A sounding-board is merely there for ceremony.

Out of this necessity grew the use of the lead and sounding line; and, ultimately, marine-surveying, which is the recording of the form of coasts and of the depth of the sea, as ascertained by the sounding-lead, upon charts.

At length the sounding-rod came up, and its lower end was held out, in order to ascertain how high up it was wet.

[Footnote 2: During the cruise of H.M.S. Bulldog, commanded by Sir Leopold M'Clintock, in 1860, living star-fish were brought up, clinging to the lowest part of the sounding-line, from a depth of 1,260 fathoms, midway between Cape Farewell, in Greenland, and the Rockall banks.

" As Gadabout slowly moved along, she occasionally got out of the channel into the shallows, in spite of chart and sounding-pole; and more than once she struck bottom.

We still felt that if the sounding-marks were right Gadabout could navigate the stream.

As soon as the boy reached the belfry, and turned himself round to seize the rope, he saw upon the stairs, near the sounding-hole, a white figure.

" Dabney got up, for want of a better answer, and walked over to where his mother was sitting, and gave the thoughtful matron a good sounding kiss.

They say she doesn't sing under her own name, but uses some prettier sounding oneforeign, I believe.

In a few moments the train was slipping smoothly out of the station and the girl who had forgotten most things else knew that she was being spirited off to a delightful sounding place called Holiday Hill in the charge of a gray-eyed young doctor who had made himself personally responsible for her from the moment he had extricated her, more dead than alive, from the wreckage.

" "It's reason and philosophy, sir," returned the sedate cock-swain; "and what land there is, should always be a soft mud, or a sandy ooze, in order that an anchor might hold, and to make soundings sartin.

This said, his feeble arm a jav'lin flung, Which on the sounding shield, scarce ent'ring, rung.

for thee the heavenly powers, With sounding anthems, fill the vaulted towers.

Methinks I have upon my tongue a whetstone of loud sounding speech, which to harmonious breath constraineth me nothing loth.

Even when the Romans built stone theatres, these had not the sounding-apparatus by which the Greek architects supported the efforts of the actors (Vitruv.

Our detention was lengthened by a succession of south-east gales, and the state of the weather throughout was such that during the period of twenty-one days the sounding boats were able to work on six onlythe other fine days were devoted to swinging the ships for magnetical purposes.

Really the lyre was merely a sounding-box, and the vibrations of the music were conveyed from instruments, played in the next room, to the lyre through a steel rod.

Then kneel'd the hoary Seer, to heaven address'd His fiery eyes, and smote his sounding breast; "Bless ye the Lord!"

Shells were falling in the city, with great hollow sounding crashes.