"Trowel" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... places, groves and woods. They are usually more abundant in the forests. Especially in dry weather are specimens more numerous in rather damp woods, along ravines or streams. In collecting specimens which grow on the ground the trowel should be used to dig up the plant carefully, to be sure that no important part of the plant is left in the ground. After one has become familiar with the habit of the different kinds the trowel will not be necessary in all cases. For example, most species of Russula, Lactarius, ...
— Studies of American Fungi. Mushrooms, Edible, Poisonous, etc. • George Francis Atkinson
... granite, quartz alone remains unaltered. Mica weathers to detached flakes which have lost their elasticity. The feldspar crystals have lost their luster and hardness, and even have decayed to clay. Where long- weathered granite forms the country rock, it often may be cut with spade or trowel for several feet from the surface, so rotten is the feldspar, and here the rock is seen to break down to a clayey soil containing grains of quartz and ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton
... paper being off, Joe washed down the walls with water, and having swept the paper into a heap in the middle of the floor, he mixed with a small trowel some cement on a small board and proceeded to stop up the cracks and holes in the walls and ceiling. After a while, feeling very tired, it occurred to him that he deserved a spell and a smoke for five minutes. He closed the door and placed a pair of steps against it. There were two windows ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... the top of his house, with a high north window and roughly plastered walls of uncolored sand, left as Bertrand himself had put the plaster on, with his trowel marks over the surface as they happened to come, and the angles and ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... I busied myself among the pile of bones of which I have before spoken. Throwing them aside, I soon un- covered a quantity of building stone and mortar. With these materials and with the aid of my trowel, I began vigorously to wall up the entrance of ...
— The Raven • Edgar Allan Poe
... water from the pond, or assisting in some grave procession, no sooner do they hear the rapid beats of a distant drum, than they begin to caper and dance spontaneously. The bricklayer will throw down his trowel for a minute, the carpenter leave his bench, the corn grinder her milling stone, and the porter his load, to keep time to the ...
— Chopin and Other Musical Essays • Henry T. Finck
... be enough to say, "the Holy Ghost fell on those that believed." No man saw the building of the New Jerusalem, the workmen crowded together, the unfinished walls and unpaved streets; no man heard the chink of trowel and pickaxe; it descended ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... about that," says MCLAUGHLIN. "I carry the keys of the Bumsteadville[1] churchyard vaults, and can tell to an atom, by a tap of my trowel, how fast a skeleton is dropping to dust in the pauper burial-ground. That's more than they can do who call me names." With which ghastly speech JOHN MCLAUGHLIN ...
— Punchinello, Vol.1, No. 12 , June 18,1870 • Various
... wants to marry you, that poverty alone prevents your setting up house, and that you told him you would not be his wife till he found means to become a master mason.—Well, go and fetch him; tell him to come here with his trowel and tools. Contrive to wake no one in his house but himself. His reward will be beyond your wishes. Above all, go out without saying a word—or else!' ...
— La Grande Breteche • Honore de Balzac
... be made by the study of Shakspeare. Do that which is assigned you, and you cannot hope too much or dare too much. There is at this moment for you an utterance brave and grand as that of the colossal chisel of Phidias, or trowel of the Egyptians, or the pen of Moses or Dante, but different from all these. Not possibly will the soul, all rich, all eloquent, with thousand-cloven tongue, deign to repeat itself; but if you can hear what these patriarchs say, surely you can reply to them in the ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... ejection, and when the earth was in a very liquid state it was ejected in little spurts, and by a slow peristaltic movement when not so liquid. It is not cast indifferently on any side, but with some care, first on one and then on another side; the tail being used almost like a trowel. When a worm comes to the surface to eject earth, the tail protrudes, but when it collects leaves its head must protrude. Worms therefore must have the power of turning round in their closely-fitting burrows; and this, as it appears to us, ...
— The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the action of worms with • Charles Darwin
... shocking oath, in connection with the name of Mrs. Curtis, and started forward with his trowel as if he were about to strike ...
— Berties Home - or, the Way to be Happy • Madeline Leslie
... three, and here she did come! And in a trice Polly had the cover up, and out flew the little green tin botany case; and within it being an iron spoon and little trowel, off flew Polly on happy feet to unearth the treasures that were to beautify Phronsie's little garden; a bunch of girls following to see ...
— Five Little Peppers at School • Margaret Sidney
... sang spring to us one fine morning, and we went out to plant our radish-seeds. With fit forethought, the seed had been bought, the ground manured and raked, the string, the dibble, the woman's trowel, the man's trowel, the sticks for the seed-papers, and the papers were all there. Lois was charming, in her sun-bonnet; I looked knowing in my Canadian oat-straw. We marked out the bed,—as the robins, meadow-larks, and bluebirds directed. Lois then looked up article "Radish" ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... could not be persuaded to attend at Miss Todd's behest. He was steadily engaged in antiquarian researches, being minded to bring out to the world some startling new theory as to certain points in Bible chronology and topography. He always went about the city with a trowel and a big set of tablets; and certain among the more enthusiastic of the visitors to Jerusalem had put him ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... at full length, like hundreds of other motionless forms about them, but all were working busily. With a short trowel, the file leader scuffled the earth from under his body, taking care not to raise his arms, and gradually making a shallow trench deep enough to hide him. The others followed his example until the whole line had ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell
... Egyptians might almost have been said to make a point of doing everything differently from other nation's. The baker, seen at the kneading-trough inside his shop, worked the dough with his foot; on the other hand, the mason used no trowel in applying his mortar, and the poorer classes scraped up handfuls of mud mixed with dung when they had occasion to repair the walls of their hovels. In Greece, even the very poorest retired to their houses and ate with closed ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 9 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... eye-brows were an ebon black, as were his eyes; his features were hard and massive; his nose, which was somewhat hooked, but too much pointed, seemed as if, while in a plastic state, it had been sloped by a trowel towards one side of his face, a circumstance which, while taken in connection with his black whiskers that ran to a point near his mouth, and piercing eyes, that were too deeply and narrowly set, gave him, aided by his heavy eyebrows, an expression at once of great cruelty ...
— The Black Prophet: A Tale Of Irish Famine • William Carleton
... is said in these days about the value or valuelessness of logic. In the main, indeed, logic is not a productive tool so much as a weapon of defence. A man building up an intellectual system has to build like Nehemiah, with the sword in one hand and the trowel in the other. The imagination, the constructive quality, is the trowel, and argument is the sword. A wide experience of actual intellectual affairs will lead most people to the conclusion that logic is mainly valuable as a ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... long upon this gold I lie Within this place, where never mason's hand Smote trowel on the marble noisily; Drowsy I lie, no folk at my command, Who once was called the Lady of the Land; Who might have bought a kingdom with a kiss, Yea, half the world with such ...
— The Earthly Paradise - A Poem • William Morris
... To dream of a trowel, denotes you will experience reaction in unfavorable business, and will vanquish poverty. To see one rusty or broken, unavoidable ill luck is ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... same," one of them informed her; "so you are too! Everybody's looking." And they crowded round to examine the objects in her hand—a dirty earth-stained trowel and a fern. They knew she collected ferns on the sly, but never before had they seen her bring home such a prize. Usually she found only crumpled things like old bits of wrinkled brown paper which she called "specimens." This one was ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood
... did not see the party set out the next morning, or the shock might so completely have overcome him as to unfit him for any business whatever. But they waited until he had gone, and then they started with their baskets, trowel, ...
— 'Our guy' - or, The elder brother • Mrs. E. E. Boyd
... threw open the lid. There they lay, the half-forgotten symbols of his old life. Worn mallets, chisels, the head of a broken hod with the plaster still caked into it, a short broad shovel for mixing mortar, a trowel, a spirit level, a plumb, all wrapped loosely in a worn leather apron. He took the mallets in his hand and turned them about with the quick little jerks that came so naturally to him. Strength for the work ...
— Waysiders • Seumas O'Kelly
... its watery cradle and the plastic matter undergoes changes so rapid and yet so steady and purposelike in their succession that one can only compare them to those operated by a skilled modeler upon a formless lump of clay. As with an invisible trowel the mass is divided and subdivided into smaller and smaller portions, until it is reduced to an aggregation of granules not too large to build withal the finest fabrics of the nascent organism. And, then, ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... speculative builders love to raise upon some miserable fragment of waste ground hanging to the skirts of a prosperous town. Brigsome's Terrace was, perhaps, one of the most dismal blocks of building that was ever composed of brick and mortar since the first mason plied his trowel and the first architect drew his plan. The builder who had speculated in the ten dreary eight-roomed prison-houses had hung himself behind the parlor door of an adjacent tavern while the carcases were yet unfinished. The man who had bought the brick and mortar skeletons had ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... 'igloo.' There is a good deal of difference of opinion as to the best implement with which to cut snow blocks. Cherry-Garrard had a knife which I designed and Lashly made, Wilson a saw, and Bowers a large trowel. I'm inclined to think the knife will prove most effective, but the others don't acknowledge it yet. As far as one can see at present this knife should have a longer handle and much coarser teeth in the saw edge—perhaps also the blade should ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... with a kind of sincere intensity that seemed to belong to her. "Isn't it in the still, quiet places that things do happen? I fancy that when God began to create the earth on the first Monday morning one could have leaned out one's window and heard the drops of mud splashing from His trowel as He built up the everlasting hills. What did the noisiest project in the world—I mean the building of the Tower of Babel—result in finally? A page and a half of Esperanto ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... a trick in brick or stone That this young man hadn't seen or known; Nor there wasn't a tool from trowel to maul But this young man could ...
— Songs from Books • Rudyard Kipling
... as the talent of a beaver—which can build houses, and uses its tail for a trowel—to the genius of a prophet and poet. Reason is all but extinct in this age; it can never ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... in earnest, and I ran downstairs accordingly, returning with a garden trowel, a plate of cold fish, ...
— The Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... made a wondrous picturesque figure of himself as, in a raised corner of the crowded and beflagged marquee, he had flourished a trowel, and talked about the great and enlightened public, and about the highest function of the drama, and about the duty of the artist to elevate, and about the solemn responsibility of theatrical managers, and about the absence of petty jealousies in the world of the stage. Everybody had ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... opened the chest, and received his friend with open arms. Grotius declared, that while he was in the chest, he had felt much anxiety, but had suffered no other inconvenience. Having dressed himself as a mason, with a rule and trowel, he went, through the back door of Bazelaer's house, accompanied by his maid, along the market-place, to a boat engaged for the purpose. It conveyed them to Vervie in Brabant: there, he was safe. His maid then left him, and, returning to his wife, communicated to her the agreeable ...
— The Life of Hugo Grotius • Charles Butler
... the small window, almost blocking the light—on a platform constructed of three planks and a couple of chairs set face to face—stood Nicky-Nan, with a trowel in one hand and a bricklayer's board in the other, surprised in the act of plastering ...
— Nicky-Nan, Reservist • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... name of Ali, son of Abou Talib, is invoked. I ascended to the terrace (roof) of this mosque, accompanied by one of the men of Bassora. There I saw, at one of the corners, a piece of wood nailed to the minaret, and resembling the handle of a mason's trowel. He who was with me took hold of it, saying, "By the head of the prince of believers, Ali, shake thyself!" Therewith he shook the handle, and the minaret trembled. In turn, I placed my hand upon it, ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... down the wood-aisle doth seem Like a lane into heaven that leads from a dream, — Ay, now, when my soul all day hath drunken the soul of the oak And my heart is at ease from men, and the wearisome sound of the stroke Of the scythe of time and the trowel of trade is low, And belief overmasters doubt, and I know that I know, And my spirit is grown to a lordly great compass within, That the length and the breadth and the sweep of the marshes of Glynn Will work me no fear like the fear they have wrought me of yore When ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... also a colporteur for the Salvation Army; in fact, of being almost everything but a tiler or plasterer. But this shrewd woman had evidently come to the conclusion that, if I did not work upon the housetops, I must perforce be an artist of the trowel. I assured her that I was as incapable of fixing a tile as of making a ceiling; ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... remonstrating with the workmen on their conduct, but, seizing a trowel, lifted a heavy ...
— The Lion of Saint Mark - A Story of Venice in the Fourteenth Century • G. A. Henty
... below it. It must be recognized that fire clay is not a cement and that it has little or no holding power. Its action is that of a filler rather than a binder and no fire-clay wash should be used which has a consistency sufficient to permit the use of a trowel. ...
— Steam, Its Generation and Use • Babcock & Wilcox Co.
... Blue Mountains. On the 11th of February, 1851, he spent the night at a little inn a few miles from the object of his journey, and shortly after dawn he sallied forth on his ride through the forest, carrying with him a spade and a trowel and a little tin dish. In the cool air of the morning the scent of the spreading gum trees braced up his frame as he plunged deeper and deeper among those lonely hollows and wood-clad hills. In an hour or two he reached the well-remembered spot—the dry course of a ...
— History of Australia and New Zealand - From 1606 to 1890 • Alexander Sutherland
... beaver, whose tail I am convinced is a trowel. I know of no naturalist who has mentioned this, but such negative evidence is of little weight. The beaver, as everybody knows, is a builder, who cuts down trees and piles log upon log until he has raised a solid, domed cabin from seven to twenty feet in diameter, which ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)
... seemed to be the only inhabitant of what I had known, a short time before, as a prosperous and thriving market town. Then through an aperture that had been a window I saw three women sitting round a candle. And in the next street I found a man on his knees on the pavement, working with bricks and a trowel. ...
— Kings, Queens And Pawns - An American Woman at the Front • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... For Doc Philipps is a tree maniac and father to every little green growing thing. He knows trees as a mother knows her children and he never sets foot outside his front gate without having tucked somewhere into the many pockets about his big person a stout trowel, some choice apple seeds, peach and cherry stones or seedlings of trees and shrubs. In every ramble, and he is a great walker, he searches for a spot where a tree seedling might grow to maturity and the minute he finds such a place off comes his coat, back ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds
... thought into Sarah's head. For three days she said nothing, but she fell into the way of going often in and out of that door, and always her eyes were hungrily fixed on one or the other of those squares. On the fourth day she bought a trowel and some flower seeds and set resolutely to work. She had dug the trowel into the earth four times, and was delightedly sniffing the odor from the moist ...
— The Tangled Threads • Eleanor H. Porter
... Ghost of an Apron), which some highest-bred housewife, sitting at Nuernberg Workboxes and Toyboxes, has gracefully fastened on; to the thick-tanned hide, girt round him with thongs, wherein the Builder builds, and at evening sticks his trowel; or to those jingling sheet-iron Aprons, wherein your otherwise half-naked Vulcans hammer and smelt in their smelt-furnace,—is there not range enough in the fashion and uses of this Vestment? How much has been concealed, how much has been defended ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... trowel cuts them quite in half, It is a bitter cup; They give a sour sardonic laugh And sew the pieces up; They sew them up and wind away With seeming unconcern, But oh, be careful! one fine day I ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, December 1, 1920 • Various
... and will be, "Till death us do part." My courtship was rather "at long range;" for Newark, Ohio, was several hundred miles away, and I have always found that a man who would build up a strong church must be constantly at it, trowel in hand. On the 17th of March, 1853, the venerable Dr. Wylie conducted for us a very simple and solemn service of holy wedlock, closing with his fatherly benediction, one of the best acts of his long and useful life. The invalid mother of my bride (for Colonel ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... borderer, leaving her Mind, indeed, to damp evenings and the winter months. When I think of her at Beckenham, I always think first of her as dressed in that blue cotton stuff she affected, with her arms in huge gauntleted gardening gloves, a trowel in one hand and a small but no doubt hardy and promising annual, limp and very young-looking and sheepish, ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... with the insignia of Garter and Thistle, Golden Fleece, Elephant of Denmark, Skinner's and Probyn's horse, Lincoln's Inn bencher and ancient and honourable artillery company of Massachusetts. He sucks a red jujube. He is robed as a grand elect perfect and sublime mason with trowel and apron, marked made in Germany. In his left hand he holds a plasterer's bucket on which is printed Defense d'uriner. A roar of welcome ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... covered with climbing plants, wild grapes, Virginia jessamine. In the middle is a sun-dial. There are many plants in pots. Your child is looking at the flowers. She shows them to her nurse—she is making holes in the earth with her trowel, and planting seeds. The nurse is raking the path. The young girl is pure as an angel, but the beginning of love is ...
— Ursula • Honore de Balzac
... a wonderfully soothing effect a little judicious flattery has on the race of husbands, and how smoothly it makes the marital wheels go round. I don't mean false, blatant, absurd flattery, such as men often bestow on us when desirous to please, not realising that compliments laid on with a trowel are an insult to one's intelligence. Nothing of that kind, of course, but delicate, subtle, loving flattery. An attitude of gentle admiration toward your Perseus, subdued a little possibly for public use, but none the less markedly appreciative, will ...
— Modern marriage and how to bear it • Maud Churton Braby
... a plant and examine the root? I am afraid we cannot, unless you care to go back to the house for a fork or a trowel. The Dandelion has a very long strong root—tap-root—which goes deep into the ground; and there is no tall main stem of which we can take hold—the leaves and flower stalks only break off in ...
— Wildflowers of the Farm • Arthur Owens Cooke
... showed no increase. This caused Pharaoh to reflect, whether this wonderful rod of Aaron might not swallow up also him and his throne. Nevertheless he refused to obey the behest of God, to let Israel go, saying, "Had I Jacob-Israel himself here before me, I should put trowel and bucket on his shoulder." And to Moses and Aaron, he said, "Because ye, like all the rest of the tribe of Levi, are not compelled to labor, therefore do ye speak, 'Let us go and sacrifice to the Lord.' If you had asked for a thousand people, or two thousand, I should have fulfilled your ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg
... of sympathy at home could not extinguish the divine fire of genius in the youthful Murgatroyd. Exhausted and hungry as he often was at the end of the day's work, he devoted his leisure to the study of bricks and mortar, and out of his scanty pocket-money he bought for himself first a trowel and later a plummet. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, June 9, 1920 • Various
... are quite right, Philip. [PHILIP goes up.] The fact is, seeing Mr. Karslake again [Laying on her indifference with a trowel.] he seems to me as much a stranger as if I were meeting him ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: The New York Idea • Langdon Mitchell
... raised precisely such a shout in just such sandy gullies, but Sile felt as if he were the first being on earth to whom such an experience had ever happened. He at once began to dig and sift among the gravel fiercely. He took out his hunting-knife and plied it as a trowel. Little bits of dull yellow metal rewarded him every now and then until he worked along to where a ledge (or the edge of one) of quartz came nearly to the surface. On the upper side of that, and lying closely against it, he pried out something that made ...
— Two Arrows - A Story of Red and White • William O. Stoddard
... going to find out." She pointed to a woman, stooped to the ground and working with a trowel; in front of the tiny bungalow. "I don't know what she's like, but at the worst she can only be mean. See! She's looking at us now. Drop your load alongside of mine, and ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... a curious thing that we do not succeed in fresco. The grace is gone out of it; modern painters have not the lightness of touch necessary; they are used to masses of colour, and they use the palette knife as a mason the trowel. The art, too, like the literature of our time, is all detail; the grand suggestive vagueness of the Greek drama and of the Umbrian frescoes are lost to us under a crowd of elaborated trivialities; perhaps it is because ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... she was to catch it! And slit open its stomach! And take out all its Directions! And follow 'em! And if it was a Bright Red Celluloid Fish she was to catch it! And take out all its Directions and follow them!—In either case her card said she would need rubbers and a trowel.—It sounded like Buried Treasure to me! Or else Iris Roots! Our Aunt Esta is very ...
— Fairy Prince and Other Stories • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... in despair. His familiars were frightened, and in their disquietude angled to learn what had happened. At last he told them, said he was lost, and that for a few inches the King forgot all his services, which had led to so many conquests; he declared that henceforth he would leave the trowel to the King, bring about a war, and so arrange matters that the King should have good need ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... nearly all gathered examine them again, and cut off the runners; but if you want to make a fresh plantation, leave some of the two first, and cut off all the rest. Then stir up the ground with a trowel, or three-pronged fork, and in August they will be fit to transplant. If you have omitted in July do not fail in August, that the runners may make good roots to be transplanted in September, for, if later, the worms will draw them ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... be hoped she laid them on with a trowel," was the answer, "and gave me a better character than ...
— Enter Bridget • Thomas Cobb
... From the father's scoundrel race. Who could give the looby such airs? Were they masons, were they butchers? Herald, lend the Muse an answer From his atavus and grandsire:[1] This was dexterous at his trowel, That was bred to kill a cow well: Hence the greasy clumsy mien In his dress and figure seen; Hence the mean and sordid soul, Like his body, rank and foul; Hence that wild suspicious peep, Like a rogue that steals a sheep; Hence he learnt the butcher's guile, How to ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... above my brother, the god Unwinding the roll. And a tale came forth of the woven slain Sequent and whole, Of flint and bronze, trowel and hod, The wheel and the plane, The carven stone and the graven clod Painted and baked. And cromlechs, proving the human heart Has always ached; Till it puffed with blood and gave to art The dream of the dome; Till ...
— Toward the Gulf • Edgar Lee Masters
... the great discoverer in the fore-ground on bended knees with a trowel in his hand, laying the corner-stone. On the right, sits an ideal female figure, representing Mother Church, fostering a little Indian child, and pointing with uplifted hand to the cross, the emblem of man's salvation. Crouching Indians are at her feet, listening ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... found, With solemn step his march around Among the patients, pacing slowly— Disciple of the meek and lowly, Who afterwards oft turned the key On many a goodly company. In that strong work of mason's trowel, Ruled now by Alexander Powell. And William Addison, no more— As trim a soldier as e'er wore The uniform, or bravely bore His head erect, with step as light As wings that touch the air in flight. Well had he won and kept from harm The honor'd stripes upon his arm. Such ...
— Recollections of Bytown and Its Old Inhabitants • William Pittman Lett
... corsets,' 'Petersham trousers,' 'Brummel cravats,' 'Osbaldistone ties,' and 'Exquisite crops,' should be only sketchily rendered in paint. Of course, Mr. Opie, who affected thorough John Bullism in art, who laid on his pigments steadily with a trowel, and produced portraits of ladies like washerwomen, and gentlemen liking Wapping publicans—of course, unsentimental, unfashionable Mr. Opie denounced the degeneracy of his competitor's style. 'Lawrence makes coxcombs of his sitters, and ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... married a young couple with the assurance that he was not only a Carpenter but a Joiner. Only a few months ago he was about to lay the foundation stone of a new vicarage. The architect handed him the trowel, etc., inviting him to become "an operative mason for ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 25, January 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... works progressed rapidly under the direction of the engineer, who himself handled the hammer and the trowel. No labor came amiss to Cyrus Harding, who thus set an example to his intelligent and zealous companions. They worked with confidence, even gaily, Pencroft always having some joke to crack, sometimes carpenter, sometimes ...
— The Mysterious Island • Jules Verne
... up the yellow one. We have brought a basket and trowel, and can examine them thoroughly. We must dig down deep so as not to break off the stem. There is a ring or collar around it near the top. There is a bulb at the base, with some slight membrane attached. ...
— Among the Mushrooms - A Guide For Beginners • Ellen M. Dallas and Caroline A. Burgin
... cutting the mainsail. The dimensions of the jib-sail are given in Fig. 194. It was such a small sail that no boom was used with it. In place of a rudder the steering oar had to be used. This was made of a rake handle with a large trowel blade fastened to the end of it. The sharp blade cut into the ice, and so steered the scow when it was running as an ice boat, and in the water the blade offered sufficient resistance to act as ...
— The Scientific American Boy - The Camp at Willow Clump Island • A. Russell Bond
... a brick from the pile, with his left hand, and he generally tossed the brick up a little way in the air, and it turned over before he caught it again, so that he saw all sides of it; and, with the flat trowel which he held in his right hand, he scooped ...
— The Doers • William John Hopkins
... Paris was seized with a building-fever. If Paris is a monster, it is certainly a most mania-ridden monster. It becomes enamored of a thousand fancies: sometimes it has a mania for building, like a great seigneur who loves a trowel; soon it abandons the trowel and becomes all military; it arrays itself from head to foot as a national guard, and drills and smokes; suddenly, it abandons military manoeuvres and flings away cigars; it is commercial, care-worn, ...
— Ferragus • Honore de Balzac
... stones, and the little waves came lipping and whispering, and the low boom of the snow slides rolled through the chambered hollows of canyon and gorge. Absurd, wasn't it, but the Ranger was not dreaming about the bevelling trowel of the titan mountain gods? He went to sleep dreaming of the star visible from the other side of the Holy Cross, dreaming dreams that men and women have dreamed since time began; of drinking, drinking, and drinking yet again, of life and love and blessedness from ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... ready to transplant, when a terrible catastrophe occurred—a little neighbor girl called on me, and, finding me gone, was right peeved. She entertained herself by uprooting my posies. With a complete thoroughness she mixed plants and dirt together, stirring water into the mixture with my trowel. If her grown-up cake-making is done as conscientiously as was that job, she'll be a wonderful pastry cook! I discovered the mischief while it was still fresh, and out of the wreckage salvaged a few brave seedlings. They pouted awhile before ...
— I Married a Ranger • Dama Margaret Smith
... out on a wooden trowel, consists of distinct grains of soap and a liquid portion, which will easily separate, sufficient salt or brine has been added; the boiling is stopped and the spent lye allowed to settle out, whilst the soap remains on the surface as a more or less ...
— The Handbook of Soap Manufacture • W. H. Simmons
... and whether they were worthy of the extra pains I was taking on their house—these and a thousand other wonderings and reveries kept possession of my mind; while the natural pride and hope and confidence of a young man turned to sweet music the sound of saw and hammer and trowel, and even translated the rustling of pine shavings with ...
— Romance of California Life • John Habberton
... nudged Harker as the master-mason began to take up the last of the small flags. And suddenly there was a movement amongst the watchers, and the master-mason looked up from his job and motioned Mitchington to pass him a trowel which lay at ...
— The Paradise Mystery • J. S. Fletcher
... celebrated, towards 1866, at the moment of the great transformations of Paris, when whole blocks were leveled to the ground, and rose again so rapidly, that one might well wonder whether the masons, instead of a trowel, did not make use ...
— Other People's Money • Emile Gaboriau
... wearing soft, round, visorless caps, were removing the debris of the fatal barricade; soldiers with shovel and hoe filled in the trenches and raked the long, winding street clean of all litter; soldiers with trowel and mortar were perched on shot-torn houses, mending chimneys and slated roofs so that their officers might enjoy immunity from rain and wind and ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... the Major, with a laugh, and pulling his front hair up. "Such things pass by me like the idle wind; or rather, perhaps, they sadden me, from my sense of my own deficiencies. But, bless me! dinner must be waiting. Look at that fellow's trowel—he knows: he turns up the point of it like a spoon. They say that he can smell his dinner two miles off. We all dine at one o'clock now, that I may rout ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... piece of slate; I can scrape holes with that,' said Allan. 'Take this old trowel, Marjorie; it hasn't a handle, but I don't suppose ...
— The Adventure League • Hilda T. Skae
... which she remembered as neglected and overgrown had become orderly. The little beds cut in the turf were neat in their Winter bareness, despite a few dead leaves which had fluttered on to them. Her eyes fell on a pair of gardening gloves and a trowel lying on the grass by one of the beds. From the open mouth of a brown paper bag a bulb had partly rolled before it became stationary. There was a hole dug in the turf. Some one had been planting bulbs and had gone away leaving ...
— Love of Brothers • Katharine Tynan
... England of a six months' winter, in which the land were as hard as a rock, in which all the cattle had to be kept within doors, in which the bricklayer's trowel and the road-mender's roller had ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... At a hazard, my suspicion would fall on the iron doors that open inwards in the base of chimneys. We have been fondly credulous that there is nothing but ash inside and mere siftings from the fire above; and when, on an occasion, we reach in with a trowel for a scoop of this wood-ash for our roses, we laugh at ourselves for our scare of being nabbed. But some day if by way of experiment you will thrust your head within—it's a small hole and you will be besmirched beyond anything but a Saturday's reckoning—you will see that the pit goes ...
— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks
... the Reist farmhouse she found Amanda ready with basket and trowel for the lady-slipper hunt. Amanda had put on a simple white dress and green-and-white sun hat. She looked with bewilderment at the city girl's attire, but said nothing just then. They stopped long enough for Isabel to meet the mistress of the home and then they ...
— Amanda - A Daughter of the Mennonites • Anna Balmer Myers
... once remembered the ceremony. She knew that her Grandmother Felicite was going to lay the first stone of the Rougon Asylum, the triumphant monument destined to carry down to future ages the glory of the family. Vast preparations had been going on for a week past. There was talk of a silver hod and trowel, which the old lady was to use herself, determined to figure to triumph, with her eighty-two years. What swelled her heart with regal pride was that on this occasion she made the conquest of Plassans for the third time, for she compelled the whole town, all the three ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola
... that he's really saved them, that he's turned over the reins to other hands just as trustworthy as his—you can give the president a big hand there—they've got to think his work is the basis of our present foreign policy—can't you see the implications? It's got to be spread on with a trowel, laid on skillfully—" ...
— Bear Trap • Alan Edward Nourse
... the term applied to constructions made of bricks. The tools and implements employed by the bricklayer are:—the trowel for spreading the mortar; the plumb-rule to keep the work perpendicular, or in the case of an inclined or battering wall, to a regular batter, for the plumb-rule may be made to suit any required inclination; the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... flowering annuals and bedding plants. Mr. Brown had to get down on his hands and knees, with gardener's shears, to clip the turfed borders and banks, and take a sickle to the hummocks. Thus he could dig out a root of dandelion with the trowel kept ever in his belt, consider the spreading crocuses and valley lilies, whether to spare them, give a country violet its blossoming time, and leave a screening burdock undisturbed until fledglings were out of their ...
— Greyfriars Bobby • Eleanor Atkinson
... fireplace, in which, some of the hearth-bricks are rather irregularly disposed; and we said to ourself, perhaps the brick-layer who built this noble fireplace worked like Ben Jonson, with a trowel in one hand and a copy of Horace in the other. That suggested to us that we had not read any Ben Jonson for a very long time: so we turned to "Every Man in His Humour" and "The Alchemist." Part of Jonson's notice "To the Reader" preceding "The Alchemist" struck ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... pulp was spread out with the trowel, it remained still colourless, but after it had undergone the process of pressing, which generally took place immediately before sponging, it presented to the astonished workmen the appearance of one sheet of gold; and when ...
— Another World - Fragments from the Star City of Montalluyah • Benjamin Lumley (AKA Hermes)
... Master of the St. Paul's Freemason's Lodge, which assembled at the "Goose and Gridiron," one of the most ancient lodges in London. He presided regularly at its meetings for upwards of eighteen years. He presented the lodge with three beautifully carved mahogany candlesticks, and the trowel and mallet which he used in laying the first stone of the great cathedral in 1675. In 1688 Wren was elected Grand Master of the order, and he nominated his old fellow-workers at St. Paul's, Cibber, the sculptor, and Strong, the master mason, Grand Wardens. In Queen Anne's ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... a lonely little group standing on the terrace, while Mr. Byles was securing a trowel and other instruments of war from his room, but a large and representative gathering of the Seminary did their best to cheer ...
— Young Barbarians • Ian Maclaren
... merrier circumstances. As there was an abundant supply of food and drink, the workmen never left their work; and amidst their continuous laughter the four walls were run up with incredible quickness, until one day Krespel cried, "Stop!" Then the workmen, laying down trowel and hammer, came down from the scaffoldings and gathered round Krespel in a circle, whilst every laughing face was asking, "Well, and what now?" "Make way!" cried Krespel; and then running to one end of the garden, he strode slowly towards the square of brick-work. When ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... couldn't remember why I was placed in that chair, and Ardelia couldn't remember. So it occurred to me that I had forgotten my trowel," he said. He put the trowel, absent-mindedly, in the tea basket, and took the seat ...
— Bambi • Marjorie Benton Cooke
... Trowel and spade and tomahawk went furiously to work, and soon cleared away the gravel from a surface of ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... the best place to dump his hodful, he went to work. He opened his beak and, in the most matter-of-fact way, pushed out his lump of plaster with his tongue, on top of the nest wall. Then he braced his body firmly in the nest and began to use his trowel, which was his upper beak, pushing the fresh lump all smooth on the inside ...
— Bird Stories • Edith M. Patch
... heels, rushes pell-mell to the bank, and with bulging eyes, demands his money. The excitement spreads like fire. The blacksmith leaves his anvil, the carpenter his bench, and the tailor his goose. The tanner deserts his hide, and the shoemaker throws down his last to save his all. The mason with his trowel in his hand, rushes from the half-finished wall; Pat drops his hod between heaven and earth and slides down the ladder, muttering: "Oi'll have me moaney or Oi'll have blood!" The fat phlegmatic Dutchman, dozing behind his bar, wakes to the situation and waddles down ...
— Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales • Robert L. Taylor
... head, hands, teeth, tail, and webbed feet the beaver accomplishes much. The tail of a beaver is a useful and much-used appendage; it serves as a rudder, a stool, and a ramming or signal club. The beaver may use his tail for a trowel, but I have never seen him so use it. His four front teeth are excellent edge-tools for his logging and woodwork; his webbed feet are most useful in his deep-waterway transportation, and his hands in house-building and especially in dam-building. It is in dam-building ...
— Wild Life on the Rockies • Enos A. Mills
... prevents their common enemy, the wolverene, disturbing them during the winter. From the beaver being seen to flap its tail when moving over its work, but especially when about to plunge into the water, has arisen the idea that it uses this member as a trowel. This custom it preserves even when it becomes tame and ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... up the joints with conspicuous pointing. This, however, is not so destructive as much of the work which has been condemned above, because at any time the walls could be recovered with a thin coat of smooth plaster laid on with a trowel, but not "floated,"—that is, not brought to a smooth ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: Wimborne Minster and Christchurch Priory • Thomas Perkins
... chiefly to keep in and contain their Water, which by the help of these Banks they overflow their Grounds with. These Banks they make as smooth with the backside of their Houghs, as a Bricklayer can smooth a Wall with his Trowel. For in this they are very neat. These Banks are usually not above a ...
— An Historical Relation Of The Island Ceylon In The East Indies • Robert Knox
... one of the prohibited Spanish daggers or knives which a traveller may occasionally get hold of and smuggle out of the country. The blade was broad, trowel-like, but the point drawn out several inches, so as to look like ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... matter undergoes changes so rapid and yet so steady and purposelike in their succession, that one can only compare them to those operated by a skilled modeller upon a formless lump of clay. As with an invisible trowel, the mass is divided and subdivided into smaller and smaller portions, until it is reduced to an aggregation of granules not too large to build withal the finest fabrics of the nascent organism. And, then, it is as if a delicate finger traced out the ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... measure, and name orbs and orbits before unknown, and chart the paths of their rotations and weigh them, as in scales, while in motion. But this ge-astronomer, whose observatory is his conservatory, whose telescope and fluxions are his trowel and watering-pot, not only brings to light the hidden life of a thousand earth-stars, but changes their forms, colors their rays, half creates and transforms, until each differs as much from its original structure and tinting as the planet ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... none may join your sacred Guild, Save only graduates (so to speak), Experts with hod and trowel, skilled In the finesse of pure technique: And that is why No rude untutored ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 12, 1920 • Various
... fishy fin where should be paw, And beaver-trowel tail, And snout of beast equip'd with teeth Where ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain |
