"Mortar" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of true belief, and the impure spirits rejoice in bloody immolations and delight in the fumes of flesh burning on the altars.[76] Terrible acts and words attended all immolations. Plutarch[77] mentions an example of the dark sacrifices of the Mazdeans. "In a mortar," he says, "they pound a certain herb called wild garlic, at the same time invoking Hades (Ahriman), and the powers of darkness, then stirring this herb in the blood of a slaughtered wolf, they take it away and drop it on a spot never reached by the rays of the ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... for the day. But as I stood not far from them, idly watching the labors of the workmen who were carrying up the column of Aurelian—noting how one laid the stone which another brought, and how another bore along and up the dizzy ladders the mortar which others tempered, and how the larger masses of marble were raised to their places by machines worked by elephants, and how all went on in exact order—while I stood thus, the voice of the speaker frequently fell ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware
... besides, which no man can learn but by some severely accurate discipline in doing. Let him once learn to take a straight shaving off a plank, or draw a fine curve without faltering, or lay a brick level in its mortar; and he has learned a multitude of other matters which no lips of man could ever teach him. He might choose his craft, but whatever it was, he should learn it to some sufficient degree of true dexterity: and the result would be, in after life, that among the middle classes ...
— Time and Tide by Weare and Tyne - Twenty-five Letters to a Working Man of Sunderland on the Laws of Work • John Ruskin
... jingle upon the similarity in sound of the words mortale (mortal), mortaio (mortar), pestello (pestle), and pestilente (pestilential). The same word-play occurs at least once more in ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... see her in the midst of the little gathering round the foundation, the sturdy workman smiling over his hod of mortar, Dr. Spencer's silver locks touching her flaxen curls as he held the shining trowel to her, and Harry's bright head and hardy face, as he knelt on one knee to guide the little soft hand, while Hector stood by, still and upright, ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... or three villages in the fighting zone and one town of considerable size. Not that it was a town now in any real sense of the word. What had once been houses were now mere pitiful heaps of wood and stone and mortar, and their inhabitants had long since been dispossessed or slain. It stood gaunt and desolate and forbidding in its mute protest against the pitiless storm of war to which it had ...
— Army Boys in the French Trenches • Homer Randall
... in the Carimants' water, huddled and pushed by the vulgar herd.' Then said Hellanicus: 'Ah, and my eyes are disordered; my pupils are turbid, I wink and blink, the tears come unbidden, my eyes crave the ophthalmic leech's healing drug, mortar-brayed and infused, that they may blush and blear no more, nor ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... on each side, and was nearly two hundred and seventy feet long, about one-third as wide, and between forty and fifty feet high. As the Indians were totally destitute of iron utensils to shape their stones, as well as mortar to cement them when they had made them fit for use, a structure of such height and magnitude must have been a work of infinite labor and fatigue. In the center of the summit was the representation of a bird, carved in wood; close ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... surface, for the foundation of their structure. They have toiled on for ages, placing storey upon storey, till the surface has been reached, when they have been compelled to cease; for out of the water, whence they draw their materials—their bricks and mortar, so to speak—they can do nothing. The outer edge breaks the force of the sea, but not altogether. Enough strength is exerted during storms to tear off the outer edge of the coral, and to throw it on the top of the wall. ...
— Ben Hadden - or, Do Right Whatever Comes Of It • W.H.G. Kingston
... County, Kentucky. It was named after old Colonel Whitney, the man who built the first brick house in Kentucky. It was in the fall of the year, and the mortar was freezing, and they mixed whiskey with their mortar to keep ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Incorporated 39th Annual Report - at Norris, Tenn. September 13-15 1948 • Various
... young man once fairly launched in life may safely confine himself for a time to the studies that bear directly upon his own special chosen subject. The thing that Telford began closely to investigate was—lime. Now, lime makes mortar; and without lime, accordingly, you can have no mason. But to know anything really about lime, Telford found he must read some chemistry; and to know anything really about chemistry he must work at it hard and unremittingly. A strict attention to one's own business, understood in this very broad ...
— Biographies of Working Men • Grant Allen
... new visitor to the Hall, in the person of a young doctor. Well, my dear, young women need never despair. The young doctor gave a certain friend of yours to understand that, if she chose to be Mrs. Glauber, she was welcome to ornament the surgery! I told his impudence that the gilt pestle and mortar was quite ornament enough; as if I was born, indeed, to be a country surgeon's wife! Mr. Glauber went home seriously indisposed at his rebuff, took a cooling draught, and is now quite cured. Sir Pitt applauded my resolution highly; he would be sorry to lose his little secretary, ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... gossip, softly, Pull up the rope a little until we break This bar away—or some kind friend may see The dangling end below. Now here's a toothpick, Six inches of grey steel, for you to work with, And here's another for me. Pick out the mortar! ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... height above the ground, with a luxuriance which is very surprising to those who witness this phenomenon for the first time. The process is this: Mosses and lichens begin to grow first on the stones and in the mortar. The roots of these plants strike in, and assisted by the sun and rain, they gradually disintegrate a portion of the masonry, which, in process of time, forms a soil sufficient for the seeds of other ...
— Rollo on the Rhine • Jacob Abbott
... an effort; he was not employed for his imagination. "Why," he hesitated, "because I suppose the cartridges would blow up in the men's pouches and in the machine-gun belts; and then the trench-mortar ammunition and the hand grenades; well, everything explosive would simply explode! And then we'd go over to what was left of them, and it ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... a surface of fifty square feet, and is the most interesting piece of architecture in all Canada. The snowflakes of almost three hundred winters have fallen into its cavernous depths since these stones and mortar were laid. When Champlain stood by its hearth, as its first blaze, lighted by tinder and flint, roared up to the sky—William Shakespeare was still writing his sublime lines, Queen Elizabeth had lain but twelve years in her marble tomb, and the Chateau de Ramezay ...
— Famous Firesides of French Canada • Mary Wilson Alloway
... of wood is especially noticeable in the buildings, which are made of sun-dried bricks, or, more frequently, of stones of medium size which are agglomerated with a kind of mortar composed of clay and chopped straw. The houses of the settled inhabitants are two stories high, their fronts whitewashed, and their window-sashes painted with lively colors. The flat roof forms a terrace which is decorated ...
— The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ - The Original Text of Nicolas Notovitch's 1887 Discovery • Nicolas Notovitch
... excuse for the crowded and irregular character of Old-World cities. They grew, and were not builded. Accumulations of people, who lighted like bees upon a chance branch, they found themselves hived in obdurate brick and mortar before they knew it; and then, to meet the necessities of their cribbed, cabined, and confined condition, they must tear down sacred landmarks, sacrifice invaluable possessions, and trample on prescriptive rights, to provide breathing-room ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various
... thick, and the whole ground floor, and two of the four towers, are built up perfectly solid from the bottom, that it might be made as strong as possible. It was built with Roman bricks, and the Roman mortar still sticks to some of them. Builders always know Roman mortar, for it is so much harder than any mortar people know how to make now—quite as hard as stone itself. The chimneys run ...
— The King's Daughters • Emily Sarah Holt
... cap had slipped back, as well as her blue silk hood, and exposed a profusion of loose flaxen hair, and a plump, innocent face, intent upon some private little bit of building of her own with some pebbles from the brook, and some mortar filched from the operations above, to the great detriment of ...
— The Dove in the Eagle's Nest • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of the French fleet, but count the guns in the broadsides of each vessel. It consisted of thirteen line-of-battle ships, comprising the flag-ship the Orient, of 120 guns, three of 80, and nine of 74, together with four frigates, four mortar vessels, and a number of gun-boats, while on an island ahead of the line was a battery of guns and mortars. Many parties of Arabs were riding about on the shore, and there were several of their encampments. Some had been attracted ...
— At Aboukir and Acre - A Story of Napoleon's Invasion of Egypt • George Alfred Henty
... was a just one was apparent from the reports of both McGowan's and the Railroad Company's experts. These showed that the McGowan mortar held but little cement, and that not of the best; that the backing of the masonry was composed of loose rubble instead of split stone, and that the collapse of his structure was not caused by the downpour, but by the caving in of culverts and spillways, which were built of materials in direct ...
— Peter - A Novel of Which He is Not the Hero • F. Hopkinson Smith
... than he who puts the idea into execution? Why should the man who works with his brain have more of the sweets of life than he who works with his hands? Why should the man who lays the brick have more of the world's goods than he who carries the brick mortar to him? These questions do not apply alone to the capitalist, but also to the laborer as well, and as long as the laboring classes champion the cutthroat policy of grading man's allowance according to his ability, of giving more to one than another, owing to a slight difference of brain ...
— Born Again • Alfred Lawson
... States-General, by which the war on the Rhine had been farmed out to him on such profitable terms:—had led his mercenaries against this important town. He had found one of its gates somewhat insecurely guarded, placed a mortar under it at night, and occupied a neighbouring pig-stye with a number of his men, who by chasing, maltreating, and slaughtering the swine, had raised an unearthly din, sufficient to drown the martial operations at the gate. In brief, the place was easily mastered, and taken possession of by Martin, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... walls are considerably worn, but six well-marked inclosures, indicative of former rooms, were readily made out. No overarching rock shielded this ruin from the elements, and rubble from fallen walls covers the talus upon which it stands. The adobe mortar between the stones is much worn, and no fragment of plastering is traceable within or without. This evidence of the great weathering of the walls of the ruin is not considered indicative of greater age than the better preserved ruins in the neighborhood, ...
— Archeological Expedition to Arizona in 1895 • Jesse Walter Fewkes
... ground. In its construction care was taken, above all things, to ensure a solid floor "impervious" to "moisture." This was made by first laying down six inches of well-prepared concrete, consisting of pounded granite, brick-dust, and gravel cemented together by hydraulic mortar, then overlaid with pure cement, and after this coated with an inch thick of asphalt. Around the whole building was an open drain, about two feet inside of the pillars, and built like the floor, and carefully graded to the outfall. The walls, ...
— Prisoners Their Own Warders - A Record of the Convict Prison at Singapore in the Straits - Settlements Established 1825 • J. F. A. McNair
... the course which his diplomacy suggested. In fact Sir Winterton was very hard to manage; the Dean understood the Quisante position better and better; Mrs. Baxter gave up her efforts; she had an almost exaggerated belief in the inutility of braying fools in a mortar; she was content to show them the mortar, and if that were not enough to leave them alone. Only the wife persevered, for she thought neither of herself nor of what was right, but only of what might serve her husband. To the meetings he would not speak, to Quisante he might be ...
— Quisante • Anthony Hope
... who had been the greatest engineer in the greatest European army of the previous generation. But the actual execution was hampered, at every turn, by want of firmness at headquarters and want of honest labour on the spot. Sea sand was plentiful, worthless, and cheap. So it was used for the mortar, with most disastrous results. The stone was hewn from a quarry of porphyritic trap near by and used for the walls in the rough. Cut stone and good bricks were brought out from France as ballast by the fishing fleet. Some of these finer materials were built into the governor's and the intendant's ...
— The Great Fortress - A Chronicle of Louisbourg 1720-1760 • William Wood
... and explains nothing," said the student, covering himself up with a sheet; "all that is simply pounding liquid in a mortar. No one knows anything and nothing ...
— Love and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... 'night chamberlains;' 'On y parle francais;' 'Man spricht Deutsch.' Of some of these there is quite a little biography, beginning with the year of their establishment and narrating their happy union with other agreeable premises, like a brick and mortar novel. I remember them well: their 'romantic surroundings' or 'their exclusive privilege of meeting trains upon the platform;' their accurate resemblance to 'a gentleman's own house' (with 'a reception-room 80 feet by 90 feet'); their 'douche ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... many parts of the town, less than a century back were studded with gardens, but the flowers have had to give place to the more prosaic bricks and mortar, and householders desirous of floral ornaments have now in a great measure to resort to the nursery grounds of the professed horticulturists. Foremost among the nurseries of the neighbourhood are those of Mr. R.H. Vertegans, Chad Valley, Edgbaston ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell
... of dip.—Weigh out the lime, 12 pounds (or hydrated lime, 16 pounds), and sulphur, 24 pounds. Place the unslaked lime in a shallow, water-tight box similar to a mortar box, or some other suitable vessel, and add water enough to slake the lime and form a lime paste or lime putty. Sift into this paste the flowers of sulphur and stir well; then place the lime-sulphur paste in a kettle, boiler, or tank containing 30 gallons ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... scratched and tickled her, that they produced the effect of an emetic. No sooner was he in, but out he was squirted with the most horrible impetuosity, like a ball or a shell from the calibre of a mortar. Sphinx was at this time quite sea-sick, and the unfortunate count was driven forth like a sky-rocket, and landed upon the peak of Teneriffe, plunged over head and ears in the snow—requiescat ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen • Rudolph Erich Raspe
... broken only by an occasional clump of trees or the smoke from some factory chimney. Perhaps, too, in a measure, to the disproportion between the humble hamlet of Judaea and that grandiose structure, that villa in the style of Louis XIII., built of small stones and mortar, and showing pink through the leafless branches of the park, where there were several large ponds with a coating of green slime. Certain it is that on passing the place one's heart contracted. When one entered the grounds it was much worse. An oppressive, inexplicable ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... logs and made pins to bind them and cut those that were to go around the fireplace and window spaces. Strong, willing and well trained hands hewed and fitted the logs together. Alexander Ferguson lined the fireplace with a curious mortar made of clay in which he mixed grass for a binder. This mortar he rolled into layers called "cats," each eight inches long and three inches thick. Then he laid them against the logs and held them in place with a woven network of sticks. ...
— A Man for the Ages - A Story of the Builders of Democracy • Irving Bacheller
... (Applause.) Across Iraq, often at great risk, millions of citizens went to the polls and elected 275 men and women to represent them in a new Transitional National Assembly. A young woman in Baghdad told of waking to the sound of mortar fire on election day, and wondering if it might be too dangerous to vote. She said, "Hearing those explosions, it occurred to me — the insurgents are weak, they are afraid of democracy, they are losing. So I got my husband, and I got my parents, and we ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... and mortar, under scaffolds, &c., we came to the armory, full of old knights and steeds in complete armor; that is to say, the armor was there, and, without peeping between the crevices, one could hardly tell that their owners were not at home in their iron houses. There sat the Elector of Saxony, in ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... of Arles was of an oval form, composed of three stages; each stage containing sixty arches; the whole was built of hewn stone of an immense size, without mortar, and of a prodigious thickness: the circumference above, exclusive of the projection of the architecture, was 194 toises three feet, the frontispiece 17 toises high and the area 71 toises long and 52 wide; the walls were 17 toises thick, which were pierced round and round with a gallery, for ...
— A Year's Journey through France and Part of Spain, Volume II (of 2) • Philip Thicknesse
... the suburbs to take a curious look at a grim monument of Turkish prowess, in the shape of a square stone structure which the Turks built in 1840, and then faced the whole exterior with grinning rows of Servian skulls partially embedded in mortar. The Servians, naturally objecting to having the skulls of their comrades thus exposed to the gaze of everybody, have since removed and buried them; but the rows of indentations in the thick mortared surface still bear ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... method of detection only. By ingenious procedures which it is unnecessary here to describe, Dr. Noguchi succeeded in cultivating these germs OUTSIDE THE HUMAN BODY; and after grinding them in a sterile mortar, and subjecting them to heat with other manipulations, he found himself finally in possession of an extract or emulsion to which he gave the name of "luetin." It contains the germs of syphilis; but they are intended to be DEAD GERMS. The ...
— An Ethical Problem - Or, Sidelights upon Scientific Experimentation on Man and Animals • Albert Leffingwell
... tobacco is rolled. Some of the tribes inhabiting the district of the lower Amazon indulge in snuff-taking. This snuff is not made from tobacco, it is the produce of a plant of the leguminous order, the seeds being carefully collected and thoroughly dried in the sun before they are pounded in a mortar, when the powder is ready for use. The snuff-making season is quite an event in a Brazilian village, the week or so during which it lasts forming a kind of religious festival mingled with a good deal of indulgence of fermented liquors, ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... lifted us fairly off our feet. A great puff of smoke came belching up through the hole, followed by the crashing of hundreds of dollars' worth of glass ware in the jewelry shop as fragments of stone, brick and mortar and huge splinters of wood were flung with tremendous force in every ...
— The Exploits of Elaine • Arthur B. Reeve
... now, though they envy and abhor thee, still fear thee, nay even against their will, honour and respect thee.... Remove from thee the false prophets, who have seen vanity and divined lies; who have daubed thy wall with untempered mortar, that it may fall; who see visions of peace where there is no peace; who have strengthened the hands of the wicked, and made the heart of the righteous sad. Oh, do this, and fear not the result, for either shall thy end be a majestic and an enviable one; ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... brick gables breathed forth "Stay!" The windows smiled, the door coaxed and beckoned, the creeper blushed confederacy. A personality within it was so far-reaching in her influence as to spread into and make the bricks, mortar, and whole overhanging sky throb with a burning sensibility. Whose was this mighty ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... 'ere mortar-board, sir," remarked the professor of the noble art of self-defence, as he pointed to the academical cap which surmounted his head, "I don't mind the mortar-board, sir; but I shall never be able to do nothink with this 'ere toggery on my shudders. ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... and the roof is almost invariably of thatch. They resemble huge stools resting upon stones, to keep the legs from sinking into the earth, and look as if the first breeze would upset them. An earthquake shakes them, and makes them vibrate, but seldom or ever injures them; whereas a brick and mortar house, subjected to the same severe trial, would certainly give way, unless it were of very substantial workmanship. I have experienced several severe shocks of earthquakes, both here and at Bencoolen, and at first felt very much disposed to quit the ...
— Trade and Travel in the Far East - or Recollections of twenty-one years passed in Java, - Singapore, Australia and China. • G. F. Davidson
... be like by moonlight—what it would be in spring—what (a few years later, when the trees should have grown large enough to arch the walks) in summer—he told himself that surely in this garden-spot of the Old Dominion, bricks and mortar had sprung into immortal bloom, and he found himself quoting a line ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... families, near which there are usually one or more square box-shaped stone buildings, the property of the chief of the place, which are designated forts, though there is nothing in their artless construction to deserve this name. They are all composed of blocks of coralline, cemented together with mortar extracted from the ...
— What Led To The Discovery of the Source Of The Nile • John Hanning Speke
... that the hostelry had been named by a whimsical fate not too dignified to stoop to punning. There were times when the hungry boarders thought the name facetious, but they conceded it to be quite exact in a descriptive sense, if its brick and mortar were intended to honor monumentally the tales of the host. His first name, August, was not an adjective of limitation as to time, for the proprietor was A. Stuffer every month and day in the year; and his ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent
... of ancient date, remains of which are found (sometimes in clusters) in Ireland and the W. of Scotland, with a conical roof formed of stones overlapping one another, undressed and without mortar; some of them appear to have ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... truth of your question, in Nature, really is! Verily so. In this time and place, as in all past and in all future times and places. To-day in St. Stephen's, where constitutional, philanthropical, and other great things lie in the mortar-kit; even as on the Plain of Shinar long ago, where a certain Tower, likewise of a very philanthropic nature, indeed one of the desirablest towers I ever heard of, was to be built,—but couldn't! My friends, I do not laugh; truly I am more inclined ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... agreeable in flavour. They cannot be otherwise than nutritious, since, as I have said, they form the whole subsistence of many people for months in the year. They can be eaten raw; but the Indians usually roast them. When roasted or parched, and then ground in a mill, or broken in a mortar, they make a species of meal, which, though coarse in appearance, can be baked into sweet and wholesome bread. This tree is called by the Mexicans "pinon," and also by travellers the "nut-pine." The only botanist who has fairly described it has given it the name of pinus monophyllus. Perhaps ...
— The Desert Home - The Adventures of a Lost Family in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... crowning it. When his warriors urged him to make his attack upon Jerusalem, he bade them take their ease for one night, and be prepared to storm the city the next day. It seemed no great undertaking. Each warrior would but have to pick up as much mortar from the wall as is needed to seal a letter and the whole city would disappear. But Sennacherib made the mistake of not proceeding directly to the attack upon the city. If he had made the assault at once, it would ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME IV BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... came down and saw the water in the cistern would believe at once that, as neither the Chimoos nor the Incas could have known how to build under water, there was no use in searching for hidden chambers under this floor. You see, neither of them had any knowledge of cement or mortar. All their bricks and stones are laid without anything of the sort; and whatever amount of labour was available no chamber could be made under water, for as fast as holes were dug the water would come in, and even if ...
— The Treasure of the Incas • G. A. Henty
... turn. The groaning-chair began to crawl, Like a huge insect, up the wall; There stuck, and to a pulpit grew, But kept its matter and its hue, And mindful of its ancient state, Still groans while tattling gossips prate. The mortar only chang'd its name, In its old shape a font became. The porringers, that in a row, Hung high, and made a glitt'ring show, To a less noble substance chang'd, Were now but leathern buckets rang'd. The ballads, pasted on the wall, Of Chevy Chase, and English Mall,[3] Fair Rosamond, ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... have no ear for true harmony. They paint in Flanders, only to deceive the external eye, things that gladden you and of which you cannot speak ill, and saints and prophets. Their painting is of stuffs—bricks and mortar, the grass of the fields, the shadows of trees, and bridges and rivers, which they call landscapes, and little figures here and there; and all this, although it may appear good to some eyes, is in truth done without reasonableness ...
— The Mind of the Artist - Thoughts and Sayings of Painters and Sculptors on Their Art • Various
... you cannot understand this," he continued with a shade of impatience in his voice, "for what can a lot of slaves like you, the brick and mortar type of man, know of freedom, all that is best and noble in life? You are so bound to the world of your own creating that it has become as meaningless as a fancy to you. Your souls run on the dead level; the great song of life sweeps ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... and doth not seem to end, but fall. The congruent and harmonious fitting of parts in a sentence hath almost the fastening and force of knitting and connection; as in stones well squared, which will rise strong a great way without mortar. ...
— Discoveries and Some Poems • Ben Jonson
... Him, with a keen interest in the Indian missions. "Let us begin in our own country," she said, and always prayed for the Sioux just after Adam and Baby. In fact, if we are all parts of God's temple, Jinny was a very essential, cohesive bit of mortar. Adam had a wider door for his charity: it took all the world in, he thought,—though the preachers did enter with a shove, as we know. However, this was Christmas: the word took up all common things, the fierce wind without, the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... three inches in width. The care with which the foundation-work was carried on may be gathered from Smeaton's description of the manner of laying each stone. 'The stone to be set being hung in the tackle, and its bed of mortar spread, was then lowered into its place, and beat with a heavy wooden maul, and levelled with a spirit level; and the stone being accurately brought to its marks, it was then considered as set in its ...
— Smeaton and Lighthouses - A Popular Biography, with an Historical Introduction and Sequel • John Smeaton
... the other hand, may be compared to a complete workman. Thus, the action of the mill which grinds grain has very little resemblance to the blowing of the wind or the running of the water, whereas the rising and falling of the pestle in the small mortar for throwing grenades corresponds to the motion of the arm. (Rau, Lehrbuch I, 125.) The infinite number of functions of which our members are capable is related to their inability to attain alone the greater number of their ends. Hence animals which require no tools can undertake ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... 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
... their inn (the famous Bell-Savage); and while the Lord Sussex's servant prepared the horses for their journey, Wayland, obtaining from the cook the service of a mortar, shut himself up in a private chamber, where he mixed, pounded, and amalgamated the drugs which he had bought, each in its due proportion, with a readiness and address that plainly showed him well practised in all ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... came to the end of his equanimity. The wall, which separated his property from that of the neighbour below him, was a continual anxiety. In spite of all possible precautions it tumbled down constantly, and scattered stones and mortar over the ground on each side of it. After this had happened two or three times, and Balzac, while investigating the extent of the damage on one of these occasions, had fallen and injured his leg, ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... and he accordingly, after viewing the marvels of the locality, pursued his way to Banda, and thence laid a dak (or travelled by palanquin with relays of bearers) to Calpee, "there to sit from nine to four, writing filthy accounts of bricks and mortar, square feet, cubic feet, and running feet, rupees, annas, and pie; squabbling with wrinkled unromantic villains, whose cool-tempered and overwhelming patience amply deserve their unlawful gains—I mean as labourers in the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... dexterously interwoven. In some, all the parts are 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 nest, plaster the inside with mortar, which cements and binds the whole together; they then stick upon it, while quite wet, some wool or moss, to give it the necessary degree of warmth. The nests of swallows are of a very different construction from those of other birds. They require neither ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... square, and having four or five terraces one above another. The rooms inside are small and the stones of which it is built are very well worked and so well adjusted to one another that it does not appear that they have any mortar and they are so smooth that they look like polished slabs with the joinings in regular order and alternating with one another after the usage in Spain.[108] There are so many rooms and towers that ...
— An Account of the Conquest of Peru • Pedro Sancho
... this report 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 the keepers and surfmen exerted themselves heroically ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various
... in this garden is a meridien sonnant (sounding meridian) this is an iron mortar which holds four pounds of gunpowder, it is loaded every morning, and exactly at noon the sun discharges the piece by means of a burning glass, so placed that the focus at that moment fires the powder in the touch-hole. The first meridian that was made of this kind is in the garden of ...
— A Trip to Paris in July and August 1792 • Richard Twiss
... them until, having entered the capacious cabin built of hewn logs, with the chinks well filled with hard mortar, they were shown a wagonload of groceries which Mr. Garrity had actually taken secret pleasure in purchasing without letting the boys ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts Snowbound - A Tour on Skates and Iceboats • George A. Warren
... The mortar and parrot shells rained alternately upon Fort Sumter every five minutes, day and night, but the sharp-shooters ...
— My Life In The South • Jacob Stroyer
... of material. They always delivered an inferior quality. There is not one case recorded in the business history of San Francisco where a contractor or builder delivered a quality superior to the one sold. A seven-million-dollar city hall became thirty cents in twenty-eight seconds. Because the mortar was not honest, a thousand walls crashed down and scores of lives were snuffed out. There is something, after all, in the contention of a few religionists that the San Francisco earthquake was a punishment for sin. It was a punishment for sin; but it was not for sin against God. ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... foot-passengers. The Doctor, abandoning any idea of chasing and securing him, lost not a moment in doing what he could. The short street was a new one, having on one side a neglected piece of waste land, where bricks, gravel, and mortar were flung in confusion; upon the other a row of half-finished houses. A curve at its upper end hid the thoroughfare beyond, although the sound of wheels and the hoarse cries of hucksters were audible to him as he dropped upon one knee, and gently ...
— A Bachelor's Dream • Mrs. Hungerford
... that what we call the real is the transitory and weak, the invisible is the lasting and eternal. What we have seen to-day is sorrow chrystalized into grand shapes. A noble young heart's ideal and asperations wrought out by loveng memory in brick and mortar. The invisible guiding the eye, holding the hand of the visible ...
— Around the World with Josiah Allen's Wife • Marietta Holley
... to boil, skimming well all the while. It 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 loose on, that the ...
— The Closet of Sir Kenelm Digby Knight Opened • Kenelm Digby
... painted, shone with dazzling brightness in the sunshine. Beside the finished building another had been begun, surrounded by scaffolding. Workmen in aprons, standing on scaffolds, were laying bricks, pouring mortar out of vats, and ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... it. That cause must be omnipotent, wise, and good, because all things are double one against another, and He has left nothing imperfect. Men make watches, build ships or houses, out of pre-existing metals, wood, hemp, bricks, mortar, and other materials, therefore God made nature out of no material at all. Unassisted nature cannot produce the phenomena we behold, therefore such phenomena clearly prove there is something unnatural. Not to believe in ...
— Superstition Unveiled • Charles Southwell
... gave way so easily, that we were quite unable to resist the temptation of breaking in." Orders were then given to bring the mason to the court-house. On his arrival he was informed of the charge brought against him. "Ah," said he, "the fault is not mine, but that of the coolie, who made mortar badly." When the coolie was brought, he laid the blame on the potter, who, he said, had sold him a cracked chattie, in which he could not carry sufficient water to mix the mortar properly. Then the potter was brought before the judge, ...
— The Book of Noodles - Stories Of Simpletons; Or, Fools And Their Follies • W. A. Clouston
... the carefully concealed evils which are undermining public morals; they demand a higher standard of life. If they aim to destroy the old wooden building, it is because they see around them not only the quarried stone, the mortar and iron beams, but a million hands waiting to erect upon the ruins of the old a nobler structure than ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 19, June, 1891 • Various
... many feet thick of solid stone masonry; and even the floors and partitions dividing the rooms are of several thicknesses too, all made of wood and stone and lime, the wood being covered over with mortar. The roof is the best part of them, however. It is made quite flat, and it is the principal spot for the family to go of an evening when the sun has gone down and the night-breeze begins to blow. The Arabs and Parsees go on top in the mornings too, ...
— The Penang Pirate - and, The Lost Pinnace • John Conroy Hutcheson
... him. Gradually Grimes's heart softened, and when Tom described her kindness to him at Vendale, Grimes wept. Then his tears did for him what his mother's could not do, for as they fell they washed the soot off his face and his clothes, and loosened the mortar from the bricks ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... strength, where the rocky coast descends abruptly to the open sea, they went to work with a will. As they had no tools for stone-cutting, they picked out the stones, and fitted them together according to their shape; and for want of hods they carried the mortar, wherever it was required, on their backs, stooping forward and clasping their hands together behind them, to prevent it from slipping off. They carried out their self-imposed task with great energy, and after ...
— Stories From Thucydides • H. L. Havell
... voice which thus in godlike accents spoke:— "The suppliant must himself bestir, Ere Hercules will aid confer. Look wisely in the proper quarter, To see what hindrance can be found; Remove the execrable mud and mortar, Which, axle-deep, beset thy wheels around. Thy sledge and crowbar take, And pry me up that stone, or break; Now fill that rut upon the other side. Hast done it?" "Yes," the man replied. "Well," said the voice, ...
— A Hundred Fables of La Fontaine • Jean de La Fontaine
... more boiling water, till the almonds are all blanched. Blanch also the bitter almonds. As you blanch the almonds, throw them into a bowl of cold water. Then take them out, one by one, wipe them dry in a clean towel, and lay them on a plate. Pound them one at a time to a fine paste, in a marble mortar, adding, as you pound them, a few drops of rose-water to prevent their oiling. Pound the bitter and sweet almonds alternately, that they may be well mixed. They must be made perfectly fine and smooth, and are the better for being prepared ...
— Seventy-Five Receipts for Pastry Cakes, and Sweetmeats • Miss Leslie
... went into was a small country cabin, such as a petty farmer of five or six acres at that time occupied. The door was not of wood, but of wicker-work woven across long wattles and plastered over with clay mortar. The house had two small holes in the front side-walls to admit the light; but during severe weather these were filled up with straw or rags to keep out the storm. On one side of the door stood a large curra, or, "ould man," for it was occasionally termed both—composed of brambles ...
— The Evil Eye; Or, The Black Spector - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... did not eat the bread. Not that we were not hungry, and not that the bread was uneatable. It was fairly good bread. But we had reasons. My cell-mate had discovered that our cell was alive with bed-bugs. In all the cracks and interstices between the bricks where the mortar had fallen out flourished great colonies. The natives even ventured out in the broad daylight and swarmed over the walls and ceiling by hundreds. My cell-mate was wise in the ways of the beasts. Like Childe Roland, dauntless the slug-horn to his lips he bore. Never was there such ...
— The Road • Jack London
... a drove An' masons, an' joiners, an' sweeps, An' a blacksmith to fit up a cove, An' bricks, stooans an' mortar ...
— Yorkshire Ditties, Second Series - To which is added The Cream of Wit and Humour - from his Popular Writings • John Hartley
... she dived into the first dark by-way that presented itself, and, without any present reference to the point to which her journey tended, made it her first business to put two good miles of brick and mortar between herself ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... which from their size and isolation are more beautiful than young ones and are little likely to be injurious to health, and ends them by raising mounds and sticking into them dense belts of quick-growing trees like poplars to hide as speedily as possible the desolation of bricks and mortar he has created. It is this senseless outdoor work of the builder and his nurseryman which stands most in need of revision from time to time in suburban residences, but which rarely receives it from a silly notion, amounting ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 611, September 17, 1887 • Various
... 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, and the room moderately ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... threatens me with persecution as a rogue an' vagabond, a-obtainin' money under false pertences for practisin' my lawful an' necessary art. Why, it ain't so long since I cured his mother o' the rheumatiz, as is more nor he can dew, wi' all his drugs, an' the pestle an' mortar ...
— Julia And Her Romeo: A Chronicle Of Castle Barfield - From "Schwartz" by David Christie Murray • David Christie Murray
... the Reviewers, Those chippers and hewers, Are judges of mortar and stone, sir; But of meet or unmeet, In a fabric complete, I'll boldly ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... in the new world, when the fields were not destroyed by marauding parties. There were windmills that ground it coarsely and both cakes and porridge were made of it. The Indian women cracked and pounded it in a stone mortar and boiled it with fish or venison. The French brought in many new ways ...
— A Little Girl in Old Detroit • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... unfortunate number! In the morning I was broken as by age when I went to the house we were building on the Boulevard Arago. Of what use is sorrow? we must work all the same. So I mounted the scaffolding. We had already built the house to the fourth story, and I began to place my mortar. Suddenly I felt some one strike me on the shoulder. It was Philip. He only worked now when the inclination seized him, and he was apparently putting in a day's work to get something to drink; but the builder, ...
— Ten Tales • Francois Coppee
... I busied myself among the pile of bones of which I have before spoken. Throwing them aside, I soon un- covered a quantity of building stone and mortar. With these materials and with the aid of my trowel, I began vigorously to wall up the ...
— The Raven • Edgar Allan Poe
... ground short pieces of bamboo sharpened and fire-hardened at both ends; they use an oblong wooden shield or a rounded shield of plaited cane; their blacksmiths use a bellows very like that of the Kayan smiths; they husk their PADI in a solid wooden mortar with a big pestle A LA Kayan; they floor their houses with similar massive planks; they catch fish in nets and traps, and by poisoning the water; men pierce the shell of the ear in various ways; omens are read from the viscera of pigs, and the cries of some birds are unlucky; they worship ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... consider the exterior. The foundation will probably need some "pointing-up," that is, replacement of mortar in the joints or cracks. The question is, how much? Will it have to be a complete job? Has frost worked such havoc that ...
— If You're Going to Live in the Country • Thomas H. Ormsbee and Richmond Huntley
... M. Zola's impressions changed. True, he did not have occasion to perambulate what he would doubtless have called the 'phalansterian' streets of new South Wimbledon. I spared him the sight of the chess-board of bricks and mortar into which the speculative builder has turned acre after acre north of Merton High Street. But the Hill Road, the Broadway, the Worple Road, and the various turnings that climb towards the Ridgeway pleased ...
— With Zola in England • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... the American General of success that, as yet, he had not a single cannon or mortar mounted, and he did not consider it expedient to attempt to carry Amherstburgh, which was only situated eighteen miles below, by assault. But, as his situation, at Sandwich, became more and more precarious, ...
— The Rise of Canada, from Barbarism to Wealth and Civilisation - Volume 1 • Charles Roger
... masses are not condemned to toil that gives no leisure, and all classes are not pursued by a greed of gain that makes life an ignoble struggle to get and to keep? Three thousand years of advance, and still the moan goes up, "They have made our lives bitter with hard bondage, in mortar and in brick, and in all manner of service!" Three thousand years of advance! Yet the piteous voices of little children ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... 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. With ...
— In the Bishop's Carriage • Miriam Michelson
... pleasure. All this—every word of it, every jot and tittle—is the liberty and equality claimed by infidelity. God has cursed it seven times in France since 1793; and he will curse it there seventy times seven, if Frenchmen prefer to be pestled so often in Solomon's mortar. He has cursed it in Prussia, Austria, Germany, Italy, Spain. He will curse it as long as time, whether it is affirmed by Jefferson, Paine, Robespierre, Ledru Rollin, Kossuth, Greeley, ...
— Slavery Ordained of God • Rev. Fred. A. Ross, D.D.
... Egypt. What do you think of nineteen of my men being killed by the concentrated rays of light falling on the barrels of the sentinels' bright muskets, and setting fire to the powder? I commanded a mortar battery at Acre, and I did the French infernal mischief with the shells. I used to pitch in among them when they had sat down to dinner: but how do you think the scoundrels weathered on me at last? D——n me, they trained a parcel of poodle dogs ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat
... natural friends could tell where in the world he was gone! She was the first, Sir, to come and tell me news of him though I was his own mother! Love, Sir, is prodigious for quickness! it can see, I sometimes think, through bricks and mortar. Yet all this would not do, he was so obstinate not to ...
— Cecilia vol. 3 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... successes which leave the owners veiled in privacy; it revealed nothing of the people who lived in it save that they were rich. There are houses that cannot be detached from their own people without protesting: every inch of mortar seems to mourn the separation, and such a house—no matter what be done to it—is ever murmurous with regret, whispering the old name sadly to itself unceasingly. But the New House was of a kind to change hands without emotion. In our swelling cities, great places of its type are useful ...
— The Turmoil - A Novel • Booth Tarkington
... by the successive depositions of mud during the annual inundations of the river, and covered with water only during those inundations. At all other seasons it has been used by the city immemorially to furnish earth for raising their streets and courtyards, for mortar, and other necessary purposes, and as a landing or quay for unlading firewood, lumber, and other articles brought by water. This having been lately claimed, by a private individual, the city opposed the claim on a supposed legal title in itself; ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 3 (of 4) of Volume 1: Thomas Jefferson • Edited by James D. Richardson
... grinding corn; no blacksmith shops to repair the farming utensils. There were no tanneries, no carpenters, shoemakers, weavers. Every family had to do everything for itself. The corn was pounded with a heavy pestle in a large mortar made by burning an excavation in a solid block of wood. By means of these mortars the settlers, in regions where saltpetre could be obtained, made very respectable gunpowder. In making corn-meal a grater was sometimes ...
— Daniel Boone - The Pioneer of Kentucky • John S. C. Abbott
... stuffed with truffles—making so superb a dish that Brillat-Savarin has singled it out for praise. Mise Fougueiroun's method, still more exquisite, was to make a stuffing of veal and fillet of pork (one-third of the former and two-thirds of the latter) minced and brayed in a mortar with a seasoning of salt and pepper and herbs, to which truffles cut in quarters were added with a lavish hand. For the basting she used a piece of salt-pork fat stuck on a long fork and set on fire. From this the flaming juice was dripped judiciously over the roast, with resulting ...
— The Christmas Kalends of Provence - And Some Other Provencal Festivals • Thomas A. Janvier
... be no mortar without water, but the words do not rhyme except to Cockney ears, though the blame lies at the door of the mouth. "Bricks and mortar" is an odd and somewhat vulgar version of "rekkeless;" and to say that a monk "beyond his bricks and mortar" is a monk "out of his cloister," is not ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... hurled shot and shell at each other in the affair at Memphis. But Farragut, stanch old sea-dog as he was, did much of his grandest fighting on the turbid waters of the Mississippi; and the work of the great fleet at Port Royal was fully equalled by Porter's mortar-boats below New Orleans. ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 2 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... bread will usually make one round sandwich and one crescent, provided the cutting is done economically. Meat used for sandwiches should be chopped very fine and slightly moistened with cream, melted butter, olive oil or mayonnaise dressing well seasoned. Fish should be rubbed or pounded in a mortar; add enough sauce tartare to make it sufficiently ...
— Sandwiches • Sarah Tyson Heston Rorer
... Iron columns and girders, and wooden girders heavily encased in cement, support the floors which are either of cement slab construction or of wooden flooring protected by expanded metal and cement mortar, both above and beneath. At one end, on the ground floor, is the exposing and recording apparatus for flame tests of explosives, also pressure gauges, and a calorimeter, and, at the other end, is a gallery ...
— Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, vol. LXX, Dec. 1910 • Herbert M. Wilson
... buried in the jail-yard, on the spot where the court-house stands, and old residents identified Smith's skeleton, when it was accidentally exhumed, by its uncommon size. A farmer from an adjacent town made off with a thigh bone, and a mason clapped mortar into the empty skull and cemented it into the wall, where it ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... the walls. The brick should be sufficiently hard to resist the fire, and should therefore be tested before using. It is an unnecessary expense to use either second or third quality fire-brick. As the pyroligneous acid which results from the distillation of the wood attacks lime mortar, it is best to lay up the brick with fire-clay mortar, to which a little salt has been added; sometimes loam mixed with coal-tar, to which a little salt is also added, is used. As the principal office of this mortar is to fill the joints, special care must be ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 415, December 15, 1883 • Various
... enjoyed the happiness of passing an afternoon in his closet of a surgery; reading some book that was new to me, with the smell of the whole Pharmacopoeia coming up my nose, or pounding something in a mortar ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... to it. It had a tower built of flint, and clad on two sides with ivy three feet deep, and the body of the church was as snowy as the cottages, and on the south side a dozen swallows and martins had lodged their mortar nests under the eaves; they looked, against the white, like rugged gray stone bosses. Swallows and martins innumerable wheeled, swift as arrows, round the tower, chirping, and in and out of the church through an open window, and added their music and their motion to the beauty ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... daughter, and I don't feel called upon to interfere. 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 ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... the whole circuit of the hills, but its exact age is doubtful. It looks like a building of the seventh century A.D. Mr. Rea, superintendent of the Madras Archaeological Survey, in an article published in the MADRAS CHRISTIAN COLLEGE MAGAZINE for December 1886, points out that the fact of mortar having been used in its construction throws a doubt upon its being as old as its type of architecture would otherwise make it appear. It is quite possible, however, that the shrine may have been used by a succession of ...
— A Forgotten Empire: Vijayanagar; A Contribution to the History of India • Robert Sewell
... work of the kind there—and there are some fine examples of skill—looks rude and barbarous in comparison." We may imagine the straits to which the advocates of Lo are driven when they point to the absence of mortar or cement of any kind in such walls as a proof of rudeness and ignorance in the builders. But, as Mr. Squier reminds us, Humboldt found a true mortar in the ruins of Pullal and Canuar, in Northern Peru. Humboldt found, too, in the same region the remains of paved roads not ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... flurries of progression, discovering higher passional affinities and new duties of demolition, proving that in Church and State every brick was loose and every timber rotten, testifying ever to the existence of a certain harmonial mortar by which the rubbish of a demolished civilization could be rebuilt into unexceptionable forms,—it happened that this woman, having towered for one proud moment at the very apex of her mission, slipped suddenly into the Romish ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... the neighbourhood was shy to own the Railroad. One or two bold speculators had projected streets; and one had built a little, but had stopped among the mud and ashes to consider farther of it. A bran-new Tavern, redolent of fresh mortar and size, and fronting nothing at all, had taken for its sign The Railway Arms; but that might be rash enterprise—and then it hoped to sell drink to the workmen. So, the Excavators' House of Call had sprung up from a beer-shop; ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... enclose a desert, a world too wide for its inhabitants, a vast straggling heterogeneous mass of buildings in every stage of preservation and decay, splendid temples, mossy and ivy-grown, but scarcely injured by time, then wastes of broken brick and mortar; stern dark towers of Savelli, and Frangipani, and Orsini, and Colonna, dominating and threatening whole quarters of ruins; strange small churches built of odds and ends and remnants not too heavy for a few workmen to move; broken-down aqueducts sticking up here and there in ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... certainly note 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 MEMOIRS, PEEL'S MEMOIRS, ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... contains many rooms. The original is supposed to accommodate forty-five families. It is built of the chips of sandstone and other rock in accordance with Hopi custom, rudely and irregularly laid in mortar. It is of the terraced style of architecture, each story receding from the one below it, so that the "second story front" finds a ready courtyard on the roof of the "first story front," and the "third story front" on that of the ...
— The Grand Canyon of Arizona: How to See It, • George Wharton James
... fantastically in the south-east wind, the apparent absence of anything like a real house behind them, the blades of grass sprouting abundantly about the foot of each pole and covering the heaps of brown pozzolana earth prepared for making mortar, even the detail of a broken wooden hod before the boarded entrance—all these things contributed at once to increase his dismay and to fill him with a bitter sense of inevitable failure. He found nothing to say, as he stood with his hands in his pockets staring ...
— Don Orsino • F. Marion Crawford
... insensitive person, whatever it endeavors to represent, is not painting, but daubing or plastering; and that, observe, irrespective of the boldness or minuteness of the work. An insensitive person will daub with a camel's hair-brush and ultramarine; and a passionate one will paint with mortar ...
— Lectures on Landscape - Delivered at Oxford in Lent Term, 1871 • John Ruskin
... and counsel; wherefore, giving the making of all the rest to diverse master-carvers brought from several districts, he applied himself with his brother to executing all the figures of the work, and, the whole being finished, he had them built in and put together very thoughtfully without mortar, with clamps of copper fixed with lead, to the end that the shining and polished marbles might not become discoloured; and in this he succeeded so well, with profit and honour from those who came after him, that to ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Volume 1, Cimabue to Agnolo Gaddi • Giorgio Vasari
... built the tower in Pharos, where the fire is kindled to prevent mariners from running on the dangerous rocks of Paraetonia, that most noble and most beautiful of all works; he carved his own name on a part of the rock on the inside, then covered it over with mortar, and inscribed on it the name of the reigning sovereign: well knowing that, as it afterwards happened, in a short space of time these letters would drop off with the mortar, and discover under it this inscription: "Sostratus the Cnidian, son of Dexiphanes, to those gods who preserve ...
— Trips to the Moon • Lucian
... the short period of his remaining days were always impressed by the sight of that face that seemed to know nothing of what went on within: like the blank wall of a prison enclosing sin, regrets, and pain, and wasted life, in the cold indifference of mortar ...
— Almayer's Folly - A Story of an Eastern River • Joseph Conrad
... he caused the corpse of the hapless dead man to be burnt, and the bones which were not consumed by the fire he caused to be placed in some mortar in a part of his house where he was building. Then he sent in all haste to the Court to sue for pardon, setting forth that he had several times forbidden his house to a person whom he suspected of plotting his wife's dishonour, and who, notwithstanding ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. I. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... not residents 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 of this instrument ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... suffers most, for he has to live, eat, sleep, and work in the mud. The plain of dragging slime that stretches from Switzerland to the sea is far worse to face than the fire of machine guns or the great black trench-mortar bombs that come twisting down through the air. It is more terrible than the frost and the rain—you cannot even stamp your feet to drive away the insidious chill that mud always brings. Nothing can keep it from your hands and face and clothes; there is no taking off your boots to dry in the trenches—you ...
— Mud and Khaki - Sketches from Flanders and France • Vernon Bartlett
... the year 1568, was "carted and banished." At Sandwich, Ipswich, and some other places, as a punishment for scolding and other offences it was not an uncommon thing to compel the transgressors to carry a wooden mortar round the town. ...
— Bygone Punishments • William Andrews
... bedded in mortar, but was altogether displaced, and turned down from one to three feet beneath the surface, where several skeletons were found very entire, and in their original position, but without any remains of coffins, vestments, or other ornaments, as appeared upon a most minute investigation. ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... till the night boat. After supper they took out the skiff from the rocky landing for a last row. They pulled round under the dark cliffs that rose sheer from the water and were crowned with the wall of the old fort, the cliffs themselves seamed across with strata of white, like mortar-lines of some Titanic masonry. They gave chase to a tug puffing northward half a mile to the right, towing two or three canal-boats through the still water and the stiller night. Then a sail came ghostily ...
— Lippincott's Magazine. Vol. XII, No. 33. December, 1873. • Various
... to restore the pristine beauty of the furniture by a little manual labour. Heat a gallon of water, in which dissolve one pound and a half of potash; and a pound of virgin wax, boiling the whole for half an hour, then suffer it to cool, when the wax will float on the surface. Put the wax into a mortar, and triturate it with a marble pestle, adding soft water to it until it forms a soft paste, which, laid neatly on furniture, or even on paintings, and carefully rubbed when dry with a woollen rag, ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous
... colony of "rooks" into good quarters, you will have another rookery on your hands; if you remove a drove of brutes into reasonable human dwelling-places, you will soon have a set of homes fit for brutes and for brutes alone. Bricks and mortar and whitewash will not change the nature of human vermin; phrases about beauty and duty and loveliness will not affect the maker of slums, any more than perfumes or pretty colours would affect the rats ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... first their omnivorousness astonished her. "Skunks and rattlesnakes, yea the very bark of trees" they esteemed as delicacies. "They would pick up old bones and cut them in pieces at the joints, ... then boil them and drink up the liquor, and then beat the great ends of them in a mortar and so eat them." After some weeks of starvation Mrs. Rowlandson herself was fain to partake of such viands. One day, having made a cap for one of Philip's boys, she was invited to dine with the great sachem. "I went," she says, "and he gave me a pancake about as big as two fingers. ...
— The Beginnings of New England - Or the Puritan Theocracy in its Relations to Civil and Religious Liberty • John Fiske
... May and June in the central region of Nepal in forests, at elevations of from 2000 to 6000 feet. The nest is placed in a fork of a branch on some small tree, and is a large mass of dry leaves and coarse dry grass, 7 or 8 inches in diameter externally, mortar-shaped, the cavity about 2.5 deep, and lined with hair-like fibres. The nest, though composed of loose materials, is very firm and compact. They lay four or five eggs, unspotted, verditer-blue, one of which is figured as a ...
— The Nests and Eggs of Indian Birds, Volume 1 • Allan O. Hume
... vert of the perfumes, eight ounces; spermaceti, four ounces; soap powder, four ounces; cinnabar, two drams; essence of rose, one dram. Melt the soap and spermaceti with the oil in a bath water; add the powder, and mix the whole in a marble mortar. It forms a paste which softens and whitens the ...
— The Ladies Book of Useful Information - Compiled from many sources • Anonymous
... A shop with "mortar-boards" displayed in its window seemed like a temple crowded with shrines; and a confectioner's shop, in which two young gentlemen in gowns sat and refreshed themselves, was like a distant glimpse of Olympus where the ...
— Follow My leader - The Boys of Templeton • Talbot Baines Reed
... where, even after such a 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 ...
— The Long Run - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... heaved up the big stones and packed them in mortar; he had laid them true by the plumb-line; Blenkiron's brother, the stonemason, couldn't ...
— Mary Olivier: A Life • May Sinclair
... the arguments of the missionary than by the fact that he still was covered by Burnham's rifle. Whichever argument moved him, he called off his warriors. On this expedition Burnham discovered the ruins of great granite structures fifteen feet wide, and made entirely without mortar. They were of a period dating before the Phoenicians. He also sought out the ruins described to him by F. C. Selous, the famous hunter, and by Rider Haggard as King Solomon's Mines. Much to the delight of Mr. Haggard, he brought ...
— Real Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis
... wild rice, shaking the ears into the canoes as they swept by. The grain fell out easily when ripe, but in order to clean it from the husk it was dried over a slow fire on a wooden grating. After being winnowed it was pounded to flour in a mortar, or else boiled like rice, and seasoned with fat. "It had a most delicate taste", wrote Alexander Henry ...
— Pioneers in Canada • Sir Harry Johnston
... piling themselves solidly between him and his desire. They formed a barrier stronger than walls of brick or mortar. ...
— The Way of the Wind • Zoe Anderson Norris
... random bog of the high places but a human spring, caught in a stone trough. Attention had been given to the trees. Below me stood a wall, which, though rough, was not the haphazard thing men pile up in the last recesses of the hills, but formed of chosen stones, and these bound together with mortar. On my right was a deep little dale with children playing in it—and this' I afterwards learned was called a 'combe': delightful memory! All our deeper hollows are called the same at home, and even the Welsh have the word, but they spell it cwm; it is their mountain ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... this, and all other questions of fact; I doubt not but, from the very same experience, to which you appeal, it may be possible to refute this reasoning, which you have put into the mouth of Epicurus. If you saw, for instance, a half-finished building, surrounded with heaps of brick and stone and mortar, and all the instruments of masonry; could you not infer from the effect, that it was a work of design and contrivance? And could you not return again, from this inferred cause, to infer new additions to the effect, and conclude, ...
— An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding • David Hume et al
... thought of the long centuries through which this strange guard has kept watch around earth's oldest empire. Dead, long dead and crumbled into dust, even when our Christian era began, were the hands that fashioned these earlier brick and laid them in the mortar, and for many generations thereafter watchmen armed with bows and arrows rode along the battlements and towers, straining their eyes for sight of whatever enemy might be bold enough to try to cross ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... no inspiring sight to see women, and even pregnant ones, at the construction of railroads, pushing heavily laden wheelbarrows in competition with men; or to watch them as helpers, mixing mortar and cement or carrying heavy loads of stone at the construction of houses; or in the coal pits and iron works. All that is womanly is thereby rubbed off from woman, her womanliness is trodden under foot, the same as, conversely, all manly attributes are stripped from the men in ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... considerable share of the most menial as well as of the most trying physical labor devolves upon the women. It is very repulsive to an American to see them, as one does here, ascending high ladders with buckets of mortar or bricks for building purposes. The stranger is unpleasantly impressed with the fact that more beer is drunk in Munich than in any other community composed of the same number of people. The obvious trouble with ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... had been with the glorious workmanship in wood, bronze, and lacquer, I scarcely admired less the masonry of the vast retaining walls, the stone gallery, the staircase and its balustrade, all put together without mortar or cement, and so accurately fitted that the joints are scarcely affected by the rain, damp, and aggressive vegetation of 260 years. The steps of the staircase are fine monoliths, and the coping at the side, the massive balustrade, and the heavy rail at the top, are cut out of solid ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... And so the work goes on, cell upon cell, each supplying the materials for the partition separating it from the one below. On reaching the end of the cylinder, the Osmia closes up the case with a thick layer of the same mortar. Then that bramble-stump is done with; the Bee will not return to it. If her ovaries are not yet exhausted, other dry stems will be exploited in ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre
... of making him read aloud, 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
... Rice.] They unshale their Rice from its outward husk by beating it in a Mortar, or on the Ground more often; but some of these sorts of Rice must first be boyled in the husk, otherwise in beating it will break to powder. The which Rice, as it is accounted, so I by experience have found, to be the wholsomest; This they beat again the second ...
— An Historical Relation Of The Island Ceylon In The East Indies • Robert Knox
... water. It is then pressed and dried in the sun, the result being a reddish-brown 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 ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... said aloud, getting up on her knees beside Luffree and holding out the book at arm's length. And then, with the mortar-board as her inspiration, there flashed into her brain a wonderful thought that was to grow through the coming years; and her lips framed a splendid purpose—heard by no mortal ears, save those of the shivering hound and the cropping pony—that time ...
— The Biography of a Prairie Girl • Eleanor Gates
... his men from the rigour of an American winter. Under these circumstances he imitated the backwoodsman's practice of hutting. Trees were felled, and log-huts wore erected, the interstices of which were filled up with earth, moss, and a rude kind of mortar, in order to render them warm and comfortable. Around them, for defence, two redoubts were erected and an intrenchment, drawn with a ditch six feet wide and three or four feet deep. His left was covered by the Schuylkill, and his rear, for the most ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... people, destitute apparently of metal tools and of any knowledge of mortar, built the gigantic burgs or duns of Mousa, Hoxay, Glenelg, Carloway, Bragar, Kildonan, Farr, Rogart, Olrick, etc., with galleries and chambers in the thickness of their huge uncemented walls? Is it true, as the Irish bardic writers ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... Towards ugliness, hideousness, rawness, whether manifested in life or in letters, he was always implacable; and this sentiment no doubt accounts for much of his hostility to Dissent. Margate was, in his eyes, a "brick-and-mortar image of English Protestantism, representing it in all its prose, all its uncomeliness—let me add, all its salubrity." When criticising the proposal to let Dissenters bury their dead with their own rites in the ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... 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 ...
— The Peace of Roaring River • George van Schaick
... and saw Dr. McGregor sound asleep in an armchair, a red silk handkerchief over his bald head, and a swarm of disappointed flies hovering above him. In the back room the clink and rattle of a pestle and mortar ceased as Tom appeared. ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... his arrival, if he wishes to farm. If he comes as an artisan he may, like the happy masons now to be found in Winnipeg, get the wages of a British Army Colonel, [1] by putting up houses as fast as brick, wood, and mortar can be got together. Favourable testimony as to the climate was everywhere given. The heavy night dews throughout the North-West keep the country green when everything is burned to the south, and the steady winter cold, although it sounds formidable ...
— Memories of Canada and Scotland - Speeches and Verses • John Douglas Sutherland Campbell
... clothes upon best be trust (a humorous Deckerian phrase)—thou'rt great in somebody's books for this!" Did it become Jonson to gibe at the histrionic tribe, who is himself accused of "treading the stage, as if he were treading mortar."[394] He once put up—"a supplication to be a poor journeyman player, and hadst been still so, but that thou couldst not set a good face upon't. Thou hast forget how thou ambled'st in leather-pilch, by a play-waggon in the highway; and took'st mad Jeronimo's ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... Horsley gives the following receipt: Triturate in a mortar thirty-six grains of gallic acid with three and one-half ounces of strong decoction of logwood, put it into an eight ounce bottle, together with one ounce of strong ammonia. Next dissolve one ounce of sulphate of iron in half an ounce of distilled water by the aid of heat; ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho |
