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noun
Flake  n.  A flat layer, or fake, of a coiled cable. "Flake after flake ran out of the tubs, until we were compelled to hand the end of our line to the second mate."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Flake" Quotes from Famous Books



... and more fast, O'er night's brim, day boils at last; Boils, pure gold, o'er the cloud-cup's brim Where spurting and suppressed it lay, 5 For not a froth-flake touched the rim Of yonder gap in the solid gray Of the eastern cloud, an hour away; But forth one wavelet, then another, curled, Till the whole sunrise, not to be suppressed, 10 Rose, reddened, and its seething breast Flickered in bounds, grew gold, ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning

... of snowfields Aglow in the sunset light, Great fir trees snow-flake laden And broken clouds piled white; While bathed in a silver sheen The pines on ...
— The Last West and Paolo's Virginia • G. B. Warren

... were deep in snow. The fall had begun two hours before light; gently, and with large flakes—the presage of what was to come. Snow was still falling in the afternoon; but now the wind had sprung up, and each large flake was torn into a dozen as the wind played with them, driving them upwards like dust, then catching them and sending them horizontally and at speed over the ground, till they could find a resting-place in some drift that was forming on the north sides of fences, or ...
— 'Murphy' - A Message to Dog Lovers • Major Gambier-Parry

... salmon and then drain. Remove the skin and bones and flake with a fork. Soak three tablespoons of gelatine in one-half cup of cold water and then place ...
— Mrs. Wilson's Cook Book - Numerous New Recipes Based on Present Economic Conditions • Mary A. Wilson

... cried Hagan, "stand close against the wall; Let not the burning ashes on your helm-laces fall. Into the blood yet deeper tread every fiery flake. In sooth, this feast of ...
— Song and Legend From the Middle Ages • William D. McClintock and Porter Lander McClintock

... a break in skate a little lunch so slimy, a west end of a board line is that which shows a little beneath so that necessity is a silk under wear. That is best wet. It is so natural, and why is there flake, there is flake ...
— Tender Buttons - Objects—Food—Rooms • Gertrude Stein

... the last of the twilight passed. Slowly, the graceful lines, the proud forms, the majestic piles of the city melted—melted, blurred and were lost even as are lost the form and loveliness of a snow flake on the sleeve. Slowly, slowly, the glorious colors faded as fade the flowers at the touch of frost. The lights went out. The darkness came. The city that is fairer than ...
— The Uncrowned King • Harold Bell Wright

... the glassy water seems momentarily stiffening into the solider blackness of ice. Here and there thin films are already formed over it, and are being constantly broken apart by the treacherous current; a flake a foot square is jerked away and goes sliding beneath the slight transparent surface till it reappears below. The same thing, on a larger scale, helps to form the mighty ice-pack of the Northern seas. Nothing except ice is capable of combining, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various

... was as gray and sombre as yesterday's had been. All the sea was in a great turmoil, and rolled in a flood of foam upon the shore as far as he could see. Not a sail in sight upon the lonely waste, not a sign of human life anywhere. Now and then a snow-flake fluttered down; and the wind screamed shrilly about the house-corners, and ...
— Culm Rock - The Story of a Year: What it Brought and What it Taught • Glance Gaylord

... Shred, flake or mince a cupful of any freshly cooked or canned sea food and save some of the liquor, if any. Make according to ...
— The Complete Book of Cheese • Robert Carlton Brown

... endeavored to draw fire from a pair that he dug from the moist earth, and failing, threw them with all his strength at the rocky wall. One of them shivered to irregular pieces, the other parted with a flake—a six-inch dagger-like fragment, flat on one side, convex on the other, with sharp edges that met in a point at one end, and at the other, where lay the cone of percussion, rounded into a roughly cylindrical ...
— "Where Angels Fear to Tread" and Other Stories of the Sea • Morgan Robertson

... Flake the fish and marinate with French dressing (three tablespoonfuls of oil, one tablespoonful of lemon juice or vinegar, a dash of salt and pepper, for each pint of fish); drain, and add half as much boiled potato, cut in small cubes and dressed with French dressing. ...
— Salads, Sandwiches and Chafing-Dish Dainties - With Fifty Illustrations of Original Dishes • Janet McKenzie Hill

... BOREHAM writes in answer to SNOW-FLAKE that the way to make almond rock is to cut in small slices three-quarters of a pound of sweet almonds, half a pound of candied peel, and two ounces of citron; add one pound and a half of sugar, a quarter of a pound of flour, and the whites of six eggs. Roll the mixture into small-sized ...
— Little Folks (October 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various

... death and separation - here is, indeed, a projected escalade of heaven; here are, indeed, labours for a Hercules in a dress coat, armed with a pen and a dictionary to depict the passions, armed with a tube of superior flake-white to paint the portrait of the insufferable sun. No art is true in this sense: none can "compete with life": not even history, built indeed of indisputable facts, but these facts robbed of their vivacity and sting; so that even when we read of the ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson

... a foam flake tossed and thrown, She could barely hold her own, While the other ships all helplessly were drifting to the lee. Through the smother and the rout The 'Calliope' steamed out — And they cheered her from the Trenton that was foundering ...
— Rio Grande's Last Race and Other Verses • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson

... day, indeed, and sorely did La Malene tempt us to a halt. It is a little oasis of verdure and luxuriance between two arid chasms—flake of emerald wedged in a cleft of barren rock. The hamlet itself, like most villages of the Lozere, has a neglected appearance. Very fair accommodation, however, is to be had at the house of the brothers Montginoux, ...
— The Roof of France • Matilda Betham-Edwards

... when he returned to the igloos. As he descended the hill a flake of snow struck his face and it was followed by others. A breath of wind like a blast from a bellows swirled the flakes abroad. The ...
— Ungava Bob - A Winter's Tale • Dillon Wallace

... all these stems were for the most part in one flake exactly of the same make, so were they in differing Figures of very differing ones; so that in a very little time I have observ'd above an hundred several cizes and shapes ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke

... utter quiet he thought even that he could hear them stir within their winding sheets, or it may have been that the Asika had risen and moved among them on some errand of her own. Far away something fell to the floor, a very light object, such as flake of rock or a scale of gold. Yet the noise of it struck his nerves loud as a clap of thunder, and those of Jeekie also, for he felt him start at his side and heard the sudden hammerlike ...
— The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa • H. Rider Haggard

... preservation of another Esquimaux youth, was likewise the cause of much joy at Hopedale. On the 10th of June, 1819, this lad had been carried out to sea upon a flake of ice, which separated from the main mass in a terrible storm, and was given up for lost. He, however, after having, for some time, been driven about, gained the larger body of drift ice, and was carried towards an island, on which he landed. ...
— The Moravians in Labrador • Anonymous

... is veiled in mystery by the haze of the south wind. The ranges and peaks far away fade into cloudlike shadows. The depths below us seem to sink unfathomably. Nablus is buried in the gulf. On the summit of Gerizim, a Mohammedan weli, shining like a flake of mica, marks the plateau where the Samaritan Temple stood. Hilltop towns, Asiret, Talluza, Yasid, emerge like islands from the misty sea. In that great shadowy hollow to the west lie the ruins of the city ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke

... Mr. Fogo; but whether dead or alive she could not say. Down on the mud she knelt, and, turning him gently over, looked into his face. It was streaked with slime, and powdered with a yellowish flake, as of sand. His locks were singed most pitifully. She started up, took him by the shoulders, and tried to drag him ...
— The Astonishing History of Troy Town • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... a shaggy fell, his choicest tool a flake of stone; His best of ornaments tattood skin and holes to hang his bits ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton

... care how hard it snows as long as it keeps on," Hector said in a low voice in answer to an exclamation from Paolo when the first flake fell upon his face. "The harder the better, for in that case no sentry could see us half a dozen paces away. There is another advantage. The wind is from the north, and we have only to keep the driving ...
— Won by the Sword - A Story of the Thirty Years' War • G.A. Henty

... my side and turn, I pray, On the lake below thy gentle eyes; The clouds hang over it, heavy and gray, And dark and silent the water lies; And out of that frozen mist the snow In wavering flakes begins to flow; Flake after flake They sink in the dark ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant

... evening, when little Kay was going to bed, he jumped on the chair by the window, and looked through the little hole. A few snow-flakes were falling outside, and one of the, the largest, lay on the edge of one of the window-boxes. The snow-flake grew larger and larger till it took the form of a maiden, dressed ...
— The Pink Fairy Book • Various

... killed two or three, and then debated whether to go to the promontory or not. Agnew was eager to go, so as to touch the actual rock; but I was satisfied with what we had done, and was now desirous of returning. In the midst of this I felt a flake of snow on my cheek. I started and looked up. To my great surprise I saw that the sky had changed since I had last noticed it. When we left the ship it was clear and blue, but now it was overspread with dark, leaden-colored clouds, and the snow-flakes that had fallen ...
— A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder • James De Mille

... a first fault draws many others in its train. As an impalpable flake is the beginning of an avalanche, so an imprudence is often the ...
— File No. 113 • Emile Gaboriau

... forward daily, hourly, to the anguish of her departure. She would vanish out of his life, intangible as a melted snow-flake, and only memory would stay behind to tell him he had known and loved her. Why should this be so hard to bear? If she stayed, he dared not tell her she was dear to him; he dared not stretch forth his hand to help her. In all the ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon

... it chanced, one gentle day, While softly wept the rain, And sadly sighed the mourning breeze, The flowers to see again; A silvery snow-flake fell to earth, ...
— Small Means and Great Ends • Edited by Mrs. M. H. Adams

... fell like a snow-flake upon Hilda's mood and was swallowed up. "You are very preposterous," she said. "Go on. You always amuse one." Then as if Hilda's going on were precisely the thing she could not quite endure, she said quickly, "The Coromandel is telegraphed ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan

... and the hour of bitterest cold, is that immediately preceding sunrise. As though by consent our three friends during this period fell into silence, and none spoke until the sun looked out over the ice, and the frost-covered snow—each frost flake a miniature prism—was set a-sparkling and a-glinting as though the snow was thick sown ...
— Bobby of the Labrador • Dillon Wallace

... "we have not seen a cloud, nor a drop of rain nor a flake of snow, nor a flash of lightning, nor heard a peal ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings

... one than that, her husband thought, was to see her in her boat at sunset; when sea and sky were aflame, when every flake of foam was a rainbow, and the great chalk-cliffs were blood-red; when the wind blew her net off, and in pretty petulance she pulled her hair down, and it rippled all about her as she dipped into the ...
— Men, Women, and Ghosts • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps

... not yet a woman, but belongs to us and the woods and the waters and the midnight. A child singing wonderful songs in the starlight, serenading with tender, passionate love-songs the old man who waves his hand and breathes down a kiss which is chilled by the night air, and falls like a snow-flake into her hot bosom, not as ...
— Early Letters of George Wm. Curtis • G. W. Curtis, ed. George Willis Cooke

... and south, to the haze wherewith, in distances beyond the ken of lads, it melted; and upon the thirty wee white houses of our folk, scattered haphazard about the harbour water, each in its own little cove and each with its own little stage and great flake; and over the barren, swelling rock beyond, to the blue wilderness, lying infinitely ...
— Doctor Luke of the Labrador • Norman Duncan

... east was streaked with angry flushes of crimson. The wind swept through my dripping clothes and froze my aching limbs to the marrow. Up the river came floating a heavy pall of fog, out of which the masts showed like grisly skeletons. The snow-storm had not quite ceased, and a stray flake or two came brushing across my face. So dawned ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... the right hand. In this way little pieces were chipped off until the arrowhead was formed. Only the most expert do this successfully.[213] Sometimes the stone to be operated on is heated in the fire, and slowly cooled, which causes it to split in flakes. A flake is then shaped with buck-horn pincers, tied together at the point with a thong.[214] In another report it is the stone with which the operation is performed which is said to be heated.[215] In a pit several hundred flint ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner

... poets who come down to us through distance Of time and tongues, the foster-babes of Fame, Life seems the smallest portion of existence; Where twenty ages gather o'er a name, 'T is as a snowball which derives assistance From every flake, and yet rolls on the same, Even till an iceberg it may chance to grow; But, after all, 't is nothing ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron

... sponge does not "plim"; it is not apparently larger when full of water than previously, and it is still limp. To "plim "up implies a certain amount of enlargement, and consequent tightness or firmness. Snow-flakes are called "blossoms." The word snow-flake is unknown. A big baby is always a thing to be proud of, and you may hear an enthusiastic aunt describing the weight and lumpiness of the youngster, and winding up with the declaration, "He's a regular nitch." A chump of wood, short, thick, and heavy, is said to be a ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies

... while aught is borne in mind? Land and sea beneath us, sun and moon and stars above, Bear the bright soul witness, seen of all but souls born blind. Stars and moon and sun may wax and wane, subside and rise, Age on age as flake on flake of showering snows be shed: Not till earth be sunless, not till death strike blind the skies, May the deathless love that waits on ...
— Astrophel and Other Poems - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne, Vol. VI • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... imaginative power, in which the outward object appears to take colour and expression, a new nature almost, from the prompting of the observant mind, the actual world would, as it were, dissolve and detach itself, flake by flake, and he himself seemed to be the creator, and when he would the destroyer, of the world in which he lived—that old isolating thought of many a brain-sick mystic of ancient and ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater

... cut open my sleeve, it matters not. I have more dresses with me at my lodging." This my magister does immediately, and draws forth the beautiful arm white as a snow-flake, throws the sleeve back upon the shoulder, and places Diliana with her face turned towards the window, on a seat which his Highness, the Duke, laid for her himself, while he exclaimed earnestly, "Now, Diliana, guard thy soul well from ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold

... {meme} about ginger vs. rotting meat may be an urban legend. It's not borne out by an examination of medieval recipes or period purchase records for spices, and appears full-blown in the works of Samuel Pegge, a gourmand and notorious flake case who ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0

... of the bomb-bird is heard. The searchlights stab and slash about the sky like tin swords in a stage duel; presently they pick up the bomb-bird—a glittering flake of tinsel—and the racket begins. Archibalds pop, machine guns chatter, rifles crack, and here and there some optimistic sportsman browns the Milky Way with a revolver. As Sir I. NEWTON'S law of gravity is still in force and all that ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, October 31, 1917 • Various

... as rapidly as iron, but the scale is more apt to flake off by the expansion and contraction of the metal, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 358, November 11, 1882 • Various

... Mellish, and he had lived for fifteen years on land of his own, in Lower Bengal, studying cholera. He held that cholera was a germ that propagated itself as it flew through a muggy atmosphere; and stuck in the branches of trees like a wool-flake. The germ could be rendered sterile, he said, by "Mellish's Own Invincible Fumigatory"—a heavy violet-black powder— "the result of fifteen ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling

... were small and their branches cut in sharp, intricate tracery against the sky; farther back, the rows of slender trunks ran together in a hazy mass, though they failed to keep out the wind, and once or twice a fine flake touched the old man's face with a cold that stung. He pulled his fur cap lower down and set about the search. For half an hour he scrambled among thick nut bushes, kicking aside the snow beneath them here and there; and then he plunged knee-deep into the withered grass where a sloo had ...
— Prescott of Saskatchewan • Harold Bindloss

... instead of marble, for mural inscriptions. How long are these expected to remain legible? They employ the same material for their buildings, and I observe that the older monuments last, on the whole, better than the new ones, which flake away rapidly—exfoliate or crack, according to the direction from which the grain of the rock has been attacked by the chisel. It may well be that Florentines of past centuries left the hewn blocks in their ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas

... ragged, swarthy, bearded like Forty-niners, with only a handful of flour and a lump of bacon left in our kit we came down to the Third Fork of the Stickeen River, without a flake of gold to show for our "panning" the sands along our way. My diaries state that for more than thirty days of this journey it rained, and as I look back upon our three weeks in the Skeena valley I shiver with a kind of retrospective terror. At one time it looked as ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland

... up from it out among the white, wandering flakes, with a feeling that they had come down from heaven as its interpreters; that they were trying to tell me, in their airy up-and-down-flight, the story of innumerable souls. I tried to fix my eye on one particular flake, and to follow its course until it touched the earth. But I found that I could not. A little breeze was stirring an the flake seemed to go and return, to descend and then ascend again, as if hastening homeward ...
— A New England Girlhood • Lucy Larcom

... the street to the yard door. As they went Hugh asked Dick what it was that he had in his mind as a mark for the arrow that Murgh had shot, that arrow which to his charmed sight had seemed to rush over Venice like a flake of fire. ...
— Red Eve • H. Rider Haggard

... the sky was flushed with colour. It was a very low tide, too, and every rock was bared, so that from the white spit of Herm it seemed as though a long dark line of ships sped northwards towards the Casquets. Brecqhou lay dark before us, and the Gouliot Pass was black with its coiling tide. A flake of light glimmered through the cave behind, and now and again came the boom of a wave under some low ledge below. Up above us the sky was full of larks, and their sweet sharp notes came down to us like peals of little silver bells. And down in Havre Gosselin the gulls were ...
— Carette of Sark • John Oxenham

... rock-built cities, bidding nations quake, And monarchs tremble in their capitals; The oak leviathans, whose huge ribs make Their clay creator the vain title take Of lord of thee, and arbiter of war,— These are thy toys, and, as the snowy flake, They melt into thy yeast of waves, which mar Alike the Armada's pride, or ...
— The Evolution of Expression Vol. I • Charles Wesley Emerson

... nuts and rub off the brown skin. If they are put in slow oven for 10 minutes, both shell and skin will come off easily. Flake in a nut-mill or pound quite smooth. Add the yolk of hard boiled egg, a teaspoonful ground almonds, or almond meal, and make into a paste. Then add some grated onion, a tablespoonful baked or mashed potato, the same of bread crumbs, and seasoning to taste. Mix well, and add the yolks of ...
— Reform Cookery Book (4th edition) - Up-To-Date Health Cookery for the Twentieth Century. • Mrs. Mill

... these sharp flakes broke straight across the masses of mountain, when once the fissure took place, all hold would be lost between flake and flake, it is ordered (and herein is the most notable thing in the whole matter) that they shall not break straight, but in curves, round the body of the aiguilles, somewhat in the manner of the coats of an onion; so that, even after fissure has taken place, the detached ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin

... evening as the trio of young folk set forth. The clouds had threatened snow all day, and occasionally a flake—spying out the land ahead of its vast army of brothers—drifted through the air and ...
— The Corner House Girls at School • Grace Brooks Hill

... every day for the past two weeks to pass by an ancient churchyard on a great hillside not far from London. Most of the stones are very old, and seem to have been thoughtfully and reverently, flake by flake, wrought into their final form by long-vanished hands. As I stand and watch them, with the yews and cypresses flocking round them, it is as if in some sort of way they had been surely wrought by the hand of love, so full are they of grief and of joy, of devotion, of the ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee

... night until the silver break Of day the little gray feet know no rest, Through the lone night until the last snow-flake Has dropped from heaven upon the earth's white breast, The dusky, half-clad girls of tired feet Are trudging, thinly ...
— The Book of American Negro Poetry • Edited by James Weldon Johnson

... fine : delikata; monpuno. fir : abio. fire : brulo, fajro; (gun), pafi. fireplace : kameno, fajrejo. fireworks : artfajrajxo. firm : firma, fortika; firmo. fish : fisx'o, -i, -kapti. fist : pugno. fit : atako. "—for", tauxga; konvena, deca. fix : fiksi. flake : floko, negxero. flame : flami. flannel : flanelo. flat : plata, ebena; apartamento. flatter : flati. flavour : gusto. flax : lino. flea : pulo. flesh : (meat), viando; karno. flint : siliko. flit : flirti. float : nagxi; surnagxi. flock ...
— The Esperanto Teacher - A Simple Course for Non-Grammarians • Helen Fryer

... these, Francois' quick eye detected the presence of some very small birds moving among the blossoms. They were at once pronounced to be humming-birds, and of that species known as the "ruby-throats" so called, because a flake of a beautiful vinous colour under the throat of the males exhibits, in the sun, all the glancing glories of the ruby. The back, or upper parts, are of a gilded green colour; and the little creature is the smallest bird that migrates into the fur countries, with one exception, and ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid

... fancy painted pictures of strange places and things. Now she saw a country-house, among cool, quiet trees; then a man dying—some one she loved—but who? Now she was in a large city, and heard the rumbling of wheels and confused voices. Now the snow was coming down, flake after flake, and everything was white; then it was night—dark, stormy, and dreadful—and she was cold, bitter cold! Some one had left her in the white, clinging snow, and ...
— Daisy's Necklace - And What Came of It • Thomas Bailey Aldrich

... passage, dark, wet, and slippery. In the left-hand wall of this passage was a door, studded with iron nails thickly covered with rust. The key was in this door. During the instant required for throwing it wide, a large flake of ice fell from the ceiling of the passage upon the head of Toussaint. He shook it off, and ...
— The Hour and the Man - An Historical Romance • Harriet Martineau

... vanished like a flake of snow in the sunshine. "Oh! Azzolati. It was a most solemn affair. It had occurred to me to make a very elaborate toilet. It was most successful. Azzolati looked positively scared for a moment as though he had got into the wrong suite ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad

... shape of a slice of orange and about five inches along the straight edge. For a hand the size of his own, he would have called it a scraper. He puzzled over it for a while, noticed that the edge was serrated, and decided that it was a saw. And there were three very good flake knives, and some ...
— Little Fuzzy • Henry Beam Piper

... the imprint of his sign-manual are among all Shakespeare's works as signally remarkable for the cleanliness as for the richness of their humour. Here is the right royal seal of Pantagruel, clean-cut and clearly stamped, and unincrusted with any flake of dirt from the dubious finger of Panurge. In the comic parts of those plays in which the humour is rank and flagrant that exhales from the lips of Lucio, of Boult, or of Thersites, there is no trace or glimpse of Rabelais. ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... and so like a flash of unreal fancy, that but for the flake of white foam left quivering and perishing on a mail-sack after the vision had flashed by and disappeared, we might have doubted whether we had seen any actual horse and man at ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... has no business to be flitting around the way Howells does—that shameless old fictitious butter fly. (But if he comes, don't tell him I said it, for it would hurt him and I wouldn't brush a flake of powder from his wing for anything. I only say it in envy of his indestructible youth, anyway. Howells will be 88 in October.) With thanks again, Sincerely yours, S. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... flash the wings returning Summer calls Through the deep arches of her forest halls,— The bluebird, breathing from his azure plumes The fragrance borrowed where the myrtle blooms; The thrush, poor wanderer, dropping meekly down, Clad in his remnant of autumnal brown; The oriole, drifting like a flake of fire Rent by a whirlwind from a blazing spire. The robin, jerking his spasmodic throat, Repeats, imperious, his staccato note; The crack-brained bobolink courts his crazy mate, Poised on a bulrush tipsy with his weight; Nay, in his cage the lone canary sings, Feels ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... the outside. How gently it falls through the soft air, always tending downwards, but sliding softly, from side to side, wavering, hesitating, balancing, until it settles as noiselessly as a snow-flake upon the all-receiving bosom of the earth! Just such would have been the fate of poor Angelina's fluttering effort, if you had left it to itself. It would have slanted downward into oblivion so sweetly and softly that she would ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... wax is turned over frequently and occasionally sprinkled with soft water if there be not dew and rain sufficient to moisten it. The wax should be bleached in about four weeks. If, on breaking the flakes, the wax still appears yellow inside, it is necessary to melt it again and flake and expose it a second time, or even oftener, before it becomes thoroughly bleached, the time required being mainly dependent upon the weather. There is a preliminary process by which, it is claimed, much time is saved ...
— Burroughs' Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889 • Barkham Burroughs

... spoke, every man, as by a set ritual, took from a little skin wallet at his side a sharp flake of coral-stone, and, drawing it deliberately across his breast in a deep red gash, caused the blood to flow out freely over his chest and long grass waistband. Then, having done so, they never strove for a moment to stanch the wound, but let the red drops ...
— The Great Taboo • Grant Allen

... The tendency of one flake or coil of cable to stick to the coil immediately below, and produce a wild irremediable entanglement before the ship could be stopped, was another danger, but these and all other mishaps of a serious nature were escaped, and the unusually prosperous voyage was ...
— The Battery and the Boiler - Adventures in Laying of Submarine Electric Cables • R.M. Ballantyne

... worship, awoke in Lord Rothie, he did not worship, but devoured, that he might, as he thought, possess! The poison of asps was under those lips. His kiss was as a kiss from the grave's mouth, for his throat was an open sepulchre. This was all in the past, reader. Baron Rothie was a foam-flake of the court of the Prince Regent. There are no such men now-a-days! It is a shame to speak of such, and therefore they are not! Decency has gone so far to abolish virtue. Would to God that a writer could be decent and ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald

... answered I, 'for this wreath of air, This flake of rainbow flying on the highest Foam of men's deeds—this honour, if ye will. It needs must be for honour if at all: Since, what decision? if we fail, we fail, And if we win, we fail: she would not keep Her compact.' ...
— The Princess • Alfred Lord Tennyson

... place of flags and reeds a white crane shot upward, turned, and then, with the slow and stately beat peculiar to her wing, sped away until, against the tallest cypress of the distant forest, she became a tiny white speck on its black, and suddenly disappeared, like one flake of snow. ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable

... with fresh lusty-hed, Go to the bowre of my beloved love, My truest turtle dove; Bid her awake; for Hymen is awake, And long since ready forth his maske to move, With his bright Tead that flames with many a flake, And many a bachelor to waite on him, In theyr fresh garments trim. Bid her awake therefore, and soone her dight, For lo! the wished day is come at last, That shall, for all the paynes and sorrowes past, Pay to her usury of long delight: And, whylest she doth her dight, Doe ye to her ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy

... griefe and anguish vehement, He lowdly brayd, that like was never heard, And from his wide devouring oven[*] sent A flake of fire, that, flashing in his beard, Him all amazd, and almost made affeard: 230 The scorching flame sore swinged all his face, And through his armour all his body seard, That he could not endure so cruell cace, But thought his armes to leave, and ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser

... soft, warm little drops, they come down in these white flakes, which we call snow. I am not very learned myself," said the Robin, humbly, "but a very wise friend of mine, an old Rook, told me all this, and he also said that if I examined a flake of snow, I should find it was made of beautiful crystals, each shaped like a ...
— What the Blackbird said - A story in four chirps • Mrs. Frederick Locker

... marble floor and pillars, or thread the darkness like a shooting star, only to reveal new depths of blackness beyond those it pierced. At length there came, softly falling from the sky-roof which never stirred to any passing breeze, a flake of snow larger than a dove's wing; but it was blood-red, and in its centre shone a wonderful light that made its passage through the darkness a track of glory. As it passed gently downwards without sound, she thought that it threw the shadow ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard

... frost covers their whiskers, But never their hind legs tire, And whenever a hare feels a flake on his ear, He leaps a full ...
— Zodiac Town - The Rhymes of Amos and Ann • Nancy Byrd Turner

... fixed in the inside of it. The other, dug out of solid wood, is called 'aragoon', and is made as follows, with great labour. On the bark of a tree they mark the size of the shield, then dig the outline as deep as possible in the wood with hatchets, and lastly flake it off as thick as they can, by driving in wedges. The sword is a large heavy piece of wood, shaped like a sabre, and capable of inflicting a mortal wound. In using it they do not strike with the convex side, but with the concave one, and ...
— A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson • Watkin Tench

... and of porphyry, cut into myriads of little pieces, precise and equal, and put together again to form the Arab designs, which, never borrowing from the human form, nor indeed from the form of any animal, recall rather those infinitely varied crystals that may be seen under the microscope in a flake of snow. It is always the Mihrab which is decorated with the most elaborate richness; generally little columns of lapis lazuli, intensely blue, rise in relief from it, framing mosaics so delicate that they look like brocades of fine ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti

... required for use they should be mixed with French polish and applied with a brush. The pigments most suitable are: drop black, raw sienna, raw and burnt umber, Vandyke brown, French Naples yellow (bear in mind that this is a very opaque pigment), cadmium yellow, madder carmine (these are expensive), flake white, and light or Venetian red; before mixing, the colours should be finely pounded. The above method of painting, however, has this objection for the best class of furniture, that the effects of time will darken the body ...
— French Polishing and Enamelling - A Practical Work of Instruction • Richard Bitmead

... she removed her hat something strange arrested her attention, something that might have been a feather or a flake of snow lying on her luminous black hair just where it grew low in a widow's peak at the centre of her forehead. She made to brush it lightly away, but it stayed, for it was not a feather at all, but a lock of her own hair that had turned white. A ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley

... and self-abasement she thought thus, a ray of brightness penetrated into the dismal abyss—a ray more vivid and glorious than the sunbeams which thaw the snow figures that the children make in their gardens. And this ray, more quickly than the snow-flake that falls upon a child's warm mouth can be melted into a drop of water, caused Inger's petrified figure to evaporate, and a little bird arose, following the zigzag course of the ray, up towards the world that ...
— The Sand-Hills of Jutland • Hans Christian Andersen

... flutterer's folded mail, Clings the cooled wax, and hardens to a scale. Swift, at the well known call, the ready train, (For not a buz boon Nature breathes in vain,) Spring to each falling flake, and bear along Their glossy burdens to the builder throng. These with sharp sickle or with sharper tooth, Pare each excrescence, and each angle smooth, Till now, in finish'd pride, two radiant rows Of snow white cells one mutual base disclose. ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth

... Of cataracts from their thaw-cloven ravines, Satiates the listening wind, continuous, vast, 35 Awful as silence. Hark! the rushing snow! The sun-awakened avalanche! whose mass, Thrice sifted by the storm, had gathered there Flake after flake, in heaven-defying minds As thought by thought is piled, till some great truth 40 Is loosened, and the nations echo round, Shaken to their roots, as do the ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley

... vengeance the last agony of the man whom he had loved, that the two who were with him in this ghastly hour shrank involuntarily from his side, awed more by the Living than the Dead. Almost unconsciously they watched him, fascinated basilisk-wise, as he stooped and severed a long flake of hair that was soiled by the dank earth and wet with the dew: unarrested they let him turn away with the golden lock in his hand and the fatal calm on his face, and move to the spot where his horse was waiting. The beat of the hoofs ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida

... still full of animation, broad forehead, and high-arched brows gave dignity and even beauty to her pale countenance. On the fire the porridge was warming for the calves' supper, while suspended from the wooden ceiling was the "bread-flake," a hurdle-shaped structure across the bars of which hung the pieces of oatcake which were eaten with buttermilk ...
— More Tales of the Ridings • Frederic Moorman

... And in spite of his wide knowledge of Greek and Italian art, our English master could scarcely have produced a work of such classic dignity with the more violent motive of the dagger, which seems to call for "The torch that flames with many a lurid flake," or at least the torpid glow of smouldering embers, to light it in such a manner as would make a really pictorial treatment possible. No doubt Duerer has been misled by a too tyrannous notion as to what ought to be the physical build ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore

... fragments split, by the innumerable questions occurring practically as to bedding and cleavage in every kind of stone, from tufo to granite, and by the unseemly, or beautiful, destructive, or protective, effects of decomposition. [1] The same processes of time which cause your Oxford oolite to flake away like the leaves of a mouldering book, only warm with a glow of perpetually deepening gold the marbles of Athens and Verona; and the same laws of chemical change which reduce the granites of Dartmoor to porcelain clay, bind the sands of ...
— Val d'Arno • John Ruskin

... curl and blacken; uncurl again, and slowly flake away. Long after the rest had fallen to ashes, this sentence remained clear: "Better an empty hearth; than a hearth where broods a curse." The flames played about it, but still it remained legible; white letters, ...
— The White Ladies of Worcester - A Romance of the Twelfth Century • Florence L. Barclay

... do I love thee, dear? Tell me how many thoughts there be In the atmosphere Of a new-fall'n year, Whose white and sable hours appear The latest flake of Eternity:— So many times do I ...
— Victorian Songs - Lyrics of the Affections and Nature • Various

... chew. He replaced it with a pipe, and prepared to flake off its filling from a plug of tobacco. Standing watched him with the anxious eyes of a prisoner awaiting sentence. With the cutting of the first flakes of ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum

... same is generally damp from the beginning of the disease; severe sweats are observed on the head; with progressing disease the skin becomes dry, brittle, comes off in flake-like scales and only when the death-predicting increase of the pulse sets in, there appears a profuse sweat, the ...
— Prof. Koch's Method to Cure Tuberculosis Popularly Treated • Max Birnbaum

... it began to rain, and it rained very, very hard. The snow began to melt, and it melted very, very fast, and when that hare awoke, not a flake of snow was ...
— Stories the Iroquois Tell Their Children • Mabel Powers

... flake of falling snow, Before it touched the ground, There came a dove, and a thousand ...
— The Haunted Hour - An Anthology • Various

... borne on what seemed a long flake of foam, the tiny craft shot up the beach amid a shower of sparkles. Not a soul was there. Leaving one of their number by the water, the rest of the pigmies stepped ashore, looking about them very circumspectly, pausing now and then hand to ear, and peering under a dense grove which swept down ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville

... water of the lagoon ran into gold-tipped ripples. In every one the low sun laid a tiny flake of azure. Over the far shore there was a continual flick and flash of wings, like a whirlwind playing with a heap of waste paper. Crooked flights of flamingoes made a moving reflection on the water like a scarlet snake, but among the queer mangrove stems, that did not ...
— The Trail Book • Mary Austin et al

... quarter of a Peck of Flower, and one Egg, yolk and white, half a Pound of Butter broke in little Bits, mix them together with so much cold Milk as will make it up, do not break your Butter too small, for then they will not flake; make them up like Rouls of Butter, and when your water boils, put them in, and do not boil them too much, then ...
— The Queen-like Closet or Rich Cabinet • Hannah Wolley

... containing the Standing Rock behind which Mr. Johnstone made his famous discovery of the concealed pin-head. It is an immense great fallen rock on whose dark surface are scattered transparent flake-like crystals of satin spar, resembling the congealed drops of a summer shower. The mind-reader entered the chamber by the ...
— Cave Regions of the Ozarks and Black Hills • Luella Agnes Owen

... images. Once more the puppet-scene of the brain was shifted; once more I saw the bleak bare flags of the Perugian piazza, the forlorn front of the Duomo, the bronze griffin, and Pisano's fountain, with here and there a flake of that tumultuous fire which the Italian sunset sheds. Who shall adequately compare the two pictures? Which shall we prefer—the Close of Salisbury, with its sleepy bells and cushioned ease of immemorial Deans—or this poor threadbare passion of ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds

... back in the coach, determined to ignore time, and thereby perhaps hasten it. In truth, time's lagging was not unpleasant for me, in one respect, at least, for Bettina was by my side. I found delight in keeping her well tucked about with rugs, so that not even a breath of the storm nor a flake of snow could reach her. She wore a great fur hood which buttoned under her chin, almost covering her face and falling in a soft warm curtain to her shoulders and bosom. She was warm, and aside from our great cause ...
— The Touchstone of Fortune • Charles Major

... eddies and maelstroms of pagans in China. People here have no conception of it. Of a frosty morning in Hong Kong, pauper pagans are found dead in the streets like so many nipped peas in a bin of peas. To be an immortal being in China is no more distinction than to be a snow-flake in a snow-squall. What are a score or two of missionaries to such a people? A pinch of snuff to the kraken. I am for sending ten thousand missionaries in a body and converting the Chinese en masse within six months of the debarkation. The thing is then ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville

... first of all went to the door, transferred the key from the outside to the inside, and locked the door. Then he drank the dregs of the tea out of the sole cup; and seeing a packet of Mr. Brool's Gold Flake cigarettes on the mahogany sideboard, he ventured to ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett

... may yet go on cleaving it by special means till the flakes no longer reflect visible light. And not less remarkable is the uniplanar nature of its cleavage. There is little cleavage in any plane but the one, although it is easy to show that the molecules in the plane of the flake are in orderly arrangement and are more easily parted in some directions than in others. In such a medium beyond all others we must look with surprise upon the perfect sphere struck out by the alpha rays, because it seems certain that the cleavage is ...
— The Birth-Time of the World and Other Scientific Essays • J. (John) Joly

... gigantic Daggoo was yet more curious; for sustaining himself with a cool, indifferent, easy, unthought of, barbaric majesty, the noble negro to every roll of the sea harmoniously rolled his fine form. On his broad back, flaxen-haired flask seemed a snow-flake. The bearer looked nobler than the rider. Though truly vivacious, tumultuous, ostentatious little Flask would now and then stamp with impatience; but not one added heave did he thereby give to the negro's lordly chest. ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville

... moment a storm breaks till the last flake has fallen, the sweepers are run unceasingly over the tracks of the railroads, each in its own division, which it is its business to keep clear. The track is all the companies have to mind. There was a law, or a rule, or an understanding, nobody seems to know exactly which, that they were to sweep ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis

... in truth; but those of Miranda and Ophelia were more embarrassing, because they seemed to defy all analysis. It was like intercepting the dew-drop or the snow-flake ere it fell to earth, and subjecting it ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson

... though the gate of mercy could never open to her; and while in deep penitence she acknowledged this, a beam, of light shot radiantly down into the depths to her, with a greater force than that of the sunbeam which melts the snow man the boys have built up; and quicker than the snow-flake melts, and becomes a drop of water that falls on the warm lips of a child, the stony form of Inge was changed to mist, and a little bird soared with the speed of lightning upward into the world of men. But the bird was timid and shy ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen

... (affection, sa/m/skara) comprises desire, aversion, &c., and the activity caused by them.—Knowledge (vij/n/ana) is the self-consciousness (aham ity alayavij/n/anasya v/ri/ttilabha/h/) springing up in the embryo.—Name and form is the rudimentary flake—or bubble-like condition of the embryo.—The abode of the six (sha/d/ayatana) is the further developed stage of the embryo in which the latter is the abode of the six senses.—Touch (spar/s/a) is the sensations of cold, warmth, &c. on the embryo's part.—Feeling ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sankaracarya - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 1 • George Thibaut

... and damp touched Harley's cheek. He looked up, and another flake of snow, descending softly, settled upon his face. The clouds rolled over them, heavy and dark, and shut out all the mountains save a little island where they stood. The snow, following the first few ...
— The Candidate - A Political Romance • Joseph Alexander Altsheler

... feet, a smooth, globular object, of the size of a crab-apple, is lying half-buried in the sand. Taking it in your hand, you find it to be a univalve shell, the inhabitant of which is concealed behind a closely-fitting door, resembling a flake of undissolved glue. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various

... which Graham looked was very wild and strange. The snow had now almost ceased; only a belated flake passed now and again across the picture. But the broad stretch of level before them was a ghastly white, broken only by gigantic masses and moving shapes and lengthy strips of impenetrable darkness, vast ungainly Titans of shadow. All about them, huge metallic ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells

... Mind like yours and mine; but how infinitely different, how much deeper, wiser, vaster. Before that thought we shrink into the nothingness from whence He called us out at first. The difference between our minds and the Mind of God is—to what shall I liken it? Say, to the difference between a flake of soot and a mountain of pure diamond. That soot and that diamond are actually the same substance; of that there is no doubt whatsoever; but as the light, dirty, almost useless soot is to the pure, and clear, ...
— All Saints' Day and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley

... and bumped in her pocket as she gripped the iron bars hand over hand and toiled aloft. "It is for the sake of a life," she panted to herself. "It is a good work. He might die if I did not come. Ah! it is terrible." A flake of rust from the long disused irons had fallen on her nose. The rungs were chafing her hands, and the minutes were flying. The round, red face of the caretaker's wife grew smaller and smaller below her, and there was a rumbling of wheels in the avenue. An idle coachman, drawn by ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various

... dirty calico drew a black sock, bulging and heavy. From this in turn he shook a small buckskin sack. He smoothed the calico, untied a shoestring from the sack's mouth, and let a stream of dun-colored dust run out. It shone in the firelight in a slow sifting rivulet, here and there a bright flake like a spangle sending out a yellow spark. Several times a solid particle obstructed the lazy flow, which broke upon it like water on a rock, dividing and sinking in two heavy streams. It poured with unctious deliberation till the sack was empty, and the man held it up to show ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner

... a mackintosh and overshoes and went to the fire. The weather was now indulging in a big flake snow that slid stealthily to the ground and disappeared into water on whatever obstacle it found there. It found me. The cook was cleaning knives—the cooking knives, the eating knives, and a full set of ...
— A Woman Tenderfoot • Grace Gallatin Seton-Thompson

... the crested waves against the cliffs, nor the cleaving of the water by our little ship. She took a step forward and sat down on the rough boards, beside this wreck of manhood we were bringing in, unmindful of the dried fish-scales that would flake off upon her skirts. It was surely an unconscious movement of hers when her hand went out and rested on the fisherman's ...
— Sweetapple Cove • George van Schaick

... offence was meant by the human invasion, came and perched on the tip of the fagots that were being sold, and looked into the auctioneer's face, while waiting for some chance crumb from the bread-basket. Standing a little behind Grace, Winterborne observed how one flake would sail downward and settle on a curl of her hair, and how another would choose her shoulder, and another the edge of her bonnet, which took up so much of his attention that his biddings proceeded incoherently; and when the auctioneer said, ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy

... than proud success, And patience and love in a chastened heart Are pearls more precious than happiness; And in that morning when she shall wake To the spring-time freshness of youth again, All trouble will seem but a flying flake, And lifelong sorrow a ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various

... gale that hurled the snow Against the window pane, And rattled the sash with a merry clash Used not its strength in vain; For now and then a wee flake sifted Through the loose ill-fitting frame, By the warmer breezes each was lifted All melting ...
— Standard Selections • Various

... Somehow it seemed as if she would find before the grate the long, thin body of her dead father, and she distinctly remembered the spindle fire-flames falling in golden yellow licks upon his face. In her imagination she could again see the flake-like ashes, thrown out from the smoldering fire, rise grey to the ceiling, then descend silently over him like ...
— Rose O'Paradise • Grace Miller White

... step and then another, And the longest walk is ended; One stitch and then another, And the largest rent is mended. One brick upon another, And the highest wall is made; One flake upon another, And the deepest ...
— Happy Days for Boys and Girls • Various

... "and I'd like to manage to have my friends live well, too. By the way, did you ever make rum-flake for the doctor when he comes ...
— The Girl at Cobhurst • Frank Richard Stockton

... are thick! But stone too has its way of rotting. Westminster palace is wearing through, flake by flake. The weather will be at the lords ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald

... there a foamy flake Upon me, as I travel, With many a silvery water-break Above the ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein

... Christmas Day, and a collection of bullets which I had picked out with my pocket knife from the walls of our house in St. Yvon. The only additional luggage to this inventory I have given was my usual copious supply of Gold Flake cigarettes, of which, during my life in France, I must have ...
— Bullets & Billets • Bruce Bairnsfather

... enough," Captain Watson said. "Even here the heat is well-nigh too great to face. Frank, you had better call the crew up and get all the sails off the yards. Were a burning flake to fall on them we might find it difficult to extinguish them. When they have done that, let the men get all the buckets filled with water and ranged on the deck; and it will be as well to get a couple of hands in the boat and let them chuck water against this ...
— When London Burned • G. A. Henty

... not only in the immense folds into which they have been thrown but in their smallest parts as well. A hand specimen of slate, or even a particle under the microscope, may show plications similar in form and origin to the foldings which have produced ranges of mountains. A tiny flake of mica in the rocks of the Alps may be puckered by the same resistless forces which have folded miles of solid rock to ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton

... late in November, 1456. The snow fell over Paris with rigorous, relentless persistence; sometimes the wind made a sally and scattered it in flying vortices; sometimes there was a lull, and flake after flake descended out of the black night air, silent, circuitous, interminable. To poor people, looking up under moist eyebrows, it seemed a wonder where it all came from. Master Francis Villon had ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various

... The flake of snow grew larger and larger; and at last it was like a young lady, dressed in the finest white gauze, made of a million little flakes like stars. She was so beautiful and delicate, but she was of ice, of dazzling, sparkling ice; yet she lived; her eyes gazed fixedly, like two stars; but ...
— Andersen's Fairy Tales • Hans Christian Andersen

... tovnder-stonde, For ere e olde gulte wat[gh] don to slake, Bot e nwe at ly[gh]t of gode[gh] sonde, e apostel in apocalyppce i{n} theme con take. 944 e lombe[39] {er}, w{i}t{h}-outen spotte[gh] blake, Hat[gh] feryed yder hys fayre flote, & as hys flok is w{i}t{h}-outen flake, So is hys mote ...
— Early English Alliterative Poems - in the West-Midland Dialect of the Fourteenth Century • Various

... little Tiarella, Thy silence speaks; No more my foolish question Thy secret seeks. The sunshine on my window Lies all the day. How shouldst thou know that summer Has passed away? The frost-flake's icy silver Is dew at noon for thee. O winter sun! O winter frost, Make summer ...
— Saxe Holm's Stories • Helen Hunt Jackson

... with pyrethrum was not very satisfactory. Knowing the volatility of naphthalene in warm weather and the irritating character of its vapor led me to try it. I took one room at a time, scattered on the floor five pounds of flake naphthalene and closed it for twenty-four hours. On entering such a room the naphthalene vapor will instantly bring tears to the eyes and cause coughing and irritation of the air passages. I mention this to show how it acts on the fleas. It proved to be a perfect ...
— Insects and Diseases - A Popular Account of the Way in Which Insects may Spread - or Cause some of our Common Diseases • Rennie W. Doane

... pale with fear. And then as the glow slowly faded in the north there floated down across the aperture of the window something soft and fluffy like feathers. Thicker and faster it came until the lawn of the White House was covered with it. The air in the room turned cold. Through the window a large flake circled and lit on ...
— The Man Who Rocked the Earth • Arthur Train

... fire, I seem to see something of your future, O my father Macumazana. Far and far your road runs," and he drew his finger along the feather. "Here is a journey," and he flicked away a carbonised flake, "here is another, and another, and another," and he flicked off flake after flake. "Here is one that is very successful, it leaves you rich; and here is yet one more, a wonderful journey this in which you see strange things and meet strange ...
— Allan and the Holy Flower • H. Rider Haggard

... it snowing I spoke of? Excuse the mistake! Look close,—you will see not a sign of a flake; We want some new garlands for those we have shed,— And these are white roses ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various

... out of his way as much as possible, watching her sister admiringly as she moved about with an easy, assured grace, or floated like a snow flake through the dance in which Wilford persuaded her to join, looking after her with a proud, all-absorbing feeling, which left no room for Sybil ...
— Family Pride - Or, Purified by Suffering • Mary J. Holmes

... he thrust the blade of his stone knife, and as it became superheated he would withdraw it, touching a spot near the thin edge with a drop of moisture. Beneath the wetted area a little flake of the glassy material would ...
— The Beasts of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... flake of snow Fall down towards the land; 'Twas such a tender little thing, It rested on my hand. But after, when I went abroad, And looked on field and hill, The snow had covered everything, And all the land ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various

... more vivid, it came on to snow as night set in; and, passing through Stamford and Grantham, and by the little alehouse where he had heard the story of the bold Baron of Grogzwig, everything looked as if he had seen it but yesterday, and not even a flake of the white crust on the roofs had melted away. Encouraging the train of ideas which flocked upon him, he could almost persuade himself that he sat again outside the coach, with Squeers and the boys; that he heard their voices in the air; and that he felt again, but with a mingled sensation ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens

... this final vision of his dream. "Inconstancy is not justified by natural law, for it means unripeness of soul. The ripe soul evolves the Infinite from a fixed point. It finds the many in the one. Elvire is the one who includes the many. Elvire is the ocean: while Fifine is but the foam-flake which the ocean can multiply at pleasure. Elvire shall ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr

... captivates us with its youthful spell. But it has no structure with which to resist the shocks of fortune, which it goes out so jauntily to meet. It turns only too often into vulgarity and worldliness. A snow-flake is soon a smudge, and there is a deeper purity in the diamond. Happiness is hidden from a free and casual will; it belongs rather to one chastened by a long education and unfolded in an atmosphere of sacred and perfected institutions. It is discipline that ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana

... "This is very serious. Off with your clothes at once." And as soon as the young man had stripped, he examined him from head to foot. "No," he cried with great relief, "there is not a flake broken. Cheer up, my young friend, your paint is as good ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson

... been largely dependent upon importations from Ceylon for crucible graphite. Domestic supplies are large and capable of further development, but for the most part the flake is of such quality that it is not desired for crucible manufacture without large admixture of the Ceylon material. Restrictions during the war required crucible makers to use at least 20 per cent of domestic or Canadian graphite in their ...
— The Economic Aspect of Geology • C. K. Leith

... man more embarrassed than L'Isle? His proud, scornful air, vanished like a snow-flake in the fire—and forgetting all that had passed, he was seizing her hands to draw them away from her face, when old Moodie abruptly entered the room, and called out, "Colonel L'Isle, you are ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen

... jawbone, so that his gullet was visible. His lungs and his lights came so that they were flying in his mouth and in his throat. He struck a blow of the —— of a lion with his upper palate on the roof of his skull, so that every flake of fire that came into his mouth from his throat was as large as a wether's skin. His heart was heard light-striking (?) against his ribs like the roaring of a bloodhound at its food, or like a lion going through bears. There were seen the palls of the Badb, and the rain-clouds ...
— The Cattle-Raid of Cualnge (Tain Bo Cualnge) • Unknown

... a Hazel-Nut burr; some are wholly brilliant scarlet, raying out regularly and finely every way, bilaterally, like the veins of a leaf; others, of more irregular form, when I turn my head slightly, emptying out some of its earthiness and concealing the trunk of the tree, seem to rest heavily flake on flake, like yellow and scarlet clouds, wreath upon wreath, or like snow-drifts driving through the air, stratified by the wind. It adds greatly to the beauty of such a swamp at this season, that, even though there may be no other trees interspersed, it is not seen as a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 60, October 1862 • Various

... cleansed and made crystalline. Its sigh was heard, and it was quickly lifted up by the sun's gentle fingers—up, out of the foul gutter, into the sweet air, then higher and higher; at length the gentle winds caught it and bore it away, away, and by and by it rested on a distant mountain-top, a flake ...
— Making the Most of Life • J. R. Miller

... lovely New England May that we left the horse- car, and, spreading our umbrellas, walked down the street to our new home in Charlesbridge, through a storm of snow and rain so finely blent by the influences of this fortunate climate, that no flake knew itself from its sister drop, or could be better identified by the people against whom they beat in unison. A vernal gale from the east fanned our cheeks and pierced our marrow and chilled our blood, while the raw, cold green of the adventurous grass on the ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells

... But God was alive; his hearth-fire burned; therefore death was nowhere! She knew it in her own soul, for the Father was there, and she knew that in his soul were all the loved. The wind had ceased, but the snow was still falling, here and there a flake. A faint blueness filled the air, and was colder than the white. Whether the day was at hand or the night, she could not distinguish. The church bell began to ring, sounding from far away through the silence: what mountains of snow must yet tower unfallen ...
— Heather and Snow • George MacDonald

... non is that the glass be hot enough to melt the shellac. The best way is to heat the glass surfaces and rub on the shellac from a bit of flake; the glass should not be so hot as to discolour the shellac appreciably, or its valuable properties will be partly destroyed. Both glass surfaces being thus prepared, and the shellac being quite fluid on both, they may be brought together and clamped tightly together till cool. ...
— On Laboratory Arts • Richard Threlfall

... stack fell in a huge burning pile to the ground, and a shower of sparks flew out of it, while fiery waves floated above the red mass, which presented in its alternations of colour parts rosy as vermilion and others like clotted blood. The night had come, the wind was swelling; from time to time, a flake of fire passed across ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert

... I suppose you would come to a limit, if you could only see it. Notice that the little flakes already differ somewhat from the large ones: because I can bend them up and down, and they stay bent; while the large flake, though it bent easily a little way, sprang back when you let it go, and broke when you tried to bend it far. And a large mass would not ...
— The Ethics of the Dust • John Ruskin

... morning of the lovely New England May that we left the horse-car and, spreading our umbrellas, walked down the street to our new home in Charlesbridge, through a storm of snow and rain so finely blent by the influences of this fortunate climate that no flake knew itself from its sister drop, or could be better identified by the people against whom they beat in unison. A vernal gale from the east fanned our cheeks and pierced our marrow and chilled our blood, while the raw, cold green of the adventurous grass on the borders of the sopping sidewalks gave, ...
— Masterpieces Of American Wit And Humor • Thomas L. Masson (Editor)

... it now came up about the puzzled young aviators as might a snowdrift or it heap of hay. Dave dashed a filmy, flake-like substance resembling sawdust from eyes, ears and mouth. Hiram tried to disentangle himself from strips and curls of some light, fluffy substance. Then ...
— Dave Dashaway and his Hydroplane • Roy Rockwood

... try hard to win The best for our dear child, And keep a resting-place within, When all without grows wild: As on the winter graves the snow Falls softly, flake by flake, Our love should whitely clothe our woe, For ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... "Each flake of snow was a locust; we stood with our backs to them, and they struck us over the face and ears; we had to protect our eyes with our hands; the ground where the flight had settled was soon bare, and the trees leafless." Can you wonder that such a storm-cloud should ...
— Twilight And Dawn • Caroline Pridham



Words linked to "Flake" :   scurf, exfoliation, sliver, unusual person, snowflake, anomaly, crackpot, flake out, geek, cover, flake off, come off, break off, bran flake, oddball, chip off, flakey, eccentric person, form, whacko, fragment, water, crank, nut case, snowfall, fruitcake, scale



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