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More "Nutshell" Quotes from Famous Books



... nutshell; it is this:—Shall man submit to the revealed will of God, or to his own will? That is the naked question when the fog of confused ideas and unmeaning ...
— Slavery Ordained of God • Rev. Fred. A. Ross, D.D.

... points of the compass impartially. "One of us must take a few days off and go and hunt up a nice, inexpensive little Eldorado for us. There!—there, my friends, you have the solution of your knotty little problem in a nutshell. I ...
— Four Girls and a Compact • Annie Hamilton Donnell

... operation, every autumn, in the month of September, when the great heat is abated. People send to one another to know if any of their family has a mind to have the small-pox: they make parties for this purpose, and when they are met (commonly fifteen or sixteen together) the old woman comes with a nutshell full of the matter of the best sort of small-pox, and asks what vein you please to have opened. She immediately rips open that you offer to her, with a large needle, (which gives you no more pain than a common scratch) and ...
— Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M—y W—y M—e • Lady Mary Wortley Montague

... earrings were all what is called Berlin iron-work; but these delicate arabesques were made in Vienna, and seemed to have been fashioned by the fairies who, the stories tell us, are condemned by a jealous Carabosse to collect the eyes of ants, or weave a fabric so diaphanous that a nutshell can contain it. Madame Rabourdin's graceful figure, made more slender still by the black draperies, was shown to advantage by a carefully cut dress, the two sides of which met at the shoulders in a single ...
— Bureaucracy • Honore de Balzac

... say nothing about it. You're wanting to get something for nothing now, and presently I daresay you'd remind me of something I had said. We can go back to the beginning if you like, but you're not going to play lawyer with me, Ray. It's in a nutshell, I suppose. You're going to marry Miss Dinnett, or else you're not. Of course, you know which. And if you won't tell me which, then don't ask me to ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts

... Johnson, but as her business is not so good at times she has me whenever she can feel as if she can spare the money. So this little life of mine has been almost locked up in a nutshell, and Jesus has come to me in the spirit's power that I should tell the world of His wonderful love to me a poor sinner of the dust. And what can not the Lord do for those who put their trust in Him? We feel like saying to the blessed One, how amiable are all of Thy works, oh Lord, and our eyes ...
— A Slave Girl's Story - Being an Autobiography of Kate Drumgoold. • Kate Drumgoold

... "that is the matter in a nutshell. Now listen to me for a few moments, please. As you are aware, we have practically destroyed the naval power of Peru; and we have also made short work of her armies wherever we have come into contact with them. In a word, Peru is almost at the end of her resources; ...
— Under the Chilian Flag - A Tale of War between Chili and Peru • Harry Collingwood

... pull at his cigarette, with his elbows outspread like the haughty wings of the Prussian eagles of war. Emitting a long streamer of smoke, he summed up the whole thing in a nutshell with a derisory—Pouf! ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry

... said we could go on the same steamer that took the baseball party. Lots of other women—wives of the managers and players and so on—will go along, I understand. So there's the whole bally story in a nutshell. Rippin' ...
— Baseball Joe Around the World - Pitching on a Grand Tour • Lester Chadwick

... beginning to me of an interest apart from that which had brought me to King's Cobb. A real nutshell drama had usurped the place of that fictitious one that had as yet failed to mark an epoch by so much as a scratch. I accepted the former as some solace for the intolerable wrong inflicted upon me by the sea ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes

... labours of the field by twos and threes, and all turned round to stare upon the stranger. I had seen them coming back last night, I saw them going afield again; and there was the life of Bouchet in a nutshell. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... Will it be better for Carthage at large, and our party in particular, for Hannibal to stay at the head of the army in Spain, or to come home and bring the influence of his popularity and reputation to bear upon the populace? There is the question put in a nutshell, and if they can't decide upon it let them toss up. There is virtue, I am ready to maintain, in an appeal to ...
— The Young Carthaginian - A Story of The Times of Hannibal • G.A. Henty

... have been modified as we find them by "the well-known influence of climate." And the persons who gave expression to this idea never dreamed of its real significance. In truth, here was the doctrine of evolution in a nutshell, and, because its ultimate bearings were not clear, it seemed the most natural of doctrines. But most of the persons who advanced it would have turned from it aghast could they have realized its import. As it was, however, only here and there a man ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams

... in labor. While he was translating Homer, he says: "As soon as breakfast is over, I retire to my nutshell of a summer-house, which is my verse manufactory, and here I abide seldom less than three hours, and not often more." This little summer-house, which he called his boudoir, was not much bigger than a sedan-chair; the door of it opened into the garden, which was covered with pinks, roses, and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various

... reported that Roosevelt's comments on the dinner party were "blistering." "He told my mother afterwards," said Lang in later times, "that Mrs. Cummins was out of place in the Bad Lands"; which was Mrs. Cummins's tragedy in a nutshell. ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn

... Disaster Charles Stuart Calverley 'Twas Ever Thus Henry Sambrooke Leigh A Grievance James Kenneth Stephen "Not a Sou Had he Got" Richard Harris Barham The Whiting and the Snail Lewis Carroll The Recognition William Sawyer The Higher Pantheism in a Nutshell Algernon Charles Swinburne The Willow-tree William Makepeace Thackeray Poets and Linnets Tom Hood, the Younger The Jam-pot Rudyard Kipling Ballad Charles Stuart Calverley The Poster-girl Carolyn Wells After Dilletante Concetti Henry Duff Traill If Mortimer ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various

... always promising to pay, promising to pay, tomorrow, and dying today, insolvent; seeking to curry favor, to get custom, by how many modes, only not state-prison offenses; lying, flattering, voting, contracting yourselves into a nutshell of civility or dilating into an atmosphere of thin and vaporous generosity, that you may persuade your neighbor to let you make his shoes, or his hat, or his coat, or his carriage, or import his groceries for him; making yourselves sick, ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau

... in a nutshell, my dear," said her Highness to my aunt. "They tell me I broke the rules when I insisted on having Jack admitted to the Hospital. Now, your late husband was one of the governors; and you are his sole executor. Very good. As your husband's representative, complain of the violation ...
— Jezebel • Wilkie Collins

... saying that I am a Democrat, brings forward the great existing issues between the two leading parties of the country. I might go into a long discussion of the principles of those two parties, but in a nutshell I can define the differences of such vital import to the voters of this land. The principles of the Democratic party represent—er, well, they represent the principles which that great party stands for, and the principles of the Republican party, ahem! Yes, ...
— Shawn of Skarrow • James Tandy Ellis

... a nutshell," went on the Prime Minister. "We are doomed unless succor reaches us from the outside. We have discussed a hundred projects. While we are inactive, Count Marlanx is gaining more power and a greater hold over the people of the city. We have no means of communication with Prince ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon

... In a nutshell, the explanation of the timid policy displayed is that the Brothers are fully assured that the disclosure of that actual truth (which constitutes the secret doctrine) about the origin of the World and of Humanity—of the laws which govern their existence, and the destinies ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various

... as one Frenchman to another, as one soldier to another. If the emperor does not die, he will declare war against Germany. There is the situation in a nutshell, is it not? And do you think the army can afford to lose one man at the present time, especially a man who has made good use of such small opportunities of distinction as the fates have offered him? And, so far as I have been able to follow the intricacies ...
— The Isle of Unrest • Henry Seton Merriman

... fine exertions of the troops on the line of communications had enabled the XXth Corps Commander to make his plans for the capture of Jerusalem, and at a conference at Enab on the following day General Chetwode outlined his scheme, which, put in a nutshell, was to attack with the 60th and 74th Divisions in an easterly direction on the front Ain Karim-Beit Surik and, skirting the western suburbs of Jerusalem, to place these two divisions astride the Jerusalem-Nablus ...
— How Jerusalem Was Won - Being the Record of Allenby's Campaign in Palestine • W.T. Massey

... the pretty fairy story you used to tell us about the good little girl who saved a cat from being drowned by some bad boys, and carried her home? and she turned out to be a fairy cat and gave that girl every thing she wished for—cakes and candy, and a lovely pink silk frock packed in a nutshell for her to ...
— Miss Elliot's Girls • Mrs Mary Spring Corning

... your ear; it is to turn pumpkins into coaches, and mice into horses, lowness into loftiness, and nothing into everything, for each child has its fairy godmother in its own soul; it is to live in a nutshell and to count yourself the king of infinite ...
— Shelley - An Essay • Francis Thompson

... This in a nutshell embraces the dramatic opening and closing episodes of the World War on the soil of France. Bracketed between these two glorious victories were the agonies of martyred France, the deaths and life-long cripplings of millions of men, the up-rooting of arrogant militarism, ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish

... difficulty, in a "nutshell," was that the commanding officer of the district was furnished no more troops or supplies for this state of war than had been provided and furnished him for ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman

... plate-glass, with mahogany sashes—only, here and there, a Gothic casement was stuck in by way of looking "tasty;" and through one window on the ground-floor, the lights shining within, showed crimson silk and gilded chairs, and all sorts of finery—Louis Quatorze in a nutshell! The reader knows the sort of house as well as if he had lived in it. Ladies of Fanny Millinger's turn of mind always choose the same kind of habitation. It is astonishing what a unanimity of taste they ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... said Legrand decidedly. "Do you think they'd give up all they had? No, it would only be a pretence—a sham. I agree with the doctor that Holgate's safety is only spelled out by our deaths. There you have it in a nutshell. The man can't afford ...
— Hurricane Island • H. B. Marriott Watson

... I do this notwithstanding that you, Marie Louise, Empress of the French, prayed to God that He would bless the arms of the enemies of the land of your adoption. And then that letter which I sent you from Grenoble in a nutshell on my way from Elba to Paris to reclaim the throne which treason had deprived me of. I requested you to come to me with my son the King of Rome. You ignored that, as you did other communications which I sent, and which I am assured you received. ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman

... to such people but wind and disturbance. White and fleecy clouds upon the azure only say that the sea will be smooth and peaceful. D'Artagnan found the sky blue, the breeze embalmed with saline perfumes, and he said: "I will embark with the first tide, if it be but in a nutshell." ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... furnished me with the clew to all the investigations I afterward conducted; I won't tell you how I went about collecting data and more data, little by little, for that would bore you. I'll put the thing for you in a nutshell." ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja

... whole thing in a nutshell. There were some who might consider this to be an ideal state. Not to care about anything at all was not to have anything at all to worry about. Certain philosophies were based upon this state of mind. In part, Monte's ...
— The Triflers • Frederick Orin Bartlett

... unanswerable arguments so summarily disposed of, and the serious impression I had made on the audience so speedily dissipated. The good man intended no disrespect, as he told me afterward. He simply put the whole argument in a nutshell: "Let a ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton

... revenge for the trifling sum of money which he was called on to pay for him. It may be that the first blame lay not with the Prime Minister himself, but with the Prime Minister's wife. With that we have nothing to do. The whole thing lies in a nutshell. The bare mention of the name of her Grace the Duchess in Parliament would have saved the Duke, at any rate as effectually as he has been saved by the services of his man-of-all-work, Phineas Finn, and would have saved him without driving poor Ferdinand Lopez to insanity. But rather ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope

... house. The ceilings are low and thin, and the walls are near and thin, and the children are omnipresent and not thin, and their wants and their joys and their quarrels are as numerous as the fishes in the sea, and there you have the problem in a nutshell. ...
— Le Petit Nord - or, Annals of a Labrador Harbour • Anne Elizabeth Caldwell (MacClanahan) Grenfell and Katie Spalding

... next resting place before we started up again. It was on this second dash that I understood why those Homeric words had come to my lips a while ago. This was indeed like nothing so much as like being out on rough waters and in a troubled sea, with nothing to brace the storm with but a wind-tossed nutshell of a one-man sailing craft. I knew that experience for having outridden many a gale in the mouth of the mighty St. Lawrence River. When the snow reached its extreme in depth, it gave you the feeling which a drowning man may have when ...
— Over Prairie Trails • Frederick Philip Grove

... degree, was merely passed on at a slightly accelerated pace to receive fresh honors. That gave me a lesson which I have never forgotten; no honor that has come to me have I ever fully earned; and no disgrace that I have earned has ever been visited upon me for the public to know. There in a nutshell you have the moral training of the heir to a modern throne. What chance, then, have I ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman

... over two-thirds of the distance, when a sudden gust of wind, rushing forth from the narrow gorges of the valley of the Rhone, stirred up the waves of the lake, and produced one of those short seas which so often prove fatal. The sail of the little boat was soon gone, and it seemed like a nutshell dancing on the still-increasing waves. It was impossible to think of returning, and full half an hour of fatigue and danger must elapse before the boat could be moored in safety under the hanging cliffs of Haute-Combe. Fate willed that my wandering sail should be on the lake ...
— Raphael - Pages Of The Book Of Life At Twenty • Alphonse de Lamartine

... "Northmorland Case" with passionate interest, for months, from the time it began with melodrama, and turned violently to tragedy, up to the present moment when (as the journalists neatly crammed the news into a nutshell) "it bade ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... M. Castan gives in a nutshell, may be greatly simplified by following his division into periods. Beginning therefore from the earliest period down to the present time. The following are the principal facts, simplified by this ...
— Holidays in Eastern France • Matilda Betham-Edwards

... the perfect family, gently chivalrous, cultured and altogether charming. Then one remembers in explanation that Dorothea was written some time ago, and that this was the old-fashioned Kultur. There you have the German tragedy in a nutshell. Of Dorothea herself I will say little. Probably you already know her, and may agree with me in considering her an unattractive prig, whose place in the list of Mr. MAARTENS' heroines is decidedly at the wrong end. But those amazing pathetic ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, December 9, 1914 • Various

... speechless with gratitude and ecstasy. The sum, which doubled the utmost he expected, would relieve him from all his immediate embarrassments. When he recovered his voice, he thanked his dear Mr. Douce with a warmth that seemed to make the little man shrink into a nutshell; and assured him that he would dine with him every Monday in the year—if he was asked! He then longed to depart; but he thought, justly, that to go as soon as he had got what he wanted would look selfish. Accordingly, ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book III • Edward Bulwer Lytton

... brakes my art all from yu for tu part, i rot them lines this marnin. mister tomas sais as i gov im mi prumass befor i cum to ave the apiness of see yu. butt i dant thinc i giv mor promass to him. nor 2 manni uthers. mi deerest deer and troo luv cuppid! i feer our nutshell song is blitid and its ros kwencht in its blum. them was plesent ours when the carnashuns and tullups was all in blo, wasunt them mi deer luv. mister tomas sais ass he can mari me in a munth and father ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume XII, No. 347, Saturday, December 20, 1828. • Various

... other day. So at first I was not sure of my man. I registered at this hotel and watched him carefully. Sometimes I became positive he was Andrews; at other times I doubted. But when he began distributing pearls to you, his new friends, all doubt vanished. There, gentlemen, is my story in a nutshell. What do you think ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces Out West • Edith Van Dyne

... least to play the man: so I mustered up courage, and informed the captain that I desired the topsail filled away. He replied that he would shoot any man who dared to touch a rope without his orders; he 'would go his own course, and had no idea of trusting himself with a d—d nutshell;' and then he went below for his pistols. I called my right-hand man of the crew, and told him my situation; I also informed him that I wanted the main topsail filled. He answered with a clear 'Ay, ay, sir!' in a manner which was not to be misunderstood, and my confidence was perfectly ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 1 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot

... to go upon. 'I have my own theory about the authorship of the Iliad and Odyssey,' said Lewis Carroll (of 'Alice in Wonderland') once in Christ Church common room: 'it is that they weren't really written by Homer, but by another person of the same name.' There you have the Iliad in a nutshell as regards the authenticity of great works. All we know about the supposed Homer (if anything) is that he was the reputed author of the two unapproachable Greek epics; and all we know directly about my old master, viewed personally, is ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen

... been soaked in sea-water for ten years. On any ordinary occasion, a man would rather not go in her from Marseilles to the Chateau d'If, but on an occasion like this one would willingly go round the world in a nutshell." ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... in a buttercup, cream in a blue-bell, Marigold butter and hollyhock cheese, Slices of strawberry served in a nutshell, And honey just brought ...
— Five Mice in a Mouse-trap - by the Man in the Moon. • Laura E. Richards

... sun? Still he seems to us a foot broad, and Epicurus thinks he may be a little broader or narrower than he seems. With all his enormous speed, too, he appears to us to stand still (82). The whole question lies in a nutshell; of four propositions which prove my point only one is disputed viz. that every true sensation has side by side with it a false one indistinguishable from it (83). A man who has mistaken P. for Q. Geminus could have no infallible mode of recognising Cotta. You say that no such indistinguishable ...
— Academica • Marcus Tullius Cicero

... medicine, what progress has been made since ague was compared to the flutter of insects among the nerves, and good Mistress Dorothy Burton, who died but in 1629, cured it by hanging a spider round the patient's neck "in a nutshell lapped in silk"! In chemistry, what strides! In astronomy, what perturbations and changes! In history, what do we not owe to the amiable authors who, dipping their pens in whitewash, have reversed the judgments of ages ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various

... life story in a nutshell. Frank had never come so closely in touch with tragedy before. He continued to squeeze the hand he held, while deep down in his heart the generous fellow was making resolutions that would bring a little of sunshine ...
— The Outdoor Chums on the Gulf • Captain Quincy Allen

... that is the whole matter in a nutshell. Why do your teeth like crackling crust, and your organs of taste like spongy crumb, and your digestive contrivances take kindly to bread rather ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... lies in a nutshell and depends entirely upon whether Lance continues true to his love or not. If he remains true, your scheme for parting them will have but little effect; if he prove false, why then all will be well, according ...
— A Mad Love • Bertha M. Clay

... truth, and indifferent to all personalities or artificial conditions of men or things. Nothing but the roots of things, their inmost anatomy, attracted him; he brushed away contemptuously the beauties on which Longfellow spent the tenderness of his character, and threw aside like an empty nutshell the form to which an artist might have given the devotion of his best art, for the art's sake. In his temper there was no patience with shams, little toleration of forms. It would, I should think, be clear to one who was well acquainted with ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James

... knew perfectly well what he ought to have done. He ought to have imitated the example of other people who behaved like scoundrels and openly gloried in it. That was the only way to be even with her; it took the wind out of her sails. Keith often put the matter into a nutshell: ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas

... that season, now that the English flock abroad in shoals, like the swallows quitting our cold country, to return again some time. France has been pretty well used up, so now we fall upon Germany. Stalkenberg was that year particularly full, for its size—you might have put it in a nutshell; and it derived its importance, name, and most else belonging to it, from its lord of the soil, the Baron von Stalkenberg. A stalwart old man was the baron, with grizzly hair, a grizzled beard, and manners as loutish ...
— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood

... then, that it looks bad—very bad. To begin with, your cousin Nettie strongly disapproves of the young woman's appearance, so loud and over-dressed, evidently got up to attract. But it lies in a nutshell. If he's not engaged to her, why is he seen everywhere with her? If he is engaged to her, and she's a respectable woman—I say if she's respectable, why doesn't he introduce her to his family? Why doesn't he ask your aunt Kate to ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair

... units of speech, the words, may on occasion identify themselves with either of the two functional units; more often they mediate between the two extremes, embodying one or more radical notions and also one or more subsidiary ones. We may put the whole matter in a nutshell by saying that the radical and grammatical elements of language, abstracted as they are from the realities of speech, respond to the conceptual world of science, abstracted as it is from the realities of experience, and that ...
— Language - An Introduction to the Study of Speech • Edward Sapir

... created mind could embrace, Thou wouldst be too small for those whom Thou hast made in Thine own image, the infinite creatures that seek their God, a Being to love and know infinitely. For the created to know perfectly would be to be damned forever in the nutshell of the finite. He who is His own cause, alone can understand perfectly and remain infinite, for that which is known and that which knows are in ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald

... also, an ideal lover. But, my dearest, kindest, best of fathers; you know very well, that to trust you implicitly, is a law of my life! I have always trusted you! Therefore, I am not disappointed; neither am I very much surprised. I am just perfectly happy. That is the whole story in a nutshell!" ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson

... won't be able to sleep, or at best only fitfully, if I don't. Here's what happened, in a nutshell." ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas

... wants, ma'am. Take my word for it, this matter rests entirely with you. It's all in a nutshell. Encourage her to confide in you—and ...
— The Frozen Deep • Wilkie Collins

... tried to slip some into my sleeves, but I was so awkward that I always dropped them. Besides, I wanted to eat a lot of them, a great big lot. I thought I should like to eat a sackful. One day I managed to steal some. Bonne Esther, who was taking us up to bed, slipped on a nutshell and dropped her lantern, which went out. I was close to a big bowl of nuts, and I took a handful and put them in my pocket. As soon as everybody was in bed I took the nuts out of my pocket, put my head under the sheets ...
— Marie Claire • Marguerite Audoux

... case in a nutshell. "Our client," he contended, "was NOT the man against whom the warrant in this case had been duly issued; he was NOT the man named Guy Waring; he was NOT the man whom the witnesses deposed to having seen at ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen

... was stiff, formal, severe. He seldom praised her work and never ungrudgingly. His censure was rare too, to be sure, but this obviously was because Rose almost never gave him an excuse for it. Of course she was up to her work, but, well, she had better be. This, in a nutshell, was his attitude toward her. Nothing but the undisputable fact that she was up to her work (Gertrude was comforting here, with her reticent but convincing reports of Abe Shuman's satisfaction with her) kept Rose from losing ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster

... vindictively, and a torrent of words poured out from her: "It was a pretty scheme your Miss Verney had planned! She was to egg me on to divorce you, so that she could get a clutch on your feelings and marry you and your money! Your money—that puts it in a nutshell! That's the kind of woman a man like you falls in love with! A woman who's too shrewd and too cunning to commit herself. Who provokes and tantalizes and lures on a man, and then stops him short at the very last moment. The musical-comedy type. The 'mind the paint' girl. A hundred times worse ...
— Swirling Waters • Max Rittenberg

... back when I liked," retorted Sampson. "I wouldn't be much of a detective if I didn't do that—still, this is my view of the case in a nutshell. One of three things must have happened—that is, granted that Mr. Shaw did put the ...
— Good Luck • L. T. Meade

... denounced by others, was in itself, to begin with, feasable, and after that advisable, he despatched Mr. Dolby to America for the purpose of surveying the proposed scene of operations. Immediately on his emissary's return, Dickens drew up a few pithy sentences, headed by him, "The Case in a Nutshell." His decision was what those more immediately about him had for some time anticipated. He made up his mind to go, and to go quite independently. The Messrs. Chappell, it should be remarked at once, had no part whatever in the ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent

... middle. Picture, if you will, an insane man being choked by a supposedly sane one, and he in turn being choked by a temporarily sane insane friend of the assaulted one, and you will have Nemesis as nearly in a nutshell as any mere rhetorician has yet been ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers

... always discontented, my lord," said Pipalee; "but then you are somewhat too old to travel,—at least, unless you go in your nutshell and four." ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... child's play in a serious outburst. The mournful fact that Manitou had never equipped itself with a first-class fire-engine or a fire-brigade was now to play a great part in the future career of the two towns. Osterhaut put the thing in a nutshell as he slithered up the main street of Lebanon on his way to the manning of the two fire-engines ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... farmer and farmer's family in the land could read "The Story of the Soil," for it gives in a nutshell the results of years of patient study and investigation upon the most vital question that now confronts the farmer: How shall he conserve his soil? I have read it with great pleasure and profit.—FRED L. HATCH, Farmer, Spring ...
— The Farm That Won't Wear Out • Cyril G. Hopkins

... from the blinding sleet and hail— When we lurk'd within the thicket, and, beneath the waning moon, Saw the sentry's bayonet glimmer, heard him chant his listless tune— When the howling storm o'ertook us drifting down the island's lee, And our crazy bark was whirling like a nutshell on the sea— When the nights were dark and dreary, and amidst the fern we lay Faint and foodless, sore with travel, longing for the streaks of day; When thou wert an angel to me, watching my exhausted sleep— Never didst thou hear me murmur—couldst thou ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various

... be entitled the Exchequer, and the alms-basket a Magazine. Methinks the Turke should license Diurnals, because he prohibits learning and books." He characterises the Diurnal as "a puny chronicle, scarce pin-feathered with the wings of time; it is a history in sippets; the English Iliads in a nutshell; the Apocryphal Parliament's Book of Maccabees in ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli

... and Winter, 1947-48 numbers of "The Nutshell", news bulletin of the NNGA, have been issued by the Secretary's office. It is intended to have this bulletin distributed to members four times a year. It will carry news of the Association's activities, supplementing the "Nut Growers News" column in the American ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Thirty-Eighth Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association

... happy prisoner at large, in this nutshell of a house at the Hills, which you have never seen since it has become the family mansion. I am now in the actual tenure and occupation of the little room, commonly called Rosamond's room, bounded on the N. E. W. and S. by blank—[N.B. a very dangerous ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. VII - Patronage • Maria Edgeworth

... properly responsible"—and he waved his spoon around in a wide sweep to indicate the comprehensive nature of that class of responsibilities which render people responsible, and several exclaimed, admiringly, "He is right!—he has put that whole tangled thing into a nutshell—it is wonderful!" After a little pause to give the interest opportunity to gather and grow, he went on: "Very good. Let us suppose the case of a pair of tongs that falls upon a man's foot, causing a cruel hurt. Will you claim that the tongs are punishable for that? The question is answered; ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc - Volume 1 (of 2) • Mark Twain

... I have had to tell it in a nutshell, space growing limited. Philip Hamlyn had ascertained it all beyond possibility of dispute, had seen Mrs. O'Connett, and had brought down ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 5, May, 1891 • Various

... return to England, and found work where he was. The little shop of Gaston of Abbeville would have interested any lad in love with the armorer's trade, and it had more attraction for Dickon than anything else he had found in that place. Wedged in, like a nutshell in the jaws of a nutcracker, between a round tower built by Rollo's men and the far older wall of a Roman basilica, it was partly built of Norman stone-work and partly of oak. Set close to the old Roman road through ...
— Masters of the Guild • L. Lamprey

... father's heart, she resolved to run away from him. In the night whilst every one was asleep, she got up, and took three different things from her treasures, a golden ring, a golden spinning-wheel, and a golden reel. The three dresses of the sun, moon, and stars she put into a nutshell, put on her mantle of all kinds of fur, and blackened her face and hands with soot. Then she commended herself to God, and went away, and walked the whole night until she reached a great forest. And as she was tired, she got into a ...
— Household Tales by Brothers Grimm • Grimm Brothers

... naturally bestows on matters of that sort; what among other nations forms a complicated code of morality more or less pure, more or less corrupt, for the nations of which we speak becomes compressed, so to speak, in a nutshell, and, the essence remaining always at the bottom, the idea of duty grows paramount in their minds and hearts, and every thing they do is illumined by that light of the human conscience, which, after all, is for each one of us the voice of God. False ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud

... barred my gates with iron, I shuttered my doors with flame, Because to force my ramparts your nutshell navies came; I took the sun from their presence, I cut them down with my blast, And they died, but the Flag of England blew free ere the ...
— Verses 1889-1896 • Rudyard Kipling

... forty years must be compressed into a nutshell. The famine was over at last, but its effects remained. Nearly a million of people had emigrated, yet the condition of life for those remaining was far from satisfactory. The Encumbered Estates Act, which had completed the ruin of many of the older proprietors, pressed, in ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless

... in a brief address, say substantially: "If I take brass, glass, and other materials, and fuse them, the product is a slag. This is what physical laws do. If I take those same materials, and form them into a telescope, that is what mind does." This is the whole question in a nutshell. That design implies an intelligent designer, is a self evident truth. Every man believes it; and no man can practically disbelieve it. Even those naturalists who theoretically deny it, if they find in a cave so simple a thing as a flint arrow-head, ...
— What is Darwinism? • Charles Hodge

... past his face; but it could be neither, for there were no insects amongst the ice. It passed him again and again, flying in circles around him, and he concluded that it must be North Wind herself, no bigger than Tom Thumb when his mother put him in the nutshell lined with flannel. But she was no longer vapoury and thin. She was solid, although tiny. A moment more, and she perched on ...
— At the Back of the North Wind • George MacDonald

... a charming moonlight evening, we embarked at Ranelagh for Vauxhall, in a wherry so light and slender that we looked like so many fairies sailing in a nutshell. My uncle, being apprehensive of catching cold upon the water, went round in the coach, and my aunt would have accompanied him, but he would not suffer me to go by water if she went by land; and therefore she favoured us with ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett

... water about two weeks when one day as he lay in his room, Robinson heard people over his head running about and crying, "A storm is coming!" The ship's sides trembled and creaked. The ship was tossed like a nutshell. Now it rolled to the right, now to the left. And Robinson was thrown from one side to the other. Every moment he expected the ship to sink. He turned pale and trembled with fear. "Ah, if I were only at home with my parents, safe on the land," he said. "If I ever get safe out of this, ...
— An American Robinson Crusoe • Samuel B. Allison

... ages! The idea of supposing that horrid old woman could give you love philtres! Why, girl, I've always loved Bruce—always. But I thought he'd forgotten me. And tonight when he came I found he hadn't. There's the whole thing in a nutshell. I'm going to marry him and go ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922 • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... Mahabharata, of the great acts of the Kurus. But, O thou of ascetic wealth, recite now that wonderful narration fully. I feel a great curiosity to hear it. It behoveth thee to recite it, therefore, in full. I am not satisfied with hearing in a nutshell the great history. That could never have been a trifling cause for which the virtuous ones could slay those whom they should not have slain, and for which they are yet applauded by men. Why also did those tigers among men, innocent and capable of avenging themselves ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa - Translated into English Prose - Adi Parva (First Parva, or First Book) • Kisari Mohan Ganguli (Translator)

... deliberately. "I 'll answer your questions so far as I think best, and then I 'll ask a few of you. The lady upstairs is Viola Henley, the wife of Philip Henley. She has come down here to take legal possession of this property. That is the situation in a nutshell. I am merely accompanying her to make sure that she gets a ...
— Gordon Craig - Soldier of Fortune • Randall Parrish

... right, we should begin to send out our paragraphs, affirmative, negative, and explanatory, and along about the first of May we should sit down about a hundred strong, the most distinguished people in the country, and solemnize our triumph. There it is in a nutshell. I might expand and I might expound, but that's the sum and substance ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... and turbid ocean, carrying within her the great central fire by which the engine was moved, which, in spite of winds and waves, carried us safely along; then the science which enabled the master of this curious nutshell of man's contriving to know just in what part of this waste of trackless waters we were. All these things I knew before, and had often thought of them, but was never so impressed with them; it was almost as if they ...
— Travellers' Tales • Eliza Lee Follen

... passage. Whilst they were eating, I was to take care that every time the secretary Escovedo asked for drink, I should be the person to serve him. I had thus the opportunity of giving him some twice; pouring the poisoned water into his wine at the moment I passed through the antechamber, about a nutshell-full, as I had been ordered. The dinner over, secretary Escovedo went away, but the others remained to play, and Antonio Perez having gone out for a moment, rejoined his major-domo and me in one of the apartments over the court-yard, ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various

... lines. It came like a whiff of fresh sea air. Yes, it would be delightful to be on board Flying Fish now. However, no doubt Algie Thynne—(how eloquently, by the way, you describe him! putting all the complications of his character and the dazzling charm of his personality in a nutshell by the simple sentence 'He's rather a nut!')—amply compensates for my absence. You ask if I know him. I do, though perhaps more by reputation than anything else. We have met once or twice. Where? I can't quite recall. Perhaps at the Oratory, or at the Supper ...
— The Limit • Ada Leverson

... think she's making herself of enough importance unless she keeps people waiting. She changed her mind three times about her veil, and had her dressing-bag (a gorgeous affair, beside which mine is a mere nutshell) reopened at the last minute to ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson

... you are hungry you just tell me, and I will send you the proper food; and it will not be gum, or cold-cream or candels ether, I can tell you. Why even Mr. le Cure wood no enuf not to give you enny of those things. That Teddy is not fit to have a godchild, and that is the hole story in a nutshell. I dunno just what I shall do if he rites to me. Mebbe I will anser and mebbe I wont. I guess I shall tell miss Betty about it. Have I ever tole you about her? She lives in the big house on the hill next to Sid Perkins and she has hare like, well like what ...
— Deer Godchild • Marguerite Bernard and Edith Serrell

... of our lot who would give me the lie!... To behave like that is treachery!... You have betrayed the Numbers. There it is in a nutshell!... What have ...
— Messengers of Evil - Being a Further Account of the Lures and Devices of Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre

... the wrong set of circumstances, the dreaming mind comes right at the third trial, and introduces the doctor and the landlady together, in connection with the right set of circumstances. There it is in a nutshell!—Permit me to hand you back the manuscript, with my best thanks for your very complete and striking confirmation of the rational theory of dreams." Saying those words, Mr. Hawbury returned the written paper to Midwinter, with the pitiless ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins

... (Hobebe Zion). Among the Russo-Jewish students in Vienna, Smolenskin, the militant Zionist, organized an academic society, Kadimah, a name which, meaning Eastward and Forward, contains the philosophy of Zionism in a nutshell. Seeing that the Alliance Israelite Universelle encouraged emigration to America, both he and Ben Yehudah published violent attacks on the French society, and endeavored to thwart its plans as far as possible.[9] The Hebrew weekly ...
— The Haskalah Movement in Russia • Jacob S. Raisin

... the sense of trying to carry a meeting like this off? I have been too astonished lately to hold on to my savoir faire. Here are my explosions in a nutshell. The announcement that the clown Gwymplane is the Prince of Vaucluse I am satisfied is authentic. He ...
— Clair de Lune - A Play in Two Acts and Six Scenes • Michael Strange

... because what pleasure is, every man knows, and what pain is, every man knows. But what justice is—this is what on every occasion is the subject-matter of dispute.'[361] That phrase gives his view in a nutshell. Justice is the means, not the end. That is just which produces a maximum of happiness. Omit all reference to Happiness, and Justice becomes a meaningless word prescribing equality, but not telling us equality of what. Happiness, on the other hand, has a substantial and independent meaning ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen

... continued Goodyer. "He's had that shop and dwelling-house of me for some years. Now, Parslett's not been doing very well of late, from one cause or another, and to put it in a nutshell, he owed me half a year's rent. I saw him yesterday, and told him I must have the money at once: in fact, I pressed him pretty hard about it.—I'd been at him for two or three weeks, and I could see it was no good going on. He'd been down in the mouth about it, the last week or so, ...
— The Orange-Yellow Diamond • J. S. Fletcher

... here is the situation in a nutshell:—Nellie doesn't see why she should be keeping up two establishments. It's expensive. The child will be comfortable and happy in the convent and this house will be off her ...
— What's-His-Name • George Barr McCutcheon

... it. Somebody certainly might come even to-night. Fred himself perhaps, if he could escape from the rigid guardianship he was under; or was that miraculous Australian Nettie a little witch, who had spirited the whole party in a nutshell over the seas? Never was man delivered from a burden with a worse grace than was Dr Rider; and the matter had not mended in these ...
— The Doctor's Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant

... be thought of as something apart from ordinary everyday life, a matter of churches, creeds, and Bible readings, instead of what it really is,—the coordinating principle of all our activities. To put the matter in a nutshell,—popular Christianity (or rather pulpit and theological college Christianity) does not interpret life. Consequently the great world of thought and action is ceasing to ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell

... gracefully decorated with stucco-work and frescoes. Next to it was an ustrinum where corpses were cremated, and on the other side a second tomb, also decorated with painted stucco-work. Here was found a piece of agate in the shape of a nut, so beautifully carved that it was mistaken for a real nutshell. There was also a skeleton, the skull of which was found between the legs, and in its place there was a mask or plaster cast of the head, reproducing most vividly the features of the dead man. The cast is now preserved in ...
— Pagan and Christian Rome • Rodolfo Lanciani

... doorway a thin, straight old man with a white beard arose from a chair and approached them in greeting. The ancient, conventional, patriarchal order, Cameron thought. He could see the whole setup in a nutshell right now. Squalid communities like this where the too-old and the too-young were nurtured on the calcified traditions to which nothing was ever added. The able serving in the homes of the Markovians, providing ...
— Cubs of the Wolf • Raymond F. Jones

... of all, I beg to compliment him on the motto in his title-page; it is felicitous. A motto should contain, as in a nutshell, the contents, or the character, or the drift, or the animus of the writing to which it is prefixed. The words which he has taken from me are so apposite as to be almost prophetical. There cannot be a better illustration than he thereby affords of the aphorism ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman

... difficulty, in a “nutshell,” was that the commanding officer of the district was furnished no more troops or supplies for this state of war than had been provided and furnished him for a state of ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman

... called original thinkers. As the great man's guest must produce his good stories or songs at the evening banquet, as the platform orator exhibits his telling facts at mid-day, so the journalist lies under the stern obligation of extemporizing his lucid views, leading ideas, and nutshell truths for the breakfast table. The very nature of periodical literature, broken into small wholes, and demanded punctually to an hour, involves the habit of this extempore philosophy. "Almost all the ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman

... himself did not assert that these statements were true. He wished, he said, to be quite fair to the Brethren; he wished to give them a chance of clearing themselves; and, therefore, he now published his pamphlet entitled "Queries to Count Zinzendorf." It contained the whole case in a nutshell. For the sum of sixpence the ordinary reader had now the case against the Brethren in a popular ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton

... out upon the balcony and take a look. You see, I am afraid of someone. Oh, Baldos, what's the use of my trifling like this? You are to escape from Edelweiss to-night. That is the whole plan—the whole idea in a nutshell. Don't look like that. Don't you want to go?" Now ...
— Beverly of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon

... livelihood to have time to think of happiness. This had been equally true of the elder Malls, was true today of Nellie and her husband. A man and a woman needed each other's help, could make a more successful fight, go farther together than either could alone. To Martin that was the whole matter in a nutshell, and Rose's gentle question threw him ...
— Dust • Mr. and Mrs. Haldeman-Julius

... There is the whole of the thorny subject of the relation of faith and works packed into a nutshell. It is exactly what James said and it is exactly what a better than James said. When the Jews came to Him with their externalism, and thought that God was to be pleased by a whole rabble of separate good actions, and so said, 'What shall ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... curiosity. This, in a nutshell, summed up Ruth's character. She could never bear to ...
— The Girl Scouts' Good Turn • Edith Lavell

... best that can be said of any "measure" is, that the sum of its perceptible benefits seems so to exceed the sum of its perceptible evils as to constitute a balance of advantage. Yet the magnificent innocence of the statesman or philosopher to whose understanding "the whole matter lies in a nutshell"—who thinks he can formulate a practical political or social policy within the four corners of an epigram—who fears nothing because he knows nothing—is constantly to the fore with a simple specific for ills whose causes are ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce

... the rain cannot, the tent conveys a feeling of charmed security, as if an invisible boundary checked the pattering drops and held the moaning wind. The front tent I share, as yet, with my adjutant; in the inner apartment I reign supreme, bounded in a nutshell, with no ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various

... alone. The cab rolled away over snow-packed streets. But he couldn't leave Anna. Yes he could. Why not? No. Impossible. A faint thought like a storm packed into a nutshell.... "I will." ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht

... see what it is like. It must be a queer little nutshell of a place, and yet I fancy," she said, glancing her eye along the village street, "people are happy ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various

... mentioning. When Octavius had contained only five thousand inhabitants, it boasted four book-stores, two of them good ones. Now, with a population more than doubled, only these latter two survived, and they must soon go to the wall. The reason? It was in a nutshell. A book which sold at retail for one dollar and a half cost the bookseller ninety cents. If it was at all a popular book, "Thurston's" advertised it at eighty-nine cents—and in any case at a profit of only two or three ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic

... launched off into a lengthy account of the interview of the night before, repeating his own arguments and his son's replies, while Norah listened with downcast eyes. "There!" he cried in conclusion, "that is the matter in a nutshell, and everyone must see that I am perfectly reasonable and within my rights. Now, my dear, you talk to him; he thinks a great deal of your opinion. Just tell him plainly that if he persists in his folly, ...
— Sisters Three • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey

... sturdily, by jumps and jerks, till we reached the top of the pass. There we were, I am afraid to pay how many hundred feet above the sea, but overhanging it so completely that a pebble dropped from one's hand fell into the waves. The Ragusan steamer looked like a nutshell from ...
— The Grateful Indian - And other Stories • W.H.G. Kingston

... the situation in a nutshell, as it were, he put his hands in his pockets and observed Frank covertly out of the corners of his eyes. Seeing how crestfallen he looked, the ...
— Our Frank - and other stories • Amy Walton

... children of that old-fangled race. Sometimes I think it's high time for me to go. There was a newspaper fellow down here when the General Walker came ashore, and, after asking a lot of questions, he put the case in a nutshell. "You're a link with the past," he said; "that's what you are." I don't know if he invented the expression, or if he picked it up somewhere and used it on me, but it's ...
— The White Wolf and Other Fireside Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... trow, to call up spirits from hell. The impotent vessel, which has neither hands nor feet, nor yet fins, which, like an overladen nutshell, floats upward in this narrow channel against wind and stream; and in it a handful of men, trusting in their intelligence and their strength. Here, too, even the Bora can not harm them, for the double range of cliffs ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai

... that he was as much opposed to female suffrage as ever, but meant to vote for it because it was bound to come. This probably had an even greater effect upon the average Member, who is not an idealist, than the nutshell novelette in which Lord HUGH CECIL lightly outlined the possible ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 27, 1917 • Various

... the whole thing in a nutshell, my lord duke! I received, from Merindol—acting for your lordship—part payment in advance for despatching a certain Baron de Sigognac, commonly called Captain Fracasse. On account of circumstances beyond my control, ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier

... put this truth which we have discovered concerning Progress in a nutshell, hiding or disregarding the internal contradiction. What is the nature, what is the kind of reality, which we have learned to ascribe to Progress (for we did pronounce it real and essentially capable of ...
— Progress and History • Various

... were honestly and capably governed the majority of us would be content to wait for the franchise for a considerable time yet in recognition of the peculiar circumstances, and of the feelings of the older inhabitants. That is the position in a nutshell.' ...
— The Transvaal from Within - A Private Record of Public Affairs • J. P. Fitzpatrick

... to determine for himself matters of faith. The position which Luther occupies in his final answer before the Emperor at Worms is generally believed to state Luther's position on the question of religious liberty in a nutshell. "Unless convinced by the Word of God or by cogent reason" that he was wrong, he declared at the Diet of Worms, he could not and would not retract what he had written. The individual conscience, he ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau

... "I might say the same. Fact is"—she spoke with sudden startling emphasis—"I ought to be dead. And I'm not. That's my trouble in a nutshell." ...
— The Odds - And Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell

... the fine work. Here's the thing in a nutshell. You find the girl. Right. Of course, you've got to meet her once, just to establish the connexion. Then you get busy. First week, looks. Just look at her. Second week, letters. Write to her every day. Third week, flowers. Send her some every afternoon. ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse

... Nutshell boats was a pretty game. The tiny craft, made of English walnut shells, with paper sails, had been prepared beforehand, and the guests wrote their names on the sails, then loaded each boat with a cargo of a wish written on a slip ...
— Marjorie's Busy Days • Carolyn Wells

... time that followed, the image of the smiling lawyer haunted Carthew's memory. "That three minutes' talk was all the education I ever had worth talking of," says he. "It was all life in a nutshell. Confound it," I thought, "have I got to the point of envying ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... it was carried no further, as it often was in the case of any criticisms as to the management of children. In this case Aunt Jen was usually invited not to meddle, on the forcible plea that what a score of old maids knew about rearing a family could be put into a nutshell without risk of overcrowding. ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett

... his song and life celebrated; duteously bringing his old parents to live and die there, entertaining his friends there, and making occasional visits to London in his little chariot, in which Atterbury compared him to "Homer in a nutshell". ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray

... again dear Chief! and put me To yoking foxes, milking of he-goats, Pounding of water in a mortar, laving The sea dry with a nutshell, gathering all The leaves are fallen this autumn—making ropes of sand, Catching the winds together in a net, Mustering of ants, and numbering atoms, all That Hell and you thought exquisite torments, rather Than stay me here a thought more. I would sooner Keep fleas within a circle, ...
— Poems, 1799 • Robert Southey

... condition of the sufferer;" that the forms in use "were merely the changing external symptoms, often having scarcely a diurnal continuance before passing from one to another," and constituting a division useless as regards moral or medical treatment—he expressed in a nutshell all the objections since urged against the orthodox classification by the other alienists I have mentioned. These, however, substituted a mixed aetiological or pathogenetic classification, which Bell did ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke

... not smile this time. Here was the whole matter in a nutshell: she wanted something to do. And there were thousands of others just like her. Man-like, he forgot that women needed something more than money and attention from an army of servants. He had his offices, his stock-ticker, his warfare. Not because she wanted to vote, but ...
— The Voice in the Fog • Harold MacGrath

... "You've put it in a nutshell: the ideal of the American woman is to be respectable without being bored; and from that point of view this world they've invented has more originality than I ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton

... and she would have cracked like a nutshell against those adamantine walls. But to get into the harbour it was the only way, and as the skipper said afterwards, when I remonstrated on his apparent foolhardiness, "Needs ...
— Labrador Days - Tales of the Sea Toilers • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell

... until she said we could go on the same steamer that took the baseball party. Lots of other women—wives of the managers and players and so on—will go along, I understand. So there's the whole bally story in a nutshell. Rippin' ...
— Baseball Joe Around the World - Pitching on a Grand Tour • Lester Chadwick

... true path is Jesus Christ, on the other hand the means by which we walk upon that path is our faith. The Apostle puts it all in a nutshell when he says that his prayer for the Ephesian Church is that 'Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith,' and then, by a linked chain which we have not now to consider, leads up to the final issues of that faith in that indwelling Christ—'that ye may be filled with all the ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... moving on this immense and turbid ocean, carrying within her the great central fire by which the engine was moved, which, in spite of winds and waves, carried us safely along; then the science which enabled the master of this curious nutshell of man's contriving to know just in what part of this waste of trackless waters we were. All these things I knew before, and had often thought of them, but was never so impressed with them; it was almost as if they were ...
— Travellers' Tales • Eliza Lee Follen

... his lips, "I do care. I care intensely. Few things in life would grieve me more deeply than to hear that a child, a dear little child—the Beautiful in a nutshell—had suffered hunger. You wrong me." His voice was tremulous with the sense of injury. Tears stood ...
— The Big Bow Mystery • I. Zangwill

... has found an assiduous apologist in their new historian. "To accuse the good fathers of Constance of conscious bad faith" is impossible. To observe the safe-conduct would have seemed absurd "to the most conscientious jurists of the council." In a nutshell, "if the result was inevitable, it was the fault of the system and not of the judges, and their ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton

... once,' said Bream Mortimer, ''I've thought it a hundred times. I wish I had a dollar for every time I thought it. Not the same colour! That's the whole thing in a nutshell.'" ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton

... chair is nailed to the floor," he remarked, as he settled himself more comfortably. "It suits me admirably. The fact is—and this is my case in a nutshell—which is all that a doctor of your marvellous development requires—the fact is, Dr. Silence, I am a victim of Higher Space. That's what's the matter ...
— Three More John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood

... Watkins, and fasten them to float in front of her bows like a triangle. Matthews, catch hold of that boat hook and try to fend off any piece of timber that comes along. You get hold of the sweeps, lads, and do the same. They would stave her in like a nutshell if ...
— Among Malay Pirates - And Other Tales Of Adventure And Peril • G. A. Henty

... dear. What?" throwing one leg negligently over the other. "It really comes to this, doesn't it? That you want me to marry a certain somebody, and that I think I cannot afford to marry her. Then it lies in the proverbial nutshell." ...
— April's Lady - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford

... returned Caw, who would have been happier standing at attention than sitting in Miss Handyside's company, "you take a lofty view of the matter, sir, and you put it in a nutshell when you say that his motives are none of our business. I am sorry to have brought you and ...
— Till the Clock Stops • John Joy Bell

... a historical romance in a nutshell. The scene is laid in Saxon times on the north-east coast of England, where Grimsby now stands, and the story of Hablok the little Danish Prince, and Grim the rough English fisherman with his cat Tib, is told with a simplicity and vivacity that will ...
— Historic Boys - Their Endeavours, Their Achievements, and Their Times • Elbridge Streeter Brooks

... called to watch over his kirk and govern his spiritual kingdom have sufficient power and authority so to do both together and severally." In this bold and masterful speech we have the whole political philosophy of Puritanism, as in a nutshell. Under the guise of theocratic fanaticism, and in words as arrogant as ever fell from priestly lips, there was couched the assertion of the popular will against despotic privilege. Melville could say such things to the king's face and walk away unharmed, because there stood behind him a people ...
— The Beginnings of New England - Or the Puritan Theocracy in its Relations to Civil and Religious Liberty • John Fiske

... the Adriatic in threatening proximity to Venice and the other Italian coast towns. It is to end the intolerable menace of that beak and those claws that Italy is fighting. There you have it in a nutshell. ...
— Italy at War and the Allies in the West • E. Alexander Powell

... Then my Lord topped off the little end of his show with the soup and great Ministers of State. And, that nothing should be left undone, the Times must have a go in at it, which it did with one of Doctor Moseley's most spicy articles, putting the whole thing into a very comical nutshell. Quoth Sam, without the thunderer's dissecting knife a London Lord Mayor would be the most beautiful of nobodys—that is, so far as sense goes. Smooth, on the nicest observation, was decidedly of ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton

... 1947-48 numbers of "The Nutshell", news bulletin of the NNGA, have been issued by the Secretary's office. It is intended to have this bulletin distributed to members four times a year. It will carry news of the Association's activities, supplementing the "Nut Growers News" column in the American ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Thirty-Eighth Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association

... did not assert that these statements were true. He wished, he said, to be quite fair to the Brethren; he wished to give them a chance of clearing themselves; and, therefore, he now published his pamphlet entitled "Queries to Count Zinzendorf." It contained the whole case in a nutshell. For the sum of sixpence the ordinary reader had now the case against the Brethren in a popular and ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton

... on the water about two weeks when one day as he lay in his room, Robinson heard people over his head running about and crying, "A storm is coming!" The ship's sides trembled and creaked. The ship was tossed like a nutshell. Now it rolled to the right, now to the left. And Robinson was thrown from one side to the other. Every moment he expected the ship to sink. He turned pale and trembled with fear. "Ah, if I were only at home with my parents, safe on the land," he said. ...
— An American Robinson Crusoe • Samuel B. Allison

... disturbance. White and fleecy clouds upon the azure only say that the sea will be smooth and peaceful. D'Artagnan found the sky blue, the breeze embalmed with saline perfumes, and he said: "I will embark with the first tide, if it be but in a nutshell." ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... lighted up. "That is precisely what I say in my speeches to the farmers. That's our whole idea in a nutshell." ...
— The Iron Heel • Jack London

... party in particular, for Hannibal to stay at the head of the army in Spain, or to come home and bring the influence of his popularity and reputation to bear upon the populace? There is the question put in a nutshell, and if they can't decide upon it let them toss up. There is virtue, I am ready to maintain, in an appeal to ...
— The Young Carthaginian - A Story of The Times of Hannibal • G.A. Henty

... one piece of stupid folly. Mr. Hughes kindly proposed to take me to see Carlyle. This was not very long after our war, when our people were full of indignation at Carlyle's bitter and contemptuous speech about us, especially his "American Iliad in a Nutshell." I was a little doubtful about what sort of a reception I should get, and declined the invitation. I have bitterly regretted this ever since. My brother visited Carlyle about 1846, bearing with him a letter from Emerson. Carlyle was ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar

... Lucian. She would stumble over the tragedies. I read them to her." Then he continued, as though it were a subject he loved, "She has a concrete view upon every question; her critical faculty is marvelous. She never lays down the law, but if you ask her, you have your answer in a nutshell, the simplest truth, which it always appears to her so strange that you have not ...
— Halcyone • Elinor Glyn

... to the Government. Look here, Luscombe,' and evidently he had forgotten the difference in our ranks, 'let me put the case into a nutshell. I was sent over here, to France, in a hurry. Never mind how I found out what I am going to tell you,—it is a fact. Two battalions of ours were urgently ordered here; our men here were hardly pressed, ...
— "The Pomp of Yesterday" • Joseph Hocking

... place before we started up again. It was on this second dash that I understood why those Homeric words had come to my lips a while ago. This was indeed like nothing so much as like being out on rough waters and in a troubled sea, with nothing to brace the storm with but a wind-tossed nutshell of a one-man sailing craft. I knew that experience for having outridden many a gale in the mouth of the mighty St. Lawrence River. When the snow reached its extreme in depth, it gave you the feeling which a drowning man may have when fighting his desperate ...
— Over Prairie Trails • Frederick Philip Grove

... the truth—and I have had to tell it in a nutshell, space growing limited. Philip Hamlyn had ascertained it all beyond possibility of dispute, had seen Mrs. O'Connett, and had brought down the ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 5, May, 1891 • Various

... sum of money which he was called on to pay for him. It may be that the first blame lay not with the Prime Minister himself, but with the Prime Minister's wife. With that we have nothing to do. The whole thing lies in a nutshell. The bare mention of the name of her Grace the Duchess in Parliament would have saved the Duke, at any rate as effectually as he has been saved by the services of his man-of-all-work, Phineas Finn, and ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope

... that the idea came to him which he afterwards imparted at Timothy's in this nutshell: "I shouldn't wonder a bit if that architect chap were sweet ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... wrong side of forty, a rocking-stone to take off from, a trembling point of rock some few feet across to land upon, and a bottomless gulf to be cleared in a raging gale! It was bad enough, God knows, but when I pointed out these things to Leo, he put the whole matter in a nutshell, by replying that, merciless as the choice was, we must choose between the certainty of a lingering death in the chamber and the risk of a swift one in the air. Of course, there was no arguing against this, but one thing was clear, we could not attempt that leap in the dark; the only thing to ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard

... arms, Jorgenson, who would be watching the entrance of the creek ever since a muffled detonation of a gun to seaward had warned him of the brig's arrival on the Shore of Refuge, would mutter to himself—"Here's Tom coming in his nutshell." And indeed she was in shape somewhat like half a nutshell and also in the colour of her dark varnished planks. The man's shoulders and head rose high above her gunwales; loaded with Lingard's heavy ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad

... delighted laugh the metaphor she had laid in his hand. "Capital! Precisely! There's the thing in a nutshell. We twentieth century Midases have got beyond the simple taste of that founder of the family for the shining yellow qualities of money, but we love to wallow in it none the less. We like to put our feet on it, in the shape of ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield

... is not time the most precious? To economize time is, consequently, to become wealthy. Now, is there anything that consumes so much time as those anxieties which I call 'pot-boiling'?—a vulgar expression, but it puts the whole question in a nutshell. For instance, what can eat up more time than the inability to give proper security to persons from whom you seek to borrow money when, poor at the moment, you are nevertheless rich ...
— The Illustrious Gaudissart • Honore de Balzac

... ridiculous. A man who made love as though he were preaching a sermon, or a man who preached a sermon as though he were teasing schoolboys, or a man who described a death as though he were describing a practical joke, must necessarily be either an ass or a lunatic." Just so. You have put it in a nutshell. You have disposed of the problem of style so far as it can be ...
— LITERARY TASTE • ARNOLD BENNETT

... matter in a nutshell, there is small risk a general will be regarded with contempt by those he leads, if, whatever he may have to preach, he shows ...
— The Cavalry General • Xenophon

... conception; law has no place for it; development does not know it; instinct revolts from it; and man is the only animal who has been silly and wrong-headed enough to stumble into it. The explanation and the remedy are so simple, so close at hand, that we have not seen them. The whole thing lies in a nutshell. Where does this abnormal, uncomfortable period come in? Between childhood, we say, and maturity; it is the transition from one to the other. When human beings, then, are neither boys nor men, girls nor women, they must be for a few years anomalous creatures, must they? We might, perhaps, find ...
— Bits About Home Matters • Helen Hunt Jackson

... we have all to gain and nothing to lose. Precisely; old man, you've put it in a nutshell. The only other thing is, do you ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne

... said, "to give an answer to any man who questions; but you haven't stooped to question. So I tell you the truth. Sheila saw Toby working as a page at the Casino Hotel at Valrosa. That right? I thought so. It's the whole matter in a nutshell. I must have seen her too, but never noticed her till my last night in the place. Then I found Antonio hammering the poor little beggar out in the garden, and I stopped it. You'd have done the same. Afterwards, late that night, I went on board ...
— Charles Rex • Ethel M. Dell

... have my own theory about the authorship of the Iliad and Odyssey,' said Lewis Carroll (of 'Alice in Wonderland') once in Christ Church common room: 'it is that they weren't really written by Homer, but by another person of the same name.' There you have the Iliad in a nutshell as regards the authenticity of great works. All we know about the supposed Homer (if anything) is that he was the reputed author of the two unapproachable Greek epics; and all we know directly about ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen

... of evidence," he said, "ought to go to the coroner's jury. It clinches the case against Perry. Here's the whole business in a nutshell: the buttons missing from his blouse, one found in Number Five, the other in your bungalow; Miss Hardesty's having seen him the night of the murder; the ease with which he undoubtedly got the kitchen ...
— The Winning Clue • James Hay, Jr.

... tigers. They chanted mantrams in unison, spread betel over the road as a token of their respect to the Rajas of the forest, and, after every couplet, made the bullocks kneel and bow their heads in honor of the great gods. Needless to say, the ekka, as light as a nutshell, threatened each time to fall with its passenger over the horns of the bullocks. We had to endure this agreeable way of traveling for five hours under a very dark sky. We reached the Inn of the Pilgrims in the ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky

... Gives a paper a following, that kind of guff does. But the duty of a newspaper is the duty of any other business, to make money. There's the principle, the policy, the politics, ethics, and religion of the newspaper in a nutshell. Now, how are you going to make money ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... said, "but in a nutshell, the Nautilus can hold only a certain number of men, so couldn't master estimate ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne

... put the matter into a nutshell, Mr Deasy said. It's about the foot and mouth disease. Just look through it. There can be no two opinions ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce

... discussed I must go to the women's clubs, or to Madam ——'s Current Topics Society. The latter is an extraordinary affair, where society women who have no time to read the news of the day listen to short lectures on the news of the preceding week, discussed pro and con, giving these women in a nutshell material for intelligent conversation when they meet senators and other men at the various receptions before which they wish to ...
— As A Chinaman Saw Us - Passages from his Letters to a Friend at Home • Anonymous

... from absolute profligacy, he was a well-disposed young man, and would doubtless grow wiser as he increased in years; but that his fortune was very limited, and that all his expectations in that way wouldn't fill a nutshell." ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various

... ustrinum where corpses were cremated, and on the other side a second tomb, also decorated with painted stucco-work. Here was found a piece of agate in the shape of a nut, so beautifully carved that it was mistaken for a real nutshell. There was also a skeleton, the skull of which was found between the legs, and in its place there was a mask or plaster cast of the head, reproducing most vividly the features of the dead man. The cast is now preserved in the ...
— Pagan and Christian Rome • Rodolfo Lanciani

... said Daylight, extending his arm in a sweeping gesture. "A hundred thousand people there, and no reason there shouldn't be half a million. There's the chance to make five people grow where one grows now. Here's the scheme in a nutshell. Why don't more people live in Oakland? No good service with San Francisco, and, besides, Oakland is asleep. It's a whole lot better place to live in than San Francisco. Now, suppose I buy in all the street railways of Oakland, Berkeley, Alameda, San ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London

... of her or know the reason why. They've poisoned her against me, that's about how it is in a nutshell. I'll get that pouting to be in that dirty Harlem hole with her mother and grandmother out of her or know the ...
— Humoresque - A Laugh On Life With A Tear Behind It • Fannie Hurst

... disease or the pathological condition of the sufferer;" that the forms in use "were merely the changing external symptoms, often having scarcely a diurnal continuance before passing from one to another," and constituting a division useless as regards moral or medical treatment—he expressed in a nutshell all the objections since urged against the orthodox classification by the other alienists I have mentioned. These, however, substituted a mixed aetiological or pathogenetic classification, which ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke

... hollow of his hand. His sister's words in Paris had come back to him and had seemed still wiser than when uttered: "She'll save you disappointments; you'd know the worst that can happen to you, and it wouldn't be bad." Julia had put it into a nutshell—Biddy would probably save him disappointments. And then she was—well, she was Biddy. Peter knew better what that was since the hour he had spent with her in Rosedale Road. But he had brushed away the sense of it, though aware that in doing so he took only half-measures and was even guilty ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James

... want you to take Colonel Corkran's place on the Candace as conductor. And I want you and your friend Fenton to go up Nile in charge of the splendid steam dahabeah I've bought to supplement the Mediterranean trip. There you have my motives in a nutshell!" ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson

... the Alps. In medicine, what progress has been made since ague was compared to the flutter of insects among the nerves, and good Mistress Dorothy Burton, who died but in 1629, cured it by hanging a spider round the patient's neck "in a nutshell lapped in silk"! In chemistry, what strides! In astronomy, what perturbations and changes! In history, what do we not owe to the amiable authors who, dipping their pens in whitewash, have reversed the judgments of ages on Nero ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various

... to be on board Flying Fish now. However, no doubt Algie Thynne—(how eloquently, by the way, you describe him! putting all the complications of his character and the dazzling charm of his personality in a nutshell by the simple sentence 'He's rather a nut!')—amply compensates for my absence. You ask if I know him. I do, though perhaps more by reputation than anything else. We have met once or twice. Where? I can't quite ...
— The Limit • Ada Leverson

... activity, brought in pressed men in greater numbers in proportion to expenditure and so reduced the cost per head. In this logical though at first sight bewildering interrelation of the laws of supply and demand, we have in a nutshell the whole case for the cost of pressing as against the gang. Taking one year with another the century through, the impress service, on a moderate estimate, employed enough able-bodied men to man a first-rate ship of the line, and absorbed at least enough money to maintain her, while the ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson

... the pass. There we were, I am afraid to pay how many hundred feet above the sea, but overhanging it so completely that a pebble dropped from one's hand fell into the waves. The Ragusan steamer looked like a nutshell from our eminence. ...
— The Grateful Indian - And other Stories • W.H.G. Kingston

... gum, or cold-cream or candels ether, I can tell you. Why even Mr. le Cure wood no enuf not to give you enny of those things. That Teddy is not fit to have a godchild, and that is the hole story in a nutshell. I dunno just what I shall do if he rites to me. Mebbe I will anser and mebbe I wont. I guess I shall tell miss Betty about it. Have I ever tole you about her? She lives in the big house on the hill next to Sid Perkins and she has hare ...
— Deer Godchild • Marguerite Bernard and Edith Serrell

... little shivering hands, and was speechless with gratitude and ecstasy. The sum, which doubled the utmost he expected, would relieve him from all his immediate embarrassments. When he recovered his voice, he thanked his dear Mr. Douce with a warmth that seemed to make the little man shrink into a nutshell; and assured him that he would dine with him every Monday in the year—if he was asked! He then longed to depart; but he thought, justly, that to go as soon as he had got what he wanted would look selfish. Accordingly, he reseated himself, and so did Mr. Douce, and the conversation turned ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book III • Edward Bulwer Lytton

... vine and fig tree in full bearing. Consider the profit and amusement you would derive from it. If you could see your way to doing this, we could arrange all the details with your lawyer, and it is possible that the Company might bear some of the cost. I have put the matter, I trust, in a nutshell. If you, my dear sir, will interest yourself in building that wall, and will kindly give us the name of your lawyers, I dare assure you that you will hear no more from the ...
— The Day's Work, Volume 1 • Rudyard Kipling

... tongue, among the simple islanders—singing a serenade under the window of his Shetland mistress—is conceived in the very highest manner of romantic invention. The words of his song, "Through groves of palm," sung in such a scene and by such a lover, clench, as in a nutshell, the emphatic contrast upon which the tale is built. In Guy Mannering,[31] again, every incident is delightful to the imagination; and the scene when Harry Bertram lands at Ellangowan is a model instance ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson

... Roosevelt's comments on the dinner party were "blistering." "He told my mother afterwards," said Lang in later times, "that Mrs. Cummins was out of place in the Bad Lands"; which was Mrs. Cummins's tragedy in a nutshell. ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn

... home. The long winters, the stubborn rains, the humidity, the continual changes in the climate, compel the Hollander to spend a great part of the year and of the day in the house. He loves his little home, his nutshell, much more than we love our houses, because it is much more necessary to him, and he lives in it much more; he provides it with every comfort, caresses it, adorns it; he delights in looking at the falling snow and drenching rain from its tight windows, and ...
— Holland, v. 1 (of 2) • Edmondo de Amicis

... who do not know each other will not dare to attack a lion. Four less brave, but knowing each other well, sure of their reliability and consequently of mutual aid, will attack resolutely. There is the science of the organization of armies in a nutshell. ...
— Battle Studies • Colonel Charles-Jean-Jacques-Joseph Ardant du Picq

... the matter in a nutshell. He had done nothing carelessly; he was touching off our conflict with flashes of genius. He was the man who had roused in me last night the fiercest passions of my life, and yet this morning he had saved me from death, and, though ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... of men is sought for in their own homes, and every effort should be made to increase domestic happiness by inducing them to remain at home. And long, long ago a quaint old book, Markham's English Housewife, published in 1637, contained the idea in a nutshell, as the following quotation will show: "To speak, then, of the knowledges which belong to our English housewife, I hold the most principal to be a perfect skill in Cookery. She that is utterly ignorant therein, may not, by the laws of strict justice, challenge the ...
— The Art of Living in Australia • Philip E. Muskett (?-1909)

... victory which marked the zenith of Jones's career, and upon which all else in his life merely served as commentary, was scored. Captain Pearson, in his court-martial, which was a formality in the British navy in case of defeat, explained Jones's victory in a nutshell: "It was clearly apparent," he said, "that the American ship was dominated by a commanding will of the most unalterable resolution," and again, "the extraordinary and unheard-of desperate stubbornness of my adversary ...
— Paul Jones • Hutchins Hapgood

... broke with them at last, for what they did on board of a bit of a snow—no matter what it was bad enough, since it frightened me—I took French leave, and came in upon the proclamation, so I am free of all that business. And here I sit, the skipper of the JUMPING JENNY—a nutshell of a thing, but goes through the water like a dolphin. If it were not for yon hypocritical scoundrel at Annan, who has the best end of the profit, and takes none of the risk, I should be well enough—as well as I want to be. Here is no lack of my ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott

... distance, when a sudden gust of wind, rushing forth from the narrow gorges of the valley of the Rhone, stirred up the waves of the lake, and produced one of those short seas which so often prove fatal. The sail of the little boat was soon gone, and it seemed like a nutshell dancing on the still-increasing waves. It was impossible to think of returning, and full half an hour of fatigue and danger must elapse before the boat could be moored in safety under the hanging cliffs of Haute-Combe. Fate willed that my wandering ...
— Raphael - Pages Of The Book Of Life At Twenty • Alphonse de Lamartine

... less to finish it: no, I Must keep the whole to tell you at once, or to read it to you, for I think I shall write the history, which, let me tell you, Buckinger himself could not have crowded into a nutshell. ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole

... labor. While he was translating Homer, he says: "As soon as breakfast is over, I retire to my nutshell of a summer-house, which is my verse manufactory, and here I abide seldom less than three hours, and not often more." This little summer-house, which he called his boudoir, was not much bigger than a sedan-chair; the door of it opened into the garden, which was covered ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various

... for Mrs. Johnson, but as her business is not so good at times she has me whenever she can feel as if she can spare the money. So this little life of mine has been almost locked up in a nutshell, and Jesus has come to me in the spirit's power that I should tell the world of His wonderful love to me a poor sinner of the dust. And what can not the Lord do for those who put their trust in ...
— A Slave Girl's Story - Being an Autobiography of Kate Drumgoold. • Kate Drumgoold

... not well how to take, but imputed it to some disorder in my brain. I answered, it was very true; and I wondered how I could forbear, when I saw his dishes of the size of a silver threepence, a leg of pork hardly a mouthful, a cup not so big as a nutshell; and so I went on, describing the rest of his household stuff and provisions after the same manner. For, although the queen had ordered a little equipage of all things necessary for me while I was in her service, yet my ideas were wholly taken up with what I saw on every side of me, and I winked ...
— The Junior Classics, V5 • Edited by William Patten

... said his lordship, with determination. "Here's the whole thing in a jolly old nutshell. If you want me to forget about this little flutter in fake diamonds of yours, you've got to pull up your socks, and start in to do things. You've got to get me attached to some embassy for a beginning. It won't be difficult. There's dozens of old boys in London, who knew ...
— The Intrusion of Jimmy • P. G. Wodehouse

... search'd the hopeful thicks of hedgy rows, For briary berries, or haws, or sourer sloes: Or when they meant to fare the fin'st of all, They lick'd oak-leaves besprint with honey fall. As for the thrice three-angled beech nutshell, Or chestnut's armed husk, and hide kernel, No squire durst touch, the law would not afford, Kept for the court, and for the king's own board. Their royal plate was clay, or wood, or stone; The vulgar, save his hand, else he had none. Their only cellar was the neighbour brook: None did for ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan

... Duval chimed in, with a laugh, 'To put it in a nutshell, gentlemen, we are going to smash ...
— The Moneychangers • Upton Sinclair

... replied Riveros; "that is the matter in a nutshell. Now listen to me for a few moments, please. As you are aware, we have practically destroyed the naval power of Peru; and we have also made short work of her armies wherever we have come into contact with them. In a word, Peru ...
— Under the Chilian Flag - A Tale of War between Chili and Peru • Harry Collingwood

... put into practice in Germany is, in a nutshell, the decision on the part of the state or the rulers that the individual is not competent to spend his own money, to choose his own calling, to use his own time as he will, or to provide himself ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier

... FOLLIOTT. My principles, sir, in these things are, to take as much as I can get, and pay no more than I can help. These are every man's principles, whether they be the right principles or no. There, sir, is political economy in a nutshell. ...
— Crotchet Castle • Thomas Love Peacock

... I'm telling you. That the lease isn't the chief factor in Fay's troubles—isn't really a factor at all. Poor old fellow's a dunderhead. That's where it is in a nutshell. Never could make a living. ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King

... of Sulaco, and got shot after a battle. His father was a prominent business man in Sta. Marta, tried to keep clear of their politics, and died ruined after a lot of revolutions. And that's your Costaguana in a nutshell." ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad

... words,' Sir Charles notes, 'there lies in a nutshell all that I afterwards wrote at much greater length upon army reform in my book, The ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn

... are going to say: you mean that I had best look out for a military swell; but, after all, the matter lies in a nutshell. I am the insulted party, and draw pistols at ten paces. If that frightens him, he will make the governor drop ...
— The Champdoce Mystery • Emile Gaboriau

... man's guest must produce his good stories or songs at the evening banquet, as the platform orator exhibits his telling facts at mid-day, so the journalist lies under the stern obligation of extemporizing his lucid views, leading ideas, and nutshell truths for the breakfast table. The very nature of periodical literature, broken into small wholes, and demanded punctually to an hour, involves the habit of this extempore philosophy. "Almost all the Ramblers," says Boswell of Johnson, "were written just as they were wanted for the press; he ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman

... conclusion an investigation which I began on Braden's behalf—though he never knew of it—years ago. At the bank I met Mr. Harker here, who had called to find something out for himself. Now I'll sum things up in a nutshell: for years Braden, or Brake, had been wanting to find two men who cheated him. The name of one is Wraye, of the other, Flood. I've been trying to trace them, too. At last we've got them. They're in this town, and without doubt the deaths of both Braden and Collishaw are ...
— The Paradise Mystery • J. S. Fletcher

... you don't know what I have gone through, or you would pity me. You are the only thing that has not failed me. There is Jane, with her smooth tongue and universal obligingness, she is the most selfish creature in existence—her heart would go into a nutshell! One grain of sympathy, and I would never have married. It was all her doing—she wanted luxuries! O Theodora, if I had but been ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge

... nothing about it. You're wanting to get something for nothing now, and presently I daresay you'd remind me of something I had said. We can go back to the beginning if you like, but you're not going to play lawyer with me, Ray. It's in a nutshell, I suppose. You're going to marry Miss Dinnett, or else you're not. Of course, you know which. And if you won't tell me which, then don't ask ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts

... I have more humour than Foot a thousand times; and I'll lay a Chaldron of Guineas to a Nutshell that my Pantomime, is a better thing than his Taste. I think I have ...
— The Covent Garden Theatre, or Pasquin Turn'd Drawcansir • Charles Macklin

... in Mind; the immediate object of understanding. There it is—the whole sublime Arcana of Christian Science in a nutshell. Do you find a weak place ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... questions so far as I think best, and then I 'll ask a few of you. The lady upstairs is Viola Henley, the wife of Philip Henley. She has come down here to take legal possession of this property. That is the situation in a nutshell. I am merely accompanying her to make sure that she gets a ...
— Gordon Craig - Soldier of Fortune • Randall Parrish

... LAWS: In 1892 Mrs. Virginia Durant Young petitioned the Legislature for her personal enfranchisement, adopting this method of presenting the arguments in a nutshell, and as "news" they were widely published and commented on. At this session Gen. Robert R. Hemphill, a stanch advocate, presented a bill in the Senate to give women the franchise and the right of holding office, and brought it ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various

... compressing the general question into a nutshell, gave the utmost satisfaction, and brought the gentleman into great notice until the ladies retired. After that, I observed that Mr. Gulpidge and Mr. Henry Spiker, who had hitherto been very distant, entered into a defensive ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens

... France in war, but now comes this meeting in the Black Forest. Germany has shown England the greater advantage of a German-English coalition, and France is frozen out. England, with her shrewd alertness to make the most profitable deal, entertained if did not close the German proposition. In a nutshell, it is this: ...
— The Secrets of the German War Office • Dr. Armgaard Karl Graves

... greater than the bent oar, what can be greater than the sun? Still he seems to us a foot broad, and Epicurus thinks he may be a little broader or narrower than he seems. With all his enormous speed, too, he appears to us to stand still (82). The whole question lies in a nutshell; of four propositions which prove my point only one is disputed viz. that every true sensation has side by side with it a false one indistinguishable from it (83). A man who has mistaken P. for Q. Geminus could have no infallible mode of recognising Cotta. You say that no such indistinguishable ...
— Academica • Marcus Tullius Cicero

... tell the story of a nation like ours in a nutshell, requires a peculiar faculty for selecting, condensing, and philosophizing. The brevity with which he relates the principal events in American history, does not detract from the charming interest of ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas

... profitable. Pastorals of the most interesting kind actually exist in literature: "pastoralism" in the abstract, unless treated in the pure historical manner, is apt, like all similar criticism and discussion of "kinds" in general, to tend to [Greek: phlyaria].[128] For a history in a nutshell there is perhaps room even here, because the relations of the thing to fiction cannot be well understood without it. That the association of shepherds,[129] with songs, and with the telling of "tales" in both senses, ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury

... glanced at the message beside him. "'The G.O.C. wishes to meet the Engineer Officer in charge of Left Section, at Centre Battalion Headquarters, at 10 a.m., A.A.A. Message ends.' There in a nutshell you have the ...
— No Man's Land • H. C. McNeile

... of Analysis, described above, is an attempt very briefly to epitomize the chief elements of a great scheme,—to give, in a nutshell, the substance of what our grammarians have borrowed from the logicians, then mixed with something of their own, next amplified with small details, and, in some instances, branched out and extended to enormous bulk and length. Of course, they have not ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown

... involved in the conventional term 'rascality.' If you have got it you can run as straight as you like. We haven't got it—at least not enough of it yet—and so we are making it, and, like the rest of the world, making it anyhow. There's the whole case in a nutshell, Stanninghame." ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford

... Duke of Argyll once said of him at a public meeting: "Oh, gentlemen, what a comfort it is to have a leader who says what he means and means you to understand what he says." Here in a nutshell was the quality which the country most admired in the Duke of Devonshire. They always knew exactly what he stood for, and whether he was a Unionist or a Home-ruler, a Free-trader or a Protectionist. He was never seeking for ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey

... Cappy interrupted, and turned to the British Consul: "This is an international affair, eh? See if I don't state the proposition in a nutshell—if I may be pardoned the bromide. This steamer is a German, and the proposition is to get her under the American flag so firmly that she'll stay there; then, I suppose, we're to charter her to the British Government, or one of ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne

... my gates with iron, I shuttered my doors with flame, Because to force my ramparts your nutshell navies came; I took the sun from their presence, I cut them down with my blast, And they died, but the Flag of England blew free ere ...
— The Kipling Reader - Selections from the Books of Rudyard Kipling • Rudyard Kipling









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