"Prop" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... part of the plateau which was invisible from the plain, and here in feverish haste they built a little cairn. Many flaky slabs of stone were lying about, and it did not take long to prop the largest of these against a rock, so as to make a lean-to, and then to put two side-pieces to complete it. The slabs were of the same colour as the rock, so that to a casual glance the hiding-place was not very visible. The two ladies were squeezed ...
— The Tragedy of The Korosko • Arthur Conan Doyle
... favor," laughed the monarch. "I ever prefer sober manhood to callow youth about me. The one is a prop, stanch, tried; the other a reed that bends this way and that, or breaks when you press ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... to him with the strangely combined passion of a mature woman and the trusting confidence of a child, was touched with gratitude. She had put out her hand and lifted him from the pit. She would always be near him, a prop and a stay. Sometimes it seemed to Hollister a miracle. He would look at his face in the mirror and thank God that she was blind. Doris said that made no difference, but he knew better. It made a difference to eyes that could ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... and the following lines some change is necessary for the Bresl. and Mac. texts are very defective. The Arabic word here translated "recess" is "Aywn," prop. a hall, an ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... seat, on thee accurst Then Tisiphon the Scepter did bestow, And set the Diadem on thy savage brow: And as thy princely Ivory, of late Thou proudly lean'dst upon, close by thee sate With stately columnes prop'd, fell tyrannie, Her Ensignes, ...
— The Odes of Casimire, Translated by G. Hils • Mathias Casimire Sarbiewski
... Prop. Baii Damn., 27: "Liberum arbitrium sine gratiae Dei adiutorio nonnisi ad ...
— Grace, Actual and Habitual • Joseph Pohle
... that urge the old medicament, Whose fusty vials have long dried impotent, Why prop ye meretricious things, Denounce the sane as vicious things, And call outworn ...
— Late Lyrics and Earlier • Thomas Hardy
... interspersed with stories and songs, until the evening was passing pleasantly. We were recovering from our despondency with this noticeable recovery on his part, when he whispered to his two big nurses to prop him up. They did so with pillows and parkers, and he actually smiled on us all. He whispered to Joe, who in turn asked the lad sitting on the foot of the cot to play Farewell, my Sunny Southern Home.' Strange we had forgotten that old air,—for it was a general favorite ...
— Cattle Brands - A Collection of Western Camp-fire Stories • Andy Adams
... seems still more proud of, a lord of parliament; but I will front him in both capacities, and frankly tell him, that in the first he is a burthen to his own estate, and not a benefactor; and in the second, a peer but not a prop. ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol I, No. 2, February 1810 • Samuel James Arnold
... milk, gleaming along the wall of Herons' Holt, drew every stray cat within a radius of two miles. Beneath, each armed with a clothes-prop, toiled Mr. Fletcher and Frederick under the immediate generalship ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson
... in that family relationship. Cousin Gustus distrusted youth. He thought young people were always either lying to him or laughing at him, and indeed they often were. Only not so often as he thought. He was no prop on which to repose confidence, and it was very easy both to tell him lies and not ...
— This Is the End • Stella Benson
... and leaders: Autonomous Haitian Workers or CATH; Confederation of Haitian Workers or CTH; Federation of Workers Trade Unions or FOS; National Popular Assembly or APN; Papaye Peasants Movement or MPP; Popular Organizations Gathering Power or PROP; Roman ...
— The 2002 CIA World Factbook • US Government
... Yet not without many strange scrutinies. More intently than ever she gazed into my eyes; rested her ear against my heart, and listened to its beatings. And love, which in the eye of its object ever seeks to invest itself with some rare superiority, love, sometimes induced me to prop my failing divinity; though it was I myself who had ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... to flowing freely and the crowd all jolly Alla would drag out the prop and make a nice little speech on ...
— The Sorrows of a Show Girl • Kenneth McGaffey
... said the Signor Grimaldi; "but it is often thus with these fragile beings, who rise the firmest and noblest in moments when prouder man begins to despair. They put their trust in God, who is a prop to sustain even those who are feebler than our gentle Adel held. But we will not exaggerate the causes of apprehension, which, after all, may pass away like many other threatening dangers, and leave us hours ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... is the nursery of all vain janglings. 13. It occasioneth the world to reproach us. 14. It holdeth staggering consciences in doubt, of the right ways of the Lord. 15. It abuseth the holy scriptures. 16. It is a prop to Antichrist. 17. And giveth occasion to many to turn aside to most ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... this remarkable production, in which one of the most exact of observers, most cautious of reasoners, and most candid of expositors, of this or any other age, is held up to scorn as a 'flighty' person who endeavours to 'prop up his utterly rotten fabric of guess and speculation,' and whose 'mode of dealing with nature' is reprobated as 'utterly dishonourable to natural science.' And all this high and mighty talk, which would have been indecent in one of Mr. Darwin's equals, proceeds from ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... truth is but too plain. He was harmless enough as long as he was content to remain secluded in his dark chamber, but now that I hear he has broken loose, Heaven knows what mischief he may do. My dear cousin Delavie, you are the prop left to me in these troubles, with my poor good man in the hands of those cruel pirates, who may be making him work in chains for all I know," and the tears came into ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... anything like a lever about a wheelbarrow?' said his father. 'O yes, sir,' said JAMES. 'The axle; and the wheel is the prop, the load is the weight, and the ...
— Punchinello Vol. 1, No. 21, August 20, 1870 • Various
... George, saying things to him which he should not have said. But his retainer took it all in the day's work, and never bore malice, continuing in his own cadging pigheaded sort of way to labour early and late to prop up his master's broken fortunes. "Lord, sir," as he once said to Harold Quaritch when the Colonel condoled with him after a violent and unjust onslaught made by the Squire in his presence, "Lord, sir, that ain't nawthing, that ...
— Colonel Quaritch, V.C. - A Tale of Country Life • H. Rider Haggard
... appreciate services as well as punish injuries. The story of Rhoecus proves this. Rhoecus, happening to see an oak just ready to fall, ordered his servants to prop it up. The nymph, who had been on the point of perishing with the tree, came and expressed her gratitude to him for having saved her life and bade him ask what reward he would. Rhoecus boldly asked her love and the nymph yielded to his desire. ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... I did notice them, seeing that I had to prop him up—me and Murcher between us. He was a long chap, with a red face, the lower ...
— A Study In Scarlet • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Britain owes (and pays you too) so much, Yet Europe doubtless owes you greatly more: You have repaired Legitimacy's crutch, A prop not quite so certain as before: The Spanish, and the French, as well as Dutch, Have seen, and felt, how strongly you restore; And Waterloo has made the world your debtor (I wish your bards would ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... for a moment, and he saw her hand go up and prop her chin while she considered what she ...
— Black Jack • Max Brand
... who'd sell thar soles fur a kountterfit dollar—an' he toled me, th' 'ministratur hadent sot yit, an' he cudent dew nuthin til he hed. Ses I: 'ye mean th' 'ooman's got ter gwo ter th' hi'est bider?' 'Yas,' he sed, 'the Cunel's got dets, an' the've got ter bee pade, an' th' persoonel prop'ty muste bee sold ter dew it.' Then I sed, 'twud bee sum time fore thet war dun, an' the 'ooman's 'most ded an' uv no use now; 'what'll ye hire har tur me fur.' He sed a hun'red for sicks months. I planked down the money ter onst, ...
— Among the Pines - or, South in Secession Time • James R. Gilmore
... her enough to share that feeling, but with the addition of a man's half-unconscious selfishness. I needed her indomitable frailness to prop my grosser strength. I needed that something not wholly of this world, which women's more exalted nature infuses into their passions, into their sorrows, into their joys; as if their adventurous souls had the power to range beyond the orbit of the earth for the gathering ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... sojourn, tarry, lodge, remain, continue, abide; support, prop, buttress, brace, uphold, strengthen; delay, obstruct, hinder, restrain, appease, withhold, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... take away the prop of self-approval entirely and immediately from any one of the habitually self-satisfied people, the probable result would be an entire nervous collapse, or even a painful form of insanity; and, in all changes of state from bondage ...
— The Freedom of Life • Annie Payson Call
... enough. The deputation broke up at once; but with how many lamentations over this unexpected reception, given by one whom they had reckoned upon as the chief stay and prop of their sect. ...
— The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales • Jean Pierre Camus
... Dan'l; "I've got it. You get a big strong clothes-prop, and I'll get another, and we'll poke him off. If he comes down your side, mind this: he'll be like a rat, and off as quick as quick; but don't you let him go. Drop your prop, and throw yourself on him; we'll ketch him, and ...
— Quicksilver - The Boy With No Skid To His Wheel • George Manville Fenn
... twenty-two dollars still lay in the chamois bag against her bosom, but the additional five dollars a week on to her salary was a saving prop against the not infrequent sag ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... has to do with building character in him Froebel has told us. Through it, he showed us, the child "first perceives moral relations," and he made that the basis of the kindergarten and all common-sense education. That prop was knocked out. New York never had a children's playground till within the last three years. Truly it seemed, as Abram S. Hewitt said, as if in the early plan of our city the children had not been thought ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis
... master Governor! your slave! The prop! the pillar of our family! To whom, at my departure hence, I gave ...
— The Comedies of Terence • Publius Terentius Afer
... James' grey hairs down with sorrow to the grave had counted with him; how intimately it was bound up with his own shrinking from scandal. His affection for his father, always deep, had increased of late years with the knowledge that James looked on him as the real prop of his decline. It seemed pitiful that one who had been so careful all his life and done so much for the family name—so that it was almost a byword for solid, wealthy respectability—should at his last gasp have to see it in all the newspapers. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... Nancarrow,' resumed her visitor, using his umbrella to prop his chin, and rolling out his words with evident enjoyment of his task, 'I have the unpleasant duty of informing you that ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... thought would plase me, Honor?—To lave your father alone in his ould age, after all the slaving he got and was willing to undergo, whilst ever he had strength, early and late, to make a little portion for you, Honor,—you, that I reckoned upon for the prop and pride of my ould age—and you expect you'd plase ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth
... always watching me, Floy, let me watch you, now!' They would prop him up with cushions in a corner of his bed, and there he would recline the while she lay beside him: bending forward oftentimes to kiss her, and whispering to those who were near that she was tired, and how she had sat up so ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... Giraud How is this, Pamela—you the solace of all our misfortunes, the prop of our ...
— Pamela Giraud • Honore de Balzac
... birchbark megaphone. On the seventh day there was still no news of Indian Joe and his mother. And on this day Billy played his last part as Deane. He went into her room at noon with broth and toast and a dish of water, and after she had eaten a little he lifted her and made a prop of blankets at her back so that he could brush out and braid her beautiful hair. It was light in the room in spite of the curtain which he kept closely drawn. Outside the sun was shining brightly, and the pale luster of it came through the curtain and lit ...
— Isobel • James Oliver Curwood
... alternate entreaty and reproof, besought his friend to attend to his real interests, resolutely to avoid those fascinations which in fact were fast deserting him, and to spend his great powers on a worthy field, in which he, his sovereign, would be his prop, his stay, and his pioneer. My father felt this kindness; for a moment ambitious dreams floated before him; and he thought that it would be well to exchange his present pursuits for nobler duties. With sincerity and fervour he ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... Felicia hardly dared to look at him until after they were on the steamer. He was really very gentle with her, he tried his best to make her comfortable, he did not refer at all to the events of the night before as he wrapped a steamer rug about her and helped the whining-voiced stewardess to prop a ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke
... in vain, and old nursie had enough to do with Miss Connie's baby to heed what the young gentlemen were about, so long as explosions of noise was all the mischief. Walter, the man-servant, who had been with us ten years, and was the main prop of the establishment, looking after everything and putting his hand to everything, with an indefinite charge ranging from the nursery to the wine-cellar, and from the corn-bin to the pig-trough, and who, as we could not possibly get on without him, sat on the box of the post-chaise ...
— The Seaboard Parish Volume 1 • George MacDonald
... well joined together at their ends. Tiles of less perfect form had better be an inch and a half or even two inches in diameter; but, as a rule, they should not be of a larger size, for the reason that the amount of water that they may be expected to carry will not be sufficient to keep them prop erly freed from silt unless the flow is concentrated ...
— Village Improvements and Farm Villages • George E. Waring
... as if I had lost a stay or prop," replied Mrs. Seagrave. "So accustomed have I been to look to him for advice since we have been on this island. Had he not been thus snatched from us - had he been spared to us a few years, and had we been permitted to surround his death-bed, and close his ...
— Masterman Ready • Captain Marryat
... the dogged male determination to over-ride all obstacles, whether feminine or financial. And pretty Belinda Bolingbroke, being alone and unsupported by other suitors at the instant, had entwined herself instinctively around the nearest male prop that offered. It had been one of those marriages of opposites which people (ignoring the salient fact that love has about as much part in it as it has in the pursuit of a spring chicken by a hawk) speak of with sentiment as ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... life and all; pardon not that: You take my house when you do take the prop That doth sustain my house; you take my life When you do take ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... peril in the case. If the Tritons of the Solway shall proceed to pull down honest Joshua's tide-nets, I am neither Quixote enough in disposition, nor Goliath enough in person, to attempt their protection. I have no idea of attempting to prop a falling house by putting my shoulders against it. And indeed, Joshua gave me a hint that the company which he belongs to, injured in the way threatened (some of them being men who thought after the fashion of the world), would pursue the rioters ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... old dog, Colonel Mapleson. Nilsson had but one rival, and she was Mme. Patti. Her Colonel Mapleson had secured; not only her, but, report said, Scalchi, Tremelli, and Tamagno also. Mme. Scalchi had been a strong prop of the first Metropolitan season, and Tremelli and Tamagno, though they had not been heard in America, had names to conjure with. Tremelli never came, and it was not until 1890, when Mr. Abbey was ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... 'Oh! The revered prop of the state soars so far above my head that I did not know what he might regard as ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... managed to prop a sack against the small cobwebbed window, fastened the door with a rusty bolt, and brought out an electric torch he always carried ...
— Harvest • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... which makes for peace of mind and happiness. Let this miserable affair be a warning to you, Andre. You are, yourself, too prone to these new-fashioned speculations upon a different constitution of the social order. You see what comes of it. A fine, estimable young man, the only prop of his widowed mother too, forgets himself, his position, his duty to that mother—everything; and goes and gets himself killed like this. It is infernally sad. On my soul it is sad." He produced a handkerchief, and blew his ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... Canada {146} had her share in it. As a demonstration of general British superiority in manufactures the Great Exhibition was a great success; but as heralding an era of universal peace it was a mournful failure. Three years later England, France, and Sardinia were fighting Russia to prop the rotten empire of the Turk. Then came the Great Mutiny; then the four years of fratricidal strife between the Northern and Southern States; then the war of Prussia and Austria; then the overthrow of France by Germany. All these ...
— The Winning of Popular Government - A Chronicle of the Union of 1841 • Archibald Macmechan
... shalt not have these staves henceforth to prop Thy roaming to and fro. Take thine own way! Since thou hast chosen to thwart thy nearest kin,— Beneath whose orders, though a royal man, I act herein,—and thine own native land. The time will surely ...
— The Seven Plays in English Verse • Sophocles
... dear Peter, you never supposed I thought I was doing anything legal, did you? No, no; the moral part of it has been my prop and stay all along, and that still holds. I promised without conditions, and I'll go ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... an unregarded and negligible spectator. I presume he missed Johnny's hand in Albert's, and Johnny's pressure on Albert's shoulder—the one with the stain; and I hope he did. It was the hand of the stronger, taking possession. "My prop, my future mainstay!" ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller
... critic dissect a whole system after proving that its premises are rotten. I shall accordingly confine myself to a few of the points that captivate beginners most; and assume that if they break down, so must the system which they prop. ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... an age when, life having lost all its sweets for them, they lived but in the happiness and in the presence of their boy, and, like weak plants drooping toward the earth, were kept from falling only by the young and vigorous prop beside them? ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... which, under any form of government, are inauspicious to liberty, and which are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty. In this sense it is that your union ought to be considered as a main prop of your liberty, and that the love of the one ought to endear to you the preservation of ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Lincoln - Section 1 (of 2) of Volume 6: Abraham Lincoln • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... here, monsieur," Adolphe said eagerly; "I have an idea! The hatches are covered with tarpaulin. If you could hide in the forecastle during the night you might cut away all the top underneath the tarpaulin and prop it up, so that if anyone trod on it in the morning they would not notice what had been done. Then when they have pushed off you could knock away the props, the board would tumble down, and there would be only the tarpaulin cover ...
— In the Reign of Terror - The Adventures of a Westminster Boy • G. A. Henty
... sure I do; let me breathe it in. Prop me up in bed, Nora. They said I was to lie flat on my back, but, bedad! I won't now that you ...
— Light O' The Morning • L. T. Meade
... Besides, the moonlight was bright enough in all conscience. Then I scooped that awful thing up in th' spade. I had a sight o' trouble doin' it. It slid off, and tipped over, and I couldn't bear Ev'n to touch it with my foot to prop it, But I done it somehow. Then I carried it off be'ind the barn, Clost to an old apple-tree Where you couldn't see from the house, An' I buried ...
— Men, Women and Ghosts • Amy Lowell
... the car and laid him back on the cushions; the boys rolled up the rugs, and their coats to prop him up. Again he opened ...
— The Boy Scouts on a Submarine • Captain John Blaine
... pull out, everything will go. The opposition needs only something like this. Besides, the GG is the one bit of insanity I can depend on in a practical world, the prop ...
— Question of Comfort • Les Collins
... slow as I come near him, leaning on one arm and trying to set up. The other arm hung loose and helpless. Half setting up that-away he made a feel at his belt with his good hand, as I come near. But that good arm was his prop, and when he took it off the ground he fell back. His hand come ...
— Danny's Own Story • Don Marquis
... all clothing except his shirt, stockings and napkin; change his position sometimes and let him lie on his stomach for awhile. Of course this exercise cannot be taken after a meal and before the fourth month. Take a large clothes basket, put a blanket and some large pillows in it and prop baby up in a half sitting position for a little while each day, beginning with fifteen minutes, then one-half hour, and you can also at this time (fourth month) play with baby for a short time every day, but never just before bedtime, and the ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... that she did not believe that he was dead! She knew that she had hope. With hope, a single thought possessed her. She must take him down the mountain.... But how? She could not carry him;—she had managed to prop him up against her knee, his blond head lolling forward, awfully, on his breast—but she knew that to carry him would be impossible. And Lion was not there! "I couldn't have harnessed him ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... of Me, he calls them, perhaps because they are not in the least melancholy—a good and sufficient reason. Yet Mr. Sothern strangely neglects the subject of sundials in his book, although they were his prop in how many a play back in the golden Nineties!—the golden, promise-laden, contradictory Nineties, that fin-de-siecle decade when Max Nordau thundered that we were going to the dogs of degeneracy, and we youngsters knew that we ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... chance avenged Pons for the indifference of womankind by finding him a prop for his declining years, as the saying goes; and he, who had been old from his cradle, found a support in friendship. Pons took to himself the only life-partner permitted to him among his kind—an old man ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... gardener also, Carved by the winter fire in nights of gloomy November, And through many a long, long night of many a dark December. 21 The good man's heart was glad, and his eyes were suffus'd with a rapture Of perfect love as they settled on her—that pulse of his heart's blood, The one sole prop of his house, the beautiful Anna Louisa. By the side of himself sate his wife, that ancient tamer of housemaids,[12] Yet kind of heart as a dove, and with matron graces adorning Her place as she sate dispensing hospitality boundless To the strangers within her gates; for, lo! two strangers ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... and baseness. Sick, chilled, withering at heart, Glendower leaned against the damp wall; as every word which the tempter fondly imagined was irresistibly confirming his purpose, tore away the last prop to which, in the credulity of hope, the student had clung, and mocked while it crushed the fondness ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... are now very anxious to come to some amicable understanding with the Government, and, if possible, to prop up the concern. They are very angry with their more violent compeers (Grote, Leader, &c.), and Fonblanque told me last night that they would take the slightest concessions, the least thing that would satisfy their constituencies, but that something they must have, and ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... Toodleism! No, I expect you didn't; but let me put you next, son: there's more 'isms and 'pathys and 'ists floatin' around these days, than any one head can keep track of. I don't know much about the lot; but this Toodleism's a punk proposition. Besides leavin' me with a game prop, it come near ...
— Odd Numbers - Being Further Chronicles of Shorty McCabe • Sewell Ford
... another question arises; whether this House stands firm upon its ancient foundations, and is not, by time and accidents, so declined from its perpendicular as to want the hand of the wise and experienced architects of the day to set it upright again, and to prop and buttress it up for duration;—whether it continues true to the principles upon which it has hitherto stood;—whether this be de facto the Constitution of the House of Commons as it has been ...
— Thoughts on the Present Discontents - and Speeches • Edmund Burke
... because they are worthy of it; from them we can learn the secrets of man's true welfare. Morality is, indeed, older than religion. It develops to a certain point, and in some cases very highly, without the concept of God. It has an and needs no supernatural prop. Religion is not the root of morality, but its flower and consummation. The finest ideals, the loftiest heights of morality, merge into religion; but even these spiritual ideals have their ultimate root in the common soil of human welfare, ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... age which has utterly passed away? If there is any building in the world which belongs wholly to the past, towards which the duty of the present is simply to preserve, to guard every stone, to prop if need be, but to disturb nothing, to stay from falling as long as human power can stay it, but to abstain from supplanting one jot or one tittle of the ancient work by the most perfect of modern copies—it is surely the donjon-keep of Falaise. But, ...
— Sketches of Travel in Normandy and Maine • Edward A. Freeman
... wicked in the times, and cheatery rampant indeed," I thought, "when the common gibbet of Inneraora has a drunkard's convoy on either hand to prop it up." ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... said as Bessie put out her arm for the bowl, "you prop up his head. I've got a steddyer hand: you'd just spill it all ...
— On the Church Steps • Sarah C. Hallowell
... One reeling, and ready to fall at the least touch; also the childish amusement of riding upon the two ends of a plank, poised upon the prop underneath its centre, called also see-saw. Perhaps tatter is a rustic pronunciation ...
— 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue • Captain Grose et al.
... historians. This puts me in mind of what happened at Sinope. {20a} When the Corinthians heard that Philip was going to attack them, they were all alarmed, and fell to work, some brushing up their arms, others bringing stones to prop up their walls and defend their bulwarks, every one, in short, lending a hand. Diogenes observing this, and having nothing to do (for nobody employed him), tucked up his robe, and, with all his might, fell a rolling his tub which he lived in up and down the Cranium. {20b} ...
— Trips to the Moon • Lucian
... influence decreased, and X.'s enthusiasm abated. X. then frequented the Elysee, but without giving his adherence. He promised his support to General Bedeau, who counted upon him. At daybreak on the 2d of December some one came to waken X. It was Edgar Ney. X. was a prop for the coup d'etat, but would he consent? Edgar Ney explained the affair to him, and left him only after seeing him leave the barracks of the Rue Verte at the head of the first regiment. X. took up his position at the Place de la Madeleine. As he arrived there La Rochejaquelein, thrust back ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... work we discern most distinctly in the constant, often—most decidedly, doubtless, in the case of the Aquitanian expedition (III. XI. The Censorship A Prop of the Nobility)— not successful, justification of every single act of war as a defensive measure which the state of things had rendered inevitable. That the adversaries of Caesar censured his attacks on the Celts ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... find himself confronted with the alternative of governing those who are not Siegfrieds or risking destruction at their hands. And this dilemma will persist until Wotan's inspiration comes to our governors, and they see that their business is not the devising of laws and institutions to prop up the weaknesses of mobs and secure the survival of the unfittest, but the breeding of men whose wills and intelligences may be depended on to produce spontaneously the social well-being our clumsy laws now aim at and miss. The majority of men at present in Europe have no business ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw
... owner, he slipped off his own sun-faded coat and rolled the sleeves of his flannel shirt above his elbows, and then, with shoulder thrusting up; and arms straining, he heaved the car high enough so that the flabby gentleman could set the prop under the axle. And when the gentleman began to dust his gloves and to search for spots on his gray immaculateness, Farr dug tools from the box and proceeded to the work ...
— The Landloper - The Romance Of A Man On Foot • Holman Day
... way o' dyin' an' leavin' prop'ty, hit mought suit white folks, but it don't become our complexioms, some way; an' de mo' I thought about havin' to die ter give de onlies' gran'son I got de onlies' prop'ty I got, de miser'bler I got, tell I couldn't stan' it ...
— Solomon Crow's Christmas Pockets and Other Tales • Ruth McEnery Stuart
... by numbers, and by new laws, to establish a new State. Comrades, do not follow this line of march, for we would perish in following it in Belgium or in France as elsewhere. Rather let us leave these governments to rot away and not prop them up with our morality. This is the reason: the International is and must be a State within States. Let these States march on as they like, even to the point where our State is the strongest. Then, on their ruins, we will place ours, all prepared, ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... Houstonville, where they stopped at the post office to leave the mail, and where two ladies appeared as claimants for seats in the stage. The driver at first demurred; but, finding the ladies persistent, he drew forth a board, and, fastening it at either end to a perpendicular prop, constructed a third bench, on which the two ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various
... Of his unfitness for the frying-pan. That controversy made it plain That letting go a good secure, In hope of future gain, Is but imprudence pure. The fisherman had reason good— The troutling did the best he could— Both argued for their lives. Now, if my present purpose thrives, I'll prop my former proposition By building on a small addition. A certain wolf, in point of wit The prudent fisher's opposite, A dog once finding far astray, Prepared to take him as his prey. The dog his leanness pled; 'Your lordship, sure,' he said, 'Cannot be ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... coats of mail, lances, pikes, halberts, brown bills, batterdashers, bucklers, and the modern colivers and petronils (in King Charles I.'s time) turned into muskets and pistols. Then were entails in fashion, (a good prop for monarchy). Destroying of manors began temp. Henry VIII., but now common; whereby the mean people live lawless, nobody to govern them, they care for nobody, having no dependance on anybody. By this method, ...
— Miscellanies upon Various Subjects • John Aubrey
... weakness consequent on protracted suffering, she had begun to fancy that the loss of Phemy was a punishment upon them for deserting the conventicle. Also the schoolmaster was under an interdict, and that looked like a judgment too! She must find some prop for the faith that was now shaking like a reed in the wind. So to the Baillies' Barn she ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... of the document, except the remark in a note that "the objections which have been urged against this narrative are not serious." [135:1] They have been considered so by men like Keim, Schuerer, Lipsius, and Holtzmann. The account has too much need to be propped up itself to be of much use as a prop for the Gospels. Dr. Lightfoot points out that an "idea of literal conformity to the life and Passion of Christ runs through the document," [135:2] and it is chiefly on the fact that "most of the incidents have their counterparts in the circumstances of the Passion, as recorded by the synoptic ...
— A Reply to Dr. Lightfoot's Essays • Walter R. Cassels
... familiar, but suggested gods instead of men. The force that moved the rock had plainly come from the north. I thought of a similar boulder I had seen not long before on the highest point of the Shawangunk Mountains in New York, one side of which is propped up with a large stone, as wall-builders prop up a rock to wrap a chain around it. The rock seems poised lightly, and has but a few points of bearing. In this instance, too, the power had come from ...
— Birds and Bees, Sharp Eyes and, Other Papers • John Burroughs
... not much of a center, Miss Dawes alighted from the buggy and entered a building bearing a sign with the words "Metropolitan Variety Store, Joshua Atwood, Prop'r, Groceries, Coal, Dry Goods, Insurance, Boots and Shoes, Garden Seeds, etc." A smaller sign beneath this was lettered "Justice of the Peace," and one below that ...
— Cy Whittaker's Place • Joseph C. Lincoln
... and betray; the business men, drawn more or less into the vortex of dissipation; the miners from the creeks, the Man with the Poke, here to-day, gone, to-morrow, and of them all the most worthy of respect. He was the prop and mainstay of the town. It was like a vast trap set to catch him. He would "blow in" brimming with health and high spirits; for a time he would "get into the game;" sooner or later he would cut loose and "hit the high ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... how happy was she, who from her childhood had taken it upon herself to be always strong, and self-reliant, to feel herself the weaker, and to be permitted to trust in a stronger arm than her own. Somewhat thus a young rose-tree might feel, which for the first time receives the support of the prop to which it is tied ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... of egg so as to form a thick batter, and then add two table-spoonfuls of the best fresh yeast. Cover it, and let it stand all night. In the morning, take a hoe-iron (such as are made purposely for cakes) and prop it before the fire till, it is well heated. Then flour a tea-saucer, and filling it with batter, shake it about, and clap it to the hoe, (which must be previously greased,) and the batter will adhere, till it is baked. Repeat ...
— Directions for Cookery, in its Various Branches • Eliza Leslie
... more pressing debt to the country by levelling with the dust at least one insolent and murderous Invader;—these have attested the efficacy of the passions which we have been contemplating—that the will of good men is not a vain impulse, heroic desires a delusive prop;—have proved that the condition of human affairs is not so forlorn and desperate, but that there are golden opportunities when the dictates of justice may be unrelentingly enforced, and the beauty of the inner mind substantiated ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... unspeakable thankfulness. No fate on earth was so dreadful but that it would be somewhat alleviated by the fact of his presence: just the sight of him, standing beside her, put her in some vague way out of Ray's power to harm. Exhausted, reeling, he was still the prop of ...
— The Sky Line of Spruce • Edison Marshall
... must be taken of the common native habit (not one to be imitated by Europeans learning the language) of inserting in a sentence words which have no meaning to fill a temporary hiatus while the speaker is thinking of his next word. These prop-words or pillow-words, to borrow a Hindustani phrase,[2] are numerous in Malay and vary in different localities. Anu, bahasa-nia, misal[3]-nia, and kata-kan are ...
— A Manual of the Malay language - With an Introductory Sketch of the Sanskrit Element in Malay • William Edward Maxwell
... an offer at the Hippodrome to walk in front of an Elephant, waving a prop Palm, but she spurned it, because she was ready to do ...
— Knocking the Neighbors • George Ade
... been true and manly one evening, he might have secured a prop that would have kept him up, though it would have been ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... was revived, and it became manifest that the prop upon which she had leaned had been slipped from under her. The spirit which had made her strong to endure the death of her boy failed when the sordid bald truth of a miserable and horrible waste of life gave the lie to the ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... won, which aye love worketh at! It is but as the pedigree Of perfectness which is to be That our best good can honour claim; Yet honour to deny were shame And robbery: for it is the mould Wherein to beauty runs the gold Of good intention, and the prop That lifts to the sun the earth-drawn crop Of human sensibilities. Such honour, with a conduct wise In common things, as, not to steep The lofty mind of love in sleep Of over much familiarness; Not ...
— The Victories of Love - and Other Poems • Coventry Patmore
... I have; but a widow's eldest son is always her prop. Kester is a mere boy; he cannot ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... the sky in Henchard's eyes; his exertions for Farfrae's good had been in vain. Over this repentant sinner, at least, there was to be no joy in heaven. He cursed himself like a less scrupulous Job, as a vehement man will do when he loses self-respect, the last mental prop under poverty. To this he had come after a time of emotional darkness of which the adjoining woodland shade afforded inadequate illustration. Presently he began to walk back again along the way by which he had arrived. Farfrae should at all events have no reason for ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... minister to the male communicants alone, but we think that every baptized adult person who contributes to the maintenance, should have a vote in electing." [Footnote: History of Brattle St. Church, p. 25, Prop. 16.] ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... Snawdor's prompt offer of hospitality and come across the hall for his meals. At the end of the week he had been allowed to show his gratitude by paying the rent, and by the end of the month he had become the chief prop of the family. It is difficult to conceive of an Atlas choosing to burden himself with the world, but there are temperaments that seek responsibilities just as there are those, like Mr. Snawdor, who ...
— Calvary Alley • Alice Hegan Rice
... would not have you to spare: let nothing be omitted that can preserve Mrs. Boswell, though it should be necessary to transplant her for a time into a softer climate. She is the prop and stay of your life. How much must your children suffer by ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... so much as fom'ly, sah! Yo' see, de Kernel's prop'ty lies in de ole parts ob de town, where de po' white folks lib, and dey ain't reg'lar. De Kernel dat sof' in his heart, he dare n' press 'em; some of 'em is ole fo'ty-niners, like hisself, sah; and some is Spanish, ...
— A Ward of the Golden Gate • Bret Harte
... Kept and Baited, Vehicles at all hours, Funeral Attendance a Specialty; and the two-inch notice of the American Pantorium and Pressing Club, Membership $1.00 per Month, Garments Called For and Delivered, Phone No. 41, M. Pincus, Prop. He was like a miser with a loaf; no crumb, however tiny, got away from him. To him there was more of absorbing interest in the appearance of the seventeen-year locust in Chittenden County than in a Balkan outbreak; less of interest in the failing state of health of the Czar than ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... is much as usual. There remains, I believe, to be considered only R. L. S., the house-bond, prop, pillar, bread-winner, and bully of the establishment. Well, I do think him much better; he is making piles of money; the hope of being able to hire a yacht ere long dances before his eyes; otherwise he is not in very high spirits at this particular moment, ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... headquarters-on-the-field at the head of Shonoho Canyon; and at that hour Evan Blount, blinking dizzily, and with his head bandaged and throbbing as if the premier company of all the African tom-tom symphonists were making free with it, was letting Mrs. Honoria beat up his pillows and prop him with them, so that the drum-beating clamor might be minimized ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... hay, now approaching, 400 And high on its summit A soldier is sitting. He's known to the peasants For twenty versts round. And, cosy beside him, Justinutchka sits (His niece, and an orphan, His prop in old age). He now earns his living By means of his peep-show, 410 Where, plainly discerned, Are the Kremlin and Moscow, While music plays too. The instrument once Had gone wrong, and the soldier, No capital owning, Bought three metal spoons, Which he beat to make music; But the words ...
— Who Can Be Happy And Free In Russia? • Nicholas Nekrassov
... of France! behold them start Nor shed one teardrop, as your ships depart. Ye love-charmed bowers of Spain! your Houris' eyes Are rayless now—for brighter lustre vies! Ye, boundless plains, and giant hills, that rise In craggy pride, and prop Columbia's skies, Ye view your maddened sons, with guilty haste, Roll from your shores and tempt the watery waste— Forgotten every claim that Virtue knows, Despised the scenes, where early childhood rose, Swift to the land of gold, they, ...
— Lays of Ancient Virginia, and Other Poems • James Avis Bartley
... under, dropping away like side curls; such a little path that I was wondering how a great lord could walk over it. Then we came down a steep place to a narrow bridge across a shallow river—abridge made of only two planks and a rail, with a prop or two to carry them. And one end of the handrail was fastened into a hollow and stubby old hawthorn-tree, overhanging the bridge and the water a good way. And just above this tree, and under its shadow, there came a dry cut into the ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... denied that support. The artist wondered if Kate had guessed her brother's secret, or if she were still the dupe of his stoicism. Stanwell was sure that the sculptor would take no one into his confidence, and least of all his sister, whose faith in his artistic independence was the chief prop of that tottering pose. Kate's penetration was not great, and Stanwell recalled the incredulous smile with which she had heard him defend poor Mungold's "sincerity" against Caspar's assaults; but she had the insight of the heart, and where her brother's happiness was concerned she ...
— The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... side of the dilemma, and be Robert Skill in earnest. What would Robert Skill have done? How does a gentleman dispose of a dead body, honestly come by? He remembered the inimitable story of the hunchback; reviewed its course, and dismissed it for a worthless guide. It was impossible to prop a corpse on the corner of Tottenham Court Road without arousing fatal curiosity in the bosoms of the passers-by; as for lowering it down a London chimney, the physical obstacles were insurmountable. To get it on board a train and drop it out, or on the top of an omnibus ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... God is nigh, my faith is strong, His arm is my almighty prop: Be glad, my heart; rejoice, my tongue, My dying flesh shall ...
— The Psalms of David - Imitated in the Language of The New Testament - And Applied to The Christian State and Worship • Isaac Watts
... Cornishman scornfully; "put that sore prop away; you're talking to men, not a set of bairns. Think they're going to be gammoned by ...
— To Win or to Die - A Tale of the Klondike Gold Craze • George Manville Fenn
... were styled "sons of gods," and "fathers of gods to come," could exercise the same power over their own fortunes which they did over those of others? The Emperor Augustus lost his children and his grandchildren, and after all the family of Caesar had perished was obliged to prop his empty house by adopting a son: yet he bore his losses as bravely as tho he were already personally concerned in the honor of the gods, and as tho it were especially to his interest that no one should complain of the injustice of Heaven. Tiberius Caesar lost ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume II (of X) - Rome • Various
... sunshine of their balconies, With a half-legend of a martyrdom And some weak wine and withered graces before them, Note by their foot the wheel of melody That catches and rolls on the sabbath dance. To drag the steady prop from failing age, Break the young stem that fondness twines around, Widen the solitude of lonely sighs, And scatter to the broad bleak wastes of day The ruins and the phantoms that ...
— Count Julian • Walter Savage Landor
... will knit him a warm jacket," said Mary, "and surely Edmund could help them to prop up ...
— The Carbonels • Charlotte M. Yonge
... more profitable, is the fancy of inventing some share for Shakespeare in the composition of plays which the veriest insanity of conjecture or caprice could not venture to lay wholly to his charge. This fancy, comparatively harmless as it is, requires no ground of proof to go upon, no prop of likelihood to support it; without so much help as may be borrowed from the faintest and most fitful of traditions, it spins its own evidence spider-like out of its own inner conscience or conceit, and proffers it with confident complacency for men's acceptance. Here again I cannot but ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... moorland into a lovely and fertile valley, where, quite unexpectedly, we came upon Bylands Abbey, the rival of Rievaulx, but far more fallen into decay. It stood alone in the midst of the wide valley; no caretaker hindered our steps to its precincts and no effort had been made to prop its crumbling walls or to stay the green ruin creeping over it. The fragment of its great eastern window, still standing, was its most imposing feature and showed that it had been a church of no mean architectural pretension. The locality, ...
— British Highways And Byways From A Motor Car - Being A Record Of A Five Thousand Mile Tour In England, - Wales And Scotland • Thomas D. Murphy
... up my time. You followed prop'sition. You agreed 'th reasonin'? Now, all I want from you ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... 'Ever bless you, Mas'r Davy, be a friend to him, poor dear!' Then, she immediately ran out of the house to wash her face, in order that she might sit quietly beside him, and be found at work there, when he should awake. In short I left her, when I went away at night, the prop and staff of Mr. Peggotty's affliction; and I could not meditate enough upon the lesson that I read in Mrs. Gummidge, and the new experience she unfolded ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... their trunks is often found in the clays above, squeezed flat in lengths of 30, 60, or 70 feet. Sometimes, instead of being flat the bark is still in the shape of a trunk, and the interior is filled with sane; and then the trunk is very heavy, and if the miners do not prop the roof up well it falls down and kills those beneath it. Stigmaria is the root of the Sigillaria, and is found in the clays below the coal. Botanists are not yet quite certain about the seed-cases of this tree, but Mr. Carruthers believes ...
— The Fairy-Land of Science • Arabella B. Buckley
... blood. But no, I have the king's solemn protestations of repentance; his guilty passion has burned into ashes, and he now sighs—gay Edward—for a lighter fere. I cannot join with Clarence, less can I join with the Lancastrians. My birth makes me the prop of the throne of York,—to guard it as a heritage (who knows?) that may descend to mine,—nay, to me! And, mark me well if Warwick attempt a war of fratricide, he is lost; if, on the other hand, he can submit himself to the hands of Margaret, stained with his father's gore, the success of an ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... (R. C.) Yes, and Catiline too; Though story wrong his fame; for he conspired To prop the reeling glory of his country, ...
— Venice Preserved - A Tragedy in Five Acts • Thomas Otway
... passing a tree against which several rifles had been placed he could not resist the temptation to take one. Laying hold of that which stood nearest, and which seemed to be similar in make to the rifle they had taken from himself when he was captured, he drew it towards him. Unfortunately it formed a prop to several other rifles, which fell with a crash, and one of ...
— Twice Bought • R.M. Ballantyne |
