That empty shell of a past reputation was my only hope.

Sulla had proved the power of the Republic to be an empty shell.

And soon the house that had kept it warm Was tossed about by the autumn storm; The stem was cracked, the old house fell, And the chestnut burr was an empty shell.

Jerry mechanically threw out the empty shell, and pushed another into the chamber of his gun.

"And he can sap away the energy from any living creature and render him an empty shell of himself," added Tweaty.

To the naked eye they lived invisible; Specks, for a world of whom the empty shell Of a mustard-seed had been a hollow sky.

So the little Goby, when nesting time comes, hunts round for the empty shell of a Cockle lying with its hollow side to the sand.

The poet, looking upon the now empty shell, thinks of human life as growing in the same way.

"'Your gun,' I said to the landlord, and he brought it from the front hall, and passed it over to the inspector, who took it and ejected the empty shell from the right barrel.

When the bolt handle is raised, it must be done with enough force to start the shell from the chamber; and when the bolt is pulled back, it must be with sufficient force to throw the empty shell well away from the chamber and far enough to engage the next cartridge.

Everywherein the hall, in the smoking-room, where the empty gun-cases still hang, and in "my lady's bower," "Sorrow and silence and sadness Are hanging over all." Until we arrived within a few yards of the front door we had almost forgotten that the place was a ruin; for though the house is but an empty shell, almost as hollow as a skull, the outer walls are absolutely complete and undamaged.

"Without you," he replied softly, "it was just an empty shell of boards and plaster, something to make me ache with loneliness.

Presently he meets with an empty shell, and, after probing it carefully with his claw to be sure it is not tenanted, he pops into it back foremost in a twinkling, and settles himself in his new house.

It was an empty shell.

For if that don't show that there is nothing but a dreadful, empty shell left of this awful world, I don't know what any true sign is.

My heart is only an empty shell!

Any man who has fired a Winchester knows that it drops its empty shell in loading, and I could therefore draw only one conclusionnamely, that all seven discharges of the Winchesters had occurred up by the mail-car.

One of them contained an empty shell, on which the hammer rested.

The sampan now was but the empty shell of a water beetle, that had crawled upon the bank into the sun of Fortune to spill forth a dragon fly to try newly found wings of adventure.

They picked up the spider's body; it was now only an empty shell.

While the other two had been busy at the scene of the ambush Rod had replaced his empty shell, and now, as he led, Wabi examined the armament that had been stolen from them by the outlaws.

Whoever got the ring would be married first; whoever got the nut would marry a widow or a widower; but if the nut were an empty shell, he or she would remain unwed.

But long before its fall our Japanese feudalism "was an empty shell."

It was staring noon when, the house singing like an empty shell in the monotonous wind, she felt she could stand the solitude

A dread of the place was beginning to creep over him; a dread of the days to come, when the monotonous sunshine should lay bare the loneliness of these walls; the long, long days of endless blue and cloudless, overhanging solitude; summer days when the wearying, incessant trade winds should sing around that empty shell and voice its desolation.