"Dial" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... survey and, after one gets accustomed to its use, it is very simple. If the prismatic compass is preferred, nothing smaller than two and one half inches in diameter should be used. In the smaller sizes the magnet is not powerful enough to move the dial quickly or accurately. ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt
... clothiers would probably have been able to defend themselves against it; but it happens that the greater part of our principal clothiers are themselves likewise dyers. Watch-cases, clock-cases, and dial-plates for clocks and watches, have been prohibited to be exported. Our clock-makers and watch-makers are, it seems, unwilling that the price of this sort of workmanship should be raised upon them by the ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... were all manner of contrivances for making money. First came machines for the trial of strength, consisting of a flat pasteboard figure of the Shah, or some other distinguished person, holding on his chest a dial-plate, the hand of which indicated the amount of strength possessed by any one who hit a certain part of the machine with ...
— A Peep Behind the Scenes • Mrs. O. F. Walton
... had become, in order that for the future the man might pay less, in proportion to the rent appointed: and I think that thus the art of geometry was found out and afterwards came into Hellas also. For as touching the sun-dial 91 and the gnomon 92 and the twelve divisions of the day, they were learnt by the ...
— The History Of Herodotus - Volume 1(of 2) • Herodotus
... ask for a cushion. Oh, that kitchen of the olden times, the old, clean, roomy New England kitchen!—who that has breakfasted, dined, and supped in one has not cheery visions of its thrift, its warmth, its coolness? The noon-mark on its floor was a dial that told of some of the happiest days; thereby did we right up the shortcomings of the solemn old clock that tick-tacked in the corner, and whose ticks seemed mysterious prophecies of unknown good yet to arise out of the hours ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... acquired a knowledge of the science in its application to the individual, take the broader field, or universal aspect, as it applies to human races, and you will find the rise and fall of nations, empires and families marked upon the celestial dial, and in perfect accord with the influence of the Sun and planets upon Mother Earth, in her various movements. And last, but most important, seek with an earnest desire for truth to learn the relation of those glittering constellations ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... clear, frosty, starlit night. White and stern was the face which he turned upward for a moment to the sky. He paused for a second in the ray of candle-light that gleamed through Puddock's window-shutter, and glanced on the pale dial of his large gold watch. It was only half-past eight o'clock. He walked on, glancing back over his shoulder, along the ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... before supper-time seemed interminable; the quarter passed, then the half, then the three-quarters. Lloyd imagined she began to detect a faint odour of the kitchen in the air. Suddenly the remaining minutes of the hour began to be stricken from the dial of her clock with bewildering rapidity. From the drawing-room immediately below came the sounds of the piano. That was Esther Thielman, no doubt, playing one of her interminable Polish compositions. All at once the piano stopped, and, with a quick sinking of the heart, Lloyd ...
— A Man's Woman • Frank Norris
... her eyes with one slender wrist, pushing back the disordered hair. Then gently disengaging herself from his arms, and still busy with her tumbled hair, she looked up at the dial of the ancient clock which glimmered red ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... is,' she said to Mrs. Denny, as she stood in the middle of the little grass-plot beside the old sun-dial, and felt the sweet fresh air blowing softly over her face. 'How pretty the garden must be ...
— Hoodie • Mary Louisa Stewart Molesworth
... as Lennox was leaving the club, Mrs. Austen, rising from the dinner-table, preceded Margaret into the drawing-room and looked at the clock, a prostrate nymph, balancing a dial on the soles of her feet. At the figures on the dial, the ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... favorite seems to us a safe prediction.... There is no part of it which, once begun, is likely to be left unread."—The Dial. ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... earliest inventories. Bradford also mentions the filling of a "runlet" with water at the Cape. The "steel-yards" and "measures" were the only determiners of weight and quantity—as the hour-glass and sun dial were of time—possessed at first (so far as appears) by the passengers of the Pilgrim ship, though it is barely possible that a Dutch clock or two may have been among the possessions of the wealthiest. Clocks and watches were not yet in common use (though ...
— The Mayflower and Her Log, Complete • Azel Ames
... an eight-day clock; has a movement of the best workmanship, is driven by two strong springs, and keeps accurate time. The dial is 12 inches in diameter and has hour, minute and second hands. Pendulum beats seconds and makes electric contact by means of an adjustable mercury cup. It is mounted in a hardwood case with glass door. ...
— Astronomical Instruments and Accessories • Wm. Gaertner & Co.
... too dark for them to see the statue of Minerva on the peak of the high gable and the sun-dial on its face with the circle of animals, but the lighted windows on the ground-floor and in the first story gave ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... were scenes of frustration and discontent. Yet enough of them were so that Mrs. Mimms was seriously disturbed. Then again, the apparatus had its indiscriminate faults: at one scene Mrs. Mimms blushed deeply and flicked the dial to another setting. Suddenly she was surprised to hear a familiar voice. The pilot monitor showed that it was the apartment of the ...
— The Amazing Mrs. Mimms • David C. Knight
... Time's finger on the dial of my life Points to high noon! and yet the half-spent day Leaves less than half remaining, for the dark, Bleak shadows of the ...
— Custer, and Other Poems. • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... long avenue to where it opened into a circle to meet two others. A sun-dial stood here in the midst and marked a point from which you could look three ways—behind you to the house, to the right and to the left. I chose for the right, and sauntered slowly towards the statue of the Dancing Faun, which closed that ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... afternoon, about three o'clock; but the winter solstice having stealthily come on, the lowness of the sun caused the hour to seem later than it actually was, there being little here to remind an inhabitant that he must unlearn his summer experience of the sky as a dial. In the course of many days and weeks sunrise had advanced its quarters from north-east to south-east, sunset had receded from north-west to south-west; but Egdon ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... brought the bays to a stand at the horse block. Jadwin did not respond until he had passed the reins to the coachman, and taking the stop watch from the latter's hand, he drew on his cigar, and held the glowing tip to the dial. ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... After raising the "portcullis", he got the man down from the black rohorse, dragged him inside, and propped him against the rec-hall bar. Then he got the man's helmet and spear and laid them beside him. After considerable reflection, he went into the control room, set the time-dial for June 10, 1964, the space-dial for a busy intersection in downtown Los Angeles, and punched out H-O-T-D-O-G S-T-A-N-D on the lumillusion panel. Satisfied, he went into the generator room and short-circuited the automatic throw-out unit so that when ...
— A Knyght Ther Was • Robert F. Young
... Twentieth Century, he is awaiting his turn. His body, his brain, his soul are in your boyish hands. He cannot help himself. What will you leave for him? Will it be a brain unspoiled by lust or dissipation, a mind trained to think and act, a nervous system true as a dial in its response to the truth about you? Will you, boy of the Twentieth Century, let him come as a man among men in his time, or will you throw away his inheritance before he has had the chance to touch it? Will you let him come, taking ...
— The Call of the Twentieth Century • David Starr Jordan
... toward the dial of the clepsydra, and Giulia followed his look in the same direction; it was ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... "Yes, my offices—I want Mr. Oliver in purchasing and contracting. Hello—Ward? Alexander here. Yes—everything's fine. I have a job for you—use your scrambler-pattern two." Alexander dialed the scrambler code on the second dial at the base of the phone, effectively preventing eavesdropping by beam tappers. "Yes," he went on. "It's Project Phoebe. Have you secured title to the moons? You haven't? Well—you'd better do it before some of our competitors get bright ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone
... delicate and fine, Is like a dial in the sun, That throws beneath a shadowy line To mark the ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... a small rug in the middle of the floor to expose a massive steel trap door. This he unlocked by twirling the dial of a complicated mechanism. Some years before Tom had constructed beneath his laboratory an impregnable chamber to safeguard his secret plans. He called it his Chest of Secrets, and ...
— Tom Swift and His Giant Telescope • Victor Appleton
... the dial stands, The golden moments shudder past, Soon shall he smite apart our hands, In vain we hold each other fast, And the last ...
— A Jongleur Strayed - Verses on Love and Other Matters Sacred and Profane • Richard Le Gallienne
... a century and a half, and for eighty years had been inhabited by Mortons. Of its neighbours in the elm-bordered road, one or two were yet older; all had reached the age of mellowness. 'Sicut umbra praeterit dies'—so ran the motto of the dial set between porch and eaves; to Harvey Rolfe the kindliest of all greetings, welcoming him to such tranquillity as he knew not how to ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... degrees and they divided the day into twenty-four hours and the hour into sixty minutes and no modern man has ever been able to improve upon this old Babylonian invention. They possessed no watches but they measured time by the shadow of the sun-dial. ...
— Ancient Man - The Beginning of Civilizations • Hendrik Willem Van Loon
... Chronicle' he has done something much bigger, and given us a work of fiction of a richly human sort, creating real characters and giving us a penetrating study of political life and domestic relations in the commonwealth of Indiana."—The Dial. ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... was the great event, and that it came from London. What may it have been? Clearly one of those tall, stately pieces with the moon and the sun showing their faces on the silver dial, the fine mahogany case worthy to uphold all. Where is that clock now? Who can tell? From this time forth this was the object of interest, for in nearly all the months we have this record, "Set my clock." He grows terribly indifferent to the weather. A clock then was a wonderful thing, and it ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... three in the afternoon of the following Saturday Ralph Denham sat on the bank of the lake in Kew Gardens, dividing the dial-plate of his watch into sections with his forefinger. The just and inexorable nature of time itself was reflected in his face. He might have been composing a hymn to the unhasting and unresting march of that divinity. He seemed to greet the lapse of minute ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... old clock slowly crept along the dial-plate towards four, the hour so relentlessly enforced for interments for half a century by the sexton, who was now about to lay away his own wife in the greedy maw of the grave. The monotonous oscillation of the pendulum, sounding as the stroke of a passing ...
— Lancashire Idylls (1898) • Marshall Mather
... bracket clock, for instance, that I was speaking of—a fellow named Richard Parsons, who belonged to the London Clockmakers' Company between 1690 and 1730, made her from start to finish. You will see his name painted on the dial, and engraved on the works is his address. The jealous old clockmakers kept their eye on those who were manufacturing clocks, I can tell you. They weren't going to have a lot of cheap, poorly made articles shunted off on the public to ruin their trade. No, indeed. A ...
— Christopher and the Clockmakers • Sara Ware Bassett
... the scent up against your nostrils. All the year after his first visit, Jeremy had been longing to smell that smell again, and now he knelt up against the window, drinking it in. With his eyes he searched the horizon. From here you could see the garden with the sun-dial, the fields beyond, the sudden dip with the trees at the edge of it bent crossways by the wind, and there, in such a cup as one's hands might form, just beyond, ...
— Jeremy • Hugh Walpole
... legion would then be six thousand men. But the legions were seldom so large as this; they varied at different periods, from six thousand to three thousand; in the time of Polybius they were usually four thousand two hundred. See Adam's Rom. Ant., and Lipsius de Mil. Rom Dial. iv. ...
— Conspiracy of Catiline and The Jurgurthine War • Sallust
... . in thoughts, not breaths; In feelings, not in figures on a dial We should count ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy
... nearer and nearer to his fear every step. He is now just on the borders of Esau's country, and close upon opening communications with his brother. At that critical moment, just before the finger of the clock has reached the point on the dial at which the bell would strike, the needed help comes, the angel guards draw near and camp beside him. It is always so. 'The Lord shall help her, and that right early.' His hosts come no sooner and no later than we need. If they appeared ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... to the name, Athenaia is of course simply 'Athenian'; the shorter and apparently original form Athana, Athene is not so clear, but it seems most likely to mean 'Attic'. Cf. Meister, Gr. Dial. ii. 290. He classes under the head of Oertliche Bestimmungen: ha theos ha Paphia (Collitz and Bechtel, Sammlung der griechischen Dialekt-Inschriften, 2, 3, 14{a}, {b}, 15, 16). 'In Paphos selbst hiess die Goettin nur ha theos oder ha wanassa;—ha ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray
... assessment: digital switching equipment; modern services include telex, cellular, internet, international calling, caller ID, and leased data circuits domestic: Majuro Atoll and Ebeye and Kwajalein islands have regular, seven-digit, direct-dial telephones; other islands interconnected by shortwave radiotelephone (used mostly for government purposes) international: country code - 692; satellite earth stations - 2 Intelsat (Pacific Ocean); US Government satellite communications system on ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... they were moving away from station, she dropped in alarmed little jumps, but when they were headed home, she inched along in serene contentment, or if they were coasting, sneaked triumphantly back up the dial. ...
— Slingshot • Irving W. Lande
... certain infidelities into which my good-natured correspondents conceive me to have fallen. The books were presents of a convertible kind also,—'Christian Knowledge' and the 'Bioscope' [1], a religious Dial of Life explained:—to the author of the former (Cadell, publisher,) I beg you will forward my best thanks for his letter, his present, and, above all, his good intentions. The 'Bioscope' contained an MS. copy of very excellent verses, from whom I know not, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... perplexed. He had been lowering the bucket more and more slowly, and still there had reached him no summons to stop, although his dial told him that the cross-head must be far below the seven-hundred level. And now came the summons to raise slowly, when he was sure that it was near the level of no station. What was the matter? It was evident that there was ...
— In Blue Creek Canon • Anna Chapin Ray
... the persistent ringing of the alarm clock the next morning and Jack turned over with a groan. The dial said five o'clock, though he was sure he had not been asleep longer than ...
— Rainbow Hill • Josephine Lawrence
... "all the days." John, then, was "a burning and shining torch," lifted for a moment aloft in the murky air; but Jesus was THAT LIGHT. As the star-light, which fails to illumine the page of your book or the dial-plate of your watch, is to the sunlight, as the courier is to the sovereign, as the streamlet is to the ocean—such was John as compared with Him whose shoe-latchet he felt himself unworthy to stoop down and ...
— John the Baptist • F. B. Meyer
... three young girls came down the path towards the sun-dial, and Mademoiselle Moineau, waking with a violent start, got up and hobbled stiffly forward ...
— Angelot - A Story of the First Empire • Eleanor Price
... tap you early, tap you late, In vain! We get—whatever you may state— Much rain. The Woodpecker of which fools sing Ne'er tapped Half so persistently. Since Spring I've rapped Your fair false dial day by day, And yet The end—whatever you may say Is wet! 'Twas wet in June, and in July Wet too; In August it is wetter. Why, Trust you? Barometer, you false old chap, You bore! I'm no Woodpecker, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, August 29, 1891 • Various
... high places of the world. Every martyr for the truth was a torch bearer, whose light was extinguished. The countries that suffered the greatest loss of their best citizenship received a check of more than a century's growth. The hand on the dial of progress was turned backward wherever the blighting inquisition was felt. Its blighting effects may yet be seen in Italy, Spain, Portugal, Ireland and other countries where the papacy exerts a controlling influence. ...
— The Choctaw Freedmen - and The Story of Oak Hill Industrial Academy • Robert Elliott Flickinger
... a dial, the knowledge that it was time to rise and go crept upon them. Although they remained silent, each knew that the other felt the same weight of responsibility, the shadow-finger of the sundial travelling over them. ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... minute or two together, and perhaps fail to throw it in the end. And there is something singularly engaging, often instructive, in the simplicity with which he thus exposes the process as well as the result, the works as well as the dial of the clock. Withal he has his hours of inspiration. Apt words come to him as if by accident, and, coming from deeper down, they smack the more personally, they have the more of fine old crusted humanity, rich in sediment and humour. There are sayings of his in which he has stamped ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the grizzled beard put his face into the fur around the eyepiece of the telescopic-'visor and twisted a dial. "You have good eyes, Miss Quinton," he complimented. "The fifth's inside the handling machine. One ...
— Ullr Uprising • Henry Beam Piper
... room.) One set Arabian Nights. One set of Stevenson, all but his novels. Ever so many Maxfield Parrish pictures full of Prussian-blue skies. A house to put them in, with fireplaces. A lady's size motor-car that likes me. A plain cat with a tame disposition. A hammock. A sun-dial. (But that might be thrown in with the garden.) A gold watch-bracelet. All the colored satin slippers I want. A room big enough to ...
— The Rose Garden Husband • Margaret Widdemer
... a sun-dial, affixed to the west end of Nantwich Church, Cheshire, there appeared, previous to its removal about ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 206, October 8, 1853 • Various
... the steep hill, and stopped at the village inn. Before the door was a magnificent, broad-armed tree, with benches and tables beneath its shadow. On the front of the house was written in large letters, "Post-Tavern by Franz Schoendorfer"; and over this was a large sun-dial, and a half-effaced painting of a bear-hunt, covering the whole side of the house, and mostly red. Just as they drove up, a procession of priests with banners, and peasants with their hats in their hands, passed by towards the church. They were ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... The Gothic halls and cloisters were infinitely more mysterious as they loomed suddenly out of the darkness, outlined each by myriad faint squares of yellow light. Indefinitely from somewhere a bell boomed the quarter-hour, and Amory, pausing by the sun-dial, stretched himself out full length on the damp grass. The cool bathed his eyes and slowed the flight of time—time that had crept so insidiously through the lazy April afternoons, seemed so intangible in the long spring twilights. Evening after ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... looked like a nymph in Tanagra. And as if she knew where she was going, exactly, she walked gently but unfalteringly between the linked crocus-beacons to where the alley broadened into a bay of cut yews, to where ghostly white seats and a dim sun-dial seemed disposed as for a scene in a comedy. The leaden statue of a skipping faun would have been made out in a recess if you had known it was there. And as she entered the place a figure seated there, with elbows on knees and chin between ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... single instrument at each of the two termini. Their mode of indicating signs for communicating intelligence was by deflecting five magnetic needles in various directions, in such a way as to point to the required letters upon a diamond-shaped dial-plate. It was necessary that the signal should be observed at the instant, or it was lost ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume II • Samuel F. B. Morse
... communication board. The meteor warning dial was fluctuating violently, showing the presence of a rapidly approaching body—a meteor, or perhaps a flight of them. Gongs throughout the liner automatically began to sound a warning for the passengers to get into their space ...
— Loot of the Void • Edwin K. Sloat
... yet to the producing it according to the standing mechanical laws of nature. Thus, for instance, it cannot be denied that God, or the Intelligence that sustains and rules the ordinary course of things, might if He were minded to produce a miracle, cause all the motions on the dial-plate of a watch, though nobody had ever made the movements and put them in it: but yet, if He will act agreeably to the rules of mechanism, by Him for wise ends established and maintained in the creation, it is necessary ...
— A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge • George Berkeley
... built pyramidically; its base is 267 feet by 87 feet; at the Top it is 250 feet by 8 feet. It is built in the same manner as we do steps leading up to a sun-dial or fountain erected in the middle of a square, where there is a flite of steps on each side. In this building there are 11 of such steps; each step is about 4 feet in height, and the breadth 4 feet 7 inches, but they decreased both in height and breadth from the bottom to the ...
— The Life of Captain James Cook • Arthur Kitson
... Sykes stared amazedly at this broadcasting station whose air was filled with a pandemonium of crashing sound from some distant room, but McGuire was concerned mainly with the motion of a lean, blood-red hand that swung an object like a pointer in free-running sweeps above a dial on the table. And he detected a variation in the din from beyond as ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various
... stir him up," he said to himself, bunching Adair's telegram with the others to be sent from the first stop where the Western Union wires could be tapped. Then he whirled around in the swing chair and scowled up at the little dial in the end of the car; scowled at the speed-recorder, and went to the door ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde
... of which we have all admired," said Madame Tiphaine, "opens upon a long corridor which divides the house unequally; on the right side there is one window, on the other, two. At the garden end, the corridor opens with a glass door upon a portico with steps to the lawn, where there's a sun dial and a plaster statue of Spartacus, painted to imitate bronze. Behind the kitchen, the builder has put the staircase, and a sort of larder which we are spared the sight of. The staircase, painted to imitate black marble with yellow veins, turns upon itself ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... hand, if historians, such as Gregory I (Dial. iv. 36) {10}, tell us that an Italian hermit had been witness in a vision to the damnation of Theodoric, whose soul was plunged, by the ministers of divine vengeance, into the volcano of Lipari, one of the flaming mouths of the infernal world, we may recognise in the heated imagination ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... them displayed, That purest sky with brightness they dismayed. High lifted up were many lofty towers And goodly galleries far overlaid, Full of fair windows, and delightful bowers, And on the top a dial told the ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... in a series of articles in the "Independent" on the technic of poetry, said that Lanier had begun such a scientific study with "great soundness and common sense;" the book is "accurate, scientific, suggestive." The editor of the "Dial" referred to it as "the most striking and thoughtful exposition yet published on the technics of English poetry." Within the past ten years books on English verse have multiplied fast. In Germany, in England, and in America, the discussion of metrics has gone on. While dissenting ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... presence of a meter, the installation can conveniently be tested for soundness by throwing into it, through the meter, a pressure of 12 inches or so of water from the weighted holder, then leaving the inlet cock open, and observing whether the index hand on the lowest dial remains perfectly stationary for a quarter of an hour—movement of the linger again indicating a leak. The search for leaks must never be made with a light; if the pipes are full of air this is useless, if full of gas, criminal in its stupidity. While the whole installation ...
— Acetylene, The Principles Of Its Generation And Use • F. H. Leeds and W. J. Atkinson Butterfield
... Things having full References To one Consent, may work contrariously: As many Arrows, loosed several Ways, Come to one Mark, as many Ways meet in one Town, As many fresh Streams meet in one salt Sea, As many Lines close in the Dial's Center, So may a thousand Actions once afoot End in one Purpose, and be ...
— Remarks on Clarissa (1749) • Sarah Fielding
... the continuance of his own house to the rescue of the Holy Sepulchre should have been punished by the disease which threatened his nephew's life. "Come," he said, "noble De Lacy—the judgment provoked by a moment's presumption may be even yet averted by prayer and penitence. The dial went back at the prayer of the good King Hezekiah—down, down upon thy knees, and doubt not that, with confession, and penance, and absolution, thou mayst yet atone for thy falling away from the ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... caught some vibration through her helmet microphones. The men were too involved to notice. Caltis heard her. He got a cruel nosehold, twisted Denver's nose like an instrument dial. Denver screamed, released his grip. In the scramble, his foot slipped. ...
— Master of the Moondog • Stanley Mullen
... here, during which the two lads looked out at the garden flooded with sunshine, where Nat was working very deliberately close by the sun-dial. And beyond him, at the lake, from which the sunbeams flashed whenever a fish ...
— Crown and Sceptre - A West Country Story • George Manville Fenn
... the room and knelt before an old iron safe in the corner near the window, peering closely at the figures on the dial as he slowly turned the knob. In a moment the combination Was complete and he pulled open the heavy door. "It occurred to me to-day that this was a poor place to leave my memorandum book. If some one succeeded in burning the building—as some one apparently wants ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... trifle heavy in her hand as she held it to read the dial! Was it not an actual watch and gold at that, and did not its tiny hands count off the moments of each one of the twenty-four hours for her to note as they flew by? And was not all of its wonder her very ...
— The Heart of Arethusa • Francis Barton Fox
... concerted; at all events, the load reaches the region sounded far more rapidly than I expected. Then begins the burial, according to the usual method. It is one o'clock. The Necrophori have allowed the hour-hand of the clock to go half round the dial while verifying the condition of the surrounding spots and ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... obscured as if by a cloud, now, as by a lightning flash, would show him the very dust upon the street. But so brief were these intervals of vision, and so violently did the watch vibrate in his hands, that it was impossible to distinguish the numbers on the dial. He covered his eyes for a few seconds; and in that space, it seemed to him that he had fallen to be a man of ninety. When he looked again, the watch-plate had grown legible: he had twenty minutes. Twenty minutes, ...
— The Dynamiter • Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny van de Grift Stevenson
... quietly; "if you will meet me in the wilderness by the broken dial at half-past five exactly, we will go together to-morrow, and watch them as they come to the rendezvous. I will on the way get the better of my present timidity, and explain to you the means I design to employ to prevent ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... a beautiful girl of seventeen awaiting him,—a tall sunny-haired girl, with Alan's own smile and Alan's own eyes,—he grew suddenly aware of an unexpected interest. The sun went back on the dial of his life for thirty years or thereabouts, and Alan himself seemed to stand before him. Alan, as he used to burst in for his holidays from Winchester! After all, this pink rosebud was his eldest son's ...
— The Woman Who Did • Grant Allen
... never seen a human frame which seemed so nearly a transparent veil for a celestial and immortal spirit. She is a soul of fire enclosed in a shell of pearl." A third American friend was one who could bring tidings of Emerson and Hawthorne—Margaret Fuller of "The Dial," now Countess d'Ossoli, "far better than her writings," says Mrs Browning, "... not only exalted but exaltee in her opinions, yet calm in manner." Her loss, with that of her husband, on their voyage to America deeply affected Mrs Browning. "Was she happy in anything?" asks her sorrowing ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... place overawed my young heart. In summer time the parterres were overgrown into a wilderness. The plants threw up their straggling arms so high, that the sunshine could hardly find its way to the quaint old dial that stood there telling its tale of time, though no man regarded; and the cordial fragrance of the strawberry-beds, mingling with entangled masses of honeysuckle in their exuberance of midsummer blossom, seemed ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... shining dial again. "If you don't mind stopping for a few minutes I'll show you that odd sight ...
— The Sensitive Man • Poul William Anderson
... formed it: it was not susceptible of cultivation. I do not blush in acknowledging she never knew how to read well, although she writes tolerably. When I went to lodge in the Rue Neuve des Petits Champs, opposite to my windows at the Hotel de Ponchartrain, there was a sun-dial, on which for a whole month I used all my efforts to teach her to know the hours; yet, she scarcely knows them at present. She never could enumerate the twelve months of the year in order, and cannot distinguish one numeral from another, notwithstanding ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... a little shade and moisture. I grow it at the base of a bit of rockwork, in black or leaf mould; the aspect is south-east, but an old sun-dial screens it from the mid-day sun. The whole plant has a somewhat quaint appearance, but it has proved a great favourite. When the tops have died down the roots can safely be lifted, cut in lengths of one or two inches, and then replanted. It also produces seed ...
— Hardy Perennials and Old Fashioned Flowers - Describing the Most Desirable Plants, for Borders, - Rockeries, and Shrubberies. • John Wood
... convertible until Rhoda Kane drove it into the garage under her apartment building. From the street, the tenth android saw Rhoda and Frank enter the elevator. As soon as the door closed, he was in the outer lobby, watching as the numbers progressed upward on the elevator dial. The hand stopped at 21. This was noted and recorded, after which the tenth android called a finish to the night's activities and retired to the small room he'd rented on a quiet street on the Lower East Side where, if you bothered no one, no ...
— Ten From Infinity • Paul W. Fairman
... that, while an announcement of that nature goes on, the mutton grows cold, your wife grows tired, the children grow cross, and that the subjugation of the world in general is set back, so far as you are all concerned, a perceptible space of time on The Great Dial. But the tale itself has a wearing and wearying perplexity about it. At the end you doubt if it is your dinner that is ready, or Fred Marsters's, or Florence's, or nobody's. Whether there is any real ...
— How To Do It • Edward Everett Hale
... "I have an all-night trip before me, as to-night. I set the pointer here upon the right-hand dial which represents the eastern hemisphere of Barsoom, so that the point rests upon the exact latitude and longitude of Helium. Then I start the engine, roll up in my sleeping silks and furs, and with lights burning, race through the air toward ...
— Thuvia, Maid of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... such a school, a deft-fingered intelligent blind boy could learn electric wiring, pipe fitting, screw fitting, bolt nutting, assembling of chandeliers and telephone parts, trained as a plumber's helper, and taught to read gas and electric meters, by passing the fingers over the dial—in short, a variety of trades and occupations could be pursued with profit to the school and to the students. But while waiting for the establishment of such a school, there is much to be done by way of preparation. ...
— Five Lectures on Blindness • Kate M. Foley
... Melville held his watch out before Mr. Farnum's eyes. That younger man hardly saw the dial. He was looking past, out beyond the mouth of the little cove or harbor. As he did so, Mr. Farnum beheld what, at first, looked like a big ripple spreading over the placid water. Then the top of a steel conning tower shot up into sight. It was followed ...
— The Submarine Boys' Trial Trip - "Making Good" as Young Experts • Victor G. Durham
... He'd decided earlier in the game that it would be a physical impossibility to get through the whole list but he was making a strong attempt on a representative of each subdivision. He'd had a cocktail, a highball, a sour, a flip, a punch and a julep. He wagged forth a finger to dial a fizz, a ...
— Frigid Fracas • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... and for the fact that it was protected he thanked again his stupendous luck. He pulled savagely at the squat control stick; the four Rahl-Diesels unleashed a torrent of power; and the slim scout rose like a comet, and hurtled, the altitude dial's nervous finger proclaimed, to ten thousand feet. Lance eased off the power, ...
— Astounding Stories, February, 1931 • Various
... practical use can such power be? The scriptures give us the most wonderful accounts of divine interference: Animals talk like men; springs gurgle from dry bones; the sun and moon stop in the heavens in order that General Joshua may have more time to murder; the shadow on a dial goes back ten degrees to convince a petty king of a barbarous people that he is not going to die of a boil; fire refused to burn; water positively declined to seek its level, but stands up like a wall; grains of sand become lice; common walking-sticks, to ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... It was a very ordinary collection of houses, some of them big farms, others humble cottages. The tiled roofs formed a reddish mass, and above them rose the squat church tower. With my glasses I could distinguish the clock-dial, and could see ...
— In the Field (1914-1915) - The Impressions of an Officer of Light Cavalry • Marcel Dupont
... inexperienced heart would beat [7] At times, while young Content forsook her seat, And wild Impatience, pointing upward, showed, 25 Through passes yet unreached, a brighter road. [8] Alas! the idle tale of man is found Depicted in the dial's moral round; Hope with reflection blends her social rays [9] To gild the total tablet of his days; 30 Yet still, the sport of some malignant power, He knows but from its shade the present hour. [10] But why, ungrateful, dwell on idle pain? To show ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth - Volume 1 of 8 • Edited by William Knight
... venerable crocodile, in a royal livery of scarlet and gold, with sixteen capes; and the crocodile is driving four-in-hand from the box of the Bath mail. And suddenly we upon the mail are pulled up by a mighty dial, sculptured with the hours, that mingle with the heavens and the heavenly host. Then all at once we are arrived at Marlborough forest, amongst the lovely households [Footnote: "Households":—Roe-deer ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... moment," thought the editor of "The Scarf of Iris," as they crossed the bridge. Arrived at the further end in front of the clock of the Institute, Rodolphe stopped short, pointed to the dial with a despairing ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger
... patriarch of the village, and landlord of the inn, at the door of which he took his seat from morning till night, just moving sufficiently to avoid the sun and keep in the shade of a large tree; so that the neighbors could tell the hour by his movements as accurately as by a sun-dial. It is true he was rarely heard to speak, but smoked his pipe incessantly. His adherents, however (for every great man has his adherents), perfectly understood him, and knew how to gather his opinions. When anything that was read or ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson
... on his rack of pain, learned to watch for her coming as the one hour of brightness in an interminable night of gloom. He made a sort of sun-dial of the cracks in the floor, and when the shadows reached a certain spot his tired eyes grew eager, and he turned his head to listen for the patter of the little tabi that was sure to ...
— Miss Mink's Soldier and Other Stories • Alice Hegan Rice
... immediately gathered to peer over his shoulder. A needle flickered wildly from one side of the dial ...
— This World Must Die! • Horace Brown Fyfe
... a little. "Oh, Jake can be generous when he likes. He had it out with her of course, but he wasn't too severe. Ah, look! She is going to jump the sun dial!" ...
— Charles Rex • Ethel M. Dell
... Nantes, and which the writer of my pamphlet ascribes only subordinately to Michel Colomb. The church, which is not of great size, is in the last and most flamboyant phase of Gothic, and in admirable preservation; the west front, before which a quaint old sun-dial is laid out on the ground, - a circle of num- bers marked in stone, like those on a clock face, let into the earth, - is covered with delicate ornament. The great feature, however (the nave is perfectly bare and wonderfully new-looking, though the warden, a stolid yet sharp old peasant, in a ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... the favourite bear was repeatedly introduced. Placed in the middle of the terrace between a sashed-door opening from the house and the central flight of steps, a huge animal of the same species supported on his head and fore-paws a sun-dial of large circumference, inscribed with more diagrams than Edward's mathematics enabled ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... joy at thought of once again seeing Hope Villa, the beach, the garden, the sun-dial—all the thousand and one little happy and pleasant things that, made by them in the heart of the vast wilderness, had brought them such ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... modern men, one finds, in strictness, almost nothing of the same rank. Goethe alone, since the days of Shakspeare, reminds me of it. Of him too you say that he saw the object; you may say what he himself says of Shakspeare: 'His characters are like watches with dial-plates of transparent crystal; they show you the hour like others, and the inward mechanism also is ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... would not have brought in this resolution because you thought the cause might be injured among the liberals in religion. In other words, if she had written your views, you would not have considered a resolution necessary. To pass this one is to set back the hands on the dial of reform. It is the reviving of the old time censorship, which I hoped ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... flowers, they had set up archery targets. Cicely Elliott, in black and white, flashing like a magpie in the alleys, ran races with the Earl of Surrey beneath the blinking eyes of her old knight; the Lady Mary, herself habited all in black, moved like a dark shadow upon a dial between the little beds upon paths of red brick between box hedges as high as your ankles. She spoke to none save once when she asked the name of a flower. But laughter went up, and it seemed as if, in this first day out of doors, all the Court opened its ...
— Privy Seal - His Last Venture • Ford Madox Ford
... Princely Highness had also inquired concerning myself and my cure, and heard that I was of ancient and noble family, and my salarium very small, he called from the window to his chancellor, D. Rungius, who stood without, looking at the sun-dial, and told him that I was to have an addition from the convent at Pudgla, item from the crown-lands at Ernsthoff, as I mentioned above; but, more's the pity, I never have received the same, although the instrumentum donationis was sent me soon ...
— The Amber Witch • Wilhelm Meinhold
... life did run musical in those dry channels once;—among the Inns, never. The only popular legend known in relation to any one of the dull family of Inns, is a dark Old Bailey whisper concerning Clement's, and importing how the black creature who holds the sun-dial there, was a negro who slew his master and built the dismal pile out of the contents of his strong box—for which architectural offence alone he ought to have been condemned to live in it. But, what populace would waste fancy upon such a place, or on New ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... rain passes to a vibrating trough; when, after a sufficient quantity has fallen into its higher side, it sinks down and discharges the rain which escapes by a tube. The vibrating action of this trough moves a train of wheel-work and indices, which register upon a dial plate the quantity ...
— The Rain Cloud - or, An Account of the Nature, Properties, Dangers and Uses of Rain • Anonymous
... is an immoderate revolutionist, speaks English very well, and is a great admirer of our party writers. In his room I observed a vast quantity of English books, and on his chimney stood what he called a patriotic clock, the dial of which was placed between two pyramids, on which were inscribed the names of republican authors, and on the top of one was that of our countryman, Mr. Thomas Paine—whom, by the way, I understand you intended to exhibit in a much more conspicuous and less tranquil situation. ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... dimly sees, Come through the trees, A woman, like a wild moss-rose: A man, who goes Softly: and by the dial They kiss a while: Then drowsily the mists blow round them, wan, And they like ...
— The Haunted Hour - An Anthology • Various
... striking twelve; And the little girls stop in the hall to watch it, And the big ships rocking in a half-circle Above the dial. Twelve o'clock! Down the side steps Go the little girls, Under their big round straw hats. Minna's has a pink ribbon, Stella's a blue, That is the way they know which is which. Twelve o'clock! An hour yet before dinner. Mother is ...
— Men, Women and Ghosts • Amy Lowell
... means, whether in physics or politics, falls not to the lot of man. What should we think of the man who should insist on having a simple watch, which should answer every object of that machine, and yet possess the simplicity of a sun-dial? The artificer would naturally say to such a customer, "Sir, if you want a sun-dial, you can have a very cheap and a very simple one; but if you desire a watch, I shall be glad to learn how its operations are to be accomplished without ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 333 - Vol. 12, Issue 333, September 27, 1828 • Various
... a decided influence on Theodore Parker; and when "The Dial" was published, Parker was one of the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... was that of the sexagenary cycle. This was operated after the manner of a clock having two concentric dials, the circumference of the larger dial being divided into ten equal parts, each marked with one of the ten "celestial signs," and the circumference of the smaller dial being divided into twelve equal parts each marked with one of the twelve signs of the zodiac. The ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... the Spectator, the Westminster, the Daily News, and the Morning Star, were the principal British pro-Northern organs. In addition The Liberator names among the lesser and provincial press the following: Nonconformist, British Standard, Dial, Birmingham Post, Manchester Examiner, Newcastle Chronicle, Caledonian Mercury and Belfast Whig. ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... another kind of winter dial, called the Anaphoric and constructed in the following way. The hours, indicated by bronze rods in accordance with the figure of the analemma, radiate from a centre on the face. Circles are described upon it, marking the limits of the months. Behind these rods there is a drum, on which is drawn ...
— Ten Books on Architecture • Vitruvius
... against it; at any rate, you will not be the only fool who stands to lose or win on that chance, which, after all, is some slight consolation. If none of these inducements are sufficient, you may fix on your choice by spinning round the index on the painted dial-plate, and choosing the numbers opposite to which the spin stops, thus making chance determine chance. Having, at last, selected your combination somehow or other, you enter the office with something of that shamefaced feeling which, I suppose, a man must be conscious of the first time that he ever ...
— Rome in 1860 • Edward Dicey
... with a dial thirty-eight feet across. In any other country this would be the largest clock in the world. In America it is ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 7th, 1920 • Various
... angel, "Nay, repent That wild vow! Look, the dial-finger's bent Down to the last hour ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... the north of him. King Gundobad desired to become the possessor of a clepsydra or water-clock, such as had long been used in Athens and Rome, to regulate the time allotted to the orators in public debates. He also wished to obtain an accurately graduated sun-dial. For both he made request to Theodoric, and again[99] the universal genius Boethius was applied to, Cassiodorus writes him, in his master's name, a letter which gives us some interesting information as to the past career of Boethius, and then proceeds to give a specification of the required ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... inquisition, the cause of truth and liberty would have been still more desperate. Nevertheless they were directed and controlled, under Providence, by humbler, but more powerful agencies than their own. The nobles were but the gilded hands on the outside of the dial—the hour to strike was determined by the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... The illuminated dial of my watch tells me that it is three minutes of one and I communicate the information to the rest of the Irish quartet. In three minutes, the little world that we look upon from our tree top is due to change with ...
— "And they thought we wouldn't fight" • Floyd Gibbons
... in her hands, and endeavored to shut out the grotesque and phantom-like forms that seemed to dance before her. A deathlike stillness reigned through the house, the silence alone broken by the ticking of the great dial at the head of the staircase. There is something inexpressibly awful in the ticking of a clock, when heard at midnight by the lonely and anxious watcher beside the bed of death. It is the voice of time ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie
... methods of breathing is not by any means mere theory, but that any one can convince himself of the truth of the rules laid down by making a few experiments with the spirometer, an instrument for measuring the breathing power of the chest by indicating on a dial the exact number of cubic inches of air expelled from the lungs. This breathing power will be found to vary according to the way in which the inspiration has been accomplished. In my own case, for instance, ...
— The Mechanism of the Human Voice • Emil Behnke
... remains of the old moat, the waters of which lay placid and motionless under the crimson rays of the setting sun; with the forest-trees lying straight along each side, and their deep-green foliage mirrored to blackness in the burnished surface of the moat below—and the broken sun-dial at the end nearest the hall—and the heron, standing on one leg at the water's edge, lazily looking down for fish—the lonely and desolate house scarce needed the broken windows, the weeds on the door-sill, the broken ...
— Curious, if True - Strange Tales • Elizabeth Gaskell
... momentous question. For all this of the Corn-Law Abrogation, and what can follow therefrom, is but as the shadow on King Hezekiah's Dial: the shadow has gone back twenty years; but will again, in spite of Free-Trades and Abrogations, travel forward its old fated way. With our present system of individual Mammonism, and Government by Laissez-faire, this ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... and banged it against the side of the station wagon. Still the needle held in the normal zone. He banged it harder and suddenly the needle dropped to zero as Hetty and her ranch hands peered over the AEC man's shoulder at the dial. ...
— Make Mine Homogenized • Rick Raphael
... rest and removed as far as possible from all excitement, may be conversed with to take his mind away from the fact that his blood pressure is being taken. He also should not watch the dial, as any tensity on his part more or less raises the systolic pressure, the diastolic not being much affected by such nervous tension. The armlet having been carefully applied, it is better to inflate gradually 10 mm. higher than the point at which the pulsation ceases ...
— DISTURBANCES OF THE HEART • OLIVER T. OSBORNE, A.M., M.D.
... detachments came away, first blowing up the 4.5 how. and removing the breech mechanism, dial sight, and sight clinometer of the 18-pdr. As soon as he had vacated the position the sergeant reported to the machine-gun officer and then to his ...
— Pushed and the Return Push • George Herbert Fosdike Nichols, (AKA Quex)
... "Not an ordinary clock, my friend. No, no. That one hand goes round the dial. As I put it, so it regulates the hour at which the door shall open. See! The hand points to eight. At eight the door opened, as you ...
— No Thoroughfare • Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins
... vain a task?" resumed Scholastique. "Is it natural that a little copper instrument should go of itself, and mark the hours? We ought to have kept to the sun-dial!" ...
— A Winter Amid the Ice - and Other Thrilling Stories • Jules Verne
... sprang out before her—against the moonlit wall, in the glazing of the pictures, on the dial of the clock. She saw his gray eyes surrounded by the fine wrinkles of those who have peered across glaring sands, and his black eyebrows united above his aquiline nose. The qualities that made him her antithesis ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... cheerful and delightful figures at Chartres is that of the very tall angel holding a sun dial, on the corner of the South tower. A certain optimistic inconsequence is his chief characteristic, as if he really believed that the hours bore more of happiness than of ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... more to tell. In Chicago once again, I spent a most exasperating two days trying to inform the F.B.I., the police, or anyone who would listen to me. My fingers couldn't dial the correct phone number, and at the crucial moment each time I grew tongue-tied. My last attempt was a letter to the F.B.I., which I couldn't remember to mail, and when I finally did remember I couldn't ...
— The Gallery • Roger Phillips Graham
... grass of that churchyard; nothing half so shady as its trees; nothing half so quiet as its tombstones. The sheep are feeding there, when I kneel up, early in the morning, in my little bed in a closet within my mother's room, to look out at it; and I see the red light shining on the sun-dial, and think within myself, 'Is the sun-dial glad, I wonder, that it ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... world, and had been so all her life. Moreover, from this blithe laugh, as well as from her happy face, you might have taken her for a young maiden of nineteen, instead of a woman of six-and-twenty, which she really was. But with some, after youth's first sufferings are passed, life's dial ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... suffer pain. The owner of the watch may be soulless, without mind-fire, a mere creature. No benefit to the heart or to the body accrues from the most accurate mechanism. Hence I debated whether the third division should be included. But I reflected that time cannot be put back on the dial, we cannot return to Sparta; there is an existent state of things, and existent multitudes; and possibly a more powerful engine, flexible to the will, might give them that freedom which is the one, and the one only, political or social idea I possess. For liberty, ...
— The Story of My Heart • Richard Jefferies
... in all humility, and unbuttoned, as it were, for a spanking by whomsoever shall wish to give it, I must confess that I myself have no great love for the Louvre, regarding it somewhat as an endurance test for tired tourists, a kind of blow-in-the-nozzle-and-watch-the-dial-mount-up contrivance, as at a country fair. And so I am not sure but that the band playing in the gardens is a better amusement for a bright afternoon, and that a nursemaid in uniform with her children—bare-legged ...
— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks
... side along a winding, rose-hedged path, past an old sun-dial, past a triumphant peacock strutting before his mild little mate, past a fountain whose spray flung out to them a welcome. She led the way with the accustomed step of one who knew and loved the place. They came to a ...
— Many Kingdoms • Elizabeth Jordan
... sighted. We use the word sighted designedly, because we wish to suggest a comparison between the sighting of a rifle at the target and the sighting of a telescope at a star. Instead of the ordinary large bull's-eye, suppose that the target only consisted of a watch-dial, which, of course, the rifleman could not see at the distance of any ordinary range. But with the telescope of the meridian circle the watch-dial would be visible even at the distance of a mile. The meridian ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... with minor poets is well set forth by Conrad Aiken in The Dial, who refers to the conclusions of M. Nicolas Kostyleff after a tentative study of the mechanism of poetic inspiration: "An important part in poetic creation, he maintains, is an automatic verbal discharge, along chains of association, ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor
... a long, slender, tubelike instrument with a dial topping it. Then, going to the brain-case, he touched a cleverly concealed catch and a square pane set in the top of the case swung back. He dipped the instrument he held into the liquid, and for a moment stood silent, watching the dial. Then he took it out, ...
— The Passing of Ku Sui • Anthony Gilmore
... At stamen-bases, nor deny The humming-birds' fine roguery, Bee-thighs, nor any butterfly; All gracious curves of slender wings, Bark-mottlings, fibre-spiralings, Fern-wavings and leaf-flickerings; Each dial-marked leaf and flower-bell Wherewith in every lonesome dell Time to himself his hours doth tell; All tree-sounds, rustlings of pine-cones, Wind-sighings, doves' melodious moans, And night's unearthly undertones; All ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... had a mainspring and a balance-wheel, for their mover and regulator. The strokes are made by a small hammer. He then showed me his last, which is moved by a weight and regulated by a pendulum, and which cost only-two guineas and a half. It presents, in front, a dial-plate like that of a clock, on which are arranged, in a circle, the words largo, adagio, andante, allegro, presto. The circle is moreover divided into fifty-two equal degrees. Largo is at 1, adagio at 11, andante at 22, allegro ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... of The Dial, Mr. W. P. Reeves tells us the tale, half-humorous, half-allegorical, of the decadence of a scholar. According to this story, one Thomson was a college graduate, full of high notions of the significance of life and the ...
— The Story of the Innumerable Company, and Other Sketches • David Starr Jordan
... led them up two stone steps to a round grass plot. There was a sun-dial in the middle, and all round against the yew hedge a low, wide marble seat. The red clew ran straight across the grass and by the sun-dial, and ended in a small brown hand with jewelled rings on every finger. The hand was, naturally, attached to an ...
— The Enchanted Castle • E. Nesbit
... The transmitter screen lit up with a blurred jumble of print, colors, a muttering of voices, music and noises. Gefty twisted a dial. The screen cleared, showed a newscast headline sheet. Gefty blinked at it, ...
— The Winds of Time • James H. Schmitz
... me to do but watch Sandoval as Kennedy prepared a little instrument with a scale and dial upon which rested an indicator resembling a watch hand, something like the new horizontal clocks which have only one hand to register seconds, minutes, and hours. In them, like a thermometer held sidewise, the hand moves along from zero to twenty-four. In this instrument ...
— The Treasure-Train • Arthur B. Reeve
... as the two ends of the piece of steel are alternately lifted out of the notches by the swaying of the pendulum. The other wheels and pinions of the movement are so arranged that they indicate the number of turns the wheel at the top of the pendulum completes, by means of hands traversing round a dial-plate inscribed with figures ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 457 - Volume 18, New Series, October 2, 1852 • Various
... to be acquainted: such, for example, as relate to what may be called our HOUSEHOLD INSTRUMENTS, namely, the Thermometer, the Barometer, and Vernier; the Hydrometer, the Hygrometer; the Tuning-Fork, Musical Glasses and Music generally; the Compass; the Prism, the Telescope, and the Sun-Dial. These subjects, and those in immediate connexion with them, are treated of extensively; as also their application ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the - Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament (1839) • Thomas Clarkson
... the size of the building; the fruit trees had been pruned and tended; an old grape arbour raised and trained into a quaint sort of pergola, a strange sight, then, in America; a beautiful old sun-dial drowsed in a tangle of nasturtiums. A delicate, dreamy humming led my eyes to a group of beehives (always dear to me because of the Miel du Chamounix and our happy, sweet-toothed boyhood!) and near ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... in fact, to consider the pointed peak as the stylus of an immense sun-dial, the shadow of which pointed on one given day, like the inexorable finger of fate, to the yawning chasm which led into ...
— A Journey to the Centre of the Earth • Jules Verne
... ground, the farm-house was of stone. It had been a plain, square building; but in the days of Poniatowski some attempt had been made at ornamentation in the French style. A pavilion had been built in the garden amid the pine-trees. A sun-dial had been placed on the lawn, which was now no longer a lawn, but had lapsed again into a meadow. The cows had polished the sun-dial with their rough sides, while the passage of cold winters and wet springs had left the plaster ornamentation mossy ...
— The Vultures • Henry Seton Merriman
... on a big bell with a hammer; as the striking ceases, a life-sized figure of Time raises its hour-glass and turns it; two golden rams advance and butt each other; a gilded cock lifts its wings; but the main features are two great angels, who stand on each side of the dial with long horns at their lips; it was said that they blew melodious blasts on these horns every hour—but they did not do it for us. We were told, later, than they blew only at night, when ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... watch on the table before me, a night watch with a luminous dial. At five minutes after nine I felt the top of the table waver under my fingers, a curious, ...
— Sight Unseen • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... full of sausage as she turned it upon me. I immediately lost all appetite, and a feeling of nausea came over me. When I reached the market-place I went to the fountain and drank a little. I looked up; the dial marked ...
— Hunger • Knut Hamsun
... little of the world, sir,' returned the other, who had a weak and quavering voice. 'I am merely passing on, like the shadow over the sun-dial. It would be worth no man's while to mislead me; it would really be too easy—too poor a success, to yield any satisfaction. The young woman whom you saw go in here is my brother's child. My brother is William Dorrit; I am Frederick. You say you have seen her at your mother's (I know ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... to right until, by means of a pin inside the case, it locks with the hour hand and takes a corresponding position. The point of this gold indicator bends over the edge of the case, round which are set eleven raised points—the stem forms the twelfth. Thus the watch, an ordinary watch with a white dial for the person who sees, becomes for a blind person by this special attachment in effect one with a single raised hour hand and raised figures. Though there is less than half an inch between the points—a space which represents sixty minutes—Miss Keller tells ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... Nan from the dial. "Well! that's not so late. I know we're allowed to remain in the car till eight. I'll hurry. But, oh! isn't it ...
— Nan Sherwood's Winter Holidays • Annie Roe Carr
... the detector plate. "Here we are," he said. "The dial's oscillating between four and eight, all ...
— The Judas Valley • Gerald Vance
... bring the price of turnips to within the reach of authors and artists. Historians claim he would have made another fortune had he lived when the sun-dial ...
— Who Was Who: 5000 B. C. to Date - Biographical Dictionary of the Famous and Those Who Wanted to Be • Anonymous
... had time for, and the antiquarians bless him to this day. Then he went off to the stables, and helped to get out his horses. My Lady Anne, who was only sixteen, saved her jewels and one or two of her more elaborate gowns, and then sat down by the sun-dial and cried. The servants worked furiously as long as the devouring flames allowed them, but when there was nothing left of Kencote Hall but smouldering, unsafe walls, under a black, winter sky, and the piled-up heap of things that had been ...
— The Squire's Daughter - Being the First Book in the Chronicles of the Clintons • Archibald Marshall
... of the garden without speaking. Then Hadria came to a standstill at the sun-dial, at the crossing of the paths, and began absently to trace the figures of the hours, with the stalk of ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... He was standing by the sun-dial, perhaps ten paces from his victim. The man on the sled must have seen that something unusual was taking place, for he had risen to his knees, his whip singing viciously among ...
— The God of His Fathers • Jack London
... the signs from Ludgate to Charing Cross." He says of Mr. John Hales, that, "He loved Canarie," and was buried "under an altar monument of black marble————with a too long epitaph"; of Edmund Halley, that he "at sixteen could make a dial, and then, he said, he thought himself a brave fellow"; of William Holder, who wrote a book upon his curing one Popham who was deaf and dumb, "he was beholding to no author; did only consult with nature." For the most part, an author ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... place, it naturally sought a vent in another. Mrs Tow-wouse is thought to have perceived this abatement, and, probably, it added very little to the natural sweetness of her temper; for though she was as true to her husband as the dial to the sun, she was rather more desirous of being shone on, as being more capable of feeling ...
— Joseph Andrews Vol. 1 • Henry Fielding |
