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Spiral   /spˈaɪrəl/   Listen
Spiral

adjective
1.
In the shape of a coil.  Synonyms: coiling, helical, spiraling, turbinate, volute, voluted, whorled.



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"Spiral" Quotes from Famous Books



... first saloon fell with a loud crash to the ground. Now the crowd saw no further impediment. Everything remaining in the palace was torn asunder. The Viceroy, causing the various doors to be bolted behind him, hastened to the gallery, that he might reach the spiral staircase leading into the court-yard. Now he repented that he had not followed Caracciolo's advice, who had desired him to make his escape to the castle. Andrea Naclerio concealed himself in the apartments of the Vice-queen, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various

... that the English who came to Rome for business established themselves, like other foreigners, in a distinct colony during the Renascence. Upon the chapel of Saint Ives, unconsecrated now and turned into a lecture room of the University, a strange spiral tower shows the talents of Borromini, Bernini's rival, at their lowest ebb. So far as one can judge, the architect intended to represent realistically the arduous path of learning; but whatever he meant, the result is as bad a piece of Barocco as is ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford

... to descend until it had arrived half way between the cloud and the sea. The water beneath, then ruffled on its surface, increasing its agitation more and more until it boiled and bubbled like a large cauldron, throwing its foam aside in every direction. In a few minutes a small spiral thread of water was perceived to rise into the air, and meet the tongue which had wooed it from the cloud. When the union had taken place, the thread increased each moment in size, until it was swelled into a column of water several ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Captain Frederick Marryat

... own distinctive character, caused by the greater quantity of foliage, thus gaining in softness what it loses in grandeur. After crossing a fine bridge, about half-way up the valley, the road takes a spiral direction, called Le Limacon, the buttresses which support it being remarkable for the solidity and excellence of the masonry; and having made our way to the summit, the peak of the Monne above Cauteretz became visible for the first ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello

... dear," said the major, "was that spiral gentleman handed to me all hot by friend Mark, who took it sizzling out of the fire with a bit of bent stick held ...
— Mother Carey's Chicken - Her Voyage to the Unknown Isle • George Manville Fenn

... Australian he was, Ted had actually brought us a twenty-six pound case of tea. It was a wondrous collection, and I drew a long breath when I remembered that there was more, much more, to come. Here were nails, not in spiral twists of paper, but in solid seven-pound packages, and quite ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson

... seated he resettled himself on the sofa, and, keeping his eyes fixed on the lad, placed the amber mouth-piece of a long spiral tube connected with a narghile which was smouldering on the floor to his lips, and the gurgling sound was once more produced. But to Harry's astonishment, no cloud issued from his uncle's mouth; like a law-abiding factory chimney, he appeared to consume his own smoke. Then, deliberately removing ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough

... silent toil That spread his lustrous coil; Still, as the spiral grew, He left the past year's dwelling for the new, Stole with soft step its shining archway through, Built up its idle door, Stretched in his last-found home, and knew ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes

... not all, of the crew must have joined their comrades in the sanctuary of the haunted cave. The accuracy of this deduction was proved by the presence of the smoke column on the hill. Indeed, the opinion was generally held that its spiral clouds were denser than at any previous hour, thus showing that the defenders were endeavoring to ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy

... larger plants, and thus injuring their appearance. To this objection some other varieties of snail are not open. The Paludina and Planorbis are the only kinds which are trustworthy. The former is a handsome snail, with a bronze-tinted, globular shell; the latter has a spiral form. These will readily reduce the vegetation. And to preserve the crystal clearness of the water, some Mussels may be allowed to burrow in the sand, where they will perform the office of animated ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various

... species of Janthina, the float of which, instead of being nearly round and extending over the shell on each side, was spread like a spiral fold from the shell; the breadth of this fold was 0.45 inch, close to the mouth of the shell, and it gradually tapered off to a point, its length being 3.6 inches. This float being curved round like the ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 2 (of 2) • George Grey

... began to dance the strangest figures in the air. Now it would sweep round a spiral of scarcely a hundred yards diameter, now rush up into the air and swoop down again, steeply, swiftly, falling like a hawk, to recover in a rushing loop that swept it high again. In one of these descents it seemed driving straight at the drifting park of ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells

... down upon me, and I could hear the low hum of his plumage, as if the web off every quill in his great wings vibrated in his strong, level flight. I watched him as long as my eye could hold him. When he was fairly clear of the mountain he began that sweeping spiral movement in which he climbs the sky. Up and up he went without once breaking his majestic poise till he appeared to sight some far-off alien geography, when he bent his course thitherward and gradually vanished in the blue depths. The eagle is a bird of large ideas, he ...
— Birds and Bees, Sharp Eyes and, Other Papers • John Burroughs

... main channel must be in the middle of the plain. The hill I ascended to-day has been under the influence of fire; it is composed of quartz, and a hard dark-coloured stone; the quartz runs in veins throughout it, in places crystalline, and formed into spiral and many-sided figures; in places there is a crust of iron, as if it had been run between the stones, that is also crystalline. Wind, south-east. Latitude, 13 degrees 17 minutes ...
— Explorations in Australia, The Journals of John McDouall Stuart • John McDouall Stuart

... upon him. Vain the attempt to depict his feelings, as he regards the movements of the vultures. They are as those of one swimming in the sea amidst sharks. For, although the birds do not yet fly towards him, he knows they will soon be there. He sees them sailing in spiral curves, descending at each gyration, slowly but surely stooping lower, and coming nearer. He can hear the swish of their wings, like the sough of an approaching storm, with now and then a raucous utterance ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid

... males are much altered by castration; for instead of being short and thick, they become longer than those of the cow, but otherwise resemble them. The Antilope bezoartica offers a somewhat analogous case: the males have long straight spiral horns, nearly parallel to each other, and directed backwards; the females occasionally bear horns, but these when present are of a very different shape, for they are not spiral, and spreading widely, ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin

... difficulty in voiding the urine, several ineffectual efforts being made before it will flow. The stream is diminished in size, of a flattened or spiral form, or divided in two or more parts, and does not flow ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis

... the nightingale began to sing. Three clear notes rang out from the echoing coppice; it was like the voice of the organ in a great church. It sounded over the fields, to die away in a low, hushed fluting. Now, louder and staccato, like a spiral stair of metallic sound, the notes rang out, high and low alternately, in quickening time, a running, rustling and rioting, with long-drawn pipings, wonderfully sweet, that rose in a storm of bell-like tinklings, limpid as water, with a strength, a violence, a ...
— The Path of Life • Stijn Streuvels

... distant estates appeared to twinkle like objects seen through a thin smoke, whilst each of the tall stems of the cocoa—nut trees on the beach, when looked at steadfastly, seemed to be turning round with a small spiral motion, like so many endless screws. There was a dreamy indistinctness about the outlines of the hills, even in the immediate vicinity, which increased as they receded, until the Blue Mountains in the horizon melted into sky. The crew were listlessly spinning oakum, and mending ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott

... which is neither physical, nor can its constitution be rendered by chemical symbols and elements. In short, the mineral monad is one—the higher animal and human monads are countless. Otherwise, how could one account for and explain mathematically the evolutionary and spiral progress of the four kingdoms? The "monad" is the combination of the last two Principles in man, the 6th and the 7th, and, properly speaking, the term "human monad" applies only to the Spiritual Soul, not to its highest spiritual vivifying Principle. But since ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various

... that is set before us, and because of the powers that are bestowed upon us to reach it, there is stamped upon every Christian life unmistakably as God's purpose and ideal concerning it, that it should for ever and for ever be growing nearer and nearer, as some ascending spiral that ever circles closer and closer, and yet never absolutely unites with the great central Perfection ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... respects more extraordinary still. There was a mast set up in the ground, thirty or forty feet high. At the ground, ten feet from the foot of the mast, there commenced an inclined plane, formed of a plank about a foot or eighteen inches wide, which ascended in a spiral direction round and round the mast till it reached the top. A man ascended this plane by means of a large ball, about two feet in diameter, which he rolled up standing upon it, and rolling it by stepping continually on the ascending side. There was no ledge or guard whatever to keep the ball ...
— Rollo in Paris • Jacob Abbott

... same time, or in 1835, the attention of Mr. F.P. Smith seems to have been drawn to the subject of the screw-propeller, and we find him taking out a patent for his form, consisting of an elongated helix or spiral of several turns, under date of May 31, 1836. Ericsson's patent followed some six weeks later, or on July 13, 1836. While it thus appears that Ericsson had been studying the problem since 1833 or earlier, according to his own statements, there is no evidence that Smith's ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord

... notable of all. Here, with an average diameter of ten hundred feet, rose a circular structure tapering irregularly until it settled to a point six thousand feet in the air. Around this, as a center, ranged terraces, hanging gardens, aerial boulevards, and spiral ...
— Mr. World and Miss Church-Member • W. S. Harris

... conforming to the organisation with which it is endowed. Such an array of paddles prophesies of a mercurial temperament and an energetic character. It can, however, anchor itself and lie by when occasion offers. It is provided with two long cables, prettily set with spiral filaments or tendrils, by means of which it can make fast to any point. When not in use, it can retract them, and stow them away in two sacs or pouches within the body, where they may be seen coiled up, through the transparent walls. The mouth is a simple opening at one pole ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 423, New Series. February 7th, 1852 • Various

... propeller of this consisted of a strong centrifugal pump, with vertical axis, actuated by a low pressure engine. This pump sucked water into a perforated channel at the bottom of the boat, and forced it through a spiral pipe to the propelling tubes. These latter consisted of two elbowed pipes issuing from the sides of the vessel and capable of pivoting in the exhaust ports in such a way as to each turn its mouth downward at ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 415, December 15, 1883 • Various

... the machine like a veteran and even showed what he could do by making a small figure eight and a spiral dip. ...
— The Rover Boys in the Air - From College Campus to the Clouds • Edward Stratemeyer

... stands up. He turns on a small electric light. This is a concession. This done, he opens a drawer behind the counter and removes a little bronze casket. The casket is placed on the counter. Slowly as if in a deep dream Sing Lee lights a match and holds it inside the casket. A thin spiral of lavender ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht

... continuous and unbroken. It is often, as one has said, a spiral rather than a straight line. It is not an unceasing advance: there are backward movements, or what appear to be such. Of particular nations it is frequently evident, that, intellectually and morally, as well as in power and thrift, they have ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher

... mediaeval hackbut. Mme. du Barry, with a star above her head, naked, and surrounded by a cloud, seemed to look longingly out of Latour's pastel at an Indian chibook, while she tried to guess the purpose of the spiral curves that wound towards her. Instruments of death, poniards, curious pistols, and disguised weapons had been flung down pell-mell among the paraphernalia of daily life; porcelain tureens, Dresden plates, translucent cups from china, ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac

... not insert a drawing of this arm—one of the three selected by the American board—as it belongs to the same class and is similar in general construction to the Hotchkiss. There is, however, an important difference in the magazine, which has no spiral spring, but is furnished instead with an ingenious system of ratchet bars. One of these carries forward the cartridge a distance equal to its own length at each reciprocal motion of the bolt, while a second bar has no longitudinal ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 601, July 9, 1887 • Various

... alone in front of the closed door, and there was none around but myself. Then I was aware of a gust in the night-breeze blowing up for rain. Time had changed. Something had been taken from the future and something had been added to the past. The spiral gusts lifted the unseen litter of the street, and with them the harpies rose in my breast. And words impetuous would have burst out like the torrents of rain ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham

... in length. There was not the slightest trace of inflammation, nor any thing unnatural to be discovered in the part; there was merely a round worm, which was situated in the upper part of the intus-susceptio. The intestine was brought together by means of six spiral stitches, after the manner of the glover's suture, and the end of the silk was allowed to hang out of the external wound ...
— North American Medical and Surgical Journal, Vol. 2, No. 3, July, 1826 • Various

... to the yawl was a pleasant young lady, who sat in a very pretty boat, rowed by a trusty man. She had hovered round and round the Rob Roy with a cautious propriety, which, however, could not conceal a certain wistful gaze as the narrowing spiral of her course brought her nearer at each turn. My little dingey was the attraction, and the lady confessed boldly that she "would so like to have a boat like that to row in." Next she consented to see dinner cooked on the Rob Roy, and—just because she was a lady—she complied ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor

... and groaned, had drawn a charmed circle round about it. So near, yet kept at a distance; all-powerful, but in disgrace, the apparently devoted wife was lying in wait for death and opportunity; crouching like the ant-lion at the bottom of his spiral pit, ever on the watch for the prey that cannot escape, listening to the fall of every ...
— Gobseck • Honore de Balzac

... soften the fall of the stones. A few people were hurt, but much less damage was done than might have been expected. I may mention for the benefit of English readers that the tunnels through Monte Piottino and the Biaschina are marvels of engineering skill, being both of them spiral; the road describes a complete circle, and descends rapidly all the while, so that the point of egress as one goes from Airolo towards Faido is at a much lower ...
— Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino • Samuel Butler

... down the long slant of the ledge, the more interested the bears became. Here the crows and gulls had not had time to capture all the prizes. There were savoury blue-shelled mussels clinging under the tips of the rocks; plump, spiral whelks between the oozy tresses of the seaweed; orange starfish and bristly sea-urchins in the shallow pools. All these dainties had shells that the cub's young teeth could easily crush, and they yielded meaty morsels that made beetles and grubs seem very meagre fare. Moreover, ...
— The House in the Water - A Book of Animal Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts

... plumes, And thus a moralizing theme assumes:— Know, gentle Ladies, once these shapeless walls, O'er whose grey wreck the shading ivy crawls, Compos'd a graceful mansion, whose fair mould Led from the road the trav'ller, to behold. Oft, when the morning ting'd the redd'ning skies, Far off the spiral smoke was seen to rise; At noon the hospitable board was spread, Then nappy ale made light the weary head; And when grey eve appear'd, in shadows damp, Each casement glitter'd with th' enliv'ning lamp; Here the laugh titter'd, ...
— Poems • Sir John Carr

... small spears I pried out dozens of them, Mao, starfish, clams, oysters, furbelowed clams, sea-urchins, and sponges. The mao is the turbo, the queer gastropod sold in the market in Papeete. He lives in a beautiful spiral shell, and has attached to him a round piece of polished shell, blue, green, brown, or yellow, which he puts aside when he wishes to feed on the morsels passing his door, and pulls shut when he wants privacy. He fits himself ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien

... of his science; and I believe we each derived equal pleasure from the other. But yet I had the advantage, for there was so much in his performance that he could not account for: as for instance, that a piece of iron which falls through a spiral line, becomes magnetic,—well, how is that? The spirit comes over it, but whence does it come from? it is just as with the human beings of this world, I think; our Lord lets them fall through the spiral line of time, and the spirit comes over them—and there stands a ...
— Pictures of Sweden • Hans Christian Andersen

... inch and a half thick. All the others have an efflorescence of lime and one of the nitrates only, and some are covered thickly with shells. These shells are identical with those of the mollusca of Lake Ngami and the Zouga. There are three varieties, spiral, univalve, ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone

... garland of orange-trees, and had lianas and star-flowered creepers climbing over and dangling on it, up as high as the slender cross that surmounted its square white tower. As we gazed, the first sign of life appeared in the village. A puff of blue smoke rose curling and spiral from a chimney, and the matin bell rang out its summons to prayer. Our Mexicans fell on their knees and crossed themselves, repeating their Ave-marias. We involuntarily took off our hats, and whispered a thanksgiving to the God who had been ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLII. Vol. LV. April, 1844 • Various

... passage, that the small light of a gas jet, inside, was not necessary to show him the way. Up he ran, sometimes clearing two steps at a jump, slipping his hand lightly along the rough wooden banister. A few spiral turns brought him to the bell, which hung in an open framework of timber. He gave the huge bronze a familiar tap as he passed, and wound on and upward until he came to a trap door, which Uncle Ith held invitingly open. Then he sprang into the little room at the top of the ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton

... into one voice of terror, while all of them stood helpless with amazement. While we had all been sitting in the curious sweltering heat, watching with pride a future for our children being foretold for them by themselves, death had reared itself behind Old Harpeth, coiled itself into a huge black spiral of thunder and lightning and was driving down the valley upon Goodloets with a velocity that defied the eyes to follow. For a long second every man and woman stood rooted to his foothold on the earth and watched the tornado strike the edge of the Settlement, smash down the ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess

... the DISENGAGEMENT contact with the opponent's rifle is abandoned and the point of the bayonet is circled under or over his bayonet or rifle and directed into the opening attacked. This attack is delivered by one continuous spiral movement of the bayonet from the ...
— Manual for Noncommissioned Officers and Privates of Infantry • War Department

... is of the nearest church to where you live, and multiply that height by the necessary number, you will get some idea of the magnitude of this prodigious column. The lightning rod, that came down the side of it in a spiral line, looked like a spider's web that had been, by chance, blown against ...
— Rollo in Scotland • Jacob Abbott

... four years and no more by the ability of Master Jacopo the German, and by the industry of friar Elias. After the friar's death twelve strong towers were erected about the lower church in order that the vast erection should never be destroyed; in each of these is a spiral staircase ascending from the ground to the summit. In the course of time, moreover, several chapels were added and other rich ornaments, of which it is not necessary to speak further, as enough has been said ...
— The Lives of the Painters, Sculptors & Architects, Volume 1 (of 8) • Giorgio Vasari

... waste energy and fancy are thrown into the manual work, and you have so much intellect as would direct the affairs of a large mercantile concern for a day, spent all at once, quite unconsciously, in drawing an ingenious spiral. ...
— Lectures on Art - Delivered before the University of Oxford in Hilary term, 1870 • John Ruskin

... up would make it possible for them to get the information that coming down hadn't afforded. But he said nothing, because he had come to feel by this time that when Captain Greene did a thing he had a perfectly sound reason for his action. Nor was he wrong. Once more they climbed in a high spiral curve until they were higher than they had been before. For the first time, Frank now felt a peculiar ringing in his ears. He mentioned it, and ...
— The Boy Scouts on the Trail • George Durston

... within it for the operator. Secondly, in front as well as behind, or all round, set a widely-stretched sail parallel to the machine forming within a hollow or bend which could be reefed like the sails of a ship. Thirdly, place wings on the sides, to be worked up and down by a spiral spring, these wings also to be hollow below in order to increase the force and velocity, take in the air, and make the resistance as great as may be required. These, too, should be of light material and of sufficient size; ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian

... representation, and if you posit a real past and a real future you posit independent objects. In absolute immediacy, on the contrary, instead of change taken realistically, you can have only a feeling of change. The flux becomes an idea in the absolute, like the image of a moving spiral, always flowing outwards or inwards, but with its centre and its circumference always immovable. Duration, we must remember, is simply the sense of lasting; no time is real that is not lived through. Therefore various lives cannot be ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana

... cupola, the finest portion of the building, stands the great altar, at which none but the Pope may read mass. Over this altar extends a giant canopy of bronze, with spiral pillars richly decorated with arabesques. The weight of metal used in its construction was 186,392 pounds, and the cost of the gold for gilding was 40,000 dollars; the entire canopy is worth above 150,000 dollars. ...
— A Visit to the Holy Land • Ida Pfeiffer

... ball of white-hot iron is placed, and forced with a rotary motion through a spiral passage, the diameter of which is constantly diminishing. The effect of this operation is to squeeze all the slag and cinder out of the ball, and force the iron to assume the shape of a short thick cylinder, called "a bloom." This process was ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 11, - No. 22, January, 1873 • Various

... rushed up the fingerboard of the fiddles accompanied by the harp in a billowing glissando and—then on ragged rims of wide thunder a gust of air seemed to melt lights, men, instruments into a darkness that froze the eyeballs. With a scorching whiff of sulphur and violets, a thin, spiral scream, the music tapered into the sepulchral clang of a tam-tam. And Pobloff, his broad face awash with fear saw by a solitary wavering gas-jet that he was alone and upon his knees. Not a musician was to be seen. Not a sound ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker

... to be a term of some series of continued fractions. When this is coupled with the geometrical law governing the evolution of form, so manifest in some departments of the animal kingdom, e. g., the spiral shells of the Mollusca, it is difficult to believe that there is not, in Nature, a deeper-seated and innate principle, to the operation of which natural selection is merely an adjunct. The whole range of the Mammalia, fossil and recent, cannot ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray

... his senses woke to the call of the brightening landscape. The scene was such as Salvator might have painted: wild blocks of stone heaped under walnut-shade; here the white plunge of water down a wall of granite, and there, in bluer depths, a charcoal burner's hut sending up its spiral of smoke to the dark raftering of branches. Though it was but a few hours since Odo had travelled from Oropa, years seemed to have passed over him, and he saw the world with a new eye. Each sound and scent plucked at him in passing: the roadside started into detail like the foreground ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton

... perceptibly influence the level of the water in the interior of the cylinder. It is attached to a copper ribbon, B, whose other extremity is fixed to the drum, T. The ribbon winds around the latter in the rising motion of the float, owing to a spiral spring arranged so as to act upon the drum. The tension of this spring goes on increasing in measure ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 443, June 28, 1884 • Various

... wait the signal rocket, Till . . . Barrow, show that locket, That turquoise-studded locket, Which you slipped from out your pocket And are pressing with a kiss! Turquoise-studded, spiral-twisted, It is hers! And I had missed it From her chain; and you have kissed it: Barrow, ...
— Songs of Action • Arthur Conan Doyle

... yourself encompassed by truth, vital and strong. This art, erstwhile so baffling, stands revealed as the struggle of a superhuman entity for self-expression. The tendency toward God has to begin anew with each round of the life-spiral - that eternal circle which ...
— The Fourth Dimensional Reaches of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition • Cora Lenore Williams

... a disease caused by a germ called spirocheta; the full name is spirocheta pallida—a pale, spiral-shaped germ. Though the disease has been ravaging Europe and America for centuries, the germ of it has been discovered only a few years ago, namely, in 1905, and, like the gonococcus, also by a German scientist, Fritz ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson

... and notches which it was said he was wont to inflict upon it. I could not perceive a scratch, he was too busily employed in that said chair in forming plans for cutting up Europe; within three yards of his table was a little door, or rather trap door, by which you descended down the oddest spiral staircase you ever beheld into the Library, which was low and small; the books were few of them new, almost all standard works upon history—at least I am sure 4 out of 5 were historical—all of his own selection, and each stamped, ...
— Before and after Waterloo - Letters from Edward Stanley, sometime Bishop of Norwich (1802;1814;1814) • Edward Stanley

... entered the bedroom, and they were shortly afterwards followed by the Countess, who, more dead than alive, sank into a Voltaire armchair. Hermann peeped through a chink. Lizaveta Ivanovna passed close by him, and he heard her hurried steps as she hastened up the little spiral staircase. For a moment his heart was assailed by something like a pricking of conscience, but the emotion was only transitory, and his heart ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne

... against it, when he must unconsciously have touched some secret spring, for a secret door opened, dividing the picture in two parts, and, to our hero's unbounded astonishment, he saw before him a small spiral staircase leading down ...
— Jack's Ward • Horatio Alger, Jr.

... "Reconnaissance spiral first, Arthur," Stryker said firmly. He chuckled at Farrell's instant scowl, his little eyes twinkling and his naked paunch quaking over the belt of his shipboard shorts. "Chapter One, Subsection Five, Paragraph Twenty-seven: No planetfall on an unreclaimed ...
— Control Group • Roger Dee

... That issues from beneath Aurora's car, Shudder the sombrous waves; at every beam More vivid, more by every breath impelled, Higher and higher up the fretted rocks Their turbulent refulgence they display. Madness, which like the spiral element The more it seizes on the fiercer burns, Hurried them blindly forward, and involved In flame the senses and in gloom the soul. Determined to protect the country's gods And asking their protection, they adjure Each other to stand forward, and insist With zeal, and trample under foot ...
— Gebir • Walter Savage Landor

... (that is, of course, every Buddhistic schoolboy) that when the Buddha made "the great renunciation," he attained Nirvana by sitting under a "Bo tree." My "Bo tree" is a great oak in the heart of the woods, mounted by a dizzy spiral staircase, at the summit of which you enter Nirvana by means of the "House on the Garden," a glass-house floored with boards and furnished with rustic chairs, a lounge and a writing-table; and here, ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill

... exceedingly simple. A current of hot air flowing from below upward is deflected more or less from its direction by the human voice. By its action an adjacent thermo-battery is excited, whose current passes through the spiral of an ordinary telephone, which serves as the receiving instrument. As a source of heat the inventor uses a common stearine candle, the flame of which is kept at one and the same level by means of a spring similar to those used in carriage lamps. On one ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 275 • Various

... projected into a large keeve, or condenser, that was kept always filled with cool water by an incessant stream from the cascade we have described, which always ran into and overflowed it. The arm of this head was fitted and made air-tight, also, into a spiral tube of copper, called the Worm, which rested in the water of the cooler; and as it consisted of several convolutions, like a cork-screw, its office was to condense the hot vapor which was transmitted to it from the glowing Still into that description of spirits ...
— The Emigrants Of Ahadarra - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton

... the way and Madelon followed out of the room across the front entry, with its spiral of stair mounting its landscape-papered height, and Lot opened the door of the opposite room, the great north parlor. "Wait here a minute," he said to Madelon, and she waited in the entry after he entered until he called ...
— Madelon - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

... in the manner described, must be concentrated, by regulated evaporation, to the degree requisite for crystallisation. This Mr. Fownes advises to be done by steam of a moderate pressure circulating in a spiral of copper-pipe laid at the bottom of the evaporating vessels, which should be large and shallow, and wholly unlike those in present use. Here it may be rapidly boiled down till the heat rises to about 225 deg., without risk of burning. ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds

... experiments that these movements and counter-movements in the field of vision can proceed in opposite directions at the same time and no eye, of course, is able to move upward and downward, or right and left, in the same moment. A very characteristic experiment can be performed with a black spiral line on a white disk. If we revolve such a disk slowly around its center, the spiral line produces the impression of a continuous enlargement of concentric curves. The lines start at the center and expand until they disappear in the ...
— The Photoplay - A Psychological Study • Hugo Muensterberg

... close to a beautifully shaped ilex, and for a few moments he could not make out the great spiral-barked chestnut, till, just as he began to fancy that he had lost his way at once, he caught sight of its glossy bronzed leaves behind the greyish ...
— !Tention - A Story of Boy-Life during the Peninsular War • George Manville Fenn

... day in the great northern city, preparing for what he regarded as his career, James sat in the same large, shabbily furnished room where his mother had once visited him—half-way up the hideously long spiral stair of an ancient house, whose entrance was in a narrow close. The great clock of a church in the neighbouring street had just begun to strike five of a wintry afternoon, dark with snow, falling and yet to fall: how often in after years was ...
— Salted With Fire • George MacDonald

... of the vine springs the capreolus, which is a little spiral tendril, like a curled hair, by means of which the vine holds on while it creeps towards the place of which it would take possession, from which quality of taking hold of things (capere) it is ...
— Roman Farm Management - The Treatises Of Cato And Varro • Marcus Porcius Cato

... at the Gorgon!" cried the mother, as the battered head of an ancient doll was displayed over his shoulder by Perseus, decorated with two enormous snakes, one made of stamps, and the other a spiral of whalebone shavings out ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge

... red, and green ascended through the air; and when reaching the highest point of their blazing paths, they discharged beautiful garnitures of floating stars, sparks, crackers, serpents, gold and silver rain. Tourbillions mounting and rotating through the atmosphere, formed brilliant spiral curves of fire. Splendid effects of changing color were brought to view by revolving fire-wheels. An appropriate finale constituted the burning of the American flag, which bore a sublime character ...
— By Water to the Columbian Exposition • Johanna S. Wisthaler

... sex. Thus in many breeds the horns are deficient in the ewe, though this likewise occurs occasionally with the female of the wild musmon. In the rams of the Wallachian breed, "the horns spring almost perpendicularly from the frontal bone, and then take a beautiful spiral form; in the ewes they protrude nearly at right angles from the head, and then become twisted in a singular manner." (3/82. 'Youatt on Sheep' page 138.) Mr. Hodgson states that the extraordinarily arched nose or ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin

... have long to look at it—not long to search its borders for some sign of the living. The dark came swiftly. As he was about to turn back, he thought he caught a glimpse of a spiral of smoke upon the farther side, but as he stared at this, it faded until he was not sure it had been at all. He took it for a good-night message from her. Then gold and jewels, though they might be within arm's reach, became ...
— The Web of the Golden Spider • Frederick Orin Bartlett

... and fastening the shutters; how he had thrown himself across the current of a torrential gutter to divert the stream into the cellar shop of a tradesman who had offended him; above all, that feat of his when, ascending the spiral turret stair of the church, he had lowered himself down from the parapet, and, astride upon a gargoyle, had worked his way along it until he could secure a stone that lay in its mouth, the perilous and dizzy adventure watched by a breathless throng in the churchyard below. The Bob Clive who ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang

... with parted, voiceless lips. The outer door stood open. Staggering out on the landing, he leaned far over the banister. Gazing down into the deep black shaft with a tiny glimmering flame at the bottom, he traced by ear the rapid spiral descent of somebody running down the stairs on tiptoe. It was a light, swift, pattering sound, which sank away from him into the depths: a fleeting shadow passed over the glimmer—a wink of ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad

... Spiral Arm, a sprawling sphere of influence vast, mighty, solid at the core. Only the far-flung boundary shows the slight ebb and flow of contingent cultures that may win a system or two today and lose them back tomorrow or a hundred ...
— History Repeats • George Oliver Smith

... the Chicadee is the Brown Creeper, (Certhia familiaris,) of similar habits, and commonly seen moving in a spiral direction around the trunks and branches of trees, and, when he is conscious of being observed, keeping on the further side of the branch. He is more frequently seen in the winter than in the summer, when he confines himself to the seclusion of the pine forest. The different birds which I have ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various

... lady. They were the same face—using a figure of speech—the type transmitted from mother to daughter: the same high front and facial angle, the same outline of the nose, straight as a ray of light, with the delicate spiral-like curve of the nostril which meets you in the Greek medallion. Their hair, too, was alike in colour, golden; though, in that of the mother, the gold showed an enamel ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid

... apparatus consists of a Bunsen pile worked with bichromate of potash, which makes no smell; an induction coil carries the electricity generated by the pile into communication with a lantern of peculiar construction; in this lantern there is a spiral glass tube from which the air has been excluded, and in which remains only a residuum of carbonic acid gas or of nitrogen. When the apparatus is put in action this gas becomes luminous, producing a ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne

... canyon the mountains rise wall-like, three thousand feet, and the long spiral of straggling huts down in its narrow bottom gets a kiss from the sun only once a day, when he sails over at noon. The village is a couple of miles long; the cabins stand well apart from each other. ...
— A Double Barrelled Detective Story • Mark Twain

... opened the throttle, and the train steamed away. The men in the little column, although eager for their new task, watched its departure with a certain sadness at parting with their comrades. The train became smaller and smaller, then it was only a spiral of smoke, and that, too, soon died on the clear ...
— The Guns of Shiloh • Joseph A. Altsheler

... idea," said Dr. Sterling. "Judge Breckenridge and Mrs. Calvert cannot, of course, climb the spiral stairs leading up into the statue, but we younger people can, and will, if you ...
— Dorothy's Triumph • Evelyn Raymond

... motion, or stopped in a conductor, a neighboring conductor has a current produced in the opposite direction. Henry proved that this principle might be made available to produce an action of a current upon itself, by forming a conductor in the whirls of a spiral, so that sparks and shocks might be obtained by the use of such spirals, when connected with a pair of galvanic plates, a current from which could give no sparks and no shocks. Henry's discoveries of the effects of a current in producing several alternations ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various

... replied a dozen yards away. Slowly, as he advanced, he made out the dim shadow of life in the white gloom—a bit of smoke climbing weakly in the storm, the black opening of a brush shelter—and then, between the opening and the spiral of smoke, a living thing that came creeping toward him on all fours, like ...
— The Honor of the Big Snows • James Oliver Curwood

... few minutes, he was apparently absorbed in the lecture; so intent indeed, was he in the task, that he did not hear the steps which wound the spiral stairs that conducted to his cell, and it was not till the wards harshly grated beneath the huge key, and the door creaked on its hinges, that Rienzi, in amaze at intrusion at so unwonted an hour, lifted his eyes. The door had reclosed on the dungeon, and by the lonely and pale lamp he beheld ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton

... cluster are quite thin, but they are decorated with the yellow and brown straw-like material above referred to in connection with abdominal belt No. 6 (being prepared from the same plant, apparently Dendrobium, and in the same way), the material being twisted in a close spiral round the strings, and making them look, when seen from a short distance off, like strings of very small yellow and brown beads, irregularly arranged in varying lengths of the two colours, shading off gradually from one to the other. Even when so bound round, these strings ...
— The Mafulu - Mountain People of British New Guinea • Robert W. Williamson

... this emergency demands that the consumers of America be protected so that our general cost of living can be maintained at a reasonable level. We ought to avoid the spiral processes of the World War, the rising spiral of costs of all kinds. The soundest policy is for every employer in the country to help give useful employment to the millions who are unemployed. By giving to those millions an increased purchasing power, ...
— The Fireside Chats of Franklin Delano Roosevelt • Franklin Delano Roosevelt

... come over. Lady Northumberland made a pompous festino for him t'other night; not only the whole house, but the garden, was illuminated, and was quite a fairy scene. Arches and pyramids of lights alternately surrounded the enclosure; a diamond necklace of lamps edged the rails and descent, with a spiral obelisk of candles on each hand; and dispersed over the lawn were little bands of kettle-drums, clarionets, flutes, etc., and the lovely moon, who came without a card. The birthday was far from being such a show; ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole

... the rear of the mission buildings. Andreo shuddered for the first time, and tightened his arm about Pilar's shaking body. He knew that they were to be locked in the dungeons. Pilar, almost fainting, shrank back as they reached the narrow spiral stair which led downward to the cells. "Ay! I shall die, my Andreo!" she cried. "Ay! my ...
— The Splendid Idle Forties - Stories of Old California • Gertrude Atherton

... nothing fed upon them but cattle. I cannot attempt to describe the mountains. I can only say that I thought those on our right—for the other side was only a continued high ridge or craggy barrier, broken along the top into petty spiral forms—were the grandest I had ever seen. It seldom happens that mountains in a very clear air look exceedingly high, but these, though we could see the whole of them to their very summits, appeared to me more majestic in their ...
— Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803 • Dorothy Wordsworth

... a deep layer of hot coals all over the cover. The biscuits should bake in about fifteen minutes. For a hurry meal each camper can take a strip of dough, wind it spirally around a peeled thick stick, which has first been heated, and cook her own spiral biscuit by holding it over the fire and constantly turning the stick. Biscuits, in common with everything cooked over a hot wood-fire, need constant watching that they may not burn. Test them with a clean splinter of wood; ...
— On the Trail - An Outdoor Book for Girls • Lina Beard and Adelia Belle Beard

... life-sized group of musicians—statues in colored metal of a Spanish girl playing a mandora, an Italian with a slender calascione, a Russian playing his jorbon, and an African playing a banjo. Luxurious couches hung by spiral springs from the ceiling to a convenient height from the floor, and here and there lay rugs of rare beauty and great ottomans of artistic designs ...
— The Land of the Changing Sun • William N. Harben

... us from the corner of the canvas to the extreme distance and thence in a circuit back; in another it moves on a flat plane like an ellipse in perspective. Again, first catching the eye in the centre, it unfolds like a spiral. ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore

... suggest to him what it was good for. His pains were rewarded by finding on the flat head the nearly obliterated figures 3 and 5, inscribed one above the other, in the manner of a vulgar fraction, thus, 3/5; and by the conviction that the spiral conformation of the rod was not the result of accident, as he had at first supposed, but had been communicated to it intentionally, for some purpose unknown. These conclusions naturally stimulated his curiosity ...
— Archibald Malmaison • Julian Hawthorne

... smiled mirthlessly. "You're forgetting your space-mechanics, Liggett. We will drift along the wreck-pack's edge, and then will curve in and go round it in a closing spiral until ...
— The Sargasso of Space • Edmond Hamilton

... clump of pines. Whimsical and wistful, it was occasionally lit by a peculiar smile which carried a hint of sadness. His eyes half closed, dreamily. The smoke from his cigarette curled upward in a thin spiral in the still air of the altitudes. His horse, with reins dangling and saddle cinch loosened, cropped the grass which carpeted ...
— The Coyote - A Western Story • James Roberts

... is a great stream of Egos, or Monads, which originally emanated from a Source of Being, and which are pursuing a spiral journey around a chain of seven globes, including the earth, called the Planetary Chain. The Life Wave of Monads reaches Globe A, and goes through a series of evolutionary life on it, and then passes on to Globe B, and so on until Globe G is reached, when after a continued life there the Life ...
— Reincarnation and the Law of Karma - A Study of the Old-New World-Doctrine of Rebirth, and Spiritual Cause and Effect • William Walker Atkinson

... carved and coloured. A suggestion of turquoise-blue and the gleam of iridescent tiles showed through the clear water in the octagonal basin set in the floor. The jets of water came from a large ball of blue faience resting on the top of a slender spiral column. The fountain was only one of the beautiful features of that Eastern mansion which Margaret noticed as her hostess conducted her to ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer

... On a sort of spiral roadway he paused, breathless, awed, bewildered, for there, eddying restlessly about the bases of towers and other huge structures, was a great sea of up-turned faces. To his surprise he found the passage he had followed ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various

... farther he advanced. A locked door barred his way at its end, but a door upon his right opened and he stepped into a dimly-lighted chamber, about the walls of which were three other doors, each of which he tried in turn. Two were locked; the other opened upon a runway leading downward. It was spiral and he could see no farther than the first turn. A door in the corridor he had quitted opened after he had passed, and the third warrior stepped out and followed after him. A faint smile still lingered upon the fellow's ...
— The Chessmen of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... creature,—that this ichthyolite was not an immature, but really a miniature Coccosteus. We may see on the plates of the full-grown Coccosteus, as on the shells of bivalves, such as Cardium echinatum, or on those of spiral univalves, such as Buccinum undatum, the diminutive markings which they bore when the creature was young; and on the plates of this species we may detect a regular gradation of tubercles from the microscopic ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller

... consists of a hollow cylinder six inches long, and half an inch in diameter, within which another cylinder fitting it tightly plays. The inner one is cut off at its extremity, somewhat in the form of a pen, and is sharp. The sharp end is kept retracted within the outer cylinder by a spiral spring in the handle at the other end, but can be protruded by pressing on this handle when required for use. When thus protruded it is plunged into the cyst up to its middle; the pressure on the handle is taken off, and the ...
— A Manual of the Operations of Surgery - For the Use of Senior Students, House Surgeons, and Junior Practitioners • Joseph Bell

... driven by gears at the back, revolving constantly at uniform speed. The inside of the cylinder is arranged with reverse-spiral flanges which mix the coffee perfectly and make uneven roasting impossible; and they discharge promptly every grain of coffee when the front-head opening is turned to the lower position. The roaster is generally operated with coal fuel, but can be used with gas by installing ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers

... border gimp, and Volodya's figure cowering in a corner. At the same moment, directly above our heads, a majestic roar resounds, which seems to rise ever higher and higher, and to spread ever wider and wider, in a vast spiral, gradually gaining force, until it passes into a deafening crash, which causes one to tremble and hold one's breath involuntarily. The wrath of God! how much poetry there is in this ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin

... gale and hurricane to deposit in the quaint pyramidal fashion in which they stand to-day. Even yet they are not fixed; occasionally a tree falls exposing the naked sand to the action of the wind, which swirls around the hole and moves the sand into a spiral whirlpool, lifting and carrying it away to be deposited again on the lea side of a distant valley, choking the pines and silver birch and sometimes destroying large woods and forests. It is surprising that though we travelled for hundreds of miles along the edge of this ...
— With the "Die-Hards" in Siberia • John Ward

... of a woman in the following manner: Small pieces of the rib of the rattan leaf are inserted at intervals of a couple of days until the hole is opened enough to receive larger pieces. When it has expanded sufficiently, a small spiral of grass, usually of pandanus[13] is inserted. This, by its natural tendency to expand, increases the size of the aperture until a larger spiral ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan

... mere abstract notion of doing so filled us with fearful joy. Chalks was right, I dare say; we were easily amused. And Nina, at these moments of literary frenzy—I can see her now: her head bent over the manuscript, her hair in some disarray, a spiral of cigarette-smoke winding ceilingward from between the fingers of her idle hand, her lips parted, her eyes gleaming with mischievous inspirations, her face pale with the intensity of her glee. I can see her as she would look up, eagerly, to listen to somebody's ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland

... quickly off his horse and ran out on the big flat rock from which they had often fished together. At his feet the turbid current rolled ponderously against the solid wall of rock and, turning back upon itself, swung round in an ever-lessening circle until it sucked down suddenly into a spiral vortex that spewed up all it caught in the boiling channel below. There in years past the lambs and weaklings from the herds above had drifted to their death, but never before had ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge

... a numbness at the heart. The affair was serious; but courage, and good hope! That sounded grave. He rose from his chair, the pipe between his lips still sending up a spiral of blue smoke. He was asking himself whether he should go in to the next apartment either to comfort or to question, when the door of the salle a manger again opened, and Annette stole into his room. She pushed the door wide and stood framed for an instant against the shadow of the corridor. ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray

... the largest is a bacillus causing an animal disease which is 1/2000 of an inch in length and 1/25000 of an inch in diameter. Among the free-living non-pathogenic forms much larger examples are found. In shape bacteria are round, or rod-shaped, or spiral; the round forms are called micrococci, the rod-shaped bacilli and the spiral forms are called spirilli. A clearer idea of the size is possibly given by the calculation that a drop of water would contain one billion micrococci of ...
— Disease and Its Causes • William Thomas Councilman

... try a spiral ascent," said Dick, as he moved the lever of the horizontal rudder. The Abaris responded instantly, and began a spiral climb, which is usually the method employed by birdmen. They also generally descend in ...
— Dick Hamilton's Airship - or, A Young Millionaire in the Clouds • Howard R. Garis

... forms (Eriocephalidae) in which lacinia and mandibles are obvious and the spiral tongue is not developed: see ...
— Explanation of Terms Used in Entomology • John. B. Smith

... these were the Triumphal Arch of Septimius Severus, still standing; the Columns of Phocas and Trajan, the latter of which is the finest monument of its kind in the world, one hundred and twenty-seven feet high, with a spiral band of admirable reliefs containing two thousand five hundred human figures. Beside these, new fora of immense size were constructed by various emperors, not for political business so much as courts of justice. ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord

... not say so, but I fancy Ooma may have been undergoing readjustment.—My dear, she has grown as pudgy as a Jupitan, and her clothes—but then she always did look more like a spiral ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IV. (of X.) • Various

... the page horizontally and give it a quick rotary motion while looking at the centre of the spiral, it will appear to revolve. Perhaps a good many readers are acquainted with this little optical illusion. But the puzzle is to show how I was able to draw this spiral with so much exactitude without using anything but a pair of compasses and the sheet of paper on which the diagram was made. How ...
— Amusements in Mathematics • Henry Ernest Dudeney

... with which the first four acts had been received. Neither of these two things took place. Balzac "n'y pensait deja plus." He talked with the greatest eagerness of the embellishments he had proposed to M. Decazes for his palace, and especially of a grand spiral staircase, which was to lead from the centre of the Luxembourg Gardens to the Catacombs, so that these might be shown to visitors, and become a source of profit to Paris. But of his ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars

... given over to sack; and the Pope was at Orvieto, where the Court was suffering very greatly from want of water. Thereupon, at the wish of the Pontiff, Antonio built in that city a well all of stone, twenty-five braccia wide, with two spiral staircases cut in the tufa, one above the other, following the curve of the well. By these two spiral staircases it is possible to descend to the bottom of the well, insomuch that the animals that go there for water, entering ...
— Lives of the most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 06 (of 10) Fra Giocondo to Niccolo Soggi • Giorgio Vasari

... Atlantic drainage of North America. Usually it was trimmed down and excavated until only about three-fourths of the outer wall of the shell remained. At one end was the long spike-like base which served as a handle, and at the other the flat conical apex, with its very pronounced spiral line or ridge expanding from the center to the circumference, as seen in Fig. 475 a. This vessel was often copied in clay, as many good examples now in our museums testify. The notable feature ...
— Origin and Development of Form and Ornament in Ceramic Art. • William Henry Holmes

... took grain from an attendant, and scattered a quantity of it before the coop. Close at his elbow stood the augur, to interpret the omen,—a weazened, bald-headed old senator, who wore a purple-striped tunic,[138] and carried in his hand a long stick,[139] curved at its head into a spiral. Drusus knew perfectly well that the fowls had been kept without food all that day; but it would have seemed treason to all the traditions of his native land to cry out against this pompous farce. The hungry chickens pecked up the grain. The augur muttered formula ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis

... Descending the great spiral staircase with its slender mahogany balusters,—here and there a break,—I caught sight of the entrance hall below with its hanging glass lantern, quaint haircloth sofas lining the white walls, and half-oval tables heaped ...
— Colonel Carter of Cartersville • F. Hopkinson Smith

... A spiral of blue smoke, curling high above the green and gold of the gorse bushes, revealed Creasy's whereabouts. He had shifted his camp since their first meeting with him: his tilted cart, his tethered pony, and his fire, were now in ...
— The Chestermarke Instinct • J. S. Fletcher

... joy meant so much that she had crept away with it to the dark staircase, spiral and stone, that rose from the wide entry to the top of the house. She sat on the third step from the floor, and from her position she commanded a full view of half the kitchen. Her eyes, deep and dark with excitement, yet almost blinding in their gaze of rapture, rested on the face of Dominic ...
— Where Deep Seas Moan • E. Gallienne-Robin

... on their outer surfaces, so as to prevent the glass from slipping from the hand; urns, oinochoai, and dishes of various sizes made of glass, are of frequent occurrence. Some of these are dark blue or green, others party-colored with stripes winding round them in zigzag or in spiral lines, reminding one of mosaic patterns. Pieces of glittering glass, being most likely fragments of so-called allassontes versicolores (not to be mistaken for originally white glass which has been discolored by exposure to the weather), are not unfrequently found. We propose to name in ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy

... true skin. They connect with the surface of the skin by small tubes, which traverse the cuticle. In some parts, these glands are wanting; in others, where their office is most needful, they are abundant, as on the face and nose, the head, the ears, &c. In some parts, these tubes are spiral; in others, straight. These glands offer every shade of complexity, from the simple, straight tube, to a tube divided into numberless ramifications, and constituting a little rounded tree-like mass, about the ...
— A Treatise on Anatomy, Physiology, and Hygiene (Revised Edition) • Calvin Cutter

... chromogenic micrococcus, and relieved the patient by the use of a five per cent solution of caustic potash. Chloroform, ether, and phenol had been tried without success. Hebra mentions a young man in whom the blood spurted from the hand in a spiral jet corresponding to the direction of the duct of the sweat-gland. Wilson refers to five cases of ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould

... behind him. As his mask touched water he saw the white coral sand of the bottom a few inches down. The only sign of life was a hermit crab, perhaps a half inch in length, dragging his home of the moment—a tiny spiral shell. ...
— The Wailing Octopus • Harold Leland Goodwin

... cement, oil refining and transshipment, salt production, rum, aragonite, pharmaceuticals, spiral ...
— The 1991 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... immediately replaced. Inside the cells cast-iron sloping shelves are hung upon the walls so that their upper edges touch the walls, but the lower edges are some inches off, so that the hot air of the furnaces passes upward behind the shelves round the four sides of the cell in a spiral manner, and out near the top into a vertical flue, which conducts it down to the horizontal flue at the bottom, which leads to the chimney. The charcoal is withdrawn from the bottom of the heating chamber through a sliding plate 2 feet above the floor, and is wheeled red hot to the charcoal ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 362, December 9, 1882 • Various

... seventeenth century had vulgarised the motive, Correggio's bold attempt to paint heaven in flight from earth—earth left behind in the persons of the Apostles standing round the empty tomb, heaven soaring upward with a spiral vortex into the abyss of light above—had an originality which set at nought all criticism. There is such ecstasy of jubilation, such rapturous rapidity of flight, that we who strain our eyes from below, feel we are in the darkness of the grave which Mary left. A kind of ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds

... a spiral stair, three steps at a time, Black did not stop till he gained the attics, and leaped through the open doorway of a garret, where he found an old woman wailing over a bed on which lay the corpse of a man with ...
— Hunted and Harried • R.M. Ballantyne

... and distinct, thick wreaths of gray-white smoke were sailing straight aloft. The waiting Apache of the Mazatzal was signalling the coming brother from the dark clefts of the Sierra Ancha. One hour later, just as ten was striking on the spiral of the office clock, two sudden shots were heard on the flats to the north-west, and the little herd of horses and mules, not two dozen in all, grazing under cover of the rifles of Sentries 3 and 4, came limping, lumbering in, fast as hoppled feet would permit and without sign ...
— Tonio, Son of the Sierras - A Story of the Apache War • Charles King

... fluttering over Crooksbury Heath. How could she have been so weak as to allow these silly, chattering rooks to entice her away from that lordly bird? Even now it was not too late to atone for her mistake. In a great spiral she shot upward until she was over the heron. But what was this? Every fiber of her, from her crest to her deck feathers, quivered with jealousy and rage at the sight of this creature, a mere peregrine, ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle

... mist rose, she left the road at sight of two ponies and a burro in a group, their heads together in drooping fellowship. She knew them at once for P.D., Wrath of God, and Jag Ear. Nearby rose a thin spiral of smoke and back of it was a huddled figure, Firio, preparing the morning meal. Animals and servant were as motionless as the cactus. Evidently they did not hear her footsteps. They formed a picture of nightly oblivion, unconscious that ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer

... A pretty talk! Eh, I will tell thy father, I will have a stop put to this—hush, would you have him hear?" she admonished, in a sudden whisper, as they opened the little door at the foot of the dark well of spiral steps. ...
— The Fortieth Door • Mary Hastings Bradley

... will suggest the rest of the studio—the Turkey carpet, the brass harem lamps, the Japanese screen, the pieces of drapery, the oak chairs covered with red Utrecht velvet, the oak wardrobe that had been picked up somewhere,—a ridiculous bargain, and the inevitable bed with spiral columns. There were vases filled with foreign grasses, and palms stood in the corners of the rooms. Marshall pulled out a few pictures; but he paid very little heed to my compliments; and sitting down at the piano, with ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore

... that added the element of caution to his advance. That, and the utter stillness of the night. He broke no sticks under his feet. He disturbed the brush so quietly that it made no sound. When he came at last to the little open where Carvel's fire was still sending a spiral of spruce-scented smoke up into the air it was with a stealth that failed even to rouse Baree. Perhaps, deep down in him, there smoldered an old suspicion; perhaps it was because he wanted to come to her while she was sleeping. The sight of the tepee made his heart throb faster. It was light as ...
— Baree, Son of Kazan • James Oliver Curwood

... worked magically. The figure of Mere Mouchard materialized at once into such zeal, such effusion, such a zest of welcome, that we, our bags, and our coachman were on the instant toiling up a pair of spiral wooden stairs. There was quite a little crowd to fill the all-too-narrow landing at the top of the steep steps, a crowd that ended in a long line of waiters and serving-maids, each grasping a remnant of luggage. Our hostess, meanwhile, was fumbling at a door-lock—an obstinate door ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd

... with spirits, and not the least discomposed by a party of angels coming to dinner, or playing a game at miracles to pass away the evening. He pointed to a chasm in the cliff, round which we were winding by a spiral path, where Gualbertus used to sleep, and, turning himself towards the west, see a long succession of saints and martyrs sweeping athwart the sky, and gilding the clouds with far brighter splendours than the setting ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford

... cabin window and nodded to the assistant pilot, who dropped overboard a signal smoke ball that left behind, as it fell, a greenish spiral trail. Straightway, the Commodore's seaplane, a mile distant, broke out a line of flags whereupon six flyers from six different points leaped ahead like sky hounds on the scent, shooting forward and downward towards their mighty prey. The remainder of the sky fleet circled away at ...
— The Conquest of America - A Romance of Disaster and Victory • Cleveland Moffett

... poison, that even a jaguar or puma which has received the slightest wound soon becomes convulsed and dies. Instead of feathers, a little cotton is wrapped neatly round the lower end of the arrow, to make it go steadily through the air: and at about an inch from the point it is spiral. ...
— In New Granada - Heroes and Patriots • W.H.G. Kingston

... bare, uncarpeted, dismal hall. It was the second time that he had entered these sacred doors —few men of his own age had ever done as much. He had stopped there once before in search of his father, when his mother had been taken suddenly ill. He recalled again the curious spiral staircase at the end of the hall where his father had met him and which had impressed him so at the time. He could see, too, the open closet out of which Mr. Horn had taken his overcoat, and which was now ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith

... yourself in a little lobby with a crooked staircase straight in front of you. It is a crazy wooden structure, the spiral balusters are brown with age, and the steps themselves take a new angle at every turn. The great old-fashioned paneled dining-room, floored with square white tiles from Chateau-Regnault, is on your right; to the ...
— La Grenadiere • Honore de Balzac

... another festoons of hops hang gracefully, and so thick as to hide everything beyond them. There is scarce a stole without its woodbine or hops; many of the poles, though larger than the arm, are scored with spiral grooves left by the bines. Under these bushes of woodbine the nightingales when they first arrive in spring are fond of searching for food, and dart on a grub with a low ...
— Nature Near London • Richard Jefferies

... The spiral striae that cross its whorls are grouped in pairs; their interstices are raised, and more or less finely crenulated; as they pass out on the expanded and wing-like varices they diverge, and the lobe-like projections that scallop the margins of the wings are ...
— Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John MacGillivray

... affect his whole future life. He knew a waterhole on the Del Oro, where cows were wont to frequent even in the summer drought, and toward this he was making in the fag-end of the sultry day. While still some hundred yards distant he observed a spiral of smoke rising from a camp-fire at the spring, and he at once made a more circumspect approach. For it might be any one of a score of border ruffians who owed him a grudge and would be glad to pay it in the silent desert that tells no tales and betrays no ...
— Bucky O'Connor • William MacLeod Raine

... these long, glossy curls, she now cut one of the longest and most spiral, cut it off close to the root, and with it bound the flowers together. Mother should see that she did know how to give up something she cared for, and was not as selfish as she was ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson

... No. — Twenty-sixth Street, in New York. The house is in some respects a curious one. It has enjoyed for the last two years the reputation of being haunted. The house is very spacious. A hall of noble size leads to a large spiral staircase winding through its centre, while the various apartments are of imposing dimensions. It was built some fifteen or twenty years since by Mr. A——, the well-known New York merchant, who five years ago threw the commercial ...
— A Stable for Nightmares - or Weird Tales • J. Sheridan Le Fanu

... to the above, the doctor caused to be constructed two sheet-iron chests two lines in thickness. These were connected by means of pipes furnished with stopcocks. He joined to these a spiral, two inches in diameter, which terminated in two branch pieces of unequal length, the longer of which, however, was twenty-five feet in height and ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne

... accordingly, and, on the second floor, came to a landing where they found the spiral staircase ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc

... it only by a narrow path, forming a spiral around this species of cone. The path was bounded on one side by a mass of perpendicular granite; on the other by a precipice of which in the broad daylight one could ...
— A Romance of the West Indies • Eugene Sue

... are drawn, but more usually the field is pretty well filled up with random meanderings which cross each other again and again. Other illustrations of type b are: A single straight or curved line going direct to the ball, short haphazard dashes or curves, bare suggestion of a fan or spiral. ...
— The Measurement of Intelligence • Lewis Madison Terman

... stable, no doubt. At each end of the stable was a stock-corral. And at the edge of the clearing was another building, long and very low, with one single door and several little square windows. A stove-pipe protruded from the far end of this house, and from it rose a thin spiral of smoke. ...
— Under Handicap - A Novel • Jackson Gregory

... way opening to us from the valley wherein we had thought that surely we must die. In a little chamber, cut in the rock above the opening into which the ladder of bolts led us, Young was waiting for us; and from this chamber a spiral stair-way ascended that was dimly lighted by crevices cut from it out to the face of the cliff. With Young leading us, up this we went; at first rapidly, but, later, slowly and wearily, for it seemed as though the stair would never end. Yet though ...
— The Aztec Treasure-House • Thomas Allibone Janvier

... the lichen is more lovely than the striated crystals of the granite on which it grows, or the moss on the mountain side more satisfying than the hidden amethyst and cairngorm in the rock beneath? Or is the botanist more astonished when his microscope reveals the architecture of spiral tissue in the stem of a plant, or the mineralogist who beholds for the first time the chaos of beauty in the sliced specimen of some common stone? So far as beauty goes the organic world ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond

... thigh and leg, transposed. Hence the same names can be given to the homologous bones in widely different animals. We see the same great law in the construction of the mouths of insects: what can be more different than the immensely long spiral proboscis of a sphinx-moth, the curious folded one of a bee or bug, and the great jaws of a beetle? Yet all these organs, serving for such widely different purposes, are formed by infinitely numerous modifications of an upper lip, mandibles, and ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin

... beast, the centaur-phenomenon that staggered all Dunstable, might have been the effect of unromantic necessity; that the horse-part carried the reasoning willy-nilly; that needs must when such a devil drove; that certain spiral configurations in the frame of Thomas Westwood, unfriendly to alighting, made the alliance more forcible than voluntary. Let him enjoy his fame for me, nor let me hint a whisper that shall dismount Bellerophon. But in case he was an involuntary martyr, yet if in ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb

... fish do not approach his station, he flies along, just over the water, and occasionally hovers with rapidly moving wings over the spot where he sees a trout or minnow. In the next instant, descending with a quick spiral sweep, he seizes a fish, with which he rises to his post and swallows it in an instant. All these proceedings were watched frequently by the children, with intense delight, as they stood concealed among the bushes, ...
— Frank and Fanny • Mrs. Clara Moreton

... The greedy flame seized upon the dry leaves, which crackled in the heat, and bore them on its shining billows high into the air. The fire continued burning till all was consumed, and the heap sent up only a spiral of indistinct smoke. ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams

... yours in a pale spiral to the bosom of the universal mother," Hwa-mei made response. "I likewise am content, having ...
— Kai Lung's Golden Hours • Ernest Bramah

... hands. He went toward the spiral-ladder-with-handholds that led below. He went down into the main saloon. A tiny green light winked on and off, urgently, on the far side. Babs was seated at a tiny board, there. As Cochrane looked, she pushed buttons with professional skill. Bill Holden ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins

... waist. It is composed of a Bunsen pile, which I do not work with bichromate of potash, but with sodium. A wire is introduced which collects the electricity produced, and directs it towards a particularly made lantern. In this lantern is a spiral glass which contains a small quantity of carbonic gas. When the apparatus is at work this gas becomes luminous, giving out a white and continuous light. Thus provided, I can ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne

... Egyptian in no uncertain tones. They had washed and eaten, and had settled down comfortably for the afternoon, and why had this confounded blanky cyclone selected their blanky tent to blanky well empty itself upon! Often during the midday heat, "weary Willies," swirling spiral columns of sand 1,000 feet high, wandered in slow procession along the edge of the desert from the north-east, usually missing the camp, but sometimes crossing it, leaving a narrow trail of chaos and ill temper. ...
— The Tale of a Trooper • Clutha N. Mackenzie



Words linked to "Spiral" :   ornamentation, construction, ornament, voluted, spiral nebula, rotation, corkscrew, rotary motion, decoration, volute, spiral spring, spiral bandage, coiled, curve, double helix, curved shape, hank, twist, economic process, turn, wind, structure, turbinate



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