"Clocks" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... be within their college walls; the number is the number of the members of the foundation of Christ Church in 1684, when the tower was finished. During the war Tom was forbidden to sound, along with all other Oxford bells and clocks, for might not his mighty voice have guided some zeppelin or German aeroplane to pour down destruction on Oxford? Few things brought home more to Oxford the meaning of the Armistice than hearing Tom once more on the night ...
— The Charm of Oxford • J. Wells
... returned Joan. "Laws! I knaws clocks by scores as hasn't gone for twenty year and more. Us has got two ourselves, that wan won't strike and t' other you can't ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... hair. They patted her face and hands. They were filled with curiosity about her clothes. They felt the texture of her dress, fingered the brooch she wore, knelt down and took her feet into their hands that they might examine her shoes. They explored the clocks on her stockings. Miss Daisy—no queen for the moment—was seriously embarrassed. She jumped to her feet, thrust the baby she held into its ...
— The Island Mystery • George A. Birmingham
... and funeral yew That bathes the charnel house with dew Methinks I hear a voice begin: (Ye ravens, cease your croaking din; Ye tolling clocks, no time resound O'er the long lake and midnight ground) It sends a peal of hollow groans Thus speaking from among the bones: 'When men my scythe and darts supply, How great a king of fears am I! They view me like the last of things: They make, and then they dread, my stings. Fools! if ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... individuals. The very bells were not exempt from experiencing the wrath and vengeance of the prince, for not a single one remained throughout the whole city or in the open country—to say nothing of the clocks, which were not spared either —which was not broken up and confiscated to the king's service for ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume IV. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... such thing as time for lovers. If they have watches and clocks, the wretched things run too fast; and if the sun himself stood still in sympathy, time would not be long. So I confess I have no record of time that night Frances Sutherland returned to her home and Mr. Sutherland kept guard at ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... though Oxford herself were speaking up to me, the air vibrated with a sweet noise of music. It was the hour of one; the end of the Duke's hour of grace. Through the silvery tangle of sounds from other clocks I floated quickly down ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... Cosmos XII, Lance, sitting flat on his back against gravity, looked up at the sweep hands on the control deck clocks and hurried through his pre-jump check list. Tension mounted inside him. He contacted the Operations people in the bunker over the radio net. Colonel Sagen's voice came in clear: ...
— Next Door, Next World • Robert Donald Locke
... the stout porter, Who fled like an arrow, nor turned a hair, Through all the mire and muck: "A ticket, a ticket, sir clerk, I pray: For by two of the clock must I needs away." "That may hardly be," the clerk did say, "For indeed—the clocks have struck." ...
— Verses and Translations • C. S. C.
... depths of the sea. It gives a uniform and unintermittent light, which the sun does not. Now look at this clock; it is electrical, and goes with a regularity that defies the best chronometers. I have divided it into twenty-four hours, like the Italian clocks, because for me there is neither night nor day, sun nor moon, but only that factitious light that I take with me to the bottom of the sea. Look! just now, it is ten ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne
... The city clocks began to strike 12; the Bread Line moved forward slowly, its leathern feet sliding on the stones with the sound of a hissing serpent, as they who had lived according to their lights closed up in ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... a pause, during which the dealer seemed to weigh this statement incredulously. The ticking of many clocks among the curious lumber of the shop, and the faint rushing of the cabs in a near thoroughfare, filled ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... the hour of six till the hour of seven. He compared clocks in the hall and the room. He changed the posture of his legs fifty times. For a while he wrestled right gallantly with the apparent menace of the Fates that he was to get no dinner at all that day; it seemed incredibly derisive, for, as I must repeat, it had never happened to ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... so accustomed to the use of pendulums in our clocks that perhaps we do not often realise that the introduction of this method of regulating time-pieces was really a notable invention worthy the fame of the great astronomer to whom it was due. It appears that sitting one day in the Cathedral of Pisa, Galileo's ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... privileged are guarded by colonies of plaster saints and Virgins that cover the whole slab; and over the handsomest Virgins and the most gaily coloured saints the soldiers have placed the glass bells that once protected the parlour clocks and ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... speech I got—what, it must be supposed, I deserved—a look of surprise: I thought also of some disapprobation. We parted, and I went into the house very chill. The clocks struck and the bells tolled midnight; people were leaving fast: the fete was over; the lamps were fading. In another hour all the dwelling-house, and all the pensionnat, were dark and hushed. I too was in bed, ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... man calling himself John Cotton, to go some twenty miles and be gone three days. Cotton was quite a stranger among us, having been in our place but six weeks. During that time he had boarded with my husband's brother, working for him a part of the time, and the rest of the time selling wooden clocks, of which he had bought a number. Three days passed, but he did not return. The fourth went by, and we began to think he had absconded. On inquiry, Mr. P. found that the clocks had been purchased on credit, and all sold for watches or money; that ...
— The Wonders of Prayer - A Record of Well Authenticated and Wonderful Answers to Prayer • Various
... him to do—any number of mechanical contrivances to go on with, notably the one intended to move a boat without oars, sails, or steam, but they were not church clocks, and for the time being nothing interested him but the old clock whose hands were pointing absurdly as to ...
— The Weathercock - Being the Adventures of a Boy with a Bias • George Manville Fenn
... of a yard wide, were all that was asked for to make a skirt, which only came down to the ankles, and was elaborately trimmed with a dozen or more rows of narrow flounces. Silk or cotton stockings were adorned with embroidered "clocks," and thin slippers were ornamented with ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... hours was generally adopted cannot now be determined. The history of gnomonics from the 13th to the beginning of the 16th century is almost a blank, and during that time the change took place. We can see, however, that the change would necessarily follow the introduction of clocks and other mechanical methods of measuring time; for, however imperfect these were, the hours they marked would be of the same length in summer and in winter, and the discrepancy between these equal hours and the temporary ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... usefulness and attractiveness were to be increased. A staff of bookbinders was to clothe the manuscripts in decorous attire; self-supplying lamps were to light nocturnal workers; sundials by day, and water-clocks by night, enabled them to regulate their hours. Here also was a scriptorium, and it appears probable that between the exertions of Cassiodorus and his friend Eugippius, South Italy was well ...
— The Care of Books • John Willis Clark
... showers ago," instead of "two hours," you see, because the jungle animals have no clocks or watches, and they tell time by the sun, or by the number of rain-showers in a day. And Umboo knew that very well, so he knew about how long ago it was that the rhinoceros had heard the loud ...
— Umboo, the Elephant • Howard R. Garis
... the place where he knew the wall must be scaled. Not three hundred feet away several guards were gathered around a fire. The night was cold, and the guards kept close to the fire. Slowly the minutes passed. The city clocks struck half-past twelve. Would they never come? Had their flight ...
— Raiding with Morgan • Byron A. Dunn
... impressive than one. There is great decorative value in a pair of mirrors, a pair of candlesticks, a pair of porcelain jars, two cupboards flanking a chimney-piece. You would not be guilty of a pair of wall fountains, or of two wall clocks, just as you would not have two copies of the same portrait in a room. But when things "pair" logically, pair them! They will furnish a backbone ...
— The House in Good Taste • Elsie de Wolfe
... covering the York River Railway and waiting the coming of McDowell. The remainder, from Woodbury's Bridge to the Charles City road, occupied the line of breastworks which stood directly east of the beleaguered city. So nearly was the prize within their grasp that the church bells, and even the clocks striking the hour, were heard in the camps; and at Mechanicsville Bridge, watched by a picket, stood a sign-post which bore the legend: "To Richmond, 41/2 miles." The sentries who paced that beat were fortunate. ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... faces; a chessboard, the completion of which had occupied a Dutchman for eighteen years; golden carriages drawn by fleas; toys composed of porcelain or ivory in imitation of Chinese works of art; curious pieces of mechanism, musical clocks, etc., were industriously collected into the cabinets of the wealthy and powerful. This taste was, however, not utterly useless. The predilection for ancient gems promoted the study of the remains of antiquity, as Stosch, Lippert, and Winckelmann prove, and that of natural history was greatly ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... for the Hanseatic Towns, and none of the objects enumerated in this article ought to enter Hamburg! But the town received from England a large quantity of fine cloths, buttons; ironmongery, toys, china; and from France only clocks, bronzes, jewellery, ribbons, bonnets, gauzes and gloves. "Let," said I to M. Eudel, "the Paris Duane be asked what that town alone exports in matters of this sort and it will be seen how important it is not to stop a trade all the more profitable to France, as the workmanship forms ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... to follow Maurice Walton and his companion until his patience was nearly exhausted. At length, just as the city clocks were striking ten, ...
— Tom, The Bootblack - or, The Road to Success • Horatio Alger
... frames: pictures of ships, and men fighting, and of the most beautiful women, and of singular places; nowhere in the world are there pictures of so bright a colour as those Keawe found hanging in his house. As for the knick-knacks, they were extraordinary fine; chiming clocks and musical boxes, little men with nodding heads, books filled with pictures, weapons of price from all quarters of the world, and the most elegant puzzles to entertain the leisure of a solitary man. And as no one would care ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... hour later, as the clocks were striking eleven, the instrument of Providence descended from a hansom, and, bidding the driver wait, rapped at the door ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... said chateaux. We began by hoisting the national flag and to demolish... The national guard of Boisset, eating and drinking without stint, entered the chateau and behaved in the most brutal manner; for whatever they found in their way, whether clocks, mirrors, doors, closets, and finally documents, all were made way with. They even sent off forty of the men to a patriotic village in the vicinity. They forced the inmates of every house to give them money, and those who refused were threatened with death." Besides this the national ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... The clocks had just struck nine when he paused in his work, and crossing to the French windows, which opened on a little terrace, looked out at the darkened square. The restless music of London's life played on his tired pulses. He heard the purring of limousines gliding into Pall Mall, and ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... industries and manufactures, largely due to the influx of Huguenot refugees, many of whom were skilled artisans. Not only did the manufacturers of cloth and silk employ a large number of hands, but also those of hats, gloves, ribbons, trimmings, laces, clocks and other articles, which had hitherto been chiefly produced in France. One of the consequences of the rapid increase of wealth was a change in the simple habits, manners and dress, which hitherto travellers had noted as one of the most ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson
... had only marked fourteen, when my sweeping was interrupted by being employed to write down my brother's observations with the large twenty-foot. I had, however, the comfort to see that my brother was satisfied with my endeavors to assist him when he wanted another person either to run to the clocks, write down a memorandum, fetch and carry instruments, or measure the ground with poles, etc., etc., of which something of the kind every moment would occur. For the assiduity with which the measurements on the diameter of the Georgium Sidus, and observations of ...
— Sir William Herschel: His Life and Works • Edward Singleton Holden
... church-towers of the city, and a stream of people in gala attire poured toward St. Peter's. Poor Blanka sat at her window with eyes fixed on a certain corner, around which she had the day before seen Manasseh Adorjan's form disappear. The clocks struck twelve, thirteen, fourteen—by Italian reckoning of time; the crowds began to thin, and at last every one seemed to have betaken himself to St. Peter's. An open carriage halted in the now deserted street in front of the hotel, and Blanka recognised in its occupant the ...
— Manasseh - A Romance of Transylvania • Maurus Jokai
... eastern turret. He knows, or is told if he asks a loitering pensioner, that the descent of the ball tells the time as truly as the sun; and that all the ships in the river watch it to set their chronometers by, before they sail; and, that, all the railway clocks, and all the railway trains over the kingdom are arranged punctually by its indications. But how the heavens are watched to secure this punctual definition of the flight of time, and what other curious labors are going on inside the Observatory, is a sealed book. The public ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... in describing the interior of the Grand Signior's palace, into which he gained admission as the assistant of a watchmaker who was employed to regulate the clocks, says that the eunuch who received them at the entrance of the harem, conducted them into a hall: "Cette salle est incrustee de porcelaines fines; et le lambris dore et azure qui orne le fond d'une coupole qui regne au-dessus, est des plus riches.... ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... were very near to their hearts, a round of beef and a tureen of pickled cabbage, while Gustavus got up from the what-not in a bemused manner, and proceeded to search dreamily for an armchair. He came upon one by chance in the dining-room, and wheeled it out into the hall just as the clocks in the house rang ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... knew nothing of the hardships in store for them, and were the least adapted to encounter them of any people in the world, as they were mechanics, whose business had been the delicate work of making watches and clocks. They arrived in 1821, and from year to year, after undergoing hardships that might have appalled the hardiest pioneer, their spirits drooped, they pined for home, and left for the south. At one time a party of two hundred and forty-three of them departed for the United States, and found homes ...
— The History of Minnesota and Tales of the Frontier • Charles E. Flandrau
... church clocks struck one hour after another, his spirits rose. He had, indeed, never had the least apprehension concerning his own liberty, since he knew himself to be perfectly innocent. He only desired to be released ...
— A Cigarette-Maker's Romance • F. Marion Crawford
... most highly. "Time is money." (Benjamin Franklin.) An English proverb calls time the stuff of which life is made.(265) While in negro nations, individuals do not even know their own age; while in Russia, there are very few clocks to strike the hours, even in the towers of churches, in England, a watch is considered an indispensable article of apparel, even for very young people and for some of the lower orders of society.(266) Railroads operate in this respect as a kind of national ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... is the double time standard. The Germans set their official clocks and watches by Berlin time, but have made no attempt to force it on the natives, who continue loyal to Belgian time, which is one ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol 1, Issue 4, January 23, 1915 • Various
... it, and no amount of discouragement can dissuade him from his lofty purpose. He sets his goal high and marches toward it with dauntless courage. If a wireless outfit is his goal, bells may ring and clocks may strike, but he hears or heeds ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson
... fill-upables, gone but not forgotten. And then followed a time when mantels and bookcase tops bore certain ills in the way of the more modern painted plaques, strings of gilded nuts, embroidered banners, and porcelain and brass clocks so gaudy and bedizened as to explain why time flies. But the architect has come to the rescue with his dignified, stately mantel which repels the trivial familiarity of meaningless decoration, and the bookcase whose simple, ...
— The Complete Home • Various
... The clocks had just struck two, the household was at rest, the logs blazed and cracked merrily, the red light shining on those mail-clad effigies in the corners, lighting up helm and hauberk, glancing on greaves and gauntlets. ...
— Vixen, Volume I. • M. E. Braddon
... figure of a mother still young enough to dance her ball-dresses to rags, while the hazy outline of a neutral-tinted father filled an intermediate space between the butler and the man who came to wind the clocks. Even to the eyes of infancy, Mrs. Hudson Bart had appeared young; but Lily could not recall the time when her father had not been bald and slightly stooping, with streaks of grey in his hair, and a tired walk. It was a shock to her to learn afterward that he was ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... of Empire curls exhibited as a modern trophy. We stopped at a shop and examined its wares, which, indeed, hung chiefly on the shutters. There were Swiss embroidered gowns and blouses to be bought, edelweiss penwipers, wooden paper-cutters, and clocks with chamois climbing wooden rocks. Nothing apparently in that shop had been "made in Germany." When we reached the verandah of the "Nassauer Hof" we were gladdened by bows from the "Assessor" and ...
— A War-time Journal, Germany 1914 and German Travel Notes • Harriet Julia Jephson
... to do well. The relations of time to mind are very strange. Some of their phenomena seem to prove that time is only of the mind—belonging to the intellect as good and evil belong to the spirit. Anyhow, if it were not for the clocks of the universe, one man would live a year, a century, where another would live but a day. But the mere motion of time, not to say the consciousness of empty time, is fearful. It is this empty time that the fool is always trying to kill: his effort should be to fill it. Yet nothing but the living ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... at least half an hour; then the clocks chimed in the town. No, there was no hope; he would see her no more that night. He rose listlessly to go back to bed, tired out with his day's climb. And as he stood up, there, above the ivy again, he saw her face looking ...
— Three Weeks • Elinor Glyn
... nothing very definite to fix upon, and you have absolutely no physical sensation of fear; but the mercury of both the barometer and the thermometer has been somehow badly shaken, and the mainsprings of all watches and clocks, although still much as the mainsprings of clocks and watches in other parts of the world—bringing your mind to bear on it you know they are exactly the same—are merely mechanism, and allow the day to have at least forty-two hours. It is strange, is it not, and you begin to understand vaguely ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... chronometers, which were instruments of navigation so precious as always to be kept under lock and key, there were no clocks in the navy till some years after I joined it. Time on board ship was ...
— Sea-Power and Other Studies • Admiral Sir Cyprian Bridge
... of this age, Which every other century surpasses, Is one,—just now the rage,— Called "Singing for all classes," That now, alas! have no more ear than asses, To learn to warble like the birds in June— In time and tune, Correct as clocks, ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... in earnest, and already we've had a few scorching days. Haying will soon be upon us, and there is no slackening in the wheels of industry about Alabama Ranch. My Little Alarm-Clocks have me up bright and early, and the morning prairie is a joy that never grows old to the eye. Life is good, and I intend ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... love so well in England, painted with true native art. Just as the Norwegians love ornamenting their woodwork with strange designs, so the Finns are partial to geometrical drawings of all descriptions; therefore corner cupboards, old bureaus, and grandfather clocks often come in for this form of decoration. Another favourite idea is to have a small cup of shot on the writing-table, into which the pen is dug when not in use—and sand is still used in many places instead ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... to her mind came the memory of that fancied sound from her father's room. She listened now, her head raised, and the two men, their eyes bleared but their noses sniffing as though they were dogs, listened also. There were certain sounds, clocks ticking, the bough scraping on the wall, a cart's echo on the frozen road, the maid singing far in the depths of the ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... (The Sergeant pronounced it as though it were all one word). Sir, my comrade Peterday is a very remarkable man,—most cobblers are. When he's not cobbling, he's reading,—when not reading, he's cobbling, or mending clocks, and watches, and, betwixt this and that, my comrade has picked up a power of information,—though he lost his leg a doing of it—in a gale of wind—off the Cape of Good Hope, for my comrade was a sailor, sir. Consequently he is a handy man, most sailors are and makes his own wooden ...
— The Money Moon - A Romance • Jeffery Farnol
... led the revels. It was he to whom the little Queen had appealed for help when she first planned her garden party. Her boy husband, Louis XVI, was more interested in machinery than in anything else. He was fond of taking clocks to pieces and putting them together again, and in working over old locks and keys, and so had left his young Queen very much to herself ever since he had brought her from ...
— Historic Boyhoods • Rupert Sargent Holland
... is; since when have you joined the realists? Somebody else's watch—or a clock. Are there no clocks in Paris? You say, 'I shall give you until the clock strikes the hour.' That is even more literary—you obtain the solemn note of the clock to ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... machinery and appliances, textiles, apparel, footwear, watches and clocks, toys, plastics, ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... follow the shadows, in changeful sport, across his unchanging features. They gleam upon his watch. His grasp conceals the dial-plate,—but we know that the faithful hands have met; for one of the city clocks tells midnight. ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... no charge for his teaching, took up no collections, and never inaugurated a Correspondence School. America has produced one man who has been called a reincarnation of Socrates; that man was Bronson Alcott, who peddled clocks and forgot the flight of time whenever any one would listen to him expound the unities. Alcott once ran his wheelbarrow into a neighbor's garden and was proceeding to load his motor-car with cabbages, beets and potatoes. Glancing up, the philosopher saw the owner of the garden looking at him ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... A clock ticked in that hurried tempo of five ticks to the second which has been the habit of clocks since time immemorial. Very small and trivial noises came from the background tape, preventing utter silence from hanging intolerably in ...
— This World Is Taboo • Murray Leinster
... plateau is also the centre of a large number of manufactures that require a high degree of mechanical skill and intellectual training, such as small fire-arms, machinery, watches and clocks, jewelry, machine-tools, etc. The location of such industries depends but little upon climate, topography, or the cost of transportation; it is wholly a question of an educated and trained people. This region is likely to lose a considerable part of its manufactures of ...
— Commercial Geography - A Book for High Schools, Commercial Courses, and Business Colleges • Jacques W. Redway
... at luncheon in the hotel, a rather strong rocking movement was felt, and I looked at the ceiling to see if there were cracks which would make it advisable to leave the room. But it lasted only a few seconds, although the chandeliers continued to swing for a long time. At other places clocks stopped, and I read in the papers that the vibration passed from south to north, damaging native villages. In one town the tremors lasted three minutes and were the worst that had occurred in thirty-four years, but when the disturbance reached Soerabaia it was far less severe ...
— Through Central Borneo: - An Account of Two Years' Travel in the Land of Head-Hunters - Between the Years 1913 and 1917 • Carl Lumholtz
... a man, or rather I should say something like a boy, of the poor creature, Ransome. But his mind was scarce truly human. He could remember nothing of the time before he came to sea; only that his father had made clocks, and had a starling in the parlour, which could whistle "The North Countrie;" all else had been blotted out in these years of hardship and cruelties. He had a strange notion of the dry land, picked up from sailor's stories: that it was a place where lads were put to ...
— Kidnapped • Robert Louis Stevenson
... were horrified to hear from Sir ROBERT HORNE that nearly four hundred thousand pounds' worth of clocks had been imported from Germany this year. They were quite under the impression that when we wound up the Watch on the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, December 1, 1920 • Various
... covered with crystals, stood around the hall upon tables of polished marble. Other articles of furniture, candelabra, girandoles, gilded clocks, filled the outline. Broad mirrors reflected the different objects; so that, instead of one apartment, this hall appeared only one of a ...
— The Rifle Rangers • Captain Mayne Reid
... the sun goes down, what events have happened in the course of the day,—events of ordinary occurrence: as, the clocks have struck, ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... then to the movements of the sentry outside as he moved from time to time, changing feet, or taking a step or two up and down as far as the size of the landing would allow. Then came a weary yawn, and the clock chimed and struck twelve, while, before it had finished, the sounds of other clocks striking became mingled with it, and Frank listened to the strange jangle, one which he might have heard hundreds of times, but which had never impressed him ...
— In Honour's Cause - A Tale of the Days of George the First • George Manville Fenn
... ridiculing kings and the most portentous events, of calling anything and everything in question with a jest. Then he sauntered along the boulevards. It was an entirely novel amusement; and so agreeable did he find it, that, looking at the turret clocks, he saw the hour hands were pointing to four, and only then remembered that he had ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... the Laughing Jackass. I have also heard it called the Hawkesbury-Clock (clocks being at the period of my residence scarce articles in the colony, there not being one perhaps in the whole Hawkesbury settlement), for it is among the first of the feathered tribes which announce the approach ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... skill in this practice through having been an ugly lonely woman for so many years, with nobody to give me information; a thing you will not consider strange when the parallel case is borne in mind,—how truly people who have no clocks will ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... one of the least objections against these fashionable fictions that the imagery of them is essentially monstrous. Hollow winds, clay-cold hands, clanking chains and clicking clocks, with a few similar etcetera are ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... in the day, for the darker it becomes, the wider open the eyes of puss. In bright sunshine, at noon, the inside doors of the cat's eyes close to a narrow slit, while at night these doors open wide. That is the reason why, in the days before clocks and watches were made, the children could tell about the time of day by looking at the cat's eyes. Sometimes they named their pussy Klok'-oog, which means Clock Eye, or Bell Eye, for bell clocks are older than clocks with a dial, and because in Holland the bells ring ...
— Dutch Fairy Tales for Young Folks • William Elliot Griffis
... that the oldest clock in existence is one in the ancient castle of Dover, on the southern coast of England, bearing the date, 1348. It has been running, therefore, five hundred and thirty-six years. Other clocks of the same century exist in various parts of Europe, the works of which have but one hand, which points the hour, and require winding every twenty-four hours. From the fact of so many large clocks of that period having been preserved in whole or ...
— Captains of Industry - or, Men of Business Who Did Something Besides Making Money • James Parton
... April there will go off under your window that most delightful of all alarm-clocks — the tiny, friendly house wren, just returned from a long visit south. Like some little mountain spring that, having been imprisoned by winter ice, now bubbles up in the spring sunshine, and goes rippling along over the pebbles, ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... difficulty. Any means which ascertained the hour at Greenwich, at the instant of making a celestial observation in any other part, would answer the difficulty; for the difference in quarters of an hour would give the difference of the degrees. But clocks could not be used on shipboard, and the best watches failed to keep the time. In the reign of Anne, Parliament offered a reward of L. 5000, perhaps not far from the value of twice the sum in the present day, for a watch within a certain degree ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLII. Vol. LV. April, 1844 • Various
... occasion of very severe exercise I actually slept seven hours. But such sleep orgies were not frequent. There was so much to learn, so much to be done, that I felt wicked when I slept seven hours. And I blessed the man who invented alarm clocks. ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... needn't be," he said. "You've got to remember that writers are an odd lot. They don't conform. They don't punch time-clocks. They boast of having written a novel in three weeks but they don't mention the fact that they sat around drinking beer for ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith
... friends—in the loyal opposition—and yes, I mean loyal: I put out my hand. I am putting out my hand to you, Mr. Speaker. I am putting out my hand to you Mr. Majority Leader. For this is the thing: This is the age of the offered hand. We can't turn back clocks, and I don't want to. But when our fathers were young, Mr. Speaker, our differences ended at the water's edge. And we don't wish to turn back time, but when our mothers were young, Mr. Majority Leader, the Congress and the ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... Headache is common, loss of memory is distressing, and in severe cases it is wider and deeper than mere inattention can explain. There is often the torture of acute hearing, or an inability to suppress attention; the hater of clocks and crowing cocks is a neurasthenic." The disease is especially common in the women players of the social game, and its unhappy victims too often seek relief from the nervous irritability which is a common early symptom in still greater nervous excitement. It is a sad commentary ...
— Disease and Its Causes • William Thomas Councilman
... generally abominable, and their cookery often disgusting. In Paris grand dinners may no doubt be had, and luxuries of every description—except the luxury of comfort. Cotton-velvet sofas and ormolu clocks stand in the place of convenient furniture; and logs of wood, at a franc a log, fail to impart to you the heat which the freezing cold of a Paris winter demands. They used to make good coffee in Paris, but even that ...
— Volume 2 • Anthony Trollope
... and they are each four minutes longer than a sidereal day. We divide our days into 24 hours; each hour into 60 minutes; each minute into 60 seconds. This subdivision of the day requires some mechanical means of continually registering time, and for this purpose we use clocks ...
— The Astronomy of the Bible - An Elementary Commentary on the Astronomical References - of Holy Scripture • E. Walter Maunder
... agreed Dorothy. "And say! Let's fix up something funny! We'll get all the alarm clocks in the house and set them so they will go off one after the other, just when Nellie gets to bed, say about nine o'clock. We'll hide them so she will just about find one when the other starts! She isn't really sick, is she?" Dorothy ...
— The Bobbsey Twins at the Seashore • Laura Lee Hope
... that moment? A dozen different clocks at that instant struck eleven. She was probably at some ball or theatre. She would soon come in, all wrapped in furs and laces. When she came, it mattered not how late, she always opened Jack's door and bent over his bed to kiss him. Even in his sleep he was generally conscious of her presence, ...
— Jack - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... writes: 'One fellow carries a shotgun around with him, another a saw, but they principally run to clocks. Of course you don't have to pay anything for these fine articles, provided you buy the goods which call for them (in your mind). The retailers, too, now are striving their very best to see which can give the most with a pound of baking powder. That is, ...
— A Man of Samples • Wm. H. Maher
... good many horses at the village, whereas, in 1837, perhaps one might have found out a dozen by great research there: as for cavalry, unless Brother Jonathan can manufacture it as cheaply and as lucratively as he does wooden clocks or nutmegs, it would be somewhat difficult ...
— Canada and the Canadians - Volume I • Sir Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... secrets," said the good-natured grocer, as he took down his hat and coat from behind the door. "Our hearts are open like them clocks, with all the works outside, eh, Lucy, my dear?" Laughing at his own simile, he ...
— Adrien Leroy • Charles Garvice
... one stirred. Hope, even at such moments, was stronger than machinery of clocks and nurses. There was a general belief that somehow or other the moment that they dreaded, the moment that was always coming to block their happiness, could be evaded and shoved aside. Nothing ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood
... registered by the electric clocks in the famous observatory overlooking the college, when the sound of running feet came down the long corridors. A stentorian voice shouted: "All ...
— Submarine Warfare of To-day • Charles W. Domville-Fife
... Joyce kept thinking of her Grandmother Ware. She could see her outdoors among her flowers, the dahlias and touch-me-nots, the four-o'clocks and the cinnamon roses, taking such pride and pleasure in her sweet posy beds. She could see her beside the little table on the shady porch, making tea for some old neighbor who had dropped in to spend the afternoon with her. Or she was asleep ...
— The Gate of the Giant Scissors • Annie Fellows Johnston
... gradually into one great white frozen ocean, and were lost in the distance and darkness of night. High overhead, in a sky which was almost black, sparkled the bright constellations of Orion and the Pleiades—the celestial clocks which marked the long, weary hours between sunrise and sunset. The blue mysterious streamers of the aurora trembled in the north, now shooting up in clear bright lines to the zenith, then waving back and forth in great majestic curves over the silent ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... by tradition. They insist that a work of art shall be a vehicle with a step where they can climb aboard, and that they shall ride, not according to the contours of the country, but to a land where for an hour there are no clocks to punch and no dishes to wash. To satisfy these demands there exists an intermediate class of artists who are able and willing to confuse the planes, to piece together a realistic-romantic compound out of the inventions of greater men, and, as Miss Patterson ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... to investigate the laws of the phenomenon, and out of what, in some shape or other, had been before men's eyes from the beginning of the world, his powerful genius extracted the most important results. The invention of pendulum clocks took place about the middle of the seventeenth century; and the honour of the discovery is disputed between Galileo and Huygens. Becher contends for Galileo, and states that one Trifler made the first pendulum clock at Florence, under the direction of Galileo ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, - Issue 491, May 28, 1831 • Various
... of leisure by mechanical employments in which he was assisted by one Torriano, who constructed a sundial in the convent-garden. He had a great fancy for clocks, and had a number of these in his royal apartments. The special triumphs of Torriano were some tin soldiers, so constructed that they could go through military exercises, and little wooden birds which flew in and out of the window and ...
— Heroes of Modern Europe • Alice Birkhead
... Roussainville," the Cure went on. "It is nothing more nowadays than a parish of farmers, though in olden times the place must have had a considerable importance from its trade in felt hats and clocks. (I am not certain, by the way, of the etymology of Roussainville. I should dearly like to think that the name was originally Rouville, from Radulfi villa, analogous, don't you see, to Chateauroux, ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... as so potent an emperor and Caesar to boot as the great Don of Germany, Charles the Fifth, was used to divert himself in his dotage by watching the gyrations of the springs and cogs of a long row of clocks, even so does an elderly Commodore while away his leisure in harbour, by what is called "exercising guns," and also "exercising yards and sails;" causing the various spars of all the ships under his command to be "braced," "topped," and "cock billed" in concert, ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... odd here; pokers and leather harness, all the women and girls with bonnets and long petticoats and shawls and flounces and comfortable poky straw bonnets, and boys so nicely dressed, and urns and small panes (no glasses and no clocks), trays, good bread, and everybody with clean and fresh and pretty faces. We have been walking this evening by the sea, and all the English look very odd; they all look hangy and loose, so different from the Paris ladies, laced so tight they can hardly walk, ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... designed for being put in connection at a distance with an indicator like the ones just described. It is a simple clock to which a few special devices have been added. Seismic clocks may be classed in two categories, according as they are stopped by the effect of a shock or are set running at the very instant one occurs. The Messrs. Brassart have always given preference to those of the second category, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 455, September 20, 1884 • Various
... had made all these arrangements, of which I am a little ashamed when I think of them, I had nothing better to do than to watch the dial-plate till the index pointed to noon. Five minutes elapsed, which. I allowed for variation of clocks—five minutes more rendered me anxious and doubtful—and five minutes more ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... first visited. Here the eye travelled over numerous shelves laden with a profusion of self-recording instruments, electric batteries and switchboards, whilst the ear caught the ticking of many clocks, the gentle whir of a motor and occasionally the trembling note of an electric bell. But such sights and sounds conveyed only an impression of the delicate methodical means by which the daily and hourly variations of our weather conditions were being recorded—a mere ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... thou hear the melodies of Time, Listen when sleep and drowsy darkness roll Over hush'd cities, and the midnight chime Sounds from their hundred clocks, and deep bells toll Like a last knell over the dead world's soul, Saying, 'Time shall be final of all things, Whose late, last voice must elegize the whole,'— O then I clap aloft my brave broad wings, And make the wide air tremble while ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... he can do that!" said Polwarth. "What sort of watchmaker were he who could not set right the watches and clocks himself made?" ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... free life, where men lived instead of vegetating, was in his veins. His footstep gave forth a ringing sound from the pavement; he felt himself stalwart, alert, his brain rejoicing in its sense of power. It was even with no sense of guilt that he heard the church clocks striking twelve as he reached the house where his wife had been awaiting his ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. VI., No. 6, May, 1896 • Various
... the house, at any rate, there was no need for caution. The clocks of the house had barely followed the church clock in striking the half-hour when the workmen on the ground floor saw Lady Kitty come down-stairs and go through the drawing-room window into the garden. There she gave her opinion on the preparations, pushing on afterwards into ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... was now nearly ended. The water-clocks announced the fifth hour; and leaving the more private triclinium, in which the ringleaders alone had feasted, followed by his guests,—who were flushed, reeling, and half frenzied,—with a steady step, a cold eye, and a presence like that of Mars himself, ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 2 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... becomes an opportunity as well as a constraint in generating new thinking. In many past cases, time was generally viewed as an adversary. We had to race against several clocks to arrive "firstest with the mostest," to prevent an enemy from advancing, or to ensure we had ample forces on station should they be required. Rapid Dominance would alleviate many of these constraints as we would have the capacity to deploy effective forces far more ...
— Shock and Awe - Achieving Rapid Dominance • Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade
... change in good money. In harvest time all doors are shut against them, nevertheless they contrive, by means of picklocks and other instruments, to effect an entrance into houses, when they steal linen, clocks, silver, and any other movable article which they can lay their hands upon. They give a strict account of everything to their captain, who takes his share. They are very clever in making a good bargain. When they know of a rich merchant living in the place, they disguise themselves, enter into communication ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... for measuring time by using the shadow of the sun. They were quite common in ancient times before clocks and watches were invented. At the present time they are used more as an ornamentation than as a means of measuring time, although they are quite accurate if properly constructed. There are several different designs of sundials, but the most common, and the one we shall describe in this article, ...
— The Boy Mechanic: Volume 1 - 700 Things For Boys To Do • Popular Mechanics
... The clocks had long struck midnight, and the sereno had several times raised his dirge-like chaunt in the street outside, before my companion came to me. She wasted no time in preliminaries. I think she could see by my outward expression that I knew how ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne
... expected to regulate the affairs of the moon as well as of Riseholme—there would be dim seances and sandwiches In the smoking-parlour. The humorous furniture should be put in cupboards, and as they drifted towards the front hall again, when the clocks struck an unexpectedly late hour, little whispered colloquies of "How wonderful he was tonight" would be heard, and there would be faraway looks and sighs, and the notings down of the titles of books that conducted the pilgrim on the Way. Perhaps as they softly assembled ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... Mr. Spear has been doing little else but studying Colonial history, and making love to old ladies who own clocks and skillets given them by their great-grandmammas. There is no doubt that Spear has dictated clauses in a hundred wills devising that William G. Spear, Custodian of the Quincy Historical Society, ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... draught swept past her and seemed to draw her inward. It shook the sere bundle. Its skeleton leaves, dissolving into motes, flickered an instant athwart the light. They sifted down like ashes on the woman's dark head as she passed in. Her color had faded, but not through fear of ghost clocks. It was the searing process she had to face. And any room where she sat alone with certain memories of her youth was to ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote
... busily engaged in the 'twisting of coils of wire, about shiny brass cylinders, with an array of small and large clocks, electric batteries and mysterious bottles on the carved library table. He was intent upon the manufacture of another of his ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... faculty, and to him he recited the optical delusion of his sister. The physician listened attentively, and seemed sanguine in his hopes of cure. He came to the house two hours before the one so dreaded by the patient. He had quietly arranged that the clocks should be put forward half an hour, unknown to Adela, and even to her brother. He was a man of the most extraordinary powers of conversation, of surpassing wit, of all the faculties that interest and amuse. He first administered to the patient a harmless potion, which he pledged ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... There was a fervor in the sky as of an August noon, although the clocks of the city would ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... can be made recorders also by simple devices. Thus, having only a most delicate pressure in the primary instrument, a distinct ink record may be made in the receiver, even though the paper be rough and soft. The method is applicable to steam gauges, water indicators, clocks, barometers, etc., in fact, to any measuring instrument where a ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 620, November 19,1887 • Various
... at floral gardening, was achieving local popularity. In the homes of the Tighes, the Leighs, Arthur Rivers, and others, he had noticed art objects of some distinction—bronzes, marbles, hangings, pictures, clocks, rugs. ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... to be punctual, always on time, So carries her watch where she goes. And if you examine her wardrobe you'll find She even has clocks on her hose. ...
— The New Pun Book • Thomas A. Brown and Thomas Joseph Carey
... clocks struck nine as she turned into Whitefriars Road, the street where the old bank of Riversborough stood. The houses on each side of the broad and quiet street were handsome, old-fashioned dwelling-places, not one of which had as yet ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton
... got a lot of these Things," said the Guest, poking at the Guinea Hen timidly with his Fork. "We use them as Alarm Clocks, but I'd just as soon eat a ...
— Knocking the Neighbors • George Ade
... The church clocks were just striking two when, Jack having duly fulfilled his promise to say good-bye to his partner, and to exchange a final word or two with him, the Thetis cast off from the wharf, backed out into the stream, and, swinging round, swept away down the river at the modest rate of fourteen ...
— The Cruise of the Thetis - A Tale of the Cuban Insurrection • Harry Collingwood
... with Madame do Rio Seco. Her house is really a magnificent one; it has its ball-room, and its music-room, its grotto and fountains, besides extremely handsome apartments of every kind, both for family and public use, with rather more china and French clocks than we should think of displaying, but which do not assort ill with the silken hangings and ...
— Journal of a Voyage to Brazil - And Residence There During Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1823 • Maria Graham
... of human life only extended to the length of a second, and if there existed one of our actual clocks mounted and in movement, each individual of our species who should look at the hour-hand of this clock would never see it change its place in the course of his life, although this hand would really not be stationary. The observations ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... equipment as quickly as possible. Louis's desk became loaded with ornaments, his room at Mrs. Green's became filled with nearly Wedgwood vases, candlesticks, and other bric-a-brac. He acquired six mission hall-clocks, a row of taborets stood outside of his door like Turkish sentinels, and his collection of ash-receivers was the best ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... It would be extremely valuable to have some method of accurately estimating, measuring, and recording these differences for medical purposes. At that time watches had not yet been invented, and it would have been very difficult to have estimated the time by the clocks, for almost the only clocks in existence were those in the towers of the cathedrals and of the public buildings. The first watches, Nuremberg eggs, as they were called, were not made by Peter Henlein until well on into the next century. The only method of measuring time ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... round a square or market, or round some great building; after a time these grew more distinct, and the lamps themselves were visible; slight yellow specks, that seemed to be rapidly snuffed out, one by one, as intervening obstacles hid them from the sight. Then, sounds arose—the striking of church clocks, the distant bark of dogs, the hum of traffic in the streets; then outlines might be traced—tall steeples looming in the air, and piles of unequal roofs oppressed by chimneys; then, the noise swelled into a louder sound, and forms grew more distinct and numerous ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... and gargoyles, nymphs and scrollwork—they shelter heroes. But heroes have changed. Destiny no longer passes in the night—a masked horseman riding a lonely road. Instead, an old watchmaker winds up clocks, sleek men and desirable women. In the inner offices of the city the new heroes sit through the day, watchmakers themselves, winding and unwinding the immemorial crowds with new devices. But in the evening they too return to ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... no telling; but I reckon he runs a smart chance of grazing agin the whole on 'em. They've got a long account agin him. In one way or t'other, he's swindled everybody with his notions. Some bought his clocks, which only went while the rogue stayed, and when he went they stopt forever. Some bought ready-made clothes, which went to pieces at the very sight of soap and water. He sold a fusee to old Jerry Seaborn, and warranted the piece, and it bursted into flinders, the very first fire, and tore ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... logic cycles, so called because each generally corresponds to one clock pulse in the processor's timing. The relative execution times of instructions on a machine are usually discussed in clocks rather than absolute fractions of a second; one good reason for this is that clock speeds for various models of the machine may increase as technology improves, and it is usually the relative times one is interested in when discussing ...
— THE JARGON FILE, VERSION 2.9.10
... perhaps." Here he paused, expecting to be encouraged by some words. But Sir Thomas had acquired professionally a knowledge that to such a speaker as Mr. Pabsby any rejoinder or argument was like winding up a clock. It is better to allow such clocks to run down. "With me, I have to consider every possible point. What will my people wish? Some of them are eager in the cause of reform, Sir Thomas; ...
— Ralph the Heir • Anthony Trollope
... microscope! How is it that you find the smallest speck of dust, yet miss the mountain? Does the time seem too short? It would not if you realised that events, not clocks, were ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy
... precept is sound, and its due application Is fraught with undoubted advantage to some, But I'm free to remark that my own situation Represents a recalcitrant re-sidu-um; Clocks I cannot abide with their truculent ticking— A nuisance I always have striven to scotch— And I gain very little assistance in sticking To work, if ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, March 7, 1917. • Various
... House even to the garret, where an old cedar chest is laid away under the eaves. Bess, the minx, well knows it, and takes out a prim little gown with the white fading yellow, and white silk mits without fingers, and white stockings with clocks, and a gauze cap, with wings and streamers, that sits saucily on the black locks; and the lawn-embroidered apron; and such dainty, high-heeled slippers with the pearls still a-glisten upon the buckles. Away she flies to put them ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... the twenty-ninth of February, when you have a birthday only once in four years. Yes—it's a good deal like that, only worse. For you may have to wait years and years before another great fire comes. You understand, of course, that having no clocks or calendars or anything like that, the wild animals can keep track of birthdays only ...
— The Tale of Cuffy Bear • Arthur Scott Bailey |
