"Cog" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... He sourly realized that he was only a cog in the big machine; that for a moment he had threatened to develop a rough edge and start a squeak, but the big file had been used on him. It had been used on many another of the State House cogs, as he well knew. Responsibility as to his party! Safety and sanity in regard to financial ...
— The Landloper - The Romance Of A Man On Foot • Holman Day
... cross sections of masonry are very elaborate. The average ascent per mile is 1,320 feet, and the total ascent is nearly 8,000 feet. In the center of the track, between the heavy steel rails, are two cog rails, of great strength. These are provided to insure absolute safety for travelers, one being for general use and the other as a ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... every step; some of it with the enemy on the run. Take it all together, it is a long way. Much of it will not have to be travelled over again. The engine of municipal progress once started as it has been in New York, may slip many a cog with Tammany as the engineer; it may even be stopped for a season; but it can never be made to work backward. Even Tammany knows that, and gropes desperately for a new hold, a certificate of character. In the ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis
... aspect, giving to it the largest degree of significance. A third consideration is Herndon's enthusiasm for the agnostic deism that was rampant in America in his day. Perhaps this causes his romanticism to slip a cog, to run at times on a side-track, to become the servant of his religious partisanship. In three words the faults of Herndon ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... woman of condition, (Who, to approve her disposition As much superior as her birth To those composed of common earth, With double spirit must engage In every folly of the age) The honourable arts would buy, To pack the cards, and cog a die. 200 The hero—who, for brawn and face, May claim right honourable place Amongst the chiefs of Butcher-row:[194] Who might, some thirty years ago, If we may be allow'd to guess At his employment by his dress, Put medicines off ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... question of time when vice should get its clutches upon her, as a cog-wheel seizes whoever comes too near the machine. After whirling her around through a short life of shame and degradation, it would, with mechanical punctuality, have cast her off into some corner, there to drag out to the end, in sordid obscurity, ...
— Tales of Two Countries • Alexander Kielland
... high cum diddledy, The cog-wheels of life have need of much oiling; Smack, crack,—this is our jubilee: Huzza, my lads! ...
— Snarley-yow - or The Dog Fiend • Frederick Marryat
... Andy, promptly. "Never could bear to let anything puzzle me long. Used to lie awake half the night trying to clinch a name that had just slipped a cog in my memory." ...
— The Airplane Boys among the Clouds - or, Young Aviators in a Wreck • John Luther Langworthy
... fast for a few seconds, and then suddenly concluding to take it easy and away goes the engine again, see if the governor belt is all right, and if it is, it would be well for you to stop and see if a wheel is not loose. It might be either the little belt wheel or one of the little cog wheels. If you find these are all right, examine the spool on the crank shaft from which the governor is run and you will probably find it loose. If the engine has been run for any length of time, you will always find the trouble in one of these places, but if it is ...
— Rough and Tumble Engineering • James H. Maggard
... "Saranoff has slipped a cog this time," said the doctor. "He sent that as a night message, but it was delivered as a straight message through error. He has got further north than I expected. We will turn out our pilot and take off. We should make Wilmington by daybreak. I'll telephone Washington ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... when the living creatures were lifted up, the wheels were lifted up over against them; and their wings were full of eyes round about, and they were so high that they were dreadful. So of the institution of Ignatius,—one soul swayed the vast mass; and every pin and every cog in the machinery consented with its whole power to every movement of the one ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord
... difficult to picture the result. Thrown into the midst of a slow-moving machinery, alone in his estimate of the potential greatness of the School, supremely conscious of his mission, he found himself a solitary. There are two methods of progress. One to oil the old cog-wheels and pray for progression. Another to point out the clogging nature of the machinery and propose a new device. He chose the latter method. It was bold and dangerous. But he went through with it courageously. The numbers dropped rapidly, the fame of the School suffered ...
— A History of Giggleswick School - From its Foundation 1499 to 1912 • Edward Allen Bell
... on being applied again with reckless force, broke, and the car was off, bringing destruction to half a dozen men at the bottom of the shaft. Quick as a flash of light, Kalman sprang to the racing cog wheels, threw in a heavy coat that happened to be lying near, and then, as the machinery slowed, thrust in a handspike and checked the descent of the runaway car. It took less than two seconds to see, to ...
— The Foreigner • Ralph Connor
... content. Mother I am going to the market place, Chide me no more. I'll mountebank their loves, Cog their hearts from them, and come back beloved Of all the trades in Rome.—[That he will—] Look I am going. Commend me to my wife. I'll return Consul [—That he will—] Or never trust to what my tongue can do, I' ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... "I told myself she would be marryin' one of the boys most likely; I kep' that in mind steady, as you may say. I thought I was so used to the idee that it wouldn't jar me much of any when it come to the fact. But it did; yes siree, it did, sure enough. 'Peared as if a cog slipped somehow, and my whole works was jolted ...
— The Wooing of Calvin Parks • Laura E. Richards
... character or to write dialogue; here would be a business-man, who had studied up the dialect of the region where he spent his summer vacations, and whose style was so crude that one winced as he turned the pages; here would be a poor bookkeeper, or a type-writer, or other cog in the business machine, who had read of the fortunes made by writers of fiction, and had spent all his hours of leisure for a year in composing a tale of the grand monde, or some feeble imitation of the sugar-coated "historical romance" ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... is touching, yet nought o' the faun— A warmth is express'd in the shake o' his han'; His cog and his bed, or ought in his biel, The lonely will share frae kind ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... done with my recital he sat with his eyes wide open, seeming to wonder whether my reason had slipped a cog. ...
— The Jucklins - A Novel • Opie Read
... as the overseer made the negroes "hurry up" with their task, I was much amused with the brisk way in which they trundled the huge hogs-heads along, running them up to the pier-head, slinging them to the chains of the crane, and then lowering them down into the launch. There was much creaking of cog-wheels and cheerful, "Yo-heave-hoing!" from the men in the boat below, as they stowed them away in the bottom of the craft as easily as if they were only so many tiny little kegs, the darkeys joining in the sailors' chorus with ...
— The White Squall - A Story of the Sargasso Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson
... of hidden jubilation in her voice worried Sarah. She had not known Patricia for all of her eleven years for nothing. "Honey, what you cog'tating?" she coaxed; as she brought Patricia a generous slice ...
— Patricia • Emilia Elliott
... seems when compared with the feat of a Thomas car which climbed Fillmore Street, San Francisco, which is alleged to have a gradient of 34 per cent., with twenty-three persons on board. As 25 per cent. is regarded as the maximum safe gradient for an Abt rack railway, since the cog-wheel is liable to climb out of the rack on any steeper grade, it will be seen that the strain upon the credulity of the hearer of this story is almost as great as that upon the car ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... life when Nature Seems to slip a cog an' go, Jes' a-rattlin' down creation, Lak an ocean's overflow; When de worl' jes' stahts a-spinnin' Lak a picaninny's top, An' yo' cup o' joy is brimmin' 'Twell it seems about to slop, An' you feel jes' lak a racah, Dat is trainin' fu' to trot— When yo' mammy says de blessin' ...
— The Book of American Negro Poetry • Edited by James Weldon Johnson
... General Dhenin, who has repulsed a charge of the enemy and whose thigh is fractured by a cannon-ball, has just passed over to the enemy. The mechanism which, for fifteen years, has worked so well, breaks down of itself through its own action; its cog-wheels have got out of gear; cracks show themselves in the metal which seemed so sound; the divinations of popular instinct verify this; the exaggerations of the popular imagination expand it and suddenly the whole machine ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... thy task by the blazing ingle, or in the solitary barn, where the repercussions of thy iron flail half affright thyself, as thou performest the work of twenty of the sons of men, ere the cock-crowing summon thee to thy ample cog of substantial brose. Be thou a kelpie, haunting the ford or ferry, in the starless night, mixing thy laughing yell with the howling of the storm and the roaring of the flood, as thou viewest the perils and miseries of man on the foundering ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... want your opinion on is this: Wouldn't it be perfectly fair for A to—well, slip a cog or ...
— Behind the Line • Ralph Henry Barbour
... of all the peoples of the universe; they are established like this on a sequence of facts which appear to be connected with nothing and which are connected with everything. Everything is cog, pulley, cord, ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... watching him," Forrest concluded. "He was a good man at first, but he's slipped a cog recently. Sure, send him down the hill. And send that other fellow—Hopkins, you said?—along with him. By the way, Mr. Hennessy." As he spoke, Forrest drew forth his pad book, tore off the last note scribbled, and crumpled it in his hand. "You've a new horse-shoer in the shop. ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... to heal the body of an ailment caused by a dislocated member, be it a bone, ligament, or nerve, by which abnormal pressure is maintained upon a blood vessel or a nerve, would be like trying to operate a machine with an important cog out of gear. To cure it involves the reduction of a dislocation; the breaking up of adhesions, and the arousing of the enervated organ or organs partially or wholly failing in ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens
... Never was there a more generous, soft-hearted, kindly people. Germany, the land of the Christmas tree and folk songs, and hearthsides and gay childish laughter, turned into a relentless fighting machine! But each individual is a cog firmly fixed in the machine, which will go ever on as long as the ruling ...
— The Better Germany in War Time - Being some Facts towards Fellowship • Harold Picton
... The cog railroad running nearly to the top has been badly damaged a number of times in recent years and the occupants of the meteorological observatory on or near the summit have had several ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... stuffing coil, O, inserted into the lower port of the tube H H', and forced up or down in the tube by the cog wheel, M, substantially as and ...
— Scientific American, Vol. 17, No. 26 December 28, 1867 • Various
... with the men in the compartment, soldiers and workers, each a cog in the big machine, each bound upon some important errand. Each had news to tell—tales of the fighting, or of the progress of preparation. For more than a year now America had been getting ready, and here, in the most desperate crisis of the war, what was ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... in the machinery of mercy, but a necessary one. A vital cog in the vast machinery of war—that is the ...
— Kings, Queens And Pawns - An American Woman at the Front • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... that the lumber lord began to fear that some one had slipped a cog in sending him to first one and then another, ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... greatness of the Universe, in the cosmos of which our earth is but an infinitesimal speck. Even our sun, round which a system of worlds revolve and which appears so mighty and majestic to us, is but an atom, a very small one, in the infinitude of matter and as a cog, would not be missed in the ratchet wheel which fits into the grand ...
— Marvels of Modern Science • Paul Severing
... clothes were threadbare and green with age. His shoes were tied to his feet with wire, and stockings he had none. Doc had studied in a Medical College until the eve of his graduation. Then he slipped a cog and went down, down, down, until he landed at Halloran's dive. For twelve years he had been selling penny song-sheets on the streets and in saloons. He was usually in rags, but a score of the wildest inhabitants of that dive told me that Doc was their "good ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine
... vehemence on the table, the dice as yet not appearing from under the box. The 'Dribble' was, when with an air of easy but ingenious motion, the caster poured, as it were, the dice on the board—when, if he happened to be an old practitioner, he might suddenly cog with his fore-finger one of the cubes. The 'Long Gallery' was when the dice were flung or hurled the whole length of the board. Sometimes the dice were thrown off the table, near a confederate, who, in ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume II (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... adding to the gloom. The men tramped wearily, hanging their heads, ashamed and humiliated by the retreat, the necessity of which they could not grasp, having, as they thought, successfully repulsed the enemy. It was difficult to make them understand that our regiment was only a cog in the huge wheel of the Austrian fighting machine and that, with a battle line extending over many miles, it was quite natural that partial successes could take place and yet the consideration of general strategy necessitate a retreat. Our arguing ...
— Four Weeks in the Trenches - The War Story of a Violinist • Fritz Kreisler
... Another officer now suggested and put in operation still another improvement, in the shape of the "gear-drill-stock" of our armorer's chest. This, being a machine for drilling iron, was rough in its construction and uneven in its action, but, having cog-wheels, a rapid and nearly steady motion could be given to its shaft. To this shaft he attached a little cross of rubber, and covered it with silk, which was of a silver-white color instead of golden-yellow, as in other cases. The difference ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... very simple, of two wooden rollers, fastened in a square frame, running against each other, and turned with a crank and cog-wheel. The rollers should be about nine inches in diameter, and set far enough apart to mash the berries, but not the seeds and stems. A very convenient apparatus, mill and press, is manufactured by Geiss ...
— The Cultivation of The Native Grape, and Manufacture of American Wines • George Husmann
... berrying, the Sundays on the hills or in the woods, the sugar-making, the apple-gathering—all had a holiday character. But the hoeing corn, and picking up potatoes, and cleaning the cow stables, had little of this character. I have never been a cog in the wheel of any great concern. I have never had to sink or lose my individuality. I have been under no exacting master or tyrant.... I have never been a slave to any bad habit, as smoking, drinking, over-feeding. I have had no social or political ambitions; society has not curtailed my freedom ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... his mind. As he let himself slowly down to his heels there was a sardonic grin on his brown face. In outguessing Tighe he had slipped one little mental cog, after all, and the chances were that he would pay high for his error. A man had been lying in the mesquite close to the creek watching him all the time. He knew it because he had caught the flash of light on the ...
— The Sheriff's Son • William MacLeod Raine
... guided solely in his inference by marks of adaptation and utility; he would recognize design in half a watch, in a mere fragment of a watch, just as surely as in a whole time-keeper . . . Two cog-wheels, grasping each other, will be thought conclusive evidence of design, quite independently of any use attaching to them. And the inference, indeed, is perfectly correct; only it is an inference, not from a mark of design, properly so called, but from a mark of human workmanship ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... to re-cog-nize me," she persisted, throwing a bitter emphasis on the middle of the word. "He ...
— Desk and Debit - or, The Catastrophes of a Clerk • Oliver Optic
... other cogs of more and larger wheels. And to make life run smoothly we all must work together, each quietly turning his own big or small circumference as he had been fashioned. Alone nothing could be accomplished. Wings indeed! Fairy-tales. Cog-wheels must mesh. Human beings ...
— The Fifth Wheel - A Novel • Olive Higgins Prouty
... of those two lads in future days. But while they seemed to be holding the fort, so to speak, Giraffe knew only too well that they were up against two desperate characters, and that if they slipped just one cog, it might have a different ending than the one ...
— The Boy Scouts in the Maine Woods - The New Test for the Silver Fox Patrol • Herbert Carter
... transportation, supervises and controls everything connected with the entire trip. He is held financially responsible, and signs many contracts. The Company Manager handles everything connected with money and transportation and is an important cog in ...
— The Art of Stage Dancing - The Story of a Beautiful and Profitable Profession • Ned Wayburn
... Bok now slipped a cog in his machinery. He published a list of twenty-seven medicines, by name, and told what they contained. One preparation, he said, contained alcohol, opium, and digitalis. He believed he had been ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok (1863-1930)
... they are most carefully obscured. In the case of archaeology, however, the tedious details of construction are so placed in the foreground that the final picture is hardly noticed at all. As well might one go to Rheims to see men fly, and be shown nothing else but screws and nuts, steel rods and cog-wheels. Originally the fault, perhaps, lay with the archaeologist; now it lies both with him and with the public. The public has learnt to ask to be shown the works, and the archaeologist is often so proud of them that ...
— The Treasury of Ancient Egypt - Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology • Arthur E. P. B. Weigall
... turning out his pockets, he displayed a double-bladed knife containing several implements, including a corkscrew and an attachment for extracting stones from horses' feet, a piece of string, a watch spring, twenty or thirty shot, a button, a magnet, a cog-wheel, a pencil, a match-box, a case of foreign stamps all stuck together with salt water, a whistle, a halfpenny with a hole in it, and a soaked and swollen cigar which ...
— The Flamp, The Ameliorator, and The Schoolboy's Apprentice • E. V. Lucas
... the application of its force this machine, being man-made, like all machines, and thus without a soul, gets out of order, loosens a cog or bolt perhaps, throwing the mechanism "out of gear," as it is called. When this happens, the engine resting on its bed-plate still keeps its foundation, but some lesser part, the loom or lathe or driving-wheel, which is another ...
— The Underdog • F. Hopkinson Smith
... clothes. Claithing, clothing. Clamb, climbed. Claught, catch up. Clinkin, smartly. Clinkumbell, the bell-ringer. Clymmynge, noisy. Cockernony, woman's hair gathered up with a band. Cofte, bought. Cog, basin. Cood, cud. Coost, cast. Corbie, raven. Core, company. Cotter, tenant of a cottage. Coulier, ploughshare. Cour, stoop. Couth, couthy, sociable, affable. Crack, chat, instant. Craig, rock. Cranreuch, hoar-frost. ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... and at last stolidly accepted. He became an official with the weight of the Federal authority behind him. He became an investigator with the secrets of the Bureau of Printing and Engraving at his beck. He found himself a cog in a machinery that seemed limitless in its ramifications. He was the agent of a vast and centralized authority, an authority against which there could be no opposition. But he had to school himself to the knowledge that he was a cog, and nothing more. And two things were expected ...
— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer
... numerous brass posts buried flush with the surface, in each of which was a square hole, as though intended to be turned with a key or crank. Some were marked with radiating lines and numbers, and they evidently controlled the inner mechanism, part of which he could see—little brass cog-wheels, worms, and levers—through a fore-and-aft slot near ...
— "Where Angels Fear to Tread" and Other Stories of the Sea • Morgan Robertson
... their places by beautiful machinery. To each gate is attached an immense screw, which stands perpendicularly, twenty feet long and ten inches in diameter. At its upper end, it passes through a matrix-worm in the centre of a large cog-wheel, lying horizontally The whole is set in motion by the slightest turning of a handle; and here I saw the application of the Turpin Wheel I spoke of before—no engine or complication, but a wheel fifteen feet in diameter, fixed horizontally, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 429 - Volume 17, New Series, March 20, 1852 • Various
... it between the rolls A B of fig. 11, (see next page). The roll A has a series of boxes on its periphery m m, with movable bottoms which serve as moulds. The peat is carried into these boxes by the rolls c c. The iron projections n n of the large roll B, which work cog-like into the boxes, compress the peat gently and, at last, the eccentric p acting upon the pin z, forces up the movable bottom of the box and throws out the peat-block upon an endless band of cloth, which carries it to ...
— Peat and its Uses as Fertilizer and Fuel • Samuel William Johnson
... Mr. Archer with a smile, "no man can put complete reliance in blind fate; he must still cog the dice." ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson
... mechanism which has been designed and put together, wound up and set going by some outside mechanician, and regard ourselves as cogs on the wheels, watching all the other wheels go round and through the maze of machinery catching sight of the mechanician standing by and watching his handiwork. A cog on the wheel as it revolved would be rigidly confined in its operations: it would have no choice as to what means it should employ to carry out its end. Yet even plants have the power of choice, as we have seen, and use different means to achieve the same end. They ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... but nothing "irreparable," and you have Mandane. For the rest, with the rare and slight exceptions mentioned, they flit like shadows ticketed with more or less beautiful names. Even Philidaspes, the most prominent male character after the hero by far, is, whether he be "in cog" as that personage or "out of cog" as Prince and King of Assyria, merely a petulant hero—a sort of cheap Achilles, with no idiosyncrasy at all. It is the fault, and in a way the very great fault, of all the kind: and there is nothing more to do with it but to admit ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... turned upon toe, upon fire, and upon Professor Wyvern, were dull and lack-lustre. The machine worked unproductive; there was a cog that required adjustment, a lever that ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson
... standing erect in the midst, I could lay my hand on the roof-tree. A heath-bed occupied one of the corners; a few grey embers were smouldering in the middle of the floor; a pot lay beside them, ready for use, half-filled with cockles and razor-fish, the spoils of the morning ebb; and a cog of milk occupied a small shelf that projected from the gable above. Such were the contents of the shieling. Its only inmate, a lively little old man, sat outside, at once tending a few cows grouped on the moor, and employed in stripping ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... extracting the fibre failed on account of our having no proper machine to bruise the stems. We extemporized a two-roller mill; but as it had no cog-gearing to cause both rollers to turn together, the only one on which the handle or crank was fixed turned, with, the result of grinding the stems to pulp instead of simply ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... as an atomic engine inspector, his work was most uncreative. He was a small cog in a large cog-laden machine. A government worker helping to produce engines that would send supplies and immigrants and tourists to the U.S. Sector ...
— The Odyssey of Sam Meecham • Charles E. Fritch
... cog; a rotten tooth. How the cull flashes his queer cogs; how the fool shews his ...
— 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue • Captain Grose et al.
... the heritage of pioneer experience,—a passionate belief that a democracy was possible which should leave the individual a part to play in free society and not make him a cog in a machine operated from above; which trusted in the common man, in his tolerance, his ability to adjust differences with good humor, and to work out an American type from the contributions of all nations—a type ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... cheek, had turned his brown hair to a crisp grey, had bowed his shoulders to the desk he had used for twenty-two years. His eyes alone retained their boyish brightness, and a sort of appealing look as of one who his whole life long had been a dependent on other people. As an automaton, a mere cog in a vast machine, he had won the praise of his superiors by his complete self-effacement. He was never ill, never absent, never had trouble with his subordinates, never talked back, never made complaints, and, ...
— Love, The Fiddler • Lloyd Osbourne
... Routine! That was the key to the enigma. It was just that unvarying smooth routine, that endless grinding away at the same familiar things that to-day, when everything about him spoke of change and growth and freedom, was making him restless and perturbed. He was just a cog in the ever-turning wheel. He was a slave to his desk, and not the less a slave because his chains happened ...
— Doubloons—and the Girl • John Maxwell Forbes
... noiselessly washed; the beds made as if by magic; and the cleaning done without shadow of inconvenience to him. So long as these processes were not forced upon his consciousness and were faultlessly performed, he accepted the results without comment. But let one cog of the wheel slip, setting the mechanism of his comfort awry, and he was ...
— The Wall Between • Sara Ware Bassett
... them, yea, And what they weigh, even to the utmost scruple: Scrambling, outfacing, fashion-monging boys, That lie, and cog, and flout, deprave, and slander, Go anticly, and show outward hideousness, And speak off half a dozen dangerous words, How they might hurt their enemies if they durst; And this is all. 223 SHAKS.: Much ...
— Handy Dictionary of Poetical Quotations • Various
... rattle of the cog-wheels as the third-floor front of the Frogmore flats buzzed its machinery back into ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... of the Post-Office Department is a system of cog-fitting wheels, in all its component parts; and were it not so, in the necessarily limited period and space allotted, the work in postal-cars could not ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Vol. 1, Issue 1. - A Massachusetts Magazine of Literature, History, - Biography, And State Progress • Various
... for his leader and one for the possible dangers on his flank, was a mere automaton. There was no opportunity for displaying initiative—he was a cog in ...
— Tam O' The Scoots • Edgar Wallace
... this very pin or crank or cog, on which he had set such store, refused the next hour or day or week to do its work, no trace of his disappointment would have been found in his face or speech. His faith was always supreme; his belief in his ideals unshaken. If ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... commaund all bailifes of Portes, at the which the Cog of Norway (wherein certaine of the king of Norwaie his souldiers, and certaine Marchants of Saxonie are comming for England) shall touch, that, when the foresaid Cog shall chance to arriue at any of their Hauens, they doe permit the said Cog safely to remaine in their said Hauens so long as neede ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries - of the English Nation, v. 1, Northern Europe • Richard Hakluyt
... civilisation—peace, progress, and prosperity. For some time past the Prince had been devoting much of his attention to the problems of commerce and industry. He had a taste for machinery of every kind, and his sharp eye had more than once detected, with the precision of an expert, a missing cog-wheel in some vast and complicated engine. A visit to Liverpool, where he opened the Albert Dock, impressed upon his mind the immensity of modern industrial forces, though in a letter to Victoria describing his experiences, he was careful to retain his customary lightness ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey
... Base Ball Basket Quilt Block Album Brickwork Quilt Carpenter's Rule Carpenter's Square Churn Dash Cog Wheel Compass Crossed Canoes Diagonal Log Chain Domino Double Wrench Flutter Wheel Fan Fan Patch Fan and Rainbow Ferris Wheel Flower Pot Hour Glass Ice Cream Bowl Log Patch Log Cabin Necktie Needle Book New Album Pincushion and Burr ...
— Quilts - Their Story and How to Make Them • Marie D. Webster
... top of this, when one stops to remember that this army of three hundred thousand men and a hundred thousand horses was merely one single cog of the German military machine; that if all the German war strength were assembled together you might add this army to the greater army and hardly know it was there—why, then, the brain refuses to wrestle with a computation so gigantic. The imagination just naturally ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... The trees are in full leaf and some are in bloom. The grass is high where we walked, but up towards the tops of the mountains, the snow still lies. One of the strange sights is to see large, splendid hotels perched in some cranny away up near the summit of the peaks. Cog railways now take the tourists up ...
— Story of Chester Lawrence • Nephi Anderson
... there in Kentucky, when he raked up that old numskull that had been inventing away at a perpetual motion machine for twenty-two years, and Beriah Sellers saw at a glance where just one more little cog-wheel would settle the business, why I could see it as plain as day when he came in wild at midnight and hammered us out of bed and told the whole thing in a whisper with the doors bolted and the candle in an empty barrel. Oceans of money in it —anybody could see that. But it did cost a deal to ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner
... detached parts. Without that power the worker is a mechanical drudge, whose work has no quality save that of dogged fidelity to the task. Now, this power of keeping the whole before the mind while dealing with the parts, of seeing the completed machine while shaping a pin or a cog, of getting the complete effect of the argument while elaborating a minor point, resides in the imagination. It is the light which must shine upon all toil that has in it intelligence, prevision, and freshness; and ...
— Essays On Work And Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... society can cultivate goodwill in you. You might as well create a society for shaving or for saying your prayers. And further, goodwill is far less a process of performing acts than a process of thinking thoughts. To think, is it necessary to involve yourself in the cog-wheels of a society? Moreover, a society means fuss and shouting: two species of disturbance which are both futile and deleterious, particularly in an ...
— The Feast of St. Friend • Arnold Bennett
... the principle of cog-wheels and weights, is attributed to a monk, named Gerbert, who died in 1013. He had been instructor to King Robert, and was made Bishop of Rheims, later becoming Pope Sylvester II. Clocks at first were large affairs in public places. Portable ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... stepped aside, but the world never waits; I was a cog discarded from the mechanism of society—" He was so pleased with the metaphor that ...
— The Prodigal Judge • Vaughan Kester
... the universe. Why the same Deity should have created law, and then set Himself up in opposition to it, should have started the wheels to running, and then, every now and then, stuck a mighty finger in, to pry them apart and make them slip a cog, in deference to some later modification of His original plan. It was just about then that I found him. He was floundering in a perfect mire, composed of the dust of conflict mingled with penitential tears. Really, he was knee-deep in the muck; and I put in a good share of my vacation ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... trembled. He had chosen the Right—but the Right was ineffective, impotent, almost ludicrous. It left him shorn, powerless, and in moral revolt. The world had suddenly left him, as the vision of Carrie Wynn had left him, alone, a mere clerk, an insignificant cog in the great grinding wheel of humdrum drudgery. His chance to do and thereby to ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... which has since become classic, that he observed in St. Thomas' Hospital in London, in 1837. A miller had carelessly thrown a slip-knot of rope about his wrist, which became caught in a revolving cog, drawing him from the ground and violently throwing his body against a beam. The force exerted by the cog drawing on the rope was sufficient to avulse his whole arm and shoulder-blade. There was comparatively little hemorrhage ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... all training today is to develop the natural faculties and stimulate the brain of the individual rather than to treat him as a cog which has to be ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... battle of Sluys, when Philip the Sixth sat on the throne of France. The English fleet consisted of only 260 ships fit for warfare. The French, whose fleet amounted to no less than 400 sail, lay securely, as they thought, in the harbour of Sluys. Edward embarked on board the cog Thomas, commanded by Richard Fyall, and attended by several noblemen. A cog was a craft larger than those usually designated ships—the cog John, which is spoken of, had a crew of eighty-two men, and probably she carried besides a considerable number of knights and soldiers. Many ships of the ...
— How Britannia Came to Rule the Waves - Updated to 1900 • W.H.G. Kingston
... difficulty in imitating the simplest designs produced by it. The machines are too expensive to be obtained by anyone but a government or a great banknote company and there are very few men who thoroughly understand operating them. A turn of a screw or a variation of a single cog will change the result entirely. Finally the work of the lathe is often reversed, so that the line which is cut by the graver and should print in color prints white, and vice versa. It would not be possible to ...
— What Philately Teaches • John N. Luff
... little band of Abolitionists despised! But they were the cutwater of the national ship. With their revolutionary idea, so opposed to the universal prejudice, they succeeded at last in moving the entire country, just as one cog-wheel set against another overcomes its resistance and puts the whole machinery in motion. The rills of thought, shooting from the heights of a few pure and lofty minds, have spread out into this sea of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... neighbourhood. Only when he is in college, in his club or in his secret society lodge or the quarters of his ward boss does he find himself in intimate social relations with human beings of like mind and a similar social status. He is a cog in a wheel, a thing, a point of potential, a lonely and numerical unit, instead of a gregarious human animal rejoicing in his friends and companions, and working, playing and quarreling with them, as God made him and meant him to be ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... informed, able machine, who held his desk regardless of changes of administrative heads. Old Kauffman instructed his new chief gradually in the knowledge of the department without seeming to do so, and kept the wheels revolving without the slip of a cog. ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... punch like that, even glancing on your shoulder, without something getting loose," he replied. "I shouldn't be surprised if I'd slipped a cog or a tendon ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... friendship which drew these young men together was the result of their great dissimilarity of character. They acted on each other somewhat after the fashion of a well-adjusted piece of mechanism, the ratchets of selfishness and cog-wheels of vanity in Shank fitting easily into the pinions of good-will and modesty which characterised his friend, so that there was no jarring in their intercourse. This alone would not, perhaps, have induced the strong friendship that existed if it had not been ...
— Charlie to the Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... the middle of the drum-head, and reaching down through the keg, completed the instrument. The pulling of the hand over this cord made a hideous bellowing, hence its name. Bill Day had a gigantic watchman's rattle, a hickory spring on a cog-wheel. It is called in the West, a horse-fiddle, because it is so unlike either a horse or a fiddle. Then there were melodious tin pans and conch-shells and tin horns. But the most deadly noise was made by Jim West, who had two iron skillet-lids ("leds" he called them) which, when placed ...
— The End Of The World - A Love Story • Edward Eggleston
... signal at short periods, but if absent from the hut he would wish to know at a glance what had happened when he returned. Judged by any standard it was a remarkably pretty little device, but when I learnt that it had been made from odds and ends, such as a cog-wheel or spring here and a cell or magnet there, begged from other departments, I began to realise that we had a very exceptional cook. Later when I found that Clissold was called in to consult on the ailments of Simpson's motor and that he was capable of constructing a dog sledge ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... pitiable state of mind, Soames walked away from the Post Office. Gianapolis had hurried off in the direction of Victoria Station. Something was wrong! Some part of the machine, of the dimly divined machine whereof he formed a cog, was out of gear. Since the very nature of this machine—its construction and purpose, alike—was unknown to Soames, he had no basis upon which to erect surmises for ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer
... person, who spoke with a harsh, cockney accent, and whom Merriton introduced as his "batman", "Whatever that might be," said Borkins, holding forth to Dimmock, one of the under-grooms. James Collins soon became a necessary part of the household machinery, a little cog in fact upon which the great wheel of ...
— The Riddle of the Frozen Flame • Mary E. Hanshew
... the Promised Land presents itself as a tremendous enterprise in transportation, unparalleled in the modern world. What transportation? It is a complex of all human enterprises which we shall fit Into each other like cog-wheels. And in the very first stages of the enterprise we shall find employment for the ambitious younger masses of our people: all the engineers, architects, technologists, chemists, doctors, and lawyers, those who have emerged in the last thirty years from the ghetto and ...
— The Jewish State • Theodor Herzl
... and we stand, bare of disguises, as helpless failures. We have lost the childlike power of living without conscious aims. Sometimes, when the aims have faded already in the gathering dusk, we still go on by the momentum acquired. Inertia carries us over the dead points—till a cog breaks somewhere, and our whole machinery of life comes to with a jar. If no such awakening supervenes, since we never live in the present, we are always looking forward to what never comes; and so life ...
— Over Prairie Trails • Frederick Philip Grove
... so painfully good that I haven't even the traditional excitement of thrashing obstreperous bad boys. Everything seems to go by clock work in Lindsay educational institution. Larry must certainly have possessed a marked gift for organizing and drilling. I feel as if I were merely a big cog in an orderly machine that ran itself. However, I understand that there are some pupils who haven't shown up yet, and who, according to all reports, have not yet had the old Adam totally drilled out of them. They ...
— Kilmeny of the Orchard • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... of driving is by means of chains, which run round sprocket (cog) wheels on the ends of a shaft crossing the frame just behind the gear-box, and round larger sprockets attached to the hubs of the driving-wheels. In such a case the axles of the driving-wheel are fixed to the springs, and the wheels revolve round them. Where a Cardan (shaft) drive is used the ...
— How it Works • Archibald Williams
... to grave consequences by reason of their wilful folly. We urge upon our readers to refrain from this dabbling in the phenomena of the Astral Plane. Some writer has well compared "Psychism" to a great machine, in the cog-wheels of which persons may become entangled only to be afterward drawn into the machine itself. Keep away from ...
— Mystic Christianity • Yogi Ramacharaka
... lieutenant harries the petty officer, and so it goes up to the highest,—a well-planned system on the part of the superior to bring the inferior to a high point of material efficiency. The propelling spirit is devotion to the Fatherland: each believes himself a cog in the machine chosen of God to achieve His purposes on earth. The world hears of the Kaiser's "Ich und Gott," of his mailed fist beating down his enemies, but those who have lived in Germany know that exactly ...
— Mobilizing Woman-Power • Harriot Stanton Blatch
... to Court gets any thing, but rather the contrary; for knowing that they have wherewith to live, will not enslave themselves to the attendance, and flattery, and fawning condition of a courtier, whereas another that brings nothing, and will be contented to cog, and lie, and flatter every man and woman that has any interest with the persons that are great in favour, and can cheat the King, as nothing is to be got without offending God and the King, there he for the most part, and he alone, saves any thing. Thence to St. James Park, and there walked two ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... emotions and a heartfelt wish to put my shoulder to the great wheel of good. What could I say? Every prayer seemed based on the idea that God was a magnified man—that He needed asking and praising and thanking. Should the cog of the wheel creak praise to the Engineer? Let it rather cog harder, and creak less. Yet I did, I confess, try to put the agitation of my soul into words. I meant it for a prayer; but when I considered afterwards the "supposing thats" and "in case ofs" with which it was sprinkled, it must have ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
... so much for me as to wish me to marry your sister, I shall never forget it. You see, I've never thought of her in that way. I suppose I don't think of women at all in that way," he went on, with a certain splendid mendacity. "It's a case of cog-wheels instead of corpuscles. I'm just a heathen bit of machinery, with my ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... have seen, an Atta worker is a member of the most implacable labor-union in the world: he believes in a twenty-four hour day, no pay, no play, no rest—he is a cog in a machine-driven Good-for-the-greatest-number. After studying these beings for a week, one longs to go out and shout for kaisers and tsars, for selfishness and crime—anything as a relief from such terrible unthinking altruism. ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... vigilance, and to make such a register by human labor, would be a tedious, expensive, and irksome task; and human ingenuity taxed itself to make a machine for perfecting such work. The wind turns a weather-cock, and, by aid of cog-wheels the motion is transferred to a lead pencil fixed over a sheet of paper, and thus the wind is made to write down the direction which itself is blowing. Not far distant is a piece of metal, the flat side of which is ever turned by the weather-cock ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... and I will not endure it. Who are they that complain unto the king, That I forsooth am stern, and love them not? By holy Paul, they love his grace but lightly, That fill his ears with such dissentious rumours: Because I cannot flatter and look fair, Smile in men's faces, smooth, deceive, and cog, Duck with French nods, and apish courtesy, I must be held a rancorous enemy. Cannot a plain man live, and think no harm, But thus his simple truth must be abus'd With silken, sly, ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... suddenly faced him. She caught her breath, stared in surprise for a moment, then turned into the kitchen. Henley saw her clutch his wife's sleeve and give it a warning pull. She meant to speak in an undertone, but her piping voice slipped a cog and ...
— Dixie Hart • Will N. Harben
... blandishments of the old-time male politicians, and so enroll themselves in the great political parties. A woman who joins one of these parties simply becomes an imitation man, which is to say, a donkey. Thereafter she is nothing but an obscure cog in an ancient and creaking machine, the sole intelligible purpose of which is to maintain a horde of scoundrels in public office. Her vote is instantly set off by the vote of some sister who joins the other camorra. Parenthetically, I may add that all of the ladies ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... thunder into showers of gold, Whose silent courtship wins securer joys, Taints by degrees, and ruins without noise. While parliaments, no more those sacred things Which make and rule the destiny of kings. Like loaded dice by ministers are thrown, And each new set of sharpers cog their own. Hence the rich oil that from the Treasury steals Drips smooth o'er all the Constitution's wheels, Giving the old machine such pliant play[6] That Court and Commons jog one joltless way, While Wisdom trembles for the crazy car, So gilt, so rotten, carrying fools so far; And the duped ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... his knavery. There is none will go with him that hath any honesty. A bots[155] on thy motley beard! I know thee; thou art Dissimulation: And hast thou got an honest man's coat to 'semble this fashion? I'll tell thee what, thou wilt even 'semble and cog with thine own father: A couple of false knaves together, a thief and a broker. Thou makes townsfolks believe thou art an honest man: in the country Thou dost nothing but cog, lie, and foist with Hypocrisy. You shall be hanged together, and go along[156] together for me, For if I should ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VI • Robert Dodsley
... without any marked loss a dozen years of venturing, he might be said to have succeeded. He had no time for other games; this was his poker. They were always the schemes of little people, very complex in organization, needing a wheel here, a cog there, finally breaking down from the lack of capital. Then some "big people" collected the fragments to cast them into the pot once more. Dr. Leonard added another might-have-been and a new sigh to the secret chamber of his soul. But his face ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... somewhere, but we don't care. We've lost step with the world, we've dropped out. When the newspapers come, the first thing we look for is the Panama news. We're obsessed by this job. Even the women and the children feel it—you'll feel it as soon as you become a cog in the machine. Polite conversation at dinner is limited to tons of rock and yards of concrete. Oh, but I'm ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... changes since the capture of Atlanta. General Schofield had gone to the rear, leaving General J. D. Cog in command of the Army of the Ohio (Twenty-third Corps). General Thomas, also, had been dispatched to Chattanooga, with Newton's division of the Fourth Corps and Morgan's of the Fourteenth Corps, leaving General D. S. Stanley, the senior major-general of the two corps of his ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... "Well, the cog-wheels was wrong," said William doggedly. "See? An' this ratchet-wheel isn't on the pawl prop'ly—not like what this book says it ought to be. Seems we've got to take it all to pieces to get it right. Seems to me the ...
— More William • Richmal Crompton
... typical of the individual, social, moral, and intellectual life. Look which way you will, you find antagonistic elements fiercely warring. There is a broken cog somewhere in the machinery of this plunging globe of ours. Everything organic, and inorganic, bears testimony to a miserable derangement. There is not a department of earth where harmony reigns. True, the stars are serene, and move in ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... among the conspicuous windows, where was set, emphasized by congested floods of light, the cunningest spoil of the interiors. There were few passers, and of this Lorison was glad. He was not of the world. For a long time he had touched his fellow man only at the gear of a levelled cog-wheel—at right angles, and upon a different axis. He had dropped into a distinctly new orbit. The stroke of ill fortune had acted upon him, in effect, as a blow delivered upon the apex of a certain ingenious toy, the musical top, which, when thus buffeted while spinning, ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... we are still dealing with the Otto cycle engine, the cam or side shaft will revolve at precisely half the speed of the crank shaft. This 2 to 1 motion is obtained by means of toothed wheels, or a screw gear. In the former case, where plain or bevel cog-wheels are employed, the one fixed on the crank shaft must be exactly half the diameter of the one on the side shaft, i.e., it must have one half the number of teeth. On the other hand, if a screw gear is used, the relative diameters of the two wheels ...
— Gas and Oil Engines, Simply Explained - An Elementary Instruction Book for Amateurs and Engine Attendants • Walter C. Runciman
... happiness of minors, especially of potential mothers, to carry on the processes of machine-dominated systems of manufacture and business. It takes so little physical strength or mental power to become a cog in these rapidly revolving wheels. It means such a waste to thus use the years of youth, meant for education and development and meant to attract toward successful family life rather ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... faces blackened so they could know one another in the dark, and they were all allowed to arm themselves in any way they wished. Some carried revolvers, others the handles of our entrenching tools (these had small iron cog wheels at one end and they made an excellent shillalah), a few had bombs, and one of the boys, Macpherson was his name, armed himself with ...
— Into the Jaws of Death • Jack O'Brien
... railing thus. "Old Pan," said Fortune, "what's this fuss? Am I the patroness of dice? Is not she our fair cousin, Vice? Do I cog dice or mark the cards? Do gamesters offer me regards? They trust to their own fingers' ends: On Vice, not me, the game depends. So would I save the fools, if they Would not defy my rule by play. They worship Folly, and the knaves Own all her votaries ...
— Fables of John Gay - (Somewhat Altered) • John Gay
... more precisely, a cog in the great fighting machine that was producing death and destruction to Belgium. Just as the Germans have put men through a certain mold and turned out the typical German soldier, in like manner through other molds they have turned out according to pattern the German secret service ...
— In the Claws of the German Eagle • Albert Rhys Williams
... fleeced him while he was drunk." He took a goblet of claret from the lackey who brought his salver, emptied it, and went on, hoarse with passion. "To the marrow of your bones you are false, all of you! You do not cog your dice, perhaps, but you bubble your friends with finesses, and are as much sharpers at heart as the lowest tat-mongers in Alsatia. You empty our purses, and cozen our women with twanging guitars and jingling rhymes, and laugh at us ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... flung his tarboosh into a corner of the room; for the tarboosh was the sign of official servitude, and Dicky was never the perfect official. Initiative was his strong point, independence his life; he loathed the machine of system in so far as he could not command it; he revolted at being a cog in the wheel. Ismail had discovered this, and Dicky had been made a kind of confidential secretary who seldom wrote a line. By his influence with Ismail he had even more power at last than the Chief Eunuch or the valet-de-chambre, before whom the highest officials bowed low. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... teeth, like ours, to chew with. You know a good many very different things are called teeth—those on a rake, for example, or a comb, or a cog-wheel. A Duck's teeth are horny like the skin that covers its whole beak, and act like strainers. When a Duck dabbles in the water, as you have all seen tame ones do, the water that gets into its mouth runs out at the sides between the teeth, but whatever food there is ...
— Citizen Bird • Mabel Osgood Wright and Elliott Coues
... A cogged or corked or caulked joint, Fig. 265, is made by cutting out only parts of the notch on the lower piece, leaving a "cog" uncut. From the upper piece a notch is cut only wide enough to receive the cog. A cogged joint is stronger than a notched because the upper beam is not weakened at its point of support. It ...
— Handwork in Wood • William Noyes
... position as "the worst school in Cincinnati" Oyler has risen, first in its own esteem, and then in the esteem of the city, until it is looked upon everywhere as a factor in the life of the west end, and an invaluable cog in the educational machinery of the city. Its tone has changed, too. Mr. Roberts, who came, a total stranger, to assist in the work while Mr. Voorhes was sick, says, "I have never heard a word of discourtesy or a bit of rudeness since I came to this school." ...
— The New Education - A Review of Progressive Educational Movements of the Day (1915) • Scott Nearing
... moment when it appeared as if her almost mechanical and rhythmical action of internal effort began to grip something. It was as when an engine after running free clenches itself again upon some wheel or cog. ...
— The Necromancers • Robert Hugh Benson
... scaffold, Champaign, open country, Chariot (Fr charette), cart, Cheer, countenance, entertainment, Chierte, dearness, Chrism, anointing oil, Clatter, talk confusedly, Cleight, clutched, Cleped, called, Clipping, embracing, Cog, small boat, Cognisance, badge, mark of distinction, Coif, head-piece, Comfort, strengthen, help, Cominal, common, Complished, complete, Con, know, be able, ; con thanlt, be grateful, Conserve, preserve, Conversant, abiding in, Cording, agreement, ...
— Le Morte D'Arthur, Volume I (of II) - King Arthur and of his Noble Knights of the Round Table • Thomas Malory
... roller of some sort," answered Songbird. "And see, here are some cog-wheels and a lot ...
— The Rover Boys on the Plains - The Mystery of Red Rock Ranch • Arthur Winfield
... hoped to find a spell, In some fine flourish of a pen, To make a better man Than long-considering Nature will or can, 280 Secure against his own mistakes, Content with what life gives or takes, And acting still on some fore-ordered plan, A cog of iron in an iron wheel, Too nicely poised to think or feel, Dumb motor in a clock-like commonweal. They wasted not their brain in schemes Of what man might be in some bubble-sphere, As if he must be other than he seems Because he was not what he should ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... a loft, open to the peak and shingles, with a window in each end. Clocks, dials, pendulums, and tiny cog-wheels of wood and brass were on a long bench by the street window. Thereon, also, were a vice and tools. The room was cleanly, with a crude homelikeness about it. Chromos and illustrated papers had been pasted ...
— Darrel of the Blessed Isles • Irving Bacheller
... he slipped a cog," remarked Mr. Nestor. "Well, Tom, I like your tank, what I've seen of her, but it's getting late and I think Mary and I had ...
— Tom Swift and his War Tank - or, Doing his Bit for Uncle Sam • Victor Appleton
... tube, lnl', the gas passes from the box, BB', into the movable drum, sets the latter in motion, and makes its exit at S. In order to count the volume discharged, that is to say, the number of revolutions of the drum, the axle terminates at a in an endless screw which, by means of a cog wheel, moves a vertical rod that traverses the tube, gg, and projects from the box. As the tube, gg, dips into the water, it does not allow the gas to escape, and this permits of the revolution counter that the rod actuates being placed ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 481, March 21, 1885 • Various
... of the shabby old building, could be seen piles of broken, twisted, and rusty things—twisted iron rods, broken cam-shafts, cog wheels with missing teeth, springs that had lost their elasticity—a miniature mountain of scrap iron each piece of which at some time had been a part of some smoothly working machine. In another pile were discarded household utensils—old pots and pans ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... life, Sir. I am insured at the Pelican, Sir. I am threescore years and six,—six; mark me, Sir: but I can play Polonius, which, I believe, few of your corre—correspondents can do, Sir. I suspect tricks, Sir; I smell a rat: I do, I do. You would cog the die upon us: you would, you would, Sir. But I will forestall you, Sir. You would be deriving me from William the Conqueror, with a murrain to you. It is no such thing, Sir. The town shall know ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... had his appointed task. He was a cog in the greatest machine the world has ever seen. He knew just what he was to do, and how much time had been allowed for the performance of his task. It was assumed he would not fail. The British army makes that assumption, and it ...
— A Minstrel In France • Harry Lauder
... than twenty years since he had last seen Orde, his schoolmate, and their paths in the world had divided early. The one had quitted college to become a cog-wheel in the machinery of the great Indian Government; the other more blessed with goods, had been whirled into a similar position in the English scheme. Three successive elections had not affected Pagett's position with a loyal constituency, and ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... smaller pulley which was fastened at the base of the apparatus. Through this pulley, the cable passed to the cylinder of a windlass which was held to the ground by massive beams. This windlass which can be operated by only two hands, multiplies man's strength by means of a series of cog-wheels. Although there is a gain in force, there is of course a ...
— Friars and Filipinos - An Abridged Translation of Dr. Jose Rizal's Tagalog Novel, - 'Noli Me Tangere.' • Jose Rizal
... Meg to turn the crank and Bobby to feed in the ears of corn. They were never allowed to touch the sheller unless some older person was around, for little fingers could get easily nipped in the cog wheels. So they were rather proud to be especially asked to ...
— Four Little Blossoms at Brookside Farm • Mabel C. Hawley
... world should jump a cog Sometime, in its dizzy spinning, And go off the track with a sudden jog, What an end would come to the sinning, What a rest from strife and the burdens of life For the millions of people in it, What a way out of care, and worry and wear, All in a ...
— Poems of Cheer • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... escaped an accident that would have involved most serious consequences. He was superintending the erection of a new corn-mill, and whilst seeing to its being properly started, incautiously stretched his arm over two cog-wheels. In an instant the shirt sleeve was caught and drawn in, and with it the arm. Fortunately the mill was stopped in time, but an ugly wound, six inches in length, with torn edges, bore witness to the danger escaped. This wound ...
— Robert Moffat - The Missionary Hero of Kuruman • David J. Deane
... ever since the morning, the King had been watching and waiting. An hour yet, two hours, it might be three, it mattered not; it was only a question of time. Wheel and pinion, cog and lever, were working in harmony, the great engine of destruction was in motion, and soon would have run its course. In the center of the immense horizon, beneath the deep vault of sunlit sky, the bounds of the battlefield were ever becoming narrower, ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... and cantie wi' mair, Whene'er I forgather wi' sorrow and care, I gie them a skelp as they're creepin' alang, Wi' a cog o' gude swats, and ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... everything out. Contemplate some able and sincere materialist, as, for instance, Mr. McCabe, and you will have exactly this unique sensation. He understands everything, and everything does not seem worth understanding. His cosmos may be complete in every rivet and cog-wheel, but still his cosmos is smaller than our world. Somehow his scheme, like the lucid scheme of the madman, seems unconscious of the alien energies and the large indifference of the earth; it is not thinking ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... not have insulted our feelings, the only time he did visit us, and humble and mortify us in the view of the Frenchmen, who saw, and remarked that our agent considered us no more than so many hogs. The Emperor Napoleon has visited some of his hospitals in cog. has viewed the situation of the sick and wounded; examined their food, and eaten of their bread; and once threw a cup of wine in the face of a steward, because he thought it not good enough for the soldier; but—some of our agents are men of more consequence, in their own ...
— A Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts, 2nd ed. • Benjamin Waterhouse
... pursuing smoke trail rose above the intervening hill-shoulders near and threatening. With the parts of a great machine whirling in unison and nicely timed to escape destruction, a small accident to a single cog may ...
— The Taming of Red Butte Western • Francis Lynde
... I wasn't married. And the old mind was working at top speed and now it's going round and round like a cog-wheel with nothing to catch it. As a matter of fact I think that if I hadn't met you I would have done something. But you make ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... a cog," Opdyke returned profanely. "Being interpreted, my reverend sire thinks I'd do better work at the School of Mines and then in Europe. I'm sorry, too, confound it, even if I know his head is level. I'd been looking forward to the pleasure of romping along here for another year or two, ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... its unsteady revolution, until at the end of about five minutes the creaking stopped, there was a clicking sound as if a cog had settled into place, and all movement ceased. The big slab, which was six inches thick, had now obtained a horizontal position, leaving an opening above and below into the next room, or cell. The axis upon which the ...
— A Voyage with Captain Dynamite • Charles Edward Rich
... divisions had been equipped and strategically grouped. England had put a million of fresh troops into France. And the line of the drive had been mapped. The advance, when it was opened on the first day of July, ought to have gone forward irresistibly from cog to cog like a wheel of a machine on the indentations of a track. But the thing didn't happen that way. The ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... fight," hastened Craig. "You have opponents who know the game in its every crooked turn. If I can be only a small cog on a wheel that crushes them, I shall be only too glad. Your face tells me that something particularly unpleasant ...
— The Ear in the Wall • Arthur B. Reeve
... limits, where she would be found and what she would be doing at any hour of the seven days of the week. Everything she influenced seemed to recur as regularly as the motions of the great ruthless-looking engines that Gillian had seen at work at Belfast; the only loose cog being apparently her sister Adeline, who quietly took her own way, seldom came downstairs before eleven o'clock, went out and came in, made visits or received them, wrote letters, read and worked at her own sweet will. Only two undertakings ...
— Beechcroft at Rockstone • Charlotte M. Yonge
... locomotive climbed the Rigi, cog by cog, Fame had mentioned your forefathers—such a noble breed of dog, How they tracked the lonely traveller with their nimble, sleuthy snouts, Till beneath a billowy snowdrift they remarked ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 15, 1920 • Various
... startled than as one surprised. He appeared to be neither shocked nor particularly interested. His expression was that of one disappointed. It suddenly flashed across Ralph, he could scarcely have told why, that the young inventor had indeed been "inventing" something, that something had slipped a cog, and that he was responsible for the catastrophe of the moment. Now Archie looked about him in a stealthy, baffled way, as though he was anxious to sneak away ...
— Ralph on the Overland Express - The Trials and Triumphs of a Young Engineer • Allen Chapman
... hundred miles of river four times traversed in every thirty-five days—the time required by that swift boat to achieve two round trips. We discussed, and discussed, and discussed, and disputed and disputed and disputed; at any rate he did, and I got in a word now and then when he slipped a cog and there was a vacancy. He did his arguing with heat, with energy, with violence; and I did mine with the reserve and moderation of a subordinate who does not like to be flung out of a pilot-house that is perched forty feet above the water. He was fiercely loyal to Shakespeare and cordially ...
— Is Shakespeare Dead? - from my Autobiography • Mark Twain
... as ever I was from my foolish dream of winning my spurs; nay, perchance never had I sunk lower in my own conceit. Till this hour I had been, as it were, the hinge on which my share of the world turned, and now I was no more than a wheel in the carriage of a couleuvrine, an unconsidered cog in the machine of war. I was to be lost in a multitude, every one as good as myself, or better; and when I had thought of taking service, I had not foreseen the manner of it and the nature of the soldier's trade. My head, ...
— A Monk of Fife • Andrew Lang
... the cog that slipped. What she only suspected, what she really knew, we never learned. She was a chambermaid in the hotel at C—, and it was evidently her intention to blackmail Doctor Walker. His position at that time was uncomfortable: to ...
— The Circular Staircase • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... too good to rob, or cog, or plot. No fool so gross to bolt Scotch collops hot. From Donjon tops no Oroonoko rolls. Logwood, not Lotos, floods Oporto's bowls. Troops of old tosspots oft, to sot, consort. Box tops, not bottoms, schoolboys flog for sport. No cool monsoons blow ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 209, October 29 1853 • Various
... Ford, I cannot cog, I cannot prate (Mist[ris]. Ford) now shall I sin in my wish; I would thy Husband were dead, Ile speake it before the best Lord, I would make ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... have some milk, but was informed that there was none in the house. The only beverage which seemed attainable was water, of which there was a supply in what Captain Donald Macdonald called an "ugly cog," which the landlord of the house used for throwing water out of his boat. This vessel though coarse, was clean. "The captain," relates Donald Roy, "had been taking a drink out of the cog, and he reached it to the Prince,[297] who took it out of his hand, and, after looking at the cog, ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume III. • Mrs. Thomson
... old shop, Dick," replied Seeley, glad to be rid of this awkward question. "But I work nearly all night and sleep most of the day, and am like a cog in a big machine that ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.) |
