"Dwindling" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... unscathed brethren of the slain wheeled abruptly and, lashed by the easterly gale, fled out over the open sea, triangular formation dwindling rapidly in the ...
— The Bronze Bell • Louis Joseph Vance
... knife Ben prepared a complete set of furniture for their little abode. His first Work was a surpassing-marvelous dining-room suite of a table and two chairs. Then he put up shelves for their rapidly dwindling supplies of provisions and cut chunks of spruce log, with a bit of bark remaining, for fireside seats. And for more than a week, Beatrice was forbidden to enter a certain covert just beyond the glade lest she should prematurely ...
— The Sky Line of Spruce • Edison Marshall
... the space of one year the Saxons had engaged in eight pitched battles and in many skirmishes. Great numbers had been slain on both sides, but the Danes ever received fresh accessions of strength, and seemed to grow stronger and more numerous after every battle, while the Saxons were dwindling rapidly. Wide tracts of country had been devastated, the men slaughtered, and the women and children taken captives, and the people, utterly dispirited and depressed, no longer listened to the voices of their leaders, and refused again ...
— The Dragon and the Raven - or, The Days of King Alfred • G. A. Henty
... Peterkin, exchanging the axe for his hoop-iron knife, with which he cut off the desired portion. "I'm only too glad, my dear boy, to see that your appetite is so wholesale, and there's no chance whatever of its dwindling down into re-tail again—at least, in so far as this pig is concerned.—Ralph, lad, why don't you laugh, eh?" he added, turning suddenly to me with a severe ...
— The Coral Island • R.M. Ballantyne
... and went off walking with great strides; and as often as Keola sank in the trough he could see him no longer; but as often as he was heaved upon the crest, there he was striding and dwindling, and he held the lamp high over his head, and the waves broke white about ...
— Island Nights' Entertainments • Robert Louis Stevenson
... me—not from me," Richard repeated, but the power which had upheld him was dwindling fast. He knew, knew beyond question that in a few more moments the truth would be shaken out of him unless he could devise some means of slackening the strain. And then ...
— Men of Affairs • Roland Pertwee
... all that could be expected of them. There was only a tiny fragment of the meteorite left, and it was dwindling swiftly. But our time was ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... river only a dwindling sight of lonely sails was to be seen, heading toward Chesapeake Bay and then to sea. But anyone with eyesight good enough might have seen a ...
— Mr. Wicker's Window • Carley Dawson
... were dwindling. He needed funds for the many secret agents in his employ—needed yet more funds for the purchase and support of his lands in the South. And the minister of Great Britain had given plain warning that unless this expedition up ...
— The Magnificent Adventure - Being the Story of the World's Greatest Exploration and - the Romance of a Very Gallant Gentleman • Emerson Hough
... repulsed. Three hours later 19,000 fresh troops came on, passed through a gap in our lines, which Cathcart's disobedience, atoned for presently by his death, had left unoccupied, and seized the heights behind us; they too were dispossessed, but our numbers were dwindling and our strength diminishing. The Home Ridge, key of our position, was next invaded by 6,000 Russians; the 7th St. Leger, linked with a few Zouaves and with 200 men of our 77th Regiment, French and English ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell
... is Scepticism. Come along, Pyrrhias, and be put up. Quick's the word. The attendance is dwindling; there will be small competition. ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... their would-be friend, the enemy, is a factor in the German subduing process the world outside must appreciate. But the Belgians are paying the price. Their resources are diminishing day by day. The world's benevolence is dwindling and they are facing an immediate future wherein life's necessities will have to be defined in terms of the irreducible minimum. The whole nation, we are told, is growing so thin on the small ration that can be provided, that wasting diseases, due to under-nutrition, are increasing ...
— No. 4, Intersession: A Sermon Preached by the Rev. B. N. Michelson, - B.A. • B. N. Michelson
... seawards, and again We, watching, praised her beauty, praised her trim, Saw her fair house-flag flutter at the main, And slowly saunter seawards, dwindling dim; ...
— Georgian Poetry 1913-15 • Edited by E. M. (Sir Edward Howard Marsh)
... father before him, for the passage of every generation had made recovery more difficult. Of course he should really have become a soldier; but soldiering in those days was an expensive calling. As a baronet—even as an Irish baronet—a good deal would have been expected of him, far more than the dwindling means of Roscarna could possibly supply, and since every career seemed closed to him but one of provincial dissipation he is scarcely to be ...
— The Tragic Bride • Francis Brett Young
... keener sight, trained by long stormy nights of watching, was following in its dwindling, mysterious course that misty vision in which he thought to recognize ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... the names of St Francis of Assisi, Pope Urban IV., the holy St Bridget of Sweden, and the notorious Queen Joanna II. of Naples. Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, afterwards Pope Pius II., however, seems to have thought Amalfi, ever dwindling in size and importance, too mean a place to own so great a treasure, and he accordingly transported the head of the Saint to Rome, where it is now accounted amongst the four chief relics of St ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... might gain entrance. We retraced our steps, and, passing out of the door, approached the stables from the road. By this time the dawn had made such progress that we knew our chances of getting inside before Mannering's return were dwindling rapidly. We found no more likelihood of obtaining admission from ...
— The Motor Pirate • George Sidney Paternoster
... Ocean is geographically a misnomer, socially and politically a dwindling superstition. That is the chief lesson one learns—and one has barely time to take it in—between Queenstown and Sandy Hook. Ocean forsooth! this little belt of blue water that we cross before we know where ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... which at headquarters was supposed to be reliable, had grossly misled her; the road bore east instead of north, dwindling, as she advanced, to a rocky path among the foothills. She had taken the wrong turn at the forks; there was nothing to direct her any farther—no landmarks except the general trend of the watercourse, and the dull cinders of sunset fading ...
— Special Messenger • Robert W. Chambers
... eighteenth century were uncongenial to it. His younger acquaintances in the Nonjuring body, however sincere and generous in temperament, were men of a different order. It was but natural that, as the schism became more pronounced and Jacobite hopes more desperate, the Church views of a dwindling minority should become continually narrower, and lose more and more of those larger sympathies which can scarcely be altogether absent in any section ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... the simple arts a barbaric peasantry would possess. In many ways they were curiously degenerate and incompetent. They had lost any idea of making textiles, they could hardly make up clothes when they had material, and they were forced to plunder the continually dwindling supplies of the ruins ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... justified her views of his capacity. On December I he broke down the bridges in his rear over the Raritan, and marched through Jersey with a dwindling army. At Princeton he had but three thousand men; destroying every boat, he wisely put the broad Delaware between his ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell
... leader, and again hear a word ending in "ell." The two remaining machines close up, and we continue. Very suddenly one of them drops out, with a rocker-arm gone. Its nose goes down, and it glides into the clouds. Yet again I call the flight-commander's attention to our dwindling numbers, and this time I cannot mistake the single-syllabled reply. It is a ...
— Cavalry of the Clouds • Alan Bott
... behaved ill to him, and he could not say he was free from resentment or pride, but he did make for them what excuse lay in the fact that the congregation had been dwindling ever since the curate at the abbey-church began to speak in such a strange outspoken fashion. There now was a right sort of man! he said to himself. No attempted oratory with him! no prepared surprises! no playhouse tricks! no studied graces in ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... plainly marked in their haggard faces, they set to work in the shelter of the dwarfed pines around them, and packed one sledge with all they felt to be necessary to take on this forlorn hope expedition, and with it the last of their dwindling ...
— To Win or to Die - A Tale of the Klondike Gold Craze • George Manville Fenn
... pulpit.—"Awake, thou that sleepest!" Why, the text is quite opposed to DOZINESS! But what of this, if the preacher be addicted to drawling, the weather unobligingly sultry, and you yourself have gradually been dwindling from an uncongenial state of wakefulness into a sleepy calm? 'Tis too much for beldame Nature, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 266, July 28, 1827 • Various
... deeper and deeper into the softness of the acceleration cushions. He had been worried about not being able to keep his eyes open to see the dwindling Earth in the teleceiver over his head, but the tremendous force of the rockets pushing him against gravity to tear the two hundred tons of steel away from the Earth's grip held his eyelids open for him. As the powerful rockets tore deeper ...
— Stand by for Mars! • Carey Rockwell
... them were, were popular with the onlookers. Each as it marched by, was hailed with a new roar. Of course there were many tears. There was hardly anybody in all that crowd, over fifty years old, in whom the sight of these fast dwindling ranks did not stir memories of some personal bereavement. The old ladies on the porch no longer used their handkerchiefs chiefly for waving. Queed saw one of them wave hers frantically toward a drooping little knot of passing gray-coats, and then fall back into ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... clothed with a dense forest, so thickly matted, that in some places it was scarcely possible to penetrate it. It grew thinner, however, as they advanced, dwindling by degrees into a straggling stunted vegetation, till, at the height of somewhat more than 13,000 feet, it faded away altogether. The Indians, who had held on thus far; intimidated by the strange subterraneous sounds ...
— Wonders of Creation • Anonymous
... Garfield, "that we shall never be able to stand against old England, because the men are a weaker race than he remembers in his day,—weaker than his father, who came from England,—and the women slighter still; so that we are dwindling away, grandfather thinks; only a little sprightlier, he says sometimes, ...
— Septimius Felton - or, The Elixir of Life • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... hundred years ago coal and oil and oxygen had been the main power sources, but with the dwindling of the supply of coal and oil, man had sought another way. He had turned back to the old dream of snatching power direct from the Sun. In the year 2048 Patterson had perfected the photo-cell. Then the Alexanderson accumulators ...
— Empire • Clifford Donald Simak
... growing excitement outside the House of Lords, and by dwindling majorities within, Lord Liverpool announced that the King's Ministers had come to the determination not to proceed further with the Bill of Pains and Penalties. The joy which this declaration spread ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... days which the siege had lasted had been terrible ones for the garrison. Never daring to expose themselves unnecessarily during the day, yet ever on the alert to repel an attack; labouring at night at the defences, with their numbers daily dwindling, and the prospect of an assault becoming more and more imminent, the work of the little garrison was terrible; and it is to the defences of Lucknow and Cawnpore, a hundred years later, that we must look to ...
— With Clive in India - Or, The Beginnings of an Empire • G. A. Henty
... Helbeck, indeed, was of real importance to Catholicism in this particular district of England. It had once abounded in Catholic families, but now hardly one of them remained, and upon Helbeck, with his small resources and dwindling estate, devolved a number of labours which should have been portioned out among a large circle. Only enthusiasm such as his could have sufficed for the task. But, for the Church's sake, he had now remained unmarried some fifteen years. He lived like an ascetic in the great house, with a couple ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. I. • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... size from pinheads to the bulk of large pumpkins. The branches of the vegetation were formed from strings of the globules set edge to edge and tapering in size like graduated beads strung upon wire, dwindling in bulk until the tips of the branches were as fragile as the fronds of maidenhair fern. The bulk of the shrubbery was head-high, and so dense that Powell could see for only a couple of yards into the thicket in ...
— Devil Crystals of Arret • Hal K. Wells
... I looked back I saw those bent and dwindling figures still standing in the mud. The woman continued to pluck at her dress; the man gazed at the horizon with the same dull vacancy. They had the weary humility of the figures in Millet's "Angelus," without their inspiration, ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan
... his familiar reminiscences my dwindling interest vanished, and I noticed again, through the window, the house fronts of the place I knew once, when Poplar was salt. The lost sailor himself was insignificant. What was he? A deck hand; one who tarred ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... again, one after the other, all the doors we had half-opened, and look at each other, on the wrong side of the threshold, with dwindling hope ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... one by one, these creatures of deformed body and dwindling movement, leaning on each other, as though attached, and mumbling, "Nothing can be ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... they are able to perform in marriage," said my lady, with a sigh. "I fear he has lost large sums; and our property, always small, is dwindling away under this reckless dissipation. I heard of him in London with very wild company. Since his return letters and lawyers are constantly coming and going: he seems to me to have a constant anxiety, though he hides it under boisterousness and laughter. ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... mirror now, And in it a long perspective I could trace Of my begetters, dwindling backward each past each All with the kindred look, Whose names had since been inked down in their place On the recorder's book, Generation and generation of my mien, and ...
— Moments of Vision • Thomas Hardy
... and no mean one. It was intended to swallow every vestige of dwindling attractiveness out of her, and there was a bit of scandal springing of it in the background that satisfactorily settled her business, and left her 'enshrined in memory, a divine recollection to him,' as his popular romances would say, and have said ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... night is fresh, silent, exquisite, the eternal song of the cicalas fills the air. We can still see the red lanterns of my new family, dwindling away in the distance, as they descend and gradually become lost in that yawning abyss, at the bottom of ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... things, or some other neology, has satisfactorily established his utter incapacity to take charge of his own affairs. No! This is not a cruel age; the rack, the wheel, the boot, the thumbikins, even the pillory and the stocks, have disappeared; death-punishment is dwindling away; and if convicts have not their full rations of cooked meat, or get damaged coffee or sour milk, or are inadequately supplied with flannels and clean linen, there will be an outcry and an inquiry, and a Secretary of State will lose a percentage of his influence, and learn to look better after ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... Nemesius, extended goodwill so far as to take into account, if not Jesus, at least Moses, and to admit Israelitish thought into the history of philosophy and of human wisdom. But, in general it was by the schools of philosophy and by the ever dwindling section of society priding itself upon its philosophy that Christianity was most decisively repulsed, thrust ...
— Initiation into Philosophy • Emile Faguet
... from. How can you call him husband who forcibly snatched you from Jivaji to whom you had been sacredly affianced? I shall never forget that night! In the wedding hall we sat anxiously expecting the bridegroom, for the auspicious hour was dwindling away. Then in the distance appeared the glare of torches, and bridal strains came floating up the air. We shouted for joy: women blew their conch-shells. A procession of palanquins entered the courtyard: but while we were asking, "Where is Jivaji?" armed men burst ...
— The Fugitive • Rabindranath Tagore
... awfully. The candle stood on the counter, its flame solemnly wagging in a draught; and by that inconsiderable movement the whole room was filled with noiseless bustle and kept heaving like a sea: the tall shadows nodding, the gross blots of darkness swelling and dwindling as with respiration, the faces of the portraits and the china gods changing and wavering like images in water. The inner door stood ajar, and peered into that leaguer of shadows with a long slit of daylight like a ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 8 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... in a desperate situation. Famine and consequent sickness were in his camp. His army was daily dwindling away. He was emphatically in an enemy's country. Not a soldier could stray from the ranks without danger of assassination. He had taken Madrid, and ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... that it seemed but a little higher than the water level, but it bore an amazingly abundant growth. The river seemed to flow through a channel cut in the dense, solid vegetation. Great cypress trees towered up from the water, enormously thick at the roots and rapidly dwindling above. Between their rough trunks cypress scrub, sturdy cabbage palms, mangrove, custard apple and other varieties of tropical trees found space to grow; and between the trunks of the smaller trees was a tangle of palmetto, saw grass, jungle vine, ...
— The Plunderer • Henry Oyen
... story. To think that we should have let a bear scramble on board like this, and should have lost three dogs at once! Our dogs are dwindling down; we have only 26 now. That was a wily demon of a bear, to be such a little one. He had crawled on board by the gangway, shoved away a box that was standing in front of it, taken the dog that stood nearest, and gone off with it. When he had satisfied the first pangs of his hunger, he had ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... notes issued by the Government. In the evening an official notice was posted on the walls prohibiting the export of grain and flour. People stared at it and said, "That means war!" Another sign of coming events, more impressive to the imagination of the Parisian, was the sudden dwindling in size of the evening newspapers. They were reduced to two sheets, and in some cases to a single broadside, owing to the possibility of a famine in paper if war broke out and cut off the supplies of Paris while the railways were being used for the ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... Captain Stokes during his marine survey of the north coast. A.C. Gregory rectified the error in after years, and gave the river the name of the lost explorer for whom he was then searching. With fast-dwindling supplies, lagging footsteps, and depressed spirits, the expedition travelled slowly on to the south-west corner of the Gulf where, in crossing a large river, the Roper, four of the horses were drowned in consequence of the boggy banks. This ...
— The Explorers of Australia and their Life-work • Ernest Favenc
... example of what may happen in advanced life, even where the prepuce has never before been a source of the least disturbance or annoyance. Persons who, with the increase of years, are also liable to an increase of adipose tissue, are more subject to this dwindling down of the penis and consequent elongation of the prepuce, with all the attendant annoyances, ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... clean water is dwindling. Organized and juvenile crimes cost the taxpayers millions of dollars each year, making it essential that we have improved enforcement and new legislative safeguards. The denial of constitutional rights to some of our fellow Americans on account of race—at the ballot box and elsewhere—disturbs ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... "Adieu." Adieu to the body of child; adieu more complete, more eternal, to the soul of husband. Which good bye was the stranger? She stood as at cross-roads, and watched, with hand-shaded eyes, the tiny, wayward babe dwindling on its journey to heaven; the man she had married dwindling on his journey—whither? And the one she had a full hope of meeting again, ...
— The Folly Of Eustace - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens
... every nationality. I need hardly say that increasing intensity of sound will suggest vehemence, approach, and its visual synonym, growth, as well as that decreasing intensity will suggest withdrawal, dwindling, ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... son and to teach him the mysteries of his father's success had been dwindling for some time past. On this night it was finally put aside. Stott's "I've 'ad enough" may be taken to include that frustrated ideal. No more experiments for him, was the pronouncement that summed ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford
... about each; in each Moreau had blended this animal with that. One perhaps was ursine chiefly, another feline chiefly, another bovine chiefly; but each was tainted with other creatures,—a kind of generalised animalism appearing through the specific dispositions. And the dwindling shreds of the humanity still startled me every now and then,—a momentary recrudescence of speech perhaps, an unexpected dexterity of the fore-feet, a pitiful attempt ...
— The Island of Doctor Moreau • H. G. Wells
... is not the worst. I have said that there was a difference this morning when I got up and looked out. The sandy paths were dry, showing that there had been no fresh rain in the night. Moreover, the hillsides were open to view, the silver rills that veined the rugged steeps were dwindling, there was a blue sky, and great ranges of wooded or desolate mountains were in clearly cut outline—the first time since the wet period set in. Over the shoulder of the huge pyramid to the east there was actual sunshine, and the fleecy clouds were high. So at last there ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... craze, however, is too widely diffused, and falls in with too obstinate a preconception [17] in the human race, which has in every age hypochondriacally regarded itself as under some fatal necessity of dwindling, much to have challenged public attention. As real paradoxes (spite of the idle meaning attached usually to the word paradox) have often no falsehood in them, so here, on the contrary, was a falsehood which had in it nothing paradoxical. ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... only have been very innocent refreshment, as no one seemed the least drunk or offensive. The bar part was crowded with every type of the mining camp, two-thirds of them splendid faces and figures, just glorious men; the other third, dwindling gradually to a rather brutal typed Mexican; and even though their dress was the rough miner's, with great boots, all were freshly shaven and smart, and all had a "gun" in their belt, although it is against the law to ...
— Elizabeth Visits America • Elinor Glyn
... difficult to kill plant life with chemicals which were not harmful to man. Lawton took dangerous risks, increasing the unwholesomeness of their rapidly dwindling air supply by spraying out a thin diffusion ...
— The Sky Trap • Frank Belknap Long
... later years, I have met with stout Protestants, gallant 'Down-with-the- Pope' men from County Antrim, and ladies who see the hand of the Jesuits in every public and private misfortune. It is the habit of a loose and indifferent age to consider this dwindling body of enthusiasts with suspicion, and to regard their attitude towards Rome as illiberal. But my own feeling is that they are all too mild, that their denunciations err on the side of the anodyne. I have no longer the slightest ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... receive the Review—a poor business, truly! Is there a reason for a man's wits dwindling the moment he gets into a critical High-place to hold forth?—I have only glanced over the article however. Well, one day I am to write of you, dearest, and it must come to something rather better ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... away from the new land back to the old, down the stately river to the bay and the wide ocean, and to the burial at sea of one upon her. With her pearly sails and the line of flame color beneath, she looked a dwindling cloud; a little while, and she would be claimed of the distance ...
— To Have and To Hold • Mary Johnston
... repeated, the sharpness of his frightened voice dwindling breathlessly. "Commines, Philip, ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... to make personal applications to such as required it. This I found to be an even more discouraging business than the epistolary process, as it was bitterly cold and the streets were filled with slush and snow. The distances were interminable, and each day found my little hoard dwindling away with frightful rapidity into innumerable car-fares and frequent cups of coffee at wayside lunch-counters. I traveled over miles and miles of territory, by trolley-car, by elevated train and ferry-boat, to Brooklyn, to Harlem, to Jersey ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... termed an unusually large accumulation of wealth. For larger accumulations existed upon the earth. A descendant of a man once known as John D. Rockefeller possessed an accumulation of great size, but which, as a matter of fact, was rapidly dwindling as it passed from generation to generation. So, let us travel ahead another one hundred years. During this time, as we learn from our historical and political archives, the socialists began to die out, since they at last realized the utter futility of combating the balance of power. The account, ...
— John Jones's Dollar • Harry Stephen Keeler
... whole town and its possibilities; and she wondered what opportunities the world out beyond Panama had for her. She recalled two trips to Philadelphia and one to Harrisburg. She made out a list of openings with such methodical exactness as she devoted to keeping the dwindling lodge insurance from disappearing altogether. Hers was no poetic outreach like that of the young genius who wants to be off for Bohemia. It was a question of earning money in the least tedious way. Una ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... not watered them myself, I suspect that no one else would; for water last year was nearly as precious hereabout as wine. Our land-springs were dried up; our wells were exhausted; our deep ponds were dwindling into mud; and geese, and ducks, and pigs, and laundresses, used to look with a jealous and suspicious eye on the few and scanty half-buckets of that impure element, which my trusty lacquey was fain to filch for my poor geraniums and campanulas and tuberoses. We were forced to smuggle them ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... his drunkery was thronged with customers. But he sold his groceries chiefly to loose girls who paid him in their coin, which, although it answered his purpose, would neither buy him goods or pay his rent, and he found his stock rapidly dwindling away without his receiving any cash to replenish it. By dissipation and inattention his new business proved unsuccessful to him. He resolved to abandon it and again try the sea for a subsistence. With a hundred dollars in his pocket, the remnant of his property, he embarked ...
— The Pirates Own Book • Charles Ellms
... felt more and more that his love must be dwindling to make him act as he did. I thought it all over wearily enough and asked myself whether I had done everything I should to hold my husband's love. I had kept him in at nights. I had cut down his smoking. I had ...
— Winsome Winnie and other New Nonsense Novels • Stephen Leacock
... size, the flea probably started on its downward course as a comparatively large insect, probably larger than the Ornithomyia. That insect has been able to maintain its existence, without dwindling like the Leptus into a mere speck, through the great modification in organs and instinct, which adapt it so beautifully to the feathery element in which it moves. The bush-tick, wingless from the beginning, and diverging in another direction, has probably been greatly ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... as if a portion of the tree had been artificially removed. These gaps do not extend all round the tree; they are irregularly disposed, some trees having several of them, others none or only one; and they seem to have been caused, when the tree was young, by the dwindling of some principal branch. The Hickory throws out its branches at first very obliquely from the shaft; afterwards the lower ones bend down as the tree increases in size, and acquire an irregular and contorted shape; for, notwithstanding their toughness, they bend easily to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... congregation, on the principle of a labor-saving machine. But, honestly, your modern disciples are no more like their Master than one of the pale, slim, white-kidded gentlemen who will be here to-night is like Richard Coeur de Lion as he led a charge against the Moslems. Your cross is dwindling to a mere pretty ornament—an emblem of a past that is fast fading from men's memories. It will never have the power to inspire the heart ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... believing it, began seriously to question whether her small attainments were saleable at all. Her friend the captain would go to sea again shortly, and having prevailed on Mrs. Davidson to receive a small contribution towards her board, the ten pounds were dwindling away. ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... use of a pen that makes ink show is the seasonable way to show pleasure. The union is perfect and the border is expressing kissing. There is no more than that touch. That comes altogether. To satisfy a message there needed to be a dwindling and then altogether the horizon was met. The window is there. The door is no more. The ...
— Matisse Picasso and Gertrude Stein - With Two Shorter Stories • Gertrude Stein
... even dreamed of. At this era, when the Adams Administration was about to close, Jefferson, in spite of his known liberal, democratic views, was one of the most popular of political leaders, save with the Federalists, now dwindling in numbers and influence. He it was who was put forward on the Republican side for the Presidency, while Adams, still favored by the Federalists and himself desiring a second term of office, became the Federalist candidate. Associated with the latter in the contest ...
— Thomas Jefferson • Edward S. Ellis et. al.
... detail, as one realizes its profound complexity, one begins to understand how impossible it would have been for that structure to have come into existence de novo, however urgently the world had need of it. But it happened that the coal needed to replace the dwindling forests of this small and exceptionally rain-saturated country occurs in low hollow basins overlying clay, and not, as in China and the Alleghanies for example, on high-lying outcrops, that can be worked as chalk is worked in England. From this fact it followed that some quite ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... as the winch—that had been jammed by a trivial accident to the control—took hold of the steel cable. Up it soared, still pursued by dwindling screams of rage, by now futile rifle-fire. Before it had reached the trap in the lower gallery, the main propellers had begun to whicker into swift revolution, all gleaming in the afternoon sun. The gigantic shadow of the ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... Marbles, and even the essentially angular angels in mediaeval stained glass almost always (as it says in "Patience") contrive to look both angular and flat. There is something intrinsically disproportionate and outrageous in the idea of the distant objects dwindling and growing dwarfish, the closer objects swelling enormous and intolerable. There is something frantic in the notion that one's own father by walking a little way can be changed by a blast of magic ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... Brilliant, dewless mornings, blinding middays, afternoons held breathless in the remorseless torrent of light. The caravan crawled along the river's edge at a footspace, the early shadows shooting far ahead of it, then dwindling to a blot beneath each moving body, then slanting out behind. There was speech in the morning which died as the day advanced, all thought sinking into torpor in the monotonous glare. In the late afternoon ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... and the trenches, sending more and more men from the workshops to the fighting line, in proportion as the unskilled labour of the country—men and women, but especially women—is drawn, more and more widely, into the service of a dwindling amount of skilled labour, more ...
— Towards The Goal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Minneha had received the rescued infant, and promised to be a mother to it, that she discovered that she had undertaken more than she was able to fulfil. It required no very searching eye to perceive that the little one was not thriving; in truth, she was dwindling away day by day, and those who were in the habit of visiting the Camp gazed sadly at the little pinched face and shrivelled limbs, and foreboded that it would not be long before Michel's child rejoined its mother in the 'silent land.' ...
— Owindia • Charlotte Selina Bompas
... from her country, which was now at war with France. Alone at Neuilly, where she had to seek shelter both for economy and safety, with no means of returning to England, and unable to go to Switzerland through her inability to procure a passport, her money dwindling, still she managed to continue her literary work; and as well as some letters on the subject of the Revolution, she wrote at Neuilly all that was ever finished of her Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution. Her only servant at this ...
— Mrs. Shelley • Lucy M. Rossetti
... differences rather than similarities in the community life. Sectarianism is very largely maintained by churches in small places. Where church competition is severe, and especially when church support is dwindling, the Church advertises its distinctiveness and enters upon a life-and-death grapple with its neighbor institutions. Of course this develops sectarianism and forbids the wide outlook in its teaching that is required of ...
— Rural Problems of Today • Ernest R. Groves
... directions, found Molly walking up and down in a small grassy path, which was sprinkled with snowdrops. The "side-garden" was a ruined, over-grown square, planted in miniature box, which the elder Gay had laid out after one of his visits to Italy. Now, with its dwindling maze and its unpruned rose-bushes, it resembled a picture which has been blotted out until the original intention of the artist is no longer discernible. Yet the place was exquisite still. Spring had passed over it with her magical ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... of closeness from the exclusion of fresh air, and a gloom and heaviness around, as though long imprisonment had made the very silence sad. The homely hangings of the beds and windows had begun to droop; the dust lay thick upon their dwindling folds; and damps had made their way through ceiling, wall, and floor. The boards creaked beneath their tread, as if resenting the unaccustomed intrusion; nimble spiders, paralysed by the taper's glare, checked the motion of their hundred legs upon the wall, or dropped like lifeless ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... resources dwindling fast. One by one his old commissions were paid and disappeared down the hopper of household expenses. He took to thinking of what would happen when the commissions were all paid, and to haunting Fisher's office. Fisher was his contractor ...
— The House of Toys • Henry Russell Miller
... fifty or a hundred years, they may have kept some sort of dwindling civilization. Probably the English language for a while continued, in ever more and more corrupt forms. There may have been some pretense of maintaining the school system, railroads, steamship lines, newspapers and churches, banks and all the rest of that ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... in times past, founded and endowed schools for the education of the natives of the forest; nor would we dampen the faith and hopes of those philanthropists who still believe in the redemption of that dwindling race by the aids of science and civilization; but we confess our inability to perceive any general results, flowing from the attempts of that character, at all adequate to the pains and outlay bestowed on the experiment. And we think we cannot be alone in this opinion. We believe ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... Ibsen began to hold very much the position that Whistler was taking among painters and etchers in this country, that is to say the abuse and ridicule of his works by a dwindling group of elderly conventional critics merely stung into more frenzied laudation an ever-widening circle of youthful admirers. Ibsen repented, for a time almost exclusively, "serious" aims in literature, and with those of Herbert Spencer, and in less measure of Zola, and a ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... lock. There was not a single light showing from the place, but in the dwindling rays of a distant street lamp she could see the meager window display through the filthy, unwashed panes. It was evidently a cheap and tawdry notion store, well suited to its locality. There were toys of the cheapest variety, stationery of the same grade, cheap pipes, cigarettes, tobacco, ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... country. Paintings are growing smaller, as if to keep in proportion with the small modern salons. That this is due to the great influence of M. Meissonier there is no doubt, but no diminution of his own fame accompanies the dwindling of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... (which are much raised in Berkshire) are good for hardly anything to eat,—a fair-sized quarter dwindling down to almost nothing ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... "La Greca" on account of her knowledge of Hellenic letters. Her uncle, Fray Espiridion Febrer, prior of Santo Domingo, a great luminary of his epoch, had been her teacher, and the "Greek woman" could write in their own language to correspondents in the Orient who still maintained a dwindling commerce with Majorca. ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... knew all the facts in both cases, and so did Ernest Seton, who had visited us in the country as well as in our city home. Fuller not only knew the ins and outs of my houses; he was also aware that my royalties were dwindling and that my wife was forced to get along with one servant and that we used the street ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... closer, the pace hotter, and a half dozen keen fellows were scrambling for their shares of a trade he had formerly controlled jointly with one other conservative house, he found sales falling off and his profits dwindling to a minus quantity. ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... goes off in search of destiny. He travels a very long time, and at last she is pointed out to him. She lives in an enormous and luxurious palace; but her wealth is dwindling day by day, and the doors and windows of her abode are shrinking. She explains to him that she passes thus, alternately, from misery to opulence; and that her situation at a given moment determines the future of all the children who may come into the world at that moment. "You were born," ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... the northern Caucasus,[1382] attended by that primitive assertion of individual right, the blood feud.[1383] Often the two forms of government are combined, but the feudal element is generally only a dwindling survival from a remote past. The little Republic of Andorra, which for a thousand years has preserved its existence in the protection of a high Pyrenean valley, is a self-governing community, organized strictly along the ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... after Trinity we marched out from another small village in the hot afternoon. This one was a model village, snug in the fields, and dwindling daily. The German shells are dropping there every day. In the course of another six months if the fronts of the contending armies do not change, that village will be a litter of red bricks and unpeopled ruins. As it is the women, children and old ...
— The Red Horizon • Patrick MacGill
... conquered India. There are no savages of a more debased type. They do not count beyond two or three; they have no idea of letters; of all the animals the dog alone is domesticated; their art consists in making bows and arrows and constructing rude huts; they are dwindling and threaten to become extinct. See "Report of the British Association for the advancement of science, for the Year 1875," ...
— The Christian Foundation, March, 1880
... east of Sarikamish on the road to Kars. Its defeat was absolutely necessary to the safety of the Russian army. It was therefore the object of General Woronzov's first attack. During four days every available man and gun he could bring up on the railway were thrown against the rapidly dwindling ranks of the Tenth Corps. The Turks fought bravely, but weight of numbers and superiority of communications told in the end, and the Ottoman forces were driven into the ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... a father—a gray-haired old man, Whom Fortune's sad reverses keenly tried; And now his dwindling life's remaining span, Locked up in me the little left of pride, And knew no hope, no joy, no care beside. My father!—dare I say I loved him well? I, who could leave him to a hireling guide? Yet all my thoughts were his, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13 Issue 364 - 4 Apr 1829 • Various
... which the opaque water strewn with leaves looked like a slab of gold-flecked agate. The path, growing narrower, wound on circuitously through the woods, between slender serried trunks twined with ivy. Patches of blue appeared above them through the dwindling leaves, and presently the trees drew back and showed the ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... perpetually drawn backwards at a great pace through some of the grandest mountains in the world has a queer effect. Like life, it leaves you with a dizzy irritation. For, as in life, you never see the glories till they are past, and then they vanish with incredible rapidity. And if you crane to see the dwindling further peaks, you miss ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... of Rawdon's undoubted skill and constant successes, it became evident to Rebecca, considering these things, that their position was but a precarious one, and that, even although they paid scarcely anybody, their little capital would end one day by dwindling into zero. "Gambling," she would say, "dear, is good to help your income, but not as an income itself. Some day people may be tired of play, and then where are we?" Rawdon acquiesced in the justice of her opinion; and in truth ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... declined toward the west, the light breeze which had prevailed throughout the day became still lighter, dwindling away to such an extent that when, about two bells in the first watch (nine o'clock p.m.), we returned to the deck after partaking of our first sea dinner, the water was like glass for the smoothness of it, while ...
— The Cruise of the "Esmeralda" • Harry Collingwood
... is plain now. It was once the residence of a country squire, whose family, probably dwindling down to mere spinsterhood, got merged in the more territorial name of Donnithorne. It was once the Hall; it is now the Hall Farm. Like the life in some coast town that was once a watering-place, and is now a port, where the genteel streets are silent and grass-grown, and the docks ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... MacLean was not to find bitterness, after all; perhaps it would be his glad good fortune to keep it from her. It was surprising the way he felt his misery dwindling, and instantly he pulled ...
— The Primrose Ring • Ruth Sawyer
... Pratts!" Hester said to herself, watching the grotesque gambols and nudgings of the dwindling humorists. "It must be very fatiguing to ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... people—more especially in our suburban areas—who are, so far as our old divisions go, delocalized. They represent, in fact, a community of a new sort, the new great modern community, which is seeking to establish itself in the room of the dwindling, little, highly localized communities of ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... kidnappings, the killing of a second high-level political figure, and renewed threats from the Chiapas rebels - combined with rising international interest rates and concerns of a devaluation to undermine investor confidence and prompt massive outflows of capital. The dwindling of foreign exchange reserves, which the central bank had been using to defend the currency, forced the new administration to change the exchange rate policy and allow the currency to float freely in the last days of 1994. The adjustment ...
— The 1995 CIA World Factbook • United States Central Intelligence Agency
... Cox is the real hero. I watch him dwindling, day by day, from nine stone to eight stone, from eight stone to seven stone twelve, and my heart goes out to the little fellow. And what a job it is! If anything goes wrong, Cox did it. He kept too far out or he kept too far in, or too much in the middle. But who ever heard ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 17, 1920 • Various
... helmeted warriors holding mailed blonde women in their arms, of queens with golden ornaments on their arms leaning over parapets and agitating their scarves, of women throwing themselves into the sea upon which ghastly barks were dwindling, of oldish men and young girls conversing teasingly through a window by a lilac-bush, that were Wagner. There were books with stories of magical swans and hordes of gold and baleful curses, of phantasmal ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... now walked grew dim: he missed the path, stumbled, saw trees and flowers indistinctly, failed to hear properly the call of birds and wind, to feel the touch of sun; and, most unwelcome of all,—was aware that his leader left him, dwindling in size, dropping away somehow among shadows far behind or ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... exclaimed, in horrified amazement: its size was that of a rickety baby under three, while its wizened face was that of a spell-struck creature of no assignable age, or the wax image of some dwindling life wasting away before the witch-kindled fire of a diabolical hatred. The tiny hands and arms were pitiably thin, and showed under the yellow skin sharp little bones no larger than a chicken's; and at her wrists and temples the blue tracery of her veins looked like a delicate map ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... France. Discontent is at its greatest height, and the royal government is on its last legs."—"I cannot tell what futurity promises to us; but whatever our fate may be, we cannot be worse off than we are at present. Our resources are dwindling away daily; we are becoming home-sick. If we were not a little upheld by hope, I really do not know what would become of us. Has the Emperor allowed you to remain with us?"—"Yes, Monsieur le Marechal."—"I give you joy, but I pity you. ...
— Memoirs of the Private Life, Return, and Reign of Napoleon in 1815, Vol. I • Pierre Antoine Edouard Fleury de Chaboulon
... her she could doubtless influence him to stay and care for her. There were many others who could be sent, who did not, could not, mean so much to those they would leave behind. Joe was all she had. She was growing old, and her little store of money was dwindling surely if slowly. ...
— The Brighton Boys with the Flying Corps • James R. Driscoll
... departments—the Hautes- and Basses-Alpes—are being gradually reduced to ruin by the destruction of the forests. Cultivation is diminishing, vineyards are being washed away, the towns are threatened, the population is dwindling, and unless something is done the country will be reduced to a desert; until, when it has been released from the destructive presence of man, Nature reproduces a covering of vegetable soil, restores the vegetation, creates the forests anew, and once ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock
... meet them. Thus pressed, Raoul looked into his affairs and asked for the accounts, and it then appeared that the receipts of the newspaper covered only two-thirds of the expenses, while the subscriptions were rapidly dwindling. The great man now grew anxious and gloomy, but to Florine only, in whom he confided. She advised him to borrow money on unwritten plays, and write than at once, giving a lien on his work. Nathan followed this advice ...
— A Daughter of Eve • Honore de Balzac
... her hardest, and gave little heed to these things. She saw her own chances of success dwindling farther into the distance, and was surprised to see how little she cared, for a curious callousness had come over her of late. Selfish ambition—selfish, because it often persists in living when all other things are dead—seemed to have died in her at last. Had ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... Our next Recourse was dwindling down to Farce, Then—Zounds, what Stuff's here? 'tis all o'er my— Well, Gentlemen, since none of these has sped, Gad, we have bought a Share i'th' speaking Head. So there you'll save a Sice, | You love good Husbandry in all but Vice; | ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn
... There was the din of conflict by day on the hustings; there was the sound of revelry by night in the cabins. The mid-night stars twinkled to the music of the merry fiddle, and the hills resounded with the clatter of dwindling shoe soles, as the mountain lads and lassies danced the hours away in the good old time Virginia reel. I rode among the mountain fastnesses like the "Knight of the woeful figure," mounted on my prancing "Rozenante," everywhere charging the windmill of the opposing party, ...
— Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales • Robert L. Taylor
... Compacted, that no sign of juncture soon Was visible: the tail disparted took The figure which the spirit lost, its skin Soft'ning, his indurated to a rind. The shoulders next I mark'd, that ent'ring join'd The monster's arm-pits, whose two shorter feet So lengthen'd, as the other's dwindling shrunk. The feet behind then twisting up became That part that man conceals, which in the wretch Was cleft in twain. While both the shadowy smoke With a new colour veils, and generates Th' excrescent pile on one, peeling it off From th' other body, lo! upon his feet ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... Discipline and Comradeship went first; and the more I think of it the more I am convinced that of all the suffering youth that was being there annealed and forged into soldiery none can have suffered like the lawyers. On the right the high trees that stand outside the ramparts of the town went dwindling in perspective like a palisade, and above them, here and there, was a roof showing the top of the towers of the Cathedral or of St Gengoult. All this I saw looking backwards, and, when I had noticed it and drawn it, I turned round again and ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... so cheerful at this point that a second postal order relieved the dwindling fortune of Spencer. And it was this, coupled with the remonstrances of Phipps, that induced the Dencroftian to break through his ...
— The Politeness of Princes - and Other School Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... the floor level. It seemed to strike its solidity of ground. I saw it fall the last little distance with a rush; land, and pick itself up. And with a last sardonic grin upward at us, the dim white figure ran. Dwindling smaller, dimmer, until in a moment it ...
— The White Invaders • Raymond King Cummings
... of Alexander, as a little David who dared a huge Goliath, ignores the facts of previous history, and would have occurred to no contemporary who had read the signs of the times. The Eastern colossus had been dwindling so fast for nearly a century that a Macedonian king, who had already subdued the Balkan peninsula, loomed at least as large in the world's eye, when he crossed the Hellespont, as the titular Emperor of contumacious satraps ...
— The Ancient East • D. G. Hogarth
... old, my children eye askance My slowly dwindling store, And crave my mite; till, worn with tarriance, I care for ...
— Wessex Poems and Other Verses • Thomas Hardy
... time of fear, followed by the leopard's terrible scream. Some animal darted by the opening, so close that they could see the gleam of its eyes as it glanced in upon them, and after it with a bound went a larger form. They listened to the dwindling noise of the chase, and Compton ...
— In Search of the Okapi - A Story of Adventure in Central Africa • Ernest Glanville |
