"Pivot" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... instrument, called the scavenger's daughter. Imagine a pair of shears with handles, not only where they now are, but at the points as well and just above the pivot that unites the blades a circle of iron. In the upper handles the hands would be placed; in the lower, the feet; and through the iron ring, at the centre, the head of the victim would be forced, and in that position the man would be thrown upon the earth, and the strain ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... a telegraph system was soon to be installed. There were also two corps of militia, an artillery battery of fifty men and forty infantrymen. These had charge of the fifteen large carriages and three small pivot guns.[157] ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various
... made for her at Myrtlewood, while the two boys were each accommodated with a window; but each moment they were claiming their mother's attention, or rushing across the ladies' feet to each other's window, treating Rachel's knees as a pivot, and vouchsafing not the slightest heed to her attempts at intelligent pointing out of ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... so well as the "bunker" at Woodend, and no face he loved so much to gaze on as Jeanie Deans's. So, after spinning round and round his little orbit, and then remaining stationary for a week, it seems to have occurred to him that he was not pinned down to circulate on a pivot, like the hands of the watch, but possessed the power of shifting his central point, and extending his circle if he thought proper. To realise which privilege of change of place, he bought a pony from a Highland drover, and with ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... the way it quakes up through one's pillow so as to be felt rather than heard. It is simply the pounding of the ponderous pestle of the kometsuki, the cleaner of rice—a sort of colossal wooden mallet with a handle about fifteen feet long horizontally balanced on a pivot. By treading with all his force on the end of the handle, the naked kometsuki elevates the pestle, which is then allowed to fall back by its own weight into the rice-tub. The measured muffled echoing of its fall seems to me the most pathetic of all sounds of Japanese life; it is the beating, indeed, ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... the ring, braced his feet and pulled. The square turned on its pivot with an ease which proved that it was frequently subjected to the same manipulation. As it turned, it ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... the appliance is as follows: The casing or receiver is a steel cylinder, which has a pivot at the bottom to receive the step for an upright hollow shaft, to which a second cylinder of smaller diameter is attached. The second cylinder is perforated, and a fine wire cloth is inserted. The mercury, after passing ...
— Getting Gold • J. C. F. Johnson
... apparatus, anyone observing their movements (or rather the movement of one, for the other is commonly fixed), will see from the manner in which the angle increases and decreases, and from the curve described by the moving extremity, that there must be some centre of motion—either a pivot or an external box equivalent to it. This may be regarded as a necessary correlation. Moreover, he might infer that beyond the centre of motion the moving blade was produced into a lever, to which the power was applied; but as another arrangement is just possible, this ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... have it, in my agent's office I was fastened upon by a fellow fresh from Madagascar with a little scheme for a wonderful piece of business. It had something to do with cattle and cartridges and a Prince Ravonalo something; but the pivot of the whole affair was the stupidity of some admiral—Admiral Pierre, I think. Everything turned on that, and the chap couldn't find words strong enough to express his confidence. He had globular eyes starting out of his head with a fishy glitter, bumps on his forehead, ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... different, Leon. Dame! I could never pass her door after your father died but she would stop my wagon and ask me for just five minutes' counsel. But you young ones are all alike: the world has got a new pivot, it seems, for this generation, and it will move round more easily when we graybeards ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... uninterrupted cannonading for eighteen minutes without casualties, a sixty-eight-pound Blakely shell passed through the starboard bulwarks below main rigging, exploded upon the quarter-deck, and wounded three of the crew of the after-pivot gun. With these exceptions, not an officer or a man of the Kearsarge received the slightest injury. The unfortunates were speedily taken below, and so quietly was the action performed, that at the termination of the fight a ...
— The Story of the Kearsarge and Alabama • A. K. Browne
... gentleman exhaled his grievance without looking to the right or to the left; at length, turning on his pivot, he perceived that the room was full of company, consisting of young Crotchet, and some visitors whom he had brought from London. The Reverend Doctor Folliott was introduced to Mr. Mac Quedy, the economist; ...
— Crotchet Castle • Thomas Love Peacock
... Carignan road by the Bavarians, the Mezieres road by the Wurtemburgers. The French have not thought of barricading the railway viaduct; three German battalions have occupied it during the night. Two isolated houses on the Balan road could be made the pivot of a long resistance, but the Germans are there. The wood from Monvilliers to Bazeilles, but the French have been forestalled; they find the Bavarians cutting the underwood with their billhooks. The German army moves in one piece, in one absolute unity; the Crown Prince ...
— Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century - Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World • Various
... leaves, splits off the outer fiber layers from the cellular matter of the interior, using a bone knife for this purpose. When he has accumulated a sufficient number of strips he carries them to the hemp machine (Fig. 27). This consists of a knife which rests on a wooden block. The handle turns on a pivot and the end is drawn upwards by means of a bent twig, or sapling, which acts as a spring. This spring is lowered and the knife blade raised by means of a foot treadle; a strip of hemp is laid on the block; the foot pressure is removed, and the knife descends. Taking a firm hold of one end of ...
— The Wild Tribes of Davao District, Mindanao - The R. F. Cummings Philippine Expedition • Fay-Cooper Cole
... before escaping? In the latter case, it had, undoubtedly, ere this, been destroyed; in the former, it would, presumably, soon be transferred to the police agent's employer. To regain the paper, if it existed, would be no light task; yet it was the pivot upon which John Steele's fortunes hung. The principal signer was, in all likelihood, making his way out of London now; he would, in a few hours, reach the sea, and after that disappear from the case. At any rate, John Steele could have nothing ...
— Half A Chance • Frederic S. Isham
... of the ax and it gave, swinging upward on a pivot. Then a minute later the door swung inward, yielding ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... time of our journeying all Europe turned on a Burgundian pivot, and the Fates were busy in that land. It was the stage of the world, on which the strong, the great, and the enterprising of mankind were playing; and I hoped that Max, who was strong and enterprising, would find his part in this Burgundian ...
— Yolanda: Maid of Burgundy • Charles Major
... that the Christian precept of morality has no advantage in respect of purity over the moral conceptions of the Stoics; the distinction between them is, however, very obvious. The Stoic system made the consciousness of strength of mind the pivot on which all moral dispositions should turn; and although its disciples spoke of duties and even defined them very well, yet they placed the spring and proper determining principle of the will in an elevation of the ...
— The Critique of Practical Reason • Immanuel Kant
... whole east began gradually to spring into flame. The sky blazed as ruddily as if a great fire were just beyond the horizon and racing to leap it and sweep across upon the farm. A broad fan of light, roseate at its pivot and radiating in shafts of yellow and red, was rising and paling the stars with its shining edge. Wider and wider it grew, until from north to south, and almost as far up as the zenith, were thrust its shining sticks. ...
— The Biography of a Prairie Girl • Eleanor Gates
... channels, the inflowing tide of immigration. There would be a threefold division into agricultural districts which would furnish food for the incoming population, a pastoral district for the cattle, and a central market, which would furnish the pivot on which all the rest would work. Our agricultural and dairy farm proposal I have already fully discussed and will now proceed to describe the social City of Refuge which will act as a sort of solar system round which all the minor constellations ...
— Darkest India - A Supplement to General Booth's "In Darkest England, and the Way Out" • Commissioner Booth-Tucker
... cordially be reunited to the Republic. With such a result, holding New Orleans and the mouth of the Mississippi and all the region west of that great stream, how could Tennessee or Mississippi remain in the Southern confederacy? The truth is, Missouri is the pivot upon which the rebellion turns. Had she gone with the South, and given to its cause a cordial support, it would have been difficult to subdue the rebellion. That she has gone with the Union is a momentous fact, and demands for her our heartfelt gratitude. I have ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... defence was concerned, was lamentable. The regular C. S. naval fleet consisted of the Louisiana (Captain McIntosh) and carrying the flag of Commodore Mitchell; the steamer McRae (Captain Huger), carrying six light 32-pounders and nine-inch pivot gun; the steamer Jackson (Captain Renshaw), with two pivoted smooth bore 32-pounders; the small ironplated "Ram" Manassas (Captain Warley), carrying one 32-pounder carronade in the bow; and two launches, each carrying a howitzer and a crew of twenty ...
— The Narrative of a Blockade-Runner • John Wilkinson
... believe the hundred misrepresentations we may have heard, but to trust her, the person who had lived with him long, and who knew him best and last. After breakfast she took us to her house, where Voltaire had lived, and where we saw his chair and his writing desk turning on a pivot on the arm of the chair: his statue smiling, keen-eyed, and emaciated, said to be a perfect resemblance. In one of the hands hung the brown and withered crown of bays, placed on his head when he appeared the last time at the Theatre Francais. Madame de Villette showed us some of his letters—one ...
— The Life And Letters Of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... was made of hard, smooth, baked white clay, and is something like a grindstone, only not half as thick. The grindstone stands up, but this lays flat, with its round side turned up, like the head of a barrel. And it's set on a pivot, like the needle of the compass in ...
— Illustrated Science for Boys and Girls • Anonymous
... ambassador did not know, nor the Nuncius, nor even the friendly Aerssens, was the vast amount of supplies which had been prepared for the coming conflict by the finance minister. Henry did not know it himself. "The war will turn on France as on a pivot," said Sully; "it remains to be seen if we have supplies and money enough. I will engage if the war is not to last more than three years and you require no more than 40,000 men at a time that I will show you munitions and ammunition and artillery and the like to such an extent that you will ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... knelt on one knee and lifted and turned a ring, at the foot of the bed, which Lupin had not noticed. One of the flagstones moved on a pivot, disclosing a black hole. ...
— The Crystal Stopper • Maurice LeBlanc
... tureen. It was her consecrated hour—the single hour of her toiling day that she dedicated to personal happiness; and because it was her hour, her life had gradually centred about it as if it were the divine point of her universe—the pivot upon which her whole world revolved. Nothing harsh, nothing sordid, nothing sad, ever touched the sacred precincts of her twilight ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... sloping shoulders, who had been running the elevator in the Chalmers Building up to a week ago, would patiently practise marching without moving, so that the rest of the line could wheel round him as a pivot. The petty tyrant who scolded at him was determined to have his own way; and Jimmie, who had had to do with many such tyrants in his long years of industrial servitude, was glad when this particular one ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... been adopted. The shed is mounted upon a double turn-table, there being two circular tracks the one near the centre of the shed and the other towards its extremities. The shed is mounted upon a centre pivot and wheels engaged with these inner and outer tracks. In this manner the shed may be swung round to the most favourable point of the compass according ...
— Aeroplanes and Dirigibles of War • Frederick A. Talbot
... to the dilemma, either of which Mr. Roach may lay hold of, but he cannot swing on a pivot between them. If he accepts these figures, or anything approaching them,—and the fact that the ocean is covered by foreign built ships to the exclusion of his own is proof of their correctness,—he may go on asking for a bounty on every ...
— Free Ships: The Restoration of the American Carrying Trade • John Codman
... discovery, "no master mariner would dare to use it, lest he should be thought to be a magician." Indeed, in the form in which it was first used it would be of little practical utility, and it was not till the method was found of balancing it on a pivot and fixing it on a card, as at present used, that it became a necessary part of a sailor's outfit. This practical improvement is attributed to one Flavio Gioja, of Amalfi, in the beginning of ...
— The Story of Geographical Discovery - How the World Became Known • Joseph Jacobs
... lain, at the floor stripped of its blood-stained carpet and especially at the walls, those solid walls through which the criminal had passed. They felt to make sure that the marble chimney-piece did not swing on a pivot, that there was no secret spring in the mouldings of the mirrors. They pictured yawning cavities, tunnels communicating with the sewers, with ...
— The Blonde Lady - Being a Record of the Duel of Wits between Arsne Lupin and the English Detective • Maurice Leblanc
... by a deluge. Another legend tells us that when the gods and demons took Mount Mandara for a churning-stick and churned the ocean to make ambrosia, the god Vishnu took on the form of a tortoise and lay at the bottom of the sea, as a pivot for the whirling mountain to rest upon. But these versions of the myth are not primitive. In the original conception the world is itself a gigantic tortoise swimming in a boundless ocean; the flat surface ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... in diameter, the escapement is jewelled, and the pendulum, which is in itself a curiosity, is over fourteen feet in length. It is a curious fact that the pendulum bob weighs over three hundred pounds; but so finely finished is every wheel, pinion, and pivot in the clock, and so little power is required to drive them, that a weight of only one hundred pounds is all that is necessary to keep this ponderous mass of metal vibrating, and turn four pairs of hands on the dials of the cupola. The clock ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... Frontenac's rule as head of the colony. No other spot in the world commanded such a highway linking the inland waters with the sea. The French had always an eye for points of strategic value; and in holding Quebec they hoped to possess the pivot on which the destinies of North America should turn. For a long time it seemed, indeed, as if this glowing vision might become a reality. The imperial ideas which were working at Quebec were based upon the substantial realities of trade. The instinct for business was hardly less strong ...
— The Conquest of New France - A Chronicle of the Colonial Wars, Volume 10 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • George M. Wrong
... a second baseman, whose cool head made him a good man at that pivot of the field; he was an able assistant to the right-field, a ready back-stop to the short-stop, and a perfect spider for taking into his web all the wild throws that came slashing from the home plate to cut off those who dared to try to ...
— The Dozen from Lakerim • Rupert Hughes
... and the rapidity of the current proportionably great. I entertained hopes that the passage was clear, and that we should shoot down it without interruption; but in this I was disappointed. The boat struck with the fore-part of her keel on a sunken rock, and, swinging round as it were on a pivot, presented her bow to the rapid, while the skiff floated away into the strength of it. We had every reason to anticipate the loss of our whale-boat, whose build was so light, that had her side struck the rock, instead ...
— Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia, Complete • Charles Sturt
... sorrow was expressed in his weary look as he gazed out of the window. I knew that the pivot on which all his emotions turned was the anxiety of uncertainty, and that beyond the bounds of conscious thought an unknown loom was weaving for him a shadowy thread of hope. He saw, he heard nothing, while his ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various
... phenomenon resides not in St Paul but in Jesus Christ. "It pleased God to reveal His Son in me" (Gal. i. 15, 16). The man had seen his Saviour with his whole soul. And because of—not the man who saw but—the Saviour who was seen, behold, the life is lifted off the pivot of self-will and transferred to that of "the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ." The same "revealing" grace can lift us also. We are not St Pauls; but the Jesus Christ of St Paul is absolutely the same, ...
— Philippian Studies - Lessons in Faith and Love from St. Paul's Epistle to the Philippians • Handley C. G. Moule
... rock tilted to one side, as if on a pivot, revealing a square opening which seemed to lead through solid stone. And at the far end of the opening Tom Swift saw a glimmer ...
— Tom Swift and his Big Tunnel - or, The Hidden City of the Andes • Victor Appleton
... redoubling its violence, the hanged man revolved on his own pivot, turning every way at once towards the swarm, as if he wished to run after the birds; his teeth seemed to try and bite them. The wind was for him, the chain against him. It was as if black deities were mixing themselves up in the fray. The ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... was leaping along the dark suburban roads at a speed little below that of an express train. Corners the chauffeur negotiated in racing fashion, so that at times two wheels thrashed the empty air; and once or twice the big car swung round as upon a pivot only to recover again in response to the skilled ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer
... mattered. There was one place in the world that stood solid and did not melt into unreality: the place where his mother was. Everybody else could grow shadowy, almost non-existent to him, but she could not. It was as if the pivot and pole of his life, from which he could not ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... of forces we cannot resist, but will do so consciously, anticipating events. In other words, we shall take advantage of such measure of detachment as we do possess, to take the lead in a saner organization of western civilization; we shall become the pivot and centre ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... unable to resist; with a strong effort I gulped down my disappointment, and gave up my darling project of making a cruise in the Paul Jones. Our fortunes in this life our destinies seem sometimes balanced on a pivot which a breath will turn. Had I accomplished my intention and embarked on a cruise, how different my fate, in all likelihood, would ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... flanks and front formidable natural or artificial obstacles to serve as points of support. The points of support on the strategic front are called pivots of operations, and are practical temporary bases, but quite different from pivots of maneuver. For example, in 1796 Verona was an excellent pivot of operations for all Napoleon's enterprises about Mantua for eight months. In 1813 Dresden ...
— The Art of War • Baron Henri de Jomini
... in the log-book, folded his hands and shut his eyes. The Leyden jars rattled in their mahogany sockets as the Vandalia climbed a wave, faltered, and sped into the hollow. Far removed from her pivot of gravity, the wireless house behaved after the manner of an express elevator. But the wireless house chair was bolted to ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... with him his unrivaled and intimate knowledge of the works; for, and in spite of all the dictates of prudence, it seemed impossible to think of the vast enterprise at St. Marys without its central pivot. ...
— The Rapids • Alan Sullivan
... enthusiasm than ever dead picture was or will be, over-powered the burgomaster with her eloquence and her feminine proof of Gerard's purity. His eyes and mouth opened, and remained open: in which state they kept turning, face and all as if on a pivot, from the picture to the women, and from the women to ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... out of doors to tell him on her return; it was she who had done many hundreds of patiences in the days when he was not well enough to play at chess. He was hardly well enough now, but he had set his heart upon the first day when he should come down and play chess with Rendel as a sort of pivot in his miserable existence. And now the moment had come. How should he know that for all practical purposes his son-in-law was a different being from the young man who had come upstairs to see him the day before? For yesterday ...
— The Arbiter - A Novel • Lady F. E. E. Bell
... the guiding theme is used with increasing frequency, it is true, so that in 'Lohengrin' its employment adds materially to the poetical interest of the score; but in 'Das Rheingold' we are in a different world. Here the guiding theme is the pivot upon which the entire work turns. The occasional use of some characteristic musical phrase to illustrate the recurrence of a special personality or phase of thought has given way to a deliberate system in which not only each of the characters in the ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... the State Trials as an epoch in this history, marking a distinct phase in the character of the Repeal Association. The proceedings of that extraordinary inquest are familiar to most men. It is not my intention to refer to them, except as a sort of pivot upon which public sentiment veered. When they were commenced there was untold wealth in the coffers of the Association. There was still a greater store of public purpose in the country. Threats, hot and violent, had been uttered. Pledges had been ...
— The Felon's Track • Michael Doheny
... the present century Persia was for a short time the pivot of the Oriental interest of English and Indian statesmen. But little known and scarcely visited during the preceding century, it suddenly and simultaneously focussed the ambitions of Russia, the apprehensions of Great Britain, the Asiatic schemes of France. The envoys of great Powers ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... rolled up astern and buried the poop. Kit felt the steamer lift and turn, as if on a pivot at the middle of her length. The after-deck was full of water, but the bows were high and going round, and he was conscious of a curious shiver that ran through the straining hull as she shook herself free from the sand. She crawled forward, stopped, and moved again with a staggering lurch. The ...
— The Buccaneer Farmer - Published In England Under The Title "Askew's Victory" • Harold Bindloss
... to be found in literature. Round this last one, the whole ode seems to turn as on a pivot, and it alone had been sufficient to stamp Smollett a ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett
... any one cry to suddenly lose the pivot upon which his emotions are swung. At any rate, Mrs. Morris cried. She said that she cried all night, first because it seemed so spooky to see him whose remains she had so recently buried on faith, waiving recognition ...
— Humorous Ghost Stories • Dorothy Scarborough
... a cultus, so also it has a clergy, who are the pivot of his entire social and political system. Their nature and office will be best shown by describing his ideal of political society in its normal state, with the various classes of which it ...
— Auguste Comte and Positivism • John-Stuart Mill
... secret," between Authority and Liberty; though his judgment that neither "can ever absolutely prevail," shows us rather that we are on the threshold of laissez-faire than that Hume really understood the problem of freedom. He realized that the House of Commons had become the pivot of the State; though he looked with dread upon the onset of popular government. He saw the inevitability of parties, as also their tendency to persist in terms of men instead of principles. He was convinced of the necessity of liberty to the progress of the arts and sciences; and ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... his breath for a final utterance of agony that should rouse the whole neighbourhood, when Clare, having reached the top, seated himself upon the wall, and Tommy restrained himself in the hope of what a parley might bring. But he sat down only to wheel on the pivot of his spine, as he had seen them do on the counter in the shop, and sit with his legs alongside of the water-but. Then he drew Tommy from his shoulder, in spite of his clinging, and laid him across ...
— A Rough Shaking • George MacDonald
... on the left, was the town to which the palace, temple, or whatever occupied the middle, belonged; on the right, the open country, landscape, mountains, sea-coast, &c. The side-scenes were composed of triangles which turned on a pivot beneath; and in this manner the change of scene was effected. According to an observation on Virgil, by Servius, the change of scene was partly produced by revolving, and partly by withdrawing. The former applies to the lateral decorations, and the latter to the middle of the background. The ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... dragged on the ground when opened or closed, necessitating the expenditure of considerable energy in performing either operation. She watched him tear down the old support wires and replace them with new ones, stretching a double strand from the top of the tall pivot posts to the free ends of the gates. Placing a short stick between the two strands of heavy wire he twisted until the shortening process had cleared the gate ends and they swung suspended, moving so freely that a rider could lean from his saddle ...
— The Settling of the Sage • Hal G. Evarts
... any moment. There was the golden Cock of Beaugard in the cinders, the ashes and the dust. His chin dropped on his breast, and a cloud like a fog on the coast of Gaspe settled round him. Yet even as his head drooped, something else happened—one of those trivial things which yet may be the pivot of great things. A cock crowed—almost in his very ear, it seemed. He lifted his head quickly, and a superstitious look flashed into his face. His eyes fastened on the burnished head of the Cock among the ruins. To his excited imagination it was as though the ancient symbol ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... from the rest of the mountain and was in motion, turning slowly around and around as if upon a pivot. When first they came to it there was a solid wall before them; but presently it revolved until there was exposed a wide, smooth path across it to the other side. This appeared so unexpectedly that ...
— Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz • L. Frank Baum.
... he says, "Professor Mller claims to have found in language an endowment which has no analogies, and no preparations in even the beings nearest to man, and of which, therefore, no process of transmutation could furnish an explanation. Here is the pivot on which his ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... centre of the picture and pass a vertical and horizontal line through it. The vertical division is the more important, as the natural balance is on the lateral sides of a central support. It will be found that the actual centre of the canvas is also the actual pivot or centre of the picture, and around such a point the various components group themselves, pulling and hauling and warring in their claim for attention, the satisfactory picture showing as much ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore
... from dinner clothes to tweeds; spent a second or so over the contents of a locked drawer in the dresser, from which he selected a very small but serviceable automatic, and a very small but highly powerful magnifying glass whose combination of little round lenses worked on a pivot, and, closed over one another, were of about the compass of ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... him ... the pivot of the gate of Amenti set upon his eye, turns upon his right eye, and turns on that eye whether in opening or in shutting, and ...
— Woman on Her Own, False Gods & The Red Robe - Three Plays By Brieux • Eugene Brieux
... on a pivot in time to see someone drop into the dip in the road, just beyond the ...
— Crooked Trails and Straight • William MacLeod Raine
... place: we made gentle and very cautious moves towards Barrow's Strait; and, at last, on August 11th, the ice, as if heartily tired of us, shot us out into Barrow's Strait, by turning itself fairly round on a pivot. We were at sea because we could not help it, and the navigable season ...
— Stray Leaves from an Arctic Journal; • Sherard Osborn
... away abstracted and downcast. It was all very well for him to say, "Keep the work up when I am gone." But how were they to do it? He was the pivot on which all their work had been turning; and without him what chance was there of keeping the house together for ...
— The Master of the Shell • Talbot Baines Reed
... Harold? I tugged at it, and thought so. I passed the rope round it like a pulley, and then tied it about my own waist. I had a happy thought: I could use myself as a windlass. I turned on my feet for a pivot. Elsie helped me to pull. 'Up you go!' I cried, cheerily. We wound slowly, for fear of shaking him. Bit by bit, I could feel the cage rise gradually from the ground; its weight, taken so, with living capstan and stone axle, was less ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... telegraphic apparatus, lenses, crucibles, and pieces of his own inventions. A perfect tangle of telegraph wires coming from all parts of the Union were focussed at one end of the room. An ash-covered forge, a cabinet organ, a rusty stove with an old pivot chair, a bench well stained with oils and acids, completed the equipment of this curious den, into which the sunlight filtered through the chemical jars and fell in coloured patches along the ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro
... and he died in the course of two months after the last fit. The nearer he approached his end the smaller were the circles that he took; and, in the latter part of his existence, he did little more than turn as if he were on a pivot, and, when the time arrived that he could walk no more, he used to lay himself down on the ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... is a kind of dial turning on a pivot, and usually enclosed in a brass frame, from which radiate a few small handles or spokes. Round the face of the dial—usually of paper—are various numerals, and between the face and its glass covering ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... The pivot upon which all right-thinking conduct involving relations with other people turns is the Golden Rule, "Whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them." It is to the moral what the sun is to the physical world, and just as we have never made full use of the heat and ...
— The Book of Business Etiquette • Nella Henney
... reasonably fast, though she could not hold her own with the Bellevite, or even the Bronx; and you have a pivot gun amidships, and six broadside guns," ...
— Fighting for the Right • Oliver Optic
... have surpassed this fight. The elephant was mad with rage, and nevertheless he seemed to know that the object of the hunters was to get behind him. This he avoided with great dexterity, turning as it were upon a pivot with extreme quickness, and charging headlong, first at one, and then at another of his assailants, while he blew clouds of sand in the air with his trunk, and screamed with fury. Nimble as monkeys, ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker
... essential condition of organization, the hierarchy of labor,—that is, the classification of laborers into parcellaires and generalizers or organizers,—and in all utopias the distinction of capacities, the basis or everlasting excuse for inequality of goods, is admitted as a pivot. Those reformers whose schemes have nothing to recommend them but logic, and who, after having complained of the SIMPLISM, monotony, uniformity, and extreme division of labor, then propose a PLURALITY as a SYNTHESIS,—such inventors, I say, are judged already, and ought ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... boat swung about as though on a pivot. The wind filled the sail; she sped forward like ...
— A Fool There Was • Porter Emerson Browne
... by their reception in the French capital. Though this composer commenced so late in life, he left thirty-six dramatic works. His greatest work was "Castor et Pollux." Thirty years later Grimm recognized its merits by admitting, in spite of the great faults of the composer, "It is the pivot on which the glory of French music turns." When Louis XIV. offered Rameau a title, he answered, touching his breast and forehead, "My nobility is here and here." This composer marked a step forward in French music, for he gave it more boldness and freedom, and was the first really scientific ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... [accused] been present, still the denial of the constitutional right ought not to be condoned. * * * Nor ought this Court to convert the inquiry from one as to the denial of the right into one as to the prejudice suffered by the denial. To pivot affirmance on the question of the amount of harm done the accused is to beg the constitutional question involved. * * * The guarantee of the Fourteenth Amendment is not that a just result shall have been obtained, but that the result, whatever it be, shall be ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... the centre of his chest, then deliberately shifted the aim to his right shoulder, and, with the thought, "That will put him out of business," pulled the trigger. The bullet, driving with momentum sufficient to perforate a man's body a mile distant, struck Tudor with such force as to pivot him, whirling him half around by the shock of its impact ...
— Adventure • Jack London
... occasion suited. The carriage or wagon, if it may be called such, appeared in as wretched a condition as the team and its driver. Sometimes a couple of horses, mules, or cows, &c., would be dragging a hogshead of tobacco, with a pivot, or axle, driven into each end of the hogshead, and something like a shaft attached, by which it was drawn, or rolled along the road. I have seen two oxen and two slaves pretty fully employed in getting ...
— An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans • Lydia Maria Child
... new friends. It was an unanswerable argument. I couldn't share my young friend's surprise and indignation. My practice of reflection had also convinced me that there is nothing on earth that turns quicker on its pivot than political idealism when touched by the breath of ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... for 40,000 spectators. Vitruvius in his fifth book explains the ground-plan of such buildings. They were almost always on the same model, differing in material and size. On one occasion two whole theatres of wood, placed back to back, were made to turn on a pivot, and so being united, to form a single amphitheatre. [4] In construction, the Roman theatre differed from the Greek in reserving an arc not exceeding a semicircle for the spectators. The stage itself was large and raised not more than five feet. But the orchestra, instead of containing the ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... "the creaking of the oar." (The word kaji to-day means "helm";—the single oar, or scull, working upon a pivot, and serving at once for rudder and oar, being now called ro.) The mist passing across the Amanogawa is, according to commentators, the spray ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn
... "Why, see here;" and with these words he tried to press the upper part of the clasp aside. It stuck at first, but finally yielded, sliding around from the main part on an invisible little pivot, and disclosing a ...
— Donald and Dorothy • Mary Mapes Dodge
... said, as he returned. He made a note of the distance in his pocket-book. "So much for that," he said, "but that's not enough. I want you to stand under the library window, Rolfe, by that chestnut-tree in front of it, and act as pivot for the measuring tape while I look at that window from various angles. My idea is to go in a semicircle right round the garden, starting at the garage by the edge of the wood, so as to see the library window and measure the distance at every ...
— The Hampstead Mystery • John R. Watson
... have failed, the whole population go forth with the priest at their head to a place at some distance from the village. Here at sunset they erect a couple of poles with a cross-bar between them, to which they attach bags of rice, wooden models of pivot-guns, gongs, bracelets, and so on. Then, when everybody has taken his place at the poles and a death-like silence reigns, the priest lifts up his voice and addresses the spirits in their own language as follows: "Ho! ho! ho! ye evil spirits ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... put his powerful shoulder to the long six-pounder that worked on a pivot, and together, with joint exertions, they trained the gun upon the stern windows of the corvette. Dick Stone had just beforehand lighted his pipe when standing at the helm, and as the long gun bore upon its object he suddenly pushed Paul upon one side, and emptied his fiery bowl upon the ...
— Journeys Through Bookland - Volume Four • Charles H. Sylvester
... and, altogether, I hate those party names. We are all followers of Christ, and to His glory we all drudge, each for his part.' But he knows that now the question is: for or against him! From the brilliant latinist and the man of wit of his prime he had become the international pivot on which the civilization of his age hinged. He could not help beginning to feel himself the brain, the heart and the conscience of his times. It might even appear to him that he was called to ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... part of the State machinery, and as something more or less than a woman. But she turned out to be, in fact, a woman whose beauty, wit, and recklessness were alike extraordinary, and who rose in disastrous revolt against the system in which she was forced to be a pivot. Alike by birth and genius she easily took the first place in Roman society; and under the very eyes of the Emperor she multiplied her lovers right and left, and launched out into a career that for ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... is provided with a steel pivot, and contains several apertures, into which a pin enters, thus rendering it easy to begin bouquets ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 595, May 28, 1887 • Various
... everything that he recognizes as being essential to his happiness and welfare, embracing a wide range of subjects, from Brahma, who created all things, to the denkhi with which their women hull the rice. This denkhi is merely a log of wood fixed on a pivot and with a hammer-like head-piece. The women manipulate it by standing on the lever end and then stepping off, letting it fall of its own weight, the hammer striking into a stone bowl of rice. The denkhi is said to have been blessed by Brahma's son Narada, the god who is ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... between her and this new nation. Such treaties are not everlasting, nor can they be made to last even for ages. Those who word them seem to think that powers and dynasties will never pass away. But they do pass away, and the balance of power will not keep itself fixed forever on the same pivot. The time may come— that it may not come soon we will all desire—but the time may come when the name and prestige of what we call British North America will be as serviceable to Great Britain as those of Great Britain are now serviceable to ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope
... an event that cast a glow of colour over the life of Paulina and the whole foreign colony. This event was none other than the marriage of Anka Kusmuk and Jacob Wassyl, Paulina's most popular lodger. A wedding is a great human event. To the principals the event becomes the pivot of existence; to the relatives and friends it is at once the consummation of a series of happenings that have absorbed their anxious and amused attention, and the point of departure for a new phase of existence offering infinite possibilities in the way of speculation. But even for ...
— The Foreigner • Ralph Connor
... still the majestic pivot, round which her thoughts swung, but the circle was growing wider and wider. The difference in their ages, which at first to her inexperience had seemed such a trifling consideration, proved more serious as time ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice
... consequences of a perception of his own. Practically then MY thought terminates in HIS realities. He willingly supposes it, therefore, to be OF them, and inwardly to RESEMBLE what his own thought would be, were it of the same symbolic sort as mine. And the pivot and fulcrum and support of his mental persuasion, is the sensible operation which my thought leads me, or may lead, to effect—the bringing of Paley's book, of Newton's portrait, etc., before ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James
... Brigade were still doubling across the rear of Maxwell and Lewis to fill the gap between the latter and MacDonald. As they had wheeled round, the regiments gained on each other according to their proximity to the pivot flank. The brigade assumed a formation which may be described as an echelon of columns of route, with the Lincolns, who were actually the pivot regiment, leading. By the time that the right of Lewis's brigade was reached and the British had begun to deploy, it was evident that the Khalifa's ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... the guns was incessant. Suddenly, close at hand, Chloe heard a quick, wicked spat, and the Indian reeled from the doorway, whirled as on a pivot, and crashed, face downward, across the table. There was a loud rattle of porcelain dishes, a rifle rang sharply upon the floor boards, and Chloe gazed in horrid fascination as the limp form of the Indian slipped slowly from ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... in it I sank a trench 10 feet below the surface without reaching anything which I considered a floor. We found in excavations at the foundation of the church walls fragments of glass, several copper nails, a much-corroded iron hook, a copper bell pivot, and fragments of Spanish pottery. From the character of these objects alone there is no doubt in my mind of the former existence of Spanish influence, and the method of construction of the mission walls and the addition ...
— Archeological Expedition to Arizona in 1895 • Jesse Walter Fewkes
... facility with which folks will turn right round and revolve, I will tell how Josiah seemin'ly forgot mawlstroms, bad air, rumatiz, ages, meetin' housen, principles, etc., and turned right round on the pivot of his inclination. A day or two after he heard down in the office about the dancin' parties they had in the parlor anon or oftener, and he come up into our room enthused with the idee and wanted to branch out and go that night, ...
— Samantha at Coney Island - and a Thousand Other Islands • Marietta Holley
... very domesticated, perhaps too much so; his family was his world, the centre and pivot of which he was. The children were the radii. His wife attempted to be a centre, too, but never in the middle of the circle, for that was exclusively occupied by him, and therefore the radii fell now on ...
— Married • August Strindberg
... work, the ingenuity with which he plied his handful of tools, the proud patience with which he endured snub after snub, his bland passivity and extraordinary rebound. First of all, he went to Rome, ever the pivot of danger to an Italian diplomat. Molly's portrait, done in his best manner by Dosso of Ferrara, was presented to Duke Caesar ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... same cargo for the last five months." This was the walk he took his young wife on the morrow of his return. She had been used to the society of lawyers and civil servants, moving in that circle which seems to itself the pivot of the nation, and is in truth only a clique like another; and Fleeming was to her the nameless assistant of a nameless firm of engineers, doing his inglorious business, as she now saw for herself, among unsavoury surroundings. But when their walk brought them ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the pivot of the league. They would be meetings of statesmen responsible to their own sovereign parliaments, and any decisions taken would therefore, as in the case of the various allied conferences during the war, have to ...
— The Peace Negotiations • Robert Lansing
... magnetic value required to produce a balance, we know the value of both. In order to balance any wire or piece of iron placed in a position east and west, a magnetic compensator is used, consisting of a powerful bar magnet free to revolve upon a central pivot placed at a distance of 30 or more cm., so as to be able to obtain delicate observations. This turns upon an index, the degrees of which are marked for equal degrees of magnetic action upon the needle. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 430, March 29, 1884 • Various
... at the end of the march, were again ordered to change front. The Grenadiers, which was a pivot regiment, did not slacken their pace and, consequently, the centre were greatly exhausted in trying to keep up with it, and were certainly in no condition to take part in the battle ...
— Through Three Campaigns - A Story of Chitral, Tirah and Ashanti • G. A. Henty
... supported on three legs, which bring it to about the level of the eye. Its essential parts are a telescope, which has two cross-hairs intersecting each other in the line of sight, and which may be turned on its pivot toward any point of the horizon; a bubble glass placed exactly parallel to the line of sight, and firmly secured in its position so as to turn with the telescope; and an apparatus for raising or depressing ...
— Draining for Profit, and Draining for Health • George E. Waring
... Wade and consorts dismally eating their victuals, and looking on from the distance, unable to attempt the least stroke in opposition. So that the Dutch Barrier, if anybody now cared for it, did go all flat; and the Balance of Power gets kicked out of its sacred pivot: to such purpose have the Dutch been hoisted! Terrible to think of;—had not there, from the opposite quarter, risen a surprising counterpoise; had not there been a Prince Karl, with his 70,000, pressing victoriously over the Rhine; which ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... proper element. Then the precaution, which had seemed so useless and incomprehensible to others, came in play. The bark made a fearful whirl from the spot where it had so long lain, yielding to the touch of the gust like a vane turning on its pivot, while the water gurgled several streaks on deck. But the cables were no sooner taut than the numerous anchors resisted, and brought the bark head to wind. Maso felt the yielding of the vessel's stern, as she swung furiously ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... Had to remain at G.H.Q. all day—the worst of all days. My visit to Anzac yesterday had infected me with the hopes of Godley and Birdwood and made me feel that we would recover what we had missed at Suvla, and more, if, working from the pivot of Chunuk Bair, we got hold of the ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume 2 • Ian Hamilton
... church-organ; and his notes rose high above the surrounding din. But the remarkable thing about this ballad-singer was one of his arms, which, while singing, he somehow swung vertically round and round in the air, as if it revolved on a pivot. The feat was unnaturally unaccountable; and he performed it with the view of attracting sympathy; since he said that in falling from a frigate's mast-head to the deck, he had met with an injury, which had resulted in making his wonderful arm ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... this case the Best Known Sovereign is a PIVOT around which all the other Sovereigns are directly or indirectly related. How, we will proceed to show. Something of the method will be intimated by the difference of type ...
— Assimilative Memory - or, How to Attend and Never Forget • Marcus Dwight Larrowe (AKA Prof. A. Loisette)
... this train of logic his fingers were busy. Palming a wrench, he was swiftly loosening the main retaining nut on his hip joint. It dropped free in his hand, only the pivot pin remained now to hold his leg on. He climbed slowly to his feet and moved towards ...
— The Velvet Glove • Harry Harrison
... when studied according to the diagrams in the manuals, but it is not particularly difficult in practice. Its use is to get the company out of the double line formation into a column of four men abreast, the usual marching formation. At the executive command, "March!" No. 1 front rank acts as the pivot, and makes a right-angled turn to the right, marking time in that position until the three other men in the front rank have executed a right-oblique movement and have come up on the new line. The rear-rank ...
— Keeping Fit All the Way • Walter Camp
... the floridness of his outlook, his conception of the excited Englishman. The Englishman takes his authors placidly; he is never in a ferment or a frenzy about anything save politics, religion, or sport: these are the poles and the axis of his life's pivot; he is not an artistic person. Art has never yet taken the centre of the stage in his consciousness; it has never even been accepted as a serious factor of life. All the pother about plays, poems and pictures is made by small ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... then wooden flagships. Steadily and majestically they marched; marched as columns of men would march, obedient to commands, independent of waves and winds, mobilized by steam and science to turn on a pivot and manoeuvre as the directing mind required them; they halted in front of the fort; they did not anchor as Sir Peter Parker's ships had done near a hundred years before in front of Moultrie, which was hard by and frowning still at her ...
— The Black Phalanx - African American soldiers in the War of Independence, the - War of 1812, and the Civil War • Joseph T. Wilson
... black comparison between the tragedy of the hero and heroine, and the situation between Osborn and herself. But at last, when the playwright had ridiculed and denounced what he called the oldest and tiredest convention in the world for long enough, the play seemed to turn on a pivot, and the pivot was the cradle. The playwright gave the playgoers the happy ending for which the world craves and ...
— Married Life - The True Romance • May Edginton
... needle was taken from the pivot and had to be replaced before the record could be continued. Other government stations throughout the country also noted the earthquake shock, and they agree in a general way that the disturbance began according to the record ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... was a bitter disappointment. Poor Britannic Majesty: Archduke Joseph came to be King of the Romans, in due course; right enough. And long before that event (almost before George had ended his vain effort to hasten it), Austria turned on its pivot; and had clasped, not England to its bosom, but France (thanks to that exquisite Kaunitz); and was in arms AGAINST England, dear Hanover, and the Cause of Liberty! Vain to look too far ahead,—especially with those fish-eyes. Smelfungus ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... world forces move with our movements, pluck us uncomprehending from the station we had struggled for, and make our sorrowful meat of our attained desires! The stars in their courses pivot and swing on these subtle attractions, ancient as themselves. Judith Barrier, tearing the gaudy ribbon from her hat and casting it upon the road under her horse's feet, stood to learn what the priests of Isis knew thousands of years ...
— Judith of the Cumberlands • Alice MacGowan
... proof that San Francisco would come back, was that the Palace would be rebuilt immediately. And a man from Virginia City, a descendant of the Comstock days, told me that in Nevada they speak of "The Palace" as Russians speak of the Kremlin as a pivot of destiny. What I am trying to say, of course, is that the Palace is a tradition just as the Waldorf-Astoria is a tradition, only not at all in ...
— Vignettes of San Francisco • Almira Bailey
... he termed it; then, grasping the eaves with both hands, he pulled himself along, the slip-noose over the cupola turning about on its pivot without a hitch. ...
— The Circus Boys on the Plains • Edgar B. P. Darlington
... have plenty of hands for working them, if we only have to fight one side at once; but we shouldn't be very strong handed, if we had to work both broadsides. There are four sixteen pounders, four twelves, and the pivot; so that gives three men to a gun, besides officers and idlers. Three men is enough for the twelves, but it makes rather slow work with the sixteens. However, we may hope that we sha'n't have to work both broadsides ...
— Held Fast For England - A Tale of the Siege of Gibraltar (1779-83) • G. A. Henty
... stone passing over stone; and though he could see nothing with his eyes, mentally he knew that one of the great time-bleached and weathered blocks of granite that helped to form the cyclopean face of the kopje wall had begun to turn as on a pivot. ...
— The Kopje Garrison - A Story of the Boer War • George Manville Fenn
... never know peace of mind till I dined on roasted mammoth-foot. And I knew, also, that that stood for skookum mamook pukapuk—excuse Chinook, I mean there was a big fight coming. Now the mouth of my valley was very narrow, and the walls steep. High up on one side was one of those big pivot rocks, or balancing rocks, as some call them, weighing all of a couple of hundred tons. Just the thing. I hit back for camp, keeping an eye open so the bull couldn't slip past, and got my ammunition. It wasn't ...
— The Faith of Men • Jack London
... up and put his weight on a rope suspended from the roof. Slowly the solid masonry swung on a pivot, leaving room on either side for a person to squeeze through. The governor found it a tight fit, ...
— Bucky O'Connor • William MacLeod Raine
... more nearly to the place advancing, Descending rather quickly the declivity, Through the waved branches o'er the greensward glancing, 'Midst other indications of festivity, Seeing a troop of his domestics dancing Like Dervises, who turn as on a pivot, he Perceived it was the Pyrrhic dance[178] so martial, To which the Levantines ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... right of impeachment and of trial by the Legislature is the mainspring of the great machine of government. It is the pivot on which it turns. If preserved in full vigor, and exercised with perfect integrity, every ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... the world, and thought all as flippant as herself. She took nothing seriously; she was too vain. Except that she was sorry Armand was gone, she rather plumed herself on having separated the Seigneur and his son— it was something to have been the pivot in a tragedy. There came others to the village, as, for instance, a series of clerks to the Avocat; but she would not decline from Armand upon them. She merely made ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... other,—for I had got up when she came in,—and I must say the unknown seemed as much surprised as I was. Then all at once she began to walk round and round me; and as I didn't want her to get behind me, I kept turning too,—just as if I'd been on a pivot; I believe I was fascinated by those big eyes glaring at me through the thick ...
— We Ten - Or, The Story of the Roses • Lyda Farrington Kraus
... of a spare and solitary shop, a place of no amplitude at all, but as of an inveterate cheerful confidence, where, among a few artists' materials, an exhibited water-colour from some native and possibly then admired hand was changed but once in ever so long. That was perhaps after all the pivot of my revolution—the question of whether or no I should at a given moment find the old picture replaced. I made this, when I had the luck, pass for an event—yet an event which would have to have had for its scene the precious Rue ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... lower end of the great eye-bolt was released from its clamp, and a small piston gave it a little shove. In a long, slow, graceful arc, it swung away from the hull, swiveling around the pivot clamp that held the eye. The braking effect of the pivot clamp was precisely set to stop the eye-bolt when it was at right angles to the hull. Moving carefully, St. Simon maneuvered the ship until the far end of the bolt was directly over the shaft. Then he nudged the Nancy ...
— Anchorite • Randall Garrett
... memories of Indian forests and pendant boughs covered with fresh green leaves that could be torn down and eaten; and, stopping short in the rapid pace which it had pursued, swinging its massive head from side to side, it once more turned itself "half-right," as if upon a pivot, stared at the tall green hedge for a few moments, and then, curling its trunk right backwards over its neck, it uttered another trumpeting note which was no longer angry, but sounded cracked and ...
— Glyn Severn's Schooldays • George Manville Fenn
... of gude tea, sought aye a cup of the Prince's mixture." This produced peals of laughter, and her ladyship laughed as heartily as any of them. When somewhat composed again, she looked across the table to Mr. Clerk, and offered to let him see it. "It is now set on the pivot of my watch, and a' the warks gae round the flech in place of ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... was so splendid," Mrs. Greyson laughed, twirling the stand yet faster upon its pivot. "Would I do for ...
— The Pagans • Arlo Bates
... rest being much easier to mark out geometrically (e.g., 10, 48, 60, and 64 teeth). The lunar phase volvelle can be seen through the circular opening at the back of the astrolabe. It is quite certain that no automatic action is intended; when the central pivot is turned, by hand, probably by using the astrolabe rete as a "handle," the calendrical circles and the lunar phase are moved accordingly. Using one turn for a day would be too slow for useful re-setting of the instrument, ...
— On the Origin of Clockwork, Perpetual Motion Devices, and the Compass • Derek J. de Solla Price
... of Acts the pivot on which all else rests and turns is the unhindered presence of ...
— Quiet Talks on Power • S.D. Gordon
... hand on the knob of the door, and, swinging round as though I worked on a pivot, I caught him full between the eyes, and sent him sprawling among the hats and umbrellas that he had knocked down in his fall. Then I closed the door, and walked away. The page is turned for ever now, I muttered to myself. I cannot even meet her father again. Poor ...
— Miss Grantley's Girls - And the Stories She Told Them • Thomas Archer
... in the rigging of their fragile vehicles, setting the full-sized ionics to produce increased acceleration which would gradually push the craft beyond orbit. Joe Kuzak ran a steel wire from a pivot bolt at the hub of his ring, to tow Tiflin and ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... making her my friend. Bah! she is that already; I saw it in her eyes, which she can't control as she does her face. Yes, I must make her my friend; my very dear friend—and then—well, to my mind, the world-pivot is a woman. I will spare no one in order to attain my ends—I will make myself my own God, and consider no one but myself, and those who stand in my path must get out of it or run the chance of being crushed. This,' with a cynical smile, 'is what some would call the devil's ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... shoulders thrown back and a scowl, as though he preferred that the youth should make the attack. He kept his gaze on the savage until some distance beyond him, the latter turning as if on a pivot and narrowly watching him to the very door of the lodge. Jack then withdrew his attention and took a ...
— Camp-fire and Wigwam • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... had stepped back to Herr Haase's side; as the young man put his hands to the apparatus, he crisped himself with a sharp intake of breath for the explosion. A switch clicked under the young man's thumb, and he began to move the machine upon its pivot mounting, traversing it like a telescope on a stand. It came round towards the fresh yellow mounds of earth which marked Herr Haase's excavations; they had an instant in which to note, faint as the whirring ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... were involved in the struggle, Ellesmere was the pivot on which arguments and contentions centred. In such a conflict, needless to say, all the old rivalries of "leviathan" interests, of which we have already heard so much, re-emerged. What was still called the "Montgomeryshire party"—the men who had brought the other local railways into existence ...
— The Story of the Cambrian - A Biography of a Railway • C. P. Gasquoine
... O'Bleary,' said the humming-top, turning round on his pivot, and facing the company, 'what did you think of Vauxhall ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... first a nimble flounce, the red moccasins, as if their wearer made a pivot of his head in the air, described a circular flourish aloft, and in a twinkle, there they were at the bear's flanks, each with a toe at one of our hero's naked heels. In another twinkle Sprigg felt himself clasped tightly around the waist, by what seemed to be a pair of small arms; small, but, ...
— The Red Moccasins - A Story • Morrison Heady
... the steps of the Sub-Treasury looks down on the centre of the earth. To the swarming thousands of the Ghetto, who seldom venture west of the Bowery, there is a point on the East Side that represents the pivot of things. There are descendants of the Knickerbockers who cling arrogantly to the corner facing the Washington Arch. Profound is the belief of the pleasure seeker in the lights, signs, theatres, and lobster palaces of Longacre Square. To others nothing counts as the trees and fountains ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... heard a word from Tomaso. Then he sprang once more upon the centre of the board, faced King, and backed up inch by inch towards the leopard till the latter began to descend. At this point of balance the white goat had one forefoot just on the pivot of the board. With a dainty, dancing motion, and a proud tossing of his head, he now threw his weight slowly backward and forward. The great teeter worked to perfection. Signor Tomaso was kept bowing to round after round of applause while the leopard, ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... mills of those days were somewhat rude contrivances. The mill proper consisted of two cogged wooden cylinders about fourteen inches in diameter and perhaps twenty-six inches in length, placed in an upright position in a frame. The pivot of one of these extended upward about six feet, and at its top was secured the long shaft to which the horse was attached, and as it was driven round and round, the mill crunched the apples, with many a creak ...
— Life in Canada Fifty Years Ago • Canniff Haight
... spite of the contests between us of resistance and defiance. But my feeling died or slumbered when I was beyond the limits of his personal influence. When in his presence I was so pervaded by it that whether I went contrary to the dictates of his will or not I moved as if under a pivot; when away my natural elasticity prevailed, and I held the same relation to others that I should have held if I had not known him. This continued till the secret was divined, and then ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard
... another house in Devonshire Place, and that he may take it, and we may be settled in it, before the year closes. I myself think of the whole business indifferently. My thoughts have turned so long on the subject of houses, that the pivot is broken—and now they won't turn any more. All that remains is, a sort of consciousness, that we should be more comfortable in a house with cleaner carpets, and taken for rather longer than a week at a time. Perhaps, after all, we are quite as well ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... animal came trotting down from the mountain, whisking its long tail from side to side and pointing its long ears forward. But as it came close up, it suddenly stopped, and spun round as if upon a pivot. ...
— The Crystal Hunters - A Boy's Adventures in the Higher Alps • George Manville Fenn
... Italian commander, General Cadorna, launched a great offensive while the British were active in Flanders and by August 23 had broken through the whole Austrian line, capturing the town of Selo, which was the pivot of the Austrian defense, and considered impregnable, and inflicting upon the enemy, in this eleventh battle of the Isonzo, the greatest losses he had sustained since the capture of Goritz. More than 13,000 Austro-Hungarian prisoners were captured during the battle, with thirty guns, and ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell
... upper rooms in the Albany Academy a wire of more than a mile in length, through which I was enabled to make signals by sounding a bell, (Fig. 7.) The mechanical arrangement for effecting this object was simply a steel bar, permanently magnetized, of about ten inches in length, supported on a pivot, and placed with its north end between the two arms of a horseshoe magnet. When the latter was excited by the current, the end of the bar thus placed was attracted by one arm of the horseshoe, and repelled by the other, and ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - Invention and Discovery • Various
... cause, properly so called, than 'it can be something, or equal to two right angles;' and therefore that everything could not have had a cause which the reader has seen is the very point assumed by Theists—the very point on which as a pivot they so merrily and successfully turn their fine metaphysical theories, ...
— An Apology for Atheism - Addressed to Religious Investigators of Every Denomination - by One of Its Apostles • Charles Southwell |
