Online dictionaryOnline dictionary
Synonyms, antonyms, pronunciation

  Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Trunk   Listen
noun
Trunk  n.  
1.
The stem, or body, of a tree, apart from its limbs and roots; the main stem, without the branches; stock; stalk. "About the mossy trunk I wound me soon, For, high from ground, the branches would require Thy utmost reach."
2.
The body of an animal, apart from the head and limbs.
3.
The main body of anything; as, the trunk of a vein or of an artery, as distinct from the branches.
4.
(Arch) That part of a pilaster which is between the base and the capital, corresponding to the shaft of a column.
5.
(Zool.) That segment of the body of an insect which is between the head and abdomen, and bears the wings and legs; the thorax; the truncus.
6.
(Zool.)
(a)
The proboscis of an elephant.
(b)
The proboscis of an insect.
7.
A long tube through which pellets of clay, etc., are driven by the force of the breath. "He shot sugarplums them out of a trunk."
8.
A box or chest usually covered with leather, metal, or cloth, or sometimes made of leather, hide, or metal, for containing clothes or other goods; especially, one used to convey the effects of a traveler. "Locked up in chests and trunks."
9.
(Mining) A flume or sluice in which ores are separated from the slimes in which they are contained.
10.
(Steam Engine) A large pipe forming the piston rod of a steam engine, of sufficient diameter to allow one end of the connecting rod to be attached to the crank, and the other end to pass within the pipe directly to the piston, thus making the engine more compact.
11.
A long, large box, pipe, or conductor, made of plank or metal plates, for various uses, as for conveying air to a mine or to a furnace, water to a mill, grain to an elevator, etc.
Trunk engine, a marine engine, the piston rod of which is a trunk. See Trunk, 10.
Trunk hose, large breeches formerly worn, reaching to the knees.
Trunk line, the main line of a railway, canal, or route of conveyance.
Trunk turtle (Zool.), the leatherback.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |
Add this dictionary
to your browser search bar





"Trunk" Quotes from Famous Books



... into a hole in a tree to carry his mate some food and told her where fire was kept. He was overheard by a squirrel running up the tree trunk. ...
— Two Indian Children of Long Ago • Frances Taylor

... trunk loosened, and he slipped slowly down the stem of the tree until he was a crumpled heap at its foot. His hands were clenched convulsively. His face became distorted with pain. ...
— The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells

... do as you like. It matters not what becomes of them, if I am spared in future all reminders of the past. Put them in your pocket. What? The case is too large? Where is your trunk—your baggage?" ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson

... proved irresistible; and Roy sat down, leaning his head against the trunk, sniffing luxuriously—whiffs of resin and sun-warmed pine-needles. Oh, to be at home, in his own beech-wood! But the journey in this weather would be purgatorial. Meantime, there was his walk; and he decided, prosaically, to fortify himself with a slab of chocolate. Instead—still more ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver

... this kind are so plentiful everywhere, that if I add one more, it is only for the pleasant oddness of it. It is of a young gentleman, who, having learnt to dance, and that to great perfection, there happened to stand an old trunk in the room where he learnt. The idea of this remarkable piece of household stuff had so mixed itself with the turns and steps of all his dances, that though in that chamber he could dance excellently well, yet it was only whilst that trunk was there; nor could he perform well in ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume I. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books I. and II. (of 4) • John Locke

... morning Peggy, crossing the path leading to the kitchen, saw Jim Crow scurrying toward the wood with a spoon in his mouth! On tip-toe she followed him. Turning off from the trail near the edge of the woodland, he stood for a moment as though listening, then dropped his treasure into the hollow trunk ...
— Keineth • Jane D. Abbott

... verge of the forest as they were and were not. Then there was a moment of alarm. An old birch, loosely clad with dry, ragged bark stood near to the house. A flake of falling fire fell on it. Instantly the whole trunk-cover blazed up with a roar like that of a great beast in pain. It was sudden and for the instant terrible, but the snow-laden leaves still left on it failed to take fire, and what in summer would have been a calamity ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell

... variant of this myth involving a 'Trunk Line Monitor', which supposedly used speech recognition to extract words from telephone trunks. This one was making the rounds in the late 1970s, spread by people who had no idea of then-current technology or the storage, ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0

... his steps and soon arrived at the well-known residence of his friend. He was amazed as soon as the door was opened to find preparations of the most evident kind for some change. The corded trunk in the hall, the displaced furniture, all things he saw were full of the sad hurry of parting. "What is the matter?" he asked in a voice ...
— The Maid of Maiden Lane • Amelia E. Barr

... than any in the Tree, and bad me be of good Comfort. This enormous Bough was a Graft out of a Welsh Heiress, with so many Ap's upon it that it might have made a little Grove by it self. From the Trunk of the Pedigree, which was chiefly composed of Labourers and Shepherds, arose a huge Sprout of Farmers; this was branched out into Yeomen; and ended in a Sheriff of the County, who was Knighted for his good Service to the Crown, in bringing up an Address. Several of the Names ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele

... and kindly sent me, a nest and eggs of this species, at Mongpho near Darjeeling, at an elevation of about 3500 feet, on the 13th May, 1873. It was placed in the hole of a trunk of a dead tree at a height of about 40 feet from the ground, and it contained three hard-set eggs. The nest was a loose shallow saucer of coarse roots devoid of lining. The eggs were rather narrow ovals, a good deal pointed towards one end; the shell fine and ...
— The Nests and Eggs of Indian Birds, Volume 1 • Allan O. Hume

... one would have expected. They had got the trunk of a tree, and were going to batter the door in. But now we were all armed, for Raven had brought Havelok's gear with him when he fetched his own. He had thought also for Goldberga, and she was sitting in the corner of the tower walls wrapped in a great cloak that she had ...
— Havelok The Dane - A Legend of Old Grimsby and Lincoln • Charles Whistler

... appeared, a stalwart figure in velveteen bearing a gun over his shoulder might appear round the trunk of a tree, demanding your licence or your life. It was interesting to discuss exactly what you would do or say under the circumstances, and the very worst thing in punishments which could possibly ...
— A College Girl • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey

... Jarboe house I saw a different kind of tree. Its trunk was old and large and bent, And I could feel ...
— Under the Tree • Elizabeth Madox Roberts

... off to his garret, and that night the Goblin, overcome by curiosity, peeped through the keyhole, and lo! the garret was full of light. Forth and up from the book shot a beam of light, which grew into the trunk of a mighty tree, and threw out branches over the bowed head of the student; and every leaf was fresh, and every flower a face, and every fruit a star, and music sang in the branches. Well, there shall be even such pages in ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... Luke had seated himself cozily with his back against the trunk of the old apple tree, Bob Lincoln began ...
— The Magic Speech Flower - or Little Luke and His Animal Friends • Melvin Hix

... weak a wet-sheet pack which covers the entire body, may tax the vitality too much and under such circumstances a chest and abdominal pack may be used. This is really a partial sheet pack covering the trunk of the body from the hips and abdomen to the line running round the chest just under the arms. A hot pack of this kind is in itself very effective, although where there is fever the pack should be applied cold. In all such packs it is well to lay several blankets on your couch first, then quickly ...
— Vitality Supreme • Bernarr Macfadden

... shore, were viewing with some apprehension the prospect of the long trudge along the dusty road to Sebastopol, Jack asked the officer in charge of the train for permission to ride up. This was at once granted, and Jack, his trunk and the sailors, were soon perched on the top of a truck-load ...
— Jack Archer • G. A. Henty

... the minimum of smoke. While the young Scotchman cleaned the fish they had caught trolling behind the canoe, Defago "guessed" he would "jest as soon" take a turn through the Bush for indications of moose. "May come across a trunk where they bin and rubbed horns," he said, as he moved off, "or feedin' on the last of the maple leaves"—and ...
— The Wendigo • Algernon Blackwood

... color, which I have never found, in Scotland at least, save associated with the Lias of our north-eastern coasts. Further, my attention was directed by Dr. Emslie to a fine Lignite in his collection, which had once formed some eighteen inches or two feet of the trunk of a straight slender pine,—probably the Pinites Eiggensis,—in which, as in most woods of the Lias and Oolite, the annual rings are as strongly marked as in the existing firs or larches of our hill-sides.[11] The Blackpots deposit is evidently a re-formation of a Liasic patch, identical, ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller

... back shop. (Likewise I beheld a porter-pot hastily concealed under a Turkish dressing-gown of a golden pattern.) I then went wandering about to look for some ingenious portmanteau, and near the corner of St. James's Street saw a solitary being sitting in a trunk-shop, absorbed in a book which, on a close inspection, I found to be "Bleak House." I thought this looked well, and went in. And he really was more interested in seeing me, when he knew who I was, than any face I had seen in any house, every house I knew being ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 1 (of 3), 1833-1856 • Charles Dickens

... for the present, John. There is no need whatever for haste. In that trunk of mine is a bottle of oils for the burns, though most of the sore places are already beginning to heal over, and the doctor said that I need not apply it any more, unless I found that they smarted too much for bearing. As for the other wounds, they are strapped up and bandaged, and ...
— When London Burned • G. A. Henty

... the head be struck off and the trunk fastened on a cross that all may see it. And you, Mardonius," addressing the bow-bearer, "ride back to the hillock where these madmen made their last stand. If you discover among the corpses any who yet breathe, bring them hither to me, that they may ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis

... along where the pine tree falls, its dissolution leaves a mossy mound—last-flung shadow of the perished trunk; never lengthening, never lessening; unsubject to the fleet falsities of the sun; shade immutable, and true gauge which cometh by prostration—so westward from what seems the stump, one steadfast spear of lichened ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville

... orchids drape the columns. Tough lianas swing in air: coiling roots overspread the ground. Bushes, shrubs, reeds and ferns of every size and height combine to make a woven thicket, filling up and even choking the spaces between trunk and trunk. Supple, snaky vines writhe amid the foliage, ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves

... the faintest sign of revolt, I lectured myself severely, lest I should let myself be seduced by some new grass, some unknown Beetle. I did violence to my feelings. My natural history books were sentenced to oblivion, relegated to the bottom of a trunk. ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre

... early Angus bid them farewell, and he left with them this warning, knowing that Finn would pursue them still: 'Go into no tree that has but one trunk; nor into any cave having but one opening; land on no island that has but one way leading to it; where you cook your food, there eat it not; where you eat, sleep not there; and where you sleep to-night, rise not there to-morrow.' ...
— Celtic Tales - Told to the Children • Louey Chisholm

... fer a while, till ther novelty wore off, and then folks went back ter ther old reliable mule or burro. Circus Jesse, he got so blamed sore, that one fine day he turned the whole shootin' match of his backterians loose, and packin' his trunk, let the country, and resolved in futur' ter stick ...
— The Border Boys Across the Frontier • Fremont B. Deering

... dog cart came round to the door. Mr. Robertson took his place in it with his trunk, and was driven away to Exeter, never ...
— With Wolfe in Canada - The Winning of a Continent • G. A. Henty

... moderation was enjoined; the incessant throb of the engines; the vision of white cliffs, and the excitement among the passengers; the headache; the landing on a black old pier; the privilege of guarding the luggage by sitting upon as much of one trunk as six years' growth of boy will cover, and pressing firmly upon two other trunks with either hand, while Mrs. Ray (that capable lady) changed francs into shillings; there was the wearisome and rolling train-journey, wherein one slept, ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond

... I find at the Dugans' but Mame all conspicuous in a blue travelling dress, with her little trunk at the door. It seems that sister Lottie Bell, who is a typewriter in Terre Haute, is going to be married next Thursday, and Mame is off for a week's visit to be an accomplice at the ceremony. Mame is waiting for a freight wagon that is going to take ...
— Heart of the West • O. Henry

... dung and spade, For which we'll recompense him with our shade. And since his kindness saw us prun'd so well, We will requite him with our fragrant smell; In winter (as in gratitude is meet) We'll strew our humble leaves beneath his feet. Nay, in each tree, root, trunk, branch, all will be Proud to serve ...
— On the Portraits of English Authors on Gardening, • Samuel Felton

... sigh'd to see the flow'ry green Skaith'd by the ruthless pleugh; Likewise the bank aboon the burn, Where broom and hawthorns grew. A lonely tree, whose aged trunk The ivy did entwine, Still mark'd the spot where youngsters met, In ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume III - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various

... sustaining the spring of the arches of the double vault, in the centre of its width. Around four of the pillars, stalls of merchants, all sparkling with glass and tinsel; around the last three, benches of oak, worn and polished by the trunk hose of the litigants, and the robes of the attorneys. Around the hall, along the lofty wall, between the doors, between the windows, between the pillars, the interminable row of all the kings of France, from Pharamond down: ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo

... Partly on account of my infirmity, though more on account of a taste for rural quiet and retirement, my railroad journeys are few and far between. Strange as the statement may seem in days like these, it had actually been five years since I had been on an express train of a trunk line. Now, as every one knows, the improvements in the conveniences of the best equipped trains have in that period been very great, and for a considerable time I found myself amply entertained in taking note first of one ingenious device and then of another, and ...
— With The Eyes Shut - 1898 • Edward Bellamy

... in girth at the height of my shoulders, and oaks past praise. But trees are everywhere, and if my observant pupil likes them, let her next note the mode in which the branches spread and their proportion to the trunk. State it all in the fewest words. It is to be only a help to memory. Then she comes to the leaf forms and the mode in which they are massed, their dulness or translucency, how sunshine affects their ...
— Doctor and Patient • S. Weir Mitchell

... bent forward to read the notes of his music book by the light of a wax candle, which was stuck in the feelers of a prickly lobster, and patiently held. Of his six pulpy arms one long one ran down like the trunk of an elephant, fingering along the pages of a music book. Two others were used to play the guitar, one to grasp the handle and pinch the strings, and the other to hold the ivory stick to strike the strings. ...
— Japanese Fairy World - Stories from the Wonder-Lore of Japan • William Elliot Griffis

... felt at liberty to open bureau-drawers or pry into closets and trunks. Besides, as Cynthia wisely suggested, it was not likely that any one would lock a door so carefully and then put the key in a drawer or trunk or on a shelf. They would either carry it away with them or lay it down, forgotten, or hide it in some unusual place. If it had been carried away, of course their search was useless. But if it had been thoughtlessly laid aside somewhere, or even hidden away in some ...
— The Boarded-Up House • Augusta Huiell Seaman

... appearance, under an increase of the above symptoms, especially of the fever and delirium, and continues to come out for about twelve hours. Usually the eruption commences in the face, on the throat and chest; thence it spreads over the rest of the trunk, and finally it extends to the extremities. The minute red points, which appear at first, soon spread into large, flat, irregular patches, which again coalesce and cover the greater part, if not the whole, of the surface, being densest on ...
— Hydriatic treatment of Scarlet Fever in its Different Forms • Charles Munde

... still stranger habit. For two or three feet above the {36} entrance hole, and for five or six feet below it, all around the tree, innumerable small openings are dug through to the inner bark. From these little wells pour streams of soft resin that completely cover the bark and give the trunk a white, glistening appearance, which is visible sometimes for a quarter of a mile. Just why they do this has never been explained. It is true, however, that the sticky resin prevents ants and flying squirrels from reaching ...
— The Bird Study Book • Thomas Gilbert Pearson

... he is thirty will never write any after. Of course, there are exceptions; I am speaking of the rule. In business, for example, what future is there for the man who has not already a dashing past at thirty? Of course, the bulk, the massive trunk and the impressive foliage of his business, must come afterwards; but the tree must have been firmly rooted and stoutly branched before then, and able to go on growing on its own account. The work, in fact, must ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne

... which he had caught up as he rushed from the house, and fired high enough in the air, so as not to hurt whoever was in hiding. The flash of the weapon showed a man in the act of sliding down the trunk. ...
— Through Space to Mars • Roy Rockwood

... relaxed that the famous jurist was allowed to receive books for the continuance of his studies. Through the ingenuity and daring of his wife De Groot contrived to escape in 1621 by concealing himself in a trunk supposed to be filled with heavy tomes. The trunk was conveyed by water to Rotterdam, from whence the prisoner managed to make his ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson

... a wild commotion of squeals, grunts, and scratchings in the depths of the invaded hole. The sounds rose swiftly up the inside of the trunk. Then there was an eruption at the mouth of the hole. A confusion of furry forms shot forth, with such violence that the startled boy almost lost his balance. As it was, he backed away precipitately along the branch, amid derisive ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts

... delights; clung round the linden-trees of the great Herrenhausen avenue, and at first would not quit the place. Schulenberg, in fact, could not come on account of her debts; but finding the Maypole would not come, the Elephant packed up her trunk and slipped out of Hanover unwieldy as she was. On this the Maypole straightway put herself in motion, and followed her beloved George Louis. One seems to be speaking of Captain Macheath, and Polly, and Lucy. The king we had selected; the ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray

... and for as long as they would. Everything was planned and mapped out. Mary had her neat travelling-dress of grey cloth, tailor-made, her close-fitting toque, her veil and gloves, all her equipment, lying ready to put on. Her old friend, Simmons, had packed her travelling trunk. It had come to almost ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan

... irritation by conveying the poison to his other eye and to his wounds. He rolled and sneezed and grunted in torment; he drew his muzzle and cheeks to and fro on the ground, wrestling with the great Earth-Mother for help in direst agony. He could not open his eyes; he stumbled blindly against a tree-trunk, and at last became entangled in the prickly undergrowth. This was Nature's method of succour—she forced her wildling to remain quiet, in helpless exhaustion, till the pain subsided and life could once again be endured. Panting and sick, the cub lay ...
— Creatures of the Night - A Book of Wild Life in Western Britain • Alfred W. Rees

... the eager warriors close, They seemed together joined, and but one man. At last Isfendiyar seized Kahram's girth, And flung him to the ground, and bound his hands; And as a leaf is severed from its stalk, So he the head cleft from its quivering trunk; Thus one blow wins, and takes away a throne, In battle heads are trodden under ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous

... Italy. The olive groves are well stocked with them (there are numbers even in the Borghese Gardens in Rome), but you must remain immovable as a rock in order to see them; for they are yet shyer, more silent, more fond of interposing the tree-trunk between yourself and them, than those at home. Mouse-like in hue, in movement and voice—a strange case ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas

... solo sings the theme; the orchestra roars antagonistically but follows.—And have I not put him into my Chapter of "English Spiritual Tendencies," with all thankfulness to the Eternal Creator,—though the chapter lie unborn in a trunk? ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson

... alternately into fire and water, and thus rendered insoluble by either. Of bone he made a globe which he placed around the brain, leaving a narrow opening, and around the marrow of the neck and spine he formed the vertebrae, like hinges, which extended from the head through the whole of the trunk. And as the bone was brittle and liable to mortify and destroy the marrow by too great rigidity and susceptibility to heat and cold, he contrived sinews and flesh—the first to give flexibility, the second to guard against heat and ...
— Timaeus • Plato

... this discovery one day as Eberhard was packing his trunk. "Where are you going, my dear friend?" he crowed in exclamatory dismay. Eberhard replied that he was going to Switzerland. "To Switzerland? What are you going to do there? I am not going to let you go," said Herr Carovius. Eberhard gave him one cold stare. ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann

... the canal some miles from the City coalesce and merge into the enormous trunk canal that passes on to Scandor through hills and mountains and the plain country, excavated by the wonderful Toto powder. This trunk canal is doubled; upon one member, the boats pass outward to Scandor, and on the other the boats return. Branches pass north ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap

... town in the southern parliamentary division of Glamorganshire, Wales, on both sides of the river Ogwr (whence its Welsh name Penybont-ar-Ogwr). Pop. of urban district (1901) 6062. It has a station 165 m. from London on the South Wales trunk line of the Great Western railway, and is the junction of the Barry Company's railway to Barry via Llantwit Major. Bridgend has a good market for agricultural produce, and is an important centre owing to its being the natural outlet for the mining valleys of the Llynvi, Garw and ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various

... Saturday, at six in the morning, that I died after a three days' illness. My wife was searching a trunk for some linen, and when she rose and turned she saw me rigid, with open eyes and silent pulses. She ran to me, fancying that I had fainted, touched my hands and bent over me. Then she suddenly grew alarmed, burst ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola

... tell Bob's man he couldn't sleep in linen sheets; had his own violet silk ones in his trunk, to match his pajamas. The goat had 'em out and half on the bed when Bob came in and stopped him. Awful row, I heard, when Mrs. Bob got on to it. He'll never ...
— Peter - A Novel of Which He is Not the Hero • F. Hopkinson Smith

... accounted for the first derangement of German plans. The invasion began towards Vis, near the Dutch frontier where the direct road from Aix to Brussels crosses the Meuse, but the main advance-guard followed the trunk railway from Berlin to Paris via Venders and Lige. It was, however, inadequately mobilized and equipped, and was only intended to clear away an opposition which was not expected to be serious. The Belgians fought more ...
— A Short History of the Great War • A.F. Pollard

... a square and fairly spacious court, surrounded by a porticus like a cloister. Some remnants of statuary, marbles discovered in excavating, an armless Apollo, and the trunk of a Venus, were ranged against the walls under the dismal arcades; and some fine grass had sprouted between the pebbles which paved the soil as with a black and white mosaic. It seemed as if the sun-rays could never reach that paving, mouldy with damp. ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola

... need not bother about a servant who was on the point of going. Before it was time for Janice to leave for school, a taxicab appeared, driven by a man of Olga's own nationality. He went upstairs for the girl's trunk. ...
— Janice Day, The Young Homemaker • Helen Beecher Long

... get used to heat in this world, for they'll have it consid'able hot in the next one, I guess! And see here, Mrs. Beresford, will you get me ten cents'—I mean sixpence—worth o' red gingham to make Miss Monroe a bag for Mr. Macdonald's letters? They go sprawlin' all over her trunk; and there's so many of 'em I wish to the land she'd send 'em to the bank while ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... concerning himself with the uncomfortable straw chairs, the walnut furniture, or the little bed with its yellowed curtain, he took the room without hesitation. A quarter of an hour was enough to empty his trunk, hang up his clothes, put his boots in a corner, and ornament the wall with a trophy composed of three pipes, a sabre, and a pair of pistols. After a visit to the grocer's, over the way, where he bought a pound of candles and a bottle of rum, he returned, put his purchase on the ...
— Ten Tales • Francois Coppee

... steering oddly, and then that it wasn't steering at all; and when it drifted to the shore at last every man in that boat was dead, and Sir Walter Vane, with his sword drawn, was leaning up against the tree trunk, as stiff ...
— The Trees of Pride • G.K. Chesterton

... swings the scythe, lift romance into a near neighbourhood with epic. These aged things have on them the dew of man's morning; they lie near, not so much to us, the semi-artificial flowerets, as to the trunk and aboriginal taproot of the race. A thousand interests spring up in the process of the ages, and a thousand perish; that is now an eccentricity or a lost art which was once the fashion of an empire; and those only are perennial matters that rouse us to-day, and that roused men in all epochs ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson

... alterable lineaments that seem to make the face of our Motherland sympathetic with the laborious lives of her children. She does not take their ploughs and waggons contemptuously, but rather makes every hovel and every sheepfold, every railed bridge or fallen tree-trunk an agreeably noticeable incident; not a mere speck in the midst of unmeasured vastness, but a piece of our social history in ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot

... next hour was a nightmare. They returned to the Lodge and slipped into the house by way of a French window opening upon the deserted north porch. Kilmeny hid the sack of treasure in his trunk and divested himself of his fishing clothes. Presently he joined Moya and his sister on the front porch, where shortly they were discovered by Verinder in search of a ...
— The Highgrader • William MacLeod Raine

... fragrance, which perfumes the air to a considerable distance, and no doubt operates powerfully in attracting insects; when a plant of this sort is fully blown, one may always find flies caught in its blossoms, usually by the trunk, very rarely by the leg; sometimes four, or even five, which is the greatest possible number, are found in one flower, some dead, others endeavouring to disentangle themselves, in which they are now and then so fortunate as to succeed; these flies are of different species, the musca ...
— The Botanical Magazine Vol. 8 - Or, Flower-Garden Displayed • William Curtis

... dumbness to discover that the Capital does not know that he is on earth. Beyond a two-line "personal" in the morning paper, jammed among the "hotel arrivals," no mention is made of his coming. He has bills in his trunk providing for a public building at Bungtown and a deep water harbor at Squashville and a light house on Jim Ned creek and the establishment of a federal court at Eden and a governmental survey of the bad lands around Dogtown, and the Bungtown Bazoo and the Squashville ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann

... your two treasures I'm afraid that this will be a disappointment." She indicated a small humpbacked trunk covered with moth-eaten horsehair. "No romance here. But the key is tied to the clasp beside ...
— Ralestone Luck • Andre Norton

... to hear an unexpected sound: blows, loud and regular, wood on wood. When he had passed the turning by the three firs he knew, really before his eyes confirmed it. Tenney was there at the hut, and he had a short but moderately large tree trunk—almost heavier than he could manage—and was using it as a battering ram. He was breaking down the door. Raven, striding on, shouted, but he was close at hand before Tenney was aware of him and turned, ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown

... trunk and traveling-bag had been brought from the inn, where I had left them the preceding night, we got our horses, and, as we wished to show particular respect to Denis's remains, rode up, with some of our friends, to the ...
— The Station; The Party Fight And Funeral; The Lough Derg Pilgrim • William Carleton

... considering any creature as subordinate to any purpose quite out of itself, for then some of the pleasure he feels in its beauty is lost, for his sense of its happiness is in that case destroyed, as its emanation of inherent life is no longer pure. Thus the bending trunk, waving to and fro in the wind above the waterfall, is beautiful because it seems happy, though it is, indeed, perfectly useless to us. The same trunk, hewn down and thrown across the stream, has lost its beauty. It serves as a bridge—it has become useful, it lives ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. IV. October, 1863, No. IV. - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various

... intend to investigate the subject of a limited atonement in the present work, because it is merely a metaphysical off-shoot from the doctrine of election and reprobation, and must stand or fall with the parent trunk. The strength of this we purpose to try in ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe

... is given in Fig. 61. Similar figures are worked in gold, one of which is now worn as a charm by Mr. J. B. Stearns. Figures of monkeys are shown in Figs. 62, 63, and 64. One creature, represented as having a long, trunk-like snout, recurs frequently. Such a form discovered in the earlier days of archaeologic investigation would probably have given rise to many surmises as to the contemporaneous existence of man and the elephant in Chiriqui. ...
— Ancient art of the province of Chiriqui, Colombia • William Henry Holmes

... equally unceremoniously, urged forward until his feet trod upon the stubbly, breaking undergrowth. Next he was brought to a stand and swung round, face about, his bonds were removed, and four powerful hands gripped his arms. By these he was drawn backwards until he bumped against a tree-trunk. His hands were then again made fast, but this time his arms embraced the tree behind him. In this ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum

... in and since the year 1797: Fouche had closed the club of the Jacobins: the Councils had recovered their rightful influence, and, but for the plotters of Brumaire, might have effected a return to ordinary government of the type of 1795-7. This was the real blow; that the vigorous trunk, the Legislature, was struck down along ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose

... snake glided, or crawled, along through the jungle, and Umboo, watching which way she went, followed, carrying in his trunk the branch of palm ...
— Umboo, the Elephant • Howard R. Garis

... brush, the lynx was an excellent guide. Here were rabbit tracks and every now and then the little sharp tracks of a squirrel. We stopped for lunch under a tall cottonwood-tree, and Arthur pointed out that the trunk, up to a high crotch, was all seamed by bear claws. He said that the black bear climbed the same tree season after season, and told me that, according to the Indians, this was chiefly done when first he came from his winter den,—for the purpose of getting his bearings, ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck

... where you are, and you have got it all into your own hands, with little or no outlay. The rent is nothing; and the business is there ready made for you. In your position, if you find the hotel is not enough, there is nothing you cannot take up.' They had now seated themselves on the trunk of a pine tree; and Michel Voss having drawn a pipe from his pocket and filled it, was lighting it as he sat upon the wood. 'No, my boy,' he continued, 'you'll have a better life of it than your father, I don't doubt. After all, the towns are better than the country. There is more ...
— The Golden Lion of Granpere • Anthony Trollope

... laughed the captain; "but we sailors have learned how to live in close quarters, and you'll soon get used to it. There are some drawers built into the side where you can put your clothes, and your trunk and bags ...
— Doubloons—and the Girl • John Maxwell Forbes

... patron, reducing him to the odious position of a mere creditor, and, if he were a man of the court, to the yet worse position of an absentee creditor.[2303] Thus, as to the clergy, it had almost separated the head from the trunk by superposing (through the concordat) a staff of gentleman prelates, rich, ostentatious, unemployed, and skeptical, upon an army of plain, poor, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine

... teachers' rooms in order. The second floor and attic, both filled with single beds covered with mosquito-netting, were the girls' dormitories. Each girl was expected to make her own bed and hang up her clothes or put them away in her trunk. A luna, or overseer, in each dormitory superintended this work, and reported any negligence on the part of a girl to one ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various

... assessment: by opening the telecommunications market to competition and foreign investment with the "Telecommunications Liberalization Plan of 1998", Argentina encouraged the growth of modern telecommunication technology; fiber-optic cable trunk lines are being installed between all major cities; the major networks are entirely digital and the availability of telephone service is being improved; however, telephone density is presently minimal, and making telephone ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... from the table by the stove and ran out into the snow. In front of the shanty a good-sized birch, tall, smooth, very straight, was still standing. He went up the trunk like a bear. ...
— The Ruling Passion • Henry van Dyke

... dogs than if they had been flies. But, tossing its curious snout, armed with two horns, high in the air, it uttered a loud, angry, snorting noise as it thundered along threatening to overtake the horses at every stride. The dogs behaved very well, but they might as well have snapped at the trunk of a tree as at that horny hide, and at last in despair they contented themselves with galloping on by ...
— Off to the Wilds - Being the Adventures of Two Brothers • George Manville Fenn

... bleached trunk among the dry kye stranded on the shore, plucked slowly the spills of a pine tassel, staring down between his knees. "You've seen how they have worked, miss, for every ounce that's in 'em. But I don't know how they'll fight ...
— Joan of Arc of the North Woods • Holman Day

... stone. Beneath this stone was a leaden cross, with the inscription in Latin, "HERE LIES BURIED THE BODY OF GREAT KING ARTHUR." Going down still below this, they came at length, at the depth of sixteen feet from the surface, to a great coffin, made of the trunk of an oak tree, and within it was a human skeleton of unusual size. The skull was very large, and showed marks of ten wounds. Nine of them were closed by concretions of the bone, indicating that the wounds by which those contusions or fractures ...
— King Alfred of England - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott

... the little trunk that contained his worldly effects, and stalked off to a neighboring hotel, that, from its small proportions, suggested a modest bill. With a highly important man-of-the-world manner he scrawled his name in an illegible, student-like hand on the dingy, dog-eared register. With a gracious, ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe

... wan more under there," she said to the Chinaman, and as he came creeping out like a monstrous bug tugging a pair of Bidwell's overalls (ore-filled), as if they formed the trunk of a man whom he had murdered and hidden, Mrs. Clark turned and fled toward the ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland

... railroad-cars for the first time; all was arranged for her to meet another little companion and travel with her, but she was detained from getting out for the station, as no one was about to carry her trunk. She drew the conclusion that she must lose her train, and she burst ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams

... hopelessly. With a stolid sort of curiosity he looked down at the spot. Yes, there was the place. A few fallen leaves were scattered upon the earth where his body had pressed tightly against the tree-trunk, and there were the hollows where his clenched hands had found hold. A dull rebellion crept over him as he looked. It had been ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge

... stripped off his jacket, and, by means of a lift from Fred, got upon one of the great horizontal boughs, and soon contrived to reach the one to which the kite tail was fluttering. But Harry was at the thick end, by the tree trunk, and the tail was twenty feet further off, at the thin end; and, as those who have tested the wood in their lead pencils well know, cedar is very brittle. Now, Harry was no coward, but he knew that he ...
— Hollowdell Grange - Holiday Hours in a Country Home • George Manville Fenn

... of this work appeared, in the beginning of 1857, the Canadian system of railways was but in its infancy. The Grand Trunk was only begun, and the Victoria Bridge—the greatest of all railway structures—was not half erected. The Colony of Canada has now more than 3000 miles in active operation along the great valley of the St. Lawrence, connecting Riviere du Loup at the mouth of that ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles

... living in a loft, had paid the money and kept the box. I walked up and down the Rue des Fosses-Saint-Germain-des-Pres and the Rue de l'Ecole de Medecine without hitting on any scheme which would release my trunk without the payment of the forty francs, which of course I could pay as soon as I should have sold the linen. My stupidity proved to me that surgery was my only vocation. My good fellow, refined souls, whose powers move in a lofty atmosphere, have none of that spirit of intrigue ...
— The Atheist's Mass • Honore de Balzac

... no one to care for them. As we explored its cramped wards our path was obstructed by a body stretched upon a bench. The face was of that peculiar smoke-color which we are obliged to accept as Chinese pallor; the trunk was swathed like a mummy in folds of filthy rags; it was motionless as stone, apparently insensible. Thus did an opium ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard

... put on his spectacles, and standing back looked at the tree. He could see imprisoned in the center of the trunk a young man with a pale, thin face. His eyes were wild and his hair long, and he looked back at Daimur ...
— The Enchanted Island • Fannie Louise Apjohn

... impulse was to stay and fight. But his nerves were not strong enough to execute so foolhardy a resolution. He seemed to see a man behind every maple-trunk. Darkness was fast coming on, and he knew that his absence from supper at his boarding-place could not fail to excite suspicion. There was no time to ...
— The Hoosier Schoolmaster - A Story of Backwoods Life in Indiana • Edward Eggleston

... pardon. Please don't think me rude; I was worrying about a trunk of mine that I think has been left behind, and for the moment I didn't see you"—she was seated on the opposite side, in the corner farthest ...
— The Four Faces - A Mystery • William le Queux

... resembles our thick willows, excepting that the branches do not grow upwards, but spread horizontally; the leaves are like those of the laurel, but somewhat larger; the bark of the branches is thinnest and best, that of the trunk thick and inferior in flavour. The fruit resembles the berries of the laurel; the Indians extract from it an odoriferous oil, and the wood, after the bark has been stripped from it, is used ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent

... the hammers and nails in the house for the use of the builders; the work went bravely on, and by noon the walls of the fortification were up, and the roof well advanced towards completion. A ladder brought from the barn, took the workmen half-way up the trunk; but the old tree was lofty, and a long space intervened between the end of the ladder and the lowest branches, which must of necessity be ascended in that squirming manner peculiar to boys, wherein they ...
— The Old Stone House • Anne March

... the trees and was now leaning against a massive trunk; his slight, tall figure almost lost against it; his arms folded, and an imposing calm upon his pale face, which was just caught by the gleam of a lamp ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill

... From the rugged trunk of the stunted cedar that leans forward from the brink, you may drop a plummet into the river below, where the catfish and the turtles may plainly be seen gliding over the wrinkled sands of the clear and shallow current. The cliff is accessible ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey

... sorrowful existence. She wandered about the forest picking up her sticks, and trying to cheer herself up a little by gathering bouquets of the pretty forest flowers. People passing by often saw the sad figure, all in gray hair and tatters, sitting on a trunk of a fallen tree, wailing and moaning, and, of course, they thought it was altogether the poor old woman lamenting for her son. They never thought of its being also Pet, bewailing ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 2, February 1886 • Various

... their having so obtained it, but I had never before seen the process actually gone through. Selecting a large healthy looking tree out of the gum-scrub, and growing in a hollow, or flat between two ridges, the native digs round at a few feet from the trunk, to find the lateral roots; to one unaccustomed to the work, it is a difficult and laborious thing frequently to find these roots, but to the practised eye of the native, some slight inequality of ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre

... and print it on his cards while life lasts. I was told the other day of an American carpet warrior who appeared at court function abroad decorated with every college badge, and football medal in his possession, to which he added at the last moment a brass trunk check, to complete the brilliancy of the effect. This latter decoration attracted the attention of the Heir Apparent, who inquired the meaning of the mystic "416" upon it. This would have been a "facer" to any but a true son of Uncle Sam. Nothing daunted, however, our "General" replied ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory

... his mouth to the dead man's nose, and filled his lungs with air: he next anointed his numerous wounds with a little of the same liquid, and yet no sign of life, appeared. I thought he was dead in earnest; his neck and veins were exceedingly swollen; when his comrade taking up the lifeless trunk in his arms, brought it out into the open air, and continued the operation of blowing for several minutes before a sign of life appeared; at length he gasped, and after a time recovered so far as to be able to speak. The ...
— An Account of Timbuctoo and Housa Territories in the Interior of Africa • Abd Salam Shabeeny

... was twelve years old, the boy had found a place as newsboy on the Grand Trunk Line running to Detroit. In the intervals between his raids upon the helpless passengers with his newspapers, periodicals, novels, and candies, he kept up the habit of reading, and by practice acquired a remarkably clear and finished handwriting. ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various

... Providence is nowhere more strongly marked than in its compensations; and what can be more beautiful than the arrangement by which the same harmless disinterestedness of matter and style that once made an author the favorite of trunk-makers and grocers should, by thus leading to the quiet absorption of his works, make them sure of commemoration by Brunet or Lowndes and of commanding famine-prices under the hammer? Fame, like electricity, is thus positive and negative; and if ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various

... years afterwards still retained a lively recollection, was, that he composed them in the thickest part of the wood in the park of Schoenbrunn, seated between the two stems of an oak, which shot out from the main trunk at the height of about two feet from the ground. This remarkable tree, in that part of the park to the left of the Gloriett, I found with Beethoven in 1823, and the sight of it called forth interesting reminiscences of the former period." The words ...
— The Standard Oratorios - Their Stories, Their Music, And Their Composers • George P. Upton

... made a rush at the royal sportsman, who would probably have fallen a victim, gored by a tusk or trampled to death under the huge beast's feet, had not Amenemheb hastened to the rescue, and by wounding the creature's trunk drawn its rage upon himself. The brute was then, after a short struggle, overpowered ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson

... of this age presented cycadeae, "a beautiful class of plants between the palms and conifers, having a tall, straight trunk, terminating in a magnificent crown of foliage." {108b} There were tree ferns, but in smaller proportion than in former ages; also equisetaceae, lilia, and conifers. The vegetation was generally analogous to that of the Cape of ...
— Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Robert Chambers

... have been another equally absurd picture in the same family, in which Noah is represented going into the ark, carrying under his arm a small trunk, on which was written "Papiers de ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole

... see; seat, trunk, sword-case, splashing-board, lamps, silver moulding, all you see complete; the iron-work as good as new, or better. He asked fifty guineas; I closed with him directly, threw down the money, and the ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen

... alive almost all their prisoners with incredible cruelty, caused the French to face ordinary death in battle as a boon rather than be taken alive; so that they fight desperately and with great indifference to life." The consequence of this judicious method of peopling a colony was that, the trunk of the tree being healthy and vigorous, the branches were so likewise. "It was astonishing," wrote Mother Mary of the Incarnation, "to see the great number of beautiful and well-made children, without any corporeal deformity unless ...
— The Makers of Canada: Bishop Laval • A. Leblond de Brumath

... details, our adventurer landed there safely, and was, of course, like all verdant voyagers, much surprised at the tariff of prices subjected to his notice. The porter who carried his trunk to the hotel charged him ten dollars; and though that same hotel was a leaky tent, a plate of tough beef was charged seventy-five cents, and a watery potato fifty. Business was very dull, too, at the moment of his arrival; the accounts ...
— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage

... a large trunk in his shirt-sleeves, with a short pipe stuck between his teeth, holding in one hand a tumbler of brandy punch, and in the other a bundle of papers containing a list of his passengers, which he was ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie

... trees in early summer, when they hang full of strings of tiny cream-colored blossoms. In winter these blossoms will have changed to a small black fruit. The trees are as rugged as the roughest old apple trees, and many of them are supported only on a hollow half-circle of trunk or on two or three mere sticks. One wonders how these slender fragments of trunk can support that spreading weight above, especially in wind and tempest, and how that wealth of blossom and fruit can draw sufficient sustenance through such narrow and splintered channels; ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various

... It is packed now in my trunk, but usually I carry it about with me everywhere in order to take a little practice at the Rupert Street range. I bought it when Sir Mallaby told me he was sending me to America, because I thought I ought to be prepared—because of the ...
— Three Men and a Maid • P. G. Wodehouse

... various financial articles in the day's papers, which would occupy him until bedtime. Occasionally his companion would read these aloud to him, and such was the monotony of her uneventful life that she found herself becoming insensibly interested in the fluctuations of Grand Trunk scrip or Ohio and Delaware shares. The papers once exhausted, a bell was rung to summon the domestics, and when all were assembled the merchant, in a hard metallic voice, read through the lesson for the day and the evening prayers. On grand ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle

... spent among the boxes of books which line the parapet of the Paris quays,—a sort of literary Morgue or dead-house, where the still-born and deceased children of the press are exhibited, to challenge the pity of passers-by, and so escape the corner grocer and the neighboring trunk-maker. Here Murger purchased all the volumes of new poems he could discover. When his friends jested him upon his wasteful extravagance in buying verse good for nothing but to cheapen the value of the paper on which it was printed, he replied, that ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various

... returning to the window looked across at the notice-board opposite, which threatened trespassers in the barracks or parade-ground with "a fine of sixty marks or five days' imprisonment." The white-lettered notice-board was fixed to the trunk of a beech-tree by a huge nail, and at the head of this nail ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein

... home, and weeping threw myself upon the bed. My trunk was packed, my luncheon was prepared by mother, the cars were ready to bear me where I would not hear the clank of chains, where I would breathe the free, invigorating breezes of the glorious North. I had dreamed such ...
— Behind the Scenes - or, Thirty years a slave, and Four Years in the White House • Elizabeth Keckley

... bell-button, which he had evidently risen to touch. One hand was clenched on his chest, but his face wore a peaceful look, as if death had come too suddenly to cause him much suffering. His bed was undisturbed; he had died before retiring, possibly in the act of packing his trunk, for it was found nearly ready for the expressman. Indeed, there was every evidence of his intention to leave on an early morning train. He had even desired to be awakened at six o'clock; and it was his failure to respond to the summons of the bellboy which led to so early ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green

... and ate them there. I can remember distinctly how lovely it was. They tasted better than any candies I've ever had before or since, and I leaned back on the boughs, rocking and eating and looking at the clouds and feeling the wind swaying the trunk. I can shut my eyes and feel again the sense of being entirely happy, sort of limp and forgetful and so contented. I don't know whether it was only the candies, or a combination of things that were just right that day and ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner

... Martyn ad loc.: "La Cerda says, that what the Poet here speaks of was practised in Spain in his time. They take the trunk of an olive, says he, deprive it of its root and branches, and cut it into several pieces, which they put into the ground, whence a root and, soon afterwards, a tree is formed." This mode of propagating by dry pieces of the ...
— The Economist • Xenophon

... he announced to his father one evening, "that the printing press was invented by Lawrence Coster (or Lorenz Koster) of Haarlem. The book said that he went on a picnic with his family, and while idly carving his name on the trunk of a beech tree he conceived the idea that he might in the same way make individual letters of the alphabet on wooden blocks, ink them over, and ...
— Paul and the Printing Press • Sara Ware Bassett

... when they made their night camp deep in the woods. But a glorious fire before a giant tree trunk made the last evening on the trail one of comfort. Na-che and Jonas had run out of excuses for leaving the lovers alone, but nothing daunted, after supper was cleared off they made their own camp fire at a distance and sat before it, singing and laughing even after Diana had withdrawn ...
— The Enchanted Canyon • Honore Willsie Morrow

... waked early, at seven o'clock, when it was broad daylight. Opening his eyes, he was surprised to feel himself extraordinarily vigorous. He jumped up at once and dressed quickly; then dragged out his trunk and began packing immediately. His linen had come back from the laundress the previous morning. Ivan positively smiled at the thought that everything was helping his sudden departure. And his departure certainly was sudden. ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky

... was the germ from which the full-grown trunk of Gruff and Tackleton had sprung; and, under its crazy roof, the Gruff before last, had, in a small way, made toys for a generation of old boys and girls, who had played with them, and found them out, and broken them, and ...
— The Cricket on the Hearth • Charles Dickens

... heard hissing as they stood wrapped in smoke; and when the fire burst forth, it suddenly lighted up the ripe plums with a phosphoric lilac-coloured gleam, or turned the yellowing pears here and there to pure gold. In the midst of them hung black against the wall of the building, or the trunk of a tree, the body of some poor Jew or monk who had perished in the flames with the structure. Above the distant fires hovered a flock of birds, like a cluster of tiny black crosses upon a fiery field. The town thus laid bare seemed to sleep; the spires and roofs, and ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol

... window and floor of clay. At one end stood a rude fireplace made of bricks where a huge kettle swung Indian-fashion above the logs. At the other end of the room several heavy blankets indicated a bed, the only furniture being a few rough chairs, a table and an old trunk half covered by a gayly striped blanket such as Indian women weave. "A rough place, even for the wilderness," confessed Mordecai, "but I dare attempt no better. Of late, the Indians once so friendly, have grown surly and suspicious; they rightly fear that the white man will wrench the wilderness ...
— The New Land - Stories of Jews Who Had a Part in the Making of Our Country • Elma Ehrlich Levinger

... were busy. Each pair of men selected a tree, the first they encountered over the blazed line of their "forty." After determining in which direction it was to fall, they set to work to chop a deep gash in that side of the trunk. ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White

... a lower branch. With the trigger-guard of his rifle he was able to catch the cord. All about the trunk, meanwhile, the wolves leaped snarling. The fetid animal smell of them was strong upon the air—that, and the scent of blood and raw meat, where they had feasted on ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England

... alcohol and opium—was a favorite medicine of my excellent mother, and in all the little ailments of childhood was freely administered. So highly thought she of it that on my leaving home at fifteen for Cambridge University she put a large vial of it in my trunk, with the injunction to take of it, ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day

... he was mistaken in supposing there was no one in the grove, for as he softly rounded the trunk of one large tree, on which the obdurate bark was knotted and overlapped like the hide of a rhinoceros or some kindred monster of the ancient days before the Flood, he saw an unexpected figure sitting on a bench near at hand, about which, in another moment, he would have wound the ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens

... Anybody that has ever seen a grove of olives knows that their beauty is not such as strikes the eye. If it was not for the blue sky overhead, that rays down glorifying light, they would not be much to look at or talk about. The tree has a gnarled, grotesque trunk which divides into insignificant branches, bearing leaves mean in shape, harsh in texture, with a silvery underside. It gives but a quivering shade and has no massiveness, nor symmetry. Ay! but there ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren

... smoke curled up over the trunk of the old tree and floated away through the forest, and tiny voices came from beneath the ...
— Friendly Fairies • Johnny Gruelle

... pocket-books, and diaries never to be continued now. All these relics of the great engineer, the skilful mechanic, the student of science, relate to his intellectual and public life; but there is a sadder relic still. An old hair-trunk, carefully kept close by the old man's stool, contains the childish sketches, the early copy-books and grammars, the dictionaries, the school-books, and some of the toys of his dearly-beloved and brilliant son ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell

... in hand-organ pants," Peace explained, scrambling to her feet and peering up among the thick leaves for a glimpse of the frightened animal, which had ceased its wild chattering and sat huddled close against the tree trunk almost within reach. "See it? Poor little Jocko, I won't hurt you!" She stretched out her hands at the same moment that unknowingly she had spoken its name, and to the intense amazement of teachers and pupils, the tiny, trembling ...
— The Lilac Lady • Ruth Alberta Brown

... bad luck yesterday and to-day; the iron wind catcher put out at our port to make a draught caught a sea, and threw it all over our cabin. G.'s maid had just opened my overland trunk to give the contents an airing, and now my collars are pulp and rose pink from the lining of the collar box, so I must call on the barber who runs a shop on board. We had the carpet taken up and our clothes hung up to dry, but they won't, for the air is so hot and damp—with the least ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch

... majestic at all seasons, there was the charred skeleton of a gigantic tree, which had been stripped naked by a bolt of lightning long years ago. At its foot a prickly clump of briars surrounded the blackened trunk in a decoration of green or red, and from this futile screen the spectral limbs rose boldly and were silhouetted against the far-off horizon like the masts of a wrecked and deserted ship. A rail fence, where a trumpet-vine hung heavily, divided the field ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow

... give a concrete example of what I mean. Suppose a man to be seated in the yard of a house with a few patches of grass in front of him and the trunk of a solitary tree. The slanting sunshine, we will suppose, throws the shadows of the leaves of the tree and the shadows of the grass-blades upon a forlorn piece of trodden earth-mould or dusty sand ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys

... nearly all of the stores are now open. In the first weeks of December you could see the reopening day by day, and when on the 10th the government returned to Paris, the art stores and the jewelry stores joined with the confectioners, trunk dealers, and book-men, and threw open shutters that had been closed ...
— The Audacious War • Clarence W. Barron

... town of Teramo, thirty-five kilometres away. It was a narrow, rough, steep road, wholly unfit for vehicles of any kind more tender than the rude ox-treggia, slow as a snail, with rounds of a tree-trunk for its wheels, and seldom used except by ...
— The Waters of Edera • Louise de la Rame, a.k.a. Ouida

... is but its own most enlarged, general and enduring sense of the coming togetherness or convenience of the various conventional arrangements which, for some reason or other, it has been led to sanction. Hence we speak of man's body as his "trunk." ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler

... the limbs that do that," declared Jerry. "The trunk of the tree is on the rock. If it had fallen a little to this side we would have ...
— The Camp in the Snow - Besiedged by Danger • William Murray Graydon

... decline in taste. A crude desire for immediate effect, and the tendency toward a more barbaric luxury, resulted in the piling up of frail palaces as impermanent as tents. Yet a last flower grew from the deformed and dying trunk of the old Empire. The Saadian Sultan who invaded the Soudan and came back laden with gold and treasure from the great black city of Timbuctoo covered Marrakech with hasty monuments of which hardly a trace survives. But there, in a nettle-grown ...
— In Morocco • Edith Wharton

... able to lay her hands on it. She grew very nervous. She was only human; she was in a very trying position, and she realised it. Where could that book be? Suddenly she espied it and, falling on her knees before the trunk, with her back still to Carmel, studied out the words she wanted. She was leaning over the tray to write these words in her note-book, when—no one ever knew how it happened—the lid of the heavy trunk fell forward and ...
— The House of the Whispering Pines • Anna Katharine Green

... infinite caution, his intended victim stole down, guarding each step, until he was in short and certain range, but, instead of being at the front, he came from the back. He, also, lay flat on his stomach, and raised the already cocked pistol. He steadied it in a two-handed grip against a tree trunk, and trained it with deliberate care on a point to the left of the other man's spine ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck

... to the stock of an old tree, upon which lawyers have engrafted the most various shoots, with the hope that, although their fruits may differ, their foliage at least will be confounded with the venerable trunk which ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville

... at the trunk, and then at Guly's face, and ejaculating an "Ah, yes!" as if he had suddenly jumped at a conclusion, asked—this time putting his question into words—if they were the young chaps Mr. Delancey was looking for from the North; ...
— The Brother Clerks - A Tale of New-Orleans • Xariffa

... wide, and father said the elephant would just be able to go through that door. If he was in the school-room, his back would reach almost to the ceiling. His ears were bigger than the top of my desk. His trunk was twice as long as father's cane, and was nearly as big around at the upper end as a bag of wheat, and the lower end was as small as my leg is below the knee. His tusks were hard and white, one on each side of ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Literature • Ontario Ministry of Education

... aged oak as that to which the king was bound, has been in a measure corroborated by the discovery in 1848 of what may well have been a rough arrow point in its fallen trunk; while the fact that, until the erection of the new bridge at Hoxne in 1823, no newly-married couple would cross the "gold bridge" on the way to church, for the reasons given in the story, seems to show that the king's hiding place may indeed have been beneath it as the legend states. ...
— Wulfric the Weapon Thane • Charles W. Whistler

... little boat in its fall, sending it down to come up in fragments, but the man was left hanging to a bough, and it was toward him that Paul Colbert was struggling against the fury of the flood. The tree hung to the bank by its loosened roots, but its trunk and branches were swaying wildly, fiercely tossed by the waves. The man was sinking lower in the water, his strength almost was gone, and his hold was giving way, when Paul reached him. The white head, turning, revealed Philip Alston's ...
— Round Anvil Rock - A Romance • Nancy Huston Banks

... neuritis and may appear in two well marked forms. In one type there is great wasting, anesthesia of the skin and finally paralysis of the limbs. In the other, the most marked symptom is excessive edema which may affect trunk, limbs and extremities. In severe cases the heart is usually involved and death may occur suddenly from ...
— The Vitamine Manual • Walter H. Eddy

... At Nature's godlike power I stand amazed, Which such vast bodies hath from atoms raised. The kernel of a grape, the fig's small grain, Can clothe a mountain and o'ershade a plain: But thou, (dear Vine!) forbid'st me to be long; Although thy trunk be neither large nor strong, Nor can thy head (not help'd) itself sublime, Yet, like a serpent, a tall tree can climb; 560 Whate'er thy many fingers can entwine, Proves thy support, and all its strength is thine. Though Nature gave not legs, it gave the hands, By which ...
— Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham • Edmund Waller; John Denham

... Nation. Our river and harbor improvement should be continued in accordance with the present policy. Expenditure of this character is compatible with economy; it is in the nature of capital investment. Work should proceed on the basic trunk lines if this work is to be a success. If the country will be content to be moderate and patient and permit improvements to be made where they will do the greatest general good, rather than insisting on expenditures ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Calvin Coolidge • Calvin Coolidge

... came to the grim old city gates. Once outside, under the wide blue sky in the free open air of the country, he drew a long, long breath of pleasure, and quickly found a hidden corner in the cleft of the hoary trunk of an olive-tree, where no passer-by could see him. There he sat, his chin resting on his hands, gazing and gazing out over the plain below, drinking in the beauty with ...
— Knights of Art - Stories of the Italian Painters • Amy Steedman

... with her; her face had worn that look for several days. He could perceive that the curiosity which had been shown by the hair-cutting group amounted in his mother to concern. But she had asked no question with her lips, even when the arrival of his trunk suggested that he was not going to leave her soon. Her silence besought an explanation of him more ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy

... How full of meaning is that old myth of Antaeus! I have touched the Earth and I am a new man; and now at seventy years of age, new feelings of curiosity take birth in my mind, even as young shoots sometimes spring up from the hollow trunk of ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France



Words linked to "Trunk" :   automobile, mammoth, dorsum, behind, bark, auto, keister, footlocker, side, hip, hindquarters, posterior, locker, bole, waistline, spare tire, car, butt, baggage, fanny, proboscis, tree trunk, loins, neb, can, fundament, celiac trunk, belly, prat, tush, rear end, machine, torso, thorax, back, stern, buttocks, shoulder, organic structure, venter, buns, chest, rump, serratus, atrioventricular trunk, snout, rear, cheek, boot, backside, diaphragm, tail, stalk, love handle, stomach, tree, tooshie, seat, luggage, motorcar, pulmonary trunk, paunch, nates, trunk road, stem, trunk route, compartment, trunk line, pectus, haunch, luggage compartment, articulatio humeri, trunk hose, serratus muscles, hind end, buttock, arse, bum, waist, bottom, abdomen, middle, trunk call, body part, trunk lid, derriere, tail end, shoulder joint



Copyright © 2024 Dictionary One.com