"Boring" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... rifles, tools, boots and shoes, while vast regions which depend upon irrigation are becoming interested in American well-boring outfits. Persia is demanding increasing quantities of American padlocks, sewing- machines and agricultural implements. German, English and American machinery is equipping great cotton factories in Japan. I saw Russian and American oil tins in the remotest ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... answer. Work must to some extent interest; if it bores, no power on earth will keep a man doing it properly. And the tendency of modern industrialism has been to subdivide processes and make work more boring and irksome. Also the workman must be satisfied with the living he is getting, and the tendency of newspaper, theatre, cinematograph show and so forth is to fill his mind with ideas of ways of living infinitely more agreeable and interesting than his own. Habit also ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... weakness which has been revealed in tests of columns whenever destructive tests of such columns have been made. The better way is to arrange a lathe with a hollow headstock and a guide which will carry a pod-auger boring in from one end. This will define the axis of the column whether it is to be turned or left square. Near each end, say five inches, a couple of transverse holes generally five-eighth of an inch in diameter are bored. This arrangement is to reduce ...
— The American Architect and Building News, Vol. 27, No. 733, January 11, 1890 • Various
... am"—he was abreast of him now, his eyes boring into his—"just as long as he wishes to stay, which I hope will be all his life, or until you have learned to be decent to him. And by decency, I mean companionship, and love, and tenderness—three things which your damned, high-toned notions have always deprived ...
— Kennedy Square • F. Hopkinson Smith
... terrifying. His earlier and later experiences came up before him, fragmentary, incoherent, chaotic even, but vivid as reality. He was at the bottom of a coal-mine in one of those long, narrow galleries, or rather worm-holes, in which human beings pass a large part of their lives, like so many larvae boring their way into the beams and rafters of some old building. How close the air was in the stifling passage through which he was crawling! The scene changed, and he was climbing a slippery sheet of ice with desperate effort, his foot on the floor of a shallow niche, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... concentric furrows. The hinge-line is long and straight, with numerous pits for the attachment of the ligament which serves to open the shell. Some of the Inocerami attain a length of two or three feet, and fragments of the shell are often found perforated by boring Sponges. Another extraordinary family of Bivalves, which is exclusively confined to the Cretaceous rocks, is that of the Hippuritidoe. All the members of this group (fig. 199) were attached to foreign objects, and lived associated in beds, like Oysters. ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... The sky is grey. There is a cold, unpleasant wind that reminds one of Moscow. It is dull. I wait for the church bells and go to late Mass. In the cathedral it is all very charming, decorous, and not boring. The choir sings well, not at all in a plebeian style, and the congregation entirely consists of young ladies in olive-green dresses ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... resolved upon a little trip, partly for the purpose of looking into some small investments of their own, and partly for the fun of the thing. What funny experiences they had! How, in particular, one horrid inquisitive, vulgar wretch had been boring a European fellow passenger who was going to Hymettus, finally asking him where he had come from last, and when he answered "Hymettus," thought the man was ...
— The Three Partners • Bret Harte
... Owl saw them laughing at him, but he could think of nothing but the sharp eyes of old Mother Nature boring straight through him, and he danced faster than ever. The faster he danced the funnier he looked, and the funnier he looked the harder the little ...
— Mother West Wind's Children • Thornton W. Burgess
... and Mme. Necker, far from boring each other, were quite unfashionably happy in their married life, some part of which was passed at Coppet, which M. Necker bought at the time of ...
— In Chteau Land • Anne Hollingsworth Wharton
... interesting, fascinating and certainly unusual story, in which only two characters are of any real moment, Cecilia, the imperfect mother, embodiment of the artist temperament, egotistical almost to inhumanity, who abandons her dull husband and boring daughters to "live her own life"; and Stephen, the son, who alone can give her a half-sympathetic, half-resentful understanding. You see already the cleverness of Mr. BERESFORD'S conception. Really, it is just this that works (at least ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 31, 1920 • Various
... for the swarm of people about one that are for ever insisting on one's saying so. Between hotel-keeper and carmen and boatmen and guides that describe to my honour the scenery, and young girls that insist on my honour taking a taste of the goats' milk, and a thousand other creatures that insist on boring me and being paid for it, I am really thankful every night when I get to my room and find all the pieces of me safe in their places. However, I shall do very well when I get to my lodge, and in the meantime I am contented to do ill. I have hopes ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... forms presented by the smaller ivory vases are also to be found in vases made of those refractory stones. Further, the vases made of stone present not merely such forms as might be made by turning or boring, but there are also bowls with ribs which are as finely polished as the turned bowls. The hardest material used in the objects already found is rock crystal, of which several small flasks and bowls and a little lion are composed. But the lion, it must be ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1178, June 25, 1898 • Various
... a new feeling; a shiver ran through her veins as if the cold breath of a spirit of evil had passed over her. A miner, boring down into the earth, strikes a hidden stone that brings him to a dead stand. So Angelique struck a hard, dark thought far down in the depths of her secret soul. She drew it to the light, and gazed on it shocked ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... the nose appears to us perfectly unnecessary. The Peruvians, however, think otherwise; and they hang on it a weighty ring, the thickness of which is proportioned by the rank of their husbands. The custom of boring it, as our ladies do their ears, is very common in several nations. Through the perforation are hung various materials; such as green crystal, gold, stones, a single and sometimes a great number of gold rings.[65] This is rather troublesome to them in blowing their noses; and the fact is, as some ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... nitela, Guenee.)—This larva (Fig. 2,) commonly burrows in the large stalks of the potato. It occurs also in the stalks of the tomato, in those of the dahlia and aster, and other garden flowers. It is sometimes found boring through the cob of growing Indian corn. It is particularly partial to the stem of the common cocklebur, (Zanthium sirumarium;) and if it would only confine itself to such noxious weeds, it might be considered more of a friend than an enemy. It is yearly becoming ...
— The $100 Prize Essay on the Cultivation of the Potato; and How to Cook the Potato • D. H. Compton and Pierre Blot
... was young Mr. Bear, boring a hole in the wind, and behind him two boys, coming strong, but not in his class for speed. Our quarry gained one block in three. We just rounded a barn in time to see him jump into a wood shed ...
— Red Saunders' Pets and Other Critters • Henry Wallace Phillips
... powerful one. The same writer, in hunting down an unworthy man, with his cutting criticism, says, that he did it not on account of his power, but to put down what might prove noisome if not settled, much as a Dutch burgomaster might hunt a rat, not for its value, but because by its boring it might cause the water to break through his dikes, and thus flood ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... once offered to make a boring by means of which it would be possible to communicate with the galleries in which the men were imprisoned, but, despite the most active efforts, success was found impossible. In order to satisfy public opinion, the committee resolved to bore a well 12 inches in diameter to a depth of 23 ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 561, October 2, 1886 • Various
... apt to be overshadowed by those of the general disease from which the patient suffers. At first the gland is swollen, hard, and tender, and the seat of constant, dull, boring pain; later there is redness, oedema, and fluctuation. The movements of the jaw are restricted and painful, the patient is unable to open the mouth, and has difficulty in swallowing. The inflammation reaches its height on the third or fourth day, ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles
... produced with something like pre-war attention to aesthetic appearance—a pleasant quarto with roomy pages faithfully printed in a fair type. You ought to enjoy the owner's evident enjoyment (he was never bored and therefore never boring), his charmingly ingenuous pride of possession, his shrewd, humorous and excessively didactic utterances about painters, pictures, architecture and female beauty, his zeal for water-colour sketching and his apparently profound contempt of other exponents of the craft. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 21, 1920 • Various
... the church on the right was grey; it was all there, in short—it was what he wanted: it was Tremont Street, it was France, it was Lambinet. Moreover he was freely walking about in it. He did this last, for an hour, to his heart's content, making for the shady woody horizon and boring so deep into his impression and his idleness that he might fairly have got through them again and reached the maroon-coloured wall. It was a wonder, no doubt, that the taste of idleness for him shouldn't need more time to sweeten; but it had in fact taken the few previous days; ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... the denuded corn field, turned and ascended buoyantly, boring into the hot breeze that rose as the shadows lengthened into late afternoon. They circled, climbing steadily. Then pop—pop-pop-pop—pop, the motor began to stutter. The earth lifted to them as if pulled up by a string. They could see more huts and tiny figures running like disturbed ants. The field ...
— The Thunder Bird • B. M. Bower
... obligations by belonging to an irregular secret society, act as recruiting agents in the lodges. For the author of these remarks was a British Freemason who, in collusion with a foreign adept, proposed to penetrate Freemasonry by the process known in revolutionary language as "boring from within." To quote his own words, "They must be got at from within, not from without." This was to be accomplished in various ways—by adepts of the Continental Order getting themselves initiated into orthodox Masonry and then spreading their own doctrines in the ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... doors and purchased a good Yale lock for them. John and I have taken our workbench and tools over there, and Bob has helped us rig up a nice little five-horse power motor and small handsaw, also a circular saw, home-made sand-drum, a small planer, and a boring-machine. That building is dry, and has lots of room in it for housing the new airplane as it grows to maturity. When cold weather comes we can easily install a couple of heating-stoves to keep ourselves comfortable and protect our materials and ...
— Around the World in Ten Days • Chelsea Curtis Fraser
... proof is that that I am to obey it, and not it me? If a flea bites me I get rid of that sensation; and if logic bothers me, I'll get rid of that too. Phantasms must be taught to vanish courteously. One's only hope of comfort lies in kicking feebly against the tyranny of one's own boring notions and sensations—every philosopher confesses that—and what god is logic, pray, that it is to be the sole exception?.... What, old lady? I give you fair warning, you must choose this day, like any nun, between the ties of family ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... his brains when he came home. And then he laughed and said he was a 'deuced clever fellow'—excuse the adjective—and it was a great thing to be 'as free as that chap was'—'without all sorts of boring colleagues and responsibilities.' ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... away," hastily interposed Lavretsky; "don't pay any attention to me. I shall feel more comfortable if I know I am not boring you. And there is no necessity for your finding me something to do. We old people have a resource which you don't know yet, and which is ...
— Liza - "A nest of nobles" • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... themselves ill-used unless he who addresses them has thoroughly well bored them—especially if they have paid any money for hearing him. My great namesake said, "Surely the pleasure is as great of being cheated as to cheat," and great as the pleasure both of cheating and boring undoubtedly is, I believe he was right. So I remember a poem which came out some thirty years ago in Punch, about a young lady who went forth in quest to "Some burden make or burden bear, but which she did not greatly care, oh Miserie." So, again, all the ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... and arranged; somebody on Mitchell's team had obviously been up all night at the job. Malone admired the work, without being able to get enthusiastic about the contents. Like all technical reports, it tended to be boring and just a trifle obscure to someone who wasn't completely familiar with the field involved. Malone and cybernetics were not exactly bosom buddies, and by the time he finished reading through the report he was suffering from an extreme ...
— Occasion for Disaster • Gordon Randall Garrett
... with us by producing a hearty laugh, in which he did not fail to join in unison. "But are you aware of the usefulness and national importance of the projector's plans? said Crony. "Not I," responded the citizen: "I hates all projections of breweries, bridges, buildings, and boring companies, from the Golden-lane speck to the Vaterloo; from thence up to the new street, and down to the tunnel under the Thames, vich my banker, Sir William Curtis, says, is the greatest bore in London." "But humanity, sir," said Crony, "has, I hope, some influence ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... together and her foil arched over her head, the hilt in one hand and the button in the other—the old general opposite, bent forward, left hand reposing on his back, his foil advanced, slightly wiggling and squirming, his watching eye boring straight into hers—and all of a sudden she would give a spring forward, and back again; and there she was, with the foil arched over her head as before. La Hire had been hit, but all that the spectator saw of it was a something like a thin flash of light in the air, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... sticking in the holes they had bored, and on examination discovered that the milky sap of the tree was of the nature of gutta-percha, hardening rapidly on exposure to the air, and glueing the little animals in self-dug graves. The habit of boring holes in trees in which to deposit their eggs, was not accompanied by a sufficient instinctive knowledge of which trees were suitable, and which destructive to them. If, as is very probable, these ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume II. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... there was no spirit of denial in Caleb, and the world seemed so wondrous to him that he was ready to accept any number of systems, like any number of firmaments, if they did not obviously interfere with the best land-drainage, solid building, correct measuring, and judicious boring (for coal). In fact, he had a reverential soul with a strong practical intelligence. But he could not manage finance: he knew values well, but he had no keenness of imagination for monetary results in the shape of profit and loss: and ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... described as brilliant white spheres, swinging in a pendulum-like motion, were on the ADC plotting boards- confirmed by radar. All pretext of ignoring the UFO's was dropped and at 11:58P.M., F-84's of the Ohio Air National Guard were scrambled. They were over Cincinnati at 12:10A.M. and made contact. Boring in at 20,000 feet, at 100% power, they closed but the UFO's left them as ...
— The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects • Edward Ruppelt
... rectum and, doubtless, to aid expulsion. It was six inches long and five inches broad and weighed 22 ounces. It contained a piece of gunbarrel four inches long, a mother-screw steel, a screw-driver, a saw of steel for cutting wood four inches long, another saw for cutting metal, a boring syringe, a prismatic file, a half-franc piece and four one-franc pieces tied together with thread, a piece of thread, and a piece of tallow, the latter presumably for greasing the instruments. On investigation it was found that ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... churl, composed of thankless earth, The fatal byword of all years to come, Boring a little auger-hole, in fear Peeped; but his eyes, before they had their will, Were shrivelled into darkness in his head, And drop: before him. So the Powers who wait On noble deeds cancelled a sense misused; And she, that ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... groan over it any more than my companions—and you've seen they're not ladies!" She mildly jested, but with an intention. "One gets used to things, and there are employments I should have hated much more." She had the finest conception of the beauty of not at least boring him. To whine, to count up her wrongs, was what a barmaid or a shop-girl would do, and it was quite enough to sit ...
— In the Cage • Henry James
... simplicity, and fully as much for his own sake as for that of his wife. This fact could hardly be inferred from his Diary, and indeed he was wholly unconscious of it himself, because he never realised his natural charm, and indeed was unduly afraid of boring ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... alert, and full of illusions. Be of good cheer, Nature! Pursue, like the deaf and blind star-fish which vegetates in the bed of the ocean, thy obscure task of life; persevere; mend for the millionth time the broken meshes of the net; repair the boring-machine which sinks to the last limits of the attainable the well from which living water will spring up. Sight and sight again the aim which thou hast failed to hit throughout the ages; try to struggle through the scarcely perceptible opening which leads to another firmament. Thou hast the ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... Boring like huge worms from the front line outward, were tunnellers, biting into the earth with grim persistence to lay mines beneath the enemy; not that this work would be finished in time for tomorrow's ...
— Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo Harris
... price of these lighter oils was so great that little progress was made until, in 1859, Col. E. L. Drake discovered oil in Pennsylvania. By studying the geological formations and concluding that oil should be obtained by boring, Drake gave to the world a means of obtaining petroleum, and in quantities which were destined to reduce the price of mineral oil to a level undreamed of theretofore. To his imagination, which saw vast reservoirs of oil in the depths of the earth, the world owes a great debt. ...
— Artificial Light - Its Influence upon Civilization • M. Luckiesh
... doctor's left, a talkative Moscow fur-merchant who, having come to definite conclusions of his own about things n general, was persuaded the rest of the world must share them, and who delivered verbose commonplaces with a kind of pontifical utterance sometimes amusing, but usually boring; on his right a gentle-eyed, brown-bearded Armenian priest from the Venice monastery that had sheltered Byron, a man who ate everything except soup with his knife, yet with a daintiness that made one marvel, and with hands so graceful they might almost have replaced ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... sometimes gain a request which soft-dealing cannot compass. Hadding was conquered by this man in an affair by land; but in the midst of his flight he came on his enemy's fleet, and made it unseaworthy by boring the sides; then he got a skiff and steered it out to sea. Toste thought he was slain, but though he sought long among the indiscriminate heaps of dead, could not find him, and came back to his fleet; when he saw from afar off a light boat tossing on the ocean billows. Putting out some ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... conduct," said the commander, as they drove away, and Harris touched his hat in acknowledgment. Briggs, with twenty stout foot soldiers, awaited them at the abandoned ranch. The doctor and two attendants accompanied him. The road for nearly four miles lay along the sandy flats, then went boring westward into the foothills, while a little worn branch turned off to the peak. Two-thirds of the way to the top the mules were able to pull the jolting vehicle, and from thence half a dozen brawny arms ...
— Tonio, Son of the Sierras - A Story of the Apache War • Charles King
... twenty feet in length, which they had brought on the wheels of the cart, drawn by the four animals. They had had some difficulty in transporting them to the place; and the greatest still remained—the boring the trunks, and then uniting them firmly. I had neither augers nor any tools fit for the purpose. I had, certainly, constructed a little fountain at Falcon's Nest; but the stream was near at hand, and was easily conveyed by cane pipes to our tortoise-shell basin. Here the distance was ...
— The Swiss Family Robinson; or Adventures in a Desert Island • Johann David Wyss
... many people carrying lighted fire-brands to make fire with, to smoke themselves with certain herbs they carried along with them, and to roast roots, which were their chief food. They could easily light a fire, by rubbing pieces of a certain wood together, as if boring. They saw several sorts of trees differing from those on the sea coast, and an extraordinary variety of birds, quite different from those of Spain; but among these there were partridges and nightingales; and they found no quadrupeds, except the dogs formerly mentioned, that could not bark. The ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. III. • Robert Kerr
... to increase his wealth, purchased twenty acres of land a few years ago in one of the Western States, and commenced boring for oil. After a few weeks spent in this work, he discovered to his dismay that there was not the slightest trace of oil on his land. He kept his own counsel, however, and paid the workmen to hold their ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... laugh. The girl was deliberately lying—but why? Was it because she feared displeasure at the invasion of the cabin. Patty thought not, for such was the established custom of the country. The girl did not look at her, but stood boring into the dirt ...
— The Gold Girl • James B. Hendryx
... publicity to the fact that at least 43 kinds of birds prey upon this destructive insect. It has discovered that 57 species of birds feed upon scale-insects—dreaded enemies of the fruit grower. It has shown that woodpeckers as a class, by destroying the larvae of wood-boring insects, are so essential to tree life that it is doubtful if our forests could exist without them. It has shown that cuckoos and orioles are the natural enemies of the leaf-eating caterpillars that destroy our shade and fruit trees; that our quails and sparrows consume annually hundreds of ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... so," cried the painter, laughing; "yet I made you the proposition, because I thought you were boring yourself to ...
— The Son of Monte-Cristo, Volume II (of 2) • Alexandre Dumas pere
... examination. Mr. Brett took it for granted he had deliberately and intentionally shut out Mary, and Mewks did not attempt to deny it, protesting he believed she was boring his master. The grin on that master's face at hearing this was not very pleasant to behold. When examined as to the missing paper, he swore by all that was holy he knew nothing ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... of the Chincha islands and the depth of the deposit according to the government surveys. The paralel lines at the bottom represent the level of the water—the crooked line above, the surface of the rock; its position having been ascertained by boring and observations of the surveyors. The rounded line is the surface of the island as it now appears; all between that and the rock being guano. The almost perpendicular line at the left hand, 100 feet high, is the rock at which ships lay to take in cargo. ...
— Guano - A Treatise of Practical Information for Farmers • Solon Robinson
... hand, study the structure of the body as a whole, systematically, and have no difficulty at all in remembering the track of the great vessels and nerves, and knowing just what tracks will be safe and what unsafe. It is just the same thing with the geologists. Here is a man close by us boring for water through one of our ledges, because somebody else got water somewhere else in that way; and a person who knows geology or ought to know it, because he has given his life to it, tells me he might as well bore there for lager-beer as ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... tastes were simple, and apart from the expensive equipment that was indispensable for their hunting trips, and which was Aubrey's choosing, not hers, she was not extravagant. The long list of figures that had been so boring during the tedious hours that she had spent with the lawyer, grudging every second of the glorious September morning that she had had to waste in the library when she was longing to be out of doors, had conveyed nothing ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... to sleep with a belt full of ammunition around you, your rifle bolt biting into your ribs, entrenching tool handle sticking into the small of your back, with a tin hat for a pillow; and feeling very damp and cold, with "cooties" boring for oil in your arm pits, the air foul from the stench of grimy human bodies and smoke from a juicy pipe being whiffed into your nostrils, then you will not wonder why Tommy occasionally takes a turn in ...
— Over The Top • Arthur Guy Empey
... Jesse watched, working his fly to where he saw a heavy fish moving. An instant and he struck, the reel screeching as the fish made its run. This time the fish did not jump, but played deep, boring and surging, but at last John conquered it and Jesse slipped ...
— The Young Alaskans on the Missouri • Emerson Hough
... themselves from rendering any financial assistance to the Scheme. Is it not worthy at least of being tried as an experiment? Tens of thousands of pounds are yearly spent in "trying" for minerals, boring for coals, sinking for water, and I believe there are those who think it worth while, at an expenditure of hundreds of thousands of pounds, to experiment in order to test the possibility of making a tunnel under ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... crawled timidly out of his hole with the peace-offering; and what do you think it was? Why, a gimlet! Just a plain, ordinary, well-sharpened gimlet for boring holes. ...
— The Curious Book of Birds • Abbie Farwell Brown
... deep folds of drapery are bored preparatory to being carved, in order that the chisel might meet less resistance in the narrow spaces; this is also the case in the Martelli David. As a technical adjunct boring was very useful, but only as a process. When employed as a mechanical device to represent the hair of the head, we get the Roman Empress disguised as a sponge or a honeycomb. These tricks reveal much more than pure technicalities ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... the scene, first builder of iron boats, and a leading iron-founder of his day, an original Captain of Industry of the embryonic type, who began working in a forge for three dollars a week. He cast a cylinder eighteen inches in diameter, and invented a boring machine which bored it accurately, thus remedying one of Watt's principal difficulties. This cylinder was substituted for the tin-lined cylinder of the triumphant Kinneil engine. Satisfactory as were the results of the engine ...
— James Watt • Andrew Carnegie
... difference. A carelessness for all things earthly and pertaining to his own worn-out old body grew upon him. Then he suddenly ceased to think of himself. The sound of the rain in his ears seemed to be boring into his brain. Steady, inexorable, unanswerable as fate, it weighed upon him like a giant hand, and it came to him that he was comparing that roar to the death that ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... the fallen statue of Rameses II., at Memphis, who reigned, according to Lepsius, from B.C. 1394 to B.C. 1328, a shaft was sunk to more than 24 feet. The water which then infiltrated compelled a resort to boring, which was continued until 41 feet 4-1/2 inches were reached. The whole consisted of Nile deposits, alternate layers of loam and sand of the same composition throughout. From the greatest depth a fragment of pottery ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... came upon her brothers playing in the sand. They had scooped it up in their wooden shoes and poured it into a heap in the middle of the road and then wetted it; and now they were boring all sorts of holes in it and tunnels and passages and making it into a rats'-castle. She let them be, gathered up her little skirts, so as not to dirty them, and ...
— The Path of Life • Stijn Streuvels
... much to her. She demands much from life, she reads, and dreams ... of love. Always nothing but love! you will say.... Suppose so; but that word means a great deal to her. I repeat that I am not speaking of a girl to whom thinking is tiresome and boring.... She looks round her, is waiting for the time when he will come for whom her soul yearns.... At last he makes his appearance—she is captivated; she is wax in his hands. All—happiness and love ...
— The Diary of a Superfluous Man and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... were carried out, and as the sun sank towards the horizon the party went down to the beach. Some rotten wood was crumbled up and a fire quickly made, then the work of boring the holes began, and was kept up all night. As it was necessary to put them very closely together, and the piercer had to be heated two or three times for each hole, two worked by turns while the rest slept, and by sunrise the holes were all finished. Then the work of sewing the planks ...
— With Cochrane the Dauntless • George Alfred Henty
... boa-constrictor fashion, till nothing was visible of it but a large knob in the worm's thin body. Then there were polypes; hermit-crabs with their tails in cast-off shells; tiny shell-fish tightly clinging to the stones; boring shells, weeds, and tangles, swarming with innumerable tiny living forms; and so at last bottles and jars were as well filled as was possible with treasures enough to afford them amusement for ...
— Hollowdell Grange - Holiday Hours in a Country Home • George Manville Fenn
... Terry, boring him with cold gray eyes, came faster: retreating rapidly to maintain his distance from the white man, Pud-Pud hurried his backward pace toward the ring of silent Hillmen who watched them. Heedless of his steps, conscious only of an overwhelming desire to maintain a safe distance from this ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... that hang from a nail on the wall. They are made by cutting two or three strips of cardboard of the size of the shelves and boring holes at the corners of each. These are then threaded one by one on four lengths of silk or fine string, knots being tied to keep the shelves the right distance apart. Care has to be taken to get the knots exactly even, or the shelf will ...
— What Shall We Do Now?: Five Hundred Games and Pastimes • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... especially as regards the working of metal. He goes already to the potter's wheel for familiar, life-like illustration. In describing artistic wood-work he distinguishes various stages of work; we see clearly the instruments for turning and boring, such as the old-fashioned drill-borer, whirled round with a string; he mentions the names of two artists, the one of an actual workman, the other of a craft turned into a proper name—stray relics, accidentally preserved, of a world, as we may believe, of ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... the buckets and troughs were overhauled, spiles were made, and when all was ready the large kettles and casks were put in the sleigh, and all hands set out for the bush. Tapping the tree was the first thing in order. This was done either by boring the tree with an auger, and inserting a spile about a foot long to carry off the sap, or with a gouge-shaped tool about two inches wide, which was driven into the tree, under an inclined scar made with an axe. The spiles used in this case were split with the same instrument, sharpened at ...
— Life in Canada Fifty Years Ago • Canniff Haight
... and also in consequence of the small amount of our planet's internal heat, the water has not undergone chemical change, and mostly lies at great depths; but, of course, well-boring is much easier work than on your world, and I expect our methods are rather in advance ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks
... traveling suit), the green cloth dress for the hunt, which I was told was absolutely necessary, seven ball dresses, five gowns for tea. Such a quantity of boxes and bundles arrived at the house in Paris that Mademoiselle Wissembourg was in a blue fidget, fussing about, boring me with silly, unnecessary suggestions, and asking so many useless questions that I wished her at the bottom of ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone
... a good left and an awful wallop with his right. Flynn had warned me to look out for that right and I did. The first round was slow. Each of us was feeling the other out. I landed a few and got one in the ribs. The second round went faster. I avoided him by ducking and side-stepping, but he kept boring in, still smiling disagreeably. I didn't like that smile. He wanted to knock me out, I think, for he made several vicious swings that might have settled me, but I got away from them ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... laid his large left hand on the bar and leaned a little toward the bartender, but his right hand remained hanging loosely at his side. It was near the holster, as Donnegan noticed. And the bartender, having met the boring glance of the big man for a moment, turned surlily away. The giant looked to Donnegan and observed: "Know a good definition of the ...
— Gunman's Reckoning • Max Brand
... on, lazily, "what that debris is on the land which runs back from the store at Fox Cross-roads. It can't be that anybody was simple enough to go boring for oil." ...
— A Young Man in a Hurry - and Other Short Stories • Robert W. Chambers
... a serious accident, which threatened the destruction of the mine, occurred. While boring, to obtain some potash salts, through an aquiferous stratum, a spring was tapped, which poured an immense quantity of water into the lower galleries. The inhabitants feared not only the ruin of the mine, but the falling ...
— The Mines and its Wonders • W.H.G. Kingston
... that the vessel was the Alert, which it may be recollected was one of the two ships in the Arctic expedition commanded by Sir George Nares. I wondered why so many workmen were busy about her, hammering, sawing, planing, riveting, fitting and boring holes with giant gimlets, so I asked the reason for this unwonted activity, when it might have been reasonably supposed that the vessel had played her part in the service, and might have been allowed to pass the remainder of her ...
— Tom Finch's Monkey - and How he Dined with the Admiral • John C. Hutcheson
... rubies. You may fancy for yourselves how extremely delicate must be the work of making holes of such exceeding smallness to accurate gauge, too, in those very hard stones. I get all my draw plates from an old Swiss lady in New York, who makes them herself to order. But, delicate as is the work of boring the holes, there is something still more delicate in the processes that produce such fine wire as this. That something is the filing of a long point on the wire to enable the poking of the end of it through the draw plate so that it ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 458, October 11, 1884 • Various
... itself a portion of solid spar, a watch-tackle was lashed, by means of which the sail was bowsed up to its place. To prevent the bagging unavoidable, in an awning of that size, several uprights were set in the centre, on end, answering their purpose sufficiently without boring ...
— The Crater • James Fenimore Cooper
... was always listened to when he spoke in such manner. Lar Tantril stared at the hard gray eyes boring into his. ...
— The Bluff of the Hawk • Anthony Gilmore
... been other letters I would like to quote, but for fear of boring my readers I will end with the following, ...
— My Impresssions of America • Margot Asquith
... of country air; the longing for the pleasures of the town, the tides of the soul attracted by the moon of habit. The tramp also confesses to that boredom. But when he gets back to the town to enjoy it for a while he swiftly finds it much more boring than the country. ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... can to protect his gardens, his orchards, his fields and forests, but if the birds did not help him the insects that work by night and day—tapping at the root, boring inside the bark, piercing the very heart of the plant, chewing off the under side of leaves, nipping off the buds—would make the earth bare and brown instead of green and blooming. Yet House People, both young ...
— Citizen Bird • Mabel Osgood Wright and Elliott Coues
... Boring Mills, Vertical and Horizontal Drills, Slotting Machines, Punching Presses, Gear and Screw Cutting Machines, ...
— The 'Pioneer': Light Passenger Locomotive of 1851 • John H. White
... carelessly, as he sauntered back to the fire-place, "that I have been here ten days, and must begin to think of my return? If there be one thing I hate, it is to outstay my welcome. I should be afraid of boring you both if I stayed much longer. Well, what now?" breaking ...
— Wee Wifie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... could follow the trend. Ever since the scullery window was found open the year Shining Light was disqualified in the Cesarewitch for boring, Uncle Tom has had a marked complex about burglars. I can still recall my emotions when, paying my first visit after he had bars put on all the windows and attempting to thrust the head out in order to get ...
— Right Ho, Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... the entrance of the town, very tired, and saying he had been a long tramp, all over the place, and Mrs. Hoxton had been boring him with her fancies. As he took Richard's arm he gave the long heavy sigh that always fell so ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... in boring a cannon much heat is generated: the longer the boring lasts, the more heat is produced. He argues that since heat without limit may be thus produced by motion, heat must ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - Invention and Discovery • Various
... followed a circuitous way to quasi Potter's Field, about a mile from the city, where the concluding ceremonies were performed. These consist of walking over the coffin, thus surmounting the difficulties of the author; boring a hole through a copy of Euclid with a hot iron, that the class may see through it; and finally burning it upon the funeral pyre, in order to throw light upon the subject. After these exercises, the procession ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... not worth engaging for; things not worth running those hazards for, that in the hour of trial may lie staring us in the face. Moreover, we shall not want false friends in every hole, such as will continually be boring our ears with that saying, Master, do good to thyself. At such times also, 'stars' do use to 'fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens shall be shaken'; and so every thing tends to weaken, or at least to ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... effects. The original idea of Mr. Piercy was to build a huge bridge from Ynyslas across the estuary of the Dovey to Aberdovey, whence it was proposed to run a service of steam boats to Ireland. Work was begun with seeking a foundation in the shifting sands. Men were engaged with the boring rods, but they could only labour at low tide, and in the long intervals when the water was high, adjacent hostelries afforded a too attractive method of spending enforced leisure, so that often, it is said, when the waters had receded ...
— The Story of the Cambrian - A Biography of a Railway • C. P. Gasquoine
... boring thing about this place is that there are no amusing ways of taking exercise, which is necessary to keep one fit. As a double Coy. Commander I have a horse, a quiet old mare which does nothing worse than shy and give an occasional little buck on starting to canter. But ...
— Letters from Mesopotamia • Robert Palmer
... happened one day that five of these at the Martinmas "Mop," or hiring, were discussing the matter, when they spied the sixth boring his way, and one exclaimed: "Yonder goes Hogarth! Let's hear what he's got to say!" and ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel
... aesculana boring in the terminal green twigs of both maple and buckeye, in Missouri, and often producing a swelling or pseudo-gall. Exceptionally it works in the leaf-stalk. It also feeds on the samara of maple, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 363, December 16, 1882 • Various
... Dante. Longfellow, it may be remarked, was always on the side of domesticity. It was the secret of his popularity. We cannot say, however, that Miss Durant has made us like Gemma better. She is not exactly the Xantippe whom Boccaccio describes, but she is very boring, for all that: ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... morning Malachi went out into the woods, taking with him the coppers and all the trays on the sledge; during that day he was busy boring the trees and fitting the reed-pipes to the holes. Strawberry and John accompanied him, and by sunset their ...
— The Settlers in Canada • Frederick Marryat
... Eugene, disparagingly, 'they work; but don't you think they overdo it? They work so much more than they need—they make so much more than they can eat—they are so incessantly boring and buzzing at their one idea till Death comes upon them—that don't you think they overdo it? And are human labourers to have no holidays, because of the bees? And am I never to have change of air, because the bees don't? Mr Boffin, I think honey excellent at breakfast; ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... Mattawa Tom. "No more mad than you. See what he's after? No! You don't remember, either, how mighty hard it was to wedge in the holdfasts for the chain guys stiffening the front of the dam, or how the keys work loose? There wouldn't be much of the boring machines or dam framing left if the chains pulled those wedges out. ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... for the complicated schemes he was always setting up. He was a medium-sized man, with light hair and eyebrows, and a yellowish face, and a frame lean, though sinewy, and had only one good eye, the other pale like a fish's. His business eye always looked like it was boring a hole in some ingenious idea. As an arguer on the Hebe Maitland his style was airy and gorgeous, contrary to the style of Stevey Todd, who was a cautious arguer, ...
— The Belted Seas • Arthur Colton
... passed a few days in a vessel that had been turned bottom up in a squall, but which, luckily, having a light and shifting cargo, floated. His only companions were two negroes, who, with the apathy of their race, spent the principal part of the time in sleep. It was by boring a small hole through the vessel's bottom, and pushing up a stick with a handkerchief attached, that they were enabled to attract the attention of a passing ship, by whose people they were cut out. Old Mitchell's propensity for fishing was very singular. Almost down to the last, ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes
... presence of which I have travelled thus far, has to be abandoned here at Constantinople, having proved itself quite a wayward weapon since it came from the gunsmith's hands in Vienna, who seemed to have upset the internal mechanism in some mysterious manner while boring out the chambers a trifle to accommodate European cartridges. My experience thus far is that a revolver has been more ornamental than useful; but I am now about penetrating far different countries to any I have yet ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... though a pair of eyes were boring into his back. He listened intently. Suddenly he heard ...
— The Boy Ranchers on Roaring River - or Diamond X and the Chinese Smugglers • Willard F. Baker
... of fever, Charmian developed a Solomon sore. It was the last straw. Every one on the Snark had been afflicted except her. I had thought that I was going to lose my foot at the ankle by one exceptionally malignant boring ulcer. Henry and Tehei, the Tahitian sailors, had had numbers of them. Wada had been able to count his by the score. Nakata had had single ones three inches in length. Martin had been quite certain that necrosis of his shinbone had set in from the roots of the amazing colony he elected to cultivate ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... think girls are better trained than with us—had sent me home to England, at sixteen, an adept in the female mystery of needlework. Not only owing to the Saturday's discipline of clothes mending by all the classes—while l'Abbe Millot's history (of blessed, boring memory) was being read aloud, to prevent 'vain babblings,' and ensure wholesome mental occupation the while—was I an expert patcher and mender, darner and piecer (darning and marking were my specialities), but ...
— Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation - 1838-1839 • Frances Anne Kemble
... him kisses, instead of wishing him to kiss her, Sally found herself aware already of a slight repugnance. As she looked forward to spending days and nights with him her heart sank. She was not shocked. She was not afraid. She knew that there would come a time when, after boring her, Gaga's kisses would become troublesome. And it was too late now to withdraw. She was too deeply into her new scheme of life. But this feverish, insatiably amorous, weak Gaga would get on her nerves. So this was what marriage might be. Sally's jaw stiffened. Yes, if she ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... with the seal of that great mind. You should hear us talk among ourselves. Everyone knows that Popinot is the sublime hero of L'Interdiction, but for the moment some feeble Balzacian does not remember the other books he appears in, and is ashamed to ask.... But I'm boring you." ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... always been my opinion founded upon considerations too long to detail, that the larger Pyramids contain many unopened chambers. Dr. Grant Bey of Cairo proposed boring through the blocks as Artesian wells are driven. I cannot divine why Lane (ii, 592) chose to omit this tale, which is founded on historic facts and interests us by suggesting a comparison between Medival Moslem superstitions and those of our xixth Century, ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... So he wrote with boring reiteration of his willingness to receive her home again as soon as she chose to return, and assured her that he and Joanna had still managed to keep the secret of her departure, so that she need not fear scornful tongues. ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... straightening short edges. Rebating planes are the moving fillister, the sash fillister, the common rebating plane, the side rebating plane. Grooving planes are the plough and dado grooving planes. Moulding planes are sinking snipebills, side snipebills, beads, hollows and rounds, ovolos and ogees. Boring tools are: gimlets, bradawls, stock, and bits. Instruments for dividing the wood, are principally the ripping saw, the half ripper, the hand saw, the panel saw, the tenon saw, the carcase saw, the sash saw, the compass ...
— Woodworking Tools 1600-1900 • Peter C. Welsh
... comparatively bright bishop as the Bishop of Princhester, she also thought of as being just as comfortably accommodated in her second system, the "serious liberal lot," which was more fatiguing and less boring, which talked of books and things, visited the Bells, went to all first-nights when Granville Barker was the producer, and knew and valued people in the grey and earnest plains between the Cecils and the Sidney Webbs. And ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... Pyramus and Thisbe. He declaimed bits of it to the guests in the house, for he had a fine loud voice. Then he flung aside the unfinished poem and suddenly fell in love with Greek tragedies of which, as it happened, he understood nothing at all, though this did not prevent him from boring everybody he met with them. Another day it was the Church music, then quite new, which flung him into enthusiasm. That day they heard Licentius singing canticles from ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... let us pass to the mechanical department of railroad engineering. This latter embraces all the machinery, both fixed and rolling; locomotives and cars coming under the latter,—and the shop-machines, lathes, planers, and boring-machines, forging, cutting, punching, rolling, and shearing engines, pumps and pumping-engines for the water-stations, turn-tables, and the like, under the former. Of this branch, little, except the design and working of the locomotive power, needs to be mentioned as affecting the prosperity of the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... contracts gradually to one-tenth of an inch. The inner surface of the tube is perfectly smooth till within a short distance of the point of contraction. For the remaining distance the circular striae, formed by the drill in boring, are distinctly marked. The carving ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... Hark! who's there? I hear some footing; officers, the saffi, Come to apprehend us! I do feel the brand Hissing already at my forehead; now, Mine ears are boring. ...
— Volpone; Or, The Fox • Ben Jonson |
