"Boring" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was sent around Lake Pontchartrain to commence boring in from that end. This could not be done on the river end. The Mississippi is too mighty a giant to risk such liberties. The 2,000-foot cut between the river and the lock would have to be done last of all, when the rest of the canal ...
— The Industrial Canal and Inner Harbor of New Orleans • Thomas Ewing Dabney
... never worked with a more unsatisfying team mate. Not that Klusky did not pull, he evidently did his best, but he never spoke, while the other grew ever conscious of the beady, glittering eyes boring into his back. At camp, the Jew watched him furtively, sullenly, till he grew to feel oppressed, as with a sense of treachery, or some fell design hidden far back. Every morning he secured the ropes next the sled, thus forcing Captain to walk ahead. He did not object to the added task of breaking ...
— Pardners • Rex Beach
... of rifle. Every rifle, owing to slight inequalities of boring, sights, and the personal errors of the firer, shoots differently. When you have ascertained its (rifle) and your own peculiar errors and you know where to set your sights to counteract these constant errors, you have determined what is commonly termed the zero of your rifle. ...
— The Plattsburg Manual - A Handbook for Military Training • O.O. Ellis and E.B. Garey
... answered. "The Blue Bird, my dove? Nonsense: my dove is grey!... Happiness, in the cottage? With Daddy and Mummy? Oh, I say! There are no toys at home and it's awfully boring there: we want to go ever so far and meet with tremendous adventures and have ...
— The Blue Bird for Children - The Wonderful Adventures of Tyltyl and Mytyl in Search of Happiness • Georgette Leblanc
... Strolled up and down with Lady Ventnor and Sir Hill Birch and saw everybody there was to be seen. I nevah make a single note; my memory's marvellous. Left the Park at twelve and took a taxi to inquire after Lord Harrogate, Charlie Sievewright, and old Lady Dorcas Newnham. I'm not boring you? ...
— The Big Drum - A Comedy in Four Acts • Arthur Pinero
... tried to laugh and wriggle away, but the cashier's gimlet eyes kept boring him, and eventually he fished out a five-dollar bill and handed it in. Mr. Hooker placed the two bills in the envelop, sealed it, and handed it ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... was smiling, "this looks suspicious. You should be blind to your favorite stamps by now. But about this other thing, since we've accepted we had better go, as you say, boring one's self to death, or being bored by other people is much the same thing, so we may as well resign ourselves and make the ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... traveller as a grasshopper or a cricket, and a much wiser settler. With all their activity these do not hop away from drought nor forward to summer. We do not avoid evil by fleeing before it, but by rising above or diving below its plane; as the worm escapes drought and frost by boring a few inches deeper. The frontiers are not east or west, north or south, but wherever a man fronts a fact, though that fact be his neighbor, there is an unsettled wilderness between him and Canada, between him and the setting sun, or, farther still, between him and ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... you think I don't know you; you are boring yourself because Kitty is upstairs in bed and ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... just come in. They will be down directly. Come back to me, Toddy; you are boring your aunt. And James ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... feel the glance of every passer-by boring into the very back of her head, awls crawling through and through her. She tried to drag her hat down over her eyes. Her black velvet sailor, modish enough when new, had suffered somewhat in the hurried packing off of her things after her. The buckram rim, misshapen ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... started from both ends at once. In order to find out what the soil and stone were like through which they would have to force their way, a shaft or pit, fifteen feet wide and two hundred feet deep, was dug on the western side of the river. From the bottom of this the boring or 'heading' (as the beginning of a tunnel is called) was worked east and west through rock and shale. Gunpowder was exploded in small holes drilled at frequent intervals to shatter this material; and when we remember that the 'heading' was only about six feet high and six ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... of silence and, though I did not look up, I knew that she was regarding me steadfastly. I could feel her eyes boring into my head like ...
— The Lost Valley • J. M. Walsh
... nervously. Then, seizing Parrington's hands, he continued hurriedly, but in a low voice: "For days I have been living as if in a trance. It is as if I were lying in the delirium of fever; my head burns and my thoughts always return to the same spot, boring and burrowing; I feel as though a horrible eye were fixed on me from whose glance I cannot escape. I feel that I may at any moment awake from the trance, and that the awakening ...
— Banzai! • Ferdinand Heinrich Grautoff
... get some things. He will come right to the desk. Please send him up at once. It is very important. (JARVIS takes out knife and begins boring hole in trunk from inside out. This hole should be already cut and covered with a label.) What ...
— The Ghost Breaker - A Melodramatic Farce in Four Acts • Paul Dickey
... easily: his foreman might say: Master is away in Jericho. But when Nicodemus called a few weeks afterwards Joseph was constrained to tell his foreman to tell Nicodemus that he would see him. The truth was, Joseph was glad of an interruption, for his business was boring him more than it did usually, but he liked to pretend to himself that he could not escape ...
— The Brook Kerith - A Syrian story • George Moore
... fell out of favor as time went on owing to reliance on long-range fire and rareness of boarding actions. Down to the middle of the 19th century there was no great improvement in ordnance, save in the way of better powder and boring. Even in Elizabeth's day the heaviest cannon had a range of ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott
... invade them with foolish tracts, that lie against God; or give their money to build churches, where there is as yet no people that will go to them. Why, the other day, a young clergyman bored me, and would have been boring me till now, I think, if I would have let him, to part with a block of my houses, where I know every man, woman, and child, and keep them in comparative comfort and cleanliness and decency, to say no more, that he might pull them down and build a church upon the site—not ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... whence a wide view is obtainable, and trust to the hounds coming back after running a ring. Given the right sort of horse, however—short-backed, thoroughbred if possible, and with good enough manners to descend a steep place without boring and tearing his rider's arms almost out of their sockets—many a fine run may be seen in this wild district. Much of the arable land has gone back to grass, so that it is quite a fair scenting country; and the foxes are stronger and more straight-necked than in more ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs
... and spruce young men, do wear their hair long hanging down behind: but when they do any work or travail hard, it annoying them, they tie it up behind. Heretofore generally they bored holes in their ears and hung weights in them to make them grow long, like the Malabars, but this King not boring his, that fashion is almost left off. The men for ornament do wear Brass, Copper, Silver Rings on their Fingers, and some of the greatest Gold. But none ...
— An Historical Relation Of The Island Ceylon In The East Indies • Robert Knox
... 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: ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... demand for machine tools, consequent upon the increasing difficulties with the workmen, took place at the time that I began business in Manchester, and I had my fair share of the increased demand. Most of my own machine tools were self-acting—planing machines, slide lathes, drilling, boring, slotting machines, and so on. When set up in my workshop they distinguished themselves by their respective merits and efficiency. They were, in fact, their own best advertisements. The consequence ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... friendship and equity, rapid communication would promote the moral and intellectual intercourse, "which, more than any one, we desire," between grave and profound Germany and intelligent Italy. In these pages Cavour foreshadowed the boring of the Alps and the German alliance, two facts which ...
— Cavour • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... as ever he was, as he was forced to follow her out of the shop. Those tools were so charming; his fingers tingled to be hammering, sawing, boring holes. Had he lost the chance for that poor blunt knife? Must he wait a whole fortnight for another sixpence, and find the ...
— The Stokesley Secret • Charlotte M. Yonge
... tea, and go away. Other people offer amazing suggestions, and no one who thinks the pictures failures quite manages to conceal his opinion. Poets are said to be fond of reading their own poems aloud, which seems amazing; but then as they read they cannot see their audience, nor guess how they are boring those sufferers. The poet, like the domestic fowl which did not scream when plucked, is "too much absorbed." But while his friends look at his pictures, the painter looks at their faces, and must make many sad discoveries. ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... angry to tolerate a reply, and boring Henry more and more towards the piano] You don't admire Mrs Bompas! You would never dream of writing poems to Mrs Bompas! My wife's not good enough for you, isn't she. [Fiercely] Who are you, pray, that you should be ...
— How He Lied to Her Husband • George Bernard Shaw
... to be the home of a young couple. They received the travellers as the patriarchs must have received the guest sent by God. They had to sleep on a corn husk mattress in an old moldy house. The woodwork, all eaten by worms, overrun with long boring-worms, seemed to emit sounds, to be alive ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... from his cards sternly, his keen eyes boring through the man. "Where is she now?" he asked, quietly; and all the men in the room looked up uneasily. There was that tone and accent again that made the Boy alien from them. What ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill
... be the reasoned act of a wasp may be cited. The insect had selected a dead log of soft wood as a site for its egg-shaft. It was at a spot to which the occupations of the season took me daily, so that the boring operations were watched from beginning to end. The work was done rapidly and neatly, and when all was ready for the deposit of the eggs the insect constructed from papier-mache-like material a disc-shaped lid exactly fitting the mouth of the excavation, to ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... Horieneke 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 passed by ...
— The Path of Life • Stijn Streuvels
... 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, ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... which, as one of my friends said enviously and longingly, was running three thousand dollars a day in clear greenbacks. Its history was remarkable. For a very long time an engineer had been here, employed by a company in boring, but bore he never so wisely, he could get nothing. At last the company, tired of the expenditure and no returns, wrote to him ordering him to cease all further work on the next Saturday. But the engineer had become "possessed" with the idea that he must ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... one practicably workable way. If that way, by one of the intimate felicities the liability to which was so far from having even yet completely fallen from him, happened handsomely to show him as more bored than boring (with advantages of his own freely to surrender, but none to be persuadedly indebted to others for,) what did such a false face of the matter represent but the fact itself that she was pledged? If she had questioned or challenged or interfered—if she had reserved herself that right—she ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... was, as we have said, about or somewhat under the middle size. In his gait he was very ungainly. When walking, he drove forward as if his head was butting or boring its way through a palpable atmosphere, keeping his person, from the waist up, so far in advance that the a posteriori portion seemed as if it had been detached from the other, and was engaged in a ceaseless but ...
— The Tithe-Proctor - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... brigade, where Barrett's battery was stationed, and told the officer commanding to do the same. In a moment the field was smoking hot, shells bursting in the air, crashing through Ruggles's ranks, and boring holes in the walls of the dilapidated old cabin. The Rebels could not face in the open field so severe a fire. Instead of advancing directly against the church, they moved into the woods east of the field, and became reinforcements to the brigades already ...
— My Days and Nights on the Battle-Field • Charles Carleton Coffin
... I am not boring you; but I thought that you might like to know that you and your encampment are still remembered ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... of Alberta and the Others (SIDGWICK AND JACKSON) was the eldest of an orphaned family of girls and boys who were finding life a little boring in an English village; and when an unexpected legacy made her mistress of a couple of town lots in a place called Sunshine, in Western Canada, nothing would content her but to emigrate with the whole tribe—reinforced by a delightful Aunt Mary and an animal known as the Meritorious Cat—to the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, August 26th, 1914 • Various
... do come, if you possibly can," supplemented Mr. Dollond, coming forward in burlesque obedience. "We are boring each other horribly—I can answer for myself—and it would be an ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... what real hunger meant, fell back on stale honey, three years old, scraped out of deserted rock-hives—honey black as a sloe, and dusty with dried sugar. He hunted, too, for deep-boring grubs under the bark of the trees, and robbed the wasps of their new broods. All the game in the jungle was no more than skin and bone, and Bagheera could kill thrice in a night, and hardly get a full meal. But the want of water was the worst, for though the Jungle People ...
— The Second Jungle Book • Rudyard Kipling
... parsimony of the doctor, and of his anxiety to amass money on all occasions, and the avidity with which even the smallest trifle was added to his gains. He accordingly resolved to amuse himself at the expense of this trait, and proceeded thus. Boring a hole in a halfpenny, he attached a long string to it, and having dropped it on the doctor's step stationed himself on the opposite side of the court, concealed from view by the angle of the Commons' wall. He waited patiently for the chapel bell, at the first toll of which the door opened, and ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... May at 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 painfully on ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... any case with a result to the good. I am trying especially to reflect our own life of the present, and to get into the heart of the pictures made by the past. To do this I do not consider any detail too small, so long as it is not boring. Nor any method wrong which I feel to be true. I am naturally not always believed in, and I do not always make myself clear. Sometimes I think I am misunderstood through laziness. To give one instance, of one or the other: ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: The Moth and the Flame • Clyde Fitch
... engine-house and derrick are next put up, the latter of timber in the modern wells, but in the older ones simply of slender saplings, sometimes still rooted in the earth. A steam-engine is next set up, and the boring commences. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... converters and generators of Triplanetary's super-dreadnaught. That beam, a pipe-like hollow cylinder of intolerable energy, flashed out, and there was a rending, tearing crash as it struck Roger's hitherto impenetrable wall. Struck and clung, grinding, boring in, while from the raging inferno that marked the circle of contact of cylinder and shield the pirates' screen radiated scintillating torrents of cracking, streaming sparks, lightning-like ...
— Triplanetary • Edward Elmer Smith
... the skirmishers in front, and the columns after, moving, yet seemingly motionless. Their eighty cannon peal out and their shots mow every space in the line of them. Up the great valley and the terraces of the hill whose fame is at that moment being woven, comes VILLATE, boring his way with foot and horse, and RUFFIN'S men ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... th' look on th' face of th' son-of-a-gun that uses them for cover—won't he be surprised" and he grinned gleefully as he pictured his shots boring through them. Then he placed in the center of each a chip or a pebble or something that he thought would show up well in ...
— Hopalong Cassidy's Rustler Round-Up - Bar-20 • Clarence Edward Mulford
... been boring a hole in one of the water kegs, and as Spider held a tin cup he tilted the keg to pour a draft of the precious fluid. A thin stream of blackish, dry particles filtered slowly through the tiny aperture into the bottom of the cup. With a groan Wilson dropped the ...
— The Return of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... said Dunham, hurt even more than angered. "If I've come to you in the wrong moment—if you are vexed at anything, I'll go away, and beg your pardon for boring you." ...
— The Lady of the Aroostook • W. D. Howells
... a blood blister under the nail is secured by boring a small hole through the nail with the sharp point of a sterilized penknife (page 38). This simple bit of surgery not only relieves the pain, but is frequently the only means of saving the nail. Ingrown toe nails are relieved by scraping a broad strip in the middle of the nail ...
— Physiology and Hygiene for Secondary Schools • Francis M. Walters, A.M.
... number of useful secrets. The point is, that particular slave takes care not to run errands nowadays without informing me. There is not much that Marcia does that I don't know about." Livius' eyes suggested gimlets boring holes into Pertinax's face. Not a change of the other's expression escaped him. Pertinax covered his mouth with his hand, pretending to yawn. He slapped his thighs to suggest that his involuntary shudder ...
— Caesar Dies • Talbot Mundy
... Robertson of Brighton claims priority of discovery touching the boring power of Pholades. His statements are founded on daily observation of the creatures at work for three months. 'The Pholas dactylus' he says, 'makes its hole by grating the chalk with its rasp-like valves, licking it up, when pulverised, with its foot, forcing it up ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 430 - Volume 17, New Series, March 27, 1852 • Various
... 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 saw, the keyhole saw, and turning saw. Tools used for forming the angles of ...
— Woodworking Tools 1600-1900 • Peter C. Welsh
... The Italian is 'sobbillato,' which might be also translated 'inveigled' or 'instigated.' But Varchi, the contemporary of Cellini, gives this verb the force of using pressure and boring on until somebody is driven ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini
... were cramped, and no wonder. Pulling double for a four-mile heat is no joke, even if a man's in training. Fancy a woman, a young girl, having to sit still and drag at a runaway horse all the time. I couldn't stop the brute; she was boring like a wild bull. So just as we came pretty close I lifted Miss Falkland off the saddle and yelled at old Brownie as if I had been on a cattle camp, swinging round to the near side at the same time. Round he came like one o'clock. I could ...
— Robbery Under Arms • Thomas Alexander Browne, AKA Rolf Boldrewood
... whom I became very friendly, and who invited me to her house. She was the wife of a Professor Maretti, and her name was Santa. The professor himself was a little half-famished looking man, full of learning, by the show of which he was in the habit of boring everybody who came near him. Santa made up for this by her liveliness and her warm interest in my affairs. Amid music and laughter I spent many happy hours in her house, made friends, and was encouraged to make my debut as an improvisatore. I had written to Eccellenza ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol. I • Various
... predatory angle. The comfort of this, the simplification it brought into the relations of the party, was immense. From this point of view Mr. Wilkins was simply ideal; he was unique and precious. Whenever she thought of him, and was perhaps inclined to dwell on the aspects of him that were a little boring, she remembered this and murmured, "But what ...
— The Enchanted April • Elizabeth von Arnim
... fault if their only resource was to turn out very poor work at a high price? Besides, how should Mr. Stelling be expected to know that education was a delicate and difficult business, any more than an animal endowed with a power of boring a hole through a rock should be expected to have wide views of excavation? Mr. Stelling's faculties had been early trained to boring in a straight line, and he had no faculty to spare. But among Tom's contemporaries, whose fathers cast their sons on clerical ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... "traitor". Hogarth had been put to bed, the two ladies were in a state of scare, Margaret anon crying on Loveday's shoulder, declaring that "He" (meaning Frankl) was in the crowd, and coming, coming, boring his way: ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel
... they'd go on boring t' shaft right down through t' earth and out at t' other side, and risk finding Owd Nick and his people in t' middle. A' tell yo' for sure. Well, good-mornin', yo've a lot to do, and so have I. A'll get those galleries blocked and ...
— The World Peril of 1910 • George Griffith
... produce a luxuriant bush, which will yield little fruit. Decomposing sandstone, and slate, known in Jamaica as rotten rock, mixed with vegetable mould, is one of the most favorable soils. The subsoil should be also carefully examined by a boring augur, for a stiff moist clay, or marly bottom retentive of moisture, is particularly injurious to the plant. A dark, rusty-colored sand, or a ferruginous marl on a substratum of limestone, kills the tree in a few years. In virgin lands, after the wood has been felled and cleared, the ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... a button on the top of the breech. There was a sharp but not very loud sound as the compressed air was released; something rushed out of the muzzle of the gun, and a few seconds later, Colston could see the missile boring its way through the air, and pursuing a slanting but perfectly direct path for ...
— The Angel of the Revolution - A Tale of the Coming Terror • George Griffith
... this idea. "I did my best," she declared, "and he was awfully nice. You'll like him, Katie. I suppose he had an engagement, or was tired and wanted to go off somewhere and smoke. He gets up plays all the time, you know. It must be horribly boring." ...
— Betty Wales Senior • Margaret Warde
... tropical trees, stood so high on the mountain that the garden terraces behind it finished at the entrance to the evergreen forest. It was fitted up with every Antillian luxury: fine mahogany furniture—the only wood that defied the boring of the West Indian worm—light cane chairs, polished floors of pitch pine, innumerable cabinets filled with bibelots collected during many English visits, tables covered with newspapers and magazines, the least possible drapery, and a good library. In ...
— The Gorgeous Isle - A Romance; Scene: Nevis, B.W.I. 1842 • Gertrude Atherton
... their charm. One of the reasons why virtue and goodness are not more attractive is because they get into the hands of people without lightness or humour, and even without courtesy; and thus the pursuit of virtue seems not only to the young, but to many older people, to be a boring occupation, and to be conducted in an atmosphere heavy with disapproval, with dreariness and dulness and tiresomeness hemming the neophyte in, like fat bulls of Bashan. It is because I should like to rescue goodness, ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... dog," I said softly, hardly glancing out from under my lashes because I was afraid to risk looking straight at him again so soon. I could fairly feel Aunt Adeline's eyes boring into my back. ...
— The Melting of Molly • Maria Thompson Daviess
... quite accidentally one night—we were on a spring round-up—when the two of us were sitting up by the fire, smoking and staring at the desert stars. All the rest were asleep." Burnaby paused. "Is this boring you?" ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... of it! Thousands of them. It's not right to expect a clergyman's wife to be an unpaid curate—plus a housekeeper, and it needs special grace to stand a succession of committees. How would it be to drop some of the most boring duties and concentrate upon the things that you could do with all your heart? You'd be happier, and ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... body," the old man went on, "is as strong as a grub hoe. With it the locust makes holes in fence rails, logs, stumps, and the earth, and in those holes mother locust lays her eggs. See, those four spines are for boring holes. With these Mrs. Locust bores a hole in the ground, and then with these same spines she guides the bundles of eggs into the hole and covers them up with a gummy stuff. There the eggs stay until next spring, when, my dear, out comes a little hopper with no wings, and this ...
— Little Busybodies - The Life of Crickets, Ants, Bees, Beetles, and Other Busybodies • Jeanette Augustus Marks and Julia Moody
... would lose, it was not from sentimental impulse but a firm persuasion it was worth while." He paused, and gave Grace an apologetic glance. "I'm afraid this is rather foggy. Perhaps I'd better begin where I met him, at a Florida hotel—if I'm not boring you." ...
— The Buccaneer Farmer - Published In England Under The Title "Askew's Victory" • Harold Bindloss
... discern character, but love was but an external experience to her, and she could not read the riddle of Mervyn's repudiation of intercourse with their fellow-inmates, and his restlessness through the evening, checking Bertha for boring about her friend, and then encouraging her to go on with what she had been saying. At last, however, Bertha voluntarily ceased her communications and could be drawn out no farther; and when the candle was put out at night, she electrified Phoebe with the remark, 'It is Mervyn, ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... boring and worrying them all out of their lives over the books,' added Fergus. 'Poking his nose into everything, so that Stebbing says his governor vows he can't stand it, and shall cut the concern it the old brute does not take himself off ...
— Beechcroft at Rockstone • Charlotte M. Yonge
... head; now head over heels; now head and heels together; doubled up in a corner; but at last stretched fairly on his back, and foaming for rage and disappointment; while the victorious salmon, slapping the stones with his tail, and whirling the spray from his shoulders at every roll, came boring and snoring up the ford. I tugged and strained to no purpose; he flashed by me with a snort, and slid into the deep water. Sam now staggered forward with battered bones and peeled elbows, blowing like a grampus, and cursing like nothing but himself. He extricated me, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XIX. No. 542, Saturday, April 14, 1832 • Various
... the thought. Annoyed to find the old man's eyes boring into him again, he cleared his throat and ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... a word to the person he had taken down, gladly turned to Edith. He always complained that the host was obliged to sit between the oldest and the most boring guests. It was unusual for him to have so pretty a neighbour as Edith. But he was a collector: his joy was to see a heterogeneous mass of people, eating and laughing at his table. For his wife there were a few social people, for him the Bohemians, and always ...
— Love at Second Sight • Ada Leverson
... do not in themselves require treatment. The treatment should be applied to the disease which causes the abnormal temperature of the horns. The usual treatment for the supposed hollow horn, which consists in boring the horns with a gimlet and pouring turpentine into the openings thus made, is not only useless and cruel, but is liable to set up an acute inflammation and result in ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... a robin boring for grubs in a country dooryard. It is a common enough sight to witness one seize an angle-worm and drag it from its burrow in the turf, but I am not sure that I ever before saw one drill for grubs and bring the big white morsel to the surface. The robin ...
— Ways of Nature • John Burroughs
... tide every day. Just such another gulf I suppose that Egypt was, and that the one ran in towards Ethiopia from the Northern Sea, and the other, the Arabian, of which I am about to speak, 17 tended from the South towards Syria, the gulfs boring in so as almost to meet at their extreme points, and passing by one another with but a small space left between. If then the stream of the Nile should turn aside into this Arabian gulf, what would hinder that gulf from being filled up with silt ...
— The History Of Herodotus - Volume 1(of 2) • Herodotus
... the girl's money as long as he could. In the meantime Mason declared an end to the engagement, and poor Helen was broken-hearted; for as I have said, she is an affectionate girl, and she hadn't a friend to confide in. But I'm boring you—you don't want to know all ...
— The Red Triangle - Being Some Further Chronicles of Martin Hewitt, Investigator • Arthur Morrison
... (the younger) was not so eloquent as Chatham. Grattan said, 'He takes longer flights, does not soar so high.' No power was ever equal to Chatham's over a public assembly, much greater in the Commons than it was afterwards in the Lords. When Sir Thomas Robinson had been boring the House on some commercial question, and introduced the word 'sugar' so often that there was at last a laugh as often as he did so, Chatham, then Mr. Pitt, who had put him up, grew very angry, and at last his wrath boiled over. ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... persons. In the mean time the priests themselves seem to doubt the soundness of their own allegations; they call the secular arm to the aid of their arguments; they marshal on their side fines, imprisonment, confiscation of goods, boring and branding, with hot irons, and death at the stake, at this time in France, and in other and in most countries of Christendom; they use the scourge to drive men into paradise; they enlighten men by the blaze of the fagot; they inculcate faith by furious and bloody strokes ...
— Letters to Eugenia - or, a Preservative Against Religious Prejudices • Baron d'Holbach
... were talking, a number of shots were heard going off in various directions. This was explained by Captain Jan. All the forenoon the miners employ their time in boring and charging the blast-holes. About mid-day they fire them and then hasten to a clear part of the mine to eat luncheon and smoke their pipes while the gunpowder smoke clears away. This it does very slowly, taking sometimes more than ...
— Personal Reminiscences in Book Making - and Some Short Stories • R.M. Ballantyne
... Lady of Misrule and arch-spirit of jollity. Pepys was shocked—or affected to be—one day by seeing all the great and fair ones of the Court squatting on the floor in the Whitehall gallery playing at "I love my love with an A because he is Amorous"; "I hate him with a B because he is Boring," and so on; and no doubt rocking with glee at some sally of wit, for, Pepys says, "some of them were ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... disquieting and depressing sound. The waves of the river were splashing on the shore, and sounded so monotonous and hopeless, just as if they were telling something unbearably dull and heavy, which was boring them into utter disgust, something from which they wanted to run away and yet were obliged to talk about all the same. The sound of the rain blended with their splashing, and a long-drawn sigh seemed to be floating above the overturned skiff—the endless, labouring ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various
... were up at the first sign of daylight, for they wanted to go to the steel works, some miles away, in time to see the cannon taken out of the mould, and preparations made for boring the rifle channels. They found the ...
— Tom Swift and his Giant Cannon - or, The Longest Shots on Record • Victor Appleton
... facts of which their performance was to be the counterfeit presentment. The dramatic effect of the incidents was incalculably heightened when they were presented, as in a looking-glass, before the guilty pair, with the eye of the avenger boring into their souls. And have we not here, perhaps, a clue to one of the most frequent and essential meanings of the word "dramatic"? May we not say that the dramatic quality of an incident is proportionate to the variety[7] and intensity of the ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... "the cleverest—and wickedest—man living." He broke off to speak of the Archbishop, whom he met weekly at Grillion's, as a delightfully instructive talker, not only full, that is, of light agreeableness, but supporting the opinions he advances with convincing, cogent, logical force, yet never boring his hearers. As another powerful speech he instanced T. P. O'Connor on Sir R. Anderson's indiscretions, "most terribly crushing in its grim, ruthless exposition," Anderson sitting in the ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... monster would quietly swallow his prey, 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 the ...
— Hollowdell Grange - Holiday Hours in a Country Home • George Manville Fenn
... persons "harboring Quakers," imposing severe penalties for each offence, then followed mild punishment on the Friends themselves. These proving ineffectual, the Puritans passed laws which authorized the cropping of the ears, boring the tongues with hot irons, and hanging ...
— The Real America in Romance, Volume 6; A Century Too Soon (A Story - of Bacon's Rebellion) • John R. Musick
... realized that MacNair's boring, steel-grey eyes were fixed upon her with a new intentness—as if to probe into the very ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... back his chair. "Look here," he said with a laugh, "don't pretend I haven't been boring your head off with all this talk about myself. You've been too patient. I'm off. Shall I see you to-morrow? Perhaps you'd lunch with us to-morrow? It would be a great pleasure for my wife. ...
— James Pethel • Max Beerbohm
... a lovely afternoon; after which there was a lull in the conversation. I was filled with a horrid fear that I was boring her. I had probably arrived at the very moment when she was most interested in her book. She must, I thought, even now be regarding me as a nuisance, and was probably rehearsing bitter things to say to the servant for not ...
— Love Among the Chickens - A Story of the Haps and Mishaps on an English Chicken Farm • P. G. Wodehouse
... eyes were on Sandy, and the erstwhile married man felt their contempt boring into his very soul. He was held silent, in spite of his anger against the broad-shouldered Toby, and was possessed of a feeling that somehow his second effort had been no more successful than his first. And forthwith the impression ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... took chances. God, what a chance she had taken this time! The picture of that court he had seen, with the girl in the witness chair and those many rows of eyes avidly fixed upon her, came back to his mind so vividly they seemed for a moment right here in the room, these eyes of the town boring into his house. Angrily he shut out the scene. And alone in the darkness, Roger said to his daughter all the ugly furious things he had not said to her upstairs—until at last he was ...
— His Family • Ernest Poole
... mortars with the besiegers, except what the navy had in front of the city; but wooden ones were made by taking logs of the toughest wood that could be found, boring them out for six or twelve pound shells and binding them with strong iron bands. These answered as cochorns, and shells were successfully thrown from them into ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... my colleague was boring upward at the time we last saw him; but the speed of that machine is marvelous. No wonder these foreign spies take the great chances they do, hoping to learn what Uncle Sam is up to. If they could carry back full information concerning the new explosive and the novel features ...
— The Boy Scouts of the Flying Squadron • Robert Shaler
... what that's got to do with the crook," pursued the secretary, with his relentless eyes boring deeper and ...
— A Thief in the Night • E. W. Hornung
... It often happens that available energy is not in a form in which it can be applied directly to our needs. The water flowing down from the mountains in the neighborhood of the Alpine tunnels was competent to provide the power necessary for boring through them, but it was not in a form in which it could be directly applied. The kinetic energy of the water had first to be changed into the potential energy of air under pressure, then, in that form, by suitable mechanism, it was used with signal success to disintegrate and excavate ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 441, June 14, 1884. • Various
... refrain of a comic song he had just finished scoring; but as the song was not going to be sung in any of the pieces they were touring with, no one was interested, and Mortimer's talk about the regeneration of the theatre was becoming so boring that Leslie and Beaumont had begun to think of bedtime, and might have taken their departure if Dubois had not said that all the great French actresses had lovers and that the English would do well to follow their examples. A variety of opinions broke forth, and everyone seemed to wake up; ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... middle of the base, bore vertically downwards, until by rough calculation they were near the lower end of the slant tunnel; or both tunnels could be made at the same time. Then a subterranean chamber would be opened out from the slant tunnel. The vertical boring, which need not be wider than necessary to allow a plumb-line to be suspended down it, would enable the architects to determine the point vertically below the point of suspension. The slant tunnel would give the direction of ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... some moments, suddenly ceased. Tad's eyes were fairly boring into the shadows. All at once the particular shadow at which ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in Montana • Frank Gee Patchin
... was set to work. The water tore through the nostril-pipe, boring a hole with such rapidity that the tall beam dropped into the socket with startling suddenness. Still breathing torrents, the pipe was withdrawn: the clutching sand seized, grappled the stake. It ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... exposure to a dangerous storm. She enjoyed the sensation of her fragility and helplessness there, cooped up with him in the close intimacy of the compartment. She was glad that he did not apologize to her for his lack of restraint, nor foolishly pretend that he was boring her. ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... boiling oil in it," but at last we decided on the brilliant suggestion of SHABRACK, who was of the party, that we should endeavour by some means or other to bring the two bores, as it were, face to face in a kind of boring-competition in the smoking-room that very night, to engage them in warfare against one another and ourselves to sit by and watch them mutually extinguishing one another; a result that, we were certain, could ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 103, December 3, 1892 • Various
... men would weary them more. They would have more resources to employ in boring them. But tell me the subject ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... dear, and I will help you all I can. Just come and tell me all of your difficulties and I'll try and smooth them away for you. I suppose you will find it easy to translate their French documents for them about this very boring mule deal. I have had to do it and I am glad to turn the burden of it all over to you. You may have some trouble with the English technicalities and perhaps you had best bring them in to me and I'll run over them to see that you get them straight. Only don't let the General know ...
— The Daredevil • Maria Thompson Daviess
... Harry Lothrop. There were too many topics between Redmond and myself to be avoided, for us to venture upon private or familiar conversation. Harry Lothrop was an accomplished, fastidious man of the world, I dreaded boring him, and so I said little. He was several years older than Redmond, and possessed more knowledge of men, women, and books. Redmond had no acquirements, he knew enough by nature, and I never saw a person with more fascination ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various
... enumerate his points. "You're not tired of me—though I see I'm boring you hideously; put up with it a little longer, I've nearly finished—and you'd shed quite a respectable number of tears if I were to die young. Yes, I am young though as ugly as Satan. I believe you think I'm some sort of ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell
... frame. By this time each joint of the latter has been numbered and given its color code. With a simple derrick and ropes and pulleys, dismembering the frame commences. The pins that make the joints tight are removed by driving or boring. Roof rafters and purlins come first; then the yard arms that brace plate and summer beams, followed by these timbers themselves. Second floor joists come after them, followed by the corner posts. Each must be removed with caution and ingenuity. There must ...
— If You're Going to Live in the Country • Thomas H. Ormsbee and Richmond Huntley
... point in your education I am going to take up later," remarked Mr. Halloway, cheerfully. "The art of not being bored by people. Once acquired, the other, that of not boring them, follows of itself. Society ...
— Only an Incident • Grace Denio Litchfield
... there were in all but five first-class passengers, a piece of news that left me calm. Stodgy I may be,—it was odd how that term of Dunny's rankled,—but I confess that I find chance traveling acquaintances boring and avoid them when I can. Unlike most of my countrymen, I suppose I am not gregarious, though I dine and week-end punctiliously, send flowers and leave cards at decorous intervals, and know people all the way ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... such a 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 thirdly there were the smart intellectual lot, ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... eyes that had been boring into him. "I'll have to trust you, Gordon. I've never been sure. But either you're loyal now or I can't depend on ...
— Police Your Planet • Lester del Rey
... and started to drink it all up. Man's premier temptation is to drink up women. Lots of men start to do it, but that's as far as they get. One woman can absorb a dozen men; a dozen men can't absorb one woman. Women—any one woman—is without end. Am I boring you?" ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain
... Didn't say a word No use in talking about feelings Distaste for all exercise once pleasurable Divided lovers in presence Enthusiasm struck and tightened the loose chord of scepticism Enthusiast, when not lyrical, is perilously near to boring Exult in imagination of an escape up to the moment of capture Few men can forbear to tell a spicy story of their friends Greatest of men; who have to learn from the loss of the woman Having contracted the fatal habit of irony He ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... number of forms belonging to different groups the end of the stem on which the sporogonium is borne grows downwards so as to form a hollow tubular sac enclosing the sporogonium; in other cases this marsupial sac is formed by the base of the sporogonium boring into the thickened end of the stem. The sac usually penetrates into the soil and bears rhizoids on its outer surface. Kantia, Calypogeia and Saccogyna are British forms, which have their sporogonia protected in this way. The sporogonium is very similar throughout the group (figs. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... till, last, she saw The white-flower'd elder-thicket from the field Gleam thro' the Gothic archways [3]in the wall. Then she rode back cloth'd on with chastity: And one low churl, [4] compact of thankless earth, The fatal byword of all years to come, Boring a little auger-hole in fear, Peep'd—but his eyes, before they had their will, Were shrivell'd into darkness in his head, And dropt before him. So the Powers, who wait On noble deeds, cancell'd a sense misused; And she, that ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson |
