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More "Piecemeal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... two mortal hours in this inn, fried by the sun, bored to death, murdered piecemeal by flies, and infuriated by the want of hospitality in this out-of-the-way ...
— The Ink-Stain, Complete • Rene Bazin
... out at once. Now we often in the Christian life deal with ourselves as if we were painters and sculptors, not as if we were mirrors: we hammer and chisel away at ourselves to bring out some resemblance to Christ in some particulars, thinking that we can do it piecemeal; we might as well try to feed up our body piecemeal; we might as well try to make our eye bright without giving our cheek colour and our hands strength. The body is a whole, and we must feed the ...
— How to become like Christ • Marcus Dods
... copy, I have heard," said Hilda, "by an artist capable of appreciating the spirit of the picture. It was Thompson, who brought it away piecemeal, being forbidden (like the rest of us) to set up his easel before it. As for me, I knew the Prince Barberini would be deaf to all entreaties; so I had no resource but to sit down before the picture, day after day, and let it sink into my heart. I do believe it is now photographed there. It is ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume I. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... "It was only a form," he said. "Yet we must do it. For look you, Signori," and here he shrugged up his shoulders, rolled his eyes, and puffed out his lips in a way that was possible to none but an Italian, "were it not thus the entire city would be carried away piecemeal!" ...
— The Dodge Club - or, Italy in 1859 • James De Mille
... article as adopted was disliked by Sherman and Wilson, the latter especially declaring his willingness to remove the disqualifications as soon as possible after a settlement had been made. In point of fact they were removed piecemeal by Congress almost as freely as President Johnson had done the like, and were ended except for a few hundred by a sweeping amnesty ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... upon the census during the latter part of 1900, and nearly a thousand during the entire year, 1901. From July 14, 1900, piecemeal results were announced almost daily. By October the population of the principal cities was out. A preliminary statement of total population was given to the press, October 30, 1900, followed by a verified one a month later. The first official report on population was made December ...
— History of the United States, Volume 5 • E. Benjamin Andrews
... quittor has its origin more often than not in contusions, punctures, or wounds of the region severe enough to cause death of a small portion of the tissues. In this case the low vitality of the parts does not allow of the dead portion being removed piecemeal by a process of phagacytosis, as is usually the case with similar injuries elsewhere. Instead, the tissues around, aided by a process of suppuration, cast the offending portion off as a slough. It is the wound remaining after the slough which we may really ...
— Diseases of the Horse's Foot • Harry Caulton Reeks
... investigated by Parliament, but instead of enforcing the old law they modified it by acts passed in 1803 and 1809, so as to allow of greater liberty. The old prohibition of using fulling mills passed in 1553 was also repealed in 1809. The Statute of Apprentices after being weakened piecemeal as just mentioned, and by a further amendment removing the wages clauses in 1813, and after being referred to by Lord Mansfield as "against the natural rights and contrary to the common law rights of the land," was finally removed from the statute book in 1814. Even the "Combination ...
— An Introduction to the Industrial and Social History of England • Edward Potts Cheyney
... always existed just as she teaches them, that Jesus instituted confession, extreme unction and marriage, and that he taught what was afterwards decided upon by the Nicene and Trent Councils. Nothing can be more erroneous. The Christian dogma has been formed, like everything else, slowly and piecemeal, by a sort of inward vegetation. Theology, by asserting the contrary, raises up a mass of objections, and places itself in the predicament of having to reject all criticism. I would advise any one who wishes to realise this to read ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... Governments grow, piecemeal, both in their tasks and in the means by which those tasks are to be performed, and very few Governments are organized, I venture to say, as wise and experienced business men would organize them if they had a clean sheet of paper to write upon. ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... things we're so proud of having built, including the Mt. Desert cottages and the Wyoming hunting-lodge. It means that we've got to be able to read our book of the Black Art backwards as well as forwards, or the Powers we've conjured up will tear piecemeal both them and us. God! it makes me crawl to ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick
... Montagu-Stuart-Wortley; we were the first complete Territorial Force Division to cross the seas and go into action as a Division against the Germans. And it may be that the whole Territorial Force owe to our General, too, that they went in Divisions, and were not sent piecemeal as some earlier battalions, and dovetailed into the Regular Army, or, perhaps, even into the New Army. We live in the assurance that the confidence the Army Council extended ...
— The Fifth Leicestershire - A Record Of The 1/5th Battalion The Leicestershire Regiment, - T.F., During The War, 1914-1919. • J.D. Hills
... with time and space; it is not surprising, therefore, that logic, in spite of the show of respect outwardly paid to her, is told to stand aside when people come to practice. In practice identity is generally held to exist where continuity is only broken slowly and piecemeal; nevertheless, that occasional periods of even rapid change are not held to bar identity, appears from the fact that no one denies this to hold between the microscopically small impregnate ovum and the born child that springs from it, nor yet, therefore, between the impregnate ovum and ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler
... fine, powdery dust that bit and stung and filled the hair, penetrating to the skin. Voices were inaudible, but there was a weird chorus from the ropes and stays, and then a loud report as one of the storm sails burst into ribbons and was torn piecemeal ...
— Steve Young • George Manville Fenn
... he would see to it that his friend Daniel should not be robbed. He intended, therefore, to go himself to Anjou to call upon those who were likely to purchase, and to be present at the sale. In his opinion, it would be wiser to sell piecemeal, without hurry. If money was needed, why, one could always ...
— The Clique of Gold • Emile Gaboriau
... procession, which was to have marched in military order to overawe Parliament, resolving itself into a confused rabble easily dispersed by the police, and the monster petition, that should have numbered six million signatures, transported piecemeal to the House, and there found to have but two million names appended, many fictitious; the Chartist leader, completely cowed, thanking the Home Office for its lenient treatment; or, on the other hand, London and its peaceful inhabitants, distracted with wild rumours of combat and bloodshed, apprehending ...
— Great Britain and Her Queen • Anne E. Keeling
... Paul, "for your Bible is no other than an imperfect, mutilated Bible, corrupted by the men who made your religion. The Catholic church, from which the Protestants stole their piecemeal Bible, always regarded the book of Machabeus as ...
— The Cross and the Shamrock • Hugh Quigley
... brought out Dec. 26, 1815, and the same day he bound himself to furnish the second by Jan. 20, 1816, with no knowledge of what the libretto would be. Sterbini furnished him with the story of the "Barber" by piecemeal, and as fast as the verses were given him he wrote the music. The whole work was finished in less than three weeks. Its original title was "Almaviva, ossia l'inutile precauzione," to distinguish it from Paisiello's "Barber of Seville." The ...
— The Standard Operas (12th edition) • George P. Upton
... to the engines, we will say, of the Great Eastern steamship as the amoeba to man, were to declare that the Great Eastern engines were not designed at all, on the ground that no one in the early kettle days had foreseen so great a future development, and were unable to understand that a piecemeal solvitur ambulando design is more omnipresent, all-seeing, and all-searching, and hence more truly in the strictest sense design, than any speculative leap of fancy, however bold and even ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... me piecemeal gifts I cast, My fleeing self to save; And that's the thing must go at last, For that's the ...
— New Poems • Francis Thompson
... his chair with his fist and babbled profanity. When he became coherent he told his story, or rather Blount got it out of him piecemeal, of how he had been employed by the "organization" to falsify the registration lists in certain districts; of how, when the work was done, he had been denied the price and driven out with cursings. In the accusation, which was shot through ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... and nod to passers as she talked. "There's no end going on. Dear me, it's a shame to come to you empty-handed, Phebe. I had two or three rosebuds for you,—beauties they were too,—but the fact is I gave them away piecemeal as I came along, and I haven't one left. It seemed as if I met every man there was this morning. How soon do you ...
— Only an Incident • Grace Denio Litchfield
... Calendau felled the larches that grew upon the flanks of the mighty mountain, and hurled the forest piecemeal into the torrent below. At the Rocher du Cire he is frightfully stung by myriads of bees, during his attempt to obtain as a trophy for his lady a quantity of honey from this well-nigh inaccessible place. The kind of criticism that is appropriate for realistic literature is ...
— Frederic Mistral - Poet and Leader in Provence • Charles Alfred Downer
... then in the head of the triumphant youth above him, finally in his completed torso. But each stage is finished relatively. Completion is relative to distance; the Brutus is finished or unfinished according to our standpoint, physical or aesthetic. Moreover, the treatment is not partial or piecemeal; the statue was in the marble from the beginning, and is an entity from its initial stage: in many ways each stage is equally fine. The paradox of Michael Angelo's technique is that his abozzo is really a finished study. The Victory also shows how the deep folds ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... that she had gone to the top of the house, as they might have gone, if they had not been fools, etc. etc.; and that it 'looked as safe and as ugly as ever'; wherewith a brickbat or two having been sent up in answer, she shut the blinds, leaving them to halt, inquire, discover gradually and piecemeal, after the method of mobs, they had been following the nature of mobs; that no one had seen the church on fire, or seen any one else who had seen the same, or even seen any light in the sky in any quarter, or knew who raised the cry; or—or—in short, Alexander's church was two miles off; ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... look upon the Koran as the direct word of God sent down by Him to the seventh or lowest heaven, and then revealed from time to time to the Prophet by the angel Gabriel. A few chapters are supposed to have been delivered entire, but the greater part of the book was given piecemeal during a period of twenty-three years. The Koran is written in Arabic prose, but its sentences generally conclude in a long-continued rhyme. The language is considered to be of the utmost elegance and purity, and ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell
... wounds in the so genial heart would have healed again had not the life-warmth of Faith been withdrawn.' But this once lost, how recoverable? how, rather, ever acquirable? 'First must the dead Letter of Religion own itself dead, and drop piecemeal into dust, if the living Spirit of Religion, freed from this, its charnel house, is to arise on us, new born of Heaven, and with new healing under ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... or brutal mates; and a thousand beds received their occupants in full harness, booted and hatted, as though the enemy were at the gates. Everywhere strains of liquor-music surged up for the next thirty minutes, finally to die away piecemeal as ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... the Publican's Journal. Young Duncan Macmorrogh was a limb of the law, who had just brought himself into notice by a series of articles in 'The Screw and Lever,' in which he had subjected the universe piecemeal to his critical analysis. Duncan Macmorrogh cut up the creation, and got a name. His attack upon mountains was most violent, and proved, by its personality, that he had come from the Lowlands. He demonstrated the inutility of all elevation, and declared that the Andes were ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli
... while the company as a whole was permanent each individual could buy or sell "shares" in the joint stock, helped to make such "joint-stock" companies very popular after the opening of the seventeenth century. The English East India Company, organized as a regulated company in 1600, was reorganized piecemeal for half a century until it acquired the form of a joint-stock enterprise; most of the other chartered colonial companies followed the same plan. In these early stock-companies we find the germ of the most characteristic of present-day ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... the same term that is applied to land, houses, and machinery. By universal practice supported by a long line of court decisions, these rights (whether evidenced by paper or not) are made subject to taxation, except as by piecemeal legislation certain grudging exceptions have been made. These views and this practice are supported by the popular desire to tax money-lenders. The result is "double taxation" of many sources of income. This involves a burden ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter
... like heroes, and fell by thousands into the infernal regions. What happiness would it be for the souls intended for these devilish repasts, if they were thereby to find an end to their torments! But no sooner are they swallowed, digested, and returned piecemeal into the pools of hell than they are regenerated, and arise to become the ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger
... advancing and securing the money which the Jew had deposited upon the table. 'This is the exact sum that was paid to thee four weeks since. It is now returned, and you are a marked man. If seen again in these parts, I will myself have thee cut in piecemeal, and hung at my castle gates. Now, villain, ...
— The Duke's Prize - A Story of Art and Heart in Florence • Maturin Murray
... something of the sort," his mother said; "but he had only heard it piecemeal from old people, and never heard enough to put the pieces together as you have done. 'What does it matter either?' he used to say; and he said those great lords had been cut-throats on the land and robbers on the river. For your father's father had worn the red shirt ...
— The Waters of Edera • Louise de la Rame, a.k.a. Ouida
... constitutions were granted in Rome, Naples, Tuscany, and Piedmont; Venice and Rome declared themselves republics. But no real scheme for all Italy emerged; the Mazzinians were heroic but unpractical; and next year Austria returned once more, dealt as before piecemeal with the revolted provinces, and finally crushed the hopes of Italy again at the battle of Novara. Yet all was not lost. The republican dreams of Mazzini were, it is true, at an end. But Piedmont ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... cliffs of the lower Alma without difficulty. Menshikov relied apparently on being able to detach his reserves to cope with them, but the assailants moved with a rapidity which he had not counted upon, and the Russians only came into action piecemeal in this quarter. Opposite the British, who as usual deployed at a distance and then advanced in long continuous lines, the Russians were posted on the crest of a long glacis-like slope, which offered but little dead ground to an assailant. The village ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... tribe survives for a time, ever struggling to possess Rome, advancing to its gates, ruining its Campagna, torturing its captured inhabitants, but never gaining possession of those battered walls, which Totila in part threw down and Belisarius in piecemeal restored. And Gregory, too, is chosen to stop the Anglo-Saxon revel of cruelty and destruction, which has turned Britain from a civilised land into a wilderness, and from a province of the Catholic Church to paganism, from the very time of St. Leo. Two ...
— The Formation of Christendom, Volume VI - The Holy See and the Wandering of the Nations, from St. Leo I to St. Gregory I • Thomas W. (Thomas William) Allies
... its end with truly Indian ceremonial. But it did not come to a close until Kars had elicited from the old rascal a complete story of the murder of Allan Mowbray. To him this was of far more importance than all the rest of the old sinner's talk. The story was extracted piecemeal, and was given in rambling, evasive fashion. But it was given completely in the end, and with a veracity which Kars had no reason ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... the wreck as if to tear the thing apart with his bare hands and carry it piecemeal to the ...
— The Boy Scouts of the Air on Lost Island • Gordon Stuart
... indistinct, like a poor "impression"—as unnoticeable as one of his own early finds, yet, like them, with a quality, if one had an eye for it. He told me he still lived in Rome, and had contrived, by fierce self-denial, to get a few decent bits together—"piecemeal, little by little, with fasting and prayer; and I mean the fasting literally!" ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... roads in a few years and spreads the cost over the period during which the public is being benefited. Better prices are obtained on contracts for a large mileage than for smaller jobs, and the community can receive the benefit more quickly than where construction proceeds piecemeal with current funds. The vital consideration is to insure that the term of the bonds is well within the useful life of the road, and that ample provision is made to maintain the roads during that period. Under proper restrictions the bond method of financing is ...
— American Rural Highways • T. R. Agg
... because, when the Royal Personage who gave it to me was married, I signed certain papers in connection with this necklace and I can't sell it, either as a whole or piecemeal. I ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... circumstance of barbarity attending the execution. Mr. Newman in language of appalling force, written a year after his conversion, has described the Anglican service as "a ritual dashed upon the ground, trodden on, and broken piecemeal; prayers clipped, pieced, torn, shuffled about at pleasure, until the meaning of the composition perished, and offices which had been poetry were no longer even good prose; antiphons, hymns, benedictions, invocations, shovelled away; Scripture ...
— Cardinal Newman as a Musician • Edward Bellasis
... too, never to be old Rome again. The last breath has been breathed, the aged eyes are closed for ever, corruption has done its work, and the grand skeleton lies bleaching upon seven hills, half covered with the piecemeal stucco of a modern architectural body. The result is satisfactory to those who have brought it about, if not to the rest of the world. The sepulchre of old Rome is the ...
— Don Orsino • F. Marion Crawford
... till your bones fall piecemeal from that chain," he said, "stay, through storm and shine, through light and darkness, while Roman and Jew alike make merry of your sufferings, which, if my voice had been listened to, would have been shorter, but more cruel. Daughter of Satan, go ...
— Pearl-Maiden • H. Rider Haggard
... truth—that the vulgarized are not un-civilized, and that there is no growth for them—it does not look like a future at all. More ballad-concerts, more quaint English, more robustious barytone songs, more piecemeal pictures, more colonial poetry, more young nations with withered traditions. Yet it is before this prospect that the provincial overseas lifts up his voice in a boast or a promise common enough among the incapable young, but pardonable ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... all the coined currency of the world. A little further onward was the spot where Lot's wife had stood forever under the semblance of a pillar of salt. Curious travellers have long since carried it away piecemeal. Had all regrets been punished as rigorously as this poor dame's were, my yearning for the relinquished delights of Vanity Fair might have produced a similar change in my own corporeal substance, and left me a warning ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... due and permanent use, must be earned. "Easy come easy go," is a saying as applicable to knowledge as to wealth. While rules, lying isolated in the mind—not joined to its other contents as out-growths from them—are continually forgotten; the principles which those rules express piecemeal, become, when once reached by the understanding, enduring possessions. While the rule-taught youth is at sea when beyond his rules, the youth instructed in principles solves a new case as readily as an old one. Between ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... new counsellors for new plans of defence. It was now gravely proposed, to build a fleet three times as powerful as that of the British, and station it near Singapore and Anjeer, to intercept the British vessels ere they reached China, and annihilate their fleet piecemeal. The forests were to be felled to supply materials: the only thing wanting was some English men-of-war, to serve as models. Again, Hou-chunn, the Marshal Ney of China, was ready to face the whole British fleet if he had but a steamer ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 433 - Volume 17, New Series, April 17, 1852 • Various
... changed color. Still those eyes regarded him—still Hiram continued to hesitate, and stammer, till some sort of response came out, by piecemeal, incoherently. ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... from my fingers the live Fly which I gave him. After killing his victim with the fangs of his mandibles, he was not satisfied, like most Spiders, to suck her head: he chewed her whole body, shoving it piecemeal into his mouth with his palpi, after which he threw up the masticated teguments and swept them ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre
... possible from the defects of the first one. These defects, which were the natural results of the somewhat hasty development of an experimental system, were of several kinds. In the first place, so large a growth had not been contemplated, and the extensions were made more or less piecemeal, instead of being on a regular plan; the location of the central station itself was very unfavorable, both as regards the facilities for obtaining coal and other supplies; the cost of water was excessive, and the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 803, May 23, 1891 • Various
... mankind. And Pirates barter all that's left behind. [22] No more the hirelings, purchased near and far, Crowd to the ranks of mercenary war. The idle merchant on the useless quay Droops o'er the bales no bark may bear away; Or, back returning, sees rejected stores Rot piecemeal on his own encumbered shores: 270 The starved mechanic breaks his rusting loom, And desperate mans him 'gainst the coming doom. Then in the Senates of your sinking state Show me the man whose counsels may have weight. ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... moreover, afflicted with a pending lawsuit; the sums he obtained for his plays from the manager were therefore very disproportionate and uncertain. His letters to Henslowe are urgent in solicitations for payment on account of work in hand; he was often obliged to send his manuscripts piecemeal to the manager, and on one occasion supplied a rough draft of the last scene of a play in order to obtain a few shillings in advance. The amounts paid for new plays at this time were very low. ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... yourselves; but until then I will say nothing about it, not from any wish to disappoint your curiosity, or to make myself important, but simply because the whole story partakes so much of the marvellous, that I am afraid to tell it in a piecemeal, hasty fashion, for fear I should be set down as one of those common fellows of whom there are so many in my profession, who are not ashamed to narrate things they have not seen, and even to tell wonderful stories about wild ...
— Hunter Quatermain's Story • H. Rider Haggard
... There is much in the writings of Marx and Engels that cannot be fitted into the rigid orthodoxy which grew up among their disciples. Bernstein's main criticisms of these disciples, apart from such as we have already mentioned, consist in a defense of piecemeal action as against revolution. He protests against the attitude of undue hostility to Liberalism which is common among Socialists, and he blunts the edge of the Internationalism which undoubtedly is part of the teachings of Marx. The workers, ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell
... now, since your majesty hath returned from hell, I lay the matter for your decision." "Stay, we've not done with you yet," cried Pope Julius, and madly they engage once more, tooth and nail, until the strokes clashed like earthquakes; the three armies of the damned tore each other piecemeal, and like snakes became whole again, and spread far and wide over the jagged, burning crags, until Lucifer bade his veterans, the giants of Hell, separate them, which indeed was no ...
— The Visions of the Sleeping Bard • Ellis Wynne
... Tolstoy, I have something to say about "Resurrection," which I have read not piecemeal, in parts, but as a whole, at one go. It is a remarkable artistic production. The least interesting part is all that is said of Nehludov's relations with Katusha; and the most interesting the princes, the generals, the ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... reckless beings compose a scattered population, residing too far for the law to reach; or where if it could reach, the power of the government would prove much too weak to enforce obedience to it. To do justice to all parties, America should be examined and portrayed piecemeal, every state separately, for every state is different, running down the scale from refinement to a state of barbarism almost unprecedented; but each presenting matter for investigation and research, and curious examples of ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... successive minor pulses shall be ascertainable. These minor pulses we can indeed go on to ascertain or to compute indefinitely if we have patience; but it would contradict the definition of an infinite number to suppose the endless series of them to have actually counted themselves out piecemeal. Zeno made this manifest; so the infinity which our intellect requires of the sense-datum is thus a future and potential rather than a past and actual infinity of structure. The datum after it has made itself must be decomposable ad ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... their under sides to sink into it, and that then gradually hardening, it kept the bones in their places; while the uncovered upper sides, exposed to the disintegrating influences, either mouldered away piecemeal, or were removed by accident. The bones of the larger animals of the basin are usually found detached; and ere they could be reconstructed into perfect skeletons, they taxed the extraordinary powers of the greatest of comparative anatomists. Rather more than twenty different ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... logical sequence his supreme negative act, he is a man-eater. "He seized two of my companions and hurled them against the ground as if they were dogs, then he devoured them piecemeal, swallowing all—entrails and flesh and marrowy bones." Surely Ulysses is getting some experience on the line ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... the day of the ball, if he mounted guard faithfully and let no one enter. Birotteau, like the Emperor Napoleon at Compiegne, when the chateau was re-decorated for his marriage with Maria Louisa of Austria, was determined to see nothing piecemeal; he wished to enjoy the surprise of seeing it as a whole. Thus the two antagonists met once more, all unknown to themselves, not on the field of battle, but on the peaceful ground of bourgeois vanity. It was arranged that Monsieur Grindot was to take Cesar by the hand and show him the appartement ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... about or paced the floor or dropped in chairs and fought as they flung off their clothes piecemeal. She had combed and brushed her hair viciously as she raged, weeping the unbeautiful tears of wrath. But he had not had that comfort of tears; his tears ran down the inside of his soul and burned. She goaded him out of his ordinary self-control—knew ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... chains lay, perhaps all mingled together where they had fallen? It would need a longer time to find it than he had at first supposed. Yet would he falter? No! Rather than give up he would pass years here, till he had dismembered the whole ship and strewn every particle of her piecemeal over the bottom of the sea. Yet he had hoped to solve the whole mystery at the first visit; and now, since he saw no sign of any thing like treasure, he was for a while at a ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille
... Lady Harman and her husband which was to be her Great Charter, the constitutional basis of her freedoms throughout the rest of her married life, had many practical defects. The chief of these was that it was largely undocumented; it had been made piecemeal, in various ways, at different times and for the most part indirectly through diverse intermediaries. Charterson had introduced large vaguenesses by simply displaying more of his teeth at crucial moments, Mrs. Harman had conveyed things ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... with his pack-horse and the first load. All afternoon they went up and down over the hot bare face of the hill, until the baggage, heavy and light, was transported and dropped piecemeal on the shore. The torn-out insides of their home littered the stones with familiar shapes and colors, and Nancy played among them, visiting each parcel and ...
— The Jimmyjohn Boss and Other Stories • Owen Wister
... opposition in the west, for the Franks were then busy fighting each other, but luckily Muza fell into disgrace with the Caliph at this time and his great project was undertaken by less able hands and on a piecemeal plan. ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott
... of the twin hills. He hung over the town of Patusan like a hawk over a poultry-yard, but he devastated the open country. Whole villages, deserted, rotted on their blackened posts over the banks of clear streams, dropping piecemeal into the water the grass of their walls, the leaves of their roofs, with a curious effect of natural decay as if they had been a form of vegetation stricken by a blight at its very root. The two parties in Patusan were not sure which one this partisan most desired to plunder. The Rajah intrigued ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... bare. All the interesting and vital qualities which matter had once been endowed with have been attributed instead to an irresponsible sensibility in man. And as habits of ideation change slowly and yield only piecemeal to criticism or to fresh intuitions, such a revolution has not been carried out consistently, but instead of a thorough renaming of things and a new organisation of thought it has produced chiefly distress and confusion. Some phases of this confusion may perhaps repay a moment's attention; they ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... think, Captain,' said Rob, looking round the room, 'that when Mr Gills was going in and out so often, these last few days, he was taking little things away, piecemeal, not ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... reason attacks on separate points of a position must be properly synchronised to be effective. The unbeaten enemy will otherwise possess a mobile reserve with which to reinforce threatened points. The attacks must be so timed that he throws them in piecemeal or fails to reach the point ...
— Lectures on Land Warfare; A tactical Manual for the Use of Infantry Officers • Anonymous
... famed for Hawawit. At first I thought of having it cut to portable size; but second thoughts determined me to leave it for another visit or for some more fortunate visitor. Lastly, we were informed, a few weeks afterwards, that the Ma'azah Shaykhs had carried it off to their tents—I fear piecemeal. ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... of small brown ants. It was really very interesting to watch the little creatures. They would saw off a leg, or a part of one, then several of them would drag it away to their hiding-place; and, piecemeal, they would, if given time, carry off the cockroach, leaving not a particle. Now there is a lesson ...
— Scenes in the Hawaiian Islands and California • Mary Evarts Anderson
... tempt him, sacrificing everything in the desperate straits to which she was reduced. Though he had loved her well, and sinfully, but truly, for so many years, his love had sometimes seemed an unbearable thraldom, to escape from which he would have given his heart piecemeal, though he should lose all the happiness life held for him, for the sake of a momentary freedom. Possibly, too, she knew that he never longed for that freedom so much as when she had just been most violent and despotic. She was prepared for the feeble dissent with ...
— Taquisara • F. Marion Crawford
... would sit for a long time there, eating fruit and bread and chocolate, on the grass, over which came to our ears, horizontal, faint, but solid still and metallic, the sound of the bells of Saint-Hilaire, which had melted not at all in the atmosphere it was so well accustomed to traverse, but, broken piecemeal by the successive palpitation of all their sonorous strokes, throbbed as it brushed ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... peace for a time, and watch the progress of events. If we hear that the people of these parts are aroused from their lethargy, we will come back and fight for our home and lands; if not, I will no longer stay in East Anglia, which I see is destined to fall piecemeal into the hands of the Danes; but we will journey down to Somerset, and I will pray King Ethelbert to assign me lands there, and to take me as ...
— The Dragon and the Raven - or, The Days of King Alfred • G. A. Henty
... in, the box was not big enough to hold it. They had before wrapped it up in a blanket, out of which they took it; Mrs. Hayes proposed to cut off the arms and legs, and they again attempted to put it in, but the box would not hold it. Then they cut off the thighs, and laying it piecemeal in the ...
— 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
... exactly such as would please the known taste of the Roman tribune, being composed of heterogeneous scraps of ancient marble, patched up with barbarous brick pilasters of his own age; affording an apt exemplification of his own character, in which piecemeal fragments of Roman virtue, and attachment to feudal state—abstract love of liberty, and practice of tyranny—formed ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 335 - Vol. 12, No. 335, October 11, 1828 • Various
... all you can to be going on with. Preach revolutionary thoughts? Yes, but rely on the ameliorative method.... The minds of men are of slow development, and we must be content, we fear, to accomplish our revolution piecemeal, bit by bit, till a point is come to when, by accumulative process, a series of small changes amounts to the Great Change. The most important revolutions are those that happen quietly without anything particularly noticeable seeming ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... janitor's lodge, tramping up and down the paved courtyard with feverish impatience, for more than three hours, watching for every officer who came up and interviewing him, and thus it was that he had become acquainted, piecemeal, with the rapid series of events; how General de Wimpffen had tendered his resignation and then withdrawn it upon the peremptory refusal of Generals Ducrot and Douay to append their names to the articles of capitulation, how the Emperor had thereupon invested ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... but to contemplate upon; where it might see the world without travel, it being a lesser scheme of the creation, nature contracted a little cosmography or map of the universe. Neither was the body then subject to distempers, to die by piecemeal, and languish under coughs, catarrhs, or consumptions. Adam knew no disease so long as temperance from the forbidden fruit secured him. Nature was his physician, and innocence and abstinence would have kept ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Vol. 2 (of 10) • Grenville Kleiser
... of Marianne is interesting, though never of so absorbing an interest as to hold the reader's attention more closely than was held that of the writer himself. It is a book to be read by piecemeal, and it may be laid down at any time. Indeed, one is not surprised, nor much distressed, when the author fails to grasp again his fallen pen after the eleventh part. I would not in any way detract from the literary value of a work which, as even critical La Harpe declares, "assures him ...
— A Selection from the Comedies of Marivaux • Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux
... be given to certain lords under the nomination of the pope. In a subsequent examination before the commons, Bedloe added, (for these men always brought out their intelligence successively and by piecemeal,) that Lord Carrington was also in the conspiracy for raising men and money against the government; as was likewise Loro Brudenel. These noblemen, with all the other persons mentioned by Bedloe, were immediately committed to custody by ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part F. - From Charles II. to James II. • David Hume
... learned of the science of the invisible realm was perforce picked piecemeal by us from all that we saw, experienced, and what several different times Tako was willing to explain to us. And it was later studied by the scientists of our world, whose additional theories I can incorporate ...
— The White Invaders • Raymond King Cummings
... capture of Tully's house, Mr. Tener writes to me, "I found it being gutted by his family, who would have carried it away piecemeal. They had already taken away the flooring of one of the rooms." Thereupon Mr. Tener had the house pulled down, with the result of seeing a statement made in a leading Nationalist paper that he was "evicting the tenants and ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (2 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert
... the Great Khan, and that it was his men who had used the arrows and made war upon the natives. It was no good for the natives to show him some of their mutilated bodies, and to tell him that the cannibals ate them piecemeal; he had no use for such information. His mind was like a sieve of which the size of the meshes could be adjusted at will; everything that was not germane to the idea of the moment fell through it, and only confirmative evidence remained; and at the moment he was not believing any stories ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... back—quantity was there, but the quality! Mournfully he gazed on two suits, complete in the three separate members of which man's raiments are composed: the one suit extended at length upon his bed, like a veteran stretched by pious hands after death; the other brought piecemeal to the invidious light—the torso placed upon a chair, the limbs dangling down from Jackeymo's melancholy arm. No bodies long exposed at the Morgue could evince less sign of resuscitation than those respectable defuncts. ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... two, and would still have a balance left after the South had spent all. The expenditure in this proportion would be disagreeable; but if this was the inevitable and only price, Grant was willing to pay it, justly regarding it as cheaper than a continuation of the process of purchase by piecemeal. In a few hours the frightful struggle in the Wilderness was in progress. All day on the 5th, all day on the 6th, the terrible slaughter continued in those darksome woods and swamps. "More desperate fighting has not been witnessed on this continent," said Grant. The Union troops could not force ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. II • John T. Morse
... sashes, and sat down at my table to eat a piece of sweet cake for my breakfast, above twenty wasps, allured by the smell, came flying into the room, humming louder than the drones of as many bagpipes. Some of them seized my cake, and carried it piecemeal away; others flew about my head and face, confounding me with the noise, and putting me in the utmost terror of their stings. However, I had the courage to rise and draw my hanger, and attack them in the ...
— Gulliver's Travels - into several remote nations of the world • Jonathan Swift
... his wide threefold throat barks as a dog Over the multitude immers'd beneath. His eyes glare crimson, black his unctuous beard, His belly large, and claw'd the hands, with which He tears the spirits, flays them, and their limbs Piecemeal disparts. Howling there spread, as curs, Under the rainy deluge, with one side The other screening, oft they roll them round, A wretched, godless crew. When that great worm Descried us, savage Cerberus, he op'd His jaws, and the ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... by the Irish when the railroad was built. This I hauled up partly on the shore. After soaking two years and then lying high six months it was perfectly sound, though waterlogged past drying. I amused myself one winter day with sliding this piecemeal across the pond, nearly half a mile, skating behind with one end of a log fifteen feet long on my shoulder, and the other on the ice; or I tied several logs together with a birch withe, and then, with a longer birch or alder which had a book at the end, dragged them across. Though completely ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... lost one arm by the premature discharge of a Fourth of July cannon, and within three months he got the other pulled out by a carding-machine. Aurelia's heart was almost crushed by these latter calamities. She could not but be deeply grieved to see her lover passing from her by piecemeal, feeling, as she did, that he could not last forever under this disastrous process of reduction, yet knowing of no way to stop its dreadful career, and in her tearful despair she almost regretted, like brokers who hold on and lose, that she had not taken him at first, before he had suffered ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... of the knower. An example will make this clear: the roundness of a body is recognised in one way by sight, in another by touch. Sight looks upon it from a distance as a whole by a simultaneous reflection of rays; touch grasps the roundness piecemeal, by contact and attachment to the surface, and by actual movement round the periphery itself. Man himself, likewise, is viewed in one way by Sense, in another by Imagination, in another way, again, by Thought, in another by pure Intelligence. ...
— The Consolation of Philosophy • Boethius
... rushes, when suddenly he stopped as if rooted to the ground, with hands thrown up and eyes bulging from his head. At his feet lay the corpses of his morning comrades,—scalped, stripped, hacked almost piecemeal! Then the instinct of the hunted thing, of flight, of self-protection, eclipsed momentary terror, and the boy was ducking into the rushes to hide when, with a crash of musketry from the woods, ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... the staircase, and hurried on to the drawing-room, with the massive front door being broken piecemeal by the heavy sledge-hammer; but each chain and bolt still held, and there was no way in yet but for light and noise, so that, before they gave way, Frank had time to get a light and ignite the candles in two sets of branches in the drawing-room which ...
— In Honour's Cause - A Tale of the Days of George the First • George Manville Fenn
... here the mighty queen of good and ill, Fortune; first marry, then enjoy thy fill Of lawful pleasures; but depart ere morn; Slip from her bed, or else thou shalt be torn Piecemeal by fiends; thy blood caroused in bowls, And thy four quarters blown to ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. II • Edited by Walter Scott
... backs and up sledge I used an ice-axe to cut steps over the cornice and thus managed to get on top, then cut steps and surmounted the edge of the cornice. Helped Bowers up with the rope; others followed—then the gear was hauled up piecemeal. For Crean, the last man up, we lowered the sledge over the cornice and used a bowline in the other end of the rope on top of it. He came up grinning with delight, and we all thought the ascent rather ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... presented itself; new topics were in fact at a premium. Lydia sometimes had premonitions of a famine-stricken period when there would he nothing left to talk about, and she had already caught herself doling out piecemeal what, in the first prodigality of their confidences, she would have flung to him in a breath. Their silence therefore might simply mean that they had nothing to say; but it was another disadvantage of their position that it allowed ...
— The Greater Inclination • Edith Wharton
... "It's them fellows down at the Landing trying to get a rise out of me. Or if it ain't that, it's some guy comin' in next spring, and sendin' in his outfit piecemeal ahead of him. And me powerless to protect myself! Ain't that an outrage! But when I meet him on the trail I'll put ...
— The Woman from Outside - [on Swan River] • Hulbert Footner
... full life history in great detail, thus obtaining a complete autobiography leading far down into the depths of the dreamer's mental life and into the inner world of his own. With the material so obtained one could truly reconstruct the complete life history, piecemeal, until the wonderful and inspiring structure of the mental world of the dreamer would be reared, reaching far back to early childhood and perhaps even to infancy, extending so far forward as to give us a prophecy, based on the dreamer's dynamic trends and ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... as the child, and at length she came to know them so well that she accepted their invitation to pass the last month of her residence abroad under their roof. All this intelligence she wrote home, piecemeal as it came about, from time to time; and at last enclosed a polite note, from the head of the chateau, soliciting, on the occasion of his approaching mission to that neighbourhood, the honour of the company of cet ...
— The Seven Poor Travellers • Charles Dickens
... his manner of consuming it? Does he really eat, that is to say, does he divide his food piecemeal, does he carve it into minute particles, which are afterwards ground by a chewing-apparatus? I think not. I never see a trace of solid nourishment on my captives' mouths. The Glow-worm does not eat in the strict sense of the word: he drinks his fill; he feeds ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... more feared than other rules, He holds his people bound, like tamed bulls. Asia is banded with his paths of war; He is more of a scourge than Attila. He triumphs glorious—but, day by day, The earth falls at his feet, piecemeal away; And the bricks for his tomb's wall, one by one, Are being shaped—are ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... of which Lincoln Cathedral was the first example on a large scale. In 1220 it was followed by Beverley Minster (see p. 189). The nave of Salisbury Cathedral was begun in 1240 (see p. 206), and a new Westminster Abbey grew piecemeal under Henry's own supervision during the greater part of the reign (see p. 205). Mental activity accompanied material activity. At Oxford there were reckoned 15,000 scholars. Most remarkable was the new departure taken by Walter de Merton, Henry's Chancellor. Hitherto each scholar ...
— A Student's History of England, v. 1 (of 3) - From the earliest times to the Death of King Edward VII • Samuel Rawson Gardiner
... coolies with their loads still on the right bank of the river, leisurely proceeding to strip before wading across; the loads had to be carried on their heads, the water being well above their waists. Those loads that could be divided were carried over piecemeal, the coolie returning for the second part after taking the first across. This idea was all very fine in theory, but we found that most of the coolies, having made the first trip, sat down on the bank and proceeded to dress, leaving the remainder of ...
— With Kelly to Chitral • William George Laurence Beynon
... of philanthropy' [the attempt to abolish the slave-trade] which has just sprung up, and which has slept for twenty years together, were allowed to sleep one summer longer, it would appear to me rather more wise than thus to take up a subject piecemeal, which it has been publicly declared ought not to be agitated at all till next session of Parliament. Perhaps, by such imprudence, the slaves themselves may be prompted by their own authority, to proceed at once to a 'total and immediate abolition of the trade.' One witness has ...
— The Trial of Theodore Parker • Theodore Parker
... than romantic. But there would be cowardice in this as mean as that other cowardice. He believed himself to be bound by his duty to his family. Were he now to renew his promise of marriage, such renewal would be caused by fear and not by duty, and would be mean. They should tear him piecemeal rather than get from him such a promise. Then he thought of the Captain, and perceived that he must make all possible use of the Captain's character. Would anybody conceive that he, the heir of the Scroope family, was bound to marry ...
— An Eye for an Eye • Anthony Trollope
... town-cycles from which they come will be seen at a glance on reference to the tables of pageants that appear in the Appendix. We may take it that all these town and country plays represent continually used and frequently tinkered texts, that must in some cases have passed through many piecemeal changes. In making them easy to the average reader of to-day, who takes the place of the mediaeval playgoer at a Corpus Christi festival, their latest copyists have but followed in the wake of a series of Tudor scribes who renewed the prompt-books from time to ...
— Everyman and Other Old Religious Plays, with an Introduction • Anonymous
... and of those easy fortunes which Clio prefers her sons to be of; but he paid for these advantages by the suffering in which he wrought at what is, I suppose, our greatest history. He wrought at it piecemeal, and sometimes only by moments, when the terrible head aches which tormented him, and the disorder of the heart which threatened his life, allowed him a brief respite for the task which was dear to him. He must have been more than a quarter of a ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... From Manning I elicited piecemeal some few and vague ideas. This meagreness was not due to a disinclination on Manning's part, but only to the fact that he never quite grasped my interest in mere surroundings. Yes, said he, it was a pretty flat country, and some brush. Yes, there ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... ships, and revictual; for I have tobacco enough to pay for it.' But he was powerless, as he confesses, to govern his crew, and no one knows how the heartbroken old man spent the next two dreadful months. His ships slunk back piecemeal to English havens, and on May 23, Captain North, who had commanded the 'Chudleigh,' had audience of the King, and told him the whole miserable story. On May 26,[12] Raleigh made his appearance, with the 'Destiny,' in the harbour of Kinsale, and on June ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... Vitensis, de Persecut. Vandal. l. i. c. 8, p. 11, 12, edit. Ruinart. Deogratius governed the church of Carthage only three years. If he had not been privately buried, his corpse would have been torn piecemeal by the mad devotion of ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... ingot in his hands. What did a dead Chinaman signify? "We shall have to take this stuff to the mainland piecemeal, and bury it there for a while. How shall we get it to ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... observes: "People had told us that this hill was most dangerous, and that we would scarcely be able to cross it, for Morgan Bryan, the first to travel this way, had to take the wheels off his wagon and carry it piecemeal to the top, and had been three months on the journey from the Shanidore [Shenandoah] to the ...
— The Conquest of the Old Southwest • Archibald Henderson
... the skeleton firm and solid. Then comes the new roof of whatever type of shingles selected. Along with it starts the work of enclosing the side walls. These steps, of course, apply to a structure taken apart piecemeal. With a "flaked" house, roofs and walls are returned to position as panels. Making saw-cut cracks tight is the ...
— If You're Going to Live in the Country • Thomas H. Ormsbee and Richmond Huntley
... drew on—came—passed, and the villagers assembled on the heights (their eyes fixed the while on the devoted vessel like vultures watching for their prey) had at length the satisfaction of seeing the laboring bark yield to the war of the elements, and her timbers float, piecemeal, over the waters. ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... James, in his royally flowing apron, and Chawner, the journeyman compositor, who, with the two apprentices outside, completed the staff! Aided by no mechanic more skilled than a day-labourer, those men had got the machine piecemeal into the office, and had duly erected it. At that day a foreman had to be ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... immediately under her forefoot; and, in a moment, there she stuck hard and fast, bumping and scraping her bottom, with a harsh, grating sound and a quivering and rending of her timbers, as if every plank below the water-line was being torn out of her piecemeal. ...
— The Wreck of the Nancy Bell - Cast Away on Kerguelen Land • J. C. Hutcheson
... pictures, jewels, and curiosities, were sold and dispersed by the regicide powers; from this fate, happily, the royal collection of manuscripts and books was preserved; neither was it, like the archiepiscopal library at Lambeth, doled out piecemeal to Hugh Peters and his brother fanatics. This good service was mainly owing to Bolstrode Whitelocke. When the British Museum was founded, King George II. presented to it the whole of the royal library; and Ferrar's Concordance, with another similarly illustrated compilation by him, is ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 62, January 4, 1851 • Various
... each woman received as her dowry a portion of territory, and enlarged by that amount her husband's little state; but the property she brought might, in a few years, be taken by her daughters as portions and enrich other houses. The fief seldom could bear up against such dismemberment; it fell away piecemeal, and by the third or fourth generation had disappeared. Sometimes, however, it gained more than it lost in this matrimonial game, and extended its borders till they encroached on neighbouring nomes or else completely absorbed ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 2 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... endeavoured to condense into a connected story the facts learnt piecemeal from Sir John in conversation. To a certain extent they supplied, if not an explanation, at least an account of the change that had come over my friend. But only to a certain extent; there the explanation broke down and I was left baffled. I could imagine that a life of unwholesome ...
— The Lost Stradivarius • John Meade Falkner
... before Calton had been on the point of going to her and trying to get the secret out of her—that is, if she knew it; but now fate appeared to be playing into his hands, and a voluntary confession was much more likely to be true than one dragged piecemeal from unwilling lips. ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... of success, and immediately disappearing ignominiously; making frantic grasps and clutches with a hundred long arms and eager outstretched hands, and finally succeeding, by shoulders and fists, in bringing the wreath away piecemeal; and then they give themselves up to mutual embraces, groans, laments, and all the enginery of pathetic affection in the last gasping throes of separation,—to the doleful tearing of hair and the rending of their fantastic garments. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... opening, and from which aperture there issued from time to time a very fine worm, like the finest silk-thread, and sometimes not much thicker than a spider's web, in small detached lengths. This worm is often of the enormous length of twenty yards, gradually oozing out piecemeal. It is a common disease of Soudan where the merchants catch the infection, and bring it over The Desert. It is said to be acquired principally by drinking the waters of ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... column. Half a mile of it had disappeared—where or how I never learned. To this day I do not know what became of that half-mile of humanity—whether it was blotted out by some frightful bolt of war, whether it was scattered and destroyed piecemeal, or whether it escaped. But there we were, at the head of the column instead of in its middle, and we were being swept out of life by ...
— The Iron Heel • Jack London
... thought he might make the point of concentration for Hardee's troops, coming from Charleston to Cheraw by railroad, and those with Beauregard, which were in the main the divisions of Hood's army, coming forward piecemeal, and now amounting to something over 9000 men. He suggested that Bragg should join him at Fayetteville also. [Footnote: Id., p. 1271. At the end of February, the portions of S. D. Lee's corps which had joined Beauregard had 2502 present ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... its sides were under water, although it had a high freeboard. Consequently, it shipped so much water that the waves washed over the decks with great noise and uproar, and entered the berths where the better-class passengers are generally quartered. The rigging had to be repaired piecemeal. Consequently, for those reasons, and as the vessel lacked other necessities, some tried to make them put back to Manila. However, this was without effect, and they proceeded on their way with some storms; and in the last, which was frightful, the people had no safety, even inside the boat, ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XVII, 1609-1616 • Various
... 9th the disorder grew worse; and the King beheld the whole surface of his body coming off piecemeal and corrupted. Deserted by his friends and by that crowd of courtiers which had so long cringed before him, his only consolation was the piety of his daughters.—SOULAVIE, "Historical and Political Memoirs," ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... Kreisler reluctantly acceded to the suggestion that he write out his personal memories of the war for publication. He has completed his narrative in the midst of grave difficulties, writing it piecemeal in hotels and railway trains in the course of a concert tour through the country. It is offered by the publishers to the public with confidence that it will be found one of the most absorbing and informing narratives of the ...
— Four Weeks in the Trenches - The War Story of a Violinist • Fritz Kreisler
... to give Madame Lacelooper, for whom he entertained the highest regard, so much trouble. Legations were peculiarly situated at times, he said. In reply to an intimation from the gentleman in waiting, he said, gentlemen of the diplomatic corps never paid in piecemeal. Here Thomas would put an end to the comedy by announcing the arrival of the 'Minister for Foreign Affairs,' and politely bowing out the retiring gentleman, who, you may well imagine, maintained a reluctant gravity. There ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton
... Space vagrantly onward; - I shall unfold: thou simply give all thyself to my teaching. Matter mingled and massed into indissoluble union Does not exist. For we see how wastes each separate substance; So flow piecemeal away, with the length'ning centuries, all things, Till from our eye by degrees that old self passes, and is not. Still Universal Nature abides unchanged as aforetime. Whereof this is the cause. When the atoms part from a substance, That suffers ...
— Verses and Translations • C. S. C.
... in sturdy democratic fashion, had to be endured. It died hard, but did come to an end, piecemeal. Tom Breeks then retired from the front, and became a unit once more. There were flourishes that indicated a termination of the proceedings, when another fellow was propelled in advance, and he, shuffling and ducking his head, to the cries of "Out wi' it, Jim!" and, "Where's your stomach?" came still ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... against a strong one, but a hopeless plan for an armament strong enough to have met its opponents on the open sea, ship to ship. At Svold, Erik Jarl had shown that such an array could be destroyed piecemeal if assailed on an exposed flank, and at Sluys the left, where the "Great Cristopher" lay to seaward, ...
— Famous Sea Fights - From Salamis to Tsu-Shima • John Richard Hale
... slopes down to the stream, some of it is sixteen feet deep. It has been suggested that it might have been dug out in order to obtain the coarse slate; but the difficulty of working a confined seam like this, in any other way than by picking it out piecemeal with immense labour, seems impossible. It can never have been meant to convey water to the mill, as the highest part begins in the solid rock, and the object must always have been to keep the water on the highest possible level, until it reached the top of the millwheel. Nothing ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 208, October 22, 1853 • Various
... anxious concern, as we should for a friend wandering, in a dark night, amidst torrents and precipices; or preparing to land on a strange island, while he knew not whether he should be received, on the shore, by cannibals waiting to tear him piecemeal, and devour him, or by gentle beings, disposed to cherish him with fond hospitality." Both writers have expressed themselves well, but meseems each has secured, as often happens, a fragment of the truth and holds it to be the whole Truth. Granted that such spiritual creatures as Jinns walk ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... knowledge,—all lead us up to the inspiration of the Almighty, which gives understanding to the world's great teachers. To fear science or knowledge, lest it disturb our old beliefs, is to fear the influx of the Divine wisdom into the souls of our fellow-men; for what is science but the piecemeal revelation,—uncovering,—of the plan of creation, by the agency of those chosen prophets of nature whom God has illuminated from the central light of ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... gave him the hand; the hand, the arm; the arm, the shoulder. He reconstructed her piecemeal with a rare faithfulness, till by the time he was on the moorland overlooking the smiling valley, where the railroad went shining away into the old world, there stood his lady beside him, complete, ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... his franchise marked "nothing doing." Afterward he put it in the hands of a very near friend, a great capitalist, who had no better luck with it. Finally, here and there, literally by piecemeal, he got together money enough to build and furnish the Hotel Chamberlin, had a notable opening with half of Congress there to see, and gently laid himself down and died, leaving little other than ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... and over every detail, it will invent unheard of things against itself, pretending that those things might happen, and will forgive nothing. Maybe it will begin to revenge itself, too, but, as it were, piecemeal, in trivial ways, from behind the stove, incognito, without believing either in its own right to vengeance, or in the success of its revenge, knowing that from all its efforts at revenge it will suffer a hundred times more than he on whom it revenges itself, while he, I daresay, ...
— Notes from the Underground • Feodor Dostoevsky
... wherein particles which once, by their operation on each other, produced a living and energetic whole, are reduced to a condition of perfect passiveness, in which they are seized upon and appropriated, one by one, piecemeal, by whatever has need of them, without any power of resistance or energy of their own. And thus there is a peculiar painfulness attached to any associations of inorganic with organic matter, such as appear to involve the ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... as is the cry of a lioness over her cubs, while Ino, for her part, set her heel on the body, and brake asunder the broad shoulder, shoulder-blade and all, and in the same strain wrought Autonoe. The other women tore the remnants piecemeal, and to Thebes they came, all bedabbled with blood, from the mountains bearing not ...
— Theocritus, Bion and Moschus rendered into English Prose • Andrew Lang
... like the element carbon! Doubtless, with his extraordinary sleight of hand, he had substituted real diamonds for the shapeless mass that came out of the apparatus, in the interval between handing the pebbles round for inspection, and distributing them piecemeal to the men of science and representatives of the diamond interest. We all watched him closely, of course, when he opened the crucibles; but when once we had satisfied ourselves that something came out, our doubts were set at rest, and we forgot to watch whether he distributed ...
— An African Millionaire - Episodes in the Life of the Illustrious Colonel Clay • Grant Allen
... end of the twenty-eighth century, or the year 2807 A.D., the moon had been completely hacked away and sent piecemeal into space, the job having required 86 years. I give, herewith, the result of John Jones's Dollar, both at the date when the moon was completely removed and also at the close of the 900th year ...
— John Jones's Dollar • Harry Stephen Keeler
... Chateau le Comte, within three or four leagues of Hesdin. The Emperor's soldiers were in garrison there, with a number of peasants from the country road. M. de Vendosme called on them to surrender; they made answer that he should never take them, unless it were piecemeal; let him do his worst, and they would do their best to defend themselves. They trusted in their moats, which were full of water; but in two hours, with plenty of faggots and casks, we made a way for our infantry to pass over, when they ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... Portent, casting a shadow now That swallowed sea and sky; and then, Anchors and nails and bolts Flew screaming out of her, and with clang on clang, A noise of fifty stithies, caught at the sides Of the Magnetic Mountain; and she lay, A broken bundle of firewood, strown piecemeal About the waters; and her crew Passed shrieking, one by one; and I was left To drown. All the long night I swam; But in the morning, O, the smiling coast Tufted with date-trees, meadowlike, Skirted with shelving sands! And a ...
— Poems by William Ernest Henley • William Ernest Henley
... have it, and very fiercely she dragged piecemeal from his reluctant lips the story of the surprised idyl. He had seen the princess with an arm round the Terror's neck, and they ...
— The Terrible Twins • Edgar Jepson
... upon this little transaction, however. In some piecemeal fashion, a sentence here, a phrase elsewhere, with scores or hundreds of pages intervening, History does, indeed, make yawning allusion to some such trivial circumstance; refraining from comment in the most well-bred manner ...
— Copper Streak Trail • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... distress. If he escaped, they would have hunted him with bloodhounds, and so brought him back; and if he sickened under his torture, they would have left him, naked and unsheltered, to languish with wasting disease and devouring vermin,—to die, or to rot and drop away piecemeal while yet alive. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... tongue relate; a single one of which was sufficient to make the hair stand erect, the blood to freeze, the flesh to melt, the bones to drop from their places—yea, the spirit to faint. What is empaling or sawing men alive, tearing off the flesh piecemeal with iron pincers, or broiling the flesh with candles, collop fashion, or squeezing heads flat in a vice, and all the most shocking devices which ever were upon earth, compared with one of these? Mere pastime! Here were a hundred thousand shoutings, hoarse sighs, and strong ...
— The Sleeping Bard - or, Visions of the World, Death, and Hell • Ellis Wynne
... to the foot of the malign gray slopes. And I, who stood intent to gaze, saw muddy people in that swamp, all naked and with look of hurt. They were smiting each other, not only with hands, but with head, and with chest, and with feet, mangling one another piecemeal with ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 1, Hell [The Inferno] • Dante Alighieri
... by piecemeal brought the pile; No barks embowel'd Portland Isle; Dig, cried experience, dig away, Bring the firm quarry into day, The excavation still shall save Those ramparts which its entrails gave. "Here kings shall ...
— The Banks of Wye • Robert Bloomfield
... supply of oil and alcohol, which Marvin and Borup were to bring to me, was, I felt, vital to our success; but even if they did not come in with it, I could not turn back here. While pacing the floe, I figured out how we should use our sledges piecemeal as fuel in our cookers, to make tea after the oil and alcohol were gone. By the time the wood of the sledges was exhausted, it would be warm enough so that we could suck ice or snow to assuage our thirst, and get along ...
— The North Pole - Its Discovery in 1909 under the auspices of the Peary Arctic Club • Robert E. Peary
... tribes-men and kinsfolk in Houndsditch and the Minories there was great joy at first, and afterward bitter, endless litigation. They screamed and battled over the heritage like vultures over a mighty carrion, tearing it at length piecemeal. He did not keep a pet dog, and so no living creature regretted him, unless it were the thin, delicate girl, with white cheeks and hollow eyes, who came once, and knelt to pray by his grave for hours, her tears ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... brought in new robbers from the sea. Yes, but not all. Much of the preciousness was hidden and the place of its hiding forgotten. Bit by bit the churls found the treasure-trove, but they did not tell their lords. They melted down jewels and sold them piecemeal to Jews for Jews' prices, and what they did not recognise as precious they wantonly destroyed. I have seen the marble heads of heathen gods broken with the hammer to make mortar of, and great cups of onyx and alabaster ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... Abbot Paul de Caen. The four enormous piers upon which it rests were weakened by the ignorance of early restorers, who cut into them freely, and dug graves in such manner as to imperil their foundations. The most arduous work of Sir Gilbert Scott was the strengthening of these piers, effected piecemeal by partial reconstruction of the piers themselves and by laying a durable substratum of cement right down to the chalk. The fine ring of eight bells was rehung. Visitors will find the ascent of the spiral staircase long and arduous, but will be rewarded ...
— Hertfordshire • Herbert W Tompkins
... week,—watch and watch. She was working herself loose, and leaked badly—not enough to drown us at once, but enough to kill us with the work at the pumps. And while we pumped the ship was going from us piecemeal: the bulwarks went, the stanchions were torn out, the ventilators smashed, the cabin-door burst in. There was not a dry spot in the ship. She was being gutted bit by bit. The long-boat changed, as if by magic, into matchwood where she stood in ...
— Youth • Joseph Conrad
... her to all manner of torture, failed in their efforts, and declared themselves beaten, not knowing what further punishment to inflict, and marvelling that she still lived, with her body pierced through and through, and torn piecemeal by so many tortures, of which a single one should have sufficed to kill her. But that blessed saint, like a valiant athlete, took fresh courage and strength from the confession of her faith; all ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... had fairly set in, it frequently happened that the straw which composed the bed, or the excuse for a bed, occupied by members of a family dying of fever or hunger, or both combined, was, piecemeal, drawn from under them and burned on the hearth to keep up a scanty fire. It was felt, we may presume, that the dying could not require it long, and those who had still some hopes of life were famishing as much from cold as from hunger. An eye-witness, describing such a family in Windmill-lane, ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... against the outbreak of the mob, which outbreak was not directed against Otway Bethel, but against Sir Francis Levison. Cowering like the guilty culprit that he was, shivered he, hiding his white face—wondering whether it would be a repetition of Justice Hare's green pond, or tearing him asunder piecemeal—and cursing the earth because it did not open and let ...
— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood
... gives understanding to the world's great teachers. To fear science or knowledge, lest it disturb our old beliefs, is to fear the influx of the Divine wisdom into the souls of our fellow-men; for what is science but the piecemeal revelation,—uncovering,—of the plan of creation, by the agency of those chosen prophets of nature whom God has illuminated from the central light of truth for ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... shade of his Patroclus, sad, bespake. Hail, oh Patroclus, even in Ades hail! For I will now accomplish to the full My promise pledged to thee, that I would give 25 Hector dragg'd hither to be torn by dogs Piecemeal, and would before thy funeral pile The necks dissever of twelve Trojan youths Of noblest rank, resentful of thy death. He said, and meditating foul disgrace 30 To noble Hector, stretch'd him prone in dust Beside the bier of Menoetiades. Then all ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... when there were riots in several states and Massachusetts was engaged in suppressing armed rebellion, when people in Europe were beginning to ask whether we were more likely to be seized upon by France or reconquered piecemeal by Great Britain, it came to be thought necessary to make some kind ...
— Civil Government in the United States Considered with - Some Reference to Its Origins • John Fiske
... down columns at random to pick out suggestive little scraps. At present we cannot get that "larger view" about which Dr. W.B. Carpenter used to talk; he was wont to study hundreds and thousands of soundings and measurements piecemeal, and the chaos of figures gradually took form until at length the doctor had in his mind a complete picture of enormous ocean depths. In somewhat the same way we can by slow degrees form a picture of a changed state of society, and we find that the faculties of body or mind which used to ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... parts of this novel to have had before him the Pharsamond of Marivaux, another copy of Cervantes. But it does not anywhere like Count Fathom, betray symptoms of being a mere translation. Sir Launcelot Greaves was first printed piecemeal in the British Magazine, or Monthly Repository, a miscellany to which Goldsmith was also a contributor. It has the recommendation of being much less gross and indelicate than any ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... "for your Bible is no other than an imperfect, mutilated Bible, corrupted by the men who made your religion. The Catholic church, from which the Protestants stole their piecemeal Bible, always regarded the book of Machabeus as the inspired ...
— The Cross and the Shamrock • Hugh Quigley
... no jealous maids renounce their sleep, Contriving malices to make her weep; No iron-faced dames her character debate And spurn imploring mercy from the gate; But down she lies to a more peaceful end, For wolves do not calumniate, but rend— Sinks piecemeal to their maws, a willing prey, While resignation lubricates the way, And all her prospects brighten at the last: To wolves, ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... conformably to the faculty of the knower. An example will make this clear: the roundness of a body is recognised in one way by sight, in another by touch. Sight looks upon it from a distance as a whole by a simultaneous reflection of rays; touch grasps the roundness piecemeal, by contact and attachment to the surface, and by actual movement round the periphery itself. Man himself, likewise, is viewed in one way by Sense, in another by Imagination, in another way, again, by Thought, in another by pure Intelligence. Sense judges figure clothed ...
— The Consolation of Philosophy • Boethius
... expectation, and which the advance of knowledge will confirm and explain. For in that pellucid atmosphere of the Greek mind, untroubled as yet by theoretic mists, there may have been visible the very things which our scientific instruments are enabling us to see and reconstruct piecemeal, great groupings of reality metamorphosed into Fata Morgana cities seemingly built ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... first, it was with the deepest sense of distaste and loathing that the dispossessed heir found himself compelled to associate with Guy Waring in such close companionship. But, bit by bit, as they two saw more and more of one another, this feeling of distaste began to wear off piecemeal. Granville Kelmscott was more than half ashamed to admit it even to himself, but in process of time he really almost caught himself beginning to like—well, to like the man he believed to be a murderer. It was shocking ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen
... Landgrave's mind; and its origin, she fancied, might be found in the refined knavery of their ruffian host at Waldenhausen, in making his market of the papers which he had purloined. Bringing them forward separately and by piecemeal, he had probably hoped to receive so many separate rewards. But, as it would often happen that one paper was necessary in the way of explanation to another, and the whole, perhaps, were almost essential to the proper understanding of any one, the result would inevitably be grievously ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... of his internal qualities, in gross and piecemeal, the diversity of means by which he is united and knit, and the accidents that threaten him. Now those that write lives, by reason they insist more upon counsels than events, more upon what sallies from within, than upon what happens without, ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... that he kept England from being devoured piecemeal by the Norman barons, who regarded her as a pack of hounds in full chase regard the hare that is on the point of falling ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... have no scruple to say that if the 'five days' fit of philanthropy' [the attempt to abolish the slave-trade] which has just sprung up, and which has slept for twenty years together, were allowed to sleep one summer longer, it would appear to me rather more wise than thus to take up a subject piecemeal, which it has been publicly declared ought not to be agitated at all till next session of Parliament. Perhaps, by such imprudence, the slaves themselves may be prompted by their own authority, to proceed at once to a ...
— The Trial of Theodore Parker • Theodore Parker
... proportions of a series of battle, properly to be entitled a campaign, he had, in his loneliness, fallen into the habit of reflecting at the close of his day's work; and the rubbing of that unused opaque mirror hanging inside a man of action had helped him piecemeal to perceive bits of his conduct, entirely approved by him, which were intimately connected, nevertheless, with a train of circumstances that he disliked and could not charge justly upon any other shoulders than his own. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... The earl your spouse Hath sent defiance to the king your husband, And, like a tried tall soldier, fled his holds In Marchland, where he knows, despite of him And all the men that he therein can raise, King John could have sent dogs enou' to tear Their ill-arm'd bodies piecemeal, ere his bands Should with base blood have stain'd their noble hands. And whither is this worshipful good earl (This first love, old love, new love, if you will) Gone, thinks your ladyship? forsooth, ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... ever and again dipping his unlovely lips into a steaming beaker of brandy-and-water, regarding himself as triumphant in the courts of Venus. But that false woman who sat at his side would have sold him piecemeal for money, as he would have sold ...
— The Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson - By One of the Firm • Anthony Trollope
... some minutes the contest raged almost in silence, friend and foe falling one upon another. But it is always the easier to destroy; and when a single note upon the tucket recalled the attacking party from this desperate service, much of the barricade had been removed piecemeal, and the whole fabric had sunk to half its height, and tottered ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 8 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... those which belong to the class called cabajoutis. This significant name is given by the populace of Paris to houses which are built, as it were, piecemeal. They are nearly always composed of buildings originally separate but afterwards united according to the fancy of the various proprietors who successively enlarge them; or else they are houses begun, left unfinished, again built ...
— Ferragus • Honore de Balzac
... fire slow-burns me, smiting to the bone. O thou whose glance is beauty and whose heart All marble: O dark-eyebrowed maiden mine! Cling to thy goatherd, let him kiss thy lips, For there is sweetness in an empty kiss. Thou wilt not? Piecemeal I will rend the crown, The ivy-crown which, dear, I guard for thee, Inwov'n with scented parsley and with flowers: Oh I am desperate—what betides me, what?— Still art thou deaf? I'll doff my coat of skins And leap into yon waves, where on the ...
— Theocritus • Theocritus
... languages Stifled, and never to be uttered more. I pause and turn my eyes, and looking back Where that tumultuous flood has been, I see The silent ocean of the Past, a waste Of waters weltering over graves, its shores Strewn with the wreck of fleets where mast and hull Drop away piecemeal; battlemented walls Frown idly, green with moss, and temples stand Unroofed, forsaken by the worshipper. There lie memorial stones, whence time has gnawed The graven legends, thrones of kings o'erturned, The broken altars of ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... The King keeps his forest head of game here, and when that horn sounds, a score of wolf-dogs are let loose that will tear thee piecemeal. Linger not till the third ...
— Becket and other plays • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... to it by instant example; and utility is appealed to for a verdict only amid the dense crowd of actual conflicting interests. Neither the one nor the other is far-sighted or imaginative. So it comes about that the political system, in England, at least, is built up piecemeal; it is founded on appetites and compromises, and mortared by immemorial habit. To explain this process, and to transfigure it in the pure light of imagination, was the work of the great poet-politician, ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... such thing as orderliness in their mythical conceptions, and no such thing as an universe. The natural question, "Who made the world, or how did the things in the world come to be?" is the question which is answered by cosmogonic myths. But it is answered piecemeal. To a Christian child the reply is given, "God made all things". We have known this reply discussed by some little girls of six (a Scotch minister's daughters, and naturally metaphysical), one of whom solved all difficulties by the impromptu myth, ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... mileage of roads in a few years and spreads the cost over the period during which the public is being benefited. Better prices are obtained on contracts for a large mileage than for smaller jobs, and the community can receive the benefit more quickly than where construction proceeds piecemeal with current funds. The vital consideration is to insure that the term of the bonds is well within the useful life of the road, and that ample provision is made to maintain the roads during that period. Under proper restrictions the bond method of ...
— American Rural Highways • T. R. Agg
... and pointed out a change in Jane. She moved among them abstractedly, with mute, half alienated eyes. She seemed to have suffered some spiritual disintegration that was pain. She gave herself to them no longer whole, but piecemeal. At times she seemed to hold out empty, supplicating hands, palms outward, showing that she could give no more. There was, she seemed to say, ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... of that cross," said the oyster-man. "It is Spanish. Many a year ago, no doubt, some high-pooped galleon, running close to the coast, went ashore on Chincoteague and drifted piecemeal through the inlet, wider then than now. This mummery, this altar toy, destined for some Papist mission-house, has lain all these years in the brackish Sound. Ha! ha! That Issachar the Jew should raise a cross, and on the Christian's Christmas eve! But it is mine! My tongs, my vessel, ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... we crossed, piecemeal, a deep lake in the canoes, and marching awhile came to a timber-covered rise which our French prisoners named as the Warriors' Island. And from the shelter of its trees we saw the steely lines of a score of low ponds, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... view, see the sentence as an organic whole made up of many parts performing various functions and standing in various relations. Without such map he must labor under the disadvantage of seeing all these things by piecemeal or in succession. ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... not remark upon this little transaction, however. In some piecemeal fashion, a sentence here, a phrase elsewhere, with scores or hundreds of pages intervening, History does, indeed, make yawning allusion to some such trivial circumstance; refraining from comment in the most well-bred ...
— Copper Streak Trail • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... leg this time, and they go through the whole story again. The man was no more astonished at the foot than he had been at the head; he snatched up the leg and threw it out at the door. Before they had finished, the other leg, both arms, the body, the whole murdered traveler, in fact, came down piecemeal. No omelette all this time! The old hemp-seller ...
— The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac
... indeed, is that it is in something of this piecemeal way that their object will ultimately be obtained; and I should not be without considerable hope of seeing Canning's measure carried, even in this year, if I felt quite sure that it would have fair ...
— Memoirs of the Court of George IV. 1820-1830 (Vol 1) - From the Original Family Documents • Duke of Buckingham and Chandos
... would be sacrificed to incompetency with every circumstance of barbarity attending the execution. Mr. Newman in language of appalling force, written a year after his conversion, has described the Anglican service as "a ritual dashed upon the ground, trodden on, and broken piecemeal; prayers clipped, pieced, torn, shuffled about at pleasure, until the meaning of the composition perished, and offices which had been poetry were no longer even good prose; antiphons, hymns, benedictions, invocations, shovelled away; Scripture ...
— Cardinal Newman as a Musician • Edward Bellasis
... men beneath its barren solid waves. The leprosy gnaws the flesh off a man's bones, and joints and limbs drop off—he is a living death. So with every soul that is under the dominion of these lying desires—it is slowly rotting away piecemeal, 'waxing corrupt according to the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... extraordinary sleight of hand, he had substituted real diamonds for the shapeless mass that came out of the apparatus, in the interval between handing the pebbles round for inspection, and distributing them piecemeal to the men of science and representatives of the diamond interest. We all watched him closely, of course, when he opened the crucibles; but when once we had satisfied ourselves that something came out, ...
— An African Millionaire - Episodes in the Life of the Illustrious Colonel Clay • Grant Allen
... food—occasioned disease to break out—fever, dysentery, and a horrible disorder which turned the skin as black and dry (says Joinville) as an old boot, and caused great swelling and inflammation of the gums, so that the barbers cut them away piecemeal. ...
— Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... the son, facing him sidewise so that no Ramsey might again surprise them: "I see it that way too. Father"—the father had stirred as if to leave him—"I want to tell you some things about our past. But I can't tell them piecemeal. I must find some ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... spirit that he was glad to hear all this, but in the meantime what was he to do to prevent his battalion being blown piecemeal out of ...
— Between the Lines • Boyd Cable
... we had escaped from his countrymen, he seemed to take things very coolly; and when Mr Vernon assured him that we meant him no injury, he replied, that if we took his life, his tribe would some day cut us up piecemeal, and throw the bits to the jackals. As we were pulling along, we heard a shout, which proved to come from Stallman, who had, of course, seen no wreck; but he had discovered a spot where the water was deep up to the shore, and where there appeared to be no inhabitants, so that he ...
— Salt Water - The Sea Life and Adventures of Neil D'Arcy the Midshipman • W. H. G. Kingston
... elephants; and the fact that the teeth found in the cave were of very young specimens seems to suggest that the hyaenas now and then found the carcase of a young elephant that had died, and dragged it piecemeal to their cave. The same would possibly apply to some of the other large animals, for hyaenas, unless in great extremes of hunger never attack a living animal. They have a loud and mournful howl, beginning low and ending high, and also ...
— The Evolution Of An English Town • Gordon Home
... instincts. The first five minutes that he spent in Emily's presence made him more conscious of womanhood than years of constant association with Beatrice. This love, riveting itself among the intricacies of his being, could not be torn out, and threatened to resist all piecemeal extraction. Wilfrid regained the command of his mind, and outwardly seemed recovered beyond all danger of relapse; but he did not deceive himself into believing that Emily was henceforth indifferent to ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... about the approaches of the janitor's lodge, tramping up and down the paved courtyard with feverish impatience, for more than three hours, watching for every officer who came up and interviewing him, and thus it was that he had become acquainted, piecemeal, with the rapid series of events; how General de Wimpffen had tendered his resignation and then withdrawn it upon the peremptory refusal of Generals Ducrot and Douay to append their names to the articles of capitulation, ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... were each opened in turn, disclosing to their astounded eyes the veritable treasure of the Incas; and Jim immediately saw that the removal of such a vast accumulation of wealth must necessarily occupy a considerable time, and that the treasure would have to be conveyed away piecemeal on mule-back. He therefore selected from the hoard of uncut jewels as many of the finest as he believed that he and Jose could conveniently carry, wrapped them up in two parcels, and, giving one to Jose to carry, took charge of the other himself. This done, the two men closed ...
— Under the Chilian Flag - A Tale of War between Chili and Peru • Harry Collingwood
... after that evening. Eagerly watched Hygelac's kinsman his cursed foe, how he would fare in fell attack. Not that the monster was minded to pause! Straightway he seized a sleeping warrior for the first, and tore him fiercely asunder, the bone-frame bit, drank blood in streams, swallowed him piecemeal: swiftly thus the lifeless corse was clear devoured, e'en feet and hands. Then farther he hied; for the hardy hero with hand he grasped, felt for the foe with fiendish claw, for the hero reclining, — who clutched it boldly, prompt to answer, propped on his arm. Soon ...
— Beowulf • Anonymous
... malign gray slopes. And I, who stood intent to gaze, saw muddy people in that swamp, all naked and with look of hurt. They were smiting each other, not only with hands, but with head, and with chest, and with feet, mangling one another piecemeal with their teeth. ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 1, Hell [The Inferno] • Dante Alighieri
... property acquired before marriage, which is now secured in most States by constitutional provision, having been there denied. In Massachusetts, the modification of the former inequalities has gone on by piecemeal, till it is said that in some respects the woman is now the more ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... soil, not even an inarable one, to alight on? Vain all its talents for ploughing, hammering, and whatever else; there is no Earth-room for this Nation with its talents: this Nation will have to keep hovering on the wing, dolefully shrieking to and fro; and perish piecemeal; burying itself, down to the last soul of it, in the waste unfirmamented seas. Ah yes, soil, with or without ploughing, is the gift of God. The soil of all countries belongs evermore, in a very considerable degree, to the Almighty Maker! The last stroke of labour bestowed ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... was one up on her as regards Life, owing to that awful business sex. Women were handicapped; they had to fight much harder to achieve equal results. People didn't give them jobs in the same way. Young men possessed the earth; young women had to wrest what they wanted out of it piecemeal. Johnny might end a cabinet minister, a notorious journalist, a Labour leader, anything.... Women's jobs were, as a rule, so dowdy and unimportant. Jane was bored to death with this sex business; it wasn't fair. But Jane was determined to live it down. She wouldn't be put off with second-rate jobs; ...
— Potterism - A Tragi-Farcical Tract • Rose Macaulay
... all the circumstances, and solemn surroundings, the labor which has been bestowed, and the character of the men that have presented this paper, we should consider it as an entirety, or attempt to cut it up by piecemeal, by which neither they, nor the public, will ever ascertain what the judgment of Congress was on the results of their labor. That ...
— A Report of the Debates and Proceedings in the Secret Sessions of the Conference Convention • Lucius Eugene Chittenden
... lines in summer and in winter. Possibly the same condition applies to the west, though I cannot speak with any authority on that subject. Apparently this obvious action of the Germans is exactly what happened. When their northern front had been combed, we find forces subtracted piecemeal from the north, reaching an aggregate of thirty divisions, or at least nearly fifteen divisions more than had been anticipated. The doom of ...
— World's War Events, Vol. II • Various
... to be used, whether on the Bosphorus or at the Dardanelles, I am to bear in mind his order that no serious operation is to take place until the whole of my force is complete; ready; concentrated and on the spot. No piecemeal ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume I • Ian Hamilton
... this is the way in which the creative artistic imagination proceeds. It has proved that a vast portion of all our thinking goes on unconsciously; and that the results may arise into consciousness piecemeal and gradually, checking each other as they come; or that they may come all at once, with all the completeness and definiteness of perceptions presented from without. The former is the case with the critical, and the latter with the artistic intellect. ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... doomed, the home throws out a hundred pleas to us. And the Pharisaic community passes by on the other side of the way, in fear of a falling brick. Down come the walls of the home, as quickly as pickaxes can send them. Down they crumble, piecemeal, into the foundations, and are carted away. Soon other walls will be rising—red-brick 'residential' walls, more in harmony with the Zeitgeist. None but I pays any heed to the ruins. I am their only friend. Me they attract so irresistibly that I haunt the ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... managing to keep alive, and the children in school. As spring opened, she shook herself, arose, and went to work. It was not planned, systematic, effective, Bates work. Piecemeal she did anything she saw needed the doing. The children helped to make garden and clean the yard. Then all of them went out to Aunt Ollie's and made a contract to plant and raise potatoes and vegetables ...
— A Daughter of the Land • Gene Stratton-Porter
... had played awhile, they heard a mighty tumult, and a wailing of men, and a croaking of Ravens, as they carried the men in their strength into the air, and, tearing them betwixt them, let them fall piecemeal to the earth. And during the tumult they saw a knight coming towards them, on a light grey horse, and the left foreleg of the horse was jet-black to the centre of his hoof. And the knight and the ...
— The Mabinogion • Lady Charlotte Guest
... That swallowed sea and sky; and then, Anchors and nails and bolts Flew screaming out of her, and with clang on clang, A noise of fifty stithies, caught at the sides Of the Magnetic Mountain; and she lay, A broken bundle of firewood, strown piecemeal About the waters; and her crew Passed shrieking, one by one; and I was left To drown. All the long night I swam; But in the morning, O, the smiling coast Tufted with date-trees, meadowlike, Skirted with shelving sands! And a great wave Cast me ashore; ...
— Poems by William Ernest Henley • William Ernest Henley
... by sudden attacks and surprises, above all by the dispatch of armed steamboats up the circuitous waterways into positions from which they could fall upon the enemy in reverse, he was able gradually to force back the rebels, to cut them off piecemeal in the field, and to seize upon their ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... well aware of it hath this fellow urged his message; but for a foe to suffer horribly at the hands of foes is no indignity. Wherefore let the doubly-pointed wreath of his fire be hurled at me, and ether be torn piecemeal by thunder, and spasm of savage blasts; and let the wind rock earth from her base, roots and all, and with stormy surge mingle in rough tide the billow of the deep and the paths of the stars; and fling my body into black Tartarus, ...
— Prometheus Bound and Seven Against Thebes • Aeschylus
... and in that long space has undergone many and strange modifications. At the dispersion from Babel, and the "confusion of tongues" occasioned thereby, people were thrown upon their own resources, and left to pick up by piecemeal such shreds as should afterwards be wove into a system, and adopted by their respective nations. Wars, pestilence, and famine, as well as commerce, enterprize, literature, and religion, brought the different nations into intercourse with each other; ...
— Lectures on Language - As Particularly Connected with English Grammar. • William S. Balch
... Petersburg, and Sherman unable to hold what he has gained in Georgia, the South may be nearer its dawning day of independence than could have been expected a few weeks ago, even though Wilmington be captured and Charleston be ground away piecemeal under a distant cannonade. The position of the Democrats would urge them to desperate measures, and the wedge of discord will be driven into the ill-compacted body which now represents the Federal ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... proposition would have had a real meaning, and been susceptible of a test. It is easy travelling through the stages of such an hypothesis; you deposit at your bank a round sum ere you start, and, drawing on it piecemeal at every pause, complete your grand ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... more powerful class toward its inferiors. Many remedies were afforded them against delays in payment of debts, one of which was that in case it happened that several persons had been lending to anybody, they had authority to divide his body piecemeal according to the proportionate amounts that he was owing. Yet, however much this principle had been declared legal, still it had surely never been put into practice. For how could a nation have proceeded to such lengths of cruelty when it frequently granted ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol VI. • Cassius Dio
... the first example on a large scale. In 1220 it was followed by Beverley Minster (see p. 189). The nave of Salisbury Cathedral was begun in 1240 (see p. 206), and a new Westminster Abbey grew piecemeal under Henry's own supervision during the greater part of the reign (see p. 205). Mental activity accompanied material activity. At Oxford there were reckoned 15,000 scholars. Most remarkable was the new departure taken by Walter de Merton, Henry's Chancellor. ...
— A Student's History of England, v. 1 (of 3) - From the earliest times to the Death of King Edward VII • Samuel Rawson Gardiner
... means of putting a check on the slavers across the lake, they hurried on with their work. She was unscrewed at a spot about five hundred yards below the first cataract, and they began to make a road over the portage of forty miles, by which she was to be carried piecemeal. ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston
... occasionally some miserable tale for the day, in order meanly to sneak out of difficulties into which they had proudly strutted. And they were put to all these shifts and devices, full of meanness and full of mischief, in order to pilfer piecemeal a repeal of an act which they had not the generous courage, when they found and felt their error, honorably and fairly to disclaim. By such management, by the irresistible operation of feeble councils, so paltry a sum as three-pence in the eyes ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... Danglars, in a tone whose bitterness Harpagon [*] alone has been capable of revealing—"tell me that you wish to despoil me of all; it will be sooner over than devouring me piecemeal." ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... both ships; the next roll, by interlacing the lower yards, and entangling the spars of one ship with the shrouds and backstays of the other, would in all likelihood bring down all three masts of both ships, not piecemeal, as the poet hath it, but in one furious crash. Beneath the ruins of the spars, the coils of rigging, and the enormous folds of canvas, might lie crushed many of the best hands, who, from being always the ...
— The Lieutenant and Commander - Being Autobigraphical Sketches of His Own Career, from - Fragments of Voyages and Travels • Basil Hall
... a half awaits my successor, and even under the sod I should be tortured by the thought that my ancestral estates, for which far better men than I shed their blood, were being scattered to the winds by a worthless descendant, were dribbling away piecemeal and passing into the hands of usurers, shopkeepers, and aliens, and all through the very man who, so far from weeping at my death, will be ready to dance for joy at it. I mean to deprive ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai
... shouting and outcry, followed by firing of guns, much as though a battle were in progress. Men, hurrying and crying excitedly as they ran, went aboard the boats. One after another the mooring-ropes were cast off. The poles and oars did their work, and slowly, piecemeal, but in a vast aggregate, the great Mackenzie brigade ...
— Young Alaskans in the Far North • Emerson Hough
... men, just reached the edge of the cornice. Clambering up over backs and up sledge I used an ice-axe to cut steps over the cornice and thus managed to get on top, then cut steps and surmounted the edge of the cornice. Helped Bowers up with the rope; others followed—then the gear was hauled up piecemeal. For Crean, the last man up, we lowered the sledge over the cornice and used a bowline in the other end of the rope on top of it. He came up grinning with delight, and we all thought the ascent rather a cunning piece of work. It was fearfully cold work, but everyone working with rare ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... unrecognizable, and as if a wild beast, half-glutted, should speak, "and I keep her! She is in my power. Mine, and you know what that means. Mine," and he bent toward me, "body and—soul. To use, to blast, to destroy, to tear piecemeal,—as I will do, so help me God! unless you meet my condition." And extending his hand, he drew aside the black veil, and my eye lay on the face of Lenore, thin and white as the familiar faces of corpses, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... deal of information during the last few days," Brand said. "Some of it has come through a source which I may not reveal—piecemeal, and in disconnected fragments. You will have to take a good ...
— The Traitors • E. Phillips (Edward Phillips) Oppenheim
... allowed, as it so often is, to degenerate into an equally unscrupulous and stupid pursuit of the self-interest of its members. Now it is quite hopeless to induce persons of a high class, either socially or intellectually, to take a share of local administration in a corner by piecemeal, as members of a Paving Board or a Drainage Commission. The entire local business of their town is not more than a sufficient object to induce men whose tastes incline them, and whose knowledge qualifies them for national affairs, to become members of a mere local body, and devote to it the time ...
— Considerations on Representative Government • John Stuart Mill
... Forum, and the city runs blood in a third Terror. Amid heaps of severed heads, Sylla sits before the temple of Castor and sells the lands of his dead enemies; and Catiline is first known to history as the executioner of Caius Gratidianus, whom he slices to death, piecemeal, beyond the Tiber. ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... and then silence, and there he was, sitting just as though he had dreamed it all. Then a voice called, "Did you get them?" And he mechanically put up the receiver without a word. Something had happened—just what, he could only guess—make out piecemeal. There was trouble—he could feel that. Uncle Buzz had somehow stepped beyond the pale. He had heard the words "all night" and "no trace of him." This was no ordinary trouble. This was not a ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... influenced him was dislike to offending a customer; customers are the divinities of tradesmen, as society is the divinity of society: in her, men and women worship themselves. Having got the two bedsteads extracted piecemeal from the disorganized heaps in his back shop, he and Hester together proceeded to carry them home—and I cannot help wishing lord Gartley had come upon her at the work—no very light job, for she went ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... extol and sing thereof, Will flee for refuge to Thy Blessed Name. Lord, look upon me from thy bliss above: Look down on me, who shrink from all the shame And pangs and desolation of my death, Wrenched piecemeal or devoured or set on flame, While all the world around me holds its breath With eyes glued on me for a gazing-stock, Pitiless eyes, while no man pitieth. The floods are risen, I stagger in their shock, ...
— Poems • Christina G. Rossetti
... defence continued to proceed in these parochial ways. Pitt's authority at Westminster was at no time more firmly founded than at the time of the meeting of the new Parliament in the autumn of 1796. Yet the piecemeal methods went on as before. He proposed to raise by means of the ballot a levy of 15,000 men in order to recruit the navy and the Line regiments; and he further asked for a levy of 60,000 men as a Supplementary Militia, one tenth ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... with me broke the egg with hatchets, and making a hole in it, pulled out the young roc piecemeal, and roasted it. I had in vain entreated them not ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments • Anonymous
... been at work in his dwelling at this turbulent moment. His wife urged him to fly into the city. "Why should I fly?" said the Moor—"to be reserved for hunger and slavery? I tell you, wife, I will await the foe here, for better is it to die quickly by the steel than to perish piecemeal in chains and dungeons." He said no more, but resumed his occupation of weaving, and in the indiscriminate fury of the assault was slaughtered ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... sprawling rail fence had lain for nearly forty years, renewed piecemeal from time to time as it rotted away, its corners full of brambles, its stakes and riders overrun with poison-vine; where this brown, jointed structure had stretched, like a fossil worm, a great transformation had come. The rails were gone, the brambles ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... reckoned as a religion, not as an ordinary political movement. The important and effective mental attitudes to the world may be broadly divided into the religious and the scientific. The scientific attitude is tentative and piecemeal, believing what it finds evidence for, and no more. Since Galileo, the scientific attitude has proved itself increasingly capable of ascertaining important facts and laws, which are acknowledged by all competent people regardless of temperament or self-interest or political pressure. Almost all the ...
— The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism • Bertrand Russell
... police report in the Publican's Journal. Young Duncan Macmorrogh was a limb of the law, who had just brought himself into notice by a series of articles in 'The Screw and Lever,' in which he had subjected the universe piecemeal to his critical analysis. Duncan Macmorrogh cut up the creation, and got a name. His attack upon mountains was most violent, and proved, by its personality, that he had come from the Lowlands. He demonstrated the inutility ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli
... from hell, I lay the matter for your decision." "Stay, we've not done with you yet," cried Pope Julius, and madly they engage once more, tooth and nail, until the strokes clashed like earthquakes; the three armies of the damned tore each other piecemeal, and like snakes became whole again, and spread far and wide over the jagged, burning crags, until Lucifer bade his veterans, the giants of Hell, separate them, which indeed ...
— The Visions of the Sleeping Bard • Ellis Wynne
... the leaves of this shrub, instead of being used piecemeal, are employed whole, when they do not exceed the proper dimensions. Their oval form and their moderate size suit the insect's requirements; and there is therefore no necessity to cut them into pieces. The leaf-stalk is ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre
... Ah, better when thou mad'st him lord—lo whereunto are come His faith and troth who erst, they say, his country's house-gods held The while he took upon his back his father spent with eld? 599 Why! might I not have shred him up, and scattered him piecemeal About the sea, and slain his friends, his very son, with steel, Ascanius on his father's board for dainty meat to lay? But doubtful, say ye, were the fate of battle? Yea, O yea! What might I fear, who was to die?—if I had borne the ...
— The AEneids of Virgil - Done into English Verse • Virgil
... generality of mankind on one level of contented ignorance.... It is quite hopeless to induce persons of a high class, either socially or intellectually, to take a share of local administration in a corner by piecemeal as members of a Paving Board or a ...
— Handbook of Home Rule (1887) • W. E. Gladstone et al.
... the heterogeneous and pitiful flotsam that reluctant seas have washed to us piecemeal from a remote past, there are, as will be shown later, many things which, although proceeding from a culture and modes of thought as far removed from our own as they may well be,[1] are worth the ...
— The Instruction of Ptah-Hotep and the Instruction of Ke'Gemni - The Oldest Books in the World • Battiscombe G. Gunn
... care on to the living model, and are made to approximate as closely as possible to the arrangement given in the first sketch, which, as it was not haphazard, but most carefully worked out, must of necessity be adhered to. They have often to be drawn piecemeal, as a model cannot by any means always retain the attitude sufficiently long for the design to be wholly carried out at one cast. This arrangement is effected with special reference to painting—that is to say, giving not only ...
— Frederic Lord Leighton - An Illustrated Record of His Life and Work • Ernest Rhys
... shot, the boy was gliding noiselessly forward through the rushes, when suddenly he stopped as if rooted to the ground, with hands thrown up and eyes bulging from his head. At his feet lay the corpses of his morning comrades,—scalped, stripped, hacked almost piecemeal! Then the instinct of the hunted thing, of flight, of self-protection, eclipsed momentary terror, and the boy was ducking into the rushes to hide when, with a crash of musketry from the woods, ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... her feet and hands, And swore they never saw such wee things; The gossips met in purring bands, And tore her piecemeal o'er the tea-things. The former drank the Doctor's health With clinking cups, the gay carousers; The latter watched her door by stealth, ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... had satisfaction of this man has been, that I have never had an opportunity since I was aware of the facts, which my friends had carefully concealed from me; and it was only by slow degrees, and by piecemeal, that I got at them. I have not sought him, nor gone out of my way for him; but I will find him, and then we can have it out: he has shown so little courage, that he must fight at last in his absolute necessity to ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... Houndsditch and the Minories there was great joy at first, and afterward bitter, endless litigation. They screamed and battled over the heritage like vultures over a mighty carrion, tearing it at length piecemeal. He did not keep a pet dog, and so no living creature regretted him, unless it were the thin, delicate girl, with white cheeks and hollow eyes, who came once, and knelt to pray by his grave for hours, ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... other Boston men of letters, was of patrician family, and of those easy fortunes which Clio prefers her sons to be of; but he paid for these advantages by the suffering in which he wrought at what is, I suppose, our greatest history. He wrought at it piecemeal, and sometimes only by moments, when the terrible head aches which tormented him, and the disorder of the heart which threatened his life, allowed him a brief respite for the task which was dear to him. ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... are improving somewhat. The County Council is opening out a few new thoroughfares piecemeal." Oh yes, in an illogical, unsystematic, English patchwork fashion, we are driving a badly-designed, unimpressive new street or two, with no expansive sense of imperial greatness, through the hopelessly congested and most squalid quarters. ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen
... prominence and prospect of success, and immediately disappearing ignominiously; making frantic grasps and clutches with a hundred long arms and eager outstretched hands, and finally succeeding, by shoulders and fists, in bringing the wreath away piecemeal; and then they give themselves up to mutual embraces, groans, laments, and all the enginery of pathetic affection in the last gasping throes of separation,—to the doleful tearing of hair and the rending of their fantastic garments. It is the personification of legalized rowdyism; and if young men ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... saddle in pawn to the white professional gambler for his $5.00, and it was not five minutes before the white gambler had the saddle and $5.00 both. Then, when they had nothing else left to bet, so intense was their love for gambling, they began to put themselves in pawn, piecemeal, saying: 'I'll bet you my whole body.' That means 'I'll put myself in pawn to you as your slave to serve you as you will for ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... said Melissa, with the same awful calmness, "jump down from this roof and break my neck, or be devoured piecemeal by that fiend down there ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1907 to 1908 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... dare confess that she'd been off all that while from her dairy. She let drop a word, and I have got it out of her piecemeal. I have threatened her, sir, that if ever she mentions it again, I'll get ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood
... believed by the aid of some of the Rohan family, to escape from prison. She fled to London, where for some time she and her husband lived on the proceeds of the necklace, which they had broken up and sold piecemeal to jewelers in London and other cities; but they were soon reduced to great distress. After the Revolution had broken out in Paris, they tried to make money by publishing libels on the queen, in which they are believed to have ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge
... up in the Forum, and the city runs blood in a third Terror. Amid heaps of severed heads, Sylla sits before the temple of Castor and sells the lands of his dead enemies; and Catiline is first known to history as the executioner of Caius Gratidianus, whom he slices to death, piecemeal, beyond the Tiber. ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... freshly painted and newly repaired. This poet was stretched upon his back, eating, in that convenient posture, his dinner out of an earthen pot, plucking the viand from it, whatever it was, with his thumb and fore-finger, and dropping it piecemeal into his mouth. When the passer asked him "Where are you from?" he held a morsel in air long enough to answer "Da Lucca, signore," and then let it fall into his throat, and sank deeper into a reverie in which that crude accent even must have sounded like ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... stone is too large to be extracted through the urethra, it may be broken down with the lithotrite and extracted piecemeal with the forceps. The lithotrite is an instrument composed of a straight stem bent for an inch or more to one side at its free end so as to form an obtuse angle, and having on the same side a sliding bar moving in a groove in the stem and operated by a screw so that the stone ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... multitude, who blindly follow the suggestions of those to whom they may have entrusted their literary consciences. If your work is denounced and to be released at once from your sufferings by one blow from the paw of a tiger, than to be worried piecemeal by creatures who have all the will, but not the power, to inflict the ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... Hurons? Frightful stories of torture she had heard rushed to her mind. Old Noko had witnessed them. So had some of the men at the fort. Death itself was not so hard, but to have burning sticks thrust into one's skin, to have fingers and toes cut off, piecemeal—oh, she had saved him from that. Yes, she would marry Savignon, and then throw herself into the river, after she ...
— A Little Girl in Old Quebec • Amanda Millie Douglas
... never moved a muscle. She held a hand of each, and looked alternately at them. Breathless, I watched. It was almost as exciting as if I had been joining in the play—more so, for to me everything was sur l'imprevu—revealed piecemeal, while to them some degree of foreknowledge must exist, to deprive the ceremony of some of ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... English history, and lastly science. One concession is made to girls which is not made to boys. They are allowed to pass in two subjects one year, and two others the next, and thus obtain their certificates piecemeal. Boys have to pass in all four subjects the same year. The High School sent in seventeen candidates for the examination in two or three of the subjects—History, Elementary Mathematics, French, German, and Latin,—and fifteen of these passed in two subjects at least: and, inasmuch as seven ...
— Three Addresses to Girls at School • James Maurice Wilson
... breaking through, he had to scrape it out piecemeal, wetting the dried mud as he toiled. He measured carefully just how much of the thickness to leave, because the weed stalks in the adobe could not be trusted to hold too thin a crust, and also ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... for American citizenship, therefore we seek his enfranchisement. The many treaties made in good faith with the Indian by our government we would like to see equitably settled. By a constructive program we hope to do away with the "piecemeal legislation" affecting Indians here and there which has proven an exceedingly expensive and ...
— American Indian stories • Zitkala-Sa
... to descend with his pack-horse and the first load. All afternoon they went up and down over the hot bare face of the hill, until the baggage, heavy and light, was transported and dropped piecemeal on the shore. The torn-out insides of their home littered the stones with familiar shapes and colors, and Nancy played among them, visiting ...
— The Jimmyjohn Boss and Other Stories • Owen Wister
... will I extol and sing thereof, Will flee for refuge to Thy Blessed Name. Lord, look upon me from thy bliss above: Look down on me, who shrink from all the shame And pangs and desolation of my death, Wrenched piecemeal or devoured or set on flame, While all the world around me holds its breath With eyes glued on me for a gazing-stock, Pitiless eyes, while no man pitieth. The floods are risen, I stagger in their shock, My heart reels ...
— Poems • Christina G. Rossetti
... 'Behind me piecemeal gifts I cast, My fleeing self to save; And that's the thing must go at last, For ...
— New Poems • Francis Thompson
... dropped the paper and got up from the desk. That son-of-a-bitch Taber was to blame for this. Shaping up a goddamn hoax and feeding it out piecemeal. ...
— Ten From Infinity • Paul W. Fairman
... of barbarity attending the execution. Mr. Newman in language of appalling force, written a year after his conversion, has described the Anglican service as "a ritual dashed upon the ground, trodden on, and broken piecemeal; prayers clipped, pieced, torn, shuffled about at pleasure, until the meaning of the composition perished, and offices which had been poetry were no longer even good prose; antiphons, hymns, benedictions, invocations, shovelled away; Scripture ...
— Cardinal Newman as a Musician • Edward Bellasis
... beyond it and through it and upon all sides of it, but the utmost delicacy of the controls would not permit of holding even upon the immense bulk of the vessel, to say nothing of holding upon such a relatively tiny object as the power bar. As they flashed repeatedly through the warship, they saw piecemeal and sketchily her formidable armament and the hundreds of men of her crew, each man at battle station at the controls of some frightful engine of destruction. Suddenly they were cut off as a screen ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... thousand jovial or brutal mates; and a thousand beds received their occupants in full harness, booted and hatted, as though the enemy were at the gates. Everywhere strains of liquor-music surged up for the next thirty minutes, finally to die away piecemeal as different ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... see to it that his friend Daniel should not be robbed. He intended, therefore, to go himself to Anjou to call upon those who were likely to purchase, and to be present at the sale. In his opinion, it would be wiser to sell piecemeal, without hurry. If money was needed, why, one could always get it at ...
— The Clique of Gold • Emile Gaboriau
... counter- marches, by sudden attacks and surprises, above all by the dispatch of armed steamboats up the circuitous waterways into positions from which they could fall upon the enemy in reverse, he was able gradually to force back the rebels, to cut them off piecemeal in the field, and to ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... T'UNG TIEN, Tu Yu's great treatise on the Constitution, the other similarly enshrined in the T'AI P'ING YU LAN encyclopedia. In both the complete text is to be found, though split up into fragments, intermixed with other matter, and scattered piecemeal over a number of different sections. Considering that the YU LAN takes us back to the year 983, and the T'UNG TIEN about 200 years further still, to the middle of the T'ang dynasty, the value of these early transcripts of Sun Tzu can hardly be overestimated. ...
— The Art of War • Sun Tzu
... wanted a claim with which to harass others; the Maori signed a worthless document on receipt of a few goods. By 1840 it was estimated that, outside the sweeping claim on the South Island, 26,000,000 acres, or more than a third of the area of New Zealand, was supposed to have been gobbled up piecemeal by the land-sharks. The claims arising out of these transactions were certain at the best to cause confusion, ill-feeling, and trouble, and indeed did so. Some legally-constituted authority was clearly wanted to deal with them. Otherwise armed strife ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... reference to Sir John, that the deep-dyed villain reckoned quite without his host; for however truly the baronet had oft-times been much less a self-denying Scipio than a wanton Alcibiades, still the fine young fellow would have flung Simon piecemeal to his hounds, if ever he had breathed so atrocious a temptation: the maid was pledged, and Vincent ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... load of bags, pots, pans, boxes, &c. into the bottom of a ravine in a confused ruin.—Halt! . . and the camel had to be raised and helped up the opposite bank, while the late avalanche of luggage was carried piecemeal after him to be again adjusted. To avoid a similar catastrophe the remaining three camels had to be UNLOADED, and reloaded when safe upon the opposite bank. The operation of loading a camel with about 700 lbs. of luggage of indescribable variety is at all ...
— The Albert N'Yanza, Great Basin of the Nile • Sir Samuel White Baker
... taught me, have ennobled me, though they lived centuries since? Men whom I should have loved had I met them on earth? Men whom I may meet yet, and tell them how I love them, in some other world? Men, too, whom I might have hated, and who might have hated me, had we met on this poor piecemeal earth; but whom I may learn to regard with justice and with charity in the world where all shall know, even as they are known? Men, too—alas! how fast their number grows—whom I have known, have ...
— Lectures Delivered in America in 1874 • Charles Kingsley
... surprising for a vireo; still I had no question about his identity (he sat between me and the sun) till I changed my position, when behold! the vireo was a linnet. A strange performance, indeed! What could have set this fluent vocalist to practicing exercises of such an inferior, disconnected, piecemeal sort? Within the next week or two, however, the same game was played upon me several times, and in different places. No doubt the trick is an old one, familiar to many observers, but to me it had all the charm ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... Accordingly, the Austrian foot took Chotusitz, after obstinate resistance; and old Konigseck, very ill of gout, got seated in one of the huts there; and the Prussian cavalry, embarrassed to get through the gullies, could not charge except piecemeal, and then though in some cases with desperate valor, yet in all without effectual result. Konigseck sits in Chotusitz;—and yet withal the Russians are not out of it, will not be driven out of it, but cling obstinately; whereupon the Austrians set fire to the place; its dry thatch ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... literature: That 'to know when one's self is interested, is the first condition of interesting other people'" And once more: "As it oftenest happens also, with natures of genuinely poetic quality, those piecemeal beginnings came suddenly to harmonious completeness among the fortunate incidents, the physical heat and light, of one singularly ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... not abruptly, but piecemeal, those outward symbols—his sombre clothes. First 'twas his hat he exchanged for a feather-trimmed beaver of more sightly hue; then those stiff white bands that reeked of sanctity and cant for a collar of fine point; next it was his coat that took on a worldly edge ...
— The Tavern Knight • Rafael Sabatini
... formed it may be cast off entire or piecemeal. The embryo (child) alone may escape, the neck of the womb contracts and shuts; bleeding persists for an indefinite period, for weeks and weeks, until the health of the poor woman is seriously affected. Persistent bleeding of this kind is ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... every eye of the vast multitude was turned to the part of the circus where we were sitting, and near which was the passage by which Zenobia would enter the theatre. The animals now tore each other piecemeal, unnoticed by the impatient throng. A greater care possessed them. And no sooner did the object of this universal expectation reveal herself to their sight, led to her seat by the dark Zabdas, followed by the Princess Julia and Longinus, and accompanied by a crowd of the ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware
... sky; and then, Anchors and nails and bolts Flew screaming out of her, and with clang on clang, A noise of fifty stithies, caught at the sides Of the Magnetic Mountain; and she lay, A broken bundle of firewood, strown piecemeal About the waters; and her crew Passed shrieking, one by one; and I was left To drown. All the long night I swam; But in the morning, O, the smiling coast Tufted with date-trees, meadowlike, Skirted with shelving sands! And a great wave Cast me ashore; and I was saved alive. So, giving thanks ...
— Poems by William Ernest Henley • William Ernest Henley
... which Fremont had provided himself, was an India rubber boat, twenty feet long and five feet wide. This was very buoyant and the carts and baggage were carried over piecemeal in it, with the exception of the last two carts. Laden with these the boat left the shore but had not gone far when the man at the helm, who was exceedingly nervous, managed to capsize the craft, with all its precious cargo. The hunters were so dismayed over the prospect of losing their stores ...
— The Life of Kit Carson • Edward S. Ellis
... social order which involves charity is not one which maintains justice. Thus it may be said that the prophets, because they operated in terms of the reorganization of the whole of society and not of the incidental correction of piecemeal evils, were humanists. Their program was constructive and aimed at the enfranchisement of manhood. The rabbis, on the other hand, were (relatively only) philanthropists. Their program was remedial, and they aimed rather at the ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... conventions, and the preaching of sincerity and independence. But not yet was Carlyle's generation prepared to listen to such sermons. Jeffrey was bewildered by the tone and offended at the style; publisher after publisher refused it; and when at length it was launched upon the world piecemeal in Fraser's Magazine, the reading public either ignored it or abused it in the roundest terms. During all this time Carlyle was anxiously looking for some surer means of livelihood, and had not yet decided that literature was ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... added that of his mother, a woman with the ungovernable spirit peculiar to her sex; that the Romans must be under bondage to a woman, and moreover to two youths, who would meanwhile oppress the state, and, at one time or other, rend it piecemeal." ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume II (of X) - Rome • Various
... sunrise, as they promised. I must die now. How shall I endure it? Oh, go! Is it not dreadful enough to be torn piecemeal, without having you to look on?" And she tried to ...
— Heroes Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... brooded, barely managing to keep alive, and the children in school. As spring opened, she shook herself, arose, and went to work. It was not planned, systematic, effective, Bates work. Piecemeal she did anything she saw needed the doing. The children helped to make garden and clean the yard. Then all of them went out to Aunt Ollie's and made a contract to plant and raise potatoes and vegetables on shares. They passed a neglected garden on the way, and learning ...
— A Daughter of the Land • Gene Stratton-Porter
... made money in Edinburgh, had gone so far south as Moonfleet to get quit, as was said, of the memories of rascally deeds. It was about four years since he bought a parcel of the Mohune Estate, which had been breaking up and selling piecemeal for a generation; and on his land stood the Manor House, or so much of it as was left. Of the mansion I have spoken before. It was a very long house of two storeys, with a projecting gable and doorway in the middle, and at each end gabled ...
— Moonfleet • J. Meade Falkner
... not unwise, my friend, to rush at a bound to the extremes of friendship? You have drained the cup, offered in all sincerity, at a draught. It is true that a real feeling is never piecemeal; it must be whole, or it does not exist. Monsieur de Mortsauf," she added after a short silence, "is above all things loyal and brave. Perhaps for my sake you will forget what he said to you to-day; if he has forgotten it to-morrow, I will myself tell him what ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... with 'ee to-all?" he asked, smashing a spider-crab and picking it out piecemeal from the net. "Pretty fair catch to-day, id'n-a? spite of all the weed; an' no harm done by these varmints that a man can't ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... Austrian possessions. The main cause of this bewildering subdivision of Germany was the habit of dealing with a principality as if it were merely private property which might be divided up among several children, or disposed of piecemeal, quite regardless of the wishes of ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... Piecemeal, Toddles wouldn't convey anything to you to speak of. You'd have to see Toddles coming down the aisle of a car to get him at all—and then the chances are you'd turn around after he'd gone by and stare at him, and it would be even money that you'd call him back and fish for a dime to ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Campfire Stories • Various
... Inculcate Socialism? Yes, but grab all you can to be going on with. Preach revolutionary thoughts? Yes, but rely on the ameliorative method.... The minds of men are of slow development, and we must be content, we fear, to accomplish our revolution piecemeal, bit by bit, till a point is come to when, by accumulative process, a series of small changes amounts to the Great Change. The most important revolutions are those that happen quietly without anything ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... nephew. No relation at all"—Fyne emitted with a convulsive effort this, the most awful part of the suspicions Mrs Fyne used to impart to him piecemeal when he came down to spend his weekends gravely with her and the children. The Fynes, in their good-natured concern for the unlucky child of the man busied in stirring casually so many millions, spent the moments of their weekly reunion in wondering ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... are too large to be portable, and too vast and comprehensive to be read on the spot, in the hasty temper of the present age. They are, therefore, almost universally neglected, whitewashed by custodes, shot at by soldiers, suffered to drop from the walls, piecemeal in powder and rags by society in general; but, which is an advantage more than counterbalancing all this evil, they are not often "restored." What is left of them, however fragmentary, however ruinous, ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... introducing their religion among the natives of Luzon, and were giving them instructions, ceremonies, and the form of observing their religion, by means of certain gazizes [333] whom they brought with them. Already a considerable number, and those the chiefest men, were commencing, although by piecemeal, to become Moros, and were being circumcised [334] and taking the names of Moros. Had the Spaniards' coming been delayed longer, that religion would have spread throughout the island, and even through the others, and it would have been difficult to extirpate it. ...
— History of the Philippine Islands Vols 1 and 2 • Antonio de Morga
... senseless stone I lay; For neither wit nor tongue could use the mean T'express the passions of my pained heart. Forceless, perforce, I sank down to this pain, As greedy famine doth constrain the hawk Piecemeal to rend and tear the yielding prey: So far'd it with me in that heavy stound. But now what shall I do? how may I seek To ease my mind, that burneth with desire Of dire revenge? For never shall my thoughts Grant ease unto my heart, till I have found A mean of vengeance ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VII (4th edition) • Various
... our "environment," this patched up and piecemeal panorama of mad chaotic blunderings, which pushes us hither and thither; and they call it our "heredity," this confused and twisted amalgam of greeds and lusts and conscience-stricken reactions, which drives us backward ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... greatest impatience. At last it came; but what a scene did it show us! The ship upon a bed of rocks, mountains of them on one side, and Cordilleras of water on the other; our poor ship grinding and crying out at every stroke between them; going away by piecemeal. However, to show the unaccountable workings of Providence, that which often appears to be the greatest evil, proved to be the greatest good! That unmerciful sea lifted and beat us up so high among the rocks, that at last the ship scarcely moved. She was ...
— Thrilling Narratives of Mutiny, Murder and Piracy • Anonymous
... for the next orders, three months' credit, and my orders are increasing. I am sure it is of great importance to have materials for customers to choose from. Ladies like to be saved the trouble of shopping, and I can give a dress at a more moderate rate, if I provide everything, than they can buy it piecemeal. I hope to double the business this season, and pay you a good percentage. Even on credit I can venture to order a fair supply ...
— A Crooked Path - A Novel • Mrs. Alexander
... translation of it into German and present it to the Elector. By the end of November Spalatin had completed his task (one marvels at the leisureliness of this, in view of the serious condition of the Elector; or was the manuscript translated and administered piecemeal to the noble patient?), and early in December he returned the original, doubtless together with his own translation, to Luther, who had requested its return, "in order to ...
— Works of Martin Luther - With Introductions and Notes (Volume I) • Martin Luther
... but, with characteristic prudence, confined himself to threatening movements, which did not exactly hit. He saw evidently that he could not swallow him whole, and what might ensue from trying him piecemeal ...
— Our Young Folks, Vol 1, No. 1 - An Illustrated Magazine • Various
... drives them about Space vagrantly onward; - I shall unfold: thou simply give all thyself to my teaching. Matter mingled and massed into indissoluble union Does not exist. For we see how wastes each separate substance; So flow piecemeal away, with the length'ning centuries, all things, Till from our eye by degrees that old self passes, and is not. Still Universal Nature abides unchanged as aforetime. Whereof this is the cause. When the atoms part from a substance, That suffers ...
— Verses and Translations • C. S. C.
... polished to perfection; let an author "keep his piece nine years," or ninety and nine, till he has made it as musical as he can—at least, as musical as his other performances. Not that we counsel dilatory and piecemeal composition. The thought must be struck off in the passion of the moment; the sword-blade must go red-hot to the anvil, and be forged in a few seconds: true; but after the forging, long and weary polishing and grinding must follow, ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, August 1850 - of Literature, Science and Art. • Various
... it had been otherwise, I should have purchased the ticket piecemeal. I cannot endure to travel all night. ...
— Try and Trust • Horatio Alger
... twenty years, but, to save the expense of keeping it up, a fleet under Lord Dartmouth was sent out to destroy all the works, and to bring home the garrison. The destruction of the mole, which was admirably built, caused much labour, it being necessary to blow it up by piecemeal. Its ruins, as well as the rubbish of the town, were thrown into the harbour to prevent ...
— How Britannia Came to Rule the Waves - Updated to 1900 • W.H.G. Kingston
... abound in empty words, and speak wildly and fiercely; they talk big, are proud, unmanageable, and threatening alike in prosperity and adversity; they are cunning, arrogant, and cruel, exercising the power of life and death over their slaves, and all low-born plebeians. They flay men alive, both piecemeal, and by stripping off the whole skin. No servant while waiting on them, or standing at their table, may gape, speak, or spit, so that ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... I can't say. They were once in Middlesex. Probably much of the land, as it was sold piecemeal, fell into small allotments, constantly changing hands. But the last relics of the property were, I know, bought on speculation by Cox the distiller; for, when we were in London, by Mr. Darrell's desire I went to look after them, and inquire if they could be repurchased. And I found ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... mutiny against that law, all was over with them. That great, foolish, ignorant multitude would have broken up, probably fought among themselves—certainly parted company, and either starved in the desert, or have been destroyed piecemeal by the wild warlike tribes, Midianites, Moabites, Amalekites—who were ready enough for slaughter and plunder. They would never have reached Canaan. They would never have become a great nation. So they had to be, by necessity, ...
— The Gospel of the Pentateuch • Charles Kingsley
... Malthus was perfectly right in his theory of population. The only difference as compared with the old, outspoken slavery is this, that the worker of to-day seems to be free because he is not sold once for all, but piecemeal by the day, the week, the year, and because no one owner sells him to another, but he is forced to sell himself in this way instead, being the slave of no particular person, but of the whole property-holding ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... politeness: "It was only a form," he said. "Yet we must do it. For look you, Signori," and here he shrugged up his shoulders, rolled his eyes, and puffed out his lips in a way that was possible to none but an Italian, "were it not thus the entire city would be carried away piecemeal!" ...
— The Dodge Club - or, Italy in 1859 • James De Mille
... estates of the nobles were divided, either deliberately or because the land was conquered piecemeal and parcelled out as it was conquered. (For example, Odo had 473 manors ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: History • Ontario Ministry of Education
... is the conquering book. It has already dominated English literature, so that almost the whole of its text from Genesis to Revelation might, if all the copies of the Bible were suddenly lost from the world, be restored in piecemeal fragments gathered out of the books in which the Book has been quoted, Then, besides, there are the Bible thoughts that have indirectly, we might almost say insidiously, permeated the literature of Europe and America. More than that, the Bible has been industriously ...
— The Jericho Road • W. Bion Adkins
... I had taken on board, and who landed with me, broke the egg with hatchets, and having made a hole in it, pulled out the young roc piecemeal and roasted it. I had earnestly entreated them not to meddle with the egg, but they would not ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... stooped to write the "Jolly Beggars." The "Saturday Night" may or may not be an admirable poem; but its significance is trebled, and the power and range of the poet first appears, when it is set beside the "Jolly Beggars." To take a man's work piecemeal, except with the design of elegant extracts, is the way to avoid, and not to perform, the critic's duty. The same defect is displayed in the treatment of Burns as a man, which is broken, apologetical, and confused. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... had yet published and from most of his subsequent work. It is not unnoteworthy that the batch of poems called in the later collected editions Switzerland, and completed at last by the piece called On the Terrace at Berne, appeared originally piecemeal, and with no indication of connection. The first of its numbers is here, To my Friends who Ridiculed a Tender Leave-taking. It applies both the note of thought which has been indicated, and the quality of style which ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... said Otto, after a few moments' thought, "but to make it big enough for two, or carry over the broken spars and planks piecemeal, and put them together opposite the wreck; ...
— The Island Queen • R.M. Ballantyne
... sufficiently cleansed from its old conglomeration of filth, was garrisoned by a selected body of Native troops. The whole of these dispositions could not have been effected at an earlier date, and Sir Henry would not do them piecemeal or successively. Simultaneous, they were effective, and tended to paralyze any seditious plots that may have been hatching. Successive and piecemeal, they would have incited the sepoys to mutiny and the turbulent ...
— Forty-one years in India - From Subaltern To Commander-In-Chief • Frederick Sleigh Roberts
... are more nota benes than notes, you will find from the sequel of this letter how that has happened. Your symphony has pleased me, on account of its ideas, more than the other pieces, and yet I think that it will produce the least effect. It is too much crowded, and to hear it partially or piecemeal (stueckweise) would be, by your permission, like beholding an ant-hill (Ameisen haufen). I mean to say, that it is as if Eppes, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... represses his honest endeavours to elucidate the situation in Greece, and actually declared to-day that the difficulties of the Allies would only be increased by the hon. Member's attempts to deal with them piecemeal. Mr. LYNCH was not entirely done with, however. "Is that reply," he asked in a "got-him-this-time" manner, "given by reason of freedom of choice or ineludible necessity?" "Sir," replied the apologist of philosophic doubt with Johnsonian authority, "questions of freewill and necessity have perplexed ...
— Punch, 1917.07.04, Vol. 153, Issue No. 1 • Various
... talents for ploughing, hammering, and whatever else; there is no Earth-room for this Nation with its talents: this Nation will have to keep hovering on the wing, dolefully shrieking to and fro; and perish piecemeal; burying itself, down to the last soul of it, in the waste unfirmamented seas. Ah yes, soil, with or without ploughing, is the gift of God. The soil of all countries belongs evermore, in a very considerable degree, to the Almighty Maker! The last stroke of labour ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... system must be authorized as one project, to be completed approximately within the specified time. Only in this way can industry efficiently gear itself to the job ahead. Only in this way can the required planning and engineering be accomplished without the confusion and waste unavoidable a piecemeal approach. Furthermore, as I pointed out last year, the pressing nature of this problem must not lead us to solutions outside the bounds of sound fiscal management. As in the case of other pressing problems, there must be an adequate ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Dwight D. Eisenhower • Dwight D. Eisenhower
... is antiquated; improvements are being made piecemeal, with emphasis on business needs and international connections; there are still about 150,000 unfulfilled requests for subscriber service domestic : substantial investment has been made in cellular systems ...
— The 1997 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... go at all, I'd rather go at once, and get it over. There's nothing to be gained by delay. 'Better to die by sudden shock than perish piecemeal on the rock.'" ...
— A College Girl • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... achievement; and the law of association by contiguity in experience holds good. If one thing recalls another to your mind, you can be sure that the two {397} have been contiguous in your experience, either as wholes or piecemeal. For two things to become associated, they ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... invasions. The Assyrian generals set out in haste from Nineveh or Assur in the hope of surprising their enemy, and they often succeeded in penetrating into the very heart of his country before he had time to mobilise or concentrate his forces. The work of subduing him was performed piecemeal; they devastated his fields, robbed his orchards, and, marching all through the night,** they would arrive with such suddenness before one or other of his towns, that he would have no time to organise a defence. Most of their ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 6 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... mound of Fort Chartres could see a frosty valley, reaching to the Mississippi, glinting in the distance. That alluvial stretch was, in the course of years, to be eaten away by the river even to the bastions. The fort itself, built at such expense, would soon be abandoned by its conquerors, to sink, piecemeal, a noble and massive ruin. The dome-shaped powder house and stone quarters would be put to ignoble uses, and forest trees, spreading the spice of walnut fragrance, or the dense shadow of oaks, would grow through the very room where St. Ange and Pontiac ...
— Heroes of the Middle West - The French • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... villagers assembled on the heights (their eyes fixed the while on the devoted vessel like vultures watching for their prey) had at length the satisfaction of seeing the laboring bark yield to the war of the elements, and her timbers float, piecemeal, over ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... the very heart of an enormous crag, affording passage for the rising sea to thunder back and forth, filling it with tumultuous foam and then leaving its floor of black pebbles bare and glistening. In this chasm there was once an intersecting vein of softer stone, which the waves have gnawed away piecemeal, while the granite walls remain entire on either side. How sharply and with what harsh clamor does the sea rake back the pebbles as it momentarily withdraws into its own depths! At intervals the floor of the chasm is left nearly dry, but anon, at the outlet, two or three great waves ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... about that, sir," answered the carpenter. "If she once strikes on that bar, she'll never get off again, except piecemeal; but that's better than ...
— The Three Admirals • W.H.G. Kingston
... of mankind. And Pirates barter all that's left behind. [22] No more the hirelings, purchased near and far, Crowd to the ranks of mercenary war. The idle merchant on the useless quay Droops o'er the bales no bark may bear away; Or, back returning, sees rejected stores Rot piecemeal on his own encumbered shores: 270 The starved mechanic breaks his rusting loom, And desperate mans him 'gainst the coming doom. Then in the Senates of your sinking state Show me the man whose counsels may have weight. Vain is each voice where tones ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... courtesy and humility—for I sympathise deeply with such men and women, and respect them deeply likewise—But are not people discontented already, from the lowest to the highest? And ought a man, in such a piecemeal, foolish, greedy, sinful world as this is, and always has been, to be anything but discontented? If he thinks that things are going all right, must he not have a most beggarly conception of what going right means? And if things are not going right, can it be anything but good for him ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... after-effects are sometimes so disconcerting—the mute reproachful looks of the people you've aided and abetted in matrimonial experiments. It's as bad as selling a man a horse with half a dozen latent vices and watching him discover them piecemeal in the course of the hunting season. I suppose you're thinking of the Coulterneb girl. She's certainly jolly, and quite all right as far as looks go, and I believe a certain amount of money adheres to her. What I don't see is how you will ever manage to propose to her. In all the ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki
... "poteen." The disarray in which we found it was probably intentional, as a security against detection. Before we left the shed, the old fellow toppled the whole concern over, and dragged it away piecemeal. ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... not realise the damage done to his car, or listen to a word that passed between Thrush and his chauffeur; he had eyes only for those of his child who had been lost but was found, and not a thought in his head outside the story he extracted piecemeal on the spot. Poor Pocket told it very volubly and ill; he would not confine himself to simple facts. He stated his suspicion of Baumgartner's complicity in the Hyde Park affair as though he knew it for a fact; cited the murders in Holland Walk and Park Lane as obvious ...
— The Camera Fiend • E.W. Hornung
... clothes than those on his back,—quantity was there, but the quality! Mournfully he gazed on two suits, complete in three separate members of which man's raiments are composed: the one suit extended at length upon his bed, like a veteran stretched by pious hands after death; the other brought piecemeal to the invidious light,—the torso placed upon a chair, the limbs dangling down from Jackeymo's melancholy arm. No bodies long exposed at the Morgue could evince less sign of resuscitation than those respectable defuncts! For, indeed, Jackeymo had been less thrifty of his apparel, more ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... mighty queen of good and ill, Fortune; first marry, then enjoy thy fill Of lawful pleasures; but depart ere morn; Slip from her bed, or else thou shalt be torn Piecemeal by fiends; thy blood caroused in bowls, And thy four quarters blown to the ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. II • Edited by Walter Scott
... of those which belong to the class called cabajoutis. This significant name is given by the populace of Paris to houses which are built, as it were, piecemeal. They are nearly always composed of buildings originally separate but afterwards united according to the fancy of the various proprietors who successively enlarge them; or else they are houses begun, left unfinished, again built upon, and completed,—unfortunate structures ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... style of painting, yet he did not disdain to labour in stone with various planes of relief which should produce the effect of chiaroscuro. Furthermore, they illustrate what Cellini and Vasari have already taught us about his method. He refused to work by piecemeal, but began by disengaging the first, the second, then the third surfaces, following a model and a drawing which controlled the cutting. Whether he preferred to leave off when his idea was sufficiently indicated, or whether his numerous engagements prevented him from excavating the lowest surfaces, ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... great battles in which General Thomas so nobly fulfilled his promise to ruin Hood, the details of which are fully given in his own official reports, long-since published. Rumors of these great victories reached us at Savannah by piecemeal, but his official report came on the 24th of December, with a letter from General Grant, giving in general terms the events up to the 18th, and I wrote at once through my chief of staff, General Webster, to General Thomas, complimenting him in the highest terms. His brilliant ...
— The Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman, Complete • William T. Sherman
... oil and alcohol, which Marvin and Borup were to bring to me, was, I felt, vital to our success; but even if they did not come in with it, I could not turn back here. While pacing the floe, I figured out how we should use our sledges piecemeal as fuel in our cookers, to make tea after the oil and alcohol were gone. By the time the wood of the sledges was exhausted, it would be warm enough so that we could suck ice or snow to assuage our ...
— The North Pole - Its Discovery in 1909 under the auspices of the Peary Arctic Club • Robert E. Peary
... by the armies of the Great Khan, and that it was his men who had used the arrows and made war upon the natives. It was no good for the natives to show him some of their mutilated bodies, and to tell him that the cannibals ate them piecemeal; he had no use for such information. His mind was like a sieve of which the size of the meshes could be adjusted at will; everything that was not germane to the idea of the moment fell through it, and only confirmative evidence ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... remains it seems probable that the site of the ruins here designated as the Casa Grande group was occupied a long time, not as a whole, but piecemeal as it were, one part being occupied and abandoned while some other part was being built up, and that this ebb and flow of population through many generations reached its final period in the occupation ...
— Casa Grande Ruin • Cosmos Mindeleff
... chauffeur was the spy, as well as the spy-courier," MacLeod said. "The information he transmitted was picked up piecemeal from different indiscreet lab-workers and students attached to our team. Of course, we are investigating, mumble-mumble. Naturally, no one will admit, mumble-mumble. No stone will be left unturned, mumble-mumble. Disciplinary ...
— The Mercenaries • Henry Beam Piper
... is interesting, though never of so absorbing an interest as to hold the reader's attention more closely than was held that of the writer himself. It is a book to be read by piecemeal, and it may be laid down at any time. Indeed, one is not surprised, nor much distressed, when the author fails to grasp again his fallen pen after the eleventh part. I would not in any way detract from the ...
— A Selection from the Comedies of Marivaux • Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux
... can. That machinery of life for the use of people who didn't know what they wanted of it, and which was known at the time as State Socialism, was partly put in motion, though in a very piecemeal way. But it did not work smoothly; it was, of course, resisted at every turn by the capitalists; and no wonder, for it tended more and more to upset the commercial system I have told you of; without providing anything really effective ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris
... their loads still on the right bank of the river, leisurely proceeding to strip before wading across; the loads had to be carried on their heads, the water being well above their waists. Those loads that could be divided were carried over piecemeal, the coolie returning for the second part after taking the first across. This idea was all very fine in theory, but we found that most of the coolies, having made the first trip, sat down on the bank and proceeded to dress, leaving the remainder of ...
— With Kelly to Chitral • William George Laurence Beynon
... pointed out a change in Jane. She moved among them abstractedly, with mute, half alienated eyes. She seemed to have suffered some spiritual disintegration that was pain. She gave herself to them no longer whole, but piecemeal. At times she seemed to hold out empty, supplicating hands, palms outward, showing that she could give no more. There was, she seemed to say, ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... narrative, though, as I said, I only picked it up piecemeal, as he was in the humour to talk about past events. He had not been so long among the Indians without acquiring somewhat of their manner and reticence. I had, indeed, to pump him to draw out what I wanted to know. He was more communicative generally to ...
— Snow Shoes and Canoes - The Early Days of a Fur-Trader in the Hudson Bay Territory • William H. G. Kingston
... and right. I fall certainly by my own sword, but honourably. I go about and am dying piecemeal, like Athens. Did we know that we adorned our statues for a funeral procession? that we were weaving our own shrouds? that the choruses ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... upon A sky without a cloud or sun? Less hideous far the tempest's roar, Than ne'er to brave the billows more—[ea] Thrown, when the war of winds is o'er, A lonely wreck on Fortune's shore, 'Mid sullen calm, and silent bay, Unseen to drop by dull decay;— Better to sink beneath the shock Than moulder piecemeal ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... youth above him, finally in his completed torso. But each stage is finished relatively. Completion is relative to distance; the Brutus is finished or unfinished according to our standpoint, physical or aesthetic. Moreover, the treatment is not partial or piecemeal; the statue was in the marble from the beginning, and is an entity from its initial stage: in many ways each stage is equally fine. The paradox of Michael Angelo's technique is that his abozzo is really a finished ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... contained the soul of the mother. If the mother does not eat the soul-bird during her accouchement the child will be stillborn or will die shortly after birth (ii. 4, 192, 194, 216). She keeps the soul-bird within the birth-bamboo, and does not eat it all at once, but piecemeal (ii. 6). All human souls grow upon a soul-tree in the other world, whence they are fetched by a bird which was killed and eaten by the ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... write two operas for the Roman Carnival of 1816. The first was brought out Dec. 26, 1815, and the same day he bound himself to furnish the second by Jan. 20, 1816, with no knowledge of what the libretto would be. Sterbini furnished him with the story of the "Barber" by piecemeal, and as fast as the verses were given him he wrote the music. The whole work was finished in less than three weeks. Its original title was "Almaviva, ossia l'inutile precauzione," to distinguish it from Paisiello's "Barber ...
— The Standard Operas (12th edition) • George P. Upton
... herself piecemeal, or over and over again, yet deem herself perfectly loyal.—And perhaps ...
— Hints for Lovers • Arnold Haultain
... invented occasionally some miserable tale for the day, in order meanly to sneak out of difficulties into which they had proudly strutted. And they were put to all these shifts and devices, full of meanness and full of mischief, in order to pilfer piecemeal a repeal of an act which they had not the generous courage, when they found and felt their error, honorably and fairly to disclaim. By such management, by the irresistible operation of feeble counsels, ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... ones, in that Early English style of which Lincoln Cathedral was the first example on a large scale. In 1220 it was followed by Beverley Minster (see p. 189). The nave of Salisbury Cathedral was begun in 1240 (see p. 206), and a new Westminster Abbey grew piecemeal under Henry's own supervision during the greater part of the reign (see p. 205). Mental activity accompanied material activity. At Oxford there were reckoned 15,000 scholars. Most remarkable was the new departure taken ...
— A Student's History of England, v. 1 (of 3) - From the earliest times to the Death of King Edward VII • Samuel Rawson Gardiner
... Caen. The four enormous piers upon which it rests were weakened by the ignorance of early restorers, who cut into them freely, and dug graves in such manner as to imperil their foundations. The most arduous work of Sir Gilbert Scott was the strengthening of these piers, effected piecemeal by partial reconstruction of the piers themselves and by laying a durable substratum of cement right down to the chalk. The fine ring of eight bells was rehung. Visitors will find the ascent of the spiral ...
— Hertfordshire • Herbert W Tompkins
... for the law to reach; or where if it could reach, the power of the government would prove much too weak to enforce obedience to it. To do justice to all parties, America should be examined and portrayed piecemeal, every state separately, for every state is different, running down the scale from refinement to a state of barbarism almost unprecedented; but each presenting matter for investigation and research, and curious examples of cause ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... the godlike in presence: "Be'st thou indeed of the train of the Peleiades Achilles? Come then, discover the truth: be there nothing, I pray, of concealment. Is my son still at the galleys, or has he already been flung forth, Piecemeal torn, for a feast to the dogs, by the ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... a good deal of information during the last few days," Brand said. "Some of it has come through a source which I may not reveal—piecemeal, and in disconnected fragments. You will have to take a good deal ...
— The Traitors • E. Phillips (Edward Phillips) Oppenheim
... procure some mitigation of his sentence, now that he perceived his doom, gave way to one of those fearful bursts of rage which no experience had succeeded in teaching him to curb. He howled till the dirt sticking about the vaulted ceiling, and the earth choking up the air-hole, dropped piecemeal to the ground, and every insect that had ears covered them up the best way it could to prevent its becoming instantaneously deafened by the horrid sound; then tearing round and round and round the confined ...
— The Adventures of a Bear - And a Great Bear too • Alfred Elwes
... lack, indeed, of men who had in view the re-establishment of the Gracchan constitution, or of projects to attain piecemeal in the way of constitutional reform what Lepidus and Sertorius had attempted by the path of revolution. The government had already under the pressure of the agitation of Lepidus immediately after the death of Sulla consented to a limited revival of the largesses ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... have to face men endowed with the courage of despair in this quarter; and fearing cold steel more than anything else, they have decided that the only way of reaching their prey is by blowing them up piecemeal. That is why they have taken to mining—most audacious mining, carried on under the noses of the French defenders. If you come here at night, and remain until one of those curious lulls in the rifle-fire suddenly begins, you will distinctly hear this ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... book piecemeal, however, the author's statements of his own observations and analysis are so thorough and so admirable, his drawings so good, and the interest of many separate portions so great, that it seems hardly fair to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... sing. She never sang to the piano,—only about her work. She made up little snatches, piecemeal, of various things, and put them to any sort of words. This time it ...
— We Girls: A Home Story • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... to mystical signification, but "spiritually," that is, invisibly, and by the power of the spirit. Hence (Tract. xxvii), expounding John 6:64: "the flesh profiteth nothing," he says: "Yea, but as they understood it, for they understood that the flesh was to be eaten as it is divided piecemeal in a dead body, or as sold in the shambles, not as it is quickened by the spirit . . . Let the spirit draw nigh to the flesh . . . then the flesh profiteth very much: for if the flesh profiteth nothing, the ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... Sisenna (praetor B.C. 78), author of Historiae of the Social and Civil Wars (Vell. Pat. ii. 9). Cicero thought him superior to his predecessors, but childish (Brut. 228, De Leg. i. 7), and Sallust remarks his want of frankness in speaking of Sulla's career (Iug. 95). He avoided a piecemeal and desultory treatment of events; cf. his own words quoted by Gell. xii. 15, 2, 'Nos una aestate in Asia et Graecia gesta litteris idcirco continentia mandavimus, ne vellicatim aut saltuatim scribendo lectorum animos impediremus.' His translation of the Milesiaka ...
— The Student's Companion to Latin Authors • George Middleton
... have something to say about "Resurrection," which I have read not piecemeal, in parts, but as a whole, at one go. It is a remarkable artistic production. The least interesting part is all that is said of Nehludov's relations with Katusha; and the most interesting the princes, the generals, ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... to all manner of torture, failed in their efforts, and declared themselves beaten, not knowing what further punishment to inflict, and marvelling that she still lived, with her body pierced through and through, and torn piecemeal by so many tortures, of which a single one should have sufficed to kill her. But that blessed saint, like a valiant athlete, took fresh courage and strength from the confession of her faith; all feeling of pain vanished, and ease returned to her at the mere utterance of the ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... although it tends to select and emphasize some parts of the field, is composed by adding together a multitude of views. When this painting is observed in its turn, it is surveyed as a real landscape would be, and apperceived partially and piecemeal; although, of course, it offers much less wealth of material than its living original, ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... of this experience Brother Grube, with a touch of modest pride, observes: "People had told us that this hill was most dangerous, and that we would scarcely be able to cross it, for Morgan Bryan, the first to travel this way, had to take the wheels off his wagon and carry it piecemeal to the top, and had been three months on the journey from the Shanidore [Shenandoah] ...
— The Conquest of the Old Southwest • Archibald Henderson
... kept back the Cossacks for some time, and left the army time to resume its deplorable flight. A large number of exhausted men fell into the hands of the enemy; the fragments of our ruined regiments disappeared piecemeal. At Ponare, where the road between Wilna and Kowno rises, the baggage which they had with great difficulty dragged so far, the flags taken from the enemy, the army-chest, the trophies carried off from Moscow, all remained scattered at the ...
— Worlds Best Histories - France Vol 7 • M. Guizot and Madame Guizot De Witt
... prospect of success, and immediately disappearing ignominiously; making frantic grasps and clutches with a hundred long arms and eager outstretched hands, and finally succeeding, by shoulders and fists, in bringing the wreath away piecemeal; and then they give themselves up to mutual embraces, groans, laments, and all the enginery of pathetic affection in the last gasping throes of separation,—to the doleful tearing of hair and the rending of their fantastic garments. It is the personification of legalized ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... exhibiting an humble copy of the conjugal affection of those whose memorials her husband had so loyally preserved. Whether to give full credit or not to the old sacristan's narration, I do not know; but it appears more probable that even so large a monument was removed piecemeal at short notice, than that the malice of the brigands would have allowed it to stand unhurt; and there is besides an ingenuity and presence of mind shown in the preservation of St. Nicholas, quite consistent with the character of M. Menestrier, ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... of the triumphant youth above him, finally in his completed torso. But each stage is finished relatively. Completion is relative to distance; the Brutus is finished or unfinished according to our standpoint, physical or aesthetic. Moreover, the treatment is not partial or piecemeal; the statue was in the marble from the beginning, and is an entity from its initial stage: in many ways each stage is equally fine. The paradox of Michael Angelo's technique is that his abozzo is really a finished study. The Victory also shows how the ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... should have stooped to write the JOLLY BEGGARS. The SATURDAY NIGHT may or may not be an admirable poem; but its significance is trebled, and the power and range of the poet first appears, when it is set beside the JOLLY BEGGARS. To take a man's work piecemeal, except with the design of elegant extracts, is the way to avoid, and not to perform, the critic's duty. The same defect is displayed in the treatment of Burns as a man, which is broken, apologetical, and confused. The man here presented to us is not that Burns, TERES ATQUE ROTUNDUS - a ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the civilizations of the past, based on a quagmire of pauperism and ignorance, or overhung by an avalanche of revolution. Other peoples, emerging from, a condition of serfdom, retaining many of the instincts of a conquered race, get what liberty they have by extorting it piecemeal from their masters. Magna Charta was forced from a weak monarch by a conspiracy of nobles, acting from purely selfish motives, in behalf of their own order. The Habeas Corpus Act was unpalatable to the Lords, and was passed only by a trick ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... The 2d Wisconsin came up the hill, then the 79th and 69th New York. An impact followed that seemed to rock the globe. Wisconsin and New York retired whence they came, and it was all done in a moment. Other regiments took their places. McDowell was making a frontal attack and sending in his brigades piecemeal. The plateau was uneven; low ridges, shallow hollows, with clumps of pine and oak; one saw at a time but a segment of the field. The nature of the ground split the troops as with wedges; over all the Henry Hill the fighting now became from hand to hand, in the woods and in the open, ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... you ever, Peace, wild wooddove, shy wings shut, Your round me roaming end, and under be my boughs? When, when, Peace, will you, Peace? I'll not play hypocrite To own my heart: I yield you do come sometimes; but That piecemeal peace is poor peace. What pure peace allows Alarms of wars, the daunting wars, the ...
— Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins - Now First Published • Gerard Manley Hopkins
... and pitiful flotsam that reluctant seas have washed to us piecemeal from a remote past, there are, as will be shown later, many things which, although proceeding from a culture and modes of thought as far removed from our own as they may well be,[1] are worth the reading, which do not require any special knowledge for their understanding; and of these are ...
— The Instruction of Ptah-Hotep and the Instruction of Ke'Gemni - The Oldest Books in the World • Battiscombe G. Gunn
... God's fair living world for a pallid, vacant Hades and extinct Pandemonium. But through such Purgatory pain," continues he, "it is appointed us to pass; first must the dead Letter of Religion own itself dead, and drop piecemeal into dust, if the living Spirit of Religion, freed from this its charnel-house, is to arise on us, new-born of Heaven, and with ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... godlike in presence: "Be'st thou indeed of the train of the Peleiades Achilles? Come then, discover the truth: be there nothing, I pray, of concealment. Is my son still at the galleys, or has he already been flung forth, Piecemeal torn, for a feast to the dogs, by the ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... Earl of Chatham, saw that the British Empire had reached a crisis in its development. Incompetence, inertia, had blurred its prestige, and the little victories which France, its chief enemy, had been winning against it piecemeal, were coming to be regarded as signs that the grandeur of Britain was passing. Pitt saw the gloomy situation, and the still gloomier future which it seemed to prophesy, but he saw also the remedy. ...
— George Washington • William Roscoe Thayer
... a twinkling, as if some unseen baggage-train carried pontoons for my convenience, and while from the heights I scan the tempting but unexplored Pacific Ocean of Futurity, the ship is being carried over the mountains piecemeal on the backs of mules and lamas, whose keel shall plough its waves, and bear me to the Indies. Day would not dawn ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... pause was hardly noticeable. He walked on at once. But years could not have instructed him more thoroughly than that one second. He had received a revelation. Like all revelations, he received it in its entirety and realized it piecemeal. His thoughts stumbled over each other in confusion.... Desire at John's office at this unusual hour? ... Desire in her prettiest frock and smiling ... smiling, and so lost in her own thoughts that she saw no one ... Desire ... ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... otherwise, I should have purchased the ticket piecemeal. I cannot endure to travel all night. It fatigues me ...
— Try and Trust • Horatio Alger
... have a powerful reality and relevance for planners. They impose a need for breadth of view, for leaving many future options open, and by the same token they present a danger of piecemeal action, excessive compromise ...
— The Nation's River - The Department of the Interior Official Report on the Potomac • United States Department of the Interior
... lips, and a disposition to glandular swelling; dyspnoea and difficulty of breathing; the voice hoarse and barking; the aspect of the face frightful, and of a dark colour; the pulse small, almost imperceptible." Sometimes the limbs drop off, piecemeal ...
— The Leper in England: with some account of English lazar-houses • Robert Charles Hope
... sheets are alone no light burden. Between his teeth—both his hands being occupied with the balancing of the bundle—he carries his chit: that indispensable list. Arrived at the store he dumps the bundle on the ground, opens it, and pitches its contents piecemeal over a counter to one of the staff of the store. One by one the objects are named and counted aloud, as they fly across the counter, the staff orderly simultaneously checking the list and keeping an eye on what he is receiving. For we may, ...
— Observations of an Orderly - Some Glimpses of Life and Work in an English War Hospital • Ward Muir
... placed the traitor on my throne. Behold the faith of him who saved from fire His honour'd household gods, his aged sire His pious shoulders from Troy's flames did bear; Why did I not his carcase piecemeal tear, 180 And cast it in the sea? why not destroy All his companions, and beloved boy Ascanius? and his tender limbs have dress'd, And made the father on the son to feast? Thou Sun! whose lustre all things here below Surveys; and Juno! conscious of my woe; Revengeful Furies! and Queen Hecate! Receive ...
— Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham • Edmund Waller; John Denham
... far away from everyone one knows. Old Kesterton, choleric-looking individual nearly opposite, will curse the cooking till he's black in the face, but he never misses a dinner. The Semitic looking young man opposite, who seems to have been committing you to memory piecemeal, will tell you that he was never so bored in all his life as he has been here. Yet ...
— Anna the Adventuress • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... can't say. They were once in Middlesex. Probably much of the land, as it was sold piecemeal, fell into small allotments, constantly changing hands. But the last relics of the property were, I know, bought on speculation by Cox the distiller; for, when we were in London, by Mr. Darrell's desire I went to look after them, and inquire if they could ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... those dark and swollen waters? what use to demand of them the bright form, that, it might be, slept beneath them?-it might be, had been washed piecemeal to the ocean? ...
— Outpost • J.G. Austin
... which they had started, the two that Lewis had taken on to the station were the only survivors; and all their equipment had been abandoned piecemeal in the desert. ...
— The Explorers of Australia and their Life-work • Ernest Favenc
... about Space vagrantly onward; - I shall unfold: thou simply give all thyself to my teaching. Matter mingled and massed into indissoluble union Does not exist. For we see how wastes each separate substance; So flow piecemeal away, with the length'ning centuries, all things, Till from our eye by degrees that old self passes, and is not. Still Universal Nature abides unchanged as aforetime. Whereof this is the cause. When the atoms part from a substance, That ...
— Verses and Translations • C. S. C.
... their lines in summer and in winter. Possibly the same condition applies to the west, though I cannot speak with any authority on that subject. Apparently this obvious action of the Germans is exactly what happened. When their northern front had been combed, we find forces subtracted piecemeal from the north, reaching an aggregate of thirty divisions, or at least nearly fifteen divisions more than had been anticipated. The doom ...
— World's War Events, Vol. II • Various
... that he would see to it that his friend Daniel should not be robbed. He intended, therefore, to go himself to Anjou to call upon those who were likely to purchase, and to be present at the sale. In his opinion, it would be wiser to sell piecemeal, without hurry. If money was needed, why, one could always get ...
— The Clique of Gold • Emile Gaboriau
... as an instinctive expectation, and which the advance of knowledge will confirm and explain. For in that pellucid atmosphere of the Greek mind, untroubled as yet by theoretic mists, there may have been visible the very things which our scientific instruments are enabling us to see and reconstruct piecemeal, great groupings of reality metamorphosed into Fata Morgana cities seemingly ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... on this matter, and have figured to myself what may be the fate of our current literature, when retrieved piecemeal by future antiquaries, from among the rubbish of ages. What a Magnus Apollo, for instance, will Moore become among sober divines and dusty schoolmen! Even his festive and amatory songs, which are now the mere quickeners of our ...
— Bracebridge Hall • Washington Irving
... a Christian device; search the temple till the accursed Nazarene be found, and hew him piecemeal—' More he would have said, but, at the instant, a bolt of lightning shot from the heavens, and, lighting upon a large sycamore which shaded a part of the temple court, clove it in twain. The swollen cloud, at the same moment, burst, and a deluge of rain poured ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... speech in Great Britain, but it was delivered piecemeal in different places. Its exordium was uttered on the ninth of October at Manchester, and its peroration was pronounced on the twentieth of the same month in Exeter Hall. He has himself furnished us an analysis of the train of representations and arguments of which this protracted and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... tower, whose graceful base the honeysuckle and eglantine no longer encircle, and whose winding access, once decorated with flowers of the richest beauty and perfume, is now overgrown with moss, decayed, and falling piecemeal to ...
— The Stranger in France • John Carr
... years and spreads the cost over the period during which the public is being benefited. Better prices are obtained on contracts for a large mileage than for smaller jobs, and the community can receive the benefit more quickly than where construction proceeds piecemeal with current funds. The vital consideration is to insure that the term of the bonds is well within the useful life of the road, and that ample provision is made to maintain the roads during that period. ...
— American Rural Highways • T. R. Agg
... the way to the staircase, and hurried on to the drawing-room, with the massive front door being broken piecemeal by the heavy sledge-hammer; but each chain and bolt still held, and there was no way in yet but for light and noise, so that, before they gave way, Frank had time to get a light and ignite the candles in two sets ...
— In Honour's Cause - A Tale of the Days of George the First • George Manville Fenn
... the jetty, seeing nothing, doing nothing, and being very much in the way—and then wonder, as we wondered, at the marvellous dexterity of our three valiant sailors, who succeeded in transporting piecemeal the crockery, cookery, and general contents of the cart into the vessel, on that pitchy night, without breaking, dropping, or forgetting anything. When I hear of professional conjurors performing remarkable feats, I think of the brothers Dobbs, and the loading of the Tomtit in the darkness; and ...
— Rambles Beyond Railways; - or, Notes in Cornwall taken A-foot • Wilkie Collins
... well he him did guard That piecemeal lay his armour scattered; And still fought hard that stalwart lord Until his beamy shield ...
— Axel Thordson and Fair Valborg - a ballad • Thomas J. Wise
... indignation, and gnasheth with his teeth, and namely when he hungreth, and spieth and lieth in wait, to take beasts which pass by the way. He hideth himself in privy caves, and reseth on beasts unawares, and slayeth them with his teeth and claws, and breaketh all their members, and eateth them piecemeal: and if he see any come against him to take away his prey, then he beclippeth the prey, and grunteth and smiteth the earth with his tail, and if he nigheth him he leapeth on him, and overcometh him, and turneth to the prey. First he drinketh and licketh the blood of the beast that he slayeth, ...
— Mediaeval Lore from Bartholomew Anglicus • Robert Steele
... thought of and perpetrated by these monsters under human form. The sufferings of Jesus from thirst, caused by the fever which his wounds and sufferings had brought on, were intense.11 He trembled all over, his flesh was torn piecemeal, his tongue contracted, and the only refreshment he received was the blood which trickled from his head on to his parched lips. This shameful scene was protracted a full half-hour, and the Roman soldiers continued during the whole time to applaud and encourage the ...
— The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ • Anna Catherine Emmerich
... law was no mean achievement; and the law of association by contiguity in experience holds good. If one thing recalls another to your mind, you can be sure that the two {397} have been contiguous in your experience, either as wholes or piecemeal. For two things to become associated, ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... his saddle in pawn to the white professional gambler for his $5.00, and it was not five minutes before the white gambler had the saddle and $5.00 both. Then, when they had nothing else left to bet, so intense was their love for gambling, they began to put themselves in pawn, piecemeal, saying: 'I'll bet you my whole body.' That means 'I'll put myself in pawn to you as your slave to serve you as you will for a ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... rebel and mutiny against that law, all was over with them. That great, foolish, ignorant multitude would have broken up, probably fought among themselves—certainly parted company, and either starved in the desert, or have been destroyed piecemeal by the wild warlike tribes, Midianites, Moabites, Amalekites—who were ready enough for slaughter and plunder. They would never have reached Canaan. They would never have become a great nation. So they had to be, by necessity, under martial law. The word must be, Obey or die. As for any cruelty ...
— The Gospel of the Pentateuch • Charles Kingsley
... features. This showed that the second scene came long after the first: my father must by that time have begun to resemble his later self. A weird feeling stole over me. Was I going to relive my previous life, piecemeal? Was the past going to unroll itself in slow but regular panorama to my sleeping vision? Was my First State to become known like this in ...
— Recalled to Life • Grant Allen
... on the Zambesi, were rejoicing in the prospect of securing captives to carry the tusks for them. "We shall now," said they, "get both corn and clothes in plenty." They were in a sad state, poor fellows; for the rains we had encountered had made their skin-clothing drop off piecemeal, and they were looked upon with disgust by the well-fed and well-clothed Zambesians. They were, however, veterans in marauding, and the head men, instead of being depressed by fear, as the people of Mpende intended should be the case in using their charms, ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... their religion among the natives of Luzon, and were giving them instructions, ceremonies, and the form of observing their religion, by means of certain gazizes [333] whom they brought with them. Already a considerable number, and those the chiefest men, were commencing, although by piecemeal, to become Moros, and were being circumcised [334] and taking the names of Moros. Had the Spaniards' coming been delayed longer, that religion would have spread throughout the island, and even through the others, and it would have been difficult to extirpate it. The mercy of God checked it ...
— History of the Philippine Islands Vols 1 and 2 • Antonio de Morga
... attempt to abolish the slave-trade] which has just sprung up, and which has slept for twenty years together, were allowed to sleep one summer longer, it would appear to me rather more wise than thus to take up a subject piecemeal, which it has been publicly declared ought not to be agitated at all till next session of Parliament. Perhaps, by such imprudence, the slaves themselves may be prompted by their own authority, to proceed at once ...
— The Trial of Theodore Parker • Theodore Parker
... established himself in a fortified camp on the summit of one of the twin hills. He hung over the town of Patusan like a hawk over a poultry-yard, but he devastated the open country. Whole villages, deserted, rotted on their blackened posts over the banks of clear streams, dropping piecemeal into the water the grass of their walls, the leaves of their roofs, with a curious effect of natural decay as if they had been a form of vegetation stricken by a blight at its very root. The two parties in ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... or generally: I speak of literal facts. Giotto's frescoes at Assisi are perishing at this moment for want of decent care; Tintoret's pictures in San Sebastian, at Venice, are at this instant rotting piecemeal into grey rags; St. Louis's chapel, at Carcassonne, is at this moment lying in shattered fragments in the market-place. And here we are all cawing and crowing, poor little half-fledged daws as we are, about the pretty sticks and wool in our own nests. There's ...
— A Joy For Ever - (And Its Price in the Market) • John Ruskin
... through the rushes, when suddenly he stopped as if rooted to the ground, with hands thrown up and eyes bulging from his head. At his feet lay the corpses of his morning comrades,—scalped, stripped, hacked almost piecemeal! Then the instinct of the hunted thing, of flight, of self-protection, eclipsed momentary terror, and the boy was ducking into the rushes to hide when, with a crash of musketry from the woods, the Iroquois ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... so sprinkled and dropped about in all directions, without seeming to have any root at all in the ground; and the small churches and chapels are so prim, and bright, and highly varnished; that I almost believed the whole affair could be taken up piecemeal like a child's toy, and ...
— American Notes for General Circulation • Charles Dickens
... the most part, in rapt silence—perhaps the model's silence was contagious—but gradually through the days I grew to communion with his shy soul, and piecemeal I learnt his sufferings. I give his story, so far as I can, in his own words, which I often paused to take down, when ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... coming out of the drawing-room window to meet the travellers—a lady whose presence diffused that sense of refinement and peace into the atmosphere which has done as much towards the expansion of our piecemeal empire as ever did the strong right arm of Thomas Atkins. It is because—sooner or later—these ladies come with us that we have learnt to mingle peace with war—to ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... the sun) till I changed my position, when behold! the vireo was a linnet. A strange performance, indeed! What could have set this fluent vocalist to practicing exercises of such an inferior, disconnected, piecemeal sort? Within the next week or two, however, the same game was played upon me several times, and in different places. No doubt the trick is an old one, familiar to many observers, but to me it had all the charm ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... perfectly secure from sudden attack. And space, especially when means of communication are scanty, and the country affords few supplies, is the greatest of all obstacles. The hostile territory must be subjugated piecemeal, state by state, province by province, as was Asia by Alexander; and after each victory a new base of supply must be provisioned and secured, no matter at what cost of time, before a further advance can be attempted. Had Napoleon in the campaign against Russia remained ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... Women were handicapped; they had to fight much harder to achieve equal results. People didn't give them jobs in the same way. Young men possessed the earth; young women had to wrest what they wanted out of it piecemeal. Johnny might end a cabinet minister, a notorious journalist, a Labour leader, anything.... Women's jobs were, as a rule, so dowdy and unimportant. Jane was bored to death with this sex business; it wasn't fair. ...
— Potterism - A Tragi-Farcical Tract • Rose Macaulay
... We pumped all night, all day, all the week,—watch and watch. She was working herself loose, and leaked badly—not enough to drown us at once, but enough to kill us with the work at the pumps. And while we pumped the ship was going from us piecemeal: the bulwarks went, the stanchions were torn out, the ventilators smashed, the cabin-door burst in. There was not a dry spot in the ship. She was being gutted bit by bit. The long-boat changed, as if by magic, into matchwood where she stood in her gripes. I had lashed her myself, and was ...
— Youth • Joseph Conrad
... been wrung from her piecemeal, but was finally told in full, and in the presence of the officers and civilians indicated. She had married in April, '65, to the scorn of her people, a young Yankee officer attached to the commissary department. She had starved all through the war. She longed ...
— Waring's Peril • Charles King
... breadwinners have furnished the money for all these things we're so proud of having built, including the Mt. Desert cottages and the Wyoming hunting-lodge. It means that we've got to be able to read our book of the Black Art backwards as well as forwards, or the Powers we've conjured up will tear piecemeal both them and us. God! it makes me crawl to ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick
... That machinery of life for the use of people who didn't know what they wanted of it, and which was known at the time as State Socialism, was partly put in motion, though in a very piecemeal way. But it did not work smoothly; it was, of course, resisted at every turn by the capitalists; and no wonder, for it tended more and more to upset the commercial system I have told you of; without providing anything really ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris
... with intent to copy or dissect! Here is grammar done without deliberation: the phrases carry their meaning simply and by a sort of limpid reflection; the thought is a living thing, not an image ingeniously contrived and wrought. Pray leave the text whole: it has no meaning piecemeal; at any rate, not that best, wholesome meaning, as of a frank and genial friend who talks, not for himself or for his phrase, but for you. It is questionable morals to dismember a living frame to seek for its ...
— On Being Human • Woodrow Wilson
... thunderbolts are a sovereign remedy for rheumatism; and in the popular pharmacopoeia of Ireland they have been employed with success for ophthalmia, pleurisy, and many other painful diseases. If finely powdered and swallowed piecemeal, they render the person who swallows them invulnerable for the rest of his lifetime. But they cannot conscientiously be recommended for dyspepsia and other forms ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... to move in the dense mass, he pressed his hands over his ears. He could not shut out those shrieks! When would they end? What in the name of the God of mercy were they doing? Tearing her piecemeal? Yes, and worse than that. And still the shrieks rang on, and still the great Christ looked down on Philammon with that calm, intolerable eye, and would not turn away. And over his head was written in the rainbow, "I ...
— The Speaker, No. 5: Volume II, Issue 1 - December, 1906. • Various
... Wilton grew up together friends, though not bound by common sympathies. The latter has known life early, and "earned experience piecemeal:" with the former, thought has already ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... it could only be dealt with piecemeal," said Mr. Britling. "And that is just where the tremendous opportunity of this war comes in. Now everything becomes fluid. We can redraw the map of the world. A week ago we were all quarrelling bitterly about things too little for human impatience. Now suddenly we face an ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... Monsieur, two mortal hours in this inn, fried by the sun, bored to death, murdered piecemeal by flies, and infuriated by the want of hospitality in ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... severed heads, Sylla sits before the temple of Castor and sells the lands of his dead enemies; and Catiline is first known to history as the executioner of Caius Gratidianus, whom he slices to death, piecemeal, beyond the Tiber. ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... regard for their own safety, had withdrawn all their soldiers within the peninsula, and began hastily to build a wall across the isthmus of Corinth with the hope of keeping back the invading army. Athens was left to care for itself. It was thus that Greece usually let itself be devoured piecemeal. ...
— Historic Tales, vol 10 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... and harmonium—a small bellows organ without legs—were easier to carry than the dulcimer, he left it and trudged eastward. And no one at that tavern could tell whether he and his instruments had perished piecemeal along the way, or whether he had found crowded houses and forgotten the old dulcimer ...
— Old Caravan Days • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... world. I expect to hear you scream hither: if you don't I shall be disappointed, for I have kept it as a most profound secret from you, till I was ready to surprise you with it: I knew your impatience, and would not let you have it piecemeal. It is the Life of the great philosopher, Lord Herbert, written by himself.(631) Now are you disappointed? Well, read it—not the first forty pages, of which you will be sick—I will not anticipate it, but I will tell you the history. I found it a year ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... no common face, none of those willow-pattern ones which Nature turns out by thousands at her potteries, but more like a chance specimen of the Chinese ware,—one to the set; unique, antique, quaint, you might have sworn to it piecemeal,—a separate affidavit to ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... union of well-ordered husbandry with the civilities of ancient city-life that we break the journey at Parma between Milan and Bologna. We are attracted rather by the fame of one great painter, whose work, though it may be studied piecemeal in many galleries of Europe, in Parma has a fulness, largeness, and mastery that can nowhere else be found. In Parma alone Correggio challenges comparison with Raphael, with Tintoret, with all the supreme ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... minor pulses we can indeed go on to ascertain or to compute indefinitely if we have patience; but it would contradict the definition of an infinite number to suppose the endless series of them to have actually counted themselves out piecemeal. Zeno made this manifest; so the infinity which our intellect requires of the sense-datum is thus a future and potential rather than a past and actual infinity of structure. The datum after it has made itself must be decomposable ad infinitum ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... "Never would you have been whole save by the blood of this Black Knight. And for this carried they off the body piecemeal and the head, for that they well knew you were wounded; and of the head shall I have right sore need, for thereby shall a castle be yielded up to me that was reft from me by treason, so I may find the knight that I go seek, through whom it ought to ...
— High History of the Holy Graal • Unknown
... a claim with which to harass others; the Maori signed a worthless document on receipt of a few goods. By 1840 it was estimated that, outside the sweeping claim on the South Island, 26,000,000 acres, or more than a third of the area of New Zealand, was supposed to have been gobbled up piecemeal by the land-sharks. The claims arising out of these transactions were certain at the best to cause confusion, ill-feeling, and trouble, and indeed did so. Some legally-constituted authority was clearly wanted ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... sworn men were not to judge testimony truly, but to bear witness truly. They were to bring into court their own knowledge of the case, and of any circumstances that threw light upon it, including the general opinion and persuasion of the neighbourhood. There was no attempt to collect evidence piecemeal, and to rise above the level of local rumour, by a patient judicial investigation. This provides us with something like a measure of the intellectual stage of the public mind in Saxon times, and will perhaps justify these remarks if they have ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... ribbons, and all joined with the soldiers in moving directly toward the place where the white flag was flapping its misplaced triumph over eyes which glared at it in hatred and hands which quivered to rend it piecemeal. Their wishes were anticipated; for the foremost rank had scarcely reached the threshold of the palace, when down went the ensign of the Bourbons, and the much-loved tricolor streamed out amidst thunder shouts which seemed to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... Manganja on which to work. It was possible that the Ajawa might be persuaded to something better, though, from having long been in the habit of slaving for the Quillimane market, it was not very probable. But the Manganja could easily be overcome piecemeal by any enemy; old feuds made them glad to see calamities befall their next neighbours. We counselled them to unite against the common enemies of their country, and added distinctly that we English would on no account enter into their quarrels. ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone
... it may be cast off entire or piecemeal. The embryo (child) alone may escape, the neck of the womb contracts and shuts; bleeding persists for an indefinite period, for weeks and weeks, until the health of the poor woman is seriously affected. Persistent ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... which the author had yet published and from most of his subsequent work. It is not unnoteworthy that the batch of poems called in the later collected editions Switzerland, and completed at last by the piece called On the Terrace at Berne, appeared originally piecemeal, and with no indication of connection. The first of its numbers is here, To my Friends who Ridiculed a Tender Leave-taking. It applies both the note of thought which has been indicated, and the ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... was sinking into the depths of the sea.... Not as a ship sinks, but piecemeal, her walls and towers crumbling and toppling as a child's sand-castle crumbles under the attack of the lapping waves. Down they crashed, carrying their freight of black, clinging, human ants, while from the sea's depths a wave, a mile ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May, 1930 • Various
... Except for all these wounded men, and the uniforms, I'd never think of it. No guns, no action, no—no dawn patrols. I feel like a fish out of water. But there must be some little old war going on up there. I've heard about Chateau-Thierry, by piecemeal. Boy! It was the big show starting the very morning I got it, and we didn't even know it. Just my luck to get forced down at a ...
— Aces Up • Covington Clarke
... villain, vassal, slave to Tamburlaine, Unworthy to embrace or touch the ground That bears the honour of my royal weight; Stoop, villain, stoop! stoop; [198] for so he bids That may command thee piecemeal to be torn, Or scatter'd like the lofty cedar-trees Struck with the ...
— Tamburlaine the Great, Part I. • Christopher Marlowe
... namely, that a vast store of knowledge is already contained in the subconscious mind of man (and the animals) and only needs the provocation of outer experience to bring it to the surface; and that in the second stage of human psychology this process of crude and piecemeal externalization is taking place, in preparation for the final or third stage in which the knowledge will be re-absorbed and become direct and intuitional on a high and harmonious plane—something like the present ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... within three or four leagues of Hesdin. The Emperor's soldiers were in garrison there, with a number of peasants from the country road. M. de Vendosme called on them to surrender; they made answer that he should never take them, unless it were piecemeal; let him do his worst, and they would do their best to defend themselves. They trusted in their moats, which were full of water; but in two hours, with plenty of faggots and casks, we made a way for our infantry to pass over, when they had to advance to the assault; and the ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... alcohol, while his stomach is inflamed, blood vitiated, brain hardened, nerves exhausted, senses perverted, and all his feelings changed by the accursed stuff with which he has been poisoning himself to death, piecemeal, for years, and which suddenly, and all at once, manifests its accumulated strength over him. In sixteen months I have fought a thousand battles, every one more fearful than the soldier faces upon the field of conflict, where it rains lead and hails shot ...
— Fifteen Years in Hell • Luther Benson
... thus The shade of his Patroclus, sad, bespake. Hail, oh Patroclus, even in Ades hail! For I will now accomplish to the full My promise pledged to thee, that I would give 25 Hector dragg'd hither to be torn by dogs Piecemeal, and would before thy funeral pile The necks dissever of twelve Trojan youths Of noblest rank, resentful of thy death. He said, and meditating foul disgrace 30 To noble Hector, stretch'd him prone in dust Beside the bier of Menoetiades. Then all the Myrmidons their radiant arms ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... your spouse Hath sent defiance to the king your husband, And, like a tried tall soldier, fled his holds In Marchland, where he knows, despite of him And all the men that he therein can raise, King John could have sent dogs enou' to tear Their ill-arm'd bodies piecemeal, ere his bands Should with base blood have stain'd their noble hands. And whither is this worshipful good earl (This first love, old love, new love, if you will) Gone, thinks your ladyship? forsooth, good man, ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... silence, friend and foe falling one upon another. But it is always the easier to destroy; and when a single note upon the tucket recalled the attacking party from this desperate service, much of the barricade had been removed piecemeal, and the whole fabric had sunk to half its height, and tottered ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 8 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... foundation of a diversified banking system, the development of stock markets, the rapid growth of the non-state sector, and the opening to foreign trade and investment. China has generally implemented reforms in a gradualist or piecemeal fashion, including the sale of equity in China's largest state banks to foreign investors and refinements in foreign exchange and bond markets in 2005. The restructuring of the economy and resulting efficiency gains have contributed to a more than tenfold ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... wrought to great advantage, supplying nearly all the coined currency of the world. A little further onward was the spot where Lot's wife had stood forever under the semblance of a pillar of salt. Curious travellers have long since carried it away piecemeal. Had all regrets been punished as rigorously as this poor dame's were, my yearning for the relinquished delights of Vanity Fair might have produced a similar change in my own corporeal substance, and left me a warning ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... extended to the wing, and was solid and permanent, and bade fair to overflow into the courtyard, and through the entrance-gates, and across the street, and to the very kitchen-garden and flower-garden themselves. Also, it seemed to have been stolen piecemeal from somewhere, and at different periods, and from different localities, and tacked at haphazard on to the walls of the parent erection. Moreover, all the windows of the latter were small, and in their ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... was no easy one, and it tested to the full the tact and ingenuity of the Chairman. Mr. Dodson, Sir Charles Dilke's immediate predecessor at the Local Government Board, and Lord Carlingford represented the views which had hitherto prevailed in favour of piecemeal and gradual reform. Mr. Chamberlain, Lord Kimberley, and Lord Edmond Fitzmaurice were, on the contrary, supporters of the large Bill which the Chairman had prepared; while Mr. Childers, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, was there mainly to keep a vigilant ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... early restorers, who cut into them freely, and dug graves in such manner as to imperil their foundations. The most arduous work of Sir Gilbert Scott was the strengthening of these piers, effected piecemeal by partial reconstruction of the piers themselves and by laying a durable substratum of cement right down to the chalk. The fine ring of eight bells was rehung. Visitors will find the ascent of the spiral staircase long and arduous, but will be rewarded by the almost unrivalled view ...
— Hertfordshire • Herbert W Tompkins
... before his time Was Arthur born, and all as soon as born Deliver'd at a secret postern-gate To Merlin, to be holden far apart Until his hour should come; because the lords Of that fierce day were as the lords of this, Wild beasts, and surely would have torn the child Piecemeal among them, had they known; for each But sought to rule for his own self and hand, And many hated Uther for the sake Of Gorlois. Wherefore Merlin took the child, And gave him to Sir Anton, an old knight And ancient friend of Uther; and his wife Nursed the young prince, ...
— Famous Tales of Fact and Fancy - Myths and Legends of the Nations of the World Retold for Boys and Girls • Various
... urged him to fly into the city. "Why should I fly?" said the Moor—"to be reserved for hunger and slavery? I tell you, wife, I will await the foe here, for better is it to die quickly by the steel than to perish piecemeal in chains and dungeons." He said no more, but resumed his occupation of weaving, and in the indiscriminate fury of the assault was ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... nature's wane in art a cure. These dames, amidst their joking and caressing The man they long'd to wed, Would sometimes set themselves to dressing His party-colour'd head. Each aiming to assimilate Her lover to her own estate, The older piecemeal stole The black hair from his poll, While eke, with fingers light, The young one stole the white. Between them both, as if by scald, His head was changed from grey to bald. 'For these,' he said, 'your gentle pranks, I owe you, ladies, many thanks. By being thus well shaved, ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... know in whose presence you stand, infidel?" he shrieked. "Do you know that I am lord and Subhadar of Bengal, of Behar, and Orissa; and that I have a million men who would die at my bidding? I will have you torn piecemeal, I will have your eyes picked out with knives and your flesh torn by hot pincers! I will plunge this knife into you, I will rip you up as I would a wild boar, I will strew your entrails on the earth, I will give your ...
— Athelstane Ford • Allen Upward
... "environment," this patched up and piecemeal panorama of mad chaotic blunderings, which pushes us hither and thither; and they call it our "heredity," this confused and twisted amalgam of greeds and lusts and conscience-stricken reactions, which drives us backward and forward ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... lawful and right. I fall certainly by my own sword, but honourably. I go about and am dying piecemeal, like Athens. Did we know that we adorned our statues for a funeral procession? that we were weaving our own shrouds? that the choruses of ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... the end of November Spalatin had completed his task (one marvels at the leisureliness of this, in view of the serious condition of the Elector; or was the manuscript translated and administered piecemeal to the noble patient?), and early in December he returned the original, doubtless together with his own translation, to Luther, who had requested its return, "in order to comfort ...
— Works of Martin Luther - With Introductions and Notes (Volume I) • Martin Luther
... Orleans, under a heavy but unwary guard, on a "tin-clad" steamer, to wear out the rest of the war in a Northern prison. Forbidden to gather even in pairs, they had yet moved freely about, often passing each other closely enough to exchange piecemeal counsels unnoticed, and all at once, at a tap of the boat's bell had sprung, man for man, upon their keepers and instantly were masters of them, of them, of their arms stacked on the boiler-deck and of the steamboat, ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... acquainted them with what had occurred and read to them the letter, whereat they were affrighted with the sorest affright and sought to soothe the King's terror with words that were only from the tongue, whilst their hearts were torn piecemeal with palpitations of alarm. But Badi'a (the Chief Wazir) presently said, "Know, O King, that there is no profit in that which my brother Wazirs have proffered, and it is my rede that thou write this King a writ and excuse thyself to him therein, saying, 'I love thee ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... knew how to tempt him, sacrificing everything in the desperate straits to which she was reduced. Though he had loved her well, and sinfully, but truly, for so many years, his love had sometimes seemed an unbearable thraldom, to escape from which he would have given his heart piecemeal, though he should lose all the happiness life held for him, for the sake of a momentary freedom. Possibly, too, she knew that he never longed for that freedom so much as when she had just been most violent and despotic. She was prepared for the feeble dissent with ...
— Taquisara • F. Marion Crawford
... not disdain to labour in stone with various planes of relief which should produce the effect of chiaroscuro. Furthermore, they illustrate what Cellini and Vasari have already taught us about his method. He refused to work by piecemeal, but began by disengaging the first, the second, then the third surfaces, following a model and a drawing which controlled the cutting. Whether he preferred to leave off when his idea was sufficiently ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... condense into a connected story the facts learnt piecemeal from Sir John in conversation. To a certain extent they supplied, if not an explanation, at least an account of the change that had come over my friend. But only to a certain extent; there the explanation broke down and I was left baffled. I could imagine that a life of unwholesome surroundings ...
— The Lost Stradivarius • John Meade Falkner
... to say; and it is for the War-leader to see to this closely and piecemeal. I deem, as we all deem, that there should be no delay; yet were it best to wend not all together to Shadowy Vale, but in divers bands, as soon as ye may after the Folk-mote, by the sure and nigh ...
— The Roots of the Mountains • William Morris
... debating in Parliament; the conqueror changing the fate of nations on bloody battle-fields; these all do their work; and are needful, doubtless, in a sinful, piecemeal world like this. But there are those of whom the noisy world never hears, who have chosen the better part which shall not be taken from them; who enter into a higher glory than that of statesmen, or conquerors, or the successful and famous of the ...
— Discipline and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... to say something of the sort," his mother said; "but he had only heard it piecemeal from old people, and never heard enough to put the pieces together as you have done. 'What does it matter either?' he used to say; and he said those great lords had been cut-throats on the land and robbers on the river. For your father's father had worn the red ...
— The Waters of Edera • Louise de la Rame, a.k.a. Ouida
... whom I had taken on board, and who landed with me, broke the egg with hatchets, and having made a hole in it, pulled out the young roc piecemeal and roasted it. I had earnestly entreated them not to meddle with the egg, but they ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... for his plays from the manager were therefore very disproportionate and uncertain. His letters to Henslowe are urgent in solicitations for payment on account of work in hand; he was often obliged to send his manuscripts piecemeal to the manager, and on one occasion supplied a rough draft of the last scene of a play in order to obtain a few shillings in advance. The amounts paid for new plays at this time were very low. Before 1600 Henslowe never gave more than L8 for a play, but after that date there was ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... circumstances, and solemn surroundings, the labor which has been bestowed, and the character of the men that have presented this paper, we should consider it as an entirety, or attempt to cut it up by piecemeal, by which neither they, nor the public, will ever ascertain what the judgment of Congress was on the results of their labor. That is ...
— A Report of the Debates and Proceedings in the Secret Sessions of the Conference Convention • Lucius Eugene Chittenden
... it looks," commented Barry as he explained the tactics to the midshipmen. "You see, they can torpedo us as much as they like, and blow the dummy sides of the ship to bits piecemeal. We can't sink, since we'll be hard aground. We can't take fire—at least, it would be quite a job to get any part of her to burn without being able to keep the flames under control. Gunnery, of course, puts a different aspect on the subject. If the enemy start shelling ...
— The Submarine Hunters - A Story of the Naval Patrol Work in the Great War • Percy F. Westerman
... magnificent remains of the fortress or citadel, the traditional camp of Caesar. Silchester again has the great advantage of being systematically and skilfully dug out, while Jublains has been examined only piecemeal. This again illustrates the difference between the state of ownership in England and in France. Silchester is at the command of a single will, which happily is in the present generation wisely guided. Jublains must fare as may seem good to a multitude of separate wills, of which it is too ...
— Sketches of Travel in Normandy and Maine • Edward A. Freeman
... friar, a word. Wouldst thou have the old man burned, drowned, or torn piecemeal? He hath a daughter too, who once sought to mar our trade with her gittern; a daughter, then in a kirtle that I would not have nimmed from a hedge, but whom I last saw in sarcenet and lawn, with a great ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... expenditure in this proportion would be disagreeable; but if this was the inevitable and only price, Grant was willing to pay it, justly regarding it as cheaper than a continuation of the process of purchase by piecemeal. In a few hours the frightful struggle in the Wilderness was in progress. All day on the 5th, all day on the 6th, the terrible slaughter continued in those darksome woods and swamps. "More desperate fighting has not been witnessed on this continent," ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. II • John T. Morse
... a burst, a groan, We felt a broadside round us battered, We saw his buttons fiercely blown About our heads, and piecemeal scattered! ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, October 1, 1892 • Various
... and the Piazzetta facade, reproducing the lagoon facade. The elaborately decorated facades of the courtyard came later, and by 1550 the palace was finished. The irregularity of the windows on the lagoon facade is explained by this piecemeal structure. The four plain windows and the very graceful balcony belong to the Sala del Maggior Consiglio. The two ornate windows on the right were added when the palace was brought into line with this portion, and they are lower because the room they light is on a level lower than the great Council ...
— A Wanderer in Venice • E.V. Lucas
... the nobles were divided, either deliberately or because the land was conquered piecemeal and parcelled out as it was conquered. (For example, Odo had ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: History • Ontario Ministry of Education
... prophets of Israel as an organised class, who first figure as guardians of the spiritual interests of the nation to the time of Samuel, when it was threatened with extinction piecemeal at the hands of the Philistines, and whose mission it was to recall the divided tribes to a sense of their unity as the chosen of Jehovah, and to see that they were welded into one under a single king; they lived together ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... assistance. He exerted his voice, until the woods rang with his shouts; but hollow echoes were the only replies: neither voice nor returning footstep was to be heard; and it seemed as if he had been rescued from the Indians' hands, only to be left, bound and helpless, to perish piecemeal among their bodies. The fear of a fate so dreadful, with the weight of the old Piankeshaw, a man of almost gigantic proportions, lying upon his bosom, was more than his agonised spirits and exhausted strength could endure; and his wounds suddenly bursting out ...
— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird
... with its old turrets dropping by piecemeal. Piles of adobe lay around covering the ground for acres. A thriving village had stood there. Where was it now? Where were the busy gossips? A wild-cat sprang over the briar-laced walls, and made off into the forest. An owl flew sluggishly up from the crumbling cupola, and hovered around ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid
... too— Oh! day of death, oh! chaos of hard times!— And princes, dukes, and lords, they all stood still, Feeling within their pockets' silent depths; And sailors went a-moaning out to sea, And chew'd their cables piecemeal: then they wept, And slept on the abyss without a quid. All quids were gone, cigars were in their graves; The plant, their mother, had been rooted up; Pawnbrokers had a ton of pipes apiece, And "Antis" ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... the "Times" has informed the United Kingdom that Mrs. Stowe is getting a new dress made! It wants to know if Mrs. Stowe is aware what sort of a place her dress is being made in; and there is a letter from a dressmaker's apprentice stating that it is being made up piecemeal, in the most shockingly distressed dens of London, by poor, miserable white slaves, worse treated than ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... of his friend 20 His homicidal hands, Achilles thus The shade of his Patroclus, sad, bespake. Hail, oh Patroclus, even in Ades hail! For I will now accomplish to the full My promise pledged to thee, that I would give 25 Hector dragg'd hither to be torn by dogs Piecemeal, and would before thy funeral pile The necks dissever of twelve Trojan youths Of noblest rank, resentful of thy death. He said, and meditating foul disgrace 30 To noble Hector, stretch'd him prone in dust Beside the bier of Menoetiades. Then all ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... incapable of understanding why, if a street-contractor, for instance, was permitted by the laws of the land to sublet the work for which he had contracted, he, John, should not be permitted to sublet his contract to Dennis, piecemeal, or even as a whole, if he ...
— Paste Jewels • John Kendrick Bangs
... there is no room for charity, while a social order which involves charity is not one which maintains justice. Thus it may be said that the prophets, because they operated in terms of the reorganization of the whole of society and not of the incidental correction of piecemeal evils, were humanists. Their program was constructive and aimed at the enfranchisement of manhood. The rabbis, on the other hand, were (relatively only) philanthropists. Their program was remedial, and they aimed rather at the relief ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... He hung over the town of Patusan like a hawk over a poultry-yard, but he devastated the open country. Whole villages, deserted, rotted on their blackened posts over the banks of clear streams, dropping piecemeal into the water the grass of their walls, the leaves of their roofs, with a curious effect of natural decay as if they had been a form of vegetation stricken by a blight at its very root. The two parties in Patusan were ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... supplying nearly all the coined currency of the world. A little further onward was the spot where Lot's wife had stood forever under the semblance of a pillar of salt. Curious travellers have long since carried it away piecemeal. Had all regrets been punished as rigorously as this poor dame's were, my yearning for the relinquished delights of Vanity Fair might have produced a similar change in my own corporeal substance, and left me a warning to ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... reasons, had never been brought under cultivation. The commons that still survive are mostly of that description, the more valuable land having been resumed during one of the successive periods of enclosure, or—piecemeal. ...
— The Customs of Old England • F. J. Snell
... No relation at all"—Fyne emitted with a convulsive effort this, the most awful part of the suspicions Mrs. Fyne used to impart to him piecemeal when he came down to spend his week-ends gravely with her and the children. The Fynes, in their good-natured concern for the unlucky child of the man busied in stirring casually so many millions, spent the moments of their weekly reunion in ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... of oil and alcohol, which Marvin and Borup were to bring to me, was, I felt, vital to our success; but even if they did not come in with it, I could not turn back here. While pacing the floe, I figured out how we should use our sledges piecemeal as fuel in our cookers, to make tea after the oil and alcohol were gone. By the time the wood of the sledges was exhausted, it would be warm enough so that we could suck ice or snow to assuage our thirst, and get along with our pemmican and raw ...
— The North Pole - Its Discovery in 1909 under the auspices of the Peary Arctic Club • Robert E. Peary
... in size to that I formerly mentioned. There was a young roc in it, just ready to be hatched, and its beak had begun to break the egg. The merchants who landed with me broke the egg with hatchets, and made a hole in it, pulled out the young roc, piecemeal, and roasted it. I had in vain entreated them not to ...
— The Junior Classics, V5 • Edited by William Patten
... mathematics, English history, and lastly science. One concession is made to girls which is not made to boys. They are allowed to pass in two subjects one year, and two others the next, and thus obtain their certificates piecemeal. Boys have to pass in all four subjects the same year. The High School sent in seventeen candidates for the examination in two or three of the subjects—History, Elementary Mathematics, French, German, and Latin,—and fifteen of these passed in two subjects at least: and, inasmuch as seven of ...
— Three Addresses to Girls at School • James Maurice Wilson
... Mr. Pickwick and his three friends were hurried about from place to place, and through adventures of all kinds, without any particularly defined purpose. In truth, many people, and myself among the number, find some difficulty in reading the book as a connected narrative, and prefer to take it piecemeal. But in "Oliver Twist" there is a serious effort to work out a coherent plot, and real unity of conception. Whether that conception be based on probability, is another point. Oliver is the illegitimate son of ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... space; it is not surprising, therefore, that logic, in spite of the show of respect outwardly paid to her, is told to stand aside when people come to practice. In practice identity is generally held to exist where continuity is only broken slowly and piecemeal; nevertheless, that occasional periods of even rapid change are not held to bar identity, appears from the fact that no one denies this to hold between the microscopically small impregnate ovum and the born child that springs from it, nor yet, therefore, between the impregnate ovum and ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler
... calculable things, and for the tone of irony in particular. But in such a nature such a phase was sure to pass, and it was passing. Burns, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson—now he was making acquaintance piecemeal with them all, as the precious volumes turned up, which he was soon able to place with a precision which tore them too soon out of his hands. The Voltairean temper in him was melting, was passing into something warmer, ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the teachings of geology. We know that the land from which America and Europe were formed once covered nearly or quite the whole space now occupied by the Atlantic between the continents; and it is reasonable to believe that it went down piecemeal, and that Atlantis was but the stump of the ancient continent, which at last perished from the same causes and in the ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... Sedgwick, Jun., a gentleman who has, on many occasions, proved himself worthy of his liberty-loving ancestry, thus speaks of him in his private life at this period: "Amid the reverses of fortune, harassed by pecuniary embarrassments, during the tortures of a disease which tore away his life piecemeal, hee ever maintained the same manly and unaltered front, the same cheerfulness of disposition, the same dignity of conduct. No humiliating solicitation, no weak complaint, escaped him." At the election in the fall of 1838, the noble-spirited democrat was not wholly ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... story again. The man was no more astonished at the foot than he had been at the head; he snatched up the leg and threw it out at the door. Before they had finished, the other leg, both arms, the body, the whole murdered traveler, in fact, came down piecemeal. No omelette all this time! The old hemp-seller grew very ...
— The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac
... encountered no more destruction by wholesale, but only destruction by piecemeal, until, nearing Liege, we passed what remained of the most northerly of the ring of fortresses that formed the city's defenses. The conquerors had dismantled it and thrown down the guns, so that of the fort proper there was nothing except a low earthen wall, almost like a natural ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... and cheat! A man who snaps his fingers in the face of the laws of the country! Isn't that a commentary on the workings of universal suffrage?" This was a caustic summing up on George's part of the story he had already told Miss Wellington piecemeal, and he looked at her as much as to ask if his dejection were ...
— The Law-Breakers and Other Stories • Robert Grant
... sometimes so disconcerting—the mute reproachful looks of the people you've aided and abetted in matrimonial experiments. It's as bad as selling a man a horse with half a dozen latent vices and watching him discover them piecemeal in the course of the hunting season. I suppose you're thinking of the Coulterneb girl. She's certainly jolly, and quite all right as far as looks go, and I believe a certain amount of money adheres to her. What I don't see is how you will ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki
... which, as I said, he had caught his "refrain," from the lips of the young men, singing because they could not help it, in the streets of Pisa. And as oftenest happens also, with natures of genuinely poetic quality, those piecemeal beginnings came suddenly to harmonious completeness among the fortunate incidents, the physical heat and light, of one ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... without breaking through, he had to scrape it out piecemeal, wetting the dried mud as he toiled. He measured carefully just how much of the thickness to leave, because the weed stalks in the adobe could not be trusted to hold too thin a crust, and also he had to take care that the water ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... working and the roads passable. Without Stanislao and the convicts, I am in doubt what would become of the present regimen in Nuka-hiva; whether the highways might not be suffered to close up, the pier to wash away, and the Residency to fall piecemeal about the ears of impotent officials. And yet, though the hereditary favourer, and one of the chief props of French authority, he has always an eye upon the past. He showed me where the old public place had stood, still to be traced by random piles of stone; told me how great and fine ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... samples. The lumber is floated down the Volga and her tributaries from the great forests of Ufa, and made up in Samara. The peasant purchaser disjoints his house, floats it to a point near his village, drags it piecemeal to its proper site, sets it up, roofs it, builds an oven and a chimney of stones, clay, and whitewash, plugs the interstices with rope or moss, smears them with clay if he feels inclined, and his house is ready for occupancy. Although such houses are cheap and warm, it would ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... Mr. BALFOUR, who politely represses his honest endeavours to elucidate the situation in Greece, and actually declared to-day that the difficulties of the Allies would only be increased by the hon. Member's attempts to deal with them piecemeal. Mr. LYNCH was not entirely done with, however. "Is that reply," he asked in a "got-him-this-time" manner, "given by reason of freedom of choice or ineludible necessity?" "Sir," replied the apologist of philosophic doubt with Johnsonian authority, "questions ...
— Punch, 1917.07.04, Vol. 153, Issue No. 1 • Various
... Comtesse de Lamotte, and others of the same stamp, should have thus fallen into an association of the Prince-Cardinal or that her libellous stories of the Queen of France should have found eager promulgators, where the real diamonds of the famous necklace being taken apart were divided piecemeal among a horde of the most depraved sharpers that ever existed to make human nature ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 5 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... pumped all the four hours. We pumped all night, all day, all the week,—watch and watch. She was working herself loose, and leaked badly—not enough to drown us at once, but enough to kill us with the work at the pumps. And while we pumped the ship was going from us piecemeal: the bulwarks went, the stanchions were torn out, the ventilators smashed, the cabin-door burst in. There was not a dry spot in the ship. She was being gutted bit by bit. The long-boat changed, as if by magic, ...
— Youth • Joseph Conrad
... lief pray to the saints they should intercede with the Virgin Mary. I will rot from this perch piecemeal ere I pray to yonder ungodly woman. Yet shall I escape out of their hands, but not by mine own might, or mine own strength," said the ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... into the city. "Why should I fly?" said the Moor—"to be reserved for hunger and slavery? I tell you, wife, I will await the foe here, for better is it to die quickly by the steel than to perish piecemeal in chains and dungeons." He said no more, but resumed his occupation of weaving, and in the indiscriminate fury of the assault ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... permanent each individual could buy or sell "shares" in the joint stock, helped to make such "joint-stock" companies very popular after the opening of the seventeenth century. The English East India Company, organized as a regulated company in 1600, was reorganized piecemeal for half a century until it acquired the form of a joint-stock enterprise; most of the other chartered colonial companies followed the same plan. In these early stock-companies we find the germ of the most characteristic of present-day business institutions—the corporation. In the ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... a kind of family property. "Scorn trifles" comes from Aunt Mary Moody Emerson, and reappears in her nephew, Ralph Waldo.—"What right have you, Sir, to your virtue? Is virtue piecemeal? This is a jewel among the rags of a beggar." So writes Ralph Waldo Emerson in his Lecture "New England Reformers."—"Hiding the badges of royalty beneath the gown of the mendicant, and ever on the watch lest their rank be betrayed by the sparkle of a gem ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... and were giving them instructions, ceremonies, and the form of observing their religion, by means of certain gazizes [333] whom they brought with them. Already a considerable number, and those the chiefest men, were commencing, although by piecemeal, to become Moros, and were being circumcised [334] and taking the names of Moros. Had the Spaniards' coming been delayed longer, that religion would have spread throughout the island, and even through the others, and it would have been difficult to extirpate it. The mercy ...
— History of the Philippine Islands Vols 1 and 2 • Antonio de Morga
... the pack expending itself on a chain of bergs some ten miles north of our present position. The unequal contest between floe and iceberg exhibited itself there in a fearful manner; for the former pressing onward against the huge grounded masses was torn into shreds, and thrown back piecemeal, layer on layer of many feet in elevation, as if mere shreds of some flimsy material, instead of solid, hard ice, every cubic yard of which weighed ...
— Stray Leaves from an Arctic Journal; • Sherard Osborn
... into German and present it to the Elector. By the end of November Spalatin had completed his task (one marvels at the leisureliness of this, in view of the serious condition of the Elector; or was the manuscript translated and administered piecemeal to the noble patient?), and early in December he returned the original, doubtless together with his own translation, to Luther, who had requested its return, "in order to comfort ...
— Works of Martin Luther - With Introductions and Notes (Volume I) • Martin Luther
... she teaches them, that Jesus instituted confession, extreme unction and marriage, and that he taught what was afterwards decided upon by the Nicene and Trent Councils. Nothing can be more erroneous. The Christian dogma has been formed, like everything else, slowly and piecemeal, by a sort of inward vegetation. Theology, by asserting the contrary, raises up a mass of objections, and places itself in the predicament of having to reject all criticism. I would advise any one who wishes to realise this to read in a theological work the treatise on Sacraments, ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... sprinkled and dropped about in all directions, without seeming to have any root at all in the ground; and the small churches and chapels are so prim, and bright, and highly varnished; that I almost believed the whole affair could be taken up piecemeal like a child's toy, and ...
— American Notes for General Circulation • Charles Dickens
... and prospect of success, and immediately disappearing ignominiously; making frantic grasps and clutches with a hundred long arms and eager outstretched hands, and finally succeeding, by shoulders and fists, in bringing the wreath away piecemeal; and then they give themselves up to mutual embraces, groans, laments, and all the enginery of pathetic affection in the last gasping throes of separation,—to the doleful tearing of hair and the rending of their ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... it and through it and upon all sides of it, but the utmost delicacy of the controls would not permit of holding even upon the immense bulk of the vessel, to say nothing of holding upon such a relatively tiny object as the power bar. As they flashed repeatedly through the warship, they saw piecemeal and sketchily her formidable armament and the hundreds of men of her crew, each man at battle station at the controls of some frightful engine of destruction. Suddenly they were cut off as a screen closed behind them—the Earth-men felt an instant of unreasoning terror as ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... shrewder man than his predecessor. For ten years' space, while Louis XI, that royal fox of France, was destroying feudalism piecemeal,—trimming its power day by day as you might pare an onion,—the new Sieur d'Arnaye steered his shifty course between France and Burgundy, always to the betterment of his chances in this world however he may have modified them in the next. ...
— The Line of Love - Dizain des Mariages • James Branch Cabell
... Chartres could see a frosty valley, reaching to the Mississippi, glinting in the distance. That alluvial stretch was, in the course of years, to be eaten away by the river even to the bastions. The fort itself, built at such expense, would soon be abandoned by its conquerors, to sink, piecemeal, a noble and massive ruin. The dome-shaped powder house and stone quarters would be put to ignoble uses, and forest trees, spreading the spice of walnut fragrance, or the dense shadow of oaks, would grow through the very room where St. Ange and Pontiac sat. Indians, passing by, would ...
— Heroes of the Middle West - The French • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... admiringly by the expert eyes of Darius, in his shirt-sleeves, Big James, in his royally flowing apron, and Chawner, the journeyman compositor, who, with the two apprentices outside, completed the staff! Aided by no mechanic more skilled than a day-labourer, those men had got the machine piecemeal into the office, and had duly erected it. At that day a foreman had to ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... awhile, they heard a mighty tumult, and a wailing of men, and a croaking of Ravens, as they carried the men in their strength into the air, and, tearing them betwixt them, let them fall piecemeal to the earth. And during the tumult they saw a knight coming towards them, on a light grey horse, and the left foreleg of the horse was jet-black to the centre of his hoof. And the knight and the horse were fully accoutred with huge heavy blue armour. And a robe of honour of yellow diapered ...
— The Mabinogion • Lady Charlotte Guest
... disc, and fine long prickly arms, which never cease their graceful serpentine motion, and its colours hardly alike in any two specimens. Handle them not, meanwhile, too roughly, lest, whether modesty or in anger, they begin a desperate course of gradual suicide, and, breaking off arm after arm piecemeal, fling them indignantly at their tormentor. Along with these you will certainly obtain a few of that fine bivalve, the great Scallop, which you have seen lying on every fishmonger's counter in Hastings. Of these you must pick out those which seem dirtiest and most overgrown ...
— Glaucus; or The Wonders of the Shore • Charles Kingsley
... improbable that they ever attacked such large animals as elephants; and the fact that the teeth found in the cave were of very young specimens seems to suggest that the hyaenas now and then found the carcase of a young elephant that had died, and dragged it piecemeal to their cave. The same would possibly apply to some of the other large animals, for hyaenas, unless in great extremes of hunger never attack a living animal. They have a loud and mournful howl, beginning low and ending high, and also a maniacal ...
— The Evolution Of An English Town • Gordon Home
... decorations, or what not. And the bill was taken down, so that prospective and prospecting tenants were kept away. The bonds being stolen, Henning took the first opportunity of carrying them to the empty office—probably piecemeal—a thing he could easily manage almost under your nose, before you were aware of your loss. There he was to conceal them, either in the chimney, under the boards, or in the ventilator, as he might find convenient—and he found the ventilator most convenient. Then ...
— The Red Triangle - Being Some Further Chronicles of Martin Hewitt, Investigator • Arthur Morrison
... very dawn of the study of mediaeval literature in France, and the admirable Romanzen und Pastourellen[127] which Herr Karl Bartsch collected and issued a quarter of a century ago. Here as elsewhere the piecemeal system of publication which has been the bane of the whole subject is to be regretted, for with a little effort and a little division of labour the entire corpus of French lyric from the tenth to the fourteenth century might have been easily ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... and the faith he swore, Who takes Troy's gods the partners of his flight, And erst from Troy his aged parent bore. O, had I torn him piecemeal, as I might, And strewn him on the waves, and slain outright His friends, and for the father's banquet spread The murdered boy! But doubtful were the fight. Grant that it had been, whom should Dido dread, What fear had death for me, self-destined to ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil
... nothing less than a native still, where he manufactured his island "poteen." The disarray in which we found it was probably intentional, as a security against detection. Before we left the shed, the old fellow toppled the whole concern over, and dragged it away piecemeal. ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... reached, was blotted out from the home they left. It is clear that they came in detachments, as their descendants went, centuries later, to a land still further west; and the process was spread over a hundred years or more. They conquered Britain blindly and piecemeal; and the traditional three years which are said to have elapsed between the occupation of Sheppey and the landing in Kent prove not that the puny arm of the intervening sea deterred those who had crossed the ocean, but that Sheppey ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... telephones; 246 telephones/1,000 persons; telephone system is antiquated; improvements are being made piecemeal, with emphasis on business needs and international connections; there are still about 150,000 unfulfilled requests for telephone service local: NA intercity: NA international: international traffic is carried to the other former ...
— The 1995 CIA World Factbook • United States Central Intelligence Agency
... sequence his supreme negative act, he is a man-eater. "He seized two of my companions and hurled them against the ground as if they were dogs, then he devoured them piecemeal, swallowing all—entrails and flesh and marrowy bones." Surely Ulysses is getting some experience on the line ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... has commented at length on our lack of unanimity when it comes to varieties. I think most of that problem has come out of the fact that our information is all based on little, piecemeal bits of work done here and there, and it does not refer to variety testing over a wide area. Now with all due respect to Dr. Anthony's remarks about varieties being a local situation, we still have, as mentioned by the chairman, the apple situation. ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 41st Annual Meeting • Various
... is that it is in something of this piecemeal way that their object will ultimately be obtained; and I should not be without considerable hope of seeing Canning's measure carried, even in this year, if I felt quite sure that it would have ...
— Memoirs of the Court of George IV. 1820-1830 (Vol 1) - From the Original Family Documents • Duke of Buckingham and Chandos
... comes, with the sunrise, as they promised. I must die now. How shall I endure it? Oh, go! Is it not dreadful enough to be torn piecemeal, without having you to look on?" And she tried to thrust ...
— Heroes Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... through the head of the dam, was now manfully battling with her two cubs; the poor fellow was sore pressed, streaming with blood from numberless scratches, and almost in a state of nature, for the sharp claws of the cubs had literally undressed him by piecemeal. His savage assailants also, bore upon their bloody hides numerous tokens of his prowess ...
— Thrilling Adventures by Land and Sea • James O. Brayman
... a sunken ridge of rock immediately under her forefoot; and, in a moment, there she stuck hard and fast, bumping and scraping her bottom, with a harsh, grating sound and a quivering and rending of her timbers, as if every plank below the water-line was being torn out of her piecemeal. ...
— The Wreck of the Nancy Bell - Cast Away on Kerguelen Land • J. C. Hutcheson
... Then, turning to his Wazirs and Grandees, he acquainted them with what had occurred and read to them the letter, whereat they were affrighted with the sorest affright and sought to soothe the King's terror with words that were only from the tongue, whilst their hearts were torn piecemeal with palpitations of alarm. But Badi'a (the Chief Wazir) presently said, "Know, O King, that there is no profit in that which my brother Wazirs have proffered, and it is my rede that thou write this King a writ and excuse thyself to him therein, saying, 'I love thee and loved thy father before ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... a tone whose bitterness Harpagon [*] alone has been capable of revealing—"tell me that you wish to despoil me of all; it will be sooner over than devouring me piecemeal." ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... the regent. His actions and gestures, instead of appearing the consequence of simple volition, seemed, like those of an automaton, to wait the revolution of some internal machinery ere they could be performed; and his words fell from him piecemeal, interrupted, as if he had first to think what he was to say, then how it was to be said, and as if, after all, it was only by an effort of continued attention that he completed a sentence without forgetting both ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... governments, and her unequal laws—the people in most cases ciphers, and in all cases ignorant and enslaved—with no room for expansion, and little or no hope of political or social betterment; every inch of liberty, in every direction, which they had gained, wrung from their oppressors piecemeal, in ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... much about English syntax as she does about Irish, and were as certain in the handling of a story as she is in the conduct of a horse, Old Andy (METHUEN) might be taken at a single refreshing gallop. As it is, I advise the reader to tackle it piecemeal, a brisk run here and there, followed by a considerable breather. For the novel is put together in a scrambling fashion, being full of repetitions of almost identical scenes and making very little definite way in a forward ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, August 19th, 1914 • Various
... and objections to Government interference, we may safely assume that there would be a national loss by this procedure: the private owner would discover very quickly if he could make a profit by letting his farms piecemeal. ...
— Speculations from Political Economy • C. B. Clarke
... is the abbot; there we can rest in peace for a time, and watch the progress of events. If we hear that the people of these parts are aroused from their lethargy, we will come back and fight for our home and lands; if not, I will no longer stay in East Anglia, which I see is destined to fall piecemeal into the hands of the Danes; but we will journey down to Somerset, and I will pray King Ethelbert to assign me lands there, and to ...
— The Dragon and the Raven - or, The Days of King Alfred • G. A. Henty
... including the Mt. Desert cottages and the Wyoming hunting-lodge. It means that we've got to be able to read our book of the Black Art backwards as well as forwards, or the Powers we've conjured up will tear piecemeal both them and us. God! it makes me crawl to think ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick
... counsellors for new plans of defence. It was now gravely proposed, to build a fleet three times as powerful as that of the British, and station it near Singapore and Anjeer, to intercept the British vessels ere they reached China, and annihilate their fleet piecemeal. The forests were to be felled to supply materials: the only thing wanting was some English men-of-war, to serve as models. Again, Hou-chunn, the Marshal Ney of China, was ready to face the whole British fleet if he had but a steamer to carry 6000 men, half divers, half ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 433 - Volume 17, New Series, April 17, 1852 • Various
... that neither rain nor dew should fall upon the earth; the eighth was the one in the time of Elisha, when an ass's head was sold for fourscore pieces of silver; the ninth is the famine that comes upon men piecemeal, from time to time; and the tenth will scourge men before the advent of Messiah, and this last will be "not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg
... incompetency with every circumstance of barbarity attending the execution. Mr. Newman in language of appalling force, written a year after his conversion, has described the Anglican service as "a ritual dashed upon the ground, trodden on, and broken piecemeal; prayers clipped, pieced, torn, shuffled about at pleasure, until the meaning of the composition perished, and offices which had been poetry were no longer even good prose; antiphons, hymns, benedictions, ...
— Cardinal Newman as a Musician • Edward Bellasis
... peninsula, and began hastily to build a wall across the isthmus of Corinth with the hope of keeping back the invading army. Athens was left to care for itself. It was thus that Greece usually let itself be devoured piecemeal. ...
— Historic Tales, vol 10 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... took very kindly your advice," Pope replied, "... and it has worked so much upon me considering the time and state you gave it in, that I determined to address to you one of my epistles written by piecemeal many years, and which I have now made haste to put together; wherein the question is stated, what were, and are my motives of writing, the objections to them, and my answers." In other words, the 'Epistle to Arbuthnot' ...
— The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems • Alexander Pope
... slightly modified chaos. The first would be to allow going or incipient Federal and State programs for water quality improvement and erosion control and such things to take their overall course, while water supply, landscape protection, and other problems are dealt with in the traditional, piecemeal, localized manner as conditions here and there become bad and force action, or as "fall-out" from non-Basin programs takes casual effect. This relinquishment of coordination would make the task ...
— The Nation's River - The Department of the Interior Official Report on the Potomac • United States Department of the Interior
... exist, but we all know that it ought to exist. Bits of it appear from time to time piecemeal and here and there, as for instance in the annotations which modern scholarship attaches to the great text, in the printed criticisms to which sundry accepted doctrines are subjected by the younger men to-day, in the detailed restatement of historical events which we get from modern research ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... son, facing him sidewise so that no Ramsey might again surprise them: "I see it that way too. Father"—the father had stirred as if to leave him—"I want to tell you some things about our past. But I can't tell them piecemeal. I must find some time when ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... anything piecemeal. Probably at the root of all our strange fanaticism about drink was the thought that the saloon had better go; that it was time for such foul places to disappear. The pendulum had to swing all the way. If it would ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam
... choleric-looking individual nearly opposite, will curse the cooking till he's black in the face, but he never misses a dinner. The Semitic looking young man opposite, who seems to have been committing you to memory piecemeal, will tell you that he was never so bored in all his life as he has been here. Yet he stays. They ...
— Anna the Adventuress • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... scream hither: if you don't I shall be disappointed, for I have kept it as a most profound secret from you, till I was ready to surprise you with it: I knew your impatience, and would not let you have it piecemeal. It is the Life of the great philosopher, Lord Herbert, written by himself.(631) Now are you disappointed? Well, read it—not the first forty pages, of which you will be sick—I will not anticipate it, but I will ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... unwise, my friend, to rush at a bound to the extremes of friendship? You have drained the cup, offered in all sincerity, at a draught. It is true that a real feeling is never piecemeal; it must be whole, or it does not exist. Monsieur de Mortsauf," she added after a short silence, "is above all things loyal and brave. Perhaps for my sake you will forget what he said to you to-day; if he has forgotten it to-morrow, I will myself tell him what occurred. ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... York. An impact followed that seemed to rock the globe. Wisconsin and New York retired whence they came, and it was all done in a moment. Other regiments took their places. McDowell was making a frontal attack and sending in his brigades piecemeal. The plateau was uneven; low ridges, shallow hollows, with clumps of pine and oak; one saw at a time but a segment of the field. The nature of the ground split the troops as with wedges; over all the Henry Hill the fighting now became from hand to hand, in the woods and in the open, small squad ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... approached the style of painting, yet he did not disdain to labour in stone with various planes of relief which should produce the effect of chiaroscuro. Furthermore, they illustrate what Cellini and Vasari have already taught us about his method. He refused to work by piecemeal, but began by disengaging the first, the second, then the third surfaces, following a model and a drawing which controlled the cutting. Whether he preferred to leave off when his idea was sufficiently indicated, or whether his numerous engagements prevented him from excavating ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... Mississippi constituted the principal outlet for the products of the Middle West; Pittsburgh furnished most of the supplies for the region, but New Orleans received its crops. The Old National road was built piecemeal, and too late, as a whole, to make a great artery of trade throughout the Middle West, in this early period; but it marked the northern borders of the Southern stream of population, running, as this did, through ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... whose sustenance was blood alone— A life translated out of other lives, I grew the king of beasts; the hurricane Leaned like a feather on my royal fell; I took the Hyrcan tiger by the scruff And tore him piecemeal; my hot bowels laughed And my fangs yearned for prey. Earth was my lair: I slept on the red desert without fear: I roamed the jungle depths with less design Than e'en to lord their solitude; on crags That cringe from lightning—black ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... this letter how that has happened. Your symphony has pleased me, on account of its ideas, more than the other pieces, and yet I think that it will produce the least effect. It is too much crowded, and to hear it partially or piecemeal (stueckweise) would be, by your permission, like beholding an ant-hill (Ameisen haufen). I mean to say, that it is as if Eppes, the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... since we returned from Rome. We have not been able to get the carriage up since that time, in consequence; and unless they finish to-night, it can't be packed in the garden, but the things will have to be brought down in baskets, piecemeal, and packed in the street. To avoid this inconvenient necessity, the Brave made proposals of bribery to the paviours last night, and induced them to pledge themselves that the carriage should come up at seven this evening. The manner of doing that sort ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... it has descended to the foot of the malign gray slopes. And I, who stood intent to gaze, saw muddy people in that swamp, all naked and with look of hurt. They were smiting each other, not only with hands, but with head, and with chest, and with feet, mangling one another piecemeal with their teeth. ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 1, Hell [The Inferno] • Dante Alighieri
... direct experiences, many a strange fulfilment of dreams of other days. For instance, the present writer had been a faithful student of the Scottish ballads, and had always envied Sir Walter the delight of tracing them out amid their own heather, and of writing them down piecemeal from the lips of aged crones. It was a strange enjoyment, therefore, to be suddenly brought into the midst of a kindred world of unwritten songs, as simple and indigenous as the Border Minstrelsy, more uniformly plaintive, almost always ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... but it cost him pangs of the keenest misery to advertise it; and, when a tenant was actually found, it was all he could do to give him the lease. He tried his wife's love and patience as a man must to whom the future is easy in the mass but terrible as it translates itself piecemeal into the present. He experienced remorse in the presence of inanimate things he was going to leave as if they had sensibly reproached him, and an anticipative homesickness that seemed to stop his heart. Again and again his wife had to make him ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... that pellucid atmosphere of the Greek mind, untroubled as yet by theoretic mists, there may have been visible the very things which our scientific instruments are enabling us to see and reconstruct piecemeal, great groupings of reality metamorphosed into Fata Morgana cities seemingly built ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... freeboard. Consequently, it shipped so much water that the waves washed over the decks with great noise and uproar, and entered the berths where the better-class passengers are generally quartered. The rigging had to be repaired piecemeal. Consequently, for those reasons, and as the vessel lacked other necessities, some tried to make them put back to Manila. However, this was without effect, and they proceeded on their way with some storms; and ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XVII, 1609-1616 • Various
... viewed her feet and hands, And swore they never saw such wee things; The gossips met in purring bands And tore her piecemeal o'er the tea things. The former drank the Doctor's health With clinking cups, the gay carousers; The latter watched her door by stealth, Just like ...
— Masterpieces Of American Wit And Humor • Thomas L. Masson (Editor)
... began to rebel and mutiny against that law, all was over with them. That great, foolish, ignorant multitude would have broken up, probably fought among themselves—certainly parted company, and either starved in the desert, or have been destroyed piecemeal by the wild warlike tribes, Midianites, Moabites, Amalekites—who were ready enough for slaughter and plunder. They would never have reached Canaan. They would never have become a great nation. So they had to be, by necessity, under martial ...
— The Gospel of the Pentateuch • Charles Kingsley
... lioness over her cubs, while Ino, for her part, set her heel on the body, and brake asunder the broad shoulder, shoulder-blade and all, and in the same strain wrought Autonoe. The other women tore the remnants piecemeal, and to Thebes they came, all bedabbled with blood, from the mountains bearing not Pentheus but ...
— Theocritus, Bion and Moschus rendered into English Prose • Andrew Lang
... for national defence continued to proceed in these parochial ways. Pitt's authority at Westminster was at no time more firmly founded than at the time of the meeting of the new Parliament in the autumn of 1796. Yet the piecemeal methods went on as before. He proposed to raise by means of the ballot a levy of 15,000 men in order to recruit the navy and the Line regiments; and he further asked for a levy of 60,000 men as a Supplementary Militia, one tenth being embodied by turns so as not to withdraw from work too many ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... but before the rules of perspective were systematized, the perspective of a picture betrays its history, tells how much of it was seen together, and what was added. Even late in the fifteenth century pictures are still more or less mosaics,—their piecemeal origin confessed by slight indications in the midst even of very advanced technical skill. Thus, in Antonio Pollaiuolo's "Three Archangels," in the Florence Academy,—three admirably drawn figures, abreast, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... "Be'st thou indeed of the train of the Peleiades Achilles? Come then, discover the truth: be there nothing, I pray, of concealment. Is my son still at the galleys, or has he already been flung forth, Piecemeal torn, for a feast to the dogs, ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... or Berlin; the brawls of this poet, that student, editor, publicist, or princeling; with soldiers of fortune hovering around waiting, like vultures that have already a whiff of the carrion, from afar. Instead of a bird's-eye, the incoherent mass of details comes piecemeal, and you get the toad's-eye view;—till we apply the simple idea that behind it all is elemental human nature, with politics as a mere frame to ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... each opened in turn, disclosing to their astounded eyes the veritable treasure of the Incas; and Jim immediately saw that the removal of such a vast accumulation of wealth must necessarily occupy a considerable time, and that the treasure would have to be conveyed away piecemeal on mule-back. He therefore selected from the hoard of uncut jewels as many of the finest as he believed that he and Jose could conveniently carry, wrapped them up in two parcels, and, giving one to Jose to carry, took charge of the other himself. This done, the ...
— Under the Chilian Flag - A Tale of War between Chili and Peru • Harry Collingwood
... paced the floor or dropped in chairs and fought as they flung off their clothes piecemeal. She had combed and brushed her hair viciously as she raged, weeping the unbeautiful tears of wrath. But he had not had that comfort of tears; his tears ran down the inside of his soul and burned. She goaded ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... conditions of success in this enterprise. But we want the light of 'the true definitions' to begin with. There is no use in revolutions till we have it; and as for empirical institutions, mankind has seen the best of them;—we are perishing in their decay, dying piecemeal, going off into a race of ostriches, or something of that nature—or threatened with becoming mere petrifactions, mineral specimens of what we have been, preserved, perhaps, to adorn the museums of some future species, gifted ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... him did guard That piecemeal lay his armour scattered; And still fought hard that stalwart lord Until his beamy ...
— Axel Thordson and Fair Valborg - a ballad • Thomas J. Wise
... donate herself piecemeal, or over and over again, yet deem herself perfectly loyal.—And perhaps naturally ...
— Hints for Lovers • Arnold Haultain
... seeing that, despite this Francesco's friends, the Stoics, who in their vanity say the creatures all subsist for man's comfort, there be snakes and scorpions which kill 'Dominum terra' with a nip, musquitoes which eat him piecemeal, and tigers and sharks which crack him like an almond, we do well to be grateful to these true, faithful, patient, four-footed friends, which, in lieu of powdering us, put forth their strength to relieve our toils, and do feed us like ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... at a "leap in the dark," and by a willingness to adjust the machinery of government to the needs of the time. In England Locke's influence has been less dynamic than static; it has helped us to preserve a moderation in politics; to be content with piecemeal legislation, because to attempt too much might be to alienate the sympathies of the majority; to keep our political eye, so to speak, on the ebb and flow of public opinion—since it is public opinion that ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton
... Rossini had engaged to write two operas for the Roman Carnival of 1816. The first was brought out Dec. 26, 1815, and the same day he bound himself to furnish the second by Jan. 20, 1816, with no knowledge of what the libretto would be. Sterbini furnished him with the story of the "Barber" by piecemeal, and as fast as the verses were given him he wrote the music. The whole work was finished in less than three weeks. Its original title was "Almaviva, ossia l'inutile precauzione," to distinguish it from Paisiello's ...
— The Standard Operas (12th edition) • George P. Upton
... facts in order that it may be seen what further appropriations are involved in a settlement for all these lands upon the basis which Congress has adopted. It does not seem to me to be a wise policy to deal with this question piecemeal. It would have been better, if a remnant of title remains in the Choctaws and Chickasaws to the lands in the leased district, to have settled the whole matter at once. Under the treaty of 1855 the Choctaws and Chickasaws quitclaimed any ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, Volume IX. • Benjamin Harrison
... built. This I hauled up partly on the shore. After soaking two years and then lying high six months it was perfectly sound, though waterlogged past drying. I amused myself one winter day with sliding this piecemeal across the pond, nearly half a mile, skating behind with one end of a log fifteen feet long on my shoulder, and the other on the ice; or I tied several logs together with a birch withe, and then, ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... always been a tradition as to the value of this picture. Her father had spoken little of his wife to the children, and it was only piecemeal, as she grew into womanhood, that Miss Euphemia learnt from hints and half-told truths the story of her mother's shame. But Michael Joliffe was known to have considered this painting his wife's masterpiece, and old Mrs Janaway ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... have tobacco enough to pay for it.' But he was powerless, as he confesses, to govern his crew, and no one knows how the heartbroken old man spent the next two dreadful months. His ships slunk back piecemeal to English havens, and on May 23, Captain North, who had commanded the 'Chudleigh,' had audience of the King, and told him the whole miserable story. On May 26,[12] Raleigh made his appearance, ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... T. R. do the question in a piecemeal fashion—on the principle that the 70 per cent. and the 75 per cent., though commenced at opposite ends of the 100, must overlap by at least 45 per cent.; and so on. This is quite correct working, but not, I think, quite the best way of ...
— A Tangled Tale • Lewis Carroll
... sweet Peace, was o'er too soon; War, piecemeal, robs me of my joy: For, on the bloodstain'd first of June Death took my eldest ...
— Rural Tales, Ballads, and Songs • Robert Bloomfield
... mitigation of his sentence, now that he perceived his doom, gave way to one of those fearful bursts of rage which no experience had succeeded in teaching him to curb. He howled till the dirt sticking about the vaulted ceiling, and the earth choking up the air-hole, dropped piecemeal to the ground, and every insect that had ears covered them up the best way it could to prevent its becoming instantaneously deafened by the horrid sound; then tearing round and round and round the confined space of his cell, till there seemed to him fifty windows instead of one, ...
— The Adventures of a Bear - And a Great Bear too • Alfred Elwes
... morn till eve put her to all manner of torture, failed in their efforts, and declared themselves beaten, not knowing what further punishment to inflict, and marvelling that she still lived, with her body pierced through and through, and torn piecemeal by so many tortures, of which a single one should have sufficed to kill her. But that blessed saint, like a valiant athlete, took fresh courage and strength from the confession of her faith; all feeling of pain vanished, and ease returned to her at the mere utterance ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
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