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More "Nail" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... give. So if you know how to read, find someone who can't. If you've got a hammer, find a nail. If you're not hungry, not lonely, not in trouble—seek ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... some form. [See Walpole, Reminiscences. ] Not this one, we say:—but the thread-paper Duchess of Kendal, actual Ex-mistress; who tore her hair on the road when apoplexy overtook poor George, and who now attends chapel diligently, poor old anatomy or lean human nail-rod. For the sake of the English reader searching into what is called "History," I, with indignation, endeavor to discriminate these two beings once again; that each may be each, till both are happily forgotten to all eternity. It was the latter, lean may-pole ...
— History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 7 • Thomas Carlyle
... the card, you are in the watch trade. Pebblemarsh is the nearest town, only five miles down the road; there's a station there, but you'd better avoid that. There's a garage. You could get a car to London. If they nail you, scream like an excited Jew, produce your credentials, and if the worst comes to the worst refer to me and come back here. I would love that interview. Country policeman, lunatic asylum man, Mr. Isaacson highly ...
— The Man Who Lost Himself • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... were all hard at it, and no hand idle but Dicky in arms, and Sally, whom he kept in full employ; but Pedro, being a sturdy lad, could drive a nail, and lift or carry the things I wanted, and Jemmy and David, though so young, could pick up the chips, hold a nail or the lamp, or be some way or other useful; for I always preached to them the necessity of earning their bread before they ate ...
— Life And Adventures Of Peter Wilkins, Vol. I. (of II.) • Robert Paltock
... good economy to make the best of everything. How much more to make the best of every creature! Therefore, when your pauper comes to you and asks for bread, ask of him instantly—What faculty have you? What can you do best? Can you drive a nail into wood? Go and mend the parish fences. Can you lay a brick? Mend the walls of the cottages where the wind comes in. Can you lift a spadeful of earth? Turn this field up three feet deep all over. Can you only drag a weight ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... were procurable. Blue and white-striped galatea exactly suited the purpose, as it would be light for packing, and the colour could not run. We bought it, we paid for it, and home we marched. In less than an hour that gown was cut out by the aid of a pair of nail scissors, without any kind or sort of pattern whatever, and was sewn up ready for use. Out my sister went to bathe, triumphant; but so rare was a bathing-dress that the onlookers thought the English lady had fallen into the water by mischance ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... twice as great in the scantling. Olaf himself helped at the work, and laboured as hard as any other two men. Whenever any difficulty arose he was there to set it right, and all knew that every part of the work must be well done, that every piece of timber must be free from rot, and every nail and rivet made of the best metal or the king would discover the fault ...
— Olaf the Glorious - A Story of the Viking Age • Robert Leighton
... his long nap, he attempted to bully the attendant and drink-mixer in the hut, and openly flaunted his incredulity until the bar-tender showed him a long bunch of Rip's hair, which hung like a scalp on a nail, and the rusty barrel and stock of the musket. The cabin is, indeed, full of old guns, pistols, locks of hair, buttons, cartridge-boxes, bullets, knives, and other undoubted relics of Rip and the Revolution. This cabin, with its facilities for slaking thirst on a hot day, which Rip would ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... she planed off a pellet of good sound wood—it looked like a nail-scrape, the mark she made—and masticating it and moistening it with saliva, whirred back like a homing aeroplane to ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... creator "no end" to tell about him—before which rigorous mission the serenest of creators might well have quailed. I was far from the serenest; I was more than agitated enough to reflect that, grimly deprived of one alternative or one substitute for "telling," I must address myself tooth and nail to another. I couldn't, save by implication, make other persons tell EACH OTHER about him—blest resource, blest necessity, of the drama, which reaches its effects of unity, all remarkably, by paths absolutely opposite to the paths of the novel: with other persons, ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... of London, latten founder, of the age of 56 years, sworn or examined upon his oath, saith that Walton did make of new for stages and stage players as much as by estimation, esteemed by this deponent and William Sayer at 50s. in board, timber, lath, nail, sprig and daubing, which the said Rastell should have paid to the said Walton by their arbitrament, which were chosen indifferently by them both, and then Rastell said it was too much, and afterwards the said Rastell arrested the same Walton, and ...
— Fifteenth Century Prose and Verse • Various
... himself, the strength of mind to forego this temptation. However, he reckoned without his window, for in it there was an old object newly displayed which caught his attention as effectually as a half-driven nail arrests the hem of a cloak. On the central shelf of the window stood an hour-glass, its framework of some wood as black as ebony. He stood gazing at it for a moment, then turned to the door and went inside, greeting the ancient shopman, ...
— The Strong Arm • Robert Barr
... skilful in all the arts of beggars and vagabonds. I know how to open locks with a nail, and how to carve ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... now, Kendric," said she. Such a feeling of weakness came over me that I could not speak. I thought a nail had been driven into my brain, but the tears that began rolling down my cheeks and the moans that broke from my lips ...
— The Master of Silence • Irving Bacheller
... key,' said Lance. 'He used to keep it on a nail inside the study door, which opens into the passage leading into this ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... hit him on a place or twain, That on his arms the red blood trickled down, And yet himself untouched did remain, No nail was broke, no plume cut from his crown; Argantes raging spent his strength in vain, Waste were his strokes, his thrusts were idle thrown, Yet pressed he on, and doubled still his blows, And where he hits he neither cares ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso
... in revolt against? Against you, fool, dolt, idiot, against you, against everything! Against Heavy, Hell and punctuation . . . against Life, Death, rhyme and rhythm . . . Persecute me, now, persecute me, curse you, persecute me! Slave that you are . . . what do Marriage, Tooth-brushes, Nail-files, the Decalogue, Handkerchiefs, Newton's Law of Gravity, Capital, Barbers, Property, Publishers, Courts, Rhyming Dictionaries, ...
— Hermione and Her Little Group of Serious Thinkers • Don Marquis
... Rue Taranne he knocked at the door of a small furnished lodging-house at the corner of that street and the Rue du Dragon, took a candlestick from a table, a key numbered 12 from a nail, and climbed the stairs without exciting other attention than a well-known lodger would returning home. The clock was striking ten as he closed the door of his room. He listened attentively to the strokes, ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... allow to monopolise the name. Cunning is the only resource of the feeble; and why may we not feel for victorious cunning as strong a sympathy as for the bold, downright, open bearing of the strong? That there may be no mistake in the essayist's meaning, that he may drive the nail home into the English understanding, he takes an illustration which shall be familiar to all of us in the characters of Iago and Othello. To our northern thought, the free and noble nature of the Moor ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... locksmith's apprentice was enabled, by the devil's help, to make the iron bars and padlock which confine the limb in its place; every locksmith's apprentice who came to Vienna after that, drove a nail into it, till finally there was room for no more. It is a singular legend, and whoever may have placed the limb there originally, there it has remained for two or three hundred years ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... he'll be calmed down, maybe before. I tell you what; you stroll out and take in the store windows for a spell and then drift back later. Come up here if you like, or you can wait in the arcade and nail him as he comes ...
— Wilt Thou Torchy • Sewell Ford
... Scenery and costumes and everything and—and—" Here Mr. Smilk showed signs of blubbering, a weakness that suddenly gave way to the most energetic indignation. "Why, doggone it, every time I think of what that woman done to me, I could bite a nail in two. If it ...
— Yollop • George Barr McCutcheon
... we could. 'Twas little; would that Drake had heeded our advice! But I am rejoiced to see you on the road to recovery, dear boy; 'twould have been another nail in my coffin to know that you had lost your life in doing a service for me. I thank God for that, from the ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang
... And damme, sir,' cried Gabriel, 'with your pardon for the word, I'd do the same if she had married fifty highwaymen in a twelvemonth; and think it in the Protestant Manual too, though Martha said it wasn't, tooth and nail, till doomsday!' ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... in that village a sword of heavenly forgery, beaten upon Vulcan's anvil. It was never used but in the temple, and then the flat of it only; and it hung on a nail by the catechist's chimney. Early one night Jack rose, and took the sword, and was gone out of the house and the village in ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson
... there's no making much of that lassie. But ae thing I have cleared—that is, that Robertson has been the father of the bairn, and so I will wager a boddle it will be he that's to meet wi' Jeanie Deans this night at Muschat's Cairn, and there we'll nail him, Rat, or my name is ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... picking off an invisible thread from her sleeve, rolling it up to an invisible ball between her white finger and thumb, and casting it delicately away; or settling a ring, or brushing off invisible dust with a flick of a polished finger-nail; all these manoeuvers executed with such leisure and easy deliberation that they didn't make her seem restless, and you knew she calculated that effect. A man who had had years with a real, living woman like Marise, didn't know whether to laugh or swear at such mannerisms and the ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... the astonished soldier, who had by the gun-flash recognized the familiar features of a quondam friend; "why on earth didn't you tell your name, man? I might have killed you as dead as a door-nail." ...
— Neville Trueman the Pioneer Preacher • William Henry Withrow
... act—scared to death. He wanted to change his overalls for pants before we took him anywhere. Said they were hanging up in here. We fell for it. We came in, and there was a pair of pants hanging on a nail. He walked over to them, and the next thing we knew he had a gun on us. I hope I know when a man means business—and he did. He had half a ...
— Desert Conquest - or, Precious Waters • A. M. Chisholm
... the name of the old boy is the matter with you, man? Have you trod on a nail or piece of glass, or anything that has gone through your foot, or what is it?" demanded Jerome, ...
— Victor's Triumph - Sequel to A Beautiful Fiend • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... them rather a barbaric appearance. The side walks are literally encumbered with bales of scarlet flannel, and every other article of an emigrant's outfit. At the outfitters' stores you can buy anything, from a cart-nail to a revolver; from a suit of oilskin to a paper of needles. The streets present an extraordinary spectacle. Everything reminds that one is standing on the very ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... there was the same lack of choice. She could not find a glass-headed picture-nail in town; she did not hunt for the sort of veiling she wanted—she took what she could get; and only at Howland & Gould's was there such a luxury as canned asparagus. Routine care was all she could devote to the house. Only ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... sweeping way, "of men who have had to spend their lives at a two-company post, where there was nothing to do when off duty but play draw-poker and drink whiskey at the sutler's shop?" This was, of course, meant to be picturesquely extravagant, but it hit the nail on the head, after all. Some of the officers of the old regime did not conceal their contempt for books. It was a stock story in the army that when the Utah expedition was fitting out in 1856, General Henry Hunt, chief of artillery of the army ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V1 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... erected near where it had before stood, and the drift wood collected to dry in the sun in order that it might serve to form a beacon-fire at night. The first thing to be done was to caulk the boat. Mr Scoones and the carpenter's mate undertook to do this and to nail such planks as had been started, which was no easy matter, as not a stone could be found, and they had only the handles of their knives. But patience and perseverance had overcome greater difficulties than theirs. The carpenter's mate ...
— Owen Hartley; or, Ups and Downs - A Tale of Land and Sea • William H. G. Kingston
... of your weakness; break it off by truth; break it off by one stout effort, in one steadfast prayer; break it off by innocent and free enjoyment; break it off by honest work. Put your 'hand to the nail and your right hand to the workman's hammer;' strike through the enemy which has ensnared you, pierce and strike him through and through. However powerful he seems, at your feet he will bow, he will fall, he will lie down; at your feet he will bow and ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... cowardice one might dislike the thought of having one's throat cut while one's hands were bound and one watched the blood gushing into an old army-ration tin. Perhaps there would be none to gush—and a good job too. Serve them right. Could he cut his wrists on a nail or a splinter or with the cords, and cheat them, if there were any blood in him now. He would try. Yes, an unpleasant death. No one, no true Somali, that is, objected to a prod in the heart with a shovel-headed spear, a thwack in the head with ...
— 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
... and unmanageable, he administered a fatherly rebuke in the shape of a boxed ear, which had no other effect than the eliciting from the child the outcry, "Let me be, old doctor, you!" if, indeed, we except the long scratch made upon his hand by the little sharp nail ...
— Cousin Maude • Mary J. Holmes
... ten thousand francs,'" continued David. "Ten thousand francs, father! Why, that is two francs a pound, and the Messrs. Didot only ask thirty-six sous for their Cicero! These nail-heads of yours will only fetch the price ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... best I could," he protested with a bright spot of color in his cheeks. "Some of the men have tinkered up their tenements and I have counted it toward the rent, but they don't all know how to drive a nail." ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... woodbines, in your 'twines, Curl me about, ye gadding vines; And oh so close your circles lace, That I may never leave this place; But, lest your fetters prove too weak, Ere I your silken bondage break, Do you, O brambles, chain me too, And, courteous briars, nail me through! ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... mien Of his own parent God were seen. Some chiefs of Vanar mothers came, Some of she-bear and minstrel dame, Skilled in all arms in battle's shock; The brandished tree, the loosened rock; And prompt, should other weapons fail, To fight and slay with tooth and nail. Their strength could shake the hills amain, And rend the rooted trees in twain, Disturb with their impetuous sweep The Rivers' Lord, the Ocean deep, Rend with their feet the seated ground, And pass wide floods with airy bound, Or forcing through the sky their way The ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... the back half an inch from the opening, the longer fitting in between the two shorter ones. Glue them on, then nail them. Against these cleats glue the back (1) before nailing it. Next glue and nail on the two supports against the back and on a level with the lower edge (Figure 4). On the fourth side, where there is no cleat, ...
— Construction Work for Rural and Elementary Schools • Virginia McGaw
... didn't have de fine house but it a big one. Us quarters sot off 'cross de field in de edge of a skit of woods. Dey have dirt floors and a fireplace and old pole and plank bunks nail ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Texas Narratives, Part 1 • Works Projects Administration
... Babylon occupied on the eastern banks of the Euphrates a space of ground six leagues in length. Throughout this space bricks are found by means of which daily additions are made to the town of Helle. Upon many of these are characters written with a nail similar to those of Persepolis. I am indebted for these facts to M. de Beauchamp, grand vicar of Babylon, a traveller equally distinguished for his knowledge of astronomy and for ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... flies the martyrs whose bodies are covered with honey; they make them walk with bare feet over broken glass or red-hot coals, put them in ditches with reptiles; chastise them with whips, whose thongs are weighted with leaden balls; nail them when alive in coffins, which they throw into the sea; hang them by their hair, and then set fire to them; moisten their wounds with quicklime, boiling pitch, or molten lead; make them sit on red-hot iron stools; burn their sides with torches; ...
— The Dream • Emile Zola
... a manicure set presented to you! When filling it with the necessary manicure preparations, include the —— Nail Polish, which all chemists keep; it keeps ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, January 28, 1914 • Various
... sir!" was his criticism, "dead as a door nail! All the medicine in the shop wouldn't kindle one spark ...
— The Midnight Queen • May Agnes Fleming
... driven the nail straight to the mark that time. I could have wailed; but was I going to have Lize Jane go home and tell that I was a baby? No! and I spoke up ...
— Aunt Madge's Story • Sophie May
... into his hand a wisp of her long, golden hair. "Sleep on it and dream of me. Do not look so sad. I shall come for you without fail, and by this sign you shall know when I am coming. When this mark begins to heal," she said, as, with the nail on the forefinger of the right hand, she scratched his forehead, ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell
... the script with her finger nail and read quickly and carelessly like a little girl in a hurry. He offered to hear her her words. She passed him the book and got up to repeat what she had learned. She floundered and would repeat ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... rough, and placed in the form of a square, upon each other, as high as they wish to have the house; the ends of these timbers are let into each other, about a foot from the ends, half of one into half of the other. The whole structure is thus made, without a nail or a spike. The ceiling and roof do not exhibit much finer work, except among the most careful people, who have the ceiling planked and a glass window. The doors are wide enough, but very low, so that you have to stoop in entering. These houses are quite ...
— Journal of Jasper Danckaerts, 1679-1680 • Jasper Danckaerts
... brine, one of the plank-ends started from its place; and the sharp, sudden sound, breaking the scorching silence, caused us both to spring to our feet. Instantly the sea burst in; but we made shift to secure the rebellious plank with a cord, not having a nail; we then bailed out the boat, nearly half full ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... finished the work the day before, he had slipped in during his lunch-hour to give it a final touch or two. He had brought his lunch in the form of a pork-pie, and while with one hand he plunged the pie occasionally among his red whiskers, with the other he would lean forward and touch up a knot or a nail-hole that needed a little more paint. And he was proud as a boy of the simple bit of slap-dashing, and entirely absorbed in it ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... breath, the poor helpless human spirit, sobbing and sighing, gurgling and rattling in the throat. No help! No help! He—he himself—his body to which he had yielded was dying. Into the grave with it. Nail it down into a wooden box, the corpse. Carry it out of the house on the shoulders of hirelings. Thrust it out of men's sight into a long hole in the ground, into the grave, to rot, to feed the mass of its creeping worms and to be ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... staring truncheon, red top, and rooted into a thicket of curls, which covered his belly to the novel, and gave it the air of a flesh brush; and soon I feel it joining close to mine, when he had drove the nail up to the head, and left no partition but the intermediate hair ...
— Memoirs Of Fanny Hill - A New and Genuine Edition from the Original Text (London, 1749) • John Cleland
... his heels. "I'm coming," he answered out of the darkness, "I'm coming." And after a slight delay he appeared with the lantern and hung it from a nail in the front pole of the tent. The shadows of a hundred trees shifted their places quickly as he did so, and when he stumbled over the rope, diving swiftly inside, the whole tent trembled as though a gust ...
— The Wendigo • Algernon Blackwood
... as he drove in a nail. Then he fell to thinking of a girl in his own village whose father was as ...
— A Village of Vagabonds • F. Berkeley Smith
... ignorance, and said to me, 'I see you have not been well taught; for you have not charity.' He had been in some measure forced into this warmth, by the exulting air which I assumed; for, when he began, he said, 'Since you will drive the nail!' He again thought of good Mr. M'Queen, and, taking him by the hand, said, 'Sir, I did not ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... that her shattered hulk Should sink beneath the wave; Her thunders shook the mighty deep, And there should be her grave; Nail to the mast her holy flag, Set every threadbare sail, And give her to the god of storms, The lightning and ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... sent but one recipe to a cook book, and that was a direction for driving a nail, as it has always been declared that women do not know how to drive nails. But that was when nails were a peculiar shape and had to be driven in particular way, but now that nails are made round there is no special way in which they need to be driven. So my favorite ...
— The Suffrage Cook Book • L. O. Kleber
... only be tested by actual trial; but since it is desirable to test before purchasing it, it may be mentioned that one method is to mix a little on the finger nail, and if it has a "bronzy" gloss it is a good indication. It should also spread out and dry without ...
— Mechanical Drawing Self-Taught • Joshua Rose
... dogmas. The human brain is a machine for coming to conclusions; if it cannot come to conclusions it is rusty. When we hear of a man too clever to believe, we are hearing of something having almost the character of a contradiction in terms. It is like hearing of a nail that was too good to hold down a carpet; or a bolt that was too strong to keep a door shut. Man can hardly be defined, after the fashion of Carlyle, as an animal who makes tools; ants and beavers and many other animals make tools, in the sense that they make an apparatus. ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... crooked to redress In trust of her (Fortune) that turneth as a ball. Greate rest stands in little business. Beware also to spurn against a nail. Strive not as doth a pitcher with a wall. Deeme thyself that deemest others' deed; And truth thee shall deliver, ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... at me, and my heart beat like a drum so loudly that I thought people must hear. But her glance wandered on casually over the throng, and then I felt truly insignificant, like a man who could hide behind the nail of his own thumb. ...
— The O'Ruddy - A Romance • Stephen Crane
... as on other occasions, in an imaginary vision, most interiorly, He held out His right hand and said: "Behold this nail! it is the pledge of thy being My bride from this day forth. Until now thou hadst not merited it; from henceforth thou shalt regard My honour, not only as of one who is Thy Creator, King, and God, but as thine, My veritable bride; My honour is thine, and thine is ...
— The Life of St. Teresa of Jesus • Teresa of Avila
... the Caesar; "thou wantest not my lantern, to discern an honest man, whom, if thou didst seek, I must needs say thou hast come to the wrong place to find one. Nail thou up these creeping shrubs before the entrance of the place, and abide thou there as already directed, till our return, to parry the curiosity of any who may be attracted by the sight ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... among the sweating industries in the country is chain and nail-making. The condition of the chain-makers of Cradley Heath has called forth much public attention. The system of employment is a somewhat complicated one. A middleman, called a "fogger," acts as a go-between, receiving the material from the master, distributing ...
— Problems of Poverty • John A. Hobson
... climax of misfortune, old Cesar had run a nail into his hoof and Madame Guix spent most of her time between injections of oxygen on the first floor, and iodine and flaxseed poultices in the stables. This of course meant that all errands outside the village must be made on bicycle, and George was "mustered into ...
— My Home In The Field of Honor • Frances Wilson Huard
... such terrible extremities. During the last six or seven months, he has been seized with intolerable sulkiness at the slightest mention of the currency; for nothing vexes Time so much as to be refused cash upon the nail. The above are the chief topics of general interest which Time is just now in the habit of discussing. For his more private gossip, he has rumors of new matches, of old ones broken off, with now and then a whisper of good-natured scandal; ...
— Time's Portraiture - (From: "The Doliver Romance and Other Pieces: Tales and Sketches") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... very straight-forward and well-meant manner. You, as a learned man, certainly know how strange nature is. Some persons cannot bear to touch grey paper, or they become ill; others shiver in every limb if one rub a pane of glass with a nail: I have just such a feeling on hearing you say thou to me; I feel myself as if pressed to the earth in my first situation with you. You see that it is a feeling; that it is not pride: I cannot allow you to say THOU to me, but I will willingly say THOU to you, ...
— Andersen's Fairy Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... lee of the rocky ridge, we took stock of our weapons and recovered our self-possession. The cook again ran his thumb-nail along the edge of the cleaver; Roger examined the lock of his pistol—I saw a queer expression on his face at the time, but he said nothing; Blodgett sharpened his knife on his calloused palm and the rest of us found clubs and stones. We could ...
— The Mutineers • Charles Boardman Hawes
... tell it. I don't like to hear reading," replied Enna in her imperious way, at the same time taking quiet possession of Elsie's little rosewood rocking-chair—a late present from her papa, and highly prized by the little girl on that account—and beginning to scratch with her thumb nail upon ...
— Elsie Dinsmore • Martha Finley
... number of closets were contemplated, for, as you are presumably aware, woman-kind are passionately fond of closets, and happy, thrice happy, is the husband who is accorded the inestimable boon of suspending his Sunday suit from a nail therein. As for myself, I have always regarded the average closet as an ingenious device of the evil one for the propagation and ...
— The House - An Episode in the Lives of Reuben Baker, Astronomer, and of His Wife, Alice • Eugene Field
... shall die!" Raising his bludgeon he rushed upon the High Priestess; but Tarzan was there before her. Leaping in to close quarters the ape-man seized the upraised weapon and wrenched it from the hands of the frenzied fanatic and then the priest closed upon him with tooth and nail. Seizing the stocky, stunted body in his mighty hands Tarzan raised the creature high above his head, hurling him at his fellows who were now gathered ready to bear down upon their erstwhile captive. La stood proudly ...
— Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... instruction is and his father replies, "As by one lump of clay all that is made of clay is known, and the change[187] is a mere matter of words, nothing but a name, the truth being that all is clay, and as by one piece of copper or by one pair of nail-scissors all that is made of copper or iron can be known, so is that instruction." That is to say, it would seem, the reality is One: all diversity and multiplicity is secondary and superficial, merely a matter of words. ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... object of the dog's search. The dog followed their horses for twenty miles, remained undisturbed in the room where they supped, followed the chambermaid into the bedchamber, and secreted himself under one of the beds. The possessor of the shilling hung his trousers upon a nail by the bed-side; but when the travellers were both asleep, the dog took them in his mouth, and leaping out of the window, which was left open on account of the sultry heat, reached the house of his master at four o'clock in the morning ...
— Anecdotes of Dogs • Edward Jesse
... as though everything must go wrong by a natural law. In the first place, while making a hobble peg, while Carmichael and Robinson were away after the horses, the little piece of wood slipped out of my hand, and the sharp blade of the knife went through the top and nail of my third finger and stuck in the end of my thumb. The cut bled profusely, and it took me till the horses came to sew my mutilated digits up. It was late when we left this waterless spot. As there was a hill with a prepossessing ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... this one was only roused to a fury as much greater for her size than Sir Jeoffry was bigger than herself. She flew at him and poured forth oaths, she shrieked at him and beat his legs with his own crop, which she caught up from the floor where it lay within reach, she tore at him with tooth and nail, and with such strength and infant fearlessness as arrested him in his frenzy and caused him to burst forth laughing as ...
— His Grace of Osmonde • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... and noisy games of other girls for fear of getting scratched. Once, however, I was playing with some of my school friends in a courtyard. We were swinging on the shafts of a cart when I fell and ran a nail into my cheek. The pain was nothing compared to the thought of a permanent mark. I was depressed for months, until one day I heard a teacher say that the mark was all but gone—a mere ...
— The Dangerous Age • Karin Michaelis
... means; I had not had the same forbearance for the superfluous wealth of others. I had learned with what simple tools old locks may fly open; and none had ever suspected me, so I had no fear of danger, small need of premeditation: a nail on your mantelpiece, the cloven end of the hammer lying beside, to crook it when hot from the fire that blazed before me! I say this to show you that I did not come provided; nothing was planned beforehand; all ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the same. No matter where he was, or in what circumstances he was placed, James Garfield always showed his colours, and he was never afraid to nail them to the mast. ...
— The Story of Garfield - Farm-boy, Soldier, and President • William G. Rutherford
... (saith Ezra), I am ashamed and blush to lift up my face to thee," Ezra. ix. 6. And what was it that did so confound him? You may find it in that which followeth: God had showed them mercy, and had left them a remnant to escape, and had given them a nail in his holy place, and had lightened their eyes: "And now (saith he), O our God, what shall we say after this? for we have forsaken thy commandments," Ezra. ix. 10. Let us this day compare, as he did, God's goodness and our own guiltiness. England deserved nothing but to get a bill of divorce, and ...
— The Works of Mr. George Gillespie (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Gillespie
... a little matter I've got to look after this afternoon," he said, his manner nicely calculated to repel any tender advances. "I'll have to hurry along, and there won't be any occasion for you to linger. Please hang the key on the nail so Persis can let herself in ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... drinking supernaculum, consisted in turning down the cup upon the thumb-nail of the drinker after his pledge, when, if duly quaffed off, no drop of liquor ought to appear ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... them,' he once said to me. Knowing his kindly nature, I was surprised at his words. It is hard to judge between parents and children. 'A great ravine starts from a little rift,' Alexey Sergeitch said to me once in this connection: 'a wound a yard wide may heal; but once cut off even a finger nail, it will ...
— A Desperate Character and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... of things earthly? It is, says the world, ever forward and rash—'a door-nail!' But the world is wrong. There is a thing deader than a door-nail, viz., Gillman's Coleridge, Vol. I. Dead, more dead, most dead, is Gillman's Coleridge, Vol. I.; and this upon more arguments than one. The book has clearly not completed its elementary act ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... not yet regular—he forthwith became her slave. She set him to draw up the fire while she got the tea, and then, without taking any notice of David, she marched John upstairs to help her hang her curtains, lay her carpet, and nail up the coloured fashion plates and newspaper prints of royalties or beauties with which she was adorning the bare ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... aught design against that steed, For, while I an avenging sabre rear, This I prohibit thee, and, should it need, And every better means of battle fail, With thee for this would battle, tooth and nail." ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... arms is the most usual, and screws with more than three arms are not now much employed in this country. The screw on being put into revolution by the engine, preserves a spiral path in the water, in which it draws itself forward in the same way as a screw nail does when turned round in a piece of wood, whereas the paddle wheel more resembles the action of a cog wheel working ...
— A Catechism of the Steam Engine • John Bourne
... is my right to forbid you,—you shall not go!' he cried. Then ensued a quarrel, bitter, terrible, between two beings who so short a while before had loved so madly. The quarrel ended by the man giving in, as usual, but the wrangle pierced one more nail in his love's coffin for ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... much persuasion, to allow the baby to be inspected, which the newcomers did thoroughly. Not an eye, a limb, a finger-nail, or even a hair, escaped their attention, but were examined and criticized with ...
— Rataplan • Ellen Velvin
... acknowledge them; look at your present and future difficulties, count them up and face them every one, and admit that they are more than you can hope to conquer; but then look at the dying Son of God, your Saviour—the Man with the seamless robe, the crown of thorns, and the nail-prints; look at the fountain of His Blood; look at His word; look at the Almighty Holy Ghost, who will dwell within you, if you but trust and obey, and cry out: "It shall be done! The mountain shall become a plain; the impossible shall become possible. Hallelujah!" Quietly, intelligently, abandon ...
— When the Holy Ghost is Come • Col. S. L. Brengle
... titles, such as—"Heaven ravished"—"The Blacksmith, a sermon preached at Whitehall before the King," 1606. Beloe, in his Anecdotes of Literature, vol. 6, has recorded many of these quaint titles, among them the following:—"The Nail hit on the head, and driven into the city and cathedral wall of Norwich. By John Carter, 1644." "The Wheel turned by a voice from the throne of glory. By John Carter, 1647." "Two Sticks made one, or the excellence of Unity. By Matthew Mead, ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... story continues the friendly face of a kindly old man standing on top of a ladder suddenly appeared at my window. He began to nail heavy boards across the window from the outside. He smiled and spoke a few kind words and told me to be of good cheer. He confided to me in a sweet and gentle way that he was in prison for drinking, ...
— Jailed for Freedom • Doris Stevens
... disposal; and a soldier should not have hesitated in his choice a moment. No: Uncle George had fallen from grace, and was unanimously damned. And the non-arrival of the Himalayan rabbits was only another nail in his coffin. Uncles, therefore, were just then a heavy and lifeless market, and there was little inclination to deal. Still it was agreed that Uncle William, who had just returned from India, should have as fair a trial as the others; more especially as romantic possibilities ...
— The Golden Age • Kenneth Grahame
... mental confusion, and in that alone, that the new Imperialism lives and moves and has its being. The whole glory and greatness of Mr. Chamberlain consists in this: that if a man hits the right nail on the head nobody cares where he hits it to or what it does. They care about the noise of the hammer, not about the silent drip of the nail. Before and throughout the African war, Mr. Chamberlain was always knocking in nails, with ringing decisiveness. But when we ask, "But what have these nails ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... beneath the finger-nail. The pain occasioned by the inflammatory action and tumor of parts bound down between the nail on one side and the bone on the other, neither of which will yield, is said to occasion so much pain as to produce immediate delirium, and even death, except the parts ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... to assist the occupant of the vehicle to alight, but Betty, ignoring assistance, attempted to spring past him to the ground. As the willful maiden did so the topknot of her hood caught in a provoking nail of the open door and was violently pulled from her head: and as her lovely, rosy face almost brushed his sleeve, Geoffrey started ...
— An Unwilling Maid • Jeanie Gould Lincoln
... round, worm-eaten knobs, and the wood was split by the dryness. On each bed was a mattress and a matting, covered with a ragged green spread. A piece of mirror in a varnished frame, an old game-bag on a nail, and a worn silk cravat which showed the crease of its folds, indicated that the room belonged to some one who probably slept there ...
— Over Strand and Field • Gustave Flaubert
... Islands, and stretches across the stream like a dyke, running nearly north and south with a westerly dip of about 60 degrees. Elsewhere, along the shores of Coral Haven, this mica-slate is of a leaden hue and glistening lustre, yielding to the nail, with a slight greasy feel, especially in some pieces of a shining ash-grey, acted upon by salt-water. From hand specimens alone it is difficult to assign a name to this rock, as it partakes more or less of the characters of mica, chlorite, ...
— 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
... had long ago stopped her work and was sitting huddled in the doorway on a nail-keg with weary, folded hands and a strange wistfulness on her apathetic face. A fine silence had settled over the group as the girl, recognizing her power, and the pleasure she was giving, sang on. Now ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill
... his size could pass, and showed so great an inclination to go through a hole in the open-work fire-board that I hastily covered it up. After a while he tested the matting and carefully investigated, by light taps of his bill, each separate nail. His step was heavy, and he did not hop, but ran around with a droll little patter of the ...
— In Nesting Time • Olive Thorne Miller
... they put him on a heavy pair of irons, and then stapled him fast down to the floor. Being left there alone in the sessions time (most of the people in the gaol then attending at the Old Bailey) with a crooked nail he opened the lock, and by that means got rid of his chain, and went directly to the chimney in the room, where with incessant working he got out a couple of stones and by that means climbed up into a room called the Red Room, where nobody had been lodged for a considerable ...
— Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences • Arthur L. Hayward
... Urania Rylance—how the serpentine coils of that damsel's malice and pride could be trodden under foot! Not a ball, not a dinner, not a garden-party given at the Abbey that would not be a thorn in Urania's side, a nail in Urania's coffin. ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... slabs set upright in the ground, and nailed on to a wall-plate. You will first plant large posts at each of the corners, and one at either side every door, and four for the chimney. At the top of these you will set your wall- plates; to the wall-plates you will nail your slabs; on the inside of the slabs you will nail light rods of wood, and plaster them over with mud, having first, however, put up the roof and thatched it. Three or four men will have split the stuff and put up the hut in a fortnight. We will suppose it to be about ...
— A First Year in Canterbury Settlement • Samuel Butler
... it's the other chap I'm after now—perhaps you'll be so obliging as to tell me where I can put my paws on him. I hung the duck from this nail—the cord was good and strong, and it couldn't have broken loose. You see it ain't there now. So the question is did the blamed bird come to life again and skedaddle off, or was one of your friends the foxes aboard while we snoozed, to make way with my fat duck? ...
— The House Boat Boys • St. George Rathborne
... never attach itself again to the trunk; and whenever wounds, abrasures, or sections of loose bark exist on the trunk of a tree, the damaged part should be cut away cleanly, as far as the injury extends. Careful persons have been known to nail to a tree a piece of loosened bark, in hope of inducing it to grow again, or at least of retaining on the young wood its natural covering. Unfortunately the result produced by this operation is exactly opposite to that intended. The decaying wood and bark attract ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 3, January 19, 1884. - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... next day when I reached Valcartier and after a month of solid work, the like of which I had never before experienced, I was as hard as a nail, and as tough, as indeed was every man in that honor division ...
— S.O.S. Stand to! • Reginald Grant
... has bartered clean away. We have threshed a stook of print and book, and winnowed a chattering wind And many a soul wherefrom he stole, but his we cannot find: We have handled him, we have dandled him, we have seared him to the bone, And sure if tooth and nail show truth he has no soul ...
— The Minister and the Boy • Allan Hoben
... became clear in his mind, but he had to let Greg know. He fingered the control of his helmet radio. The boarding party would have a snooper, but if he was quick, they wouldn't have time to nail him. He buzzed an attention code. "Greg? Can ...
— Gold in the Sky • Alan Edward Nourse
... long-boat. The carpenter pronounced some of the planks so rotten and worm-eaten, as to make it surprising that she had not at once gone to the bottom, and he was afraid of doing anything to them lest he should make matters worse. Our only means, therefore, of stopping the leaks, was to nail some canvas we fortunately had with us over the bottom of the boat; having first carefully inserted some oakum between the planks, and rubbed ...
— Mark Seaworth • William H.G. Kingston
... in the central hall of the world's fair. From his distracting account of the business it would appear that he is now building a monument, anon he is painting a picture (with brushes dipped in a gallipot made of an earthquake); again he strikes a keynote, weaves a pattern, draws a wire, drives a nail, treads a measure, sounds a trumpet, or hits a target; or skirmishes around his subject; or lays it bare with a dissecting knife; or embalms a thought; or crucifies an enemy. What is he really doing ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... patrol fallers never ban so lucky as when you sail with Ole Ericsen," he was saying, when a rifle cracked sharply astern, and a bullet gouged along the newly painted cabin, glanced on a nail, and sang shrilly onward ...
— Tales of the Fish Patrol • Jack London
... spirit Hitty snatched her child, and wrapped him in the blanket where he lay; her shawl was on the chair she had slept in, her hood upon a nail by the door, and flinging both on, with the child in her arms, she followed her husband down-stairs, across the back-yard, hitting her feet against stones and logs in the darkness, stumbling often, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... a horizon are difficult things to nail signboards to. Emerson's outward-inward qualities make him hard to classify, but easy for some. There are many who like to say that he—even all the Concord men—are intellectuals. Perhaps—but intellectuals who wear their brains nearer the heart than some ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... Mell's sore and angry fancies flew as usual to the chest. "It's so big," she thought, "that all the children could get into it. I'll play that a wicked enchanter came and flew away with mother, and never let her come back. Then I should have to take care of the children; and I'd get somebody to nail some boards, so as to make five dear little cubby-houses inside the chest. I'd put Tommy in one, Isaphine in another, Arabella Jane in another, Belinda in another, and Gabella Sarah in another. Then I'd shut the lid down and fasten it, and wouldn't ...
— Nine Little Goslings • Susan Coolidge
... among carpenters, and blacksmiths, and stone masons, and weavers, when they began to take pride in their work, when they began to try and ornament their own tools, when the joiner who knew nothing of the Greeks began to trace a pattern with a red-hot nail on the clumsy wooden chest, when the smith dinted out a simple design upon the head of his hammer, when the mason chipped out a face or a leaf on the corner of the rough stone house, and when the weaver taught himself to make patterns in the stuff he wove. The true ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... kinship. Well, we two know these transfigured persons, these college passmen, these well groomed monocular Algys and Bobbies, these cricketers to whom age brings golf instead of wisdom, these plutocratic products of "the nail and sarspan business as he got his money by." Do you know whether to laugh or cry at the notion that they, poor devils! will drive a team of continents as they drive a four-in-hand; turn a jostling anarchy of ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... occasional opportunity like that of Tuesday, has been present to me these two days as better than nothing. But if our friends are so accountable to this house of course there's no more to be said. And it's one more nail, thank God, in the coffin of our odious delay." He was but too glad without more ado to point the moral. "Now I hope you see we ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... true course. Tomorrow by the end of the day we shall come to a mountain of black stone, highs the Magnet Mountain;[FN257] for thither the currents carry us willy-nilly. As soon as we are under its lea, the ship's sides will open and every nail in plank will fly out and cleave fast to the mountain; for that Almighty Allah hath gifted the loadstone with a mysterious virtue and a love for iron, by reason whereof all which is iron travelleth towards it; and on this mountain is much iron, how much none knoweth save the Most High, from ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... was much in love with the lusty young farmer who had stolen the bales of cotton and sold them for a drunk. And it was he who suggested that, through her, we get possession of the keys. For, every day, she informed us, she passed them by where they hung on a nail, downstairs, as she swept and cleaned house ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... go by himself for a five-mile walk, leaving Daphne, Valentia and Harry in the garden, but a nail in his boot hurt so much that, after the first half-mile, Romer decided he couldn't stand it any longer, and would walk back, go quietly in, and then surprise them by coming ...
— The Limit • Ada Leverson
... the first in order to prevent people touching it; but I have managed to get a piece of it, and here it is." I took it in my hand, and the matter was made clear in an instant. The stone was not our hard Onondaga gray limestone, but soft, easily marked with the finger-nail, and, on testing it with an acid, I found it, not hard carbonate of lime, but a soft, friable sulphate of lime—a form of gypsum, which must have been brought from some other part ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... I'll give it up. But you are a good deal to blame. You have told me of what you saw when you were in the army. You have showed me that there are bigger things in this world than plodding after a plough, and more exciting chases than those after foxes. I want to do more than sit on a nail-keg in the store and discuss big events. I want to have a little part ...
— The Soldier of the Valley • Nelson Lloyd
... Barker paused; then a slow, calculating smile creased his lips. "Miss Gresham—her he was engaged to! Dog-gone if I don't believe you've hit the nail on the ...
— Midnight • Octavus Roy Cohen
... curse of modesty I would tell how eagerly I grasped the axe and with what ease I hit, not twice, but half a dozen times in the same place—until the stump yielded. This victory was all the sweeter to me because it came right after our sports day when I had entered every available contest, from the nail-driving competition to the fat woman's race, and had never even been ...
— The Next of Kin - Those who Wait and Wonder • Nellie L. McClung
... can all set," lamented sister Mandana. "There ain't but the one chair an' the bed; t'other chair's too rickety; an' we've been promised another these ten days; but first they've forgot it, an' next Mis' Janes can't spare it,—one excuse an' another. I am goin' to git a stump o' wood an' nail a board on to it, when I can git outdoor again," said Mandana, in a plaintive voice. "There, I ain't goin' to complain o' nothin', now you've come," she added; and the guests sat down, Mrs. Trimble, as was proper, ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... observe the apartment—the neatly-scrubbed floor, with one narrow cot bed against the wall, a tall bureau on which some brown old books were lying, and the little dust-pan and dust-brush on a brass nail in the corner. There was a brightly polished stove with no fire in it, and some straight-backed chairs of yellow wood stood round the room. An open door into a large, roomy closet showed various garments of men's apparel hanging upon the wall. ...
— On the Church Steps • Sarah C. Hallowell
... leading to the fore-peak he saw that the place was nearly full of water. His exploration of the forecastle ended here; and he was about to proceed on deck when he caught sight of a fishing-line suspended on a nail inside one of the bunks. This fishing-line he at once secured and took on deck with him laying it down on top of the carpenter's tool-chest so that it might not be forgotten ...
— The Missing Merchantman • Harry Collingwood
... paper box, intending to observe his habits and development. Seeing Dr. Bandinel near, I asked him to look at my curiosity. Hardly, however, had I turned the wriggling little victim out upon the leather-covered table, when down came the doctor's great thumb-nail upon him, and an inch-long smear proved the tomb of all my hopes, while the great bibliographer, wiping his thumb on his coat sleeve, passed on with the remark, "Oh, yes! they have black heads sometimes." That was something ...
— Enemies of Books • William Blades
... some shelves," said my mother, "that we may put things on them, or else we never can be tidy; and we have not one except that which holds the books. I think we can manage it. We have, two oars left besides the boat's yard; we will nail them along the side of the cabin, about a foot or more from it, and then we will cut some of the boat's sail, and nail the canvass from the side of the cabin to the oars, and that will make a sort of shelf which will ...
— The Little Savage • Captain Frederick Marryat
... plan. Then Ducks have wide flat beaks of various shapes, with a sort of nail bent over like a hook at the end, and all along each side is a double row of little teeth, to help them take their food. Their stiff, pointed wings are quite strong enough to lift their heavy bodies off the ground or water into the air, and keep up an even flight, ...
— Citizen Bird • Mabel Osgood Wright and Elliott Coues
... dear boy," said Captain Scraggs admiringly. "I apologize for my actions of a few minutes ago. I was unstrung. You're still mate o' th' American steamer Maggie, an' as such, welcome to th' ship. All I ask is that you nail up your property, Gib, an' remove it from th' dinin' room table. I want to remind you, however, Gib, that as shipmates me an' McGuffey don't stand for you shoulderin' any loss on them two cases o'—Oriental goods. We was t' share th' gains, if any, ...
— Captain Scraggs - or, The Green-Pea Pirates • Peter B. Kyne
... and baskets under the bed. If the lodgers had any underwear they could make use of these, but as Perrine had only what she was wearing, the nail at the head of the ...
— Nobody's Girl - (En Famille) • Hector Malot
... though a few of them are just little thumb-nail icon-sized images placed at the ends of chapters. The rest are quite nice images, though shown here at only 30% of each linear dimension of those we found in our ...
— Notable Voyagers - From Columbus to Nordenskiold • W.H.G. Kingston and Henry Frith
... other, through the portholes, as he sped, he also caught flying glimpses of Stubb and Flack, busying themselves on deck among bundles of new irons and lances. As he saw all this; as he heard the hammers in the broken boats! far other hammers seemed driving a nail into his heart. But he rallied. And now marking that the vane or flag was gone from the mainmast-head, he shouted to Tashtego, who had just gained that perch, to descend again for another flag, and a hammer and nails, and so nail ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various
... boar, rolls his eyes, gnashes his teeth, and rushes on his antagonist with the fury of a beast of prey. In the winter of 1840, a quarrel arose between two individuals about the sex, which led to a fight; the struggle was continued for a time with tooth and nail; when one of the parties at length got hold of his knife, and stabbed his adversary in the belly. The bowels protruded, yet the wounded man never desisted, until loss of blood and repeated stabs compelled him to yield the contest and his life. Gallantry seems to be the main cause of quarrels ...
— Notes of a Twenty-Five Years' Service in the Hudson's Bay Territory - Volume II. (of 2) • John M'lean
... He related how it screamed, how it followed him in the brush, how he took to his boat, how its eyes gleamed from the shore, and how he fired his rifle at them with fatal effect. His wife in the mean time took something from a drawer, and, as her husband finished his recital, she produced a toe-nail of the identical animal with marked ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... abstraction of blood from the part; and I thought, consequently, that if I could exhaust the blood from the extremity of a limb, the exhausted part might be operated upon without pain.... I tried the process on myself, and finding it succeed, the operation of removing the nail of the greta toe, was tried on a patient, quite painlessly, the patient looking on and feeling nothing. But the proceeding was too long and cumbersome to admit of introduction into practice generally, though it indicated an important principle ...
— An Ethical Problem - Or, Sidelights upon Scientific Experimentation on Man and Animals • Albert Leffingwell
... his rank and precedency to suffer any one else to lead the bride down the first dance; but she was not, I believe, much obliged to him for his politeness; it cost her the tail of her wedding-gown and a broken nail, and she continued lame during the remainder of the night. In making an apology to her for his want of dexterity, and assuring her that he was not so awkward in handling the enemies of his country in battle as in handling friends he esteemed ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... been stolen, Ben Grimes had borrowed an axe from him, on examining which afterwards he discovered that a small piece had been broken off on one side, and that Grimes acknowledged he had done it by striking a nail in a piece of wood he was chopping up. On hearing this the captain again summoned all hands aft, and ordered Andrews to bring his sugar cask. There in the head was found a piece of iron which exactly fitted the notch in the axe ...
— Peter Trawl - The Adventures of a Whaler • W. H. G. Kingston
... only by a few rays filtered between the slats of the shutters, sat a young girl. Her hat was hung upon a nail above her head; one arm rested on a wretched white wood table; her head was bent forward in mournful resignation. On the other side of the table, her father was leaning back in his chair against the whitewashed wall, with folded arms, heightened color, and every sign of extreme disgust. ...
— The Ink-Stain, Complete • Rene Bazin
... the very ones that I anticipated would go against it tooth and nail. And Mr. Glentworth—surely he ...
— The Garies and Their Friends • Frank J. Webb
... "Gary Motor," issue of March 8, page 144, you say: "There is no neutral line in the sense that polarity changes when Mr. Gary moves his piece of sheet iron with its attached shingle nail across the pole or near the pole of a magnet." "The most delicate instruments fail to detect such a change of polarity," etc. Mr. Gary's claim of a neutral line is of course absurd, but you are wrong in saying that the polarity does not change under the conditions ...
— Scientific American, Volume 40, No. 13, March 29, 1879 • Various
... had a queer fad. He cultivated one of his finger-nails, that of the little finger of his left hand, with the greatest care. Just like a Chinese mandarin. At last the nail was fully a centimetre long, and made holes in all his gloves. Now, whenever a speck of dirt lodged in this nail, he was in the habit of removing it with his teeth. It wasn't exactly a nice thing to do; but, you see, he had a passion for that nail. I often said to him, 'My dear fellow, do keep ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... suspicions are already too well confirmed.' 'Pardon me, I have a pendulum which beats seconds.' 'Show it me.' The doctor brings down a silk thread to which an ivory ball is attached. Fixing the upper end to a nail, he draws the ball a little from the vertical, counts the number of oscillations, and shows that his pendulum beats seconds; he explains also how his profession, requiring him to feel pulses and count pulsations, he has no difficulty in mentally ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... peculiarities, the same as folks do, and the peculiar kink in this house wuz it hadn't a nail or a bit of iron in it anywhere from top to bottom—bolts and pegs made of ...
— Samantha at the World's Fair • Marietta Holley
... came, and he was lost sight of in Foreign Parts. Then Mrs. Saxham died, and the Captain—mentioned by Janellan with the ringing sniff that speaks volumes of disparagement—had turned her and her old man out of the Plas "without as much as that!"—here Janellan snapped her strong thumb-nail against her remaining front tooth—in recognition of their forty years ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... stay put. If I can convict certain corrupt members of the department, I'm going to nail brass-buttoned hides all over the front ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... plank and rope and nail, without the King his leave, After the custom of Portesmouth, but I will not suffer a thief. Nay, never lift up thy hand at me! There's no clean hands in the trade. Steal in measure,' quo' Brygandyne. 'There's measure in all ...
— Rewards and Fairies • Rudyard Kipling
... them sign; then he makes them forswear cream and baptism, makes them renounce Jesus Christ and his church; and, to give them a distinctive character and make them known for his own, he imprints on their bodies a certain mark with the nail of the little finger of one of his hands; this mark, or character, thus impressed, renders the part insensible to pain. They even pretend that he impresses this character in three different parts of the body, and at three different times. The demon does ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... captain of the ship, "I have only one eye; I have a right to be blind sometimes!" Then, putting the glass to his blind eye, in the mood that sports with bitterness, he exclaimed, "I really do not see the signal. Keep mine for closer battle flying! That's the way I answer such signals. Nail mine to that mast!" Admiral Graves disobeyed in like manner, and the other ships of the line also continued the action. The victory was soon complete, and Sir Hyde Parker heartily ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... wall, but, alas! it was still a long way from six o'clock. At last, however, while he was still reading, the clock did strike six. Margari instantly stood up in the middle of a sentence, marked the passage with his thumb-nail so as to know at what word to begin again on the following evening, turned down the ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... was his opening remark. "A good one can come mighty nigh holding a outfit together. Money ain't to be sneezed at, neither. Good wages paid on the nail run the cook a close second. How would you boys like to work ...
— The Heart of the Range • William Patterson White
... sure that a large dose of alcohol in shock puts a nail in the coffin of the patient."—DR. H. C. WOOD of ...
— Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine, How and Why - What Medical Writers Say • Martha M. Allen
... bear curious signs, such as footmarks of chickens, dogs, or pigs, which stept over them while still fresh, impressions of coins and medals, words or sentences scratched with a nail, etc. A bricklayer, who had perhaps seen better times in his youth, wrote on a tile the first ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 7 - Italy, Sicily, and Greece (Part One) • Various
... situation, sent, as was usual, to his godfathers, John London and Stephen Nail, for their protections. They went, but were refused admittance to him. At length he sent for Mr. Granville Sharp: the latter went, but they still refused access to the prisoner. He insisted, however, upon seeing him, and charged the keeper of the prison at his peril to deliver him up, till he ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the - Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament (1839) • Thomas Clarkson
... did nothing but laugh. "I've seen a few passages of arms," he said. "By Jove, you don't know what war is till you see two —— at it tooth and nail. Two—what, Lucy? Oh, I mean fine ladies; they have no mercy. Her Grace will set her claws into the fair countess. And ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... a lantern from a nail on the wall and lit it, and the Rat, looking round him, saw that they were in a sort of fore-court. A garden-seat stood on one side of the door, and on the other a roller; for the Mole, who was a tidy animal when at home, could not stand having ...
— The Wind in the Willows • Kenneth Grahame
... arranged. At the bottom was a seat on which he sat with the necessary space for him to stretch his legs when he placed them obliquely; under the seat, shut in by a lid, were a few provisions, and table utensils reduced to a simple pocket knife and metal mug; an overcoat and a rug hung from a nail, and the little lamp he used at nighttime was hooked onto ...
— The Adventures of a Special Correspondent • Jules Verne
... these men laid all the stress on a doctrine taught by Hus in his later years. As he lay in his gloomy dungeon near Constance, he had written letters contending that laymen should be permitted to take the wine at the Communion. For this doctrine the Utraquists now fought tooth and nail. They emblazoned the Cup on their banners. They were the aristocrats of the movement; they were led by the University dons; they were political rather than religious in their aims; they regarded Hus as a patriot; and, on the whole, they did not care much ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... seen in combination with these simple articles of furniture are few and somewhat rudely shaped. A jug with a long neck, an angular handle, and a pointed bottom, is common: it usually hangs from a nail or hook inserted into the tent-pole. Vases and bowls of a simple form occur, but are less frequent. The men are seen with knives in their hands, and appear sometimes to be preparing food for their meals; but the form of the knife ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 2. (of 7): Assyria • George Rawlinson
... dejected-looking house, and as I raised the heavy latch of the massive door, my heart beat as if I were about to meet, after a long absence, an aged mother who wept for my return, or a much-loved sister. I took a key from its nail in the porter's lodge and began to climb the stair, which, viewed from below, looked more picturesque than inviting, particularly when one proposed to ascend to the very top. Fortunately, I am a mountaineer; I bounded up that wide ladder ...
— The Cross of Berny • Emile de Girardin
... views of Orgy, among savages in classic times in mediaeval Christianity its religious origin modern need of Oneida Community Ouled-Nail prostitution Ovarian irritation Ovid ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... of drinking supernaculum, consisted in turning down the cup upon the thumb-nail of the drinker after his pledge, when, if duly quaffed off, no drop of liquor ought ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... of Rob Roy proclivities; it believes in a fair fight and no favour. A sufficient supply of food it almost takes for granted, if only it can once gain a sufficient ground-space. But other plants are competing with it, tooth and nail (if plants may be permitted by courtesy those metaphorical adjuncts), for their share of the soil, like crofters or socialists; every spare inch of earth is permeated and pervaded with matted fibres; and ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... young man, hurriedly. "Remember who began. To be shot at wouldn't rile me so much—it's being threatened, don't you see, that was heavy on my chest. Last night is very far off though—and I will be hanged if I know what I meant exactly when I took the old thing from its nail. There. More I can't say till all's settled one way or another. Will ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... trail of the young man had abruptly ended, and all beyond was smooth, unbroken snow. The last footprints were as conspicuous as any in the line; the very nail-marks were distinctly visible. Mr. Ashmore looked upward, shading his eyes with his hat held between them and the lantern. The stars were shining; there was not a cloud in the sky; he was denied the explanation which had ...
— Present at a Hanging and Other Ghost Stories • Ambrose Bierce
... paced over it. I struck it obliquely with my foot, where the surface lay dry and incoherent in the sun, and the sound elicited was a shrill, sonorous note, somewhat resembling that produced by a waxed thread, when tightened between the teeth and the hand, and tipped by the nail of the forefinger. I walked over it, striking it obliquely at each step, and with every blow the shrill note was repeated. My companions joined me; and we performed a concert, in which, if we could boast of but little variety in the ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... so much like a boat that had sprung a single leak, as like one out of which every nail had been pulled and the joints left open to the ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... critical eyes, the gentleman prepared the food. Taking one of the auks, he twisted off its head, put his forefinger under the integuments of the neck, drew the skin down backwards, and the bird was skinned. Then he ran his long thumb-nail down the breast and sliced off a lump, which he presented to the lady with the off-hand air of one who should say, "If you don't want it ...
— The Giant of the North - Pokings Round the Pole • R.M. Ballantyne
... wheels to keep them on the rails. The first road of this kind in America was built at Boston in 1807. It was a very rude affair and was only used to carry dirt from the top of a hill to the harbor. The wooden rails soon wore out, so the next step was to nail strips of iron on top of them. Long lines of railroads of this kind were soon built. Both passengers and goods could be carried on them. Some of them were built by private persons or by companies. ...
— A Short History of the United States • Edward Channing
... split wooden slabs set upright in the ground, and nailed on to a wall-plate. You will first plant large posts at each of the corners, and one at either side every door, and four for the chimney. At the top of these you will set your wall- plates; to the wall-plates you will nail your slabs; on the inside of the slabs you will nail light rods of wood, and plaster them over with mud, having first, however, put up the roof and thatched it. Three or four men will have split the stuff and put up the hut in a fortnight. We will suppose ...
— A First Year in Canterbury Settlement • Samuel Butler
... recently to be enlisted in the Royal Flying Corps as a carpenter was medically rejected because he had a hammer toe. If he had lost a nail we could ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol 150, February 9, 1916 • Various
... quinsy or he may have diphtheria, and the treatment is different. But oh! Grantley, I wish I had that Scotch-gray confidence in myself that you have. If you were a doctor you would tell a man he had typhoid, and he'd proceed to have it, even if he had only set out to have an ingrowing toe-nail. But my patients have a decided will of their own. There's young Ab Cowan—they sent for me last night to go out to see him. He has a bad attack of quinsy, but it is the strangest case I ...
— Sowing Seeds in Danny • Nellie L. McClung
... him two or three books he had lent me. In the volume of Shelley I underlined with my nail the last two lines of a certain verse and put a mark in ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... about the woods, or in the churchyard reading the inscriptions on the tombstones, and thinking of this and that. Also, I was looking about for a nail from some corpse. I wanted a nail; it was a fancy of mine, a little whim. I had found a nice piece of birch-root that I wanted to carve to a pipe-bowl in the shape of a clenched fist; the thumb was to act as a lid, and I wanted a nail to set in, to make it specially lifelike. ...
— Wanderers • Knut Hamsun
... footsteps, and at my pace. Ah! of course, echo. But why wasn't there an echo when I shouted?... I will go on quicker. I'm not a bit nervous, only the sooner I'm out of this, the better. At last a door. Thick, solid, iron-barred, and nail-studded door. Where's the handle? None. Yes, an iron knob. It won't be turned. It won't be twisted. It's locked; or, if not, fastened somehow. No; a faint light is admitted through the keyhole, and by putting my eye to it, I ...
— Happy-Thought Hall • F. C. Burnand
... and the crowd, some such little raft in the wreck, some occasional opportunity like that of Tuesday, has been present to me these two days as better than nothing. But if our friends are so accountable to this house of course there's no more to be said. And it's one more nail, thank God, in the coffin of our odious delay." He was but too glad without more ado to point the moral. "Now I hope you see we can't work ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... quite the best of the argument; and indeed I was determined not to give it up, till you acknowledged yourself vanquished; so to verse I go again, tooth and nail. ...
— Boswell's Correspondence with the Honourable Andrew Erskine, and His Journal of a Tour to Corsica • James Boswell
... shoes, and put on an unparalleled pair of ankle-jacks, which he only wore on extraordinary occasions. The Captain being at length attired to his own complete satisfaction, and having glanced at himself from head to foot in a shaving-glass which he removed from a nail for that purpose, took up his knotted stick, ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... with Willie Logan. John had replied "Yes, ma!" That was sufficient for Mrs. MacDermott, that and the testimony of John's discoloured eye, and she had beaten him with the leather tawse that was kept hanging from a nail at the side of the fireplace. "That my son should do the like of that!" she said over and over again until a cold fury of resentment against her had formed in his heart. It was true that he had pulled Aggie's hair much harder than he ought ...
— The Foolish Lovers • St. John G. Ervine
... phenomena, supernatural and divine. It must not however be understood that anything like a regular worship is paid to the sea by these people, any more than we should conclude that people in England worship witches when they nail a horseshoe on the threshold to prevent their approach, or break the bottoms of eggshells to hinder them from sailing in them. It is with the inhabitants of Lampong no more than a temporary sentiment of fear and respect, which a little familiarity soon effaces. ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... come in; but he saw that cousin Margaret was there: and he had felt an unconquerable awe of cousin Margaret ever since the day of his conveying her over the ice. So he stood irresolutely watching, as nail after nail was driven into Fairy's hoof, casting glances ...
— Deerbrook • Harriet Martineau
... lap lies the slender, youthful figure of the dead Christ. The head falls back, and the limbs are relaxed in death. Suffering has left no trace on his face. The nail prints in hands and feet, and the scar in the side, are the only signs of his crucifixion. The delicately moulded body is ...
— Michelangelo - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures And A Portrait Of The - Master, With Introduction And Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... Mrs. Jenkins lost a finger-nail by an injudicious use of the hammer. Bud sat down in the paint pot, and had to go to bed while his clothes were cleaned. In fact Lily Rose was the only one of the whole family circle to suffer no injury, but the Boarder guided her so tenderly ...
— Amarilly of Clothes-line Alley • Belle K. Maniates
... lift the door. My first effort was successless. Every inspiration was quicker and more difficult than the former. As my terror, so my strength and my exertions increased. Finally my trembling hand lighted on a nail that was imperfectly driven into the wood, and which, by affording me a firmer hold, enabled me at length to raise it, and to ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... select the locality in the fall, choosing a warm location on a southern slope, protected by a fence or building on the north and north-west. Set posts in the ground, nail two boards to these parallel to each other, one about a foot in height, and the other towards the south about four inches narrower; this will give the sashes resting on them the right slope to shed the rain and receive as much heat ...
— Cabbages and Cauliflowers: How to Grow Them • James John Howard Gregory
... taken some little thing from the household of his father-in-law, a knife, or other trifle? But thou hast felt about all my stuff, what hast thou found of all thy household stuff? Not so much as a needle or a nail." ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg
... our helpers been so many, we could never have made the place so beautiful. Before the general dancing begins there will be a double quadrille of honor, in which all those will take part who have driven a nail, papered or painted a wall, dug a spadeful of earth, or done any work in or ...
— Mother Carey's Chickens • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... himself. He was a pedant, to the most extreme point, the greatest pedant I had met on earth, and with that had a vanity only befitting Alexander of Macedon. He was in love with every button on his coat, every nail on his fingers—absolutely in love with them, and he looked it! In his behaviour to me he was a perfect tyrant, he spoke very little to me, and if he chanced to glance at me he gave me a firm, majestically ...
— Notes from the Underground • Feodor Dostoevsky
... we believe that every married man, who is at all attached to his wife from honorable motives, can, in the words of the elder Corneille, seek a rope and a nail; ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac
... much time for reflection. There is generally some work to keep him going. Rupert has a weakness for dropping things down the sinks. Last week, for a change, he drove a nail into a gas-pipe. And there are the bills to pay, and new things to order, and endless notes of inquiry and arrangements to be written. His evenings ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... strong closed vessel of metal in which liquids can be heated above their boiling points under pressure. Etymologically the word indicates a self-closing vessel ([Greek: autos], self, and clavis, key, or clavus, nail), in which the tightness of the joints is maintained by the internal pressure, but this characteristic is frequently wanting in the actual apparatus to which the name is applied. The prototype of the autoclave was the digester of Denis Papin, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... whatever kind it be, must work on its pivots with very little friction, and be capable of fine adjustment as regards balance. For the Rectilinear Harmonograph the form of lever pivot shown in Fig. 174 is very suitable. The spindle is a wire nail or piece of knitting needle sharpened at both ends; the bearings, two screws filed flat at the ends and notched ...
— Things To Make • Archibald Williams
... conscious that her brown hair was rough and untidy from running about the garden in the March wind, that her hands were not clean, and that there was an ugly rent in her blue checked apron where it had caught on a nail in the shed. ...
— A Little Maid of Old Philadelphia • Alice Turner Curtis
... Taranne he knocked at the door of a small furnished lodging-house at the corner of that street and the Rue du Dragon, took a candlestick from a table, a key numbered 12 from a nail, and climbed the stairs without exciting other attention than a well-known lodger would returning home. The clock was striking ten as he closed the door of his room. He listened attentively to the strokes, ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... minute you'd see that frog whirling in the air like a doughnut—see him turn one summerset, or maybe a couple, if he got a good start, and come down flat-footed and all right, like a cat. He got him up so in the matter of ketching flies, and kep' him in practice so constant, that he'd nail a fly every time as fur as he could see him. Smiley said all a frog wanted was education and he could do 'most anything—and I believe him. Why, I've seen him set Dan'l Webster down here on this ...
— Little Masterpieces of American Wit and Humor - Volume I • Various
... and praise my verses, still Thy long black thumb-nail marks them out for ill: A fellon take it, or some whitflaw come For to unslate or to untile that thumb! But cry thee mercy: exercise thy nails To scratch or claw, so that thy tongue not rails: Some numbers prurient are, and some of these ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... 1/2 inches, and the extent of the outstretched arms from 7 feet 2 inches to 7 feet 6 inches; the width of the face from 10 to 13 1/4 inches. The colour and length of the hair varied in different individuals, and in different parts of the same individual; some possessed a rudimentary nail on the great toe, others none at all; but they otherwise present no external differences on which to establish even ...
— Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature • Thomas H. Huxley
... Twittenham, at John Robarts's Esq. This Gentleman has several Vines laid up against the side of his House, as full of Grapes as I have ever seen any; but at the bottom where they grow, the Ground is paved with Bricks for about ten or twelve foot from the Wall they are nail'd to. This Pavement, in the last wet Summer, kept the Roots from imbibing, or receiving too much Moisture, and therefore the Juices of the Vines were digested, and capable of producing Fruit this Year; whereas such Vines as were not growing in dry places ...
— The Country Housewife and Lady's Director - In the Management of a House, and the Delights and Profits of a Farm • Richard Bradley
... entered a co-operative grocery store, where she was going to give an order for a quarter's supplies. She was her mother's housekeeper, and had an incredible knowledge of groceries, as well as a severely practical mind: she stuck her finger-nail into butter, tasted cheeses off the blade of a knife, ran her hands through currants, nibbled biscuits, discussed brands of burgundy and desiccated soups—Laura meanwhile looking on, from a high, uncomfortable ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... his neighbors were quick to respond to the tribute offered him before the distinguished men present. He rose, gaunt and grizzled in his shirt sleeves, but what he said was brief and as square-cut and to the point as any nail he had ever driven. I saw the Governor and father exchange glances and I noticed when the Governor responded to his call he was much less ornate of speech than usual and much more universal. They all spoke, from Nickols along the ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess
... assist us to understand the characters; they are a very important portion of the writer's method. None of our great writers ever had this double instrument: and Thackeray has used it with consummate effect. The sketches in Vanity Fair and in Punch, especially the minor thumb-nail drolleries, are delightful—true caricatures—real portraits of character. It is true they are ill drawn, often impossible, crude, and almost childish in their incorrectness and artlessness. But they have in them the soul of a great caricaturist. They have the Hogarthian ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... bait but are captured by cutting a hole in the ice and dropping in a piece of ivory carved in the shape of a small fish. When the fish rises to examine this visitor, it is secured with a spear. The Eskimo fish spear has a central shaft with a sharp piece of steel, usually an old nail, set in the end. On each side is a piece of deer antler pointing downward, lashed onto the shaft with a fine line, and sharp nails, pointing inward, are set in the two fragments of antler. When this spear ...
— The North Pole - Its Discovery in 1909 under the auspices of the Peary Arctic Club • Robert E. Peary
... head, stopped short, less I think, from human respect, than from one of those movements of profound surprise which affect the limbs, creep down the length of the spine, and cease only in the sole of the feet, to nail you to the ground. I have often produced effects of this nature, a sort of animal magnetism which becomes enormously powerful when the relations are reciprocally precise. But, my dear fellow, this was not stupefaction, nor was she a common girl. Morally speaking, her face seemed to say: 'What, ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... monitress went to bed, her sponge, nail-brush, tooth-brush, and cake of soap were missing, and it was only after a long search that she found them at the bottom of her emptied water-jug. On the next evening it was impossible for her to strike a light, owing to the fact that both her candle and matches ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... you may rely upon my giving you nothing, which does not admit of literal substantiation. Among other letters which I have, are several from "George Clymer," (whom you mention in your note,) which hit the nail on the head. ...
— Nuts for Future Historians to Crack • Various
... studio, and taking from its nail a small oil painting, brought it over and laid it on the board beside my paper. It was a fascinating little picture, painted with that exquisite minutiae and development of detail that a newer school was then ridiculing: as though Art had but one note ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... took some water, washed himself with the white powder, and in an instant was young and handsome as ever. Militrisa at once knew him, fell at his feet, and began to beg for pardon. But Bova ordered Tervis to take her and nail her up in a cask, and roll her into the sea. Then he called together the princes and boyars and announced to them that he was Bova Korolevich, the rightful heir to the throne of his father Guidon, returned from foreign lands, and required of them the ...
— The Russian Garland - being Russian Falk Tales • Various
... good carpenters to go to the country." The Sunday papers gave a lurid account of the sentiment of the Carpenters' Union and its sympathetic attitude toward the striking hoisters. The forecast was that there would not be a nail driven if the strike were not settled by Tuesday night. It seemed that I had not moved a day too soon. On Monday thirty-seven carpenters applied at my office. Most of them had union tickets and were not considered. Thirteen, however, ...
— The Fat of the Land - The Story of an American Farm • John Williams Streeter
... then away at full speed between wooded banks and green islands, to the nail works dam, where the air rang to the clatter of big hammers and pitchy black smoke was vomited ...
— Canoe Boys and Campfires - Adventures on Winding Waters • William Murray Graydon
... "You just nail a seat in that surrey over there, while I chase out my two 'prospects.' We sell on commission and I've ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... any in this world: even as if one should cut off the limbs from his perishable body with knives of brass, or still worse; down there the pain for that deed shall be as hard as any in this world: even as if one should nail his perishable body with nails of brass, or still worse; down there the pain for that deed shall be as hard as any in this world: even as if one should by force throw his perishable body headlong down a precipice a hundred times the height of a man, or still worse; ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various
... collection. The hostess presided in a black serge golf skirt, a business woman's white shirt-waist, and stout walking boots, her hair brushed flat and tidily back and fastened as though for riding, her face and hands redolent of soap. No powder, not a nail manicured. Had she been a girl earning her living, she could not have been more suitably dressed, but her millions and her palace background demand that her clothes be at least moderately ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... been brought, he would have another go, the whole family, including the girl and the charwoman, standing round in a semi-circle, ready to help. Two people would have to hold the chair, and a third would help him up on it, and hold him there, and a fourth would hand him a nail, and a fifth would pass him up the hammer, and he would take hold of the nail, and ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome
... stayed there till he'd got the lay of that cartwheel. Aw, yes, though—thinking, thinking, thinking constant—that's me when I'm in bed. But it isn't the lying awake I'm minding. Och, no; it's the wakening up again. That's like nothing in the world but a rusty nail going driving into your skull afore a blacksmith's seven-pound sledge. Good ...
— Capt'n Davy's Honeymoon - 1893 • Hall Caine
... was now open, he inserted his thumb nail into the crease of the large knife, and opened the blade. Then he extended out his hand, and offered the open knife ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Adventures on Strange Islands • Roger Thompson Finlay
... was a wonder, and is a wonder still to me. No amount of mechanical skill, though the Yankee has made machines that almost think, and altogether do, for him, has superseded or exhausted his natural tact, expediency, and invention. With string and nail in his pocket, I would defy the horses of Phoebus to get away from a Yankee, or his chariot to get out of gear; and if Phaeton had only been a Vermonter, the deserts of Ethiopia might to this day have been covered ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... showed no mercy. One of them carried two great nails, such as those portrayed in pictures of the Crucifixion; the other bore a mallet: the first placed a nail upright over one of the old man's eyes; the other struck it with the hammer, and drove it into his head. The throat was pierced in the same way with the second nail; and thus the guilty soul, stained throughout its career with ...
— The Cenci - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... it tooth and nail," observed David in an amused tone. "I should have stopped to listen to them, only this fellow was so sick of the discussion. What a ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... that Lopez was doing well in the world,—in a profession of the working of which Mr. Wharton himself knew absolutely nothing. He had a large fortune at his own bestowal,—intended for his daughter,—which would have been forthcoming at the moment and paid down on the nail, had she married Arthur Fletcher. The very way in which the money should be invested and tied up and made to be safe and comfortable to the Fletcher-cum-Wharton interests generally, had been fully settled among them. ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... expectantly. On the wall, just opposite his bed, was a large illuminated card hanging by a string from a nail—"A Busy Day is a Happy Day." That had not been there the day before. Brightly-coloured roses and forget-me-nots and honeysuckle twined round all the words. William hastily thought over the three aunts staying in the house, and put it down to ...
— More William • Richmal Crompton
... hurry tore his nail by letting the falls run through his hand too fast. I was binding it up, the boat making for the poor fellow faster than any swimmer could have done. How it was that he did not lay hold of the buoy, or sank so soon, I can't say; the great mistake was not jumping overboard at once. This is a gloomy ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of the ordinance of 1787, carried to its last analysis, applied in its broadest sense. It drove the last nail in the coffin of slavery, and blighted the fondest hope of the ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... care of him. Three days later, he was at a wedding, singing like a thrush, leaping like a kid, and frisking about in the old-fashioned way. On leaving a marriage-feast, he would go and dig a grave and nail up a coffin. He performed those duties devoutly, and although they seemed to have no effect on his merry humor, he retained a melancholy impression which hastened the return of his attacks. His wife, a paralytic, had not ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... Jerry heartily. "I was just the same at your age. I used to scamp at school and shirk at college until I found myself so far behind fellows I despised that I was ashamed. Then I went after them tooth and nail until I caught them ...
— Peg O' My Heart • J. Hartley Manners
... outer surface with a potsherd; not with the sharp fractured edge but with the blunt side of the rim; and thus the leaf is reduced to rags. In this manner a stratum of coarse longitudinal fiber is disclosed, and the operator, placing her thumb-nail beneath it, lifts it up, and draws it away in a compact strip; after which she scrapes again until a second fine layer of fiber is laid bare. Then, turning the leaf round, she scrapes its back, which now lies upwards, down to the layer of fiber, which she seizes with her hand ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... this question it had to go unanswered, and instead he waited in silence while the Irishwoman took her key from a nail in the wall, and set off across her garden, which was only one degree less untidy than the doctor's, to open ...
— The Adventurous Seven - Their Hazardous Undertaking • Bessie Marchant
... possible that one of his size could pass, and showed so great an inclination to go through a hole in the open-work fire-board that I hastily covered it up. After a while he tested the matting and carefully investigated, by light taps of his bill, each separate nail. His step was heavy, and he did not hop, but ran around with a droll little patter of the feet, like ...
— In Nesting Time • Olive Thorne Miller
... ordered Monsoor to arrange a stake in the ground, with a large nail driven in the top at right angles to form a rocket-stand. I now asked Kabba Rega if he would like to see ...
— Ismailia • Samuel W. Baker
... was upon the floor, and high screened doors opened on to the north verandah. Zu Pfeiffer sprawled in a swing chair before the office desk placed at an oblique angle to the wall, encumbered with books and papers. After tapping reflectively on a book cover with a polished nail zu Pfeiffer's hand sharply struck the bell. Instantly a corporal appeared at the farther door and stood as if petrified, black hand to black temple. Zu Pfeiffer snapped instructions in Kiswahili without removing his cigar. The man grunted, shot his hand away at right angles ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle
... very great influence on the climate of the world. Besides, why should we be surprised that the nature of man should change? Does not everything change? Is not change the law of nature? My skin changes every year, my hair never belongs to me a month, the nail on my hand is only a passing possession. I doubt whether a man at fifty is the same material being that he ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... fury, Getz drew her a few steps to the closet where his strap hung, and jerking it from its nail, ...
— Tillie: A Mennonite Maid - A Story of the Pennsylvania Dutch • Helen Reimensnyder Martin
... treatment of moral taints I will use the following comparison. Suppose our brain is a plank in which are driven nails which represent the ideas, habits, and instincts, which determine our actions. If we find that there exists in a subject a bad idea, a bad habit, a bad instinct,—as it were, a bad nail, we take another which is the good idea, habit, or instinct, place it on top of the bad one and give a tap with a hammer—in other words we make a suggestion. The new nail will be driven in perhaps a fraction of an inch, while the old one ...
— Self Mastery Through Conscious Autosuggestion • Emile Coue
... picture of the legs and feet of a hen. We see that the legs are covered with scales, and that each foot has four toes, three pointing forward and one back. Each toe has a long, sharp, and strong nail. ...
— Friends in Feathers and Fur, and Other Neighbors - For Young Folks • James Johonnot
... ways. I dunno," said Pliny, impartially. "Anyhow, Abner he lets on public and constant that he's a-goin' to nail Asa's hide to the barn door.... It's one good, healthy hate ...
— Scattergood Baines • Clarence Budington Kelland
... on his clothes, and descended, taking his horn- lantern from a nail in the passage, and lighting it before opening the door. The rays fell on the form of a tall, dark man in cavalry accoutrements and wearing a sword. He was pale with fatigue and covered with mud, though the weather ...
— A Changed Man and Other Tales • Thomas Hardy
... tome and would lose myself in it by the hour he could not understand it. I was preparing for the law. He could see no advantage to be derived from this digging into speculation. He was practical and unless he could drive a nail into a thing or at least dig into its chemical elements it was ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... Borromee, "you will denounce me when you wake!" and, rising, he made a furious blow with his dagger on the back of his companion, thinking to pierce him through and nail him to the table. But he had not reckoned on the shirt of mail which Chicot had carried away from the priory. The dagger broke upon it like glass, and for the second time Chicot ...
— The Forty-Five Guardsmen • Alexandre Dumas
... a half high, in pencil. This small sketch should determine, first, the general balance of the page; second, the inter-relations and spacings of the various lines and words and their relative importance and sizes. From this thumb-nail sketch the design should be drawn out at full size in pencil, and much more carefully. In this redrawing the separate letter shapes and their harmonious relations to each other should be determined, and such deviations made from the smaller sketch as seem to benefit the effect. [202] Some draughtsmen ...
— Letters and Lettering - A Treatise With 200 Examples • Frank Chouteau Brown
... view; and whilst the "Intrepid" and "Assistance," with the "Prince Albert," communicated with the natives of Cape York, the "Pioneer" pushed on, and soon passed the brigs, who, although they knew full well that the late arrivals from England had letters for them, were to be seen pushing tooth and nail, to ...
— Stray Leaves from an Arctic Journal; • Sherard Osborn
... wide and a man appeared in the light. A rush of frost, turned to vapor by the heat of the room, swirled about him to his knees and poured on across the floor, growing thinner and thinner, and perishing a dozen feet from the stove. Taking the wisp broom from its nail inside the door, the newcomer brushed the snow from his moccasins and high German socks. He would have appeared a large man had not a huge French-Canadian stepped up to him from the bar and ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... run away," announced Kittie, presently, with some abruptness; but no one but Bea, who was on the alert, saw how her mother started, with a force that ran her needle clear under her thumb nail, or how excessively pale she was as she wiped off the little drops ...
— Six Girls - A Home Story • Fannie Belle Irving
... our galleys went, With cleaving prows in order brave To a speeding wind and a bounding wave— A gallant armament: Each bark built out of a forest-tree Left leafy and rough as first it grew, And nail'd all over the gaping sides, Within and without, with black bull-hides, Seethed in fat and suppled in flame, To bear the playful billows' game; So, each good ship was rude to see, Rude and bare to the outward view. But each upbore a stately tent Where cedar pales in ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... find in his bag. And the man what he showed 'em to was so terrible interested that nothing would do but he must come up to Dunnabridge and see the lot. He offered two hundred and fifty pound for the things on the nail; so Jonathan saw very clear that they must be worth a good bit more. They haggled for a week, and finally the owner went up to Exeter and got another chap to name a price. In the long run, the dealers halved the things, and Jonathan ...
— Humorous Ghost Stories • Dorothy Scarborough
... slumped into corners on platforms—what happened to it in slides, in slots and pigeon-holes, in mail bags on noisy city sidewalks, in freight cars on awful silent sidings in the night, in depots, in junctions—if all the long story of this one letter could be written like the Lord's Prayer on a thumb nail and could be put in that little hole of information stamped on the envelope—what is it that the little autobiography of the letter would ...
— The Ghost in the White House • Gerald Stanley Lee
... few words with his companion, "how will this proposition suit you? All expenses, before and after the affair itself, of course refunded; one hundred thousand sesterces clear gain for doing the deed, twenty-five thousand sesterces for every poor fellow we have to nail up to satisfy the law, and you to be guaranteed against any evil consequence. ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... or rather genius, in whose hand a jews-harp is the lyre of Orpheus, a fiddle the harp of David, a chisel a hewer of heroic forms, a brush or a pen the scepter of souls, and, alas! a nail a picklock. ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... counsel me and bring you prosperity." A lean arm, a mere bone covered with a sun-tanned skin, reached for a key which was hanging from a nail in the wall. Without speaking, he unlocked the gate. Michael noticed the fleshlessness of the ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... The enormously long nail of his right index finger rested upon the opened page of the book, to which he seemed constantly to refer, dividing his attention between the volume, the contents of the test-tube, and the progress of a second experiment, or possibly a part of the ...
— The Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... her nose in the most approved form of Algerine elegance. Then she dyed her nails and the palms of her hands dark-red with another substance named henna. The first of these takes about a week to remove, and the last can be got rid of only by the growth of the nail. Agnes was not aware of this, else she might have objected. They finished up the adornment of the face by sticking it all over ...
— The Pirate City - An Algerine Tale • R.M. Ballantyne
... a fuss, let them,' he said. 'It is their way of persuading themselves that they are important.... If they put me in prison, I should just draw on the walls with a nail, and the time would soon go by. The difference between us and them is that they are in a hurry and we are not. There won't be much left of my Tempest by the time they've done with it.... The electricians ...
— Mummery - A Tale of Three Idealists • Gilbert Cannan
... wrings my very soul. Silk hat, ruffled shirt, silver-buckled shoes, kid gloves, cane, velvet suit, with one two-inch pocket which is an insult to his sex,—how I pity the pathetic little caricature! Not a spot has he to locate a top, or a marble, or a nail, or a string, or a knife, or a cooky, or a nut; but as a bloodless substitute for these necessities of existence, he has a toy watch (that will not go) and an embroidered handkerchief ...
— Children's Rights and Others • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... his chair; but he contemplated the nail on the middle finger of his left hand with absorbed interest, even bringing it nearer the light in order to ...
— Doctor Claudius, A True Story • F. Marion Crawford
... songs it is written, "Drink, Runes, must thou know, if thou wilt maintain thy power over the maiden thou lovest. Thou shalt score them on the drinking-horn, on the back of thy hand, and the word NAUD" (NEED—necessity) "on thy nail." Moreover, when it is remembered that the ladies of the house themselves minister on these occasions, it will be easily understood that all flinching is out of the question. What is a man to do, when a wicked little golden-haired maiden insists on ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... time, Signor Carlo, when a friend of ours, in order to win a favour of his beloved, filled his room with skulls and bones like a churchyard?' The most loathsome tasks were prescribed—to draw three teeth from a corpse or a nail from its finger, and the like; and while the hocus-pocus of the incantation was going on, the unhappy participants ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... so rotten and worm-eaten, as to make it surprising that she had not at once gone to the bottom, and he was afraid of doing anything to them lest he should make matters worse. Our only means, therefore, of stopping the leaks, was to nail some canvas we fortunately had with us over the bottom of the boat; having first carefully inserted some oakum between the planks, and rubbed ...
— Mark Seaworth • William H.G. Kingston
... excitedly. "I didn't change for football yesterday afternoon, but before going into the field I hung my watch up on a nail in the shed, and stupidly forgot all about it until I came to wind it up last night. Then it was too late to fetch it, and now ...
— The Triple Alliance • Harold Avery
... country keeps on growing and growing, and you're not content with half. You want everything,—all the new states must abolish slavery. And after a while you will overwhelm us, and ruin us, and make us paupers. Do you wonder that we contend for our rights, tooth and nail? They ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... on great matters of dissolution than to respect the departed. Julian could not help smiling at the child's evident discomfiture as he pursued his way towards Grosvenor Place. On one of the doorsteps of the big houses that drive respect like a sharp nail into the hearts of the poor passers-by, a ragged old woman was tumultuously squatting. Her gin-soddened face came, like a scarlet cloud, to the view from the embrace of a vagabond black bonnet, braided ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... to the ship they had hailed, in a sea that would swamp any other boat in half a minute, and so they would bring their letters on deck. Those who knew their story refused to take the letters, and then the sailors would nail them to the mast or lay them on the deck, with a heavy weight to keep them from blowing away, and go back to their own ship. So the letters sometimes reached their homes, for it was said to bring bad luck either to take their letters willingly ...
— The Wagner Story Book • Henry Frost
... hats, piled on top of one another, all as stiff as sheet-iron and trimmed with gay flowers. At the marble wash-stand stood Rena Kalski, the right bower of the business manager, polishing her diamond rings with a nail-brush. ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... with his fist. "I'm glad you said that," he cried triumphantly. "There's a lie in that, and I want to nail it. The man gives only his money, you say. Do you understand what that means where a hard-working devil is concerned? What has he got besides the few pennies he earns? When he gives his money, isn't ...
— Children of the Desert • Louis Dodge
... failing, the heart throbbing faintly and more faintly, all but vanquished, the breath, the poor breath, the poor helpless human spirit, sobbing and sighing, gurgling and rattling in the throat. No help! No help! He—he himself—his body to which he had yielded was dying. Into the grave with it. Nail it down into a wooden box, the corpse. Carry it out of the house on the shoulders of hirelings. Thrust it out of men's sight into a long hole in the ground, into the grave, to rot, to feed the mass of its creeping worms and to be ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... hole in the ice and dropping in a piece of ivory carved in the shape of a small fish. When the fish rises to examine this visitor, it is secured with a spear. The Eskimo fish spear has a central shaft with a sharp piece of steel, usually an old nail, set in the end. On each side is a piece of deer antler pointing downward, lashed onto the shaft with a fine line, and sharp nails, pointing inward, are set in the two fragments of antler. When this spear is thrust down on the fish, the ...
— The North Pole - Its Discovery in 1909 under the auspices of the Peary Arctic Club • Robert E. Peary
... permanency in a transient world is terrifying. A permanent husband is a bore, and we do not know what to do with him. He cannot be put on a shelf. He cannot be hung on a nail. He will not go out of the house. There is no escape from him, and he is always the same. A smile of a certain dimension, moustaches of this inevitable measurement, hands that waggle and flop like those of automata—these are his. He eats this way and he drinks that way, and he will ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... The Alcalde bowed, murmured her title, and went lamely out of the house. He was plainly in an agony of uncertainty as to his duty, but he glanced at the Vicomtesse—and went, flipping the note nervously with his finger nail. He paused for a few low-spoken words with the tawdry constable, who sat down on the banquette after his chief had gone, still clinging to the bridle. The Vicomtesse went to the doorway, looked at him, and closed the battened doors. The constable did ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... get to the house you can hang the key on its nail behind the kitchen door," Reliance told her. "It is always ...
— A Dear Little Girl's Thanksgiving Holidays • Amy E. Blanchard
... the horse are long, straight, and strong, and the single toe (or hoof) means that the horse walks on the tip of one toe, and the hoof is in reality a large toe nail developed to protect the tip of the toe. To these features is due the great speed of the horse. Horses gather together in the field with the foals in the most protected part of the group, just as wild horses found it necessary to do for protection. ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Nature Study • Ontario Ministry of Education
... acquaintance. The female laid her eggs, and was about to brood them: some days elapsed, and the people saw the female still sitting on the eggs, but the male, flying about the nest, and sometimes settling on a nail, was herd to utter a very plaintive note, which betrayed his uneasiness. On a nearer examination the female was found dead on the nest, and, on her being removed, the male took his seat upon the eggs; but after remaining upon them about two hours, he went out, ...
— Domestic pleasures - or, the happy fire-side • F. B. Vaux
... With those he pierced them and with clinchers bound. Long and capacious as a shipwright forms Some bark's broad bottom to out-ride the storms, So large he built the raft; then ribb'd it strong From space to space, and nail'd the planks along; These form'd the sides: the deck he fashion'd last; Then o'er the vessel raised the taper mast, With crossing sail-yards dancing in the wind; And to the helm the guiding rudder join'd (With yielding osiers fenced, to break the force Of surging waves, and steer the steady ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer, translated by Alexander Pope
... all in vain that warning strain—the king has crost the tide— But never more off Samos shore his bark was seen to ride! The Satrap false his life has ta'en, that monarch bold and free, And his limbs are black'ning in the blast, nail'd to the gallows-tree! ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... our bodies, by the seeds of the million years that flow in our veins, material things are spiritually discerned. There is not science enough nor scientific method enough in the schools of all Christendom for a man to listen intelligently to his own breathing with, or to know his own thumb-nail. Is not his own heart thundering the infinite through him—beating the eternal against his sides—even while he speaks? And does he not know it ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... were a dozen or more bottles that looked as if they might contain chemicals; a square black box stood on the table and also a brass spring and what resembled a cord hanging from one side. Bob decided it was a bomb. From a nail in the center of the ceiling a small alligator was suspended by its tail. Bob recognized the missing Percy, and decided that this must be the headquarters of the gang that had used an alligator as its symbol, and traced a picture of it on ...
— Bob Cook and the German Spy • Tomlinson, Paul Greene
... generation of a female. A little over three inches from the anus was a rudimentary limb with a movable articulation; it measured five inches in length and tapered to a fine point, being furnished with a distinct nail, and it contracted strongly to irritation. Marie, the left child, was of fair complexion and more strongly developed than Rosa. The sensations of hunger and thirst were not experienced at the same time, and one might be asleep while the other was crying. ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... turned slightly underneath the hand will form its support, and the pen, these fingers and the muscles of the arm near the elbow form the only points of rest or contact on desk or paper. The pen should point over the shoulder, and should be so held that it may pass the root of the nail on the second finger, and about opposite the knuckle of the hand. An unnatural or cramped position of the hand, like such a position of the body, is opposed to good writing, and after many years of observation and study, all teachers concur in the one position above described, as being ...
— Burroughs' Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889 • Barkham Burroughs
... describe every nook of that darling old house, and every thing surrounding it, from its old-fashioned chimneys—wherein the domestic swallows have sung their little ones to sleep each successive summer, time out of mind—to the unseemly nail that projected its Judas-point from one of the crosspieces of that same little gate, and which always contrived to give a triangular tear to my flying robes every time they fluttered through that dear little gate. Just ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various
... time I had in a brig off Hatteras," observed Teddy, who had somewhat recovered his composure; "we had to cut away both masts, you persave, and to scud under a scupper nail driv into the deck, wid a man ready to drive it further as ...
— Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXII No. 4, April 1848 • Various
... priest, "see what it is to be a bishop in any church! The moment a man becomes a bishop, he fastens tooth and nail upon luxury, as if a mitre was a dispensation for enjoying the world that they have sworn to renounce. Dionysius, look about you! Isn't this worth ...
— Going To Maynooth - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... Christianity is dying in this country. We are being more and more filled with the spirit of militarism, which means the death of religion; while every new Dreadnought, which drains the nation of its treasure, is another nail driven ...
— All for a Scrap of Paper - A Romance of the Present War • Joseph Hocking
... and T. Watters, On Yuan Chwang, i. 390). It is a striking example of the way in which such legends grow, that it is only the latest of these authorities, Hsuean Tsang, who says that, though ostensibly approaching the Buddha with a view to reconciliation, Devadatta had concealed poison in his nail with the object ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... ground sloped towards the house door; so that in rainy weather, when the pond was full, the kitchen was overflowed; and at all times the floor was so damp and soft, that the print of the nails of brogues was left in it wherever the wearer set down his foot. To be sure these nail-marks could scarcely be seen, except just near the door or where the light of the fire immediately shone; because, elsewhere, the smoke was so thick, that the pig might have been within a foot of you without your seeing ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... nothing but laugh. "I've seen a few passages of arms," he said. "By Jove, you don't know what war is till you see two —— at it tooth and nail. Two—what, Lucy? Oh, I mean fine ladies; they have no mercy. Her Grace will set her claws into the fair countess. And ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... moochin' days of me giddy youth, When I kidded meself a treat, I'd have pass him one ez a gooey. 'Strewth On the track iv Huns, he's a eight-day sleuth, 'N' at tearin' into 'em nail 'n' tooth He's got ...
— 'Hello, Soldier!' - Khaki Verse • Edward Dyson
... with a daredevil recklessness that would have done honor to prehistoric man. That part of their adventures is a record that exceeds the wildest darings of fiction. Their boats were called kotches. They were some sixty feet long, flat bottomed, planked with green timber. Not a nail was used. Where were nails to come from six thousand miles across the frozen tundras? Indeed, iron was so scarce that at a later day when ships with nails ventured on {296} these seas natives were detected diving below to pull the nails from the timbers with their teeth. Instead of nails, the ...
— Vikings of the Pacific - The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward • Agnes C. Laut
... about. A plow team occupied two of the stalls, and though they were heavy Clydesdales with no speed in them, they would be capable of traveling faster than a man on foot. As he could not find a saddle, he ran back to the house and returned with a blanket. A bit and bridle hung on a nail, he found a girth, but his hands were cold and he spent some time adjusting straps and fastening on the blanket before he led one of ...
— Prescott of Saskatchewan • Harold Bindloss
... scramble-rush, and a barking and squeaking, and a terrible monster stood before me. It was something like a dog and something like a broom, something like being thrown out of the larder by cook—I can't describe it. It caught me up, and in less than a moment it had hung my tabby skin on a nail ...
— Pussy and Doggy Tales • Edith Nesbit
... Croubel whispered to him: "Bid seven on no suit. You've got the joker." Her delicate forefinger, its nail shining, was pointing at a curious card in ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis
... the practice of employing the Indian tribes in our army, arising from the fact that the orator handled the subject with clean hands. Colonel Barre, excited by it, declared that if it were printed and published he would nail it on every church-door by the side of the king's proclamation for a general fast; and Governor Johnson said it was fortunate for Lord North and Germaine that the galleries had been cleared before the speech was uttered, as the indignation and enthusiasm ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... perseverance, and the pertinency of her remarks. The editor of The Rochester Democrat said the next morning, that "whatever the schoolmasters might think of Miss Anthony, it was evident that she hit the nail on the head." ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... cumbersome instrument, heavy, with deep pine socket for the stump, and a projecting brace which passed under a leather belt around the man's waist. This instrument he used with the dexterity of a third hand. As Thorpe watched him, he drove in a projecting nail, kicked two "turkeys" dexterously inside the open door, and stuck the armed end of his peg-leg through the top and bottom of the whisky jug that one of the new arrivals had set down near the door. ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... moor, picket, harness, chain; fetter &c. (restrain) 751; lock, latch, belay, brace, hook, grapple, leash, couple, accouple[obs3], link, yoke, bracket; marry &c. (wed) 903; bridge over, span. braze; pin, nail, bolt, hasp, clasp, clamp, crimp, screw, rivet; impact, solder, set; weld together, fuse together; wedge, rabbet, mortise, miter, jam, dovetail, enchase[obs3]; graft, ingraft[obs3], inosculate[obs3]; entwine, intwine[obs3]; interlink, interlace, intertwine, intertwist[obs3], interweave; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... Now the poor thing had already done much. Liquor in these far inland countries, where there are no distilleries, reaches the enormous price of from sixteen to twenty dollars a gallon. So she mildly but firmly refused, upon which Golpin seized from the nail, where it was hung, a very heavy key, which he knew to be that of the little cellar underground, where the woman kept the liquor. She tried to regain possession of it, but during the struggle Golpin beat her brains out with a bar of iron that was in the room. This deed perpetrated, ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat
... "Well hit won't tak me long ter git breakfus reddy," and Mrs. Pervis darted into the kitchen. Teck Pervis dipped his hands into the basin, poured the cool water on his head until his gray hair hung in thick mats over his face then leisurely drawing the towel from the nail beside the door, lazily wiped his head and face. The smell of fried bacon and delicious coffee arose from the kitchen; the rattling of dishes was to him sufficient token of the putting of victuals on the table. Teck Pervis sauntered ...
— Hanover; Or The Persecution of the Lowly - A Story of the Wilmington Massacre. • David Bryant Fulton
... hypocrites: they must be, since as educated men they could not well believe the fables they were paid to teach! But it was hard to associate hypocrisy with Mr. Stafford, whose fond ambition it was to nail Lawrence Hyde to lecture on his Chinese travels before the Bible Class. "Oh, nothing religious," he explained, holding his victim firmly by the coat as Lawrence edged away. "Only half an hour's story-telling to put a few new ideas into their heads—as if you were talking to a young ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... a fourteenth-century patrician, which had the uncommon advantage of a lower jaw hinged to the upper. She proudly clapped it up and down for their astonishment, and waited, with a toothless smile, to let them discover the bead of a nail artfully figured in the skull; then she gave a shrill cackle of joy, and gleefully explained that the wife of this patrician had killed him by driving a nail into his temple, and had been fitly beheaded ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... Alex rose once more to his knees, and began a cautious examination of the door. The cause of its refusal to open was soon apparent. The old hinges had given, allowing it to sag and catch against a raised nail-head in the sill. ...
— The Young Railroaders - Tales of Adventure and Ingenuity • Francis Lovell Coombs
... centuries old. Their growth is almost imperceptible, being scarcely to be noticed in the lapse of twenty or thirty years. The wood of the palma de cobija is excellent for building. It is so hard, that it is difficult to drive a nail into it. The leaves, folded like a fan, are employed to cover the roofs of the huts scattered through the Llanos; and these roofs last more than twenty years. The leaves are fixed by bending the extremity of the footstalks, which have been beaten beforehand between ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt
... Bristles, now more than ever determined on finishing the terror of the neighboring farmers. "We've just got to nail him, boys. Don't let him shoot past you! Pound him on the head! Knock him galleywest! That was a socker, Fred; you've got him down, I tell you! Now, everyone pile in and we'll end ...
— Fred Fenton Marathon Runner - The Great Race at Riverport School • Allen Chapman
... of these days, I will write an article for the 'Atlantic,' that your papa need not have all the say to himself: however, I believe he has hit the nail on the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... don't like you. The explanation of that is simple enough. You've heard some one saying something about you, or pretending to repeat something Lu and Ruth have said about you. There! Now haven't I hit the nail on ...
— The Governess • Julie M. Lippmann
... continued to stare at the leaf. It had been scratched or rather written upon with a sharp tool, such as a nail, and wherever this instrument had touched it, the acid juice oozing through the outer skin had turned a rusty blood colour. Presently I found the beginning of the scrawl, and read this in English, and covering the surface ...
— Maiwa's Revenge - The War of the Little Hand • H. Rider Haggard
... earth. You can't leave it to me. I don't want to love you. I'm perfectly happy as I am. If you want me, win me, carry me off my feet and then you shall see what it is to be loved. It's entirely up to you, understand that. I shall fight against it tooth and nail, but I give you leave to do your best. ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... Giant-Foe didst seize and rend, Fierce, fearful, long, and sharp were fang and nail; Thou who the Lion and the Man didst blend, Lord of the ...
— Indian Poetry • Edwin Arnold
... he, "I said: thus endeth the worst man in the world. Well done, lion-tamer! thou art no ill guest, and hast paid on the nail for meat, drink and lodging. But what shall we do now? Then thou saidst; 'Well, I suppose thou wilt be for slaying me.' 'Nay,' said I, 'We will not slay thee; at least not for this, nor now, nor without terms.' Thou saidst: 'Perchance then thou wilt let ...
— The Well at the World's End • William Morris
... five o'clock—for her hours with Dora were not yet regular—he forthwith became her slave. She set him to draw up the fire while she got the tea, and then, without taking any notice of David, she marched John upstairs to help her hang her curtains, lay her carpet, and nail up the coloured fashion plates and newspaper prints of royalties or beauties with which she was adorning the ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... circles in the snow-white alkali and at last he sat down to await the dawn. There was something eerie about this pursuit, if pursuit it was, for while the horse had been watered from the bucket at the well, its rider had not left a track. Not a heel-mark, not a nail-point, and the last of the water had been dropped craftily on the spot where he had mounted. That was enough—Wunpost knew he had met his match. He watered his mules again, rode west into the mesquite brush and at sun-up he was hid ...
— Wunpost • Dane Coolidge
... Curate? 'tis a Paratour That comes to tell ye a delightfull story Of an old whore ye have, and then to teach ye What is the penaltie; Laugh at me now Sir, What Legacie would ye bequeath me now, (And pay it on the nail?) to fly ...
— The Spanish Curate - A Comedy • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
... put there: it was the radish-row; these must be radish leaves. She examined them very closely, so that she might know a radish next time. The little leaves, no bigger than half your little-finger nail, grew in twos,—two on each tiny stem; they ...
— Stories to Tell to Children • Sara Cone Bryant
... suddenly, however, the old statesman died, and his fiddle was heard no more across the valley in the quiet of the evening, but was left untouched for the dust to gather on it where he himself had hung it on the nail in the kitchen under his hat. Then when life seemed to the forlorn girl a wide blank, a world without a sun in it, Angus Ray went over for the first time as a suitor to the cottage under Castenand, and ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine
... axes, several bill-hooks, a good hatchet with hammer head and nail-puller should be in the tool kit. In addition, each man should be provided with a belt knife and a machete with sheath. Collins makes the best machetes. His axes, too, are excellent. The bill-hook, called foice ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt
... creep in and lie at full length inside the temple. The Emperor, advancing toward me from among his courtiers, all most magnificently clad, surveyed me with great admiration, but kept beyond the length of my chain. He was taller by about the breadth of my nail than any of his Court, which alone was enough to strike awe into the beholders, and graceful and majestic. The better to behold him, I lay down on my side, so that my face was level with his, and he stood three yards off. However, ...
— The Blue Fairy Book • Various
... that the Little Doctor had not returned from Denson's, where she had been summoned to attend one of the children, who had run a rusty nail into her foot. She had gone alone, for Dr. Cecil was learning to make bread, and had refused to budge from the kitchen till her ...
— Chip, of the Flying U • B. M. Bower
... General Epistle of April, 1852, announced two potteries in operation, a small woollen factory begun, a nail factory, wooden bowl factory, and many grist and saw mills. The General Epistle of October, 1855, enumerated, as among the established industries, a foundery, a cutlery shop, and manufactories of locks, cloth, leather, hats, cordage, brushes, ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... before in all my life, and I have never seen any such since. They had never seen a ship before, I should think. I thought they did not know much more than the white bears. Why, they would sell almost all the clothes they had on, if we would give them a few pieces of glass, or a nail or two. One of the women who came to the ship had a little girl about four years old, and she said she would give us that girl, if we would let her have a tin pan ...
— Jack Mason, The Old Sailor • Theodore Thinker
... venture life and limb for every individual present, he drank to the health of the whole company out of a wooden beaker. The cup went round and every one uttered the same vow as be set it to his lips. Then one after the other they received the beggar's purse, and each hung it on a nail which he had appropriated to himself. The shouts and uproar attending this buffoonery attracted the Prince of Orange and Counts Egmont and Horn, who by chance were passing the spot at the very moment, and on entering the house were boisterously pressed by Brederode, as host, to remain ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... no mercy. One of them carried two great nails, such as those portrayed in pictures of the Crucifixion; the other bore a mallet: the first placed a nail upright over one of the old man's eyes; the other struck it with the hammer, and drove it into his head. The throat was pierced in the same way with the second nail; and thus the guilty soul, stained throughout its career with crimes of violence, was in its turn ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... Wilkinson blushed until he was nearly as red as the other. "May I ask what I can do for you?" he asked, picking up his stethoscope and tapping it gently against his thumb-nail. ...
— Round the Red Lamp - Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life • Arthur Conan Doyle
... yard, three quarters, half-yard, quarter, nail, Thou flea, thou nit, thou winter cricket thou: Away thou rag, thou quantity, thou remnant. 12 SHAKS.: Tam. of the S., Act iv., ...
— Handy Dictionary of Poetical Quotations • Various
... Haskins, after some argument and much suggestion, was entitled "Claw-Hammer." Such titles as "Deer-Foot," "Rail-Hopper," "Back-Flip Bill," "Wind-Splitter," and the like were discarded in favor of "Claw-Hammer"—for the unfortunate Bill had stepped on a rusty nail in his recent exodus from the lion's den, and was at the time suffering from a swollen and inflamed foot—really a serious injury, although scoffed at by the good-natured Bill himself despite Mrs. Bailey's solicitude and solution ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... that told-you-so stuff," Bud growled. "You never figured anything of the kind, and you know it." He pulled his heavy sweater down off a nail and put it on, scowling because the sleeves had to be pulled ...
— Cabin Fever • B. M. Bower
... is the amount?" asked Jim; and, when the figure was named (it was generally two or three dollars), paid upon the nail and offered a bonus in the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Before the cock crew they were ready, and the Abbot said the mass of the Holy Trinity, and when it was done they left the church and went to horse. And my Cid embraced Dona Ximena and his daughters, and blest them; and the parting between them was like separating the nail from the quick flesh: and he wept and continued to look round after them. Then Alvar Fanez came up to him and said, Where is your courage, my Cid? In a good hour were you born of woman. Think of our road now; these sorrows will yet be turned ...
— Chronicle Of The Cid • Various
... Nail to the mast her holy flag; Set every threadbare sail; And give her to the God of Storms, The lightning ...
— Cupology - How to Be Entertaining • Clara
... great part of the fruit is wasted. If, instead of fish, he has flesh, he must have some succedaneum for a knife to divide it; and for this purpose a piece of bamboo is tossed to him, of which he makes the necessary implement by splitting it transversely with his nail. While all this has been doing, some of his attendants have been employed in beating bread-fruit with a stone-pestle upon a block of wood; by being beaten in this manner, and sprinkled from time to time with water, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... to the front door with me, an' I thought I'd jest step round an' nail up t'other one," he said, in the tone of one conscious of right. "There was some nails in the wood-shed. Then I heard somebody steppin' round inside, an' ...
— Meadow Grass - Tales of New England Life • Alice Brown
... she set Charlie down in front of the hearth, and proceeded to shut the cottage door, which had been left open as they entered,—and locking it, dropped an iron bar across it for the night. Then she threw off her cloak, and hung it up on a nail in the wall, and bending over a lamp which was burning low on the table, turned up its wick a little higher. Helmsley watched her in a kind of stupefied wonderment. As the lamplight flashed up on her features, he saw that she was not a girl, but a woman who seemed to have thought and ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... winter rain ends with a cold snap, and every twig and seed is encased in a transparent armour of ice, then starvation stalks close to all the feathered kindred. Then is the time to scatter crumbs and grain broadcast, to nail bones and suet to the tree-trunks and so awaken hope and life in the shivering little forms. If a bird has food in abundance, it little fears the cold. I have kept parrakeets out through the blizzards and storms of a severe winter, seeing them play and frolic ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe
... is sound and firm, as also the nail on which the specimen hangs, otherwise your own, or your stag's, head may come to grief. Plaster heads being very heavy at first, before drying, it is as well to get them dried, if possible, in advance of the mounting, to obviate great weight, and also ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... was finished. Lewis the saddler was ready to nail down the carpets and hanging. Ivo offered to help him too; but being gruffly repelled, he sat down upon his heap of chips, and looked at the mountains, behind which the sun was setting in a sea of fire. His father's whistle aroused him, and he ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... prosimii, or "half apes," including the lemurs, are nearly all arboreal forms. Perhaps they were driven to this life by their more powerful competitors. The arboreal life developed the fingers and toes, and most of these end, not with a claw, but with a nail. The little group has much diversity of structure, and at present finds its home mainly in Madagascar; though in earlier times apparently occurring all over the globe. The brain is more highly developed than in the average ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... of the husband before the caste committee, and a divorced woman is at liberty to marry again. The Nais worship all the ordinary Hindu deities. On the Dasahra and Diwali festivals they wash and revere their implements, the razor, scissors and nail-pruners. They pay regard to omens. It is unpropitious to sneeze or hear the report of a gun when about to commence any business; and when a man is starting on a journey, if a cat, a squirrel, a hare or a snake should cross the road in front ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... in their lives have been eyewitnesses to the phenomena, supernatural and divine. It must not however be understood that anything like a regular worship is paid to the sea by these people, any more than we should conclude that people in England worship witches when they nail a horseshoe on the threshold to prevent their approach, or break the bottoms of eggshells to hinder them from sailing in them. It is with the inhabitants of Lampong no more than a temporary sentiment of fear and respect, which a little familiarity soon effaces. Many of them ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... stags were slain. Then Oisin grew wearied of hunting, and as he plunged his sharp black hunting-knife into the throat of the last stag, he thought of the sword of magic temper that hung idle by his side in the City of Youth, or rested from its golden nail in his bed-chamber, and he said to Niam, "Has thy father never a foe to tame, never a wrong to avenge? Surely the peasant is no man whose hand forgets the plough, nor the warrior whose hand forgets the sword hilt." Niam looked on him strangely for a while and as if she did not ...
— The High Deeds of Finn and other Bardic Romances of Ancient Ireland • T. W. Rolleston
... Well, now go ahead and nail up the rest of these boxes. We want to get started as soon as we can," and the colored man got busy, murmuring from time to time something about ...
— Tom Swift in Captivity • Victor Appleton
... Union!" amended Dr. Melton grimly. He subsided after this into one of his fidgety, grimacing, finger-nail-gnawing reveries. He was wondering whether he dared tell Lydia of a talk he had had that morning with her father. After a look at Lydia's flushed, tired face, he decided that he would better not; but as the two ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... lithe, healthy figures of the children in the stream, are some compensation for the lack of London mud, London fog, and London illustrations of practical Christianity in the Isle of Dogs and the Bermondsey purlieus. I don't know whether I am knocking the last nail into the completed coffin of my own contention, but I believe every right-minded man returns from the Tropics a good deal more of a Communist than when he ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... writing-table, was a raised wooden dais or bed, like that in the coach-house, a good six feet square, with sides to it, perhaps six inches high. Tara watched the making of this dais, and saw the master cover its floor with a kind of sawdust that had a strong, pleasant smell, and then nail down a tightly stretched piece of old carpet over that, making altogether, as she thought, a very excellent bed. And as such Tara used it by night, but in the daytime she usually preferred to stretch herself beside the writing-table, or on the rug by the door, where the sunshine formed a pool ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... right in the morning, Mr Large," said Tom; "I believe you've hit the right nail on the head; but we shan't starve; see, we've brought plenty of food, and we left fifty times as many behind us, waiting till we go ...
— The Three Commanders • W.H.G. Kingston
... crush one temple in upon the brain. So swift and sudden had been the whole thing, that, on turning the wheel, his lifeless body was still inclining on its periphery, retained erect, I believe, in consequence of some part of his coat getting attached, to the head of a nail. This was the first serious sorrow of my life. I had always regarded my father as one of the fixtures of the world; as a part of the great system of the universe; and had never contemplated his death as a possible thing. That another revolution might occur, and carry the country back under the dominion ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... the required sum. The native thumbed it, pocketed it, lifted his coat from a nail behind the door and started across the ...
— The Bandbox • Louis Joseph Vance
... Lovey Mary, hanging her dripping coat on a nail. "I'll stay with her now. Don't talk, ...
— Lovey Mary • Alice Hegan Rice
... revolver, and after spinning the cylinder under his finger-nail, put it back in its holder again, and the men, taking this as an encouraging promise of immediate action, began to examine their weapons again for the twentieth time, and there was a chorus of short, muffled clicks as triggers were drawn back and cautiously lowered and levers ...
— Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis
... pious Theodelinda Could be recompense more sweet Than the nail, forever sacred, That once pierced her Saviour's feet? Which, when rounded to a circlet, (To fine wire beaten down,) Then became the precious basis Of the Lombards' ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard
... by the fast young men of the day, are called "The Piccadilly three-folds." Now, if this goes on until they get to a "nail in depth, and stiffened with yellow starch, and double wired," I think it will only be proper to put a heavy ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 211, November 12, 1853 • Various
... before closing this chapter. One was the peculiar skin of the whale. It was a bluish-black, and as thin as gold-beater's skin. So thin, indeed, and tender, that it was easily scraped off with the finger-nail. Immediately beneath it, upon the surface of the blubber, was a layer or coating of what for want of a better simile I must call fine short fur, although unlike fur it had no roots or apparently any hold upon the blubber. Neither was ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... skin of his body just scratched by a cut from the hind leg. Had this person been any nearer the kangaroo, his bowels would have been torn open. The middle toe projecting and being armed with a strong nail, enable them to inflict dreadful wounds, and frequently to kill dogs. It is seldom, indeed, that they will attack a kangaroo in front; old dogs never do, but have a very clever way of throwing the smaller kind by the stump of the ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes
... putting my hand in my pocket. "Oh, it's a crimson nail in my boot," he said. "I thought I got the blanky thing out ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson
... git somebody to ketch de sorrel for me. He wuz cotched arfter awhile, an' I hed some money, so I got some pine plank an' made a coffin dat evenin', an' wrapt Marse Chan's body up in de fleg, an' put 'im in de coffin; but I didn' nail de top on strong, 'cause I knowed ole missis wan' see 'im; an' I got a' ambulance an' set out for home dat night. We reached dyar de nex' evenin', arfter travellin' all dat night an' all ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 9 • Various
... he stood, grasping his sword, prepared, and looking quickly right and left, suddenly he saw a thing which rivetted his gaze to it, as if with an iron nail. ...
— An Essence Of The Dusk, 5th Edition • F. W. Bain
... son Edwin; his good son, who had never given him a single care. He declared this settling of Edwin had been to him almost like the days when he himself used to come of evenings, hammer in hand, to put up shelves in the house, or nail the currant-bushes against the wall, doing everything con amore, and with the utmost care, knowing it would come under the quick observant ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... should be well washed and dried, tepid water, scentless soap, and a smooth towel being used. The nails should have a vigorous rubbing with a good nailbrush in the morning before your meals and before you go to bed at night. The nail file and nail scissors must be used as often as possible. Remember, dirty finger nails betray the vulgar and the unkempt. A man ...
— The Complete Bachelor - Manners for Men • Walter Germain
... doubtful if in all its hothouse garden of women the Hotel Bon Ton boasted a broken finger nail or that little brash place along the forefinger that tattles so of potato ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst
... an' we thought as it war a boguy, Seth made no more ado, but he up to't as bold as a constable. Why, there he comes out o' Will Maskery's; an' there's Will hisself, lookin' as meek as if he couldna knock a nail o' the head for fear o' hurtin't. An' there's the pretty preacher woman! My eye, she's got her bonnet off. I mun go ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... Julia, dance!" he cried; and in his gyrations brought without warning his nail-spiked sandal down on Hito's foot. Hito bellowed and danced upon one foot with pain, and once dancing, found that ...
— Nicanor - Teller of Tales - A Story of Roman Britain • C. Bryson Taylor
... a social amenity! Preposterous! No; Mr. Cedarquist forgot that we were dining out ourselves to-night, and when he told me he had asked you here for the same evening, I fell upon the man, my dear, I did actually, tooth and nail. But I wouldn't hear of his wiring you. I just dropped a note to our hostess, asking if I could not bring you, and when I told her who you WERE, she received the idea with, oh, empressement. So, there it is, all settled. Cedarquist and the girls are gone on ahead, and you are to take the old ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... appeared to the narrator, or conveyed his infernal dictates. The man at first refused to say; but it was gradually drawn from him that the Demon had no certain and invariable form: sometimes it appeared to him in the form of a rat; sometimes even of a leaf, or a fragment of wood, or a rusty nail; but that his Master's voice always came to him distinctly, whatever shape he appeared in; only, he said, with an air of great importance, his Master, this time, had graciously condescended, ever since he left the asylum, to communicate with him in a much more pleasing and imposing ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... shall be made, I recommend the court circle as your place of retirement. Governors, creditors, Queen, and imprisonment, all as compactly placed, in the same sentence, as if it were the creed written on a thumb-nail! Well, Sir, we will suppose my interest what you wish it.—Who and ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... remarked slowly and thoughtfully, "you 've no idea the trouble that negro is to me. Would you believe it? he actually left my nail-brush behind at Detroit, and not another to be had for love or money this side of Montreal! And only last night he mislaid a box of rouge, and, by Saint Denis! I hardly dare hope there is so much as an ounce of it ...
— When Wilderness Was King - A Tale of the Illinois Country • Randall Parrish
... We exhausted one subject completely before we turned to the other. One of the returning turkeys took an unwarrantable liberty, and, mounting the doorstep, came in and walked about the kitchen without being observed by its strict owner; and the tin dipper slipped off its nail behind us and made an astonishing noise, and jar enough to reach Mrs. Hight's inner ear and make her turn her head to look at it; but we talked straight on. We came at last to understand each other upon such terms ...
— The Queen's Twin and Other Stories • Sarah Orne Jewett
... old-style Radical: he won't do you much harm. You hit the nail on the head when you mention Norburn. Norburn would be very pleased to run your factory as a State work-shop for two pound ...
— Half a Hero - A Novel • Anthony Hope
... said of printing can be extended to every agent for the advancement of labor; from the nail and the mallet, up to the locomotive and the electric telegraph. Society enjoys all, by the abundance of its use, its consumption; and it enjoys all gratuitously. For as their effect is to diminish prices, it is evident that just so much of the price as is taken off by ...
— Sophisms of the Protectionists • Frederic Bastiat
... stairs. She was in a very bad humor. She had snagged her skirt on a nail in the old gate, and although that very morning she had detested the suit, her round of shopping had again endeared it to her. She told the Portier in English what she thought of him, and climbed ponderously, pausing at each ...
— The Street of Seven Stars • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... and Algeria, countries that are wilder looking, and much wilder seeming than Egypt. Now, as I approached Assuan, I seemed at last to be also approaching the real, the intense Africa that I had known in the Sahara, the enigmatic siren, savage and strange and wonderful, whom the typical Ouled Nail, crowned with gold, and tufted with ostrich plumes, painted with kohl, tattooed, and perfumed, hung with golden coins and amulets, and framed in plaits of coarse, false hair, represents indifferently to the eyes of the travelling stranger. For at ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens
... them. As the leaves develop, these membranous wrappings curl back, and finally wither and fall. In the plane-tree, or sycamore, this inner wrapping of the bud is a little pelisse of soft yellow or tawny fur. When it is cast off, it is the size of one's thumb nail, and suggests the delicate skin of some golden-haired mole. The young sycamore balls lay aside their fur wrappings early in May. The flower tassels of the European maple, too, come packed in a slightly furry covering. The long and fleshy inner scales that ...
— A Year in the Fields • John Burroughs
... set Charlie down in front of the hearth, and proceeded to shut the cottage door, which had been left open as they entered,—and locking it, dropped an iron bar across it for the night. Then she threw off her cloak, and hung it up on a nail in the wall, and bending over a lamp which was burning low on the table, turned up its wick a little higher. Helmsley watched her in a kind of stupefied wonderment. As the lamplight flashed up on her features, he saw that she was not ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... port-hole, too indistinctly, however, to locate it. And this lasted for weeks. One morning, in the ninth week, I perceived that the hatch had been left unfastened and I pushed it open. The cabin was empty at the time. With an effort, I was able to take a nail-file from a dressing-table. Two weeks after that, by dint of patient perseverance, I had succeeded in filing through the bars of my port-hole and I could have escaped that way, only, though I am a good swimmer, I soon grow tired. I had therefore to choose a moment when the yacht was not too ...
— The Confessions of Arsene Lupin • Maurice Leblanc
... resembled pouring wine out of one vessel into another; there was no increase of quantity, and the flavor of the vintage was liable to evaporate;"—whoever would study the great, as well as the small, peculiarities of the painter who converted his thumb-nail into a palette, and while transcribing characters and events both rapidly and faithfully, complained of his "constitutional idleness:"—whenever, we say, our readers feel desirous of revelling in the biography of so diligent, so observing, so ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... health and consequent despondency, we had to work among labourers in a quarry. But the feeling soon passed, and we set ourselves carefully to examine the quarry. Cowper describes a prisoner of the Bastile beguiling his weary hours by counting the nail-studs on the door of his cell, upwards, ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... the President again fought tooth and nail against the industry, and most strenuous efforts were made by him and his party to obtain a reversal of the decision, but without effect. This, however, only disposed of a small portion of the ground at stake. With regard to those areas which had never been ...
— The Transvaal from Within - A Private Record of Public Affairs • J. P. Fitzpatrick
... in town. And then, too, they are always sighing and groaning and trying to make out that they are too good for the business. I don't like such people myself. Those who are likely to excel in this business show their teeth betimes. Those children who put out the eyes of birds, nail bats to barn doors, and love to shoot at little dogs, those are the sort of fellows from which apt pupils ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai
... Prince with the Lip's Power is in, to make such a huff at this Time, shall come under Examination by and by; in the mean time the Solunarians have clench'd the Nail, and secur'd the War to last as ...
— The Consolidator • Daniel Defoe
... exuviation, are apparently soon worn entirely away by the friction against the sides of the cavity; hence in most specimens this part of the peduncle is quite naked. This same part, however, is furnished with nail- or rather star-headed little projections of hard, yellow, horny chitine (fig. 3 e). The star on the summit seems generally to have about five irregular points; one star which I measured was 7/6000th of an inch in total width, the footstalk being only ...
— A Monograph on the Sub-class Cirripedia (Volume 1 of 2) - The Lepadidae; or, Pedunculated Cirripedes • Charles Darwin
... could employ, was freed from any suspicion of dishonest political methods or acts. As William M. Ivins, attorney for Mr. Barnes, left the New York Constitutional Convention to try the case at Syracuse, he said with un concealed and alluring self-satisfaction to Mr. Root: "I am going to nail Roosevelt's hide to the barn door." Mr. Root replied: "Be sure it is Roosevelt's and not some other hide that is ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... to the weapons, too. She had taken off her pistol when she had been nursing Bill and hadn't put it on since. Quietly, so as not to attract attention, she glanced about to locate it. It was hanging on a nail at the opposite end of the table,—and Joe stood just beside it. She had no desire to waken his suspicions of her fear. She knew she must put up a bold front, at least. Nevertheless her fingers longed ...
— The Snowshoe Trail • Edison Marshall
... story of a boy who, having been left alone in his father's house one day, was suddenly set upon and roughly handled by a what-not, a shaggy old hair-cloth sofy and an album. The sofy had begun it by scratchin' his face and he had scratched back with a shingle nail. The album had watched its chance and, when he stood beneath it, had jumped off a shelf on to his head. Suddenly he heard a voice ...
— The Light in the Clearing • Irving Bacheller
... clumsy, hasty sort of way. They made all sorts of mistakes and messes. Payne, the foreman carpenter, was putting some new boards on a part of the drawing-room floor: he was in such a state of panic that, while driving a nail, he accidentally struck the thumb of his left hand a severe blow with his hammer. Bundy was also working in the drawing-room putting some white-glazed tiles in the fireplace. Whilst cutting one of ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... recollection made him start. In his fear of being robbed, he had finally adopted the plan of carrying the key of the large press in his pocket. But this afternoon, oppressed by the heat, he had taken off his jacket, and he remembered having seen Clotilde hang it up on a nail in the study. A sudden pang of terror shot through him, sharp and cold as a steel point; if she had felt the key in the pocket she had stolen it. He hastened to search the jacket which he had a little before thrown upon a chair; the key was not here. At this very moment he was being ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola
... nail and thumb—they struggled and they thrust, The blood ran red from Dollar's side, like rain, upon the dust; He nerved his might for one last spring, and as he sank and died, Reft of an eye, his enemy fell ...
— The Bon Gaultier Ballads • William Edmonstoune Aytoun
... wild and desperate conflict. Tooth and nail Tommy attacks, the foe, fists and legs doing very gallant service. There would indeed have been a serious case of assault and battery for the next Court day, had not Providence sent Mrs. Monkton ...
— April's Lady - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford
... music is a modern phenomenon. Beethoven encouraged it by his "Pastoral Symphony," and the French Berlioz did some very remarkable things in this line in his dramatic symphonies; but it remained for Liszt to hit the nail on the head in his symphonic poems. The French Saint-Saens followed him, rather than his countryman Berlioz; so did Tschaikowsky, Dvorak, and most modern composers, up to Richard Strauss, whose symphonic poems are the most widely discussed, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... all at once to bethink himsel' o' something, an' he ran to his coat that was hangin' behind the door on a nail, an' he drew oot a letter fra the pocket, an' ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... struck the nail on the head," said Irene. "Look here, Agnes; if anything happened to divide us I'd get worse than ever; because, you see, I am cleverer than I ...
— A Modern Tomboy - A Story for Girls • L. T. Meade
... interests, and you study the interests of your country; press the point of your own services, and rail at the Tories, and I'll bet my spurs against a rusty nail that you get to be a county ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... premature, but his getaway doesn't cut any ice. What we want to do is to nail him, clamp the evidence home, and put him out of business before his friends can say Jack Robinson. The story now is that he was caught driving a little bunch of cows to met the big bunch his pals were rustling, and that we left him in charge of Brad while ...
— Mavericks • William MacLeod Raine
... Administration lost some of its staunchest supporters the moment its later organ, the Sentinel, began advocating the general regulation of prices. With ruin staring them in the face, these devotees of tradition could only reiterate their ancient formulas, nail their colors to the mast, end go down, satisfied that, if they failed with these principles, they would have failed still more terribly without them. Confronting the practical question how to prevent speculators ...
— The Day of the Confederacy - A Chronicle of the Embattled South, Volume 30 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... the Little Doctor had not returned from Denson's, where she had been summoned to attend one of the children, who had run a rusty nail into her foot. She had gone alone, for Dr. Cecil was learning to make bread, and had refused to budge from the kitchen till her first batch was ...
— Chip, of the Flying U • B. M. Bower
... of," cheerfully. "You've hit the nail on the head about her, Maria." He was a peaceable, affectionate fellow at bottom. He had never hoped that his sister would tolerate Kitty, and women's squabbles in a family he abhorred, like every other man; and here she was extending a ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various
... fierce destroyer, chose Above the faith of wedlock-bands, my tomb With odours visited and annual flowers. Not less renown'd then in Mount Ephraim, Jael who with inhospitable guile Smote Sisera sleeping through the Temples nail'd. 990 Nor shall I count it hainous to enjoy The public marks of honour and reward Conferr'd upon me, for the piety Which to my countrey I was judg'd to have shewn. At this who ever envies or repines I leave him to his lot, and ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... to-o much nail-o ketchem clo'e (clothes)?" snorted Hop Sing, coming around to the side verandah with two pins in his hand, to where Miss Jo Halstead was embroidering ...
— Down the Mother Lode • Vivia Hemphill
... the cross. In the relief of the night against the window-pane its jewels shone like the only living things in the hovel. A figure was extended upon this cross, and every nail was a precious stone; the crown of thorns ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... coroner, having indicated thus clearly his opinion that Mr Bunner had hit the right nail on the head, desired the jury ...
— Trent's Last Case - The Woman in Black • E.C. (Edmund Clerihew) Bentley
... was dignified and businesslike, and if a smile hovered about her lips as they explored the odd little house, it did not go beyond the bounds of a polite interest. At length she seated herself on an empty nail keg in the shop, and became absorbed in thought. The agent leaned against the door frame ...
— The Pleasant Street Partnership - A Neighborhood Story • Mary F. Leonard
... obscure piano-forte teacher, who could only venture to address pupils, patrons, and friends. What did he promise? Among other things, music from "Lucia," music from "Norma," music from "Ernani." Teresa made another approving mark with her thumb-nail; and Carmina purchased tickets. ...
— Heart and Science - A Story of the Present Time • Wilkie Collins
... on acts which were assuredly not recorded as examples for our imitation. The prophet who hewed in pieces a captive king, the rebel general who gave the blood of a queen to the dogs, the matron who, in defiance of plighted faith, and of the laws of eastern hospitality, drove the nail into the brain of the fugitive ally who had just fed at her board, and who was sleeping under the shadow of her tent, were proposed as models to Christians suffering under the tyranny of princes and prelates. Morals and manners were subjected to a code ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... horny appendages of the skin, and, with the exception of the hands, the soles of the feet, the backs of the fingers and toes, between the last joint and the nail, and the upper eyelids, are distributed more or less abundantly over every part of the surface of the body. Over the greater part of the surface the hairs are very minute, and in some places are not actually apparent above the level of the skin; but the hair of the head, ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... it cannot be controlled to cut accurately. A light hatchet is preferable to a heavy one. It should never be used for nailing purposes, except in emergencies. The pole of the hammer—that part which is generally used to strike the nail with—is required in order to properly balance the hatchet ...
— Carpentry for Boys • J. S. Zerbe
... tackles, hold hard. Tear holes big enough for the man with the ball to get through. Don't be afraid. Ends, you want to get down like lightning on kicks. Nail in his tracks the man who catches the ball, but don't, for the love of the pigskin, touch him until he has it, or you'll be offside. Watch out for fake kicks, forward passes, double passes—watch out for all tricks. If there's a fumble, fall on the ball and stay there, unless you see a ...
— Tom Fairfield's Pluck and Luck • Allen Chapman
... thickest thither flew The knight, and at each stroke felled, hurt, or slew. L Thus fought they long, yet neither shrink nor yield, In equal balance hung their hope and fear: All full of broken lances lay the field, All full of arms that cloven and shattered were; Of swords, some to the body nail the shield, Some cut men's throats, and some their bellies tear; Of bodies, some upright, some grovelling lay, And for themselves eat graves out ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso
... an old empty nail-keg near the improvised cot and looked at the child; while Laughing Anne, moving to and fro, preparing the hot drink, giving it to the boy in spoonfuls, or stopping to gaze motionless at the flushed face, whispered disjointed bits of information. She had succeeded ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... As far as Pelle could see, there would soon be no place as big as his thumb-nail for capital to feed upon out there. The farmers went about things so quickly! Pelle came of peasant stock himself, and did not doubt that he would be able to get in touch with the ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... Elizabeth with the manuscript set in a ring of gold covered with a crystal; he had also contrived a magnifying glass of such power, that, to her delight and wonder, her majesty read the whole volume, which she held on her thumb-nail, and "commended the same to the lords of the council and the ambassadors;" and frequently, as Peter often heard, did her majesty vouchsafe to wear ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... moment on his way to this country—-if he is not already here, by the by—one of the shrewdest and finest speculators in the world, who is coming over on purpose to do what up to now our own men seem to have funked—fight the B. & I. tooth and nail." ...
— The Profiteers • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... see Mr. Mason now. He's all lathered up and frothin' at the mouth. But in an hour or so he'll be calmed down, maybe before. I tell you what; you stroll out and take in the store windows for a spell and then drift back later. Come up here if you like, or you can wait in the arcade and nail him as he comes ...
— Wilt Thou Torchy • Sewell Ford
... his lips as if he enjoyed himself; and the hawk soon came wheeling down to the ground, which he no sooner touched, than away ran the weasel, having got an excellent dinner at the expense of the hawk. He was not a bit the worse for the ride; while Mr. Hawk lay there as dead as a nail. The biter was bitten that time, wasn't he? It was a pretty good lesson to the hawk family not to be so greedy, though whether they ever profited by it is more than I can say. From the account that a little girl gave me of the incursions recently made upon her chickens, I judge that they ...
— Stories about Animals: with Pictures to Match • Francis C. Woodworth
... the Interrupted Scolia. It is very like the larva of the Common Cockchafer. It is a fat, pot-bellied grub, with a thick, red cap on its head and armed with strong, black mandibles, which are powerful implements for digging and cutting through roots. The legs are sturdy and end in a hooked nail. The creature has a long, heavy, brown paunch. When placed on the table, it lies on its side; it struggles without being able to advance or even to remain on its belly or back. In its usual posture it is curled up into a narrow hook. I have never seen it straighten itself completely; the bulky ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre
... island. I had not shaved since I arrived, so the little hostess asked me after a while if I would like to shave myself before dinner. I told her I would, so she got me some water in the potato-dish and put it on a chair; then her sister got me a little piece of broken looking-glass and put it on a nail near the door, where there was some light. I set to work, and as I stood with my back to the people I could catch a score of eyes in the glass, watching me intently. 'That is a great improvement to you now,' said the host, when I had done; 'and whenever you want ...
— In Wicklow and West Kerry • John M. Synge
... of a nail the shoe was lost; for want of a shoe the horse was lost; and for want of a horse the ...
— Graded Memory Selections • Various
... little indeed. So that most individuals, under a wise government, would be most carefully protected from all vicious attempts to inject extraneous ideas into them. Every extraneous idea, which has no inherent root in the dynamic consciousness, is as dangerous as a nail driven into a young tree. For the mass of people, knowledge must be symbolical, mythical, dynamic. This means, you must have a higher, responsible, conscious class: and then in varying degrees the lower classes, varying ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... of wool-growing I ever heard," cried the girl. "Up to this I've held it against you that you were a sheepman—a silly prejudice, of course, that I have grown up with—but now you can consider yourself free of that. I believe you have hit the nail on the head." ...
— The Free Range • Francis William Sullivan
... would see about it, and then once more she took herself off. Quenu thought that it was too good of her to take so much trouble in running about after that brute Gavard. In point of fact, however, she had simply gone upstairs to Florent's bedroom, the key of which was hanging from a nail in the kitchen. She hoped to find out something or other by an inspection of this room, since the poultry dealer had failed her. She went slowly round it, examining the bed, the mantelpiece, and every corner. The window with the little balcony was open, and the budding pomegranate was steeped ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... had concentrated on a broken fingernail, and he turned to the dressing-table for a knife. She followed him with her eyes and watched him carefully trimming the nail. She had often, amongst the many things that puzzled her, wondered at the fastidious care he took of his well-manicured hands. The light of the lamp fell full on his face, and there was a dull ache in her heart as she looked at him. He demanded implicit ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... just as I was beginning to feel quiet stealing over my limbs, and settling densely on my mind, a noise at my head startled me broad awake again, and, I will frankly confess it, brought my heart into my mouth. It was such a noise as a person would make scratching loudly with a finger-nail; it came from under the knapsack which served me for a pillow, and it was thrice repeated before I had time to sit up and turn about. Nothing was to be seen, nothing more was to be heard, but a few of these mysterious rustlings far and near, and the ceaseless accompaniment ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... lived in, and the concern that was now upon me, put an end to all invention, and to all the contrivances that I had laid for my future accommodations and conveniences. I had the care of my safety more now upon my hands than that of my food. I cared not to drive a nail, or chop a stick of wood now, for fear the noise I might make should be heard: much less would I fire a gun for the same reason: and above all I was intolerably uneasy at making any fire, lest the smoke, which is visible at a great distance in the day, should ...
— Robinson Crusoe • Daniel Defoe
... seven miles Northwest of Southampton by the London and Southwest railway, but the 311th did not take the L. & S. W. The hob-nail limited was the official troop train and the route covered ...
— The Delta of the Triple Elevens - The History of Battery D, 311th Field Artillery US Army, - American Expeditionary Forces • William Elmer Bachman
... were extremely intimate. Kneller had a very fine garden, and as the doctor was fond of flowers, he permitted him to have a door into it. Ratcliffe's servants gathering and destroying the flowers, Kneller sent to inform him that he would nail up the door; to which Ratcliffe, in his rough manner, replied, "Tell him, he may do anything but paint it."—"Well," replied Kneller, "he may say what he will, for tell him, I will take anything from him, ...
— The Jest Book - The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings • Mark Lemon
... dawn into the modern world of distant enemies and secret deadly missiles was unforgettable. Some one showed me a steel arrow which had been dropped within the arsenal, a small, sharpened, nail-like thing that would transfix a body from head to feet. These arrows are dumped over by the thousands to fall where they will. That little machine a mile and more aloft in the sky, busily buzzing its way across the heavens, is the ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... can be crumbled between the fingers, and the bean within is too hard to be dented by finger nail or teeth. ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... said. You may kiss my thumb-nail with the white spot in it for luck. No, sir. That is presuming. Now I am snug, and ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... is just one of Tim's large stories. I do assure you it was not, at first, bigger than my thumb nail, and I am certain it ...
— McGuffey's Fourth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... busy about the breakfast, and as Mr. Van Brunt afterwards described it, "looking as if she could have bitten off a tenpenny nail," and indeed as if the operation would have been rather gratifying than otherwise. She gave them no notice at first, bustling to and fro with great energy, but all of a sudden she brought up directly in front of ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Susan Warner
... but laugh. "I've seen a few passages of arms," he said. "By Jove, you don't know what war is till you see two —— at it tooth and nail. Two—what, Lucy? Oh, I mean fine ladies; they have no mercy. Her Grace will set her claws into the fair countess. And as for the ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... the collar—here.' Wastei moved closer to her and presented himself sideways to Berbel pointing out the place with his finger. 'The Jew said it was from a rusty nail, or that it might be an ink-spot—but he is only a Jew. That is not rust, nor ink, Frau Berbel. That is the old wolf's last blood—on the right side, just under the ear. He would have shot me for a poacher, if he could, ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... and entered, Garth following in stony silence. It was dark within the long, narrow room, although the starlight gleamed feebly through the dirty window panes. Wayne found the lantern upon the nail where it had hung when he was a boy, lighted it, and turned the wick low so that there was only a wan light in the ...
— The Short Cut • Jackson Gregory
... and put by that psalm-book which had already played a part so decisive in the first chapter of her love-story. In the absence of the mesmerist's eye, we are told nowadays that the head of a bright nail may fill his place, if it be steadfastly regarded. So that torn page had riveted her attention on what might else have been but little, and perhaps soon forgotten; while the ominous words of Dandie - heard, not heeded, and still remembered ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... loosened can never attach itself again to the trunk; and whenever wounds, abrasures, or sections of loose bark exist on the trunk of a tree, the damaged part should be cut away cleanly, as far as the injury extends. Careful persons have been known to nail to a tree a piece of loosened bark, in hope of inducing it to grow again, or at least of retaining on the young wood its natural covering. Unfortunately the result produced by this operation is exactly opposite to that intended. The decaying ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 3, January 19, 1884. - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... you've hit the nail on the head this time, Mr. Fairfield," added Dock, who evidently had a theory of his own to propose. "They say you are worth some thirty or forty thousand dollars, ...
— Freaks of Fortune - or, Half Round the World • Oliver Optic
... enough ejaculation, but it served to drive home the nail which the detective's outspoken declaration had hammered into the Earl's startled consciousness. Here, in truth, was a new and disturbing phase of the matrimonial problem contrived by Hermione, aided and abetted by that mischievous scoundrel, Curtis. Still, ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy
... chosen his time well. Yet she screamed, loud and shrill, once, twice, a third time, before Malbihn could leap across the tent and throttle her alarming cries with his brute fingers. Then she fought him, as any jungle she might fight, with tooth and nail. The man found her no easy prey. In that slender, young body, beneath the rounded curves and the fine, soft skin, lay the muscles of a young lioness. But Malbihn was no weakling. His character and appearance were brutal, nor did they belie his brawn. He was ...
— The Son of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... too. Turn the hands up to muster by the quarter-bell. We'll load the guns as soon as the lights are out; let the gunner fill forty rounds, and desire the carpenter to nail up the hatchway-screens. Let them be rolled up and stopped. We'll keep them up for a full due, till we return ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... have a front-door and a side-door by which they may be entered. The front-door is on the street. Some keep it always open; some keep it latched; some, locked; some, bolted,—with a chain that will let you peep in, but not get in; and some nail it up, so that nothing can pass its threshold. This front-door leads into a passage which opens into an ante-room, and this into the interior apartments. The side-door opens at ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... part of the operation now begins: to isolate the vessel from the spine behind, the inferior cava on the right side, and the plexus of nerves in the cellular tissue all round. The cleaning of the vessel must be done in great measure by the finger-nail, and much dexterity will be required to pass the ligature without unnecessarily raising the vessel from its bed, especially as the vessel itself may very possibly be diseased, and the aneurism of the iliac ...
— A Manual of the Operations of Surgery - For the Use of Senior Students, House Surgeons, and Junior Practitioners • Joseph Bell
... was a nail in the Kid's coffin, for Carlyle was well liked at White Oaks. By this time the toils began to tighten in all directions. The United States Government had a detective, Azariah F. Wild, in Lincoln county. ...
— The Story of the Outlaw - A Study of the Western Desperado • Emerson Hough
... at what was good or noble—his hardest critic could not nail him to one such sentence; and yet, it seemed somehow to me that his unknown nature was a systematic blasphemy against it all. If fiend he was, he was yet something higher than the garrulous, and withal feeble, demon of Goethe. ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... steel Saw steel Hot-rolled sheet steel Scythe steel Lathe spindle steel Shear knife steel Lawn mower knife steel Silico-manganese steel Machine knife steel Spindle steel Magnet steel Spring steel Mining drill steel Tool holder steel Nail die shapes Vanadium tool steel Nickel-chrome steel Vanadium-chrome steel Paper knife steel ...
— The Working of Steel - Annealing, Heat Treating and Hardening of Carbon and Alloy Steel • Fred H. Colvin
... night. Such is the way in which mortgages of this kind are always drawn. Yes, sir, it was drawn with such diabolical skill that on this night of all nights the mortgage would be foreclosed. At midnight the men would come with hammer and nails and foreclose it, nail it ...
— Nonsense Novels • Stephen Leacock
... Thou liest, thou thread, thou thimble, Thou yard, three-quarters, half-yard, quarter, nail, Thou flea, thou nit, thou winter-cricket, thou:— Brav'd in mine own house with a skein of thread! Away, thou rag, thou quantity, thou remnant; Or I shall so be-mete thee with thy yard, As thou shalt think on prating whilst thou liv'st." ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... like a doughnut—see him turn one summerset, or maybe a couple if he got a good start, and come down flat-footed and all right, like a cat. He got him up so in the matter of ketching flies, and kep'him in practice so constant, that he'd nail a fly every time as fur as he could see him. Smiley said all a frog wanted was education, and he could do 'most anything—and I believe him. Why, I've seen him set Dan'l Webster down here on this flor—Dan'l Webster was the name of the frog—and sing out, 'Flies, Dan'l, flies!' and ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... one plant may be made to live and grow and produce on the roots of another? If we strip off the bark of any actively growing, woody plant we will find just beneath a soft, colorless substance; this substance is cambium. It feels slimy to the touch and if scraped with the finger nail a little doughy mass can be raised. As we examine it it will be seen to quickly darken to cream color, then to yellow and finally to dark brown. A change has taken place in it in a few seconds, right under our eyes. When we first exposed it, it was living, active ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association, Report of the Proceedings at the Fourth Annual Meeting - Washington D.C. November 18 and 19, 1913 • Various
... my gun the whole crowd were on their feet, and a moment later were at the scene of war. We went to the place where it lay, and beheld a very large white wolf lying there, "dead as a door nail." ...
— Thirty-One Years on the Plains and In the Mountains • William F. Drannan
... she would there was eagerness in her tone. Remarking this, I decided to give another and closer look at the floor and the nails. I found the latter had not been properly inserted; or rather that there were two indentations for every nail, a deep one and one quite shallow. This caused me to make some examination of the others, those which had not been drawn from the floor, and I found that one or two of them were equally insecure, but not all; only ...
— The Millionaire Baby • Anna Katharine Green
... the young lord stood in helpless fury; and the hand he had grasped around his sword-hilt gripped it so hard that blood started under each nail. But his page bent and kissed the clenched fist with ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... poor stunned wife something to do, and he had taken more interest in the details of the proceeding than he otherwise would have done, in the hope of calling her forth to action again. So he seemed to know every brass-headed nail driven up for her convenience. Only one had been displaced. It was Esther's bonnet nail, which in his deep revengeful anger against her, after his wife's death, he had torn out of the wall, and cast ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... occasion of Captain Owen visiting the brother of the King of Baracouta, a calabash of palm-wine was produced, which, in consequence of some imperfection in the vessel, leaked out its contents; in order to cure this defect, the hospitable chief took off his hat, and, scraping with his thumb-nail a portion of the clay and grease from his head, effectually checked further leakage, with ...
— A Voyage Round the World, Vol. I (of ?) • James Holman
... was his delight to tell of cruises against the French and battles with his own shipmates, when he and an antagonist used to be seated astride of a sailor's chest, each fastened down by a spike-nail through his trousers, and there to fight it out. Sometimes he expatiated on the delicious flavor of the hagden, a greasy and goose-like fowl which the sailors catch with hook and line on the Grand Banks. He dwelt with rapture on an interminable winter at the Isle of Sables, where ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... ensuing summer, and these are the fruit-bearers. One bunch of grapes is enough for a spur to carry. Professional gardeners cast off the weight of the bunches, and allow 1 ft. of rod to each pound of fruit. Tie or nail the bunches to the trellis or wall, and remove all branches or leaves ...
— Gardening for the Million • Alfred Pink
... not quite amounting to a trespass as it had been sued for in the older precedents. To take an instance which is substantially one of the earliest cases, suppose that a man left a horse with a blacksmith to be shod, and he negligently drove a nail into the horse's foot. It might be that the owner of the horse could not have one of the old writs, because the horse was not in his possession when the damage was done. A strict trespass property could only be committed against the person in possession of it. It could not be ...
— The Common Law • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
... wide and about three feet long, should be placed on a firm support, upon which it would rest solidly without any tendency to joggle. At its middle was bored a small circular depression, about the size of a man's thumb-nail and shallow. Into this was thrust the tapered end of a round rod of maple wood about as thick as a large man's thumb. The upper end of the rod fitted freely into a socket in a ball of maple wood of suitable size to be held in the ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... to take off. This hard rider came aboard in a skiff after the anchor was up, and, having cast the skiff adrift, offered good money for a passage to Spain or any other foreign port, and paid it down upon the nail. He, Goody, had taken the money, though with a doubtful heart, and given a receipt to the name of Charles Smith, asking no questions, since for this gold he need not account to the owners. Afterwards also the man, having put off his spurs and soldier's jerkin, set himself to ...
— The Lady Of Blossholme • H. Rider Haggard
... started for police headquarters at breakneck speed, but on the way he stopped at Brander's rooms; for a miserable suspicion was growing in his brain. "If that really was Isis," he was thinking, "it's funny she didn't nail me before I got to the door, even with ...
— The False Gods • George Horace Lorimer
... exceedingly. A packman who chanced to be passing heard the tale and suspected the cause. Going to the discarded sweetheart, he told her that her rival had given birth to a fine child; thereupon she sprang up, pulled a large nail out of the beam, and called to her mother, 'Muckle good your craft has done!' The labouring wife was delivered forthwith. (See The Folklore ...
— Ballads of Mystery and Miracle and Fyttes of Mirth - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - Second Series • Frank Sidgwick
... face of the picture smartly with a finger-nail, he gave a slight start, passed a hand over it with the palm pressed flat, and suddenly assumed the humanly intelligent expression of a hunting-dog that has hit on ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... primly side by side upon it; and at the back stood a couple of small bound volumes in which the nun was accumulating little by little private devotions that appealed to her. A pair of beads hung on a nail by the window over which was drawn an old red curtain; two brass candlesticks with a cross between them stood over the hearth, giving it a faint resemblance to an altar. The boards were bare except for a strip of matting by the bed; and the whole room, ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... glance at the mantle hanging on a nail in the wall, and took the baby on her knee and danced him about; and the little fellow burst into a chuckling laugh, and Thomas echoed it with ...
— Littlebourne Lock • F. Bayford Harrison
... over that humble but wholesome meal! Miss Harding praised our host's cooking, and his honest blue eyes glistened at the compliment. Miss Harding and I sat on a board which rested on two nail kegs, while Peterson, against his protest, had the one ...
— John Henry Smith - A Humorous Romance of Outdoor Life • Frederick Upham Adams
... I set my thumb-nail to it, and there, freshly cut and tied with a piece of the very blue ribbon she was wearing, lay a lock of her hair, a curl curiously and as it seemed wilfully twisted back upon itself, as if it had refused to be so imprisoned—just, in ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett
... sharp and swift, but must be calculated so as only just to reach the glass, being checked just at the right point, as one hammers a nail when one does not want to stir the work into which the nail is driven. A pushing stroke, a blow that would go much further if the glass were not there, is no use; and for this reason neither the elbow nor the hand must move; the knuckles are the hinge upon ...
— Stained Glass Work - A text-book for students and workers in glass • C. W. Whall
... Stebbins, you've released your chin To say that here, and here, we press-folk ail. 'Tis a great thing an editor to skin And hang his faulty pelt upon a nail (If over-eared, it has, at least, no tail) And, for an admonition against sin, Point out its maculations with a rod, And act, in short, the gentleman ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... 'football. By no means a scaly idea. I rather fancy, Comrade Bannister, that you have whanged the nail on the head. Is he strong on any particular team? I mean, have you ever heard him, in the intervals of business worries, stamping on his desk and yelling, "Buck up Cottagers!" or "Lay 'em out, Pensioners!" or anything like that? One moment.' Psmith ...
— Psmith in the City • P. G. Wodehouse
... nothin' to a time I had in a brig off Hatteras," observed Teddy, who had somewhat recovered his composure; "we had to cut away both masts, you persave, and to scud under a scupper nail driv into the deck, wid a man ready to drive it further ...
— Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXII No. 4, April 1848 • Various
... so, whilst waiting, Pierre stationed himself at an open window, conducting on to a balcony, and his eyes roamed over the endless sea of herbage to the far-away whiteness of Rome, above which rose the dome of St. Peter's, at that distance a mere sparkling speck, barely as large as the nail of ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... we did all we could. 'Twas little; would that Drake had heeded our advice! But I am rejoiced to see you on the road to recovery, dear boy; 'twould have been another nail in my coffin to know that you had lost your life in doing a service for me. I thank God for that, from ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang
... inches; the width of the face from 10 to 13 1/4 inches. The colour and length of the hair varied in different individuals, and in different parts of the same individual; some possessed a rudimentary nail on the great toe, others none at all; but they otherwise present no external differences on which to establish even varieties ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... that one nail had been driven home, and he was on the point of leaving the attic, for he knew he had not much time and hoped that downstairs he would be able to make some discoveries of importance, when it occurred ...
— The Bittermeads Mystery • E. R. Punshon
... business and financial supermen. As a clever traveler had announced in an after-dinner speech at the Alta-Pacific, "There was honor amongst thieves, and this was what distinguished thieves from honest men." That was it. It hit the nail on the head. These modern supermen were a lot of sordid banditti who had the successful effrontery to preach a code of right and wrong to their victims which they themselves did not practise. With them, a man's word was good just as long as he was compelled to keep it. THOU SHALT NOT STEAL ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... enough to show that it was all that the other old house was not. It did not sag, or lurch, or do any of those disreputable things. It stood up as straight and was as firm on its foundations as on the day when its last hand-wrought nail had been driven home, a century or so before. No mistaking its period or architecture—it was the long-roofed salt-box type, the first Connecticut habitation that followed the pioneer cabin; its vast central ...
— Dwellers in Arcady - The Story of an Abandoned Farm • Albert Bigelow Paine
... dead—dead as nail in door—and my revenues have died with it; but I am not as a man without hope. I have got a sort of opening to the "Morning Chronicle," !!! Mister Manning, by means of that common dispenser of benevolence, Mister Dyer. I have not seen Perry the editor yet: but I am preparing a specimen. I shall ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... men seek the plaudits of the world by achievements for human good, and by striving to elevate and ennoble men. Looking back through nineteen centuries we behold a cross, and on it the crucified Christ, with nail-pierced hands, and wounded, bleeding side, but whose heart was so full of love and pity that even in His dying agonies He had compassion upon His persecutors, and cried out, "Father, forgive them, for they know not ...
— The Jericho Road • W. Bion Adkins
... shock, Albeit finer than her smock, {50a} Marry! her smiles are not of vanity, But resting on sound Christianity. Faith, you would swear, had nail'd {50b} her ears on The book and cushion of ...
— Citation and Examination of William Shakspeare • Walter Savage Landor
... she wept. "He never came upstairs, but went out, and I went to bed. He left the door leading to the stairs open, too, on that night, a thing he never did before. And then the key of the shop. Bart used to hang it on a nail in the cellar and father would put it into his pocket after supper. Deborah couldn't find it in his clothes, and when she went afterwards to the cellar it was on the nail. On that night, Paul, father did everything different to what ...
— The Opal Serpent • Fergus Hume
... drawing the tongue partially forward, to pass the hand into the pharynx and to twist the tumor gently from its attachment. One veterinarian who has had considerable practice in treating this form of disease scrapes through the attachment of the tumor gradually with his thumb nail. When the attachment is too strong to be severed in this way an instrument like a thimble, but possessing a sharp edge at the end, may be used to effect the same purpose, or the base of the tumor may be severed by the use ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... led the way to a big and naked outhouse strewn with very dirty rushes; and lighted a rush-candle fixed between two of the stones of the wall, and set the glowing turf upon the hearth and gave him two unlighted sods and a wisp of straw, and showed him a blanket hanging from a nail, and a shelf with a loaf of bread and a jug of water, and a tub in a far corner. Then the lay brother left him and went back to his place by the door. And Cumhal the son of Cormac began to blow ...
— The Secret Rose • W. B. Yeats
... Give it to him, Nora; it's on a nail by the white boards. I hung it up this morning, for the pig with the black feet ...
— The Atlantic Book of Modern Plays • Various
... and with his long pear-shaped head, shaven to the skin, his white cheeks, protruding chin and long heavy white hands he resembled nothing so much as a large fish hanging on a nail at a fishmonger's. He worked always in a kind of cold desperate despair, his pince-nez slipping off his shiny nose, his mouth set grimly. "What is the use?" he seemed to say, "of helping these poor wounded ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... putting the great barn in readiness for the dance was accomplished; the last bolt of cambric was hung in place from the rafters. The last evergreen tree was nailed to the joists of the walls; the last lantern hung, the last nail driven into the musicians' platform. The sun set. There was a great scurry to have supper and dress. Annixter, last of all the other workers, left the barn in the dusk of twilight. He was alone; he had a saw under one arm, a bag of tools was in his ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... much about him. Scientific experimenter of some kind, I believe. Very exclusive," added Mr. Curtis Fleming, with a grin. "Never sociated with any of us neighbors. Rent on the nail, though. Insane, too, I think. Writes letters to himself ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... thing happened. As the king stepped on board the boat one of the sandals of the white slipper, which had got loose, caught in a nail that was sticking out, and caused the king to stumble. The pain was great, and unconsciously he turned and shook his foot, so that the sandals gave way, and in a moment the precious shoe was in ...
— The Orange Fairy Book • Andrew Lang
... down there, colonel, and play me something good," said Johnson, rolling a nail-keg as a seat up to one ...
— The Pirate Island - A Story of the South Pacific • Harry Collingwood
... groups; he is evidently a non-partisan and is timidly hesitating for whom to give his vote! He does not know, and is at odds with himself; he leaves it to chance—he has lifted up his hands and extended his thumbs; with his eyes shut he aims nail against nail; evidently he will trust his vote to fortune; if the thumbs meet, he will cast an affirmative ballot, but if they miss he will ...
— Pan Tadeusz • Adam Mickiewicz
... nails. Una's own finger-tips were hard with typing; her manicuring was a domestic matter of clipping and hypocritical filing. But to Mrs. Truax manicuring was a life-work. Because of much clipping of the cuticle, the flesh at the base of each nail had become a noticeably raised cushion of pink flesh. Her nails were too pink, too shiny, too shapely, and sometimes they were an unearthly white at the ends, because of nail-paste left under them. ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... savages; but one, I observed, possessed a necklet unlike that of the others, which greatly aroused my curiosity. It was made of thirteen gold plates, irregular in form, about as broad as a man's thumb-nail, and linked together with fibres. I was allowed to examine it, and had no doubt that the pieces were of pure gold, beaten flat by the savages. When questioned about it, they said it was originally obtained from the Indians of Parahuari, and Parahuari, they further ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... I'll be there to-morrow night," she thought, picking it up and slitting the wrapper with a convenient nail file. ...
— Betty Gordon in Washington • Alice B. Emerson
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