He would stand at his house, and watch the slaves picking cotton; and if any of them straitened their backs for a moment, his savage yell would ring, 'bend your backs.' "Mrs. Barr stated, that Mrs. H, of Courtland, a member of the Presbyterian church, sent a little negro girl to jail, suspecting that she had attempted to put poison in the water pail.

But straitened circumstances, and the unsettled times of the Revolution, in which he had taken an earnest and zealous part, had delayed to a late bachelorhood the fulfilment of this resolution.

Yet, in spite of his professed love of savage scenery and his knowledge of pastoral sports, it is after all in a very artificial and straitened form that nature filters to us through Sannazzaro's pages.

The sight of this vessel excited in us a transport of joy which it would be difficult to describe; each of us believed his deliverance certain, and we gave a thousand thanks to God; yet, fears mingled with our hopes: we straitened some hoops of casks, to the end of which we tied handkerchiefs of different colours.

Not only to the hero and the sage is this immortality given; it belongs to each according to the measure of his deeds; world-wide life for world-wide service; straitened life for straitened work; each reaps as he sows, and the harvest is gathered by each in his rightful order.

She seemed to be herself that very 'somebody' who was to answer at the bar of God for the curtailed supplies and straitened means of this humble minister.

Essex often drew out to fight, but the king fortifies, takes the passes and bridges, plants cannon, and secures the country to keep off provisions, and continually straitens their quarters, but would not fight.

Every rigorous law will be either secretly evaded, or openly violated; every severe restraint will be shaken off, either by artifice or vice; nor can this vice, however dangerous or prevalent, be corrected but by slow degrees, by straitening the reins of government imperceptibly, and by superadding a second slight restraint, after the nation has been for some time habituated to the first.

He means, that perhaps the cheapness is apparent only, and not real; or the bargain by straitening thee in thy business, may do thee more harm than good.

Truly, it is sad and dispiriting to the artist to find that all modern aesthetical writings limit and straiten the free walks of highest Art with strict laws deduced from rigid science, with mathematical proportions and the formal restrictions of fixed lines and curves, nicely adapted from the frigidities of Euclid.