"Gritty" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the swarms of tormenting flies that buzzed about him, and waiting patiently for the desired water before he swallowed the dark brown unsavoury mass of crushed dates which, warm from his pocket and gritty with the sand that penetrated everything, was the only food available. Said was still busy among the throng of men and horses, but near him Omar sat plunged in gloomy silence, his melancholy eyes fixed on the distant hills. He had re-adjusted ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... breathing through the mouth instead of the nose, and, particularly, sleeping with the mouth open, are habits which are very prejudicial to the teeth and gums. In this way the mouth forms a trap to catch the dust and gritty particles floating in the atmosphere, which soon mechanically injure the enamel of the ...
— The Ladies Book of Useful Information - Compiled from many sources • Anonymous
... gloomy eyes was the kitchen yard, a gray and gritty expanse, with never a tree or bush to shade it except the lilac hedge bounding it on the garden side, and one sickly peach tree growing at the corner of "the house." Three hens and one rooster were scratching about the flat stone at ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland
... rooms in the City The rags have been sent, and it's there That I'll burn them unopened and gritty Or, if (and it's little I care) I am whelmed in the wave, I shall laugh from my grave At the blow that I've dealt the banditti ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, July 29, 1914 • Various
... managed to say, "take the kiddie; he's slipping off. I'm good for a minute longer." So they lifted Freddy into the launch, then poor unconscious Hal, and lastly Shag, exhausted but gritty and ...
— The Shagganappi • E. Pauline Johnson
... arise, whirl and drift languidly over the tree-tops and fall back again out of sight. He lashed at the huskies, and with difficulty set them going. But the sled drew heavily, as though it were being dragged through sand, for the snow was gritty as the seashore: so intense was the cold that all slipperiness had gone out of it. He fastened a line to the load and went on ahead, breaking the trail and hauling ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson
... When I delivered that yell the entire dinner company jumped as one person, and punched their heads through the ceiling, damaging it, for it was only lath and plaster, and it all came down on us, and much of it went into the victuals and made them gritty, but no one was hurt. Then I explained why it was that I had played that game, and begged them to take the moral of it home to their hearts and be rational and merciful thenceforth, and cease from screaming in mass, and agree to let one ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... on the gritty mud below, and a voice humming. Midmore rose quickly saying: 'Well, I ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling
... of the column was Dr. John Knight—a small but gritty little man. Among the Rangers was James Paull, of West Virginia, a young Buckskin of twenty-two who had left his widowed mother in order to ...
— Boys' Book of Frontier Fighters • Edwin L. Sabin
... cleaning stuffs containing acids, after this. I have gone to great expense to have the house remodeled this summer, and the bathrooms have all been tiled and fitted up afresh, from beginning to end. I know that, in the past, you have used acid, gritty soaps on the basins and tubs, Martha, and my plumber tells me you mustn't do it. He says it's ruinous. He recommends kerosene oil for the bath-tubs and marble slabs. He says it will take any stain out, and ...
— Martha By-the-Day • Julie M. Lippmann
... ventured to inquire, but I suppose—that Mrs. Crupp, after frying the soles, was taken ill. Because we broke down at that point. The leg of mutton came up very red within, and very pale without: besides having a foreign substance of a gritty nature sprinkled over it, as if if had had a fall into the ashes of that remarkable kitchen fireplace. But we were not in condition to judge of this fact from the appearance of the gravy, forasmuch as the 'young gal' had dropped it ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... lubber giant, had ceased to kick a leg, and Ireland, our fever-invalid, wore the aspect of an opiate slumber. The volcano we couch on was quiet, the gritty morsel unabsorbed within us at an armistice with the gastric juices. Once more the personification of the country's prosperity had returned to the humming state of roundness. Trade whipped him ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... am happy; 300 At home, in White Russia, The bread is of barley, All gritty and weedy. At times, I can tell you, I've howled out aloud, Like a woman in labour, With pains in my stomach! But now, by God's mercy, I work for Gubonine, And there they give rye-bread, 310 ...
— Who Can Be Happy And Free In Russia? • Nicholas Nekrassov
... are particularly partial to the young plants, an occasional dusting of old soot, slaked lime, or any gritty substance should be given to render the leaves unpalatable to these pests. During drought copious watering of the rows is essential, especially on shallow soils; spraying the plants in the evening with soft water is also freely practised and this assists ...
— The Culture of Vegetables and Flowers From Seeds and Roots, 16th Edition • Sutton and Sons
... weather—cloudless, clear and fresh and free! Let the sailor sing the story of the ancient ocean's glory, Forests golden, mountains hoary—can he look and love like we? Sordid worldling, haunt thy city with that heart so hard and gritty! There are those who turn with pity when they ...
— The Poems of Henry Kendall • Henry Kendall
... the light, to see if there are not some marks of the crayon pencil that show too prominently. These can be subdued with the ends of the fingers. Sometimes in finishing with the No. 0 crayon the paper will seem to be gritty so that you can hardly work on it. The difficulty is that some of the pumice stone has adhered to the surface of the paper. This can be disposed of by rubbing it with the fingers. It should be remembered that the pumice stone must be entirely removed from the ...
— Crayon Portraiture • Jerome A. Barhydt
... hands at the fire, he glanced aside at a little deal desk, much blotched with ink, which his elbow touched. Upon it, were some scraps of coarse paper, and a superannuated steel pen in very reduced and gritty circumstances. ...
— Mugby Junction • Charles Dickens
... a woman. And was it necessary, was it even wise? As I hesitated she turned and glanced downward once more toward the glacier, then rose and went to the lip of our grassy ledge, and as she returned I caught the sound which she had been the first to hear. It was the gritty planting of nailed boots upon ...
— No Hero • E.W. Hornung
... versatile blackguardism. Lady Buckley's life was made impossible by his abominable conduct. At this juncture my heroine chanced to be obliged to lunch at a railway refreshment-room. My last chapter had described the poor lady lunching lonely in the bleak and gritty waiting room of Swilby Junction, lonely except for the company of her little boy. I showed how she fell into a strange and morbid vein of reflection suggested by the qualities of the local sherry. If she was ...
— In the Wrong Paradise • Andrew Lang
... to be "a pinch,"' says one, 'when I am obliged to put on black mittens on occasions when I know other girls will have long white kid gloves.' I must confess I have a prejudice myself against mittens; they are, so to speak, 'gritty' to touch; so that the pinch, if it be one, experienced by the wearer, is shared by her ungloved friends. The same thing may be said of that drawing-room fire which is lit so late in the season for economical reasons, and so late in the day at all times: ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... the continual scraping of chairs across the gritty floor, that the places at the table must be nearly all taken; and while she anticipated, with an utterly unreasonable terror, any further invasion of her seclusion at the end of the table, still she could not persuade herself ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... again to camp. It did not suit him to be a modern soldier. In the thick, gritty, hideous khaki his subtle physique was extinguished as if he had been killed. In the ugly intimacy of the camp his thoroughbred sensibilities were just degraded. But he had chosen, so he accepted. An ugly little look came on to his ...
— England, My England • D.H. Lawrence
... their shirts or stripped to the waist. Sweat streaks mapped the faces of the men who came out of the trenches. Stifling clouds of dust hung over the roads, with the trucks phantom-like as they emerged from the gritty mist and their drivers' eyes peered out of masks of gray which clung to their faces. A fall of rain came as a blessing to Briton and German alike. German prisoners worn with exhaustion had complexions the tint of their uniforms. If the British seemed weary sometimes, one had only to see the prisoners ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... white in ten minutes, a gritty mire defiled the horse's sides, and Seaforth floundered, coughing, ankle-deep at times, with livid circles where he had rubbed the grime away about his eyes. There was no sign of beast or bird, and the shuffle of weary feet ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss
... the muddle of books in Ed Sheehan's gritty, dusty little office Terry turned her piano-playing talent to practical account. At twenty-one she was still playing at the Bijou, and into her face was creeping the first hint of that look of sophistication which comes from daily contact with the ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber
... while he sat down, and she told him about it, with that faithfulness to inessential detail that marks her class. Barry listened like a man in a dream. Mrs. Smiley begged him to stay to dinner to see "Aunt Ide," but he refused, and in the gritty dusk he found himself walking down the street, alone in silence at last. He took a car to the ocean beach, and far into the night sat on the rocks watching the dark play of the rolling Pacific, and listening to the steady rush ...
— The Rich Mrs. Burgoyne • Kathleen Norris
... although she rolled slightly from time to time the motion was not continuous like that of a floating ship, but intermittent, with intervals when she did not move at all, but lay motionless with a list to starboard. Also, when she moved, there was a gritty, grinding sound, which at once suggested to me that she was lying upon a bed of coral. There was also another sound, a bumping sound, accompanied by a perceptible jar of the hull, recurring at frequent and pretty regular intervals, which I set down to the bumping of wreckage alongside. The next ...
— The First Mate - The Story of a Strange Cruise • Harry Collingwood
... though possibly its embattled reformatory, frowning from the hillside, contributed its gloomy associations to our spirits. It was against towns in general that our gorge rose. Did our vagabond ethics necessitate our conscientiously tramping every foot of these "gritty paving-stones," we asked each other, as we entered upon a region of depressing suburbs, and we called a halt on the spot to discuss the point. The discussion was not long, and it was brought to a cheerful, demoralized end by the approach of the trolley, into which, regardless ...
— October Vagabonds • Richard Le Gallienne
... have done with the p'lice they'll have the prohibition law wiped out of the statute book, Stormy," he said, with a knowing wink. "Ther's fellers o' grit around this valley, eh? Good boys and gritty. Guess it ain't fer us to open our mouths wide, 'cep' to swallow prohibition liquor, but there'll be some tales to tell of these days later, eh, Stormy? An'," he added slyly, "guess you'll be able to tell ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... in far less splendor. There was no foreign furniture to speak of in our portions of the house; we slept on beds the cords of which creaked through honest American maple posts; we walked on floors which offered gritty sand to the tread instead of carpet-stuffs. But there were two great stands laden with good books in our living-room; we had servants now within sound of a bell; we habitually wore garments befitting men of refinement and substance; we rode our own ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic
... culture unusual for a soldier. A handy, sagacious, learned and intelligent man; whom Friedrich, in the course of a year's experience, has grown to see willingly about him. There is something of positive in Guichard, of stiff and, as it were, GRITTY, which might have offended a weaker taste; but Friedrich likes the rugged sense of the man; his real knowledge on certain interesting heads; and the precision with which the known and the not rightly known are divided from one another, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... sturdy and warm-hearted dwellers of the plains and rockies, cold in death, scalped and mutilated almost beyond recognition—a deed committed by those dastardly red fiends of the Far West. Both were friends of mine and with uncovered head, in the presence of that gritty son of ...
— Dangers of the Trail in 1865 - A Narrative of Actual Events • Charles E Young
... evening dreaming of the time when she should be a Harding girl, and be able to say bright, funny things like Miss Ayres. She resolved to wear her hair like Miss Watson and to have a pleasant manner like Miss Wales, and above all to be "gritty" like Miss Hildreth. For the present evening the fiercest steed she could find to subdue was an arithmetic lesson. Annie hated arithmetic, but in the guise of a plunging bay mare, that it took grit to ride, she rather enjoyed ...
— Betty Wales Senior • Margaret Warde
... already been sent over, I did not doubt that the table arrangements would be excellent. Even now, standing at my window, I could see a basket laden with long-necked bottles going into the boat, and became aware that we should not depend altogether for our morning repast on that gritty coffee which my ...
— George Walker At Suez • Anthony Trollope
... master of expression, in whose hands the difficult medium of blank verse becomes an instrument of Shakespearian flexibility and compass, easily answering to all the shifts and windings of a prodigal invention, familiar without being vulgar, gritty with homely detail without being flat; always, at its lowest levels, touched, like a plain just before sunrise, with hints of ethereal light, momentarily withheld; and rising from time to time without effort to a magnificence of phrase and movement touched ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... and ropy from the ladle; and if you see little bright grainy-looking bubbles in it, drop some on a cold plate, and continue to stir or rub it till it is quite cold: if it is ready to granulate, you will find it gritty, and turn whitish or pale straw colour; and stiff. The sugar may then safely be poured off into a tin dish, pail, basin, or any other utensil. I tried two different methods after taking the sugar from the fire, but could find little difference in ...
— The Backwoods of Canada • Catharine Parr Traill
... They was pretty An' white o' the hand, But good-heart an' gritty An' chockful o' sand; Wi' energy brimmin' Right up to the chin— An' that sort o' wimmin Was ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 27, 1917 • Various
... might seem; for when one of the braves, half-awakened by his loud, unmannerly yawn, called out a reproof to him in Cherokee, he wagged his tail among the cold ashes till he stirred up a cloud of gritty particles; then he made his way across the room to the speaker, wheezing and sniffing, and bantering for a romp, till he was caught by the muzzle and, squeaking and shrilling, thrust under ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... whenever possible, translated by two soldier- operators, who perched on wooden stools among batteries and things, for which I know not the technical names. The spitty snarl of the apparatus filled the air for rods roundabout. It made you think of a million gritty slate pencils squeaking over a million slates all together. We were permitted to take up the receivers and listen to a faint scratching sound which must have come ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... reposing on a door-mat; Diana properly dressed and returning from the chase; a small iron boy holding over his head a parasol from the ferrule of which a fountain squirted. The paths were of asphalt, gray and gritty in winter, but now, in the summer heat, black and pulpy to ...
— The Blue Flower, and Others • Henry van Dyke
... "Gritty, by George! I didn't know as Yankee gals, had such splendid pluck," muttered one of the men, while Harney continued: "You say 'we.' May I ask the number of ...
— Bad Hugh • Mary Jane Holmes
... cold-process soaps may be traced. Owing to the rapidity with which free acidity is neutralised by caustic soda, granules of soap are formed, which in the presence of strong caustic lye are "grained out" and difficult to remove without increasing the heat; the soap will thus tend to become thick and gritty ...
— The Handbook of Soap Manufacture • W. H. Simmons
... particularly noxious ducking in icy filth. The sun was warm, however, and after basking upon the rocks awhile he was able to proceed, still wet, though he had stripped and wrung out his clothes—for we had no dry change—and very gritty in underwear, but taking no harm whatever. I think Tatum regretted losing, in the mad rush of black water, the ice-axe he had carried to the top of the mountain more ...
— The Ascent of Denali (Mount McKinley) - A Narrative of the First Complete Ascent of the Highest - Peak in North America • Hudson Stuck
... the sand-wastes of Fact, Long level of gritty aridity; With pompous conceit make a pact, Be bondsman to bald insipidity; Be slab as a black Irish bog, Slow, somnolent, stupid, and stodgy; Plunge into sophistical fog, And the realms of the dumpishly dodgy. With trump elephantine and slow, Tread on through word-swamps, dank and darkling; ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 15, 1893 • Various
... of protest from Toto, drowned in the mighty shriek and roar of the train. The great Eastern Limited swept past them, rocking the ground, sending out a cloud of black smoke shot with sparks, and letting fall a rain of gritty cinders. ...
— Betty Gordon in the Land of Oil - The Farm That Was Worth a Fortune • Alice B. Emerson
... upon whose imagination the contrast between champagne and oysters and the gritty pork and biscuit he had been feeding upon for several days past acted ...
— The Rifle Rangers • Captain Mayne Reid
... soundings are from four and a half to six fathoms; at twelve miles, from six to eight fathoms. There is a wonderful uniformity in the depth from the Pei-ho round to the south-east corner of the Gulf; the bottom is mud, sometimes a little gritty, particularly towards ...
— Account of a Voyage of Discovery - to the West Coast of Corea, and the Great Loo-Choo Island • Captain Basil Hall
... the room, leaving the two girls face to face. "They don't like me to see 'em cuddling," he said with a grin; and, urged by the enormous amount of vitality that was in him, Bob bounded to the kitchen stairs to slide down, and, directly after, a gritty rubbing noise, made metrical to accompany the shrill whistling of a tune, arose, the result of the fact that Bob Hartnup, the doctor's boy, who clung to the house with the fidelity of a cat, was cleaning the knives. Bob's facts were correct, ...
— The Bag of Diamonds • George Manville Fenn
... had reached home, late in the evening, the colonel, not having taken his bunch of keys with him, laid down his dress-suit case on the dark porch, and reached out one hand to the door-bell. He found it muffled with some flimsy, gritty fabric. He did ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... buzzing with them; and they were accompanied in their attacks upon our persons by bees, who hummed about like air-ships among aeroplanes. I dropped upon the table a speck of Sir Joseph Paxton's excellent jam, now peppered and gritty with dust, and in a few seconds it was hidden by a scrimmage of black flies, fighting over it and over one another. Other flies fell into my tea, and did the breast-stroke for the side of the mug. I pushed the mug along to Jimmy Doon, and pointed out to him, with the conceit of ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... tooth decays, slowly but surely: hence we must guard against certain habits which injure the enamel, as picking the teeth with pins and needles. We should never crack nuts, crush hard candy, or bite off stout thread with the teeth. Stiff tooth-brushes, gritty and cheap tooth-powders, and hot food and drink, often injure ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell
... see!" The older man took a portion of the blackish, gritty mass and held it close to his carbide. "It looks like something—it looks like something!" His voice was high, excited. "I 'll finish the 'ole and jam enough dynamite in there to tear the insides out of it. I 'll ...
— The Cross-Cut • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... trees on a black night," he had said. "You must not try to make love definite. It is the divine accident of life. If you try to be definite and sure about it and to live beneath the trees, where soft night winds blow, the long hot day of disappointment comes swiftly and the gritty dust from passing wagons gathers upon lips inflamed and made tender ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... out of the store. He did not often lift his hat to anyone; for, believing that all men were equal, such observance struck him as servile. But Katherine had a way with her that compelled respect; moreover, she was a downright gritty girl, as he expressed it: so the hat-flourish was really a tribute to her ...
— A Countess from Canada - A Story of Life in the Backwoods • Bessie Marchant
... these handsome vessels cannot be determined. It can hardly have been of a domestic nature, as they show no evidences of discoloration or wear, and we are left to speculate upon the possibility of a purely ceremonial use. The paste is moderately fine, but contains an extremely large share of gritty sand; the slip is thin and has received but a slight degree of polish, so that the surface has a dead, somewhat granular effect. As a rule the vases are of small size and are very thin walled. The forms are symmetrical and exceptionally graceful. The ornamentation includes incised figures ...
— Ancient art of the province of Chiriqui, Colombia • William Henry Holmes
... career And hem him round on every side: On his thigh the leech has fixed his hold, The quad's long arms are round him rolled, The prickly prong has pierced his skin, And the squab has thrown his javelin, The gritty star has rubbed him raw, And the crab has struck with his giant claw. He howls with rage, and he shrieks with pain; He strikes around, but his blows are vain; Hopeless is the unequal fight Fairy, naught is ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... to brush it off, and the gritty substance cut into his flesh as if he had rubbed ...
— Dick in the Desert • James Otis
... left the town behind him, and was marching on between stretches of uncultivated prairie and bare reddish hillocks. They, at least, stood for what they were,—and see, how the wildflowers had thrust themselves up through the harsh gritty sand; that great tract of yellow vetches, for instance, that had brought up out of the earth a glory of gold that might well put all Lame Gulch to the blush! Over yonder stood the Range, not beautiful, in the uncompromising noon light, but strong and steadfast, ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... like a well-fought resistance in the early stages of invalidism. Keep up the will, and if need be the temper. There are times when to grow heavenly is fatal,—when one is to let the soul run loose, and to gather up the gritty determination of Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, who, when told that she must be blistered or die, exclaimed, "I won't be blistered, and I won't die!" Indeed, it is often necessary to reverse the decision of the doctor who gives one up, and simply end ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various
... the key from its nail on the cupboard door, went out into the rain. She locked the door on the outside, and hid the big key on the ledge of the manger in the shippon. Then she was outside in the steady rain, on the gritty turnpike road washed clean to the stones. As she set off, it was a small relief to her that she would not be noticed, unless when she passed the cottages, because there were few workers in the fields, and none who could help ...
— Women of the Country • Gertrude Bone
... between hazing a fellow and torturing him. Some mighty gritty people can't stand snakes or suckers. You kids ought to ...
— Still Jim • Honore Willsie Morrow
... an hour I do not think there was even the faintest sound within those four walls and under the canopy of that vaulted roof. Our slippers made no scratching on the gritty floor, and our breathing was suppressed almost to nothing; even the rustle of our clothes as we shifted from time to time upon our seats was inaudible. Silence smothered us absolutely—the silence of night, of listening, the silence of a haunted expectancy. The very gurgling of the lamps was too ...
— Three John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... most tooth powders, is very good; but an equally good and much cheaper and simpler one is ordinary baking soda, or saleratus, though this will make the gums smart a little at first. Any powder that contains pumice-stone, cuttle-fish bone, charcoal, or gritty substances of any sort, as many unfortunately do, is injurious, because these scratch the enamel of the teeth and give the acids in the mouth a chink through which they may begin to attack the softer dentine underneath the ...
— A Handbook of Health • Woods Hutchinson
... motionless waiting to hear what message was coming through. When his meal was finished he resisted an impulse to 'phone' all the forward trenches, asking how things were, unlaced his boots, paused, and laced them up again, lay down on a very gritty mattress in a corner of the cellar, and tried to sleep. For the first hour every rattle of rifle fire, every thud of a gun, every call on the telephone brought him up on his pillow, his ears straining to catch any further sound. After about the tenth alarm he reasoned ...
— Between the Lines • Boyd Cable
... Froude, Maine and Symonds, side by side with a Carlylese tendency to extravagance, slang, and caricature, we find another vein in English prose—the flat, ungainly, nerveless style of mere scientific research. What lumps of raw fact are flung at our heads! What interminable gritty collops of learning have we to munch! Through what tangles of uninteresting phenomena are we not dragged in the name of Research, Truth, and the higher Philosophy! Mr. Mill and Mr. Spencer, Mr. Bain and Mr. Sidgwick, have taught our age very much; but no one of them was ever seen to smile; and it ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... the best method of grinding Indian meal. Miss Martha preferred to have it from a wind-mill; while Miss Amy was too conscientious to deny that she thought it better when prepared by a water-mill. She said firmly, though gently, that it seemed to her "less gritty." ...
— Oldport Days • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... now that this hotel was the one (whichever that may be) which has the fragment of a Gallo-Roman portico inserted into one of its angles. I had chosen it for the sake of this exceptional ornament. It was damp and dark, and the floors felt gritty to the feet; it was an establishment at which the dreadful "gras-double" might have appeared at the table d'hte, as it had done at Narbonne. Nevertheless, I was glad to get back to it; and nevertheless, too—and this is the moral of my simple anecdote—my pointless ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... ready for use. As this process of sharpening tools is a very important one, it must be reserved for another place. Should tools be seriously blunted or broken they must be reground. This can be done by the carver, either on a grindstone or a piece of gritty York stone, care being taken to repeat the original bevel; or they may be sent to a tool shop where they are in the ...
— Wood-Carving - Design and Workmanship • George Jack
... South Wales border, the fruit soils are all of granitic origin. The country is much broken, but between the ridges and along the creek flats there is a considerable area possessing soils varying from a coarse, granitic, gritty soil to a fine granitic soil; that on the creeks of an alluvial nature, but still granitic. These soils vary considerably in quality, but are, as a rule, easy to work and retain moisture well. They are covered ...
— Fruits of Queensland • Albert Benson
... first time I knew how long was a man's tongue. The sight of the sand on it made me sick for the second time. It is a terrible thing, the next day after a night of drinking. I was afire, dry afire, all the inside of me like a burnt cinder, like aa lava, like the harpooner's tongue dry and gritty with sand. I bent for a half-drunk drinking coconut, but Aimoku kicked it out of my shaking fingers, and Humuhumu smote me with the heel of his ...
— On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales • Jack London
... be a bumblebees' nest in that fence," he said. "If we should poke the bees out we'd find honey, nice gritty honey, all over ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... this she thought as she swallowed the hostile knobs of cheese and drank the tepid, gritty coffee. ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... first of the "Kitchener men," as we called them then. The tramp of their feet in a steady scrunch, scrunch, along a gritty road of France, passed the window of my billet very early in the mornings, and I poked my head out to get another glimpse of those lads marching forward to the firing-line. For as long as history lasts the imagination of our people will strive to conjure up the vision ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... two Tatums, Jess being stone-dead and Harve still senseless, with a leg dangling where the bones were snapped below the knee, and a great cut in his scalp; and they laid the two of them side by side on the floor in the gritty dust of the meal tailings and the flour grindings. This done, some ran to harness and hitch and to go to fetch doctors and law officers, spreading the news as they went; and some stayed on to work over Harve Tatum and to give such comfort as they might to Dudley Stackpole, he sitting ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... sick o' wastin' leather on these gritty pavin'-stones, An' the blasted Henglish drizzle wakes the fever in my bones; Tho' I walks with fifty 'ousemaids outer Chelsea to the Strand, An' they talks a lot o' lovin', but wot do they understand? Beefy face an' grubby 'and— Law! wot do they ...
— Barrack-Room Ballads • Rudyard Kipling
... dust and grime. Misspelt lewd words were fingered on the dirt of the window-panes. The horror of the room seemed to grip Mavis by the throat. She coughed, to sicken at a foul feeling in her mouth, which seemed to be gritty from the unclean air of the room. This atmosphere was not only as if the windows had not been opened for years; it was as if it had been inhaled over and over again by alcohol-breathing lungs; also, the horrid memories of sordid lusts, of unnumbered ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... flour is made. Spring wheat, the seeds of which are sown in the springtime, usually contains more protein than winter wheat, the seeds of which are sown in the fall. The flour made from spring wheat is called hard wheat flour or bread flour. This flour is creamy in color, rather gritty in feeling, and when pressed in the hand does not retain the impression of the fingers. Flour made from winter wheat is called soft wheat flour or pastry flour. This is white, very fine and velvety in feeling, and easily retains ...
— School and Home Cooking • Carlotta C. Greer
... grain, and fading holds aloft a seed spike of prolific invention; the lupin has stout, podded, countable seeds that must of necessity fall to the ground by force of weight. Also in fingering the seeds, you will know why some are slow in germinating: these are either hard and gritty, sandlike, like those of the English primrose, smooth as if coated with varnish, like the pansy, violet, columbine, and many others, or enclosed in a rigid shell like the iris-hued Japanese morning-glories and other ipomeas. Heart of Nature is never ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright
... aroused by the voice of the Mexican, who, with brushes and currycomb in hand, had come to clean him. Pat was in need of just this cleaning. Though wallowing but little, leaving that form of exercise to the older horses, he nevertheless was gritty with sand from swirling spring winds. So he stood very still under the hostler's vigorous attention. But Miguel's ambition did not stop here. He turned to the other horses and curried and brushed them also, working till ...
— Bred of the Desert - A Horse and a Romance • Marcus Horton
... said the Chamberlain, refusing a seat proffered; for anything of the law to him seemed gritty in the touch, and a three-legged stool would, he always felt, be as unpleasant to sit ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... jungle afford never ending pleasure. Look, where the dolorous sphinx sheds gritty tears because of the boldness of the sun and the solvency of the disdainful sea. Look, where the jungle clothes the steep Pacific slope with its palms and overskirt of vines and creepers! Glossy, formal bird's-nest ferns and irregular mass of polypodium edged with fawn-coloured, ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... blowing; excellent for the corn. At Mustapha's farm they are preparing for the harvest, baking bread and selecting a young bull to be killed for the reapers. It is not hot to-day; only 84 degrees in a cool room. The dust is horrid with this high wind; everything is gritty, and it obscures the sun. I am desired to eat a raw onion every day during the Khamseen for health and prosperity. This too must be a remnant of ancient Egypt. How I do long to see you and the children. Sometimes I feel rather down-hearted, but it is no good to say all ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... bad!" sez he. "But this is business all right. Whenever I hear any one talk about the morals of business it drives me wild. The' ain't any morals in business. The best it ever is, is straight gamblin'—I say the BEST it ever is, is straight gamblin'"—Jim's voice was gritty with wrath—"while at the worst," he went on, "it stoops to murder, wholesale and retail, it ruins homes, it ...
— Happy Hawkins • Robert Alexander Wason
... newspaper that some passenger had thrown aside and endeavored to distract his mind from the forlorn sight. The sheets were gritty to the touch, and left a smutch upon the fingers. His clothes were sifted over with dust and fine particles of manure. The seat grated beneath his legs. The great headlines in the newspaper announced that the troops were arriving. Columns of childish, reportorial prattle followed, describing ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... ever likely to be. I met one of them last winter out in the Carriso cow country; a 'Protestant' priest, he called himself, of your persuasion. He was the most hopeless bigot I've ever known, and by long odds the nearest masculine approach to true, gritty saintliness. There was nothing he wouldn't do, no hardship he wouldn't cheerfully undergo, to brother a man who was down, and the wickedest devil in all that God-forsaken country swore by him. Yet he would argue with me by the hour, splitting hairs over ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... into ignominious positions; and I cannot feel, as I should do, that she would have achieved those ignominies without Mr. ONIONS' impelling hand behind her. I have myself considerable sympathy for cranks, and perhaps that is why I regard Mr. ONIONS' satire as a dry, gritty business. His humour is, of course, always a delightful thing, but here I fancy that he has not drawn the true line between comedy and farce, between satire that preserves the probabilities and indiscriminate ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 22, 1914 • Various
... his audience. That he lived in a happy and blessed country Moulder was well aware, and with those blessings he did not wish any one to tamper. "Mother," said a fastidious child to his parent, "the bread is gritty and the butter tastes of turnips." "Turnips indeed,—and gritty!" said the mother. "Is it not a great thing to have bread and butter at all?" I own that my sympathies are with the child. Bread and butter is a great thing; but I would have it of the ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... but I paid no heed, and gave him half of what I had in my hands, and then putting the parcel with the rest right at the end where the sand did not fall, I sat down and we ate our gritty but welcome meal. ...
— Brownsmith's Boy - A Romance in a Garden • George Manville Fenn
... A coarse gritty texture is peculiar to smalt, whether it be the Powder Blue of the washtub and Blue Sand of the pottery, or the Dumont's and Royal Blue of the artist and high-class manufacturer. But the strict stability which is a feature in smalt when used for painting on glass and enamel ...
— Field's Chromatography - or Treatise on Colours and Pigments as Used by Artists • George Field
... of their caps—they and the deck were gritty. It was a shower of ashes; the mystery was explained; the light was that of a burning mountain. As there was no object to be gained in going nearer to it, and Peter gave them to understand that he had not seen it when on board the canoe, they tacked ...
— Washed Ashore - The Tower of Stormount Bay • W.H.G. Kingston
... elaborate process of preparation. A famous play which is justly chargeable with this fault is The Gay Lord Quex. The third act is certainly one of the most breathlessly absorbing scenes in modern drama; but by what long, and serpentine, and gritty paths do we not approach it! The elaborate series of trifling incidents by means of which Sophy Fullgarney is first brought from New Bond Street to Fauncey Court, and then substituted for the Duchess's maid, is at no point actually improbable; and yet we feel that a vast effort has been ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... varieties have been observed: (1) buff ground with simple linear decoration applied direct on the gritty body-clay in lustreless pigments, black, chocolate-brown, or red, according to the firing; (2) greenish-buff face, hand-polished, with polychrome varnish decoration of vandykes and other geometric motives; (3) monochrome, black ...
— How to Observe in Archaeology • Various
... together—and keep the horses from stampeding to the stables!" He was afraid they would break away and dash us against the iron supports to the flagstaff in the center of the parade ground. How he could say one word, or even open his mouth, I do not understand, for the air was thick with gritty dirt. The horses were frantic, of course, whirling around each other, rearing and pulling, in their efforts to ...
— Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871-1888 • Frances M.A. Roe
... is described best in those inimitable beatitudes which canonize, not the stern and rugged, but the sweet and tender, the humble and meek; and stamp Heaven's tenderest smile on virtues which had hardly found a place in the strong and gritty ...
— John the Baptist • F. B. Meyer
... aside, Rita pressed on as quickly as she could. Then her vague alarm became actual terror. She heard the brakes being applied to the car, and heard the gritty sound of the tires upon the roadway as the vehicle's headlong progress was suddenly checked. She had been seen—perhaps recognized, and whoever was in the car proposed to return to speak ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... back into my memory. Away late that awful Saturday night when I was wandering around about this prisoner's place, grieving and troubled, I was down by the corner of the tobacker-field and I heard a sound like digging in a gritty soil; and I crope nearer and peeped through the vines that hung on the rail fence and seen this prisoner SHOVELING—shoveling with a long-handled shovel—heaving earth into a big hole that was most filled up; his back was to me, but it was bright moonlight ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... armed with great tin scoops or funnels, with which they solemnly shovelled lime and flour out of bushel-baskets and down on the heads of the people in the street. They were packed into balconies all the way along the straight vista of the Corso, in which their calcareous shower maintained a dense, gritty, unpalatable fog. The crowd was compact in the street, and the Americans in it were tossing back confetti out of great satchels hung round their necks. It was quite the "you're another" sort of repartee, and less ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... comes once a week To keep the garden weeded and swept, To keep it as we don't want it kept. He cuts the grass with his mowing-machine, And we think he cuts it too much. But even on the lawn, all dry and gritty, The daisies play about. They are so brave as well as so pretty, You cannot keep them out. I love them, I want to let them grow, But that respectable man says no. He cuts off their heads with his mowing-machine Like the French ...
— Many Voices • E. Nesbit
... If food is burned on, scour with some gritty material or boil in a solution of washing soda, rinse in hot water, ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Household Management • Ministry of Education |
