" As the Doctor concluded his story, the sharp crack of Spalding's rifle broke the stillness of the night, and went reverberating among the hills, and dying away over the lake.

Every little crack leaked it in generous streams, while the main illumination appeared fairly to bulge the walls outward.

In a complicated crack the plate serves the further useful purpose of holding in position antiseptic pledgets, and so keeping the lesion free from dirt and grit.

There followed the loud crack of rending wood as he broke the ruler passionately across his knee, putting forth all his strength, and the clatter of the falling fragments as he hurled them violently from him.

Who is she?" There was a sudden crack between Piers' fingers.

I pursued it as fast as I could, and found myself in a narrow crack among the rocks, along which I was just able to force my way.

It was not very large and there were innumerable tiny cracks interlacing each other, there were little raised figures on the broad rim and a figure in the centre, the colors were buff and blue.

For, though shingles and even slates will generally keep out the rain, the innumerable cracks between the sides of them can never be made air-tight, and therefore admit heat and cold much more freely than any proper wall-covering.

But on the word followed a more ominous crack, and there was the whine of a bullet above them.

Should the whole frame of nature round him break, In ruin and confusion hurled, He, unconcerned, would hear the mighty crack, And stand secure amidst a falling world.

If I say sooth, I must report, they were As cannons overcharg'd with double cracks.

Then suddenly, silently, the door opened a mere crack, letting in a gleam of yellow light from the main cabin, while the crouching figure of a man, like a gliding shadow slipped through the aperture, closing the door behind him as softly as he had opened it.

Yet they are undoubtedly the result of the very slow cooling and contraction of melted rocks under compression by strata below and above them, so that, when once solidified, the mass was held in position and the tension produced by contraction could only be relieved by numerous very small cracks at short distances from each other in every direction, resulting in five, six, or seven-sided polygons, with sides only a few inches long.

The smart crack of a rifle was simultaneous with the attempt, and the tormentor's arm fell useless by his side.

And as Heywood dodged back through the gate, and Nesbit's rifle answered from his little fort on the pony-shed, the distant crack of the muskets joined with a spattering of ooze and a chipping of stone on the river-stairs.

Four or five of the shot-guns boomed at once; then the second barrels were discharged, along with a sharper cracking of small arms.

His keen bronzed face and his obviously athletic body, clothed in white flannel, brought back to me the far days when the sharp clean crack in the adjoining field told of a loose one which had been got away square.

While his design was an advance on those of the day, the demands on the makers of iron forgings were more than could be successfully met, and the gun developed some slight cracks in the test, which prevented further developments on this line.

As he stooped to do it, however, the ship heaved up upon a swell, and the captain saw in the yellow light of his lantern sinuous black cracks which radiated away backwards from the central hole.

He used alwaysPhew! my eye, what an awful crack!" A terrifically swift ball from Austin had risen suddenly from the hard ground.

He started up from his seat, but as he did so a blast that shook the house swept by; there was an awful cracking, then a crash, and, to his horror, a huge limb of the old oak came with an awful thud upon the very spot where his little niece was standing.

A distant cracking was audible, like the noise of a formidable battery of mitrailleuses.

She heard a dry stick crack under his feet three hundred yards away.

In the golden sunrise came the faint, far crack of a rifle, and a stricken woman would throw up her hands on the distant edge of the village; in the noonday heat, men in the trenches heard the shrill sing-song and knew their deaths; or in the gray afterglow of evening, the dirt kicked up in puffs by the winking fires.

The man was fully thirty yards from them: but close to him, between them and him, stretched a long ghastly crack, some ten feet wide, cutting the point across.