The transition is very slow, and extends over several hundred fathoms of increasing depth; the shells gradually lose their sharpness of outline, and assume a kind of 'rotten' look and a brownish colour, and become more and more mixed with a fine amorphous red-brown powder, which increases steadily in proportion until the lime has almost entirely disappeared.

Sculptured edges lose their sharpness in a year or two; yellow lichens overspread a beloved name, and obliterate it while it is yet fresh upon some survivor's heart.

The vexation I felt with myself gave, after the manner of men, some sharpness to the tone of my remonstrance with her.

Looking southward along the axis of the range, the eye is first caught by a row of exceedingly sharp and slender spires, which rise openly to a height of about a thousand feet, above a series of short, residual glaciers that lean back against their bases; their fantastic sculpture and the unrelieved sharpness with which they spring out of the ice rendering them peculiarly wild and striking.

'He reproved me,' she writes, 'with pretended sharpness for reading Les Pensées de Pascal, alleging that as a good Protestant I ought to abstain from books written by Catholics.

Blue-Star Woman had not yet detected any particular sharpness about their ears, but by an impulse she looked up into their faces and scrutinized them.

So forth they fared with sweetness in their hearts, That took the sense of sharpness from the thorn.

Carlyle allows no one a chance, but bears down all opposition, not only by his wit and onset of words, resistless in their sharpness as so many bayonets, but by actual physical superiority, raising his voice and rushing on his opponent with a torrent of sound.

"No, sir; certainly notmost peremptorily not," answered Marston, with more sharpness than, in his early days, he would have thought quite consistent with politeness.

Upon this occasion, however, the whole figure was stamped out with intense sharpness against the darkness, and Barnaby beheld, as clear as day, a great burly man, clad in a tawdry tinsel coat, with a cocked hat with gold braid upon his head.