"Tinker" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of other riddles than those here given see Brooke, English Literature from the Beginning to the Norman Conquest, Pancoast and Spaeth, Early English Poems, and Cook and Tinker, Selections from Old ...
— Old English Poems - Translated into the Original Meter Together with Short Selections from Old English Prose • Various
... bicycling, auto racing, kite flying, hiking, rock climbing, aviation, target-shooting, sailing, caving, juggling, skiing, skating (ice and roller). Hackers' delight in techno-toys also tends to draw them towards hobbies with nifty complicated equipment that they can tinker with. ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... and papa thinks Mr. Null a remarkably clever man." Zo stood by frowning, while these smooth conventionalities trickled over her sister's lips. Carmina asked what was the matter. Zo looked gloomily at the dog on the rug. "I wish I was Tinker," she said. Maria smiled sweetly. "Dear Zoe, what a very strange wish! What would you do, if you were Tinker?" The dog, hearing his name, rose and shook himself. Zo pointed to him, with an appearance of the deepest interest. "He hasn't got to brush his hair, before he goes out for a walk; ...
— Heart and Science - A Story of the Present Time • Wilkie Collins
... store was beginning. Steam was up in the engine, and the coffee-mills were grinding merrily. Mr. Gifford and all his clerks were busied with other matters, and Jack was left to tinker away at the Alligator press. "She's ready to run. I'll start her," he ...
— Crowded Out o' Crofield - or, The Boy who made his Way • William O. Stoddard
... "You saucy tinker's apprentice, if you don't cease your jaw, I'll——" But here she gasped for breath, unable to hawk up any more words, for the last volley of O'Connell had nearly knocked the wind out ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous
... muscle in the sun. For walk or ride take the mind over greater distances than a throbbing whirl with stiffening joints and cramped limbs through a dozen counties. Surely you seem to cover vaster spaces with Lavengro, footing it with gipsies or driving his tinker's cart across lonely commons, than with many a globe-trotter or steam-yachtsman with diary or log? And even that dividing line — strictly marked and rarely overstepped — between the man who bicycles and the man who walks, is less due to a prudent regard for personal safety of ...
— Pagan Papers • Kenneth Grahame
... shivered upon the girl's dark head and played about the bundle of white over which her hands were busy. She moved aside to avoid it, but it followed her, and when she moved back it followed again and danced in her lap as if it were a live thing with a malicious sense of humor. It might have been Tinker Bell out of Peter Pan, only it did not jingle. Mlle. O'Hara uttered an exclamation of annoyance, and Ste. Marie laughed at her, but in a moment the leaves overhead were still again, and the sunbeam, with a sense of humor, was gone to torment ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... tinker, Dobson? I would not trust such a bungler to shoe a goat. No, no; none but uncle Tom Thumper ...
— McGuffey's Fourth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... you done to edify, You clammy chapel tinker? What act like his of days gone by— The grand ...
— The Poems of Henry Kendall • Henry Kendall
... had lost his father, a clever tinker who could make silver brooches and mend brass kettles and had married an Irish colleen in a seashore village. Then pirates raided the coast, and the Irish girl with her baby escaped only by hiding in a cellar under a ruined house. When the boy was seven years old his mother died, and since ...
— Masters of the Guild • L. Lamprey
... as a starved veezel — 0, Molly, hadst thou seen him come down the ladder, in a shurt so scanty, that it could not kiver his nakedness! — The young 'squire called him Dunquickset; but he looked for all the world like Cradoc-ap-Morgan, the ould tinker, that suffered at Abergany for steeling of kettle — Then he's a profane scuffle, and, as Mr Clinker says, no better than an impfiddle, continually playing upon the pyebill and the new-burth — I doubt he has as little manners as money; for he can't say a civil ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... desolateness of lonely wolds, with the passion of loyalty to a leader. Read "Deor's Lament," "Widsith," "The Wanderer," "The Sea-farer," or the battle-songs of Brunanburh and Maldon in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. [Footnote: See Cook and Tinker, Select Translations from Old English Poetry (Boston, 1902), and Pancoast and Spaeth, Early English Poems (New York, 1911).] The last strophe of "Deor's Lament," our oldest English ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... the same words are expressed by Rom, romni, and romnipen. D, be it observed, very often changes to r in its transfer from Hindoo to Romany. Thus doi, "a wooden spoon," becomes in gypsy roi, a term known to every tinker in London. But, while this was probably the origin of the word Rom, there were subsequent reasons for its continuance. Among the Cophts, who were more abundant in Egypt when the first gypsies went there, the word ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... If not, disconnect the ground wire and examine all connections. Also press the sounder of each instrument down and see if it springs back readily. It may be that some screw is too tight, or too loose, or that a spring has come off; tinker awhile and see if you cannot make the instrument work. If you are unable to do ...
— Common Science • Carleton W. Washburne
... Zacatecas which recalled far-away Hong Kong, China. This was the prosecution of various trades in the open air. Thus the shoemaker was at work outside of his dwelling; the tailor, the barber, and the tinker adopted the same practice, quite possible even in the month of March in a land of such intense brightness and sunshine. We wandered hither and thither, charmed by the novelty and strangeness of everything; ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... was an Englishman, believed to be the son of a gipsy tinker. He said his youth was very ungodly; but he married a religious woman and early became a preacher. At the same time he began to write books of a religious nature. Because he preached at "unlawful meetings" ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... as we went, and had a nice little sentimental conversation. There are depths of human feeling I should never have suspected in this lazy panther of a woman, and although she openly avows having no more education than a tinker's dog, she can talk with considerable force and vividness ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... to puzzle out his philosophy. For the ordinary French philosophy of the war is very simple. They have no high-falutin, altruistic ideas of improving the Boche. They don't care a tinker's curse what happens to the unholy brood beyond the Rhine, so long as they are beaten, humiliated, subjected: so long as there is no chance of their ever deflowering again with their brutality the sacred soil of France. The French ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... Sir, I am very much obliged to you.—You send a brazier to challenge me, and now, I suppose, you have brought a travelling tinker for his second. ...
— John Bull - The Englishman's Fireside: A Comedy, in Five Acts • George Colman
... state of the roads troubles him not. Give him a screw-hammer, a bundle of rags, an oil-can, and something to sit down upon, and he is happy for the day. He has to put up with certain disadvantages, of course; there is no joy without alloy. He himself always looks like a tinker, and his machine always suggests the idea that, having stolen it, he has tried to disguise it; but as he rarely gets beyond the first milestone with it, this, perhaps, does not much matter. The mistake ...
— Three Men on the Bummel • Jerome K. Jerome
... claim for his mother, who so long formed one of this queer household, a degree of refinement superior to that of her surroundings. After describing the daily dinner-party in the kitchen—master, mistress, servants, with an occasional "travelling rat-catcher or tinker"—he skilfully points out that his mother's feelings must have resembled those of the boarding-school miss in his father's "Widow's Tale" when subjected to ...
— Crabbe, (George) - English Men of Letters Series • Alfred Ainger
... Essay Concerning the Human Understanding, the two diarists Evelyn and Pepys, and the critics Rymer and Langbaine; there was Isaac Newton, who expounded in his Principia, 1687, the laws of gravitation; and there was the preaching tinker, who, confined in Bedford jail, gave to the world in 1678 one of its greatest ...
— Palamon and Arcite • John Dryden
... the drunkard manufacturing machine behind her. That confounded pot, as round as the stomach of a tinker's fat wife, with its nose that was so long and twisted, sent a shiver down her back, a fear mingled with a desire. Yes, one might have thought it the metal pluck of some big wicked woman, of some witch who was discharging drop by drop the fire of her entrails. A fine source ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... suppose—tinkering round, as he does. The everlasting loafer, artist, tinker, poet, gardener. 'Pon my soul, he's like the game we used to do with cherry-stones round the pudding plate. Don't you know? Soldier, sailor, tinker, tailor, and all the rest. He's all those things, and has two pair of bags to his name, and lives in a cart, and's a gentleman. Not ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... Stinson, a lady aviatrix, will fly from Grant Park to the ball park, and just before the battle starts Manager Tinker will be presented with a ...
— News Writing - The Gathering , Handling and Writing of News Stories • M. Lyle Spencer
... you have never learned to use tools properly," said his father. "Where do you suppose I'd be now if I hadn't started out when I was a boy to tinker round a farm? That's where I got my manual training, and there isn't a course in the country that can equal it. I had to use my brains, too, as well as my hands, for very often the things I needed were not to be had and I ...
— The Story of Porcelain • Sara Ware Bassett
... Emma," reproved old Grandma Watterby severely. "Here, Betty, you sit next to me, and Bob can have Will's place. He's gone over to Flame City with a bolt he wants the blacksmith to tinker up." ...
— Betty Gordon at Boarding School - The Treasure of Indian Chasm • Alice Emerson
... that would fling heaven's gates off the hinges,' 'a bat,' 'an angel of darkness.' Such epithets sound strangely in our more refined age; but they were then considered essential to faithful dealing. The Bishop in his reply, called 'Dirt wiped off,' beat the tinker in abusive language; he calls Bunyan 'A wretched scribbler,' 'grossly ignorant,' 'most unchristian and wicked,' 'a piece of proud folly,' 'so very dirty a creature that he disdains to dirt his fingers with him,' 'Bunyan ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... describes, are endured upon a public stage, thought he, why may not I?—cannot I be as useful as them? besides I can—but these men sing, I suppose—do not they sing John, much better than me?" "Noa, I tell thee they doan't: sing better than thee! they can't sing at all. A tinker's jackass is as good at it as any of them I see here. When they are on the stage (I went three or four times with our Sall to the play) od rot 'un—they make a noise by way of a song, and the musicianers sing for them on their fiddles." ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 4, April 1810 • Various
... with the clergyman as he steps on the grass outside. Don't I know that his being there is a compromise, and that he stands before me an Act of Parliament? That the church he occupies was built for other worship? That the Methodist chapel is next door; and that Bunyan the tinker is bawling out the tidings of damnation on the common hard by? Yes, I am a Sadducee; and I take things as I find them, and the world, and the Acts of Parliament of the world, as they are; and as I intend to ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... into, sir. I found the garage all right, left her safe and sound, came back here, but after dinner thought I'd go round again to tinker a bit at the car in case of an early start to-morrow. When I got to the place there were three new fellows on duty, and they seemed astonished when they saw I intended to work on the Gloria. The chauffeur who looked after that car had been in, they said; and you can believe, ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... same year, an old woman, named Marion Haw, was returned upon that, her native parish, from Glasgow. She had led a migratory life with her son—who was what he called a bell-hanger, but in fact a tinker of the worst grade—for many years, and was at last returned to the muckle town in a state of great destitution. She gave the parishioners a history of the Mysterious Bride, so plausibly correct, but withal so ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... was Nathan Perry, with a mechanical instinct that gloried in adjustment. He loved to tinker and potter and patch things up. Now something was wrong with the gearing of his heart action. His theory was that Anne was for the moment crazy. He could see nothing to get excited about over the renomination and election of Judge Van Dorn. The men in the mine where ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... were blind mendicants, with patched or bandaged eyes; crippled ones, with wooden legs and crutches; diseased ones, with running sores peeping from ineffectual wrappings; there was a villain-looking pedlar with his pack; a knife-grinder, a tinker, and a barber-surgeon, with the implements of their trades; some of the females were hardly-grown girls, some were at prime, some were old and wrinkled hags, and all were loud, brazen, foul-mouthed; and all soiled and slatternly; there were ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... was broken right in the middle; through its four socketless eyes, neighboured by the nettle, peered the thistle,—the thistle! a forest of thistles!—and, to complete the degradation of the whole, those thistles had attracted the donkey of an itinerant tinker; and the irreverent animal was in the very act of taking his luncheon out of the eyes ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... covered with straw, and then a carpet is stretched over it, which makes a particularly bulgy, uneven surface to stand dressing-tables and things on. The straw, too, is apt to stick out where it is least expected, and gives one rather the feeling of being a tinker sleeping in a barn. At night a tent is an awesome place. It is terrible to have no door to lock, and to be entirely at the mercy of anything that creeps and crawls; to have only a mosquito-net between you and an awful end. I woke last night to hear ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas
... temperament, in his richness of representation and ingenuity of analogy, and in his forcible quaintness of style, as completely as he did in social status and in personal surroundings. In complete contrast to the romantic productions of the self-educated tinker of Bedford, the works of Walton and Evelyn were at any rate influenced by, though they can hardly be said to have been moulded upon, the style of the preceding age of old English prose writers ending with Milton. The influence of the latter is, indeed, plainly noticeable ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... fade. He took to haunting department-store kitchenware sections. He would come home with a new kind of cream whipper, or a patent device for the bathroom. He would tinker happily with this, driving a nail, adjusting a screw. At such times he was even known to begin to whistle some scrap of a doleful tune such as he used to hum. But he would change, quickly, into something lovely. ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... I will merely bid you note that aristocratic pedigree-tracers confine themselves to one line, or to a few lines. Burke will tell you that one of the great-great-grandfathers of the present Lord Foozlem was the First Baron; he is silent about his great-grandfather, the tinker, and his great-grandfather, the pettifogging country lawyer. Americans are far more apt to push their genealogical investigations in all directions, because they are prompted by a legitimate curiosity ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... Mark Twain that year deserve to be remembered. One of these; unsigned, was published in the Century Magazine, and expressed the need for a "universal tinker," the man who can accept a job in a large household or in a community as master of all trades, with sufficient knowledge of each to be ready to undertake whatever repairs are likely to be required in the ordinary ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... happens that a tinker or coal heaver hears a sermon or falls in with a tract which alarms him about the state of his soul. If he be a man of excitable nerves and strong imagination, he thinks himself given over to the Evil Power. ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... could talk, but not at all in French, but he was glad that the tinker spoke German, because otherwise he would not be able to understand ...
— What Sami Sings with the Birds • Johanna Spyri
... tongues—some who have personal grievances. And there are always some people in every community who stand all ready to be led by the last brain with which they come in contact; or, if not that, they are sure to think exactly as Dr. Jones and Judge Tinker and Prof. Bolus do, without reason as to why or wherefore. This class is very easily managed. A little care, a judicious repetition of a sentence which fell from the doctor's or the judge's or the professor's lips, and which might have ...
— Divers Women • Pansy and Mrs. C.M. Livingston
... and painstaking craft that their writers have before now exhibited elsewhere. Here are no sensational happenings; the drama of the tales is wholly emotional. My own favourites are the first, called "The Little Tinker," a half-ironical study of the temptation of a tramp mother to surrender her child to the blessings of civilisation; and how, by the intervention of a terrible old woman, the queen of the tribe, this momentary weakness was overcome. My other choice, the ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 152, Feb. 7, 1917 • Various
... The hallalloo of fire in every street! Odsbobs! I have a mind to hang myself, To think I should a grandmother be made By such a rascal!—Sure the king forgets When in a pudding, by his mother put, The bastard, by a tinker, on a stile Was dropp'd.—O, good lord Grizzle! can I bear To see him from a pudding mount the throne? Or can, oh can, my Huncamunca bear To take a pudding's ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... week from de smokehouse. Twenty-five or thirty hogs was killed at de time. Lots o' sheep and goats was also killed. All our meat was raised, and us wore wooden-bottom shoes. Raised all de wheat and corn. Hogs, cows, goats and sheep jes' run wild on Tinker and Brushy Fork Creeks. On Sat'day us git one peck meal; three pounds o' meat and one-half gallon black molasses fer a person; and dat's lot mo' dan dey gits in dese days and times. Sunday morning, us git two, or maybe three pounds o' flour. ...
— Slave Narratives Vol. XIV. South Carolina, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... tied the note to the inside of the dog's collar. The next thing was to get Chance started on the road to the Concho. He rolled down his sleeves and strolled to the doorway. A Mexican sat smoking and watching the road. Sundown stepped past him and began to tinker with the gas-engine. Chance stood watching him. Presently the gas-engine started with a cough and splutter. Sundown walked to the door and seemed about to enter when the Mexican called to him and pointed toward the distant tank. Water was pouring over ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs
... hungry indeed. He had been going from place to place with his master, and now it was two long days since he had eaten a good dinner. His master was a poor tinker who traveled about the country and never stayed long in one place. Rover would have liked this if his master had been kind to him, but the dog was used ...
— Friends and Helpers • Sarah J. Eddy
... reticule from her arm in Broadway and got clear off with it; but upon examining my prize, I found it contained nothing but a handkerchief and some letters. The wipe I kept for my own use; as for the letters, here they are—they are not worth a tinker's d——n, for they are all ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... which means to shake, ("A. S. sceac-an, to shake, or shock, or shog.") Shog has nothing whatever to do with shaking, unless when Nym says to Pistol, "Will you shog off?" he may be said to have shaken him off. When the Tinker in Beaumont and Fletcher's "Coxcomb" says, "Come, prithee, let's shog off," what possible allusion to shaking is there, except, perhaps, to "shaking stumps"? The first jog and shog are identical in meaning and derivation, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... into the batter, and his mother not observing him, stirred him into the pudding, and popped him into the pot to boil. The hot water made Tom kick and struggle; and his mother, seeing the pudding jump up and down in such a furious manner, thought it was bewitched; and a tinker coming by just at the time, she quickly gave him the pudding, who put it into ...
— Fairy Tales Every Child Should Know • Various
... tomes that are taken to bed to pave the way to restful, happy slumber. Perhaps that night it had been the last volume to be tossed aside before turning out the light, for as I slept, to use the words of the tinker of Bedford, ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... 'I cal'late when it gets high enough them floats'll rise with it and lift the automobile up, too. If she's anchored bow and stern she'll hold, unless it comes on to blow a gale, and to-morrow mornin' at low tide maybe you can tinker her up ...
— The Depot Master • Joseph C. Lincoln
... the vulgar will call "stays." In earlier days a husband used to lock his wife in a pair of iron-bound corsets when he went away from home, keeping the key in his pocket, and thus not caring a tinker's cuss if his home were simply overflowing with handsome gentleman lodgers! The poor wife couldn't retaliate by locking her husband in such a virtuous prison, because men never wore such things—which, perhaps, was one or the reasons ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... ashamed of owning that my father was just a travelling tinker, and when I was a little fellow I used to go round with him and see him do most things. It was from travelling through the country I learned to love it so. And my father, he was a thoughtful man, and when I used to ask where the tin came from, and where the iron and where the lead, he ...
— His Big Opportunity • Amy Le Feuvre
... letter; and I hope Mr. Rives will be able to tell me you are entirely restored. But our machines have now been running seventy or eighty years, and we must expect that, worn as they are, here a pivot, there a wheel, now a pinion, next a spring, will be giving way; and however we may tinker them up for a while, all will at length surcease motion. Our watches, with works of brass and steel, wear out within that period. Shall you and I last to see the course the seven-fold wonders of the times will take? The Attila of the age dethroned, ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... particularly about Granada in Spain, as will subsequently be shown. True it is, that at present there are none amongst the English Gypsies who manufacture horseshoes; all the men, however, are tinkers more or less, and the word Petul-engro is applied to the tinker also, though the proper meaning of it is undoubtedly what I have already stated above. In other dialects of the Gypsy tongue, this cognomen exists, though not exactly with the same signification; for ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... further discovery be made as to what was become of Mr. Harrison. But it hath been said that during his restraint at Campden he told some (who pressed him to confess what he knew concerning his master) that a tinker had killed him; and to others he said that a gentleman's servant of the neighbourhood had robbed and murdered him; and others, again, he told that he was murdered and hid in a bean-rick in Campden, where search was in vain made for him. At length he gave out that if he ...
— Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences • Arthur L. Hayward
... Arrive at the Goal A Page from the Observation Book, December 17, 1911 At the South Pole, December 16 and 17, 1911 Mount Don Pedro Christophersen Framheim on the Return of the Polar Party Lindstrom in the Kitchen Farewell to the Barrier Bjaaland as Tinker Dogs Landed at Hobart for Dr. Mawson's Expedition Members of the Japanese Antarctic Expedition Lieutenant Prestrud An Original Inhabitant of the Antarctic Stubberud Reviews the Situation Camp on the Barrier: Eastern Expedition A Broken-off Cape Off to the East The Junction of the Great ...
— The South Pole, Volumes 1 and 2 • Roald Amundsen
... a nobleman to be a lord president, but it must be a prelate? Is there never a wise man in the realm to be a comptroller of the mint? I speak it to your shame. I speak it to your shame. If there be never a wise man, make a water-bearer, a tinker, a cobbler, a slave, a page, comptroller of the mint: make a mean gentleman, a groom, a yeoman, or ...
— Sermons on the Card and Other Discourses • Hugh Latimer
... many difficulties, perplexities, and hardships were surmounted, and we were on the good and promised land, felt that a just tribute of respect to the day ought to be paid. There were in all, including women and children, fifty in number. The men, under Captain Tinker, ranged themselves on the beach and fired a federal salute of fifteen rounds, and then the sixteenth in honor of New Connecticut. Drank several toasts.... Closed with three cheers. Drank several pails of grog. Supped and retired in ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells
... Nobleman, gallant and bold; O was an Oysterman, who went about town; P was a Parson, and wore a black gown; Q was a Quack, with a wonderful pill; R was a Robber, who wanted to kill; S was a Sailor, who spent all he got; T was a Tinker, and mended a pot; U was an Usurer, a miserable elf; V was a Vintner, who drank all himself; W was a Watchman, who guarded the door; X was Expensive, and so became poor; Y was a Youth, that did not love school; Z was a Zany, a poor ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... Hale: 'Alas! poor woman.' Twisden: 'Poverty is your cloak, for I hear your husband is better maintained by running up and down a-preaching than by following his calling?' Sir Matthew Hale: 'What is his calling?' Elizabeth: 'A tinker, please you my Lord; and because he is a tinker, and a poor man, therefore he is despised and cannot have justice.' Sir Matthew Hale: 'I am truly sorry we can do you no good. Sitting here we can only act as the law gives ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... were under the necessity last night of sleeping in the brick fields, and on the steps of doors, for which they were taken before the magistrates in a body this morning, and committed to prison as vagrants for various terms. One of these persons I understand to be a highly-respectable tinker, of great practical skill, who had forwarded a paper to the President of Section D. Mechanical Science, on the construction of pipkins with copper bottoms and safety-values, of which report speaks highly. The incarceration of this gentleman is greatly to be regretted, as his absence will preclude ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... a cobbler it should be my pride The best of all cobblers to be; If I was a tinker, no tinker beside Should mend ...
— Childhood's Favorites and Fairy Stories - The Young Folks Treasury, Volume 1 • Various
... komatik (sledge) in front was a single thong of sealskin with a loop on its end. This was called the "bridle." Each dog had an individual trace, its end passed through the loop in the bridle and securely tied. Tinker, the leading dog, was fully thirty-five feet from the komatik when his trace was stretched to its full length. He had the longest trace of all. He was trained to respond to shouted directions, turning to the right when "ouk" was called, or left for "rudder," the word being repeated ...
— Troop One of the Labrador • Dillon Wallace
... Finland shows that the Socialist leaders have lost control of the workmen, and all kinds of excesses are taking place. The present Commandant at Tornea was a sailor, the head of the passport office was a tailor, and the chief telegraphic censor a tinker."—Central News. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Nov. 28, 1917 • Various
... specialist as well as comrade-like aspect; and the case of militarism is not the only case of such specialist submission. The tinker and tailor, as well as the soldier and sailor, require a certain rigidity of rapidity of action: at least, if the tinker is not organized that is largely why he does not tink on any large scale. The tinker and ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... coal-black, jet-black; fuliginous^, pitchy, sooty, swart, dusky, dingy, murky, Ethiopic; low-toned, low in tone; of the deepest dye. black as jet &c n., black as my hat, black as a shoe, black as a tinker's pot, black as November, black as thunder, black as midnight; nocturnal &c (dark) 421; nigrescent^; gray &c 432; obscure &c 421. Adv. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... to talk to me," she said, "you must talk straight. I've had no more education than a tinker's dog." ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... "Something like a tinker's job on an iron kittle, son," he commented. "You must have been born with some of the instincts of a plumber. Keep on the way you're operating and you'll get ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... shadow, rummaged the wardrobe and turned every pocket inside out. It was not really a light; it made this light by flashing about so quickly, but when it came to rest for a second you saw it was a fairy, no longer than your hand, but still growing. It was a girl called Tinker Bell exquisitely gowned in a skeleton leaf, cut low and square, through which her figure could be seen to the best advantage. She was slightly ...
— Peter and Wendy • James Matthew Barrie
... applied human nature. If a rule is sound in politics, it will work anywhere this side of the pearly gates. Graves may not care a tinker's dam for politics, but evidently he does get queasy when another man's ideas are misappropriated. Perhaps that's his crotchet. Writes himself, ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... again, or stop her in the way, or have speech with her, I'll set p'liceman 'pon 'e! For a year and more she 'm not her awn mistress; and, at the end of that time, if she doan't get better sense than to tinker arter a harum-scarum young jackanapes like you, she ban't a true Lyddon. Now be off with 'e an' doan't dare to look same way Phoebe 's walkin', no more, else theer'll be trouble ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... born in 1628 at the village of Elstow, just outside of Bedford, in central England. After very slight schooling and some practice at his father's trade of tinker, he was in 1644 drafted for two years and a half into garrison service in the Parliamentary army. Released from this occupation, he married a poor but excellent wife and worked at his trade; but the important experiences ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... when he saw that he must acknowledge Moscione as his future son-in-law, and summoned the wise men of his court to ask if there was no way out of the difficulty. The council at once decided that Canetella was far too dainty a morsel for the mouth of such a travelling tinker, and advised the king to offer Moscione a present of gold, which no doubt a beggar like him would prefer to all the wives ...
— The Grey Fairy Book • Various
... the turgidities and involutions which had marked the prose of the preachers and moralists of the times of James and Charles I.; scholars and men of letters were arising who would have taken John Bunyan, the unlettered tinker of Bedford, for their model rather than the learned ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... seeing that the object of all religious observances is better obtained, when the government of the church is confided to the wisdom and experience of the most venerated among the people, than when it is placed in the hands of every tinker and tailor who chooses to claim a share in it. Nor is this the only evil attending the want of a national religion, supported by the State. As there is no legal and fixed provision for the clergy, it is hardly surprising that ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope
... gambler. "I don't even know what the fight was about, and I don't care a tinker's whoop either. I got you here to give you a chance to put Van Buren out of commission ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... period gives ample evidence of his extreme reluctance to reassume public responsibilities. To bring the matter to its true proportions, it must be remembered that to the view of the times the new constitution was but the latest attempt to tinker the federal scheme, and it was yet to be seen whether this endeavor would be any more successful than previous efforts had been. As for the title of President, it had already been borne by a number of congressional politicians and had been rather tarnished ...
— Washington and His Colleagues • Henry Jones Ford
... he proceeded, "is the Wilderness of Nasty Possibilities. Hold up, Tinker, my lad, and get out of it ...
— The Keeper of the Door • Ethel M. Dell
... morning upon the Introduction to the Chronicles; it may be thought egotistical. Learned a bad accident had happened yesterday. A tinker (drunk I suppose) entered the stream opposite to Faldonside with an ass bearing his children. The ass was carried down by the force of the stream, and one of the little creatures was drowned; the other was brought out alive, ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... want supper, and we don't mean to sit around here an hour or two, just watchin' you tinker with that silly old bow and stick, twirling away like you had to saw through to China. How about that, Thad?" and Bumpus turned appealingly toward the patrol leader, well knowing that whatever he said ...
— The Boy Scouts in the Maine Woods - The New Test for the Silver Fox Patrol • Herbert Carter
... geese feeding around him. Next I passed a bare-footed cantonnier breaking stones, and he told me that if I made haste I might reach Neuvic before dark. On the outskirts of a village—Roche-le-Peyroux—a wandering tinker and his boy were at work by the side of the road with fire and bellows, and I felt a trampish or romantic desire to stay with them awhile in the cheerful glow; but thinking of the coming ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... half again as much as any of the others, though this was really all his own doing. Besides his usual share of the luggage he had pots and pans and skillets sticking out in all directions, so that he presented the appearance of a traveling tinker. ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts Snowbound - A Tour on Skates and Iceboats • George A. Warren
... the Government's business. Understand that clearly. You say it was a campaign-fund contribution. How do I know it was? It never reached us. It's Nickleby's money and its loss is his funeral. Go and report to him and try to understand the meaning of the word 'loyalty.' Our party doesn't care a tinker's dam who has had, now has, or will have that envelope. And if you want to get thrown out by the scruff of the neck just try going to headquarters ...
— Every Man for Himself • Hopkins Moorhouse
... true basis of public prosperity. Still, ministers and moralists do but tinker at the regeneration of the world in merely recommending individual improvement. The most prolific cause of depravity is the social system that forms the character to what it is. The virtues, like ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... Tinker; I would give him the care of kettles, but I would not give him 'the cure of souls'. So long as he attended to the management and mending of his pots and pans, I would wish success to his ministry: but when he came to declare 'himself' a "chosen vessel," and demand permission to take the souls ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... tinker, and worship god Pan, or I might grind scissors as sharp as the noses of bakers. But, as a matter of fact, I'm a piper, not a rat-catcher, you understand, but just a simple singer of sad songs, and a mad singer of ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... out of former Mr. Hydes and the transformation is complete. It can be done swiftly; the rapidity depends upon the strength of the mind of the operator compared to the mind of the subject. It is slightly harder to reorient a defiant mind than a willing one. It sticks unless someone else begins to tinker again. It is easier to make a good man out of a bad one than the reverse, although the latter is eminently possible. This is too difficult a problem to discuss to the satisfaction of everybody, but it seems to go along with the old theory that "Good" does benefit the tribe of mankind in ...
— Highways in Hiding • George Oliver Smith
... From here he could see the long garden. He was fond of his garden, and spent what few moments he could spare from work and games pottering about it. He had his views as to what the ideal garden should be, and he hoped in time to tinker his own three acres up to the desired standard. At present there remained much to be done. Why not, for instance, take away those laurels at the end of the lawn, and have a flower-bed there instead? Laurels lasted all the year round, ...
— Mike • P. G. Wodehouse
... blessed truth that Christian morality does not say to us, 'Now begin, and work, and tinker away at yourselves, and try to get up some kind of excellence of character, and then come to God, and pray Him to accept you.' That is putting the cart before the horse. The order is reversed. We are to begin with taking our personal salvation and ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... lift his aunt and her children to a little higher plane. To this, hitherto, he had found an obstacle in the pride of her husband. Henry Martin was a tinsmith who had come to the city to work in a great factory for a little higher wages than he could get as a journeyman tinker in a country town. He did not refuse to let the children accept presents from "Cousin Charley," but he was not willing "to be beholden to any of his wife's folks," as he expressed it. He resented the fact that even in Cappadocia ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston
... he had seriousness—extreme seriousness—for others, but never for himself. Tranquillity was to him instead of it. This philosophical levity of tranquillity, so to speak, is shown in his easy variety of pursuits. Printer, postmaster, almanac maker, essayist, chemist, orator, tinker, statesman, humorist, philosopher, parlor man, political economist, professor of housewifery, ambassador, projector, maxim-monger, herb-doctor, wit:—Jack of all trades, master of each and mastered by none—the type and genius of his land. Franklin was everything ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... a tinker's dam for me," said Farwell bluntly. "That's not saying what I think of her. I'm no ladies' man—don't pretend to be. Let that go. I suppose I'll be blamed for young McCrae's arrest. Well, I didn't know a thing about it. I've tried to give the family a good deal—better ...
— Desert Conquest - or, Precious Waters • A. M. Chisholm
... spot in men of science! The average man doesn't give a tinker's damn for progress or knowledge, not really. He wants only that he and his shall be ascendant at the center of things, the inevitable, the only possible goal of the non-science mind. Surely the history of science versus non-science should have made this evident long ago! Surely there had ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... be frightened because he was so angry, and he spoke right out loud! He stood up and shook his fist at the Tinker. His head showed over the top of the wall. Eileen ...
— The Irish Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... does report, a young duke keeps a court, One that pleases his fancy with frolicksome sport: But amongst all the rest, here is one I protest, Which will make you to smile when you hear the true jest: A poor tinker he found, lying drunk on the ground, As secure in a sleep as if ...
— The Book of Brave Old Ballads • Unknown
... sale. When a play was written for and bought by a manager, it became his absolute property. He could request the author to rewrite or modify passages deemed ineffective; he could even call in another man to tinker the work, unrestrained and unrebuked. It is supposed that Shakespeare first showed his great parts as a dramatist in improving other men's work for Manager Burbage, and that this constant exercise of talent ...
— William Shakespeare - His Homes and Haunts • Samuel Levy Bensusan
... and a poor, ill-fed beast harnessed to it, happened to be passing, and heard the little girl's words. He stared after her, for she seemed very small to speak so wisely, and the tinker did not, of course, know that she was only repeating what she had heard ...
— Our Young Folks at Home and Abroad • Various
... it was up to me. There wasn't no escapin' it. A man might just as well meet his fate smilin' as trailin' his lip on the ground, for my experiences teaches, dear friends and brothers, that Fate just naturally don't care a wooden-legged tinker's dam. ...
— Mr. Scraggs • Henry Wallace Phillips
... spray of brilliant vermilion berries she fancied, saying meanwhile, "I wonder what he is? Tinker, tailor, ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... he would begin to read the passage, where Mansie, simple soul that he was, was described as going into the byre in the morning to learn if the cow had calved during the night, and finding, on opening the door, the donkey of a traveling tinker, he turned and ran into the house, crying: "Mither! Mither! The coo has ...
— The Underworld - The Story of Robert Sinclair, Miner • James C. Welsh
... Death The Trace of Cromwell Cromwell's Law Cromwell in Connacht A Worse than Cromwell The Battle of Aughrim The Stuarts Another Story Patrick Sarsfield Queen Anne Carolan's Song 'Ninety-Eight Denis Browne The Union Robert Emmet O'Connell's Birth The Tinker A Present His Strategy The Man was Going to be Hanged The Cup of the Sassanach The Thousand Fishers What the Old Women Saw O'Connell's Hat The Change He Made The Man He Brought to Justice The Binding His ...
— The Kiltartan History Book • Lady I. A. Gregory
... splendid, didn't you—and then it fizzled. It must have been tough—I can get that part of it.... To find you'd married him and couldn't get out of it —and that he didn't have any thousands of men to—tinker with.... Especially when you loved Mr. Dulac." Hilda added the last sentence ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... nothing left to do for Oliver but to stroll up and down the drive, stare through the tall gates at the motors going by, or to spend hours in the garage, sitting on a box and watching Jennings, the chauffeur, tinker with the big car that was so seldom used. Janet was able to amuse herself better, but her brother, by the third day, had reached a state of disappointed boredom that was almost ready, at any small thing, to flare out into open revolt. The very small ...
— The Windy Hill • Cornelia Meigs
... the poet's father. The prefix Mr. is not used in the entries; it is certain that he retained his freeholds in Henley Street all his life, and if he had "no goods whereon to distrain," he could hardly have been received as sufficient bail at Coventry, on July 19 of that year, for Michael Price, tinker, of Stratford-on-Avon, or as security for his brother Henry's debts. In 1586 he was removed from his ...
— Shakespeare's Family • Mrs. C. C. Stopes
... sailor, A tinker and a tailor, Had once a doubtful strife, sir, To make a maid a wife, sir, Whose name was buxom Joan. For now the time was ended, When she no more intended To lick her lips at men, sir, And gnaw the sheets in vain, sir, And lie ...
— Love for Love • William Congreve
... will hire girls at less than any one could exist on in decency. When they meet these same girls in the hall or when they come directly into contact with them in their work they may be polite enough, but their politeness is not worth a tinker's curse. Justice must come first. Only if the employer pays a fair day's wage can he expect a fair day's work. "Even then," he protests, "I can't get it." And this is, unfortunately, in large measure true. As Kipling said some few years ago, and ...
— The Book of Business Etiquette • Nella Henney
... looking a little worried. "We heard just before I came over this morning that there is a case of fever in the village—some travelling tinker-people seem to have brought it. Dad said I must tell you we had better not let the children go down there for ...
— Captain Jim • Mary Grant Bruce
... inwardly wondered where the man could be hiding. Billingsfield was not, he believed, an easy place to hide in, for every ploughman knew his fellow, and a new face was always an object of suspicion. Not a gipsy tinker entered the village but what every one heard of it, and though tramps came through from time to time, it would be a difficult matter for one of them to remain two days in the place without attracting a great deal of attention. It was possible ...
— A Tale of a Lonely Parish • F. Marion Crawford
... me I weren't in no such 'urry after all. Why 'urry for a Harab? The car's been rattlin' worse 'n a tinker's basket. I gets down to lave a look—lights a gasper*—an' takes my bloomin' time about it. You seen them yellow curs there by Lazarus' tomb? Well, they come for me, yappin' an' snarlin' to beat 'ell. I'm pickin' up stones to break their 'eads with—good stones ain't such easy ...
— Jimgrim and Allah's Peace • Talbot Mundy
... it a point to be there, and as we've got some time to kill meanwhile, let's hop over to that nice landingplace at the foot of old Thunder top, and overhaul the machine again. There are a few things I'd like to tinker with, because I'm not quite pleased with the way they work; and you know, Andy, I'm a regular crank about having a motor run like ...
— The Aeroplane Boys Flight - A Hydroplane Roundup • John Luther Langworthy
... Joe brightened. He chewed his cud a second, and bubbled, "I've often thought of that! If I had the money, I'd go down to Tinker's Falls and open a ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... in the great chimney, a very tall old woman clad in a red cloak and a slouched bonnet, having all the appearance of a gipsy or tinker. She smoked silently at her clay pipe, while the doubtful-looking landlady ...
— Red Cap Tales - Stolen from the Treasure Chest of the Wizard of the North • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... resolved to appeal to his better nature. "I don't know who the dickens you are. You may be the three wise men of Gotham who went to sea in a bowl rolled into one, for all I know. You may be any old thing. I don't give a tinker's cuss what you are. Under ordinary circumstances I've no doubt I should find you a very pleasant old gentleman, but under present conditions you are ...
— Olympian Nights • John Kendrick Bangs
... inhabitants—I beg your pardon, to the nobility and gentry of our neighbourhood—the spectacle of an ascension. As one of the gentry concerned I may be permitted to remark that I am unmoved. I care not a Tinker's Damn for his ascension. No more—I breathe it in your ear—does anybody else. The business is stale, sir, stale. Lunardi did it, and overdid it. A whimsical, fiddling, vain fellow, by all accounts—for I was at that time rocking in my cradle. But once was enough. If Lunardi ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... we not, madam?" said the dame. "Was not my man yonder, Rob, the tinker's son, whom my father and brethren, the smiths down yonder at Buxton, thought but scorn of, but we'd taken a sup together at the Ebbing Well, and it played neither of us false, so we held out against 'em all, and when they saw there was no help for it, they gave Bob the second best anvil and ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... declared. "I don't say it for a minute. I like your going. I wouldn't give a tinker's dam for you, whatever that is, if you didn't want to do something for those fellows over there. I won't even say to be careful, for you can't if you do your duty—only, don't you be too all-fired foolhardy, even for ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... We sat and smoked on a siding while two accommodations and a freight dashed past. I think we must have broken something, and had to tinker up our engine. The conductor ...
— Dear Enemy • Jean Webster
... are an incredible people. They seem to think that it is not necessary that a general should have the least knowledge of the art of war. It is as if you had the stone, and should cry out to any travelling tinker or blacksmith and say, 'Here, come here and cut me for the stone,' and he WOULD cut you! Sir Charles Napier would have been a great general if he had had the opportunity. He was much delighted with Frederick. ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford
... hoped ye'd feel all right this mornin'. Let's see th' bandage—I guess it's slipped." He began to tinker at the wound in rather a clumsy way until the ...
— The Red Badge of Courage - An Episode of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... this much, Oscar: the humdrum farm-life, as I've heard you call it behind my back"—Dr. Willett smiled somewhat sadly—"won't be so humdrum as you think, if you make of it a life work—a something to be handled nobly, and made the most of. A tinker's life could be hardly humdrum with that ...
— The Heiress of Wyvern Court • Emilie Searchfield
... London. By that time a hamper on the coach had been emptied and the bottles thrown out; the procession had drawn up at a dozen villages on the way; the perspiring tipsters, with whom "things hadn't panned out well," had forgotten their disappointments and "didn't care a tinker's! cuss"; every woman in a barrow had her head-gear in confusion, and she was singing in a drunken wail. Nevertheless Drake, who was laughing and talking constantly, said it was the quietest Derby night he had ever seen, and he couldn't tell what things ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... it. He was an artist first and last, and as an artist he bent and shaped the rough material, selecting with great fastidiousness, so that in his plays every speech is, as he himself declared all good speech should be, "as fully flavored as a nut or apple." Even in The Tinker's Wedding (1907), possibly the least important of his plays, one ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... remarkable than the play itself: a drunken tinker, removed in his sleep to a palace, where he is deceived into the belief of being a nobleman. The invention, however, is not Shakspeare's. Holberg has handled the same subject in a masterly manner, and with inimitable truth; but he has spun it out to five acts, for which such material is hardly ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... combination of springs and wheels whereby they are moved." A similar transparency of motive and purpose, of individual traits and spontaneous action, belongs to the Bible. From the hand of Shakspeare, "the lord and the tinker, the hero and the valet, come forth equally distinct and clear." In the Bible the various sorts of men are never confounded, but have the advantage of being exhibited by Nature herself, and are not a contrivance of the imagination. "Shylock," observes ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... will not let her children be mishandled too far. "This is too much," she says; "this wounded leg, these crusted lips, this anxious, weary mind. Come away for a time, until your body becomes more habitable." And so she coaxes the mind away into the Nirvana of delirium, while the little cell-workers tinker and toil within to get things better for its home-coming. When you see the veil of cruelty which nature wears, try and peer through it, and you will sometimes catch a glimpse of a ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle
... fell asleep, Robin made haste away, And left the tinker in the lurch, For the great shot ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... but me. William Nye 'e were a tinker, and a rare, merry 'un 'e were—a little man always up to 'is jinkin' and jokin' and laughin'. 'Dick,' 'e used to say (but Richard I were baptized, though they calls me Dick for short), 'Dick,' 'e used to say, 'd'ye know that theer big oak-tree—the big, 'oller ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... was ever to be found the fierce wrangle of Remonstrant and Contra-Remonstrant, the hissing of red-hot theological rhetoric, the pelting of hostile texts. The blacksmith's iron cooled on the anvil, the tinker dropped a kettle half mended, the broker left a bargain unclinched, the Scheveningen fisherman in his wooden shoes forgot the cracks in his pinkie, while each paused to hold high converse with friend ...
— Memoir of John Lothrop Motley, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... the most popular religious writer in the English language, was born at Elstow, about a mile from Bedford, in the year 1628. He may be said to have been born a tinker. The tinkers then formed an hereditary caste, which was held in no high estimation. They were generally vagrants and pilferers, and were often confounded with the gipsies, whom in truth they nearly ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 3. (of 4) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the wheelwright's, Mr. Carnegie pulled up at a spot by the wayside where an itinerant tinker sat in the shade with his brazier hot, doing a good stroke of work on the village kettles and pots: "Eh, Gampling, here you are again! They bade me at home look out for you and tell you to call. There is a whole ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... give a tinker's dam if he's had all the training in creation, he can't lick Mack McGowan and do ...
— Captain Pott's Minister • Francis L. Cooper
... air, or come singly to solicit my regard, I must own the secret purport of their lives is still inscrutable to man. Is man the friend, or is he the patron only? Have they indeed forgotten nature's voice? or are those moments snatched from courtiership when they touch noses with the tinker's mongrel, the brief reward and pleasure of their artificial lives? Doubtless, when man shares with his dog the toils of a profession and the pleasures of an art, as with the shepherd or the poacher, the affection warms and strengthens till it fills the soul. But doubtless, ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... he hadn't an object in life now—didn't care about drinking any longer, nor yet about women, because of the thing that had happened, and so hadn't got any reasonable sort of use for money—he began to make it. That's the secret of success, that is. Because he didn't care what he called a tinker's cuss about being foreman he was made foreman—then, for the same reason, manager. Then he got sort of interested in seeing the money come in. He didn't want it himself, but it struck him that it wouldn't be a bad thing to pay back his mother and his sisters what they'd lost on him, besides ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... gone now and the din was monstrous. Anti-aircraft guns, singly and in groups, were firing from every side. As I watched it seemed a futile waste of ammunition. The enemy didn't give a tinker's curse for it ... But surely there was one down. I could only count four now. No, there was the fifth coming out of a cloud. In ten minutes they would be all over the line. I fairly stamped in my vexation. Those guns were no more use ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... mistake trying to build their own cars," said Ernest. "More accidents come from that than people realize. While the war was going on, no one had time to tinker at building, but now half the chaps I know are studying up and attempting to make aeroplanes ...
— Battling the Clouds - or, For a Comrade's Honor • Captain Frank Cobb
... comfortable arrangement of his part of the boat, as an old stage-driver is about the snugness of his box. When close to the whale, in the very death-lock of the fight, he handled his unpitying lance coolly and off-handedly, as a whistling tinker his hammer. He would hum over his old rigadig tunes while flank and flank with the most exasperated monster. Long usage had, for this Stubb, converted the jaws of death into an easy chair. What he thought of death itself, there is no telling. Whether he ever thought of it at all, might be a question; ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... at you, Mr. Burns, and the way you go about admiring every tinker-peddler who tosses a rhyme together. Ye've no sense of your own value at times. Do you know," she went on, fair glorious to see in her enthusiasm glowering down at him—"Do you know that when this man Shenstone's grave is as flat to the earth as my hand, and ...
— Nancy Stair - A Novel • Elinor Macartney Lane
... for a pony, dear boy," grinned Beaumanoir. "There was a deuce of a shindy when three fat johnnies tried to pull me out of my compartment. I told 'em I didn't give a tinker's continental for their bally frontier, and then the band played. I slung one joker through the window. Good job it was open, or he might ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... remember that I have read of one Alexander a coppersmith, who did much oppose, and disturb the apostles;— (aiming it is like at me, because I was a tinker). ...
— Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners • John Bunyan
... dog, who leaned against the wall to bark. As lazy as the tinker, who laid down his ...
— 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue • Captain Grose et al.
... found himself married in 1645 to a "godly" wife as young and penniless as himself. So poor were the young couple that they could scarce muster a spoon and a plate between them; and the poverty of their home deepened perhaps the gloom of the young tinker's restlessness and religious depression. His wife did what she could to comfort him, teaching him again to read and write for he had forgotten his school-learning, and reading with him in two little "godly" books which formed his library. But darkness only gathered the thicker ...
— History of the English People, Volume VI (of 8) - Puritan England, 1642-1660; The Revolution, 1660-1683 • John Richard Green
... Joan, she appeared to be even more after the tinker type than Darby. Her cotton frock had once upon a time been pink and pretty as a double daisy. Now it was washed-out, worn, and, sad to say, in several places torn. At different points the skirt had rebelliously escaped from the confinement of gathers ...
— Two Little Travellers - A Story for Girls • Frances Browne Arthur
... Porter Barber | Chinaman Coffeeman | Founder Porkshop-keeper | Grave-digger Cartwright | Tradesman Tinker, a brasier | Stockingmender Nailer ...
— English as she is spoke - or, A jest in sober earnest • Jose da Fonseca
... baptism of Francois Xavier, tenth son of Pierre Lecour, master-butcher, of this Parish, and of his wife, Marie LeCoq. He had for godfather, Jean LeCoq, tinker, and for godmother, Therese, wife of ...
— The False Chevalier - or, The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette • William Douw Lighthall
... him, but it was all swamp land, and so Hank's father, he hunted more'n he farmed, and Hank and his brothers done the same when he was a boy. But Hank, he learnt a little blacksmithing when he was growing up, cause he liked to tinker around and to show how stout he was. Then, when he married Elmira Appleton, he had to go to work practising that perfession reg'lar, because he never learnt nothing about farming. He'd sell fifteen or twenty acres, every now and then, and they'd be high times till he'd spent ...
— Danny's Own Story • Don Marquis |
