"Skeleton" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... has been my great help," said the shopkeeper; "she is the nicest lady, is Miss Wodehouse, in all Carlingford. I do respect them people; they've had their troubles, like most families, but there aint many as can lay their finger on the skeleton as is in their cupboard: they've kept things close, and there aint a many as knows; but Miss Wodehouse has spoke up for me, ma'am, right and left, and most persons as count for anything in Carlingford gets their fancy articles out o' my shop. Mr Wentworth, ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... until I had begun to study Latin prosody; and then it became clear to me that only a few bones in the structure of English, taken from the Latin practice, were valuable; that the flesh of the English tongue would not fit the whole skeleton. ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... formerly was called Duncan-street. The mill occupied the site of the Quaker's school, which was pulled down to make room for the railway yard. When this mill was razed to the ground, a grave was discovered in the foundation, in which was a skeleton, and it was freely said that this was the White Mill miller, who had so mysteriously disappeared some years previously. It was the talk of the town at the time, and crowds of persons went to the spot to look at the grave. When the mill in Duncan-street was taken down it was ...
— Recollections of Old Liverpool • A Nonagenarian
... into a lane, its lights picking out the skeleton outlines of trees: peculiar trees—tall, gaunt, leafless. They added to Ted ...
— Old Rambling House • Frank Patrick Herbert
... N. side of the screen of the choir, just behind the pulpit, is the "Danse Macabre," or dance of death, afavourite subject with artiste from the 12th to the 14th cent. The ironic grin and jocund gait of the skeleton death contrast vividly with the dismayed and demure expression of the great and mighty kings, priests, and warriors, young and old, gay and sedate, he marshals off, in the midst of their projects and plans, to the dark silent grave. Under it is the sadly mutilated mausoleum ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black
... the elaborate epitaph, and filling with strained animation the features of the portrait statue; and the other summoning underneath, out of the niche or from behind the curtain, the frowning skull, or scythed skeleton, or some other more terrible image of the enemy in whose defiance the whiteness of the sepulchre had been set to shine above the whiteness of ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin
... beheld was also soaking in the hot sunlight of the South, and there was also a mounted knight in armor. A second glance undeceived me. This knight was old and thin and worn, and his armor was broken and pieced, and his helmet was but a barber's basin, and his steed was a pitiful skeleton. His countenance was sorrowful indeed, but there was that in his manner which would stop any man from denying his nobility. His eye was fired with a high purpose and a lofty resolve. In the distance before him were ...
— Tales of Fantasy and Fact • Brander Matthews
... as a large number of telegraph lines; and at Albany, the town on King George's Sound, it has established a coaling depot for the mail steamers on their way to Adelaide, Melbourne, and Sydney. But West Australia is still what it was called twenty years ago, "the giant skeleton of a colony," consisting of about forty thousand people, scattered over a hundred thousand square miles of territory, behind which stretches a vast region of unexplored wilderness. There is every indication, however, that its progress in the near future will be rapid. Up to 1870 ...
— History of Australia and New Zealand - From 1606 to 1890 • Alexander Sutherland
... August the 22nd, I have received your favors of August the 16th, September the 2nd, 14th, 15th, and, and Mrs. Adams's, of September the 20th. I now send you, according to your request, a copy of the syllabus. To fill up this skeleton with arteries, with veins, with nerves, muscles, and flesh, is really beyond my time and information. Whoever could undertake it, would find great aid in Enfield's judicious abridgment of Brucker's ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... approached this object very cautiously. It was not an unusual thing to hang spies, and not unfrequently those mistaken for spies, but to hang them on a regularly constructed gibbet was not usual; and therefore while Lemon insisted that the black and skeleton-like object that loomed against the horizon was a gallows, he still entertained some doubt upon the subject, and determined to satisfy ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... make peace with my own conscience without doing something to elevate their aims and quicken their aspirations for the good and pure in thought and life. Our female schools are but poor apologies for the purposes of mind-culture and soul-development. The idea of life they inspire is but a skeleton of custom-service and fashion-worship. It is altogether subservient to what is, not what should be. Society does little else than to teach its girls to be dolls and drudges. The prevailing current of instruction and influence is deplorably low. I feel confident that ...
— Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women • George Sumner Weaver
... by differentiation. He further discovered the gelatinous, cylindrical cord, known as the chorda dorsalis, which passes along the body of the embryo of vertebrates, in the lower types of which it is limited to the entire inner skeleton, while in the higher the backbone and skull are developed round it. His "law of corresponding stages" in the development of vertebrate embryos was exemplified in the fact recorded by him about certain specimens preserved in spirit which he had omitted ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... hippopotamus, elephant, rhinoceros, lion, hyena, bear, reindeer, &c.; Pls Heaton cave, the glutton; Pont Newydd, felstone tools and a polished stone axe (like that of Rhosdigre); Carnedd Tyddyn Bleiddian, "platycnemic (skeleton) men of Denbighshire" (like those of Perthi Chwareu). Clawdd Coch has traces of the Romans; so also Penygaer and Penbarras. Roman roads ran from Deva (Chester) to Segontium (Carnarvon) and from Deva to Mons Heriri (Tomen y ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... and the Furies are seen in the interior, sleeping on the benches. Clytemnestra's ghost now ascends by the charonic stairs, and, passing through the orchestra, appears on the stage. We are not to imagine it a haggard skeleton, but a figure with the appearance of life, though paler, with the wound still open in her breast, and shrouded in ethereal-coloured vestments. She calls on the Furies, in the language of vehement reproach, and then disappears, probably through a trap-door. The Furies ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... take a piece of paper and the pencils with you, and secure an outline in your room. It need not be worked up with all the detail in this. Merely a skeleton sketch would do. Could I leave it at the house or send ...
— The Harvester • Gene Stratton Porter
... mouth; and every now and then he seemed to remember that he had the said whip, and took it in hand, to give it a crack which sounded like a pistol shot, with the result that the horse in the van threw up its head, which had hung down toward the road, and the other skeleton-like creature in the cart threw up its tail with a sharp whisk that disturbed the flies which appeared to have already begun to make a meal upon its body, while the scattered drove of ragged ponies and horses ceased cropping the roadside herbage, and ...
— The Weathercock - Being the Adventures of a Boy with a Bias • George Manville Fenn
... Marion had come back and looked in through the window. She was to shed one by one the shelters that protected her soul from the chill of the universe: her house, her clothes, her flesh, her skeleton. This first step had cost her so much that for one shuddering moment she had gone back ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... wagons; inside there were bins for storage, as well as a space for operating the gin; and in the rear a lean-to room extending to the ground level received the flying lint and let it settle on the floor. The press, a skeleton structure nearby, had in the center a stout wooden box whose interior length and width determined the height and thickness of the bales but whose depth was more than twice as great as the intended bale's width. ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... vice-admiral, and he opposed his ship single-handed against five great Spanish galleons, supported at intervals by ten others, and he fought them during nearly fifteen hours. Then Grenville's vessel was so battered that it resembled rather a skeleton than a ship, and of the crew few were to be seen but the dead and dying. Grenville himself was captured mortally wounded, and died uttering these words, "Here die I, Richard Grenville, with a joyful and quiet mind, for that I have ended my life, as a true soldier ought to do, fighting ...
— England in America, 1580-1652 • Lyon Gardiner Tyler
... is a truth of the simplest kind—the definition of a stone, rather than the painting of one—and the lights are in some degree dead and cold—the natural consequence of striking a mixed opaque pigment over a dark ground. It would now be possible to treat this skeleton of a stone, which could only have been knit together by Tintoret's rough temper, with the care of a Fleming; to leave its fiercely-stricken lights emanating from a golden ground, to gradate with the pen ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... humanities of the collection; and amongst these, two only I will molest the reader by noticing. One of the two was a mummy; the other was a skeleton. I, that had previously seen the museum, warned Lady Carbery of both; but much it mortified us that only the skeleton was shown. Perhaps the mummy was too closely connected with the personal history of Mr. White for exhibition to strangers; it was that of a lady who had been attended medically for some years by Mr. White, and had owed much alleviation of her sufferings to his inventive skill. She had, ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... the southern winter had come round, and they had to delay further to make more particular inquiry into Doughty's desertion. An ominous and strange spectacle met their eyes as they entered the harbour. In that utterly desolate spot a skeleton was hanging on a gallows, the bones picked clean by the vultures. It was one of Magellan's crew who had been executed there for mutiny fifty years before. The same fate was to befall the unhappy Englishman who had been guilty of the same fault. Without the strictest ...
— English Seamen in the Sixteenth Century - Lectures Delivered at Oxford Easter Terms 1893-4 • James Anthony Froude
... the same rules but was not of so much importance. That of the large crow was favourable if the bird was sitting on a tree, especially when a tank or river could be seen; but if the crow was perched on the back of a buffalo or pig or on the skeleton of any animal, it was a bad omen. Tanks or rivers were likely places for booty in the shape of resting travellers, whose death the appearance of the crow might portend; whereas in the other positions it might prognosticate a Thug's own death. The chirping ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... generations ago, witnessed the bodies of slain Happar warriors, wrapped in palm-leaves, carried to banquet at the Ti. At another time, at the Ti, he "observed a curiously carved vessel of wood," and on looking into it his eyes "fell upon the disordered members of a human skeleton, the bones still fresh with moisture, and with particles of flesh clinging ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... where our guide stops us, and points to a place where all the pines have been broken short off by one of them. Along here some old ghostly pines, dead ages ago, their white, ghastly skeletons bleached by a hundred storms, stand, stretching out their long, bony arms, like phantom giants. These skeleton pines are a striking image; I wonder I have not seen them ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... those bold ones whom the chances of their enterprise had borne over that invisible face of the disc, which no human eye until then had ever seen? It was now their turn to impose some limit on that selenographic science, which had reconstructed the lunar world as Cuvier did the skeleton of a fossil, and say, "The moon was this, a habitable world, inhabited before the earth. The moon is that, a world uninhabitable, ...
— Jules Verne's Classic Books • Jules Verne
... the missing words, which most children who are able to keep out of fire and water can accomplish after a certain number of trials. When the poet that is to be has got so as to perform this task easily, a skeleton verse, in which two or three words of each line are omitted, is given the child to fill up. By and by the more difficult forms of metre are outlined, until at length a feebleminded child can make out a sonnet, completely equipped with ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... Cape Cod Newbury's Old Elm Samuel Sewall's Prophecy The Shrieking Woman Agnes Surriage Skipper Ireson's Ride Heartbreak Hill Harry Main: The Treasure and the Cats The Wessaguscus Hanging The Unknown Champion Goody Cole General Moulton and the Devil The Skeleton in Armor Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket Love and Treason The Headless Skeleton of Swamptown The Crow and Cat of Hopkins Hill The Old Stone Mill Origin of a Name Micah Rood Apples A Dinner and its Consequences The New Haven Storm Ship The Windham Frogs The Lamb of Sacrifice Moodus ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... Anglo-Saxondom, but only with Conrad's place therein. That place is isolated and remote; he is neither of it nor quite in it. In the midst of a futile meliorism which deceives the more, the more it soothes, he stands out like some sinister skeleton at the feast, regarding the festivities with a flickering and impenetrable grin. "To read him," says Arthur Symons, "is to shudder on the edge of a gulf, in a silent darkness." There is no need to be told that he is there almost by accident, that he came in a chance passerby, a bit ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... the Icelandic Chronicles tell us that Lief, the son of Eric the Red, 1001, sailed with a crew of thirty-five men, in a Norwegian vessel, and driven southward in a storm, from Greenland along the coasts of Labrador, wintered in Vineland on the shores of Mount Hope Bay. Longfellow's Skeleton in Armor has revealed their temporary settlement. Thither sailed Eric's son, Thorstein, with his young and beautiful wife, Gudrida, and their twenty-five companions, the following year. His death occurred, and ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Vol. 1, Issue 1. - A Massachusetts Magazine of Literature, History, - Biography, And State Progress • Various
... the same subject. To have filled up the outline, in conformity with the plan upon which it was sketched, would have swelled it to a volume. Much of the foregoing has therefore been thrown into the form of a mere skeleton of heads, or rather a series of indices, to trains of thought and classes of proof, which, however limited or imperfect, may perhaps, afford some facilities to those who have little leisure for minute and ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... the outer wall of the spacer slid back. His hands blundering with the metallic claws of the gloves, Dane buckled two safety belts about him. Then the skeleton flitter moved to the left—out into the glare of the early day, a light too bright, even through the shielded viewplates of ...
— Plague Ship • Andre Norton
... hunger, spoke the heron's croak, died a heron's death. A dead jackal was lying on the sandy bank, and Siddhartha's soul slipped inside the body, was the dead jackal, lay on the banks, got bloated, stank, decayed, was dismembered by hyaenas, was skinned by vultures, turned into a skeleton, turned to dust, was blown across the fields. And Siddhartha's soul returned, had died, had decayed, was scattered as dust, had tasted the gloomy intoxication of the cycle, awaited in new thirst like a hunter in ...
— Siddhartha • Herman Hesse
... travelling, first through the mountainous district of our country, and then along the coast, and finding no change for the better, I determined to try the effect of a sea voyage. I accordingly embarked at Calcutta, in a coasting vessel that was bound to Madras. At this time I had wasted away to a mere skeleton, and no one who saw me, believed I could live a month. Such, indeed, were my own impressions. In the letter which I wrote to my parents, I endeavoured to prepare them for the worst. When, after a long voyage, we reached Madras, my health was evidently improved; but a piece of ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker
... is a small, neat guy with a face that has all the muscular machinery for producing an expression; he just doesn't care to use it. Mr. Yardo is taller than any of us except Eru and flesh is spread very thin on his bones, including his face which splits now and then in a grin like an affable skeleton. Where the colonel fits is guessable enough, Mr. Yardo is presumably Expert at something but no ...
— The Lost Kafoozalum • Pauline Ashwell
... temple, a ghastly scar split the cheek-bone, sank into the depths of the hollow cheek, notched across the lower jaw, and plunged to disappearance among the prodigious skin-folds of the neck. The withered lobes of both ears were perforated by tiny gypsy-like circles of gold. On the skeleton fingers of his right hand were no less than five rings—not men's rings, nor women's, but foppish rings—"that would fetch a price," Daughtry adjudged. On the left hand were no rings, for there were no ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London
... see, that's what bothers me, that's what bothers me. Don't you suppose that each one of us has a skeleton in his closet? Yes, indeed! Well, there are people who continue to be children all their lives, so that they cannot control their lawless desires. Whenever the opportunity comes, the criminal is ready. But I cannot understand why you do not feel innocent. ...
— Plays: Comrades; Facing Death; Pariah; Easter • August Strindberg
... of you. I fancied I was standing close to the glass door of your little apartment, and saw you sitting at your work-table, between a skeleton and a parcel of dried plants. Haller, Humboldt, and Linnaeus lay open before you;—on your sofa were a volume of Goethe, and The Magic Ring. {37} I looked at you for a long time, then at everything around you, and then at you again; but you moved not—you ...
— Peter Schlemihl • Adelbert von Chamisso
... a musty skeleton, to which still clung a few mouldy shreds left by the rats; and only the celebrated bone handle identified it as what had once been the ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., Issue 31, October 29, 1870 • Various
... was bound to prove startling any way one looked at it. The prominence of the family, the baldness of its skeleton, and the gleeful eagerness with which it danced into full view left but little for meddlers to covet. A crash was inevitable; it was the clash that Grover & Dickhut were trying to avert. Old Wharton, worn to a slimmer ...
— The Purple Parasol • George Barr McCutcheon
... lips parted stammeringly. The apathy caused by physical exhaustion and his recently administered drug was passing from him; the hopelessly shattered condition of mind and body was showing through it like a skeleton through a thin ...
— The Masquerader • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... skeleton of the story, but the episodes and apologues which round its dimensions, and give it its mediaeval popularity, do not concern our subject. In this skeleton the story of ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... stuffed animals Andy wanted to take a look at his favorite dinosaur. There were other dinosaurs in the exhibit but Andy always devoted himself to the one nearest the entrance. "Dip," he called the enormous skeleton, though its full name was Diplodocus. Jerry was interested in reading that the bones of this dinosaur had been found out in Utah and that it was seventy feet long and twelve feet high. Andy did not care ...
— Jerry's Charge Account • Hazel Hutchins Wilson
... wanting in themselves. The accused malignants, on the other hand, complained bitterly of the impertinence of meddling fanatics and hypocrites. Paterson was cruelly reviled, and was unable to defend himself. He had been completely prostrated by bodily and mental suffering. He looked like a skeleton. His heart was broken. His inventive faculties and his plausible eloquence were no more; and he seemed to have sunk ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... organization has, nevertheless, some striking peculiarities. They have been entirely covered with bony scales or plates, enamelled externally; their spines are tipped with bone, and, as one striking and unvarying feature, the tail is only finned on the lower side. The internal skeleton, of which no traces have been preserved, is presumed to have been cartilaginous. They therefore unite the character of cartilaginous fishes with a character peculiar to themselves, and in which we see pretty clear vestiges of the pre- ...
— Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Robert Chambers
... light-hearted opinions of their own on burning questions such as we sometimes hear: "Do you believe in evolution?—I do." "No, I don't, I think there is very little evidence for it." And that if they are introduced to a man of science it is better not to ask his opinion about the latest skeleton that has been discovered, or let him see that they are alarmed lest there might be something wrong with our pedigree after all, or with the book of Genesis. One would be glad, however, that they should know the names and ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart
... chaplets drest; But, oh! what loathsomeness is hid beneath— A fleshless, mould'ring effigy of death; A thing to check the smile and wake the sigh, With thoughts that living excellence can die. How many at the coming feast will see THE SKELETON OF HONOURED ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, August 7, 1841 • Various
... better gods than ours, Seemed to the king troubled with fleas, and slaves Were told to groom him smartly, which they did Thoroughly with steel combs, until at last They curried the living flesh from off his bones And stript his face of gristle, till he was Skull and half skeleton and yet alive. You're not for ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various
... a mere skeleton. The reason of this is obvious. Servia forms part of one great empire, and adjoins two others; therefore, the largest disciplined force that she might bring into the field, in the event of hostilities, could make no impression for offensive ...
— Servia, Youngest Member of the European Family • Andrew Archibald Paton
... volume referred to I have given a skeleton plan upon such a scale of subdivision that a tracing-board, of 5 feet by 8 feet, would be divided up into over one million parts, and, as all these subdivisions are perfect representations of the original Vesica figure with ...
— Science and the Infinite - or Through a Window in the Blank Wall • Sydney T. Klein
... To Guida the letters of the word seemed to stand out from the paper like shining hieroglyphs on a misty grey curtain. The rest of the page was resolved into a filmy floating substance, no more tangible than the ashy skeleton on which writing still lives when the paper itself has been eaten by flame, and the flame ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... some skeleton keys, a burglar's jemmy in two sections, a pair of india-rubber gloves, a small, thin saw, and an electric pocket-lamp, all of which he carefully ...
— The White Lie • William Le Queux
... grand opportunity to study their evil side, and what I don't see is told me by the neighbors; then their good side turns up after awhile, like a rainbow after a shower. I find it takes wise men to be really bad ones, but, after they've learnt their lesson, they see what a dried-up skeleton an evil life is, and then it's a race to make up fer their wasted years. Course, if a fool is led into idle habits, he must be led out again, and it's doubtful whether the process is very purifyin'. But ...
— Nancy McVeigh of the Monk Road • R. Henry Mainer
... that will plunge you into midnight woe; rhythms rescued from the Greeks of old, that will drive you into panting dance; rhythms that will make drunkards of sober men, warriors of cowards, harlots of angels. I can intoxicate, dazzle, burn, madden you. Why? Because all music is rhythm. It is the skeleton, the structure of life, love, the cosmos. God! how I will exult, even if my skin crackles in hell-fire, when the children of the earth listen to my Tympani Symphony, and ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... And night was coming on. In daytime, even, Copsley Wood was a shadowy place; but now, when above the trees and beyond their margin twilight had fallen, it was indeed a dark and lonesome spot. All around the pines rose straight and tall, like gaunt giant forms flinging out long, skeleton arms eager to infold them in a cruel clasp. Strange and stealthy sounds from bird and beast came to their ears at intervals, while the unfamiliar music of rustling branches and whispering leaves filled the souls of these two little travellers with a feeling of awe and vague alarm. Nevertheless ...
— Two Little Travellers - A Story for Girls • Frances Browne Arthur
... muttered the young lady, as the remains of what had been a carry-all were pulled up beside the platform by the skinny skeleton of what might once have been a ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, July 1878, No. 9 • Various
... Siddons's, and nothing better proves her great dramatic genius than her having clothed so meager a part in such magnificent proportions as she gave to it, and filled out by her own poetical conception the bare skeleton Mr. Murphy's Euphrasia presented to her. This frightened me a great deal; Juliet and Belvidera scarcely anybody can do ill, but Euphrasia I thought few people could do well, and I feared I was not one ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... by strong drink and by misery, did its work fast. The patient's stomach rejected all nourishment. He dwindled in a few weeks from a portly and even corpulent man to a skeleton. On the eighteenth of April he died, in the forty-first year of his age. He had been Chief Justice of the King's Bench at thirty-five, and Lord Chancellor at thirty-seven. In the whole history of the English bar there is no other instance of so rapid an elevation, or of so terrible a fall. ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the denoument was brought about by the aid of a clergyman. Men of this profession have always been considered the most efficient guardians against the powers of darkness. He, with the help of Mrs. M——, made the excavation in the cellar which brought to light the half-consumed skeleton. Here, unfortunately, is a gap in the evidence. The remains were pronounced by medical authority to be human, but was that authority reliable? was that doctor skilled in comparative anatomy? If not, the bones might have been those of a sheep, buried perchance in the cellar ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... remember, on the one hand, how frequently it is stated that important parts of the structure never vary; and, on the other hand, on what small differences in the skeleton fossil species have often been founded, the variability of the skull and of some other bones in the domesticated rabbit well deserves attention. It must not be supposed that the more important differences immediately to be described strictly characterise any one breed; all that can ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... great to-do in the jay world. One day, while I was living in Kansas, the skeleton of a jay, with the feathers still attached, was found in the rubbish of an ash-pile in my rear yard, and exposed to view. An hour later a half dozen or more jays were flinging about in the peach tree above the feathers of their dead comrade, screaming ...
— Our Bird Comrades • Leander S. (Leander Sylvester) Keyser
... throughout this book, upon the necessity for logical associations, you will readily see that the key-note to note-taking is, Let your notes represent the logical progression of thought in the lecture. Strive above all else to secure the skeleton—the framework upon which the lecture is hung. A lecture is a logical structure, and the form in which it is presented is the outline. This outline, then, is your chief concern. In the case of some lectures it is an easy matter. The lecturer ...
— How to Use Your Mind • Harry D. Kitson
... and nights alternate Old Nokomis and the sea-gulls Stripped the oily flesh of Nahma, Till the waves washed through the rib-bones, Till the sea-gulls came no longer, And upon the sands lay nothing But the skeleton of Nahma. ...
— The Song Of Hiawatha • Henry W. Longfellow
... sorts: a huge crocodile, from the Nile; a vulture, with expanded wings, and talons tearing its prey, at which its bloodshot eyes looked down with an expression of life-like savageness. On one side there was a human skeleton of gigantic proportions, with a club in its hand, in the attitude of striking. Toads and lizards abounded. There were mummy cases, with their lids off, exposing the dried remnants of mortality within. In huge bottles were children, some with two heads, or three arms, and other deformities, ...
— The Golden Grasshopper - A story of the days of Sir Thomas Gresham • W.H.G. Kingston
... drink; and, for some time, he continued to look in upon us pretty regularly of an evening,—still abstaining, with wonderful perseverance, from the "rank poison" he had so bravely forsworn. But some of our members protested against this conduct. They did not like to have him sitting there like a skeleton at a feast, instead of contributing his quota to the general amusement, casting a cloud over all, and watching, with greedy eyes, every drop they carried to their lips—they vowed it was not fair; ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... and drew back the curtain. What was that? A gibbet in the air, a body hanging? Ah! Only the trees—the dark trees—the winter skeleton trees! Recoiling, he returned to his armchair and sat down before the fire. It had been shining like that, the lamp turned low, his chair drawn up, when Larry came in that afternoon two months ago. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... that once he would have found her most brilliant, but that now it was exactly as when he had looked at the X-ray photograph of his own broken ankle, where the sole thing which made a reality was the skeleton substructure. He could only seem to see Cecilia Cricklander's vulgar soul—-the pink and white perfection of her body had melted ...
— Halcyone • Elinor Glyn
... overhead, and the stars, like magnificent dewdrops, hung richly in the sky. Away to the north, just clear of a stretch of heaven-high peaks, the scintillating shafts of the northern lights shuddered convulsively, like skeleton arms outstretched to grasp the rich gems which hung just beyond their reach. The moving shadows had changed to material forms. Lank, gaunt, hungry-looking beasts crowded just beyond the fire-lit circle; shaggy-coated creatures, with manes a-bristle and baleful ...
— In the Brooding Wild • Ridgwell Cullum
... be still somewhat dazed from the rough handling he had suffered, his brother was thrust forward. The latter was stripped to the waist, his wrists were firmly bound, then trussed up to one of the stout end-poles of the tent-frame which, skeleton-like, stood over the platform. This done, the committee fell back, and the wielder of ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... jail and the somewhat tiresome church exhaust one's opportunities for doing good in Baddeck on Sunday. There seemed to be no idlers about, to reprove; the occasional lounger on the skeleton wharves was in his Sunday clothes, and therefore within the statute. No one, probably, would have thought of rowing out beyond the island to fish for cod,—although, as that fish is ready to bite, and his associations ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... tent the first thing," said Toby, as he seated himself on the saw-horse as a sort of place of honor, and proceeded to give his companions the benefit of his experience in the circus line. "I s'pose we could get along without a fat woman, or a skeleton; but we'd have to have the tent anyway, so's folks couldn't look right in an' see ...
— Mr. Stubbs's Brother - A Sequel to 'Toby Tyler' • James Otis
... grew stronger, he found himself compelled to play alone, for the sister no longer lifted her head nor moved about. His little body rounded out with the meat he now ate; but the food had come too late for her. She slept continuously, a tiny skeleton flung round with skin in which the flame flickered lower and lower and at last ...
— White Fang • Jack London
... made no complaint, because he told them that he should be deeply involved in trouble if his participation in their escape should be discovered; but, happy as Rosa was in reciprocated love, this necessity of concealment was a skeleton ever sitting at her feast; and Floracita, who had no romantic compensation for it, chafed under the restraint. It was dusk when they returned to the cottage, and the thickets were alive with fire-flies, as if Queen Mab and all her train ...
— A Romance of the Republic • Lydia Maria Francis Child
... around the dusty square, half-dazed by the sunlight—it was a glittering noonday in July—but the postal waggon to Spezzano Albanese, my first resting-point, had not yet arrived. Then a withered old man, sitting on a vehicle behind the sorry skeleton of a horse, volunteered to take me there at once; we quickly came to terms; it was too hot, we both agreed, to waste breath in bargaining. With the end of his whip he pointed out the church of Spezzano on its hilltop; a proud structure it looked at this ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... dangerous, when it should become more than half diminished; and immediately upon your death five or six thousand of his majesty's subjects might, in two or three days, cut your flesh from your bones, take it away by cart-loads, and bury it in distant parts, to prevent infection, leaving the skeleton as a monument of admiration ...
— Gulliver's Travels - into several remote nations of the world • Jonathan Swift
... of black slaty shingle, we found the skeleton of a whale from which the baleen was absent; also a quantity of driftwood, some of it twelve inches in diameter; a wooden wedge; a barrel-stave; a piece of a boat's spar and a fragment of a biscuit-box. The river, ...
— The First Landing on Wrangel Island - With Some Remarks on the Northern Inhabitants • Irving C. Rosse
... went back with him searched and found in the skull the mark of a pistol ball, and buried in the sand, 'neath the skeleton fingers, was found a Smith & Wesson revolver. In the side pocket of his coat his wallet was discovered, with its contents untouched, and among numerous other articles was a letter addressed to ...
— From Wealth to Poverty • Austin Potter
... ran up the hillock, and stood by his father's side. The marble was all burnt into perfect, snow-white lime. But on its surface, in the midst of the circle,—snow-white too, and thoroughly converted into lime,—lay a human skeleton, in the attitude of a person who, after long toil, lies down to long repose. Within the ribs—strange to say—was the shape of a ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... is the beginning of the park," said Lady Glencora, pointing to a grand old ruin of an oak tree, which stood on the wide margin of the road, outside the rounded corner of the park palings, propped up with a skeleton of supporting sticks all round it. "And that is Matching oak, under which Coeur de Lion or Edward the Third, I forget which, was met by Sir Guy de Palisere as he came from the war, or from hunting, or something of that kind. It was the king, you know, who had ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope
... It was the mere skeleton of a woman who lay there. She had suffered long and intensely; no one could look upon her now and doubt that the hour of discharge was very near. The woman standing above her reasoned that if a word of reproof or advice was to be given there was not much time to lose. Often, from open ...
— A Sheaf of Corn • Mary E. Mann
... the tent to which they had been directed, they found, lying upon the ground, a man about forty years of age. Although he appeared a mere skeleton, consisting of little more than skin and bones, he did not present the general aspect of a man suffering from ill health; nor yet would he have passed for a white man ...
— The Boy Slaves • Mayne Reid
... consciousness that his landlord, his neighbour on the same flat, his barber, or his fellow workman, may be a "vertrauter," a spy in the pay of the police, and his simplest actions, through their means, perverted into misdemeanours. A worthy cooper, with whom I occasionally dined, on reading a skeleton report of a public meeting in England, where working men had made speeches and moved resolutions, exclaimed, as he threw down the paper: "But, seriously, don't you think ...
— A Tramp's Wallet - stored by an English goldsmith during his wanderings in Germany and France • William Duthie
... advance of us. Some deep ocean-current has been moving her on, strong, but silent,—yes, stronger than these noisy winds that puff our sails until they are swollen as the cheeks of jubilant cherubim. And when at last the black steam-tug with the skeleton arms, which comes out of the mist sooner or later and takes us all in tow, grapples her and goes off panting and groaning with her, it is to that harbor where all wrecks are refitted, and where, alas! we, towering in our ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... in early winter, that we commenced our journey to that city, where little more than a year ago I had gone a young and happy bride. As we rode along the winding avenue, I looked out on the dry russet lawn, the majestic skeleton of the great elm, stripped of the foliage and hues of life, and saw the naked branches of the oaks clinging to each other in sad fraternity, and heard the wind whistling through them as through the shrouds of a vessel. With an involuntary shiver I drew ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... temperate and more circumspect. Moreover, both of them seemed vaguely weaker in fibre, not so much in what they did as in their subtle reactions to the civilization about them. In Gloria had been born something that she had hitherto never needed—the skeleton, incomplete but nevertheless unmistakable, of her ancient abhorrence, a conscience. This admission to herself was coincidental with the slow decline of her ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... there now behind that rock and make a fire, while we go out and kill a deer. You must build a wigwam, too, by the time we get back. Hear me? I'm a big chief! 'I am Famine—Buckadawin!' and I'll make a living skeleton of ...
— Two Little Knights of Kentucky • Annie Fellows Johnston
... pounced, with the celerity of a hawk, on a fine roast goose, which unfortunately happened to have been just then placed within the reach of his annihilating fangs, and in a very short space of time it was reduced to a skeleton; having occasion for a few minutes to leave the room, the company in the meanwhile secreted the bones of the goose. The waiter now entered for the purpose of removing the cloth: casting his eyes round the room, he seemed absorbed in perplexity—"What is the matter?" ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... almost entire, found in the gypsum beds of Paris. Daubenton had also slightly anticipated Cuvier's law of correlation, giving "a very remarkable example of the mode of procedure to follow in order to solve these kinds of questions by the way in which he had recognized a bone of a giraffe whose skeleton he did not ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... with sturdy pine trees; at the crest line the children of the Tropics meet and intermingle with those of the temperate zone. There are gigantic, rolling, bare backs whose only covering is the carpet of grass periodically green and brown. There are long, rambling, skeleton ranges with here and there pine forests gradually creeping up the sides to the crests. There are solitary volcanoes, now extinct, standing like things purposely let alone when nature humbled the surrounding earth. There are sculptured lime rocks, cities of them, with gray hovels and ...
— The Bontoc Igorot • Albert Ernest Jenks
... Count de Dreux. The solemnities at the nuptial ceremony, which took place in the town of Jedburgh, were very great and remarkable, and particularly when, amidst the display of a pageant which was exhibited on the occasion, a ghastly spectre made its appearance in the form of a skeleton, as the King of Terrors is said to be represented.—Your worship is free to laugh at this, if you think it a proper subject for mirth; but men are alive who viewed it with their own eyes, and the event showed too well of what misfortunes this ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... help me to such information as I should require, and even mentioned a subject in which he thought I could appear to advantage. "If you try your hand on a story," he observed, "I would advise you to prepare a kind of skeleton, and when you have pleased yourself with the line of narrative, you may then leisurely clothe it with flesh and blood." Some years afterwards, I reminded him of this advice. "Did you follow it?" he inquired. "I tried," I said; "but I had not gone ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 470 - Volume XVII, No. 470, Saturday, January 8, 1831 • Various
... force open a secret drawer, the presence of which he had one day accidentally discovered. He tried a number of keys to no account, and was thinking of giving up his researches for the day until he had procured a skeleton key, when at last ...
— The House of the Vampire • George Sylvester Viereck
... Here are the chalk and the sand, vieing with each other in making beautiful scenes. Here is a navigable river and fine meadows. Here are woods and downs. Here is something of everything but fat marshes and their skeleton-making agues. The vale all the way down to Chilworth from Reigate is very delightful." He has as many praises for the neighbourhood on the other side. "Everybody that has been from Godalming to ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... mile. At present, as we elsewhere remarked, the only tolerable shaded map of Ireland is that of the Railway Commission, which is on a scale of one inch to four statute miles. Captain Larcom proposes, and the Commission on the Ordnance Memoir recommend, that contour lines should be the skeleton of the shading. If this plan be adopted the publication cannot be for some years; but the shading will have the accuracy of machine-work instead of mere hand skill. Contours are lines representing series of levels ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... her, the fair, The peerless Dulcinea del Toboso. I knew of her enchantment and her fate, From high-born dame to peasant wench transformed And touched with pity, first I turned the leaves Of countless volumes of my devilish craft, And then, in this grim grisly skeleton Myself encasing, hither have I come To show where lies the fitting remedy To give relief in such a piteous case. O thou, the pride and pink of ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... known it dead than alive, one might not wish perhaps to say; but the place itself is curiously without pathos; Newport in ruins might not be touching; possibly all skeletons or even mummies are without pathos; and Pompeii is a skeleton, or at the most a mummy, of ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... with a circle and cross within it, and one straight wire. One solid cube. One Skeleton Wire Cube. One Sphere. One Cone. One Cylinder. One Hexagonal Prism. ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 3 (of 3), 1836-1870 • Charles Dickens
... most some few hours. Three stumps of masts, broken off about two feet above the bridge, showed that the vessel had had to sacrifice its masts. But, lying on its side, it had filled, and it was heeling over to port. This skeleton of what it had once been was a sad spectacle as it lay lost under the waves, but sadder still was the sight of the bridge, where some corpses, bound with ropes, were still lying. I counted five—four men, one of whom was standing at the helm, and ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne
... it touches somewhat on a subject delicate and difficult to treat—the "skeleton in the closet" of society. But the evil exists on every side, and at some time or other threatens every home and life. It is my belief that Christian teachers should not timidly or loftily ignore it, for, mark it well, the evil does not let us or ours alone. It is my ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... scaffolding draped in red, people heaped on piles of lumber and bricks, perched high upon shadowy girders, intent and thunder-voiced. Through the dull, heavy sky now and again burst the sun, flooding reddish light through the skeleton windows upon the mass of simple faces upturned ...
— Ten Days That Shook the World • John Reed
... larva. This creature feeds and grows until finally it settles down and spins a home of silk, called a cocoon (Fig. 145). If we open the cocoon we shall find that the animal is now covered with a hard outside skeleton, that it cannot move freely, and that it cannot eat at all. The animal in this state is known as the pupa (Figs. 145 and 146). Sometimes, however, the pupa is not covered by a cocoon, sometimes it is soft, and sometimes it has some power of motion (Fig. 141). ...
— Agriculture for Beginners - Revised Edition • Charles William Burkett
... delicate subjects, where a seemingly trifling difference of more or less may constitute a difference in kind, even a faithful display of the main and supporting ideas, if yet they are separated from the forms by which they are at once clothed and modified, may perchance present a skeleton indeed; but a skeleton to alarm and deter. Though I might find numerous precedents, I shall not desire the reader to strip his mind of all prejudices, nor to keep all prior systems out of view during his examination of the present. For ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... great Square was knocked to fragments. The huge belfry, Saint Rombaud's Tower, wherein hangs the famous carillon of more than thirty bells, was battered but still stood firm. The vast cathedral was a melancholy wreck of its former beauty and grandeur. The roof was but a skeleton of bare rafters; the side wall pierced with gaping rents and holes; the pictured windows were all gone; the sunlight streamed in everywhere upon the stone floor, strewn with an indescribable confusion of shattered glass, fallen beams, fragments of carved ...
— Fighting For Peace • Henry Van Dyke
... raise loyal corps to assist in the defence of the kingdom. This was agreed to in the commons; but in the lords the clause enabling the king to double the militia was rejected, thereby leaving the bill a mere skeleton. When it was brought back to the commons thus mutilated, Lord North was taunted by the opposition with having at length, after spreading the spirit of disunion and discord on every hand, seen it enter into the very cabinet itself. In reply, North, with wonderful equanimity of ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... seven little tables and forty-nine chairs were occupied. There was not room for an ordinary-sized steward to pass up and down between the tables; but our waiter was not an ordinary-sized man—he was a living skeleton in miniature. We handed the soup, and the "roast beef one," and "roast lamb one," "corn beef and cabbage one," "veal and stuffing one," and the "veal and pickled pork," one—or two, or three, as the ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson
... customs and language was attained; the facts of their history were separated from their mythical and legendary elements; the dress, the looks of men, the climate of the time, the physical aspects of their country—all the skeleton of things was fitted together, bone to bone. And for a good while this merely critical school held the field. It did admirable ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... and less of the round and lancet-shaped forms, such as pleurosigmata and diclyochae, as the tube-shaped diatoms absorb the nitro-glycerine better, and it becomes packed into the centre of the silicious skeleton of the diatoms, the skeleton acting as a kind of tamping, and increasing the intensity of ...
— Nitro-Explosives: A Practical Treatise • P. Gerald Sanford
... Australians would indeed be good cause for surprise—only—it has never taken place, and never will take place. I can only surmise that my request made to Maxwell that these 4,500 men should come to me as drafts for my skeleton units, instead of as a raw brigade, has twisted itself, going down some office corridor, into a story that I don't want the men! K. tells me Egypt is mine and the fatness thereof; yet, no sooner do I make the most modest suggestion concerning anything or anyone Egyptian than K. is got at and I ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume I • Ian Hamilton
... not the wreck she anticipated that met her eyes as she came through the hedge. On the opposite side of the road a long low skeleton car was standing, one side lurched drunkenly down with two wheels in the gutter. Still in his seat, the driver was leaning over the steering-wheel, out of breath, but laughing a ...
— The Flying Mercury • Eleanor M. Ingram
... Skeleton: the hard chitinous parts which externally (exoskeleton) or internally (endoskeleton) form a protective covering, or serve as points of attachment, to ...
— Explanation of Terms Used in Entomology • John. B. Smith
... asked where Sheffield was, and was answered; it was then pointed to by the dux, as a dot on a skeleton map. And now came a flourish. "What is Sheffield famous for?" Blank stupor, hopeless vacuity, till he came to a sort of sprouting Dougal Cratur—almost as wee, and as glegg, and as tousy about the head, as my own Kintail terrier, whom ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... efforts to sweep a pathway across the road, and the dashing cab pulls up suddenly just in time to save him from being hurled to the ground by the horse. Then he gives it up as a vain attempt, and leans, the model of despair, against the wall, and wrings his skeleton fingers in agony—when just as a compassionate matron is drawing the strings of her purse, stopping for her charitable purpose in a storm of wind and rain, the voice of the policeman is heard over her shoulder: 'What! you are here ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 437 - Volume 17, New Series, May 15, 1852 • Various
... Etchingham Manor. Perhaps my aunt had even forced her to take the family name, to save appearances. The old woman was capable of anything, even of providing an obscure nephew with a brilliant sister. And I should not be thanked if I interfered. This skeleton of swift reasoning passed between word and word ... "You are no sister of mine!" I was continuing my ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... of what was called in those days, "Belyando Spew." Everything one ate came back again and no one seemed to know of an antidote to what appeared to be a summer sickness. The gidya around seemed to accentuate the complaint, until I became a walking skeleton. ...
— Reminiscences of Queensland - 1862-1869 • William Henry Corfield
... otherwise inevitably lose his life. At length, finding that neither threats nor entreaties would avail, and Adams having remained in irons from June to the beginning of August, and his sufferings having reduced him almost to a skeleton, his master was advised to sell him; for, if longer confined, he would certainly die, and thereby prove a total loss. Influenced by this consideration, his master at last determined to release him from his confinement; but, although very weak, the moment he was liberated, he was set to ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... angry that he should not be the first applied to. Often carried away by the anti-hero, but rescued either by her father or the hero. Often reduced to support herself and her father by her talents, and work for her bread; continually cheated, and defrauded of her hire; worn down to a skeleton, and now and then starved to death. At last, hunted out of civilised society, denied the poor shelter of the humblest cottage, they are compelled to retreat into Kamtschatka, where the poor father quite worn down, finding his ...
— Memoir of Jane Austen • James Edward Austen-Leigh
... man with the greatest ease. It is considered to be the largest of the species ever met with in any of the seas of Europe. Colonel Bothwell has purchased it for his friend Mr. Home, the surgeon, of Sackville-street, who intends to dissect it, and place the skeleton in his museum. ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol I, No. 2, February 1810 • Samuel James Arnold
... out into the ripple with their fresh child-like laurel-line leaves and dangling rods of emerald, that were really the suckers of their banyan-like roots, had grown into an obscene and bizarre maturity, like nightmares striding out in every direction with skeleton feet planted in festering mud, and stretching out horned, clawing hands that seemed to take root as one looked, and to throw out other roots of ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne
... some of my friends in America, desiring they would send me such of the spoils of the moose, caribou, elk and deer, as might throw light on that class of animals; but more particularly, to send me the complete skeleton, skin and horns of the moose, in such condition as that the skin might be sewed up and stuffed, on its arrival here. I am happy to be able to present to you at this moment, the bones and skin of a moose, the horns of another individual of ...
— The Writings of Thomas Jefferson - Library Edition - Vol. 6 (of 20) • Thomas Jefferson
... so from the trail, and coming quite near where I expected to find the game. Passing cautiously by a clump of willows I noticed something white on the dead grass, which, upon investigation, proved to be a human skeleton in a perfect state of preservation. I picked up the skull, looked it over, and picked off the under jaw which was filled with beautiful teeth. Putting these in my pocket and replacing the skull, I moved carefully forward, expecting to soon see the geese. Picking my way through ...
— In the Early Days along the Overland Trail in Nebraska Territory, in 1852 • Gilbert L. Cole
... main maxim in the first department. Object-lessons, wherever possible: i.e. if boys are taught about the stars, let it be with the stars over their heads to look at; if about the structure of the human body, let it be with a skeleton before them; if about the action of a pump, or other machine, let it be with the machine actually at hand. "Always let the things which the words are to designate be shown; and again, whatever the pupils ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... striking Treatise would do real service to science by educating naturalists. If you were to keep a portfolio open for a couple of years, and throw in slips of paper as subjects crossed your mind, you would soon have a skeleton (and that seems to me the difficulty) on which to put the flesh and colours in your inimitable manner. I believe such a book might have a brilliant success, but I did not intend to scribble so ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... front of the tomb he had posted a grim sentinel—a black marble statuette of Mors, modeled from that hideous little brass figure which Spence saw at Florence, representing a skeleton sitting on the ground, resting one ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... 'which you are pleased to compare with fireworks, constitute the skeleton, or framework, of four turrets, which, after having been concealed behind canvas, painted stone-colour, and relieved with imitation port-holes, will be suspended from the uppermost angles of ...
— The Pearl of the Antilles, or An Artist in Cuba • Walter Goodman
... the Bishop of Wodgate, and here with his arms bare and black, he worked at those locks, which defied any skeleton key that was not made by himself. He was a short, thickset man, powerfully made, with brawny arms disproportionately short even for his height, and with a countenance, as far as one could judge of a face so disfigured by his grimy toil, rather brutal than savage. His choice ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... through, has hardly been surpassed. The Ballad-collections, beginning with Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1705), brought poets back to the original sources of terror in popular tradition, and helped to revive the latent feelings of awe, wonder and fear. In Coleridge's Ancient Manner the skeleton-ship with its ghastly crew—the spectre-woman and her deathmate—the sensations of the mariner, alone on a wide, wide sea, seize on our imagination with irresistible power. The very substance of the poem is woven of the supernatural. The dream imagery ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... the points—with some others—and they are likely to remain unsettled. Reuben's rooms have been searched by the police, who failed to find any skeleton or duplicate keys; but this proves nothing, as he would probably have made away with them when he heard of the thumb-mark being found. As to the other matter, I have asked Reuben, and he has no recollection of ever having made a ...
— The Red Thumb Mark • R. Austin Freeman
... instruments, huge folios, piled higgledy-piggledy, carpenter's tools, retorts, bottles of chemicals. In one corner, beside a door leading to his bedroom, stood a turning-lathe three inches deep in sawdust and shavings; in another, a human skeleton hung against the wall, its feet concealed by the model of a pumping-engine. Hard by was nailed a rack containing a couple of antique swords, a ...
— The Blue Pavilions • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... they can here gets me. You know how some folks is. The fishin' 's always better somewheres else. Yes," continued Mrs. Lem sagely, "we don't know what we're doin' when we're envyin' folks. There's a skeleton in most family closets. Most everybody's got somethin' to contend with. I used to think," she lowered her voice, "that the Creator sent 'em for our good. Thinkright says not; so I humor him, and I hope it won't be visited on me. I apologize reg'lar ...
— The Opened Shutters • Clara Louise Burnham
... the 14th, and we went back for our long promised rest at Sarona, arriving there at 4 a.m. on the 15th. The Commanding Officer, Intelligence Officer, and the four company commanders, remained behind after the relief, and carried out a skeleton withdrawal scheme the ...
— The Fifth Battalion Highland Light Infantry in the War 1914-1918 • F.L. Morrison
... Any One of Them Open? Six Recently Exterminated North American Birds Sacred to the Memory of Exterminated Birds Whooping Cranes in the Zoological Park California Condor Primated Grouse, or "Prairie Chicken" Sage Grouse Snowy Egrets in the McIlhenny Preserve Wood-Duck Gray Squirrel Skeleton of a Rhytina Burchell's Zebra Thylacine, or Tasmanian Wolf West Indian Seal California Elephant Seal The Regular Army of Destruction G.O. Shields Two Gunners of Kansas City Why the Sandhill Crane is Becoming Extinct A Market Gunner at Work on Marsh Island Ruffed Grouse A Lawful ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... queen has lands and gold, mother, The queen has lands and gold, While you are forced to your empty breast A skeleton babe to hold,— A babe that is dying of want, mother, As I am dying now, With a ghastly look in its sunken eye, And ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... the adjacent country, and in the plenty and elegance of the domestic entertainment, to a castle in Gothic romances. The sea with a little island is before us; cascades play within view. Close to the house is the formidable skeleton of an old castle probably Danish, and the whole mass of building stands upon a protuberance of rock, inaccessible till of late but by a pair of stairs on the sea side, and secure in ancient times against any enemy that was likely to invade the kingdom ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... appearance at breakfast and dinner time, and squatting himself on the floor by L.'s or my side, gravely watched us throughout the meal. He was a thin, cadaverous-looking old man, about sixty years of age, with a most melancholy cast of features, so much so that we christened him the "Skeleton at the Feast!" As I am but little conversant with high-class Malay, and L. knew none, our conversation was somewhat limited, and while I fully acted up to the old Turkish proverb that "Silence is golden," ...
— On the Equator • Harry de Windt
... with full freedom to use, but has he the right to conceal and withhold his benefaction? Or suppose again, that one has some distinction of no use to humanity, yet of sufficient interest to the gaping crowd to command a price for exhibition; if one is a Bearded Lady, say, or a Living Skeleton, or a Fat Boy, and if one makes a living by exhibiting these peculiarities and selling one's photograph—then would it be just to allow any and every photographer to forcibly take one's picture and ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... was convened straightway To set a price upon the guilty heads Of these marauders, who, in lieu of pay, Levied black-mail upon the garden beds And corn-fields, and beheld without dismay The awful scarecrow, with his fluttering shreds; The skeleton that waited at their feast, Whereby ...
— Tales of a Wayside Inn • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... you think," said Mr Braine, warmly. "She is a good daughter—a dear girl, whom I love as well as if she were my own child. I shall never forget the way in which she devoted herself to my boy when he came out here, still weak, and a perfect skeleton, and it is my tender affection for the girl that makes me speak as ...
— The Rajah of Dah • George Manville Fenn
... for us both; I have not leisure now; A crown is come, and will not fate allow: And yet I feel something like death is near, My guards, my guards,— Let not that ugly skeleton appear! Sure destiny mistakes; this death's not mine; She dotes, and meant to cut another line. Tell her I am a queen;—but 'tis too late; Dying, I charge rebellion on my fate. Bow down, ye slaves:— [To the Moors. Bow quickly down, and your submission show.— [They bow. I'm ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Volume 4 (of 18) - Almanzor And Almahide, Marriage-a-la-Mode, The Assignation • John Dryden
... Ramsay, that he tried to learn his Sunday School lesson, tried to give attention to the sermons he heard, and tried to be interested in the good books he essayed to read on Sunday; but I am not sure that he succeeded entirely, for the skeleton frame of the Maud would rise up in his imagination to cloud the vision of higher things, and the remembrance of his relations with Captain Shivernock would thrust itself upon him. Yet it is a great deal even to try to be faithful in one's thoughts, and ...
— The Yacht Club - or The Young Boat-Builder • Oliver Optic
... remains were almost undecayed, as when he received the fatal wound on the banks of the Lech. The bones of Charles V., the savior of his country, were dispersed. At his feet was found the coffin of the faithful Du Gueselin, and the French hands profaned the skeleton before which English invasion had rolled back. Most of these tombs were found to be strongly secured. Much time, and no small exertion of skill and labor, were required to burst their barriers. They would have resisted forever the decay of time or the violence of enemies; they yielded ...
— The Revelation Explained • F. Smith
... and the rust come, and the separating, bony fingers of the skeleton Death filch away at last your treasure, what about you who are wrapped up with it, implicated in it; so grown into it, and it into you, that to wrench you from it opens your veins, and you bleed to death? There is a pathetic inscription in one of the rural churches of this country, in which ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... relation of each character to his environment in the same way he has outlined and measured the bonds uniting the various characters; so well that each individual is defined separately as to his personal and his social side, and in the same manner each family is defined. It is the skeleton of these individuals and of these families that is laid bare for your contemplation in these notes of Messieurs Cerfberr and Christophe. But this structure of facts, dependent one upon another by a logic equal to that of life itself, is the smallest ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... what my fate would have been had the ship gone down in deep water, leaving me safe, but deprived of all the stores she contained. The long, lingering agony, the starvation, the madness of thirst, and finally a horrible death on that far-away strip of sand, and another skeleton ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont
... to a most interesting skeleton, Vic," he used to say. "Catch me bothering myself about anything I ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross
... "coyotes," or small prairie-wolves; but though small, they exhibit wonderful activity and power of swallowing. By the time we got up to the brutes they had devoured every particle of the deer, and nothing remained but a well-picked skeleton, from which they slunk off when we were almost close enough to knock them over with the butts of our guns. They were not worth shooting, so we let them go, and, bitterly disappointed, set off to return to our camp. We had no difficulty in finding our way, ...
— Snow Shoes and Canoes - The Early Days of a Fur-Trader in the Hudson Bay Territory • William H. G. Kingston
... gave it to a convent, and she sold it to a merchant, but back it came; and she locked it up in the heaviest chests, and she buried it down in the lowest vaults, but it always came back in the night, till she was worn to a skeleton; and at last the old thing died without confession or sacrament, and went where she belonged. She was found lying dead in her bed one morning, and the rosary was gone; but when they came to lay her out, they found the marks of it burned to the bone into her breast. Father ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... with their daggers cut to pieces what remains of the flesh. The highest Lama present eats the first morsel, then, muttering prayers, the other Lamas partake of it, after which all the relations and friends throw themselves on the now almost denuded skeleton, scraping off pieces of flesh, which they devour greedily; and this repast of human flesh continues till the ...
— In the Forbidden Land • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... wood. You can, in the springtime or early summer find out what has happened to them if you go into a wood or carefully search under a big hedge in a lane where the leaves were not swept away. Here and there you come across skeleton leaves where only the veins are left, all the rest having disappeared. But generally where the leaves have kept moist they have changed to a dark brown mass which still shows some of the structure of a leaf. This ...
— Lessons on Soil • E. J. Russell
... a large part of the armies operating against Richmond is left behind. The enemy, knowing this, may, as an only chance, strip their lines to the merest skeleton, in the hope of advantage not being taken of it, while they hurl everything against the moving column, and return. It cannot be impressed too strongly upon commanders of troops left in the trenches not to allow this to occur without taking advantage of it. The very fact of the enemy coming ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... poor Mr. Gathergold was dead and buried; and the oddest part of the matter was that his wealth, which was the body and spirit of his existence, had disappeared before his death, leaving nothing of him but a living skeleton, covered over with a wrinkled, yellow skin. Since the melting away of his gold, it had been very generally allowed that there was no such striking resemblance, after all, betwixt the ignoble features of the ruined merchant ...
— The Literary World Seventh Reader • Various
... going away from seeing of it, at Paul's, and in the Convocation House Yard did there see the body of Robert Braybrooke, Bishop of London, that died 1404: He fell down in his tomb out of the great church into St. Fayth's this late fire, and is here seen his skeleton with the flesh on; but all tough and dry like a spongy dry leather, or touchwood all upon his bones. His head turned aside. A great man in his time, and Lord Chancellor; and his skeletons now exposed to be handled and derided by some, though admired for its duration by others. Many flocking ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... Near the skeleton lay a helmet of hammered brass and a corroded breastplate of steel while at one side was a long, straight sword in its scabbard and an ancient harquebus. The bones were those of a large man—a man of wondrous strength and vitality Tarzan knew he must have been to have ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... on the floor, and that night two of the men helped him home. The poor old man was put to bed, and though he tried it every morning until the end, he never could get up again. He would lie there and cough and cough, day and night, wasting away to a mere skeleton. There came a time when there was so little flesh on him that the bones began to poke through—which was a horrible thing to see or even to think of. And one night he had a choking fit, and a little river of blood came out ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... was passed around to remind the guests that they, too, would soon be in the same condition, and have no more time to enjoy life and its pleasures. The Romans imitated this custom by sending the larva, a statuette in the form of a skeleton, to make the round of the revellers. The Greek love of beauty converted this ugly scarecrow into a ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... and produced his implements. He had already introduced a skeleton key into the lock, when a loud exclamation was heard from the crowd outside ...
— The Widow Lerouge - The Lerouge Case • Emile Gaboriau
... Mrs. Larch observed that the smile did not long linger on her face. And that behind the laughter in her eyes was the shadow of a skeleton at the feast. Then came the legal separation and the parting. Mrs. Larch, resuming, her maiden name, it was announced, had gone to a quiet place ...
— The Diamond Cross Mystery - Being a Somewhat Different Detective Story • Chester K. Steele
... ran to the lodges, about the village, looking for the bones of his friend, which he carried to a secret place, and as fast as he found them arranged all in their natural order. At length he had formed all the skeleton complete, except the heel bone of one foot. It so happened that two sisters were out of camp, according to custom, at the time the body was cut up, and this heel was sent out to them. The dog hunted every lodge, and being satisfied that it ...
— The Myth of Hiawatha, and Other Oral Legends, Mythologic and Allegoric, of the North American Indians • Henry R. Schoolcraft
... sum o'th' wimmen held thair tungs to that pain and misery wal thair stockings fell down ower thair clog tops; but hasumever th' silence wur brokken by a Haworth Parish chap 'at they call Bob Gimlet, he happen'd to be thare an' he said, na lads, look daan th' valley, for I think I see th' skeleton at ony rate, an' Bob wur reight, for it wur as plain to be seen as an ...
— Th' History o' Haworth Railway - fra' th' beginnin' to th' end, wi' an ackaant o' th' oppnin' serrimony • Bill o'th' Hoylus End
... quite a different way from ours. First of all a complete skeleton house is set up, made of wood, and, when this is finished, the spaces between the wooden structure are filled in with bricks and mortar. Before the roof is put on, a large green bush is hoisted up as far as the eaves, and there tied to the scaffolding ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... from the sketch upon which he had been working, and taking one of the lamps in his hand peered out into the darkness. The long skeleton limbs of the bare trees tossed and quivered dimly amid the whirling drift. His sister sat by the fire, her fancy-work in her lap, and looked up at her brothers profile which showed against the brilliant yellow light. It was a handsome face, ...
— The Doings Of Raffles Haw • Arthur Conan Doyle
... give her no figure of Mr. Brumley as intimate, as habitual. She could as easily imagine his skeleton. He remained in all this queer speculation something friendly, something incidental, more than a trifle disembodied, entirely devoted of course in that ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... understanding for what possible cause he—or any of the others for the matter of that—could have resolved in cold blood to die in such an awful manner. You know how men babble away each other's characters in London, you may be sure any buried scandal or hidden skeleton would have been brought to light in such a case as this; but nothing of the sort has taken place. As for the theory of mania, that is very well, of course, for the coroner's jury, but everybody knows that it's all nonsense. Suicidal mania is ...
— The Great God Pan • Arthur Machen
... shop was a woman with touzled hair and a gown with placket split from gathers to hem, showing the ribs of a dirty skeleton skirt. A child with one garment on,—some sort of woolen thing that had never been a clean color, and was all gutter-color now,—the woman holding the child by the hand here, in a safe place, in a way these mothers have who turn their children out ...
— Real Folks • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... that the condors, like other carrion-vultures, soon gain intelligence of it, and congregate in an inexplicable manner. In most cases it must not be overlooked, that the birds have discovered their prey, and have picked the skeleton clean, before the flesh is in the least degree tainted. Remembering the experiments of M. Audubon, on the little smelling powers of carrion-hawks, I tried in the above-mentioned garden the following experiment: ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... be most effectively aided by some organization of the economic units that would provide a structurally sound skeleton for the whole economic mechanism. The needs of particular localities, the requirements of larger groups within one industry, the economic relations of continental areas, and finally the world organization of industries must be provided ...
— The Next Step - A Plan for Economic World Federation • Scott Nearing |
