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More "Pith" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... "Miles has more pith in him than ever poor old Raymond had," said Phil. "Poor old Poynsett, I used to think he wanted to be spoony on you, Joan, if he had only known his own mind. If he had, I suppose he would have ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... poverty of our poor is generally not such complete destitution as that of many of the poor in foreign cities, their average condition is worse. The increase of disease and mortality is a result not so much of poverty as of condition. "The pith and burden of the whole matter is, that the great mass of the poor are compelled to live in tenements that are unfit for human beings, and under circumstances in which it is impossible ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... wall, he trimmed it with his knife into the desired shape and size. Laying the piece, thus prepared, upon a large stone, he pounded one side of it lustily with a piece of rock. A few minutes sufficed to pound out the pith and leave ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... chip off the yellow rinds, taking care that none of the white underlying pith is taken, as that would make the punch bitter, whereas the yellow portion of the rinds is that in which the flavor resides and in which the cells are placed containing the essential oil. Put this yellow ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 315, January 14, 1882 • Various
... get a piece of elder, and punch out the pith, and that will make a hollow reed; and I can draw up the water through that into ...
— Rollo's Museum • Jacob Abbott
... him, saying,—This is he,—when he sees him after waking, after the same manner the good man having seen the Supreme Soul in the deep contemplation of Samadhi recognises it upon waking from Samadhi.[33] As one beholds the fibrous pith after extracting it from a blade of the Saccharum Munja, even so the Yogin beholds the soul, extracting it from the body. The body has been called the Saccharum Munja, and the fibrous pith is said to stand for the soul. This is the excellent illustration ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... scandal. A woman of culture skims over that like a bird, never touching it with the tip of a wing. What she brings home is the freshness and brightness of life. She touches everything so daintily, she hits off a character in a sentence, she gives the pith of a dialogue without tediousness, she mimics without vulgarity; her narration sparkles, but it does n't sting. The picture of her day is full of vivacity, and it gives new value and freshness to common things. If we could only have on the stage ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... to the Daguerrean artist, or the amateur dabbler in Photography. I have read nearly all of the many works upon this art that have emanated from the London and Paris presses, and I think the reader will find in yours the pith of them all, with much practical and useful information that I do not remember to have ...
— The History and Practice of the Art of Photography • Henry H. Snelling
... center it is all soft pith." He got from the boat one of the augers that had scuttled the Proserpine, and soon turned the pith out. "They pound that pith in water, and run it through linen; then set the water in the sun to evaporate. The sediment ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... to turn his verse-narratives into prose, and less would be lost in the transfer. In Multitude and Solitude, the author has given us more of the results of his own thinking than can be found in most of the poems. Whole pages are filled with the pith of meditative thought. In Captain Margaret, we have a remarkable combination of the love of romance and the ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... us would allow the votaries of the divine right of kings to tell us so, albeit we are ready enough to admit the imperfections of universal suffrage, too often committing affairs of pith and moment, even of life and death, to the arbitrament of the mob, and costing more in cash outlay than ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... their dear rough stems, rough with nice little white hairs, and I knew how easily their poor heads would cut off, there is so much pith inside ...
— Last Words - A Final Collection of Stories • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... thirteenth century. Then we went into the side aisle of the choir, where there were one or two modern monuments; and I was appalled to find that a sermon was being preached by the ecclesiastic of the day, nor were there any signs of an imminent termination. I am not aware that there was much pith in the discourse, but there was certainly a good deal of labor and earnestness in the preacher's mode of delivery; although, when he came to a close, it appeared that the audience was not more ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Soon, however, it was found that the editor could very well perform all such duties for himself, and the post of "pony" was abolished. Horace—or "Ponny," as he was invariably nicknamed—became one of the accepted writers. He was most prolific as a suggestor, and never failed of point and pith in his own numerous little paragraphs. As a proposer he had much of the talent of his brother, but little of his genius. "The Life and Adventures of Miss Robinson Crusoe," written by Douglas Jerrold, was "Ponny's" suggestion; but he carried out his conceptions ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... studies; and if I can bring it to a perfection before I die, shall reckon I have well employed the poor remains of an unfortunate life. This indeed is more than I can justly expect from a quill worn to the pith in the service of the State, in pros and cons upon Popish Plots, and Meal Tubs, and Exclusion Bills, and Passive Obedience, and Addresses of Lives and Fortunes; and Prerogative, and Property, and Liberty of Conscience, and Letters ...
— A Tale of a Tub • Jonathan Swift
... to come at once to the very pith of the whole matter, I think I've been sticking to the mill long enough—for the present. And it may come to pass that some day I shall be married, ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... chien. This story is well known among the pupils and friends of the master, but not always told in exactly the same way. According to another version, Chopin improvised the waltz when the little dog was playing with a ball of wool. This variation, however, does not affect the pith of the story. ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... ample, east and west, But two cannot go abreast, Cannot travel in it two: Yonder masterful cuckoo Crowds every egg out of the nest, Quick or dead, except its own; A spell is laid on sod and stone, Night and Day were tampered with, Every quality and pith Surcharged and sultry with a power That works its will on ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... these Indians use is an ingeniously contrived weapon. It is made from a species of palm-tree. When an Indian wants one, he goes into the woods and selects a tree with a long slender stem of less than an inch in diameter; he extracts the pith out of this, and then cuts another stem, so much larger than the first that he can push the small tube into the bore of the large one,—thus the slight bend in one is counteracted by the other, and a perfectly straight ...
— Martin Rattler • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... clairvoyant just as long as he gives us palatable things, and no longer, and nobody knows this better than your genus clairvoyant. When his advice is contrary to our desires, we pronounce him a fraud and go our way. When enterprises of great pith and moment are to be carried through, we give the power into the hands of the worldling infidel, rather ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... for the intrusion. The joint-grass of soggy pastures produces edible, nut-flavored tubers, called by the Indians taboose. The common reed of the ultramontane marshes (here Phragmites vulgaris), a very stately, whispering reed, light and strong for shafts or arrows, affords sweet sap and pith which makes ...
— The Land of Little Rain • Mary Austin
... me some pretty flower-holders made of bamboos of different lengths, intended evidently to hang against door-jambs or in hallways. The pith was hollowed out here and there, and the hole plugged from beneath to make little water pockets. These did admirably for a season, but when the wood dried, it invariably split, and treacherous dripping followed, most ruinous ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright
... I sat in the service o' foreign commanders, Selling a sword for a beggar man's fee, Learning the trade o' the warrior who wanders, To mak' ilka stranger a sworn enemie; There was ae thought that nerved roe, and brawly it served me. With pith to the claymore wherever I won,— 'Twas the auld sodger's story, that, gallows or glory, The Hielan's, the Hielan's were ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... grey old town was wrapped in a golden mist of romance; its windows reflected the fire of the sunset. It was not until we had separated from the Bishop and stood, a group of four, before Mrs. Handsomebody's house, that dread misgiving took the pith out of our legs. All of a sudden Granfa loomed bulky and solid; the problem of where he was to be stowed presented itself. He was not like Giftie to be hidden in the scullery. He was not even like a white rat ...
— Explorers of the Dawn • Mazo de la Roche
... hurds are 1 Pith, wood, and fiber 2 Character of hurds affected by retting 2 Proportion of hurds to fiber and yield per acre 3 Hurds available from machine-broken hemp 3 Present uses of hemp hurds 4 Present supplies of hurds available 5 Baling for shipment 5 ...
— Hemp Hurds as Paper-Making Material - United States Department of Agriculture, Bulletin No. 404 • Lyster H. Dewey and Jason L. Merrill
... removing all the white pith. Put the rinds of these into 1/2 pint of cold water; boil it gently for 10 minutes. Strain, and add to the water 6 oz, of loaf sugar. Boil it until it is a thick syrup, then drop into it the oranges, divided in ...
— The Allinson Vegetarian Cookery Book • Thomas R. Allinson
... kamidana, are set two quaintly shaped jars for the offerings of sake; two small vases, to contain sprays of the sacred plant sakaki, or offerings of flowers; and a small lamp, shaped like a tiny saucer, where a wick of rush-pith floats in rape-seed oil. Strictly speaking, all these utensils, except the flower-vases, should be made of unglazed red earthenware, such as we find described in the early chapters of the Kojiki: and still at Shinto festivals ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... of national income, the consequent dependence of the citizens upon the Court, etc. etc.,—all these conditions, within which German society and a political organization corresponding thereto developed, are transformed by Heinzen's bluff common sense into a few pithy sayings, the pith of which consists in the assertion that "German princedom" made and ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... a remark which I confess astonished me—a remark I could never forget as coming from him. He said that he "had lived a very full and varied life, and had no interest in remarks about morals." "Remarks about morals" are, nevertheless, in essence, the pith of all the books to which he referred, as those to which he turned in preference to the Edinburgh Edition of R. L. Stevenson's works. The moral element is implicit in the drama, and it is implicit there because it is implicit in ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... The pith and heart of Christianity, the consummate goal of the way of Salvation, for Boehme is, as we have seen, not "history" and not any kind of outward "form" or "letter"—buchstaebliches Wort,—it is an experience in which ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... the same weight as another, provided they are both of the same age; still, how difficult is narration even to the man who is rich in well-selected evidence. What a tendency there is to round off a narrative into falsehood; or else by parenthesis to destroy its pith and continuity. Again, the historian knows the end of many of the transactions he narrates. If he did not, how differently often he would narrate them. It would be a most instructive thing to give a man the materials for the account of a great transaction, stopping short ...
— Friends in Council (First Series) • Sir Arthur Helps
... to be the head or beginning of a Pith, as it were, or a part of the body which seemed more spungy then the rest, and much more irregularly flawed, which from T ascended by EE, though less visible, into the small neck towards A. The Grain, as it were, of all the flaws, that proceeds from all the outward Surface ADCCDA, was much the ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke
... and his whole condition. 'You will be soon weary of all contentious books,' he wrote to CASPER LINDERN, 'if you entertain and get The Threefold Life of Man into your mind and heart.' 'The subject of regeneration,' says Christopher Walton, 'is the pith and drift of all Behmen's writings, and the student may here be directed to begin his course of study by mastering the first eight chapters of The Threefold Life, which appear to have been in ...
— Jacob Behmen - an appreciation • Alexander Whyte
... another, and be united together by their common Interest. Almost every Degree produces something peculiar to it. The Food often grows in one Country, and the Sauce in another. The Fruits of Portugal are corrected by the Products of Barbadoes: The Infusion of a China Plant sweetned with the Pith of an Indian Cane. The Philippick Islands give a Flavour to our European Bowls. The single Dress of a Woman of Quality is often the Product of a hundred Climates. The Muff and the Fan come together from the different Ends of the Earth. ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... inches in diameter. Its general appearance is not unlike the cocoa-nut palm. Our conductor called the sago tree sibla, but the Malays give it the name of rumbiga. They say that each tree, if kept properly pruned down, will produce at least five hundred pounds of pith per annum; but it soon degenerates if suffered to grow to any considerable height. The pith is soaked in large troughs of running water until it dissolves and afterward settles, the sand and heavy dirt sinking beneath it, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various
... give the pith of the adventure: "I did not report aright when I went to the Leader and bade him arise. It was a wolf ...
— Indian Story and Song - from North America • Alice C. Fletcher
... Sambucus. The common European species (S. nigra), a mystic plant, was once employed to cure every ill that flesh is heir to; not only that, but, when used as a switch, it was believed to check a lad's growth. Very likely! Every whittling schoolboy knows how easy it is to remove the white pith from an elder stem. An ancient musical instrument, the sambuca, was doubtless made from many such ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... serpent-bearing head, Lest the bare sand should harm it. Twigs marine He likewise strews, and rests Medusa there. The fresh green twigs as though with life endow'd, Felt the dire Gorgon's power; their spongy pith Hard to the touch became, the stiffness spread Through every twig and leaf. The Nereid nymphs More branches bring, and try the wonderous change On all, and joy to see the change succeed: Spreading the transformation ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... smiling, peaceful spot of great tropical beauty; it is one of the fairest places in the West Indies. At every hour of the year the harbor of Port of Spain holds open its arms to vessels of every draught. A governor in a pith helmet, a cricket club, a bishop in gaiters, and a botanical garden go to make it a prosperous and contented colony. But the little derelict Trinidad, in latitude 20 degrees 30 minutes south, and longitude 29 degrees 22 minutes west, seven hundred miles from the coast of Brazil, is but a ...
— Real Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis
... not rejoice at all; he grew and grew, and was green both winter and summer. People that saw him said, "What a fine tree!" and toward Christmas he was one of the first that was cut down. The axe struck deep into the very pith; the tree fell to the earth with a sigh: he felt a pang—it was like a swoon; he could not think of happiness, for he was sorrowful at being separated from his home, from the place where he had sprung up. He knew well that he should never see his dear old comrades, ...
— The Children's Book of Christmas Stories • Various
... "It was the pith and point of my contention! I mentioned the two moments at which I hold that a man's soul may be caught apart, may be cut off from his body by no other medium than a good sound lens in a light-tight camera. You cannot have forgotten them ...
— The Camera Fiend • E.W. Hornung
... oursels, my Lord has na the heart of a true bairn to that aged and worthy grannie of the papistry, our leddy the Virgin Mary—here's her health, poor auld deaf and dumb creature—she has na, I doubt, the pith to warsle wi' the blast she ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt
... sorts of Worms, Flies, Cheese, Grain, and Black Worms, their Bellies being slit, that the White may be seen: And very much delighteth in the Pith of an Oxes back, the tough outward skin being carefully taken off, without breaking the inward tender skin. In the Morning early angle for Chevins, with a Snail; in the heat of the day, with some other Bait; in the afternoon with the Fly; ...
— The School of Recreation (1696 edition) • Robert Howlett
... enkephalon].] Literally "the brain." Dulcis medulla earum [palmarum] in cacumine, quod cerebrum appellant. Plin. H. N. xiii. 4. See also Theophr. ii. 8; Galen. de Fac. simpl. Medic. iv. 15. It is generally interpreted medulla, "marrow" or "pith," but it is in reality a sort of bud at the top of the palm-tree, containing the last tender leaves, with flowers, and continuing in that state two years before it unfolds the flower; as appears from Boryd. St. Vincent ...
— The First Four Books of Xenophon's Anabasis • Xenophon
... doesn't this tempt your ambition? The whole wealth of Fudge, that renowned man of pith. All brought to the hammer, for Church competition,— Sole encumbrance, Miss Fudge to be taken therewith. Think, my boy, for a Curate how glorious a catch! While, instead of the thousands of souls you now watch, To save Biddy Fudge's is all you need do; And her purse ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... limes, and oranges. There is something about those oranges I should like to have explained. They are usually green and sweetish in taste, nor have they much white pith, but now and again you get a big bright yellow one from those trees that have been imported, and these are very pithy and in full possession of the flavour of verjuice. They have also got the papaw on the Coast, the Carica papaya of botanists. It is an insipid fruit. To the ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... the world's renown, For their valour is known to England's throne as a gem in the British crown; These are the men who face the front, whose courage the world may scan, The men who are feared by the felon, but are loved by the honest man; These are the marrow, the pith, the cream, the best that the blood contains, Who have cast their days in the valiant ways of the Riders of the Plains; And theirs is the kind whose muscle makes the power of old England's jaw, And they keep the peace of her people and the honour ...
— Flint and Feather • E. Pauline Johnson
... the great god Pan (How tall it stood in the river!), Then drew the pith, like the heart of a man, Steadily from the outside ring, And notch'd the poor dry empty thing In holes, as he sat by ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... any danger of changing my mind, the good lawyer would have saved me in the nick of time. The extract that follows contains the pith of his letter; and shows how he encouraged me when I stood in sore need of a ...
— The Law and the Lady • Wilkie Collins
... and in the South it was held in universal honour. Jasmin, he continued, is what Burns was to the Scottish peasantry; only he received his honours in his lifetime. The comparison with Burns, however, was not appropriate. Burns had more pith, vigour, variety, and passion, than Jasmin who was more of a descriptive writer. In some respects Jasmin resembled Allan Ramsay, a barber and periwig-maker, like himself, whose Gentle Shepherd met with as great a success ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... has been largely through concrete illustrations which have pith, point, and purpose, to be more suggestive than dogmatic, in a style more practical than elegant, more helpful than ornate, more ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... pitch of faith makes connections. It ties our God and our need and our action into one knot. This is the pith of this whole story. Jesus' one effort in His tactful patient wooing is to get Martha up to the point of ordering that stone aside. He got her faith into touch with the gravestone of her sore need. Her faith and her action connected. ...
— Quiet Talks on John's Gospel • S. D. Gordon
... making single-eye cuttings. The most common form of the cutting is the single bud with an inch of wood above and below, the ends being cut with a slant. Some modify this form by cutting away the wood on the side opposite the bud, exposing the pith the whole length of the cutting. In another form, a square cut is made directly under the bud, leaving an inch and a half of wood above. Or this last form is modified by making a long sloping cut from the bud to the upper end, thereby exposing the ...
— Manual of American Grape-Growing • U. P. Hedrick
... him, because he could bear to see nothing happy. The pony had sense enough to reply, weary as he was, with a stronger kick, which took Master Lancelot in the knee, and discouraged him for any further contest. Bully as he was, the boy had too much of ancient Yordas pith in him to howl, or cry, or even whimper, but sat down on a little ridge to nurse his poor knee, and meditate revenge against the animal with hoofs. Presently pain and wrath combined became too much for the weakness of his frame, and he fell back and lay upon the hard ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... an exaggerated feeling of the ignorance of men. 'Men take truths of this nature,' said Emerson, 'very fast;' and his own style does no doubt very boldly take this capacity for granted in us. In 'choice and pith of diction,' again, of which Mr. Lowell speaks, he hits the mark with a felicity that is almost his own in this generation. He is terse, concentrated, and free from the important blunder of mistaking intellectual ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... lumps of sugar deftly longwise through the whipped cream. Buck Mulligan slit a steaming scone in two and plastered butter over its smoking pith. He bit off ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... goodly crop of florins, with here and there a speck of gold shining amongst the silver harvest, is being sown over the field of the cloth of green, soon to be reaped by the croupier's sickle, and the pith ball is being dropped into the revolving basin that is partitioned off into so many tiny black and red niches. For the next twelve hours the processes in question are carried on swiftly and steadily, without variation or loss of time; relays of ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... represents the very pith and marrow of the art of study, we may dwell a little longer on the process of changing the form of an author, whether by condensing, expanding, varying the expression, altering the order, selecting, and rejecting,—or by any other known device. Worst of all is change for the mere sake of change; ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... he stopped yet a while, shared in the supper, and resumed his seat in the corner when the book was brought out for worship. The iron lamp, with its wick of rush-pith, which hung against the side of the chimney, was lighted, and John sat down to read. But as his eyes and the print, too, had grown a little dim with years, the lamp was not enough, and he asked for a 'fir-can'le.' A splint of fir dug from the peat-bog was handed to ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... fashion then, like a grown-up young lady, and I think Rupert was pleased, though she looked rather funny and very red. And so Henrietta nursed him altogether, and used to read battles to him as he lay on the sofa, and Rupert made plans of the battles on cardboard, and moved bits of pith out of the elder-tree about for the troops, and showed Henrietta how if he had had the moving of them really, and had done it quite differently to the way the generals did, the other side would have won ...
— A Great Emergency and Other Tales - A Great Emergency; A Very Ill-Tempered Family; Our Field; Madam Liberality • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... saw that we were properly secured, our uniforms were torn off our backs and a couple of blue cotton shirts, such as the Chinese coolies wear, pulled over our shoulders, as a sort of disguise. An ugly old pith hat, of the shape of a mushroom, was then jammed down on the tops of our unfortunate heads; and we looked at one another in wonder as to what ...
— Crown and Anchor - Under the Pen'ant • John Conroy Hutcheson
... representation in the parable, however, is true to nature and fact: it would be a mistake to attribute to a miser a high appreciation of the dignity of man. Covetousness, in its more advanced stages, eats the pith out of the understanding, and ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... waistcoat, and his regimental trousers were tied round the waist by a bit of rope. On the sleeve of his collarless shirt were three dark dry splashes; he noticed them as he raised his arm to put on his pith helmet. The words did not reach his lips, but his heart cried out within him for a ...
— The Story of Sonny Sahib • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... fetch't, and fliskit, But thy auld tail thou wad hae whiskit, An spread abreed thy weel-fill'd brisket, Wi' pith an' pow'r, Till spritty knowes wad rair't and riskit, An' ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... considerably exhausted, the idea of sitting down on this tempting log was conceived and executed simultaneously by the whole party, and the whole party sunk together through its treacherous surface into a mass of rotten rubbish that had formed part of the pith and marrow of the eternal forest a hundred ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope
... of rows of microscopic cylinders, situated between the wood and the pith; it is that part from which all the branches take their rise, and from it all the wood-threads grow.—Corona astronomically means the luminous ring or glory which surrounds the sun or moon during an eclipse, or the intervention of a ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... Tuned, from Bocafoli's stark-naked psalms, To Plara's sonnets spoilt by toying with, 'As knops that stud some almug to the pith 'Pricked for gum, wry thence, and crinkled worse 'Than pursed eyelids of a river-horse 'Sunning himself o' the slime when whirrs the breeze— ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... lodgings, in Piccadilly, with much of the same palpitation of heart which Boswell experienced when introduced to Johnson. I was welcomed with both hands, and such kind, and complimentary words, that confusion and fear alike forsook me. When I saw him in Edinburgh, he was in the very pith and flush of life—even in my opinion a thought more fat than bard beseems; when I looked on him now, thirteen years had not passed over him and left no mark behind: his hair was growing thin and grey; the stamp of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 470 - Volume XVII, No. 470, Saturday, January 8, 1831 • Various
... of clear coffee and some thickly buttered toast. After that the three hastened in a cab to the station, stopping on the way to buy half a case each of grapefruit and oranges. Aboard the train Blake was at once set to eating grapefruit and chewing the bitter pith to allay the burning of his ...
— Out of the Primitive • Robert Ames Bennet
... necessary for wholesome life in any age, but particularly amidst confused affairs and shifting standards. Genuineness is not mere simplicity, for that may lack vitality, and genuineness does not. We expect what we call genuine to have pith and strength of fiber. Genuineness is a quality which we sometimes mean to include when we speak of individuality. Individuality is lost the moment you submit to passing modes or fashions, the creations of an artificial ...
— On Being Human • Woodrow Wilson
... note from Miss Smith, recounting shortly and accurately the very incidents which I had seen, but the pith of the letter lay ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle
... to atone for our sins, and forward the work of national purification, by doing our duty—our whole duty—now. One thing is certain: we cannot look for help to other nations, nor to the amiable disposition of a foe whose pith and pluck are consanguineous with our own, nor to the agency of individuals. It was written in the beginning that the people which aspired to make its own laws should also work out its own salvation. For this reason great leaders have not been given ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... watching the raft, which remained stationary. There were about a hundred of them armed with blow-tubes formed of a reed peculiar to these parts, and which is strengthened outside by the stem of a dwarf palm from which the pith has been extracted. ...
— Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon • Jules Verne
... coming. On the base-angles, Maxen and Dohna, Finck expects Daun and the Reich. From Trohnitz to Maxen is near two miles; from Maxen to Dohna above four. At Dohna stands Wunsch against the Reich; Finck himself at Maxen, expecting Daun, as the pith of the whole affair. In this triangular way stands Finck at the topmost heights of the country,—"Maxen highest, but Hausdorf only a little lower,"—and has not thought of disputing the climb upwards. Too literal an eye to his orders: ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... spring of water, whereof some that were seare and rotten, and some that of purpose were broken off, fell into the water and were all turned into stone. Of these, boughs, or parts of the tree, I brought into London, which, when I had broken into pieces, therein might be seen that the pith and all the rest was turned into stones, still remaining the same shape and fashion that they were of before they were in the water." Similarly, Sir John Maundeville notices the "Dead Sea fruit"—fruit found on the apple-trees near the Dead Sea. ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... the apostrophes to Barto left it one of the ironical, veiled Republican, semi-socialistic ballads of the time, which were sung about the streets for the sharpness and pith of the couplets, and not from a perception of the double edge down the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... "Condense as often as possible" is the interviewer's watchword,—"cut to the bone," as the reporters express it. Much of what a man says in conversation is prolix. In that part of the interview that is dull or wordy, give the pith of what is said in one or two brief sentences, then fall into direct quotation again when his words become interesting. As a rule, however, it is well as far as possible to quote his exact language all through the interview, ...
— News Writing - The Gathering , Handling and Writing of News Stories • M. Lyle Spencer
... about on the sea, would Tsz-lu, I wonder, be my follower there?" That disciple was delighted at hearing the suggestion; whereupon the Master continued, "He surpasses me in his love of deeds of daring. But he does not in the least grasp the pith ...
— Chinese Literature • Anonymous
... other, sitting. "Here's pith!" said Gibson. "Pith!" said the other in chorus, and they nodded to each other in amity, primed glasses up and ready. And then it was eyes heavenward and the ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... the sun and the danger of exposure to it. They will run up on deck bare-headed to look at some passing object, and then are surprised that they at once get a bad headache. They are all well provided with pith hats, and awnings are spread everywhere, so that one cannot feel quite as much sympathy for them as if they were sufferers in ...
— The Last Voyage - to India and Australia, in the 'Sunbeam' • Lady (Annie Allnutt) Brassey
... was walking by the shore of the sea he found a reed, or, as some say, a tall stalk of fennel, growing; and when he had broken it off he saw that its hollow center was filled with a dry, soft pith which would burn slowly and keep on fire a long time. He took the long stalk in his hands, and started with it towards the dwelling of the sun in ...
— Old Greek Stories • James Baldwin
... cell, lighted by a European lamp, but smelling of soy and Asiatics. Stiff black-wood chairs lined the walls. A distorted landscape on rice-paper, narrow scarlet panels inscribed with black cursive characters, pith flowers from Amoy, ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... time came when I longed to live deeper, and to get at the pith and marrow of life. I was over twenty when it was revealed to me in a noonday splendour and warmth of light, that the human is unspeakably the highest and most enthralling expression of life in all Nature. That discovery happened to me when I was in Morocco with my father, who died there—no matter ...
— Master of His Fate • J. Mclaren Cobban
... mistake. The thicker part of the stem is in such a state of keeping, that it presents to the microscope, in a sliced preparation, the internal structure, and exhibits, as in recent coniferous twigs of a year's growth, a central pith, a single ring of reticulated tissue arranged in lines that radiate outwards, and a thin layer of enveloping bark. Nothing, then, can be more certain than that this ancient twig, which must be ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... retire. Then the people flocked out of the hall in crowds, talking, laughing, and delightedly commenting upon the afternoon's enjoyment, the brief remarks exchanged by two Americans who were sauntering on immediately in front of Heliobas and Alwyn being perhaps the very pith and essence of the universal opinion concerning the great artist they had ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... construction of the fountain. A healthy poplar, seven or eight years old, is taken from its native soil, and a cold iron borer is run up the heart of the trunk from the roots, for six feet or more, by which means the pith is removed, and the trunk is made to assume the character of a pipe. A hole is then bored through from the outside of the trunk, to communicate with the highest point reached by the former operation, and in this second ...
— Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland • George Forrest Browne
... anchors flexed as lissome withe; With boles like mighty monolith; These arms of brawn, outstretched in power To brave the storms that would test their pith! ...
— Song-waves • Theodore H. Rand
... graver matter. All creeds may be welded together, but the Puritan and the scoffer are like oil and water. Yet the Puritan is the oil, for he will be ever atop. These courtiers do but stand for themselves, while the others are backed up by the pith and marrow of the army. It is well that we are afoot to-morrow. The King's troops are, I hear, pouring across Salisbury Plain, but their ordnance and stores are delaying them, for they know well that they must bring all they need, since they can expect little from the goodwill of the country ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... renown, Of various nations, and all volunteers; Not fighting for their country or its crown, But wishing to be one day brigadiers; Also to have the sacking of a town;— A pleasant thing to young men at their years. 'Mongst them were several Englishmen of pith, Sixteen called Thomson, and nineteen ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... tailoring establishment he was measured dubiously, being far removed from stock size. But a principal made light of difficulties, and Royson noticed that he was to be supplied with riding breeches and boots in addition to a sea-faring kit, while a sola topi, or pith helmet, appeared, in ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... '64, and pleaded for once again in '72, this call to unity began to appear in the nineties as the one supreme commandment of the labor movement. And, in truth, it is an epitome of all their teachings. It is the pith of their program and the marrow of their principles. Nearly all else can be waived. Other principles can be altered; other programs abandoned; other methods revolutionized; but this principle, program, and method must not be tampered with. It is the one and only unalterable ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... is a woody shell, enclosing a wide pith and covered by a thick cortex traversed by resin-ducts. By removing the scales and cortex from the axis (fig. 65) the wood is seen to be in sinuous strands uniting above and below fusiform openings, the points of insertion of the ...
— The Genus Pinus • George Russell Shaw
... now well-kept lawns and flower-beds and entered a long avenue of fig-trees. The purple fruit hung abundantly among the large green leaves. Miss Williams opened one of the figs and showed Strowbridge the red luscious pith. ...
— The Bell in the Fog and Other Stories • Gertrude Atherton
... Southern Africa, and which forms a staple food of the native inhabitants. For vegetables they had the bulbs of many species of Ixias and Mesembryanthemums, among others the "Hottentot fig" (Mesembryanthemum edule). They had the "Caffir bread"—the inside pith of the stems of a species of Zamia; and the "Caffir chestnut," the fruit of the Brabeium stellatum; and last, not least, the enormous roots of the "elephant's foot" (Testudinaria elephantipes). They had wild onions and garlic too; and in ...
— The Bush Boys - History and Adventures of a Cape Farmer and his Family • Captain Mayne Reid
... drawing-room, he wore his honors in the quietest way possible, never speaking of his own part in the brave deeds of the time, except when pressed to do so, and then with a reticence all too provoking, from the well-grounded suspicion that he kept back the pith of the real story of personal participation he might tell without tinge ...
— The Bay State Monthly - Volume 1, Issue 4 - April, 1884 • Various
... from Brunai is sago flour. The sago palm is known to the natives under the name of rumbiah, the pith, after its first preliminary washing, is called lamantah (i.e., raw), and after its preparation for export by the Chinese, sagu. The botanical name is Metroxylon, M. Laevis being that of the variety the trunk of which is unprotected, ...
— British Borneo - Sketches of Brunai, Sarawak, Labuan, and North Borneo • W. H. Treacher
... had sat down by my side, I told him quickly what I had overheard, and how. The moment he had got the pith of the story he jumped up, looking preoccupied and anxious. "I must go at once," he said, "before the girls at the telephone exchange have time to forget the numbers of those who've called and been called ...
— Secret History Revealed By Lady Peggy O'Malley • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... out of date; and Mr. E. F. Henderson's "Select Documents of the Middle Ages" and the late Mr. Serjeant Pulling's "Order of the Coif," though widely differing in scope, are both extremely useful publications. Mr. Pollard's introduction to the Clarendon Press selection of miracle plays contains the pith of that interesting subject, and Miss Toulmin Smith's "York Plays" and Miss Katherine Bates's "English Religious Drama" will be found valuable guides. Perhaps the most realistic description of a miracle play is that presented in a few pages of Morley's "English ...
— The Customs of Old England • F. J. Snell
... a writer, "is like gaming to get rich. You are liable, in the hazard, to lose all you carry to the game." They, who join hands, with cold hearts, often cease even to respect one another. They become, in truth, like the pith-ball, in its approach to the electrified cylinder, the more fiercely repelled, the nearer the contact. If you do not love the individual you wed, above all his sex; if nothing more than fancy and ...
— The Young Maiden • A. B. (Artemas Bowers) Muzzey
... suspended with all the formalities of a military execution. It appeared that the unfortunate beast had transgressed the laws of war; it had climbed the ramparts of a card-board fortress, and had actually eaten two pith sentries on duty at the bastions. It was to be exposed to the public view as an example during three days following! Catharine, unluckily, was so lost to the fitness of things as to betray open merriment. The Grand Duke was furious; ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... with them as they bade, and they were all very merry together: because for those two wanderers it was a great delight to see the faces of the children of men once more after so many months, and to hold converse with them; while for their part the young men marvelled at Ursula's beauty, and the pith ...
— The Well at the World's End • William Morris
... genius,—whether it progresses and evolves, or only spins upon itself. Take Dryden's Achitophel and Zimri; every line adds to or modifies the character, which is, as it were, a-building up to the very last verse; whereas in Pope's Timon, &c. the first two or three couplets contain all the pith of the character, and the twenty or thirty lines that follow are so much evidence or proof of overt acts of jealousy, or pride, or whatever it may be that is satirized." (Table-Talk, 192.) Some of Dryden's best satirical hits are let fall by seeming accident in ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... top of your head you must have a sun helmet. Get it of cork, not of pith. The latter has a habit of melting unobtrusively about your ears when it rains. A helmet in brush is the next noisiest thing to a circus band, so it is always well to have, also, a double terai. This is not something to eat. It is a wide felt hat, and then another ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White
... the curious incidents and adventures of pioneer life, rude in fact and rough in language, but having pith ...
— In The Boyhood of Lincoln - A Tale of the Tunker Schoolmaster and the Times of Black Hawk • Hezekiah Butterworth
... resembled himself. He could find in none of those animals a sociable companion, because none of them had a soul like his, and consequently, could not share in the sweet joy that arises from an interchange of thoughts and sentiments, which constitutes the charming pith of life. ...
— Serious Hours of a Young Lady • Charles Sainte-Foi
... think, the marriage under our consideration would not be found, upon enquiry, to be an exception. Lord Byron himself, indeed, when at Cephalonia, a short time before his death, seems to have expressed, in a few words, the whole pith of the mystery. An English gentleman with whom he was conversing on the subject of Lady Byron, having ventured to enumerate to him the various causes he had heard alleged for the separation, the noble poet, who had seemed much amused with their absurdity and falsehood, said, after listening ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... curious, and may in large buds, as of the horse-chesnut, be almost seen by the naked eye; if with a penknife the remaining rudiment of the last year's leaf, and of the new bud in its bosom, be cut away slice by slice. The seven ribs of the last year's leaf will be seen to have arisen from the pith in seven distinct points making a curve; and the new bud to have been produced in their centre, and to have pierced the alburnum and cortex, and grown without the assistance of a mother. A similar process ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... pound of rhubarb cut without peeling, a pound of sugar and one lemon. Pare the yellow peel from the lemon, taking care to get none of the bitter white pith. Slice the pulp of the lemon in an earthen bowl, discarding the seeds. Put the rhubarb into the bowl with the sugar and lemon, cover and stand away in a cool place over night. In the morning turn into the ...
— Good Things to Eat as Suggested by Rufus • Rufus Estes
... have attempted the task—to demonstrate the contradictions, the superficiality, the inadequateness, of the teaching of Rousseau, Voltaire, or Diderot. But it is well also, and in a historical student it is not only well, but the very pith and marrow of criticism, to search for that 'adaptation,' to use M. Taine's very proper expression, which gave to the word of these teachers its mighty power and far-spreading acceptance. Is it not as true of Rousseau and Voltaire, acting in a small society, as it is of Buddha ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 8: France in the Eighteenth Century • John Morley
... are inevitably recompensed with their own vices, and the injurious effects of their actions on their fellow-beings. This is the unshaken conviction of humanity, past, present, and future. It is the pith and marrow of our moral ideal. It is the crystallization of ethical truths, distilled through long experiences from time immemorial to this day. We can safely approve Edwin ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya
... done! That's the right spirit, and I never refuse to help anybody if they've a mind to do themselves justice. There's a young man of two-and-twenty I've got my eye on now. I shall do what I can for that young man; he's got some pith in him. But then, you see, he's made good use of his time,—a first-rate calculator,— can tell you the cubic contents of anything in no time, and put me up the other day to a new market for Swedish bark; he's uncommonly knowing in manufactures, ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... only in my second year, if the examination were confined to the subject of slavery. I have thoroughly understood the theory; I have learned by heart the codes of the iniquitous system. I know it root and branch, from pith to bark. All the lecturers on the subject have not labored in vain, nor spent their strength for nought, with me. And now to be called "ignorant!" Just as though I could not reason, that is, draw inferences from ...
— The Sable Cloud - A Southern Tale With Northern Comments (1861) • Nehemiah Adams
... was detained from sailing until our pith helmets arrived on the 26th, when, at 10 o'clock on a clear moonlight night, we steamed away escorted by two T.B.Ds. The Bay was crossed in calm weather. Gibraltar passed on the 30th and Malta reached on the 2nd June. Our clothing, consisting of the ordinary drab khaki, now began to ...
— The Fifth Battalion Highland Light Infantry in the War 1914-1918 • F.L. Morrison
... man about town—a boulevardier, with his jacket cut in the latest fashion, with his cockle-shell of a boat, which he managed as well on salt water as on fresh, sculling with his arms bare, a cigarette in his mouth, a monocle in his eye, and a pith-helmet, such as is worn in India. The young ladies used to gather on the sands to watch him as he struck the water with the broad blade of his scull, near enough for them to see and to admire his nautical ability. They thought all his jokes ...
— Jacqueline, Complete • (Mme. Blanc) Th. Bentzon
... edification—or as some facetious folks say, for the mystification—of M.Ps. Having carefully waded through its voluminous pages, we have jotted down the passages that especially struck us, and propose to present the pith and substance of our labour—for it is nothing less—in a condensed ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 450 - Volume 18, New Series, August 14, 1852 • Various
... Spain, By spies informed, had swiftly warned his king, Who sent out mandates through his huge empire From Gaudalchiber to the golden West For the instant sinking of all English ships And the instant execution of their crews Who durst appear in the Caribbean sea. Moreover, in the pith of their emprise A peril lurked—Burleigh's emissaries, The smooth-tongued Thomas Doughty, who had brought His brother—unacquitted of that charge Of poisoning, raised against him by the friends Of Essex, but in ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... in him I will tell him," Halfman affirmed. "Your honor over-refines your pleasant purpose. The pith is that he be killed. Remember ...
— The Lady of Loyalty House - A Novel • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... men who bitterly stigmatized its course. You might disapprove of its editorials often, and regret their appearance—as I did—but it was impossible not to be carried onward by the hardy logic of the writer: impossible not to admire the Swift-like pith and vigor of this man, who seemed to have re-discovered the ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke
... without, from its halls to its numerous bedrooms, the taste displayed was perfect. When I was in New York it was just about to be opened, and I was invited to take part in the ceremony by delivering an inaugural address. I took for my subject the Influence of Women on Industry; and the pith of what I had to say was compressed into a single anecdote which I had heard only the day before. My informant had just been told it by one of Tiffany's salesmen. A few days previously the great jeweler's ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... exultation: Little right has he to sing Through whose heart in such an hour 295 Beats no march of conscious power, Sweeps no tumult of elation! 'Tis no Man we celebrate, By his country's victories great, A hero half, and half the whim of Fate, 300 But the pith and marrow of a Nation Drawing force from all her men, Highest, humblest, weakest, all,— Pulsing it again through them, Till the basest can no longer cower, 305 Feeling his soul spring up divinely tall, Touched but in passing by her mantle-hem. Come back, then, noble pride, ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... of things, their last concentrated, intensified meanings, for the pith and marrow of men and events, and not for their body and bulk. He wanted the ottar of roses and not a rose garden, the diamond and not a mountain of carbon. This bent gives a peculiar beauty and stimulus ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... star; but then he remembered that the distance to that first solar neighbor was estimated in trillions, not billions, and that our little system, even with its new additions, was a child's handbreadth on the plane of the sky. He had brought along a small book called The Pith of Astronomy—a fascinating little volume—and he read from it about the great tempest of fire in the sun, where the waves of flame roll up two thousand miles high, though the sun itself is such a tiny star in the deeps ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... at a flowering rush. The crest breaks forth from nothingness—out of the lifeless-seeming pith come crowding the golden brown blossoms, till there is hardly "room to receive" them. What more do we need for our souls than to have this God for ...
— Parables of the Cross • I. Lilias Trotter
... burn No incremate returns—weakens the will, And makes us rather bear the graves we have Than fly to ovens that we know not of? This, Thompson, does make cowards of us all. And thus the wisdom of incineration Is thick-laid o'er with the pale ghost of nought, And incremators of great pith and courage With this regard their faces turn awry, ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... can be taken without check from existing generalizations. Sowerby's definition of Monocotyledons, in his ninth volume, begins thus: "Herbs, (or rarely, and only in exotic genera,) trees, in which the wood, pith, and bark are indistinguishable." {157} Now if there be one plant more than another in which the pith is defined, it is the common Rush; while the nobler families of true herbs derive their principal character from being pithless altogether! ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... obtained against the vast and highly-disciplined armies of Austria and her allies, unless the established rules and etiquettes of strategy were abandoned. It was only by such rapidity of motion as should utterly transcend the suspicion of his adversaries, that he could hope to concentrate the whole pith and energy of a small force upon some one point of a much greater force opposed to it, and thus rob them (according to his own favourite phrase) of the victory. To effect such rapid marches, it was necessary that the soldiery should make up their minds to consider tents and baggage as ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart
... pithy sentences which would give a ready handle to his opponents: Macht geht vor Recht; he had not said these words, but he had said something very much like them, and they undoubtedly represented what seemed to his audience the pith of his speeches. And then these words, blood and iron. He has told us in later years what ...
— Bismarck and the Foundation of the German Empire • James Wycliffe Headlam
... the chapter of contents is the seed; the divisions called Pauloma and Astika are the root; the part called Sambhava is the trunk; the books called Sabha and Aranya are the roosting perches; the books called Arani is the knitting knots; the books called Virata and Udyoga the pith; the book named Bhishma, the main branch; the book called Drona, the leaves; the book called Karna, the fair flowers; the book named Salya, their sweet smell; the books entitled Stri and Aishika, the ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa - Translated into English Prose - Adi Parva (First Parva, or First Book) • Kisari Mohan Ganguli (Translator)
... individual with an unequivocal theory of life, to inspire every member of the nation with lofty ideals. Their work did not fail to leave its traces. Slowly but deeply idealism entered into the very pith and marrow of the national consciousness. This consciousness gained in strength and amplitude century by century, showing itself particularly in the latter part of the first period, after the crisis known as "the ...
— Jewish History • S. M. Dubnow
... slanderous tongue Few Tutors e'er are free) puzzles the will, And makes us rather bear these lesser ills, Than fly to those of greater magnitude. Thus error does make cowards of us all; And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied over with undue clemency, And pedagogues of great pith and spirit, With this regard their firmness turn away, And lose ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 5: Some Strange and Curious Punishments • Henry M. Brooks
... black, with the eternal red fez on his head and a rifle slung on his back, was the first to sight the coming expedition, and to notify its approach with a yell that brought a dozen like him from the sun-baked hovels and, a moment later from the office, a white man in a pith helmet, who stood for a moment looking across the half-ruined wall at the newcomers, and then advanced to ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... sent for the boatswain. The proud father had heard of his son's gallantry, and the captain's words had been repeated to him. It would have been difficult to find a finer specimen of the superior class of British seaman, the pith and sinew of the navy, than the boatswain of the "Marlborough" presented, as, still in the prime of manhood, he stood, hat in hand, before his captain. By his manner and appearance he looked indeed well fitted for the higher ...
— The Grateful Indian - And other Stories • W.H.G. Kingston
... of it is worth a pint of guineas; and this is the pith of it. Far down West Indies way, some twenty-five, maybe, or thirty years ago, there was a plate ship wrecked upon a reef. I got it from a Spaniard, who had been sworn upon oath to keep it secret by priests who knew. The priests were killed and after a time the Spaniard died also, but not until ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... tenth, the ships, crowded with troops, set sail. Ribaut was gone, and with him the pith and sinew of the colony. The miserable remnant watched his receding sails with dreary foreboding, a foreboding which seemed but too just, when, on the next day, a storm, more violent than the Indians had ever known, howled through the forest and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... stick, that had not been rubbed, she experienced no effect whatever.[11] Yet when M. de Faremont, on the nineteenth of January, tried the same experiment with a stick of sealing-wax and a glass tube, well prepared by rubbing, he obtained no effect whatever. So also a pendulum of light pith, brought into close proximity to her person at various points, was neither attracted nor repulsed, in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... repeated in '64, and pleaded for once again in '72, this call to unity began to appear in the nineties as the one supreme commandment of the labor movement. And, in truth, it is an epitome of all their teachings. It is the pith of their program and the marrow of their principles. Nearly all else can be waived. Other principles can be altered; other programs abandoned; other methods revolutionized; but this principle, program, ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... action drove the impetuous explorers over the high Sierras. Gain alone buried them in the dim canons of the Yuba and American. The sturdy citizens pouring in with their families, seeking homes; those who laid the enduring foundations of the social fabric, the laws and enterprises of necessity, pith, and moment, are the real fathers of the great Golden State. In the rapidity of settlement, all the manifold labors of civilization began together. Laus Deo! There were hands, brains, and hearts for those trying hours of the sudden acquisition ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... And makes us rather bear the graves we have Than fly to ovens that we know not of? This, Thompson, does make cowards of us all. And thus the wisdom of incineration Is thick-laid o'er with the pale ghost of nought, And incremators of great pith and courage With this regard their faces turn ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... wild, or can be cultivated out of doors, in the northern States belong to one class, the stems having a separable bark on the outside, a minute stem of pith in the center, and, between these, wood in annual layers. Such a stem is called exogenous (outside-growing), because a new layer forms on the outside ...
— Trees of the Northern United States - Their Study, Description and Determination • Austin C. Apgar
... it immensely too; though the water of the green cocoanut is refreshing, and in appearance, taste, and color not unlike lemonade—one nut filling a tumbler; and though when mothers die they feed the babies on it and on the soft white pith, and they flourish on the same, yet the Natives themselves show their delight in preferring, when they can get it, the water ...
— The Story of John G. Paton - Or Thirty Years Among South Sea Cannibals • James Paton
... dead, I feel justified in naming Jack Harris. He was engaged in all manner of speculative ventures on his own account, but the special agent had so frequently employed him in "enterprises of great pith and moment" that he was in a certain sense and to a certain extent one of us. He seemed to me at the time unique, but shortly afterward I had learned to classify him as a type of the Californian adventurer with whose peculiarities of manner, speech and disposition most of us are to-day familiar ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... export from Brunai is sago flour. The sago palm is known to the natives under the name of rumbiah, the pith, after its first preliminary washing, is called lamantah (i.e., raw), and after its preparation for export by the Chinese, sagu. The botanical name is Metroxylon, M. Laevis being that of the variety the trunk of which is unprotected, ...
— British Borneo - Sketches of Brunai, Sarawak, Labuan, and North Borneo • W. H. Treacher
... of the apostrophes to Barto left it one of the ironical, veiled Republican, semi-socialistic ballads of the time, which were sung about the streets for the sharpness and pith of the couplets, and not from a perception of the double edge down ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... was found that the editor could very well perform all such duties for himself, and the post of "pony" was abolished. Horace—or "Ponny," as he was invariably nicknamed—became one of the accepted writers. He was most prolific as a suggestor, and never failed of point and pith in his own numerous little paragraphs. As a proposer he had much of the talent of his brother, but little of his genius. "The Life and Adventures of Miss Robinson Crusoe," written by Douglas Jerrold, was "Ponny's" ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... I am supposed to be everywhere, to follow the footsteps of each and all of my characters, and with a fidelity and a perspicacity nothing short of the marvelous. So I take the liberty of imagining the pith of the conversation between the ...
— The Man on the Box • Harold MacGrath
... an Englishman could go. Drake proposed to try. There was a party in Elizabeth's Council against these adventures, and in favour of peace with Spain; but Elizabeth herself was always for enterprises of pith and moment. She was willing to help, and others of her Council were willing too, provided their names were not to appear. The responsibility was to be Drake's own. Again the vessels in which he was preparing to tempt fortune seem preposterously small. The Pelican, or Golden Hinde, ...
— English Seamen in the Sixteenth Century - Lectures Delivered at Oxford Easter Terms 1893-4 • James Anthony Froude
... the sugar-maple this sap is more like water than sugar. From the middle of February to the second week in March, according to the warmth or the coldness of the locality, is the time for tapping the trees; and when the holes are bored, spouts of elder or sumac from which the pith has been taken are put into them at one end, while the other goes down to the bucket which receives the sap. 'Several holes are so bored that their spouts shall lead to the same bucket, and high enough to allow the bucket ...
— Among the Trees at Elmridge • Ella Rodman Church
... any breath in him I will tell him," Halfman affirmed. "Your honor over-refines your pleasant purpose. The pith is that he be ...
— The Lady of Loyalty House - A Novel • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... conversant with the tactics of the Jupiter to know that the pith of the article would lie in the last paragraph. The place of honour was given to him, and it was indeed as honourable as even he could have wished. He was very grateful to his friend Mr Towers, and with full heart looked forward to the ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... mother sent me some pretty flower-holders made of bamboos of different lengths, intended evidently to hang against door-jambs or in hallways. The pith was hollowed out here and there, and the hole plugged from beneath to make little water pockets. These did admirably for a season, but when the wood dried, it invariably split, and treacherous dripping followed, most ruinous ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright
... possessed only that profound knowledge of human nature, that moulding humour and quick sense of dialogue, that live, human, and local interest in matters antiquarian, that statesmanlike insight into the pith and marrow of the historic past, which makes one of Scott's historical novels what it is—the envy of artists, the delight of young and old, the despair of formal historians. Veranilda is without a doubt a splendid piece of work; Gissing wrote it with every bit of ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... "The pith of the charge against the author of the Essays is, that he has written 'an elaborate Treatise on Government,' and 'deduced the whole science from the assumption of certain propensities of human nature.' ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... structural timbers reference is sometimes made to "boxheart," meaning the inclusion of the pith or centre of the tree within a cross section of the timber. From numerous experiments it appears that the position of the pith does not bear any relation to the strength of the material. Since most season checks, however, are radial, the position of the pith may influence the resistance of a ...
— The Mechanical Properties of Wood • Samuel J. Record
... day, as he was walking among some reeds he broke off one, and seeing that its hollow stalk was filled with a dry, soft pith, exclaimed: ...
— Myths and Legends of All Nations • Various
... thoughts and my studies; and, if I can bring it to a perfection before I die, I shall reckon I have well employed the poor remains of an unfortunate life. This indeed is more than I can justly expect, from a quill worn to the pith in the service of the state, in pros and cons upon popish plots, and meal tubs, and exclusion bills, and passive obedience, and addresses of lives and fortunes, and prerogative, and property and liberty of conscience, and letters to a friend: from an understanding and a conscience, ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... Kirwan. 321. X. 1. Seeds suspended in their pods. Stars discovered by Mr. Herschel. Destruction and resuscitation of all things. 351. 2. Seeds within seeds, and bulbs within bulbs. Picture on the retina of the eye. Concentric strata of the earth. The great seed. 381. 3. The root, pith, lobes, plume, calyx, coral, sap, blood, leaves respire and absorb light. The crocodile in its egg. 409. XI. Opening of the flower. The petals, style, anthers, prolific dust. Transmutation of the silkworm. 441. XII. 1. Leaf-buds changed into flower-buds ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... I haven't got any pride where she's concerned. Why should I? She's—she's my soul, I think. I can't put it into words, because you can't put feelings into words, but she's the pith of life. Then I wrote her. Half a dozen times I wrote her. I got down to the level of bribing the colored maid to take the notes to her, one every hour, like a medicine, and slip them under her door. I know she received them. I repeated it again to-day. It's Mary Virginia at stake, and I can't ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... jacket cut in the latest fashion, with his cockle-shell of a boat, which he managed as well on salt water as on fresh, sculling with his arms bare, a cigarette in his mouth, a monocle in his eye, and a pith-helmet, such as is worn in India. The young ladies used to gather on the sands to watch him as he struck the water with the broad blade of his scull, near enough for them to see and to admire his nautical ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... a laugh at the grave manner in which this good old woman entered her protest. Her idea of freedom was two or more old shifts every year. Northern readers may not fully recognize the pith of the joke. On the Southern plantation, the mistress, according to established custom, every year made a present of certain under-garments to her slaves, which articles were always anxiously looked forward to, and ...
— Behind the Scenes - or, Thirty years a slave, and Four Years in the White House • Elizabeth Keckley
... uniformly agreed that, on returning home, they sorely missed the water of the Mississippi. "I'll tell you, sir," said one very intelligent fellow, within whose hut I walked to light my cigar; "there's no pith in any other water after one's bin' used to drink o' this; it seems as though a man couldn't work on water alone ...
— Impressions of America - During The Years 1833, 1834, and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Tyrone Power
... of the Egyptian papu, is a kind of sedge growing 10 ft. high, with a soft triangular stem, the pith of which is easily split into ribbons, found still in Egypt, Nubia, Abyssinia, &c.; the pith ribbons were the paper of the ancient Egyptians, of the Greeks after Alexander, and of the later Romans; they were ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... some facetious folks say, for the mystification—of M.Ps. Having carefully waded through its voluminous pages, we have jotted down the passages that especially struck us, and propose to present the pith and substance of our labour—for it is nothing less—in ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 450 - Volume 18, New Series, August 14, 1852 • Various
... on musty grain. Material treasures cannot save a soul from death. The representation in the parable, however, is true to nature and fact: it would be a mistake to attribute to a miser a high appreciation of the dignity of man. Covetousness, in its more advanced stages, eats the pith out of the understanding, and leaves its ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... down by my side, I told him quickly what I had overheard, and how. The moment he had got the pith of the story he jumped up, looking preoccupied and anxious. "I must go at once," he said, "before the girls at the telephone exchange have time to forget the numbers of those who've called and been called up in the last twenty minutes or so. We may be able ...
— Secret History Revealed By Lady Peggy O'Malley • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... outside with a strong send of sea. The spray flew in the oarsmen's faces. They saw the Union Jack blow abroad from the Flying Scud, the men clustered at the rail, the cook in the galley-door, the captain on the quarter-deck with a pith helmet and binoculars. And the whole familiar business, the comfort, company, and safety of a ship, heaving nearer at each stroke, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... fair, and sanctimonious Princess— Plague, what comes next? I had something orthodox ready; 'Tis dropped out by the way.—Mass! here's the pith on't.— Madam, I come a-wooing; and for one Who is as only worthy of your love, As you of his; he bids me claim the spousals Made long ago between you,—and yet leaves Your fancy free, to grant or pass that claim: And being that Mercury is not my planet, He hath advised himself to set ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley
... the death of me!" cried the old witch, convulsed with laughter. "That was well said! If an honest man and a gentleman may! Thou playest thy part to perfection. Get along with thee for a smart fellow and I will wager on thy head, as a man of pith and substance, with a brain and what they call a heart, and all else that a man should have against any other thing on two legs. I hold myself a better witch than yesterday for thy sake. Did I not make thee? And I defy any ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... can mak a belted knight, A marquis, duke, an' a' that; But an honest man's aboon his might, [above] Guid faith, he mauna fa' that! [must not claim] For a' that, an' a' that, Their dignities, an' a' that, The pith o' sense an' pride o' worth Are higher rank than ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... layers. For the filling, take two good-sized, juicy oranges. Flavor two tablespoonfuls of sugar by rubbing it over the skin of the oranges, then peel, remove the white rind, and cut into small pieces, discarding the seeds and the central pith. Put the orange pulp in a china bowl, and set in a dish of boiling water. When it is hot, stir in a heaping teaspoonful of cornstarch which has been braided smooth in two spoonfuls of water. Stir constantly until the starch ...
— Science in the Kitchen. • Mrs. E. E. Kellogg
... the pith of the whole matter. "Reading and writing are mere increase of power," and they may be turned to a good or a bad purpose. Here enters the ethical consideration which the zealots of sheer knowledge so persistently ignored. ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... did not rejoice at all; he grew and grew, and was green both winter and summer. People that saw him said, "What a fine tree!" and toward Christmas he was one of the first that was cut down. The axe struck deep into the very pith; the tree fell to the earth with a sigh: he felt a pang—it was like a swoon; he could not think of happiness, for he was sorrowful at being separated from his home, from the place where he had sprung up. He knew well that he should never see his dear old comrades, the ...
— The Children's Book of Christmas Stories • Various
... of excellent pith,— Fate tried to conceal him by naming him Smith; But he shouted a song for the brave and the free,— Just read on his medal, "My ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... visitors were simply announced by an usher, and were received whenever business did not prevent. Mr. Davis' manner was unvarying in its quiet and courtesy, drawing out all that one had to tell, and indicating by brief answer, or criticism, that he had extracted the pith from it. At that moment he was the very idol of the people; the grand embodiment to them of their grand cause; and they gave him their hands unquestioning, to applaud any move soever he might make. ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... up, nothing fragmentary. The rhymes are easy and good, the words choice and proper, the meaning clear and intelligible, the melodies lovely and hearty, and in summa all is so rare and majestic, so full of pith and power, so cheering and comforting, that, in sooth, you will not find his equal, much ...
— The Hymns of Martin Luther • Martin Luther
... the homely wisdom which gained for Cato the proud title of Sapiens, by which, says Cicero, [30] he was familiarly known. Other original works, the product of his vast experience, were the treatise on eloquence, of which the pith is the following: "Rem tene: verba sequentur;" "Take care of the sense: the sounds will take care of themselves." We can well believe that this excellent maxim ruled his own conduct. The art of war formed the subject of another volume; in this, too, he had abundant and faithful experience. ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... which seems minded of late years to exterminate the coconut throughout the West Indies; belonging, we are told, to the Elaters—fire-fly, or skipjack beetles. His grub, like that of his cousin, our English wire-worm, and his nearer cousin, the great wire-worm of the sugar-cane, eats into the pith and marrow of growing shoots; and as the palm, being an endogen, increases from within by one bud, and therefore by one shoot only, when that is eaten out nothing remains for the tree but to die. And so it happens that almost every coconut grove which we have seen has a sad and shabby look ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... satisfaction as though they felt that to have escaped from Chinde, for even that brief time, was sufficient recompense for a thorough ducking and the pains of sea-sickness. On the bridge of the Adjutant, in white duck and pith helmets, were the only respectable members of Chinde society. We knew that they were the only respectable members of Chinde society, because they told us so themselves. On her lower deck she brought two French explorers, fully dressed for the ...
— The Congo and Coasts of Africa • Richard Harding Davis
... greatly to the amount of light emitted. It was a logical step to try to reproduce this condition by artificial means. As a consequence rushes were cut and soaked in water. They were then peeled, leaving lengths of pith partially supported by threads of the skin which were not stripped off. These sticks of pith were placed in the sun to bleach and to dry, and after they were thoroughly dry they were dipped in scalding grease, ...
— Artificial Light - Its Influence upon Civilization • M. Luckiesh
... tallow for candles. Every particle of grease rescued from pot liquor, or fat from meat, was utilized for candle-making. Rushlights were made by stripping part of the outer bark from common rushes, thus leaving the pith bare, then dipping them in tallow or ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... case that we can speak of agrarian relations with any sort of certainty—the Servian reform shows very clearly not only that the agricultural class originally preponderated in the state, but also that an effort was made permanently to maintain the collective body of freeholders as the pith and marrow of the community. When in the course of time a large portion of the landed property in Rome had passed into the hands of non-burgesses and thus the rights and duties of burgesses were no longer bound up with freehold property, ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... we pule and we prate, we are nerveless and weak, And we swallow, like Pistol, the odorous leek. We palter with truth, and we flatter our foes, And we cringe, and we crawl, and are led by the nose. We are fools soft of speech, and without any pith, For we smother our feelings to ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, August 1, 1891 • Various
... belong to the natives of that island, and return during the first part of the brisas. They enter the river of Manila and sell their cargoes in their vessels. These consist of fine and well-made palm-mats, a few slaves for the natives, sago—a certain food of theirs prepared from the pith of palms—and tibors; large and small jars, glazed black and very fine, which are of great service and use; and excellent camphor, which is produced on that island. Although beautiful diamonds are found on the opposite coast, they are not taken to Manila by those vessels, for the Portuguese ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XVI, 1609 • H.E. Blair
... Ministers of the Crown for the time being are the persons who are constitutionally held answerable for all administrative acts in the last resort, and that was the pith and substance of the evidence given by Lord Panmure. Those persons who want to make great changes in the existing arrangements were much vexed and disappointed by that evidence, and the attempt made yesterday to put off the Committee till next year on the ground that the evidence ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume III (of 3), 1854-1861 • Queen of Great Britain Victoria
... nothing else will matter either way. You see, if men and women had been primarily designed to be rational creatures, there would be no explanation for their being permitted to continue in existence," he lucidly explained. "And to have grasped this fact is the pith of all wisdom." ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... ventilated bins prepared for it. The selected husks were packed and baled, ready for market. The stalks were stripped and topped by a clever machine. The excellent forage thus accumulated, was baled and stored. The pith in the large part of the stalk, was then extracted by another machine. These piths were then treated to a water-proofing process, sent to a shop on the farm, and made up into life preservers. Both life preservers and life rafts, made from pith treated in this way, proved ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson
... their meal, consisting of broiled fish and cakes, made, I suspect, from the flour, or pith of the very palm-trees on which the platform was erected. They gave us also some palm-wine; we did not ask how it was made, but it tasted very well. Indeed, our hosts showed every wish to be friendly. The flooring of this strange habitation was, I ...
— The Three Lieutenants • W.H.G. Kingston
... unfriendly and polemical spirit, of asking you quite frankly what good you think can be done by resolutions of this character? I am not now referring to the resolution against myself. That is a matter of very minor importance. The pith of the whole business is in resolution number one, a resolution evidently framed with great care by the clever men who are engineering the present agitation in the Colony. Now, that resolution asks for two things—a termination of the war, and the restoration ...
— Lord Milner's Work in South Africa - From its Commencement in 1897 to the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 • W. Basil Worsfold
... into verse than it would be to turn his verse-narratives into prose, and less would be lost in the transfer. In Multitude and Solitude, the author has given us more of the results of his own thinking than can be found in most of the poems. Whole pages are filled with the pith of meditative thought. In Captain Margaret, we have a remarkable combination of the love of romance and the ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... gale; and the strings of his harp seem, as the hand of age, as the tale of other times, passes over them, to sigh and rustle like the dry reeds in the winter's wind! The feeling of cheerless desolation, of the loss of the pith and sap of existence, of the annihilation of the substance, and the clinging to the shadow of all things as in a mock embrace, is here perfect. In this way, the lamentation of Selma for the loss of Salgar is the finest of all. If it were indeed possible to shew ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... kick at him, because he could bear to see nothing happy. The pony had sense enough to reply, weary as he was, with a stronger kick, which took Master Lancelot in the knee, and discouraged him for any further contest. Bully as he was, the boy had too much of ancient Yordas pith in him to howl, or cry, or even whimper, but sat down on a little ridge to nurse his poor knee, and meditate revenge against the animal with hoofs. Presently pain and wrath combined became too much for the weakness of his ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... says the man who was waiting to be shaved, "I can slip from your jesses no mercenary eagle. These limbs have yet the pith to climb and this heart the daring to venture to the airiest crag of Monte d'Oro, and I have ravished from his eyrie a true Corsican eagle to be the omen of our expedition. Wherever this eagle is your ...
— Old Friends - Essays in Epistolary Parody • Andrew Lang
... emancipated citizens of the world had permitted the dissolvent philosophy of the century to enter the very pith and fiber of their mental quality. For the rich and the well-born it was rather an imported fashion, an attractive drapery laid over the surface of minds that were conventional down to the ground, the modish mental recreation of men who lived by custom and guided their steps in the well-worn ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... of Douglass extracts are given from letters of distinguished contemporaries who knew the orator. Colonel T.W. Higginson writes thus: "I have hardly heard his equal, in grasp upon an audience, in dramatic presentation, in striking at the pith of an ethical question, and in single [signal] illustrations and examples." Another writes, in reference to the impromptu speech delivered at the meeting at Rochester on the death of Lincoln: "I have heard Webster and Clay in their best moments, Channing and Beecher in their highest inspirations. ...
— Frederick Douglass - A Biography • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... of rhubarb cut without peeling, a pound of sugar and one lemon. Pare the yellow peel from the lemon, taking care to get none of the bitter white pith. Slice the pulp of the lemon in an earthen bowl, discarding the seeds. Put the rhubarb into the bowl with the sugar and lemon, cover and stand away in a cool place over night. In the morning turn into the preserving kettle, simmer gently three-quarters ...
— Good Things to Eat as Suggested by Rufus • Rufus Estes
... was also found on another occasion that the trees which bore thin-shelled nuts produced long vigorous succulent shoots with a large pith and loose, spongy buds. On the other trees that bore thick-shelled nuts the shoot growth was shorter and firmer than on the trees with thin-shelled nuts. In contrast to these trees the buds on the Crath trees Nos. 2 and 5 were short, rather broad and very solid. The wood ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Twenty-Fifth Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... confers by the most dexterous mimicry of its outside expressions; for a swift analysis, which drives directly to the heart of the man, instantly detects the impostor behind the braggart, and curtly declares him to lack "the true grit." The word is so close to the thing it names, has so much pith and point, is so tart on the tongue, and so stings the ear with its meaning, that foreigners ignorant of the language might at once feel its significance by its griding utterance as it is shot impatiently through the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... all parts of Southern Africa, and which forms a staple food of the native inhabitants. For vegetables they had the bulbs of many species of Ixias and Mesembryanthemums, among others the "Hottentot fig" (Mesembryanthemum edule). They had the "Caffir bread"—the inside pith of the stems of a species of Zamia; and the "Caffir chestnut," the fruit of the Brabeium stellatum; and last, not least, the enormous roots of the "elephant's foot" (Testudinaria elephantipes). They had wild onions and garlic ...
— The Bush Boys - History and Adventures of a Cape Farmer and his Family • Captain Mayne Reid
... was appointed editor of the "Echoes," and invited to dine at Mme. Walter's. The "Echoes" were, M. Walter said, the very pith of the paper. Everything and everybody should be remembered, all countries, all professions, Paris and the provinces, the army, the arts, the clergy, the schools, the rulers, and the courtiers. The ...
— Bel Ami • Henri Rene Guy de Maupassant
... inbeing[obs3], inherence, inhesion[obs3]; subjectiveness; ego; egohood[obs3]; essence, noumenon; essentialness[obs3] &c. adj.; essential part, quintessence, incarnation, quiddity, gist, pith, marrow, core, sap, lifeblood, backbone, heart, soul; important part &c. (importance) 642. principle, nature, constitution, character, type, quality, crasis[obs3], diathesis[obs3]. habit; temper, temperament; spirit, humor, grain; disposition. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... has had nothing but papyrus-pith, and lotus-bread, and now he brings me the cake which ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... for fasting and prayer And mortification most deserving; And as for preaching beyond compare, He'd exert his powers for three or four hours, With greater pith than Sydney Smith Or ...
— Ballads • William Makepeace Thackeray
... dense character. The projections are so arranged that a tube, or canal, is formed immediately behind the bodies of the vertebrae, in which is placed the me-dul'la spi-na'lis, (spinal cord,) sometimes called the pith of the back-bone. ...
— A Treatise on Anatomy, Physiology, and Hygiene (Revised Edition) • Calvin Cutter
... was corn't, an' I was mellow, We took the road aye like a swallow: At brooses thou had ne'er a fellow, For pith an' speed; But ev'ry tail thou pay't ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... text, he reached the pith of his sermon: "A man out of place is only half a man. His nature is perverted. He becomes restless and discontented and his life is made a failure, while the same person might have made a success of all his undertakings if he had been properly placed. As a rule, that which one ...
— Watch Yourself Go By • Al. G. Field
... the readers. It is a matter of congratulation to mankind that the writer of the hoax, with an apology (Heaven save the mark!) spared us Herschel's notes of "the Moon's tropical, sidereal, and synodic revolutions," and the "phenomena of the syzygies," and proceeded at once to the pith of the subject. Here came in his grand stroke, informing the world of complete success in obtaining a distinct view of objects in the moon "fully equal to that which the unaided eye commands of terrestrial objects at the distance of a hundred yards, affirmatively settling the ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... angelic beings, by interpreting Mariolatry in all its charm and pathos, and by rousing deep sympathy with our Lord in His Passion, painting lent efficient aid to piety. Yet painting had to omit the very pith and kernel of Christianity as conceived by devout, uncompromising purists. Nor did it do what the Church would have desired. Instead of riveting the fetters of ecclesiastical authority, instead of enforcing mysticism and asceticism, it really restored ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... Lingborough," and you will recognize your Cockie in it! I have taken no end of pains with it, and it has been a matter of seven or eight hours a day lately. I mean the last few days. Rather too much. It knocked me off my sleep, and reduced "my poor back" to the consistency of pith. But I am picking up, partly by such gross material aid as bottled stout affords! and any amount of fresh air blowing in full draughts ...
— Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books • Horatia K. F. Eden
... turned enforced solitude to account in executing works of great pith and moment. It is in solitude that the passion for spiritual perfection best nurses itself. The soul communes with itself in loneliness until its energy often becomes intense. But whether a man profits by solitude or ...
— How to Get on in the World - A Ladder to Practical Success • Major A.R. Calhoon
... speech of every succeeding generation is a falling away from the pith and pathos of the preceding. Speech gains in ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... returns, puzzles the will And makes us rather bear those ills we have Than fly to others that we know not of? Thus conscience does make cowards of us all; And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought, And enterprises of great pith and moment With this regard their currents turn awry, And lose the name ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... steamed slowly to the eastward, and were, that same day, sighted in the offing from Wei-hai-wei, apparently practising evolutions. But on the following day they all returned to Port Arthur, and anchored in the roadstead, under the guns of the batteries. The pith of the Akashi's report, therefore, was that there were two Russian ships—the new cruiser Variag, and the gunboat Korietz—at Chemulpo, four cruisers and an armed merchantman at Vladivostock, while the remainder of the Russian ...
— Under the Ensign of the Rising Sun - A Story of the Russo-Japanese War • Harry Collingwood
... thought Halbert was ower gleg at his weapon to be killed sae easily by ony Sir Piercie of them a'. They might say of these Southrons as they liked; but they had not the pith and wind of a canny Scot, when it came to ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... what to do, and Hercules reminded him that the natives often eat the young shoots of the ferns and the pith which the papyrus leaf contains. He himself, while following the caravan of Ibn Ilamis across the desert, had been more than once reduced to this expedient to satisfy his hunger. Happily, the ferns and the papyrus grew in profusion along the banks, and the ...
— Dick Sand - A Captain at Fifteen • Jules Verne
... came out in pith helmets the corporation sand cart spreads sand in front of you, and you are supposed to be in Egypt. To accomplish The Great Practical Joke, Troops are trained to exercise their imagination. They begin by being soldiers ...
— Letters from France • Isaac Alexander Mack
... and stones!' I says. 'You come inside,' I says, 'and I'll punch your blooming head.' There was a kind of silence and more jabbering, and in he came, Bible in hand, after the manner of them—a little sandy chap in specks and a pith helmet. I flatter myself that me sitting there in the shadows, with my copper head and my big goggles, struck him a bit of a heap at first. 'Well,' I says, 'how's the trade in calico?' for I don't ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... foodstuffs, vegetables contain cellulose. The latter is a fibrous substance which forms for the most part the skins and interior framework of vegetables and fruits. The strings of beans and celery and the "pith" of turnips and radishes, for example, ...
— School and Home Cooking • Carlotta C. Greer
... did not intend to go back to that room where he had left the candle burning. Oh no! He couldn't have faced even the entry and the staircase with the broken step—certainly not that pith-white, fascinating room. He would go back for the present to his old arrangement, of workroom and separate sleeping-quarters; he would go to his old landlady at once—presently—when he had finished ...
— Widdershins • Oliver Onions
... more especially on its under surface. Specially characteristic of Egypt, though not altogether peculiar to it, were the papyrus and the lotus—the Cyperus papyrus and Nymphaea lotus of botanists. The papyrus was a tall smooth reed, with a large triangular stalk containing a delicate pith, out of which the Egyptians manufactured their paper. The fabric was excellent, as is shown by its continuance to the present day, and by the fact that the Greeks and Romans, after long trial, preferred it to ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson
... in the service o' foreign commanders, Selling a sword for a beggar man's fee, Learning the trade o' the warrior who wanders, To mak' ilka stranger a sworn enemie; There was ae thought that nerved roe, and brawly it served me. With pith to the claymore wherever I won,— 'Twas the auld sodger's story, that, gallows or glory, The Hielan's, the Hielan's were crying ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... whether that would not impair the humour of the situation. And besides, my dear Sir, the pith of the whole device is to take ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... relation to these sources of evil, that, while the poverty of our poor is generally not such complete destitution as that of many of the poor in foreign cities, their average condition is worse. The increase of disease and mortality is a result not so much of poverty as of condition. "The pith and burden of the whole matter is, that the great mass of the poor are compelled to live in tenements that are unfit for human beings, and under circumstances in which it is impossible to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... told them I feared to have them in company with me. In return for my civilities, the king then send one of his chopi officers to see me, who went four stages with Bombay, and he also sent some rich beads which he wished me to look at. They were nicely kept in a neat though very large casing of rush pith, and were those sent as a letter from Gani, to inform him that we were expected to come via Karague. After this, to keep us in good-humour, Kamrasi sent to inform us that some Gani men, twenty-five in number, had just arrived, and had given him a lion-skin, several tippet monkey-skins, ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke
... story much resembles Cinderella's famous adventures, and I need not repeat it here. The pith of the story turns upon the fact that a father purposes to marry his own daughter, or, in some versions, his daughter-in-law; and the daughter, naturally, as we say, objecting to this arrangement, runs away, and hence her many adventures. This famous story, told by English nurses to English children, ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... flax is used most largely in our textile manufactures. The linen fiber consists of the bast cells of certain species of flax grown in Europe, Africa, and the United States. All bast fibers are obtained near the outer surface of the plant stems. The pith and woody tissues are of no value. The flax plant is an annual and to obtain the best fibers it must be gathered before it is fully ripe. To obtain seed from which the best quality of linseed oil can be made it is usually necessary to sacrifice ...
— Textiles and Clothing • Kate Heintz Watson
... that I had deceived him when I appeared, what he called "faible"—that is incompetent; he said I had feigned a false incapacity. Again, he would turn suddenly round and accuse me of the most far-fetched imitations and impossible plagiarisms, asserting that I had extracted the pith out of books I had not so much as heard of— and over the perusal of which I should infallibly have fallen down in a sleep as deep as that ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... easily in Chicago last summer. The beginner should sell 10c booklets or pamphlets, and elsewhere in this volume he will find two speeches that will show him how to do it. At a street meeting he need not make these speeches in detail, but just give the pith of them. ...
— The Art of Lecturing - Revised Edition • Arthur M. (Arthur Morrow) Lewis
... an interest in my new acquaintance. He was communicative, shrewd, and peculiar; and though apt to express himself quaintly, it was always with the pith of one who had seen a great deal of at least one portion of his fellow-creatures. The conversation, under such circumstances, did not flag; on the contrary, it soon grew more interesting by the stranger's beginning to touch on his private interests. He told ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... it would be for them to grow the things they like best, around their huts, instead of feeling obliged to get it from others, and they evidently shared his dislike to torturing the earth with iron, for before my advent and sojourn amongst them they simply burnt the pith of the trees and plants they felled and into the bed formed by the ashes they cast indiscriminately bulb and grain, covering up both with their feet or with a piece of wood, and afterwards they took ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... drill shooting-kit, very white at the seams and a little frayed at the wrists. William regarded him thoughtfully, from his pith helmet to his greased ankle-boots. "You look very nice, I think. Are you sure you've everything you'll ...
— The Day's Work, Volume 1 • Rudyard Kipling
... Tacitus). "The work," says La Bletterie, "is brief without being superficial. Within the compass of a few pages, it comprises more of ethics and politics, more fine delineations of character, more substance and pith (suc), than can be collected from many a ponderous volume. It is not one of those barely agreeable descriptions, which gradually diffuse their influence over the soul, and leave it in undisturbed tranquillity. It is a picture in strong light, like the subject itself, full of fire, of sentiment, ...
— Germania and Agricola • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... tosses, Are they, Smith? Do they, fasting, tramping, bleeding, Wait the news from this our city? Groaning "That's the Second Reading!" Hissing "There is still Committee!" If the voice of Cecil falters, If McKenna's point has pith, Do they tremble for ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... Werper spent in overhauling his Belgian uniform, removing from it every vestige of evidence that might indicate its military purposes. From a heterogeneous collection of loot, Achmet Zek procured a pith helmet and a European saddle, and from his black slaves and followers a party of porters, askaris and tent boys to make up a modest safari for a big game hunter. At the head of this party ...
— Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... hasten to atone for our sins, and forward the work of national purification, by doing our duty—our whole duty—now. One thing is certain: we cannot look for help to other nations, nor to the amiable disposition of a foe whose pith and pluck are consanguineous with our own, nor to the agency of individuals. It was written in the beginning that the people which aspired to make its own laws should also work out its own salvation. For this ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... who pressed him to speak at a moment when his heart was full. Grave results followed from what he said that day; but a week sooner or later he was bound to say these things, and the results were bound to follow. Here is the pith of his utterance: ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn
... removing the skin and pith, make a dressing with 3 tablespoonfuls of olive oil, a tablespoonful of lemon juice, and a pinch of salt. Serve ...
— 365 Luncheon Dishes - A Luncheon Dish for Every Day in the Year • Anonymous
... the mouth of the Liuche, which is very wide; the river oozes out through a forest of eschinomenae (pith tree). This was a rendezvous agreed upon between shore and lake parties, that the canoes might all cross to the other side, distant a mile and a half. The mouth of the Liuche forms the Bay of Ukaranga, so named because on the other side, ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... was one of calm repose, and, I may say, of peace. The cocoa-nut, the betel, the sago, and the gno or gomati, are the four favorite palms of the Dyaks. In their simple mode of life, these four trees supply them many necessaries and luxuries. The sago furnishes food; and after the pith has been extracted, the outer part forms a rough covering for the rougher floor, on which the farmer sleeps. The leaf of the sago is preferable for the roofing of houses to the nibong. The gomati, or gno, ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... his intimate friends. He tried also to encourage civilised warfare among earthworms, by supplying them with small pieces of pipe, with which they might fight if so disposed. His notions of charity at this early age were somewhat rudimentary; he used to peel rushes with the idea that the pith would afterwards "be given to the poor," though what possible use they could put it to he never attempted to explain. Indeed he seems at this time to have actually lived in that charming "Wonderland" which he afterwards described so vividly; but ...
— The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll • Stuart Dodgson Collingwood
... hereditary transmission.] (a natural process, the laws of which are for the most part unknown), aided by the subordinate action of natural selection," it seems to me that I enunciate a proposition which constitutes the very pith and marrow of the first edition of the "Origin of Species." And what the evolutionist stands in need of just now, is not an iteration of the fundamental principle of Darwinism, but some light upon the questions, What are the limits of variation? and, If a variety has arisen, can that variety ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... was estimated in trillions, not billions, and that our little system, even with its new additions, was a child's handbreadth on the plane of the sky. He had brought along a small book called The Pith of Astronomy—a fascinating little volume—and he read from it about the great tempest of fire in the sun, where the waves of flame roll up two thousand miles high, though the sun itself is such a tiny star in the deeps ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... led him directly to what became a favorite pursuit of his lifetime. By way of adding to the slender gains of his mother, he extracted the white pith from certain rushes of the region, which made very good lamp-wicks for the kind of lamps then in use in Scotland. These wicks of pith he sold about the town in small penny bundles. In order to get his supply of rushes he was obliged to roam the country far and wide, and ...
— Captains of Industry - or, Men of Business Who Did Something Besides Making Money • James Parton
... marched along, always facing Fuji, they began singing a weird chant. When the motors drew nearer the tourists saw that each man wore a huge mushroom hat made of lightest pith and from his neck hung a piece of matting suspended by ...
— The Motor Maids in Fair Japan • Katherine Stokes
... to me the perfection of pith and poetry. What could be more terse? Not a word to spare, and yet everything fully expressed. Rhyme and rhythm faultless. It was a delightful poet who made those verses. As for the beer itself—that, I think, must have been made ...
— The Story of a Bad Boy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... be fairly objected that, in view of what is to come later, the Carlos of the first act is a little too soft even for the sentimental age. We are required to have faith in his heroic capacity for enterprises of great pith and moment. But after his first dialogue with Posa it is as difficult for the reader or spectator to trust him as it is for King Philip. His lacrimose raptures over so simple a thing as a youthful friendship; his abject ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... the silk-hat industry by all means, but there must be no imposition of any one kind of hat on the public. The individual must be allowed perfect freedom to wear what he liked. (Hear, hear!) He personally hoped never to be seen either in a pith helmet or a Tam-o'-shanter, but if the whim took him to wear either—or indeed both—he claimed the right to do so. (Loud cheers.) Meanwhile he should adhere to his ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 18, 1919 • Various
... frank setting off of the masses against the classes," he returned. "He said the same things I had heard him say in conversation, only with more pith and point. Emmet has the Irish gift of expression when he's aroused—there's no doubt of it. He practically took for his text: The Man in the One-storied House against the Man in the Mansion. One thing struck me as especially keen. His opponents have ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... about the bigness of a man's two fists, full of stones or kernels, which eat pleasant enough when roasted. The libby tree grows here in the swampy valleys, of which they make sago cakes. I did not see them make any, but was told by the inhabitants that it was made of the pith of the tree, in the same manner I have described in my "Voyage Round the World." They showed me the tree whereof it was made, and I bought about forty of the cakes. I bought also three or four nutmegs in their shell, which did not seem to have been long gathered; but ...
— Early Australian Voyages • John Pinkerton
... thy crimes; and Wit, who never once Forgave a brother, shall forgive a dunce. But should thy soul, form'd in some luckless hour, Vile interest scorn, nor madly grasp at power; 30 Should love of fame, in every noble mind A brave disease, with love of virtue join'd, Spur thee to deeds of pith, where courage, tried In Reason's court, is amply justified: Or, fond of knowledge, and averse to strife, Shouldst thou prefer the calmer walk of life; Shouldst thou, by pale and sickly study led, Pursue coy Science to the fountain-head; ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... cut it short, did the great god Pan, (How tall it stood in the river!) Then drew the pith, like the heart of a man, Steadily from the outside ring, And notched the poor, dry, empty thing In holes as he ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... Mason very grateful at the end of the last chapter for the promise made to her by Sir Peregrine with reference to her son; but there was still a weight on Lady Mason's mind. They say that the pith of a lady's letter is in the postscript, and it may be that that which remained for Lady Mason to say, was after all the matter as to which she was most anxious for assistance. "As you are here," she said to the baronet, "would you ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... truant from his bright abode, Sir, How would he chant the Chief heroic, The trundler's hope become zeroic, The drives from liberal shoulders poured, The changing history of the Board! Long may the champion's pith be scored In figures leaping ...
— More Cricket Songs • Norman Gale
... clearly defined round hole. My Bees therefore are capable of a task for which they were not born; to come out of their reed cells they do what probably none of their race did before them; they perforate the wall of sorghum-pith, they make a hole in the paper barrier, just as they would have pierced their natural clay ceiling. When the moment comes to free themselves, the nature of the impediment does not stop them, provided that it be not beyond their strength; and henceforth ...
— The Mason-bees • J. Henri Fabre
... often inclined from his hard experience of life to go further than this, and to count them disqualifying circumstances. This aggressive independence was, however, always as far removed from insolence as it was from servility. He saw clearly that the 'pith o' sense and pride o' worth' are beyond all the dignities a king can bestow; and he looked to the time when class distinctions would cease, and the glory of manhood be ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... is an indication that the MSS. must be of some antiquity. The word "paper" is derived from papyrus, the most ancient material for writing, if we except the rocks used for runes, or the wood for oghams. Papyrus, the pith of a reed, was used until the discovery of parchment, about 190 B.C. A MS. of the Antiquities of Josephus on papyrus, was among the treasures ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... of England to permit the Genovese Columbus to discover America!" That task was clearly England's! "And now there being nothing great left to be done," the sole work Frobisher finds worth attempting is the discovery of the northwest passage to Cathay. Upon this he spends the pith of his manhood year by year, and the result of all the labours of this sea-Hercules, well! it is perhaps to be sought in those dim beings, "half-man, half-fish," whom he brings back from some voyage, ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... conversation, as one tells any experience; and he added, when the British admiral returned the commander's visit he complimented the ship on the smartest performance he had ever seen. But it is in the combination of license and smartness that the pith of these related stories lies; between them they embody much of the spirit of a time which in 1855 was remembered and influential. Midway in the War of Secession I met the first lieutenant who held the trumpet in that memorable manoeuvre—a man of 1813; now a quiet, elderly, ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... and by the Greeks "papyros" or "byblos." It was the great source of raw material for Egyptian manufactures. Its tufted head was used for garlands; its woody root for various purposes; its tough rind for ropes, shoes, and similar articles—the basket of Moses, for instance; and its cellular pith for a surface to write on. As the stem was jointed, the pith came in lengths, the best from eight to ten inches. These lengths were sliced through from top to bottom, and the thin slices laid side by side. Another layer was pasted ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman
... Elphinstone had lost heart. On the 5th he had written to Macnaghten suggesting that the latter should 'consider what chance there is of making terms,' and since then he had been repeatedly pressing on the Envoy the 'hopelessness of further resistance.' Macnaghten, vacillating as he was, yet had more pith in his nature than was left in the debilitated old general. He wrote to Elphinstone on the 18th recommending, not very strenuously, the policy of holding out where they were as long as possible, and indeed throughout the winter, if subsistence could be obtained. He pointed out that ...
— The Afghan Wars 1839-42 and 1878-80 • Archibald Forbes
... end, 810 Melting into its radiance, we blend, Mingle, and so become a part of it,— Nor with aught else can our souls interknit So wingedly: when we combine therewith, Life's self is nourish'd by its proper pith, And we are nurtured like a pelican brood. Aye, so delicious is the unsating food, That men, who might have tower'd in the van Of all the congregated world, to fan And winnow from the coming step of time 820 All chaff of custom, wipe away all slime Left by men-slugs and human serpentry, ...
— Endymion - A Poetic Romance • John Keats
... "Grace of sin and gracelessness! It is not all worth so much as one of these rushes upon your floor. If you carry grace of congruity to the gates of Heaven, I warn you it shall never bear you one step beyond. Lay down those miserable rush-staffs, wherein is no pith; and take God's golden staff held out to you, which is the full and perfected obedience of the Lord Jesus Christ. That staff shall not fail you. All the angels at the gate of Paradise know it; and the doors shall fly wide open to whoso smiteth on them with that staff of God. Lord, ...
— The Well in the Desert - An Old Legend of the House of Arundel • Emily Sarah Holt
... ruffians—ex-captains of free companies and such marauders—were daily offering their services; there was no lack of them, and they had done but little. How should Parma, seeing this obscures undersized, thin-bearded, runaway clerk before him, expect pith and energy from him? He thought him quite unfit for an enterprise of moment, and declared as much to his secret councillors and to ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... all the officers that a quiet rest during the heat of the day was the one thing needful to make them bear the exertion of the journey; and then, as soon as he saw every one following his advice, he arranged his puggaree around his pith helmet, put some cartridges in his pocket, and went off into the jungle to shoot specimens, with ...
— Middy and Ensign • G. Manville Fenn
... ... I have just got F. Darwin's "Foundations." He tries to make out that his father could have dispensed with Malthus. But the selection death-rate in a slightly varying large population is the pith of the whole business. The Darwin-Wallace theory is, as you say, "the continuous adjustment of the organic to the inorganic world." It is what mathematicians call "a moving equilibrium." In fact, I have always maintained that it is a ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant
... the part of Hamlet, which, in these days, the very mention of his name suggests. Little remains to be said of that undying play, whose pith and meaning escaped the sturdy English critics, until Coleridge discovered it by looking into his own soul, and those all-searching Germans pierced to the centre of a disposition quite in keeping with their national character. A ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... were not always at one. Caird and Green—and, for other reasons, Martineau—were to me names "of great pith and moment," and Christian Theism was a reasonable faith. And Huxley, in controversy, was no more kind to my sacra than to other people's. Once I dared a mild remonstrance—in 1892—only to provoke one of his ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... History of Jamaica, vol. ii. p. 221, tab. 258, but not so smooth; the ants which inhabited these nests were small and their bodies white. But upon another species of the tree we found a small black ant, which perforated all the twigs, and having worked out the pith, occupied the pipe which had contained it, yet the parts in which these insects had thus formed a lodgment, and in which they swarmed in amazing numbers, bore leaves and flowers, and appeared to be in as flourishing a state as those that were sound. We found also an incredible ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... given are full of the pith of facts. Dread of Africa lay deep in the Spanish heart and gave point to these and other magical and romantic tales. The story of how the great conqueror, Mohammed, had come out from the deserts of Arabia and sent his generals, ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume VII • Charles Morris
... and the G. C. Of this the Game-Captain is made aware when the game commences. The partial slacker, scorning to insert his head in the scrum, assumes a commanding position outside and from this point criticises the Game-Captain's decisions with severity and pith. The last end of the partial slacker is generally a sad one. Stung by some pungent home-thrust, the Game-Captain is fain to try chastisement, and by these means silences the ...
— A Wodehouse Miscellany - Articles & Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... we had a note from Miss Smith, recounting shortly and accurately the very incidents which I had seen, but the pith of the letter lay in ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes • Arthur Conan Doyle
... joke for the ages; Full of intricate meaning and pith; A feast for your scholars and sages - How it would have rejoiced Sidney Smith! 'Tis such thoughts that ennoble a mortal; And, singing him out from the herd, Fling wide immortality's portal - But what ...
— Fly Leaves • C. S. Calverley
... consideration would not be found, upon enquiry, to be an exception. Lord Byron himself, indeed, when at Cephalonia, a short time before his death, seems to have expressed, in a few words, the whole pith of the mystery. An English gentleman with whom he was conversing on the subject of Lady Byron, having ventured to enumerate to him the various causes he had heard alleged for the separation, the noble ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... apparatus shown in the accompanying engraving is to effect a separation of the tough epidermis of the sugar-cane from the internal spongy pith which is to be pressed. Its function consists in isolating and separating the cells from their cortex, and in putting them in direct contact with the rollers or cylinders of the mill. After their passage into the apparatus, which is naturally placed in a line with the endless chain that carries ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 441, June 14, 1884. • Various
... interest. Almost every degree produces something peculiar to it. The food often grows in one country, and the sauce in another. The fruits of Portugal are corrected by the products of Barbadoes, and the infusion of a China plant is sweetened with the pith of an Indian cane. The Philippic islands give a flavour to our European bowls. The single dress of a woman of quality is often the product of an hundred climates. The muff and the fan come together from the different ends of the earth. The scarf is sent ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock
... made of a piece of splint or flat pith fifteen inches long. Form this into a ring, having the ...
— Spool Knitting • Mary A. McCormack
... had sewn as a lining to an ordinary wide-awake. I regret I have had no opportunity of trying this combination, but can easily believe that the touch of the cool, smooth grass, to the wet brow, would be more agreeable than that of any other material. I need hardly mention Pith hats (to be bought under the Opera Colonnade, Pall Mall), Indian topees, and English hunting-caps, as having severally many merits. A muslin turban twisted into a rope and rolled round the hat is a common plan to keep the sun from the head and spine: it can also be used ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton
... e'er are free) puzzles the will, And makes us rather bear these lesser ills, Than fly to those of greater magnitude. Thus error does make cowards of us all; And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied over with undue clemency, And pedagogues of great pith and spirit, With this regard their firmness turn away, And lose the name ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 5: Some Strange and Curious Punishments • Henry M. Brooks
... move slowly and languidly; the ordinary piercing and dominant English enunciation has fallen to modulation; their eyes, while observant and alert, look tired. It is as though the far countries have sucked something from the pith of them in exchange for great experiences that nevertheless seem of little value; as though these men, having met at last face to face the ultimate of what the earth has to offer in the way of danger, hardship, difficulty, and the things that try men's souls, having unexpectedly found ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... of Nature Cure and kindred subjects will do well to study these definitions and formulated principles closely, as they contain the pith and marrow of our philosophy and greatly facilitate ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... can tell so much so briefly. Here are the facts then—bare. He found a punt and a pole, got across to the steps on the opposite side, picked up an elderly gentleman in an alpaca jacket and a pith helmet, cruised with him vaguely for twenty minutes, conveyed him tortuously into the midst of a thicket of forget-me-not spangled sedges, splashed some water-weed over him, hit him twice with the punt pole, and finally ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... was raised a trifle resentfully. "Yet was not the very pith of it spoken by Ruskin when he stood upon this identical spot? His words were these, ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley
... Dick? doesn't this tempt your ambition? The whole wealth of Fudge, that renowned man of pith. All brought to the hammer, for Church competition,— Sole encumbrance, Miss Fudge to be taken therewith. Think, my boy, for a Curate how glorious a catch! While, instead of the thousands of souls you now watch, To save Biddy Fudge's is all you need do; And ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... colonial government. His lordship denounced the imprudence of the Colonial Reform Association, which, by its correspondence with disaffected persons, kept alive discontent wherever it existed, and indirectly promoted it everywhere else. The pith of the noble lord's statement was, that the colonies were a source of strength in peace and war, contrary to the doctrine propounded by Messrs. Cobden and Bright: that it was the duty of England to preserve ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... Greek was the fountain from which he drew his stores, his wit, thought, and language were entirely Roman, and his style was Latin of the purest and most elegant kind—not, indeed, controlled by much deference to the laws of metrical harmony, but full of pith and sprightliness, bearing the stamp of colloquial vivacity, and suitable to the general briskness of his scenes. Yet in the tone of his dialogue we miss all symptoms of deference to the taste of the more polished classes of society. ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... short heavy-set man, and occasionally imbibed, the pith of the joke was at once apparent, and most heartily enjoyed ...
— Lincoln's Yarns and Stories • Alexander K. McClure
... peculiarly expressive and heart-touching, and in the South it was held in universal honour. Jasmin, he continued, is what Burns was to the Scottish peasantry; only he received his honours in his lifetime. The comparison with Burns, however, was not appropriate. Burns had more pith, vigour, variety, and passion, than Jasmin who was more of a descriptive writer. In some respects Jasmin resembled Allan Ramsay, a barber and periwig-maker, like himself, whose Gentle Shepherd met with as great a success as Jasmin's Franconnette. ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... of the epoch. Its views had become those even of men who bitterly stigmatized its course. You might disapprove of its editorials often, and regret their appearance—as I did—but it was impossible not to be carried onward by the hardy logic of the writer: impossible not to admire the Swift-like pith and vigor of this man, who seemed to have re-discovered the ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke
... the test of the Pilgrims, Captain Sons calls sago a root, while Purchas, in a marginal note, informs us that some say it is the tops of certain trees. Sago is a granulated dried paste, prepared from the pith of certain trees that grow in various of the eastern islands of India, and of which a bland, mucilaginous, and nutritive jell; is made by maceration and boiling ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. VIII. • Robert Kerr
... I caused it to be hung up, with the big end of the stem turned upwards, the leaves of each stalk slightly touching one another, being well assured they would shrivel in drying, and no longer touch each other. It hereby happened, that the juice contained in the pith (sometimes as big as one's finger) of the stem of the plant, flowed into the leaves, and augmenting their sap, made them much more mild and waxy. As fast as these leaves assumed a bright chesnut colour, I stripped them from the stalk, and made them directly ...
— History of Louisisana • Le Page Du Pratz
... days of rush-lights are gone by, but rush-baskets for flowers and helmets are made by the children, and the white pith, when pressed, is made up into devices. (F. effusus) (F. glaucus) All in Itchen meadows. (F. acutiflorus) ...
— John Keble's Parishes • Charlotte M Yonge
... three blows with the cutlass, at the small end of the nut, cut off not only the pith-coat, but the point of the shell; and disclose—the nut being held carefully upright meanwhile—a cavity full of perfectly clear water, slightly sweet, and so cold (the pith-coat being a good non-conductor of heat) that you are advised, for fear ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... 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 and swell to life again. And here we sit at the tea-shop. People come and stare ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... defined round hole. My Bees therefore are capable of a task for which they were not born; to come out of their reed cells they do what probably none of their race did before them; they perforate the wall of sorghum-pith, they make a hole in the paper barrier, just as they would have pierced their natural clay ceiling. When the moment comes to free themselves, the nature of the impediment does not stop them, provided that it be not ...
— The Mason-bees • J. Henri Fabre
... bargains with deacons, instead of talking over texts with them, a man who has found out that there are plenty of praying rogues and swearing saints in the world,—above all, who has found out, by living into the pith and core of life, that all of the Deity which can be folded up between the sheets of any human book is to the Deity of the firmament, of the strata, of the hot aortic flood of throbbing human life, of this infinite, instantaneous consciousness ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... especially on its under surface. Specially characteristic of Egypt, though not altogether peculiar to it, were the papyrus and the lotus—the Cyperus papyrus and Nymphaea lotus of botanists. The papyrus was a tall smooth reed, with a large triangular stalk containing a delicate pith, out of which the Egyptians manufactured their paper. The fabric was excellent, as is shown by its continuance to the present day, and by the fact that the Greeks and Romans, after long trial, preferred it to parchment. ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson
... curls over at last in a hollow circle, and pounds down upon the sand or reef with all the crushing force of some enormous sledge-hammer. But after the fourth assault, Felix felt himself flung up high and dry by the wave, as one may sometimes see a bit of light reed or pith flung up some distance ahead by an advancing tide on the beach in England. In an instant he steadied himself and staggered to his feet. Torn and bruised as he was by the pummelling of the billows, he looked eagerly into the water in search of his companion. The next wave flung up Muriel, ...
— The Great Taboo • Grant Allen
... one hundred, it opens with about eighty of the old MOTHER GOOSE RHYMES. Nothing better was ever invented to tell to little folks who are young enough for lullabies. Their rhythm, their humor, and their pith will always cause us to prize them as ...
— Childhood's Favorites and Fairy Stories - The Young Folks Treasury, Volume 1 • Various
... all terrestrial bonds," she continued, not exactly remarking the pith of his last observation; "from bonds quasi- terrestrial and quasi-celestial. The full-formed limbs of the present age, running with quick streams of generous blood, will no longer bear the ligatures which past times have woven for the decrepit. Look down upon that multitude, Mackinnon; ...
— Mrs. General Talboys • Anthony Trollope
... regard to colonial government. His lordship denounced the imprudence of the Colonial Reform Association, which, by its correspondence with disaffected persons, kept alive discontent wherever it existed, and indirectly promoted it everywhere else. The pith of the noble lord's statement was, that the colonies were a source of strength in peace and war, contrary to the doctrine propounded by Messrs. Cobden and Bright: that it was the duty of England to preserve her colonial influence, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... that bade him man himself against this discouragement, as true bravery mans itself against the sensation of fear? and why should he be less worthy of approbation than other spirits who venture on "enterprises of great pith and moment" with beating hearts indeed, but with unflinching courage and ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... its resemblance to a mighty loaf of bread, became a mockery to the hungry people cowering in its shelter. Bread! Rosa Varona could not remember when she had last tasted such a luxury. Raw cane, cocoanuts, the tasteless fruita bomba, roots, the pith from palm tops, these were her articles of diet, and she did not thrive upon them. She was always more or less hungry. She was ragged, too, and she shivered miserably through the long, chill nights. ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... an ox, and lay it in water for two days, changing the water night and morning. Then dry the pith well in a cloth, and, having scraped off all the skin, beat it well; add a little rose-water till it is very fine and without lumps. Boil a quart or three pints of cream, according to the quantity of pith, with such spices ...
— The Lady's Own Cookery Book, and New Dinner-Table Directory; • Charlotte Campbell Bury
... elements of the wood or xylem and the bast or phloem stand side by side on the same radius. In the larger of the two great groups into which the Angiosperms are divided, the Dicotyledons, the bundles in the very young stem are arranged in an open ring, separating a central pith from an outer cortex. In each bundle, separating the xylem and phloem, is a layer of meristem or active formative tissue, known as cambium; by the formation of a layer of cambium between the bundles (interfascicular cambium) a complete ring is formed, and a regular periodical ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 2, Part 1, Slice 1 • Various
... and grew; and he stood there in all his greenery; rich green was he winter and summer. People that saw him said, "That's a fine tree!" and toward Christmas he was the first that was cut down. The axe struck deep into the very pith; the Tree fell to the earth with a sigh: he felt a pang—it was like a swoon; he could not think of happiness, for he was sad at being parted from his home, from the place where he had sprung up. He well knew that he should never see his dear old comrades, the little bushes and flowers ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott
... appears this fleet majestical, Holding due course to Harfleur. Follow, follow: Grapple your minds to sternage of this navy, And leave your England, as dead midnight still, Guarded with grandsires, babies and old women, Or passed or not arrived to pith and puissance; For who is he, whose chin is but enriched With one appearing hair, that will not follow These culled and choice-drawn cavaliers to France? Work, work your thoughts, and therein see a siege: Behold the ordnance on their carriages, With ...
— Lyra Heroica - A Book of Verse for Boys • Various
... those days they used goosequills for pens.] 'This pen,' replied he, 'belonged to a Bohemian goose [Huss] a hundred years old. I had it from one of my old schoolmasters. It is so strong because no one can take the pith out of it, and I am myself quite astonished at it.' On a sudden I heard a loud cry; from the monk's long pen had issued a host of other pens. I awoke a third time; it was day light." History of the Reformation, Book III, ...
— The Revelation Explained • F. Smith
... attempting to report all a man says. "Condense as often as possible" is the interviewer's watchword,—"cut to the bone," as the reporters express it. Much of what a man says in conversation is prolix. In that part of the interview that is dull or wordy, give the pith of what is said in one or two brief sentences, then fall into direct quotation again when his words become interesting. As a rule, however, it is well as far as possible to quote his exact language all through the interview, since the interest of an interview frequently rests not only in what ...
— News Writing - The Gathering , Handling and Writing of News Stories • M. Lyle Spencer
... said Alister; "you get astride my shoulders, and I'll carry you home. I believe you're hungry, and that takes the pith out of you!—Come," he went on, perceiving some sign of reluctance in the youth, "you'll break down if you walk much farther!—Here, Ian! you take the bag; you can manage ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... licence if possible,—he thought that a father's opposition would almost add something to the pleasure of the occasion. So he pitched the letter on one side, and went on with his article. And he finished his article; but it may be doubted whether it was completed with the full strength and pith needed for moving the pulses of the national mind,—as they should be moved by leading articles in the D. R. As he was writing he was thinking of Nora,—and thinking of the letter which Nora's father had sent to him. Trivial as was the letter, he could not keep himself ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... attached,—there can be no mistake. The thicker part of the stem is in such a state of keeping, that it presents to the microscope, in a sliced preparation, the internal structure, and exhibits, as in recent coniferous twigs of a year's growth, a central pith, a single ring of reticulated tissue arranged in lines that radiate outwards, and a thin layer of enveloping bark. Nothing, then, can be more certain than that this ancient twig, which must be accepted as representative of the foliage of whole forests of the Secondary ages ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... than it would be to turn his verse-narratives into prose, and less would be lost in the transfer. In Multitude and Solitude, the author has given us more of the results of his own thinking than can be found in most of the poems. Whole pages are filled with the pith of meditative thought. In Captain Margaret, we have a remarkable combination of the love of romance and the romance ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... can't. They would be all Greek and Hebrew to you. Thank your stars that you have got a sharp son, who can take the pith out of these papers, and give it a smack of the right flavor in serving it up. There are not ten men in England who could tell you this woman's story as I can tell it. It's a gift, old gentleman, of the sort that is given to very ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... decorous, old dotard-of-state; senile prudence; fatuous soullessness! The ribanded old dog is paralytic all down one side, and that the side of nobleness. His soul is gone out. Only nature's automatonism keeps him on his legs. As with some old trees, the bark survives the pith, and will still stand stiffly up, though but to rim round punk, so the body of old Polonius has ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... This is the pith of the theme of the story, very briefly put, for, as she is introduced to us in the opening chapters, she is, with all her beauty, as hopeless a termagant as can well be conceived, and when she bids us farewell at the end of the book, the transformation has ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various
... were, of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country and mankind." The assertion that they desired to invert this order, to destroy every social link in so far as it tended to produce inequalities, was the pith of his great indictment against the French "metaphysical" revolutionists. They had perverted the general logical precept of the sufficient reason for all inequalities by converting it into an assuming ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... towns, and especially to Rouen and Lisieux, in the articles of cloth, stuffs, and lace, it takes a decided lead in that which relates to pottery and china: no mean articles in the supply of domestic wants and luxuries. But it is in matters of higher "pith and moment" that Caen may claim a superiority over the towns just noticed. There is a better spirit of education abroad; and, for its size, more science and more literature ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume One • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... Gosson, in The Schoole of Abuse, writes favorably of "the two prose books played at the Bell Savage, where you shall find never a word without wit, never a line without pith, never a letter placed in vain; the Jew and Ptolome, shown at the Bull ... neither with amorous gesture wounding the eye, nor with slovenly talk hurting the ...
— Shakespearean Playhouses - A History of English Theatres from the Beginnings to the Restoration • Joseph Quincy Adams
... orange. If you take the skin off a piece of orange, you will see inside a number of long-shaped transparent bags, full of juice. These we call cells, and the flesh of all plants and animals is made up of cells like these, only of various shapes. In the pith of elder they are round, large, and easily seen (a, Fig. 39); in the stalks of plants they are long, and lap over each other (b, Fig. 39), so as to give the stalk strength to stand upright. Sometimes many cells growing ...
— The Fairy-Land of Science • Arabella B. Buckley
... the most wonderful thing in the world that you and I have met?' said Cadurcis. 'Now I look upon ourselves as something like, eh! Fellows with some pith in them. By Jove, if we only joined together, how we could lay it on! Crack, crack, crack; I think I see them wincing under the thong, the pompous poltroons! If you only knew how they behaved to me! By Jove, ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... too large, hold them in the hot grease till a part melts off. Let them remain one night to cool; then cut off the bottoms, and keep them in a dry, cool place. Cheap lights are made, by dipping rushes in tallow; the rushes being first stripped of nearly the whole of the hard outer covering and the pith alone being retained with just enough of the tough bark to ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... the water, and having strained off the glutinous matter which comes from them, add it to the other parts. When the peels have boiled till they are sufficiently tender to admit of a fork being stuck into them, scrape away all the pith from the inside of them; lay them in folds, and cut them into thin slices of about an inch long. Clarify the sugar; then throw the peels and pulp into it, stir it well, and let it boil for half an hour. Then remove it from the fire, and when it becomes cool, ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous
... of us could make out. We soon discovered that there was no need of covering at the Equator; but this bolster must have some use, if we could only find it. Upon inquiring next day we ascertained that it is composed of a kind of pith which has the property of keeping cool in the hottest weather, and that it is the greatest relief at night to cultivate the closest possible acquaintance with this strange bed-fellow; in fact, in Singapore, "no family ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie
... the now well-kept lawns and flower-beds and entered a long avenue of fig-trees. The purple fruit hung abundantly among the large green leaves. Miss Williams opened one of the figs and showed Strowbridge the red luscious pith. ...
— The Bell in the Fog and Other Stories • Gertrude Atherton
... feather has unfolded to its full size, leaving it light and dry, with a horny part at the root that sticks in the hole where it grew, and a spray-like part that makes up most of the feather. The horny part becomes hollow or contains only a little dry pith; when it is large enough, as in the case of a rowing feather from a Goose's wing, it makes a quill pen to write with. But the very tiniest feather on this Sparrow is built up in ...
— Citizen Bird • Mabel Osgood Wright and Elliott Coues
... palmiste, is like raw turnip-shavings and tastes like green almonds; is very delicate and good. Costs the life of a palm tree 12 to 20 years old—for it is the pith. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... a child to whom his nurse is telling some wonderful story. Planchette put the clay down upon the slab, drew a pruning-knife from his pocket, cut two branches from an elder tree, and began to clean them of pith by blowing through them, as if ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... It hath reached me, O auspicious King, that when the fisherman's craft, carrying Rose-in-Hood, made the city sitting upon the sea-shore, the man set about making fast to the land. Now the King of the city was a Prince of pith and puissance named Dirbas, the Lion; and he chanced at that moment to be seated, with his son, at a window in the royal palace giving upon the sea; and happening to look out seawards, they saw the fishing- boat make the land. They observed it narrowly and espied therein a young ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... us part first of the above Songs and Poems, containing thirteen pieces, and consisting of 36 pp., crown 8vo, with an Introduction. We have not met with anything to equal them in our language for pith, spirit, and poetic genius, since the days of Rob Donn; and we trust the bard will receive the encouragement he so well deserves with the first part, so as to enable him to give us the second on an early date. There is a short introduction ...
— The Celtic Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 1, November 1875 • Various
... abiding memory. What was it Ann herself had said about love? "It's faith... and trust, Eliot." He remembered her grave, steadfast eyes and groaned in spirit, realising that he himself had despoiled love of its very pith and marrow, its deepest inner significance. There was no ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... Douglass extracts are given from letters of distinguished contemporaries who knew the orator. Colonel T.W. Higginson writes thus: "I have hardly heard his equal, in grasp upon an audience, in dramatic presentation, in striking at the pith of an ethical question, and in single [signal] illustrations and examples." Another writes, in reference to the impromptu speech delivered at the meeting at Rochester on the death of Lincoln: "I have heard Webster and Clay in their best moments, Channing and ...
— Frederick Douglass - A Biography • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... Hamlet, which, in these days, the very mention of his name suggests. Little remains to be said of that undying play, whose pith and meaning escaped the sturdy English critics, until Coleridge discovered it by looking into his own soul, and those all-searching Germans pierced to the centre of a disposition quite in keeping with their national character. A score of lights have since ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... with energy. "It works most distressingly. I am coming to the very pith of my lecture now, which is this: I have been teaching school for more than seven years. I have taught all sorts and sizes of pupils. I had a fancy that I could manage almost anything in that line, believing that I had been through experiences varied enough to serve me in whatever line I could ...
— The Chautauqua Girls At Home • Pansy, AKA Isabella M. Alden
... puto, fosajxo, kavo. Pit (theatre) partero. Pitch (to smear with) kalfatri. Pitch pecxo. Pitch (of ships) subakvigxi. Pitcher krucxo. Pitchfork forkego. Piteous kompatinda. Pitfall enfalujo. Pith suko. Pitiable kompatinda. Pitiful kompatinda. Pitiless senkompata. Pity kompati, bedauxri. Pity, it is a estas domagxo. Pivot akso. Placable kvietebla, kvietema. Placard afisxo, kartego. Place (to put) meti. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... off the yellow rinds, taking care that none of the white underlying pith is taken, as that would make the punch bitter, whereas the yellow portion of the rinds is that in which the flavor resides and in which the cells are placed containing the essential oil. Put this yellow rind into a punch bowl, add to ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 315, January 14, 1882 • Various
... end of the sumpitan, like a bayonet, thus providing a weapon for use at close quarters. The dart is made from a sliver of bamboo, or from a palm-frond, scraped to the size of a steel knitting-needle. One end of the dart is imbedded in a cork-shaped piece of pith which fits the hole in the sumpitan as a cartridge fits the bore of a rifle; the other end, which is of needle-sharpness, is smeared with a paste made from the milky sap of the upas tree dissolved in a juice extracted from the root of the tuba. With ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... current in his favour—so had they. He had oars or paddles—his feet; they had oars as well. He "carried sail," while they spread not a "rag." The wind chanced to blow directly down-stream, and the broad wings of the bird, held out from his body, and half extended, caught the very pith of the breeze on their double concave surfaces, and carried him through the water with the velocity of an arrow. Do you think that he was not aware of this advantage when he started in ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... delight to naught. So to myself I live not, but for you; For you I live, and you I love, but none else, Oh then, fair eyes, whose light I live to view, Or poor forlorn despised to live alone else, Look sweet, since from the pith of contemplation Love gathereth life, and ...
— Elizabethan Sonnet Cycles - Phillis - Licia • Thomas Lodge and Giles Fletcher
... measure exactly one hundred units, for instance, millimeters. From this section, which measures exactly one hundred millimeters, carefully separate the epidermal structures in strips, and place the strips at once under an inverted glass to prevent drying; next, separate the pith in a single unbroken piece wholly freed from the ligneous tissue. Finally, remeasure the isolated portions, and compare with the original measure of the internode. There will be found an appreciable shortening of the epidermal ...
— Outlines of Lessons in Botany, Part I; From Seed to Leaf • Jane H. Newell
... is usually in the form of tin water-bottles and ewers. Every native possesses a sweeping broom, sleeping mats, coarse or fine, and bamboo or grass baskets. Most families use an iron pan for cooking, with a half cocoa-nut shell for a ladle. A large nut shell filled with palm-oil, and containing a pith wick, is the ordinary Malay lamp. Among the poor, fresh leaves serve as plates and dishes, but the ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... its fitting ode, Sir! Could Pindar fire the athletic lyre, A truant from his bright abode, Sir, How would he chant the Chief heroic, The trundler's hope become zeroic, The drives from liberal shoulders poured, The changing history of the Board! Long may the champion's pith be scored In ...
— More Cricket Songs • Norman Gale
... it was also found on another occasion that the trees which bore thin-shelled nuts produced long vigorous succulent shoots with a large pith and loose, spongy buds. On the other trees that bore thick-shelled nuts the shoot growth was shorter and firmer than on the trees with thin-shelled nuts. In contrast to these trees the buds on the Crath trees Nos. 2 and 5 were short, rather broad and very solid. ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Twenty-Fifth Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... are 1 Pith, wood, and fiber 2 Character of hurds affected by retting 2 Proportion of hurds to fiber and yield per acre 3 Hurds available from machine-broken hemp 3 Present uses of hemp hurds 4 Present supplies of hurds available 5 Baling for shipment 5 Cost of ...
— Hemp Hurds as Paper-Making Material - United States Department of Agriculture, Bulletin No. 404 • Lyster H. Dewey and Jason L. Merrill
... close to the root, and the top and leaves trimmed off. Within several hours a full load was thus procured. The boys enjoyed the pith, and George playfully gave some to Angel. His surprise knew no bounds. When he knew what the cane was good for, he simply gorged ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: The Mysteries of the Caverns • Roger Thompson Finlay
... in the dim canons of the Yuba and American. The sturdy citizens pouring in with their families, seeking homes; those who laid the enduring foundations of the social fabric, the laws and enterprises of necessity, pith, and moment, are the real fathers of the great Golden State. In the rapidity of settlement, all the manifold labors of civilization began together. Laus Deo! There were hands, brains, and hearts for those trying hours of the sudden ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... was a much more difficult task than to cook without proper conveniences, for it cost considerable labor. We had our choice between the candle wood, as the pitch pine is called, or rushlights, which last are made by stripping the outer bark from common rushes, thus leaving the pith bare; then dipping these in tallow, or grease, and allowing them to harden. In such manner did we get makeshifts for candles, neither pleasing to the eye nor affording very much in the way of light; yet they served in a certain degree to dispel the darkness when by reason of storm we were ...
— Richard of Jamestown - A Story of the Virginia Colony • James Otis
... come over Safdar Khan. Certainly Shere Ali was wearing the dress of one of the Sahibs. A man passed carrying a lantern, and the light, feeble though it was, threw into outline against the darkness a pith helmet and a very English figure. Certainly, too, Shere Ali spoke the Pushtu tongue with a slight hesitation, and an unfamiliar accent. He seemed ...
— The Broken Road • A. E. W. Mason
... old methods of the explorer are still the best. Simply equipped with an elephant-rifle and a pith helmet, let him plunge into the bush and be lost to sight for a few years. Whereas the Missing Link may be relied on to remain resolutely beneath his rock at the sight of a sort of a Lord Mayor's Show wandering among the vegetation, the spectacle of a simple-looking ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, November 3, 1920 • Various
... the cherry tree, and for fear of touching the pith while stripping off the bark, the youth requested all the elves ...
— Roumanian Fairy Tales • Various
... stone, &c. Pledges herself. The pith of the phrase is in its almost homely simplicity, the more striking in its contrast with the classical allusions by ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... himself softly for a bit, and then produced a scrap of paper. 'It's a bit of paper from the tenants, sir,' he said. A queer bit of paper it was to look at—ruled paper, with a composition written upon it which might have been the work of a village schoolmaster. It was neither signed nor addressed! The pith of it was in these words,—'in consequence of the manner in which we have been harassed, our cattle driven throughout the country, and our crops not sown, we shall be unable to pay the half-year's rent due in March, in addition to the reduction already claimed!' I own I rather lost ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (2 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert
... than smoke in the cause of the rapid flight of John Simson and Meg Johnston from their own houses to that of Wat Webster; and more than the roses in the cheeks of the fair Marion, or Wat Webster's pith of anecdote, that produced the congregation of individuals round his "blazing ingle," at the approach of the eerie hour of twelve, when it was probable the mysterious stranger would again appear. Be all this as ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland Volume 17 • Alexander Leighton
... therefore, to manufacture pyroxyle, that is to say gun-cotton, a substance in which cotton is not indispensable, as the elementary tissue of vegetables may be used, and this is found in an almost pure state, not only in cotton, but in the textile fiber of hemp and flax, in paper, the pith of the elder, etc. Now, the elder abounded in the island towards the mouth of Red Creek, and the colonists had already made coffee of the berries of these shrubs, which belong to the family ...
— The Mysterious Island • Jules Verne
... of the electric telegraph; first, that in which frictional electricity has been proposed to produce sparks and motion of pith balls at a distance. ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - Invention and Discovery • Various
... the trunk there is nothing comparable to what is found in existing trees, there being a thick bark surrounding a zone principally composed of "scalariform" vessels, this in turn enclosing a large central pith. In their general appearance the Lepidodendra bring to mind the existing Araucarian Pines; but they are true "Cryptogams," and are to be regarded as a gigantic extinct type of the modern Club-mosses (Lycopodiaceoe). They are amongst the commonest and most characteristic of the Carboniferous ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... The pony had sense enough to reply, weary as he was, with a stronger kick, which took Master Lancelot in the knee, and discouraged him for any further contest. Bully as he was, the boy had too much of ancient Yordas pith in him to howl, or cry, or even whimper, but sat down on a little ridge to nurse his poor knee, and meditate revenge against the animal with hoofs. Presently pain and wrath combined became too much for the weakness of his frame, and he fell back ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... [S']ami-tree is pregnant with fire.' The legend is, that the goddess Parvati, being one day under the influence of love, reposed on a trunk of this tree, whereby a sympathetic warmth was generated in the pith or interior of the wood, which ever after broke into a sacred flame on the ...
— Sakoontala or The Lost Ring - An Indian Drama • Kalidasa
... already been illustrated, that every natural process is a version of a moral sentence. The moral law lies at the centre of nature and radiates to the circumference. It is the pith and marrow of every substance, every relation, and every process. All things with which we deal, preach to us. What is a farm but a mute gospel? The chaff and the wheat, weeds and plants, blight, rain, insects, sun,—it is a sacred emblem from the first ...
— Nature • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... a' that; But an honest man's aboon [Footnote: above] his might— Gude faith, he maunna fa' [Footnote: must not claim (to make the honest man)] that! For a' that, an' a' that, Their dignities, an' a' that, The pith o' sense, an' pride o' worth, Are higher ranks than ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... or patched up, nothing fragmentary. The rhymes are easy and good, the words choice and proper, the meaning clear and intelligible, the melodies lovely and hearty, and in summa all is so rare and majestic, so full of pith and power, so cheering and comforting, that, in sooth, you will not find his equal, much less ...
— The Hymns of Martin Luther • Martin Luther
... giving the convalescents instructions to arm themselves at once and to stand by to show themselves when called upon, I entered my own quarters and hastily shifted from my uniform into a somewhat soiled suit of "whites" and a pith hat that had doubtless once been the property of one of the former inhabitants of the place—and which I had appropriated in view of some such contingency as the present—and otherwise made such preparations as were possible for the ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood
... thus have been lost among boys. His incessant intrepidity, his restless curiosity, his undertaking spirit, all indicated early maturity; all should have led to pursuits, if not better, at least of more pith and moment than the ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... let themselves think, what a boon it would be for them to grow the things they like best, around their huts, instead of feeling obliged to get it from others, and they evidently shared his dislike to torturing the earth with iron, for before my advent and sojourn amongst them they simply burnt the pith of the trees and plants they felled and into the bed formed by the ashes they cast indiscriminately bulb and grain, covering up both with their feet or with a piece of wood, and afterwards they took no ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... that it will be readily yielded, that in regard to the treaty, in aid of which this bill is exhibited, the treaty-making power has not exceeded its just limits. So far we have proceeded on sure ground; we now come to the pith of the question. Is the legislative sanction necessary to give it effect? I answer in the negative. Why? Because, by the second clause of the sixth article of the constitution, it is declared that all treaties made or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... his answer. "I've known a derelict up-end and sift her engines out of herself and flicker round the Lower Lanes for three weeks on her forward tanks only. We'll run no risks. Pith her, George, and look ...
— With The Night Mail - A Story of 2000 A.D. (Together with extracts from the - comtemporary magazine in which it appeared) • Rudyard Kipling
... And makes us rather bear those ills we have Than fly to others that we know not of? Thus, conscience does make cowards of us all;[20] And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought; And enterprises of great pith and moment,[21] With this regard, their currents turn away, And lose ...
— Hamlet • William Shakespeare
... returns—puzzles the will, and makes us rather bear the ills we have than fly to others that we know not of. Thus conscience does make cowards of us all, and so the native hue of resolution is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought, and enterprises of great pith and moment by this regard their currents turn awry and lose ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... Shag-eared, military, hirsute ruffians—ex-captains of free companies and such marauders—were daily offering their services; there was no lack of them, and they had done but little. How should Parma, seeing this obscures undersized, thin-bearded, runaway clerk before him, expect pith and energy from him? He thought him quite unfit for an enterprise of moment, and declared as much to his secret ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... asking you quite frankly what good you think can be done by resolutions of this character? I am not now referring to the resolution against myself. That is a matter of very minor importance. The pith of the whole business is in resolution number one, a resolution evidently framed with great care by the clever men who are engineering the present agitation in the Colony. Now, that resolution asks for two things—a termination of the war, and the restoration of the independence of the ...
— Lord Milner's Work in South Africa - From its Commencement in 1897 to the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 • W. Basil Worsfold
... short steps: and I find no step can be taken without check from existing generalizations. Sowerby's definition of Monocotyledons, in his ninth volume, begins thus: "Herbs, (or rarely, and only in exotic genera,) trees, in which the wood, pith, and bark are indistinguishable." {157} Now if there be one plant more than another in which the pith is defined, it is the common Rush; while the nobler families of true herbs derive their principal character from being pithless altogether! ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... heart to satisfy his own hunger, or wiped his feet upon his father's beard. The gifted, intellectual, and rapacious savage seized whatever came near him that pleased his fancy or aroused his curiosity, extracted the pith, and tossed aside what no longer amused or served him. There was no generosity in him, only an insatiable and ferocious demand that life should give him more, always more! Peter, who both admired and detested him, was sorry for this gentle creature fallen into his remorseless claws. And ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... makes vs rather beare those illes we haue, Then flye to others that we know not of. Thus Conscience does make Cowards of vs all, And thus the Natiue hew of Resolution Is sicklied o're, with the pale cast of Thought, And enterprizes of great pith and moment, With this regard their Currants turne away, And loose the name of Action. Soft you now, The faire Ophelia? Nimph, in thy Orizons Be all ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... must be flung into water, and kept there, for otherwise they will dry and shrink, and the peel will not run. At first a person would find it no easy matter to divest a rush of its peel or rind, so as to leave one regular, narrow, even rib from top to bottom that may support the pith; but this, like other feats, soon becomes familiar, even to children; and we have seen an old woman, stone blind, performing this business with great despatch, and seldom failing to strip them with the nicest regularity. When these junci are thus far prepared, they must lie out on the ...
— The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 2 • Gilbert White
... bring you sugar-canes half as thick as your wrist, looking as innocent as may be; both ends are sealed up with bits of the pith, and when you open one end you find that all the joints have been bored through, and the cane is full of rum. But mind, lads, you are fools if you touch it; it is new and strong and rank, and a bottle of ...
— By Conduct and Courage • G. A. Henty
... upon the kamidana, are set two quaintly shaped jars for the offerings of sake; two small vases, to contain sprays of the sacred plant sakaki, or offerings of flowers; and a small lamp, shaped like a tiny saucer, where a wick of rush-pith floats in rape-seed oil. Strictly speaking, all these utensils, except the flower-vases, should be made of unglazed red earthenware, such as we find described in the early chapters of the Kojiki: and still at Shinto festivals in Izumo, when sake is drunk in honour of the gods, it is drunk out of ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... the basis of all Wagner's reforms. A leading motive is simply a musical phrase suggestive of a dramatic idea. Wagner's motives are marvellous in their descriptive and soul-stirring power. They seem to indicate not only the pith, but the utmost depths of the heart of the ideas which they represent. It is this that makes Wagner so very like Shakespeare. All can appreciate him, yet he is above all criticism, universal ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... may, Since none may wrestle with necessity. And yet to speak or not to speak alike Is miserable. High service done to man— For this I bear the adamantine chain. I to its elemental fountain tracked, In fern-pith stored and bore by stealth away, Fire, source and teacher of all arts to men. Such mine offence, whereof the penalty I pay, thus chained in face of earth ...
— Specimens of Greek Tragedy - Aeschylus and Sophocles • Goldwin Smith
... mixed with half-ground flour, and they are also pounded and made into chapatis with flour and water. The leaves of the young gram-plants make a very favourite vegetable and are eaten raw, either moist or dried. In times of scarcity the poorer classes eat tamarind leaves, the pith of the banyan tree, the seeds of the bamboo, the bark of the semar tree, [80] the fruit of the babul, [81] and other articles. A cultivator will eat 2 lbs. of grain a day if he can get it, or more in the case ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... for example, be hung up in a room, then the lines of force, which extend from the ball, indicate the stress in the Aether surrounding the pith ball, so that if a hair be placed across these lines of force, any movement of the pith ball will be indicated by the motion of ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... turned upwards, the leaves of each stalk slightly touching one another, being well assured they would shrivel in drying, and no longer touch each other. It hereby happened, that the juice contained in the pith (sometimes as big as one's finger) of the stem of the plant, flowed into the leaves, and augmenting their sap, made them much more mild and waxy. As fast as these leaves assumed a bright chesnut colour, I stripped them from the stalk, ...
— History of Louisisana • Le Page Du Pratz
... his political designs, it is clear that they could never have been executed under a jealous and acute tyrant; for, in the first place, radical innovations are never so effectually opposed as in governments concentrated in the hands of a single man; and, secondly, the very pith and core of the system of Pythagoras consisted in the establishment of an oligarchic aristocracy—a constitution most hated and most persecuted by the Grecian tyrants. The philosopher migrated into ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... stones!' I says. 'You come inside,' I says, 'and I'll punch your blooming head.' There was a kind of silence and more jabbering, and in he came, Bible in hand, after the manner of them—a little sandy chap in specks and a pith helmet. I flatter myself that me sitting there in the shadows, with my copper head and my big goggles, struck him a bit of a heap at first. 'Well,' I says, 'how's the trade in calico?' for I don't hold ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... spirit, so that I might not have to waste the few years in which I should be fit to do anything. As for the balance due upon my Perseus, he might give this to me when he judged it opportune. Such was the pith of my discourse: but I expanded it with lengthy compliments, expressing my gratitude toward his most illustrious Excellency. To all this he made absolutely no answer, but rather seemed to have taken my communication ill. On ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini
... both is the same, and their pith is given in a still more brief and condensed form in our own proverb. It is remarkable that while Dr. A. Clarke, in his notes on Proverbs xvi., has quoted it without reference to its authorship in the edition of Stanhope's version of De Imitatione Christi, which I happen to ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 214, December 3, 1853 • Various
... to make their way up the beach a trim figure with neatly waxed black mustaches, almost extinguished in a huge pith helmet and dressed in white duck with a red sash about the waist, emerged from the nearest ...
— The Boy Aviators in Africa • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... belted knight, A marquis, duke, and a' that; But an honest man's aboon his might, Guid faith he maunna fa' that! For a' that, and a' that, Their dignities, and a' that, The pith o' sense, and pride o' worth, Are higher rank ...
— The Evolution of Expression Vol. I • Charles Wesley Emerson
... directly to what became a favorite pursuit of his lifetime. By way of adding to the slender gains of his mother, he extracted the white pith from certain rushes of the region, which made very good lamp-wicks for the kind of lamps then in use in Scotland. These wicks of pith he sold about the town in small penny bundles. In order to get his supply of rushes ...
— Captains of Industry - or, Men of Business Who Did Something Besides Making Money • James Parton
... stacks her cells in the spiral staircase of an empty snail-shell; another, attacking the pith of a dry bit of bramble, obtains for her grubs a cylindrical lodging and divides it into floors by means of partition-walls; a third employs the natural channel of a cut reed; a fourth is a rent-free tenant of the vacant galleries of some Mason-bee. ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... and accomplished, who had lived on public employments nearly all his life, but who hardly knew the difference between the two ends of a ramrod. He asked, in long sentences, the questions which Palmerston had put shortly and in the pith; all sorts of queries as to winter transport in the Provinces, the disposition for fight of the people, and so on. Then it was demanded, What we had to suggest? Van Koughnet, who writhed under the tone adopted, bluntly said, "Why, to fight it out, of course; we in Canada will have to bear ...
— Canada and the States • Edward William Watkin
... "If a steel mill were to start in a Mississippi swamp paying wages of $2 a day, the news would hum through foreign lands in a month, and that swamp would become a beehive of humanity and industry in an incredibly short space of time." Dr. A. F. Schauffler says, with equal pith, that "the great cause of immigration is, after all, that the immigrants propose to better themselves in this country. They come here not because they love us, or because we love them. They come here because they can do themselves good, not because they can do us ...
— Aliens or Americans? • Howard B. Grose
... For so appears this fleet majestical, Holding due course to Harfleur. Follow, follow! Grapple your minds to sternage of this navy, And leave your England, as dead midnight still, Guarded with grandsires, babies, and old women, Either past or not arriv'd to pith and puissance. For who is he, whose chin is but enrich'd With one appearing hair, that will not follow These cull'd and choice-drawn cavaliers to France? Work, work your thoughts, and therein see a siege; Behold the ordnance on their carriages, With fatal mouths gaping on girded Harfleur. ...
— The Life of King Henry V • William Shakespeare [Tudor edition]
... people. If Thomas Gordon had been a man like Robert Williamson I shouldn't have waited to see your Kilmeny. But they are all right—rugged and grim, but of good stock and pith—native refinement and strong character. But I must say candidly that I hope your young lady ...
— Kilmeny of the Orchard • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... and came, watching the raft, which remained stationary. There were about a hundred of them armed with blow-tubes formed of a reed peculiar to these parts, and which is strengthened outside by the stem of a dwarf palm from which the pith has been extracted. ...
— Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon • Jules Verne
... One stacks her cells in the spiral staircase of an empty snail-shell; another, attacking the pith of a dry bit of bramble, obtains for her grubs a cylindrical lodging and divides it into floors by means of partition-walls; a third employs the natural channel of a cut reed; a fourth is a rent-free tenant of the vacant galleries of some Mason-bee. Here are the Macrocerae and the ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... a stick to feed the chimney rent, Where scanty pith ill fills the narrow sheath, The vapour, in its little channel pent, Struggles, tormented by the fire beneath; And, till its prisoned fury find a vent, Is heard to hiss and bubble, sing and seethe: So the offended myrtle inly ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... in the center it is all soft pith." He got from the boat one of the augers that had scuttled the Proserpine, and soon turned the pith out. "They pound that pith in water, and run it through linen; then set the water in the sun to evaporate. The sediment ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... we teach the ten commandments, where a world of morals lies condensed, the very pith and epitome of all ethics and religion; and a young man with these precepts engraved upon his mind must follow after profit with some conscience and Christianity of method. A man cannot go very far astray who neither dishonours his parents, nor kills, nor commits ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... to the Duke of York's sixteenth article that contains the pith of the author's ideas. All his examples are chosen to show that the system of bearing down together from windward in a line parallel to that of the enemy is radically defective, even if all the advantages of position and superior force are with you, and for this reason—that ...
— Fighting Instructions, 1530-1816 - Publications Of The Navy Records Society Vol. XXIX. • Julian S. Corbett
... one of his chopi officers to see me, who went four stages with Bombay, and he also sent some rich beads which he wished me to look at. They were nicely kept in a neat though very large casing of rush pith, and were those sent as a letter from Gani, to inform him that we were expected to come via Karague. After this, to keep us in good-humour, Kamrasi sent to inform us that some Gani men, twenty-five in number, had just arrived, and had given him a lion-skin, several tippet monkey-skins, ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke
... yelled, "ye're nae pittin' a twa-ounce strain on him; he's makin' fun o' ye!" The nobleman tried yet harder, yet could not please his relentless critic. "God forgie me, but ye canna fush worth a damn! Come back on the lan', an' gie him the butt wi' pith!" Thus adjured, his lordship acted at last with vigour; the sage, having gaffed the fish, abated his wrath, and, as the salmon was being "wetted," tendered ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes
... coolness springs up between him and the G. C. Of this the Game-Captain is made aware when the game commences. The partial slacker, scorning to insert his head in the scrum, assumes a commanding position outside and from this point criticises the Game-Captain's decisions with severity and pith. The last end of the partial slacker is generally a sad one. Stung by some pungent home-thrust, the Game-Captain is fain to try chastisement, and by these means silences ...
— A Wodehouse Miscellany - Articles & Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... I went to the river to wash our hair with the pith of the wild oranges. We sat on the smooth stones near the water, and had just begun to beat the oranges with pieces of wood to soften them, when we saw a man come down the bank and enter a deep ...
— A Memory Of The Southern Seas - 1904 • Louis Becke
... little better than insane visions? Did not Doctor Lardner prove to demonstration that railway carriages could never go more than twenty miles an hour, owing to the laws of resistance, friction, &c., and did not Brunel take the breath out of him, and the pith out of his arguments, by carrying the learned demonstrator with him on a locomotive, and whisking him ten miles out of London in as many minutes? When I see that among so intelligent and practical a people as the New Englanders—a people whose thoughts and energies ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... biography comes to be written, be held grandfather to an epic poem or a murder on the high seas—and it seems to be considered that it is touch and go which way the thing turns out. Are there then any episodes left? Does not everything become an enterprise of great pith and moment, with results that will probably, some day or other, be found to admit of mathematical demonstration? Happily the human race, in practice if not in theory, declines the conclusion. We know that we are free, and there's an end of ...
— Tristram of Blent - An Episode in the Story of an Ancient House • Anthony Hope
... the passing of fourscore years! On almost every page of her tracts, her letters, her account of her life, one finds quotations of proverbial pith: ...
— A Social History of the American Negro • Benjamin Brawley
... death of me!" cried the old witch, convulsed with laughter. "That was well said! If an honest man and a gentleman may! Thou playest thy part to perfection. Get along with thee for a smart fellow and I will wager on thy head, as a man of pith and substance, with a brain and what they call a heart, and all else that a man should have against any other thing on two legs. I hold myself a better witch than yesterday for thy sake. Did I not make thee? And I defy any witch in ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... muttering shoalbrains leave the helm to me: God, let me not in their dull ooze be stranded: Let not this one frail bark, to hollow which I have dug out the pith and sinewy heart 270 Of my aspiring life's fair trunk, be so Cast up to warp and blacken in the sun, Just as the opposing wind 'gins whistle off His cheek-swollen pack, and from the leaning mast Fortune's ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... tea and munched his cookies, with his head on one side and the air of a thievish jackdaw; and proceeded, after his wont, to extract such pith as the situation offered. ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... never opened my lips in parliament on the subject. But it afforded me an excellent opportunity to decline with modesty and with courtesy as well as reason. I am sorry to say that, to the best of my recollection, I did far otherwise, and the pith of my answer was made to be that I regarded the Anti-Corn Law League as no better than a big borough-mongering association. Such was my first capital offence in the matter of protection; redeemed from public ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... Archbishop of Spalato, and he, having taken refuge in England, had it translated there, the authorship being ascribed on the title-page to "Pietro Soave Polano." This English translation was, in vigor and pith, worthy of the original. In it can be discerned, as clearly as in the original, that atmosphere of intrigue and brutal assertion of power by which the Roman Curia, after packing the Council with petty Italian bishops, bade ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... enforced solitude to account in executing works of great pith and moment. It is in solitude that the passion for spiritual perfection best nurses itself. The soul communes with itself in loneliness until its energy often becomes intense. But whether a man profits by solitude or not will mainly depend upon his ...
— How to Get on in the World - A Ladder to Practical Success • Major A.R. Calhoon
... which is brewed a pleasant common beverage; and, by boiling this plant and the sweet herb together, in the proportion of one to five of the latter, and fermenting the liquor in the ordinary way, is obtained a strong and excellent vinegar. The leaves of it are used instead of tea, and the pith is dried and mixed in many of their dishes; the morkovai,[50] which is very like angelica; the kotkorica,[51] the root of which they eat indifferently, green or dried; the ikoum,[52] the utchichlei,[53] which is much eaten with ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 17 • Robert Kerr
... homilies read in the Church of England prior to the Reformation, called 'The Festival,' contains the pith of these lying legends and pretended miracles. Omitting the obscene parts, it ought to be republished, to exhibit the absurdities of popery as it ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... off his hat. But Jack did not stop, and went on talking with that pleasant vivacity which she, poor girl, knew so well and valued so highly. Lady George liked it too, though she could hardly have given any reason for liking it, for, to tell the truth, there was not often much pith in Jack's conversation. ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope
... immense terminal spike of flowers, after which it dies. It is not so tall as the cocoa-nut tree, but is thicker and larger. The mid-ribs of its immense leaves are twelve or fifteen feet long, and sometimes the lower part is as thick as a man's leg. They are excessively light, consisting of a firm pith, covered with a hard rind. They are frequently used instead of bamboo; entire houses, indeed, are built of them. They serve for the roofs of houses, as also for the floors; and when pegged together, side by side, they form ...
— In the Eastern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... cut in the latest fashion, with his cockle-shell of a boat, which he managed as well on salt water as on fresh, sculling with his arms bare, a cigarette in his mouth, a monocle in his eye, and a pith-helmet, such as is worn in India. The young ladies used to gather on the sands to watch him as he struck the water with the broad blade of his scull, near enough for them to see and to admire his nautical ability. They thought all his jokes amusing, and ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... surface. Specially characteristic of Egypt, though not altogether peculiar to it, were the papyrus and the lotus—the Cyperus papyrus and Nymphaea lotus of botanists. The papyrus was a tall smooth reed, with a large triangular stalk containing a delicate pith, out of which the Egyptians manufactured their paper. The fabric was excellent, as is shown by its continuance to the present day, and by the fact that the Greeks and Romans, after long trial, preferred it to parchment. The lotus was a large ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson
... in a little grease. The light emitted from such a candle was feeble in the extreme. The second, a superior rushlight, had the rush pealed of its bark with the exception of one small strip which held the pith from breaking. This pith was dipped in boiling fat, and when the tallow had condensed it was dipped again, and the candle given as many coats as was desired. Such a rushlight was a far more useful candle, and if it did not emit as large ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould
... expressive and heart-touching, and in the South it was held in universal honour. Jasmin, he continued, is what Burns was to the Scottish peasantry; only he received his honours in his lifetime. The comparison with Burns, however, was not appropriate. Burns had more pith, vigour, variety, and passion, than Jasmin who was more of a descriptive writer. In some respects Jasmin resembled Allan Ramsay, a barber and periwig-maker, like himself, whose Gentle Shepherd met with as great a success as Jasmin's Franconnette. Jasmin, ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... certain conversations which Maltravers held with De Montaigne, the germ and pith of which it is necessary that I should place before the reader,—for I write the inner as well as the outer history of a man; and the great incidents of life are not brought about only by the dramatic agencies of others, but also by ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book VI • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... eighteenth was passed by Kilpatrick's command at Gainesville, but the first faint streak of dawn saw him and his faithful followers in the saddle, booted, spurred, and equipped for some enterprise as yet unexplained to them, but evidently, in their leader's estimation, one of "pith and moment." At the word of command, the force, including the "Harris Light," moved forward at a quick trot, taking the road to Warrenton, and anticipating a brush with Stuart's cavalry who, during the previous ten hours, had thrown out ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... whispered Jeanne, looking rather doubtfully at the succession of leaf trays that continued to appear. She nibbled away at some of the least extraordinary-looking cakes, which the frog informed her were made from the pith of rushes roasted and ground down, and then flavoured with essence of marsh marigold, and found them nearly as nice as macaroons. Then, having eaten quite as much as they wanted, the tadpoles handed to each ...
— The Tapestry Room - A Child's Romance • Mrs. Molesworth
... weary of all contentious books,' he wrote to CASPER LINDERN, 'if you entertain and get The Threefold Life of Man into your mind and heart.' 'The subject of regeneration,' says Christopher Walton, 'is the pith and drift of all Behmen's writings, and the student may here be directed to begin his course of study by mastering the first eight chapters of The Threefold Life, which appear to have been in great favour ...
— Jacob Behmen - an appreciation • Alexander Whyte
... in jest, because my common sense laughs it to scorn. The idea of the "little man" shocks me less—it would be a more likely match if "matches" were at all in question, which they are not. He still sends his little newspaper; and the other day there came a letter of a bulk, volume, pith, judgment, and knowledge, worthy to have been the product of a giant. You may laugh as much and as wickedly as you please; but the fact is, there is a quiet constancy about this, my diminutive and red-haired friend, which ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... providing a weapon for use at close quarters. The dart is made from a sliver of bamboo, or from a palm-frond, scraped to the size of a steel knitting-needle. One end of the dart is imbedded in a cork-shaped piece of pith which fits the hole in the sumpitan as a cartridge fits the bore of a rifle; the other end, which is of needle-sharpness, is smeared with a paste made from the milky sap of the upas tree dissolved in a juice extracted from the root of the tuba. With the possible exception of curare, this is the deadliest ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... chosen. I hope young women will not make such mistakes as these young men have done, who might have been supposed to know something, if they had only kept still. (Laughter). If these papers, to which I have referred, were all in the hands of women, and so destitute of editorial pith and point as they now are, I should counsel against any further efforts for the elevation of the sex, believing the case to be hopeless. (Applause). If I mistake not, women have a peculiar fitness for trade. Mrs. Dall says, in her second lecture, that ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... biography of Douglass extracts are given from letters of distinguished contemporaries who knew the orator. Colonel T.W. Higginson writes thus: "I have hardly heard his equal, in grasp upon an audience, in dramatic presentation, in striking at the pith of an ethical question, and in single [signal] illustrations and examples." Another writes, in reference to the impromptu speech delivered at the meeting at Rochester on the death of Lincoln: "I have heard Webster and Clay in their best moments, Channing and Beecher in their highest ...
— Frederick Douglass - A Biography • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... breath in him I will tell him," Halfman affirmed. "Your honor over-refines your pleasant purpose. The pith is that he be killed. Remember the ...
— The Lady of Loyalty House - A Novel • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... should not wish to live without the society of my equals in knowledge and intelligence. In my opinion, the interchange of ideas and information is one of the charms of existence. In that way we get, in the most agreeable manner, at the pith and marrow of books, at the opinions of other people, and at what is going forward in the world: don't ...
— Ernest Bracebridge - School Days • William H. G. Kingston
... plant now living, sometimes being as much as eight feet high. In the nature of their stems, too, they exhibited a more highly organised arrangement than their living representatives, having, according to Dr Williamson, a "fistular pith, an exogenous woody stem, and a thick smooth bark." The bark having almost al ways disappeared has left the fluted stem known to us as the calamite. The foliage consisted of whorls of long narrow leaves, ...
— The Story of a Piece of Coal - What It Is, Whence It Comes, and Whither It Goes • Edward A. Martin
... tablets—whose many-leaved tablets, are they then, that are tumbled out upon us here, glowing with 'all saws, all forms, all pressures past, that youth and observation copied there.' And if aphorisms are made out of the pith and heart of sciences, if 'no man can write good aphorisms who is not sound and grounded,' what Wittenberg, what University was ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... apostrophes to Barto left it one of the ironical, veiled Republican, semi-socialistic ballads of the time, which were sung about the streets for the sharpness and pith of the couplets, and not from a perception of the double edge down the length ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Europe, all eager to save their souls by fighting at the Pope's bidding, eager to signalize their valor in so great an enterprise, and eager also for the pay and the plunder which William liberally promised. But the Normans themselves were the pith and the flower of the army, and William himself was the strongest, the sagest, and the fiercest ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various
... trees, affected by her dear Delightful presence, could not choose but melt At their hard pith; whilst all the birds whose clear Pipes tossed mirth about the branches, felt The influence of her looks; for having let Their song fall down, their eyes on her ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... a day, the news would hum through foreign lands in a month, and that swamp would become a beehive of humanity and industry in an incredibly short space of time." Dr. A. F. Schauffler says, with equal pith, that "the great cause of immigration is, after all, that the immigrants propose to better themselves in this country. They come here not because they love us, or because we love them. They come here because ...
— Aliens or Americans? • Howard B. Grose
... freedom of banishment. We were going to say (but it might sound vainglorious), where do things read so well as in notes? but we will put the question in another form:—Where do you so well test an author's learning and knowledge of his subject?—where do you find the pith of his most elaborate researches?—where do his most original suggestions escape?—where do you meet with the details that fix your attention at the time and cling to your memory for ever?—where do both writer and reader luxuriate so much at their ...
— Notes And Queries,(Series 1, Vol. 2, Issue 1), - Saturday, November 3, 1849. • Various
... is like raw turnip-shavings and tastes like green almonds; is very delicate and good. Costs the life of a palm tree 12 to 20 years old—for it is the pith. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... and west, But two cannot go abreast, Cannot travel in it two: Yonder masterful cuckoo Crowds every egg out of the nest, Quick or dead, except its own; A spell is laid on sod and stone, Night and Day were tampered with, Every quality and pith Surcharged and sultry with a power That works its will on ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... discussion of these things to priests and scholars.... I do not believe, however, that these complaints are made of your own free will, but rather at the instigation of certain priests and monks, whose desire is to keep the truth unknown." This sentence with which he closed contains the pith of the entire letter. The monarch felt that in the coming contest the opposing parties were to be the Church and State. He endeavored, therefore, by every means to win the Dalesmen to his side. Letters were despatched to Dalarne from various portions of the realm, to instruct the peasants that ...
— The Swedish Revolution Under Gustavus Vasa • Paul Barron Watson
... each pound of rhubarb cut without peeling, a pound of sugar and one lemon. Pare the yellow peel from the lemon, taking care to get none of the bitter white pith. Slice the pulp of the lemon in an earthen bowl, discarding the seeds. Put the rhubarb into the bowl with the sugar and lemon, cover and stand away in a cool place over night. In the morning turn into the preserving kettle, ...
— Good Things to Eat as Suggested by Rufus • Rufus Estes
... willow branch out of which he had knocked the pith; then he would put in round pebbles, when he wanted to use it, and punch them out suddenly with another stick, screaming out at the same time, "Look out, my gun's ...
— The Adventures of Joel Pepper • Margaret Sidney
... Mexican War," we observe that he has given an account of the engagement at Huamantla, and the fall of Walker. We believe the Major's account, compiled as it is from "the documents," to be in the main correct, but lacking incidental pith, and slightly erroneous in the grand denouement, in which our gallant friend—whose manly countenance even now stares us in the face, as if in life he "yet lived"—yielded up the balance of power ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... crosses, F. E. Smith. Where the Breton boat-fleet tosses, Are they, Smith? Do they, fasting, tramping, bleeding, Wait the news from this our city? Groaning "That's the Second Reading!" Hissing "There is still Committee!" If the voice of Cecil falters, If McKenna's point has pith, Do they tremble for their ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... now seemed to be to teach Barnwell the language, and then to confide to him not only the story of his eventful life, but the pith of it, which covered a ...
— The Boy Nihilist - or, Young America in Russia • Allan Arnold
... been willfully taken for the purpose of suicide. It is a powerful irritant. The first thing to be done is to give freely of magnesia and water; then to give mucilaginous drinks as flaxseed tea, gum water or sassafras pith and water; and lastly to administer finely powdered bone-charcoal, either in pill or ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens
... February to the second week in March, according to the warmth or the coldness of the locality, is the time for tapping the trees; and when the holes are bored, spouts of elder or sumac from which the pith has been taken are put into them at one end, while the other goes down to the bucket which receives the sap. 'Several holes are so bored that their spouts shall lead to the same bucket, and high enough to allow the bucket to hang two or three feet ...
— Among the Trees at Elmridge • Ella Rodman Church
... a hearsay, Paris but a myth, Rome a wand of sweet-flag withered to the pith; Growing, growing, all ...
— Lundy's Lane and Other Poems • Duncan Campbell Scott
... strained to make half-a-pint to the above. Beat well together, and when on the point of setting, add the fruit of two oranges prepared as follows: Peel the oranges, cut away all the white you can without drawing the juice, divide the orange in quarters, take out seeds and all pith, and cut the quarters into three or four pieces. Mix these with the jelly, which at once put into a mould, allowing it to stand a ...
— Nelson's Home Comforts - Thirteenth Edition • Mary Hooper
... women prefer the epigrammatic form in sentences, crisp and laconic; short sayings full of pith, of which I have made ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... of such pith required, indeed, less talking than consideration. The first thing they did in carrying it out was to return to the railway station, where Baptista took from her luggage a small trunk of immediate necessaries which she would in any case have required after missing ...
— Victorian Short Stories, - Stories Of Successful Marriages • Elizabeth Gaskell, et al.
... disgust. Since the days when I had known her at Pasean, nineteen years of misery, profligacy, and shame had made her the most debased, the vilest creature that can be imagined. She told us her story at great length; the pith of it might be expressed ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... a zone of fire and steel. Her villas and homesteads flamed or smoked; her orchards flared heavenward in a torrent of sparks or stood black sapless trunks charred to their inmost pith; the promise of her harvests lay as grey ashes over the land. But her ramparts, though breached in places, were yet manned by her sons, and their assailants recoiled pierced by the shafts or stunned by the catapults of the defence. Kaiser Frederick sat in his tent, giving secret audience ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... revolting. But Helwyse felt no pity,—only ugly, hateful, unrelenting anger, needing not much stirring to blaze forth in fearful passion. Where now were his wise saws,—his philosophic indifference? Self-respect is the pith of such supports; which being gone, ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... this, but this is the pith of it. I knelt down, and swore that I would strive, to the utmost in my power, to do as he bade me; and he put his hands on my head, and bade me go in peace; and I tell you, I mean to prove to him that his words ...
— Both Sides the Border - A Tale of Hotspur and Glendower • G. A. Henty
... England to permit the Genovese Columbus to discover America!" That task was clearly England's! "And now there being nothing great left to be done," the sole work Frobisher finds worth attempting is the discovery of the northwest passage to Cathay. Upon this he spends the pith of his manhood year by year, and the result of all the labours of this sea-Hercules, well! it is perhaps to be sought in those dim beings, "half-man, half-fish," whom he brings back from some voyage, ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... of public meetings, sayings of pith and moment are often attributed to "A Voice" from the audience. On this occasion, when Sir Edward Carson referred to the Army and the Navy, "A Voice" cried "They are on our side." It was the truth, as subsequent events were to show. It would indeed have ...
— Ulster's Stand For Union • Ronald McNeill
... their arm-pits. It was horrible to look upon. The chain-gang, the galley-slaves, how often the idea of them was recalled by that horrid pull! Yet onward they went, with teeth set and hands bruised by the rope, surmounting difficulty after difficulty with the pith ...
— Through the Mackenzie Basin - A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899 • Charles Mair
... moment. 'Stocks and stones!' I says. 'You come inside,' I says, 'and I'll punch your blooming head.' There was a kind of silence and more jabbering, and in he came, Bible in hand, after the manner of them—a little sandy chap in specks and a pith helmet. I flatter myself that me sitting there in the shadows, with my copper head and my big goggles, struck him a bit of a heap at first. 'Well,' I says, 'how's the trade in calico?' for I don't hold ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... years and who know what an artist he is in swearing, heard him then utter swear words that they had never heard before, words invented on the spur of the moment, and in the heat of passion, words full of pith and meaning." ...
— The Shades of the Wilderness • Joseph A. Altsheler
... I have just got F. Darwin's "Foundations." He tries to make out that his father could have dispensed with Malthus. But the selection death-rate in a slightly varying large population is the pith of the whole business. The Darwin-Wallace theory is, as you say, "the continuous adjustment of the organic to the inorganic world." It is what mathematicians call "a moving equilibrium." In fact, I have always maintained that it is ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant
... public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country and mankind." The assertion that they desired to invert this order, to destroy every social link in so far as it tended to produce inequalities, was the pith of his great indictment against the French "metaphysical" revolutionists. They had perverted the general logical precept of the sufficient reason for all inequalities by converting it into an assuming of the equality of concrete units. They fell into the fallacy of which ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... did the great god Pan, (How tall it stood in the river!) 20 Then drew the pith, like the heart of a man, Steadily from the outside ring, And notched the poor, dry, empty thing In holes, as he ...
— Narrative and Lyric Poems (first series) for use in the Lower School • O. J. Stevenson
... Goethe's style, for they are foreign to his mental character; but he excels Goethe in susceptibility to the manifold qualities of prose, and in mastery over its effects. Heine is full of variety, of light and shadow: he alternates between epigrammatic pith, imaginative grace, sly allusion, and daring piquancy; and athwart all those there runs a vein of sadness, tenderness and grandeur which reveals ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... alone, upwards of a hundred species are found in these forests. These supply the Indian with nearly all he wants to support existence. Their fruit, or pith, or crowns, furnish him with an abundance of food. He builds his hut and floors it with their wood, and thatches it with their leaves. From the trunks of some species he forms his canoes, of different sizes. He obtains from them oil, cord, thread, wine—or a beverage which answers ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... painted, colours and details, that she might get a vision of the scene at Moorsedge. She did her best to feel an omen and sound it, in his question 'whether the yearly increasing army of the orderly annuitants and their parasites does not demonstrate the proud old country as a sheath for pith rather than of the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... well-kept lawns and flower-beds and entered a long avenue of fig-trees. The purple fruit hung abundantly among the large green leaves. Miss Williams opened one of the figs and showed Strowbridge the red luscious pith. ...
— The Bell in the Fog and Other Stories • Gertrude Atherton
... am supposed to be everywhere, to follow the footsteps of each and all of my characters, and with a fidelity and a perspicacity nothing short of the marvelous. So I take the liberty of imagining the pith of the conversation between the woman and ...
— The Man on the Box • Harold MacGrath
... and branching, and seldom rises higher than 10 or 12 feet. the Mountains continue high on either side of the valley, and are but scantily supplyed with timber; small pine apears to be the prevalent growth; it is of the pith kind, with a short leaf. at 11 A.M. Drewyer killed a doe and we halted about 2 hours and breakfasted, and then continued our rout untill night without halting, when we arrived at the river in a level bottom ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al
... glorious work is before you, Glory! You'll take it up where I have left it, and carry it on and on. You are nobler than I am, and stronger, far stronger, and purer and braver. And haven't I said all along that what the world wants now is a great woman? I had the pith of it all, though I saw the true light—but I was not worthy. I had sinned and fallen, and didn't know my own heart, and was not fit to enter into the promised land. It is something, nevertheless, that I see it a long way ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... for a swift analysis, which drives directly to the heart of the man, instantly detects the impostor behind the braggart, and curtly declares him to lack "the true grit." The word is so close to the thing it names, has so much pith and point, is so tart on the tongue, and so stings the ear with its meaning, that foreigners ignorant of the language might at once feel its significance by its griding utterance as it is shot impatiently through ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... observer and renowned authority, Dr. Gunsaulus, is persuaded that the mysterious organ known as the spleen is nothing less than our important part. To the contrary, Professor Garrett P. Servis holds that man's soul is that prolongation of his spinal marrow which forms the pith of his no tail; and for demonstration of his faith points confidently to the fact that no tailed animals have no souls. Concerning these two theories, it is best to suspend judgment ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... been described under the name of Lepidostrobi. In the structure of the trunk there is nothing comparable to what is found in existing trees, there being a thick bark surrounding a zone principally composed of "scalariform" vessels, this in turn enclosing a large central pith. In their general appearance the Lepidodendra bring to mind the existing Araucarian Pines; but they are true "Cryptogams," and are to be regarded as a gigantic extinct type of the modern Club-mosses (Lycopodiaceoe). They are amongst ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... Subtile Differences as those of the forms of Asperity, that belong to differing Colours, to receive whose Languid and Delicate Impressions by the Intervention of Light, Nature seems to have appointed and contexed into the Retina the tender and delicate Pith of the Optick Nerve. Wherefore I confess, I propos'd divers Scruples, and particularly whether the Doctor had taken care to bind a Napkin or Hankerchief over his Eyes so carefully, as to be sure he could make no use of his Sight, though he had but Counterfeited the want of it, to which ...
— Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours (1664) • Robert Boyle
... tolerance run to seed, a man is not called upon to die for his beliefs, he is occasionally called upon to live for them; which is not necessarily the easier of the two. But up to his lights Henry Peters achieved it. At all possible and impossible hours, his unwieldy white umbrella, pith hat, and badly-cut drill suit pervaded the dwellings of his scattered converts; while his wife, torn between pride in him and mortal dread of infection, grieved in secret over inadequate meals snatched at odd hours; and supplemented ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... various nations, and all volunteers; Not fighting for their country or its crown, But wishing to be one day brigadiers; Also to have the sacking of a town;— A pleasant thing to young men at their years. 'Mongst them were several Englishmen of pith, Sixteen called Thomson, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... Christmas the discontented fir tree was the first to fall. As the axe cut sharply through the stem, and divided the pith, the tree fell with a groan to the earth, conscious of pain and faintness, and forgetting all its dreams of happiness, in sorrow at leaving its home in the forest. It knew that it should never again see its dear old companions, the trees, nor the little bushes and many-colored ...
— Christmas Stories And Legends • Various
... they like best, around their huts, instead of feeling obliged to get it from others, and they evidently shared his dislike to torturing the earth with iron, for before my advent and sojourn amongst them they simply burnt the pith of the trees and plants they felled and into the bed formed by the ashes they cast indiscriminately bulb and grain, covering up both with their feet or with a piece of wood, and afterwards they took no ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... have now altogether circumscribed my thoughts and my studies; and if I can bring it to a perfection before I die, shall reckon I have well employed the poor remains of an unfortunate life. This indeed is more than I can justly expect from a quill worn to the pith in the service of the State, in pros and cons upon Popish Plots, and Meal Tubs, and Exclusion Bills, and Passive Obedience, and Addresses of Lives and Fortunes; and Prerogative, and Property, and Liberty of Conscience, and Letters to ...
— A Tale of a Tub • Jonathan Swift
... the fiery pith, The compact nucleus, 'round which systems grow; Mass after mass becomes inspired therewith, And whirls impregnate with ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... snake-bearing head with the bare sand, he softens the ground with leaves; and strews some weeds produced beneath the sea, and lays upon them the face of Medusa, the daughter of Phorcys. The fresh weeds, being still alive, imbibed the poison of the monster in their spongy pith, and hardened by its touch; and felt an unwonted stiffness in their branches and their leaves. But the Nymphs of the sea attempt the wondrous feat on many {other} weeds, and are pleased at the same result; and raise seed again from them ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... and plainly; and if they themselves which fly our doctrine, and would be called Catholics, shall manifestly see how all these titles of antiquity, whereof they boast so much, are quite shaken out of their hands; and that there is more pith in this our cause than they thought for; we then hope and trust that none of them will be so negligent and careless of his own salvation, but he will at length study and bethink himself to whether ...
— The Apology of the Church of England • John Jewel
... Zimri,—Shaftesbury and Buckingham; every line adds to or modifies the character, which is, as it were, a-building up to the very last verse; whereas, in Pope's Timon, &c. the first two or three couplets contain all the pith of the character, and the twenty or thirty lines that follow are so much evidence or proof of overt acts of jealousy, or pride, or whatever it may be that is satirized. In like manner compare Charles Lamb's exquisite criticisms ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... all listened to the tale, That drew, the Student said, its pith And marrow from the ancient myth Of some one with an iron flail; Or that portentous Man of Brass Hephaestus made in days of yore, Who stalked about the Cretan shore, And saw the ships appear and pass, And threw ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... and not to esthetics—that is, the love of beauty for its own sake. Such a germ of esthetic pleasure we find in our infants years before they have the faintest conception of what is meant by personal beauty; and this brings me to the pith of my argument. Had the facts warranted it, I might have freely conceded that savages decorate themselves for the sake of gaining an advantage in courtship without thereby in the least yielding the main thesis of this chapter, which is that ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... the house, I caused it to be hung up, with the big end of the stem turned upwards, the leaves of each stalk slightly touching one another, being well assured they would shrivel in drying, and no longer touch each other. It hereby happened, that the juice contained in the pith (sometimes as big as one's finger) of the stem of the plant, flowed into the leaves, and augmenting their sap, made them much more mild and waxy. As fast as these leaves assumed a bright chesnut colour, I stripped them from the stalk, and made them directly ...
— History of Louisisana • Le Page Du Pratz
... lieutenant bars and a pith helmet and was carrying a large piece of wood in imitation of Norton's swagger stick. Terrence took one look at him and at the two orderlies who stood behind him holding his field kit. He strode toward ...
— Narakan Rifles, About Face! • Jan Smith
... two travellers, mounted on wiry yet strong looking steeds, were wending their way through a forest in Australia. They were both young and dressed much alike in broad-brimmed pith hats, loose red shirts, corduroy trousers and ...
— Adventures in Australia • W.H.G. Kingston
... will bring you sugar-canes half as thick as your wrist, looking as innocent as may be; both ends are sealed up with bits of the pith, and when you open one end you find that all the joints have been bored through, and the cane is full of rum. But mind, lads, you are fools if you touch it; it is new and strong and rank, and a bottle ...
— By Conduct and Courage • G. A. Henty
... and the electricity remains on the surface of it. If, however, we attach a glass handle to the rod and hold it by that whilst rubbing it, the electricity cannot then escape to the earth, and the brass rod will attract the pith-ball. ...
— The Story Of Electricity • John Munro
... in which Henry entered upon the general question—assuredly a more calm and rational one than historians have usually represented it to be. In dealing with the obstacle which had been raised, he displayed a most efficient mastery over himself, although he did not conclude without touching the pith of the matter with telling clearness. The secretary was to take some opportunity of speaking to the pope privately; and of warning him, "as of himself," that there was no hope that the king would give way: he was to "say plainly to his Holiness that the king's desire and ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... I speculated a little on the subject. Astonishing nonsense is often spoken of the sand wasp's knowledge of anatomy. Now will any one say that the Gauchos on the plains of La Plata have such knowledge, yet I have often seen them pith a struggling and lassoed cow on the ground with unerring skill, which no mere anatomist could imitate. The pointed knife was infallibly driven in between the vertebrae by a single slight thrust. I presume ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... the Galvanic battery, and it was seriously proposed to have as many wires as there were letters; each wire to have a frictional battery for generating electricity at one end of the circuit, and a pith-ball electroscope at the other. The modern reader may smile at the idea of the hurried sender of a message taking a piece of cat-skin, or his silk handkerchief, and rubbing up the successive letter-balls of glass or sulphur until he ...
— Steam Steel and Electricity • James W. Steele
... red fez on his head and a rifle slung on his back, was the first to sight the coming expedition, and to notify its approach with a yell that brought a dozen like him from the sun-baked hovels and, a moment later from the office, a white man in a pith helmet, who stood for a moment looking across the half-ruined wall at the newcomers, and then advanced to ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... immense leaves form one of the most useful articles in these lands, supplying the place of bamboo, to which for many purposes they are superior. They are twelve or fifteen feet long, and, when very fine, as thick in the lower part as a man's leg. They are very light, consisting entirely of a firm pith covered with a hard thin rind or bark. Entire houses are built of these; they form admirable roofing-poles for thatch; split and well-supported, they do for flooring; and when chosen of equal size, and pegged together side by side ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume II. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... king may make a belted knight, A marquis, duke and a' that, But an honest man's aboon his might Gude faith he mauna fa' that! For a' that and a' that, Their dignities and a' that, The pith o' sense and pride o' worth Are higher ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... children, and will not or cannot understand the power of the sun and the danger of exposure to it. They will run up on deck bare-headed to look at some passing object, and then are surprised that they at once get a bad headache. They are all well provided with pith hats, and awnings are spread everywhere, so that one cannot feel quite as much sympathy for them as if they were sufferers in ...
— The Last Voyage - to India and Australia, in the 'Sunbeam' • Lady (Annie Allnutt) Brassey
... Indian pith-helmet that is three sizes too large, and wellnigh conceals his features, Mr. Pronatti orders his horse, and accompanies me some distance out, to put me on the proper course to Erzingan. My route from Enderes leads along a lovely fertile ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... Stevenson in the Pall Mall Magazine, has a remark which I confess astonished me—a remark I could never forget as coming from him. He said that he "had lived a very full and varied life, and had no interest in remarks about morals." "Remarks about morals" are, nevertheless, in essence, the pith of all the books to which he referred, as those to which he turned in preference to the Edinburgh Edition of R. L. Stevenson's works. The moral element is implicit in the drama, and it is implicit there because it is implicit in ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... must somehow have laid hold of the pith of the matter, for, many years afterwards, when Dean Mansel's Bampton Lectures were published, it seemed to me I already knew all that this eminently agnostic ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... aptitudes and abilities, he should not thus have been lost among boys. His incessant intrepidity, his restless curiosity, his undertaking spirit, all indicated early maturity; all should have led to pursuits, if not better, at least of more pith and moment than the mere mechanism ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... twenty-nine years later, won unenviable notoriety at the hanging of Ruth Blay. The circumstances are set forth by the late Albert Laighton in a spirited ballad, which is too long to quote in full. The following stanzas, however, give the pith of ...
— An Old Town By The Sea • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... although my rhyme is ragged, Tattered and jagged, Rudely rain-beaten, Rust and moth eaten, If ye take well therewith, It hath in it some pith." ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... disappeared from the list after two representations, and had been heard at an improvised performance, which scarcely deserves to be considered in a record of this character. In the supplemental season, however, a novelty of real pith and moment was brought forward in the shape of Massenet's "Werther," which had been promised to the regular subscribers, and which, while it made no profound impression, was accepted as an earnest of the excellent and honorable intentions ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... political power in the Union increased by the presence on their soil of persons to whom they deny political rights, but that representation shall be based throughout the Republic on voters, and not on population. The pith of the whole amendment is in the last clause; and is there anything in that to which reasonable objection can be made? Would it not be a curious result of the war against Rebellion, that it should end in conferring on a Rebel voter in South Carolina a power equal, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... couple of miles from Will Tree to select the larger bamboos, he it was who helped him build his hearth. The stones were placed on the ground opposite to the door; the bamboos, emptied of their pith and bored through at the knots, afforded, when joined one to another, a tube of sufficient length, which ran out through an aperture made for it in the sequoia bark, and would serve every purpose, provided it did not catch fire. Godfrey ...
— Godfrey Morgan - A Californian Mystery • Jules Verne
... fresh outside, with a strong send of sea. The spray flew in the oarsmen's faces. They saw the Union Jack blow abroad from the Flying Scud, the men clustered at the rail, the cook in the galley door, the captain on the quarter-deck with a pith helmet and binoculars. And the whole familiar business, the comfort, company, and safety of a ship, heaving nearer at each ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... "leading motives." These form the basis of all Wagner's reforms. A leading motive is simply a musical phrase suggestive of a dramatic idea. Wagner's motives are marvellous in their descriptive and soul-stirring power. They seem to indicate not only the pith, but the utmost depths of the heart of the ideas which they represent. It is this that makes Wagner so very like Shakespeare. All can appreciate him, yet he is above all ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... shunned by a single jolly companion, for the exposure of his nephew. But a man can't be saved against his will. Here am I, full of expedients and resources for his good; there is he, throwing cold water on everything, and making difficulties as if he loved them. It's his abominable pride, that's the pith of the matter. He could not have behaved worse though I had played the bully with him, and had reproached him with his Christianity. But I have studiously avoided every subject which could put his back ...
— Callista • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... came round and stood at Mollie's side. He wore a coat of tussore silk, and his shirt was open at the neck; a wide pith helmet was on his head, draped with a striped pugaree with broad ends hanging down his back, and further decorated with vine leaves, which looked rather droopy in the heat. He held out a hand to Mollie ...
— The Happy Adventurers • Lydia Miller Middleton
... rather bear these lesser ills, Than fly to those of greater magnitude. Thus error does make cowards of us all; And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied over with undue clemency, And pedagogues of great pith and spirit, With this regard their firmness turn away, And ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 5: Some Strange and Curious Punishments • Henry M. Brooks
... you lack borrow from yourself." Such is the homely wisdom which gained for Cato the proud title of Sapiens, by which, says Cicero, [30] he was familiarly known. Other original works, the product of his vast experience, were the treatise on eloquence, of which the pith is the following: "Rem tene: verba sequentur;" "Take care of the sense: the sounds will take care of themselves." We can well believe that this excellent maxim ruled his own conduct. The art of war formed the subject of another volume; in this, too, he had abundant ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... a nice youngster of excellent pith; Fate tried to conceal him by naming him Smith! But he shouted a song for the brave and the free— Just read on his medal, 'My ...
— Eclectic School Readings: Stories from Life • Orison Swett Marden
... Alister; "you get astride my shoulders, and I'll carry you home. I believe you're hungry, and that takes the pith out of you!—Come," he went on, perceiving some sign of reluctance in the youth, "you'll break down if you walk much farther!—Here, Ian! you take the bag; you can manage ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... bare arm of the milkmaid, Adonis drew the figure down a pith toward the small lake that was on one edge of ...
— The Motor Girls • Margaret Penrose
... and cup laid by, among a great litter of tools and things. He was looking along the level with one eye shut, and the other most sternly intent; but when I came near he rose and raised his broad pith hat, and made me think that I was ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
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