"Rafter" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... with the insurrectos against the troops of Diaz, while they themselves were supposed to be more of the same brand. Evidently they had been expected by Ramon's subterranean river, and in taking the boat they must have forestalled the real Con Divver, Jim Hickey, and Ted Rafter. Jack caught himself wondering how long it would take the latter to ride over the ...
— The Border Boys Across the Frontier • Fremont B. Deering
... shingle-splitting; he had had a year or two at sawing, too, but after he was married he dropped that. But I've heard mother say that he took great pride in the hut when he brought her to it first, and said it was the best-built hut within fifty miles. He split every slab, cut every post and wallplate and rafter himself, with a man to help him at odd times; and after the frame was up, and the bark on the roof, he camped underneath and finished every bit of it—chimney, flooring, doors, windows, and partitions—by himself. Then he dug up a little garden ...
— Robbery Under Arms • Thomas Alexander Browne, AKA Rolf Boldrewood
... Chinese lantern of yellow silk, decorated with black dragons, with only one tear in its entire circumference, and that one Auntie Gossburger darned so skilfully that nobody noticed the hole. This, Felix, after much consideration, swung to the rafter immediately over the throne, so that its mellow light should fall directly on ...
— Felix O'Day • F. Hopkinson Smith
... plates, formed masses of sickly white, through which rays of light were caught and sent dancing. Along the wall on the left-hand side presses were overcharged with dusty tea-services. On the right were square grey windows, under which the convex sides of salad-bowls sparkled in the sun; and from rafter to rafter, in garlands and clusters like grapes, hung gilded mugs bearing devices suitable for children, and down the middle of the floor a terrace was built ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... saw that by means of some projections and crevices in the rocky wall he could reach the end of the ledge. Creeping along it he soon found himself close to the opening, surrounded by strong light, but effectually concealed from view by the ledge. It was as if he were on a natural rafter, peeping down on the floor below! As there was a multitude of such ledges around, which it would take several men many hours to examine, he began to breathe more freely, for, would the searchers ...
— Charlie to the Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... their invitation, turned to go into the palace, little anticipating the danger that awaited him, for the eldest daughter had drawn up by a chain a huge rafter to let fall and slay Iliya as he rode through the gate. But Iliya perceived her design, and slew her with his lance. Thereupon he rode on toward Kiev, and going straight to the palace, prayed to God and saluted the nobles. And the Prince of ...
— The Russian Garland - being Russian Falk Tales • Various
... requirements. The large ones, which are a very great trouble to build, and which are kept in sheds constructed specially for them, are twenty-six feet long, two and a half wide, and four deep. They are furnished with gimbals, the cross-pieces being connected by a rafter. On the other side there is a small platform, four feet square, and furnished with a roof, under which they are accustomed to keep their provisions. These pirogues have a triangular sail, which is made of matting woven from ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... will rock thee As the storms rock the ravens on high; Bright reason will mock thee Like the sun from a wintry sky. From thy nest every rafter Will rot, and thine eagle home Leave thee naked to laughter, When leaves fall ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... thick grown with bushes. Here, years before I was born, there had once lived a man by the name of Buck, who hanged himself in the garret one day, while his wife was away. It was said she came back just at dusk and found him hanging lifeless from a rafter in the garret. What became of her I never knew, but no one ever lived on the place afterward, and in time the farm and house reverted to the town for taxes. It also soon obtained the reputation of being haunted, and no one ever went ...
— Pocket Island - A Story of Country Life in New England • Charles Clark Munn
... country "Diablerets" close to a rapid mountain stream, which was of a greyish white, like bubbling soap suds. A smaller stream, rushes forth from the rocks on the other side of the river, passes through an enclosed, broad rafter-made-gutter and turns the large wheel of the mill. The gutter was so full of water, that it streamed over and offered a most slippery way, to one who had the idea of crossing more quickly to the mill; ...
— The Ice-Maiden: and Other Tales. • Hans Christian Andersen
... press before him stops the client's pace; The crowd that follows crush his panting sides, And trip his heels; he walks not but he rides. One elbows him, one jostles in the shoal, A rafter breaks his head or chairman's pole; Stockinged with loads of fat town dirt he goes, And some rogue-soldier with his hob-nailed shoes Indents his legs behind in bloody rows. See, with what smoke our doles we celebrate! A hundred guests invited walk ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... and his friend, Mr. Hastings, having waited until they saw the last rafter of unfortunate Reilly's house and premises sink into a black mass of smoking ruins, turned their steps to the parsonage, which they had no sooner entered than they went immediately to Reilly's room, who was still there under concealment. Mr. Brown, however, went out again and returned ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... to impede their way for fully half a mile, and there, in a deep curve down in the valley, in a turgid stream still running fast, lay in wild confusion, baulk and beam, rafter and mass of swept-down stone, the relics of the ...
— Will of the Mill • George Manville Fenn
... general propagation of plants as are needed on a country place of moderate extent. The curvilinear roof gives beauty to the design as well as affording more head room inside than the ordinary straight rafter. ...
— Woodward's Graperies and Horticultural Buildings • George E. Woodward
... deep and drowsy peace, and as they climbed from storey to storey it is doubtful if the children caught their leader's words at all. There were no echoes—the spaces were too vast for that—and they swung away from spar to spar, and from rafter to rafter, as easily as acrobats on huge trapezes. Jimbo and Monkey ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... Stone," also, is in its original place, being so large that it can not be easily removed. Formerly this had a grass roof over it, supported by high poles. When the victim's life was extinct his body was suspended to a rafter or crossbeam at the top of the structure and left there until the flesh had decayed. The bones were then interred on top of the bluff in the rear. It is said that the corpses of chiefs and others of high rank were wrapped in banana leaves and steamed until the flesh fell away. ...
— Archeological Investigations - Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 76 • Gerard Fowke
... beat upon their breasts and blew into their hands for warmth. The house had entirely fallen, the walls outward, the roof in; it was a mere heap of rubbish, with here and there a forlorn spear of broken rafter. A sentinel was placed over the ruins to protect the property, and the party adjourned to Tentaillon's to break their fast at the Doctor's expense. The bottle circulated somewhat freely; and before they left the table it had ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... yawning and passing a hand through his black hair. "Hang them, they might as well shut up their guests in the smoke-house with the bacons and hams! I feel as cured as a side of pig, ready to be hung to a dirty rafter." ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... such acuteness! It was wonderful. I had a seat in the gallery. The grand old hall was a thrilling scene—the dense throng, the upturned faces, the counsel, the judges, the officers of court, and then the windows, the statues, the echo of history that made every stone and rafter live—Oh, Nan, Nan, listen to me! If I live I'll sit on the bench there some day—I will, so help ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... writing this in an old Flemish farmhouse, and the room I'm sitting in has a carved rafter ceiling, red brick floor and nasty purple cabbage wallpaper. All the men of the house with the exception of the old man are at the war; one son has already died. The Germans have been through here. They tied the mayor of the town to a tree and shot him. The trenches have been filled in, all ...
— "Crumps", The Plain Story of a Canadian Who Went • Louis Keene
... the snoring boy, The winding echo of "N-a-n-j-e-m-o-y." All day it follows, all night it whines, From the suck of waters, the moan of pines, And the tread of cavalry following after, The flash of flames on beam and rafter, The shot, the strangle, the crash, the swoon, Scarce break his trance or disturb the croon Of the meaningless notes on his lips which fasten, And the soldier hears, as he seeks to convoy The dying words of the dark assassin, A wandering ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... finished his porridge, he was to go into the barn to thrash. He took one of the rafters from the roof and made a flail out of it, and when the roof was about to fall in, he took a big pine tree with branches and all and put it up instead of the rafter. So he went on thrashing the grain and the straw and the hay all together. This was doing more damage than good, for the corn and the chaff flew about together, and a cloud of dust arose over the ...
— Folk Tales Every Child Should Know • Various
... generation of the same name and line had inhabited it until now. Aunt Faith, exultingly, told each curious visitor that it had been built precisely two hundred and ten years. Out in the back kitchen, or lean-to, was hung to a rafter the identical gun with which the "old settler" had ranged the forest that stretched then from the very door; and higher up, across a frame contrived for it, was the "wooden saddle" fabricated for the back of the placid, ...
— Faith Gartney's Girlhood • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... we presume to say, is inferior in all the true requisites of cheap and substantial building. Light sticks, uninjured by cutting mortices or tenons, a close basket-like manner of construction, short bearings, a continuous support for each piece of timber from foundation to rafter, and embracing and taking advantage of the practical fact, that the tensile and compressible strength of pine lumber is equal to one-fifth of that of wrought iron, constitute ...
— Woodward's Country Homes • George E. Woodward
... chart, the open sky Thy roof and rafter Often, and thou didst learn night's mystery; Learning some tale from each poor passer-by, Some gracious secret for the grand Hereafter. Master of lore Occult, and wanderer on ...
— Souvenir of the George Borrow Celebration - Norwich, July 5th, 1913 • James Hooper
... of body, who feels for every body, and a good deal for herself, is of a certain age, wears well, has some pretensions that she thinks very reasonable still, and a gouty husband. Well! she was talking to Mr. Rafter about Captain Mawhood a little before he died. "Pray, Sir, does the Captain ever communicate his writings to Mrs. Mawhood?" "Oh, dear no, Madam; he has a sovereign contempt for her understanding." "Poor woman!" "And pray, Sir,- - give me leave ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... A valiant friend, and mindful of thy love. She spake; nor made she victory as yet Entire his own, proving the valour, first, Both of the sire and of his glorious son, But, springing in a swallow's form aloft, Perch'd on a rafter of the splendid roof. Then, Agelaues animated loud The suitors, whom Eurynomus also roused, Amphimedon, and Demoptolemus, And Polyctorides, Pisander named, 280 And Polybus the brave; for noblest far Of all the suitor-chiefs who now survived ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer
... got back was jest a little bit of flour yit. The fences was all tore down, so that there wa'n't one standing, and the rails was burnt up. One shell come into the house and knocked a bedstead all to pieces for me. One come in under the roof and knocked out a rafter for me. The porch was all knocked down. There was seventeen dead horses on my land. They burnt five of 'em around my best peach-tree, and killed it; so I ha'n't no peaches this year. They broke down all my young apple-trees for me. The dead horses sp'iled my spring, so I ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... of the north wall stood a rude writing table on which were a few official papers. Ranged about the room were a dozen or more rawhide-seated chairs, each standing stiffly at "attention" against the wall scrupulously equidistant order. Glaring at me in crude lettering from a broad rafter facing the door was the grimly patriotic sentiment, "Libertad o Muerte." (Liberty or Death!) In the southwest corner of the room stood a low and narrow cot, beneath whose thin serape covering a tall, gaunt cadaverous frame was plainly outlined. From the headpost of the cot dangled ...
— The Red-Blooded Heroes of the Frontier • Edgar Beecher Bronson
... They were soon driven out by the fiery element. The towering flames surmounted every obstruction and rose to the evening skies one huge and burning beacon, seen far and wide through the adjacent country. Tower after tower crashed down, with blazing roof and rafter. ...
— The Literary World Seventh Reader • Various
... night," went on Newt joyously. "From a rafter in Ed Higgins's livery stable. With a clothesline. Kicked a step-ladder out from under himself. Why, even Uncle Dad Simms has heard about it. Ed found him when he went out to—wait a second! I'm goin' your way. What's the rush? He's been dead six or eight hours. He can't ...
— Anderson Crow, Detective • George Barr McCutcheon
... a little boy wouldn't say his prayers,— So when he went to bed at night, away up stairs, His Mammy heerd him holler, an' his Daddy heerd him bawl, An' when they turn't the kivers down, he wasn't there at all! An' they seeked him in the rafter-room, an' cubbyhole, an press, An' seeked him up the chimbly-flue, an' ever'wheres, I guess; But all they ever found was thist his pants an' roundabout! An' the Gobble-uns git you ...
— Childhood's Favorites and Fairy Stories - The Young Folks Treasury, Volume 1 • Various
... in the hall through the night; and when the third part of the night was passed, Grettir heard huge din without, and then one went up upon the houses and rode the hall, and drave his heels against the thatch so that every rafter cracked again. ...
— The Story of Grettir The Strong • Translated by Eirikr Magnusson and William Morris
... thing!" Altamont raged. "'Wielding a gold-plated spade handled with oak from an original rafter of the Congressional Library, at three-fifteen one afternoon last week—' One afternoon last week!" He cursed luridly. "Why couldn't that blasted magazine say what afternoon? I've gone over a lot of twentieth century copies of that magazine; that expression was ...
— The Return • H. Beam Piper and John J. McGuire
... hall are song and laughter, The cheeks of Christmas glow red and jolly, And sprouting is every corbel[22] and rafter With the lightsome green of ivy and holly; Through the deep gulf[23] of the chimney wide 215 Wallows the Yule-log's[24] roaring tide; The broad flame-pennons droop and flap And belly and tug as a flag in the wind; Like a locust shrills the imprisoned ...
— Narrative and Lyric Poems (first series) for use in the Lower School • O. J. Stevenson
... of his guards, huge and distorted, against the woven reed and bamboo walls, their every movement being magnified and strange. In his own part, from time to time he could see the bright green growth that had forced itself through the palm-thatch, and trace every bamboo rafter, save where, in places, all ...
— Middy and Ensign • G. Manville Fenn
... sort of haze, born mostly of horror, but not entirely, I saw Eltham, stripped to the waist and tied, with his arms upstretched, to a rafter in the ancient ceiling. A Chinaman, who wore a slop-shop blue suit and who held an open knife in his hand, stood beside him. Eltham was ghastly white. The appearance of his chest puzzled me momentarily, then I realized that a sort of tourniquet ...
— The Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... when fair and soft, The roof began to mount aloft; Aloft rose every beam and rafter; The ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... hurricane struck the cabin with such force that every plank, rafter, beam, and log was first dislocated and then caught up in the whirlwind and scattered over the forest in the wake of the storm. As the roar of the blast died away the rain commenced pouring in torrents accompanied by vivid flashes of lightning and ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... dread of the power, abhorred by the gods of high heaven, The ruinous curse of the home till roof-tree and rafter be riven! Too true are the visions of ill, too true the fulfilment they bring To the curse that was spoken of old by the frenzy and wrath of the king! Her will is the doom of the children, and Discord ...
— Suppliant Maidens and Other Plays • AEschylus
... pleasant mansion and a strong. A dry ditch was dug deep about it; but it was now choked with masonry, and bridged by a fallen rafter. The two farther walls still stood, the sun shining through their empty windows; but the remainder of the building had collapsed, and now lay in a great cairn of ruin, grimed with fire. Already in the interior a few plants were ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 8 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... him." And when Bill gets his paper back finally—which is often only after much bush grumbling, accusation, recrimination, and denial—he severely and carefully re-arranges theme pages, folds the paper, and sticks it away up over a rafter, or behind a post or batten, or under his pillow where it will safe. He wants that paper ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson
... sixteenths, twelfths, tenths, and eighths of an inch, also a brace-measure, an eight-square measure, and the Essex board-measure. Another style, instead of an Essex board-measure, and the hundredths graduation has a rafter-table. The side upon which the name of the maker is stamped, is called the "face," and the reverse ...
— Handwork in Wood • William Noyes
... more easily, for now you may use a rafter for the fulcrum of your iron lever and pry where the long nails grip the oak too tenaciously, and it is not long before you have the roof unboarded. And here you may have a surprise and be taught a lesson in wariness which you will need if you would survive your ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... advance; for beneath, the wreathed smoke and dim hot fume of the consuming fire told him of certain death; unable to retreat,—for the insidious flame had already destroyed the door which Roupall had failed to move, and danced, like a fiend at play with destruction, from rafter to rafter, and beam to ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... about eighteen inches across; carry it up two feet high, drawing it in a little, then lay a long stone across the front, after which build up {63} the flue behind the corner braces right up to the roof. The top corner-piece carries the rafter that may be cut off to let the flue out. Build the chimney up outside as high as the ...
— Boy Scouts Handbook - The First Edition, 1911 • Boy Scouts of America
... on the rafter gave a low whistle. Through the window he had seen the dim form of the sentry outside approach the space lighted by the rays from the lantern, which he had laid down at a corner of the shed. Before the soldier had time to lift it and throw a beam into the ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang
... hay. He took from his pocket Sue Dawson's letters and the one from Sally and wrapped them in a piece of paper. Then he looked about for a place to hide them. In a corner overhead he saw a jutting rafter, and behind it a dark niche where the shingles sloped to the wall. It was too high for him to reach from the floor, so he placed the table beneath the spot, and, mounting it, pushed the packet tightly into the ...
— Westerfelt • Will N. Harben
... and rafter, And they hang begrimed and black; And stair, and hall, and chapel, Are turn'd to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... turkey in a gunny-sack which hung from a kitchen rafter. Should he leave it in the sack, hang it from a rafter of their veranda, out of reach of a chance bobcat or coyote, or—it would be much more of a real surprise to hang the big bird in front of their door in all his feathered glory. The ...
— Jim Waring of Sonora-Town - Tang of Life • Knibbs, Henry Herbert
... ye!' Puck cried from a rafter overhead. 'See what it is to be beautiful! Sir Harry Dawe—pardon, Hal—says I am the very image of a head for ...
— Puck of Pook's Hill • Rudyard Kipling
... sword dropped from its hook on a rafter, Jane danced in glee and declared "a ghost did it," although Dozia insisted she had cut a piece of cord on that very hook. Finally Jane was "canned," as Dozia described the state of being inside of tin things, and an attempt was ...
— Jane Allen: Junior • Edith Bancroft
... heavy "bents" with long poles. The noise of the men shouting and driving in the wooden pins with great wooden beetles, away up in the beams and stringers, alarmed me a great deal, but it all went up, and then one of the men mounted the plate (the timber on which the foot of the rafter rests) with a bottle in his hand, and swinging it round his head three times, threw it off in the field. If the bottle was unbroken it was an omen of good luck. The bottle, I remember, was picked up whole, and shouts of congratulation followed. Hence, I suppose, the prosperity ...
— Life in Canada Fifty Years Ago • Canniff Haight
... shaping, and the struggle and the strain Of their hands, the deft in labour, they tugged thereat in vain; And still as the shouting and jeers, and the names of men and the laughter Beat backward from gable to gable, and rattled o'er roof-tree and rafter, Moody and still sat Siggeir; for he said: "They have trained me here As a mock for their woodland bondsmen; and yet shall ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs • William Morris
... without delay she went, As her strong passion did her rashly guide, And those bright arms, down from the rafter hent, Within her closet did she closely hide; That might she do unseen, for she had sent The rest, on sleeveless errands from her side, And night her stealths brought to their wished end, Night, patroness of thieves, and ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso
... women with it before. Do you despise her and those others for the predominance of the primal instinct, the sacred passion for the inviolate hearth? Not so much they yearned for the man as for the roof-tree, whose roots are twined about the heart-strings of the natural woman, the spreading rafter-branches of which shelter ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... gazed about and laughed until the echoes rang from rafter to rafter as the eye took in each black-featured, bearded and grubby individual. Stumpy was requested to "leave that foot of fungus on his face, as it hid what for weeks had been an infliction," and to which he cuttingly replied that the other gentleman had ...
— Norman Ten Hundred - A Record of the 1st (Service) Bn. Royal Guernsey Light Infantry • A. Stanley Blicq
... time Penrod returned from chasing Duke to the next corner, Verman had the long, black snake down from the rafter where its active head had taken refuge, with the rest of it dangling; and both boys agreed that Mrs. Williams's cat must certainly be able to "see SOME, anyway", through the meshes of ...
— Penrod and Sam • Booth Tarkington
... never thought of yourself in an individual capacity at all. It was as if you were a private in an army, or a very ordinary billow of the sea, feeling the battle or the storm, in a collective sort of way, but unable to distinguish your sensations from those of the mass. If a rafter had fallen and crushed you and your unimportant row of people, you could scarcely have regarded it as a personal calamity, but might have found it disagreeable as a shock to that great body of humanity. Recall, then, how astonished ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... my long, lean hands and arms, that offended my sense of beauty constantly, as I dwelt on their hopelessly angular turns. I had one beauty; so my little paper-framed glass, that rested on the rough rafter that edged the sloping roof of my garret, told me, whenever I took it down to gaze in it, which, but for that beauty, would have been but seldom. It was a finely cut and firmly set mouth and chin. There was, and I felt it, beauty and character in the curves of the lips, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... lying one night on a wretched bed in a rude hut, while debating in his own mind whether it were not best to enlist in a crusade, when his attention was directed to a spider on the rafters overhead. He saw that the little spinner was trying to swing from one rafter to another, so as to fix his thread across the space. Time and again it tried and failed. Admiring the perseverance of the creature, Bruce began to count the number of times he tried. One, two, three, four, five, six. It ...
— Ten Great Events in History • James Johonnot
... descended from kings; but, as in the case of "The Fair Cuban," he must have added, "African, unfortunately." Did his father perform these mythical feats of strength? did he lift up a horse between his legs while clutching a rafter with his hands? did he throw his regiment before him over a wall, as Guy Heavistone threw the mare which refused the leap ("Memoires," i. 122)? No doubt Dumas believed what he heard about this ancestor—in whom, perhaps, one may see a hint of the giant Porthos. ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... work begin in the still-room. Faithfully did dames and maids gather in field and garden, from early spring to chilly autumn, precious stores for their stills and limbecks. In every garret, from every rafter, slowly swayed great susurrous bunches of withered herbs and simples awaiting expression and distillation, and dreaming perhaps of the summer breezes that had blown through them in the sunny days of their ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... wipe his mustach en study. He 'low ter hisse'f, 'De pot rack know what gwine up de chimbley, de rafters know who's in de loft, de bed-cord know who und' de bed. I ain't no pot-rack, I ain't no rafter, en I ain't no bed-cord, but, please gracious! I'm gwine ter fin' who's in dat house, en I ain't gwine in dar nudder. Dey mo' ways ter fin' out who fell in de mill-pond widout fallin' ...
— The Book of Stories for the Storyteller • Fanny E. Coe
... reckon I had hunted the place over as much as a hundred times; well, I was most all the time at it, because it was about the only way to put in the time. But this time I found something at last; I found an old rusty wood-saw without any handle; it was laid in between a rafter and the clapboards of the roof. I greased it up and went to work. There was an old horse-blanket nailed against the logs at the far end of the cabin behind the table, to keep the wind from blowing through the chinks and putting the candle out. I got under the table and raised the blanket, and went ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... buttresses. There is a small building which abuts on the east, and ranges along the southern side, which was probably the Chapter House of the Nuns. The walls are entire, the roof is of wood, and some of the rafter work is in fair preservation. It is in this building that the remains of Rosamond are supposed to have been deposited, when they were removed from the choir of the church, by the order of Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln, in 1191. On the north wall is painted a pretended copy of her ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 331, September 13, 1828 • Various
... praying, although I could not see them. I did not pray. They were taken and I was left for some purpose, I suppose. My house finally landed up against the stone railway bridge. I was then pinned down to the floor by a heavy rafter or something. Somehow or other I was lifted from the floor and thrown almost out upon the bridge. Then some people got hold of me and pulled me out and took me over to a brickyard. My eyes and nose were full of cinders. After I reached ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... the candle down from the rafter, and she went swiftly to the tiny window. She raised her hand, once, then pinched out the flame ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... Mr. George and his communistic friends, they disbelieve entirely in the principle of private rights in real estate. They will eat their way through the beams of your house till there is only a slender core of solid wood left to support the entire burden. I have taken down a rafter in my own house in Jamaica, originally 18 inches thick each way, with a sound circular centre of no more than 6 inches in diameter, upon which all the weight necessarily fell. With the material extracted from the wooden ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... feebly protested that he could not discharge them. Thereon Ramani Babu ordered him to be hung up. Forthwith, a dozen eager hands were laid on him, a rope was passed under his armpits, and the free end thrown over a rafter of the office. By this means he was hauled from the ground and swung suspended, a butt of sarcasm and abuse for Ramani Babu's myrmidons. After enduring this humiliation for an hour or so, he was let down and a final demand made on him for the arrears ...
— Tales of Bengal • S. B. Banerjea
... woods, to the woods is the wizard gone; In his grotto the maiden sits alone. She gazes up with a weary smile At the rafter-hanging crocodile, The slowly swinging crocodile. Scorn has she of her master's gear, Cauldron, alembic, crystal sphere, Phial, philtre—"Fiddlededee For all such trumpery trash!" quo' she. "A soldier is the lad for me; ...
— Fairies and Fusiliers • Robert Graves
... by the bird's song ye may learn the nest," Said Yniol; "enter quickly." Entering then, Right o'er a mount of newly-fallen stones, The dusky-rafter'd many-cobweb'd hall, He found an ancient dame in dim brocade; And near her, like a blossom vermeil-white,[2] That lightly breaks a faded flower-sheath, Moved the fair Enid, all in faded silk, Her ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 5 • Charles Sylvester
... they now entered extended across the entire east end of the building, and had windows upon three sides. These were heavily curtained. The apartment was lighted by a small cresset hanging from a rafter near ...
— The Outlaw of Torn • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... Works, gives a description of how the roof of a house, 54.6 meters wide, for a gasholder in Berlin, was raised to a height of 22 meters. In that instance the iron structure was put together at the bottom of the tank, leaving the rafter ends and the mural ring. The hoisting itself was effected by means of levers—one to each rafter—connected with the ironwork below by means of iron chains. At the top there were apertures at distances of about 26 mm. from each other, and through these ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 586, March 26, 1887 • Various
... in the chimney, for the night was cool. It filled the room with a gracious heat and with huge, comfortable shadows. Here and there on the wall a tin cup flashed back the radiance of the fire, the barrel of a gun glistened soberly along a rafter, and the long, wiry hair of an otter-skin in the corner sent out little needles of light. Upon the fire a pot was simmering, and a good savour came from it. A wind went lilting by outside the but in tune with the singing of the kettle. The ticking of a huge, old-fashioned repeating-watch ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... accurately the external outline of a pair of rafters (80 inches long each before shaping) and a line joining their lower ends. Then draw a line bisecting the ridge angle. With this template as guide the rafters can be quickly cut to shape. Another method is to cut one rafter out very carefully, making a notch for half the width of the ridge, and to use it as a pattern for the rest. In any case the chalked lines will prove useful in the next operation of pairing the rafters and uniting ...
— Things To Make • Archibald Williams
... shone into the loft revealed, to the boy's surprise and wonder, a coil of rope. He examined this, and found a stout clasp-hook at one end. The other end of the rope was made fast to a rafter. ...
— Frank Merriwell's Bravery • Burt L. Standish
... Spanish defence, this strategic point of all their operations, and their chief hope of success against the revolutionists, was furnished by their despised and hated enemies in the United States. Every sheet of armor plate, every corrugated zinc roof, every roll of barbed wire, every plank, beam, rafter and girder, even the nails that hold the planks together, the forts themselves, shipped in sections, which are numbered in readiness for setting up, the ties for the military railroad which clings to the trocha from one sea to the other—all of these ...
— Cuba in War Time • Richard Harding Davis
... in house construction meets the requirement. It is firmly planted, penetrates flooring, and clutches and holds a rafter ...
— A Little Book of Filipino Riddles • Various
... she ain't much of a ranch now," admitted Jack Harpe. "But everything has to have a beginning. I'm figuring on a right smart growth for the Rafter H within the ...
— The Heart of the Range • William Patterson White
... the ceiling follow the course of the great beams supporting the roof. Till it was resolved to construct this ceiling the beams were exposed, and the whole was open to the leads. Canon Stewart speaks of it as a "remarkable example of a trussed rafter roof of seven cants," and says that such a roof was sometimes called a compass roof. He thinks it might have taken the place of an original roof of the ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Ely • W. D. Sweeting
... having sufficiently watched the rings of smoke flatten themselves against a black, studded rafter, Carter gave a slight rein ...
— Trusia - A Princess of Krovitch • Davis Brinton
... looking as though they had been in the Ashtabula railroad accident. Young Mr. Smith had a stream of dirty water sent up his trousers leg, which went clear up to his collar, and wilted it beyond repair. Mr. Hatch entwined his doeskin pants around the burnt ridge-pole of the roof, hung on to a rafter with his teeth, and chopped shingles, and the pipemen kept him wet, and he looked like a bundle of damp stuff in a paper mill. Mr. Spence was on the top of the ladder, and Mr. Drummond was next below him. In falling, Mr. D. caught hold of one tail of Mr. ...
— Peck's Compendium of Fun • George W. Peck
... blow, blow! Bellows, you must work till the furnace is aglow. Snug is my old smithy when, without, comes down the snow, When sooty wall and rafter in the blaze are all aglow. Blow, blow, blow, blow! What care I if the storm, then, without, be high or ...
— The Nursery, August 1877, Vol. XXII, No. 2 - A Monthly Magazine for Youngest Readers • Various
... been raised from the ground, new sills placed under it, and while every part—scantling, rafter, joist, crossbeam, lath and weatherboard—of the original house has been retained, it has been put in such order that it is no longer ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... several chiefs and their dependants, the labour, though immense, was greatly facilitated by everyone's bringing his post, or his rafter, or his pole strung with thatching, ready for instant use. The materials thus prepared being afterwards secured together by thongs, there was literally "neither hammer, nor axe, nor any tool of iron heard in the house ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... with the wreckage, borne onward by the tide, A loving mother with her babe close sheltered at her side; One hand has grasped a rafter, the other guards her child; Oh, how she pleads with God and man in accents loud and wild! Men hear but give no answer, no human hand can save; Her voice, alas, is hushed in ...
— Gleams of Sunshine - Optimistic Poems • Joseph Horatio Chant
... hand in the household is busily toiling, And hither and thither boys bustle and girls; Whilst, up from the hearth-fires careering and coiling, The smoke round the rafter-beams languidly curls. Let the joys of the revel be parted between us! 'Tis the Ides of young April, the day which divides The month, dearest Phyllis, of ocean-sprung Venus, A day to ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... drearily about them. At a little distance stood a wooden church, black with age, and in a dismal state of ruin and decay, with broken windows, a great rift through the main body of the edifice, and a rafter dangling from the top of the square tower. Farther off was a farm-house, in the old style, as venerably black as the church, with a roof sloping downward from the three-story peak, to within a man's height of the ground. It seemed uninhabited. There were the relics of a wood-pile, ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... herself that he should think so, as all traces of beam and rafter had long since disappeared from the priory and its dependencies. However she followed her conductor, who strode along among the ruins at a pace which it taxed her powers to keep up with. Presently he plunged ...
— The Old Helmet, Volume I • Susan Warner
... America. Sir,—The members of the Traders' Association, Gloucester, England, ask your acceptance of a bound copy of their guide to this ancient and historic City, together with this box made from part of a rafter taken from the room in which Bishop Hooper was lodged the night before his burning, and from oak formerly in old All Saints' Church, as souvenirs of the regard which the association entertains for you and its recognition of your ardent affection for the City of Gloucester, the honored place of ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... gradually back I could distinguish a narrow, dingy cabin, dimly lit by one flickering oil-lamp which swung from a rafter above. Its faint ray just revealed the furniture of the room, which consisted of a seaman's chest standing in the middle, and two gaunt stools. On one of these I was seated, propped against the cabin wall, or rather partition, and as I attempted to move I ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... VP's couldn't make the calf Manley's. If anybody came and saw that cow, why—" Val looked at him rafter pityingly, as if she could not quite understand how he could even question her upon that point. "And, after all," she added forlornly, "he's my husband. I couldn't—I had to do what I could to shield him—just for sake of the past, I suppose. Much as I despise ...
— Lonesome Land • B. M. Bower
... this out. Then he began to drag posts, pieces of rafter and other wreckage over to the cave. He laid the longest pieces sloping against the cave-mouth—he badly wanted his father to be within four walls,—covered them over and filled the gaps with bits of sail-cloth ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... the sou'east. In the nor'west, too, was another floe. 'Twas there, in the mist, an' 'twas comin' down with the wind. It cotched the first of the gale; 'twas free t' move, too. 'Twould overhaul us soon enough. Ever see the ice rafter, sir? No? Well, 'tis no swift collison. 'Tis horrible an' slow. No shock at all: jus' slow pressure. The big pans rear. They break—an' tumble back. Fields—acres big—slip one atop o' the other. Hummocks are crunched t' slush. The big ...
— Harbor Tales Down North - With an Appreciation by Wilfred T. Grenfell, M.D. • Norman Duncan
... suicide ages ago, and thus end the eventful history with a blank page in the middle of the book. I dare say the very bashfulness which has been my bane has prevented me; the idea of being cut down from a rafter, with a black-and-blue face, and drawn out of the water with a swollen one, has put me so out of countenance that I had not the courage to brave a coroner's jury under ...
— The Blunders of a Bashful Man • Metta Victoria Fuller Victor
... clean-winged hearth about, Content to let the north wind roar In baffled rage at pane and door, While the red logs before us beat The frost line back with tropic heat; And ever, when a louder blast Shook beam and rafter as it passed, The merrier up its roaring draft The great ...
— Eighth Reader • James Baldwin
... middle of the room. Backless benches were on both sides of every table. At the end, chairs were placed, the seats of honor for famous Bourgeois. British flags had been draped across windows and colored bunting hung from rafter to rafter. ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut |
