Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 28, 2025
Before the measuring-tape the proudest tree of them all quails and shrinks into itself. All those stories of four or five men stretching their arms around it and not touching each other's fingers, if one's pacing the shadow at noon and making it so many hundred feet, die upon its leafy lips in the presence of the awful ribbon which has strangled so many false pretensions.
We struck off into the wood, where last year's dead leaves made the footprints almost indistinguishable, and followed the faint double track for a long distance between the dense clumps of bushes. Suddenly my eye caught, beside the double trail, a third row of tracks, smaller in size and closer together. Thorndyke had seen them, too, and already his measuring-tape was in his hand.
The nearer man a stout corporal dropped his end of the measuring-tape. The other wound it up slowly. "We'll have to lay the trench through here," said the officer; and quoted, "'I'm sorry for Mr Naboth I'm sorry to cause him pain; but you, corporal, must find him and tell him he'll get compensation for disturbance." He pocketed his note-book, turned, and mounted the slope towards the encampment.
Having my measuring-tape in a game-bag that was always carried by Abdoolahi, I measured accurately one of the elephants that had fallen with the legs stretched out, so that the height to the shoulder could be exactly taken: From foot to shoulder in a direct line, nine feet one inch; circumference of foot, four feet eight inches.
In my younger days, when I never travelled without a measuring-tape in my pocket, it amused me to see how meek one of the great swaggering elms would look when it saw the fatal measure begin to unreel itself. It seemed to me that the leaves actually trembled as the inexorable band encircled the trunk in the smallest place it could find, which is the only safe rule.
"You're making a regular inventory, sir," he remarked, "as if you were going to put 'em up for auction. I shouldn't think those snails' eggs would be much help in identification. And all that has been done already," he added as I produced my measuring-tape. "No doubt," I replied; "but my business is to make independent observations, to check the others, if necessary."
I prescribed for the man, and gave the mother a bright farthing to hang round the child's neck, which delighted the party. My watch was only wondered at; but a little spring measuring-tape that rolled itself up, struck them dumb, and when I threw it on the ground with the tape out, the mother shrieked and ran away, while the little savage howled after her.
But what most attracted her eye was a small flagstone turned up in the middle of the floor, a heap of earth beside it, and a measuring-tape. Derriman went to the corner of the cellar, and pulled out a clamped box from under the straw. 'You be rather heavy, my dear, eh? he said, affectionately addressing the box as he lifted it.
I then fetched my measuring-tape from the game-bag, in which it was always at hand. Although the snake was only 5 ft. 4 in. in length it was slightly above 15 inches in girth. The tail was, as usual in poisonous snakes, extremely blunt, and the head perfectly fiat, and about 2 1/2 inches broad, but unfortunately during my short absence to fetch the measure the natives had crushed it with a rock.
I carried myself a small barometer, a large knife and digger for plants, note-book, telescope, compass, and other instruments; whilst two or three Lepcha lads who accompanied me as satellites, carried a botanising box, thermometers, sextant and artificial horizon, measuring-tape, azimuth compass and stand, geological hammer, bottles and boxes for insects, sketch-book, etc., arranged in compartments of strong canvass bags.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking