"Tick" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the awful silence. Day after day, year after year, not a sound. I have stood in that street at mid-day and heard a watch tick in my pocket. Think of it, Mr. de Windt. I myself arrived here only a few months ago, but even I shall soon have to get away for a change, or——" and he tapped ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... went on for a twelvemonth, and at last came the end of the year. That day and night the merry-making was merrier and wilder and madder than it had ever been before, but the great clock in the tower went on—tick, tock! tick, tock!—and by and by it came midnight. Then, as it always happened before, the lights went out, and all was as black as ink. But this time there was no wailing and crying out, but everything was silent as death; the door opened slowly, and in came, ...
— Twilight Land • Howard Pyle
... form to the extreme margin of the paper, and you are not to trust your eye by laying the lath flat down and ticking off opposite the inch-marks, but you are to stand the lath on its edge, so that the inch-marks actually meet the paper, and then tick opposite to them. ...
— Stained Glass Work - A text-book for students and workers in glass • C. W. Whall
... which is the cheaper, titles or money in these days," said King. "I understand one can get a most acceptable duke for three or four millions, a nice marquis or count for half as much, and a Sir on tick." He eyed the Count speculatively. "Of course a prince of the royal ...
— The Prince of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... was upset! I wasn't thinking!" She could hear him pleading and sighing to her to forgive him. But she would not—not this time! He had hurt a helpless thing once too often. Her fit of crying ceased, and she lay listening to the tick of the clock, and marshalling in her mind a hundred little evidences of his malevolence toward her baby—his own baby. How was it possible? Was he really going mad? And a fit of such chilly shuddering seized her that she crept under the eider down to regain warmth. In her rage, she retained ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... young birds out of their nests, and devouring them. Not a single plant, not even a lichen, grows on this islet; yet it is inhabited by several insects and spiders. The following list completes, I believe, the terrestrial fauna: a fly (Olfersia) living on the booby, and a tick which must have come here as a parasite on the birds; a small brown moth, belonging to a genus that feeds on feathers; a beetle (Quedius) and a woodlouse from beneath the dung; and lastly, numerous ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... fell a silence so utter that Barnabas could distinctly hear the tick of Natty Bell's great watch in his fob; a silence in which Mr. Smivvle stared with wide-eyed dismay, while Barrymaine sat motionless with his glass half-way to his lips. Then Mr. Chichester laughed again, but the scar glowed upon his pallid cheek, and ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al
... draw upon his hoard of merit to acquit myself. You will at least get thus much by this charming manner of obliging me: I look upon myself as double obliged; and when it cost me so much to ask one favour, and I find myself in debt for two, I shall scarce run in tick for a third. ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... sides of the hall were closed, and there was no light save one small gleam which trickled from the keyhole of Nancy's writing-room. Advancing to the door I rapped boldly upon it, and waited for the duke to bid me enter; no voice answered, nor was any sound to be heard save the tick, tick, tick of a great clock that stood near. Again I beat upon the door, and called Montrose loudly by name, and with baited breath listened to the tick-ticking of the ...
— Nancy Stair - A Novel • Elinor Macartney Lane
... a key in the lock. Were they back already? Had her hope been spoiled by some accident? Surely not. It was twenty minutes to nine. They were safe in the theatre by now. Oh, she was afraid! She was alone in the house—worse than alone! Jenny cowered. She felt she could not answer the summons. Tick-tick-tick said the clock, striking across the silences. Again Jenny made a step forward. Then, terrifying her, the noise began once more—the thunderous knock, the ping-ping-ping-whir of ...
— Nocturne • Frank Swinnerton
... to move yore tent an' truck didn't make a good job of it, Plimsoll," drawled Sandy. "I reckon they warn't the right so't of help. Ef you-all are aimin' to take that stuff erlong with you I'd recommend you 'tend to it yorese'f. It's gettin' erlong to'ards sun-up, fast as a clock can tick." ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... three hundred dollars of debts. He then comprehends that the insidious chit is loaded; is pregnant with the disgrace germ, if he cannot raise the wherewithal to redeem the sheafs of them reposing in a dozen tills—so many notes going to protest with every tick of the clock. "I'll write home for funds," he decides; "but how am I to live while awaiting the remittance?" By giving more chits, only. He does this with a bold front for another month or so, and is doubly insolvent when the remittance finally comes to ...
— East of Suez - Ceylon, India, China and Japan • Frederic Courtland Penfield
... [Symbol: tick mark] A Chapter on Provincial or local organization is to be inserted under Chapter ..., providing for certain powers and rights to be given to local governments with the residual power left in the hands of the central government. The exact text is ...
— The Fight For The Republic in China • Bertram Lenox Putnam Weale
... in daylight this would have been a difficult matter. Griselda felt her way as best she could, past the Chinese cabinet and the pot-pourri jar till she got to the ante-room door. It was open, and now, knowing her way better, she hurried in. But what was the use? All was silent, save the tick-tick of the cuckoo clock in the corner. Oh, if only the cuckoo would come out and call the hour as usual, what a weight would ...
— The Cuckoo Clock • Mrs. Molesworth
... diamonds and rubies, that the back was just one crust of gems. In one of her little tempers, as they called her hideously ugly rages, she dashed it against the back of the chimney, after which it never gave a single tick; and some of the diamonds went to the ash-pit. As she grew older still, she became fond of animals, not in a way that brought them much pleasure, or herself much satisfaction. When angry, she would beat them, and try to pull them to pieces, and as soon as she became a little used ...
— A Double Story • George MacDonald
... doll, head downward, hung over a chair-back, and a toy soldier with drawn sword dominated the little stand by the bed. And everywhere was silence—the peculiar silence that comes only to a room where the clock has ceased to tick. ...
— The Tangled Threads • Eleanor H. Porter
... Then there was a mantelboard with maroon plush and wool fringe that did not match the plush; a dreary clock like a black marble tomb—it was silent as the grave too, for it had long since forgotten how to tick. And there were painted glass vases that never had any flowers in, and a painted tambourine that no one ever played, and painted brackets with ...
— The Story of the Amulet • E. Nesbit
... twitching movement of her clasped hands, one might have supposed she had already passed from the scene of her woe. Even the old-fashioned timepiece that hung upon a nail in the wall seemed to be smitten with the pervading spell, for its pendulum was motionless, and its feeble pulse had ceased to tick. ...
— The Floating Light of the Goodwin Sands • R.M. Ballantyne
... a fresco peels and drops, Wherever an outline weakens and wanes Till the latest life in the painting stops, Stands One whom each fainter pulse-tick pains; One, wishful each scrap should clutch the brick, 45 Each tinge not wholly escape the plaster, —A lion who dies of an ass's kick, The wronged great ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... had fallen on my left forearm and went to flick it off. Instead of being that, the thing burst into a blood splotch as soon as I hit it. That was the first time I had been bitten by one of those bugs. They are about the size of a sheep tick when empty, but they get on you and suck and suck, till they are full of your blood and size of a grape. Queer things, but ugly. Ista laughed as you would laugh if you saw a nigger afraid of a harmless snake. It's queer that it should be considered a joke ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... Cruickshanks, and tremble. Rob gripped the board to keep himsel' frae obeying, and again Mr. Dishart says, 'Come forward,' and syne Rob rose shaking, and tottered to the pulpit stair like a man suddenly shot into the Day of Judgment. 'You hulking man of sin,' cries Mr. Dishart, not a tick fleid, though Rob's as big as three o' him, 'sit down on the stair and attend to me, or I'll step doun frae the pulpit and run you out ...
— The Little Minister • J.M. Barrie
... Palace of Slumber, and as you waited your turn in one of the wooden arm-chairs beside the wall, what with the quiet of the hour, and the low drone of Jeff's conversation, the buzzing of the flies against the window pane and the measured tick of the clock above the mirror, your head sank dreaming on your breast, and the Mariposa Newspacket rustled unheeded on the floor. It makes one drowsy just ...
— Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town • Stephen Leacock
... DE LA PRYME'S suggestion as to the origin of the expression "going tick" is ingenious; nevertheless I take it to be clear that "tick" is merely an abbreviation of ticket. (See Nares's Glossary, and Halliwell's Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words, under "Ticket.") In addition to the passages cited by them from Decker, Cotgrave, Stephens, and Shirley, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 82, May 24, 1851 • Various
... Ships' lanterns don 't. Captain, I feels as mournful as when Flint's clock did n't tick no more and we knowed he was ...
— Wappin' Wharf - A Frightful Comedy of Pirates • Charles S. Brooks
... market; and pepree-pot was no go. Bean-soup was just as bad; people said kittens wasn't good done that way, and the more I hollered, the more the customers wouldn't come, and them what did, wanted tick. Along with the boys and their pewter fips, them what got trust and didn't pay, and the abusing of my goods, I was soon fotch'd up in the victualling line—and I busted for the benefit of my creditors. But genius riz. I made a raise of a horse and saw, after being a wood-piler's prentice for a while, ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... bad about twenty years ago, caused I think by a cold in the head. When in bed I can hear the tick of a watch with the left ear but the other is almost stone deaf. I am not much at a loss in ordinary conversation, but in trying to hear people speak I lose much of what is said. Although I have ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various
... bald-beaded galoot," but when he told her that to him life without her would be a blasted mockery, and that his income was L50,000 a year, she threw herself on to him and froze there with the tenacity of a tick on a brindled cow, and said, with tears of joy, "Hen-ery, I ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... pressin' ez a deppity Shiriff. Sence M^r Wilbur's disease I hevn't hed no one thet could dror out my talons. He ust to kind o' wine me up an' set the penderlum agoin' an' then somehow I seemed to go on tick as it wear tell I run down, but the noo minister ain't of the same brewin' nor I can't seem to git ahold of no kine of huming nater in him but sort of slide rite off as you du on the eedge of a mow. Minnysteeril natur is wal enough an' a site better'n ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... same boat exactly as the rest; I was entitled to the little bit I'd worked for. But now it's different. It's like I'd won the big prize in the lottery. I can't be stingy with it and not blush. I can't sit there like a swollen wood-tick and ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... while I was helping Timmy Finbrink out of his difficulties, and afterwards tried to fool you with the fake window-breaking, some of the Central fellows had been down at Ritchie's playing tick-tack on one of his front windows. Tick-tack is a stupid game, and it got me into ...
— The High School Boys' Fishing Trip • H. Irving Hancock
... of time as I sit in my grandfather's chair and listen to the tick of my grandfather's clock I see a smaller but more picturesque London, in which I shot snipe in Battersea Fields, and the hoot of the owl in the Green Park was not yet drowned by the hoot of the motor-car—a London of chop-houses, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, January 26, 1916 • Various
... stove—and once Peter reached up above his head for a pile of papers, spreading them out before him under the white glare of the overhead light, then silence again, broken only by the slow, dogged tock-tick, tock-tick, or the sagging of a hot coal adjusting itself for ...
— Peter - A Novel of Which He is Not the Hero • F. Hopkinson Smith
... THE BEAN.—Several kinds of Beans are cultivated by farmers. The principal are the Horse-Bean or Tick-Bean; the Early Mazagan; and the Long-pods. Beans grow best in stiff clayey soils, and in such they are the most convenient crop. The season for planting is either the winter or spring month, as the weather affords opportunity. They are either drilled, broad-cast sown, or put in by the dibble, which ...
— The Botanist's Companion, Vol. II • William Salisbury
... preservation, and he had strong faith in prayer. At any rate, at half past eleven o'clock that night he was up and dressed, and routed his two sons out of their beds. At the stroke of midnight, waiting a tick longer perhaps, to be quite sure that Sunday had gone and Monday morning had arrived, he and his sons pushed ...
— The Story of Grenfell of the Labrador - A Boy's Life of Wilfred T. Grenfell • Dillon Wallace
... was no sound in the room except the soft crackle of the fire, and Amy thought deeply on the noble example before her of calm, trustful waiting. At last she became conscious that the house was growing strangely still; the faint tick of the great clock on the landing of the stairs struck her ear; the rush and roar of the wind had ceased. Bewildered, she rose softly and went to Maggie's room, and found that the tired mother in watching over her children had ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... everybody had something to show but Danny. Tommy had his mouse's nest; Patsey had the hawk's nest; Bugsey had a fungus. Danny was the only empty-handed one, but Pearlie cheered him up wonderfully by predicting that he would get the very first wood-tick when the season opened. ...
— The Second Chance • Nellie L. McClung
... house was still as still could be, But on the stair-case near, The big clock seemed to talk to me In whispers hard to hear. "He's coming! Tick! He's coming soon!" I thought I heard it say: "Look, look toward the window-blind,— Tick-tock, tick-tock—and you shall find ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... finger-at-nose connivance between the pilot-house and the chief engineer's grille platform. No, Captain Wass was not that kind of a man, though the fog had held in front of him two days, vapor thick as feathers in a tick, and he had averaged not much over six nautical miles an hour, and was bitterly aware that the rate of freight on steel rails was sixty-five ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... THAT," protested Faith. "The spare room is all torn up. The mice have gnawed a big hole in the feather tick and made a nest in it. We never found it out till Aunt Martha put the Rev. Mr. Fisher from Charlottetown there to sleep last week. HE soon found it out. Then father had to give him his bed and sleep on the study ...
— Rainbow Valley • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... in the doorway of the cave, thrown by the shadow of a boulder beside it, even before the Irishman's big nickel watch came with its bustling, authoritative tick to bring the question of time into the mountains. But the two men kept uncertain hours: sometimes they talked more than half the night, the close-cropped, sandy poll and the unshorn crest of Jove-like curls nodding at each other across the fire, then slept far into the ...
— Southern Lights and Shadows • Edited by William Dean Howells & Henry Mills Alden
... wept my eye to see the timber planks That hid our ruins; many a day I cried, Ah me! I fear they never will rebuild it! Till on one eve, one joyful Monday eve, As along Charles-street I prepared to walk. Just at the corner, by the pastrycook's, I heard a trowel tick against a brick. I looked me up, and straight a parapet Uprose at least seven inches o'er the planks. Joy to thee, Drury! to myself I said: He of the Blackfriars' Road, who hymned thy downfall In loud Hosannahs, and who prophesied That flames, like ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... fifty miles away. The lads were sitting in their cosy office, Teddy lounging back on the divan, Phil in an easy chair at the roll-top desk. The lights shed a soft glow over the room; the bell rope above their heads swayed, tapping its rings with the regularity of the tick ...
— The Circus Boys on the Plains • Edgar B. P. Darlington
... coast. It was first noticed in the vicinity of Huron by a woman. No sooner had she seen the vessels bearing down towards the coast from the westward, than she rushed into the house, emptied her feather bed and placed the tick on a horse as a pack-saddle; then catching up one child before her and another behind, she rode at the top of the animal's speed, thinking torture and death lay behind her. Whenever she passed a house she raised an alarm, and at two o'clock in the morning, more dead than alive with terror ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... that beastly hymn? It had got hold of him now! The measured tramp of the tune fitted itself to the tick of the clattering little tin ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... an' flat, Not big enough to zun a-cat, An' dealen door a-meaede so thin, A puff o' wind would blow en in, Where woone do vind a thing to knock So small's the hammer ov a clock, That wull but meaeke a little click About so loud's a clock do tick! Gi'e me the wold house, wi' the wide An' lofty-lo'ted rooms inside; An' wi' the stwonen pworch avore The nail-bestudded woaken door, That had a knocker very little Less to handle than a bittle, That het a blow that vled ...
— Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect • William Barnes
... broken heart. Number 1, is that of a haughty young damsel who had cut me on various occasions. Number 2, is that of the girl I loved, now an officer's wife. Number 3, is that of her husband, for they are separated." He continued to tick them off, giving each a short description with comments of almost diabolical cynicism. "I have two more in view," he continued, "and when I have completed my record of fifty, I intend to take a long rest and go for ...
— Australia Revenged • Boomerang
... knowledge of the one she had bartered for money. Money! The thought stung and almost maddened her. She had given her own flesh and blood for money, and her punishment was rapidly increasing upon her. Her sin had followed her through the years, and had now suddenly enmeshed her. The steady tick of the clock seemed like an accusing voice to her hot brain, and the gentle motion of the blind at the open window annoyed her. She fancied it knew of her guilt and was mocking her. She was learning, as others have learned, that to ...
— Jess of the Rebel Trail • H. A. Cody
... of interrupting Marlow when he stopped of himself, his eyes fixed on vacancy, or—perhaps—(I wouldn't be too hard on him) on a vision. He has the habit, or, say, the fault, of defective mantelpiece clocks, of suddenly stopping in the very fulness of the tick. If you have ever lived with a clock afflicted with that perversity, you know how vexing it is—such a stoppage. I was vexed with Marlow. He was smiling faintly while I waited. He even laughed a little. And then ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... happened, and it does be troubling me in my old days. And I sit there afeared by the peat fire, and when I've thought too much on it, I get up and go to the half-door. And I look out on the Moyle, wee Shane, and I think: that's been roaring since the first tick of time, and I see the stars so many of them, and the moon that never changed its shape or size, and it comes to me that nothing matters in the long run, that the killed men were no more nor caught trout, and the rent families no more nor birds' nests fallen from a tree.... None of us are big enough ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... tethered by his own chain to the imperious baby, in whose fingers the watch was tightly clasped. The child was in high delight at the loquacious new toy—so superior to foolish fluffy rabbits that could not tick to save their skins. Martha had no notion of relinquishing her hold, so they need not tug in that feeble way; if they pulled ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... States by the advance of the boll weevil. The Department is doing all it can to organize the farmers in the threatened districts, just as it has been doing all it can to organize them in aid of its work to eradicate the cattle fever tick in the South. The Department can and will cooperate with all such associations, and it must have their help if its own work is to be done in the ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... here, you see, to the tick," he said noisily, kissing the forehead his goddaughter pressed forward to him. Then, turning to the waiter, "You can serve without delay," he said. "I like my ...
— The Idol of Paris • Sarah Bernhardt
... to rub his hands in a sort of malicious glee. Then in a moment, he pointed at the straining guide. "It's got way," he cried. "Look, she's spinning. The rope. She'll part in half a tick. Get it? Say, might as well try to hold a house with pure rubber, as a new rope. It's got such a spring. It's give the old tree way. ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... two are very conscious of being together, without so much as the tick of a clock to help them. The father clings to his cigar, sticks his knife into it, studies the leaf, tries crossing his legs another way. The son examines the pictures on the walls as if he had never seen them before, and is all the time ...
— Echoes of the War • J. M. Barrie
... floor of her home filled with vague alarms. Although on the next day she discovered, through an inquiry made by the town marshal, on what adventure the boys had gone, she could not quiet herself. All through the night she lay awake hearing the clock tick and telling herself that Seth, like his father, would come to a sudden and violent end. So determined was she that the boy should this time feel the weight of her wrath that, although she would not allow the marshal to interfere with his adventure, she got out a pencil and ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... Everett is! It happens once in so often, Luke—a situation like this. Everett is lugging too much. Last fire we had in the village here Ed Stilson tried to lug an old-fashioned bureau on his back and a feather tick in his teeth, but he ...
— The Ramrodders - A Novel • Holman Day
... a fig to me whether you go bankrupt or not. It would suit me as well to have you two 'hammered' as to take your money." Upon the spur of a sudden thought he drew out his watch. "In just two minutes' time to a tick, the price will ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... case stands on a basement formed of cork blocks, which project a wee bit beyond the case; this structure is supported by 4 feet of a club-like form. So far so good. Now we will raise the structure higher. A case in which the pendulum with its chain is supposed to be hanging and swinging and tick-tacking is formed likewise of bricks of cork: its length is 2-1/2 inches, its breadth is 1 inch. Now as the upper case is smaller, you see, than the lower one, there would be a cavity, and indeed nothing for the higher one to rest upon, so we put little bevelled pieces on the lower case, ...
— Little Folks (Septemeber 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... of Ad'line's has been too much for her all along," she announced, "she's wild as a hawk, and a perfect torment. One day she'll come strollin' in and beseechin' me for a bunch o' flowers, and the next she'll be here after dark scarin' me out o' my seven senses. She rigged a tick-tack here the other night against the window, and my heart was in my mouth. I thought 'twas a warnin' much as ever I thought anything in my life; the night before my mother died 'twas in that same room and against ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... the whiskey, I told you before. Not a sound could we hear of Godfrey or of my father. Only the rapid, calling and calling,—I mind it well that night. Ay, and well I mind the striking of the great clock,—tick, tick, tick, tick, tick,—I listened and I dreamed on it till I doubted but it was the beating ...
— Old Man Savarin and Other Stories • Edward William Thomson
... hot, perspiration trickled amid the curls, and handkerchiefs taken from pockets were mopping red foreheads; and now and then a warm wind that blew from the river gently stirred the border of the tick awnings hanging from the doors of the public-houses. A little lower down, however, one was refreshed by a current of icy air that smelt of tallow, leather, and oil. This was an exhalation from the Rue des Charrettes, full of large black ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... not supply the current for the eight miles of line up Horse Creek. For a time, which lengthened to dragging minutes, the anxious experimenters hung over the tiny field instrument. The sensitive magnet seemed wholly dead. Then, suddenly, it began to tick hesitantly in response to ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde
... had been sent to take the place of the old one. Certainly the new friend had very little to do with all that old life of which the fountain was the door. He belonged, most definitely, to the new one, and everything about him—the delightfully mysterious tick of his gold watch, the solid, firm grasp of his hand, the sure security of his shoulder upon which Ernest Henry now gloriously rode—these things were of this ...
— The Golden Scarecrow • Hugh Walpole
... time silence reigned, as befitted the close of such a story. Nothing but the solemn tick of the tall clock was to be heard. On and on it went, as steady as before. Ghosts were nothing special to the clock: it had to measure out the time both ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... this, young man, exactly as I am telling it to you. Tell him you have performed your part of the bargain; tell him that the second Miss Belle is yours, the ruby shall be his; tell him he shall never get his hands on it one tick ...
— The Paternoster Ruby • Charles Edmonds Walk
... listener whispered to us when we touched him gently on the leg, so we lay there all three listening for it to start again, the tick-ticking of our wrist-watches and the pulsing of our hearts sounding ...
— From the St. Lawrence to the Yser with the 1st Canadian brigade • Frederic C. Curry
... chapter" and to "compose herself for the night," the housekeeper sat late rocking alone in her rooms, while the hollow tick of the hall clock sounded doubly lonely in the cheerless night. The modern castle's walls were proof against the wildest rain and even the blows of a catapult, and so the dashing storm never even stirred the heavy leaded diamonded panes. "Thanks be to God, auld Andrew never ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... adjective, short, spick and span, Well hated by Hunkers and kept under ban. My second it qualifies, also my third, Though a high fen between can't be crossed nor be stirred. Now my next, like a swindler when cleaned out of tin, Has always its tick, and takes most people in. Amphibious its habit, as frequently found Beneath the blue sea as on top of the ground: Yet, oddest caprice out of destiny's cup, Just when in full feather 't is always "sewed up." What is forced and affected most all people spurn, ...
— Our Young Folks—Vol. I, No. II, February 1865 - An Illustrated Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... judicial bodies. This could not well be otherwise. If the precise moment of actual time were to settle such a matter, it would be material to ask, Who shall settle the time? Shall it be done by public authority, or shall every man observe the tick of his own watch? If absolute time is to furnish a precise rule, the excess of a minute, it is obvious, would be as fatal as the excess of an hour. Sir, no bodies, judicial or legislative, have ever ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... thought, not to have to stand waiting in the sun. At the tent door—for a tent was usually borrowed from somewhere to give decency and privacy to the rites—an acolyte dabbed a large yellow patch of iodine on the victim's arm. Moving into the superheated shrine, he assisted Sergt. Lyon to tick off his name on the nominal roll, and then approached the M.O. Some doctors were bland and cheerful, others humorous, others strictly businesslike, but they all knew that this was their chance to pay off old scores. By using ...
— The Fifth Battalion Highland Light Infantry in the War 1914-1918 • F.L. Morrison
... But as the water would not boil all at once she stood there watching the little blue and yellowish flames of that unsatisfactory Thorhaven gas splutter under the kettle. All sorts of thoughts went scurrying about her mind as the clock measured the seconds—tick-tock! ...
— The Privet Hedge • J. E. Buckrose
... manor-house, we spent our last hour at Brandon; for Gadabout was to sail away next day. It was a colonial hour; for Brandon clocks tick off no other, nor would any other seem natural within ...
— Virginia: The Old Dominion • Frank W. Hutchins and Cortelle Hutchins
... of the clock, and that only! Tick! Tick! Tick! Tick! That only! Why then had she felt it impossible to finish her sentence? The judge was looking at her; he had not moved; nor had an eyelash stirred, but the rest of that sentence had stuck in her throat, ...
— Dark Hollow • Anna Katharine Green
... In a chair opposite is a young woman with such a mournful, careworn face, that a glance inspires you with sorrow; and from a bundle of clothes on her knee issues the fretful wail of a restless child. The monotonous tick of an old clock is the only sound, saving the longdrawn sigh of that young mother, or the quick, hollow breathing of the sleeping man. Now and then the wind whistles more shrilly through the crevices of the door, and the rain beats with greater force against the little ...
— Yorksher Puddin' - A Collection of the Most Popular Dialect Stories from the - Pen of John Hartley • John Hartley
... example of an audit at Canterbury we have one belonging to Durham, a little later in date (1416). The list of books assigned to the Spendement was evidently read over, and a tick or point was put against every volume found in its place. On a second check certain books were accounted for, and notes of their whereabouts were added to the inventory. Some were found in the cloister, others were in the library; the prior of Finchale had a number; many had been sent to ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... room. I wants to show you whar I burned my bed last night tryin' to kill de chinches: dey most eats me up evvy night." In the bedroom an oil lamp was burning. The bed and mattress showed signs of fire. The mattress tick was split from head to foot and cotton spilling out on the floor. "Dat's whar I sleep," declared Alice. The atmosphere of the bedroom was heavy with nauseous odors and the interviewer hastened to return to the front of the house desiring to get out of range ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - Volume II. Arkansas Narratives. Part I • Work Projects Administration
... velvet of Leroy's voice ran a note more deadly than any threat could have been. It rang a bell for a silence in which the clock of death seemed to tick. But as the seconds fled Reilly's courage oozed away. He dared not accept the invitation to reach for his weapon and try conclusions with this debonair young daredevil. He mumbled a retraction, and flung, with a ...
— Bucky O'Connor • William MacLeod Raine
... silence followed. I could hear them slowly dripping out of eternity in the tick of a watch near me. I felt the stare of many eyes invisible to me. A broad beam of bright light shot through the gloom, resting full upon my face. I started back upon the strong hands behind me. Then I felt my muscles tighten as I ...
— D'Ri and I • Irving Bacheller
... the clock, but the great book, the book with infinite vistas in it, shall not be read by men with a rim of time around it. The place of it is unmeasured, and there is no sound that men can make which shall tick in that place. ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... some huge iguanodon or a hipsohopus would pass, shaking the ground with its tread; but so implicit was the travellers' trust in the vigilance of their mechanical and tireless watch, that they slept on as calmly and unconcernedly as though they had been in their beds at home, while the tick was as constant and regular as a sentry's march. The wires of course did not protect them from creatures having wings, and they ran some risk of a visitation from the blood-sucking bats. The far-away volcanoes occasionally sent up sheets of flame, which in the distance were like ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor
... god, and I grow sick Of heaven's heights. We plunge to the valley to hear the tick Of days and nights. We walk and loiter around the Loom To see, if we may, The Hand that smashes the beam in the gloon To the shuttle's play; Who grows the wool, who cards and spins, Who clips and ties; For the storied weave of the ...
— Toward the Gulf • Edgar Lee Masters
... a maudlin state and his wife remarked, "Well, you are beautiful. With the accent on the full." Another was of a man who wanted unlimited credit at a bar and was told, "I like not your arithmetic. With the accent on the tick." All very poor literature, perhaps, but it amused, and this night after singing three verses of the old song, Sanders "turned loose" on a verse of his own which, when heard, the mess applauded and chorused to the echo, and broke up singing again and again ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... shrank so sadly as to become hardly visible to the mind's eye. In the fourth inning, however, it began to pick up, and in the seventh it had resumed its normal shape, and in the ninth it was as big as a dinner-plate and we could hear it tick, although hung in Moses Levy's secluded retreat on Dearborn Street, two and one-half miles distant. As we were riding over to the base-ball grounds Cowen's eyes rested on a vision of female loveliness—a girl he knew—standing ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... Irish blood in me, old chappie," said he, "and that means a natural taste for amateur conspiracy and general devilment. But don't let's stay jawing here any longer. We're both due for a good jaunt ashore, and there's a bran-new tick here to guarantee us every mortal thing (bar one) which we want. And for that one, which is almost always a ready-money commodity, it will do us good to wait till we've tapped the ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne
... child's pattern sense which we shall discuss at length under "Form." Now the pleasure of enumeration, like that of a refrain, is in part at least a pleasure in muscle pattern. My two-year-old daughter composed a song which well illustrates the fascination of enumeration. The refrain "Tick-tock" was borrowed from a song which had been ...
— Here and Now Story Book - Two- to seven-year-olds • Lucy Sprague Mitchell
... distant drumming As the clock goes tick-a-tack, And the chiming of the hours Is the music of his pack. You may hardly note their growling Underneath the noonday sun, But at night you hear ...
— Songs of Action • Arthur Conan Doyle
... men in shirt-sleeves prowled backwards and forwards—as the tigers do about feeding time in the Zoo. They, too, had super-hearing. From little funnels that looked like electric light shades they caught the tick of the messages, and chalked the figures of the latest prices as they altered with the dealing on the floor upon a huge blackboard that ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton
... "'Tick'larly at your age, sir. Why, I almost wish my wound hadn't got well. It did give me something to think about. If I go on with nothing to do much longer, they'll have to dig a ...
— The Young Castellan - A Tale of the English Civil War • George Manville Fenn
... huddled together. Around the sides bunks were framed on pieces of scantling that extended from floor to ceiling, arranged in three tiers, so that a floor space of six feet by four sufficed for six men. My cotton tick was never refilled, and after doing service for many months it became flat and hard. Our quarters and accommodations were such as the Yankees thought good enough for rebels and traitors, but in summer we were uncomfortably and unhealthily crowded, and in winter we suffered from the cold, because ...
— Reminiscences of a Rebel • Wayland Fuller Dunaway
... "A tick," explained Ginger. "A rotter. He was pretty generally barred at school. Personally, I never had any use ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... hands. He never was flogged, but it was a wonder how he escaped the whipping-post. When he had money he spent it royally in tarts for himself and his friends; he has been known to disburse nine and sixpence out of ten shillings awarded to him in a single day. When he had no funds he went on tick. When he could get no credit he went without, and was almost as happy. He has been known to take a thrashing for a crony without saying a word; but a blow, ever so slight from a friend, would make him roar. To fighting he was averse from his ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... about that time, and the reading would be apt to continue. But no sooner was there stillness than it began again—tick, tick, tick. With a wild explosion of blasphemy, the book would go across the floor and the light would disappear. Sometimes, when he couldn't sleep, he would dress and walk out in the street for an hour, while the cruel Steve slept like ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... of influences,—through the order and gravity and solemn monotone of life at home, with the unceasing tick-tack of the clock forever resounding through clean, empty-seeming rooms,—through the sea, ever shining, ever smiling, dimpling, soliciting, like a magical charger who comes saddled and bridled and offers ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... ah toon me nick ah keeng e mah me quom ah kik e kewh me zeh ah mik e newh me squeh ahn doohm e qua me tigk ah nungk I yahdt nah maih ah owh kah yawsk ne gigk ah pa ke tahn ne peh ah pweh ke quis ne peeng ah sin ke nwazhe ne sing ah tick mah quah ...
— Sketch of Grammar of the Chippeway Languages - To Which is Added a Vocabulary of some of the Most Common Words • John Summerfield
... I stay in that cursed room?" he mutters, striding wildly among the sand-hills. "The very tick of the clock was enough to drive one mad in those long fearful pauses—solemn and silent as death! Can't the fools do anything for her? What is the use of nurses and doctors, and all the humbug of medicine and science? My darling! my darling! It was too cruel to hear you wailing and crying, ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... hearing can be tested by finding the distance at which the various members of the class can hear a watch-tick. The teacher can plan an experiment using whispering instead of the watch-tick. (See the author's Examination ...
— The Science of Human Nature - A Psychology for Beginners • William Henry Pyle
... he couldn't have his own selfish way, Hen, with much grumbling, arranged the coats on two chairs not far from the fire. When he considered the coats dry enough he crawled into his chosen bunk, grumbling at the coarse tick filled only with dried leaves, and was covered by Dick and Greg. Then the other fellows, after replenishing the fire, sat down ...
— The Grammar School Boys Snowbound - or, Dick & Co. at Winter Sports • H. Irving Hancock
... when she gets married he will give her "a feather bed and a cow," and feel that her claim upon him has been handsomely met. The gift of a feather bed is rather interesting, too, when you consider that it is the daughter who has raised the geese, plucked them, and made the bed-tick. But "father" gives it to her just the same. The son, for a corresponding term of service, ...
— In Times Like These • Nellie L. McClung
... "Tick," sounded the wheel and the sound reverberated like sudden thunder in his ears. His hand was iron, and he raised it slightly. "Six," said the ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... had a persistent, relentless, remorseless regularity. Tick, tick—tick, tick. Every moment it appeared to be louder and louder. His brow wrinkled and his head bent forward more deeply, while his eyes were set straight before him. Tick, tick—tick, tick. The solemn beat became human as he listened. He ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... I have so many things to think of about my work and the young gentlemen that I haven't got room to remember everything; and I always have to tick things off." ...
— Glyn Severn's Schooldays • George Manville Fenn
... had also acquired some useful accomplishments. I could paddle my skiff up to Surly Hall and back, swim across the river at Upper Hope, and had even begun to get in debt, having some weeks ago "gone tick" with Joe Hyde for a couple of bottles of ginger-beer, with the proviso of returning them when empty, but which, it must be confessed, were still lying at the bottom of Deadman's Hole, for the farther ...
— Confessions of an Etonian • I. E. M.
... Edward. "But anyhow the notes and things stopped, and so did the shillings. Bobby was fairly cornered, for he had bought two ferrets on tick, and promised to pay a shilling a week, thinking the shillings were going on for ever, the silly young ass. So when the week was up, and he was being dunned for the shilling, he went off to the fellow and said, 'Your broken-hearted Bella implores you to meet her at sundown,—by the hollow ...
— The Golden Age • Kenneth Grahame
... bit of weather herself, and can't quit station. I've turned in a General Call, so even if they don't see our beam some one's bound to help—or else we must. Shall I clear our slings? Hold on! Here we are! A Planet liner, too! She'll be up in a tick!" ...
— Actions and Reactions • Rudyard Kipling
... now about time for dinner, which was always pulled off on the tick of the clock. On the ranch in camp the cook always calls "Grub pile!" for the hands. In the home ranch he's more particular, and he says, "Come and git it!" when dinner's ready. But here, in our new house, ...
— The Man Next Door • Emerson Hough
... distinguished either by lightness or by sureness of touch. A dozen of Mendelssohn's pupils could have done as well or better. In the andante their is neither grace nor feeling: the music does not flow spontaneously, but is got along by a clockwork tick-tick rhythm. The best stuff is in the finale. Here we find at least sturdiness ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... George, "what makes you call that great clumsy dog 'Watch'? A watch goes 'tick, tick,' as busy as can be all the time; and this dog is ...
— The Nursery, November 1873, Vol. XIV. No. 5 • Various
... I saw a man— A fat man with dull eyes aleer— Within the shadow of the van; And I was on the point to rise To send him spinning 'mid the wheels And stop his leering grin with mud ... And would have done it in a tick ... When, suddenly, alive with fright, She started, with red, parted lips, As though she guessed we'd come to grips, And turned her black eyes full on me ... And as I looked into their light My heart forgot the lust of fight, And something shot me to the ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various
... which made all men welcome to their tables, a person may be notoriously both unwilling and unable to pay, and still find credit for the necessaries of life in the stores of Monterey. Now this villainous habit of living upon "tick" has grown into Californian nature. I do not mean that the American and European storekeepers of Monterey are as lax as Mexicans; I mean that American farmers in many parts of the State expect unlimited credit, and profit ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... above them, driving them with a lash that their chained limbs may not resist. Such men, if they try to explain that torment, can often point to the very day and even hour of their sudden slavery; at such a tick of the clock the clouds gather, the very houses and street are weighted with a cold malignity, thoughts, desires, impulses are all checked, perverted, driven and counter-driven by a mysterious force. Let no man who has not known such hours and ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... He heard her slip the picture from the envelope, and he knew that she was looking at it. He heard his watch tick in the stillness, and her absolute silence frightened him. It lasted, perhaps, a moment more and then he turned and looked at her. She was standing erect with the picture in her hand. He saw that she had turned it over and that it was upon ...
— A Beautiful Alien • Julia Magruder
... Tick the clock with a wooden sound, And fill the hearing with childish glee Of rhyming riddle, or story found In the Robinson Crusoe, leather-bound Old book ...
— Afterwhiles • James Whitcomb Riley
... to one, and backed him for four pounds. He had to push and elbow his way through a struggling crowd; immediately after the bet was made, Eyot's quotation was reduced by two points in response to signals tick-tacked from the inclosures. This, of course, argued a decided following for Dale's selection, and these eleventh hour movements in the turf market are illuminative. Before he got back to the car there was a mighty shout of "They're off!" and he saw ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... them, told us that it was come.... Mr. Mompesson and I and a gentleman that came with me went up. I heard a strange scratching as I went up the stairs, and when we came into the room I perceived it was just behind the bolster of the children's bed and seemed to be against the tick. It was as loud a scratching as one with long nails could make upon a bolster. There were two modest little girls in the bed, between seven and eight years old, as I guessed. I saw their hands out of the clothes, and they could not contribute ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce
... been flung over the end of the bed, corded it about him, and switched on the electric light. Then he passed out into the big common room, with its chairs drawn together in overnight comradeship, and the solemn tick of the big clock to emphasize the desolation. He paused a second to switch on the lights, then went to the door and flung ...
— The Keepers of the King's Peace • Edgar Wallace
... corpulent, but has a remarkably fine face; the Grecian character is finely portrayed in it; she excels to admiration in deep tragedy. In Mrs. Beverly, in the play of the 'Gamesters' a few nights ago, she so arrested the attention of the house that you might hear your watch tick in your fob, and, at the close of the play, when she utters an hysteric laugh for joy that her husband was not a murderer, there were different ladies in the boxes who actually went into hysterics and were obliged to be carried out of the theatre. This I think is ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Samuel F. B. Morse
... some upside down, and one standing upright. The door by which he had entered was at one side, on the other side was another, and between the two stood a sofa, the shape of which was plainly discernible under the sand. Over this was a clock, which had ticked its last tick. ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille
... Canonical Law from morn to dewy eve in the lecture-hall or the library of my inn, and, as soon as the shades of night are falling fast, in returning to my domicilium at Ladbroke Grove with the undeviating punctuality of a tick? ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... little money—not much—and transformed Camp One. Every bunk was provided with a tick, which the men could fill with hay, balsam, or hemlock, as suited them. Cheap but attractive curtains on wires at once brightened the room and shut each man's "bedroom" from the main hall. The deacon seat remained but was supplemented by a half-dozen simple and comfortable ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... bed and bedding, My only chattels worth the sledding, Consisting of a maple stead, A counterpane, and coverlet, Two cases with the pillows in, A blanket, cord, a winch and pin, Two sheets, a feather bed and hay-tick, I order sledded up to Natick, And that with care the sledder save them For those kind parents, ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... left at our last repast. Night came right down in the midst of my cares and tribulations. A slight drizzling rain began to fall. The stillness of a prairie is a damper to the best of spirits—the entire suspension of all noises and sounds, not even the tick of an insect to break the black, dull, dark monotony, is a wet blanket to cheerfulness. I really think the stillness of a large prairie is one of the most painful sensations of loneliness, a man ever encountered. The sombre and dreary monotony of a dungeon, ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... shovelled among the soil upon his coffin would forthwith quicken {8a} him. Sooth to say, there is ne'er a buckhound in the county but he treateth him as a godchild, patting him on the head, soothing his velvety ear between thumb and forefinger, ejecting tick from tenement, calling him 'fine fellow,' 'noble lad,' and giving him his blessing, as one dearer to him than a king's debt to a debtor, {8b} or a bastard to a dad of eighty. This is the only kindness I ever heard of Master Silas toward ...
— Citation and Examination of William Shakspeare • Walter Savage Landor
... nothing was heard but the loud tick of the old clock and a mournful whine front Sancho, shut up in the shed lest he should go to church without ...
— Under the Lilacs • Louisa May Alcott
... in the eighteenth century among divines as well as philosophers; the theory which Goethe (to do him justice), and after him Mr. Thomas Carlyle, have treated with such noble scorn; the theory, I mean, that God has wound up the universe like a clock, and left it to tick by itself till it runs down, never troubling Himself with it, save possibly—for even that was only half believed—by rare miraculous interferences with the laws which He Himself had made? Out of that chilling dream of a dead universe ungoverned ...
— Scientific Essays and Lectures • Charles Kingsley
... sugar in cake or loaf. papaya. a fruit. pastorela. a drama relative to the Nativity. pastores. shepherds. patio. inside court of house. pelico, mai. tobacco, with chili and lime. peso. a money denomination, one hundred centavos, one dollar. petate. mat. pinolillo. a species of tick. pinto. a disease, spotted skin. pita. a fibre. pitero. a fifer. pito. fife. plaza. town square. portales. a building with corridor in front. posol, posole. corn prepared to carry on journey, for mixing with water. prefecto. prefect. presidente. president. ...
— In Indian Mexico (1908) • Frederick Starr
... climbed the rocky mountains, we've plodded o'er the plain, We've bid a wild defiance to the drizzling, drenching rain; And yielding to the influence of your coquettish weather, We've grilled beneath the sunshine on thy "tick" infected heather. ...
— The Sunny Side of Ireland - How to see it by the Great Southern and Western Railway • John O'Mahony and R. Lloyd Praeger
... to make his six or eight shillings a week. I have often sat with him in the darkness that his "cruizey" lamp could not pierce, while his mutterings to himself of "ay, ay, yes, umpha, oh ay, ay man," came as regularly and monotonously as the tick of his "wag-at-the-wa'" clock. Hendry and he were paid no fixed sum for their services in the Auld Licht kirk, but once a year there was a collection for each of them, and so they jogged along. ...
— Auld Licht Idyls • J.M. Barrie
... the tick-tick! Aw, I wouldn't bite into it... oh, well, darn it, if nothing else'll do yuh, why, eat ...
— Cabin Fever • B. M. Bower
... it, as he did every thing, very easily. "I don't see why Aunt Selina should make such a fuss. Why need you do anything, Aunt Hilary? Can't we hold out a little longer, and live upon tick till I get into practice? Of course, I shall then take care of you all; I'm the head of the family. How horribly dark this ...
— Mistress and Maid • Dinah Craik (aka: Miss Mulock)
... girls are shovel-feeted, and she wishes they could not walk one step, only lie in bed!" exclaimed the largest girl, sitting down on a straw-tick to discuss the matter. "Then we should be cripples, and, tokee! how many cripples there ...
— Big and Little Sisters • Theodora R. Jenness
... while the silence of the room was unbroken, save for the steady tick-tock of a great clock in one corner. Mr. Grimm's eyes were fixed unwaveringly upon those of the chief executive. At last the secretary of war crumpled a sheet of paper impatiently and hitched his chair up ...
— Elusive Isabel • Jacques Futrelle
... sketch. He discovered the now celebrated change of dimensions produced by the magnetization of soft iron by the current. The peculiar noise which accompanies the magnetization of an iron bar by the current, sometimes called the "magnetic tick," was thus explained. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 363, December 16, 1882 • Various
... at night to tell his landlady how he had been seeking for a job. I believe this kind of existence was not unpleasant to Alick himself, and he might have long continued to enjoy idleness and a life on tick; but he had a comrade, let us call him Brown, who grew restive. This fellow was continually threatening to slip his cable for the States, and at last, one Wednesday, Glasgow was left widowed of her Brown. Some months afterwards, Alick met another ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... home has fallen into sympathetic hands. Today Queen Anne chairs and piecrust tables grace the parlor. From the hall comes the vibrating tick-tock of a fine old clock. Logs blaze cheerfully in open fireplaces, the flames reflected in old and polished silver. The hall window frames Catherine Brown's garden, which is divided into three sections, one shut ...
— Seaport in Virginia - George Washington's Alexandria • Gay Montague Moore
... whom she met in the vestibule—"I cannot divine the reason, but this bridal has to me the semblance of a funeral. God shield us all from evil! there is a cold deathlike chill throughout the house. I heard—(though, my lady, I do not believe in such superstitions,) but I heard the death-watch tick—tick—ticking, as plain as I hear the old clock now chime seven! And I saw—I was wide awake—yet I saw a thin misty countenance, formed as of the white spray of the salt-sea wave, so sparkling, so shadowy, yet so clear, come between me and the ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... nowadays. The Front Trenches have about as much use for the Front Benches as a big-game hunter for mosquitoes. The bayonet professor indicates his row of dummies and says to his lads, "Just imagine they are Cabinet Ministers—go!" and in a clock-tick the heavens are raining shreds of sacking and particles of straw. The demon bomber fancies some prominent Parliamentarian is lurking in the opposite sap, grits his teeth, and gets an extra ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 26, 1917 • Various
... so high she had to climb on a chair to get in. She heard Maria's heavy feet go shuffling down the stairs. A door banged. Then it was so still she could hear the clock tick in ...
— The Little Colonel • Annie Fellows Johnston
... digressing—it is my usual fault. We invested presently in a Chippendale sideboard, and a tall clock which gave me no peace night or day until I heard its mellow tick and strike in our own dim little hall. The aperture in the Sum was now plainly visible, and by the time we had added the desk, which I had felt unable to afford at the start, and a chair to match, it had become an orifice that widened to a gap, with the still further addition of a small but not ...
— The Van Dwellers - A Strenuous Quest for a Home • Albert Bigelow Paine
... foliage on the lilac-bush beside her. All at once the flowering branches on a wide-spreading apple-tree cut the gloom like great silvery wings of a brooding bird. The grass in the yard was like a shaggy silver fleece. Charlotte paid no more attention to it all than to her own breath, or a clock tick which she would have to withdraw from herself ...
— Pembroke - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... kite evenly balanced; otherwise it may be lopsided. Fasten on the strings of the frame, beginning at the neck at equal distances from the spine, as indicated by the dotted lines in the diagram. Extend a string slantingly from the arms tick to the head on both sides of the spinal column, and run all the other strings as shown in the cut, being careful that both sides of ...
— The Boy Mechanic: Volume 1 - 700 Things For Boys To Do • Popular Mechanics
... flora. In these respects, as well as from an ethnological standpoint, Barotseland essentially belongs not to South but to Central Africa. The great river has also served to prevent the spread from South Africa into Barotseland of such disastrous cattle diseases as tick fever and lung sickness. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... alone in the dirt and filth. It was just at the foot of the mountain and no neighbors under half a mile. I say he lived there, but he wasn't there more than a third of the time. The boy will remember how he used to go along the road, full as a tick, and the school children making fun of him and then running before he could get at them. I don't know as he would, though. There never was any harm in him, only he did neglect himself so he was an awful sight. And the only time he was in his little ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... cried, "I'm on that. Bet you a quid—But, no. You'd hardly lay against your own opinion. Just wait a tick. I'll ...
— The Postmaster's Daughter • Louis Tracy
... sighing, 'what shall that gamester set, who has already played for all he had, and lost it at a cast?' 'O, madam,' replied Antonet,'the young and fair find credit every where, there is still a prospect of a return, and that gamester that plays thus upon the tick is sure to lose but little; and if they win it is all clear gains.' 'I find,' said Sylvia, 'you are a good manager in love; you are for the frugal part of it.' 'Faith, madam,' said Antonet, 'I am indeed of that opinion, that love and interest always do ...
— Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister • Aphra Behn
... voice, speaking from Boston to Omaha, can vibrate more than a million pounds of copper wire; and he will invent a finer system of time to fit the telephone, which can do as many different things in a second as a man can do in a day, transmitting with every tick of the clock from twenty-five to eighty thousand vibrations. He will deal with the various vibrations of nerves and wires and wireless air, that are necessary in conveying thought between two separated minds. He will make clear how a thought, originating in the brain, ...
— The History of the Telephone • Herbert N. Casson
... stroll backwards and forwards by the lakeside. Encouragement was all very well; but... "Shall I—shall I not? Shall I—shall I not? Shall I—shall I not?" The eternal question went tick-tack, tick-tack, to the rhythm of his march. He glared at vacancy, and tried hard to ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... over!' I said to myself; 'and I could come here, and to all the lovely places I know, without this awful contraction of the heart, and this knowledge that at every tick of my watch some human body is being mangled or destroyed. Ah, if only I could! Will ...
— Tatterdemalion • John Galsworthy
... unconditional surrender of the machinery of government; zealots urged revolts against all manner of constituted authority. The point was to gain for the barber, the tailor, the shoemaker and the blacksmith more life, more political experience, more freedom of choice—and right on the next tick ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... however, from which my eye takes more pleasure is one of those old clocks which reach from the ceiling to the floor, and conceal all the mystery and solemnity of pendulum and weights from the vulgar gaze. It has a very loud and self-asserting tick, and a still more arrogant strike, for such an old clock; but, then, everybody here has a voice that is much stronger than is needed, and it is the habit to scream in ordinary conversation. A clock, therefore, could not make itself heard by such people as these Quercynois, unless it ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... fall, and my hold of you were to give way, I should be down after you in a less moment than a lady's watch can tick, and catch you long before you had ...
— At the Back of the North Wind • George MacDonald
... officer who has not felt it, particularly in the beginning, before he is assured in his own presence. But if the greater part of the officer corps were ever to become absorbed in the business of taking men apart to see what makes them tick, thereby superinducing self-consciousness all down the line, an irremediable blight would come upon the services. There is no need to look that deeply. What matters mainly is that an officer will know how men are won to accept authority, how they can be made ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... then fight over what they have; then they eat too much French candy, and get sick and cross, and the whole house is filled with their noise. So mamma has a headache; and papa longs for his office, and misses the tick-tick of the stock telegraph, and thinks what a confounded nuisance holidays are. That is what Christmas is like ...
— Christmas - Its Origin, Celebration and Significance as Related in Prose and Verse • Various
... them or—or others. Things is purty tick'lish—you know that, widder. The King ain't treatin' us right, an' his ministers and advisers don't care anything about these colonies, 'ceptin' if we don't make 'em rich. Then they trouble us. And the governors are mostly all alike. I don't think a bit better of Benning ...
— With Ethan Allen at Ticonderoga • W. Bert Foster
... Around and around In the turret stair He clambers, to where The wheelwork is, With its tick, click, whizz, Reposefully measuring Each day to its end That mortal men spend In sorrowing and pleasuring Nightly thus does he climb To the trackway ...
— Moments of Vision • Thomas Hardy
... years between the bells that ring for their majority, and those that will toll for my decease. It is enough for me that I have a brother and a sister—that my brother's son will inherit my estates—and that, in the meantime, he grudges me every tick in that clock. What then? If he had been my uncle, I had done the same. Meanwhile, I see as little of him as good breeding will permit. On the face of a rich man's heir is written the rich man's memento mori! But ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... bent: remarked what a marvelous mingling of grace and power was in his form and bearing: as the watch ticked again, she saw him spring forward and upward, grasping and dragging down both reins in his hands: another tick—he was dashed against Dolly's shoulder, and his body swung around along the shaft, but without loosening his hold upon the reins: tick, tick, tick, the mare's headway was slackened; the dragging at the bit of that great weight was more than she could carry; tick, tick, tick, she staggered ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... at the nest there was only one bee, And only one berry to pick, And only one drink in the jug at the tree: But that boy was as full as a tick. ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... make start on like cow and ting. They ain't treat you like a beast. Ain't take no advance o' you. What the Cap'n do he do for you good. I b'long Dr. Ward. I entitle to bring him two string o' bird. Rice bird come like jest as tick as dat (thick as that) Sometimes ...
— Slave Narratives Vol. XIV. South Carolina, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... liked to pretend that she was indistinguishable from the rest, and that when a wet day drove her to the Underground or omnibus, she gave and took her share of crowd and wet with clerks and typists and commercial men, and shared with them the serious business of winding-up the world to tick ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... knitting at one side of the ingle. The kitten, with a bell attached to a ribbon about its neck, sported with the bows of her dainty slippers. Only the click of the needles, and the tinkle of the bell, and the hollow tick of the great clock in ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... wish my duns would do the same, even if it were only my washerwoman; but there's no more tick for me here, except this old watch of my father's, which serves to remind me of what I cannot obtain from others—time; but, however, there is a time for all things, and when the time comes that my romance is ready, my ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... done in," said he. "It makes one feel like a Sultan. You have just to clap your hands and say 'I want this,' and you've got it. I've a good mind to say to this dear lady, 'Fetch their gracious Majesties from Buckingham Palace,' and I'm sure they'd be here in a tick. It's awfully good of ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... corridor outside, whose ticking sounded dull and muffled from the distance, yet it penetrated, with clear, sharp vibrations, to the brain of the sick man, and seemed to him, in the gathering excitement of this fearful hour, to grow louder and louder, till each tick sounded to his sharpened sense like the vibrations of a bell, and seemed to be the funeral knell of his destiny; sounding thus to his ears, solemnly, fatefully, bodingly; pealing forth thus with ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille |
