"Skim" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... by chance—the first two persons to get up at the dairy-house, they seemed to themselves the first persons up of all the world. In these early days of her residence here Tess did not skim, but went out of doors at once after rising, where he was generally awaiting her. The spectral, half-compounded, aqueous light which pervaded the open mead impressed them with a feeling of isolation, as if they were Adam and Eve. At this dim inceptive stage of the day Tess ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... making slow progress because the trail was very poor. The second day after dismissing the three Indians they were enveloped in a blinding snowstorm, and they had to halt and make camp. It was terribly cold, so cold that a hot cup of tea would have a skim of ice over it in a minute after it was poured out. It seemed as if ...
— The Young Treasure Hunter - or, Fred Stanley's Trip to Alaska • Frank V. Webster
... live through more than two weeks, as it happened. Almost a month having elapsed since the liniment cake episode, it was high time for her to get into fresh trouble of some sort, little mistakes, such as absentmindedly emptying a pan of skim milk into a basket of yarn balls in the pantry instead of into the pigs' bucket, and walking clean over the edge of the log bridge into the brook while wrapped in imaginative reverie, not really ...
— Anne Of Green Gables • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... and at eve we stand On long bare islands of yellow sand. And when the sun sinks slowly down, And the great rock-walls grow dark and brown, When the purple river rolls fast and dim, And the ivory Ibis starlike skim, Wing to ...
— Nonsense Books • Edward Lear
... cups cornmeal 2 cups sweet milk (whole or skim) 4 teaspoons baking powder 2 tablespoons corn syrup 2 tablespoons fat 1 teaspoon ...
— Foods That Will Win The War And How To Cook Them (1918) • C. Houston Goudiss and Alberta M. Goudiss
... pleasant sequel. About a year later, coming home in the small hours from a dance, our bookman found a catalogue from this same bookseller on his table. Although tired out, his previous bitter experience had taught him a lesson; so pulling up a chair before the remains of the fire he proceeded to skim through the catalogue. He had reached the last page, and was already beginning to nod, when suddenly his weariness vanished in a flash: he was wide awake and on his feet in an instant, for his eyes had met the same ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... young lady; as it was, out of the three hundred guests that crowded the handsome rooms in the Rue Saint-Lazare, he alone comprehended the unpublished romance revealed by a garrulous quadrille. People certainly noticed Isaure d'Aldrigger's dancing; but in this present century the cry is 'Skim lightly over the surface, do not lean your weight on it;' so one said (he was a notary's clerk), 'There is a girl that dances uncommonly well;' another (a lady in a turban), 'There is a young lady that dances enchantingly;' and ...
— The Firm of Nucingen • Honore de Balzac
... anything at all about cattlemen, you will know that the Quirt was a poor man's ranch, when I tell you that Hunter and Johnson milked three cows and made butter, fed a few pigs on the skim milk and the alfalfa stalks which the saddle horses and the cows disdained to eat, kept a flock of chickens, and sold what butter, eggs and pork they did not need for themselves. Cattlemen seldom do that. More often ...
— Sawtooth Ranch • B. M. Bower
... hewn asunder midway, were fitted flush to a Norwegian cliff, beetling precipitately over the whirlpool; then tilt the sledge with its furred inmate over the slope, let it skim with quicker impetus the smoking ice, let it touch that beetling edge, and, leaping from the tangent, let it dart through the air, let it strike the eddying waters, be sucked hurriedly down that hoarse black throat, ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... sun tearfully Ere the clouds clear fully, Still you skim cheerfully, Swallow, oh! swallow swift! often I sigh For a home Where you roam Nearing ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... things in the words, which I cannot touch in the course of a single sermon; but I wish now, at all events, to skim their surface, and try to gather some of their ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... trying to discover where it might lead. Under sharp commands the crew brought the schooner about on the starboard tack, for the wind was on the bow, and set a staysail between the fore and main masts. The splendid ship seemed to skim over the surface of the sea, touching only ...
— The Harbor of Doubt • Frank Williams
... start, And spreads the story of the haunted grove,) Curses the owl, whose loud ill-omen'd scream, With ceaseless spite, robes from his watchful ear The well known footsteps of his darling maid; And fretful, chaces from his face the night-fly, Who buzzing round his head doth often skim, With flutt'ring wing, across his glowing cheek: For all but him in deep and balmy sleep Forget the toils of the oppressive day; Shut is the door of ev'ry scatter'd cot, And silence ...
— Poems, &c. (1790) • Joanna Baillie
... first place, not a single iceberg is to be seen on this fantastic sea. Innumerable flocks of birds skim its surface, among them is a pelican which is shot. On a floating piece of ice is a bear of the Arctic species and of gigantic size. At last land is signalled. It is an island of a league in circumference, to which the name of Bennet Islet was given, in honour ...
— An Antarctic Mystery • Jules Verne
... such a nature and such a quantity as not to render the article injurious to health), or if any part of it has been abstracted to the detriment of the article. Margarine or cheese containing margarine has to be conspicuously marked as such; condensed, separated or skim milk has to be clearly labelled "machine-skimmed milk'' or "skimmed milk,'' as the case may be. The next sections give to the Local Government Board and the Board of Agriculture a roving commission to see that the acts are properly enforced throughout the kingdom so as ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... bound for the office of the Beacon—the local weekly. And thoughts of what tremendous possibilities might be stretching out from this very hour, and of what she would say to Ed Martin, the editor, made her feet now skim along impatiently, and now slow ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin
... allow it to stand for ten minutes. Score the rind of the slices and fry slowly until they are a golden brown. Make a milk gravy by heating flour in the fat that has been tried out, allowing two tablespoonfuls of fat and two tablespoonfuls of flour to each cup of milk. This is a good way to use skim milk, which is as rich in protein as whole milk. The pork and milk gravy served with boiled or baked potatoes makes a cheap and simple meal, but one that most people like very much. Bacon is often used in place of salt pork in making ...
— Practical Suggestions for Mother and Housewife • Marion Mills Miller
... beef, 10 per cent. of the milch cows to be thus disposed, of. Then swine, in particular, must be slaughtered down to 65 per cent. of the present number, they being great consumers of material suitable for human food. In Germany much skim milk and buttermilk is fed to swine; the authors demand that this partial waste of very valuable albumens be stopped. The potato crop—of which Germany produces above 50,000,000 tons a year, or much more than any other land—must be more extensively drawn upon than hitherto for feeding the people. ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... a 3-inch ladle and heat it over the fire and then dip it into the solder and skim off any ...
— Elements of Plumbing • Samuel Dibble
... encounters in war and rivalries in love between Christian and Pagan champions; journeys through undiscovered lands and over untracked oceans; fantastic hyperboles of desire, ambition, jealousy, and rage, employed as motive passions. Enchanted forests; fairy ships that skim the waves without helm or pilot; lances endowed with supernatural virtues; charmed gardens of perpetual spring; dismal dungeons and glittering palaces, supply the furniture of this romance no less than of its predecessors. Rinaldo, like any other hero of the Renaissance, ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... such a man as Miss Fountain is a woman. He was but a dish of skim-milk, yet he could ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... which she received her own particular friends, wrote her letters, and read; just then she was engaged in the latter occupation, for the books had come in from the library that day, and she had sat down after luncheon to skim them through before selecting any which seemed worth ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... not faint; On the stones he will not stumble, 560 Time nor toil shall make him humble; In the stall he will not stiffen, But be winged as a Griffin, Only flying with his feet: And will not such a voyage be sweet? Merrily! merrily! never unsound, Shall our bonny black horses skim over the ground! From the Alps to the Caucasus, ride we, or fly! For we'll leave them behind in the glance of an eye. [They ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... day,' said Armstrong, 'a poet laid a table for men to eat and drink at. We'd Sir Walter's beef and bannocks, and puir young Byron's Athol brose. Wha calls this mingling o' skim milk an' treacle the wine o' the soul a poet ought ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... a pleasant little excursion from Gurgan Point to the harbour; the sea was luckily calm, but there was sufficient breeze to enable The Kittiwake to skim over the water like her sea-gull namesake. The girls, who by this time had grasped the depths of their friend's plot, enjoyed the situation immensely. They were actually having their coveted sail in the very company of the dear lady who had so expressly ...
— Monitress Merle • Angela Brazil
... sympathy with what seemed to him the shallow rationalism of the contemporaneous Aristotelian, who fancied in his conceit that with a few logical formul he could penetrate the mysteries of the divine, when in reality he was barely enabled to skim the surface; into the sanctuary he ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... stoop and swoop On the air, or loop Through the trees, and then go soaring, O: To group with a troop On the gusty poop While the wind behind is roaring, O: I skim and swim By a cloud's red rim And up to the azure flooring, O: And my wide wings drip As I slip, slip, slip Down through the rain-drops, Back where Peg Broods in the nest On the little white egg, So ...
— Georgian Poetry 1916-17 • Various
... the cultivator, a flock of blackbirds fed in the fresh-turned earth. The boy watched them with half-shut eyes. When one of the birds had fed, it would hop upon a lump of wet, black earth, and being satisfied that it could eat no more, would skim in rapid, undulating flight to the row of willows in the next pasture. On a fence-post, a meadow-lark filled the silence with a liquid flow of music. As it laid back its head in an abandon of joy, the ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... always try to profit by my superiors. She has courage: I have none. I beat about the bush, and talk skim-milk; she uses the very word. She said we have been the dupe and the tool of a little scheming rascal, an anonymous coward, with motives as base as his heart is black—oh! oh! Ay, that is the way to speak of such a man; ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... along the drawbridge flies, Just as it trembled on the rise; Not lighter does the swallow skim Along the smooth lake's level brim: And when Lord Marmion reached his band, He halts, and turns with clenched hand, A shout of loud defiance pours, And shakes his gauntlet at the towers! Sir ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... a little in low tones, and I looked at Margarita and thought of the odd chances of life, and how we are hurried past this and that and stranded on the other, and skim the rapids sometimes, to be wrecked ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... one say they are doomed. This lady is well along in years, therefore, this one fair spot of sky-scene is large enough to fill in the remaining periods with joy and hope. I am not content to skim over the mere surface. Helpful revelations ...
— Cupology - How to Be Entertaining • Clara
... the red-men rally With dance and song the woods resound; The hatchet's buried in the valley; No foe profanes our hunting-ground! The green leaves on the blithe boughs quiver, The verdant hills with song-birds ring, While our bark canoes, the river Skim, like swallows on the wing.—G. ...
— The Riflemen of the Miami • Edward S. Ellis
... generations of tourists. There had been a full pour of forenoon sunshine on the white dust of the street before our hotel, but the cold of the early morning, though it had not been too much for the birds that sang in the garden back of us, had left a skim of ice in damp spots, and now, in the late gray of the afternoon, the ice was visible and palpable underfoot in the Colosseum, where crowds of people wandered severally or collectively about in the half-frozen ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... called on deck. Now one sail and now another was added,—some rigged out so as just to skim the surface of the water, while with buckets and scoops the sails were wetted as high as they could be reached. Harry and David could see in the far distance a large ship, which from her narrow yards and the cut of her sails Harry said he ...
— Adrift in a Boat • W.H.G. Kingston
... himself, Castanier could travel in a few moments over the fertile plains of India, could soar on the wings of demons above African desert spaces, or skim the surface of the seas. The same insight that could read the inmost thoughts of others, could apprehend at a glance the nature of any material object, just as he caught as it were all flavors at once upon his tongue. He took his pleasure like a despot; ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... sense in keeping this deck watch. Only a short distance away lay the United States gunboat "Waverly," with her alert marine guard. Though there was no moon, the starlight was bright enough to enable a marine on the gunboat to see anything that might skim over the water toward ...
— The Submarine Boys and the Spies - Dodging the Sharks of the Deep • Victor G. Durham
... got the matter twisted. It was you interfering with our game. We've been after this man two months. And you ain't going to skim the cream off our hard work, I ...
— The Bradys and the Girl Smuggler - or, Working for the Custom House • Francis W. Doughty
... the Swallows. They are very common birds, and frequent, as a rule, the cultivated lands in the neighborhood of water, showing a decided preference for the habitations of man. "How gracefully the swallows fly! See them coursing over the daisy-bespangled grass fields; now they skim just over the blades of grass, and then with a rapid stroke of their long wings mount into the air and come hovering above your head, displaying their rich white and chestnut plumage to perfection. Now they chase each other for ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photograph [March 1897] - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various
... branches of the beech-trees dip, swish, and bend to the swirl of water created by our boat, which makes miniature waves leap and run along the bank in a playful way. How delightfully peaceful the surrounding landscape is as we skim over the silvery lake and then land! The climbing of this mountain does not take long. There is a splendid view from the top of Himmelbjerget, for the country lies spread out like a map before us. This lake district is very beautiful, and ...
— Denmark • M. Pearson Thomson
... accompanied us. It is something remarkable that they only inhabit the colder latitudes, for in a warmer climate it is a rare thing to find them. Sometimes a few weary land-birds that have strayed from their homeward way, skim over the ocean, or rest upon the masts; how they maintain themselves on the wing cannot be conjectured, but certain it is, they have been seen on the trackless ocean, when no point of land was ...
— Hair Breadth Escapes - Perilous incidents in the lives of sailors and travelers - in Japan, Cuba, East Indies, etc., etc. • T. S. Arthur
... called by sailors, "mother Carey's chickens." These birds are seldom seen in calm weather, but appear to follow the gale, and when it blows most heavily they are seen in greatest numbers. The colour is brown and white; the size about that of the swallow, whose motions oh the wing they resemble. They skim over the surface of the roughest sea, gliding up and down the undulations with astonishing swiftness. When they observe their prey, they descend flutteringly, and place the feet and the tips of the wings on the surface of the water. In this position ...
— A Ramble of Six Thousand Miles through the United States of America • S. A. Ferrall
... name's Thomas, vulgar cad!—Of the new Shavings Bank—the man's gone mad! That's libelous; I'll have him up for that—Has had his corns cut. Devil take the rat! What business is 't of his, I'd like to know? He didn't have to cut them. Gods! what low And scurril things our papers have become! You skim their contents and you get but scum. Here, Mary, (waking wife) I've been attacked In this vile sheet. By ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... rapidity, and glitter with flowers of the rarest hues and shapes, or bear quantities of luscious fruit, pleasant to the eye and sweet to the taste. The air resounds with the hum of insect-life; through the bright green leaves of the banana skim the sparkling humming-birds, and gorgeous butterflies of enormous size float, glowing with every colour of the rainbow, on the flower-scented breezes. But over all this beauty—over the luxuriance of vegetation, over the softness of the tropical air, over the ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... hours later his wife got wearily up and was going away to bed without a good-night—custom now—but she stopped near the letter and eyed it awhile with a dead interest, then broke it open, and began to skim it over. Richards, sitting there with his chair tilted back against the wall and his chin between his knees, heard something fall. It was his wife. He sprang to her side, but ...
— The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg • Mark Twain
... pigs, cattle, grain, and wheat produced on the farm and not consumed, or required for further agricultural production, will automatically be delivered to the co-operative business centre of the district, where the manager of the dairy will turn the milk into butter or cheese, and the skim milk will be returned to feed the community's pigs. The poultry and egg department will pack and dispatch the fowl and eggs to market. The mill will grind the corn and return it ground to the member, or there may be a co-operative bakery to which some of it ...
— National Being - Some Thoughts on an Irish Polity • (A.E.)George William Russell
... and the Mississippi, we saw crawling beneath us from west, south and north, an endless succession of railway trains bearing their multitudes on to Washington. With marvellous speed we rushed westward, rising high to skim over the snow-topped peaks of the Rocky Mountains and then the glittering rim of the Pacific was before us. Half way between the American coast and Hawaii we met the fleets coming from China and Japan. Side by side they were ploughing the main, ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putman Serviss
... the sewing-machines, who should be abundantly able to "hoe their row" with them anywhere. In short, I was extremely disappointed. I expected to see the high fashion, the very birth and breeding, the cream cheese of the country, and it was skim-milk. If that is birth, one can do quite as well without being born at all. Occasionally you would see a girl with gentle blood in her veins, whether it were butcher-blood or banker-blood, but she only made the prevailing plebsiness more striking. Now ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... It always annoyed her to have Miss Boyd called her double. The figure and manner was so different. Zay was so light and airy, she seemed rather to skim over space than to walk, and every motion was replete with grace, while Miss Boyd was stately, and when critical eyes were upon her, sometimes ...
— The Girls at Mount Morris • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... Mrs. Skim; and quite agree with you that he knows very little about us and our affairs," answered one of the swallows with a shrill chirp, like a scornful laugh. "We work harder than he does any day. Did he build his own ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... were flying gracefully above the water, sometimes coming close to the boat and now and then one would make a sudden dash down to the water, just dip his head in it and skim it with his wings, then soar up into the ...
— Sunny Boy in the Big City • Ramy Allison White
... hour of this, he had wearied and sought to save himself by abandoning the lynx's territory, so had struck across the open lake. But here the snow was too soft to bear him at all, and the lynx could still skim over. So it proved a fatal error. He was strong and brave. He fought at least another hour here before the much stronger, heavier lynx had done him to death. There was no justification. It was a clear case of tyrannical murder, but in this case vengeance ...
— Rolf In The Woods • Ernest Thompson Seton
... his companions a characteristic of the hawk and buzzard tribe, by which these birds can always be distinguished from the true falcon. That peculiarity lay in the manner of seizing their prey. The former skim forward upon it sideways—that is, in a horizontal or diagonal direction, and pick it up in passing; while the true falcons—as the merlin, the peregrine, the gerfalcon, and the great eagle-falcons—shoot down upon their prey perpendicularly ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... felt the words of my lessons slipping off, not one by one, or line by line, but by the entire page; I tried to lay hold of them; but they seemed, if I may so express it, to have put skates on, and to skim away from me with a smoothness ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... We skim too closely to the earth, We press too slowly for the prize, Let thoughts and cares of trivial worth Retard our journey to the skies. Oh, let us watch and pray to have A loftier flight from transient things, Inspired like swans at last to lave In streams ...
— The Mountain Spring And Other Poems • Nannie R. Glass
... these two elements, which is the very keynote of this letter, is wonderfully set forth in this passage. They would require much more space than we command for their treatment, for every clause is weighty as gold. We can but skim the surface, and try to bring ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... government authority, and I feel an inch or two taller'n I ever felt before on my own quarter-deck. But this is a gun-deck now, aint it?" he added, stamping his foot upon it to see how solid it was. "If we only had aboard the howitzer that belongs here so that we could salute Plymouth as we skim by—You aint listening to me at all. What you looking ...
— True To His Colors • Harry Castlemon
... one box of gelatine soaked in a cup of cold water. Beat into the mixture the slightly beaten whites and crushed shells of two eggs. Heat to the boiling-point, stirring constantly, and let boil five minutes. After standing ten minutes skim off the froth, etc., and strain through a cheese-cloth folded double and held in ...
— Salads, Sandwiches and Chafing-Dish Dainties - With Fifty Illustrations of Original Dishes • Janet McKenzie Hill
... MY DEAR HOWELLS,—Just got your letter last night. No, dern that article,—[One of the Bermuda chapters.]—it made me cry when I read it in proof, it was so oppressively and ostentatiously poor. Skim your eye over it again and you will think as I do. If Isaac and the prophets of Baal can be doctored gently and made permissible, it will redeem the thing: but if it can't, let's burn all of the articles except the tail-end of it and use that as an introduction ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the fig-leaf apron Of Old Adam's ancient days;— Or become a hardy Briton— Beard the lion in his lair, And lie down in dainty slumber Wrapped in skins of shaggy bear,— Rear the hut amid the forest, Skim the wave in light canoe? Ah, I see! you do not like it. Then if these "old ways" won't ...
— Friends and Neighbors - or Two Ways of Living in the World • Anonymous
... When Lavretsky lay down at night he took to bed with him a whole bundle of French newspapers, which had already lain unopened on his table for two or three weeks. He began carelessly to tear open their covers and to skim the contents of their columns, in which, for the matter of that, there was but little that was new. He was just on the point of throwing them aside, when he suddenly bounded out of bed as if something had stung him. In the feuilleton of one of the papers our former acquaintance, ...
— Liza - "A nest of nobles" • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... tell you, in a bit of marshy meadow just at the outlet of the pond. Garry was paddling me along at the top of his pace, after a wing-tipped wood-duck, when up jumped one of the long-billed rascals, and had the impudence to skim across the creek under my very nose—'skeap! skeap!' Well, I dropped him, you may be sure, with a charge, too, of duck shot; and he fell some ten yards over on the meadow; so leaving Garry to pursue the drake, I landed, loaded my gun with No. 9, and went to work—the result as you see; but I cleared ...
— Warwick Woodlands - Things as they Were There Twenty Years Ago • Henry William Herbert (AKA Frank Forester)
... be seen that a well-balanced ration is possible without the use of expensive foods. In fact, among the cheap foods are some consisting mostly of protein, some consisting mostly of fat, and some consisting mostly of carbohydrate. For instance, cheap sources of protein are skim milk, beans, cheese, and peanuts. Cheap sources of fat are oleomargarine and cottonseed-oil. Cheap sources of carbohydrate, i.e., starch and sugar, are bread, bananas, potatoes, glucose, and even ordinary sugar. If a diet, selected for cheapness, is not ...
— How to Live - Rules for Healthful Living Based on Modern Science • Irving Fisher and Eugene Fisk
... were sent fore-riders to skim the country, and they met with the fore-riders of the north, and made them to tell which way the host came, and then they told it to Arthur, and by King Ban and Bors' council they let burn and destroy all the country afore them, ...
— Le Morte D'Arthur, Volume I (of II) - King Arthur and of his Noble Knights of the Round Table • Thomas Malory
... Meg. So did a dozen of the children who had been playing on the slide. They saw Twaddles start himself with a little forward push, skim down the slide like a bird, take the jump at the end of the bank, and shoot out into the pond ...
— Four Little Blossoms and Their Winter Fun • Mabel C. Hawley
... quart of carrots and turnips, half and half, in small balls, and add them, with one dozen button onions, a bouquet of sweet herbs, half a saltspoonful of pepper, and a teaspoonful of salt; simmer for one hour; take up the cutlets with a fork, skim out the vegetables, and remove the bouquet; lay the cutlets in a wreath on a hot dish, place the vegetables in the centre, and strain the gravy over all. Green peas, new turnips, or new potatoes, may replace the first named vegetables. The dish ...
— The Cooking Manual of Practical Directions for Economical Every-Day Cookery • Juliet Corson
... presents the public which, fighting the world, and with a good footing in the fight, knows the world best. It may be the most selfish, but that is a question leading us into sophistries. Cultivated men and women, who do not skim the cream of life, and are attached to the duties, yet escape the harsher blows, make acute and balanced ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... that they should not be priggish, and I do not think they are in any danger of becoming so. I suppose I rather skim the cream of their education, and leave the duller part to the governess, a nice, tranquil person, who lives in the village, the daughter of a previous vicar, and comes in in the mornings. I don't mean that ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... from the dark flock'd up the shadowy tribes;— And as the swallows crowd the bulrush-beds Of some clear river, issuing from a lake, On autumn-days, before they cross the sea; And to each bulrush-crest a swallow hangs Quivering, and others skim the river-streams, And their quick twittering fills the banks and shores— So around Hermod swarm'd the twittering ghosts. Women, and infants, and young men who died Too soon for fame, with white ungraven shields; And old men, known ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... coffee to finish off with; put on the pot, Bess, and skim the milk," added Becky, as she produced cups, mugs, and a queer little vase, to supply drinking ...
— An Old-fashioned Girl • Louisa May Alcott
... caldron hangs over the fire on a low hearth; various figures appear in the vapour rising from it. A FEMALE MONKEY sits beside the caldron to skim it, and watch that it does not boil over. The MALE MONKEY with the young ones is seated near, warming himself. The walls and ceiling are adorned with ...
— Faust Part 1 • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... on the Regicide Peace" and consult the title-page, you will find them ostensibly addressed to 'a Member of the present Parliament'; and the opening paragraphs assume that Burke and his correspondent are in general agreement. But skim the pages and your eyes will be arrested again and again by ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... pound and a halfe of fine sugar, and beat it small, and put it into a pretty brasse pot, with twenty spoonfulls of Rose-water, and when it boyleth skim it clean, then take it off the fire, and let it stand while it be almost cold, then take two pound of Pare-plums, and wipe them upon a faire cloath, and put them into your Syrupe when it is almost cold, ...
— A Book of Fruits and Flowers • Anonymous
... Labour we mean us working men; and by Capital we mean those that derive benefit from us, take the cream off us and leave us the skim. ...
— Touch and Go • D. H. Lawrence
... the right, the other to the left, while the third kept near the middle of the stream. Then two would swerve toward shore, or perhaps it was all three, and again it was Jennie who kept the farthest from land, or perhaps a fancy led her to skim so close that some of the ...
— Cowmen and Rustlers • Edward S. Ellis
... They try to skim through by doing just as little work as possible. They cut the corners as closely as possible with their lessons, so that they can have time for play. They do that with the work in subtraction, and then, when they get into multiplication or division, they have all sorts of trouble. And ...
— Fifty-Two Story Talks To Boys And Girls • Howard J. Chidley
... prone in Dantesque confusion. There are rock-doves and falcons fluttering about the sunny precipices; cliff-swallows build precarious habitations against the roof of yawning caverns; sandpipers and wagtails skim over the streamlet that glides in a smiling flood across reaches of yellow sand. The charm of water in the waste! This Seldja-brook is a true child of the sun; cold in the morning and evening hours, its restless little heart becomes tepid at ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... clamorous birds is winged in an inferior region of the air. We hear them, and we look upon them, just as you, Gentlemen, when you enjoy the serene air on your lofty rocks, look down upon the gulls that skim the mud of your river, when it ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... 'Faster! Faster!' And they went so fast that at last they seemed to skim through the air, hardly touching the ground with their feet, till suddenly, just as Alice was getting quite exhausted, they stopped, and she found herself sitting on the ground, breathless ...
— Through the Looking-Glass • Charles Dodgson, AKA Lewis Carroll
... reduced by the distress it has suffered, and environed on every side by the enemy, whose boldness visibly increases with our necessities. What, therefore, I should infer from this extraordinary present is this: they intimate that unless, like the mouse, you can dig your passage through the earth, or skim the air like the bird, or glide through waters with the fish, you shall certainly perish by the Scythian arrows.' Such was the sentiment of Gobrias, and all the assembly was struck with the evident truth of his interpretation, and the king himself began to perceive and repent his rashness; ...
— The History of Sandford and Merton • Thomas Day
... the boat skim through the moonlit water, and he floated for some little distance to ascertain whether he ...
— The Hero of Ticonderoga - or Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys • John de Morgan
... season, Three centuries ago, When Roberval set sail from France To skim broad ocean's flow. Nobles, rich, young and restless, Statesmen and soldiers too, Women of birth, and sailors, Composed the ...
— Home Lyrics • Hannah. S. Battersby
... believe this would do for little Pete;" and the dear old lady drew a large, pressed-tin pan off the top shelf in the pantry. A long, smooth butter-tray was found for Jimmy. Grandma shook her cap-border with laughter to see them skim over the hard crust in their queer sleds. And the boys shouted and swung their hands as they ...
— The Night Before Christmas and Other Popular Stories For Children • Various
... I'm on the inside," he went on impressively. "I know some of those big ones personally. That makes the difference; those fellows don't lose, they skim the cream off of everything. Say, I ought to know—didn't I go in there lone-handed and fight it out with a king of finance? That's the man we're in with—I can't tell you his name, now—he's the one that owns the forty-nine per cent. They're crazy about copper or he'd ...
— Rimrock Jones • Dane Coolidge
... Reno Tragedies: Consists of a few short tales of people who have been members of the divorce colony. Whilst the comedy part describes characters who find life is all froth, who skim its surface, so to speak, those portrayed in this chapter are people who take existence seriously; who want to drain the cup of life to its last dregs! If one listens as one reads one can almost hear the steady ...
— Reno - A Book of Short Stories and Information • Lilyan Stratton
... time—no childer, dear, don't be thinkin' of it, and Pearlie, I think ye'd better not be puttin' notions inter their heads. Yer father wouldn't like it. Well Danny, me man, how goes it?" went on Mrs. Watson, as her latest born was eating his rather scanty supper. "It's not skim milk and dhry bread ye'd be havin', if you were her child this night, but taffy candy filled wid nuts and chunks o' cake as big as yer head." Whereupon Danny wailed dismally, and had to be taken from his chair and have the "Little Boy Blue" sung to him, before he could ...
— Sowing Seeds in Danny • Nellie L. McClung
... show blossom among the seed-heads, and though the thick round rushes have turned to russet, the forget-me-not is still in flower; and though the water-lilies have all gone to the bottom again, and the swallows no longer skim over the surface, the river seems as rich in life as ever; and the birds and fish, unfrightened by the boat traffic, are tamer and ...
— The Naturalist on the Thames • C. J. Cornish
... an ardent mind, Time, wealth, and fame forgot, Our glory in our patience find And skim, and skim ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 14 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Kalee? Had she not seen the Cradle (still standing in the hollow of the hill)? No doubt; but woman will go through worse storms than man's passion to get to the goal of wealth and honour. Then there is a frenzy in woman, Aminadab. She is like the boys, who seek danger for its own sake, and will skim on skates the rim of the black pool that descends from the film of ice down to the bubbling well of death below. Women have an ambition to tame wild men; ay, even wild men have a charm for them, which the tame sons of prudence and industry cannot inspire. So it was: they were married, ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Vol. XXIII. • Various
... going to do what I can while I live to increase that feeling of independence and manhood in the American people.—We can control ourselves. I believe in the gospel of this world; I believe in happiness right here; I do not believe in drinking skim milk all my life with the expectation of butter beyond the clouds. I believe in the gospel, I say, in this world. This is a mighty good world. There are plenty of good people in this world. There is ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... call to Rhoda, in her elegant fashion, "you are a bit of a German sausage, aren't you? Just read over that passage for me. I've been puzzling over it for the whole of the evening," and then would follow some blissful moments, when Rhoda would skim lightly over the difficulty, and feel the eyes of the girls ...
— Tom and Some Other Girls - A Public School Story • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... different liquid substances are extensively used, such as beef broth, milk, and infusions of various vegetable and animal tissues. Skim-milk is of especial value in studying the milk bacteria and may be used in its natural condition, or a few drops of litmus solution may be added in order to detect any change in its chemical reaction due ...
— Outlines of Dairy Bacteriology, 8th edition - A Concise Manual for the Use of Students in Dairying • H. L. Russell
... Atlantic and Gulf States, where it is very abundant; it is frequent in the Middle States, and only occasionally seen in New England. The wings are exceedingly long; they fly in close flocks, moving simultaneously. They seem to feed as they skim low over the water, the under-mandible grazing or cutting the surface, and thus taking in their food.—Vide Coues's Key to North American Birds, ...
— Voyages of Samuel de Champlain, Vol. 2 • Samuel de Champlain
... would skim over the polished boards to the newcomer, and, tendering the menu, would wait, pencil in hand, until the guest, after careful contemplation, selected his five ...
— A Versailles Christmas-Tide • Mary Stuart Boyd
... the latter, "you will gut my fish in a jiffy; permit me to recall that expression, with apologies for my freedom. I would say, you will, in a few minutes of your valuable existence, skim the ...
— Peg Woffington • Charles Reade
... paddles as only those can who have life at stake. Their light canoe leaped suddenly forward, and seemed fairly to skim over the water like some great aquatic bird, but the larger craft behind them gained steadily though slowly. Three pairs of arms, no matter how strong or expert, are no match for twelve, and the hunter frowned as he glanced back now ...
— The Hunters of the Hills • Joseph Altsheler
... amusement to me this first evening, scribbling as egotistically as usual about myself and my doings; so you must forgive me, as I know well your kind heart will do. I have managed to skim the newspaper, but had not heart to read all the bloody details. Good God! What will the end be? Perhaps we are too despondent here; but I must think you are too hopeful on your side of the water. I never ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... fantastic flight, They scour the regions of the night, Free as the winds that wildly blow O'er hill and dale the blinding snow, Or, through the woods, their frolics play, And whirling, sweep the dusty way, When summer shines with burning glare, And sportive breezes skim the air, And Ocean's glassy breast is fanned To ...
— Cottage Poems • Patrick Bronte
... a dozen men are watching the fords of the Lodden, and a bullet in your back would probably be the first intimation of the presence of a party of skulkers. No, sirs, unless you can skim over the surface of this bog, and then scale Mount Tarrengower, your only place of safety is on this ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... enough buoyancy to sustain itself and its engine. In this way, the upper craft has no engine or other load than its cargo; and as it merely rests upon the surface, the inventor thinks that it will skim over the same like ...
— Scientific American, Volume XXXVI., No. 8, February 24, 1877 • Various
... Oldfield, produce the best perry when unmixed with other varieties. Some fining of an albuminous nature is generally requisite in order to clear the juice and facilitate its passage through the filter, but the less used the better. The simplest and cleanest is skim milk whipped to a froth and blended gradually with the cider as it is pumped into the mixing vat. Many nostrums are sold for the clearing of cider, but none is ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... curves to be taken, and I blessed the memory of that famous ruler wielded by the hand of Nicholas I. Here and there, at some slight rise in the ground, the engine literally did leave the rails and skim through the air for a few yards, alighting with a jar that brought my teeth together like ...
— The International Spy - Being the Secret History of the Russo-Japanese War • Allen Upward
... broth is done, set it aside to cool. Then skim off all the fat and warm it up and use. One pound of lean meat will produce a quart ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker
... morning put them in a kettle with a close fitting top; pour over them three quarts of cold water, adding half a pound of lean ham or bacon cut into slices or pieces; also a teaspoonful salt, a little pepper and a stalk of celery cut fine. When the soup begins to boil, skim the froth from the surface. Cook slowly from three to four hours, stirring occasionally until the peas are all dissolved. Strain through a colander and leave out meat. It should be quite thick. If not rich enough, add a small ...
— Stevenson Memorial Cook Book • Various
... which is referable to muriatic acid being used in curdling the milk instead of rennet. This renders it pungent, and preserves it from mites. Parmesan cheese, so called from Parma in Italy, where it is manufactured, and highly prized, is merely a skim-milk cheese, which owes its rich flavour to the fine herbage of the meadows along the Po, where ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. - 582, Saturday, December 22, 1832 • Various
... with much vomiting and fever, all milk should be immediately stopped and rice water or barley water substituted. When vomiting ceases and the fever approaches normal and food is desired, begin with boiled skim milk in small amounts, well diluted with cereal water, and do not approach the normal amount of milk for twenty-four to forty-eight hours. In this way the weak digestive organs are not overtaxed and they gradually resume their usual work of good digestion. When a baby seems to have no appetite ...
— The Mother and Her Child • William S. Sadler
... stock and half a pint of white sauce. Season with salt and half a teaspoonful of moist sugar, boil for a quarter of an hour, adding more white stock if necessary, and stirring constantly. Put through a strainer into another saucepan, boil up again, skim, and use ...
— Twenty-four Little French Dinners and How to Cook and Serve Them • Cora Moore
... o'er the level how the skaiters slide, And skim the glitt'ring surface as they go: Thus o'er life's specious pleasures lightly glide, But pause not, press not on the ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi
... hunt New York over for the desired shade. Where he found it I never knew, but find it he did, or something approximating to it, a faded, washed-out color, which seemed a cross between wood-ashes and pale skim milk. A sample was sent up for Guy's approval, and then the work commenced again, when order number three came in one of those dainty little billets which used to make Guy's face radiant with happiness. Daisy had changed her mind ...
— Miss McDonald • Mary J. Holmes
... that is what it is with us. As a spectacle, the racing lacks the definition in England which our course gives, and when it began, I missed the relief into which our track throws the bird-like sweep of the horses as they skim the naked earth in ...
— Seven English Cities • W. D. Howells
... and place for the national Carl Schurz convention. As Chicago will make no attempt to secure this convention, we do not mind telling St. Louis, Philadelphia and Cincinnati that the biggeet inducement which can be held out to the Carl Schurz party is a diet of oatmeal and skim milk and ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... see, there is so little to unravel! Some books, we all know, you must 'chew and digest'; they can only be read slowly; but some you can glance at, skim, and skip; the mere turning of the pages tells you what little worth ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... tole my son so. Had you been to the do' befo'?" She talked on not waiting for a reply. "Ah sho did enjoy the victuals you sent day befo' yistidy. They send me surplus food frum the gove'nment but Ah don't like what they send. The skim milk gripes me and Ah don't like that yellow meal. A friend brought me some white meal t'other day. And that wheat cereal they send! Ah eats it with water when Ah don't have milk and Ah don't like it but when you don't have nothin' else you got to eat what you have. They send me 75c ever ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves: Volume IV, Georgia Narratives, Part 1 • Works Projects Administration
... an' at night, Do skim the yollow cream, an' mwold An' wring her cheeses red an' white, An' zee ...
— Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect • William Barnes
... in certain proportions with organic matter. The reader must be familiar with cements of this kind long known among the people, and much used in the repairing of broken pottery, such as a cement compounded of quicklime made of oyster shells, mixed up with a glue made of skim-milk cheese, and another cement made also of quicklime mixed up with the whites of eggs. In Mrs. Marshall's cements, the organic matter is variously compounded of both animal and vegetable substances, while the earth generally employed is sulphate of lime; and the result is a close-grained ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... would go away by degrees, and gradually draw them unconsciously off to a shorter or a longer distance from the nest. The swallow taught her children to fly high when the air was calm, for then the insects kept in a more elevated part of the air; or to skim along the ground at the approach of a storm, as then the same insects would direct their course toward the earth, where they might find shelter under the stones at the fall of the first drop of rain. Then the little ones, more experienced, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... nationalist majority. At times, indeed, he had to restrain their zeal. In 1867, for instance, when they desired to take Baden alone into the new union,—the rest of South Germany being averse to entrance,—Bismarck was obliged to tell them that it would be a poor policy "to skim off the cream and let the rest of the ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... conservative and discreet; Rabelais sought development of all the faculties alike, Montaigne gave preference to the training of the judgment; Rabelais would thoroughly master every branch of human knowledge, Montaigne was content to skim over the sciences. And yet, Montaigne must be recognized as an important factor in education, not only for his own teachings, but because undoubtedly Bacon, Locke, Rousseau, and other apostles of reform were greatly influenced by him. Bacon furthered Montaigne's ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley
... external appearance. The covers will be well worn and the edges begrimed with dirt from much handling. Children soon tire of the shallow sameness which characterizes the "moral" parts of most of these books, and skim lightly over them, selecting and devouring with eagerness those portions which relate the silly narrative of some love adventure. This kind of literature arouses in children premature fancies and queries, and fosters a ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... snow had tinted it; some silvery clouds were floating just over the pale summits, and on the other side of the gulf Nice, lying close to the water, stretched like a white thread between the sea and the mountain. Two great sails, driven by a strong breeze, seemed to skim over the waves. I looked ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... say "unthinkable." They were unthinkable to me until I saw them, and I was no spring chicken in the ways of the world and the awful abysses of human degradation. It would take a deep plummet to reach bottom in the Erie County Pen, and I do but skim lightly and facetiously the surface of things as ...
— The Road • Jack London |
