That is what happened; he literally and actually crumbled into a mouldering heap of bones and dust.

Most of the plants crumble to dust beneath the foot, and the ground is full of cracks; while the thirsty traveler gazes with eager longing through the burning glare to the snowy summits looming like hazy clouds in the distance.

On one side of the yew stood a framework of worm-eaten timber, the use and meaning of which puzzled me exceedingly, till I made it out to be the village-stocks: a public institution that, in its day, had doubtless hampered many a pair of shank-bones, now crumbling in the adjacent church-yard.

He was crumbling under it, and a wild hatred for the colonel rose in him.

Upon a bed of sandy flood-soil I counted ninety-four Sequoias, from one to twelve feet high, on a patch, of ground once occupied by four large Sugar Pines which lay crumbling beneath them,an instance of conditions which have enabled Sequoias to crowd out the pines.

A granite mountain does not crumble with alacrity, but once resolved to soil makes the best of it.

In the ashes lay some scattered fragments of paper which crumbled at my touch.

" Yes, this is I think the lesson we have to learn, now at this turning point in history with the epoch of intellect crumbling about our ears, and the great World's Fair of multiplied, ingenious mechanisms we have called "modern civilization" at a point of practical bankruptcy.

And nought but ruin remained around him, thanks to his imbecile resolve to limit his family: a foul life had killed his only son, and his only daughter had gone off with a scion of the triumphant farm, while he was now utterly alone, weeping and howling in his deserted mill, that mill which he had likewise disdained and which was crumbling around him with old age.

Already 700 out of the 1000 millions of our race have perished, and the empires of civilisation have crumbled like sand-castles in a horror of anarchy.

Who could know that a crumble of island beach and six months ashore would turn him into what he had become?

The womanly woman and the manly man, those ideals of the Victorians, which crumbled before the attack of the Ibsenites, Strindbergians and Shavians in the nineties, but which must be recognized as quite valid biologically, are the masterpieces of these interstitial cells when in their perfection.

The ground seemed crumbling from under himnot even a straw to grasp.

I rather think you won't be allowed to crumble over the buttery shelves.

But while thus zealously defending, the fortress of British connection committed to his care, Lord Elgin was dismayed to find that its walls were crumbling round him?

Every individual board appeared to be rotting and crumbling toward the ground, awaiting the shake of one fierce gust of wind to disappear in a cloud of mouldy dust.

Poor devils, their hopes crumbled along with their walls when the Germans brought up the forty-twos.

The road, having been cut in the side of the cliff, exposed layers of brown argillaceous schist, like rotten wood, and so friable that it crumbled between the fingers; but what was more remarkable was that the layers, scarcely thicker than slate, instead of being on their natural plane, were turned up quite vertically.

Three desperate efforts they made to free her, then, just as the giant cake towered, crumbling above them, the Major shouted the word of warning that sent them leaping back to safety but cost them their machine.

The three impostors were not powerful enough to disturb seriously the steady flow of Mahomet's organising and administrative activities, but they are indicative of the thin crust that divided his rule from anarchy, a crust even now cracking under the weight of the burdens imposed upon it, needing the constant cement of armed expeditions to keep it from crumbling beyond Mahomet's own remedying.

Those which are strong and do not crumble by exposure are useful for building.

On this occasion there was a nice piece of cake put into the box, which was to be crumbled for the doves, and Reuben knew that they liked cake as well as he did himself, and more especially the kind of cake which cook had given him.

The two old people were thee-ing and thou-ing each other with the tranquil non-morality of those that realize that they are very near to death, and forget the tremors and scruples of a life crumbling behind them.

Yet he did not know what he ate, or afterward, whether he had eaten anything at allunless it was some bread which, with bitter disgust at his bad manners, he vaguely remembered crumbling on the table.