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Mortar   /mˈɔrtər/   Listen
Mortar

verb
1.
Plaster with mortar.



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"Mortar" Quotes from Famous Books



... confessions relating to an intended husband, who was awaiting her at Berne, and whose letters, both in prose and verse, were her comfort in her exile. This future husband was an apothecary, and the idea that he pounded out verses as he pounded his drugs in a mortar, and rolled out rhymes with his pills, sometimes inclined Jacqueline to laugh, but she listened patiently to the plaintive outpourings of her 'promeneuse', because she wished to acquire a right to reciprocate by a few half- confidences of her own. In her turn, therefore, she ...
— Jacqueline, v1 • Th. Bentzon (Mme. Blanc)

... and was to occupy it upon the morrow, but when the morrow came the palace was a pile of ruins. "Woe is me!" cried the King, "who is guilty of this crime?" "There is no crime," replied the sage at his side; "but the mortar was made of sand and water only, and the builders forgot to put in the lime." So fell the old empires, because the governors forgot to put justice into their ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick

... the Baba Yaga got up in the morning, the sorry colt was not to be seen! Off she set in pursuit. At full speed did she fly in her iron mortar, urging it on with the pestle, sweeping away her traces with the broom. She dashed up to the fiery river, gave a glance, and said, "A capital bridge!" She drove on to the bridge, but had only got half-way when the bridge broke in two, ...
— Russian Fairy Tales - A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore • W. R. S. Ralston

... that he had never heard any one who spoke such excellent Spanish. The emperor fixed his eyes upon me. 'You must have traveled a great deal,' he said. 'You should not be wasting your time with stones and mortar.' Then, turning to the officer who had spoken to me, he said, 'He understands Spanish so well that we may make him useful.' He was about to address me again, but was interrupted by the arrival of an orderly with a despatch. This he read hastily, and walked ...
— The Vizier of the Two-Horned Alexander • Frank R. Stockton

... brought all of us Bretons up to Paris, as claimants of justice for our province, or counters of the king's grace, as they phrase it, is finished happily; and there is nothing to detain any of us in this great wilderness of stone and mortar any longer. D'Argenson told me yesterday that he should set out homeward on Wednesday next; and it is but hurrying our own preparations a little to travel with them in one party. I will see him this ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 1 July 1848 • Various

... gave, as it peered through its veil of melting snow and freezing rain, a peculiar cheerfulness to the landscape. Here and there in the vacant lots abandoned hoop-skirts defied decay; and near the half-finished wooden houses, empty mortar-beds, and bits of lath and slate strewn over the scarred and mutilated ground, added their interest to ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various

... by our plastic power... Bricks and mortar are mortar and bricks until the architect can ...
— Heart's-ease • Phillips Brooks

... dropped in a few from her box. They were longer and finer than O-Kin's, and as they unfolded, the children screamed with delight. A man in a boat, with a pole and line, was catching a fish; a rice mortar floated alongside a wine-cup; the Mikado's crest bumped the Tycoon's; a tortoise swam; a stork unfolded its wings; a candle, a fan, a gourd, an axe, a frog, a rat, a sprig of bamboo, and pots full of many-colored flowers sprung ...
— Harper's Young People, May 25, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various

... response, was the discovery of some inconveniencies which had already been remarked. "I am very glad you told me," he said. "I must have everything put right for you, mother. A thing that can be put right by bricks and mortar ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant

... came other unmistakable, characteristic, copyrighted smells of spring that belong to the-big-city-above-the-Subway, alone. The smells of hot asphalt, underground caverns, gasoline, patchouli, orange peel, sewer gas, Albany grabs, Egyptian cigarettes, mortar and the undried ink on newspapers. The inblowing air was sweet and mild. Sparrows wrangled happily everywhere ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry

... on foreign support other than an occasional supply of beads and calico; coffee is indigenous, and so is sugar-cane. When detained by ulcerated feet in Manyuema I made sugar by pounding the cane in the common wooden mortar of the country, squeezing out the juice very hard and boiling it till thick; the defect it had was a latent acidity, for which I had no lime, and it soon all fermented. I saw sugar afterwards at Ujiji made in the same way, and that kept for months. Wheat and rice are cultivated ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume II (of 2), 1869-1873 • David Livingstone

... installed a sort of laboratory, and shut himself up in it. The prohibition to enter it was formal. It was here that he gave himself up to special preparations, of which he spoke to no one. Almost immediately the slow and regular sound of a pestle grinding in a mortar was heard. ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola

... the Monkey, in high glee, carrying his pot. By-and-by he came to a place, where was a Cowherd's wife making curds in a mortar. ...
— The Talking Thrush - and Other Tales from India • William Crooke

... was a small addition used as a storeroom. Not far away were the barn and the stable, built always of untrimmed logs, the intervening chinks securely filled with clay or mortar. There was also a root-house, half-sunk in the ground or burrowed into the slope of a hill, where the habitant kept his potatoes and vegetables secure from the frost through the winter. Most of the habitants likewise had their own bake-ovens, set a convenient distance ...
— Crusaders of New France - A Chronicle of the Fleur-de-Lis in the Wilderness - Chronicles of America, Volume 4 • William Bennett Munro

... the same, such as their late agreement with their king, and hopes by him to carry on their designe, [they] may know, that the Sion promised and hoped for will not be built with such untempered mortar. As for the unjust invasion they mention, time was, when an army of Scotland came into England, not called by the supreame authority. We have said in our papers with what hearts and upon what accompt we came, and the Lord hath heard us, though you would not, upon as solemn an appeal ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning

... in a mortar, with half an ounce of butter, and rub it through a hair sieve. (If spawn is used it need ...
— The Skilful Cook - A Practical Manual of Modern Experience • Mary Harrison

... house in an inclosure of two or three acres. The unvarying model was one story high, with porches or galleries surrounding it. Wooden walls were filled and daubed with a solid mass of what was called cat-and-clay, a mixture of mortar and chopped straw or Spanish moss. The chimney was of the same materials, shaped by four long corner posts, wide apart below, and ...
— Heroes of the Middle West - The French • Mary Hartwell Catherwood

... streets of a great town, far more than country roads and lanes, hold over the long years precious, poignant memories, for a background of stones and mortar has about it a character of permanence which holds captive and echoes the scenes and words ...
— Studies in love and in terror • Marie Belloc Lowndes

... making (commencing stage) 2. Ancient Mortar 3. Illustrative Diagram of a Mafulu Community of Villages 4. Diagram of Front of Emone (Front Hood of Roof and Front Platform and Portions of Front Timbers omitted, so as to show Interior) 5. Diagram of Transverse Section across Centre of Emone 6. Diagrammatic Sketch of Apse-like Projection ...
— The Mafulu - Mountain People of British New Guinea • Robert W. Williamson

... demons grew as vigilant as the pupils of Amoros,—bold as hawks, agile at all exercises, clever and strong as criminals. They trained themselves in climbing roofs, scaling houses, jumping and walking noiselessly, mixing mortar, and walling up doors. They collected an arsenal of ropes, ladders, tools, and disguises. After a time the Knights of Idleness attained to the beau-ideal of malicious mischief, not only as to the accomplishment but, still more, in the invention of their pranks. They ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac

... my lord," he said, "I'd like to say a word. I'm a business man. I've as much at stake as any one in this room. My fortune, gentlemen, is in bricks and mortar, in machinery and plant not ten miles from this city. I've thought this matter out, and I came to a conclusion years ago. Home Rule won't do for Belfast, and Belfast isn't going to have it. If I saw any way of stopping it but the one I'd take it. There are thousands, ...
— The Red Hand of Ulster • George A. Birmingham

... however, don't set till November, and before that there is October to be considered, the season of the rains. Get you into the woods in October and cut for your needs. And what might these be? Well, a mortar to pound your grain in, and a pestle to pound it withal; an axle for your wain, a beetle to break the clods. Then, for your plows, look out for a plow-tree of holm-oak: that is the best wood for them. Make two plows in case of accident, one all ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett

... glance; looked around me, saw but heaps of brick, mortar, and ashes, where barns, smoke-houses, granaries, and stables had stood. The cellar of my old home was almost choked with weeds; slender young saplings had already sprouted ...
— The Reckoning • Robert W. Chambers

... was a clatter as of old iron behind him, and Service, the machine-gunner, rushed up and erected his tripod and lethal toy. No man was more popular than Service in normal times. But to-day he and all his tribe stirred the bitter enmity that Ian Hay tells us the trench-mortar people aroused in France. 'Go away, Service,' his friends entreated. But Service stayed, a fact which precipitated G.A.'s next short ...
— The Leicestershires beyond Baghdad • Edward John Thompson

... erected for centuries. These saline incrustations consist of carbonates and sulphates, with alkaline bases; and it is well known these act an important part in vegetation. The influence of lime in their production is manifested by their appearing first at the place where the mortar and ...
— Familiar Letters of Chemistry • Justus Liebig

... big candles when you send a parcel. This one is lasting beautifully. Yesterday (Sunday) we fired off the mortar in the morning, and in the afternoon went into the town for dinner. I wanted to go to a Catholic Church in the evening to see what it is like, because, of course, there are no ...
— Letters from France • Isaac Alexander Mack

... and yet they will not be humbled, and when it is even at the door next to utter destruction and consumption, he addeth, "If then their uncircumcised hearts be humbled, and they take with the punishment of sin," &c. We need ask no reason of this, for "bray a fool in a mortar, his folly will not depart from him," Prov. xxvii. 22. Poor foolish man is a foolish man, folly is born with him, folly is his name, and so is he. He hath not so much wisdom as to "hear the voice of the ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning

... said, self-educated, drudging for his daily bread in some dreary Glasgow prison-house of brick and mortar, he has seen the sky, the sun and moon—and, moreover, the sea, report says, for one day in his whole life; and this is nearly the whole of his experience in natural objects. And he has felt, too painfully for his peace of mind, the contrast between his environment and that of ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley

... taste can achieve wonders almost past belief. What a contrast this, between the cultured, logical, profound, masterly reason of a Gladstone and that of the hod-carrier who has never developed or educated his reason beyond what is necessary to enable him to mix mortar ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden

... me, and they shall not be disappointed. God forbid it should so happen, that the enemy escape me, and get into any port! You may rely, if I am properly supplied, that there they shall remain, a useless body, for this summer. But, if I have gun and mortar boats, with fire-ships, it is most probable they may be got at: for, although I hope the best, yet it is proper to be prepared for the worst; which, I am sure, all this fleet would feel to be, the escape of the enemy into port. My distress for frigates is ...
— The Life of the Right Honourable Horatio Lord Viscount Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) • James Harrison

... one form, however, in which the fruit is occasionally served, that renders it a dish fit for a king. As soon as it is taken from the fire the exterior is removed, the core extracted, and the remaining part is placed in a sort of shallow stone mortar, and briskly worked with a pestle of the same substance. While one person is performing this operation, another takes a ripe cocoanut, and breaking it in halves, which they also do very cleverly, proceeds to grate the juicy meat into fine particles. This is done by means of a ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville

... vaporization is physical and molecular energy; the potential energy stored up in uncombined potassium oxide and water, or calcium oxide (quicklime) and water is molecular, and when either two substances are brought together kinetic, thermal or heat energy is set free, as in slaking lime for mortar. ...
— The Standard Electrical Dictionary - A Popular Dictionary of Words and Terms Used in the Practice - of Electrical Engineering • T. O'Conor Slone

... Lieut. W. Beckett reported some activity in No-man's Land in front of "A" Company and invited the bombers to try their hand. Now the bombers had received their first introduction to their precarious weapons only 24 hours previously, when they took over from the 7th H.L.I. a Garland mortar, a trench catapult and various crude jam-tin and canister bombs of sinister aspect. Selecting the catapult, which Lieut. Leith thought would be less dangerous to his team than the mortar, they aimed as best they could in the dark, applied a canister bomb to the pouch, lit the fuse and pressed the ...
— The Fifth Battalion Highland Light Infantry in the War 1914-1918 • F.L. Morrison

... in with great severity, and the sufferings of the army were extreme. In a few days, however, these sufferings were considerably diminished by the erection of logged huts, filled up with mortar, which, after being dried, formed comfortable habitations, and gave content to men long unused to the conveniences of life. The order of a regular encampment was observed; and the only appearance of winter quarters, was the ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 2 (of 5) • John Marshall

... me there; but I went to bed at last, and dreamed that we two were building houses on the seashore. Carrie's was the prettier, for it was all of sea-weed and bright-colored shells that looked as though the sun were shining on them, while mine was made of clay, tempered by mortar. ...
— Esther - A Book for Girls • Rosa Nouchette Carey

... courses, are down upon our level, and as the building rises the scaffolding rises, and sometimes the platform where they stand is screened off by some frail canvas stretched round it, so that we cannot see them as they ply their work with trowel and mortar. So Christ came down to earth to lay the courses of His Temple that had to rest upon earth, but now the scaffolding is raised and He is working at the top stories. Though out of our sight, He is at work ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren

... the neighbourhood was shy to own the Railroad. One or two bold speculators had projected streets; and one had built a little, but had stopped among the mud and ashes to consider farther of it. A bran-new Tavern, redolent of fresh mortar and size, and fronting nothing at all, had taken for its sign The Railway Arms; but that might be rash enterprise—and then it hoped to sell drink to the workmen. So, the Excavators' House of Call had sprung up from a beer-shop; and the old-established Ham and Beef Shop had become ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens

... Gurgaon on the Rohtak border. The popular idea of the Mina, Mr. Crooke remarks, [268] is quite in accordance with his historical character; his niggardliness is shown in the saying, 'The Meo will not give his daughter in marriage till he gets a mortar full of silver'; his pugnacity is expressed in, 'The Meo's son begins to avenge his feuds when he is twelve years old'; and his toughness in, 'Never be sure that a Meo is dead till you see the third-day ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell

... shaped like a flattened ovoid. And so the work goes on, cell upon cell, each supplying the materials for the partition separating it from the one below. On reaching the end of the cylinder, the Osmia closes up the case with a thick layer of the same mortar. Then that bramble-stump is done with; the Bee will not return to it. If her ovaries are not yet exhausted, other dry stems will be exploited in the ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre

... most everything else is dirty when you get into these brick and mortar tunnels. That's what I call the streets. The air even isn't clean," went on the lumberman. "Give me the woods, with a fresh wind blowing, and the world looks good to me," then his voice and face fell, as he added, "excepting that snake-in-the-grass, ...
— Nan Sherwood at Pine Camp - or, The Old Lumberman's Secret • Annie Roe Carr

... it's glad enough I'll be to get shut of this ould wad that's on me. Every breath of win' goes thro' it as ready as if it was a crevice in a wall, fit to freeze you into mortar." ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane

... by dropping a bunch of parsley into boiling water, and in a minute or two, when it becomes intensely green, take it up, pound it in a mortar, and then through a sieve. Use as much pulp as will color ...
— Choice Cookery • Catherine Owen

... deliverers of the kingdom; had it not been for them neither Jargeau nor Beaugency would have been taken in June. Quite in the beginning of July, when they thought the Loire campaign was to be continued, they had sent their great mortar, La Bougue, to Gien. With it they had despatched ammunition and victuals; and now, in the early days of December, at the request of the King addressed to the magistrates, they sent to La Charite all the artillery brought back from Gien; likewise eighty-nine soldiers of the municipal troops, wearing ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France

... always at sea, if the maintenance of discipline was ever liable to the slightest failure? Filled as I was with even more than the ordinary sense of the imperious claims of duty on the officer in command, I reassured my subordinate. "Make your mind easy," I told him. "I would be brayed in a mortar sooner than tolerate one moment's hesitation in carrying out the sentence. I shall stand at the head of the crew, and have the punishment carried out in front of me. The men will read my countenance and nobody will stir, I'll answer for it!" And so ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville

... of burnt brick, bas-reliefs were made upon alabaster slabs and heightened by coloring, and painting was largely upon tiles, with mineral paints, afterward glazed by fire. These glazed brick or tiles, with figured designs, were fixed upon the walls, arches, and archivolts by bitumen mortar, and made up the first mosaics of which we have record. There was a further painting upon plaster in distemper, of which some few traces remain. It did not differ in design from the ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Painting • John C. Van Dyke

... the words as well as the spirit of the original. Not least will they appreciate the fact that he has left the hewn stones of Bjoernson's lines in their native ruggedness instead of attempting to reduce them to a brick-and-mortar smoothness. Yale Review. ...
— Modern Icelandic Plays - Eyvind of the Hills; The Hraun Farm • Jhann Sigurjnsson

... now—and flinging himself into a chair with deep arms that stood on the hearth, he lit his cigar and sipped drowsily the glass of brandy she had left on a silver tray on the table. The ceiling was ridiculously high—what a waste of good bricks and mortar!—the room was ridiculously large! On the smooth white walls reddish shadows moved in a fantastic procession, and from the big chintz-covered lounge the monstrous blue poppies leaped out of the firelight. The high canopy over the bed was draped with prim folds ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow

... tumult of a city round about her desolation. The spectator turns away at first, revolted, from the central object of the picture, forced painfully and coarsely forward, a mass of shattered brickwork, with the plaster mildewed away from it, and the mortar mouldering from its seams; and if he look again, either at this or at the carpenter's tools beneath it, will perhaps see in the one and the other, nothing more than such a study of scene as Tintoret could but too easily obtain among the ruins of his own Venice, chosen to give a coarse ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin

... description. At first their omnivorousness astonished her. "Skunks and rattlesnakes, yea the very bark of trees" they esteemed as delicacies. "They would pick up old bones and cut them in pieces at the joints, ... then boil them and drink up the liquor, and then beat the great ends of them in a mortar and so eat them." After some weeks of starvation Mrs. Rowlandson herself was fain to partake of such viands. One day, having made a cap for one of Philip's boys, she was invited to dine with the great sachem. "I went," she says, "and he gave me a pancake about as ...
— The Beginnings of New England - Or the Puritan Theocracy in its Relations to Civil and Religious Liberty • John Fiske

... Still, he has missed you, and his father is actually pathetic in his mourning. He told me, yesterday, that you had never seen his new hood. Really, it sounded rather feminine, his pride in that new hood of his. You'd have thought it must be a creation of chiffon and ermine, not of ordinary brick and mortar. How is Mrs. Brenton?" ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray

... of arrowroot are powdered in a mortar with a little water and then mixed by small quantities to 800 parts of boiling water. After a few minutes 200 parts of alcohol are added and the mixture filtered. The paper is immersed for two or three minutes in the warm solution and hung ...
— Photographic Reproduction Processes • P.C. Duchochois

... extraordinary; nothing has crumbled or collapsed; every feature remains; and the huge blocks of stone, of a brownish-yellow (as if they had been baked by the Provenal sun for eighteen centuries), pile themselves, without mortar or cement, as evenly as the day ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various

... Babcock doubled his gangs, and utilized every hour of low water to the utmost, even when the men stood waist-deep. It was his only hope for completing the first section that season. After that would come the cold, freezing the mortar, and ending everything. ...
— Tom Grogan • F. Hopkinson Smith

... it as the judgment of common sense that there neither is nor is likely to be any educational mortar wherein a fool may be so brayed that he shall come forth a wise man. The broad, unequivocal sentence of history seems to be that whoever is not noble by nature will hardly be rendered so by art. Education ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... they lay a floor of this kind of tempered mortar on the ground, upon which they deposit a layer ...
— An English Grammar • W. M. Baskervill and J. W. Sewell

... and how dusty the pavements from the crumbling masonry. The houses are so lofty that the strip of blue sky can scarcely send its light to the bottom, whilst the upper storeys have such an affectionate leaning towards each other, that the wonder is that any mortar is capable of restraining their eagerness to fall on each other's necks. But all the houses are not like this, and the character of the masonry speedily improves on emerging from the gloomy alleys into the magnificent Strada Reale, more of ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith

... probable, and at tea-time, when Cyril came home under a mortar-board hat and with a satchel full of new books and a head full of new ideas, the triumph was actually and definitely achieved. He had been put into the third form, and he announced that he should soon be at the ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett

... eatin' chicken, if you've ever seen bricks piled, kind a thrown down in a pile around a mortar box, that's the way the chicken bones looked around Uncle Lemuel's plate; and all the time there was a lot of talk about the evil of intemperance and the curse of strong drink, and grandpa said that he'd seen slavery ...
— Mitch Miller • Edgar Lee Masters

... pantiles in common use in the South of France. The decrepit casements were fitted with the heavy, unwieldy shutters necessary in that climate, and held in place by massive iron cross bars. It would have puzzled you to find a more dilapidated house in Angouleme; nothing but sheer tenacity of mortar kept it together. Try to picture the workshop, lighted at either end, and dark in the middle; the walls covered with handbills and begrimed by friction of all the workmen who had rubbed past them for thirty years; the cobweb of cordage across the ceiling, the stacks of ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac

... never to fall? Sometimes it seemed to her in the pure and perfect happiness of this calm rural home, this useful, innocent life, as if that ill-advised act of hers had never been acted—as if that autumn morning, that one half-hour in the modern Gothic church, still smelling of mortar and pitch-pine, set in flat fields, from which October mists were rising ghostlike, was no more than a troubled dream—a dream that she had dreamed and done with for ever. Could it be that such an ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon

... mortar of lime and sand, and also that made from clay, greatly improved in durability by mixing boiled potatoes ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 331, September 13, 1828 • Various

... sadly at war with the picturesque. To whatever the hand of man builds the hand of Time adds a grace, and nothing is so prosaic as the rawly new. Fancy for a moment the difference for the worse, if all the grim, browned, rotted walls of Rome, with their peeling mortar, their thousand daubs of varying grays and yellows, their jutting brickwork and patched stonework, from whose intervals the cement has crumbled off, their waving weeds and grasses and flowers, now sparsely fringing their top, now thickly protruding from their sides, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various

... his own natural friends could tell where in the world he was gone! She was the first, Sir, to come and tell me news of him though I was his own mother! Love, Sir, is prodigious for quickness! it can see, I sometimes think, through bricks and mortar. Yet all this would not do, he was so obstinate not to take ...
— Cecilia vol. 3 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)

... the period when he is engaged in forming his mind: a young man once fairly launched in life may safely confine himself for a time to the studies that bear directly upon his own special chosen subject. The thing that Telford began closely to investigate was—lime. Now, lime makes mortar; and without lime, accordingly, you can have no mason. But to know anything really about lime, Telford found he must read some chemistry; and to know anything really about chemistry he must work at it hard and unremittingly. A strict attention to one's own business, understood ...
— Biographies of Working Men • Grant Allen

... beauty, save in the Vatican, and the ignorant priest of the remote village where the spade of the peasant had revealed the sleeping marble was certain to declare the beautiful image an evil spirit, and have it broken up forthwith and ground for mortar, unless some influential scholar, or powerful lord touched with "the new learning," chanced to be on hand to save it from destruction. Yes! even at that time when beauty was being victoriously born again, the mad fear of her raged with such panic in certain minds that, when Savonarola ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne

... built of sticks of wood, the largest at the bottom, and the smallest at the top, and laid up with a supply of mud or clay mortar. The interstices between the logs are chinked with strips of wood and daubed with mortar both outside and in. A double cabin consists of two such buildings with a space of 10 or 12 feet between, ...
— A New Guide for Emigrants to the West • J. M. Peck

... five shillings) and, followed by half the harbour's fleet of rowing-boats and cutters, proceeded to the neighbourhood of the strip of beach, where a rocket apparatus had been installed by the help of the Lifeboat Secretary. The mortar was trained; there was a flash, a whizz, a line of fire, and a rope fell out of the sky across the lifeboat. The effect was thrilling and roused cheers. Never did the Lifeboat Institution receive such an advertisement as ...
— The Card, A Story Of Adventure In The Five Towns • Arnold Bennett

... we were in Becodar's house—a low adobe but of two rooms with a red light burning over the door, to guard against the plague. It had a table hanging like a lid from the wall, a stone for making tortillas, a mortar for grinding red peppers, a crucifix on the wall, a short sword, a huge pistol, a pair of rusty stirrups, and several chairs. The chairs seemed to be systematically placed, and it was quite wonderful to see how the beggar twisted in and out among them without stumbling. I could not understand ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... kept the huge iron mortar where the grains of corn were crushed to make the delicious hominy Kentuckians are so fond of. When rightly prepared each grain stands out like the beautiful white-plumed corn captains and colonels that dance up so gaily over beds of live coals. There were made also ...
— That Old-Time Child, Roberta • Sophie Fox Sea

... fellows sitting upon a wall, with their hands in their corduroy pockets, smoking short pipes, and, I believe, talking politics. They pretended to be at a standstill because their satellites—their ames damnees, the men who hold their hods and mix their mortar—had not turned up. 'Don't disturb yourselves, gentlemen,' I said. 'There's nothing like taking things easy. It's a time-job. I'll send you the morning papers and a can of beer.' And so I did, and since that day, do you know, the fellows have worked twice as ...
— Vixen, Volume III. • M. E. Braddon

... says Stendhal, who seized the master-idea of the reign, "there was no apothecary's apprentice in his back shop, surrounded by his drugs and bottles, filtering and pounding away in his mortar, who did not say to himself that, if he chanced to make some great discovery, he would be made a count with ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine

... can preserve marriage from the miseries of excessive cold and excessive heat? Listen to me! Here we have a book on the Art of preserving foods; on the Art of curing smoky chimneys; on the Art of making good mortar; on the Art of tying a cravat; on the Art of ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac

... tried to understand the sensation of utter unfamiliarity with which the whole place filled me. The answer came to me in a flash as I turned away from Fuller Place,—Clark's Field no longer existed! Its place was completely filled by the maze of brick and mortar in which for the better part of an hour I had lost myself. There was nothing surprising that after a third of a century a large, vacant field should have been carved up into streets, alleys, and lots, and be covered ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick

... same thing over at the new schoolhouse. Mr. Todd and the men worked miracles with their stone and mortar and wood and iron when he was standing by or lending a hand. The school was built partly of stone like the chapel and partly of old purple-pink brick like Mother Spurlock's Little House, and it was beamed with heavy timbers. It was roofed with heavy colonial clapboards which made it look as if ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess

... I had found it. I had spent a mournful morning at Ypres seeking out the procureur du roi, and I had sought in vain. He was nowhere to be found. Ypres was a city of catacombs, wrapt in a winding-sheet of mortar, fine as dust, which rose in clouds as the German shells winnowed among the ruins. The German guns had been threshing the ancient city like flails, beating her out of all recognition, beating her into shapes strange, uncouth, and lamentable. ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan

... the thrush; "I wish mine was a cocktail, and then I shouldn't have had these nobs of clay sticking to it;" saying which he showed his neighbour three or four little clay-pellets attached to his tail-feathers, evidently caught up when fetching his mortar ...
— Featherland - How the Birds lived at Greenlawn • George Manville Fenn

... majestic thought of life than this—the scaffolding by which souls are built up into the temple of God? And to care whether a thing is painful or pleasant is as absurd as to care whether the bricklayer's trowel is knocking the sharp corner off a brick, or plastering mortar on the one below it before he lays it carefully on its course. Is the building getting on? That is the one question ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren

... similar construction. Dr. Hales to prevent the spreading of fire proposed to cover the floors and stairs of the adjoining houses with earth; Mr. Hartley proposed to prevent houses from taking fire by covering the cieling with thin iron-plates, and Lord Mahon by a bed of coarse mortar or plaister between the cieling and floor above it. May not this age of chemical science discover some method of injecting or soaking timber with lime-water and afterwards with vitriolic acid, and thus fill its pores with alabaster? or of ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin

... disadvantage in that volatile properties deteriorate more rapidly and that the goods may be easily adulterated. The Bavarians, under Duke Albrecht, in 1553 prohibited the grinding of spices for that very reason! Ground spices are time and labor savers, however. Modern kitchen methods have put the old mortar practically out of existence, at the expense of quality of the ...
— Cooking and Dining in Imperial Rome • Apicius

... thro' a Lawn Sieve, then sift some Starch as fine; to a Pound of Sugar put a Quarter of a Pound of Starch; make it of what Colour you please, into a stiff Paste; putting thereto Gum-Dragon well steep'd in Orange-Flower-Water; beat it well in a Mortar, and make it in Knots or Shells in a Mould or Moss, with rubbing it thro' an Hair Sieve: The Red must be colour'd with Carmine; the Yellow with Gumboodge, steep'd in Water, and put to the Gum; the Green is made with Yellow Gum, putting to it Stone-Blue ...
— Mrs. Mary Eales's receipts. (1733) • Mary Eales

... negligence of some one, the name of this man of talent was overlooked. The port of Boulogne contained about seventeen hundred vessels, such as flatboats, sloops, turkish boats, gunboats, prairies, mortar-boats, etc.; and the entrance to the port was defended by an enormous chain, and by four forts, two on the right, and ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton

... myself acquainted with the local names. What was the brook called? It was called "The Cockshoot"! And the great hill, here, on my right? It was called "The Overblow"! Five minutes more, and we saw our first house—lonely and little—built of mortar and flint from the hills. A name to this also? Certainly. Name of "Browndown." Another ten minutes of walking, involving us more and more deeply in the mysterious green windings of the valley—and the great event of the day happened at last. Finch's boy pointed before ...
— Poor Miss Finch • Wilkie Collins

... which it bore on the day after its surrender to the Western Allies in 1856. We drove through miles of ruins, the roofless walls staring at us from the dismantled doors and windows, the dust from the rubbish-heaps of brick and mortar blinding us at every turning of the streets, though, we were told, the city is looking up and thriving, and both house-rent and building-ground are rising in price from ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various

... wreck any edifice until all who enjoy ownership in it agree to its demolition. You can not build for all unless each voluntarily comes forward to aid with stone and mortar. ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers

... or the smoke of factory chimneys. Possibly also by the disproportion that existed between the humble little straggling village which you expected to find and the grandiose establishment, this country mansion in the style of Louis XIII, an agglomeration of mortar looking pink through the branches of its leafless park, ornamented with wide pieces of water thick with green weeds. What is certain is that as you passed this place your heart was conscious of an oppression. When ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet

... ran downstairs to the cow-shed. No one had been there. With eager fingers I tore away the bricks from the crumbling mortar, and drew out my prize. The buckle glittered in the light that stole through the gaping door. All was safe, and as I ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... we had heard. More than one of the five senses were called into requisition to determine which article of furniture was entitled to that designation. Across one corner of the room stood a tall white monument composed of glazed tiles laid in mortar, built into the room as a chimney might have been, with a hidden flue in the rear connecting it with the wall. A drab cornice and plaster ornaments of the same color set off the four or five feet above the mantel which surrounded ...
— In and Around Berlin • Minerva Brace Norton

... their sacred trusts of kine, chipping and carving away at their totem hawks and their crocodiles, breaking limbs and necks over a sky-high tower, with stones for their bricks, and no slime to make them mortar. How they sang over their work, and how it grew! Talk of Troy's walls; if only Kaffirs would start building a Troy, or a Palace of Art, or a Spiritual City, how the work would go forward to the music of them! I could hear all the parts ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps

... finished when the foliage of the oak rustled, a quantity of mortar and moss fell from the old wall, and a man threw himself at the feet of Diana, who uttered an ...
— Chicot the Jester - [An abridged translation of "La dame de Monsoreau"] • Alexandre Dumas

... The mortar and parrot shells rained alternately upon Fort Sumter every five minutes, day and night, but the sharp-shooters could only ...
— My Life In The South • Jacob Stroyer

... through the palisades into the fort. It was but a poor affair, judged by European military standards, and absolutely worthless if it should have to withstand a siege by artillery. But to the savages it was an imposing fortress, the very laws of its construction unknown to them, even the mortar between the logs, a substance of which they had no comprehension. Over the bastion as they emerged on the other side they beheld the English flag floating. This they took to be some kind of an Okee, in which opinion Smith's action confirmed them, for taking off his hat, he waved it in ...
— The Princess Pocahontas • Virginia Watson

... width, around each piece. This border guarded the feet of the operators whose bodies were protected by steel shields on both sides of them. Then they raised a breastwork of trunks and boughs, leaving only the mouth of the cylindrical mortar visible. ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... matchless interest to every man, woman and child in the plantation. Till that began its tireless turning, the grain for every loaf of bread had to be carried to Watertown mill, or ground laboriously in a hand quern, or parched and brayed in a mortar, Indian fashion. Before the starting of his saw-mill, the rude houses must have been of logs, stone, and clay, for it was an impossibility to bring from the lower towns on the existing "Bay road" and with the primitive tumbril any large amount ...
— Bay State Monthly, Vol. II. No. 5, February, 1885 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various

... virtue must be totally laid aside, for many years to come, in novels. Mr. Lane, of the Minerva Press, has given them up long since; and we were quite surprised to find such a writer as Mrs. Moore busied in moral brick and mortar. Such an idea, at first, was merely juvenile; the second time a little nauseous; but the ten thousandth time, it is quite intolerable. Caelebs, upon his first arrival in London, dines out,—meets with a bad dinner,—supposes the cause ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson

... their release at 100 dollars each. During his absence, the Gaffat people had consulted amongst themselves as to the best means of regaining the Emperor's favour, and decided on proposing to cast an immense mortar for him. Theodore was delighted. A foundry was erected, and the "Great Sebastopol," which was destined to be the crushing blow for him, and the means ...
— A Narrative of Captivity in Abyssinia - With Some Account of the Late Emperor Theodore, - His Country and People • Henry Blanc

... mother's frequent admonitions concerning "manners"—that one about stirring up your potatoes as though you were mixing mortar, and biting into one big slab of bread. He did his best, but his cheek protruded with half a pickled peach when he heard ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart

... from the ground. In its construction care was taken, above all things, to ensure a solid floor "impervious" to "moisture." This was made by first laying down six inches of well-prepared concrete, consisting of pounded granite, brick-dust, and gravel cemented together by hydraulic mortar, then overlaid with pure cement, and after this coated with an inch thick of asphalt. Around the whole building was an open drain, about two feet inside of the pillars, and built like the floor, and carefully graded to the outfall. The walls, pillars, and drains were coated with coal tar, and here ...
— Prisoners Their Own Warders - A Record of the Convict Prison at Singapore in the Straits - Settlements Established 1825 • J. F. A. McNair

... brush, which is not very hard, with warm water and fine charcoal dust. A lump of charcoal should be put a second time into the fire till it is red hot, as soon as it becomes cool the external ashes should be blown off, and it should be immediately reduced to fine powder in a mortar, and kept close stopped in a phial. It takes away the bad smell from decayed teeth, by washing the mouth with this powder diffused in water immediately. The putrid smell of decaying stumps of teeth may be destroyed for a time by washing the mouth with a weak solution of alum in water. If the ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin

... curing. When the reaping was done the threshing began, and then followed the tedious labor of separating the grain from its tightly adhering husk. In colonial times the work was mostly done by hand, first the flail for threshing, then the heavy fat-pine pestle and mortar for breaking off the husk. Finally the rice was winnowed of its chaff, screened of the "rice flour" and broken ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips

... slept the better for it. After a little turn up with a Judy he was fuller of that spirit of manly fortitude and forbearance so necessary to those whom Fate brought frequently into contact with Mr Dexter. The Judies wore mortar-boards, and it was an enjoyable pastime sending these spinning into space during one of the usual rencontres in the High Street. From the fact that he and his friends were invariably outnumbered, ...
— The White Feather • P. G. Wodehouse

... some new subdivision of the sprawling city. Absorbed, charmed, grimly content with the abominable desolation of it all, he stood and gazed. No evidence of any plan, of any continuity in building, appeared upon the waste: mere sporadic eruptions of dwellings, mere heaps of brick and mortar dumped at random over the cheerless soil. Above swam the marvellous clarified atmosphere of the sky, like iridescent gauze, showering a thousand harmonies of metallic colors. Like a dome of vitrified glass, it shut down on the illimitable, ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick

... in a silken altar, From oaths and covenants, and being pounded in a mortar, From contributions, ...
— Cavalier Songs and Ballads of England from 1642 to 1684 • Charles Mackay

... brick houses suffered more than stone ones. This was attributed to the inferior mortar used by Jamaican masons, for which there can be no excuse, for the island abounds in lime. Wooden houses escaped scatheless. Every statue in the Public Gardens was thrown down, except that of Queen Victoria. The superstitious negroes ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton

... whom it is written, 'Though thou bray a fool in a mortar, yet will not his folly depart from him,'" interposed Frank, in so sad a tone that no one at the table replied; and few more words were exchanged, till the two brothers were safe ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley

... and skin your swan, and beat the flesh in a mortar, taking out the strings as you beat it; then take some clear fat bacon, and beat with the swan, and when 'tis of a light flesh colour, there is bacon enough in it; and when 'tis beaten till 'tis like dough, 'tis enough; then season it with pepper, salt, cloves, mace, and nutmeg, all beaten fine; ...
— Old Cookery Books and Ancient Cuisine • William Carew Hazlitt

... going to the ladang in the morning, and she said to her young son, Amon Amang, whose father was dead: "When the sun comes over the tree there you must begin to husk paddi." She then went away to the ladang while the boy remained at home. He carried the paddi, as well as the oblong wooden mortar, up into a tree. There he began to work, and the mortar and the paddi and the boy all tumbled down because the branch broke. A man helped the half-dead boy to come to his senses again, throwing water on him, and when the mother returned she was very angry to see ...
— Through Central Borneo: - An Account of Two Years' Travel in the Land of Head-Hunters - Between the Years 1913 and 1917 • Carl Lumholtz

... happened in our first month at sea—events so subtle as perhaps to seem an unimportant part of this narrative of a strange voyage, yet really as necessary to the foundation of the story as the single bricks and the single dabs of mortar at the base of a tall chimney are necessary to the completed structure. I later had cause to remember each trivial incident as if it had been written ...
— The Mutineers • Charles Boardman Hawes

... too well to hope to console her by joking about it. He said gravely: "There's plenty of time yet, love. The boys are only just in trousers; and we may think of some way to spare it before we come to bricks and mortar." ...
— We and the World, Part I - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing

... of Greek sculpture are very scanty. The statues of gold and ivory vanished long ago. The bronze statues, formerly numbered by thousands, have nearly all gone into the melting pot. Sculptures in marble were turned into mortar or used as building materials. Those which escaped such a fate were often ruined by wanton mutilation and centuries of neglect. The statues which we still possess are mainly marble copies, made in Roman times from Greek originals. It is as if the paintings by the old masters of ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER

... which generally approached two hundred pounds a year, for which, upon an average, he travelled about five thousand miles on horseback in the course of the twelve months. Nay, so liberally did this revenue support himself and his ponies, called Pestle and Mortar, which he exercised alternately, that he took a damsel to share it, Jean Watson, namely, the cherry-cheeked daughter of an honest farmer, who being herself one of twelve children who had been brought up on an income of fourscore pounds a year, never thought ...
— The Surgeon's Daughter • Sir Walter Scott

... before she split, cutting down her shrouds, and some of her sails and other tackle, by which means we rigged our bark. Instead of pitch, we made some lime, which we mixed with oil of tortoises; and as soon as the carpenters had caulked a seam, I and another, with small sticks, plastered the mortar into the seams, and being fine dry warm weather, in the month of April, it became dry, and as hard as stone, as soon as laid on. Being very hot and dry weather, we were afraid our water might fail us, and made therefore the more haste to get away. Before our departure, we built two great wooden chests, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. VIII. • Robert Kerr

... see in charge of the removal of the galley-hulk this night of the twenty-third of May is Count Corti. It is wanted at St. Romain. The gate is a hill of stone and mortar, without form; the moat almost level from side to side; and Justiniani has decided upon a barricade behind a new ditch. He will fill the hull with stones, and defend from its deck; and it must be on the ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace

... one of the twelve; "we have not the money to get ourselves shaved, and so we have, some of us, taken to using sticking-plasters by way of an economical remedy, for by applying them to our faces and plucking them off with a jerk we are left as bare and smooth as the bottom of a stone mortar. There are, to be sure, women in Kandy that go about from house to house to remove down, and trim eyebrows, and make cosmetics for the use of the women, but we, the duennas of my lady, would never let them in, for most of them have a ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

... to be careful lest he should stave in the whole vault, and thus open a way therein after himself for the fire. He must cautiously pick out the mortar from the interstices with a knife, and lift up ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai

... walls are not a dilettantism and dubiety; they are an earnest fact. It was a most real and serious purpose they were built for! Yes, another world it was, when these black ruins, white in their new mortar and fresh chiselling, first saw the sun as walls, long ago. Gauge not, with thy dilettante compasses, with that placid dilettante simper, the Heaven's-Watchtower of our Fathers, the fallen God's-Houses, the Golgotha ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle

... business on hand. Most innocently as he crossed the Cathedral Green he strutted, his head up, his brow stern, his hands crossed behind his back. The choristers coming in from the choir-school practice in the Cathedral passed him in a ragged line. They all touched their mortar-boards and he smiled benignly upon them, reserving a rather stern glance for Brockett, the organist, of whose musical eccentricities he did not ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole

... dark here that Russell could see nothing; but he felt that Rita was descending, so he prepared to follow. The steps here had been broken in places, leaving a rough, inclined plane, with loose stones and mortar. There was no great difficulty in descending, but it was dark, and Russell's long skirts were very much in the way. However, by moving slowly, and by exercising great caution, he was able to reach the ...
— A Castle in Spain - A Novel • James De Mille

... building tinged the whole course of his thought. I doubt whether he was ever called upon by founders of institutions of any sort for counsel without his warning them to beware of spending their money in bricks and mortar. The building being already started before he took charge, and the three other objects being sanctioned by law, he was, of course, hampered in carrying out his views. But he did his utmost to reduce ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb

... are dangling. The porter sits there and snoozes as comfortably as a professor. The crows which they tempt with rice-gruel and curdled milk will not eat the offering, because they can't distinguish it from the mortar. ...
— The Little Clay Cart - Mrcchakatika • (Attributed To) King Shudraka

... not exchanging a word. Some still had their pipes, which had gone out between their teeth. Four masons poked their white faces out of the windows of a cab which they had hired between them, and on the roof of which their mortar-troughs rocked to and fro. House-painters were swinging their pots; a zinc-worker was returning laden with a long ladder, with which he almost poked people's eyes out; whilst a belated plumber, with his box on his back, played the tune of "The Good King Dagobert" on his little ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola

... which we do with every breath that we breathe, every fire that we make, every factory that we build. Our only chance of safety, our only hope of life, is to connect every room and every corner of those little brick and mortar boxes, those caged sections of out-of-doors, that we call houses, with nature's great system of air supply, "All Outdoors." Fortunately, the only thing needed to make the connection is to open a window—no need to send for a plumber or put in a meter, and ...
— A Handbook of Health • Woods Hutchinson

... a hundred little wafers of suction take hold of his body, and a sense of great compression, as if he was being pulled through a mortar bed. He opened his eyes on the summit of a stalagmite in a vast thicket or swamp of overthrown and decaying trees. Birds of buried ages, whose long, bittern-like cries flopped wofully through the silence, made ever and ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend

... I had been with the glorious workmanship in wood, bronze, and lacquer, I scarcely admired less the masonry of the vast retaining walls, the stone gallery, the staircase and its balustrade, all put together without mortar or cement, and so accurately fitted that the joints are scarcely affected by the rain, damp, and aggressive vegetation of 260 years. The steps of the staircase are fine monoliths, and the coping at the side, the massive balustrade, and the heavy rail at the top, are cut out ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird

... seen those brick-and-mortar knaves at their process of destruction," he continues, "at the plucking of every pannel I should have felt the varlets at my heart. I should have cried out to them to spare a plank at least out of that cheerful storeroom, in whose hot window-seat ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks

... everywhere continue to employ the primitive method of treating rice-paddy for domestic and local use. The grain is generally husked by them in a large mortar hewn from a block of molave, or other hardwood, in which it is beaten by a pestle. Sometimes two or three men or women with wooden pestles work at the same mortar. This mortar is termed, in Tagalog dialect, Luzon, the name given ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman

... that followed lifted us fairly off our feet. A great puff of smoke came belching up through the hole, followed by the crashing of hundreds of dollars' worth of glass ware in the jewelry shop as fragments of stone, brick and mortar and huge splinters of wood were flung with tremendous force in every ...
— The Exploits of Elaine • Arthur B. Reeve

... in a sorry plight when the States took possession of it. As at Zutphen, the substantial burghers had wandered away, and the foreign soldiers bivouacking there so long had turned the stately old Hanseatic city into a brick and mortar wilderness. Hundreds of houses had been demolished by the garrison, that the iron might be sold and the woodwork burned for fuel; for the enemy had conducted himself as if feeling in his heart that the occupation could not be a permanent one, and as if desirous ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... fatal disease broke out among Multnomah's attendants. The howling of medicine-men rang all day long in the royal lodge; each day saw swathed corpses borne out to the funeral pyre or mimaluse island. And no concoction of herbs,—however skilfully compounded with stone mortar and pestle,—no incantation of medicine-men or steaming atmosphere of sweat-house, could stay ...
— The Bridge of the Gods - A Romance of Indian Oregon. 19th Edition. • Frederic Homer Balch

... but not plastered, with ventilators above and a large airy window on either side. The floors should be laid with flags or paved with bricks. Cement may be used instead of mortar, and the kennels will then be found wholesome and dry. The doorways of the lodging-houses will generally be four feet and a half wide, in the clear. The posts are rounded, to prevent the hounds from being injured when they rush out. The benches may be made of cast-iron ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt

... you have only to scrape away a little mortar from the gate-post near the hinge, and I will give you, through that opening, a pair of pincers and a hammer, with which you may by night draw out the nails of the staple, and we can easily put that to rights again, so that no one will ever suspect that the lock was opened. Once shut up ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

... it is that he needs—good broth and gruel and panada, and wine, the Rhenish and the French, and the juice of the orange and the lemon, or, failing those, fresh apple-juice squeezed from the fruit when you shall have brayed it in a mortar. Ha, my cure pleases thee? Well, smell to it, then. 'Tis many a day since thou hadst ...
— Harding's luck • E. [Edith] Nesbit

... seen on the feet of Chaacmol. The edifices of Ake are composed of large blocks of stone, generally square, often oblong in shape, superposed, and held together merely by their enormous weight, without the aid of mortar or cement of any sort. We did not tarry in this strange city more than eight days. The malaria of the place very seriously affected the health of my wife, and obliged us to hasten back to Tixkokob. We brought with ...
— The Mayas, the Sources of Their History / Dr. Le Plongeon in Yucatan, His Account of Discoveries • Stephen Salisbury, Jr.

... regular crystals. Saltpetre exists in the ashes of many plants, of which tobacco is one; it is also found copiously on the ground in many places, in saltpans, or simply as an effloresence. Rubbish, such as old mud huts, and mortar, generally abounds with it. (It is made by the action of the air on the potash contained in the earths.) The taste, which is that of gunpowder, is the best test of its presence. To extract it, pour hot water on the mass, then evaporate and ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton

... Make the mortar bed large enough to hold the material for one course; put in unslaked quicklime in proportion to 1 to 20 or 30 of other material; throw into it plenty of water, and don't have that antediluvian idea that you can drown it; put in clean sand and gravel, broken ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 443, June 28, 1884 • Various

... whom, as is well known, cherished an exalted faith in the survival of the conscious soul and in a just retribution. "Strike!" one of them said, with the dauntless courage of an immortal, to a tyrant who had threatened to have him brayed in a mortar: "strike! you may crush the shell of Anaxarchus: you cannot touch his life." Than all the maze of fabulous fancies and physical rites in which the dreams of the poets and the guesses of the people ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger

... laid in his grave you threaten to upset the household because your brother acts as its master. Why shouldn't he? Are you fitted to take the reins or share his responsibility? If you were at your right job, Robert Fenley, you'd be carrying bricks and mortar in a hod; for you haven't brains enough to lay a brick or use ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy

... to Monterey. The houses here, as everywhere else in California, are of one story, built of clay made into large bricks, about a foot and a half square and three or four inches thick, and hardened in the sun. These are cemented together by mortar of the same material, and the whole are of a common dirt-color. The floors are generally of earth, the windows grated and without glass; and the doors, which are seldom shut, open directly into the common room; there being no entries. Some of the more wealthy ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana

... and Brixton were once on the border region between town and country; nay, the city really did reach the country there; but now, all these belong to London. A bit of green at Kennington is, by good-luck, to be kept green as a people's park; but nearly all else has become brick and mortar; the City man has to go further to get a pleasant house and a good garden, and we have to go further to ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 457 - Volume 18, New Series, October 2, 1852 • Various

... in which Winifred had lived and died I passed into a new world of horror. Dead matter had become conscious, and for a second or two it was not the human being before me, but the rusty iron, the broken furniture, the great patches of brick and dirty mortar where the plaster had fallen from the walls,—it was these which seemed to have life—a terrible life—and to be talking to me, telling me what I dared not listen to about the triumph of evil over good. I knew that the woman was still speaking, but for a time ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton

... some flowers I have, made of pearls, and to let him take them away. One also requires a piece of deep red gauze, three feet in length of the best quality; and the pearls must be triturated to powder in a mortar." ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin

... these things to me, but that was later. And then there are still other marvels which I do not understand, as the fugue, counterpoint, the canon for two and three voices, and so on—an entire heavenly structure, one part joined to the other without mortar and all held together by God's own hand. With a few exceptions, nobody wants to know anything about these things. They would rather disturb this breathing of souls by the addition of words to be spoken ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke

... the lighted match, which went out before he could apply it to his tobacco. "Yus. 'The Pipes of Pan.' I don't know what it means. Anyway, he said he'd love to hear them in the real forest, but duty kept him to bricks and mortar and so he had to hear them in imagination. He said that all them footling little beasts were a-listening to 'em, and they told him all about it. I remember he told me more about the woods than I know myself—and I reckon I could teach his business to any gamekeeper or poacher ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke



Words linked to "Mortar" :   daub, cement, building material, trench mortar, high-angle gun, plaster, mortar fire, vessel, masonry



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