"Tick" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... came home and found the task done, she was almost in despair, and cried, "That dog Thunder-and-Lightning has played me this trick; but you shall not escape thus! So take these pieces of bed-tick, which are enough for twelve mattresses, and mind that by this evening they are filled with feathers, or else I will ...
— Stories from Pentamerone • Giambattista Basile
... on his heel, without replying, and walked up the siding. The spare man shuffled back to the uneasy group. "Jim's ez full ez a tick, ez ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... hope that it had escaped. There is no doubt he prayed for its preservation, and he had strong faith in prayer. At any rate, at half past eleven o'clock that night he was up and dressed, and routed his two sons out of their beds. At the stroke of midnight, waiting a tick longer perhaps, to be quite sure that Sunday had gone and Monday morning had arrived, he and his sons pushed out in ...
— The Story of Grenfell of the Labrador - A Boy's Life of Wilfred T. Grenfell • Dillon Wallace
... begin?" Cleo asked as the girls tramped into the long, quiet hall. "Isn't it cave-like to come into an empty house? Oh, I know; see the hall clock has stopped ticking, and when a tick goes out it seems to leave a smoke of silence," she finished. "There, don't you think I have an ...
— The Girl Scouts at Bellaire - Or Maid Mary's Awakening • Lilian C. McNamara Garis
... begin this sentence may not live to read its close. There is a chance, one in three or four billions, that you will die in a second, by the tick of the watch. The chair upon which you sit may collapse, the car in which you ride may collide, your heart may suddenly cease. Or you may survive the sentence and the article, and live twenty, ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... guinea in his pocket, and having left not many in the pockets of his friends whom he might command, had purchased (on tick doubtless) the whole and sole Editorship, Proprietorship, with all the rights and titles (such as they were worth) of the Albion, from one Lovell; of whom we know nothing, save that he had stood in the pillory for a libel on the Prince of Wales. With this hopeless concern—for ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... he not for instance have said, "What if a certain being should even now be putting in my way the honour and gladness of helping this woman—making me his messenger to her?" What if his soul was too impatient to listen for the next tick of the clock of eternity, and was left therefore to declare there was no such clock going! Ought he not even now to have been capable of thinking that there might be a being with a design for his creatures ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... whiskers of our lodger at West Inch. As to my father, he had a fine gold watch with a double case; and a proud man was he as he sat with it in the palm of his hand, his ear stooping to hearken to the tick. I do not know which was best pleased, and they would talk of nothing but what de ...
— The Great Shadow and Other Napoleonic Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... being shovelled among the soil upon his coffin would forthwith quicken {8a} him. Sooth to say, there is ne'er a buckhound in the county but he treateth him as a godchild, patting him on the head, soothing his velvety ear between thumb and forefinger, ejecting tick from tenement, calling him 'fine fellow,' 'noble lad,' and giving him his blessing, as one dearer to him than a king's debt to a debtor, {8b} or a bastard to a dad of eighty. This is the only kindness I ever heard ...
— Citation and Examination of William Shakspeare • Walter Savage Landor
... shake, wag, seesaw, dance, lurch, dodge; logan^, loggan^, rocking-stone, vibroscope^. V. oscillate; vibrate, librate^; alternate, undulate, wave; rock, swing; pulsate, beat; wag, waggle; nod, bob, courtesy, curtsy; tick; play; wamble^, wabble^; dangle, swag. fluctuate, dance, curvet, reel, quake; quiver, quaver; shake, flicker; wriggle; roll, toss, pitch; flounder, stagger, totter; move up and down, bob up and down &c adv.; pass and repass, ebb and ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... green chestnuts. There was no game in the forest. The trout would not bite, for I had no tackle and no hook. I was starving. I sat me down, and rested my trusty, but futile rifle against a fallen tree. Suddenly I heard a tread, turned my head, saw a Moose,—took—my—gun,—tick! he was dead. I was saved. I feasted, and in gratitude named the lake Moosetookmyguntick.' Geography has modified it, but the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... Carey's stall?" said Mick, pointing in that direction. "When there's a tick at Madam Carey's there is no tin for Chaffing Jack. That's what ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... thou think'st I took thee tardy, And dar'st presume to be so hardy, To try thy fortune o'er a-fresh, I'll wave my title to thy flesh, 790 Thy arms and baggage, now my right; And if thou hast the heart to try't, I'll lend thee back thyself a while, And once more, for that carcass vile, Fight upon tick. — Quoth HUDIBRAS, 795 Thou offer'st nobly, valiant lass, And I shall take thee at thy word. First let me rise and take my sword. That sword which has so oft this day Through squadrons of my foes made way, 800 And some to other worlds dispatch'd, ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... telegraph, semaphore, flagstaff; cresset[obs3], fiery cross; calumet; heliograph; guidon; headlight. [sign (evidence) on physobj of contact with another physobj] mark, scratch, line, stroke, dash, score, stripe, streak, tick, dot, point, notch, nick. print; imprint, impress, impression. [symbols accompanying written text to signify modified interpretation] keyboard symbols, printing symbols; red letter[for emphasis], italics, sublineation[obs3], ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... when they go home," said a spare tin-peddler, stroking his long yellow goatee. "Go into the store: nobody speak to you; go to cattle-show: everybody follow you 'round; go to the wharf: nobody weigh your fish; go to buy seed-cakes at the cart: baker won't give no tick." ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 9 • Various
... the tick of my watch," he breathed against her ear. "I reckon it has taken ten minutes to collect two dug-outs. Unless we mean to remain all night we must let up ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... room, and that was wretched enough. Many of the windows were broken, and pieces of shingle were stuck over the holes in the glass. In one corner stood a miserable bedstead, with a ragged coverlet partially spread over a dirty bed tick filled with leaves. There was only one chair, and that was a broken rocker, on which the unhappy mistress of the cottage was seated. But there were two or three rough stools, made of pieces of pine slab, standing beside the rickety table. Pointing to these stools, Mrs. Button, without ...
— Aunt Amy - or, How Minnie Brown learned to be a Sunbeam • Francis Forrester
... made with several French farmers to bring a quantity of straw to the public square, where the soldiers, later in the afternoon, filled their bed ticks. It was on a tick of straw, thrown on the floor of the old dilapidated, vacated house, that one hundred of the battery spent their nights of sleep in Montmorillon while the other half occupied similar beds on the ...
— The Delta of the Triple Elevens - The History of Battery D, 311th Field Artillery US Army, - American Expeditionary Forces • William Elmer Bachman
... a dragon in the way, I suppose—in the way even of nature study. There are unpleasant, perhaps unnecessary, and evil creatures—snakes!—in the fields and woods, which we must be willing to meet and tolerate for the love within us. Tick-seeds, beggar-needles, mud, mosquitos, rain, heat, hawks, and snakes haunt all our paths, hindering us sometimes, though never ...
— Roof and Meadow • Dallas Lore Sharp
... cotton growers of the Southern States by the advance of the boll weevil. The Department is doing all it can to organize the farmers in the threatened districts, just as it has been doing all it can to organize them in aid of its work to eradicate the cattle fever tick in the South. The Department can and will cooperate with all such associations, and it must have their help if its own work is to be done in the most ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... up the colts with merry tick-tack of the brush and comb, and after the last stroke on their shining limbs, threw his tools in the box ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... other with brave smiles, hand in hand. And now their chatter became fast and furious, to drown the clock's impatient tick. ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... the kitchen 'd look by night, With just a clock, — But they could gag the tick, And mice won't bark; And so the walls ...
— Poems: Three Series, Complete • Emily Dickinson
... the West Park, and going home at night to tell his landlady how he had been seeking for a job. I believe this kind of existence was not unpleasant to Alick himself, and he might have long continued to enjoy idleness and a life on tick; but he had a comrade, let us call him Brown, who grew restive. This fellow was continually threatening to slip his cable for the States, and at last, one Wednesday, Glasgow was left widowed of her Brown. Some months afterwards, Alick met another ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... made up his mind to go to a shopkeeper called Madame Tsitrinnikov to try and get it from her on tick: who knows? perhaps the woman would feel for them and let them have it. The jeune premier went off, and half an hour later returned with a bottle of brandy and some castor-oil. Shtchiptsov was sitting motionless, as before, on the bed, gazing dumbly at the floor. He drank the castor-oil ...
— The Horse-Stealers and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... green and with flowers. The church bells sounded, and they recognized the high steeples and the great town; it was the one in which they lived, and they went to the grandmother's door, and up the stairs, and into the room, where everything remained in its usual place. The big clock was going "Tick! tack!" and the hands were turning; but as they went through the rooms they noticed that they had become grown-up people. The roses out on the roof-gutter were blooming in at the open window, and there ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V2 • Charles H. Sylvester
... lather was all right on his face, and began to strop his razor. "I knew that boy when he was telegraphing. But he knew what all those sounds meant. You just keep ticking away, and don't know one tick from another." ...
— Peck's Uncle Ike and The Red Headed Boy - 1899 • George W. Peck
... stirred Jon up so fearfully, yet nothing definite was promised or arranged! But the more uncertain and hazardous the future, the more "the will to have" worked its tentacles into the flesh of her heart—like some burrowing tick! ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... female, a natural instinct. The rhythmical and, if I may so say, well-modulated undulation of the back in our ladies of Circular rank is envied and imitated by the wife of a common Equilateral, who can achieve nothing beyond a mere monotonous swing, like the ticking of a pendulum; and the regular tick of the Equilateral is no less admired and copied by the wife of the progressive and aspiring Isosceles, in the females of whose family no "back-motion" of any kind has become as yet a necessity of life. Hence, in every family of position and consideration, "back motion" is as prevalent as time ...
— Flatland • Edwin A. Abbott
... with straw or pine needles. The best room may have had a carved oak chest, brought from England, a tent or field bedstead, with green baize, or white dimity curtains, and generous feather bed. The stout tick for this, the snow-white sheets, the warm flannel blankets, and heavy woollen rugs, woven in checks of black, or red, and white, or the lighter harperlet, were all the products of domestic wheel and loom. There were no carpets. The floors were sprinkled with fine, white ...
— The New England Magazine Volume 1, No. 3, March, 1886 - Bay State Monthly Volume 4, No. 3, March, 1886 • Various
... much better company than a clock," she said; "though when I'm here by myself I always like to hear the clock tick. It seems as if I were not so entirely alone. But a bird is better. I talked to Dickey to-day and he twittered back. He has such a cute way of perking his little head to one side just as knowing as you please, and he acts exactly as ...
— Dickey Downy - The Autobiography of a Bird • Virginia Sharpe Patterson
... Manewaring's hand appeared over the edge of the table and gave a trembling jerk toward the pistol-butt. Then it fell back into his lap. He gasped. A drop of sweat ran down his temple into his gray beard. Again the only sounds were the tick of the cabin clock, the wash of the seas outside and the hoarse breathing of the cornered man. At length he moved with a sort of shudder, whispered the name of his Maker and seized the butt ...
— The Black Buccaneer • Stephen W. Meader
... to the routine of a camp, and after he had checked up he should have reported, 'Sir, the company is present and accounted for.' Instead he got rattled and said, 'Sir, the company is full.' Our captain, looking us over, sarcastically remarked, 'I should say as much, full as a tick.'" ...
— Jokes For All Occasions - Selected and Edited by One of America's Foremost Public Speakers • Anonymous
... thus enabled to understand the allusions I had already heard to Rachel's being "dry," or Abigail's being as "full as a tick," ...
— Cape Cod Folks • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... Knew you'd be disgusted, and sat down to see what we could do. Then Jack piped up, and said he'd show us a place where we could get a plenty. 'Come on,' said we, and after leading us a nice tramp, he brought us out at Morse's greenhouse. So we got a few on tick, as we had but four cents among us, and there you are. Pretty clever of the little ...
— Jack and Jill • Louisa May Alcott
... call that mean of father,' said Desmond indignantly. 'You can't go tick with a secretary. It means cash. There'll never be anything for you, Pam, and nothing for the garden. The two old fellows that were here last week have been turned off, Forest ...
— Elizabeth's Campaign • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... speaks to me about it arterwards, they'll wish they hadn't. I was all by myself in the house. I set down in my clock-room, about three in the arternoon, an' there I set. I didn't git no supper. I couldn't. I set there an' heard the clock tick. Byme-by it struck seven, an' that waked me up. I thought I'd gone crazy. The figgers on the wall-paper provoked me most to death; an' that red-an'-white tidy I made, the winter I was laid up, seemed to be talkin' out loud. I got up an' run outdoor ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... the shape of those large, black, night-moths with pale skull-like effigies painted on their backs as upon tombs, beneath whose feet the furniture creaks and crackles, which makes that tiny invisible beetle hidden between the boards of the beds begin tick-tick-ticking like a fairy watch, eleven times in succession, by way of showing that the witching hour of night is close ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai
... Ships' lanterns don 't. Captain, I feels as mournful as when Flint's clock did n't tick no more and we knowed he was took by ...
— Wappin' Wharf - A Frightful Comedy of Pirates • Charles S. Brooks
... the landlord who refused with a shake of the head. My-Boots understood, and again set to abusing the old Jew Colombe. What! A rascal like him dared to behave in that way to a comrade! Everywhere else one could get drink on tick! It was only in such low boozing-dens that one was insulted! The landlord remained calm, leaning his big fists on the edge of ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... took it, as he did every thing, very easily. "I don't see why Aunt Selina should make such a fuss. Why need you do anything, Aunt Hilary? Can't we hold out a little longer, and live upon tick till I get into practice? Of course, I shall then take care of you all; I'm the head of the family. How horribly ...
— Mistress and Maid • Dinah Craik (aka: Miss Mulock)
... fell a silence so utter that Barnabas could distinctly hear the tick of Natty Bell's great watch in his fob; a silence in which Mr. Smivvle stared with wide-eyed dismay, while Barrymaine sat motionless with his glass half-way to his lips. Then Mr. Chichester laughed again, but the scar glowed upon his pallid cheek, and the ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al
... table with a rasping sound you may serve it honest cuthbert said the captain impatiently and the butler broke a hole in the top crust he touched a hidden mechanism for immediately something right under me began to go tick tock tick tock tick tock what is that noise captain said the larboard mate only the patent log clicking off the knots said the butler it needs oiling again but cuthbert said the captain why are you so nervous ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... nerve or resolution find insupportable. To me, trained to a serenity of stoicism, it could make no demoralizing appeal. I had out my matchbox, opened it at leisure, and, while the whole vaulting blackness seemed to tick and rustle with secret movement, took a half-dozen vestas into my hand, struck one alight, and, by its dim radiance, made my way through the building by the passages we had penetrated in the morning. If at all I shrank or perspired on ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... you a song and a sensible song is a worthy and excellent thing; But how could I sing you that sort of a song, if there's never a song to sing?) At ten to the tick, by the kitchen clock, I marked him blundering by, With his eyes astare, and his rumpled hair, and his hat cocked over his eye. Blind, in his pride, to his shoes untied, he went with a swift jig-jog, Off on the quest, with a strange ...
— The Glugs of Gosh • C. J. Dennis
... half a tick. Humphrey, I'm only a light weight, and you fight at twelve stone ten, but I'm damned if I'm going to stand still and see you hitting a ...
— The Plays of W. E. Henley and R. L. Stevenson
... took off its cap and cloak, and got its garments nicely straightened out, and then to complete the cure, for want of something better, gave it my long suffering watch to nibble. The little creature may have recognized the soothing effect of a woman's hands, or it may have been the bright tick, tick which it was gazing at now with pleased expression, and with its untutored tongue was already trying to imitate. What the cause was I could not say; but when the father returned, silence reigned in the car so far as his offspring ...
— Medoline Selwyn's Work • Mrs. J. J. Colter
... They left behind almost all their possessions, and took away, so to speak, only what they had on their backs and a change of clothes. A few things for remembrance were to be sent after them by goods-train: a few books, portraits, the old grandfather's clock, whose tick-tock seemed to them to be the beating of their hearts.—The air was keen. No one was stirring in the town: the shutters were closed and the streets empty. They said nothing: only the old servant spoke. Madame Jeannin was striving to fix in her memory all the images ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... climbed the rocky mountains, we've plodded o'er the plain, We've bid a wild defiance to the drizzling, drenching rain; And yielding to the influence of your coquettish weather, We've grilled beneath the sunshine on thy "tick" ...
— The Sunny Side of Ireland - How to see it by the Great Southern and Western Railway • John O'Mahony and R. Lloyd Praeger
... crickets chirping all round the warm hearth-stones; there was the clock ticking with the peculiar beat Susan had known from her childhood, and which then and ever since she had oddly associated within the idea of a mother and child talking together, one loud tick, and quick—a feeble, ...
— Half a Life-Time Ago • Elizabeth Gaskell
... Signal. His wife came in, seated herself, and overflowed the low rocking-chair on the other side of the table with her voluminous skirts. She was tall and very large. Her face was as placid as that of a clock which has just marked the last hour of the day and has nothing to do but tick-tock until bed-time. ...
— The Co-Citizens • Corra Harris
... table with such energy that it groaned beneath him. "Error? Not a bit of it. Can't you follow a simple calculation like that? The thing is, you see, you get your original hen for next to nothing. That's to say, on tick. Anybody will let you have a hen on tick. Now listen to me for a moment. You let your hen set, and hatch chickens. Suppose you have a dozen hens. Very well, then. When each of the dozen has a dozen chickens, ...
— Love Among the Chickens - A Story of the Haps and Mishaps on an English Chicken Farm • P. G. Wodehouse
... our wives will tick their Souls on Sin, Tis vain to make about their Ears a din, For that exasperates their will the more, And where in private may in publick Whore; So then the Scandal coming to all Ears, Each Neighbour will not only fling his Jeers Upon us, but the Boys will hoot it too, ...
— The Fifteen Comforts of Matrimony: Responses from Men • Various
... fountain of your mind were clear again, that I might water an ass at it. I had rather be a tick in a sheep than ...
— The History of Troilus and Cressida • William Shakespeare [Craig edition]
... a shop that he broods over with a housewife's solicitous eyes, watchful and jealous, lest some one walks over him. With my eye I tick off his ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... senses of the matron were strung to an almost painful acuteness. The moonlight streaming in at the window was to her eyes like the glare of the sun at noonday: the ticking of the clock on the wall fell on her ears, each tick like a sharply pointed hammer seeming to bruise the nerve. A keen thrill ran like a knife through her tense frame when the infant stirred and moaned in his sleep. The lion roused himself in an instant, and fixing his eyes upon the bed came towards it arching his back and yawning. ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... distant voices, and laughs of more fortunate, older people and the opening and shutting of distant doors, that told of scenes of animation and interest from which we were excluded? How doleful sounded the tick of the clock, and how dismal was the darkness as sunshine faded from the window, leaving only a square of dusky ...
— A Budget of Christmas Tales by Charles Dickens and Others • Various
... high she had to climb on a chair to get in. She heard Maria's heavy feet go shuffling down the stairs. A door banged. Then it was so still she could hear the clock tick in the next room. ...
— The Little Colonel • Annie Fellows Johnston
... blending together, in the dim light of a late October afternoon, to form shadowy backgrounds for autumnal reverie, or for silent, solitary listening—listening to the tales told by the soughing wind outside, to the whisper of embers in the fireplace, the slow somber tick of the tall clock telling of ages past and passing, the ghostly murmur of the old house talking softly ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... shilling, which had remained there ever since I changed my winter clothes in the spring. Now at that time we were reduced to anchovy paste for breakfast, and our bare rations for tea. Money was spent, tick was scarce, stores were exhausted. Faithful to a friendship which has all things in common. I went out to Dell's and bought a pot of apricot jam for tea, the time for which had arrived. As ill-luck would have it, both you fellows were ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough
... The young man's voice was high and plaintive. "I go out with that man Hemmingway to play an ordinary friendly round—nothing depending on it except a measly ball—and on the seventh he pulls me up and claims the hole simply because I happened to drop my niblick in the bunker. Oh, well, a tick's a tick, and there's nothing more to say, ...
— The Clicking of Cuthbert • P. G. Wodehouse
... look like mahogany:—there's two poets, and a poll parrot, the best images the jew had on his head, over the mantlepiece; and was I to leave you all alone by yourself, isn't there an eight day clock in the corner, that when one's waiting, lonesome like, for any body, keeps going tick-tack, and is ...
— John Bull - The Englishman's Fireside: A Comedy, in Five Acts • George Colman
... protested Faith. "The spare room is all torn up. The mice have gnawed a big hole in the feather tick and made a nest in it. We never found it out till Aunt Martha put the Rev. Mr. Fisher from Charlottetown there to sleep last week. HE soon found it out. Then father had to give him his bed and sleep on the study lounge. Aunt ...
— Rainbow Valley • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... yet to remain below surface narrowed down to ten minutes, then to five. At last, tick by tick, the time wound by until the full hour ...
— The Submarine Boys on Duty - Life of a Diving Torpedo Boat • Victor G. Durham
... We lived in a log house with a dirt floor and the cracks was chinked with mud and our bed was some poles nailed against the wall with two legs out on the dirt floor, and we pulled grass and put in a lowel[HW: ?] bed tick. My aunty would get old dresses, old coats, and old pants and ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Arkansas Narratives Part 3 • Works Projects Administration
... the telegraph instrument increased in rapidity and emphasis and the operator went to the table. The rapid tick aroused Prescott from the sleep into which ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... bottle to old Gus Peterson. Gus never paid his debts, and he would oniy promise fifty cents "on tick" for the bottle, and yet so desperate was Ripley that this questionable sale cheered him up ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... and looked at his watch—a cheap American article, with a loud tick. He held it out with his queer washed-out smile, and ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... too; give 'em whack-whack," cried he, offering Austin another bamboo. "Dey no work proper widout 'tick; ...
— Harper's Young People, May 18, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... got a bruise on the left thigh, but no one could notice that, while his opponent had a bleeding nose and a cut lip. The school was amused, but Gordon overheard a Milton man say: "I don't think much of the way these Fernhurst men play the game. Look at that tick of a forward there. ...
— The Loom of Youth • Alec Waugh
... the old fable of the clock, whose pendulum and wheels stopped one day, appalled by the discovery that they would have to move and tick over three million times a year for many wearisome years, but resumed work again when reminded that they would only have to ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... down, and one standing upright. The door by which he had entered was at one side, on the other side was another, and between the two stood a sofa, the shape of which was plainly discernible under the sand. Over this was a clock, which had ticked its last tick. ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille
... world, a world of slavery, moral galley-driving with a master high above them, driving them with a lash that their chained limbs may not resist. Such men, if they try to explain that torment, can often point to the very day and even hour of their sudden slavery; at such a tick of the clock the clouds gather, the very houses and street are weighted with a cold malignity, thoughts, desires, impulses are all checked, perverted, driven and counter-driven by a mysterious force. Let no man who has ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... Crab nebula, hanging over the infinitely remote space, a sprawling terror, every point holding millions of worlds, thinking of these all transcendent wonders, and then remembering his own inexpressible littleness, how that the visible existence of his whole race does not occupy a single tick of the great Sidereal Clock, will he not sink under helpless misgivings, will he not utterly despair of immortal notice and support from the King of all this? In a word, how does the solemn greatness of man, the supposed eternal destiny of man, stand affected by the modern knowledge of the vastness ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... feel the cruelty of that inexorable clock in the stillness; for the minutes passed too quickly. How could it be else, when each one of them might have heralded a hope and did not; when each bequeathed its little legacy of despair? But was there need that each new clock-tick as it came should say, as the last had said: "Another second has gone of the little hour that is left; another inch of the space that parts us from the sentence that knows no respite or reprieve"? Was it not enough that the end must come, without the ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... may be had at the lowest prices. Pains are also taken, in many instances, to indicate the previous experience of the advertisers. Thus tailors and mantua-makers generally 'hail from' London. Mr. Hanna, the watch- maker, whose time-keepers still tick attestation to his industry and popularity, is proud to have learned his trade by the banks of the Liffey. Mr. Bennie, tailor and habit-maker, from Edinburgh, 'begs leave to inform the public that all gentlemen ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... the present day. There is, perhaps, no point in the river where the mud and clay are not from two to three times as deep as the water. That ancient and grander Hudson lies back of us several hundred thousand years—perhaps more, for a million years are but as one tick of the time-piece of the Lord; yet even it was a juvenile compared with some of the rocks and mountains which the Hudson of to-day mirrors. The Highlands date from the earliest geological race—the primary; the river—the ...
— The Hudson - Three Centuries of History, Romance and Invention • Wallace Bruce
... week. I have often sat with him in the darkness that his "cruizey" lamp could not pierce, while his mutterings to himself of "ay, ay, yes, umpha, oh ay, ay man," came as regularly and monotonously as the tick of his "wag-at-the-wa'" clock. Hendry and he were paid no fixed sum for their services in the Auld Licht kirk, but once a year there was a collection for each of them, and so they jogged along. Though not the only kirk-officer of my time Hendry made the most lasting impression. ...
— Auld Licht Idyls • J.M. Barrie
... moss; in one corner, a well, whose stagnant waters you shuddered to look upon; a stairway covered with old shells; at the farther end a gallery, with wooden balustrade, and hanging upon it some old linen and the tick of an old straw mattress; on the first floor, to the left, the stone covering of a common sewer indicated the kitchen; to the right the lofty windows of the building looked out upon the street; then ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... was raked down, and Comfort's father and mother and grandmother were all in bed and asleep, when a little figure in a white nightgown, holding a lighted candle, padding softly on little cold bare feet, came down the stairs. Comfort paused in the entry and listened. She could hear the clock tick and her father snore. The best parlor door was on the right. She lifted the brass catch cautiously, and pushed the door open. Then she stole into the best parlor. The close, icy air smote her like a breath from the north pole. There was no fire in the best parlor except on Thanksgiving ...
— Comfort Pease and her Gold Ring • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... daughters in one when they was married, and there have been feathers enough for another in the house the last twelve months. Now then, neighbours, I think we have laid on enough wax. Grandfer Cantle, you turn the tick the right way outwards, and then I'll begin to shake ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... and Mop and Drop so clear, Pip and Trip and Skip that were To Mab, their sovereign, ever dear, Her special maids of honour; Fib and Tib and Pink and Pin, Tick and Quick and Jill and Jin, Tit and Nit and Wap and Win, The train ...
— The Sources and Analogues of 'A Midsummer-night's Dream' • Compiled by Frank Sidgwick
... herself about "an old bald-beaded galoot," but when he told her that to him life without her would be a blasted mockery, and that his income was L50,000 a year, she threw herself on to him and froze there with the tenacity of a tick on a brindled cow, and said, with tears of joy, ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... purposeless tenacity, watches the flickering of the flame or the sun-gleams on the wall, counts the quarries on the floor, watches even the hand of the clock, and pleases itself with detecting a rhythm in the tick. ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... evenly balanced; otherwise it may be lopsided. Fasten on the strings of the frame, beginning at the neck at equal distances from the spine, as indicated by the dotted lines in the diagram. Extend a string slantingly from the arms tick to the head on both sides of the spinal column, and run all the other strings as shown in the cut, being careful that both sides of the ...
— The Boy Mechanic: Volume 1 - 700 Things For Boys To Do • Popular Mechanics
... a goal which a little while ago seemed far before us? Do we observe how quickly we shoot by it? Do we mark with what increasing swiftness the line of our life seems reeling off, and how close we are coming to the end? Time never stops! Each tick of the clock echoes our advancing footsteps. The shadow of the dial falls upon it a shorter and shorter tract, which we have yet to pass over. Even if a long life lies before us, let us consider that thirty-five years is high noon with us,—the meridian of that ...
— The Crown of Thorns - A Token for the Sorrowing • E. H. Chapin
... his own selfish way, Hen, with much grumbling, arranged the coats on two chairs not far from the fire. When he considered the coats dry enough he crawled into his chosen bunk, grumbling at the coarse tick filled only with dried leaves, and was covered by Dick and Greg. Then the other fellows, after replenishing the fire, sat down to ...
— The Grammar School Boys Snowbound - or, Dick & Co. at Winter Sports • H. Irving Hancock
... troubling me in my old days. And I sit there afeared by the peat fire, and when I've thought too much on it, I get up and go to the half-door. And I look out on the Moyle, wee Shane, and I think: that's been roaring since the first tick of time, and I see the stars so many of them, and the moon that never changed its shape or size, and it comes to me that nothing matters in the long run, that the killed men were no more nor caught trout, and the rent families no more nor birds' nests ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... with the first faint streak of the dawn of June 7 the mines at Hill 60 and St. Yves were exploded. The sight was awe-inspiring, and the ground trembled as if in the throes of an agonizing palsy. On the tick of the appointed time our 'boys' went 'over the top.' It was for this experience that they had worked and waited. They advanced immediately behind the barrage so consistently sustained by the artillery, and in the face of a terrific fusilade of machine-gun ...
— Over the Top With the Third Australian Division • G. P. Cuttriss
... the whiskey, I told you before. Not a sound could we hear of Godfrey or of my father. Only the rapid, calling and calling,—I mind it well that night. Ay, and well I mind the striking of the great clock,—tick, tick, tick, tick, tick,—I listened and I dreamed on it till I doubted but it was the beating of my ...
— Old Man Savarin and Other Stories • Edward William Thomson
... up Horse Creek. For a time, which lengthened to dragging minutes, the anxious experimenters hung over the tiny field instrument. The sensitive magnet seemed wholly dead. Then, suddenly, it began to tick hesitantly in response to Ford's ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde
... is prowling about And his shaky old fingers will soon snuff us out; There's a hint for us all in each pendulum tick, For we're low in the tallow and long in ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... you, dweller in the city, there is no pause; hence the low attention-value. After riding on a train several hours you will become so accustomed to its roar that it will lose its attention-value, unless the train should stop for a while and start again. If you attempt to listen to a clock-tick that is so far away that you can barely hear it, you will find that at times you are unable to distinguish it, but in a few moments the sound becomes distinct again. Your mind will pause for rest whether you desire it to ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... rogues—strong and brawny, for the voyage kills many, sergeant, and the climate doth also tell upon them. Now here is one whom I must have. Yes, in very truth he is a young man, and hath much life in him and much strength. Tick him off, sergeant, ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... you are well again, though I never looked on that deafness very seriously; but if you like hearing watches tick, and boots creak, and plates clatter, so be it to you, for many and many a year to come. I think I should so like to be deaf, mostly, not expected to answer anybody in society, never startled ...
— Hortus Inclusus - Messages from the Wood to the Garden, Sent in Happy Days - to the Sister Ladies of the Thwaite, Coniston • John Ruskin
... in the very nature of Rhythm, that old name for the ceaseless pulsing or "flowing" of all living things. So deep indeed lies the instinct for rhythm in our consciousness that we impute it even to inanimate objects. We hear the ticking of the clock as tick-tock, tick-tock, or else tick-tock, tick-tock, although psychologists assure us that the clock's wheels are moving with indifferent, mechanical precision, and that it is simply our own focusing of attention upon alternate beats which creates the impression of rhythm. We hear a rhythm ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... stopped short off in the middle of telling him something Miss Satterly had said—some whimsical thing—and he could hear his heart pounding in the silence which followed. The little, nickel alarm clock tick-tick-ticked with such maddening precision and speed that Chip wanted to shy a book at it, but his eyes never left the rocky bluff opposite, and the clock ...
— Chip, of the Flying U • B. M. Bower
... skimming from branch to branch, whisper us to retire to our bedchambers. In the morning, again, the dull monotonous double note of the whee-whee, (so named from the sound of its calls,) chiming in at as regular intervals as the tick of a clock, warns us to rub our eyes and con over the tasks of the impending day, as it is but half an hour to dawn; till again the loud laughter of the jackass summons us to turn out, and take a peep at the appearance of the morning, which just begins to ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 10, No. 271, Saturday, September 1, 1827. • Various
... face—sinkers and coffee—dat don't touch it. It's way down—at de bottom. Yuh can't grab it, and yuh can't stop it. It moves, and everyting moves. It stops and de whole woild stops. Dat's me now—I don't tick, see?—I'm a busted Ingersoll, dat's what. Steel was me, and I owned de woild. Now I ain't steel, and de woild owns me. Aw, hell! I can't see—it's all dark, get me? It's all wrong! [He turns a bitter mocking face up like an ape gibbering at the moon.] Say, youse up dere, ...
— The Hairy Ape • Eugene O'Neill
... Marjolin laid them in a row, with their heads between the wooden bars above the zinc trough, into which their blood fell drop by drop. He repeated each different movement with the regularity of clockwork, the blows from the knife-handle falling with a monotonous tick-tack as he broke the birds' skulls, and his hand working backwards and forwards like a pendulum as he took up the living pigeons on one side and laid them down dead on the other. Soon, moreover, he worked with increasing rapidity, gloating over the massacre with glistening ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... in one of the corners, whose loud tick filled up every interval of silence. By this clock it was just ten minutes to eight when two gentlemen—I should say men, and coarse men at that—crossed the open threshold ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... new friend had been sent to take the place of the old one. Certainly the new friend had very little to do with all that old life of which the fountain was the door. He belonged, most definitely, to the new one, and everything about him—the delightfully mysterious tick of his gold watch, the solid, firm grasp of his hand, the sure security of his shoulder upon which Ernest Henry now gloriously rode—these things were of this world ...
— The Golden Scarecrow • Hugh Walpole
... 'im. Tick those bits o' grass out o' the path, old gal,' he ses to 'is wife; 'they look untidy, and untidiness ...
— Light Freights • W. W. Jacobs
... you and me was up to de president's plantation, his cook was makin' plum pudden, he was. Now how in natur does you rimagine he did it? why, Missus, he actilly made it wid flour, de stupid tick-headed fool, instead ob de crumbs ob a six cent stale loaf, he did; and he nebber 'pared de gredients de day afore, as he had aughten to do. It was nuffin' but stick jaw—jist fit to feed turkeys and little niggeroons wid. Did you ebber hear de likes ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... think he'll do? The neighbors are comin' for fifty miles round, two is comin' up a hundred miles, and you can't—Jinny, you can't do it. I bin sick of answerin' questions all these years 'bout you and Jake, an' I ain't goin' through it again. I've told more lies than there's straws in a tick." ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... and rubies, that the back was just one crust of gems. In one of her little tempers, as they called her hideously ugly rages, she dashed it against the back of the chimney, after which it never gave a single tick; and some of the diamonds went to the ash-pit. As she grew older still, she became fond of animals, not in a way that brought them much pleasure, or herself much satisfaction. When angry, she would beat them, and try ...
— A Double Story • George MacDonald
... upon the patient's pulse had sat all night; once he placed his hand over her mouth, and rising with a puzzled look, walked to the window and thrust his head into the vines; then drawing his hand over his eyes, he resumed his place, and all was silent again, save the clock with its monotonous tick, tick, beating as calmly as, though human passions were trifles, and the passing away of a soul from earth, only the falling of the niches ...
— The Wedding Guest • T.S. Arthur
... the young birds out of their nests, and devouring them. Not a single plant, not even a lichen, grows on this islet; yet it is inhabited by several insects and spiders. The following list completes, I believe, the terrestrial fauna: a fly (Olfersia) living on the booby, and a tick which must have come here as a parasite on the birds; a small brown moth, belonging to a genus that feeds on feathers; a beetle (Quedius) and a woodlouse from beneath the dung; and lastly, numerous spiders, which I suppose prey on these small attendants and scavengers of the water-fowl. The ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... both twenty-one years of age, but what a difference between us! He, accustomed to an existence regulated by the graduated tick of the clock; never having seen anything of life, except that part of it which lies between an obscure room on the fourth floor and a dingy government office; sending his mother all his savings, that farthing of human joy which the hand ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... monotonous heave-and-drop stunt. Course, it ain't any motion worth mentionin', but somehow it sort of surprises you to find that it keeps up so constant. It's up and down, up and down, steady as the tick of a clock; and every time you glance over the rail or through a porthole you see it's quite a ride you take. I didn't mind goin' up a bit; it's that blamed feelin' of bein' let down ...
— Wilt Thou Torchy • Sewell Ford
... the last ringing beat had throbbed and swooned into a whisper, and died, one always felt that other strokes would follow. One looked for them, and waited for them, but they did not come. To-day nothing seemed to come but the regular, echoing, church-like tick-tock, and to-day there was no diversion of any kind; there was only a large, ...
— A Melody in Silver • Keene Abbott
... Navy and Army both, searchlights swept the sea and sky, shut themselves off, and opened anew. Signals in Morse sparkled with their dots and dashes. From the distant trenches star-shells rose in the air, and seemed to hang suspended for a space, while we caught the rapid tick-tick ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... delirium, clouded with fantastic memories of Portuguese officials trying to tax calves'-foot jelly; voluble doctors insisting that true typhoid was unknown in the island; nurses who had to be exercised, taken out of themselves, and returned on the tick of change of guard; night slides down glassy, cobbled streets, smelling of sewage and flowers, between walls whose every stone and patch Attley and I knew; vigils in stucco verandahs, watching the curve and descent of great stars or drawing auguries from the break ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling
... wilderness. He did not mind being alone. He was never afraid. With his trusty rifle, Tick-Licker, over his shoulder, he explored much of Kentucky. He was happy because the wilderness was wide and he felt free. After a few months, Squire came back. Again ...
— Daniel Boone - Taming the Wilds • Katharine E. Wilkie
... did stop about that time, and the reading would be apt to continue. But no sooner was there stillness than it began again—tick, tick, tick. With a wild explosion of blasphemy, the book would go across the floor and the light would disappear. Sometimes, when he couldn't sleep, he would dress and walk out in the street for an hour, while the cruel ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... bedding. Those iron cross bars to the bedsteads cut the straw, hence the former warden made it a point to refill the beds once a quarter, but the latter filled them perhaps once in six months. Indeed, some would be neglected till nothing could be found in the bed-tick but a mass of chaff-like substance to which the straw had been reduced, thus leaving the occupant with little besides the bare slats on which to sleep. Men would at times complain that, from that cause, they could obtain but little rest at night, and were in the ...
— The Prison Chaplaincy, And Its Experiences • Hosea Quinby
... order to the rebellious member—it stirs with sullen reluctance—it moves an inch—and then it breaks from the prison of its waking nightmare. Summoning his entire array of vital forces, our patient leaps, and smites his breast, kicks, whirls his arms, and little by little feels his heart tick again. By the time a feeble and sickly but regular pulse is re-established he has gone through enough agony to punish the worst enemy, my dear Sir, that you or I ever had. The vague, overpowering fear of death which during such an attack afflicts even the man who by grace or nature ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... minute nothing was heard but the loud tick of the old clock and a mournful whine front Sancho, shut up in the shed lest he should go ...
— Under the Lilacs • Louisa May Alcott |
