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More "Pith" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Spirit creates its oppo- [5] site, named matter,—are conclusions that destroy their premise and prove themselves invalid. Here is where Christian Science sticks to its text, and other systems of religion abandon their own logic. Here also is found the pith of the basal statement, the cardinal point in [10] Christian Science, that matter and evil (including all inharmony, sin, disease, death) are unreal. Mortals accept natural science, wherein no species ever pro- duces its opposite. Then why not accept divine Sci- ence on this ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... twenty-nine years later, won unenviable notoriety at the hanging of Ruth Blay. The circumstances are set forth by the late Albert Laighton in a spirited ballad, which is too long to quote in full. The following stanzas, however, give the pith of ...
— An Old Town By The Sea • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... pare them, and cut out the lines of white pith, which are on three sides; cut them in slices about half an inch thick; to six cucumbers, put one onion, sliced fine; then sprinkle them with salt, placing the fruit in layers, with salt between;—next morning, press the ...
— Domestic Cookery, Useful Receipts, and Hints to Young Housekeepers • Elizabeth E. Lea
... brother, shall forgive a dunce. But should thy soul, form'd in some luckless hour, Vile interest scorn, nor madly grasp at power; 30 Should love of fame, in every noble mind A brave disease, with love of virtue join'd, Spur thee to deeds of pith, where courage, tried In Reason's court, is amply justified: Or, fond of knowledge, and averse to strife, Shouldst thou prefer the calmer walk of life; Shouldst thou, by pale and sickly study led, Pursue coy ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... ruffians—ex-captains of free companies and such marauders—were daily offering their services; there was no lack of them, and they had done but little. How should Parma, seeing this obscures undersized, thin-bearded, runaway clerk before him, expect pith and energy from him? He thought him quite unfit for an enterprise of moment, and declared as much to his secret councillors ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... the apostrophes to Barto left it one of the ironical, veiled Republican, semi-socialistic ballads of the time, which were sung about the streets for the sharpness and pith of the couplets, and not from a perception of the double edge down ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... come over Safdar Khan. Certainly Shere Ali was wearing the dress of one of the Sahibs. A man passed carrying a lantern, and the light, feeble though it was, threw into outline against the darkness a pith helmet and a very English figure. Certainly, too, Shere Ali spoke the Pushtu tongue with a slight hesitation, and an unfamiliar accent. He seemed to ...
— The Broken Road • A. E. W. Mason
... carved a little wooden image in trousers and coat, nicely whitewashed, and stuck up on that old ju-ju tree down there by the swamp. I saw it when I was down there this morning. Of course, it mayn't be intended to be a likeness of you, skipper, but it's got a pith helmet on, which the up-country nigger doesn't generally add to portraits of himself; and moreover, it's wearing a neat torpedo beard on the end of its chin, ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... sighted in the offing from Wei-hai-wei, apparently practising evolutions. But on the following day they all returned to Port Arthur, and anchored in the roadstead, under the guns of the batteries. The pith of the Akashi's report, therefore, was that there were two Russian ships—the new cruiser Variag, and the gunboat Korietz—at Chemulpo, four cruisers and an armed merchantman at Vladivostock, while the remainder of the Russian ...
— Under the Ensign of the Rising Sun - A Story of the Russo-Japanese War • Harry Collingwood
... in a minute. It would bear torsion through four revolutions or 1440 deg., and yet, when released, return accurately to its position; probably it would have borne considerably more than this without injury. The repelled ball was of pith, gilt, and was 0.3 of an inch in diameter. The horizontal stem or lever supporting it was of shell-lac, according to Coulomb's direction, the arm carrying the ball being 2.4 inches long, and the other only 1.2 inches: to this was attached the vane, also described by Coulomb, ...
— Experimental Researches in Electricity, Volume 1 • Michael Faraday
... circumscribed my thoughts and my studies; and, if I can bring it to a perfection before I die, I shall reckon I have well employed the poor remains of an unfortunate life. This indeed is more than I can justly expect, from a quill worn to the pith in the service of the state, in pros and cons upon popish plots, and meal tubs, and exclusion bills, and passive obedience, and addresses of lives and fortunes, and prerogative, and property and liberty ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... tubes of iron,—the ice seals the surface, past all gnawing out; and yet, amid the quietly flowing water, where snow and wind never penetrate, these warm-blooded, air-breathing muskrats live the winter through, with only the trout and eels for company. Their food is the bark and pith of certain plants; their air is what leaks through the house of sticks, or what may collect at the melting-place of ice ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe
... feet; they had oars as well. He "carried sail," while they spread not a "rag." The wind chanced to blow directly down-stream, and the broad wings of the bird, held out from his body, and half extended, caught the very pith of the breeze on their double concave surfaces, and carried him through the water with the velocity of an arrow. Do you think that he was not aware of this advantage when he started ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... company marched along, always facing Fuji, they began singing a weird chant. When the motors drew nearer the tourists saw that each man wore a huge mushroom hat made of lightest pith and from his neck hung a piece of ...
— The Motor Maids in Fair Japan • Katherine Stokes
... neighbor was estimated in trillions, not billions, and that our little system, even with its new additions, was a child's handbreadth on the plane of the sky. He had brought along a small book called The Pith of Astronomy—a fascinating little volume—and he read from it about the great tempest of fire in the sun, where the waves of flame roll up two thousand miles high, though the sun itself is such a tiny star in the deeps of ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... saw Judge Barbour, who, though president of the Convention, as the house was in committee, engaged in the debate, fairly reel in his seat from one of Judge Marshall's massy blows, which he returned presently with right good will; but Tazewell, if I may use a figure which presented the pith of the argument of one side, and which was frequently used by both,—Tazewell fairly "sunk the boat" under the Chief Justice. The views of Tazewell prevailed; and in such a contest, in which all were kingly, and in which the combatants were magis ...
— Discourse of the Life and Character of the Hon. Littleton Waller Tazewell • Hugh Blair Grigsby
... from sailing until our pith helmets arrived on the 26th, when, at 10 o'clock on a clear moonlight night, we steamed away escorted by two T.B.Ds. The Bay was crossed in calm weather. Gibraltar passed on the 30th and Malta reached on the 2nd June. Our clothing, consisting of the ...
— The Fifth Battalion Highland Light Infantry in the War 1914-1918 • F.L. Morrison
... palmetto, which grew in abundance around the wall, he trimmed it with his knife into the desired shape and size. Laying the piece, thus prepared, upon a large stone, he pounded one side of it lustily with a piece of rock. A few minutes sufficed to pound out the pith and leave ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... compasses were curiously formed. The Chinese used a magnetised needle, which they placed in a bit of rush or pith, which was floated in a basin of water, and thus allowed to move freely and turn towards the poles. They also made needles in the form of iron fish. An Arabian author of the thirteenth century thus writes:—"I heard it said that the captains in the Indian seas substitute ...
— Man on the Ocean - A Book about Boats and Ships • R.M. Ballantyne
... king may make a belted knight, A marquis, duke and a' that, But an honest man's aboon his might Gude faith he mauna fa' that! For a' that and a' that, Their dignities and a' that, The pith o' sense and pride o' worth Are higher ranks than ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... extracts are given from letters of distinguished contemporaries who knew the orator. Colonel T.W. Higginson writes thus: "I have hardly heard his equal, in grasp upon an audience, in dramatic presentation, in striking at the pith of an ethical question, and in single [signal] illustrations and examples." Another writes, in reference to the impromptu speech delivered at the meeting at Rochester on the death of Lincoln: "I have heard Webster and Clay in their best ...
— Frederick Douglass - A Biography • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... freedom of banishment. We were going to say (but it might sound vainglorious), where do things read so well as in notes? but we will put the question in another form:—Where do you so well test an author's learning and knowledge of his subject?—where do you find the pith of his most elaborate researches?—where do his most original suggestions escape?—where do you meet with the details that fix your attention at the time and cling to your memory for ever?—where do both writer and reader luxuriate ...
— Notes And Queries,(Series 1, Vol. 2, Issue 1), - Saturday, November 3, 1849. • Various
... but slowly. I have got to a crossing place, I suppose; the present book, SAINT IVES, is nothing; it is in no style in particular, a tissue of adventures, the central character not very well done, no philosophic pith under the yarn; and, in short, if people will read it, that's all I ask; and if they won't, damn them! I like doing it though; and if you ask me why! - after that I am on WEIR OF HERMISTON and HEATHERCAT, two Scotch stories, which will either be something different, or I shall ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... components. Steel helmets could be worn only in winter. In many of the native regiments the British officers wore tasselled pugrees, and long tunics that were really shirts, and an adaption of the native custom of wearing the shirt-tails outside the trousers. The Gurkhas were supplied with pith helmets. It was generally claimed that this was unnecessary, but the authorities felt that coming from a cold, high climate they would be as much affected by the Mesopotamian sun as were Europeans. The presence of the Indian troops brought about unusual additions to ...
— War in the Garden of Eden • Kermit Roosevelt
... remark I could never forget as coming from him. He said that he "had lived a very full and varied life, and had no interest in remarks about morals." "Remarks about morals" are, nevertheless, in essence, the pith of all the books to which he referred, as those to which he turned in preference to the Edinburgh Edition of R. L. Stevenson's works. The moral element is implicit in the drama, and it is implicit there because it is implicit in life itself, or so the great common-sense conceives it ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... puzzles the will And makes us rather bear those ills we have Than fly to others that we know not of? Thus conscience does make cowards of us all; And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought, And enterprises of great pith and moment With this regard their currents turn awry, And ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... space between the wharf and the buildings, and, giving the convalescents instructions to arm themselves at once and to stand by to show themselves when called upon, I entered my own quarters and hastily shifted from my uniform into a somewhat soiled suit of "whites" and a pith hat that had doubtless once been the property of one of the former inhabitants of the place—and which I had appropriated in view of some such contingency as the present—and otherwise made such preparations as ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood
... hand on the pommel and resigned her left foot; Mr. Talboys put his hand under that foot and heaved her smoothly into the saddle. "That is clever," thought simple David; "that chap has got more pith in his arm than one would think." They cantered away, and left him looking sadly after them. It seemed so hard that another man should have her sweet foot in his hand, should lift her whole glorious person, and smooth her sacred dress, and he stand by helpless; ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... well known, the concept of the cell arose first in botany. Robert Hooke discovered cells in cork and pith in 1667, and his discovery was followed up by Grew and Malpighi in 1671, and by Leeuenhoek in 1695. But they did not conceive the cell as a living, independent, structural unit. They were interested in the physiology of the plant as a whole, how it lived and nourished itself, and they studied cells ...
— Form and Function - A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology • E. S. (Edward Stuart) Russell
... ants' nests, made of clay as big as a bushel. The ants themselves, by which the nests were inhabited, were small, and their bodies white. Upon another species of the gum trees, was found a small black ant, which perforated all the twigs, and, having worked out the pith, occupied the pipe in which it had been contained. Notwithstanding this, the parts in which these insects, to an amazing number, had formed a lodgment, bore leaves and flowers, and appeared to be entirely in a flourishing state. Butterflies were found in such multitudes, ...
— Narrative of the Voyages Round The World, • A. Kippis
... life followed, and during these years the rapid growth tells of good seasons as well as good soil. This rapid growth also shows that there could not have been any crowding neighbors to share the sun and the soil. The tree had grown evenly in all quarters, and the pith of the tree was in the centre. But had one tree grown close, on that quarter the old pine would have grown slower than the others and would have been thinner, and the pith would thus have been ...
— Wild Life on the Rockies • Enos A. Mills
... betel, the sago, and the gno or gomati, are the four favorite palms of the Dyaks. In their simple mode of life, these four trees supply them many necessaries and luxuries. The sago furnishes food; and after the pith has been extracted, the outer part forms a rough covering for the rougher floor, on which the farmer sleeps. The leaf of the sago is preferable for the roofing of houses to the nibong. The gomati, or gno, gives the black fibre which enables the owner ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... Panama grass, which he had sewn as a lining to an ordinary wide-awake. I regret I have had no opportunity of trying this combination, but can easily believe that the touch of the cool, smooth grass, to the wet brow, would be more agreeable than that of any other material. I need hardly mention Pith hats (to be bought under the Opera Colonnade, Pall Mall), Indian topees, and English hunting-caps, as having severally many merits. A muslin turban twisted into a rope and rolled round the hat is a common plan to keep ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton
... be almost seen by the naked eye; if with a penknife the remaining rudiment of the last year's leaf, and of the new bud in its bosom, be cut away slice by slice. The seven ribs of the last year's leaf will be seen to have arisen from the pith in seven distinct points making a curve; and the new bud to have been produced in their centre, and to have pierced the alburnum and cortex, and grown without the assistance of a mother. A similar process may be seen on dissecting ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... gone thus far on the road of concession, I take the liberty, in no unfriendly and polemical spirit, of asking you quite frankly what good you think can be done by resolutions of this character? I am not now referring to the resolution against myself. That is a matter of very minor importance. The pith of the whole business is in resolution number one, a resolution evidently framed with great care by the clever men who are engineering the present agitation in the Colony. Now, that resolution asks for two things—a termination of the war, and the restoration of the ...
— Lord Milner's Work in South Africa - From its Commencement in 1897 to the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 • W. Basil Worsfold
... task—to demonstrate the contradictions, the superficiality, the inadequateness, of the teaching of Rousseau, Voltaire, or Diderot. But it is well also, and in a historical student it is not only well, but the very pith and marrow of criticism, to search for that 'adaptation,' to use M. Taine's very proper expression, which gave to the word of these teachers its mighty power and far-spreading acceptance. Is it not as true of Rousseau and Voltaire, ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 8: France in the Eighteenth Century • John Morley
... under-ripe oranges of all rind and pith, slice them into a dish, season with a little cayenne pepper, add the rind of one minced, the juice of one lemon and a tablespoonful of oil if ...
— The Cooking Manual of Practical Directions for Economical Every-Day Cookery • Juliet Corson
... your brothers life Fals into forfeit: he arrests him on it, And followes close the rigor of the Statute To make him an example: all hope is gone, Vnlesse you haue the grace, by your faire praier To soften Angelo: And that's my pith of businesse 'Twixt you, ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... o' the Lord wi' auld Sanny Grame!" she resumed to herself, as she lifted her head. "He's stickit nae mair, but a chosen trumpet at last! Foul fa' 'im for a wearifu' cratur for a' that! He has nowther balm o' grace nor pith o' damnation. ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... to ennoble every heart by moral aspirations, to indoctrinate every individual with an unequivocal theory of life, to inspire every member of the nation with lofty ideals. Their work did not fail to leave its traces. Slowly but deeply idealism entered into the very pith and marrow of the national consciousness. This consciousness gained in strength and amplitude century by century, showing itself particularly in the latter part of the first period, after the crisis known as "the Babylonian Exile." Thanks to the exertions of the Soferim (Scribes), ...
— Jewish History • S. M. Dubnow
... was bred in a bangalow wood, And bangalow pith was the principal food His mother served out ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... spent in overhauling his Belgian uniform, removing from it every vestige of evidence that might indicate its military purposes. From a heterogeneous collection of loot, Achmet Zek procured a pith helmet and a European saddle, and from his black slaves and followers a party of porters, askaris and tent boys to make up a modest safari for a big game hunter. At the head of this party Werper ...
— Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... article issue was joined, the flag of truce still flying during the debate. The very pith of the thing was the act of amnesty and oblivion. Yet so eager were now the majority of the boys for their amusement, that had it not been for the noble firmness of Saint Albans, the leaders, with poor Pilgarlick, would have ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... bit, Mrs. Blyth," said Zack, "you haven't heard the best of my notion yet: all the pith and marrow of it has got to come. The bracelet I mean to give her is one that she will prize to the day of her death, or she's not the affectionate, warm-hearted girl I take her for. What do you think of a bracelet that reminds her of you and Valentine, and jolly old Peck ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... are all mine; Well, I would trade the pack For one sweet year in which to shine Again as 'Mrs. Jack.' That gave to life a core, a pith, Not found ...
— Poems of Optimism • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... of Egypt, though not altogether peculiar to it, were the papyrus and the lotus—the Cyperus papyrus and Nymphaea lotus of botanists. The papyrus was a tall smooth reed, with a large triangular stalk containing a delicate pith, out of which the Egyptians manufactured their paper. The fabric was excellent, as is shown by its continuance to the present day, and by the fact that the Greeks and Romans, after long trial, preferred it to parchment. ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson
... quickness of thought, a handful of a certain herb, broke a young palma christi across her knee, and took out the delicate, fleshy substance found under the bark of that tree. Returning to the stranger, she filled the wound with the pith, overlaid it with herbs, and bound it with the handkerchief. The whole was the work of an instant, and so rapid and decided were Canondah's movements, that Rosa's neckerchief was tied round the leg of the stranger before the blush ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... rejoined; "these four Latin words, which have a cabalistic sound, not unlike the croaking of certain batrachians, and might have been borrowed, one would say, from the 'Comedy of the Frogs,' by one Aristophanes, an Athenian poet, contain the very pith and marrow of all theories of love and lovemaking; they would make a capital rule to regulate everybody's conduct—of the virile as well ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... a remarkable discovery: you write two or three words on a paper; he takes it with him into a room, and turns a machine inclosed in a cylindrical case, at the top of which is an electrometer, a small fine pith ball; a wire connects with a similar cylinder and electrometer in a distant apartment; and his wife, by remarking the corresponding motions of the ball, writes down the words they indicate; from ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
... magnificent limbs, striding down from the heights carolling a song, to enter the bastardly-civilised city of Tangier, so, it would seem, Chidley descended on to the city of Sydney. Having written a book in which to contain the pith of his message, he proceeded to clothe himself in a sort of scanty bathing dress, to lecture the public in the most fashionable streets of the city, and to sell his book to ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... suffocating in the damp inclosure, as the discarded pith began to fill the opening. Tiny apertures let in just enough air, but Piang was panting and dripping with sweat. As he struggled on toward the hole, he could feel the water under him, as it swayed the log ...
— The Adventures of Piang the Moro Jungle Boy - A Book for Young and Old • Florence Partello Stuart
... patched up, nothing fragmentary. The rhymes are easy and good, the words choice and proper, the meaning clear and intelligible, the melodies lovely and hearty, and in summa all is so rare and majestic, so full of pith and power, so cheering and comforting, that, in sooth, you will not find his ...
— The Hymns of Martin Luther • Martin Luther
... from all terrestrial bonds," she continued, not exactly remarking the pith of his last observation; "from bonds quasi- terrestrial and quasi-celestial. The full-formed limbs of the present age, running with quick streams of generous blood, will no longer bear the ligatures which past times have woven for the decrepit. Look down ...
— Mrs. General Talboys • Anthony Trollope
... [S']ami-tree is pregnant with fire.' The legend is, that the goddess Parvati, being one day under the influence of love, reposed on a trunk of this tree, whereby a sympathetic warmth was generated in the pith or interior of the wood, which ever after broke into a sacred flame on the ...
— Sakoontala or The Lost Ring - An Indian Drama • Kalidasa
... they ingender a-dust cholor, or melancholly humours, by reason that they bee burned and dry. And therefore great estates the which be [orig. the] chollerick of nature, cause the crustes aboue and beneath to be chipped away; wherfore the pith or crumme should be chosen, the which is of a greater nourishment then the crust." Regimen Sanitatis Salerni, ed. 1634, p. 71. Fr. chapplis, bread-chippings. ...
— Early English Meals and Manners • Various
... had been taught to hold As full of pith and gravity, he took As 'twere, 'twixt thumb and finger of his wit— Rubbed off their gloss, until they seemed to me, All, as he ...
— A Wreath of Virginia Bay Leaves • James Barron Hope
... "Interest, pith, force, and charm—Mr. Parker's new story possesses all these qualities.... Almost bare of synthetical decoration, his paragraphs are stirring because they are real. We read at times—as we have read the great ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... Silent. Shag-eared, military, hirsute ruffians, ex-captains of free companies and such marauders, were daily offering their services; there was no lack of them, and they had done but little. How should Parma, seeing this obscure, undersized, thin-bearded, runaway clerk before him, expect pith and energy from him? He thought him quite unfit for an enterprise of moment, and declared as much to his secret councillors and to ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... water, whereof some that were seare and rotten, and some that of purpose were broken off, fell into the water and were all turned into stone. Of these, boughs, or parts of the tree, I brought into London, which, when I had broken into pieces, therein might be seen that the pith and all the rest was turned into stones, still remaining the same shape and fashion that they were of before they were in the water." Similarly, Sir John Maundeville notices the "Dead Sea fruit"—fruit found ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... thought it vastly pretty that the people were walking under their bows and cabbin windows and climbing of their sides like mermen, but I, being a plain, blunt man, had no joy in such idlenesse, deeming it better that in these times of pith and enterprise they should be more seemly employed. My Lord, because of one or two misadventures by reason of the slipperiness of the ice, was fain to go by London Bridge, which we did; my Lord as suited his ...
— New Burlesques • Bret Harte
... culture skims over that like a bird, never touching it with the tip of a wing. What she brings home is the freshness and brightness of life. She touches everything so daintily, she hits off a character in a sentence, she gives the pith of a dialogue without tediousness, she mimics without vulgarity; her narration sparkles, but it does n't sting. The picture of her day is full of vivacity, and it gives new value and freshness to common things. If we could only have on the stage such actresses ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... common pith ball of your high school physics days? An accumulation of positive electricity repels an accumulation of negative—if indeed we can correctly use 'accumulation' for a negativity—and it is my idea that the earth is the container of a gigantic accumulation of this meta—or hyper-electricity which ...
— Disowned • Victor Endersby
... two horsemen jogged into view, ambling over the sand-hills whose red-hot edge met a shimmering sky some little distance beyond the station pines. Both wore pith helmets and fluttering buff dust-coats, but both had hot black legs, the pair in gaiters being remarkable for their length. The homestead trio, their red necks chafed by the unaccustomed collar, gathered grimly ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung
... to angelic beings, by interpreting Mariolatry in all its charm and pathos, and by rousing deep sympathy with our Lord in His Passion, painting lent efficient aid to piety. Yet painting had to omit the very pith and kernel of Christianity as conceived by devout, uncompromising purists. Nor did it do what the Church would have desired. Instead of riveting the fetters of ecclesiastical authority, instead of enforcing mysticism and asceticism, it really ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... at daybreak, and making my toilet by tightening my belt and putting on my mud-spattered pith helmet, I went down to the water's edge to try to find some means of communicating with the ship. During my absence at the front there had evidently been strong winds and heavy seas, for the strip of beach was covered ...
— Campaigning in Cuba • George Kennan
... this fleet majestical, Holding due course to Harfleur. Follow, follow: Grapple your minds to sternage of this navy, And leave your England, as dead midnight still, Guarded with grandsires, babies and old women, Or passed or not arrived to pith and puissance; For who is he, whose chin is but enriched With one appearing hair, that will not follow These culled and choice-drawn cavaliers to France? Work, work your thoughts, and therein see a siege: Behold the ordnance on their carriages, With fatal mouths gaping on girded Harfleur. Suppose ...
— Lyra Heroica - A Book of Verse for Boys • Various
... often as possible" is the interviewer's watchword,—"cut to the bone," as the reporters express it. Much of what a man says in conversation is prolix. In that part of the interview that is dull or wordy, give the pith of what is said in one or two brief sentences, then fall into direct quotation again when his words become interesting. As a rule, however, it is well as far as possible to quote his exact language all through the interview, since the interest ...
— News Writing - The Gathering , Handling and Writing of News Stories • M. Lyle Spencer
... was appointed editor of the "Echoes," and invited to dine at Mme. Walter's. The "Echoes" were, M. Walter said, the very pith of the paper. Everything and everybody should be remembered, all countries, all professions, Paris and the provinces, the army, the arts, the clergy, the schools, the rulers, and the courtiers. The man at the head of that department should be wide awake, always on his guard, ...
— Bel Ami • Henri Rene Guy de Maupassant
... storm 'tis useless to think of the sailor on his slippery shrouds; but the "outland eerie cattle" he teaches his feres to care for in the drifting snow. In what jocund strains he celebrates their amusements, their recreations, their festivals, passionately pursued with all their pith by a people in the business of life grave and determined as if it left no hours for play! Gait, dress, domicile, furniture, throughout all his poetry, are Scottish as their dialect; and sometimes, in the pride of his heart, he rejoices by such nationality ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... Tuned, from Bocafoli's stark-naked psalms, To Plara's sonnets spoilt by toying with, 'As knops that stud some almug to the pith 'Pricked for gum, wry thence, and crinkled worse 'Than pursed eyelids of a river-horse 'Sunning himself o' the slime when whirrs the ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... of gelatin, and is of two kinds,—animal glue and fish glue. Animal glue is made of bones and trimmings, cuttings and fleshings from hides and skins of animals. Sinews, feet, tails, snouts, ears, and horn pith are also largely used. Cattle, calves, goats, pigs, horses, and rabbits, ...
— Handwork in Wood • William Noyes
... perceived a plant with large pointed leaves, which I knew to be the karata. I pointed out to the boys its beautiful red flowers; the leaves are an excellent application to wounds, and thread is made from the filaments, and the pith of the stem is used by ...
— The Swiss Family Robinson; or Adventures in a Desert Island • Johann David Wyss
... immense leaves form one of the most useful articles in these lands, supplying the place of bamboo, to which for many purposes they are superior. They are twelve or fifteen feet long, and, when very fine, as thick in the lower part as a man's leg. They are very light, consisting entirely of a firm pith covered with a hard thin rind or bark. Entire houses are built of these; they form admirable roofing-poles for thatch; split and well-supported, they do for flooring; and when chosen of equal size, and pegged together side by side ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume II. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... of faith makes connections. It ties our God and our need and our action into one knot. This is the pith of this whole story. Jesus' one effort in His tactful patient wooing is to get Martha up to the point of ordering that stone aside. He got her faith into touch with the gravestone of her sore need. Her faith and her action connected. That told her expectancy. ...
— Quiet Talks on John's Gospel • S. D. Gordon
... George might think it right to come up. The Dean would of course ask at the hotel on the following day, and would go to the police office. He believed, he said, that no permanent injury had been done. Then came, perhaps, the pith of his letter. He trusted that Lord George would agree with him in thinking that Mary had better remain with him in town during the two or three days of his necessarily prolonged sojourn. This was put in the form of a request; but was put in a manner intended to show ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope
... shed in such considerable quantities. When the development of the feather is complete, growth gradually ceases, the proximal part of the feather remains tubular and does not split, and the vascular tissue within dies, shrivels, and dries up, forming the pith of the quill When the papilla recommences to grow the old feather is pushed out, and this process causes the moult. It would appear, therefore, that the feather must have been evolved, not by a continuous modification from the scale but by a development of a new kind between the scales. ...
— Hormones and Heredity • J. T. Cunningham
... wood, river, stars and sea, Goes most disconsolate. A babble now, A huge and wind-swelled babble, fills the place Of that great adoration which of old Man had for Woman. In these days no more Is love the pith and marrow of Man's fate. Thou who in early years feelest awake To finest impulses from nature's breath, And in thy walk hearest such sounds of truth As on the common ear strike without heed, Beware of men around thee! Men are foul With avarice, ambition and deceit; The worst of all, ambition. ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... day, when the gentlemen were gone out, after the usual time spent in the writing of letters, the reading of newspapers, and desultory conversation. We sat silent for two or three minutes. She was busy with her work, and I was running over the columns of a paper from which I had extracted all the pith some twenty minutes before. It was a moment of painful embarrassment to me, and I thought it must be infinitely more so to her; but it seems I was mistaken. She was the first to speak; and, smiling with ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... about on the sea, would Tsz-lu, I wonder, be my follower there?" That disciple was delighted at hearing the suggestion; whereupon the Master continued, "He surpasses me in his love of deeds of daring. But he does not in the least grasp the pith of my remark." ...
— Chinese Literature • Anonymous
... called Pauloma and Astika are the root; the part called Sambhava is the trunk; the books called Sabha and Aranya are the roosting perches; the books called Arani is the knitting knots; the books called Virata and Udyoga the pith; the book named Bhishma, the main branch; the book called Drona, the leaves; the book called Karna, the fair flowers; the book named Salya, their sweet smell; the books entitled Stri and Aishika, the refreshing shade; the book called ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa - Translated into English Prose - Adi Parva (First Parva, or First Book) • Kisari Mohan Ganguli (Translator)
... the fiery pith, The compact nucleus, 'round which systems grow; Mass after mass becomes inspired therewith, And whirls impregnate with the ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... our friend said, but the above was the pith of his discourse. I believe that neither my young messmate nor I ever forgot what he said. By following his advice, we have found a comfort, a joy, a strength, which we should never otherwise have ...
— Salt Water - The Sea Life and Adventures of Neil D'Arcy the Midshipman • W. H. G. Kingston
... Trinidad is a smiling, peaceful spot of great tropical beauty; it is one of the fairest places in the West Indies. At every hour of the year the harbor of Port of Spain holds open its arms to vessels of every draught. A governor in a pith helmet, a cricket club, a bishop in gaiters, and a botanical garden go to make it a prosperous and contented colony. But the little derelict Trinidad, in latitude 20 degrees 30 minutes south, and longitude 29 ...
— Real Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis
... more or less current use. Among such words are carpos fruit, pericarpion seed vessel pericarp, and metra, the word used by him for the central core of any stem whether formed of wood, pith, or other substance. It is from the usage of Theophrastus that the exact definition of fruit and pericarp has come down to us.[18] We may easily discern also the purpose for which he introduces into botany the term metra, a word meaning primarily the womb, and the vacancy in the ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... scholars.... I do not believe, however, that these complaints are made of your own free will, but rather at the instigation of certain priests and monks, whose desire is to keep the truth unknown." This sentence with which he closed contains the pith of the entire letter. The monarch felt that in the coming contest the opposing parties were to be the Church and State. He endeavored, therefore, by every means to win the Dalesmen to his side. Letters were despatched to Dalarne from various portions ...
— The Swedish Revolution Under Gustavus Vasa • Paul Barron Watson
... Under whose heavy sense your brother's life 65 Falls into forfeit: he arrests him on it; And follows close the rigour of the statute, To make him an example. All hope is gone, Unless you have the grace by your fair prayer To soften Angelo: and that's my pith of business 70 'Twixt you ...
— Measure for Measure - The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] • William Shakespeare
... years. The air there is burning, and would be almost unfit to breathe, if frequent rains did not fall and refresh the atmosphere. The natural productions are extremely valuable. In the first rank must be placed the sago-tree, of which the pith called sago takes, with yams, the place of cereals throughout Malacca. As soon as the tree is cut down, the pith is extracted, which is then grated, passed through a sieve, and afterwards cut up in the form of small rolls, ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part I. The Exploration of the World • Jules Verne
... beautiful arch of social amenities which vaults the temple of Christian virtues. Lest you should take umbrage at my frankness, which ought to assure you of my interest in your happiness and improvement, permit me to remind you of the oriental definition of a faithful friend, that has more pith ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... wholesome life in any age, but particularly amidst confused affairs and shifting standards. Genuineness is not mere simplicity, for that may lack vitality, and genuineness does not. We expect what we call genuine to have pith and strength of fiber. Genuineness is a quality which we sometimes mean to include when we speak of individuality. Individuality is lost the moment you submit to passing modes or fashions, the creations ...
— On Being Human • Woodrow Wilson
... devotes to that important question, which the Enquirer says is the real question, and which many of your speakers doubtless here say is the real question, precisely eleven lines—one short paragraph. And the pith of that paragraph is contained in these two lines: "I am sorry that what I have to say on that subject for publication I must reserve for some ...
— The Life, Public Services and Select Speeches of Rutherford B. Hayes • James Quay Howard
... whether it is irrigated or not, whether it grows on bottoms or on hill slopes, in dry or in damp regions, everywhere the cane seems to thrive, and undoubtedly it is the one product of the islands which succeeds. A worm, which pierces the cane near the ground and eats out the pith, has of late, I am told, done some damage, and in some parts the rat has proved troublesome. But these evils do not anywhere endanger or ruin the crop, as the blight has ruined the coffee culture and discouraged other agricultural ventures. The sugar product of the islands has constantly ...
— Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands • Charles Nordhoff
... does our new god Pan (As did he of the reeds by the river), To take all the pith from the heart of a man, To make him a sheep—though a tiger in spring,— A cruel, remorseless, poor, cowardly thing, With ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, Sep. 24, 1892 • Various
... finer spirits of the University generally. He had the gift which enables a man, sitting perhaps after dinner in a mixed society of his college contemporaries, to lead the way imperceptibly from the casual subjects of the hour—the river, the dons, the schools—to arguments "of great pith and moment," discussions that search the moral and intellectual powers of the men concerned to the utmost, without exciting distrust or any but an argumentative opposition, Edward Hallin could do this without a pose, without a false note, nay, rather by the natural force of a boyish ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... 1. Seeds suspended in their pods. Stars discovered by Mr. Herschel. Destruction and resuscitation of all things. 351. 2. Seeds within seeds, and bulbs within bulbs. Picture on the retina of the eye. Concentric strata of the earth. The great seed. 381. 3. The root, pith, lobes, plume, calyx, coral, sap, blood, leaves respire and absorb light. The crocodile in its egg. 409. XI. Opening of the flower. The petals, style, anthers, prolific dust. Transmutation of the silkworm. 441. XII. 1. Leaf-buds changed into flower-buds by ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... ships, crowded with troops, set sail. Ribaut was gone, and with him the pith and sinew of the colony. The miserable remnant watched his receding sails with dreary foreboding, a foreboding which seemed but too just, when, on the next day, a storm, more violent than the Indians had ever known, howled through the forest and lashed the ocean into fury, Most forlorn ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... took no notice, and just grew and grew; there it stood fresh and green in winter and summer, and all who saw it said, 'What a beautiful tree!' And at Christmas-time it was the first to be cut down. The axe went deep into the pith; the tree fell to the ground with a groan; it felt bruised and faint. It could not think of happiness, it was sad at leaving its home, the spot where it had sprung up; it knew, too, that it would never see again its dear old companions, or the little shrubs and flowers, perhaps not even ...
— The Pink Fairy Book • Various
... it. His lecture shall be somtimes by way of talke and sometimes by booke: his tutor may now and then supply him with the same Author, as an end and motive of his institution: sometimes giving him the pith and substance of it ready chewed. And if of himselfe he be not so throughly acquainted with bookes, that hee may readily find so many notable discourses as are in them to effect his purpose, it shall not be amisse that some learned man bee appointed to keepe ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... for the intrusion. The joint-grass of soggy pastures produces edible, nut-flavored tubers, called by the Indians taboose. The common reed of the ultramontane marshes (here Phragmites vulgaris), a very stately, whispering reed, light and strong for shafts or arrows, affords sweet sap and pith which ...
— The Land Of Little Rain • Mary Hunter Austin
... more than this, but this is the pith of it. I knelt down, and swore that I would strive, to the utmost in my power, to do as he bade me; and he put his hands on my head, and bade me go in peace; and I tell you, I mean to prove to him that his words ...
— Both Sides the Border - A Tale of Hotspur and Glendower • G. A. Henty
... your 'Rodde' of a fair staff even of a six foot long or more, as ye list, of hazel, willow, or 'aspe' (ash?), and 'beke hym in an ovyn when ye bake, and let him cool and dry a four weeks or more.' The pith is taken out of him with a hot iron, and a yard of white hazel is similarly treated, also a fair shoot of blackthorn or crabtree for a top. The butt is bound with hoops of iron, the top is accommodated with a noose, a hair line is looped ...
— Andrew Lang's Introduction to The Compleat Angler • Andrew Lang
... sing-song, turned with a skip, and was gone. I stood where she left me, with my hair on end. In those days folk still believed in witches and trembled at a curse; and this one, falling so pat, like a wayside omen, to arrest me ere I carried out my purpose, took the pith out of my legs. ...
— Kidnapped • Robert Louis Stevenson
... weapon used for pething (pithing) cattle; that is, killing them by piercing the spinal cord (pith, ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... cut in the latest fashion, with his cockle-shell of a boat, which he managed as well on salt water as on fresh, sculling with his arms bare, a cigarette in his mouth, a monocle in his eye, and a pith-helmet, such as is worn in India. The young ladies used to gather on the sands to watch him as he struck the water with the broad blade of his scull, near enough for them to see and to admire his nautical ability. They thought all his jokes amusing, and they delighted ...
— Jacqueline, Complete • (Mme. Blanc) Th. Bentzon
... which men have made with the kindling of words from abstract conceptions,—go out. For however otherwise a man may be distinguished—unless there be in him a spirit of love, devotion, and self-sacrifice, we feel he lacks the very pith and beauty of manhood; and though he may be a great performer with his pen as one plays well on a musical instrument, a Great Being ...
— Washington's Birthday • Various
... Shinto worship be placed upon the kamidana, are set two quaintly shaped jars for the offerings of sake; two small vases, to contain sprays of the sacred plant sakaki, or offerings of flowers; and a small lamp, shaped like a tiny saucer, where a wick of rush-pith floats in rape-seed oil. Strictly speaking, all these utensils, except the flower-vases, should be made of unglazed red earthenware, such as we find described in the early chapters of the Kojiki: and still at Shinto festivals in Izumo, when ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... something final about this. And Gudrun seems like the end, to me. I don't know—but she seems so soft, her skin like silk, her arms heavy and soft. And it withers my consciousness, somehow, it burns the pith of my mind.' He went on a few paces, staring ahead, his eyes fixed, looking like a mask used in ghastly religions of the barbarians. 'It blasts your soul's eye,' he said, 'and leaves you sightless. Yet you WANT to be sightless, you WANT to be ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... established rules and etiquettes of strategy were abandoned. It was only by such rapidity of motion as should utterly transcend the suspicion of his adversaries, that he could hope to concentrate the whole pith and energy of a small force upon some one point of a much greater force opposed to it, and thus rob them (according to his own favourite phrase) of the victory. To effect such rapid marches, it was necessary that the soldiery should make up their ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart
... photograph of his car hit by a shell outside Messines. I have spoken of the simplicity and directness of Mr. COLEMAN'S style; he himself describes his book as a plain tale. It has, indeed, that kind of plainness which in dealing with enterprises of great pith and moment has a peculiar brilliancy of its own. The account, for instance, of the Cambrai—Le Cateau battle, with all its vicissitudes, is extraordinarily graphic and interesting, and the story of the charge of some fifty men of the 9th Lancers against more than twice their number ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 22, 1916 • Various
... now raise it, but you may still catch the worms by laying under the bees a narrow shingle, a stick of elder split in two lengthwise, and the pith scraped out, or anything else that will afford them protection from the bees, and where they may spin their cocoons. These should be removed every few days, and the worms destroyed, and the trap put back. Do not neglect it till they change to the moth, and you have ...
— Mysteries of Bee-keeping Explained • M. Quinby
... universal honour. Jasmin, he continued, is what Burns was to the Scottish peasantry; only he received his honours in his lifetime. The comparison with Burns, however, was not appropriate. Burns had more pith, vigour, variety, and passion, than Jasmin who was more of a descriptive writer. In some respects Jasmin resembled Allan Ramsay, a barber and periwig-maker, like himself, whose Gentle Shepherd met with as great a success as Jasmin's Franconnette. Jasmin, however, was the greater poet ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... and sense, and laughing myself and making you laugh, as I used to do, though I am six years beyond the allotted age and have had so many attacks of illness within the last two years; but I am, as Bess Fitzherbert and poor dear Sophy used to say, like one of those pith puppets that you knock down in vain, they always start up the same as ever. I was particularly fortunate in my last attack of erysipelas in all the circumstances, just having reached Harriet and Louisa's comfortable home, and happy in having Harriet Butler coming to me the ...
— The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... me to the heart," the Duke apologized—"it pains me, pith and core, to be guilty of this rudeness to a lady; but, after all, honesty is a proverbially recommended virtue, and so I must unblushingly admit I do nothing ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... has a remark which I confess astonished me—a remark I could never forget as coming from him. He said that he "had lived a very full and varied life, and had no interest in remarks about morals." "Remarks about morals" are, nevertheless, in essence, the pith of all the books to which he referred, as those to which he turned in preference to the Edinburgh Edition of R. L. Stevenson's works. The moral element is implicit in the drama, and it is implicit there because ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... prince can mak' a belted knight, A marquis, duke, and a' that, But an honest man's aboon his might— Guid faith, he mauna fa' that! For a' that, and a' that, Their dignities, and a' that, The pith o' sense and pride o' worth Are higher ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... palace, and I have given them wherewith to find lodgings in the city. Here go the ladies with their bundles under their arms, and the lord high-steward has a broom sweeping after them as they go. This charming individual in the corner with a hunting-whip, is myself. And here is the pith of the joke. 'Rooms to let here. Inquire of the proprietor on the first floor.' [Footnote: Hubner, i., p. 190.] What ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... the Middle Ages" and the late Mr. Serjeant Pulling's "Order of the Coif," though widely differing in scope, are both extremely useful publications. Mr. Pollard's introduction to the Clarendon Press selection of miracle plays contains the pith of that interesting subject, and Miss Toulmin Smith's "York Plays" and Miss Katherine Bates's "English Religious Drama" will be found valuable guides. Perhaps the most realistic description of a miracle play is that presented in a few pages of Morley's "English Writers," where ...
— The Customs of Old England • F. J. Snell
... make a white and red wine, as beer is made in England, mixing it with their spice as it suits their palate, having a pleasant taste like sharp brisk wine. They also make another sort of wine from certain trees like palms which have prickly trunks like thorns: This wine is made from the pith of these palms, which resemble squeezed palmitoes, and from which they extract the juice and boil it up with water and spice. They make another wine from a fruit which grows likewise in Guadaloup, resembling a large pine-apple. This is planted in large fields, and the plant is a sprout ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. III. • Robert Kerr
... could be dismissed. But there was the bitter fact, he was accomplishing absolutely nothing by continuing the struggle, nothing more than a woman yoked to a Silenus hoping to reform him when he daily grew worse under her eyes. The Government had blocked him. The party had blocked him. What was the pith of it all, anyway? Should those who had the power be given the legal right to take what they cared to seize? It was the same old question that had split every country up into revolution. And closest of all, keenest of all arguments, the new influence that had come into ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... with the eternal red fez on his head and a rifle slung on his back, was the first to sight the coming expedition, and to notify its approach with a yell that brought a dozen like him from the sun-baked hovels and, a moment later from the office, a white man in a pith helmet, who stood for a moment looking across the half-ruined wall at the newcomers, and then advanced ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... was apprenticed to a trade, he ran away while a mere stripling, and shifted for himself ever after. An adventurer, therefore, in the fullest sense of the word, he was; and doubtless he had the appreciation of his own achievements which self-made men are apt to have. But there was sterling pith in him, a dauntless and humane soul, and inexhaustible ability and resource. Such a man could not fail to possess imagination, and imagination and self-esteem combined conduce to highly-colored narrative; but that Smith ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... so much so briefly. Here are the facts then—bare. He found a punt and a pole, got across to the steps on the opposite side, picked up an elderly gentleman in an alpaca jacket and a pith helmet, cruised with him vaguely for twenty minutes, conveyed him tortuously into the midst of a thicket of forget-me-not spangled sedges, splashed some water-weed over him, hit him twice with the punt pole, and finally landed him, alarmed but abusive, in treacherous soil ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... either way. You see, if men and women had been primarily designed to be rational creatures, there would be no explanation for their being permitted to continue in existence," he lucidly explained. "And to have grasped this fact is the pith of all wisdom." ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... goes along but slowly. I have got to a crossing place, I suppose; the present book, SAINT IVES, is nothing; it is in no style in particular, a tissue of adventures, the central character not very well done, no philosophic pith under the yarn; and, in short, if people will read it, that's all I ask; and if they won't, damn them! I like doing it though; and if you ask me why! - after that I am on WEIR OF HERMISTON and HEATHERCAT, ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... with thy happiness marred by consorting with this bed! thy purity is handled by the impurity of a peasant, thy nobility is bowed down by ignoble commonness, thy high birth is impaired by the estate of thy husband! But thou, if any pith be in thee, if valour reign in thy soul at all, if thou deem thyself fit husband for a king's daughter, wrest the sceptre from her father, retrieve thy lineage by thy valour, balance with courage thy lack of ancestry, requite by bravery thy detriment of blood. Power won by daring is more prosperous ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... feelers of this ligneous serpent had twisted round the larger boughs, and blended their broad leaves with those of the tree, so that it looked like two trees grafted into one; but, as Aaron Bang said, in a very few years the cedar would entirely disappear, its growth being impeded, its pith extracted, and its core rotted, by the baleful embraces of the wild fig, of "this Scotchman hugging the Creole." After we had fairly shaken into our places, there was every promise of a very pleasant ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... superstitious populations about. At midnight on the Hallow-Eve, dark smiths would repair thither, to cut a twig of the Zisca Oak: twig of it put, at the right moment, under your stithy, insures good luck, lends pith to arm and heart, which is already good luck. So that a Bishop of those parts, being of some culture, had to cut it down, above a hundred years ago,—and build some Chapel in its stead; no Oak there now, but an orthodox Inscription, not ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... sometimes eaten by children and has been willfully taken for the purpose of suicide. It is a powerful irritant. The first thing to be done is to give freely of magnesia and water; then to give mucilaginous drinks as flaxseed tea, gum water or sassafras pith and water; and lastly to administer finely powdered bone-charcoal, either in pill ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens
... will have been enlivened by a considerable to and fro of pleasure and business. He will have encountered many varieties of whites,—sailors, merchants, clerks, priests, Protestant missionaries in their pith helmets, and the nondescript hangers-on of any island beach. And the sailors are sometimes in considerable force; but not the residents. He will think at times there are more signboards than men to own them. It may chance it ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... however, before the discovery of the electro-magnet (about 1800), or even the Galvanic battery, and it was seriously proposed to have as many wires as there were letters; each wire to have a frictional battery for generating electricity at one end of the circuit, and a pith-ball electroscope at the other. The modern reader may smile at the idea of the hurried sender of a message taking a piece of cat-skin, or his silk handkerchief, and rubbing up the successive letter-balls of glass or sulphur until he had spelled out his telegram. Later a man named Dyer, of New ...
— Steam Steel and Electricity • James W. Steele
... various nations, and all volunteers; Not fighting for their country or its crown, But wishing to be one day brigadiers; Also to have the sacking of a town;— A pleasant thing to young men at their years. 'Mongst them were several Englishmen of pith, Sixteen called Thomson, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... man. This is the very pith and marrow of the Old Testament and of the New; which gradually unfolds itself, from the very first chapter of Genesis to the last of Revelation,—that man is made in the likeness of God; and that therefore God can speak to him, and he can understand ...
— The Water of Life and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... strove to cheer The prince with counsel wise and clear. Who, prompt to seize the pith of all, Let not that wisdom idly fall. With vigorous effort he restrained The passion in his breast that reigned, And leaning on his bow for rest His brother Lakshman thus addressed: "How shall we labour now, reflect; Whither ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... the discontented fir-tree was the first to fall. As the axe cut through the stem, and divided the pith, the tree fell with a groan to the earth, conscious of pain and faintness, and forgetting all its anticipations of happiness, in sorrow at leaving its home in the forest. It knew that it should never again see its dear old companions, the trees, nor the little bushes and many-colored ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... paper. 'It's a bit of paper from the tenants, sir,' he said. A queer bit of paper it was to look at—ruled paper, with a composition written upon it which might have been the work of a village schoolmaster. It was neither signed nor addressed! The pith of it was in these words,—'in consequence of the manner in which we have been harassed, our cattle driven throughout the country, and our crops not sown, we shall be unable to pay the half-year's rent due in March, in addition to the reduction already claimed!' I own I rather lost my temper ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (2 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert
... the tale, That drew, the Student said, its pith And marrow from the ancient myth Of some one with an iron flail; Or that portentous Man of Brass Hephaestus made in days of yore, Who stalked about the Cretan shore, And saw the ships appear and pass, And threw stones at the Argonauts, Being filled with indiscriminate ire That tangled and perplexed ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... under surface. Specially characteristic of Egypt, though not altogether peculiar to it, were the papyrus and the lotus—the Cyperus papyrus and Nymphaea lotus of botanists. The papyrus was a tall smooth reed, with a large triangular stalk containing a delicate pith, out of which the Egyptians manufactured their paper. The fabric was excellent, as is shown by its continuance to the present day, and by the fact that the Greeks and Romans, after long trial, preferred ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson
... to the very pith of the endeavour: The child is ready to change—that is the whole story. The child is fluid, volatile, receptive to reason. In all our world-life there is nothing so ostentatiously or calamitously ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... a zone of fire and steel. Her villas and homesteads flamed or smoked; her orchards flared heavenward in a torrent of sparks or stood black sapless trunks charred to their inmost pith; the promise of her harvests lay as grey ashes over the land. But her ramparts, though breached in places, were yet manned by her sons, and their assailants recoiled pierced by the shafts or stunned by the catapults of the defence. Kaiser Frederick ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... provincialism, we can detect that mysterious quality which distinguishes the good letter-writer. She writes to please two people—her correspondent and herself; she has no need, therefore, to canvass general truths, but can afford to be personal and charming. Her artful wit gives pith and moment to the most trivial enterprises, and turns domestic projects into adventures of high romance. She never makes great things small by declamation; she prefers to make small things great by insinuation. ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... the honours are all mine; Well, I would trade the pack For one sweet year in which to shine Again as 'Mrs. Jack.' That gave to life a core, a pith, Not ...
— Poems of Optimism • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... If a small pith ball is suspended from a non-conducting support, it forms a simple and ready means of testing the electricity in a stone. According to whether the ball is repelled or attracted, so is the electricity in the stone made evident, though the electroscope gives the better results. By ...
— The Chemistry, Properties and Tests of Precious Stones • John Mastin
... which the essence of a conversation is extracted, and the whole scene indicated by a few telling touches. We are tempted to fancy that we have heard the very thing, and rashly infer that Boswell was simply the mechanical transmitter of the good things uttered. Any one who will try to put down the pith of a brilliant conversation within the same space, may soon satisfy himself of the absurdity of such an hypothesis, and will learn to appreciate Boswell's powers not only of memory but artistic representation. Such a feat implies not only admirable quickness of appreciation, but ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... marvelous episcopal lettering used in the old house of Le Clere, he had Baudelaire's works printed in a large format recalling that of ancient missals, on a very light and spongy Japan paper, soft as elder pith and imperceptibly tinted with a light rose hue through its milky white. This edition, limited to one copy, printed with a velvety black Chinese ink, had been covered outside and then recovered within with a wonderful genuine sow skin, chosen among a thousand, the ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... But, lord Christ, when that it rememb'reth me Upon my youth, and on my jollity, It tickleth me about mine hearte-root; Unto this day it doth mine hearte boot,* *good That I have had my world as in my time. But age, alas! that all will envenime,* *poison, embitter Hath me bereft my beauty and my pith:* *vigour Let go; farewell; the devil go therewith. The flour is gon, there is no more to tell, The bran, as I best may, now must I sell. But yet to be right merry will I fand.* *try Now forth to tell you of my fourth husband, I say, I in my heart had great despite, That he of any other had delight; ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... ... Tuned, from Bocafoli's stark-naked psalms, To Plara's sonnets spoilt by toying with, 'As knops that stud some almug to the pith 'Pricked for gum, wry thence, and crinkled worse 'Than pursed eyelids of a river-horse 'Sunning himself o' the slime when whirrs the breeze— Gad-fly, ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... all a man says. "Condense as often as possible" is the interviewer's watchword,—"cut to the bone," as the reporters express it. Much of what a man says in conversation is prolix. In that part of the interview that is dull or wordy, give the pith of what is said in one or two brief sentences, then fall into direct quotation again when his words become interesting. As a rule, however, it is well as far as possible to quote his exact language all through the interview, since the interest ...
— News Writing - The Gathering , Handling and Writing of News Stories • M. Lyle Spencer
... reproduced the least reprehensible in his "Ad Censuram Scriptorum Veterum Prologomena." From the manner in which he has been replied to by scholars all over Europe, especially in Holland, France and Germany, conspicuous among whom for pith of argument stand Basnage, Leclerc, Lacroze, Ittig and Bierling, nobody at the present day considers that what he said about the monuments of antiquity is worthy of the slightest attention, though everybody acknowledges his wonderful memory, sagacity, ingenuity, ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... as evening closed, was one of calm repose, and, I may say, of peace. The cocoa-nut, the betel, the sago, and the gno or gomati, are the four favorite palms of the Dyaks. In their simple mode of life, these four trees supply them many necessaries and luxuries. The sago furnishes food; and after the pith has been extracted, the outer part forms a rough covering for the rougher floor, on which the farmer sleeps. The leaf of the sago is preferable for the roofing of houses to the nibong. The gomati, or ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... he has had nothing but papyrus-pith, and lotus-bread, and now he brings me the cake which grandmother ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Douglass extracts are given from letters of distinguished contemporaries who knew the orator. Colonel T.W. Higginson writes thus: "I have hardly heard his equal, in grasp upon an audience, in dramatic presentation, in striking at the pith of an ethical question, and in single [signal] illustrations and examples." Another writes, in reference to the impromptu speech delivered at the meeting at Rochester on the death of Lincoln: "I have heard Webster ...
— Frederick Douglass - A Biography • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... identified me as Merton Ware, and we all three started in business together as the Ford Boot and Shoe Manufacturing Company at Lynn in Massachusetts. Incidentally, we've done all right. Heaps more, of course, but that's the pith of it. As for the body that was fished out of the canal, if you make enquiries, you'll find there was a tramp missing, a ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... grow less. He had a keen instinct for reality, and perhaps he found little in books that satisfied him. For poetry and philosophy he had small aptitude, and in science he had no training. What books he read he seemed to digest and get the pith of. Once, made suddenly conscious by defeat of his lack of book-culture, he took up Euclid's geometry, and resolutely studied and re-studied it. Doubtless that helped him in the close logic which often characterized his ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... to bring out the very pith of his story in so abrupt a manner. He wished to have the work over, to feel, that as regarded Herbert it was done,—but his heart failed him ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... called because of its resemblance to a mighty loaf of bread, became a mockery to the hungry people cowering in its shelter. Bread! Rosa Varona could not remember when she had last tasted such a luxury. Raw cane, cocoanuts, the tasteless fruita bomba, roots, the pith from palm tops, these were her articles of diet, and she did not thrive upon them. She was always more or less hungry. She was ragged, too, and she shivered miserably through the long, chill nights. Rosa could measure the ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... Apple Cake, and bake in two layers. For the filling, take two good-sized, juicy oranges. Flavor two tablespoonfuls of sugar by rubbing it over the skin of the oranges, then peel, remove the white rind, and cut into small pieces, discarding the seeds and the central pith. Put the orange pulp in a china bowl, and set in a dish of boiling water. When it is hot, stir in a heaping teaspoonful of cornstarch which has been braided smooth in two spoonfuls of water. Stir constantly ...
— Science in the Kitchen. • Mrs. E. E. Kellogg
... aesthetical and critical tone of the journals, a sort of half culture finds its way into the masses; but to productive talent it is a noxious mist, a dropping poison, which destroys the tree of creative power, from the ornamental green leaves, to the deepest pith ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... thus providing a weapon for use at close quarters. The dart is made from a sliver of bamboo, or from a palm-frond, scraped to the size of a steel knitting-needle. One end of the dart is imbedded in a cork-shaped piece of pith which fits the hole in the sumpitan as a cartridge fits the bore of a rifle; the other end, which is of needle-sharpness, is smeared with a paste made from the milky sap of the upas tree dissolved in a juice extracted from the root of the tuba. With the possible exception ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... and west, But two cannot go abreast, Cannot travel in it two: Yonder masterful cuckoo Crowds every egg out of the nest, Quick or dead, except its own; A spell is laid on sod and stone, Night and Day were tampered with, Every quality and pith Surcharged and sultry with a power That works its will on age ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... the quintessence of things, their last concentrated, intensified meanings, for the pith and marrow of men and events, and not for their body and bulk. He wanted the ottar of roses and not a rose garden, the diamond and not a mountain of carbon. This bent gives a peculiar beauty and stimulus to his writings, while at the same time it makes the reader ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... greatly to the amount of light emitted. It was a logical step to try to reproduce this condition by artificial means. As a consequence rushes were cut and soaked in water. They were then peeled, leaving lengths of pith partially supported by threads of the skin which were not stripped off. These sticks of pith were placed in the sun to bleach and to dry, and after they were thoroughly dry they were dipped in scalding grease, which was saved from cooking operations or was otherwise acquired ...
— Artificial Light - Its Influence upon Civilization • M. Luckiesh
... medical students the value of power and promptitude in combination, for their professional purposes; the uses to them of nearness of the {Nous}, and of happy guessing; and how you may see the sense, and neatness, and pith of that excellent thinker, as well as best of all story-tellers, Miss Austen, when she says in Emma, "Depend upon it, a lucky guess is never merely luck, there is always some talent in it." Talent here denoting intelligence and will in action. In all sciences except those ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... men could not catch a sufficient number in six months. And, if caught, how could they be preserved, together with the original stock of insects necessary to supply the world after the deluge? Some insects eat only bark; others, resinous secretions, the pith, solid wood, leaves, sap in the veins, as the aphid, flowers, pollen, and honey. Wood, bark, resin, and honey might have been supplied; but how could green leaves, sap, flowers and pollen, be furnished ...
— The Deluge in the Light of Modern Science - A Discourse • William Denton
... the electric telegraph; first, that in which frictional electricity has been proposed to produce sparks and motion of pith balls at a distance. ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - Invention and Discovery • Various
... said Charles Larkyns, "that the pith of it, like a lady's letter, lies in the postscript ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... beginner should sell 10c booklets or pamphlets, and elsewhere in this volume he will find two speeches that will show him how to do it. At a street meeting he need not make these speeches in detail, but just give the pith of them. ...
— The Art of Lecturing - Revised Edition • Arthur M. (Arthur Morrow) Lewis
... Hamlet, which, in these days, the very mention of his name suggests. Little remains to be said of that undying play, whose pith and meaning escaped the sturdy English critics, until Coleridge discovered it by looking into his own soul, and those all-searching Germans pierced to the centre of a disposition quite in keeping with their national character. A score of lights have since brought out every ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... the mouth of the Liuche, which is very wide; the river oozes out through a forest of eschinomenae (pith tree). This was a rendezvous agreed upon between shore and lake parties, that the canoes might all cross to the other side, distant a mile and a half. The mouth of the Liuche forms the Bay of Ukaranga, so named because on the other side, whither we were about to cross our party, was ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... mak' a belted knight, A marquis, duke, an' a' that; But an honest man's aboon his might, Guid faith he mauna fa' that! For a' that, an' a' that, Their dignities, and a' that, The pith o sense an' pride o' worth, Are higher rank ...
— English Songs and Ballads • Various
... which these Indians use is an ingeniously contrived weapon. It is made from a species of palm-tree. When an Indian wants one, he goes into the woods and selects a tree with a long slender stem of less than an inch in diameter; he extracts the pith out of this, and then cuts another stem, so much larger than the first that he can push the small tube into the bore of the large one,—thus the slight bend in one is counteracted by the other, and a perfectly straight pipe is formed. ...
— Martin Rattler • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... spare thy crimes; and Wit, who never once Forgave a brother, shall forgive a dunce. But should thy soul, form'd in some luckless hour, Vile interest scorn, nor madly grasp at power; 30 Should love of fame, in every noble mind A brave disease, with love of virtue join'd, Spur thee to deeds of pith, where courage, tried In Reason's court, is amply justified: Or, fond of knowledge, and averse to strife, Shouldst thou prefer the calmer walk of life; Shouldst thou, by pale and sickly study led, Pursue coy ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... long speech he devotes to that important question, which the Enquirer says is the real question, and which many of your speakers doubtless here say is the real question, precisely eleven lines—one short paragraph. And the pith of that paragraph is contained in these two lines: "I am sorry that what I have to say on that subject for publication I must reserve for some ...
— The Life, Public Services and Select Speeches of Rutherford B. Hayes • James Quay Howard
... accuracy. He possessed only that profound knowledge of human nature, that moulding humour and quick sense of dialogue, that live, human, and local interest in matters antiquarian, that statesmanlike insight into the pith and marrow of the historic past, which makes one of Scott's historical novels what it is—the envy of artists, the delight of young and old, the despair of formal historians. Veranilda is without a doubt ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... things they like best, around their huts, instead of feeling obliged to get it from others, and they evidently shared his dislike to torturing the earth with iron, for before my advent and sojourn amongst them they simply burnt the pith of the trees and plants they felled and into the bed formed by the ashes they cast indiscriminately bulb and grain, covering up both with their feet or with a piece of wood, and afterwards they took no more care ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... before you can come. But you have no idea of the heat here! I tried to wear my great beauty Indian shawl at a pic-nic. I kept myself up with proverbs as long as I could; "Pride must abide,"—and such wholesome pieces of pith; but it was of no use. I was like mamma's little dog Tiny with an elephant's trappings on; smothered, hidden, killed with my finery; so I made it into a capital carpet for us all to sit down upon. Here's this boy of mine, Margaret,—if you don't pack up your things ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... a stick to feed the chimney rent, Where scanty pith ill fills the narrow sheath, The vapour, in its little channel pent, Struggles, tormented by the fire beneath; And, till its prisoned fury find a vent, Is heard to hiss and bubble, sing and seethe: So the offended myrtle inly pined, Groaned, ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... harvest that is coming in this blessed year!" In the centre of the table, its browned crust slashed with a cross, was the great loaf of Christmas bread, pan Calendau; on which was a bunch of holly tied with the white pith of rushes—the "marrow" of the rush, that is held to be an emblem of strength. Old Jan, the master of the house, cut the loaf into as many portions as there were persons present; with one double-portion over to be given to some poor one in charity—"the ...
— The Christmas Kalends of Provence - And Some Other Provencal Festivals • Thomas A. Janvier
... came out in pith helmets the corporation sand cart spreads sand in front of you, and you are supposed to be in Egypt. To accomplish The Great Practical Joke, Troops are trained to exercise their imagination. They begin by being soldiers in blue, and imaginary uniforms. Then they ...
— Letters from France • Isaac Alexander Mack
... must somehow have laid hold of the pith of the matter, for, many years afterwards, when Dean Mansel's Bampton Lectures were published, it seemed to me I already knew all that this eminently agnostic thinker had to ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... that was in fashion then, like a grown-up young lady, and I think Rupert was pleased, though she looked rather funny and very red. And so Henrietta nursed him altogether, and used to read battles to him as he lay on the sofa, and Rupert made plans of the battles on cardboard, and moved bits of pith out of the elder-tree about for the troops, and showed Henrietta how if he had had the moving of them really, and had done it quite differently to the way the generals did, the other side would have won ...
— A Great Emergency and Other Tales - A Great Emergency; A Very Ill-Tempered Family; Our Field; Madam Liberality • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... rule, by means of what are known as "leading motives." These form the basis of all Wagner's reforms. A leading motive is simply a musical phrase suggestive of a dramatic idea. Wagner's motives are marvellous in their descriptive and soul-stirring power. They seem to indicate not only the pith, but the utmost depths of the heart of the ideas which they represent. It is this that makes Wagner so very like Shakespeare. All can appreciate him, yet he is above all criticism, universal ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... pith in him! I like him better than if he came like a spaniel to my foot. But I will say no more till I fully have my brother's consent. No one knows what crooks there may be ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... perfection of pith and poetry. What could be more terse? Not a word to spare, and yet everything fully expressed. Rhyme and rhythm faultless. It was a delightful poet who made those verses. As for the beer itself—that, I think, must have been ...
— The Story of a Bad Boy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... the air, and there are scarcely any beetles; up here there is deer and turkey, and the gray wolf; jays and magpies flutter through the thickets, and the horned lizard is met with occasionally. The pith of the pine-trees attracts a large species of buprestis, and lepidopterae are quite common. But there is not the least vestige of former human dwellings, so far as I could see: the top of the mesa of Pecos is, and was, a wilderness. It may have been the hunting-grounds of the tribe even in winter, ...
— Historical Introduction to Studies Among the Sedentary Indians of New Mexico; Report on the Ruins of the Pueblo of Pecos • Adolphus Bandelier
... the leading professional men of Ireland, the most learned scholars of her great University, her great soldiers, White, Wolseley, Roberts, her greatest living authors, the whole of her Protestant clergy of whatever sect, with their congregations, the pith and marrow of everything that is strong, stable, cultured, enlightened, prescient, must be pronounced unpatriotic—if Nationalism is Patriotism. Contrary to all human experience and to the course and constitution ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... rash to pronounce a decided opinion upon the much disputed question, whether, in addition to their Constitutions and Declarations, the Jesuits were provided with an esoteric code of rules known as Monita Secreta.[169] The existence of such a manual, which was supposed to contain the very pith of Jesuitical policy, has been confidently asserted and no less confidently denied. In the absence of direct evidence, it may be worth quoting two passages from Sarpi's Letters, which prove that this keen-sighted observer believed the Society to be governed in its practice ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... prepared from the pith of the Sago Palm, which grows naturally in various parts of Africa and the Indies. The pith, which is even eatable in its natural state, is taken from the trunk of the tree, and thrown into a vessel placed over a horse-hair sieve; water is then thrown over the mass, and the finer parts ...
— A Catechism of Familiar Things; Their History, and the Events Which Led to Their Discovery • Benziger Brothers
... any breath in him I will tell him," Halfman affirmed. "Your honor over-refines your pleasant purpose. The pith is that he be killed. Remember ...
— The Lady of Loyalty House - A Novel • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... moment. 'Stocks and stones!' I says. 'You come inside,' I says, 'and I'll punch your blooming head.' There was a kind of silence and more jabbering, and in he came, Bible in hand, after the manner of them—a little sandy chap in specks and a pith helmet. I flatter myself that me sitting there in the shadows, with my copper head and my big goggles, struck him a bit of a heap at first. 'Well,' I says, 'how's the trade in calico?' for ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... ennoble every heart by moral aspirations, to indoctrinate every individual with an unequivocal theory of life, to inspire every member of the nation with lofty ideals. Their work did not fail to leave its traces. Slowly but deeply idealism entered into the very pith and marrow of the national consciousness. This consciousness gained in strength and amplitude century by century, showing itself particularly in the latter part of the first period, after the crisis known as "the Babylonian Exile." ...
— Jewish History • S. M. Dubnow
... four under-ripe oranges of all rind and pith, slice them into a dish, season with a little cayenne pepper, add the rind of one minced, the juice of one lemon and a tablespoonful of oil if desired; decorate ...
— The Cooking Manual of Practical Directions for Economical Every-Day Cookery • Juliet Corson
... hope young women will not make such mistakes as these young men have done, who might have been supposed to know something, if they had only kept still. (Laughter). If these papers, to which I have referred, were all in the hands of women, and so destitute of editorial pith and point as they now are, I should counsel against any further efforts for the elevation of the sex, believing the case to be hopeless. (Applause). If I mistake not, women have a peculiar fitness for trade. Mrs. Dall says, ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... her right hand on the pommel and resigned her left foot; Mr. Talboys put his hand under that foot and heaved her smoothly into the saddle. "That is clever," thought simple David; "that chap has got more pith in his arm than one would think." They cantered away, and left him looking sadly after them. It seemed so hard that another man should have her sweet foot in his hand, should lift her whole glorious person, and smooth her sacred dress, and he stand by helpless; and then ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... no better proof of it than his masculine faculty of fecundating other minds. Search for his eloquence in his books and you will perchance miss it, but meanwhile you will find that it has kindled all your thoughts. For choice and pith of language he belongs to a better age than ours, and might rub shoulders with Fuller and Browne,—though he does use that abominable word, reliable. His eye for a fine, telling phrase that will carry true is like that of a backwoodsman for a rifle; ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... 5th, by letter. Two days he waited for an answer, but received none; on the evening of the 7th, he himself called on the Count, and a long discussion took place. Bismarck adopted a tone of indignation: "The whole affair makes us doubt Napoleon and threatens to destroy our confidence." The pith of it was contained in the last words: "Do you ask this from us under threat of war?" said Bismarck. "Yes," said Benedetti. "Then it will be war." Benedetti asked to have an interview with the King; it was granted, and he received ...
— Bismarck and the Foundation of the German Empire • James Wycliffe Headlam
... taking place at the Roulette table—a goodly crop of florins, with here and there a speck of gold shining amongst the silver harvest, is being sown over the field of the cloth of green, soon to be reaped by the croupier's sickle, and the pith ball is being dropped into the revolving basin that is partitioned off into so many tiny black and red niches. For the next twelve hours the processes in question are carried on swiftly and steadily, without variation or loss of time; relays of croupiers are laid on, who unobtrusively ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... our own day he has himself witnessed, and which might perhaps have given rise to some such statement as that of the Arab travellers, if it be not indeed a relic, in a mitigated form, of the very practice they assert to have prevailed. After an execution at Peking certain large pith balls are steeped in the blood, and under the name of blood-bread are sold as a medicine for consumption. It is only to the blood of decapitated criminals that any such healing power is attributed. It has been asserted in the annals of the Propagation de la Foi that the Chinese ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... was Thomas Packer, the same official who, twenty-nine years later, won unenviable notoriety at the hanging of Ruth Blay. The circumstances are set forth by the late Albert Laighton in a spirited ballad, which is too long to quote in full. The following stanzas, however, give the pith of the story— ...
— An Old Town By The Sea • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... wanting in the leaves known to belong to some Calamites. Figures 462 and 463 represent leaves of Annularia and Sphenophyllum, common in the coal, and believed by Mr. Carruthers to be leaves of Calamites. Dr. Williamson, who has carefully studied the Calamites, thinks that they had a fistular pith, exogenous woody stem, and thick smooth bark, which last having always disappeared, leaves a fluted stem, as ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... Genovese Columbus to discover America!" That task was clearly England's! "And now there being nothing great left to be done," the sole work Frobisher finds worth attempting is the discovery of the northwest passage to Cathay. Upon this he spends the pith of his manhood year by year, and the result of all the labours of this sea-Hercules, well! it is perhaps to be sought in those dim beings, "half-man, half-fish," whom he brings back from some voyage, ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... a bad kick at him, because he could bear to see nothing happy. The pony had sense enough to reply, weary as he was, with a stronger kick, which took Master Lancelot in the knee, and discouraged him for any further contest. Bully as he was, the boy had too much of ancient Yordas pith in him to howl, or cry, or even whimper, but sat down on a little ridge to nurse his poor knee, and meditate revenge against the animal with hoofs. Presently pain and wrath combined became too much for the weakness of his frame, and he fell back and lay upon the hard ground ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... Alec had described to her so minutely the changing scene that she was able to bring it vividly before her eyes. She saw him come out of his tent, in heavy boots, buckling on his belt. He wore knee-breeches and a pith helmet, and he was more bronzed than when she had bidden him farewell. He gave the order to the headman of the caravan to take up the loads. At the word there was a rush from all parts of the camp; each porter seized his load, carrying it off to lash on his mat and his cooking-pot, and then, sitting ...
— The Explorer • W. Somerset Maugham
... bavins that kindle forthwith; Billets that blaze substantial and slow; Pine-stump split deftly, dry as pith; 30 Larch-heart that chars to a chalk-white glow: They up they hoist me John in a chafe, Sling him fast like a hog to scorch, Spit in his face, then leap back safe, Sing "Laudes" and ...
— Dramatic Romances • Robert Browning
... an' fetch't, and fliskit, But thy auld tail thou wad hae whiskit, An spread abreed thy weel-fill'd brisket, Wi' pith an' pow'r, Till spritty knowes wad rair't and riskit, ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... gave him a satisfaction altogether new. It may be supposed that he set some value on the opinions of two travellers who could compare his apparatus with those constructed in Europe. I had brought with me electrometers mounted with straw, pith-balls, and gold-leaf; also a small Leyden jar which could be charged by friction according to the method of Ingenhousz, and which served for my physiological experiments. Senor del Pozo could not contain his joy on seeing for the first time instruments ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt
... the three hastened in a cab to the station, stopping on the way to buy half a case each of grapefruit and oranges. Aboard the train Blake was at once set to eating grapefruit and chewing the bitter pith to allay the burning of his ...
— Out of the Primitive • Robert Ames Bennet
... studies; and if I can bring it to a perfection before I die, shall reckon I have well employed the poor remains of an unfortunate life. This indeed is more than I can justly expect from a quill worn to the pith in the service of the State, in pros and cons upon Popish Plots, and Meal Tubs, and Exclusion Bills, and Passive Obedience, and Addresses of Lives and Fortunes; and Prerogative, and Property, and Liberty of Conscience, and Letters to a Friend: from an ...
— A Tale of a Tub • Jonathan Swift
... passages have been sealed up from time immemorial, and subjected to no invasion by man or beast, or to any change of air or temperature. And secondly, that the artists obtained light from melted fat in stone bowls on the floor, in which was a wick of pith; and such lamps would hardly discolour ceiling or walls. Of the genuineness of these paintings and sculptures there can be no question, from the fact that some are partly glazed over and some half ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... literary women prefer the epigrammatic form in sentences, crisp and laconic; short sayings full of pith, of which ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... thought to save their children's bread, And then return to battle with light hearts. For, though their hard necessities o'erpoised Their duty for the moment, these are men. Who draw their pith from loyal roots, their sires, Dug up by revolution, and cast out To hovel in the bitter wilderness, And wring, with many a tussle, from the wolf Those very ...
— Tecumseh: A Drama • Charles Mair
... insensible degrees into the second place. Mr. Greg's temperament, moreover, was too sanguine in practical affairs, as Cobden's was; and we might almost gather from his writings that he had not that faculty of sustained attention to details which is the pith and marrow of success in such a business as his. At last the crash came in 1850. Three years before this the health of his brother Samuel had broken down, and William Greg added the management of his affairs to his own. The strain was too great, and a long ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 7: A Sketch • John Morley
... opened his mouth, and gave the young man a scientific lecture on mining, the pith ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... love," says a writer, "is like gaming to get rich. You are liable, in the hazard, to lose all you carry to the game." They, who join hands, with cold hearts, often cease even to respect one another. They become, in truth, like the pith-ball, in its approach to the electrified cylinder, the more fiercely repelled, the nearer the contact. If you do not love the individual you wed, above all his sex; if nothing more than fancy and friendship draw you toward him, then your marriage will be indeed a "lottery," and yours may ...
— The Young Maiden • A. B. (Artemas Bowers) Muzzey
... thrown or trampled down, and the little army within began to move slowly out on to the plain. Once clear of the camp they halted, and the slant rays of the sun struck flashes from bayonet and from gun-barrel as the ranks closed up until the big pith helmets joined into a single long white ribbon. Two streaks of scarlet glowed on either side of the square, but elsewhere the fringe of fighting-men was of the dull yellow khaki tint which hardly shows against the desert sand. Inside their ...
— The Green Flag • Arthur Conan Doyle
... split open later on. With the bones of the sheep's head, it will not make so much difference. But we couldn't get the horns off yet awhile—they'll have to dry out before they will slip from the pith, and the best way is not to take them off at all. If we keep on scraping and salting we'll keep ...
— The Young Alaskans on the Trail • Emerson Hough
... deck, he, Doe, and I, and watched the new arrivals. Troop-trains were rolling right up to the quay and disgorging hundreds of men, spruce in their tropical kit of new yellow drill and pith helmets. Unattached officers arrived singly or in pairs; in carriages or on foot. Many of them were doctors, who were being drafted to the East in large numbers. A still greater proportion consisted of young Second Lieutenants, who, like ourselves, were ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... Alister; "you get astride my shoulders, and I'll carry you home. I believe you're hungry, and that takes the pith out of you!—Come," he went on, perceiving some sign of reluctance in the youth, "you'll break down if you walk much farther!—Here, Ian! you take the bag; you can manage that and ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... and Unsuitable Organs, such Nice and Subtile Differences as those of the forms of Asperity, that belong to differing Colours, to receive whose Languid and Delicate Impressions by the Intervention of Light, Nature seems to have appointed and contexed into the Retina the tender and delicate Pith of the Optick Nerve. Wherefore I confess, I propos'd divers Scruples, and particularly whether the Doctor had taken care to bind a Napkin or Hankerchief over his Eyes so carefully, as to be sure he could make no use of his Sight, though he had but Counterfeited the want of it, to which ...
— Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours (1664) • Robert Boyle
... always facing Fuji, they began singing a weird chant. When the motors drew nearer the tourists saw that each man wore a huge mushroom hat made of lightest pith and from his neck hung a piece of matting suspended ...
— The Motor Maids in Fair Japan • Katherine Stokes
... by the shore of the sea he found a reed, or, as some say, a tall stalk of fennel, growing; and when he had broken it off he saw that its hollow center was filled with a dry, soft pith which would burn slowly and keep on fire a long time. He took the long stalk in his hands, and started with it towards the dwelling of the sun ...
— Old Greek Stories • James Baldwin
... Edgar, and I discussed the matter in detail, and finally completed certain arrangements that appeared to us to promise a fairly satisfactory solution of the whole difficulty. On the following day I found an opportunity to communicate to Joe the pith of these arrangements—which were to be put into operation as soon as ever the treasure, if found, should be safely placed on board the barque—and he cheerfully undertook to maintain a constant watch for my signals, and to be ...
— The Cruise of the "Esmeralda" • Harry Collingwood
... uniform stamp are the angels, sexless youths for ever charming. They are of matchless purity, of a more than human innocence in their blue and rose-pink and green robes sprigged with gold, with their yellow or red hair, at once aerial and heavy, their chastely downcast eyes, and flesh as white as pith. Grave, but in ecstasy, they play on the harp or the theorbo, on the Viol d'Amore or the rebeck, singing the eternal glory of the ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... chip off the yellow rinds, taking care that none of the white underlying pith is taken, as that would make the punch bitter, whereas the yellow portion of the rinds is that in which the flavor resides and in which the cells are placed containing the essential oil. Put this yellow rind into a punch bowl, add to it two pounds ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 315, January 14, 1882 • Various
... expressions; for a swift analysis, which drives directly to the heart of the man, instantly detects the impostor behind the braggart, and curtly declares him to lack "the true grit." The word is so close to the thing it names, has so much pith and point, is so tart on the tongue, and so stings the ear with its meaning, that foreigners ignorant of the language might at once feel its significance by its griding utterance as it is shot impatiently through ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... fitting ode, Sir! Could Pindar fire the athletic lyre, A truant from his bright abode, Sir, How would he chant the Chief heroic, The trundler's hope become zeroic, The drives from liberal shoulders poured, The changing history of the Board! Long may the champion's pith be scored In figures leaping on ...
— More Cricket Songs • Norman Gale
... should be cut green and dried. They should be uniform in length—not more than six inches—and should show the bark at one side. The side showing the bark should be two inches wide at most, six inches long, and running in a V-shaped, radial section toward the pith. A tangential section also shows well the annual layers. A piece of slab as cut lengthwise off a round stick is tangential. Also visit wood-working factories for specimens of rare or foreign woods. In securing these specimens, care should be taken ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Nature Study • Ontario Ministry of Education
... attract all light bodies. This gutta percha when rubbed with a cat's skin attracts these bits of paper, and this pith ball, and this copper ball; it moves this long lath balanced on its center, and deflects this vertical jet of water ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 488, May 9, 1885 • Various
... palmiste, is like raw turnip-shavings and tastes like green almonds; is very delicate and good. Costs the life of a palm tree 12 to 20 years old—for it is the pith. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... and I went to the river to wash our hair with the pith of the wild oranges. We sat on the smooth stones near the water, and had just begun to beat the oranges with pieces of wood to soften them, when we saw a man come down the bank and enter a deep pool further up ...
— A Memory Of The Southern Seas - 1904 • Louis Becke
... make a belted knight, A marquis, duke and a' that, But an honest man's aboon his might Gude faith he mauna fa' that! For a' that and a' that, Their dignities and a' that, The pith o' sense and pride o' worth Are higher ranks ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... crowds, talking, laughing, and delightedly commenting upon the afternoon's enjoyment, the brief remarks exchanged by two Americans who were sauntering on immediately in front of Heliobas and Alwyn being perhaps the very pith and essence of the universal opinion concerning the great artist ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... furnished to Champollion (1810) and to Young the clew to the deciphering of the Egyptian writing, and thus the key to the sense of the monumental inscriptions. The Egyptian manuscripts were made of the pith of the byblus plant, cut into strips. These were laid side by side horizontally, with another layer of strips across them; the two layers being united by paste, and subjected to a heavy pressure. The Egyptians wrote with a reed, using black ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... history of his life. What experience has called forth such a marvelous character? Eumaeus now gives his fateful story. The Phoenician background is again employed, with its commerce in merchandise, with its stealing and selling of free, high-born people into slavery, with its navigation. The pith of the story is, a Phoenician female slave, who had been stolen and bought by the king of the country, plays false to her master, steals his child and what valuables she can carry off, and escapes on ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... carried off with him in that ship, had long ceased to occupy a thought in the public mind. Throughout the whole of that eventful period, the attention of all Europe had been absorbed in the contemplation of 'enterprises of great pith and moment,'—of the revolutions of empires—the bustle and business of warlike preparations—the movements of hostile armies—battles by sea and land, and of all 'the pomp and circumstance of glorious war.' If the subject of the Bounty was accidentally mentioned, it was merely to express an ...
— The Eventful History Of The Mutiny And Piratical Seizure - Of H.M.S. Bounty: Its Cause And Consequences • Sir John Barrow
... name was not made public, nor was it likely to be. There is no doubt that it was generally known who the author was. In that general knowledge lies the whole pith of the Biblical quotation circulated abroad on the heels of the proclamation: "And the people said unto Saul, shall Jonathan die, who had wrought this great salvation in Israel? God forbid: as the Lord liveth there shall not one hair of his head fall to the ground, for he hath wrought ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. VI; The Drapier's Letters • Jonathan Swift
... this dramatic performance was pronounced in the Massachusetts Assembly, one day in June, 1773, by Mr. John Hancock, who darkly declared that within eight and forty hours a discovery of great pith and moment would be made to the House. On the next day but one, Samuel Adams arose and desired the galleries cleared, as there were matters to lay before the members which the members only had a right to know of. When the galleries were cleared he informed the House that certain letters, written ...
— The Eve of the Revolution - A Chronicle of the Breach with England, Volume 11 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Carl Becker
... is his answer. "I've known a derelict up-end and sift her engines out of herself and flicker round the Lower Lanes for three weeks on her forward tanks only. We'll run no risks. Pith her, George, and look sharp. ...
— With The Night Mail - A Story of 2000 A.D. (Together with extracts from the - comtemporary magazine in which it appeared) • Rudyard Kipling
... an unexpected dainty bit for breakfast As never yet I cook'd; 'tis not Botargo, Fried frogs, potatoes marrow'd, cavear, Carps' tongues, the pith of an English chine of beef, Nor our Italian delicate, oil'd mushrooms, And yet a drawer-on too;[162] and if you show not An appetite, and a strong one, I'll not say To eat it, but devour it, without grace too, (For it will not stay a preface) I am shamed, And ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... day buying a war correspondent's outfit: the camel, the travelling bath, the putties, the pith helmet, the quinine, the sleeping-bag, and the thousand-and-one other necessities of active service. On the Friday his colleagues at the office came down in a body to Southampton to see him off. Little did they ...
— Happy Days • Alan Alexander Milne
... they set downe in manner of an historie the acts and notable exploits of some persons worthie memorie: then in the same fiction, as a second rine and somewhat more fine, as it were nearer to the pith and marrow, they place the Morall sence profitable for the active life of man, approving vertuous actions and condemning the contrarie. Many times also under the selfesame words they comprehend some true understanding of naturall Philosophie, or sometimes of politike government, and now and ...
— Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance - A Study of Rhetorical Terms in English Renaissance Literary Criticism • Donald Lemen Clark
... priest for fasting and prayer And mortification most deserving; And as for preaching beyond compare, He'd exert his powers for three or four hours, With greater pith than Sydney Smith Or the ...
— Ballads • William Makepeace Thackeray
... man, too infirm now to do more than take care of the baby that he holds in his arms, while the baby's mother is earning her three-pence an hour inside. To this ancient we will address all our inquiries; and he is well qualified to answer us, for the poor old fellow has worked away all the pith and marrow of his life in the ...
— Rambles Beyond Railways; - or, Notes in Cornwall taken A-foot • Wilkie Collins
... spiral in direction, the curling will be very great. A hair is composed of three different layers of cell-tissues: a loose, cellulated substance, which occupies its center, and constitutes the medulla, or pith; the fibrous tissue, which incloses the medulla, and forms the chief bulk of the hair; and a thin layer, which envelops this fibrous structure, and forms the smooth surface of the hair. The medulla is absent in the downy hairs, but in the coarser class it is always present, especially in white ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... sen, or 1d., each of which, as it slowly consumes, throws off fiery coruscations, shaped like the most beautiful of snow crystals. I was also tempted by small boxes at 2 sen each, containing what look like little slips of withered pith, but which, on being dropped into water, expand into trees ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... that first solar neighbor was estimated in trillions, not billions, and that our little system, even with its new additions, was a child's handbreadth on the plane of the sky. He had brought along a small book called The Pith of Astronomy—a fascinating little volume—and he read from it about the great tempest of fire in the sun, where the waves of flame roll up two thousand miles high, though the sun itself is such a tiny star in the deeps ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... decapitating it, and suffering the juice to flow. The vinegar was perhaps the same fluid corrupted, or it may have been obtained from the dates. The honey was palm-sugar, likewise procurable from the sap. How the groats were obtained we do not know; but it appears that the pith of the palm was eaten formerly in Babylonia, and was thought to have a very agreeable flavor. Ropes were made from the fibres of the bark; and the wood was employed for building and furniture. It was soft, light and easily worked; but tough, ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 1. (of 7): Chaldaea • George Rawlinson
... lips had loathed Had life been theirs to choose. Beast-like they drain The swollen udder, and where milk was not, They sucked the life-blood forth. From herbs and boughs Dripping with dew, from tender shoots they pressed, Say, from the pith of ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan
... being words, words, words—strung of mouldy sentences, scriptural phrases, foolish exclamations, and such-like: yet when necessary, he showed that he could sufficiently command his style, delivering himself with so much energy, pith, propriety, and strength of expression, that it was commonly said of him under such circumstances, "every word he spoke was a thing." But the strongest indication of his vast abilities was, the extraordinary tact with which he entered into, dissected, and scrutinized the nature of human kind. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. - 582, Saturday, December 22, 1832 • Various
... the whole pith of the matter," said Mr. Esterworth, who was not above the weakness of liking to be the bearer of a piece of gossip. "I'll give you three guesses, and I'll bet you won't ...
— Vera Nevill - Poor Wisdom's Chance • Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron
... a divinity school. To a mind appreciative, like mine, his preaching was a continual course of education and a continual feast. He was copious and polished in style, though disciplined and logical. There was a pith and power of doctrine there that has not been since ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... over that like a bird, never touching it with the tip of a wing. What she brings home is the freshness and brightness of life. She touches everything so daintily, she hits off a character in a sentence, she gives the pith of a dialogue without tediousness, she mimics without vulgarity; her narration sparkles, but it does n't sting. The picture of her day is full of vivacity, and it gives new value and freshness to common things. ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... instance, millimeters. From this section, which measures exactly one hundred millimeters, carefully separate the epidermal structures in strips, and place the strips at once under an inverted glass to prevent drying; next, separate the pith in a single unbroken piece wholly freed from the ligneous tissue. Finally, remeasure the isolated portions, and compare with the original measure of the internode. There will be found an appreciable shortening of the epidermal tissues and ...
— Outlines of Lessons in Botany, Part I; From Seed to Leaf • Jane H. Newell
... exerted himself to the utmost, at last with success, to explain the construction of the fountain. A healthy poplar, seven or eight years old, is taken from its native soil, and a cold iron borer is run up the heart of the trunk from the roots, for six feet or more, by which means the pith is removed, and the trunk is made to assume the character of a pipe. A hole is then bored through from the outside of the trunk, to communicate with the highest point reached by the former operation, ...
— Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland • George Forrest Browne
... cows for an old fellow called Sam Ford; a man so mean you could pull the pith out of a horse-hair and then put his soul inside, ...
— Bob Chester's Grit - From Ranch to Riches • Frank V. Webster
... congratulation kept coming in from all the societies and public bodies in the kingdom, and at every philanthropic function in which any member of royalty took part during the next twelve-month it gave pith to all the speeches and focussed the applause. Its influences extended to every department of public life; it affected politics, trade, public holiday, art, science; it invaded literature, increased ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... pods. Stars discovered by Mr. Herschel. Destruction and resuscitation of all things. 351. 2. Seeds within seeds, and bulbs within bulbs. Picture on the retina of the eye. Concentric strata of the earth. The great seed. 381. 3. The root, pith, lobes, plume, calyx, coral, sap, blood, leaves respire and absorb light. The crocodile in its egg. 409. XI. Opening of the flower. The petals, style, anthers, prolific dust. Transmutation of the silkworm. 441. XII. 1. Leaf-buds changed into flower-buds by wounding the ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... day Werper spent in overhauling his Belgian uniform, removing from it every vestige of evidence that might indicate its military purposes. From a heterogeneous collection of loot, Achmet Zek procured a pith helmet and a European saddle, and from his black slaves and followers a party of porters, askaris and tent boys to make up a modest safari for a big game hunter. At the head of this party Werper ...
— Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... will find that he has only the refuse of working intellects to form his induction on. The devil has got the best long ago. By the neglect of the Church, by her dealing (like the Popish Church and all weak churches) only with women, children, and beggars, the cream and pith of working intellect is almost exclusively self-educated, and, therefore, alas! infidel. If he goes on as he is doing, lecturing on history, poetry, science, and all the things which the workmen crave for, and can only ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... straight piece of the root of a scrub palmetto, which grew in abundance around the wall, he trimmed it with his knife into the desired shape and size. Laying the piece, thus prepared, upon a large stone, he pounded one side of it lustily with a piece of rock. A few minutes sufficed to pound out the pith and leave ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... The pale-faced clerk, accustomed to such documents, glanced over the ambages, the "whereases," the "aforesaids," the rich exuberance of "admors.," "exors.," and "assigns," till he deftly came to the pith of the matter, and then he began to make extracts, a date here and a date there. John Ball watched him all the time, till the door was opened, and old Mr Slow himself appeared ...
— Miss Mackenzie • Anthony Trollope
... peculiar to it. The food often grows in one country, and the sauce in another. The fruits of Portugal are corrected by the products of Barbadoes, and the infusion of a China plant is sweetened with the pith of an Indian cane. The Philippic islands give a flavour to our European bowls. The single dress of a woman of quality is often the product of an hundred climates. The muff and the fan come together from the different ends of the earth. The scarf is sent from the torrid zone, ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock
... till a part melts off. Let them remain one night to cool; then cut off the bottoms, and keep them in a dry, cool place. Cheap lights are made, by dipping rushes in tallow; the rushes being first stripped of nearly the whole of the hard outer covering and the pith alone being retained with just enough of the tough bark ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... old dotard-of-state; senile prudence; fatuous soullessness! The ribanded old dog is paralytic all down one side, and that the side of nobleness. His soul is gone out. Only nature's automatonism keeps him on his legs. As with some old trees, the bark survives the pith, and will still stand stiffly up, though but to rim round punk, so the body of old Polonius ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... sixth kingdom, having the best camphor, which Is sold weight for weight with gold. In that kingdom, they make a kind of meal from great and long trees, as thick as two men are able to fathom. Having taken off the thin bark, the wood within is only about three fingers thick, all the rest being pith, from which the meal is made. This pith is broken to pieces, and stirred among water, the light dross swimming, and being thrown away, while the finer parts settle at the bottom, and is made into paste[14]. I brought ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 1 • Robert Kerr
... is the pith of a species of palm (Cycas circinalis). Its form is that of a small round grain. There are two sorts of sago,—the white and the yellow; but their properties are the same. Sago absorbs the liquid in which it is cooked, becomes transparent ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... Later, his taste for reading seemed to grow less. He had a keen instinct for reality, and perhaps he found little in books that satisfied him. For poetry and philosophy he had small aptitude, and in science he had no training. What books he read he seemed to digest and get the pith of. Once, made suddenly conscious by defeat of his lack of book-culture, he took up Euclid's geometry, and resolutely studied and re-studied it. Doubtless that helped him in the close logic which often characterized his speeches. The strength of his speeches lay in their logic, their close ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... Piccadilly, with much of the same palpitation of heart which Boswell experienced when introduced to Johnson. I was welcomed with both hands, and such kind, and complimentary words, that confusion and fear alike forsook me. When I saw him in Edinburgh, he was in the very pith and flush of life—even in my opinion a thought more fat than bard beseems; when I looked on him now, thirteen years had not passed over him and left no mark behind: his hair was growing thin and grey; the stamp of years and study was on his brow: he told me he ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 470 - Volume XVII, No. 470, Saturday, January 8, 1831 • Various
... punching cows for an old fellow called Sam Ford; a man so mean you could pull the pith out of a horse-hair and then put his soul inside, and ...
— Bob Chester's Grit - From Ranch to Riches • Frank V. Webster
... the conclusions arrived at by Brewster, and sought to explain the source of the silica by studying the composition of different parts of the bamboo. While the ashes of the wood contained 0.0612 of the whole weight of the wood, the pith was found to contain 0.448 per cent., the inner wood much less, and the greatest proportion occurred in the external wood. On these determinations Guibourt founded a theory of the mode of formation of tabasheer based ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 595, May 28, 1887 • Various
... ground the waster weel! Haud him down! Ye haena the pith o' a cat!' were the cries of advice, encouragement, and expostulation from those who were on the bank to the sportsman engaged with the salmon, who stood up to his middle in water, jingling among broken ice, struggling against the force of the fish and the strength of the current, ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... down, and the little army within began to move slowly out on to the plain. Once clear of the camp they halted, and the slant rays of the sun struck flashes from bayonet and from gun-barrel as the ranks closed up until the big pith helmets joined into a single long white ribbon. Two streaks of scarlet glowed on either side of the square, but elsewhere the fringe of fighting-men was of the dull yellow khaki tint which hardly shows against the desert sand. Inside their array was a dense ...
— The Green Flag • Arthur Conan Doyle
... cabin he sent for the boatswain. The proud father had heard of his son's gallantry, and the captain's words had been repeated to him. It would have been difficult to find a finer specimen of the superior class of British seaman, the pith and sinew of the navy, than the boatswain of the "Marlborough" presented, as, still in the prime of manhood, he stood, hat in hand, before his captain. By his manner and appearance he looked indeed well fitted for the higher ranks of his profession, but it was his lot to be a boatswain, ...
— The Grateful Indian - And other Stories • W.H.G. Kingston
... of these emancipated citizens of the world had permitted the dissolvent philosophy of the century to enter the very pith and fiber of their mental quality. For the rich and the well-born it was rather an imported fashion, an attractive drapery laid over the surface of minds that were conventional down to the ground, the modish mental recreation of men who lived by custom and guided their ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... was a frank setting off of the masses against the classes," he returned. "He said the same things I had heard him say in conversation, only with more pith and point. Emmet has the Irish gift of expression when he's aroused—there's no doubt of it. He practically took for his text: The Man in the One-storied House against the Man in the Mansion. One thing struck me as especially keen. His opponents have been claiming that the city ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... smooth; the ants which inhabited these nests were small and their bodies white. But upon another species of the tree we found a small black ant, which perforated all the twigs, and having worked out the pith, occupied the pipe which had contained it, yet the parts in which these insects had thus formed a lodgment, and in which they swarmed in amazing numbers, bore leaves and flowers, and appeared to be in as flourishing a state as those that were sound. We found ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... the Givers, "Inasmuch as ye cannot praise us, ye shall be killed and eaten". They then made men out of clay; these men were weak and watery, and by water they were destroyed. Next they made men of wood and women of the pith of trees. These puppets married and gave in marriage, and peopled earth with wooden mannikins. This unsatisfactory race was destroyed by a rain of resin and by the wild beasts. The survivors developed into apes. Next came a period occupied by the wildest ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... steamboats and railways long opposed as being little better than insane visions? Did not Doctor Lardner prove to demonstration that railway carriages could never go more than twenty miles an hour, owing to the laws of resistance, friction, &c., and did not Brunel take the breath out of him, and the pith out of his arguments, by carrying the learned demonstrator with him on a locomotive, and whisking him ten miles out of London in as many minutes? When I see that among so intelligent and practical a people as the New Englanders—a people whose ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... did the great god Pan (How tall it stood in the river!), Then drew the pith, like the heart of a man, Steadily from the outside ring, And notch'd the poor dry empty thing In holes, as he sat ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... contend than myself, who have attempted the task—to demonstrate the contradictions, the superficiality, the inadequateness, of the teaching of Rousseau, Voltaire, or Diderot. But it is well also, and in a historical student it is not only well, but the very pith and marrow of criticism, to search for that 'adaptation,' to use M. Taine's very proper expression, which gave to the word of these teachers its mighty power and far-spreading acceptance. Is it not as true of Rousseau and Voltaire, acting in a small society, as it is of Buddha or Mahomet acting ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 8: France in the Eighteenth Century • John Morley
... the mosses that imitated the trees, vines, and other growing things, was made of corn-stalks and corn-husks—"shucks" as Virginians call them. The human creatures and the dumb animals were carved out of the firm, dried pith of the stalks, and afterward painted with water colors. The clothes of men and women were made of the soft inner shucks, dried carefully to the pliability of silk. Log and frame houses were built of the canes themselves; the smallest were used whole, the ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland
... catch'd a cold, sir, and can scarce be heard six inches off; as if he spoke out of a bulrush that were not pick'd, or his throat were full of pith: a fine quick fellow, and an excellent barber of prayers. I came to tell you, sir, that you might omnem movere lapidem, as they say, be ready ...
— Epicoene - Or, The Silent Woman • Ben Jonson
... construction of the fountain. A healthy poplar, seven or eight years old, is taken from its native soil, and a cold iron borer is run up the heart of the trunk from the roots, for six feet or more, by which means the pith is removed, and the trunk is made to assume the character of a pipe. A hole is then bored through from the outside of the trunk, to communicate with the highest point reached by the former operation, and in this second hole a spout is fixed. The same is done at a very short distance ...
— Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland • George Forrest Browne
... through the table, where he spies The horns of papery butterflies, Of which he eats; and tastes a little Of that we call the cuckoo's spittle; A little fuz-ball pudding stands By, yet not blessed by his hands, That was too coarse; but then forthwith He ventures boldly on the pith Of sugar'd rush, and eats the sagge And well-bestrutted bees' sweet bag; Gladding his palate with some store Of emmets' eggs; what would he more? But beards of mice, a newt's stew'd thigh, A bloated earwig, and a ...
— A Selection From The Lyrical Poems Of Robert Herrick • Robert Herrick
... time came when I longed to live deeper, and to get at the pith and marrow of life. I was over twenty when it was revealed to me in a noonday splendour and warmth of light, that the human is unspeakably the highest and most enthralling expression of life in all Nature. That discovery happened to me when I was in Morocco with my father, who ...
— Master of His Fate • J. Mclaren Cobban
... considerably exhausted, the idea of sitting down on this tempting log was conceived and executed simultaneously by the whole party, and the whole party sunk together through its treacherous surface into a mass of rotten rubbish that had formed part of the pith and marrow of the eternal forest a ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope
... was not made public, nor was it likely to be. There is no doubt that it was generally known who the author was. In that general knowledge lies the whole pith of the Biblical quotation circulated abroad on the heels of the proclamation: "And the people said unto Saul, shall Jonathan die, who had wrought this great salvation in Israel? God forbid: as the Lord liveth there shall not ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. VI; The Drapier's Letters • Jonathan Swift
... make of elder-sticks with the pith scooped out,' said the beetle. 'The real instruments would not allow them to play with them. The elder-whistles said they would not have joined had they been asked. They were amateurs, and never played with professionals. So they have private ...
— The Brownies and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... speaks to man. This is the very pith and marrow of the Old Testament and of the New; which gradually unfolds itself, from the very first chapter of Genesis to the last of Revelation,—that man is made in the likeness of God; and that ...
— The Water of Life and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... way in her to sink can find To penetrate the pith of contemplation; These tears cannot dissolve her hardened mind, Nor move her heart on me to take compassion; O then, poor Corin, scorned and quite despised, Loathe now to live since life procures thy woe; Enough, thou hast thy heart anatomised, For her sweet sake which will no pity show; But as ...
— Elizabethan Sonnet Cycles - Idea, by Michael Drayton; Fidessa, by Bartholomew Griffin; Chloris, by William Smith • Michael Drayton, Bartholomew Griffin, and William Smith
... more prominent actors were of Danish birth. Theatrical managers drew freely on the dramatic treasures of Danish literature, and occasionally, to replenish the exchequer, reproduced a French comedy or farce, whose epigrammatic pith and vigor were more than half-spoiled in the translation. The drama was as yet an exotic in Norway; it had no root in the national soil, and could accordingly in no respect represent the nation's own struggles and aspirations. The critics themselves, ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... had nothing but papyrus-pith, and lotus-bread, and now he brings me the cake which grandmother ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... their parts, and of justifiably indignant feeling on the part of the Americans. By many of the writers on America, the little discrepancies, the mere trifles of custom have been dwelt upon, with a sarcastic, ill-natured severity to give their works that semblance of pith, in which, in reality, they were miserably deficient; and they violated the rights of hospitality that they might increase their ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... women and men alike go to and fro in loin-cloths, pajamas, or towels. I wore the pareu, the red strip of calico, bearing designs by William Morris, which the native buys instead of his original one of tapa, the beaten cloth made from tree bark or pith. ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... especially on its under surface. Specially characteristic of Egypt, though not altogether peculiar to it, were the papyrus and the lotus—the Cyperus papyrus and Nymphaea lotus of botanists. The papyrus was a tall smooth reed, with a large triangular stalk containing a delicate pith, out of which the Egyptians manufactured their paper. The fabric was excellent, as is shown by its continuance to the present day, and by the fact that the Greeks and Romans, after long trial, preferred it to parchment. ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson
... is an indication that the MSS. must be of some antiquity. The word "paper" is derived from papyrus, the most ancient material for writing, if we except the rocks used for runes, or the wood for oghams. Papyrus, the pith of a reed, was used until the discovery of parchment, about 190 B.C. A MS. of the Antiquities of Josephus on papyrus, was among the treasures seized by Buonaparte ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... in long tufts, his eyes had black circles under them. He wore neither coat nor waistcoat, and his regimental trousers were tied round the waist by a bit of rope. On the sleeve of his collarless shirt were three dark dry splashes; he noticed them as he raised his arm to put on his pith helmet. The words did not reach his lips, but his heart cried out within him for a boy of ...
— The Story of Sonny Sahib • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... thickly buttered toast. After that the three hastened in a cab to the station, stopping on the way to buy half a case each of grapefruit and oranges. Aboard the train Blake was at once set to eating grapefruit and chewing the bitter pith to allay the burning of ...
— Out of the Primitive • Robert Ames Bennet
... with energy. "It works most distressingly. I am coming to the very pith of my lecture now, which is this: I have been teaching school for more than seven years. I have taught all sorts and sizes of pupils. I had a fancy that I could manage almost anything in that line, believing that I had been through experiences varied ...
— The Chautauqua Girls At Home • Pansy, AKA Isabella M. Alden
... is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country and mankind." The assertion that they desired to invert this order, to destroy every social link in so far as it tended to produce inequalities, was the pith of his great indictment against the French "metaphysical" revolutionists. They had perverted the general logical precept of the sufficient reason for all inequalities by converting it into an assuming of the equality of concrete units. They fell into the fallacy of ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... elm may be for half a century in decay without exhibiting much outward change; and when, in some tempestuous night, half its bulk is torn away, the neighborhood notes with surprise that what seemed solid wood is dry and crumbling pith. During the last fifteen years of Daniel Webster's life, his wonderfully imposing form and his immense reputation concealed from the public the decay of his powers and the degeneration of his morals. At least, few said what perhaps many felt, that "he was not the man ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... spear. When the King had hung the shield at his neck and held the spear in his hand, sword-girt, on the tall destrier armed, well seemed he in the make of his body and in his bearing to be a knight of great pith and hardiment. He planteth himself so stiffly in the stirrups that he maketh the saddlebows creak again and the destrier stagger under him that was right stout and swift, and he smiteth him of his spurs, and the horse maketh answer with a great leap. The Queen was at ...
— High History of the Holy Graal • Unknown
... shaving and dressing; fifteen for breakfasting, in which time he eats two slices of toast, drinks two cups of coffee, and swallows two eggs boiled for two and a half minutes by an infallible chronometer. After breakfast he reads the newspaper, but lays it down in the very heart and pith of a clever article on his own side of the question, the moment his time is up. He has even been known to leave the theatre at the very moment of the denouement of a deeply-interesting play rather than exceed ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, October 30, 1841 • Various
... There is some return of that superabundance of interval and inaction which has been noted in the Bride. And, above all, there appears here a fault which had not been noticeable before, but which was to increase upon Scott,—the fault of introducing a character as if he were to be of great pith and moment, and then letting his interest, as the vernacular says, 'tail off.' The trouble taken about Halbert by personages natural and supernatural promises the case of some extraordinary figure, and he is but very ordinary. Still, at the works of how many novelists except ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... analysis, which drives directly to the heart of the man, instantly detects the impostor behind the braggart, and curtly declares him to lack "the true grit." The word is so close to the thing it names, has so much pith and point, is so tart on the tongue, and so stings the ear with its meaning, that foreigners ignorant of the language might at once feel its significance by its griding utterance as it is shot ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... of Douglass extracts are given from letters of distinguished contemporaries who knew the orator. Colonel T.W. Higginson writes thus: "I have hardly heard his equal, in grasp upon an audience, in dramatic presentation, in striking at the pith of an ethical question, and in single [signal] illustrations and examples." Another writes, in reference to the impromptu speech delivered at the meeting at Rochester on the death of Lincoln: "I have heard Webster and Clay in their best moments, ...
— Frederick Douglass - A Biography • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... directly to what became a favorite pursuit of his lifetime. By way of adding to the slender gains of his mother, he extracted the white pith from certain rushes of the region, which made very good lamp-wicks for the kind of lamps then in use in Scotland. These wicks of pith he sold about the town in small penny bundles. In order to get his supply of rushes he was obliged to roam the country far ...
— Captains of Industry - or, Men of Business Who Did Something Besides Making Money • James Parton
... nearest fixed star; but then he remembered that the distance to that first solar neighbor was estimated in trillions, not billions, and that our little system, even with its new additions, was a child's handbreadth on the plane of the sky. He had brought along a small book called The Pith of Astronomy—a fascinating little volume—and he read from it about the great tempest of fire in the sun, where the waves of flame roll up two thousand miles high, though the sun itself is such a tiny star in the deeps of ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... slightest ambiguity about my position in this matter; in fact, if you will turn to one paper on the School Board written by me before my election in 1870, I think you will find that I anticipated the pith of ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... presently; we must go on by very short steps: and I find no step can be taken without check from existing generalizations. Sowerby's definition of Monocotyledons, in his ninth volume, begins thus: "Herbs, (or rarely, and only in exotic genera,) trees, in which the wood, pith, and bark are indistinguishable." {157} Now if there be one plant more than another in which the pith is defined, it is the common Rush; while the nobler families of true herbs derive their principal character from being pithless altogether! We cannot ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... to the Daguerrean artist, or the amateur dabbler in Photography. I have read nearly all of the many works upon this art that have emanated from the London and Paris presses, and I think the reader will find in yours the pith of them all, with much practical and useful information that I do not remember to have ...
— The History and Practice of the Art of Photography • Henry H. Snelling
... electro-magnet (about 1800), or even the Galvanic battery, and it was seriously proposed to have as many wires as there were letters; each wire to have a frictional battery for generating electricity at one end of the circuit, and a pith-ball electroscope at the other. The modern reader may smile at the idea of the hurried sender of a message taking a piece of cat-skin, or his silk handkerchief, and rubbing up the successive letter-balls ...
— Steam Steel and Electricity • James W. Steele
... verse than it would be to turn his verse-narratives into prose, and less would be lost in the transfer. In Multitude and Solitude, the author has given us more of the results of his own thinking than can be found in most of the poems. Whole pages are filled with the pith of meditative thought. In Captain Margaret, we have a remarkable combination of the love of romance and the romance ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... love, We would not understand what was most fit; But, like the owner of a foul disease, To keep it from divulging, let it feed Even on the pith of life." ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... in small and inferior plants the color of both stem and gills is nearly white, and if the volva is not distinct it is difficult to distinguish it from the fly mushroom, which is very poisonous. The stem is hollow, with a soft cottony pith ...
— The Mushroom, Edible and Otherwise - Its Habitat and its Time of Growth • M. E. Hard
... arranged in order, built up into high heaps, according to the localities whence they were brought. After a short rest, they went on through the hall in which the triangular green stems were sorted, according to the quality of the white pith they contained. The next rooms, in which men stripped the green sheath from the pith, and the long galleries where the more skilled hands split the pith with sharp knives into long moist strips about a finger wide, and of different degrees of fineness, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... is the light by which we are enabled to discover the limits of his personality. Every man brings into the world with him a certain amount of pith and force, and to that pith or force his amount of accomplishment is exactly proportioned. It is in this way that every spoken word, every action of a man, becomes biographical. Everything a man says or does ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... of things, their last concentrated, intensified meanings, for the pith and marrow of men and events, and not for their body and bulk. He wanted the ottar of roses and not a rose garden, the diamond and not a mountain of carbon. This bent gives a peculiar beauty and stimulus to his writings, while at the same time it makes the reader crave a little more body and substance. ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... had sense enough to reply, weary as he was, with a stronger kick, which took Master Lancelot in the knee, and discouraged him for any further contest. Bully as he was, the boy had too much of ancient Yordas pith in him to howl, or cry, or even whimper, but sat down on a little ridge to nurse his poor knee, and meditate revenge against the animal with hoofs. Presently pain and wrath combined became too much for the weakness of his frame, ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... been transported, after the operation, to the places where we now find them, since it is not rare to find at Commentry trunks of Calamodendrons, Anthropitus, and ferns which are still provided with roots from 15 to 30 feet in length, and the carbonized wood of which surrounds a pith that has been replaced by a stony mould. The fragile ligneous cylinder would certainly have been ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 481, March 21, 1885 • Various
... two magic words, All Right! was what the waiter most desired. "All right! Yes! All Right!" This is the pith, the marrow, the sum and essence of the English language to a southerner. Of course it is not all right. It is Or-rye—and one word at that. The blow that would be given to most foreign waiters, if they were forced to realize that the famous orye was really composed of two words, and spelt ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... heavy-set man, and occasionally imbibed, the pith of the joke was at once apparent, and ...
— Lincoln's Yarns and Stories • Alexander K. McClure
... Rameses, of David, of Nebuchadnezzar, of Cyrus, of Alexander, of Hannibal, of Caesar, and other heroes are still the subjects of contemplation among statesmen and schoolboys. The exploits of heroes are the pith of history. ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume III • John Lord
... followed, and during these years the rapid growth tells of good seasons as well as good soil. This rapid growth also shows that there could not have been any crowding neighbors to share the sun and the soil. The tree had grown evenly in all quarters, and the pith of the tree was in the centre. But had one tree grown close, on that quarter the old pine would have grown slower than the others and would have been thinner, and the pith would thus have been away from the ...
— Wild Life on the Rockies • Enos A. Mills
... Jones be years of acute psychic senility, as observed by Dr. Steinach in his rat? To the writer it seems a non sequitur. The cases are not parallel. The rejuvenated rat appears to regard his acquired vitality as impelling toward revelry and excess. It is necessary to emphasize the point that the pith and marrow of Dr. Brinkley's discovery is that since it is clearly shown that rejuvenation is accomplished by the restoration of activity to the sex-glands, therefore the preservation of this rejuvenation ...
— The Goat-gland Transplantation • Sydney B. Flower
... is this. They take a reed and shave one side of the surface flat. In this they make a small incision to reach the pith, and introducing a stick, purposely blunted at the end, into it, turn it round between the hands (as chocolate is milled) as swiftly as possible, until flame be produced. As this operation is not only ...
— A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson • Watkin Tench
... soullessness! The ribanded old dog is paralytic all down one side, and that the side of nobleness. His soul is gone out. Only nature's automatonism keeps him on his legs. As with some old trees, the bark survives the pith, and will still stand stiffly up, though but to rim round punk, so the body of old Polonius has ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... 'Undress blue trousers, plain.' 'White trousers and many of them.' 'Service overcoat of heavy blue cloth.' 'Cloak of blue cloth.' 'A black mackintosh.' 'Blue uniform cap.' 'White uniform cap.' 'Cork or pith helmet.' 'Sword with sword knot.' 'Leggings.' 'A suit of rain clothes.' 'Black satin or silk, four-in-hand tie.' 'Plain black tie for evening dress uniform.' 'White ...
— The High Calling • Charles M. Sheldon
... cut the reed, and sat himself down on the mound, and carved away at the reed with his knife, and got the pith out of it by pushing a twig through it, and beating it gently till the bark swelled, made holes in it, and there was his whistle-pipe. And then he put it to his lips to see what sort of music he could make on ...
— Old Peter's Russian Tales • Arthur Ransome
... lightly as we may, Since none may wrestle with necessity. And yet to speak or not to speak alike Is miserable. High service done to man— For this I bear the adamantine chain. I to its elemental fountain tracked, In fern-pith stored and bore by stealth away, Fire, source and teacher of all arts to men. Such mine offence, whereof the penalty I pay, thus chained in face ...
— Specimens of Greek Tragedy - Aeschylus and Sophocles • Goldwin Smith
... same room. Casual visitors were simply announced by an usher, and were received whenever business did not prevent. Mr. Davis' manner was unvarying in its quiet and courtesy, drawing out all that one had to tell, and indicating by brief answer, or criticism, that he had extracted the pith from it. At that moment he was the very idol of the people; the grand embodiment to them of their grand cause; and they gave him their hands unquestioning, to applaud any move soever he might make. And equally unthinking as this popular manifestation of early hero-worship, was ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... and always the same, because the human race is one. The white man (European or Caucasian), the black man (Ethiopian), the yellow man (Mongol), and the red man (American) are only varieties of the human species. As the Scots express it with wonted pith, "We're a' Jock ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... glittering hero, but when England numbers Patriots of worth and pith, His name shall sound, who after suffering slumbers, Plain WILLIAM ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. October 17, 1891 • Various
... hue of Resolution Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of Fear, And enterprizes of great pith and moment, With this regard, their currents turn awry And lose the name ...
— The Eulogies of Howard • William Hayley
... had come over Safdar Khan. Certainly Shere Ali was wearing the dress of one of the Sahibs. A man passed carrying a lantern, and the light, feeble though it was, threw into outline against the darkness a pith helmet and a very English figure. Certainly, too, Shere Ali spoke the Pushtu tongue with a slight hesitation, and an unfamiliar accent. He seemed ...
— The Broken Road • A. E. W. Mason
... to be to teach Barnwell the language, and then to confide to him not only the story of his eventful life, but the pith of it, which covered a ...
— The Boy Nihilist - or, Young America in Russia • Allan Arnold
... limes, and oranges. There is something about those oranges I should like to have explained. They are usually green and sweetish in taste, nor have they much white pith, but now and again you get a big bright yellow one from those trees that have been imported, and these are very pithy and in full possession of the flavour of verjuice. They have also got the papaw on the Coast, ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... after all worldly objects, like a fish (dragged to its ruin) by the bait of meat. Like unto the body that is made up of different limbs and organs, all mortal creatures exist depending upon one another. They are as destitute of vigour as the pith of the banana plant. (Left to themselves) they sink in the world's ocean like a boat (made of weak materials). There is no fixed time for the acquisition of righteousness. Death waits for no man. When man is constantly running towards the jaws of Death, the accomplishment ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... heart was stirred with a lightning love to its pith For a newcomer who, while less in years, was one Full eager and able to make her his own forthwith, ...
— Late Lyrics and Earlier • Thomas Hardy
... which it attains, has acquired the title of the Elephant of the vegetable kingdom. The Baobab often serves the negroes for a dwelling, the construction of which costs no further trouble than cutting an opening in the side to serve as a door, and taking out the very soft pith which fills the inside of the trunk. The tree, far from being injured by this operation, seems even to derive more vigour from the fire which is lighted in it for the purpose of drying the sap, by carbonising it. In this state it almost ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to Senegal in 1816 • J. B. Henry Savigny and Alexander Correard
... with all the formalities of a military execution. It appeared that the unfortunate beast had transgressed the laws of war; it had climbed the ramparts of a card-board fortress, and had actually eaten two pith sentries on duty at the bastions. It was to be exposed to the public view as an example during three days following! Catharine, unluckily, was so lost to the fitness of things as to betray open merriment. The Grand Duke was furious; and she had ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... tree side of the insects, and scraped away the inner bark, so as to destroy all the ascending vessels. I also cut a hole in the side of the branch, reaching to the middle, and then cut out the pith and internal vessels. The distillation was then going on at the rate of one drop each 67 seconds, or about 2 ounces 5-1/2 drams in 24 hours. Next morning the distillation, so far from being affected by the attempt ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... hundred, it opens with about eighty of the old MOTHER GOOSE RHYMES. Nothing better was ever invented to tell to little folks who are young enough for lullabies. Their rhythm, their humor, and their pith will always cause us to prize ...
— Childhood's Favorites and Fairy Stories - The Young Folks Treasury, Volume 1 • Various
... very pith of the endeavour: The child is ready to change—that is the whole story. The child is fluid, volatile, receptive to reason. In all our world-life there is nothing so ostentatiously or calamitously amiss as the ignorance and customs of our ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... back to her lair. She has no implements other than her tongue, her mouth and her claws; but her tongue is too short, her legs are feeble, and her mandibles without strength. Unable to produce wax, bore holes through wood, or dig in the earth, she contrives clumsy galleries in the tender pith of dry berries; erects a few awkward cells, stores these with a little food for the offspring she never will see; and then, having accomplished this poor task of hers, that tends she knows not whither and of whose aim we are no less ignorant, ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck
... preferred, therefore, to manufacture pyroxyle, that is to say gun-cotton, a substance in which cotton is not indispensable, as the elementary tissue of vegetables may be used, and this is found in an almost pure state, not only in cotton, but in the textile fiber of hemp and flax, in paper, the pith of the elder, etc. Now, the elder abounded in the island towards the mouth of Red Creek, and the colonists had already made coffee of the berries of these shrubs, which belong to the ...
— The Mysterious Island • Jules Verne
... will try the pith Of this smooth-faced courtesy; Do they prize myself, do they prize my pelf, Do they value ...
— More Bywords • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the perfection of pith and poetry. What could be more terse? Not a word to spare, and yet everything fully expressed. Rhyme and rhythm faultless. It was a delightful poet who made those verses. As for the beer itself—that, I think, must have been made from the root ...
— The Story of a Bad Boy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... Not fighting for their country or its crown, But wishing to be one day brigadiers; Also to have the sacking of a town;— A pleasant thing to young men at their years. 'Mongst them were several Englishmen of pith, Sixteen called Thomson, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... worthy priest for fasting and prayer And mortification most deserving; And as for preaching beyond compare, He'd exert his powers for three or four hours, With greater pith than Sydney Smith Or ...
— Ballads • William Makepeace Thackeray
... reef with all the crushing force of some enormous sledge-hammer. But after the fourth assault, Felix felt himself flung up high and dry by the wave, as one may sometimes see a bit of light reed or pith flung up some distance ahead by an advancing tide on the beach in England. In an instant he steadied himself and staggered to his feet. Torn and bruised as he was by the pummelling of the billows, he looked eagerly into the water in search of his companion. The next wave flung up Muriel, ...
— The Great Taboo • Grant Allen
... his new lieutenant bars and a pith helmet and was carrying a large piece of wood in imitation of Norton's swagger stick. Terrence took one look at him and at the two orderlies who stood behind him holding his field kit. He strode toward ...
— Narakan Rifles, About Face! • Jan Smith
... air of a young man about town—a boulevardier, with his jacket cut in the latest fashion, with his cockle-shell of a boat, which he managed as well on salt water as on fresh, sculling with his arms bare, a cigarette in his mouth, a monocle in his eye, and a pith-helmet, such as is worn in India. The young ladies used to gather on the sands to watch him as he struck the water with the broad blade of his scull, near enough for them to see and to admire his nautical ability. They thought all his jokes amusing, and they ...
— Jacqueline, v2 • Th. Bentzon (Mme. Blanc)
... objected that, in view of what is to come later, the Carlos of the first act is a little too soft even for the sentimental age. We are required to have faith in his heroic capacity for enterprises of great pith and moment. But after his first dialogue with Posa it is as difficult for the reader or spectator to trust him as it is for King Philip. His lacrimose raptures over so simple a thing as a youthful friendship; his abject confession of despair and dependence; his long-drawn-out revelation of a sick ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... Mascagni's "L'Amico Fritz," which disappeared from the list after two representations, and had been heard at an improvised performance, which scarcely deserves to be considered in a record of this character. In the supplemental season, however, a novelty of real pith and moment was brought forward in the shape of Massenet's "Werther," which had been promised to the regular subscribers, and which, while it made no profound impression, was accepted as an earnest of the excellent and honorable intentions ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... bring out the very pith of his story in so abrupt a manner. He wished to have the work over, to feel, that as regarded Herbert it was done,—but his heart failed him when ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... Game-Captain is made aware when the game commences. The partial slacker, scorning to insert his head in the scrum, assumes a commanding position outside and from this point criticises the Game-Captain's decisions with severity and pith. The last end of the partial slacker is generally a sad one. Stung by some pungent home-thrust, the Game-Captain is fain to try chastisement, and by these means silences ...
— A Wodehouse Miscellany - Articles & Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... horrible to look upon. The chain-gang, the galley-slaves, how often the idea of them was recalled by that horrid pull! Yet onward they went, with teeth set and hands bruised by the rope, surmounting difficulty after difficulty with the pith of lions. ...
— Through the Mackenzie Basin - A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899 • Charles Mair
... and the ruins of the once proud and imperial but now utterly deserted cities of Amber and Fatehpuhr-Sikri have a strange and melancholy interest. But all these have been often enough described, and there are things of greater pith and moment in present-day India to which ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... wise instinct, Friedrich Wilhelm had discerned that all things in Prussia must point towards his Army; that his Army was the heart and pith; the State being the tree, every branch and leaf bound, after its sort, to be nutritive and productive for the Army's behoof. That, probably for any Nation in the long-run, and certainly for the Prussian Nation straightway, life or death depends on the Army: Friedrich Wilhelm's ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume V. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... irrigated or not, whether it grows on bottoms or on hill slopes, in dry or in damp regions, everywhere the cane seems to thrive, and undoubtedly it is the one product of the islands which succeeds. A worm, which pierces the cane near the ground and eats out the pith, has of late, I am told, done some damage, and in some parts the rat has proved troublesome. But these evils do not anywhere endanger or ruin the crop, as the blight has ruined the coffee culture and discouraged other agricultural ventures. The sugar product of the islands has constantly ...
— Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands • Charles Nordhoff
... fifteen seeds; each considerably larger than a pea, with a membraneous covering expanding into three wings, whence the specific name of pterygosperma. On removing the winged envelope the seeds appear somewhat like pith balls; but upon dividing them with the nail, they are found to abound in a clear, colorless, tasteless, scentless oil, of which the proportion is so large that it may be expressed from good fresh ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... desire to attract attention, etc.) and not to esthetics—that is, the love of beauty for its own sake. Such a germ of esthetic pleasure we find in our infants years before they have the faintest conception of what is meant by personal beauty; and this brings me to the pith of my argument. Had the facts warranted it, I might have freely conceded that savages decorate themselves for the sake of gaining an advantage in courtship without thereby in the least yielding the main thesis of this chapter, which is that the admiration ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... Christian faith, and plainly denyeth Christ in his life.... The great Mysterie of the Gospel, it doth not lie only in CHRIST WITHOUT US, (though we must know also what he hath done for us) but the very Pith and Kernel of it, consists in *Christ inwardly formed in our hearts. Nothing is truly Ours, but what lives in our Spirits. SALVATION it self cannot SAVE us, as long as it is onely without us; no more then HEALTH ...
— Bygone Beliefs • H. Stanley Redgrove
... saying, and the advocate of equity, of love, and of humility; that he may have disregarded the subtleties of the bigots for legal observance, and appealed rather to those noble conceptions of religion which constituted the pith and kernel of the teaching of the great prophets of his nation seven hundred years earlier; and that, in the last scenes of his career, he may have embodied the ideal sufferer of Isaiah, may be, as I think it is, extremely probable. But all this involves not a step beyond the borders of orthodox ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... of the Rush were not all bad. Newton, in 1587, said of the Rush—"It is a round smooth shoote without joints or knots, having within it a white substance or pith, which being drawn forth showeth like long white, soft, gentle, and round thread, and serveth for many purposes. Heerewith be made manie pretie imagined devises for Bride-ales and other solemnities, as little baskets, ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... moment for me when, in response to my interrogative "Yes?" my companion said "That is all" and closed the book. We had extracted the pith and marrow of six considerable volumes in two hours ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman
... personal contact with him in the Presidential campaigns of 1860 and 1864, when he seemed to be pleased with my efforts. I had once heard him make a stump speech which was evidently inspired by intense hatred of slavery, and remarkable for argumentative pith and sarcastic wit. But the impression his personality made upon me was not sympathetic: his face, long and pallid, topped with an ample dark-brown wig which was at the first glance recognized as such; beetling brows overhanging keen eyes of uncertain color which sometimes seemed ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... the ships, crowded with troops, set sail. Ribaut was gone, and with him the pith and sinew of the colony. The miserable remnant watched his receding sails with dreary foreboding, a foreboding which seemed but too just, when, on the next day, a storm, more violent than the Indians had ever known, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... decided opinion upon the much disputed question, whether, in addition to their Constitutions and Declarations, the Jesuits were provided with an esoteric code of rules known as Monita Secreta.[169] The existence of such a manual, which was supposed to contain the very pith of Jesuitical policy, has been confidently asserted and no less confidently denied. In the absence of direct evidence, it may be worth quoting two passages from Sarpi's Letters, which prove that this keen-sighted observer believed the Society to be governed in its practice by statutes ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... manner of airy substance, and most subtle outward, natheless in a wonder manner it is strong in working and virtue. For it besprinkleth the earth, and maketh it plenteous, and maketh flour, pith, and marrow increase in corn and grains: and fatteth and bringeth forth broad oysters and other shell fish in the sea, and namely dew of spring time. For by night in spring time oysters open themselves against dew, and receive dew that cometh in between the two shells, and hold and keep it; ...
— Mediaeval Lore from Bartholomew Anglicus • Robert Steele
... waking, crude sunlight on her lemon streets. Moist pith of farls of bread, the froggreen wormwood, her matin incense, court the air. Belluomo rises from the bed of his wife's lover's wife, the kerchiefed housewife is astir, a saucer of acetic acid in her hand. In Rodot's Yvonne and Madeleine newmake their tumbled beauties, shattering with gold teeth ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... I were not always at one. Caird and Green—and, for other reasons, Martineau—were to me names "of great pith and moment," and Christian Theism was a reasonable faith. And Huxley, in controversy, was no more kind to my sacra than to other people's. Once I dared a mild remonstrance—in 1892—only to provoke one ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... that had hung by the same strap over his shoulder, attracted her attention and she guessed that it had been used as a carrier for provision. She laid it open and took out the water-bottle. The pith-stopper had held, during all the violent motion, and the dull surface of the porous and ever-cooling ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... if intuitively knowing the incapacity of his rider to restrain him, and despising curb and rein, the indignant animal set off at full speed, to the great dismay of Dashall and the Squire, who putting their horses to the pith of their mettle, hurried after their friend with the utmost solicitude. Luckily, however, the career of the spirited animal was impeded, and finally stopped, by the frequent interposition of the passengers on the road, ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... poets sang well, though that conduces not at all to our advantage, and though all those songs are now dumb, the Life of Reason was thereby increased once for all in pith and volume. Brief erratic experiments made in living, if they were somewhat successful in their day, remain successes always: and this is the only kind of success that in the end can be achieved at all. The philosopher that looks for what is good ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... as if in unrestrained enjoyment of his freedom and drollery. Clearly observing, however, from the expression in Ralph's features, that he had best come to the point as speedily as might be, he composed himself for more serious business, and entered upon the pith ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... my studies; and, if I can bring it to a perfection before I die, I shall reckon I have well employed the poor remains of an unfortunate life. This indeed is more than I can justly expect, from a quill worn to the pith in the service of the state, in pros and cons upon popish plots, and meal tubs, and exclusion bills, and passive obedience, and addresses of lives and fortunes, and prerogative, and property and liberty of conscience, and letters to a friend: from an understanding and a conscience, ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... which distinguishes the good letter-writer. She writes to please two people—her correspondent and herself; she has no need, therefore, to canvass general truths, but can afford to be personal and charming. Her artful wit gives pith and moment to the most trivial enterprises, and turns domestic projects into adventures of high romance. She never makes great things small by declamation; she prefers to make small things great by insinuation. Her friend is assumed to be interested in all ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... etc.) puto, fosajxo, kavo. Pit (theatre) partero. Pitch (to smear with) kalfatri. Pitch pecxo. Pitch (of ships) subakvigxi. Pitcher krucxo. Pitchfork forkego. Piteous kompatinda. Pitfall enfalujo. Pith suko. Pitiable kompatinda. Pitiful kompatinda. Pitiless senkompata. Pity kompati, bedauxri. Pity, it is a estas domagxo. Pivot akso. Placable kvietebla, kvietema. Placard afisxo, kartego. Place (to put) meti. Place loko. Place, a ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... crosses, F.E. Smith, Where the Breton boat-fleet tosses, Are they, Smith? Do they, fasting, tramping, bleeding, Wait the news from this our city? Groaning "That's the Second Reading!" Hissing "There is still Committed" If the voice of Cecil falters, If McKenna's point has pith, Do they tremble for their altars? Do ...
— Poems • G.K. Chesterton
... us part first of the above Songs and Poems, containing thirteen pieces, and consisting of 36 pp., crown 8vo, with an Introduction. We have not met with anything to equal them in our language for pith, spirit, and poetic genius, since the days of Rob Donn; and we trust the bard will receive the encouragement he so well deserves with the first part, so as to enable him to give us the second on an early date. There is a ...
— The Celtic Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 1, November 1875 • Various
... convalescents instructions to arm themselves at once and to stand by to show themselves when called upon, I entered my own quarters and hastily shifted from my uniform into a somewhat soiled suit of "whites" and a pith hat that had doubtless once been the property of one of the former inhabitants of the place—and which I had appropriated in view of some such contingency as the present—and otherwise made ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood
... that he has left behind him—as far as we can tell—is this one psalm which he wrote, as may be guessed from its arrangement, slowly, and with exceeding care, as the very pith and marrow of an experience spread over many painful years of ...
— Westminster Sermons - with a Preface • Charles Kingsley
... Elphinstone had lost heart. On the 5th he had written to Macnaghten suggesting that the latter should 'consider what chance there is of making terms,' and since then he had been repeatedly pressing on the Envoy the 'hopelessness of further resistance.' Macnaghten, vacillating as he was, yet had more pith in his nature than was left in the debilitated old general. He wrote to Elphinstone on the 18th recommending, not very strenuously, the policy of holding out where they were as long as possible, and indeed throughout ...
— The Afghan Wars 1839-42 and 1878-80 • Archibald Forbes
... evening; and once or twice a week I will go to Gunnersbury and drink a bottle with Princess Amelia. Alas, dear lady! and cannot you do all that without skuttling from one end of the world to the other?—This was the, upshot of all Cineas's inquisitiveness: and this is the pith of this tedious letter from, Madam, your ladyship's most faithful ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... answer. "I've known a derelict up-end and sift her engines out of herself and flicker round the Lower Lanes for three weeks on her forward tanks only. We'll run no risks. Pith her, George, and look ...
— With The Night Mail - A Story of 2000 A.D. (Together with extracts from the - comtemporary magazine in which it appeared) • Rudyard Kipling
... Steel helmets could be worn only in winter. In many of the native regiments the British officers wore tasselled pugrees, and long tunics that were really shirts, and an adaption of the native custom of wearing the shirt-tails outside the trousers. The Gurkhas were supplied with pith helmets. It was generally claimed that this was unnecessary, but the authorities felt that coming from a cold, high climate they would be as much affected by the Mesopotamian sun as were Europeans. The presence of the Indian troops brought about unusual additions ...
— War in the Garden of Eden • Kermit Roosevelt
... layers. For the filling, take two good-sized, juicy oranges. Flavor two tablespoonfuls of sugar by rubbing it over the skin of the oranges, then peel, remove the white rind, and cut into small pieces, discarding the seeds and the central pith. Put the orange pulp in a china bowl, and set in a dish of boiling water. When it is hot, stir in a heaping teaspoonful of cornstarch which has been braided smooth in two spoonfuls of water. Stir constantly until the starch has cooked, and the whole becomes thickened. Beat the yolk of one egg to ...
— Science in the Kitchen. • Mrs. E. E. Kellogg
... more calm and rational one than historians have usually represented it to be. In dealing with the obstacle which had been raised, he displayed a most efficient mastery over himself, although he did not conclude without touching the pith of the matter with telling clearness. The secretary was to take some opportunity of speaking to the pope privately; and of warning him, "as of himself," that there was no hope that the king would give way: he was to "say plainly ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... circles round to find out what the disturbance can be, and then settles down again with a splash. Hundreds of Linongolos (Anastomus lamelligerus) rise on the wing from the clumps of reeds, or low trees (the Eschinomena, from which pith hats are made), on which they build in colonies, and are speedily high in mid-air. Charming little red and yellow weavers (Ploceidae) remind one of butterflies, as they fly in and out of the tall grass, or hang ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone
... its men, by the way, merit passing remark, for they were fashioned by our chief entirely, and very neatly, out of the pith of a bush, the name of which I forget; and, on the voyage, many an hour that might otherwise have been tedious we whiled away with this interesting game. I knew nothing of it when we began, but Lumley taught me the moves, and I soon picked up enough of the game to enable me to fight a fairish ...
— The Big Otter • R.M. Ballantyne
... "for my part I should not wish to live without the society of my equals in knowledge and intelligence. In my opinion, the interchange of ideas and information is one of the charms of existence. In that way we get, in the most agreeable manner, at the pith and marrow of books, at the opinions of other people, and at what is going forward in the world: ...
— Ernest Bracebridge - School Days • William H. G. Kingston
... preparations to make. He ordered, at once, a khaki uniform and pith helmet, and a supply of light shirts and underclothing. Then he ran down to Somersetshire to say goodbye to his uncle and aunt, and arrived in Liverpool on the Monday evening. Sleeping at the hotel at the station, he went on board ...
— Through Three Campaigns - A Story of Chitral, Tirah and Ashanti • G. A. Henty
... the lovely, peaceful afternoons in the botany laboratory. There were few students. How she loved to sit on her high stool before the bench, with her pith and her razor and her material, carefully mounting her slides, carefully bringing her microscope into focus, then turning with joy to record her observation, drawing joyfully in her book, ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... they are foreign to his mental character; but he excels Goethe in susceptibility to the manifold qualities of prose, and in mastery over its effects. Heine is full of variety, of light and shadow: he alternates between epigrammatic pith, imaginative grace, sly allusion, and daring piquancy; and athwart all those there runs a vein of sadness, tenderness and grandeur ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... course, is universally known, rags, straw, old rope, poplar pith, etc., are the materials used. The best writing-paper is made of linen rags, which are for the most part imported from Germany. For ordinary writing and printing paper cotton rags are used, while straw and hemp, and even wool, go largely into the construction of manilla and wrapping paper. ...
— Katie Robertson - A Girls Story of Factory Life • Margaret E. Winslow
... leave your England as dead midnight still, Guarded with grandsires, babies, and old women, Either past or not arrived to pith and puissance, For who is he whose chin is but enrich'd With one appearing hair that will not follow Those cull'd and choice-drawn ...
— Lloyd George - The Man and His Story • Frank Dilnot
... wretched, confined like the pith within the bark of the tree.... My voice is like a wasp imprisoned within a sack of skin and bone. ... My teeth rattle like the keys of an old musical instrument.... My face is a scarecrow.... There is a ceaseless buzzing in my ears—in one a spider spins his web, in the other a cricket chirps all ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... and heart-touching, and in the South it was held in universal honour. Jasmin, he continued, is what Burns was to the Scottish peasantry; only he received his honours in his lifetime. The comparison with Burns, however, was not appropriate. Burns had more pith, vigour, variety, and passion, than Jasmin who was more of a descriptive writer. In some respects Jasmin resembled Allan Ramsay, a barber and periwig-maker, like himself, whose Gentle Shepherd met with as great a success as Jasmin's Franconnette. Jasmin, ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... went and came, watching the raft, which remained stationary. There were about a hundred of them armed with blow-tubes formed of a reed peculiar to these parts, and which is strengthened outside by the stem of a dwarf palm from which the pith has been extracted. ...
— Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon • Jules Verne
... were received whenever business did not prevent. Mr. Davis' manner was unvarying in its quiet and courtesy, drawing out all that one had to tell, and indicating by brief answer, or criticism, that he had extracted the pith from it. At that moment he was the very idol of the people; the grand embodiment to them of their grand cause; and they gave him their hands unquestioning, to applaud any move soever he might make. ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... three inches of the elderberry wood and have it clear of knots; cut a flat ended ramrod so as just to fit the bore, and force out the pith with one clean sharp push: or else whittle away the surrounding wood. The latter way gives a better ...
— Woodland Tales • Ernest Seton-Thompson
... gentle witt, and the golden pillar of his noble courage; and ever notify unto the world that thy writer was the secretary of eloquence, the breath of the muses, the honey bee of the daintyest flowers of witt and arte, the pith of morale and intellectual virtues, the arme of Bellona in the field, the tongue of Suada in the chamber, the spirits of Practise in esse, and the paragon of excellence in print."-Harvey ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... reputations; and in no author of any age are the cadence of phrases and the beat of words more provocative of attention than in Montaigne. They must have affected Shakspere as they have done so many others; and in point of fact his work, from HAMLET forth, shows a gain in nervous tension and pith, fairly attributable to the stirring impact of the style of Montaigne, with its incessancy of stroke, its opulence of colour, its hardy freshness of figure and epithet, its swift, unflagging stride. Seek in any of Shakspere's plays for such a strenuous rush ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... Every word of it is worth a pint of guineas; and this is the pith of it. Far down West Indies way, some twenty-five, maybe, or thirty years ago, there was a plate ship wrecked upon a reef. I got it from a Spaniard, who had been sworn upon oath to keep it secret by priests ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... cultivated in the Kandyan hills for the sake of its sap, which is drawn, boiled down, and crystallised into a coarse brown sugar, in universal use amongst the inhabitants of the south and west of Ceylon, who also extract from its pith a farina scarcely inferior to sago. The black fibre of the leaf is twisted by the Rodiyas into ropes of considerable smoothness and tenacity. A single Kitool tree has been pointed out at Ambogammoa, which furnished ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... it rouses loyal spunk To think of that old tree! Its stately stem, its spacious trunk By Nature robbed of pith and punk ...
— Poems - Vol. IV • Hattie Howard
... had made a most unbecoming joke about Jupiter and Venus, which outraged Charlotte's "common sense". "The idea of the little man," says Charlotte, "shocks me less. He still sends his little newspaper; and the other day there came a letter of a bulk, volume, pith, judgment and knowledge, fit to have been the product of a giant. You may laugh as much and as wickedly as you please, but the fact is, there is a quiet constancy about this, my diminutive and red-haired friend, which adds a foot to ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... were practical. The original design of Yale College was to found a divinity school. To a mind appreciative, like mine, his preaching was a continual course of education and a continual feast. He was copious and polished in style, though disciplined and logical. There was a pith and power of doctrine there that has not been since surpassed, ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... minutes by taking a pine board two feet long, and six inches wide and on this nail two strips an inch thick, so that there is a crack between them. The crack should be half an inch wide at one end and a quarter of an inch wide at the other end, and in the bottom of it press strips of cornstalk pith so as to have something soft in which to stick the pins. After a pin has been stuck through the body of a dead butterfly between the wings, it is then pinned in the crack so that the back of the butterfly ...
— An Elementary Study of Insects • Leonard Haseman
... There were no present means of replacing these; meanwhile, men were in daily danger of heat stroke. It was decided, therefore, to clothe all the troops in khaki cotton shorts (trousers reaching only to the knees), linen shirts, and pith helmets. These they wore with the ordinary underclothing and with boots and puttees. This issue was completed within ten days of arrival. It added considerably to the comfort of the individual and the dress in itself was not unattractive. One individual ...
— The 28th: A Record of War Service in the Australian Imperial Force, 1915-19, Vol. I • Herbert Brayley Collett
... it sport, does our new god Pan (As did he of the reeds by the river), To take all the pith from the heart of a man, To make him a sheep—though a tiger in spring,— A cruel, remorseless, poor, cowardly thing, With the whitest ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, Sep. 24, 1892 • Various
... tea, Fanny was sent for, and after many attempts, her bonnet and pretty little white Marseilles cloak were fastened, for she jumped, and Sallie jumped during the operation, till you would have thought they were pith witches, only they fortunately kept on their feet; afterward they kissed each other jumping, and the kisses lighted on the very ends of their noses, and Sallie ran to the corner with her, and bade her good-by, ...
— Little Mittens for The Little Darlings - Being the Second Book of the Series • Frances Elizabeth Barrow
... sat in the service o' foreign commanders, Selling a sword for a beggar man's fee, Learning the trade o' the warrior who wanders, To mak' ilka stranger a sworn enemie; There was ae thought that nerved roe, and brawly it served me. With pith to the claymore wherever I won,— 'Twas the auld sodger's story, that, gallows or glory, The Hielan's, the Hielan's ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... star; but then he remembered that the distance to that first solar neighbor was estimated in trillions, not billions, and that our little system, even with its new additions, was a child's handbreadth on the plane of the sky. He had brought along a small book called The Pith of Astronomy—a fascinating little volume—and he read from it about the great tempest of fire in the sun, where the waves of flame roll up two thousand miles high, though the sun itself is such a tiny star in the deeps of ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... tenth, the ships, crowded with troops, set sail. Ribaut was gone, and with him the pith and sinew of the colony. The miserable remnant watched his receding sails with dreary foreboding, a foreboding which seemed but too just, when, on the next day, a storm, more violent than the Indians had ever known, howled through the forest and lashed the ocean into fury, Most forlorn was the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... became constantly more ominous and menacing, but still we saw no sign of human life. Near the edge of the forest we came to a halt. Plainly it would be unwise to venture within range of the arboreal hailstones without protection, for though our pith-helmets were of the best quality they were, after all, but pith, and a cocoanut is a cocoanut, the world over. While we were debating this point and seeking a possible way into the jungle which was ...
— The Cruise of the Kawa • Walter E. Traprock
... nearer to her, confiding: "I know a spell my master mountebank taught me. A Greek fellow made it, a Roman rogue stole it, an Italian rascal gave a new twist to it; here is the pith of it. Oh, it sounds simple enough, but it will win a matron from her allegiance, a nun from her orisons, a maid from her modesty. See, now, how she will trip to my whistle. Mistress Modesty, Mistress Modesty, follow me home, follow ...
— The Proud Prince • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... short, did the great god Pan, (How tall it stood in the river!) Then drew the pith, like the heart of a man, Steadily from the outside ring, And notched the poor, dry, empty thing In holes as he ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... every degree produces something peculiar to it. The food often grows in one country, and the sauce in another. The fruits of Portugal are corrected by the products of Barbadoes, and the infusion of a China plant is sweetened with the pith of an Indian cane. The Philippic islands give a flavour to our European bowls. The single dress of a woman of quality is often the product of an hundred climates. The muff and the fan come together from the different ends of the earth. The scarf is sent from ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock
... to Barto left it one of the ironical, veiled Republican, semi-socialistic ballads of the time, which were sung about the streets for the sharpness and pith of the couplets, and not from a perception of the double edge down the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the pith of the thing," Harry said. "The first thing for you to do is to send round notes to the mothers of these children saying that from unforeseen circumstances you have retired from the profession, and that the school has finally closed from ...
— In The Heart Of The Rockies • G. A. Henty
... disputed that?" said Hitt. "Quite the contrary, that is the pith of my observations. Reform is a hearthside affair. And no sane man will maintain that general reform can ever come until the individual's needs are ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... noted down for the entertainment of the readers of the London "Athenaeum," a few specimens of his table-talk. Although these paragraphs of table-talk are not transcripts of their author's actual conversation, they doubtless contain the pith and substance of what he had really said in some of his familiar discourses with friends and acquaintances. They contain none of his "jests that scald like tears," none of his play upon words, none of his flashes ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... ready. On this occasion it was a live tame duck. Passing the bend of the hook round its neck, and the shank under its right wing, we tied the hook in this position with thread. We then made a small raft of the soft pith of the plantain-tree, tied the duck to the raft and committed it to the stream. Holding the rope as clear of the water as we could, the poor quacking duck floated slowly down the muddy current, making an occasional vain effort to get free. We saw at ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... nagxejo. Pistil (botany) pistilo. Pistol pafileto. Piston pisxto. Pit (well, etc.) puto, fosajxo, kavo. Pit (theatre) partero. Pitch (to smear with) kalfatri. Pitch pecxo. Pitch (of ships) subakvigxi. Pitcher krucxo. Pitchfork forkego. Piteous kompatinda. Pitfall enfalujo. Pith suko. Pitiable kompatinda. Pitiful kompatinda. Pitiless senkompata. Pity kompati, bedauxri. Pity, it is a estas domagxo. Pivot akso. Placable kvietebla, kvietema. Placard afisxo, kartego. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... wide rings from the pith out to about number forty-five. The tree was healthy up to that time. Then it met with an injury of some kind, as is indicated by this black scar. After that the rings grew narrower. The tree ...
— The Young Forester • Zane Grey
... sing 360 Through whose heart in such an hour Beats no march of conscious power, Sweeps no tumult of elation! 'Tis no Man we celebrate, By his country's victories great, 365 A hero half, and half the whim of Fate, But the pith and marrow of a Nation Drawing force from all her men, Highest, humblest, weakest, all, For her time of need, and then 370 Pulsing it again through them, Till the basest can no longer cower, Feeling his soul spring up divinely tall, Touched but in passing by her mantle-hem. Come back, ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... spear-blade is usually lashed to one end of the sumpitan, like a bayonet, thus providing a weapon for use at close quarters. The dart is made from a sliver of bamboo, or from a palm-frond, scraped to the size of a steel knitting-needle. One end of the dart is imbedded in a cork-shaped piece of pith which fits the hole in the sumpitan as a cartridge fits the bore of a rifle; the other end, which is of needle-sharpness, is smeared with a paste made from the milky sap of the upas tree dissolved in a juice extracted from the root of the tuba. With the possible exception of curare, this is ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... their dear rough stems, rough with nice little white hairs, and I knew how easily their poor heads would cut off, there is so much pith ...
— Last Words - A Final Collection of Stories • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... By producing, with the aid of the electrical generator contained in this car, an enormous charge of electricity, Mr. Edison was able to counterbalance, and a trifle more than counterbalance, the attraction of the earth, and thus cause the car to fly off from the earth as an electrified pith ball flies from ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putman Serviss
... king can make a belted knight, Confer proud names, and a' that; But pith of sense and pride of worth Are brighter ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... of such pith required, indeed, less talking than consideration. The first thing they did in carrying it out was to return to the railway station, where Baptista took from her luggage a small trunk of immediate necessaries which she would in any case have ...
— Victorian Short Stories, - Stories Of Successful Marriages • Elizabeth Gaskell, et al.
... leave it behind. Thou spoiler of grace, that changest the face To hasten its race on the route to the tomb, To whom nothing is dear, unaffection'd the ear, Emotion is sere, and expression is dumb; Of spirit how void, thy passions how cloy'd, Thy pith how destroy'd, and thy pleasure how gone! To the pang of thy cries not an echo replies, Even sympathy dies—and thy helper is none. We see thee how stripp'd of each bloom that equipp'd Thy flourish, till nipp'd the winter thy rose; Till the spoiler made bare the scalp of the hair, And the ivory[128] ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... seldom tend to the spiritual improvement of the present. An interesting judgment by Professor Horstman on Rolle's place in mysticism is too long for quotation; but the following sentence may be taken as the pith of it:—"His position as a mystic was mainly the result of the development of scholasticism. The exuberant luxuriant growth of the brain in the system of Scotus called forth the reaction of the heart, and this reaction is embodied in Richard Rolle, ...
— The Form of Perfect Living and Other Prose Treatises • Richard Rolle of Hampole
... And something white slid in the waves. One lamentation, far and wide, Followed behind that flying dart. Things soulless and immortal died, As if they filled the self-same part; The flower, the girl, the oak, the man, Made the same dust from pith or heart, Then spoke I, calmly as one can Who with his purpose curbs his fear, And thus to both my question ran:— "What two are ye who cross me here, Upon these desolated lands, Whose open fields lie waste and drear Beneath ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... defends A spot, to rest the serpent-bearing head, Lest the bare sand should harm it. Twigs marine He likewise strews, and rests Medusa there. The fresh green twigs as though with life endow'd, Felt the dire Gorgon's power; their spongy pith Hard to the touch became, the stiffness spread Through every twig and leaf. The Nereid nymphs More branches bring, and try the wonderous change On all, and joy to see the change succeed: Spreading ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... the delicate, pointed and picturesque phraseology of the Sieur Amadis! Strange, coarse slang-words were used,—and the news of the day was slung together in loose ungrammatical sentences and chopped-up paragraphs of clumsy construction, lacking all pith and eloquence. So, repelled by the horror of twentieth-century "style," she had hidden her manuscripts deeper than ever in the old bureau, under little silk sachets of dried rose-leaves and lavender, as though they were love-letters or old ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... each pound of rhubarb cut without peeling, a pound of sugar and one lemon. Pare the yellow peel from the lemon, taking care to get none of the bitter white pith. Slice the pulp of the lemon in an earthen bowl, discarding the seeds. Put the rhubarb into the bowl with the sugar and lemon, cover and stand away in a cool place over night. In the morning turn into the preserving kettle, simmer ...
— Good Things to Eat as Suggested by Rufus • Rufus Estes
... which drives directly to the heart of the man, instantly detects the impostor behind the braggart, and curtly declares him to lack "the true grit." The word is so close to the thing it names, has so much pith and point, is so tart on the tongue, and so stings the ear with its meaning, that foreigners ignorant of the language might at once feel its significance by its griding utterance as it is shot impatiently through the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... life had a man shut off thus from all but lickspittles and slaves? No wonder that the victims of such dignity beat the sea with rods, when it was rude enough to wreck their ships! No wonder that they wallowed in sensuality, and lost pith and manhood! No wonder that Greece crushed their ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... progresses and evolves, or only spins upon itself. Take Dryden's Achitophel and Zimri,—Shaftesbury and Buckingham; every line adds to or modifies the character, which is, as it were, a-building up to the very last verse; whereas, in Pope's Timon, &c. the first two or three couplets contain all the pith of the character, and the twenty or thirty lines that follow are so much evidence or proof of overt acts of jealousy, or pride, or whatever it may be that is satirized. In like manner compare Charles Lamb's ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... magpie, bighorn, and a grizzly-hide or so. They got their four bighorn heads at the Mandans, none very large, though 'two feet long and four inches diameter' seemed big to them. And I shouldn't wonder if those horns could have been pulled off the pith after they got good and dry. The horns of the bighorn will dry out and lose at least ten per cent of their measurement, in a few years' hanging on a wall. I have had a bighorn's curly horn come off the pith in rough handling three or four years after it was killed; but of course ...
— The Young Alaskans on the Missouri • Emerson Hough
... to turn his verse-narratives into prose, and less would be lost in the transfer. In Multitude and Solitude, the author has given us more of the results of his own thinking than can be found in most of the poems. Whole pages are filled with the pith of meditative thought. In Captain Margaret, we have a remarkable combination of the love of romance and the romance ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... work is before you, Glory! You'll take it up where I have left it, and carry it on and on. You are nobler than I am, and stronger, far stronger, and purer and braver. And haven't I said all along that what the world wants now is a great woman? I had the pith of it all, though I saw the true light—but I was not worthy. I had sinned and fallen, and didn't know my own heart, and was not fit to enter into the promised land. It is something, nevertheless, that I see it a long way off. And if I have been taken up to Sinai and heard the thunders ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... is no such mighty matter as some folks try to make it out. The boy went to sleep as soon as he was born, and has but just waked up—that's my notion about it. So now, instead of starting, the way most of us do, at the point of helplessness, he begins life with a body full of seven years' pith, and faculties sharp set as a new watch. Till now he has but dreamed; now he's going to exist, with so much the more extra impetus. He don't recollect what ...
— Archibald Malmaison • Julian Hawthorne
... have often turned enforced solitude to account in executing works of great pith and moment. It is in solitude that the passion for spiritual perfection best nurses itself. The soul communes with itself in loneliness until its energy often becomes intense. But whether a man ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... history. The depth of their misery and of their degradation was hardly yet known to themselves, and this was perhaps the most hideous proof of the tyranny of which they had been the victims. To the outward world, the hollow fabric, out of which the whole pith and strength had been slowly gnawed away, was imposing and majestic still. But the priest, the soldier, and the courtier had been busy too long, and had done their work too thoroughly, to leave much hope of ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... was a great delight to see the faces of the children of men once more after so many months, and to hold converse with them; while for their part the young men marvelled at Ursula's beauty, and the pith ...
— The Well at the World's End • William Morris
... to Woodstock. But of all the college walks, those of Magdalen were the more impressive and attractive. It appeared to embody the whole of the noble city in its own personification, as a single word will sometimes express the pith of an entire sentence. The "Mighty Tom" in the olden time, even of Walter de Mapes, if its metal was then out of the ore, never sounded (then perhaps not nine) but the midnight hour, to that worthy archdeacon, with more of the character of its locality, than the ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... that every natural process is a version of a moral sentence. The moral law lies at the centre of nature and radiates to the circumference. It is the pith and marrow of every substance, every relation, and every process. All things with which we deal, preach to us. What is a farm but a mute gospel? The chaff and the wheat, weeds and plants, blight, rain, insects, sun,—it is a sacred emblem from the first furrow of ...
— Nature • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... being sawed at mills along the shore road. On the streets are seen men of several nationalities, Chinese, Malays, Moros, East Indians, and occasionally a Caucasian in his customary white suit and pith helmet; but of all these the most dignified and stately is the Indian policeman. He is tall and slender, with frequently a fine black beard; his head is covered with the usual white turban, set off with a touch of red. His gray spiral puttees generally do not quite reach the bottom of his ...
— Wanderings in the Orient • Albert M. Reese
... taken out of the Ground, wash them clean, and boil them in several Waters till they are very tender: wash them again, and rub them with a Cloth, to dry as much as they will bear, without breaking, or bruising; slit them, and take out the Pith, and twist two together, like a Screw. Then take to every Pound of Root two Pounds of fine Sugar powder'd, of which Sugar take one Pound at first, and boil it with some Rose-Water, to a Syrup; and then ...
— The Country Housewife and Lady's Director - In the Management of a House, and the Delights and Profits of a Farm • Richard Bradley
... are full of the pith of facts. Dread of Africa lay deep in the Spanish heart and gave point to these and other magical and romantic tales. The story of how the great conqueror, Mohammed, had come out from the deserts of Arabia and sent his generals, sword ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume VII • Charles Morris
... bare arm of the milkmaid, Adonis drew the figure down a pith toward the small lake that was on one edge of the ...
— The Motor Girls • Margaret Penrose
... riding-house, which was appropriately decorated, and in which each group of the guests were supplied with food cooked after the manner of their own country. A ball followed, in which the people of each nation danced their national dances to their national music. The pith of the joke, in the Russian appreciation of that day, came at the end, the bride and groom being conducted to a bed of ice in an icy palace, in which they were forced to spend the night, guards being stationed at the door to prevent their getting ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 8 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... interest in my new acquaintance. He was communicative, shrewd, and peculiar; and though apt to express himself quaintly, it was always with the pith of one who had seen a great deal of at least one portion of his fellow-creatures. The conversation, under such circumstances, did not flag; on the contrary, it soon grew more interesting by the stranger's beginning ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... then cut off the bottoms, and keep them in a dry, cool place. Cheap lights are made, by dipping rushes in tallow; the rushes being first stripped of nearly the whole of the hard outer covering and the pith alone being retained with just enough of the tough ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... natures are the fiery pith, The compact nucleus, round which systems grow. Mass after mass becomes inspired therewith, And whirls impregnate ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... with a large rat in the centre of the room, which had just been suspended with all the formalities of a military execution. It appeared that the unfortunate beast had transgressed the laws of war; it had climbed the ramparts of a card-board fortress, and had actually eaten two pith sentries on duty at the bastions. It was to be exposed to the public view as an example during three days following! Catharine, unluckily, was so lost to the fitness of things as to betray open merriment. The Grand Duke was furious; and she had to retire, excusing herself ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... caused it to be hung up, with the big end of the stem turned upwards, the leaves of each stalk slightly touching one another, being well assured they would shrivel in drying, and no longer touch each other. It hereby happened, that the juice contained in the pith (sometimes as big as one's finger) of the stem of the plant, flowed into the leaves, and augmenting their sap, made them much more mild and waxy. As fast as these leaves assumed a bright chesnut colour, I stripped them from the stalk, and made them ...
— History of Louisisana • Le Page Du Pratz
... says. 'You come inside,' I says, 'and I'll punch your blooming head.' There was a kind of silence and more jabbering, and in he came, Bible in hand, after the manner of them—a little sandy chap in specks and a pith helmet. I flatter myself that me sitting there in the shadows, with my copper head and my big goggles, struck him a bit of a heap at first. 'Well,' I says, 'how's the trade in calico?' for I don't hold ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... the strings of his harp seem, as the hand of age, as the tale of other times, passes over them, to sigh and rustle like the dry reeds in the winter's wind! The feeling of cheerless desolation, of the loss of the pith and sap of existence, of the annihilation of the substance, and the clinging to the shadow of all things, as in a mock-embrace, is here perfect. In this way, the lamentation of Selma for the loss of Salgar is the finest of all. If it were indeed possible to show that this writer ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... cut it short, did the great god Pan, (How tall it stood in the river!) 20 Then drew the pith, like the heart of a man, Steadily from the outside ring, And notched the poor, dry, empty thing In holes, as he sat ...
— Narrative and Lyric Poems (first series) for use in the Lower School • O. J. Stevenson
... latter being physical and not political. The only indigenous tree is the ombu, and the ombu makes itself conspicuous by its rarity. Nature must have fashioned this tree with her tongue in cheek, for the wood is a mere pith, and a walking-stick can be driven right into the tree. Not only is the wood useless as timber, but it is equally valueless as fuel, for the pith rots before it can be dried. The leaves are poisonous, and in spite ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... said the reporter. "They and the women led off in this war. I'm glad of it,—brings out the pith in 'em." ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 60, October 1862 • Various
... can come. But you have no idea of the heat here! I tried to wear my great beauty Indian shawl at a pic-nic. I kept myself up with proverbs as long as I could; "Pride must abide,"—and such wholesome pieces of pith; but it was of no use. I was like mamma's little dog Tiny with an elephant's trappings on; smothered, hidden, killed with my finery; so I made it into a capital carpet for us all to sit down upon. Here's this boy of mine, Margaret,—if you don't pack up your things as soon as you get ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... within began to move slowly out on to the plain. Once clear of the camp they halted, and the slant rays of the sun struck flashes from bayonet and from gun-barrel as the ranks closed up until the big pith helmets joined into a single long white ribbon. Two streaks of scarlet glowed on either side of the square, but elsewhere the fringe of fighting-men was of the dull yellow khaki tint which hardly shows against the desert sand. Inside their array was a dense mass of camels and mules bearing stores ...
— The Green Flag • Arthur Conan Doyle
... A tree is cut down in its proper stage of growth, just when it begins to flower. The pith is pulled and torn into shreds and fibres, then the juice is squeezed out so as to allow it to run or drip into some vessel, while water is poured on the pith by some one assisting the performer. The grounds (as ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... he is a bare "O without a figure," counting for nothing in the sum of things. He only is truly himself who has nature in him, when the old shell is cracked, to build up a new one about him out of the pith and substance of himself. ...
— Uppingham by the Sea - a Narrative of the Year at Borth • John Henry Skrine
... alone, upwards of a hundred species are found in these forests. These supply the Indian with nearly all he wants to support existence. Their fruit, or pith, or crowns, furnish him with an abundance of food. He builds his hut and floors it with their wood, and thatches it with their leaves. From the trunks of some species he forms his canoes, of different ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... frontiers more thoroughly than the idea of a foray. The summons of Bexir was gladly obeyed by the alcaydes of the border towns, and in a little while there was a force of fifteen hundred horse and four thousand foot, the very pith and marrow of the surrounding country, assembled within the walls of Ronda. The people of the place anticipated with eagerness the rich spoils of Andalusia soon to crowd their gates; throughout the day the city resounded with the noise of kettle-drum and trumpet; the high-mettled steeds stamped ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... philosophies, who kept his tables always by him for open questions? and whose tablets—whose many-leaved tablets, are they then, that are tumbled out upon us here, glowing with 'all saws, all forms, all pressures past, that youth and observation copied there.' And if aphorisms are made out of the pith and heart of sciences, if 'no man can write good aphorisms who is not sound and grounded,' what Wittenberg, what ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... The pith of the whole lies in Professor Bruehl's own expression: "In German unity," he says, "the idea precedes everything else, engenders the fact l'est l'Unite nationale d'abord; Unite l'etat ensuite," and nowhere in any historical phenomenon has ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various
... was corn't, an' I was mellow, We took the road aye like a swallow: At brooses thou had ne'er a fellow, For pith an' speed; But ev'ry tail thou pay't ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... told, we teach the ten commandments, where a world of morals lies condensed, the very pith and epitome of all ethics and religion; and a young man with these precepts engraved upon his mind must follow after profit with some conscience and Christianity of method. A man cannot go very far astray who neither dishonours his parents, nor kills, nor commits adultery, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... shrewd therewith; Slow to resolve, but firm to hold; Still with parable and with myth Seasoning truth, like Them of old; Aptest humor and quaintest pith! (Still we smile ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... Tutors e'er are free) puzzles the will, And makes us rather bear these lesser ills, Than fly to those of greater magnitude. Thus error does make cowards of us all; And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied over with undue clemency, And pedagogues of great pith and spirit, With this regard their firmness turn away, And lose the ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 5: Some Strange and Curious Punishments • Henry M. Brooks
... hands of the Danes, and all the more prominent actors were of Danish birth. Theatrical managers drew freely on the dramatic treasures of Danish literature, and occasionally, to replenish the exchequer, reproduced a French comedy or farce, whose epigrammatic pith and vigor were more than half-spoiled in the translation. The drama was as yet an exotic in Norway; it had no root in the national soil, and could accordingly in no respect represent the nation's own struggles and aspirations. ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... a remark which I confess astonished me—a remark I could never forget as coming from him. He said that he "had lived a very full and varied life, and had no interest in remarks about morals." "Remarks about morals" are, nevertheless, in essence, the pith of all the books to which he referred, as those to which he turned in preference to the Edinburgh Edition of R. L. Stevenson's works. The moral element is implicit in the drama, and it is implicit there because it is implicit in life itself, or so the great common-sense conceives ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... Fritz," which disappeared from the list after two representations, and had been heard at an improvised performance, which scarcely deserves to be considered in a record of this character. In the supplemental season, however, a novelty of real pith and moment was brought forward in the shape of Massenet's "Werther," which had been promised to the regular subscribers, and which, while it made no profound impression, was accepted as an earnest of the excellent ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... tosses, Are they, Smith? Do they, fasting, tramping, bleeding, Wait the news from this our city? Groaning "That's the Second Reading!" Hissing "There is still Committee!" If the voice of Cecil falters, If McKenna's point has pith, Do they tremble for their altars? ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... surprised Keith had he known how accurately the young engineer he had glanced at and dismissed as almost an amateur at the game, followed the trend of his scheming. There is not much variation in the methods of Mining Promotion, and Westlake was an observer and a conserver of the pith ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... rejoice at all; he grew and grew, and was green both winter and summer. People that saw him said, "What a fine tree!" and towards Christmas he was one of the first that was cut down. The axe struck deep into the very pith; the Tree fell to the earth with a sigh; he felt a pang—it was like a swoon; he could not think of happiness, for he was sorrowful at being separated from his home, from the place where he had sprung up. He well knew that he should never see his dear old comrades, the little ...
— Andersen's Fairy Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... may be for half a century in decay without exhibiting much outward change; and when, in some tempestuous night, half its bulk is torn away, the neighborhood notes with surprise that what seemed solid wood is dry and crumbling pith. During the last fifteen years of Daniel Webster's life, his wonderfully imposing form and his immense reputation concealed from the public the decay of his powers and the degeneration of his morals. At least, few said what perhaps ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... the intrusion. The joint-grass of soggy pastures produces edible, nut-flavored tubers, called by the Indians taboose. The common reed of the ultramontane marshes (here Phragmites vulgaris), a very stately, whispering reed, light and strong for shafts or arrows, affords sweet sap and pith which ...
— The Land of Little Rain • Mary Austin
... to esthetics—that is, the love of beauty for its own sake. Such a germ of esthetic pleasure we find in our infants years before they have the faintest conception of what is meant by personal beauty; and this brings me to the pith of my argument. Had the facts warranted it, I might have freely conceded that savages decorate themselves for the sake of gaining an advantage in courtship without thereby in the least yielding the main thesis of this chapter, which is that the admiration of personal beauty is not one of the motives ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... produce, wherein I have now altogether circumscribed my thoughts and my studies; and if I can bring it to a perfection before I die, shall reckon I have well employed the poor remains of an unfortunate life. This indeed is more than I can justly expect from a quill worn to the pith in the service of the State, in pros and cons upon Popish Plots, and Meal Tubs, and Exclusion Bills, and Passive Obedience, and Addresses of Lives and Fortunes; and Prerogative, and Property, and Liberty of Conscience, ...
— A Tale of a Tub • Jonathan Swift
... Tacitus). "The work," says La Bletterie, "is brief without being superficial. Within the compass of a few pages, it comprises more of ethics and politics, more fine delineations of character, more substance and pith (suc), than can be collected from many a ponderous volume. It is not one of those barely agreeable descriptions, which gradually diffuse their influence over the soul, and leave it in undisturbed tranquillity. It is a picture in strong light, like the ...
— Germania and Agricola • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... tarnish, and then peg out each hole many times, until you are sure every hole is clean, by pegging both sides, and then with a soft dust brush dust thoroughly by striking the brush into the holes on both sides. Of course, remove all end stones, and clean out with soft pith, holding the jewels in a pair of hook nose tweezers, mentioned. Should the plates and wheels be very much soiled and oily, a covered dish of alcohol is indispensable, and I have had a glass stopper bottle, with ether, in which to dip the jewels, pallets, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 664, September 22,1888 • Various
... '64, and pleaded for once again in '72, this call to unity began to appear in the nineties as the one supreme commandment of the labor movement. And, in truth, it is an epitome of all their teachings. It is the pith of their program and the marrow of their principles. Nearly all else can be waived. Other principles can be altered; other programs abandoned; other methods revolutionized; but this principle, program, and method must not be tampered with. ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... statement in regard to colonial government. His lordship denounced the imprudence of the Colonial Reform Association, which, by its correspondence with disaffected persons, kept alive discontent wherever it existed, and indirectly promoted it everywhere else. The pith of the noble lord's statement was, that the colonies were a source of strength in peace and war, contrary to the doctrine propounded by Messrs. Cobden and Bright: that it was the duty of England to preserve her colonial influence, and to ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... University generally. He had the gift which enables a man, sitting perhaps after dinner in a mixed society of his college contemporaries, to lead the way imperceptibly from the casual subjects of the hour—the river, the dons, the schools—to arguments "of great pith and moment," discussions that search the moral and intellectual powers of the men concerned to the utmost, without exciting distrust or any but an argumentative opposition, Edward Hallin could do this without a ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... did it depart from a comprehensive name. Some title-pages in old folios make about half an hour's reading.[42] One advantage, however, was found in these lengthy titles—they afforded to controversialists a means of condensing the pith of their malignity towards each other, and throwing it, as it were, right in the face of the adversary. It will thus often happen that the controversialist states his case first in the title-page; ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... or indeed to allow them the right to think for themselves; but in troubled times the blood mounts to the head, and colors the judgment, giving to suspicions and fancies the force of realities, and intensifying personal predilections, till they seem the pith and substance of national duties. Even where the office of historian is assumed in the fairest temper, it is impossible that the narrative of events whose bearing is so momentous should not insensibly ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... not intend to go back to that room where he had left the candle burning. Oh no! He couldn't have faced even the entry and the staircase with the broken step—certainly not that pith-white, fascinating room. He would go back for the present to his old arrangement, of workroom and separate sleeping-quarters; he would go to his old landlady at once—presently—when he had finished his brandy—and see if she could ...
— Widdershins • Oliver Onions
... and of a deep green colour. the stem is simple ascending and branching, and seldom rises higher than 10 or 12 feet. the Mountains continue high on either side of the valley, and are but scantily supplyed with timber; small pine apears to be the prevalent growth; it is of the pith kind, with a short leaf. at 11 A.M. Drewyer killed a doe and we halted about 2 hours and breakfasted, and then continued our rout untill night without halting, when we arrived at the river in a level bottom which appeared to spread to greater extent ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al
... I had on a rig of clean striped pyjamas—for, of course, I had dressed decent to go before the chiefs; but when I saw the missionary step out of this boat in the regular uniform, white duck clothes, pith helmet, white shirt and tie, and yellow boots to his feet, I could have bunged stones at him. As he came nearer, queering me pretty curious (because of the fight, I suppose), I saw he looked mortal sick, for the truth was he ...
— Island Nights' Entertainments • Robert Louis Stevenson
... now filled with the tiny darts, and my thick pith helmet intercepted so many of them that, as Mac said afterwards, it looked like a miniature reed-plantation. Far on our left the deep rumble of the river was heard, and towards it we rushed blindly, closely ...
— Adventures in Many Lands • Various
... these natives are few and simple. Four sorts of spears, made from the suckers of a very light wood tree with large pith, headed with hard wood and generally topped with bone so as to form a point or barb, are the most common. The end of the tail of a species of ray fish is sometimes used as a point. It is serrated and brittle, and on entering any object breaks short off. It is said to be poisonous, but I do not believe ...
— The Overland Expedition of The Messrs. Jardine • Frank Jardine and Alexander Jardine
... taking his aim, and preparing to draw the trigger, I turned round my back, not being able to stand it, and brizzed the flats of my hands with all my pith against the opening of my ears; nevertheless, I heard a faint boom; so, heeling round, I observed the miserable bleeding creature lift her head, and pulling up her legs, give them a plunge down again on the divots: after which she lay still, and we ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - tailor in Dalkeith • D. M. Moir
... comprised in the concluding chapter of the Gulistan, under the heading of "Rules for the Conduct of Life," many others, of great pith and moment, are interspersed with the tales and anecdotes which Saadi recounts in the preceding chapters, a selection of which can hardly fail to ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... public as it is valuable to the Daguerrean artist, or the amateur dabbler in Photography. I have read nearly all of the many works upon this art that have emanated from the London and Paris presses, and I think the reader will find in yours the pith of them all, with much practical and useful information that I do not remember to ...
— The History and Practice of the Art of Photography • Henry H. Snelling
... slight occasions;" and to this remark, I think, the marriage under our consideration would not be found, upon enquiry, to be an exception. Lord Byron himself, indeed, when at Cephalonia, a short time before his death, seems to have expressed, in a few words, the whole pith of the mystery. An English gentleman with whom he was conversing on the subject of Lady Byron, having ventured to enumerate to him the various causes he had heard alleged for the separation, the noble poet, ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... a change of diet," he explained. "No; we don't boil the leaves or nibble the bark. When I split this palm open you will find that the interior is full of pith. I will cut it out for you, and then it will be your task to knead it with water after well washing it, pick out all the fiber, and finally permit the water to evaporate. In a couple of days the residuum will become a white ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... his tea and munched his cookies, with his head on one side and the air of a thievish jackdaw; and proceeded, after his wont, to extract such pith ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... his friend, Antonio de Dominis, Archbishop of Spalato, and he, having taken refuge in England, had it translated there, the authorship being ascribed on the title-page to "Pietro Soave Polano." This English translation was, in vigor and pith, worthy of the original. In it can be discerned, as clearly as in the original, that atmosphere of intrigue and brutal assertion of power by which the Roman Curia, after packing the Council with petty Italian bishops, bade defiance to the ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... worn only in winter. In many of the native regiments the British officers wore tasselled pugrees, and long tunics that were really shirts, and an adaption of the native custom of wearing the shirt-tails outside the trousers. The Gurkhas were supplied with pith helmets. It was generally claimed that this was unnecessary, but the authorities felt that coming from a cold, high climate they would be as much affected by the Mesopotamian sun as were Europeans. The presence of the Indian troops brought about unusual additions to the dry "General Routine Orders" ...
— War in the Garden of Eden • Kermit Roosevelt
... has been largely through concrete illustrations which have pith, point, and purpose, to be more suggestive than dogmatic, in a style more practical than elegant, more helpful than ornate, more pertinent ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
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