"Billowing" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... his arm about her waist; she was unresponsive, but he did not notice that; they went together to the chesterfield drawn up before the fire and sat down. She took a corner, turning herself to face him a little, so that he had to withdraw his arm from her, and she pushed a billowing cushion which he did not remember into a comfortable ...
— Married Life - The True Romance • May Edginton
... telegraph poles that marked the course of the railway and a traveling column of smoke indicated the busy course of a railway train. This was the setting within which lay the broad stretches of the Athi Plains, billowing in ...
— In Africa - Hunting Adventures in the Big Game Country • John T. McCutcheon
... There was a billowing of frantically writhing fumes, which darted madly in every direction until they ceased to be. The Chief in his insect-like contraption came bolting out of the hole which was the airlock. He was a good half-mile away. The rocket fumes ceased. He kept ...
— Space Tug • Murray Leinster
... pony's speed, of course, but when he had halted momentarily he had noted that the animal was quivering all over, that it caught its breath shrilly in the brief interval of rest, and now as he rode, bending far over its mane, he saw that the billowing foam on its muzzle was flecked with blood. The animal was not equal to the demands he ...
— The Range Boss • Charles Alden Seltzer
... you will hear him, you shall know he is sobbing for children that are not. One lonely, distraught, mystified, sorely-beleagured, and still surely-trusting man,—this is the audience. The scene is a tawny desert, once sown to oases of flowers, and billowing grain, and stately palm-tree, and olive-groves, now harvestless, flowerless, palmless. Once a stately palace rose beside a fountain here, and from its open doors ran genial hospitality, to greet the coming guest and the wayfarer overtaken by the night and weariness; and ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... and terror, I heard a great rending and tearing. I looked up, and a tractor just missed me as it rolled by on swishing treads. But that one glance was enough. The ice cap was moving, flowing forward, a thousand-foot wall of ice! Great billowing clouds of steam spurted from innumerable cracks. The deed had been done! The ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... whizzed them up the zigzag road to La Turbie, while the noon sunshine still gilded Caesar's Trophy. They lunched in the Moorish restaurant, and then sped on along the Upper Corniche, with a white sea of snow mountains billowing away to the right, and a sea of sapphire spreading to the horizon, ...
— Rosemary in Search of a Father • C. N. Williamson
... Miss Ann said, but she sought the girl's hand and held it a moment in the folds of her billowing lace dress. ...
— The Comings of Cousin Ann • Emma Speed Sampson
... days before, now smiled with friendly faces. There was much waving of hats and many shouts of farewell from the little group on the shore, but Rezanov saw only the figure of a tall graceful girl with the soft folds of a mantilla billowing about her head and shoulders and heard only the murmur of love from the rosy lips. 'Two years,' he whispered back to her, as the ship passed out through the Gulf of the Farallones and became but a speck on ...
— The Lure of San Francisco - A Romance Amid Old Landmarks • Elizabeth Gray Potter and Mabel Thayer Gray
... the last—the Sixteenth Mazurka. This strange foreign thing she played with her eyes closed, her head tilted obliquely so that Theron could see the rose-tinted, beautiful countenance, framed as if asleep in the billowing luxuriance of unloosed auburn hair. He fancied her beholding visions as she wrought the music—visions full of barbaric color and romantic forms. As his mind swam along with the gliding, tricksy phantom of a tune, it seemed as if he too could ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... like a guppy with my head, sounding out the boundary of that deadness, ducking down as soon as the mental murk gave me a faint perception of the wall and ceiling above me. Then I'd move aside and sound it again. Eventually I found a little billowing furrow that rose above the floor level and I crawled out along the floor, still sounding and moving cautiously with my body hidden in the deadness that rose and fell like a cloud of murky mental smoke ...
— Highways in Hiding • George Oliver Smith
... though billowed up by a mighty wind beneath. And the lights, the mists, the drifting cloud shadows! Why had Juno not wanted him to see them? And when he took to horseback and mounted through that billowing rug, through ferns stirrup-high, with flowers innumerable nodding on either side of the trail and the air of the first dawn in his nostrils—mounted to the top of the Big Black, rode for miles along its gently waving summit, and saw at ...
— In Happy Valley • John Fox
... construction of ocean vessels, and the repairs to the seaboard. This was the only time in which preparations were made for the reception of the Emperor, and money was lavished in quantities as great as the billowing waters of the sea!" ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... the ground was open and fairly level, the trail cutting across a bend in the stream. Just ahead towered Good Heart Butte, with its glistening, gilded crest throwing a black shadow half-way up the billowing westward slopes. Over at the east across the stream, bold and beautifully rounded, the bluffs went rolling away, knoll after knoll, shoulder after shoulder heavily wooded and fringed at their bases and in the deep ravines, and away over those natural ramparts, ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... bricks jammed even when they were undermined, and the wall was four bricks thick to its further side. Moreover, every alternate course was cross-pinned, and the workman was rapidly becoming asphyxiated by the terrible reek which came billowing in ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... my eyes to-night, I see Barrows, billowing prehistorically along the horizon, and I see Stonehenge, black against a red sunset, and silver in the moonlight. Also, I have begun to think architecturally, I find, through seeing so much architecture, and trying to talk about it intelligently, as Mrs. Senter contrives to ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... the farmer by the shoulders and spun him around to face the sea of fire that was billowing down the slopes from the blazing mountain, that was now a real torch. The fire had passed beyond the stage of the slow burning circle that is so characteristic of wood fires. It was rushing relentlessly forward, and even now it was at the edge ...
— The Boy Scout Fire Fighters - or Jack Danby's Bravest Deed • Robert Maitland
... shoulders and leaned back in her chair. The little room was plainly furnished. Shelves covered three sides, and the window-seat and the table were littered with books. There were no curtains, no ornaments; but Chonita's hair, billowing to the floor, her slender voluptuous form, her white skin and green irradiating eyes, the candlelight half revealing, half concealing, made a picture requiring no background. I caught the expression of Estenega's face, and determined to remain if he ...
— The Doomswoman - An Historical Romance of Old California • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... by Adige, and one forgot the muddy bed wondering at the slim grace of the shaft with its crown of yellow atop. Her hair waved about her like a flag; she should have been planted in a castle; instead, Giovanna the stately calm, with her billowing line, staid lips, and candid grey eyes, was to be seen on her knees by the green water most days of the week. Bare-armed, splashed to the neck, bare-headed, out-at-heels, she rinsed and pommelled, wrung and dipped again, laughed, ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... Behind him the town sank into the dun emerald-striped plain, roofs clustering, huddling more and more under the shadow of the beetling church, and the tower becoming leaner and darker against the steamy clouds that oozed in billowing tiers over the mountains to the north. Crows flapped about the fields where here and there the dark figures of a man and a pair of mules moved up a long slope. On the telegraph wires at a bend in the road two magpies sat, the sunlight glinting, when they stirred, on the ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... then I cite the closing act of her life as valid on her behalf, were all other testimonies against her. The executioner had been directed to apply his torch from below. He did so. The fiery smoke rose upwards in billowing volumes. A Dominican monk was then standing almost at her side. Wrapt up in his sublime office, he saw not the danger, but still persisted in his prayers. Even then, when the last enemy was racing up the fiery stairs to seize her, even at that moment did this noblest of girls ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... tried it once, and failed. Now she realized that it would be but a matter of minutes ere the whole space between the north and the south would be a seething mass of billowing flames. ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... a similar range or spur, the highest peak of which is Mount Conness, on the north; the noble Mounts Dana, Gibbs, Mammoth, Lyell, McClure and others on the axis of the Range on the east; a heaving, billowing crowd of glacier-polished rocks and Mount Hoffman on the west. Down through the open sunny meadow-levels of the Valley flows the Tuolumne River, fresh and cool from its many glacial fountains, the highest of which are the glaciers that ...
— The Yosemite • John Muir
... was still far below the eastward horizon, but the clouds were gorgeous with his livery of red and gold, and the stars had shrunk from sight before the ardor of his beams. The level "bench" through which the stream meandered, the billowing slopes to the north and south, were bare of foliage and uninviting to the eye, yet keen and wary eyes were scanning their bald expanse, studying every crest and curve and ridge in search of moving objects. ...
— To The Front - A Sequel to Cadet Days • Charles King
... on which God sits is described: it is erected in the temple, and it is high and lifted up, for He is a great King. But no description is given of the figure seated on it; only His train—the billowing folds of His robes—filled the temple. Above the throne, or rather round it, like the courtiers surrounding the throne of an Eastern monarch, stand the seraphim. These beings are mentioned only here in ...
— The Preacher and His Models - The Yale Lectures on Preaching 1891 • James Stalker
... over the rocky bed. The seaweed stood up on end like a heavy, dark vegetation and the deep currents made it wave gracefully, stretching and billowing like floating hair. ...
— The Hollow Needle • Maurice Leblanc
... how insensible the street population was to the grandeur of the storm. While the thunder was billowing and ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... lantern and hurried away, her head bowed, the cloak billowing about her. He watched the lantern till its gleam was swallowed up in ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... current. Then we ran to the spot, and found the sick and the aged,— Those who at home and in bed could before their lingering ailments Scarcely endure,—lying bruised on the ground, complaining and groaning, Choked by the billowing dust and scorched by the ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... brow of the mountain over fifteen miles of billowing green, to where, far across a far stretch of pale blue lay a dim purple line that we knew was Staten Island. Towns and villages lay before us and under us; there were ridges and hills, uplands and lowlands, woods and plains, all massed ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... channel between the bar of sand dunes on the one side and a steep, high, frowning red sandstone cliff on the other. We appreciated its significance the first time we saw a splendid golden sunrise flooding it, coming out of the wonderful sea and sky beyond and billowing through that narrow passage in waves of light. Truly, it was a golden gate through which one might sail ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... right height, a previously invisible picture came to view. It was of a towering clipper ship with sails that stretched across their masts like skin over the bones of a pleasantly plump fellow, the wind billowing them about at a leisurely rate. Waves broke gently upon the ship's side as the crew rested peacefully on the various cables and nets, all except for the one-legged captain who was busy looking at the map and accompanying ...
— The Revolutions of Time • Jonathan Dunn
... breakfast. Notwithstanding his excellent health and youthful energy, mind and body alike were somewhat spent. He made short work of preparation, slipped in between the fine cool linen sheets, and laid his brown head upon the soft billowing pillows, impatient neither to think nor feel any more but simply ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... rotors to permit the craft to rise, Tom guided the Sea Hound back to the surface. Then he reversed blade pitch for air flight and gunned the atomic turbines. The seacopter rose steeply above the billowing ...
— Tom Swift and the Electronic Hydrolung • Victor Appleton
... the dryest, the deadest, were enfolded in the resistless swirl of green. Tree top ignited tree top; the parks and boulevards were one smother of radiance. From end to end and from side to side of the city, fed by the rains, urged by the south winds, spread billowing and surging the superb conflagration of ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... had had no glimpse of the sea; but Robert turned the car, and driving between two gigantic hotels, ran down to a beach with sands of gleaming gold, and a background of wind-blown dunes billowing away as far as the eye could reach. The very wildness of this background gave a bizarre sort of charm to the fantastic buildings which made up ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... the Markagunt Plateau and with its tributaries crosses one of these plateaus above the Gray Cliffs, carving a labyrinth of deep gorges. This is known as the Colob Plateau. Above, there is a vast landscape of naked, white and gray sandstone, billowing in fantastic bosses. On the margins of the canyons these are rounded off into great vertical walls, and at the bottom of every winding canyon a beautiful stream of water is found running over quicksands. Sometimes the streams in their curving have cut under the rocks, and overhanging ...
— Canyons of the Colorado • J. W. Powell
... somebody was thinking...." He paused expectantly. Lucilla reread the ornate letters on the framed diploma on the wall, looked critically at the picture of Mrs. Andrews—whom she'd met—and her impish daughter—whom she hadn't—counted the number of pleats in the billowing drapes, ran a tentative finger over the face of her wristwatch, straightened a fold of her skirt ... and could ...
— The Sound of Silence • Barbara Constant
... ammunition-wagon. They rode speechless for the best part of an hour, each man's eyes on the distant conflagration that had begun now to light up the whole of the sky ahead of them. They still rode in darkness, but they seemed to be approaching the red rim of the Pit. Huge, billowing clouds of smoke, red-lit on the under side, belched upward to the blackness overhead, and a something that was scarcely sound—for it was yet too distant—warned them that it was no illusion they were riding into. The conflagration grew. ...
— Told in the East • Talbot Mundy
... is over. We can go and see the animals again, and get home all dry, just as well as not," observed Ben, encouragingly, as Billy looked anxiously at the billowing canvas over his head, the swaying posts before him, and heard the quick patter of drops outside, not to mention the melancholy roar of the lion which sounded rather awful through the sudden gloom which ...
— Under the Lilacs • Louisa May Alcott
... hush in the big room. All men were gazing at the mounting masses that rolled into the heavens and blossomed bodefully over the wooded hills. Fat clouds of the smoke hung high and motionless. From the earth went up to them whirls and spirals and billowing discharges ...
— The Ramrodders - A Novel • Holman Day
... she moved cautiously forward, till she was clear of the bushes, there to sit down upon a billowing cushion of heather which grew conveniently about as close to the edge of the bluff as it was prudent to venture. Abstractedly Anthony followed her and, after a glance about him, took his seat by her side ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... looked paler, with darker shadows in the folds and recesses of her obesity; and, in the fluted mob-cap tied by a starched bow between her first two chins, and the muslin kerchief crossed over her billowing purple dressing-gown, she seemed like some shrewd and kindly ancestress of her own who might have yielded too freely to the pleasures ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... exciting as the society of a man who thinks different things and makes you argue.) The silver pouring down from that small crescent seemed to sift through the strong golden light in a separate and distinct radiance. It shimmered on the sea of waving hills and billowing mountains that opened out before us, as if sprinkling a glitter of sequins over the vivid green and amber and purple. Wherever there was shadow this pale glimmer painted it with ethereal colours, like the backs of rainbow fish moving under ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... choir vestry the Bishop stopped for a moment beside us, his surplice billowing about him like the sails about a tall mast when the wind dies. "At seven," he said, "tomorrow morning at my house. ...
— Explorers of the Dawn • Mazo de la Roche
... rug, displaying a branch of yellow roses, upon which stood a mathematically straight line of purple-breasted robins. The one window was draped in stiff, white lace curtains that fell from the ceiling in a billowing cascade and flowed out into the middle of the room. Here the flood was dammed, very appropriately, by two large, pink-tinted seashells. In one corner stood a high, old-fashioned chest of drawers, covered with a white cloth worked in red to match the "Sweet ...
— Treasure Valley • Marian Keith
... always enjoying, or seeking to enjoy, social pleasure; they seek also, and have need to seek continually, both through books and men, intellectual growth, fresh power, fresh strength, to keep themselves ahead or abreast of this moving, surging, billowing world of ours; especially in these modern times, when society revolves through so many new phases, and shifts its aspects with so much more velocity than in past ages. A king, especially of this country, needs, beyond most other men, to keep ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... a window where he could follow Lake Michigan's blue until the horizon dipped into it. He could see big soft clouds, white-capped waves, shimmering sails, and puffing steamers trailing billowing banners of lavender and gray across the sky. Gulls and curlews wheeled over the water and dipped their wings in the foam. The room was filled with every luxury that ...
— Freckles • Gene Stratton-Porter
... desert upland country of Utah, but a naked and bony world of colored rock and sand—a painted desert of heat and wind and flying sand and waterless wastes and barren ranges. But it did not daunt Slone. For far down on the bare, billowing ridges moved a red speck, at a snail's pace, a slowly moving dot of color which ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Campfire Stories • Various
... been pierced. The quartermaster at the wheel let go the spokes and collapsed on deck, and Jim staggered to the helm just in time to prevent the Janequeo from crashing into the mole. Then, still floating, and with smoke, steam, and flame billowing along her decks and blinding her gallant skipper, the maimed little vessel staggered forward. But escape was not for her. The Union had a smart man for captain, and he did not intend the little Chilian hornet to go clear. The forward 8-inch gun bellowed out, and its ...
— Under the Chilian Flag - A Tale of War between Chili and Peru • Harry Collingwood
... Madame Beattie, billowing along in the witch-patterned silk and clicking on prodigiously high heels and Esther with her head haughtily up, led the way, and Jeff, following them, sat down as soon as they had given him leave by doing it, and looked about the room with a faint foolish curiosity to note whether it, too, had ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... struggled to keep his wits through the pain and billowing weakness beginning to creep through him. "Reds mustn't get to the towers! Worse than the bomb ... ...
— The Defiant Agents • Andre Alice Norton
... she had suffered all things that she could suffer. She had not yet suffered this. Someone, the Governing Power, had held this in reserve. Now it was being sent forth by decree. Now it was coming upon her. Now it was enveloping her. Now it was rolling round her and billowing away on every side to ...
— The Woman With The Fan • Robert Hichens
... cloud of incense broke, The vision, if it were a vision, spoke,— If it were speech that filled the quivering air With low harmonious music. Let none dare In the rude jargons of this world to fashion That sweet, wild anthem of unearthly passion. Could I from the broad-billowing ocean borrow Of Tristan's love and of Isolde's sorrow, The flood of those world-darkening surges, wrought With thoughts that lie beyond the reach of thought, Might bring me succor where weak words must fail. But Gawayne saw and heard, and passion-pale ...
— Gawayne And The Green Knight - A Fairy Tale • Charlton Miner Lewis
... place at his side, with her silk billowing against his knee. "This is it," she declared, her face set against the illimitable, still dark. "I recognized it only a little while ago. I think unconsciously I came to America hoping to find it; there was ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... She had turned away from him and was staring at the long billowing sweep of snow lying between her and those men who had gone to arrest Wayne Shandon. She saw the broken imprints of the Canadian snowshoes, the smooth tracks of ...
— The Short Cut • Jackson Gregory
... train, a billowing tumult of white, firelit smoke, and a long caterpillar of lighted windows, went flying south—clatter, clatter, clap, rap, and it had gone. A dim group of people talked in the gate of one of the houses in the pretty little row of gables that was called Oriental Terrace. It was all so real and so ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... must have covered a great many thousand square miles of territory, and yet we had seen nothing in the way of a familiar landmark, when from the heights of a mountain-range we were crossing I descried far in the distance great masses of billowing clouds. ...
— Pellucidar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... beauty. Here a solitary elm in the meadow below the cliff, in the region which the collegians called "over the rock," stood forth all crimson against the green sward; further on, the woods began, masses of yellow and red maples, with scattered pines and oaks of more sombre hue, billowing gently upward toward the blue ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... it robbed me of heart and hope. Here, scarce have I assured myself that the last leaf has fallen, scarce have I watched the glistening of hoar-frost upon the evergreens, when a breath from the west thrills me with anticipation of bud and bloom. Even under this grey-billowing sky, which tells that February is ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... been a road with hedges on each side and fields stretching beyond them, there was now no road, no hedge, no field; but there was a great broad river sweeping across their path; a mighty tumble of yellowy-brown waters, very swift, very savage; churning and billowing and jockeying among rough boulders and islands of stone. It was a water of villainous depth and of detestable wetness; of ugly hurrying and of desolate cavernous sound. At a little to their right there was a thin uncomely bridge that waggled across ...
— Irish Fairy Tales • James Stephens
... Mr. Wing, as the unique outfit rumbled by. "What on earth do you suppose that is?" They followed the progress of the billowing mother and her husky infant with amused eyes, and at the corner of the street she attempted to turn the barrow, ran into a stone, upset the barrow and spilled the infant on the ground. The infant immediately ...
— The Camp Fire Girls Do Their Bit - Or, Over the Top with the Winnebagos • Hildegard G. Frey
... for midsummer. The sky was ruffled with great billowing white summer clouds, and a cool northwest breeze was coming off the mountain tops. The whole world about them was assuming that tawny green of the ripening season, and the trail was sufficiently dusty for ...
— The Forfeit • Ridgwell Cullum
... should have risked itself beside him! If any grisette of the Place Cambrai or the Rue Saint-Jean-de-Beauvais, seeing that face of a youth escaped from college, that page's mien, those long, golden lashes, those blue eyes, that hair billowing in the wind, those rosy cheeks, those fresh lips, those exquisite teeth, had conceived an appetite for that complete aurora, and had tried her beauty on Enjolras, an astounding and terrible glance would have promptly ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... window to draw the shutters, stopping for an instant to peer out into the gloom along the stony path that ran from his house to an old foot-bridge about fifty feet away. Curling up from the gorge, mist seemed to play among the rotted planks; it rose and fell in great billowing blankets, sometimes concealing the ...
— The White Feather Hex • Don Peterson
... A light that shone from the coming day, Travelling unseen to the East away. In his cloudy robes that lay shadowing wide, I stretched myself motionless by his side; And his eyes with their calm, unimpassioned power, Soothing my heart like an evening shower, Led in a spectral, far-billowing train, The hours of the Past through ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... gun, and could not be heard from other points. He invited close watch of the atmosphere a hundred yards before the gun at the next shot. Not only could the projectile be seen plainly in the beginning of its flight, but the waves of billowing air, rushing back to fill the void left by the discharge and bounding and rebounding in a tempestuous sea of gas, could be distinctly observed. This airy commotion caused the sound heard for ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol 1, Issue 4, January 23, 1915 • Various
... go? Well, wouldn't it make you think you were a Lady, sure enough, if you couldn't move without that lace train billowing after you; without being dazzled with diamond-shine; without a truly Lord tagging ...
— In the Bishop's Carriage • Miriam Michelson
... central lagoon a torpedo. No missile this, but a capsule containing a full ton of allotropic iron, which would be of more use to the Nevian defenders than millions of men. For the Third City was sore pressed indeed. Around it was one unbroken ring of boiling, exploding water—water billowing upward with searing, blinding bursts of superheated steam, or being hurled bodily in all directions in solid masses by the cataclysmic forces being released by the embattled fishes of the greater deeps. Her outer defenses were already down, and even as the Terrestrials stared in amazement another ...
— Triplanetary • Edward Elmer Smith
... abundance. Over this she had worn the gray veils to smother all that color and sheen into neutral sameness with night and shadows. No wonder her face had seemed wraith-like when her startled shrinking away from the light had set all that drapery billowing about her. ...
— The Thing from the Lake • Eleanor M. Ingram
... out more intently. Beyond the pine forest, a murky cloud was rising. A storm? Hardly. For the sun had set in a clear sky. But there was a cloud surely, growing in darkness and intensity. He could see it more clearly now, billowing upward ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs
... to the window, to be between the German and the light, and let him see her silhouetted in an attitude of hope awakening. She gazed at the billowing smoke as if the hope of India were embodied ...
— Winds of the World • Talbot Mundy
... stately than the greater part of mountains, and yet a living thing, liable to sicknesses and death, like you and me: is not that in itself a speaking lesson in history? But acres on acres full of such patriarchs contiguously rooted, their green tops billowing in the wind, their stalwart younglings pushing up about their knees; a whole forest, healthy and beautiful, giving colour to the light, giving perfume to the air; what is this but the most ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... lady was Mrs. Warden, wearing her thin but still brown hair in "water-waves" over a pale high forehead. She was sitting on a couch on the broad, rose-shaded porch, surrounded by billowing masses of vari-colored worsted. It was her delight to purchase skein on skein of soft, bright-hued wool, cut it all up into short lengths, tie them together again in contrasting colors, and then crochet this hashed rainbow ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... to see. And what a sight it was! The clouds lay below us and a starlit sky above. At our feet the mountain fell away like a cliff, but it fell rather to a glacier than a sea—a glacier infinite as the ocean, yawning in crevasses, billowing in ridges; a glacier not of ice, but of vapour, changing form as one watched, opening here, closing there, rising, falling, shifting, while far away, at the uttermost verge, appeared a crimson crescent, then a red oval, then a yellow globe, swimming up above the clouds, touching their lights ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... pressed or their gloves cleaned in preparation) promenade like stupid black-and-white peacocks past uninteresting apartment-houses and uninspiring upper Broadway shops, while two blocks away glorious Riverside Drive, with its panorama of Hudson and hills and billowing clouds, its trees and secret walks and the Soldiers and Sailors Monument, is nearly deserted. Together they scorned the glossy well-to-do merchant in his newly ironed top-hat, and were thus drawn together. ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... came spices and aloes and sandalwood, nutmegs, spikenard and ebony, and riches beyond mention. Big junks laded these things, together with musk from Tibet, and bales of silk from all the cities of Mansi[C], and sailed away in and out of the East India Archipelago, with its spice-laden breezes billowing their sails, to Ceylon. There merchants from Malabar and the great trading cities of southern India took aboard their cargoes and sold them in turn to Arab merchants, who in their turn sold them to the Venetians in one or other of the Levantine ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power
... the Rockies go rolling and billowing far out to the east, and the entire stretch of country, from what are called the "Black Hills of Wyoming," in contradistinction to the Black Hills of Dakota, far east as the junction of the forks of the Platte, is one vast ...
— Starlight Ranch - and Other Stories of Army Life on the Frontier • Charles King
... Talbot turned white, and shouting, 'Save yourselves, it is the Standard-Bearer of Joan of Arc!' drove his spurs home till they met in the middle of his horse's entrails, and fled the field with his billowing multitudes at his back! I could have cursed myself for not putting on a disguise. I saw reproach in the eyes of her Excellency, and was bitterly ashamed. I had caused what seemed an irreparable disaster. Another might have gone aside to grieve, as not seeing any way to mend it; but ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... crumbling rails of what had once been the farm sheepfold. I looked at Archie and he smiled back at me, for he saw that my face had changed. Then he turned his eyes to the billowing clouds. ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... a wave Of ocean's billowing surge (Where Thrakian storm-winds rave, And floods of darkness from the depths emerge,) Rolls the black sand from out the lowest deep, And shores re-echoing wail, as rough blasts o'er them sweep. ...
— Story of Orestes - A Condensation of the Trilogy • Richard G. Moulton
... the city Eva found turmoil there. The first of the American troops to be sent to France were leaving. Michigan Boulevard was a billowing, surging mass: flags, pennants, banners, crowds. All the elements that make for demonstration. And over the whole-quiet. No holiday crowd, this. A solid, determined mass of people waiting patient hours to see the khaki-clads go by. Three years had brought ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber
... of the sheltering foot-hills looked warm and comfortable; naked but unashamed, the woods were smiling; southward, a long flash spoke of the sunlit peaks and the dead march of snow; and there, a league away, grey Pau was basking contentedly, her decent crinoline of villas billowing about her sides, lazily looking down on such a fuss and pother as might have bubbled out of the pot of Revolution, but was, in fact, the hospitable rite daily observed on the arrival of the ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates
... through cracks made by the earthquake in the cornices. Then the cloud grew denser. A puff of hot wind came from the west, and as if from the signal there streamed flamboyantly from every window in the top floor of the structure billowing banners, as a poppy colored silk that jumped skyward in curling, snapping breadths, a fearful heraldry of the ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... had retired to the cellar; but when the Germans entered to burn the city she stood there at the door watching the flames rolling up from the warehouses and factories in the distance. Nearer and nearer came the billowing tide of fire. A fountain of sparks shooting up from a house a few hundred yards away marked the advance of the firing squad into her street, but she never wavered. Down the street came the spoilers, relentless, ruthless, ...
— In the Claws of the German Eagle • Albert Rhys Williams
... came to El Paso, the more foreign and Mexican the country seemed, with its wild purple mountains billowing along the sunset sky of red and gold; its queer, Moorish-looking groups of brown huts, and its dark-skinned men in sombreros or huge straw hats with steeple crowns. It was quite a relief to draw into El Paso station where everything was suddenly modern ...
— Secret History Revealed By Lady Peggy O'Malley • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... this window; and with a smoldering pipe let himself to dreams. He was still in the uniform of the royal hunt, a meet having taken place that morning. He saw darling faces in the rugged outlines of the mountains, in the white clouds billowing across, in the patches of dazzling blue in between. Such is the fancy of a ...
— The Goose Girl • Harold MacGrath
... warm, but not enough to smoke, much less to catch. He muttered, "A drill, that's the idea. All the friction in one spot." He tugged at the ring under his lapel and the parachute fastened into his uniform collar shot out in a billowing mass of gossamer silk, flung out by the powerful elastics designed to make its opening certain. Savagely, he tore at the shrouds and had a stout cord. He made a drill and revolved it as fast as he could with ...
— Invasion • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... stolen car along it. He saw the strange steel embroidery of the landing grid rising to the height of a minor mountain against the sky. He drove furiously. Beyond it. He had seen the highway system from twenty miles height, and ten, and five. From somewhere near here stolen weather rockets had gone billowing skyward with explosive war heads to ...
— The Hate Disease • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... and flung past me to the house, this superb young creature, tall, slim, supple, a very Diana in her rage, a woman too if one might judge by the breasts billowing with rising sobs. More slow I followed, quite dashed to earth. All that I had gained by months of service in one moment had been lost. She would think me another of the Volney stamp, and her liking for me would turn to hate ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... slightly elevated, not far from the dais, his attention was at length challenged by an upheaving and billowing of purple and black. He looked, and in the same instant what seemed to have been a kind of storm centre resolved itself cloudily into Mrs. Medora Hastings, breathlessly resuming her seat, while Mr. Augustus Frothingham, in indescribably ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale
... twist around the hill's shoulder he stopped and pointed his hand. The view from there was almost county-wide, billowing away across heights and depths to a blue merging of hill ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... open window, listening to the dreary, monotonous patter of the rain, and to the distant sounds of moving horses and men, the rattle of wheels, the bugle calls, the departure of the allied troops to meet the armies of the great adventurer on the billowing ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... a wide expanse of rolling waters from their feet to Blackwells Island in the east, all hurling swiftly like a billowing floor of gray. Here and there whitecaps spouted. On Blackwells Island loomed the gray hospitals and workhouses, and at intervals on the shore ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim
... would be leveled, washes and arroyos filled, ditches would be made to the company canals, and in place of the thin growth of gray-green desert vegetation with the ragged patches of dun earth would come great fields of luxuriant alfalfa, billowing acres of grain, with miles upon miles of orchards, vineyards and groves. The fierce desert life would give way to the herds and flocks and the home life of the farmer. The railroad would stretch its steel strength into this new world; towns and cities would come ...
— The Winning of Barbara Worth • Harold B Wright
... With much billowing of the lower, less stiff part of her garments, she sailed to the cloudy mirror over the magazine-filled bookcase and inspected her cap of false curls, with many prods of her large firm hands which flashed with Brazilian diamonds. Though he had heard the word "puffs," he did not know that ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis
... wearing grey, with some of her old lace trimming it. It was a tabinet which I must have seen in my childhood. The memory of it was so remote that I felt as if I must have read about it; but I had an exact memory of the way it was made, which was billowing about the feet, and with a very straight bodice. While I looked at them she picked a rose from the wall and fastened ...
— The Story of Bawn • Katharine Tynan
... planet. It was so wonderful and mysterious, this new, white, moon-lit world. Away in the vast blue dome the stars smiled faintly, outshone by the glory of the big, round moon that rode high above the black tree-tops. The billowing drifts along the road blazed under a veil of diamonds, and the strip of ice on the pond, where Elizabeth and John had swept away the snow for a slide, shone like polished silver. The fields melted away gray and mysterious into the darkness of ...
— 'Lizbeth of the Dale • Marian Keith
... here I watched the flood, first as it covered the quays, tumbling in cascades of glittering water over the high parapet, trickling in little lines and pools, then rising into sheeted levels, then billowing in waves against the walls of the house, flooding the doors and the windows, until so far as the eye could reach there were only high towers remaining above its grasp. I do not know what happened to my security, and saw at length the waters stretch from sky ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... for proof of this. Poseidon is the lord of wind and wave. Now, there are waves of corn, under the wind, as well as waves of the sea. When the Suabian rustic sees the wave running over the corn, he says, Da lauft das Pferd, and Greeks before Homer would say, in face of the billowing corn, [Greek], There run horses! And Homer himself {51c} says that the horses of Erichthonius, children of Boreas, ran over cornfield and sea. We ourselves speak of sea-waves as 'white horses.' So, to be brief, Mannhardt explains the myth of Demeter Erinnys ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang
... represent a new world to her—this world of the forest, this region toward the sunset, which was quite as mysterious to her thinking as it was to the eyes of any plains-dweller. Her imagination went with the ranger on his solitary march into those vague, up-billowing masses of rocks and trees. To her there were many dangers, and she wondered ...
— Cavanaugh: Forest Ranger - A Romance of the Mountain West • Hamlin Garland
... quaintness of tone which wakens feelings, so strangely far-away from all the nineteenth-century part of me, that the faint blind stirrings of them make me afraid,—deliciously afraid. Never do I hear that billowing peal but I become aware of a striving and a fluttering in the abyssal part of my ghost,—a sensation as of memories struggling to reach the light beyond the obscurations of a million million deaths ...
— Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things • Lafcadio Hearn
... Courtenay stepped out and watched a moment. Bomb after bomb whizzed true and hard across the hollow, just skimmed the breastwork, struck on the trench wall that showed beyond and a foot above it, and fell behind the barricade. Billowing smoke-clouds and gusts of flame leaped and flashed above the parapet. Courtenay saw the chance and took it. He plunged out into the lake of mud and plowed through it towards the barricade, the men swarming behind him, and the sergeant's ...
— Action Front • Boyd Cable (Ernest Andrew Ewart)
... Black earth, fountains of earth rise, leaping, Spouting like shocks of meeting waves, Death's fountains are playing, Shells like shrieking birds rush over; Crash and din rises higher. A stream of lead raves Over us from the left ... (we safe under cover!) Crash! Reverberation! Crash! Acrid smoke billowing. Flash upon flash. Black smoke drifting. The German line Vanishes in confusion, smoke. Cries, and cry Of our men, 'Gah, yer swine! Ye're for it', die In a ...
— Georgian Poetry 1916-17 • Various
... all with a shout. We leaped up and stared blinkingly into the north. That whole region of the sky was aflame from zenith to horizon with spectral fires. It was the aurora. Not the pale, ragged glow, sputtering like the ghost of a huge lamp-flame, which is familiar to every one, but a billowing of color, rainbows gone mad! In the northeast the long rolling columns formed—many-colored clouds of spectral light whipped up as by a whirlwind—flung from eastward to westward, devouring Polaris and the Wain—rapid sequent towers ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... of unbridled pleasure had suddenly sprung upon them like a grisly spectre, torn their hearts, shaken them into tears. Or—and this happened often—a fantastic recognition of the obvious fact that even butterflies must die, had abruptly started into their minds, obtruding a skeleton head above the billowing chiffons, rattling its bones until the dismal sound outvied the frou-frou of silk, the burr of great waving fans, the click of high heels from Paris. Then, in terror, they drove to Doctor Levillier's door and begged to see him, if only for ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... times she passed the flat and looked up at the windows of her home, marked by the huge golden molar that projected, flashing, from the bay window of the "Parlors." She saw the open windows of the sitting-room, the Nottingham lace curtains stirring and billowing in the draft, and she caught sight of Maria Macapa's towelled head as the Mexican maid-of-all-work went to and fro in the suite, sweeping or carrying away the ashes. Occasionally in the windows of the "Parlors" she beheld ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... and Lily was laid there, to rest there for ever. There she lies, facing Italy, which she never knew but in dream. The wide country leading to Italy lies below her, the peaks of the rocky coast, the blue sea, the gray-green olives billowing like tides from hill to hill; the white loggias gleaming in the sunlight. His thoughts followed the flight of the blue mountain passes that lead so enticingly to Italy, and as he looked into the distance, dim and faint as the dream that had gone, there rose in his mind an even ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... man stood, overlooking the crowd. A soft breeze, playing about the torches, sent shadows billowing across the massed folk on the ground. Shrewdly set with an eye to theatrical effect, these phares of a night threw out from the darkness the square bulk of the man's figure, and, reflecting garishly upward from the naked hemlock of the platform, accentuated, as in bronze, ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... occurrence than a strong man's death, the littlest of the bells upon the western arch laughs while it calls to all to hearken; when a man is killed, the angry-toned bell pendant from the eastern arch shouts out the word to go billowing across the stretches of sage and greasewood and gama-grass; if one of the later-day frame buildings bursts into flame, Ignacio Chavez warns the town with a strident clamor, tugging frantically; be it wedding or discovery of gold or returns from ...
— The Bells of San Juan • Jackson Gregory
... we shipped, and after taking him aboard we were soon out of the harbor of Prairie Flower, and bearing away across the plain to the southwest. In twenty minutes we ware among the billowing sunflowers, standing five or six feet high on other side of the road, which seemed like a narrow crack winding through them. Ollie reached out and gathered a handful of the drooping yellow blossoms. The ...
— The Voyage of the Rattletrap • Hayden Carruth
... seventh ten showed more than twenty-seven thousand. The preparation may be as slow as the solemn gathering of the thunder-clouds, as they noiselessly steal into their places, and slowly upheave their grey billowing crests; the final success may be as swift as the lightning which flashes in an instant from one side of the heavens to the other. It takes long years to hew the tunnel, to 'make the crooked straight, and the rough places plain,' and then smooth and fleet the great power rushes along the rails. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... saw but did not heed. She was under the spell of the guns, the sound rose against the brightness of the day as a black cloud rises across the sky or a sorrow across one's life, insistent, rhythmical, a pall of sound now billowing, now sinking, as though ...
— The Ghost Girl • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... vocation. The crayons and the pen-and-ink drawings that I had seen in the library were his work. He had a pale, high forehead and a thick, upright grove of very soft, brown hair which I pictured as billowing in a breeze like a field of rye. "Just the kind of son for a poet ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... shall mention first of all the first one in A flat, which is rather a poem than an etude. It would be a mistake, however, to suppose that he brought out every one of the little notes with distinctness; it was more like a billowing of the A flat major chord, swelled anew here and there by means of the pedal; but through the harmonies were heard the sustained tones of a wondrous melody, and only in the middle of it did a tenor part once come into greater prominence amid the chords along with that principal cantilena. ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... for safer quarters, Miss Penny had started off towards the path which led precariously across the narrow neck to the mainland. The neck itself, with white clouds of mist billowing on either side, and streaming raggedly across the path, looked fearsome enough. She gave a startled cry and ...
— Pearl of Pearl Island • John Oxenham |
