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Thinned   /θɪnd/   Listen
Thinned

adjective
1.
Mixed with water.  Synonyms: cut, weakened.  "A cup of thinned soup"






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Thinned" Quotes from Famous Books



... on the plantation just like they did in the real slavery days, only I received a small wage. I picked cotton and thinned rice. I always did just what they told me to do and didn't ever get into any trouble, except once and that was my ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - From Interviews with Former Slaves - Florida Narratives • Works Projects Administration

... to the Corners. Or the Corners belongs to them, I don't know which you'd say. Never heard of them boys? Well, most folks has. There used to be lots like the Bedloe boys when I was a girl, Miss, but thank gracious they're getting thinned out powerful fast. First an' last an' all the time they're rowdies an' gunfighters an' bad men. There's more of their kind in Hill's Corners, but these are the worst of the outfit. They keep close in to the Corners, seeing it's ...
— Six Feet Four • Jackson Gregory

... connection in the Paddington district. Old Mr. Farquhar, from whom I purchased it, had at one time an excellent general practice; but his age, and an affliction of the nature of St. Vitus's dance from which he suffered, had very much thinned it. The public not unnaturally goes on the principle that he who would heal others must himself be whole, and looks askance at the curative powers of the man whose own case is beyond the reach of his drugs. Thus as ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

... butter, cinnamon and nutmeg, then cover with bread crumbs and repeat the layers until the dish is filled, having a layer of crumbs sprinkled with bits of butter on top. Then pour over all three-quarters of a cup of molasses thinned with a little hot water. Bake until the apples are tender and ...
— Joe Tilden's Recipes for Epicures • Joe Tilden

... appropriate voice of the impressive scenery from amid which it arose. It was late ere we reached the shepherd's cottage—a dark, raftered, dimly-lighted building of turf and stone. The weather for several weeks before had been rainy and close, and the flocks of the inmate had been thinned by the common scourge of the sheep-farmer at such seasons on marshy and unwholesome farms. The rafters were laden with skins besmeared with blood, that dangled overhead to catch the conservative influences of the smoke; and on a rude plank table below there rose two tall pyramids ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller

... the same terrible grasses, and crossing swamp after swamp, we were at last rewarded by a striking view. The jungles had thinned; we found ourselves unexpectedly standing on the edge of a plateau, on the west of which, for distance interminable, lay apparently a low flat country of grass, yellowed by the sun, with a few trees or shrubs only thinly scattered over the surface; ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke

... of roses. Your friend Beaucourt (who will not put on his hat), has thinned the trees and greatly improved the garden. Upon my life, I believe there are at least twenty distinct smoking-spots expressly made ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 1 (of 3), 1833-1856 • Charles Dickens

... many different sorts and well-tasted, but not, generally speaking, very plentiful. It is probable that their numbers are considerably thinned by the otters, which are much larger than those of Europe. In going through the overflowed savannas, which have all a communication with the river, you may often see a dozen or two of them sporting ...
— Wanderings In South America • Charles Waterton

... that she heard, she instantly accepted it as something of which she had really known for some time. At any rate, she had no sense of shock. She felt no horror, no deep disgust, simply the distaste into which her original sense of horror had been thinned down by constant contact with poverty's conditions—just as filth no longer made her shudder, so long as it did not touch her ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips

... thinned down his spear and tied an iron point very cleverly to the end of it; I had formed a sling, the lines of which were composed of thin strips of the cocoa-nut cloth, plaited; and Jack had made a stout bow, nearly five feet long, with two arrows, feathered with two or three large plumes which ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne

... had thinned a little and they walked through it easily, three abreast. But Uncle William had moved to the other side of the girl, as far away from the Frenchman as he could get. Now and then he cast a glance of disapproval ...
— Uncle William - The Man Who Was Shif'less • Jennette Lee

... to be covered, not with hair, but with a thick woolly coat; their manes and tails are very long, and of surprising thickness. At the end of May or the beginning of June the tail and mane are docked and thinned, their woolly coat falls of itself, and they then look smooth enough. The sheep have also a very thick coat during the winter. It is not the custom to shear them, but at the beginning of June the wool is picked off piece by piece with the hand. A sheep treated in this way sometimes presents ...
— Visit to Iceland - and the Scandinavian North • Ida Pfeiffer

... seeds. Mulchers usually sow in well-separated rows. The gardener merely rakes back the mulch and exposes a few inches of bare soil, scratches a furrow, and covers the seed with humusy topsoil. As the seedlings grow taller and are thinned out, the mulch is gradually pushed back around ...
— Organic Gardener's Composting • Steve Solomon

... the Christians penetrated to the royal tent. By the means of divers and pigeons, a regular correspondence was maintained with the besieged; and, as often as the sea was left open, the exhausted garrison was withdrawn, and a fresh supply was poured into the place. The Latin camp was thinned by famine, the sword and the climate; but the tents of the dead were replenished with new pilgrims, who exaggerated the strength and speed of their approaching countrymen. The vulgar was astonished by the report, that the pope himself, with an innumerable crusade, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon

... each person. To one cup tomato catsup add juice of one lemon, two tablespoonfuls grated horseradish thinned with vinegar; a few drops of tabasco sauce and just before serving, ...
— Stevenson Memorial Cook Book • Various

... height. When thus planted and properly pruned, the tree will bear its beautiful flowers from May all through the summer; but generally the tree is so pruned that it cannot flower. It should be pruned like a Banksian Rose, and other plants that bear their flowers on last year's shoots, i.e., simply thinned, but not cut back or spurred. With this treatment the branches may be allowed to grow in their natural way without being nailed in, and if the single-blossomed species be grown, the flowers in good summers will ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe

... subjection of the provinces. He had, however, deemed it more consonant to his "glory" to follow the advice of Louvois in preserving all his conquests entire, and had thus been obliged to disperse a large portion of his army into garrisons, leaving the remainder, thinned, moreover, by sickness and desertion, wholly insufficient to make head against the increasing number of his opponents. He therefore came to the mortifying resolution of abandoning the United Provinces, the possession of which he had anticipated with ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson

... did not live who would tackle it. Beardless itself, it was father of all bearded ones, a mile long, rising up far out beyond where the others rose, towering its solid bulk higher and higher till it blotted out the horizon, and was a giant among its fellows ere its beard began to grow as it thinned its crest ...
— On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales • Jack London

... of life the which is implanted in each one of us, I fell to a wild struggling against my bonds, until, seeing in a little the hopelessness of this, I grew resigned to despair, and, ceasing my passionate efforts, looked about me, for the smoke was thinned away. And truly an evil sight was this great galleass, with its shot-torn decks and huddled heaps of dead, its litter of broken spars and dismantled guns, and with everywhere great gouts and pools of blood, while below and beyond were ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol

... nearest bank, hastily gathered a few red hips to stay his gnawing hunger, then returned to the prison-drift and clucked and stamped. He got only one reply, a feeble 'peete, peete,' and scratching with his sharp claws on the thinned granular sheet he soon broke through, and Graytail feebly crawled out of the hole. But that was all; the others, scattered he could not tell where in the drift, made no reply, gave no sign of life, ...
— Lobo, Rag and Vixen - Being The Personal Histories Of Lobo, Redruff, Raggylug & Vixen • Ernest Seton-Thompson

... of bright mild weather followed, and the troops got themselves fairly well sheltered again. The cutting of trees for huts and for firewood thinned out the forest, and the elevation of the camp above the surrounding country exposed us to the wind, as we soon learned to our cost. Whilst the fair days lasted, we had a favorable example of an East Tennessee ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox

... usual, brisk decision Mr. Traill turned the backs of a couple of chairs over against the nearest table, to signify that the corner was reserved, and he went about his duties with unwonted silence. As the crowd thinned he returned to the inglenook to find Bobby asleep, not curled up in a tousled ball, as such a little dog should be, but stretched on his side ...
— Greyfriars Bobby • Eleanor Atkinson

... look," said Trevarthen, and led him to the window. Roger rubbed his eyes, and at first could see nothing. A white sea-fog covered the land and made the view a blank; but by-and-by, as he stared, the fog thinned a little, and disclosed, two fields away, a row of blurred white tents, ...
— Two Sides of the Face - Midwinter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... rising and his brows knitted at each successive charge, but at this last his anger boiled over, and he hurried forward with fury in his face, dragging his elderly companion by the elbow. They had been passing through one of those winding paths, bordered by high hedges, which thinned away every here and there to give a glimpse of some prowling faun or weary nymph who slumbered in marble amid the foliage. The few courtiers who met them gazed with surprise at so ill-assorted a pair of companions. ...
— The Refugees • Arthur Conan Doyle

... it seem a reflection on the Americans. Why should a country be so rich when his had been devastated, so thinned, so difficult to live in? Fanny thought of the poor huddled clients who had sat on the floor of the car during the snowstorm. It had been ...
— The Happy Foreigner • Enid Bagnold

... of the Holt are much thinned and reduced by the night hunters, who perpetually harass them in spite of the efforts of numerous keepers, and the severe penalties that have been put in force against them as often as they have been detected, and rendered liable to the lash of the law. Neither ...
— The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 1 • Gilbert White

... which they had passed the day, extended north of the village (see map) and thinned out upon the eastern side so that one following the eastern edge would emerge from the wood a little east of the main settlement. Here was the by-path which Roscoe had mentioned, and which led down into the ...
— Tom Slade Motorcycle Dispatch Bearer • Percy Keese Fitzhugh

... or three stalks of celery broken into finger lengths, and cook again until the whole is well flavored with the celery, which may then be removed with a fork; add a half cup of cream, and the soup is ready to serve. Cold oatmeal mush may be thinned with milk, reheated, strained, flavored, and made into soup the same as fresh material. A slice or two of onion may be used with the celery for flavoring the soup if desired, or a cup of strained stewed tomato may ...
— Science in the Kitchen. • Mrs. E. E. Kellogg

... the State, but which is now no longer a statesman's remedy, there is obviously no solution except by the migration of a portion of the occupiers, and the utilisation of the vacated holdings in order to enable the peasants who remain to prosper—much as a forest is thinned to promote the growth of trees. In typical congested districts this operation will have to be carried out on a much larger scale than is generally realised, for a considerable majority of families will have to be removed, in order to allow a ...
— Ireland In The New Century • Horace Plunkett

... from the ground it can be prepared at the table, but it is better boiled a short time in water and thinned with ...
— Favorite Dishes • Carrie V. Shuman

... with pain. He worked away indefatigably but without effect until he lost patience and resorted to less scrupulous tactics—thrusting his fingers into eyes, or attacking noses, windpipes, and any vulnerable part he could get at. That thinned them out, and he was able to rise and fling a last little ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo

... The clouds thinned and broke, the snow ceased falling, and the valley became distinct. While I admired its beauty, we reached the summit of a hill and I saw before me a cluster of glittering domes and turrets, rising from a wide bend in the Angara. At first I could discern only churches, but ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox

... hoping to find the country of gold, Coronado's gallant little army, frequently thinned by death and desertion, for three years beat up and down the southwestern wilderness: now thirsting in the deserts, now penned up in gloomy canons, now crawling over pathless mountains, suffering the horrors of starvation and of despair, but following this will-o'-the-wisp with a ...
— Great Epochs in American History, Volume I. - Voyages Of Discovery And Early Explorations: 1000 A.D.-1682 • Various

... Shot-ravaged, thinned, but urgent still, The brown, fierce, blooded Anzacs sweep, And Hell leaps a up. The lilies weep Strange crimson tears. Tight-lipped and mute, The grim, gaunt soldiers ...
— 'Hello, Soldier!' - Khaki Verse • Edward Dyson

... now between the steep high banks of a coulee. The trees gradually thinned out, and a wide swath of the starry sky showed ...
— The Fur Bringers - A Story of the Canadian Northwest • Hulbert Footner

... Midsummer not to call night, |in the white and the walk of the morning: The moon, dwindled and thinned to the fringe | of a finger-nail held to the candle, Or paring of paradisaical fruit, | lovely in waning but lustreless, Stepped from the stool, drew back from the barrow, | of dark Maenefa the mountain; A cusp still ...
— Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins - Now First Published • Gerard Manley Hopkins

... were to issue," said he, with an eloquence too erratic to be convincing, "against the Republican party of 1798, it would be impossible for a constable with a search-warrant to find it. Death, resignations, and desertions, have thinned its ranks. New men ...
— The United States of America Part I • Ediwn Erle Sparks

... rally, see that drooping column rise! I can almost see the fire newly kindled in their eyes. Fresh for conflict, nerved to conquer, see them charging on the foe— Face to face with deadly meaning—shot and shell and trusty blow. See the thinned ranks wildly breaking—see them scatter to the sun— I can die, Uncle Jared, for the ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various

... thinned out and the open spaces increased as he approached the country. At last the city was behind him, and he was walking down a leafy lane beside the railroad track. He did not walk like a man. He did not look like a man. He was a travesty of the human. It was a twisted ...
— When God Laughs and Other Stories • Jack London

... the crowd thinned; until Irish, by betting safely and sticking to a caution that must have cost him a good deal in the way of self-restraint, had sixty dollars' worth of chips piled in ...
— The Flying U's Last Stand • B. M. Bower

... and as Kendrick smiled at the start the sound gave him he was sub-consciously aware that the bellowings of the frogs had stopped. His glance in the direction of the sound was purely automatic, but his attention was rivetted instantly by a movement among the trees at a point where they thinned out against a silvering background ...
— Every Man for Himself • Hopkins Moorhouse

... range, where the sun smote through the canvas as if it had been so much brown paper and the stricken regiment strove, by constantly shifting ground, to shake off the pursuing horror that steadily thinned its ranks. Here Colonel Stanham Buckley waked each morning with the cold clutch of fear at his heart; fortified himself with incessant 'nips' throughout the day; and left the bulk of the work to a cheery little Adjutant, untroubled by the sorrowful great gift of imagination. ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver

... thinned out as they passed into the forward bulkheads. The only men they saw now were the few young ones on duty. Except for their set, anxious faces they might have been handling any routine landing in any ...
— An Empty Bottle • Mari Wolf

... the House pleased John very much. He respected the fearless spirit which did not hesitate to make sacrifices for the greater good, no matter how many beautiful blossoms she scattered on the garden path. John Gayther might have thinned out all this superfluous growth himself, but he knew the Mistress liked to do it, and he left for her gloved hands many tangled ...
— John Gayther's Garden and the Stories Told Therein • Frank R. Stockton

... about half his original army, moved forward towards the Malian plain, and there met the advancing Persians. A bloody combat ensued, in which the Persians lost by far the greater number; but the ranks of the Greeks were gradually thinned, and they were beaten back step by step into the narrowest part of the pass, where finally they all perished, except the four hundred Thebans, who ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 5. (of 7): Persia • George Rawlinson

... wooden or a wire potato masher, being careful to reduce all the particles to a pulpy mass in order to prevent lumps, or put them through a ricer. When sufficiently mashed, season with additional salt, a dash of pepper, and a small piece of butter, and add hot milk until they are thinned to a mushy consistency, but not too soft to stand up well when dropped from a spoon. Then beat the potatoes vigorously with a large spoon until ...
— Woman's Institute Library of Cookery, Vol. 1 - Volume 1: Essentials of Cookery; Cereals; Bread; Hot Breads • Woman's Institute of Domestic Arts and Sciences

... The terrible waste of human life that followed his battles, found him in want of recruits. No reserves of any consequence had been organized, and the government were sorely troubled to find men to fill the thinned ranks of our heroic army. Where were these men to be got from in time ...
— Siege of Washington, D.C. • F. Colburn Adams

... at night, as it seemed so likely to do, and by morning the cloudiness of the sky had so far thinned that the sun looked mildly through it without more than softening the frozen surface of the pond, so that Mrs. Westangle's ice-tea (as everybody called it, by a common inspiration, or by whatever ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... the Gothic architecture of Italy excluded some of the chief principles of the French builders. It was much more liberal and more fond of light and air. Speaking of the exaggerated type of Gothic architecture, in which everything is heightened and thinned, Renan asks what would have happened to Giotto if he had been told to paint his frescoes in churches from which flat spaces had entirely disappeared. "Once we have exhausted the grand idea of infinity which springs from its unity, we realise the shortcomings of this egoistic and ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford

... Saturday, at half past three o'clock, I left Liverpool by the London and Northwest Railway for London. Mrs. Blodgett's table had been thinned by several departures during the week. . . . . My mind had been considerably enlivened, and my sense of American superiority renewed, by intercourse with these people; and there is no danger of one's intellect becoming a standing pool in such society. I think better of American ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... and Africa in three days, the Atlantic in two, America in two, and, in short, put a girdle round the world in thirteen days. Moreover, the cloud of dust was so big that it took two or three days to pass any given point. During its second circumnavigation it was considerably spread and thinned, and the third time still more so, having expanded enough to include Europe and the greater part of North America. It had thinned away altogether and disappeared in the spring ...
— Blown to Bits - or, The Lonely Man of Rakata • Robert Michael Ballantyne

... words, holding that true Which sweetly tickles in their stupid ears, Or which is rouged in finely finished phrase. For how, I ask, can things so varied be, If formed of fire, single and pure? No whit 'Twould help for fire to be condensed or thinned, If all the parts of fire did still preserve But fire's own nature, seen before in gross. The heat were keener with the parts compressed, Milder, again, when severed or dispersed— And more than this thou canst conceive of naught That from such ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius

... last survey of the interior of the cathedral before its destruction, which he now saw was inevitable, Leonard motioned to Wingfield, and forcing his way through the crowd, which was now considerably thinned, entered the southern door. He had scarcely gained the middle of the transept when the door opened behind him, and two persons, whom, even in the brief glimpse he caught of them, he knew to be Chowles and Judith, darted towards the steps leading to Saint Faith's. They ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth

... "Don't crowd his elbows," they began to say at once, and told each other to come away. "We'll sure give the Doc room. You don't want to be shovin' your auger in, Chalkeye. You want to get yourself pretty near absent." The room thinned of them forthwith. "Fix her up good, Doc," they said, over their shoulders. They shuffled across the threshold and porch with roundabout schemes to tread quietly. When one or other stumbled on the ...
— Lin McLean • Owen Wister

... worthy reformers of the Cromwell era, everything which he did, and everything which he said, had Scripture for its authority. Psalm-singing commenced and ended the day in his house, and graces before meat and graces before sleep, prayers and ablutions, thanksgivings and fastings, had so much thinned the animal necessities of his household, that a domestic war was the consequence, and the sheriff and the sheriff's lady held separate sway, having equally divided the dwelling between them, and ruling each their ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms

... ships. But our return was far from triumphant. We, who only seven weeks ago had set out in the surest confidence of glory, and I may add, of emolument, were brought back dispirited and dejected. Our ranks were woefully thinned, our chiefs slain, our clothing tattered and filthy, and our discipline in some degree injured. A gloomy silence reigned throughout the armament, except when it was broken by the voice of lamentation over fallen friends. The interior ...
— The Battle of New Orleans • Zachary F. Smith

... party spirit—no unity of interests. A few, who were mischievously inclined, marched off to the College of Surgeons in a pretentious file; but even before they reached their destination the feeble inspiration had died out in many, and their numbers were sadly thinned. Some followed strange gods in the direction of Drummond Street, and others slunk back to meek good-boyism at the feet of the Professors. The same is visible in better things. As you send a man to an English University that he may have his prejudices rubbed off, ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson

... to blue as they lengthened. The clouds of small flies thinned and their ranks began to be refilled by the mosquitoes. Birnier lay with his back to the tent with a fly switch of grass, but he watched the doings of the corporal covertly. The corporal and his women had been drinking a good deal of the brandy ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle

... bushes, breaking the sand beach to the northward, and forming one of the leading marks in, had been so thinned that it was very indistinct. Mr. LaTrobe, however, was going to remedy this evil by erecting a ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes

... the oaks and wide the sweep of sward, there is something wanting if antlers do not rise above the fern. The pictures that the deer make are moving and alive; they dissolve and re-form in a distant frame of tree and brake. Lately the herd has been somewhat thinned, having become too numerous. One slope is bare of grass, a patch of yellow sand, which if looked at intently from a distance seems presently to be all alive like mites in cheese, so thick are the rabbits in the warren. Under a little house, as it were, built over a stream is a ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies

... danger.' Alleyne, as God is my help, as I came up the stairs this night I saw her stand before me, her face in tears, her hands out as though in warning—I saw it, Alleyne, even as I see those two archers upon their couches. Our very finger-tips seemed to meet, ere she thinned away like a mist ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle

... of the Propeller by the Fitter, and the Engine is awake and working. Slowly at first though, and in a weak voice demanding, "Not too much Throttle, please. I'm very cold and mustn't run fast until my Oil has thinned and is circulating freely. Three minutes slowly, as you love ...
— The Aeroplane Speaks - Fifth Edition • H. Barber

... generation which gave its choicest in intellectual, as well as in religious gifts to the ministry, when a fresh tide of enthusiasm was impelling men forward to build up, instead of breaking down, before disappointment and suspicion had thinned the ranks, and hurled back many a recruit, or doctrinal carpings had taught men to dread a search into their own tenets. He was a highly cultivated, large-minded man, and the conversation between him and his nephew was a constant ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge

... hanging in doorways. Words such as "Bushel girls on pants" or "Stockroom assistants" had signified nothing to her. Month by month she had worked in shops and factories where the work she exacted from her ill-nourished body sapped her strength and thinned her blood. Nor could she compete with many of the girls, brought up to such labor, smart, pushing, inured to an existence carried on with the minimum of ...
— The Peace of Roaring River • George van Schaick

... cultivation the land formerly open; therefore, the jungle closes over the surface and rapidly encroaches upon the village. Thus the circulation of air is impeded and disease again halves the population. In each successive year the wretched inhabitants are thinned out, and disease becomes the more certain as the jungle continues to advance. At length the miserable few are no longer sufficient to cultivate the rice-lands; their numbers will not even suffice for driving their buffaloes. ...
— Eight Years' Wandering in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker

... northern bank is almost flat, with low hills rising on beyond like the rim of a saucer. The town—most of it—is on this side. On the south the land lifts in a moderately stiff bluff, perhaps seventy feet high, with wooded edges, and extending off and away in a plateau, where trees stand in well-thinned groves, and sunken roads meander between fields of hops and grain and patches of cabbages and sugar beets. As for the town, it has perhaps twenty-five hundred people— Walloons and Flemish folk—living in tall, bleak, stone houses built flush with the little ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb

... for some time. The trees thinned as he reached the bottom of the hill and gave place to a broad stretch of sand. This surface showed no sign of water whatever, which was strange, for there had been several storms in the hills since Stobart had ...
— In the Musgrave Ranges • Jim Bushman

... The reporters thinned out in the course of a few days when no result was forthcoming; but they were all back again presently when the Maxim Gorky fiasco came along. The distinguished revolutionist, Tchaykoffsky, as a sort of advance ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine

... I can't imagine more exquisite torture myself. Last summer the flies here were dreadful. It seems to me that they are getting worse and worse every year, and worry the animals more. I believe it is because the birds are getting thinned out all over the country. There are not enough of them to catch the flies. John says that the next improvements we make on the farm are to be wire gauze at all the stable windows and screen doers to keep the little pests from ...
— Beautiful Joe • Marshall Saunders

... appear amongst us before we could accomplish this, but fortunately they were mistaken, and our persistent fire soon turned them. We did not lose a single inch of ground the whole day, though after these successive charges our numbers were fearfully thinned; and even during the short interval between each charge the enemy's cannon had been doing some mischief among our ...
— The Autobiography of Sergeant William Lawrence - A Hero of the Peninsular and Waterloo Campaigns • William Lawrence

... British and settled in 1790 by the Bounty mutineers and their Tahitian companions. Pitcairn was the first Pacific island to become a British colony (in 1838) and today remains the last vestige of that empire in the South Pacific. Outmigration, primarily to New Zealand, has thinned the population from a peak of 233 in 1937 ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency

... thick patch of jungle between us and the sea, and though I had run at least a mile out of the way I soon began to overhaul him. But long before I reached the clump he had found an opening in it and dived out of sight, and I overtook him only when the growth thinned suddenly by the edge of a crater, plunging down to a lake so exactly like Sinquan that I had to look about me and take my bearings before making sure that this was another, and one I had never ...
— The White Wolf and Other Fireside Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... of black crows sailed across the sky. The wind soughed through the naked tree-tops; the mist rose and the world thinned away in a bluey haze; this all vanished and slowly it ...
— The Path of Life • Stijn Streuvels

... footmen and their guard. Again and again did the knights charge through the ranks of the Moslems, while the billmen stoutly kept together and resisted the onslaughts of the enemy's cavalry. In spite of their bravery, however, the storm of arrows shot by the desert horsemen thinned their ranks with terrible rapidity. Charging up to the very point of the spears, these wild horsemen fired their arrows into the faces of their foe, and although numbers of them fell beneath the more formidable missiles sent by the English archers, ...
— Winning His Spurs - A Tale of the Crusades • George Alfred Henty

... the spirits of those who were homing Passed on, rushingly, Like the Pentecost Wind; And the whirr of their wayfaring thinned And surceased on the sky, and but left in the gloaming Sea-mutterings ...
— Poems of the Past and the Present • Thomas Hardy

... "Hum!" And roused to instant alertness by the crackle of a twig in the forest, he glanced sharply roadwards where the trees thinned. ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple

... The terrible mortality which thinned the ranks of the British troops in the West Indies, induced the British Ministers to think of reinforcing the army with men better calculated to resist the influence of the climate. The West India Governors were instructed, therefore, in 1795, to bring forward in their respective legislatures ...
— The History of the First West India Regiment • A. B. Ellis

... led Cosette off in the direction of Livry and Bondy. He walked slowly, with drooping head, in an attitude of reflection and sadness. The winter had thinned out the forest, so that Thenardier did not lose them from sight, although he kept at a good distance. The man turned round from time to time, and looked to see if he was being followed. All at once he caught sight of Thenardier. He plunged ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo

... having more juice and in usually being white," replied Mr. Powers. "The ground has first to be plowed and harrowed, and is afterward laid off in eighteen-inch rows because beets, you know, are planted from seed. When the crop comes up trouble begins, for it has to be thinned until each plant has a good area in which to grow; the beets must also be carefully weeded and the soil round them loosened if ...
— The Story of Sugar • Sara Ware Bassett

... to make Culloden fatal to the fortunes of the Pretender. The discouragement of some of the clans, the disaffection of others, the wholesale desertions which had thinned the ranks of the rebel army, the Prince's sullen distrust of his advisers, the position of the battle-field, the bitter wintry weather, which drove a blinding hail and snow into the eyes of the Highlanders—all these were so many elements of danger that ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various

... most like their own home. They may however rest satisfied that the voyage to Australia is as safe as that to New York, that it is far more pleasant as regards the weather, and that little or no sickness has ever thinned the number of those who have embarked for the Australian colonies. The expense of the voyage is certainly greater than that of a passage to the Canadas, or to the United States, but it is to be hoped that the means of transport ...
— Expedition into Central Australia • Charles Sturt

... narrowest of the sound, and they were huddled together both by the ships and the stream; but Onund and his men set on fiercely, whereas Vigbiod was, but Thrand set on Vestmar, and won little thereby; so, when the folk were thinned on Vigbiod's ship, Onund's men and Onund himself got ready to board her: that Vigbiod saw, and cheered on his men without stint: then he turned to meet Onund, and the more part fled before him; but Onund bade his men mark how it went between them; for he was of huge strength. Now they set a log ...
— The Story of Grettir The Strong • Translated by Eirikr Magnusson and William Morris

... done before: he called for another pint, for some time talked very loud, and at last laid his head on the table; after a time he lifted it up again, drank more, and then fell back on the bench. By degrees the company thinned, until there was no one left but the schoolmaster, the pedlar, and the stranger. The schoolmaster, as usual, offered to assist the pedlar in helping Rushbrook to his cottage; but Byres replied that he was busy, and that he need not wait ...
— The Poacher - Joseph Rushbrook • Frederick Marryat

... In ship-building, the planking wrought under the wales, where it is thinned progressively to the ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth

... old churches. But these things are of the nerves and may not be imparted, though they may be intimated. As rich in its way as the sentiment of St. Ethelburga was that of the quiescing streets of the city, that pleasant afternoon, with their shops closed or closing, and the crowds thinned or thinning in their footways and wheelways, so that we got from point to point in our desultory progress, incommoded only by other associations that rivalled those we had more specifically in mind. History, of people and of princes, finance, ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells

... of any discussion such as this should be to narrow down, by a gradual elimination, the various factors to be considered, in order that the decisive ones, remaining, may become conspicuously visible. The trees being thus thinned out, the features of the strategic landscape can appear. The primary processes in the present case have been carried out before seeking the attention of the reader, to whom the first approximations have been presented under three heads. ...
— The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future • A. T. Mahan

... power to grip, to restrain, to impel me. If I may use such a figure, He stands, as it were, bugle in hand, and blows the sweet strains that are meant to set the echoes flying. But the rock must receive the impact of the vibrations ere it can throw back the thinned echo of the music. Love must be believed and known ere it can be ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren

... now well along toward spring. The winter had been like summer, and with the exception of a few rains of a week or so, we had enjoyed beautiful skies. The seals had thinned out considerably, but were now returning in vast numbers ready ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams

... stood listening to the long-drawn and savage howl, thinned out by the distance and mist, but he knew that it was coming nearer, and that the animal that was making it was not only hungry, but that it was a master wolf. It was none of the gaunt, half-starved, cowardly brutes that follow in the pack and take what the master wolf leaves of the scraps of the ...
— Ted Strong in Montana - With Lariat and Spur • Edward C. Taylor

... stupid partner as each girl discovered, his eyes ever turning towards the door and windows, hoping to catch the luring face, the vision that did not come ... and at length, hoping even against hope. For the ball-room thinned; groups left one by one, going home to their hotels and chalets; the band tired obviously; people sat drinking lemon-squashes at the little tables, the men mopping their foreheads, everybody ready ...
— Four Weird Tales • Algernon Blackwood

... murmuring, occasionally broken by the crack of a whip. Yet these sounds did not seem to disturb him. He trotted along, crossing the tracks, and when on the opposite side set out straight down the avenue. The avenue was broad, and in this widening area the congestion rapidly thinned, and soon the colt was quite alone in the open. But he continued forward, seeming not to miss his mother, until there suddenly loomed up beside him a very fat and very matronly appearing horse. Then he hesitated, turning apprehensive eyes upon her. But not for long. Evidently ...
— Bred of the Desert - A Horse and a Romance • Marcus Horton

... drove on without making the least call upon her attention. The views opened and softened as they drew near the house; the trees here had been more thinned out, and were by consequence larger; the carriage passed from one great shadow to another, with the thrushes ringing out their clear music and the wild roses breathing upon the evening air. From out the forest came wafts of dark dewy coolness, ...
— Wych Hazel • Susan and Anna Warner

... teaspoonful of mustard and one-half a teaspoonful of salt, and a tablespoonful of melted butter. She placed the ingredients in a bowl, set in a dish of water on the front of the stove, and when they thickened she removed it from the fire and thinned with cream. To make sandwiches, she mixed the dressing with minced turkey, added half a fine-chopped pepper, and spread the mixture ...
— American Cookery - November, 1921 • Various

... to the cacao-planters of Trinidad, I recommended twenty-four to thirty feet from tree to tree as the proper distance; but so as to meet the feelings of those who, unfortunately for themselves, consider every cacao tree cut down a sacrifice, I propose that the trees be thinned out to twenty-four feet, and that, at intervals of twenty rows at most, avenues of fifty feet in both directions should be left. After this, it will be better seen what may be necessary to be done to each individual tree; neither should the shade trees be forgotten; as a general rule, they ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds

... of Canada balsam, which can be had at any druggist's; draw out he cork and set the bottle of balsam at a little distance from the fire, turning it round several times, until the heat has thinned it; then have something that will hold as much as double the quantity of balsam; carry the balsam from the fire, and, while fluid mix it with the same quantity of good turpentine, and shake them together until they are well incorporated. ...
— Young's Demonstrative Translation of Scientific Secrets • Daniel Young

... turned to see the guest of the evening, as the hostess rose to meet him. He was a young man on the right side of thirty, with dark, closely brushed hair that thinned slightly at the temples. He was clean-shaven, and his light-brown eyes lay in a smiling setting of quizzical good-humour. He was of rather more than medium height, with well-poised shoulders; and though a firmness of lips and jaw gave a suggestion of hardness, ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter

... dipping it out with a large spoon, strews it the whole length of the trough, being careful to put the greater portion at the head, where the fish nearly always congregate. Finely chopped food, for very young fish, is slightly thinned with water before feeding. At one time the finest food was fed through perforations in the bottom of a tin dish; the food was placed in the dish, which was dipped into the water a little and shaken till enough of the food ...
— New England Salmon Hatcheries and Salmon Fisheries in the Late 19th Century • Various

... approach of winter had stripped well-nigh all the leaves from the great oaks in the park, whose dark branches now stood up against a gray sky, like branches of funereal candelabra. A light fog seemed to indicate rain; through the melancholy boughs of the thinned wood the heavy carriages of the court were seen slowly passing on, filled with women, uniformly dressed in black, and obliged to await the result of a chase which they did not witness. The distant hounds gave tongue, and the horn was sometimes faintly heard ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet

... hot lard. They will brown at once. Drain them. Heat a pint of salmon, picked into flakes, season with salt and pepper and turn in a tablespoonful of melted butter. Heat in a pan. Stir in one egg, beaten light, with three tablespoonfuls evaporated milk not thinned. Pour the mixture on ...
— Boy Scouts Handbook - The First Edition, 1911 • Boy Scouts of America

... reddish-coloured sandy clay took the place of the dark and compact loam: oaks began to appear, sparsely at first, but afterwards forming vast forests, which the peasants of our own days have thinned and reduced to a considerable extent. The stunted trunks of these trees are knotted and twisted, and the tallest of them do not exceed some thirty feet in height, while many of them may be regarded as nothing more imposing than large bushes.* Muddy rivers, infested ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 4 (of 12) • G. Maspero

... inches. It is not planted as corn is, that is, dropped so far apart, but is planted in a continuous stream. After the cotton comes up out of the ground, when it is about three inches high, it is hoed by ordinary labor with a hoe, and is cut out or, rather, thinned. This is called "chopping out" and is for the purpose of removing the inferior or weak plants until only one strong plant is left. The distance between the plants depends on the nature of the plant, frequently about twelve inches being ...
— Textiles • William H. Dooley

... planted together that a great deal of labour was required to widen and heighten the path: where bamboos prevail they have starved out the woody trees. The reason why the trees are not large is because all the spaces we passed over were formerly garden ground before the Makonde had been thinned by the slave-trade. As soon as a garden is deserted, a thick crop of trees of the same sorts as those formerly cut down springs up, and here the process of woody trees starving out their fellows, and ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume I (of 2), 1866-1868 • David Livingstone

... considerably thinned. He drew from it with palsied fingers for all burial expenses, looking about him in a dazed way. Mechanically he performed the Hebrew rites for the dead, which his neighbors taught him. He took a knife and made a deep gash in his shabby ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... verdure, and from the grass and the plaited apple-boughs. But the spirit of improvement has laid all waste, has thrown the wee rooms into ample ones, has changed the narrow windows for bays and oriels, has thinned the apple-trees for the sake of the grass. There was once a pond, long and green, with a little island in the midst, where a water-hen had her nest. I always thought of it as the pond in Hans Andersen's Ugly Duckling, and never watched the ducks paddling among the reeds that I did not ...
— An Isle in the Water • Katharine Tynan

... rivers were at this time in undisputed possession of the powerful tribe of Comanches, and their allies, the Kiawas, Lipans, and Tonkewas. Hence, these Indians, uninterrupted in their pursuit of the buffalo, had rendered the latter wild and difficult of approach, and had also thinned their numbers. On the waters of the Red River the case was different. This was hostile ground. The Wacoes, Panes, Osages, and bands from the Cherokee, Kickapoo, and other nations to the east, occasionally hunted there, and sanguinary ...
— The White Chief - A Legend of Northern Mexico • Mayne Reid

... facilitated the settling of the Spanish colonies were also likely to accelerate their liberation. A sense and a remembrance of national honour and freedom, remained among the polished Mexicans and Peruvians. Their numbers indeed had been thinned by the cruelties of the conquerors, but enough were left to perpetuate the memory of their fathers, to hand down the prophecies uttered in the phrenzy of their dying patriots; and the Peruvian, when ...
— Journal of a Voyage to Brazil - And Residence There During Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1823 • Maria Graham

... seemed no hope of finding the lady they sought until the crowd should have thinned a little, Jack laughed and entered the silver-spangled tent. The seeress was gowned in white, with silver chains and bracelets and girdle, and a long white veil completely enveloped her except the face, and this was concealed by her yashmak up to her mocking gray eyes, with ...
— An American Suffragette • Isaac N. Stevens

... never-dying force, the wind Roared till we shouted with it, roared until Its vast vitality of wrath was thinned, Had beat its ...
— Georgian Poetry 1913-15 • Edited by E. M. (Sir Edward Howard Marsh)

... his dress, he was in the habit of performing his ablutions with Eastern precision; for he had forgot neatness, but not cleanliness. His hair might have appeared much more disorderly, had it not been thinned by time, and disposed chiefly around the sides of his countenance and the back part of his head; black stockings, ungartered, marked his professional dress, and his feet were thrust into the old slipshod ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott

... Had there been, I will not say sin, but a sin; had there been the shade of a suspicion of what the world significantly calls a "past" in that Soul, the devil would have had his leverage, and the Divine Saviourhood would have thinned out at the most in the ordinary tragedy of ...
— Men in the Making • Ambrose Shepherd

... its novelty and nature and strange contrasts; in the old barbaric force and native colour of the passions as they burst out undisguised around the gold; in the hundred and one personal combats and trials of cunning; in a desert peopled and cities thinned by the magic of cupidity; in a huge army collected in ten thousand tents, not as heretofore by one man's constraining will, but each human unit spurred into the crowd by his own heart; in the "siege of gold" defended stoutly by rock ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne

... the coast, had time to assemble their friends and allies from the interior; who, mustering in prodigious force, set upon the Grecians, while they negligently revelled and feasted, and slew many of them, and recovered the spoil. They, dispirited and thinned in their numbers, with difficulty made their retreat good ...
— THE ADVENTURES OF ULYSSES • CHARLES LAMB

... Keep the leaves thinned, by taking out the oldest first, in order that they may stand single, and not one over the other; to accomplish which it will be necessary to peg them out. When taking off the leaves, cut them close to the vine, not leaving a long stalk, as that will rot and injure the plants. ...
— The art of promoting the growth of the cucumber and melon • Thomas Watkins

... bunched close together, and it seemed to have dropped where the men were thickest; and ere the now demoralised troops could recover from the panic into which they had been thrown, their ranks were yet more disastrously thinned, a rattling crash of Maxim fire from Carlos' position indicating the direction from which this new punishment had come. But by this time General Echague had begun to recover his presence of mind. He saw that to attempt to advance ...
— The Cruise of the Thetis - A Tale of the Cuban Insurrection • Harry Collingwood

... from which only a few large areas of arctic vegetation peeped out, was thrown over the greater part of Europe. Ten thousand feet thick where it left the hills of Norway and Sweden, several thousand feet thick even in Scotland, the ice-sheet that resulted from the fusion of the glaciers gradually thinned as it went south, and ended in an irregular fringe across Central Europe. The continent at that time stretched westward beyond the Hebrides and some two hundred miles beyond Ireland. The ice-front followed this curve, casting icebergs into ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe

... glance athwart his shoulder and caught a glimpse of the pretty lips thinned and straightened and the half-closed eyes and wrinkled forehead. He was evidently the disturbing cause, but in what way he could not for the life of him see. That she was angry to the tips of her fingers was beyond question; the first time he had seen her ...
— The Tides of Barnegat • F. Hopkinson Smith

... hill with a view to kill the ram. the Misquetors was So noumerous that I could not keep them off my gun long enough to take Sight and by thair means missed. at 10 a.m. the wind rose with a gentle breeze from the N. W. which in Some measure thinned the Misquetors. I landed on a Sand bar from the South Point intending to form a Camp at this place and Continue untill Capt Lewis Should arive. and killed two Buck Elks and a Deer the best of their flesh & fat I had Saved. had all the dryed ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al

... scene changes. The crowd of vehicles on the street is not so dense, and the "foot passengers" are somewhat thinned put. The lower part of the city, which is devoted exclusively to business, is deserted. For blocks the only persons to be seen are the policemen on their beats. Above Canal street, however, all is life and bustle. The street is brilliantly lighted. The windows of the stores and restaurants, ...
— The Secrets Of The Great City • Edward Winslow Martin

... his regiment thinned out by disease, famine, fighting, and the midnight knife, Seti came on to Dongola, to Berber, to Khartoum; and he grinned with satisfaction when he heard that they would make even for Kordofan. He had outlived ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... or any dry color insoluble in water, lithographic ink, much thinned with turpentine oil, be applied on the print in a light coating which permits one to see the design under it, and if, then, the print be soaked in water and afterwards developed as just directed, an image in greasy ink is obtained. And, ...
— Photographic Reproduction Processes • P.C. Duchochois

... related all this, with many other particulars, Mohi was interrupted by Babbalanja, who inquired how the people of Diranda relished the games, and how they fancied being coolly thinned ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville

... Howland fancied that he could distinguish dark shadows between the thinned walls of ...
— The Danger Trail • James Oliver Curwood

... the barber first. And lay off the eats until about noon. You had enough for now. By noon you can stoke up with meat and potatoes—anything you want that'll stick to the merry old slats. And I'd take milk instead of any more coffee. You've thinned down some—you're not near so plump as Harold Parmalee. Then you rest up for the balance of the day, and you show here to-morrow morning about this time. Do you get it? The Countess'll let you in. Tell her I said to, and come over to the office ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson

... in his spirit kept his jaw set and his legs working steadily forward into the pitch-black undergrowth. Once or twice he stumbled over fallen logs or tripped in the rocks, but he held on upward till the trees thinned and he felt that the looming shape of the ledge was just in front. His heart seemed to beat almost as loudly as the cannonade while he felt his way up the ...
— The Black Buccaneer • Stephen W. Meader

... there. Hundreds passed him, laughing and crowding into the big show. The longer Alfred waited the more miserable he became. Despair came over him. He waited, Cousin Charley did not come. The crowd thinned out; deeper and deeper ...
— Watch Yourself Go By • Al. G. Field

... and cravat had been loosened—showed that sleep must have overtaken him almost instantly. In fact, the bed was scarcely disturbed beyond the actual impress of his figure. He seemed to be a handsome, matured man of about forty; his dark straight hair was a little thinned over the temples, although his long heavy moustache was still youthful and virgin. His clothes, which were elegantly cut and of finer material than that in ordinary use, the delicacy and neatness of his linen, the whiteness of his hands, and, more particularly, a certain dissipated pallor ...
— The Heritage of Dedlow Marsh and Other Tales • Bret Harte

... small," she said meditatively. "And the yard is small too—and there are far too many trees and shrubs all messed up together. They must be thinned out—and that paling taken down. I think a good deal can be done with it. As for the house—well, ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922 • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... troops at Seeah Sung, he was fired upon by fifty Juzdilchees, who were placed in ambush, and was killed. General Pollock remained at Jellalabad upwards of four months, during which time his troops suffered severely from sickness, and their ranks were greatly thinned by death; and it was not until the 20th of August that he commenced his march towards Cabul. The prisoners, male and female, which were captured by Akbar Khan were in separate forts within the valley of Tezeen, where General ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan

... sinking fund, our national debts shall be lessened; when the posture of foreign affairs, and the universal introduction of a well planned and national militia, will suffer our formidable army to be thinned and regulated; and when (in consequence of all) our taxes shall be gradually reduced; this adventitious power of the crown will slowly and imperceptibly diminish, as it slowly and imperceptibly rose. ...
— Commentaries on the Laws of England - Book the First • William Blackstone

... an excited look around her. The space before the marriage throne had thinned, for there were no more arrivals waiting to offer their congratulations and the guests were clustering now about the tables for refreshment or drifting into the next salon where behind firmly stretched silken walls a ...
— The Fortieth Door • Mary Hastings Bradley

... column yielded; dykes of dead Lay between vale and ridge, As, thinned yet closing, faint yet fierce, they sped In packs to ...
— Wessex Poems and Other Verses • Thomas Hardy

... movement of the soil-water is retarded. This is easily understood by recalling that the soil particles have an attraction for water, which is of definite value, and may be measured by the thickest film that may be held against gravity. When the film is thinned, it does not diminish the attraction of the soil for water; it simply results in a stronger pull upon the water and a firmer holding of the film against the surfaces of the soil grains. To move soil-water under such conditions requires the expenditure of more energy than is necessary for moving ...
— Dry-Farming • John A. Widtsoe

... upon decency, and as such was felt and resented. From Maroney's personal popularity and agreeable manners, there were many who believed in his innocence, still more who did not desire his conviction. His marriage thinned the ranks of the latter and entirely wiped out almost every trace of the former. The man who would live with and introduce a prostitute as his wife, was regarded as never too good to be guilty of robbery ...
— The Expressman and the Detective • Allan Pinkerton

... the measureless hollows that evaded her also; without injury she sounded its horrible depths, amid a loud splashing of water, which did not even sprinkle her decks, but was blown on and on like everything else, evaporating in finer and finer spray until it was thinned away to nothing. In the trough it was darker, and when each wave had passed the men looked behind them to see if the next to appear were higher; it came upon them with furious contortions, and curling crests, over its transparent emerald body, seeming ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti

... produced in the usual way from the two sets of plants of the third generation, were sown on opposite sides of two pots (1 and 2); but the seedlings were not thinned enough and did not grow well. Many of the self-fertilised plants, especially in one of the pots, consisted of the new and tall variety above referred to, which bore large and almost white flowers marked with crimson blotches. I will call it the WHITE VARIETY. I believe that it first appeared ...
— The Effects of Cross & Self-Fertilisation in the Vegetable Kingdom • Charles Darwin

... chiefly against the Indians near the Cordillera; for many of the tribes on this eastern side are fighting with Rosas. The general, however, like Lord Chesterfield, thinking that his friends may in a future day become his enemies, always places them in the front ranks, so that their numbers may be thinned. Since leaving South America we have heard that this war of extermination ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin

... but she ran over in her mind the spring treatment for children at home. The blood, she felt, should be thinned after a winter of sausages and rich cocoa. She mentally ...
— Long Live the King • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... France for an invasion; Roger Mortimer with the border barons was still in arms and only held in check by Llewelyn. It was impossible to make binding terms with an imprisoned king, yet to release Henry without terms was to renew the war. The imprisonment too gave a shock to public feeling which thinned the Earl's ranks. In the new Parliament which he called at the opening of 1265 the weakness of the patriotic party among the baronage was shown in the fact that only twenty-three earls and barons could be found to sit beside the ...
— History of the English People, Volume II (of 8) - The Charter, 1216-1307; The Parliament, 1307-1400 • John Richard Green

... noted many other signs of old age which the glow from the stove made so cruelly apparent. It had taken sixty years of life just to streak her hair with grey; but the past seven years had remorselessly thinned and whitened it, and now not even one black hair was to be seen. All these things and many more he thought of as he gazed ...
— A Lover in Homespun - And Other Stories • F. Clifford Smith

... looked, and wondered if he was in the habit of so preparing himself to meet the eye of all the suspected criminals he encountered. The thought made me glance again her way. She lay like a statue, and her face, naturally round but now thinned out and hollow, looked up from the pillow in pitiful quiet, the long lashes accentuating the dark ...
— That Affair Next Door • Anna Katharine Green

... each side the backbone in long fillets. Cut two cucumbers and one Bermuda onion in thin slices, salt them, and let them drain. Lard the fillets of rabbit, season them, and lay them in a stewpan, with a pint of white sauce slightly thinned with white stock, the cucumber, and the onion. Let them simmer for half an hour. Lay the fillets in a circle, and put the cucumber and onion in the centre, the sauce, which should be thick enough to mask them, over the fillets. Fried sippets ...
— Choice Cookery • Catherine Owen

... same continuous lacustrine FORMATION at some distance from the first, nearly the same series of beds is commonly met with, yet with slight variations; some, for example, of the layers of sand, clay, or marl, may be wanting, one or more of them having thinned out and given place to others, or sometimes one of the masses first examined is observed to increase in thickness to the exclusion of ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell

... by. The tide of battle had swept inland and northward; and all eyes were on the plucky advance of MacArthur's strong division, while far out to the south and east the thinned and depleted lines of Anderson held an insurgent force that forever menaced but dare not attack. The Primeval Dudes, sorely missing their calmly energetic colonel, had drifted into a war of words with their nearest neighbors on the firing line, a far Western ...
— Found in the Philippines - The Story of a Woman's Letters • Charles King

... The wood thinned into glades where the shadows of beech and maple were beginning to be long upon the grass; then, in the afternoon light, the coach entered open country, fields of ox-eyed daisies, and tall pine ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston

... prudence that people marry, but from inclination. A man is poor; he thinks, "I cannot be worse, and so I'll e'en take Peggy."' BOSWELL. 'But have not nations been more populous at one period than another?' JOHNSON. 'Yes, Sir; but that has been owing to the people being less thinned at one period than another, whether by emigrations, war, or pestilence, not by their being more or less prolifick. Births at all times bear the same proportion to the same number of people.' BOSWELL. 'But, to consider the state of our own country;—does ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill

... distance it seemed—they dropped through clouds utterly impenetrable to the eye. Then gradually the clouds thinned; there appeared brief clear spots, spots into which they could see short distances—then here and there they caught glimpses of green below. ...
— The Black Star Passes • John W Campbell

... time, it is said by the old settlers that hog cholera thinned out the nobility a good deal, whether directly or indirectly ...
— Comic History of England • Bill Nye

... heart of the fern clump, where the ferns were tallest, a little spring bubbled out of the ground, at the rate, I suppose, of a pint of water in a minute. The ferns grew immensely thick there; but someone had thinned out a few of the roots from the ground, leaving the uprooted plant with the ferns still living, to form a rough kind of thatch above a piece of earth big enough for a man's body. In the scented shade of this ...
— Martin Hyde, The Duke's Messenger • John Masefield

... weighted plate to extract the bitter juices. Then fry the slices delicately in lard. Make a ragout of chickens' hearts and livers as follows: Put two tablespoons of butter into a saucepan, fry the hearts and livers, and when cooked add two tablespoons of tomato paste, thinned with hot water (or a corresponding amount of tomato sauce). ...
— Simple Italian Cookery • Antonia Isola

... of monotonous patience, and Miss Hyde was thirty-six. Her hair had thinned, and was full of silver threads; a wrinkle invaded either cheek, and she was angular and bony; but something painfully sweet lingered in her face, and a certain childlike innocence of expression gave her the air of a nun; ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various

... tell you what consolations I had to support me under these trials; first, the self-approving consciousness of the smiling fortitude with which I bore my gown's disaster; secondly, a lovely nosegay, which was presented to me; and lastly, at about twelve o'clock, when the rooms were a little thinned, a dance for an hour which sent me home perfectly satisfied with my fate. By the bye, I asked Campbell if he knew any method to preserve my flowers from fading, to which he replied, "Give them to me, and I will immortalize them." I did so, and am expecting some verses ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble

... and more rugged as the newly-mated pair advanced, and as they drew near the foot-hills surrounding Mount Desolation, the bush thinned out, and the ground became stony, with here and there big lichen-covered boulders standing alone, like huge bowls upon a giants' green. Then came a patch of thin, starveling-looking trees, mere bones of trees, half of whose skin was missing. Suddenly Warrigal gave a ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson

... advance and endure this storm of shot and shell, that by the time he reached the line of the enemy's infantry, his ranks were too much broken to offer a very formidable front. From the enemy's fortified position their deadly fire caused our already thinned ranks to melt like snow before the sun's warm rays. The result was a complete repulse along the whole line. But McClellan was only too glad to be allowed a breathing spell from his seven days of continual defeat, and availed himself of the opportunity of this respite to pull off his army under ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert

... struggle that finally smoked out the "Hornets' Nest." They told of the Crescent Regiment, known and loved on all these sidewalks and away up to and beyond their Bishop-General Polk's Trinity Church, whose desperate gallantry had saved that same Washington Artillery three of its pieces, and to whose thinned and bleeding ranks swarms of the huddled Western farm boys, as shattered and gory as their captors and as glorious, had at last laid down their arms. And they told of Kincaid's Battery, Captain Kincaid commanding; how, having early lost ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable

... that he was the landlord. The woman then came and introduced herself as his sister, and they both stood silently before us in a house as silent as themselves, the great festival at the neighboring hamlet having probably thinned their custom. It was evident that they had plenty of leisure to answer any questions, and we had soon learned from them that the old Tharer-wirth ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various

... few in number compared with what they used to be," Charley remarked, "and I'll bet you can't guess what has thinned them out so." ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely

... utensils of a simple supper at his side. The gentle horses tethered near were to be heard softly cropping the grass, and the sound of the creek came from a farther distance. Above, the poplar boughs, whose yellow foliage had been thinned by the advancing season, let through the rays of the brilliant stars. These were the sights and sounds which met the young man's senses as he came brushing the fallen leaves with ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall

... no reason. In most parts this border was not so high as in the last case, viz., from 2 to 2.5 inches, but in one place it was as much as 5.5. Its average height close to the stone was probably about 3 inches, and it thinned out to nothing. If so, a layer of fine earth, 15 inches in breadth and 1.5 inch in average thickness, of sufficient length to surround the whole of the much elongated slab, must have been brought up by the worms in chief part from beneath the ...
— The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the action of worms with • Charles Darwin

... transplants were used and the trees were planted at the rate of 100 to the acre. They were cultivated for two years. The average tree is 4 inches in diameter and 20 feet high. The trees are healthy and in good condition. The grove is yielding from one to two bushels of nuts a year and should be thinned so as to open it up and ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Sixth Annual Meeting. Rochester, New York, September 1 and 2, 1915 • Various

... go away, driven by hunger, she had to pass close to Dom Ferdinand and Lord Dauntrey. There was no crowd round the chairs, as the morning throng had thinned for dejeuner, and she heard Lord Dauntrey say: "I assure you, Monseigneur, it never went as badly as this on my roulette at home. You saw the records. But nobody can win at every seance. Don't be discouraged. I'm confident my system's unbreakable ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... Harrison of Kentucky was appointed. The Free State preponderance among settlers constantly increased. Nearly all the clearing, plowing, and planting was done by Free State men. All manner of irregularities constantly thinned the ranks of volunteers from the South. Kansas, according to Greeley's expressive phrase, "was steadily hardening into the bone and sinew ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson

... cargoes worth about half a million sterling (4th June 1794). This brilliant success cost the assailants very few lives; but the heats of the summer and probably also the intemperance of the troops soon thinned their ranks. The French, too, having received succours which slipped out from Rochefort, recovered Guadeloupe in the month of September.[377] And from this point of vantage they sought, often with success, to stir up the slaves ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose

... japanned; then apply vermilion ground in shellac varnish or with drying oil, very thinly diluted with oil of turpentine, on the places intended to imitate the more transparent parts of the tortoise-shell. When the vermilion is dry, brush the whole over with the black varnish thinned to the right consistency with oil of turpentine. When set and firm put the work into a stove where it may undergo a very strong heat, which must be continued a considerable time, for three weeks or even a ...
— Handbook on Japanning: 2nd Edition - For Ironware, Tinware, Wood, Etc. With Sections on Tinplating and - Galvanizing • William N. Brown



Words linked to "Thinned" :   dilute, diluted, weakened



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