"Close-packed" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... cart not far from him. Ivan Parmenov was standing on the cart, taking, laying in place, and stamping down the huge bundles of hay, which his pretty young wife deftly handed up to him, at first in armfuls, and then on the pitchfork. The young wife worked easily, merrily, and dexterously. The close-packed hay did not once break away off her fork. First she gathered it together, stuck the fork into it, then with a rapid, supple movement leaned the whole weight of her body on it, and at once with a bend of her back under the red belt she drew herself up, and ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... eddying upon the stream that rushes to the grave. The sweeping outlines of life, that lay once before the vision,—rolling into wide billows of years, like easy lifts of a broad mountain-range,—now seem close-packed together as with a Titan hand, and you see only crowded, craggy heights,—like Alpine fastnesses,—parted with glaciers of ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell
... to the close-packed circle behind him as if mere words were too weak things to do the question justice. And this time as he turned his eyes met squarely those of the gray-shirted figure that was staring straight back at him in a kind of fascination. For one disconcerted instant Judge Maynard ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... in an instant, in the twinkling of an eye; and before a hand could be lifted among the retainers, a whirling hurricane of lead smote with crushing fury among the close-packed group of Kachins which had been clustered behind the leaders. A stream of bullets was poured into them as swiftly as magazines could be worked, and half their number went down headlong. None of the rest stayed ...
— Jack Haydon's Quest • John Finnemore
... splendid army eaten away as waves eat a sandhill. Never once did I get a chance of forcing close action. These new tactics that had come from Phorenice's invention, were beyond my art to meet or understand. We were eight to her one, and our close-packed numbers only made us so much the more easy for slaughter. A panic came, and those who could fled. Myself, I had no wish to go back and earn the axe that waits for the unsuccessful general. I tried to die there fighting where I stood. But death would not come. It ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
... pitted from innumerable collisions with dust particles, sped out and out. The close-packed suns of the central hub lay far behind. Here at the rim of the galaxy the stars lay scattered, separated by vast distances. A gaunt hollow-eyed figure sat in the observation bubble staring half-hopefully, half-despairingly ...
— Faithfully Yours • Lou Tabakow
... oak benches which were set out here in the open air as in the nave of a church. Nearly all these benches were already occupied by those sufferers who could sit down, while the vacant spaces were soon filled with litters and little vehicles whose wheels became entangled together, and on whose close-packed mattresses and pillows all sorts of diseases were gathered pell-mell. Immediately on arriving, the young priest had recognised the Vignerons seated with their sorry child Gustave in the middle of a bench, and now, on the flagstones, he caught sight of the lace-trimmed bed of Madame ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... kontusz. In vain the geese called out hoarsely, winding their necks about; in vain the ganders hissed and nipped their assailant. He ran; besprinkled with the glittering down, borne forward as if on wheels by the motion of the close-packed wings, he seemed to be Chochlik, the ...
— Pan Tadeusz • Adam Mickiewicz
... them away from the palace on the beautiful hill—away from all the sights and sounds that were collected together there to delight the soul of man with both bodily and intellectual enjoyment— down into the city in the valley, among the close-packed habitations of common men, congregated there to labour, and just exist, ...
— Aunt Judy's Tales • Mrs Alfred Gatty
... remaining poems of The Temple one of the most suggestive is "The Pilgrimage." Here in six short stanzas, every line close-packed with thought, we have the whole of Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. The poem was written probably before Bunyan was born, but remembering the wide influence of Herbert's poetry, it is an interesting question whether Bunyan ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... business in London, took his sister-in-law there, driving old Major to the crossroads, where they met the stage-coach. He went outside, on the box-seat, and she in the dull and close-packed interior, where four persons and one small child had to make the best of their quarters for the six hours that the journey lasted. Tired, headachy, and dusty with March dust, at last Dora emerged, and was very glad to rattle through ...
— The Carbonels • Charlotte M. Yonge
... contrast was all this to the clouded world we had left behind us, in yonder close-packed city, with its poverty, its misery, its sin, its injustice, its scramble for gold, its dark hates and terrible plots. But, I said to myself, while God permits man to wreck himself, he denies him the power to destroy the world. The grass covers the graves; the ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... our pistols, in case of an attack from a recovering panther, we started upon our butchering expedition. On our way we met with some fierce-looking jaguars, which we did not think it prudent to attack, so we let them alone, and soon found occupation enough for our knives and tomahawks among a close-packed herd of wolves. ...
— Monsieur Violet • Frederick Marryat
... bodies away from the wheels when it happened. We learned afterward how it happened. A block distant a hundred of our comrades had been holding a building. Across roofs and through buildings they made their way, till they found themselves looking down upon the close-packed ...
— The Iron Heel • Jack London
... aluminium boot-trees and weightless hair-brushes and hand-mirrors and pomade in his hands, resumed possession. Bert was put in with Kurt because there was nowhere else for him to lay his bandaged head in that close-packed vessel. He was to mess, he was told, ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... galley attacking galley, that officer replied to him, "Never fire your arquebus at the foe until you are so close at hand that his blood will leap into your face at the discharge." If we bear in mind such an instruction as this it will help us to picture that close-packed sanguinary conflict upon which the Mediterranean sun looked down on this day. Eight to one, all that could find room to get alongside of the Santa Ana, fought with the Knight and his followers. The issue was, of course, never in doubt for a ...
— Sea-Wolves of the Mediterranean • E. Hamilton Currey
... develop itself freely into a more or less rounded form. You must not even look at the tropic forests. For there, from the immense diversity of forms, twenty varieties of tree will grow beneath each other, forming a close-packed heap of boughs and leaves, from the ground to a hundred feet and ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... horseback, he pushed forward into the sea as far as his horse would let him, doing battle himself, and encouraging his troopers and the infantry alike to play their parts. Then the Peloponnesians, ranging their ships in close-packed order, and drawing up their battle line in proximity to the land, kept up the fight. At length the Athenians, having captured thirty of the enemy's vessels without their crews, and having recovered those of their own ...
— Hellenica • Xenophon
... exceeding steep, the expedition buried under fathoms of foliage. Presently water appeared in the bottom, a good quantity; perhaps thirty or forty cubic feet, with pools and waterfalls. A tree that stands all along the banks here must be very fond of water; its roots lie close-packed down the stream, like hanks of guts, so as to make often a corrugated walk, each root ending in a blunt tuft of filaments, plainly to drink water. Twice there came in small tributaries from the ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... The small patens of the beeches shone like green glass, and the pale spired chestnuts were candelabras on either side of the steep path. In the bright breathless glades of larches the willow-wrens sang softly, but with boundless vitality. On sunny slopes the hyacinths pushed out close-packed buds between their covering leaves; soon they would spread their grave blue like a prayer-carpet. Hazel, stooping in her old multi-coloured pinafore, her bare arms gleaming like the stripped trees, seemed to Edward as he came up the shady path to be the spirit of beauty. He ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... clang, and the Roman vanguard, with incessant attacks and threatening cries, assailed the enemy, who were covered from head to foot with thin plates of iron like the feathers of a bird, and who had full confidence that any weapons that fell on this hard iron would recoil; while our close-packed shields with which our men covered themselves as with a testudo, opened loosely so as to adapt themselves to their continual motion. On the other hand the Persians, obstinately clinging to their walls, laboured ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... water, whenever he needed it; or a special head, according to agreement with the parties owning the dam. Early in the drive, he found that Morrison & Daly intended to cause him trouble. It began in a narrows of the river between high, rocky banks. Thorpe's drive was floating through close-packed. The situation was ticklish. Men with spiked boots ran here and there from one bobbing log to another, pushing with their peaveys, hurrying one log, retarding another, working like beavers to keep the whole mass straight. The entire surface of the water was practically covered with the ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... The manner of the welcome given by the captain to his aide need not be recorded here. It was curt and lurid; it would serve as a sorry passport if proffered on his entry to another world; but the tragi-comedy of Watts's appearance among the close-packed gathering on the forecastle was forthwith blotted out of existence by a thing so amazing, so utterly unlooked for that during a couple of spellbound seconds not a ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... the shelf-like mountain road rose the sharp hillside, clothed in close-packed, straight-rising redwoods; on the other the ground fell away so precipitously to the tiny thread of creek below that they looked down upon the water through the top branches of the trees. Years ago, when he had first entrusted her with the ...
— Sisters • Kathleen Norris
... in every twenty-four, night and day watching of their convoy, of their colleagues, of periscopes. (The prospect of collision with their close-packed convoy and themselves is a bad chance in itself.) On a destroyer convoying ships the officer of the deck has to stand with one eye to the compass ordering, say, two hundred changes of course in every hour. And one watch-officer ...
— The U-boat hunters • James B. Connolly
... left—it was crowded and riot was at its height; a stringed orchestra in Hungarian costume played what purported to be Hungarian airs; shouts, laughter, clatter of dishes, and thump of steins added to the din. He made his way between the close-packed tables to the stairs, and descended to the lower floor. Here, if anything, the confusion was greater than above; but here, too, was an exit through to the rear street—and a moment later he was sauntering past the front of an unkempt little pawnshop, closed for the night, over whose door, in the ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... cathedral at Lustadt excitement was at fever heat. It lacked but two minutes of noon, and as yet no king had come to claim the crown. Rumors were running riot through the close-packed audience. ...
— The Mad King • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... trial lasted, there were brisk encounters between the lawyers, and several points the prosecution sought to prove were ruled irrelevant. As a climax, came George's story, which caused a sensation, though the close-packed assembly felt that he scarcely did ...
— Ranching for Sylvia • Harold Bindloss
... excitement of these close-packed moments Desmond had forgotten the other man, whom he had last seen with his leg dangling over the windowsill. He looked up now; the window was still open; the ladder lay exactly where he had jerked it; evidently the robber had ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang
... his Highness, after the public banquet at the palace, was to proceed in state to the University; and the throng was thick about the palace gates and in the streets betwixt it and the Signoria. Here the square was close-packed, and every window choked with gazers, as the Duke's coach came in sight, escorted meagrely by his equerries and the half-dozen light-horse that preceded him. The small escort, and the marked absence of military display, perhaps disappointed the splendour-loving crowd; and from ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... trees from where they lay they could see the close-packed wooden crosses of a cemetery from which came a sound of spaded earth, and where, preceded by a priest in a muddy cassock, little two-wheeled carts piled with shapeless things in sacks kept being brought up and unloaded ...
— One Man's Initiation—1917 • John Dos Passos
... the broad and quiet streets of the Hill, the boys were shocked and stunned by the life that teemed in the close-packed quarter. It seemed some thick and monstrous growth of vegetation, and that they were wading through it. They shrank closely together in the tangle of narrow streets as though for protection, conscious of the strangeness of it all, and how unrelated ...
— The Cruise of the Dazzler • Jack London
... him a moment thoughtfully. Then she stepped to the tall show-case, pushed back the sliding glass door, and pointed to the rows of brilliant-hued petticoats that hung close-packed within. ...
— Roast Beef, Medium • Edna Ferber
... waves at every movement of the particles; to others it is a continuous fluid, every cubic millimetre of which possesses "an energy equivalent to the output of a million-horse-power station for 40.000,000 years" (Lodge); to others it is a close-packed granular mass with a pressure of 10,000 tons per square centimetre. We must wait. It is little over ten years since the vaults were opened and physicists began to peer into the sub-material world. The lower, perhaps lowest, depth is reserved for ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... degree even that Mr. Mudge himself—habitually inclined indeed to a scrutiny of all mysteries and to seeing, as he sometimes admitted, too much in things—made remarks on it as he sat on the cliff with his betrothed, or on the decks of steamers that conveyed them, close-packed items in terrific totals of enjoyment, to the Isle of Wight and the ...
— In the Cage • Henry James
... "A close-packed crowd doth hem him round, a tight, malodorous 'block' Of fustian men and women gross, of dry and dusty lock; His 'By your leaves' they heed no whit, his struggles wild ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... to be my historian's principles. As for diction and style, he is not to set about his work armed to the teeth from the rhetorician's arsenal of impetuosity and incisiveness, rolling periods, close-packed arguments, and the rest; for him a serener mood. His matter should be homogeneous and compact, his vocabulary fit to be understanded of the people, for the clearest possible setting forth of ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... her watch. It was quarter after four. With a little gasp she turned to work her way through the close-packed crowd. It was an actual physical struggle, from which she emerged disheveled, breathless, uncomfortably warm, and minus her handkerchief, but she had gained the comparative quiet of the side street, and she made the short distance that lay between the Avenue and ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... of oaks and ash trees. At Sandyfield rectory, deep-roofed, bow-windowed, the red walls and tiles of it half smothered in ivy and coton-easter. At the low, squat-towered, Georgian church, standing in its acre of close-packed graveyard, which is shadowed by yew trees and by the clump of three enormous Scotch firs in the rectory garden adjoining. At the Church Farm, just beyond—a square white house, the slated roofs of it running up steeply to a ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... over the style; but left the thought, in an English Double-Dutched, far remoter than he found it from our understanding. The thought demands in English a vehicle crystal-clear; but Aeschylus in the Greek is not crystal-clear: so close-packed and vast are the ideas that there are lines on lines of which the best scholars can only conjecture the meaning.—In all this criticism, let me say, one is but saying what has been said before; echoing Professor Mahaffy; echoing Professor Gilbert Murray; ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... miniature the same result as happened at the Giant's Causeway on the sea margin at the northeast corner of Ireland. There a long vein of once liquid basalt, freezing suddenly ages ago, left a great ridge of close-packed, vertical rock crystals running out an unknown distance ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... Naglee's banks it was the same. The human queue, which issued from the doors of Page, Bacon & Company, now reached around the corner. It was growing turbulent. Women tried to force themselves between the close-packed file and were repelled. One of these was Sherman's washwoman. She clutched his coat-tails as he ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... parallelism until they touch the borders of Baluchistan. Immediately on the west of the Kaisargarh there towers the Shingarh Mountain, a geological repetition of the Kaisargarh ridge, black with pines towards the summit and crowned with crags of coral limestone. Beyond it are the grey outlines of the close-packed ridges which enclose the lower reaches of the Zhob and the Kundar. As they pass away southwards this grid-iron formation strikes with a gentle curve westwards, the narrow enclosed valleys widening out towards the sources of ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... the Kuriles, the Bitter Seas, I come, And me men call the Home-Wind, for I bring the English home. Look—look well to your shipping! By the breath of my mad typhoon I swept your close-packed Praya and beached your best ...
— Lyra Heroica - A Book of Verse for Boys • Various
... which unite these lower societies to their soil are easily ruptured and the people themselves dislodged, while their land is appropriated by the intruder. But who could ever conceive of dislodging the Chinese or the close-packed millions of India? A modern state with a given population on a wide area is more vulnerable than another of like population more closely distributed; but the former has the advantage of a reserve territory for ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... him. One of the National Guard who chanced to be near rescued the child, and succeeded in placing him in the hands of his mother. But the younger child, the Duke de Chartres, could nowhere be found. In vain the distracted mother called aloud for her child. The close-packed throng swayed to and fro, and her feeble voice was unheard in the deafening clamor. She was swept along by the flow of a torrent which it was impossible to resist. With exceeding difficulty her friends succeeded in forcing her into a house. ...
— Louis Philippe - Makers of History Series • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... southward, moving slowly, grazing on the wheat stubble as they proceeded. But the number seemed incalculable. Hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of grey, rounded backs, all exactly alike, huddled, close-packed, alive, hid the earth from sight. It was no longer an aggregate of individuals. It was a mass—a compact, solid, slowly moving mass, huge, without form, like a thick-pressed growth of mushrooms, spreading out in all directions over ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... would soon become uncomfortably warm. This hill was always active whenever I visited it, while in other localities the ants would often be all housed. Around this active nest I stuck stems of millet eighteen inches high, surmounted by the close-packed heads. The ants climbed the stems, loosened and secured the seeds, and stored them within the nest. They worked vigorously, sometimes twenty or more on one head pulling away at the seeds. In my artificial ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... the address of Johnny Upright. Let it suffice that he lives in the most respectable street in the East End—a street that would be considered very mean in America, but a veritable oasis in the desert of East London. It is surrounded on every side by close-packed squalor and streets jammed by a young and vile and dirty generation; but its own pavements are comparatively bare of the children who have no other place to play, while it has an air of desertion, so few are the people that ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... lay on the other side of the ravine from us as they had since the Fourth, except for such times as they had assaulted our position. The smoke of Ypres and all the close-packed villages of a thickly populated countryside rose sullenly ...
— The Escape of a Princess Pat • George Pearson
... heart beat rapidly, and she began to lag behind. She was soon pushed aside hard against a fence, and the close-packed crowd went streaming past her. She saw that there were many people, ...
— Mother • Maxim Gorky |
