"Sponge" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... straight to the quay," exclaimed a fifth, "though what sends her Satan alone knows, for the tide is slack and this wind would scarce move a sponge boat. Stand by with the hawser, or she'll swing round and ...
— Red Eve • H. Rider Haggard
... hours at a time, stopping, perhaps, only during the very hottest part of the day. And when an elephant is very tired it begins to perspire, or "sweat," over each eye, and two little hollow places there look as though they had been wet with a sponge. ...
— Umboo, the Elephant • Howard R. Garis
... be little doubt of the stranger's confidence in the coming of the expected company. In token thereof, he went first to the litter, and, from the cot or box opposite the one he had occupied in coming, produced a sponge and a small gurglet of water, with which he washed the eyes, face, and nostrils of the camel; that done, from the same depository he drew a circular cloth, red-and white-striped, a bundle of rods, and a stout cane. The latter, after some manipulation, proved to be a cunning ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... pleases thee. The little world, and then the great, we'll see. With what delight, what profit winning, Shalt thou sponge through ...
— Faust • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... soil of Central Asia is like a sponge impregnated with liquid hydrogen. At the port of Bakou, on the Persian frontier, on the Caspian Sea, in Asia Minor, in China, on the Yuen-Kiang, in the Burman Empire, springs of mineral oil rise in thousands to the surface of the ground. It is an "oil country," similar to the one which ...
— Michael Strogoff - or, The Courier of the Czar • Jules Verne
... loose, coarse, and sandy soil; and, secondly, that the ranges were wholly deficient in that peat formation which fills the valleys, or covers the flat summits of the hills or mountains, in the northern hemisphere. The peculiar property of this formation is to retain water like a sponge; and to this property the regular and constant flow of the rivers descending from such hills, may, in a great measure, be attributed. In New South Wales on the contrary, the rains that fall upon the mountains drain ...
— Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia, Complete • Charles Sturt
... is the name, or that it is your opinion that it is worthy to be food for the gods?" asked Bessie Sanford, who paused at my elbow, bearing in her hands a tray of delicate sponge-cakes. ...
— Uncle Rutherford's Nieces - A Story for Girls • Joanna H. Mathews
... me at my capers and his heart swelled like a wet sponge. He swore a great oath that my fool's head should be the first to ...
— The Proud Prince • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... White waited till she heard the last of Nurse's steps on the stairs below, and then she put both her cat-children into the tub, and washed them with rose-scented soap and a Turkey sponge. At first they thought it very good fun, but presently the soap got in their eyes and they were frightened of the sponge, and they cried, mewing piteously, to be taken out. I don't know how she could have done it, I couldn't have treated a kitten of ...
— Pussy and Doggy Tales • Edith Nesbit
... of general paresis (commonly though improperly called "softening of the brain") passed into the second stage as a delusion was uppermost to the effect that there was opium everywhere; opium in his hat, opium in his newspaper, opium in his bath sponge, opium in his food. He thereupon refused to eat, and was fed with a tube for two years, at the end of which time he resumed natural methods of nutrition and ate voraciously. Another general paretic promised to his physician such gifts ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume II (of VI) • Various
... throw up the sponge. I pull down the flag. Let us begin on the debts. I cannot bear the weight any longer. It totally unfits me for work. I have lost three entire months now. In that time I have begun twenty magazine articles and books—and flung every one of them aside in turn. The debts interfered ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the membranes of the tail and wings." Unfortunately, these interesting observations were cut short by the death of the mother, and the young animal, which was with some difficulty removed from the nipple, survived only eight days, during which it was fed with milk from a sponge, and made but little progress, its eyes being still unopened, and ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... introductions to the company,—Mr. Vivian, Mr. Bolding, on the one side; Major MacBlarney, Mr. Bullion, Mr. Emanuel Speck, on the other. Major MacBlarney is a fine, portly man, with a slight Dublin brogue, who squeezes your hand as he would a sponge. Mr. Bullion, reserved and haughty, wears green spectacles, and gives you a forefinger. Mr. Emanuel Speck—unusually smart for the Bush, with a blue-satin stock and one of those blouses common in Germany, with elaborate hems and pockets enough for Briareus to have put all hands ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... may stop in for a little while," said Mr. Longears, with a smile that made his pink nose twinkle like the frosting on a sponge cake. "But when is the party going to take ...
— Uncle Wiggily in the Woods • Howard R. Garis
... course," said Midget, politely, and suddenly feeling that her younger sister was getting very grown-up, with her recipe book and her sponge cake. ...
— Marjorie at Seacote • Carolyn Wells
... exclaimed the discomfited Ritson impatiently. "Run in the gun, lads; and be smart with it; that's your sort; sponge it well out; that'll do; now in with the cartridge; three strokes with the rammer; now home with the shot; run out the gun again; bear a hand with the priming-iron, you Ned; muzzle to the left—a little more yet; well with that. ...
— The Voyage of the Aurora • Harry Collingwood
... scarcely ceased to skulk, and where the rattlesnakes and alligators, who shared the wilderness with them, still lurk in undisturbed possession of the soil, if soil that may be called which is only either muddy water or watery mud, a hardly consolidated sponge of alluvial matter, receiving hourly additions from the ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... treat us better in Fez, but Tetuan is poor; the means, Seedna, the means, not the will!" Then fish in garlic, eaten with loud "Bismillah's." Then kesksoo covered with powdered sugar and cinnamon, and meat on skewers, and browned fowls, and fowls and olives, and flake pastry and sponge fritters, each eaten in its turn amid a chorus of "La Ilah illa Allah's." Finally three cups of green tea, as thick and sweet as syrup, drunk with many "Do me the favour's," and countless "Good luck's." ...
— The Scapegoat • Hall Caine
... often been asked to describe the lava beds. That is beyond the power of language. In a letter to the Army and Navy journal, written at the suggestion of General Wheaton, I compared the Indians in the lava beds to "ants in a sponge." In the language of another it is a "black ocean tumbled into a thousand fantastic shapes, a wild chaos of ruin, desolation, barrenness—a wilderness of billowy upheavals, of furious whirlpools, of miniature mountains rent asunder, of gnarled and knotted, wrinkled and twisted masses of blackness, ...
— Reminiscences of a Pioneer • Colonel William Thompson
... with them until they knew how it felt themselves. In speaking of injustice and cruelty toward the hill tenants, I was often told, "Oh, these things are of the past," they occurred thirty years ago. How philosophically people can endure the miseries they do not feel. The sponge has not been created that will wipe off the Donegal mountains the record of deeds ...
— The Letters of "Norah" on her Tour Through Ireland • Margaret Dixon McDougall
... Piercie Shafton knelt down, and most gracefully presented to the nostrils of Mary Avenel a silver pouncet-box, exquisitely chased, containing a sponge dipt in the essence which he recommmended so highly. Yes, gentle reader, it was Sir Piercie Shafton himself who thus unexpectedly proffered his good offices! his cheeks, indeed, very pale, and some part of ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... this thirst of the Chinese coolie—I know it well. It is born of sheer heat and sheer perspiration. Every drop of liquid has been wrung out of my body; I have seemed to have swum in my clothes, and inside my muscles have seemed to shrink to dry sponge and my bones to dry pith. My substance, my strength, my self has drained out of me. I have been conscious of perpetual evaporation and liquefaction. And I have felt that I must stop and wet myself again. I really must wet myself ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... day of my ordination, and in those halcyon moments of our first housekeeping! To be the confidential friend in a hundred families in the town—cutting the social trifle, as my friend Haliburton says, "from the top of the whipped-syllabub to the bottom of the sponge-cake, which is the foundation"—to keep abreast of the thought of the age in one's study, and to do one's best on Sunday to interweave that thought with the active life of an active town, and to inspirit both and make both infinite by glimpses of ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... process of nature when they wish, for example, to obtain, in animals under experiment, a state of complete immobility. But did the first surgeon who thought of trepanning the skull in order to exert on the brain, by means of a sponge, a certain degree of compression, ever imagine that an analogous procedure had long been employed in the insect world, and that these clumsy methods were merely child's play beside the ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... made of bacteria in the commercial preparation of sponges. The sponge of commerce is simply the fibrous skeleton of a marine animal. When it is alive this skeleton is completely filled with the softer parts of the animal, and to fit the sponge for use this softer organic material must be ...
— The Story Of Germ Life • H. W. Conn
... legend which afterward became, in a thousand variants, a stock part of every news item interesting enough to merit graphic treatment, "The X Marks the Spot Where the Body Was Found." He, too, adapted, from a design in a drug-store window picturing a sponge fisherman in action, the cross-section illustration for news. Within a few weeks he had displaced the outdated art editor and was in receipt of a larger salary than the city editor, who dealt primarily in news, ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... full stream in her cunt. "I hope to God that sperm's all up your womb," said I. Her own pleasure had so overcome her, that she could not move for a minute; then jumping up she washed herself with a sponge,—she recently had used one. I never had a spend in her again ...
— My Secret Life, Volumes I. to III. - 1888 Edition • Anonymous
... and he is a genuine specimen of the average results. He told me a few days ago that "he is no longer a Christian." There are two varieties of convolvolus growing here; also a peculiar gourd, which, when dry and divested of its shell, exposes a vegetable sponge, formed of a dense but fine network of fibers; the seeds are contained in the center of this fiber. The bright yellow flowers of the ambatch, and of a tree resembling a laburnum, are in great profusion. The men completely done: I served them ...
— The Albert N'Yanza, Great Basin of the Nile • Sir Samuel White Baker
... rags, which I did not tell her; the sponge cake would have stuck in her throat at tea if I had. But I gave him something for his ready wit, and wished for weeks afterwards that I had plunged into the darkness after him. "What a charming man!" said Cousin Penelope. But to ...
— The Professional Aunt • Mary C.E. Wemyss
... got supper, strained and skimmed milk, set a sponge for bread, and slept all night like a dormouse. George Tucker never ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... attention to it at the proper time, a slight circumstance might have revealed the truth to me. Whilst I was bargaining with the Jew, before he opened the chest, he swallowed a large dram of brandy, and stuffed his nostrils with sponge dipped in vinegar: this he told me he did to prevent his perceiving the smell of musk, which always ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... ran to a drawer, to return with a roll and scissors; then getting sponge, water, and basin, and proceeding deftly to bathe and strap up the bleeding wound, before turning to her assistant, who looked dim, as the fog seemed to have filtered into the room. "Now," she said sharply, "is there some one ...
— The Bag of Diamonds • George Manville Fenn
... wrong again and again till you have it well in your mind. If you have no flat glass for tracing on, take some very thin kidts-kin parchment, well oiled and dried. And when you have used it for one drawing you can wash it clean with a sponge and make a second. ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... began, "My dear father." She had meant to write him that she was tired of college and wanted to come home at once; but somehow she couldn't begin. For she thought, "I can see him raise his eyebrows and smile and say, 'so you want to throw up the sponge, do you? I was under the impression that you had promised to stay out the year,' as he did to the private secretary who wouldn't sit up with him till three in the morning to ...
— Betty Wales Freshman • Edith K. Dunton
... it had 'a' been our heavenly Fawther's will," announced Mrs. Dysart, with solemnity, rising slowly from her chair, which gave a little squeak of relief. "I've got to set the sponge," she went on in the same tone, as if it were some sacred religious rite. "I wish you'd talk it over with Mr. Palmerston, Jawn, and tell him the offer you've had from this perfessor—I'm sure I don't know what he's perfessor of. He ain't a perfessor ...
— The Wizard's Daughter and Other Stories • Margaret Collier Graham
... comes about that the figures in fresco are washed, as is often done after some time to restore them, what has been worked on the fresh plaster remains, and what has been retouched on the dry is carried away by the wet sponge. ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Volume 1, Cimabue to Agnolo Gaddi • Giorgio Vasari
... frighten them. Whenever a crowd was so dense that the people were forced off the causeway, one of these six-feet gentlemen, on a black horse, rode straight at the place, making his horse rear very high, and fall on the thickest spot. You would suppose men were made of sponge to ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... England Mr. Chamberlain was remarking (at Highbury, August 27th) that he "could not truly say that the crisis was passed," and picturesquely complaining of President Krueger "dribbling out reforms like water from a squeezed sponge," every loyalist in South Africa knew that the time for words had gone by. On September 6th and 7th public meetings were held respectively at Maritzburg and Capetown, at which resolutions were passed affirming ...
— Lord Milner's Work in South Africa - From its Commencement in 1897 to the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 • W. Basil Worsfold
... turned up my sleeves and poured some of the "Milk of Beauty" into a little onyx bowl that was at hand, then I dipped a little sponge into it, and approached my Aunt ...
— Monsieur, Madame and Bebe, Complete • Gustave Droz
... stone. To him, the old definition that an animal is possessed of life and locomotion, a plant of life without locomotion, and a mineral deficient in both, seems to be sufficient, until some day he travels beyond the circuit of diurnal routine, and encounters a sponge or a zoophyte, which possesses only one of his supposed attributes of animal life, but which he is assured is nevertheless a member of the animal kingdom. Such an encounter usually perplexes the neophyte at first, but rather than confess his generalizations to have been too ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke
... rapidly evaporate and cause the destruction of the object studied. To prevent this an arrangement was devised by which the lens and the covered fluid under examination were used in an air-tight chamber, the air of which was kept in a saturated condition; so that being, like a saturated sponge, unable to take in any more, it left the film of fluid unaffected. But to make the work efficient I soon found that there must be a second observer. Observation by leaps was of no avail. To be accurate it must be unbroken. There must ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XIX, No. 470, Jan. 3, 1885 • Various
... the car drove away from the Plaza a few minutes after the appointed time Joan was as excited as a child, Mrs. Harley quite certain that she had forgotten her sponge bag and her bedroom slippers, and George Harley betting on a time that would put more lines ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... cajoled into that office by the blandishments of Stalky and McTurk and the extreme rigor of study law. Once installed, he discovered, as others have done before him, that his duty was to do the work while his friends criticized. Stalky christened it the "Swillingford Patriot," in pious memory of Sponge—and McTurk compared the output unfavorably with Ruskin and De Quincey. Only the Head took an interest in the publication, and his methods were peculiar. He gave Beetle the run of his brown-bound, tobacco-scented library; prohibiting nothing, recommending nothing. There Beetle found a fat arm-chair, ...
— Stalky & Co. • Rudyard Kipling
... territory known as "between the lines." It was the country outside our lines and outside the Confederate lines, peopled by our enemies, always willing to serve the Confederacy, never serving us; acting as a sponge to draw supplies from us by means of blockade-running, which could in turn be absorbed by the Confederates. The efforts of our gunboats to stop the traffic were futile, ...
— Between the Lines - Secret Service Stories Told Fifty Years After • Henry Bascom Smith
... Puss? You just ask me to pass the sponge over Elmer Moffatt of Apex City? Cut the gentleman when we meet? ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... kept that thing up for two days an' two nights, while the gale lasted, an' when we finally gets under the lee of an island, all hands are for throwin' up the sponge an' goin' back home. Somehow or other, the expedition don't look so enticin' as it did at first. We cleared away both whaleboats and landed the brotherhood on the island, where there was a wharf an' a big tradin' ...
— Captain Scraggs - or, The Green-Pea Pirates • Peter B. Kyne
... the last four or five years, I have adopted a simple plan. When the books are well dusted I take about half an ounce of the best horn glue, and, having dissolved it in the usual way, I add to it about a pint of warm water and a teaspoonful of glycerine, and stir it well. Then dipping a soft sponge into the solution, I wash over the backs of the books. If the leather is much perished or decayed, it will unduly absorb the size, and a second touch over may be necessary. The glycerine will have the effect of preventing the glue from drying too hard or stiffening the leather. ...
— The Private Library - What We Do Know, What We Don't Know, What We Ought to Know - About Our Books • Arthur L. Humphreys
... principle on which your butler's practiced elbow draws the twisted screw sunk into the cobwebbed seal of your '48 port, he uncorks himself. The box pulled out of the hatch, the sea-gods threw up the sponge, that zoophyte ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... hand, till that part of the flour is quite thick and well mixed, though all the rest must remain unwetted; then sprinkle a little flour over the moist part, and cover with a cloth: this is called "sponge," and must be left half an hour ...
— Our Farm of Four Acres and the Money we Made by it • Miss Coulton
... as if to himself, and laid hand to pommel. The heap shuddered and turned on itself. It swarmed. Finally, like a drop from a sponge, Master Porges exuded and stood ...
— The Forest Lovers • Maurice Hewlett
... were with child. From these excrements let the child be cleansed with wine and water a little warmed, washing every part therewith, but chiefly the head because of the hair, also the folds of the groin, and the cods or privities; which parts must be gently cleansed with a linen rag, or a soft sponge dipped in lukewarm wine. If this clammy or viscous excrement stick so close that it will not easily be washed off from those places, it may be fetched off with oil of sweet almond, or a little fresh butter melted with wine, and afterwards well dried ...
— The Works of Aristotle the Famous Philosopher • Anonymous
... to have about a king's privacy taking notes of this sort on his tablets. Among 'those saw and forms and pressures past, which youth and observatior copied there,' all that part reserved for Caesar and his history, appears to have escaped the sponge in ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... passage of town into country through an extensive sponge of suburbs, which was so characteristic a feature of the great cities of the nineteenth century, existed no longer. Nothing remained of it here but a waste of ruins, variegated and dense with thickets of the heterogeneous growths that had once adorned the gardens of the belt, interspersed ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... valleys on either side. From the absence of marshes the climate is the most healthy in Greece. The island forms part of the modern Uomos of Attica and Boeotia, of which it forms an eparchy. The sponge fisheries are of considerable importance. The chief town is Aegina, situated at the north-west end of the island, the summer residence of many Athenian merchants. Capo d'Istria, to whom there is a statue in the principal square, erected there a large building, intended for a barracks, which was ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... Dear, dear! Well, it doesn't make much difference, does it? Something always seems to ail your Massachusetts fires; your hickory is green, and your maple is gnarly, and the worms eat out your oak like a sponge. I haven't seen anything like what I call a fire,—not since Mary Ann was married, and I came here to stay. "As long as you live, father," she said; and in that very letter she told me I should always have an open fire, and how she wouldn't let Jacob put in the air-tight in the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... a good many of us, possessors of patience, self-control, and a sponge in a bottle, who rarely enjoy this royal prerogative. We shine our own shoes. Alone, and, if one may argue from the particular to the general, simply dressed in the intermediate costume, more or less becoming, that is between getting up and going out, we wear a shoe on our left hand, ...
— The Perfect Gentleman • Ralph Bergengren
... have sat under a big brown umbrella, to have our shoes shined, when we had nothing more important to do than go to the doughnut foundry on Park Row and try some of those delectable combinations of foods they have there, such as sponge cake with whipped cream and chocolate fudge. And in a few seconds we have found ourself getting all stirred up and crying loudly to the artist that we only wanted a once-over, as we had an important appointment. You have to put a very heavy brake on your spirit ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... himself, boarders in one of the near hotels, and casual acquaintances of his. They joined him and the three rambled on together, whistling, talking, and occasionally stooping to pick up a shell, pebble, or bit of seaweed or sponge. ...
— Grandmother Elsie • Martha Finley
... that which is heard; the medium, air; organ, the ear. To the sound, which is a collision of the air, three things are required; a body to strike, as the hand of a musician; the body struck, which must be solid and able to resist; as a bell, lute-string, not wool, or sponge; the medium, the air; which is inward, or outward; the outward being struck or collided by a solid body, still strikes the next air, until it come to that inward natural air, which as an exquisite organ is contained in a little skin formed like a drum-head, and ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... of the trawl-boat—the net's closing in on me and I'm caught. The game's up. I did deceave you. I did write those letters myself. I've no Uncle Joe, nor no Auntie Joney neither. My wife's left me. I'm not knowing where she is, or what's becoming of her. I'm done, and I'm for throwing up the sponge." ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... and sand and distant hills and a bay all filled with real water from the Pacific. You will perceive that no expense has been spared. I now live with a little French doctor; I take one of my meals in a little French restaurant; for the other two, I sponge. The population of Monterey is about that of a dissenting chapel on a wet Sunday in a strong church neighbourhood. They are mostly Mexican ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... said Isabel offended: "and you're not used to mud, are you? You don't look as if you were." She pointed down the glen, and Lawrence saw that some high spring, dammed at its exit and turned back on itself, had filled the wide bottom with a sponge of moss thickset with flowering rush and silken fluff of cotton grass. "There's no danger in summertime, the shepherds often cross it and so do I. ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... present. Or, perchance, the coachman, whose inside porosity is well indicated by his bundle of coats, as Dr. Kitchiner says, is labouring under "the unwholesome effervescence of the hot and rebellious liquors which have been taken to revive the flagging spirits," and like a sponge, absorbs liquids, owing to the pressure ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 332, September 20, 1828 • Various
... and on this occasion she was briefer than usual, for the good woman had many things upon her mind this morning. First, there was Betty to rouse and get into a state of locomotion, a good half hour's work, as Aunt Barbara knew from a three years' experience. There was the "sponge" put to rise the previous night. She must see if that had risen, and with her own hands mold the snowy breakfast rolls which Ethelyn liked so much. There were the chambers to be inspected a second time, to ascertain if everything ...
— Ethelyn's Mistake • Mary Jane Holmes
... tablespoonfuls of water. In the smaller doses it serves admirably to relieve pains in the loins when depending on a sluggish inactivity of the kidneys. Unbroken chilblains may be readily cured by rubbing them once a day with a piece of sponge saturated with the tincture of Capsicum until a strong tingling is induced. In the early part of the present century, a medicine of Capsicum with salt was famous for curing severe influenza with putrid sore throat. Two dessert spoonfuls ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... that the ground was like a sponge, that the little cart-track, which was the only approach to the house, was filled up with water, and that rain still fell, Mr. Carlyle made his way to the highest point of the moor to look about him. It was ...
— Anxious Audrey • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... got to his room he shook himself, much as a dog renews its vitality by shaking its ears. Then he poured some water into the basin and washed his hot face, scrubbing his lips with the sponge. ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... and half drawn in, as if rheumatism detained the upper moiety and only below the elbow were at liberty to move. After you have shaken the hand, (but for what reason you squeeze it, as if it were a sponge, I can by no means imagine,) can you not withdraw it to your side, and keep it in the station where nature and comfort alike tell you it ought to be? Do you think your breeches' pocket the most proper place to push your daddle into? Do you put it there ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 326, August 9, 1828 • Various
... grasp; very shy. My chance of observing it lies precisely in this: that I am neither a sky-pilot, nor a district visitor, nor a reformer, nor a philanthropist, nor any sort of 'worker,' useful or impertinent; but simply a sponge to absorb and, so far as can be, an understander to sympathize. It is hard entirely to share another people's life, to give oneself up to it, to be received into it. They know intuitively (their intuitions are extraordinarily ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... the time we should be preparing all such spots for withstanding next summer's drouth! You may remember how strongly was emphasized the necessity for having abundant humus (decayed vegetable matter) in the soil—how it acts like a sponge to retain moisture and keep things growing through the long, dry spells which we seem to be sure of getting every summer. So take thought for next year. Buy a bushel of rye, and as fast as a spot in your garden can be ...
— Home Vegetable Gardening • F. F. Rockwell
... stupor, made a piteous effort to substitute himself for that expert so far as the gray trousers were concerned. He divested himself of them and brought water, towels, bath-soap, and a rubber bath-sponge to the bright light of his window; and; there, with touching courage and persistence, he tried to scrub the paint out of the cloth. He obtained cloud studies and marines which would have interested a Post-Impressionist, but upon trousers they seemed ...
— Seventeen - A Tale Of Youth And Summer Time And The Baxter Family Especially William • Booth Tarkington
... sorts of untidy things which belong to him into his bedroom, which is a picture of disorder. You will please to imagine mine, airy and clean, little dressing-room attached, eight water-jugs (I never saw such a supply), capital sponge-bath, perfect arrangement, and exquisite neatness. We breakfast at half-past eight, and fall to work for H. W. afterwards. Then I go ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 2 (of 3), 1857-1870 • Charles Dickens
... lasted—governed by the eye. When the gun was sponged, it was loaded; when loaded, aimed and fired. The colonel observed something new to his military experience—something horrible and unnatural: the gun was bleeding at the mouth! In temporary default of water, the man sponging had dipped his sponge into a pool of comrade's blood. In all this work there was no clashing; the duty of the instant was obvious. When one fell, another, looking a trifle cleaner, seemed to rise from the earth in the dead man's tracks, to fall in ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... look at the nails very intently. 'The soldiers climbed up by a ladder,' she would say. 'Don't you see the ladder? And by and by, when in his fever he called for some drink, they reached something up to him by a sponge fastened to the end of a long pole. Do you see the pole?' The child would look at all these things, and would get a much more clear and vivid idea of the transaction than it would be possible for so ignorant a mother to communicate to it in any ...
— Rollo in Naples • Jacob Abbott
... received when so much younger, remains vividly impressed on my memory, and it is the same with Tzschirner's lessons, the knowledge I acquired between my fifteenth and seventeenth year is effaced as completely as though I had passed a sponge over the slate of my memory. A chasm yawns between these periods of instruction, and I cannot ascribe this circumstance entirely to the amusements which withdrew my thoughts from study; for they continued under Tzschirner's rule, though with some restrictions. I wish I could believe ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... is aggravated by anemia and general weakness, a good iron preparation, such as one Blaud's five-grain pill three times a day, or a tonic of iron, quinine and strychnine, will do good. A daily cold bath or cold sponge, followed by a brisk dry rubbing with a ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... Fitzhugh made you so prodigiously drunk at Bonn, Tommy? And we put you in the kneading-trough, and the servants found you and shifted you to the horse-trough? Gad! you would have died of laughter if you could have seen yourself when we rescued you, lank and dripping, with your wig like a sponge!' ...
— The Castle Inn • Stanley John Weyman
... that I journeyed with him to the old town, background of stirring naval history. On the way down half a dozen department heads poured into his responsive ears the up-to-the-minute details of the work in hand. He became a Human Sponge soaking up the ...
— The War After the War • Isaac Frederick Marcosson
... trainer shot out from the side-lines with bucket and sponge, Diemann saw Ashley spring up, slap the grimy moleskins of the men nearest him, and get back into position to kick. Stanford was standing on her own goal line. He saw the ball snapped back; the fullback kicked it, in time; then, instead of the long, curving drive ...
— Stanford Stories - Tales of a Young University • Charles K. Field
... are not the poor the first that sacrifice their lives to hunger? If war thunders in the trembling country's lap, are not the poor those that are exposed to the enemy's sword and outrage? If the plague, like a loaded sponge, flies, sprinkling poison through a populous kingdom, the poor are the fruit that are shaken from the burdened tree; while the rich, furnished with the helps of fortune, have means to wind out themselves, and turn these sad indurances on the poor, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. - 581, Saturday, December 15, 1832 • Various
... Mary, you know very well she's just as good as I am; better, probably, for she's got no pies nor starch in her pedigree. Her father's a Major and her mother was of quite good family—and she's got lots of rich, stingy relations ... and she doesn't sponge on 'em. What's the matter ...
— Jan and Her Job • L. Allen Harker
... the fire, and filled them both, and put them on the desk. He also placed in the desk a supply of paper, in quarter sheets. After Marco had come back, and had put in his books and papers, Forester gave him a ruler and a lead pencil; also a slate and half a dozen slate pencils; also a piece of sponge and a piece of India-rubber. He gave him besides a little square phial, and sent him to fill it with water, so that he might have water always at hand to ...
— Marco Paul's Voyages and Travels; Vermont • Jacob Abbott
... in individual molds. Unmold on rounds of sponge cake a little larger than the custard molds, cover with meringue creamed with almond extract. Sprinkle with sugar and brown. Decorate ...
— Stevenson Memorial Cook Book • Various
... he repeated. "Joan, will you keep reminding me to-morrow of the air-holes? I might forget. You can always tell them, for the snow and the crust over them are whiter than that on the rest of the ice, and like a sponge. ...
— Kazan • James Oliver Curwood
... the love of Pete, don't go oh-ing and ah-ing like that. You've handed me the pickled visage since I got the rowdy-dow on my last job—good Lord! you acted like you thought I liked to sponge on you. Now let me tell you I've kept account of every red cent you've spent on me, and I expect to pay ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... upper end of this table Undine is discovered, as she sits with a slate and arithmetic book before her, her elbows on the table, her head supported on both hands, holding a slate pencil from which a bit of sponge dangles by ...
— The Black Cat - A Play in Three Acts • John Todhunter
... physical exercise, I became a pupil in a gymnasium, and worked there regularly. One thing seemed strange in the way they treated us. When we were as hot as possible with exercise, at the moment of leaving off and changing our dress, men came to the dressing-rooms to sponge us with ice-cold water. They said it did nothing but good, and certainly I never felt any ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... dell. Here it was rocky and stony, and lay on the steep scarps of the ravine; here it was choked with brambles; and there, in fairy haughs, it lay for a few paces evenly on the green turf. Like a sponge, the hillside oozed with well-water. The burn kept growing both in force and volume; at every leap it fell with heavier plunges and span more widely in the pool. Great had been the labours of that stream, and great and agreeable the changes it had wrought. ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... power; and what good does that do you? People say that you're a game fellow; but they won't find the stakes for you unless you can win them. You'd far better put your game in your pocket, and throw up the sponge while you can see ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... wasting considerable time in playing with it, but all the while he is making sure that the clay is perfectly uniform and that there are no bubbles of air in it. He holds a piece of leather against the outside surface and a wet sponge against the inside, to make them perfectly smooth; and in a moment he has made a bowl. He holds his bent finger against the top of the bowl, and it becomes a vase. With another touch of his magical finger the top of the vase rolls over into a lip. If he makes a cup ...
— Makers of Many Things • Eva March Tappan
... cup to his lips far more daintily and dexterously than either of his boy companions could have done; then when he moaned and said his head and eye pained him, the white- bearded elder came and bathed his brow with the soft sponge. It seemed all to pass before him like a dream, and it was not much otherwise with his unhurt companions, especially Stephen, who followed with wonder the movements made by the slippered feet of father ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... ingenuousness—or silliness—after all! For was Mary Ann as innocent as she looked? The guilelessness of the dove might very well cover the wisdom of the serpent. The instinct—the repugnance that made him sponge off her first kiss from his lips—was probably a true instinct. How was it possible a girl of that class should escape the sordid attentions of street swains? Even when she was in the country she was well-nigh of woo-able age, the likely cynosure ...
— Merely Mary Ann • Israel Zangwill
... become badly stained by the iron, while a still greater excess of the citrate, in a concentrated solution causes the sensitized paper to change without exposure to light, and to produce a redder blue or purple, which does not adhere to the paper, but may be washed off with a sponge. I have found that the cheapest method of reproducing inked drawings that have been made on thick paper is not to trace them, but to print the blues from a photographic glass negative; and also, that the dry plate process is well adapted to such work in offices, when one has become sufficiently ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 365, December 30, 1882 • Various
... Hot or warm sponge-baths may be taken throughout the period; and the vulva should be bathed with warm water twice a day through the entire period of the flow, as this not only removes the clotted blood before it decomposes and becomes the source of irritation, but also removes other irritating ...
— The Four Epochs of Woman's Life • Anna M. Galbraith
... fancy some of you saying, 'These gloomy views of yours will lead to nothing but absolute despair. You have been telling us that success is impossible; that we are bound to fight, and are sure to be beaten. What are we to do? Throw up the sponge, and say, "Very well! then I may as well have my fling, and give up all attempts to be any better than my passions and my senses would lead me to be."' And if there is nothing more to be said about the fight than has been already said, that is ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... go on quietly with your square till you have covered it all in. When you get to the bottom, the color will lodge there in a great wave. Have ready a piece of blotting-paper; dry your brush on it, and with the dry brush take up the superfluous color as you would with a sponge, till it ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin
... with the water, and knelt down and held the basin while Katie flew for a sponge and ...
— Illustrated Science for Boys and Girls • Anonymous
... through the pretence of counting his shaving papers, closes the pocket-book, takes it to the head of the bed and slips it under the pillow. Makes the motion of taking up his pyjamas, crosses below the INSPECTOR to the washstand, takes up a bath sponge, crosses to the door, takes out the key, opens ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... sponge was fired point blank from an open bedroom door, missed McFudd's head by an inch and bounded down ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... the billows crack and plunge, We saw nor waves nor ships. Earth sucked the vapors like a sponge, The ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... strained to secure a safe foothold amid the tangled roots, on the slippery, moss-covered logs, over precipitous rocks that lie in your path. It will take time to pick your way over boggy places where the water oozes up through the thin, loamy soil as through a sponge; and experience alone will teach you which hummock of grass or moss will make a safe stepping-place and will not sink beneath your weight and soak your feet with hidden water. Do not scorn to learn all you can about ...
— On the Trail - An Outdoor Book for Girls • Lina Beard and Adelia Belle Beard
... father, "are those that can be compressed, that is, pressed together, so as to take up less room than they did before. Sponge is compressible. A pillow is compressible. But iron is not compressible, and ...
— Rollo's Philosophy. [Air] • Jacob Abbott
... is the greatest Asian mystery alive. His politics are romantic, his romances are political, and he himself is a fiction founded on fact." Of another person whom I will not name, he said: "You put the man into a book as you put a sponge into a bucket. You take him out and squeeze him, and he returns the stream uncoloured. He is a sort of Half Hours with the Best Authors, bound in man's skin; he is intellectually impotent, ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... was simply stunned for a moment, when the other companion, with that rare, straightforward brutality for which she became so deservedly infamous later on, snorted angrily: "No, you don't! Don't you touch anything of mine! You can't sponge on me ...
— Stage Confidences • Clara Morris
... contrivers of this Rebellion have told is that which tries to make out a difference of race in the men of the North and South, It would be worth a year of battles to abolish this delusion, though the great sponge of war that wiped it out were moistened with the best blood of the land. My Rebel was of slight, scholastic habit, and spoke as one accustomed to tread carefully among the parts of speech. It made my heart ache ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... me now!' cried he in pitiable agitation; and then he began to mutter bitter curses against me, or the evil fortune that had brought me there; while I put down the sponge and basin, and resumed my seat at ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... Right here in Dutchess County we are the consistency of a wet sponge. Rain for five days, and everything wrong ...
— Dear Enemy • Jean Webster
... wasted when fear alone was enough. Some connivances are secured before they are sought for. Cowardice is the old fawner upon felony. The blood of the law is quickly wiped up. Behind the assassin who holds the poniard comes the trembling wretch who holds the sponge. ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... thoroughly, as I did long and long before daybreak, I knew I was ill. I had a bad sore throat and an oppression at my chest which made me feel as if I was breathing through a sponge. My limbs ached more than had been the case on the previous evening whilst my head felt heavier than a ...
— The Uninhabited House • Mrs. J. H. Riddell
... number of tender things were said on both sides. I am told that you Englishmen consider it cowardly to cry; as for me, I wept and roared incessantly: when Mary squeezed me, for the last time, the tears came out of me as if I had been neither more nor less than a great wet sponge. My cousin's eyes were stoically dry; her ladyship had a part to play, and it would have been wrong for her to be in love with a young chit of fourteen—so she carried herself with perfect coolness, as if there was nothing the matter. I should not have known ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... bedroom where the two girls lay talking every preparation had been made for a journey. Two new trunks, painted respectively with the initials "M. D. A." and "D. E. A.", stood side by side with the lids open, filled to the brim, except for sponge-bags and a few other items, which must be put in at the last. Weeks of concentrated thought and practical work on the part of Mother, two aunts, and a dressmaker had preceded the packing of those boxes, for the requirements of Brackenfield seemed numerous, and the list of essential ...
— A Patriotic Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... the Bar 99 had just ridden up and Laura sent him at once for the doctor. She led the way into the house and swiftly gathered bandages, a sponge, and a basin of water. Together she and Curly bathed and wrapped the wound. Stone did not weaken, though he was pretty gray ...
— Crooked Trails and Straight • William MacLeod Raine
... crow, came and gave me a ball of nardoo, saying that she would give me more only she had such a sore arm that she was unable to pound. She showed me a sore on her arm, and the thought struck me that I would boil some water in the billy and wash her arm with a sponge. During the operation, the whole tribe sat round and were muttering one to another. Her husband sat down by her side, and she was crying all the time. After I had washed it, I touched it with some nitrate of silver, when she began to yell, and ran off, crying out "Mokow! Mokow!" (Fire! ...
— Successful Exploration Through the Interior of Australia • William John Wills
... the facility with which she seemed to rupture all the natural ties of kinship and affection. Her own tribe—her father, mother, sisters, all were apparently wiped from her mind as completely as writing is removed from a slate by a sponge; or, if ever remembered, it was never with any ...
— Australian Search Party • Charles Henry Eden
... was misunderstood. She had made it, said those who did not like her, in order to gain credit for unselfishness, or to have an excuse for displaying herself en route to the public bath, in a dream of a dressing-gown, and a vision of a cap, carrying a poem of a sponge bag. Rachel Guest was still mysteriously more popular than Monny, and was said to have had two proposals on the first day. She didn't want to get off the boat to see irrelevant painted pavements, in the harem ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... up the sponge, Pynsent?" Charles Milton began, after a short pause in the conversation. "Had enough of the Radical ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... beefsteaks, boiled pork, sweet potatoes, 'Kohl-slaw,' pickled cucumbers and red beets, apple butter and preserved peaches, pumpkin and apple pie, sponge cake and coffee. After dinner came our next neighbours, 'the maids,' Susy and Katy Groff, who live in single blessedness and great neatness. They wore pretty, clear-starched Mennonist caps, very plain. Katy is a sweet-looking woman and, ...
— Quilts - Their Story and How to Make Them • Marie D. Webster
... mere advertisement, it proved more effective than anything devised for pills and patent soaps. Hundreds who went to Bayreuth to pass the time, or at most in a spirit of intelligent curiosity, came away converted to the new faith; many who went to sponge remained to pay; and all preached the doctrine of Wagnerism wherever they went. Well they might. As I was an infant at the time, my recollections of the first performances and of Wagner's speech are not so vivid ...
— Wagner • John F. Runciman
... course used only in winter, receive outside air at a low temperature, holding little moisture; This it sucks up, like a sponge, from the walls and furniture of a house. If it is taken into the human lungs, it draws much of its required moisture from the body, often causing dryness of lips and throat, and painfully affecting the lungs. Prof. Brewer, ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... as ether and chloroform are administered by the modern surgeon. The method was modified by Hugo of Lucca (died in 1252 or 1268), who added certain other narcotics, such as hemlock, to the mixture, and boiled a new sponge in this decoction. After boiling for a certain time, this sponge was dried, and when wanted for use was dipped in hot water ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... key to all celestial treasures; by it we penetrate into the midst of all the joy, strength, mercy, and goodness Divine, ... we receive our well-being from all around us, as the sponge plunged into the ocean imbibes without an effort the water that surrounds it ... this joy, strength, mercy, ...
— Gold Dust - A Collection of Golden Counsels for the Sanctification of Daily Life • E. L. E. B. |
