"Pendulum" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... shall introduce a new chapter in answer to miscellaneous objections, and shall give up the greater part to answer Mivart's cases of difficulty of incipient structures being of no use: and I find it can be done easily. He never states his case fairly, and makes wonderful blunders...The pendulum is now swinging against our side, but I feel positive it will soon swing the other way; and no mortal man will do half as much as you in giving it a start in the right direction, as you did at the first commencement. God ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... a print of Millet's Angelus, and a rude etching of a dog hung anyhow, the frames smashed and the glass broken. A Dutch clock, with figures of nymphs on the face, and the timing piece of a shell dangling from the weights, looked idly down, its pendulum ...
— The Red Horizon • Patrick MacGill
... of perspiring in the palms of the hands. He took out a miserable little cotton pocket-handkerchief, rolled it up into a ball, and softly dabbed it to and fro, from one hand to the other, with the regularity of a pendulum. Performed by other men, under other circumstances, the action might have been ridiculous. Performed by this man, at the crisis of the interview, the action ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... recurring at regular intervals; and they had only to listen attentively to recognise the ticking of a clock. Yes, it was this and nothing else that broke the profound silence of the dark room; it was indeed the deliberate ticking, rhythmical as the beat of a metronome, produced by a heavy brass pendulum. That was it! And nothing could be more impressive than the measured pulsation of this trivial mechanism, which by some miracle, some inexplicable phenomenon, had continued to live in the ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc
... from Harper's Weekly and pasted flat on the tent wall. Also there were too many fire zouaves around his bed—if it was a bed, this vague vibrating hammock he occupied. It was much more like a hollow nook inside a gigantic pendulum which swung eternally to and fro until it swung him into senselessness—or aroused him with fierce struggles to escape. But his mother's slender hand sometimes arrested the maddening motion, or—and this was curiously restful—she ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers
... only for the purpose of assuring the future of his nephew. At the same time, in a merry moment, he would load down his table with all that kitchen and cellar could provide, for the reflection of his friends. Thus he oscillated continuously between two extremes; but the power which swung the pendulum was always the aural malady. He grew peevish and capricious towards his best friends, rude, even brutal at times in his treatment of them; only in the next moment to overwhelm them most pathetically ...
— Beethoven: the Man and the Artist - As Revealed in his own Words • Ludwig van Beethoven
... that the candelabra on the mantel-piece darted out jets of flame, whose green, blue, and rose-coloured tongues ascended to the ceiling; and it appeared to him as though his heart was beating as noisily as a clock-pendulum, and that every one would turn to inquire whence came the noise. But every one was occupied; no one turned round; no one suspected that there was a man present on whom a thunderbolt had ...
— Samuel Brohl & Company • Victor Cherbuliez
... those that contain sets of dancing figures, which issue from the dial-plate when the hour is struck; or like those, where a ship sails across the face of the clock, and is seen tossing up and down on the waves, as often as the pendulum vibrates. ...
— True Stories from History and Biography • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... column in the first hall. Were they always like that? Once that face dwelt with a crowd of worship. And all the other faces have gone, and all the glory has passed. And, like so many of the living, the goddess has paid for her splendors. The pendulum swung, and where men adored, men hated her—her the goddess of love and loveliness. And as the human face changes when terror and sorrow come, I felt as if Hathor's face of stone had changed upon its column, looking toward the Nile, in obedience ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens
... foreshape thy word; The poet is not lord Of the next syllable may come With the returning pendulum; And what he plans to-day in song, To-morrow sings it in another tongue. Where the last leaf fell from his bough, He knows not if a leaf shall grow, Where he sows he doth not reap, He reapeth where he did not sow; He sleeps, and dreams forsake his sleep To meet him ...
— Sister Songs • Francis Thompson
... into 3000 parts, and this you can do with a clock by making the pendulum lighter ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... some joy without security and without a morrow; when life seems concentrated in one short hour which we would wish to make eternal, and which we feel slipping away minute by minute, while we listen to the pendulum which counts the seconds, or look at the hand that seems to gallop o'er the dial, or watch a carriage-wheel, of which each turn abridges distance, or hearken to the splashing of a prow that distances the ...
— Raphael - Pages Of The Book Of Life At Twenty • Alphonse de Lamartine
... known as the 'short-horn' in contradistinction to its front-elevatored predecessor which, owing to its general reliability and easy flying capabilities, had long been affectionately called the 'mechanical cow.' The 1913 Salon also saw some lingering attempts at attaining automatic stability by pendulum and other freak devices. ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian
... little duties were faithfully done each day, and many of her sisters' also, for they were forgetful, and the house seemed like a clock whose pendulum was gone a-visiting. When her heart got heavy with longings for Mother or fears for Father, she went away into a certain closet, hid her face in the folds of a dear old gown, and made her little moan and prayed her little ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... motion of the swing seemed to set the breeze blowing. It waved Katy's hair like a great fan, and made her dreamy and quiet. All sorts of sleepy ideas began to flit through her brain. Swinging to and fro like the pendulum of a great clock, she gradually rose higher and higher, driving herself along by the motion of her body, and striking the floor smartly with her foot, at every sweep. Now she was at the top of the high ...
— What Katy Did • Susan Coolidge
... such as one or Being, which was absolutely at rest. But the positive had its negative, the conception of Being involved Not-being, the conception of one, many, the conception of a whole, parts. Then the pendulum swung to the other side, from rest to motion, from Xenophanes to Heracleitus. The opposition of Being and Not-being projected into space became the atoms and void of Leucippus and Democritus. Until the Atomists, ...
— Sophist • Plato
... to encircle it, is often raised to the undue dignity of a throne, and not rested upon. It seems to produce an inability for any sort of recreation, and a scorn of the necessity or the pleasure of being amused. Every one will admit that recreation is one swing of life's pendulum; and in proportion to the swing in that direction will be the strength of the swing in the other direction, and ...
— As a Matter of Course • Annie Payson Call
... looking dreamily at the old French clock on the mantelpiece, whose tarnished gilt face glimmered between two slender black-marble columns; sometimes she counted the tick-tock of the slowly swinging pendulum; sometimes, toward dawn, she watched the foggy yellow daylight peer between the red rep curtains; but counting, and looking, and drowsing, she was glad to be alive. It was not until the next afternoon that ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... no doubt that even the smallest of the agriculturists are getting some share of the spoils of the tariffs and other measures Bebel mentions, there can also be little question that in such a storm of revolt as he predicts the pendulum would swing too far the other way, and they would suffer unjustly. It is true that the agriculturist produces bread, while the city worker consumes it, but so also do shoe workers produce shoes that are consumed by garment workers, and certainly no Socialist predicts ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... stern seat, his Lordship the bow, and we pushed off. The boatman, a big, husky fellow, had been rowing a long hour when we put into a cove under the high shore of an island. I could see a moving glow back in the bushes. It swung slowly, like a pendulum of light, with a mighty flit and tumble of shadows. We tied our boat, climbed the shore, and made slowly for the light. Nearing it, his Lordship whistled twice, and got answer. The lantern was now still; it lighted ...
— D'Ri and I • Irving Bacheller
... kept losing his shoes, and got stuck in the fence, and you never saw anything so funny! And then Joy couldn't climb, and she just hung there swinging; and now, mother, I couldn't help laughing to save me, it was so exactly like a great pendulum with hoops on. Well, Joy was mad 'cause we laughed and all, and so she said she'd go home. Then—let me see—oh, it was after that, Winnie tumbled into the ditch, splash in! with his feet up in the air, and I thought I should go off to ...
— Gypsy's Cousin Joy • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... will now go further, and confess to you that men get tired of everything, of heaven no less than of hell; and that all history is nothing but a record of the oscillations of the world between these two extremes. An epoch is but a swing of the pendulum; and each generation thinks the world is progressing because it is always moving. But when you are as old as I am; when you have a thousand times wearied of heaven, like myself and the Commander, and a thousand times wearied of hell, as you are wearied now, you will ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... clock. He got up and stopped the pendulum. "I can't bear the sound of it," he said to John as he sat down again. They remained in silence for a while longer, and then Uncle William got up and started the clock again. "Mebbe ... mebbe, it's better for it to be going." ...
— The Foolish Lovers • St. John G. Ervine
... the doctor's gaze, when his mind entered that of his distant agent, was a clock. It was a very ordinary sort of an instrument, such as one sees in schools and offices; it had two hands, and a pendulum of ...
— The Devolutionist and The Emancipatrix • Homer Eon Flint
... pocket-watches were first made about 1477, at Nuremberg, in Germany. The most ancient clock of which we possess any certain account, was made in 1634 by Henry de Wycke, a German artist; it was erected in a tower of the palace of Charles V., king of France. The pendulum was applied ...
— A Catechism of Familiar Things; Their History, and the Events Which Led to Their Discovery • Benziger Brothers
... Professor Huxley says, materialistic; but from the self-contradictions inseparable from every species of materialism the Cartesian variety is, of course, no more exempt than any other, and it has besides one self-contradiction peculiar to itself. A clock's pendulum vibrates, and its hands move, not simply by reason of the situation and figure of its weight and wheels, but also because some intelligent person, by winding up the clock, has communicated an impulsive force to ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... towards Providence to do the rest. To find Providence unwilling to help him brought a wave of riotous indignation through his mind on each occasion of making that discovery. These waves, sweeping at irregular intervals over Will, left the mark of their high tides, and his mind, now swinging like a pendulum before this last buffet dealt by Fate in semblance of the Duchy's man, plunged him into a huge discontent with all things. He was ripe for mischief and would have quarrelled with his shadow; but he did worse—he quarrelled ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... by the hind legs for mutton, all which Pussy bore like a lamb, for she had been killed a great many times, and was used to it. But it did not please Flyaway; neither did aunt Martha's collection of shells and pictures call forth a single smile. There was a beautiful clock in the parlor, and the pendulum was in the form of a little boy swinging; but Flyaway would not have cared if it had been a gallows, and the boy ...
— Dotty Dimple's Flyaway • Sophie May
... Hepialus genus.—The gold Swift sometimes moves slowly through the air, a few feet from the ground, where it poises itself; at others, vacillates like the pendulum of a clock, and again altering its motion, darts about ...
— The Emperor's Rout • Unknown
... and social movements by the phrase 'reaction' is a very tempting one, for the simple reason that it enables us to effect a great saving of thought. The change is made to explain itself. History becomes a record of oscillations; we are always swinging backwards and forwards, pendulum fashion, from one extreme to another. The courtiers of Charles II. were too dissolute because the Puritans were too strict; Addison and Steele were respectable because Congreve and Wycherley were licentious; Wesley was zealous because the Church had become indifferent; the Revolution ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... age he discovered the principle of isochronism of the pendulum, which, in the hands of Huyghens in the middle of the seventeenth century, led to the invention of the pendulum clock, perhaps the most ...
— History of Astronomy • George Forbes
... form; and the schools had been dominated by teachers who trained boys to declaim in elegant periods on any subject whatever, regardless of its content; thus carrying to an extreme the precepts with which the great orators had enforced the importance of style. The Schoolmen swung the pendulum back, letting sound and froth go and thinking only of their subject-matter, despising the classics. In their turn they were confronted by the humanists, who reasserted the ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... out from the cliff, and oscillating along its facade—like the pendulum of some gigantic clock—he was seen tying the strings and adjusting the pieces of stick, as coolly, as if he had been standing upon ...
— The Cliff Climbers - A Sequel to "The Plant Hunters" • Captain Mayne Reid
... lights, an electroscope for determining the amount of electricity in the air, photographic apparatuses, of which we had seven, large and small, and a photographometer for making charts. I considered a pendulum apparatus with its adjuncts to be of special importance to enable us to make pendulum experiments in the far north. To do this, however, land was necessary, and, as we did not find any, this instrument unfortunately did not come into use. For hydrographic observations we took a full equipment ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... comes. To such as these, the counsel of "action right or wrong but action anyway!" is good, but the difficulty is to make them overcome their doubts. Their cerebral oscillation makes them weary but they cannot seem to stop it; their pendulum of choice never ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... short by the tautening of the rope. Then the doctors will group around me, and one will relieve another in successive turns in standing on a stool, his arms passed around me to keep me from swinging like a pendulum, his ear pressed close to my chest, while he counts my fading heart-beats. Sometimes twenty minutes elapse after the trap is sprung ere the heart stops beating. Oh, trust me, they make most scientifically sure that a man is dead once they ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... number of its blows. Nevertheless, all these irregular, and apparently lawless, catastrophes would be the result of an absolutely uniformitarian action; and we might have two schools of clock-theorists, one studying the hammer and the other the pendulum. ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... arc, its oscillations always consumed the same time and, because he had no other means, he timed its motion by the beating of his pulse. That was one time when a boy went to church and did well to forget the service. He soon began to wonder whether he could not make a pendulum which, swinging like the chandeliers, would do useful business for men. He soon began to discover, in what he had seen that day, new light on the laws of planetary motion. That was one of the turning points in human history—the boy was Galileo. The ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... hours the word money had been sounding in Lucien's ears as the solution of every difficulty. In the theatre as in the publishing trade, and in the publishing trade as in the newspaper-office—it was everywhere the same; there was not a word of art or of glory. The steady beat of the great pendulum, Money, seemed to fall like hammer-strokes on his heart and brain. And yet while the orchestra played the overture, while the pit was full of noisy tumult of applause and hisses, unconsciously he drew a comparison between this scene and others that ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... body, to which the energy has been transferred. In the case of a body falling, as the potential energy diminishes, the kinetic energy increases, but the total amount of the two combined always remains the same. This is well illustrated in the case of a swinging pendulum. When a pendulum is at the highest point of its swing, its velocity or kinetic energy is zero, but at that point its potential energy is greatest. As it descends, the potential energy decreases, but the kinetic energy increases. When the pendulum is at the lowest point its energy is wholly kinetic, ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... 1) the nature and habits of oviparous animals, the possibility of aerial flight, certain abnormalities of vision, the secular process of imbalsamation: 2) the principle of the pendulum, exemplified in bob, wheelgear and regulator, the translation in terms of human or social regulation of the various positions of clockwise moveable indicators on an unmoving dial, the exactitude of the recurrence per hour of an instant in each hour when the longer and the shorter indicator ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... So the pendulum swung, this way and that, lacerating her heart each time it swept forward or back. But the blind agony of her recoil, when she had first learned the story of that tragic happening on the Indian ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... as athletics or outdoor sports in my world. The only physical exercise known to us was to be swinging like a pendulum in front of your reading-desk from nine in the morning to bedtime every day, and an all-night vigil every Thursday in addition. Even a most innocent frolic among the boys was suppressed as an offense ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... Titian, Velasquez, and Rembrandt. He accepts them as they are, and is grateful. But even the most obscure of mortals may have his preferences, and a curious chapter in the lives of individuals who have concerned themselves with painting would be the bewildering way in which the pendulum of their appreciation and admiration has swung backwards and forwards from Titian to Velasquez, from Velasquez to Rembrandt, and sometimes back to Titian. It is often a question ...
— Rembrandt • Mortimer Menpes
... the whistling of the wind through the cordage, and the wash of the waves as they raced over each other and broke with a seething 'whish' into masses of foam, and the motion of the ship gently rocking to and fro like a pendulum as she lurched this way and that with rhythmical regularity, my eyes presently began to close. So, cuddling myself up in the tarpaulin, for the air fresh from the north felt rather chilly, I dropped off into a sound nap, not ...
— The Island Treasure • John Conroy Hutcheson
... really, truly clock party?" exclaimed Caddy, and in the same moment the big clock had swung its long pendulum wire around her waist, and lifted Caddy as if she were a feather, whirled her so fast that Caddy saw nothing at all, and then set her down very gently in a room whose floor was shaped like the flat side of a wheel, and the edges of the floor were notched ...
— Harper's Young People, January 20, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... just looks that way to you, Ustinya Naumovna. I keep getting punier; first it's stomachache, then palpitation of the heart—just like the beating of a pendulum. Now I have a sinking feeling, or feel kind of seasick, and things swim ...
— Plays • Alexander Ostrovsky
... struggle which the Moderates of Chinese politics must have waged to avert the catastrophe by merely gaining time and allowing the Desperates to dash themselves to pieces when the inevitable swing of the pendulum took place. Finally, it will not escape notice that many remarks borne out all through the narrative tend to show that British diplomacy in the Far East was at one time ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... severe, the first of the extraordinary forms of torture, was so called when the sufferer, having hung suspended by the wrists, for sometimes a whole hour, was swung about by the executioner, either like the pendulum of a clock, or by elevating him with the windlass and dropping him to within a foot or two of the ground. If he stood this torture, a thing almost unheard of, seeing that it cut the flesh of the wrist to the bone and dislocated the limbs, weights were attached to the feet, thus doubling ...
— The Cenci - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... felt ashamed that the thought had not struck her before. She almost, but not quite, decided to insert such an advertisement at once; but, as she pondered, she questioned the wisdom of such an action. Her mind swung, like a pendulum, from one side to the other, and at last she fell asleep, still undecided, but still ...
— The Woman's Way • Charles Garvice
... monastic mysticism had produced a revolt against a conception of life that was false, its passive hostility to civilisation, the hollowness of its ideal existence, its exaggerated asceticism, its disparagement of the family life, and the result was the swing of the pendulum in the opposite direction. The recoil came with the Methodists. But we cannot live wholly in the world of spirit, any more than we ought to live wholly in the world of matter, for our nature is double, and no portion of it should be atrophied. Extreme mysticism is as falsifying ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... attempted to demonstrate that the waves or pulses of the air are propagated in all directions round a sounding body, and that during their progress and regress they are twice accelerated and twice retarded, according to the law of a pendulum vibrating in a cycloid. These propositions are the foundation of almost all our reasoning concerning sound. When sonorous bodies are struck, they, by their vibration, excite waves in the air, similar to those caused by a stone thrown into water; some parts of these waves entering ...
— Popular Lectures on Zoonomia - Or The Laws of Animal Life, in Health and Disease • Thomas Garnett
... prove them. Hansen, it was supposed, had straightened out the tangle by showing that the action of Venus produced a swinging of this sort in the moon; for one hundred and thirty years she would be running ahead and then for one hundred and thirty years more falling back again, like a pendulum. Two motions of this sort were combined together. They were claimed to explain the whole difficulty. The moon, having followed Hansen's theory for one hundred years, would not be likely to deviate from it. Now, it was deviating. ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb
... well as individuals, keeps up such a due balance between the Prince's authority and the people's obedience as to make all things succeed and prosper. But the present Prime Minister has neither judgment nor strength to adjust the pendulum of this State clock, the springs of which are out of order. His business is to make it go slower, which, I own, he attempts to do, but very awkwardly, because he has not the brains for it. In this lies the fault ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... there was company—a parlour, four bedrooms, and the room reserved for the old people. Up-stairs were the sleeping and store-rooms. In the hall stood the tall old fashioned house clock, with its long pendulum swinging to and fro with slow and measured beat. Its face had looked upon the venerable sire before his locks were touched with the frost of age. When his children were born it indicated the hour, and it ...
— Life in Canada Fifty Years Ago • Canniff Haight
... before we got back to the genial warmth of the stove. Crack! Crack! Crack! went the little dwelling again, as a more than usually fierce blast of the hurricane, strengthened by the furiously driving snow, hit it like another hammer of Thor. Crack! Crack! The house seemed to swing like a pendulum before it came to rest again. I could see that the ...
— Labrador Days - Tales of the Sea Toilers • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... pelting rain, which half-blinded him, swinging from side to side like a rapid and erratic pendulum, his torn hands paining him severely and his lungs panting from his exertions and panting from the very air which the wind sometimes blew into his mouth with strangling force, he finally arrived at the ...
— Dutch Courage and Other Stories • Jack London
... resurrection and life of the world," as well as "judge of quick and dead." Both are to be accomplished in the last day, and that day is now progressing. A general resurrection, at the last vibrating pendulum of time, cannot I humbly conceive, be substantiated by the oracles of truth, any more than a general judgment. I am rather inclined to think that the judgment of the world by Jesus Christ expresses the whole, including the resurrection and all; even as the high ...
— Twenty-Four Short Sermons On The Doctrine Of Universal Salvation • John Bovee Dods
... might have tricked out thirty Castilian mules with them. These thousand tiny bells quivered for some time with the vibration of the rope, then gradually died away, and finally became silent when the manikin had been brought into a state of immobility by that law of the pendulum which has dethroned the water clock and the hour-glass. Then Clopin, pointing out to Gringoire a rickety old stool placed beneath the manikin,—"Climb ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... no fear at all as he drew her up and she swung out of the boat over the swiftly-running current. Hiram laid along the tree-trunk in an easy position, and began swinging the girl at the end of the rope, like a pendulum. ...
— Hiram The Young Farmer • Burbank L. Todd
... whole ebb and flow of emotion, may be revulsed for the rest of an existence. Nothing can ever seem to us as it did: it is a blow upon the fine mechanism by which we think, and move, and have our being—the pendulum vibrates aright no more—the dial hath no account with time—the process goes on, but it knows no symmetry or order;—it was a single stroke that marred it, but the harmony ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, No. - 488, May 7, 1831 • Various
... always ran to extremes. He thought that an oath, if it were only big enough, would frighten away Human Nature, instead of serving only as a challenge to it. Accordingly, each reformation was more intemperate than the last, to be duly followed by a greater swing of the pendulum in the opposite direction. ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, April 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... be before the smash-up. There must be a difference of at least half an hour. Just as soon as I can get around to it, I'll build a clock, and see. Though if the force of gravity has changed, too, that, of course, will change the time of vibration of any pendulum, and so of course will invalidate my results. It's ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... A vibrating body is one having a to-and-fro movement, like that of a clock pendulum or the string of a violin on sounding. Bodies to give out sound waves must vibrate rapidly, making not less than sixteen vibrations per second. The upper limit of hearing being about 40,000 vibrations per second, certain bodies may even vibrate too ...
— Physiology and Hygiene for Secondary Schools • Francis M. Walters, A.M.
... hands fell on his shoulders. The fingers bit deeply into the flesh, drawing a groan of pain from Hamlin. He was lifted to his feet—off his feet, so that he dangled in the air like a pendulum. He was suspended by the shoulders, Lawler's fingers gripping him like iron hooks; he was shaken until his feet, powerless to retard the movement, were flopping back and forth wildly, and his teeth rattled despite his efforts to clench them. It seemed to him that Lawler would snap his head ...
— The Trail Horde • Charles Alden Seltzer
... unaffected by this outburst, but for that matter he seemed unaffected by anything. His dead gaze followed his employer's to-and-fro striding as a cat's follows a pendulum, but without the cat's curiosity about a pendulum. He never interrupted when Potter was speaking; and Canby noticed that whenever Potter talked at any length Tinker looked thoughtful and distant, like a mechanic so accustomed to the whirr and thunder of the machine-shop ...
— Harlequin and Columbine • Booth Tarkington
... the traitor's death!" shouted the Sovereign Pontiff. The chest was loosed, and swung like a pendulum lengthwise of the room, down almost to the floor and up nearly to the ceiling. The profanity now turned into a yell of terror. The Martyrs slapped one another's backs and grew blue in the face with laughter. At a signal, a light box was placed where ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VI. (of X.) • Various
... impending, independent, pendulum, perpendicular, expenditure, pension, suspense, expense, pensive, compensate, ponder, ponderous, preponderant, pansy, poise, pound; (2) pendant, stipend, appendix, compendium, propensity, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... 1874. They had believed that the good works of a Government which had wrought so much for the public benefit would have been appreciated by the great mass of the electors, and they were unfeignedly astonished at the verdict returned by the country. They had not taken into account that swing of the pendulum which has so large an influence in popular constituencies. Nor had they noted the extent to which the unity of the Liberal party, and its consequent strength, had been impaired by the action of advanced sections, who were so passionately bent upon carrying the measures ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.
... clock designed for domestic use and to the smaller portable clocks and still smaller and more portable pocket watches. In mechanical refinement a similar continuity may be noted, so that one sees the cumulative effect of the introduction of the spring drive (ca. 1475), pendulum control (ca. 1650), and the anchor escapement (ca. 1680). The transition from de Dondi to the modern chronometer is indeed basically continuous, and though much research needs to be done on special topics, it has an historical unity and seems to conform for the most part to ...
— On the Origin of Clockwork, Perpetual Motion Devices, and the Compass • Derek J. de Solla Price
... Ring, lifted by the tractor, swung to and fro like a pendulum. Bennie threw himself upon his stomach. The earth was dropping away from them like a stone. He felt ...
— The Man Who Rocked the Earth • Arthur Train
... he clung to the string, and, as he did so, he began to sway to and fro, like the pendulum ...
— The Story of a Bold Tin Soldier • Laura Lee Hope
... puppet, puppet-show; "one of the small figures on the face of a large clock which was moved by the vibration of the pendulum" (Whalley). ...
— Cynthia's Revels • Ben Jonson
... 'of his portion'; in the present case it means an agreement with Death to pass by the supposed speaker while he visits others.—This discourse illustrates what is a characteristic feature of Hebrew literature—the 'pendulum structure,' by which the thought alternates in successive paragraphs between one and the other of two contrasting themes, in this case between Judgment and Salvation. The prophet is writing for the southern kingdom ...
— Select Masterpieces of Biblical Literature • Various
... evening, and the one to which he attached the most importance, was that all scientists have spoken of the swift movement of the tuning fork, while in fact it moved 25,000 times slower than the hour hand of a clock and 300,000,000 times slower than any clock pendulum ever constructed. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XIX, No. 470, Jan. 3, 1885 • Various
... when this coincides with the southing and northing of the sun, and this in a still greater degree about the times of the equinoxes. This decrease of the gravity of all bodies during the time the moon passes our zenith or nadir might possibly be shewn by the slower vibrations of a pendulum, compared with a spring clock, or with astronomical observation. Since a pendulum of a certain length moves slower at the line than near the poles, because the gravity being diminished and the vis inertiae continuing ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... the experiment which about two years ago was much talked of, for demonstrating the rotation of the earth by means of a pendulum, been satisfactorily carried out and proved? And if so, where is the best place for finding an account of it? The diagram by Mr. Little in the Illustrated London News does not seem to explain ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 179. Saturday, April 2, 1853. • Various
... whose comic articles shook the fat sides of the nation for one summer, and whose pseudonyme was in everybody's mouth. Alas! what he took for perpetual motion was but an eight-day clock, and I need not call your attention to the present dead and leaden stillness of its pendulum. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... breathing, (to give it no other name), of the slumberers—in the midst of many deep thoughts, I say, I came to the conclusion that in my present circumstances the worst thing I could do was to think! I remembered the fable of the pendulum that became so horrified at the thought of the number of ticks it had to perform in a lengthened period of time, that it stopped in despair; and I determined ...
— Freaks on the Fells - Three Months' Rustication • R.M. Ballantyne
... years, the room had not the air of being resigned to its solitude. The mirror waited for the old lady's glance, and on the onyx clock a pensive Sappho was lonely because she did not hear the noise of the pendulum. ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... followed in 1914, was almost as well done as "The Financier" had been ill done, and there are parts of it which remain, to this day, the very best writing that Dreiser has ever achieved. But "The 'Genius'"? Ay, in "The 'Genius'" the pendulum swings back again! It is flaccid, elephantine, doltish, coarse, dismal, flatulent, sophomoric, ignorant, unconvincing, wearisome. One pities the jurisconsult who is condemned, by Comstockian clamour, to plough through such a novel. ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... university at Pisa at seventeen, with the strict injunction not to neglect medical subjects for the alluring study of philosophy or literature. But when he was eighteen he discovered the great principle of the pendulum by a lamp left swinging ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... been loosened on the mountain crest a half mile above, and was plunging downward with inconceivable momentum. Striking some obstruction, it rebounded like a rubber ball against the opposite side of the gorge, then recoiled, still diving downward, oscillating like a pendulum from wall to wall, whirling with increasing speed until it crashed to the bottom of the gorge with a shock so terrific that the ...
— A Waif of the Mountains • Edward S. Ellis
... they were very near a division that might be fatal to the future good of the cause. He wondered whether he could swing the crowd to the other side, like the pendulum of a clock. It would take considerable eloquence, as well as all his powers of leadership to accomplish it; but the crisis was upon them, and he would be false to himself if he did not meet ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts - Or, The Struggle for Leadership • George A. Warren
... towards the pulpit. In the middle of the nave, there were only a number of empty benches, left there in disorder by the urchins of the catechism class. Amidst all this void came a low tic-tac from the swaying pendulum. She went down the church to knock at the confessional-box, which she saw standing at the other end. But, just as she passed the Chapel of the Dead, she caught sight of Abbe Mouret prostrated before the great bleeding Christ. He did not stir; he must have thought ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... as society is constituted there is no being, of whatever sex, who ought to submit to the indignity involved in an aspersion on all his or her past life, be that life regulated as by a pendulum. Reflect; who escapes that law? There are some, I admit; but what happens? If it is a man, dishonor; if it is a woman, what? Forgiveness. Every one who lives ought to give some evidence of life, some proof of existence. There is, then, for woman as well ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... zinc trough, into which their blood fell drop by drop. He repeated each different movement with the regularity of clockwork, the blows from the knife-handle falling with a monotonous tick-tack as he broke the birds' skulls, and his hand working backwards and forwards like a pendulum as he took up the living pigeons on one side and laid them down dead on the other. Soon, moreover, he worked with increasing rapidity, gloating over the massacre with glistening eyes, squatting there like a huge delighted bull-dog enjoying ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... did not return, to lift the curtain, come what might. He struck a match, and looked at the dial. It was a quarter past ten o'clock. Then, to occupy his mind, he began to try and count the three hundred seconds, fancying that he could see a pendulum swinging before his eyes in the dark. At twenty minutes past ten he ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... slowly, and so still swung in equal times; He straight devised another boon to man, Those pulse-clocks which by many a fevered bed Our doctors use; dreamed of that timepiece, too, Whose punctual swinging pendulum on earth Measures the starry periods, and to-day Talks peacefully to children by the fire Like an old grandad full of ancient tales, Remembering endless ages, and foretelling Eternities to come; but, all the while There, in the dim ...
— Watchers of the Sky • Alfred Noyes
... the offending couple would probably be put off the floor. Moreover, their origin and history demonstrates their essentially vicious character. Is there any sensible reason why one's daughter should be encouraged to imitate the dances of the Apache and the negro debauchee? Perhaps, after all, the pendulum has merely swung just a little too far and is knocking against the case. The feet of modern progress cannot be hampered by too much of the dead underbrush ...
— The "Goldfish" • Arthur Train
... doing nothing more injurious to golf than serenely admiring the view. But the clerical golfer, being a man of quick temper, poured forth a torrent of abuse, exclaiming, "How could I hole the ball with that blockhead over there working his umbrella as if it were the pendulum of an eight-day clock!" When this is the kind of thing that is happening, I advise the golfer to try variations in his stance for putting, effecting the least possible amount of change at a time. There is a chance that at last he will drop into his natural stance, or something ...
— The Complete Golfer [1905] • Harry Vardon
... Mavick excused herself to ascertain the cause of the delay. Evelyn and her suitor were left alone. She was standing by a window looking out, and he was standing by the fireplace watching the swing of the figure on the pendulum of the tall mantelpiece clock. He was the first to ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... pendulum swung as far to the other extreme. My hypocrisy made me sick of living in my own body with myself. I threw off the transient cloak of assumed belief. Once more I attacked the stupidity of belief in a six-day God, inventor of an impossible paradise, ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... the study of astronomy. Here, as before, they used the Greek knowledge, but they advanced the study of the science greatly by the introduction of instruments, such as those for measuring time by the movement of the pendulum and the measurement of the heavenly bodies ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... the resistance of the air bring it to rest, yet no one considered this information of the slightest practical importance; but the boy Galileo, as he watched a lamp left swinging by accident in the cathedral at Pisa, saw in the regularity of those oscillations the useful principle of the pendulum. Even the iron doors of a prison were not enough to shut him out from research. He experimented with the straw of his cell, and learned valuable lessons about the relative strength of tubes and rods of ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... by States, elected on the first trial John Quincy Adams. Seldom in our history has the cup of power come so near to the lips of a candidate and been dashed away again. Yet nothing is surer in a republic than a certain swing of the pendulum afterward, in favor of any candidate to whom a special injustice has been done, and in the case of a popular favorite like Jackson, this might have been foreseen to be irresistible. His election four ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... picture of the normal state of a small Scottish provincial town and its society, it may have been as false in its own direction as the kail-yarders had been in theirs. But for Mr. Douglas's untimely death—a real loss to literature—he would doubtless have shown in future fictions that the pendulum had ceased to swing, and would have given us more artistic, because completer, pictures of human life. With Crabbe the force of his primal bias never ceased to act until his life's end. The leaven of protest against the sentimentalists ...
— Crabbe, (George) - English Men of Letters Series • Alfred Ainger
... that, if value is variable, it is for that very reason determinable; that variability is the sign and condition of determinability. They pretend that value, ever varying, can never be determined. This is like maintaining that, given the number of oscillations of a pendulum per second, their amplitude, and the latitude and elevation of the spot where the experiment is performed, the length of the pendulum cannot be determined because the pendulum is in motion. Such is political ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... too. Our house, our roses, our clothes, the bed-clothes not forgotten, and now our child! I'm within your doors, I sit at your table, I lie in your bed; I exist in your blood; in your lungs, in your brain; I am everywhere and yet you can't get hold of me. When the pendulum strikes the hour of midnight, I'll blow cold, on your heart, so that it stops like a clock that's run down. When you sit at your work, I shall come with a poppy, invisible to you, that will put your thoughts ...
— The Road to Damascus - A Trilogy • August Strindberg
... gave him an odd feeling of wonder, which he took to be apologetic realization that he had spent a longer time oblivious of her than he had meant. His explanation had a little compunction in it. "I have a time with that pendulum always. I can't seem to get it ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... (Move arms to right, left, right, in pendulum fashion. Stamp right—left.) The mouse ran up the clock. (Run four steps forward.) The clock struck "One!" (Pause a moment to listen on "One"—clap hands) And down he ran. (Run four steps back to ...
— Games and Play for School Morale - A Course of Graded Games for School and Community Recreation • Various
... Barbicane, "but not the whole of it. By a certain movement of liberation, a sort of balancing on its centre, the moon presents more than the half of her disc to the earth. She is like a pendulum, the centre of gravity of which is towards the terrestrial globe, and which oscillates regularly. Whence comes that oscillation? Because her movement of rotation on her axis is animated with uniform velocity, whilst ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne
... seventeenth century the pendulum moved from a position of the colony ignoring any Indian rights in the land to a gradual recognition of the Indian right of occupation. This sweep of the pendulum brought the establishment of boundary lines between the whites and the Indians with reservations being ...
— Mother Earth - Land Grants in Virginia 1607-1699 • W. Stitt Robinson, Jr.
... a pendulum, whose movement is a continual reaction; when it moves to the right, it has to go to the left in order to return to the right again, and so on. Suppose virtue is on one side and love on the other, and the feminine balance ...
— Gerfaut, Complete • Charles de Bernard
... Nature's wonderful processes we find many evidences of that great principle of Action and Reaction, which, like the forward and backward swing of the pendulum, changes cause into effect, and effect into cause, in a never ending series. We find this principle in effect in the psychic relation of mental states and colors. That is to say, that just as we find that ...
— The Human Aura - Astral Colors and Thought Forms • Swami Panchadasi
... the vine tighten, heard it creak and groan under his weight, and finally it lifted him clear of the island, swinging him far out over the abyss like a weight at the end of a pendulum. ...
— The Adventures of Piang the Moro Jungle Boy - A Book for Young and Old • Florence Partello Stuart
... you,' exclaimed No. 1, 'and you will see what a fool I have made of myself. You must know that it is impossible to follow the pendulum of the clock with the hand, and to repeat "Here she goes—there see goes," just as it swings to and fro, that is when people are talking all round you, as it puts you out. One day I was with a set of jolly fellows in a dining-room, with a clock just like this in ...
— Monsieur Violet • Frederick Marryat
... applied to Venetian gold chains is very great, but incomparably less than that which is applied to some of the manufactures of iron. In the case of the smallest Venetian chain the value of the labour is not above thirty times that of the gold. The pendulum spring of a watch, which governs the vibrations of the balance, costs at the retail price twopence, and weighs fifteen one-hundredths of a grain, whilst the retail price of a pound of the best iron, the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 559, July 28, 1832 • Various
... graceful men of course the grace predominates, and nothing can be finer than the large, firm way in which, from their point of vantage, they throw themselves over their tremendous oar. It has the boldness of a plunging bird and the regularity of a pendulum. Sometimes, as you see this movement in profile, in a gondola that passes you—see, as you recline on your own low cushions, the arching body of the gondolier lifted up against the sky—it has a kind of nobleness which suggests an image on a Greek frieze. ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... "We have a system of levers to do our walking with, and they act precisely as do all levers. One leg is a lever to pry the body over the other leg, and the latter becomes a pendulum and swings back by force of gravity. When you walk three miles and feel as if you could walk ten, you are walking that way. When you are tired out, you are taking irregular steps and ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... are to grapple with those old metaphysical-divinity books...The pendulum is now swinging against our side, but I feel positive it will soon swing the other way; and no mortal man will do half as much as you in giving it a start in the right direction, as you did ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... The pendulum of emotion swung as far back, and I almost disliked the innocent cause of my decorative folly. I began to look over my accounts, to study my check books, to do some big sums in addition, and it made me even more depressed. Result ...
— Adopting An Abandoned Farm • Kate Sanborn
... flattening out just in time to reach out and grasp a branch. Once or twice, when a fitful breeze blew at sunset, I had a magnificent exhibition of aeronautics. The birds came upwind slowly, beating their way obliquely but steadily, long legs stretched out far behind the tail and swinging pendulum-like whenever a shift of ballast was needed. They apparently did not realize the unevenness of the wind, for when they backed air, ready to descend, a sudden gust would often undercut them and over they ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... with that. Hardly! You wanted me to be in love with you. There's no doubt of it." He laughed. "Oh, anyone else would have done as well, but I happened along at a favorable time—on the back swing of the pendulum. It hurt your pride, I think, that one of my Arcadian simplicity should fail to droop where others, more sophisticated, had fallen swiftly. Perhaps I, too, might have fallen if you hadn't warned me that you had no heart. You ...
— Madcap • George Gibbs
... of a pendulum Kennedy swung back against our own building, managing to keep his hold on the rope ...
— The Romance of Elaine • Arthur B. Reeve
... forward like a huge pendulum his body swayed, and in an agony of suspense he watched the fatal rope. With writhing body he swayed far out, and then he saw ...
— The Master Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve and John W. Grey
... swore bitterly, and stooped to pick up the paper. Then with sullen bravado, still staring at his reflection in the glass, he took off the glass shade of the clock, touched the pendulum and stopped it; then turning his back, crept to his chair, ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... crater holes flattened by distance and the gathering darkness into a seeming level surface. The night slowly deepened. The dead-black vault of the sky blazed with its brilliant starry gems. The gibbous Earth hung high above the horizon, motionless, save for the invisible pendulum sway over the tiny arc, of its libration: widening to quadrature, casting upon the bleak naked Lunar landscape ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various
... impulses, and so unsupported by any moral convictions, would suffer in so keen a contest waged under such unequal and cruel conditions. It was in truth a year of great passion and great despair. Defeat is bitter when it comes swiftly and conclusively, but when defeat falls by inches like the pendulum in the pit, the agony is a little beyond verbal expression. I remember the first day of my martyrdom. The clocks were striking eight; we chose our places, got into position. After the first hour, I compared my drawing with Marshall's. He had, it is true, ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... speech was a huge success. If, for a moment, the pendulum of public favor had swung toward Simpson, this trumping of the latter's leading card pushed it back again. The moderator had some difficulty in restoring order to the ...
— Cy Whittaker's Place • Joseph C. Lincoln
... genial than the garrulous banter of Eugene Thrush, at his best, it was impossible to encounter or incur; he had been, however, for a few minutes at his worst, and it was difficult to see why the pendulum should have swung so suddenly to the other extreme. Mullins went about his business with his usual sleek solemnity. But Thrush was yet another man the moment he was alone. His face was a sunny background ...
— The Camera Fiend • E.W. Hornung
... leave the theatre unsatisfied or with hostile thoughts," E. Heckel wrote; and Liszt affirmed that nothing could be said about this wonderful work: "Yes, indeed, it silences all who have been profoundly touched by it. Its sanctified pendulum swings from the lofty to the most sublime." Of the first act it had already been said: "We here meet with a harmony of the musico-dramatic and religious church style which alone enables us to experience in succession the most terrible, heartrending sorrow and again that most sanctified devotion ...
— Life of Wagner - Biographies of Musicians • Louis Nohl
... a being with probably a very wide range of possibilities, a machine with a pendulum that most likely had an unusual ...
— The Empty House And Other Ghost Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... it was idle to put the brakes on now. He was internally committed and must go wherever it might lead. And the thought rejoiced him. He had climbed upon a pendulum that swung into an immense past; but its return swing would bring him safely back. It was rushing now into that nameless place of freedom that the primitive portion of his being had hitherto sought in vain, and a fundamental, starved craving of his life would know satisfaction at last. Already ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... becomes darker. A very pretty and uncommon object to copy is that of an old-fashioned clock, a veritable "my grandfather's clock," an upright tall eight-day clock that has a long chain and a heavy pendulum concealed within its tall case, and that shows a big square face with large figures printed on it. I will give you a few details about my cork clock, and I think you will make one and set it upon a bracket to ...
— Little Folks (Septemeber 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... the pendulum has swung to its extreme. At every depression of business, armies of the unemployed perish in sight of the land they abandoned in the hope of a brighter future. Their children have forgotten the traditions of the soil, and the energies of our people must now be concentrated to ...
— Three Acres and Liberty • Bolton Hall
... of her lips? Perhaps so. Still, no one would have known it as he stood there, swinging his hunting-crop like a pendulum from ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... the time with regularity. This clock is still in existence. It is to be seen at the Museum of Patents, South Kensington; and when we visited it a few months ago it was going, and still marking the moments as they passed. It is contained in a case about six feet high, with a glass front, showing a pendulum and two weights. Over the clock is ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles
... Cradle." The turners of the rope do not make a complete circle with it, but swing it from side to side in a pendulum motion. In this position the player runs in and jumps from one to five times and runs ...
— Games for the Playground, Home, School and Gymnasium • Jessie H. Bancroft
... nothing, any one else would say. He smoked on as if Rogers were not there, and Rogers remained before the fire as patient as the clock ticking behind his head on the mantel, and showing the gleam of its pendulum beyond his face on either side. But ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... suffering his well-preserved white hand—always suggestive of poultices to me—with its signet ring, to droop in front of it—a hand which he moved up and down habitually, as he conversed, in a singularly soothing and mechanical fashion—his "pendulum" we used to call it in old times, Evelyn and I, when it was one of our chief resources for amusement to laugh at "Cagliostro," our sobriquet for this ci-devant jeune homme, ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... that the poor painter grew weaker and weaker from day to day, from hour to hour. And notwithstanding Doctor Splendiano Accoramboni's assurance that, after the vital process had reached a state of perfect equilibrium, he would give it a new start like the pendulum of a clock, they were all very doubtful as to Salvator's recovery, and thought that the Doctor had perhaps already given the pendulum such a violent start that the mechanism ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... mind as well as a temperament. Experience is a swing of the pendulum between the momentary ecstasy of immediate contact and the subsequent reaction upon the moment, which is consciousness of it. In order to make his vision actual, the artist rises out of the domain of feeling into that of thought. The landscape has compelled ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes
... and dimpled. The pendulum had swung the other way now, and she was hugging her secret ...
— The Beggar Man • Ruby Mildred Ayres
... considered Jesus as a mere man. Theodotus, in the year 200, taught the same, with Artemon and Praxeas. In the next century the Arians and Sabellians opposed Orthodoxy from opposite sides,—the one confounding the persons of the Godhead, and the other dividing the substance. So for several centuries the pendulum of opinion swung from one side to the other before it rested in the ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... and slaves into a six years' quarrel in which they stood on something like equal terms. It was surely not to be wondered if the parties should come out of this contest too hostile ever to maintain to each other the relation of employer and employed. This six years of vexatious swinging like a pendulum over the line between bondage and liberty was well calculated to spoil all the gratitude and ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... Sevillian, Neapolitan, Algerian, mixed with masked Satyrs, which made Hogarth pale, while at a Herod's-table buried under fruits, wines, flowers and gold, reclined Pat O'Hara, tonsured now, crowned with ivy and violets, gowned in a violet toga; while under a pendulum whose swings left whiffs of ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel
... passed, during which I was left unvisited. Sometimes I heard men talking in the cabin; over my head there went a regular swing of heavy feet, a pendulum tread, as of half-a-score of burly ruffians marching abreast, and keeping a look-out all together. The door of my berth was opened at last, and the villain who had seduced me ...
— The Honour of the Flag • W. Clark Russell
... that's the character I have received of him," replied Mr. Jonas, whose mind was very much roused against the man. The pendulum of his impulses had swung, from a light touch, ...
— Home Lights and Shadows • T. S. Arthur
... auditor. She began to retail her efforts, her hopes, her dreams, her presentiments, her disappointments, in the cause of her daughter's matrimonial fortunes. It was a long story, and while it was being unfolded, the prince continued to pass to and fro, stiffly and solemnly, like a pendulum marking the time allowed for the young lady to come to her senses. Mrs. Light evidently, at an early period, had gathered her maternal hopes into a sacred sheaf, which she said her prayers and burnt incense to, and treated like a sort of fetish. They had been her religion; ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James |
