"Pivot" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... manifested all the unflattering amazement common to successive generations of brothers when confronted with the astounding fact that the apparently quite ordinary young woman whom they have hitherto regarded merely as a sisterly adjunct to life has suddenly become the pivot upon which some other man's entire happiness will ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... that again, Mr. Passford, we must be ready to return her fire," said the captain. "Have the pivot gun ready, and aim for her Armstrong, which seems to be sufficiently prominent on her deck to ...
— A Victorious Union - SERIES: The Blue and the Gray—Afloat • Oliver Optic
... of battle was to swing the whole army forward in a wheel, Preston's Division on Longstreet's extreme left being the pivot, the right wing to break the enemy's lines and uncover the McFarland and Rossville Gaps, thus capturing the enemy's lines of ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... definite successor to Maggie. His mother's thoughts were on Cyril as long as she was awake. His father, when not planning Cyril's welfare, was earning money whose unique object could be nothing but Cyril's welfare. Cyril was the pivot of the house; every desire ended somewhere in Cyril. The shop existed now solely for him. And those houses that Samuel bought by private treaty, or with a shamefaced air at auctions—somehow they were aimed at Cyril. Samuel and Constance had ceased to be self-justifying beings; they never thought ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... Mr. Lidgerwood," the man behind the counter warned him, and Lidgerwood whirled around on the pivot stool and turned his back upon the malcontents and their watcher. The keen inner sense, which neither the physiologists nor the psychologists have yet been able to define or to name, apprised him of a threat developing in ...
— The Taming of Red Butte Western • Francis Lynde
... 1st British Brigade were still doubling across the rear of Maxwell and Lewis to fill the gap between the latter and MacDonald. As they had wheeled round, the regiments gained on each other according to their proximity to the pivot flank. The brigade assumed a formation which may be described as an echelon of columns of route, with the Lincolns, who were actually the pivot regiment, leading. By the time that the right of Lewis's brigade was reached and the British had begun to deploy, it was evident that the ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... is a kind of dial turning on a pivot, and usually enclosed in a brass frame, from which radiate a few small handles or spokes. Round the face of the dial—usually of paper—are various numerals, and between the face and its glass covering is a small marble or wooden ball. The appliance is used in lieu of dice ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... is man in proportion to the vast systems of the Universe, in which he represents an ultra-microscopic atom less ten thousand times than the tiniest of the "gay motes that people the sunbeams." Yet, with colossal audacity, this thinking atom regards himself as the anthropocentric pivot around which revolve the eternal purposes of the Universe. Knowing not whence he came, why he is here, or whither he is going, man feels himself of supreme importance, and certainly is of interest—to himself. Let ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler
... which would have condemned them in Greece and Rome at that day, but through failings of which Greece and Rome took small account. Charmides pondered and pondered, and saw that this Jew had given a new centre, a new pivot to society. This, then, was the meaning of the world as nearly as it could be said to have a single meaning. Read by the light of the twenty-third chapter, the twenty-fourth chapter was magnificent. 'For as the lightning cometh out of the east, and shineth even unto the west, ...
— Catharine Furze • Mark Rutherford
... the argument. Let's try your Aunt Sue's idea of studying how the big things come from little ones. Wouldn't it be interesting to find the cause of this one case? I would not be one bit surprised if it were just some little thing which was the pivot that ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... from the statue of Nepomeck down into the earth, the seventh step was movable and turned on a pivot; if you stood on one end of this, the statue above raised itself, but if you stood on the other end, it sank gently down, The builders of this subterranean passage had chosen well the guardian of their ...
— Peter the Priest • Mr Jkai
... now was but the part of the sword in the hands of Justice; I might no more hope to make Egypt free and great and sit upon my lawful throne. Khem was lost, and lost was I, Harmachis. In the rush and turmoil of events, the great plot of which I had been the pivot was covered up and forgotten; scarce a memory of it remained. The curtain of dark night was closing in upon the history of my ancient Race; its very Gods were tottering to their fall; I could already, in the spirit, hear the shriek of the Roman eagles as they flapped their wings above ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard
... brown dust, and where huge vessels have been discharging that same cargo for the last five months.' This was the walk he took his young wife on the morrow of his return. She had been used to the society of lawyers and civil servants, moving in that circle which seems to itself the pivot of the nation and is in truth only a clique like another; and Fleeming was to her the nameless assistant of a nameless firm of engineers, doing his inglorious business, as she now saw for herself, among ...
— Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin • Robert Louis Stevenson
... into Broad. At high noon the colossal figure of Washington on the steps of the Sub-Treasury looks down on the centre of the earth. To the swarming thousands of the Ghetto, who seldom venture west of the Bowery, there is a point on the East Side that represents the pivot of things. There are descendants of the Knickerbockers who cling arrogantly to the corner facing the Washington Arch. Profound is the belief of the pleasure seeker in the lights, signs, theatres, and lobster palaces ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... for relations, he will find them, for I shall seek in such a fashion as to make him find. For instance, instead of using a pair of compasses to draw a circle, I shall draw it with a pencil at the end of bit of string attached to a pivot. After that, when I want to compare the radii one with another, Emile will laugh at me and show me that the same thread at full stretch cannot have given distances of unequal length. If I wish to measure an angle of ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... appearance of being like other ponds, and the revenue officers, who sometimes dined here with their hospitable host, could see nothing in the least suspicious. But, when desired, this duck-pond could be made to swing round on a pivot, and underneath it was a most convenient recess which was an admirable storehouse for such things as it was not expedient for the Preventive men to see. The ingenuity fostered by smuggling was notorious, but surely few cleverer devices than ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... been made quite unnecessarily to pivot upon the express contractual obligations of England, Germany, and France with respect to the neutrality of Belgium. The indictment of Germany has been placed upon the sound but too narrow ground that by the Treaty ...
— The Evidence in the Case • James M. Beck
... were forced to climb chimneys) sidled up to one of the fore horses, and sought to detach a pink bow from his mane. The creature felt his honours diminishing, and turned to snap at the blackee. The sweep screamed, the horse neighed, the mob shouted, and Sir William turned on his pivot cushion to learn what the noise meant; and thus we were enabled to gaze on a Lord Mayor's face. In sooth he was a goodly gentleman, burly, and with three fingers' depth of fat on his portly person, yet every feature evinced kindliness ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... March—Greene made them pay so dearly for their victory that Tarleton called it "the pledge of ultimate defeat"; and, three days later, Cornwallis was retreating towards Wilmington. In a sense, then, King's Mountain was the pivot of the war's revolving stage, which swung the British from their succession of victories ...
— Pioneers of the Old Southwest - A Chronicle of the Dark and Bloody Ground • Constance Lindsay Skinner
... leftmost gun on Blue's advance, get the remnants of his right across to the church—the cottage in the centre and their own gun would have given them a certain amount of cover—and build up a new position about that building as a pivot. With two guns right and left of the church he might conceivably have saved the ...
— Little Wars; a game for boys from twelve years of age to one hundred and fifty and for that more intelligent sort of girl who likes boys' games and books • H. G. Wells
... 3d, all except a few wounded men were safely on board a large scow attached to a tug boat which hauled into American waters. Here they were hailed by the tug Harrison, belonging to the U.S. steamer Michigan, having on board one 12-pounder pivot gun, which fired across their bows and threatened to sink them unless they hauled to and surrendered. With this request they complied; not because they feared the 12-pounder, or the still more powerful guns of the Michigan, which lay close by, but because they respected the ...
— Ridgeway - An Historical Romance of the Fenian Invasion of Canada • Scian Dubh
... little man with sloping shoulders, who had been running the elevator in the Chalmers Building up to a week ago, would patiently practise marching without moving, so that the rest of the line could wheel round him as a pivot. The petty tyrant who scolded at him was determined to have his own way; and Jimmie, who had had to do with many such tyrants in his long years of industrial servitude, was glad when this particular one got mixed up in his orders, and ran his squad into the fountain in ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... concerned, was lamentable. The regular C. S. naval fleet consisted of the Louisiana (Captain McIntosh) and carrying the flag of Commodore Mitchell; the steamer McRae (Captain Huger), carrying six light 32-pounders and nine-inch pivot gun; the steamer Jackson (Captain Renshaw), with two pivoted smooth bore 32-pounders; the small ironplated "Ram" Manassas (Captain Warley), carrying one 32-pounder carronade in the bow; and two launches, ...
— The Narrative of a Blockade-Runner • John Wilkinson
... "The Pivot City is a sobriquet invented by the citizens to symbolize it as the point on which the fortunes of the colony would culminate and revolve. They also invented several other original terms—a phraseology christened by the Melbourne press as ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... most relied on, between the American and other republics, consists in the principle of representation; which is the pivot on which the former move, and which is supposed to have been unknown to the latter, or at least to the ancient part of them. The use which has been made of this difference, in reasonings contained in former papers, will have shown that I ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... Murfreesboro, covering Nashville, but the Confederate general did not intend to threaten that place. The valleys and ridges of eastern Tennessee screened him as he rapidly marched on Louisville and Cincinnati. The whole of the Southern army in the west swung round on its left wing as the pivot, and Buell only just reached Louisville before his opponent. The Washington authorities, thoroughly dissatisfied, ordered him to turn over the command to General Thomas, but the latter magnanimously declined ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... Christ was not to reconcile God to man, but man to God; and this is effected in proportion as Christ dwells in us, bringing us more and more into harmony with the Divine. The Atonement is indeed the central doctrine, the pivot of Christianity, but it is an atONEment, a making of one mind. To which Tanner's Lane listened with much wonderment and not without uncomfortable mental disturbance, the elder members complaining particularly that this was not the simple gospel, and that the ...
— The Revolution in Tanner's Lane • Mark Rutherford
... men, women, and children are coming into or passing through this harbour on their way to the southward. By a nice arrangement the little east window points to the north—if that is not Irish—and two large bracket lamps can be turned on a pivot, so that the lamps and their reflectors throw a light out to sea. The good planter, at his own expense, often maintains a light here on stormy or dark nights, and "steering straight for it" brings ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... up the winding staircase of the great tower, toilsomely turning and turning, and lowering [our] heads to avoid the stairs above, or the rough stone pivot around which they twist." About ninety steps bring us on to the roof of the Cathedral over the choir, and then, keeping along a passage by the parapet, we reach the belfry, and from thence go on by ladder to the bell-chamber, which contains ...
— A Week's Tramp in Dickens-Land • William R. Hughes
... into which this last scurvy villany (which none but wretches of her own sex could have been guilty of) has thrown her, returning love will re-enter her time-pacified mind: her thoughts will then turn once more on the conjugal pivot: of course she will have livelier notions in her head; and these will make her perform all her circumvolutions with ease and pleasure; though not with so high a degree of either, as if the dear ...
— Clarissa, Volume 7 • Samuel Richardson
... fires out, the engines broken down, the ship ready to roll over like a corpse. He was anxious not to get muddled and lose control of her head, because the compass-card swung far both ways, wriggling on the pivot, and sometimes seemed to whirl right round. He suffered from mental stress. He was horribly afraid, also, of the wheelhouse going. Mountains of water kept on tumbling against it. When the ship took one of her desperate dives the corners of ...
— Typhoon • Joseph Conrad
... Malakh mounted with difficulty and St. George, waiting, saw him standing before a blank stone wall. Immediately and without effort the old man's scanty strength served to displace one of the wall's huge stones which hung upon a secret pivot and rolled noiselessly within. He stepped through the aperture, and St. George sprang behind him, watched his moment to cross the threshold, crouched in the leaping shadow of the displaced stone and looked—looked with the undistinguishing amazement that a man feels in the panorama ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale
... Egyptian, therefore, had his seal, which he kept about his person, ready for use if required. The poor man's seal was a simple copper or silver ring; the ring of the rich man was a more or less elaborate jewel covered with chasing and relief work. The bezel was movable, and turned upon a pivot. It was frequently set with some kind of stone engraved with the owner's emblem or device; as, for example, a scorpion (fig. 296), a lion, a hawk, or a cynocephalous ape. As in the eyes of her husband his ring was the one essential ...
— Manual Of Egyptian Archaeology And Guide To The Study Of Antiquities In Egypt • Gaston Camille Charles Maspero
... on to a lower step—as Smith, bringing all his weight to bear upon the ring, turned the huge stone slab upon its hidden pivot, so that it fell back upon the ...
— The Hand Of Fu-Manchu - Being a New Phase in the Activities of Fu-Manchu, the Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... man, perhaps six feet four inches in height, and all muscle, his contortions and the frenzied movements of his muscles exceeded all anatomical laws. Many Daughters, her big eyes shining, her red lips parted, followed and matched his every motion. Her entire trunk seemed to revolve on the pivot of her waist, her hips twisting in almost a spiral, and her arms akimbo accentuating and ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... At Newcastle, the river is bridged by four huge structures—The Redheugh Bridge, the new King Edward VII. bridge, the High Level, and Swing Bridges,—all connecting Newcastle with the sister town of Gateshead. An interesting sight it is to see the Swing Bridge gradually turning on its central pivot, until it lies in a straight line up and down the stream, allowing some huge liner to pass, or some new battleship, fresh from Elswick, to sail down the river, on its way to make its trial trip over the "measured ...
— Northumberland Yesterday and To-day • Jean F. Terry
... in literature. Round this last one, the whole ode seems to turn as on a pivot, and it alone had been sufficient to stamp Smollett a man of ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett
... court is admirably expressed in the phrase imputed to the empress who, pointing to the prince imperial, said, "This child will never reign unless we repair the misfortunes of Sadowa." Such was the ceaseless refrain. The word haunted French imaginations incessantly, and it was the pivot on which the imperial policy revolved; it exercised a spell scarcely less powerful and disastrous upon monarchists like Thiers and republicans like Gambetta. Long foreseen, the dread shock, like all grave calamities, came nevertheless as a surprise, even upon ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... whose cool head made him a good man at that pivot of the field; he was an able assistant to the right-field, a ready back-stop to the short-stop, and a perfect spider for taking into his web all the wild throws that came slashing from the home plate to cut off those who dared to try ...
— The Dozen from Lakerim • Rupert Hughes
... connect and bind together the bones of the system. By them the small bones of the wrist and foot, as well as the large bones, are as securely fastened as if retained by clasps of steel. Some of them are situated within the joints, like a central cord, or pivot, (3, fig. 26.) Some surround it like a hood, and contain the lubricating synovial fluid, (8, 9, fig. 25,) and some in the form of bands at the ...
— A Treatise on Anatomy, Physiology, and Hygiene (Revised Edition) • Calvin Cutter
... emphasizes the importance of the Negro in the general history of the United States. Other races have come, sometimes with great gifts or in great numbers, but it is upon this one that the country's history has turned as on a pivot. It is true that it has been despised and rejected, but more and more it seems destined to give new proof that the stone which the builders refused is become the head stone of the corner. In the colonial era it was the economic advantage of slavery over servitude that caused it to displace ...
— A Social History of the American Negro • Benjamin Brawley
... throw open the furnace doors. Then from these fiery round holes in the black a flood of terrific light and heat pours full upon the men who are outlined in silhouette in the crouching, inhuman attitudes of chained gorillas. The men shovel with a rhythmic motion, swinging as on a pivot from the coal which lies in heaps on the floor behind to hurl it into the flaming mouths before them. There is a tumult of noise—the brazen clang of the furnace doors as they are flung open or slammed shut, the grating, ...
— The Hairy Ape • Eugene O'Neill
... whole section in the side of the room turned on a pivot, and there entered three native harpers and eight pretty Egyptian girls, in gauzy dresses, who danced in intricate figures, and juggled with balls; now with two, now with three, catching them with their ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... this while was pointing out this thing and that to me—showing how the telephone operated; how his field glasses poised just before his eyes, being swung and balanced on a delicately adjusted suspended pivot; telling me how on a perfectly clear day—this October day was slightly hazy—we could see the Eiffel Tower in Paris, and the Cathedral at Rheims; gyrating his hands to explain the manner in which the horses, trotting away from us as we ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... by the Wurtemburgers. The French have not thought of barricading the railway viaduct; three German battalions have occupied it during the night. Two isolated houses on the Balan road could be made the pivot of a long resistance, but the Germans are there. The wood from Monvilliers to Bazeilles, but the French have been forestalled; they find the Bavarians cutting the underwood with their billhooks. ...
— Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century - Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World • Various
... Clark had taken with him his unrivaled and intimate knowledge of the works; for, and in spite of all the dictates of prudence, it seemed impossible to think of the vast enterprise at St. Marys without its central pivot. ...
— The Rapids • Alan Sullivan
... go on being right. What is it that we all live upon but self-esteem? When we want praise it is only because praise enables us to think well of ourselves. Every one to himself is the centre and pivot of ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... few moments the bullock stood fast, but by the time Dexter was within half a dozen yards, he flung his cap right in the animal's face, and, with a loud snort, it turned as on a pivot, and dashed off toward the upper part of the field, now driving the whole of the rest ...
— Quicksilver - The Boy With No Skid To His Wheel • George Manville Fenn
... it into a block. The blocks m, once formed, by their friction in the channel e, oppose enough resistance to the peat to effect its compression. In order to regulate this resistance according to the varying quality of the peat, the piece of metal g, which hangs on a pivot at o, is depressed or raised, by the screw i, so as to contract or enlarge the channel. At each stroke of the plunger a block is formed, and when the channel e is once filled, the peats fall continuously from its extremity. ...
— Peat and its Uses as Fertilizer and Fuel • Samuel William Johnson
... exactly alike in construction, were similar in principle to the acoustical hammers employed by Estel and Mehner. Each consisted essentially of a lever about ten inches in length, pivoted near one extremity, and having fastened to it near the pivot an armature so acted upon by an electromagnet as to depress the lever during the passage of an electric current. The lever was returned to its original position by a spring as soon as the current ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... setting the centres of the slots true to the lines passing through the axis) and set the pivots as follows: Place the pencil-point G so that it coincides with one of the points as C, and place the pivot E so that it comes directly at the point of intersection of the two slots, and fasten it there. Then turn the arm so that the pencil-point G coincides with one of the points of the minor axis as D, the arm lying parallel to B D, and place the pivot F over the ...
— Mechanical Drawing Self-Taught • Joshua Rose
... everything—they were quite jolly about everything else. I concede that the Christians of the Middle Ages were only at peace about everything—they were at war about everything else. But if the question turn on the primary pivot of the cosmos, then there was more cosmic contentment in the narrow and bloody streets of Florence than in the theatre of Athens or the open garden of Epicurus. Giotto lived in a gloomier town than Euripides, but he lived in a ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... hot with passion and whose temper had never known a curb. He had never realized until this moment how beautiful Elsa was, and how madly he loved her. For he called the jealous rage within by the sacred name of love, and love to a Magyar peasant is his whole existence, the pivot round which he frames his life, his thoughts of the present, his dreams ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... of the lock clanked open. Joe tried to walk toward it. He discovered his astounding clumsiness. To walk in magnetic-soled shoes in weightlessness requires a knack. When Joe lifted one foot and tried to swing the other forward, his body tried to pivot. When he lifted his right foot, he had to turn his left slightly inward. His arms tried to float absurdly upward. When he was in motion and essayed to pause, his whole body tended to continue forward with a sedate toppling motion that brought ...
— Space Tug • Murray Leinster
... weathercock to crown the new dome of the Capitol at Washington. By this happy contrivance, the horse will be freed from the degrading necessity of touching the earth at all,—thus distancing Mr. Mills by two feet in the race for originality. The pivot is to be placed so far behind the middle of the horse, that the statue, like its original, will always indicate which way the wind blows by going along with it. The inferior animal I have resolved to model from a spirited saw-horse in my own collection. ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... circuits. There was a difference; anybody knew that. The trouble was that he had never met anybody—which included physicists, biologists, psychologists, psionicists, philosophers and theologians—who could define the difference in satisfactorily exact terms. He watched the robot pivot on its treads and glide away, trailing steam from its coffee pot. It might be silly to treat robots like people, but that wasn't as bad as treating people like robots, an attitude which was becoming entirely too prevalent. If only so many people didn't ...
— Ministry of Disturbance • Henry Beam Piper
... bidding, I donned it when it arrived, and on my way to him transfixed the Rue des Saladiers with awe and wonder. Upstairs, Paragot twirled me slowly round as if I were a mannequin on a pivot, and called Blanquette to admire, and uttered strange oaths in the dozen languages of which he was master. Was ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... down upon his knees, and defending himself with his antlers; while one of the dogs lay sprawling on the ground and howling with pain. The other still kept up the fight, endeavouring to seize the elk from behind; but the latter spun round, as though his knees were upon a pivot, and always presented his horny spikes in the direction ...
— The Desert Home - The Adventures of a Lost Family in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... aesthetic creation; and it is a help and an added beauty, if it be not obtrusive and too self-conscious, and if it be not a target at which the line aims; for then it becomes a clog to freedom of movement, and the pivot of factitious pauses, that are offensive both to sense and to ear. Like buds that lie half-hidden in leaves, rhymes should peep out, sparkling but modest, from the cover of words, falling on the ear as though they were the irrepressible ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... creature. Manhood, and Mill would emphatically add womanhood too, rests on the spontaneous development of faculty. To find vent for the capacities of feeling, of emotion, of thought, of action, is to find oneself. The result is no anarchy. The self so found has as the pivot of its life the power of control. To introduce some unity into life, some harmony into thought, action and feeling, is its central achievement, and to realize its relation to others and guide its own life thereby, its ...
— Liberalism • L. T. Hobhouse
... if Eve's serpent was so splendid," Mrs. Greyson laughed, twirling the stand yet faster upon its pivot. "Would I do for ...
— The Pagans • Arlo Bates
... Tarahumare the cross is the pivot around which all his ceremonies and festivals move. He always dances to the cross, and on certain occasions he attaches strings of beads, ears of corn, and other offerings to it. It is used by the heathen as well as by the Christian Tarahumares. The question ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... theme is used with increasing frequency, it is true, so that in 'Lohengrin' its employment adds materially to the poetical interest of the score; but in 'Das Rheingold' we are in a different world. Here the guiding theme is the pivot upon which the entire work turns. The occasional use of some characteristic musical phrase to illustrate the recurrence of a special personality or phase of thought has given way to a deliberate system in which ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... and he didn't have to talk...whether people stopped asking him or not, now that his wife was away, or whether they entertained or not, didn't so much matter. He had the Club. That was the all important pivot of his life, his altar, his fetish...a lot he cared what went so ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... across the upper part of the yard to the big dog-kennel, which could be turned on a pivot according to the direction of the wind. He seated himself upon the angle of the roof, and made a merry-go-round of it by pushing off with his foot every time he passed the fence. Suddenly it occurred to him that he himself was everybody's dog, and had better hide himself; so he ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... one of those who take nothing for granted. A weight of authority is little in his mind when compared to the personal investigation of the fact—facts for the people, and for himself as one of the people—that's the pivot on which Mathew Mizzle turns and returns, one fact being to his mind worth whole volumes of speculative assumption; and to Mizzle all facts, let them relate to what they may, are of peculiar interest. It is useless to ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various
... he whirled on a pivot, high and clear, and came to the ground with a force to match his weight, his body, like a whip-lash, cracking its whole ...
— A Man and a Woman • Stanley Waterloo
... the skirmish line had made an irregular half wheel to the southward with a flying pivot toward the village, and the Indians were darting or crawling out south of the tepees so as to get an enfilading fire on the line. Cranston's quick eyes saw the danger and warned his right skirmishers. "Back there! Fall back, you men! ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... could not suck. The cow's foreleg was caught over her own head, and so she held herself from rising. The sand was rolled and grooved into a wheel by her circlings; her body heaved and fell with breathing, and the sand was wet where her pivot nostrils had ground it. While Genesmere untangled her and gave her tongue the last of his canteen the calf walked round and round. He placed the cow upon her feet, and as soon as he moved away to his horse the calf came to its mother, who began to lick it. He presently marked ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... humming-top, turning round on his pivot, and facing the company, 'what did you think of ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... they seemed to touch upon what he was in search of. He was much fascinated, for instance, by the doctrine of "the greatest happiness of the greatest number," and for its sake swallowed for a time, though not without wry faces, the dogmas, that self-interest is the true pivot of all social action, that population has a perpetual tendency to outstrip the means of living, and that to establish a preventive check on population is the duty of all good citizens. And so he lived on for some time ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... was separate from the rest of the mountain and was in motion, turning slowly around and around as if upon a pivot. When first they came to it there was a solid wall before them; but presently it revolved until there was exposed a wide, smooth path across it to the other side. This appeared so unexpectedly that they were unprepared to take advantage of it at first, and allowed the rocky wall to swing around ...
— Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz • L. Frank Baum.
... to the maherry was sufficient to effect his purpose. On hearing it, the well-trained quadruped wheeled, as upon a pivot, and in a shambling, but quick pace, started back towards the ravine, ...
— The Boy Slaves • Mayne Reid
... and obligations; and every tything was responsible for the production of its criminals, and obliged to pay a fine if they escaped. Every householder was liable to answer for any stranger who might stop at his house. "This mutual liability or suretyship was the pivot of all Alfred's administrative reform, and wrought a remarkable change in the kingdom, so that merchants and travellers could go about without armed guards. The forests were emptied of outlaws, and confidence and security succeeded distrust and lawlessness.... The frank pledge-system, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord
... frigate Congress and sloop Cumberland, off the batteries of Newport News. As the Patrick Henry could not have returned unseen, Tucker took a position about a mile distant from the batteries, and opened on the Federal vessels with his port battery and pivot guns. The fire was promptly returned, many of the shots from the rifled guns passing over the Patrick Henry, and one, going through her pilot-house and lodging in the starboard hammock-netting, did some injury to the vessel, besides ...
— Life of Rear Admiral John Randolph Tucker • James Henry Rochelle
... had run into a brick wall, pawed, stamped, snorted, and went off once more into furiously insane caperings—a new set—all the time circling, with the little, black-and-gray, erect figure of the surprised ratel as a pivot. ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... yearly excess of from one million and a half to two million births over deaths, with the development of her industries and the formation of important commercial centres, progressed very rapidly and was about to become the pivot of ...
— Peaceless Europe • Francesco Saverio Nitti
... mature age of sixteen,—for a moment she was impelled to make a clean confession of her own egotism, and to ask his pardon for having, under the tuition of her mother, made him the unconscious pivot of all her worldly ambitions,—then, with a sudden impetuous movement, she swept past him without a word, ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... them wrong. She was not a United States person. It would be easy for another kind of a person to get things wrong. Still—"not wanted"—they certainly sounded very plain. And they meant—Bobby gave a faint gasp, and suddenly his thoughts turned dizzily round and round one terrible pivot—"not wanted." He sprang away out of the nurse's hands and darted down the long, bright hall to his mother's room. She was being dressed for a ball, and the room was pitilessly light. She sat at a table with a little mirror before her. Suddenly ...
— The Very Small Person • Annie Hamilton Donnell
... stem of a fruiting plant, of shepherd's-purse, let us say, and select a well-filled but green pod, mid-way up the stem, those below being ready to shed their seeds at a touch. Then seizing it in its jaws, and fixing its hind legs firmly as a pivot, it contrives to turn round and round, and so to strain the fibres of the fruit-stalk until they snap; it then patiently backs down the stem. Sometimes two ants combine their efforts; one, at the base of the peduncle, gnaws at the point of greatest ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... space I could go on multiplying cases where the same results have followed when the cross of Christ has been the pivot of all Christian teaching, and prayer has been ...
— How I Know God Answers Prayer - The Personal Testimony of One Life-Time • Rosalind Goforth
... I ran round and round the stove, crying aloud for help. But my mother and the woman seemed not to know my danger. They sat still, looking quietly upon the devil's chase after me. At last I grew dizzy. My head revolved as on a hidden pivot. My knees became numb, and doubled under my weight like a pair of knife blades without a spring. Beside my mother's chair I fell in a heap. Just as the devil stooped over me with outstretched claws my mother awoke from her quiet indifference, and lifted me ...
— American Indian stories • Zitkala-Sa
... denial at this easy and common generalization. It is that of a young German officer, a mere stripling of twenty or thereabouts, with the most frank, open, ingenuous expression. One would expect to find him presiding at a Christian Endeavor social, rather than right here at the very pivot of the most terrible military organization ...
— In the Claws of the German Eagle • Albert Rhys Williams
... San Francisco, were here, and two nurses. Martin had been laid upon a hastily moved bed in the old study, to be spared the narrow stairs. The room was metamorphosed, the whole house moved about it as about a pivot, and there was no thought but for the man who lay, sometimes moaning and sometimes ...
— Sisters • Kathleen Norris
... our readers must know, was no other than the long twenty-four pounder, formerly belonging to Gerald's gun-boat, which, now removed to his new command, lay a mid ships, and mounted on a pivot, constituted the whole battery of the schooner. The apron was the leaden covering protecting the touch-hole, which, having unaccountably fallen off, had encountered the heavy foot of Tom Fluke, in his advance along ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... not true, my dear sisters, that you are of this opinion? Do not you thoroughly understand that if love is absent from marriage it should, on the contrary, be its real pivot? To make one's self lovable is the main thing. Believe my white hairs that it is so, and let me ...
— Monsieur, Madame and Bebe, Complete • Gustave Droz
... to conspire with each other! Jeremiah scorns the people's trust in the Temple as utterly as he had scorned their trust (it is the same word) in the Baals or in Egypt and Assyria. The change in the pivot of their false confidence is to be marked. So much at least had Deuteronomy effected—shifting their trust from foreign gods and states to something founded by their own God, yet leaving it material, and unable to restrain them ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... governor, by which it may be turned forward or back as the load requires. The three points of lead, or admission and exhaust and compression, are fixed and independent of the changes and cut off. The motion of the main eccentric is given to a rocker arm, the pivot of which is at the bottom, and from the upper end the valve rod transfers the motion to the valve without reversing the motion, as is done sometimes in the slide valve to overcome the effects of the angularity of the connecting rod. The action of the rocker ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 787, January 31, 1891 • Various
... and Jocasta.]—The technique of this wonderful scene, an intimate self-revealing conversation between husband and wife about the past, forming the pivot of the play, will remind ...
— Oedipus King of Thebes - Translated into English Rhyming Verse with Explanatory Notes • Sophocles
... hardly likely. Look at these guys to-night—dead set on making an awful example of anybody that couldn't come clean. I didn't notice them missing any bets. They combed me to the Queen's taste; for a while I was sure scared they'd extract my pivot tooth to see if there wasn't something incriminating and degrading secreted inside it. And nobody got off any easier. I say the good ship Assyrian has a pretty clean bill of health ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... those with conical valves and seats, of which the latter kind are the best. The former kind have for the most part consisted of a circular valve and face, with radial apertures, the valve resembling the outstretched wings of a butterfly, and being made to revolve on its central pivot by connecting links between its outer edges, or by its central spindle. In some of Stephenson's engines the regulator consists of a slide valve covering a port on the top of the valve chests. A rod passes from this valve through the smoke box ...
— A Catechism of the Steam Engine • John Bourne
... still the majestic pivot, round which her thoughts swung, but the circle was growing wider and wider. The difference in their ages, which at first to her inexperience had seemed such a trifling consideration, proved more serious as ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice
... little forward amidships on either side under what might be called the fins. These fins collapsed close against the sides of the vessel when under water and expanded to a spread of twenty feet when she took the air. They worked on a pivot and could be inclined either way from the horizontal to an angle of thirty degrees. Midway between the end of these and the stern was a smaller pair with one driving screw. The eighth screw was an ordinary propeller at the stern, but the outside portion of the shaft worked on a ball ...
— The World Peril of 1910 • George Griffith
... brush heaps, sending out Fierce summers, beating on their swollen brows. O, such a battle! had we heard of serfs Driven to like hot conflict with the soil, Armies had march'd and navies swiftly sail'd To burst their gyves. But here's the little point— The polish'd di'mond pivot on which spins The wheel of Difference—they OWN'D the rugged soil, And fought for love—dear love of wealth and pow'r, And honest ease and fair esteem of men; One's blood heats at it!" "Yet you said such fields Were all inglorious," Katie, wondering, said. "Inglorious? yes; they make no promises ...
— Old Spookses' Pass • Isabella Valancy Crawford
... kids swings like they was on a pivot, and piles in after him. There wasn't anything to do then but stop under the gate, seein' as the club-house was a hundred yards or so off. I snaked Woodie out, though, and made him help me range the youngsters under the middle of the roof; and when we'd got 'em packed in four deep, ...
— Shorty McCabe • Sewell Ford
... suggestive of the stage; a big tin-lined box with half a dozen powerful tungsten lamps in it, and grooves in the mouth of it for the reception of colored slides. And a sort of search-light that swung on a pivot. There was a high cutting-table with a deep indentation in it, in which Rose could stand with her work all around her. On a shelf in a corner he noticed two or three little figures twelve inches high or so that ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... hands for working them, if we only have to fight one side at once; but we shouldn't be very strong handed, if we had to work both broadsides. There are four sixteen pounders, four twelves, and the pivot; so that gives three men to a gun, besides officers and idlers. Three men is enough for the twelves, but it makes rather slow work with the sixteens. However, we may hope that we sha'n't have to ...
— Held Fast For England - A Tale of the Siege of Gibraltar (1779-83) • G. A. Henty
... days were somewhat rude contrivances. The mill proper consisted of two cogged wooden cylinders about fourteen inches in diameter and perhaps twenty-six inches in length, placed in an upright position in a frame. The pivot of one of these extended upward about six feet, and at its top was secured the long shaft to which the horse was attached, and as it was driven round and round, the mill crunched the apples, with many a creak and groan, and shot them out on the opposite ...
— Life in Canada Fifty Years Ago • Canniff Haight
... the appliance is as follows: The casing or receiver is a steel cylinder, which has a pivot at the bottom to receive the step for an upright hollow shaft, to which a second cylinder of smaller diameter is attached. The second cylinder is perforated, and a fine wire cloth is inserted. The mercury, after passing through the cloth, is discharged through the perforations. When the machine ...
— Getting Gold • J. C. F. Johnson
... on the table, Mr. Locket was on the hearthrug, like an orator on a platform, and Peter, under the influence of his sudden ultimatum, had dropped, rather weakly, into the seat which happened to be nearest and which, as he became conscious it moved on a pivot, he whirled round so as to enable himself to look at his tempter with an eye intended to be cold. What surprised him most was to find Mr. Locket taking exactly the line about the expediency of publication ...
— Sir Dominick Ferrand • Henry James
... support. The points of support on the strategic front are called pivots of operations, and are practical temporary bases, but quite different from pivots of maneuver. For example, in 1796 Verona was an excellent pivot of operations for all Napoleon's enterprises about Mantua for eight months. In 1813 ...
— The Art of War • Baron Henri de Jomini
... sleeves. The sun came in through the windows, a tired and ancient sun, yellow as parchment and stretched out of shape in transit. It tried to enter in triumphant squares and produced only warped splotches—but it was appallingly steady; so much so that it disturbed Anthony not to be the pivot of all the inconsequential sawmills and trees and telegraph poles that were turning around him so fast. Outside it played its heavy tremolo over olive roads and fallow cotton-fields, back of which ran ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... a desk, covered with papers in chaotic confusion, on a chair which moved on a pivot. His desk was against the wall, and when clients came to him, he turned himself sharp round, sticking out his dirty shoes, throwing himself back till his body was an inclined plane, with his hands thrust into his pockets. In this attitude he would listen to his client's story, and would ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... matter of the scene pretty fully roughed-out before details of furniture, properties, and position are arranged.[14] It may happen, indeed, that some natural phenomenon, some property or piece of furniture, is the very pivot of the scene; in which case it must, of course, be posited from the first. From the very moment of his conceiving the fourth act of Le Tartufe, Moliere must have had clearly in view the table under which Orgon hides; and ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... no concern at what was going on was David Drennen. His calm was like that of a chip caught and held motionless for a little in the centre of a whirlpool while scores of other chips gyrated madly about him; himself the pivot about which all rotated while he seemed unmoved. There were hundreds of sharp-eyed old prospectors looking for the thing he had found; if they in turn found it it would become theirs and be lost ...
— Wolf Breed • Jackson Gregory
... a golden cup, with which he sailed over the ocean. This cup was the compass, which old writers have called Lapis Heracleus. Pisander says Oceanus lent him the cup, and Lucian says it was a sea-shell. Tradition affirms that the magnet originally was not on a pivot, but set to float on water in a cup. The old antiquarian is wildly theoretical on this point, and sees a compass in the Golden Fleece of Argos, in the oracular needle which Nero worshipped, and in everything else. Yet undoubtedly ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... geometrically (e.g., 10, 48, 60, and 64 teeth). The lunar phase volvelle can be seen through the circular opening at the back of the astrolabe. It is quite certain that no automatic action is intended; when the central pivot is turned, by hand, probably by using the astrolabe rete as a "handle," the calendrical circles and the lunar phase are moved accordingly. Using one turn for a day would be too slow for useful re-setting of the instrument, in practice a turn corresponds ...
— On the Origin of Clockwork, Perpetual Motion Devices, and the Compass • Derek J. de Solla Price
... more for a quarrel than for a play. And this quarrel about the censorship is one on which he feels so strongly that in a book embodying any sort of sympathy it would be much better to leave out Mrs. Warren than to leave out Mr. Redford. The veto was the pivot of so very personal a movement by the dramatist, of so very positive an assertion of his own attitude towards things, that it is only just and necessary to state what were the two essential parties to the dispute; the play and the official ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... preference for some of her children to the prejudice of all the others. They make God a tyrant, who punishes the inevitable faults to which he has impelled them, or into which he has allowed them to be seduced. This dogma, which served as the foundation of Paganism, is now the grand pivot of the Christian religion, whose God should excite no less hatred than the most wicked divinities of idolatrous people. With such notions, is it not astonishing that this God should appear, to those who meditate ...
— Letters to Eugenia - or, a Preservative Against Religious Prejudices • Baron d'Holbach
... the Christian Scriptures: 'Those who obey not God, and believe not the Gospel of his Son, shall be punished with everlasting destruction.' This is the pivot upon which all religions turn:—they all assume that it is in our power to believe or not to believe; whereas the mind can only believe that which it thinks true. A human being can only be supposed accountable for those actions ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... mass brooding over our very mastheads began to pivot away from the ship's side silently. And now I forgot the secret stranger ready to depart, and remembered only that I was a total stranger to the ship. I did not know her. Would she do it? How was she to ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... and iron-hooped cask, by the way, but huge pine structures very roughly made. The old machine for prizing was a primitive affair, the upright beam through which ran another at right angles, turning slightly on a pivot, heavily weighted at one end, and used as a lever for compressing the brown mass into the hogsheads. Now, most well-to-do planters own a tobacco straightener and screw-press, inventions which materially lessen the manual labor of preparing the crop for ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... beauty-worship in metaphysical love, the adoration of woman; thanks to Plato, it has for all time become the inalienable property of the human mind. The striving to rise above all individualism was another ideal which a later period revived. But the pivot round which the emotions revolved was the love for a beloved individual, the modern, European, fundamental motive, as opposed to the antique Platonic cult of ideas. Thus Plato, too, was a citizen of the old world, at whose threshold stood universal sexual intercourse, ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... of this exercise may be increased by placing the hands on the neck so that at the moment of extreme pivot the hand may knead the parts. This action of the hand increases the effect and tends, in cases of congestion around the throat or ears, to give great assistance towards the elimination of all abnormal conditions. The other exercises for the ...
— How to Add Ten Years to your Life and to Double Its Satisfactions • S. S. Curry
... was in a sense that left him no pretence for thinking that anything connected with this beautiful young widow-lady could be unimportant to him. On the contrary, she was more and more filling all his waking thoughts, and becoming the pivot on which all things turned. It is true, he "dismissed from his mind"—whatever that means—every presumptuous suggestion that in some precious time to come she might be willing to throw in her lot with his own, ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... bluff, and ascending gradually to the summit. It served the double purpose of a road, and also a protection for riflemen; as a bank was thrown up on the outer edge of it breast high. Where the road reached the summit of the bluff, was placed a six-inch mortar, mounted on a pivot carriage; and a little further on was a battery, mounting three eight-inch mortars, which were cast in 1804, and looked as if they had seen much service. A great extent of ground was cleared on the summit, and extensive land defences laid out; but while ...
— Thirteen Months in the Rebel Army • William G. Stevenson
... the piston; when a diagram is to be taken, these plugs are taken out and other screws put in their places, to which a copper pipe is attached; the screw plugs are 1 inch in diameter, also the copper pipes; and exactly mid-way on the copper pipe is a small cylinder which moves on a pivot, by means of a string with a turn round it. One end of the string is fixed by a clip on the connecting rod, the other end anywhere to keep the string tight, so that by the movement of the steam entering the cylinder at either end, and the connecting ...
— The Stoker's Catechism • W. J. Connor
... fastened back in its place, in fear of another storm, was still pointing due north, and moving on its pivot, just as it had at Stockholm. The dipping of the needle had ceased. What could this mean? Then, too, our many days of sailing had certainly carried us far past the North Pole. And yet the needle continued to point north. We were sorely perplexed, ...
— The Smoky God • Willis George Emerson
... his battle with the maelstroms in the chasm. But he had wrestled a great deal with the Indians of the north, who fought as their half-wolf sledgedogs fought, and he employed their methods now. Slowly and deliberately he began to circle around Quade, so that Quade became the pivot of that circle, and as he circled he drew nearer and nearer to his enemy, but never in a frontal advance. He edged inward, with his knife-arm on the outside. His deadly deliberateness and the steady glare of his eyes discomfited ...
— The Hunted Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... consisting indeed of a simulation of death and subsequent resurrection. It is, therefore, significant that the very same simulation figures prominently in the Fijian ceremony, nay it would seem to be the very pivot on which the whole ritual revolves. Yet there is an obvious and important difference between the drama of death and resurrection as it is enacted in New Guinea and in Fiji; for whereas in New Guinea it is the novices who pretend to ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... wider schemes were involved in the struggle, Ellesmere was the pivot on which arguments and contentions centred. In such a conflict, needless to say, all the old rivalries of "leviathan" interests, of which we have already heard so much, re-emerged. What was still called the "Montgomeryshire party"—the ...
— The Story of the Cambrian - A Biography of a Railway • C. P. Gasquoine
... entertained hopes that the passage was clear, and that we should shoot down it without interruption; but in this I was disappointed. The boat struck with the fore-part of her keel on a sunken rock, and, swinging round as it were on a pivot, presented her bow to the rapid, while the skiff floated away into the strength of it. We had every reason to anticipate the loss of our whale-boat, whose build was so light, that had her side struck the rock, instead of her keel, she would have been laid open from stem to stern. ...
— Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia, Complete • Charles Sturt
... called the Scavenger's Daughter. Think of a pair of shears with handles, not only where they now are, but at the points as well, and just above the pivot that unites the blades, a circle of iron. In the upper handles the hands would be placed; in the lower, the feet; and through the iron ring, at the centre, the head of the victim would be forced. In this condition, he would be thrown prone upon the earth, and the ...
— The Ghosts - And Other Lectures • Robert G. Ingersoll
... en route. He had to do the same with the store-rooms, and managed so well that he succeeded in laying in provisions enough for two years. There was abundance of money at his command, and enough remained to buy a cannon, on a pivot carriage, which he mounted on the forecastle. There was no knowing what might happen, and it is always well to be able to send a good round bullet ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... current strove to wrest my dipped blade away, as with the paddles on one side held fast by sinewy wrists the craft turned as on a pivot, and lurching on the backwash whirled past the stone, after which the cry was: "Drive her all!" and we shot away on the eddy with our faces turned slantwise up-stream. This was well, for close below the whole weight of the current hurled itself ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... then come to another handsome village with country houses, and the street would end in another busy town; and so on until I began to think there was no real country, at least, in the direction we was going. It is my opinion that if London was put on a pivot and spun round in the State of Texas until it all flew apart, it would spread all over the State and settle up the ...
— Pomona's Travels - A Series of Letters to the Mistress of Rudder Grange from her Former - Handmaiden • Frank R. Stockton
... a round black spot on the map, in the main ganglia of the great A. and P. and the junction point of two other railroads. At Cincinnati it is a commercial centre of considerable importance, almost a rival. While Torso to Torso is the coming pivot of ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... become the fashion among novelists to introduce their hero in knee pants, their heroine in pinafore and pigtails. Time was when we were rushed up to a stalwart young man of twenty-four, who was presented as the pivot about whom the plot would revolve. Now we are led, protesting, up to a grubby urchin of five and are invited to watch him through twenty years of intimate minutiae. In extreme cases we have been obliged to witness his evolution from swaddling clothes to dresses, from dresses to shorts (he is so ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... the mounting of these starkly beautiful weapons. They seemed to be fixed on a movable pivot set into the coal black rock itself. Like modern artillery, these curious pieces of ordnance bore a bronze shield to protect their crews, through which projected the long and very narrow barrels of the guns. Grouped like cannoneers about their piece stood various red-crested Atlantean ...
— Astounding Stories, February, 1931 • Various
... appreciative both of the springs and the scenery of these mountains. And so, with the rise and dip of the seasons, the European element waxes as the English wanes, in a kind of solstitial see-saw. And the smiling landlord stands upon the pivot. ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... that they were grey, pure grey, without a taint of green or a shadow of blue in them. That was what his mind was running on as he looked into the distance and Miss Quincey imagined that his bumpy intellectual forehead was bulging with great thoughts. And now Miss Quincey supplied a convenient pivot for the wild gyrations of his wrath. He got up and with his hands behind his back he seemed to be lashing himself into a fury with ...
— Superseded • May Sinclair
... separate, but are turned out of one piece; a string is fastened to the cone at its base a, with a bullet or any other small weight at the other end of it; and another string and weight are fastened to the cylinder at c; the pivot p of wire is bent into the form of a handle; if the handle is turned either way, the strings will be respectively wound up upon the cone and cylinder; their lengths should now be adjusted, so that when the string on the cone is wound up as far as the cone will permit, the two weights may be ...
— Practical Education, Volume II • Maria Edgeworth
... all her sister's doings, and always spoke of herself as the invalid, precluded from all service except that of being a pivot for Jane, the stationary leg of the compasses, as she sometimes called herself. This repose, together with her prettiness and sweetness of manner, was very attractive; especially to Gillian, who had begun to feel herself in the grip of the great engine which bore her ...
— Beechcroft at Rockstone • Charlotte M. Yonge
... driving, as occasion suited. The carriage or wagon, if it may be called such, appeared in as wretched a condition as the team and its driver. Sometimes a couple of horses, mules, or cows, &c., would be dragging a hogshead of tobacco, with a pivot, or axle, driven into each end of the hogshead, and something like a shaft attached, by which it was drawn, or rolled along the road. I have seen two oxen and two slaves pretty fully employed in getting along a single hogshead; and some of ...
— An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans • Lydia Maria Child
... if a powerful force had turned him on a pivot. He saw Fay Larkin. She seemed to be almost running. She was unhooded and her bright hair streamed down. Her swift, lithe action was without its usual grace. She looked wild, and she almost fell crossing the stepping-stones ...
— The Rainbow Trail • Zane Grey
... after monitor, and then wooden flagships. Steadily and majestically they marched; marched as columns of men would march, obedient to commands, independent of waves and winds, mobilized by steam and science to turn on a pivot and manoeuvre as the directing mind required them; they halted in front of the fort; they did not anchor as Sir Peter Parker's ships had done near a hundred years before in front of Moultrie, which was hard by and frowning still at her ancient enemies of the ocean. They halted ...
— The Black Phalanx - African American soldiers in the War of Independence, the - War of 1812, and the Civil War • Joseph T. Wilson
... All which I wished to say I would not be allowed to say, and just to pay an aimless visit seemed a foolish thing to do, and, being outspoken, I said so. A friend in whom I had implicit confidence advised me to go by all means. I was possibly being used as a political pivot. After some delay I did go, splattering through the mud in a wheezy old cab behind a splayfooted white horse driven by a hunchbacked negro boy. The interview lasted five minutes, and was perfectly meaningless. ...
— A Woman's Part in a Revolution • Natalie Harris Hammond
... we set out again, to explain to his pupil how sugar was made, took him to the mill, situated in a wide rotunda. Here two upright wooden cylinders, fitting close to one another, revolved on a pivot, set in action by means of two oxen yoked together, crushing the canes which an Aztec[C] was introducing between them. The machine groaned, and seemed almost ready to fall to pieces under the impetus of the powerful animals, which were urged on both by voice and gesture. Lucien ...
— Adventures of a Young Naturalist • Lucien Biart
... overhead to feel about till his fingers sank into a crevice, and then, panting heavily, he made one brave effort, holding on tightly and letting his legs glide over, while he stiffly raised himself up, moving as it were upon a pivot, that pivot being ...
— The Peril Finders • George Manville Fenn
... of practice in adjusting my mind. It often seems to me as movable as if it was on a pivot. I'm rather ashamed ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King
... That makes a difference." He drew a mark in the dust with his toe. "There, that's right. Don't step over that. Pivot yourself on your spine, and make a half turn. When you've swung your ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... which I could not neglect. Then, as ill-luck would have it, in my agent's office I was fastened upon by a fellow fresh from Madagascar with a little scheme for a wonderful piece of business. It had something to do with cattle and cartridges and a Prince Ravonalo something; but the pivot of the whole affair was the stupidity of some admiral—Admiral Pierre, I think. Everything turned on that, and the chap couldn't find words strong enough to express his confidence. He had globular eyes starting out of his head with a fishy glitter, ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... Chateau St. Louis, the scene of Frontenac's rule as head of the colony. No other spot in the world commanded such a highway linking the inland waters with the sea. The French had always an eye for points of strategic value; and in holding Quebec they hoped to possess the pivot on which the destinies of North America should turn. For a long time it seemed, indeed, as if this glowing vision might become a reality. The imperial ideas which were working at Quebec were based upon the substantial realities of trade. ...
— The Conquest of New France - A Chronicle of the Colonial Wars, Volume 10 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • George M. Wrong
... was not merely the outcome of public changes; it was an intensely personal matter, too. Victoria was the Queen of England, the Empress of India, the quintessential pivot round which the whole magnificent machine was revolving—but how much more besides! For one thing, she was of a great age—an almost indispensable qualification for popularity in England. She had given proof of one of the most admired characteristics of the race—persistent ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey |
