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More "Breech" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... council was ended with a dram to the Indians. In the evening we exhibited different objects of curiosity, and particularly the air-gun, which gave them great surprise. Those people are almost naked, having no covering except a sort of breech-cloth round the middle, with a loose blanket or buffalo robe, painted, thrown over them. The names of these warriors, besides those already mentioned, were Karkapaha, or Crow's Head, and Nenasawa, or Black Cat, Missouris; and Sananona, or Iron Eyes, ...
— First Across the Continent • Noah Brooks
... gone from the ditch to within a few feet of where I was lying. A little beyond the other end of the building stood two cannon pointing towards me with a group of rebels at the breech of each one of them trying to discharge it. They were two of our own guns that had been captured before they had been fired by our gunners and were still loaded with the double charges of canister intended for ...
— The Battle of Franklin, Tennessee • John K. Shellenberger
... conceived that the peculiarity, 'and they sewed fig tree leaves together, and made themselves breeches,' belongs exclusively to this Bible, but it is a mistake. The Saxon version of AElfric has, {166} 'and sewed fig-leaves, and worked them WEED-BREECH, or cloaths for the breech.' Wicliffe also translates 'and maden hem breechis;' and it is singular that Littleton, in his excellent Dictionary, explains perizomata, the word used in the Vulgate, by breeches. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 70, March 1, 1851 • Various
... ate below, with seaward port-holes blinded, and sweat dripping from our chins. Then we lay on the cabin roof again, in breech-clouts, waiting for a breeze, and showing no light except the red coals ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... in line carried the model of a new rifle which would shoot sixteen times. The army officers believed in the idea of a single shell breech loader on account of the simplicity of its mechanism. Our muskets were still muzzle loaders and the men were compelled to ...
— The Southerner - A Romance of the Real Lincoln • Thomas Dixon
... to call attention; the touch is looser in the ranks than formerly; squares to resist cavalry are no longer used; [Footnote: A British officer, who has had good opportunities, says the infantry drill is second to none.] the Berdan breech-loader is the infantry arm; sergeant-majors wear officers' swords, and ...
— Afghanistan and the Anglo-Russian Dispute • Theo. F. Rodenbough
... sabre-cut, excellenza," replied the man, in a low, tremulous voice. "I was in the breech, fighting hand to hand with a Turk, whom I had just overthrown. While I was stooping over his prostrate body, he drew forth a yataghan and gashed my ...
— Prince Eugene and His Times • L. Muhlbach
... a devilkin lives there as ever put paw and breech upon hidden treasure. 'Tis the ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... cayuse was brought to the front. Red Cloud made a gesture. A sixteen-year-old boy, armed with a quirt, appeared; an Indian gave him a leg up, and, naked to the breech clout on the naked horse, he sat like a statue. Jim got a strange thrill as he recognized him for ...
— The Preacher of Cedar Mountain - A Tale of the Open Country • Ernest Thompson Seton
... at the front! Near by, as part of the same works, which are not specialised, but engaged in general engineering, is a bomb shop staffed by women, which is now sending 3,000 bombs a week to the trenches. Women are also doing gun-breech work of the most delicate and responsible kind under the guidance of a skilled overseer. One of the women at this work was formerly a charwoman. She has never yet broken a tool. All over the works, indeed, the labour of women and unskilled men is ...
— The War on All Fronts: England's Effort - Letters to an American Friend • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... suit he thought most suitable to each Was, for the elder and the stouter, first A Candiote cloak, which to the knee might reach, And trousers not so tight that they would burst, But such as fit an Asiatic breech; A shawl, whose folds in Cashmire had been nursed, Slippers of saffron, dagger rich and handy; In short, all things ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... must have had it in his breech-cloth," remarked the corporal seriously, for not a rag besides had he about him. "No, no it couldn't be him, and ...
— Hardscrabble - The Fall of Chicago: A Tale of Indian Warfare • John Richardson
... to a rope, one att each end, and hang them so all night, throwing red coales att them, or bourning sand, and in such like bourne their feet, leggs, thighs, and breech. The litle ones doe exercise themselves about such cruelties; they deck the bodyes all over with hard straw, putting in the end of this straw, thornes, so leaves them; now & then gives them a litle rest, and sometimes gives them ...
— Voyages of Peter Esprit Radisson • Peter Esprit Radisson
... he expressed them. He was the central sun below stairs, and passed judgment upon the social order without stint, even occasionally to argufying economics with his master, the Baron, as he brushed his breech. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... thrown in the air, and small, slow-winged birds as they flitted near the ground. My father had at first made him practise for a long time without caps, powder, or shot, merely in quickly bringing the stock close to the shoulder, and getting the eye directly behind the breech. When proficiency in that had become a mechanical habit, the gun was loaded, and then commenced the practice of shooting at moving objects. As the art of bringing the gun properly to the cheek had been so thoroughly mastered as to require no effort nor attention, ...
— Captain Mugford - Our Salt and Fresh Water Tutors • W.H.G. Kingston
... place where the gun was mounted. Before he had gone a step he caught sight of the figure of Soa, outlined in bold relief against the background of the fire and surrounded by many of the freed Settlement men. At the instant when he saw her she was in the act of springing back from the breech of the gun, the lanyard in her hand. Then came the roar of the shot and the ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard
... of pretty boys, if they would wash their faces, and were well breech'd[23] in an hour or two. The rest of the green men have reasonable voices, good to sing catches or the great Jowben by the fire's side in a winter's evening. But let us hear what Summer can say for himself, why he should not be ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... denoted him to be, continued motionless in the attitude he had at first assumed—his right cheek reposing on the ornamented stock of his rifle, and his quick and steady eye fixed in one undeviating line with the sight near the breech, and that which surmounted the extreme end of the deadly weapon. No sooner, however, had the head of the advancing column come within sight, than the trigger was pulled, and the small and ragged bullet sped hissing from the grooved and delicate barrel. A triumphant cry was next ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... breach of veracity indicates some latent vice. " bridge " rascality " " latest vice. " breech " feracity " " latinet vice. " preach " eracity " " late device. " branch " vivacity " " great advice. " " " veracity " " late advice. " " " " " " ladovice. " " " " " " ladened vice. Every branch of veracity in the next some latent vice. Every ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart
... are three swivel-guns, located in the three casemates, of about twenty quintals' weight. On the first floor over the rampart, there are seven heavy pieces, extra thick and strong at the breech. Two are of about forty quintals' weight, three varas in length and carry a ball of cast iron weighing sixteen libras. Two others are of wrought iron, of sixty quintals' weight, three and two-thirds varas in length, and carry a ball ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, V7, 1588-1591 • Emma Helen Blair
... works by compressed air," and Tom showed his chum how, when the gun was loaded, the projectile in place, and the breech-block screwed fast, the officer in charge of the firing squad would, on getting the range from the soldier detailed to calculate it, make the necessary adjustments, and ...
— Tom Swift and his Giant Cannon - or, The Longest Shots on Record • Victor Appleton
... Chickahominy was not less peaceful. A couple of batteries lay below us, in the meadows; but the horses were dozing in the harness, and the gunners, standing bolt upright at the breech, seemed parts of their pieces; the teamsters lay grouped in the long grass. Immediately in front, Gaines's Mansion and outhouses spotted a hillside, and we could note beyond a few white tents shining through the trees. The ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... correction I had already received from him for my insolence; for he might not always be in the humour of sparing a wretch who abused his goodness. To this inuendo I made no reply but by a kick on the breech, which overturned him in an instant. He started up with wonderful agility, and, drawing his sword, attacked me with great fury. Several people interposed, but, when he informed them of its being an affair of honour, they retired, and left us to decide the battle by ourselves. I sustained ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett
... applied immediate action, pulled back the cocking-handle and pressed the trigger again. Nothing happened. After one more immediate action test, I examined the gun and found that an incoming cartridge and an empty case were jammed together in the breech. To remedy the stoppage, I had to remove spade-grip and body cover. As I did this, I heard an ominous ta-ta-ta-ta-ta from the returning German scout. My pilot cart-wheeled round and made for the Hun, his gun spitting continuously through the propeller. The two machines ...
— Cavalry of the Clouds • Alan Bott
... joker—in his language as much as anything else. He pursued 'is investigations with the eye of an 'awk outside the galley. He knew better than to advance line-head against Retallick, so he attacked ong eshlong, speakin' his remarks as much as possible into the breech of the starboard four point seven, an' 'ummin' to 'imself. Our chief cook 'ated 'ummin'. 'What's the matter of your bowels?' he says at last, fistin' out the mess- pork agitated like. "'Don't mind me,' says 'Op. 'I'm only a mildewed buntin'-tosser,' 'e says: 'but ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling
... moccasins of hide, mingling fraternally with their tufted and bepainted visitors, as well as with those rangers, both envied and hated, the savage coureurs de bois of the far Northern fur trade; men bearded, silent, stern, clad in breech-clout and leggings like any savage, as silent, as stoical, as hardy on the trail as on the narrow ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough
... prepared to throw it at his enemy. Morgan struck with the butt of his gun, and the Indian hurled his tomahawk at one and the same moment. Both blows took effect; and both of the combatants were at once wounded and disarmed. The breech of the rifle was broken against the Indian's skull, and the edge of the tomahawk was shattered against the barrel of the rifle, having first cut off two of the fingers of Morgan's left hand. The Indian ...
— Thrilling Adventures by Land and Sea • James O. Brayman
... more accuracy. A long course of mathematical experiment and calculation has determined the exact pressure of a charge of powder at all points in the bore of a cannon during its combustion and evolution into gas. These experiments have proved that strength is principally required near the breech, and that a cannon need not be of so great length as was formerly supposed to be necessary. We are thus able to construct guns which can be handled, throwing balls of several hundred pounds' weight. Another splendid result of scientific investigation is the ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... the breech plug before turning on the power," said the German, "but I had no reason to suspect that anything was wrong." He went on to explain that the explosion was something like that which occurs when the breech-block of a big navy ...
— Lost on the Moon - or In Quest Of The Field of Diamonds • Roy Rockwood
... indictment, which was in the usual form. It charged Laura Hawkins, in effect, with the premeditated murder of George Selby, by shooting him with a pistol, with a revolver, shotgun, rifle, repeater, breech-loader, cannon, six-shooter, with a gun, or some other, weapon; with killing him with a slung-shot, a bludgeon, carving knife, bowie knife, pen knife, rolling pin, car, hook, dagger, hair pin, with a hammer, with a screw-driver; with a nail, ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner
... board Lingard gave orders to his mate, and leading Willems on the poop, sat on the breech of one of the brass six-pounders with which his vessel was armed. The boat went off again to bring back the messenger. As soon as it was seen returning dark forms appeared on the brig's spars; then the sails fell in festoons with a swish of their heavy folds, and hung motionless under the ...
— An Outcast of the Islands • Joseph Conrad
... was, in truth, just approaching its height as the two crept near. Four powerful warriors, naked except for the breech clout, were beating incessantly and monotonously upon the Indian drums. These drums (Ga-no-jo) were about a foot in height and the drummer used a single stick. The dance itself was called by the Shawnees, ...
— The Keepers of the Trail - A Story of the Great Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... lasted but a few moments; many of the troops encountered hand to hand, and not having the advantage of bayonets on our side, our riflemen used their pieces as war-clubs, breaking many of them off at the breech. The rout commenced at half-past four, and the pursuit by the main army continued until twilight. ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... Breech, side, back, and other presentations sometimes occur; in all of which instances, the foetus must be turned in such a position that it can be brought away with as little trouble as possible. When this cannot be accomplished, the only resort is embryotomy, or cutting up of the foetus, ...
— Cattle and Their Diseases • Robert Jennings
... except for a slight twinge in his lame knee. But his gun was a wreck. The stock was shattered close to the breech and a twist of his hand broke ...
— The Grizzly King • James Oliver Curwood
... The forward section of the 53rd Battery had one gun destroyed. Lieut. Reeves got the other into the open, and, after firing 850 rounds with it over open sights and having exhausted his ammunition, brought back his detachment and the breech-block. The forward section of the 87th Battery continued firing until rushed by the enemy's infantry. Sergt. Pengelly of the 112th Battery, who was in command of a 15-pounder in an anti-tank position, having had his gun ...
— A Short History of the 6th Division - Aug. 1914-March 1919 • Thomas Owen Marden
... is commenced by those who are present, while the committee run through the tribe or town, and hurry the people to assemble, by knocking on their houses. At this time the committee are naked, (wearing only a breech-clout,) and each carries a paddle, with which he takes up ashes and scatters them about the house in every direction. In the course of the ceremonies, all the fire is extinguished in every hut throughout the tribe, and new fire, ...
— A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison • James E. Seaver
... getting up the chest, Raed and I brought up the cannon-rifle. It was about as much as we could get up the stairs with easily. It was, as the reader will probably remember, set in a light framework of wrought-iron, adjusted to a swivel, and arranged with a screw for raising or lowering the breech at will. The bed-pieces of the framework had been pierced for screws. It was, therefore, but a few minutes' work to bore holes in the top of the chest and drive the screws. Meanwhile the captain, who enjoyed the scheme as well as any of us, split open a ...
— Left on Labrador - or, The cruise of the Schooner-yacht 'Curlew.' as Recorded by 'Wash.' • Charles Asbury Stephens
... her flag and was headed in for the beach. After she had thus surrendered, and before the Americans could board, she was wrecked by her own crew, who opened sea-valves, smashed out dead lights, threw overboard the breech-blocks of their great guns, and in many other ways worked what destruction they could in the time allotted. As a result of this vandalism, the fine ship rolled over on her side soon after striking, and would have slipped off into ...
— "Forward, March" - A Tale of the Spanish-American War • Kirk Munroe
... application are susceptible to change, for in their application the principles are subject to the influence of successive inventions. Gunpowder abolished the bow and arrow and the knight in armour; the bayonet affixed to the musket superseded the pike; the rifle outranged the musket; the breech-loader and the magazine attachment progressively increased the rate of fire; smokeless powder rendered a firing line almost invisible; the flat trajectory of the small-arms bullet increased the danger-zone in an advance; ...
— Lectures on Land Warfare; A tactical Manual for the Use of Infantry Officers • Anonymous
... flown past, and darting through a hatchway, reached the upper deck, where a group of sailors were gathered round a cannon. On its breech an officer had spread a paper, which a big good-natured Connaught man was awkwardly endeavoring to sign. After several floundering attempts with his huge hairy right hand, he suddenly shifted ...
— Harper's Young People, March 9, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... largest yet manufactured in France, have been successfully cast in the foundry of Ruelle near Angouleme. They are made of steel, and are breech loading. The weight of each is 97 tons, without the carriage. The projectile weighs 1,716 pounds, and the charge or powder is 616 pounds. To remove them a special wagon with sixteen wheels has had to be constructed, and the bridges upon the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 417 • Various
... return to Zanzibar and inform the world through the press that Livingstone was alive. They went to Tabora, for Livingstone expected fresh supplies, and in addition Stanley gave him forty men's loads of cloth, glass beads and brass-wire, a canvas boat, a waterproof tent, two breech-loaders and other weapons, ammunition, tools, and cooking utensils. All these things were invaluable to Livingstone, who was determined to remain in Africa at any cost until ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin
... In that at the foot of page 175 the cannon is lying useless upon the earth; one wheel already forms the rude resting-place of a gunner, whilst the other is in the act of being displaced. By the application of a rope round the termination of the breech, and the lifting of the trail of the carriage, care being previously taken that the trunnions are in their respective sockets, a very slight exertion of manual labour is required to put the gun into fighting trim. ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... the manger, and the leaf-picker in the home-field, and Mr. Stoat of Stoneheap, and Sir Squirrel of the Brake, and Reynard Slyboots, and Mr. Hopper the hare, and Greedy Graylegs the wolf, and Bare-breech the bear-cub, and Mrs. Bruin, and Baron Bruin, and a bridal train on the king's highway, and a funeral at the church, and Lady Moon in the sky, and Lord Sun in heaven—and, now I think of it, I'll take ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf (Vol 2 of 17) - Folk-Lore, Fables, And Fairy Tales • Various
... herd, and we would bring back some fresh meat for supper. I had no saddle, as mine had been left at the camp a mile distant, so taking the harness from Brigham, I mounted him bareback and started out after the game, being armed with my celebrated buffalo-killer, "Lucretia Borgia,"—a newly-improved breech-loading needle gun, which I ...
— The Life of Hon. William F. Cody - Known as Buffalo Bill The Famous Hunter, Scout and Guide • William F. Cody
... passed a tea-curing house. This was a long rectangular, one-story building with twenty furnaces arranged, each under an open window, around the sides. In front of each heated furnace with its tray of leaves, a Japanese man, wearing only a breech cloth, and in a state of profuse perspiration, was busy rolling the tea leaves between ...
— Farmers of Forty Centuries - or, Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea and Japan • F. H. King
... Aide-de-Camp. A.S.C. Army Service Corps. B.L. Breech-loading. Battn. Battalion. Brig. divn. Brigade division2 batteries of horse, or 3 of field artillery, commanded by a Lieut.-Colonel. (The term has since been changed to "brigade.") Captn. Captain. C.B. Companion of the Order ...
— History of the War in South Africa 1899-1902 v. 1 (of 4) - Compiled by Direction of His Majesty's Government • Frederick Maurice
... complain that Webb took the matter too coolly. He was all action, but his movements were as deft as they were quick. la the basket which Maggie had furnished with brandy and food he placed the conch-shell used to summon Abram to his meals. Then, taking down a double-barrelled breech-loading gun, he filled ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... he led me from gun to gun slapping hand on breech or trunnion, and as I hearkened 'twas hard to recognise the merry peddler in this short, square, grave-faced gunner who spake with mariner's tongue, hitched ever and anon at the broad belt of his galligaskins, and rolled in ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... figured out on the envelope. Then he took a cylinder about twelve inches long, and almost half as much in diameter, a huge thing, constructed, it seemed, of a substance that was almost as brittle as an eggshell. Into the large hemispherical cavity in the breech of the gun he shoved it. He took another quick look at the light gleaming from the house in the darkness ...
— Guy Garrick • Arthur B. Reeve
... threw a cartridge into the breech, and handed the weapon over, with the remark, "She shoots a trifle high, compared with the average rifle, I've found—perhaps an inch at a hundred ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson
... new breech-loaders now, Mr. Folsom," said the officers. "The Indians have only old percussion-cap rifles, and not ...
— Warrior Gap - A Story of the Sioux Outbreak of '68. • Charles King
... the best of cutlery, knives, hatchets, and saws for their work, and the cooking utensils of civilization. Formerly they were dependent upon the most primitive hunting weapons; now they have repeating rifles, breech-loading shotguns, and an abundance of ammunition. There was not a rifle in the tribe when I first went there. As they have no vegetables, and live solely on meat, blood, and blubber, the possession of guns and ammunition has increased the food-producing capacity of every hunter, ...
— The North Pole - Its Discovery in 1909 under the auspices of the Peary Arctic Club • Robert E. Peary
... He was oiling the breech action of a gun. It was an unusual thing for him to do, at that time of night, in his evening clothes. It never occurred to her, nevertheless, that he was going to shoot himself with that implement. She knew that he was doing it just for occupation—to ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford
... storming such a place. The breech-loading rifles of the Indians thrust through chinks between the rocks were ready to pick off every soldier who showed himself for a moment, while the Indians lay utterly invisible. They were familiar with byways both over and under ground, and could at any ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir
... summer's heat, always a-staling. This object swives girls enow, and fancies himself a handsome fellow, and is not condemned to the mill as an ass? Whatso girl would touch thee, we think her capable of licking the breech ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... point), a genus of plants belonging to the natural order Acanthaceae. The species are natives of the southern parts of Europe and the warmer parts of Asia and Africa. The best-known is Acanthus mollis (brank-ursine, or bears' breech), a common species throughout the Mediterranean region, having large, deeply cut, hairy, shining leaves. Another species, Acanthus spinosus, is so called from its spiny heaves. They are bold, handsome plants, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... Algiers, a nomad robber in Persia, a Bey in Cairo, a Sahib in Bombay—equally at home as gentleman or tribesman? Where shall we find his like again as gatherer of the yellow honey of Berlin and as negotiator in Marseilles (where the discarded Gras breech-loaders of the army grow) and in Muscat? ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren
... with a novelty, the encounter of two tight-rope walkers on a taut rope stretched fully thirty feet in the air. It was proclaimed that they were rivals for the favor of a pretty freedwoman and that they had agreed on this contest as a settlement of their rivalry. Certainly the two, naked save for breech-clouts and each armed with a light lance in one hand and a thin-bladed Gallic sword in the other, neared each other with every sign of caution, enmity and courage. Their sparring for an opening lasted some time, but was breathlessly ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... splinters fly from the solid oak like bright silver sparks in the moonlight. A sharp, piercing cry rose in the air—my soul identified that death-shriek with the voice that I had heard, and I saw the man who was standing with the lanyard of the lock in his hand drop heavily across the breech, and discharge the gun in his fall. Thereupon a blood-red glare shot up in the cold blue sky, as if a volcano had burst forth from beneath the mighty deep, followed by a roar, and a scattering crash, and a mingling of unearthly ...
— Thrilling Narratives of Mutiny, Murder and Piracy • Anonymous
... to his rifle and loaded both barrels. It was a breech-loader. Then he crawled softly to the window, and peered ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... name formerly used for large blunderbusses, as well as for those small pieces of ordnance which were loaded by shifting metal chambers placed in the breech. ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... picturesquely murderous of all weapons, and Black Eagle offered, through the interpreter, to give him a mustang and a fine wolf-skin. The pony was declined, the skin accepted, a quid pro quo being bestowed on the chief in the shape of one of Mr. Ramsay's breech-loaders, a gift that made the snake eyes glitter. But what earthly return can be made for some friendly offices? Could a thousand guns be considered as an adequate payment for the delirious thrill that Mr. Ramsay felt when he shot an arrow straight through the neck of a big buffalo, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, August, 1885 • Various
... service, and they are being discharged as rapidly as they can be replaced by regular troops. The Army has been promptly paid, carefully provided with medical treatment, well sheltered and subsisted, and is to be furnished with breech-loading small arms. The military strength of the nation has been unimpaired by the discharge of volunteers, the disposition of unserviceable or perishable stores, and the retrenchment of expenditure. Sufficient war material to meet ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Andrew Johnson • Andrew Johnson
... water out of the tube, opened the breech-door; and, reaching in with a long, heavy wire, lifted the starting lever and water tripper that gave motion to the torpedo's engine. The exhaust of air into the tube was driven out into the ...
— The Wreck of the Titan - or, Futility • Morgan Robertson
... wore very little clothing in winter and none in the summer. Women usually wore a primitive skirt, which consisted of a piece of cotton cloth fastened about the waist, and extending to the knees. Men wore breech cloths and moccasins. In winter they had shirts ...
— Geronimo's Story of His Life • Geronimo
... knave, hence, I beseech you! For if you hit me, knave, in faith I'll breech you." ...
— Lyrics from the Song-Books of the Elizabethan Age • Various
... rage, and did not answer. There were with Manka six men—all armed with rifles which loaded at the breech like that which he had given Manaia, and Manka was too great a man for even Tamavili to hurt. But suddenly, as we in the canoe sailed in between the boat and the taumualua, the old chief found his voice, and called out to ...
— A Memory Of The Southern Seas - 1904 • Louis Becke
... precedent or as an estoppel (Johnson, "The Southern Presbyterians," pp. 335, 359). But it is natural, no doubt, that exscinding acts should look different when examined from the muzzle instead of from the breech. ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... Winchester, and, holding it in front of him, jerked down the lever as he had seen Dorothy do, so as to eject the old and put a fresh cartridge into the breech. But the old cartridge, in springing out, flew up and hit him such a smart rap between the eyes that Leon at once seized his little opportunity ...
— The Rising of the Red Man - A Romance of the Louis Riel Rebellion • John Mackie
... to be cruel, And dare you think of mercy? I'le tell thee fool, Those that surpriz'd thee, were my instruments, I can plot too good Madam, you shall find it: And in the stead of licking of my fingers, Kneeling and whining like a boy new breech'd, To get a toy forsooth, not worth an apple, Thus make my way, and with Authority Command ...
— The Little French Lawyer - A Comedy • Francis Beaumont
... were cooking up something. They've got some Indians in it too. Saw them rehearsing old Thunder Mountain the other day in nothing but a breech-clout." ...
— Tish, The Chronicle of Her Escapades and Excursions • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... of the young Onondaga and was intercepted by the huge figure of Tandakora, the Ojibway, who stood erect by one of the fires, bare save for a breech cloth and moccasins, his body painted in the most hideous designs, of which war paint was ...
— The Masters of the Peaks - A Story of the Great North Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... combustion and respiration, the elevation of the continents, the laws of gravitation, the undulatory theory of light and heat, steam as a motive power in navigation, flying machines, the invention of the camera obscura, magnetic attraction, the use of the stone saw, the system of canalisation, breech loading cannon, the construction of fortifications, the circulation of the blood, the swimming belt, the wheelbarrow, the composition of explosives, the invention of paddle wheels, the smoke stack, the mincing machine! It is, therefore, ...
— Leonardo da Vinci • Maurice W. Brockwell
... Louis, perhaps the first thing to engage attention is the strange mixture of nations—representatives, he might at first be inclined to imagine, of half the countries of the earth. He stares at a Coolie from Madras with a breech-cloth and soldier's jacket, or a stately, bearded Moor, striking a bargain with a Parsee merchant; a Chinaman, with two bundles slung on a bamboo, hurries past, jostling a group of young Creole exquisites smoking their cheroots at a corner, and talking of last night's ...
— 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
... did not understand what was meant, and turned haughtily upon the speaker, totally unconscious of the fact that he was exactly behind the breech of the piece, whose recoil ...
— The Young Castellan - A Tale of the English Civil War • George Manville Fenn
... slate-edge gashed it. The wound was severe. For many years a long white cicatrice recorded the fact in my right hand. The ordeal was, I fancy, unique - a prerogative of the naval 'bull-dogs.' The other torture was, in those days, not unknown to public schools. It was to hold a boy's back and breech as near to a hot fire as his clothes would bear without burning. I have an indistinct recollection of a boy at one of our largest public schools being thus exposed, and left tied to chairs while his companions were at church. ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... the Sioux and their allies armed with the best modern breech-loaders, well supplied with ammunition and countless herds of war ponies, and far too numerous and powerful to be handled by the ...
— Starlight Ranch - and Other Stories of Army Life on the Frontier • Charles King
... gun to free the breech from the fork when Joe caught him by the shoulder and tried to ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... disputed his authority. His colleagues became his clerks. The treasury was empty, but he re-filled it. The arsenal was half empty, but in six weeks one great army, and almost two, were supplied with artillery, horses, gunners, and breech-loaders. The Lyons Reds had been told that they were wicked fools, and Communists and Anarchists ripe for revolt in Toulouse, Lyons, and Marseilles had been put down. The respectables everywhere rose at his summons, anarchy ...
— France in the Nineteenth Century • Elizabeth Latimer
... that was something between a hat and a turban, and over his baggy Turkish trousers hung a long Persian coat of bright-colored, large-figured cloth, bound at the waist by a belt of cartridges. Across the shoulders was slung a breech-loading Martini rifle, and from his neck dangled a heavy gold chain, which was probably the spoil of some predatory expedition. A quiet dignity sat on ...
— Across Asia on a Bicycle • Thomas Gaskell Allen and William Lewis Sachtleben
... illustration. The pain must have been acute, for the creature fell on its knees, drove its nose into the ground, and produced a miniature earthquake with a snort. Then it sprang up and rushed at its foe. Ian was reloading swiftly for his life. Vain hope. Men used to breech-loaders can scarce understand the slow operations of muzzle-loaders. He had only got the powder in, and was plucking a bullet from his pouch. Another moment and he would have been down, when crack! ...
— The Red Man's Revenge - A Tale of The Red River Flood • R.M. Ballantyne
... Smooth, the silkman; Shallow and Silence, country justices; Elbow and Hull, constables; Dogberry and Verges, Fang and Snare, sheriffs' officers; Mouldy, Shadow, Wart, and Bull-calf, recruits; Feebee, at once a recruit and a woman's tailor, Pilch and Patch-Breech, fishermen (though these last two appellations may be mere nicknames); Potpan, Peter Thump, Simple, Gobbo, and Susan Grindstone, servants; Speed, "a clownish servant"; Slender, Pistol, Nym, Sneak, Doll ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy
... scene with Peter yesterday. Rex has two guns, you must know—a rifle, and an old fowling-piece—good enough in its way, but awfully old-fashioned (not a breech-loader), and he determined to make old Peter a present of this, for he is a good old fellow, and does not cheat one, and we had resolved to give him something, and we knew this would delight him. I wish you could have seen him. ...
— Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books • Horatia K. F. Eden
... afternoon, "you must see our 'Wild Irishman' here before you say you've yet found the queerest, brightest, cleverest chap in all your travels. What d'ye say, Stockford?" And the Major paused in his work of charging cartridges for his new breech-loading shotgun and turned to await ...
— Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley • James Whitcomb Riley
... them from the wast downeward; and another ouer their shoulder, with their right arme out, like vnto the Egyptians. The men weare but one mantle vpon their shoulders after the same manner: and haue their secrets hid with a Deeres skin, made like a linen breech, which was wont to be vsed in Spaine. The skins are well corried, and they giue them what colour they list, so perfect, that if it be red, it seemeth a very fine cloath in graine, and the blacke is most fine: and of the same leather they make shooes; and they die their mantles in the same colours. ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of - the English Nation. Vol. XIII. America. Part II. • Richard Hakluyt
... indeed Silvertip. But how changed! Stripped of the blanket he had worn at the settlement, now standing naked but for his buckskin breech-cloth, with his perfectly proportioned form disclosed in all its sinewy beauty, and on his swarthy, evil face an expression of savage scorn, he surely looked a warrior ...
— The Spirit of the Border - A Romance of the Early Settlers in the Ohio Valley • Zane Grey
... was in the rest, of stately beech: Nothing was wanting, but a Page, or 'Squire;— The Duke, with thistles, switch'd old Dumpling's breech; And off he ...
— Broad Grins • George Colman, the Younger
... subject being the duties of hospitality. He did not at the time know how nearly the speech concerned him, or that its object was to preserve his life. This, however, soon became manifest when, exception being taken to some breech of etiquette by one of his servants, he was surrounded by a mob of shouting savages, whose evident object was to put an end to him and those with him. For two hours he remained sitting there, expecting that every moment would be his last, but showing not the slightest emotion, till at length ...
— Cetywayo and his White Neighbours - Remarks on Recent Events in Zululand, Natal, and the Transvaal • H. Rider Haggard
... or three days to get ready in, I began doing the best I could. I found an old saddle tree which had been thrown away, and managed to fix it up so I could use it. I also found an old gun some traveler had left, and with a little work I fitted the breech of that to my own gun which was broken, and had been roughly tied together with strips of raw-hide. I now had a good sound gun if it was not very handsome. I bought a Spanish blanket, not so wide as ours, but coarse and strong, and having a hole in the center through which to put the head ...
— Death Valley in '49 • William Lewis Manly
... breech is opened by pulling back the bolt, a projection on the latter strikes the carrier at N, causing its front extremity to raise the cartridge into the position shown in the section. This movement is accelerated by the spring, A, acting against a knife-edge projection ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 601, July 9, 1887 • Various
... interview with Vaubois; which, I believe, is a lie: and, as to his conduct with the Maltese, it was, probably, to shew his consequence. I am sure, the good queen never had a thought of any under-hand work against us; therefore, I would recommend sending him here with a kick in the breech, and let ...
— The Life of the Right Honourable Horatio Lord Viscount Nelson, Vol. II (of 2) • James Harrison
... cohort stood over the cloisters of the temple, [for they always were armed, and kept guard at the festivals, to prevent any innovation which the multitude thus gathered together might make,] one of the soldiers pulled back his garment, and cowering down after an indecent manner, turned his breech to the Jews, and spake such words as you might expect upon such a posture. At this the whole multitude had indignation, and made a clamor to Cumanus, that he would punish the soldier; while the rasher part of the youth, and such as were naturally the most tumultuous, fell to fighting, ...
— The Wars of the Jews or History of the Destruction of Jerusalem • Flavius Josephus
... quarter-deck and poop-bulwarks were fixed in sockets implements of warfare now long in disuse, but what were then known by the names of cohorns and patteraroes; they turned round on a swivel, and were pointed by an iron handle fixed to the breech. The sail abaft the mizen-mast (corresponding to the driver or spanker of the present day) was fixed upon a lateen-yard. It is hardly necessary to add (after this description) that the dangers of a long voyage were not a little increased by the peculiar structure ...
— The Phantom Ship • Captain Frederick Marryat
... increasing European colony at Shanghai and the numerous mail steamers which daily arrive there, a profitable market for game has sprung up during the past few years, to supply which there are now a number of native gunners who, as a means of livelihood, scour the country with foreign breech-loaders in search of pheasants, wildfowl, etc., so that, being capital shots, within a considerable distance of this port the shooting is not so good as formerly, although in all other parts of the Empire it still remains practically untouched ...
— Life and sport in China - Second Edition • Oliver G. Ready
... Below the breech-clout the iron limbs were encased in leggings and the small feet were covered with moccasins, now faded and worn by hard usage. The Panther paused, with his left foot in advance, his right hand grasping the hilt of his knife at his waist, and his shoulders ...
— The Phantom of the River • Edward S. Ellis
... keep starvation off for ten days. The tide and wind helped, and early one afternoon the big white boat under a ragged sail shouldered its way before the sea breeze into Patusan Reach, manned by fourteen assorted scarecrows glaring hungrily ahead, and fingering the breech-blocks of cheap rifles. Brown calculated upon the terrifying surprise of his appearance. They sailed in with the last of the flood; the Rajah's stockade gave no sign; the first houses on both sides of the ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... was fought with the muzzle-loading rifle. Toward the close I had one brigade (Walcutt's) armed with breech-loading "Spencer's;" the cavalry generally had breach-loading carbines, "Spencer's" and "Sharp's," both ...
— The Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman, Complete • William T. Sherman
... of the British;" he had formed one of a gang that had infested the mountains, and his brother had murdered a friend of Georgi (the van-driver), and was now in gaol at Rhodes for the capital offence. The Turk was very intelligent, and thoroughly conversant with the various methods of breech-loading firearms; he examined several rifles and guns belonging to me, and at once comprehended the mechanism, and explained it to the admiring crowd. When this individual left our camp in the evening, the story that I had heard in outline was corroborated by the driver Georgi, who asked ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... 'em compot from the lef' flank when we opened out. No!' he said, bringing down his hand with a thump on the bedstead, 'a bay'nit ain't no good to a little man—might as well 'ave a bloomin' fishin'-rod! I 'ate a clawin', maulin' mess, but gimme a breech that's wore out a bit, an' hamminition one year in store, to let the powder kiss the bullet, an' put me somewheres where I ain't trod on by 'ulkin swine like you, an' s'elp me Gawd, I could bowl you over five times outer seven at height ...
— Soldier Stories • Rudyard Kipling
... Cupid's bow, Once on a time was an a— gut; Now to a nobler office put, By favour or desert preferr'd From giving passage to a t—; But still, though fix'd among the stars, Does sympathize with human a—. Thus, when you feel a hard-bound breech, Conclude love's bow-string at full stretch, Till the kind looseness comes, and then, Conclude the bow relax'd again. And now, the ladies all are bent, To try the great experiment, Ambitious of a regent's ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... as he struggled from his cramped quarters. The savage had grabbed him about the shoulders, but his hands were still free; they held the gun on high. And in the second when he found his feet under him, as Phee-e-al dragged him clear of the chest, Rawson brought the breech of the gun crashing ...
— Two Thousand Miles Below • Charles Willard Diffin
... God knows. What a whirl is this? Monstrous incongruity. Philosophy and fighting troopers. The Infinite and dead horses. There's humour for you. The Sublime takes off its hat to the Ridiculous. Send a cartridge clashing into the breech and speculate about the Absolute. Keep one eye on your sights and the other on Cosmos. Blow the reek of burned powder from before you so you may look over the edge of the abyss of the Great Primal Cause. Duck to the whistle of a bullet and commune with Schopenhauer. Perhaps ...
— A Deal in Wheat - And Other Stories of the New and Old West • Frank Norris
... them, but never succeeded in seeing one. One day in my eagerness to get near what I believed to be one, I rushed into rather unpleasant proximity with a jaguar, the "tigre" of the natives. I had just received a fresh supply of cartridge cases for my breech-loader, and wishing to get some specimens of the small birds that attend the armies of the foraging ants, I made up three or four small charges of Number 8 shot, putting in only a quarter of an ounce of shot into each charge, so as ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... horse-shackle. The quartermaster's and medical departments were without trained assistants. At the very last moment it was discovered that thirty thousand rifles were practically useless owing to the absence of some small pin or other interchangeable mechanism about the breech-blocks, and the officer who posted off in hot haste to Paris succeeded with the greatest difficulty in securing five thousand of the missing implements. Their inactivity, again, was another matter that kept him on pins and needles; why did they idle away their time for two weeks? why ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... on deck, walking so softly up and down as to disturb nobody. They had taken but a few turns when their attention was attracted by the sound of low voices, being those of the men constituting the anchor watch. Roger and his friend strolled up to them, and, sitting down on the breech of a gun, prepared to listen to what was evidently a yarn that the ...
— Across the Spanish Main - A Tale of the Sea in the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... Indian, dropping his empty gun, brandished his tomahawk and prepared to throw it at his enemy. Morgan struck with the butt of his gun, and the Indian hurled his tomahawk at one and the same moment. Both blows took effect; and both of the combatants were at once wounded and disarmed. The breech of the rifle was broken against the Indian's skull, and the edge of the tomahawk was shattered against the barrel of the rifle, having first cut off two of the fingers of Morgan's left hand. The Indian then attempting to draw his knife, Morgan grappled him, and bore him to the ...
— Thrilling Adventures by Land and Sea • James O. Brayman
... to be, continued motionless in the attitude he had at first assumed—his right cheek reposing on the ornamented stock of his rifle, and his quick and steady eye fixed in one undeviating line with the sight near the breech, and that which surmounted the extreme end of the deadly weapon. No sooner, however, had the head of the advancing column come within sight, than the trigger was pulled, and the small and ragged bullet sped hissing from the grooved and delicate barrel. A triumphant ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... what was sufficient for one Child, but not enough for Twins, wherefore Nature Form'd what she could. There might be many other particular Instances given of Monstrous Births, as some sticking together by the Bellies, others by the Breech; some Born without Arms or Legs others without Heads, yet have they liv'd for some time, till want of Sustenance made them pine away and Die, as having no place to receive it, and others with Heads like Dogs, Wolves, ...
— Tractus de Hermaphrodites • Giles Jacob
... like a madman, and pounced on one gunner, and hurled him across his culverin; but the others had fled, and a heavy oak door fell to with a bang, behind them. So utterly were my senses gone, and naught but strength remaining, that I caught up the cannon with both hands, and dashed it, breech-first, at the doorway. The solid oak burst with the blow, and the gun stuck fast, ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... the soldiers and refugees. He was discovered afterwards, terribly mutilated. His body lay in one place, his head in another, while his arms and legs were scattered about over the prairie. The warriors of this tribe, stripped to the skin, except breech-cloth and moccasins, and with bodies painted with red stripes, went into battle with the rage of mad-men and demons and committed every ...
— The Land of the Miamis • Elmore Barce
... I reckon the ball's opened," rejoined Lash, and now that former nervous impatience so unnatural to him was as if it had never been. He was smilingly cool, and his voice had almost a caressing note. He tapped the breech of his Winchester with a sinewy brown hand, and he did not appear to be addressing any one in particular. "Yaqui's opened the ball. Look up your pardners there, gents, ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... interested them greatly. On either side of the vessel, chained to the sides of the hull on long runners that led up to the firing tubes, were the massive torpedoes, ready to be pushed forward for insertion in the firing chambers. Chief Gunner Mowrey was working over one of the breech caps and turned ...
— The Brighton Boys with the Submarine Fleet • James R. Driscoll
... they could not be grasped and the men held their guns by the sling strap. I had some personal experiences in this battle that were unique in my service. Our muskets were the Enfield rifle, an English gun, much like the Springfield. They were, of course, muzzle loaders, breech loaders then were the exception. The Minnie bullet had no device for cleaning out the barrel, and after a dozen shots it would become foul, and often it was difficult to ram the bullet home. After I had fired my gun a number of times, in attempting to load, the bullet lodged half way down. I made ...
— Personal Recollections of the War of 1861 • Charles Augustus Fuller
... was not less peaceful. A couple of batteries lay below us, in the meadows; but the horses were dozing in the harness, and the gunners, standing bolt upright at the breech, seemed parts of their pieces; the teamsters lay grouped in the long grass. Immediately in front, Gaines's Mansion and outhouses spotted a hillside, and we could note beyond a few white tents shining through ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... wanting. He wore a headgear that was something between a hat and a turban, and over his baggy Turkish trousers hung a long Persian coat of bright-colored, large-figured cloth, bound at the waist by a belt of cartridges. Across the shoulders was slung a breech-loading Martini rifle, and from his neck dangled a heavy gold chain, which was probably the spoil of some predatory expedition. A quiet dignity sat on ...
— Across Asia on a Bicycle • Thomas Gaskell Allen and William Lewis Sachtleben
... up also. Again the officer called, keeping his rifle steadily pointed, and the man dived like a frog over the bank. Like magic his blanket had left his limbs and painted body naked, except for the breech-clout. Balwin's tardy bullet threw earth over the squaw, who went flapping and screeching down the river. Balwin and Powell ran to the edge, which dropped six abrupt feet of clay to a trail, then shelved into the swift little stream. The red figure was making up the trail to the foot-bridge ...
— The Jimmyjohn Boss and Other Stories • Owen Wister
... regulation uniform. They had been furnished a regular cavalry uniform and on this parade some of them had their heavy overcoats on, others their large black hats, with all the brass accoutrements attached; some of them were minus pantaloons and only wore a breech-clout. Others wore regulation pantaloons but no shirts, and were bareheaded; others again had the seat of their pantaloons cut out, leaving only leggings; some of them wore brass spurs, though without boots or moccasins; but for ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... with indifferent success, with the result that Jake was adding to his exchequer without damage to his hat, I could not resist the inclination to quietly drop out of sight behind a clump of bushes, where from my place of concealment I sent from my breech-loading Ballard repeating rifle four bullets in rapid succession, through the hat, badly riddling it. Jake inquired, "Whose revolver is it that makes that loud report?" He did not discover the true state of the case, ...
— The Discovery of Yellowstone Park • Nathaniel Pitt Langford
... Silvertip. But how changed! Stripped of the blanket he had worn at the settlement, now standing naked but for his buckskin breech-cloth, with his perfectly proportioned form disclosed in all its sinewy beauty, and on his swarthy, evil face an expression of savage scorn, he surely looked a warrior ...
— The Spirit of the Border - A Romance of the Early Settlers in the Ohio Valley • Zane Grey
... from his chair and turned about, forgetful of the stick and bowl. When his glance reached Frojac, my good man had his arquebus on a line with the governor's head, the match dangerously near the breech. ...
— An Enemy To The King • Robert Neilson Stephens
... have the new breech-loaders now, Mr. Folsom," said the officers. "The Indians have only old percussion-cap rifles, and not too many ...
— Warrior Gap - A Story of the Sioux Outbreak of '68. • Charles King
... and Fortifications" provided for under the act approved September 22 last was convened October 30, 1888, and plans and specifications for procuring forgings for 8, 10, and 12 inch guns, under provisions of section 4, and also for procuring 12-inch breech-loading mortars, cast iron, hooped with steel, under the provisions of section 5 of the said act, were submitted to the Secretary of War for reference to the board, by the Ordnance ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... buckskins, and cap of fur and moccasins of hide, mingling fraternally with their tufted and bepainted visitors, as well as with those rangers, both envied and hated, the savage coureurs de bois of the far Northern fur trade; men bearded, silent, stern, clad in breech-clout and leggings like any savage, as silent, as stoical, as hardy on the trail as on the narrow ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough
... blacks took a gun and a cutlass, as Dick Sand had done. A cartridge was slipped into the breech of the Remingtons, and, thus armed, all four went to the ...
— Dick Sand - A Captain at Fifteen • Jules Verne
... Gerron, becoming a corporal, had obtained no idea of any kind of sorrow other than that coming from the blows of a baton on the rump . . . . On this idea, he thought that the soul of an honest man was no different than a soldier's breech. If Gerron caused trouble to the spirit of a man of honor, he thought that this spirit, like his own, had only a rump, and that any trouble he caused would pass likewise. He deceived himself. The breech of the spirit of an honest man is different than the breech of the spirit of ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... education of children; and I asked him what he thought was best to teach them first. JOHNSON. 'Sir, it is no matter what you teach them first, any more than what leg you shall put into your breeches first. Sir, you may stand disputing which is best to put in first, but in the mean time your breech is bare. Sir, while you are considering which of two things you should teach your child first, another boy ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... the finest loke, that could be cut with sheere, His mittens were of Bauzens skinne, His cockers were of Cordiwin his hood of Meniueere. 60 His aule and lingell in a thong, His tar-boxe on his broad belt hong, his breech of Coyntrie blew: Full crispe and curled were his lockes, His browes as white as Albion rockes, so like a louer true. And pyping still he spent the day, So mery as the Popingay: which liked Dowsabell, ...
— Minor Poems of Michael Drayton • Michael Drayton
... oaths Lighthouse Harry thrust a shell into the breech of the quick-firing gun. Without waiting to aim it, he tugged at the trigger. Nothing happened! He threw open the breech and gazed impotently at the base of the shell. It was untouched. The ship was ringing with cries of anger, of hate, ...
— The Boy Scout and Other Stories for Boys • Richard Harding Davis
... most harm. The cannonading was lively and well sustained, though it was not like one of the present time, when shot are hollow, and a gun is chambered and, not unfrequently, has a muzzle almost as large as the open end of a flour-barrel, and a breech as big as a hogshead. At the commencement-of this century a long twelve-pounder was considered a smart piece, and was thought very capable of doing a good deal of mischief. The main battery of the ship was composed of guns of ...
— The Crater • James Fenimore Cooper
... is the second battle of Ypres, or the battle of the Yser, I do not know which. At one time we were down to seven guns, but those guns were smoking at every joint, the gunners using cloth to handle the breech levers because of the heat. We had three batteries in action with four guns added from the other units. Our casualties were half the number of men in the firing line. The horse lines and the wagon lines farther ...
— In Flanders Fields and Other Poems - With an Essay in Character, by Sir Andrew Macphail • John McCrae
... made for a bunker coal capacity of 400 tons, and this is calculated to give a radius of action of 8,000 knots at a reduced speed of 10 knots. The armament of the ship will consist of two 6 in. breech-loading guns on central pivot stands, one mounted on the poop and another on the forecastle; six quick-firing 4.7 in. guns, mounted three on each broadside; eight quick-firing 6-pounder guns, four ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 832, December 12, 1891 • Various
... the land where dwells only mock-turtle, Where wine that should gladden but makes you fell queer. Where bayonets bend, where guns burst and hurtle Their breech in the face of their friends at the rear, Where lamps labelled 'safety' with just terrors fill you, Where water supplied you for milk is no theft, Where pills that should cure, if persisted in, kill you And the 'Hair Resurrector' takes all you've got left! Where soap, that should ...
— Punch Among the Planets • Various
... barrel, which is octagon and extremely heavy. Ramrod under barrel. Stock extends only to breech and is inlaid with German silver. Extremely rare. This type was used on the ...
— A Catalogue of Early Pennsylvania and Other Firearms and Edged Weapons at "Restless Oaks" • Henry W. Shoemaker
... blue breech, now playes he the Devil. So get ye home, drink small beer, and be honest; ...
— Beggars Bush - From the Works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher (Vol. 2 of 10) • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
... shells during the siege of Ladysmith. Its muzzle had been shortened, showing that it had been damaged. The Boers had blown the gun to pieces. The barrel of the gun was blown about fifty yards in front of the emplacement, whilst the breech-block was found afterwards 1-1/2 miles in rear. They had destroyed also one pompom and one Maxim. Twenty-eight Boers were captured, with about sixty head of cattle and thirteen wagons. The Australians had one man ...
— The Record of a Regiment of the Line • M. Jacson
... himself at full length on the ground and pressed a cartridge into the breech of his rifle. His companions stood over him as he cast a hurried glance forward ...
— The Jungle Girl • Gordon Casserly
... of a substantial piece of Wood, well season'd, and not subject to split or warp; and first the Caliber or Bore of it, being an Inch in Diameter; the Mould must be six Inches long, and Breech an Inch and half; the Broach that enters into the Choaking part, three Inches and a half long, and in Thickness a quarter of an Inch. The Rowler on which you wrap the Paper or Paste board, being three quarters of an Inch Diameter, and the Rammer somewhat less, that it may ...
— The School of Recreation (1696 edition) • Robert Howlett
... softly to his rifle and loaded both barrels. It was a breech-loader. Then he crawled softly to the window, and peered out, rifle ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... in placing them so as to have been unable to take any other range than point blank! Here is a fort mounting upwards of fifty guns of large calibre, which would have commanded the bay, but the embrasures are so small as barely to admit the muzzle of the gun, the breech of which was imbedded in the earth. These were soon silenced, as may well be supposed, by the attacking squadron taking a position beyond their range, and training their own batteries to bear upon the Chinese gunners within, who ...
— Kathay: A Cruise in the China Seas • W. Hastings Macaulay
... its square uprights of pine wood the Stand resembled one of our own pistol-galleries at a fair, with this difference, that the amateurs brought their own weapons, breech-loading muskets of the oldest pattern, which they managed, however, with some adroitness. Tar-tarin, his arms crossed, observed the shots, criticised them aloud, gave his advice, but did not fire himself. The Russians watched him, making signs to ...
— Tartarin On The Alps • Alphonse Daudet
... swift-running streams. Into these rivulets and streams the soldiers plunged, one in front, feeling the depth of the water with a sounding rod, and as he led we followed. The black men made a splendid picture. They were naked but for breech-cloths, and the moonlight flashed on their wet skins and upon the polished barrels of the muskets. But, as a sporting proposition, as far as I could see, we had taken on the hippopotamus at his own game. We were supposed to be on an island, but the water was up to our belts ...
— The Congo and Coasts of Africa • Richard Harding Davis
... value to labor, has cheapened time, and is assuredly one of the chief triumphs of human ingenuity. We have done our part, too, in devising deadly weapons for contending armies. The revolver, invented by Samuel Colt, made a man armed with it six times as formidable as he was before; and the breech-loader, first attempted by John Hall of Yarmouth, Massachusetts, more than seventy years ago, was generally adopted in Europe. It is said that the greater number of the military arms made in the United States for Europe are on the breech-loading system. The invention of what is called the principle ...
— The Nation in a Nutshell • George Makepeace Towle
... with the exception of blankets—still much worn by both sexes at their homes, and dancing suits—their original costumes are now seldom seen. The blanket has been substituted for the sea-otter cloak, trousers and dresses for the breech cloth, and leather undergarments by woven ones. The men wear hats, but the women very rarely; a handkerchief or shawl being their most common head covering. Some of the elderly women, however, wear large ...
— Official report of the exploration of the Queen Charlotte Islands - for the government of British Columbia • Newton H. Chittenden
... always were armed, and kept guard at the festivals, to prevent any innovation which the multitude thus gathered together might make,] one of the soldiers pulled back his garment, and cowering down after an indecent manner, turned his breech to the Jews, and spake such words as you might expect upon such a posture. At this the whole multitude had indignation, and made a clamor to Cumanus, that he would punish the soldier; while the rasher part of the youth, and such as were naturally the ...
— The Wars of the Jews or History of the Destruction of Jerusalem • Flavius Josephus
... towards centralisation. Naval duties are now formulated at a desk on shore, and the mode of carrying them out notified to the service in print. All this would have been quite as astonishing to the contemporaries of Nelson or of Exmouth and Codrington as the aspect of a battleship or of a 12-inch breech-loading gun. ...
— Sea-Power and Other Studies • Admiral Sir Cyprian Bridge
... fight, the finest ship of the Spanish navy lowered her flag and was headed in for the beach. After she had thus surrendered, and before the Americans could board, she was wrecked by her own crew, who opened sea-valves, smashed out dead lights, threw overboard the breech-blocks of their great guns, and in many other ways worked what destruction they could in the time allotted. As a result of this vandalism, the fine ship rolled over on her side soon after striking, and would have slipped off into deep water had not the ...
— "Forward, March" - A Tale of the Spanish-American War • Kirk Munroe
... all happy at losing dear friends," the young man answered, gently, as he turned away and patted the breech of a gun, upon which there was a little rust next day; "that feeling comes ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... Mildmay. "She is fitted with a torpedo port for'ard, for firing what the professor called 'torpedo-shells'; two 10-inch breech-loading rifled guns, fired through ports in the dining-saloon, and six Maxim guns, fired from the upper deck, to say nothing of small-arms. Such an armament is ample for every occasion which is at all likely to ...
— With Airship and Submarine - A Tale of Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... go almost naked, usually with nothing but the smallest possible breech clout around their loins, which the police require them to wear; they plaster their bodies with mud, ashes and filth; they rub clay, gum and other substances into their hair to give it an uncouth ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... to open the breech, but he and Furneaux simultaneously noticed a bit of black thread tied to one of the triggers. It had been broken, and the two loose ends were some ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... as he led me from gun to gun slapping hand on breech or trunnion, and as I hearkened 'twas hard to recognise the merry peddler in this short, square, grave-faced gunner who spake with mariner's tongue, hitched ever and anon at the broad belt of his galligaskins, and rolled in his ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... districts, we passed a tea-curing house. This was a long rectangular, one-story building with twenty furnaces arranged, each under an open window, around the sides. In front of each heated furnace with its tray of leaves, a Japanese man, wearing only a breech cloth, and in a state of profuse perspiration, was busy rolling the tea leaves between the ...
— Farmers of Forty Centuries - or, Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea and Japan • F. H. King
... I claim combining the breech block, A, hinged at its posterior extremity, and operating as described, with the hammer, D, by means of the protuberant inclined plane, C, or its equivalent, substantially as described for ...
— Scientific American, Vol. 17, No. 26 December 28, 1867 • Various
... prostrate. The fellow now began to beg for mercy, and pretended to be very sorry for his conduct. The parson now proposed to give him a severe hiding for his villainous treatment of the poor beast; but as the coward would not get off his breech, but remained seated upon the earth, and declared that he would not get upon his legs while I remained, he saved himself from a severe and well-merited drubbing. He very coolly offered to sell me the mutilated beast, which I instantly purchased ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 2 • Henry Hunt
... I with the chase, and glorious sport it was: I oft perceiv'd them tumbling o'er each other heels over head; nor did one dare stay to help his brother—but, with bloody breech, made the best of his way—nor ever stopped till they were ...
— The Fall of British Tyranny - American Liberty Triumphant • John Leacock
... crept over Hare. As he crawled under the blankets Naab had spread for him his hand came into contact with a polished metal surface cold as ice. It was his rifle. Naab had placed it under the blankets. Fingering the rifle Hare found the spring opening on the right side of the breech, and, pressing it down, he felt the round head of a cartridge. Naab had loaded the weapon, he had placed it where Hare's hand must find it, yet he had not spoken of it. Hare did not stop to reason with his first impulse. Without a word, with silent insistence, disregarding ...
— The Heritage of the Desert • Zane Grey
... but my anxiety for success was never greater than in this, my first essay as a hunter. I had not gone far from the camp before I met with pigeons, and some of them alighted in the bushes very near me. I cocked my pistol, and raised it to my face, bringing the breech almost in contact with my nose. Having brought the sight to bear upon the pigeon, I pulled trigger, and was in the next instant sensible of a humming noise, like that of a stone sent swiftly through the air. I found the pistol at the distance of some paces behind me, ...
— The True Story Book • Andrew Lang
... begun to fade when I stepped out through the dew-soaked clover, carrying in one hand a satchel containing the swimming-suit, in the other a gun-case, in which, carefully oiled and doubly cased in flannel, reposed my only luxury—my breech-loading shot-gun. ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... stowed there were of a varied assortment, including the three breech-loading rifles, ammunition, tool-chest and contents, a portion of the medicine-chest, some biscuits, cooking utensils, and a trunk of calicoes, linens and materials such as are used in the making of feminine costumes. It was a singular coincidence that Abe ...
— Adrift on the Pacific • Edward S. Ellis
... master of Erskine, Buchanan was reading, and desired them to make less noise. As they disregarded his admonition, he told his majesty, if he did not hold his tongue, he would certainly whip his breech. The king replied, he would be glad to see who would bell the cat, alluding to the fable. Buchanan lost his temper, and throwing his book from him, gave his majesty a sound flogging. The old countess of Mar rushed into the room, and taking the king in her arms, asked ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... at the breech plug before turning on the power," said the German, "but I had no reason to suspect that anything was wrong." He went on to explain that the explosion was something like that which occurs when the breech-block of a big navy gun is not properly in place. The force of the Cardite, ...
— Lost on the Moon - or In Quest Of The Field of Diamonds • Roy Rockwood
... the necessities of his pocket, and captures his Constantinople to pay for a dinner at the "Freres." What fleets of Russian gunboats have I seen launched to procure a few bottles of champagne! I remember a chasse of Kersch, with the cafe, costing a whole battery of Krupp's breech-loaders!' ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... trembled. The dog stopped, looked at Paul a moment, broke into a louder growl, opened his jaws wider, his eyes glaring more wildly, and stepped slowly forward. Now or never, Paul thought, was his time. The breech of the gun touched his shoulder; his eye ran along the barrel,—bang! the dog rolled over with a yelp and a howl, but was up again, growling and trying to get at Paul, who in an instant seized his gun by the barrel, ...
— Our Young Folks—Vol. I, No. II, February 1865 - An Illustrated Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... pitiful to see from leanness, and a great fever was upon it. Robert Barrow, the crippled captain, and a sick passenger shared the child's shelter. "Whereupon two Canibals appeared, naked, but for a breech-cloth of plaited straw, with Countenances bloody and furious, and foaming at the Mouth"; but on being given tobacco, retreated inland to alarm the tribe. The ship's company gathered together and sat down to wait their return, expecting cruelty, says Dickenson, and dreadful ...
— Stories of Childhood • Various
... away from my Nell. But you must come out with us. There is no such fun as stumping over the moors—the Jew has got all the turn-out for that sort of thing—short frocks and knickerbockers, and a duck of a little breech-loader. She thinks she's a great shot, poor thing, and men are civil and let her imagine that she's knocked over a pheasant or a hare, now and then. As for the partridges, she lets fly, of course, but to say ...
— The Marriage of Elinor • Margaret Oliphant
... artillerymen sprang to their posts, some to a series of levers which sprouted from the rock platform without any apparent connection, and some to wheels and gauges of varying size that clustered in bewildering intricacy about the breech of ...
— Astounding Stories, February, 1931 • Various
... ship, a boy when flogged is either lashed to the breech of a gun, or brought right up to the gratings, the same way the men are. But as a general rule, he is never punished beyond his strength. You seldom or never draw a cry from the young rogue. He bites his tongue and stands ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... itinerant quack or dogmatic practitioner rolls in undeserved affluence, I question the wisdom of our ethical code. Braddock, at the Monongahela, scorned to have his regulars, who had fought under Marlborough and Eugene, break ranks before a lot of breech-clouted savages, and take shelter that the nature of the ground and the trees could afford, thinking it an unfit action for men who had faced the veterans of Louis XIV on many a hard-fought European field. I sometimes think that if our regulars were, for only a season, to follow ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... officer upon a lively sorrel cantered as if for observation a short distance to the left of the work. Some sharpshooters in our front, protected slightly by the ground which rose gently towards the west, tried their breech-loaders upon him. At 450 yards there was certainty enough in the aim to make the music of their bullets unpleasant, and he again sought the cover of the work. An upright puff of smoke,—then a large volumed puff horizontally,—shrill music in its short flight,—a dull, ...
— Red-Tape and Pigeon-Hole Generals - As Seen From the Ranks During a Campaign in the Army of the Potomac • William H. Armstrong
... my thoughts. I do assure you that I am not his puff. What I tell you of his reading is literally true; but it is not reading that expresses it, for I could have said as much if he had read nothing but the History of Cinder Breech and that kind of biography. He read with me English History, and stopped for information, and showed an uncommon thirst for it. He asked me as many questions in the History of George 1st concerning the South Sea Scheme, the prosecution of Lord Macclesfield, and the Barrier Treaty, ...
— George Selwyn: His Letters and His Life • E. S. Roscoe and Helen Clergue
... squarely across the Indian trail, and ready for their coming. Roswell Holmes could not have that distinction at all events, thought McLean, as he tried the lock and breech-block of his rifle to see that everything was in perfect working order. Come what might,—if it were only Indians,—he meant to make a record in this fight that any woman might be proud of; and if he fell,—well, he wouldn't have to pay for Sergeant Marsland's stealings, ...
— 'Laramie;' - or, The Queen of Bedlam. • Charles King
... small pyramid of light rose from the breech of the gun, which sufficed, during the moment it lasted, to discover three boats filled with armed men, advancing immediately opposite, while two others could be seen diverging, apparently one towards the quarter, ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... thin, dark, dried up, shrivelled fellow, with keen eyes, and a sharp nose. The midshipmen called him "Old Chili Vinegar," or, "Old Hot and Sour." He was what we term a martinet. He would keep a man two months on his black list, giving him a breech of a gun to polish and keep bright, never allowing him time to mend his clothes, or keep himself clean, while he was cleaning that which, for all the purposes of war, had better have been black. He seldom flogged a man; but he tormented him into sullen discontent, ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat
... advance has been made in the construction of the implements of war. The whole science and art of war have been fundamentally changed, mainly in consequence of these modern inventions. Reference may be made to the invention of rifled cannon, heavier ordnance, breech-loading guns, and shells and explosive bullets. It was the needle-gun of the Prussians, which gave them a signal advantage in their war with the French. The building of armored battle ships has been followed by the construction of small swift vessels ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... into his mouth, but finding he was dead, they began to prepare for his burial in the following manner:—Having shaved or scraped his body, arms, and legs, with their knives, they dug a great hole, in which they placed him on his breech in a sitting posture, heaping stones about him to keep him upright. Then came the women, making a most horrible noise round the hole which was afterwards filled up ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume X • Robert Kerr
... life will be ventured. It sometimes takes several days to arrange these preliminaries. A pleasant afternoon is selected, and the contestants appear. They are usually very nearly naked, having on only moccasins, a breech-clout and a head-dress; the two latter articles, being susceptible of ornamentation, are usually adorned with eagle feathers, foxtails, or a string of sleigh-bells about the player's waist. The men are painted in the most grotesque ...
— The History of Minnesota and Tales of the Frontier • Charles E. Flandrau
... King John at Runnymede the Great Charter—the mother of the American Constitution. It found Ireland a nation of savages and did for it what the mighty power of the Caesars could not—brought it within the pale of civilization. But for the Roman Catholic Church Slattery might be wearing a breech clout, digging roots with his finger nails and gorging himself with raw meat in Ireland to-day instead of insulting the intelligence of American audiences and wringing money from fanatics and fools by warring upon the ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... unguarded. A clasp of the hand, and the boys parted, one going, as previously arranged, each way. Ned rose very quietly by the side of the gun, keeping his head, however, below its level, and running his hand along it until it came to the breech. The touch-hole was covered by a wad of cloth to keep the powder dry from the heavy dew. This he removed, put up his hand again with the wet sponge, gave a squeeze, and then cautiously ...
— In Times of Peril • G. A. Henty
... as the fact of their rifles being good slayers, and they quickly learn to take a pride in their weapons, and to strive in the race to hand the spare rifles. Dust storms, such as I have constantly witnessed in Africa, would be terrible enemies to breech-loaders, as the hard sand, by grating in the joints, would wear away the metal, and destroy the exactness ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker
... in de Courcelles' party were of two types, the converted Indians of Canada, partly in white man's costume, and utterly savage Indians of the far west, in very little costume at all, one or two of them wearing only the breech cloth. The looks they bestowed upon Robert and his comrades were far from friendly, and he wondered if any Ojibway, a warrior who perhaps owned Tandakora as a chief, was among them. They were sitting about the fire and ...
— The Hunters of the Hills • Joseph Altsheler
... the airship each one aboard was given a chance to pilot her. He was also allowed to stop and start the machinery, since it could not be told at what moment, in an emergency, someone would have to jump into the breech. ...
— Dick Hamilton's Airship - or, A Young Millionaire in the Clouds • Howard R. Garis
... he thought most suitable to each Was, for the elder and the stouter, first A Candiote cloak, which to the knee might reach, And trousers not so tight that they would burst, But such as fit an Asiatic breech; A shawl, whose folds in Cashmire had been nursed, Slippers of saffron, dagger rich and handy; In short, all things which form a ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... platform of Penalty, in beholding breaches of the statutes. He would not have rained upon the unjust as the just if he had had the directing of the heavens. As Private Gellatly put it: "Sergeant Fones has the fear o' God in his heart, and the law of the land across his saddle, and the newest breech-loading at that!" He was part of the great machine of Order, the servant of Justice, the sentinel in the vestibule of Martial Law. His interpretation of duty worked upward as downward. Officers and privates ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... and their allies armed with the best modern breech-loaders, well supplied with ammunition and countless herds of war ponies, and far too numerous and powerful to be handled by the small force at ...
— Starlight Ranch - and Other Stories of Army Life on the Frontier • Charles King
... heavy field artillery, their long barrels sticking out from pits and pointing at them. They went closer to examine, and found the guns were made of wood painted black. The barrels were perfectly made, even to the breech blocks mounted on wheels, the tires of which were made of tin. They were a perfect imitation of a heavy ordnance piece in every detail. Curious, wondering what it could mean, the two explorers looked about them and saw an old Frenchman coming toward them. ...
— The War Romance of the Salvation Army • Evangeline Booth and Grace Livingston Hill
... the two candidates had hurried off to prepare for the long journey. Cumbersome garments were discarded, and Piang was clothed in the easy costume of the jungle traveler; breech-clout, head-cloth, a sarong, flung carelessly over one shoulder, and a panuelo (handkerchief) with a few necessary articles tied securely in it. His weapons were a bolo, a creese, and a bow and arrow. Piang's bare limbs, bronze and powerful, glistened in the ...
— The Adventures of Piang the Moro Jungle Boy - A Book for Young and Old • Florence Partello Stuart
... invention of Mr. Henry Schlund. It may be regarded as the most simple in respect of lock mechanism of any existing revolver, whether single or double action. It extracts the cartridges automatically, and combines with this important feature strength and safety in the closing of the breech. Certainty of aim when firing is obtained by means of a double trigger, which serves many purposes. This secures quick repeating as in the double-action revolvers, and at the same time the revolver is not pulled out of the line of sight, as the trigger is pulled ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 530, February 27, 1886 • Various
... fighting, on which the Government can always count, the Raja has a small standing army known as the "Sarawak Rangers," recruited from excellent material—the natives of the country—under European Officers, armed with breech-loading rifles, and numbering two hundred and fifty or three hundred men. There is, in addition, a small Police Force, likewise composed of natives, as also are the crews of the small steamers and launches which form the Sarawak ...
— British Borneo - Sketches of Brunai, Sarawak, Labuan, and North Borneo • W. H. Treacher
... clean the bore. With the cleaning rod the bore must always be cleaned from the breech—never from the muzzle. Cleaning from the muzzle is liable to wear and otherwise injure the mouth of the barrel, which is easily injured and thus the ...
— Manual of Military Training - Second, Revised Edition • James A. Moss
... Provincials coolly withdrew to the summit, under the accumulating fire of the returning mountaineers, who quickly gathered in their rear. Owing to their elevated location, the British, although using the rapid-fire breech-loading rifle invented by Ferguson himself, found their vision deflected, and continually fired high, thus suffering from nature's handicap, refraction. The militia, using sharpened butcher-knives which Ferguson had taught them to utilize as bayonets, charged against the ...
— The Conquest of the Old Southwest • Archibald Henderson
... are rifle breech-loaders, London maker, Flint Locks, silver mounted, with English coat of arms on butt; the sash was cut up; Dr. Strong has a piece; ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... very simple and scant, before being initiated into the use of a more ample and complete style of covering while living at the reservations. The ordinary full complement of dress for a man (Nung'-ah) was simply a breech-clout, or short hip-skirt made of skins; that for a woman (O'-hoh) was a skirt reaching from the waist to the knees, made of dressed deerskin finished at the bottom with a slit fringe, and sometimes decorated with various fancy ...
— Indians of the Yosemite Valley and Vicinity - Their History, Customs and Traditions • Galen Clark
... proceeded direct to the island where, having landed Flora, he proceeded, with some difficulty, to rouse the savages, and supply them with food and drink. They proved to be, as Leslie had said, a pair of fine, well-made men, naked, save for a kind of breech-clout round their loins, of sturdy physique, and apparently but little the worse for their adventure. Nor were they especially unprepossessing in appearance, although there was a certain character of ruthlessness in the expression of their eyes and about their mouths and chins ...
— Dick Leslie's Luck - A Story of Shipwreck and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... he replied. "I'll give an account of myself." And he stepped forward, grasping one of his pistols, not by the breech, but by the barrel. ...
— Philip Winwood • Robert Neilson Stephens
... man should love all things that are swift and strong and honest, keen for marks and goals—a big, clean-limbed, thoroughbred horse that will break his heart to get under the wire first; a high-power rifle, slim of muzzle, thick of breech, with its wicked little throaty cry, doing its business over a flat trajectory a thousand yards away: I love her as a man should love those. Little did I dream that she ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... no spurs, his feet being shod with moccasins, and, instead of the revolver worn by the Mexicans, he carried a knife thrust in at his girdle and a breech-loading ...
— The Great Cattle Trail • Edward S. Ellis
... through the man's pockets, reaching up and putting each article as it came to light on the desk above him. From an inner breast pocket he extracted the Browning. He glanced at it: the magazine was full with a cartridge in the breech. ...
— The Man with the Clubfoot • Valentine Williams
... afterwards. He read it again and again, bewildered, tempted and yet afraid to believe it true, moved to the depths of his nature, at once happy and unhappy in the gamut of his doubts. It could not be possible. No, it could not be possible. Standing at the breech of his gun, his eyes on a Spanish gunboat they had driven under the shelter of a fort, he found himself repeating: "And very much in love with my boy. And very much in love with my boy." And then, suddenly becoming intent again on the matter in hand, he slammed ...
— Love, The Fiddler • Lloyd Osbourne
... He pursued 'is investigations with the eye of an 'awk outside the galley. He knew better than to advance line-head against Retallick, so he attacked ong eshlong, speakin' his remarks as much as possible into the breech of the starboard four point seven, an' 'ummin' to 'imself. Our chief cook 'ated 'ummin'. 'What's the matter of your bowels?' he says at last, fistin' out the mess- pork agitated like. "'Don't mind me,' says 'Op. 'I'm only a mildewed buntin'-tosser,' 'e says: 'but speakin' for my mess, I ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling
... bauld ye set your nose out, As plump and gray as onie grozet; [gooseberry] O for some rank mercurial rozet, [rosin] Or fell red smeddum! [deadly, dust] I'd gie you sic a hearty doze o't, Wad dress your droddum! [breech] ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... own a gun, that his father bought him one on the day he reached the age of ten years, which was shortly after Nellie's adventure with the bear. Although the farmer was frugal in all things, he believed it was the cheapest to buy the best, and the gun which was placed in the hands of Nick was a breech-loader with double barrels. It was a shot-gun, as a matter of course, for little use could be found for ...
— Through Forest and Fire - Wild-Woods Series No. 1 • Edward Ellis
... courtepy, That was furred well fine; And took him a green mantle, To lap his body therein. ROBIN commanded his wight young men, Under the green-wood tree, They shall lay in that same suit, That the Sheriff might them see. All night lay that proud Sheriff, In his breech and in his shirt: No wonder it was in green wood Though his sides do smart. "Make glad cheer," said ROBIN HOOD, "Sheriff, for charity! For this is our order, I-wis, Under the green-wood tree!" "This is harder order," ...
— Fifteenth Century Prose and Verse • Various
... extraordinarily striking look and demeanor. He stood considerably over six feet in height, with a remarkably powerful yet lean body. He was naked except for a cloth breech clout girdled about his loins. His appearance was not that of an Oroid, for beside his greater height, and more muscular physique, his skin was distinctly of a more brownish hue. His hair was cut at the base of the neck ...
— The Girl in the Golden Atom • Raymond King Cummings
... and stopped at a little city in India and looked on while a juggler did his tricks before a group of natives. They were wonderful, but I knew Satan could beat that game, and I begged him to show off a little, and he said he would. He changed himself into a native in turban and breech-cloth, and very considerately conferred on me a ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... that led to his house, they heard the roar and crackle of the flames; when they gained the open they saw the bright light shining on the old cannon, whose polished brass was stained and streaked with red. Tiaru lay across the breech, dead. ...
— The Brothers-In-Law: A Tale Of The Equatorial Islands; and The Brass Gun Of The Buccaneers - 1901 • Louis Becke
... a short time before, Major Plympton decided not to execute the prisoners. They were turned over to their own people to be flogged in the presence of the officers. More humiliating than death was their punishment. Their blankets, leggins, and breech-cloths were cut into small pieces, and finally the braves whipped them with long sticks while ...
— Old Fort Snelling - 1819-1858 • Marcus L. Hansen
... swarthy hue, Between a gingerbread-nut and a Jew, And his pigtail is long, and bushy, and thick, Like a pump-handle stuck on the end of a stick. Hairy-faced Dick understands his trade; He stand by the breech of a long carronade, The linstock glows in his bony hand, Waiting that grim old ...
— The Haunted Hour - An Anthology • Various
... compot from the lef' flank when we opened out. No!' he said, bringing down his hand with a thump on the bedstead, 'a bay'nit ain't no good to a little man—might as well 'ave a bloomin' fishin'-rod! I 'ate a clawin', maulin' mess, but gimme a breech that's wore out a bit, an' hamminition one year in store, to let the powder kiss the bullet, an' put me somewheres where I ain't trod on by 'ulkin swine like you, an' s'elp me Gawd, I could bowl you over five times outer seven ...
— Soldier Stories • Rudyard Kipling
... walkers on a taut rope stretched fully thirty feet in the air. It was proclaimed that they were rivals for the favor of a pretty freedwoman and that they had agreed on this contest as a settlement of their rivalry. Certainly the two, naked save for breech-clouts and each armed with a light lance in one hand and a thin-bladed Gallic sword in the other, neared each other with every sign of caution, enmity and courage. Their sparring for an opening lasted some time, but was breathlessly interesting. The victor kept his feet ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... one of the voyageurs threw open the breech of the dead man's gun. It was patent to all that it had been fired once. The empty cartridge was still ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... When time permitted he made many experiments with ropes reeved through the pulley and attached to a rifle action. He might have succeeded in his main object had not his thoughts taken a new line. His aim was to achieve some method of opening and closing the breech-block by means of two ropes. The difficulty was to secure the preliminary and final lateral movement of the lever bolt, but it suddenly occurred to him that if he could manage to convey the impression that Iris and he had left the island, the Dyaks would go away after ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... four 10-inch and six 6-inch breech-loading rifles; in the secondary battery seven 6-pounder and eight 1-pounder rapid-fire guns and four Gatlings. Her crew was made up of 370 men, and the following officers: Capt. C. D. Sigsbee, Lieut.-Commander R. Wainwright, ...
— The Boys of '98 • James Otis
... hotly. "The assignments of the Polaris unit, whether it be to Tara or the Moon, has nothing to do with your own breech of conduct. In any case, if they were to be assigned, they'd do a better job than you 'experienced' spacemen who are disrespectful of your superior officers and break regulations! If either of you makes one more crack about ...
— Danger in Deep Space • Carey Rockwell
... press that Livingstone was alive. They went to Tabora, for Livingstone expected fresh supplies, and in addition Stanley gave him forty men's loads of cloth, glass beads and brass-wire, a canvas boat, a waterproof tent, two breech-loaders and other weapons, ammunition, tools, and cooking utensils. All these things were invaluable to Livingstone, who was determined to remain in Africa at any cost until ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin
... uprose, and upward goes Each sheep with dangling breech; Borne by the horse's rapid course, The miller's hut ...
— Mediaeval Tales • Various
... took the tube in hand. Colonel Thouvenin abandoned the chamber, and filled up much of the place it had occupied with a cylindrical steel pillar, or tige, which projected from the breech-plug longitudinally into the barrel. This formed a little anvil whereon the bullet was to be beaten into the grooves. But the bottom was flattened, and the powder acted only on the periphery ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... use o' worritin' 'bout these things?' said Ortheris. 'You're bound to find all out quicker nor you want to, any'ow.' He jerked the cartridge out of the breech-block into the palm of his hand. ''Ere's my chaplain,' he said, and made the venomous black-headed bullet bow like a marionette. ''E's goin' to teach a man all about which is which, an' wot's true, after all, before sundown. But wot 'appened ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling
... greatest stage in the history of war, the notable invention of gunpowder was achieved, and an enormous transformation took place in the whole terrible art. The musket, the rifle, the pistol, the cannon were one by one evolved, to develop in the nineteenth century into the breech-loader, the machine gun, the bomb, and the multitude of devices fitted to bring about death and destruction by wholesale, instead of by the retail methods of ...
— A History of The Nations and Empires Involved and a Study - of the Events Culminating in The Great Conflict • Logan Marshall
... what was instilled into him in the nursery may possibly occur to some even at this day. 'In our childhood,' he complains, 'our mothers' maids have so terrified us with an ugly devil having horns on his head, fire in his mouth, a tail in his breech, eyes like a bison, fangs like a dog, a skin like a niger, a voice roaring like a lion, whereby we start and are afraid when we hear one cry Boh!' Chaucer has expressed the belief of his age on the subject. It seems to have been a proper ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams
... allow for the superior centering of the shot obtainable with the breech-loading system, Bashforth introduces a factor [sigma], called the coefficient ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... have looked at the breech plug before turning on the power," said the German, "but I had no reason to suspect that anything was wrong." He went on to explain that the explosion was something like that which occurs when the breech-block of a big navy gun is not properly in place. The force of the Cardite, instead of ...
— Lost on the Moon - or In Quest Of The Field of Diamonds • Roy Rockwood
... two parties. The first, eight in number, enter in single file, preceded and followed by a man in everyday costume. These dancers, called Tsannati{COMBINING BREVE}, are nude, save for the breech-cloth, with body and face painted in white and black, and the hair hanging loose. Immediately following them are the Chanzhini{COMBINING BREVE}, six in number, accompanied by four keepers, two in front and two behind. The six are nude, the bodies painted ...
— The North American Indian • Edward S. Curtis
... healing solitudes of the crater of Haleakala and get a good rest, for the mails do not intrude there, nor yet the telephone and the telegraph; and after resting we would come down the mountain a piece and board with a godly, breech-clouted native, and eat poi and dirt, and give thanks to whom all thanks belong for these privileges, and ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... get out of this," said Haltren to himself. He felt for the breech of his gun, unloaded both barrels, and ...
— A Young Man in a Hurry - and Other Short Stories • Robert W. Chambers
... hurt, except for a slight twinge in his lame knee. But his gun was a wreck. The stock was shattered close to the breech and a twist of his hand broke ...
— The Grizzly King • James Oliver Curwood
... a month longer there won't be enough material on land or sea to supply the demand for ready-made garments. As it is, I'm afraid the poor devils will have to go naked themselves until a new crop springs up. I saw one of Pootoo's wives patching his best suit of breech clothes to-day, so he must be ...
— Nedra • George Barr McCutcheon
... usefulness of hatpins or hairpins as pipe-cleaners, usefulness of pins to schoolboys, both when bent for fishing and when filed to an extra point for use on the boy in the seat in front (honouring him in the breech, as Hamlet would have said) and their curious habits of turning up in unexpected places, undoubtedly caught by pins in their long association with the lovelier sex. But of these useful hyphens of raiment we will merely conclude by saying that those interested ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... is reached when the point of a bayonet, 23 1/2 inches long, fastened to the breech of a cannon, is placed in her mouth and the piece discharged; the recoil driving the bayonet suddenly down her throat. The gun is loaded with ...
— The Miracle Mongers, an Expos • Harry Houdini
... to Mr. Jewell about a single-barrel breech-loader our house was controlling, and quoted it at ...
— A Man of Samples • Wm. H. Maher
... "She is fitted with a torpedo port for'ard, for firing what the professor called 'torpedo-shells'; two 10-inch breech-loading rifled guns, fired through ports in the dining-saloon, and six Maxim guns, fired from the upper deck, to say nothing of small-arms. Such an armament is ample for every occasion which is at all likely to arise; and if the professor will only furnish me with ...
— With Airship and Submarine - A Tale of Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... Army in 1878—and before—there had been a vein of conservatism running through the upper ranks of the Royal Artillery. (When my battery proceeded from India to Natal to take part in the first Boer War in 1881, we actually had to change our Armstrong breech-loading field-guns for muzzle-loaders on the way, because breech-loaders had been abandoned at home and there was no ammunition for them.) Of late years a progressive school had come into being—technically described as "Young Turks"—who ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... him round, this inquisitive wife, And nabbed and teased him half out of his life; So to terminate this unhallowed strife, He consented at last to admit her. And first to disguise her from bonnet to shoon, The ridiculous lady agreed to put on His breech—ah! forgive me—I meant pantaloon; And miraculously did they fit her. The Lodge was at work on the Master's Degree; The light was ablaze on the letter G; High soared the pillars J. and B.; The officers sat like Solomon, ...
— The Universal Reciter - 81 Choice Pieces of Rare Poetical Gems • Various
... plain sight, the cannon was loaded with powder and ball. A man lit a slow match, blew it painstakingly to a glow, then took his position at the breech. The slight innumerable sounds of these activities died. The bustle of men moving imperceptibly fell. Not even the coughing and sneezing usual to a gathering of people paying attention was heard, for the intense interest inhibited these nervous symptoms. Probably never have twenty thousand people, ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White
... but was opened by another Field officer, who sent back this flatulent reply. "If you are with Major Blinks, you had better ask him whether you may use your own discretion and, if necessary, remove breech blocks and abandon guns." I was not with Major Blinks, and I neither knew nor cared where he might be. Nor had I any intention of abandoning the guns. I determined, without asking anyone's permission, to use my discretion in ...
— With British Guns in Italy - A Tribute to Italian Achievement • Hugh Dalton
... climbs up a very tall tree, And fixes himself to his comfort and glee, Hung up from the end of a branch by his breech, Quite out of all mischievous quadrupeds' reach. A position not perfectly easy 't is true, But yet at the same time ...
— Children's Books and Their Illustrators • Gleeson White
... and its square uprights of pine wood the Stand resembled one of our own pistol-galleries at a fair, with this difference, that the amateurs brought their own weapons, breech-loading muskets of the oldest pattern, which they managed, however, with some adroitness. Tar-tarin, his arms crossed, observed the shots, criticised them aloud, gave his advice, but did not fire himself. The Russians watched him, making signs to ...
— Tartarin On The Alps • Alphonse Daudet
... for the poor Indian. Me lose a son, me lose a broder. The squaws have taken the breech clout, and fight worse than the ...
— Daniel Boone - The Pioneer of Kentucky • John S. C. Abbott
... regarded as the most simple in respect of lock mechanism of any existing revolver, whether single or double action. It extracts the cartridges automatically, and combines with this important feature strength and safety in the closing of the breech. Certainty of aim when firing is obtained by means of a double trigger, which serves many purposes. This secures quick repeating as in the double-action revolvers, and at the same time the revolver is not pulled out of the line of sight, as the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 530, February 27, 1886 • Various
... otherwise. He was abundant, ranging in herds of hundreds along the pampas of the great Thames valley, and furnished forth abundant food for man as well as the wild beasts, when they could capture him. His skin, though, was not counted of much worth. Its short hair afforded little warmth in cloak or breech-clout, and the tanned pelt became hard and uncomfortable when it dried after a wetting. Still, there were various uses for this horse's hide. It made fine strings and thongs, and the beast's flesh, as has been said, was a staple of the larder. The first great resolve of Ab and Oak, these two ...
— The Story of Ab - A Tale of the Time of the Cave Man • Stanley Waterloo
... and then hammered lightly on the outside without a mandrel. Other short tubes are similarly added. Five tubes of different lengths and diameters are turned and bored and shrunk over one another, without successively increasing tension, however, to form a gun. The breech-end of the second tube from the bore is forged solid so that its grain will run parallel with the bore and give the gun longitudinal strength. Both the wedge and the screw breech-loading apparatus are employed on guns of 7 inches bore (110-pounders) ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... A twelve-inch breech-loading gun, fifty calibers long and weighing eighty-three tons, will propel a shell weighing eight hundred and eighty pounds, by a powder charge of six hundred and twenty-four pounds, at a velocity of over two thousand six hundred and twenty feet per second, giving an energy ...
— Marvels of Modern Science • Paul Severing
... in the bottom of my cart." His expectations in this particular were realized, and he loaded the rifle with a small blank charge. "Now," he said, shaking the powder into the pan by a succession of smart taps on the breech, "sometimes these old pieces go off and sometimes they don't; it depends on the flint, but you stand back of your Uncle Bob, sonny, and keep yo' fingers out of yo' ears, and when ...
— The Prodigal Judge • Vaughan Kester
... mounted. Before he had gone a step he caught sight of the figure of Soa, outlined in bold relief against the background of the fire and surrounded by many of the freed Settlement men. At the instant when he saw her she was in the act of springing back from the breech of the gun, the lanyard in her hand. Then came the roar of the shot and the shriek ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard
... arrived at the forecastle. Then, gliding among the convicts stretched here and there, he made the round of the ship, and found that the "Speedy" carried four guns, which would throw shot of from eight to ten pounds in weight. He found also, on touching them that these guns were breech-loaders. They were therefore, of modern make, easily used, ...
— The Mysterious Island • Jules Verne
... an instant.— [To himself, going off.] I ne're met with a more subtle old Hag than this i' my days: I'm cursedly afraid this Witch shou'd trap me in my discourse, and discover the place where I've hid my Gold: Troth, I believe the consuming Jade has Eyes in her Breech.—— Now for my Gold, that has cost me such a woful deal of trouble, I'll go see whether that be safe as I ...
— Prefaces to Terence's Comedies and Plautus's Comedies (1694) • Lawrence Echard
... attacking party. When the late insurrection commenced in Satsuma, the Tokio boys, hearing of the campaign on modern tactics, would form attack and defence parties. A little company armed with bamboo breech-loaders would march to the assault of the roguish battalion lurking ...
— Child-Life in Japan and Japanese Child Stories • Mrs. M. Chaplin Ayrton
... as a stranger at Port Louis, perhaps the first thing to engage attention is the strange mixture of nations,—representatives, he might at first be inclined to imagine, of half the countries of the earth. He stares at a coolie from Madras with a breech-cloth and a soldier's jacket, or a stately bearded Moor striking a bargain with a Parsee merchant. A Chinaman with two bundles slung on a bamboo hurries past, jostling a group of young Creole exquisites smoking their cheroots ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... more fine things than all the rest of the boys about there put together. He took particular pride in his splendid hunting and fishing outfit, and it was coveted by almost every boy who had seen it. He had four guns—all breech-loaders; a beautiful little fowling-piece for such small game as quails and snipes; a larger one for ducks and geese; a light squirrel rifle, something like the one Clarence Gordon owned; and a heavier weapon, which he called his deer gun, and which carried ...
— The Boy Trapper • Harry Castlemon
... rubbed some oil upon my leg, which was very sore from the cub's tongue, I took the driver, Tom, who did not half like the job, and having armed myself with an ordinary double No. 12 smooth-bore, the first breech-loader I ever had, I started. I took the smooth-bore because it shot a bullet very well; and my experience has been that a round ball from a smooth-bore is quite as effective against a lion as an express bullet. ...
— Stories by English Authors: Africa • Various
... to be about the war; there are no other stories nowadays. And so he wrote of English soldiers who, in the dusk on a field of France, faced the sullen mass of the oncoming Huns. They were few against fearful odds, but, as they sent the breech-bolt home and aimed and fired, they became aware that others fought beside them. Down the air came cries to St. George and twanging of the bow-string; the old bowmen of England had risen at England's need from their graves in that ...
— The Angels of Mons • Arthur Machen
... had taken but a few turns when their attention was attracted by the sound of low voices, being those of the men constituting the anchor watch. Roger and his friend strolled up to them, and, sitting down on the breech of a gun, prepared to listen to what was evidently a yarn that the old quarter-master, ...
— Across the Spanish Main - A Tale of the Sea in the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... with no gentle hand let the breech fall upon the fellow's head. The blow loosened the skin, and let ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... the Tongue of Jagai. 5 But if he be passed the Tongue of Jagai, right swiftly turn ye then, For the length and the breadth of that grisly plain is sown with Kamal's men. There is rock to the left, and rock to the right, and low 10 lean thorn between, And ye may hear a breech bolt snick where never a man ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... and the empty shell flew out, for the rifle was an ejector. His practised hands had another cartridge in and the breech closed in an instant. He fired again and then again, aiming each time at a different spot in the palisade. There was a roar of anger from the hidden Kachins, a roar answered by an ...
— Jack Haydon's Quest • John Finnemore
... it was my good chance, To meet with a Black-coat that was in a Trance; I speedily grip'd him and whip'd off his Cods, 'Twixt his Head and his Breech, I left little odds: O, quoth the Devil, and so away ran, Thou oft will be curst by many ...
— Wit and Mirth: or Pills to Purge Melancholy, Vol. 5 of 6 • Various
... Unmannerly breech'd with gore] An unmannerly dagger, and a dagger breech'd, or as in some editions breech'd with, gore, are expressions not easily to be understood. There are undoubtedly two faults in this passage, which I have endeavored to take away ...
— Notes to Shakespeare, Volume III: The Tragedies • Samuel Johnson
... it in silence. Having thus succeeded in his benevolent purpose, Girty lost no time in attending to the comfort of his friend. He led him into his own wigwam, and from his own store gave him a pair of moccasins and leggins, a breech-cloth, a hat, a coat, a handkerchief for his neck, and another for ...
— Life & Times of Col. Daniel Boone • Cecil B. Harley
... very little clothing in winter and none in the summer. Women usually wore a primitive skirt, which consisted of a piece of cotton cloth fastened about the waist, and extending to the knees. Men wore breech cloths and moccasins. In winter they had shirts and leggings ...
— Geronimo's Story of His Life • Geronimo
... to the defiles of the Argonne where there are defiles no longer; never mind, that is according to tradition. I have a friend in Rouen who proposed to a club the manufacture of lances to fight against the breech-loaders! ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... the boat with the cartridge-pouch and examining the breech of his gun, after which he walked slowly to the corner of the green opening and took his place close to the edge of the river, where he was partly hidden by some pendent boughs, while Rob, Joe, and Shaddy got ...
— Rob Harlow's Adventures - A Story of the Grand Chaco • George Manville Fenn
... table with a small rook-rifle in her hands. The breech was open. She looked down the barrel, holding up the weapon so that the light might shine into ...
— Witness For The Defense • A.E.W. Mason
... me from gun to gun slapping hand on breech or trunnion, and as I hearkened 'twas hard to recognise the merry peddler in this short, square, grave-faced gunner who spake with mariner's tongue, hitched ever and anon at the broad belt of his galligaskins, and rolled in ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... the next gas-flare, and by the light of it he threw the breech-block of the repeating rifle to make sure the cartridge was in place. Then he, too, passed through the wicket and went to stand in the shadow of the slab-floored porch, redolent of memories. He had forgotten the lesser vengeance ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... children; and I asked him what he thought was best to teach them first. JOHNSON. 'Sir, it is no matter what you teach them first, any more than what leg you shall put into your breeches first. Sir, you may stand disputing which is best to put in first, but in the mean time your breech is bare. Sir, while you are considering which of two things you should teach your child first, another boy has ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... little difficulties arose too, connected with the use of the guns as a shelter from fire, and very exact rules had to be made to avoid tilting the nose and raising the breech of a gun in order to ...
— Little Wars; a game for boys from twelve years of age to one hundred and fifty and for that more intelligent sort of girl who likes boys' games and books • H. G. Wells
... from the ditch to within a few feet of where I was lying. A little beyond the other end of the building stood two cannon pointing towards me with a group of rebels at the breech of each one of them trying to discharge it. They were two of our own guns that had been captured before they had been fired by our gunners and were still loaded with the double charges of canister intended for the rebels. ...
— The Battle of Franklin, Tennessee • John K. Shellenberger
... the service, and they are being discharged as rapidly as they can be replaced by regular troops. The Army has been promptly paid, carefully provided with medical treatment, well sheltered and subsisted, and is to be furnished with breech-loading small arms. The military strength of the nation has been unimpaired by the discharge of volunteers, the disposition of unserviceable or perishable stores, and the retrenchment of expenditure. Sufficient war material ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... They looked with a feeling somewhat akin to pity upon the gallant seamen, many of whom were hurrying to death. Lieutenant Morris himself stood by the long gun, holding the match in his hand, and frequently taking aim over its long breech—another moment and the fatal volley would be sped, but even as he was about to apply the match, his quick eye saw the sails filling with the breeze, and with the true magnanimity of a generous heart ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 5 November 1848 • Various
... such a weapon as he had coveted all his life long, seeing such in gunsmiths' windows and the halls of noblemen: a breech-loader, of foreign make, beautifully ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... to make them appear as natural looking as possible, and then we are ready for business. Now here they come—a flock of seven geese, plump down among the stool, but get up again with equal haste. Two of them are knocked down with the breech-loader, one dead, the other only wounded—a third stopped by the muzzle-loader. Theodoric was dreamily watching his decoys as they danced about, when a bunch of sprig-tail swooped dawn, hovering above the stool. He picked his bird, and dropped two with the first barrel, and ...
— Nick Baba's Last Drink and Other Sketches • George P. Goff
... of storming such a place. The breech-loading rifles of the Indians thrust through chinks between the rocks were ready to pick off every soldier who showed himself for a moment, while the Indians lay utterly invisible. They were familiar with byways both ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir
... a great scene with Peter yesterday. Rex has two guns, you must know—a rifle, and an old fowling-piece—good enough in its way, but awfully old-fashioned (not a breech-loader), and he determined to make old Peter a present of this, for he is a good old fellow, and does not cheat one, and we had resolved to give him something, and we knew this would delight him. I wish you could have seen ...
— Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books • Horatia K. F. Eden
... mouth, but finding he was dead, they began to prepare for his burial in the following manner:—Having shaved or scraped his body, arms, and legs, with their knives, they dug a great hole, in which they placed him on his breech in a sitting posture, heaping stones about him to keep him upright. Then came the women, making a most horrible noise round the hole which was afterwards filled ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume X • Robert Kerr
... a body resembling the little toe of a newly-born infant. On the left side the limb was represented by a fleshy corpuscle 1 inch long and 1/4 inch in circumference, resembling the great toe of an infant. There was no history of shock or injury to the mother. The child presented by the breech, and by the absence of limbs caused much difficulty in diagnosis. The three stages of labor were one and one-half hours, forty-five minutes, and five minutes, respectively. The accompanying illustration shows the appearance of the limbs ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... and a—ditter—pound of powder!" was the stern and significant reply of the other, as with one hand he struck his rattling bullet-pouch and huge powder-horn, and with the other brought down the breech of his rifle with a ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... straight at the handle but curved at the other end. The broad portion used for throwing or carrying the ball was formed of thongs of deerskin, interwoven and drawn firm and tight. It was a picturesque sight when the opposing teams were ready to commence play. The animated warriors were nude except for a breech-cloth reaching to the knee. When all was in readiness, an Indian maiden came tripping into the centre of the field. She was prettily attired after the custom of her tribe, wore bracelets of silver and a red tiara decked with eagle feathers. Placing the ball ...
— The War Chief of the Six Nations - A Chronicle of Joseph Brant - Volume 16 (of 32) in the series Chronicles of Canada • Louis Aubrey Wood
... readily understood by an examination of the Illustrations. In that at the foot of page 175 the cannon is lying useless upon the earth; one wheel already forms the rude resting-place of a gunner, whilst the other is in the act of being displaced. By the application of a rope round the termination of the breech, and the lifting of the trail of the carriage, care being previously taken that the trunnions are in their respective sockets, a very slight exertion of manual labour is required to put the gun into fighting trim. That we may be understood, we will add that the trunnions are ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... as ever I heard tell! In sooth me thinkes the breech becomes her well; And might it not make their husbands feare them[127] Wold all the wives in our town might weare them. Tell me, youth, art a straunger here ...
— Old English Plays, Vol. I - A Collection of Old English Plays • Various
... forced him to renounce his salvation and curse Jesus Christ; that they then made him submit to many unholy and disgusting ceremonies, and forced him to kiss the superior on the cheek, the navel, and the breech, and spit three times upon a crucifix; that all the members were forbidden to have connexion with women, but might give themselves up without restraint to every species of unmentionable debauchery; that when by any mischance a Templar infringed this order, and a child ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... must have plastered it on thick; they look like living statues. Not a rag on them except 'breech-clouts.' Hello, there comes a troop around that mound to the right. Must be two ...
— Captured by the Navajos • Charles A. Curtis
... rhinoceros, with no more danger than had attended the killing of B.'s. On this occasion, however, I had my first experience of the lightning skill of the first-class gunbearer. Having fired both barrels, and staggered the beast, I threw open the breech and withdrew the empty cartridges, intending, of course, as my next move to fish two more out of my belt. The empty shells were hardly away from the chambers, however, when a long brown arm shot over my right shoulder and popped two fresh cartridges in the breech. So astonished was ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White
... to the ground as if he had been shot. The giraffe had not seen him, for the head, having vanished for a moment, reappeared; it was feeding, plucking down small branches of leaves, and Felix, lying on his side, opened the breech of the rifle, drew the empty cartridge case, inserted a cartridge in each barrel, and closed the breech. Now, unknown to Adams, when he had fired the gun the day before, there was a plug of clay in the left-hand barrel about two inches from ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... the guns was on the further side from me, and therefore I was able to have a pretty close look at the breech action and various other items before he could come round to my side. But he very quickly noticed my presence, and not only came himself, but shouted to another man whom I had not so far seen behind a corner ...
— My Adventures as a Spy • Robert Baden-Powell
... gun-crew had just finished rolling it slowly, correctly, without haste, into position facing the barricade. Not one of them had been struck. Then the captain of the piece, bearing down upon the breech in order to raise the muzzle, began to point the cannon with the gravity of an ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... In their triumph three or four savage foes have leaped up from behind their sheltering rocks, and one of them pays the penalty,—a vengeful carbine from across the canon stretches the lithe, slender, dusky form lifeless among the rocks, with the dirty white of his breech-clout turning crimson in the noonday glare. Up from the cave, cat-like, Patterson and "Little Mac" come climbing the narrow trail. Between them they drag Walsh's senseless body to the edge, and then, somehow, despite hissing, spattering lead, they bear him safely down and ...
— Foes in Ambush • Charles King
... was, as I think I have mentioned before, a four-pound rifled piece, which was specially made to my order by an eminent firm. It was a most beautiful little weapon, exquisitely finished; was a breech- loader, and threw a solid shot about a mile, and a shell nearly half as far again. It was mounted on a swivel or pivot, which we had the means of ...
— For Treasure Bound • Harry Collingwood
... down the breech-strap he was mending. "Did you ever fire a gun?" he inquired suddenly, as he was starting across the yard to fetch the weapon from ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... Shanghai and the numerous mail steamers which daily arrive there, a profitable market for game has sprung up during the past few years, to supply which there are now a number of native gunners who, as a means of livelihood, scour the country with foreign breech-loaders in search of pheasants, wildfowl, etc., so that, being capital shots, within a considerable distance of this port the shooting is not so good as formerly, although in all other parts of the Empire it still remains practically untouched until ...
— Life and sport in China - Second Edition • Oliver G. Ready
... 'total gules' any worse than Duncan's 'silver skin laced with his golden blood,' or so bad as the chamberlains' daggers 'unmannerly breech'd with gore'?[262] If 'to bathe in reeking wounds,' and 'spongy officers,' and even 'alarum'd by his sentinel the wolf, Whose howl's his watch,' and other such phrases in Macbeth, had occurred in the speech of Aeneas, we should certainly ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... belonged to the overseer. These were the only weapons at the time that were in serviceable condition, for though there were a brace of pistols they had been packed away, as there were no cartridges for them, and my rifle was useless, from having a ball sticking fast in the breech, and which we had in vain endeavoured to extract. A few days' previous to our leaving the last water, the overseer had attempted to wash out the rifle not knowing it was loaded, and the consequence was, ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... This Nicholas anon let fly a fart, As great as it had been a thunder dent*; *peal, clap That with the stroke he was well nigh y-blent*; *blinded But he was ready with his iron hot, And Nicholas amid the erse he smote. Off went the skin an handbreadth all about. The hote culter burned so his tout*, *breech That for the smart he weened* he would die; *thought As he were wood*, for woe he gan to cry, *mad "Help! water, ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... safely through the door, came in between our two lines. He said "Just give me your guns as I'm ready for them," a deceptively mild beginning, we feared, knowing how sharp he could be. But at the fourth gun he said, "The rifles are not so bad." I handed him mine, breech open, hoping that it was up to the average. He tried to look down the barrel; then when he snorted I declare I felt like a boy before his schoolmaster. But to my relief he laughed, took from the muzzle the plug that I had put there in ...
— At Plattsburg • Allen French
... of warriors expert in jungle fighting, on which the Government can always count, the Raja has a small standing army known as the "Sarawak Rangers," recruited from excellent material—the natives of the country—under European Officers, armed with breech-loading rifles, and numbering two hundred and fifty or three hundred men. There is, in addition, a small Police Force, likewise composed of natives, as also are the crews of the small steamers and launches which form the Sarawak Navy. With the exception, therefore, of the European Officers, ...
— British Borneo - Sketches of Brunai, Sarawak, Labuan, and North Borneo • W. H. Treacher
... fought with the muzzle-loading rifle. Toward the close I had one brigade (Walcutt's) armed with breech-loading "Spencer's;" the cavalry generally had breach-loading carbines, "Spencer's" and "Sharp's," both of ...
— The Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman, Complete • William T. Sherman
... the gun, meaning to open the breech, but he and Furneaux simultaneously noticed a bit of black thread tied to one of the triggers. It had been broken, and the two loose ends were some ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... answered Jack, and Needham, giving a friendly slap on the breech of the gun, while he cast his eye along the sight, brought it to a proper elevation, and the brig yawing slightly, he pulled the trigger. The shot flew straight for the chase, but as Jack watched its course, he saw that it fell into the water ...
— The Three Lieutenants • W.H.G. Kingston
... bound at the wrists with four yellow laces, closed before very richly with a dozen of pewter buttons; his hose was of grey kersey, with a large slop[1] barred overthwart the pocket-holes with three fair guards, stitched of either side with red thread; his stock was of the own, sewed close to his breech, and for to beautify his hose, he had trussed himself round with a dozen of new-threaden points[2] of medley color: his bonnet was green, whereon stood a copper brooch with the picture of Saint Denis; and to want nothing that might make him amorous in his old days, ...
— Rosalynde - or, Euphues' Golden Legacy • Thomas Lodge
... love?" answered the Major coolly, as, with spectacles on his nose, he examined the position of a gun—"The matter? Why,—raise her breech a thought more, John Gudyill—the matter? Why, Claver'se is routed, my dear, and the whigs are coming down upon us in ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... the Yellow Sea busy gunners on a Japanese battleship aimed a 12-inch gun at one of the German forts in Tsing-tao. Opening the breech, they removed the smoking cartridge case, put in another loaded one, and waited to learn whether the projectile had scattered death among the enemy or exploded harmlessly in soft earth. They were five or six miles from ...
— Current History, A Monthly Magazine - The European War, March 1915 • New York Times
... become careless. The camel-guns spoke at intervals, and the square slouched forward amid the protesting of the camels. Then came the attack of three thousand men who had not learned from books that it is impossible for troops in close order to attack against breech-loading fire. ...
— The Light That Failed • Rudyard Kipling
... gun at the end of a rope. This they wheeled into position in the square and pointed it at the door of the jail. Quite deliberately, the cannon was loaded with powder and balls. A man lit a slow match, blew it to a glow, and took his position at the breech. Nothing then happened for a full ten minutes. The six men stood rigid by the gun in the middle of the square. The sunlight gleamed from the ranks of bayonets. The vast multitude held its breath. The wall of the ...
— The Forty-Niners - A Chronicle of the California Trail and El Dorado • Stewart Edward White
... lieutenant in command of the turret, as the first shell appeared at the mouth of the dark tube. Into the breech with it and the two cartridges after it. When the lieutenant had taken his position at the telescope sight in order to determine the direction and distance for firing, orders came down from the commander to fire at the enemy's leading ship, the Satsuma. The distance ...
— Banzai! • Ferdinand Heinrich Grautoff
... either appetite nor honor . . . . Gerron, becoming a corporal, had obtained no idea of any kind of sorrow other than that coming from the blows of a baton on the rump . . . . On this idea, he thought that the soul of an honest man was no different than a soldier's breech. If Gerron caused trouble to the spirit of a man of honor, he thought that this spirit, like his own, had only a rump, and that any trouble he caused would pass likewise. He deceived himself. The breech of the spirit of an honest man is different than ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... of bulleted breech-caps, were stored in Stalky's trunk, and this trunk was in their dormitory, and their dormitory was a three-bed attic one, opening out of a ten-bed establishment, which, in turn, communicated with the great range ...
— Stalky & Co. • Rudyard Kipling
... Karri Davies. There were no bayonets, but that was a detail. At the word the gunners were off, and there in the darkness in front of the storming party loomed the enormous gun, gigantic in that uncertain light. Out with the huge breech-block! Wrap the long lean muzzle round with a collar of gun-cotton! Keep the guard upon the run until the work is done! Hunter stood by with a night light in his hand until the charge was in position, and then, with a crash which brought both armies from their tents, the huge tube reared up on its ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the female, the formidable warrior, for such his garb denoted him to be, continued motionless in the attitude he had at first assumed—his right cheek reposing on the ornamented stock of his rifle, and his quick and steady eye fixed in one undeviating line with the sight near the breech, and that which surmounted the extreme end of the deadly weapon. No sooner, however, had the head of the advancing column come within sight, than the trigger was pulled, and the small and ragged bullet sped hissing from ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... something between a hat and a turban, and over his baggy Turkish trousers hung a long Persian coat of bright-colored, large-figured cloth, bound at the waist by a belt of cartridges. Across the shoulders was slung a breech-loading Martini rifle, and from his neck dangled a heavy gold chain, which was probably the spoil of some predatory expedition. A quiet dignity sat on Ismail Deverish's ...
— Across Asia on a Bicycle • Thomas Gaskell Allen and William Lewis Sachtleben
... the captain had said, "it's all very well to use breech-loaders when you've got towns and railways and suchlike to supply you wi' cartridges, but when you've got to cruise in out-o'-the-way waters, there's nothin' like the old style. It's not difficult to carry a few thousand percussion-caps ...
— Blown to Bits - or, The Lonely Man of Rakata • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... leap, he launched himself full-speed across the bare plain, aiming for the Madison River, five miles before. A burst of yells and whoops reached his ears. He glanced behind and saw some one hundred young braves, naked, the most of them, to their breech-clouts, ...
— Boys' Book of Frontier Fighters • Edwin L. Sabin
... making sail, preparing for action, and gun and cutlass exercise had been performed, anchor again cast, ropes coiled up, and everything in apple-pie order, the Chilian officers rallied round Stephen, and, taking his seat on the breech of a gun, he told them the story, but with a good deal less detail than he had given to Lord Cochrane. This relation elicited the greatest admiration on the part of his hearers. The fact that he and two others alone, and without any tools save swords, should have built the stout ...
— With Cochrane the Dauntless • George Alfred Henty
... water—confused, increasing, nearing! Then a shriek broke within the fort palisades,—"The enemy! the Iroquois!" and the courtyard was in an uproar indescribable. Painted redskins, naked but for the breech clout, were dashing across the cornfields to scale the palisades or force the hastily slammed gates. Father Daniel rushed from church to wigwams rallying the Huron warriors, while the women and children, the aged and the feeble, ran a terrified rabble to the shelter ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... the proper tying up of the patient. He should be placed with his breech projecting over the edge of a narrow table, with head slightly raised on a pillow, but the shoulders low. The hands are then to be secured each to its corresponding foot, by a strong bandage passing round wrist and instep, ...
— A Manual of the Operations of Surgery - For the Use of Senior Students, House Surgeons, and Junior Practitioners • Joseph Bell
... and ornaments—in a vain search for a box of cartridges wherewith to kill herself. She found them at last behind the whisky bottle, and clutched at them with a great sigh of relief. She carried them over to the table on which she had laid her rifle, and as she pushed one into the breech, Stephen Ballantyne stood in the doorway ...
— Witness For The Defense • A.E.W. Mason
... be past the Tongue of Jagai, right swiftly turn ye then, For the length and the breadth of that grisly plain is sown with Kamal's men. There is rock to the left, and rock to the right, and low lean thorn between, And ye may hear a breech-bolt snick where never ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... blue, with gaudy belt and buckskins, and cap of fur and moccasins of hide, mingling fraternally with their tufted and bepainted visitors, as well as with those rangers, both envied and hated, the savage coureurs de bois of the far Northern fur trade; men bearded, silent, stern, clad in breech-clout and leggings like any savage, as silent, as stoical, as hardy on the trail as on the narrow ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough
... and write yourself plush-breech. Can't you be more than a footman? Try to be a man of the world; you're old enough for that by now. I know she 's good-looking; the whole tale hangs on that. You needn't be singing me mooncalf hymn tunes of "Lady Ormont, Lady Ormont," solemn as a parson's clerk; ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... her as a man should love all things that are swift and strong and honest, keen for marks and goals—a big, clean-limbed, thoroughbred horse that will break his heart to get under the wire first; a high-power rifle, slim of muzzle, thick of breech, with its wicked little throaty cry, doing its business over a flat trajectory a thousand yards away: I love her as a man should love those. Little did I dream that ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... for the reporting of the trial would fall on me without a relief. What that trial would be like I knew even to weariness. There would be the rifle carefully uncleaned, with the fouling marks about breech and muzzle, to be sworn to by half a dozen superfluous privates; there would be heat, reeking heat, till the wet pencil slipped sideways between the fingers; and the punkah would swish and the pleaders would jabber in the verandahs, and his Commanding Officer would put in certificates of the ...
— This is "Part II" of Soldiers Three, we don't have "Part I" • Rudyard Kipling
... bit of statuary in Italy, wherein marbles of differing hue and shade had been ingeniously used by the sculptor to give color to his work. The boys themselves, as I have said, were of polished ebony hue, while the breech-cloths which formed their sole garment were of purest alabaster white. Upon their heads were turbans of pink. They grinned broadly as I came out, and opened the door of the chair ...
— Olympian Nights • John Kendrick Bangs
... the revolver, throwing open the breech—the cylinder was empty; he had forgotten to load it. "What a fool!" he exclaimed, laughing scornfully, and still laughing he walked to the centre of the room under the chandelier and turned ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris
... slant that the deck was slowly beginning to take. They thrust the first projectile into the breech of the cannon while the gunner made an effort to distinguish that small black cane hardly perceptible among ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... article on "Rifled Guns" in the "Atlantic Monthly" for October, 1859, has the following passage: "No breech-loading gun is so trustworthy in its execution as a muzzle-loader; for, in spite of all precautions, the bullets will go out irregularly. We have cut out too many balls of Sharpe's rifle from the target, which had entered sidewise, not to be certain on this point; and we know of no other breech-loader ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... Percivale, and speak we of Sir Launcelot that suffered and endured many sharp showers, that ever ran wild wood from place to place, and lived by fruit and such as he might get, and drank water two year; and other clothing had he but little but his shirt and his breech. Thus as Sir Launcelot wandered here and there he came in a fair meadow where he found a pavilion; and there by, upon a tree, there hung a white shield, and two swords hung thereby, and two spears leaned there by a tree. And when Sir Launcelot saw ...
— Le Morte D'Arthur, Volume II (of II) - King Arthur and of his Noble Knights of the Round Table • Thomas Malory
... give this as one of the General Canons of the Syllogism; but we have seen (chap. vi. Sec. 6) that it is of wider application. Indeed, 'not to go beyond the evidence' belongs to the definition of formal proof. A breech of this rule in a syllogism is the fallacy of Illicit Process of the Minor, or of the Major, according to which term has been unwarrantably distributed. The following parasyllogism illicitly distributes both ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... When recently examining the Museum of the Arsenal at Venice, we were surprised to find numerous weapons of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries embodying the most recent English improvements in arms, such as revolving pistols, rifled muskets, and breech-loading cannon. The latter, embodying Sir William Armstrong's modern idea, though in a rude form, had been fished up from the bottom of the Adriatic, where the ship armed with them had been sunk hundreds of years ago. Even Perkins's steam-gun was an old invention ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
... occurred at that station. More than half the original battery was gone. The little shelter house was splintered in a hundred places. There were shell holes throughout the field, and the breech of one gun had recently been shattered and was ...
— Kings, Queens And Pawns - An American Woman at the Front • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... The gun, which is constructed of forged and tempered steel, has a 3" bore. Its total length is 8 feet and its weight is 726 pounds. The body of the gun consists of three elements:—1. A tube in which the breech piece is fixed. 2. A sleeve covering the tube for a length of 3 feet 6 inches. 3. A chase hoop. The chamber is provided with twenty-four grooves of variable pitch which have a final inclination of ...
— With the Naval Brigade in Natal (1899-1900) - Journal of Active Service • Charles Richard Newdigate Burne
... Paul, where I spent a couple of days with Teddy Worthington. Teddy and Bud Hathaway of Chicago were going on a shooting trip in the Big Woods of Minnesota, and they asked me to go with them. It was new deal for me, so of course I was for it. I hired a hammerless breech-loader for seven a week, borrowed a lot of fishing-tackle, and bought a hunting-knife with a nickel-plated handle. It was a beaut, and stood me three fifty. A fellow can never be too careful. Up there you are likely any minute to come face to face with an Apache or some old left-over Aztec ...
— Billy Baxter's Letters • William J. Kountz, Jr.
... naked, usually with nothing but the smallest possible breech clout around their loins, which the police require them to wear; they plaster their bodies with mud, ashes and filth; they rub clay, gum and other substances into their hair to give it an uncouth appearance. Sometimes they ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... forecastle. Then, gliding among the convicts stretched here and there, he made the round of the ship, and found that the Speedy carried four guns, which would throw shot of from eight to ten pounds in weight. He found also, on touching them, that these guns were breech-loaders. They were, therefore, of modern make, easily ...
— The Secret of the Island • W.H.G. Kingston (translation from Jules Verne)
... lively sea was beginning to make. The shoals toward the beach were already white with the churn of water, while those farther out as yet showed no more sign than of discoloured water. As the schooner went into the wind and backed her jib and staysail the whaleboat was swung out. Into it leaped six breech-clouted Santa Cruz boys, each armed with a rifle. Denby, carrying the lanterns, dropped into the stern-sheets. Grief, following, ...
— A Son Of The Sun • Jack London
... fill with water and cellulose material, and as they are also minutely subdivided, the effects of damage by shot and consequent flooding may be localized to a considerable extent. The guns of the ship are to consist of four 20 centimeter Hontorio breech loading guns on Vavasseur carriages, six 12 centimeter guns, eight 6 pounder rapid firing, and eight or ten small guns for boats and mitrailleuse purposes, four of which are in the crow's nests at ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 623, December 10, 1887 • Various
... most suitable to each Was, for the elder and the stouter, first A Candiote cloak, which to the knee might reach, And trousers not so tight that they would burst, But such as fit an Asiatic breech; A shawl, whose folds in Cashmire had been nurst, Slippers of saffron, dagger rich and handy; In short, all things ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... him with tensely anxious eyes as he broke the breech, looked at the shining circle of cartridges, ...
— Philip Steele of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • James Oliver Curwood
... came to be killed. Distant about three hundred yards upon the sandy plain are other men and horses, to the number of near two hundred. Their half-naked bodies of bronze colour, fantastically marked with devices in chalk-white, charcoal-black, and vermillion red—their buckskin breech-clouts and leggings, with plumes sticking tuft-like above their crowns—all these insignia show them to ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... about fifteen miles on the road, an Apache Indian appeared, and so suddenly that it seemed as if he must have sprung up from the ground. He was in full war dress—that is, no dress at all except the breech clout and moccasins—and his face and whole naked body were stained in many colors in the most hideous manner. In his scalp lock was fastened a number of eagle feathers, and of course he wore two or three necklaces of beads and wampum. There ...
— Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871-1888 • Frances M.A. Roe
... bring back some fresh meat for supper. I had no saddle, as mine had been left at the camp a mile distant, so taking the harness from Brigham, I mounted him bareback and started out after the game, being armed with my celebrated buffalo-killer, "Lucretia Borgia,"—a newly-improved breech-loading needle gun, which I had obtained ...
— The Life of Hon. William F. Cody - Known as Buffalo Bill The Famous Hunter, Scout and Guide • William F. Cody
... them record the days of duelling, others the dangers of the road, when highway robbers lurked in every wood, and many a family coach was waylaid and its occupants robbed of their jewels and their purses of gold. To those interested in sporting, and familiar with the breech-loading guns of the present day, much interest attaches to the old powder flasks which were once necessary accompaniments of sportsmen. There are many beautifully engraved, embossed, and decorated flasks in museums, some of the early seventeenth-century specimens being made of boxwood, others ...
— Chats on Household Curios • Fred W. Burgess
... and looked on while a juggler did his tricks before a group of natives. They were wonderful, but I knew Satan could beat that game, and I begged him to show off a little, and he said he would. He changed himself into a native in turban and breech-cloth, and very considerately conferred on me a temporary knowledge of ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... trail, past the spring, ride in single file the Apaches, slowly, on tired horses, for the pursuing soldiers have given them no halting space. Naked, save for a breech-clout, with a narrow red band of dyed buckskin about his forehead, in which sticks a feather, each rides silent, grim, cruel, a hideous human reptile, as native to the desert as is the Gila monster. ...
— The Round-up - A Romance of Arizona novelized from Edmund Day's melodrama • John Murray and Marion Mills Miller
... near the ground. My father had at first made him practise for a long time without caps, powder, or shot, merely in quickly bringing the stock close to the shoulder, and getting the eye directly behind the breech. When proficiency in that had become a mechanical habit, the gun was loaded, and then commenced the practice of shooting at moving objects. As the art of bringing the gun properly to the cheek had been so thoroughly mastered as to require no effort nor attention, ...
— Captain Mugford - Our Salt and Fresh Water Tutors • W.H.G. Kingston
... place of honour was seen, covered by a splendid glass case, a piece of breech, broken and twisted under the effort of the powder—a precious fragment of ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne
... reason. Here lay Duncan, His silver skin lac'd with his golden blood; And his gash'd stabs look'd like a breach in nature For ruin's wasteful entrance: there, the murderers, Steep'd in the colours of their trade, their daggers Unmannerly breech'd with gore: who could refrain, That had a heart to love, and in that heart Courage ...
— Macbeth • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... dissemble. But (if it please your Maiestie) may it not seeme inough for a Courtier to know how to weare a fether, and set his cappe a slaunt, his chaine en echarpe, a straight buskin al inglesse, a loose alo Turquesque, the cape alla Spaniola, the breech a la Francoise, and by twentie maner of new faishoned garments to disguise his body, and his face with as many countenances, whereof it seemes there be many that make a very arte, and studie who can shew ...
— The Arte of English Poesie • George Puttenham
... The country was more tropical than any through which we had passed. Clumps of palm trees were to be seen here and there. Pools of standing water, where horses and cattle stood cooling themselves, were frequent. The people whom we met wore little clothing. Men frequently had nothing but the breech-clout and hat. Women wore a skirt, but no upper garment. Children up to ten and twelve years of age ran naked. Reaching San Mateo at twelve o'clock, we found the village excited at our non-appearance. Our carretero had arrived long before with our luggage. ...
— In Indian Mexico (1908) • Frederick Starr
... hit into the path I had been always looking for. It was narrow, but well beaten, and I saw that Case had plenty of disciples. It seems, indeed, it was a piece of fashionable boldness to venture up here with the trader, and a young man scarce reckoned himself grown till he had got his breech tattooed, for one thing, and seen Case’s devils for another. This is mighty like Kanakas; but, if you look at it another way, it’s mighty ...
— Island Nights' Entertainments • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Washington," he would say, "spring from his panting horse, and seize a brass field-piece as if it had been a stick. His look was terrible. He put his right hand on the muzzle, his left hand on the breech; he pulled with this, he pushed with that, and wheeled it round, as if it had been a plaything: it furrowed the ground like a ploughshare. He tore the sheet-lead from the touch-hole; then the powder-monkey rushed up with the fire, when the cannon went off, ...
— The Farmer Boy, and How He Became Commander-In-Chief • Morrison Heady
... muzzles of these guns look enormous, but I was completely thunderstruck when I saw the two great breeches side by side. They reminded me of two big engine boilers. They must be about 6 feet in diameter and are probably not less. The officer who took us round had a breech block swung back, and we were allowed to examine ...
— The Incomparable 29th and the "River Clyde" • George Davidson
... hastily figured out on the envelope. Then he took a cylinder about twelve inches long, and almost half as much in diameter, a huge thing, constructed, it seemed, of a substance that was almost as brittle as an eggshell. Into the large hemispherical cavity in the breech of the gun he shoved it. He took another quick look at the light gleaming from the house in ...
— Guy Garrick • Arthur B. Reeve
... my lad, or else 'tis tuptomai, as thy breech well knew when we followed school. But I am of a quiet turn, and would never lift my hand to pull a trigger, no, nor a nose, nor anything but a rose," and here he took and handled one of Madam Esmond's bright pink apron ribbons. "I hate ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... and gallant and gay; Jules Francois makes frocks in the Rue de la Paix; Since the mobilisation Jules Francois's the one That sits by the breech of a galloping gun, In the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, October 14, 1914 • Various
... the cub, intent on recapturing his pistol, but Reade shot out a foot, tripping him. Then Tom ran nimbly over to the cook tent. Here he halted, breaking the weapon at the breech and allowing the cartridges to drop into his hand. He transferred them to his pocket, then wheeled and picked ...
— The Young Engineers in Colorado • H. Irving Hancock
... visitor meets the shell coming up upon a little trolley to the gun. He sees the gunners, as drilled and precise as the men he saw at the forges, swing out the breech block and run the shell, which has met and combined with its detonators and various other industrial products since it left the main dump, into the gun. The breech closes like a safe door, and hides the shell from the visitor. It is "good-bye." He ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells
... two detachments came away, first blowing up the 4.5 how. and removing the breech mechanism, dial sight, and sight clinometer of the 18-pdr. As soon as he had vacated the position the sergeant reported to the machine-gun officer and then to his battery's ...
— Pushed and the Return Push • George Herbert Fosdike Nichols, (AKA Quex)
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