"Mortar" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the tree's top branches—is filled in with two grey tints, it matters not at all how the task is accomplished. Truly the brush has plastered that back as a trowel might, and the result reminds one of stone and mortar, as Millet's execution reminds one of mud-pie making. The handicraft is as barbarous in Chavannes as it is in Millet, and we think of them more as great poets working in a not wholly sympathetic and, in their hands, somewhat rebellious material. Chavannes ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... Connel recognized as Tom's, boomed out over the loud-speaker of the large jet ship near the edge of the clearing. "Now hear this! You are covered by an atomic mortar. Drop your guns ...
— The Revolt on Venus • Carey Rockwell
... cast-iron mortar, exactly fitted for my purpose, which I filled with gunpowder. I then took a strong oak plank to cover it, to which I fixed iron hooks, so that they could reach the handles of the mortar. I cut a ...
— The Swiss Family Robinson; or Adventures in a Desert Island • Johann David Wyss
... teacups or tin cans with wet sand and others with clay that has been wet and then thoroughly stirred till it is about the consistency of cake batter or fresh mixed mortar. Take a tumbler of the wet sand and one of the wet clay and plant two or three kernels of corn in each, pressing the kernels down one-half or three-quarters of an inch below the surface; cover the seeds and carefully smooth the surface. In other tumblers plant peas, beans, ...
— The First Book of Farming • Charles L. Goodrich
... gardens, then frozen over. From this place the Emperor was drawn on a sledge to a tent pitched on the ice, whilst the Embassador and his suite were conducted into a dirty hovel little better than a pig-stye, where they were desired to sit down on a sort of bench built of stone and mortar; for, like the room they were put into on a former day, it was destitute of the least furniture; and they were told that something presently would be brought for them to eat. On complaining to their conductors that this was not the manner in which ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... neck. Poor William was meekly submitting to being smeared, as to his countenance, with a most pungent and unattractive lotion of pennyroyal and other green herbs which had been hastily pounded and mixed with cream in the little white stone mortar. ...
— The Queen's Twin and Other Stories • Sarah Orne Jewett
... and had been considerably strengthened since the commencement of the war. The citadel of this water-surrounded fortress is called Wargon. The allied fleet, consisting of seventeen British men-of-war, fifteen gunboats, and sixteen mortar-vessels, with two French men-of-war, six gunboats, and five mortar-vessels, left Nargen on the 6th of August, and anchored the same night among the islands about five miles from Sveaborg. During the night and next day, some batteries were thrown up on the neighbouring islands; and early ...
— Our Sailors - Gallant Deeds of the British Navy during Victoria's Reign • W.H.G. Kingston
... The standard for recording attacks acts as a filter to keep events out of reports and databases. A murder of an Iraqi is not necessarily counted as an attack. If we cannot determine the source of a sectarian attack, that assault does not make it into the database. A roadside bomb or a rocket or mortar attack that doesn't hurt U.S. personnel doesn't count. For example, on one day in July 2006 there were 93 attacks or significant acts of violence reported. Yet a careful review of the reports for that single day brought to light 1,100 acts of violence. Good policy is difficult to make when ...
— The Iraq Study Group Report • United States Institute for Peace
... Tintagel, and have used for the last thousand years or so; a dark stone, singularly rich with colour—pansy and wallflower colour, with splashes of green flung on to dead gray, like bright autumn leaves stirred into a heap of other leaves dim and dead. And the mortar for my masonry was the moonlight which flooded the sea and those wide downs whose divisions into fields turned ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... if ever, see the glorious face of Nature and, when they do, gaze into it with blank unrecognising eyes; whose whole life is one long round of monotony—monotonous toil, monotonous amusements, monotonous clothes, monotonous bricks and mortar;—until the very heaven itself, with its trailing cloud-armadas and its eternal stars, is forgotten, and the whole universe becomes a cowl of hodden grey, "where-under crawling cooped they live and die." And then look at those other millions—the millions of Russia—look at the grand simple life ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... that of the Sultan before it, I should have judged it the best that mine eyes had seen. The ostentation and richness of this empire being evidenced in nothing more than the richness of their pavilions, sumptuous beyond the fixed palaces of princes, erected with marble and mortar.' ...
— A Book of Quaker Saints • Lucy Violet Hodgkin
... from the shells and scrape off the brown skin, pound them to a paste in a mortar with the hard-boiled yolk and sweet herbs. When quite smooth, add the shalot and parsley minced, the salt, pepper, lemon rind, baked potato, and bread crumbs. Mix all well together, then add the two raw yolks; stir ...
— New Vegetarian Dishes • Mrs. Bowdich
... is made by dropping a bunch of parsley into boiling water, and in a minute or two, when it becomes intensely green, take it up, pound it in a mortar, and then through a sieve. Use as much pulp as will color the sauce a ...
— Choice Cookery • Catherine Owen
... is always on duty outside. The only way would be to escape at the rear. I have often thought it over, but it was of no use breaking out there, if I could not get any farther. The wall is built of loose stone, without mortar. You see, it would have been a big job to bring up either mortar or bricks from down below, so most of the buildings are entirely of stone. The wall is two feet thick, but there would be no great difficulty in getting out ...
— The Tiger of Mysore - A Story of the War with Tippoo Saib • G. A. Henty
... disorderly discomfort inseparable from the process of house-building. The room they sat in was in the roughest condition which admitted of their occupying it, at all; the raw, new chimney smoked intolerably. Out-of-doors the whole place was one chaos of bricks, mortar, scaffolding, tiles, and slates. A heavy mist shrouded the whole landscape of lovely Tweed side, and distilled in a cold, persistent, and dumb drizzle. Maida, the well-beloved staghound, kept fidgeting in and out of the room, Walter Scott every five minutes exclaiming, "Eh, Adam! the ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... smallest sketch, was there to pay homage to the great master. All went in procession to the place where the monument is to be raised, and the magistrates of the city laid the first stones of the pedestal. To my amusement they cemented these first stones with a mortar which was served in great silver platters, and made of fine pounded porcelain mixed with champagne. In the evening all the streets were illuminated; there were balls, concerts, and plays, so that we must have been doubled or quadrupled to see everything. We stayed some days longer ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... haven't the money," remarked Euphemia, "it would be of no earthly use to look at the book. It would only make us doubt our own calculations. You might as well try to make brick without mortar, as the children ...
— Rudder Grange • Frank R. Stockton
... ancient green on the river's banks. The St. Mary's River is here about three-fourths of a mile wide, and the green in front of my office is covered with Indian lodges, and presents a noble expanse. I have now a building some thirty-six feet square, built of squared timber, jointed with mortar and whitewashed, so as to give it a neat appearance. The interior is divided into a room some twenty feet by thirty-six, with two small ante-rooms. A large cast iron Montreal stove, which will take in three feet wood, occupies the centre. The walls are plastered, ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... is a nobler ornament, in the eye of the world, than an Italian palace, that is, stone and mortar skilfully put together, and adorned with sculpture and painting; and whether this may not be compassed without ...
— The Querist • George Berkeley
... of raspberry syrup and fifteen drops of muriatic acid. Rub the whole of the acid with two or three spoonfuls of syrup in a porcelain mortar (or, if there is none, in a soup-plate with the foot of a wine-glass, or a tumbler) for a minute or two; then add some more of the syrup and rub again, and thus continue till the acid is well divided and mixed ...
— Hydriatic treatment of Scarlet Fever in its Different Forms • Charles Munde
... could see that he was surprised, and presently he told the emperor that he had never heard any one who spoke such excellent Spanish. The emperor fixed his eyes upon me. 'You must have traveled a great deal,' he said. 'You should not be wasting your time with stones and mortar.' Then, turning to the officer who had spoken to me, he said, 'He understands Spanish so well that we may make him useful.' He was about to address me again, but was interrupted by the arrival of an orderly with a despatch. This he read hastily, and walked toward the officers ...
— The Vizier of the Two-Horned Alexander • Frank R. Stockton
... from the sea is the town and arsenal of Cavite, which, projecting as it does from the mainland, forms a most commodious and safe harbour. Cavite was well fortified, and directly opposite its fort, on the mainland, was a heavy mortar battery. Between the arsenal and the city was a Krupp battery, at what was known as the Luneta Fort, while further toward the sea, extending from Cavite to the outermost portion of Limbones Point, ...
— The Boys of '98 • James Otis
... it is cloudy. Neither need be more than four thousand miles off; so much the larger and more beautiful will they be. If on the old Thornbush moon old Herschel with his reflector could see a town-house two hundred feet long, on the Brick Moon young Herschel will be able to see a dab of mortar a foot and a half long, if he wants to. And people without the reflector, with their opera-glasses, will be able to see sufficiently well." And to this they agreed: that eventually there must be two Brick Moons. Indeed, it were better ...
— The Brick Moon, et. al. • Edward Everett Hale
... important food-stuff; the fruit is peeled and cut in strips, which are then dried and pounded in a mortar. In East Africa and elsewhere, an intoxicating drink is prepared from the fruit. The root-stock which bears the leaves is, just before the flowering period, soft and full of starch, and is sometimes used as food, as in the case of ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... of Essen knew about the new mortar which the firm of Friedrich Krupp manufactured at its own expense and which later, because its shell rapidly smashed the strongest fortifications of reinforced concrete, our military authorities promptly acquired. Must we be ashamed ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... should expect the shaft and the chamber at the bottom to have soft, powdery walls, subject to petty landslips, if no work were done but that of excavation. On the contrary, the walls are neatly daubed, plastered with a sort of clay-like mortar. They are not precisely smooth, indeed they are distinctly rough; but their irregularities are covered with a layer of plaster, and the crumbling material, soaked in some glutinous liquid and dried, is held firmly ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... I sought, and made it unlike all the other houses in the street—though they were all built on one monotonous pattern, and looked like the early copies of a blundering boy who was learning to make houses, and had not yet got out of his cramped brick-and-mortar pothooks—reminded me still more of Mr. and Mrs. Micawber. Happening to arrive at the door as it was opened to the afternoon milkman, I was reminded of Mr. and Mrs. Micawber ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... received with great applause, and the Putney Pet was dressed out in a gown and mortar-board, and the whole party then sallied out to battle. From time immemorial it has been the custom at Oxford for the town-people and the scholars to engage, at least once a year, in a wild scrimmage, and the pitched ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... his flag in the Melampus frigate of 44 guns. The Frederica, of same size, was commanded by Captain Van der Straten. The other four vessels were smaller. There were, besides, a flotilla of fifty-five small craft, including mortar and gun-boats, rocket flats, ...
— The Pirate City - An Algerine Tale • R.M. Ballantyne
... built, during the war, fourteen heavily armored gunboats, four heavy mortar boats, and converted seven transports into musket-proof gunboats, or "tin-clads," as they were called on the river. He had a share in other enterprises of a similar nature during the war, and besides rendering good service to the Union, was enabled to retire at the close of the ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... best expresses the voter's own opinions, or because he is one of those whose abilities and character the voter most respects, and whom he most willingly trusts to think for him. The member would represent persons, not the mere bricks and mortar of the town—the voters themselves, not a few vestrymen or parish notabilities merely. All, however, that is worth preserving in the representation of places would be preserved. Though the Parliament of the nation ought to have as little as possible to do with purely ...
— Considerations on Representative Government • John Stuart Mill
... is in great request for hearth-stones, and the beds of ovens; and in lining of lime-kilns it turns to good account, for the workmen use sandy loam instead of mortar, the sand of which fluxes, and runs by the intense heat, and so cases over the whole face of the kiln with a strong vitrified coat-like glass, that it is well preserved from injuries of weather, and endures thirty or forty years. When chiseled ...
— The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 1 • Gilbert White
... pride and purposes, and that makes you yearn, as your forehead mantles with fresh blood, for a kindred spirit and a kindred strength. Above all you love—though you do not know it now—the BREADTH of a country life. In the fields of God's planting there is ROOM. No walls of brick and mortar cramp one; no factitious distinctions mould your habit. The involuntary reaches of the spirit tend toward the True and the Natural. The flowers, the clouds, and the fresh-smelling earth, all give width to your ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell
... but, owing to the shameful negligence of some one, the name of this man of talent was overlooked. The port of Boulogne contained about seventeen hundred vessels, such as flatboats, sloops, turkish boats, gunboats, prairies, mortar-boats, etc.; and the entrance to the port was defended by an enormous chain, and by four forts, two on the right, and two on ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... out beyond the walls. Even the light-hearted students were sobered by the sight beyond. Thousands of men were engaged on the work of demolition. Where but ten days since stood villas surrounded by gardens and trees, there was now a mere waste of bricks and mortar stretching down to the Forts of Issy and Vanves. The trees had all been felled and for the most part cut up and carried into Paris for firewood. Most of the walls were levelled, and frequent crashes of masonry showed that these last vestiges of bright and happy ...
— A Girl of the Commune • George Alfred Henty
... mass composed of the micro-organisms contained in kumys ferment, casein, and a small quantity of fat. Twenty grains of this yeast are ground up in a small quantity of freshly drawn milk in a clean porcelain mortar, and shaken in a quart bottle with one pound of fresh milk,—all mare's milk, naturally,—after which it is lightly corked with a bit of wadding and set away in a temperature of 22 degrees to 26 degrees Reaumur. In about twenty-four hours small ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... pretty sitting-room looked, indeed, as if a tornado had struck it. The fireplace was a litter of broken brick and mortar; half the floor was ripped up and the boards flung back anyhow; table drawers and bookcases had been ransacked, and looked it; books rifled in vain were heaped in disorderly hummocks wherever there was room for them; everywhere ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... find it there; in truth, he would not have been much surprised to find the basement itself gone. Certainly, the foundation had disappeared from under a structure mightier and stronger, as he viewed it, than piles of stone and mortar. He had frequently criticized the office slavery of the bank, but he had never lost faith in the institution's magnitude and imperishability. It was the solidity of it that he had banked on and clung to, ...
— A Canadian Bankclerk • J. P. Buschlen
... through the pores of the leather in tiny streams, until at last a lump of pasty metal remained. This was squeezed again and again, until not a single globule of quicksilver passed through the leather. The ball, which was of the consistency of half-dried mortar was then taken out, and the process repeated again and again until the whole of the quicksilver had been passed through the leather. Six lumps of amalgam about the size of small hens' ...
— In The Heart Of The Rockies • G. A. Henty
... inclement morning in January—and left the young delicate sprig, apparently joyous and content, to the care of his masters and the mercy of his companions. But Sidney came home for dinner weeping—weeping in spite of his new mortar-board cap, his new satchel, his new box of compasses, and his new books. His mother kept him at home in the afternoon, and by the evening another of those terrible attacks had supervened. The doctor and Horace and Mrs Carpole once more ...
— The Grim Smile of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... Temple coldly; and he went on calcining a piece of the soft white stone, and then placing it in a mortar ...
— Menhardoc • George Manville Fenn
... his thoughts, pursued a tangled course, and led him into the prosaic brick-and-mortar monotony of Bayswater, but the moon was lavish in her generosity, and strewed his path with glinting strands of light. He paused in a quiet square to get his bearings. There was the heavy smell of fallen leaves from the gardens on the other ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... mother had opened was directly beneath Laura's, and was a very long, narrow window, in the style of the house, and there was a protecting stone ledge above it. Upon this ledge lay the book, wrapped in its oil-skin covering and secured from falling by a piece of broken iron hooping, stuck in the mortar of the bricks. It could be seen from nowhere save an upper window of the house next door, or from the tree itself, and in either case only ...
— The Flirt • Booth Tarkington
... apologies for having detained you so long over a question on which, as I have already warned you, I do not profess to be a scientific expert. I fear I have been no architect, not even a builder. But perhaps I have done a hodman's work, by bringing a little mortar, with which some of the nobler materials may presently ...
— Animal Sanctuaries in Labrador • William Wood
... is Paris,—laughing, tragic Paris, who once had need of a singer to proclaim her splendor and all her misery. Fate made the man; in necessity's mortar she pounded his soul into the shape Fate needed. To king's courts she lifted him; to thieves' hovels she thrust him down; and past Lutetia's palaces and abbeys and taverns and lupanars and gutters and prisons and its very gallows—past each in turn the man was dragged, ...
— The Line of Love - Dizain des Mariages • James Branch Cabell
... lapse of time, one can be sure of finding familiar faces and picking up old threads; where for a moment one can abandon one's self to the illusion that New York humanity is a shade less unstable than its bricks and mortar. And that evening in particular I remember feeling that there could be no pleasanter way of re-entering the confused and careless world to which I was returning than through the quiet softly-lit diningroom in which Mrs. Cumnor, with a characteristic sense of my ...
— The Long Run - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... conservative, would certainly refuse to start. When they travel round and round, working the mill which squeezes the juice out of the sugar cane, or, in the same fashion, causing the great stone wheel to revolve which grinds the mortar, their master alternately whips them and sings to them. I once listened to the song which the man sung when they were making mortar. It was something like this—"Oh bullocks! what a work you are doing. Going round and round making mortar ...
— India and the Indians • Edward F. Elwin
... realized that these Companions of the Rosy Hours were the only thing in the world to fear. Rasta and Stumm seemed feeble simpletons by contrast. The window I had been looking out of was changed to a prison wall—I could see the mortar between the massive blocks. In a second these devils would be smelling out their enemies like some foul witch-doctors. I felt the burning eyes of their leader looking for me in the gloom. Peter was praying audibly beside me, and I could have choked him. His infernal ...
— Greenmantle • John Buchan
... grotesquely belying its romantic name, and only surpassed in squalor by the classically named Athens—beware, reader, of American towns named out of classical dictionaries! Here, however, our wanderings in the brick-and-mortar wilderness were to end, for by a long, romantic, old, covered bridge we crossed the Chemung River, and there once more, on the other side, was Nature, lovelier than ever, awaiting us. Not Dante, when he emerged from Hades and again ...
— October Vagabonds • Richard Le Gallienne
... exhibit in the true light this copious source of error, there is not one half so striking as that furnished by the false association which connects the holiness that can alone attach to the living and the immortal, with earth, mortar, and stone, pieces of mouldering serge, and bits of rotten wood. Nearly one half of the errors with which Popery has darkened and overlaid the religion of the Cross, have originated in this particular species of false association. The superstition of pilgrimages, with ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... broad shelves are formed on the sides of the cliffs, and these shelves, or the deep recesses between them, were utilized, so that here is a village of cliff dwellings. There are several hundred rooms altogether. The rooms are of sandstone, pretty carefully worked and laid in mortar, and the interior of the rooms was plastered. The opening for the chimney was usually by the side of the entrance, and the ceilings of the rooms are still blackened with soot and smoke. Around this village, on the terrace ...
— Seventh Annual Report • Various
... incarceration in the convent of S. Valeria at Milan. She was to be 'inclosed within a little dungeon, the door of which shall be walled up with stones and mortar, so that the said Virginia Maria shall abide there for the term of her natural life, immured both day and night, never to issue thence, but shall receive food and other necessaries through a small hole in the wall of the said chamber, ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... a garret; it would not seem that the alteration in his status, assistant now and no longer apprentice, had increased his social conveniences. He was still the over-worked apothecary, pounding drugs with a pestle and mortar from morning till night. Someone has pointed out the odd circumstance that almost every scene in the drama of Catilina takes place in the dark. This was the unconscious result of the fact that all the attention which the future realist could give to the story had to be given ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... quarters of the firmament. There are great varieties in the construction of the houses. Small insignificant huts often stand close to a palace having twenty or twenty-five windows in one front. Private dwellings in the mountainous parts are built of unhewn stone, cemented with a very strong calcareous mortar. On the coast the walls are of brick. In the departments of Junin and Ayacucho, I met with the ruins of great villages, consisting of dwellings of a peculiar construction, in the form of a tower. Each house is quadrangular, with a diameter of about six feet, and seventeen or eighteen feet high. ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... examine with a lens and note resemblance to pieces of broken stone. Draw a magnet through the sand and note black particles adhering, showing presence of iron in some form. Show the hardness by rubbing against the surface of a piece of glass. Sand is used for mortar, concrete, and glass. The chief sand-forming rocks are quartz and granite. Show pupils how to recognize these. Examine a sample of sand ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Nature Study • Ontario Ministry of Education
... columns, the domes carved into foliage, or scooped out in the form of a fruit-basket, offered so many receptacles into which the winds carry, with the dust, the seeds of vegetables. The house-leek fixes itself in the mortar, the mosses cover rugged masses with their elastic coating; the thistle projects its brown burrs from the embrasure of a window; and the ivy creeping along the northern cloisters falls ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... surely goes back to the morning of the world. The glassblower is a classic, like the sower who goes forth to sow, the potter at his wheel, and the grinding of grain with mortar and pestle. Thus, too, the art of the mosaicist—who places bright bits of stone and glass in certain positions so as to form a picture—goes back to the dawn. The exquisite work in mosaic at Pompeii is the first thing that impresses the visitor to that silent city. Much of the work there was done ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard
... carbonates and sulphates, with alkaline bases; and it is well known these act an important part in vegetation. The influence of lime in their production is manifested by their appearing first at the place where the mortar and brick come ...
— Familiar Letters of Chemistry • Justus Liebig
... old mortar crumbled beneath their blows, out fell a shower of glittering gold coins ...
— Patty's Friends • Carolyn Wells
... and lively manner; the peace- loving Trygaeus rides on a dung-beetle to heaven in the manner of Bellerophon; War, a desolating giant, with his comrade Riot, alone, in place of all the other gods, inhabits Olympus, and there pounds the cities of men in a great mortar, making use of the most celebrated generals for pestles. The Goddess Peace lies buried in a deep well, out of which she is hauled up by ropes, through the united exertions of all the states of Greece: all these ingenious ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... relish were gorging themselves with pieces as big as their fists. The course of flesh being over, the goatherds spread on the skins a great number of parched acorns and half a cheese, harder than if it had been made of mortar. The horn in the meantime was not idle, but came full from the wineskins and returned empty, as though it had been a bucket sent ...
— The Junior Classics, V4 • Willam Patten (Editor)
... bend of the stream above Vicksburg he came upon a more animated scene. Here were the mortar-boats in full blast, bombarding the city, every shot lighting up the stream for a wide space around. But the gun crews were too busy to pay any attention to the seeming drift-log that glided silently by the fleet or to notice the man that lay at ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 2 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... coca, thoroughly mixed in a mortar with 8 grammes of caustic magnesia, were stirred into 200 c.c. of boiling water, and the mixture boiled for ten minutes. The liquid was filtered off, and the residue percolated with about 60 c.c. of water. It was then again ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 492, June 6, 1885 • Various
... servants had hitherto put in force, far too successfully, to thin the numbers of this poor, harmless, unsuspecting tribe. On the ruin of the old gateway, against which, tradition says, the waves of the lake have dashed for the better part of a thousand years, I made a place with stone and mortar, about 4 ft. square, and fixed a thick oaken stick firmly into it. Huge masses of ivy now quite cover it. In about a month or so after it was finished, a pair of barn owls came and took up their abode ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 529, January 14, 1832 • Various
... many straight intersecting roads which characterise that crude nebula of a future city; and the woman and the man met thus face to face; not another passer-by visible in the thoroughfare;—at a distance the dozing hack cab-stand; round and about them carcases of brick and mortar—some with gaunt scaffolding fixed into their ribs, and all looking yet more weird in their raw struggle into shape through the living haze of a ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of these two, and called, in consequence of the changes thus brought about, the Metamorphic rocks. The effect of heat upon clay is to bake it into slate; limestone under the influence of heat becomes quick-lime, or if subjected afterwards to the action of water, it is changed to mortar; sand under the same agency is changed to a coarse kind of glass. Suppose, then, that a volcanic eruption takes place in a region of the earth's surface where successive layers of limestone, of clay, and of sandstone have been previously deposited by ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... themselves On the main promenade just at the wrong time: You'd come upon his scrutinizing hat, Making a peaked shade blacker than itself Against the single window spared some house Intact yet with its mouldered Moorish work,— Or else surprise the ferrel of his stick Trying the mortar's temper 'tween the chinks Of some new shop a-building, French and fine. He stood and watched the cobbler at his trade, The man who slices lemons into drink, The coffee-roaster's brazier, and the boys That volunteer to help him turn its winch. ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... colonies, planted in places wisely chosen, Italy was kept in subjection. The colonies were connected together by roads. The Appian Way, from Rome to Capua, was built in the midst of the conflict with Samnium. It was made of large, square stones, laid on a platform of sand and mortar. In later times the Roman Empire was traversed in all directions by ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... gods in one of those dreary thoroughfares which speculative builders love to raise upon some miserable fragment of waste ground hanging to the skirts of a prosperous town. Brigsome's Terrace was, perhaps, one of the most dismal blocks of building that was ever composed of brick and mortar since the first mason plied his trowel and the first architect drew his plan. The builder who had speculated in the ten dreary eight-roomed prison-houses had hung himself behind the parlor door of an adjacent ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... not have understood that a vehicle, such as yolk of egg mixed with vinegar, was absolutely necessary to tempera, or that it was proper, in fresco-painting, to prepare the walls, and paint in the fresh wet mortar. They used no vehicle, they fixed their colors in no coat of plaster, but they threw their ineffectual dry paint on the naked brick. The result has been that their interesting boyish efforts are now decayed beyond any chance of restoration. It is impossible, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... or might not have heard; but, at any rate, he deigned no reply, and went on with his task, which was pounding seeds in a stone mortar. ...
— Fairy Book • Sophie May
... whereon they were, lay Silver-stead, the town of the Dale. Hitherto it had been an unfenced place; but Folk-might pointed to where on the western side a new white wall was rising, and on which, young as the day yet was, men were busy laying the stones and spreading the mortar. Fair seemed that town to Face- of-god: the houses were all builded of stone, and some of the biggest were roofed with lead, which also as well as silver was dug out of the mountains at the eastern end of the Dale. ...
— The Roots of the Mountains • William Morris
... pine lumber, and contained but one room, to which one window gave light and one door admission. Its weatherbeaten sides revealed a virgin innocence of paint. Against one end of the house, and occupying half its width, there stood a huge brick chimney: the crumbling mortar had left large cracks between the bricks; the bricks themselves had begun to scale off in large flakes, leaving the chimney sprinkled with unsightly blotches. These evidences of decay were but partially concealed by ...
— The Conjure Woman • Charles W. Chesnutt
... continue to employ the primitive method of treating rice-paddy for domestic and local use. The grain is generally husked by them in a large mortar hewn from a block of molave, or other hardwood, in which it is beaten by a pestle. Sometimes two or three men or women with wooden pestles work at the same mortar. This mortar is termed, in Tagalog dialect, Luzon, ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... commandments according to the clear precept, do you let them alone, if you do not want a worse thing to befal you, for just so sure as you fight against them they will destroy you. This beating the air, is some like daubing with untempered mortar; you cannot make any of it stay put. If I were in your place, I should a great deal rather have been fast asleep than to be caught in such heaven-daring business—fighting against God! This looks like "following anything but 'the word of God and ...
— A Vindication of the Seventh-Day Sabbath • Joseph Bates
... Despite the adoption of every precaution suggested by experience in such work, some disturbance of the surface above the east tunnel resulted, and several house fronts were damaged. The portion of the tunnel affected was bulkheaded at each end, packed with rubble and grouted with Portland cement mortar injected under pressure through pipes sunk from the street surface above. When the interior was firm, the tunnel was redriven, using much the same methods that are employed for tunnels through earth when the arch lining is built before the central core, or dumpling ...
— The New York Subway - Its Construction and Equipment • Anonymous
... school-house. O, father does so want Mr. Gray for to have his wish! Father saw all the stones lying quarried and hewn on Farmer Hale's land; Mr. Gray had paid for them all himself. And father said he would work night and day, and little Tommy should carry mortar, if the parson would let him, sooner than that he should be fretted and frabbed as he was, with no one giving him a helping hand or ...
— My Lady Ludlow • Elizabeth Gaskell
... earnestly urged that one of them should go down, as I was very much fatigued; but, terrified at my relation, they both refused. I then received fresh courage, went down a third time, taking a lighted flambeau in my hand. When I had descended into the ninth arch, a parcel of stone and mortar suddenly fell in and extinguished my light, and I immediately saw a triangular plate of gold, richly adorned with precious stones, the brilliancy of which struck me with admiration and astonishment. ...
— The Mysteries of Free Masonry - Containing All the Degrees of the Order Conferred in a Master's Lodge • William Morgan
... is the distinctive characteristic of Montesquieu's ideas, as it is of the seventeenth century altogether. He was already councillor in the Parliament of Bordeaux when Louis XIV. died; next year (1716) he took possession of a mortar-cap president's (president d mortier) office, which had been given up to him by one of his uncles. "On leaving college," he says, "there were put into my hands some law-books; I examined the spirit of them." Those profound researches, which were to last ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... of Bohemia work very hard indeed; they help their husbands in all kinds of work. Among other occupations they act as bricklayers' labourers. They run up and down the tall ladders with heavy loads of bricks or mortar, chattering gaily all the while as if life ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... They were afraid, not only for our house, but for the rest of the village: no one remembered such a storm. As for our datcha, being as it is the nearest to the sea, the waves were already washing stones and mortar away. Vassily worked as hard as man could, shifting the furniture, taking out his household things, and trying to save the house. The villagers helped him—even the councillors who had hoped for ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... Valley. Cyclopean walls and other remains show a marvellous skill in construction; individual blocks of granite-stone, measuring as much as fifteen to twenty feet in diameter, being placed in these walls with such skill that even to-day a pen-knife blade cannot be inserted between them. No mortar was used, but the blocks are keyed together in a peculiar way. How this stone was so skilfully cut and transported we cannot imagine; even with iron and all our modern appliances it is doubtful if we could produce ...
— Ranching, Sport and Travel • Thomas Carson
... was roughly constructed, the walls being often less than a foot thick. Very little adobe mortar seems to have been used; some of the thickest and best preserved walls have apparently been laid nearly dry (Pl. LXI). The few openings still preserved also show evidence of hasty and careless construction. Over most of the area the debris of the fallen walls is very clearly marked, ...
— A Study of Pueblo Architecture: Tusayan and Cibola • Victor Mindeleff and Cosmos Mindeleff
... Nomini Hall, a great colonial mansion in Westmoreland County. It was built between 1725 and 1732 of brick covered with strong mortar, which imparted a perfectly white exterior, and was seventy-six feet long and forty wide. The interior was one of unusual splendor for the time, such as only the very rich could afford. There were eight large rooms, one of ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... NOT EXIST,"—it is Voltaire, the enemy of religions, who says so,—"IT WOULD BE NECESSARY TO INVENT HIM." Why? "Because," adds the same Voltaire, "if I were dealing with an atheist prince whose interest it might be to have me pounded in a mortar, I am very sure that I should be pounded." Strange aberration of a great mind! And if you were dealing with a pious prince, whose confessor, speaking in the name of God, should command that you be burned alive, would you not be very sure of being burned also? Do you forget, then, anti-Christ, the ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... boy tempted by a varnished widow, with pounds of barley sugar in her pockets;—and she already serving as a test-vessel or mortar for awful combinations in druggery! Gilt widows are equal to decrees of Fate to us young ones. Upon my word, the cleric who unites, and the Law that sanctions, they're the criminals. Victor Radnor is the noblest of fellows, the very best friend a man can have. I will tell ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... and conscientious were the workmen employed by Roger de Fiennes, and how sound were their bricks and mortar, may be learned by the study of Hurstmonceux Castle to-day. In many parts the walls are absolutely uninjured except by tourists. The floors, however, have long since returned to nature, who has put forth her energies without stint to clothe the old apartments with greenery. ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... and he removed the nails which fastened the end of the bar. They looked secure enough, and were nails an inch long driven into the mortar; but they had been successfully loosened, and only wanted a little pull to bring them out. In one minute Wildney had unfastened and pushed down one end of the bar. He then got through the broken pane and dropped down outside. Eric ...
— Eric, or Little by Little • Frederic W. Farrar
... 28-31. It is seldom found in this form in combination. If its equivalent is given in these, it is of the form shown in 33. It is, however, occasionally seen on articles of stone, as the spearpoint (32) and stone hatchet (34) and sacrificial knife. It also appears in the symbol for the stone mortar (36) from Tro. 19c. Before discussing its signification and probable origin we will give the significations which have been suggested of the different ...
— Day Symbols of the Maya Year • Cyrus Thomas
... Barbicane, J.T. Maston, and tutti quanti. His greatest pleasure consisted in repeating to these brave artillerymen that they were only amiable and learned murderers. He was always joking about it. The day he visited the Columbiad he greatly admired it, and went down to the bore of the gigantic mortar that was soon to hurl him towards ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne
... live on board nails. If they cannot understand that, they cannot understand much that I have to say. For my part, I am glad to bear of experiments of this kind being tried; as that a young man tried for a fortnight to live on hard, raw corn on the ear, using his teeth for all mortar. The squirrel tribe tried the same and succeeded. The human race is interested in these experiments, though a few old women who are incapacitated for them, or who own their thirds in mills, may ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... through a mist. Then he found himself once more in the Rue de la Femme-sans-Tete, where he breakfasted at Gomard's wine shop, whose sign 'The Dog of Montargis,' inspired him with interest. Some stonemasons, in their working blouses, bespattered with mortar, were there at table, and, like them, and with them, he ate his eight sous' 'ordinary'—some beef broth in a bowl, in which he soaked some bread, followed by a slice of boiled soup-beef, garnished ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... mounted on its hill between the marshes of Missaguash and Tantemar, was a regular work, pentagonal in form, with solid earthern ramparts, bomb-proofs, and an armament of twenty-four cannon and one mortar. The commandant, Duchambon de Vergor, a captain in the colony regulars, was a dull man of no education, of stuttering speech, unpleasing countenance, and doubtful character. He owed his place to the notorious Intendant, Bigot, who it is said, was in his debt for disreputable service in an affair ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... true basis and motive of morals, to true psychology, to the noblest poetry. All will be of the earth, earthy. You cannot strike religion out of men's thoughts, as you might take a stone out of a wall and leave the wall standing; you take out foundation and mortar, and make ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... Roots, draw out the pith, and boil them in two waters till they be soft, when it is cold put to it the like quantity of the pap of roasted Pippins, and three times their weight of brown sugar-candy beaten to powder, stamp these in a Mortar to a Conserve, whereof take every morning fasting as much as a Walnut for a week or fortnight together, and afterwards but three ...
— A Queens Delight • Anonymous
... of the colonists were generally built of logs, hewn on both sides, the spaces chinked with mortar, and the roof constructed of boards. The lower part was generally left in one large room, and when another apartment was desired, it was made by drawing a curtain across it. When we arrived at the residence of Mrs. Paul, we were immediately ushered ...
— Twenty-Two Years a Slave, and Forty Years a Freeman • Austin Steward
... are jagged walls and falling houses close at hand, and through the battered roofs and broken windows, wretched rooms are seen, where 'want and fever hide themselves in many wretched shapes, while smoke and crowded gables, and distorted chimneys, and deformity of brick and mortar penning up deformity of mind and body, choke the murky distance. As Mr Dombey looks out of his carriage window, it is never in his thoughts that the monster who has brought him there has let the light of day in on these things: not made or caused them. It was the journey's fitting ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... humbled, and when it is even at the door next to utter destruction and consumption, he addeth, "If then their uncircumcised hearts be humbled, and they take with the punishment of sin," &c. We need ask no reason of this, for "bray a fool in a mortar, his folly will not depart from him," Prov. xxvii. 22. Poor foolish man is a foolish man, folly is born with him, folly is his name, and so is he. He hath not so much wisdom as to "hear the voice of the rod, and him that appointeth it." Poor Ephraim is an undaunted heifer. Nature is ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... epoch. No tradition subsisted of a period when it was not practised. After the deluge, when men wished to build a city and a tower which should reach to heaven, "they said to one another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them throughly; and they had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar."[133] ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... spell of a necromancer would still call up the figure of the dame irate, in her horn spectacles and her black-ribboned cap, leaning with one arm on her crutch, and with the other uplifting what was with her no mere symbol of authority. Like a shell from a mortar, he departed from the house. She hobbled to the door after him, but his diminutive figure many yards away, his little bare legs misty with swiftness as he ran, was the last she ever saw of him, and her pupils had a bad time of it the rest of the day. He never even entered the street again ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... made no farther enquiry, but took the lady by the hand, and by the directions which the prince my cousin had given me, I brought her to the place. We were scarcely got thither, when we saw the prince following us, carrying a pitcher of water, a hatchet, and a little bag of mortar. ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... consisteth (in like sorte) of wickers, meeting aboue into one little roundell, out of which roundell ascendeth a necke like vnto a chimney, which they couer with white felte, and oftentimes they lay mortar or white earth vpon the sayd felt, with the powder of bones, that it may shine white. And sometimes also they couer it with blacke felte. The sayd felte on the necke of their house, they doe garnish ouer with beautifull varietie of pictures. Before the doore likewise they hang a felt curiously painted ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries - Vol. II • Richard Hakluyt
... bricks and the litter and debris of building; always in his ears as he remembered those days were the confused noises of wagons whining and groaning under their heavy loads, of gnawing saws and rattling hammers, of the clink of trowels on stones, of the swish of mortar in boxes, and of the murmur of the tide of hurrying feet over board sidewalks, ebbing and flowing night and morning. In those days new boys came to town so rapidly that sometimes John met a boy in swimming whom he did not know, and, even in 1866, when Ellen and Molly Culpepper were giving a birthday ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... of reminiscence when looking at the old moldy mortar that belonged to the knights of St. John when at Rhodes, the expiring chivalry of Europe gleams fitfully upon us, once more, to provoke a mortifying comparison with the not yet completed pictures of the capture of Abd-el-Kader and the last siege of Rome; thence turn to the "Jeu de Paume," where ...
— Gifts of Genius - A Miscellany of Prose and Poetry by American Authors • Various
... 1. Beat in a Mortar the Leg of a young Coney (Vulgarly called the Almond) or of a Whelp or Catling, and a quantity of Virgins Wax and Sheeps suet, till they are incorporated, and temper them with clarified Honey ...
— The School of Recreation (1684 edition) • Robert Howlett
... isn't all. It means that Nature keeps on asking for more bricks and mortar to go on building up the works that were begun years ago and not finished—muscle and bone and nerve, sir, so as to get him a sound body; and mind you, a sound body generally means a sound brain. Everything in a ...
— Jack at Sea - All Work and no Play made him a Dull Boy • George Manville Fenn
... Epicurus said. Now this loss of feeling is caused by being entirely absorbed in the cultivation of virtue, or of real good and felicity, in such wise that Regulus did not feel the chest, Lucretia the dagger, Socrates the poison, Anaxagoras the mortar, Scaevola the fire, Cocles the abyss, and other worthies felt not those things which would torment and fill ...
— The Heroic Enthusiasts,(1 of 2) (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... bituminous jet of the Lower Old Red Sandstone, and were excavators among its fossiliferous beds. The vitrified forts of the north of Scotland give evidence of yet another of the obsolete arts. Before the savage inhabitants of the country were ingenious enough to know the uses of mortar, or were furnished with tools sufficiently hard and solid to dress a bit of sandstone, they must have been acquainted with the chemical fact, that with the assistance of fluxes, a pile of stones could be fused into a solid wall, ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... directions. He also tells how to redden ivory. "There is likewise an herb called 'rubrica,' the root of which is long, slender, and of a red colour; this being dug up is dried in the sun and is pounded in a mortar with the pestle, and so being scraped into a pot, and a lye poured over it, is then cooked. In this, when it has well boiled, the bone of the elephant or fish or stag, being placed, is made red." Mediaeval chessmen were made in ivory: very likely ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... will be an hour upon the fire before it boil. When it is clear and enough boiled, pour it out into woodden vessels to cool. When you are ready to Tun it, have four Gallons of Black-currants, bruise them in a stone mortar, that they may the more easily part with their juyce to the Liquor. Put them and their juyce into the barrel, and pour the cool Liquor upon them, so as the vessel be quite full. Cover the bung with a plate of lead lying ...
— The Closet of Sir Kenelm Digby Knight Opened • Kenelm Digby
... sloping roof, drops at regular intervals upon my forehead. By the light of the patron saint who watches over me I perceive that the rain has found an inlet through a gotera in the roof. A gotera is a hole in the tiles, formed during the day by the action of the baking sun upon the mortar, which yields to its cracking influence and leaves an aperture. Rising hurriedly in the dead of night, I remove my catre to a dry corner, and at the same time place a basin beneath the spot from whence the drops of rain issue. Once more I awake under the ...
— The Pearl of the Antilles, or An Artist in Cuba • Walter Goodman
... immodest, bold, unwomanly. But that first vision had been so keen of a quiet-voiced man extending a strong hand to welcome and protect as he smiled at her in pleasant greeting! Her vague notions of a far country in which was no wilderness of brick and mortar but only the beauty of smiling fields or of scented forests had filled her heart with a passionate longing. And the last thing the doctor had told her, in the hospital, was that she ought to live far away from the city, in the pure air of God's country. It was with ...
— The Peace of Roaring River • George van Schaick
... P.M., the mortar batteries opened fire, and from that time the firing was continued without ceasing until the 23d, when it was suspended for a few hours. The fire was returned from the batteries. Fire was also opened on the city from the vessels. Heavy guns having arrived, preparations were made ...
— General Scott • General Marcus J. Wright
... Monterey. The houses here, as everywhere else in California, are of one story, built of clay made into large bricks, about a foot and a half square and three or four inches thick, and hardened in the sun. These are cemented together by mortar of the same material, and the whole are of a common dirt-color. The floors are generally of earth, the windows grated and without glass; and the doors, which are seldom shut, open directly into the common ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... meet them, every day, in the streets of London, but no one ever encounters them elsewhere; they seem indigenous to the soil, and to belong as exclusively to London as its own smoke, or the dingy bricks and mortar. We could illustrate the remark by a variety of examples, but, in our present sketch, we will only advert to one class as a specimen—that class which is so aptly and expressively designated ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... back at old Saint Paul's looming through the smoke, its cross peeping above the cloud (if the day were clear), and glittering in the sun; and casting his eyes upon the Babel out of which it grew until he traced it down to the furthest outposts of the invading army of bricks and mortar whose station lay for the present nearly at his feet—might feel at last that ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... Good, pitiful yet masterful, then anon in His good time America shall rend the Veil and the prisoned shall go free. Free, free as the sunshine trickling down the morning into these high windows of mine, free as yonder fresh young voices welling up to me from the caverns of brick and mortar below—swelling with song, instinct with life, tremulous treble and darkening bass. My children, my little children, are singing to the sunshine, and ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... Casaubon is as good as most of us. He is a scholarly clergyman, and creditable to the cloth. Some Radical fellow speechifying at Middlemarch said Casaubon was the learned straw-chopping incumbent, and Freke was the brick-and-mortar incumbent, and I was the angling incumbent. And upon my word, I don't see that one is worse or better than the other." The Rector ended with his silent laugh. He always saw the joke of any satire against himself. His conscience was large and easy, like the rest of him: it did ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... a floor of this kind of tempered mortar on the ground, upon which they deposit a layer ...
— An English Grammar • W. M. Baskervill and J. W. Sewell
... the bed white and glistening in the sun, which made it very hard for the eyes, and so that a man in passing over it made no visible track. It looked as if it one time might have been a smooth bed of plastic mortar, and had hardened in the sun. It looked as if there must have been water there sometime, but we had not seen a drop, or a single cloud; every day was clear and sunny, and very warm, and at night no stars forgot ...
— Death Valley in '49 • William Lewis Manly
... they were only lads together, and they talked freely with each other. Dick, after a while, returned to his commanding officer, Colonel Winchester, but there was little to do, and he sat on the deck with him, looking out over the fleet, the transports, the floating batteries, the mortar boats, and the iron-clads. He saw that the North, besides being vastly superior in numbers and resources, was the supreme master on the water through her equipment and the mechanical skill of her people. The South had no advantage save the defensive, ...
— The Guns of Shiloh • Joseph A. Altsheler
... what Mr. Carnegie himself would like to do, but with his big, stiff, clumsy libraries trailing their huge, senseless brick-and-mortar bodies, their white pillars and things, about the country, unmanned, inert, eyeless, all those great gates and forts of knowledge, Coliseums of paper, and with the mechanical people behind the counters, the policemen of the books, all standing about ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... vault without any window or other opening than the door. It was very old and much neglected. The mortar had vanished from between the stones, and it was half filled with a heap of all sorts of rubbish, beaten down in the middle, but looser at the sides; it sloped from the door to the foot of the opposite wall: evidently for a long time the vault had been left open, ...
— The Princess and the Curdie • George MacDonald
... Whoever loiters among the ruins of a monastery will see, commonly leading out of the cloisters, rows of cellars half under-ground, low, damp, and wretched-looking; an earthen floor, bearing no trace of pavement; a roof from which the mortar and the damp keep up (and always must have kept up) a perpetual ooze; for a window a narrow slip in the wall, through which the cold and the wind find as free an access as the light. Such as they are, a well-kept dog ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... through the early summer in order that this might be achieved; and although the fittings were not completed, and the outward signs of the masons and labourers had not been removed,—although the heaps of mortar were still there, and time had not yet sufficed to have the chips cleared away,—on Sunday the fifteenth of July the chapel was opened. Great efforts were made to have it filled on the occasion. The builder ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope
... are the fourteen lives lost on the Italian bark Giovanni near Provincetown, Cape Cod, in a storm unprecedented for its terrors. A story found its way into the papers at the time that the powder used in the mortar was damp, and that from this trifling neglect help could not be extended from the station. A strict investigation was made, and it was proved by the testimony of the people in Provincetown that all the apparatus was in perfect order and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various
... three-fourths of the nitre will separate in regular crystals. Saltpetre exists in the ashes of many plants, of which tobacco is one; it is also found copiously on the ground in many places, in saltpans, or simply as an effloresence. Rubbish, such as old mud huts, and mortar, generally abounds with it. (It is made by the action of the air on the potash contained in the earths.) The taste, which is that of gunpowder, is the best test of its presence. To extract it, pour hot water on the mass, then evaporate and ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton
... beat The granite wall in summer's scorching heat. This is the place; whether its name you spell Tavern, or caravansera, or hotel. Would I could steal its echoes! you should find Such store of vanished pleasures brought to mind Such feasts! the laughs of many a jocund hour That shook the mortar from King George's tower; Such guests! What famous names its record boasts, Whose owners wander in the mob of ghosts! Such stories! Every beam and plank is filled With juicy wit the joyous talkers spilled, ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... Junior was "on his own," striving for self-expression, he spent practically every waking hour of each day in picking the mortar out from between the bricks in the fire-place and ...
— Love Conquers All • Robert C. Benchley
... spectacles, and a husky voice. He had a German name which one could not pronounce. It was impossible to tell what was his calling and what he did. When, a fortnight before, Fyodor had gone to take his measure, he, the customer, was sitting on the floor pounding something in a mortar. Before Fyodor had time to say good-morning the contents of the mortar suddenly flared up and burned with a bright red flame; there was a stink of sulphur and burnt feathers, and the room was filled ...
— The Schoolmistress and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... firmly fastened by a thread, which the bird makes of hemp, wool, hair, or, more commonly, of spiders' webs. Other birds—as, for instance, the blackbird and the lapwing—after they have constructed their nests, plaster the inside with mortar; they then stick upon it, while quite wet, some wool or moss to give warmth; but all alike construct their nests so as to add ...
— Chatterbox Stories of Natural History • Anonymous
... for the shells which had been flying high moved lower and lower, and buzzed more and more fiercely, until at last one struck the roof. The aim, however, was still too high, for the debris of tiles, timber and mortar clattered down the other side of the house ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... of January we had secured the main gates against an assault, by building a wall of stone and mortar behind them, leaving merely what is called a man-hole, for the entrance of one person at a time. Even this was covered by a twenty-four-pounder howitzer, ...
— Reminiscences of Forts Sumter and Moultrie in 1860-'61 • Abner Doubleday
... instinctively and because of a long-accepted tradition that those antique symbols were the only way to hide the ugly look of the truth. For certainly he could have used a ball at one end—a cannon-ball—and a mortar at the other. Just as we might use an aerial torpedo at one end, and the image of a mutilated child at the other; or a gas cylinder at one end, and a gas-mask at the other. But the artist is not going to be deprived ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson
... both sides of the building; in others they face the inclosed space; and in others still they face outside. Most of the inhabited pueblos are built of adobe—that is, sun-dried bricks. The majority of the ancient ruins were built of stone set in adobe mortar. With this digression, we will now ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... pages on the fly. If you think it a dream, will Bain get me a second-hand copy, or who would? The sooner, and cheaper, I can get it the better. If there is anything in your weird library that bears on either the man or the period, put it in a mortar and fire it here instanter; I shall catch. I shall want, of course, an infinity of books: among which, any lives there may be; a life of the Marquis Marmont (the Marechal), MARMONT'S MEMOIRS, GREVILLE'S ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... says Goethe, (alluding to one of his own early attachments), "which is conceived and cherished without any certain object, may be compared to a shell thrown from a mortar by night: it rises calmly in a brilliant track, and seems to mix, and even to dwell for a moment, with the stars of heaven; but at length it falls—it bursts—consuming and destroying all around ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 563, August 25, 1832 • Various
... strips of soft body-stuff soaked with lime and hardened, like bricklayer's mortar, or concrete.[24] When you know the shape of the body, you know the bones; for they simply form a shell over the head and run like cores, or piths, down the centre of the back, and down ...
— A Handbook of Health • Woods Hutchinson
... way of managing the process to ensue. To roughly seize a chump of wood and begin filing it away anyhow, collecting the residue and making a rough paste, will bring disappointment, as sure as houses built with wrongly mixed mortar. To put method into the matter, a piece of clear, knotless, soft, grained wood should be obtained and cut to a cylindrical form (diagram 19). A flat file of rather fine texture—this may be according to the size of the instrument to be repaired—should be worked against it at ...
— The Repairing & Restoration of Violins - 'The Strad' Library, No. XII. • Horace Petherick
... ruins are most extensive, is at some distance from Actium, where the wall of the Hippodrome survives in a few fragments. These ruins are large masses of brickwork, the bricks of which are joined by interstices of mortar, as large as the bricks ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... work, could do if furnished with steel tools." Arrows made east of Lake Nyanza were found to be nearly as good as the best Swedish iron in Birmingham. From Egypt to the Cape, Livingstone assures us that the mortar and pestle, the long-handled axe, the goatskin bellows, etc., have the same form, size, etc., pointing to a migration southwestward. Holub (1879), on the Zambesi, found fine workers in iron and bronze. The Bantu huts contain spoons, wooden dishes, ...
— The Negro • W.E.B. Du Bois
... minutes he found himself entering Alt-Aussee. It wore a bright appearance, with its various-coloured villas on the lake shores, and its church and inn for a core. The garden of this hotel he found to be larger than he had imagined; it stretched along the bank and only stopped as if stone and mortar had been too lazy ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... I said slowly, "the thing that keeps a woman straight and a man faithful is not a matter of bricks and mortar nor ways of thinking nor habits of living. It's something finer and stronger than these. It's the magic taboo of her love for him and his for her that makes them—sacred. ...
— In the Bishop's Carriage • Miriam Michelson
... as one does in a bad dream: "Fearful things are happening to me..." In the salon beside the pharmacy where she was taking her little nap after supper, Mme. Bezuquet, mere, might hear him, or the pupil whose pestle was pounding its regular blows in the big marble mortar of the laboratory. Bezuquet continued his reading in a low voice, beginning it over again two or three times, very pale, his hair literally standing on end. Then, with a rapid look about him, cra cra... and the letter in a thousand scraps went into ...
— Tartarin On The Alps • Alphonse Daudet
... this life. When I come back to dress for dinner, the archbishop is dead on my table in five pages; medicine, topography, theology, all right, and Jones has gone home to his family some hours. Sir Christopher is the architect of St. Paul's. He has not laid the stones or carried up the mortar. There is a great deal of carpenter's and joiner's work in novels which surely a smart professional hand might supply. A smart professional hand? I give you my word, there seem to me parts of novels—let us say the love-making, the "business," the ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... it! Needn't rub it in! . . . Look, 'ere, comride, I 'adn't a bad nature to begin with. Didn't me an' my brother Joshua pinch an' slave the skin orf our bones to send that spotted swine to school? Didn't we 'elp 'im out with 'is books an' 'is mortar-boards an' 'is bits of clothes to try an' mek 'im look respectable? That's wot we did, till 'e got 'is lousy scholyships, an' run away to get spliced with that she-male pup of a blood-'ound! Cos why? Cos we was proud of the little perisher!—proud of 'is 'ead-piece! We ...
— The Servant in the House • Charles Rann Kennedy
... a new Brigadier in the person of General Dugan arrived and held command for a short while. The General, I regret to say, did not stay long enough for the full benefit of his experience and geniality to accrue, a fragment of a Stokes' mortar shell wounding him at a demonstration near Merville and causing his retirement to hospital. The new Brigadier, the Hon. R. White, C.M.G., joined us at the beginning of September, 1916, from action on the Somme, and soon ...
— The Story of the 2/4th Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry • G. K. Rose
... the business on hand. Most innocently as he crossed the Cathedral Green he strutted, his head up, his brow stern, his hands crossed behind his back. The choristers coming in from the choir-school practice in the Cathedral passed him in a ragged line. They all touched their mortar-boards and he smiled benignly upon them, reserving a rather stern glance for Brockett, the organist, of whose musical eccentricities he did not at ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... to find a stone large and hard enough out of which he might hollow a vessel or kind of mortar. He thought he could put the corn into this mortar and grind it by means of another stone or pestle. It was with great difficulty that he could get a stone of suitable size and form. After several days' trial he at last ...
— An American Robinson Crusoe • Samuel B. Allison
... shadowy passages and interiors, speckled with fallen mortar, lay chains, rubble of brick and chipped stone; splinters, flinders and odd ends of timber; scraps of metal, broken implements and the what-not that litters the path of construction. Without, in the avenues, vaguely outlined by the slowly rising structures on either side, were low-riding, ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... roof had to be covered before the wet weather set in, and nobody was near who could do it better. Indeed, on one or two occasions in the depth of winter, when frost peremptorily forbids all use of the trowel, making foundations to settle, stones to fly, and mortar to crumble, he had taken to felling and sawing trees. Moreover, he had practised gardening in his own plot for so many years that, on an emergency, he might have made a living ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... and curling hair with one foot on those doorsteps, the knights in armour and the sumpter mules and red-robed Cardinals defiling through those gates into the courts within. The modern bricks and mortar with which that picturesque scene has been overlaid, the ugly oblong windows and bright green shutters which now interrupt the flowing lines of arch and gallery; these disappear beneath the fine remembered touch of a sonnet sung by Folgore, when still the Parties had their day, and this deserted ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... a steel-gray, metallic-looking substance of density 5.73. Though resembling metals in appearance, it is quite brittle, being easily powdered in a mortar. When strongly heated it sublimes, that is, it passes into a vapor without melting, and condenses again to a crystalline solid when the vapor is cooled. Like phosphorus it can be obtained in several allotropic forms. It alloys readily with some of the ...
— An Elementary Study of Chemistry • William McPherson
... tranquil world, and beamed down upon the peaceful village like a benediction. Breakfast over, Aunt Polly had family worship: it began with a prayer built from the ground up of solid courses of Scriptural quotations, welded together with a thin mortar of originality; and from the summit of this she delivered a grim chapter of the Mosaic Law, as ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... head erect Whatever fate could befall them; Tried but the good to recollect, Cried for the truth to call them. To be loved by the children of other suns And send a message to find them, This is the fate of the happiest ones Tho' the mortar of life may grind them. They were like swimmers breasting the waves In the troughs of a stormy channel, They are silent now in their lonely graves, But the world has become the panel. They wore the truth like a bridal dress And sorrow like wedding apparel, ...
— A Legend of Old Persia and Other Poems • A. B. S. Tennyson
... by day and takes greater share of night,—then, when it showers its leaves to the ground and stops sprouting, the wood you cut with your axe is least liable to worm. Then remember to hew your timber: it is the season for that work. Cut a mortar [1313] three feet wide and a pestle three cubits long, and an axle of seven feet, for it will do very well so; but if you make it eight feet long, you can cut a beetle [1314] from it as well. Cut ...
— Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica • Homer and Hesiod
... the last two pages must be laid—took the latter course; not that he was not awed, calmed, and even humbled, as he felt how poor and petty his own troubles were, compared with that great tragedy: but in his fatal habit of considering all matters in heaven and earth as bricks and mortar for the poet to build with, he considered that he had "seen enough;" as if men were sent into the world to see and not to act; and going home too excited to sleep, much more to go and kiss forgiveness to his sleeping wife, sat up all ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... which have reached our time. It is a plane surface of masonry, hung in the air, supported neither on the principle of the arch, nor by iron cramps, but owing its existence entirely to the adherence of the mortar by which it is cemented. It is divided into compartments by false beams (caissons) of the same construction. The whole is of remarkable solidity. D. Open hall at the end of the western portico. E. ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... the whole and was after it sword in hand. The holders were in Castle Chalus, short of weapons but not of valour, and held out gallantly armed with frying-pans and whatnot. The place was undermined. Richard, without his hauberk, was directing the crash, when a man pulled an arrow from the mortar; aimed it and hit him on the neck and side. He went to his tent, and plucked at it, broke it off; was operated upon; would not keep quiet. The wound turned angry and then black, and the Lion lay dying. He made his will, a generous ...
— Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln - A Short Story of One of the Makers of Mediaeval England • Charles L. Marson
... success, he proceeded with fresh ardour, and the rapidity of his progress was proclaimed by the heap of bricks, stones, and mortar which before long covered the floor. At the expiration of an hour, by dint of unremitting exertion, he had made so large a breach in the chimney, that he could stand upright in it. He was now within a foot of the bar, and introducing himself into the hole, speedily worked his ...
— Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth
... let one place any hard substance, consisting of large fragments, in a mortar, and proceed to reduce it with a pestle to a fine powder. The work proceeds rapidly at first, until a portion of the material is triturated; you then find that the pulverized part has packed around and protected the larger fragments, and the work is brought ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... Big-foot, hurrying over to him. "The thing is sealed up with mortar. Hasn't been used in fifty cats' lives. Wonder what's ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in Texas - Or, The Veiled Riddle of the Plains • Frank Gee Patchin |
