"Tropics" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... he added, 'and Dendrobium Devonianum, too delicate and beautiful for a flower of earth.' This and other references ... gave them, in my mind, a weird and mysterious charm ... which, I believe, had its share in producing that longing for the tropics which a few years later was satisfied in the equatorial forests ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... which have Ice-Fathers," Salvadro explained. "They are all worlds having one pole or the other in open water, surrounded by land. When the polar sea is warmed by water from the tropics, snow falls on the lands around, and more falls in winter than melts in summer, and so is an Ice-Father formed. Then, when the polar sea is all frozen, no more snow falls, and the Ice-Father melts faster than ...
— The Keeper • Henry Beam Piper
... of a practical work treating of the cultivation and manufacture of the chief Agricultural Productions of the Tropics and Foreign Countries, has long been felt, for not even separate essays are to be met with on very many of the important subjects treated ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... the sun, which had shown some promise of its coming in the glow above the hills, shot up suddenly from behind them in all the splendor of the tropics, a fierce, red disk of heat, and filled the air ...
— Notes of a War Correspondent • Richard Harding Davis
... tropics day comes and goes with a rush, and, even while the skipper had been speaking, the object which had first revealed itself to me, a minute earlier, as a mere wan, ghostly suggestion had assumed solidity and definiteness of form, and ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood
... cheek, form prematurely developed into round robustness, frank, free, and manly bearing, returning ever and anon from his ocean wanderings, and bearing to his friends some rare bird or shell of the tropics as a memorial of his labours and his love. Before he was eighteen years of age, Providence supplied him with the materials whence he was to pile up the monument of his future fame. He became second mate in the ship 'Britannia', a vessel ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... be immensely increased, and its quality improved, till it rivaled the silks of the Old World. The yield of rice would be doubled, and its gardens and orchards would supply the North with fruits now known only to the tropics. ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I., No. IV., April, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... must have calculated largely on favorable weather during the passage; for had we experienced a gale on the coast, or fallen in with the tail-end of a hurricane in the tropics, the whole deck-load would have been swept away, and the lives of the ship's company placed in imminent peril. The weather, however, proved remarkably mild, and the many inconveniences to which the crew were subjected were borne with exemplary patience, and sometimes ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... about the size and appearance of a crab apple, but contains only a single seed. It grows on a spiny tree, long and bare of trunk, with its foliage cropping out at the very top like a royal palm of the tropics. The jujube itself has been used for years to flavor candies and other confections. But the essence is very expensive and comparatively rare, despite the profusion with which the fruit ...
— Three Acres and Liberty • Bolton Hall
... of this favoured climate, Madame de la Tour often regretted the quick succession from day to night which takes place between the tropics, and which deprived her pensive mind of that hour of twilight, the softened gloom of which is so soothing and sacred to the feelings of tender melancholy. This regret is expressed ...
— Paul and Virginia • Bernardin de Saint Pierre
... night, such as he had seen in the tropics. Only here, in the north, his vision reached to greater distances. Churchill lay lifeless in its pool of light; the ship hung like a black silhouette in the distance, with a cloud of jet-black smoke rising straight up from ...
— Flower of the North • James Oliver Curwood
... hour the glory faded, leaving a transparent lilac sky over which the darkness closed with all the swiftness of the tropics. ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross
... with one life does not exist. The suicide does not commit suicide because he is tired of life, but because he wants so many more lives that he cannot have. The native of the tropics buys a book to the North Pole. If we are poor, we grow rich on paper. We roll in carriages through the highway of letters. If we are rich, we revel in a printed poverty. We cry our hearts out over our ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... of Health and have the nuisance abated. There is nothing sadder than to look at dressy old things, who have reached the frozen latitudes beyond fifty, and who persist in appearing in the airy costume of the tropics. They appear to think, as Goldsmith says, that they can conceal their age by ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... are all out of the region of the tropics, and form in general the summit of very elevated plateaux. America also presents, on the reverse of the mountains of Mexico, of Peru, and of Quito, steppes of considerable extent. But the greatest steppes, the Llanos of Cumana, of Caraccas, and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... and glory of the tropics attracted him. "In one open spot a vine of a species unknown had taken possession of two tall dead stumps, and wound around and about them, and swung out from their tops, and twined their meeting tendrils together into a faultless arch. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... occasion, Chaldeans and Astrologers were now consulted, made the poet specially careful to treat this subject with clearness and precision. It is accordingly the most readable of all the purely technical parts of the work. The account of the tropics, with which the book closes, is singularly inaccurate, but contains some rather elegant descriptions: [81] at the tropic of Cancer summer always reigns, at Capricorn there is perpetual winter. The book here breaks off quite abruptly; apparently he intended to compose the epilogue at some future time, ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... thin, set lips, which gave him a rather predatory air, belied rather by his pleasant blue eyes. The sun wrinkles round their corners and his sallow complexion gave Mr. Manley the impression that he had spent some years in the tropics ...
— The Loudwater Mystery • Edgar Jepson
... nonhustling life, such as occurs in the warmer climates, is much less harmful than in our colder climates, where life is more active. Something at least seems to demonstrate that cigaret smoking is more harmful in our climate than in the tropics. ...
— DISTURBANCES OF THE HEART • OLIVER T. OSBORNE, A.M., M.D.
... And moreover, I certainly did wish to go. I therefore took no notice of them when they shouldered their arms, but went into the house to give my wife her last kiss. "Now, Neverbend, remember you wear the flannel drawers I put up for you, as soon as ever you get out of the opposite tropics. Remember it becomes frightfully cold almost at once; and whatever you do, don't forget the little bag." These were Mrs Neverbend's last words to me. I there found Jack waiting for me, and we together walked down to the quay. "Mother ...
— The Fixed Period • Anthony Trollope
... half prostrate in its triumph. Many will come as the Puritans came, and as the bulk of our own excellent Germanic element came, and will cast in their lot with a new nation. We shall get a good share, but doubtless some will go to the republics of the far South, and some to the highlands of the tropics and through the canal to the West Coast. If so, this will tend gradually toward increased production and purchasing power, as well as toward a leavening of social, political, and economic ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... continued, growing softer and softer as it sounded, till it crept through the vastness of the building like a light breeze wafted from the sea, bringing with it suggestions of far flower-islands in the tropics, golden shores kissed by languid foam, and sweet-throated birds singing, and still the Cardinal sat thinking of griefs and cares and inexplicable human perplexities, which were not his own, but which seemed ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... tried to estimate the service rendered by Reed, who, in finding a remedy for yellow fever, made the tropics habitable and made it possible for the United States to add the Panama Canal to our ...
— In His Image • William Jennings Bryan
... to that degree, evidence foreign influence; but even in such cases there may be local coloring; thus, calling rain-drops falling "rods," "St. Joseph's rods cannot be counted," could hardly be found outside of the tropics. Religious riddles, relating to beads, bells, church, crucifixes, are common enough and are necessarily due to outside influence, but even such sometimes show a non-European attitude of mind, metaphorical ...
— A Little Book of Filipino Riddles • Various
... through the city-set earth, save in the administered "black belt" territories of the tropics, the same cosmopolitan social organisation prevailed, and everywhere from Pole to Equator his property and his responsibilities extended. The whole world was civilised; the whole world dwelt in cities; the whole world was property. Over the British ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... glided on in perfect safety hour after hour, with the reef nearer or more distant, but always affording an ample space of deep pellucid water full of the wonders of the tropics, and calling ...
— Jack at Sea - All Work and no Play made him a Dull Boy • George Manville Fenn
... showing his fangs, there would be no temptation to have to do with him. You would know that you had to deal with an evil beast, and must either kill him or escape from him at once. But if, again, you met, as you may meet in the tropics, a lovely little coral snake, braided with red and white, its mouth so small that it seems impossible that it can bite, and so gentle that children may take it up and play with it, then you might be tempted, as many a poor child has been ere now, to admire it, fondle it, wreathe it round ...
— All Saints' Day and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... huge cigars between their lips. It was an old story to Clay and King, but none of the others had seen a Spanish-American city before; they were familiar with the Far East and the Mediterranean, but not with the fierce, hot tropics of their sister continent, and so their eyes were wide open, and they kept calling continually to one another to notice some new ...
— Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis
... Teddy Wright and Neal Emery, embark on the steam yacht Day Dream for a cruise to the tropics. The yacht is destroyed by fire, and then the boat is cast upon the coast of Yucatan. They hear of the wonderful Silver City, of the Chan Santa Cruz Indians, and with the help of a faithful Indian ally carry off a number of the golden ...
— The Young Lieutenant - or, The Adventures of an Army Officer • Oliver Optic
... follow him everywhere. After an evening of smoking and chatting, Sam, Cleary, and Colonel James bade the general good-night and started for their quarters, which lay in the same direction. It was a gorgeous moonlight night, such a night as only the tropics can produce, and they sauntered slowly along the mountain road, ...
— Captain Jinks, Hero • Ernest Crosby
... this tall Creole, slender, fleshy, strong and active as a panther, was the type of that sensuality which is only lighted up by the fires of the tropics. Such was Cecily. ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... Mariana la Mursiana,'" George answered; "— one of those women who come to Paris from the tropics to form themselves on the legend of the one great famous and infamous Spanish dancer who died a long while ago. Mariana did very well for a time. I've heard that the revolutionary societies intend striking medals in her honour: she's done worse things to royalty than all the anarchists ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington
... President wasn't in no danger of running out of tropics of conversation while he was in England, Abe," Morris said, "which during all the spare time Mr. Wilson had on his trip he did nothing but hold conversations with Mr. Balfour, and this here Lord George, and you could take it from me, Abe, there wasn't many pauses to be filled up by ...
— Potash and Perlmutter Settle Things • Montague Glass
... saith: "Give and it shall be given unto you." The sun gives heat to the forests, and afterward the burning coal and tree give heat back to the heavens; the arctics give icebergs and frigid streams for cooling the fierce tropics, and the tropics give back the warm Gulf Stream. The soil in the spring gives its treasures to the growing tree, and in the autumn the tree gives its leaves to make the soil richer and deeper. Personal also is this principle. Give thy ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... nearing the Tropic of Cancer, and when we have passed it we shall be in the Torrid Zone, in which are situated all those places on the globe where the sun is ever directly overhead. The tropics are generally said to be twenty-three and a half degrees from the equator, which is near enough for ordinary purposes, but it is not quite accurate. When the sun is at the summer solstice, June 21, it is overhead on this tropic, and enters the constellation ...
— Asiatic Breezes - Students on The Wing • Oliver Optic
... head-piece on; he was talking into a disc—talking in a private code. I could see the surface of the small mirror. A room, with windows. Through one of the windows, by daylight, palms and huge banana leaves were visible. A room seemingly in the tropics of our ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings
... solemn voice, "ghostesses is a subject 'taint proper to talk on, and the queernesses ob our marsters and misseses is not tropics for us." ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... exposed a wrinkled brow and a baldish head, except for a few wisps of hair at the temples. He appeared to be of great age—a fossil, an animated mummy, a relic from an ancient graveyard; and the stoop of his lean shoulders accentuated these impressions. It was plain that the tropics were fast making ...
— The Devil's Admiral • Frederick Ferdinand Moore
... to cultivate the germs, aside from the food. One is moisture and the other is heat. The earth is full of bacteria from which plants get their food; some places the bacteria go down only one or two feet; at other places, where it is warm, as in the tropics, they have been found five or six feet below the surface. When a hole is made, and the sun strikes it, the bottom of the hole gets warm, and thus facilitates the growth of the germs around the hole, so that the plants in the immediate vicinity get ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Exploring the Island • Roger Thompson Finlay
... development of all the features of that land—lakes and woods; hills undulating like the sea in sunset, after hours of tempest: rivulets and crystal streams, each with its own peculiar murmurs, but all of melody; groves teeming with the most luxurious fruit of the tropics, and valleys carpeted with the brightest green, varied with nature's own embroidery of flowers—the development of this scene was inexpressibly beautiful, far surpassing the finest efforts ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... But when I go among snows and desolations—and usually I take my pilgrimage in mountains or the north—I think very much of the Night of this World—the time when our sun will be red and dull, and air and water will lie frozen together in a common snowfield where now the forests of the tropics are steaming.... I think very much of that, and whether it is indeed God's purpose that our kind should end, and the cities we have built, the books we have written, all that we have given substance and a form, should lie ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... counter-jumper he'd been, and he'd got his head all stuffed full. It was 1890, one of Rhodes' big years, the year they went north. It would have done you good to hear him talk. He was so keen, and his eyes glowed. Just like the water glows near the keel in the tropics.' 'That must have been a time,' I said; 'I've only read about it. It was before I saw the country.' The sailor grinned and spat. 'I reckon there hadn't been better days for young fellows to live in,' he said, 'not since Queen Elizabeth's reign. It came just ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps
... Wherefore it is that the sea-water is salt, that at the time when Phoebus gave the government of his resplendent chariot to his son Phaeton, the said Phaeton, unskilful in the art, and not knowing how to keep the ecliptic line betwixt the two tropics of the latitude of the sun's course, strayed out of his way, and came so near the earth that he dried up all the countries that were under it, burning a great part of the heavens which the philosophers call Via lactea, and the huffsnuffs St. James's way; although the most coped, lofty, ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... is only one "way out"—namely, through the furnace and tubes (or gas-ways) of the boiler, and the funnel. So through these it rushes, raising the fuel to white heat. As may easily be imagined, the temperature of a stokehold, especially in the tropics, is far from pleasant. In the Red Sea the thermometer sometimes rises to 170 deg. Fahrenheit or more, and the poor stokers have a very bad ...
— How it Works • Archibald Williams
... held cheaply by the Magdalena negro—excepting his own. Shiftless and improvident child of the tropics, his animal wants are readily satisfied by the fruits and fish which nature provides for him so bountifully. Spiritual wants he has none—until calamity touches him and he thinks he is about to die. Then witchcraft, charm, incantation, the priest—anything ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... enjoy our English woods, but these, lovely though they are, convey no idea whatever of the luxuriant and bewildering beauty of a forest in the tropics. ...
— Burma - Peeps at Many Lands • R.Talbot Kelly
... stands guard like the photographer's ruby window, protecting the deeper layers of the skin. The black skin of the negro was no longer a mystery. It is his protection against the fierce sunlight of the tropics and the injurious ...
— Hero Tales of the Far North • Jacob A. Riis
... the famous landscapes of both hemispheres. The luxuriant fancy of my favorite artist has suggested unique collocations of aquaria and mossy grottoes in the angles of the apartment, where the vegetable wealth of the tropics rises in perfect bounty and lawless exuberance, and fishes of every hue and shape flash to and fro among the tangled roots, in the light of a thousand lamps. In the centre, I have caused the seats of ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Marquis de Goutte. "The finest climate in France, perhaps in Europe," he wrote, "a beautiful and healthy country, excellent roads, and navigation to Paris; wine, game, fish, and everything appears on the table except the produce of the tropics; a good house, a fine garden, with ready markets for every kind of produce; and, above all the rest, three thousand acres of enclosed land, capable in a very little time of being, without expense, quadrupled in its produce—altogether formed a picture sufficient to tempt a man who ...
— East of Paris - Sketches in the Gatinais, Bourbonnais, and Champagne • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... with us, though the daylight does not depart suddenly, leaving the darkness of night behind it without any intermediate time of warning, as is the case farther south, down among the islands of the tropics. But the soft, sweet light of the evening had waned and gone, and night had absolutely come upon her, while Anastasia was still seated before the cottage with her eyes fixed upon the white streak of motionless sea which was still visible through the gloom. She was thinking of ...
— Aaron Trow • Anthony Trollope
... its way across Europe like some gorgeous bird of the tropics, and since the war has checked the output of Europe's factories, another channel has supplied the same wonderful colours in silks and gauze. They come to us by way of the Pacific, from China and from Japan. There is no escaping the colour spell. ...
— Woman as Decoration • Emily Burbank
... of the world where we could not live. We could find our way to the islands, like your great writer Stevenson in whom you delight so much; islands full of colour, and wonderful birds, and strange blue skies; islands where the peace of the tropics dulls memory, and time heats only in the heart. The world is a great place, Philippa, and there are corners where the sordid crime of this ghastly butchery has scarcely been heard of, where the horror and the taint of it are as though they never existed, where the sun and moon ...
— The Zeppelin's Passenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... follows temperature, being greatest in warm and least in cold climates. But marine animals, he thinks, obey no such law. The Arctic and Atlantic seas, he says, are as full of fishes and other animals as those of the tropics. It is, therefore, clear that cold does not affect the dwellers in the sea as it does land animals, and that this must be the case follows from the fact that sea water, "propter varias quas continet bituminis ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... real Kris Kringle. He stands at the centre of exchange, distributes from the tropics and the arctic zones. He deals out fur and feathers, books, toys, clothing, engines; ribbons, laces, silks, perfumes; bread-stuffs, sugar, cotton, iron, ice, steel; wheat, flour, beef, stone; lumber, drugs, coal, leather. He scatters periodically ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... should like Mr. Thorpe to tell us," suggested Lady Cressage, mildly, "is about the flowers in the tropics—in Java, for example, or some of the West Indies. One hears ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... not always supreme; and many a time he went back with a sigh from his window to his books, and tried to forget the alluring strains of the quadrille and waltz in the descriptions of the lion's roar and the bull-frog's croak in the far-off tropics. ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... find a still more striking discrepancy. The inhabitant of South America enjoys a soil and a climate, not superior merely to our own, but combining all the advantages of every climate and soil possessed by the remainder of the world. His valleys have all the exuberance of the tropics, and his mountain-plains unite the temperature of Europe to a fertility of which Europe offers no example. Nature collects for him, within the space of a morning's walk, the fruits and vegetables which she has elsewhere separated by thousands of miles. She has given him inexhaustible forests, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 10, No. 277, October 13, 1827 • Various
... required twenty centuries ago were different from those at present demanded for their advantageous cultivation. [Footnote: Probably no cultivated vegetable affords so good an opportunity of studying the law of acclimation of plants as maize or Indian corn. Maize is grown from the tropics to at least lat. 47 degrees in Northeastern America, and farther north in Europe. Every two or three degrees of latitude brings you to a new variety with new climatic adaptations, and the capacity of the plant to accommodate ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... for, turned out to be Red Indians of a type which varied but little throughout the entire vast continent. Wanderers from the Old World grew weary of seeking the tropics only to sink into flowery graves. They turned away sick at heart from the great desolation where the splendid empire of the Children of the Sun had so lately flourished. The accumulated treasures had been squandered. The cruel ...
— The Purple Land • W. H. Hudson
... for a young married woman. But he was in every respect a man very different from Sir Marmaduke. Sir Marmaduke, blessed and at the same time burdened as he was with a wife and eight daughters, and condemned as he had been to pass a large portion of his life within the tropics, had become at fifty what many people call quite a middle-aged man. That is to say, he was one from whom the effervescence and elasticity and salt of youth had altogether passed away. He was fat and slow, thinking much of his wife and eight daughters, thinking much also of ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... which abound in Africa, and from numerous animal and vegetable remains of the dry season, which cover the soil every where, are productive of putrid effluvia. These rains, or rather periodical torrents of water, which annually visit the tropics, invariably continue for about four months of the year, and during the other eight it rarely happens that one single drop falls; in some instances, however, periodical showers have happened in the dry season, but the effects of these are ...
— Observations Upon The Windward Coast Of Africa • Joseph Corry
... have sworn our destruction; the sea appeared all a-fire, while our little vessel was the sport of winds and waves. We kept the hatches closed, which did not prevent us from passing very uncomfortable nights while the storm lasted; for the great heats that we had experienced between the tropics, had so opened the seams of the deck that every time the waves passed over, the water rushed down in quantities upon our hammocks. The 14th, the wind shifted to the S.S.W., which compelled us to beat to windward. During the night we were ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to the Northwest Coast of America in the years 1811, 1812, 1813, and 1814 or the First American Settlement on the Pacific • Gabriel Franchere
... knees, lithe, erect, with glistening teeth and eyes, and their sisters, after two years in the mission schools, demurely and correctly dressed like British school marms. Sierra Leone has all the hall marks of the crown colony of the tropics; good wharfs, clean streets, innumerable churches, public schools operated by the government as well as many others run by American and English missions, a club where the white "mammies," as all women are called, and the white officers—for Sierra Leone is a coaling station on the Cape route ...
— The Congo and Coasts of Africa • Richard Harding Davis
... breakfast was served by electric light, he was always punctual, and one of the first to descend and retrieve his boots through the smoky atmosphere of the lower regions. What a contrast were those murky hours to these glorious mornings in the tropics—the green translucent sea, the soft golden light, the salt, stimulating air, all shimmering and melting together! The day really dawned for Shafto when a certain Panama hat, crowning a beautiful head, emerged from the companion ladder, and ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker
... never in the tropics, I think you told me?" he said to Evadne, with exaggerated preciseness. "Ah! now, I have been, off and on, several times. The heat is very trying. I knew a lady, the wife of a Colonial Governor, who used to be so overcome ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... should see them at Philae. They ignite and bound into brilliance like sparks of meeting metal and flint. Ah, but the tropics are precipitate!" ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... tropics. The black, the brown, and the yellow will have to do the work, managed by the white men. The black labour is too wasteful, however, and in time Chinese or Indian coolies will be imported. The planters ...
— Adventure • Jack London
... his mind. 405 Man, where the gloom of the long polar night Lowered o'er the snow-clad rocks and frozen soil, Where scarce the hardiest herb that braves the frost Basked in the moonlight's ineffectual glow, Shrank with the plants, and darkened with the night; 410 Nor where the tropics bound the realms of day With a broad belt of mingling cloud and flame, Where blue mists through the unmoving atmosphere Scattered the seeds of pestilence, and fed Unnatural vegetation, where the land 415 Teemed with all earthquake, tempest and disease, Was ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... Of deed of mine, my Lord. I did but think That in the sunlit tropics I had known The wantonness of cruelty; and seen Aged men grown grey in crime, whose hair thus blanch'd Show'd white, like sugar by ...
— Cromwell • Alfred B. Richards
... of oak to the skirts of the limitless prairie, Into whose sea of flowers the sun was slowly descending. Full in his track of light, like ships with shadowy canvas Hanging loose from their spars in a motionless calm in the tropics, Stood a cluster of trees, ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... and the sun shone with more heat than I had felt in the tropics. Indeed, everything around us reminded one so vividly of a tropical climate, that it required some resolution to keep imagination in subserviency. The thermometer was at 80 on deck; and our good-tempered pilot told us it was "manga varm" ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... instead of pouring, bent his head toward the window, listened a moment, and then turned and lifted a warning hand. The soft breeze of the evening, laden with the fragrance of the tropics, swept up from the river and wafted to the Vice-Governor's ears the sound of hoof beats on the hard, dry road. With senses keenly alert, he, also, listened. There were a number of them, a troop possibly. They were ...
— Sir Henry Morgan, Buccaneer - A Romance of the Spanish Main • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... patriotism. He loves his country like the Swiss. Nowhere else do men and women have to work so hard for a living, but life is the more precious the harder one has to labor to sustain it. We value things according to their cost. In the tropics, where no man need work, human life is held cheaply. Men die and kill without compunction; they excite revolutions and overthrow governments, sparing neither themselves nor others. But in Norway, as in Switzerland, where it is a ceaseless struggle from the cradle to the grave, there is ...
— Norwegian Life • Ethlyn T. Clough
... have seen and heard many curious things. I only stop here for letters and shall go on at once to Wady Halfeh, as the weather is very cold still, and I shall be better able to enjoy the ruins when I return about a month hence, and shall certainly prefer the tropics now. I can't describe the kindness of the Copts. The men I met at a party in Cairo wrote to all their friends and relations to be civil to me. Wassef's attentions consisted first in lending me his superb donkey and accompanying ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... house on the square, where all the windows are lighted? The rich man lives there. Now look into the rooms. On the table there is a lighted Christmas-tree laden with all kinds of gifts: the golden fruits of the tropics from across the seas; earth's hidden treasures, to which people bend the knee and which in their dazzling settings reflect the lights. But, do you see the light in the faces of the little children? That is the earth-life's sun—that is happiness—which ...
— Lucky Pehr • August Strindberg
... deep sorrow stripped the tale of half its vileness. At times her voice fell to a breath. Then she bent towards him humbly, and a perfume swept over him like a breeze from the tropics. The tale turned him to stone. Sister Claire undoubtedly drew upon her imagination and her reading for the facts, since it rarely falls to the lot of one woman to sound all the depths of depravity. Louis had little nonsense in his character. At first his horror urged him to fly from ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... never had he seen a squall approach so singularly. It seemed to move very slowly—a great black cloud, which looked intensely luminous withal, and yet so dense and heavy, that an ordinary observer might have mistaken it for one of the ordinary rain squalls encountered in the tropics. Captain Lane consulted his barometer, and found it ...
— Sustained honor - The Age of Liberty Established • John R. Musick,
... to the sea as the distillery, or the place from which water is drawn up invisibly, in its purest state, into the air; and we must go chiefly to the seas of the tropics, because here the sun shines most directly all the year round, sending heat-waves to shake the water-particles asunder. It has been found by experiment that, in order to turn 1 lb. of water into vapour, as much heat must be used as is required to melt 5 lbs. of iron; ...
— The Fairy-Land of Science • Arabella B. Buckley
... still southwest, but it had moderated, and roaring seas had turned to gossiping waves that rippled and pattered against her sides as she rolled among them, delighted with their story. Rapid changes went on, those days, in things all about while she headed for the tropics. New species of birds came around; albatrosses fell back and became scarcer and scarcer; lighter gulls came in their stead, and pecked for ...
— Sailing Alone Around The World • Joshua Slocum
... defiance and scorn as he turns towards the enemy. His advice was disregarded; but he does his duty proudly and cheerfully. He is as cool and unconcerned as if he were watching the flying fish as they rise from the bows of the ship, when running down the tropics, instead of the enemy's shot, as they splash in the water alongside, or tear open the timbers of the vessel, and the bodies of his crew. The men still ply their half-manned guns; but they are exhausted with fatigue, ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... that moment. He was a wild Spanish-like fellow, with a handsome-enough figure, and a swart countenance that might have been good-looking but for the thickish lips and nose and the bad temper that marked it. Since getting into the tropics, the sailors had modified their costumes considerably, and as each man had in some particular allowed himself a slight play of fancy, their appearance, when grouped together, was varied and picturesque. Most of them ...
— The Red Eric • R.M. Ballantyne
... sensations which cannot easily be conceived; they saw cocoa-nuts in great abundance, the milk of which is, perhaps, the most powerful antiscorbutic in the world: They had reason to suppose that there were limes, bananas, and other fruits which are generally found between the tropics; and, to increase their mortification, they saw the shells of many turtle scattered about the shore. When I knew the soundings; I could not forbear standing close round the island with the ship, though I also knew it was impossible to procure any of the refreshments ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... thrills me mightily. Be it of stately northern pines, or a jungle tangle in the tropics, it is so filled with glamour and mystery that I enter it with a delightful feeling of expectation. There is so much that is concealed from view, it is so pregnant with the possibility of surprises, that I am as excited as a ...
— Across Mongolian Plains - A Naturalist's Account of China's 'Great Northwest' • Roy Chapman Andrews
... complain if I remind you of the tropics this dreary winter night; so I'll bear out your fanciful conceit. Your face, a moment since, was like a burst ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... the first time in my life, I found myself in possession of five or six months which were not heavily forestalled, and feeling like a boy with a new half-crown, I lay about in my mind, as Mr. Bunyan would say, as to what to do with them. "Go and learn your tropics," said Science. Where on earth am I to go? I wondered, for tropics are tropics wherever found, so I got down an atlas and saw that either South America or West Africa must be my destination, for the Malayan region was too far off and too expensive. ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... "The tropics vanish, and meseems that I, From Halkerside, from topmost Allermuir, Or steep Caerketton, dreaming ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... any number of them about here, from some so tiny you can hardly see them to others with great bell flowers and broad leaves. I'm afraid if you went to the tropics Saxe, you would find fault with the plants there, because you had seen so many of them at home in England. Now, let's sit down and rest here, and look at the mountains! I never tire of watching their snow peaks, ridges and hollows, ...
— The Crystal Hunters - A Boy's Adventures in the Higher Alps • George Manville Fenn
... instance of love through fire and water," said she; "this is the second. But it ought not to count, as it comes from the Tropics." ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... along swept clean over our heads, sometimes coming so suddenly as to cut a breath in half. If the wind should increase—but no—I wouldn't face the possibility of such a disagreeable thing. I was cool enough now in a double sense, for although we were in the tropics, we soon got ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... those rich mother-notes for them breathed round. Those voices are not magic of the will To strike love's wound, but of love's wound give sound, Conveying it; the yearnings, pains and dreams. They waft to the moist tropics after storm, When out of passion spent thick incense steams, And jewel-belted clouds the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... wild creature in its cage, paced that handsome woman, with bent head, locked hands, and restless steps. Some mental storm, swift and sudden as a tempest of the tropics, had swept over her and left its marks behind. As if in anger at the beauty now proved powerless, all ornaments had been flung away, yet still it shone undimmed, and filled her with a passionate regret. A ...
— Pauline's Passion and Punishment • Louisa May Alcott
... there—those large golden fruit, the foliage of which resembles a trophy of savage sabre blades! They are called pineapples, and are the pippins of the tropics." ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger
... from four distinct points. After this first recorded eruption the island relapsed into a state of repose, and except for a stream of molten lava which issued from the northern extremity, there was no evidence of its dangerous condition. The luxuriant vegetation of the tropics speedily re-established itself, and the volcano was generally regarded as "extinct."[2] History repeats itself; and the history of Vesuvius was repeated in the case ...
— Volcanoes: Past and Present • Edward Hull
... mamones, pomegranates, figs, christophines, and the varied range of citrus fruits. There are also great polished apples in the markets, coming from cooler regions, tied by their stems, good to look at but impossible to relish; and I understand how these people of the tropics think the apple an inferior fruit, so successfully do the poor varieties stop the desire for more. There are vegetables I have ...
— The Apple-Tree - The Open Country Books—No. 1 • L. H. Bailey
... market to thrice the extent that it increases the foreign one. The latest accounts inform us of new arrangements about to be made with a view to competition with this country for the passenger traffic to and within the tropics, while the greatest of all trades now left to British ships is represented to be the transport of British men, women, and children, so heavily taxed at home for the maintenance of this very system that they are compelled to seek an asylum abroad. In all this there is nothing like freedom ...
— The trade, domestic and foreign • Henry Charles Carey
... they can. But I'm not going to waste the winter and my salary in the semi-tropics just because you ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... you do that?" she asked in a voice that rang with a low musical quality. Her voice and her beauty were of the tropics, as were the features which, molded together, gave form to that beauty; because her hair and eyes were of a color, dark like walnut, and her olive skin was like silk under silk, with the rosy color of her youth and ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... ran back to that cruise on the Aquila. He saw that group on the after-deck; Rainier lifting southward like a phantom mountain over the opal sea; and westward the Olympics, looming clear-cut, vivid as a scene in the tropics; the purplish blue of the nearer height sharply defined against the higher amethyst slope that marked the gorge of the Dosewallups. This setting had brought the tragedy to his mind, and to evade the questions Morganstein pressed, he had ...
— The Rim of the Desert • Ada Woodruff Anderson
... was this woman? Was she a being like myself, or one of those visions which, like living meteors, shoot athwart the sky of our imagination, dazzling the eye? Was she of my own country, or from some distant land, from some island of the tropics, or the far East, whither I could not follow her? After adoring her for a few days, might I not have to mourn forever her absence? Was her heart free to respond to mine? Was it likely that enthralling beauty such as hers should have traversed the world and reached maturity without kindling ...
— Raphael - Pages Of The Book Of Life At Twenty • Alphonse de Lamartine
... I received a present of an armadillo, or ant-eater, who is certainly a wonderful animal, and well worth studying, in the tedium of a calm between the tropics. The body proper is but about nine inches, but, when stretched at length, he covers an extent of two and a half feet, from head to tail, and is wholly fortified with an impenetrable armor of bony scales. On any occasion of alarm, it is his custom ...
— Journal of an African Cruiser • Horatio Bridge
... to the land-crab, which is a native of the Bahamas, and also of most of the other islands between the tropics. They live in clefts of the rocks, or holes which they dig for themselves among the mountains, and subsist on vegetables. About the months of April and May, they descend to the sea coast in a body of millions at a time, for the purpose of depositing their spawn. They march ...
— Stories about the Instinct of Animals, Their Characters, and Habits • Thomas Bingley
... engaged upon this duty, it came on to rain in a manner worthy of the tropics. The vault reverberated; every gargoyle instantly poured its full discharge; we waded back to the inn, ankle-deep in impromptu brooks; and the rest of the afternoon sat weatherbound, hearkening to the sonorous deluge. For two hours I talked of indifferent matters, laboriously feeding the conversation; ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... favorably placed for observation when the zodiacal plane is but slightly inclined to the horizon. Its faint light requires the contrast of a background of dark sky in order to be readily perceptible. But within the tropics, where the Zodiac is always at a favorable angle, the mysterious light is more constantly visible. Nearly all observant travelers in the equatorial regions have taken particular note of this phenomenon, for being so much more ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss
... Leichhardt, or Match-box, n. Entada scandens, Benth., N.O. Leguminosae. Though this bean has two Australian names, it is really widely distributed throughout the tropics. A tall climbing plant; the seeds are used ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... English and French authors, and has studied thoroughly the history and character of the people with whom the tie of color has connected him. He travelled two years in Hayti, and his letters, written in a flowing and luxuriant style, as a son of the tropics should write, giving an account of his observations and inquiries in that interesting island, were published extensively in England; and have been copied into the anti-slavery journals in this country. His journal will be given ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... valuable woods imported from the tropics to this country in the form of round logs, with or without bark on, are commonly damaged more or less seriously by ambrosia ...
— Seasoning of Wood • Joseph B. Wagner
... adjoining seas, the want of mountains within the region having any great elevation, and the general absence of timber, combined to produce an amount of heat and dryness scarcely known elsewhere outside the tropics. ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 4. (of 7): Babylon • George Rawlinson
... Kangaroo. He ran through the ti-trees; he ran through the mulga; he ran through the long grass; he ran through the short grass; he ran through the Tropics of Capricorn and Cancer; he ran ...
— Kipling Stories and Poems Every Child Should Know, Book II • Rudyard Kipling
... one of them, a part of the way, perhaps, in a sailing vessel or a steamer, but the rest in a light canoe. Tropical shrubbery and forests line the banks of the stream. New forms and modes of life impress the traveller from the temperate zone. The scenery of the tropics, so long the wonder of the imagination, now expands in wild luxuriance before the sight. When you have gone as far as you can along the winding river, waiting, perhaps, for hours, here and there upon the bank, in some rude cabin, or ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... the south, like Night in the tropics, comes 'at one stride'; but Wordsworth finds the rendering distasteful 'neque sic ...
— Theocritus, Bion and Moschus rendered into English Prose • Andrew Lang
... waning of faith, the growth of despair, the triumph of brute force, the reign of the liar and huckster—all these are more real and threatening here, as beasts and reptiles increase in size as we near the tropics. We are nearing the tropics of civilisation. We must not forget that the flowers will be richer, wilder, more beautiful, and life ...
— The One Woman • Thomas Dixon
... drawn from depths where it lay under a triple guard of wrappings, still further defended by formidable lines of pins. Above all, Mademoiselle Cormon sacrificed on the altar of her hopes three bottles of the famous liqueurs of Madame Amphoux, the most illustrious of all the distillers of the tropics,—a name very dear to gourmets. Thanks to the devotion of her lieutenants, mademoiselle was soon ready for the conflict. The different weapons—furniture, cookery, provisions, in short, all the various munitions of war, together with a body of reserve ...
— An Old Maid • Honore de Balzac
... training-ground for travellers. Bernier thought the first summit he crossed, coming from the south, "the dreadful rim of the world," but the descent of it plumped him, "as if by enchantment, into the centre of France." In sheltered places with a southern exposure the tropics reappear, but the vegetation of the foothills and middle mountains is said to be, but for the deodara cedar (Pinus excelsa) and a few other trees, European in character. The resemblance of the undergrowth is less marked, and still less that of the inhabitants, the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... failing this, a few necessary phrases can be written down. Such a phrase, for example, as this: Apa nama ini? ("What is the name of this?") will serve to supply the place of many vocabularies. The language, which from its soft sounding has been called "the Italian of the Tropics," is very simple, and seems to consist almost exclusively of nouns (i.e. substantives, adjectives, and pronouns). The verb "to be" and prepositions are often omitted, e.g. Pighi bawa ini Tuan X— "Go [and] take this [to] Mr. X——;" and most substantives can be formed into verbs. ...
— A Visit to Java - With an Account of the Founding of Singapore • W. Basil Worsfold
... attempt to account for the exquisite enjoyment on beholding the setting sun between the tropics, I should perhaps say, that it arose from the warmth, the repose, the richness, the novelty, the glory of the whole, filling the mind with the most exalted, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 344 (Supplementary Issue) • Various
... least a hundred feet square. The floor was covered with a foot or more of soil in which the rich grass and plants of the tropics flourished. There were tiny flower beds in the center; baby palms, patchouli plants and a maze of interlacing vines marked the edges of this wonderful garden in mid-air. Cool fountains sprayed the air at either end of the green enclosure: the ...
— The Man From Brodney's • George Barr McCutcheon
... things, sitting up there on the counter swinging his legs and pointing out this and that,—quinine, ipecac, opium, hasheesh,—all the silly patent medicines, every sloppy soothing syrup! Lordy! He knew 'em as though they were people! Where they come from! Where they're going to! Yarns about the tropics that would kink the hair along the nape of your neck! Jokes about your own town's soup-kettle pharmacology that would make you yell for joy! Gee! But the things that man had seen and known! Gee! But the things that man could make you see and know! And he had ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... trader rather than the scholar who carried these numerals from their original habitat to various commercial centers, it is evident that we shall never know when they first made their inconspicuous entrance into Europe. Curious customs from the East and from the tropics,—concerning games, social peculiarities, oddities of dress, and the like,—are continually being related by sailors and traders in their resorts in New York, London, Hamburg, and Rotterdam to-day, customs that no scholar has yet described ...
— The Hindu-Arabic Numerals • David Eugene Smith
... counselled the General. "You can travel in uniform—take flannels for the tropics; everything you need in Australia you can get just as well, or better, out there. Most fellows who go out take tons of unnecessary stuff. Come into the smoking-room and give ...
— Back To Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... for any one who has not resided in the tropics to comprehend the feeling of enjoyment which accompanies these periodical commotions of the atmosphere; in Europe they would be fraught with annoyance, but in Ceylon they are welcomed with a relish proportionate to the monotony ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... to twitch curiously. I thought at first he was really intending to make the best of things, but suddenly two great tears squeezed from his eyes and rolled lumberingly over his cheeks; then, as an unbridled torrential storm breaks in the tropics, he threw himself face down upon the ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... integral limit of value proposed for our currency, is the star, which is to be divided into one hundred equal parts, each part to be called a centime, namely: 10 centimes—1 tropic; 10 tropics—1 star; 10 ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862 - Devoted To Literature and National Policy • Various
... given to the city by its cosmopolitan atmosphere. For San Francisco, serving as one of the two main great gateways to an enormous country, a front entrance to America from the Orient, a back entrance from Europe and a side entrance from South America, standing halfway between tropics and polar regions, a great port of the greatest ocean in the world, becomes naturally one of the world's main caravanseries, a meeting ...
— The Californiacs • Inez Haynes Irwin
... the mountain grew only the trees and plants of the tropics. Three hours' upward travel brought them into the regions of the temperate zone, and they plucked wild strawberries such as grew in New England. Pressing on up the steep side, scaling cliffs and rocks, which at times almost defied their skill and strength, the air grew cooler. ...
— The Real America in Romance, Volume 6; A Century Too Soon (A Story - of Bacon's Rebellion) • John R. Musick
... play. We looked into the green house in passing, where the floral splendor of every zone was combined. There were lofty halls, with glass roofs, where the orange grew to a great tree, and one could sit in myrtle bowers, with the brilliant bloom of the tropics around him. It was the only thing there ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor |
