"Clockwork" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... tyranny and oppression was not discernible in the acts of officers, from general down to corporal, as formerly. Notwithstanding all this grand transformation in our affairs, old Joe was a strict disciplinarian. Everything moved like clockwork. Men had to keep their arms and clothing in good order. The artillery was rubbed up and put in good condition. The wagons were greased, and the harness and hamestrings oiled. Extra rations were issued to negroes ...
— "Co. Aytch" - Maury Grays, First Tennessee Regiment - or, A Side Show of the Big Show • Sam R. Watkins
... life is laid out with regularity and goes on like clockwork in punctuality. The children rise at six and are expected to be ready at seven, the girls for knitting and the boys for reading, until eight o'clock, when breakfast is served. Half an hour later there is a brief morning service, and the school begins ...
— George Muller of Bristol - His Witness to a Prayer-Hearing God • Arthur T. Pierson
... my quiet attic room. France goes rolling all around, Fledged with forest May has crowned. And I puff my pipe, calm-hearted, Thinking how the fighting started, Wondering when we'll ever end it, Back to Hell with Kaiser send it, Gag the noise, pack up and go, Clockwork soldiers in a row. I've got better things to do Than to waste my time ...
— The War Poems of Siegfried Sassoon • Siegfried Sassoon
... clockwork must be wound and set each time. The accompanying diagram shows how to make the connection that will ring a bell by electric current at the time set without winding the alarm. The bell is removed from an ...
— The Boy Mechanic: Volume 1 - 700 Things For Boys To Do • Popular Mechanics
... 23d the powder-boat was towed in by a gunboat as near to the fort as it was safe to run. She was then propelled by her own machinery to within about five hundred yards of the shore. There the clockwork, which was to explode her within a certain length of time, was set and she was abandoned. Everybody left, and even the vessels put out to sea to prevent the effect of the explosion upon them. At two o'clock in the morning the explosion took place—and produced no more ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... uneasy consciousness of a dream about bottomlessness. Of grief or pain, I think, I felt nothing; though I have a sort of memory now that some sound, resembling a sob or groan, though it was neither, came at regular clockwork intervals from my bosom during three or four days. Meantime, my brain registered like a tape-machine details the most frivolous, the most ludicrous—the name of a street, Strond Street, Snargate Street; ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... moveth not that wise and ancient cow, Who chews her juicy cud so languid now Beneath her favorite elm, whose drooping bough Lulls all but inward vision, fast asleep: But still, her tireless tail a pendulum sweep Mysterious clockwork guides, and some hid pulley Her drowsy cud, each moment, ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... that easily, and if you wanted a green-house on the north side it would only be necessary to set up a few looking-glasses to pour a blazing sun upon it all day long. You might need a little clockwork to keep them adjusted at the right angles, but Yankee invention ought to be equal to that. I have no doubt we shall see patent sunshine-distributors in the market very shortly if your idea gets abroad; in fact, I shouldn't be surprised to hear that ...
— The House that Jill Built - after Jack's had proved a failure • E. C. Gardner
... when she maintains that "the State only aims at instilling those qualities in its public by which its demands are obeyed, and its exchequer is filled. Its highest attainment is the reduction of mankind to clockwork. In its atmosphere all those finer and more delicate liberties, which require treatment and spacious expansion, inevitably dry up and perish. The State requires a taxpaying machine in which there is no hitch, an exchequer in which there is never a deficit, and a public, monotonous, ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... once more to interest in affairs, the morning was well spent. On the river the work was going forward with the precision of clockwork. The six-foot lowering of the sluice-way had produced a fine current, which sucked the logs down from above. Men were busily engaged in "sacking" them from the sides of the pond toward its centre, lest ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... whose basement formed the glass isolating "island" which all of us who have ever seen an electrical machine know so well. The electric machine itself, a battery of Leyden jars was hidden under the altar and connected by a piece of clockwork with that opening covered with metal in which ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... have got the habit now of sticking together, and if they get loose in camp never leave the lines. It is a nuisance sometimes, if you have to act as a single mount, and ride away on some errand. My Argentine greatly resents such a move, and tries to circle like a clockwork mouse. She has grown as fat as a pig, though some horses are doing poorly. The oats are of a ...
— In the Ranks of the C.I.V. • Erskine Childers
... was still there, however petty the man seemed now. Dave started to phrase some protest, when he found his legs taking him forward to stop in front of Sather Karf, like some clockwork man whose lever has been pushed. He stood in front of the raised bench, noticing that the spot had been chosen to highlight him in the sunset light from the windows. He listened ...
— The Sky Is Falling • Lester del Rey
... An enormous green dragon, very long and fierce-looking, that rattled as it moved, going in and out among the ruins, rubbing itself against the fallen pillars. And the reason Philip laughed and sighed was that he knew that dragon very well indeed. He had known it long ago. It was the clockwork lizard that had been given him the Christmas before last. And he remembered that he had put it into one of the cities he and Helen had built together. Only now, of course, it had grown big and had come alive like all the other images of live ...
— The Magic City • Edith Nesbit
... send for you; you are simply spoiling for some one to fall in love with, I can tell that from your last letter. The pretty brunette had not intellectuality enough, had she? My dear fellow, as if that had anything to do with it! You were not ready, that was all. You fall in love by clockwork once every year; and it is time now. If you should see the P. B. again to-morrow, you'd be lost directly. As for me—I should think you would be tired of asking. No, I am not in love. No, I feel no inclination whatever to become ...
— Geoffrey Strong • Laura E. Richards
... musings did not permit her to listen very closely to the remarks that fell one by one from Poiret's lips like water dripping from a leaky tap. When once this elderly babbler began to talk, he would go on like clockwork unless Mlle. Michonneau stopped him. He started on some subject or other, and wandered on through parenthesis after parenthesis, till he came to regions as remote as possible from his premises without coming to any conclusions ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac
... peculiar style of supporting the instrument consists in the ease with which the telescope can be moved so as to follow a star in its apparent journey across the sky. The necessary movements of the tube are given by clockwork driven by a weight, so that, once the instrument has been correctly pointed, the star will remain in the observer's field of view, and the effect of the apparent diurnal movement will be neutralised. The last refinement in this direction is the application of an electrical ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... in that malarial hole, Salonica, gave of their best with the bayonet, in which bright pastime they were capably aided and abetted by the 60th Division. It is the fashion to speak of successful military operations as being carried out "like clockwork." If extreme dash and gallantry in the face of every obstacle that brain of man could devise constitute the "clockwork," then the attack that led to the capture of Kauwukah Ridge merits ...
— With Our Army in Palestine • Antony Bluett
... right up the wall of the summer-house and along a joist bare of all save dust, and—well, the spider walked straight on, moving with little jerks as if by intermittent clockwork, and she seemed to stroll right on top of the wasp lying curled up on her side. Only when one of the latter's delicate feelers shifted round towards her, as though in some uncanny way conscious of her approach, did she leap back as if she had touched an electric ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... dreamed of fire and the engines not to be had, and woke up shaking so as you'd hardly believe it! And I don't really think that I've gone to bed hardly one night without wondering whether Lydia had fastened the door and the little window into the yard, which is not safe if left open. As regular as clockwork, when the time came round, I'd ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... Not a single disguise was ever penetrated. All was planned and ordered as by destiny. The accused was tried by secret tribunal, sentenced without a hearing, executed in the dead of night without warning, mercy, or appeal. The movements of the Klan were like clockwork, without a word, save the whistle of the Night Hawk, the crack of his revolver, and the hoofbeat of swift horses moving like figures in a dream, and vanishing in mists ...
— The Clansman - An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan • Thomas Dixon
... think o' that?" he said to his wife. "He goes as pat to the music as if he was made o' clockwork. I used to be a pretty good un at dancing myself when I was lighter, but I could niver ha' hit it just to th' ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... night was very slightly more than one mile per hour. The routes for guns were not chosen until the whole country had been reconnoitred, and it was a highly creditable performance for artillery to get their field guns and heavy howitzer batteries through to the time-table. But the clockwork precision of the movements reflected even more highly on the staff working out the details than on the infantry and artillery, and it may be said with perfect truth that the staff made no miscalculation or mistake. The XXth ...
— How Jerusalem Was Won - Being the Record of Allenby's Campaign in Palestine • W.T. Massey
... brilliant detail reorganizations. The shipping department, first; the correspondence division next; the accounting department third, and he literally swept through the office like the proverbial new broom, caught up all the loose ends, and established a routine like clockwork. So successful was his work that the directors hastened to add supervision ...
— Increasing Efficiency In Business • Walter Dill Scott
... of no small amount of patience before it could be pronounced ready for use. It was said to be a "torpedo-boat destroyer," and was constructed out of the hull of an old tin boat. Her engines had once formed the motive power of a clockwork locomotive, but they had now been adapted to marine requirements, and made ...
— Under Padlock and Seal • Charles Harold Avery
... geometrical development of a farcical misunderstanding, and many other stage contrivances, must derive their comic force from the same source,—the art of the playwright probably consisting in setting before us an obvious clockwork arrangement of human events, while carefully preserving an outward aspect of probability and thereby retaining something of the suppleness of life. But we must not forestall results which will be duly disclosed in ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... the hands of a repairer. It was always so with Lloyd. Her charges were not infrequently persons whom she knew, often intimately, but during the time of their sickness their personalities vanished for the trained nurse; she saw only the "case," only the mechanism, only the deranged clockwork in ...
— A Man's Woman • Frank Norris
... Benthamite. I disown you. Your mother would have died for shame; there was no modern cant about your mother; she thought - she said to me, sir - I'm glad she's in her grave, Dick Naseby. Misinformed! Misinformed, sir? Have you no loyalty, no spring, no natural affections? Are you clockwork, hey? Away! This is no place for you. Away!' (waving his hands in the air). 'Go away! ...
— Tales and Fantasies • Robert Louis Stevenson
... was christened the Fortune, and on this the mine was to be exploded by a slow match, cut so as to explode at a calculated moment. The mine on board the Hope was to be started by a piece of clockwork, which at the appointed time was to strike fire from a flint. Planks and woodwork were piled on the decks to give to the two vessels the appearance of simple fireships. Thirty-two small craft, saturated with tar ...
— By Pike and Dyke: A Tale of the Rise of the Dutch Republic • G.A. Henty
... started at once, if his legs had not started of themselves, he would never have started; and, not being in command of a fiver, he would afterwards have cut a preposterous figure in the group. But started he was, like a piece of clockwork that could not be stopped! In the grand crises of his life something not himself, something more powerful than himself, jumped up in him and forced him to do things. Now for the first time he seemed to understand what had occurred within ...
— The Card, A Story Of Adventure In The Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... put the company through half a dozen movements of the manual of arms, next marching the company away in column of fours. The regulars, of course, responded like clockwork. They made a fine appearance as they started off under their freakish second lieutenant. Ere they had gone far Ferrers swung them into column of twos at the ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys as Sergeants - or, Handling Their First Real Commands • H. Irving Hancock
... the little girl found that the Bear did no harm, but only growled in a make-believe, jolly fashion, she decided to make friends with him. She sat down on the floor close beside him, and when the clockwork inside the toy had run down, and the Bear was still, Nettie took him up in ...
— The Story of a Plush Bear • Laura Lee Hope
... writing home to his wife. You would never think how particular such a gruff old fellow as he is about writing home. Writes a long letter every week as regular as clockwork. Doesn't seem ...
— Fitz the Filibuster • George Manville Fenn
... enter the other house, mount to the roof and make sure that everything is in order. At ten minutes to twelve, I hoist into place the two arms to which our wires are secured, stretching them tight by means of the winch which we have provided, and then I at once start the clockwork. I then descend, make my way to the tram-station, and take a third-class ticket to Colmar, where I will await you at Valentin's cabaret. If you do not arrive by sundown, I am to go on to Paris to make ...
— The Destroyer - A Tale of International Intrigue • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... the winged heels of Love came our discovery of the Dawn. Of course we had known all along that there was a sunrise—a mechanical sort of affair that started things going like clockwork. But Dawn was a bird ...
— Explorers of the Dawn • Mazo de la Roche
... discussion and all beneficial legislation being out of the question, the House of Commons may become a mere mechanical puppet-show, and may present the spectacle of 'a steam Irish Party, an electric Ministry, and a clockwork Speaker.' It is certain that there never was so much talk in the Lower House as at the present moment; but it is also certain that the complaint of 'much speaking' has before now been frequently preferred against both Chambers. Politicians have always been ...
— By-ways in Book-land - Short Essays on Literary Subjects • William Davenport Adams
... Dorothy was seated, and next to her was Tik-Tok, the Clockwork Man, who had been wound up as tightly as his clockwork would permit, so he wouldn't interrupt the festivities by running down. Then came Aunt Em and Uncle Henry, Dorothy's own relations, two kindly old people who had a cozy home in the Emerald City and were ...
— The Magic of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... that Nature, in Skitzland, never removes the stomach. Every man has to feed himself; and the necessity for finding food, joined to the necessity for buying clothes, is a mainspring whereby the whole clockwork of civilized life is kept in motion. Now, if a man positively can not feed and clothe himself, he becomes a pauper. He then goes to the Workhouse, where he has his stomach filled with a cement. That stopping lasts a life-time, and he thereafter needs no food. His body, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... should be dragons in the way! Here were no dragons. As he went down the High Street people smiled at him and waved hands. The town sparkled under the afternoon sun. It was market-day, and the old fruit-woman under the green umbrella, the toy-man with the clockwork monkeys, the flower-stalls and the vegetable-sellers, all these were here; in the centre of the square, sheep and pigs were penned. Dogs were barking, stout farmers in corduroy breeches walked about arguing and expectorating, and suddenly, above all ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... clockwork puppet pressed A phantom lover to her breast, Sometimes they seemed to try ...
— Poems • Oscar Wilde
... Clockwork Mice, and Coloured Marbles Painted Bird that sweetly warbles, Dolls of every age and size, With flaxen hair and ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole
... quiet the whole evening. In Mrs. Selvig's tap-room he found a remedy which made him insensible to moral lectures even the most reasonable and impressive. There he stood every evening a quarter of an hour after working-hours, as regular as clockwork, and when the hands of the clock drew near to eight, he just as regularly set off homewards, a punctuality which, be it said in passing, had gained for him in the tap-room the title ...
— One of Life's Slaves • Jonas Lauritz Idemil Lie
... shook her head. "The dear knows," she said, "but something must 'a' happened to him, sure. He's been steady as clockwork since ever he took that room upstairs, I'll say that for him." She sighed as she spoke, thinking ...
— The Bishop's Shadow • I. T. Thurston
... streak-of-lightning man to say, that the present companies in operation do not afford us that to our heart's content. It is but a very few years ago since we used to glorify ourselves in the rapidity of the mail-coach, doing its ten miles an hour with the punctuality of clockwork. Now we have arrived at the ratio of forty within the same period, and yet we are not content. Next year, within fourteen hours we shall be transported from Edinburgh to London. That, it seems, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... at the side of the dining-room foundation, according to the railroad men, and it was set off by some sort of clockwork," ...
— Dave Porter and the Runaways - Last Days at Oak Hall • Edward Stratemeyer
... lamps have been devised by Serrin, Dubosq, Siemens, Brockie, and others, some regulating the arc by clockwork and electro-magnetism, or by thermal and other effects of the current. They are chiefly used for lighting halls and railway stations, streets and open spaces, search-lights and lighthouses. They are sometimes naked, but as a rule their brightness is tempered by ...
— The Story Of Electricity • John Munro
... mother's playing Canada. And this is little Sidonia Vavasour—mother out in one of the highest-priced sketches in vaudeville. Know it? 'The Snake.' Every morning that God sends comes her good-morning telegram to this little mite, just as regular as clockwork." ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... Street. We was happy then. It's your success has lost you for me. I ought to known it, but—I—I wanted things so for you and the boy. It's your success has lost you for me. Back there, not a supper we didn't eat together like clockwork, not a night we didn't take ...
— Gaslight Sonatas • Fannie Hurst
... is clockwork, all is order. They make no mistakes. Every third man wears a uniform, and whether he be a marshal of the empire or a brakeman, he is ready and perfectly willing to answer all your questions with tireless politeness, ready to tell you which car to take, yea, and ready to go and put you into it to ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Franklin Inst., 1886) employed a cylinder driven by clockwork, making ten revolutions per second. The surface was divided into 100 equal parts, each equal to 1/1000 second. The time marks were made by two galvanometer needles, when successive screens were broken by a shot. Henry also used an induction-coil spark to make the cylinder, the primary of the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... an anchorite's life, going to and fro with clockwork regularity, and denying himself all those diversions in Society which are ever at the command of a notable man. Very rarely did he accept an invitation to dine, and the fact that he lived down at Hove was in order to have a good excuse to ...
— The Seven Secrets • William Le Queux
... doubt about it. For five-and-twenty years he had lived by clockwork. But it was by Jefferson clockwork, not London clockwork. He had changed his longitude, but not himself. The habits of a quarter of a century were not to be shifted at the ...
— Sketches in Lavender, Blue and Green • Jerome K. Jerome
... Paris again, he brought a large, flat, polished box, in which there were a dozen different games, French games with balls, and battledores and shuttlecocks, games which grown-up people liked playing, too; and there were carriages which went round and round by clockwork, and a tumbler who turned somersaults backwards down a flight of steps as soon as he was placed on the top step. Those were things that the people in France ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... was presently to know more, and the same must be said of another inventor, Dr. Barton, of Beckenham, who shortly completed an airship model carrying aeroplanes and operated by clockwork. In an early experiment this model travelled four ...
— The Dominion of the Air • J. M. Bacon
... no work, it exercises no influence or control, it is nothing. How then can it be the vehicle and instrument of my conscious soul? It cannot. Then is my soul homeless? Or is it to be identified with the activity and fortunes of a single atomic constituent of my body, a single cog in the animal clockwork? If so, how irrational! For the soul does not experience itself as the soul of one minute part, but as the soul of ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... began the term badly by being largely responsible for a disturbance which occurred in the dining-hall, when a clockwork frog was suddenly discovered disporting itself in Pilson's teacup; and it is probable that Jack would have continued to distinguish himself as a black sheep, in company with his three unruly classmates, had it not been for an unforeseen occurrence ...
— Soldiers of the Queen • Harold Avery
... probably familiar with the structure of an ordinary astronomical observatory. The building is usually cylindrical in shape, with a very light hemispherical roof capable of being turned round from the interior. The telescope is supported upon a stone pillar in the centre, and a clockwork arrangement compensates for the earth's rotation, and allows a star once found to be continuously observed. Besides this, there is a compact tracery of wheels and screws about its point of support, by which the astronomer adjusts ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... but he stood around till the thing opened itself, trying to invent some way of unfastening it. That's William's trouble. He will invent. A little while ago he got up a cabinet bedstead that would shut and open without handling. It went by clockwork. William got into it, and up it went. Bless your heart, he staid in there from Saturday afternoon till Sunday night, when it flew open and disclosed William with the plans and specifications of a patent washbowl that would tip over ...
— The Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56, No. 2, January 12, 1884 - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... shown into a splendid room, thirty-five or forty feet long by twenty wide, secured bedrooms as clean and comfortable as heart could desire, and had every thing we asked for with the precision of clockwork and the rapidity of steam. The Three Cocks began to descend from the lofty place they held in our esteem, and we resolved for one day at least to rest contentedly in such comfortable quarters, and look about us; so forth we sallied, and in the course of our pilgrimage ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... about kill that child to find out the truth," thought Jane. "She looks, anyhow, like she hadn't a friend on earth! I'm going to let her think the money comes as regular as clockwork! I d' know but I'm real glad he don't send it. Makes me feel closer ...
— A Prairie Infanta • Eva Wilder Brodhead
... we have a new departure. Gill at the Cape, having the comet 1882.ii. all to himself in those latitudes, wished his friends in Europe to see it, and employed a local photographer to strap his camera to the observatory equatoreal, driven by clockwork, and adjusted on the comet by the eye. The result with half-an-hour's exposure was good, so he tried three hours. The result was such a display of sharp star images that he resolved on the Cape Photographic Durchmusterung, which after fourteen ...
— History of Astronomy • George Forbes
... an ancient trunk. Then I conquered them and garrisoned their land. (Alas! they died, no doubt through contact with civilisation—one my mother trod on—and their land became a wilderness again and was ravaged for a time by a clockwork crocodile of vast proportions.) And out towards the coal-scuttle was a region near the impassable thickets of the ragged hearthrug where lived certain china Zulus brandishing spears, and a mountain country of rudely piled bricks concealing ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... the Begum's palace," explained Archie rapidly. "Dahlia decoys the Chief Mucilage; you, Thomas, drive the submarine; Myra has charge of the clockwork mouse, and we others hang about and sing. To say more at this stage would be to bring ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, March 11, 1914 • Various
... then in the best bit of shade he could find, flapping his great ears about, blinking his little pig's eyes, and turning his trunk and his tail into two pendulums, swinging them backwards and forwards as regular as clockwork, and all the time watching Harry, when Measles says all at once, ...
— Begumbagh - A Tale of the Indian Mutiny • George Manville Fenn
... kind of calculation, or to carry on the routine of any existing work in an observatory, it is easy to go into the labor market and engage a sufficient number of accurate computers, either by time or piece work, or to find an assistant who will make observations with the regularity of clockwork. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 611, September 17, 1887 • Various
... practical nature, which could be advanced by mathematical knowledge, had an interest for him: and his incessant industry enabled him to find time for many of them. Amongst such subjects were Tides and Tidal Observations, Clockwork, and the Strains in Beams and Bridges. A certain portion of his time was also given to Lectures, generally on current astronomical questions, for he held it as his duty to popularize the science as far as lay in his power. And he attended the meetings ...
— Autobiography of Sir George Biddell Airy • George Biddell Airy
... method of finding asteroids and comets by means of photography is simple and easy. The plate is exposed in a frame that moves by clockwork with the earth, so as to keep the same field of stars steady on the glass. After two, three or four hours' exposure, the photograph will show the fixed stars, but the planets, asteroids and comets will reveal ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... successful. The machine which she had had in mind proved to be an oak box, perhaps eighteen inches long, by half the width, and a foot deep. On its face it bore a little dial. Inside there appeared a fine wire on a spool which unwound gradually by clockwork, and, after passing through a peculiar small arrangement, was wound up on another spool. Flexible silk-covered copper wires led ...
— Constance Dunlap • Arthur B. Reeve
... we stand, like clockwork toys, A lecturer whom papa employs Proceeds to prussia Our modest ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... broken by a shrill sound like the creaking of a rusty spring. It startled Don Juan; he all but dropped the phial. A sweat, colder than the blade of a dagger, issued through every pore. It was only a piece of clockwork, a wooden cock that sprang out and crowed three times, an ingenious contrivance by which the learned of that epoch were wont to be awakened at the appointed hour to begin the labors of the day. Through the windows there came already a ...
— The Elixir of Life • Honore de Balzac
... of the various tides. This is done by means of a tide recording instrument similar to Fig. 4, which represents one made by Mr. J. H. Steward, of 457, West Strand, London, W.C. It consists of a drum about 5 in diameter and 10 in high, which revolves by clockwork once in twenty-four hours, the same mechanism also driving a small clock. A diagram paper divided with vertical lines into twenty-four primary spaces for the hours is fastened round the drum and a pen or pencil attached to a slide ...
— The Sewerage of Sea Coast Towns • Henry C. Adams
... was out some years ago, but that has made no difference. Nothing would induce him to leave me; and I would not part with him for any amount, for a more faithful and trusty fellow never lived, and when I go away I know everything will go along like clockwork. As for his wife, she's a treasure, and she knows how to cook a dinner, as you ...
— A Final Reckoning - A Tale of Bush Life in Australia • G. A. Henty
... accustomed during a long life to habits regulated by clockwork, the jar must have been especially sharp; yet before his neighbours had fairly begun to wonder how he would take it, he had made for himself a new routine of living, and he might have been observed each day doing the same things at the same hours—smoking his ...
— Sir Robert Hart - The Romance of a Great Career, 2nd Edition • Juliet Bredon
... the big bedroom of Mamma blossomed with delicate fabrics, with bright ribbons and frilly laces, and amid the blossoming, the whir of the machine and the feet and hands of the two-lire-a-day seamstress went like mad clockwork, while in and out Mamma's friends came hurrying, at the rumor, to hint of congratulation or suggest ...
— The Innocent Adventuress • Mary Hastings Bradley |
