"Tinkering" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... dinner, I recognize the importance of the difference; but if the rich man plunders the community by exorbitant profits, or speculation with other people's money, while the gipsy adds a fowl or two to the produce of his tinkering; or, once again, if the gipsy is as honest as the honest citizen, which is not so rare a case by any means as people imagine, I return to my question: Wherein, I say, is the warm house, the windows hung with purple, and the table covered ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... under the most democratic of democracies; and weighs things down;—and you cast about for new methods of reform. Democratic government, somehow, does nothing of what was expected of it; is not the panacea;—you see that, to bring the chaos of affairs into order, you must stop all this jabber and tinkering, and set up some undivided council,—some Man, for God's sake!—a Dictator who can keep his own and other people's mouths shut and hands busy, and get things done unimpeded. So you make one more grand reform for the sake of efficiency, ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... readers think this matron's eyes Saw, in the tinker, a most likely prize To win, as husband, for her daughter fair; But surely they must be mistaken there! This family's standing was considered good; WILLIAM, amongst the very poorest stood: And, in his tinkering garb, was not a match For that fair girl, whom many strove to catch. Let this be as it might; he left the house Without proposing to make her his spouse. Yet not without the strongest inclination To ...
— The Emigrant Mechanic and Other Tales In Verse - Together With Numerous Songs Upon Canadian Subjects • Thomas Cowherd
... she was only glued together by the rust. "You shouldn't make me laugh so much, Tommy," he would say. "I am afraid I'll shake the sternpost out of her." And, as Hemstead went to and fro with his tool-basket on an endless round of tinkering, Wicks lost no opportunity of chaffing him upon his duties. "If you'd turn to at sailoring or washing paint or something useful, now," he would say, "I could see the fun of it. But to be mending things that haven't no insides to them appears to me the height of foolishness." And doubtless these ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... make a man's life better, the true way is to make the man better. First of all be, and then do; first of all receive, and then give forth; first of all draw near to Christ, and then there will be fruit to His praise. That is the Christian way of mending men, not tinkering at this, that, and the other individual excellence, but grasping the secret of total excellence ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... sets out in a few days. I cannot, of course, resist his request for a letter to you, nor let pass the occasion of a greeting. Health, Joy, and Peace be with you! I hope you sit still yet, and do not hastily meditate new labors. Phidias need not be always tinkering. Sit still like an Egyptian. Somebody told me the other day that your friends here might have made a sum for the author by publishing Sartor themselves, instead of leaving it with a bookseller. Instantly I wondered ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... nature," and to rescue it from the rut of listless and soporific topographical description. Both poems, in the definitive text, are readable, and exhibit here and there a glimmer of the poet's future greatness; yet it must be borne in mind that Wordsworth was continually tinkering at his verse, to the subsequent despair of conscientious variorum editors, and that most of the absurdities and infelicities in his first editions disappeared under the correcting influence of his sarcastic critics ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... reproductions which completed the extinction of architecture as a vernacular art, and replaced it by the series of revivalisms from which it has suffered for the last one hundred and fifty years. Conscious and deliberate tinkering with the art of architecture ended ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... afterwards, Lord Elgin, in his communications to the home government, said that the Canadian millers and shippers had a substantial grievance, not in the introduction of free trade, but in the constant tinkering incident to the abandoned system of imperial protection. The preference given in 1843 to Canadian wheat and to flour, even when made of American wheat, had stimulated milling in Canada; but almost before the newly-built ...
— George Brown • John Lewis
... a looser fit for him than that conduit was for me, and there were twelve feet of conduit; good long strait-jacket, but I've been in it a lot of times now, and feel quite at home. You see, the job couldn't be done in one go, for I had to make the hole under the fountain bigger, and I've been tinkering away for nearly a week, o' nights when the water was stopped. And if I'd come up at last, like a demon in a pantomime, to find I'd had my trouble for my pains, I can't say what I should have ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... effective or less lasting than the skill acquired in sewing yards of stitches or sawing yards of board just for "exercise" in a class? On the contrary, other things being equal, arithmetic and authors and sewing and tinkering can be made both more effective and more lasting when associated with pleasurable feelings than when performed under strain, compulsion and resentment. If it is only a question of "learning" this or that, there is no doubt ...
— Your Child: Today and Tomorrow • Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg
... behind him brought Duncan round with a start. At a work-bench near the window sat a white-haired man garbed baggily in an old crash coat and trousers. His head was bowed over something clamped in a vise, at which he was tinkering busily with a file. He did not look up, but, as his ...
— The Fortune Hunter • Louis Joseph Vance
... other side of the street. There was the wonted warmth in the sunny squares, and the old familiar damp and stench in the deep narrow streets. But some charm had gone out of all this. The artisans coming to the doors of their shallow booths for the light on some bit of carpentering, or cobbling, or tinkering; the crowds swarming through the middle of the streets on perfect terms with the wine-carts and cab horses; the ineffective grandiosity of the palaces huddled upon the crooked thoroughfares; the slight but insinuating cold of the southern winter, gathering in the shade ...
— Indian Summer • William D. Howells
... the second go abroad. M. Mynas forwarded a transcript which he sold to the British Museum. It was after examination pronounced to be the work of a forger, and not even what it purported to be—the tinkering of a writer who had turned the original of Babrius into barbarous Greek and halting metre. Suggestions were made that the forger was Mynas himself. And there were scholars who ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... to work, away from his Elmira study. "Magnanimous Incident Literature" (for the Atlantic) was about his only completed work of the winter of 1877-78. He was always tinkering with the "Visit to Heaven," and after one reconstruction Howells suggested that he bring it out as a book, in England, with Dean Stanley's indorsement, though this may have been only semi-serious counsel. The story continued ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... old woman,' said the man of the house, 'who tried to take down her fortune into her stomach. She was near death, and she was all day stretched in her bed at the corner of the fire. One day when the girl was tinkering about, the old woman rose up and got ready a little skillet that was near the hob and put something into it and put it down by the fire, and the girl watching her all the time under her oxter, not letting on she seen her ...
— In Wicklow and West Kerry • John M. Synge
... suddenly and got out. Ruth looked ahead with curiosity. The road seemed rather smooth and quite unoccupied. There was a group of trees, tortured by gunfire, which hid a turn in the track and what lay beyond. Charlie was tinkering with ...
— Ruth Fielding at the War Front - or, The Hunt for the Lost Soldier • Alice B. Emerson
... Grind both well and fast!" said the man, and the mill began to grind fish and gruel. It first filled all the dishes and tubs full, and after that it covered the whole floor with fish and gruel. The man kept puttering and tinkering, and tried to get the mill to stop; but no matter how he turned it and fingered at it, the mill kept on, and before long the gruel got so deep in the room that the man was on the point of drowning. Then he opened the door to the ...
— The Younger Edda - Also called Snorre's Edda, or The Prose Edda • Snorre
... Department, or Ceres from the Colonies, heard with as rapt attention as powerful Pallas of the Foreign Office, the goddess that is never seen without her lance and helmet? Does our Whitehall Mars make eyes there at bright young Venus of the Privy Seal, disgusting that quaint tinkering Vulcan, who is blowing his bellows at our Exchequer, not altogether unsuccessfully? Old Saturn of the Woolsack sits there mute, we will say, a relic of other days, as seated in this divan. The hall in which he rules ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... assorting and stowing the bales of cloth and the other goods in the Jenks two wagons, watering the animals and staking them out anew, tinkering with the equipment and making various essays with the bull whip, I found occupation enough; nevertheless there were moments of interim, or while passing to and fro, when I was vividly aware of the scenes and events transpiring in ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... purposes for which they were built, would several times over have paid for themselves. But war gave them no time to pay even for their tires. You saw them by the roadside, cast aside like empty cigarette-boxes. A few hours' tinkering would have set them right. They were still good for years of service. But an army in retreat or in pursuit has no time to waste in repairing motors. To waste the ...
— With the Allies • Richard Harding Davis
... Why, it's like magic, that's what. A flip of the hand and everything is changed. The opening of Uncle Ambrose's letter must have been the turning point in my life—our lives, Thad. Oh, I am so glad I hardly know what to do." "Ditto here. On my part I'll put the week in tinkering on the old barge, for she can stand some improvement, I guess. When that fisherman gave her to me on going to the hospital, from which the poor fellow never came back, he said he always intended dropping down the river to the gulf in her; but I never dreamed I'd be the one to navigate ...
— The House Boat Boys • St. George Rathborne
... through the French windows into the garden. With perilous despatch she set down the tray and rushed out to the gravel path, calling loudly to Flora. Flora, arrayed in a greasy blue overall, came hurrying from the garage where she had been spending the day tinkering with the car. ...
— Men of Affairs • Roland Pertwee
... seven-mile tramp to town before him Archie was unable to sympathize with Grubbs' longing for slumber. He left the foreman tinkering the machine in which Putney was to be borne to the station, changed his hat for his cap and stole out of the sleeping quarters to ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... threatened his life—"judgments mixed with mercy" he terms them,—which made him feel that he was not utterly forsaken of God. Twice he narrowly escaped drowning; once in "Bedford river"—the Ouse; once in "a creek of the sea," his tinkering rounds having, perhaps, carried him as far northward as the tidal inlets of the Wash in the neighbourhood of Spalding or Lynn, or to the estuaries of the Stour and Orwell to the east. At another time, ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... four and a half years, is a puerile tinkering with three or four small industries—a tinkering that is on the face of it open to suspicion of political corruption. To intelligent Free Traders there is nothing in it all that can give the faintest surprise. They knew their ground. The doctrine of Free Trade is science, or it is nothing. ...
— Essays in Liberalism - Being the Lectures and Papers Which Were Delivered at the - Liberal Summer School at Oxford, 1922 • Various
... Wade had surprised Jack Belllounds in the blacksmith shop. The meetings were accidental, yet Wade ever remembered how coincidence beckoned him thither and how circumstance magnified strange reflections. There was no reason why Jack should not be tinkering in the blacksmith shop early of a morning. But Wade followed an uncanny guidance. Like his hound Fox, he never split on trails. When opportunity afforded he went into the shop and looked it over with ...
— The Mysterious Rider • Zane Grey
... returned to the Ford, still determined to carry on the bluff and pretend that much tinkering was necessary before he could travel further. With a great show of industry he rummaged for pliers and wrenches, removed the hood from the motor and squinted down at the ...
— The Trail of the White Mule • B. M. Bower
... you? Nice piece of impudence! Here am I, who have devoted half my life to the tinkering up of damaged soldiers, and know to a tittle how much a man can bear, all wrong, of course! And you, a young jackanapes of a subaltern, a mere boy, tell me to my face that you ...
— Trapped by Malays - A Tale of Bayonet and Kris • George Manville Fenn
... tinkering and cobbling could only be a ramshackle structure, built without any reference to the canons of political architecture. It was shaped neither by the Fourteen Points nor by the canons of the balance of power and territory. It was hardly more than an abortive attempt to make a synthesis ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... tinkering absent-mindedly with one of the wagons in the back lot, and the men were standing about idly, waiting for orders, when Barker came out of the main tent and called ...
— Polly of the Circus • Margaret Mayo
... particularly stupid, and he was so willing and anxious to learn, that his ill-success seemed a reason for pity rather than for wrath. Grim Norvold, Bonnyboy's father, was by trade a carpenter, and handy as he was at all kinds of tinkering, he found it particularly exasperating to have a son who was so left-handed. There was scarcely anything Grim could not do. He could take a watch apart and put it together again; he could mend a harness ...
— Boyhood in Norway • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... haste—then adding that she was not quite sure if they had progressed so rapidly as before; blushingly correcting herself at this point and that, in the tinkering manner of a nervous organization aiming at nicety ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... said. "This is the first real intellectual puzzle I've had to contend with in years. Tinkering with machinery ... that's easy. You know what you want, all you need is to make the machinery perform properly. But this ... I'm afraid I'm too old to handle a ...
— The Dueling Machine • Benjamin William Bova
... the wire in its beak, the Phoenix flew up into the darkness once more. The tinkering sounds began again, and a spurt of falling debris rattled in the leaves of ...
— David and the Phoenix • Edward Ormondroyd
... Hedinn, saying he is a rude unfriendly fellow. Next morning thou must be off early and go to the farm nearest Hrutstede. There thou must offer thy goods for sale, praising up all that is worst, and tinkering up the faults. The master of the house will pry about and find out the faults. Thou must snatch the wares away from him, and speak ill to him. He will say, 'twas not to be hoped that thou wouldst behave well to him, when thou behavest ...
— Njal's Saga • Unknown Icelanders
... on a few days more, hopefully enough, without any outbreak, till one morning, just after they had passed the Sargasso-beds. The ship was taking care of herself; the men were all on deck under the awning, tinkering, and cobbling, and chatting; Brimblecombe was catechising his fair pupil in the cabin; Amyas and Cary, cigar in mouth, were chatting about all heaven and earth, and, above all, of the best way of getting up a fresh adventure against ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... Add to this, that now and then there is to be found in a printing-house a presumptuous intermeddler, who will fancy himself a poet too, and what is still worse, a better than he that employs him. The consequence is, that with cobbling, and tinkering, and patching on here and there a shred of his own, he makes such a difference between the original and the copy, that an author can not know his own work again. Now, as I choose to be responsible for nobody's dulness but my own, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various
... home from the foundry early that afternoon, and when Dot and Twaddles heard him tinkering in the garage, they ran out to see what he ...
— Four Little Blossoms on Apple Tree Island • Mabel C. Hawley
... gypsy? But I soon saw that I was not fitted to become either in reality. It was much more agreeable to play the gypsy or the tinker, than to become either in reality. I had seen enough of gypsying and tinkering to be convinced of that. All of a sudden the idea of tilling the soil came into my head; tilling the soil was a healthful and noble pursuit! but my idea of tilling the soil had no connection with Britain; ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... complete and explicit handbook for boys who fall under the spell of experimenting and "tinkering" with electrical apparatus. Simple explanations of the principles involved make the operation ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Life-Savers • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... were returning from a rather hurried excursion to a near-by town when they came face to face with the motorcyclist. His motor had evidently stalled, and he was standing in the middle of the road tinkering with it. ...
— The Outdoor Girls at the Hostess House • Laura Lee Hope
... was Ramrod. He knew a little of most mechanical things and was for ever tinkering at something or other, useful or otherwise as the case might be. He could also "doctor" a sick cow or dog, and was even known to have successfully set the broken leg of an old and ...
— The Empire Annual for Girls, 1911 • Various
... eight feet long. The bony framework of the head, too, resembled something between a crocodile and a monstrous snapping-turtle. The walls of the shanty were hung with drawings and blue prints. A man dressed in white linen was tinkering with the vertebrae of ...
— In Search of the Unknown • Robert W. Chambers
... intelligent, he lacked strength of will to resist temptation, and had therefore fallen a victim to intemperance. He had lost his place as foreman of the great machine-shop, and what money he now earned came from odd jobs of tinkering which he was able to do here and there at private houses; for Tom was a genius as well as a mechanic, and when his head was steady enough, he could mend a clock or clean a watch as well as he could set up and regulate a steam-engine, and this latter he could do better than any ...
— Choice Readings for the Home Circle • Anonymous
... back and jiu-jitsing the fried chicken, and then doing a high dive into a little dish that ain't—that isn't either a wash-bowl or real good lemonade. He's a perfect lady, Percy is. Dabs his mouth with his napkin like a watchmaker tinkering the carburetor in ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... disembarking. A sloop with a lateen sail lay at anchor in the rude harbor. Some of the fishermen were repairing nets, and some were tinkering about their fishing boats. Beyond the beach nestled a few huts. Toward these other fishermen ...
— The Adventures of Kathlyn • Harold MacGrath
... possession of the sick man's soul, or to the powerful influence of some conjunction of the planets, or to the new-fangled power of electricity which Dr. Franklin had just discovered and was making so much talk about, and was so recklessly tinkering with in Philadelphia at that very time. The doctor had strongly disapproved of Franklin's reprehensible and meddlesome boldness, but he felt that it was best, nevertheless, to write and obtain the philosopher's ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... There is yet a fourth bastard: The Prince of Angola, by one J. Ferriar, 'a tragedy altered from the play of Oroonoko and adapted to the circumstances of the present times.'[4] (Manchester, 1788.) It must be confessed that all this tinkering with an original, which does not require from any point of view the slightest alteration or omission, is most uncalled ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... his interest in the question were increasing, he became less and less sanguine about the value of such efforts as the Working Men's College, and less and less ready to co-operate with others in their schemes. He began to see that no tinkering at social breakages was really worth while; that far more extensive repairs were needed to make the ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... down and floated it in through one of the archways. As usual, the place was cluttered with equipment we hadn't gotten around to repairing or installing, merchandise we'd taken in exchange for advertising, and vehicles, our own and everybody else's. A couple of mechanics were tinkering on one of them. I decided, for the oomptieth time, to do something about cleaning it up. Say in another two or three hundred hours, when the ships would all be in port and work would be slack, and I could hire a couple of ...
— Four-Day Planet • Henry Beam Piper
... letter which is really opposed to my contention—that under rational social conditions the healthy instincts of men and women will solve the population problem far better than any tinkering interference either by law or ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant
... completed, two of the men left the tree and went to where they had dropped their blankets and guns, about a hundred yards away. One picked up the blankets and the other took the three rifles and started back toward the tree, where the third man was still tinkering the platform. ...
— Bears I Have Met—and Others • Allen Kelly
... faces. He was personally acquainted with the painter who never painted, the writer who never wrote, the student who never studied, and the inventor who never invented anything. He knew all about the sculptor who squandered such talents as he may have had in tinkering with plaster casts, the actor who had been on a leave of absence for years, and the half dozen mendicant Philistines who came here day after day to have a good time in their own repelling fashion. ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... stand, but you know how sensitive capital is, and how timid investors are. All this sort of rot is likely to frighten them, and we can't afford to frighten them. The passengers aboard an Ocean steamer don't feel reassured when the ship's way is stopped, and they hear the workmen's hammers tinkering at the engines down below. The old Ark's going on all right as she is, and only wants quiet and room to move. Them's my sentiments, and those of some other people who have to do ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... habits. These may furnish a theatre and properties for our drama; but they offer no hint of its plot and meaning. A great imaginative apathy has fallen on the mind. One-half the learned world is amused in tinkering obsolete armour, as Don Quixote did his helmet; deputing it, after a series of catastrophes, to be at last sound and invulnerable. The other half, the naturalists who have studied psychology and evolution, look at life from the outside, and the processes of Nature ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... England, Fourierists in France, both of them already reduced to the position of mere sects, and gradually dying out; on the other hand, the most multifarious social quacks, who, by all manners of tinkering, professed to redress, without any danger to capital and profit, all sorts of social grievances; in both cases men outside the working class movement and looking rather to the "educated" classes for support. Whatever portion of the working classes had become convinced ...
— Manifesto of the Communist Party • Karl Marx
... that one very important result would be obtained, viz., the dog of the pronounced terrier type could be bred much more easily. But is an easy production a desideratum? I certainly think not. To those who "must be doing something" and who find a certain sense of satisfaction in tinkering with the standard, we extend our pity, and state that experience is a hard school, but some people will learn in no other. To those of us who love the dog as he is, and who believe in "letting well enough alone," we admit we might ...
— The Boston Terrier and All About It - A Practical, Scientific, and Up to Date Guide to the Breeding of the American Dog • Edward Axtell
... the distance toward the Lincoln Memorial. Abe had done his share of tinkering. His weird boot-strap system for hoisting river boats off shoals and bars hadn't amounted to much, but Abe knew the principle that every man has the right ...
— The Great Gray Plague • Raymond F. Jones
... (Georgiana Sheridan, Mrs. Norton's youngest sister, afterward Duchess of Somerset and Queen of Beauty) and her husband, with Corinne and Mr. Norton, in a box opposite ours. What a terrible piece! what atrocious situations and ferocious circumstances! tinkering, starving, hanging—like a chapter out of the Newgate Calendar. But, after all, she's in the right; she has given the public what they desire, given them what they like. Of course it made one cry horribly; but then of course one cries when one hears of people reduced by sheer ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... academic triviality. For just as the ancient State was wounded to the heart through the death of her healthy sons in the field, just so slowly, just so silently, is the modern receiving deadly hurt by the botching and tinkering of her unhealthy children. The net result is in each case the same—the altered ratio of the total amount of reproductive health to the total amount of reproductive disease. They recklessly spent their best; we sedulously conserve our worst; and as they pined and died of anaemia, ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
... remarked, Wriggle," put in the brigadier; "for they have been tinkering them, and altering them, any time these five hundred and fifty years, and still they remain ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... had various attractions. Among them was Charlie's "maginary." It was a box covered with white cloth, a piece of workmanship at which Charlie had been secretly tinkering for two days. It was labeled "A Distant Cousin of the White Elephant of Siam. Price to see, three cents, and don't tell ...
— The Knights of the White Shield - Up-the-Ladder Club Series, Round One Play • Edward A. Rand
... me a little open that Scripture to you: As every man hath received the gift; that is, said he, as every one hath received a trade, so let him follow it. If any man have received a gift of tinkering, as thou hast done, let him follow his tinkering. And so other men their trades. And ...
— Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners • John Bunyan
... suppose that they expect to lessen it; but, to be sure, it was grown to a sauciness that did call for a decenter veil. I do not think they have found out a good cure; and I am of opinion, too, that flagrancy proceeds from national depravity, which tinkering one branch will not remedy. Perhaps polished manners are a better proof of virtue in an age than of vice, though system-makers do not hold so: at least, decency has seldom been the symptom of ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume II • Horace Walpole
... from the back of the negro slave the politician who has seated himself there to ride into office for the purpose of carrying out the object of this unholy combination. The chains of slavery are sufficiently strong, without being riveted anew by tinkering politicians of the free States. I feel myself compelled into this contest, in defence of the institutions of my own State, the persons and firesides of her citizens, from the insatiable grasp of the slaveholding power as being used and felt in the free States. To say that I am opposed to slavery ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... on the road and died there. Never got to New York at all. Ike Schumann wouldn't let Fillmore have a theatre. The book wanted fixing and the numbers wanted fixing and the scenery wasn't right: and while they were tinkering with all that there was trouble about the cast and the Actors Equity closed the show. Best thing that could have happened, really, and I was glad at the time, because going on with it would only ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... went to bed that night, Blix sought out her father, who was still sitting up tinkering with the cuckoo clock, which he had taken all to pieces under the pretext that it was out of order and went ...
— Blix • Frank Norris
... reply to this; instead, he bent over Hal who was still tinkering with the engine ...
— The Boy Allies At Verdun • Clair W. Hayes
... hinterland of this size there might well be depths of wood that would never in the life of the world be known or trodden. The thought was not exactly the sort he welcomed. In a loud voice, cheerfully, he suggested that it was time for bed. But the guide lingered, tinkering with the fire, arranging the stones needlessly, doing a dozen things that did not really need doing. Evidently there was something he wanted to say, yet found it difficult ...
— The Wendigo • Algernon Blackwood
... is flatly opposed to Liberalism, but is shrewd enough to have a moderate Liberal among his kingly advisers; for William realizes the political weakness of further constitution-tinkering. ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... help, and the chauffeur who had never had the pleasure of tinkering with a "Marvin Six," was inclined to dismount and aid at least in diagnosing the car's ailment. While he was thinking about it and surveying the parts which Harry had taken out and strewn about the running board in his pretended trouble hunt Pauline had dashed away her tears ...
— The Perils of Pauline • Charles Goddard
... first amateurs to get a job on the great Reward Claim, though subsequently it became a regular harbour of refuge for young men crowded out from the banks and offices of Sydney and Melbourne. Nothing but a fabulously rich mine could have stood the tinkering of so many unprofessional miners. It speaks well for the kindness of heart of those at the head of the management of the mine that they were willing to trust the unearthing of so much treasure to the hands of boys unused to ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie
... this," she said: "I've been tinkering with that machine gun most of the day, and my conviction is that it will work. You simply turn a handle like a hand sewing machine. As soon as you hear me starting it you leave the church by that shell hole at the back and go as rapidly as possible back to the American lines. I'll guarantee," ...
— More Tish • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... except that the days flew too fast. Clover said it seemed to her very queer that there was so much less time than usual in the world. She couldn't imagine what had become of it: there used to be plenty. And she was certain that Dorry must have been tinkering all ...
— What Katy Did At School • Susan Coolidge
... handicraft men. Are they not all over England, in this Midsummer time? Where does the lark sing, the corn grow, the mill turn, the river run, and they are not among the lights and shadows, tinkering, chair-mending, umbrella-mending, clock-mending, knife-grinding? Surely, a pleasant thing, if we were in that condition of life, to grind our way through Kent, Sussex, and Surrey. For the worst six weeks or so, we should ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... surgeons to remove the vermiform appendix and portions of the intestines upon too little provocation, Sir W. Macewin, M.D., F.R.S. (B. Medical Jrn., 1904, 2 p. 874) says:—"Is this human body of ours so badly constructed that it contains so many useless parts and requires so much tinkering? Possibly I may be out of fashion with the times, as I cannot find such imperfections in the normal human body as are alleged. On the contrary, the more one looks into the human body and sees it work, the better one understands it and the more one is struck with ...
— The Chemistry of Food and Nutrition • A. W. Duncan
... grouping these three sonnets under this heading. The second one beginning "What is't to live" appears in Butler's Note-Book with the remark, "This wants much tinkering, but I cannot tinker it"—meaning that he was too much occupied with other things. He left the second line of the third of these ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... where Liane superintended its disposal in the luggage-jammed tonneau. A second trip, less laborious, brought them the hamper. Liane uttered perfunctory thanks and called to Jules, who was still tinkering at the limousine engine with the aid of an ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... get the doors open," announced the darky, after tinkering vainly with them. "I reckon the lock's done got jammed. If I could get 'em open the lil girl under the seat could shinny up the wall and that ...
— Betty Gordon in Washington • Alice B. Emerson
... attitude, of a change in our laws and in our judgments strictly parallel to several we have considered. Once more I am convinced of the poverty, and selfishness, and the immorality of our views. Nor do I find great improvement to-day over yesterday. There is much talk and some tinkering, but though our judgments are less harsh, still we are choked with the weeds of false sentiment and feminine egoism. We fail to attack ...
— Women's Wild Oats - Essays on the Re-fixing of Moral Standards • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... distance between the two boats made it possible to distinguish the disabled speeder more clearly, Orme saw that the Japanese was still tinkering with the motor. He was busying himself as though he realized that he had no hope of escape unless ...
— The Girl and The Bill - An American Story of Mystery, Romance and Adventure • Bannister Merwin
... as Fred was tinkering around, fixing up some of his traps, he heard the whistle of one of his chums outside. Poking his head out of the window, and wondering why, if it should be Sid, he did not come upstairs without any knocking at the door, he saw to his surprise ...
— Fred Fenton on the Crew - or, The Young Oarsmen of Riverport School • Allen Chapman
... Dade and Malcolm standing near the stable. There was a brilliant moon. At Dade's invitation they all went down to the bunkhouse. In spite of the dilapidated appearance of its exterior, the interior of the building was in comparatively good condition—due to the continual tinkering of Malcolm, who liked to spend his idle hours there—and Malcolm lighted a candle, placed it on the rough table, took a deck of cards from the shelf, and the three played "pitch" for two hours. At the end of that time Malcolm said he was going to bed. Dade signified that he intended ...
— The Boss of the Lazy Y • Charles Alden Seltzer
... suggested by Coleridge, but luckily quite beyond all the resources of tinkering open to William Wordsworth, is—in the choice of a Pedlar as the presiding character who connects the shifting scenes and persons in the 'Excursion.' Why should not some man of more authentic station have been complimented ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... judicious and kind exertions made on their behalf. There are already several families of them within my knowledge, who reside in houses during the winter, and travel about only in the summer. Their means of subsistence are tinkering, and fiddling at feasts and fairs; by which some, I believe, make a good deal of money, which helps them out in the winter, when there is ...
— A Historical Survey of the Customs, Habits, & Present State of the Gypsies • John Hoyland
... had damaged one of the control levers beyond the possibility of repair outside a machine shop; but after considerable tinkering, Carthoris was able to propel his wounded flier at low speed, a rate which could not approach the rapid gait of the thoat, whose eight long, powerful legs carried it over the ochre vegetation of the ...
— Thuvia, Maid of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... come to the second Poem, 'Allegorical lines.' This poem has sound materials, but it wants some of your hard tinkering. Pardon my unceremonious language. I do not like that affected old word, 'ill-besped' in the first line. To ascribe human feelings to a leaf, as you have done through the whole Poem, notwithstanding your authority, as I ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... food, from sea-fish to beef, may be bought at the lowest prices, and the people are consequently well-developed and of a high stomach. They demand ten shillings for tinkering a jammed lock of a trunk; they receive sixteen shillings a day for working as carpenters; they spend many sixpences on very bad cigars, which the poorest of them smoke, and they go mad over a prize-fight. When ...
— American Notes • Rudyard Kipling
... Elstow, a mile side of Bedford, about the year 1628. His father was mean, and by trade a mender of pots and kettles, vulgarly called a tinker, and of the national religion, as commonly men of that trade are, and was brought up to the tinkering trade, as also were several of his brothers, whereat he worked about that country,[6] being also very profane and poor, even when ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... hushed," said the woman, speaking English. "The man is a good man, and he will do us no harm. We are tinkers, sir; but we do many things besides tinkering, many sinful things, especially in Wales, whither we are soon going again. Oh, I want to be eased of some of my sins before I go into Wales again, and so do you, Tourlough, for you know how you are ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... his wife who lived in the kitchen. So she passed through the empty farm-yard and through the wilderness of a garden, and mounted the bank by the sluice. When she got to the top, to see the old, velvety surface of the pond before her, she noticed a man on the bank, tinkering with a punt. It was Birkin sawing ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... her up and she'll be all right, eh?" said Chamberlain, but Hand kept on tinkering. The sudden neighing and plunging of Little Simon's poor tormented horse gave warning of the sheriff, crashing from the underbrush directly ...
— The Stolen Singer • Martha Idell Fletcher Bellinger
... nor two, nor three Sundays that Brother Simon was away from his congregation, but six passed before he was there again. He was seen to be very busy tinkering around during the week, and then one Sunday he appeared suddenly in his pulpit. The church nodded and smiled a welcome to him. There was no change in him. If anything he was more fiery than ever. But, there was a change. Lize, who was news-gatherer and ...
— The Strength of Gideon and Other Stories • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... and did it so thoroughly that nothing in the little cutter was ever found wanting. And when, for any reason, his presence was in demand, the first place to look for him was—in the boat, and there, too, he was usually found, tinkering away with sheets, sails, or rudder and ...
— Three More John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... is simple in design and construction and does not require constant tinkering and adjustment of valve gears or taking up of wear in the running parts, it is like any other piece of fine machinery in that it should receive intelligent and careful attention from the operator by inspection of the working parts that are ...
— Steam Turbines - A Book of Instruction for the Adjustment and Operation of - the Principal Types of this Class of Prime Movers • Hubert E. Collins
... house-cleaning time, and she was getting the diningroom ready for the new carpet. Therefore, although she heard the noise upstairs, she gave herself no concern about it; supposing that Larry was merely amusing himself, for he was continually tinkering ...
— Apples, Ripe and Rosy, Sir • Mary Catherine Crowley
... the liquor business involves fundamental questions of the function and scope of government, and there is hardly any department of organized human activity that has been the subject of so much experiment and futile tinkering.... The only people who are perfectly consistent are the prohibitionists, whose policy is abolition. Let us, however, try to detach ourselves from any personal interest that we may have in the subject, and consider it impartially as a matter ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... strengthened, soldered, tinkered, mended, and braced every accordion, guitar, melodeon, dulcimer, and fiddle in Edgewood, Pleasant River, and the neighboring villages. There was a little money to be earned in this way, but very little, as people in general regarded this "tinkering" as a pleasing diversion in which they could indulge him without danger. As an example of this attitude, Dr. Berry's wife's melodeon had lost two stops, the pedals had severed connection with the rest of the works, it wheezed like an asthmatic, and two black keys were missing. Anthony worked more ...
— The Village Watch-Tower • (AKA Kate Douglas Riggs) Kate Douglas Wiggin
... sprang up and ran, Crusoe and the Honorable Cuthbert at my heels. There in the midst of the camp Mr. Tubbs stood, the center of a group who were regarding him with astonished looks. Mr. Shaw and the captain had left their tinkering, Cookie his saucepans, and Aunt Jane and Violet had come hurrying from the hut. Among us all stood Mr. Tubbs with folded arms, looking round upon the company with an extraordinary air of ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon
... and feed bins, a small room where the former owner had done his "tinkering and odd jobs," and many other places where someone might have hidden. But no one could be found. No farm animal had made the noise, that was evident, for Sandy could account for all the larger stock on the place, and it must have ...
— The Moving Picture Girls at Oak Farm - or, Queer Happenings While Taking Rural Plays • Laura Lee Hope
... vehicle of improvement is education. It is by education that the American is trained for such democracy as he possesses; and it is by better education that he proposes to better his democracy. Men are uplifted by education much more surely than they are by any tinkering with laws and institutions, because the work of education leavens the actual social substance. It helps to give the individual himself those qualities without which no institutions, however excellent, are of any use, and with which even bad ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... the last of the oysters, which he had made sure to throw aboard the Wireless, and had found no time up to now, to tackle. George was tinkering with his motor, a customary amusement with him; for his heart was bent on learning how to coax yet another bit of speed from the engine that racked his boat so terribly when ...
— Motor Boat Boys Down the Coast - or Through Storm and Stress to Florida • Louis Arundel
... had only a single defect—they would not reap. An ingenious English actor had developed a contrivance which would cut imitation wheat on the stage, but no one had developed a machine that would work satisfactorily in real life. Robert McCormick spent the larger part of his days and nights tinkering at a practical machine. He finally produced a horrific contrivance, made up of whirling sickles, knives, and revolving rods, pushed from behind by two horses; when he tried this upon a grain-field, however, ...
— The Age of Big Business - Volume 39 in The Chronicles of America Series • Burton J. Hendrick
... very much," he returned. "Yes, I feel actually comfortable once more. Don Manuel has dressed and bound up my wounds, applying soothing salves to them, and altogether tinkering me up until I am pretty nearly as good as new. But, Hawkesley, my dear boy, are we in our sober senses, or is this only a delightful dream? I can scarcely realise that I am awake; that we are actually among our fellow-men once more; and that I am surrounded by the walls ...
— The Congo Rovers - A Story of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... decided against the United States, was to draw up regulations for the protection of the seal herds. These regulations when drafted did not prove entirely satisfactory, and bound only the United States and Great Britain. It required many years and much tinkering to bring about the reasonably satisfactory arrangement that is now in force. Yet to leave to an international tribunal not merely the decision of a disputed case but the legislation necessary to regulate an international property ...
— The Path of Empire - A Chronicle of the United States as a World Power, Volume - 46 in The Chronicles of America Series • Carl Russell Fish
... anyhow? This is my first saengerfest for eons. Old Bannister has a clear track ahead at last, the Championship is won for sure, and Thor, that mighty engine of destruction to Ham's and Ballard's hopes, after much tinkering, is hitting on all twelve cylinders. Why, I prithee, deny me the pleasure of ...
— T. Haviland Hicks Senior • J. Raymond Elderdice
... however, it is rather a wet business to stand admiring crocuses in the streaming rain, so Ingred made a dash through the dripping bushes to the cycle-shed. If she had calculated upon finding solitude here she was disappointed. It was occupied already. Egbert, looking as gloomy as Hamlet, was tinkering with the motor-bicycle. He greeted his sister with something between a sigh and a grunt, whistled monotonously for a moment or two, then burst ...
— A Popular Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... finished his mysterious tinkering and rose from his dusty job to brush off his clothes, he remarked, "There, now you may have your heart's desire, Dillon, if all you want to do is ...
— Guy Garrick • Arthur B. Reeve
... good service if, by her means, we can get away to some Christian land. We might have been much worse off than we are, and, to my mind, we have no cause to grumble. Here's our boat still safe, and, with some tinkering, she may be made to swim and serve us well. We will tow her on shore; but first we will see what provisions we can come at ...
— The Voyages of the Ranger and Crusader - And what befell their Passengers and Crews. • W.H.G. Kingston
... only that it was spent on his father's farm. He went to Kalamazoo for his schooling, and it was there that I first met him. He worked hard, saved his money, and went to Ann Arbor for his college work. He was ambitious to become a great engineer, and was always tinkering at some kind of a machine. He used to joke with me about becoming a great inventor, and after we were married he did try his hand at a patent coupler and a back-firing device for a gas engine. He was just like you, ...
— Buffalo Roost • F. H. Cheley
... export ice, and talk through a telegraph, and ride thirty miles an hour, without a doubt, whether they do or not; but whether we should live like baboons or like men, is a little uncertain. If we do not get out sleepers, and forge rails, and devote days and nights to the work, but go to tinkering upon our lives to improve them, who will build railroads? And if railroads are not built, how shall we get to heaven in season? But if we stay at home and mind our business, who will want railroads? We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us. Did ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... tinkering at the patent laws are before Congress, and one of these (House Bill, No. 3,370) passed the House on the 30th ult. It has one section that may be made to work great harm to inventors, as it prevents infringers ...
— Scientific American, Volume XXXVI., No. 8, February 24, 1877 • Various
... great deal of tinkering and trying, they did succeed in making two paddle wheels. They were very rough and crude, but strong and serviceable. They fastened each of these wheels to the end of an iron rod which they passed through the boat from side to side. The rod was bent in the middle so that it could be ...
— Fifty Famous People • James Baldwin
... willing to make; namely, the choice between wealth and a modest competency, when that modest competency is to be combined with a scientific career, and the means of advancing knowledge. I do not believe that all the talking about, and tinkering of, medical education will do the slightest good until the fact is clearly recognized, that men must be thoroughly grounded in the theoretical branches of their profession, and that to this end ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... not the very effort to make the existing machine run more perfectly merely makes matters worse. For the tinkering reformer is frequently one of the worst of the routineers. Even machines are not altogether inflexible, and sometimes what the reformer regards as a sad deviation from the original plans is a poor rickety ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann |
