially like that of the Pearly Nautilus are—the comparatively small size of the body-chamber, the often contracted aperture of the mouth, and the enormous ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... were soon made; and waiting only to secure a copy of the treaty with Badur, and plans of the fort which had been commenced, he ordered the short mast, with its tapering lateen yard, to be raised, and the sail trimmed close to the breeze blowing into the roadstead of Diu. But instead of turning up along the northern coast of the Gulf of Cambaya, he directed the bow of his little bark boldly ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... the great contrast it presented to the form of Viola, which was so wonderfully ethereal, so divine in colour and design. Every line in it was long and tapering, never coming to a sudden stop, but merging with infinite grace into the next, and the dazzling, immaculate whiteness of it all made it seem like something of heaven. It suggested the vision, the ideal, all that man longs after with his soul, that stirs the celestial fires within his brain, not ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross
... all.' His eyes were fastened upon her hands, small and tapering, in their tan gauntlets. The point of a patent-leather boot glanced from the edge of her skirt. A short gold watch-chain dangled from her breast, a cluster of ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland
... account of the rites, etc., see Riggs' "Tahkoo Wahkan", Chapter VI. The Ta-sha-ke—literally, "Deer-hoofs"—is a rattle made by hanging the hard segments of deer-hoofs to a wooden rod a foot long—about an inch in diameter at the handle end, and tapering to a point at the other. The clashing of these horny bits makes a sharp, shrill sound something like distant sleigh-bells. In their incantations over the sick they sometimes ...
— Legends of the Northwest • Hanford Lennox Gordon
... South did many deeds of the most desperate valor. There is much of romance about service on the blue ocean which is not to be found in routine duty along the yellow muddy streams that flowed through the territory claimed by King Cotton. The high, tapering masts, the yards squared and gracefully proportioned, the rigging taut, and with each rope in its place, of an ocean-frigate, are not seen in the squat, box-like gunboats that dashed by the batteries at Vicksburg, or hurled shot and shell at each other in the affair ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 2 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... evident (Fig. 7). You now see a quartz fiber far finer than this, or, rather, you see a diffraction phenomenon, for no true image is formed at all; but even this is a conspicuous object in comparison with the tapering ends, which it is absolutely impossible to trace in a microscope. The next two photographs, taken by Mr. Nelson, whose skill and resources are so famous, represent the extreme end of a tail of quartz, and, though the scale is a great deal larger than that used in ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 717, September 28, 1889 • Various
... from which the rind has not been removed. In such a ham, the proportion of fat and lean is about right, but when ham is bought with the rind removed, much of the fat is also taken off. The best hams weigh from 8 to 15 pounds, and have a thin skin, solid fat, and a small, short tapering leg ...
— Woman's Institute Library of Cookery, Vol. 3 - Volume 3: Soup; Meat; Poultry and Game; Fish and Shell Fish • Woman's Institute of Domestic Arts and Sciences
... waves like a sea-gull, carrying her head with a care-free air and dipping to the waves in jaunty fashion. Her lines were very fine, tapering and beautiful, even to the eye ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... said nothing more, but rummaged among the riff-raff on an upper shelf. He got down with the tapering, translucent, wicked-looking thing in his hand. "I reckon that's ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... hand—a slim old tapering, bony hand, in colour like dusky ivory—closed peremptorily, in a dumb-show of receiving; and now, by the bye, you could not have failed to notice the big lucent amethyst, in its setting of elaborately-wrought pale ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... baskets (ki khoh) which are carried on the back, slung across the forehead by a cane head-strap. These, again, are of different sizes. They are, however, always of the same conical shape, being round and broad-mouthed at the top and gradually tapering to a point at the bottom. A bamboo cover is used to protect the contents of the basket from rain. There is a special kind of basket made of cane or bamboo with a cover, which is used for carrying articles on a journey. These baskets, ...
— The Khasis • P. R. T. Gurdon
... The fat man's hands dropped limply to his sides. Emma McChesney stared at them, fascinated. They were quite marvelous hands; not at all the sort of hands one would expect to see attached to the wrists of a fat man. They were slim, nervous, sensitive hands, pink-tipped, tapering, blue-veined, delicate. As Emma McChesney stared at them the man turned slowly on the revolving stool. His plump, pink ...
— Roast Beef, Medium • Edna Ferber
... the quick skill of woman, rolled down the stocking on her right leg. Modestly daring, she stretched out her foot and slightly lifted her dress. On the outer side of the tapering limb was an ugly bruise, scratched deeply ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy |
