"Tropical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... example are very tropical, a miniature peacock on the lower branches spreads its tail stiffly, parrots like the one illustrated in our collection of details, birds of paradise, and squirrels, are all to be noted among foliations that are the most superb, taken individually, ...
— Jacobean Embroidery - Its Forms and Fillings Including Late Tudor • Ada Wentworth Fitzwilliam and A. F. Morris Hands
... incurable idleness, of the Negro, was, both immediately before their emancipation in 1838, and for long years after that event, the cuckoo-cry of their white detractors. It was laziness, pure and simple, which hindered the Negro from exhausting himself under a tropical sun, toiling at starvation wages to ensure for his quondam master the means of being an idler himself, with the additional luxury of rolling in easily come-by wealth. Within the last twenty years, however, the history of the Black Man, both in the West Indies and, better still, in the ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... perhaps the most beautiful tropical country in the world, lies near the end of the Indian peninsula but a little to the east. At one point a chain of smaller islands and rocks said to have been built by Rama as a passage for his army of monkeys leads to the mainland. It is therefore natural that the population should have ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... with a force of 25,000 men, full of ardour despite their recent defeat. Indeed Napier encouraged their confidence by spreading rumours of the terror prevailing in his own camp. He did not wish to exhaust his men needlessly by long marches in tropical heat; so he played a waiting game, gathering reinforcements and trusting that the enemy would soon give him a chance of fighting. This chance came on March 24, and with a force of 5,000 men and 19 guns ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... and the sudden tropical night fell. On the Cuban coast lights went on, dominated by the intermittent glare of a ...
— Tom Swift and His Giant Telescope • Victor Appleton
... height affords. From Melbourne a party would take train to Fern-tree Gully and picnic among the giant eucalyptus there, or, without going so far afield, would make for one of the beautiful Hobson's Bay beaches. Farther north than Sydney, a note of tropical exuberance comes into the forest. You may see a gully filled with cedars in sweet wealth of lavender-coloured blossom; or with flame trees, great giants covered all over with a ...
— Peeps At Many Lands: Australia • Frank Fox
... Barbadoes. Our aversion to the sepulchre-like cabin obliged us to spend, not the days only, but the nights mostly on the open deck. Wrapping our cloaks about us, and drawing our fur caps over our faces, we slept securely in the soft air of a tropical clime, undisturbed save by the hoarse voice of the black captain crying "ready, bout" and the flapping of the sails, and the creaking of the cordage, in the frequent tackings of our staunch little sea-boat. On our way we passed ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... thought that tropical heat was not needed to form sugar. About 1740 Morgroff discovered that many plants of the temperate zones, and among ...
— The Physiology of Taste • Brillat Savarin
... full-summed completeness, will be given to them at once the perfection of all the various stages through which they passed on earth. The perfect man in the heavens will include the graces of childhood, the energies of youth, the steadfastness of manhood, the calmness of old age; as on some tropical trees, blooming in more fertile soil and quickened by a hotter sun than ours, you may see at once bud, blossom, and fruit—the expectancy of spring, and the maturing promise of summer, and the fulfilled fruition of autumn—hanging together on ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... for his musical reputation. Some of the sparrows still sing, and occasionally across the hot fields, from a tall tree in the edge of the forest, comes the rich note of the scarlet tanager. This tropical-colored bird loves the hottest weather, and I ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... by myself, in no instance has a specimen been procured by means of any of the moulds that are of spontaneous growth in this country, which has entirely resembled the vinegar plant, or which has been so efficient in the production of vinegar. Thirdly, because in tropical and warm climates abnormal variations of vegetable productions are much more likely to originate, and to become naturalised, than in this country. If imported, perhaps some of your correspondents could say where it was ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 184, May 7, 1853 • Various
... sea, and hastened to our rescue. All the boats now, with their willing Native crews, got fastened to our schooner, and to our great joy she began to move ahead. After pulling for hours and hours, under the scorching rays of a tropical sun, we were all safely landed on shore at Aneityum, about six o'clock in the evening of 30th August, just four months and fourteen days since we sailed from Greenock. We got a hearty welcome from the Missionaries' wives, ...
— The Story of John G. Paton - Or Thirty Years Among South Sea Cannibals • James Paton
... to be held the next week. We arrived about seven o'clock in the morning. I found the change of climate particularly refreshing and agreeable. During the last fortnight, the range of the thermometer had frequently reached 94 degrees or 96 degrees in the shade: a tropical heat, without those alleviations which render the heat of the tropics not only tolerable, but sometimes delightful. In Rhode Island, the climate, while we were there, was almost as temperate as an ...
— A Visit To The United States In 1841 • Joseph Sturge
... Albrecht, a common friend of her father's and Chopin's, stood her in good stead. Although I heard her play only one or two of her master's minor pieces, and under very unfavourable circumstances too—namely, at the end of the teaching season and in a tropical heat—I may say that her suave touch, perfect legato, and delicate sentiment seemed to me to bear out the above-quoted remark of M. Marmontel. Madame Dubois, who is one of the most highly-esteemed teachers of the piano ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... over me as I saw the North Star for the last time but I was soon interested in the Southern Cross of which I had heard so much. I wish I could describe some of the beautiful colorings shown in the tropical sunsets. I missed the twilight effects as seen at home, for as quickly as the sun goes down, darkness closes in. As I was enjoying my evening walk with the Captain at one time, a small boy who had been sent to sea apparently with the idea ...
— Cape Cod and All the Pilgrim Land, June 1922, Volume 6, Number 4 • Various
... upon which the foot of the white man has not yet trodden, and of all the regions in the tropical world New Guinea beckons with most alluring fascination to him to whom ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... a smiling, peaceful spot of great tropical beauty; it is one of the fairest places in the West Indies. At every hour of the year the harbor of Port of Spain holds open its arms to vessels of every draught. A governor in a pith helmet, a cricket club, a bishop in gaiters, and a botanical garden go to make it a prosperous ...
— Real Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis
... expanding the world. "I want all this trouble stopped," said Darkness; "the people are suffering and all is burning; you must continue stretching." And the men blew and stretched, and after a time they saw the sun rise beautifully, and when the sun again reached the meridian it was only tropical. It was then just right, and as far as the eye could reach the earth was encircled first with the white dawn of day, then with the blue of early morning, and all things were perfect. And Ahsonnutli commanded the twelve men to go to the east, south, ...
— Eighth Annual Report • Various
... Bournemouth, no fewer than nineteen species of ferns have been determined. The west side of Bournemouth is rich in Polypodiaceae, and the east side in Eucalypti and Araucaria. These, together with other and sub-tropical forms, demonstrate the existence of a once luxuriant forest that extended to the Isle of Wight, where, in the cliffs bounding Alum Bay, are contemporaneous beds. The Bournemouth clay beds belong to the Middle ...
— Bournemouth, Poole & Christchurch • Sidney Heath
... of our earth, for it has been shown to be the violent extremes and rapid changes of physical conditions, rather than the actual mean state in the temperate and frigid zones, which renders them less prolific than the tropical regions, as exemplified by the great distance beyond the tropics to which tropical forms penetrate when the climate is equable, and also by the richness in species and forms of tropical mountain regions which ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace
... was remarked that those who escaped were the lower-deck workers, those whose duties kept them off the upper deck and away from gunports and deadlights. It was also suggested that the cause was some deadly attribute of the night air in these tropical regions, to which the Americans succumbed; for, so far, ...
— The Wreck of the Titan - or, Futility • Morgan Robertson
... the stairs, and our door was opened to admit as fine a specimen of manhood as ever passed through it. He was a very tall young man, golden-moustached, blue-eyed, with a skin which had been burned by tropical suns, and a springy step which showed that the huge frame was as active as it was strong. He closed the door behind him, and then he stood with clenched hands and heaving breast, choking down ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle
... tropical forest, full of strength and majesty, tangled in luxuriance, a wilderness of self-repetition. Utterly unsuited to form a book without immense abridgment, they contain materials adapted equally for ...
— Select Speeches of Kossuth • Kossuth
... more engrossed with thoughts of his parents and Jenny at home than with the calm grandeur of a tropical sea, and he was wondering how many months must pass before he should be able to meet her, when the sound of a cat-like step behind ...
— Jack North's Treasure Hunt - Daring Adventures in South America • Roy Rockwood
... which were caged in the upper part of the building were set free by some charitably inclined person at the first alarm of fire, and at intervals they flew out. There were many valuable tropical birds, parrots, cockatoos, mockingbirds, humming-birds, etc., as well as some vultures and eagles, and one condor. Great excitement existed among the swaying crowds in the streets below as they took wing. There were confined in the same room a few serpents, which also obtained their liberty; ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton
... splendid reception in Rio Janeiro. But of these pianoforte versions, and the Emperor of Brazil and his consul Ferreiro, I never heard a single syllable again as long as I lived. Semper, it is true, involved himself in an architectonic entanglement with this tropical country: a competition was invited for the building of a new opera house in Rio; Semper had announced that he would take part in it, and completed some splendid plans which afforded us great entertainment, and ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... the Upper Columbia, stretching from the river away to the far north, are incomparably rich, the soil of great depth and wondrous fertility, rainless harvests, and a luxuriance of farm and garden produce which is almost tropical in its wealth. This favored region has been for ...
— Oregon, Washington and Alaska; Sights and Scenes for the Tourist • E. L. Lomax
... associations and attachments. In making the home she learns to love it, and this feeling seems to be often strongest when the surroundings are the bleakest, the rudest, and the most comfortless. The Highlander and the Switzer pine amid the luxuriant scenes of tropical life, when their thoughts revert to the smoky shieling or to the rock-encompassed chalet of their far-off mountains. Such, too, doubtless, was the clinging fondness with which, the women regarded their rude ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... us join the Madame," said Hawke, with an uneasy feeling of a coming tropical storm, "I'm glad to be out of it," mused Hawke. "If Abercromby stays a week, both parties will defer hostilities until he goes. If that soft-hearted Swiss fool only telegraphs! By God, I would have liked to have had one final tete-a-tete. She can ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... an instance of international trade where one country has the advantage in both of the commodities entering into the exchange: "The inhabitants of Barbadoes, favored by their tropical climate and fertile soil, can raise provisions cheaper than we can in the United States. And yet Barbadoes buys nearly all her provisions from this country. Why is this so? Because, though Barbadoes has the advantage over us in the ability ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... the Festiniog flags, and the Dolgelly slates. The collecting of lepidoptera was his chief amusement in Brazil, where he made his first acquaintance with the teeming life of the torrid zone and laid the foundation for those observations on tropical nature which his longer stay in Nicaragua gave rise to, and which ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... (and is) widely different as regards certain—not all—of the tropical states in the neighborhood of the Caribbean Sea. Where these states are stable and prosperous, they stand on a footing of absolute equality with all other communities. But some of them have been a prey to such continuous revolutionary misrule as to have grown impotent ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... caught the idea, and broke our partnership. I turned to literature, and he began drifting around the world for long shots. He'd be gone six months, and then turn up with big game night pictures out of Africa—a lion drinking under a tropical moon. Two more years, and I had lost him entirely. But I knew we should meet. He was one of those chaps that, once in your life, is like the motif in an opera, or like the high-class story, which starts with an insignificant loose brick on a coping and ends with ...
— Golden Lads • Arthur Gleason and Helen Hayes Gleason
... never fail to talk about is a certain wooded peninsula in this sea of cultivated land. Its ancient trees never die, unless the lightning strikes their high tops. Dust gathers layer on layer in their hollow trunks, the rain makes soil of it, the birds bring seeds, a tropical vegetation grows there in wild freedom: bushes, briers, curtains of netted bind-weed, spring from the roots, reach from tree to tree, hang swaying from the branches, and Flora, as if yet unsatisfied, sows on the trees themselves; mosses and fungi live on the ...
— An Eagle Flight - A Filipino Novel Adapted from Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... deep emotions of pity for outraged humanity, her anger at the cruelties of the slave-driver aye ready with knout or knife, are manifest in every line. Beyond the intense interest of the pure narrative we have passages of a rhythm that is lyric, exquisitely descriptive of the picturesque tropical scenery and exotic vegetations, fragrant and luxuriant; there are intimate accounts of adventuring and primitive life; there are personal touches which lend a colour only personal touches can, as Aphara tells her prose-epic of her Superman, Caesar ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... Pacific is of course a long one, but the journey is interrupted, before the end of the first week, by a stop at that tropical paradise, ...
— Wanderings in the Orient • Albert M. Reese
... neighboring villages. Hardly a statue or picture escaped destruction. Fortunately, the illustrious artist, whose labors were destined in the next generation to enrich and ennoble the city, Rubens, most profound of colorists, most dramatic—of artists; whose profuse tropical genius seemed to flower the more luxuriantly, as if the destruction wrought by brutal hands were to be compensated by the creative energy of one, divine spirit, had not yet been born. Of the treasures which existed the destruction was complete. Yet the rage was directed exclusively against ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... next day when, after riding through a wild hilly country, densely clad with tropical vegetation, amid which the only road was a horse track, my guide told me we were approaching our journey's end. The road broadened, and by and by ran between large fields of pasture land. Then we came beneath a thick grove, and were jogging along carelessly, ...
— Humphrey Bold - A Story of the Times of Benbow • Herbert Strang
... Gum varies much in thickness and color. The first three cent stamp of the Danish West Indies furnishes an instance of this. The stamps were sent from Denmark without gum, as is frequently done with stamps for tropical countries. When they reached the islands the stamps were given to two druggists to be gummed. One used gum of good quality and, light color, while the other used poor material and of so dark color as to stain the paper and even darken the ink of the stamps. In Hanover ...
— What Philately Teaches • John N. Luff
... to be a wild caprice amongst the institutions; if such they may be called, of all these tropical nations. In a neighbouring state to that of Abyssinia, the king, when appointed to the regal dignity, retires into an island, and is never again visible to the eyes of men but once—when his ministers come to strangle him; for it may not be that the proud monarch of ...
— The Book of Enterprise and Adventure - Being an Excitement to Reading. For Young People. A New and Condensed Edition. • Anonymous
... have neglected his sister. Miss Hempstead was a tall, fine-looking young girl, with, however, a strikingly foreign appearance for an American pur sang. She was born, she told me, in Belize, Central America, where her father was United States Consul. A tropical sun had given her a complexion of Spanish darkness, heightened by large black eyes and jet black hair—the exact counterpart, Ida afterwards told me, of her brother, who was ...
— The Story of a Summer - Or, Journal Leaves from Chappaqua • Cecilia Cleveland
... most beautiful landlocked gulf, and were immediately surrounded by shore boats full of negroes and Mexican Indians and half-bloods, selling fruits and vegetables, and offering to dive for bits of money. The sight of so many good-humored faces (especially the blacks), the taste of the tropical fruits, and above all, the lights that began to shine in the town, made a most charming contrast to our dark and bloody sojourn on the island; and the doctor and the squire, taking me along with them, went ashore to pass the early part of the night. Here they met the ...
— Treasure Island • Robert Louis Stevenson
... "superfluous encumbrances" to join. Ships, as his staff officer Semenoff afterward wrote, were needed, but not "old flatirons and galoshes"; guns, but not "holes surrounded by iron."[1] After a tedious 10 weeks' delay in tropical waters, the fleet moved on to French Indo-China, where, after another month of waiting, the last division under Nebogatoff finally joined—a slow old battleship, 3 coast defense ironclads, and a cruiser. Upon these, Rojdestvensky's officers vented their ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott
... early Scripture will remember, perhaps, that the Garden of Eden was in reality an oasis of trees in the great valley of Mesopotamia, and even today "garden" in the oriental term means a group of trees. It has been proven by experience in these different tropical realms that where tree production is biggest and nuts and other products are grown under intensive cultivation, an acre will produce more food than where grazing is practiced. I spent a very pleasant year in California and saw some of the operations of the California ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 13th Annual Meeting - Rochester, N.Y. September, 7, 8 and 9, 1922 • Various
... Sedgwick that he had been earning a commission by going out and reporting on a mine in Venezuela, just over the border from British Guiana. He brought to Rose a world of tropical and marine curiosities. He was in superb health and seemed to ...
— The Wedge of Gold • C. C. Goodwin
... of greater importance and responsibility; but, on the other hand, he had been married to the Hon. Alice Rutherford for scarce a three months, and it was the thought of taking this fair young girl into the dangers and isolation of tropical ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... despise the creatures because they are minute. No doubt we should most of us prefer discovering monstrous apes in the tropical forests of Borneo, or stumbling upon herds of gigantic Ammon sheep amid the rhododendron thickets of the Himalaya: but it cannot be; and "he is a fool," says old Hesiod, "who knows not how much better half is than the whole." ...
— Glaucus; or The Wonders of the Shore • Charles Kingsley
... thick (five eighths or more of the volume, as in Fig. 20, b), the fibre sinks whether empty or filled. This applies to most of the fibres of the dark summer-wood bands in pines, and to the compact fibres of oak or hickory, and many, especially tropical woods, have such thick-walled cells and so little empty or air ...
— Seasoning of Wood • Joseph B. Wagner
... soft-bodied creatures. This kind of polyp can live only in warm, clear water. So it is not found in the cold depths of the sea, nor in the seas near our islands, but in the warm shallow waters near tropical lands it flourishes so well that it builds up most wonderful Coral walls. So strong are they that they can defy the terrific force ...
— Within the Deep - Cassell's "Eyes And No Eyes" Series, Book VIII. • R. Cadwallader Smith
... looked with much interest at the faces, soft, piquant, tropical, which made the effect of pansies looking inquisitively over a snowdrift. The girls returned their glances with approval, for they were as fine and manly a set of men as ever had faced death or woman. Ten minutes later California and the ...
— The Splendid Idle Forties - Stories of Old California • Gertrude Atherton
... grew the giant trees of the tropical jungle, festooned with hanging vines and mosses. She seized upon the nearest and started to clamber, apelike, to the branches above. As she did so, there was a sudden rush of a great body behind her, a menacing roar that caused the earth to tremble, and something crashed into ...
— Jungle Tales of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... knife. When Barker arrived the patient was literally drenched with blood and to all appearance dead. He extracted a dead child from the abdomen and bandaged the mother, who lived only forty hours. In his discourses on Tropical Diseases Moseley speaks of a young negress in Jamaica who opened her uterus and extracted therefrom a child which lived six days; the woman recovered. Barker relates another case in Rensselaer County, N.Y., in which the incision ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... inarticulate veracity of the English People, unable to speak its meaning in words, has turned itself silently on things; and the dark powers of Material Nature have answered, "Yes, this at least is true, this is not false!" So answers Nature. "Waste desert-shrubs of the Tropical swamps have become Cotton-trees; and here, under my furtherance, are verily woven shirts,—hanging unsold, undistributed, but capable to be distributed, capable to cover the bare backs of my children of men. Mountains, old ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... and the rapid drying and the work of many hands soon produced a change. In two days we could go about on dry ground. In four, mud was scaling over everything in cakes, and being cracked into dust it regularly powdered off the trees, and a couple of tremendous tropical showers sufficed to clear off the remainder from twig and leaf, so that what with the rapid vegetation, and the clearing effects of rain and dew, a month had hardly passed before the place began to look very much as it did before the misfortune, Morgan ...
— Mass' George - A Boy's Adventures in the Old Savannah • George Manville Fenn
... human conditions. The most superficial eye recognizes this. A city is, in one respect, like a high mountain; the latter is an epitome of the physical globe; for its sides are belted by products of every zone, from the tropical luxuriance that clusters around its base, to its arctic summit far up in the sky. So is the city an epitome of the social world. All the belts of civilization intersect along its avenues. It contains ...
— Humanity in the City • E. H. Chapin
... latest air, all the rage, gave no thought to all that. He was reveling in the idea that a few hours hence he would be installed in a comfortable sleeping compartment, to awake next morning on the wonderful Cote d'Azur, inundated with light, drenched in the perfume of tropical flowers, bathed in the radiance ...
— A Nest of Spies • Pierre Souvestre
... with tropical birds and foliage and as the hangings were many and elaborate the effect was gorgeous. The bathroom was spacious and fully equipped, and as Mona's things had arrived she turned to instruct the maid who was already ...
— Patty and Azalea • Carolyn Wells
... riser, and believe I owe much of my good health to this custom. I used to delight in a lovely tropical morning, when, with a cigar in my mouth, I walked into the market. What would Sir William Curtis, or Sir Charles Flower have said, could they have seen, as I did, the numbers of luxurious turtle lying on their backs, and displaying their rich calapee to the epicurean ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat
... Canadian forests, Sue, on some of the tropical beaches, or the color in a japanese street, or the moon rising over the Irish lakes!" he went on, "and how you ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... the life of them; No background of eternity Over which they had traversed From eon to eon, Sun-system to sun-system, Planets and stars under them, Planets and stars over them; Now dwelling on immeasurable plains of azure Bigger than space, Dazzling with the super-tropical brightness Of passionate flowers without a name, In all the romance of color and beauty— Now, in the cities celestial, Where they made their acquaintances With other souls, which had never been incarnated, But were getting themselves ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... us have families dependent on us for support, and are suffering for our forfeited wages. Many of us are already suffering from that dread scourge—the scurvy—which must increase to a fearful extent in this tropical climate as the season advances and sweep, us away. And now that the campaign is open and advancing, and men are needed, we hope we may be permitted to return to the field, and by future faithfulness in our country's cause be able to return to our homes with what all good men so highly prize- untarnished ...
— A Woman's Life-Work - Labors and Experiences • Laura S. Haviland
... backed up his lies with a ready credence. If Moriarty told some fearful incident of a tiger hunt, the colonel capped it with something more wonderful, of slaughtering lions in a wholesale way, like rabbits. When Moriarty expatiated on the intensity of tropical heat, the colonel would upset ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover
... tropical—palms, cacti of many sorts, and masses of a deep purple flower that covered large expanses of wall. All trees were in full leaf, but they would be mostly evergreen. Worthy looking padres in their shovel hats were plentiful, also monks in dark ...
— The Incomparable 29th and the "River Clyde" • George Davidson
... said Dr. Shrapnel. 'Heed not that girl, my Beauchamp. The old woman's in the Tory, and the Tory leads the young maid. Here's a fable I draw from a Naturalist's book, and we'll set it against the dicta of Jenny Do-nothing, Jenny Discretion, Jenny Wait-for-the-Gods: Once upon a time in a tropical island a man lay sick; so ill that he could not rise to trouble his neighbours for help; so weak that it was lifting a mountain to get up from his bed; so hopeless of succour that the last spark of distraught wisdom perching on his ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Elsie,' I said, staring hard at the paper-board,' when I first went to Girton, how all you girls wore your hair quite straight, in neat smooth coils, plaited up at the back about the size of a pancake; and how of a sudden I burst in upon you, like a tropical hurricane, and demoralised you; and how, after three days of me, some of the dear innocents began with awe to cut themselves artless fringes, while others went out in fear and trembling and surreptitiously purchased a pair of curling-tongs? I was a bomb-shell in your midst ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... gloomy reflections, she took the hairpin Annie had loaned her to pin up a lock of her heavy hair, and began tracing out pictures on the window-pane. There was already a magic tapestry there, woven by the frost-fairies; ferns, and sea-weed and tropical flowers of fantastic shapes, and wonderful palm branches all exquisitely intertwined. To these Elizabeth added the product of her imagination. Lords and ladies rode through the sea-weed, and Joan of Arc stood surrounded by palms. She had almost forgotten her woes in their icy beauty, and ...
— 'Lizbeth of the Dale • Marian Keith
... was limpid water, or at any rate not very muddy, but as bright as need be for the time of year, and a sea which is not tropical. No one may hope to see the bottom through ten feet of water on the Yorkshire coast, toward the end of the month of November; but still it tries to look clear upon occasion; and here in the caves it settles down, after even a week free ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... the party had reached the valley in which the lakelet lay, and beautiful indeed was the scene which presented itself as they passed under the grateful shade of the palm-trees. Everywhere, rich tropical vegetation met their gaze, through the openings in which the sunshine poured like streams of fire. On the little lake numerous flocks of ducks and other fowl were seen swimming in sportive mood, while an occasional splash told of fish of ...
— The Battery and the Boiler - Adventures in Laying of Submarine Electric Cables • R.M. Ballantyne
... no experience to qualify him for the post. Senator Crawford intimated that in instructing his naval officers Hamilton impressed upon them the desirability of keeping their superiors supplied with pineapples and other tropical fruits—an ill-natured comment which, true or not, gives us the measure of the man. Both Monroe and Gallatin shared the prevailing estimate of the Secretaries of War and of the Navy and expressed themselves without reserve to Jefferson; but the President with characteristic ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson
... revealed itself as a monstrous sham, more dangerously indecent because of its pretense at decency. It is something like those poisoned tropical forests, fever-infested, which were in the land of my birth, beautiful outwardly, with great vivid flowers, high palms, towering trees of fern, all garlanded with creepers and lovely wild growth,—glades of fair shadow inviting to rest, yet poisonous ...
— Women's Wild Oats - Essays on the Re-fixing of Moral Standards • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... inserted either a piece of stick or the end of my finger in the flower. The segments of the perianth also closed on the pistil, but more slowly than the stamens. Plants of this family, generally considered as tropical, occur in North America "Lewis and Clarke's Travels" page 221, in the same high latitude as here, namely, in both cases, in 47 degrees.) On the arid plains a few black beetles (Heteromera) might be seen slowly crawling about, and occasionally a lizard darted from side to side. Of birds we have ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... sea-worn Frenchmen as if they had set foot in an enchanted world. Stalwart natives, whom Laudonniere, one of the officers, describes as "mighty and as well shapen and proportioned of body as any people in the world," greeted them hospitably.[1] Overhead was the luxuriant semi-tropical vegetation, giant oaks festooned with gray moss trailing to the ground and towering magnolias opening their great white, fragrant cups. No wonder they thought this newly discovered land the "fairest, fruitfullest, and pleasantest ...
— French Pathfinders in North America • William Henry Johnson
... study of the organic remains contained in its rocks, the following may be mentioned: It has been shown that in Eocene times, or at the commencement of the Tertiary period, the climate of what is now Western Europe was of a tropical or sub-tropical character. Thus the Eocene beds are found to contain the remains of shells such as now inhabit tropical seas, as, for example, Cowries and Volutes; and with these are the fruits of palms, and the remains of other tropical plants. It has been ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... brig swinging in midstream by her chain, with her square sails hanging motionless in the hot air; and then as the men dipped their oars gently, the boat glided close in towards the overhanging boughs, which displayed every tint of rich tropical green. ...
— Old Gold - The Cruise of the "Jason" Brig • George Manville Fenn
... Islands one may have proof of this before his eyes. On one end of the island of Maui, the rainfall is very great, and its deep valleys and high sharp ridges are clothed with tropical verdure, while on the other end, barely ten miles away, rain never falls, and the barren, rocky desolation which the scene presents I can never forget. No rain, no soil; ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... and boulders, but a fairly good grazing country, with here and there, at long intervals, a white cottage. The engine slows at one point, where the rails are twisted into serpentine convolutions by yesterday's tropical heat. Both sides are considerably displaced, but they still bear the right relation to each other, and the faithful machine, sniffing and picking her way carefully, glides safely over the contorted ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... To the north rises the old crater, black at night against the unfathomable blue of the sky. From the little circular building, with its mushroom dome, the slopes plunge steeply downward into the black mysteries of the tropical forest beneath. The little house in which the observer and his assistant live is about fifty yards from the observatory, and beyond this are the huts ...
— The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... the heavy boughs, so still was the day, and an indefinable, milky haze stretched between us and the cloudless sky above. The sun's rays pierced it and gathered fire; the mighty river beside us rolled listless and sullen, flinging back the heat defiantly. And on our left was a tropical forest in all its bewildering luxuriance, the live-oak, the hackberry, the myrtle, the Spanish bayonet in bristling groups, and the shaded places gave out a scented moisture like an orangery; anon we passed ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... the West Indies and Jack figures as the hero of a daring rescue. Their experiences in tropical waters form a most stirring narrative, and the young reader is assured of a tale of gripping interest from ...
— The Boy Volunteers with the Submarine Fleet • Kenneth Ward
... was night before they awoke, and looked out. All signs of the storm had passed. The moon was shining calmly, the stars were brilliant, and seemed to hang like lamps in the sky, an effect which is only seen in tropical climes. ...
— Under Drake's Flag - A Tale of the Spanish Main • G. A. Henty
... eyes open frightfully wide now. The tropical afternoon was lengthening the shadows on the hot, weary earth, the abode of obscure desires, of extravagant ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... Tropical: is that faunal region which covers the southern part of the peninsula of Florida, the greater part of Central America, the lowlands of southern Mexico south of the table land, and a narrow strip on each side of Mexico which follows the coast northward ...
— Explanation of Terms Used in Entomology • John. B. Smith
... Tasmanian, but he has not become like those races; nor will a thousand years, in most respects, make him like them. The Papuan and the Malay, as Mr. Wallace finds, live now, and have lived for ages, side by side in the same tropical regions, with every sort of diversity. Even in animals his researches show, as by an object-lesson, that the direct efficacy of physical conditions is overrated. 'Borneo,' he says 'closely resembles New Guinea, not only in its vast size and freedom from volcanoes, but in its variety of ...
— Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political society • Walter Bagehot
... in retrospect no doubt appeared more attractive than they had done in reality. The West Indian, on the other hand, settled down permanently with his wife and family in the island of his choice. Barbados and Jamaica are the only two tropical countries under the British flag where there was a resident white gentry born and bred in the country, with country places handed down from father to son. In these two islands not one word of any language but English was ever to be heard from either black or white. ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... their language and customs. He remembered several of their songs of war and love, and translated them to gratify the insatiable thirst for knowledge of the famous essayist. The refrain of one of them, supposed to be addressed to one of those beautiful serpents of the tropical ...
— Aboriginal American Authors • Daniel G. Brinton
... is deeply grieved at my going. Still she understands that, for me, it is best. When last I saw you in Oakdale I had no idea of leaving civilization for tropical wildernesses. Mr. Graham's invitation to join his expedition was wholly unexpected, and I was not slow to take advantage ...
— Grace Harlowe's Problem • Jessie Graham Flower
... of mistake, what in this country his destiny must be. Like his brother, the Indian of the forest, he must melt away and disappear forever from the midst of us. I do not affirm or intimate that this must be his destiny in all countries. In the tropical regions of the earth, where he may have little to fear from the competition of the more civilized white man, he may preserve and multiply his race. Let him try the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No. V, May, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... its expression was calculated to impress a degree of awe, if not of fear, upon strangers. High features, naturally strong and powerfully expressive, had been burnt almost into negro blackness by constant exposure to the tropical sun, and might, in their ordinary state, be said to slumber after the storm of passion had passed away; but the projection of the veins of the forehead, the readiness with which the upper lip and its thick black mustache quivered ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... upon the head, although they are continually exposed to the rays of an almost tropical sun. In extreme seasons of heat, and 'when they are travelling, they sometimes gather a few green bunches or wet weeds and place upon their heads; but this ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... with the parent worms of the filaria Bancrofti. Cases of elephantiasis of the lower extremity are met with in this country in which there are no filarial parasites in the lymph vessels, and these present features closely resembling the tropical variety, and usually follow upon repeated attacks ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... United States Public Health Service. The best man on tropical diseases and quarantine that ...
— The Unspeakable Perk • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... is given to all these deposits of water, also to some immense natural circular wells from 50 to 300 feet in diameter. The walls are more or less perpendicular, generally covered with tropical vegetation. The current in some is swift, but no inlets or outlets are visible. The water is deliciously pure and sweet, much better than that of wells opened by man in the same country. These enormous deposits generally have a rugged ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 508, September 26, 1885 • Various
... who had not were reminded of some of the wonders of "The Black Crook." There were apartments turned into bowers and grottoes, where the gas-light shimmered behind veils of falling water, and through pendant leaves of all sorts of strange water-plants of tropical regions. There were all those wonderful leaf-plants of every weird device of color, which have been conjured up by tricks of modern gardening, as Rappacini is said to have created his strange garden in Padua. There were beds of hyacinths ...
— Pink and White Tyranny - A Society Novel • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... demand and also to bring to the notice of those unacquainted with the beauties of these semi-tropical islands that the writer has been led to issue this work, which is the first illustrated guide-book and history of Bermuda yet published. The book contains two hundred pages, and is embellished with sixteen photo-mechanical prints ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Vol. II, No. 6, March, 1885 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... Khan, a beautiful Peruvian tale of thirty pages, by Mr. Fraser. The French story, La Fiancee de Marques, is a novelty for an annual, but in good taste. Tropical Sun-sets, by Dr. Philip, is just ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 344 (Supplementary Issue) • Various
... a tin cup of hot coffee, "here's to food. You may sleep without beds, and, in tropical climates, you may go without clothes, but in whatever part of the world you may be, you must have food. And it's best when you've ridden hard all day, and, in the cool of an October evening, to sit down by a roaring fire in the woods with the dry leaves beneath ...
— The Tree of Appomattox • Joseph A. Altsheler
... Altogether, perhaps, they lead safer lives in England than anywhere else. We do not shoot them; the fowlers do mischief, still they make but little impression; there are few birds of prey, and there is not that fearful bloodthirstiness that makes a tropical forest so terrible in fact, under its outward show of glowing colour. There, with cruel hawks and owls, and serpents, and beasts of prey, a bird's life is one long terror. They are ever on the watch here, but they are not so fearfully ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... wild-flowers, and flowering shrubs, Palestine has always been a famous country for bees. They deposit their honey in hollow trees, as our bees do when they escape from the hive, and in holes in the rocks, as ours do not. In a tropical or semi-tropical climate, bees are quite apt to take refuge in the rocks; but where ice and snow prevail, as with us, they are much safer high up in the trunk ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... brown earth, giving curiously the sense of fecundity—a warm, generous odour of daylight and sunshine. Down the field, toward the corner, cutting in sharply, as though a door opened (or a page turned to another lyric), came the cloying, sweet fragrance of wild crab-apple blossoms, almost tropical in their richness, and below that, as I came to my work, the thin acrid smell of the marsh, the place of the rushes and ...
— Adventures In Contentment • David Grayson
... reptile, which was formerly an inhabitant of these districts, are now in the possession of Mr G. B. Holmes, of Horsham, by whom these particulars are obligingly communicated. The animal which more nearly approximates to it, than any other now in existence, is the Iguana Cornuta a native of the tropical parts of America, and from its resemblance to which it has received its name; but more particularly on account of the teeth of the Iguanadon, which resemble those of no other animal than the Iguana, of which one species (the Cornuta,) has, like ...
— The History and Antiquities of Horsham • Howard Dudley
... within the limits of one of these magic isles could in every case be cut off from the rest of the story and framed as a separate work of art. The long starvation of David Balfour on the island of Earraid, the sharks of crime and monsters of blasphemy that break the peace of the shining tropical lagoons in Treasure Island and The Ebb Tide, the captivity on the Bass Rock in Catriona, the supernatural terrors that hover and mutter over the island of The Merry Men—these imaginations are plainly generated by the scenery against which they are ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Walter Raleigh
... still at his old business, conducting a runaway sailors' boarding house. A few weeks later found me in Panama, an engineer on the Panama and Aspinwall railroad. The climate, I believe, is the most wretched in the world, and tropical vegetation grows the rankest. In a few months I was stricken with the yellow fever, but thanks to my robust constitution I soon recovered. About this time I met an official of the government railway at Ilo, who desired me to return and accept ...
— Where Strongest Tide Winds Blew • Robert McReynolds
... change, wild and fearful, as that of the tropical tornado to a southern landscape, swept over that ...
— The Mystery of a Turkish Bath • E.M. Gollan (AKA Rita)
... indicated that they had not been in the mines at all. (His idea of a miner was a coal-miner, and not one from the Comstock mine, where there is no coal dust, and where the thermometer indicates a tropical climate always.) ...
— The Wedge of Gold • C. C. Goodwin
... amends for the decay which critics did not fail to notice in his faculties. Schubart's sufferings had in fact permanently injured him; his mind was warped and weakened by theosophy and solitude; bleak northern vapours often flitted over it, and chilled its tropical luxuriance. Yet he wrote and rhymed; discoursed on the corruption of the times, and on the means of their improvement. He published the first portion of his Life, and often talked amazingly about the Wandering Jew, and a romance of which he was to form the subject. The idea of making old Joannes ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... bade fair to prevent him from taking active part in the prospective battles, he set to work with the utmost energy. By the time the enemy began to dispute the road, he had overcome the immense difficulty of supplying troops on a march through a tropical country and was prepared to take part in any fighting that occurred. But the Mexicans gathered at TALL TREES on May 8, 1846, were not prepared for a serious encounter. They fired at the invaders, ...
— On the Trail of Grant and Lee • Frederick Trevor Hill
... know where to go to look for it; but if, after all, no Continent was to be found, then he might turn his thoughts towards the discovery of those Multitude of Islands which, we are told, lay within the Tropical regions to the South of the Line, and this we have from very good Authority, as I have before hinted. This he will always have in his power; for, unless he be directed to search for the Southern lands in a high Latitude, he will not, ...
— Captain Cook's Journal During the First Voyage Round the World • James Cook
... now began to praise Rectus, and he told what obligations the boy had put him under in Nassau, when he wrote to his father, and had that suit about the property stopped, and so relieved him—Uncle Chipperton—from cutting short his semi-tropical trip, and hurrying home to New York in the middle ...
— A Jolly Fellowship • Frank R. Stockton
... Peninsula; and we as Irishmen can take a legitimate pride in the fact that your muster-roll of glory is replete with familiar names which abound throughout the hills and valleys of our far-off motherland. The name and fame of your regiment are world-wide; and whether on frozen shores or in tropical climes, a light-heartedness, an uncomplaining endurance of hardship and fatigue, and a ready adaptability to circumstances, afford abundant proof that the best traditions of our race have been maintained by the DUBLIN FUSILIERS. ...
— The Second Battalion Royal Dublin Fusiliers in the South African War - With a Description of the Operations in the Aden Hinterland • Cecil Francis Romer and Arthur Edward Mainwaring
... an arched trellis, that led from the hardier flowers of the lawn to a rare collection of tropical plants under a lofty glass dome (connecting, as it were, the familiar vegetation of the North with that of the remotest East), was a form that instantaneously caught and fixed my gaze. The entrance of the arcade was covered with parasite creepers, in prodigal luxuriance, of variegated ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... yelping cries, having somewhat the resemblance to "Tocano! tocano! tocano!" Hence the Indians give them the name from which we derive toucan—a bird especially characteristic of the forests of Tropical America. The Brazilians also call them "preacher-birds,"—from their habit of lifting up their beaks, and clattering them together, and shouting hoarsely. One, mounted higher than the rest, acts either as the leader of the inharmonious chorus, ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... was, and forgot to shave. These alternations of tenderness and severity worked upon this feeble creature whose only life was through his amorous fibre, the same morbid effect which great changes from tropical heat to arctic cold produce upon the human body. It was a moral pleurisy, which wore him out like a physical disease. Flore alone could thus affect him; for to her, and to her alone, he was as ...
— The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... Spaniard is more indolent than the Frenchman; the Frenchman more so than the German. The Europeans themselves who reproach the residents of the colonies so much (and I am not now speaking of the Spaniards but of the Germans and English themselves), how do they live in tropical countries? Surrounded by a numerous train of servants, never going afoot but riding in a carriage, needing servants not only to take off their shoes for them but even to fan them! And yet they live and eat better, they work for themselves to get rich, with the hope of a future, free and respected, ...
— The Indolence of the Filipino • Jose Rizal
... significantly by adaptation. Given enough generations a human gene pool can adapt to extracting its nutrition from a different group of foods. For example, a group of isolated Fijians currently enjoying long healthy lives eating a diet of seafoods and tropical root crops could suddenly be moved to the highlands of Switzerland and forced to eat the local fare or starve. But most of the Fijians would not have systems adept at making those enzymes necessary to digest cows milk. ...
— How and When to Be Your Own Doctor • Dr. Isabelle A. Moser with Steve Solomon
... diversities is simply absurd. The Esquimaux, who live in Greenland and the arctic regions of America, are remarkable for the darkness of their complexion. Humboldt remarks that the American tribes of the tropical regions have no darker skin than the mountaineers of the temperate zone. Climate may modify the complexion, but ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... to settlement than free land was the discovery of a crop that could be exported at a profit. Virginia had been founded to raise silk and tropical products, and to supply England with naval stores. But the difficulties were greater than had been anticipated, and in 1616, when John Rolfe, having discovered a superior method of curing the leaf, sold a ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... day a serious importance at which our own age can merely marvel. It brings no historical conviction; it is altogether free from such conventional limits as Time and Space. Stripped of its dreamy diction, there is even a tropical residue of sensuousness, to which the English language is prone to give a plainer name. It develops into a fantastic melange which no American mind can possibly reckon with; what its effect would be upon a person relegated ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... was almost audible the father turned away. At the door he glanced back, having noted the intense warmth of the room. The nurse, as many of her tropical race are apt to do, had forgotten to ventilate the chamber. The two windows were closed. Angrily he crept across the carpeted floor and noiselessly raised the sashes as high as they would go, feeling ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben
... that evening to take Mrs. and Miss Kimball to the theatre he discovered that his reception in the morning had been tropical compared to this one. He was compelled to wait fully fifteen minutes before Miss Kimball appeared in house gown and slippers, indicating her purpose to remain at home, and the bearer of a message that her mother begged to be excused, as she had retired with ...
— An American Suffragette • Isaac N. Stevens
... companions never left them so long as the sun remained above the horizon, swarming like insects and birds in tropical lands. When the sailors put their meat-tubs for a moment out upon the ice a bear's intrusive muzzle would forthwith be inserted to inspect the contents. Maddened by hunger, and their keen scent excited by the salted provisions, and by the living flesh and blood ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... not all clothed in rags. On that road chariot jostles against chariot; and behind steeds in harness golden-plated and glittering, they go down, coach and four, herald and postilion, racketing on the hot pavements of hell. Clear the track! Bazaars hang out their colors over the road; and trees of tropical fruitfulness overbranch the way. No sound of woe disturbs the air; but all is light and song, and wine and gorgeousness. The world comes out to greet the dazzling procession with Hurrah! and Hurrah! ...
— The Abominations of Modern Society • Rev. T. De Witt Talmage
... daytime, Saigon is as hot as that last bourne whither all evil-doers wander—Englishmen and dogs alone are seen abroad between nine and one. But in the soothing cool of the soft tropical evening, gay-lit boulevards, a magnificent State-subsidized opera-house, alfresco cafes where dawdle the domino-playing absinthe drinkers, the fierce-moustached gendarmes, and innumerable features ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... trouble of the soul is not for them. Theirs is the realm of the senses, and if man could live by sense alone, surely he must revel in what they offer. They dye their canvasses in such blaze of color and light as can be seen only in the sunset or in the azure of the Mediterranean, or in tropical flowers. How they clothe their figures in every conceivable splendor of orphrey and ermine, in jewels and shining armor and rich stuff of silk and samite, in robe of scarlet or in yellow dalmatic! Every house for them is a palace, ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... one of those September days of almost tropical heat that finishes the work of summer and ripens the grapes. Such heat forebodes a coming storm; and though as yet there were wide patches of blue between the dark rain-clouds low down on the horizon, pale golden masses were rising and scattering with ominous swiftness from ...
— Farewell • Honore de Balzac
... Porto Rico. The islands are of volcanic origin and some of the mountain peaks are over six thousand feet high. The climate is delightful and the variation in temperature is not much over thirty degrees. Semi-tropical vegetation and flowers abound everywhere, and the place is beautifully clad with verdure. The natives have "that tired feeling," and do just as little work as will earn them a scanty living. They, however, blame this condition ...
— A Fantasy of Mediterranean Travel • S. G. Bayne
... fact the new code was too theoretically fine to be practical, and was never put in force. His personal good sense was equal to his industry and his talents, and he preserved his health by strict habits of temperance. Even in that tropical country he presented a strong contrast to the sallow, bilious officials with whom he was surrounded, and in due time returned to England in perfect health, one of the most robust of men, capable of indefinite work, which never ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... nature by effects. We know that vegetation planted in native soil and properly attended with light, heat and moisture, will grow and yield a certain species of fruit. We may infer how it does this, but we cannot explain the process of transformation any more than we can explain why certain tropical birds are burnished with glowing colors, and that other birds under the murky skies are gray and brown, while in the ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... conspicuous, wearing only the red headgear and facings, but Duryea's regiment is a sight! A magnificent one from the spectacular stand-point, but the regiments in blue stand a better chance of being missed by the rebel riflemen. I certainly wish Colonel Craig's Zouaves weren't attired like tropical butterflies. But for heaven's sake don't say ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers
... add the atrocities of Bertrand, of Canrobert, of Espinasse, of Martimprey; the ship-loads of women sent off by General Guyon; Representative Miot dragged from casemate to casemate; hovels in which there are a hundred and fifty prisoners, beneath a tropical sun, with promiscuity of sex, filth, vermin, and where all these innocent patriots, all these honest people are perishing, far from their dear ones, in fever, in misery, in horror, in despair, wringing their hands. Add all these poor wretches handed over to gendarmes, ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... flavour; flour and eggs, cream and sugar, prepared in every way known to New York confectioners. Kisses and Mottoes were insisted upon. Then came the fruits, beginning with peaches and grapes, and concluding with bananas and other tropical productions, until at length even Mrs. Hilson's "ambition" was ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... mountain, as nearly suffocated and blinded them. It was too much even for their hardy frames to endure, and, however reluctantly, they were compelled to abandon the attempt on the eve of its completion. They brought back some huge icicles—a curious sight in those tropical regions—as a trophy of their achievement, which, however imperfect, was sufficient to strike the minds of the natives with wonder, by showing that with the Spaniards the most appalling and mysterious perils were only as pastimes. The undertaking was eminently characteristic of the bold ...
— Wonders of Creation • Anonymous
... appropriately this period has been named that of old life forms. In imagination we can recall a scene of this old age. The air is sultry and full of vapors. The soil seems hot and steaming. This is a veritable forest, but we see none of the beautiful flowers which we associate with tropical vegetation to-day. In the branches of the graceful tree-ferns, we will look in vain for birds. They were yet far in the future. Neither were there any of the higher orders of animals present. Not a ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... Fatherland as soon as they become citizens, and on this basis he defends that degree of nationalism which the war has since shown to be prevalent in the ranks of Socialists. He even goes so far as to maintain that European nations have a right to tropical territory owing to their higher civilization. Such doctrines diminish revolutionary ardor and tend to transform Socialists into a left wing of the Liberal Party. But the increasing prosperity of wage-earners before the war made these developments ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell
... last on to the terrace, and rested my arms on the low balustrade, looking with unseeing eyes across the lawn, with its tropical trees standing motionless in the golden haze. Everything around me was very still, and a peculiar strained calm seemed to be upon me also—the calm of an intense desire, hushed and expectant, in all ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross
... romantic adventure that mind can conceive. He has set forth to conquer and subdue the world, including the stupidities and basenesses of his own nature. At first his progress was incalculably slow; then he came on with a rush in the great sub-tropical river basins; and presently, where the brine of the AEgean got into his blood, he achieved such miracles of thought and art that his subsequent history, for well-nigh two thousand years, bore the ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... of life is somewhat precarious, but if haply she withers as she grows old, she lives for ever. Such promised to be the case with William the Testy, who grew tough in proportion as he dried. He had withered, in fact, not through the process of years, but through the tropical fervor of his soul, which burnt like a vehement rushlight in his bosom, inciting him to incessant broils and bickerings. Ancient traditions speak much of his learning, and of the gallant inroads he had made into the dead languages, in which he had made captive ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... still for the most part sensuous and trivial, shifting with the chance currents of the brain, and representing nothing, so to speak, but personal temperature. Personal temperature, moreover, is sometimes tropical. There are brains like a South American jungle, as there are others like an Arabian desert, strewn with nothing but bones. While a passionate sultriness prevails in the mind there is no end to its luxuriance. Languages intricately articulate, ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... taken literally, compared with some other passage in his writings, admitted to be authentic, involve a palpable contradiction, it hath been the custom of the ingenuous commentator to smooth the difficulty by the supposition, that in the one case an allegorical or tropical sense was chiefly intended. So by the word 'native,' I may be supposed to mean a town where I might have been born; or where it might be desirable that I should have been born, as being situate in wholesome air, upon a dry chalky soil, in which I delight; or a town, with the inhabitants ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... in the form of an amphitheatre, the houses and gardens rising higher and higher as they recede from the sea, tended somewhat to reassure the explorer, who had been wondering that human stupidity should have been equal to selecting in a tropical country, and in one of the best-watered islands of the world, such a situation for its capital. Wells are of little account, for the water thus obtained is at the level of the sea, and always salt. The population has to depend upon the rain that falls on roofs, and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... never been moved before. He once told me that even as a little boy he had never in all his life known one pang of jealousy. He will never be able to make that boast again. And like some damned insidious tropical malaria, the passion has taken root in his system, so that only death can wholly ...
— We Three • Gouverneur Morris
... richness of the early creation; for one may actually collect the remains of Silurian Shells and Crustacea by cart-loads around the city of Cincinnati. A naturalist would find it difficult to gather along any modern sea-shore, even on tropical coasts, where marine life is more abundant than elsewhere, so rich a harvest, in the same time, as he will bring home from an hour's ramble in the environs ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... Chinese, with British government buildings, Mohammedan mosques, Buddhist temples, an English cathedral, and a Methodist church. Our road thither led us through seemingly endless forests of rubber trees and of coconut palms. The profusion of tropical vegetation was both novel and impressive. These Federated Malay States furnish the world with more than half its supply of rubber, and many English and American investors are growing rich from the soaring of prices induced ...
— A Tour of the Missions - Observations and Conclusions • Augustus Hopkins Strong
... is painted with trembling truth of touch and delicate tenderness of feeling. We feel it to be destitute of profound suggestiveness and massive thought, but its verse is solemnly dignified, its imagery is chastely grand, and a rich chiaroscuro rests like a tropical night upon the whole. Besides the stanzas we have already alluded to, it has some of those brief touches which show the master's hand: ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.] |
