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adjective
Elastic  adj.  
1.
Springing back; having a power or inherent property of returning to the form from which a substance is bent, drawn, pressed, or twisted; springy; having the power of rebounding; as, a bow is elastic; the air is elastic; India rubber is elastic. "Capable of being drawn out by force like a piece of elastic gum, and by its own elasticity returning, when the force is removed, to its former position."
2.
Able to return quickly to a former state or condition, after being depressed or overtaxed; having power to recover easily from shocks and trials; as, elastic spirits; an elastic constitution.
Elastic bitumen. (Min.) See Elaterite.
Elastic curve.
(a)
(Geom.) The curve made by a thin elastic rod fixed horizontally at one end and loaded at the other.
(b)
(Mech.) The figure assumed by the longitudinal axis of an originally straight bar under any system of bending forces.
Elastic fluids, those which have the property of expanding in all directions on the removal of external pressure, as the air, steam, and other gases and vapors.
Elastic limit (Mech.), the limit of distortion, by bending, stretching, etc., that a body can undergo and yet return to its original form when relieved from stress; also, the unit force or stress required to produce this distortion. Within the elastic limit the distortion is directly proportional to the stress producing it.
Elastic tissue (Anat.), a variety of connective tissue consisting of a network of slender and very elastic fibers which are but slightly affected by acids or alkalies.
Gum elastic, caoutchouc.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Elastic" Quotes from Famous Books



... Oldham. He produced a bundle of papers bound by a thick elastic. "Well, I've saved you some trouble in your next case. Here are certified copies of the documents for it, copied at Sacramento, and subscribed to before a notary. Of course, you can verify them; but ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White

... by the mountains that surround it, and there fall in rain or snow: as for those that gather from other quarters, I suppose their progress hitherward is obstructed by those very Alps, which rise one over another, to an extent of many leagues. This air being dry, pure, heavy, and elastic, must be agreeable to the constitution of those who labour under disorders arising from weak nerves, obstructed perspiration, relaxed fibres, a viscidity of lymph, and a languid circulation. In other respects, it encourages the scurvy, the atmosphere being undoubtedly impregnated with sea-salt. ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett

... but empty bubbles; the only wealth he prized was his soul's increase in love and understanding: "If the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like sweet-scented herbs—is more elastic, starry and ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long

... prongs and swift wrath of the moose. The buffalo charged down the knoll at a thundering gallop; but just before reaching the fence he checked himself violently. More than once or twice before had those elastic but impenetrable meshes given him his lesson, hurling him back with humiliating harshness when he dashed his bulk against them. He had too lively a memory of past discomfitures to risk a fresh one now in the face of this insolent ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts

... of food, enough of raiment, enough of shelter, and enough of recreation, if only he will work? But Polly's cheeks, and Polly's lips, the eager fire of Polly's eye as she would speak, and all the elastic beauty of Polly's gait as she would walk, drove the great question from his mind. Was he ever destined to hold Polly in his arms,—close, close to his breast? If not, then the laws of Nature and the laws of God, let them ...
— Ralph the Heir • Anthony Trollope

... Sawyer possesses a soprano-voice which is quite elastic, of great range, and strong and clear in the upper register. She has been favorably received on several occasions ...
— Music and Some Highly Musical People • James M. Trotter

... manipulation, is strengthened, refined, made more elastic or more resistant, and adapted to the use each artisan dreams of. If every blow should fracture it, if every furnace should burn the life out of it, if every roller should pulverize it, of what use would it be? It has that virtue, those qualities ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden

... a whole bag of what were women's things judging from the frilliness of the garments included. She set aside some squeeze-packs and little gadgets and elastic items right away, but she didn't take any of the clothes. I caught her measuring some kind of transparent chemise against herself when she thought we weren't looking; it was for a girl maybe six ...
— The Night of the Long Knives • Fritz Reuter Leiber

... her. She appeared to his mind in every allurement of action, fulfilling all the duties and enjoying all the pleasures that she had proposed to him. He imagined her happy and healthful, journeying gaily by his side in the fresh morning, with rosy cheek and elastic step; he imagined her delighting him by her promised songs, enlivening him by her eloquent words, in the mellow stillness of evening; he imagined her sleeping, soft and warm and still, in his protecting arms—ever happy and ever gentle; girl in years, and woman in capacities; at once ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins

... phenomena in nature; but yet with reference to the general system of things, he could consider attraction but as an effect, whose cause at that time he did not attempt to trace. But when he afterwards began to account for it by a subtle elastic aether, this great man (if in so great a man it be not impious to discover anything like a blemish) seemed to have quitted his usual cautious manner of philosophising: since, perhaps, allowing all that has been advanced on this subject to be sufficiently proved, I think it leaves us with as many ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke

... as quaint a figure as Diedrich Knickerbocker in the preliminary advertisement of the 'History of New York.' Thirty years ago he might have been seen on an autumnal afternoon, tripping with an elastic step along Broadway, with low-quartered shoes neatly tied, and a Talma cloak,—a short garment that hung from his shoulders like the cape of a coat. There was a chirping, cheery, old-school air in his appearance, which was undeniably Dutch, and most harmonious with the associations ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold

... as they sit with us around the fireside, chucking us under the chins, and slyly poking us in the ribs; and in the field how nobly they have charged upon humbugs and shams. They have been true knights, chivalrous, kind-hearted, brave, religious; their spears are slender, perhaps, yet sharp and elastic as the blades of Toledo; and as they have galloped up and down in the lists, gaily caparisoned and cheery, it has done our hearts good to see how they have hurled into the dust the pompous, sleepy champions of error ...
— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various

... "In this case the elastic tourniquet will stop the blood flow as effectively as the Heidenhain backstitch suture method, I think, Miss Merriman, and it will be much simpler. I'm glad I brought it. Have you the saline solution, and the ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson

... of those tall, straight, wiry, brown men of the West, but from the old Selection Districts, where many drovers came from, and of the old bush school; one of those slight active little fellows whom we used to see in cabbage-tree hats, Crimean shirts, strapped trousers, and elastic-side boots—"larstins," they called them. They could dance well; sing indifferently, and mostly through their noses, the old bush songs; play the concertina horribly; and ride like—like—well, ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson

... soon cease to be young, and the middle-aged become old—or die! this was the thought that preyed on her very soul. She could not endure the conviction that her own father must one day walk with a less elastic step, and smile on her with eyes ever loving indeed, but more and more dimmed with age—and that her own mother must one day move to and fro with tottering gait, and speak with the tremulous accents of those old people ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various

... Farquissaire, that he was British—British from the well-trimmed head of hair beneath his light-grey Homberg hat to the most elegant socks and tan shoes which adorned his feet. His walk was British, his stride the active, elastic, athletic stride of one of our young fellows; and the poise of his head, the erectness of his lithe figure, a symbol of what one is accustomed to in Britons wherever they are met. That one gathered from a mere casual glance; though a second glance—a more penetrating ...
— With Joffre at Verdun - A Story of the Western Front • F. S. Brereton

... arterial blood. The obvious chemical alteration of the air is sufficiently simple in this process: a certain quantity of carbon only is added to it, and it receives an addition of heat or vapour; the volumes of elastic fluid inspired and expired (making allowance for change of temperature) are the same, and if ponderable agents only were to be regarded it would appear as if the only use of respiration were to free the blood from a certain ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy

... made the penances light, he loosened the bonds of the cross and sprinkled the way of salvation with sand. From the hard, unlovely, stern religion of the poor he had evolved a pleasant religion for the rich; it was easy, charming, elastic, adapting itself to things and to people, to all the ways and manners of society, to its customs and habits, and even to its prejudices. Of the idea of God he had made ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt

... necessary in the choice of brushes. Two are necessary: a penetrating and a polishing brush; the one composed of strong, and the other of fine hair. The penetrating brush (especially that used by ladies) should be made of elastic hairs, rather inclining to irregular lengths. The other should be made of firm, soft, silken hair, thickly studded. Unfortunately, however, we cannot but observe that penetrating brushes are often selected, so harsh and strong, that they ...
— The Ladies' Vase - Polite Manual for Young Ladies • An American Lady

... best newspapers gave full reports of the speech, with compliments. The columns of the "Evening Post" were generously declared to be "indefinitely elastic" for such utterances; and the "Tribune" expressed commendation wholly out of accord with the recent notions of its editor. The rough fellow from the crude West had made a powerful impression upon the cultivated gentlemen of ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse

... fine, but more simple, sensuous, and passionate." This relative statement, it must not be forgotten, is conditioned by what went before. If the terms are used absolutely, and not comparatively, as Milton used them, they must be very elastic if they would stretch widely enough to include all the poems which the world recognizes as masterpieces, nay, to include some of the best ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... chance as he often did, sent ground scouts forward and ordered a charge instantly, to catch the savages unready; and the stiff rods snapped and tangled between the beating hoofs. The horses plunged at the elastic edges of this excellent fortress, sometimes half lifted as a bent willow levered up against their bellies, and the forward-tilting men fended their faces from the whipping twigs. They could not wedge a man's length into that ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister

... form a correct judgment on the question whether this bill were constitutional or unconstitutional, it must, I think, be admitted that, as has been remarked before, the terms "constitutional" and "unconstitutional" are somewhat vague and elastic. There is no one document—not Magna Charta, nor the Petition of Eight, nor the Bill of Rights—which can be said to contain the whole of the British constitution. Its spirit and principles are, indeed, to be found in all the laws, to which they ...
— The Constitutional History of England From 1760 to 1860 • Charles Duke Yonge

... of realising your dreams, and you build for yourselves fair fabrics in imagination which you never take one step to accomplish and make real. Be not the slaves and fools of your imaginations, but cultivate the faculty of hoping largely; for the possibilities of human life are elastic, and no man or woman, in their most sanguine, early anticipations, if only these be directed to the one real good, has ever exhausted or attained the possibilities ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren

... Brahman wife chatted away, as gay as a bird. The fount of knowledge was opened to her—the beaming eye, the elastic figure, and the individuality of her Western sisters were becoming hers. But none of ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various

... of his house. I now continued my journey as before, towards the north. The weather, though beautiful, was much cooler than it had been for some time past; I walked at a great rate, with a springing and elastic step. In about two hours I came to where a kind of cottage stood a little way back from the road, with a huge oak before it, under the shade of which stood a little pony and cart, which seemed to contain various articles. I was going past, ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow

... render our excursion as gay to the eye, as it certainly was to our feelings. In a few minutes every trace of uneasiness had vanished. Away we went, the blacks doing full credit to their owner's boasts, seeming scarcely to touch tke ice, from which their feet appeared to rebound with a sort of elastic force. Herman Mordaunt's bays followed on our heels, and the sleighs had passed over the well-known shoal of the Overslaugh, within the first twenty minutes after they touched ...
— Satanstoe • James Fenimore Cooper

... older than he seemed. The fountain of benevolence within freshened his old age with its continuous flow. The step of the octogenarian was elastic as that of a boy, his form ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still

... afternoon, early in 1765. I had entered the green by the gate at the foot of Charlotte Street and had passed the old washing-house. I was thinking upon the engine at the time, and had gone as far as the herd's house, when the idea came into my mind that as steam was an elastic body it would rush into a vacuum, and if a communication were made between the cylinder and an exhausted vessel it would rush into it, and might be there condensed without cooling the cylinder. I then saw that I must ...
— James Watt • Andrew Carnegie

... ease, spirit, and elastic vigour, may be ranked his clear, sharp intellect. He may be called more a logician than a poet. He reasons often, and always acutely, and his rhyme, instead of shackling, strengthens the movement of his argumentation. Parts of his "Religio Laici" and the "Hind and Panther" ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden

... coming, is on board ships which an enemy cannot touch except when bound to a blockaded port, what will constitute an efficient blockade? The present definition is, that it is such as to constitute a manifest danger to a vessel seeking to enter or leave the port. This is evidently very elastic. Many can remember that during the Civil War, after a night attack on the United States fleet off Charleston, the Confederates next morning sent out a steamer with some foreign consuls on board, who so far satisfied themselves that no blockading vessel was ...
— The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783 • A. T. Mahan

... elastic, as you heard," said the lieutenant. "I am merely ordered to keep you in Ostend, under my eye, until your case has been passed upon by the commandant or the general staff. Since you have money, you may enjoy every luxury save that of travel, and I ask you ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces in the Red Cross • Edith Van Dyne

... me to go, an' never come back," he said, stepping out into the moonlight with the elastic tread of twenty-five. He stopped and looked back at her, with a beaming countenance, ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor

... traps for chetahs would be very powerful vermin-gins, made expressly of great size and strength, so as to lie one foot square when open. Even a common jackal-trap would hold a leopard, provided the chain was fastened to an elastic bough, so that it would yield slightly to his spring; but if it were secured to a post, or to anything that would enable him to get a dead pull against it, something would most likely give way. I have constantly set these traps for them, but always without success, as some other ...
— Eight Years' Wandering in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker

... for maneuvering or for wriggling free. Clear from the ground Brice's feet were swung. The breath was squeezed out of him. His elastic strength was cramped and made useless. His lungs seemed bursting. The pressure on his ribs was unbearable. Like many a better man he was paying the price for ...
— Black Caesar's Clan • Albert Payson Terhune

... thick hemp rope stretched and absorbed the strain; the wire was less elastic. They were approaching Carmel Point, and Holyhead was not far, but they must front the gale when they got round the corner. In the meantime, the engines were running smoothly, and Lister smoked and waited while the ...
— Lister's Great Adventure • Harold Bindloss

... 1650 feet per second, will assuredly assume the form of a button mushroom immediately upon impact, and it will increase in diameter as it meets with resistance upon its course until, when expended beneath the elastic hide upon the opposite side, it will have become fully spread like a mature mushroom, instead of the button shape that it had assumed on entrance. I prefer pure lead for tigers, lions, sambur deer, wapiti, and such large animals which are not thick-skinned, as the ...
— Wild Beasts and their Ways • Sir Samuel W. Baker

... our generalship was the system which put the High Command into the hands of a group of men belonging to the old school of war, unable, by reason of their age and traditions, to get away from rigid methods and to become elastic in ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs

... a footstep; but he could not persuade himself that the slow and lingering tread of the person approaching him was that of Susan, so much did it differ from the buoyant and elastic step with which she used to trip along. On looking through the branches, however, he perceived her coming towards him, carrying the pitcher as usual in her hand. The blood was already careering at full speed through his veins, and the palpitations of his heart were ...
— Going To Maynooth - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton

... manufactured by MESSRS. D'ALMAINE & CO., have great pleasure in bearing testimony to their merits and capabilities. It appears to us impossible to produce instruments of the same size possessing a richer and finer tone, more elastic touch, or more equal temperament, while the elegance of their construction renders them a handsome ornament for the library, boudoir, or drawing-room. (Signed) J. L. Abel, F. Benedict, H. R. Bishop, J. Blewett, J. Brizzi, T. P. Chipp, P. Delavanti, C. H. Dolby, E. F. Fitzwilliam, W. Forde, Stephen ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 232, April 8, 1854 • Various

... one instant left, in which he might have drawn, back into the library in time to escape Sydney's notice. He was incapable of the effort of will. Grief and suspense had deprived him of that elastic readiness of mind which springs at once from thought to action. For a moment he hesitated. In that moment she looked ...
— The Evil Genius • Wilkie Collins

... over a much longer period of time. Wilson, too, contemplated a work upon our quadrupeds, but did not live to begin it. Audubon was blessed with good health, length of years, a devoted and self-sacrificing wife, and a buoyant, sanguine, and elastic disposition. He had the heavenly gift of enthusiasm—a passionate love for the work he set out to do. He was a natural hunter, roamer, woodsman; as unworldly as a child, and as simple and transparent. We have had better trained and more scientific ...
— John James Audubon • John Burroughs

... railroad company with which he was connected. For a time its operations had been suspended, owing to a financial crisis,—a sort of periodical American epidemic that, like cholera, sweeps over the land at intervals, making frightful ravage for a season, and departing as mysteriously as it came. The elastic nation, never long prostrate, had risen out of temporary difficulties and depression with a sudden bound, and prosperity walked in the very footprints of ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie

... the creeping country press has not dressed it yet. Now congratulate me, my friend, as indeed you have already done, that I live with my wife in my own house, waiting on the good future. The house is not large, but convenient and very elastic. The more hearts (specially great hearts) it holds, the better it looks and feels. I have not had so much leisure yet but that the fact of having ample space to spread my books and blotted paper is still ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson

... black and powerful. His long neck fitted into well-placed shoulders. He had great depth of girth, immense length from shoulder-points to hips, big cannon-bones, and elastic pasterns. There was neither amiability nor pride in his mien; rather a sullen sense of brute power, such as may have belonged to the knights of the Middle Ages. Now and again he curled his lips away from the bit and laid his ears back as if he intended ...
— The Splendid Idle Forties - Stories of Old California • Gertrude Atherton

... strike a vital part. The consequence is, that the rifles are so light in proportion to their load that the recoil seriously diminishes the force of the ball, and entirely prevents accuracy of aim; and at the same time their elastic metal springs so much under the pressure of the gas generated by the explosion of the powder that anything like exactitude becomes impossible.[1][Footnote 1: Experiments have shown, that, with a barrel about the thickness of that of our "regulation ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various

... up the engine. She could see him stooping and rising to it, a rhythmic, elastic movement; he was cranking energetically, with a sort of furious, flushed enjoyment of ...
— The Romantic • May Sinclair

... or to the rear of Souville toward Verdun the surprising thing was how few soldiers you saw and how little transport within range of German guns; which impressed you with the elastic system of the French, who are there and are not there. Let an attack by the Germans develop and soldiers would spring out of the earth and the valleys echo with the thunder of guns. A thrifty ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer

... common purpose, and linked together by the effectual energy of a single will."[12] Vessels in a state of concentration he compares to a fan that opens and shuts. In this view concentration connotes not a homogeneous body, but a compound organism controlled from a common centre, and elastic enough to permit it to cover a wide field without sacrificing the mutual support ...
— Some Principles of Maritime Strategy • Julian Stafford Corbett

... Margaret's elastic temper rose with the encouragement thus received, and Edward's heart beat high with hope. The party began their westward march, and through the bright days of April and May they rode through the smiling land, receiving welcome and adulation from all, and reinforcements ...
— In the Wars of the Roses - A Story for the Young • Evelyn Everett-Green

... went to the Tower, as we saw, rather than swear; and about the same time the royal commissioners appeared at the Charterhouse to require the submission of the brethren. The regular clergy through the kingdom had bent to the storm. The conscience of the London Carthusians was less elastic; they were the first and, with the exception of More and Fisher, the only recusants. "The prior did answer to the commissioners," Maurice tells us, "that he knew nothing of such matters, and could not meddle with them; and they continuing to insist, and the prior ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude

... important thing to preserve, in decorative design, however widely we may depart from the letter sometimes. This is a difficult quality to define, but I should say it chiefly consists in a nice attention to the character of form, the elastic spring of curves, an understanding of the construction and proportions, and grasp of the effect. In designing we constantly feel the need of repeating certain masses with variations or balancing them by equivalents, ...
— Line and Form (1900) • Walter Crane

... elastic wing, Aloft the rapid whirlwind flies; The coldest gale of Zembla bring, And brace with ...
— The Philadelphia Magazines and their Contributors 1741-1850 • Albert Smyth

... year's growth, see how the silvery dust lies on every seared leaf and twig, deposited in such infinite and luxurious forms as by their very variety atone for the absence of color. Observe the tiny tracks of mice around every stem, and the triangular tracks of the rabbit. A pure elastic heaven hangs over all, as if the impurities of the summer sky, refined and shrunk by the chaste winter's cold, had been winnowed from the heavens ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau

... along. I find it difficult to believe them all uxoriously wed—at any rate this is not a pleasure excursion. Agreed the captain should take his and told him to effect some compromise on the others. The capacity of the Sisyphus is not elastic. ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore

... letting her attention wander to the smoothly shining arms she had folded across her knees just below the edge of the table. She was feeling extraordinarily well that night, so that the sense of her body was a deep delight, a realization of a gentle warmth and strength and elastic firmness. Then she glanced at the cards again, over which her aunt's many-ringed hand played, and then at the rather weak, rather plump face ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells

... Fatty Melchers today to make a violin, we cut a piece of wood the shape of a violin then take some horsehairs and strech them over a brige and you can play a tune on them. in school i learnt to play on a piece of india rubber. you pull a piece of elastic out of your congres boot and hold it in your teeth and pull it tite and snap it with your fingers and you can play tunes that you can hear but no one else can. old Francis saw me snapping the elastic and came and took it away. i have ...
— The Real Diary of a Real Boy • Henry A. Shute

... Fairfax's opinions respecting his granddaughter, and she again found time to communicate them to her brother. To her prodigious relief, he was not moved thereby. He had a letter from Ryde in his pocket, apprising him on what day his dear Julia was to become Mrs. Brotherton; and he was in an elastic humor because of his late success—just in the humor when a man of mature age and sense puts his trust in Fortune and expects to go on succeeding. Perhaps he had not consciously endeavored to detach his thoughts from Julia, but a shade of retrospective reverie had fallen ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr

... influence by bungling efforts to make the lovers' path smooth. Catherine was a sort of cushion against which all the billiard balls of the game knocked themselves in succession, leaving her cool and elastic temper undisturbed. Three more days passed without throwing much new light on the disputed question whether the engagement could last, except that Esther seemed clearly more anxious and restless. Mr. Hazard was with her several hours every day and ...
— Esther • Henry Adams

... With elastic step and cheery voice the men swung along to the inspiring strains of 'Tipperary.' The road was typical of Belgium; the long avenue of poplar trees, flanked by broad ditches, being the distinguishing feature of this and most Belgium roads (the centre being ...
— With The Immortal Seventh Division • E. J. Kennedy and the Lord Bishop of Winchester

... the corset hung two elastic suspenders as yet awaiting their prey. But first must be drawn on the silk or stockinette knickerbockers which in the 1910 woman replaced the piteously laughable drawers of the Victorian period. Then the suspenders clutched the rims of the stockings with an arrangement of nickel and rubber ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston

... Hillside—at least she was supposed to be resting. Her sharp ears, though, were ever on the alert, and if she guessed what was going on, she would come out and spoil everything. Mrs. Pike was shopping—buying gloves, and elastic for Anna's shoes, and a few trifles for herself, for she too was going ...
— Kitty Trenire • Mabel Quiller-Couch

... alive—By Jove, there he is!" and the subject of his speech came as briskly up the walk as if the thermometer had been in the seventies instead of the nineties. His dress was quiet and elegant, and his form erect and step elastic. ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe

... admits not of idle wailing compelled her still to pursue her daily course of labour, and she pursued it with the same constancy and punctuality as she had ever done. But the exquisitely chiselled face, the majestic gait, the elastic step—the beauty and glory of youth, unshaken because unassaulted by death and sorrow—where were they? Alas! all the bewitching charms of her former being had gone down into the grave of her mother and sister; and she, their support ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal, No. 421, New Series, Jan. 24, 1852 • Various

... we are about to be severe on Young's failings and failures, we ought, if a reviewer's space were elastic, to dwell also on his merits—on the startling vigor of his imagery—on the occasional grandeur of his thought—on the piquant force of that grave satire into which his meditations continually run. But, since our "limits" ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot

... highest gifts,—so truly many-sided, that it would be presumptuous in me to attempt to describe him, except under those aspects in which he came before me. Nor have I here to speak of the gentleness and tenderness of nature, the playfulness, the free elastic force and graceful versatility of mind, and the patient winning considerateness in discussion, which endeared him to those to whom he opened his heart; for I am all along engaged upon matters of belief and opinion, and am introducing others into my narrative, not for ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman

... a small hill, Willet rose to his feet and the others, with intense relief, did likewise. Robert's and Grosvenor's joints were young and elastic, and the stiffness quickly left them, but both had done enough creeping and crawling for one night. All stood listening for a minute or two. They heard no more shots fired at the rocks, but the two owls began to call ...
— The Lords of the Wild - A Story of the Old New York Border • Joseph A. Altsheler

... the handkerchief disappeared into nothingness, when it really disappeared into a small tin cup, attached to my person by a piece of elastic. ...
— The Little White Bird - or Adventures In Kensington Gardens • J. M. Barrie

... was wise enough never to take advantage of a customer regarding either price or quality. If the buyer held off long enough she might buy very close to cost, but if she bought quickly and at Stewart's figures, he had a way of throwing in a yard of ribbon, or elastic, or a spool or two of thread, all unasked for, that equalized the transaction. He seems to have been the very first man in trade to realize that to hold your trade you must make a friend of the customer. In a year he had outgrown ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard

... delightful to him to look into Gordon's honest face again and to return his manly grasp. And he looked well—he looked happy; to see that was more delightful yet. During these few instants, while they exchanged a silent pledge of renewed friendship, Bernard's elastic perception embraced several things besides the consciousness of his own pleasure. He saw that Gordon looked well and happy, but that he looked older, too, and more serious, more marked by life. He looked as if something had happened to him—as, in ...
— Confidence • Henry James

... the leg will obviate the difficulty, provided the weather is not wet; for if so, the shoe soon wears out. Mexican and Indian horses and mules will make long journeys without being shod, as their hoofs are tough and elastic, and wear away very gradually; they will, however, in time become very smooth, making it difficult for ...
— The Prairie Traveler - A Hand-book for Overland Expeditions • Randolph Marcy

... Mr. Greggs start work, Hugh?" asked his mother, rescuing the elastic bands from Shirley and moving the ink well back from the ...
— Rainbow Hill • Josephine Lawrence

... the same. She wouldn't give anybody but you such an elastic invitation as that, and you should appreciate her eagerness to get you," declared Judith, who cared very much from whom her invitations came and could never understand her friend's careless attitude toward the ...
— The Indifference of Juliet • Grace S. Richmond

... requires time and care for these ligaments to resume their natural strength and elasticity after childbirth. Then, too, the walls of the abdomen are one of the supports provided by nature to keep all the organs they contain in proper place by a constant elastic pressure. When, as in pregnancy, these walls are distended and put on the strain, suddenly to be relaxed after confinement, the organs miss their support, and are liable to take positions which interfere with the performance of their natural functions. Therefore we may ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys

... black, and are formed chiefly of agal-agal a marine cellular plant. The Chinese lanterns are made of netted thread, smeared over with the gum produced by boiling down this same plant, which, when dry, forms a firm pellucid and elastic substitute for horn. ...
— Mark Seaworth • William H.G. Kingston

... are copied from originals found in the more modern Etruscan sepulchres, and are probably contemporary with the earliest days of the Roman empire. Fig. 85 is admirably adapted to the finger; being made of the purest gold, it is naturally slightly elastic; but the hoop is not perfected, each extremity ending in a broad leaf-shaped ornament, most delicately banded with threads of beaded and twisted wire, acting as a brace upon the finger. Fig. 86 is equally meritorious; the solid half-ring ...
— Rambles of an Archaeologist Among Old Books and in Old Places • Frederick William Fairholt

... his step light and elastic as he left the house. He thought over what Nell had told him, and her confidence in him gave him great joy. He valued this far more than the explanation she had volunteered about her family affairs. She trusted ...
— The Unknown Wrestler • H. A. (Hiram Alfred) Cody

... a professional career with a more vigorous and elastic constitution than Mr. Paine's. Endowed with an iron frame and nerves of lignum vitae, he very naturally felt in youth that his fund of physical energy was inexhaustible; but, like thousands of other professional men in this fiery and impatient age, he finds himself in ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 6 • Various

... fortune, but for some unaccountable reason he hesitated about addressing himself to the narrow work of getting it. He never walked Broadway, a part of its tide of abundant shifting life, without feeling something of the flush of wealth, and unconsciously taking the elastic step of one ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 2. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner

... makes his jokes, you applaud the accuracy of his memory, and 'tis only when he states his facts that you admire the flights of his imagination." After many efforts to express this thought more concisely, and to reduce the language of it to that condensed and elastic state, in which alone it gives force to the projectiles of wit, he kept the passage by him patiently some years,—till at length he found an opportunity of turning it to account, in a reply, I believe, to Mr. Dundas, in the House of Commons, when, with the most extemporaneous air, he ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore

... were drawn up, his head hung at a dreadful angle to his body, and the clatter of his heels against the door made the noise which had broken in upon our conversation. In an instant I had caught him round the waist, and held him up while Holmes and Pycroft untied the elastic bands which had disappeared between the livid creases of skin. Then we carried him into the other room, where he lay with a clay-colored face, puffing his purple lips in and out with every breath—a dreadful wreck of all that he had ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

... making down from the roots, and sometimes Nature in high tides brings her mirror to its foot and makes it visible. The stillness was intense and almost conscious, as if it were a natural Sabbath, and we fancied that the morning was the evening of a celestial day. The air was so elastic and crystalline that it had the same effect on the landscape that a glass has on a picture, to give it an ideal remoteness and perfection. The landscape was clothed in a mild and quiet light, in which the woods and fences checkered ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau

... Deputies there are Merchants, Artists, Men of Letters; three hundred and seventy-four Lawyers; (Bouille, Memoires sur la Revolution Francaise (London, 1797), i. 68.) and at least one Clergyman: the Abbe Sieyes. Him also Paris sends, among its twenty. Behold him, the light thin man; cold, but elastic, wiry; instinct with the pride of Logic; passionless, or with but one passion, that of self-conceit. If indeed that can be called a passion, which, in its independent concentrated greatness, seems to have soared into transcendentalism; ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle

... pale, clear skin, the large, black eyes, the glossy and abundant hair. Here the resemblance ceased. I have heard my uncle say,—how often!—"Your mother, Juanita, had the most perfect form I ever saw, except in marble"; all Spanish women, indeed, he told me, had a full, elastic roundness of shape and limb, rarely seen among our spare and loose-built nation. I was American in form, at least,—slight and stooping, with a certain awkwardness, partly to be imputed to my rapid growth, partly to my shyness and reserve. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various

... his hand questingly. What his fingers flattened against was not a tight, solid surface, but rather an unseen elastic curtain which gave a little under his prodding and ...
— Star Hunter • Andre Alice Norton

... note of sorrow or even of despair is perceptible in these sentences, there is no sign that the virile and elastic spirit of the writer is broken. But there are manifest signs of an increasing tendency towards mental detachment from the world which had used him so ill. With the happiest of men the almost certain prospect of extinction at the end of a dozen years usually tends ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters

... wheat, garnered by moonlight, a peacock's feather, and a small silver bell with a coiled snake for a handle. When anything is to be decided, a few of the grains are taken out and counted. If they are even, the omen is bad, but if they are odd, all is well. Old John had an elastic and accommodating mind, like all Romanys, so he never thought it strange that he should ask the "box of meanings" whether or not it was going to ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various

... her early days, the growing anxiety of her later life, the maturer judgments, the occasional despairing terrors which came to try her bright nature, but along with it all, that innocent and enduring hopefulness which never really deserted her. Her elastic spirit she owed to her father, that incorrigible old Skimpole. 'I am generally happy everywhere,' she writes in her youth—and then later on: 'It is a great pleasure to me to love and to admire, this is a faculty which has survived many frosts and storms.' It ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford

... thought Charles, marvelling at his sister, and his elastic spirits throwing him into the project with a sort of enjoyment, partaking of the pleasure of being of use, the spirit of enterprise, and the 'fun' of starting independently on an expedition unknown to ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge

... very long since Jack had trod the ground with the elastic step with which he hastened back to bring his friend to Mr Gournay's house. He felt, indeed, very proud at the thought that he should thus have been the means of restoring two loving hearts to each other, and still more proud he felt he should be if he could discover their long-lost ...
— John Deane of Nottingham - Historic Adventures by Land and Sea • W.H.G. Kingston

... however, though indeed very seldom, the swelling does not disappear, but it goes on gradually increasing and becoming more definite in its outlines until at the end of three or four days it may be as big as half a small orange, or sometimes even larger, soft, elastic, painless, under the unchanged scalp, but presenting the peculiarity of having a hard raised margin with a distinct edge, which gives to the finger passed over it the sensation of a bony ridge, beyond which the bone seems deficient. This tumour is due ...
— The Mother's Manual of Children's Diseases • Charles West, M.D.

... we found a wonderful change of climate: the degree of heat was, at least, equal to that of a usual summer day in England, without the disagreeable pressure experienced from a thick atmosphere. The air was perfectly clear, elastic, and animating, nothing could be more charming; but this was of short continuance; the next morning the wind shifted to the N. E., and blew a gale, which lasted eighteen hours. We had then a calm, which was succeeded by ...
— Travels in the United States of America • William Priest

... of poverty which may be nobly accepted and gaily borne; but Vinet, devoured by ambition, and feeling himself guilty towards his wife, was full of darkling rage; his conscience grew elastic; and he finally came to think any means of success permissible. His young face changed. Persons about the courts were sometimes frightened as they looked at his viperish, flat head, his slit mouth, his eyes gleaming through glasses, and heard his sharp, persistent voice which rasped ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac

... independently of stars. If it is self-luminous, it seems more fit to produce a star by its condensation, than to depend upon the star for its own existence. Such were a few of the theorems to which his discovery of this nebula led him. The hypothesis of an elastic shining fluid existing in space, sometimes in connection with stars, sometimes distinct from them, was adopted and never abandoned. How well the spectroscope has confirmed this idea it is not necessary to say. We know the shining fluid does exist, and in late ...
— Sir William Herschel: His Life and Works • Edward Singleton Holden

... thumping mechanically with his heels, sucking at the knob of his ash-plant, his legs in trousers that had slipped up to show his gray socks, and his feet shod with elastic-sided boots. ...
— Boy Woodburn - A Story of the Sussex Downs • Alfred Ollivant

... globules have not become a curiosity as yet, like Perkins's Tractors. But time is a very elastic element in Geology and Prophecy. If Daniel's seventy weeks mean four hundred and ninety years, as the learned Prideaux and others have settled it that they do, the "not many years" of my prediction may be stretched out a generation or two beyond our time, if necessary, when the prophecy will ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... viz., the mould will stand obliquely to the piston, and a dangerous friction will result." "Of course, it is necessary to protect the man working the hydraulic valves during compression. At Waltham Abbey they have a curtain made of ship's hawsers, which is at the same time elastic and resistant." Mr Guttmann has found that a partition wall 12 inches thick, made of 2-inch planks, and filled with ground cinders, gives very effective protection. A door in this partition enables the workman to get to the press, and a conical ...
— Nitro-Explosives: A Practical Treatise • P. Gerald Sanford

... now took from her pocket a beautiful pair of elastic glass slippers, which she caused Cinderella to put on; and when she had thus completed her work, and Cinderella stood before her, arrayed in her beautiful clothes, the fairy was much pleased, and desired her to get into ...
— Little Cinderella • Anonymous

... A truce with remark, and let nothing control This "feast of our reason, and flow of the soul." Oh! my dear Mr. Botherby! sympathise!—I Now feel such a rapture, I'm ready to fly, 130 I feel so elastic—"so buoyant—so buoyant!"[631] ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron

... overlooking its true character on account of its external appearance; and yet ellipses may be so elongated, that, far from resembling a circle, they make the impression of parallel lines linked at their extremities. Or we may have an elastic curve in which the appearance of a circle is produced by the meeting of the two ends; nevertheless it belongs to the family of elastic curves, in which may even be included a line actually straight, and is formed by a process entirely different from that ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various

... been used for many purposes. It is split up into little pieces, and used for light frameworks, which are required to be stiff, but, at the same time, elastic. It used to be used for the ribs of umbrellas and for ladies' hoops. It was also split very small and used for the bristles of brushes. But it is now becoming scarce, and other substances are generally used ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various

... precepts, as above-mentioned, a man remains in the evil in which he was born. Before such implantation, it is impossible for any good to reach him, or if it reaches him, it is instantly struck back and rebounds like an elastic ball falling upon a rock, or it is absorbed like a diamond thrown into a bog. A man not reformed as to the Spirit, is like a panther or an owl, and may be compared to a bramble and a nettle; but a man regenerated is like a sheep or a dove, and may be compared to an olive and a vine. Consider, ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg

... Remember first, as to the driving system, that it works on the fabric of space. Space is, in the physical sense, a fabric woven of the threads of lines of force from every body in the universe, made up of fields and forces. It is elastic, and can transmit strains. But anything that can transmit strains, can be strained against. With the tremendous field intensities available by the material engines, I can get such fields as will 'dig their ...
— The Ultimate Weapon • John Wood Campbell

... when technical expressions are properly formed, even a bad writer can make himself understood. In the early days of Buddhist philosophy in the Pali literature, this difficulty is greatly felt. There are some technical terms here which are still very elastic and their repetition in different places in more or less different senses heighten the difficulty of understanding the real ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta

... places completely covered with a variety of yellowish-green moss, varying from a couple of inches to a foot and a half in thickness; and yielding to the pressure of the foot or the body as comfortably as a feather bed, if not more so, being elastic in nature. A large square of this had been cut up from some other part of the island and placed on the already moss-grown and cushioned ground, serving as a mattress, while two smaller pieces served as pillows. A sumac tree ...
— Crowded Out! and Other Sketches • Susie F. Harrison

... wear, and the surface is so fresh, that if we use card or paper alone we shall leave a mark of the pressure, hand over those thin pieces of cork and let us put them between the paper and the metal of the vice, there, that will be better for standing the pressure, more elastic you see." The vice under the fresh conditions is now applied, the parts of the table or plate are brought together accurately and held tightly in position by the fingers, the glue exuding from the crack ...
— The Repairing & Restoration of Violins - 'The Strad' Library, No. XII. • Horace Petherick

... resistance to the air of the wings he explains: 'The air when struck offers resistance by its elastic virtue through which the particles of the air compressed by the wing-beat strive to expand again. Through these two causes of resistance the downward beat of the wing is not only opposed, but even caused to recoil with a reflex movement; and these two ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian

... rebounding Touches he the vaulted roof. Anxiously the mother calleth: Spring amain, and at thy pleasure; But beware, think not of flying, unto thee is flight denied. And so warns the faithful father: In the earth the force elastic Lies, aloft that sends thee bounding; let thy toe but touch the surface, Like the son of earth, Antaeus, straightway is thy strength renewed. And so o'er these rocky masses, on from dizzy ledge to ledge, Leaps he ever, hither, thither, springing like ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke

... that rise and flow against the base of the mount are more insidious and taxing to strike against than those which encircle the Mount of St. Michael, in Cornwall; but then the quality of the sea must be more pure and far more buoyant off the Cornish coast, and freshens to a greater extent the elastic movements of the swimmer. The sea, speaking from experience, does not harass one, swimming in the bay of St. Michael, Normandy, until the "retirage" is met; when all the force that can be exerted is necessarily called forth to prevent being ...
— Original Letters and Biographic Epitomes • J. Atwood.Slater

... as the pores of the wood have become impregnated with oil. This makes the instrument heavy both in weight and sound; but as time rolls on the oil dries, leaving the wood mellowed and wrapped in an elastic covering which yields to the tone of the instrument and imparts to it much of its own softness. We will now turn to spirit varnish. When this is used a diametrically opposite effect is produced. The Violin ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart

... the customers. Madame Defarge wore no rose in her head, for the great brotherhood of Spies had become, even in one short week, extremely chary of trusting themselves to the saint's mercies. The lamps across his streets had a portentously elastic swing ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens

... He had not written letters to anybody save to his employer, but his conscience was an elastic one. ...
— The Secret House • Edgar Wallace

... while the whole progress of Cesare Borgia in his career of villany is analyzed with exquisite distinctness in Chapter xxvi. The wisdom of Guicciardini nowhere appears more ripe, or his intellect more elastic, than in the Istoria Fiorentina. Students who desire to gain a still closer insight into the working of Guicciardini's mind should consult the 403 Ricordi Politici e Civili collected in the first volume of his Opere Inedite. These have all the charm which belongs to occasional utterances, ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds

... always been, and to-day is more than ever, a very elastic term. The Census Superintendent, himself a high caste Hindu, wrote: "The definition which would cover the Hindu of the modern times is that he should be born of parents not belonging to some recognised ...
— The Panjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir • Sir James McCrone Douie



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