"Mechanic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... respective tables—that is, three o'clock. It is singular how this important period recedes from the meridian as people grow more refined in their own opinions, or more fashionable in those of their neighbors. The hard-working farmer or mechanic has his dinner at the matin hour of twelve; the country doctor or village lawyer stands upon his dignity and dines at one; in country towns, of twenty or thirty thousand inhabitants, the "good society" feels obliged to dine at two; when you reach the great metropolis ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... mechanic, and had invented a machine for making chenille. Sad to say, this invention he used for the purpose of inveigling the girl into his workshop, which was situated on the second floor of an extensive range ...
— The Reminiscences Of Sir Henry Hawkins (Baron Brampton) • Henry Hawkins Brampton
... pleasures; the result is, that slaveholding states and colonies are proverbial for dissipation. Hence, too, the contempt for industry, which prevails in such a state of society.—Where none work but slaves, usefulness becomes degradation. The wife of a respectable mechanic, who accompanied her husband from Massachusetts to the South, gave great offence to her new neighbors by performing her usual household avocations; they begged her to desist from it, (offering the services of their own blacks,) because the sight of a white person engaged ...
— An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans • Lydia Maria Child
... which was the kitchen mechanic, she says the perfessor's wife's been over to her mother's while this smallpox has been going on, and they is a nurse in the house looking after Miss Margery, the little kid that's sick. And Biddy, ...
— Danny's Own Story • Don Marquis
... to those of boyhood. The country once more attracted him; he took out his old sketch-books, bought a new one, revived the regret that he could not be a painter of landscape. A visit to one or two picture-galleries, and then again profound discouragement, recognition of the fact that he was a mechanic and never could be ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... speaks with bitterness thereof: 'To the end that they may not lack means of subduing their neighbours, they think it no shame to gird as knights young men of low birth, or even handicraftsmen in despised mechanic arts, the which folk other nations banish like the plague from honourable and liberal pursuits.' Such knights, amid the chivalry of Europe, were not held in much esteem; nor is it easy to see what the cities, which had formally excluded nobles from their government, thought to gain ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... regard it as a sacred duty, nor had demagogues yet found it a lucrative trade, to talk and write about the distress of the labourer. History was too much occupied with courts and camps to spare a line for the hut of the peasant or the garret of the mechanic. The press now often sends forth in a day a greater quantity of discussion and declamation about the condition of the working man than was published during the twenty-eight years which elapsed between the Restoration and the ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... that his grandfather had once been a poor mechanic, or rather he ignored it. He chose to consider that he had sprung from a long line of wealthy ancestors. His father heard with pleasure that Herbert was not likely to realize any money at present for his services. Already he felt that the little cottage was as good as his. It was only ...
— Herbert Carter's Legacy • Horatio Alger
... anything other than a phonograph on legs is self-made. But if we award his just praise to the man who has attained any kind of excellence without having had the same advantages as others whom, nevertheless, he has equalled or surpassed, let us not be betrayed into undervaluing the mechanic's careful training to his business, the thorough and laborious education of the scholar and the ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... consideration and were heartily commended. These planned an organization of the colored people in their municipal sub-divisions with the special object of the promotion of their improvement in morals, literature and the mechanic arts. Lewis Tappan refers to them in the biography previously referred to. The "Mental Feast" which was a social feature, survived thirty years later in some of the interior towns of Pennsylvania and the West. ...
— The Early Negro Convention Movement - The American Negro Academy, Occasional Papers No. 9 • John W. Cromwell
... education of colored youth" is one of the most striking phenomena of the times: as if theology and the classics were the things best suited to and most urgently needed by a class of persons unprepared in rudimentary education, and whose immediate aim must be that of the mechanic and the farmer—to whom the classics, theology and the sciences, in their extremely impecunious state, are unequivocable abstractions. There will be those who will denounce me for taking this view of collegiate and ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune
... A mechanic, or a man in any small line of business, must trust his wife with the disbursement of a certain part of the family income. It passes through her hands in the way of housekeeping, and the management of it exercises and develops her faculties; but the wife of the farmer ...
— How to make rugs • Candace Wheeler
... the message he wished his son to take to the village, the young mechanic inspected the motor-cycle he had purchased. Tom found that a few repairs would suffice to put it in good shape, though an entire new front wheel would be needed. The motor had not been damaged, as he ascertained ...
— Tom Swift and his Motor-cycle • Victor Appleton
... arc-lights of the platform glared above the semaphores, the men swarmed to the windows to catch a glimpse of the belated engine. When the rays of its electric headlight pierced the Western night they shouted like boys, ran to the telephones, and while the roundhouse, the superintendent, and the master-mechanic were getting the news the Special engine steamed slowly into sight through the whirling snow and stopped at the semaphore. So a liner shaken in the teeth of a winter storm, battered by heading seas, and swept by stiffening spray, rides ...
— The Daughter of a Magnate • Frank H. Spearman
... The reply which Dr. Jameson caused to be sent was concealed in one of the bicycles, which were seized by the Boer authorities on the return ride of the despatch-carriers, and was not brought to light until the following March, when a mechanic who was repairing the ...
— The Transvaal from Within - A Private Record of Public Affairs • J. P. Fitzpatrick
... again and breaks a pedal, and when we dismount at Indjia, for our noontide halt, he discovers that his saddle-spring has snapped in the middle. As he ruefully surveys the breakage caused by the roughness of the Fruskagora roads, and sends out to scour the village for a mechanic capable of undertaking the repairs, he eyes my Columbia wistfully, and asks me for the address where one like it can be obtained. The blacksmith is not prepared to mend the spring, although he makes a good job of the pedal, ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... who first conceived the principle involved in sewing by machinery, or in respect to who first constructed a machine that would fulfill that idea; but so far as great results are concerned the world must be considered as indebted to Elias Howe, Jr., a New England mechanic, born and reared in obscurity, and at an early age thrown upon his own resources. He was born at Spencer, Massachusetts, July 9th, 1819. His father was a farmer and miller, but at sixteen he left home, engaging in a cotton mill. Space will not permit us to follow ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... small, and the prospect of high wages certain; pay and bounties are trifles, as laboring men at the mines can now earn in one day more than double a soldier's pay and allowances for a month, and even the pay of a lieutenant or captain cannot hire a servant. A carpenter or mechanic would not listen to an offer of less than fifteen or twenty dollars a day. Could any combination of affairs try a man's fidelity more than this? I really think some extraordinary mark of favor should be given to those soldiers who remain faithful to ...
— The Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains, Oregon and California • Brevet Col. J.C. Fremont
... to be converted into money, and this set in motion the various appliances of commerce. Vessels were needed to carry their produce to market, and merchants to purchase it, who, in turn, supplied the multifarious wants of the household. Then came the mechanic and the professional man, and with the latter education was a necessity. It was not to be expected that the tastes of the rising generation would always run in the same groove with the preceding, and as wealth and population increased, so did the openings for advancement ...
— Life in Canada Fifty Years Ago • Canniff Haight
... readily be believed. The Archbishop of Aix, when I first showed him the same plate, was so struck with horror, that he could scarcely speak: and when Mirabeau first saw it, he was so impressed by it, that he ordered a mechanic to make a model of it in wood, at a considerable expense. This model he kept afterwards in his dining-room. It was a ship in miniature, about a yard long, and little wooden men and women, which were painted black to represent the slaves, were seen ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament (1808) • Thomas Clarkson
... products, of course, with these junior achievement efforts, are chemical specialties that can be made safely and that people will buy and use without misgivings—solvent to free up rusty bolts, cleaner to remove road tar, mechanic's hand soap—that sort of thing. Mr. McCormack had told me, though, that I might find these youngsters a bit more ambitious. "The Miller boy and Mary McCready," he had said, "have exceptionally high IQ's—around one forty or one fifty. ...
— Junior Achievement • William Lee
... torture, unequivocal answers to prepared and preconceived questions—yet still they would not have been talked of or described, as instances of LUCK, but as the natural results of his admitted genius and known skill. But should an accident have disclosed similar discoveries to a mechanic at Birmingham or Sheffield, and if the man should grow rich in consequence, and partly by the envy of his neighbours, and partly with good reason, be considered by them as a man below par in the general powers of his understanding; ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... all building materials, and where inferior workmanship and materials can be used to an equal advantage with those of first class. To slight work and yet do it justice; to give it all the strength and endurance necessary, requires one of skillful acquirements. A mechanic may persuade a proprietor into many a long day's work, as it pays well to nurse good jobs when other work is slack, but an architect who understands such things would save the value ...
— Woodward's Country Homes • George E. Woodward
... early days somewhere in the suburbs of Paris, on so elaborate a scale, that it represented Troy besieged, with the two hosts, their several leaders, and all other objects in their full proportion.] art, which in those days (like the needlework of Miss Linwood in ours), though no more than a mechanic craft, in some measure realized the effects of a fine art by the perfect skill of its execution. All these modes of luxury, with a policy that had the more merit as it thwarted his own private inclinations, did Hadrian peremptorily abolish; perhaps, amongst other more obvious purposes, seeking ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... populace, believing that they would not be punished, pursued the members of the University with continued insults and threats. After an unusually serious attack cum bombardis, (in which, "by the divine clemency," a young mechanic was wounded), the University, failing to obtain redress, appealed to Prince Maurice of Saxony, who promised to protect the University. A conference between the University and the city authorities took place, ...
— Life in the Medieval University • Robert S. Rait
... Cawood was a good-tempered industrious little woman; but her husband—Cawood the carpenter—was a thorn in Mrs. Churton's tender side. Not that he was a black sheep in the Eyethorne fold; on the contrary, he was known to be temperate, a good husband and father, and a clever industrious mechanic. But he was never seen at church; on Sundays he went fishing, being devoted to the gentle craft; and it was wrong, more so in him because of his good name than in many another. Mrs. Churton was anxious to point this ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... naturally be conducted to the boiler, steam chest, shafts, and every part that belongs to a completed engine. To know that they are straight and in place as shown upon the plan and described by the specification, he has done all that is required of a master mechanic. Then it goes into the hands of the engineer, who waters, fires and conducts this artificial being on its journey. You as Osteopathic machinists can go no farther than to adjust the abnormal condition, in which you find the afflicted. Nature ...
— Philosophy of Osteopathy • Andrew T. Still
... Lionardo's Faun-S. John, the wilding grace of Correggio's Diana, the voluptuous fascination of Titian's Venus, the mundane seductiveness of Veronese's Europa, the golden glory of Tintoretto's Bacchus,—all have evanesced, and in their place are hard mechanic figures, excellently drawn, correctly posed, but with no touch of poetry. Where, indeed, shall we find 'the light that never was on sea or land' ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... long now, and you can accomplish a great deal if you feel disposed to do so. I think it possible I can obtain a situation for your father as carpenter on a plantation in the country, if he will promise to abstain from drinking. I have heard that he was a very good mechanic, and in the country he would not meet with such constant temptation. Do you suppose that he will be willing ...
— Macaria • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... the builder of the Meum and Tuum. His son is still living, and a well-known mechanic in Lowestoft. Mutford Bridge will be better recognised as the bridge at ...
— Edward FitzGerald and "Posh" - "Herring Merchants" • James Blyth
... 2. The mechanic's dark little third-story room, seen in a flash from the Elevated Railway train; the sewing-machine in a corner; the small cook-stove; the whole family eating cabbage around a kerosene lamp; of the clatter and roar and groaning wail of the Elevated train unconscious; ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... Sheet Iron, and Copper plate Workers, Practical Geometry; Mensuration of Surfaces and Solids, Tables of the Weights of Metals, Lead pipe, etc., Tables of Areas and Circumferences of Circles, Japan, Varnishes, Lackers, Cements, Compositions, etc., etc. By LEROY J. BLINN, Master Mechanic. With over One Hundred Illustrations. ...
— Mechanical Drawing Self-Taught • Joshua Rose
... to look for signs of disturbance in either loaves or eggs; it was quicker and easier to break them up. I then addressed my attention to the sardine tins, which from the first had seemed the most likely hiding-places. A very moderately skilled mechanic can unsolder a tin, empty out the fish and oil, put in what he pleases in place, weight judiciously, and then refasten with fresh solder. I opened all the tins, found that all except one had been undisturbed, but ...
— The Lost Naval Papers • Bennet Copplestone
... it had left at two in the morning. Seventy miles from Delhi to Catskill—a good day's journey! It was full, and our landlord put on an extra, giving me a seat beside the driver, and filling the inside with men. Said driver was a carpenter, and an excellent specimen of an American mechanic—intelligent and self-respecting. This is a great cattle and dairy region, and we passed several hundred lambs on their way to the New York market. The driver pitied the poor creatures; and, when passing through a drove, endeavored to frighten them ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... purchase farm implements, plows, harrows and cultivators; to erect shops and furnish tools and materials for instruction and use in the mechanic arts, for carpenters, blacksmiths, tin-men, harness and shoemakers; and to supply the girls' industrial rooms with sewing and ...
— The American Missionary — Volume 39, No. 03, March, 1885 • Various
... lowest and meanest of our species are the most strongly addicted to this vice—men who are a scandal to their sex, and women who disgrace human nature; for the basest mechanic is so far from being exempt that he is generally the most guilty of it. It visits ale-houses and gin-shops, and whistles in the empty heads of ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... paid wages of ashes, any more than a man who superintends other people's capital is paid the reward of capital. The payment for services, in the one case as in the other, depends upon the skill of the manager, just as it does with an ordinary mechanic, rising or falling with his fitness for the peculiar work. Skill as a manager is the cause; the amount of the remuneration is the consequence. If so, then the wages of superintendence have no logical connection, in the economic sense, ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... better off, my time became daily more valuable. I have never seen the hour when I felt like moving that precious collection. Besides, I am a man of the people. I like the working class, and am willing to be thought one of them. I can find time to talk to a hard-pushed mechanic as easily as to such members of the moneyed class as I encounter on stray evenings at the Hotel Clermont. I have led—I may say that I am leading—a double life; but of neither am I ashamed, nor have I cause to be. Love drove me to ape the gentleman in the halls of the Clermont; ...
— Initials Only • Anna Katharine Green
... not have been so far off the mark. The man with whom he was spending the evening in that cafe was a mechanic from Kroten." ...
— The Great Prince Shan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... a fine pace for several miles and then our tractor stopped and wouldn't start up again. Whereupon there came to our assistance a young man named Rinaldo Rinaldi, a skilled and resourceful mechanic, who was driving a tractor in rear of us. He patched up our engine and got us going again. But we kept on breaking down after intervals never very long. Time after time Rinaldo Rinaldi came running up, smiling and eager to help. He patched us up and got us going six times. But at last he ...
— With British Guns in Italy - A Tribute to Italian Achievement • Hugh Dalton
... his treasure, for the present, under locks so solid that no wrist could break them, and so complicated that no master-key could open them. D'Artagnan remembered that the English are masters in mechanics and conservative industry; and he determined to go in the morning in search of a mechanic who would sell him a strong box. He did not go far; Master Will Jobson, dwelling in Piccadilly, listened to his propositions, comprehended his wishes, and promised to make him a safety lock that should relieve him from ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... published in Chicago a booklet entitled "A Brief Narrative of the Invention of Reaping Machines," a large part of which is reproduced in this book. The pamphlets of which the narrative was a republication were from the pen of Edward Stabler, an able man and a mechanic of great skill and ability, a close friend of Mr. Hussey and one familiar with his reaper and with all the facts which he set forth in these articles. Such other facts and information as are published herein were furnished by Martha Hussey, daughter ...
— Obed Hussey - Who, of All Inventors, Made Bread Cheap • Various
... mechanic as well as surgeon, proceeded to invent, and with his own hands in a great measure construct, a kind of litter, which, with a water-bed laid upon it, could be placed in our own carriage for Connie to lie upon, and from that lifted, without disturbing her, and placed ...
— The Seaboard Parish Volume 1 • George MacDonald
... Burgrave was a Flemish mechanic, who, by the exertion of much energy and talent, had risen to the poet of procureur-general of Flanders. After the conquest of the principal portion of that Province by Parma, he had made himself useful to the English governor-general in various ways, and particularly ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... coppersmiths fell ill on the 4th September. Skilled labour such as theirs could not readily be replaced in the circumstances, and every hour of the now far advanced season had become precious. Smeaton had set his heart on "showing a light" that year. In this difficulty, being a skilled mechanic himself, he threw off his coat and set to ...
— The Story of the Rock • R.M. Ballantyne
... daring man, one that would neither forget nor fear to avenge his wrong, to get him out of the way they betrayed him to the Connecticut police as one of the express robbers. He was sent to Norwalk to stand his trial, was convicted and sentenced to five years, and sent to Weathersfield. Being a good mechanic, he was put in the blacksmith shop, and there, with an eye to the future, he did what is frequently done by professional gentlemen in our prisons, made a complete and most finely tempered set of burglar tools. They were too bulky to be smuggled out by friendly ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... water, to spin, to weave, to drive every mill; and he it was who gave it the form demanded by Stephenson, by Fulton, by the whole industrial world, for use on railway and steamboat, and in mill and factory, throughout the civilized countries of the globe. It was this great mechanic who showed how it might be made to do its work with least expense, with highest efficiency, with greatest regularity, with utmost concentration ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 803, May 23, 1891 • Various
... you to send the fugitives to Canada. I don't know much of this Province but I beleaves that there is Rome enough for the colored and whites of the United States. We wants farmers mechanic men of all qualification &c., if they are not made we will make them, if we cannot make the old, we will make ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... have been admitted to all departments of the State University since its foundation, and there are women professors and assistants in practically every department, including that of Political Science and the College of Engineering and Mechanic Arts. Of the four officers of the Department of Drawing and Industrial Art, three are women. The College of Medicine and Surgery also has women professors in every department, and women are on the faculty of ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... control and manipulate such corporations. I shall not be personal; I have no feelings against any of those men. But I say to you, men and women of Montgomery, that when I heard this morning from the lips of an industrious and frugal German mechanic that a certain financier of this town had bought from him a traction bond that represented twenty years of savings—then my blood boiled with ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... of professional men, tradesmen, and adventurers of every description. Towards the first class our attention is now directed, premising that throughout a great portion of the western country, except in large towns, almost every mechanic is almost necessarily a farmer; the population being in but few places sufficiently dense to support that designation of mechanical employments which is common in the eastern and ...
— A New Guide for Emigrants to the West • J. M. Peck
... condescension, by which the horrors of his fate might be assuaged: he scorns to execute the lowest offices of menial services, particularly in attending those who are the objects of contempt or abhorrence; he is incapable of exercising any mechanic art, which might afford a happy though a scanty independence: shrunk within his dismal cell, surrounded by haggard poverty, and her gaunt attendants, hollow-eyed famine, shivering cold, and wan disease, he wildly casts his eyes ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... that may contribute to your improvement, and I shall rejoice to see you what Providence intended you, a very great man. This you were, in your ideas, before you quitted this; you best know how far you have studied, that is, practised the mechanic; despised nothing till you had tried it; practised dissections with your own hands, painted from nature as well as from the statues, and portrait as well as history, and this frequently. If you have done all this, as I trust you have, you want nothing but ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... justice, and they had it. He never intended to coddle laborers or to make them feel that, having a grievance, as they alleged, they must be specially favored. Since Labor is, or should be, common to all men, Roosevelt believed that every laborer, whether farmer or mechanic, employer or employee, merchant or financier, should stand erect and look every other man straight in the eyes, and neither look up nor down, but with level gaze, fearless, uncringing, uncondescending. The laws he proposed, the adjustments he arranged, had the self-respect, the dignity, of ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... were then frequented by men who came, not to talk, but to read; the smaller tradesmen and the better class of mechanic now came to the coffee-house, called for a cup of coffee, and with it the daily paper, which they could not afford to take in. Every coffee-house took three or four papers; there seems to have been in this latter phase of the once social institution no general ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... hands in his pockets, was standing, his back against the bench, surveying, with something of a mechanic's eye, the frame of a boat which was set ...
— The Village Convict - First published in the "Century Magazine" • Heman White Chaplin
... trust his man absolutely, and was quite sure that the Mercury would then be in the drying stage after a thorough cleaning. Thus far he was justified, but he had not counted on the pride of the born mechanic. Though the car was housed for the night, when he entered the garage the hood was off, and Dale was annoying two brothers of the craft by explaining the superiority of his engine to every other ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... already have told you, Richard Morris knew Hume. The latter was a frequent visitor to a shop which the inventor maintained in the outskirts, as was the mute Locke. I have talked with an old mechanic who worked for Morris at the time; he told me that the inventor had made a stubborn fight against the drink habit and seemed likely to conquer it up to the time that he became acquainted with Hume. After ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Investigator • John T. McIntyre
... Mechanic soul, thou must not only do With Martha, but with Mary ponder too; Happy's the home where these fair sisters vary; But most, when Martha's ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... have been assumed; for he was a pedant in a different sense from Lord Shaftesbury; not from undervaluing modern poetry, but from caring little or nothing for any poetry, although he wrote about its mechanic rules. Still the royal imprimatur would be influential and serviceable no less when offered hypocritically than in full sincerity. Next let us consider, at the very moment of Shakspeare's death, who were the leaders of the British youth, the principes juventutis, ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... the mechanic: he cranked the engine and it got off to a fine start and before throwing in the clutch that hooked it up with the stripper I looked out over the silent, brown-faced crowd. I had to grin at their expectant, half-scared ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... imperfect ones: for in former times among some people the mechanics were either slaves or foreigners, for which reason many of them are so now: and indeed the best regulated states will not permit a mechanic to be a citizen; but if it be allowed them, we cannot then attribute the virtue we have described to every citizen or freeman, but to those only who are disengaged from servile offices. Now those who are employed by one person in them are slaves; those who do them for ...
— Politics - A Treatise on Government • Aristotle
... went on; this being his whole theory of God and Man: that Londoners are peripatetic tombstones, but Manchester-men just the other way—seemed a mechanic, brisk-eyed, small; a man who had read; but now, ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel
... scientific knowledge are the only passports for entrance in the Grosser General Stab, the General Staff of the German Empire. You will find blooded young officers and gray-haired generals past active efficiency, experts ranking from an ordinary mechanic to the highest engineering expert, all working harmoniously together with one end in view, the acme of efficiency. Controlled and directed by the War Lord in person through the Chef des Grossen General Stabs, ...
— The Secrets of the German War Office • Dr. Armgaard Karl Graves
... in my world and change of an ominous kind was in my brain. Subjects which once interested me had lost their savor, and several tales in which I had put my best effort had failed to meet my own approval and had been thrown aside. No mechanic, no clerk, would have envied me as I boarded a filthy street car on my way to the Englewood station. That I had reached a fork in my trail was all too evident. The things for which I had labored all my days were as ashes in my hand. I walked with a stoop and the bag containing ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... believe that which makes against their own predominant passions, that mechanics will combine to raise the price for one week, though they destroy the manufacture for ever. The best remedy seems to be the probable supply of labourers from other trades. Jeffrey proposes each mechanic shall learn some other trade than his own, and so have two strings to his bow. He does not consider the length of a double apprenticeship. To make a man a good weaver and a good tailor would require as much time as the patriarch served for his two wives, and after all, he ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... of all was his precious possession, the rubber gloves, a detail of equipment which every gas-engine mechanic is pretty sure to have, though, he regarded the discovery as a rare find. He was thankful to have found them, for the terrific deadly current which he knew rushed through the formidable wire entanglement along the frontier had haunted him and baffled his wits. It was characteristic of Tom to ...
— Tom Slade with the Boys Over There • Percy K. Fitzhugh
... art be discriminated from science, but art in the industrial or mechanical sense must be distinguished from art in the esthetic sense; the former aims chiefly at utility, the latter at beauty. The mechanic arts are the province of the artisan, the esthetic or fine arts are the province of the artist; all the industrial arts, as of weaving or printing, arithmetic or navigation, are governed by exact rules. Art in the highest esthetic sense, while it makes use of rules, transcends all rule; ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... mechanical regularity to the organic world seemed to rob faith of a kind of refuge. The romantics had, as Berthelot ("Evolutionisme et Platonisme", pages 45, 46, 47. Paris, 1908.) shows, appealed to life to redress the judgments drawn from mechanism. Now, in Spencer, evolution gave us a vitalist mechanic or mechanical vitalism, and the appeal seemed cut off. We may return to this point later when we consider evolution; at present I only endeavour to indicate that general pressure of scientific criticism ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... sturdy man, with thick brown hair over keen watchful eyes. His open look was fearless and winning. His hands, which grasped the rail, had both the strength and the skill of the trained mechanic and the writer. For John Williams could build a ship, make a boat and sail them both against any man in all the Pacific. He could work with his hammer at the forge in the morning, make a table at his joiner's bench in the afternoon, preach a powerful sermon in the evening, ...
— The Book of Missionary Heroes • Basil Mathews
... few days Hare learned what conquering the desert made of a man. August Naab was close to threescore years; his chest was wide as a door, his arm like the branch of an oak. He was a blacksmith, a mechanic, a carpenter, a cooper, a potter. At his forge and in his shop, everywhere, were crude tools, wagons, farming implements, sets of buckskin harness, odds and ends of nameless things, eloquent and pregnant proof of the fact that necessity is the mother ...
— The Heritage of the Desert • Zane Grey
... take my leave of the Queen, with the many visits I am to perform, according to the custom to which I am to conform, in regard of the honour of his Highness and our nation; for he who neglects these ceremonies here is censured for a mechanic or a boor. I intend from hence to go to the Prince of Sweden, to salute him from my Lord Protector, as I am advised that the Prince expects and desires it. From thence I purpose to go to Stockholm, where I am to take ship for Luebeck; and from thence to Hamburg, where ...
— A Journal of the Swedish Embassy in the Years 1653 and 1654, Vol II. • Bulstrode Whitelocke
... done by hand presses, but is also done by machinery. At Herr Albert's a gas engine of six-horse power is employed to drive the machines, and each machine requires the attention of a skilled mechanic and a girl. The press is very like the lithographic quick press. Upon a big steel bed lies the little collotype block. The glass printing block, with its brownish film of gelatine, moves horizontally to and fro, and, as ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 362, December 9, 1882 • Various
... yes, yes, yes. We have such thousands of applicants. I remember you! A mechanic, aren't ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... genius, original, sagacious, and inventive, capable of discoveries in science no less than of improvements in the fine arts and the mechanic arts. He had a vast imagination, equal to the comprehension of the greatest objects, and capable of a cool and steady comprehension of them. He had wit at will. He had humor that when he pleased was delicate and delightful. ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... stings, Make boot upon the summer's velvet buds; Which pillage they with merry march bring home To the tent-royal of their emperor: Who, busied in his majesty, surveys The singing masons building roofs of gold, The civil citizens kneading up the honey, The poor mechanic porters crowding in Their heavy burdens at his narrow gate, The sad-eyed justice, with his surly hum, Delivering o'er to executors pale The lazy yawning drone. I this infer, That many things, having full reference To one consent, may ...
— It Can Be Done - Poems of Inspiration • Joseph Morris
... will concede that a taxidermist should receive at least as much as a skilled mechanic and the experts both in commercial and museum work are ...
— Home Taxidermy for Pleasure and Profit • Albert B. Farnham
... sounds suggested the unthinking vitality of a steam-engine or of a dynamo in a powerhouse. A mechanic by nature, as a school-boy Ben had often induced Scotty to take him to the electric light station, where he had watched the great machines with a fascination bordering on awe, until fairly dragged away by the prosaic Englishman. ...
— Ben Blair - The Story of a Plainsman • Will Lillibridge
... going away, yet with each mile he regained the rebounding spirit of youth, while Winsome lay dazed in her room at Craig Ronald. But let it not be forgotten that he went in order that no more she might so lie with the dry mechanic sobs catching ever and anon in her throat. So the world is not so ill divided, after all. And, being a woman, perhaps Winsome's grief was as dear and natural to ...
— The Lilac Sunbonnet • S.R. Crockett
... straining after the light. Joussier used to come with his mistress, the fair Berthe, a large coquettish young woman, with a pale face, and a purple cap, and merry, wandering eyes. She had under her thumb a good-looking boy, Leopold Graillot, a journeyman mechanic, who was clever and rather a poseur: he was the esthete of the company. Although he called himself an anarchist, and was one of the most violent opponents of the burgess-class, his soul was typical of that class at its very worst. Every morning for years he had drunk in the erotic and ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... body feel as if they hadn't a thing fit to wear, the way Mrs. Eldred comes out in her silks and velvets," Mrs. Jenks, a mechanic's wife, remarked to her neighbour. I wonder what she'd say to wearing a black alpaca dress seven years running, for her best dress! I declared, it made me feel as if there wa'n't any sort of use scrimping and saving as we do, to pay fifteen dollars ...
— Divers Women • Pansy and Mrs. C.M. Livingston
... is considered that I was all eagerness to behold the very house at which my father stopped; where he slept and dined, smoked his cigar, opened his letters, and read the papers. I inquired of some gentlemen and ladies where the missing hotel was; but they only stared and passed on; until I met a mechanic, apparently, who very civilly stopped to hear my questions and ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... two strong fellows, who thought a great deal of their vigor, and who showed in all their movements that elasticity and grace of the limbs which can only be acquired by exercise, and which is so different to the deformity with which the same continual work stamps the mechanic. ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... on some fine morning, and say, "I am full of life, I will go to sea, and find an Antarctic continent: to-day I will square the circle: I will ransack botany, and find a new food for man: I have a new architecture in my mind: I foresee a new mechanic power;" no, but he finds himself in the river of the thoughts and events, forced onward by the ideas and necessities of his contemporaries. He stands where all the eyes of men look one way, and their hands all point in the direction in which he should go. The ...
— Representative Men • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... the minister is primarily to deal with man, either in his own personal life, his relations to his Maker, or to his fellow-man. Unlike the farmer, whose interest lies in the control of animal or plant growth, or the mechanic, who controls and molds the forces and conditions of inanimate nature, the minister has to do with that most delicate and elusive subject of all—the human soul. His business is to tune the individual soul instrument so that it will harmonize with the musical vibrations ...
— Church Cooperation in Community Life • Paul L. Vogt
... frescoes or pictures, nor aids to monastic devotion like Angelico's Gospel histories at St. Mark's—they are illustrations to the book which every one is reading, things to be framed in the chamber of every burgher or mechanic, to be slipped into the prayer-book of every housewife, to be conned over during the long afternoons, by the children near the big stove or among the gooseberry bushes of the garden. And they are, therefore, much more than the Giottesque ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... children. But in the matter of procuring a livelihood let us, for their own good, induce them to lay aside the bow and fish-spear, and, in lieu thereof, put their hand to the plough, or make them wield the tool of the mechanic. ...
— Missionary Work Among The Ojebway Indians • Edward Francis Wilson
... splendid, up there behind the rocks. And now to be unconscious of it! But that was only a pose, she decided. Yet what made him so stupidly commonplace, and so dense? She hated to be robbed of her enthusiasm for an artistic bric-a-brac of emotion; and here he was, like some sordid mechanic who would not ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... mechanic by the rail—he of the overalls and keen blue eyes—turned toward the bows, picked up a canvas bag of tools and stood there waiting with ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... men have such opportunity of speech and power as these thirty thousand ministers. What have they to show for it all? The hunter, fisher, woodman, miner, farmer, mechanic, has each his special wealth. What have this multitude of ministers to show?—how much knowledge given, what wise guidance, what inspiration of humanity? Let the best ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... that one endowed with the ardent and glowing imagination of Madame Roland should not, at times, feel inwardly the spirit of exultation in the consciousness of this vast power. From the windows of her palace she looked down upon the shop of the mechanic where her infancy was cradled, and upon those dusty streets where she had walked an obscure child, while proud aristocracy swept by her in splendor—that very aristocracy looking now imploringly to her for a smile. ...
— Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... character of our present knowledge. In other words, the more important the aspects read into any presentation, the more valuable will be the present experience. Although when the child apperceives a stick as a horse, and the mechanic apperceives it as a lever, each interpretation is valuable within its own sphere, yet there is evidently a marked difference in the ultimate significance of the two interpretations. Education is especially valuable, in fact, in that it so adds to the experience of the child that ...
— Ontario Normal School Manuals: Science of Education • Ontario Ministry of Education
... herself out of the skins of animals which they had shot, and snow-shoes from the sinews of deer stretched on a frame composed of strips of hard wood. She also felled trees for fuel and lined the walls of the cabin with deer and bear skins; she was the most skilful mechanic of the party, and having fitted runners of hickory to one of the boats she rigged a sail of soft skins sewed together, and once in November, after the river was frozen, and when the wind blew strongly from the northwest, the whole ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... Divine help (!), been enabled to plant his foot somewhere beyond the waves of Time," (p. 433,) who doubts everything, and believes nothing? Can any one of sane mind dream that posterity will come to the rescue of a man who, when he is asked for his story, rejoins, (with a well-known needy mechanic,) that he has "none to tell, Sir?" What then is posterity to vindicate? What has the Regius Professor of Greek written so many weak pages to prove? Just nothing! If Mr. Jowett's Essay could enforce the message it carries, the result would simply ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... particular person shall ever be qualified for the employments to which he is educated, is very different in different occupations. In the greatest part of mechanic trades success is almost certain; but very uncertain in the liberal professions. Put your son apprentice to a shoemaker, there is little doubt of his learning to make a pair of shoes; but send him to study the law, it as at least twenty ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... was slow, painful, and uncertain, only because the mechanic arts were pursued only to an extent possible with the skill and muscular energy of men. There were none of the wonderful automatic mechanisms that we know as machine-tools. There was only the almost unaided human arm with which to subdue ...
— Steam Steel and Electricity • James W. Steele
... suppose that all the inhabitants ran away, and left a desolate region to the victor; this would have been of little more value to the conqueror, than the possession of Sutton Coldfield or Bromsgrove Lickey. The mechanic and the peasant were left, which are by far the greatest number; they are also the riches of a country; stamp a value upon property, and it becomes current. As they have nothing to lose, so they have nothing to fear; for let who will be master, they must be drudges: Their ...
— An History of Birmingham (1783) • William Hutton
... sharpen his wits, and render him fertile in expedients. He had been a foundling, and knew no more of his parentage than a young ostrich, that springs from the deserted egg in the sand. He was left, when an infant, at the door of a poor mechanic, in Boston, by the name of Burt, and by him transferred to the almshouse, where he was called after the name of his finder, with the pet name of Barty, given him by his nurse. Here he was kept ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... that in order to understand the character and aims of the mob he must appear to be one of them, and he decided that he could carry off the disguise of a young city mechanic ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... have some business to attend to to-night, in which you can help me if you choose. I know you are a good mechanic.' ...
— The Stories of the Three Burglars • Frank Richard Stockton
... "WANTED: A skilled mechanic, qualified to act in the capacity of landscape gardener and agricultural chemist. Applicant must be a strong, healthy young man, of good habits, pleasing address; with a general knowledge of business methods, and an excellent moral character. Qualifications must be well attested ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson
... contention from the lovers of Truth. On all sides nothing of philosophy remains but the name, and this is become the subject of the vilest prostitution; since it is not only engrossed by the naturalist, chemist, and anatomist, but is usurped by the mechanic in every trifling invention, and made subservient to the lucre of traffic and merchandise. There cannot surely be a greater proof of the degeneracy of the times than so unparalleled a degradation and so barbarous ...
— An Essay on the Beautiful - From the Greek of Plotinus • Plotinus
... completed. Car-builders were set to work repairing the locomotives and cars. Thus every branch of railroad building, making tools to work with, and supplying the workmen with food, was all going on at once, and without the aid of a mechanic or laborer except what the command itself furnished. But rails and cars the men could not make without material, and there was not enough rolling stock to keep the road we already had worked to its ...
— Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, Complete • Ulysses S. Grant
... regard to their domestics extends simply to the things they have contracted to do and the hours during which they have contracted to serve; otherwise than this, they have no more right to interfere with them in the disposal of their time than with any mechanic whom they employ. They have, indeed, a right to regulate the hours of their own household, and servants can choose between conformity to these hours and the loss of their situation; but, within reasonable limits, their right to come and go at their own discretion, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... way he managed to lay aside quite a little sum of money, besides paying his interest to Arthur, and when Maude came home from Europe in March he felt himself warranted in beginning to raise the roof. He was naturally a mechanic, and would have made a splendid carpenter; he was also something of an architect, and sketched upon paper the changes he proposed making. The roof was to be raised over Jerrie's room; there was to be a pretty bay-window at the south, commanding a view of the Collingwood ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes
... the Springfield armory would be incomplete without some allusion to the inventor of the machinery for turning irregular forms adapted to the manufacture of gun-stocks. This was the invention of Thomas Blanchard, then a citizen of Springfield and now of Boston,—whose reputation as a mechanic has since become world-wide,—and was first introduced into the armory about the year 1820. Before this the stocks were all worked and fitted by hand; but the marvellous ingenuity of this machinery made a complete revolution in this department, and contributed to a very large increase ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... time before this Association, which, as I am informed, comprises the faculty and the entire body of students of the Sibley College of Mechanical Engineering and the Mechanic Arts, a reminiscence of the founder of this College suggests itself to me, in the relation of which I beg first to ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XXI., No. 531, March 6, 1886 • Various
... said he, "noiseless and of tremendous power. I knew Von Herder, the blind German mechanic, who constructed it to the order of the late Professor Moriarty. For years I have been aware of its existence, though I have never before had the opportunity of handling it. I commend it very specially to your attention, Lestrade, and also the ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle
... mechanics. Does not this seem natural? The former work mainly with their head; when their daily duties are over the brain is often exhausted, and of their leisure time much must be devoted to air and exercise. The laborer and mechanic, on the contrary, besides working often for much shorter hours, have in their work-time taken sufficient bodily exercise, and could therefore give any leisure they might have to reading and study. They have not done so as yet, it is true; but this has been for obvious reasons. Now, however, in ...
— The Pleasures of Life • Sir John Lubbock
... base. Right, law, and industry gave way Where'er his selfish rule had sway; And so corruption seized the swarm, Who plundered underneath his arm. Thus he harangued: "Whilst vulgar souls Waste life in low mechanic holes, Let us scorn drudgery: the drone And wasp, whose elegance we own, Like gentlemen sport in the rays Of sunbeams on all summer days; It were not fitting they should moil,— They live upon ...
— Fables of John Gay - (Somewhat Altered) • John Gay
... wages in cash, and spending a fair part of the same in drink. Then, too, they are more popular among the girls. It is the same with men working on the roads or railways, with all factory-hands; even the mechanic is looked down upon, and as for the farm-hand, he is ...
— Wanderers • Knut Hamsun
... head for mechanics, but Overholt had already made an invention which was considered very successful, though he had got little or nothing for it. The mechanic who had helped him in its construction had stolen his principal idea before the device was patented, and had taken out a patent for a cheap little article which every one at once used, and which made a fortune for him. Overholt's instrument ...
— The Little City Of Hope - A Christmas Story • F. Marion Crawford
... Portland to Savannah the steamboats made their way, tying the young nation indissolubly together. Curiously enough it was Livingston's monopoly that gave the first impetus to the extension of steam navigation. A mechanic by the name of Robert L. Stevens, one of the first of a family distinguished in New York and New Jersey, built a steamboat on the Hudson. After one or two trips had proved its usefulness, the possessors of the monopoly became alarmed and began proceedings against the new ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... statesmen—all that the country holds most in honour, love, and reverence. The impulse thus given is felt throughout the land. Classes are formed in every town, almost in every village; the labourer, the mechanic, young men and maidens, old men and children, may be seen, after their daily toil is done, busy with the do, re, mi, fa, &c., of the class-book. Although the system may not prove all that might be desired, yet much is taught and learned, and the desire of acquiring more is ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... impossible, so the trio gazed eagerly around them. Just ahead, sat a shop girl in a shabby best dress, with a head of blonde, mismatched hair, and beside her, her escort, an Irish mechanic, who shifted his head from time to time as the unaccustomed collar scraped his neck. Across the aisle was a family of towheaded Swedes, the father self-conscious in his carefully pressed black suit; the mother, watchful of her two mischievous, ...
— A Son of the City - A Story of Boy Life • Herman Gastrell Seely
... me, or the plaits of my hair refuse to keep their place, and so I delay thee unreasonably, as thou sayest, though it is all to honor thee; for would it not be unbeseeming for the help-meet of a worshipful Assistant to appear like a common mechanic's wife? But art thou ill?" she added, observing his air of dejection, and instantly changing the tone that had in it something of reproach into one of anxiety; "then will I remain ...
— The Knight of the Golden Melice - A Historical Romance • John Turvill Adams |
