"Pivot" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... assistance, the natives would probably have obtained possession of the vessel; as it was the survivors retired in confusion, which was further increased by the discharge among them of a swivel gun, mounted on a pivot amidships. ...
— Narrative Of The Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Commanded By The Late Captain Owen Stanley, R.N., F.R.S. Etc. During The Years 1846-1850. Including Discoveries And Surveys In New Guinea, The Louisiade • John MacGillivray
... Murfreesborough. Yet, despite these back-sets, the general course of events showed that Providence remained on the side of the heaviest battalions; and the spring of 1863 saw our armies extended from the pivot midway between the rival capitals in a more or less irregular line, and interrupted by the Alleghany Mountains, to Vicksburg and the ...
— The Campaign of Chancellorsville • Theodore A. Dodge
... world and feels at home in it. Meanwhile I suppose I must be her guide and philosopher! I believe that my acquaintance with Senator North has made me feel like a child. He is so much wiser in a minute than I could be in a lifetime; and as I have made him the pivot on which the world revolves, no wonder I ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... proper use. Even before the art of printing was discovered by a Catholic, and when books were scarce, a Bible, in large, plain writing, was chained to a stand or desk in each parish church in most countries, so that all who wished could read. I saw one of these stands, which turned on a pivot, in an old Catholic church in Yorkshire, England, where it remains to this day. And as regards the absurdity that Luther found the only copy of the Bible extant in a monastery or university, that story is refuted by the fact that there were millions of Bibles, and countless editions of ...
— The Cross and the Shamrock • Hugh Quigley
... They make God a tyrant, who punishes the inevitable faults to which he has impelled them, or into which he has allowed them to be seduced. This dogma, which served as the foundation of Paganism, is now the grand pivot of the Christian religion, whose God should excite no less hatred than the most wicked divinities of idolatrous people. With such notions, is it not astonishing that this God should appear, to those who meditate on his attributes, ...
— Letters to Eugenia - or, a Preservative Against Religious Prejudices • Baron d'Holbach
... their accompaniments of rammers and sponges, water buckets, boxes of round, grape, and canister, and tubs of wadding, while the combings of the hatchways were thickly studded with round shot. The tarpawling and lumber forward had disappeared, and there lay long Tom ready levelled, grinning on his pivot. ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... of the philosophy he sought to supersede, had to be attacked with their own weapons and by methods adapted to the spirit of his age. Similar judgment may be passed upon his championship of the Copernican system. That system was the pivot of his metaphysic, the revelation to which he owed his own conception of the universe. His strenuous and ingenious endeavors to prove its veracity, his elaborate and often-repeated refutations of the Ptolemaic theory, ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... method was practised until the introduction of swaged metallic plates. Where the crown only of a tooth or those of several teeth were lost, the restoration was effected by engrafting upon the prepared root a suitable crown by means of a wooden or metallic pivot. When possible, the new crown was that of a corresponding sound tooth taken from the mouth of another individual; otherwise an artificial crown carved from bone or ivory, or sometimes from the tooth of an ox, was used. To replace entire dentures a ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... (The stout gentleman swung round as if on a pivot, as Audrey moved gracefully by.) "You don't mean to say ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... an entry in the log-book, folded his hands and shut his eyes. The Leyden jars rattled in their mahogany sockets as the Vandalia climbed a wave, faltered, and sped into the hollow. Far removed from her pivot of gravity, the wireless house behaved after the manner of an express elevator. But the wireless house chair was bolted to ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... as thick as ever and twice as savage. Do you know what meddling with the folks without names, as you call 'em, is like?—It is like riding at the quintaan. You run full tilt at the board, but the board is on a pivot, with a bag of sand on an arm that balances it. The board gives way as soon as you touch it; and before you have got by, the bag of sand comes round whack on the back of your neck. "Ananias," for instance, pitches into your lecture, we will say, in some paper taken by the people in your kitchen. ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... armies, rules cabinets, or leads senates; but though you are none of these, yet you are backed by all of them. Theirs is the external power which sustains your moral authority; you are the incarnate mind of the political body of the nation. In the complex institutions of our country you are the pivot point upon which the rights and liberties of all, government and people alike, turn; or, rather, you are the central light of constitutional wisdom around which they perpetually revolve. Long may this court ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay
... does, but a man always does t'other way. And when you throw at a rat or anything, hitch yourself up a tiptoe and fetch your hand up over your head as awkward as you can, and miss your rat about six or seven foot. Throw stiff-armed from the shoulder, like there was a pivot there for it to turn on, like a girl; not from the wrist and elbow, with your arm out to one side, like a boy. And, mind you, when a girl tries to catch anything in her lap she throws her knees apart; she don't ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... huge structures—The Redheugh Bridge, the new King Edward VII. bridge, the High Level, and Swing Bridges,—all connecting Newcastle with the sister town of Gateshead. An interesting sight it is to see the Swing Bridge gradually turning on its central pivot, until it lies in a straight line up and down the stream, allowing some huge liner to pass, or some new battleship, fresh from Elswick, to sail down the river, on its way to make its trial trip over the "measured mile" in the open sea at the mouth ...
— Northumberland Yesterday and To-day • Jean F. Terry
... heartwood is a red or pinkish color, the sapwood, which is considerable, is a creamy white. The wood has a dull surface and very fine grain. It is valuable for turnery, tool handles, and mallets, and being so free from silex, watchmakers use small splinters of it for cleaning out the pivot holes of watches, and opticians for removing dust from deep-seated lenses. It is also used for butchers' skewers, and shuttle blocks and wheel stock, and is suitable for turnery and inlaid work. Occurs scattered in all the broad-leaved forests of ...
— Seasoning of Wood • Joseph B. Wagner
... division of French troops [blockaded in Brest], but more especially in the expected naval superiority, which was the pivot upon which everything turned, we have been compelled to spend an inactive campaign after a flattering prospect at the opening of it.... Latterly we have been obliged to become spectators of a succession ...
— The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783 • A. T. Mahan
... advantages and disadvantages of British principles and laws with those of the United States, the beam of the latter has mounted into the thin air of Mr. Gourlay's vision. The greatest absurdity at present discoverable is in the ideas of unfortunate individuals, who imagine themselves placed near the pivot desired by the philosopher, and that they possess the lever which is to move the solid globe to any position into which it may ...
— Canada and the Canadians, Vol. 2 • Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... although its position in that regard was splendid. In front was a great gravel space, in the centre of which lay a huge block of serpentine, from a quarry on the estate, filling the office of goal, being the pivot, as it were, around which ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... often had they seen it in their dreams, that dreadful mahogany cylinder turning lazily upon its pivot and rolling in its womb, along with that of a hundred others, the fate of all that was dear to them on earth! How often, too, had their poor brains, racked and fired by doubt, fear and anguish, followed ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... were young maids in the world. She was an only child, and desperately spoiled: and her father joined in the Lancaster insurrection long ago, and it ruined his fortunes, so she came into a convent. That's her story. Ada Mansell is the pivot of her thoughts ...
— In Convent Walls - The Story of the Despensers • Emily Sarah Holt
... were nearing a skew bridge, with an almost right-angled approach; and the strange resultant of the nicely balanced forces that control an automobile skating on "pneus" over slippery mud twisted us round, suddenly and without warning. Instantly, oilily, the car gyrated as on a pivot, and behold, we were facing down the valley instead of up. Terry could not had done it had ...
— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... shown himself superior in cavalry. The infantry which had marched at 21/2 P. M. from the house of Boisseau, on the Boydtown plank-road, was drawn up in four battle lines, a mile or more in length, and in the beginning facing the White Oak road obliquely; the left or pivot was the division of General Ayres, Crawford had the center and Griffin the right. These advanced from the Boydtown plank-road, at ten o'clock, while Sheridan was thundering away with the cavalry, mounted and dismounted, and deluding the Rebels with the idea that he was the ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... up and put his weight on a rope suspended from the roof. Slowly the solid masonry swung on a pivot, leaving room on either side for a person to squeeze through. The governor found it a tight fit, as ...
— Bucky O'Connor • William MacLeod Raine
... indispensable. As the most interesting of it centers in and radiates from certain personalities whom I had the good fortune to meet and to know as well as their days and mine would permit, it has seemed to me that the surest way of vivifying any account of the work itself is to make its pivot the central figure of the story. So I will begin with ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... be seen, Mr. President, that the South Carolina doctrine is the Republican doctrine of '98,—that it was promulgated by the fathers of the faith,—that it was maintained by Virginia and Kentucky in the worst of times,—that it constituted the very pivot on which the political revolution of that day turned,—that it embraces the very principles, the triumph of which, at that time, saved the Constitution "at its last gasp," and which New England statesmen were not unwilling to adopt when they believed ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... the finger of denial at this easy and common generalization. It is that of a young German officer, a mere stripling of twenty or thereabouts, with the most frank, open, ingenuous expression. One would expect to find him presiding at a Christian Endeavor social, rather than right here at the very pivot of the most terrible military organization ...
— In the Claws of the German Eagle • Albert Rhys Williams
... combat, seized the Jew Mendoza by the hair, and so ensured that the pugs for ever afterwards should be a close-cropped race. Inside you see the square face of old Broughton, the supreme fighting man of the eighteenth century, the man whose humble ambition it was to begin with the pivot man of the Prussian Guard, and work his way through the regiment. He had a chronicler, the good Captain Godfrey, who has written some English which would take some ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... shops, stores, and sheds. A pontoon attached to a cylinder may be fitted with an ordinary wet dock; and then the pontoon, before or after the vessel is upon it, can be slewed round to suit the slips up which the vessel has to be moved, supposing the slips are arranged radially. In this case, the pivot end of the pontoon would be a fixture, so ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 275 • Various
... self-love; instinctive evasions of everything that threatens to interrupt the career of his triumphant jollity and self-complacency. His very size floats him out of all his difficulties in a sea of rich conceits; and he turns round on the pivot of his convenience, with every occasion and at a moment's warning. His natural repugnance to every unpleasant thought or circumstance, of itself makes light of objections, and provokes the most extravagant and licentious answers in his own justification. His indifference to truth ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... mouth, no twinkle about the corners of his little eyes. He looked at Mrs. Moon as much as to say, "What is to be done? The boy has been going the wrong way: must we disown him?" The moon neither shook her head nor moved her lips, but turned as on a pivot, and stood with her back to her husband, looking very miserable. Not one of the star-children moved from its place. They shone sickly and small. In a little while they faded out; then the moon paled and paled ...
— Ranald Bannerman's Boyhood • George MacDonald
... gude tea, sought aye a cup of the Prince's mixture." This produced peals of laughter, and her ladyship laughed as heartily as any of them. When somewhat composed again, she looked across the table to Mr. Clerk, and offered to let him see it. "It is now set on the pivot of my watch, and a' the warks gae round the flech in place ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... paper-weights, paper-knives, pens, and inkstands of "artistic" pat terns. He was seated at the table, with his back to the fire, his arm lifted, and a hairpin between his finger and thumb—the pivot round which his paper twist was spinning briskly. Across the table stood his daughter, leaning forward with her chin on her hands and her white teeth showing as she laughed for laughing's sake, to give play to ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... army Corps, forming the pivot upon which the intended wheel to the right was to be effected, occupied the Bois de Vaux and Bois des Ognons; the 8th, under the personal command of the King, halted at Rezonville, ready to proceed to ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... be made plain by a few illustrations. In Fig. 128, A is a pulley four times larger, diametrically, than B, and C is the pivot on which they turn. The pulleys are, of course, secured to each other. In this case we have the two weights, one of four pounds on the belt, which is on the small pulley (B), and a one-pound weight on the belt from the large ...
— Practical Mechanics for Boys • J. S. Zerbe
... three weeks long, to count for anything. It was to be a holiday and no more. And lo! with that inexplicableness, that unforeseenness which is so curious a quality of human life, it had become a turning point of existence, the pivot perhaps upon which Chatty's being might hang. Mrs. Warrender was not so decided as Chatty. She saw nothing final in the parting. She was able to imagine that secondary causes, something about money, some family arrangements ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... second flight of steps into the next chamber, which was wonderfully like the floor below, minus the millstones; but the roof, instead of being a flat ceiling of boards and beams, was a complication of rafters, ties, posts, and cog-wheels, while at one side was the large pivot passing out through well-greased and blackened bearings, which bore the five sails of the mill, balanced to a great extent by the projecting fan, which, acted upon by the wind, caused the whole of the wooden cap which formed the ...
— The Vast Abyss - The Story of Tom Blount, his Uncles and his Cousin Sam • George Manville Fenn
... there was going to be no other concession, Truedale pulled himself together, went around to the front door and knocked, ceremoniously. The girl turned, as if on a pivot, ...
— The Man Thou Gavest • Harriet T. Comstock
... bush or hammer steel Facing and welding steel Pick steel Fork steel Pivot steel Gin saw steel Plane bit steel Granite wedge steel Quarry steel Gun barrel steel Razor steel Hack saw steel Roll turning steel High-speed tool steel Saw steel Hot-rolled sheet steel Scythe steel Lathe spindle steel Shear knife steel Lawn mower knife steel ...
— The Working of Steel - Annealing, Heat Treating and Hardening of Carbon and Alloy Steel • Fred H. Colvin
... idea of studying how the big things come from little ones. Wouldn't it be interesting to find the cause of this one case? I would not be one bit surprised if it were just some little thing which was the pivot ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... proceed after Clark had taken with him his unrivaled and intimate knowledge of the works; for, and in spite of all the dictates of prudence, it seemed impossible to think of the vast enterprise at St. Marys without its central pivot. ...
— The Rapids • Alan Sullivan
... rock. Blondin saw that there was not sufficient depth in a passage which he had intended to traverse. With a shout to the steersman he thrust his pole over the side with all his might. The obedient craft turned as if on a pivot, and would have gone straight into a safe stream in another second, if Blondin's pole had not stuck fast either in ...
— The Big Otter • R.M. Ballantyne
... enough to write and tell her he would abide by her decision. Her business in the North had been satisfactorily settled, for which she was, alas! to receive but poor thanks; and the welfare of the child having now become the pivot of her actions, she returned to England. From Dover she sent him a letter informing him that she was prepared once more to ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... without result; but soon after there was a snort, and a peculiar-looking animal came trotting down from the mountain, whisking its long tail from side to side and pointing its long ears forward. But as it came close up, it suddenly stopped, and spun round as if upon a pivot. ...
— The Crystal Hunters - A Boy's Adventures in the Higher Alps • George Manville Fenn
... Pollux wasted the precious time yet given him, he let the golden moments escape. In a state of strong excitement, he at length quitted his daughter's presence, to seek that solitude in which his perturbed mind might become sufficiently calm to form a judgment which must be as the pivot upon which his whole future life would turn. Pollux left Zarah still on her knees, nor did she rise when he had torn himself from her clinging arms and left the apartment. When the daughter could no longer ...
— Hebrew Heroes - A Tale Founded on Jewish History • AKA A.L.O.E. A.L.O.E., Charlotte Maria Tucker
... streak, a large head with the horn of plenty painted white, large maintopmast but no yards or sail on it. Mast raked very much, mainsail very square at the head, sails made with split cloth and all new; had two long brass twelve pounders and a large gun on a pivot amidships, and about seventy men, who appeared to be ...
— The Pirates Own Book • Charles Ellms
... a second baseman, whose cool head made him a good man at that pivot of the field; he was an able assistant to the right-field, a ready back-stop to the short-stop, and a perfect spider for taking into his web all the wild throws that came slashing from the home plate to cut off those who dared to try to ...
— The Dozen from Lakerim • Rupert Hughes
... whole issue depends, the "pivot" upon which it turns, is the existence of actual living souls filling the immense ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... the lieutenant had an opportunity to examine the prize, as she would be if he succeeded in getting her out of the bay. She was certainly a fine little steamer, and, with the heavy gun mounted on a pivot, she would have been capable of doing a great deal of mischief among the unprotected ...
— Within The Enemy's Lines - SERIES: The Blue and the Gray—Afloat • Oliver Optic
... fighters and workers of mankind, with a laugh that pealed above the noise, blue eyes that seemed to pursue some converse of their own, and a hand that grasped and cheered, where other hands withdrew and repelled. This one man's will had now, for some years, made the pivot on which vast issues turned—issues of peace and war, of policy embracing the civilized world; and, here, one saw him in drawing-rooms, discussing Alaric's campaigns with an Oxford professor, or chatting with a young ...
— Marriage a la mode • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... triumph. The question was not of abandoning this or that province: his political superiority was at stake. At Marengo, Austerlitz, and Wagram, he was in greater danger. His forces now were not in the air; they rested on the Elbe, on its fortresses, and on Erfurt. Dresden was the pivot on which all his movements turned. His enemies were spread out on a circumference stretching from Prague to Berlin, while he was at the centre; and, operating on interior and therefore shorter lines, he could outmarch and outmanoeuvre them. "But," he concluded, "where I am not ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... the many difficulties caused occurs in transposition on the piano. When transposing from, say, C minor to F minor, the child must first think in E[b] major, so as to get the pivot of reference, then in A[b] major for the new pivot A[b]. Yet all the time its real sense of pivot, which, be it noted, has been admirably trained by the Sol-fa treatment of the major scale, is in favour of C and ...
— Music As A Language - Lectures to Music Students • Ethel Home
... must inevitably wane under the new conditions, and they set themselves strongly to defeat the measure. However, the ancient city lay too far east to remain the capital of the expanding territories, and with an almost exclusively French population it could not remain the political pivot of a British dependency. Opposition was overborne in due time, and the Act of Union shifted the national centre of gravity ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... breathed more easily as they jumped for the sheets, and with a great banging and thrashing of sailcloth the vessel shot up to windward, and turned as on a pivot. As the schooner gathered way on the other tack, the men glanced at Wyllard, for the Selache's bows were pointing to the southeast again, and they felt that was not ...
— Masters of the Wheat-Lands • Harold Bindloss
... loved so much to gaze on as Jeanie Deans's. So, after spinning round and round his little orbit, and then remaining stationary for a week, it seems to have occurred to him that he was not pinned down to circulate on a pivot, like the hands of the watch, but possessed the power of shifting his central point, and extending his circle if he thought proper. To realise which privilege of change of place, he bought a pony from a Highland drover, and with its assistance and company stepped, or rather stumbled, ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... amiability the Superintendent whirled back into place in her pivot-chair and with her left hand which had all this time been rummaging busily in a lower desk drawer proffered Rae Malgregor a ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... plays an even more important role, since his study of Memory and conclusions as to its nature lead him on to a discussion of the relation of soul and body, spirit and matter. His second large work, which appeared in 1896, bears the title Matiere et Memoire. For him, Memory is a pivot on which turns a whole scheme of relationships—material and spiritual. He wrote in 1910 a new introduction for the English Translation of this work. He there says that "among all the facts capable of throwing light on the ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... question has been made quite unnecessarily to pivot upon the express contractual obligations of England, Germany, and France with respect to the neutrality of Belgium. The indictment of Germany has been placed upon the sound but too narrow ground that by the Treaty of 1839, and The Hague Convention of 1907, ...
— The Evidence in the Case • James M. Beck
... he whirled on a pivot, high and clear, and came to the ground with a force to match his weight, his body, like a whip-lash, cracking its whole length ...
— A Man and a Woman • Stanley Waterloo
... penetrated the sanctity of my regret,—from that instant, whatever was more soft and holy in the passions and darkness of my mind seemed to vanish away like a scroll. I again returned to the intense and withering remembrance which was henceforward to make the very key and pivot of my existence. I again recalled the last night of Gertrude's life; I again shuddered at the low murmured sounds, whose dreadful sense broke slowly upon my soul. I again felt the cold-cold, slimy grasp of those wan and dying fingers; and I again nerved my heart ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... fortification to walk round these wonderful defences. The wiring too was most ingenious and often carefully concealed in the hedges or ditches. Inside the gun shelters, you found that the gun was fixed on a central pivot and worked round a wooden platform with every degree carefully marked. Whilst on the walls stood a painted board with every barrage line and target carefully worked out, and the range and code call set out ...
— Q.6.a and Other places - Recollections of 1916, 1917 and 1918 • Francis Buckley
... to sit still. Her hand still burned where M. Raoul's lips had touched it. She recalled Endymion's prophecy that these entertainments would throw the domestic mechanism—always more delicately poised on Sundays than on weekdays—completely oft its pivot. She had pledged herself to prevent this, and had made a private appeal to the maidservants with whose Sunday-out they interfered. ...
— The Westcotes • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... termed it; then, grasping the eaves with both hands, he pulled himself along, the slip-noose over the cupola turning about on its pivot ...
— The Circus Boys on the Plains • Edgar B. P. Darlington
... like—when she moved it; and the confinement to bed was irksome enough, no doubt. But otherwise there was nothing in the lady's condition, before the fatal attack came, to alarm her or anybody about her. She had her books and her writing materials on an invalid table, which worked on a pivot, and could be arranged in any position most agreeable to her. At times she read and wrote a good deal. At other times she lay quiet, thinking her own thoughts, or talking with me, and with one or two lady friends in the neighborhood who came ...
— The Law and the Lady • Wilkie Collins
... principle of beauty-worship in metaphysical love, the adoration of woman; thanks to Plato, it has for all time become the inalienable property of the human mind. The striving to rise above all individualism was another ideal which a later period revived. But the pivot round which the emotions revolved was the love for a beloved individual, the modern, European, fundamental motive, as opposed to the antique Platonic cult of ideas. Thus Plato, too, was a citizen of the old world, at whose threshold stood universal ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... those days were somewhat rude contrivances. The mill proper consisted of two cogged wooden cylinders about fourteen inches in diameter and perhaps twenty-six inches in length, placed in an upright position in a frame. The pivot of one of these extended upward about six feet, and at its top was secured the long shaft to which the horse was attached, and as it was driven round and round, the mill crunched the apples, with many a creak ...
— Life in Canada Fifty Years Ago • Canniff Haight
... ranger, who held picket on that side of the village, sprang forth from his hiding-place, and challenged the horseman to halt. The challenge was unheeded. Another jerk of the rein spun the mustang round, as upon a pivot; and the next instant, impelled by the spur, the animal resumed his gallop. He did not return by the road, but shot off in a new direction, nearly at right angles to his former course. A rifle-bullet ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... front the Italian commander, General Cadorna, launched a great offensive while the British were active in Flanders and by August 23 had broken through the whole Austrian line, capturing the town of Selo, which was the pivot of the Austrian defense, and considered impregnable, and inflicting upon the enemy, in this eleventh battle of the Isonzo, the greatest losses he had sustained since the capture of Goritz. More than 13,000 Austro-Hungarian prisoners were captured during the battle, ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell
... at full length and spinning round and round like a wagon wheel upon its nave. They revolve with great rapidity, using their humped shoulders as a pivot, and their legs as levers. They sometimes continue this motion for half-an-hour at a time. No doubt they do this, as has been said, to scratch themselves; for, notwithstanding their thick hides and hair, they ...
— The Boy Hunters • Captain Mayne Reid
... is the pivot around which all his ceremonies and festivals move. He always dances to the cross, and on certain occasions he attaches strings of beads, ears of corn, and other offerings to it. It is used by the heathen as well as by the Christian Tarahumares. ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... necessitating the expenditure of considerable energy in performing either operation. She watched him tear down the old support wires and replace them with new ones, stretching a double strand from the top of the tall pivot posts to the free ends of the gates. Placing a short stick between the two strands of heavy wire he twisted until the shortening process had cleared the gate ends and they swung suspended, moving so freely that a rider could lean from his saddle and throw them ...
— The Settling of the Sage • Hal G. Evarts
... began to walk round and round the room, while the widow, who stood in the middle, turned as upon a pivot, keeping him always in view. This circus-ring performance lasted some minutes before ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - LA CONSTANTIN—1660 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... turned upon the Atlanta campaign, and he told some interesting facts in regard to Hood's obstinate holding on at Atlanta when Sherman was executing the movement around the place on the south. It happened that my own division held the pivot point close to the works of the city on the southeast, and Hardee's corps occupied the lines in front of us. He said an old woman had been brought to him who said she had gone to General Cox's headquarters to beg some provisions, and the general had told her she could have ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... not so easy to consider fairly a question like this in the hour when vital personal interests pivot on the decision, as it is in a season of rest and safety; yet, if in a time of extremest peril the unvarying duty of truthfulness shines clearly through an atmosphere of sore temptation, that light may be accepted as diviner because of its very power to penetrate clouds and to dispel darkness. Being ...
— A Lie Never Justifiable • H. Clay Trumbull
... knots an hour. As soon as her course had been changed, so as to bring the wind forward of the beam, which was her best point of sailing, the men were sent to the guns; the first mate placing himself at a long eighteen pounder, which was mounted as a pivot gun aft, a similar weapon being in her bows. All this took but four or five minutes, and shot after shot from the sloop ...
— Under Wellington's Command - A Tale of the Peninsular War • G. A. Henty
... busy swinging the light on its pivot. Behind, peering ahead in all directions, crouched Dick Prescott ...
— The Grammar School Boys of Gridley - or, Dick & Co. Start Things Moving • H. Irving Hancock
... a Jesus he must expect his Judas. That's why Abraham Lincoln gets shot. A Jesus makes a Judas inevitable. A man should remain himself, not try to spread himself over humanity. He should pivot himself ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... statue of Nepomeck down into the earth, the seventh step was movable and turned on a pivot; if you stood on one end of this, the statue above raised itself, but if you stood on the other end, it sank gently down, The builders of this subterranean passage had chosen well the guardian of their secret. The place where stood the ...
— Peter the Priest • Mr Jkai
... same with the store-rooms, and managed so well that he succeeded in laying in provisions enough for two years. There was abundance of money at his command, and enough remained to buy a cannon, on a pivot carriage, which he mounted on the forecastle. There was no knowing what might happen, and it is always well to be able to send a good round bullet ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... were. On the 9th and 10th, a general disruption of the little remaining ice took place: we made gentle and very cautious moves towards Barrow's Strait; and, at last, on August 11th, the ice, as if heartily tired of us, shot us out into Barrow's Strait, by turning itself fairly round on a pivot. We were at sea because we could not help it, and the navigable season was ...
— Stray Leaves from an Arctic Journal; • Sherard Osborn
... Bouillon road by the Prussian Guard, the Carignan road by the Bavarians, the Mezieres road by the Wurtemburgers. The French have not thought of barricading the railway viaduct; three German battalions have occupied it during the night. Two isolated houses on the Balan road could be made the pivot of a long resistance, but the Germans are there. The wood from Monvilliers to Bazeilles, but the French have been forestalled; they find the Bavarians cutting the underwood with their billhooks. The German army moves in one piece, in one absolute unity; the Crown Prince of Saxony is on the height ...
— Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century - Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World • Various
... had stepped back to Herr Haase's side; as the young man put his hands to the apparatus, he crisped himself with a sharp intake of breath for the explosion. A switch clicked under the young man's thumb, and he began to move the machine upon its pivot mounting, traversing it like a telescope on a stand. It came round towards the fresh yellow mounds of earth which marked Herr Haase's excavations; they had an instant in which to note, faint as the whirring of ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... epoch in this history, marking a distinct phase in the character of the Repeal Association. The proceedings of that extraordinary inquest are familiar to most men. It is not my intention to refer to them, except as a sort of pivot upon which public sentiment veered. When they were commenced there was untold wealth in the coffers of the Association. There was still a greater store of public purpose in the country. Threats, hot and violent, had been uttered. Pledges had been made ...
— The Felon's Track • Michael Doheny
... their election. The last extensive structure that he designed, and the election of which he personally superintended, was the Union Passenger Depot, at Cleveland. He was the first person that designed and erected pivot draw-bridges of long spans, which, however, have been much increased in length of span by other parties since. He was also the first to design and erect a dome roof of a span of 150 feet, sufficient to cover three lengths of a locomotive with its tender, and numerous ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... always be the central pivot of a whirlpool of excitement? God knows he loved peace even if Fate never permitted him to sample it. He laid the whole thing unconditionally at Brian's door. Let Brian, instead of shirking his usual numismatic responsibilities in some indefinite ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... ship, the lower end of the great eye-bolt was released from its clamp, and a small piston gave it a little shove. In a long, slow, graceful arc, it swung away from the hull, swiveling around the pivot clamp that held the eye. The braking effect of the pivot clamp was precisely set to stop the eye-bolt when it was at right angles to the hull. Moving carefully, St. Simon maneuvered the ship until the far end of the bolt was directly over the shaft. Then he nudged the Nancy Bell ...
— Anchorite • Randall Garrett
... my narrative to ask myself whether I dare venture to pause yet a little longer over this first period of my life. But this was the time when the buds began to unfold on my tree of life; this was the time when my heart found its pivot-point, and when first my inner life awoke. If, then, I succeed in giving an exact description of my early boyhood, I shall have provided an important aid to the right understanding of my life and work as a man. For that reason I venture ...
— Autobiography of Friedrich Froebel • Friedrich Froebel
... aside at the head of the stairs and ran past him. Long concealment of the deadly poverty within the walls had taught her to close the gates behind her whenever she entered, but now for greater security, or to gain time, she swung the great oaken beam round on its pivot across the doors on the inside. Then turning round on her heels she watched the bell that hung above her head. The Abbe, who had followed her as quickly as he could, was naively looking for a peep-hole between the timbers of ...
— The Last Hope • Henry Seton Merriman
... rapidity of the current proportionably great. I entertained hopes that the passage was clear, and that we should shoot down it without interruption; but in this I was disappointed. The boat struck with the fore-part of her keel on a sunken rock, and, swinging round as it were on a pivot, presented her bow to the rapid, while the skiff floated away into the strength of it. We had every reason to anticipate the loss of our whale-boat, whose build was so light, that had her side struck the rock, instead of her keel, she would have been laid open from stem to stern. As it was, however, ...
— Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia, Complete • Charles Sturt
... people, the seats are placed in front of one another on both sides the whole length of the carriage or car, except a certain space at either end, of which presently. When the passengers are seated they thus all face the engine, but the back of each seat works on a pivot at its foot, so that the said back can be placed on either side of the seat. In other words, you can thus sit either with your face or back to the engine. This is a great convenience, for, if the carriage is not crowded and two people can occupy two seats, by ...
— The Truth About America • Edward Money
... pad and pencil she hastily began to write a lecture in which she used the material gained in her hospital experience. She called it "Hospital Life." When she gave it on that night at Concord with a heavy heart it proved to be the pivot on which her success as a lecturer swung to its greatest height. As she drew her vivid pictures of the hospital experience and horrors of war and slavery she melted her audience to tears by her impassioned delivery. The secretary of the New Hampshire Central Committee was in ...
— Ten American Girls From History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... leave the earthworks they had so laboriously constructed, and deliberately risk the perils of an attack. He seems to have had little idea that in the hands of a skilful general intrenchments may form a "pivot of operations,"* (* The meaning of this term is clearly defined in Lee's report. "It was therefore determined to construct defensive lines, so as to enable a part of the army to defend the city, and leave the other part free to operate on the north bank." O.R. ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... far as it would go, but nothing suspicious presented itself to his searching eye. As he dropped the carpet back his foot touched the curb of the fireplace, and one end slid along. It seemed a curious thing that one end of the old oak curb should work on a pivot, but so it did, and Berrington pushed it as far as it would go. An instant later and he jumped ...
— The Slave of Silence • Fred M. White
... dreads the fire," and the more it is burnt, the greater the dread: so your affections, once interrupted, will recoil from a second love, and distrust all mankind. No! you cannot be too choice of your love—that pivot on which turn your destinies ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... play with the left foot advanced," he said. "Bend the left knee but keep the other one more nearly rigid. Keep the weight of your body on your heels or you will fall on your ball when you swing through. Do not curve your back like a letter C. Keep the backbone straight but not rigid. It is the pivot on which your body and shoulders must turn, and how can it turn true if your vertebrae ...
— John Henry Smith - A Humorous Romance of Outdoor Life • Frederick Upham Adams
... the history of this religion, viz., dogma, that is, the philosophical means which were used in early times for the purpose of making the Gospel intelligible have been fused with the contents of the Gospel and raised to dogma. This dogma, next to the Church, has become a real world power, the pivot in the history of the Christian religion. The transformation of the Christian faith into dogma is indeed no accident, but has its reason in the spiritual character of the Christian religion, which at all times will feel the need of a scientific apologetic.[10] But the question ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... character, which is a distinction between man and man, emanating originally from the will, and expressing its determinations, moving under the large variety of human impulses. The will is the central pivot of character; and this was obliterated, thwarted, cancelled, by the dark fatalism which brooded over the Grecian stage. That explanation will sufficiently clear up the reason why marked or complex variety of character ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... of the mists that hang round my friend, and show him as worthy of love as he was of admiration? The task is not an easy one. In most minds some one influence governs, from which all secondary impulses are found to radiate, but this pivot of character was wanting to Lord Byron. Governed at different moments by totally different passions, and impelled sometimes, as in his excess of parsimony in Italy, by springs of action never before developed in his nature, he presents ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... the last floe, the rain fell, and the wind blew heavily, dashing huge cakes against the windward side with a ceaseless crashing of broken ice. Before they could reach the end of the field, they saw their own turn as if on a pivot, and grind slowly past the leeward point of the one across which they pressed at full speed. Their efforts were in vain, for before they could reach the verge their refuge was twenty feet distant; but Regnar ...
— Adrift in the Ice-Fields • Charles W. Hall
... the trick's done. From the top of either of 'em we shall look down upon the Narrows, and blow their forts to glory. Up'll go the Navy, and there y'are!" It would be over by Christmas, they believed; for Christmas was always the pivot of ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... its muffled depth, in the way it quakes up through one's pillow so as to be felt rather than heard. It is simply the pounding of the ponderous pestle of the kometsuki, the cleaner of rice—a sort of colossal wooden mallet with a handle about fifteen feet long horizontally balanced on a pivot. By treading with all his force on the end of the handle, the naked kometsuki elevates the pestle, which is then allowed to fall back by its own weight into the rice-tub. The measured muffled echoing of its fall seems to me ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... liveth in me;" that the office of Christ was not to reconcile God to man, but man to God; and this is effected in proportion as Christ dwells in us, bringing us more and more into harmony with the Divine. The Atonement is indeed the central doctrine, the pivot of Christianity, but it is an atONEment, a making of one mind. To which Tanner's Lane listened with much wonderment and not without uncomfortable mental disturbance, the elder members complaining particularly that this was not the simple gospel, and that the ...
— The Revolution in Tanner's Lane • Mark Rutherford
... lit a taper, through these, shutting and locking sundry doors behind him, to what appeared to be a very damp wall covered with cobwebs, and situated in a dark corner of a wine-cave. Here he stopped and tapped again in his peculiar fashion, whereon a portion of the wall turned outwards on a pivot, leaving an opening ...
— Fair Margaret • H. Rider Haggard
... and the fleet of little gunboats were now visible from the battery, advancing against the Cumberland and Congress. The former opened fire upon her at a distance of a mile with her heavy pivot guns, but the Merrimac, without replying, continued her slow and steady course toward them. She first approached the Congress, and as she did so a puff of smoke burst from the forward end of her pent-house, and the water round the Congress ...
— With Lee in Virginia - A Story of the American Civil War • G. A. Henty
... sitting in a stall and wearing a biretta, got up, muttered something, and sat down again, while the three singers continued, with their eyes fixed on the big book of plain song lying open before them on the outstretched wings of an eagle, mounted on a pivot. ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... the two northern corps of Sir Henry Rawlinson's army. My instructions to Sir Hubert Gough were that his army was to maintain a steady pressure on the front from La Boisselle to the Serre road and to act as a pivot on which our line could swing as our attacks on his right ...
— World's War Events, Vol. II • Various
... fleet of little gunboats were now visible from the battery, advancing against the Cumberland and Congress. The former opened fire upon her at a distance of a mile with the heavy pivot guns, but the Merrimac, without replying, continued her slow and steady course toward them. She first approached the Congress, and as she did so a puff of smoke burst, from the forward end of her pent-house, and ...
— With Lee in Virginia - A Story of the American Civil War • G. A. Henty
... religion has a cultus, so also it has a clergy, who are the pivot of his entire social and political system. Their nature and office will be best shown by describing his ideal of political society in its normal state, with the various classes of which it ...
— Auguste Comte and Positivism • John-Stuart Mill
... Gertrude's portrait, and he afterwards transferred to canvas the features of many members of that circle of which it may be said that he had become for the time the pivot and the centre. I am afraid it must be confessed that he was a decidedly flattering painter, and that he imparted to his models a romantic grace which seemed easily and cheaply acquired by the payment of a hundred ...
— The Europeans • Henry James
... of attack was that the whole American line should rotate to the north and west on Caloocan as a pivot, driving the Insurgents in toward Malabon if possible. The latter began to fire as soon as the American troops showed themselves, regardless of the fact that their enemies were quite out of range. As most of them were using black-powder cartridges, their four or five miles of trenches ...
— The Philippines: Past and Present (vol. 1 of 2) • Dean C. Worcester
... one fundamental institution whereupon the whole of society reposes; that fundamental institution is Slavery.... Our European ancestry, those men from whom we are descended and whose blood runs with little admixture in our veins, took slavery for granted, made of it the economic pivot upon which the production of wealth should turn, and never doubted but that it was ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... capture and take her triumphantly into Port Royal harbour. She was now well within range, so I sang out to Lindsay, who was looking after matters on the forecastle, to know whether the nine- pounder pivot gun was ready. ...
— A Pirate of the Caribbees • Harry Collingwood
... local colour, the real pivot of the great official wheel of Indian administration, "the Collector," is drawn with the exactness due to his importance. Withal very lifelike and picturesque in many of ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... mind is the most unchangeable thing in the world. It has turned on identically the same pivot since the present ...
— What eight million women want • Rheta Childe Dorr
... These would have given to his body and to his mind just what both needed, for the trials and temptations of the day; and they would have saved him, at least for the day, perhaps for life; for the pivot upon which the whole of a man's future destiny turns is ...
— The Two Wives - or, Lost and Won • T. S. Arthur
... his first visit in the air, he withdrew into his cabin. But after that morning, he was every day visible to the crew; either standing in his pivot-hole, or seated upon an ivory stool he had; or heavily walking the deck. As the sky grew less gloomy; indeed, began to grow a little genial, he became still less and less a recluse; as if, when the ship had sailed from home, nothing ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons in London, a mast-pivot, 15 inches in length and weighing between seven and eight pounds, which had passed obliquely through the body of a sailor. The specimen is accompanied by a colored picture of the sufferer himself in two positions. The name of the ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... shoulder, and, with the thought, "That will put him out of business," pulled the trigger. The bullet, driving with momentum sufficient to perforate a man's body a mile distant, struck Tudor with such force as to pivot him, whirling him half around by the shock of its impact and knocking ...
— Adventure • Jack London
... six-shooter—let us hope not one of those pitiful toys of the East—upon each forefinger, each weapon so hanging balanced on the trigger-guard and the trigger itself that it shall be ready to turn about the finger as upon a pivot, and shall be ready for instant discharge, the thumb cocking the weapon as it turns; yet so that it shall none the less be discharged only when the muzzle of the weapon is pointed away from the operator's person and ...
— Heart's Desire • Emerson Hough
... and the wedges at the foot of the ribs were then removed, leaving the ribs hanging on the timber c. This timber was then jacked down to clear the lining and the ribs rotated horizontally on the point of suspension as a pivot until their ends swung in over the platform. The car was then moved ahead to where the centers were to be used again; the ribs were rotated back to their normal position across tunnel; the timber c was jacked up, and the wedges and railings ...
— Concrete Construction - Methods and Costs • Halbert P. Gillette
... much easier to mark out geometrically (e.g., 10, 48, 60, and 64 teeth). The lunar phase volvelle can be seen through the circular opening at the back of the astrolabe. It is quite certain that no automatic action is intended; when the central pivot is turned, by hand, probably by using the astrolabe rete as a "handle," the calendrical circles and the lunar phase are moved accordingly. Using one turn for a day would be too slow for useful re-setting of the instrument, ...
— On the Origin of Clockwork, Perpetual Motion Devices, and the Compass • Derek J. de Solla Price
... but carrying garments and towels. LOIS is a year older than JULIE and is nearly her double in face and voice, but in her clothes and expression are the marks of the conservative. Yes, you've guessed it. Mistaken identity is the old rusty pivot upon which the ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... from Neby Samwil to the east of Beit Iksa, through Lifta, to a point of about 1-1/2 miles west of Jerusalem, whence it was thrown back facing east. Thus, our main line had swung forward, circling on its pivot at Neby Samwil, with its extreme right flank refused. The refused right flank afforded protection against the fire coming from the city. The main directions of our advance, however, now menaced, not so much Jerusalem itself, as the main Nablus road a few miles to the north of the city. All the ...
— With the British Army in The Holy Land • Henry Osmond Lock
... youth," says the professor. "An electrical current passing through a coil of wire makes a magnet of a bar of iron lying within it, but not touching it. So a woman is turned into a love-magnet, by a tingling current of life running round her. I should like to see one of them balanced on a pivot properly adjusted, and watch if she did not turn so as to point north and south, as she would if the love-currents are like those of the ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... unnatural, and offensive. Its plot, really simple, moves heavily and perplexes attention. It is a piece that lacks pervasive concentration and enthralling point. It might be defined as Othello with a difference—the difference being in favour of Othello. Jealousy is the pivot of both: but in Othello jealousy is treated with profound and searching truth, with terrible intensity of feeling, and with irresistible momentum of action. A spectator will honour and pity Othello, and hate and execrate Iago—with ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... Saint Malo,—was nearly new, a stout, substantially built little craft of one hundred and thirty-four tons register, as tight as a bottle, well found, and armed with six long six-pounders in her batteries, with a long nine-pounder mounted on a pivot on her forecastle, and ...
— A Pirate of the Caribbees • Harry Collingwood
... 12-pounder; the whole culverin an 18-pounder, and the demi-culverin a 9-pounder; the saker a 6-pounder, and the mignon a 4-pounder. The smaller guns were called swivels, and were mounted on upright timbers, having a pivot on which the gun traversed. Guns at sea were formerly known by the names of beasts and birds of prey, till about the year 1685 they were designated by the weight of the shot ...
— How Britannia Came to Rule the Waves - Updated to 1900 • W.H.G. Kingston
... qui restaient essayrent d'implorer la piti des rvolts; mais tous, jusqu' l'interprte, qui ne leur avait jamais fait de mal, furent impitoyablement massacrs. Le lieutenant mourut avec gloire. Il s'tait retir l'arrire, auprs d'un de ces petits canons qui tournent sur un pivot, et que l'on charge de mitraille. De la main gauche, il dirigea la pice, et, de la droite, arm d'un sabre, il se dfendit si bien qu'il attira autour de lui une foule de noirs. Alors, pressant la dtente du canon, il fit au milieu de cette masse serre une large rue pave de morts et de mourants. ...
— Quatre contes de Prosper Mrime • F. C. L. Van Steenderen
... If the change were not effected when the plough was swung round, the furrow would be made opposite. Next he leans heavily on the handles, still standing on the same spot; this lifts the plough, so that it turns easily as if on a pivot. ...
— Nature Near London • Richard Jefferies
... bristol board [1] which can be tacked in the board. Then a pointed piece of wood ten inches long should be fastened with a nail in the center of the circle. At the ends of the pointer pins should be placed vertically so that they are in line with the pivot nail. This will form a sight for measuring the angles. The board is then mounted upon a pointed stick or tripod. You will need a hatchet and a half dozen sharpened sticks for markers and a boy for rod man. You are now ...
— Camping For Boys • H.W. Gibson
... kids swings like they was on a pivot, and piles in after him. There wasn't anything to do then but stop under the gate, seein' as the club-house was a hundred yards or so off. I snaked Woodie out, though, and made him help me range the youngsters under the middle of the roof; and when we'd got 'em packed in four deep, with ...
— Shorty McCabe • Sewell Ford
... proceeded, on the 12th of June, to Koenigsberg. At that place ended the inspection of his immense magazines, and of the second resting-point and pivot of his line of operations. Immense quantities of provisions, adequate to the immensity of the undertaking, were there accumulated. No detail had been neglected. The active and impassioned genius of Napoleon was then entirely directed towards that most important and difficult department of ...
— History of the Expedition to Russia - Undertaken by the Emperor Napoleon in the Year 1812 • Count Philip de Segur
... surrounded, each field is closed by what is called in the West an echalier. That is a trunk or stout branch of a tree, one end of which, being pierced, is fitted to an upright post which serves as a pivot on which it turns. One end of the echalier projects far enough beyond the pivot to hold a weight, and this singular rustic gate, the post of which rests in a hole made in the bank, is so easy to work that ...
— The Chouans • Honore de Balzac
... mountain walls and pours out of the gorge, it spreads and divides itself into numerous smaller streams which shoot out from the mouth of the ravine as from a centre, in different directions, like the ribs of a fan from the pivot, each carrying with it its quota of stones and gravel. The plain below the point of issue from the mountain is rapidly raised by newly-formed torrents, the elevation depending on the inclination of the bed and ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... estuary, he made more than one expedition to Kaipara and the more northern parts of the island, including places where no white man had hitherto been seen.[2] In these journeys the Mokoia pa, which stood on the site of the present village of Panmure, near Auckland, became a kind of pivot of his operations. Its chief, Hinaki, was particularly friendly, and in him Marsden hoped to find a second Ruatara, and in his village a basis for mission work further south. In fact, all the people of this district seemed more accessible to the ...
— A History of the English Church in New Zealand • Henry Thomas Purchas
... soldiers, servants, tools, spies, and even assassins. He who stands in the way of the men who assemble here perishes. He who would oppose them takes his life in his hands. You are, young man, as if I had led you to the center of the earth, and I had placed your hand upon the very pivot, the well-oiled axle, upon which, noiselessly, the whole great globe revolves, and from which the awful forces extend which hold it ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... waistcoat, white gloves three sizes too big for him, and a huge white cravat flaring out almost to the tips of his ears. Nothing was too good for Alec—so his mistress thought—and for the best of reasons. Not only was he the ideal servant of the old school, but he was the pivot on which the whole establishment moved. If a particular brand or vintage was needed, or a key was missing, or did a hair trunk, or a pair of spurs, or last week's Miscellany, go astray—or even were his mistress's spectacles mislaid—Alec ...
— Kennedy Square • F. Hopkinson Smith
... discoursing, brought in abruptly, and abandoned with equal suddenness, and an utter want of connexion with any association of ideas which it could be thought might lead to the subject at the time; as if the machinery of thought were dislocated, so that one part of it got off its pivot, and protruded into the regular workings; or as if a note had got into a piece of music which had no business there. This was the only symptom of aberration of mind we observed about Clare; though, being strangers to him, there might be ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin
... Circle, and the Azimuth of its Collimator, Mr Main has brought together the results of several years, and the following law appears to hold. There is a well-marked annual periodical change in the position of the Transit Circle, the southerly movement of the eastern pivot having its minimum value in September, and its maximum in March, the extreme range being about 14 seconds; and there is a similar change, but of smaller amount, in the position of the Collimator. I cannot conjecture any cause for these changes, except in the motion of the ground. There is ...
— Autobiography of Sir George Biddell Airy • George Biddell Airy
... Tonty and the rovings of Hennepin, we have lost sight of La Salle, the pivot of the enterprise. Returning from the desolation and horror in the valley of the Illinois, he had spent the winter at Fort Miami, on the St. Joseph, by the borders of Lake Michigan. Here he might have brooded on the redoubled ruin that had befallen him: the ...
— France and England in North America, a Series of Historical Narratives, Part Third • Francis Parkman
... It is only carrying that which is daily necessary into perfection. When a bullock is checked and caught by the lazo, it will sometimes gallop round and round in a circle, and the horse being alarmed at the great strain, if not well broken, will not readily turn like the pivot of a wheel. In consequence many men have been killed; for if the lazo once takes a twist round a man's body, it will instantly, from the power of the two opposed animals, almost cut him in twain. On the same ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... be made to last even for ages. Those who word them seem to think that powers and dynasties will never pass away. But they do pass away, and the balance of power will not keep itself fixed forever on the same pivot. The time may come— that it may not come soon we will all desire—but the time may come when the name and prestige of what we call British North America will be as serviceable to Great Britain as those of Great Britain are now serviceable ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope
... misrepresentations we may have heard, but to trust her, the person who had lived with him long, and who knew him best and last. After breakfast she took us to her house, where Voltaire had lived, and where we saw his chair and his writing desk turning on a pivot on the arm of the chair: his statue smiling, keen-eyed, and emaciated, said to be a perfect resemblance. In one of the hands hung the brown and withered crown of bays, placed on his head when he appeared the last time at the Theatre Francais. Madame de Villette showed us some of his letters—one ...
— The Life And Letters Of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... empire over the loungers seemed uncontrolled and absolute, and all things were engaged in the tourbillon, of which she formed the pivot and centre. Even the hunters, and shooters, and hard drinkers, were sometimes fain reluctantly to follow in her train, sulking, and quizzing, and flouting at her solemn festivals, besides encouraging the younger nymphs to giggle when they should have looked ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... this passage in the Christian Scriptures: 'Those who obey not God, and believe not the Gospel of his Son, shall be punished with everlasting destruction.' This is the pivot upon which all religions turn:—they all assume that it is in our power to believe or not to believe; whereas the mind can only believe that which it thinks true. A human being can only be supposed accountable ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... dock is impossible. Accordingly turntable sheds have been adopted. The shed is mounted upon a double turn-table, there being two circular tracks the one near the centre of the shed and the other towards its extremities. The shed is mounted upon a centre pivot and wheels engaged with these inner and outer tracks. In this manner the shed may be swung round to the most favourable point of the compass ...
— Aeroplanes and Dirigibles of War • Frederick A. Talbot
... childhood—and a kind of strange, happy terror. I struggle to wonder my way out. Thousands of railways—after this—bind Johnstown to me; miles of high, narrow, steel-built streets—the whole world lifting itself mightily up, rolling itself along, turning itself over on a great steel pivot, down in Pennsylvania—for its days and nights. I am whirled away from it as from a vision. I am as one who has seen men lifting their souls up in a great flame and laying down floors on a star. I have stood and watched, in the melting-down ...
— The Voice of the Machines - An Introduction to the Twentieth Century • Gerald Stanley Lee
... the whole east began gradually to spring into flame. The sky blazed as ruddily as if a great fire were just beyond the horizon and racing to leap it and sweep across upon the farm. A broad fan of light, roseate at its pivot and radiating in shafts of yellow and red, was rising and paling the stars with its shining edge. Wider and wider it grew, until from north to south, and almost as far up as the zenith, were thrust its shining sticks. Then out of the cold mist floating over the distant ...
— The Biography of a Prairie Girl • Eleanor Gates
... the Asiatic nations still wear the skin of the Kingfisher about their persons, as a protection against both moral and physical evils; the feathers are used as love-charms; and it is believed, that, if the body of the Kingfisher be evenly fixed upon a pivot, it will turn its head to the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... amazement common to successive generations of brothers when confronted with the astounding fact that the apparently quite ordinary young woman whom they have hitherto regarded merely as a sisterly adjunct to life has suddenly become the pivot upon which some other man's entire happiness ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... and we'd go on and through this and then come to another handsome village with country houses, and the street would end in another busy town; and so on until I began to think there was no real country, at least, in the direction we was going. It is my opinion that if London was put on a pivot and spun round in the State of Texas until it all flew apart, it would spread all over the State and settle up the ...
— Pomona's Travels - A Series of Letters to the Mistress of Rudder Grange from her Former - Handmaiden • Frank R. Stockton
... probably the weakest of human passions; but truth when attained ultimately gives the fulcrum for a reconstruction of the world. When a solid core of ascertained and verifiable truth has once been formed and applied to practical results it becomes the fixed pivot upon which all beliefs must ultimately turn. The influence, however, is often obscure and still indirect. The more cultivated recognise the necessity of bringing their whole doctrine into conformity with the definitely organised and established system; and, at ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... corvette, and sling their cots alongside of Mr Bang, so long as the courses—of the two vessels lay together. This being carried into execution, we set about our arrangements. Our precious blockheads at the dockyard had fitted a thirty—two pound carronade on the pivot, and stuck two long sixes, one on each side of the little vessel. I hate carronades. I had, before now, seen thirty—two pound shot thrown by them jump off a ship's side with a rebound like a football, when ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... other element in the working machine of government, the Cabinet, or policy-directing body, which is the very pivot of our whole system. Two main functions fall to the Cabinet. In the first place, it has to ensure an effective co-ordination between the various departments of government; in the second place, it is responsible for the initiation and guidance of national policy in every ...
— Essays in Liberalism - Being the Lectures and Papers Which Were Delivered at the - Liberal Summer School at Oxford, 1922 • Various |
