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More "Ballast" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... through the turmoil of waters, and the boy, supple-limbed, yet weather-worn already, and with steady eyes that look through the blast, you see him understanding commandments from the jerk of his father’s white eyebrow, now belaying and now letting go, now scrunching himself down into mere ballast, or baling out death with a pipkin. Stale enough is the sight, and yet when I see it I always stare anew, and with a kind of Titanic exultation, because that a poor boat with the brain of a man and the hands of a boy on board can match herself so bravely against black heaven and ocean. Well, so ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... heavy piece of iron under the middle board of the cabin," said Betty. "Uncle Amos said it was there for ballast in case we wanted to use a sail, but I don't ...
— The Outdoor Girls at Rainbow Lake • Laura Lee Hope
... placed opposite Ben's own bunk in the forecastle of a frigate,—and it appeared to be kept steadily balanced in this position by the weight of some iron cleeting along the bottom, which acted as ballast. Otherwise the chest sat so high upon the water, as to show that it must either be quite empty or nearly so; for the sennit handles at each end, which were several inches below the level of the lid, hung quite clear ...
— The Ocean Waifs - A Story of Adventure on Land and Sea • Mayne Reid
... a gentleman? No, no, I will never marry her to one who would take her as so much ballast to her gold, and scorn her as ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... better; they also distribute the weight more evenly on the wheels. The gauge of the rails is 15 ft, the wheels are 2 ft. 6 in. in diameter, and have heavy steel tires. The weight on each of the front wheels when running with the ballast, but no load, is about 16 tons. A powerful brake is applied to the wheels when ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 312, December 24, 1881 • Various
... from Panama and the adjacent cities. Waggons of maize and cassava were dragged into the streets, with numbers of fowls and hogs. Lodgings rose in value, until a "middle chamber" could not be had for less than 1000 crowns. Desperate efforts were made to collect ballast for the supply ships. Then the treasure trains from Panama began to arrive. Soldiers marched in, escorting strings of mules carrying chests of gold and silver, goatskins filled with bezoar stones, and bales of ...
— On the Spanish Main - Or, Some English forays on the Isthmus of Darien. • John Masefield
... with him on the subject. If you had an ounce of common-sense in your make-up, you'd see it for yourself. But I always say the clever people are the biggest fools. And Roy's in the same boat—being your son. No ballast. All in the clouds. That's the fruits of Lil's fancy education. And you can't say I didn't warn you. What he needs is discipline—a tight hand. Why not one of the Services? If he gets bitten with India—at his age, it's quite on the cards that he may ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... not had enough To make Religion sad, and sour, and snubbish, But Saints Zoological must cant their stuff, As vessels cant their ballast-rattling rubbish! Once let the sect, triumphant to their text, Shut Nero up from Saturday till Monday, And sure as fate they will deny us next To see the Dandelions on a Sunday— But what is ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... nationality it belonged, as the centre was ornamented with a golden elephant with very curly tusks worked in white beads. Another day I fished up a copper oil can, such as engineers use to oil machinery with; and yet another time a bag of gravel which had apparently once formed part of a yacht's ballast. ...
— Jethou - or Crusoe Life in the Channel Isles • E. R. Suffling
... measures gauged by their dollars; life was auctioneered, appraised, put up, and knocked down for its dollars. The next respectable thing to dollars was any venture having their attainment for its end. The more of that worthless ballast, honour and fair-dealing, which any man cast overboard from the ship of his Good Name and Good Intent, the more ample stowage-room he had for dollars. Make commerce one huge lie and mighty theft. Deface the banner of the ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... exhausting, Guynemer seemed to prolong his flights to the point where overwork and nervous depression compelled him to go away and take a little rest—which made him suffer still more. And suddenly, before he had taken the necessary repose, he threw it off like ballast, and returning to camp, reappeared in the air, like the falcon in the legend of Saint Julien the Hospitaller: "The bold bird rose straight in the air like an arrow, and there could be seen two spots of unequal size which turned and joined, and then disappeared in the heights of heaven. The falcon ...
— Georges Guynemer - Knight of the Air • Henry Bordeaux
... farewell to his son and to Athens, and returned? That he insults and abuses Antony, whom he was wont to say he loved, and cooeperates with Caesar, whose father he killed? And if chance so favor, he will ere long attack Caesar also. For the fellow is naturally distrustful and turbulent and has no ballast in his soul, and he is always stirring things up and twisting about, turning more ways than the sea-passage to which he fled and got the title of deserter for it, asking all of you to take that man for friend or foe whom ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol. III • Cassius Dio
... to the present period, Tahiti has produced nothing for exportation, and therefore all vessels have to clear out in ballast. The island is important to the French, as a port where their ships in the Pacific ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... serviceable;—trust not only in their labour,—for any man rising from the mass of the people may be equally laborious; nor yet simply in their honesty and patriotism. The confidence is given to their labour, honesty, and patriotism joined to such a personal stake in the country as gives them a weight and ballast which no politician in England ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope
... he lacks, yet Apemantus is contemptible beside him. The churlish philosopher is like some dingy little scow, which rides out the tempest because the small cargo which it has is all in its hold; Timon is like some splendid, but top-heavy, battleship, which turns turtle in the storm through lack of ballast. There is something lionlike and magnificent, despite its unreason, in the way he accepts the inevitable, and later, after the discovery of the gold, spurns away both the chance of wealth and the human jackals whom it attracts. ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... we were in ballast, searching for freight, whereupon our visitor said: 'Why don't you make for the Lacepede Islands, off the north-west Australian coast, and load guano, which you can get there for nothing?' We said we did not possess the necessary requisites in the ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont
... any of great extent. Till this difficulty shall be removed by the discovery of chalk or lime-stone, the public buildings must go on very slowly, unless care be taken to send out those articles as ballast in all the ships destined for Port Jackson. In the mean time the materials can only be laid in clay, which makes it necessary to give great thickness to the walls, and even then they are not so firm as might be wished. Good clay ...
— The Voyage Of Governor Phillip To Botany Bay • Arthur Phillip
... in his time; no unseemly hussies stuck under his bowsprit, to put an honest man out of countenance; no high-fliers in sail and paint; no singing and luting—but all was rational and gainful barter. Then, he was a man to ballast his boat with something valuable. I have known him throw in fifty ankers of gin, without a farthing for freight, when a bargain has been struck for the finer articles—ay, and finish by landing them in England for a small premium, ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... shore of the Thames, and on the morning of the twelfth had reached Emley Ferry near the island of Sheppey. There lay the hoy in which he was to sail. He went on board: but the wind blew fresh; and the master would not venture to put to sea without more ballast. A tide was thus lost. Midnight was approaching before the vessel began to float. By that time the news that the King had disappeared, that the country was without a government, and that London was in confusion, had travelled fast down the ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... and had her christened without her parents' knowledge. Having been left in narrow circumstances by her husband, she was at present living with Miss Power as chaperon and adviser on practical matters—in a word, as ballast to the management. Beyond her Somerset discerned his new acquaintance Mr. Woodwell, who on sight of Somerset was for hastening up to him and performing a laboured shaking of hands ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... nights; and as if that were not enough, he bored holes in the stomach, the shoulders, and the lungs, and filled the holes with stones, so that even if the poor ghost should succeed by a desperate effort in dragging his mangled body out of the grave, he would be so weighed down by this ballast of stones that he could not get very far. However, after roaming up and down in this pitiable condition for a time in their old haunts, the spirits were supposed at last to go up aloft to the Milky Way.[225] The Kwearriburra tribe, on the Lynd River, in Queensland, also took forcible ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... balloon. Thus there was a valve at the top by means of which the gas could be let out as desired; a cord net covered the whole fabric, and from the loop which it formed below the neck of the balloon a car was suspended; and in the car there was a quantity of ballast which could be ...
— The Mastery of the Air • William J. Claxton
... as exciting as a regatta, and you pulled well, Evan; but you had too much ballast aboard, and Miss Wilder ran up false colors just in time to save her ship. What was the wager?" asked the lively Joseph, complacently surveying his marine millinery, which would have ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... I am rather proud of my descent from families which, if not noble themselves, are allied to nobility,—and as to my "rise in the world"—if I had risen, it would have been rather for balloon-like qualities than for mother-wit, to being unencumbered with heavy ballast either in my head or my pockets. However, it was my cue to agree: so ...
— The Grey Woman and other Tales • Mrs. (Elizabeth) Gaskell
... anxieties of the husband might be relieved by the sprightliness and good-humour of the wife. When these are rightly tempered, care and chearfulness go hand in hand; and the family, like a ship that is duly trimmed, wants neither sail nor ballast. ...
— The Coverley Papers • Various
... or two he was clambering up again with several other men behind him. There was another hoot of the whistle, and, as Wisbech glanced up the track, a great locomotive broke out from among the pines. It was veiled in whirling dust and flying fragments of ballast, and smoke that was grey instead of white, for the track led down-grade, and the engineer had throttled the steam. The engine was a huge one, built for mountain hauling, and the freight cars that lurched out of the forest behind it were huger ...
— The Greater Power • Harold Bindloss
... the courage of the aerostats: the losing sight of this earth, and the being in or above the clouds, must also be delightful: but the moment will come when the travellers descend, and then begins the danger; then they differ about throwing out the ballast, the balloon is rent in the quarrel, it sinks with frightful rapidity, and they run the hazard, like the poor Marquis D'Arlande, of being spitted upon the spire of the Invalides, or of being entangled among woods and briers—at last, alighting ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth
... after-years, he was glad he made the resolve, and stood by it manfully. It gave ballast to his character, shaped him to a definite purpose. A narrow life, to be sure; nay, more, a distasteful one: but he did his best, and waited, and that was all that ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... Helwyse commune with himself. He liked to follow the whim of the moment, whither it would lead him. He was romantic; it was one of his agreeablest traits, because spontaneous; and he indulged it the more, as being confident that he had too much solid ballast in the hold to be in danger of upsetting. To-night, at this point of his mental ramble, he found that his cigar had gone out. Had he been thinking aloud? He believed not, and yet there was no telling; he often did so, unconsciously. Were it so, and were any one listening, that person ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... no Leads in the Sleeves, and I hope we are not lighter than the French Ladies, so as to want that kind of Ballast; the Petticoat has no Whale-bone; but fits with an Air altogether galant and degage: the Coiffeure is inexpressibly pretty, and in short, the whole Dress has a thousand Beauties in it, which I would not have as ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... Antilles. It was found that the ship had sprung a leak; the pumps were not sufficient: they were in imminent danger, and the necessity of lightening the vessel was so urgent that they were forced to throw overboard almost all the merchandise, a part of the ballast, and even several barrels of water. This last sacrifice was an appalling one: it was with a solemn feeling they made it, similar to that with which one hears the earth fall upon a coffin, or gives to the departed one the ocean for its tomb. Indeed, these casks of water carried ...
— Tales for Young and Old • Various
... under the arch, and am clear of all obstructions, I lay the sculls aside, and reclining let the boat drift past a ballast punt moored over the shallowest place, and with a rising load of gravel. One man holds the pole steadying the scoop, while his mate turns a windlass the chain from which drags it along the bottom, filling the bag with pebbles, and finally ...
— Nature Near London • Richard Jefferies
... into vice, and, with shipwrecked morals, sinking into ruin, can we at all wonder if a poor boy, cast forth into the world in the circumstances of Hodgkinson, and, like a half decked skiff, with lofty rigging and no ballast but its own intrinsic weight, drifted out upon the tempestuous ocean of life, without compass, or chart, or means of keeping reckoning, should have sometimes struck upon those treacherous shelves which lay hidden in the track before him? Is there not rather just ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various
... fleas, Like gnats they swarm, like flies they buzz and breed. Thought works in silence: Wisdom stops to think. No ass so obstinate as ignorance. Oft as they seize the ship of state, behold— Overboard goes all ballast and they crowd To blast or breeze or hurricane full sail, Each dunce a pilot and a captain too. How often cross-eyed Justice hits amiss! Doomed by Athenian mobs to banishment, See Aristides leave the land he saved: Wisdom his fault ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... layin' ties,' I says. 'Ye'll be mixin' up me ol' man with th' Cassidy's in th' nex' lot that,' I says, 'he niver spoke to save in anger in his life,' I says. 'Ye're an ancestor worshiper, heathen,' says the la-ad, an' he goes on to tamp th' mounds in th' cimitry an ballast th' thrack with th' remains iv th' deceased. An' afther he's got through along comes a Fr-rinchman, an' an Englishman, an' a Rooshan, an' a Dutchman, an' says wan iv them: 'This is a comfortable lookin' saloon,' he says. 'I'll take th' bar, ye take th' ice-box an' th' r-rest iv th' fixtures.' ...
— Mr. Dooley's Philosophy • Finley Peter Dunne
... propelled by mechanical power, or sail, sufficiently near the float to assist the observers, prevents its use, and the best result will be obtained by employing a substantial, seaworthy rowing boat with a broad beam. The boatmen appreciate the inclusion of a mast, sails, and plenty of ballast in the equipment to facilitate their return home when the day's work is done, which may happen eight or nine miles away, with twilight fast passing into darkness. There should be two boatmen, or a man and ...
— The Sewerage of Sea Coast Towns • Henry C. Adams
... through and through with a crash, but lodged in a timber; nevertheless it started one of the planks across which Paul and I lay, and pitched us both with extreme violence bodily into the run amongst the men, three of them lying amongst the ballast, which was covered with blood, two badly wounded, and one dead. I came off with some slight bruises, however; not so the poor mate. He had been nearest the end or but that was started, which thereby struck him so forcibly, that it fractured his spine, and dashed him amongst ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... punctually performed. William W. Kolderup was too practical a man not to put to some purpose a journey of 15,000 or 16,000 leagues across all the oceans of the globe. His ship was to go without cargo, undoubtedly, but it was easy to get her down to her right trim by means of water ballast, and even to sink her to her ...
— Godfrey Morgan - A Californian Mystery • Jules Verne
... they had to put it on short allowance of a Winchester bushel of tenpenny nails and a pump—bolt a day; but their supplies failing, they had even to reduce this quantity, whereby the poor bird, after unavailing endeavours to get at the iron ballast, was driven to pick out the iron bolts of the ship in the clear moonlight nights, when no one was thinking of it; so that the craft would soon have been a perfect wreck. And as the commodore would not hear ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... same blood, and which (for all they had never seen each other) she, with the woman's unerring instinct that sometimes seems akin to inspiration, divined. She too was something of a dreamer, with an ear for the voices of Nature and a mind open to the influences of its beauty, but with a goodly ballast ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... having been left in her purposely to receive the oil, which was emptied into them by means of a hose. By the end of the third week, this ground-tier was filled, and the craft became stiff, and was in good ballast trim, although the spare water was now ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper
... height of her tops, with the voice of her scientists and artists: "Onward, advance! Follow me!" She carries a huge crew, which delights in adorning her with fresh streamers. Boys and urchins laughing in the rigging; ballast of heavy bourgeoisie; working-men and sailor-men touched with tar; in her cabins the lucky passengers; elegant midshipmen smoke their cigars leaning over the bulwarks; then, on the deck, her soldiers, innovators or ambitious, would accost every fresh shore, and shooting out their ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... so Bristow ready made, Which to the King they bountifully lent, With Spanish Wines which they for Ballast lade, In happy speed of his braue Voyage ment, Hoping his Conquest should enlarge their Trade, And there-withall a rich and spacious Tent: And as, this Fleet the Seuerne Seas doth stem, Fiue more from ...
— The Battaile of Agincourt • Michael Drayton
... shallow craft that she looked; there was more of her below than above the surface, and she drew a great deal of water for a vessel of her tonnage. This great draught of water enabled her to carry a heavy load of ballast, tall masts, and a correspondingly heavy press of sail; thus she was an enormously fast vessel, and had up till now easily eluded capture, being able to run away from and out-weather many vessels more powerful ...
— Across the Spanish Main - A Tale of the Sea in the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... contributed to the preservation of the state. For before it had been veering and unsettled, sometimes inclining to arbitrary power, and sometimes towards a pure democracy; but this establishment of a senate, an intermediate body, like ballast, kept it in a just equilibrium, and put it in a safe posture: the twenty-eight senators adhering to the kings, whenever they saw the people too encroaching, and, on the other hand, supporting the people, when the kings attempted to make themselves absolute. This, according to Aristotle, ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... balloon Kentucky, and drifting toward the gulf. Our valve refuses to work, and we dare not attempt to land in the dark. Ballast nearly gone. We fear we may be swept out to sea. Please notify station at Pensacola to send assistance—a tug, if possible. We may keep afloat a short time if we ...
— The Outdoor Chums on the Gulf • Captain Quincy Allen
... in this patache five pieces of artillery as ballast. They are medium-sized cannon, in very good condition; and, with their ammunition cases and fittings may be utilized by the ships which your Excellency may be pleased to despatch. They will not be missed here, ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803 - Volume III, 1569-1576 • E.H. Blair
... sea. Her cargo of oranges, that had smelt so sweetly, must have been a blind, for no ship, discharging cargo the day before, could be loaded, ready for sea, within twenty-four hours. Indeed, she was in excellent trim. She was not too light to put to sea. No doubt, I said to myself, she has taken in ballast to equal the weight of oranges sent ashore. But I knew just enough of ships to know that there was some mystery in the business. The schooner could not be the plain fruit-trader for which men took her. As I looked over her rail, noting this, I said to myself that "here is ...
— Martin Hyde, The Duke's Messenger • John Masefield
... failing senses could indulge a little impatience; but it was like throwing ballast out of a balloon. She meant to be ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... The scene around me was a strange one. The captain, pilot, and one or two native passengers were taking up the boards of the cabin floor, and putting their money and other valuables out of sight, among the ballast. The common sailors, too, had their copper cash, or "tsien," to hide; and the whole place was in a state of bustle and confusion. When all their more valuable property was hidden, they began to make some preparations for defense. ...
— Thrilling Adventures by Land and Sea • James O. Brayman
... is off again, shooting while he retreats; but the prose writer has conquered like a Roman and settled colonies." We may ask ourselves, almost with dismay, whether such works exist at all but in the imagination of the student. For the bulk of the best of books is apt to be made up with ballast; and those in which energy of thought is combined with any stateliness of utterance may be almost counted on the fingers. Looking round in English for a book that should answer Thoreau's two demands of a style like poetry and sense that shall be both ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the Indies? Dro. Oh sir, vpon her nose, all ore embellished with Rubies, Carbuncles, Saphires, declining their rich Aspect to the hot breath of Spaine, who sent whole Armadoes of Carrects to be ballast at ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... against you, if at all, for a lack of mannerism," said Vera briskly. "It's too bad of you. Here I am as so much ballast for your party, and when I begin to make myself useful, you pretend I'm not there. But I ...
— Love and Lucy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... decreased the depth from seventy-two to forty-one fathoms, we steered off to the northward until daylight, and then to the East-South-East, in order to anchor in the Mermaid's Strait to the eastward of Malus Island, to take some stones on board as ballast, for the brig was so very light and leewardly that it would have been running a great risk to approach the land, as she then was. But in this we were disappointed, for after an interval of close sultry weather, and a severe thunderstorm, a gale of wind set in from the South-West, during which the ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia] [Volume 2 of 2] • Phillip Parker King
... called the "gross lift." The term "disposable," or "nett" lift, is obtained by deducting the weight of the structure, cars, machinery and other fixed weights from the gross lift. The resultant weight obtained by this calculation determines the crew, ballast, fuel and other necessities which can be carried by ...
— British Airships, Past, Present, and Future • George Whale
... up the Baltic in ballast to some small port—just a sawmill, at the head of a fjord—where I shall have a cargo of timber waiting for you to bring back to London. When ...
— The Vultures • Henry Seton Merriman
... headstrong passion gets the reins of reason, The force of Nature, like too strong a gale, For want of ballast, ...
— Strange Pages from Family Papers • T. F. Thiselton Dyer
... somewhat "blocky" above water was doubtless true of her, as of most of her class; but that she was not unshapely below the water-line is quite certain, for the re markable return passage she made to England (in ballast) shows that her lower lines must have been good. She made the run from Plymouth to London on her return voyage in just thirty-one days, a passage that even with the "clipper ships" of later days would have been respectable, and for a vessel of her model and rig was exceptionally good. ...
— The Mayflower and Her Log, Complete • Azel Ames
... British ship, was by carrying goods destined for the enemy's territory, illegally engaged in trade with the enemy in contravention of Her Majesty's proclamation of December 27, 1899."[24] The vessel sailed for Calcutta in ballast on ...
— Neutral Rights and Obligations in the Anglo-Boer War • Robert Granville Campbell
... Cancut dropped anchor very quietly opposite the Aybol's mouth. Iglesias, the man of Maine experience, seemed nought surprised. We were to throw our lines, as it appeared, from the birch; we were to peril our lives on the unsteady basis of a roly-poly vessel,—to keep our places and ballast our bowl, during the excitement of hooking pounds. Self-poise is an acrobatic feat, when a person, not loaded at the heels, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... scored a point—'but a representative of the British public? Alas, I could weep for your short-sightedness! When the reins of the ship of State—no, the helm of the chariot of Government, is in the hands of a semi-barbarous public, what will it do with it? The old aristocratic ballast once thrown overboard, it will drive that chariot upon the rocks of anarchy, it will overturn it upon the shores of revolution. And you, contemptible tool of an infatuated majority, what will you do then? Ah, then, too late you will cry, "Give ...
— 'That Very Mab' • May Kendall and Andrew Lang
... him the three remaining men, terror-struck at his sudden and inexplicable appearance, his superhuman size and strength. One by one he swept them overboard; then grasping a huge stone, which formed part of the ballast, he dashed it with the full force of his gigantic strength through the planks of the boat, which at once began to fill. All this was the work of a few moments. He then leaped into the skiff, which sank as he swiftly transferred to his own vessel its ...
— The Forest of Vazon - A Guernsey Legend Of The Eighth Century • Anonymous
... they, old man?" he asked, without looking up. The perspiration was streaming down his face, and he held a brace and bit in his hand. Under him was the trap-door which gave access to the ballast below, and through this he had bored a neat hole. The yellow chips ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... he said bitterly; "I couldn't bear it now. Janet, if I go to the bad, it won't be all my fault. I know I'm a weak fellow, but with something to act as ballast, I should be all right. What have I done that ...
— The Bag of Diamonds • George Manville Fenn
... master, and the Water-dog, Garbrand Peters master—are detained somewhere in the Baltic by his Majesty's forces. They had sailed from London to France; thence to Amsterdam, where one had taken in ballast only, but the other a cargo of herrings, belonging in part to one Peter Heinsberg, a Dutchman; and, so laden, they had been bound for his Majesty's port of Stettin. Probably the Dutch ownership of part of the herring cargo was the cause of the detention of ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... it occurred to her to try working the dugout into the stream by loading the stern with ballast and then rocking the bow back and forth along the bank until the craft eventually worked itself into ...
— The Beasts of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... Suddenly a squall struck the boat, and before the helm could be put down, or a sheet let go, over she heeled, and being already heavily laden with the fresh provisions, the water rushed in on the lee side, and she capsized. Providentially most of the provisions fell out of her, and her ballast consisting of water casks, instead of sinking, she floated keel upwards. The officers had previously taken off their swords, the marines let go their muskets, and nearly all hands, disentangling themselves from the rigging, ...
— Owen Hartley; or, Ups and Downs - A Tale of Land and Sea • William H. G. Kingston
... nor quarantine To ask him awkward questions on the way, About the time and place where he had been: He left his ship to be hove down next day, With orders to the people to careen; So that all hands were busy beyond measure, In getting out goods, ballast, guns, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... musician and teacher. The mother was a housekeeper, adviser and critic, and supplied the necessary ballast of commonsense, without which the domestic dory would ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... quiet," Festing remarked. "I can't get used to the stillness; I feel as if I was dreaming and would wake up to hear the din of the rivers and the ballast roaring off the gravel cars. However, I have some business to do to-morrow that I'm not keen about. Can one see ...
— The Girl From Keller's - Sadie's Conquest • Harold Bindloss
... fare you well, for we've got to take her out again— Take her out in ballast, riding light and cargo-free. And it's time to clear and quit When the hawser grips the bitt, So we'll pay you with the foresheet and ...
— The Seven Seas • Rudyard Kipling
... Octave. "If you will not persist in the folly of swimming against the current, I see no danger whatever in your being submerged. You are strong; you have principles and religion; you adore your children; you love Monsieur de l'Estorade, their father, in them. With all that ballast you ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac
... mushroom anchors according to the nature of the ground. London Trinity House buoys are [v.04 p.0808] built of steel, with bulkheads to lessen the risk of their sinking by collision, and, with the exception of bell buoys, do not contain water ballast. In 1878 gas buoys, with fixed and occulting lights of 10-candle power, were introduced. In 1896 Mr T. Matthews, engineer-in-chief in the London Trinity Corporation, developed the present design (fig. 12). ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... be regretted, Mister Lambton!—I take too much ardent spirits! I certainly am not of that opinion, Mister Lambton, and if you are I can only say you are very much mistaken. You shall see yourself,' said I, 'how much ballast an old Kentuckian can take in without sinking under it: devil a diving duck ever swallowed more water than a Kentucky man ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... part of the night, in rubbing my feet and legs to keep them from freezing. * * * In consequence of these chills I have been obliged to wear a laced stocking upon my left leg for nearly thirty years past. My bunk was directly against the ballast-port; and the port not being caulked, when there came a snow-storm the snow would blow through the seams in my bed, but in those cases there was one advantage to me, when I could not otherwise procure water to quench my thirst. ...
— American Prisoners of the Revolution • Danske Dandridge
... speculative, historical, and abstract thing. Here in the concrete and saliently objective facts of crime it should have its beginning, and have more blood and body in it by getting again close to the hot battle line between vice and virtue, and then only, when balanced and sanified by a rich ballast of facts, can it with advantage slowly work its way over to the larger and higher philosophy of conduct, which, when developed from this basis, will be a radically different thing from the shadowy phantom, schematic speculations of many contemporary moralists, ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... the labyrinth of metaphysics; she had no clue by which she could guide her path—the imagination that led her into her difficulties, could not get her out of them; the want of a mathematical education, which might have served as a ballast to steady and help her into the port of reason, was always visible, and though she had great tact in concealing her defeat, and covering a retreat, a tolerable logician must have always discovered the scrapes she got into. Poor dear Madame ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 20, Issue 561, August 11, 1832 • Various
... gale to the south gave them a fair wind down Lake Bennett, before which they ran under a huge sail made by Liverpool. The heavy weight of outfit gave such ballast that he cracked on as a daring sailor should when moments counted. A shift of four points into the south-west, coming just at the right time as they entered upon Caribou Crossing, drove them down that connecting link to lakes Tagish and Marsh. In stormy sunset and twilight—they made ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... the sheriff easily. "Del, you better relieve Mr. Hardman of his ballast. He ain't really fit to be trusted with a weapon, and him so excitable. That Winchester came awful near going off, friend. You don't want to be so careless when you're playing with firearms. It's a habit that's liable to get ...
— Bucky O'Connor • William MacLeod Raine
... remarks made to him by the captain and that was all. Ellen was in no better plight and sat on a bench near me, and I cannot say I felt cheerful, for the schooner, which was empty and had not much ballast, was rolling considerably. I carried on various conversations and strained my eyes to see if Mr. Keytel's boat was coming. It was a long wait, and when at last he did get on board he had gifts to bestow upon the men before we could get off. How thankful we were ...
— Three Years in Tristan da Cunha • K. M. Barrow
... to all this, the sword dropped from his hands and fell into the hold, so that he could not get it up again. Then he was beside himself for rage, and seized a stone of the ballast, to rush down with ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V1 • William Mienhold
... of a great love can never die from out the heart. It affords a ballast 'gainst all the storms that blow. And although it lends an unutterable sadness, it ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 2 of 14 - Little Journeys To the Homes of Famous Women • Elbert Hubbard
... revolution?—Aid their aim, But be the revolution—in our hearts! Wouldst thou (whose hand is at the helm) the bark, The shaken bark of Britain, should outride The present blast, and every future storm? Give it that ballast which alone has weight With Him whom wind, and waves, and war, obey, Persist. Are others subtle? Thou be wise: Above the Florentine's court-science raise; Stand forth a patriot of the moral world; The pattern, and the patron, of ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young
... battery was the only available means of propelling vessels by electrical power, and considering that these batteries might be made to serve the purpose of keel ballast, their weight, which was still considerable, would not be objectionable. The secondary battery was not an entirely new conception. The hydrogen gas battery suggested by Sir Wm. Grove in 1841, and which was shown in operation, realized in the most perfect manner the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 384, May 12, 1883 • Various
... is characteristic of the man. In his lexicon there was no such word as "fail." His balloon was small, holding only eight thousand cubic feet of gas. The gas was of poor quality, and when ready to rise he found it impossible even to make a start until all ballast had been thrown from the basket; and when at length the start was made, it was only to alight in a few minutes on the roof of a neighboring house. Bent upon winning and doing at all hazards what he had undertaken, Donaldson quickly cast overboard all loose objects in the basket—ropes, ...
— The Red-Blooded Heroes of the Frontier • Edgar Beecher Bronson
... he was so very English that most people would have sworn falsely as to his native land. Lord Ralles was a little, well-built chap, not half so English as Albert Cullen, quick in manner and thought, being in this the opposite of his brother Captain Ackland, who was heavy enough to rock-ballast a road-bed. Both brothers gave me the impression of being gentlemen, ...
— The Great K. & A. Robbery • Paul Liechester Ford
... 'Ay, heave the ballast overboard, And stow the eatables in the aft locker.' 'Would not this keg be best a little lowered?' 75 'No, now all's right.' 'Those bottles of warm tea— (Give me some straw)—must be stowed tenderly; Such as we used, in summer ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... Starbuck was consequently obliged to attempt it from the hotel—for which purpose he had introduced himself as a boarder—by opening the disused well secretly at night. These facts were obtained from papers found in the otherwise valueless trunks, weighted with stones for ballast, which Starbuck had brought to the hotel to take away his stolen treasure in, but which he was obliged to leave in his hurried flight. The attempt would have doubtless succeeded but for Polly's ...
— Mr. Jack Hamlin's Mediation and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... breakers, your hopes have been often shipwrecked upon them, more than once your desires—those of a young marrying man—(where, alas, is that time!) have seen their richly laden gondolas go to pieces there: the flower of the cargo went to the bottom, the ballast of the marriage remained. In short, to make use of a colloquial expression, as you talk over your marriage with yourself you say, as you look at Caroline, "She is not what I ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... which are always bobbing up and down close under the fall or circling round and round in the eddies. The trouble is, such sticks float too lightly on the surface of things; if they carried more heart-ballast, and would sink deeper, the current would bear them on.—Another variety of the Conservative is the man who is really progressive and right-minded, but extremely slow. Give him time, and he is certain to form a just judgment, and range himself on the right side at last. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... such different types of character, each so pronounced in his kind, that, after vain attempts to get along together, they parted for good, heedless of each other henceforth, pursuing their sundered destinies. Henry was by nature a political enthusiast, of insufficient ballast, careless of the main chance, of hot and ready tongue; the Chartist movement gave him opportunities of action which he used to the utmost, and he became a member of the so-called National Convention, established in ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... in each. Buck-shot and slugs are better than bullets, for the purposes of which we are speaking. Bows and arrows might render good service. The Chinese, in their junks, when they expect a piratical attack, bring up baskets filled with stones from the ballast of the ship, and put them on deck ready at hand. They throw them with great force and precision: the idea is not a bad one. Boiling water and hot sand, if circumstances happened to permit their use, are worth bearing in mind, as they tell well on the bodies of naked assailants. In close quarters, ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton
... that they were the exact counterpart of the new clique of humanity which has sprung up recently on this side of the Irish Sea; advanced thinkers without thought—the products of a little education without the ballast of a brain. Wild, enthusiastic in their desire for change, they know not what they want as the result of the change. Destructive without being constructive, they bemuse themselves with long words, and scorn simplicity. ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... the elimination of morbid matter through stomach and intestines by forcing these organs to take up the work of digestion and assimilation. diverts the vital forces from their combat against the disease conditions and draws upon them to remove the worse than useless food ballast from ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... Dores progressed, though very slowly; she had become much more leaky, the cargo was completely rotten, and the stench drove them all on deck; nor could they heave a particle of it overboard, for then the vessel would have capsized, as she had no ballast in. The sails were perfectly rotten—so bad that the vessel was often a whole day without a stitch of canvas set when the wind fell light, that they might be repaired with monkey skins, of which there was ...
— Our Sailors - Gallant Deeds of the British Navy during Victoria's Reign • W.H.G. Kingston
... of great scarcity in the South. Coming over from Liverpool in ante bellum times as ballast, made it so cheap that little attention was given to the salt industry, and most of our best salt mines were in the hands of the enemy. But the Southern people were equal to any emergency. Men were put along ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... the 11th.—It had been settled that to-day should be devoted to an excursion to the forests which are now being opened up by the new line of railway in course of construction. The special train of ballast-trucks which had been provided for us was to have started at ten o'clock, soon after which hour we landed, some delay having been caused at the last moment by the receipt of a message requesting us to send ashore every rug we possessed, in order to make the truck in which we were to travel as comfortable ...
— The Last Voyage - to India and Australia, in the 'Sunbeam' • Lady (Annie Allnutt) Brassey
... Vice-President of the Literary and Historical Society of Quebec, went with him on Saturday, the 19th instant, (1843) to visit the place, and according to the position of the debris of the vessel, the nature of the wood it is composed of, and the character of the stones (ballast) they found at the bottom, they were satisfied that all the probabilities are in favor ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... my crude attempts at love-making "silly tosh and flub-dub," which makes the going rather difficult. She was bridesmaid to Helen and is the one person, besides myself, who can influence her in the least, so I felt that her presence would add ballast to our wildly tossing domestic craft. Needless to say, my own lack of self-control during the afternoon had been as unexpected as it was disappointing, but when it comes to anything that concerns Jim, I'm ...
— 32 Caliber • Donald McGibeny
... reconnoissance proved that the land forces had abandoned Norfolk, and it was necessary to get the ship away before the Union troops arrived and hemmed her in. Her pilots declared that if the ship was lightened they could take her up the James River; and accordingly all hands threw overboard ballast and trappings, until she was lightened three feet. Then the pilots claimed that with the prevalent wind they could not handle her. It was now useless to try to run her through the Union fleet, for the lightening process had exposed three feet of her unarmed hull to the fire of the enemy. ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 2 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... Howard, with six English line-of-battle ships, six victuallers, and two or three pinnaces, were lying at anchor under the Island of Florez. Light in ballast and short of water, with half their men disabled by sickness, they were unable to pursue the aggressive purpose on which they had been sent out. Several of the ships' crews were on shore: the ships themselves "all pestered and rommaging," with everything ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... china was very beautiful and costly. An old tradition is mentioned in the "Life of Nollekens" that the clay was at first brought as ballast in ships from China, and when the Orientals discovered what use was being made of it, they forbade its exportation, and the Englishmen had to be content with their own native clay. Nollekens says that his father worked at the pottery, ...
— Chelsea - The Fascination of London • G. E. (Geraldine Edith) Mitton
... the Woodwards had not been long at Torquay. Mr. Peppermint was made a happy man before Christmas; and therefore Charley was left to drift before the wind without the ballast of any lady's love to keep him in sailing trim. Poor fellow! he had had wealth on one side, beauty and love on another, and on the third all those useful qualities which Miss Geraghty has been described as possessing. He had been thus surrounded by feminine attractions, ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... foresight, at moderate rates, and at the rates taken in the subsequent calculations. Merchant vessels, bound to all quarters, so soon as they perceived that they were sure of a market, would take a proportion of coals as ballast; and others would be glad to take a portion even beyond that, to aid them in completing their cargoes, instead of remaining, as vessels both at Liverpool, Glasgow, &c. frequently do, some time, till they can obtain a sufficient quantity of goods to enable them to do so: while such vessels could ...
— A General Plan for a Mail Communication by Steam, Between Great Britain and the Eastern and Western Parts of the World • James MacQueen
... to the sum-total of impulse what the central weight was to one of Martha's toys: a leaden ballast that always brought the balance right again, however wildly the little tyrant might swing the creature off the perpendicular. When Hadria used to come in, pleasantly tired with her morning's occupation, and the wholesome heat of the sun, to take ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... bad taste from very superfluity. Yet she never entered the painter's study but with trembling heart, uncertain foot, and fluttering breath, as of one stepping within the gates of an enchanted paradise, whose joy is too much for the material weight of humanity to ballast even to the steadying of the bodily step, and the outward calm of the bodily carriage. How far things had gone between them we shall be able to judge by and by; it will be enough at present to add that it was this relation and the inward strife arising from it that ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... anger; otherwise you would not have been able to tolerate M." His electric, vehement soul needed exactly the check her reflective subtilty and prudent consideration gave. So she tells him once, "I acted as your ballast, or rather I held you by the skirts of your garment, to retard your too impetuous movements. Perhaps these are the very attributes with which you would have done well to invest some one at Rome, who might have united the two conditions which I fulfilled so perfectly: first, that of ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... work to inspect the bridge; and ordered the men—who were provided with the necessary implements—to set to, and dig a hole down to the crown of the principal arch. It was harder work than they had expected. The roadway was solid, the ballast pressed down very tightly, and the crown of the arch covered, to a considerable depth, with concrete. Only a few men could work at once and, after a half-hour's desperate labor, the hole was nothing like far enough advanced ...
— The Young Franc Tireurs - And Their Adventures in the Franco-Prussian War • G. A. Henty
... Shifted their ballast, which threw them on their beam ends, and shipped a very heavy sea. Held a consultation; the result of which was, that seeing they were now driven so far to sea, and the weather continuing still very bad, it was better to steer for Liverpool, their port of destination, though they had not their ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... and received the last Year, which I always register in a Book, I find the Medium to be two hundred weight, so that I cannot discover that I am impaired one Ounce in my Health during a whole Twelvemonth. And yet, Sir, notwithstanding this my great care to ballast my self equally every Day, and to keep my Body in its proper Poise, so it is that I find my self in a sick and languishing Condition. My Complexion is grown very sallow, my Pulse low, and my Body Hydropical. Let me therefore beg you, Sir, to consider me as your Patient, and to ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... promised that the next day should be pleasant, our thoughts turned with the prow of the China to Japan. We were bound for Nagasaki, to get a full supply of coal to drive us across the Pacific, having but twelve hundred tons aboard, and half of that wanted for ballast. It was at the mouth of the harbor of Nagasaki that there was a settlement of Dutch Christians for some hundreds of years. An indiscreet letter captured on the way to Holland by a Portuguese adventurer and ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... her striking very heavily; and by those repeated shocks she was thrown for a short time broad-side to the sea: had she kept in that position, she would soon have gone to pieces; but from her being very light forward, the iron ballast having dropt out of her bottom, she was lifted fairly round, and was thrown more than her own length nearer to the shore, and was, by this change in her position, almost out of the reach of the break of the sea; that is, the surf, which before generally broke upon her, ...
— An Historical Journal of the Transactions at Port Jackson and Norfolk Island • John Hunter
... order in the soul. When Job perceived that his friends did not deal with him in an even spirit and orderly manner, he said that they forsook "the fear of the Almighty" (Job 6:14). For this fear keeps a man even in his words and judgment of things. It may be compared to the ballast of the ship, and to the poise of the balance of the scales; it keeps all even, and also makes us steer our course right with respect to the things that ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... very high class, and would have commanded attention in our own House of Commons. He possessed, however, a mind of that peculiarly volatile order, that is sometimes met with in conjunction with great talents, and which seems to be entirely without ballast. His intellect was of a balloon-like nature, and as incapable of being steered. He was always soaring in the clouds, and, as is natural to one in that elevated position, taking a very different and more sanguine view of affairs to that which men of a more lowly, ...
— Cetywayo and his White Neighbours - Remarks on Recent Events in Zululand, Natal, and the Transvaal • H. Rider Haggard
... got orders to tak' the Kite round to Liverpool in water-ballast, and McRimmon came to bid's good-bye, yammerin' an' whinin' o'er the acres o' paint ...
— The Day's Work, Volume 1 • Rudyard Kipling
... Pucacancha, stopping far enough back to allow the passenger to pull up and back on the side track. The siding had only one switch, chiefly used for ballast for the road bed. I looked anxiously for the passenger. Seconds dragged like hours. Would she never come? There was a curve not far from the station, and the passenger could not be seen until it almost reached it. I listened. I ...
— Where Strongest Tide Winds Blew • Robert McReynolds
... little trivial soul like Hetty's, struggling amidst the serious sad destinies of a human being, are strange. So are the motions of a little vessel without ballast tossed about on a stormy sea. How pretty it looked with its parti-coloured sail in the sunlight, moored in ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... Early the next morning they were led by Daaka and some Caffres who accompanied him to the sea-shore, and when they had arrived at the beach, it being then low water, Daaka pointed to a reef, upon which were to be seen the guns, ballast, and a portion of the keelson of a ship—all that remained of ...
— The Mission • Frederick Marryat
... consists in a due proportion of hope and fear. When devoid of hope, we resemble a ship without an anchor; when unrestrained by fear, we are like the same vessel under full sail without ballast. True comfort is the effect of watchfulness, diligence, and circumspection. What lessons could possibly have been selected of greater importance or more suited to establish the new convert, than these are which our author has most ingeniously and agreeably ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... yarn short, the Kill-Smudge done the bus'ness. Kenelm stuck to smokin' till he couldn't read a cigar sign without his ballast shiftin', and then he give it up. And—as you might expect from that kind of a man—he was more down on tobacco than the Come-Outer parson himself. He even got up in revival meetin' and laid into it hammer and tongs. He was the best 'horrible example' ...
— Thankful's Inheritance • Joseph C. Lincoln
... be obtained, keel boats will serve as a substitute. When these water-craft are of very unequal sizes, (as is frequently the case,) two smaller ones may be lashed together to form a single support; they can be brought to the same level by means of stone ballast. The gunwales must be suitably arranged for supporting the balks, or else frameworks should be erected for this purpose from the centre of the boat. The arrangement of the roadway, anchors, &c., is the same ...
— Elements of Military Art and Science • Henry Wager Halleck
... unsaid; she was so forgetful of herself, and so regardful of the sorrow about her, that I held her in a sort of veneration. The work she did that day! There were many things to be brought up from the beach and stored in the outhouse—as oars, nets, sails, cordage, spars, lobster-pots, bags of ballast, and the like; and though there was abundance of assistance rendered, there being not a pair of working hands on all that shore but would have laboured hard for Mr. Peggotty, and been well paid in being asked to do ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... without sensations or suicides, and perhaps a well-shaped soul sits in each of these stones. But heaven protect me just the same from the inhabitants of these towns! Rolling stones cannot bark, neither do they attract thieves; they are mere ballast. Quiet behavior: that is what I hold against them, that they make no fiery gestures; it would become them to roll a little, but there they lie, with even their sex unknown. But you saw the ...
— Look Back on Happiness • Knut Hamsun
... time when you skimmed all the cream off the milk and capsized the dish and said the cat done it, although you was slobbered with it from your nose to your toes—but you was a very small fellow at that time, you was, and hadn't got much ballast aboard nor begun to stow ...
— The Floating Light of the Goodwin Sands • R.M. Ballantyne
... to our winter station, which I named Turton Bay, we anchored there in the afternoon in ten fathoms, and immediately commenced our preparations for lightening the Fury. Seven months' provisions, a bower anchor, and a few other stores, were received by the Hecla, some of her water, before filled as ballast, being started to make room for them; and such other arrangements made as circumstances would permit for improving the stowage of the Fury's hold. The bay was now entirely clear of ice in every part; and so changed was its appearance in ...
— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry
... universe lies open before them. They dart forward and cleave the opposing clouds, and outrun the morning breezes which started from the same eastern goal. The steeds soon perceived that the load they drew was lighter than usual; and as a ship without ballast is tossed hither and thither on the sea, so the chariot, without its accustomed weight, was dashed about as if empty. They rush headlong and leave the travelled road. He is alarmed, and knows not how to guide them; nor, if he knew, has he the power. Then, ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... dangerous part of the coast. The calm, however, still continued, and at length the time came for lowering our late captain into his ocean grave. The sailmaker came aft with the boatswain to superintend the operation of enclosing him in a hammock, into which they fastened a pig of iron ballast. ...
— In the Wilds of Africa • W.H.G. Kingston
... so much of the world that she was unusually lively for an English girl; while her various accomplishments made her a most agreeable companion. Much good sense gave her ballast; and the late experiences of danger and happiness added a sweet gravity at times, which contrasted well with her natural gaiety. Mrs Jo was quite satisfied with Emil's choice, and felt sure this true and tender pilot would bring him safe to port through fair or stormy weather. She had feared that ...
— Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... Of sorrows kissed to death And joys that were; Our ballast is a rose; Our way lies where God knows And love knows where. We are in ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... first to lighten the vessel, by conveying everything on board to land. The masts were to be cleared of rigging, taken out, and placed on the plateau. It was necessary to lighten the vessel as much as possible, even to clear out the ballast, owing to the difficult and dangerous operation of launching. It would be better to put off our departure for some days if this operation could be performed under more favourable circumstances. The loading might be afterwards ...
— An Antarctic Mystery • Jules Verne
... Adams were industrious and savin'—the little farm prospered, for Boston supplied a goodly market, and weekly trips were made there in a one-horse cart, often piloted by young John, with the minister's boy for ballast. The Adams family had ambitions for their son John—he was to go to Harvard and be educated, and be a minister and preach at Braintree, or ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... the front wheel struck the heel of the newsboy's boot and he and Jimmy fell, face downward on the sharp, fresh-gravel ballast so hard that they were both bleeding and the baggage man thought sure the wheel had gone over them. To his surprise their injuries proved to ...
— Radio Boys Cronies • Wayne Whipple and S. F. Aaron
... It was beautiful, but not quite so pleasant, to watch it, as, upon the least carelessness on the part of the helmsman, it would immediately have filled. As it was, we shipped some heavy seas, but the blankets at the bottom being saturated, gave us the extra ballast which we required. Before we were clear of the islands, we were joined by a whole fleet of Indian canoes, with their dirty blankets spread to the storm, running, as we were, for Mackinaw, being on their return from Maniton Islands, where they had congregated to ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... no objection, however, to light reading, desultory reading, the reading of newspapers, or the reading of fiction, if you take enough ballast with it, so that these light kites, as the sailors call them, may not carry your ship over in some sudden gale. The principle of sound habits of reading, if reduced to a precise rule, comes out thus: That for each hour of ...
— How To Do It • Edward Everett Hale
... was lowered down the black-looking pit, and was drawn up again nearly full of water. This was given to the nearest grazing animals, and the bucket sent down again, to catch against some projecting block and tilt out the ballast, after which it refused to sink, but made a jerk or two to escape, and then had to be ...
— The Peril Finders • George Manville Fenn
... Commons, too, though not necessarily, yet in fact, is always so composed, in the far greater part. Let those large proprietors be what they will, and they have their chance of being among the best, they are, at the very worst, the ballast in the vessel of the commonwealth. For though hereditary wealth, and the rank which goes with it, are too much idolized by creeping sycophants, and the blind, abject admirers of power, they are too rashly slighted in shallow speculations of the ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... other night. It would have delighted you to see the old man's pride in him. As he was going away, he patted him on the head, and said, "Take care of him, Lady Blessington, for my sake. He is a clever lad, but wants ballast. I am glad he has the honour to know you, for you will check him sometimes when I am away...." D'Israeli the younger is quite his own character of Vivian Grey, crowded with talent, but very soigne of his curls, and a bit of a coxcomb. There is no reverse about him, ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... ships, while the nearest vessel to the Ranger was a large schooner, whose superior sailing qualities had permitted her to reach several miles to windward of the square-rigged ships; she appeared to be light in ballast also. All of the convoy showed lights. The Ranger, on the contrary, was as dark as the night, not even the battle lanterns being lighted. She rapidly overhauled the schooner, and almost before her careless people were aware of ...
— For Love of Country - A Story of Land and Sea in the Days of the Revolution • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... lived in vain. There are no partisans now. The only songs of the sort that I ever saw with any verve in them were some seditious Irish ones: rather spirited—only they had not grammar enough to ballast them. The writer either was, or wanted to be, transported. We are all very fond of the Guelphs—at least every body in decent society is—and that is just the reason why we are not enthusiastic. We are all ready to 'die for the throne,' etc., but we don't see any immediate probability ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... to take in his freight, have his ballast on board, and keep everything in readiness for departure. From the day that you reach him the Proserpina must be ready for sea, and a boat must lie in the harbor night and day to receive the members of our league who will come if the ...
— A Conspiracy of the Carbonari • Louise Muhlbach
... that do?" exclaimed Beardsley. "Where are my dockyments to prove that I am an honest trader? And even if I had some, and the cargo was safe out of the hold and sunk to the bottom, I couldn't say that I am in ballast, because I ain't got a pound of any sort of ballast to show. Oh, I tell you we're gone coons, Morgan. Do the Yankees put striped clothes on their prisoners when they shove 'em into jail, ...
— Marcy The Blockade Runner • Harry Castlemon
... beneath the glorious news— Ten plays, and forty tales of Kotzebue's; [8] One envoy's letters, six composer's airs, And loads from Frankfort and from Leipsic fairs: Meiners' four volumes upon Womankind, [9] Like Lapland witches to ensure a wind; Brunck's heaviest tome for ballast, [10] and, to back it, Of Heyne, [11] such as should not sink the ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... I've bullied you for having played skittles with my life, my career. So you have! Damn it, so you have! But you've done it out of blind thoughtlessness; and if I'd been a fairly strong man, with some ballast in me, you couldn't have landed me where I am— not you nor fifty Pandora girls! [Sitting erect.] And that— that's the moral of the tale; and— and— [abruptly, to FARNCOMBE] There's nothing more, ...
— The 'Mind the Paint' Girl - A Comedy in Four Acts • Arthur Pinero
... imports are Australian coal, and general merchandise from Europe, but most sailing ships arrive in ballast. ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... him out of pawn. Panics and so on hadn't cleaned out her share of the Stidler estate—not so you'd notice it! She'd been on the spot, Aunt Emma had, watchin' the market. Long before the jinx hit Wall Street she'd cashed in her mill stock for gold ballast, and when property prices started tumblin' she dug up a lard pail from under the syringa bush and begun investin' in bargain counter real estate. Now she owns business blocks, villa plots, and shore frontage in big chunks, and spends her time collectin' ...
— On With Torchy • Sewell Ford
... corvette of ten guns, four swivels, and eighty-seven men; a French gun-boat of one brass gun, four swivels, and forty-nine men; a French galley of one brass gun, four swivels, and thirty men; a like galley, with twenty-nine men; a French brig, in ballast, burden a hundred tons; a French bark, burden seventy tons, laden with powder and shells; a French brig, burden a hundred tons, laden with wine; a galley, burden fifty tons, in ballast; and a tartane, burden thirty-five tons, ...
— The Life of the Right Honourable Horatio Lord Viscount Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) • James Harrison
... passengers or cargo, $1.20 per net vessel ton-each 100 cubic feet-of actual earning capacity. 2. On vessels in ballast without passengers or cargo, 40 per cent less than the rate of tolls for vessels with passengers or cargo. 3. Upon naval vessels, other than transports, colliers, hospital ships, and supply ships, 50 cents per displacement ton. 4. Upon Army and Navy transports, ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... that they had left the whaler in such a hurry, that they had only had time to throw into the boat two breakers of water, four empty breakers to fill with saltwater for ballast to the boat, and the iron pitch kettle, with a large ...
— The Little Savage • Captain Marryat
... June 25. Shifted their ballast, which threw them on their beam ends, and shipped a very heavy sea. Held a consultation; the result of which was, that seeing they were now driven so far to sea, and the weather continuing still very bad, it was better to steer ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... gets the reins of reason, The force of nature, like too strong a gale, For want of ballast oversets ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... a steady pneumatic pressure in the region of morals, and even faith. Picture to yourself, Ruth, New York without sermons. The dear old city would be like a ship without ballast, heeling over with every wind, and letting in the waters of immorality and scepticism. Remove this pulpit balance just for one week from New York City, and where should ...
— The Man Between • Amelia E. Barr
... intestines by forcing these organs to take up the work of digestion and assimilation. diverts the vital forces from their combat against the disease conditions and draws upon them to remove the worse than useless food ballast from the organism. ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... a good working day soon made itself felt. The north wind rose, causing the lively Mukhbir, whose ballast, by-the-by, was all on deck, to waddle dangerously for the poor mules; and it was agreed, nem. con., to put into Tor harbour. We found ourselves at ten a.m. (December 12th) within the natural pier of coralline, and we were not alone in our misfortune; an English steamer making ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... importance of their search in the fascination of it. They explored almost every known type of ship—freighters, liners, cold-storage boats, and grain-boats. Once Kent's hopes ran high at sight of a fuel-ship, but it proved to be in ballast, its cargo-tanks empty and its own tanks and tubes apparently ...
— The Sargasso of Space • Edmond Hamilton
... that you cannot tear up ancient rootages and safely plant the tree of liberty in soil which is not native to it. I believe that the ancient traditions of a people are its ballast; you cannot make a tabula rasa upon which to write a political program. You cannot take a new sheet of paper and determine what your life shall be to-morrow. You must knit the new into the old. You cannot put a new patch on an old garment without ruining it; it must be not a patch, ...
— The New Freedom - A Call For the Emancipation of the Generous Energies of a People • Woodrow Wilson
... ye d—d cowardly, useless lubber," cried he; and while Jack, who had recoiled into his normal state of nerves with almost ridiculous rapidity, was heaving out ballast, David discharged another rolling ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... honor an' her future peace an' happiness, an' she's doin' it all alone. She's pretty as a picture, an' nothin' but a child when he married her four months ago, an' we've took away her natural pervider an' entertainer, an' left her nothin' but her freedom for a ballast wheel. An' I say I wish some of the patriotic people who are jest showerin' every Charlie Turner with attentions would please sprinkle jest a few on Charlie's wife, to help keep her straight an' sweet an' honest for Charlie ...
— Dawn • Eleanor H. Porter
... gravely, "that did not occur to me; no doubt you must go. Our boat does require a good deal of ballast; and all that you say, Peterkin, carries so much weight with it, that we won't need stones if ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne
... home of the dag'—short for dago of course. My spirits are constantly improving. Funny Christmas, second day out. Wonder if we'll dock New Year's Day. My God what a list to starboard. They say a waiter broke his arm when it happened, ballast shifted. Don't believe it. Something wrong. I know I nearly ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... is," replied Madame Octave. "If you will not persist in the folly of swimming against the current, I see no danger whatever in your being submerged. You are strong; you have principles and religion; you adore your children; you love Monsieur de l'Estorade, their father, in them. With all that ballast you cannot sink." ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac
... "Reminds me of a skipper I once sailed with, bound from Rotterdam to Hull in ballast. There was a Scotch mist best part of the trip, an' the old man loaded with schnapps to keep out the damp. First time he got a squint of the sun he went as yaller as a Swede turnip. 'It's all up with us, boys,' he said. ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... legs to keep them from freezing. * * * In consequence of these chills I have been obliged to wear a laced stocking upon my left leg for nearly thirty years past. My bunk was directly against the ballast-port; and the port not being caulked, when there came a snow-storm the snow would blow through the seams in my bed, but in those cases there was one advantage to me, when I could not otherwise procure water to quench my thirst. The provision allowed ...
— American Prisoners of the Revolution • Danske Dandridge
... chances. No doubt they could get fish and some game in that land toward which their imaginings already had set full sail, but ham by the stack and bacon by the yard and countless tins of fruit and vegetables made a fair ballast. Kendric spent lavishly and at the end was highly satisfied ...
— Daughter of the Sun - A Tale of Adventure • Jackson Gregory
... and furthermore, the great ballast of old pain and new gladness which lay deep down in her heart, kept her quite steady and unruffled under all such breezes. She had many of the like to meet that day; and the sweet calm and poise of her manner through them all ...
— Diana • Susan Warner
... Such breadth Ulysses to his raft assign'd. He deck'd her over with long planks, upborne On massy beams; He made the mast, to which He added suitable the yard;—he framed Rudder and helm to regulate her course, With wicker-work he border'd all her length For safety, and much ballast stow'd within. Meantime, Calypso brought him for a sail Fittest materials, which he also shaped, And to his sail due furniture annex'd 310 Of cordage strong, foot-ropes, and ropes aloft, Then heav'd her down with levers to the Deep. He finish'd all his work on the fourth ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer
... engraving on wood. The English is esteemed inferior to that which comes from the Levant; and the American box is said to be preferable to ours. But the ships from the Levant brought such quantities of it in ballast, that the wood on Box Hill could not find a purchaser, and not having been cut for sixty-five years, was growing cankered. The war diminished the influx from the Mediterranean; several purchasers offered; and in 1795 it was put up to auction at 12,000l. The depredations made on Box Hill, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 12, Issue 337, October 25, 1828. • Various
... improper for a married woman to joke about such things, even a woman married to a no-good count, isn't it? And it's foolish, too. Well, I'm going to do something even more foolish—I'm going to give you some advice. Cut out that young man. He hasn't found himself yet; he's running wild. He's light in ballast and he's rudderless. If he straightens out he'll make some woman very happy; otherwise—he'll create a good deal of havoc. Believe me, I know what I'm talking about, for I collided with ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... obtained, keel boats will serve as a substitute. When these water-craft are of very unequal sizes, (as is frequently the case,) two smaller ones may be lashed together to form a single support; they can be brought to the same level by means of stone ballast. The gunwales must be suitably arranged for supporting the balks, or else frameworks should be erected for this purpose from the centre of the boat. The arrangement of the roadway, anchors, &c., is the ...
— Elements of Military Art and Science • Henry Wager Halleck
... sea when this tempest or tyffon takes place, as few escape the dreadful danger. In this year it was our evil fortune to be at sea in one of these terrible storms; and well it was for us that our ship was newly over-planked, and had no loading save victuals and ballast, with some gold and silver for Bengal, as no other merchandise is carried to Bengal from Pegu. The tyffon accordingly assailed us and lasted three days, carrying away our sails, yards, and rudder; and as the ship laboured excessively, we cut away our mast, yet she continued ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr
... car generally carries four passengers, two on each side. On such occasions, the driver sits on a little seat over the well, looking to the front, while the passengers' backs are turned toward each other. Having only one passenger, Andy decided to sit on the opposite side of the car to ballast her evenly. After Paul bid good-bye to the coast guard and thanked him for his hospitality, he placed his rubber suit on the forward part of the seat and sprung up behind. Andy seemed in no hurry to get under way. A multitude ...
— The Story of Paul Boyton - Voyages on All the Great Rivers of the World • Paul Boyton
... consequence of his nautical experience Sam was soon at home among all sailors, and not having my scruples as to knowing who was who or their affairs, soon knew everything that was going on. Our captain was a handsome, dissipated, and "loud" young man, with rather more sail than ballast, ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... scant feeding that he cannot fly against the wind. If he would go back to his starting point while the March winds are out, he must needs come down close to the ground and yewyaw towards his objective, making leeway like an old boat without ballast or centerboard. ...
— Secret of the Woods • William J. Long
... lack of will, competence, and energy. If once that charge can be substantiated, I regard the Liberal cause as lost—and lost for many a year to come. Any Government almost is better than a Government which cannot govern; and the sentiment is so universal that I have no doubt the shifting ballast, which decides all elections, would go with a rush to the Tory side, and would enthrone in the place of power a strong Tory majority and an almost omnipotent Tory Government. The Tories know this, and ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... from the point of the first descent. His discomfort over the rapid ascent was mainly due to the fact that, when Robert landed, he forgot to compensate for the reduction of weight by taking in further ballast, but the ascent proved the value of the tube at the bottom of the balloon envelope, for the gas escaped very rapidly in that second ascent, and, but for the tube, the balloon must inevitably have burst in the air, with ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian
... going or returning, we may safely count, at this season, on a plenty of trout; and, on the borders of the lake beyond, I know of several favorite haunts of the deer, one of which I propose to take into the canoe as ballast to steady it for running the ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... they not see the spawn of the blow-flies? Or, if Virgil had been a real observer of the bees, would he ever have credited, as he certainly appears to do, the fable of bees originating from the carcass of a steer? or that on windy days they carried little stones for ballast? or that two hostile swarms fought each other in the air? Indeed, the ignorance, or the false science, of the ancient observers, with regard to the whole subject of bees, is most remarkable; not false ...
— A Year in the Fields • John Burroughs
... may be thrown over as a life-preserver or for a buoy, while the life-belt to be worn round the waist is stowed away under the seat, and an iron basin with a handle is placed alongside it just over the flooring, below which is seen, at p. 41, a wedge of lead-ballast, and in front of this the water-well, where water collecting from leakage or dashing spray is conveniently reached by the tube of vulcanised india-rubber represented as just in front. This pump hose has a brass union joint on ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor
... said the major with an enigmatical smile, "what you need to see you through life is a wife. When a man mounts a high-horse aeroplane and goes sailing off, dimity is the best possible ballast. Consider the matter I beg of ...
— Andrew the Glad • Maria Thompson Daviess
... began the serious labour of ballasting, and it being wished to expedite her preparations for Norfolk Island, her ship's company were assisted with twelve convicts from the settlement, and the occasional use of such boats as could be spared to convey the ballast to the ship. The governor was anxious to learn the state of that dependency, not having heard from it since the return of the Queen transport early ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 1 • David Collins
... we tooke in two or three skiffes lading of stones to ballast our shippe withall. It hyeth here four foot water, and floweth by ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, • Richard Hakluyt
... like Oglethorpe, had no special personal sympathy with the peculiar ideas of Wesley; but as a matter of policy they recognized that his influence in the great educational center was needed for moral ballast. And so his services were secured as Greek Professor and ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... one reason why Clara should be so calm and unselfish in her elevation; her sorrows served her as ballast. Why should she let riches turn her head when she found that they could not lighten her heart? There was a certain night in her past which gold could not illuminate; there had once been a precious life near her, which was gone now beyond the power of ransom. Thurstane! How ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... be of his mind about everything, but, if he is a Republican, I have done with him. If he will in his Republican system throw in a little royal authority as ballast, we shall soon come to an agreement. I wish him to come neuf to all those great and important questions, and examine them sans l'esprit de systeme, without prejudice and strong inclination to be of either side, but to investigate the truth, ...
— George Selwyn: His Letters and His Life • E. S. Roscoe and Helen Clergue
... replied Tom. "He makes good ballast. I wish Mr. Damon was here. If everything goes right we may take a ...
— Tom Swift and his Great Searchlight • Victor Appleton
... might derive from Robert's last letters, he felt saddened by his unsatisfactory career. Writing to his friend Moore (5th August) he says: "I hope your eldest son will do well in the distant land to which he has gone. My son is in the Federal army in America, and no comfort. The secret ballast is often applied by a kind hand above, when to outsiders we appear to be sailing gloriously with ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... the seventh ballast[1] change and rechange, and here let the novelty be my excuse, if my pen straggle[2] a little. And although my eyes were somewhat confused, and my mind bewildered, those could not flee away so covertly but that I clearly distinguished Puccio Sciancato, ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 1, Hell [The Inferno] • Dante Alighieri
... generous enough to lift a few plants, scatter a few seeds over our fences into the fields and roadsides—to raise the bars of their prison, as it were, and let them free! Many have run away, to be sure. Once across the wide Atlantic, or wider Pacific, their passage paid (not sneaking in among the ballast like the more fortunate weeds), some are doomed to stay in prim, rigidly cultivated flower beds forever; others, only until a chance to bolt for freedom presents itself, and away they go. Lucky are they if every flower they produce is not picked ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... chase, on which it was evident they were at length gaining. "It seems to me, Mr Needham," observed Tom, who had been taking a long, steady look at the chase, "they're heaving something overboard; what it is I can't make out,—scarcely a cargo of ballast,— but we shall soon discover when we get up to her, as we shall, I hope, ...
— The Three Commanders • W.H.G. Kingston
... community, the writings of Channing,—he left it to others to say of Emerson,—all had their part in this intellectual, or if we may call it so, spiritual revival. He describes with that exquisite sense of the ridiculous which was a part of his mental ballast, the first attempt at organizing an association of cultivated, thoughtful people. They came together, the cultivated, thoughtful people, at Dr. John Collins Warren's,—Dr. Channing, the great Dr. Channing, among ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... state. For before it had been veering and unsettled, sometimes inclining to arbitrary power, and sometimes towards a pure democracy; but this establishment of a senate, an intermediate body, like ballast, kept it in a just equilibrium, and put it in a safe posture: the twenty-eight senators adhering to the kings, whenever they saw the people too encroaching, and, on the other hand, supporting the people, when the kings attempted to make themselves absolute. ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... the length of the South end of Ulietea, and to windward of some Harbours that lay on the West side of this Island. Into one of them I intended to go with the Ship, in order to stop a Leak in the Powder room, which could not be easily done at Sea, and to take in more Ballast, as I found her too light to carry sail upon a wind. At Noon plying off one of the Harbour's mouth, the wind ...
— Captain Cook's Journal During the First Voyage Round the World • James Cook
... of French-Canadians were, at Mr. Brassey's suggestion, brought up in organized gangs, each having an Englishman or an American as their leader. We are told, however, that they proved useless except for very light work. "They could ballast, but they could not excavate. They could not even ballast as the English navvy does, continuously working at filling for the whole day. The only way in which they could be useful was by allowing ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... is done, and the darkness Falls from the wing of night As ballast is wafted downward From an air-ship ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... to remarks made to him by the captain and that was all. Ellen was in no better plight and sat on a bench near me, and I cannot say I felt cheerful, for the schooner, which was empty and had not much ballast, was rolling considerably. I carried on various conversations and strained my eyes to see if Mr. Keytel's boat was coming. It was a long wait, and when at last he did get on board he had gifts to bestow upon the men before we could ...
— Three Years in Tristan da Cunha • K. M. Barrow
... about winded when it occurred to her to try working the dugout into the stream by loading the stern with ballast and then rocking the bow back and forth along the bank until the craft eventually worked ...
— The Beasts of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... bullets, for the purposes of which we are speaking. Bows and arrows might render good service. The Chinese, in their junks, when they expect a piratical attack, bring up baskets filled with stones from the ballast of the ship, and put them on deck ready at hand. They throw them with great force and precision: the idea is not a bad one. Boiling water and hot sand, if circumstances happened to permit their use, are worth bearing in mind, as they tell well on the bodies of naked assailants. In close quarters, ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton
... one's putting into harbour is more dangerous than the storm which will not let one sail, so those storms of the soul are more formidable which do not allow a man to take in sail, or to calm his reason when it is disturbed, but without a pilot and without ballast, in perplexity and uncertainty through contrary and confusing courses, he rushes headlong and falls into woeful shipwreck, and shatters his life. So that from these points of view it is worse to ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... escaped; as would be the case, were conceitedness, vanity, and pride, to take hold of my frail heart; and if I was, for my sins, to be left to my own conduct, a frail bark in a tempestuous ocean, without ballast, or other pilot than my own inconsiderate will. But my master said, on another occasion, That those who doubted most, always erred least; and I hope I shall always doubt my own strength, my ...
— Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded • Samuel Richardson
... drift-wood which are always bobbing up and down close under the fall or circling round and round in the eddies. The trouble is, such sticks float too lightly on the surface of things; if they carried more heart-ballast, and would sink deeper, the current would bear them on.—Another variety of the Conservative is the man who is really progressive and right-minded, but extremely slow. Give him time, and he is certain to form a just judgment, and range himself on the right side at ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... of his companions, "let the poor lad alone; he hasn't a mind for the drink, perhaps he ain't used to it, and it'll only make him top heavy. You can see he wants ballast; he'll be over on his beam-ends the first squall if he takes the ale and ...
— Frank Oldfield - Lost and Found • T.P. Wilson
... of men were relieved of all need, hardship, and adversity, if everything they took in hand were successful, they would be so swollen with arrogance . . . that they would present the spectacle of unbridled folly. A ship without ballast is unstable, and will not go straight." Therefore let us make our ship of life go straight with its ballast of miseries and hardships, over which we ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya
... both rivers are sweet, pleasant, and fresh. The one is distant from the other a league and a half, consisting of a beach of black gravel, with small heavy stones, excellent for ballast ...
— The First Discovery of Australia and New Guinea • George Collingridge
... closer parallel than in the maxims of La Rochefoucauld. The union of the philosopher, the enthusiast, and the man of the world is fairly unusual in literature, but in Hazlitt's case the union was not productive of any sharp contradictions. His common sense served as a ballast to his buoyant emotions; the natural strength of his feelings loosened the bonds which attached him to his favorite theories; his cynicism, by sharpening his perception of the frailty of human nature, prevented his philanthropic ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... when lessons were done, he had devoted his spare time to work on his model, fixing the engines, soldering down the decks, and putting in ballast, so as to balance the boat and keep her on an even keel. At length the work was finished; the Fury, as she was called, was painted all over an orthodox black, and when given a trial trip in the bath, ran from end to end in a manner which was ...
— Under Padlock and Seal • Charles Harold Avery
... extreme cases we have, with due rite and ceremonial, given a victim to an airship, without ballast or rudder, and abundantly provisioned. Then with solemn ritual we have set him adrift—an offering to the great spirits of space—so that he may come to know. This," the prince paused in emotion, "this is the worst ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale
... passed the Isle of Wight, making the open channel more and more, while Lieutenant Anderson—the real—was closeted with Admiral and Captain Charteris, all puzzled at the sudden flight of the Kestrel, which had set sail without her despatches, and also without what the old admiral called ballast for the young commander, namely, Lieutenant Anderson, who had gone off with his despatches directly after his counterfeit, only to find ...
— In the King's Name - The Cruise of the "Kestrel" • George Manville Fenn
... to Matamoras, with supplies for General Ampudia," came much more cheerfully back. "We had to run away from Matamoras in ballast to escape the gringos. Their cruisers are around like hawks. You won't get to Vera Cruz if they can ...
— Ahead of the Army • W. O. Stoddard
... ballast, catch that ball in your arms when I throw it to you, and don't let go of it!" shrieked Bost, shooting ...
— At Good Old Siwash • George Fitch
... and, as we were particularly anxious to see this done, I persuaded one of the men to let me join his party, which he only allowed me to do after I had faithfully promised to sit perfectly still. I have described what cockly things these tar-boats are, even filled with their barrels or luggage for ballast, but when perfectly empty, as they always are when they go to fetch the salmon except for the weight of half a dozen men, it is a perfect marvel they do not upset. They are not so long, however, as those used for the rapids, although they are ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... insipid executions, painstaking executions, cursive and impertinent executions. Through all these the Beaux Arts student, if he is intelligent enough to perceive the falseness and worthlessness of his primary education, slowly works his way. He is like a vessel without ballast; he is like a blindfolded man who has missed his pavement; he is blown from wave to wave; he is confused with contradictory cries. Last year he was robust, this year he is lymphatic; he affects learning which he does not possess, and then he assumes airs of ignorance, equally unreal—a mild, ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... because there is as much difference between them and a real frigate, like the one we are sailing in, as there is between a donkey and a racehorse. Well, the ship was no sooner brought down to the dock-yard to have her ballast taken in, than our captain came down to her—a little, thin, spare man, but a man of weight nevertheless, for he brought a great pair of scales with him, and weighed everything that was put on board. I forget his ...
— Peter Simple and The Three Cutters, Vol. 1-2 • Frederick Marryat
... regretted, Mister Lambton!—I take too much ardent spirits! I certainly am not of that opinion, Mister Lambton, and if you are I can only say you are very much mistaken. You shall see yourself,' said I, 'how much ballast an old Kentuckian can take in without sinking under it: devil a diving duck ever swallowed more water than ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... Beyond it several minor rapids were passed without difficulty; and then they came upon a series of great whirlpools which seemed impassable. But the men unloaded the canoes and—'a desperate undertaking'—ran them down the rapids with light ballast. They then came back overland for ...
— Pioneers of the Pacific Coast - A Chronicle of Sea Rovers and Fur Hunters • Agnes C. Laut
... have we not had enough To make Religion sad, and sour, and snubbish, But Saints Zoological must cant their stuff, As vessels cant their ballast-rattling rubbish! Once let the sect, triumphant to their text, Shut Nero up from Saturday till Monday, And sure as fate they will deny us next To see the Dandelions on a Sunday— But what ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... under their self-imposed guardianship." As he was the party who was most interested in the result, I said nothing more, but proceeded to lighten the ship as speedily as possible, by making several additional trips to the shore with as much of the cargo as enabled us to get at the ballast; and on each occasion we received the same prompt and energetic assistance from our turbaned allies, each boat-load being carried to the corner of the field where the others were deposited. It required two days to get the ship sufficiently ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 444 - Volume 18, New Series, July 3, 1852 • Various
... a due proportion of hope and fear. When devoid of hope, we resemble a ship without an anchor; when unrestrained by fear, we are like the same vessel under full sail without ballast. True comfort is the effect of watchfulness, diligence, and circumspection. What lessons could possibly have been selected of greater importance or more suited to establish the new convert, than these are which our author has most ingeniously ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... my body below the armpits, and attached, in like manner, to our stalwart alcalde. Long before we reached the middle of the stream, notwithstanding I carried a large stone under each arm by way of ballast, I was swept from my feet out to the length of my tether, and thus towed over by our guide. When all were snugly across, the laughter was loud and long over the ridiculous figure which everybody had cut in everybody's eyes, except his own. ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... brought the obelisk from Egypt, which stands in the Vatican Circus, and four blocks of the same sort of stone to support it. Nothing certainly ever appeared on the sea more astonishing than this vessel; 120,000 bushels of lentiles served for its ballast; the length of it nearly equalled all the left side of the port of Ostia; for it was sent there by the emperor Claudius. The thickness of the tree was as much as four men could embrace with their arms."—B. ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... Festing remarked. "I can't get used to the stillness; I feel as if I was dreaming and would wake up to hear the din of the rivers and the ballast roaring off the gravel cars. However, I have some business to do to-morrow that I'm not keen about. Can one see ...
— The Girl From Keller's - Sadie's Conquest • Harold Bindloss
... mound," said he, speaking very rapidly, "and when we got to the top and lifted off that stone lid—upon my soul, ladies, I believe there is gold enough in that thing to ballast a ship. It isn't filled quite up to the top, and, of course, I could not find out how deep the gold goes down; but I worked a hole in it as far down as my arm would reach, and found nothing but gold bars like this." Then, glancing around to see that none of the Africans were returning, ...
— The Adventures of Captain Horn • Frank Richard Stockton
... Saucy Sally shipped some shingle ballast, got under weigh on the first of the ebb tide, and safely threading her way past the shallows and through the narrow channels of the harbor, emerged into the open sea, and turned her ...
— Golden Stories - A Selection of the Best Fiction by the Foremost Writers • Various
... Thomas Howard, with six English line-of-battle ships, six victuallers, and two or three pinnaces, was lying at anchor under the Island of Florez. Light in ballast and short of water, with half his men disabled by sickness, Howard was unable to pursue the aggressive purpose on which he had been sent out. Several of the ships' crews were on shore: the ships themselves 'all pestered and rommaging,' with everything out of ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... things that have been ... A time will come when that zeal will be understood, and his works will be cherished with a melancholy gratitude, when the pillars of Venice shall be mouldering in the salt shallows of her sea, and the stones of the goodly towers of Rouen have become ballast for the ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... found his favorite fishing ground, and came every day to watch him from a thicket on the shore. It was of little use to go in a canoe. At my approach he would sink deeper and deeper in the water, as if taking in ballast. How he does this is a mystery; for his body is much lighter than its bulk of water. Dead or alive, it floats like a cork; yet without any perceptible motion, by an effort of will apparently, he sinks it out of sight. You are approaching ...
— Wilderness Ways • William J Long
... British public? Alas, I could weep for your short-sightedness! When the reins of the ship of State—no, the helm of the chariot of Government, is in the hands of a semi-barbarous public, what will it do with it? The old aristocratic ballast once thrown overboard, it will drive that chariot upon the rocks of anarchy, it will overturn it upon the shores of revolution. And you, contemptible tool of an infatuated majority, what will you do then? Ah, then, too late ...
— 'That Very Mab' • May Kendall and Andrew Lang
... balloon with which ter cross thet thar chasm. It's ther only way ter git over. In crossin' ther balloon will be loaded with a ballast of sand; but when we come back, ther ballast ...
— Frank Merriwell Down South • Burt L. Standish
... balloon was almost fully charged, and was swaying to and fro in a wild, fitful manner, that could not have been beheld without trepidation by any of the thirty gentlemen who had so judiciously booked seats in advance. The wickerwork car now secured to the balloon was half filled with ballast and crowded with men, whilst others hung on to the ropes and to each other in the ...
— Faces and Places • Henry William Lucy
... use," exclaimed the carpenter, who had been below; "it's my belief that the coral rock has gone through the planking, and that unless we can get the cargo out of her, and every pig of ballast, no power will float her ...
— Twice Lost • W.H.G. Kingston
... requesting them to take a sick man on board, which they did, and then continued their cruise with a strong breeze, under three lugs. They were taking a snack of food, when, having imprudently trimmed the ballast to windward—a most dangerous practice—a tremendous squall took the sails aback, and in a moment capsized her. Brock being a good swimmer, struck out to get clear of his companions, his ears assailed ...
— A Yacht Voyage Round England • W.H.G. Kingston
... was the only country manufacturing rubber articles, and her best market soon proved to be North America. Probably the first rubber this country saw was brought to New England in clipper ships as ballast in the form of crude lumps and balls. Rubber shoes, water-bottles, powder-flasks, and tobacco-pouches found buyers in the American ports, but rubber ...
— The Romance of Rubber • United States Rubber Company
... Crump carefully. "Looked as if he was going out in ballast—except his pockets; there was something in his pockets, I ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... o'clock we saw the land again, bearing S.W. by W. The ship was now so light, that in a gale of wind she drove bodily to leeward; so that I was very solicitous to get into Port Desire,[12] that I might put her hold in order, and take in sufficient ballast, to avoid the danger of being caught upon a lee-shore in her present trim. We steered in for the land with the wind at N.E. and in the evening brought to; but the wind coming to the westward, we were driven off in the night. At seven the next morning, we ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... man, "put some lead on the bottom of that double-ender of yours. It'll stand up, if you ballast it well. That'll be two. When you make ...
— Harper's Young People, May 4, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... floated far more steadily wrong side up, perhaps because we had lashed all our loads in place and they acted as ballast. Will took the pole and acted the part of Charon, our proper pilot contenting himself with perching on the rear end lamenting the ill-fortune noisily until Kazimoto struck him and threatened to throw him back ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... being asked to cut off her baby's legs in order that it might fit into a new cradle, she looked at the marked passages and was surprised to find that all the moral reflections—which she had carefully put in as ballast for much romance—had been ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... convenient and congenial arrangement; farther down the board were State Senator Nat Billings, Mr. Ridout (when he did not sup at home), the Honourables Brush Bascom and Elisha Jane, and the Honourable Jacob Botcher made a proper ballast for the foot. This table was known as the Railroad Table, and it was very difficult, at any distance away from it, to hear what was said, except when the Honourable Jacob Botcher made a joke. Next in importance and situation was the Governor's Table—now ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... pole leaving the sun, by increasing the amount of material there for the sun to attract, and to lighten the pole approaching or turning towards the sun, by removing some heavy substance from it, and putting it preferably at the opposite pole. This shifting of ballast is most easily accomplished, as you will readily perceive, by confining and removing water, which is easily moved and has a considerable weight. How we purpose to apply these aqueous brakes to check the wabbling of the earth, by means ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor
... that she had found favor in his eyes. Erle's sunshiny nature made him a universal favorite, but it may be doubted whether any of his friends really read him correctly. Now and then an older man told him he wanted ballast, and warned him not to carry that easy good nature too far or it might lead him into mischief; but the spoiled child of fortune only shook his ...
— Wee Wifie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... leaped down the companion-way, and caught his pistols from a drawer. "Mr. Reyburn, we need you and the other gentlemen," he cried. "We are throwing out our ballast. All hands must take spells at the pumps, for the leak gains, and I shall have all I can do to keep the men at work and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... to sleep pretty soon and I set in the one chair, readin' the newspaper and wishin' I hadn't ate so many of the warm bricks that the Golconda folks hoped was biscuit. They made me feel like a schooner goin' home in ballast. I guess I was drowsin' off myself, but there comes a most unearthly yell from the bed and I jumped ha'f out of the chair. There was Jonadab settin' up ...
— The Depot Master • Joseph C. Lincoln
... Mary was a light ship, as sailors term a vessel that stands high upon the water, having discharged her cargo at Callao, from which port we were proceeding in ballast to Cape Town, South Africa, there to call for orders. Our run to within a few parallels of the latitude of the Horn had been extremely pleasant; the proverbial mildness of the Pacific Ocean was in the mellow sweetness of the wind and in the gentle undulations of the silver-laced ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell
... all the vine countries, including the Canaries. This, of course, greatly lessened the demand for staves, and there were consequently very few taken from England to France, although French vessels are in the habit of taking them for ballast at a merely nominal rate, owing to the difficulty they experience in procuring return freights from England. The short crops in Canada and the great scarcity of money, forced an unusual number of laborers in that country into the stave and ...
— Old Mackinaw - The Fortress of the Lakes and its Surroundings • W. P. Strickland
... a fuel material; it does not serve in the body as an energy-giver. Its value in diet is due to the fact that it is bulky and furnishes ballast for the alimentary canal. It stimulates the flow of the digestive juices as it brushes against the walls of the digestive tract, and thus aids in the digestion of foods and in the ...
— School and Home Cooking • Carlotta C. Greer
... of; you have stocked in your little heart a great deal of ballast, and neglected the most necessary things. Do you know the ...
— The Son of Monte-Cristo, Volume I (of 2) • Alexandre Dumas pere
... unseen. But when those of the inhabitants who styled themselves of his connection became acquainted with him, they were rather pleased with the substitute than otherwise, though he had scarcely as yet acquired ballast of character sufficient to steady the consciences of the hundred-and-forty Methodists of pure blood who, at this time, lived in Nether-Moynton, and to give in addition supplementary support to the mixed race which ...
— Wessex Tales • Thomas Hardy
... twice a gale and nothing happened to either of us. Probably no stiffer class of vessels sails the seas than the big coasters of our side of the North Atlantic. Give them plenty of ballast and there is no capsizing them. We surely had plenty of ballast in us now, and took cheerfully all the hard westerly had to give us, and foamed along. Foamed? We wallowed—like a couple of sailing submarines almost. In ...
— Sonnie-Boy's People • James B. Connolly
... a moon in the sky, and the silvery light streamed down on towering hillside and battalions of flitting pines. The great train swept on, clattering and clanking, and dust and fragments of ballast whirled about the lonely man. Still, the rush of the cool night wind was exhilarating, and his mind was busy, though his thoughts were not altogether pleasant. The few weeks he had spent in Ida Stirling's company had reawakened ambition in him; and that was why he had set out with ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... relays of coach horses along the southern shore of the Thames, and on the morning of the twelfth had reached Emley Ferry near the island of Sheppey. There lay the hoy in which he was to sail. He went on board: but the wind blew fresh; and the master would not venture to put to sea without more ballast. A tide was thus lost. Midnight was approaching before the vessel began to float. By that time the news that the King had disappeared, that the country was without a government, and that London was ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... presuming to be spirit nor condescending to be body, but hovering intermediate. But the more strongly the antithesis is felt, the nearer the thought to end this remaining tenderness for the gross and unspiritual,—to drop this ballast of earth, and rise into the region of heavenly realities. Upon a window of Canterbury Cathedral, beneath a representation of the miracle of Cana, is the legend,—"Lympha dat historiam, vinum notat allegoriam." But if the earthly is ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... winter station, which I named Turton Bay, we anchored there in the afternoon in ten fathoms, and immediately commenced our preparations for lightening the Fury. Seven months' provisions, a bower anchor, and a few other stores, were received by the Hecla, some of her water, before filled as ballast, being started to make room for them; and such other arrangements made as circumstances would permit for improving the stowage of the Fury's hold. The bay was now entirely clear of ice in every part; and so changed was its appearance in the course of the last four-and-twenty hours, that it was ...
— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry
... discharging from the Smeaton of her cargo of the cast-iron rails and timber. It must not here be omitted to notice that the Smeaton took in ballast from the Bell Rock, consisting of the shivers or chips of stone produced by the workmen in preparing the site of the building, which were now accumulating in great quantities on the rock. These the boats loaded, after discharging the iron. The ...
— Records of a Family of Engineers • Robert Louis Stevenson
... rides with full sail, cries from the height of her tops, with the voice of her scientists and artists: "Onward, advance! Follow me!" She carries a huge crew, which delights in adorning her with fresh streamers. Boys and urchins laughing in the rigging; ballast of heavy bourgeoisie; working-men and sailor-men touched with tar; in her cabins the lucky passengers; elegant midshipmen smoke their cigars leaning over the bulwarks; then, on the deck, her soldiers, innovators or ambitious, ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... Ballast weights of stone, iron or bags of sand used to balance the boat. A good way to learn about the parts of a boat is to whittle out a small working model. This is a help, but only the actual experience can teach you how to manage a sail and at the same time steer the boat. ...
— Healthful Sports for Boys • Alfred Rochefort
... preserving the level of the turntable, whether unloaded, partially loaded, or loaded, is happily met by an arrangement of water ballast and pumping. I cannot pass away from the mention of Mr. Eads' work without just reminding you of the successful manner in which he has dealt with the mouth of the Mississippi, by which he has caused that river to scour and maintain a channel 30 feet ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 488, May 9, 1885 • Various
... quickly covered with Manchester bales and Birmingham cases; and it was not long before the tackle at the main-yard arm was set a-clicking, as the baskets of sand ballast were hove up to be poured into the empty hold. No such luxuries were there as steam-winches; not any of those modern appliances for lightening labour. Instead, five or six hands plied the ponderous work at the winch handles, the labour being substantially aggravated ...
— Stories by English Authors: The Sea • Various
... perceived that his friends did not deal with him in an even spirit and orderly manner, he said that they forsook "the fear of the Almighty" (Job 6:14). For this fear keeps a man even in his words and judgment of things. It may be compared to the ballast of the ship, and to the poise of the balance of the scales; it keeps all even, and also makes us steer our course right with respect to the things that pertain ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... Nevertheless, she was a good boat; and Mark, knowing that he must depend on sails principally to move her, had built a short deck forward to prevent the seas from breaking aboard her, as well as to give him a place in which he might stow away various articles, under cover from the rain. Her ballast was breakers, filled with fresh water, of which there still remained several in the ship. All these, as well as her masts, sails, oars, &c., were in her when she was launched; and that important event having taken place early in ...
— The Crater • James Fenimore Cooper
... is. Tanks filled too full of coal are dangerous and a great waste of coal, as the jar when running will cause a part of it to fall off; water overflowing from tanks results in washing away the ballast and in cold weather freezes ...
— The Traveling Engineers' Association - To Improve The Locomotive Engine Service of American Railroads • Anonymous
... yet more quick grew the pace of the white-maned steeds. Soon they left the morning breezes behind, and very soon they knew that these were not the hands of the god, their master, that held the golden reins. Like an air-ship without its accustomed ballast, the chariot rolled unsteadily, and not only the boy's light weight but his light hold on their bridles made them grow mad with a lust for speed. The white foam flew from their mouths like the spume from the giant waves of a furious sea, and their pace was swift as that of a bolt that is cast ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... Sam scoffingly. "Why, he wan't no more a suicide than I am right now. He was murdered or wan't nothin'! I've dredged up some suicides in my day, and some of 'em had stones tied to 'em, to make sure they'd sink, and some thought they'd sink without no ballast, but nary one of 'em ever sewed himself into a bag, and I give my word," he said positively, "that Hen Smitz couldn't have sewed himself into that burlap bag unless some one done the sewing. Then the feller that did it was an assistant-suicide, and ...
— Philo Gubb Correspondence-School Detective • Ellis Parker Butler
... Lord Howard passed away with five ships of war that day, Till he melted like a cloud in the silent summer heaven; But Sir Richard bore in hand all his sick men from the land Very carefully and slow, Men of Bideford and Devon, And we laid them on the ballast down below; For we brought them all aboard, And they blest him in their pain, that they were not left to Spain, To the thumbscrew and the stake, for the glory ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... and ready cash. Our ship carried twenty-four guns and two hundred Sclavonian soldiers. We sailed from Malamacca to the shores of Istria during the night, and we came to anchor in the harbour of Orsera to take ballast. I landed with several others to take a stroll through the wretched place where I had spent three days nine months before, a recollection which caused me a pleasant sensation when I compared my present position to what it was at that time. What a difference ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... public welfare, by erecting establishments which must be insecure, since, property being divided into infinitely small shares, and being no longer supported by profit, business enterprises would lack ballast, and would be unable to weather commercial gales. And even if no expropriation was involved, what a poor prospect to offer the working class is an increase of eighteen centimes in return for centuries of economy; for no less time ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... his craft would be top-heavy and over he would go, as the kayah has no keel and carries no ballast, and if we should try a kayah, it would certainly be on land. But those Greenlanders learn to handle themselves so well that their kayahs will go dancing over the big billows and then fly through ...
— Connor Magan's Luck and Other Stories • M. T. W.
... sundry others—as those of traffic-takers, reference-takers. Consider, next, the yet more marked changes implied in railway construction—the cuttings, embankings, tunnellings, diversions of roads; the building of bridges, and stations; the laying down of ballast, sleepers, and rails; the making of engines, tenders, carriages, and waggons: which processes, acting upon numerous trades, increase the importation of timber, the quarrying of stone, the manufacture of iron, the mining of coal, the burning ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... and protector through life. Then came the devastating thought that Elfride's childlike, unreasoning, and indiscreet act in flying to him only proved that the proprieties must be a dead letter with her; that the unreserve, which was really artlessness without ballast, meant indifference to decorum; and what so likely as that such a woman had been deceived in the past? He said to himself, in a mood of the bitterest cynicism: 'The suspicious discreet woman who imagines dark and evil things of all her fellow-creatures is far too ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... we had to row again for hours, and when night came had not reached the village. We were so fortunate, however, as to find a deep sheltered cove where the water was quite smooth, and we constructed a temporary anchor by filling a sack with stones from our ballast, which being well secured by a network of rattans held us safely during the night. The next morning my men went on shore to cut wood suitable for making fresh anchors, and about noon, the current turning in our favour, ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume II. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... sick-room looking very much pleased. 'I only wish you could make Lady Betty a useful member of society, Miss Garston,' he said, with one of the rare smiles that always lit up his dark face so pleasantly. 'She is a good little thing, but she wants ballast. As a rule, young ladies ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... Universities, along with our whole system of education, are in poor plight. As, at the public school, the child is robbed of valuable time by filling his brain with matters that accord neither with common sense nor scientific experience; as a mass of ballast is there dumped into him that he can not utilize in life, that, rather, hampers him in his progress and development; so likewise is it done in our higher schools. In the preparatory schools for the Universities a mass of dry, useless matter is pounded into the pupils. ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... again—after you are married and settled. If you had the substantial interests to give you the steadiness and ballast, I think you'd be the very man for your scheme. Yes, something—some such thing as you suggest—must be done to stop the poisoning of public opinion against the country's best and strongest men. The political ...
— The Plum Tree • David Graham Phillips
... I should no longer fear the pirates; I should return with the cranes, loaded with a supply of lawsuits by way of ballast. ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... lay, to permit a vessel like his prize to touch her; and many things lay on deck, in readiness to be transferred to this tender, previously to beginning to heave. The rocks too, were well garnished with casks, cordage, shot, ballast, and such other articles and could be come at—the armament and ammunition excepted. These last our hero always treated with religious care, for in all he did there was a latent determination resolutely ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... have gone under the arch, and am clear of all obstructions, I lay the sculls aside, and reclining let the boat drift past a ballast punt moored over the shallowest place, and with a rising load of gravel. One man holds the pole steadying the scoop, while his mate turns a windlass the chain from which drags it along the bottom, filling the bag with pebbles, and finally hauls it to the surface, when the contents ...
— Nature Near London • Richard Jefferies
... brought into notice by care, and foresight, at moderate rates, and at the rates taken in the subsequent calculations. Merchant vessels, bound to all quarters, so soon as they perceived that they were sure of a market, would take a proportion of coals as ballast; and others would be glad to take a portion even beyond that, to aid them in completing their cargoes, instead of remaining, as vessels both at Liverpool, Glasgow, &c. frequently do, some time, till they ...
— A General Plan for a Mail Communication by Steam, Between Great Britain and the Eastern and Western Parts of the World • James MacQueen
... delayed in discharging freight by a series of storms which prevailed at the bay, and was now down at Haparanda Fjord taking in ballast. The probability was that she would not leave for several days. Meantime I was extremely anxious to see a little more of domestic life in Iceland, and made several foot-expeditions to the farm-houses in ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... us, time we get to Flanders.' Then the low-down slab-pilers got their mutinous heads together, and says, 'The J.P. and the bailiff's got to be roasted anyway, wisht we could heave Nash in atop.' I've left the cursing and swearin' out, because it's useless ballast, and don't count in the deal any more'n sawdust. Now, John, what do you ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... concentration necessary to follow the badly blazed trees, and a biting hunger that gnawed, helped to keep his mind steady. Otherwise, he admits, the temporary aberration he had suffered might have been prolonged to the point of positive disaster. Gradually the ballast shifted back again, and he regained something that ...
— The Wendigo • Algernon Blackwood
... take another look at the water tank valves," said Tom to himself as he prepared to enter the big compartments which received the water ballast. "I want to be sure they work properly and quickly. We've got to depend on them to make us sink when we want to, and, what's more important, to rise to the surface in a hurry. I've got time enough to look them over before dad and Mr. ...
— Tom Swift and his Submarine Boat - or, Under the Ocean for Sunken Treasure • Victor Appleton
... from Australia, and most of our crew, having little wages due to them, had deserted soon after our arrival. Only we apprentices and the sail-maker remained, and we had work enough to set our muscles up in the heavy harbour jobs. Trimming coal and shovelling ballast may not be scientific training, but it is grand work ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various
... tack, an operation of some time with a vessel of her great length, the Swash was barely visible in the obscurity, gliding off upon a slack bowline, at a rate which nothing but the damp night air, the ballast-trim of the vessel, united to her excellent sailing qualities, could have produced with so light ...
— Jack Tier or The Florida Reef • James Fenimore Cooper
... opinions. It struck him that they were the exact counterpart of the new clique of humanity which has sprung up recently on this side of the Irish Sea; advanced thinkers without thought—the products of a little education without the ballast of a brain. Wild, enthusiastic in their desire for change, they know not what they want as the result of the change. Destructive without being constructive, they bemuse themselves with long words, and scorn simplicity. ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... quick grew the pace of the white-maned steeds. Soon they left the morning breezes behind, and very soon they knew that these were not the hands of the god, their master, that held the golden reins. Like an air-ship without its accustomed ballast, the chariot rolled unsteadily, and not only the boy's light weight but his light hold on their bridles made them grow mad with a lust for speed. The white foam flew from their mouths like the spume from the giant waves ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... questioning from the elder of the bunch, a man designated by the name Siwash, how he was lately graduated from the Kansas Agricultural College at Manhattan, and how he had taken the road with a grip full of hardware to get enough ballast in his jeans to keep the winter wind from ...
— The Duke Of Chimney Butte • G. W. Ogden
... at a kraal about half-way. Early the next morning they were led by Daaka and some Caffres who accompanied him to the sea-shore, and when they had arrived at the beach, it being then low water, Daaka pointed to a reef, upon which were to be seen the guns, ballast, and a portion of the keelson of a ship—all that remained of ...
— The Mission • Frederick Marryat
... my friend; there's nothing like plenty of work to help keep a person out of mischief; but, after all, he must have steadiness and good principles. They alone are to be depended on, and I hope your son has got those as ballast." ...
— Hendricks the Hunter - The Border Farm, a Tale of Zululand • W.H.G. Kingston
... sky being charged with clouds. As it was the purpose of this project to examine much higher regions of the atmosphere than those which it had been customary for aeronautic exhibitors to rise to, the arrangements of ballast and inflation which were adopted, were such as to cause the ascent to be infinitely more rapid than in the case of public exhibitions; in short, the balloon darted upward with the speed of an arrow, and in two minutes from the moment ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... the money was not hidden in any of these, he unfastened and raised the trap-door, and descended into the vacant place below the floor. Almost creeping on his face, he moved along, noticing at once that the ballast ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls, Vol. XIII, Nov. 28, 1891 • Various
... is always a conjunction. That it always connects sentences, I do not affirm; because there are instances in which it is difficult to suppose it to connect anything more than particular words: as, "Less judgement than wit is more sail than ballast."—Penn's Maxims. "With no less eloquence than freedom. 'Pari eloquentia ac libertate.' Tacitus."—Walker's Particles, p. 200. "Any comparison between these two classes of writers, cannot be other than vague and loose."—Blair's Rhet., p. 347. "This far more than compensates ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... crops of the others, was perfectly empty. Indeed, he appeared to prefer traveling in ballast that way. But his eyes shone, and his wing-strokes, with little pauses of rigidity between, such as many birds take—only one doesn't notice it ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... her tops, with the voice of her scientists and artists: "Onward, advance! Follow me!" She carries a huge crew, which delights in adorning her with fresh streamers. Boys and urchins laughing in the rigging; ballast of heavy bourgeoisie; working-men and sailor-men touched with tar; in her cabins the lucky passengers; elegant midshipmen smoke their cigars leaning over the bulwarks; then, on the deck, her soldiers, ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... length, but quite deep for boats of their size, drawing, if I remember correctly, when fully laden, some fourteen or sixteen inches of water. This depth made it possible to carry a heavy load, which was necessary, and at the same time which acted as ballast to keep them right side up amidst the counter-currents and tumbling waters. A rudder being entirely out of place in the kind of navigation found in the canyons, a heavy rowlock was placed at the stern to hold ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... lay between two large ships in ballast; so that its deck was at least twenty feet below those of its neighbors. Thus shut in, its hatchways looked like the entrance to deep vaults or mines; especially as her men were wheeling out of her hold some kind of ore, which might have ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... filled too full of coal are dangerous and a great waste of coal, as the jar when running will cause a part of it to fall off; water overflowing from tanks results in washing away the ballast and in cold weather freezes over ...
— The Traveling Engineers' Association - To Improve The Locomotive Engine Service of American Railroads • Anonymous
... cap, and made a dash for the child, whom he picked up and lifted to safety without a second to spare, as the wheel of the car struck his heel; and both were cut about the face and hands by the gravel ballast on which they fell. The two boys were picked up by the train-hands and carried to the platform, and the grateful father at once offered to teach the rescuer, whom he knew and liked, the art of train telegraphy and to make an operator of him. It is needless to ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... after him now and then, Riddell," he said; "he's not a bad fellow, I fancy, but he's not got quite enough ballast on board, and unless there's some one to look after him he's very likely to ...
— The Willoughby Captains • Talbot Baines Reed
... courage of the aerostats: the losing sight of this earth, and the being in or above the clouds, must also be delightful: but the moment will come when the travellers descend, and then begins the danger; then they differ about throwing out the ballast, the balloon is rent in the quarrel, it sinks with frightful rapidity, and they run the hazard, like the poor Marquis D'Arlande, of being spitted upon the spire of the Invalides, or of being entangled among woods and briers—at ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth
... repentance; to wit, on this easy chair, doing penance, as you perceive, in a pair of duck trousers. Last night I was half seas over, and tolerably happy; this morning, I am high and dry, and intolerably miserable. Carried more sail than ballast last night, and lost my head; this morning I've found it again, with a pig of ballast in it I believe. All owing to ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat
... and then descend. Every few minutes Lieutenant Mallet, suspended in his cobweb of netting, says to Captain Jovis: "We are descending; throw down half a handful." And the captain, who is talking and laughing with us, with a bag of ballast between his legs, takes a handful of sand out of the bag ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... nearest vessel to the Ranger was a large schooner, whose superior sailing qualities had permitted her to reach several miles to windward of the square-rigged ships; she appeared to be light in ballast also. All of the convoy showed lights. The Ranger, on the contrary, was as dark as the night, not even the battle lanterns being lighted. She rapidly overhauled the schooner, and almost before her careless people were aware ...
— For Love of Country - A Story of Land and Sea in the Days of the Revolution • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... the hold; the man at the helm was preparing for the tack as he saw his messmate's danger, and started forward to save him: he was too late; the poor fellow pitched upon his head and shoulders among the ballast; at the same instant the mainsail caught the wind, the boom swung across, and striking the helmsman on the back of the neck, swept him half overboard, where he lay doubled across the gunnel, with his arms and head dragging through the water, till I hauled him in. He was stunned and nearly scalped ...
— Tales from Blackwood, Volume 7 • Various
... vessels in the Road, consisting of the Confiance, French ship privateer, pierced for 26 twelves and nines, none of which, however, were on board; the Belier, French privateer brig, pierced for 20 eighteen-pounder carronades; and a Spanish merchant brig in ballast. I then hoisted a flag of truce, and sent to inform the inhabitants of the town, that if they would deliver up such stores of the ship as were on shore, there would be no further molestation. The proposal was thankfully agreed to. I did not, however, think it advisable ...
— The Surrender of Napoleon • Sir Frederick Lewis Maitland
... think his craft would be top-heavy and over he would go, as the kayah has no keel and carries no ballast, and if we should try a kayah, it would certainly be on land. But those Greenlanders learn to handle themselves so well that their kayahs will go dancing over the big billows and then fly through ...
— Connor Magan's Luck and Other Stories • M. T. W.
... find this opinion fearlessly exprest: "I have really never had any strong feeling of solidarity; in fact, I have only in a way accepted it as a traditional tenet of faith,—and if one had the courage to leave it out of consideration altogether, one would perhaps be rid of the worst ballast with which one's personality is burdened." In another letter he wrote: "I may as well say the one thing I love in freedom is the struggle for its attainment. Its possession does not ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... ashore without delay, Having no custom-house nor quarantine To ask him awkward questions on the way, About the time and place where he had been: He left his ship to be hove down next day, With orders to the people to careen; So that all hands were busy beyond measure, In getting out goods, ballast, guns, and treasure. ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... badly scared for tears. Mr. Miller, you seem to be in charge of this expedition—couldn't you do something? Throw out ballast, or let the boy down in a parachute? Or I've read of a shipwreck where the survivors, in an open boat, joined in a cry, and attracted the notice of a vessel that was going to pass them. We might ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... compensate exactly for the loss of the weight of the fuel. To obtain such an equilibrium, an automatic device controlled by the pressure of the water, which, of course, varies with the depth, is used. This device controls the pumps which fill or empty the ballast-tanks, so as to keep the relation of the submersible to the water which it displaces constant, under which condition the vessel maintains a fixed depth. The principle of this mechanism is, of course, old, and was first embodied in the Whitehead ...
— The Journal of Submarine Commander von Forstner • Georg-Guenther von Forstner
... grandeur elsewhere, but this was a new form of grandeur to me. The "Urgent" is long and narrow, and during our expedition she lacked the steadying influence of sufficient ballast. She was for a time practically rudderless, and lay in the trough of the sea. I could see the long ridges, with some hundreds of feet between their crests, rolling upon the ship perfectly parallel to her sides. As they ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... temporary scarcity of coals and oil from the interruption of the railway traffic. It was a fortnight before the next train ran on the stretch between us and Machynlleth, and in the meanwhile the gap was bridged by a coach service. From four miles of embankment the ballast had been sapped away, and the sleepers and rails collapsing into the void presented a dismal ...
— Uppingham by the Sea - a Narrative of the Year at Borth • John Henry Skrine
... to violate, but for an easygoing, trouble-dodging brain like my own there is no such thing as tenacity of purpose, unless it be in the direction of an obfuscated tendency to maintain its own pitiful equilibrium. I try to keep an even ballast in my dome of thought and to steer straight through the sea of circumstance, a very ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... appointed chief engineer in 1813, at Killingworth, at a salary of L100 per year. Besides erecting a winding engine for drawing up coal, and a pumping-engine, he projected and laid down a self-acting incline along the declivity of the Willington ballast quay, so arranged that full wagons descending to the vessels drew up the empty ones. But the construction of an efficient and economical locomotive steam engine mainly occupied his mind. He was among ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... it belonged, as the centre was ornamented with a golden elephant with very curly tusks worked in white beads. Another day I fished up a copper oil can, such as engineers use to oil machinery with; and yet another time a bag of gravel which had apparently once formed part of a yacht's ballast. ...
— Jethou - or Crusoe Life in the Channel Isles • E. R. Suffling
... piped Dinshaw, with childish simplicity. "Gold enough to make us all rich. Gold enough to ballast ...
— Isle o' Dreams • Frederick F. Moore
... me of a skipper I once sailed with, bound from Rotterdam to Hull in ballast. There was a Scotch mist best part of the trip, an' the old man loaded with schnapps to keep out the damp. First time he got a squint of the sun he went as yaller as a Swede turnip. 'It's all up with us, boys,' he said. 'My missus is forty fathoms ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... the man from the Victory, 'I won't say that your brother's intended ha'n't got some ballast, which is very lucky for'n, as he might have picked up with a girl without a single copper nail. To be sure there was a time we had when we got into port! It was open house for us all!' And after mentally regarding the scene for a few ...
— The Trumpet-Major • Thomas Hardy
... sunset promised that the next day should be pleasant, our thoughts turned with the prow of the China to Japan. We were bound for Nagasaki, to get a full supply of coal to drive us across the Pacific, having but twelve hundred tons aboard, and half of that wanted for ballast. It was at the mouth of the harbor of Nagasaki that there was a settlement of Dutch Christians for some hundreds of years. An indiscreet letter captured on the way to Holland by a Portuguese adventurer and maliciously sent to Japan, caused the tragic destruction of the Christian colony. ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... either smash our boat to pieces or upset it; but, finding his efforts unsuccessful, he gracefully accepted the situation, and behaved himself admirably. When storms arose he quietly lay down, and served as so much ballast to steady the boat. "Tom," the guide, kept him well supplied with food from the rich nutritious grasses which grew abundantly along the ...
— By Canoe and Dog-Train • Egerton Ryerson Young
... sum-total of impulse what the central weight was to one of Martha's toys: a leaden ballast that always brought the balance right again, however wildly the little tyrant might swing the creature off the perpendicular. When Hadria used to come in, pleasantly tired with her morning's occupation, and the wholesome heat of the sun, to take her simple dejeuner ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... brows and looked about him. Lying on a shelf above his instrument was one of the new ballast coils that Henderson had used with the long waves from lightning flashes, and he leaned over and connected the heavy spiral of closely wound wire, throwing it into his circuit. Instantly the telephones spoke so loud that he could hear the shrill ...
— The Man Who Rocked the Earth • Arthur Train
... supposing it came to birth, would remain intransmissible and incommunicable, and would perish in a solitary cry. By language alone are we enabled to submit it to a positive test: the letter is the ballast of the mind, the body which allows it to act, and in acting to scatter the ...
— A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson • Edouard le Roy
... to do more thorough work, thus securing to them other sources of pleasure than social amusements and the companionship of friends. The process of co-education tends to develop a well-balanced character, and to put into it a trustworthy ballast, which American girls cannot afford to do without. For confirmation of this, one need only read the reports of any school judiciously managed on this plan, or he need only use his eyes in comparing the past school days ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... was quite past reading barometers or anything else. He could just assent to remarks made to him by the captain and that was all. Ellen was in no better plight and sat on a bench near me, and I cannot say I felt cheerful, for the schooner, which was empty and had not much ballast, was rolling considerably. I carried on various conversations and strained my eyes to see if Mr. Keytel's boat was coming. It was a long wait, and when at last he did get on board he had gifts to bestow ...
— Three Years in Tristan da Cunha • K. M. Barrow
... front wheel struck the heel of the newsboy's boot and he and Jimmy fell, face downward on the sharp, fresh-gravel ballast so hard that they were both bleeding and the baggage man thought sure the wheel had gone over them. To his surprise their injuries proved to be only ...
— Radio Boys Cronies • Wayne Whipple and S. F. Aaron
... which, by the command of Caligula, brought the obelisk from Egypt, which stands in the Vatican Circus, and four blocks of the same sort of stone to support it. Nothing certainly ever appeared on the sea more astonishing than this vessel; 120,000 bushels of lentiles served for its ballast; the length of it nearly equalled all the left side of the port of Ostia; for it was sent there by the emperor Claudius. The thickness of the tree was as much as four men could embrace with their ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... at Carvel Hall in the year of our Lord 1696, when the house was, I am told, but a small dwelling. It was his father, George Carvel, my great-grandsire, reared the present house in the year 1720, of brick brought from England as ballast for the empty ships; he added on, in the years following, the wide wings containing the ball-room, and the banquet-hall, and the large library at the eastern end, and the offices. But it was my grandfather who built the great stables and the ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... that, had any noticed that Grim was taking these sacred things with him, there would have been a talk; but as we sailed light, none thought them aught but needed ballast; and we brought other stones to the ship with ...
— Havelok The Dane - A Legend of Old Grimsby and Lincoln • Charles Whistler
... in all the vine countries, including the Canaries. This, of course, greatly lessened the demand for staves, and there were consequently very few taken from England to France, although French vessels are in the habit of taking them for ballast at a merely nominal rate, owing to the difficulty they experience in procuring return freights from England. The short crops in Canada and the great scarcity of money, forced an unusual number of laborers in that country into ...
— Old Mackinaw - The Fortress of the Lakes and its Surroundings • W. P. Strickland
... is very much improved,' observed Max, as we watched his retreating figure. 'His sermons have more ballast, and he is altogether grown. I begin to have hopes ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... is the field horse-tail (Equisetum arvense), a very abundant and widely distributed species. It grows in low, moist ground, and is often found in great abundance growing in the sand or gravel used as "ballast" for railway tracks. ...
— Elements of Structural and Systematic Botany - For High Schools and Elementary College Courses • Douglas Houghton Campbell
... material alteration made in the fitting out was lessening the quantity of iron and other ballast. I gave directions that only nineteen tons of iron should be taken on board instead of the customary proportion which was forty-five tons. The stores and provisions I judged would be fully sufficient to answer the purpose of the remainder; for I am of opinion that many of the ...
— A Voyage to the South Sea • William Bligh
... descent. He is able to cause a very rapid escape by pulling another cord depending from a "ripping piece" near the top of the bag. In case of emergency this is torn away bodily, leaving a large hole. The ballast (usually sand) carried enables him to maintain a state of equilibrium between the upward pull of the gas and the downward pull of gravity. To sink he lets out gas, to rise he throws out ballast; and this process can be repeated until ...
— How it Works • Archibald Williams
... up by irresistible levity to the regions of mere speculation and fancy, to the sphere of air and fire, where his delighted spirit floats in 'seas of pearl and clouds of amber.' There is no caput mortuum of worn-out, threadbare experience to serve as ballast to his mind; it is all volatile intellectual salt of tartar, that refuses to combine its evanescent, inflammable essence with anything solid or anything lasting. Bubbles are to him the only realities:—touch them, and they vanish. Curiosity is the only proper category of his mind, and though a ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... forcing these organs to take up the work of digestion and assimilation. diverts the vital forces from their combat against the disease conditions and draws upon them to remove the worse than useless food ballast from the organism. ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... of Sultan Abdullah's are the most amusing children I ever saw. They are nine and twelve years old, with monkey-like, irrepressible faces. They have no ballast. They talk ceaselessly, and are very playful and witty, but though a large sum is being paid for their education at Malacca, they speak atrocious "pidjun," and never use Malayan, in my hearing at least. They are never still for one instant; they ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... and that of their ship, their joy at their release, and—here was the Wolf again! What would their fate be now? The Wolf did not leave them long in doubt. She came up to her prize about 5 p.m. She was a four-masted barque in full sail, in ballast from the Cape to South America, and made a beautiful picture as she lay bathed in floods of golden light from the setting sun. Before dark, however, preparations had begun to remove her officers and crew and provisions, and this was completed in a few hours. We were invited by the Germans ...
— Five Months on a German Raider - Being the Adventures of an Englishman Captured by the 'Wolf' • Frederic George Trayes
... immediate community, the writings of Channing,—he left it to others to say of Emerson,—all had their part in this intellectual, or if we may call it so, spiritual revival. He describes with that exquisite sense of the ridiculous which was a part of his mental ballast, the first attempt at organizing an association of cultivated, thoughtful people. They came together, the cultivated, thoughtful people, at Dr. John Collins Warren's,—Dr. Channing, the great Dr. Channing, among the rest, full of the great thoughts ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... you cannot tear up ancient rootages and safely plant the tree of liberty in soil which is not native to it. I believe that the ancient traditions of a people are its ballast; you cannot make a tabula rasa upon which to write a political program. You cannot take a new sheet of paper and determine what your life shall be to-morrow. You must knit the new into the old. You cannot put a new patch on an old garment without ...
— The New Freedom - A Call For the Emancipation of the Generous Energies of a People • Woodrow Wilson
... presently, a little late because of a last look at Lily, but as serene and well-appointed as if her good-night kiss had been laid on the brow of health. Her composure was restful to him; it acted as ballast to his somewhat unstable sensibilities. As he pictured her bending over the child's bed he thought how soothing her presence must be in illness: her very ...
— The Descent of Man and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... smiling. "Lay aside every weight, that your wings may waft you into the heaven of heavens while at Sans-Souci. You have been relieved of your pension, cast all your ballast into the ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... 3d day of March, 1845, entitled "An act regulating commercial intercourse within the islands of Miquelon and St. Pierre," it is provided that all French vessels coming directly from those islands, either in ballast or laden with articles the growth or manufacture of either of said islands, and which are permitted to be exported therefrom in American vessels, may be admitted into the ports of the United States on payment of no higher duties of tonnage ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Polk - Section 3 (of 3) of Volume 4: James Knox Polk • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... carrying passengers or cargo, $1.20 per net vessel ton-each 100 cubic feet-of actual earning capacity. 2. On vessels in ballast without passengers or cargo, 40 per cent less than the rate of tolls for vessels with passengers or cargo. 3. Upon naval vessels, other than transports, colliers, hospital ships, and supply ships, 50 cents per ...
— State of the Union Addresses of William H. Taft • William H. Taft
... do?" exclaimed Beardsley. "Where are my dockyments to prove that I am an honest trader? And even if I had some, and the cargo was safe out of the hold and sunk to the bottom, I couldn't say that I am in ballast, because I ain't got a pound of any sort of ballast to show. Oh, I tell you we're gone coons, Morgan. Do the Yankees put striped clothes on their prisoners when they shove ...
— Marcy The Blockade Runner • Harry Castlemon
... of some harbours that lay on the west side of this island. Into one of these harbours, though we had before been ashore on the other side of the island, I intended to put, in order to stop a leak which we had sprung in the powder-room, and to take in more ballast, as I found the ship too light to carry sail upon a wind. As the wind was right against us, we plied off one of the harbours, and about three o'clock in the afternoon on the 1st of August, we came to an anchor in the entrance of the channel leading into it in fourteen fathom water, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... steadying himself the slightest particle by catching hold of anything with his hands; indeed, as token of his entire, buoyant self-command, he generally carries his hands in his trowsers' pockets; but perhaps being generally very large, heavy hands, he carries them there for ballast. Nevertheless there have occurred instances, well authenticated ones too, where the captain has been known for an uncommonly critical moment or two, in a sudden squall say—to seize hold of the nearest oarsman's hair, and hold on there like ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... ranchman's voice, "but I will have to lodge a protest against you, Mr. Annixter, in the matter of keeping your line fence in repair. The sheep were all over the track last night, this side the Long Trestle, and I am afraid they have seriously disturbed our ballast along there. We—the railroad—can't fence along our right of way. The farmers have the prescriptive right of that, so we have to look to you to keep your fence in repair. I am sorry, but I shall have to protest——" Annixter returned to the hammock and stretched himself ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... The cheerfulness was not only in his disease, but in his temperament. Its excess was always a little against him in his church work, and Mrs. Leighton was right enough in feeling that if it had not been for the ballast of her instinctive despondency he would have made shipwreck of such small chances of prosperity as befell him in life. It was not from him that his daughter got her talent, though he had left her his temperament intact of his widow's ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... the balloon Kentucky, and drifting toward the gulf. Our valve refuses to work, and we dare not attempt to land in the dark. Ballast nearly gone. We fear we may be swept out to sea. Please notify station at Pensacola to send assistance—a tug, if possible. We may keep afloat a short time if we ...
— The Outdoor Chums on the Gulf • Captain Quincy Allen
... bold Knight, "you think I am afraid of the trepan? Why now, what if I should say that Dalgarno has more wit than honesty,—the duke more sail than ballast,—the Prince more pride than prudence,—and that the king—" The Lady Mansel held up her finger in a warning manner—"that the king is my very good master, who has given me, for forty years and more, dog's wages, videlicit, bones and beating.—Why now, all this is said, and Archie Armstrong ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... to follow the whim of the moment, whither it would lead him. He was romantic; it was one of his agreeablest traits, because spontaneous; and he indulged it the more, as being confident that he had too much solid ballast in the hold to be in danger of upsetting. To-night, at this point of his mental ramble, he found that his cigar had gone out. Had he been thinking aloud? He believed not, and yet there was no telling; he often did so, unconsciously. Were it so, and were any one listening, ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... to the shore, and when the dawn came we saw that the schooner stood high and dry on the reef and that Franka and his men were trying to float her by throwing overboard the iron ballast and putting a kedge anchor out upon the lee side of the reef. And at the same time we saw three boats put off from the mainland. These boats were all painted white, and when I saw them I said to Solepa, 'Be of good heart. Thy husband ...
— By Rock and Pool on an Austral Shore, and Other Stories • Louis Becke
... partitioned off, so as to form four tanks in which water and gasolene could be stored. Caps screwed over vent-holes provided opportunity to insert a small pump when it was necessary to draw on the emergency supplies or water ballast thus carried. ...
— The Boy Aviators' Treasure Quest • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... Dan, and it would be just as well if we had some ballast on board; however, she has a good beam and walks along splendidly. If the wind keeps as it is, we shall be back at the mouth of the York in three or four hours. You may as well open that basket again and hand me that cold ...
— With Lee in Virginia - A Story of the American Civil War • G. A. Henty
... blind, for no ship, discharging cargo the day before, could be loaded, ready for sea, within twenty-four hours. Indeed, she was in excellent trim. She was not too light to put to sea. No doubt, I said to myself, she has taken in ballast to equal the weight of oranges sent ashore. But I knew just enough of ships to know that there was some mystery in the business. The schooner could not be the plain fruit-trader for which men took her. As I looked over her rail, noting this, I said to myself that "here is another mystery with ...
— Martin Hyde, The Duke's Messenger • John Masefield
... force generated at the descent and at the rising. For a strong current of air is generated in an aqueduct which bursts its way even through stones unless the water is let in slowly and sparingly from the source at first, and checked at the elbows or turns by bands, or by the weight of sand ballast. All the other arrangements should be made as in the case of lead pipes. And ashes are to be put in beforehand when the water is let in from the source for the first time, so that if any of the joints have not been sufficiently coated, they ...
— Ten Books on Architecture • Vitruvius
... pleasant boat-shop, close on the shore of a little arm of the sea. The tide ebbs and flows before its wide double doors, and sometimes rises so high as to flow the sills; then you have to walk across in front of the shop on a plank, laid upon iron ballast. There is a little wharf or pier close at hand, the outer end of which is always going to be repaired. There are two or three other shops near by, and about them is the pleasant litter of a boat-yard. In the cove before them lie ...
— By The Sea - 1887 • Heman White Chaplin
... McCarthy, come on!" I didn't care which, I had one right on my side, and I kept that always in view; namely, the right to discharge the cargo where I had first received it; but where the money to buy ballast and pay other charges was to come from I ...
— Voyage of the Liberdade • Captain Joshua Slocum
... furniture till near the end of the seventeenth century. A London physician had a brother, the captain of a West India ship, who, on his return to England, having on board several logs of mahogany for the purpose of ballast, made him a present of the wood, he being engaged in a building project; his carpenter, however, threw it aside, observing that it was too hard to be wrought. Some time after, the lady of the physician being in want of a box to hold candles, the cabinet-maker was directed ...
— A Catechism of Familiar Things; Their History, and the Events Which Led to Their Discovery • Benziger Brothers
... returning to the point from which he started, like those bits of drift-wood which are always bobbing up and down close under the fall or circling round and round in the eddies. The trouble is, such sticks float too lightly on the surface of things; if they carried more heart-ballast, and would sink deeper, the current would bear them on.—Another variety of the Conservative is the man who is really progressive and right-minded, but extremely slow. Give him time, and he is certain to form ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... respected, without house or furniture, and almost without a flock.[32116] Two years after this, finding himself sovereign of his province, his head is spinning. Lesser events would have made it turn; his is only a twenty-eight-year-old head, not very solid, without any inside ballast,[32117] already disturbed by vanity, ambition, rancor, and apostasy, by the sudden and complete volteface which puts him in conflict with his past educational habits and most cherished affections: ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... Trenholm & Co. was represented in Liverpool by a Mr. Prioleau who was by no means anxious for the consignment of the Chameleon in ballast; with a cargo on board the case would have been different. He evidently considered her a very big and unsalable elephant, and repudiated the part of showman. The vessel was therefore turned over to Captain ...
— The Narrative of a Blockade-Runner • John Wilkinson
... five ships of war that day Till they melted like a cloud in the silent summer heaven, But Sir Richard bore in hand All his sick men from the land, Very carefully and slow, Men of Bideford in Devon— And he laid them on the ballast down below; And they blessed him in their pain That they were not left to Spain, To the thumbscrew and the stake, for the ...
— The Militants - Stories of Some Parsons, Soldiers, and Other Fighters in the World • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... through me, an awful premonitory chill. I knew what to do, but there was little I could do. We carried no ballast, for this was a captive balloon. What could I throw out? The extra rifle! Out it went, and fell not far from the tiger; but he did not move; with his green eyes fixed upon the car, he watched it slowly descend. ...
— John Gayther's Garden and the Stories Told Therein • Frank R. Stockton
... before the reading public, it had only been as the author of shorter or longer contributions to the philosophical discussion of the relations between Science and Faith; when these had been accepted by a daily paper it had been as its heaviest ballast. I had never yet written anything that the ordinary reader could follow with pleasure, and I had likewise been obliged to make use of a large number ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... A bucket, loaded with stones heavy enough to sink it, was lowered down the black-looking pit, and was drawn up again nearly full of water. This was given to the nearest grazing animals, and the bucket sent down again, to catch against some projecting block and tilt out the ballast, after which it refused to sink, but made a jerk or two to escape, and then had to ...
— The Peril Finders • George Manville Fenn
... old farmer shook his head doubtfully. "But when the wits are away the brain is like a ship without ballast—there is no safe sailing possible. He would not mean any harm, perhaps,—and yet in his wild moods he might do it, and be sorry for it directly afterwards. 'Tis little use to cry when the mischief is done,—and I confess I do not ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... liquors, needles and pins—all manner of things auctioned and sold. The ship, American-owned, had come from England, and Chris overheard one man say to another: "See there, the thin man. That be Mr. Mason's agent. I heard he's here to buy the ballast bricks for his ...
— Mr. Wicker's Window • Carley Dawson
... another side; and the rest is divided into staircases, on each of which are six or eight sets of rooms, inhabited by us undergraduates, and here and there a tutor or fellow dropped down amongst us (in the first-floor rooms, of course), not exactly to keep order, but to act as a sort of ballast. This quadrangle is the show part of the college, and is generally respectable and quiet, which is a good deal more than can be said for the inner quadrangle, which you get at through a passage leading out of the other. The rooms ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... this day hove the Horatio down alongside the Eden to a pinnace filled with iron ballast: the pinnace sunk during the night in a squall, in consequence of her iron ballast not having been taken out at sunset. Eighty-one adult female slaves, and some female children, were landed this ...
— A Voyage Round the World, Vol. I (of ?) • James Holman
... Manchester House, illuminating its dark rooms with her own sure, radiant presence: her silver-white hair, and her pale, heavy, reposeful face seemed to give off a certain radiance. She seemed to give weight, ballast, and repose to the staggering and bewildered home. She controlled the maid, and suggested the meals—meals which James ate without knowing what he ate. She brought in flowers and books, and, very rarely, a visitor. Visitors were out of place in the dark sombreness of Manchester ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... the Ocean Commerce of America remind one of the railings of a gallery? Because, just now, it is simply Ballast Trade. ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 16, July 16, 1870 • Various
... where you are, lady,' the Guard was saying. 'You're good ballast. You can keep the train down. That's something. Steady thinking's always best, ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... persist in the folly of swimming against the current, I see no danger whatever in your being submerged. You are strong; you have principles and religion; you adore your children; you love Monsieur de l'Estorade, their father, in them. With all that ballast you cannot sink." ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac
... in the sky, and the silvery light streamed down on towering hillside and battalions of flitting pines. The great train swept on, clattering and clanking, and dust and fragments of ballast whirled about the lonely man. Still, the rush of the cool night wind was exhilarating, and his mind was busy, though his thoughts were not altogether pleasant. The few weeks he had spent in Ida Stirling's company ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... necessity of forming some fixed ideas concerning the general policy of the British Empire. Something of this sort seemed to be indispensable, in order, amidst so vast a fluctuation of passions and opinions, to concentre my thoughts, to ballast my conduct, to preserve me from being blown about by every wind of fashionable doctrine. I really did not think it safe or manly to have fresh principles to seek upon every fresh mail which should arrive ...
— Burke's Speech on Conciliation with America • Edmund Burke
... loss of our ships and seamen. The Senate hurried a bill through all its stages in a single day; and the House, by nearly two to one, accepted it. No foreign merchant vessel could leave an American port, except in ballast, or with a cargo then on board; no American merchantman could leave for a foreign port on ...
— Formation of the Union • Albert Bushnell Hart
... the low-down slab-pilers got their mutinous heads together, and says, 'The J.P. and the bailiff's got to be roasted anyway, wisht we could heave Nash in atop.' I've left the cursing and swearin' out, because it's useless ballast, and don't count in the deal any more'n sawdust. Now, John, what do ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... that he cannot fly against the wind. If he would go back to his starting point while the March winds are out, he must needs come down close to the ground and yewyaw towards his objective, making leeway like an old boat without ballast or centerboard. ...
— Secret of the Woods • William J. Long
... guardianship." As he was the party who was most interested in the result, I said nothing more, but proceeded to lighten the ship as speedily as possible, by making several additional trips to the shore with as much of the cargo as enabled us to get at the ballast; and on each occasion we received the same prompt and energetic assistance from our turbaned allies, each boat-load being carried to the corner of the field where the others were deposited. It required two days ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 444 - Volume 18, New Series, July 3, 1852 • Various
... this, that the railways were concerned for their own new developments—double-trackings, loops, cutoffs, taps, and feeder lines, and great swoops out into untouched lands soon to be filled with men. So the construction, ballast, and material trains, the grading machines, the wrecking cars with their camel-like sneering cranes—the whole plant of a new civilisation—had to find room somewhere in the general rally before ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... year 1820 American merchantmen, plying between Brazil and New England, sometimes carried rubber as ballast on the home voyage and dumped it on the wharves at Boston. One of the shipmasters exhibited to his friends a pair of native shoes fancifully gilded. Another, with more foresight, brought home five hundred pairs, ungilded, ...
— The Age of Invention - A Chronicle of Mechanical Conquest, Book, 37 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Holland Thompson
... entrance FROM the garden, and Starbuck was consequently obliged to attempt it from the hotel—for which purpose he had introduced himself as a boarder—by opening the disused well secretly at night. These facts were obtained from papers found in the otherwise valueless trunks, weighted with stones for ballast, which Starbuck had brought to the hotel to take away his stolen treasure in, but which he was obliged to leave in his hurried flight. The attempt would have doubtless succeeded but for ...
— Mr. Jack Hamlin's Mediation and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... is only a living and very remarkable instance of the inefficacy of the most splendid talents, unless they are accompanied with other qualities, which scarcely admit of definition, but which must serve the same purpose that ballast does for a ship. Brougham has prospered to a certain degree; he has a great reputation and he makes a considerable income at the bar; but as an advocate he is left behind by men of far inferior capacity, whose names are hardly known beyond ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... unsatisfactory career. Writing to his friend Moore (5th August) he says: "I hope your eldest son will do well in the distant land to which he has gone. My son is in the Federal army in America, and no comfort. The secret ballast is often applied by a kind hand above, when to outsiders we appear to be ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... "It was up at Johannesburg. Two chums settled there, and one married a girl. Nice lil thing, too; some of the Boer girls, you know; but not much ballast at her at all. The husband went up country for the Consolidated Co., and when he came back there was trouble. Chum had been sweethearting ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... son and to Athens, and returned? That he insults and abuses Antony, whom he was wont to say he loved, and cooeperates with Caesar, whose father he killed? And if chance so favor, he will ere long attack Caesar also. For the fellow is naturally distrustful and turbulent and has no ballast in his soul, and he is always stirring things up and twisting about, turning more ways than the sea-passage to which he fled and got the title of deserter for it, asking all of you to take that man for friend or ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol. III • Cassius Dio
... went abroad on the water a great deal with Jean. At first the neighbours gave out sinister suspicions as to Jean's intentions, for sea-going with your own wife was uncommon among the sailors of the coast. But at last these dark suggestions settled down into a belief that Jean took her chiefly for ballast; and thereafter she was ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... in they gather very faire white salt, without any further art or labour, for it is only done by the great heate of the sunne. This the Venetians haue, and doe maintaine to the vse of S. Marke, and the Venetian ships that come to this Island are bound to cast out their ballast, and to lade with salt for Venice. Also there may none in all the Iland buy salt but of these men, who maintaine these pits for S. Marke. This place is watched by night with 6. horsemen to the end it be not stolne by night. Also vnder the Venetians dominions no towne may spende any salt, ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, - and Discoveries of The English Nation, Volume 9 - Asia, Part 2 • Richard Hakluyt
... Spike," she answered, rising. "A craft should never go astern, and I am quite willing to ballast the boat. We have seen such terrible accidents to-day, that all should lend their aid in endeavoring to get under way, and in averting all possible hamper. Only take me to my poor, dear Rosy, Capt. Spike, and every thing shall be forgotten that ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various
... winded when it occurred to her to try working the dugout into the stream by loading the stern with ballast and then rocking the bow back and forth along the bank until the craft eventually worked itself into ...
— The Beasts of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... Jim got a piece of canvas, a sail-maker's needle, and some twine, with a pig of iron ballast which had been used in one of the boats. As there was no sign of a breeze, with these he went below, and for the first time since his death opened the captain's state-room. We brought the corpse into the main cabin, and placing it ...
— Peter Trawl - The Adventures of a Whaler • W. H. G. Kingston
... remarkable that only one woman ever joined this community. Mrs. Lamb merely followed wheresoever her husband led,—"as ballast for his balloon," as she said, in her ...
— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various
... uppers, Clemmie. But we'll be fit as fiddles when we get some of them cakes stowed amidships, and ballast 'em down with a few swallers of that coffee. There ain't everybody that can b'ile coffee like ...
— Captain Pott's Minister • Francis L. Cooper
... with her sail aback. There was already a good deal of water in her. He allowed her to drift towards the harbour entrance, and, letting the tiller swing about, squatted down and busied himself in loosening the plug. With that out she would fill very quickly, and every lighter carried a little iron ballast—enough to make her go down when full of water. When he stood up again the noisy wash about the Hermosa sounded far away, almost inaudible; and already he could make out the shape of land about the harbour entrance. This was a desperate affair, and he was ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... but two or three journeymen, may do as safe, though not so profitable a business, as he who employs twenty or thirty—in the same way as a small vessel may navigate the ocean as safely as a large one, and may be even less likely to overset in a storm, if it carry less sail in proportion to its ballast. ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... Kant! have we not had enough To make Religion sad, and sour, and snubbish, But Saints Zoological must cant their stuff, As vessels cant their ballast-rattling rubbish! Once let the sect, triumphant to their text, Shut Nero up from Saturday till Monday, And sure as fate they will deny us next To see the Dandelions on a Sunday— But what is ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... on New Year's Day in 1681 on the Most Holy Trinity, they clapped their captain in irons and put him down below on the ballast, and elected an old pirate and a "stout seaman," John Watling, in his place. One of the reasons for the revolt was said to be the ...
— The Pirates' Who's Who - Giving Particulars Of The Lives and Deaths Of The Pirates And Buccaneers • Philip Gosse
... was very beautiful and costly. An old tradition is mentioned in the "Life of Nollekens" that the clay was at first brought as ballast in ships from China, and when the Orientals discovered what use was being made of it, they forbade its exportation, and the Englishmen had to be content with their own native clay. Nollekens says ...
— Chelsea - The Fascination of London • G. E. (Geraldine Edith) Mitton
... an eye to using her as a cruiser. As a rule, the prisoners were put ashore on the first opportunity, but some buccaneers had a way of selling their captives into slavery. If the ship were old, leaky, valueless, in ballast, or with a cargo useless to the rovers, she was either robbed of her guns, and turned adrift with her crew, or run ashore in some snug cove, where she could be burnt for the sake of the iron-work. If the cargo were of value, and, as a rule, the ships they ...
— Great Pirate Stories • Various
... but not quite so pleasant, to watch it, as, upon the least carelessness on the part of the helmsman, it would immediately have filled. As it was, we shipped some heavy seas, but the blankets at the bottom being saturated, gave us the extra ballast which we required. Before we were clear of the islands, we were joined by a whole fleet of Indian canoes, with their dirty blankets spread to the storm, running, as we were, for Mackinaw, being on their return from Maniton Islands, where they had congregated to receive presents from the Governor ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... set to work to inspect the bridge; and ordered the men—who were provided with the necessary implements—to set to, and dig a hole down to the crown of the principal arch. It was harder work than they had expected. The roadway was solid, the ballast pressed down very tightly, and the crown of the arch covered, to a considerable depth, with concrete. Only a few men could work at once and, after a half-hour's desperate labor, the hole was nothing ...
— The Young Franc Tireurs - And Their Adventures in the Franco-Prussian War • G. A. Henty
... made by using foundry sand or smith's ashes instead of ordinary sand. There are many other substitutes for the ordinary sand. As an example, fine stone grit may be used with advantage. Thoroughly burnt clay or ballast, old bricks, clinkers and cinders, ground to a uniform size and screened from dust, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... stood in a Chinese vase beneath the stairs and has seemed a listless creature. But when a November wind is up it is a cousin of the balloon, with an equal zest to explore the wider precincts of the earth and to alight upon the moon. Only persons of heavier ballast—such as have been fed on sweets—plump pancake persons—can hold now an umbrella to the ground. A long stowage of muffins and ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks
... course the cargo of the little brig was discharged and the ballast was brought alongside. The side ports were knocked out, and the crew commenced to throw the ballast into the hold, as it frequently happened that only one side was available. A couple of hands were placed in the hold ...
— The Shellback's Progress - In the Nineteenth Century • Walter Runciman
... fermentation had never gone further than the ripeness of the vinous stage. Disappointment had never made it acetous, nor had it ever putrefied into the turbid zeal of Fifth Monarchism and sectarian whimsey. There is no better ballast for keeping the mind steady on its keel, and saving it from all risk of crankiness, than business. And they were business men, men of facts and figures no less than of religious earnestness. The sum of two hundred thousand pounds had been ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... into the two boats, the second mate having charge of the launch, and the third mate of the pinnace. For several days we were employed in this way, until all the hides were taken out, when the crew began taking in ballast, and we returned to our ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... Navy was much offended at the request, denying that the plan of the Navy Board had failed; and when Sir Edward alluded to the notorious inefficiency of the ships, he said that it arose entirely from faulty stowage of the ballast and hold. They parted, mutually dissatisfied; and Sir Edward appealed immediately to Lord Spencer, who, a short time before, had been placed at the head of the Admiralty. This nobleman showed every ...
— The Life of Admiral Viscount Exmouth • Edward Osler
... 26th, we got into the after-hold four boat-load of shingle ballast, and struck down six guns, keeping only six on deck. Our good friends the natives, having brought us a plentiful supply of fish, afterwards went on shore to the tents, and informed our people there, that a ship like ours had been lately lost ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr
... yellowish lather where the collar rubbed their necks and the traces their flanks. They were slack and heavy, and the omnibus hugged the curb. Within it was empty, and on the top boasted but three passengers besides Iglesias himself. It followed that, carrying insufficiency of ballast, the great red-painted vehicle lumbered, and jerked, and swayed uneasily; while the lighter traffic swept past it in a glittering stream, the dominant note of which was black as against the dirty drab of the recently watered wood-pavement. And the character of that traffic was new to Dominic Iglesias, ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... preservation of the state. For before it had been veering and unsettled, sometimes inclining to arbitrary power, and sometimes towards a pure democracy; but this establishment of a senate, an intermediate body, like ballast, kept it in a just equilibrium, and put it in a safe posture: the twenty-eight senators adhering to the kings, whenever they saw the people too encroaching, and, on the other hand, supporting the people, when the kings attempted to make themselves absolute. ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... New York, stopping at Havana for passengers and mail. She had made thirty-six such voyages, almost always having a cargo for the American port, and never being permitted to bring freight into Havana. The custom of her agent was to clear her 'in ballast' the day before her arrival. The practice, while contrary to the regulations of Cuban ports, had always been winked at by the authorities. It was well understood that the Black Warrior generally had a cargo aboard, but a detailed manifest of her ...
— Cuba, Old and New • Albert Gardner Robinson
... that one of these vans or trucks would serve his purpose admirably, if he could only get into it, and very cautiously he picked his way over the clogging ballast and rails, till he came to a low narrow strip of ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... is uplifted with some fancy of his own. It may be only with the meeting of me after our encounter," said Humfrey. "He is a brave fellow and kindly, but never did craft so want ballast as does that ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... supplied in this manner for many buildings, or indeed for any of great extent. Till this difficulty shall be removed by the discovery of chalk or lime-stone, the public buildings must go on very slowly, unless care be taken to send out those articles as ballast in all the ships destined for Port Jackson. In the mean time the materials can only be laid in clay, which makes it necessary to give great thickness to the walls, and even then they are not so firm as might ...
— The Voyage Of Governor Phillip To Botany Bay • Arthur Phillip
... was the descent that the Parachute appeared to be stationary. Mr. Hampton remembered that a bag of ballast was fastened beneath the car, he stooped over and upset the sand, he also noted by his watch the time he occupied in descending. The earth seemed coming up to him rapidly; the Parachute indicated ...
— Umbrellas and their History • William Sangster
... his hands; indeed, as token of his entire, buoyant self-command, he generally carries his hands in his trowsers' pockets; but perhaps being generally very large, heavy hands, he carries them there for ballast. Nevertheless there have occurred instances, well authenticated ones too, where the captain has been known for an uncommonly critical moment or two, in a sudden squall say—to seize hold of the nearest oarsman's hair, and hold on ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... the intellectual side of human nature began, not with the search after a theoretical psychology—for that, Aristotle still sufficed—but with the endeavor to observe and to describe. The indispensable ballast of theory was limited to the popular doctrine of the four temperaments, in its then habitual union with the belief in the influence of the planets. Such conceptions may remain ineradicable in the minds of individuals, without hindering the general progress of the age. It certainly ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... did not long remain ignorant; nor was he backward in making the best arrangements possible to meet the danger. By shifting the ballast in each of the vessels entirely to one side, he caused them to lean in such a manner as that their artillery could be elevated to a surprising degree, and the shot rise even to the summit of the hill. The guns were then stuffed, rather than loaded, with grape and musket-balls; and the ships, ...
— The Campaigns of the British Army at Washington and New Orleans 1814-1815 • G. R. Gleig
... next morning, I sent the launch, protected by a party of marines in another boat, to take in ballast, which was wanted. This work was done before breakfast; and after it, she was sent for wood and water, and with her the people employed in this service, under the protection of a serjeant's guard, which was now thought sufficient, as the natives seemed to be pretty well ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr
... the names of, with maps he had made, stuffed beasts and birds he had killed, and a few live ones which he kept in cages and attended to himself in the empty hold; for we were flying light, you know, without even ballast aboard, and bound ...
— The Grain Ship • Morgan Robertson
... wanted," he said, "for I've no notion that jolly-boat will do to go out as far as we shall find it necessary to sound. So I am about to ballast the launch, and get her sails ready; there's no use in mincing matters in such a ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... to advise or to aid him, Columbus must have felt himself alone with the tempest and the night. But his brave heart bore him up, and his wonderful capacity for devising expedients on sudden emergencies did not forsake him. As the stores were consumed, the Nina felt the want of the ballast which Columbus had intended to take on board at the Amazonian Island. "Fill the empty casks with water," he said, "and let them serve as ballast," an expedient which has grown common enough now, but ...
— The Life of Columbus • Arthur Helps
... in two or three skiffes lading of stones to ballast our shippe withall. It hyeth here four foot water, and floweth by fits, ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, • Richard Hakluyt
... the other, where the flat part of the keel begins. One is usually employed for managing the boat, and both of them when it is stormy. With the second they keep the boat from getting unsteady, which would follow from its lightness, that rudder giving the boat more stiffness and serving as ballast. That is a precaution rendered necessary by its very lightness, the vessels that are lightest being those that require most care by being unsteady. In the middle they have a scaffold, four or six brazas ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 40 of 55 • Francisco Colin
... of postscript to this earlier one—and the two Sheare brothers. Compared to Wolfe Tone, however, all these were mere amateurs in insurrection, and pale and shadowy dabblers in rebellion. Lord Edward was an amiable warm-hearted visionary, high-minded and gallant, but without much ballast, and to a great degree under the guidance of others. The mainspring of the whole movement, as has been seen, was Protestant and Northern, and now that all hope of constitutional reform was gone, it was resolved to appeal openly to force and to call in the aid of the enemies of England to assist ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless
... four ballast bags from the balloon was marked: the balloon darted high, wildly high; and with her, seated on the bar, the cord between his thighs, darted high ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel
... With ballast stored, masts stepped, rigging set up, and sails bent, setting as sweet as could be to her lines and the lumpers beginning to get her ready for the mackerel season, the Fred Withrow was certainly ...
— The Seiners • James B. (James Brendan) Connolly
... vessel which, by the command of Caligula, brought the obelisk from Egypt, which stands in the Vatican Circus, and four blocks of the same sort of stone to support it. Nothing certainly ever appeared on the sea more astonishing than this vessel; 120,000 bushels of lentiles served for its ballast; the length of it nearly equalled all the left side of the port of Ostia; for it was sent there by the emperor Claudius. The thickness of the tree was as much as four men could embrace with their arms."—B. xvi. ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... was the gaieties of Paris and the gaming-tables of Monte Carlo—a sphere which has made short work of fortunes compared with which mine would be insignificant. The pace was fast and furious; I threw out my ballast liberally as I went along, and the harpies, male and female, who surrounded me, picked it up. Bright and fair enough was the prospect as I started on the road to ruin; gloomy the clouds that settled round me as I approached that dismal terminus. Then, when too late, I began ...
— Under the Dragon Flag - My Experiences in the Chino-Japanese War • James Allan
... having seated himself, and trimmed[187] the boat with his coachman, who, being a very sober man, always serves for ballast on these occasions, we made the best of our way for Fox-Hall. Sir Roger obliged the waterman to give us the history of his right leg, and hearing that he had left it at La Hogue, with many particulars which passed in that glorious action, the Knight in the triumph ...
— The De Coverley Papers - From 'The Spectator' • Joseph Addison and Others
... over. We had a dull, rainy night, a heavy, broadside swell, and as the steamer had not enough ballast, she rolled frightfully. In this nasty sea we were afraid she might turn turtle, as another steamer had done some months ago. The storm became such that we had to lie at anchor for five days, sheltered by the coast of Gaua. It was with real relief that I left ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... amount to. I've bullied you for having played skittles with my life, my career. So you have! Damn it, so you have! But you've done it out of blind thoughtlessness; and if I'd been a fairly strong man, with some ballast in me, you couldn't have landed me where I am— not you nor fifty Pandora girls! [Sitting erect.] And that— that's the moral of the tale; and— and— [abruptly, to FARNCOMBE] There's nothing more, ...
— The 'Mind the Paint' Girl - A Comedy in Four Acts • Arthur Pinero
... duty free." "It would," he says, "save our country very great sums, and no way hurt the landed interest. It would lower the price of iron, and consequently of all our manufactures, which would increase the consumpt and sale; it would serve for ballast to our ships from North America, and when tobacco is scarce, fill up part of the tonnage; would increase our exports, and no way interfere with our neighbours in the South."[68] That language might be held indifferently by the mercantilist and ...
— Life of Adam Smith • John Rae
... she's doin' it all alone. She's pretty as a picture, an' nothin' but a child when he married her four months ago, an' we've took away her natural pervider an' entertainer, an' left her nothin' but her freedom for a ballast wheel. An' I say I wish some of the patriotic people who are jest showerin' every Charlie Turner with attentions would please sprinkle jest a few on Charlie's wife, to help keep her straight an' sweet an' honest for ...
— Dawn • Eleanor H. Porter
... to the safe termination of our voyage. Our vessel (the brig Governor Macquarie) we well knew was a leaky one, though her leaks did not distress us on the outward voyage, she being then only in ballast trim; but now that she was loaded to the water's edge, and the winter coming on, we became greatly alarmed for her. Another disagreeable circumstance was having no bread or flour on board. To obviate ...
— A Narrative of a Nine Months' Residence in New Zealand in 1827 • Augustus Earle
... English Government further allows and encourages the communities to provide for themselves railways, canals, pawnbroking, theatres, forestry, cinchona farms, irrigation, leper villages, casinos, bathing establishments, and immigration, and to deal in ballast, guano, quinine, opium, salt, and what not. Every one of these functions, with those of the army, navy, police, and courts of justice, were at one time left to private enterprise, and were a source of ...
— Problems of Poverty • John A. Hobson
... more quick grew the pace of the white-maned steeds. Soon they left the morning breezes behind, and very soon they knew that these were not the hands of the god, their master, that held the golden reins. Like an air-ship without its accustomed ballast, the chariot rolled unsteadily, and not only the boy's light weight but his light hold on their bridles made them grow mad with a lust for speed. The white foam flew from their mouths like the spume from the giant waves of a furious sea, and their pace was swift as that of a bolt ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... passing between Soller in North Mallorca and Marseille, they aren't to be depended on. By a singular irony of fate, I did come across an old white—painted barque which had just come out of Palma in ballast; but her skipper only told what I knew full well in my own heart, that I might very likely wait three years before I found a craft going the ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne
... you, if at all, for a lack of mannerism," said Vera briskly. "It's too bad of you. Here I am as so much ballast for your party, and when I begin to make myself useful, you pretend I'm not there. But I am there, ...
— Love and Lucy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... lighten his task by excluding theology and politics, and indeed but for such self-denial he could scarcely have moved at all in so dense an air. He was able, however, having thrown out so much formidable ballast, to rise above his subject, and gazing at the Victorian Age, as it recedes, he declared it to have been very good. The young men who despise and attack that Age receive no support in any particular ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... traffic-takers, reference-takers. Consider, next, the yet more marked changes implied in railway construction—the cuttings, embankings, tunnellings, diversions of roads; the building of bridges, and stations; the laying down of ballast, sleepers, and rails; the making of engines, tenders, carriages, and waggons: which processes, acting upon numerous trades, increase the importation of timber, the quarrying of stone, the manufacture of iron, the mining of coal, the burning of bricks: institute a variety of special manufactures ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... money to the planter on his growing crop; that British and other shipping resorting to Bang-kok for the purchase of produce, are compelled to buy from the King on his own terms, or to leave the port in ballast; and finally, that these proceedings are in direct opposition to the terms of an existing Treaty between Great Britain and Siam. A Consul at Bang-kok, and a visit twice a year from one of the ships of war cruizing in the China Sea and the Straits of Malacca, would put ...
— Trade and Travel in the Far East - or Recollections of twenty-one years passed in Java, - Singapore, Australia and China. • G. F. Davidson
... I What men be ye? Gotham's three wise men we be. Whither in your bowl so free? To rake the moon from out the sea. The bowl goes trim. The moon doth shine. And our ballast is old wine; And your ...
— Nightmare Abbey • Thomas Love Peacock
... hag who forms the torrent beds which seam the mountain side; for she gathers great stones in her cloak to make her ballast, when she flies upon the storm; and when about to retire to her mountain cave, she lets them drop progressively as she moves onwards, when they fall with such an unearthly weight that they lay open the ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 19, Saturday, March 9, 1850 • Various
... those veering lists of the ballast aboard which are so disconcerting to the author. The story got out of hand. The old woman silent, indomitable, fed and deeply satisfied for all of her hard and grinding life by her love for the husband whom she had taken from her sister, ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... crushed beneath the glorious news— Ten plays, and forty tales of Kotzebue's; [8] One envoy's letters, six composer's airs, And loads from Frankfort and from Leipsic fairs: Meiners' four volumes upon Womankind, [9] Like Lapland witches to ensure a wind; Brunck's heaviest tome for ballast, [10] and, to back it, Of Heyne, [11] such as should not ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... have not Leisure, or Skill, or Industry enough to serve themselves, shou'd be allowed no other Instances of Gratitude, than the reproachful Title of Men of low Genius, of which low Genius's it may be observed, that they carry some Ballast, and some valuable Loading in them, which may be despised, but is seldom to be exceeded in any thing truly valuable, by light and fluttering Wits. But it is not to be wonder'd, that Men of Worth are to be trampled upon, for otherwise ...
— An Apology For The Study of Northern Antiquities • Elizabeth Elstob
... the canoes paddled up to the tide pole on the neighbouring reef, and before a boat could reach them, the natives managed to secure the pigs of iron ballast with which it was moored. They communicated with two canoes, coming from the direction of Piron Island, which soon afterwards came under the stern. As one of the stolen pigs was seen partially concealed in the bow of ...
— Narrative Of The Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Commanded By The Late Captain Owen Stanley, R.N., F.R.S. Etc. During The Years 1846-1850. Including Discoveries And Surveys In New Guinea, The Louisiade • John MacGillivray
... mentioned; the Gentile lies but little more than a cable's length from the shore, so that you can almost look down upon her decks. You perceive that she is a handsome craft of some six or seven hundred tons burthen, standing high out of water, in ballast trim, with a black hull, bright waist, and wales painted white. Her bows flare very much, and are sharp and symmetrical; the cut-water stretches, with a graceful curve, far out beyond them toward the long ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... for their little yacht, which did not suit the Captain's notions of sea-worthiness. Williams overruled his objections, and the "Don Juan" was built according to his cherished fancy. "When it was finished," says Trelawny, "it took two tons of iron ballast to bring her down to her bearings, and then she was very crank in a breeze, though not deficient in beam. She was fast, strongly built, and Torbay rigged." She was christened by Lord Byron, not wholly ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... Saxon! I mean we'd have had a row over the provisions. It wasn't too hours' run round to Tim Brady's, and I found the old man stowing away half-a-peck of cold boiled potatoes, and big bottles of tea, and goodness knows what. 'Is it for ballast ye're using the potatoes, Barney?' says I. 'Mind your own business, Master Dennis'—(and I could see he was cross as two sticks),—'and leave the provisioning to them that understands it,' says he. 'How many meals d'ye reckon to eat between this and ...
— We and the World, Part II. (of II.) - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... George Washington, rising and standing in the attitude of Webster, "I rises to appoint to order. We took ballast in de prior cases, and why make flesh of one man an' ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 9 • Various
... understand it,' answered Gladys. 'He said, "Don't let them take you for a walk on the Ballast Bank." What ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... reasoned upon the improbability of there being one in such a place. And yet, why not? A crab might very well find lodgment in the hold of a ship: it might have been brought aboard in some strange way— among the ballast—or possibly carried aboard by some of the sailors, out of curiosity; it may have been abandoned to its fate, and left to hide itself among the numerous corners and crevices which are found among the timbers of a vessel's hold? It might procure sustenance in ...
— The Boy Tar • Mayne Reid
... Viceadmirall, at their departure from Dominica brought away two young Saluages, which were the chiefe Casiques sonnes of that Countrey and part of Dominica, but they shortly after ran away from them at Santa Cruz Iland, where the Viceadmirall landed to take in ballast. ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of - the English Nation. Vol. XIII. America. Part II. • Richard Hakluyt
... at. It was floating bottom downwards, and lid upwards,—just as it might have been placed opposite Ben's own bunk in the forecastle of a frigate,—and it appeared to be kept steadily balanced in this position by the weight of some iron cleeting along the bottom, which acted as ballast. Otherwise the chest sat so high upon the water, as to show that it must either be quite empty or nearly so; for the sennit handles at each end, which were several inches below the level of the lid, hung quite ...
— The Ocean Waifs - A Story of Adventure on Land and Sea • Mayne Reid
... I assured her. But I was feeling hurt all the way up to my topmost hair and down to my tipmost toe. Not that I mind going with the Tyndals, but that Sir Lionel should pick me out as the bit of superfluous ballast to cast to the winds! That was what made me feel cold and old, and alone in the world. I conscientiously told myself that I was the youngest of the party, and the right one to sacrifice; but nothing was much comfort until the thought jumped into my head that ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... the opposite side of the hall came a woman's frightened cry, followed by the sound of breaking furniture. The next instant the door was flung open, and Mrs. Smelts, with her baby in her arms, rushed forth. Close behind her rolled Mr. Smelts, his shifted ballast of Christmas cheer threatening ...
— Calvary Alley • Alice Hegan Rice
... the whole, gain or lose by a given degree of conservatism? An increase of knowledge is by no means the only thing that makes for civilization. Men may be highly enlightened, and yet rotten to the very core. How much of the ballast of conservatism and of loyalty to tradition is it well to throw overboard in the interest of accelerated motion? Those who, in our judgment, throw overboard much too much ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... force in that region; and one may observe that whenever a boat comes to the beach a stout fellow in the costume of a man-of-war's man, goes up to it and pries into all its holes and corners, pulling about the ballast-bags and examining the same in a cool matter-of-course manner that must be extremely irritating, one would imagine, to the owner ...
— The Lifeboat • R.M. Ballantyne
... land forces had abandoned Norfolk, and it was necessary to get the ship away before the Union troops arrived and hemmed her in. Her pilots declared that if the ship was lightened they could take her up the James River; and accordingly all hands threw overboard ballast and trappings, until she was lightened three feet. Then the pilots claimed that with the prevalent wind they could not handle her. It was now useless to try to run her through the Union fleet, for the lightening process had exposed three feet of ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 2 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... Ned, as he had a better view of what was going on. "It's sand, that's what it is! Tom is giving battle to the flames with sand from the ballast bags of the dirigible! Hurray? That's the ticket! Sand! The only thing safe to use in case of an explosive ...
— Tom Swift and his Aerial Warship - or, The Naval Terror of the Seas • Victor Appleton
... relation of properties has enabled incandescent-lamp signals to be connected direct to lines without relays, but compensated against too great a current by causing the resistance in series with the lamp to be increased inversely as the resistance of the filament. Employment of a "ballast" resistance in this way is referred to in Chapter XI. In Fig. 27 is shown its relation to a signal lamp directly in the line. 1 is the carbon-filament lamp; 2 is the ballast. The latter's conductor is fine ...
— Cyclopedia of Telephony & Telegraphy Vol. 1 - A General Reference Work on Telephony, etc. etc. • Kempster Miller
... in which an adventurous navigator might undertake to go beneath the hull of a man-of-war, and affix the torpedoes, so that failure should be impossible. This boat in shape was not unlike a turtle. A system of valves, air-pumps, and ballast enabled the operator to ascend or descend in the water at will. A screw-propeller afforded means of propulsion, and phosphorescent gauges and compasses enabled him to steer with ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 1 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... which an entrance is effected. In the fore part of the platform projects a periscope, or lookout, formed by port-holes or lenses through which an electric searchlight can throw its gleam for some distance under water in front of and on each side of the tug. Now relieved of its ballast of water the boat has risen to the surface. Its lid will open and fresh air will penetrate it to every part. In all probability, if it remained submerged during the day it rose at night and towed the Ebba ...
— Facing the Flag • Jules Verne
... aboard a five masted schooner engaged in the lumber business," went on Jack Jepson. "We were going down to South America, in ballast t' bring back a cargo of hard woods, an' off the Hole in the Wall th' ...
— The Moving Picture Girls at Sea - or, A Pictured Shipwreck That Became Real • Laura Lee Hope
... burthen of his calling, and hath studied to make his shoulders sufficient; for which he hath not been hasty to launch forth of his port, the university, but expected the ballast of learning, and the wind of opportunity. Divinity is not the beginning but the end of his studies; to which he takes the ordinary stair, and makes the arts his way. He counts it not prophaneness to be polished with human reading, or to smooth his way by Aristotle to ...
— Microcosmography - or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters • John Earle
... do," he said. "Of course, it would have seemed strange to the mate and to Rogers if I hadn't given them some explanation, especially as we came out in ballast. So I dropped hints that we were out on a survey expedition that couldn't be talked of just now. They probably have the idea that we're looking up a suitable coaling station for the Government, or something of that kind. To carry that ...
— Doubloons—and the Girl • John Maxwell Forbes
... with a heap of stones for ballast, and with no great elegance in shape of rigging, comes slowly in from the mouth of the harbor, and is gently run alongside the boat in which the man is painting. A fresh-colored young fellow, with ...
— Lippincott's Magazine. Vol. XII, No. 33. December, 1873. • Various
... there is and has been for this long time a fleet of "heretic" lighters sailing out of Boston Bay, and they have been saying, and they say now, and they mean to keep saying, "Pump out your bilge-water, shovel over your loads of idle ballast, get out your old rotten cargo, and we will carry it out into deep waters and sink it where it will never be seen again; so shall the ark of the world's hope float on the ocean, instead of sticking in the ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... scarce, a number of French-Canadians were, at Mr. Brassey's suggestion, brought up in organized gangs, each having an Englishman or an American as their leader. We are told, however, that they proved useless except for very light work. "They could ballast, but they could not excavate. They could not even ballast as the English navvy does, continuously working at filling for the whole day. The only way in which they could be useful was by allowing them to fill the ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... to lodge a protest against you, Mr. Annixter, in the matter of keeping your line fence in repair. The sheep were all over the track last night, this side the Long Trestle, and I am afraid they have seriously disturbed our ballast along there. We—the railroad—can't fence along our right of way. The farmers have the prescriptive right of that, so we have to look to you to keep your fence in repair. I am sorry, but I shall have to protest——" Annixter returned to the hammock and stretched ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... cottage an old dinghy sail that fits the Moondaisy. Her yard and boom were in his linhay, the sheet and downhaul in Tony's. One oar, the tholepins, and the ballast bags have not yet been found. I bent on the sail, spliced the sheet to the boom; borrowed tholepins from Uncle Jake,[7] ballast bags and a mackerel line with a very rusty hook from Tony, an oar from John—and, ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... cheerfully we shall not stand on our rights, but shall give you an equal portion of it with ourselves. At present the gold is of no more value to any of us than so much sand, beyond the fact that if we build a craft, as the senor and I have been talking of doing, the boxes will be found excellent ballast, otherwise it is not worth a thought ...
— With Cochrane the Dauntless • George Alfred Henty
... since I have been in the office, it hath been customary for said Cockle to receive of the masters of vessels entering from Lisbon, casks of wine, boxes of fruit, etc., which was a gratuity for suffering their vessels to be entered with salt or ballast only, and passing over unnoticed such cargoes of wine, fruit, etc., which are prohibited to be imported into His Majesty's Plantations. Part of which wine, fruit, etc., the said James Cockle used to share with Governor Bernard. And I further declare that I used to be the negotiator of this ...
— The Eve of the Revolution - A Chronicle of the Breach with England, Volume 11 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Carl Becker
... families which, if not noble themselves, are allied to nobility,—and as to my "rise in the world"—if I had risen, it would have been rather for balloon-like qualities than for mother-wit, to being unencumbered with heavy ballast either in my head or my pockets. However, it was my cue to ...
— The Grey Woman and other Tales • Mrs. (Elizabeth) Gaskell
... this officer, a copy of which is also enclosed, confirms everything, extolling the grandeur of the view of the port, the water, wood, and ballast with which it abounds, and although the climate is rather cold, it is healthy and free from the fogs found ...
— The March of Portola • Zoeth S. Eldredge
... "I want them for ballast to steady us with all this sail up," said the mate, smiling; and without any pause the second boat was drawn close up astern, four men crept into the leader, and the rope was allowed to run ...
— Jack at Sea - All Work and no Play made him a Dull Boy • George Manville Fenn
... companions, "let the poor lad alone; he hasn't a mind for the drink, perhaps he ain't used to it, and it'll only make him top heavy. You can see he wants ballast; he'll be over on his beam-ends the first squall if he takes the ale and ...
— Frank Oldfield - Lost and Found • T.P. Wilson
... lately, the cemetery of the city; the space enclosed within its marble galleries is filled to the depth of eight or ten feet, with earth from the Holy Land. The vessels which carried the knights of Tuscany to Palestine were filled at Joppa, on returning, with this earth as ballast, and on arriving at Pisa it was deposited in the Cemetery. It has the peculiar property of decomposing all human bodies, in the space of two days. A colonnade of marble encloses it, with windows of the most exquisite sculpture opening on the inside. They ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... Men were weighed by their dollars, measures gauged by their dollars; life was auctioneered, appraised, put up, and knocked down for its dollars. The next respectable thing to dollars was any venture having their attainment for its end. The more of that worthless ballast, honour and fair-dealing, which any man cast overboard from the ship of his Good Name and Good Intent, the more ample stowage-room he had for dollars. Make commerce one huge lie and mighty theft. Deface ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... keep them off his pillow: To whom the factor replyed, that they had a strange beast aboard which he made no doubt would rid them of those vermine: which being told the king he rose from his place and imbracing the factor told him if he could shew him such a creature he would ballast his vessel with silver and lade her with gold and pearl. Who apprehending the occasion made very coy of the business, telling him it was a creature of great value and not common. Besides they could not spare her from the ship, in regard when they were asleep yet she was still waking in the night, ...
— The History of Sir Richard Whittington • T. H.
... the United States for any foreign port, except vessels under the immediate direction of the President. Foreign armed vessels were exempted as a matter of course from the operation of this act; so also were all vessels in ballast or already loaded with goods at the time when the act was passed. Coasting vessels were to give bonds double the value of vessel and cargo to re-land their goods, wares, or merchandise in some port of ...
— Union and Democracy • Allen Johnson
... just take another look at the water tank valves," said Tom to himself as he prepared to enter the big compartments which received the water ballast. "I want to be sure they work properly and quickly. We've got to depend on them to make us sink when we want to, and, what's more important, to rise to the surface in a hurry. I've got time enough to look them over before dad and Mr. Sharp ...
— Tom Swift and his Submarine Boat - or, Under the Ocean for Sunken Treasure • Victor Appleton
... than half as long as they should, if once thoroughly constructed. Wooden bridges are allowed to rot down for want of protection. Rails are left to be battered to pieces for want of drainage and ballast. One road spends thirty-four thousand dollars a year for "watching cuts," and fifty-five thousand more for removing slides that should never have taken place. Everything is done for the moment, and nothing thoroughly. Who can wonder that this system tells ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... lady,' the Guard was saying. 'You're good ballast. You can keep the train down. That's something. Steady thinking's always best, ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... saddened by his unsatisfactory career. Writing to his friend Moore (5th August) he says: "I hope your eldest son will do well in the distant land to which he has gone. My son is in the Federal army in America, and no comfort. The secret ballast is often applied by a kind hand above, when to outsiders we appear to be sailing gloriously ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... "With ballast on board, but none in his brain, Away went our gallant Gantheaume, On a voyage from Brest to Bertheaume, And then from Bertheaume—to ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... morning of the 4th the Alliance appeared again, and (p. 102) had brought to two very small coasting sloops in ballast, but without having attended properly to my orders of yesterday. The Vengeance joined me soon after, and informed me that in consequence of Captain Landais' orders to the commanders of the two prize ships, they had refused to follow him to the rendezvous. I am to this ...
— The Medallic History of the United States of America 1776-1876 • J. F. Loubat
... much the same thing, with all the readers of Notes and Queries, we propose, on Saturday next, treating them to a Christmas Number, rich in articles on Folk Lore, Popular Literature, &c., and to use as ballast for our barque, which will at such occasion be of unwonted lightness, a number of Replies which we have by us imploring ...
— Notes and Queries, 1850.12.21 - A Medium of Inter-communication for Literary Men, Artists, - Antiquaries, Genealogists, etc. • Various
... gone under the arch, and am clear of all obstructions, I lay the sculls aside, and reclining let the boat drift past a ballast punt moored over the shallowest place, and with a rising load of gravel. One man holds the pole steadying the scoop, while his mate turns a windlass the chain from which drags it along the bottom, filling the bag with pebbles, and finally hauls it to the surface, ...
— Nature Near London • Richard Jefferies
... tack held freely in my hand - With ballast snug—I put about, and scudded for the land; Loud hissed the sea beneath her lee—my little boat flew fast, But faster still the rushing storm came borne upon ...
— Playful Poems • Henry Morley
... this have been outrun and absorbed by Spain or France. To stand still is to retreat. It is the same with men as it is with races. England's Colonies have been her strength. They have given her poise, reserve, ballast—and enough trouble to prevent either ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... swam to the shore, and when the dawn came we saw that the schooner stood high and dry on the reef and that Franka and his men were trying to float her by throwing overboard the iron ballast and putting a kedge anchor out upon the lee side of the reef. And at the same time we saw three boats put off from the mainland. These boats were all painted white, and when I saw them I said to Solepa, 'Be of good heart. Thy husband is not dead, for here are three of his boats ...
— By Rock and Pool on an Austral Shore, and Other Stories • Louis Becke
... and Grace Ferrall had taken to motoring, driving away into the interior or taking long flights north and south along the coast. Sometimes they took Quarrier, sometimes, when Mrs. Ferrall drove, they took in ballast in the shape of a superfluous Page boy and a girl for him. Once Grace Ferrall asked Siward to join them; but no definite time being set, he was scarcely surprised to find them gone when he returned from a morning on the snipe meadows. And Sylvia, leagues away by that time, curled up in the tonneau ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... some time at an elevation of about 2000 ft., it descended in about two hours at Nesle, a small town about 27 m. from Paris, when Robert left the car, and Charles made a, second ascent by himself. He had intended to have replaced the weight of his companion by a nearly equivalent quantity of ballast; but not having any suitable means of obtaining such at the place of descent, and it being just upon sunset, he gave the word to let go, and the balloon being thus so greatly lightened, ascended very rapidly to a height of about 2 m. After staying ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... only country manufacturing rubber articles, and her best market soon proved to be North America. Probably the first rubber this country saw was brought to New England in clipper ships as ballast in the form of crude lumps and balls. Rubber shoes, water-bottles, powder-flasks, and tobacco-pouches found buyers in the American ports, but rubber shoes were most ...
— The Romance of Rubber • United States Rubber Company
... in good order in the soul. When Job perceived that his friends did not deal with him in an even spirit and orderly manner, he said that they forsook "the fear of the Almighty" (Job 6:14). For this fear keeps a man even in his words and judgment of things. It may be compared to the ballast of the ship, and to the poise of the balance of the scales; it keeps all even, and also makes us steer our course right with respect to the things that pertain ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... assign'd. He deck'd her over with long planks, upborne On massy beams; He made the mast, to which He added suitable the yard;—he framed Rudder and helm to regulate her course, With wicker-work he border'd all her length For safety, and much ballast stow'd within. Meantime, Calypso brought him for a sail Fittest materials, which he also shaped, And to his sail due furniture annex'd 310 Of cordage strong, foot-ropes, and ropes aloft, Then heav'd her down with levers to the Deep. He finish'd all his work ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer
... grandeur consists in the fact hat he tore himself clear of all those peddling and pitiful compromises, those half humorous concessions, those lazy conventionalisms, with which most people cover their brains as if with wool, and ballast their imagination as ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... bring her home. He had picked ten men from the "George Henry," leaving her fifteen, and with a rough tracing of the American coast drawn on a sheet of foolscap, with his lever watch and a quadrant for his instruments, he squared off for New London. A rough, hard passage they had of it. The ship's ballast was gone, by the bursting of the tanks; she was top-heavy and under manned. He spoke a British whaling bark, and by her sent to Captain Kellett his epaulettes, and to his own owners news that he was coming. They had heavy gales and head winds, were driven as far down as the Bermudas; ...
— The Man Without a Country and Other Tales • Edward E. Hale
... which were characteristic of the times of Ronsard. So far as poets were concerned, that generation must be regarded as entering on a first romanticism. Theophilus de Vian, a fine but over-prodigal poet, without ballast, did not live long enough to grow wise and acquire self-mastery: Cyrano de Bergerac was a brilliant madman, sometimes sparkling with wit and imagination, but often dirty and ridiculous. Saint-Amant possessed plenty of imagination ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... commonest forms is the field horse-tail (Equisetum arvense), a very abundant and widely distributed species. It grows in low, moist ground, and is often found in great abundance growing in the sand or gravel used as "ballast" for railway tracks. ...
— Elements of Structural and Systematic Botany - For High Schools and Elementary College Courses • Douglas Houghton Campbell
... operations been favoured by highwaymen. Fat purses were few in those parts, and if he attempted to rob a farmer homeward bound from fair or tryst—one who, perhaps, like Dandie Dinmont on such an occasion, temporarily carried rather more sail than he had ballast for—a knight of the road would have been quite as likely to take a broken ...
— Stories of the Border Marches • John Lang and Jean Lang
... an article of great scarcity in the South. Coming over from Liverpool in ante bellum times as ballast, made it so cheap that little attention was given to the salt industry, and most of our best salt mines were in the hands of the enemy. But the Southern people were equal to any emergency. Men were put along the sea coast and erected great vats into which was put the ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... any of the enemy's vessels she may happen to fall in with, who are not strong enough to resist her. We had cleared out for Genoa with a cargo of lead, which lay at the bottom of the hold, and which merely served for ballast. ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Captain Frederick Marryat
... sound conscience with regard to the affair that you wot of. As for your remaining free, that's all very well to think during the interregnum, but a man without a true love is a ship without ballast, a one-tined fork, half a pair of scissors, an utter flash in the pan.... So you are going home, my dear Morse, and God knows if ever I shall see you again. Pardon, I pray you, anything of levity which you may have been offended at in me. ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Samuel F. B. Morse
... one day, on the wharf of Mr. Waters; and seeing two Irishmen unloading a large scow of stone, or ballast I went on board, unasked, and helped them. When we had finished the work, one of the men came to me, aside, and asked me a number of questions, and among them, if I were a slave. I told him "I was a slave, and a slave for life." The good Irishman gave his shoulders ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... cliffs, its deep, safe bay and its velvet sand. What matter? The wind is fair and you are for Calabria with twenty tons of macaroni from Amalfi. There is no time to be lost, either, for you will probably come home in ballast. Past Scalea, then, where tradition says that Judas Iscariot was born and bred and did his first murder. Right ahead is the sharp point of the Diamante, beyond that low shore where the cane brake grows to ...
— The Children of the King • F. Marion Crawford
... believe it, Ford. You're blue because Mr. Colbrith has thrown Mr. North into your boat as ballast. I don't blame you: but you mustn't let it ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde
... hands, and Huger had disappeared without signaling us, when our pilots informed us that Harrison's Bar, which we must cross, drew only eighteen feet of water. Under their advice, on the night of May 11th we lightened ship by throwing overboard all our coal and ballast, thus raising our unprotected decks above water. At last all was ready—and then we found that the wind which had been blowing down-stream all day had swept the water off the bar. When morning dawned ...
— The Monitor and the Merrimac - Both sides of the story • J. L. Worden et al.
... friend; there's nothing like plenty of work to help keep a person out of mischief; but, after all, he must have steadiness and good principles. They alone are to be depended on, and I hope your son has got those as ballast." ...
— Hendricks the Hunter - The Border Farm, a Tale of Zululand • W.H.G. Kingston
... oars, mind his helm, and bring alongside a short allowance of brandy or grog, that he might cant a slug into his bread-room, for there was such a heaving and pitching, that he believed he should shift his ballast. The fellow understood no part of this address but the word brandy, at mention of which he disappeared. Then Crowe, throwing himself into an elbow chair, "Stop my hawse-holes," cried he, "I can't think what's the matter, brother; ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... and the chain and sail locker was a spacious hold. Six large steel tanks built into the bottom of the hold served for the storage of fresh water and at any time when empty could be filled with seawater, offering a ready means of securing emergency ballast. ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... wind, just touching the water here and there. There was scarcely a cloud in the sky, and nothing whatever to suggest a squall. But as he looked again, a suspicious wisp of white water lifted suddenly from the surface a few yards to windward. Like a flash he remembered that the boat had no ballast in her, and was running with her sheets made fast. Instinctively he leaned forward to let go the foresail, but at the same moment the squall struck the boat like the hammer of Thor. Relieved of the fore canvas, the trap should have come to the wind in an instant. Instead, leaning over ...
— Labrador Days - Tales of the Sea Toilers • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... property of Mr. Bates. Standing near the side, he had observed Rex and Fair bring up a great pig of iron, erst used as part of the ballast of the brig, and poise it on the rail. Their intention was but too evident; and honest Bates, like a faithful watch-dog, barked to warn his master. Bloodthirsty Cheshire caught him by the throat, and Frere, unheeding, ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... new truth when it has gained a certain degree of acceptance, always pass over all at once in masses. They are like the ballast with which every ship is always loaded, at once to keep it upright and enable it to sail properly. If there were no ballast, the ship would not be low enough in the water, and would shift its position at the slightest change in its conditions. This ballast, ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... The British Empire, like the Roman, was built up by dull men. It may be we shall be ruined by clever ones. Imagine a regiment of lively and eccentric privates! There never was a statesman yet who had not some ballast of stupidity, and it seems to me that part at least of the essentials of a genius is a certain divine dulness. The people we used to call the masters—Shakespeare, Raphael, Milton, and so forth—had a certain simplicity Crichton lacks. They do not scintillate nearly so much as he does, and ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... Boyle. "Reminds me of a skipper I once sailed with, bound from Rotterdam to Hull in ballast. There was a Scotch mist best part of the trip, an' the old man loaded with schnapps to keep out the damp. First time he got a squint of the sun he went as yaller as a Swede turnip. 'It's all up with us, boys,' he said. 'My missus is forty fathoms below. We've just sailed over York.' You ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... was born when I was very young and have been desperately tidy about my morals ever since, but for fear of stumbling just because I'm so bored I have entrenched myself behind a maddening routine. Six months here ought to put ballast into the brain ...
— Letters of a Dakota Divorcee • Jane Burr
... increase the weight of the pole leaving the sun, by increasing the amount of material there for the sun to attract, and to lighten the pole approaching or turning towards the sun, by removing some heavy substance from it, and putting it preferably at the opposite pole. This shifting of ballast is most easily accomplished, as you will readily perceive, by confining and removing water, which is easily moved and has a considerable weight. How we purpose to apply these aqueous brakes to check the wabbling of the earth, by means of the attraction ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor
... had left the whaler in such a hurry, that they had only had time to throw into the boat two breakers of water, four empty breakers to fill with saltwater for ballast to the boat, and the iron pitch kettle, with a large sack ...
— The Little Savage • Captain Marryat
... passengers, two on each side. On such occasions, the driver sits on a little seat over the well, looking to the front, while the passengers' backs are turned toward each other. Having only one passenger, Andy decided to sit on the opposite side of the car to ballast her evenly. After Paul bid good-bye to the coast guard and thanked him for his hospitality, he placed his rubber suit on the forward part of the seat and sprung up behind. Andy seemed in no hurry to get under way. A multitude of knots in the harness required attention and he carefully ...
— The Story of Paul Boyton - Voyages on All the Great Rivers of the World • Paul Boyton
... with himself. He liked to follow the whim of the moment, whither it would lead him. He was romantic; it was one of his agreeablest traits, because spontaneous; and he indulged it the more, as being confident that he had too much solid ballast in the hold to be in danger of upsetting. To-night, at this point of his mental ramble, he found that his cigar had gone out. Had he been thinking aloud? He believed not, and yet there was no telling; he often did so, unconsciously. Were it ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... skipper! Put the whole cargo aboard! This here craft needs ballast; hoist her over the side!" And he reached out his hand for the whole plug of tobacco and took it from Freddie, and gnawed off a corner with ...
— The Old Tobacco Shop - A True Account of What Befell a Little Boy in Search of Adventure • William Bowen
... will not undertake to say, for certain, that the stout man was paid for doing this; but, as his hands were small and remarkably white, indications that he toiled not with them, and as he made his appearance on deck only when movable ballast was wanted, I am bound to suppose that he secured a living by sitting heavily and throwing himself on for weight, in circumstances under which such actions command a ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... be devoted to poetry, both as regarded original verse and the critical appreciation of modern poetry as a whole. Articles on art, music, the drama, were all to find a home in his pages; and there was to be a judicious sprinkling of science to add a little ballast ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... Skipper Bill said to Sir Archibald, running his eyes over the tall, trim spars of the new craft; "an' once she gets t' sea she's got ballast enough t' stand up to a sousing breeze. With any sort o' civil weather she ought t' make Ruddy ...
— Billy Topsail & Company - A Story for Boys • Norman Duncan
... this happened the Woodwards had not been long at Torquay. Mr. Peppermint was made a happy man before Christmas; and therefore Charley was left to drift before the wind without the ballast of any lady's love to keep him in sailing trim. Poor fellow! he had had wealth on one side, beauty and love on another, and on the third all those useful qualities which Miss Geraghty has been described as possessing. He had been thus surrounded ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... reach the Ladrones. There we filled our water-butts, and I took on board a large anchor that I found there that had belonged formerly to the flagship lost there by Ffelipe de Sauzedo; in the other ship we placed four small boat-loads of ballast. All this detained us only a day and a half. On nearing the cape of Spiritu Santo in Tandaya, one of the Philipinas, our progress was impeded by the vendaval, and our pilots also gave us considerable trouble, so that I arrived at Manilla ...
— The Philippine Islands 1493-1898, Vol. 4 of 55 - 1576-1582 • Edited by E. H. Blair and J. A. Robertson
... kindly brought on board a basket of ripe apples for me, besides fresh meat, vegetables, bread, butter, and milk. The deck is all bustle with custom-house officers, and men unloading a part of the ship's freight, which consists chiefly of rum, brandy, sugar, and coals, for ballast. We are to leave Quebec by five o'clock this evening. The British America, a superb steam-vessel of three decks, takes us in tow as far as Montreal. I must ...
— The Backwoods of Canada • Catharine Parr Traill
... of an hour. There were forty-five other ships, each capable of carrying some fifty tons of small stones and rubble. These latter cargoes were shot into the water in much the manner that ordinary ballast is unloaded. ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... was the only available means of propelling vessels by electrical power, and considering that these batteries might be made to serve the purpose of keel ballast, their weight, which was still considerable, would not be objectionable. The secondary battery was not an entirely new conception. The hydrogen gas battery suggested by Sir Wm. Grove in 1841, and which was shown in operation, realized in the most perfect manner the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 384, May 12, 1883 • Various
... men—vikings, Swedes, and Danes — lost their lives on this bridge. So when Erik saw that King Olaf was gaining the upper hand of him he got his berserks to take down the oars and to fling them over the Serpent's nearer gunwale, together with all logs of wood, spars, ballast stones, and other weighty things that could be found. And as the weight increased so did the Serpent lean over, until at last her bulwarks were almost on a level with ...
— Olaf the Glorious - A Story of the Viking Age • Robert Leighton
... professor, living for some reason in London, takes on some adventurous and rich Englishmen, and sets off with them in an airship that is made of a material so light that it can rise vertically into the air if you pump out some of the air in its ballast tanks. It can also plunge into the depths of the ocean, because this special material, aetherium, is so strong that it can withstand water pressure to a ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... one of the candles newly placed on the washstand. He pushed the electric button summoning the steward, and, giving him some money, asked if there was such a thing as a piece of stone on board, carried as ballast, or for any other reason. The steward said he would inquire, and finally returned with a sharpening stone used for the knives in the galley. Bolting his door, Lermontoff began an experiment, and at once forgot ...
— A Rock in the Baltic • Robert Barr
... more important things to think about," Mr. Skinner retorted icily. As a business man he was opposed to levity in the office. "What are your plans with reference to the Retriever? Do you wish to bring her back from Antofagasta in ballast?" ...
— Cappy Ricks • Peter B. Kyne
... equipment had been allowed to fall into disrepair under indifferent supervision and the short-handing of the section gangs—always an impractical directory's first retrenchment when the dividends begin to fail. Lidgerwood had seen how the ballast had been suffered to sink at the rail-joints, and he had read the record of careless supervision at each fresh swing of the train, since it is the section foreman's weakness to spoil the geometrical curve by working it back, little by ...
— The Taming of Red Butte Western • Francis Lynde
... in cliques at home and within our walls, and later we exported this plague to the camps. Therefore our city, like a great merchantman full of a crowd of every race borne without a pilot these many years through rough water, rolls and shoots hither and thither because it is without ballast. Do not, then, allow her to be longer exposed to the tempest; for you see that she is waterlogged. And do not let her split upon a reef[5]; for her timbers are rotten and will not be able to hold out much longer. But since the gods have taken pity on this land and have set you up as her ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol. 4 • Cassius Dio
... the resistance of the wings, is thus changed into a perpendicular pressure, acting upwards or downwards according to the position of the wings; by means of which the aeronaut hopes to be enabled to ascend or descend without losing either gas or ballast. ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 431 - Volume 17, New Series, April 3, 1852 • Various
... crew mutinied on New Year's Day in 1681 on the Most Holy Trinity, they clapped their captain in irons and put him down below on the ballast, and elected an old pirate and a "stout seaman," John Watling, in his place. One of the reasons for the revolt was said to be ...
— The Pirates' Who's Who - Giving Particulars Of The Lives and Deaths Of The Pirates And Buccaneers • Philip Gosse
... reply to kindly, polite questioning from the elder of the bunch, a man designated by the name Siwash, how he was lately graduated from the Kansas Agricultural College at Manhattan, and how he had taken the road with a grip full of hardware to get enough ballast in his jeans to keep the winter wind ...
— The Duke Of Chimney Butte • G. W. Ogden
... head-punching spirit might have saved him with all his ballast, but he didn't have it. The Reverend Robert was a good fellow to everybody—a fairly sound-hearted, decent, handsome fellow, but not a man. To be that, one has to know things at first hand—especially work and trouble. He was a second-hand, school-made thinker. His ...
— 'Charge It' - Keeping Up With Harry • Irving Bacheller
... our turn, and I led the way, with a thong fastened around my body below the armpits, and attached, in like manner, to our stalwart alcalde. Long before we reached the middle of the stream, notwithstanding I carried a large stone under each arm by way of ballast, I was swept from my feet out to the length of my tether, and thus towed over by our guide. When all were snugly across, the laughter was loud and long over the ridiculous figure which everybody had cut in everybody's ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... been naughty in her life; she was an independent, quick-tempered child; she had determination, and heaps of courage, but she was always supposed to want ballast. It was the fashion in the house to be a little more lenient to Polly's misdemeanors than to any one else's. When a very little child, Nurse had excused ungovernable fits of rage with the injudicious words, "Poor lamb, she ...
— Polly - A New-Fashioned Girl • L. T. Meade
... altogether exquisite; as well as the contrast of her black and glistering side with those sails, and with the sea. Examine the wayward and delicate play of the dancing waves along her flank, and between her and the brig in ballast, plunging slowly before the wind; I have not often seen anything so perfect in fancy, or ...
— The Harbours of England • John Ruskin
... least to drive deep and hold on while the boarders poured up and over her side. In addition to this formidable weapon, each carried four guns right forward, besides a heavier piece which was worked on a circular platform amidships, and when not required for service was stowed by the mainmast for ballast. Each galley had two masts, though they were next to useless, for it is easy to see that vessels so laden and open at the decks were fit only for the lightest breezes, and in foul weather must run ...
— The Blue Pavilions • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... to tak' the Kite round to Liverpool in water-ballast, and McRimmon came to bid's good-bye, yammerin' an' whinin' o'er the acres o' paint he'd lavished on ...
— The Day's Work, Volume 1 • Rudyard Kipling
... fitted to the top, and by means of it the aeronaut can descend to the earth at will, by allowing some quantity of the gas to escape. The car in which he sits is suspended to the balloon by a network, which covers the whole structure. Sacks of sand are carried in this car as ballast, so that, when descending, if the aeronaut sees that he is likely to be precipitated into the sea or into a lake, he throws over the sand, and his air-carriage, being thus lightened, mounts again and travels away to a more desirable resting-place. The idea of the valve, as well as ...
— Wonderful Balloon Ascents - or, the Conquest of the Skies • Fulgence Marion
... 30, and the bogies enable it to take the incline better; they also distribute the weight more evenly on the wheels. The gauge of the rails is 15 ft, the wheels are 2 ft. 6 in. in diameter, and have heavy steel tires. The weight on each of the front wheels when running with the ballast, but no load, is about 16 tons. A powerful brake is applied to the wheels when ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 312, December 24, 1881 • Various
... staircases, on each of which are six or eight sets of rooms, inhabited by us undergraduates, and here and there a tutor or fellow dropped down amongst us (in the first-floor rooms, of course), not exactly to keep order, but to act as a sort of ballast. This quadrangle is the show part of the college, and is generally respectable and quiet, which is a good deal more than can be said for the inner quadrangle, which you get at through a passage leading out of the other. The rooms ain't half so large or good in the ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... Feu-Follet lay, to permit a vessel like his prize to touch her; and many things lay on deck, in readiness to be transferred to this tender, previously to beginning to heave. The rocks too, were well garnished with casks, cordage, shot, ballast, and such other articles and could be come at—the armament and ammunition excepted. These last our hero always treated with religious care, for in all he did there was a latent determination resolutely ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... forgive when there is magnanimity, vainglory and probably folly in forgiveness, but will not overlook the most trivial affront when there is every reason for so doing. They have brain, but not ballast, and their whole life is usually a lopsided effort to "play to ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs
... vessels in the ports of the United States, whether cleared or not cleared, if bound to any foreign port. Exception was made only in favor of foreign ships, which of course could not be held. They might depart with cargo already on board, or in ballast. Vessels cleared coastwise were to be deterred from turning foreign by bonds exacted in double the value of ship and cargo. American export and foreign navigation were thus completely stopped; and ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... truth, fatal to sound theological doctrine, and deadly to the faith. Those clerics who maintain the rights of science in opposition to him are pernicious doctors and pestilent teachers, and the faithful who approve of them are lacking in either mental or moral ballast. ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... thus have the wind with them when they returned home heavily laden, and with these little navigators the difference is an important one. With a full cargo, a stiff head-wind is a great hindrance, but fresh and empty-handed they can face it with more ease. Virgil says bees bear gravel stones as ballast, but their only ballast is their honey bag. Hence, when I go bee-hunting, I prefer to get to windward of the woods in which the swarm is supposed to ...
— Birds and Bees, Sharp Eyes and, Other Papers • John Burroughs
... dear to the Provencal palate. It sounds very well in verse, but is not very substantial. On such an occasion men would look for that fundamental dish, the plate of red haricots, seasoned with chopped onions. All in good time; this at least would ballast the stomach. Thus refreshed in the open air, listening to the song of the cigales, the gang of harvesters would take their mid-day rest and gently digest their meal in the shadows of the sheaves. ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
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