BALL AND CHAIN • DICTIONARY ONE.COM • Definition of Ball and chain

"Ball and chain" Quotes from Famous Books

... of it. At all events she took a line; the new Arab was typical, and there were other measures which she arranged deliberately with the idea that she was making a physical fight. Life might weigh one down with a dragging ball and chain, but one could always measure the strength of one's pinions against these things. She made it her sorry and remorseless task to separate from her impulses those that she found lacking in philosophy, hinting of the foolish woman, and to turn a cruel heel upon them. She stripped her meditations ...

— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)

... long years I should be used like a brute, and before my term expired I should be in a felon's grave; for a man must possess a constitution of iron to endure the tasks that are inflicted upon a convict remanded back to the tender mercies of overseers whose hearts are harder than the ball and chain which many ...

— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes

... slightest pretexts he arrested whom he pleased, male and female, and threw them into prison. Aged men who had incurred his displeasure were confined at hard labor with ball and chain. Men were imprisoned in Fort Jackson, whose only offense was the giving of medicine to sick Confederate soldiers. The wife of a former member of Congress was arrested and sent to Ship Island in the ...

— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon

... approach to the ball and chain that this age will permit, and it should be the glorious aim of the thinkers of to-day that so refined and cruel a form of tyranny shall not be left for those who come after us. We owe physical freedom to the intellectual giants of the past; let us leave mental freedom to the intellectual ...

— Men, Women, and Gods - And Other Lectures • Helen H. Gardener

... the least degree to their profession? If not, then each officer may define cruelty according to his own temper, and if it is not usual he will make it usual. Corporal punishment, imprisonment, the gag, the ball and chain, and all the almost insupportable forms of torture invented for military punishment lie within the range of choice. Third. The sentence of a commission is not to be executed without being approved by the commander, ...

— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 2) of Volume 6: Andrew Johnson • James D. Richardson

Words linked to "Ball and chain" : hamper, bond, shackle, trammel