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Cracking   /krˈækɪŋ/   Listen
Cracking

noun
1.
A sudden sharp noise.  Synonyms: crack, snap.  "He heard the cracking of the ice" , "He can hear the snap of a twig"
2.
The act of cracking something.  Synonyms: crack, fracture.
3.
The process whereby heavy molecules of naphtha or petroleum are broken down into hydrocarbons of lower molecular weight (especially in the oil-refining process).



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"Cracking" Quotes from Famous Books



... inflation. However, the Georgian Government has suffered from limited resources due to a chronic failure to collect tax revenues. Georgia's new government is making progress in reforming the tax code, enforcing taxes, and cracking down on corruption. Georgia also suffers from energy shortages; it privatized the T'bilisi electricity distribution network in 1998, but payment collection rates remain low, both in T'bilisi and throughout the regions. The country is pinning its hopes for long-term ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency

... apiece, which gave them the appearance of being armed to the teeth—a more determined-looking band cannot be imagined. The horses of these burghers were well bred and in good condition, and, although their clothes were threadbare, they seemed cheerful enough, smoking their pipes and cracking ...
— South African Memories - Social, Warlike & Sporting From Diaries Written At The Time • Lady Sarah Wilson

... nutpicks and bowls, and Mr. Maynard and Dick Fulton took the other two nutcrackers, and then work began in earnest. But the work was really play, and they all enjoyed cracking and picking out the nuts, though what they were doing it for nobody knew. But with so many at it, it was soon over, and the result was several bowlsful of kernels. The shells were thrown into the fire, and ...
— Marjorie's Busy Days • Carolyn Wells

... began to find means of dealing, not with the dependent family alone but with the family in danger of becoming dependent—not with the family broken and estranged only, but with the one whose bonds, even if cracking and ...
— Broken Homes - A Study of Family Desertion and its Social Treatment • Joanna C. Colcord

... you suppose has become of Mr. Thorn?" said Constance. "I have a presentiment that you will find him cracking nuts sociably with Mr. Rossitur, or drinking one of aunt Lucy's excellent cups of coffee, in ...
— Queechy, Volume II • Elizabeth Wetherell

... fiddle, and the hey-dey-diddle of his frolicking fiddle called back the happy days of my boyhood. The old field schoolhouse with its batten doors creaking on wooden hinges, its windows innocent of glass, and its great, yawning fireplace, cracking and roaring and flaming like the infernal regions, rose from the dust of memory and stood once more among the trees. The limpid spring bubbled and laughed at the foot of the hill. Flocks of nimble, noisy boys turned somersaults ...
— Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales • Robert L. Taylor

... dexterous swing he set it cracking over his horses' backs. The high-strung beasts plunged at their bits, and the leaders started to rear. Again he swung out his whip, and this time it flicked the plunging leaders. Instantly there was a rush of feet and a scrunch of wheels. The "tugs" pulled ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum

... at the start of the war and had seen a great deal of the open warfare at the commencement of hostilities. He said: "My friend Fritz is not through; he'll try to do some more yet." As the smoke died down and the cracking stopped, the enemy decided that an attempt would be made either to carry out salvage of whatever they had hit or else we would try to get the wounded away. So without any preliminary warning the whole area was covered by a battery fire of whiz bangs, and the shrapnel bullets came down ...
— "Crumps", The Plain Story of a Canadian Who Went • Louis Keene

... private residences. The shocks | | |appeared to advance from south to north. | | | 46 |1830 I 18 17 — | IX |Southern Luzon. Destructive in the | | |Provinces of Rizal, Laguna, and Tayabas. | | |In Manila the damage was confined to the | | |cracking of walls and the falling of such | | |as had little power of resistance; but | | |toward Laguna and Tayabas the destruction | | |was greater; the complete destruction of | | |the church and convento of Mauban is | | |expressly mentioned. | | ...
— Catalogue of Violent and Destructive Earthquakes in the Philippines - With an Appendix: Earthquakes in the Marianas Islands 1599-1909 • Miguel Saderra Maso

... n. 1. The art and science of cracking the phone network (so as, for example, to make free long-distance calls). 2. By extension, security-cracking in any other context (especially, but not exclusively, ...
— THE JARGON FILE, VERSION 2.9.10

... fled. A score of such terrible possibilities rushed through Ste. Marie's brain and tortured him. He was in a state of nervous tension that was almost unendurable, and the little noises of the night outside, a wind-stirred rustle of leaves, a bird's flutter among the branches, the sound of a cracking twig, made him start violently ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman

... with a quick gasp as the man's boot struck him and the cruel collar tightened; and at this sharp movement of his great body, there in the middle of the road, the pony shied violently, just as it was being drawn in to a standstill; the cart swerved sharply into the hedge, and a cracking sound betrayed the ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson

... Truscott's odd behavior and Ray's presence at the house were symptoms of a revival of that suspected flame. She was trying to draw Webb out when Gleason, looking black as a thunder-cloud and immensely melodramatic, came in to say good-by to her as she stood on the piazza. The stage came cracking in at the front gate at the moment and stopped below at Gleason's quarters, where the orderly began stowing in their ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King

... true; but across this moonbeam passed a sort of grey streak, for all the world as though some long thin shape had been withdrawn, snakelike, from the room, through the open window.... From somewhere outside the house, and below, I heard the cough again, followed by a sharp cracking sound like the lashing of ...
— The Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer

... turned out, there were none, or none to throw me back. At the stream-side, holding by an elder-bough, I tested the ice with my weight, proved it firm, crossed without so much as cracking it, and breasted a bare grassy slope, too little to be called a down, where a few naked hawthorns chafed and creaked in the wind. Above it was an embankment rounded like a bastion, up the left side of which I crept—or, you might almost say, crawled—and, reaching the top, found myself ...
— Corporal Sam and Other Stories • A. T. Quiller-Couch

... and the reason for having it, and not something else in its place; and he treated Fulkerson and Frescobaldi as if they were in league to impose upon him. There were moments when Fulkerson saw the varnish of professional politeness cracking on the Neapolitan's volcanic surface, and caught a glimpse of the lava fires of the cook's nature beneath; he trembled for Dryfoos, who was walking rough-shod over him in the security of an American who had known how to make his money, and must know how to spend it; but he got him ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... The latter building had a remoteness of prosperity far beyond the others, having been a wayside Spanish-American posada, with adobe walls of two feet in thickness, that shamed the later shells of half-inch plank, which were slowly warping and cracking like dried ...
— Mr. Jack Hamlin's Mediation and Other Stories • Bret Harte

... would not suffer the reins out of his own hands. There was something so grotesque in our appearance that I could not avoid shrinking into myself when I saw a gentleman-like man in the group which crowded round the door to observe us. I could have broken the driver's whip for cracking to call the women and children together, but seeing a significant smile on the face, I had before remarked, I burst into a laugh to allow him to do so too, and away we flew. This is not a flourish of the pen, for we actually went on full gallop a long ...
— Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark • Mary Wollstonecraft

... had in the Hebrew prophets—humour. A man must be very full of faith to jest about his divinity. No Neo-Pagan delicately suggesting a revival of Dionysus, no vague, half-converted Theosophist groping towards a recognition of Buddha, would ever think of cracking jokes on the matter. But to the Hebrew prophets their religion was so solid a thing, like a mountain or a mammoth, that the irony of its contact with trivial and fleeting matters struck them like a blow. So it was with Carlyle. His ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton

... china—by sticking it together; secondly, organic substance of armour which grows into its proper shape at once for good and all, and can't be mended at all, if broken, (as of insects); thirdly, organic substance of skin, which stretches, as the creatures grows, by cracking, over a fresh skin which is supplied beneath it, as in bark of trees; fourthly, organic substance of skin cracked symmetrically into plates or scales which can increase all round their edges, and are ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin

... The upper planking of the boat began to warp; here and there, cracking and splintering. But though we kept it moistened with brine, one of the plank-ends started from its place; and the sharp, sudden sound, breaking the scorching silence, caused us both to spring to our feet. Instantly the sea ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville

... leather lining to stiffen and keep the leg part in place, are cooler and more comfortable than any other kind. A pair of boot-hooks will be required for putting them on, and a boot-jack for taking them off. A little Lucca oil used occasionally prevents patent leather from cracking. The dry mud should be brushed off soiled boots with a soft brush that will not scratch the leather, and they should then be sponged over with a damp sponge and polished with a selvyt or chamois ...
— The Horsewoman - A Practical Guide to Side-Saddle Riding, 2nd. Ed. • Alice M. Hayes

... you'll read no more when you get to this point. I allow you've provocation for it. But come now—would you, any of you, give a fig for a fellow who didn't believe in and stand up for his own house and his own school? You know you wouldn't. Then don't object to me cracking up the old School house, Rugby. Haven't I a right to do it, when I'm taking all the trouble of writing this true history for all of your benefits? If you ain't satisfied, go and write the history ...
— Tom Brown's Schooldays • Thomas Hughes

... of our conflicting glances was unbroken for several seconds, and then words came uncontrollably from my mouth and I managed to snap that nerve-cracking tension. ...
— The Homicidal Diary • Earl Peirce

... a tremendous shock, as if the earth had quaked and opened beneath me, and this was followed by a deafening uproar, the clashing of stones, the cracking of wood and glass, the grating and crushing of iron, and the pitiful cries of men, women, and children. The great mass of rock broke through the protecting barricade and rushed right upon the engine. The ...
— Dr. Dumany's Wife • Mr Jkai

... to hold in her cracking brain, and wabbled out into new scenes of mud and wetness, but she came up to the young man with the most rain-washed and careless of smiles. "Won't you come back and meet my father? He's terribly grateful to you—as I am. And may we—— You've worked so hard, and about saved ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis

... shell of an egg, is a fused mass, kept fluid by heat—a heat of 450,000 deg. Fahrenheit, at the center, Cordier calculates—but constantly cooling, and contracting its dimensions;" and occasionally cracking and falling in, and "squeezing upward large portions of the mass;" "thus producing those folds or wrinkles which we call mountain chains;" or, with Davy and Lyell, that the heat of such a boiling ocean below would melt the solid crust, like ice from the surface of boiling water—and with it ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson

... the artillery officers,—to Captain Taylor, Captain Dresser, and Captain Schwartz, telling them where to place their guns. As he rode over the hills and through the ravines, he passed the sharpshooters. Their rifles were cracking merrily. Among them was the soldier whom Paul had helped on the march. The soldier saluted him. Paul saw that he was not only ...
— Winning His Way • Charles Carleton Coffin

... "4th. LOBSTER-CRACKING.—An external pressure of the magnetic atmosphere surrounding the person assailed. Williams has been so operated on, and says he felt as if he was grasped by an enormous pair of nut-crackers with teeth, and subjected to a piercing pressure, which he still remembers with horror. ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade

... bringing its western margin in closer contact with the eastern edge of the floe that lay within it. The movement could be seen merely by the closing of the channel through which the boat had come, and by the cracking and crushing of the ice on the edges of the two fields. So tremendous was the pressure, however, that cakes as large as a small house were broken off, and forced upward on the surface of the field, or ground into small fragments, as it might be under the ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper

... one o'clock, when their father and uncle were galloping here and there in search of them, they were sitting at their rock table cracking more nuts, and listening proudly to the mimic roar of the water going over the dam ...
— Harper's Young People, September 21, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various

... he was; there was no sign of habitation—or even occupation—anywhere. He had been too terrified to notice the direction in which he had drifted—even if he had possessed the ordinary knowledge of a backwoodsman, which he did not. He was helpless. In his bewildered state, seeing a squirrel cracking a nut on the branch of a hollow tree near him, he made a half-frenzied dart at the frightened animal, which ran away. But the same association of ideas in his torpid and confused brain impelled him to search for the squirrel's hoard ...
— A Drift from Redwood Camp • Bret Harte

... Pohjola's old Mistress, Crone of Sariola the misty, Sometimes out of doors employ her, Sometimes in the house was busied; And she heard how whips were cracking, On the shore heard sledges rattling, And her eyes she turned to northward, Towards the sun her head then turning, And she pondered and reflected, "Wherefore are these people coming 10 On my shore, to me unhappy? Is it perhaps a ...
— Kalevala, Volume I (of 2) - The Land of the Heroes • Anonymous

... busy in camp with the packing for the voyage, had shared in the gloom of my temporary defeat. But now, as I plunged past them, I could see them leaping into the air and cracking their heels together with delight. They had wet every plank of her with their sweat, and they were as proud as I. In the light of the following days, their delight dwindled into a ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt

... the calamity possibly ensuing to our son; fourthly, reference to the unhappiness likely to result to herself." And, interlacing his fingers, Alexey Alexandrovitch stretched them, and the joints of the fingers cracked. This trick, a bad habit, the cracking of his fingers, always soothed him, and gave precision to his thoughts, so needful to him ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy

... distributes stellar essences to the sleeping flowers. All birds that fly have round their leg the thread of the infinite. Germination is complicated with the bursting forth of a meteor and with the peck of a swallow cracking its egg, and it places on one level the birth of an earthworm and the advent of Socrates. Where the telescope ends, the microscope begins. Which of the two possesses the larger field of vision? Choose. A bit of mould is a pleiad of flowers; a nebula is an ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo

... I saw in the doubtful twilight a post- chaise and four come out of the gateway of the Red Horse inn, heard the whips cracking and the horses pawing the ground when the driver stopped on the highroad, close to the tree on the roots of which Friar Ange was sitting. It was not an ordinary post-chaise, but a very large, clumsy vehicle, having room to seat four, ...
— The Queen Pedauque • Anatole France

... the night I could hear the gay music of the bells and hoofs, the rumbling of the wheels the cracking of the eternal whip, as I fidgeted from one familiar lap to the other in search of sleep; and waking out of a doze I could see the glare of the red lamps on the five straining white and gray backs that dragged us so gallantly through the ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al

... desperate resistance. Then, at last, when his head almost touched the ground, Darius groaned and his limbs relaxed. Instantly Zoroaster threw him on his back and kneeled with his whole weight upon his chest,—the gilded scales of the corselet cracking beneath the burden, and he held the king's hands down on either side, pinioned to the floor. Darius struggled desperately twice and then lay quite still. Zoroaster gazed down upon ...
— Marzio's Crucifix and Zoroaster • F. Marion Crawford

... the slow champings of a huge governmental machine in travail, there was little to do but wait, and in the interim not a day that he and Mrs. Becker failed to follow up this or that newest device against bone-cracking seas. ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst

... know whether he liked her, and I don't care, but what I'm not going to do is to wait here listening to you all cracking up a landlady's ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore

... "What's the matter with you? Why do you care? You can't care! What is it to you that a drunken beast slinks back into hell again? Do you think you are Samaritan enough to follow him and try to drag him out by the ears?... A man whose very brain is already cracking with it all—a burnt-out thing with neither ...
— In Secret • Robert W. Chambers

... the rifle play. They saw the cook-house disrupt itself and disintegrate into a thousand flying timbers and twisted sheets of tin which soared upward and outward over their heads and into the night. As the rocking hills ceased echoing, the sound of the Vigilantes' rifles recurred like the cracking of dry sticks, then everywhere about the defenders the earth was lashed by falling debris while the iron roofs ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach

... but his lordship, after laughing heartily, was politer, and knew better about manners than all that; so, bidding the flunkies hurry away with the fragments of the china jugs and jars, they found themselves, sweating with terror and vexation, ranged along silk settees, cracking about ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - Tailor in Dalkeith, written by himself • David Macbeth Moir

... of an excessive amount of sulphate may result in cracking the grids, and the active materials falls out in lumps. Such plates may be put in a serviceable condition by a long charge and several cycles of charge and discharge if there is not too much cracking or too much ...
— The Automobile Storage Battery - Its Care And Repair • O. A. Witte

... cried the postillion. 'House!' And, cracking his whip on his boot, he looked up at the rows ...
— The Castle Inn • Stanley John Weyman

... and Phronsie held fast to the other of the bonbon, and a sharp little report gave the signal for all the bonbons to be opened. Thereupon, everybody, old and young, hurried to secure one, and great was the snapping and cracking that now followed. ...
— Five Little Peppers Grown Up • Margaret Sidney

... red eyes rolling. Finally the bear, nearly exhausted, made a sudden charge, the bull leaped aside, backed again with incredible swiftness, caught the bear in the belly, tossed him so high that he met the hard earth with a loud cracking of bone. The vaqueros circled about the maddened bull, set his hide thick with arrows, tripped him with the lasso. A wiry little Mexican in yellow, galloping in on his mustang, administered the coup de grace amidst the wild applause ...
— Rezanov • Gertrude Atherton

... down to find the whole neighborhood in a ferment, and many pleasant illusions, in the shelter of which she had walked for years, both before and since her husband's death, questioned, at least, and cracking, if not shattered. That the Corystons were model landlords, that they enjoyed a feudal popularity among their tenants and laborers, was for Lady Coryston one of the axioms on which life was based. She despised people who starved their ...
— The Coryston Family • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... keep only two stablemen; one to take care of the horses and one to act as groom. I'm off. I've a cracking good hunter, if you'd like a leg up. We'll all ride out to Chevy Chase Sunday. ...
— The Man on the Box • Harold MacGrath

... child like me—Mr Carstairs depressed as he generally was, poor man!—I with a heavy weight inside me, feeling all of a sudden as if I hated parties and everything about them, and dear little Mr Nash, happy and complacent, cracking jokes to which no one deigned to listen. Isn't it funny to think how miserable you can be when you are supposed to be enjoying yourself? I dare say if you only knew it, lots of people have aching hearts when you ...
— The Heart of Una Sackville • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey

... men who have to crack the heads of animals all day seem to get into the habit, and to practice on their friends, and even on their families, between times. This makes it a cause for congratulation that by modern methods a very few men can do the painfully necessary work of head-cracking for the whole of ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair

... collar of his coat, sallied forth into the street. His first destination was intended to be the Governor's mansion, and, as he walked along, certain thoughts concerning the Governor's daughter would keep whirling through his head, so that almost he forgot where he was, and took to smiling and cracking jokes to himself. ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol

... were any road; and, as I did it, past the gate, full in view there swept at a gallop, first three guards riding abreast, a brave blaze of colour in the dusky lane; then the four grey horses, with their postilions cracking their whips; then the coach; and, as this passed, as plain as a picture I saw the King lean forward and look—his great hat and periwig thrust forward—and behind him another man. Then the coach was gone; and two more guards flew by and ...
— Oddsfish! • Robert Hugh Benson

... retentive of good phrases which had once come up under his pen, as that witty phrase about crushing and cracking had come up in the course of a brief note scribbled on a half-sheet of paper. The phrase reappears five years afterwards, elaborated into an impressive sentence, in the preface to The Rod, the Root, and the Flower, ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons

... the vegetables and seasoning will cost about five cents; add one pint of water, put on the cover of the jar, and cement it in place with a paste of flour and water, which you must grease a little to prevent cracking; then put the jar into a moderately hot oven, and bake it about four hours. With the addition of bread and butter it makes a hearty meal, and costs ...
— Twenty-Five Cent Dinners for Families of Six • Juliet Corson

... glass can be used for soft boiling or poaching up to November. Before boiling such eggs prick a tiny hole in the large end of the shell with a needle to keep them from cracking, as the preservative seals the pores of the shell and prevents the escape of gases, which is possible in the ...
— Every Step in Canning • Grace Viall Gray

... the fore and aft stays, and when it was judicious to do it the pinch on the main rigging was also eased to give the masts more play. The windjammer seamen knew when this order was given that they were in for a time of "cracking on," and really enjoyed both the sport and the risk that it involved, even in the hands of skilful commanders. By this means the speed was always increased, and it was quite a common practice on tea-clippers, Australian passenger vessels, and American packets. The commander rarely ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman

... Lucerne. Boys went about from house to house begging for wood and straw, then piled the fuel on a conspicuous mountain or hill round about a pole, which bore a straw effigy called "the witch." At nightfall the pile was set on fire, and the young folks danced wildly round it, some of them cracking whips or ringing bells; and when the fire burned low enough, they leaped over it. This was called "burning the witch." In some parts of the canton also they used to wrap old wheels in straw and thorns, put a light ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer

... piled up on the lawn. The men-servants came and looked after these; they had done all they could elsewhere; they left the work to the firemen now, and there was little hope of saving the house. The window-frames were smoking, and the panes were cracking with the heat, and fire was running along the piazza roofs before we left the building. The water ...
— We Girls: A Home Story • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney

... hear Linnell's voice sharply hailing somebody in the boiler-room passage. Presently he saw him running by the bulkhead door; and then, from the far end of the passage, his voice cracking out like a whip: "Back, I say! Back, you dogs, back to your stations! I'll tell you ...
— Sonnie-Boy's People • James B. Connolly

... as Chippy saw the waggon an idea popped into his mind, and he hurried forward to meet the great vehicle. He kept among the bushes so that the driver did not see him. The latter, indeed, from his high perch, was too busy cracking his whip over his team to urge them to the ascent to see that small, gliding figure slipping through the gorse. So Chippy dodged behind the waggon, swung himself up by the tail-board, and climbed in as nimbly as a cat. The forepart ...
— The Wolf Patrol - A Tale of Baden-Powell's Boy Scouts • John Finnemore

... the A. D. C.! Their performance of TOM TAYLOR'S romantic, pathetic, melodramatic, crib-cracking, head- (though not always side-) splitting play, was an admirable one, carefully rehearsed, well stage-managed, and played with a fine feeling for the capital situations in which the piece abounds. Especially good was Mr. BROMLEY-DAVENPORT'S ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, February 4, 1893 • Various

... Salagrams, which he had found at the hut of some priest within the enemy's frontier. He called for a large stone and hammer, and proceeded to examine them. The Hindoos were all in a dreadful state of consternation, and expected to see the earth open and swallow up the whole camp, while he sat calmly cracking their gods with his hammer, as he would have cracked so many walnuts. The Tulasi is a small sacred shrub (Ocymum sanctum), which is a metamorphosis of Sita, the wife of Rama, the ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman

... ball. Experience could not teach him. He parted with the ball and got it again, twice. The devil was in him and in the ball. The devil was driving him towards Myatt. They met. And then came a sound quite new: a cracking sound, somewhat like the snapping of a bough, ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett

... called, and his voice came back through the echoing depths beyond. Presently a man could be dimly seen clinging to a cross-piece in an alcove made for an air-shaft from the main working. To get to him the treacherous ground must be crossed, with its cracking roof, through which the sand slid even yet, and under the ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine

... the catastrophe had been preceded by "horrible da-da-da-bang" sounds and lightnings, and that it was accompanied by "thunderbolts and heavy thick smoke." The old woman had beheld "soil boiling and cracking." ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott

... for horse-flesh, and the four dapple-greys which pressed their fine shoulders into the harness of his breaking plow might have delighted the heart of any teamster. As he sat on his steel seat and watched the colter cut the firm sod with brittle cracking sound as it snapped the tough roots of the wild roses, or looking back saw the regular terraces of shiny black mould which marked his progress, he felt that he was engaged in a rite of almost ...
— Dennison Grant - A Novel of To-day • Robert Stead

... Instead he dashed into the open space in front of the custom house, just as the marines swept by, his hat off and his rifle cracking as fast ...
— The Broncho Rider Boys with Funston at Vera Cruz - Or, Upholding the Honor of the Stars and Stripes • Frank Fowler

... upon his knees beside his father on the polished oaken floor of the gallery, and giddy now with the heat and exhaustion, his lips cracking, and every breath he drew laden with the poisonous fumes, he felt that all was over, and, with a prayer coming confusedly to his mind, he made a snatch at his father's hand, ...
— Crown and Sceptre - A West Country Story • George Manville Fenn

... he perceived that the roadway was now a crying mass of wagons, teams, and men. From the heaving tangle issued exhortations, commands, imprecations. Fear was sweeping it all along. The cracking whips bit and horses plunged and tugged. The white-topped wagons strained and stumbled in ...
— The Red Badge of Courage - An Episode of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane

... producer is that he should continually realize a surplus: otherwise his existence is precarious, monotonous, fatiguing. The interest due to the capitalist by the producer therefore is like the lash of the planter cracking over the head of the sleeping slave; it is the voice of progress crying: "On, on! Toil, toil!" Man's destiny pushes him to happiness: that is ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon

... water and rubbed over one of the flattish surfaces of the stone slightly to moisten it, and is then beaten against the outer surface of the bowl, while the stone, tapped against the inner surface, prevents indenting or cracking, and, by offering a more or less nonresisting surface, assists in thinning and expanding the clay. After the upper part of the bowl has been thus completed the potter sits on her feet and haunches, with her knees ...
— The Bontoc Igorot • Albert Ernest Jenks

... square man, in a wet overcoat, fumbled his way into the damp entrance of the house, stumbled up the cracking stairs, unlocked, after many languid efforts, the door of the two rooms, and falling over the hair-trunk, slept until the morning sunbeams climbed over the balcony and in at the window, and shone full on the back of his head. Old Kookoo, passing the door just then, ...
— Old Creole Days • George Washington Cable

... such peasants springing up now. What a shame! You ought to hear them shout and fight at the village assemblies. The other day when Vosynkov was sold out for arrears he dealt the starosta (bailiff) a cracking blow on the face. 'There are my arrears for ...
— Mother • Maxim Gorky

... the gallery, where the servants were already arranged on their knees, praying and crossing themselves with all their might. The shock lasted above a minute and a half, and I believe has done no injury, except in frightening the whole population, and cracking a few old walls. All Mexico was on its knees while it lasted, even the poor madmen in San Hepolito, which A—— had gone to visit in company with Seor ——-. I have had a feeling of sea-sickness ever since. They expect a return of the shock in twenty-four hours. ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca

... heavy axe and a stout arm there is no need for that. I had begun this weapon," continued the youth, as if he were musing aloud rather than speaking to his companion, "with intent to try its metal on the head of the King; but I fear me it will be necessary to use it in cracking a viking's headpiece before it cleaves ...
— Erling the Bold • R.M. Ballantyne

... him fascinated with her little black eyes. His jaw fallen, the expression of his loose mouth was horrible. Suddenly she thrust her face close to his. Her eyes burned and the blood surged through the distended veins under the cracking rouge. Her lips formed the ...
— In the Quarter • Robert W. Chambers

... "That it would be proper to take the depositions of the witnesses against them." Which he bid him do, and he would light his pipe in the meantime. Whilst the clerk was employed in writing down the deposition of the fellow who had pretended to be robbed, the justice employed himself in cracking jests on poor Fanny, in which he was seconded by all the company at table. One asked, "Whether she was to be indicted for a highwayman?" Another whispered in her ear, "If she had not provided herself a great belly, he was at her service." A third said, "He warranted she was a relation of Turpin." ...
— Joseph Andrews Vol. 1 • Henry Fielding

... sorrowfully at the rug. Too well he realized that Cappy had the whip hand and was fully capable of cracking the ...
— Cappy Ricks • Peter B. Kyne

... this was the day of the Highland gathering of the county. A dance was going on as he approached, and four tall and stalwart Highlanders in complete national costumes, bonneted and kilted, were leaping and wheeling, cracking their fingers and uttering shrill cries as they danced with astonishing vigour and adroitness ...
— Little Folks (Septemeber 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various

... crawled to the stair-head, leaving our invisible enemies cracking away at the fire basket, knocking little cascades of sparks out of it, indeed, but doing no harm. For the beacon was thoroughly well alight, and the ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett

... other, of ages the most different. Thus, then, we have distinct and conclusive evidence, that as we inferred from theory, the solid crust of the globe has been shattered and fractured repeatedly, and at all the different epochs of its history. This fracturing and cracking we have shown, must, in conformity with strict mechanical laws, have been attended with the rise of the molten liquid from beneath, which ought in some cases to have formed veins and dykes, in the places where the fractures occurred. It is however possible, that the rise of the fluid from beneath, ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various

... than those that had gone before, and during the day which followed the place became like a hell. They crept into the cave and lay there gasping, while from without came loud cracking sounds, caused, as they thought, by the trees of the forest splitting in the heat. About midday the sky suddenly became densely overcast, although no breath stirred; the air was thicker than ever, to breathe it was like breathing hot cream. In their restless despair they wandered out ...
— The Ghost Kings • H. Rider Haggard

... RUFFLES.) Eh God! how still the house is! There's something in hypocrisy after all. If we were as good as we seem, what would the world be? [The city has its vizard on, and we - at night we are our naked selves. Trysts are keeping, bottles cracking, knives are stripping; and here is Deacon Brodie flaming forth the man of men he is!] - How still it is! . . . My father and Mary - Well! the day for them, the night for me; the grimy cynical night that ...
— The Plays of W. E. Henley and R. L. Stevenson

... to the cross-trees; and here it looked rather squally. The foot of the top-gallant-mast was working between the cross and trussel trees, and the mast lay over at a fearful angle with the topmast below, while everything was working and cracking, strained to the utmost. ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana

... Children of Darkness, saying, "Yes, we know you, you are Children of Light!"—and so has fallen all out at elbows in body and in soul; and now having lost its potatoes is come as it were to a crisis; all its windy nonsense cracking suddenly to pieces under its feet: a very pregnant crisis indeed! A country cast suddenly into the melting-pot,—say into the Medea's-Caldron; to be boiled into horrid dissolution; whether into new youth, into sound healthy ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson

... Toomsville-Montgomery highway dipped to the stream that fed the Cresswell swamp squatted a square barn that slept through day and weeks in dull indifference. But on the First Sunday it woke to sudden mighty life. The voices of men and children mingled with the snorting of animals and the cracking of whips. Then came the long drone and sing-song of the preacher with its sharp wilder climaxes and the answering "amens" and screams of the worshippers. This was the shrine of the Baptists—shrine and oracle, centre and source of inspiration—and ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois

... yet! yes I will! no I will not! I am going; I cannot stay till I turn over.(21) What shall I do? My fingers itch; and now I have it in my left hand; and now I will open it this very moment.—I have just got it, and am cracking the seal, and cannot imagine what is in it; I fear only some letter from a bishop, and it comes too late; I shall employ nobody's credit but my own. Well, I see though— Pshaw, 'tis from Sir Andrew Fountaine. What, another! I fancy that's from Mrs. Barton;(22) she told me ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift

... ambition soars at random; he is light-hearted, generous, and enthusiastic; in short, the fledgling bird has discovered that he has wings. A poor student snatches at every chance pleasure much as a dog runs all sorts of risks to steal a bone, cracking it and sucking the marrow as he flies from pursuit; but a young man who can rattle a few runaway gold coins in his pocket can take his pleasure deliberately, can taste the whole of the sweets of secure possession; ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac

... I recollect in the good old times. The town of Calais has bought the old hotel, and "Dessein" has gone over to "Quillacq's." And I was there yesterday. And I remember old diligences, and old postilions in pigtails and jack-boots, who were once as alive as I am, and whose cracking whips I have heard in the midnight many and many a time. Now, where are they? Behold they have been ferried over Styx, and ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray

... they had become so suddenly dull. What was his dismay to find that they were not near him. Both were stretched their length, as it seemed, on the ice, at a considerable distance. As he turned he was conscious of a cracking noise, which seemed to pass from one end of the lake to the other. Still he must reach his brothers, or attempt to do so, even should the ice be giving way ...
— The Log House by the Lake - A Tale of Canada • William H. G. Kingston

... one of the most useful men of the ship's crew. Called into requisition, doubtless, in the conferences as to the condition of the SPEEDWELL, on both of her returns to port, at the inception of the voyage, he was especially in evidence when, in mid-ocean, "the cracking and bending of a great deck-beam," and the "shaken" condition of "the upper works" of the MAY-FLOWER, gave rise to much alarm, and it was by his labors and devices, and the use of the now famous "jack-screw," that the bending beam and ...
— The Mayflower and Her Log, Complete • Azel Ames

... in 1886, the injury caused by it being largely due to the fact that it passed through a populous city. As it occurred after many of the people had retired, the confusion and terror due to it were greatly augmented, people fleeing in panic fear from the tumbling and cracking houses to seek refuge in the ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various

... of civilization was thin; the true savage was cracking out through it. In the days of the Mutiny Umballa would have been the Nana Sahib's right hand. He would have given the tragedy at Cawnpur an ...
— The Adventures of Kathlyn • Harold MacGrath

... from the wharf. A smart, cold breeze gushed out of the north-west. The huge, dim-white sails were filling: "The Curlew" gathered way, and stood out to sea. The chilling breeze, the motion, the ink-black waves, and their sharp cracking on the beach, were altogether a little disheartening at first, coming so suddenly from sleep. We felt not a little inclined to shrink back to our warm blankets; but, mastering this feeling, braced our courage, and drew breath ...
— Left on Labrador - or, The cruise of the Schooner-yacht 'Curlew.' as Recorded by 'Wash.' • Charles Asbury Stephens

... always came and felled some of the largest trees. This happened every year; and the young Fir tree, that had now grown to a very comely size, trembled at the sight; for the magnificent great trees fell to the earth with noise and cracking, the branches were lopped off, and the trees looked long and bare: they were hardly to be recognized; and then they were laid in carts, and the horses dragged them out of ...
— The Junior Classics, Volume 1 • Willam Patten

... men were watching alertly at the loopholes. Occasionally they would fire at some partly exposed Indians, and then dodge back as a straggling volley of bullets pelted the stockade. Over on the east side muskets were cracking in the same desultory fashion. The storm showed no signs of abating. On the contrary, the snow was falling more thickly and in finer flakes, and a bitter wind was constantly heaping it in higher drifts, and blowing it in blinding, eddying showers ...
— The Cryptogram - A Story of Northwest Canada • William Murray Graydon

... I had feared to light my candle lest I should make a mark of myself, but now, after cracking my shin over a box, and catching my spurs in some canvas, I thought the bolder course the wiser. I lit it, therefore, and then I advanced with long strides, my sword in my hand. 'Come out, you rascal!' ...
— The Exploits Of Brigadier Gerard • Arthur Conan Doyle

... beautiful you are, Fire! Out from your ruddy center shoot tatters and shreds of gold, sudden spurts of blue, and smoke that twists upwards and draws queer shapes of beasts ... Oh, but I'm hot! Gently, gently, sovereign Fire, see how my truffle of a nose is drying up and cracking, and my ears—are they not ablaze? I adjure thee with suppliant paw. I groan ... ah ... I can endure it no longer!... (He turns away.) Nothing is ever perfect. The east wind coming under the door nips my hind-legs. Well, it can't be helped! I'll freeze behind if I must, provided I can ...
— Barks and Purrs • Colette Willy, aka Colette

... "Only this old floor cracking. Don't flatter it by noticing. How odd to find, meeting in this way, that we are both searching for the same ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison

... which seems to have been sometimes resorted to, both in poems and pictures; namely, in the sympathy excited by excruciating bodily suffering. Suppose a man on the rack to be placed before us,—perhaps some miserable victim of the Inquisition; the cracking of his joints is made frightfully audible; his calamitous "Ah!" goes to our marrow; then the cruel precision of the mechanical familiar, as he lays bare to the sight his whole anatomy of horrors. And suppose, ...
— Lectures on Art • Washington Allston

... minutes: less time than that in boiling water will not be sufficient to solidify the white, and more will make the yolk hard and less digestible: it is very difficult to guess accurately as to the time. Great care should be employed in putting them into the water, to prevent cracking the shell, which inevitably causes a portion of the white to exude, and lets water into the egg. Eggs are often beaten up raw ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton

... Poe Tato-Bug say, but flying and jumping she hurried home. Her red speckled wings kept cracking louder and louder as she hurried along ...
— The Cheerful Cricket and Others • Jeannette Marks

... scream drowned out her words, a woman's voice ranging swiftly the staccato gamut of terror and cracking discordantly on ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance

... back-filling open cuts, the material backing up the haunches is more or less loosened and therefore is not at first compact enough to prevent the spreading of the haunches when the load comes on the arch. This causes cracking, but, as soon as the haunches have been pressed out against the solid material, the cracking usually ceases, unless the pressure has been ...
— Pressure, Resistance, and Stability of Earth • J. C. Meem

... coachman's whip got caught in the harness so that he could not liberate it, as it often did on the road, the conductor would climb down, run forward to the horses, set the snapper free, fall back to the coach, catch hold of the side and climb up, the coachman cracking his whip as soon as it was freed, and urging on his horses to a gallop, without troubling himself at all to consider how the conductor ...
— Rollo in Switzerland • Jacob Abbott

... Republican associates, and a majority of them were opposed to any change. Francis E. Spinner, of New York, said he would never change his vote from me, and Thaddeus Stevens said he never would do so until the crack of doom. When afterwards reminded of this Mr. Stevens said he thought he "heard it cracking." ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman

... darkish, we saw the fire as only one entire arch of fire from this to the other side the bridge, and in a bow up the hill for an arch of above a mile long: it made me weep to see it. The churches, houses, and all on fire, and flaming at once; and a horrid noise the flames made, and the cracking houses at their ruine. So home with a sad heart, and there find every body discoursing and lamenting the fire; and poor Tom Hater come with some few of his goods saved out of his house, which was burned upon Fish-street Hill. I invited him to lie at my house, and did receive ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys

... rose in the air from various parts of the bands, each the scene of some obstinate fight. Indians and buffalo make the poetry and life of the prairie, and our camp was full of their exhilaration. In place of the quiet monotony of the march, relieved only by the cracking of the whip, and an 'avance donc! enfant de garce!' shouts and songs resounded from every part of the line, and our evening camp was always the commencement of a feast, which terminated only with our departure on the following morning. At any time of the night ...
— The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, from Facts Narrated by Himself • De Witt C. Peters

... and some of woven horse-hair, alternately coated with a tree varnish, ash, and clay, polished in laths and covered with faintly raised designs and colours between, and brought to a polished surface. The best is so elastic that one side of a tumbler or box can be pressed to meet the other without cracking the colour inlay. They seem to cost a good deal, but when you examine them, the intricacies of the designs of figures and foliage account for the price. The groups of sellers on the shore were interesting, but there was altogether loo much orange vermilion for my particular ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch

... and, after a long, stealthy glance towards the house, had advanced to the extreme boundary of the potato patch. His behaviour here for the first time seemed to denote the hopeless lunatic. He swung his long arms backward and forwards, cracking his fingers, and talked unintelligibly to himself, hoarse, guttural murmurings without sense or import. Trent changed his place and for the first time saw the Kru boy. His face darkened and an angry exclamation broke from his lips. It was something like this ...
— A Millionaire of Yesterday • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... struck cold to his heart, and touching his horse with the spur, he dashed off at a hand-gallop. Meeting the Bristol night-wagon beyond the bend of the road he was by it in a second. Nevertheless, the bells ringing at the horses' necks, the cracking whips, the tilt lurching white through the dusk somewhat reassured him. Reducing his pace, and a little ashamed of his fears, he entered the inn grounds by the stable entrance, threw his reins to a man—who ...
— The Castle Inn • Stanley John Weyman

... for charity coming to him to seek help for an orphan's home. It was a pathetic mess at times, but so are all defiant variations from the accustomed drift of things. In the hardy language of Napoleon, one cannot make an omelette without cracking a number of eggs. ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser

... city-visits, and may be relieve a Circassienne, who has confessed herself weary amidst a shower of calumnies. Go! thou wilt be consulted in the kitchens of many critics; they will fly thy light, and like the screech-owl, retreat into thy shadow. Ho, ho, ho! Already I hear the ear-cracking howls in the inhospitable forest, and anxiously conceal ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller

... Piccadilly Circus. As he strolled home towards Belgrave Square, he met the great waggons on their way to Covent Garden. The white-smocked carters, with their pleasant sunburnt faces and coarse curly hair, strode sturdily on, cracking their whips, and calling out now and then to each other; on the back of a huge grey horse, the leader of a jangling team, sat a chubby boy, with a bunch of primroses in his battered hat, keeping tight hold of the mane with his little hands, and laughing; and the great piles of vegetables ...
— Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories • Oscar Wilde

... glad! I don't know when I've felt such a flutter about my heart. But, anyway, I secured a cracking good snapshot of that burning bridge. Every time we look at it we can remember our hold-up," observed Will, ...
— The Outdoor Chums After Big Game - Or, Perilous Adventures in the Wilderness • Captain Quincy Allen

... scene was destroyed after that. These two gentlemen went on cracking jokes during the whole of the subsequent performance, to their own amusement, but the indignation of their company, and perhaps of the people in the adjacent boxes. Young Douglas, in those days, used ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray

... aloft was ballooning out, and the ropes slatting and cracking, with blocks banging against the spars, all making a regular pandemonium of noise, in conjunction with the hoarse shriek of the sou'-wester and the clashing of the billows when they broke, buffeting the Denver City as if they would smash in her ...
— The Island Treasure • John Conroy Hutcheson

... began to be mingled with other trees. The undergrowth was thicker and more tangled. It was not always easy for Cuthbert to force his way along. He paused sometimes in fear lest his steps and the cracking of the boughs should be heard by the ...
— The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn - A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot • Evelyn Everett-Green

... and admits the finer parts of the surrounding fluid. In order to reach the muscles, this cement must be broke with large hammers; and it may be truly said, the kernal is not worth the trouble of cracking the shell. [These are found in great plenty at Ancona and other parts of the Adriatic, where they go by the name of Bollani, as we are informed by Keysler.] Among the fish of this country, there is a very ugly animal of the eel species, which might pass for a serpent: it is of a dusky, black ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett

... out, Bob!" cried Lennox, for the firing from the farther bank suddenly ceased, and the rustling and cracking of twigs somewhere overhead told that the ...
— The Kopje Garrison - A Story of the Boer War • George Manville Fenn

... spaniel—snapping, yelling and whining, with score of lolling tongues and waving tails, came surging down the narrow lane which leads from the Twynham kennels to the bank of Avon. Two russet-clad varlets, with loud halloo and cracking whips, walked thigh-deep amid the swarm, guiding, controlling, and urging. Behind came Sir Nigel himself, with Lady Loring upon his arm, the pair walking slowly and sedately, as befitted both their age and their condition, while they ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle

... the leading characteristics of individual families as displayed through a series of generations. But it is a subject that from its very nature is more or less unapproachable, since it is but little that we know even of our immediate ancestors. Occasionally in glancing at the cracking squares of canvas, many of which cannot even boast a name, but which alone remain to speak of the real and active life, the joys and griefs, the sins and virtues that centred in the originals of those hard daubs and of ourselves, we may light upon a face that about six generations ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard

... desired accomplishment of a pair of black eyes, and in all cases, when manageable, a good smash in the regions either of the teeth, or of the ribs—both, if possible, preferred—was supposed to improve the transaction so much, that, what with the tooth dropping, or the rib cracking, or both, as aforesaid, it was considered 'settled.' Thus originated the special title of 'rowdy mob,' or Tipperary, in reference to the Irish. Let us have ...
— The Eureka Stockade • Carboni Raffaello

... water curled away on either side of her sharp prow, that cut its way onward at the full rate of five miles an hour, and the team came swinging down the tow-path at a gallant trot, the driver sitting the hindmost horse of three, and cracking his long-lashed whip with loud explosions, as he whirled its snaky spirals in the air. All the boys in town were there, meekly proud to be ordered out of his way, to break and fly before his volleyed oaths and far before his horses' feet; and suddenly the captain ...
— A Boy's Town • W. D. Howells

... sunny day," says Mr. Haydon, "when all was quiet, save the occasional cracking of a racket ball, while some were reading, some smoking, some lounging, some talking, some occupied with their own sorrows, and some with the sorrows of their friends, in rushed six fine grenadiers with ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 336 Saturday, October 18, 1828 • Various

... said. "Do wait a moment. Yes, that's right. And how can you say that my nose went in the air? I'm sure Mr. Taynton will agree with me that that is really libellous. And as for your being afraid to tell me you had bought a motor-car yourself, why, that is sillier than cracking nuts ...
— The Blotting Book • E. F. Benson

... sphere of metal was gone—snapped off into space. Thad clung desperately to the wire, muscles cracking, tortured arms almost drawn from their sockets. Fear flashed over his mind; what if the wire broke, and left him ...
— Salvage in Space • John Stewart Williamson

... language fluctuated between the persuasively religious and the horribly profane; and how, at one crisis in the conversation, although he had self-command enough to bow to the matron, he was on the point of cracking the lawyer's crown with the fine specimen of Irish oak which he carried in his hand, and, in fact, nothing but his prudent respect for that gentleman's cloth prevented ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu



Words linked to "Cracking" :   good, chemical process, chemical change, break, colloquialism, noise, chemical action, breaking, breakage



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