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More "Billowing" Quotes from Famous Books



... on which God sits is described: it is erected in the temple, and it is high and lifted up, for He is a great King. But no description is given of the figure seated on it; only His train—the billowing folds of His robes—filled the temple. Above the throne, or rather round it, like the courtiers surrounding the throne of an Eastern monarch, stand the seraphim. These beings are mentioned only here in Holy Writ. Their name signifies the shining or fiery ones. They are attendants of the Divine ...
— The Preacher and His Models - The Yale Lectures on Preaching 1891 • James Stalker

... soft whirr, that seemed to pervade everything and to tingle in the nerves of the spectators; and—what had been was not! The wall was gone! But high above and all around the place where it had hung over the street with its threat of death there appeared, swiftly billowing outward in every direction, a faint bluish cloud. It was the scattered atoms ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putnam Serviss

... breakfast. Notwithstanding his excellent health and youthful energy, mind and body alike were somewhat spent. He made short work of preparation, slipped in between the fine cool linen sheets, and laid his brown head upon the soft billowing pillows, impatient neither to think nor feel any more ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet

... images aroused by his music, is impossible. I am forced to employ the technical terminology of other arts, but against my judgment. Read Mr. W. F. Apthorp's disheartening dictum in "By the Way." "The entrancing phantasmagoria of picture and incident which we think we see rising from the billowing sea of music is in reality nothing more than an enchanting fata morgana, visible at no other angle than that of our own eye. The true gist of music it never can be; it can never truly translate what is most essential and ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker

... Upon her, the high kakoshnik, with its jewelled rim, and the floating veil that softened so beautifully the great weight of her braids, proved startlingly beautiful. And, with a neck like hers, what more desirable than the daring decolletage of her white tulle gown, from the billowing skirts of which her tiny waist sprang like the slender stem of a huge, white rose. About her throat was clasped a double row of pearls—her father's gift to her for the great occasion. And, in her arms,—last, ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter

... Hummocks would be leveled, washes and arroyos filled, ditches would be made to the company canals, and in place of the thin growth of gray-green desert vegetation with the ragged patches of dun earth would come great fields of luxuriant alfalfa, billowing acres of grain, with miles upon miles of orchards, vineyards and groves. The fierce desert life would give way to the herds and flocks and the home life of the farmer. The railroad would stretch its steel strength into this new world; towns and cities would come to be where now ...
— The Winning of Barbara Worth • Harold B Wright

... shaggy green rug that swept on and on over the folds of the hills as though billowed up by a mighty wind beneath. And the lights, the mists, the drifting cloud shadows! Why had Juno not wanted him to see them? And when he took to horseback and mounted through that billowing rug, through ferns stirrup-high, with flowers innumerable nodding on either side of the trail and the air of the first dawn in his nostrils—mounted to the top of the Big Black, rode for miles along its gently waving summit, and saw at every turn of the ...
— In Happy Valley • John Fox

... Shaken by the spectacular thing occurring before their eyes, yet, driven by curiosity as to what might lie at the end of that swift-forming tunnel, the men came crowding obediently after him. A moment later they were within the passage, stumbling dazedly forward through the billowing fog of bluish radiance. There was an odd, almost electric, tingle of exhilaration in that radiant mist as ...
— The Cavern of the Shining Ones • Hal K. Wells

... of his case. But men are not always enjoying, or seeking to enjoy, social pleasure; they seek also, and have need to seek continually, both through books and men, intellectual growth, fresh power, fresh strength, to keep themselves ahead or abreast of this moving, surging, billowing world of ours; especially in these modern times, when society revolves through so many new phases, and shifts its aspects with so much more velocity than in past ages. A king, especially of this country, needs, beyond most other men, to keep himself in a continual ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey

... on outside the rest of his things. But likewise there must have been drawbacks. Suppose, now, the marquis were caught out in blowy weather and the wind worked in under his tucks and the ratlines pulled loose and, all full-rigged and helpless, bellying and billowing and flapping and jibing, he went scudding against his will before the gale. Could he hope to tack and go about before he blew clear over into the ...
— One Third Off • Irvin S. Cobb

... and hurried away, her head bowed, the cloak billowing about her. He watched the lantern till its gleam was swallowed ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson

... edge, and at other points not a curtain but steady hose-streams of fire. Answering German shells revealed which of the chalky scars on the slope was the British first-line trench, and from this, as steam from a locomotive runs in a flying plume along the crest of a railway cutting, rose a billowing wall of smoke which was harmless, not even asphyxiating, its only purpose being to screen the infantry attack, with a gentle breeze sweeping it on into the mantle over Contalmaison as the wind carries the smoke of a prairie fire. Lookout Mountain was known as the battle in the clouds, ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer

... With much billowing of the lower, less stiff part of her garments, she sailed to the cloudy mirror over the magazine-filled bookcase and inspected her cap of false curls, with many prods of her large firm hands which flashed ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis

... of her own drawing-room, Evelyn Desmond sank gratefully into a chair, her skirts billowing ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver

... came spices and aloes and sandalwood, nutmegs, spikenard and ebony, and riches beyond mention. Big junks laded these things, together with musk from Tibet, and bales of silk from all the cities of Mansi[C], and sailed away in and out of the East India Archipelago, with its spice-laden breezes billowing their sails, to Ceylon. There merchants from Malabar and the great trading cities of southern India took aboard their cargoes and sold them in turn to Arab merchants, who in their turn sold them to the Venetians in one or other of the Levantine ports. Europeans who saw Zaiton ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power

... said Alicia, with a laugh. As she sat, with her head thrown back against the chair, the light sparkling on her white skin, on her necklace of yellow topazes, and the jewelled fan in her hands, the folds of blue chiffon billowing round her, there could be no doubt of her effectiveness. Marsham ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... it once, and failed. Now she realized that it would be but a matter of minutes ere the whole space between the north and the south would be a seething mass of billowing flames. ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... awhile than morn; And knights whose lives were flights of eagles' wings, And lives like snakes' lives of engendering kings; And all the ravin of all the swords that reap Lives cast as sheaves on heap 350 From all the billowing harvest-fields of fight; And sounds of ...
— Songs of the Springtides and Birthday Ode - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne—Vol. III • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... an instant to peer out into the gloom along the stony path that ran from his house to an old foot-bridge about fifty feet away. Curling up from the gorge, mist seemed to play among the rotted planks; it rose and fell in great billowing blankets, sometimes concealing the ...
— The White Feather Hex • Don Peterson

... still far below the eastward horizon, but the clouds were gorgeous with his livery of red and gold, and the stars had shrunk from sight before the ardor of his beams. The level "bench" through which the stream meandered, the billowing slopes to the north and south, were bare of foliage and uninviting to the eye, yet keen and wary eyes were scanning their bald expanse, studying every crest and curve and ridge in search of moving objects. Only at the very brink of the flowing waters, and ...
— To The Front - A Sequel to Cadet Days • Charles King

... little and then lay down and slept. Longstreet, his knees gathered in his arms, his back to a tree, sat staring thoughtfully across the billowing country before them; Howard smoked a cigarette, stood a moment looking curiously down at the weary figure of the girl, and then strode off to the next shade for ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory

... piece became a flaming torch, and he waved it before him and laughed to see the warriors cringe. A cloud of smoke was billowing about him—he leaped to safety through a ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various

... at the end of the shadowy road that leads like a causeway to the desert, and on the verge of the golden, billowing sea which flows round the Pyramids and engulfs the distant Sphinx. Oriental life encircled us, in the foreground of the picture—a long row of waiting camels gaily saddled and tasselled, delicately nibbling bersim green as heaped emeralds—donkeys white and gray, beribboned ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson

... the edge of the cushion. Its top surface was a trifle lower than our heads—a billowing, wrinkled mass of fabric. But I saw that the folds of it were rough enough to afford a footing. I thought that I could climb it. We stood erect. There was a deep shadow along here, but it was brighter ...
— Beyond the Vanishing Point • Raymond King Cummings

... sea. The gray, picturesque Cathedral Range bounds it on the south; a similar range or spur, the highest peak of which is Mount Conness, on the north; the noble Mounts Dana, Gibbs, Mammoth, Lyell, McClure and others on the axis of the Range on the east; a heaving, billowing crowd of glacier-polished rocks and Mount Hoffman on the west. Down through the open sunny meadow-levels of the Valley flows the Tuolumne River, fresh and cool from its many glacial fountains, the highest of which are the glaciers that lie on the north ...
— The Yosemite • John Muir

... had impressed me at first sight. There were long billowing hills and vales, much of their surface densely wooded, but with wide spaces under cultivation and even greater tracts of a sort of heath-land very wild in aspect and conjuring up pictures of outlaws' camps and ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer

... twist around the hill's shoulder he stopped and pointed his hand. The view from there was almost county-wide, billowing away across heights and depths to a blue merging of hill ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck

... said Joe, looking in; and without waiting for reply he started the engine. The car moved out amid a volley of stones, balls, cheers, and other missiles from the fifteen boys who pursued it with frenzy. Swaying slightly from side to side, with billowing bag, it gathered speed, and, turning a corner, took road for the country. Mr. Lavender, somewhat dazed, for the indiarubber had been hard, sat gazing through the little back window at the great city he was leaving. His lips moved, expressing unconsciously the sentiments of innumerable ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... vision, if it were a vision, spoke,— If it were speech that filled the quivering air With low harmonious music. Let none dare In the rude jargons of this world to fashion That sweet, wild anthem of unearthly passion. Could I from the broad-billowing ocean borrow Of Tristan's love and of Isolde's sorrow, The flood of those world-darkening surges, wrought With thoughts that lie beyond the reach of thought, Might bring me succor where weak words must fail. But Gawayne saw and heard, and passion-pale Shrank back, and ...
— Gawayne And The Green Knight - A Fairy Tale • Charlton Miner Lewis

... of Plug Pass, on the old snow-crust which, even in midsummer, never entirely disappears at altitude ten thousand feet, they could look away westward over a billowing sea of mountain and mesa and valley breaking in far-distant, crystalline space against the mighty rampart of the Wasatch range, two hundred and ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde

... and graceful, though slender to gauntness; and it was only on nearer contact that one marvelled to see the soul die out of him, as a face set in the shadow of leafage resolves itself into some accident of twisted branches as one approaches the billowing tree that presented it. ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes

... somebody was thinking...." He paused expectantly. Lucilla reread the ornate letters on the framed diploma on the wall, looked critically at the picture of Mrs. Andrews—whom she'd met—and her impish daughter—whom she hadn't—counted the number of pleats in the billowing drapes, ran a tentative finger over the face of her wristwatch, straightened a fold of her skirt ... and could stand ...
— The Sound of Silence • Barbara Constant

... Cody's drays, rattling and thundering; the high school boys thudding down the road, dog-tired and sweaty in their football suits, or their track pants and jersies, on their way from the athletic field to the school shower baths; Mrs. Mosher flying home, her skirts billowing behind her, after a protracted afternoon at whist; little Ernie Trost with a napkin-covered peach basket carefully balanced in his hand, waiting for the six-fifteen interurban to round the corner near the switch, so ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber

... crash of the climax. The tone rapidly subsided and receded; for the composer had so cunningly scored it that groups of instruments were withdrawn without losing the thread of the musical tale. The tone, spun to a needle fineness, rushed up the fingerboard of the fiddles accompanied by the harp in a billowing glissando and—then on ragged rims of wide thunder a gust of air seemed to melt lights, men, instruments into a darkness that froze the eyeballs. With a scorching whiff of sulphur and violets, a thin, spiral scream, the music tapered ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker

... a chip at the moment, and some of them so deep as to afford cover even for the biggest pony of the wild warriors of the plains. Then, to the front, the barrier ridges, streaked with deep winding ravines, were now billowing against the northward sky, and once among those tangled land waves no chances could be taken now that it was known that the Sioux had declared for war, and that Stabber's band was out to join their red brethren in the oft recurring outbreak. Until their lands were criss-crossed by the ...
— A Daughter of the Sioux - A Tale of the Indian frontier • Charles King

... more. Truth to tell, the conditions surrounding them were by now beginning to look fearfully desperate, with those billowing clouds at times shutting out all view of the ...
— The Airplane Boys among the Clouds - or, Young Aviators in a Wreck • John Luther Langworthy

... copses alive with small game; rare openings where the squatter's wooden ploughshare lay forgotten; dark chasms scintillant with the treasures of the chemist, if not of the lapidary; outlooks that opened upon great seas of billowing forest, whence blue mountains peered up, sank and rose again like ocean monsters at play; glens where the she-bear suckled her drowsing cubs to the plash of yeasty waterfalls that leapt and whimpered ...
— John March, Southerner • George W. Cable

... was a man's impression. What he saw was a billowing, filmy mass of soft stuff, and out of it there greeted him the faintest possible scent of lilac sachet powder. He closed the curtains with a deep breath of utter joy and of consternation. The two emotions were a jumble to him. The shoes, all that mass of soft ...
— The Valley of Silent Men • James Oliver Curwood

... the granite stone was too solid to be overturned, and saw in it an oasis of safety. They flocked towards it, many of them dragging themselves up the steep deep high steps on hands and knees because their feet had been injured by the billowing ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne

... autumn-tinged brushwood of Red River. South, shimmering in the purple mists of Indian summer, was Red River Valley. Westward the sun hung like a red shield, close to the horizon, over vast reaches of prairie billowing to the sky-line in the tide of a boundless ocean. Such was the discovery of the ...
— Pathfinders of the West • A. C. Laut

... from the brow of the mountain over fifteen miles of billowing green, to where, far across a far stretch of pale blue lay a dim purple line that we knew was Staten Island. Towns and villages lay before us and under us; there were ridges and hills, uplands and lowlands, woods and plains, all massed and mingled in that great silent sea of sunlit green. For silent ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various

... glimpse of the sea; but Robert turned the car, and driving between two gigantic hotels, ran down to a beach with sands of gleaming gold, and a background of wind-blown dunes billowing away as far as the eye could reach. The very wildness of this background gave a bizarre sort of charm to the fantastic buildings which made up the ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson

... tributaries crosses one of these plateaus above the Gray Cliffs, carving a labyrinth of deep gorges. This is known as the Colob Plateau. Above, there is a vast landscape of naked, white and gray sandstone, billowing in fantastic bosses. On the margins of the canyons these are rounded off into great vertical walls, and at the bottom of every winding canyon a beautiful stream of water is found running over quicksands. ...
— Canyons of the Colorado • J. W. Powell

... smoke would be almost continuous, but these shell-bursts were not confined to the front lines. From where Tam hung he could see billowing smoke clouds appear in every direction. Far behind the enemy's lines at the great road junctions, in the low-roofed billeting villages, on the single-track ...
— Tam O' The Scoots • Edgar Wallace

... veil of smoke, intangible and unreal, at first, which merely seemed to hang about the trunks of the mighty trees and make them seem dim and far away. Nearer yet, and the air grew hard to breathe, the smoke was billowing through the foliage of the pines, which sighed wearily and moaned in a vague fear of the enemy ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Foresters • Francis Rolt-Wheeler

... place at his side, with her silk billowing against his knee. "This is it," she declared, her face set against the illimitable, still dark. "I recognized it only a little while ago. I think unconsciously I came to America hoping to find it; there was nothing at Annapolis, ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer

... deep, trenchlike valley marching from east to west and carrying the Paris-Verdun-Metz Railroad, no longer available for traffic. And as we coasted down the hill we heard the guns at last, not steadily, but only from time to time, a distant boom, a faint billowing up of musketry fire. Some three or four miles straight ahead there were the lines of fire beyond the brown ...
— They Shall Not Pass • Frank H. Simonds

... a beautiful adventure, and he enjoyed the sensation of running away exactly as much as I. Not once did I let him mention insanity. I made him look at the wide stretches of meadow and the lines of pollard willows backed by billowing hills, and sniff the air, and listen to the cawing crows and the tinkle of cowbells and the gurgling of the river. And we talked—oh, about a million things far removed from our asylum. I made him throw away the idea that he is a scientist, and pretend to be a boy. You will scarcely credit ...
— Dear Enemy • Jean Webster

... waves of corn, under the wind, as well as waves of the sea. When the Suabian rustic sees the wave running over the corn, he says, Da lauft das Pferd, and Greeks before Homer would say, in face of the billowing corn, [Greek], There run horses! And Homer himself {51c} says that the horses of Erichthonius, children of Boreas, ran over cornfield and sea. We ourselves speak of sea-waves as 'white horses.' So, to be brief, Mannhardt explains the ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang

... on a wind-swept hill, a few miles from Conwell's old home. In this isolated burying-ground bushes and vines and grass grow in profusion, and a few trees cast a gentle shade; and tree-clad hills go billowing off for miles and miles in wild and lonely beauty. And in that lonely little graveyard I found the plain stone that marks the resting-place ...
— Acres of Diamonds • Russell H. Conwell

... could always find just the right spot to sleep away the afternoon. Best of all it was perfectly safe; for though from the door of her den she could look down on the old Indian's cabin, like a pebble on the shore, so steep were the billowing hills and so impassable the ravines that no human foot ever trod the place, not even in autumn when the fishermen left their boats at anchor in Harbor Weal and camped inland on the paths of ...
— Northern Trails, Book I. • William J. Long

... see. And what a sight it was! The clouds lay below us and a starlit sky above. At our feet the mountain fell away like a cliff, but it fell rather to a glacier than a sea—a glacier infinite as the ocean, yawning in crevasses, billowing in ridges; a glacier not of ice, but of vapour, changing form as one watched, opening here, closing there, rising, falling, shifting, while far away, at the uttermost verge, appeared a crimson crescent, then a red oval, then a yellow ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson

... observed a volcano in active eruption off to the southeastward, apparently on the island of Timor. It was a beautiful sight, so wonderful that John awoke the sleepers, that they too might enjoy it. Fantastic lights of various colors shot upward from the crater. These shafts lit up billowing clouds of smoke and ashes, which poured out in awe-inspiring volume. Back of it all stood the dark-blue velvet sky, against which the pyrotechnics were embossed in a stunning manner. Man could never have wished to witness a more remarkable manifestation of nature than did the young aviators, ...
— Around the World in Ten Days • Chelsea Curtis Fraser

... ancestors clamored in me. "What do you mean?" I demanded. You see, I wanted an explanation. And I got it. Bang! His club came down on top of my head, and I was reeling backward like a drunken man, the curious faces of the onlookers billowing up and down like the waves of the sea, my precious book falling from under my arm into the dirt, the bull advancing with the club ready for another blow. And in that dizzy moment I had a vision. I saw that club descending many times upon my ...
— The Road • Jack London

... it go? Well, wouldn't it make you think you were a Lady, sure enough, if you couldn't move without that lace train billowing after you; without being dazzled with diamond-shine; without a truly Lord ...
— In the Bishop's Carriage • Miriam Michelson

... forcing her nearer and nearer to the table which was his goal. In the struggle one of the large shell hair pins which she wore fell to the floor. In another second she heard it ground to pieces under his heel. A long strand of hair came billowing down ...
— The Land of Promise • D. Torbett

... blinkingly into the north. That whole region of the sky was aflame from zenith to horizon with spectral fires. It was the aurora. Not the pale, ragged glow, sputtering like the ghost of a huge lamp-flame, which is familiar to every one, but a billowing of color, rainbows gone mad! In the northeast the long rolling columns formed—many-colored clouds of spectral light whipped up as by a whirlwind—flung from eastward to westward, devouring Polaris and the Wain—rapid sequent towers of ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt

... whose symmetrical slopes are so corrugated by hardened rivulets of lava that they look for all the world like folds of gray-brown cloth. Beyond Batok we could catch a glimpse of Bromo itself, belching skyward great clouds of billowing smoke and steam, while from its crater came a rumble as of distant thunder. And far in the distance, its purple bulk faintly discernible against the turquoise sky, rose Smeroe, the ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell

... mass of assimilatory matter, mere clouds in clothing, niente, nefas, the most inconsiderable of men. There he sits watching until I have done this writing. Then, if he can, he will waylay me. He will come billowing ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells

... slowly withdrawing her waning silvery light from the billowing mass of tawny hair, tumbling in lavender-scented masses around the girl; lingering for a moment on the eyes staring from under the unblinking eyelids, and for a second upon the glint of even teeth showing through the ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest

... means 'Pass of the Oaks,'" said Nick, as they came into a stretch of billowing country where immense trees shadowed ...
— The Port of Adventure • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson

... mountain (a masculine mountain) to fly from its firm base; while kindness, justice, and good sense leave it upon unshaken foundations of selfishness. Mrs. Cyrus was a Goliath of silliness; when billowing black clouds heaped themselves in the west on a hot afternoon, she turned pale with apprehension, and the Captain and Cyrus ran for four tumblers, into which they put the legs of her bed, where, cowering among the feathers, she lay cold with fear and perspiration. ...
— Quaint Courtships • Howells & Alden, Editors

... brown, blond, living colours, and the irregular symmetry, flower-like, of their natural patterning, are all seemingly organic and ready for life. Time has added that, with the polish and dimming alternately of the marbles, the billowing of the pavement, the slanting of the columns, and last, but not least, the tarnishing of the gold and the granulating of the mosaic into an uneven surface: the gold seeming to have become alive and in a way vegetable, and to ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee

... commenced to hurl the bombs again. Courtenay stepped out and watched a moment. Bomb after bomb whizzed true and hard across the hollow, just skimmed the breastwork, struck on the trench wall that showed beyond and a foot above it, and fell behind the barricade. Billowing smoke-clouds and gusts of flame leaped and flashed above the parapet. Courtenay saw the chance and took it. He plunged out into the lake of mud and plowed through it towards the barricade, the men swarming behind him, and ...
— Action Front • Boyd Cable (Ernest Andrew Ewart)

... is it as a wave Of ocean's billowing surge (Where Thrakian storm-winds rave, And floods of darkness from the depths emerge,) Rolls the black sand from out the lowest deep, And shores re-echoing wail, as rough blasts o'er them sweep. ...
— Story of Orestes - A Condensation of the Trilogy • Richard G. Moulton

... with upturned face, Celia began what she had withheld for the last—the Sixteenth Mazurka. This strange foreign thing she played with her eyes closed, her head tilted obliquely so that Theron could see the rose-tinted, beautiful countenance, framed as if asleep in the billowing luxuriance of unloosed auburn hair. He fancied her beholding visions as she wrought the music—visions full of barbaric color and romantic forms. As his mind swam along with the gliding, tricksy phantom of a tune, it ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic

... twenty-seven converts, the seventh ten showed more than twenty-seven thousand. The preparation may be as slow as the solemn gathering of the thunder-clouds, as they noiselessly steal into their places, and slowly upheave their grey billowing crests; the final success may be as swift as the lightning which flashes in an instant from one side of the heavens to the other. It takes long years to hew the tunnel, to 'make the crooked straight, and the rough places plain,' and then smooth and fleet the great power rushes along the rails. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren

... laid a hand upon the lashings of the tops'l and undid them. Then it turned, slid to the deck by I know not what strange process, and, still hooded, still shrouded, still lapped about by its mummy-wrappings, seized a rope's end. In an instant the jib was set and stood on hard and billowing against the night wind. The tops'l followed. Then the figure moved forward and passed behind the companionway of ...
— A Deal in Wheat - And Other Stories of the New and Old West • Frank Norris

... wings and the golden, O'er the billowing meadows blown, Were still as by magic holden From the ...
— Ride to the Lady • Helen Gray Cone

... Your hands lie open in the long fresh grass,— The finger-points look through like rosy blooms: Your eyes smile peace. The pasture gleams and glooms 'Neath billowing skies that scatter and amass. All round our nest, far as the eye can pass, Are golden kingcup-fields with silver edge Where the cow-parsley skirts the hawthorn-hedge. 'Tis visible silence, still as the hour-glass. Deep ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various

... suicide of the protecting Apollo that surmounted and crested the centre of this roof. The god was stationary with his lyre, and seemed looking down upon the fiery ruins that were so rapidly approaching him. Suddenly the supporting timbers below him gave way; a convulsive heave of the billowing flames seemed for a moment to raise the statue; and then, as if on some impulse of despair, the presiding deity appeared not to fall, but to throw himself into the fiery deluge, for he went down head ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey

... their own sweet will and fancy. Beyond the yew hedge on the left was another garden of yews, and firs, and hollies. A long avenue ran its full length while white marble statues, set on either side, gleamed among the darkness of the trees. The end of the avenue formed a frame for an expanse of billowing moorland, range upon range of hills, melting from purple into pale ...
— Antony Gray,—Gardener • Leslie Moore

... to smother all that color and sheen into neutral sameness with night and shadows. No wonder her face had seemed wraith-like when her startled shrinking away from the light had set all that drapery billowing ...
— The Thing from the Lake • Eleanor M. Ingram

... no desire to investigate anything further. The girl let us help her through the window. I stood in the entryway holding her arms. Her dress was of billowing white satin with a single red rose at the breast; her snowy arms and shoulders were bare; white hair was piled high on her small head. Her face, still terrified, showed parted red lips; a little round black beauty patch adorned one of her powdered cheeks. ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various

... reverberating thunder, and thrown off her balance by the sudden lurch of the ship under her feet, Miss Bishop hurtled violently against Lord Julian, who kept his feet only by clutching the rail on which he had been leaning. Billowing clouds of smoke to starboard blotted out everything, and its acrid odour, taking them presently in the throat, set them ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini

... was a handsome fellow with a picturesque face which betrayed his vocation. The crayons and the pen-and-ink drawings that I had seen in the library were his work. He had a pale, high forehead and a thick, upright grove of very soft, brown hair which I pictured as billowing in a breeze like a field of rye. "Just the kind of son for a poet to have," ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan

... thousand square miles of territory, and yet we had seen nothing in the way of a familiar landmark, when from the heights of a mountain-range we were crossing I descried far in the distance great masses of billowing clouds. ...
— Pellucidar • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... bronze—with an inset panel representing the tragedy—rose upward in the shape of billowing curling waves supporting a marble Christ standing erect with outstretched pitying hand, majestic ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull

... breath of the abstract freezes our hearts; and we pray best in some pillared niche consecrated and set apart, I recall a day in Umbria, when the wonderful light of sunset fell on ilex and olive, on mountain snows, on valleys billowing between vine-mantled hills, on creamy marble walls, on columned campaniles; and standing there, I seemed verily to absorb, to become saturated as it were, with the reigning essence of beauty. I walked on, a few steps, lifted a worn, frayed leather curtain, and looked into a small gray, dingy church, ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson

... him to judge the pony's speed, of course, but when he had halted momentarily he had noted that the animal was quivering all over, that it caught its breath shrilly in the brief interval of rest, and now as he rode, bending far over its mane, he saw that the billowing foam on its muzzle was flecked with blood. The animal was not equal to the demands he ...
— The Range Boss • Charles Alden Seltzer

... met him in the whirlwind of smoke and billowing flame related that he chuckled continuously. "Isn't this fun?" he yelled at them. "Say, isn't this the best ever? I wouldn't have missed this for ...
— Ranson's Folly • Richard Harding Davis

... the gate and flung past me to the house, this superb young creature, tall, slim, supple, a very Diana in her rage, a woman too if one might judge by the breasts billowing with rising sobs. More slow I followed, quite dashed to earth. All that I had gained by months of service in one moment had been lost. She would think me another of the Volney stamp, and her liking for me would turn to hate ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine

... strange steel embroidery of the landing grid rising to the height of a minor mountain against the sky. He drove furiously. Beyond it. He had seen the highway system from twenty miles height, and ten, and five. From somewhere near here stolen weather rockets had gone billowing skyward with explosive war ...
— The Hate Disease • William Fitzgerald Jenkins

... Riding over the billowing fields, mounting the grassy hills, threading the matchless forests of uncut timber, he sees all. He sits plotting and dreaming on the porch by the lake side. Thousands of horses and cattle, now crossed and improved, are wealth wandering at will ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage

... than a strong man's death, the littlest of the bells upon the western arch laughs while it calls to all to hearken; when a man is killed, the angry-toned bell pendant from the eastern arch shouts out the word to go billowing across the stretches of sage and greasewood and gama-grass; if one of the later-day frame buildings bursts into flame, Ignacio Chavez warns the town with a strident clamor, tugging frantically; be it wedding or discovery of gold or returns from the county elections, the bell-ringer ...
— The Bells of San Juan • Jackson Gregory

... field-glass. Concha, as ever, stood a little apart. As the ship grew smaller and the company turned toward the Presidio, she advanced to the edge of the bluff. The wind lifted her loosened mantilla, billowing it out on one side, and as she stood with her hands pressed against her heart, she might, save for her empty arms, have been the eidolon of the Madonna di San Sisto. In her eyes was the same expression of vague arrested horror as she looked out on that world of menacing imperfections the blind ...
— Rezanov • Gertrude Atherton

... her inches by Adige, and one forgot the muddy bed wondering at the slim grace of the shaft with its crown of yellow atop. Her hair waved about her like a flag; she should have been planted in a castle; instead, Giovanna the stately calm, with her billowing line, staid lips, and candid grey eyes, was to be seen on her knees by the green water most days of the week. Bare-armed, splashed to the neck, bare-headed, out-at-heels, she rinsed and pommelled, wrung and dipped again, laughed, chattered, flung her hair to the wind, her ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett

... rose and went to the window, looking out on a great, golden, billowing sea where a wild wind was harping. For a few moments there was silence in the little dark-walled room. Then he turned and looked down into Anne's sympathetic face ...
— Anne Of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... other points. He invited close watch of the atmosphere a hundred yards before the gun at the next shot. Not only could the projectile be seen plainly in the beginning of its flight, but the waves of billowing air, rushing back to fill the void left by the discharge and bounding and rebounding in a tempestuous sea of gas, could be distinctly observed. This airy commotion caused the sound heard for ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol 1, Issue 4, January 23, 1915 • Various

... with shady walks and a good hotel; or extend the drive to Haarlem's watering-place Zaandvoort, which otherwise can be gained by steam-tram, and where, says the author of Through Noord-Holland, "the billowing is strong and strengthening". The same author tells us also that "the ponnies and asses have a separated standing-place, whilst severe stipulations warrant the bathers for trouble of the ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas

... vapor were mingling now and expanding: they blossomed and mushroomed, and the light of the moon came in pale iridescence from their billowing folds. ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various

... is visited. All around me is the mellow grace of sunshine, roses, lilies, heliotropes, carnations, marigolds, nasturtiums, marguerites, and geraniums are a-bloom; and as far as the eye can reach, the green velvet of billowing acres is blended with the passion of wild poppies; the olive, the orange, and the lemon abound; yonder a vineyard lies fast asleep in the glorious noonday; the giant rubber trees in all this remarkable ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson

... all the other passengers who had been attracted on deck by the beauty of the evening, to the man at the helm. He was in the act of stretching out his arms to the centre of the ship, whence a cloud of smoke was billowing upwards in voluminous surges: the passengers turned pale: the sailors began to swear: "It's all over!" they shouted: "old Davy has us. So huzza! let's have some sport as long as he leaves us any day-light." Amidst an uproar of voices the majority of the crew ...
— Walladmor: - And Now Freely Translated from the German into English. - In Two Volumes. Vol. I. • Thomas De Quincey

... and carrying the Paris-Verdun-Metz Railroad, no longer available for traffic. And as we coasted down the hill we heard the guns at last, not steadily, but only from time to time, a distant boom, a faint billowing up of musketry fire. Some three or four miles straight ahead there were the lines of fire beyond the brown hills that ...
— They Shall Not Pass • Frank H. Simonds

... with a laugh. As she sat, with her head thrown back against the chair, the light sparkling on her white skin, on her necklace of yellow topazes, and the jewelled fan in her hands, the folds of blue chiffon billowing round her, there could be no doubt of her effectiveness. Marsham could not help ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... accurately. We must have covered a great many thousand square miles of territory, and yet we had seen nothing in the way of a familiar landmark, when from the heights of a mountain-range we were crossing I descried far in the distance great masses of billowing clouds. ...
— Pellucidar • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... my spirits were of lead. Suddenly we got out from behind the granite wall, and there she was, standing, where I had seen her so often, beside the little waterfall that she calls the happy one. She was looking straight up at the billowing mist that dipped down the mountain, mammoth saffron rolls of it, plunging so madly from the impetus of the wind that one marvelled how it could be noiseless. Ah, you do not know Judith! That strange, unsophisticated, ...
— A Mountain Woman and Others • (AKA Elia Wilkinson) Elia W. Peattie

... languid lady was Mrs. Warden, wearing her thin but still brown hair in "water-waves" over a pale high forehead. She was sitting on a couch on the broad, rose-shaded porch, surrounded by billowing masses of vari-colored worsted. It was her delight to purchase skein on skein of soft, bright-hued wool, cut it all up into short lengths, tie them together again in contrasting colors, and then crochet this hashed rainbow into afghans of startling ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman

... carried by all; the very colour of the marbles, brown, blond, living colours, and the irregular symmetry, flower-like, of their natural patterning, are all seemingly organic and ready for life. Time has added that, with the polish and dimming alternately of the marbles, the billowing of the pavement, the slanting of the columns, and last, but not least, the tarnishing of the gold and the granulating of the mosaic into an uneven surface: the gold seeming to have become alive and in a way vegetable, and to have faded and ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee

... was quickly finished; they passed into the drawing-room, and took comfortable chairs on either side of the hearth. May had brought cold, clammy weather; a sky of billowing grey and frequent gusts against the window made it pleasant here by this bright fireside. Lashmar stretched his legs, smiled at the gimcracks shelved and niched above the mantelpiece, and began talking. His description of Lady Ogram was amusing, but not disrespectful; ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing

... single grayish-green wall as they moved forward. The hazewall's gray-green was shot by yellow and purple tinges as the sun's weak rays touched it. To the left of the Here-We-Comes, and then in front of them, appeared the same wall of billowing gas. ...
— Bruce • Albert Payson Terhune

... Saturn," and Stevens projected the visiray beam out toward the mighty planet. It was now an enormous full moon, almost five degrees in apparent diameter,[1] its visible surface an expanse of what they knew to be billowing cloud, shining brilliantly white in the pale sunlight, broken only ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith

... thing we shipped, and after taking him aboard we were soon out of the harbor of Prairie Flower, and bearing away across the plain to the southwest. In twenty minutes we ware among the billowing sunflowers, standing five or six feet high on other side of the road, which seemed like a narrow crack winding through them. Ollie reached out and gathered a handful of the drooping yellow blossoms. The pony was tied behind carrying her big saddle, and tossing her head about, and showing ...
— The Voyage of the Rattletrap • Hayden Carruth

... Pink Cliffs of the Markagunt Plateau and with its tributaries crosses one of these plateaus above the Gray Cliffs, carving a labyrinth of deep gorges. This is known as the Colob Plateau. Above, there is a vast landscape of naked, white and gray sandstone, billowing in fantastic bosses. On the margins of the canyons these are rounded off into great vertical walls, and at the bottom of every winding canyon a beautiful stream of water is found running over quicksands. Sometimes the streams ...
— Canyons of the Colorado • J. W. Powell

... which the collegians called "over the rock," stood forth all crimson against the green sward; further on, the woods began, masses of yellow and red maples, with scattered pines and oaks of more sombre hue, billowing gently upward toward the blue of ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins

... everything they'd ever been taught. Simpson had expected it, but it was enough to keep Kielland sleepless for three nights and drive his blood pressure to suicidal levels. At length, the blue-gray mud began billowing out of the dredge onto the platforms built to receive it, and the transport ship was notified to stand by for loading. But by the time the ferry had landed, the platform with the load had somehow drifted free of the island and required a week-long expedition into the hinterland to track ...
— The Native Soil • Alan Edward Nourse

... the distance jerked about madly. It seemed to be struggling to free itself from an agony. The billowing smoke was filled with ...
— The Red Badge of Courage - An Episode of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane

... and where the oak Sturdily grows above the sturdy field, Amid the smell of hemp and nettles rank... There, there, in meadows stretching wide, Where rich and black as velvet is the earth, Where the sweet rye, far as the eye can see, Moves noiselessly in tender, billowing waves, And where the heavy golden light is shed From out of rounded, white, transparent clouds: There it ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Volume II • Ivan Turgenev

... Rockies go rolling and billowing far out to the east, and the entire stretch of country, from what are called the "Black Hills of Wyoming," in contradistinction to the Black Hills of Dakota, far east as the junction of the forks of the Platte, is one vast ...
— Starlight Ranch - and Other Stories of Army Life on the Frontier • Charles King

... into the hearts of the herd. Another falls just when they are so close that we could have sprung on their backs. At that moment they divide, and the next we are standing on a desert island, a sea of billowing backs flowing round on either side in a half-mile current of crazy buffaloes. The herd is fully five minutes in passing us. We watch them as they come, and as the last laggers pant by the mound we look westward ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston

... everywhere, flaming from tall silver candlesticks, and uniforms, mostly in white and silver, or white with black or violet facings, were thick in the rooms. Ladies, too, were present, in silk or satin billowing in many a fold, their powdered hair rolled high in the style made fashionable by Madame Jeanne Poisson de Pompadour. From an inner room came the music of a band softly playing French songs or airs from the Florentine opera. The air was charged with ...
— The Hunters of the Hills • Joseph Altsheler

... up Mrs. Morton on the telephone and asked her to talk to him on the wireless. A moment later their invisible messages were speeding back and forth over the miles of billowing pine tops that intervened between the two little forest homes, and no listener in on the department telephone system could either know that they were talking or tell what they said. Charley was overjoyed when Mrs. Morton told him that her ...
— The Young Wireless Operator—As a Fire Patrol - The Story of a Young Wireless Amateur Who Made Good as a Fire Patrol • Lewis E. Theiss

... the closing act of her life as valid on her behalf, were all other testimonies against her. The executioner had been directed to apply his torch from below. He did so. The fiery smoke rose upward in billowing volumes. A Dominican monk was then standing almost at her side. Wrapped up in his sublime office, he saw not the danger, but still persisted in his prayers. Even then, when the last enemy was racing up the fiery stairs to seize her, even at that moment did ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey

... dispensation of God I was recognized! Talbot turned white, and shouting, 'Save yourselves, it is the Standard-Bearer of Joan of Arc!' drove his spurs home till they met in the middle of his horse's entrails, and fled the field with his billowing multitudes at his back! I could have cursed myself for not putting on a disguise. I saw reproach in the eyes of her Excellency, and was bitterly ashamed. I had caused what seemed an irreparable disaster. Another might have gone aside ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc Volume 2 • Mark Twain

... and watched a moment. Bomb after bomb whizzed true and hard across the hollow, just skimmed the breastwork, struck on the trench wall that showed beyond and a foot above it, and fell behind the barricade. Billowing smoke-clouds and gusts of flame leaped and flashed above the parapet. Courtenay saw the chance and took it. He plunged out into the lake of mud and plowed through it towards the barricade, the men swarming behind him, and the sergeant's bombs ...
— Action Front • Boyd Cable (Ernest Andrew Ewart)

... not far from the dais, his attention was at length challenged by an upheaving and billowing of purple and black. He looked, and in the same instant what seemed to have been a kind of storm centre resolved itself cloudily into Mrs. Medora Hastings, breathlessly resuming her seat, while Mr. Augustus Frothingham, ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale

... or—kerosene oil! Also in the boom of the big bell there is a quaintness of tone which wakens feelings, so strangely far-away from all the nineteenth-century part of me, that the faint blind stirrings of them make me afraid,—deliciously afraid. Never do I hear that billowing peal but I become aware of a striving and a fluttering in the abyssal part of my ghost,—a sensation as of memories struggling to reach the light beyond the obscurations of a million million deaths and births. I hope to remain within hearing of that bell... And, considering ...
— Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things • Lafcadio Hearn

... black, and was wearing grey, with some of her old lace trimming it. It was a tabinet which I must have seen in my childhood. The memory of it was so remote that I felt as if I must have read about it; but I had an exact memory of the way it was made, which was billowing about the feet, and with a very straight bodice. While I looked at them she picked a rose from the wall and fastened it ...
— The Story of Bawn • Katharine Tynan

... monotonous patter of the rain, and to the distant sounds of moving horses and men, the rattle of wheels, the bugle calls, the departure of the allied troops to meet the armies of the great adventurer on the billowing plains ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy

... is over. We can go and see the animals again, and get home all dry, just as well as not," observed Ben, encouragingly, as Billy looked anxiously at the billowing canvas over his head, the swaying posts before him, and heard the quick patter of drops outside, not to mention the melancholy roar of the lion which sounded rather awful through the sudden gloom which filled ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, Nov 1877-Nov 1878 - Scribner's Illustrated • Various

... sincere. Oh, look at that divinely ridiculous Madonna!" They were now making their way out of the crooked footway behind their hotel toward the street leading to the cathedral, and she pointed to the Blessed Virgin over the door of some religious house, her drapery billowing about her feet; her body twisting to show the sculptor's mastery of anatomy, and the halo held on her tossing head with the help of stout gilt rays. In fact, the Virgin's whole figure was gilded, and so was that of the child in ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... she moved cautiously forward, till she was clear of the bushes, there to sit down upon a billowing cushion of heather which grew conveniently about as close to the edge of the bluff as it was prudent to venture. Abstractedly Anthony followed her and, after a glance about him, took his seat by her side ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates

... the billowing fields sailed away the gray steamer, cutting a path that sprayed and sang after. Sunlight danced and lay whitely as far as the eye could reach. It prolonged for those on shore the contour of the line of faces above ...
— Humoresque - A Laugh On Life With A Tear Behind It • Fannie Hurst

... with my head, sounding out the boundary of that deadness, ducking down as soon as the mental murk gave me a faint perception of the wall and ceiling above me. Then I'd move aside and sound it again. Eventually I found a little billowing furrow that rose above the floor level and I crawled out along the floor, still sounding and moving cautiously with my body hidden in the deadness that rose and fell like a cloud of murky mental smoke to my sense ...
— Highways in Hiding • George Oliver Smith

... it exhibited the extraordinary feature of not being an island at all. A long, curving neck of sand, as smooth and wet as the neck of the sea serpent, ran out into the sea and joined their rock to a line of low, billowing, and glistening sand-hills, which the sinking sea had just bared to the sun. Whether they were firm sand or quicksand it was difficult to guess; but there was at least no doubt that they lay on the edge of some larger land; for colourless hills appeared faintly behind them and no sea could ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton

... has it robbed me of heart and hope. Here, scarce have I assured myself that the last leaf has fallen, scarce have I watched the glistening of hoar-frost upon the evergreens, when a breath from the west thrills me with anticipation of bud and bloom. Even under this grey-billowing sky, which tells that ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing

... laughed Mr. Wing, as the unique outfit rumbled by. "What on earth do you suppose that is?" They followed the progress of the billowing mother and her husky infant with amused eyes, and at the corner of the street she attempted to turn the barrow, ran into a stone, upset the barrow and spilled the infant on the ground. The infant immediately sprang up, clutching the Gargantuan feeding bottle, and berated his mother ...
— The Camp Fire Girls Do Their Bit - Or, Over the Top with the Winnebagos • Hildegard G. Frey

... was up, broad and bright, burning over the darkened wheat-fields, when Kurt and Jerry reached home. Kurt had never seen the farm look like that—ugly and black and bare. But the fallow ground, hundreds of acres of it, billowing away to the south, had not suffered any change of color or beauty. To Kurt it seemed to smile at him, to bid ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey

... crusted a moonless sky, the vast stretches of billowing sand glimmered faintly golden as a phosphorescent sea. And among the dimly gleaming waves of that endless waste the motor tossed, rocking on the rough track like ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... stages is colored the pale pink of asparagus, with faint touches of yellow, and hints of blue. At maturity it breaks into a gorgeous head of lavender-tinted, creamy pendent flowers covering the upper third of its height, billowing out slightly in the center, so that from a distance the waxen torch takes on very much the appearance of a flaming candle. For this reason, in Mexico, where the plant flourishes in even greater abundance than in California, ...
— Her Father's Daughter • Gene Stratton-Porter

... it as a wave Of ocean's billowing surge (Where Thrakian storm-winds rave, And floods of darkness from the depths emerge,) Rolls the black sand from out the lowest deep, And shores re-echoing wail, as rough blasts o'er them sweep. ...
— Story of Orestes - A Condensation of the Trilogy • Richard G. Moulton

... no glimpse of the sea; but Robert turned the car, and driving between two gigantic hotels, ran down to a beach with sands of gleaming gold, and a background of wind-blown dunes billowing away as far as the eye could reach. The very wildness of this background gave a bizarre sort of charm to the fantastic buildings which made up the ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson

... Miss Ann said, but she sought the girl's hand and held it a moment in the folds of her billowing lace dress. ...
— The Comings of Cousin Ann • Emma Speed Sampson

... swear disgustedly. Not long later, a badly battered, blackened, scuffed old spacecraft came rolling up on rocket-impulse and stopped with a billowing of rocket fumes. Hoddan threw a switch and used the landing grid field he'd used on Walden in another fashion. The ships came together with fine precision, lifeboat-tube to lifeboat-tube. He heard his grandfather swear ...
— The Pirates of Ersatz • Murray Leinster

... the hilltops. The vermilion deepened into charred umber, and soon the west was a blackened grate; another day vanished in ashes. The filmy golden pallor of twilight now blurred the landscape; the wind increased with a gayer, madder, keener touch; the lake went billowing in shadows of gray and black, and one by one the lamps of the city sprang up, vivid as sparks from an anvil. Now and again the thin, clear music of the band drifted across from the park. The fountain glimmered in the Platz, the cafes ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath

... twisting little water courses, dry as a chip at the moment, and some of them so deep as to afford cover even for the biggest pony of the wild warriors of the plains. Then, to the front, the barrier ridges, streaked with deep winding ravines, were now billowing against the northward sky, and once among those tangled land waves no chances could be taken now that it was known that the Sioux had declared for war, and that Stabber's band was out to join their red brethren in the oft recurring outbreak. Until their lands were criss-crossed ...
— A Daughter of the Sioux - A Tale of the Indian frontier • Charles King

... passed, and still they fell endlessly through space, unaware of their motion except that Jupiter was now a huge orb blotting out the universe. The grim face of the giant planet was enswathed in endless billowing clouds. No one had ever penetrated to the real core. But what held their eager, straining attention was a vast blood red disk, cyclonic in character, directly beneath them. The Great Red Spot! And immediately in the center of it was the tiny, blindingly brilliant ...
— Pirates of the Gorm • Nat Schachner

... Then billowing blue, like an ocean, rolled from the shores of morn to even: And the stars, like rafts, went down: and the moon, like a ghost-ship, driven, A feather of foam, from port to port of the cloud-built isles ...
— Myth and Romance - Being a Book of Verses • Madison Cawein

... Then the billowing surges of silk and velvet swept the small, inquiring face into the background with the accustomed ease and ...
— The Transfiguration of Miss Philura • Florence Morse Kingsley

... the coming day, Travelling unseen to the East away. In his cloudy robes that lay shadowing wide, I stretched myself motionless by his side; And his eyes with their calm, unimpassioned power, Soothing my heart like an evening shower, Led in a spectral, far-billowing train, The hours of the Past through ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald

... getting there. The crowd around the port looked smaller, or was it simply huddling closer? Then suddenly, a wail of fear and despair went up, and there was a roar of water. The observation room walls had given. I saw the green surge of waves, and a billowing deluge rushed down upon us. I had ...
— The Worlds of If • Stanley Grauman Weinbaum

... would be almost continuous, but these shell-bursts were not confined to the front lines. From where Tam hung he could see billowing smoke clouds appear in every direction. Far behind the enemy's lines at the great road junctions, in the low-roofed billeting villages, on the single-track railways, they ...
— Tam O' The Scoots • Edgar Wallace

... Doctor said to one who had been under his anxious care for a few, vivid days. The little brown-bearded man with the grey- brown hair nodded in reply, but his gaze was on the billowing waste of snow, which stretched as far as eye could see to the pine-hills in the far distance. He nodded assent, but it was plain to be seen that the Young Doctor's suggestion was not in tune with ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... the hill's shoulder he stopped and pointed his hand. The view from there was almost county-wide, billowing away across heights and depths to a blue merging of ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck

... edge of the bluff, her red cape billowing out into a scarlet banner, her hair streaming back from her face, the velvet tam flattened by the ...
— The Trumpeter Swan • Temple Bailey

... in the descent, the still air vibrated with a sibilant rattle. Slade's pony snorted and jumped sideways, leaving Lennon a clear view of the big diamond-back rattlesnake that lay coiled in the middle of the trail. The gaping jaws of the angry snake and the peculiar billowing of its body so fixed Lennon's gaze that he only half glimpsed the final ...
— Bloom of Cactus • Robert Ames Bennet

... turned to reassure their well-wisher, and in that moment a sigh went up from the crowd. Rick heard a sudden splash, and then the white mist was rising, billowing ...
— The Blue Ghost Mystery • Harold Leland Goodwin

... Emil was a handsome fellow with a picturesque face which betrayed his vocation. The crayons and the pen-and-ink drawings that I had seen in the library were his work. He had a pale, high forehead and a thick, upright grove of very soft, brown hair which I pictured as billowing in a breeze like a field of rye. "Just the kind of son for a ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan

... color and exquisite adjustment of line and mass. The luminous night which enwraps the Palisades is a solemn mighty chord. The white rhythm of this statue caresses the eye that follows it. This symphony is an intricate and wonderful wave-pattern upon a sea of billowing sound in which the listener immerses himself voluptuously. The essential significance of a work of art is not to be received apart from its form, but the form is more than merely sensuous in its appeal. Finally, therefore, the color and the composition ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes

... windows of her home, marked by the huge golden molar that projected, flashing, from the bay window of the "Parlors." She saw the open windows of the sitting-room, the Nottingham lace curtains stirring and billowing in the draft, and she caught sight of Maria Macapa's towelled head as the Mexican maid-of-all-work went to and fro in the suite, sweeping or carrying away the ashes. Occasionally in the windows of the "Parlors" she beheld McTeague's rounded back as he bent to his work. Sometimes, even, they ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris

... incense broke, The vision, if it were a vision, spoke,— If it were speech that filled the quivering air With low harmonious music. Let none dare In the rude jargons of this world to fashion That sweet, wild anthem of unearthly passion. Could I from the broad-billowing ocean borrow Of Tristan's love and of Isolde's sorrow, The flood of those world-darkening surges, wrought With thoughts that lie beyond the reach of thought, Might bring me succor where weak words must fail. But Gawayne saw and heard, and passion-pale Shrank ...
— Gawayne And The Green Knight - A Fairy Tale • Charlton Miner Lewis

... beyond them, there was now no road, no hedge, no field; but there was a great broad river sweeping across their path; a mighty tumble of yellowy-brown waters, very swift, very savage; churning and billowing and jockeying among rough boulders and islands of stone. It was a water of villainous depth and of detestable wetness; of ugly hurrying and of desolate cavernous sound. At a little to their right there was a thin uncomely bridge that waggled across ...
— Irish Fairy Tales • James Stephens

... rose; the boat nodded to the leeward of the rock, with its mast stepped, its sail billowing with a rustle in the faint air, and Mungo at the sheet. The dawn came slowly, but fast enough for the departing, and the landward portion of the rock was still in shadow when Olivia stepped forth with a tear-stained face and a trembling hand on Victor's arm. He shared her sorrow, but ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro

... He saw the strange steel embroidery of the landing grid rising to the height of a minor mountain against the sky. He drove furiously. Beyond it. He had seen the highway system from twenty miles height, and ten, and five. From somewhere near here stolen weather rockets had gone billowing skyward with explosive war heads to shatter ...
— The Hate Disease • William Fitzgerald Jenkins

... a flaming torch, and he waved it before him and laughed to see the warriors cringe. A cloud of smoke was billowing about him—he leaped to safety through ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various

... his excellent health and youthful energy, mind and body alike were somewhat spent. He made short work of preparation, slipped in between the fine cool linen sheets, and laid his brown head upon the soft billowing pillows, impatient neither to think nor feel any ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet

... as warm as summer, and there were fragrances which seemed to wash over them in waves as they passed old gardens and old orchards. There was bridal-wreath billowing above stone fences, snow-balls, pale globes among the green, beds of iris, purple-black ...
— The Tin Soldier • Temple Bailey

... no longer fashioned themselves so brightly and corporeally. The melody gently developed itself, majestically billowing and swelling like an organ chorale in a cathedral, and everything around, stretching larger and higher, had extended into a colossal space which, not the bodily eye, but only the eye of the spirit could seize. In the midst of this space ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard

... makes you argue.) The silver pouring down from that small crescent seemed to sift through the strong golden light in a separate and distinct radiance. It shimmered on the sea of waving hills and billowing mountains that opened out before us, as if sprinkling a glitter of sequins over the vivid green and amber and purple. Wherever there was shadow this pale glimmer painted it with ethereal colours, like the backs of rainbow fish moving under water. I might have jumped out of the car and found ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... cleaned in preparation) promenade like stupid black-and-white peacocks past uninteresting apartment-houses and uninspiring upper Broadway shops, while two blocks away glorious Riverside Drive, with its panorama of Hudson and hills and billowing clouds, its trees and secret walks and the Soldiers and Sailors Monument, is nearly deserted. Together they scorned the glossy well-to-do merchant in his newly ironed top-hat, and were thus drawn together. It is written that loving the same cause makes honest friendship; ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis

... bed. The seaweed stood up on end like a heavy, dark vegetation and the deep currents made it wave gracefully, stretching and billowing like floating hair. ...
— The Hollow Needle • Maurice Leblanc

... the sky above—slow, bright and clear—the Morning Star. Yama saw her twinkling feet pass him as she drew nearer and nearer to the sea; and as the first pink light began to show behind the pine trees she reached the surf. Flinging her arms high above her head, she plunged in, with her snowy mantle billowing round her. Long, long Yama gazed after her, but she had ...
— More Tales in the Land of Nursery Rhyme • Ada M. Marzials

... narrow entrance through which the avengers had disappeared; but they were halted by the guards and forced to content themselves by greeting every shot with an exultant cry. The streets in all directions were tossing and billowing like the waves of the sea; men capered and flung their arms aloft, shrieking; women and children waved their aprons and kerchiefs, sobbing and spent with excitement. It was a wild and grotesque scene, unspeakably terrible, ...
— The Net • Rex Beach

... gush of fumes that burst in a billowing cloud out along the hall and up the stairs, he staggered forward. Tightly to his body he clutched the remaining vials. Where was Beatrice? He knew not. Everything boomed and echoed in his stunned ears. ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England

... over the open channel of the common. And I remember I was thinking with myself: "If the air would only become faintly visible for a moment, what a sight it would be of waste grandeur with its thousands of billowing eddies, and self-involved, conflicting, and swallowing whirlpools from the sea-bottom of this common!" when, with my imagination resting on the fancied vision, I was startled by such a moan as seemed about to break into ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald

... distance. With her larboard lipping low and that long break of swishing waters against her ports which is as a croon to the seaman's ear, the St. Pierre dipped and rose and sank again to the swell of the billowing sea. Behind, crowding every stitch of canvas and staggering not a little as she got under weigh, ploughed the Ste. Anne. And all about, heaving and falling like the deep breathings of a slumbering monster, were the wide wastes ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut

... pardon to his share in the tragedy? And, if all this were insufficient, then I cite the closing act of her life as valid on her behalf, were all other testimonies against her. The executioner had been directed to apply his torch from below. He did so. The fiery smoke rose upwards in billowing volumes. A Dominican monk was then standing almost at her side. Wrapt up in his sublime office, he saw not the danger, but still persisted in his prayers. Even then, when the last enemy was racing up the fiery stairs to seize her, even at that moment did this noblest ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey

... below them—growing vaster with each passing moment. It had changed from a disc to a globe, and now, as the molten silver of its surface seemed swiftly clouding, it turned grey; then they saw its true appearance, a vast field of rolling, billowing clouds! ...
— The Black Star Passes • John W Campbell

... serpentine by the roadside, or in the golden bulrush blades by the lake shore, takes more than double value. It is shed upon the landscape like a spiritual and transparent veil. Most beautiful of all are the sweeping lines of pure untroubled snow, fold over fold of undulating softness, billowing along the skirts of the peaked hills. There is no conveying the charm of immaterial, aerial, lucid beauty, the feeling of purity and aloofness from sordid things, conveyed by the fine touch on all our senses of light, colour, form, and air, and ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds

... symmetrical slopes are so corrugated by hardened rivulets of lava that they look for all the world like folds of gray-brown cloth. Beyond Batok we could catch a glimpse of Bromo itself, belching skyward great clouds of billowing smoke and steam, while from its crater came a rumble as of distant thunder. And far in the distance, its purple bulk faintly discernible against the turquoise sky, rose Smeroe, the greatest volcano ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell

... them. Then it turned, slid to the deck by I know not what strange process, and, still hooded, still shrouded, still lapped about by its mummy-wrappings, seized a rope's end. In an instant the jib was set and stood on hard and billowing against the night wind. The tops'l followed. Then the figure moved forward and passed behind the companionway of ...
— A Deal in Wheat - And Other Stories of the New and Old West • Frank Norris

... pedestal of green bronze—with an inset panel representing the tragedy—rose upward in the shape of billowing curling waves supporting a marble Christ standing erect with outstretched pitying hand, majestic and ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull

... There was a funnelling roar, sucking up earth and air, trees and brushwood; whips and lashes and splintering crashes of rain and wind and jagged light-lines; the bronchos cowering against the inner wall of the trail. Then the funnelling wind tore the pinnacled rock tops clear of the billowing mist. ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut

... to say that in their time they had never seen its like. The lightning split the sky into even more fearsome fiery chasms, and in the moments of wild illumination they could see the road gullied by scores of impromptu rivulets, could glimpse the broad river billowing and raging, the cattle huddling terrified in the pastures, the woods swaying and writhing in deathlike grapple. The wind hurled by them in a thousand moods and tones, all angry; a fine, high shrieking on its topmost note—a hoarse snarl—a lull, as though the straining monster were pausing ...
— Counsel for the Defense • Leroy Scott

... hall, he started toward the stair. A tall Gel rippled into view ahead, its shape flowing and wavering, now billowing out, then rising up. The shifting form undulated toward Brett. He made a move to run, then remembered Dhuva, stood motionless. The Gel wobbled past him, slumped suddenly, flowed under a door. Brett let out a breath. Never mind the fat man. There were ...
— It Could Be Anything • John Keith Laumer

... auditorium. All about that platform stood hundreds, close packed, faces raised eagerly, the better to see the slight, graceful, girlish figure occupying the center of the stage—a figure strangely familiar to Jock's eyes in spite of its quaintly billowing, ante-bellum garb. She was speaking. Jock, mouth agape, eyes protruding, ears straining, heard, as in a daze, the sweet, ...
— Emma McChesney & Co. • Edna Ferber

... wouldn't it make you think you were a Lady, sure enough, if you couldn't move without that lace train billowing after you; without being dazzled with diamond-shine; without a ...
— In the Bishop's Carriage • Miriam Michelson

... instant to peer out into the gloom along the stony path that ran from his house to an old foot-bridge about fifty feet away. Curling up from the gorge, mist seemed to play among the rotted planks; it rose and fell in great billowing blankets, sometimes concealing the structure ...
— The White Feather Hex • Don Peterson

... a rapid rate. The first ten years of labour in India showed twenty-seven converts, the seventh ten showed more than twenty-seven thousand. The preparation may be as slow as the solemn gathering of the thunder-clouds, as they noiselessly steal into their places, and slowly upheave their grey billowing crests; the final success may be as swift as the lightning which flashes in an instant from one side of the heavens to the other. It takes long years to hew the tunnel, to 'make the crooked straight, and the rough places plain,' and then smooth and fleet ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren

... curls, And her patched, uncoloured robes of common cloth. And with a change of mood I charge the elegant ladies Three times the value of the articles chosen, And thus tear from their flowery bodies Pieces of their billowing silk To deck the less ...
— Song Book of Quong Lee of Limehouse • Thomas Burke









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