"Sawdust" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... said, "you ought not to joke about such things. There really are such people. I've known people who've met them. To think of all the adorable things there are to eat in the world, and then to go through life munching sawdust ...
— The Chronicles of Clovis • Saki
... per cent of volatile oil, and from 3 to 5.5 per cent of fixed oil. There is a large amount of starch. The chief adulterants are rice, wheat, and potato starch, mustard hulls, exhausted ginger from ginger-ale and extract factories, sawdust and ground peanut-shells, and turmeric is frequently used for coloring the product. The United States standard for ginger is not more than 42 per cent starch, 8 per cent fiber, and 6 per cent ...
— Human Foods and Their Nutritive Value • Harry Snyder
... end, I think. The other's yours, though I'm afraid you'll have a poor time bowling fast to-day. Even with plenty of sawdust I doubt if it will be possible to get a decent foothold till ...
— Mike • P. G. Wodehouse
... They were seated on a rude bench in an angle of the wall, flanked by a low, heavy bastion. And from the parapet their gaze might have wandered over a goodly sight, for on a broad space, covered with sand and sawdust, within the vast limits of the castle range, the numerous knights and youths who sought apprenticeship in arms and gallantry under the earl were engaged in those martial sports which, falling elsewhere in disuse, the Last ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... look after the shop, Gibbons went away into a wooden building in the back yard; it was about twenty-five feet square, and there were holes in the floor for the stakes, when a regular ring was made. The floor was strewn with clean sawdust; a number of boxing gloves ...
— Colonel Thorndyke's Secret • G. A. Henty
... trusses cost little more to make than a pair of good suspenders or garters. A little leather, a few pieces of elastic or web band, a cloth-covered pad with sawdust in it, is about all there is ...
— Cluthe's Advice to the Ruptured • Chas. Cluthe & Sons
... boy assured her) that it could only have been picked out for her by the eldest brother. And when, after gazing down upon her stupidly for two or three months from the clock-shelf, it was finally fastened, by thread run through the holes in its shoulders, to a clumsy, jointless, sawdust body, it had only served to remind her more bitterly than ever of the ill fortune that could make two great events in one small life fall ...
— The Biography of a Prairie Girl • Eleanor Gates
... understanding it. If for any reason we are unable to do this, we should close the book, take some exercise or recreation, or at any rate do something else, for we are not at the moment fitted for study. We might as well eat sawdust and deceive ourselves with thinking that we are taking nourishment. It is not what is read or what is remembered, but only what ...
— How to Study • George Fillmore Swain
... of the barn was covered with sawdust, and all around the sides of the barn were cages containing many animals. There were lions, tigers, wolves, leopards, monkeys, snakes, and many other strange beasts, some of which Tum Tum had seen in his jungle home, and some of which ...
— Tum Tum, the Jolly Elephant - His Many Adventures • Richard Barnum
... man and boy adjusting the logs to the cradle, and listened to the apparently self-acting saw as it did its work, and observed the perfection of the simple machinery which he himself had adjusted, and smelt the sweet scent of the newly-made sawdust, and listened to the music of the little stream, when, between whiles, the rattle of the mill would cease for half a minute,—George, as he stood in silence, looking at all this, listening to the sounds, smelling the perfume, thinking how much sweeter it all was than the ...
— The Golden Lion of Granpere • Anthony Trollope
... the comparison. Well, well, contagion is as often mental as physical; and I do not think my readers, who have all been under his lash, will blame me very much for giving the headsman a mouthful of his own sawdust. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... begin the use of the enema you will have to continue its use; you can't stop, and, lo and behold! the enema habit is formed—a new habit in addition to the many habits civilized man is already carrying; the constipated habit, the physic habit, the sand, bran, sawdust-food habit, the muscular peristaltic habit, etc.—and with all these habits the poor victim of proctitis and intestinal foulness wonders that he ...
— Intestinal Ills • Alcinous Burton Jamison
... more than your words. What a smile! My dear, I envy you. And yet I do not. You have got to wake up from all that. You are seventeen, eighteen—nineteen, is it?—and you have not found out yet that the world is hollow and your doll stuffed with sawdust.' ...
— A Red Wallflower • Susan Warner
... assumption-parts, and in particular, Samuel Weller and Mrs. Gamp, of which I say no more. I am pining for Broadstairs, where the children are at present. I lurk from the sun, during the best part of the day, in a villainous compound of darkness, canvas, sawdust, general dust, stale gas (involving a vague smell of pepper), and disenchanted properties. But I hope to get down on ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... governess in a rich family where they believed that the world is round, and how she threw up her job sooner than teach immoral geography. That was at the overflow meeting outside the Baptist chapel. She knocked 'em to sawdust! We must look out for Winnie.... But Lafone! Lafone was beyond everything. Impact, personality—conviction—the whole bag o' tricks! He sweated conviction. Gad, he convinced me while he was speaking! (Him? He was President of the Geoplanarians, of course. Haven't you read my account?) It is ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling
... families Buprestidae, Dynastidae, Passalidae, and, above all, that glorious group the Longicornia. These beetles worm their way into the wood, making often long tunnels, feeding as they work, and leaving their ejecta in the shape of agglomerated sawdust. It is into the long holes drilled by these beetles that the Aye-Aye searches with his long fingers, one of which, on the fore-hand, is specially thin, slender, and skeleton-like. It looks like the tool of some lock-picker. Our large-eyed little friend, like the burglar, comes out at night and ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... Pan on the other, Forbes-Robertson in the garb of the Melancholy Dane looked out with his fine nobility of countenance. The room was heavy with tobacco-smoke, which seemed to have been accumulating for years, and to have darkened the very beams of the ceiling. Over the floor a liberal coating of sawdust was sprinkled. ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... the wool over your own eyes. You have set up a straw man and knocked the stuffing out of him in the complacent belief that it was the reasoning of lower animals you were knocking out of the minds of those who disagreed with you. When the highhole perforated the icehouse and let out the sawdust, you called him a lunatic ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... these tests is sometimes cut from large beams after failure. The specimens are carefully weighed in grams, and all dimensions measured to the nearest 0.01 inch. If to be tested in a green or fresh condition the specimens should be kept in a damp box or covered with moist sawdust until needed. No defects should be allowed ...
— The Mechanical Properties of Wood • Samuel J. Record
... be their crime; each individual carter feels himself under the ban of confiscation and attainder: his blood is attainted through six generations, and nothing is wanting but the headsman and his axe, the block and the sawdust, to close up the vista of his horrors. What! shall it be within benefit of clergy to delay the king's message on the high road?—to interrupt the great respirations, ebb or flood, of the national intercourse—to ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... Trimalchio gave orders for the dessert to be served, whereupon the slaves took away all the tables and brought in others, and sprinkled the floor with sawdust mixed with saffron and vermilion, and also with powdered mica, a thing I had never seen done before. When all this was done Trimalchio remarked, "I could rest content with this course, for you have your second tables, but, if you've something especially nice, why ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... at a lighted cabin, and was followed in by Shorty in answer to the "Come in" of the voice they heard groaning. It was a simple log cabin, the walls moss-chinked, the earth floor covered with sawdust and shavings. The light was a kerosene-lamp, and they could make out four bunks, three of which were occupied by men who ceased from groaning in ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... recent output, which had been appearing in a well-known monthly. It was concerned chiefly with the preposterous actions of a class of sawdust effigies who, one was assured, were New York society people, and it turned, as a rule, upon questions of the heroine's technical purity, with mock-sociological overtones about the "mad antics ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... are not particular as to the cooking of their food. Quantity, not quality, is what they desire. They generally feel very much like the Russian, of whom it is said, that he would be content to eat sawdust if only he got plenty of it! The steaks were washed down with tea. There is no other drink in Rupert's Land. The Hudson's Bay Company found that spirits were so hurtful to the Indians that they refused to send ...
— Away in the Wilderness • R.M. Ballantyne
... to it. Then wash the bottle thoroughly and dry it, finally polishing the inside with a piece of soft cloth or tissue paper. Place one ounce of cyanide of potassium into the bottle and pour in enough dry sawdust to cover the lumps of poison. Then wet some plaster of paris until it is the consistency of thick cream and quickly pour it over the sawdust, taking care that it does not run down the sides or splash against the bottle. Place the bottle on a level table and very soon the ...
— Outdoor Sports and Games • Claude H. Miller
... interested faces. A lame seller of fruit and drinks hobbled about crying his wares; at intervals came the "pop" of a lemonade bottle, and there was a steady crunching of peanut shells. The scent of orange peel rose over the circus smell—that weird compound of animal and sawdust and acetylene lamps. In the midst of all was the ring, with its surface banked up towards ...
— A Little Bush Maid • Mary Grant Bruce
... were still veiled in the translucent shade of the deep cypress swamp, whose long moss drapings almost overhung them on the side next the brightening dawn. The solemn gray festoons did overhang the farthest two or three of a few flimsy wooden houses and a saw-mill with its lumber, logs, and sawdust, its cold furnace and ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... their feats. Under its canvas roof reigns dust and silence. In the distance, where the seats are arranged, it is totally dark; the greatest part of the light falls through the roof on the ring, with its sand and sawdust covering. With the help of the gray light which filters through the canvas can be seen a horse standing near the parapet. The big horse feels very lonely, whisks the flies with his tail, and often sways his head. Gradually the eye, becoming accustomed to the dim light, discerns other ...
— Sielanka: An Idyll • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... dense, refreshing dark shadow that seemed to throw from itself an odour of coolness. This was rendered further attractive by the warm spicy odour of damp pine that arose from the resilient surface of sawdust and shingles broken beneath the wheels of traffic. Back from these trees, in wide, well-cultivated lawns, stood the better residences. They were almost invariably built of many corners, with steep roofs meeting each other at ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... cleared, every article that can possibly be used again is brought; and the manager pointed with pride to the furnaces in his power-house, which formerly burned coal and now are fed with refuse—broken wheels of gun-carriages, sawdust, and even old shoes. Hundreds of French girls and even German prisoners are resoling and patching shoes with the aid of American machinery, and even the uppers of such as are otherwise hopeless are cut in spirals into laces. Tunics, breeches, and overcoats are mended by tailors; rusty camp cookers ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... presence of the insect can be detected by the small holes in the bark of the trees and the fine sawdust which is ejected from these holes, when the insects are active. It is important to emphasize the advisability of detecting the fine sawdust because that is the best indication of the actual operations of the hickory bark borer. These holes, ...
— Studies of Trees • Jacob Joshua Levison
... some sawdust and bark I could stuff in the dark An owl better than that. I could make an old hat Look more like an owl than that horrid fowl Stuck up there so stiff like a side of coarse leather. In fact, about him there's not one natural feather." Just then, with a wink and a sly normal ...
— Eighth Reader • James Baldwin
... the other, alternately denouncing the wickedness and deriding the toothlessness of a grim Giant Pope, may be likened, at a distance, to John Bunyan. About the whole—to conclude—is an atmosphere, not too pronounced, of the Newgate Calendar, and a few patches of sawdust from the Prize Ring. May not people well have wondered (the good pious English folk to whom Luck is a scandal, as the Bible Society's secretary wrote to Borrow),—what manner of man is this, this muleteer-missionary, this natural man with a pen in the hand of a prize-fighter, ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... himself, and spent the rest of the way in seeing her at it. They would drink pink lemonade, and there would be pop-corn balls—the entrancing smell of sawdust—the beat of the band. He hoped there would be a tom-tom, and some of the dark people ...
— The Gay Cockade • Temple Bailey
... we have established at the River Rouge plant. Coke moves on from the ovens by mechanical transmission to the blast furnaces. The low volatile gases from the blast furnaces are piped to the power plant boilers where they are joined by the sawdust and the shavings from the body plant—the making of all our bodies has been shifted to this plant—and in addition the coke "breeze" (the dust in the making of coke) is now also being utilized for stoking. The steam power ...
— My Life and Work • Henry Ford
... Centers Standard Household Effect Co. Notes of a Vanished Summer Worries of a Winter Walk Summer Isles of Eden Wild Flowers of the Asphalt A Circus in the Suburbs A She Hamlet The Midnight Platoon The Beach at Rockaway Sawdust in the Arena At a Dime Museum American Literature in Exile The Horse Show The Problem of the Summer Aesthetic New York Fifty-odd Years Ago From New York into New England The Art of the Adsmith The Psychology of Plagiarism Puritanism in American Fiction ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... himself in a condition of perpetual semi-intoxication. This besotted wretch practically lived at the 'Cricketers'. He came regularly very morning and sometimes earned a pint of beer by assisting the barman to sweep up the sawdust or clean the windows. He usually remained in the bar until closing time every night. He was a very good customer; not only did he spend whatever money he could get hold of himself, but he was the cause of others ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... waters of Coney Island Creek and Sheepshead Bay; and on Monday afternoons in midwinter it was a regular thing that I should go with him to New York to ramble among the old book-shops in Nassau Street and eat oysters at Dorlon's stall, with wooden tables and sawdust-sprinkled floor, in Fulton Market. Say what you please about the friendship of books: it was worth a thousand times more to have the friendship of ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke
... love to all at home. I've got a log from the cedars of Lebanon, my Moslem carpenter who smoothed the broken end, swallowed the sawdust, because he believed 'Our Lady Mary' had sat under the tree with 'Our ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... mixed with seal oil, looks like ice-cream, and is the Esquimau substitute for that confection. It has none of the flavor, however, of ice-cream, but, as Lieutenant Schwatka says, may be more likened to "locust sawdust and wild honey." The first time I partook of this dainty I had unfortunately seen it in course of preparation, which somewhat marred the relish with which I might otherwise have eaten it. The confectioner was a toothless old hag, who mixed the ingredients in ...
— Schwatka's Search • William H. Gilder
... not. But look! Here's some fresh sawdust on the ground! The posts have been sawed within a few hours—perhaps even inside an hour. Maybe just before I came." Dave pointed to the moist earth under some of the splintered posts and boards. There was the fine sawdust where it had been ...
— Cowboy Dave • Frank V. Webster
... when that shell fell I had gone into the trench to ask the time. I found my rifle, that I'd left in my place, bent double, as if some one had folded it in his hands, the barrel like a corkscrew, and half of the stock in sawdust. The smell of fresh blood was enough ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... conceded that the larvae are three years in reaching maturity. The young ones lie for the first year in the sapwood and the inner bark, excavating flat, shallow cavities, about the size of a silver dollar, which are filled with their sawdust-like castings. The holes by which they enter being small are soon filled up, though not until a few grains of castings have fallen from them. Their presence may, however, often be detected in young ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 443, June 28, 1884 • Various
... together, so that he presented an air of weakness and irresolution. His lips were thick and pursed in a kind of weary good humour. He wore an old skin shirt and a pair of towlinen pants, which flapped about his bare brown ankles. A fine sawdust coated his hair and shoulders, for he had been working in the shed where he eked out his farming by making spinning wheels for ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... I'd better be lightin' out fer home with it!" answered Black Angus, hugely elated. Turning gently, so as not to dislodge the passengers on his shoulder, he strode off over the bridge and up the sawdust-muffled street towards his clapboard cottage, Ebenezer's snout still held rigidly up in air, his eyes shut in heroic resignation, while Ananias-and-Sapphira, tremendously excited by this excursion into the outer world, kept shrieking at the ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... night the entire basement cafe and dance-hall assumed a hebdomadal air of expectancy; extra marble-topped tables were crowded about the polished square of dancing-space; the odor of hops and sawdust and cookery hung in visible mists over ...
— Every Soul Hath Its Song • Fannie Hurst
... cordwood. A stovepipe led from the stove here and there in wire suspension to a final exit near the other corner. On the wall were two sporting chromos, and a good variety of lithographed calendars and illuminated tin signs advertising beers and spirits. The floor was liberally sprinkled with damp sawdust, and was occupied, besides the stove, by a number of wooden chairs and a ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... consider the accumulation of manure and the exclusion of light, we are not apt to wonder much at the prevalence of blindness among horses. The manure should be cleaned out in the morning, at noon, and again at night. Use sawdust or straw liberally for bedding. It will absorb the urine, and as soon as foul, should be removed to the compost heap with the dung, where it will soon be ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 3, January 19, 1884. - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... bit of good. And on her own ground I shouldn't wonder if she might not have made a fight for it. But now she hadn't a chance. Poor old Duggie was just like so much putty in Florence's hands when he couldn't get away from her. You could see the sawdust trickling out of Love's Young ...
— A Wodehouse Miscellany - Articles & Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... at the same time wrote—"When I was a cadet at Sandhurst in 1855-58, Milo's cutty pipes were quite the thing, and the selection by cadets of a good one out of a fresh consignment packed in sawdust was eagerly watched by the 'Johns.' Of course we were imitating our parents." It was no doubt these cutty pipes which are referred to in one of the sporting books of Robert Surtees as ...
— The Social History of Smoking • G. L. Apperson
... songs; and we and all good fellows may say that bad people have no Christmas, and though they copy the letter they know not the spirit; and I say that a copied Christmas is no Christmas at all, because Christmas is a feast of hearts and not of poor bits of cut-down trees stuck up in sawdust and covered with lights and tinsel, even if they are hung with the most expensive gewgaws and gimcracks that ever are bought for gifts by people who are expected to give, whether they like or not. But when the heart for Christmas is there and is beating, then a very little ...
— The Little City Of Hope - A Christmas Story • F. Marion Crawford
... those nondescript buildings of wood which are not worth more than a three-line paragraph even when they burn down. It was smelly. The kitchen joined the dining-room, and the dining-room the office, which was half a bar-room, with a few boxes of sawdust mathematically arranged along the walls. There were many like it up and down the coast. There were pictures on the walls of terrible wrecks at sea, naval battles, and a race ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... dividends by giving the men a chance at decent living conditions, in decent houses and decent streets, and you'll have another sort of attitude toward the company. Quit cheating them at the store, and you'll have more honesty in the mines; quit sprinkling sour beer and whiskey on the sawdust in front of the saloons to coax men in who have an appetite, and you'll have less drinking—but, of course, Sands will have less rents. Let the company obey the law—the company run by men who are pointed out as examples, and there'll be less lawlessness among the men when ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... makin' love is to send the gal a box of candy an' walk pussy-footed an' write poems to her. You want to write life an' I want to live it. So does a gal like that. She's more my breed than yores, if she has got eddication. An' she's flesh and blood. Same as I am. Yo're half sawdust. Yo're stuffed." ...
— A Man to His Mate • J. Allan Dunn
... must be served. Man, I was young myself once—and Nan of the Sawdust Pile is not a woman a young man would look at once and go ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... been frozen over for a month, even above the bridge and the mills, where the current was swiftest. Long lines of sawdust, which had been coiling and whirling in the eddies, or stretching across the black seething water, were caught in the ice, or blown about with the powdered snow over ...
— John Ward, Preacher • Margaret Deland
... trill of the ringmaster's whistle. It is a call that captures the imagination of old and young alike, and so do the books of this series capture and enthrall the reader, for they were written by one who, besides wielding a master pen, has followed the sawdust trail from coast to coast, who knows the circus people and the sturdy manliness of those who do and dare for the entertainment of millions of circus-goers when the grass is green. Mr. Darlington paints a true picture of the ...
— The Story of Young Abraham Lincoln • Wayne Whipple
... mean, sir," resumed the Inspector, after inflating his lungs for another gust, "what in the name of all the piebald circus clowns that ever jiggered around on sawdust, do you mean by coming on parade dressed like the ringmaster of a traveling monkey-show, sir? Haven't you any more idea of the honor of wearing a United States sword—the noblest weapon on earth, sir—than to ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... usually has for her doll. But Maria had never had any particular love for a doll. She had possessed dolls, of course, but she had never been quite able to rise above the obvious sham of them, the cloth and the sawdust and the paint. She had wondered how some little girls whom she had known had loved to sleep with their dolls; as for her, she would as soon have thought of taking pleasure in dozing off with any little roll of linen clasped in ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... him. There were two detectives in the doorway, their revolvers covering him,—Sanford Quest, with Lenora in the background. In the sudden illumination, Macdougal's horror turned almost to hysterical rage. He had wasted his fury upon a dummy! It was sawdust, not ...
— The Black Box • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... engine or motor, if you put into it several pinches of hard grain, such as rice or wheat. They will swell up and choke the circulation of water, and the cooling system will have to be torn down to remove the obstruction. Sawdust or hair may also be used to clog a ...
— Simple Sabotage Field Manual • Strategic Services
... aqueous salammoniac solution, then plunge in hot oil (palm or tallow). When thoroughly heated remove and dip in a pot of fused tin (grain tin) covered with tallow. When tinned, drain in oil pot and rub with a bunch of hemp. Clean and polish in hot sawdust. ...
— Scientific American, Volume XLIII., No. 25, December 18, 1880 • Various
... Agis, king of Sparta. Clearly, we should be grateful to an editor who feels it his chief duty to scrape away these barnacles from the brave old hull, to replace with the original heart-of-oak the planks where these small but patient terebrators have bored away the tough fibre to fill the gap with sawdust! ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... we'll go!" said Little O'Grady spiritedly. "Anybody may go who's able to pay a dollar and who's got a friend to name him. I hope you and I can cough up as much as that, Ignace; and then if we have to live the rest of the week on sawdust, why, we will. Go? I guess yes. If I'm ever to make the Queen's acquaintance and get her profile, this is ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... day the twins were taken around the woods by the driver or some of the lumbermen who were not busy. They saw big trees cut down, but were careful not to get in the way of the great, swaying trunks. They played in the piles of sawdust, jumping off powdery wood. ...
— The Bobbsey Twins in the Great West • Laura Lee Hope
... delights and rankling stings together, of good and evil angels and low bred lover at one sweep. Quiet would console for dulness, innocence for weariness. She would fain have a good conscience toward Society— that image whose feet are of gold and its head a bag of chaff and sawdust. ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... lately the water was discoloured by a conferva resembling the sea-sawdust of Captain Cook, with which it was found to agree generically in consisting of long filaments joined together by a softer gelatinous-looking substance. The present species, however, is six times larger than the more common sort, some of which was mixed up ...
— Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John MacGillivray
... you make these vile insinuations in my hearing?" burst forth Noel. "Do you think I'm made of sawdust? Tell me what you mean, or else retract every single word ...
— The Keeper of the Door • Ethel M. Dell
... The wood is of a light yellow colour, and is very fragrant. It is sold to the Chinese, who burn it as incense in their temples, and manufacture from it a variety of articles. Candles are also made from it thus: a thin sheet of the wood forms a wick, which is surrounded by a mixture of its sawdust ...
— The Cruise of the Mary Rose - Here and There in the Pacific • William H. G. Kingston
... I cannot rhyme to, One Scherer, dry as sawdust, grim and prim. Of him there's much to say, if I had time to Concern myself in any wise with HIM. He seems to hate the heights he cannot climb to, He thinks your poetry a coxcomb's whim, A good deal of his sawdust he has spilt on Shakespeare, ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... men in view desisted, quite as though he had sounded the dinner horn. Heads of others emerged from the pits. Within a minute there was a small crowd gathered, of burly fellows diffusing the fragrance of pine sawdust, all stamped in their degrees with the M'Lauchlin family likeness, and all eager to know the ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... bar-room to the more private chambers upstairs. The chief glory of the Cheshire Cheese, however, is to be seen downstairs on the left hand of the principal entrance. This is the genuinely old-fashioned eating-room, with its rude tables, its austere seats round the walls, its sawdust-sprinkled floor, and, above all, its sacred nook in the further right hand corner which is pointed out as the favourite seat of Dr. Johnson. Above this niche is a copy of the Reynolds portrait of the sturdy lexicographer, beneath which is the following inscription: ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley
... things of the workmen. Some of the very stiff calfskins, he discovered, were "dusted" or laid in bins of damp sawdust and softened before they were taken to the finishers. There were a multitude of processes, he found, for converting the leather into the special kinds desired. What a numberless variety of finishes there was! There ...
— The Story of Leather • Sara Ware Bassett
... the acid. For winter-grafting, pull the seedlings that are of suitable size, cut off the tops eight inches from the root, and pack in moist sand in a cellar that will not freeze. After grafting, tie them up in bunches, and pack in tight boxes of moist sand or sawdust. ...
— Soil Culture • J. H. Walden
... lowered and the stakes pulled, he was hitched to the leaden-wheeled band-wagon to strain and tug at the traces all through the last weary half of the night. But when fame has started your way, be you horse or man, you cannot escape. Just before the season closed Calico was put on the sawdust. This was ...
— Horses Nine - Stories of Harness and Saddle • Sewell Ford
... the large supply of timber, and second, the very cold climate. All of our barracks, washhouses, latrines, blockhouses, and stables, were designed to use available timber stocks. For a form of rapid construction we used double walls six inches apart and filled the spaces with sawdust. This proved very satisfactory and much faster than the local method which calls for ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... to be a barrel-shaped man who was unaccountably cheerless, as if the inside structure had been carefully removed, and then replaced by sawdust, Jonas thought. Even the offer of seven kroner for a single week's stay failed to produce the delirious joy Jonas ...
— Wizard • Laurence Mark Janifer (AKA Larry M. Harris)
... Hector McKay, millionaire lumber king, falls in love with "Nan of the Sawdust Pile," a charming girl who has been ...
— With Hoops of Steel • Florence Finch Kelly
... gentleman in the neighbourhood for an accurate description of a lock. It happened that the man of science had on one occasion been a trottee, and was glad to have an opportunity of retaliation. "A lock," said he, "is a quantity of sawdust congealed into boards, which, being let down into the water in a perpendicular slope- level, raises it to the declivity of the sea above!"—" Eh?" said the Athenian, "what dun yo' say?" The gentleman repeated his description, and the worthy Boltonian recorded every word in ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... wrought-iron, similar to those used in conveying gas. They could be curved to suit any peculiarity of the situation; and when the pipes were lapped with felt, or enclosed in wooden troughs filled with sawdust, the loss of heat by radiation was reduced to a minimum. The loss of power was certainly much less than in the friction of a long and perhaps tortuous line of shafting. With steam of 50 lbs. to the ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... a strong man, determined and persistent; but two days more had passed, and many blisters covered his palms ere—after innumerable experiments with different kinds of woods and varying strokes—the first tiny glow fell into the carefully scraped sawdust. And it was with a fast-beating heart and tremulous breath that he blew his spark to a larger one, then laid on his shredded strips of bark and blew again, and so at last, with a great up-welling triumph in his soul, beheld the flicker of ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... for a look. If you'll believe me, when his head come up again he was just pale with rage. He says, 'I've shoveled acorns enough in there to keep the family thirty years, and if I can see a sign of one of 'em I wish I may land in a museum with a belly full of sawdust in two minutes!' ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... back and see all my philosophy refuted, all my prim little opinions lying prone like dolls with the sawdust knocked out of them. All these years I have been judging Judith with an ignorance as cruel as it has been complacent. Verily I have been the fag end of wisdom. So I forbear to judge ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... Sam, although he thought his friend in the wrong, striking out with his fist and dragging Prince through the door and into a passing street car in time to avoid a rush of other waiters hurrying to the aid of the one who lay dazed and sputtering on the sawdust floor. ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson
... shape. They drill holes in the solid wood, and look like tiny animated gimlets when seen at work; their pointed heads being fixed in the wood, while their smooth glossy bodies work rapidly round so as to create little streams of sawdust from the holes. ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... have seen it on my own estate in Poitou, and can make every allowance for them. In many cases the amounts they are adjudged to pay are absolutely greater than their whole income. They are forced to live upon bread made of bran and sawdust, to eat acorns and beechnuts; they are gaunt with hunger; they see their children dying before their eyes. They know not how their sufferings arise, they only know that they suffer, and in their despair they turn like hungry wolves against all who ...
— Won by the Sword - A Story of the Thirty Years' War • G.A. Henty
... I was shown into the Editor's room, where again I was struck by the imaginative adequacy of the surroundings. Before coming to the man himself let me say something of these. The floor was not bare or even sprinkled with sawdust, as it might easily have been, but it was covered by a comfortable carpet, probably from Axminster. Comfort was indeed the note. The desk was neither pitch pine nor teak, but mahogany. Upon it were scattered ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 1, 1919 • Various
... I get?" he demanded, passionately. "Do you think it means anything to me that some fat old woman sees me making love to a sawdust actress at a matinee and then goes home and hates her fat ...
— Harlequin and Columbine • Booth Tarkington
... page, in case the door-knob doesn't tickle the dining room bread-board and make the sawdust come out of the breakfast oatmeal, I'll tell you about the piggie boys ...
— Curly and Floppy Twistytail - The Funny Piggie Boys • Howard R. Garis
... have a sufficient thickness of concrete, and the iron joists and cross girders well buried therein. Ordinary floors may be rendered heat-proof by partially filling the space between ceiling and floorboards with sawdust or sheets of slag-wool laid on boarding nailed to fillets on the joists. The sawdust should be filled up to the top of the joists; over this a layer of thick felt, and the boarding above. This, however, is only a makeshift when compared with ...
— The Turkish Bath - Its Design and Construction • Robert Owen Allsop
... window-blind kept up an imaginary warmth in the cold room, and threw quite a glow on the floor. Twelve cockle-shells and a half- penny china figure were ranged solemnly along the mantel-shelf. Even the spittoon was an original note, and instead of sawdust contained sea-shells. And as for the hearthrug, it would merit an article to itself, and a coloured diagram to help the text. It was patchwork, but the patchwork of the poor; no glowing shreds of old brocade and Chinese silk, shaken together in the ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... cargo, and confident that by its size and his sense of touch he could separate it from the gold, found that he must first remove his pocket-handkerchief. As he drew it forth, alas! two golden sovereigns followed in its fold, fell, and jingled on the slate-paved floor. Not all the fresh sawdust strewn there could deaden the merry sound of wealth. The two coins ran trickling, the one to clash against a brass spittoon, the other to take hiding in a dark corner under the counter. "You might," said Mr Latter that evening, relating the occurrence to a circle of steady customers, "have knocked ...
— Nicky-Nan, Reservist • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... playing all manner of gambols in the extremity of their distresses. Nor was this enough for its malicious fury, for not content with driving them abroad, it charged small parties of them and hunted them into the wheelwright's saw-pit and below the planks and timbers in the yard, and scattering the sawdust in the air, it looked for them underneath, and when it did meet with any, whew! how it drove them on and ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... safe to manufacture, handle and transport. There is no more danger of its exploding accidentally than there would be of an explosion of shavings or sawdust; for, unless well confined and set off with a strong primer, it will not explode at all. In the open its combustion is so slow as to in no way resemble or partake of ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 821, Sep. 26, 1891 • Various
... or prosperous farmer, and not likely to be successful at dairying. But because the old Squire and others were embarking in that business, Rufus wished to do so, too. He had no ice-house, but thought he could keep ice buried in sawdust, in the shade of a large apple-tree near his barn; and I may add here that he tried it with indifferent success for three years, and ...
— A Busy Year at the Old Squire's • Charles Asbury Stephens
... large as a barn. A stove with a round paunch sat in the middle of the room. Around its base was piled sawdust, held in place by heavy planks nailed to the floor. By the door stood a huge table that had once been a part of the furniture of Herrick's Clothing Store and that had been used for displaying custom-made clothes. ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... maintained his reputation as a thief by quietly going behind the bar and lifting from a box four cigars which he stowed away in his pockets. But even that, apparently did not satisfy him, for when he espied the butt of a cigar, flung into the sawdust on the floor by a man who had just come in, he picked it up before squatting down again to resume ...
— The Girl of the Golden West • David Belasco
... for the same purpose, is made by mixing fine sifted oak sawdust with linseed oil which has been ...
— Ordnance Instructions for the United States Navy. - 1866. Fourth edition. • Bureau of Ordnance, USN
... reckon," Anna replied, almost indifferently. "It was the same thing—the doll stuffed with sawdust, and all that; you with a friend, and I with a lover. Well, it ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... to christen him Robinson Crusoe," she explained, as she laid the small garments, one by one, on the straw; "but he can't be Robinson Crusoe till I've dressed him up again." The doll was stark naked now, with waxen face and shoulders, and bulging bags of sawdust for body and legs. ...
— Noughts and Crosses • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... which date they ought to be laying steadily. As they will lay many more eggs than they can successfully hatch, pick up some eggs at intervals from the nests, taking care always to leave two or three in each nest. These eggs should be placed on a large tray or shallow box, lined with hay, sawdust, or other suitable material. It is not advisable to place them touching each other, and care should be taken to turn them daily; if this is done the eggs will keep well for three weeks, by which time you have collected a sufficient number to put under hens, ...
— Wild Ducks - How to Rear and Shoot Them • W. Coape Oates
... in Park to collect my thoughts. Find two leading Belfast linen-merchants busily gathering up sawdust, &c, round tree I felled yesterday. They explain that they've been "much interested in my novel idea of converting chips of wood into best cambric pocket-handkerchiefs," and think that it beats General BOOTH's notion of making children's toys out of old ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., November 8, 1890 • Various
... paved yard, with its open gutter,—these and how much else come up at the hint of my far-off friend, who is my very near enemy. Nothing is more familiar than the power of smell in reviving old memories. There was that quite different fragrance of the wood-house, the smell of fresh sawdust. It comes back to me now, and with it the hiss of the saw; the tumble of the divorced logs which God put together and man has just put asunder; the coming down of the axe and the hah! that helped it,—the straight-grained stick opening at the first appeal of the implement as if it were a pleasure, ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... lost one of the black beads from his worsted countenance) turned for a moment toward the table, or so much as winked, as they lay in decorous rows, gazing with mute admiration at Belinda. She, unable to repress the joy and pride which swelled her sawdust bosom till the seams gaped, gave an occasional bounce as the wind waved her yellow skirts, or made the blue boots dance a sort of jig upon the door. Hanging was evidently not a painful operation, for she smiled contentedly, and looked as if the red ribbon around her neck was not uncomfortably ...
— Under the Lilacs • Louisa May Alcott
... of this worthy assembly, specialists began to fill the body with strongly odorous plants and sawdust, they even poured in odorous resin, all amid prayers. Then in his eye-sockets they inserted glass eyes set in bronze. After that the whole body was ...
— The Pharaoh and the Priest - An Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt • Boleslaw Prus
... sent a trial lot of small brown eggs packed in sawdust to this country, and it is thought that after all we shall be able to have ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, January 26, 1916 • Various
... under the sun, nothing more nearly approaching to a state of addle, than a builder's brains. Your regular builders (and, indeed, not a few of your architects) are the sorriest animals twaddling about on two legs; mere vivified bags of sawdust, or lumps of lath and plaster, galvanised for a while, and forming themselves into strange, uncouth, unreasonable shapes. A mere "builder" has not two ideas in his head; he has only one; he can draw only one "specification," ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various
... and went on our way. Long before daylight we were climbing the steep road at Rossie to the inn of the Travellers' Rest—a tavern famous in its time, that stood half up the hill, with a store, a smithy, and a few houses grouped about it, We came up at a silent walk on a road cushioned with sawdust. D'ri rapped on the door until I thought he had roused the whole village. At last a man came to the upper window. He, too, inspected us with a candle. Then he opened the door and gave us a hearty welcome. We put up our horses for a bite, and came ...
— D'Ri and I • Irving Bacheller
... same kind of feeling pursues us in many other instances, but there is no place which recalls so strongly our recollections of childhood as Astley's. It was not a 'Royal Amphitheatre' in those days, nor had Ducrow arisen to shed the light of classic taste and portable gas over the sawdust of the circus; but the whole character of the place was the same, the pieces were the same, the clown's jokes were the same, the riding-masters were equally grand, the comic performers equally witty, the tragedians equally hoarse, and the 'highly-trained chargers' ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... and wooden benches, a zinc counter, cheap bar fixtures, and blue-stained wooden pitchers; in the ceiling a U-shaped gas bracket. Two pick-and-shovel labourers were playing cards. They turned around and laughed. The proprietor took the excessively short-stemmed pipe from his mouth and spat into the sawdust. He seemed not at all surprised to see this fashionably gowned woman in his dive. Durtal, who was watching him, thought he surprised an understanding look exchanged by the proprietor ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient etherized upon a table; Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets, The muttering retreats Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells: Streets that follow like a tedious argument Of insidious intent To lead you to an overwhelming question.... Oh, do not ask, "What is it?" Let us go and ...
— Poems • T. S. [Thomas Stearns] Eliot
... wants it, and he always know of the best in the old country") they all were duly humble. He accepted a few orders and went to work with a will; he would show them what the old man could do. But it was only a temporary gleam; in a little while he grew homesick for the shop, for the sawdust floor and the familiar smell of oil, and the picture of Lossing flitting in and out. He missed the careless young workmen at whom he had grumbled, he missed the whir of machinery, and the consciousness of rush ...
— Stories of a Western Town • Octave Thanet
... belonged to the Florida Bakery and Lunch Room, where Carl was chastely lunching. There was dirty sawdust on the floor, six pine tables painted red and adorned with catsup-bottles whose mouths were clotted with dried catsup, and a long counter scattered with bread and white cakes and petrified rolls. Behind ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... eyes, came around the corner of the house. By one arm she carried a doll, and the doll was "leaking" sawdust on the porch. Mrs. Brown smiled when ...
— Bunny Brown and His Sister Sue on Grandpa's Farm • Laura Lee Hope
... through the exhibition, when you could smell the sawdust and hear the seconds shouting advice under the ropes, that Claire, who, never having seen anything in her life like this extraordinary performance, had been staring spellbound, awoke to the realization that Dudley Pickering was proposing to her. It required a woman's intuition to ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse
... and after-supper-overtime work, was the preparation for Potlatch Day, the festival that meant to the BSG what April Fifteenth means to the Internal Revenue Service. Cases of fireworks piled up in the brick warehouse next door to Headquarters. Sawdust-packed thermite grenades were stacked right up to the perforated pipes of the sprinkler system. No Smoking sign blossomed a hundred yards on every side. The blacklists, naming consumers who'd withheld dated gifts from the Potlatch ...
— The Great Potlatch Riots • Allen Kim Lang
... rovings, Markheim's eyes returned to the body of his victim, where it lay both humped and sprawling, incredibly small and strangely meaner than in life. In these poor, miserly clothes, in that ungainly attitude, the dealer lay like so much sawdust. Markheim had feared to see it, and, lo! it was nothing. And yet, as he gazed, this bundle of old clothes and pool of blood began to find eloquent voices. There it must lie; there was none to work the cunning hinges or direct the miracle of locomotion—there it must lie till it was ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... through the half-open door his call come up from a distant field. Then I hear the steady hammering of one that has been for three days trying to penetrate the weather boarding of the big icehouse by the river, and to reach the sawdust filling for ...
— Bird Stories from Burroughs - Sketches of Bird Life Taken from the Works of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... to my life at this period, and that my love of adventure, my taste for excitement, my obstinate resolution to conquer a difficulty, my inflexible perseverance when thwarted, and my eager anxiety for praise, were all picked up amid the sawdust and tan of the riding-school. How long I might have continued satisfied with such triumphs, and content to be the wonder of the freshly-joined conscripts, I know not, when accident, or something very like ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... the better man? Which of us two can repeat most poetry? Which of us two has, in the service of him that shall be nameless, tackled the Romans, both civil and military, till he has got as husky as if he'd been weaned and ever since brought up on sawdust? Not the talking-over stranger. Yet the house is as free to him as if it was his, and he has his room, and is put upon a footing, and draws about a thousand a year. I am banished to the Bower, to be found in it like a piece of furniture whenever wanted. Merit, therefore, don't win. That's the ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... Smith, who was at her right—the latest addition to her menagerie. "What is this friend of yours?" she asked. "I have never seen such complex simplicity. This new plaything has no real charm for him. He is breaking it to find out what it is made of. And something will happen when he discovers the sawdust." ...
— Brewster's Millions • George Barr McCutcheon
... spot whose psychological effect is so exactly like a dozen others that you will recognize at once its kinship with former experience. Mere physical likeness does not count at all. It may possess a water-front of laths and sawdust, or an outlook over broad, shimmering, heat-baked plains. It may front the impassive fringe of a forest, or it may skirt the calm stretch of a river. But whether of log or mud, stone or unpainted board, its identity becomes at first sight indubitably evident. Were you, ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... in Leipsic. It's a queer little sawdust affair, but I love it to pieces. It always reminds me of my mother. Do you know what I am playing?" but Von Barwig did not ...
— The Music Master - Novelized from the Play • Charles Klein
... of profaneness; and a view of the interior of Doctor Daniel Burgess's Presbyterian meeting-house in Russell Court, with portraits of the reverend gentleman and the principal members of his flock. The floor was thickly strewn with sawdust and shavings; and across the room ran a long and wide bench, furnished at one end with a powerful vice; next to which three nails driven into the boards served, it would appear from the lump of unconsumed tallow left in their custody, as a substitute ...
— Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth
... of the city, the imperial procession wound, moving steadily and easily along, since, an hour or two previously, hundreds of slaves had filled up the cavernous holes in the roadway with innumerable barrel loads of sawdust, in honour of the Sultan's arrival. Surrounded by multitudes of welcoming citizens, the procession wound its way at length out on the far side of the city. There, amid a semicircle of low hills, clothed with chestnut woods, the imperial encampment of hundreds and thousands of silken tents shone ...
— A Book of Quaker Saints • Lucy Violet Hodgkin
... different when he woke the next morning, when the courage which he had drawn from wine and company had evaporated, when he was alone with the iron grates and stone walls, and when the thought of the block, the axe and the sawdust rose in his mind. During some time he regularly wrote a confession every forenoon when he was sober, and burned it every night when he was merry. [14] His nonjuring friends formed a plan for bringing Sancroft to visit the Tower, in the hope, doubtless, that ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... heads intervened between them and the operating table. It was of unpainted deal, plain, strong, and scrupulously clean. A sheet of brown water-proofing covered half of it, and beneath stood a large tin tray full of sawdust. On the further side, in front of the window, there was a board which was strewed with glittering instruments—forceps, tenacula, saws, canulas, and trocars. A line of knives, with long, thin, delicate blades, lay at one side. Two young men lounged in front of this, one threading ...
— Round the Red Lamp - Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life • Arthur Conan Doyle
... was recovering. "Congratulate him for me. I didn't know the little milksop had it in him. You ought to thank Sissy, ma'am, for proving that he is not really stuffed with sawdust. Where is she, anyway?" ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... mine. Beneath the conveyors are great ragged mounds of short logs cut into sections for the paper pulp trade, and jumbled heaps of shorter sections that are to serve as the winter firing for whole districts; these have the contours of coal dumps, while fed from chutes are hillocks of golden sawdust as big and as conspicuous as the ash and slag mounds ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton
... a silver dollar. In the book we can smell the sawdust, hear the flapping of the big white canvas and the roaring of the lions, and listen to the merry ...
— The Outdoor Girls in Florida - Or, Wintering in the Sunny South • Laura Lee Hope
... to play house, by herself. Arranging her three dolls, made of rags and sawdust, on top of the bin, she stood before them, with her fingers in her mouth. Then all at once ...
— Autumn • Robert Nathan
... the bulletins and as near as we can estimate, it ought not to cost more than $500 for a dairy house alone, but when we build the new dairy house, I think we should abandon this old wooden ice house that keeps the yard all mussed up with sawdust— besides, you have to cut from thirty to fifty per cent, more ice than we really use in order to provide for the great waste in such a poorly built house. Now, if we build our ice house in connection with the dairy house, it will be better protected and the waste will be practically eliminated. ...
— Hidden Treasure • John Thomas Simpson
... would be given. At this the young braves would leap into the woods, to see which one first could bring back fire. Each had his own secret way of making it. Usually a bowstring was twisted about a fire stick, and the stick was turned rapidly in a groove. In a few seconds, smoke would rise from the sawdust that formed. After a little fanning a ...
— Stories the Iroquois Tell Their Children • Mabel Powers
... R. "What do you think I 've been doing? I 've been fishing out of the saw-mill window just to kill time. There was a patch of floating sawdust there,—kind of unlikely place for trout, anyway,—but I thought I'd put on a worm and let him crawl around a little." He opened his creel as he spoke. "But I did n't look for a pair of 'em," he added. And there, on top of his smaller ...
— Fishing with a Worm • Bliss Perry |
