"Mechanic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... needle book," replied Jane, politely, "but there aren't any needles in it now. George took them all to do the things with pieces of cork—in the 'Boy's Own Scientific Experimenter' and 'The Young Mechanic.' He did not do the things, but he ...
— The Book of Dragons • Edith Nesbit
... men have chilled it with the foul and withering breath of infidelity and materialism, let us leave the busy arena of commerce, men are gloating over gain and gold in their hidden corners; let us rest with that sturdy, active, middle-class, where the mechanic's ingenious conceptions puzzle and captivate the most listless observer; let us watch the busy minds and busier fingers of those men, so fascinated by their daily toil, that all the world outside ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters,—a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man.... Man is thus metamorphosed into a thing, into many things.... The priest becomes a form; the attorney a statute book; the mechanic a machine; the sailor a rope ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... down in my dressing-gown to open the front door, but nothing would induce the chain to move. It was a newly acquired habit of the servants, started by Henry Hill from the night he had barred out the police. Being a hopeless mechanic and particularly weak in my fingers, I gave it up and went to the open window in the library. I begged him to go away, as nothing would induce me to forgive him, and I told him that my papa had only ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... enemy of man and his frail purposes, how potent an ally has it become in combination with great mechanic changes! Many an imperfect hemisphere of thought, action, desire, that could not heretofore unite with its corresponding hemisphere, because separated by ten or fourteen days of suspense, now moves electrically to its integration, ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... discernibly out of shape. It were easy to show that there is no solid earth nor immovable mountains. I came away saying to my friend, "I am glad God lets you into so much of his finest thinking." He is a mechanic, not a theologian. This foremost man in the world in his fine department was lately but a "greasy mechanic," an engineer ...
— Among the Forces • Henry White Warren
... one of five ports equally efficient, equally protected, and equally furnished with the products of mechanic and nautical invention. Brest, L'Orient, and Rochefort, on the west, have far greater natural and scarcely less acquired advantages; while the old port of Toulon on the Mediterranean, old only in name, has ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... land. Whoever made an attempt on any other part must necessarily have arrived in ships of some magnitude, and must therefore have in a degree been cultivated, if not by the liberal, at least by the mechanic arts. In fact, the principal colonies-which we find these countries to have received were sent from Phoenicia, or the Lesser Asia, or Egypt, the great fountains of the ancient civility and learning. And they became more or less, earlier or later, polished, as they were situated nearer to or ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... start, for he arrived at eleven o'clock next morning in the small car, armed with his master's instructions. He paid the hotel bill, chartered a taxi, in which he dispatched Lilias, Dulcie, Roland, Bevis and Clifford, straight for home, then, engaging a mechanic from a garage, and taking Everard as guide, he started up the hill in the pouring rain to find the abandoned car. It needed several hours' attention before it could be induced to start, and it was not until evening that he was able to place it safely back ...
— The Princess of the School • Angela Brazil
... be restored. Before 1789, the ignorant or indifferent Catholic, the peasant at his plough, the mechanic at his work-bench, the good wife attending to her household, were unconscious of the innermost part of religion; thanks to the revolution, they have acquired the sentiment of it, and even the physical sensation. It is the prohibition of the mass which has led them to comprehend its importance; ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... A skilled mechanic, qualified to act in the capacity of landscape gardener and agricultural chemist. Applicant must be a strong, healthy young man, of good habits, pleasing address; with a general knowledge of business ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson
... reason easy to state. This is, that all facts which exist and are revealed to us reach us by the testimony of the consciousness, and are, consequently, facts of consciousness. If I look at a locomotive, and analyse its machinery, I act like a mechanic; if I study under the microscope the structure of infusoria, I practise biology; and yet the sight of the locomotive, the perception of the infusoria, are just facts of consciousness, and should belong to psychology, if one takes literally the above definition, which is so absolute that it ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... venture to remove entirely from it the praise of perfection, have added the correction that it is a state in which to acquire perfection. If we follow this, monasticism will be no more a state of perfection than the life of a farmer or mechanic. For these are also states in which to acquire perfection. For all men, in every vocation, ought to seek perfection, that is, to grow in the fear of God in faith, in love towards one's neighbor, and ...
— The Apology of the Augsburg Confession • Philip Melanchthon
... society had been in existence covering the main features of this organization. In 1867 the state recognized this society by appropriating $1,000 for its encouragement. Its object was the promotion of agriculture, horticulture and the mechanic arts. The society held annual fairs in different localities in the state, with varying success, until 1885, when the county of Ramsey offered to convey to the State of Minnesota, forever, two hundred acres of land adjoining the city limits ...
— The History of Minnesota and Tales of the Frontier • Charles E. Flandrau
... to be a school-boy passing that way at the time. He was not much of a farmer, and still less of a mechanic, I should think; but he thought he saw what the trouble was. It did not seem to be so much the lever itself, or the farmer, or the stone to be moved, as in the way the man went to work. The boy ventured to hint this idea to ...
— The Diving Bell - Or, Pearls to be Sought for • Francis C. Woodworth
... the threshold of the higher life. He knew that he was a very poor creature. He longed to rise to something better. He was a mere ignorant, untaught mechanic. He had not been to school with Aristotle and Plato. He could not help himself or lose himself in the speculations of poets and philosophers. He had only the Bible, and studying the Bible he found that the wonder-working power in man's ...
— Bunyan • James Anthony Froude
... physician who objects to the entrance of women to his highly fenced professional enclosure, would probably object yet more strenuously if it were proposed to throw down the barriers of restraint and monetary charges, which would result in the flooding of his profession by other males: while the mechanic, who resists the entrance of woman into his especial field, is invariably found even more persistently to oppose any attempt at entrance on the part of other males, when he finds ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner
... roller that it struck him his own appearance was unusual for a highway mechanic. He was still wearing the famous floorwalker suit, which he had punctiliously donned every Sunday for chapel. But he had had to flee without a hat—even without his luggage, which was neatly packed in a bag in the vestry. That, he felt sure, Mr. Poodle ...
— Where the Blue Begins • Christopher Morley
... Mom," Matt said, stroking her tangled white hair. "Right from the ruling state official. You won't have to scrub floors anymore! I'm going straight, Mom. I'm a good mechanic now. They learned me a lot in the enclosure. Come on. I got a used truck outside, ...
— Stopover Planet • Robert E. Gilbert
... with these junior achievement efforts, are chemical specialties that can be made safely and that people will buy and use without misgivings—solvent to free up rusty bolts, cleaner to remove road tar, mechanic's hand soap—that sort of thing. Mr. McCormack had told me, though, that I might find these youngsters a bit more ambitious. "The Miller boy and Mary McCready," he had said, "have exceptionally high IQ's—around one forty or one fifty. The other three are ...
— Junior Achievement • William Lee
... who have had occasion to use a few of the hundreds of recipes and information so essential to the housekeeper, farmer, mechanic, merchant, laborer and all others who wish to travel the road others have, to wealth and happiness. It reveals the secret processes of making patent medicines, inventions, and discoveries that have brought fortunes to their owners. Substantially ...
— How to Become Rich - A Treatise on Phrenology, Choice of Professions and Matrimony • William Windsor
... A mechanic, or a man in any small line of business, must trust his wife with the disbursement of a certain part of the family income. It passes through her hands in the way of housekeeping, and the management of it exercises ...
— How to make rugs • Candace Wheeler
... left the room, mounted his steed, and rode through the town towards the bridge. He was compelled to ride slowly through the streets, for he was recognised; and cheapman and mechanic rushed from house and from stall to hail the Man of the Land and ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... patronage of the monarch, when, for his first artist, she would have presented him with his nephew! How different a figure did the same prince make in a reign of dissimilar complexion! The philosophic warrior, who could relax himself into the ornament of a refined court, was thought a savage mechanic, when courtiers were only voluptuous wits. Let me transcribe a picture of Prince Rupert, drawn by a man who was far from having the least portion of wit in that age, who was superior to its indelicacy, and who yet was so overborne by its prejudices, that ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... caged canaries straining after the light. Joussier used to come with his mistress, the fair Berthe, a large coquettish young woman, with a pale face, and a purple cap, and merry, wandering eyes. She had under her thumb a good-looking boy, Leopold Graillot, a journeyman mechanic, who was clever and rather a poseur: he was the esthete of the company. Although he called himself an anarchist, and was one of the most violent opponents of the burgess-class, his soul was typical of that class at its very worst. Every morning for years he had drunk in the erotic and ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... up costly and lofty monuments—reaching heavenward; let the artist cut their names and virtues deep into the enduring granite; let the mechanic, with all his skill, set the foundations, yet the lettering will perish and the stone will crumble. Parasitic plants will fasten upon them; beneath their destroying grasp names and dates will disappear, and generations yet to come will be unable to tell ...
— Nick Baba's Last Drink and Other Sketches • George P. Goff
... majority of men of letters are so to some extent, though poets are apt to be ragamuffins. It was Thomson, I believe, who used to cut the leaves with his snuffers. Perhaps an event in his early career may have soured him of the proprieties. It is said that he had an uncle, a clever active mechanic, who could do many things with his hands, and contemplated James's indolent, dreamy, "feckless" character with impatient disgust. When the first of The Seasons—Winter it was, I believe—had been completed ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... met, and the relationship was evident at the first glance. They were mother and son. The youth was about seventeen years of age, tall and muscular. He wore the dress of a mechanic, and there was in his appearance a suggestion of capability and of resolute resolve. Strangely handsome he was, and yet no one seemed attracted by him. During his journey from Bodmin a labourer would ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking
... vivacious, and fascinating women of the day, but was likewise an ardent politician. Whilst canvassing for the election of Fox, she purchased the vote of a butcher for a kiss, and received from an Irish mechanic the complimentary assurance that he could light his ...
— Beaux and Belles of England • Mary Robinson
... volume is all story and adventure, those that follow it will not be wholly given up to the details of the mechanic arts. The captain has a steam-yacht; and the hero of the first story has a fine sailboat, to say nothing of a whole fleet of other craft belonging to the nabob. The boys are not of the tame sort: they are not of the humdrum kind, and they are inclined to make things lively. In fact, they are live ...
— All Adrift - or The Goldwing Club • Oliver Optic
... Zealand, the "mechanic" missionary only carries on his trade till he has every comfort around him—his house finished, his garden fenced, and a strong stockade enclosing all, to keep off the "pagan" savages. This done, then commences the easy task of preaching. They collect a few ragged urchins of natives, whom ...
— A Narrative of a Nine Months' Residence in New Zealand in 1827 • Augustus Earle
... two later, as Rainham sat in his river-bound office struggling, by way of luncheon, with the most primitive of chops, his eyes, wandering away from a somewhat mechanic scrutiny of the Shipping Gazette, fell upon the ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... physician, when he puts on his large perriwig, would put under it the knowledge of the human frame, of the virtues and effects of his medicines, of the signs and nature of diseases, with the most approved and experienced forms of cure; that the mechanic, when he puts on his leather or woollen apron, put on diligence, frugality, temperance, modesty, and good nature; and that kings themselves, when the crown, which is adorned with pearls and many precious stones, is put on their heads, would put on at the same time the more inestimable ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Bampfylde Moore Carew • Unknown
... he managed to lay aside quite a little sum of money, besides paying his interest to Arthur, and when Maude came home from Europe in March he felt himself warranted in beginning to raise the roof. He was naturally a mechanic, and would have made a splendid carpenter; he was also something of an architect, and sketched upon paper the changes he proposed making. The roof was to be raised over Jerrie's room; there was to be a pretty bay-window at the south, commanding a view of the ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes
... great style, genius, and taste among the English, are but different appellations of the same thing. It is this intellectual dignity, they say, that ennobles the painter's art; that lays the line between him and the mere mechanic; and produces those great effects in an instant, which eloquence and poetry, by slow and repeated efforts, are ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... see that it is extraordinarily slender, and free from projections, and of unusual materials. You also see that it was obviously not made by an ordinary dagger-maker; that, in spite of the Italian word scrawled on it, there is plainly written all over it 'British mechanic.' The blade is made from a strip of common three-quarter-inch tool steel; the hilt is turned from an aluminium rod; and there is not a line of engraving on it that could not be produced in a lathe by any engineer's apprentice. Even the boss at the top is mechanical, for ...
— John Thorndyke's Cases • R. Austin Freeman
... Phillips'. "Louis Phillips, age twenty-six, five-ten, one-eighty. Hair brown, eyes brown, complexion darkly tanned—that was before Luna, wasn't it, Phillips? Convicted of unjustified homicide, having assaulted a jet mechanic so as to cause ...
— This World Must Die! • Horace Brown Fyfe
... only seven descendants remain of this family, which underwent strange vicissitudes since; its present representatives are found in all ranks of society, from the sovereign to the mechanic. ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... to add foreign luxuries to domestic comforts, being collected on our seaboard and frontiers only, and, incorporated with the transactions of our mercantile citizens, it may be the pleasure and the pride of an American to ask, What farmer, what mechanic, what laborer ever sees a taxgatherer of the United States? These contributions enable us to support the current expenses of the Government, to fulfill contracts with foreign nations, to extinguish the native right of soil within our limits, to extend those limits, and to apply ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 3 (of 4) of Volume 1: Thomas Jefferson • Edited by James D. Richardson
... the Emperor Mu of the Chou dynasty was making a tour of his empire, a skillful mechanic, Yen Shih by name, was brought into his presence and entertained him and the women of his seraglio with a dance performed by automaton figures, which were capable not only of rhythmical movements of their limbs, but of accompanying ...
— The Chinese Boy and Girl • Isaac Taylor Headland
... not exist, and which is therefore an employment in itself honourable, nay necessary. Nevertheless, if the purest sentiments of a generous mind, streaming forth like the rays of the sun reflected by a diamond, may ennoble one, who is in some sort the daughter of a molendinary mechanic——" ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... and their successors, who were now collected to listen to the wisdom of Mr. Writ. Such a thing as a coat of two generations was no longer to be seen; the latest fashion, or what was thought to be the latest fashion, being as rigidly respected by the young farmer, or the young mechanic, as by the more admitted bucks, the law student, and the village shop-boy. All the red cloaks had long since been laid aside to give place to imitation merino shawls, or, in cases of unusual moderation and sobriety, to mantles ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... one can cover by the phrase "mechanics and engineers," if one uses it in its widest possible sense. At present it would be almost impossible to describe such a thing as a typical engineer, to predicate any universally applicable characteristic of the engineer and mechanic. The black-faced, oily man one figures emerging from the engine-room serves well enough, until one recalls the sanitary engineer with his additions of crockery and plumbing, the electrical engineer with his little tests and wires, the mining engineer, the railway maker, the motor builder, and the ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... a soldier's kiss; rebukable, And worthy shameful check it were to stand On more mechanic compliment." ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 196, July 30, 1853 • Various
... years old he entered the Lowell machine shop as an apprentice, and after a service of three years, graduated with a diploma from the Middlesex Mechanics Association. He served as a journeyman for two years, when, feeling that his education was not adequate to his wants, he left the mechanic's bench for the student's desk, entering the classical school of Professor Coffin at Ashfield, in the western part of the same State. Subsequently he resumed his mechanical labors, which he continued until 1833, part of the time as a journeyman, but during the greater part as a manufacturer ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... nature with a special taste for mechanical pursuits. Not only had he the qualifications of a scientific engineer, but he had the manual dexterity which qualified him personally to carry out many practical arts. Lord Rosse was, in fact, a skilful mechanic, an experienced founder, and an ingenious optician. His acquaintances were largely among those who were interested in mechanical pursuits, and it was his delight to visit the works or engineering establishments ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... resident of Fifth avenue and other noted fashionable thoroughfares, the incidents of actual every-day life that are here revealed will read like a revelation. To the merchant and the business man they may probably read like romance. To the thrifty mechanic, however, who occupies a vastly different social sphere, who hurries to his work in the morning, and with equal haste seeks to reach his home at night, this chapter may, perhaps, cause a tear to glisten in his manly ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... understood) terms are employed. (The exact subject depends, of course, upon your own observation or experience; you are sure to be familiar with something that most people know hazily, if at all. Bank clerk, chess player, bridge player, stenographer, journalist, truck driver, backwoods-man, mechanic—all have special knowledge of one kind or another and can use the ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... trusted mechanic, working secretly at dead of night, made half a dozen tiny branding-irons in the form of a cross, to be used for branding the traitors between the eyes, when captured red-handed. This drastic measure was, ...
— The Petticoat Commando - Boer Women in Secret Service • Johanna Brandt
... further declare freely, that I have not exactly kept to the three mechanic rules of unity. I knew them, and had them in my eye, but followed them only at a distance; for the genius of the English cannot bear too regular a play: we are given to variety, even to a debauchery of pleasure. My scenes are therefore sometimes ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... any particular person shall ever be qualified for the employments to which he is educated, is very different in different occupations. In the greatest part of mechanic trades success is almost certain; but very uncertain in the liberal professions. Put your son apprentice to a shoemaker, there is little doubt of his learning to make a pair of shoes; but send him to study the law, it as at least twenty to one if he ever makes such proficiency ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... summer occurred in Hartford. There had been a report of a strange man seen about the Clemens place, thought to be a prospecting burglar, and Clemens went over to investigate. A little searching inquiry revealed that the man was not a burglar, but a mechanic out of employment, a lover of one of the house-maids, who had given him food and shelter on the premises, intending no real harm. When the girl found that her secret was discovered, she protested that he was her fiance, though she said he appeared ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... coachman, supervised by a groom no bigger than his fist, and as infantile as Saint George in the picture, endeavoured to curb the ardour of the flying, steel-tipped pinions with which they thundered along the ground. Alas! there was nothing now but motor-cars driven each by a moustached mechanic, with a tall footman towering by his side. I wished to hold before my bodily eyes, that I might know whether they were indeed as charming as they appeared to the eyes of memory, little hats, so low-crowned as to ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... "wisdom of the Creator" and the design visible in his works. As a matter of fact, you will discover, on mature reflection, that on this theory the Creator is at bottom only playing the part of a clever mechanic or watch-maker; all these familiar teleological ideas of Creator and creation are based, in the long run, ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.2 • Ernst Haeckel
... a broad, sturdy man, with thick brown hair over keen watchful eyes. His open look was fearless and winning. His hands, which grasped the rail, had both the strength and the skill of the trained mechanic and the writer. For John Williams could build a ship, make a boat and sail them both against any man in all the Pacific. He could work with his hammer at the forge in the morning, make a table at his joiner's bench in the afternoon, preach ...
— The Book of Missionary Heroes • Basil Mathews
... African, whose countenance beamed with intelligence. Being a mechanic, he had by industry earned more money than he had paid to his owner for his time, and this he had laid aside, with the hope that he might some day get enough to purchase his freedom. He had in his chest about a hundred and fifty dollars. His was a heart that felt for others, ...
— Clotelle - The Colored Heroine • William Wells Brown
... reference has just been made, is surely a blot on our social economy. It is seemingly easier to girdle the globe with a wire, than to make sure that every child in Her Majesty's dominions shall receive the simplest elements of education. Within the sphere of the mechanic or the chemist, flights beyond the bounds of imagination may be pursued without restraint, and indeed with commendation; but anything in social economics, however philanthropic in design and beneficial in tendency, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 429 - Volume 17, New Series, March 20, 1852 • Various
... First Pennsylvanian, who had taken up his quarters near me, was an object of peculiar interest. Reasonably intelligent and fairly read, I presume that he was a respectable mechanic before entering the Army. He was evidently a very domestic man, whose whole happiness centered in ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... the unthinking vitality of a steam-engine or of a dynamo in a powerhouse. A mechanic by nature, as a school-boy Ben had often induced Scotty to take him to the electric light station, where he had watched the great machines with a fascination bordering on awe, until fairly dragged away ...
— Ben Blair - The Story of a Plainsman • Will Lillibridge
... to-night men of science, philanthropists, the representatives of the learned professions. We have the capitalist; we have the merchant; we have the mechanic; and we have the daily laborer, who toils from the rising to the setting sun,—we have them all here, to give out a voice to-night, expressing the opinions of the people, which can neither be misrepresented ...
— Parks for the People - Proceedings of a Public Meeting held at Faneuil Hall, June 7, 1876 • Various
... concerns. Their dress and manners are similar to those of the society of Friends; hence they are often called Shaking Quakers. They display great skill and science in agriculture, horticulture, and the mechanic arts; and their honesty, industry, hospitality, and neatness, are proverbial. These people choose their locations with great taste and judgment. A Shaker village always presents a scene ...
— The Book of Religions • John Hayward
... to 18 deg., of 5-10 of a second only, unparalleled in the history of horology and certified to by Theo F. Kone. Esq., Commander U. S. N. in charge of the Observatory. Mr. Heinrich is a practical working mechanic and adjuster of marine and pocket chronometers to positions and temperatures, and is now prepared to apply his new balance wheel to any fine timekeeping instrument, either for public or private use, he also repairs marine and pocket chronometers, ...
— Scientific American, Volume XLIII., No. 25, December 18, 1880 • Various
... was found to open industrial schools that should include classes for girls. Every State, and almost every city and town of any size, had them. It was not long ere multitudes of societies and organizations furnished means for women's education in business and mechanic arts. The growth of the philanthropy of self-help is one of the wonders of the past twenty-five years, and women, without the ballot, have ...
— Woman and the Republic • Helen Kendrick Johnson
... mother were poor people. The house they lived in had formerly belonged to a convent, and it was rented to them for a very small sum, on condition that they would keep up the repairs. Even this Murillo's father found to be a heavy burden. He was a mechanic and his ...
— Great Artists, Vol 1. - Raphael, Rubens, Murillo, and Durer • Jennie Ellis Keysor
... to this gratuitous conveyance, he put himself to the trouble of inspecting the chauffeur—a capable-looking mechanic togged out in a rich black livery which, though relieved by a vast amount of silk braiding, was like the car guiltless of any ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... the sensual and divided prey of any race, however inferior in scientific knowledge, which has a clear and fixed notion of its work and destiny. That many of these signs are themselves more and more ominously showing in our young men, from the fine gentleman who rides in Rotten Row to the boy-mechanic who listens enraptured to Mr. Holyoake's exposures of the absurdity of all human things save Mr. Holyoake's self, is a fact which presses itself most on those who have watched this age most carefully, and who (rightly or wrongly) attribute much of this miserable temper to the way in which ...
— Froude's History of England • Charles Kingsley
... Robert Louis had now severed the umbilical cord. He was going to live his own life, to earn his own living. He could do but one thing, and that was to write. He may have been a procrastinator in everything else, but as a writer he was a skilled mechanic. And so straightway on that ship he began to work his experiences up into copy. Just what he wrote the world will never know, for although the manuscript was sold to a publisher, yet Barabbas did not give it to the people. There are several ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... one endowed with the ardent and glowing imagination of Madame Roland should not, at times, feel inwardly the spirit of exultation in the consciousness of this vast power. From the windows of her palace she looked down upon the shop of the mechanic where her infancy was cradled, and upon those dusty streets where she had walked an obscure child, while proud aristocracy swept by her in splendor—that very aristocracy looking now imploringly to her for a smile. She possessed ...
— Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... of these shoes a mile and sunk knee deep into solid rock at every step. Babe cast a shoe while making a hard pull one day, and it was hurled for a mile and tore down forty acres of pine and injured eight Swedes that were swamping out skidways. Ole was also a mechanic and built the Downcutter, a rig like a mowing machine that cut down a swath ...
— The Marvelous Exploits of Paul Bunyan • W.B. Laughead
... not quite as rational to express the material in terms of the immaterial as to express the immaterial in terms of the material. Oneness of allness in quasiness. I will engage to write the formula of any novel in psycho-chemic terms, or draw its graph in psycho-mechanic terms: or write, in romantic terms, the circumstances and sequences of any chemic or electric or magnetic reaction: or express any historic event in algebraic terms—or see Boole and Jevons ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... is, the man of letters must in some way reconcile himself to the paradox that he is at once the acolyte and the rival of the ancients. Young is optimistic enough to believe that it is possible to surpass them. In the mechanic arts, he complains, men are always attempting to go beyond their predecessors; in the liberal arts, they merely try to follow them. The analogy between the continuous advance of science and a possible continuous advance ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... Damon, it was to be expected that he would be eccentric as he always was. He was not an expert mechanic, but he knew something of machinery and was of considerable help to Tom in the rush work on the airship. He would hear the dinner bell ring, ...
— Tom Swift and his Electric Rifle • Victor Appleton
... to take up the trade, special skill not being thought at all necessary on the part of a road-maker. It is only in this way that we can account for the remarkable fact, that the first extensive maker of roads who pursued it as a business, was not an engineer, nor even a mechanic, but a Blind Man, bred to no trade, and possessing no experience whatever in the arts of surveying or bridge-building, yet a man possessed of extraordinary natural gifts, and unquestionably most successful as a road-maker. ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... The mechanic, farmer, apprentice, clerk, merchant, and a large circle of readers outside of these classes will find in the volume a wide range of counsel and advice, presented in perspicuous language, and marked throughout by vigorous good sense; ...
— Harper's Young People, March 9, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... for the mere sharpening of his faculties, instead of convincing, he not unfrequently confounded his opponent; but whenever he had thus casually argued, and had obtained an acknowledged confutation, like an ingenious mechanic, he never failed to organize the discordant materials and to do homage to truth, by pointing out his own fallacies, or otherwise, by formally re-confuting ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... disciples, he was really striking at the Master through them. It is easy to conceive what an affront the pretensions of Jesus must have been felt to be by Paul. Jesus had been a man of about his own age—a young man; he had sprung from the lowest of the people, being a villager and mechanic; he had never sat in the schools of learning; the men of ability and authority had had no hesitation in condemning Him. That such a one should be esteemed the Messiah of the Jews and worshipped as if He were Divine, raised a storm of indignation ...
— The Preacher and His Models - The Yale Lectures on Preaching 1891 • James Stalker
... reservoirs of force are kept perennially full by the sun and the moon, to whose action they are due, and at a future period, when men have prodigally squandered their heritage of coal and wood wealth, they will be invoked by the mechanic and manufacturer to furnish their chief motive-power. As an economist of the force-capital deposited by the sun's influence in the bowels of the earth during its carboniferous epoch, and as using, instead of it, the force-interest ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... facts have been cited, not at all for the benefit of Europe, but for our own good. The American People are now confronted by the Italian and Austrian and Hungarian laborer and saloon-keeper and mechanic, and all Americans should have an exact measure of the sentiments of southern Europe toward our wild life generally, especially the birds that we do not shoot at all, and therefore are easy ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... their actual influence upon legislation, except in a feeble advisory capacity, amounts to nothing. In this Herrenhaus, or upper chamber, of Prussia there are at this writing among the 327 members 3 bankers, 8 representatives of the industrial and merchant class, and 1 mechanic; 12 in all, or not even four per cent., to represent the industrial, financial, commercial, and working classes. Even in the lower chamber, or Abgeordnetenhaus, there are only 10 merchants, 19 manufacturers, ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... romance and idealism, to peg away for a year or two at some, if possible, unique form of manufacture, going into it from the bottom and learning its tricks and its manners. He will have at least the opportunity of becoming a good mechanic, and probably some chance of getting up a paying novel in the hereafter—with ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... ingenuity, were the cause of his poverty, we cannot undertake to determine—but perhaps various causes combined to keep his finances low; and it was quite as notorious in the city that Amos Sparks was a poor man, as that he was an ingenious mechanic. But his business was sufficient for the supply of his wants and those of his family, and so he studied and worked on, ...
— Tales for Young and Old • Various
... an ex-dragoon officer working as a clerk in an attorney's office at fifteen shillings a week, who lived like a mechanic, and yet spake and stepped like his old self; one listened involuntarily for the clink of the sabre and spur whenever ...
— Station Amusements • Lady Barker
... tried to read it, but soon afterwards sat down and thought again. To become a doctor? But to do that one must pass an examination in Latin; besides, she had an invincible repugnance to corpses and disease. It would be nice to become a mechanic, a judge, a commander of a steamer, a scientist; to do something into which she could put all her powers, physical and spiritual, and to be tired out and sleep soundly at night; to give up her life to something that would make her an interesting person, ...
— The Duel and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... woollen and linen and fur.' 'Nay,' they add, 'we are sold like slaves or left as unredeemed pledges in taverns: we are given to cruel butchers to be slaughtered like sheep or cattle. Every tailor, or base mechanic may keep us shut up in his prison.' Worst of all was the abominable ingratitude that sold the illuminated vellums to ignorant painters, or to goldsmiths who only wanted these 'sacred vessels' as receptacles for their sheets of gold-leaf. ...
— The Great Book-Collectors • Charles Isaac Elton and Mary Augusta Elton
... by the example of manly virtue; to banish luxury from the court and from the camp; to substitute, in the place of the Barbarian mercenaries, an army of men, interested in the defence of their laws and of their property; to force, in such a moment of public danger, the mechanic from his shop, and the philosopher from his school; to rouse the indolent citizen from his dream of pleasure, and to arm, for the protection of agriculture, the hands of the laborious husbandman. At the head of such ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... December 22, 1911, with a programme of work outlined by our leader. H. Hamilton was biologist, L. R. Blake surveyor and geologist, C. A. Sandell and A. J. Sawyer were wireless operators, the former being also a mechanic, and I was appointed meteorologist and leader ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... just praise to the man who has attained any kind of excellence without having had the same advantages as others whom, nevertheless, he has equalled or surpassed, let us not be betrayed into undervaluing the mechanic's careful training to his business, the thorough and laborious education of the ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... highest. "Equal," when two are equal one has everything the other has. You could say one pen is the equal of another if it is just as nice and will write just as well; one mechanic is the equal of another if he can do the work equally well. Two boys are equal in class if they have exactly the same marks at the end of the month or year. You could not have two persons chief. For example, you could not have two chief generals in an army; two presidents ...
— Baltimore Catechism No. 4 (of 4) - An Explanation Of The Baltimore Catechism of Christian Doctrine • Thomas L. Kinkead
... a peasant or mechanic being a legislator, what vast education is requisite to enable him to judge amongst his neighbours which is most qualified by his industry and integrity to be intrusted with the care of the interests of himself and of his fellow-citizens? But leaving this ground, as ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... live in a moderate way. He resided for a time in Florence, Massachusetts, and then purchased a small house in Essex Street, Boston, which has since been torn down to make room for the extension of Harrison Avenue. It was a house of very small dimensions, such as is commonly occupied by a mechanic's family; but possessed the advantage of admitting as much sunshine as possible into Mrs. Phillips' lonely chamber, which was probably his reason for selecting it. He wished to live economically in order to save money for the cause of freedom, ...
— Sketches from Concord and Appledore • Frank Preston Stearns
... see, Lily," he said. "I shall do something some day. I'm a bit of a mechanic, a bit of an electrician, that is to say, a bit of a wizard. Others have started lower down and ...
— The Bill-Toppers • Andre Castaigne
... without learning something, which he afterwards turned to good account. This you may see in his public speeches, but I am more completely convinced of it since I have heard him converse. His illustrations are drawn from the workshop, the manufactory, the mine, the mechanic, the poet—from every art and science, from every thing ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. VII - Patronage • Maria Edgeworth
... had not been worked for forty years; but this, when you come to think of the abandoned Roman mines yet deeper in the hill, was a thing of yesterday. The man in the oily overalls had evidently not come to think of it, but he was otherwise a very intelligent mechanic, and of a hospitable mind, like all the rest of our chance acquaintance in Great Britain. I do not know that I like to think of those Roman mines myself, where it is said the sea now surges back and forth: they must have been worked by British slaves, who may be fancied climbing ...
— Seven English Cities • W. D. Howells
... I say?" March echoed. "Look here, Fulkerson; you may regard this as a joke, but I don't. I'm not used to being spoken to as if I were the foreman of a shop, and told to discharge a sensitive and cultivated man like Lindau, as if he were a drunken mechanic; and if ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... step towards this great business undertaking happened before he was seventeen years of age, when he left his father's farm and went to Detroit to work as a mechanic in a shop. He never returned to the farm, although for a time he lived on some land his father had given to him, and conducted a lumber business. All the time he was experimenting, and he wanted to make something that would go. By the ...
— Modern Americans - A Biographical School Reader for the Upper Grades • Chester Sanford
... passions only operate occasionally, the interested find the object of their ordinary cares; their motive to the practice of mechanic and commercial arts; their temptation to trespass on the laws of justice; and, when extremely corrupted, the price of their prostitutions, and the standard of their opinions on the subject of good and of evil. Under this influence, they would enter, ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... Make boot upon the summer's velvet buds, Which pillage they with merry march bring home To the tent-royal of their emperor; Who, busied in his majesty, surveys The singing masons building roofs of gold, The civil citizens kneading up the honey, The poor mechanic porters crowding in Their heavy burdens at his narrow gate, The sad-eyed justice, with his surly hum, Delivering o'er to executors pale The lazy yawning drone. I this infer, That many things, having full reference To one consent, may ...
— The Life of King Henry V • William Shakespeare [Tudor edition]
... waste time, the corporal rode towards Courthorne's homestead, and found its owner stripping a binder. Pieces of the machine lay all around him, and from the fashion in which he handled them it was evident that he was capable of doing what the other men at Silverdale left to the mechanic at the settlement. Payne wondered, as he watched him, who had taught the gambler ...
— Winston of the Prairie • Harold Bindloss
... delayed are a great company. Elizabeth Barrett Browning exclaiming, "I have not used half the powers God has given me," poets dying ere the day was half done; the inventors and reformers denied their ideals; obscure and humble workmen—the mechanic who emancipates man by his machine; the artisan whose conveniences are endless benefactions to our homes; the smith whose honest anchor holds the ship in time of storm—all these labored and died without seeing the fruitage, but other men entered ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... yet symbolic; and the file had its pathetic history. It was given to him unexpectedly one evening, by a quiet, pale-faced girl. The poor creature had come out to the mines to join one of his fellow convicts, a delicate young man, a mechanic and a social democrat, with broad cheekbones and large staring eyes. She had worked her way across half Russia and nearly the whole of Siberia to be near him, and, as it seems, with the hope of helping him to escape. But she arrived too late. ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... candidly and earnestly on all topics relating to health, and appeal to the common sense of the reader for justification. Although it is my aim to simplify the work, and render it a practical common-sense guide to the farmer, mechanic, mariner, and day-laborer, yet I trust that it may not prove less acceptable to the scholar, in its discussion of the problems of Life. Not only does the method adopted in this volume of treating of the Functions of the Brain and Nervous System present many new suggestions, in its ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... our good fortune to visit the little town of Cabo (which means Cape), two hours' ride from Pernambuco, where we have a small church, organized about two years ago. We were entertained in the home of a mechanic who superintends the bridge construction along the railroad which passes through the town. He takes his Bible with him when he goes to work, and wherever he is he preaches the gospel. He told us of two station agents along the line who ...
— Brazilian Sketches • T. B. Ray
... characteristics of the age in which he lived. He was the miracle of that age of miracles. Ardent and versatile as youth; patient and persevering as age; a most profound and original thinker; the greatest mathematician and most ingenious mechanic of his time; architect, chemist, engineer, musician, poet, painter—we are not only astounded by the variety of his natural gifts and acquired knowledge, but by the practical direction of his amazing powers. The extracts ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... a curse no more; Since He, whose name we breathe with awe, The coarse mechanic vesture wore, A poor man toiling with the poor, In labor, as in prayer, fulfilling the ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... the same end is gained in ten thousand other flowers which do not possess them. Is it not then an extraordinary idea, to imagine the Creator of the Universe contriving the various complicated parts of these flowers, as a mechanic might contrive an ingenious toy or a difficult puzzle? Is it not a more worthy conception that they are some of the results of those general laws which were so co-ordinated at the first introduction of life upon the earth as to result necessarily in the utmost possible development ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace
... that miserable quarter of the city where Sarah and her mother now lived. It was not in a tenement house either; but in a little dwelling owned by an Irishman and his wife who seemed decent people. He was a mechanic, and one room of their small house they were accustomed to let, to help ...
— Trading • Susan Warner
... a decent mechanic, who lodged hard by, lounging with his pipe near the gate of Musgrove Cottage, offered to converse with old Betty. She gave him a rough answer; but with a touch of ineradicable vanity must ask Peggy if she wanted a sweetheart, because ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... Mr. R., a middle aged man, mechanic, was sent by Dr. ARCULARIUS Nov. 9th, 1874. Had post-rheumatic sciatica of some six weeks' standing. There were no remarkable features about the case, which however was sufficiently severe to disable him from pursuing his avocation. He took his first bath on the date above-mentioned. ...
— The Electric Bath • George M. Schweig
... eagerness to behold the very house at which my father stopped; where he slept and dined, smoked his cigar, opened his letters, and read the papers. I inquired of some gentlemen and ladies where the missing hotel was; but they only stared and passed on; until I met a mechanic, apparently, who very civilly stopped to hear my questions ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... our house was one occupied by a mechanic, from which the most dismal cries and moans constantly proceeded. I entered the shop one day, and found it was occupied by a saddler, who had two negro boys working at his business. He was a tawny, cadaverous-looking ...
— The History of Mary Prince - A West Indian Slave • Mary Prince
... machinery, which will necessitate the communal employment of labor. If this takes place, as I hope it will, the rural laborer, instead of being a manual worker using primitive implements, will have the status of a skilled mechanic employed permanently by a cooperative community. He should be a member of the society which employs him, and in the division of profits receive in proportion to his wage, as the farmers in ...
— National Being - Some Thoughts on an Irish Polity • (A.E.)George William Russell
... the early part of the nineteenth century, when Koenig found his bed and platen press impracticable, he immediately set to work, assisted by one of his countrymen, Andreas Bauer, a mechanic who had helped him formerly, and in the latter part of 1812, the first flat-bed cylinder press was erected by them in Bensley's office. The cylinder of this press had three impression surfaces with spaces between them, and each covered with a soft blanket. With each forward movement of the ...
— The Building of a Book • Various
... comic actors, aspires to play also in drama. He can do so in reality, but under particular conditions; for in spite of his grotesque nose, he has strong and spirited qualities, and recites verses very well. He is to represent an old mechanic, in his friend's work, a sort of faubourg Nestor, and this type will accommodate itself very well to the not very aristocratic face of Jocquelet, who more and more proves his cleverness at "making-up." However, at first the actor ...
— A Romance of Youth, Complete • Francois Coppee
... wages certain; pay and bounties are trifles, as laboring men at the mines can now earn in one day more than double a soldier's pay and allowances for a month, and even the pay of a lieutenant or captain cannot hire a servant. A carpenter or mechanic would not listen to an offer of less than fifteen or twenty dollars a day. Could any combination of affairs try a man's fidelity more than this? I really think some extraordinary mark of favor should be given to those soldiers who remain faithful to their flag throughout this tempting ...
— The Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains, Oregon and California • Brevet Col. J.C. Fremont
... a temperate man to become a sot, to hear what talent, what versatility, what genius, is almost always attributed to a moderately bright man who is habitually drunk. Such a mechanic, such a mathematician, such a poet he would be, if he were only sober; and then he is sure to be the most generous, magnanimous, friendly soul, conscientiously honorable, if he were not so conscientiously drunk. I suppose it is now notorious ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... the licence of a University, but come seriously to study,—is no more than, may be well defrayed and reimbursed by one year's revenue of an ordinary good benefice? If they had then means of breeding from their parents, 'tis likely they have more now; and, if they have, it needs must be mechanic and uningenuous in them to bring a bill of charges for the learning of those liberal Arts and Sciences which they have learnt (if they have indeed learnt them, as they seldom have) to their own benefit and accomplishment. But they will say 'We had betaken us to some other ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... over human. They gloriously transfigure. A Murillo beggar is not more precious than sight of London in any of the streets admitting coloured cloud-scenes; the cunning of the sun's hand so speaks to us. And if haply down an alley some olive mechanic of street-organs has quickened little children's legs to rhythmic footing, they strike on thoughts braver than pastoral. Victor Radnor, lover of the country though he was, would have been the first to say it. He would indeed have said it too emphatically. Open London as a theme, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Flemish mechanic, who, by the exertion of much energy and talent, had risen to the poet of procureur-general of Flanders. After the conquest of the principal portion of that Province by Parma, he had made himself useful ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... nutritious food for the mind, that it may be growing all the time by reflection, and thus be saved from falling into a morbid state, such as too often results from long confinement to an occupation demanding little exertion of its powers. The farmer at his plough, the mechanic at his bench, the seamstress at her needle, and a host of others, too often suffer the thoughts to wander into realms of morbid egotism and discontent, when, if they would turn them upon moral or intellectual themes, they might be growing wiser and ...
— The Elements of Character • Mary G. Chandler
... taken up her basket; she had not risen from her chair, however, but held it on her knees with a dreary look in her eyes, as if the words of the young mechanic had awakened in her mind strange thoughts of a ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... of little ANNIE PROTHEROE. She kept a small post-office in the neighbourhood of BOW; She loved a skilled mechanic, who was famous in his day - A gentle executioner whose name ...
— Fifty Bab Ballads • William S. Gilbert
... certain malicious cunning. With a single glance, she could make Rosemary feel mentally undressed. Had the girl's forehead been transparent, like the crystal of a watch, with the machinery of thought and emotion fully exposed to the eye of a master-mechanic, her sensation could not have differed from the helpless awe her ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... is not written for the specialist, but for that restless, seething multitude known as "the masses." It is written for busy people, for workers, such as the shop-girl, the factory-girl, the clerk, the mechanic, the farmer, the merchant, and the busy housewife; but ministers, lawyers, and doctors may find food ...
— A California Girl • Edward Eldridge
... informed that there was a considerable iron foundry close by, I thought it would be worth my while to go and see it. I entered the premises, and was standing and looking round, when a man with the appearance of a respectable mechanic came up and offered to show me over the place. I gladly accepted his offer, and he showed me all about the iron foundry. I saw a large steam-engine at full play, terrible furnaces, and immense heaps of burning, crackling cinders, and a fiery stream of molten metal rolling ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... a seeming misfortune," agreed the Tin Man, "for a one-legged woodchopper is of little use in his trade. But I would not allow the Witch to conquer me so easily. I knew a very skillful mechanic at the other side of the forest, who was my friend, so I hopped on one leg to him and asked him to help me. He soon made me a new leg out of tin and fastened it cleverly to my meat body. It had joints at the knee and at the ankle and was almost as ...
— The Tin Woodman of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... was born on the 29th September, 1802, in the parish of Glencairn, and county of Dumfries. He first wrote verses while apprenticed to a mechanic in a neighbouring parish. In his nineteenth year he published a volume of poems, which excited some attention, and led to his connexion with the newspaper press. He became a regular contributor to the Dumfries Courier, edited by the ingenious ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume VI - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... A mechanic thrust in a package of sandwiches and a thermos of coffee while he waited. And Captain Blake grinned cheerfully and gulped the last of his food as he waved to the mechanics to pull out the wheel blocks. He opened the throttle and shot ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... now proceeded to put down his mechanic's straw-bag upon the hall-table, which he did with great care, as if it were of priceless stuff and contained fragile articles; having done this, he posed himself with one elbow resting on the post at the foot of the staircase, like a grimy ...
— The Talking Horse - And Other Tales • F. Anstey
... knowing that the ship will pursue its way on the Sabbath. They write letters to their friends knowing that they will be carried in violation of Jehovah's law, by wicked men. Yet they hate to see a pale-faced sewing girl enjoying a few hours by the sea; a poor mechanic walking in the fields; or a tired mother watching her children playing on the grass. Nothing ever was, nothing ever will be, more utterly absurd and disgusting than a Puritan Sunday. Nothing ever did make a ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... detective story. The man or woman who can do it can also write a good play (according to modern ideas of plays), and possesses force of character, individuality, and mental ability. He or she must combine the intuition of the artist with the talent of the master mechanic, but will seldom be a poet, and will generally care more for things and events than for fellow creatures. For, although the story is often concerned with righting some wrong, or avenging some murder, yet it must be confessed ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... off to Dammartin, and knew something would go wrong. It did. A sentry all but shot me. I nearly rode into an unguarded trench across the road, and when I started back with my receipt my bicycle would not fire. I found that the mechanic at Dammartin had filled my tank with water. It took me two hours, two lurid hours, to take that water out. It was three in the morning when I got going. I was badly frightened the Division had gone on, because I hadn't the remotest ...
— Adventures of a Despatch Rider • W. H. L. Watson
... apparatus with its moveable jack, and its particular copper for hot water,—all these things, and a thousand others too minute to tell, acted so impressively on their minds, that I could hear them extolling, in barbarous grammar, to the cook the singular sagacity of an English mechanic, and the collective greatness of the English nation. They remained on board nearly three hours; and, after conversing with R——, P——, and myself as well as they could, they presented each of us with their cards, and, begging that we would honour them with a visit, took their leave. I returned ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... people would be well and even remuneratively spent. The kitchens, my informant—who has spent many years among them—added, are generally the turning point between honesty and crime. The discharged soldier or mechanic out of work is there herded with the professional thief or burglar, and learns his trade and ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... election at Bristol. The gentleman put the question to me upon the hustings, whether I had not, or whether my father had not, sold his wheat for fifty pounds a load in Marlborough market? I was saved the trouble of an answer by the observation of a sensible, shrewd mechanic, a freeman of that city; who said, "Well, and suppose he did, what has that to do with the merit or demerit of a representative who is contending for our rights and liberties? Was Mr. Hunt not justified in selling his corn for the best price that he could obtain for it? It is only ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 1 • Henry Hunt
... a series of resolutions, recognizing the right of man in the primary era in his physical and cerebral structure, to be the conqueror, the mechanic, the inventor, the clearer of forests, the pioneer of civilization, but she looked to the dawning of a higher era, when woman should assume her true position in harmony with her superior organism, her delicacy ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... provokes noise. "In continently," says L'Estoile, "everybody seizes his arms, goes out on guard in the streets and cantons; in less than no time chains are stretched across and barricades made at the corners of the streets; the mechanic leaves his tools, the tradesman his business, the University their books, the attorneys their bags, the advocates their bands; the presidents and councillors themselves take halberds in hand; nothing is heard but shouts, murmurs, and the seditious ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume IV. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... will of nature that man should owe to himself alone everything which transcends the mere mechanic constitution of his animal existence, and that he should be susceptible of no other happiness or perfection than what he has created for himself, instinct ...
— Colloquies on Society • Robert Southey
... pleased with it now. It is possible in liturgies so to employ the principle of repetition that no wearying sense of sameness will be conveyed, and again it is possible so to mismanage it as to transform worship into something little better than a "slow mechanic exercise." Mere iteration, as such, is barren of spiritual power; witness the endless sayings over of Kyrie Eleison in the Oriental service-books, a species of vain repetition which a liturgical writer of high intelligence rightly characterizes as "unmeaning, if not profane."[21] Now ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington
... know if Protestants will be saved, in God's good time, or not," continued Michael. "I find there are different opinions among the clergy about that, and of course it is not for me, only a plain mechanic, to be sure where learned and pious scholars are in doubt. But I am sure about one thing. Those Protestants, and others too, mind you, who profess and preach good deeds, and themselves do bad deeds—they will never be saved. They will have no chance ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... noting here that Shakespeare lends Cleopatra, as he afterwards lent Coriolanus, his own delicate senses and neuropathic loathing for mechanic slaves with "greasy aprons" and "thick breaths rank of gross diet"; it is Shakespeare too and not Cleopatra who speaks of death as bringing "liberty." In "Cymbeline," Shakespeare's mask Posthumus dwells on the same idea. But these lapses are momentary; the superb declaration ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... The pure mechanic does not accept the doctrine. "Your alleged supernatural appearance," he says, "is based on such a simple fact as this: two pictures can be taken on ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... would permit one man to do the work of three, it would save strength, and make for efficiency. The reason why I have been able to go farther than my colleagues, is that I have had the privilege of using Government conveyances by land and water; to have a car and a mechanic missionary would be supplying us with a grand opportunity for multiplied service." She expatiated on the matter in letters to her friends at home, and the longer she thought of the idea, the more it fired her ...
— Mary Slessor of Calabar: Pioneer Missionary • W. P. Livingstone
... of a rich merchant, who, as soon as he bought me, took me to his house, treated me well, and clad me handsomely as a slave. Some days after, he asked me if I understood any trade. I answered that I was no mechanic, but a merchant, and that the pirates who sold me had robbed me of all ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments • Anonymous
... movement these iron pathways will enable us to command." And again,—"We have spoken of vehicles travelling at twenty miles an hour; but we see no reason for thinking that, in the progress of improvement, a much higher velocity might not be found practicable; and in twenty years hence a shopkeeper or mechanic, on the most ordinary occasion, may probably travel with a speed that would leave the fleetest courser behind." Wonderful words these! At a first glance we may not deem them so, being so familiar with the ideas which they convey, but our estimate of them will be ...
— The Iron Horse • R.M. Ballantyne
... preserved an accurate description; and indeed there is a print of him, supposed to be by Reginald Elstracke, pulling the press with his own hand, as it works off the sheets of his scarce edition of the Augsburg Confession. He was a chemist as well as a good mechanic, and either of these qualities in this country was at that time sufficient to constitute a white witch at least. This superstitious old writer had heard all this, and probably believed it, and in his sleep the image and ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... to you how surprised I was; I had only known him as a mechanic, a member of this Society. I spent an hour and a half there I shall never forget; I asked the privilege of bringing ...
— Silver Links • Various
... "I have bad news for you, Orps. Tom and Fred have gone West." It was bad news. Tom and Fred, two gallant hearts, dead! I was told afterwards how it happened. One of the last days of the fighting, Fred went out to test his machine with his mechanic. He taxied off down the aerodrome, which was a huge old Boche one that his squadron had moved forward to. As he was taxi-ing he hit a Boche booby trap, planted in the ground, and up went the machine and fell in flames. The mechanic was thrown clear, ...
— An Onlooker in France 1917-1919 • William Orpen
... any of his work, and the new comer was obliged to learn his practical experience at that establishment, where he was known as the mechanical engineer, by having all his work done over by the pattern maker or others, under the eye of the superintendent or master mechanic, and be subjected all the time to the jealousies and annoyances incident to such a method ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 623, December 10, 1887 • Various
... without murmuring that I prepared for my new home; and what added to my unhappiness, was the fact that my brother William was purchased by the same family. My father, by his nature, as well as by the habit of transacting business as a skillful mechanic, had more of the feelings of a freeman than is common among slaves. My brother was a spirited boy; and being brought up under such influences, he daily detested the name of master and mistress. One day, when his father and his mistress both happened to call him ...
— Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl - Written by Herself • Harriet Jacobs (AKA Linda Brent)
... away, and was sailing above a desert which, from the height it had attained, looked little more than a small stretch of sand such as children play upon by the sea. Its speed gradually slackened—and its occupants, Morgana, the Marchese Rivardi and their expert mechanic, Gaspard, gazed down on the unfolding panorama below them with close and eager interest. There was nothing much to see. Every sign of humanity seemed blotted out. The red sky burning on the little ...
— The Secret Power • Marie Corelli
... Mechanic soul, thou must not only do With Martha, but with Mary ponder too; Happy's the home where these fair sisters vary; But most, when Martha's reconciled ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... contracts, and enter into any penalties for keeping time at thirty per cent. less. But navies and billbrokers, that are in excess now, then were scarce. Still the affair, though not mercenary, was illiberal in a higher sense of art; and no anecdote shows more pointedly Pope's sense of the mechanic fashion, in which his own previous share of the Homeric labor had been executed. It was disgraceful enough, and needs no exaggeration. Let it, therefore, be reported truly: Pope personally translated one-half of the 'Odyssey'—a dozen books ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... he said, he had chanced to arrest an Irish mechanic who, during the season, had been employed at the neighboring hotel in replacing some plaster that had fallen by reason of leakage. Since then, a hard drinking man, he had been idly loafing, occasionally jobbing, ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... Southworth. Some rich man, young and charming, possibly the owner of the factory I was working in, would fall passionately in love with me, marry me and carry me away to his palace! Gradually, my ideas came down. I should have been glad to marry a foreman, then some good mechanic, and finally, some workman, however humble, whom I would love dearly. And now I was deliberately preparing for a ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... mechanic was carried to the hospital, and the school doctor was soon working over him. Meanwhile, dry garments had been supplied to Larry and Mr. Vardon. A messenger came from Colonel Masterly to learn what was going on, and, when he heard of ...
— Dick Hamilton's Airship - or, A Young Millionaire in the Clouds • Howard R. Garis
... my suburban residence is charming. To the serious poet, and writer of elegiac verses, the aspect of Nature, viewed from my veranda, is suggestive. I myself have experienced moments when the "sad mechanic exercise" of verse would have been of infinite relief. The following stanzas, by a young friend who has been stopping with me for the benefit of his health, addressed to a duck that frequented a small pond in the vicinity of my mansion, may be worthy of ...
— Urban Sketches • Bret Harte
... burly in a fat-pig style, Mr Verloc, without either rubbing his hands with satisfaction or winking sceptically at his thoughts, proceeded on his way. He trod the pavement heavily with his shiny boots, and his general get-up was that of a well-to-do mechanic in business for himself. He might have been anything from a picture-frame maker to a lock-smith; an employer of labour in a small way. But there was also about him an indescribable air which no mechanic could have acquired in the practice of his handicraft however ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... racing across the field. He reached the machine and took one glance at the pilot. Then he turned to the mechanic who followed ...
— Tam O' The Scoots • Edgar Wallace
... something to be known. Not only must art be discriminated from science, but art in the industrial or mechanical sense must be distinguished from art in the esthetic sense; the former aims chiefly at utility, the latter at beauty. The mechanic arts are the province of the artisan, the esthetic or fine arts are the province of the artist; all the industrial arts, as of weaving or printing, arithmetic or navigation, are governed by exact rules. Art in the highest esthetic sense, while it makes use of ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... Every mechanic who has had anything to do with the hardening of tools knows how necessary it is to take a cut from the surface of the bar that is to be hardened. The reason is that in the process of making the steel its outer surface has become decarbonized. This change makes it low-carbon steel, which ...
— The Working of Steel - Annealing, Heat Treating and Hardening of Carbon and Alloy Steel • Fred H. Colvin
... absence in Germany his works had been left under the general charge of Samuel Block. This old man was not a scientific person; he was not a skilled mechanic; in fact, he had been in early life a shoemaker. But when Roland Clewe, some five years before, had put up his works near the little village of Sardis, he had sent for Block, whom he had known all his life and who was at that time the tenant of a small farm, built ...
— The Great Stone of Sardis • Frank R. Stockton
... necessary, because the said term tradesman is understood by several people, and in several places, in a different manner: for example, in the north of Britain, and likewise in Ireland, when you say a tradesman, you are understood to mean a mechanic, such as a smith, a carpenter, a shoemaker, and the like, such as here we call a handicraftsman. In like manner, abroad they call a tradesman such only as carry goods about from town to town, and from market to ...
— The Complete English Tradesman (1839 ed.) • Daniel Defoe
... for their thrift and prudence; the lower orders are in general well-educated, and it is the height of ambition in a Scottish mechanic, to appear with his family in neat, clean dresses, on Sundays and ...
— The World's Fair • Anonymous
... world. Their thoughts—if they have any, and doubtless they have, a good many of them—are those of the most tranquil and placid nature. Perhaps they are edifying each other with reflections on the great advantages of the mechanic arts, and the art of making earthen ware in particular. The old cow is a genuine philosopher. She makes the best of every thing. Seldom, very seldom, does she allow herself to get excited. As for being angry, she makes such a bungling piece ...
— Stories about Animals: with Pictures to Match • Francis C. Woodworth
... incessant tear, Adorn his tomb!—oh, raise the marble bust, 360 Proclaim his honours, and protect his dust! With urns inverted, round the sacred shrine Their ozier wreaths let weeping Naiads twine; While on the top MECHANIC GENIUS stands, Counts the fleet waves, ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... practical value to them for future wage earning. It is doubtful whether high school courses which have been formulated in the first instance to prepare pupils for a college course can furnish such instruction and it is still more doubtful whether the trade training required by the future mechanic and the broader preparation required for the professions can be given effectively ...
— Wage Earning and Education • R. R. Lutz
... There won't be a particle of good result to the child from any such acquirements. It isn't as though he was a white child. What use can Latin or Greek be to a coloured boy? None in the world—he'll have to be a common mechanic, or, perhaps, a servant, or barber, or something of that kind, and then what use would all his fine education be to him? Take my advice, Ellen, and don't have him taught things that will make him feel above the situation he, in all probability, will have ...
— The Garies and Their Friends • Frank J. Webb
... daily more valuable. I have never seen the hour when I felt like moving that precious collection. Besides, I am a man of the people. I like the working class, and am willing to be thought one of them. I can find time to talk to a hard-pushed mechanic as easily as to such members of the moneyed class as I encounter on stray evenings at the Hotel Clermont. I have led—I may say that I am leading—a double life; but of neither am I ashamed, nor have I cause to be. Love drove me to ape the gentleman in the halls of the Clermont; a broad human interest ...
— Initials Only • Anna Katharine Green |
