"Hammer" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... views which connect rhythm with the symmetry of the body as making rhythmical gesture necessary; or more particularly with the conditions of work, which, if it is skilled and well carried out, proceeds in equal recurring periods, like the swinging of a hammer or an axe. But it appears that primitive effort is not carried on in this way, and proceeds, not from regularity to rhythm, but rather, through, by means of rhythm, which is made a help, to regularity. Again, it is said ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... answer them when they talk. They say things I've got ideas about but I never can explain my ideas to them. I never can argue my ideas with them. They've all got convictions and I believe I haven't any convictions. I've only got instincts and these convictions come down on instincts like a hammer on an egg." ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... often that a sound comes across its rugged pavements, save perchance (in summer) the drone of an ancient hand-organ, such as might have been devised by Adam to console his Eve when Paradise was lost. Yet of late the desecrating hammer and the ear-piercing saw have entered that haunt of ancient peace. May it be long ere any such invasion reaches those strange little wharves in the lower town, full of small, black, gambrel-roofed houses, with ...
— Oldport Days • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... stiff and cold, and had clearly been dead many hours. It seemed to me that not only his features but all his limbs were twisted and turned in the most fantastic fashion. By his hand upon the table there lay a peculiar instrument,—a brown, close-grained stick, with a stone head like a hammer, rudely lashed on with coarse twine. Beside it was a torn sheet of note-paper with some words scrawled upon it. Holmes glanced at it, and then handed ...
— The Sign of the Four • Arthur Conan Doyle
... bell' of Roc-Amadour has not rung since 1551, but it may do so any day or night, for it is still suspended to the vault of the Miraculous Chapel. It is of iron, and was beaten into shape with the hammer—facts which, together with its form, are regarded as certain evidence of its antiquity. The first time that it is said to have rung by its own movement was in 1385, and three days afterwards, according to Odo de Gissey, the phenomenon was repeated ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... friend Orchis,' replied the candle-maker, 'but don't take it illy if I call to mind the word of my uncle, the blacksmith, who, when a loan was offered him, declined it, saying: "To ply my own hammer, light though it be, I think best, rather than piece it out heavier by welding to it a bit off a neighbor's hammer, though that may have some weight to spare; otherwise, were the borrowed bit suddenly wanted again, it might not ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... of red (top) and black with a centered yellow emblem consisting of a five-pointed star within half a cogwheel crossed by a machete (in the style of a hammer and sickle) ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... all the testimony agrees in describing them, with the exception of the mark on the side, as blackish, fleshy excrescences, like the heads of nails, and in the palms of the hands like the points of nails clinched by a hammer. There was no bloody ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... What the hammer? what the chain? In what furnace was thy brain? What the anvil? what dread grasp Dare its ...
— Poems of William Blake • William Blake
... rest from the heat and the hammer! Oh, that we were all at the sweet vale of St. Auburn!" said the leader of ...
— Allegories of Life • Mrs. J. S. Adams
... the pavement before the houses, and an idle little boy was leading an idle little dog along by a string on the other. I heard the dull tinkling of a piano at a distance, accompanied by the intermittent knocking of a hammer nearer at hand. These were all the sights and sounds of life that encountered me ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... something in his hand, and aimed a vicious blow at his face with it; he had barely time to block it with his forearm. Then he was clutching the Fuzzy and disarming him; the weapon was a quarter-pound ballpeen hammer. He put it in his hip pocket and then picked up the struggling Fuzzy ...
— Little Fuzzy • Henry Beam Piper
... by this dangerous plant is of the size and form of a small orange, slightly depressed at the stalk and the opposite part. It is very black and hard to break, a hammer or its substitute being necessary to disclose its contents which consist in a great number of little seeds ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... inflated and self-conceited and presumptuous. He requires me to walk with Himself, and I have shaken away His hand from me, and passed whole days without ever thinking of Him, and 'the God in whose hands' my 'breath is, and whose are all' my 'ways,' I have 'not glorified.' I cannot hammer this truth into your consciences. You have to do it for yourselves. But I beseech you, recognise the fact that you are implicated in the universal failure, and that God's requirement is God's condemnation of ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... seniors, under question, discover that they have no body of doctrine, and have never till now dreamt of the need of any. If they are wise, they will put away the taboo on politics and sit down with their juniors to hammer these things out, and perchance clear their own minds ...
— The School and the World • Victor Gollancz and David Somervell
... Against this tendency the prophets were the constant witnesses. The religious "machine" is always in the same danger of becoming corrupt and mischievous as is the political "machine;" the man with the sledge-hammer who will smash it and fling it into the junk-pile has a work to do in every generation. This was the work of the Hebrew prophets. "I desired mercy, and not sacrifice," cries Hosea, speaking for Jehovah. "I hate, I despise your feast days," ...
— Who Wrote the Bible? • Washington Gladden
... lowered, and Jesus, being stripped of his outer garments, was laid prostrate upon his cross. A soldier approached with hammer and spikes, at sight of whom the frenzied multitude ceased their revilings for the moment and pressed near. The prisoner preserved his calm demeanor. A stupefying draught was offered him; but he refused it, apparently ...
— The Centurion's Story • David James Burrell
... he proceeded to examine the two pieces of metal under a magnifying glass. Then with his geologist's hammer he broke off bits of the metal, through all of which sparkled the bright ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in the Rockies • Frank Gee Patchin
... mental exploration, and distinguished from purely motor exploration of the trial and error variety. Suppose you need the hammer, and go to the place where it is kept, only to find it gone. Now if you simply proceed to look here and there, ransacking the house without any plan, that would be motor exploration. But if, finding ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... he had called it a thousand times; suddenly he stopped short, listening, his heart beating like a hammer, then standing still in his breast. It couldn't be—but, oh, ...
— The Old Gray Homestead • Frances Parkinson Keyes
... of production, and consequently the definitive overthrow of the political rule of the bourgeoisie, had not yet been created in the course of historical development. From this point of view, the Reign of Terror in France did no more than to clear away the feudal ruins from French soil by its hammer blows. ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... to the slow and painful beating of his heart. He listened attentively, wondering at the regularity of its beats. He began to count mechanically. One, two. Why count? At the next beat it must stop. No heart could suffer so and beat so steadily for long. Those regular strokes as of a muffled hammer that rang in his ears must stop soon. Still beating unceasing and cruel. No man can bear this; and is this the last, or will the next one be the last?—How much longer? O God! how much longer? His hand weighed heavier unconsciously on the girl's shoulder, and she spoke the last words of her story ...
— Almayer's Folly - A Story of an Eastern River • Joseph Conrad
... agility, she had other talents equally extraordinary. There was no fence that she could not take down; nowhere that she could not go. She took the pickets off the garden fence at her pleasure, using her horns as handily as I could use a claw hammer. Whatever she had a mind to, whether it were a bite in the cabbage garden, or a run in the corn patch, or a foraging expedition into the flower borders, she made herself equally welcome and at home. Such a scampering and driving, such ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... most notable smithy was at Site 41, where now stands one of the oldest houses on the Hill. Here Davis Marsh wrought in iron, and the sound of his trip-hammer audible for miles smote its own remembered impression upon the ears of those ancient generations. Doubtless the favored location of Marsh's shop in the neighborhood most central, as is shown in Chapter III, Part ...
— Quaker Hill - A Sociological Study • Warren H. Wilson
... man set his chisel against the inner rim of the cask, and dealt it a short sharp blow with his hammer, a sort of trial tap, to guide his aim. "French liquor?" He sniffed. "Furrin fruit, more like. Phew! Keep back there, and stand by ...
— The Mayor of Troy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Where had that prodigy come from, when all the rest of his family were such brutes? And he nodded affirmatively when the village notables spoke of doing something for the boy. To be sure, he did not know what to do, but they were right; his Mariano was not destined to hammer iron like his father. He might become as great a personage as Don Rafael, a gentleman who painted saints in the capital of the province and was a teacher of painting in a big house, full of pictures, in the city. ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... dream!" asked the smith eagerly, grasping the handle of his heavy hammer firmly, ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... Metal isn't half worked any more. We could turn that into steel at almost nothing a ton." He showed them in the mouldering shed the foundation of the anvil, traced the probable shafting of the trip hammer, marked the location of the hearths. "Three," he decided; "and a cold trickle of air. A nigger pumping a bellows, probably. No, they could get that from the wheel," he drew an explanatory ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... joy in the coming fray. "The Norns spin close to the end of this web," he rumbled. "Ja! And the threads of Lugur and the Heks woman are between their fingers for the breaking! Thor will be with me, and I have fashioned me a hammer in glory of Thor." In his hand was an enormous mace of black metal, fully five feet long, crowned with ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... the story of the eternal smith, Ilmarinen, who forged the foundations of the world, forged the mountains, forged the blue sky, so well forging them that nowhere can be seen the marks of the pincer, the marks of the hammer, the heads of the nails. Working in his smithy we see him all grime and black; upon his head there is one yard deep of iron firing, upon his shoulders there is one fathom deep of soot—the soot of the forge; for he seldom has time to bathe himself. But when the notion takes ...
— Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn • Lafcadio Hearn
... take me into partnership, me and my goods," said the Auvergnat, as he took La Cibot's plump arm and gave it playful taps like hammer-strokes. "I don't ask her to bring anything into the firm but her good looks! You are making a mistake when your stick to your Turk of a Cibot and his needle. Is a little bit of a porter the man to make a woman rich—a fine woman like you? Ah, what a figure you would make in a shop on ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... were chattering, and all my bones beginning to ache with the chilliness and the wetness. Before very long the moon appeared, over the edge of the mountain, and among the trees at the top of it; and then I espied rough steps, and rocky, made as if with a sledge-hammer, narrow, steep, and far asunder, scooped here and there in the side of the entrance, and then round a bulge of the cliff, like the marks upon a great brown loaf, where a hungry child has picked at it. And higher up, where the light of the moon shone broader ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... commonplace, to English critics. These are, in fact, the protests of Derain's genius against his talent, and whether they are good or not I cannot say. Derain has a super-natural gift for making things: give him a tin kettle and in half a morning he will hammer you out a Summerian head; he has the fingers of a pianist, an aptitude that brings beauty to life with a turn of the wrist; in a word, that sensibility of touch which keeps an ordinary craftsman happy for a lifetime: and these things terrify him. He ties both hands behind his back and fights ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... this time was uttered by any of our garrison. The insurgents, finding that the gate would not yield, shouted for some one in the chateau to open it. No one replied. Again and again they shook it. At last we heard the sound of loud blows, as if it were being struck by a sledge hammer, while several figures appeared on the top of the wall, ladders having been procured to ...
— Paddy Finn • W. H. G. Kingston
... line, Camp Taylor. It was soon rumored around Limerick how they were burning down practically new buildings to make immediate room for barracks and were paying unheard-of prices for labor. Every one who owned a saw, hammer and square and who could hit the hammer with the nail, called himself a carpenter and journeyed thither. The paper boys became water boys at three dollars per day. So Tim gave up his paper stand and became ...
— Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight • Mathew Joseph Holt
... the hour appointed, Colin presented himself at the Deputy Commissioner's office and was met by Dr. Crafts' secretary. His pulse was beating like a trip-hammer, and he probably looked nervous, for the secretary glanced once or twice in his direction. Then, wishing to give news that would be welcome, she said formally, of course, but betraying a ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Fisheries • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... cream taffy recipe. Just before the candy is done cooking stir in any kind of nut goodies, pour out, and when cool enough not to run, form it into a block, cut or break it with a hammer. ...
— One Thousand Secrets of Wise and Rich Men Revealed • C. A. Bogardus
... gave a few anxious looks round; all seemed mingled in a common, indistinct noise,—the clatter of the salesman crying off his qualifications in French and English, the quick fire of French and English bids; and almost in a moment came the final thump of the hammer, and the clear ring on the last syllable of the word "dollars," as the auctioneer announced his price, and Tom was made ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... Surrey,— with a leather valise behind me and a mackintosh before; very singular to see: over Sussex, down to Pevensey where the Norman Bastard landed; I saw Julius Hare (whose Guesses at Truth you perhaps know), saw Saint Dunstan's stithy and hammer, at Mayfield, and the very tongs with which he took the Devil by the nose;—finally I got home again, a right wearied man; sent my horse off to be sold, as I say; and finished the writing of my Lectures ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... the hammer and chisel, the thing might have become more powerful; but how many things he had had to consider in employing the accursed gold and ivory ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... to myself with a smile, 'after the sword, the hammer; after the hammer, the broom; you are going downstairs, my old boy, but you ...
— An "Attic" Philosopher, Complete • Emile Souvestre
... head, bearing herself so erect, and stepping so light and free under her burden, that it seemed rather an ornament than an encumbrance. The lads of the neighbouring suburb, who held their evening rendezvous for putting the stone, casting the hammer, playing at long bowls, and other athletic exercises, watched the motions of Effie Deans, and contended with each other which should have the good fortune to attract her attention. Even the rigid Presbyterians ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... back into a small drawer under the shelf, and brought out an ugly-looking weapon, tried the hammer movement with his thumb, and handed it over to me ...
— The Devil's Own - A Romance of the Black Hawk War • Randall Parrish
... things. He liked to collect fresh ideas, to be impregnated with the mentality of other people—he knew how much he had to learn. But he would have preferred his mind to be moulded gently, in artistic fashion. Marten's style was more like random blows from a sledge-hammer, half of them wide of the mark. It was not very edifying, or even instructive. Keith was the same. Why was everybody so violent, ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... With mallet, hammer, saw, and screw-driver I worked until noon, maturing my plans all the while. These plans would take the last penny in the treasury and leave us in debt several thousand francs. But it was win or go to smash now, and personally I have always preferred a tremendous smash to a slow ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... her fairyland. But, except Hans Christian Andersen's, there are no such gripping fairy tales as those of the Brethren Grimm. During this vacation, too, I discovered the "Leprachaun," the little Irish fairy with the hammer. He was not at all like the English fairies in Shakespeare's "Midsummer Night's Dream," and, leaving out Ariel, I think I liked ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... most, he had disappeared in the garb of a self-respecting gentleman with a yachting turn of mind. He reappeared in a suit of Hendrik's blue overalls, and, apparently, nothing else, his feet being bare. In his hand were a hammer and a chisel. ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... by both shoulders. Her white hands, with their rose-pink nails and little round dimples at the finger roots, felt hard and remorseless as steel claws. She looked suddenly capable of anything. The thought struck on my heart like a hammer-stroke that she would stop at nothing to save Sidney's reputation. For the first time, I was afraid for myself. I was afraid she would be too strong for me. She would push me along the corridor and through the open door into her room. If I screamed she would tell the servants ...
— Secret History Revealed By Lady Peggy O'Malley • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... appearance of Santa Claus are not unknown to them. He stands in the big shop windows in Tokyo as in London, with his red cloak, his long white beard and his sack full of toys. Sometimes he is to be seen chatting with Buddhist deities, with the hammer-bearing Daikoku, with Ebisu the fisherman, with fat naked Hotei, and with Benten, the fair but frail. In fact, with the American Billiken, Santa Claus may be considered as the latest addition to ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... ponderous stamps and hammers—in the midst of this whole terrific commotion, man, a helpless and defenseless creature, finds himself placed, not secure for a moment, that on an imprudent motion a wheel may not seize and rend him, or a hammer crush him to a powder. This sense of abandonment is at first SOMETHING AWFUL." (Capitals mine.) Reader, the religion of Jesus Christ will save you from the terrible mental condition which is legitimate from a denial of God and his Christ. ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume 1, January, 1880 • Various
... whom the king called "old fellow," in honour of his white hairs, hearing his royal master, to whom he was devotedly attached, remark, "Your clock has just struck twelve, old fellow!" replied, "Ah! sire, to twelve strokes of a hammer, an old one now, but years ago a good one, at this hour of the clock do I owe my lands, the money spent on this place, and honour of being ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 2 • Honore de Balzac
... von Hammer Purgstall, who died in Vienna during the last year, we owe our best knowledge of the Persians. He has translated into German, besides the "Divan" of Hafiz, specimens of two hundred poets, who wrote during a period of five and a half centuries, from A.D. 1000 to 1550. The seven ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... land. He thus multiplied his audience very greatly, while perhaps losing to some degree the power of close logic and of addressing a specific statement to a special point. Yet it seemed as if he could easily leave the lancet to others, grant him only the hammer and the forge. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... know what my father is! Just made of iron. You might as well put your hand under a Nasmyth's hammer." And as he saw that his hearer was unconvinced, "Besides, it is ever so much more than what I put upon Racket! That was only the way out of it! It is all up with me if he hears of it. You might as well pitch me over the cliff ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... the fact to be, there was a great Northman builder, a true son of Thor, who came down into Italy in 1200, served the order of St. Francis there, built Assisi, taught Arnolfo how to build, with Thor's hammer, and disappeared, leaving his name uncertain—Jacopo—Lapo—nobody knows what. Arnolfo always recognizes this man as his true father, who put the soul-life into him; he is known to his Florentines ...
— Ariadne Florentina - Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving • John Ruskin
... the summer—he came with his derricks, a steam-engine, a trip-hammer, and a lot of men. They took off the roof of my house, removed the engine, and ...
— The Magic Egg and Other Stories • Frank Stockton
... the warlike drift of such a social body, the inevitable intensification of international animosities in such a body, the absolute determination evident in the scheme of things to smash such a body, to smash it just as far as it is such a body, under the hammer of war, that must finally bring about rapidly and under pressure the same result as that to which the peaceful evolution slowly tends. While we are as yet only thinking of a physiological struggle, of complex ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... temple. The course of thought and action in the Orient is in many respects similar to that in the Occident. In western lands, with the ebb and flow of religious sentiment, the iconolater has been followed by the iconoclast, and the overcrowded cathedrals have been purged by the hammer and fire of the Protestant and Puritan. So in Japan we find analogous, though not exactly similar, reactions. The rise and prosperity of the believers in the Zen dogmas, which in their early history used sparingly the eikon, idol and sutra, give some indication ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... room, without a sound; and both kinds of labour admit of such keen and vigilant superintendence, as will render even a word of personal communication amongst the prisoners almost impossible. On the other hand, the noise of the loom, the forge, the carpenter's hammer, or the stonemason's saw, greatly favour those opportunities of intercourse - hurried and brief no doubt, but opportunities still - which these several kinds of work, by rendering it necessary for men to be employed very near to each other, and often side by side, without any barrier ...
— American Notes for General Circulation • Charles Dickens
... terrified expression of a child in its mother's arms, as it turned from the yawning mouth of a great mask, for refuge in her bosom. The way mounted, and descended again, down the steep street of another place, all resounding with the noise of metal under the hammer; for every house had its brazier's workshop, the bright objects of brass and copper gleaming, like lights in a cave, out of their dark roofs and corners. Around the anvils the children were watching the work, or ran to fetch water to the hissing, red-hot metal; and Marius ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... read him the description of the strange forms of the coral animals, and the beauties of their flower-like feelers and branching fabrics. It would once have delighted him, but his first comment was, "Nasty little brutes!" However, the next minute he thanked her, took the book, and said he could hammer something out of it, though it was too bad to give such an unclassical subject. At dusk he left off, saying he should get it done at night, his senses would come then, and he should be ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... passionate, vindictive, triumphant vocal fireworks ever heard out of hell. It made black noises like Niagara Falls, and white noises higher than Pike's Peak. It made leaps, lighting on tones as a carpenter's hammer lights on nails. It ran up and down the major and minor diatonics, up and down the chromatic, with the speed and fury of a typhoon, and the attention to detail of Paderewski—at his best, when he makes the women faint—and with the power and volume of a church organ ...
— IT and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... great crowd of connoisseurs and others; when, in the moment of a very interesting piece being put up, Mr. Pope entered the room. All was in an instant, from a scene of confusion and bustle, a dead calm. The auctioneer, as if by instinct, suspended his hammer. The audience, to an individual, as if by the same impulse, rose up to receive the poet; and did not resume their seats till he had reached the upper end of ...
— On the Portraits of English Authors on Gardening, • Samuel Felton
... conceptions, and is made directly responsible for all cosmic phenomena. Thus thunder to these American children was God groaning or kicking or rolling barrels about, or turning a big handle, or grinding snow, or breaking something, or rattling a big hammer; while the lightning is due to God putting his finger out, or turning the gas on quick, or striking matches, or setting paper on fire. According to Boston children, God is a big, perhaps a blue, man, to be seen in the sky, on the clouds, in church, or even in the streets. They declare that God comes ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... to draw back the hammer until two chilling clicks warranted his opinion that the pistol was now ready to perform its office. "I guess she'll do all right ...
— Penrod and Sam • Booth Tarkington
... into surf is not merely motionless 'froth,' that is half air and half water, but it runs at speed, and being partly composed of solid water strikes any obstacle with enormous force and smashes like a hammer. These then were the characteristics of the sea which beat all round the wreck, and through which the half-dazed and storm-beaten sailors had to ...
— Heroes of the Goodwin Sands • Thomas Stanley Treanor
... looked after him. All were armed. Twenty paces farther he met young Jasper on his gray, and the look on his enemy's face made him grip his rifle. With a flashing cross-fire from eye to eye, the two passed, each with his thumb on the hammer of his Winchester. The groups on the court-house steps stopped talking as he rode by, and turned to look at him. He saw none of his own friends, and he went on at a gallop to Rufe Stetson's store. His uncle was not in sight. Steve Marcum and old Sam Day stood in the porch, and inside a woman ...
— A Cumberland Vendetta • John Fox, Jr.
... gotten that out. Now go on and tell them about the old man in the dome-house on Luna. The room was silent, except for the small insectile hum of the electric clock. Then somebody set a glass on the table, and it sounded like a hammer blow. ...
— The Cosmic Computer • Henry Beam Piper
... to Jack. I think it can be managed if he will take you for his pupil, as no doubt he will. You cannot well be poorer than I was on the day when I entered my name at Exeter College. There, go away and think it over! There's no hurry, you understand: if you are to go, I must first of all hammer some Greek into you—eh? What ...
— Hetty Wesley • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... declines obeying Kaiser; asserts that "he is himself in such matter the sovereign:" Kaiser fulminates what of rusty thunder he has about him; to which the Duke, flung on his back by it, still continues contumacious in mind and tongue: and so between thunder and contumacy, as between hammer and stithy, the poor Country writhes painfully ever since, and is an affliction to everybody ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... pony," continued Mr. Grimes, "I might have patted him once or twice with the handle of the hammer. I often do that; but my blows ...
— Little Prudy's Dotty Dimple • Sophie May
... piece of Damascus steel and old English walnut, imported years before. The barrels were forty inches and choked. The small bright hammers rested on the yellow brass caps deep sunk on steel nippers. They shone through the hammer slit fresh ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... Something of this charm is undoubtedly due to the beauty of the language they wrote in and to the free, airy grace of assonants. What a hard, artificial sound the rhyme too often has: the clink that falls at regular intervals as of a stone-breaker's hammer! In the freer kinds of Spanish poetry there are numberless verses that make the smoothest lines and lyrics of our sweetest and most facile singers, from Herrick to Swinburne, seem hard and mechanical by comparison. But there is something more. I doubt, for one thing, ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... advocate and exponent of evangelical truth, Gregory was summoned to Constantinople in 379, and as bishop of that See adorned the high position with gifts and graces as brilliant as they were rare. But he was not the man for such a position at such a time. Hilary, the 'Hammer of the Arians,' could keep the heretics at bay, and do in the Latin Church what Gregory could not do in the Greek Church—maintain his position and his cause against all comers. For one thing, the retiring disposition of Gregory inclined him to shrink from the din of ...
— Hymns of the Greek Church - Translated with Introduction and Notes • John Brownlie
... the vessel was making about three knots. The whale was going at the same speed. The mate saw at once that if he did not change his course, the whale would strike his ship. Dropping the hammer, he shouted to the boy at the helm to put it hard up, and himself sprang across the deck to reenforce his order. The unwieldy ship paid off slowly, {234} and before her head had been fairly turned to leeward the whale deliberately rammed her ...
— South American Fights and Fighters - And Other Tales of Adventure • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... Eagle of Liberty, and all the emblems of Independence, Freedom, and the rights of man; let him muse on the thoughts they awaken, and then behold the actualities of life around him. Suddenly the sharp rap of an auctioneer's hammer startles him, and the loud striking of the hour of twelve will divert his attention to the throng of men around him, and the appearance of three or four men on raised stands in different parts of the Rotunda, who are calling the attention of those around him, at the same time unrolling a hand-bill ...
— Canada and the Canadians - Volume I • Sir Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... Baden-Powell. This gentleman had a supreme contempt for bullets, and certainly did not know the meaning of the word "fear," but the bursting shells produced a disagreeable impression on him. "Does it always go on like that?" he asked, when he heard the vicious hammer of the enemy's Maxim. "Yes," somebody gloomily answered, "it always goes on like that, till at length we pretend to like it, and that we should feel dull if it ...
— South African Memories - Social, Warlike & Sporting From Diaries Written At The Time • Lady Sarah Wilson
... been dignified and correct in his behavior, and a merciful misadventure of Mrs. Bundercombe with a policeman three days previously, which had led to her being arrested with a hammer in her satchel, had finally resulted in her being forced to partake of the hospitality of Holloway for the period of fourteen days; in fact, everything just then with me was couleur ...
— An Amiable Charlatan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... loafers had drawn back. A sight of the massive arms and sledge hammer fists of the young giant they had derided, and his prompt measures with one of their cronies, dissuaded them from any ...
— Ralph on the Overland Express - The Trials and Triumphs of a Young Engineer • Allen Chapman
... well-hammer'd soles protect thy feet, Thro' freezing snows, and rain, and soaking sleet. 1677 GAY: Trivia, ...
— Handy Dictionary of Poetical Quotations • Various
... Hollyhock. 'Flowers are a bit soft, except roses, which have thorns; but when you meet Jasper and Sapphire and Garnet and Opal and Emerald, I can tell you you 'll have to mind your p's and q's. They won't stand any nonsense; they won't endure any silly speeches, but they 'll just go for you hammer and tongs. They 're boys, every one of them—and—and—we 're expecting them ...
— Hollyhock - A Spirit of Mischief • L. T. Meade
... smoker, day-coach, and sleeper were all more or less shattered, with the smoking-car already beginning to blaze from the broken lamps. It was a crisis to call out the best in any gift of leadership, and Lidgerwood's genius for swift and effective organization came out strong under the hammer-blow of ...
— The Taming of Red Butte Western • Francis Lynde
... in Antioch, full of anger and unbelief, so that he had turned and left what he loved just when evil was at hands and his heart stood still, and then smote him in his breast, and stood still again, as the smith's hammer is poised in the air between ...
— Via Crucis • F. Marion Crawford
... were swiftly invaded. One blow of Andrew Sproat's massy hammer did that business, and thereafter the gaoler did not lack for coercion. Godfrey McCulloch had a pistol to his head, and the bell mouth of a huge blunderbuss lay chill between his shoulder-blades, ...
— Patsy • S. R. Crockett
... deliver it into the hand of King Omar bin al-Nu'uman and say to him, 'Thy handmaid, Nuzhat al-Zaman, would have thee to know that the chances and changes of the nights and days have struck her as with a hammer, and have smitten her so that she hath been sold from place to place, and she sendeth thee her salams.' And, if he ask further of her, say that I am now with the Viceroy at Damascus." The merchant wondered at her eloquence, ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... and exalted with anticipation of the crown of happy love, and laid it on the little white bed. Later, when the officials came to view the body, they opened the door softly and shrinkingly, and the drip, drip, drip on the clay floor sounded on their tense brains like strokes from the hammer of doom. ...
— Kafir Stories - Seven Short Stories • William Charles Scully
... late at night into Fleet Street to collect his rents. At every door the jovial collectors winded the Temple horn, and if at the second blast the door was not courteously opened, my lord cried majestically, "Give fire, gunner," and a sturdy smith burst the pannels open with a huge sledge-hammer. The horrified Lord Mayor being appealed to soon arrived, attended by the watch of the ward and men armed with halberts. At eleven o'clock on the Sunday night the two monarchs came into collision in Hare Alley (now Hare Court). The Lord of Misrule bade my Lord Mayor come to him, but Palmer, ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... grammar is better, take the Tower of Babble. They built it, I suppose, many miles high, and the Lord looked down and mixed up their grammar. So if a man was on top of the tower he would call down, 'John, bring up the hammer,' and John would come up with a saw. Then he would send him down for the hammer again, and John would bring up the nails. How much could we learn of religion, of history and the world around us, if it were not for grammar? Would 1-2-3 tell us ...
— American Missionary, Volume 43, No. 4, April, 1889 • Various
... based not so much upon superiority of numbers as upon superiority of the selected troops to the average of the forces opposed; and success depended less upon the weight than upon the sharpness of the weapon used for the blow. Hindenburg liked a hammer; Ludendorff chose an axe with which to cleave the enemy front. When it was cleft, inferior metal might be used to widen the gap between the French and British armies and drive the latter to the coast while the former was ...
— A Short History of the Great War • A.F. Pollard
... hands, but I succeeded in making her remark the clockwork and the striking apparatus. The means I employed were very simple; I asked them not to have the bell rung for lunch, and everybody got up and went into the dining-room when the little brass hammer struck twelve o'clock, but I found great difficulty in making her learn to count the strokes. She ran to the door each time she heard the clock strike, but by degrees she learned that all the strokes had not the same ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... I might say, of a mixture of such sounds; and as I began to rub my eyes, I thought that I should have been hove out of the narrow crib in which I was stowed away in the very bows of the vessel. Sometimes I felt the head of the brig lifted up, and then down it came like a sledge-hammer into the water; now I felt myself rolled on one side, now on the other. I fully thought that the vessel must be on the rocks. Not a gleam of light reached me, nor could I hear the sound of a human voice. I wanted to be out of the place; ...
— Old Jack • W.H.G. Kingston
... speed of a pin-wheel, was on top of his man. He had momentarily released his hold on the Greek's wrist, however, and he had to fight for another hold now—in the dark. Presently he captured it, twisted the arm in the terrible hammer-lock, and broke it; then, while the Greek lay writhing in agony, Mr. O'Leary leaped to his feet and commenced to play with his awful boots a devil's tattoo on that portion of his enemy's superstructure so frequently alluded to in pugilistic circles as "the slats." After five or ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... storeroom, among them an unopened case of battle-axe brandy. This was the centre of attraction. For a moment even the man on guard craned his neck to watch, as the leader of the gang, the man they called the Mopoke, produced a chisel and a hammer and ...
— The Moving Finger • Mary Gaunt
... retinue, and eke squiers, Nailing the spears, and helmes buckeling, Gniding* of shieldes, with lainers** lacing; *polishing There as need is, they were nothing idle: **lanyards The foamy steeds upon the golden bridle Gnawing, and fast the armourers also With file and hammer pricking to and fro; Yeomen on foot, and knaves* many one *servants With shorte staves, thick* as they may gon**; *close **walk Pipes, trumpets, nakeres*, and clariouns, *drums That in the battle blowe bloody souns; The palace full of people up and down, There three, ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... her hand on the knob to open the door, when she heard the click of the pistol's hammer as ...
— The Round-up - A Romance of Arizona novelized from Edmund Day's melodrama • John Murray and Marion Mills Miller
... each other in low tones, and from beneath their greasy caps their anointed side curls dangled and swung as they moved their heads. But Levi the Short-handed was not among them. Their muffled talk was interrupted from time to time by the sound of sharp, loud blows, as of a hammer striking upon nails, and as though a carpenter were at work not far from the ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... brethren, is not the shortest and the surest way to have our faces shining like that of Moses when he came down from the mountain, or like Stephen's when he 'saw the heavens opened,' to keep near Jesus Christ? It is slow work to hammer bits of ore out of the rock with a chisel and a mallet. Throw the whole mass into the furnace, and the metal will come out separated from the dross. Get up the heat, and the light, which is the ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... mark confidently, raising his gun with the surety of a man who does not know what it means to miss. Yet, before dropping the hammer, he braced himself ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... a hammer and a few nails," said Farmer Green to his son Johnnie. "We must fix this pen before any more of ...
— The Tale of Grunty Pig - Slumber-Town Tales • Arthur Scott Bailey
... when the sun went to his setting, the weapons of the Fomorians were all bent and notched, but those of the Gods were like new. And new they were: new and new after every blow struck or cast thrown. For with three strokes of his hammer Goibniu would be fashioning a spear-head, and after the third stroke there could be no bettering it. With three chippings of his knife, Luchtine had cut a handle for it; and at the third chipping there would be no fault to find with the handle either by Gods or men. And as ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... mutton, tied it to a string, and trailed it along after him in the dirt, so that by the time he had got home the meat was completely spoilt. His mother was this time quite out of patience with him, for the next day was Sunday, and she was obliged to make do with cabbage for her dinner. "You ninney-hammer," said she to her son; "you should have carried it on your shoulder." "I'll do so another ...
— English Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)
... ships in Rosenborg Palace. The mast seemed to bend slightly and the stays were as taut as fiddle-strings. The boat quivered like a leaf. The waves pounded hard against the thin strakes of the boat's side. I could feel them on my cheek, though their dampness never penetrated; but in between these hammer blows their little pats were wonderfully friendly. Every now and then I could see the white frothing of the wave-crests above the gunwale, and sometimes under the sail the horizon was visible but, more often, there ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... other respects the buntings greatly resemble the finches, but their eggs are generally distinguishable by the irregular hair-like markings on the shell. In the British Islands by far the commonest species of bunting is the yellow-hammer (E. citrinella), but the true bunting (or corn-bunting, or bunting-lark, as it is called in some districts) is a very well-known bird, while the reed-bunting (E. schoeniclus) frequents marshy soils almost to the exclusion of the two former. In certain localities ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... knowledge is barred and double barred; not until all your common schools are closed, your free presses manacled, your free Bible suppressed, your right of free speech and free inquiry smothered to death; not until your ships have gone down in the waters, and the hammer rests in your shipyards, and your railroads cease to open a way in the wilderness made straight for the entrance of the most advanced civilization; not until the race of Yankee capitalists is extinct, and enterprise, thrift, industry, nerve, moral ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... supply it, on the plea that they had no more than was needed for their lemon-gardens. Some carpentering was urgently needed by the Enterprise; but, as it had to be done on Sunday, the workmen declined to touch a hammer, notwithstanding the exhortations of a priest who promised them absolution, and even threatened to excommunicate them if they failed in their duty to the country in this pressing time of its necessity. Of those sorts were the obstacles that occurred ...
— The Life of Thomas, Lord Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald, Vol. II • Thomas Lord Cochrane
... Varones mount with hammers in their hands, and the priest then says, "Ye holy man, on the right of the Saviour, strike the first blow on the nail of the hand, and take it out!" The command is obeyed, and no sooner is the stroke of the hammer heard, than deep groans and sounds of anguish resound through the church; whilst the cry of "Misericordia! misericordia!" repeated by a thousand imploring voices, produces an indescribable sensation of awe and ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... entered to say Mr. Shagg was come to know her ladyship's final decision about the hammer-cloths; and the new footman was come to be engaged; and the china merchant ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... do so. It came to me, I suppose, with that breath of the past when I was so great and absolute. Perhaps I, or that part of me then incarnate, was a tyrant in those days, and this is why now I must be so humble. Fate is turning my pride to its hammer and beating it out ...
— The Mahatma and the Hare • H. Rider Haggard
... stood back from the narrow road, at a corner, surrounded by a low stone wall and a mass of rather dense shrubs that obscured the view from the windows. The front door was a thing of solid olive-wood. We had to hammer on it for several minutes. There was ...
— Jimgrim and Allah's Peace • Talbot Mundy
... as they call him, was a sturdy fellow till he got a fell against the mouth of a furnace, and lay ten months in St. Bartholomew's Spital, scarce moving hand or foot. He cannot wield a hammer, but he has a cunning hand for gilding, and coloured devices, and is as good as Garter-king-at-arms himself for all bearings of knights ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... and rested on a gate, listening to the faint and indeterminate sounds of the night, through which came occasionally the barking of a distant dog like the beating of a trip hammer. ...
— The Man Who Lost Himself • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... seize upon their spouses, Burn down their houses! Is such a breach of faith to be endured? See what a lurid Light from the insolent invader's torches Shines on your porches! E'en now, with thundering battering-ram and hammer And hideous clamor; With axemen, swordsmen, pikemen, billmen, bowmen, The conquering foemen, O Sophy! beat your gate about your ears, Alas! and here's A humble company of pious men, Like muttons in a pen, ...
— Ballads • William Makepeace Thackeray
... commandments of men had encrusted and corrupted the pure word of truth. Thus the greatest impulsion was given to a reformation in doctrine; and thus, too, the exclusiveness and arrogance of the clergy received the first of many sledge-hammer blows which were to result in their ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... direct information from them. He held the supreme command of the British armies on the western front when, in the battlefields of the Somme and Flanders, of Picardy and Artois, there was not much chance for daring strategy, but only for hammer-strokes by the flesh and blood of men against fortress positions—the German trench systems, twenty-five miles deep in tunneled earthworks and machine-gun dugouts—when the immensity of casualties among British troops was out of all proportion to their gains ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... with a hammer and he chopped it with a bill, He poured sulphuric acid on the edge of it, until This terrible Avenger of the Majesty of Law Was far less like a ...
— Fifty Bab Ballads • William S. Gilbert
... he proceeded to open the cases which had so long been objects of interest to his own party, and objects of intense curiosity to the Eskimos, who crowded round the entrance of the shallow cavern with eager looks, while their leader went to work with hammer and chisel on the ...
— The Giant of the North - Pokings Round the Pole • R.M. Ballantyne
... thrashing the fibrous bark of mulberry-trees to fabricate their stuffs. For this purpose they used a bit of square wood, with long parallel grooves more or less hollowed, according to the different sides. They paused a moment to enable us to examine the bark, the hammer, and the beam which ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... power this time seemed to aid me. I shot. I should have hit the beast, he was not ten paces distant—but only a click answered when my hammer fell. My gun was empty. I threw up my arm, intending to hurl the weapon, and I think I cried out. Swope shot—and the lady threw up ...
— The Blood Ship • Norman Springer
... this to Cousin E. E. when that man in the pulpit took up a little wooden hammer that lay on the desk before him, and struck it down with a force that hushed the whole congregation into ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens |
