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More "Butt" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and tumble of public schools, universities and sport, and now throbbing under the stress of the new deadly game, to understand poor Doggie Trevor? They had no time to take him seriously, save to curse him when he did wrong, and in their leisure time he became naturally a butt ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... porcupine, and din'd just like a pig, sir, And an over-running butt of sack she swallow'd at a swig, sir! Her brawny maids of honour ate and drank confounded hard, sir, And droves of oxen daily bled within her palace-yard, sir! ...
— Poems • Sir John Carr
... mumbled incoherently, and in desperation sent the pistol-butt crashing against the glass. It was tough, stout, stubborn; the first blow scarcely flawed it. As he redoubled his efforts to shatter it, Hickey's hand shot over his shoulder to aid him.... And with startling abruptness the barrier seemed to dissolve before their eyes, the ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... the order from any position in the manual, the motion next to the last concludes with the butt of the piece about 3 inches from the ground, barrel to the rear, the left hand above and near the right, steadying the piece, fingers extended and joined, forearm and wrist straight and inclining downward, all fingers of the right hand grasping the piece. To complete the order, ...
— Manual for Noncommissioned Officers and Privates of Infantry • War Department
... plans of Catherine, the Queen-mother. The Vicomte de Turenne, then aged about twenty, could not resist making the passion of the old soldier a theme of ridicule among his companions; and Henry, instead of discouraging this humour, joined in it heartily, making his faithful servant a butt on all occasions. Ussac could not endure this attack on so very tender a point, and, rendered almost frantic with vexation, forgetting every consideration of honour and religion, abandoned the cause of Henry, and delivered ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... in hand and taught him polite letters and he became a reader and a writer and well versed in all knowledge before he reached his tenth year. Then his adopted father appointed for him a horse that he might learn cavalarice and the shooting of shafts and firing of bullets at the butt,[FN561] and then brought for him a complete rider that he might teach him all his art and when he came to the age of fourteen he became a doughty knight and a prow. Now one chance day of the days the youth purposed going to the wild that he might hunt,—And Shahrazad ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... rocks, roots, mire, logs, bushes, stumps, and, in fact, over and through almost any thing, chewing their cud all the time, patient and unconcerned. When they were brought up near to one of the trees that had been cut down, Raymond would hook the chain around the butt end of it, and then, at his command, they would drag it out of its place in the line of the fence. After looking on for some time, Caleb began to think that he would go to work; and he went to a little tree, with a stem about as big round as ...
— Caleb in the Country • Jacob Abbott
... hour of Resurrection, thy brethren will always number thee among those who have renounced the Mother. Hark! thy enemies are in pursuit of thee, already near. Should they capture thee, thou must be the slave of their wills, the partner of their crimes, the sport and butt of all their bitter jests throughout the remnant of thy wretched life. One only refuge remains for thee!' And as he spoke, he drew his ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various
... butt in here!" he said, holding the iron close to Driscoll's chest. Then he turned to Drummond. "Put that cutter down! I don't: want to see ...
— The Lure of the North • Harold Bindloss
... sacrifice and the pickaxe was passed seven times through the flames. A cocoanut was placed on the ground, and the priest, holding the pickaxe by the point in his right hand, said, 'Shall I strike?' The others replied yes, and striking the cocoanut with the butt end he broke it in pieces, upon which all exclaimed, 'All hail, Devi, and prosper the Thugs.' All then partook of the kernel of the cocoanut, and collecting the fragments put them into the pit so that they might ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... man!" said the overwhelmed Mrs. Macleuchar, totally exhausted at having been so long the butt of his rhetoric, "take back your three shillings, and make me quit ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... thoroughly and wholly upset, so much so that at first he could not speak. He went pale and paler while we stood talking it over, and crossed himself—he was a Catholic—furtively behind the water-butt. ...
— A Deal in Wheat - And Other Stories of the New and Old West • Frank Norris
... generally have armed me a hundred fold for retaliation; but at present, chiefly, perhaps, because I had no effectual ally, and could count upon no sympathy in my audience, I was mortified beyond the power of retort, and became a passive butt to the lady's stinging contumely and the arrowy sleet of her gay rhetoric. The narrow bounds of our deck made it not easy to get beyond talking range; and thus it happened, that for two hours I stood the worst of this bright lady's feud. At length the tables ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... laughter. Fiery objurgations, words that pierce and burn, are to be found in Shakspeare; yet he is always in measure here; never what Johnson would remark as a specially 'good hater.' But his laughter seems to pour from him in floods; he heaps all manner of ridiculous nicknames on the butt he is bantering, tumbles and tosses him in all sorts of horse-play; you would say, with his whole heart laughs. And then, if not always the finest, it is always a genial laughter. Not at mere weakness, at misery or poverty; never. No man who can laugh, what we call laughing, will laugh at these ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... assailant with the bear-spear, he struck up his arms, and with the butt end hit hard so that he fell. The matchless runner leapt away on the instant, to follow a forlorn hope. Sweyn, on regaining his feet, was as amazed as angry at this unaccountable flight. He knew in his heart that his brother was no coward, and that it was ...
— The Were-Wolf • Clemence Housman
... runs ever away To the bosom of God's great ocean. Don't set your force 'gainst the river's course, And think to alter its motion. Don't waste a curse on the universe, Remember, it lived before you; Don't butt at the storm with your puny form, But bend and let it ...
— Poems of Cheer • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... listened while the renewed search was going on. The sounds sometimes showed that the searchers were retiring from the yard, at other times drawing near to it. At last a step was heard on the rubbish heap above them; then a blow resounded on their covering, as if with the butt-end of a musket. This was followed by a shout, a clamour of voices, and a hasty clearing ...
— The Fugitives - The Tyrant Queen of Madagascar • R.M. Ballantyne
... asked in ever-growing bitterness, till so-called altruism became to him a mockery; and he took a painful delight in twisting his wisdom into the most fantastic forms, which he also made the sport and butt of formal logic; knowing always, in his own heart, the evil that was wrought in him by those bitter reflections that formed the refuge of his idle hours. Ah! Had Nathalie ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... and while her breath seemed to choke her, Adelle saw the man in the glare of the flame pull himself up, inch by inch, until his head was level with the glass, butt his head against the heavy pane, and with a final heave disappear within while a black smudge of smoke poured from ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... say, in the witty words of one of Cibber's comedies, "There is no arguing with Johnson, for when his pistol misses fire, he knocks you down with the butt end of it." ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... The castle he identified as the cottage where he and Jenny had spent the summer; the bleary-eyed old peacock was the chicken he had dosed with cayenne pepper, hoping to cure its rheumatism; the pool with the white threads for sunlight was the water-butt into which Tom had fallen from the tiles—"those are the hairs out of his own old tail." The nymphs were Laura, Maggie, Emily, &c. Mike asked Lady Helen to come into the dancing-room, but she did not appear to hear, and her ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... the principal mark or butt; the most conspicuous, owing to his being in advance of his men, and perhaps on account of his stature also, if "eg ...
— Y Gododin - A Poem on the Battle of Cattraeth • Aneurin
... watched him with inward amusement, yet fully understanding the woodman's love for a perfect weapon. As an ordinary man would lift a child's airgun, the giant tossed the rifle to a firing position, snuggled the butt against his shoulder, and leaned his gray-bearded cheek on it affectionately. Finally he lowered it regretfully to the ground, and remarked, with the suggestion of a sigh, "This hyar shor' air a mighty purty weepon, doctor. I reckon she'll ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson
... But just as they were getting near to Tom, he awoke and sat up. Bang went his rifle at once, as he saw his danger. One fox fell dead, but the others came on with a rush, and there was soon a lively fight. Tom laid about him with the butt end of his rifle, and, being a strong young fellow, dead and dying foxes were soon lying ...
— Crusoes of the Frozen North • Gordon Stables
... my life hung that I often marvel that I escaped so easily. Had not the rifle of the leader of the party swung from its fastenings beside his saddle in such a way as to strike against the butt of his great metal-shod spear I should have snuffed out without ever knowing that death was near me. But the little sound caused me to turn, and there upon me, not ten feet from my breast, was the point of that ...
— A Princess of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... me. Have you seen that African gazelle out in the animal top? The one with the eyes so close together and the long white nose? Well, that's how Colonel Grand looks to me. I've always hated that horrid deer, David. I see it in my dreams, over and over again, and it is always trying to butt me in the face with that awful white nose. Isn't it odd that I should dream ...
— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon
... one club after the other, with both hands, close to his ear; then he examined their butt-ends under the electric light. I saw what he suspected now, and caught the contagion of his suppressed excitement. Neither of us spoke. But Raffles had taken out the portable tool-box that he called a knife, and always carried, and as he opened the gimlet he handed me the club he held. Instinctively ...
— Raffles - Further Adventures of the Amateur Cracksman • E. W. Hornung
... and in the excitement of talking for victory, he would use any device that came to hand. "There is no arguing with Johnson," said Goldsmith, quoting a phrase from Cibber, "for if his pistol misses fire, he knocks you down with the butt-end of it." ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... staff officers, as from drummers and trumpeters, she was accustomed to flattery and wooing, luscious as sugared chocolate, and ardent as flirtation, with a barrack flavor about it, commonly is; she would, as often as not, to be sure, finish it with the butt-end of her pistol, or the butt-end of some bit of stinging sarcasm, but still, for all that, she liked it, and resented its omission. "They say you are English, but I don't believe it; you speak too soft, and you sound the double ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... on the edge of the curb where he had evidently posted himself in distinct refusal to come any farther. In vain his master,—for the well-dressed man before me was no less a personage than the whilom butt of all the boys between the Capitol and the Treasury building,—signaled and commanded him to cross to his side; nothing could induce the mastiff to budge from that quarter of the street ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... through the counter into a little dingy room behind the shop, looking out on a yard a few feet square, with a water butt, half a dozen flower pots, and a maimed plaster Cupid perched on the windowsill. There sat the schoolmaster, in conversation with a lady, whom the woman of the house, awed by her sternness and grandeur, had, out of regard to her lodger's feelings, shown into her ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... other, and dropped the butt of his rifle to the ground. "You sure did startle me. You're one of those boys staying ...
— Ruth Fielding on Cliff Island - The Old Hunter's Treasure Box • Alice Emerson
... a man of action, not given to reflections, not imaginative, essentially simple in what he thought and did. What he did was to dismount and doff his helmet. Next, with the butt of his spear, he battered out the cognizance on his shield till no fesse dancettee rippled there. "I will bear you next when I have won you," said he to the maimed arm. Bare-headed then he knelt before the form in the ...
— The Forest Lovers • Maurice Hewlett
... pervades most of his love-songs. And so he uses it as a veil for his chagrin, preferring to laugh and have the world laugh with him, rather than to weep alone. But the incident in Heine's life which probably more than any other experience fostered this habit of making himself the butt of his witty irony was his outward renunciation of Judaism. Little need be said concerning this, since the details are so well known. He himself confesses that the step was taken from the lowest motives, for which he justly hated and ...
— Types of Weltschmerz in German Poetry • Wilhelm Alfred Braun
... "Butt in there, me lads," vociferated Coke, who had accounted for one of the Brazilians with an ax. "Step lively! Now we've got some uniforms an' guns, we can ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... your uncle Red get under the influence of strong drink? DID he? Oh my! Oh MY! I wish I could make it clear to you. The vigilantes put after a horse thief once in Montana, and they landed on him in a butt-end canon, and there was all the stock with the brands on 'em as big as a patent medicine sign, as the lad hadn't had time ...
— Red Saunders • Henry Wallace Phillips
... a failure greater. Few its end regret. Surely not the Waiter. He his finger had In the pie—or gravy. Did he? Well, 'tis sad. He must cry "Peccavi!" But whoever mixed, Or whoever boiled it, Our opinion's fixed, He, or they, quite spoiled it. 'Tis the general scoff, Butt of chaff and rudeness. Irish Stew ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, March 15, 1890 • Various
... gaed butt the hoose, Aye steekin' door and door. Three hours gaed by or her mother heard Her fit ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... The butt or target used in archery at Solvamhall was not marked out in concentric rings as at the present day, but was prepared in fanciful designs. In the illustration is shown a numbered target prepared by Sir Hugh himself. ...
— The Canterbury Puzzles - And Other Curious Problems • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... confound it! they were the convictions of England, after all—met with scurrilous derision; and here Master Randall nursed a dull and inarticulate resentment in a world out of joint, where the winning side was a butt for epigrams. To win, and be laughed at! To have the account reopened in lampoons and witticisms, contemptible but irritating, when it should be closed by the mere act of winning! It puzzled him, and he brooded ...
— Hetty Wesley • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... transcontinental Siberian railway. When you take "The Flying Scotchman" from London to Edinburgh you ride in a Pullman car, with all the appurtenances, even to a Gould coupler, a Westinghouse air-brake, and a dusky George from North Carolina, who will hit you three times with the butt of a brush-broom and expect a bob as recompense. You feel ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... gunner got rattled. The shell consisted of three parts, a conical head with smaller cylinderical base, a cap to fit, that base loosely and a ring of lead that connected the head and base. When fired the cap at butt was thrown forward on the cylinderical base of the cone, expanding the lead ring into the grooves of the rifle, the cone exploding by percussion cap on striking. It was the most accurate field piece of that date. Our smooth bore ...
— A History of Lumsden's Battery, C.S.A. • George Little
... just going to ask of what use weapons could be, situated as we were, when I saw Deschamps with a sudden movement jump up from her bed, her eyes blazing. With an involuntary cry in my throat I hammered the glass in front of us with the butt of my revolver, but it was at least an inch thick, and did not even splinter. Sir Cyril sprang from the ledge instantly. Meanwhile Rosa, the change of whose features showed that she divined the shameful trick played upon her, stood up, half-indignant, half-terrified. Deschamps was ...
— The Ghost - A Modern Fantasy • Arnold Bennett
... to come back. After a moment's hesitation, he let go his sheet and began to paddle back. This bolsa was nothing but a bundle of tule, or bullrush, bound together with grass-ropes in the shape of a cigar, about ten feet long and about two feet through the butt. With these the California Indiana cross streams of considerable size. When he came ashore, I gave him a good overhauling for attempting to desert, and put him to work getting breakfast. In due time we returned him to his ship, the Ohio. Subsequently, I made a bargain with Mr. Hartnell ...
— The Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman, Complete • William T. Sherman
... bundle, and then I would await a favourable opportunity and take my departure, for at the worst it seemed certain I should be safe from pursuit. Mr. and Mrs. Turton would be thankful enough to get me off their hands, although Augustus might miss me as his butt. ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... doing? He had turned half round in the saddle; something touched her hair—the butt of his carbine. "I beg your pardon!" said Captain Jack. "I ...
— Rita • Laura E. Richards
... to Mr. Beddoes, and partaking largely of his well-known eccentricity and genius, called Death's Jest-Book or the Fool's Tragedy. A republication of Mr. Cottle's twenty-four books of Alfred, though the old pleasant butt and "jest-book" of his ancient friend Charles Lamb, is said hardly to deserve even so many words of mention. Nor is there much novelty in A Selection from the Poems and Dramatic Works of Theodore Korner, though ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... and her own brother bearing his part as naturally as the rest. She was more scandalised than ever to-day, for it absolutely seemed to her that they were all treating Captain Evelyn, long moustache and all, like a mere family butt, certainly worse than they would have treated one of her own brothers, for Rob would have sulked, and Joe, or any of the younger ones, might have been dangerous, whereas this distinguished-looking personage bore all as angelically as befitted one ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... sharp teeth, at work on the small trees,—then soon the falling of the trees,—then the rustling and tugging of the creatures, in getting the fallen trees out of the water,—and, finally, the surging and splashing with which they came swimming towards the ground-work of the dam, with the butt end of those trees in their mouths. The line of the dam they had begun, passed with a curve up stream in the middle, so as to give it more strength to resist the current; across the low-water bed of the river some five rods; and extended up over the first low bank, about as much farther, to a second ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... my boldness," said Mr. Seabright, tremblingly, "but you have a totally wrong conception of my disposition I fear, Mr. Stranger. You can get the full benefit of my services with only the butt end of that thing pointing my way, instead of the occasional shifting of ...
— The Hindered Hand - or, The Reign of the Repressionist • Sutton E. Griggs
... the pickles to me this morning, and I took one mouthful, and like to had the lockjaw. But Ma didn't do it on purpose, I guess. She never had the mumps and didn't know how discouraging a pickle is. Darn if I didn't feel as though I had been struck in the butt of the ear with a brick. But about Pa. He has been fuller'n a goose ever since New Year's day. I think its wrong for women to tempt feeble minded persons with liquor on New Year's. Now me and my chum, we can take a drink and then let it alone. ...
— Peck's Compendium of Fun • George W. Peck
... I got from a pistol butt (Lucky my head's not a hazel nut); The horse they raced, and scudded and swore; There were Leicestershire gantlemen, seventy score; Up came the "Lobsters," covered with steel— Down we went with a stagger and reel; Smash at the ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 8 • Various
... will say of us, In life or death our fame will never end. Consent, dear sister; for thy father strike, Strike for thy brother, rescue me from woe, Redeem thyself. Those who are nobly born Honour forbids to live the butt of scorn. ...
— Specimens of Greek Tragedy - Aeschylus and Sophocles • Goldwin Smith
... again as he reached the Indian's side. The Indian stopped and drew a knife. "You would, eh? Take that, will you?" Leaning down over his horse's neck Cameron struck the Indian with the butt of his gun. Before he could rise the three constables in a converging rush were upon ...
— The Patrol of the Sun Dance Trail • Ralph Connor
... intelligence contenting themselves with a perpetual routine of small-talk and genteel insularity, and he wondered how it was that a race so gifted with the blessed quality of humour could evolve a state of society offering such a butt ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... mother begged me to come with her, and I went. The phaeton was waiting, but we had scarcely started when some fellow seized the horses' heads, and a couple of ruffians attacked us. One of them I beat over the head with the butt of the whip, so that he dropped the cudgel with which he was about to strike me; then lashing the horse, I shook off the others and got safely away. I cannot imagine who they were or ...
— Rodney Stone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... egret and the diamond brooch to hold the egret in its place—his jeweled sabre—his swaggering, almost ruffianly air—were no more meant to escape attention than his charger that clattered and kicked among the crowd, or his following, who cleared a way for him with the butt ends of their lances. He rode ahead, but every other minute a mounted sepoy would reach out past him and drive his lance-end into the ribs of some one in ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy
... tory camp-meeting not far distant, Marion despatched the brave captain Snipes with a party to chastise them. They had scarcely got upon the tory cruising-ground, before, at a short turn in the road, they came full butt upon a large body of horsemen. Supposing them to be tories, Snipes instantly gave the word to charge; himself leading the way with his usual impetuosity. The supposed tories, wheeling about, took to the sands, and went off, as hard as their horses could stave; and thus, crack and crack, ...
— The Life of General Francis Marion • Mason Locke Weems
... had passed by. As he checked the onward rush of his horse at the far end of the course, he heard faintly in the dim hollow recess of the helm the loud shout and the clapping of hands of those who looked on, and found himself gripping with nervous intensity the butt of a broken spear, his mouth clammy with excitement, and his heart ...
— Men of Iron • Ernie Howard Pyle
... Tomalin that she spoke, and on behalf of May's possible children. Dymchurch, looking back into years long before he was born, saw a beautiful maiden of humble birth loyally wooed and wedded by a romantic artist, son of a proud baronet. Of course she became the butt of calumny, which found its chief support in the fact that the young artist had sculptured her portrait, and indiscreetly shown it to friends, before their marriage. Hearing these slanderous rumours, she wished all the work ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... whilst the majority hurried to the forest belt, miles away on the mountain side, to fell the straightest and tallest trees. Then 50 or 100 men, (for in that day horses and oxen were known only as wild beasts of the wilderness,) attached hawsers to the butt ends of logs, and dragged them away through bush and brake, through broken ground and river beds, till they deposited them on the site of the new church. The wild, monotonous chant, as the men hauled in the timber, lives in the memories of the missionaries' children, who say that ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... bolt, while a second bar has no longitudinal motion, but prevents the cartridges from moving to the rear in the magazine tube after they have been moved forward by the other bar. The magazine is loaded through an aperture in the butt plate, the opening of the spring cover of which causes the two ratchet bars to be depressed, so that the magazine can be filled by passing the cartridges along a smooth middle bar. The act of closing the spring cover again brings the two ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 601, July 9, 1887 • Various
... are accustomed to its strong smoaky tang; yet is it much used in some of the Western Parts of England, and many thousand Quarters of this Malt has been formerly used in London for brewing the Butt-keeping-beers with, and that because it sold for two Shillings per Quarter cheaper than the Straw-dryed Malt, nor was this Quality of the Wood-dryed Malt much regarded by some of its Brewers, for that its ill Taste is lost ...
— The London and Country Brewer • Anonymous
... suddenly became angry. He jammed his own cigarette butt into the ash tray, turned toward Spanding, and snapped: "Harry, just for the sake of argument, let's suppose that Bossard wasn't actually guilty. Let's suppose that the Constitution of the United States is really true—that a man isn't guilty until ...
— Hail to the Chief • Gordon Randall Garrett
... late. Dick saw Albert struggling in the grasp of two big warriors, and then saw and heard nothing more. He had received a heavy blow on the head from the butt of a rifle ...
— The Last of the Chiefs - A Story of the Great Sioux War • Joseph Altsheler
... the land! Why the barefooted band It just nailed up that door: and the very next day, With master for Cap'en, went marchin' away; And Bally the butt of the whole Wabash band. But he bore with it all, yet once firmly said, "When I get back home, ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 3, January 19, 1884. - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... just time to deflect a sword blade, when he saw a terrific blow aimed at him with the butt of a rifle. He dodged just in time, and, as the stock went whizzing by his ear, he knocked the dealer of the blow flat on his back. In the meantime, Walt and Ralph had been giving good accounts of themselves, and Bob Harding had succeeded ...
— The Border Boys Across the Frontier • Fremont B. Deering
... stood up on the wagon seats and shouted at the stars. Sometimes they fought long and bitterly and at other times they broke forth into songs. Once Enoch Bentley, the older one of the boys, struck his father, old Tom Bentley, with the butt of a teamster's whip, and the old man seemed likely to die. For days Enoch lay hid in the straw in the loft of the stable ready to flee if the result of his momentary passion turned out to be murder. He ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... hammered hand to his forehead courteously, and as lightly as if the hammer had been the butt-end of a whip. ...
— The Seaboard Parish Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... eight shots scattering through the trees in the direction in which Tudor had disappeared. Wishing he had a shot-gun, Sheldon dropped to the ground behind a tree, slipped a fresh clip up the hollow butt of the pistol, threw a cartridge into the chamber, shoved the safety catch into place, and ...
— Adventure • Jack London
... universally admired. The Arab poet sings of the beauties of his camel. The bull, the cow, the dog, and even the cat have all been praised in prose or verse; but the poor donkey still remains an ass, the butt of ridicule, the symbol of stupidity, the object of abuse. Yet if there be another and a better world for animals, and if in that sphere patience ranks as a cardinal virtue, the ass will have a better pasture-ground than many of its rivals. The donkey's ...
— John L. Stoddard's Lectures, Vol. 10 (of 10) - Southern California; Grand Canon of the Colorado River; Yellowstone National Park • John L. Stoddard
... the vision of "the big boy," the lout—the butt of every one, even of the masters, who, when any little imp did a thing well, always made the appropriate laudation tell to the detriment of the big boy, as if he were bound to be as superfluous in intellect as in flesh. He has sufficiently dinned ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... will come from your anger. Shatter their skulls with blows from your ax and the butt of your musket. These brigands are timid beasts.... They are not men.... May your fist perform the ...
— Fighting France • Stephane Lauzanne
... them—strangers. The boy observed that they were dressed like cowboys, broad brimmed hats, blue shirts and all. From the belt of each was suspended a holster from which protruded the butt ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in Montana • Frank Gee Patchin
... yet I 'm teugh as the wire, Sae we 'll at the rogues have a dash, And, fegs, if my gun winna fire, I 'll turn her butt-end, and I ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel , Volume I. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... the first time, in Odette's eyes. It was after dinner at the Verdurins'. Whether it was because Forcheville, aware that Saniette, his brother-in-law, was not in favour with them, had decided to make a butt of him, and to shine at his expense, or because he had been annoyed by some awkward remark which Saniette had made to him, although it had passed unnoticed by the rest of the party who knew nothing of whatever tactless allusion it might conceal, or possibly because he had been for some time looking ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... array which met his eyes. Every one of the Dutchmen had got his musket to an order, following a sort of fugleman of their own; while Mike had invented a "motion" that would have puzzled any one but himself to account for. The butt of the piece was projected towards the captain, quite out of line, while the barrel rested on his own shoulder. Still, as his arms were extended to the utmost, the county Leitrim-man fancied he was performing much better than common. Jamie had correct notions of the perpendicular, from having used ...
— Wyandotte • James Fenimore Cooper
... ca'm, little one. You people got the rush-bug worsen some full-size cities aintyer? Butt out and gimme a chanst. Hello! ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... ye rebel knaves—what make you there beneath?' 'The bays, the bays! we want the bays! we seek the laureate wreath! We seek the butt of generous wine that cheers the sons of song; Choose thou among us all, Sir Knight—we ...
— The Bon Gaultier Ballads • William Edmonstoune Aytoun
... by degrees deprived me of my natural gaiety. One day when the king was with me, he perceived my want of spirits. "What ails you?" said be, with the greatest solicitude. "What ails me!" replied I, "I wish I were dead, rather than see myself the butt of all the scandal of the foul-mouthed gossips of your court." The king, suspecting the confidence I was about to repose in him, was sorry he had asked for it, and was silent. He began to play a tattoo with ...
— "Written by Herself" • Baron Etienne Leon Lamothe-Langon
... silence; yet Lite reached back and laid his fingers upon the smooth butt of his six-shooter and opened the door with his left hand, which was more or less awkward. He pushed the door open and stepped inside. Then for a full minute he ...
— Jean of the Lazy A • B. M. Bower
... butting our heads together. Very well, said the Ghoul, only wait a little until I can make me a pair of horns like you. So the goat waited, and away went the Ghoul to make her horns. She made two horns of dough and dried them in the sun until they were hard, and then came to "butt" with the goat. At the first shock, when the goat butted her with her horns, the horns of dough broke all to pieces; then the goat butted her again in her bowels and broke her in twain, and out jumped Sunaisil ...
— The Women of the Arabs • Henry Harris Jessup
... ye, where didst thou purchase that rich Canary we drank to-day? Tell me, that I may adore the Spigot, and sacrifice to the Butt: the Juice was divine, into which I must dip my Rosary, and then bless all things that I would have ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... and an old lady ran up with a door-mat. Carpenters arrived with a water-butt, and the painters ...
— Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens • J. M. Barrie
... to his audience, but his audience had fled. From beneath one of the life-boats protruded the riding-boots of Colonel Beamish, the tall form of Lighthouse Harry was doubled behind a water butt. A shell splashed to port, a shell splashed to starboard. For an instant David stood staring wide-eyed at the greyhound of a boat that ate up the distance between them, at the jets of smoke and stabs of flame that sprang from her bow, at the figures crouched ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis
... mirth by being ridiculous in person, age, and attire. He is represented as grey-haired, hump-backed, lame and hideously ugly. In fact, he is a species of buffoon, who is allowed full liberty of speech, being himself a universal butt. His attempts at wit, which are rarely very successful, and his allusions to the pleasures of the table, of which he is a confessed votary, are absurdly contrasted with the sententious solemnity of the despairing ...
— Tales from the Hindu Dramatists • R. N. Dutta
... the rain still fell and the wind still blew; but we found a double-bedded room with plenty of furniture, real water- jugs with real water in them, and dinner: a real dinner, not innocent of real wine. After having been a pedlar for one night, and a butt for the elements during the whole of the next day, these comfortable circumstances fell on my heart like sunshine. There was an English fruiterer at dinner, travelling with a Belgian fruiterer; in the ...
— An Inland Voyage • Robert Louis Stevenson
... our line. But by this I had leapt to my feet; and it was time, for he was almost on me. Spear had I none; so I dragged out the standard shaft from the ground where I had struck it, and levelled that sharp butt end full at his chest. Overhead was his axe again, and I had no shield to stop the blow; but I must ...
— A Thane of Wessex • Charles W. Whistler
... little silver pencil-cases with a movable almanac at the butt-end are still favorite implements with boys, and whether pedlers still hawk them about the country? Are there pedlers and hawkers still, or are rustics and children grown too sharp to deal with them? Those pencil-cases, as far as my memory serves me, were not of much use. The screw, upon which ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... his little pony's flank. With a neigh of pain the animal leaped forward. For a moment there was a tangle of striking hoofs and wriggling coils of the foiled reptile, while Charley leaning over in his saddle struck with the butt-end of his riding whip at the writhing coils. Though it seemed an eternity to the helpless watchers it was really only a few seconds ere the pony sprang away from its loathsome enemy and Charley with difficulty reined ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... of this returned with a good supply of grain. The sepoys won't come; they say they cannot,—a mere excuse, v because they tried to prevail on the Nassick boys to go slowly like them, and wear my patience out. They killed one camel with the butt ends of their muskets, beating it till it died. I thought of going down disarming them all, and taking five or six of the willing ones, but it is more trouble than profit, so I propose to start westwards on Monday the 4th, or Tuesday the 5th. My sepoys offered Ali eight rupees to take them to the ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume I (of 2), 1866-1868 • David Livingstone
... Sui passed, while two pairs of eyes from two leafy trees watched closely every instant of his passing, and one man's hand dropped unconsciously to the butt ...
— The Passing of Ku Sui • Anthony Gilmore
... moor and the site of the old fair, a farmer said to him, "I well remember the train of pack-horses and the effect of their jingling bells on the silence of Dartmoor. My grandfather, a respectable farmer in the north of Devon, was the first to use a 'butt' (a square box without wheels, dragged by a horse) to carry manure to field; he was also the first man in the district to use an umbrella, which on Sundays he hung in the church-porch, an object of curiosity to the villagers." We are also informed ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... round the table, and Moriarty could scarcely conceal the satisfaction he felt as each person read the engraven testimonial of his worth. When it had gone the circuit of the board, Tom Loftus put his hand into his pocket and pulled out the butt-end of a rifle, which is always furnished with a small box, cut out of the solid part of the wood and covered with a plate of brass acting on a hinge. This box, intended to carry small implements for the use of the rifleman, to ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover
... to let her?" protestingly demanded Bohannan. His hand twitched against the butt of the Lewis. "In two seconds I could sight an aft gun, sir, ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... sad feeling prevailed, that she had been overtasked by her father, who wished to train her like a boy, and that she was paying the penalty for undue application, in nearsightedness, awkward manners, extravagant tendencies of thought, and a pedantic style of talk, that made her a butt for the ridicule of frivolous companions. Some seasons later, I call to mind seeing, at the "Commencements" and "Exhibitions" of Harvard University, a girl, plain in appearance, but of dashing air, who was invariably the centre of a listening group, ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... belt and stole forth into the starlight. Yes, there was the sound again—a few notes, a bar or two of the song Pancha was singing at the willows the night before, and close to the edge of the willows crouched the musician. With his hand on the butt of his revolver, Blake strode slowly toward the shrinking form, and, beckoning, it ...
— A Wounded Name • Charles King
... across the stone-paved plaza and threw his mount back on its haunches as he stopped before a house. Glancing around and determining to find out a few facts as soon as possible, he rode up to the low door and pounded upon it with the butt of his Colt. After waiting for possibly half a minute and receiving no response he hammered a tune upon it with two Colts and had the satisfaction of seeing half a score of heads protrude from the windows in the ...
— Hopalong Cassidy's Rustler Round-Up - Bar-20 • Clarence Edward Mulford
... stables, standing gable ends to the north, like so many companies in close column, and at the sixth of these, farthest from the bluff whereon stood the barracks and quarters, they stopped and banged at the door. No answer—even when the sentry came to their aid and hammered with the butt of his carbine. They went round and rattled at the window of the sergeant's room. Still no response, and at their beck the sentry yelled for the corporal-of-the-guard, ...
— Lanier of the Cavalry - or, A Week's Arrest • Charles King
... place where you can't butt in on her," answered the young man with a snarl. "When are you going to turn me loose? Aw, what's the matter with you?" he continued, assuming an air of good- fellowship. "I never did anything to you. Why can't you let me go, and say ...
— Boy Scouts in a Submarine • G. Harvey Ralphson
... twenty charged upon the beast. Another of the combatants was killed and half devoured by the hungry monster before a fortunate bullet struck him in the head. But even then the bear maintained his grip upon his two victims, and it was not until his brains were fairly beaten out with the butt end of a snaphance by the boldest of the party that they were enabled to secure the bodies of their comrades and give them a hurried kind of Christian burial. They flayed the bear and took away his hide with them, and this, together with an ample supply of the diamonds ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... three successive evenings we had a jolly time in the old sheep pasture taking our lessons from this most remarkable "hired man." We had to let Mr. Harding into the secret the second evening, but he promised not to "butt in" to our class, so he and Bishop sat on a side hill and smoked and laughed and seemed to enjoy ...
— John Henry Smith - A Humorous Romance of Outdoor Life • Frederick Upham Adams
... they examined the water-butt. It was new, and very solidly constructed for its office. If anything had been wanting to decide them, this eminently practical barrel would have turned the scale. A bargain was promptly struck, the month's rent was paid upon the nail, ...
— The Wrong Box • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... anything about that, Miss Guion. It seems to me I'm not called upon to know. Where we see things going crooked we must butt in and help to straighten them. Even when we've done that to the best of our powers, I guess there'll still be punishment enough to go round. Outside the law-courts, that's something we ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... fact, we found terrible proofs of the enemy's presence. After taking possession of the towns and villages, they had arrested the inhabitants, maltreated them with saber-strokes and the butt ends of their guns, stripping them of their clothing, and compelling those to follow them whom they thought capable of serving as guides on their march; and if they were not guided as they expected they killed with ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... and Difficulty, reach'd into the Ring and Centre of that mix'd Multitude. But how did I blush? with what Confusion did I appear? when I found one of my own Countrymen, a drunken Granadier, the attractive Loadstone of all that high and low Mob, and the Butt of all their Merriment? It will be easily imagin'd to be a Thing not a little surprizing to one of our Country, to find that a drunken Man should be such a wonderful Sight; However, the witty Sarcasms that were then by high and low thrown upon that senseless Creature, and as I interpreted ...
— Military Memoirs of Capt. George Carleton • Daniel Defoe
... thatdo for a BAThrooM wallpaper? it could be produced verery cheaply and itcould be calld the CHER RYdesigN damn, imeant to put all that in capitals. iam afraid this articleis spoilt now but butt bUt curse . But perhaps the most excitingthing aLout this macLine is that you can by presssing alittle switch suddenly writein redor green instead of in black; I donvt understanh how Lt is done butit is very jollY? busisisness men us ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 28th, 1920 • Various
... mistakes is that of imagining that brusqueness and pertness are wit. There is no other error more common with girls from fifteen to eighteen; they generally choose a boy as the butt of their sarcastic remarks—and, to their shame be it said, they frequently select a lad who is too ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... victory has decided in favour of one of his sons, the conqueror visits the hut in which his father's body lies in state. He approaches the corpse, and standing by its side, he sticks the butt-end of his spear in the ground, and leaves it thus fixed near the right hand of the dead king. This is ...
— Ismailia • Samuel W. Baker
... they cut, And all of them good size; With a five mile long water-butt, "In which to float," Tom cries, And "Time," they said—"flies! ...
— Sugar and Spice • James Johnson
... and spontaneous humour, and "the kindest heart in the world." His friends included some of the best and greatest men in England, among them Johnson, Burke, and Reynolds. They all, doubtless, laughed at and made a butt of him, but they all admired and loved him. At the news of his death Burke burst into tears, Reynolds laid down his brush and painted no more that day, and Johnson wrote an imperishable epitaph on ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... for a space of seconds, while I wondered what I'd do if he didn't. Then, slowly, he unbuckled the straps and handed it to me, butt first. ...
— The Planet Savers • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... him beside a good fire, and turned into the southwest to burn Langlois and his cabin. The red flag still floated where he had seen it weeks before. The windows were thicker with frost. He shouted, beat upon the door with the butt of his rifle and broke in the windows. The silence of death quickened the beating of his heart when he stopped to listen. There was no doubt that Langlois lay ...
— The Honor of the Big Snows • James Oliver Curwood
... well-grown ones too—leaped up upon one of our negroes, who stood sentinel, before he saw him, at which he was heartily frighted, cried out, and ran into the tent. Our other man, who had a gun, had not presence of mind at first to shoot him, but struck him with the butt-end of his piece, which made him whine a little, and then growl at him fearfully; but the fellow retired, and, we being all alarmed, three of our men snatched up their guns, ran to the tent door, where they saw the great old lion by ...
— The Life, Adventures & Piracies of the Famous Captain Singleton • Daniel Defoe
... especially after the money had been restored, continued to believe that he had, for a short while, been the butt of Richard's sense of humor, whereas Richard, on his side, was convinced that Moncharmin had amused himself by inventing the whole of the affair of the Opera ghost, in order to revenge himself ...
— The Phantom of the Opera • Gaston Leroux
... that every man of the desert riders was resting a careless hand on the butt of his revolver. At the same time Hi observed something else in the opposite direction. Grace Harlowe and Elfreda Briggs had stepped up close to the water hole and each was standing with ...
— Grace Harlowe's Overland Riders on the Great American Desert • Jessie Graham Flower
... preliminary flourishes; and in the excitement of talking for victory, he would use any device that came to hand. "There is no arguing with Johnson," said Goldsmith, quoting a phrase from Cibber, "for if his pistol misses fire, he knocks you down with the butt-end of it." ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... ... I told you, didn't I? ... was at Cambridge with us. He came down a year before we did. As a matter of fact, he was sent down and told to stay down. He ducked a proctor in a water-butt and the dons were very cross about it. He's not a bad fellow. I think we'll ask him round here one evening. Lady Cecily's very fond of him ... she used to come up to Cambridge to see him ... before the affair with the proctor, of course ... and Gilbert and I ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... of the camp was Tom Cain, a raw Irishman, who officiated as cook, whose various blunders and expedients in his novel situation, and in the wild scenes and wild kind of life into which he had suddenly been thrown, had made him a kind of butt or droll of the camp. Tom, however, began to discover an ambition superior to his station; and the conversation of the hunters, and their stories of their exploits, inspired him with a desire to elevate himself to the dignity of their order. The buffalo in such ...
— The Adventures of Captain Bonneville - Digested From His Journal • Washington Irving
... well," Mr. Cupples replied sadly. "In fact, far from well. I can tell you almost exactly what he said—it wasn't much. He said, 'See here, Cupples, you don't want to butt in. My wife can look after herself. I've found that out, along with other things.' He was perfectly quiet—you know he was said never to lose control of himself—though there was a light in his eyes that would have frightened ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley
... the name "Butts" refers to the fact of the land, under the common-field system, abutting on meadows or roads, e.g. "Butt-close," in the ...
— English Villages • P. H. Ditchfield
... have restrained him, but it was too late; he was gone before either could speak. Then a latch creaked and snapped behind them and, slowly and cautiously, the wooden shutter began to open outward. In an instant Harvey had raised his rifle and struck the resounding board a fierce blow with the butt. The door flew back, crashing in violent contact against the grizzled pate of Moreno himself, who, with a howl of mingled rage and anguish, fell ...
— Foes in Ambush • Charles King
... feeling prevailed, that she had been overtasked by her father, who wished to train her like a boy, and that she was paying the penalty for undue application, in nearsightedness, awkward manners, extravagant tendencies of thought, and a pedantic style of talk, that made her a butt for the ridicule of frivolous companions. Some seasons later, I call to mind seeing, at the "Commencements" and "Exhibitions" of Harvard University, a girl, plain in appearance, but of dashing air, who was invariably the centre of a listening group, and kept their merry interest alive ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... peculiar features. Two minor chiefs came to where I was sitting and sat down. About twenty men then approached and drove their spears into the ground in a circle with the butts all leaning inwards. Many of the spears had a small piece broken off at the butt end. From these spears were then hung clubs, spears and shields, and native masks and fighting ornaments. An old chief then said they had given me their arms. Next they placed cloth, fishing nets and spears and other native ornaments inside the circle, and the same old chief ...
— Wanderings Among South Sea Savages And in Borneo and the Philippines • H. Wilfrid Walker
... sheep, not mine; <"Pastor est tui Dominus."> You find In this the pleasant pasture of our life Much you may eat without the least offence, Much you don't eat because your maw objects, 880 Much you would eat but that your fellow-flock Open great eyes at you and even butt, And thereupon you like your mates so well You cannot please yourself, offending them; Though when they seem exorbitantly sheep, You weigh your pleasure with their butts and bleats And strike the balance. Sometimes certain fears Restrain you, ...
— Men and Women • Robert Browning
... in hand, making a tomb for his body of his enemies on the field of battle, than to be hated of his own and poniarded by the hands of his nearest and dearest, or to die of poison or of drowning in a wine-butt." ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... through the gravel, which shot up all round, and then the end of the bank seemed to fall away. There was a shower of stones; the butt of the log went down and its after end tilted up. Then it lurched out of sight and there was a heavy crash below. After this Festing heard a confused din, and imagined, though he could not see, the mass of timber plunging down the precipitous slope, smashing rocks and scattering gravel ...
— The Girl From Keller's - Sadie's Conquest • Harold Bindloss
... treading the path that leads to it. 'Voluntariness in treading the path that leads to it, and if so, there could have been no divine ordination of the end.' Not so! When human thought comes, if I may so say, full butt against a stark, staring contradiction like that, it is no proof that either of the propositions is false. It is only like the sign-boards that the iceman puts upon the thin ice, 'dangerous!' a warning that that is not a place for us to tread. We have to keep ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... their sharp teeth, at work on the small trees,—then soon the falling of the trees,—then the rustling and tugging of the creatures, in getting the fallen trees out of the water,—and, finally, the surging and splashing with which they came swimming towards the ground-work of the dam, with the butt end of those trees in their mouths. The line of the dam they had begun, passed with a curve up stream in the middle, so as to give it more strength to resist the current; across the low-water bed of the river some five rods; and extended up over ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... the things he carried in a closet partly filled with rubbish. Then he flashed his light around carefully. Adam Adams got down out of sight and placed his hand on the butt of his pistol. He was resolved to take no more risks ...
— The Mansion of Mystery - Being a Certain Case of Importance, Taken from the Note-book of Adam Adams, Investigator and Detective • Chester K. Steele
... 4.5 hows.; and special instruction in musketry and Lewis-gun manipulation was given by infantry instructors. There was memorable jubilation one morning at our Brigade Headquarters, when one of the orderlies, a Manchester man who fired with his left hand, and held the rifle-butt to his left shoulder, beat the infantry crack shot who came to instruct the ...
— Pushed and the Return Push • George Herbert Fosdike Nichols, (AKA Quex)
... would not let him do it. Mr. Black then attempted to strike Champion with the breech of his gun, but Champion kicked him down, and as he drew his knife to stab Mr. Black, Mr. Turner, the overseer, struck him on the back of his head with the butt of a loaded whip. This stunned him for a few moments, and by the time he had regained his senses ...
— My Life In The South • Jacob Stroyer
... these ejaculations the inmate of the chamber was heard drawing back a table, then the butt of a gun sounded upon the floor, and ...
— The Youth of Jefferson - A Chronicle of College Scrapes at Williamsburg, in Virginia, A.D. 1764 • Anonymous
... not returned and the time hung heavily on his hands, he crept out and up the hill towards the Red Hand. He prowled about amongst the old tips for a time, then seated himself at the foot of a dead butt and gave himself up to thought. He began to fear that Peterson would prove unfaithful, or, worse still, that he had fallen into the hands of the enemy; and the idea made him very uneasy. He hesitated about returning ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... the battle of Welcome and of Tagliacozzo, (which you might almost English in the real meaning of it as the battle of Hart's Death: 'cozzo' is a butt or thrust with the horn, and you may well think of the young Conradin as a wild hart or stag of the hills)—between those two battles, in 1266, comes the second and central revolt of the trades in Florence, of which I have to speak in ...
— Val d'Arno • John Ruskin
... patently strong—strong enough to excuse any disheartenment. Scarcely a window pierced its narrow butt-end, four stories high, under which the steps wound. It ended just where they met the towpath, and from its angle sprang a brick wall dead-blank, at least twelve feet high, which ran for eighty or ninety yards along the straight line of the path. Across ...
— True Tilda • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... quite near to the disabled vessel, and anchored. This act of neighbourly kindness was too unequivocal to require explanation. It was the intention of the Vineyard men to lie by their consort until she was relieved from all apprehensions of danger. The 'butt-end' of the 'nor'-wester' was too large to admit of intercourse until next morning, when that which had been a small gale had dwindled to a good steady breeze, and the seas had gone down, leaving comparatively ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper
... pistol in his hand. He went noisily, muttering oaths, feeling that something was wrong but not being able to divine exactly what. Marteau heard him coming. He put the candle down, concealed himself and, as the man came, struck him heavily over the head with the butt of his remaining pistol. He fell like a log. Leaving the candle where it was, the young officer, dispossessing his victim of his pistols, entered the hall and, instead of entering the great room by the door by which he had left it, ran along the hall to the main entrance ...
— The Eagle of the Empire - A Story of Waterloo • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... red wine he really looked as though murdered. Both the flunkeys wanted to throw themselves on the murderer, and one of them, a burly fellow, tried to grasp him, when M. Coignard gave the fellow such a butt that he rolled in the ...
— The Queen Pedauque • Anatole France
... sitting; PARNELL predominant; issues getting a little mixed; understood that Session summoned to decide whether, in view of certain proceedings before Mr. Justice BUTT, PARNELL should be permitted to retain Leadership. Everything been discussed but that. Things got so muddled up, that O'KEEFE, walking about, bowed with anxious thought, not quite certain whether it is TIM HEALY, SEXTON, or JUSTIN McCARTHY, who was involved in recent Divorce ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., December 13, 1890 • Various
... detective proved no mean adversary, and he might have conquered had not a third party appeared upon the scene, who at once went to the assistance of Barkswell, and by beating Keene over the head with the butt of a revolver he succeeded in quieting him so that he could ...
— Five Thousand Dollars Reward • Frank Pinkerton
... Your Imperial Majesty," General Dorflay said, bowing the couple of inches consistent with military dignity. The Thoran captain saluted by touching his forehead, his heart, which was on the right side, and the butt of his pistol. Paul complimented him on the smart appearance of his detail, and the captain asked how it could be otherwise, with the example and inspiration of his imperial majesty. Compliment and response could have been a playback from every morning of the ...
— Ministry of Disturbance • Henry Beam Piper
... ran half a mile from their heads. The country is rent with deep chasms, made still deeper by vast torrents that pour down them during times of heavy rains." There were found petrified trees. One of them was 210 feet long and another was over five feet across the butt, this in a land where not a tree or bush was found growing. Holmes fervently observed, "However, I do not know whether it makes any difference whether the country is barren or fruitful, if the Lord has a ...
— Mormon Settlement in Arizona • James H. McClintock
... wore a Sweater, and whose people butt into the Society Column with Sickening Regularity, started to Tackle Low; he had Bushy Hair and a Thick Neck, and his strong Specialty was to swing ...
— Fables in Slang • George Ade
... rifle by the barrel with the muzzle against his shoulder, having aimed the butt at the crouching lion. Chunky had had a severe ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in the Grand Canyon - The Mystery of Bright Angel Gulch • Frank Gee Patchin
... then goes on with his grazing without looking round, leaving the tank for dead, as by all human standards it should have been, of course. But instead of being dead the box of tricks ups and gives the donk another butt and moves on. That roused the mule properly. He closed his eyes and laid into the tank for dear life; you could hear it clanging a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Nov. 14, 1917 • Various
... I had to run hard to get level with it. Here was work indeed, and at that joyous moment I would not have changed places with Jack Dobson. Without ado, I jumped into the river, waded out, recovered the butt of my rod, ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... the upper hand when the thug whom he had thrown over his head recovered. The brute took the situation in at a glance, saw his pal in trouble, and, sneaking treacherously behind Locke, dealt him a terrific blow with the butt of a revolver. Locke dropped to the floor as ...
— The Master Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve and John W. Grey
... hailstorm, but the light foreign pistol which, shot as true as a musket. Weir had learned his trade in Italy, and was a neat craftsman, so I employed him to make me a pistol after my own pattern. The butt was of light, tough wood, and brass-bound, for I did not care to waste money on ornament. The barrel was shorter than the usual, and of the best Spanish metal, and the pan and the lock were set after my own device. Nor was that all, for I became an epicure in the matter of bullets, ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... interest. To the left a large space was devoted to three or four bulky casks, and here an aproned drawer sat astride of a rush-bottomed chair, grinning delightedly and exchanging nods and winks from time to time with an impish, undersized lad who lay on his stomach on a wine-butt with his head ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... worthy alderman during forty years. Staines also built Barbican Chapel, and rebuilt the "Jacob's Well" public-house, noted for dramatic representations. The alderman was an illiterate man, and was a sort of butt amongst his brethren. At one of the Old Bailey dinners, after a sumptuous repast of turtle and venison, Sir William was eating a great quantity of butter with his cheese. "Why, brother," said Wilkes, "you lay it on with a trowel!" A son of Sir William Staines, who worked ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... sake. I almost think that I would do it entirely for her sake, if there were no other reason. But to shame myself by taking that which belongs to another, as though it were my own property! To live a coward in mine own esteem! Though I may be the laughing-stock and the butt of all those around me, I would still be a man to myself. I ought to have felt that it was sufficient when she told me that some of her thoughts must still be given to you. She is yours, Mr Gordon; but I doubt much whether you ...
— An Old Man's Love • Anthony Trollope
... into the raw twilight, and clicking over the wet stones in a pair of pattens that worked innumerable rough impressions of the first proposition in Euclid all about the yard—Mrs. Peerybingle filled the kettle at the water-butt. Presently returning, less the pattens (and a good deal less, for they were tall and Mrs. Peerybingle was but short), she set the kettle on the fire. In doing which she lost her temper, or mislaid it for an instant; for, the water being uncomfortably cold, and in that slippy, slushy, ...
— The Cricket on the Hearth • Charles Dickens
... most diligent searche for your family as you required butt I have not discovered muche that will be to your satisfaction. I send you, Sir, a coppie of certain things sette down in the Parish Register of St. Clement Danes, wch I thoughte most like to be of interest to you. Bye these you will discover that Walter Sanford Browne was born the ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston
... was not nice to look upon, and more than once had he leapt for Leclere's throat, to be stretched quivering and senseless in the snow, by the butt of the ever ready dogwhip. And so Batard learned to bide his time. When he reached his full strength and prime of youth, he thought the time had come. He was broad-chested, powerfully muscled, of far more than ordinary size, ...
— The Faith of Men • Jack London
... 'em. Yer should 'ave been there to see it. They were all round me and two taubes over 'ead watching my movements. Swish! and my bayonet went through the man in front and stabbed the identity disc of another. When I drew the bayonet out the butt of my 'ipe[3] would 'it a man behind me in the tummy. Ugh! 'e would say and flop bringing a mate down with 'im may be. The dead was all round me and I built a parapet of their bodies, puttin' the legs criss-cross and makin' loop 'oles. Then they began to bomb me from the ...
— The Red Horizon • Patrick MacGill
... angry. Others tried in vain. A Southerner named Benham, while deploring passionately the condition of the city which had been seized by a mob, robbed of its sacred rights, etc., happened inadvertently to throw back his coat, thus revealing the butt of a Colt's revolver. The bystanders caught the point ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White
... exclaimed Ikey. He was a Jew, and not ashamed of it, often making himself the butt of the many expressions used against his race. On this account he was more than tolerated—he had many friends out of his own faith. "Such a business!" he went on, using his hands, without which he used to say he could ...
— Andy at Yale - The Great Quadrangle Mystery • Roy Eliot Stokes
... mother stand looking down at the wheelers, that backed and twisted their necks under their yokes. Her lips were set firmly together, and her eyes were bright with purple hollows beneath. She held the rifle for a moment, then set the butt of it on the "jockey box" just in front of the dashboard. The wheelers, helpless between the weight of the wagon behind and the dead oxen in front, might twist their necks off but they could do ...
— Cow-Country • B. M. Bower
... wagged his ears knowingly. Tom Jonah came up to him and they companionably "snuffed noses," as Sammy said. But Billy Bumps had to be kept at a distance, for he showed a marked desire to butt the new member of the Corner House ...
— The Corner House Girls Growing Up - What Happened First, What Came Next. And How It Ended • Grace Brooks Hill
... Naisi and his brothers. LAVARCHAM. We are lonely women. What is it you're wanting in the blackness of the night? NAISI. We met a young girl in the woods who told us we might shelter this place if the rivers rose on the pathways and the floods gathered from the butt of the hills. [Old Woman clasps ...
— Deirdre of the Sorrows • J. M. Synge
... scrambled out on the jam and was clawing out the butt of a log with a rude sort of boat-hook. It slid forward slowly as an alligator moves, three or four others followed it, and the green water spouted through the gaps they had made. Then the villagers howled and shouted and scrambled across the logs, pulling and pushing the obstinate ...
— The Kipling Reader - Selections from the Books of Rudyard Kipling • Rudyard Kipling
... have just as many animals, with the power of locomotion and appearance of snakes, as there were hairs in the bundle. I have raised them one-eighth of an inch in diameter, with perceptible eyes and mouth on the butt end or root part of the hair. Take such a snake and dip it in an alkaline solution, and the flesh or mucus that formed about the hair will dissolve, and the veritable horse hair is left. They will not generate in limestone water, only in freestone ...
— Scientific American, Vol. 17, No. 26 December 28, 1867 • Various
... was a very spirited and strong animal—it reared upwards, and very nearly brought me and my horse to the ground—at that instant, Thornton struck the unfortunate man a violent blow across the head with the butt end of his heavy whip—Sir John's hat had fallen before in the struggle, and the blow was so stunning that it felled him upon the spot. Thornton dismounted, and made me do the same—'There is no time to lose,' said he; 'let us drag him from the ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... received, as upon a mount, to shew the knowledges adjacent and confining. If therefore the true end of knowledge not propounded hath bred large error, the best and perfectest condition of the same end not perceived will cause some declination. For when the butt is set up men need not rove, but except the white be placed men cannot level. This perfection we mean not in the worth of the effect, but in the nature of the direction; for our purpose is not to stir up men's hopes, but to guide their travels. The fullness ...
— Valerius Terminus: of the Interpretation of Nature • Sir Francis Bacon
... on slowly, the young man who had waded ashore, whom his comrades addressed as Kirkwood or Kirk, walking behind the wagon with the dog in his arms, responding to his whimpering claims for attention with teasing caresses. The dog, it seemed, was the butt as well as the pet of the party. As they approached the house he scrambled out of Kirkwood's arms and lingered to take a roll in the sandy path, coming up a moment afterward to be received with blighting sarcasms upon his appearance. After his ignominious ...
— In Exile and Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... Arvanian Embassy. For, in this big sunny kitchen five men lounged about in addition to the white-coated chef and his beardless stripling of an assistant. And each of the five had a holster strapped openly over his coat with the butt of an automatic protruding in ...
— The Radiant Shell • Paul Ernst
... wrath checked her. Stretching one huge, bony hand, as if to close her lips, trembling with rage and pain, livid and convulsed in every feature of his face, Prince Alexis reversed the whip in his right hand, and weighed its thick, heavy butt for one crashing, fatal blow. Life and death were evenly balanced. For an instant the Princess became deadly pale, and a sickening fear shot through her heart. She could not understand the effect of her words: her ...
— Beauty and The Beast, and Tales From Home • Bayard Taylor
... are spoilt by either insufficient curing, or curing by wrong methods, I have asked Mr. Geo. F. Butt, F.Z.S., who was for many years manager to Edwin Ward, whom he has now succeeded, to give me a page or two of useful hints on the preservation of skins. The following notes are what he has kindly placed at my disposal. I know of no one I can more strongly recommend for ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... not been near enough to hear Wamba's directions. At length Brian remarked, what had at first escaped him in the twilight; "Here is some one either asleep, or lying dead at the foot of this cross—Hugo, stir him with the butt-end ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... cut off the foot which had prest down the Armatost, and lopt off the hands which had held the bow and fitted the quarrel, and plucked out the eyes which had taken the mark; and the living trunk was then set up as a butt for the archers. ...
— Chronicle Of The Cid • Various
... in a red cloak was passing a field in which a goat was feeding. What strange transformation suddenly took place?—Answer: The goat turned to butter (butt her), and the woman into ...
— Games For All Occasions • Mary E. Blain
... drenched in pouring rains, she had been frozen with the cold and prostrated with the heat, she had been blown about by Chicago wind until it was strange there was any of her left in one piece, she had had front doors—yes, and back doors too, slammed in her face, she had been the butt of the alleged wit of menials and hirelings, she had been patronised by vapid women as the poor girl who must make her living some way, she had been roasted by—but never mind—she had had a beat ...
— The Glory Of The Conquered • Susan Glaspell
... throat. They swayed and gulped for breath, rutting the earth with sharp heels; they rolled to the floor and floundered with legs tight tangled, the boy blindly striking at Mr. Adams with the pistol-butt, and the audience drawing closer to lose nothing, when the bright knife flashed suddenly. It poised, and flew across the room, harmless, for a foot had driven into Mr. Adams's arm, and he felt a cold ring grooving his temple. ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... around and it isn't often that even a Hun will surrender, fair and square, to one man. I've seen too much of this 'kamarad' business. I can't afford to take chances, Tommy. But I don't put nicks in my rifle butt like some of them do. I don't want to know how many I beaned after it's all over. We kill to save—that's the idea you want to get into your ...
— Tom Slade Motorcycle Dispatch Bearer • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... drawing back and putting one hand to her breast—while the other, I noticed, fell mechanically to the butt of a revolver swung to her waist. Her eyes were wide with surprise, as her lips were parted in fear and utter wonderment. Truly, she was the incarnation ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... of the 26th Currt was soe short and soe abrupt that I fear you can peck butt little satisfaction out ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang
... look where, how, or at whom he struck. All he knew was that his rifle blazed, and as he clubbed at soft flesh with the butt, blood spurted, and new screams filled the night. He felt and half saw big, stinking bodies going down, and clawed his way forward, around them, over them. Then he felt no more bodies, and knew that he was through. ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various
... ahoy!" yelled the mate; but the butt of the pirate's pistol crashed down on his head, and he dropped like a pithed ox. Scarrow rushed for the door, but the sentinel clapped his hand over his mouth, and threw his other arm ...
— The Green Flag • Arthur Conan Doyle
... than to put your shoulder between the butt of a gun like that and a half ton of ice?" asked La Salle. "Why, you've broken two brass hooks, and knocked down all the ice-blocks on that side. Can't I do anything to stop that bleeding? Lay down, face upward, on the ice. Hold ...
— Adrift in the Ice-Fields • Charles W. Hall
... Californian replaced the targets with new ones—old tin dinner plates this time—and voiced a philosophical regret over his recent defeat. The Texas man, ready at last, took his place beside Pete and raised his gun till the butt of it was level with his ear, the barrel pointing up and back. Johnson swung up his heavy ...
— Copper Streak Trail • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... wife and children, and had shown himself to be an excellent soldier. He had evidently exactly calculated the danger zone, and found that by getting close to the traverse he could sit up erect and make ready his supper without being cramped. I watched him solemnly pounding the coffee with the butt end of his revolver, and then boiling the water and frying his bacon, just as if he had been in the lee of the roundup wagon somewhere ...
— Rough Riders • Theodore Roosevelt
... southwest faint glimmerings of lightning gave warning of what might be looked for; but we had used light well while we had it, and could now bear what was to come. At 2 P.M. it came with a roar and a rush, "butt-end foremost," as the saying is, preceded by a few ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... appearance. He went up to Corentin and spoke to him in a low voice: "I know these premises well," he said; "I have searched everywhere; unless those young fellows are buried, they are not here. We have sounded all the floors and walls with the butt ...
— An Historical Mystery • Honore de Balzac
... thrust the butt of my gun ahead of me, and moved it up and down and right and left, trying the inequalities of the ground. To make no sound required the very greatest care; a slip of an inch might ...
— Who Goes There? • Blackwood Ketcham Benson
... people could not make enough of him, while Richard Tresidder had but scant courtesy paid him. When it became known that my father was disinherited, no matter how unjustly, these same folks discovered that Richard Tresidder was a very mine of wit and goodness, while my father was made a butt ...
— The Birthright • Joseph Hocking
... flag rolled up in oil-skin in the cabin, and that Father Burrows had declared: 'By the hoary-headed Nebblekenizer, I'll put them stars and stripes on new land, and mighty near to the Pole, or start a butt a-trying.' ...
— Danger Signals • John A. Hill and Jasper Ewing Brady
... lad: one at a time: no ramming; hit the butt on the saddle; blaze away; one down, another ...
— The Buffalo Runners - A Tale of the Red River Plains • R.M. Ballantyne
... vote in the county, where he proposed to offer himself a candidate at the next general election. He now remembered nothing of Eastgate, but the freedoms he had used to take with him, while Tom had quietly stood his butt, with an eye to the benefice; and those freedoms he began to repeat in common-place sarcasms on his person and his cloth, which he uttered in the public coffeehouse, for the entertainment of the company. But he was egregiously mistaken in giving his own wit credit for that tameness of Eastgate, ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... receive the action of the powder in the most effective way. An ellipsoid cone would leave the air behind it most smoothly, but it would not receive the pressure of the gas in a line with its direction of motion; and so of the hollow butt; the gas, acting and reacting in every way perpendicularly to the surface it acts on, wastes its force in straining outwardly. The perfectly flat butt would take as much forward impetus at the edge of the cone base, where the soft lead would yield slightly. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... Soc.' vol. xxvi. 1868, p. 296.) says: "it is very amusing to see these little creatures (Smynthurus luteus) coquetting together. The male, which is much smaller than the female, runs round her, and they butt one another, standing face to face and moving backward and forward like two playful lambs. Then the female pretends to run away and the male runs after her with a queer appearance of anger, gets in front and stands facing her again; then she turns coyly round, but he, quicker ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... the intention was ambitious and honorable. It was not until several days later that he became interested in Bertie, when that young adventurer insisted on showing him an automatic 44-caliber pistol. Bertie explained the mechanism and demonstrated by slipping a loaded magazine up the hollow butt. ...
— South Sea Tales • Jack London
... meantime an unhappy goat was pounced on and the three young-tigers took to her teats as if 'to the manner born.' The poor Nanny screamed tremendously at first sight of them, but she soon got accustomed to them, and when they grew a little bigger, she would often playfully butt at them with ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... his eyes screwed up into a perplexed frown and he dropped the butt of his rifle to the ground. Holding the barrels with both hands, he stared down at the ...
— A Virginia Scout • Hugh Pendexter
... passage of arms at Ashby, or on the Field of the Cloth of Gold, was afforded a more thrilling spectacle than when these two paladins rushed to the onset and met in mid-career. Each gave a yell and dug his heels into his charger, and whacked her with the butt end of his lance, and forced her into a ponderous gallop for the meeting. It matters not now what was the precise intent of either jouster, which of them aimed at gorget or head-piece, or at shield, ...
— A Man and a Woman • Stanley Waterloo
... to deflect a sword blade, when he saw a terrific blow aimed at him with the butt of a rifle. He dodged just in time, and, as the stock went whizzing by his ear, he knocked the dealer of the blow flat on his back. In the meantime, Walt and Ralph had been giving good accounts of themselves, and Bob Harding had succeeded in ...
— The Border Boys Across the Frontier • Fremont B. Deering
... a carriage of some kind to bring in my grain, and draw away my ashes. So I blocked off the wheels with my axe, from the butt of a black oak tree, and backed home boards for a box, three miles, from the nearest saw-mill. It did me good service, and I sold it for a price when I bought my first wagon. But we all took a world of comfort; and what was pleasanter work than ...
— Summerfield - or, Life on a Farm • Day Kellogg Lee
... and, balancing it there, to walk away merrily under their burthen. And it is surprising how heavy a load they will thus carry. But they could not manage to take our tusks in that fashion. They carried them on their shoulders, four men to a tusk, three near to the thick or butt end, and one near the point. In this way we brought all our ivory to Behar, and the tusks were so perfect and exceptional in size that we could obtain almost any equivalent we pleased for them. And in fact of such marvellous size and beauty were most of the gems that we got in ...
— Tales of the Caliph • H. N. Crellin
... your society for half an hour" murmured Bob, and smiled. "I'm not going to hurt you if I can avoid it, but if you make a row I'll tap you back of the ear with the butt of this gun. The individual on the floor has been poking his nose into my business and I had to put him in storage for a while. Unfortunately you discovered him, so, much to our mutual displeasure, I must ask ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... right and found Mr. Grant's trial-shaft. It had been sunk amongst a number of round holes dug by the native miner, and it appeared to us that they had been working the southern butt-end of the eastern reef. He had preferred it to another pit sunk a little distance from the centre by a man named Jones, whose venture yielded the poorest results. Cameron drew my attention to the necessity of 'hydraulicking' this hill-side; and from three pounds of its yellow clay, ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... difficult to match "God save the King," the mediocrity of which, especially as regards the words, has been the butt of countless satirists. Beethoven wrote in his diary that he "must show the English what a blessing they have" in that "national disgrace." If Haydn regarded it as a "blessing," he certainly did not take it as a model. He produced an air which, looking at it from a purely artistic ...
— Haydn • J. Cuthbert Hadden
... his brother as they examined the water-butt. It was new, and very solidly constructed for its office. If anything had been wanting to decide them, this eminently practical barrel would have turned the scale. A bargain was promptly struck, the month's rent was paid ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... it lasted; two of the blacks and one of my mates had been hit by thar musket-balls, and the rest of us war either gashed by thar knives or had got ugly cracks. However, six of them war lying in the boat when we hauled it alongside; two war stone-dead, the other four had been stunned with the butt ends of the muskets, or cut down by the darkies' sabres. We took 'em down to the next place and handed 'em over to the sheriff; and as thar happened to be a lot of boats waiting thar for the wind, you may guess it warn't many hours afore they tried ...
— Captain Bayley's Heir: - A Tale of the Gold Fields of California • G. A. Henty
... when near enough as I thought to him, I fired; but it did him no mischief and only made him take himself off at once. I nearly got into a scrape through it, however, for I was fired at myself in return, the bullet fortunately only taking the butt end off my musket. I turned to run off, and another shot hit the knapsack on my back, but I soon got out of reach of their shot again, luckily, as it happened, without any injury; but it must have been a near thing, for when I next opened my knapsack, I found the ball had gone through the leather ...
— The Autobiography of Sergeant William Lawrence - A Hero of the Peninsular and Waterloo Campaigns • William Lawrence
... brawny negro made a strong effort to seize the bucket, regardless of the cowhide, when Long Tom felled him at a blow with his pistol butt, then cocking the weapon, glanced sternly around at the circle of angry faces by which they ...
— Ralph Granger's Fortunes • William Perry Brown
... were to be defrayed by the Mayor of Tiverton and kindly Mr. Oliver Peard. After a year under Hudson, young Cosway entered Shipley's Academy, already mentioned. Probably he was a somewhat puny, insignificant-looking lad, and was therefore made the butt and fag of the robuster students, compelled to attend upon them and obey their behests, even to performing menial offices, just as younger boys do in other academies—for might is right in the world of school—and thus Mr. Smith's errand-boy ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... smoking room, is criticism, playful and otherwise, of others. There are people in whom the adversely critical spirit is so highly developed that they find it hard to praise any one or to hear any one praised—their criticism leaps to the surface in one way or another, in the sneer, in the "butt," in the joke, in the gibe, in the openly expressed attack. This way of being superior may be direct and open, more often it is disguised. Many a woman (and man) who denounces the sinner receives from her contemplation of that sinner the most of her feeling of virtue ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... twilight of two steep streets in Camden Town, the shop at the corner, a confectioner's, glowed like the butt of a cigar. One should rather say, perhaps, like the butt of a firework, for the light was of many colours and some complexity, broken up by many mirrors and dancing on many gilt and gaily-coloured cakes and sweetmeats. Against this ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... what you'll want. Well, good-bye. I'll have the answer for you here on Wednesday morning—if he ever deigns to answer you. He is a violent, dangerous, cantankerous character, hated by everyone who comes across him, and the butt of the students, so far as they dare take a liberty with him. Perhaps it would be best for you if you never heard from the fellow ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... their stolen boat, and reach quarters without being seen. This theory appeared far more reasonable than the other, and, if it proved true, to arouse the sleepers on deck, would only result in making me a butt for ridicule. It appeared safe enough for me to adventure alone, and I was at least determined to assure myself as to the identity of these strangers. If they had actually landed it would require only a ...
— Wolves of the Sea • Randall Parrish
... the butt of his fellow students' ridicule, yet he was never aroused to anger. Instead, these annoyances only served to increase his acts of devotion. Still greater trials, however, were in store for him. Before being admitted into the great seminary of Lyons ...
— The Life of Blessed John B. Marie Vianney, Cur of Ars • Anonymous
... other side. I lost no time in placing the muzzle of my Mannlicher close to his face, and the perplexed Shoka, dropping his kukri, went down on his knees to implore my pardon. After giving him a good pounding with the butt of my rifle, I sent him about his business. The man lacked the qualities of a murderer, but I felt I had better see that no other disturbance took place during the night. It is true that two men attempted to crawl out ...
— In the Forbidden Land • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... Caney, a man with a lanyard gave a quick jerk. There was a cap explosion at the butt of the gun and a bulging white cloud from the muzzle; the trail bounced from its shallow trench, the wheels whirled back twice on the rebound, and the shell was hissing through the air as iron hisses when a blacksmith thrusts it red-hot into cold water. ...
— Crittenden - A Kentucky Story of Love and War • John Fox, Jr.
... be quiet, not for nobody," Polly objected, with a bold disregard of double negatives. "I got to get a move. If you ain't goin' to help me, you needn't butt in." ...
— Polly of the Circus • Margaret Mayo
... that she could not be freed by four pumps assisted by bailing. On the 9th the wind became calm, but the sea continued so high that the ship, in rolling, opened all her upper works and seams, and started the butt ends of her planks, and the greatest part of her top-timbers, the bolts being drawn by the violence of the roll. In this condition, with additional disasters to the hull and rigging, they continued beating westward to the 12th, when they were in lat. 60 deg. S. and in great want of ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... late in October, 1786, the Merchant of St. Elphege sat at the pine dinner-table in his kitchen, opposite his wife, resting his wooden soup spoon on its butt on the table. The windows, both front and rear, were wide open, for one of those rare fragrant golden days of late autumn still permitted it. He was listening, with some of the stolid Indian manner, to his wife reading Germain's letter. He vouchsafed only one remark, and that a mercantile one: "Seven ...
— The False Chevalier - or, The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette • William Douw Lighthall
... a German soldier was seen to fire three times at a little girl 5 years old. Having failed to hit her, he subsequently bayoneted her. He was killed with the butt end of a rifle by a Belgian soldier who had seen him commit this murder ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... statement was a wilful untruth on James's part. He had distinctly caught a glimpse of Mrs. Butt's ...
— Helen with the High Hand (2nd ed.) • Arnold Bennett
... she is discovered at grey dawn far below the region of snow, assailed and insulted by the meanest carrion; till a bullet whizzing through her heart, down she topples, and soon is despatched by blows from the rifle-butt, the shepherd stretching out his foe's carcass on the sward, eight feet from wing-tip to wing-tip, with leg thick as his own wrist, and foot broad ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... belts, black waist belt, and black military hat, with plume. By the side of the soldier, near the front of the stage, stands an officer, who is leading on the British. He holds a sword on his right shoulder, while the left grasps the butt of the musket of the soldier previously described. His body is bent forward, feet separated thirty inches, eyes fixed on Warren, countenance expressing energy and decision. Costume consists of a crimson coat, decorated with gold epaulets ...
— Home Pastimes; or Tableaux Vivants • James H. Head
... the attacking line thinned out, stretched itself out and, continually seeking cover, tried to advance. A few minutes only and the first Russian trench line was reached. In storm, with bayonet and rifle butt, they came on and broke into the trenches. They were fighting now man for man. Then the artillery fire set in again. Again in the afternoon the infantry advanced in storm formation against the head of the village and the trenches flanking it. From them roared rifle ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume II (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... scarcely subsided, when the ancient Lysander opened one of the doors, and, after ringing the tiled floor with the butt of his javelin, and bowing statelywise, announced Sergius. Taking a nod from the Princess, he withdrew to ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... vex me, but I bind them down like slaving Calibans, by the magic of a pen; and glad shall I be to victimize my monsters, eager to dissipate my musquito-like tormentors; yea, I would "take up arms against a sea"—["Arms against a sea?" dearest Shakspeare, would that Theobald, or Johnson's stock-butt, "the Oxford Editor," had indeed interpolated that unconscionable image! It has been sapiently remarked by some hornet of criticism, that "Shakspeare was a clever man;" but cleverer far must that champion stand forth who wars with any prospect ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... bluffed. My grandfather reaches out of bed an' he rings that bell I tells you-all of, an' proceeds to convene his niggers. He commands 'em to cut down a big whitewood tree that lives down in the bottoms, hollow out the butt log for a trough, an' haul her up alongside ...
— Wolfville Days • Alfred Henry Lewis
... had served to complete her discomfiture; and presently, the storm slackening a little, hearing footsteps behind her, she wheeled round, her chin bravely in the air, but her heart galloping with nervous fright, while her fingers closed down on the butt of the small silver-plated revolver which rested in the right- hand waist pocket ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... often to miss opportunities of effective intervention. The sensitiveness of his nature appeared in his falling in love at first sight with a Highland girl whom Burke and he casually met during a tour. His loss of her made a painful impression on him.[406] The butt of an unkind fate, he seemed destined also to be the leader of lost causes; and the proud and penniless emigres found in him their ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... think that they could not get across the Alps till summer-time, and then had to hack and hew, and thrust and dig, and slash and climb, and charge and puff, and blow and swear, and parry and receive, and aim and dodge, and butt and run for their lives at the end, under an unaccustomed sun. No wonder they saw visions, the dear people! They are dead now, and we do not even know their ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... vision of "the big boy," the lout—the butt of every one, even of the masters, who, when any little imp did a thing well, always made the appropriate laudation tell to the detriment of the big boy, as if he were bound to be as superfluous in intellect as in flesh. He has sufficiently dinned into him to ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... too long in training camp to forget duty and discipline so readily and the only answer Tom got was the dull thud of Pickles' rifle butt on the floor as the officer uttered ...
— Tom Slade on a Transport • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... play well worthy of the best and most legitimate subject which satire can have to deal with. Nothing can be fairer or more appropriate than that the art which consists in feigning a representation of real life on the stage should take, as the butt of its ridicule and the object of its skill, the man whose whole life and character are engaged in feigning the possession of virtue and seeming to be that which he is not. The earliest satirists and dramatists have seized on the topic with avidity; ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... another stood on his head on the sofa. There was a beautiful young lord there, that sort of figure that no woman can resist. There was a delightful chappie who seemed inclined to empty the mustard-pot down my neck; him I could keep in order, but the beautiful lord I saw was attempting to make a butt of me. With his impertinences I did not for a moment intend to put up; I did not know him, he was not then, as he is now, if he will allow me to say so, a friend. About three or half-past the ladies retired, and the festivities continued with unabated vigour. We had passed through ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... commenced a struggle that was pleasant to witness. No sooner had the fish discovered that the hook was in his jaw, than away he dashed towards the middle of the lake. The rod was bent into a semicircle, but the game was fast; with the butt firm between his knees and his thumb pressing the reel, the sportsman gave him a hundred and fifty feet of line, when his efforts began to relax, and as Smith began to reel him in, a moment of dead pull, a holding back like an obstinate mule occurred. The trout was slowly ...
— Wild Northern Scenes - Sporting Adventures with the Rifle and the Rod • S. H. Hammond
... set down the items of her happiness. In the first place, she gave up Peter Butt, a young man who kept company with her, and in consequence of his disappointment in love, took to smuggling, poaching, and a thousand other bad courses. Then she quarrelled, as in duty bound, with all the friends and intimates of her youth, who, of course, could not be received by my Lady at ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... conversed with the utmost freedom, and sang duets; I was perfectly at my ease, had sallies of wit and merriment; Father Cato was charming, Madam de Warrens adorable, and the Abbe Palais, with his rough voice, was the butt of the company. Pleasing moments of sportive youth, how long since have ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... to be of good sound Elm, in not more than two pieces, with Hook and Butt Scarphs 6 feet long, sided 6-1/2 inches. Depth aft 12 inches, forward 14 inches, with a ...
— King's Cutters and Smugglers 1700-1855 • E. Keble Chatterton
... Byron's place." But it may be doubted if Byron would have made a good husband to any woman; his wife and he were even more than usually ill-assorted. A model of the proprieties, and a pattern of the learned philanthropy of which in her sex he was wont to make a constant butt, she was no fit consort for that "mens insana in corpore insano." What could her stolid temperament conjecture of a man whom she saw, in one of his fits of passion, throwing a favourite watch under the fire, and grinding it to pieces with a poker? ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... Emperor of Britain already," a fellow shouted. I knocked him over with the butt of my spear, and explained to these Roman-born Romans that, if there were any further trouble, we should go on with one man short. And, by the Light of the Sun, I meant it too! My raw Gauls at Clausentum ...
— Puck of Pook's Hill • Rudyard Kipling
... awake or dreaming, or was this some trick of liquor in his often distorted fancy? He, Whiskey Dick! the butt of his friends, the chartered oracle of the barrooms, even in whose wretched vanity there was always the haunting suspicion that he was despised and scorned; he, who had dared so much in speech, and achieved so little in fact! he, whose habitual weakness ...
— Devil's Ford • Bret Harte
... train; s'pose I'll have to be a-goin'; good-bye; cum down and see me some time if you kin, ev'ry one of ye; cum down about apple-butter time and jist butt in—good bye. ...
— Uncles Josh's Punkin Centre Stories • Cal Stewart
... the river Irvine, attended by a boy who carried his basket, when some English soldiers, belonging to the garrison of Ayr meeting him, insisted on seizing his trout. A fray took place, and Wallace killed the foremost Englishman with a blow from the butt of his fishing-rod, took his sword, and put the ...
— Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... of the Revolutionary War Committee, who escorted us, entered the quarters of the General Staff, noisily dropped his rifle-butt to the floor and resting upon it, announced: "General Krassnov, you and your staff are prisoners of the Soviet authorities." Immediately armed Red Guards barred both doors. Kerensky was nowhere to be seen. He had again fled, as he had done before from the Winter Palace. As to the circumstances ...
— From October to Brest-Litovsk • Leon Trotzky
... though deserted, made a gallant stand. The Life Guards attacked them on the right, the Blues on the left; but the Somersetshire clowns, with their scythes and the butt ends of their muskets, faced the royal horse like old soldiers. Oglethorpe made a vigorous attempt to break them and was manfully repulsed. Sarsfield, a brave Irish officer, whose name afterwards obtained a melancholy celebrity, charged on the other flank. ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... their scheme of life as a well-made reel fits the butt of a good rod. He was a steady oarsman, a lucky fisherman, with a real genius for the use of the landing-net, and a cheerful companion, who did not insist upon giving his views about artificial flies and advice about casting, ...
— The Ruling Passion • Henry van Dyke
... twenty to thirty stripes, and never leaving them until they had confessed what he required. He was also charged with furnishing a scant diet to his pupil boarders, keeping them on porridge and pudding, though their parents were paying for better fare. He appears to have admitted the evil, butt threw the blame upon his wife. The court found him guilty. At first he denied his guilt. He was put in care of a marshal for safe keeping, and, on the following day, the court was informed that he had repented in tears. In the open court "he ...
— Bay State Monthly, Vol. I, No. 3, March, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... join in blasphemy, nor be the butt of an assembly; be not moody in an alehouse, and never forget ...
— The High Deeds of Finn and other Bardic Romances of Ancient Ireland • T. W. Rolleston
... tell how to fight against thee with the sword of his mouth, and to make thee a butt for his arrows; and this is a dispensation ...
— The Riches of Bunyan • Jeremiah Rev. Chaplin
... that vessels can be unloaded in the least possible space of time and sent back for other cargoes. Hence it has been sane economy on the part of America to put much of her early energy into construction rather than into fighting. Nevertheless, it has made her an easy butt for criticism both in the States and abroad, since the only proof to the newspaper-reader that America is at war is the amount of front-line that she ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson
... call me that. The children say my name is a disgrace." His eyes filled with tears, but he wiped them away secretly so that his father should not see him cry. Stephen laughed harshly. He did not answer. He stooped forward, and his rugged brow looked as if he meant to butt into some obstacle; moreover he began ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... wot makes me so squeamish these days," he drawled, with a slow smile. "He sartin desarved it in the throat. That Pole 'n' me's goin' to butt agin each other some more. I never was wuth shucks when it comes to justice . . . an' I allus suffer fer it after. Look at Bilsy, an' Dutch Henry, an' ...
— The Return of Blue Pete • Luke Allan
... become a sort of butt with those who shoot their arrows at what is called slowness, and who delight to transfix old generals. Since Bonaparte, in less than a year, tumbled over Beaulieu, Wurmser, and Alvinczy, (whose united ages exceeded two hundred years,) it has been taken for granted that the Austrians ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... say you were only present at the murder of Noonan; now, was it not you who knocked down the unfortunate man with the butt-end of a blunderbuss?—Yes, the very ...
— Gossip in the First Decade of Victoria's Reign • John Ashton
... upper part only just showed above the leaves. Almost instantly Jacopo levelled his rifle and fired. Stephen gave a loud cry and dropped the cap. The Peruvian, with a yell of exultation, threw away the gun, drew his knife, and bounded forward. As he came up, Stephen sprang out, and brought the butt end of his gun down with all his strength on the Peruvian's head, striking him senseless to the ground. Stephen picked up the murderer's knife and placed it in his belt, took the musket from his shoulder, and then with a cord he had brought with him bound ...
— With Cochrane the Dauntless • George Alfred Henty
... gone on forever, to the bottom of a butt of Xeres wine; but finding the second glass better than the first, he called to Mrs. Jellicorse, who was in the garden gathering striped roses, to come and have a sip with him, and taste the yellow cherries. And when she came promptly, ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... body-servant, table-waiter, pet, butt for his jests, tool, man of all occasions. He considered himself a part of Mr. Belcher's personal property. To be the object of his clumsy badinage, when visitors were present and his master was particularly amiable, ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland
... sacred engagements. The state of a widow is always an afflictive and unprotected one. Rank does not soften, frequently aggravates the calamity. A tragedy had just been acted, that rendered the name of Matilda the butt of common fame, the subject of universal discussion. How painful and humiliating must this situation have been to that anxious and trembling mind; a mind whose highest ambition coveted only the tranquility that reigns in the shade of retreat, the silence and obscurity that the wisest of philosophers ...
— Italian Letters, Vols. I and II • William Godwin
... treble shriek, on beholding her husband struggling in the water, and Cain himself felt somewhat alarmed at what he had done. He quickly extended the butt of his rod to his father, and dragged him safe to land, to ...
— Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished - A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure • R.M. Ballantyne
... making him an inn-keeper in a German village instead of a king. Around this smoke-shrouded table the most important affairs of state were discussed. Around it the rudest practical jokes were perpetrated. Gundling, a beer-bibbing author, whom the king made at once his historian and his butt, was the principal sufferer from these frolics, which displayed abundantly that absence of wit and presence of brutality which is the characteristic of the practical joke. As if in scorn of rank and official dignity, Frederick ...
— Historical Tales, Vol 5 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality, German • Charles Morris
... clairvoyant returned, loosened his fetters, and he arose mortified and confounded. Singularly disposed, he ever after treated these gifts with virulent ridicule, and never was heard to utter any serious remarks concerning this transaction. The clairvoyant after this event was the butt of his satire and jests, and received them without revenge so long as Henry remained, which was about five years—a reckless, abandoned, evil-minded person, eventually severed by that same power which he strove incessantly to ridicule. All these strange operations and gifts are attributed ...
— The Communistic Societies of the United States • Charles Nordhoff
... and to pronounce a hasty verdict upon actions which may be carelessly misrepresented, or words, if not intentionally, yet heedlessly misquoted, without affording an opportunity to the condemned individual to speak for himself, is unjust in the extreme. But how many excellent persons are made the butt of ridicule, or tossed about as the playthings of a gossipping spirit, which, incapable of a direct charge, gratifies its malignity by infusing calumnies into the too listening ear of prejudice. An idle report is, by this means, magnified and circulated to an incalculable extent; ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... the quarry, and then, as Billy had not returned and the time hung heavily on his hands, he crept out and up the hill towards the Red Hand. He prowled about amongst the old tips for a time, then seated himself at the foot of a dead butt and gave himself up to thought. He began to fear that Peterson would prove unfaithful, or, worse still, that he had fallen into the hands of the enemy; and the idea made him very uneasy. He hesitated ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... she would not let me—Miss O'Shane, I shall not forget myself again—amuse yourself with being as capricious as you please, but not at my expense; little as you think of me, I am not to be made your butt or your dupe: therefore, I must seriously beg, at once, that I may know whether you wish me ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... vindictive look shot from Terry's eyes as his hand involuntarily played with the butt of the pistol he had ...
— Syd Belton - The Boy who would not go to Sea • George Manville Fenn
... intervention. The sensitiveness of his nature appeared in his falling in love at first sight with a Highland girl whom Burke and he casually met during a tour. His loss of her made a painful impression on him.[406] The butt of an unkind fate, he seemed destined also to be the leader of lost causes; and the proud and penniless emigres found in him their most ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... she exclaimed bitterly. "I can understand Jimmy, because he likes me to drive him all the time, but you others, who aren't regular clients at all, why you should butt in and try to spoil my chances, I can't think. Mr. Wingate is just my conception of the ideal fare—generous, affable, and with trans-Atlantic notions about tips. I shall send you my card, all the same, ...
— The Profiteers • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the day, sharpened by no sudden flashes of pain or pleasure.—I know: only the outline of a dull life, that long since, with thousands of dull lives like its own, was vainly lived and lost: thousands of them, massed, vile, slimy lives, like those of the torpid lizards in yonder stagnant water-butt.—Lost? There is a curious point for you to settle, my friend, who study psychology in a lazy, dilettante way. Stop a moment. I am going to be honest. This is what I want you to do. I want you to hide your disgust, take no heed to ...
— Life in the Iron-Mills • Rebecca Harding Davis
... between the blind and the window-pane, as usual; if he was the same bluebottle that was there when Fenwick was first brought into this room, he had learned nothing and forgotten nothing, like the old regime in France. He only knew how to butt and blunder resonantly at the glass; but he could do it as well as ever, and he seemed to have made up his mind to persevere. Sally listened to his monotone, and watched her image in ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... Civil War tell of a raw recruit who came into his regiment. This recruit was awkward and uncouth and unattractive. He seemed to be little more than an incarnate blunder. He would stumble and fall down over his own musket. Naturally he was the butt of many jokes. He was the laughing stock of all his comrades. But this officer said that he tried to befriend him. But if the uncouth fellow appreciated his efforts to help him he never said so. He seemed as awkward ...
— Sermons on Biblical Characters • Clovis G. Chappell
... want to butt in," he urged in the pause that followed; "but I want to help all I can. You don't need to ...
— On the Edge of the Arctic - An Aeroplane in Snowland • Harry Lincoln Sayler
... mother and make it easy for me, and Ply says he really meant it; but I thought then that's the way the bad ones always get the others into concealments and lies. So I wouldn't listen a moment, and I ran down, with him after me, saying, 'Hear reason, Mysie.' And I ran full butt up against some-body—Lord Ormersfield it was, I found—but I didn't know then. I only said something about begging pardon, and dashed on, and opened the door. I saw a whole lot of fine people all at five-o'clock tea, but I couldn't stop to get more frightened, ...
— The Two Sides of the Shield • Charlotte M. Yonge
... warlike than the rest, suggested that as we had some Enfields on board, we should make "a little bit of a fight," or at least "make one butt at a gunboat." I was relieved to find that these insane proposals were not received with ...
— Three Months in the Southern States, April-June 1863 • Arthur J. L. (Lieut.-Col.) Fremantle
... not draw horses. Uccello was a most laborious student of animal life and so absorbed in the mysteries of perspective that he preferred them to bed; but he does not seem to have been able to unite them. He was a perpetual butt of Donatello. It is told of him that having a commission to paint a fresco for the Mercato Vecchio he kept the progress of the work a secret and allowed no one to see it. At last, when it was finished, he drew aside the sheet for Donatello, who was buying fruit, ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... man's face was an unhappy one, and he seemed to be the butt of his comrades, for they poured forth such a volley of good-natured ridicule on his appearance that Teddy looked from one to the ...
— Teddy's Button • Amy Le Feuvre
... impart the delightful intelligence. A woman (with more or less skill) buries her secret away from her kind. For days and weeks past, had not this old Maria made fools of the whole house,—Maria, the butt of the family? ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... thought which led him stealthily to place his hand on the butt of the revolver at his hip, prepared to whip it out and fire as quickly as he knew how. At the same time he edged away from him, so as to maintain considerable ...
— The Land of Mystery • Edward S. Ellis
... mistake! The sweat's pourin' out o' me like water outen a sponge. I guess that's what's makin' me so all-fired thirsty. Where's the water cask? I'm boun' to have a drink. My tongue's so dry it's rattlin' agin my teeth! Can't ye hear it? Where's that there scuttle butt, I say?" ...
— Turned Adrift • Harry Collingwood
... with their heads. They found some street porter with a wide chest and a stupid countenance. They offered him, and compelled him, if necessary, to accept a pot of porter, in return for which he was to allow them to butt him with their heads four times in the chest, and on this they betted. One day a man, a great brute of a Welshman named Gogangerdd, expired at the third butt. This looked serious. An inquest was held, and the jury returned the following verdict: ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... societies, however small they may be, provided that they do but amount to half-a-dozen, you will invariably meet with a bully. And it is also generally the case that you will find one of that society who is more or less the butt. You will discover this even in occasional meetings, such as a dinner-party, the major part of which have never ...
— Mr. Midshipman Easy • Frederick Marryat
... only told us to "well cleanse the buttermilk from it," without giving us an idea how the process was to be accomplished; while the far-famed Mrs. Rundle, in an article headed "Dairy," tells the dairy-maid to "keep a book in which to enter the amount of butter she makes," and gives butt little idea how the said butter is to be procured. Another authority said, "after the butter is come, cut it in pieces to take out cow-hairs;" this appeared to us the oddest direction of all, for surely it was possible to remove them from the ...
— Our Farm of Four Acres and the Money we Made by it • Miss Coulton
... republic out of all the little German states. As for England, she's scarcely to be feared; if she budged ever so little I should send a hundred thousand men to India. Add to that I should send the Sultan back to Mecca and the Pope to Jerusalem, belaboring their backs with the butt end of a rifle. Eh? Europe would soon be clean. ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... about what is to befall me now. So far as my dog's bark can be heard and my gun reach, the wood is in order; the rest belonged to the agent. That is my reckoning, and now you may do what you like with me;" and, much excited, he stamped the butt-end of ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... ejaculations the inmate of the chamber was heard drawing back a table, then the butt of a gun sounded upon the floor, and the ...
— The Youth of Jefferson - A Chronicle of College Scrapes at Williamsburg, in Virginia, A.D. 1764 • Anonymous
... previous evening, but, for some unexplained reason, it was not noticed until the next morning that he suffered from illness, and, therefore, he was allowed to mix with the other inmates in the general ward. Drs. Butt and Clarkson, who were called in to attend, state that the cause of death was the worst form of smallpox. The body will be buried in quicklime, but some alarm is felt in the district owing to the deceased, who, it is said, arrived here from Dunchester, ...
— Doctor Therne • H. Rider Haggard
... influencing the opinions of a nation, and what a powerful spring they are for moving the affections. Why then are not theatrical representations here so regulated, that the stage may conduce to the amelioration of morals? Instead of this, in most French comedies, the husband is generally made the butt of ridicule, and the whole plot often lies in his being outwitted by some conceited spark. Marriage, in short, is incessantly railed at in such a lively, satirical manner as to delight nine-tenths ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... her something supple and corrupt. Hers was an idiotic sort of attachment, full of admiration for him, of voluptuousness for her, a beatitude that benumbed her; her soul sank into this drunkenness, shrivelled up, drowned in it, like Clarence in his butt of Malmsey. ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... by the barrel with the muzzle against his shoulder, having aimed the butt at the crouching lion. Chunky had had a severe ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in the Grand Canyon - The Mystery of Bright Angel Gulch • Frank Gee Patchin
... shall give Medea back to me? Was't I that in thy homeland sought thee out? Was't I that lured thee from thy father's house? Was't I that forced, ay, forced my love on thee? Was't I that wrenched thee from thy fatherland, Made thee the butt of strangers' haughty scorn, Or dragged thee into wantonness and crime? Thou nam'st me Wanton?—Woe is me! I am! Yet—how have I been wanton, and for whom? Let these pursue me with their venomous hate, Ay, drive me forth and slay me! 'Tis their right, Because I ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... on at his work. The splintered shards were piled high against his brake: he had not paused to clear them out of his way except around his bootlegs. Near by, the remnant of the shock had fallen over, clods of mingled frost and soil still sticking to the level butt-ends. Several yards to windward, where the dust and refuse might not settle on it, lay the pile of gray-tailed hemp,—the coarsest of man's work, but finished as conscientiously as an art. From the warming ...
— The Reign of Law - A Tale of the Kentucky Hemp Fields • James Lane Allen
... just as they were getting near to Tom, he awoke and sat up. Bang went his rifle at once, as he saw his danger. One fox fell dead, but the others came on with a rush, and there was soon a lively fight. Tom laid about him with the butt end of his rifle, and, being a strong young fellow, dead and dying foxes were soon lying all ...
— Crusoes of the Frozen North • Gordon Stables
... he had been poured molten into it. He wore a wide, flapping sombrero, set cavalierly upon long white hair that descended to the shoulders of his fringed buckskin jacket; the belt at his waist drooped loosely to the weight of a great holster, out of which protruded the lustrous butt of a silver-mounted revolver; long gleaming boots rose to his hips, their toes within carved tapaderos, their heels, high to the point of feminity, roweled ...
— The Trimming of Goosie • James Hopper
... necessary at the sides and top of the door. That at the hinged side can be as shown at A, Fig. 5, the closing side as at B, and the top as at C in the same drawing. These are all in section and are self-explanatory. In hinging the door, three butt hinges should be used so as ...
— The Boy Mechanic: Volume 1 - 700 Things For Boys To Do • Popular Mechanics
... to the fire (I dare say he never saw the stroake), and I have done that like to an other, but I hitting him with the edge of the hattchett could not disingage [it] presently, being so deep in his head, rises upon his breast, butt fell back sudainly, making a great noise, which almost waked the third; but my comrade gave him a deadly blow of a hattchet, and presently after I shott ...
— Voyages of Peter Esprit Radisson • Peter Esprit Radisson
... expedited Norah's love-letter to a happy close. But when Dan took her place at the counter Isaac assured him, not without satisfaction, that "they were cliver and clane run out of all their writin' paper, barrin' it might be a sort of butt-ind of loose sheets left litterin' at the bottom of the drawer, and they that thick wid dust you could be plantin' pitaties in them, forby gettin' mildewed lyin' up in the ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane
... regarded her anxious and frightened features, and then he dropped the butt of his rifle on the ground, like one whose purpose had undergone ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... on the log as he spoke, and extended a hand to Norah, who followed him lightly. Then the Hermit led the way along the log, which was quite broad enough to admit of a wheelbarrow being drawn down its length. He stopped where the butt of the old tree, rising above the level of the trunk, barred the view, and pulling aside the dogwood, showed rough steps, cut in the side of ...
— A Little Bush Maid • Mary Grant Bruce
... done a bit of fencing in his time, and we got talking about timber. He didn't believe in having fencing-posts with big butts; he reckoned it was a mistake. "You see," he said, "the top of the butt catches the rain water and makes the post rot quicker. I'd back posts without any butt at all to last as long or longer than posts with 'em—that's if the fence is well put up and well rammed." He had supplied fencing stuff, and fenced by contract, ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson
... you we gave it ter 'em!" exclaimed another in excited jerks. "Fight! Wall, that's what I call fightin', leastways it's put. I declar' I reckon I hit six Yankees plum on the head with the butt of ...
— The Battle Ground • Ellen Glasgow
... I don't have stretcher-bearers following me around and it isn't often that even a Hun will surrender, fair and square, to one man. I've seen too much of this 'kamarad' business. I can't afford to take chances, Tommy. But I don't put nicks in my rifle butt like some of them do. I don't want to know how many I beaned after it's all over. We kill to save—that's the idea you want to get into your head, ...
— Tom Slade Motorcycle Dispatch Bearer • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... were sweating at every pore. Pel Frost, then, must have overheard his wife's storm of reproaches, perhaps even her threats of violence. It had come to this, that he was the village laughing-stock, a butt of ridicule ...
— The Village Watch-Tower • (AKA Kate Douglas Riggs) Kate Douglas Wiggin
... terrific right-hand cross-counter. Macpherson never even knew what happened to him. The canvasser's right hand, which had been adjusted by his inventor for a high blow, had landed on the butt of Macpherson's ear and dropped him like a fowl. The gasping, terrified bull-dog fled the scene, and the canvasser stood over his fallen foe, still intoning the virtues of his publication. He had come there merely as a friend, he said, to give the inhabitants of Ninemile a chance to ...
— Three Elephant Power • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... Moor arrived at the castle of Coyn. He silently and cautiously walked his panting steed under its dark walls, and having nearly passed round them, came to the portal denoted by Xarisa. He paused and looked around to see that he was not observed, and then knocked three times with the butt of his lance. In a little while the portal was timidly unclosed by the duenna of Xarisa. "Alas! senor," said she, "what has detained you thus long? Every night have I watched for you; and my lady is sick at heart with doubt ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving
... Schonburg saw near his camp by the water-holes a small group of horsemen standing motionless in the desert, their lances erect, butt downward, resting on the sand, the little company looking like an oasis of leafless poplars. The Count was instantly astride his Arab charger, at the head of his men, ready to meet whatever came, ...
— The Strong Arm • Robert Barr
... Your Majesty!" and if such a jest, with a king for the butt, seems incredible, let one remember that already Louis had been refused his cour pleniere and the Queen lampooned and ...
— Calvert of Strathore • Carter Goodloe
... out, and drives the butt of his spear into the earth, and throws himself into the ...
— The story of Burnt Njal - From the Icelandic of the Njals Saga • Anonymous
... piercing shriek the boy leapt convulsively from Nurse Beaton's arms, rushed blindly into the wall and endeavoured to butt and bore his way through it with his head, screaming like a wounded horse. As the man and woman sprang to him he shrieked, "It'th under my foot! It'th moving, moving, moving out" and fell to the ground in ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... just then struck the hour of three. That was the sound. And the movement—? I was aware that a figure was passing across the distant center of the floor. Instantly I dropped back into the arena of my little human terror. My hand again clutched stupidly at the pistol butt. I drew back into the folds of the heavy curtain. And the ...
— The Damned • Algernon Blackwood
... the raw twilight, and clicking over the wet stones in a pair of pattens that worked innumerable rough impressions of the first proposition in Euclid all about the yard—Mrs. Peerybingle filled the kettle at the water-butt. Presently returning, less the pattens (and a good deal less, for they were tall and Mrs. Peerybingle was but short), she set the kettle on the fire. In doing which she lost her temper, or mislaid it for an instant; for, the water being uncomfortably cold, and in that slippy, slushy, ...
— The Cricket on the Hearth • Charles Dickens
... pistol from his holsters, and striking those near him with the butt end, opened a way towards his lieutenant, who drew his sword; but at this moment the commissary-general, Vincel, and Captain Cappon threw themselves between the two and asked the cause of ...
— Massacres Of The South (1551-1815) - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... shirt-sleeves rolled up. "Susan," said he, "I don't want to git mad, I don't want to go out yander, snatch them chickens out of the coop an' make 'em nod at each other in the dark, but when you talk that way you almost drive me—by jings, you almost drive me out there agin that tree, hard enough to butt the bark off. Do you reckon they are takin' them fellers down there to feed 'em, to fatten 'em up and then turn 'em loose? Hah, is that your idee? 'Zounds, madam, they are lucky to get there with their necks. And here you are lamentin' ...
— The Jucklins - A Novel • Opie Read
... infinite disgust, than the very Count Ericson whose acquaintance she had already made, and whom she infinitely and unappeasably disliked. He was the most awkward, stupid-looking young man she ever saw, and had furnished her with a butt for her malicious pleasantries ever since she had known him. He rose to lead her to her seat. "How different from Adolphus! If he is no better performer in the battle-field than at the supper-table, the King must be very ill off for soldiers. What can papa mean by asking such a horrid ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... o'clock in the morning, and as he passed he saw the Onondaga runner at the door of one of the prison lodges. He was about to cry out, but the Onondaga turned and struck him such a violent blow with the butt of a pistol, snatched from under his deerskin tunic, that he fell senseless. When a Mohawk sentinel found and revived him an hour later, the door of the hut was open, and the oldest of the prisoners, the one called ...
— The Scouts of the Valley • Joseph A. Altsheler
... she was locked in Cleve's arms, when the silence was so beautiful and full, she heard the heavy pound of a gun-butt upon the ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... gangway under water. He likewise sprung his main-mast, and the ship made so much water that she could not be freed by four pumps assisted by bailing. On the 9th the wind became calm, but the sea continued so high that the ship, in rolling, opened all her upper works and seams, and started the butt ends of her planks, and the greatest part of her top-timbers, the bolts being drawn by the violence of the roll. In this condition, with additional disasters to the hull and rigging, they continued beating westward to the 12th, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... had placed their muskets in the corner. The speaker took them, and handed one to his comrade. And now the widow observed that out of the muzzle of each protruded the butt-end of a small cowhide. Each soldier held his gun at his side, and laying hold of the said butt-end, drew out the long taper belly and dangling lash of the whip, like a ...
— Cudjo's Cave • J. T. Trowbridge
... to their Pope. This is Luther's unpardonable sin. Luther has done two things to the Pope: he has denied that the Pope exists by divine right, and he has in the most scurrilous manner spoken and written about the Pope and made his vaunted dignity the butt of universal ridicule. The indictment is true, but when the facts are stated, it will be seen to recoil on the heads of ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... all wrong, Bi did. He came to college from a Western university and entered the junior class. That was his first mistake. A fellow can't butt in at the beginning of the third year and expect to trot even with fellows who have been there two years. It takes a chap one year to get shaken down and another year to get set up. By the time Bi was writing his "life" he had just about ...
— The New Boy at Hilltop • Ralph Henry Barbour
... on the grassy slopes or in the forest adjoining the glaciers. During the day they go up again into the snow, for which they have an extraordinary love, and in which they skip and play, amusing themselves like a band of scholars in play hours. They tease one another, butt with their horns in fun, run off, return, pretend new attacks and new flights with ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume VI • Various
... with her. Men were at work clearing the land, and to one of them she gave an order to cut a couple of bamboo-trees for the Spray from a clump she had planted four years before, and which had grown to the height of sixty feet. I used them for spare spars, and the butt of one made a serviceable jib-boom on the homeward voyage. I had then only to take ava with the family and be ready for sea. This ceremony, important among Samoans, was conducted after the native fashion. A Triton horn was sounded to let us know when the beverage ...
— Sailing Alone Around The World • Joshua Slocum
... he did not belong to our regiment. Our chaplain took it from him and had it strapped to his saddle-bag. His purpose was to preserve it for its owner if the time should come that it could be returned. But in the meantime its presence attached to his saddle made him the butt of any amount of raillery from both ...
— War from the Inside • Frederick L. (Frederick Lyman) Hitchcock
... through our barbed-wire fence that everyone puts up here, and out a little ways to where I had heard one snoop; and, sure enough—what do you think? He seen me first and knocked my gun out of my hands with the butt of his. It got me mad, because it is a new gun and I am taking fine care of it; so I clanched him'—that's what Squat says, clanched. 'And, first, he run his finger into my right eye, clear up to the knuckle it felt like; so I didn't say a word, but hauled ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... returning from the town, were wending their way across the plain—lank overgrown girls with long thin legs and overhanging mops of hair like deck-swabs. They were a favourite butt of my men, who chaffed them in the humorous Eastern manner, with remarks that were, I am afraid, more coarse than witty. Kachins are not virtuous. Their customs preclude such a possibility. No Japanese maiden is more innocent of ...
— An Australian in China - Being the Narrative of a Quiet Journey Across China to Burma • George Ernest Morrison
... the man had the narrowest possible escape from being stoned to death—as he richly deserved to be; what business had he to be the only sane man in a crowd of madmen, and needlessly make himself the butt of ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... it not only serves no useful purpose, but, on the contrary, is pernicious in its effects, inasmuch as it occasions, not unnaturally, a feeling of soreness on the part of those, whether individuals or a nation, who are made the subject of it. Japan has too often been the butt of the humourist. I have no desire to deprecate humour, which no doubt gives a savour to life, but that humour which is only exercised at the expense of others, in my opinion, needs reprobation. As I have said, Japan among nations has been subjected ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... the storm of battle rides Olivier, His weapon, the butt of his broken spear, Down upon Malseron's shield he beat, Where flowers and gold emblazoned meet, Dashing his eyes from forth his head: Low at his feet were the brains bespread, And the heathen lies with seven hundred dead! ...
— The Harvard Classics, Volume 49, Epic and Saga - With Introductions And Notes • Various
... plough. Lot 222. Iron turnwrist [pronounced turn-riced] plough. Lot 242. 9-time scarifier. Lot 251. Clod crusher. Lot 252. Hay tedder." From another catalogue more ramalogues, these abrupt and active little words might be called, butt at one. As "Lot 4. Flint spud, two drain scoops, bull lead and five dibbles. Lot 10. Dung rake and dung devil. Lot 11. Four juts and a zinc skip." Farm labourers are men of little speech, and it is often needful that ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... transformed into some one terrible and sinister, standing upon pyramids of corpses, dictating laws to all those who were passing before his gaze now in magnificent carriages. He laughed like one condemned to death and patted the butt of the revolver. The boxes of cartridges were also ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... queer old fellow, that Mister Lambton, as stiff and as cold as an icicle on a water-butt. Of a morning he was scarcely out of bed when he knocked at the door of the ladies' cabin in his brocade dressing-gown, and Miss Lambton must come out and hear him read the whole morning service of the Episcopal Church, and make the responses, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... Tabby—Oh, lack-a-daisy-me! didn't she have at him! She's a good un, and no mistake! She stuck to his heels all the way along, and she beat him black and blue with her tongue, and he looked like a butt of alegar with a hogshead o' mustard in it. Hooray for old Tabby!"—and Silas announced that sentiment to the neighbourhood at the top of his ...
— All's Well - Alice's Victory • Emily Sarah Holt
... found myself face to face with the man on the other side. I lost no time in placing the muzzle of my Mannlicher close to his face, and the perplexed Shoka, dropping his kukri, went down on his knees to implore my pardon. After giving him a good pounding with the butt of my rifle, I sent him about his business. The man lacked the qualities of a murderer, but I felt I had better see that no other disturbance took place during the night. It is true that two men attempted to ...
— In the Forbidden Land • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... the gods, on Olympus of old, (And who the bright legend profanes with a doubt!) One night, 'mid their revels, by Bacchus were told, That his last butt of nectar had ...
— A Poetical Cook-Book • Maria J. Moss
... that you amuse him, you wound him in the nicest point,—his self-love. Besides irritating vanity, a constant flow of wit is excessively fatiguing to the listeners. A witty man is an agreeable acquaintance, but a tiresome friend. "The wit of the company, next to the butt of the company," says Mrs. Montagu, "is the meanest person in it. The great duty of conversation is to follow suit, as you do at whist: if the eldest hand plays the deuce of diamonds, let not his next neighbour ...
— The Laws of Etiquette • A Gentleman
... their bread in manufacturing guns for the African trade; and these, it was pretended, could not make guns of another sort.—But where lay the difficulty?—One of the witnesses had unravelled it. He had seen the Negros maimed by the bursting of these guns. They killed more from the butt than from the muzzle. Another had stated, that on the sea-coast the natives were afraid to ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament (1808) • Thomas Clarkson
... among the trees openly watching him. The garb proclaimed the figure to be that of a woman, and for a moment he was utterly startled. Then, acting on impulse, he started to walk towards the watcher, his unmittened hand on the butt of the ...
— A Mating in the Wilds • Ottwell Binns
... thing my life hung that I often marvel that I escaped so easily. Had not the rifle of the leader of the party swung from its fastenings beside his saddle in such a way as to strike against the butt of his great metal-shod spear I should have snuffed out without ever knowing that death was near me. But the little sound caused me to turn, and there upon me, not ten feet from my breast, was the point of that huge spear, a spear forty feet long, tipped with gleaming ...
— A Princess of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... again. I had a strong English hunting-whip, and was wearing a short riding-habit. So I sprang nimbly from my saddle, and seized him by the throat, twisting his necktie tightly, and at the same time showering blows upon his head, face, and shoulders with the butt-end of my whip till he howled for mercy. My servant, who was a little way behind, heard the noise at this moment, and, seeing how I was engaged thought that I was attacked, and flew to the rescue. Six men flung themselves upon him, ...
— The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton Volume II • Isabel Lady Burton & W. H. Wilkins
... face already bore the stamp of self-indulgence was stationed behind the butt with Lisle, and the latter was not favorably impressed with ...
— The Long Portage • Harold Bindloss
... for management would do well to butt their heads three times against the wall and take note that the wall falls not. Then and then only are they safe from Megalocephalia. There are temptations in life that require all of one's will to succumb to; and he who resists not the current of his being, nor attempts to ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... ewe after ewe will come back and rush up affectionately to one lamb after another. A good few will try to palm themselves off upon her. If she is young and foolish, she will be for a short time in doubt; if she is older and wiser, she will butt away the little impostors with her head; but they are very importunate, and will stick to her for a long while. At last, however, she finds her true child, and is comforted. She kisses its nose and tail with the most affectionate fondness, and soon the lost lamb ...
— A First Year in Canterbury Settlement • Samuel Butler
... "distinguished" by Madame Schontz, but as for marrying her, that folly seemed debatable to a bachelor of thirty-eight whom the revolution of July had made a judge. Seeing his hesitation, Madame Schontz made the Heir the butt of her wit, her jests, and her disdain, and turned to Couture. Within a week, the latter, whom she put upon the scent of her fortune, had offered his hand, and heart, and future,—three things of ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... log turned outward from its circling fellows, quivered for a moment in the cleft, then shot smoothly forth into the sluice. With a groan Henderson came to his senses, starting up and catching instinctively at the butt of the heavy Colt in his belt. At the same instant the coil of a rope settled over his shoulders, pinioning his arms to his sides, and he was jerked backwards with a violence that fairly lifted him over the projecting root of the birch. ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... initiative was in the hands of the Jacobins, and the executive power with the mob. The king, without an organ, without privilege, without force, had merely the odious responsibility of anarchy. He was the butt against which all parties directed the hate or rage of the people. He had the privilege of every accusation; whilst from the tribune Mirabeau, Barnave, Petion, Lameth, and Robespierre, eloquently threatened ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... by an electric shock, it flashed across my mind, "Peradventure, I might be lost for the night!" and be obliged to make my bed in Open Desert. I have seen in my life-time people strike a dead wall, as a convenient butt against which to vent their ill-disguised rage. I now must have a victim for my vexation. It was not wanting. I felt something heavy and dragging in my pocket. The half hour's running about had reminded ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... while Bob and the inspector made a detour through the woods so as to approach the cabin on the side away from the path, where there was little likelihood of those inside keeping a lookout. Very cautiously they advanced from the concealment of the woods, Frank Brandon with his right hand on the butt of a deadly looking automatic pistol. They crept close to the wall of the cabin, and listened intently for some ...
— The Radio Boys Trailing a Voice - or, Solving a Wireless Mystery • Allen Chapman
... cheerfully, and he dropped his right hand down to the butt of his gun. By Jove, he did! Then I had ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... of theirs. Their line gets hitched across your mast, and overturns you, or it catches somebody in the boat, and either throws them into the water, or cuts their face open. The best plan is to stand your ground, and be prepared to keep them off with the butt-end of a mast. ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome
... the New South Wales black butt and tallow wood were the most durable and noiseless ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... an' sit down," was the Secretary's advice, "Rosie meant you're out of parliamentry order. We got a motion on the table an' it's too late for you to butt in on it. This meetin' is ...
— New Faces • Myra Kelly
... Goldsmith defend his literary views, or Burke his Whiggism, or Gibbon his Deism? There was no common ground of philosophic toleration on which one could stand. If he could not argue he would be rude, or, as Goldsmith put it: "If his pistol missed fire, he would knock you down with the butt end." In the face of that "rhinoceros laugh" there was an end of gentle argument. Napoleon said that all the other kings would say "Ouf!" when they heard he was dead, and so I cannot help thinking that ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Home Rule movement connected with the name of Isaac Butt, and for some years previously, I had been brought into still closer contact with him, first, as secretary of his refuge for destitute and homeless boys, and then as manager and acting editor of the "Northern Press and Catholic Times," after that paper had come ...
— The Life Story of an Old Rebel • John Denvir
... addressed himself to the eight Irish miles that lay between him and home with unexpected vivacity. We swung in the ruts, we shook like jellies on the merciless patches of broken stones, and Croppy stimulated the pace with weird whistlings through his teeth, and heavy prods with the butt of his whip in the region of the ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... enough to excite the fancy of a sportsman. Dick's heart fairly leaped in his breast as he grasped the butt ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne
... one of the Dutchmen had got his musket to an order, following a sort of fugleman of their own; while Mike had invented a "motion" that would have puzzled any one but himself to account for. The butt of the piece was projected towards the captain, quite out of line, while the barrel rested on his own shoulder. Still, as his arms were extended to the utmost, the county Leitrim-man fancied he was performing much better ...
— Wyandotte • James Fenimore Cooper
... his large frame lurched closer. He wore a heavy gun and a knife in his belt. Also there protruded the butt of a pistol from the inside of his open vest. Allie felt the heat from his huge body, and she smelled the whisky upon him, and sensed the base, faithless, malignant animalism of the desperado. Assuredly, if he had any fear, ...
— The U.P. Trail • Zane Grey
... private opinion that no place does - and she is now away down to New York for a change, which (as Lloyd is in Boston) leaves my mother and me and Valentine alone in our wind-beleaguered hilltop hatbox of a house. You should hear the cows butt against the walls in the early morning while they feed; you should also see our back log when the thermometer goes (as it does go) away - away below zero, till it can be seen no more by the eye of man - not the thermometer, which is still perfectly visible, but the mercury, ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... to a triangular indentation, which, with footmarks, was imprinted in the soft yellow sand at the foot of a small boulder; and taking the butt of his Winchester rifle, fitted it ...
— Chinkie's Flat and Other Stories - 1904 • Louis Becke
... which they are now just hoisting is, in shape, like a right-angled triangle, with a parallelogram below its base; the hypothenuse or head of the sail is secured to a yard, like an enormous fishing-rod; the halyards are secured to it about a third of the way from the butt-end, and it is hoisted close up to the head of the mast. A tackle brings down the lower end of the yard to the deck, and serves to balance the lofty tapering point, while the sheet is secured to the lower after-corner ...
— The Three Commanders • W.H.G. Kingston
... dar behind, and get out ob de way in front, I'm jist going to take a run and butt dat nigger out of de State. Let me go, do you hear? Golly, if you hadn't held me he'd a been werry small pieces by dis time. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, October 30, 1841 • Various
... it isn't the case," he cried. "It's simply this: I wouldn't for the world have her feel that I am not grateful, and that's exactly what it would look like if I allowed you or any one else to butt ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... England, France, and Turkey; and the lion and the eagle conjointly supported devices which bore the names "Alma, Balaclava, and Inkermann." At the dejeuner sherry was served which had reached the venerable age of one hundred and nine years, was valued at L600 the butt, and had belonged to the great Napoleon. The same evening, the Queen and the Prince, with their guests, went in State to the Italian Opera, where Fidelio was performed. "We literally drove through a sea of human beings, cheering and pressing near the ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen, (Victoria) Vol II • Sarah Tytler
... It was on the sea that our laurels were chiefly won. Yet, at the time of the declaration of war, the navy of the United States consisted of twenty vessels, of which the largest carried forty-four guns, and the majority rated under thirty. For years this navy had been a butt of ridicule for all the European naval powers. The frigate "Constitution" was scornfully termed by an English newspaper "a bunch of pine boards sailing under a bit of striped bunting." Not long after the publication of this insolent jeer, the "Constitution" sailed ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 1 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... little butt of rain to-night, but my lawn is far from being drunk yet. Did not you find the Vine in great beauty? My compliments to it, and to your society. I only write to enclose the enclosed. I have consigned your button ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... discontinuous Wound Passed through him; butt the Ethereal Substance closed Not long divisible; and from the Gash A Stream of Nectarous Humour issuing flowed Sanguine, (such as celestial Spirits may bleed) And all ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... Colin a rod and the boy looked at it. It was nearly seven feet long, and the whole weight of it, except for the short butt which held the reel, was not more than sixteen ounces. The line was thin enough to be threaded through a big darning-needle, it was known as '21 thread' as it had that number of strands, each strand being tested to a breaking strain of ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Fisheries • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... bed on the leaves under some hedge, I've remembered that the Son of God when on the earth to teach us the sweet lesson of charity, 'had not where to lay his head.' The lesson he came to teach, you certainly have not learned, or you would never have made my poverty and my misfortunes the butt of your scoffings." ...
— How Deacon Tubman and Parson Whitney Kept New Year's - And Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray
... going on in this wild, stupid way, and treating me as if I were some stupid boy whom you meant to make your butt." ...
— In Honour's Cause - A Tale of the Days of George the First • George Manville Fenn
... circular hall, selected the table at the point of the compass indicated by the horseman's spear, touched with the point of a magic lance some of the pigmy effigies before him, and belabored others with the butt-end. A scene of confusion at once ensued in the mimic army. Part fell dead, and the rest, turning their weapons upon each other, fought with the utmost fury. The same scene was repeated in the ranks of the advancing enemy. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... find as Chagres. The California acted as if she were going to butt right into the beach; and the passengers, crowded along the landside rails, eagerly waiting, could make out no harbor. Yet Acapulco was said to have the finest harbor between Panama and San Francisco; and there was Acapulco itself—the old fort guarding ...
— Gold Seekers of '49 • Edwin L. Sabin
... hand gripped the butt of his pistol as he led the way straight ahead. The sudden gloom helped to hide in his face the horror he felt of what that "rescue" would mean to Mary Standish; and then a cold and deadly definiteness possessed him, and every nerve in his body gathered ...
— The Alaskan • James Oliver Curwood
... to get me right, Commander," Tolson pleaded. "I went up to one of the boys to show him how to hold his gun and he banged me with the butt of it!" ...
— All-Wool Morrison • Holman Day
... to Cascade Bay. The pine trees, of the utility of which such sanguine hopes had been entertained, were found to be unfit for large masts or yards, being shakey or rotten at thirty or forty feet from the butt; the wood was so brittle that it would not make a good oar, and so porous that the water soaked through the planks of a boat which had been built of it. Mr. King also lamented their ignorance of the proper mode of preparing the flax plant, which ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 1 • David Collins
... There was no sight of any spree in prospect. A glimpse of the kitchen showed only the preparations for an ordinary meal, and Hartigan wondered whether or not there had been a mistake. Could it be that he was the butt ...
— The Preacher of Cedar Mountain - A Tale of the Open Country • Ernest Thompson Seton
... says, "Jack, let me present my friends!" so the driver he shook hands with us and says, "Any friend of Billy's on your meal ticket! Where you crowd of sand skinners headed for?" So, after some talk, he understood. "You want a town," says he. "Well," p'inting with the butt of his whip, "eighteen miles over yonder you'll find your place, if you're looking to make the sidewalks stand perpendicular; and twenty mile over there, if you want to find some of the nicest people outdoors. Pretty girls there, bet cher life. Chip ...
— Red Saunders' Pets and Other Critters • Henry Wallace Phillips
... is?" said Mr Burkett, giving it a blow with the butt end of his gun, which broke the moss to pieces as if it had been a huge toadstool. The mossy coat was an inch and a half in thickness, and the whole interior appeared filled with wide-spreading miniature fir-trees. Every stalk, of which there were a great number, was edged with diminutive ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston
... way up the bank of the stream toward a huge sycamore that leaned lovingly over the water. An ancient wild grape vine, its butt four inches through and its roots fairly in the water, had a strangle-hold upon this decrepit forest monarch, its tendrils reaching the ...
— Hiram The Young Farmer • Burbank L. Todd
... and we set forth; at a deserted spot in the woods near Warsaw he tried to kiss me—I struck him in the face with the butt of his own whip. ...
— The Diary of a U-boat Commander • Anon
... who loved Lancelot better than any being in the world save one, promised that if I were willing, and seemed a lad of spirit, I should go along with Lancelot and himself to help build the colony at the butt end of the world. As the ship was to sail from Sendennis—that being Captain Amber's native place—he promised Lancelot that he would seek me out, and see if I pleased him, and if the plan pleased me. And I, on fire with the thought of getting away from Sendennis and feeling the width of the ...
— Marjorie • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... my commission arrived, and as the colonel seemed to hate to see me in the ranks when I was looked upon as an officer, he sent me to brigade headquarters on a detail to carry the brigade colors. The brigade colors consisted of a blue guidon, on a pole. The butt end of the pole, or staff, was inserted in a socket of leather fastened to my stirrup, and I held on to the staff with my right hand when on the march, guiding my horse with my left hand, When the command halted ...
— How Private George W. Peck Put Down The Rebellion - or, The Funny Experiences of a Raw Recruit - 1887 • George W. Peck
... thing That confesseth itself but the ape of a King; A tragical Caesar acted by a clown, Or a brass farthing stamped with a kind of crown; A bauble that shines, a loud cry without wool; Not Perillus nor Phalaris, but the bull; The echo of Monarchy till it come; The butt-end of a barrel in the shape of a drum; A counterfeit piece that woodenly shows; A golden effigies with a copper nose; The fantastic shadow of a sovereign head; The arms-royal reversed, and disloyal instead; In fine, he is one we may Protector call,— From ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... we are speeding gayly over the bright waters, never very calm along this shore. Presently we come to a spot clearly marked by some odd-colored, tumbled-down cliffs and the remains of a great iron butt, where, more than a hundred years ago, the Grosvenor, a splendid clipper ship, was wrecked. The men nearly all perished or were made away with, but a few women were got on shore and carried off as prizes to the kraals of the Kafir "inkosis" or chieftains. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various
... friend of his own to whom he may impart the delightful intelligence. A woman (with more or less skill) buries her secret away from her kind. For days and weeks past, had not this old Maria made fools of the whole house,—Maria, the butt of the family? ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... came about that Mr. Johnson bought him a commission in the same cavalry regiment that the General's grandson (whose commission had been given him by the Iron Duke) was in; and that he was quite content to be the butt of the mess where Jackanapes was the hero; and that when Jackanapes wrote home to Miss Jessamine, Tony wrote with the same purpose to his mother,—namely, to demand her congratulations that they were on active service at last, and were ordered to the front. And he added a postscript, to the effect ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... he, "I don't want to git mad, I don't want to go out yander, snatch them chickens out of the coop an' make 'em nod at each other in the dark, but when you talk that way you almost drive me—by jings, you almost drive me out there agin that tree, hard enough to butt the bark off. Do you reckon they are takin' them fellers down there to feed 'em, to fatten 'em up and then turn 'em loose? Hah, is that your idee? 'Zounds, madam, they are lucky to get there with their necks. And here you are lamentin' that there's nothin' at the ...
— The Jucklins - A Novel • Opie Read
... Moran to Wilbur one day, after a dinner of turtle steaks and fish, eaten in the open air on the quarterdeck; "mate, this is slow work, and the schooner smells terribly foul. We'll have the dory out and go ashore. We can tumble a cask into her and get some water. The butt's three-quarters empty. Let's see how it feels to ...
— Moran of the Lady Letty • Frank Norris
... for a week or two afterwards she would not pass through that room. As we entered the refectory one evening for dinner we saw a large snake vanish out of the back door, and we found it curled up behind the water-butt. ...
— India and the Indians • Edward F. Elwin
... had set down the empty pitcher and drawn his breath, he began to criticise the liquor which it had lately contained.—"Sufficient single beer, old Pillory—and, as I take it, brewed at the rate of a nutshell of malt to a butt of Thames—as dead as a corpse, too, and yet it went hissing down my throat—bubbling, by Jove, like water upon hot iron.—You left us early, noble Master Grahame, but, good faith, we had a carouse to your honour—we heard butt ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... to listen to orders. Gradually gathering, until they were in considerable numbers, several shots were fired at the officers; and one man, advancing up the steps, began to hammer at the door with the butt end of his musket. Terence leaned over the balcony and, drawing his pistol and taking a steady aim, fired, and the man fell with a sharp cry. A number of shots were fired from below, but the men were too unsteady to take aim, ...
— Under Wellington's Command - A Tale of the Peninsular War • G. A. Henty
... Hobart," he said quietly, taking the chance as though it was the most natural thing in the world. "I am not hunting trouble in any way, or seeking to butt in where I am not wanted. Your guess as to my purpose in coming here is about right. I had no other object but to be of some service to this young lady. If I can talk with her a moment alone, and thus assure myself ...
— The Case and The Girl • Randall Parrish
... otherwise measure me up for a crop of angelic pin-feathers that I've been unable to write anything worth reading. But as soon as I can swallow my heart and quit shivering I will grab the English language by the butt-end and make it crack like a new bull-whip about the ears of hypocrites and humbugs. Meanwhile I desire to state that there is nothing the matter with the ICONOCLAST's contributors. They are a bouquet of pansy blossoms of whom any publisher might well ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... Thuthanna Peathe!" With frown to make a statue thrill, The master thundered, "Hither, Will!" Like wretch o'ertaken in his track With stolen chattels on his back, Will hung his head in fear and shame, And to the awful presence came,— A great, green, bashful simpleton, The butt of all good-natured fun, With smile suppressed, and birch upraised The threatener faltered, "I'm amazed That you, my biggest pupil, should Be guilty of an act so rude— Before the whole set school to boot— What evil genius put you to 't?" "'Twas she, ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For • Various
... frequently played with him: they were one evening at this diversion, when the lover of Charlotta having his mind a little perplexed, placed his men so ill, that the chevalier beat him out at every motion. How is this, Horatio, cried he; you used to play better than I, butt now I have the advantage of you.—May you always have it, sir, replied he with the utmost respect, over all who pretend to oppose you.—Chess is a kind of emblem of war, where policy should go hand in hand ...
— The Fortunate Foundlings • Eliza Fowler Haywood
... starving Irish met occasionally ships sailing out of the Irish ports laden with food reaped by the starving Irish. On the quays of Galway the unhappy people wailed as they saw their harvests borne away from them, and were admonished by the butt-ends of British muskets, the British Government meantime passing Relief measures which provided employment for hordes of English officials and Irish understrappers, and pauper-relief for those who surrendered their manhood ...
— The Felon's Track • Michael Doheny
... tomb, sounding each with the butt of the pistol he held in his hand. Silence everywhere. They crossed the vault, reached the second gate, and entered the chapel. The same silence, the same solitude; all was deserted, as it seemed, for years. Roland went straight to the choir; there lay the blood on the stones; ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... field, he had recourse to the device which Goldsmith imputed to him in the witty words of one of Cibber's comedies: 'There is no arguing with Johnson; for when his pistol misses fire, he knocks you down with the butt end of it[300].' He turned to the gentleman, 'Well, Sir, go to Dominicetti, and get thyself fumigated; but be sure that the steam be directed to thy head, for that is the peccant part'. This produced a triumphant roar of laughter from the motley assembly ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... they had not been near enough to hear Wamba's directions. At length Brian remarked, what had at first escaped him in the twilight; "Here is some one either asleep, or lying dead at the foot of this cross—Hugo, stir him with the butt-end of ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... Hardy being at William Morse his house, affirm that ye earth in ye chimny cornar moved and scattered on us. I was hitt with somewhat; Hardy hitt by a iron ladle; somewhat hitt Morse a great blow, butt itt was so swift none could tell what itt was. After, we saw itt was ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 4 • Various
... safe in attributing the rarity, if not the positive absence, with the Indian, of that unhappy condition of bow-leggedness, of not too slight prevalence with us, and which renders its victim often a butt for not very charitable or ...
— A Treatise on the Six-Nation Indians • James Bovell Mackenzie
... carelessly, I was struck with the appearance of the vessel's being deeper than common. I had a little conversation about it, with a man in the forechains, who thought the same thing. This man leaned over, in order to get a better look, when he called out that he could see that we had started a butt! I went over, immediately, and got a look at this serious injury. A butt had started, sure enough, just under the chains, but so low down as to be quite out of our reach. The plank had started quite an ...
— Ned Myers • James Fenimore Cooper
... bushes, stumps, and, in fact, over and through almost any thing, chewing their cud all the time, patient and unconcerned. When they were brought up near to one of the trees that had been cut down, Raymond would hook the chain around the butt end of it, and then, at his command, they would drag it out of its place in the line of the fence. After looking on for some time, Caleb began to think that he would go to work; and he went to a little tree, with a stem about as big round as his arm, and ...
— Caleb in the Country • Jacob Abbott
... last day of November, we met with an English ship, and because it was too late that night, it was agreed that they were to give us two or three tons of wine next morning, being, as they said, all the provision of drink they had, save only a butt or two which they must reserve for their own use: But, after all, we heard no more of them till they were set on ground on the coast of Ireland, where it appeared they might have spared us much ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr
... meerschaum pipes, and profiles instinct with hatred and suffering. There was the head master, who ruined himself in giving parties, in order to marry his daughters—two tall, elegant girls, the butt of constant and abominable insults, written and sketched on every wall; there was the comptroller Pifard, whose wonderful nose betrayed his presence behind every door, when he went eavesdropping; and there were ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... fowl and venison and bear had passed round the circle, each Indian was glancing furtively sideways to see if his neighbor could still eat. He who was compelled to forsake the feast first was to become the butt of the company. All the while the French kept up a din of drums and trumpets and flageolets, dancing and singing and shouting to drive off sleep. The eyes of the gorging Indians began to roll. Never had they attempted to demolish such a banquet. Some shook ...
— Pathfinders of the West • A. C. Laut
... lightning, whose powerful glare was truly awful. Our people told us, that these formidable animals frequently upset canoes in the river, when every one in them was sure to perish. These came so close to us, that we could reach them with the butt-end of a gun. When I fired at the first, which I must have hit, every one of them came to the surface of the water, and pursued us so fast over to the north bank, that it was with the greatest difficulty ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 19, No. 535, Saturday, February 25, 1832. • Various
... horses' flanks with their sharp, gleaming teeth. A few more seconds, and I knew we should be both fighting, back to back, the last great fight for existence. Indeed I had ceased firing, and was already beginning to strike out furiously with the butt end of my rifle, when a new sound arrested my attention. The baying of dogs! 'Dogs!' I screamed, 'Dogs, Ivan!' (that was the coachman's name) 'Dogs!' and, in my mad joy, I brained two wolves in as many blows. The next moment a large pack of enormous ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell
... the look: thy mark is there; While on our temporal ground alive, Rightly though fearfully thou wieldest sword Of finer temper now a numbered learn That they resisting thee themselves resist; And not thy bigger joy to smite and drive, Prompt the dense herd to butt, and set the snare Witching them into pitfalls for hoarse shouts. More now, and hourly more, and of the Lord Thou lead'st to, doth this rebel heart discern, When pinched ascetic and red sensualist Alternately recurrent freeze or burn, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... a severe chastener to an obstinate ox. It is an elastic whip made of rhinoceros or hippopotamus skin,—hippopotamus is the best,—near six feet long, and tapering regularly from butt to tip. ...
— The Bush Boys - History and Adventures of a Cape Farmer and his Family • Captain Mayne Reid
... not do much for her sake. I almost think that I would do it entirely for her sake, if there were no other reason. But to shame myself by taking that which belongs to another, as though it were my own property! To live a coward in mine own esteem! Though I may be the laughing-stock and the butt of all those around me, I would still be a man to myself. I ought to have felt that it was sufficient when she told me that some of her thoughts must still be given to you. She is yours, Mr Gordon; but I doubt much whether ...
— An Old Man's Love • Anthony Trollope
... of this unbounded benevolence, and this exalted genius, deserve such honours as were never paid before; they deserve to bestride a butt upon every signpost in the metropolis, or to have their countenances exhibited as tokens where this liquor is to be sold by the license which they have procured. They must be at least remembered to future ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 11. - Parlimentary Debates II. • Samuel Johnson
... not say what had happened. Then I understood that, in the tension of looking for the ghost I could not see, my foot had stretched against the butt of one of the guns and upset a stack of some six of them on to the stone floor, thereby putting an end to all things, the ghost included; for when we recovered from this last fright, and Tim in desperation struck a light, ...
— Kilgorman - A Story of Ireland in 1798 • Talbot Baines Reed
... a fragment of a fourth (butt-end), a copper halberd, and a short blade of copper of somewhat similar form, found in 1892, near Birr, King's County, formerly in the collection of Mr. Robert ...
— The Bronze Age in Ireland • George Coffey
... reticent, most uncouth and awkward-appearing, homeliest and worst-dressed of any in the crowd. So superlatively wretched a butt could not hope to look on long unmolested. He was attacked one day as he stood near a tree by a larger boy with others at his back. But the crowd was greatly astonished when little Lincoln soundly thrashed the first, the second, and third boy in succession; and then, placing his back against the ...
— The Story of Young Abraham Lincoln • Wayne Whipple
... had an elder sister living in the city, an old maid who had withdrawn from the world, and in happier times had been the butt of the family's sarcasms. She did nothing all day but go to church, say her prayers, and caress her cat; and whenever she and her cronies came together they would gossip and abuse the younger generation, possibly because they themselves ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai
... member of the family, denied him all public honours, and left him a most paltry legacy. Tiberius, when looking out for a successor, deliberately passed him over as a man of deficient intellect. Caius kept him as a butt for his own slaps and blows, and for the low buffoonery of his meanest jesters. If the unhappy Claudius came late for dinner, he would find every place occupied, and peer about disconsolately amid insulting smiles. If, as ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... see of the battle then was the remarkable number of cartridges the Greek soldiers wasted in firing into space, and the fact that they had begun to fire at such long range that, in order to get the elevation, they had placed the rifle butt under the armpit instead of against the shoulder. Their sights were at the top notch. The cartridges reminded one of corn-cobs jumping out of a corn-sheller, and it was interesting when the bolts ...
— Notes of a War Correspondent • Richard Harding Davis
... price. The bakers of this place were obliged to work up the small stock of flour in their possession for the use of the troops; and all other persons were driven from the doors by the guards with the butt-ends of their muskets; though the citizen who came in quest of bread had perhaps twenty men quartered upon him, who all expected him to find wherewith to satisfy ...
— Frederic Shoberl Narrative of the Most Remarkable Events Which Occurred In and Near Leipzig • Frederic Shoberl (1775-1853)
... to drink and degradation, he had been the butt-end of riot and revolt at the Foundry. He had had his own way with Whiffler. He did not like to abdicate and give in to this new ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... delivered and accompanied by action illustrative of the various exercises referred to, Phil Squod shoulders his way round three sides of the gallery, and abruptly tacking off at his commander, makes a butt at him with his head, intended to express devotion to his service. He then begins to ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... that virtue is its own reward. &c. &c. If men truly virtuous care to be rewarded for it, their virtue is but a poor investment of their moral capital. Was Job so happy then on that ash-heap of his, the mark of the world's scorn, and the butt for the spiritual archery of the theologian, alone in his forlorn nakedness, like some old dreary stump which the lightning has scathed, rotting away in the wind and the rain? Happy! if happiness be indeed what we men are sent into this world to seek for, those ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... gun, broke it, examined the chamber. The six bullets lay snug. He snapped it back in position, held the automatic butt against his side, reached over and pressed the ...
— Slaves of Mercury • Nat Schachner
... world is overkind to his virtues and blind to his faults; he enters manhood indeed as "one of our conquerors"; and it will cost him some trouble to throw away his advantages. Before the war such a youth was the common butt of the Socialist orator. He was the typical "shirker" and "loafer," while other men worked; the parasite bred from the sweat of the poor; the soft, effeminate creature who had never faced the facts of life and never would. ...
— The War on All Fronts: England's Effort - Letters to an American Friend • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Sonny. "They wouldn't be but two. 'T wouldn't take my team more 'n half a minute to butt the life out ...
— Sonny, A Christmas Guest • Ruth McEnery Stuart
... sentry indifferently, letting the butt of his rifle drop again to the ground. Max slouched on again, directing his steps so that he would pass just in front ...
— Two Daring Young Patriots - or, Outwitting the Huns • W. P. Shervill
... loaf in Dawson are superior to style, For the man who wears a coat and vest is apt to cause a smile; While he who sports suspenders or a belt would be a butt, And cause ironic comment, and ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume X (of X) • Various
... dismal march; she elbows, and writhes, and tramples, and prances to the one end of making the most of the misery. She gets up early and sits up late, and is loud, and restless, and noisy, and unpitying. She drags her husband on to the woolsack, or pushes him into Parliament. She drives him full butt at the dear, lazy machinery of government, and knocks and buffets him about the wheels, and cranks, and screws, and pulleys; until somebody, for quiet's sake, makes him something that she wanted him to be made. That's why incompetent men sometimes ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... soldiers opposed them and were wounded, but it fortunately happened that they were, to an inconceivable degree, ignorant of the right use of fire-arms—holding their muskets in their hands when they discharged them, without allowing the butt-end to rest against their shoulders or any part of their bodies.[48] This fact accounts for the comparatively little mischief they did in proportion to the quantity ...
— The History of the First West India Regiment • A. B. Ellis
... spoke, and on behalf of May's possible children. Dymchurch, looking back into years long before he was born, saw a beautiful maiden of humble birth loyally wooed and wedded by a romantic artist, son of a proud baronet. Of course she became the butt of calumny, which found its chief support in the fact that the young artist had sculptured her portrait, and indiscreetly shown it to friends, before their marriage. Hearing these slanderous rumours, she wished all the work which represented her to ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... fed up with the whole thing," returned the Captain snapping his cigarette butt viciously into a corner. "What are we out here for anyway; what are we fighting for; what is the whole bally business about; that is what I ...
— On the Fringe of the Great Fight • George G. Nasmith
... disputant: the character was as well established as that of Sam Johnson. But there was a marked difference. It was said of Johnson that if his pistol missed fire, he would knock you down with the butt end of it: but Whewell, in like case, always acknowledged the miss, and loaded again or not, as the case might be. He reminded me of Dennis Brulgruddery, who says to Dan, Pacify me with a good reason, and you'll find me a dutiful master. I knew him from the time when ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... round each of the household when he was "boun," and every one of them went out of doors with him; he leans on the butt of his spear and leaps into the saddle, and he ...
— Njal's Saga • Unknown Icelanders
... please excuse my boldness," said Mr. Seabright, tremblingly, "but you have a totally wrong conception of my disposition I fear, Mr. Stranger. You can get the full benefit of my services with only the butt end of that thing pointing my way, instead of the occasional shifting of the muzzle ...
— The Hindered Hand - or, The Reign of the Repressionist • Sutton E. Griggs
... of wood that was lying near the kitchen door and made a desperate attempt to smash it in. Mrs. Godfrey, who had stood near the door for sometime, appeared calm and decided amid all the murderous clamour. She stepped back a pace, and placing the butt of the musket against her hip, with the muzzle slanting upwards, stood firm as ...
— Young Lion of the Woods - A Story of Early Colonial Days • Thomas Barlow Smith
... miserable place, very low and very damp; the walls disfigured by a thousand rents and blotches. The water was trickling out of a leaky butt, and a most wretched cat was lapping up the drops with the sickly eagerness of starvation. The grate was screwed up so tight as to hold no more than a thin sandwich of fire. Everything was locked up; the coal-cellar, ...
— Ten Girls from Dickens • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... I will not endure this! Why are you always making me your butt,—insulting me, sir, even in your father's house? You do not understand me; and I do not care to understand you. If my presence is disagreeable to you, I can easily relieve you of it!" and the dark youth turned to go away like Naaman, ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... the meanwhile, the duke of York had rallied his broken infantry, and while they faced the English, he charged the latter in flank at the head of his company of horse-guards. Though thrown into disorder, they continued to fight, employing the butt-ends of their muskets against the swords of their adversaries, and in a few minutes several squadrons of French cavalry arrived to their aid. James was surrounded; and, in despair of saving himself by flight, he boldly assumed the character of a French officer; rode at the head ...
— The History of England from the First Invasion by the Romans - to the Accession of King George the Fifth - Volume 8 • John Lingard and Hilaire Belloc
... I understood his idea. Crenshaw had traveled the road before, but I never had; we had traveled several miles on the mountain, when he passed near a great precipice; just before we passed it Crenshaw asked me for my whip, which had a pound of lead in the butt; I handed it to him, and he rode up by the side of the South Carolinian, and gave him a blow on the side of the head and tumbled him from his horse; we lit from our horses and fingered his pockets; we got twelve hundred and sixty-two ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... through the trees when he turned into the park and skirted the wall to the wicket. The wicket was locked. He rang repeatedly, he shook the grille and pounded on the iron escutcheon with the butt of his riding-crop; and at length a yawning servant appeared from the gate-lodge and sleepily dragged ...
— Lorraine - A romance • Robert W. Chambers
... and overhanging vines, about which I have serious doubts, and fully expect some day to see Columbine appear on that pistache-green balcony (where the magpie is hanging in a wicker cage), and, taking Arlequin’s hand, disappear into the water-butt while Clown does a header over the half-door, and the cottage itself turns into a gilded coach, with Columbine kissing her hand from ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... this camp we saw some of the largest spruce timber that we came upon in the whole journey across Labrador. Some of these trees were fully twenty-two inches in diameter at the butt and perhaps fifty to sixty feet in height. These large trees were very scattered, however, and too few to be of commercial value. For the most part the trees that we met with were six to eight, and, occasionally, ten inches through, scrubby and knotted. In Labrador ...
— The Long Labrador Trail • Dillon Wallace
... a fellow-servant; first an altercation, then a scuffle ensued, in which latter the mastiff took an effective part, in maintaining the equality of the house against what otherwise would have been overwhelming odds; but he was at last disabled by a blow with the butt of a fowling-piece, whilst the lap-dog, as it stood barking on the borders of the fray, was shot dead by the cowardly and vindictive Narcisse. This was too much to be borne, and, indignant, the ladies descended to the lawn. At the same ...
— The Advocate • Charles Heavysege
... 'ave wan iv our boys in for abjection an' rubbry—an' it seems is resolved to parsequte the poor boy at the nuxt 'Shizers—now dhis is be way av a dalikit hint to yew an' yoos that aff butt wan spudh av his blud is spiled in quensequence av yewr parsequtin' im as the winther's comin' on an' the wether gettin' cowld an' the long nights settin' in yew may as well prapare yewr caughin an' not that same remimber ...
— Fardorougha, The Miser - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... that the magic horseman indicated the approach of an enemy, than His Majesty hastened to the circular hall, selected the table at the point of the compass indicated by the horseman's spear, touched with the point of a magic lance some of the pigmy effigies before him, and belabored others with the butt-end. A scene of confusion at once ensued in the mimic army. Part fell dead, and the rest, turning their weapons upon each other, fought with the utmost fury. The same scene was repeated in the ranks of the advancing enemy. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... continued the captain, "steer for that canoe in the centre. We're going faster than they are. You, gentlemen, don't shoot, but use the butt-ends of your rifles if we should happen to get to close quarters. Every man take an oar or boathook, and use 'em like as if they were ...
— Old Gold - The Cruise of the "Jason" Brig • George Manville Fenn
... dead nobleman's coffin. The black mourning drapery which yet clung to the wood gave them quite a sense of magnificence. Their first child, Hans Christian, grew up amid these mean surroundings, constantly worried by the street boys, who made a butt of him, and tortured him in the thousand ingenious ways known to their species. He had no schooling to speak of; but, for all that, was haunted, like Joseph, by dreams foreshadowing his future greatness. Guided by this premonition he started, at the age of fourteen, for ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... Dutch ambassador, to realise the shrill pedant shrieking against Vorstius, the crapulous comrade of Carrs and Steenies, the fawning solicitor of Spanish marriages, the "pepperer" and hangman of Puritans, the butt and ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... to have an intuitive perception that danger was approaching, for it turned abruptly round just as the missile left the seaman's hand, and received the butt with full force close to the ...
— Gascoyne, the Sandal-Wood Trader • R.M. Ballantyne
... Scotland," said the Douglas. "I would sooner bare my breast, within flight shot, as a butt to an hundred Tynedale bowmen. No, by St. Bride of Douglas! I could but say I saw the ill fated youth dead. How he came by his death, your Grace can perhaps better explain. Were it not for the rebellion of March and the English war, I would speak my ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... masquerade. Drew could not recall his last really full meal. Just thinking about food made a warm, sickish taste rise in his mouth. He brought out the hardtack which Boyd had so indignantly rejected the night before, and holding the chunk balanced on his saddle horn, rapped it smartly with the butt of a revolver. It broke raggedly across, and then he was able to crack it again ...
— Ride Proud, Rebel! • Andre Alice Norton
... fellow trotted to church alone behind the usher, acutely conscious of the very grotesque figure he was presenting. I must have been dressed very much as Henry Fairchild was when he went to visit his little friend Master Noble. On returning from church, I threw my velvet cap into the water-butt, where, for all I know, it probably is still, and nothing would induce me to put on the velvet tunic or the floppy collars a second time. I bombarded my family with letters until I found myself equipped with a high hat and Eton jackets and collars such ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... There are fifty men there, well armed. I enter. 'Is all going on well?' 'Yes.' 'Courage.' I press all these brave hands; they make a report to me. They had seen a Municipal Guard smash in the head of a dying man with the butt end of his musket. A pretty young girl, wishing to go home, took refuge in the barricade. There, terrified, she remained for an hour. When all danger was over, the chef of the barricade caused her to be reconducted home by the eldest of ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... principal mark or butt; the most conspicuous, owing to his being in advance of his men, and perhaps on account of his stature also, if "eg gawr," ...
— Y Gododin - A Poem on the Battle of Cattraeth • Aneurin
... abuse. And what was the chief burden of their invective? It was the manner in which he distributed his patronage. In short, they were discontented with the share they received of the loaves and fishes, and thus the target of their adulation during the summer of hope, became the butt for their abuse in the winter ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... however enter decidedly tiresome very butt Solomon infection bluff Czar short although Caesarism distance ...
— Deductive Logic • St. George Stock
... essayed the feat, but each time a heavy blow over the knuckles from the butt-end of the whip forced him to desist. The lady burst into tears. The Baron swore in five languages alternately, and still the cab pursued its headlong career through deserted midnight streets, past infrequent policemen and stray belated revellers, on into an unknown ...
— The Lunatic at Large • J. Storer Clouston
... he had remained in his saddle. His rifle—its butt resting in the stirrup, its barrel extending up to his shoulder—had been seen by no one. The "armas de aqua" covering his legs, and the serape his shoulders, had completely concealed it. In addition to this, his sharp hunting-knife, ...
— The White Chief - A Legend of Northern Mexico • Mayne Reid
... voice, his cool mien, his satire, were as giant's arms to drag Belllounds back from murder. The rifle was raised, the hammer reset, the butt lowered to the ground, while Belllounds, snarling and ...
— The Mysterious Rider • Zane Grey
... blunder, I have now great hope, in the event of Mr. Pye's decease, of 'warbling truth at court,' like Mr. Mallet of indifferent memory.—Consider, one hundred marks a year! besides the wine and the disgrace; but then remorse would make me drown myself in my own butt before the year's end, or the finishing of my first dithyrambic.—So that, after all, I shall not meditate our laureate's ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... rapidly and blowing defiantly through his upturned nostrils as he saw his doom rushing upon him, let drive one more of his long shafts into the red, towering bulk, then dropped his bow, sank upon one knee, and held up his spear slantingly before him, with its butt firmly braced upon the ground. As the monster reared itself and fell upon him, the jagged point of the spear was forced deep into its belly, straight up till it reached the backbone. Then the shaft snapped, Ook-ootsk sprawled forward ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... them further, for we came upon another crowd of them with a poor frightened man in the centre. He was crying out—"For me, I am a man of peace—gentlemen, I am no spy. I have lived all my life in the Rue Scribe." But one after another struck at him, some with the butt-end of their rifles, some with their bayonets, those behind with the heels of their boots—till that which had been a man when I stood on one side of the street, was something which would not bear ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... shuddered before, my heart stood still now with a nameless dread, for sure enough, from both the 'butt' and the 'ben' of the so-called witch's cottage ...
— Our Home in the Silver West - A Story of Struggle and Adventure • Gordon Stables
... don't stop to talk now!" gasped the rescued aviator. "My machinist, Jack Butt, went down with us! Can you see ...
— Dick Hamilton's Airship - or, A Young Millionaire in the Clouds • Howard R. Garis
... he was gone before either could speak. Then a latch creaked and snapped behind them and, slowly and cautiously, the wooden shutter began to open outward. In an instant Harvey had raised his rifle and struck the resounding board a fierce blow with the butt. The door flew back, crashing in violent contact against the grizzled pate of Moreno himself, who, with a howl of mingled rage and anguish, fell ...
— Foes in Ambush • Charles King
... slouch hat, her gray flannel shirt, her weather-beaten khaki Norfolk and riding-breeches, looking for all the world like an extraordinarily slim, extraordinarily shabby little boy just starting out to play. Up from the top of one riding-boot the butt of a ...
— Little Eve Edgarton • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... or lend his horses, because it was mostly Squirrel's country, and he was afraid Squirrel would not like it. Squirrel could not go because it would be indelicate of him to butt in after negotiations had been opened with Kiya. Kirma was not well. Sousi could not go because his wife was sick, and it preyed on his mind so that he dare not trust himself away from the settlement; at least, not without much medicine to fortify ...
— The Arctic Prairies • Ernest Thompson Seton
... said von Horn quickly, seeing another possibility that would make his future plans immeasurably easier. "It was wicked, and it is still more wicked to continue the work and bring still other unfortunate creatures into the world to be the butt and plaything of ...
— The Monster Men • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... good supply of grain. The sepoys won't come; they say they cannot,—a mere excuse, v because they tried to prevail on the Nassick boys to go slowly like them, and wear my patience out. They killed one camel with the butt ends of their muskets, beating it till it died. I thought of going down disarming them all, and taking five or six of the willing ones, but it is more trouble than profit, so I propose to start westwards on Monday the 4th, or Tuesday the 5th. My sepoys offered Ali eight rupees to ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume I (of 2), 1866-1868 • David Livingstone
... lost in three weeks, or, to be more exact, in nineteen days, for he was back begging on the twentieth. Then he was given a lodge to keep, exactly as he had feared upon the island; and he still lives, a great favorite, though something of a butt with the country boys, and a notable singer in church ...
— Treasure Island • Robert Louis Stevenson
... fool's fire-ship became the butt of all sensible people in Europe as well as in America. Victor Hugo remarks that, "In the year 1807, when the first steamboat of Fulton, commanded by Livingston, furnished with one of Watts's engines sent from England, and manoeuvred, besides her ordinary crew, by two ...
— Four Months in a Sneak-Box • Nathaniel H. Bishop
... variety of individualities a herd of cows presents when you have come to know them all, not only in form and color, but in manners and disposition! Some are timid and awkward, and the butt of the whole herd. Some remind you of deer. Some have an expression in the face like certain persons you have known. A petted and well- fed cow has a benevolent and gracious look; an ill-used and poorly fed one, ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... desire me to feel. The arrow may be keen and true, the shaft rounded and straight, the bow strong, and the arm sinewy; but unless the steel be winged it will fall to the ground long before it strikes the butt. Your arrows must be winged with faith, else orthodoxy, and wise arrangements, and force and zeal, will avail nothing. No man will believe in, and no demon will obey, spells which the would-be ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... understand that a new-chum is, throughout the colonies, regarded as food for mirth. He is treated with good-humoured contempt and kindly patronage. He is looked upon as a legitimate butt, and a sort of grown-up and incapable infant. His doings are watched with interest, to see what new eccentricities he will develop; and shouts of laughter are raised at every fresh tale of some new-chum's ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... For the famous seven sisters were perpetrating something of a practical joke; they were leaving the castle in a boat, and on perceiving the men's faces at the windows they gave vent to a loud laugh of disdain. Hardly had the angry suitors realized that they were the butt of the ladies' ridicule when they were seized with consternation. For one of the sisters, in the attempt to shake her fist at the men she affected to despise, tried to stand up on one of the thwarts ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence
... the inmate of the chamber was heard drawing back a table, then the butt of a gun sounded upon the ...
— The Youth of Jefferson - A Chronicle of College Scrapes at Williamsburg, in Virginia, A.D. 1764 • Anonymous
... with a second shot from his six-shooter, stretched Kansas on the ground; then, rushing forward with reversed weapon, he brought the butt down on Red's head with such force as to deprive him of consciousness. So swift and deadly were his movements, so wild his appearance as, with long locks streaming in the wind and huge black whiskers ...
— Lahoma • John Breckenridge Ellis
... its birth. You're merely a butt for our mirth. You're a "sheeny" — and therefore despised And rejected as "scum o' ...
— The Little Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... answered Brown, "there's both, for we're fed every day out of the ship's stores. There's the scuttle butt on deck nearly full o' water, and there's grub down in the lazarette, but how much I ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood
... Maslenikoff said, frowning as he recalled how Fanarin, examining him as a witness the year before, in the most polite manner made him the butt of ridicule. ...
— The Awakening - The Resurrection • Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy
... nat'al stuffin' outen you,' sez Brer Rabbit, sezee, but de Tar-Baby, she ain't sayin' nuthin'. She des hilt on, en den Brer Rabbit lose de use er his feet in de same way. Brer Fox, he lay low. Den Brer Rabbit squall out dat ef de Tar-Baby don't tu'n 'im loose he butt 'er cranksided. En den he butted, en his head got stuck. Den Brer Fox, he sa'ntered fort', lookin' dez ez innercent ez wunner ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... your pluck, Mike, but, to quote your favorite method of expressing yourself, you showed mighty poor judgment, as the owner of the bull said when the animal tried to butt a locomotive off the track. That man would ...
— The Launch Boys' Adventures in Northern Waters • Edward S. Ellis
... with both his hands he gripped it as he spoke, And, where the butt and top were spliced, in pieces twain he broke; The limber top he cast away, with all its gear abroad, But, grasping the tough hickory butt, with spike of iron shod, He ground the sharp spear to a point; ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... a shovin' off?" complained one of the linemen, as he was pushed toward the motor. He made some effort to resist but the next moment he pitched forward. One of the Germans had struck him on the head with the butt of his revolver. It was a stunning blow, and the man was certainly silenced. Dick recoiled angrily from the sight, but he kept quiet. He knew he could do no good by interfering. But the sheer, unnecessary brutality of it shocked and angered him. He felt that Englishmen, ...
— Facing the German Foe • Colonel James Fiske
... interminable time, it seemed to him, there was no sound from within. He guessed what Cassidy was doing—peering through that slit of window under the curtain. But he was not absolutely sure. And he knew the necessity of making no error, with Cassidy in there, gripping the butt of his gun. ...
— The Country Beyond - A Romance of the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... we gave it ter 'em!" exclaimed another in excited jerks. "Fight! Wall, that's what I call fightin', leastways it's put. I declar' I reckon I hit six Yankees plum on the head with the butt of this here musket." ...
— The Battle Ground • Ellen Glasgow
... intentions towards you, when the arrival of the Moors happened in time to frustrate them. Should he, however, learn that you are at Granada, where your presence may throw invincible impediments in his way, the knowledge would be perhaps attended with disastrous results. I am a poor man, a butt to sustain my master's ill humors, but I will not so far dishonor my feelings as to permit the possibility of your being exposed a second time to the dreaded manoeuvres of Gomez Arias. Fly, lady, fly to your ...
— Gomez Arias - The Moors of the Alpujarras, A Spanish Historical Romance. • Joaquin Telesforo de Trueba y Cosio
... the King!" he said, gravely, with the calm which presages a storm; "our Royal person must be no butt for raillery. This sceptre appears light, my lords, but he who ridicules it shall be crushed thereby as with a block of iron. I believe that our holy father the Pope is somewhat indebted to us, so that we do not fear his displeasure ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 27, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... you, Jimmy Bourke," replied FitzPatrick, calmly, "th' stick is sound and good, or was before your murderin' crew got hold of it, but if ye'll take a squint at the butt of it ye'll see that your gang has sawed her on a six-inch slant. They've wasted a good foot of th' log. I spoke of that afore; an' now I give ye warnin' that I cull every log, big or little, punk or sound, that ain't sawed square and ...
— Blazed Trail Stories - and Stories of the Wild Life • Stewart Edward White
... function of such importance, he had failed to offer the people as evidence of his power a brilliant spectacle of some sort. The very fact that Adrian VI did not understand and appreciate this requirement of the Renaissance made him the butt ...
— Lucretia Borgia - According to Original Documents and Correspondence of Her Day • Ferdinand Gregorovius
... placed the cartridges in the chambers of the revolvers, the shining brass gleaming beside the dull steel. He gripped the pistols by the barrel, and held out the butt-ends to ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... next moment Mr. Adams had him by the throat. They swayed and gulped for breath, rutting the earth with sharp heels; they rolled to the floor and floundered with legs tight tangled, the boy blindly striking at Mr. Adams with the pistol-butt, and the audience drawing closer to lose nothing, when the bright knife flashed suddenly. It poised, and flew across the room, harmless, for a foot had driven into Mr. Adams's arm, and he felt a ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... proposed that he should call at the office of the paper, "where he would give him every satisfaction." Colonel Berkeley replied, "No, sir! Now, sir! Now, sir!" and without further notice commenced a cowardly attack on the unarmed man by beating him over the head and face with the butt-end of a heavy hunting whip. To make the dastardly affair more dastardly if possible, one of the two fellows with him stood at the door, and the other near the fire place, so as to prevent Judge from seizing any weapon or calling any one to ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... are God's sheep, not mine; <"Pastor est tui Dominus."> You find In this the pleasant pasture of our life Much you may eat without the least offence, Much you don't eat because your maw objects, 880 Much you would eat but that your fellow-flock Open great eyes at you and even butt, And thereupon you like your mates so well You cannot please yourself, offending them; Though when they seem exorbitantly sheep, You weigh your pleasure with their butts and bleats And strike the balance. Sometimes certain ...
— Men and Women • Robert Browning
... which may corrupt children, schools and playgrounds and museums which may educate them. Few doctrines have been productive of more pain than the "woman's sphere" argument. It is this which has, for a thousand years, made the unmarried woman, the Old Maid, the butt of the contemptible jibes of Christian society, whereof you will find no parallel in pagan antiquity. Dramatic writers have held her up to ridicule on the stage on account of the peculiarities of character which are naturally acquired when ...
— A Short History of Women's Rights • Eugene A. Hecker
... could'st thou gain the butt of sack And salary that Pye has, Would it not cheer thy visage black, ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 14. Saturday, February 2, 1850 • Various
... you, didn't I? ... was at Cambridge with us. He came down a year before we did. As a matter of fact, he was sent down and told to stay down. He ducked a proctor in a water-butt and the dons were very cross about it. He's not a bad fellow. I think we'll ask him round here one evening. Lady Cecily's very fond of him ... she used to come up to Cambridge to see him ... before the affair with the proctor, of course ... and Gilbert and I took ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... point,—his self-love. Besides irritating vanity, a constant flow of wit is excessively fatiguing to the listeners. A witty man is an agreeable acquaintance, but a tiresome friend. "The wit of the company, next to the butt of the company," says Mrs. Montagu, "is the meanest person in it. The great duty of conversation is to follow suit, as you do at whist: if the eldest hand plays the deuce of diamonds, let not his ...
— The Laws of Etiquette • A Gentleman
... for Bucephalus to butt the door down, however, as one of the men with Rollins had been captured, and was forced to open the door with ...
— The Hilltop Boys on Lost Island • Cyril Burleigh
... seat in mingled fear and wrath. Was he to be the butt of those overbearing sophomores? He thought he could do nothing but hang on with all his might. The ascending student jumped upon the fourth bench and, reaching up, laid hold of Ken with no gentle hands. His grip was so hard that Ken had difficulty ...
— The Young Pitcher • Zane Grey
... petition the more readily that his Emir, he could see, regarded the most exquisite of dragomans simply as a standing joke. They laughed together at his superstition and his boastfulness. But their butt was really serviceable in small ways, knowing where to hire good horses at the lowest price, and pointing out in the course of their rides objects of interest of the very existence of which ...
— The Valley of the Kings • Marmaduke Pickthall
... Mr. Ross saw above fifty of them in the course of his walk, and several others were met with near the tents. A large one was shot by one of the men, who struck the animal; as he lay on the ground, a blow on the head with the butt end of his piece, and, leaving him for dead, ran towards the tents for a knife to bleed and skin him; when the deer very composedly got on his legs, swam across a lake, and finally escaped. A small fawn was the only one killed. Three black whales and a few seals were ...
— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry
... the volley was returned; and ere the smoke rose a cheer rang through the ravine, and Riley fell with a swoop on the intrenchments. With bayonet and butt of musket, the Second and Seventh drove the enemy from his guns, leaping into his camp and slaughtering all before them. Up rushed Smith's own brigade on the left, driving a party of Mexicans before them, and charging with the bayonet straight at Torrejon's cavalry, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... looked out along its barrel through the open, sunshiny window. Something in the pose of the body, in the curve of the arm, struck Nicolas strangely. He moved almost in front of Ferrol. There came back to him mechanically the remembrance of a piece of silver on the butt of one of ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Each apostle based her claim on the superior virtue and attainments of her clergy, and clenched the business with a threat of hell-fire. 'Pas bong pretres ici,' said the Presbyterian, 'bong pretres en Ecosse.' And the postmaster's daughter, taking up the same weapon, plied me, so to speak, with the butt of it instead of the bayonet. We are a hopeful race, it seems, and easily persuaded for our good. One cheerful circumstance I note in these guerilla missions, that each side relies on hell, and Protestant ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... creation of the best work, who "never wrote a line of poetry with the least shadow of public thought," who believes that after his death he will be among the English poets, and that if he only has time now, he will make himself remembered—that such a one should be merely the butt and laughing-stock of his readers! It is an unendurable position. Not that Keats attaches undue importance to popular applause. "Praise or blame," he says, "has but a momentary effect upon the man whose love of beauty ...
— A Day with Keats • May (Clarissa Gillington) Byron
... may invariably get mixed up in railway accidents. That is a kind of ill-luck which one can bear, not indeed without grumbling, but without rancour. The man who is unlucky to experience these things at least has the consolation of other people's sympathy; but the man who is the butt of inanimate things has no one's sympathy. We may be on a motor bus which overturns and nobody will say that it is our fault, but if our collar deliberately and maliciously squeaks, everybody will say that ...
— Not that it Matters • A. A. Milne
... the log as he spoke, and extended a hand to Norah, who followed him lightly. Then the Hermit led the way along the log, which was quite broad enough to admit of a wheelbarrow being drawn down its length. He stopped where the butt of the old tree, rising above the level of the trunk, barred the view, and pulling aside the dogwood, showed rough steps, cut in the ...
— A Little Bush Maid • Mary Grant Bruce
... breast with the spear, and rent the coat of bronze about him, that aforetime warded death from his body, but now rang harsh as it was rent by the spear. And he fell with a crash, and the lance fixed in his heart, that, still beating, shook the butt-end of the spear. Then at length mighty Ares spent its fury there; but Idomeneus boasted terribly, and cried aloud: "Deiphobos, are we to deem it fair acquittal that we have slain three men for one, since thou ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer (Lang, Leaf, Myers trans.)
... greatest offense is what he has done to their Pope. This is Luther's unpardonable sin. Luther has done two things to the Pope: he has denied that the Pope exists by divine right, and he has in the most scurrilous manner spoken and written about the Pope and made his vaunted dignity the butt of universal ridicule. The indictment is true, but when the facts are stated, it will be seen to recoil on the heads of those who ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... contrary, is pernicious in its effects, inasmuch as it occasions, not unnaturally, a feeling of soreness on the part of those, whether individuals or a nation, who are made the subject of it. Japan has too often been the butt of the humourist. I have no desire to deprecate humour, which no doubt gives a savour to life, but that humour which is only exercised at the expense of others, in my opinion, needs reprobation. As I have said, Japan ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... My father stamped the butt of his musket upon deck. "'Rested in the notion,' did it? Nothing of the sort, sir! It rested in the apple, which he was told not to eat; but, nevertheless, ate. Born a philosopher, was he? And knew the effect of every ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... accompanied by Hopalong and Red, rode up to where the guards smoked and joked. Frenchy came out of the cabin and smiled at his friends. Swinging in his left hand was a newly filled Colt's .45, which was recognized by his friends as the one found in the cabin and it bore a rough "T" gouged in the butt. ...
— Hopalong Cassidy's Rustler Round-Up - Bar-20 • Clarence Edward Mulford
... he couldn't!" Amy quoted. "Poor Cigarette," she added, descending to prose again, and tapping Cigarette's nose with the butt of her riding-crop. "How he did heave and pant when he caught up with us! And Sunbeam never turned ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... Boort Meerbeek a German soldier was seen to fire three times at a little girl 5 years old. Having failed to hit her, he subsequently bayoneted her. He was killed with the butt end of a rifle by a Belgian soldier who had seen him commit ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... for Kirstie and the credit of the Elliotts. And again she had a vision of herself, the day over for her old-world tales and local gossip, bidding farewell to her last link with life and brightness and love; and behind and beyond, she saw but the blank butt-end where she must crawl to die. Had she then come to the lees? she, so great, so beautiful, with a heart as fresh as a girl's and strong as womanhood? It could not be, and yet it was so; and for a moment her bed was horrible to her as the sides of the grave. And ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... his secretary and many of his guards. It was even reported; and generally believed, that Farnese himself had been in imminent danger, that Schenk had fired his pistol at him unsuccessfully, and had then struck him on the head with its butt-end, and that the Prince had only saved his life by leaping from his horse, and scrambling through a ditch. But these seem to have been fables. The alarm at last became general, the dawn of a summer's day was fast approaching; the drums beat to arms, and the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... frenzy Edith struck that hand again and again with the heavy butt of her riding-whip, but it did not loosen ...
— The Living Link • James De Mille
... as that, I have no desire to butt in for an interview," he said. "Oblige me by ascertaining at your earliest convenience whether or not I may be of service to Mr. Kent in ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... whispered the taunt. It added a thousandfold to my embarrassment that there was in all a certain orderliness, so that while no one moved, and none, while I looked at them, raised their voices, I seemed the more singled out, and placed as a butt in ...
— A Gentleman of France • Stanley Weyman
... Arab who kept the Bordj, roused by my beating upon the door with the butt end of my revolver, came with D'oud to ask what was the matter. The door had to be broken in. This took some time. Long before I could escape, the light of the sun, entering through the little arched windows, had illumined the nude corpse of the Spahi, ...
— The Desert Drum - 1905 • Robert Hichens
... with a start. Anson with his admiring smile pulled his gun and, taking a couple of steps forward, held it out butt first. She stretched eagerly for it and he jerked ...
— The Man of the Forest • Zane Grey
... unconscious, stolid Scotchman named Johnstone, with sneers and sarcasms which the Scotchman seemed to disregard or take in good part. On the next morning, however, Townshend's victim, enlightened by some friend as to the way in which he had been made a butt of, became belligerent and sent Townshend a challenge. Various opinions have been expressed of Townshend's action in the matter. He has been applauded for good sense. He has been reproached for cowardice. Certainly Townshend did not, would ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... the second son of Sir Clarence Butt Malmaison, of Malmaison, Sussex. He had the odd distinction of being born on the 29th of February, 1800. His elder brother, Edward, born 1798, died before him, as will be hereinafter shown. There were no other brothers, but four girls ...
— Archibald Malmaison • Julian Hawthorne
... the rifle butt to the ground, and before Lone quite realized what he was doing Swan had a short, wicked-looking automatic pistol in one hand and a pair of handcuffs in the other. Lone flushed, but there was nothing to do but hold ...
— The Quirt • B.M. Bower
... to the troopers in his rear; and as the horsemen reined in and came to a standstill, he allowed his hand to drop to the butt of one of the four automatic pistols which he had taken the precaution to thrust into his belt before setting out from the palace in the morning. Drawing forth the weapon and allowing the hand which held it to drop to his side, ...
— In Search of El Dorado • Harry Collingwood
... they've got to go to a fashionable private one to learn hog-Latin, hog-wash, and how much the neighbors are worth. Of course, the rich children are going to say that they're pushing little kids, but they've got to learn to push and to shove and to butt right in where they're not wanted if they intend to herd with the real angora billy-goats. They've got to learn how to bow low to every one in front of them and to kick out at every one behind them. It's been my experience that it takes a good four-year course in ...
— Old Gorgon Graham - More Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son • George Horace Lorimer
... time the fire was lighted, and when Shad brought up a kettle of water from the river Bob had already cut a stiff pole about five feet in length. The butt end of this he sharpened, and, jamming it into the ground, inclined it in such manner that the kettle, which he took from Shad and hung by its bail upon the other end of the pole, was ...
— The Gaunt Gray Wolf - A Tale of Adventure With Ungava Bob • Dillon Wallace
... smile of some, and retort the frown of others; to wrestle with the anxiety of the heart, and to depend on the caprice of the excited nerves. It is something to feel one part of the drama of disgrace is over, and that I may wait unmolested in my den until, for one time only, I am again the butt of the unthinking and the monster of the crowd. My lord, I have now done! To you, whom the law deems the prisoner's counsel,—to you, gentlemen of the jury, to whom it has delegated his fate,—I leave the chances ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... man put flagons or mixing-bowls on the tables; the steward filled the cup from the butt, and there was no ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... feet away, suddenly up-end and start a very devil's dance. This was a diversion from the profitless discussion, and Kohokumu and I dipped our paddles and raced the little outrigger canoe to the dancing pole. Kohokumu caught the line that was fast to the butt of the pole and under-handed it in until a two-foot ukikiki, battling fiercely to the end, flashed its wet silver in the sun and began beating a tattoo on the inside bottom of the canoe. Kohokumu picked up a squirming, slimy squid, with his teeth bit a chunk of live bait out of it, attached ...
— On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales • Jack London
... this object proceeded to dismount, but on bringing my leg to the ground, as I imagined, I made a rapid descent of about eight feet. On clambering up I was met with a sharp blow on the face from what I believe to have been the butt of a Turkish musket, and my horse was not to be found. About half an hour later, while feeling for the road, to my great satisfaction, I placed my hand upon my English saddle, and thus repossessed myself of my steed. No need to dilate farther ...
— Herzegovina - Or, Omer Pacha and the Christian Rebels • George Arbuthnot
... everybody said he was a senator's son, but the other boys had rather be acquainted with me, because I belonged to the show, and I took pity on the senator's son and let him talk to me, without looking cross at him, or snubbing him, as I do most boys who try to butt in on me. I got to liking the senator's son and had him come in the tent, and we put in the afternoon ...
— Peck's Bad Boy at the Circus • George W. Peck
... goal. He had those to deal with who possessed every facility and advantage successfully to battle him in his hopes and plans. But then he was no longer the poor painter, who did not know where his next meal was to be obtained; he was no longer the hungry artist-the butt and jest of his old companions. No! he was under the patronage of the Grand Duke, whose personal friendship he could boast. His brush brought him daily-or as often as he was pleased to exert himself-large sums of money; and his well-lined ...
— The Duke's Prize - A Story of Art and Heart in Florence • Maturin Murray
... history, law, and usage with them form such a manifold, diversified, and complex mass, that it is not one subject but a world of subjects that we have to deal with in approaching them.' And he pointed out that if any clever lawyer such as Butt or Cairns were employed to oppose the bill systematically, debate would run to such lengths as to make it hopeless. This was a point of view that Mr. Gladstone's more exacting and abstract critics now, and many another time, forgot: they forgot ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... wrote a line of poetry with the least shadow of public thought," who believes that after his death he will be among the English poets, and that if he only has time now, he will make himself remembered—that such a one should be merely the butt and laughing-stock of his readers! It is an unendurable position. Not that Keats attaches undue importance to popular applause. "Praise or blame," he says, "has but a momentary effect upon the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic on his own works.... In Endymion ...
— A Day with Keats • May (Clarissa Gillington) Byron
... my gun. At the corner of Market and Front streets I met Mr. Philip Hines, who offered to take me through the crowd to safety, and led me right into trouble. I was held up and searched. Ben Turpin took my revolver from me and gave me this gash on my forehead with the butt of it." I bathed and bound up Bently's wound, and he lay himself upon the lounge in my dining-room, and being weak from the loss of blood, soon dropped off to sleep. We were too frightened to lie down. Thirty minutes elapsed. We heard the sound of footsteps ...
— Hanover; Or The Persecution of the Lowly - A Story of the Wilmington Massacre. • David Bryant Fulton
... statue thrill, The master thundered, "Hither, Will!" Like wretch o'ertaken in his track With stolen chattels on his back, Will hung his head in fear and shame, And to the awful presence came,— A great, green, bashful simpleton, The butt of all good-natured fun, With smile suppressed, and birch upraised The threatener faltered, "I'm amazed That you, my biggest pupil, should Be guilty of an act so rude— Before the whole set school to boot— What evil genius put you ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For • Various
... ducked the submarine boy; then came up straight at close quarters. Benson's sudden grapple deprived the driver of a chance to use the butt of his whip in the manner ...
— The Submarine Boys' Lightning Cruise - The Young Kings of the Deep • Victor G. Durham
... against the wooden cross awry with age and shorn of all its symbols. Lambs frisk among the boats; impudent kids nibble the drooping ears of patient mules. Hinds in white jackets and knee-breeches made of skins, lead shaggy rams and fiercely bearded goats, ready to butt at every barking dog, and always seeking opportunities of flight. Farmers and parish priests in black petticoats feel the cattle and dispute about the price, or whet their bargains with a draught of wine. Meanwhile the nets are brought on shore glittering with the fry of sardines, which are cooked ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... when she heard the soldier assigned to their home bang on the door with the butt of his rifle, fled to the kitchen, where she stood listening and watching. She nearly cried out when the soldier thrust the bayonet of his rifle at her father, and all the resentment of her race at such injustice rose ...
— The Children of France • Ruth Royce
... soldiers' uniforms because they are soldiers, and then they shoot all natives who resist them in civil dress, because they are not soldiers and have no right to fight. I suppose they ought to go about naked. They used to kill their prisoners with the butt-end of their rifles, but that breaks the rifles, and now ...
— Captain Jinks, Hero • Ernest Crosby
... victory, he would use any device that came to hand. "There is no arguing with Johnson," said Goldsmith, quoting a phrase from Cibber, "for if his pistol misses fire, he knocks you down with the butt-end ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... describes the hoop and pole game as played by the Apaches. With them the pole is marked with divisions throughout its whole length and these divisions are stained different colors. The object of the game is to make the hoop fall upon the pole as near the butt as possible, graduated values being applied to the different divisions of the pole. The women are not permitted to approach within a hundred yards while the game is going on. [Transcriber's Note: Lengthy footnote relocated to chapter ...
— Indian Games • Andrew McFarland Davis
... corner to get him out of her husband's sight; and in the corner Vance was glad enough to stay hid while the giant ate an enormous supper, and drank a whole cask of ale which his wife drew for him from a huge butt in the ...
— Prince Vance - The Story of a Prince with a Court in His Box • Eleanor Putnam
... has decided in favour of one of his sons, the conqueror visits the hut in which his father's body lies in state. He approaches the corpse, and standing by its side, he sticks the butt-end of his spear in the ground, and leaves it thus fixed near the right hand of the dead king. This is ...
— Ismailia • Samuel W. Baker
... passed over his weapon, butt first, in the accepted style of surrendering. Paz grinned again, and motioned to his men to come up. One of them began loosening a lariat ...
— The Boy Ranchers Among the Indians - or, Trailing the Yaquis • Willard F. Baker
... in its luxurious carriage through its private park, when it saw something which frantically and repeatedly ran against a stone wall, endeavouring to butt out its brains. ...
— Fantastic Fables • Ambrose Bierce
... muzzle of a heavy gun, a fowling-piece of about six or seven foot barrel, did lift up the gun, and hold it out at arms' end,—a gun which the deponents thought strong men could not with both hands lift up, and hold at the butt end, as ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... the Indian chief. In vain he tried to shake off that grip. It was like that of a bulldog and could not be loosened. He struck out wildly, but the pistol butt only landed upon Pawnee Brown's shoulder, a shoulder that was as tough as iron and could ...
— The Boy Land Boomer - Dick Arbuckle's Adventures in Oklahoma • Ralph Bonehill
... doublet by the grain; The monk beneath the hood can spy; Master from man can ascertain; I know the nun's veiled modesty; I know when sportsmen fables ply; Know fools who creams and dainties stow; Wine from the butt I certify; All things except ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... cast into the fire."[12] In order to make this Saturnalian amusement general in the family, you sent it down stairs, that judges and juries might partake of the entertainment. The unfortunate antiquary and augur who is the butt of all this sport may suffer in the roistering horse-play and practical jokes of the servants' hall. But whatever may become of him, the discussion itself, and the timing it, put me in mind of what I have read, (where I do not recollect,) that the subtle ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... to him, I fired; but it did him no mischief and only made him take himself off at once. I nearly got into a scrape through it, however, for I was fired at myself in return, the bullet fortunately only taking the butt end off my musket. I turned to run off, and another shot hit the knapsack on my back, but I soon got out of reach of their shot again, luckily, as it happened, without any injury; but it must have been a near thing, for when I next opened my ...
— The Autobiography of Sergeant William Lawrence - A Hero of the Peninsular and Waterloo Campaigns • William Lawrence
... were waiting to see me place the second joint in the butt first!" She deftly ran the silk through the guides, and then scientifically knotting the leader, slipped on a cast of three flies and picked her way daintily to the river bank. As she waded in the sudden cold made her gasp a little to herself, but she kept straight on without turning her ...
— In the Quarter • Robert W. Chambers
... question for your honour to be after axing me. Sure all the country knows O'Sullivan of Toomies, for didn't him, and his father before him, live at the butt end of the mountain, near the neck of the Lawn; and wasn't they great chieftains in the ould times; and hadn't they a great sketch of country to themselves: they haven't so much now, for their hearts were too big for their manes (means;) ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 352, January 17, 1829 • Various
... Mrs. Sherwood—or, to give her her maiden name, Mary Butt—was a clergyman. He had a beautiful country living called Stanford, in Worcestershire, not far from Malvern, where Mary was born on May 6, 1775. She had one brother, a year older than herself, and a sister several years ...
— The Fairchild Family • Mary Martha Sherwood
... [with a flash of family pride.] — And I the son of a strong farmer (with a sudden qualm), God rest his soul, could have bought up the whole of your old house a while since, from the butt of his tailpocket, and not have missed the weight ...
— The Playboy of the Western World • J. M. Synge
... Miss Scarlett went on. "I'm not used to it. To be left alone—oh, of course Billy Cox has been trying to butt in, but what good is he? My Hercules, my Roman Antony, who won my trusting heart last summer, at a time when I had just got it back from what I had thought a final and total loss—I find him away, and when he gets back, because, forsooth, he happens to be newly ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... no time to think o' trifles. I gave the butt an extra bang on the pommel to send the ball home, shoved the muzzle right in among the hair an' pulled the trigger. There was a bang that sounded to me as if the ship's magazine had blown up. It was followed ...
— The Buffalo Runners - A Tale of the Red River Plains • R.M. Ballantyne
... they foretold, that one day that duke should usurp the crown from his children, resolved to put him to death, he only gave him the liberty to choose what death he would die of. The duke being willing to die a merry death, chose to be drowned in a butt of Malmsey. Not unlike him on whom this epigram ...
— Ebrietatis Encomium - or, the Praise of Drunkenness • Boniface Oinophilus
... of words followed, and then in uncontrolled rage Werner and Glutts attacked Jack and Gif. Half a dozen blows were exchanged, and then Glutts attempted to run away while Werner attempted to use the butt of his gun as a club. Andy tripped Glutts up, and Spouter caught Werner from behind, and as a consequence of the general mix-up the two bullies received a well-deserved drubbing. Then their weapons were discharged and their ammunition was taken away from them, and they were told ...
— The Rover Boys on a Hunt - or The Mysterious House in the Woods • Arthur M. Winfield (Edward Stratemeyer)
... in 1843, the distasteful truth that the medical attendant was chiefly responsible for the deaths from this disease; and the great lights of the profession in Philadelphia made him and his theory the butt of their ridicule and scorn. It was Semmelweis, a young assistant in the Lying-in Hospital of Vienna, who in 1847 pointed out the same truth, drawn, not from any experiments, but from rational observation in the hospital wards; and his discovery was received with contempt, ...
— An Ethical Problem - Or, Sidelights upon Scientific Experimentation on Man and Animals • Albert Leffingwell
... bound together by an argument; a Vita nova without its overmastering occasion. Simonetta was dead; whereupon "tutti i fiorentini ingegni, come si conviene in si pubblica jattura, diversamente ed avversamente si dolsono, chi in versi, chi in prosa." The poor dead lady was, in fact, a butt for these ...
— Earthwork Out Of Tuscany • Maurice Hewlett
... Lancelot better than any being in the world save one, promised that if I were willing, and seemed a lad of spirit, I should go along with Lancelot and himself to help build the colony at the butt end of the world. As the ship was to sail from Sendennis—that being Captain Amber's native place—he promised Lancelot that he would seek me out, and see if I pleased him, and if the plan pleased me. And I, on fire with the thought of getting away from Sendennis and feeling ...
— Marjorie • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... the sea, leaving in her wake a long silvery train of phosphoric light. Drawing no response from Mr. Higgins, the captain raised his night-glass and scanned along the heavens to the west. "We'll get somethin' out o' that quarter, butt end foremost," said the captain, lowering ...
— The Von Toodleburgs - Or, The History of a Very Distinguished Family • F. Colburn Adams
... club after the other, with both hands, close to his ear; then he examined their butt-ends under the electric light. I saw what he suspected now, and caught the contagion of his suppressed excitement. Neither of us spoke. But Raffles had taken out the portable tool-box that he called a knife, ...
— Raffles - Further Adventures of the Amateur Cracksman • E. W. Hornung
... which Peterkin had cut was full twelve feet long, being a very strong but light and tough young tree, which merely required thinning at the butt to be ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne
... painting, of music, of dancing—even of sculpture! She proved herself equally familiar with the pencil, with tunes, and with books, until Thaddeus was petrified by so much learning, and feared that he might become the butt of ridicule, and stammered like a little lad before his teacher. Luckily the teacher was beautiful and lenient; his neighbour guessed the cause of his perturbation, and shifted the talk to less deep and difficult subjects, ...
— Pan Tadeusz • Adam Mickiewicz
... Joe. She polished that blamed quarter the same way she jaws an' sweeps; she polished it 'til she rubbed both sides smooth as glass, an' then Sam wouldn't take it, nuther, 'n' said it wasn't money any more. So I drilled two holes in it an' sewed it on my pants fer a 'spender butt'n." ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces at Millville • Edith Van Dyne
... pitiful, grotesque, and terrible procession it was, with such heads as are seen on meerschaum pipes, and profiles instinct with hatred and suffering. There was the head master, who ruined himself in giving parties, in order to marry his daughters—two tall, elegant girls, the butt of constant and abominable insults, written and sketched on every wall; there was the comptroller Pifard, whose wonderful nose betrayed his presence behind every door, when he went eavesdropping; and there were all the teachers, each befouled with some insulting nickname: the severe 'Rhadamantus,' ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... when Jim thundered at the doors and called. When only silence followed his echoing voice he hammered at the hardwood doors with the butt of his revolver and shouted, demanding to be a let out. He tried the iron gratings over the windows and found them firm in their places and too heavy-barred to be bent. In the end he gave over in ...
— Daughter of the Sun - A Tale of Adventure • Jackson Gregory
... purpose than either," she answered coldly. Her right hand, concealed by the folds of her skirt, was uplifted, the fingers grasping the black butt of a Colt. Her lips smiled. "I suppose you know the efficacy of this weapon, Lieutenant, and that it ...
— Love Under Fire • Randall Parrish
... grassy slopes or in the forest adjoining the glaciers. During the day they go up again into the snow, for which they have an extraordinary love, and in which they skip and play, amusing themselves like a band of scholars in play hours. They tease one another, butt with their horns in fun, run off, return, pretend new attacks and new flights with charming ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume VI • Various
... gains his elastic blow by the free movement of the wrist. To gain a similarly elastic blow mechanically in his first action, Cristofori cut a notch in the butt of his hammer from which the escapement lever, "linguetta mobile" as he called it—"hopper," as we call it—being centered at the base, moved forward, when the key was put down, to the extent of its radius, and after the delivery of the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 385, May 19, 1883 • Various
... in the face of this tribe of Delawares, which is the better man," cried the scout, tapping the butt of his piece with that finger which had pulled so many ...
— The Last of the Mohicans • James Fenimore Cooper
... knowledge, with any of a later age. They may, in fact, be considered as characteristic appendages, or accompanying features, to the ecclesiastical structures of those times. There is one at Rathmichael, near Dublin, where there is the butt of a round tower. I have seen many of them in various states of preservation, and I think all were about 4 feet both in breadth and height. They were, however, never arched, but roofed with large ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... racing ahead, the visible night. Sometimes it was a wide old road, with grass-spaces on either side, flying magic and elfin in the greenish illumination, sometimes it was trees looming overhead, sometimes it was bramble bushes, sometimes the walls of a crew-yard and the butt ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... me to madness, and with a mighty effort I shook myself free and sprang forward, but the butt of a lance brought me down, and once more I ...
— Orrain - A Romance • S. Levett-Yeats
... found that I knew and took an interest in many of the people in his own country his delight was unbounded. The height of his ambition seemed to be to have "tin min undher him," and his greatest trial was "huntin' thim tarmints of cows." He was the butt of all the jokes and tricks in the camps round, yet he took everything good-naturedly; "the boys must have their laugh sometimes," being his only comment. He said he was only thirty-seven, but, according to his own account, he had been "kept at school till he was sixteen, lived tin years ...
— A Trip to Manitoba • Mary FitzGibbon
... sacrificing me to his desire not to immolate his friend." M. Arago also came off with very doubtful honours from a wrestle with the uncombative Martyr; who is perfectly clear (and so are we, let us add) that scientific men are not the men for his purpose. Of course, he is the butt of "utter and acknowledged ignorance", and of "the most gross and foolish statements", and of "the unjust and dishonest", and of "the press-gang", and of crowds of other alien and combative ...
— Contributions to All The Year Round • Charles Dickens
... shrieked wildly as the line ran out. The rod quivered and bent almost double. Chichester had the butt pressed against his belt, the tip well up in the air, the reel-handle free from any possible touch of coat-flap or sleeve. To check that fierce rush by a hundredth part of a second meant the snapping of the delicate casting-line, or the smashing of the pliant rod-tip. He knew, as ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke
... lies a great wooden doll, which so far as mutilation is concerned bears a strong resemblance to the finest Greek sculpture, and especially in the total loss of its nose. Near it there is a little chair, and the butt-end of a boy's leather ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... or started to tell him, why, and was knocked flat in a second. He sprang up, knife in hand, and rushed upon him a second time, only to be floored again, and the knife sent spinning. Willett seized it, and was standing over him, panting a bit, when felled by a crashing blow with a pistol-butt at the base of the skull. Then in terror Case fled the way he came, for he saw both Indians and Mexicans were on him, realized that murder was meant, and knew he would be involved unless he could instantly get back to his bed. Willett made a desperate fight, ...
— Tonio, Son of the Sierras - A Story of the Apache War • Charles King
... for me, friends and strangers, while I carry out my duty here. Run, all of you, scatter and clear the road! I'm in a hurry and I don't want to butt into anybody with my head, or elbow, or chest, or knee.... And there's none so rich as can stand in my way, ... none so famous but down he goes off the sidewalk and stands on his head in the street," and ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • William Wallace Blancke
... he brought a gleaming weapon with a long barrel and an unusually large butt—an air pistol of great power and reliability. In the old South African times Bullard had been a notable shot with rifle and revolver, and practice during the last few days had shown him that his hand and ...
— Till the Clock Stops • John Joy Bell
... sword, ay, the flower of Smithfield for a sword, a right fox,[298] i'faith; with that, and a man had come over with a smooth and a sharp stroke, it would have cried twang, and then, when I had doubled my point, trac'd my ground, and had carried my buckler before me like a garden-butt, and then come in with a cross blow, and over the pick[299] of his buckler two ells long, it would have cried twang, twang, metal, metal: but a dog hath his day; 'tis gone, and there are few good ones made now. I see by this dearth of good swords, that[300] dearth of sword-and-buckler fight begins ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VII (4th edition) • Various
... and best known. Thompson must be regarded as one of the greatest precursors of Marx in the development of modern Socialist theory. A Ricardian of the Ricardians, he states the law of wages in language that is almost as emphatic as Lassalle's famous Ehernes Lohngesetz, which Marx made the butt of his satire.[141] Accepting the view of Ricardo,—and indeed, of Adam Smith and other earlier English economists, including Petty,—that labor is the sole source of exchange value,[142] he shows by cogent argument ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... which one felt disposed to assume, the attitude that as this was an India Office business with which the War Office had nothing to do it was their funeral, was a mistaken one. The War Office could not, of course, butt in unceremoniously. But Lord Kitchener was a member of the Government in an exceptionally powerful position in all things connected with the war, and had one represented one's doubts to him, he would certainly have gone into the question and might have taken up a strong line. I, ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... parted and his eyes screwed up into a perplexed frown and he dropped the butt of his rifle to the ground. Holding the barrels with both hands, he stared down ...
— A Virginia Scout • Hugh Pendexter
... upon this picture, pleasant as it is—nor yet upon the adventures of Josey among the pigs, chickens, cats, with the calf (which managed to "butt" her over, even if it could not "hook"), and among all and singular the belongings and appliances connected with that cozy little retreat in the country village. Then what a supper followed, with the flaky white tea-biscuit ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... happen.... Several times lately Olga had, so to speak, run full-tilt into Lucia, and had passed on leaving a staggering form behind her. And in each case, so Georgie clearly perceived, Olga had not intended to butt into or stagger anybody. Each time, she had knocked Lucia down purely by accident, but if these accidents occurred with such awful frequency, it was to be expected that Lucia would find another name for them: they would have to be christened. With all his Riseholme appetite ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... perfectly inarticulate, as low as the sound of water coming from a spring, where there is no fall, and where there are no stones to fret it. Frank strained his ears. It ceased. He held his breath and began to tremble. Resting the butt of his gun on the ground, he parted the mulberry leaves softly with his fingers and peered through the hedge at the dark figures on the grass, in the shadow of the mulberry tree. It seemed to him that they must feel his eyes, that they must hear him breathing. But ...
— O Pioneers! • Willa Cather
... preceded your mission, the interesting course which that had taken, and particularly and personally as it regarded yourself, made me anxious to hear from you on your return. I was the more so too, as I had myself during the whole of your absence, as well as since your return, been a constant butt for every shaft of calumny which malice and falsehood could form, and the presses, public speakers, or private letters disseminate. One of these, too, was of a nature to touch yourself; as if, wanting confidence in your efforts, I had been capable of usurping powers committed to you, ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... such married life for me," I thought I could hear him responding, rather pleased than not to be the butt of ...
— Great Possessions • David Grayson
... period in a similar manner. Neither had this been but a partial tempest, for to the very base of the mountain the same effects were visible. The trees on its side were of a much grander character than those in the forest, and consisted principally of black-butt and bluegum eucalypti measuring from six to eight feet in diameter. The rock was syenite, so weathered as ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 2 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... Mercer, whom Washington called "the worthy and brave General Mercer." Early in the conflict his horse was shot under him, and on foot he was attempting to rally his men, when a blow from the butt of a British musket felled ...
— From Farm House to the White House • William M. Thayer
... steel? The momentary hesitation ended the debate, for the Guard was almost upon him. Quickly he prepared for the shock, and, parrying the Hun's first thrust, he gave him the upward stroke with the butt of his gun; but the Hun kept coming, and he quickly brought his gun down—his second stroke cutting the head with the blade of his bayonet. The Prussian reeled but was not finished, and as he came again ...
— The Fight for the Argonne - Personal Experiences of a 'Y' Man • William Benjamin West
... studying the room while we got our bearings picked up a queer-looking revolver from the floor. As he held it up I could see that along the top of the barrel was a long cylinder with a ratchet or catch at the butt end. He turned it over ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... humour into which he had fallen, David was suddenly flung by a low and ferocious growl. He had stepped around a young balsam that stood like a seven-foot ghost in his path, and found himself face to face with a beast that was cringing at the butt of a thick spruce. It was a dog. The animal was not more than four or five short paces from him, and was chained to the tree. David surveyed him with sudden interest, wondering first of all why he was larger than the other dogs. As he lay crouched there against his tree, his ivory fangs ...
— The Courage of Marge O'Doone • James Oliver Curwood
... prances to the one end of making the most of the misery. She gets up early and sits up late, and is loud, and restless, and noisy, and unpitying. She drags her husband on to the woolsack, or pushes him into Parliament. She drives him full butt at the dear, lazy machinery of government, and knocks and buffets him about the wheels, and cranks, and screws, and pulleys; until somebody, for quiet's sake, makes him something that she wanted him to be made. That's ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... his pipe. "You don't mean that the angler is there," exclaimed I. "Yes, I do though," replied mine host, "and see, he has just got a bite." Sure enough the sedentary sportsman put forth one of his hands just as these words were uttered, and grasping the butt of a willow wand, seemed to give it a slight hitch in the air; but no results followed. It was quietly laid aside ...
— Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary, Visited in 1837. Vol. II • G. R. Gleig
... Handles Splitting.—All carpenters know how soon the butt-end of chisel handles split when daily exposed to the blow of a mallet or hammer. A remedy suggested by a Brooklyn man consists simply of sawing or cutting off the round end of the handle so as to make ...
— Burroughs' Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889 • Barkham Burroughs
... sense. Do you suppose that these guys here will stand for this? Not on your life. Not for a minute. See here. I'm not blaming you. I know you don't know what you're saying. But listen here. You must cut out this kind of thing. You mustn't get these ideas in your head. You stick to your job, and don't butt in on other folks'. Do you know how long you'd stay Prince of this joint if you started in to monkey with my Casino? Just about long enough to let you pack a collar-stud and a toothbrush into your grip. And after that there ...
— The Prince and Betty - (American edition) • P. G. Wodehouse
... build up a fine neighborhood, was a man to keep on good terms with. Grindot accordingly resolved to sacrifice his immediate gains to his future interests. He listened patiently to the plans, the repetitions, and the ideas of this worthy specimen of the bourgeois class, the constant butt of the witty shafts and ridicule of artists, and the object of their everlasting contempt, nodding his head as if to show the perfumer that he caught his ideas. When Cesar had thoroughly explained everything, the young man proceeded to sum up ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... were soldiers round the walls, and that a considerable part of the hall was filled by a body of youths of foreign aspect, with white gowns and long hair. All this he perceived; but what it meant he could not imagine. He bent over to a neighbour to ask him, but a soldier prodded him at once with the butt end of his spear, and commanded him fiercely to hold his peace. The man whom he had addressed, thinking that Policles had demanded a seat, pressed closer to his neighbour, and so the shepherd found himself sitting at the end ...
— The Last Galley Impressions and Tales - Impressions and Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... angry. He jammed his own cigarette butt into the ash tray, turned toward Spanding, and snapped: "Harry, just for the sake of argument, let's suppose that Bossard wasn't actually guilty. Let's suppose that the Constitution of the United States is really true—that a man isn't guilty until ...
— Hail to the Chief • Gordon Randall Garrett
... secured. It ensures even running when used in belting. Any irregularity in thickness of a belt affects the speed of the driven pulley. As dynamos are generally driven by belts, and it is important to drive them at an even speed to prevent variations in the electro-motive force, butt joints should be used on belting for them, unless a very perfect lap joint is made, which does not affect either the thickness or the stiffness of ...
— The Standard Electrical Dictionary - A Popular Dictionary of Words and Terms Used in the Practice - of Electrical Engineering • T. O'Conor Slone
... well balanced on the arches of the feet. The butt of the flag stick is held lightly in the right hand; the left hand steadies and directs the flag at a distance from six to twelve inches above the right on the stick. The length of the stick will determine the position of the left hand; the longer the stick the ...
— Scouting For Girls, Official Handbook of the Girl Scouts • Girl Scouts
... long-backed, long-legged, frightful swine were grubbing in a heap of refuse; four or five gaunt ferocious-looking dogs came bounding up to greet their comrade Festhold; and a great old long-bearded goat stood on the top of the mixen, looking much disposed to butt at any newcomer. The Sorel family had brought cleanliness from Flanders, and Hausfrau Johanna was scrupulously dainty in all her appointments. Christina scarcely knew how she conveyed herself and ...
— The Dove in the Eagle's Nest • Charlotte M. Yonge
... table-land, a solitary breaker kept on at his work. The splintered shards were piled high against his brake: he had not paused to clear them out of his way except around his bootlegs. Near by, the remnant of the shock had fallen over, clods of mingled frost and soil still sticking to the level butt-ends. Several yards to windward, where the dust and refuse might not settle on it, lay the pile of gray-tailed hemp,—the coarsest of man's work, but finished as conscientiously as an art. From the warming depths of this, rose the head and neck of a common shepherd ...
— The Reign of Law - A Tale of the Kentucky Hemp Fields • James Lane Allen
... am saying may not apply to nut growing. Foresters grow trees for the wood crop, with nuts as a by-product. The first 16 feet of trunk or the butt log is his main interest. It should be completely free of limbs, knots, and other defects for at least 16 feet. You can use the logs above the butt-cut but they usually produce lower ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Forty-Second Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... little, take the halter in your left hand, and approach him as before, and on the same side that you have gentled him. If he is very timid about your approaching closely to him, you can get up to him quicker by making the whip a part of your arm, and reaching out very gently with the butt end of it, rubbing him lightly on the neck, all the time getting a little closer, shortening the whip by taking it up in your hand, until you finally get close enough to put your hands on him. If he is inclined to hold his head from you, put the end ...
— A New Illustrated Edition of J. S. Rarey's Art of Taming Horses • J. S. Rarey
... go my grasp. The bandit, once more released, fell upon me with fury, and gave me several blows with the butt end of his carbine, one of which wounded me severely in the forehead, and covered me with blood. He took advantage of my being stunned to rifle me of my watch and whatever valuables I had ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... of Baron Harnier was exceedingly tragic. Having wounded a buffalo, the animal charged a native attendant and threw him to the ground; Baron Harnier was unloaded, and with great courage he attacked the buffalo with the butt-end of his rifle to rescue the man then beneath the animal's horns. The buffalo left the man and turned upon his new assailant. The native, far from assisting his master, who had thus jeopardized his life to save him, fled from the spot. The unfortunate baron was found by the missionaries trampled ...
— The Albert N'Yanza, Great Basin of the Nile • Sir Samuel White Baker
... a dark autumn night, behold the young Beaver toiling with might and main. His parents have felled a tree, and it is his business to help them cut up the best portions and carry them home. He gnaws off a small branch, seizes the butt end between his teeth, swings it over his shoulder, and makes for the water, keeping his head twisted around to the right or left so that the end of the branch may trail on the ground behind him. Sometimes he even rises on his hind legs, and walks almost upright, with his broad, strong ...
— Forest Neighbors - Life Stories of Wild Animals • William Davenport Hulbert
... of even number front rank: butt between his feet, barrel to front. Even number rear rank passes ...
— Military Instructors Manual • James P. Cole and Oliver Schoonmaker
... few days earlier, and for the first time, in Odette's eyes. It was after dinner at the Verdurins'. Whether it was because Forcheville, aware that Saniette, his brother-in-law, was not in favour with them, had decided to make a butt of him, and to shine at his expense, or because he had been annoyed by some awkward remark which Saniette had made to him, although it had passed unnoticed by the rest of the party who knew nothing ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... rashuns!" exclaimed the old trapper, striking the butt of his rifle upon the prairie. "Durn pay an rashuns! Young fellur, ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... the Barchester street corners were curiously similar to the boys of Firdale in their love of teasing and making a mock of any creature weaker than themselves, any one whose appearance or peculiarities presented a fair butt for their rough ridicule, and gradually the dwarf grew to cherish a rooted ...
— Two Little Travellers - A Story for Girls • Frances Browne Arthur
... legs over the edge of his loft. Then he again put down the ladder and descended. He had trod the three-quarters of a mile of beach to the village but once since the boats came in. Now that his mind was fixed he took to it again with a loping step, bending his body forward and grasping his cap to butt ...
— The Cobbler In The Devil's Kitchen - From "Mackinac And Lake Stories", 1899 • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... ambitious and honorable. It was not until several days later that he became interested in Bertie, when that young adventurer insisted on showing him an automatic 44-caliber pistol. Bertie explained the mechanism and demonstrated by slipping a loaded magazine up the hollow butt. ...
— South Sea Tales • Jack London
... a brace must be blocked together at intervals, and When they are spliced,—a butt joint Should be used—and it should come in the centre of a panel. Below are given the dimensions of the Thayer Engineering ...
— Instructions on Modern American Bridge Building • G. B. N. Tower
... their ship or status. So that could well be the "Polestar" standing needle slim behind them—and not the notorious "Solar Queen." But each, as he passed through the inner lock, gave a hitch to his belt which brought the butt of his sleep rod closer to hand. Innocuous as that weapon was, in close quarters its effects, if only temporary, was to some purpose. And since they were prepared for trouble, they might have a slight edge over the Eysies ...
— Plague Ship • Andre Norton
... words of Pitt himself. In one of his speeches, having accused his rival of filling his speech with everything that was personal, inflammatory, and invidious, he remarked:—"I am not surprised if he should pretend to be the butt of ministerial persecution; and if, by striving to excite the public compassion, he should seek to reinstate himself in that popularity which he once enjoyed, but which he so unhappily has forfeited. For it is the best and most ordinary resource of these political apostates ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... samouran; by others, the tarbucan; by the Portuguese, the gravatana. The arrows are made from thin strips of the hard rind of the leaf-stalks of palms, and are scraped at the end till they become as sharp as needles. Round the butt-end is wound a little mass from the silk-cotton tree, which exactly fits into the bore of the blow-pipe. The quivers were very neatly formed of the plaited strips of a plant growing wild, from which arrow-root is made. The upper part consisted of a rim of the red ...
— On the Banks of the Amazon • W.H.G. Kingston
... shouldn't have blamed you. Anyhow, you've took it like a sensible chap. You've got over it, as I always told her you would. Young men out of story-books don't die of broken hearts, even if for a month or two they do feel like standing on their head in the water-butt." ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... mean time, we are speeding gayly over the bright waters, never very calm along this shore. Presently we come to a spot clearly marked by some odd-colored, tumbled-down cliffs and the remains of a great iron butt, where, more than a hundred years ago, the Grosvenor, a splendid clipper ship, was wrecked. The men nearly all perished or were made away with, but a few women were got on shore and carried off as prizes to the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various
... at the sides and top of the door. That at the hinged side can be as shown at A, Fig. 5, the closing side as at B, and the top as at C in the same drawing. These are all in section and are self-explanatory. In hinging the door, three butt hinges should be used so as to keep the ...
— The Boy Mechanic: Volume 1 - 700 Things For Boys To Do • Popular Mechanics
... Trueworth, I must needs be gone! She treats me worse and worse! I am a stock, That words have none to pay her. For her sake I quit the town to-day. I like a jest, But hers are jests past bearing. I am her butt, She nothing does but practise on! A plague!— Fly her shafts ever ...
— The Love-Chase • James Sheridan Knowles
... thing about it," Lance Darby said to Laura when she told him of the way in which Miss Carrington had tried to interfere with the girls' choice of the play, "she cannot butt into the Ice Carnival arrangements. Nobody but your Mrs. Case and our Mr. Haskins has anything to say ...
— The Girls of Central High Aiding the Red Cross - Or Amateur Theatricals for a Worthy Cause • Gertrude W. Morrison
... not gone many yards from his own door when he was confronted by one of those ruffians who, by their way of putting it, are the eternal butt of iniquitous people and iniquitous things, namely, honest men, curse them! and the law, confound it! This was no other than that Ben Burnley, who, being a miner, had stuck half-way between Devonshire and Durham, and had been some months ...
— A Perilous Secret • Charles Reade
... Capt. Noah, for the muley cow was a very gentle creature and never tried to butt any one with her horns, because she didn't ...
— The Cruise of the Noah's Ark • David Cory
... Mr. Adams happened to be at the moment, and the next moment Mr. Adams had him by the throat. They swayed and gulped for breath, rutting the earth with sharp heels; they rolled to the floor and floundered with legs tight tangled, the boy blindly striking at Mr. Adams with the pistol-butt, and the audience drawing closer to lose nothing, when the bright knife flashed suddenly. It poised, and flew across the room, harmless, for a foot had driven into Mr. Adams's arm, and he felt a cold ring grooving his temple. It was the smooth, chilly muzzle of Specimen ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... Conquest, we must doubt the history of all the miracles of the Church, for all of them rest on the like untenable grounds. I did not wonder at finding the country abounding in unbelief. Now that the fires of the Inquisition have ceased to burn, the priesthood are made the butt and laughing-stock of those who are educated. Still, the national mind does not run toward the pure Gospel, which is here unknown and prohibited, but to infidelity and socialism. A sincere Protestant can have no sympathy with ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... people to succour the starving Irish met occasionally ships sailing out of the Irish ports laden with food reaped by the starving Irish. On the quays of Galway the unhappy people wailed as they saw their harvests borne away from them, and were admonished by the butt-ends of British muskets, the British Government meantime passing Relief measures which provided employment for hordes of English officials and Irish understrappers, and pauper-relief for those who surrendered their manhood and their property—the cost of this relief, ...
— The Felon's Track • Michael Doheny
... worship," said the other. "Belike you think me a sorry dog not to make fight of this. But the old knight, look you, is not come-at-able. I threw one of his varlets into a thorn hedge, and another into a water-butt, and a third landed head-first into a ditch. But I couldn't do any fighting ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... the road. He sprang at Pauline and wrested the gun from her. As Harry rushed him, he had no time to fire, but the butt of one revolver crashed on the young man's forehead. Harry sank ...
— The Perils of Pauline • Charles Goddard
... the soldier halted. Then Gaddon moved up quickly behind the man. Before the soldier sensed what was about to occur, Gaddon's hand raised over his head and the butt of the weapon in his hand crashed against the back ...
— The Monster • S. M. Tenneshaw
... mental, spiritual, and physical contact with Tom had fretted his soul as that sawdust inside his clothes had fretted his body. "He, he! Ho, ho!" he chortled. "You don't shove. Oh no! All the same, whenever I stop pullin' you butt your brains out." ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... governing consideration with him on the Irish question. 'I showed in this way,' he notes, 'a working of the opinion which in 1874 caused me to vote, alone of English members unpledged by their constituents, in support of Mr. Butt when he brought forward his Home Rule Bill.' [Footnote: Eight in all voted; all except Dilke represented Northern constituencies, with a large Irish ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... a blow at him with the butt end of my whip, which missed his head, but fell on his shoulder. My horse started, he fired and missed, but sprung suddenly forward, and seized hold of the bridle. He had another pistol which he was preparing, ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... at Clonmel a week after O'Brien had quitted it a convict. He was defended by Mr. Whiteside and Isaac Butt, whose magnificent speech in his defence was perhaps the most brilliant display of forensic eloquence ever heard Within the court in which he stood. Of course the jury was packed (only 18 Catholics were named on a jury-panel of 300), and of course the crown carried its point. On the close ...
— Speeches from the Dock, Part I • Various
... a quantity of potatoes, which indeed might yet be purchased, though at an exorbitant price. The bakers of this place were obliged to work up the small stock of flour in their possession for the use of the troops; and all other persons were driven from the doors by the guards with the butt-ends of their muskets; though the citizen who came in quest of bread had perhaps twenty men quartered upon him, who all expected him to find wherewith to satisfy ...
— Frederic Shoberl Narrative of the Most Remarkable Events Which Occurred In and Near Leipzig • Frederic Shoberl (1775-1853)
... about that Mr. Johnson bought him a commission in the same cavalry regiment that the General's grandson (whose commission had been given him by the Iron Duke) was in; and that he was quite content to be the butt of the mess where Jackanapes was the hero; and that when Jackanapes wrote home to Miss Jessamine, Tony wrote with the same purpose to his mother,—namely, to demand her congratulations that they were on active service at last, ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... more warlike than the rest, suggested that as we had some Enfields on board, we should make "a little bit of a fight," or at least "make one butt at a gunboat." I was relieved to find that these insane proposals were not received with ...
— Three Months in the Southern States, April-June 1863 • Arthur J. L. (Lieut.-Col.) Fremantle
... flesh is heir to. And then there is the wild chase after it, accompanied by an excitable small dog, who thinks it is a game, and in the course of which you are certain to upset three or four innocent children—to say nothing of their mothers—butt a fat old gentleman on to the top of a perambulator, and carom off a ladies' seminary into the arms of a ...
— Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... to put on even the semblance of mirth. At last I ventured a home thrust. I determined to commence a series of covert insinuations, or innuendos, about the oblong box, just to let him perceive, gradually, that I was not altogether the butt, or victim, of his little bit of pleasant mystification. My first observation was by way of opening a masked battery. I said something about the "peculiar shape of that box"; and, as I spoke the words I smiled knowingly, ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery - Riddle Stories • Various
... disposed of in the same way. For instance, these 'disciples' assure us that when Jesus said, 'Resist not evil', 'If a man smite thee upon he right cheek turn unto him also the left', He really meant 'Turn on to him a Maxim gun; disembowel him with a bayonet or batter in his skull with the butt end of a rifle!' When He said, 'If one take thy coat, give him thy cloak also,' the 'Christians' say that what He really meant was: 'If one take thy coat, give him six months' hard labour. A few of the followers ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... that he should call at the office of the paper, "where he would give him every satisfaction." Colonel Berkeley replied, "No, sir! Now, sir! Now, sir!" and without further notice commenced a cowardly attack on the unarmed man by beating him over the head and face with the butt-end of a heavy hunting whip. To make the dastardly affair more dastardly if possible, one of the two fellows with him stood at the door, and the other near the fire place, so as to prevent Judge from seizing any weapon ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... In a blackened butt of an inn, a group of Senegalese were hiding. They were great six-foot fellows, with straight bodies, and shoulders for carrying weights—the face a black mask, expressionless, save for the rolling whites of the eyes, and the sudden startling grin of perfect ...
— Young Hilda at the Wars • Arthur Gleason
... Duchess's, she desired her 'valet de chambre' to bring her billiard cue into her closet, and ordered me to open the box that contained it. I took out the cue, broken in two. It was of ivory, and formed of one single elephant's tooth; the butt was of gold and very tastefully wrought. "There," said she, "that is the way M. de Vaudreuil has treated a thing I valued highly. I had laid it upon the couch while I was talking to the Duchess in the salon; he had ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... soda and in another some pyrogallic acid, from each of which he took just a drop, as he had done before, inclining the tubes to let the fluid gravitate to the throttle end. Finally in the flame he sealed both the tip and butt of the tubes. ...
— The Treasure-Train • Arthur B. Reeve
... out, at the end of the performance, I again saw 'Horace.' He had just rescued a 'butt' from a watery grave in the gutter. 'Jeminy! don't chaps about town smoke 'em awful short now'days!' was the ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... the life and centre of this set, as Robert Shallow was the butt of it. The latter had few personal attractions. According to Falstaff's portrait of him, he looked like a man made after supper of a cheese-paring. When he was naked he was for all the world like a forked radish, ...
— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell
... him, had been loaded with two balls, and both taking effect, crippled his arm a good deal. Two savages immediately ran towards him; and he, towards the door; and just as he was in the act of entering it, one of them had approached so closely as to strike at him with the butt end of his gun. The breech came first in contact with the facing of the door, and descending on his head, seemed to throw him forward into the house, and his wife closing the door, no attempt was made by the savages to force it open. Still, however, they did not feel secure; and as soon as ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... wind is favourable," and he arranges his defences, not forgetting to lay in a large stock of water. The savages return in force, and then—this is most important—at the most thirsty moment of the siege it is discovered that the water is all gone! Generally a stray arrow has pierced the water-butt, but in Masterman Ready the insufferable Tommy has played the fool with it. (He would.) This is the Hero's great opportunity. He ventures to the spring to get more water, and returns with it—wounded. ...
— If I May • A. A. Milne
... by the Regent in honour of the French King, Sheridan sent a forged card of invitation to Romeo Coates, the half-witted dandy, who used at this time to walk about in absurd ribbons and buckles, and was the butt of all the streetsters. The poor fellow arrived at the entrance of Carlton House, proud as a peacock, and he was greeted with a tremendous cheer from the bystanding mob, but when he came to the lackeys he was ...
— The Works of Max Beerbohm • Max Beerbohm
... something of a joke if we should butt into that detective now, wouldn't it?" Sandy laughed, as they passed ...
— Boy Scouts in the Coal Caverns • Major Archibald Lee Fletcher
... advantages of the notions received, as upon a mount, to shew the knowledges adjacent and confining. If therefore the true end of knowledge not propounded hath bred large error, the best and perfectest condition of the same end not perceived will cause some declination. For when the butt is set up men need not rove, but except the white be placed men cannot level. This perfection we mean not in the worth of the effect, but in the nature of the direction; for our purpose is not to ...
— Valerius Terminus: of the Interpretation of Nature • Sir Francis Bacon
... gare[7] rhym mote bee thenne, Butt eefte[8] nowe flyeth to the odher syde; In hallie[9] preeste apperes the ribaudes[10] penne, Inne lithie[11] moncke apperes the barronnes pryde: 10 But rhym wythe somme, as nedere[12] widhout teethe, Make pleasaunce to the sense, botte ...
— The Rowley Poems • Thomas Chatterton
... scalping-knife.[27] His weapon was the long, small-bore, flint-lock rifle, clumsy, and ill-balanced, but exceedingly accurate. It was very heavy, and when upright, reached to the chin of a tall man; for the barrel of thick, soft iron, was four feet in length, while the stock was short, and the butt scooped out. Sometimes it was plain, sometimes ornamented. It was generally bored out—or, as the expression then was, "sawed out"—to carry a ball of seventy, more rarely of thirty or forty, to the pound; and was usually of backwoods manufacture.[28] ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume One - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776 • Theodore Roosevelt
... argument, nay, and of humour, at which he makes an effort too, both things are below scorn. As an instance of the former, he says, the Duke of Clarence might die of drinking sack, and so be said to be drowned in a butt of malmsey; of the latter sort, are his calling the Lady Bridget Lady Biddy, and the Duke of York poor little fellow! I will weary you with ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... was about to meet, when there were some final difficulties between the King and his Liberal Ministers over the exact wording of the oath of allegiance. The excitable Neapolitan populace forthwith became unmanageable. The Swiss Guards, who had long been the butt of the people, put down the revolt without mercy. Once more King Ferdinand was master. He hastened to dismiss his Cabinet and dissolved the Parliament before it could come to order. Orders were sent to General Pepe, who had marched to the front ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... sift the corn as her stepsister had been. But it was only when someone was watching her that she did her work; at other times the cow-house was dirty, and the cows ill-fed and beaten, so that they kicked over the pail, and tried to butt her; and everyone said they had never seen such thin cows or such poor milk. As for the cats, she chased them away, and ill-treated them, so that they had not even the spirit to chase the rats and mice, which nowadays ...
— The Orange Fairy Book • Andrew Lang
... sorry for him, his position being so solitary on board. For he could not make himself at home with the sailors in the forecastle, and though as frank, good-hearted fellows as ever lived, they seemed to look upon him only in one way, that of being a butt for their sharp witticisms, an object upon whom they ...
— Blue Jackets - The Log of the Teaser • George Manville Fenn
... I hate to butt in where I may not be wanted, but if the remainder of my darling's story is to be understood I must say what was happening in ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... she spoke, and on behalf of May's possible children. Dymchurch, looking back into years long before he was born, saw a beautiful maiden of humble birth loyally wooed and wedded by a romantic artist, son of a proud baronet. Of course she became the butt of calumny, which found its chief support in the fact that the young artist had sculptured her portrait, and indiscreetly shown it to friends, before their marriage. Hearing these slanderous rumours, she wished all the work ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... favour with anybody he robs; catch old Mumbo Jumbo currying favour with the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Dean and Chapter, should he meet them in a stage-coach; it would be with him, Bricconi Abbasso, as he knocked their teeth out with the butt of his trombone; and the old regular-built ruffian would be all the safer for it, as Bill would say, as ten to one the Archbishop and Chapter, after such a spice of his quality, would be afraid to swear against him, and to hang him, even if he were in ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... the meantime, had his own hands full. He had accounted for a German trooper who had sought to bring his rifle butt down on the lad's head and was now engaged with two other troopers, who sought to ...
— The Boy Allies At Verdun • Clair W. Hayes
... London. Here, too, were to be met the wits, musicians and literati whom a traditional morgue still excluded from many aristocratic houses. Yet in spite of his hospitality (or perhaps because of it) the Procuratore, as Odo knew, was the butt of the very poets he entertained, and the worst satirised man in Venice. It was his misfortune to be in love with his wife; and this state of mind (in itself sufficiently ridiculous) and the shifts ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... the site selected, they are cut down and trimmed, stripped of bark, and roughly dressed. They are then carried or dragged to the site of the hogan and there laid on the ground with their forked ends together somewhat in the form of a T, extreme care being taken to have the butt of one log point to the south, one to the west, and one to the north. The two straight timbers are then laid down with the small ends close to the forks of the north and south timbers and with their butt ends pointing to the east. They must be spread apart about the ...
— Navaho Houses, pages 469-518 • Cosmos Mindeleff
... of pride which prevented me from making advances when unfairly treated. I had always lived in an atmosphere of confidence, love, and goodwill,—perhaps I had been a little spoilt by the kindness of my friends, and now it seemed hard to be a butt for ill-natured sarcasms. These shafts, however, were seldom, if ever, let loose in the presence of my husband, who would not have tolerated it; the want of welcome being as much as he could bear. Still, there was no doubt that ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... Real and Personal, and never forgett in its proper place, him and his heirs forever.... But after all what can I do if a poor Creature lies a-dying, and their family takes it into their head that I can serve them. I can't refuse; butt when they are well, and able to employ a Lawyer, I ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... thee among those who have renounced the Mother. Hark! thy enemies are in pursuit of thee, already near. Should they capture thee, thou must be the slave of their wills, the partner of their crimes, the sport and butt of all their bitter jests throughout the remnant of thy wretched life. One only refuge remains for thee!' And as he spoke, he drew ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various
... useless. For a moment, no one moved. Then a crashing blow, from the butt of a rifle in the hands of a man in the rear of the two prisoners, sent Young Matt once more to the ground. When he again regained consciousness, he was so securely bound, that, even with his great ...
— The Shepherd of the Hills • Harold Bell Wright
... Wednesday and we had much pleasant intimacy. I found the way to his heart by frequent scratching of his huge head, and an occasional bone. When I did not notice him he would plant himself straight before me, and stand wagging that butt of a tail, and looking up, with his head a little to one side. His master I occasionally saw; he used to call me "Maister John," but was ...
— Famous Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... river and entering the town to traffic off their skins, ostrich feathers, and other commodities. On one of these occasions the head chief of the Tovas tribe, by name Naraguana, having imbibed too freely of guarape, and in some way got separated from his people, became the butt of some Paraguayan boys, who were behaving towards him just as the idle lads of London or the gamins of Paris would to one appearing intoxicated in the streets. The Prussian naturalist chanced to be passing at the time; and seeing the Indian, an ...
— Gaspar the Gaucho - A Story of the Gran Chaco • Mayne Reid
... and 'beke hym in an ovyn when ye bake, and let him cool and dry a four weeks or more.' The pith is taken out of him with a hot iron, and a yard of white hazel is similarly treated, also a fair shoot of blackthorn or crabtree for a top. The butt is bound with hoops of iron, the top is accommodated with a noose, a hair line is looped in the noose, and the angler is equipped. Splicing is not used, but the joints have holes to receive each other, and ...
— Andrew Lang's Introduction to The Compleat Angler • Andrew Lang
... beauty, he paid the board of the "young rogue," as he called him, at the seminary, up to the year 1805. As Lousteau died in 1800, and the doctor apparently obeyed a feeling of vanity in paying the lad's board until 1805, the question of the paternity was left forever undecided. Maxence Gilet, the butt of many jests, was soon forgotten,—and for this reason: In 1806, a year after Doctor Rouget's death, the lad, who seemed to have been created for a venturesome life, and was moreover gifted with remarkable vigor and ...
— The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... is heir to. And then there is the wild chase after it, accompanied by an excitable small dog, who thinks it is a game, and in the course of which you are certain to upset three or four innocent children—to say nothing of their mothers—butt a fat old gentleman on to the top of a perambulator, and carom off a ladies' seminary into the arms ...
— Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... have been so developed as to justify such being made. To this practice, at least, I am safe in attributing the rarity, if not the positive absence, with the Indian, of that unhappy condition of bow-leggedness, of not too slight prevalence with us, and which renders its victim often a butt for not very charitable ...
— A Treatise on the Six-Nation Indians • James Bovell Mackenzie
... her own family and sex, she trembled for Kirstie and the credit of the Elliotts. And again she had a vision of herself, the day over for her old-world tales and local gossip, bidding farewell to her last link with life and brightness and love; and behind and beyond, she saw but the blank butt-end where she must crawl to die. Had she then come to the lees? she, so great, so beautiful, with a heart as fresh as a girl's and strong as womanhood? It could not be, and yet it was so; and for a moment her bed was horrible to her as the sides ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... only kept from turning full-fledged freebooters by a wholesome fear of retributive justice. While I am discussing my bread and water one of these worthies saunters with assumed carelessness up behind me and makes a grab for my revolver, the butt of which he sees protruding from the holster. Although I am not exactly anticipating this movement, travelling alone among strange people makes one's faculties of self-preservation almost mechanically on the alert, and my hand reaches the ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... hip and hanging low down on the right hip so that none of the weight came upon the abdomen. This was typical, for the cowboy was neither fancy gunman nor army officer. The latter carries the revolver on the left, the butt pointing forward. ...
— The Passing of the Frontier - A Chronicle of the Old West, Volume 26 in The Chronicles - Of America Series • Emerson Hough
... barrel more often than miss, unless the gunner got rattled. The shell consisted of three parts, a conical head with smaller cylinderical base, a cap to fit, that base loosely and a ring of lead that connected the head and base. When fired the cap at butt was thrown forward on the cylinderical base of the cone, expanding the lead ring into the grooves of the rifle, the cone exploding by percussion cap on striking. It was the most accurate field piece of that ...
— A History of Lumsden's Battery, C.S.A. • George Little
... dummy-chucker. "Except when the police butt into my game. I just got off Blackwell's Island ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... the room, and although he had delivered his ultimatum in a hectoring tone, it was plain that he found himself dissatisfied with the situation. Perhaps he was uncertain whether or not the whole thing was a hoax and himself the butt of a joke, to be laughed at later for treating the affair in a melodramatic way. The faces before him told him nothing. At last he cleared his throat again with finality, and bowing to Lady Clifford with something approaching a flourish, ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... boughs are generally used, and should be from the tips of the branches where the wood is not too large. Commence at the back part of the shelter, and lay down a row of the boughs with the butt of the branch towards the front. Overlap these with another nearer row and continue the operation, laying the evergreen as evenly as possible until the whole interior is smoothly covered. The projecting ...
— Camp Life in the Woods and the Tricks of Trapping and Trap Making • William Hamilton Gibson
... given him, for the moment the material things of life were forgotten. And, indeed, if he had searched he would have found only half a sack of potatoes in the caboose, for the lazarette was awash, and the water in the scuttle-butt was stinking. ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... While very young, he had been fishing in the river Irvine, attended by a boy who carried his basket, when some English soldiers, belonging to the garrison of Ayr meeting him, insisted on seizing his trout. A fray took place, and Wallace killed the foremost Englishman with a blow from the butt of his fishing-rod, took his sword, and put the ...
— Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... were over it is to be supposed: and in the leisure of that relaxation from former duties amused himself with compositions of various sorts, and in particular with the Somnium, a lively poetical satire upon the Franciscans. The monks, who had been the favourite butt of all the ages, were more than ever open to the assaults of the wits now that the general sentiment had turned so strongly against them, and Buchanan said no more than Dunbar with full permission, before any controversy arose, had said, nor half so much as David Lindsay ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... exact a terrible retribution. The more belligerent of the Locos had formed themselves into various associations for purposes of offence, rejoicing in the classic names of "Spartans," "Ring-tailed Roarers," "Huge Paws," and "Butt-enders." Some two hundred of this last body chanced to be in attendance, all armed with bludgeons, and they instantly started off to make an assault upon the Masonic Hall, where the friends of the registry law were assembled. The surprise bid fair to be a complete one, and so doubtless ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... Walpole and King George. But at Westminster these convictions—and, confound it! they were the convictions of England, after all—met with scurrilous derision; and here Master Randall nursed a dull and inarticulate resentment in a world out of joint, where the winning side was a butt for epigrams. To win, and be laughed at! To have the account reopened in lampoons and witticisms, contemptible but irritating, when it should be closed by the mere act of winning! It puzzled him, and he brooded over it, turning sulky in the end, not vicious. It was in no ...
— Hetty Wesley • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... awakened had scarcely subsided, when the ancient Lysander opened one of the doors, and, after ringing the tiled floor with the butt of his javelin, and bowing statelywise, announced Sergius. Taking a nod from the Princess, he withdrew to give the ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... — Naisi and his brothers. LAVARCHAM. We are lonely women. What is it you're wanting in the blackness of the night? NAISI. We met a young girl in the woods who told us we might shelter this place if the rivers rose on the pathways and the floods gathered from the butt of the hills. [Old Woman clasps her ...
— Deirdre of the Sorrows • J. M. Synge
... put into a great consternation on this account, lest they should run into our grove, and consequently bring us into the like danger. Hereupon we resolved to kill the first that came, to prevent discovery, and that too with our swords, and the butt end of our muskets, for fear the report of our guns ...
— The Life and Most Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of - York, Mariner (1801) • Daniel Defoe
... tubs, buckets, kegs, and open casks, including the scuttle butt, were ranged along the spar-deck, below the break of the poop, to catch the welcome shower, tarpaulins being spread over the open hatchways, where exposed, to prevent the flood from going below: while the ends of the after awning were tied up in a sort of huge bag for the rain to ...
— The Wreck of the Nancy Bell - Cast Away on Kerguelen Land • J. C. Hutcheson
... Japan," cried Shaw. "I've heard that Mexico is full of Japs, all trained and ready to fight. And I've heard about a secret treaty between Mexico and Japan, too. Let the Japs butt in, if they want to. We'll drive ...
— Boy Scouts in Mexico; or On Guard with Uncle Sam • G. Harvey Ralphson
... palms, the olive and fruit trees, the corn and the brakes of the sugar-cane. The Egyptians often call it "the country of the roses," and they say that everything grows there. The fellah thinks of it as of a Paradise where man can only be happy. Every Egyptian who has ever set the butt end of a gun against his shoulder sighs to be among its multitudinous game. The fisherman longs to let down his net into the depths of its sacred lake. The land-owner would rather have a few acres between Sennoures ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... Italian theatre has passed through all the vicissitudes of fortune. At first he was a true representative of the ancient Mime, but afterwards degenerated into a booby and a gourmand, the perpetual butt for a sharp-witted fellow, his companion, called Brighella; the knife and the whetstone. Harlequin, under the reforming hand of Goldoni, became a child of nature, the delight of his country; and he has commemorated the historical character of the great Harlequin Sacchi. It may serve the reader ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... something of an East Indian cast, but taller and stronger; his nose hooked, his face narrow, his forehead very high, the whole elaborately tattooed. I may say I have never entertained a guest so trying. In the least particular he must be waited on; he would not go to the scuttle-butt for water; it must be given him in his hand; if aid were denied him, he would fold his arms, bow his head, and go without; only the work would suffer. Early the first forenoon he called aloud for biscuit and salmon; biscuit and ham were brought; he looked on them inscrutably, and signed they should ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... ran up to the new boy, his mates shouted: "Don't butt in, now, Jim. Don't butt in. ...
— Still Jim • Honore Willsie Morrow
... condition on one of the Galapagos Islands, and only lived a few days. The story was told to me by the captain of the brigantine Isaac Revels, of San Francisco, who put into the Galapagos to repair his ship, which had started a butt-end and was leaking seriously. He had just anchored between Narborough and Albemarle Islands when he saw a man sitting on the shore, and waving his hands to the ship. A boat was lowered, and the man brought on board. He was in a ravenous state of hunger, and half-demented; but after ...
— The Call Of The South - 1908 • Louis Becke
... which was a very spirited and strong animal—it reared upwards, and very nearly brought me and my horse to the ground—at that instant, Thornton struck the unfortunate man a violent blow across the head with the butt end of his heavy whip—Sir John's hat had fallen before in the struggle, and the blow was so stunning that it felled him upon the spot. Thornton dismounted, and made me do the same—'There is no time to lose,' said he; 'let us drag him from the roadside and rifle him.' ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... and putting one hand to her breast—while the other, I noticed, fell mechanically to the butt of a revolver swung to her waist. Her eyes were wide with surprise, as her lips were parted in fear and utter wonderment. Truly, she was the incarnation ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... generation. But unmoved amid the roaring sea of plunderers and plundered, stood, scattered up and down, Cyril's spiritual police, enforcing, by a word, an obedience which the Roman soldiers could only have compelled by hard blows of the spear-butt. There was to be no outrage, and no outrage there was: and more than once some man in priestly robes hurried through the crowd, leading by the hand, tenderly enough, a lost child ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... effect, others who came along were less disposed to listen to orders. Gradually gathering, until they were in considerable numbers, several shots were fired at the officers; and one man, advancing up the steps, began to hammer at the door with the butt end of his musket. Terence leaned over the balcony and, drawing his pistol and taking a steady aim, fired, and the man fell with a sharp cry. A number of shots were fired from below, but the men were too unsteady to take aim, ...
— Under Wellington's Command - A Tale of the Peninsular War • G. A. Henty
... excitedly; "do but let me get a blow at this fellow with the butt end of my musket, and we shall ...
— Eclectic School Readings: Stories from Life • Orison Swett Marden
... lighting the fuses); then began quite a battle. Rifles and our Lewis guns opened out rapid fire, ceased fire, and opened again, and then began to withdraw. It was time, as the Turks were enveloping us. Several men had been hit and half the butt of the Lewis gun blown off by a bomb. It was difficult to estimate the number of the enemy, but an officer found himself in the third extended line of advancing Turks and reckoned we were up against a big roving patrol which had a good reputation for this sort of work. This ...
— The Fifth Battalion Highland Light Infantry in the War 1914-1918 • F.L. Morrison
... this, and come up," replied the other, holding out the butt end of a spear to him, which he caught hold of and clambered up the ship's side. When the officer saw before him a handsome gentleman, naked all but his loincloth, and with his hair all in disorder, he called to his servants ...
— Tales of Old Japan • Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford
... to his chest. Because of the shortness of Tepoktan arms, the launcher was constructed so that the butt rested against the chest with the sighting loops before the eyes. The little rocket tubes were above head height, to prevent the handler's catching ...
— Exile • Horace Brown Fyfe
... captain is killed, and that captain is Walter Raleigh, his firstborn. He died leading them on, when some, 'more careful of valour and safety, began to recoil shamefully.' His last words were, 'Lord have mercy upon me and prosper our enterprise.' A Spanish captain, Erinetta, struck him down with the butt of a musket after he had received a bullet. John Plessington, his sergeant, avenged him by running Erinetta ...
— Sir Walter Raleigh and his Time from - "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... the early hours of Wednesday morning a party of six volunteers from Trinity—including both civilians and members of the O.T.C.—went forth to dig holes below the cobbles for the gun-trails. The position was at the Tara Street end of Butt Bridge, and the object, in order to be ready to begin early the shelling of Liberty Hall, which was looked upon as the centre ...
— Six days of the Irish Republic - A Narrative and Critical Account of the Latest Phase of Irish Politics • Louis Redmond-Howard
... with trotting along upon the shore, keeping abreast of the boats as well as they were able, crying out taunts and imprecations; and one, more zealous in his passion, went to the top of a hill and struck the earth three times with the butt of his gun,—the registration of a mighty oath against the whites, long since ...
— Lewis and Clark - Meriwether Lewis and William Clark • William R. Lighton
... correspondent has furnished a drawing. Another mode, and which appears to have been applied to the ancient bows, was by a sort of two-handed windlass, with ropes and pulleys, called a "moulinet," which was temporarily attached to the butt-end of the Cross-bow; of this a drawing is given in the illustrations of Froissart's Chronicles, particularly in that one descriptive of the Siege of Aubenton; in which two bowmen are shown, one in the act of winding up the bow, and the other taking his aim, the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XIX. No. 541, Saturday, April 7, 1832 • Various
... which that had taken, and particularly and personally as it regarded yourself, made me anxious to hear from you on your return. I was the more so too, as I had myself during the whole of your absence, as well as since your return, been a constant butt for every shaft of calumny which malice and falsehood could form, and the presses, public speakers, or private letters disseminate. One of these, too, was of a nature to touch yourself; as if, wanting confidence ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... watched Kells unsaddle the horses. He was wiry, muscular, quick with his hands. The big, blue-cylindered gun swung in front of him. That gun had a queer kind of attraction for her. The curved black butt made her think of a sharp grip of hand upon it. Kells did not hobble the horses. He slapped his bay on the haunch and drove him down toward the brook. Joan's pony followed. They drank, cracked the stones, climbed the other bank, and began to roll in the grass. Then the other men with ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... while afterwards he was in some other strait. I think Mrs. Southcote, his wife, was in extremity - and we adjusted that point too. A little while afterwards he had taken a new house, and was going headlong to ruin for want of a water-butt. I had my misgivings about the water- butt, and did not reply to that epistle. But a little while afterwards, I had reason to feel penitent for my neglect. He wrote me a few broken-hearted lines, informing me that ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... is that of imagining that brusqueness and pertness are wit. There is no other error more common with girls from fifteen to eighteen; they generally choose a boy as the butt of their sarcastic remarks—and, to their shame be it said, they frequently select a lad who is too ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... undisciplined flash of temper, Carl brutally clubbed his assailant into insensibility with the revolver butt and dragged him heavily to the tonneau of his car, throbbing unheeded in the darkness. Having assured himself of his guest's continued docility by the sinister adjustment of a handkerchief, an indifferent rag or so from the repair kit and a dirty rope, he covered the motionless figure ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... out a butterfly net in two sections and the deeply scalloped, silver-trimmed butt of a sporting rifle. Edelweiss adorned his green felt hat; a green tin box punched full of holes was slung from ...
— Barbarians • Robert W. Chambers
... them, and on their thinner margin turning rose-grey, when the alarm of an attack came down the line. Instantly the huddled, sleeping bodies that lay at the side of the trench started into being, and in the moment's pause that followed, Michael found himself fumbling at the butt of his revolver, which he had drawn out of its case. For that one moment he heard his heart thumping in his throat, and felt his mouth grow dry with some sudden panic fear that came from he knew not where, and invaded him. A qualm of sickness took him, something gurgled in his throat, and ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... you. They healed your wounds, they soothed your ravings, they cooled your fever. They were a great team, and they pulled you through. Seems as if they'd pulled you through a knot-hole, but they were on to their job. And you weren't one bit grateful—seemed to think they had no business to butt in." ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... 'Twasn't long afterward before I heard of a man being held up just as I was. Two men came along in a buggy and locked wheels with him and while he was trying to help himself out of the fix one of them dropped him with the butt of his gun and went through his pockets and all his belongings. That's one reason why I have always remembered Jump ...
— The Go Ahead Boys and Simon's Mine • Ross Kay
... tumbling scamp, I suppose; but what are we to say? All young animals gambol, and are saucy. Only this morning I was watching a lamb butt its mother in the ribs, and roll in the grass, and dirty its wool—the ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... coldness from his old friends, from those to whom he had been lavish in marks of kindness, but to find that he was an object of derision, in fact the laughing-stock of the youths of the new generation. The young people of the present day made a regular butt of him. ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds
... all!" she exclaimed bitterly. "I can understand Jimmy, because he likes me to drive him all the time, but you others, who aren't regular clients at all, why you should butt in and try to spoil my chances, I can't think. Mr. Wingate is just my conception of the ideal fare—generous, affable, and with trans-Atlantic notions about tips. I shall send you my card, all the ...
— The Profiteers • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... ulmus folio latissimo scabro of Ray, which, though it had lost a considerable leading bough in the great storm in the year 1703, equal to a moderate tree, yet, when felled, contained eight loads of timber; and, being too bulky for a carriage, was sawn off at seven feet above the butt, where it measured near eight feet in the diameter. This elm I mention to show to what a bulk planted elms may attain; as this tree must certainly have been such from ...
— The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 1 • Gilbert White
... vegetated on one corner of an hundred-and-sixty acres of woods, having made but a small clearing, and managed in some unknown way to live on it. His feeble condition exposed him to imposition, and he was the butt for the unthinking, and victim of the unscrupulous and unruly. For some years his land, a valuable tract, had been coveted by several greedy men, and especially by one Sam Ward. Failing to induce Cole to sell what right it was admitted he had, Ward, ...
— Bart Ridgeley - A Story of Northern Ohio • A. G. Riddle
... believed, the sum of my patience is no longer equal to the strain, and jerking my revolver around from the obscurity of its hiding-place at my hip to where it can plainly be seen, and laying a hand menacingly on the butt, I warn him to clear off, in a manner that causes him to wilt and turn pale. He leaves the caravanserai at once in high dudgeon. It has been a most humiliating occasion for him, to fall so ignobly from the very high horse on which he just entered with his bosom friends; but it ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... apple or turnip, and cut from it a piece of the shape of Fig. 1, to resemble the butt-end of a tallow candle; then from a nut of some kind—an almond is the best—whittle out a small peg of about the size and shape of Fig. 2. Stick the peg in the apple as in Fig. 3, and you have a very fair representation of a candle. The wick you can light, and it will burn ...
— Harper's Young People, July 27, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... you are thoroughly capable and independent; but, believe me, India is not like England, and a white woman needs a good many things done for her here if she's to be at all comfortable. I don't want to butt in and be a nuisance; but just remember I'm ...
— Jan and Her Job • L. Allen Harker
... dozen peppercorns were inserted ano suo: the target was a sheet of paper held at a reasonable distance; the match was applied by a pinch of cayenne in the nostrils; the sneeze started the grapeshot and the number of hits on the butt decided the bets. We can hardly wonder at the loose conduct of Persian women perpetually mortified by marital pederasty. During the unhappy campaign of 1856-57 in which, with the exception of a few brilliant skirmishes, we gained no glory, Sir ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... I came home and found her on the portico, in her riding-habit. She was whipping one of the maids with the butt end of her riding-whip. I rushed up and released the poor creature, whose cries were really heart-rending, when my wife turned on me, like a fury, and struck two blows over my head. One of the scars is on ...
— The American Baron • James De Mille
... functionary the flour was obtained, and the raisins; the beef-fat, or "slush," from Old Coffee; and the requisite supply of water from the scuttle-butt. I then went among the various cooks, to compare their receipts for making "duffs:" and having well weighed them all, and gathered from each a choice item to make an original receipt of my own, with due deliberation and solemnity I proceeded to business. Placing the component parts ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... necessitous, and those that are accustomed to its strong smoaky tang; yet is it much used in some of the Western Parts of England, and many thousand Quarters of this Malt has been formerly used in London for brewing the Butt-keeping-beers with, and that because it sold for two Shillings per Quarter cheaper than the Straw-dryed Malt, nor was this Quality of the Wood-dryed Malt much regarded by some of its Brewers, for that its ill Taste is lost in nine or twelve Months, by the Age ...
— The London and Country Brewer • Anonymous
... autumn night, behold the young Beaver toiling with might and main. His parents have felled a tree, and it is his business to help them cut up the best portions and carry them home. He gnaws off a small branch, seizes the butt end between his teeth, swings it over his shoulder, and makes for the water, keeping his head twisted around to the right or left so that the end of the branch may trail on the ground behind him. Sometimes he even rises on his hind legs, and walks almost upright, with his broad, strong tail ...
— Forest Neighbors - Life Stories of Wild Animals • William Davenport Hulbert
... I.e. with a single point or spike only, the Hellenic spear having a spike at the butt ...
— Anabasis • Xenophon
... the hatch with blood running down his face, shouting that the Richard was sinking, and yelling for quarter as he made for the ensign-staff on the poop, for the flag was shot away. Him the commodore felled with a pistol-butt. At the gunner's heels were the hundred and fifty prisoners we had taken, released by the master at arms. They swarmed out of the bowels of the ship like a horde of Tartars, unkempt and wild and desperate with fear, until I thought that the added weight on the scarce-supported ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... Buck ground the butt of his cigarette under one heel and reached for the makings. He had an almost irresistible desire to take the garrulous old man by the shoulders and shake ...
— Shoe-Bar Stratton • Joseph Bushnell Ames
... slowly cleared he congratulated himself for his repression. During his struggle with Gore his hand had come in contact with the butt of the mate's electrogun. He could easily have pulled it out of its holster and turned it against its owner. But this hasty action would not only have assured his own death, but would have destroyed the only chance the I.F.P. had of ...
— In the Orbit of Saturn • Roman Frederick Starzl
... and how trivial her sex! A man might be an angel or an Apollo, and a mustard-coloured coat would wholly blind them to his merits. I was a prisoner, a slave, a contemned and despicable being, the butt of her sniggering countrymen. I would take the lesson: no proud daughter of my foes should have the chance to mock at me again; none in the future should have the chance to think I had looked at her with ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the quare question for your honour to be after axing me. Sure all the country knows O'Sullivan of Toomies, for didn't him, and his father before him, live at the butt end of the mountain, near the neck of the Lawn; and wasn't they great chieftains in the ould times; and hadn't they a great sketch of country to themselves: they haven't so much now, for their hearts were too big for their manes (means;) and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 352, January 17, 1829 • Various
... expectations. The next moment the boy had set a match to the rags, and they were ablaze with wild sputterings and jets of red flame. Eagerly, but carefully, he lowered the fiery ball into the hole, paying out the string till it was evident that the tree was hollow almost down to the butt. ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... kindly the lithe black form. Clean to see: the gloss of her sleek hide, the white button under the butt of her tail, the green flashing eyes. He bent down to her, ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... went up in rapid rushes, with the ease and surefootedness of a coolheaded, steel-muscled climber. He stopped frequently, not because of weariness or of lack of breath, but to test the structure and hardness of the rocks with a small magnifying glass and the butt ...
— Out of the Depths - A Romance of Reclamation • Robert Ames Bennet
... maintained was the final triumph and revelation of their utter shiftlessness. With square miles of woodland all about them, they had prepared no billets of suitable size. The man had merely cut down two small trees, lopped off their branches, and dragged them into the room. Their butt-ends were placed together on the hearth, whence the logs stretched like the legs of a compass to the two further corners of the room. Amy, in the uncertain light, had nearly stumbled over one of them. As the logs burned away they were shoved together on the hearth from time to time, the ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... said eagerly. I wondered if, when he was through with the cigarette, he would keep the butt as a souvenir. He might even frame it, I told myself. After all, I'd given it to him, hadn't I? The magnificent Mr. Carboy, who almost acts like an ordinary human being, had actually given a poor, respectful spaceship ...
— The Man Who Played to Lose • Laurence Mark Janifer
... to sea; little thinking that, by so doing, he was incurring a greater risk than by remaining within the reefs and steering along the coast. Some of our people walked round the island where they found a whaler's ton butt cast upon the beach: it had probably belonged to the Echo. Near the cask were lying several coconuts, one of which was quite sound and perfect. The beach was strewed with pumice-stone heaped up ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia - Performed between the years 1818 and 1822 • Phillip Parker King
... to be filled, blew on it, sipped, and then hunted on the ledge under the desk for the butt of the cigar he had half-smoked ...
— The Return • H. Beam Piper and John J. McGuire
... blasphemy, nor be the butt of an assembly; be not moody in an alehouse, and never ...
— The High Deeds of Finn and other Bardic Romances of Ancient Ireland • T. W. Rolleston
... battle of Landau he had his skull broken open by a blow from the butt end of a musket. This occasioned his going through the operation called trepanning, which is performed by an engine like a coffee-mill, which being fixed on the bruised part of the bone, is turned round, and cuts out all the black till the edges appear white and sound. ...
— Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences • Arthur L. Hayward
... never, to my knowledge, with any of a later age. They may, in fact, be considered as characteristic appendages, or accompanying features, to the ecclesiastical structures of those times. There is one at Rathmichael, near Dublin, where there is the butt of a round tower. I have seen many of them in various states of preservation, and I think all were about 4 feet both in breadth and height. They were, however, never arched, but roofed with large flags, laid ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... just the kind of a man I am looking for. I want somebody with nerve. The trouble with the fellows in college who hate Merriwell is that they do not dare butt up against him. They are ...
— Frank Merriwell's Races • Burt L. Standish
... tomb-stone with an inscription implying "That when St Thomas built this church the king of Meliapour gave him the duties of all merchandize imported, which was the tenths[170]." Going still deeper, they came to a hollow place between two stones, in which lay the bones of a human body with the butt and head of a spear, which were supposed to be the remains of the saint, as those of the king and disciple were also found, but not so white. They placed the bones of the saint in a China chest, and the ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VI - Early English Voyages Of Discovery To America • Robert Kerr
... spurred boot-heels crossed the porch floor; there was a thundering knock with the butt-end of a riding-whip on ...
— That Old-Time Child, Roberta • Sophie Fox Sea
... enraged, the dog was pommelled, and kicked, and passed along from one to the other, until he at last gained the stern-sheets, and crouched between the legs of his master, who kicked him away in a rage, and he saved himself under the legs of the informer, who, seizing a pistol, struck him with the butt-end of it such a blow, that nothing but the very thick skull of the dog could have saved him. Snarleyyow was at a sad discount just then, but he very wisely again sought protection with his master, and this time ...
— Snarleyyow • Captain Frederick Marryat
... lightning, and, swinging the butt of his rifle round—for the weapon was hanging over his right shoulder—struck the figure he could but dimly see beside him, and heard at once a dull thud as the wooden stock rapped the man's head violently. Then, with a dive, he gained the trees, and, pausing for ...
— With Joffre at Verdun - A Story of the Western Front • F. S. Brereton
... arm, but only knocked the pistol from his hand. The lad found himself threatened on the right by a trooper, and slashed at him with his sword. The blow went home, but the sword's end became entangled with the victim's breast knot. A second trooper brought his rifle butt down heavily upon the sword, and it ...
— The Boy Allies with the Cossacks - Or, A Wild Dash over the Carpathians • Clair W. Hayes
... length found it necessary to check the excessive planting of the weed, and by the consent of the "Generall Assemblie" restraining the plantations to "one hundred plants[15] ye headd, uppon each of wich plantes there are to bee left butt onely nyne leaves wich portions as neare as could be guessed, was generally conceaved would be agreable with the hundred waight ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... the public—is quite true, but it does not go far to account for their failure. Punch has done this steadily ever since its establishment, without serious injury. No good cause has ever received much backing from it till it became the cause of the majority, or indeed has escaped being made the butt of its ridicule; and we confess we doubt whether "the friends of progress," using the term in what we may call its technical sense, were ever a sufficiently large body, or had ever sufficient love of fun, to make their disfavor of any great consequence. Most people in the United States who are ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin
... King granted him after his condemnation was to leave him the choice of his death; and he was privately drowned in a butt of malmsey in the Tower—a whimsical choice, which implies that he had an ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson
... Hammond Butt (Miss.) discussed The Changed Intellectual Qualifications of the Women of this Century, with the intense eloquence of Southern women, ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... joked. Frenchy came out of the cabin and smiled at his friends. Swinging in his left hand was a newly filled Colt's .45, which was recognized by his friends as the one found in the cabin and it bore a rough "T" gouged in the butt. ...
— Hopalong Cassidy's Rustler Round-Up - Bar-20 • Clarence Edward Mulford
... where Edith was standing. She had placed her right foot on the second board of the fence just ready to jump, when Jerry arrived just in time to take advantage of the opportunity presented. With one strong butt he hoisted her clear of the fence, landing her on all fours on the soft, plowed ground on the other side. She jumped up quickly, spitting out a mouthful of the soft earth she had scooped up. Bob and Edith were doubled ...
— Hidden Treasure • John Thomas Simpson
... nowbut again!I hate but; I know no form of expression in which he can appear, that is amiable, excepting as a butt of sack. But is to me a more detestable combination of letters than no itself.No is a surly, honest fellowspeaks his mind rough and round at once.But is a sneaking, evasive, half-bred, exceptuous sort of a conjunction, which comes to ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... when the dog-star first rose a horrible shape with a lion's mane flew across the desert, but it was not till midnight that the fearful uproar began, and even you shuddered when it broke out in the Apis-cave. Frightful things must be coming on us when the sacred bulls rise from the dead and butt and storm at the door with their horns to break it open. Many a time have I seen the souls of the dead fluttering and wheeling and screaming above the old mausoleums, and rock-tombs of ancient times. Sometimes they would soar up in the air in the form of hawks with men's ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... saw a man appear, tall, slim, dressed in black, hat in hand, who came in like a ram ready to butt his opponent, showing a receding forehead, a small pointed head, and a colorless face of the hue of a glass of dirty water. You would have taken him for an usher. The stranger wore an old coat, much worn at the seams; but he had a diamond in his shirt ...
— La Grande Breteche • Honore de Balzac
... her anxious and frightened features, and then he dropped the butt of his rifle on the ground, like one whose purpose had undergone a ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... smoke-shrouded table the most important affairs of state were discussed. Around it the rudest practical jokes were perpetrated. Gundling, a beer-bibbing author, whom the king made at once his historian and his butt, was the principal sufferer from these frolics, which displayed abundantly that absence of wit and presence of brutality which is the characteristic of the practical joke. As if in scorn of rank and official ...
— Historical Tales, Vol 5 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality, German • Charles Morris
... was but the flaunting cover of shrewd observation and trenchant vision. Going where he would, and saying what he listed, now in the Queen's inner chamber, then in the midst of the Council, unconsidered, and the butt of all, he paid for his bed and bounty by shooting shafts of foolery which as often made his listeners shrink as caused their laughter. The Queen he called Delicio, and Leicester, Obligato—as one who piped to another's dance. He had taken to Buonespoir at ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... his riding-crop under one arm and stood watching them, buttoning his tan gloves. Then with the butt of his crop he rubbed a dry spot of mud from his leather puttees, freed the incrusted spurs, and turned towards the door, pausing ...
— A Young Man in a Hurry - and Other Short Stories • Robert W. Chambers
... hesitation, he let go his sheet and began to paddle back. This bolsa was nothing but a bundle of tule, or bullrush, bound together with grass-ropes in the shape of a cigar, about ten feet long and about two feet through the butt. With these the California Indiana cross streams of considerable size. When he came ashore, I gave him a good overhauling for attempting to desert, and put him to work getting breakfast. In due time we returned him to his ship, the Ohio. Subsequently, I made a bargain with Mr. Hartnell to ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... reason came back into his eyes. Sheba was standing before him, his rifle in her hand. She had struck him with the butt of it. ...
— The Yukon Trail - A Tale of the North • William MacLeod Raine
... Letter, I must desire you to recollect yourself; and you will find, that when you did me the Honour to be so merry over my Paper, you laughed at the Idiot, the German Courtier, the Gaper, the Merry-Andrew, the Haberdasher, the Biter, the Butt, and not at ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... sir. But she drew so much water that she hit slap against the rock, and started a butt. We merely touched on its top with ...
— Jack Tier or The Florida Reef • James Fenimore Cooper
... is master of the country, and I am not minded to butt my head against a wall, Brian Buidh. If I am to hold to the little that is left me, I shall ...
— Nuala O'Malley • H. Bedford-Jones
... was thus delineating the character of Nathan Slaughter, the latter found himself surrounded by the young men of the Station, the butt of a thousand jests, and the victim of the insolence of the captain of horse-thieves. It is not to be supposed that Roaring Ralph was really the bully and madman that his extravagant freaks and expressions seemed to proclaim him. These, like ...
— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird
... Samuel Duhobret, a disciple whom Durer had admitted into his school out of charity. He was employed in painting signs and the coarser tapestry then used in Germany. He was about forty years of age, little, ugly, and humpbacked; he was the butt of every ill joke among his fellow disciples, and was picked out as an object of especial dislike by Madame Durer. But he bore all with patience, and ate, without complaint, the scanty crusts given him every day for dinner, while his companions ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... passed, and the boom of the cannon continued. Finally, one morning there was a great racket in the court-yard of our house. Cries, threats, oaths! The noise came up and up. Great blows with the butt ends of muskets were struck on the wardrobe doors. They were smashed in and we perceived eight or ten slovenly looking, dirty, and bearded men. Among these men was a woman, a little brunette; fairly pretty, I must say, but queerly gotten ...
— Parisian Points of View • Ludovic Halevy
... his arms round each of the household when he was "boun," and every one of them went out of doors with him; he leans on the butt of his spear and leaps into the saddle, and he and Kolskegg ...
— The story of Burnt Njal - From the Icelandic of the Njals Saga • Anonymous
... His sincere desire to "butt into the Desha family" he kept for the moment to himself. But as a preliminary maneuver he had intimated that a visit to the Desha home would not come in amiss. And the old colonel, for reasons he knew and Waterbury knew, thought it would ...
— Garrison's Finish - A Romance of the Race-Course • W. B. M. Ferguson
... on Infamy's high stage, And bore the pelting scorn of half an age; The very butt of slander and the blot For every ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... the seam, and pry up the slab; others with the butts of their muskets striking the slab with all their might to break it, while the priests remonstrated against our desecrating their holy and beautiful house. While thus engaged, a soldier, who was striking with the butt of his musket, struck a spring, and the marble slab flew up. Then the faces of the inquisitors grew pale as Belshazzar when the hand writing appeared on the wall; they trembled all over; beneath the marble slab, now partly up, there was a stair-case. I stepped to the altar, ...
— Life in the Grey Nunnery at Montreal • Sarah J Richardson
... without moving its feet, had drawn its body slightly backward from the verge; the man remained immobile as before. Broad awake and keenly alive to the significance of the situation, Druse now brought the butt of his rifle against his cheek by cautiously pushing the barrel forward through the bushes, cocked the piece, and glancing through the sights covered a vital spot of the horseman's breast. A touch upon the trigger and all would have been well with Carter Druse. At that instant the horseman turned ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... the youngster cried, glowering into the speaker's face. "That the feller Buck called an outlaw passon?" he demanded. His right hand slipped to the butt of his gun. "Say you," he cried threateningly, "if you got anything to say I'm right here ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... day of November, we met with an English ship, and because it was too late that night, it was agreed that they were to give us two or three tons of wine next morning, being, as they said, all the provision of drink they had, save only a butt or two which they must reserve for their own use: But, after all, we heard no more of them till they were set on ground on the coast of Ireland, where it appeared they might have spared us much more than they pretended, as they ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr
... in a state of torment over that which they had to face. If it happened to be the bell cow's turn, she advanced with drooping head and faltering step. The goats had no desire either to play or to butt. The horses tried to bear up bravely, but their bodies were all of a quiver with fright. The most pathetic of all was the sheep-dog. He kept his tail between his legs and ...
— The Wonderful Adventures of Nils • Selma Lagerlof
... realized their purpose, they held me helplessly struggling, and had forced me back against the low rail. Here I endeavored to break away, to shout an alarm, but was already too late. Carver's hands closed remorselessly on my throat, and, when I managed to strike out madly with one free fist, the butt of Kirby's pistol descended on my head, so lacerating my scalp the dripping blood blinded my eyes. The blow partially stunned me, and I half fell, clutching at the rail, yet dimly conscious that the two straining men were uplifting my useless body. Carver swearing viciously as he helped to thrust ...
— The Devil's Own - A Romance of the Black Hawk War • Randall Parrish
... man walked to the rear end of the counter and came around to the inner side. He was met by Matt, who, becoming alarmed, had picked up the butt-end of a fishing-rod with which to ...
— Young Auctioneers - The Polishing of a Rolling Stone • Edward Stratemeyer
... black and white beans still going on down there? Who are the Priori in these months, eating soberly—regulated official dinners in the Palazzo Vecchio, with removes of tripe and boiled partridges, seasoned by practical jokes against the ill-fated butt among those potent signors? Are not the significant banners still hung from the windows—still distributed with decent pomp under Orcagna's Loggia ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... between him and home with unexpected vivacity. We swung in the ruts, we shook like jellies on the merciless patches of broken stones, and Croppy stimulated the pace with weird whistlings through his teeth, and heavy prods with the butt of his whip in the region ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... bawled, with his detested jocularity. "They hain't nobody a-goin' to butt in on our love-makin' ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... This he never finds, but the likest substitute is trimmed and balanced and poised to that ideal. One man I know has evolved very nearly the weapon of Umslopogaas. It is almost straight, lapped at the butt with leather, amazingly springy, and carries a two-edged blade for splitting and chopping. If his Demon be with him—and what artist can answer for all his moods?—he will cause a tree to fall upon any stick or stone that you choose, uphill or down, to the right or ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... they rode back to the schoolhouse, on the door of which Willis pounded with his revolver butt, and when the door was opened he invited Gobel and the "grammar man" to come forth and do battle. But Steve had gone home, and the teacher, on seeing the two gladiators, fled, while the scholars, dismissing themselves, ran home in ...
— Last of the Great Scouts - The Life Story of William F. Cody ["Buffalo Bill"] • Helen Cody Wetmore
... opinion after Robertson said it, than before. I know nothing more offensive than repeating what one knows to be foolish things, by way of continuing a dispute, to see what a man will answer,—to make him your butt!' (angrier still.) BOSWELL. 'My dear Sir, I had no such intentions as you seem to suspect; I had not indeed. Might not this nobleman have felt every thing "weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable[1039]," as Hamlet says?' JOHNSON. 'Nay, if you are to bring in gabble, I'll talk no more. I will not, upon ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... he may impart the delightful intelligence. A woman (with more or less skill) buries her secret away from her kind. For days and weeks past, had not this old Maria made fools of the whole house,—Maria, the butt of ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Lion peering o'er the way, Invites each passing stranger that can pay; Where Calvert's butt and Parson's black champagne Regale the drabs and bloods of Drury Lane: There, in a lonely room, from bailiffs snug, The muse found Scroggin stretch'd beneath a rug; A nightcap deck'd his brows instead of bay, A cap by night, a stocking all ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... to fear from the Sedition Act, appeared with startling suddenness in October, 1798, when Representative Matthew Lyon, of Vermont, an eccentric character who had become the butt of all Federalists, was indicted for publishing a letter in which he maintained that under President Adams "every consideration of the public welfare was swallowed up in a continual grasp for power, in an unbounded thirst for ridiculous pomp, foolish adulation, and selfish avarice." The unlucky ...
— Union and Democracy • Allen Johnson
... clergy, which had been reduced by the drowning of Mason, and by the withdrawal of two other priests to England. His first ordination was that of Richard Davis, the farmer-catechist, in June, 1843; while in September three more students were admitted to the diaconate (Bolland, Spencer, and Butt), and thus at least for a time the ranks ...
— A History of the English Church in New Zealand • Henry Thomas Purchas
... will he butt alike the just and the unjust, the fat and bloated German merchant nor the herring-gutted Yankee skipper, nor the bare—ah—um—legged Samoan, nor the gorgeous consul in the solar topee. Gone is the glory of Samoa with Billy MacLaggan. Goodbye for the present, ...
— By Rock and Pool on an Austral Shore, and Other Stories • Louis Becke
... with the use of the lariat (La Riata). The hang of the six-shooter required more particular consideration; when needed it would be needed badly, and therefore must be easily drawn, with no possible chance of a hitch. The butt of a revolver must point forwards and not backwards, as shown in the accompanying illustration, a portrait of one of our men as he habitually appeared at work. We ourselves did not go the length of wearing three belts of cartridges and two six-shooters; but two belts were needed, ...
— Ranching, Sport and Travel • Thomas Carson
... room! The Regent comes from Mass. Guards, butt them on the toes—way there! give room! Prick me that laggard's ...
— The Vigil of Venus and Other Poems by "Q" • Q
... looking for her, wandering in utter misery through the house and through the courtyard and stables and the kitchen garden. He looked for Jane in the hothouse and the cucumber frames, and under the rhubarb, and on the scullery roof, and in the water butt. It was just possible that on a day of complete calamity Jane should have slithered off the scullery roof into the water-butt. The least he could do was to find Jane, ...
— The Tree of Heaven • May Sinclair
... which at once gave him and his partner liberty of action. They knew where the arms lay, and each in the twinkling of an eye secured a large navy revolver without disturbing the Indians. They then simultaneously struck the two sleeping guards a powerful blow on the head with the butt of their revolvers. The Indian struck by the herder was nearly killed by the heavy blow, while Glazier's man was only stunned. They then made for the ponies, leaped into the saddles, and before any of the other Indians had shaken off their heavy slumber, had struck out with all their might in the ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... to north-west are very common on the American coast. They are almost always sudden; sometimes so much so, as to take ships aback; and the force of the breeze usually comes so early, as to have produced the saying that a "nor'-wester comes butt-end foremost." Such proved to be the fact in our case. In less than half an hour after it began to blow, the wind would have brought the most gallant ship that floated to double-reefed topsails, steering by, and to reasonably ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... been christened the Robert Bullmer, and her first act when the dog-shores had been knocked away was a bull charge down the launching slip, resulting in the bursting of a hawser, the washing over of a boat and the drowning of two innocent spectators; her next was an attempt to butt the Eddystone over in a fog, and, being unbreakable, she might have succeeded only that she was going dead slow. She drifted out of the Bullmer line on the wash of a law-suit owing to the ramming by her of a Cape boat in Las Palmas harbour; engaged herself in the fruit trade in the service of ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various
... the gentleman. 'I am accustomed to do it for one of my shepherds. But recollect you will have to do a great deal of work for your high wages. The cows are wild, and must be bailed up and foot-roped. You may get an ugly kick or butt'—— ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence
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