"Plumber" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... odd how we call some persons by their profession or calling, and others not. We say "Doctor," but we do not address our gum-architect as "Dentist." We say "Carpenter," but we do not address a plumber as "Plumber." (Incidentally, all plumbers might be called Warner). We say "Gardener" and "Coachman," but we do not address an advocate as "Barrister." If we had a definite rule everything would be simple, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 28, 1919. • Various
... her spare time she had written stories for magazines. The two girls became attached through doing Christian social work together in their spare time, and resolved to live as husband and wife to prevent any young man from coming forward. The "husband" became a plumber's mate, and displayed some skill at fisticuffs when at length discovered by the "wife's" brother. Hence her appearance in the Police Court. Both girls were sent back to their friends, and situations found for them as day-servants. But as they remained devoted to each other arrangements were ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... making the coffin of his dear one and lining with his memories those burial planks, could not bear up against this strange reminder. His strength gave way; he was not able to lift the lead, and the plumber, seeing this, came with him, and offered to accompany him to the house and solder the last sheet when the body had been laid ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... and Mr. Philipson. The other alterations are at last fixed. Winnington is to be paymaster; Sandys, cofferer, on resigning the exchequer to Mr. Pelham; Sir John Rushout, treasurer of the navy; and Harry Fox, lord of the treasury. Mr. Compton,(876) and Gybbons remain at that board. Wat. Plumber, a known man, said, the other day, "Zounds! Mr. Pultney took those old dishclouts to wipe out the 'treasury, and now they are going to lace them and lay them up!" It is a most just idea: to be sure, Sandys and Rushout, and their fellows, are dishclouts, if ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... had taken but a lukewarm interest in the diversions of her playmates. Even in the early days when she had lived with her parents in a ragged outskirt of Apex, and hung on the fence with Indiana Frusk, the freckled daughter of the plumber "across the way," she had cared little for dolls or skipping-ropes, and still less for the riotous games in which the loud Indiana played Atalanta to all the boyhood of the quarter. Already Undine's chief delight was to "dress up" in her mother's Sunday skirt and "play lady" ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... ears till nearly too late. What a risk to take! What an expense to incur! And for how poor a gain! Apart from the treachery of it. My dear fellow, politics is a vile and a bungling business. I used to think meanly of the plumber; but how ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and attend to the transfer of title. He engages a fashionable architect to build his house, and a society young lady who has gone into landscape gardening to lay out his grounds. He cannot work the game through his dentist or plumber, but he establishes friendly relations with the swell local medical man and lets him treat an imaginary illness or two. He has his wife's portrait painted by an artist who makes a living off similar aspirants, and in exchange gets an invitation to drop in to tea at the studio. He buys broken-winded ...
— The "Goldfish" • Arthur Train
... lengths out of narrow boards, whilst on the other hand cross tongues are limited by the width of the board. After cutting off the tongues, they require planing with nicety to fit the grooves, and the advantage of a grooved board (Fig. 105) will be appreciated. A glue spoon similar to a plumber's ladle is generally used to pour the glue into the grooves, and it is customary to glue the tongue into one board first; after allowing this to set, the joint is completed in ...
— Woodwork Joints - How they are Set Out, How Made and Where Used. • William Fairham
... both stopped in th' newspa-apers. A well-known fi-nanceer who thravelled to Tokeeo with a letter iv inthraduction to th' Mickydoo fr'm th' Prisidint beginnin' 'Dear mick,' got a brick put through his hat as he wint to visit th' foorth assistant to th' manicure iv th' eighth assistant to th' plumber iv th' bricklayer iv th' Mickydoo, which is th' nearest to his Majesty that foreign eyes ar-re permitted to look upon. A little later a number iv Americans in private life who wint over to rayceive ...
— Mr. Dooley Says • Finley Dunne
... of a political boss's beer-party to the bums of his ward; had it been an account of Mrs. Van Astorbilt's elopement with a plumber; had it been the life-story of a shooting show girl; had it been the description of the latest style in slit skirts; had it been a sarcastic message from some drunken, over-rated city official; had it been a sympathy-squad ...
— Traffic in Souls - A Novel of Crime and Its Cure • Eustace Hale Ball
... car repairer," says Mr. Justice BRAY, "is like a plumber. Once you get him into the house you cannot get him out."... Unless, of course, you show him a burst bath pipe, when he will immediately go ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, March 7, 1917. • Various
... various styles of architecture, but, for our part, we are agreed that there is nothing to be compared with a tent. It is the most venerable and aristocratic form of human habitation. Abraham and Sarah lived in it, and shared its hospitality with angels. It is exempt from the base tyranny of the plumber, the paper-hanger, and the gas-man. It is not immovably bound to one dull spot of earth by the chains of a cellar and a system of water-pipes. It has a noble freedom of locomotion. It follows the wishes of its inhabitants, and goes with them, a travelling home, ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke
... entitled to prompt and willing service. That, at the very least! Yet I must tell you that Mabel, my cook, has left me most ungratefully after only three months' notice! She is to be married to Bob Summers, the plumber. (Lieutenant Robert Summers, since the war, if you please!) Well, she can never say I did not warn her. I did not mince matters. I told her exactly what married life is, and why I have never tried it. But the foolish girl is beyond advice. ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... if they're theere at all! I heerd on it at t' Bay Horse first; but I thought yo'd niver be satisfied 'bout I seed it wi' my own eyes. They do say as Gregory Jones, t' plumber, got it done i' York, for that nought else would satisfy old Jeremiah. It'll be a matter o' some hundreds ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. II • Elizabeth Gaskell
... too bad!" exclaimed Uncle Toby. "I may be able to fix it myself; but if I can't, we'll have hard work getting a plumber this time of night. I can shut off the water in the cellar, though, I suppose. However, I'll ...
— The Curlytops and Their Playmates - or Jolly Times Through the Holidays • Howard R. Garis
... branch-covered, a great company of us four abreast, when suddenly and after his very military fashion there came a "Halt! Right by fours! Right dress! Face!" and presently we were all lined up in a row facing a greensward which had suddenly been revealed to the left and on which, and before a small plumber's stove standing outside some gentleman's stable, was stretched a plumber and his helper. The former, a man of perhaps thirty-five, the latter a lad of, say, fourteen or fifteen, were both very grimy and dirty, but taking their ease in the morning sun, a ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... smiled rather wanly. Encouraged, Elizabeth continued: 'Wot's the use o' spoilin' your pretty eyes cryin' for the moon—by which I mean Mr. 'Arbinger—when 'e isn't your Fate? Why, bless you, I was once goin' to marry a plumber's mate, and jest a week afore the weddin 'e went orf with some one else an' owin' me arf-a-crown, too. I was cut up at the time, but I know now 'e wasn't my Fate, 'avin been told since that I'm goin' to marry a man wot'll work with 'is brain. So cheer up, Miss ...
— Our Elizabeth - A Humour Novel • Florence A. Kilpatrick
... grandeur in soap-manufacturing, and we don't look to manicures and plumbers for social prestige. A feline race would have honored such occupations. J. de Courcy Tiger would have felt that nothing /but/ making soap, or being a plumber, was compatible with a high social position; and the rich Vera Pantherbilt would have deigned ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day Jr.
... the garden's island summer And heard far off the shunting of the trains, Noises of wheels, and speech of every comer Passing the entrance—heard the man of brains Talking of George's Budget, heard the plumber ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, May 27, 1914 • Various
... glove counter at Mason's years ago; she was then Maggie McKay, and a vain, pretentious thing. She married a plumber with a romantic name, and her rise has been rapid. Now, if you and I could ...
— The Pleasant Street Partnership - A Neighborhood Story • Mary F. Leonard
... had proceeded, as usual, to-day under the direction of Mr. Dove, assisted in the plumber-work by Mr. John Gibson, and in the brazier-work by Mr. Joseph Fraser; while Mr. James Slight, with the joiners, were fitting up the storm-shutters of the windows. In these several departments the artificers were at work till seven o'clock p.m., and it being then dark, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... healthy body set to work at once to repair the damage. If any comparative anatomist ever gets hold of the widow and dissects her, he will find a curious swelling in the principal bone of her left wing, like a plumber's join in a lead pipe, and he will know what it means. It is the place where Nature soldered the broken pieces together. And it was while Nature was engaged in this soldering operation that Mahng arrived and began to cultivate ...
— Forest Neighbors - Life Stories of Wild Animals • William Davenport Hulbert
... I replied. "I'm a God-fearing sailor man who is doing the best he can to keep nice and clean in spite of the uncalled for intervention of a red-faced oaf of a plumber person who should know better than to stand around ...
— Biltmore Oswald - The Diary of a Hapless Recruit • J. Thorne Smith, Jr.
... nothing left but the wash-boiler. Now, I had heard tales of amateur syrup-boilings, and I felt that the wash-boiler would not do. Besides, I meant to work outdoors—no kitchen stove for me! I must have a pan, a big, flat pan. I flew to the telephone, and called up the village plumber, three miles away. Could he build me a pan? Oh, say, two feet by three feet, and five inches high—yes, right away. Yes, Hiram would call for it ...
— More Jonathan Papers • Elisabeth Woodbridge
... then do it so slackly. Then a certain sudden warmth in the applause about me quickened my attention, and I realized the satirical purport of drunken old father Eccles, and the moral intention of his son-in-law, the plumber. Between them they expressed the whole duty of the workingman as the prosperous Victorians conceived it. He was to work hard always at any job he could find for any wages he could get, and if he didn't he was a "drunken shirker" and the dupe of "paid agitators." A comforting but misleading doctrine. ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... elevations of roof, which were at all sorts of different heights, the chancel lower than the nave, and one transept than the other; besides that the nave had both triforium and clerestory. It was a sort of labyrinth, and they wondered whether any one, except perhaps the plumber's foreman knew his way among all the doors. Then there was one leading inwards to the eight bells—from whose fascinations Ethel thought Dickie never would be taken away—and still more charming, to ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... been entertained by ancestors of the present owner, Mr. Laurence Moore, who would now act as host; and that there were baths to all but five of the bed chambers. Was it not good chance that Larry had them put in? They are not paid for yet, and the plumber, with some others, has been very unkind, making Larry a bankroot—no, a bankrupt. We shall soon be rich again with all these thirties and forties and fifties and hundreds of dollars a day (we can take forty people to say nothing of servants if some of them will sleep ensemble), and then we can ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)
... perpetually driven: the hours are scourges. If you work by the hour, you gently sail on the stream of Time, which is always bearing you on to the haven of Pay, whether you make any effort or not. Working by the hour tends to make one moral. A plumber working by the job, trying to unscrew a rusty, refractory nut, in a cramped position, where the tongs continually slipped off, would swear; but I never heard one of them swear, or exhibit the least ...
— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various
... glad I'm a plumber! There'll be plenty of work for me and my kind to-day. We're not used to anything of this sort down here, and nobody'll think to look out for his water pipes. Just listen to that wind, ...
— Divided Skates • Evelyn Raymond
... the discovery that if one lighted a match and stepped within the blackness, the match was immediately extinguished, but that upon emerging into daylight the flame came up again. Some one happened along with a plumber's gasoline torch. Immediately this was lighted and the experiment repeated. The bearer of the torch, astonished at the instant extinguishment of the flame, felt with his hand to see what could be the matter. Instantly he ...
— The Sign at Six • Stewart Edward White
... the phases of his death which struck home the hardest was the concern and sorrow the small tradespeople showed—the cobbler, the plumber, the drug-store clerk. You hear men say: "I often find it interesting to talk to working-people and get their view-point." Such an attitude was absolutely foreign to Carl. He talked to "working-people" because he talked to everybody ...
— An American Idyll - The Life of Carleton H. Parker • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... on the other hand, tastes and capacities fit for academic or professional careers, such as medicine, law, teaching, or engineering, the principle would remain the same but the program would differ. The academic work, meaningless to the prospective plumber, or dressmaker, would be full of meaning to the embryo lawyer or teacher, and the period ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd
... will kill other things besides germs," returned Average Jones. "Luna moths, for instance. Wait a few days and I'll have some mail to show you on that subject. In the meantime, have a plumber solder up that keyhole so tight that nothing short of dynamite can get ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... results than any other five members of the mess. Jimmie was not a flying officer; by all the laws of nature he should have been a corpse, but he had a heart which disregarded an intestine designed by a surgeon who must have been a plumber in some previous incarnation, and this great heart carried him through four years of war, and made of him an energizing force to all who came in contact with him. It was not until after the cessation of hostilities that the ...
— Night Bombing with the Bedouins • Robert Henry Reece
... Better service brought more work, and new machinery made greater output possible without additional labor. The manager found labor cost too high and introduced methods which saved both labor and money. He found the machinery badly arranged. When the plumber told him it would cost twenty-five dollars to rearrange it he spent a dollar and forty cents and did it himself. After a discussion in the Board of Directors which nearly wrecked the organization, a Board policy of leaving all details of management to the manager and chairman of a managing committee ...
— Consumers' Cooperative Societies in New York State • The Consumers' League of New York
... bracket will do for a connection. Any plumber can take this bracket off and fasten a ...
— The Bicyclers and Three Other Farces • John Kendrick Bangs
... the future. Girls like Annie know that the future is a very uncertain thing, and they feel no responsibility about it. The present is what they have—and it is all they have. If Annie missed a chance to go sailing with the plumber's son on Saturday afternoon, why, she missed it. As for the two dollars her boss gave her, she handed them over to her mother. Now that Annie was getting more money, one of her sisters quit a job she didn't ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... that his own drill-hall is an efficient substitute. He meets men there who'll be useful to him later, and he keeps himself in touch with what's going on while he's studying for his profession. The town-birds—such as the chemist's assistant, clerk, plumber, mechanic, electrician, and so forth—generally put in for their town Volunteer corps as soon as they begin to walk out with the girls. They like takin' their true-loves to our restaurants. Look yonder!" I followed his gaze, and saw across the room a man and a maid ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling
... before the gentlemen' to stand or fall by his accusations, and that an old shoe was thrown after him on his departure from the building on this dread errand;- -not ineffectually, for, the interview resulting in a plumber, was considered to have encircled the temples of Mr. Battens with ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... Miss Barbara," he said; "the plumber's bin and gone, and the feller from the hardware store has swore hell be around before noon to fix the new knobs in ...
— The Penalty • Gouverneur Morris
... waiting for him. One had been discharged by the Metropolitan Rail way Company for neglect of duty, and wanted the district leader to fix things. Another wanted a job on the road. The third sought a place on the Subway and the fourth, a plumber, was looking for work with the Consolidated Gas Company. The district leader spent nearly three hours fixing things for the four men, and succeeded ...
— Plunkitt of Tammany Hall • George Washington Plunkitt
... 1381, and of Henry V. doing the same at the time of his father's death in 1413. It is said that one of these "holy men" had been buried in a leaden coffin, in a small chapel adjoining his cell. The keeper of the palace, William Ushborne, paid a plumber to dig up this coffin and bring it to his office, after throwing the bones down the cloister well. Tradition says that the plumber fainted and died in Ushborne's house. Ushborne was guilty of other crimes; he managed to steal a piece of the convent land and made it into a garden with a ...
— Little Folks (November 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... happen reg'lar and sensible. If you see rocks flyin' round in the air, or a new building doin' the hoochee-coochee an' sheddin' its cornices, or manhole covers poppin' off, you know just what's up—nothing but a little stick dynamite handled careless, or some mislaid gas touched off by a plumber. ...
— Shorty McCabe • Sewell Ford
... travelled with four horses, and was attended by a guard; nay, that a flourish of music preceded my arrival at various points of my journey; but all these little less than royal honours I shared with a plebeian butcher, a wheezing and attenuated plumber and glazier, and other of his lieges, all very useful, but hardly deemed ornamental members of ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... PLUMBER One who ascertains the capacity of your purse, soaks you with a piece of lead and gets away with the money—a process vulgarly known as ...
— The Foolish Dictionary • Gideon Wurdz
... seemed to know where all her things were. Before Dick had filled his pipe she was ready dressed and waiting for him. Robina said she would give them a list of things they might bring back with them. She also asked Dick to get together a plumber, a carpenter, a bricklayer, a glazier, and a civil engineer, and to see to it that they started off at once. She thought that among them they might be able to do all that was temporarily necessary, but the great thing was that the work ...
— They and I • Jerome K. Jerome
... that the conductor of a daily humorous column stands in the hierarchy of unthanked labourers somewhere between a plumber and a submarine trawler. Most of the available wheezes were pulled long ago by Plato in the Republic (not the New Republic) or by Samuel Butler in his Notebooks. Contribs come valiantly to hand with a barrowful of letters every day—("The ravings fed him" as ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... turned the water on from the street, and it was gaily pouring into the cellar. Mr. Close is a fat man, but he ran like a jack-rabbit to that water main, and shut it off. Then without daring to face—Mary, he started to town for a plumber. ...
— At Home with the Jardines • Lilian Bell
... are provided, care must be taken to prevent the entrance of sewer gas into the house and also the passage of material from these pipes into the water supply. The placing and connecting of sewer pipes should, of course, be under the direction of a plumber. ...
— Physiology and Hygiene for Secondary Schools • Francis M. Walters, A.M.
... week has passed away into eternity, another month has opened its eyes on the world, and still the illustrious Charles [bricklayer] potters about, still the carpenter plies the creaking saw and the stunning hammer, still the plumber plumbs and the bellhanger rattles, still the cisterns overflow and the unfinished drains send forth odorous fumes, still the rains descend and all around the house is a muddle of muck and mire, and still there is so much to do that we look ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant
... had returned. But the windows were blank, and even the front door, as he stood there knocking and ringing repeatedly, had an air of dust and neglect about it which prepared him for the worst. After considerable delay a journeyman plumber unfastened the door and explained that the caretaker had just stepped out, while he himself had been employed on a job with the cistern at the back of the house. He was not able to give Vincent much information. The family were all away; they ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... that the cannon were stolen by a plumber in Highland Falls, a little village near West Point. This plumber, whose name is Earle, sold them to ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 32, June 17, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... the West. It was a delight to see the fine carriage of the women and girls astride on the high saddles of the horses.[197] Both sexes in the district wear over their kimonos blue cotton trousers, something like a plumber's overall only tighter in the legs. The women are certainly strong. One day I saw a woman carrying uphill on her back two wooden doors about 6 ft. by 5 ft. 6 ins. An old woman I met on the road volunteered her view that women were "stronger" than men. She was very much ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... or to be considered because they work more with their hands or feet than with their brains, but because the work they do is good. If it is not good work they do, they are as unprofitable as any other wasters. A plumber is not a useful or admirable creature because he plumbs (if he plumbs ignorantly or dishonestly, he is often either a manslayer or a murderer), but because he plumbs well, and saves the community ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton
... of the vegetables we are to eat to-night happens to be leeks. And, of course, he, being a plumber, ...
— If Winter Don't - A B C D E F Notsomuchinson • Barry Pain
... up again!" vociferated a delighted plumber, with a sounding slap on his own leg. "Gor blimy, if she ...
— Tommy and Co. • Jerome K. Jerome
... with a guard of the Royal train. A policeman from the train danced with a Finnish girl, demure and well-dressed, who might have been anything from the leader of local Society to a clerk (i.e., a counter hand) in one of the shops. For all we knew, the plumber might have been dancing with the leading citizen's daughter, and the local Astor ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton
... the world before him why should a man turn dentist? He must have been a cruel fellow from his rattle. When did his malicious ambition first sprout up towards molars and bicuspids? Or who would scheme to be a plumber? He is a cellarer—alas, how shrunk from former days! Or consider the tailor! Perhaps you recall Elia's estimate. "Do you ever see him," he asks, "go whistling along the foot-path like a carman, or brush through ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks
... formidable," he said, taking a long, cigar-shaped roll from his pocket. "It is an ordinary plumber's smoke-rocket, fitted with a cap at either end, to make it self-lighting. Your task is confined to that. When you raise your cry of fire, it will be taken up by quite a number of people. You may then walk to the end of ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Detective Stories • Various
... windows, which hard freezing of the sod house and settling of the walls might have a tendency to shatter, double sheets of mica, such as is used in the flexible tops of automobiles, were set in and plastered with clay which was burnt to the hardness and consistency of brick by a plumber's flash lamp sending out the hot flame of burning gasoline ...
— The Boy Scouts on the Yukon • Ralph Victor
... house of their own. What a dream! A little home all to themselves, with six rooms and a bath, with a grass plat in front and calla-lilies. Then there would be children. He would have a son, whose name would be Daniel, who would go to High School, and perhaps turn out to be a prosperous plumber or house painter. Then this son Daniel would marry a wife, and they would all live together in that six-room-and-bath house; Daniel would have little children. McTeague would grow old among them all. The dentist ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... of gentleman, visited Leonardo da Vinci's sick-bed; and that Henry VIII. had said to a pert lord who had snubbed Holbein, "I can make a lord any day, but I cannot make a Holbein!" how Mrs. Haughton still confounded all painters in the general image of the painter and the plumber who had cheated her so shamefully in the renewed window-sashes and redecorated walls, which Time and the four children of an Irish family had made necessary to the letting of the first floor. And these playful allusions to the maternal ideas were still not irreverent, ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... comfortable fat above his silk collar; from the stray British or American private perspiring in khaki to splendid officers, French, Italian, Roumanian, Serbian, Czecho-Slovak, be-medalled like the advertisements of patent foods; from the middle aged, leaden pipe laden Marseilles plumber, in his blue smock, to the blue-uniformed Senegalese private, staring with his childish grin, at the multitudinous hurrying sights of an unfamiliar crowd. Backwards and forwards they passed in two thick unending streams. And the roadway ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... say that many—not on the pay of a dough-boy, put in a plumber from up-state in New York. For his part, he did not bother to grunt—he would make drinking motions or eating motions, and they would bring him things till they found what he wanted. One time he had met a girl that he thought was all right, and he wanted to treat her to a feed, so he drew a picture ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... on the stage it would have taken us the whole play to get out of it. Stage people are not allowed to put things right when mistakes are made with their identity. If the light comedian is expecting a plumber, the first man that comes into the drawing-room has got to be a plumber. He is not allowed to point out that he never was a plumber; that he doesn't look like a plumber; that no one not an idiot would mistake him for a plumber. He has got to be shut up in the bath-room and have water poured over ...
— Idle Ideas in 1905 • Jerome K. Jerome
... It seems the lead roofs are being repaired at the Admiralty, and the plumbers are walking about where they like. Now I needn't tell you I've had a man or two fishing about among the doorkeepers and so on at the Admiralty, and one of them found a plumber he knew slightly, working on the roof. That plumber happens to be no fool—a bit smarter than the detective-constable, it seems to me, in fact. Anyhow, he seems to have got more out of my man than my man got out of him; and soon after I reached the Yard he turned up, asking to ...
— The Red Triangle - Being Some Further Chronicles of Martin Hewitt, Investigator • Arthur Morrison
... could get nothing from him so I left him looking after me with a perplexed and somewhat indignant gaze. As a detective it seemed I might make a good plumber. I knew very well he would not repeat my questions, but it would be just like good old Paisley to worry himself to ...
— 32 Caliber • Donald McGibeny
... a simple matter to determine the presence of hardpan; you have but to make a series of tests—four or five to the acre—with a plumber's auger; and this care should be taken in every area where soil conditions have not been ...
— Walnut Growing in Oregon • Various
... Artemas Ward's generally fresh and unforced humor. But perhaps the worst instance in all Robertson's play of this pitiful sacrifice of situation and character to a petty "joke" is found in Caste. Sam Gerridge, a gas-fitter and plumber, desiring to marry Polly, the daughter of Eccles, a drunken old brute, tells him so, casually mentioning that to prove his affection he will do anything he can in "the way of spirituous liquor or tobacco." This captivates the heart ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... they do, these happy superstitious lovers, though probably the practices obtain now mostly among a class of fair maids who have none of Mrs. Pepys' fears of 'paynters,' and who are not averse even from a bright young plumber. Indeed, it is to be feared that the one sturdy survival of St. Valentine is to be sought in the 'ugly valentine.' This is another of Time's jests: to degrade the beautiful and distinguished, and mock at old-time sanctities with coarse burlesque. ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne
... drop Don Quixote's troubles with innkeepers demanding to be paid for his food and lodging, and make him as free of economic difficulties as Amadis de Gaul. Hamlet's experiences simply could not have happened to a plumber. A poor man is useful on the stage only as a blind man is: to excite sympathy. The poverty of the apothecary in Romeo and Juliet produces a great effect, and even points the sound moral that a poor man cannot afford to have a conscience; ...
— Dark Lady of the Sonnets • George Bernard Shaw
... pit, at the very place where Stephenson had made the experiments with his first lamp; and, when told of the accident, he observed that if the boy had been provided with his lamp, his life would have been saved. On the 20th November he went over to Newcastle to order his third lamp from a plumber in that town. The plumber referred him to his clerk, whom Stephenson invited to join him at a neighbouring public-house, where they might quietly talk over the matter, and finally settle the plan of the new lamp. They adjourned to the "Newcastle ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... for him," he went on, "he'd break all speed laws getting up here, and if he came for her of his own accord—if she thought he did that she'd be in his arms so quick that she'd make a bounding antelope look like a plumber's assistant going back ...
— Bought and Paid For - From the Play of George Broadhurst • Arthur Hornblow
... found himself in a queerly mixed atmosphere of luxurious modernity and stately antiquity. His four-poster, the huge couch at the foot of his bed, and all the furniture about the room, was of the Queen Anne period. The bathroom which communicated with his apartment was the latest triumph of the plumber's art—a room with floor and walls of white tiles, the bath itself a little sunken and twice the ordinary size. He dispensed so far as he could with the services of the men and descended, as soon as he was dressed, into the hall. Meekins was waiting at the bottom ...
— The Vanished Messenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... down town, feeling relieved. It is much better for Clarice to take the responsibility of opening communications, and I wish she would conduct the whole interview, like a major-general with his aid-de-camp or a master plumber sending out his apprentices to mend the pipes—leaving me only to take notes of instructions. But that is too much to expect. It is a delicate task before me, and my talents for such (according to the ladies), are not so eminent that I should be anxious to overwork ...
— A Pessimist - In Theory and Practice • Robert Timsol
... clothes and aggressive cleanliness and formality, when I and my mother returned from church to find my father dead. He had been pruning the grape vine. He had never had a ladder long enough to reach the sill of the third-floor windows—at house-painting times he had borrowed one from the plumber who mixed his paint—and he had in his own happy-go-lucky way contrived a combination of the garden fruit ladder with a battered kitchen table that served all sorts of odd purposes in an outhouse. ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... bread and water. It was now past noon and they were all hungry. She gave Bennie some of the baby's milk, and then sat down to think. The door-bell rung. "I was just passing by," said Mr. Hawkins, "and thought I'd stop and see if there was any show to get that room. I work for the plumber in the next block, so you see it would be ...
— Snow on the Headlight - A Story of the Great Burlington Strike • Cy Warman
... from you!! I have torn all my hair off, and constantly beat my unoffending family. Wild notions have occurred to me of sending in my own plumber to do the drains. Then I remember that you have probably written to prepare your man, and restrain my audacious hand. Then Stone presents himself, with a most exasperatingly mysterious visage, and says that a rat has appeared in the kitchen, and it's his opinion (Stone's, ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 1 (of 3), 1833-1856 • Charles Dickens
... brood. She shows no affection for the male, no pleasure in his society; she only tolerates him as a necessary evil, and, if he is killed, goes in quest of another in the most business-like manner, as you would go for the plumber or the glazier. In most cases the male is the ornamental partner in the firm, and contributes little of the working capital. There seems to be more equality of the sexes among the woodpeckers, wrens, and swallows; while the ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... Willis suddenly. "Do my eyes deceive me, or is that really a plumber that I see over in ...
— For Gold or Soul? - The Story of a Great Department Store • Lurana W. Sheldon
... salve from the medicine closet in the bathroom and discovering Rosemary wearily putting the bedrooms to rights. "I've burned my finger on that silly hot water heater again. I've told the doctor and told him to have the plumber stop in and fix it, but he ...
— Rosemary • Josephine Lawrence
... The plumber shrugged. "I don't know anything about this. Lora says you're all right." He turned around. "It might interest you to know some more of them are coming. Not ...
— The Skull • Philip K. Dick
... He wabbles like a ship in distress, in the wild effort to keep his feet untangled from his rapier. I'll wager he's a wealthy plumber on week-days. Observe Anne of Austria! What arms! I'll lay odds that her great-grandmother took in washing. There's Romeo, now, with a pair of legs like an old apple tree. The freedom of criticism is mine to-night! Did ...
— Hearts and Masks • Harold MacGrath
... rather annoyed me. "Besides, it doesn't matter how a poem begins, it is how it goes on that is the important thing and anyhow, I'm not going to write you anything about Christmas. Ask me to make you a new joke about a plumber; suggest my inventing something original and not too shocking for a child to say about heaven; propose my running you off a dog story that can be believed by a man of average determination and we may come to terms. But on the subject of Christmas I ...
— The Second Thoughts of An Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... waiting in the window of William Miller, plumber, turned back his thoughts. They could: and watch it all the way down, swallow a pin sometimes come out of the ribs years after, tour round the body changing biliary duct spleen squirting liver gastric juice coils of intestines like pipes. But ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... was in a neighbour's office, when the local plumber presented himself with a bill about a yard long. This neighbour was one of those very busy men. He was connected with what seemed to me an unlimited number of enterprises. He merely glanced at this tiresome bill, turned to the ...
— Random Reminiscences of Men and Events • John D. Rockefeller
... faces out of the windows of a cab which they had hired between them, and on the roof of which their mortar-troughs rocked to and fro. House-painters were swinging their pots; a zinc-worker was returning laden with a long ladder, with which he almost poked people's eyes out; whilst a belated plumber, with his box on his back, played the tune of "The Good King Dagobert" on his little trumpet. Ah! the sad music, a fitting accompaniment to the tread of the flock, the tread of ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... bending solid pressed pipes always put the thickest part of your pipe at the back. Lead, in a good plumber's hands, may be twisted into every conceivable shape; but, as in all other trades, there is a right and a wrong way of doing everything, and there are many different methods, each having a right and wrong way, which I shall describe. I shall be pleased if my readers will adopt the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 315, January 14, 1882 • Various
... immersing them in a saccharine plot that would offend not a single stomach in Marietta. He had it typed in double space—this last as advised by a booklet, "Success as a Writer Made Easy," by R. Meggs Widdlestien, which assured the ambitious plumber of the futility of perspiration, since after a six-lesson course he could make at least a ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... conclusion is reached that the less fit and less efficient, or the unfit and inefficient, compose the surplus labor army. Here are to be found the men who have tried and failed, the men who cannot hold jobs,—the plumber apprentice who could not become a journeyman, and the plumber journeyman too clumsy and dull to retain employment; switchmen who wreck trains; clerks who cannot balance books; blacksmiths who lame horses; lawyers who cannot plead; in ...
— War of the Classes • Jack London
... mechanism to one man, all form and colour to another, so to Anthony Croft the world was all melody. Notwithstanding these many gifts and possibilities, the doctor's wife advised the Widow Croft to make a plumber of him, intimating delicately that these freaks of nature, while playing no apparent part in the divine economy, could sometimes be ...
— A Village Stradivarius • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... there is lack of the restoration which repose and sleep bring. We know into what a condition one's nervous system may be thrown by the incessant noise attending the erection of a building in the vicinity of one's house or the pounding of a plumber working within the house, this being accentuated in the latter case by the thought of impending financial disaster. Even the confused and disagreeable sound due to the clatter of high-pitched women's voices at teas and receptions may, ...
— Disease and Its Causes • William Thomas Councilman
... the sweet influence of the gold angel that tops the Town Hall spire. The other four towns are apt to ridicule that gold angel, which for exactly fifty years has guarded the borough and only been regilded twice. But ask the plumber who last had the fearsome job of regilding it whether it is a gold angel to be ...
— Helen with the High Hand (2nd ed.) • Arnold Bennett
... of the opening delivers a blow which may be of great violence. The nature of this stroke may be judged by the familiar instance where the relatively slow-flowing stream from a hydrant pipe is suddenly choked by closing the stopcock. Unless the plumber provides a cushion of air to diminish the energy of the blow, it is often strong enough to shake the house. Again, when steam or other gases are by a sudden diminution of pressure enabled to expand, they may deliver a blow which is exactly like that caused by the ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... passionately and persistently, two things which she believed should subsist together in any well-ordered life: amusement and respectability; and despite her surface-sophistication her notion of amusement was hardly less innocent than when she had hung on the plumber's fence with Indiana Frusk. It gave her, therefore, no satisfaction to find herself included among Madame Adelschein's intimates. It embarrassed her to feel that she was expected to be "queer" and "different," to respond to pass-words and talk in innuendo, ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... patients described above, Mr. C, was by trade a plumber; both of them could digest no food, and died apparently for want of blood. Might not the transfusion of blood be used in these cases ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... careless man, the lazy man are each indifferent as to how their work is done; such men seldom do well that which they undertake. Everything carelessly or lazily done is incomplete, inadequate, incompetent, and, therefore, a source of distress, discontent, and worry. A careless or lazy plumber causes much worry, for, even though his victims may have learned the lesson I am endeavoring to inculcate throughout these pages, it is a self-evident proposition that they will not allow his indifferent ...
— Quit Your Worrying! • George Wharton James
... way after the model of the Pavilion at Brighton. The peculiarity of this bathing establishment is or was when I first knew the charming place that regularly at the end of September the pump gets out of order, and the new year is far advanced before the solitary plumber of the place gets it put right. He begins to walk dreamily round the place at Easter. At Whitsuntide he brings down an iron vessel containing unmelted solder, and early in July ...
— Faces and Places • Henry William Lucy
... seek him out, wherever he was, and pay the landlady, who was usually well enough disposed towards Roger unless he had tried to win her affections by being handy about the house, in which case there were extra charges for the plumber and an irremovable feeling of exasperation. And she would ask him to come home with her, and not bother about working, but just be a companion to her. At that, however, he always slowly shook his small, mouse-coloured head. ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... vacation with an unsympathetic but kindly uncle who was a plumber and builder. His uncle had a family of six, the eldest eleven, and Lewisham made himself agreeable and instructive. Moreover he worked hard for the culminating third year of his studies (in which he had decided to do great things), ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells
... also to belong to the daughter of the house, was white, shiny tile from floor to ceiling, and it contained every conceivable device known to the mind of a modern plumber that makes for comfort in a bath-room. Could Elinor have but glimpsed the high-backed tin tub in which Arethusa had bathed all of her life at ...
— The Heart of Arethusa • Francis Barton Fox |
