"Trowel" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... on with a trowel] I suppose the meaning is, that there is too heavy a mass of big words laid ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... circumstances. As there was an abundant supply of food and drink, the workmen never left their work; and amidst their continuous laughter the four walls were run up with incredible quickness, until one day Krespel cried, "Stop!" Then the workmen, laying down trowel and hammer, came down from the scaffoldings and gathered round Krespel in a circle, whilst every laughing face was asking, "Well, and what now?" "Make way!" cried Krespel; and then running to one end of the garden, he strode slowly towards the square of brick-work. ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... and has watched with keen interest and satisfaction your success in overcoming the many difficulties that lay in your way. Brooklyn herself has awakened from her sleep of almost ten years, and the sound of the hammer and the saw and the ring of the trowel are heard on every hand. Owing to the enterprise, energy and self-sacrificing efforts of many of the men who are with us to-day, she is astonishing the country by the wonderful increase in population. Brooklyn can no longer be regarded ...
— New York at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis 1904 - Report of the New York State Commission • DeLancey M. Ellis
... who worshipped flowers, was perhaps the most ineffective gardener in England. With a trowel and the best intentions he would do more damage in twenty minutes than Miss Bracy could repair in a week. She had made a paradise in spite of him, and he contented himself with assuring her that the next tenant would dig it up and find ...
— The White Wolf and Other Fireside Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... fail to grasp the architect's grave problem? The Osmia is measuring; and her measure is her body. Has she quite done, this time? Oh dear no! Ten times, twenty times, at every moment, for the least particle of mortar which she lays, she repeats her mensuration, never being quite certain that her trowel is going just ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre
... At trowel, a knife, fork, and spoon, of artistically painted wood, and a pair of oars, all claim a passing ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... so ethically. Mr. WILDE has preferred the sensuous and hyperdecorative manner of "Mademoiselle DE MAUPIN," and without GAUTIER'S power, has spoilt a promising conception by clumsy unideal treatment. His "decoration" (upon which he plumes himself) is indeed "laid on with a trowel." The luxuriously elaborate details of his "artistic hedonism" are too suggestive of South Kensington Museum and aesthetic Encyclopaedias. A truer art would have avoided both the glittering conceits, which bedeck the body of the story, and the unsavoury suggestiveness which ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, July 19, 1890 • Various
... you don't," said Mark merrily, snatching away his wrist. "I am not going to have my hand used as a trowel to save yours, you lazy beggar. Here, Dean, get hold of Pig and do as I do. Let's give ...
— Dead Man's Land - Being the Voyage to Zimbambangwe of certain and uncertain • George Manville Fenn
... search and to indicate the existence, somewhere in the immediate vicinity, of a mine of untold wealth. Several days were spent in unprofitable search: then more favorable indications led the shepherds to dispose of their flocks and set out in good earnest to dig for gold. A couple of spades, a trowel and a calabash were their only tools, but our adventurer was a knowing man, and "knowledge is power." His practiced eye knew just where the precious metals would be most likely to exist if at all in that locality—that in the old beds of rivers now dried up gold would more naturally ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... there any other greater, more satisfying, more majestic thought of life than this—the scaffolding by which souls are built up into the temple of God? And to care whether a thing is painful or pleasant is as absurd as to care whether the bricklayer's trowel is knocking the sharp corner off a brick, or plastering mortar on the one below it before he lays it carefully on its course. Is the building getting on? That is the one question that is ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... I hear one point, and know a second.' 3. The Master said, 'You are not equal to him. I grant you, you are not equal to him.' CHAP. IX. 1. Tsai Yu being asleep during the daytime, the Master said, 'Rotten wood cannot be carved; a wall of dirty earth will not receive the trowel. This Yu!— what is the use of my reproving him?' 2. The Master said, 'At first, my way with men was to hear their words, and give them credit for their conduct. Now my way is to hear their words, and look at their conduct. It is from Yu ...
— The Chinese Classics—Volume 1: Confucian Analects • James Legge
... trowel cuts them quite in half, It is a bitter cup; They give a sour sardonic laugh And sew the pieces up; They sew them up and wind away With seeming unconcern, But oh, be careful! one fine day I hear ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, December 1, 1920 • Various
... afraid of the responsibility of treasure- trove, but he was overruled by a chorus of eager voices, and dispossessed of the trowel, which he had brought to dig up some down- gentians for the garden. While Norman set to work as pioneer, some skipped about in wild ecstasy, and Ethel knelt down to ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... piece of slate; I can scrape holes with that,' said Allan. 'Take this old trowel, Marjorie; it hasn't a handle, but I don't ...
— The Adventure League • Hilda T. Skae
... that fire clay is not a cement and that it has little or no holding power. Its action is that of a filler rather than a binder and no fire-clay wash should be used which has a consistency sufficient to permit the use of a trowel. ...
— Steam, Its Generation and Use • Babcock & Wilcox Co.
... curious fact in connection with the tails of these two animals. Both are almost naked of hair, and covered with "scales," and both are flat. The tail of the beaver, and the uses it makes of this appendage, are things known to every one. Every one has read of its trowel-shape and use, its great breadth, thickness, and weight, and its resemblance to a cricket-bat. The tail of the muskrat is also naked, covered with scales, and compressed or flattened; but instead of being horizontally so, as with the beaver, it is the ...
— The Hunters' Feast - Conversations Around the Camp Fire • Mayne Reid
... two, three, and here she did come! And in a trice Polly had the cover up, and out flew the little green tin botany case; and within it being an iron spoon and little trowel, off flew Polly on happy feet to unearth the treasures that were to beautify Phronsie's little garden; a bunch of girls ...
— Five Little Peppers at School • Margaret Sidney
... up a plant and examine the root? I am afraid we cannot, unless you care to go back to the house for a fork or a trowel. The Dandelion has a very long strong root—tap-root—which goes deep into the ground; and there is no tall main stem of which we can take hold—the leaves and flower stalks only break off ...
— Wildflowers of the Farm • Arthur Owens Cooke
... sprung up between Brother John and Komba about the former's butterfly net, which Komba suspected of being a new kind of gun or at least a magical instrument of a dangerous sort, attracted my notice. After this dispute, another arose over a common garden trowel that Stephen had thought fit to bring with him. Komba asked what it was for. Stephen replied through Brother John that it ...
— Allan and the Holy Flower • H. Rider Haggard
... in my friend's library. It is a princely copy of Ben Jonson, the Illustrious. Southey lent it, when he possessed the magnifico, to Coleridge, who has begemmed it all over with his fine pencillings. As Ben once handled the trowel, and did other honorable work as a bricklayer, Coleridge discourses with much golden gossip about the craft to which the great dramatist once belonged. The editor of this magazine would hardly thank me, if I filled ten of his pages with extracts from the rambling dissertations in S.T.C.'s handwriting ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... of the prohibited Spanish daggers or knives which a traveller may, occasionally get hold of and smuggle out of the country. The blade was broad, trowel-like, but the point drawn out several inches, so as ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... the West, And the slant yellow beam down the wood aisle doth seem Like a lane into heaven that leads from a dream,— Aye, now, when my soul all day hath drunken the soul of the oak, And my heart is at ease from men, and the wearisome sound of the stroke Of the scythe of time and the trowel of trade is low, And belief overmasters doubt, and I know that I know, And my spirit is grown to a lordly great compass within, That the length and the breadth and the sweep of the marshes of Glynn Will ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... instinct or sagacity, is carried into execution by the male. As soon as his mate has squatted upon her eggs, he goes to work at the masonic art; and using his great horned mandibles, first as a hod, and afterwards as a trowel, he walls up the entrance to the nest—leaving an aperture just large enough to be filled up by the beak of the female. The material employed by him for this purpose is a kind of agglutinated mud, which he procures from the neighbouring watercourse or quagmire, and somewhat similar to that used ...
— The Cliff Climbers - A Sequel to "The Plant Hunters" • Captain Mayne Reid
... roof had to be covered before the wet weather set in, and nobody was near who could do it better. Indeed, on one or two occasions in the depth of winter, when frost peremptorily forbids all use of the trowel, making foundations to settle, stones to fly, and mortar to crumble, he had taken to felling and sawing trees. Moreover, he had practised gardening in his own plot for so many years that, on an emergency, he might have made a living ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... fastidious Van Dyck who came long afterward; he was hail-fellow-well-met among his associates, though often given over to dreaminess. He belonged to a jolly club named the "Kettle Club," literally, the Company of the Kettle; and to another called "The Trowel," both suggesting an all around good time and much good fellowship The members of these clubs were expected to contribute to their wonderful suppers, and Andrea on one occasion made a great temple, in imitation of the Baptistry, of jelly with ...
— Pictures Every Child Should Know • Dolores Bacon
... the rock or the plaster. It was the sign of victory, and he who lay within had conquered. The great rudeness in the drawing of the palm, often as if, while the mortar was still wet, the mason had made the lines upon it with his trowel, is a striking indication of the state of feeling at the time when the grave was made. There was no pomp or parade; possibly the burial of him or of her who had died for the faith was in secret; those who carried the corpse of their beloved to the tomb were, perhaps, in this very act, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... position he rose to a situation in the studio of Bubb, the sculptor; and through the counsel of Eugenius Roche, the former editor of the "Literary Recreations," and then the conductor of The Day newspaper, he was induced to lay aside the trowel and undertake the duties of reporter to that journal. The Day soon falling into the hands of other proprietors, Cunningham felt his situation uncomfortable, and returned to his original vocation, attaching ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... work by night as well as by day. Close to the furnace tower we see a strange sight, and one which is well worthy of our notice. This part of the wall deserves our earnest attention, for here are actually young ladies engaged in the work, standing, trowel in hand, toiling away side by side with the other workmen. Who are these girls? They are the daughters of Shallum, the ruler of the half part of Jerusalem (ver. 12) (or rather of the country round Jerusalem). Shallum was evidently a wealthy and influential ...
— The King's Cup-Bearer • Amy Catherine Walton
... from his master. Those who desired to set some mark on the resting-place of a relative, to distinguish it from those around, either had the name engraved upon the slab, or rudely scratched with the sharp end of a trowel in the mortar by which the slab was secured, or else a bit of ornamented glass or a ring or coin was impressed in the mortar while ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... nothing to complain of in the matter of supplies," I said. They had been having a kind of high tea on tables laid across trestles on the lawn, and one of them, using his knife as a bricklayer uses his trowel, was luxuriously spreading a layer of apple and plum jam upon a stratum of hard-boiled egg, which reposed on a bed-rock of bread and butter, the whole representing a most interesting geological formation and producing ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan
... that my only course was to bury the poor animal where he fell, and say nothing about it. With some vague idea of precaution, I first took off the silver collar he wore, and then hastily interred him with a garden-trowel, and succeeded in removing all traces ...
— Stories By English Authors: London • Various
... dahlia-cultivation was the Colonel's most absorbing hobby. The old gentleman's anger had already begun to cool, under the influence of his enemy's persistent politeness, and this liberal application of the flattery-trowel at once set up ...
— The Harmsworth Magazine, v. 1, 1898-1899, No. 2 • Various
... space, to make the most of it in a pecuniary point of view, 346 was encroached upon by three uncurtained beds, of most impoverished appearance,—while, exhibiting the ravages of time in divers fractures, the dingy walls and ceiling, retouched by the trowel in many places with a lighter shade of repairing material, bore no unapt resemblance to the Pye-bald Horse in Chiswell-street! Calculating on its utility and probable future use, the builder of the mansion had given to this room the appendage of a chimney, but evidently it had for many years ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... the rest of it?" asked Ethel Brown, on her knees taking up some of the plants with her trowel and placing them in her basket so carefully that there was plenty of earth surrounding each one to serve as a nest when it should be put ...
— Ethel Morton's Enterprise • Mabell S.C. Smith
... is to wear himself out and to settle down into a sort of quiet despair," thought Sarah as she looked after him. Then lifting her trowel, she returned with a sigh to the sowing of portulaca seeds ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... Breton); the "moss-bag" of the eastern Tinne, the use of which has now extended to the employes of the Hudson's Bay Company; the "trough-cradle" of the Bilqula; the Chinook cradle, with its apparatus for head-flattening; the trowel-shaped cradle of the Oregon coast; the wicker-cradle of the Hupas; the Klamath cradle of wicker and rushes; the Pomo cradle of willow rods and wicker-work, with rounded portion for the child to sit in; the Mohave cradle, ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... an introduction to professor Joly or learn up something about his family. That would do to: man always feels complimented. Flattery where least expected. Nobleman proud to be descended from some king's mistress. His foremother. Lay it on with a trowel. Cap in hand goes through the land. Not go in and blurt out what you know you're not to: what's parallax? ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... buy a cheap trowel. They may be had for fifteen or twenty cents but a fifty-cent one will outlast a dozen of these and not break just when you need ...
— Gardening Indoors and Under Glass • F. F. Rockwell
... Fish she was to catch it! And slit open its stomach! And take out all its Directions! And follow 'em! And if it was a Bright Red Celluloid Fish she was to catch it! And take out all its Directions and follow them!—In either case her card said she would need rubbers and a trowel.—It sounded like Buried Treasure to me! Or else Iris Roots! Our Aunt Esta is very much ...
— Fairy Prince and Other Stories • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... the talent of a beaver—which can build houses, and uses its tail for a trowel—to the genius of a prophet and poet. Reason is all but extinct in this age; it can never be ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... towards 1866, at the moment of the great transformations of Paris, when whole blocks were leveled to the ground, and rose again so rapidly, that one might well wonder whether the masons, instead of a trowel, did not make ...
— Other People's Money • Emile Gaboriau
... lips. "Men are not made so easily. I think I know the trowel and the mortar that built that wall! ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... afternoon Uncle William mounted the roof again. His face, under its vast calm, wore a look of resolve. He looked thoughtfully down the chimney hole. Then he sat down on the platform and took up his trowel. He balanced it on his palm and looked at the pile of bricks. His gaze wandered to the sky. It swept the bay and came back across the moors. A look of soft happiness filled it; the thin edges of resolve melted before it. "Best kind of weather," ...
— Uncle William - The Man Who Was Shif'less • Jennette Lee
... on different errands, opened the chest, and received his friend with open arms. Grotius declared, that while he was in the chest, he had felt much anxiety, but had suffered no other inconvenience. Having dressed himself as a mason, with a rule and trowel, he went, through the back door of Bazelaer's house, accompanied by his maid, along the market-place, to a boat engaged for the purpose. It conveyed them to Vervie in Brabant: there, he was safe. His maid then left him, and, returning ...
— The Life of Hugo Grotius • Charles Butler
... the slaves return from handling their trowel-shaped iron hoes, and the "gentleman" takes a siesta proportioned to his drink. The poorer classes sit at home weaving, spinning, or threading beads, whilst the wives attend to household work, prepare the meals, buy and sell, dig and delve. Europeans often pity the sex thus "doomed to ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... fishy fin where should be paw, And beaver-trowel tail, And snout of beast equip'd with teeth Where gills ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... great discoverer in the fore-ground on bended knees with a trowel in his hand, laying the corner-stone. On the right, sits an ideal female figure, representing Mother Church, fostering a little Indian child, and pointing with uplifted hand to the cross, the emblem of man's salvation. Crouching Indians are at her feet, listening with astonishment ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... older than Rome, the builder a little anterior to what he built. Varro and the Capitoline Tables and Mr. Hook will all agree to that postulate. And whatever some of them may say as to the youth of Romulus, when he first began to wield the trowel, at least, I suppose, he was come to years of discretion; and, if we say twenty-three or twenty-four, which I am as much entitled to say as they to deny it, then we are all right. 'All right behind,' as the mail guards say, 'drive on.' And so I feel entitled to lay my hand ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... alone remains unaltered. Mica weathers to detached flakes which have lost their elasticity. The feldspar crystals have lost their luster and hardness, and even have decayed to clay. Where long- weathered granite forms the country rock, it often may be cut with spade or trowel for several feet from the surface, so rotten is the feldspar, and here the rock is seen to break down to a clayey soil containing grains of quartz and flakes ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton
... on a wooden trowel, consists of distinct grains of soap and a liquid portion, which will easily separate, sufficient salt or brine has been added; the boiling is stopped and the spent lye allowed to settle out, whilst the soap remains on the surface as a more or ...
— The Handbook of Soap Manufacture • W. H. Simmons
... reach its watery cradle, and the plastic matter undergoes changes so rapid and yet so steady and purposelike in their succession, that one can only compare them to those operated by a skilled modeller upon a formless lump of clay. As with an invisible trowel, the mass is divided and subdivided into smaller and smaller portions, until it is reduced to an aggregation of granules not too large to build withal the finest fabrics of the nascent organism. And, then, it is as ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... canvas fatigue-dress, wearing soft, round, visorless caps, were removing the debris of the fatal barricade; soldiers with shovel and hoe filled in the trenches and raked the long, winding street clean of all litter; soldiers with trowel and mortar were perched on shot-torn houses, mending chimneys and slated roofs so that their officers might enjoy immunity from rain and ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... Shakespeare. Do that which is assigned to you, and you cannot hope too much or dare too much. There is at this moment for you an utterance brave and grand as that of the colossal chisel of Phidias,[255] or trowel of the Egyptians,[256] or the pen of Moses,[257] or Dante,[258] but different from all these. Not possible will the soul all rich, all eloquent, with thousand-cloven tongue, deign to repeat itself; but if you can hear what these patriarchs say, ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... furnished it, I had dug a vault yesterday. It was modelled upon the description given in The Fairchild Family of one belonging to a nobleman's estate. My self-education was essentially Squeersian. When I read a thing, I forthwith went and did it. The gardener had lent me a trowel, and I had found a thin, flat stone that served as a cover. Digging was easy work in the top-dressing of sand and the ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland
... Afterwards he had left Silliston for a lumber camp on a remote river in northern Maine, abruptly to reappear, on a mild afternoon late in April, in Augusta Maturin's garden. The crocuses and tulips were in bloom, and his friend, in a gardening apron, was on her knees, trowel in hand, assisting a hired man to set ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... Mark out the rows, and if fertilizer is to be used, mix it thoroughly with the soil before beginning transplanting. Then prepare the plants carefully. Unless they are very small, cut back the largest leaves about one-half with an old pair of scissors. With a small trowel or an old knife, cut them out of the frame or flat in which they are growing, keeping as much soil as possible with each. (If not in flats, cut them out as you use them in the garden.) If they are in pots, knock them out carefully and pack into flat for convenience in handling. Paper pots, which ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various
... both. His natural disposition and endowments are to be sedulously watched, and guided or wholly repressed as the case may demand. The budding artist is supplied with pencil, the nascent musician with trumpet or tuning-fork, the florist with tiny hoe and trowel, and so on. The boy is never loosed, physically or metaphysically, quite out of leading-strings. They are made, however, so elastic as scarce to be felt, and yet so strong as never to break. Moral suasion, perseveringly ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various
... extinguish the divine fire of genius in the youthful Murgatroyd. Exhausted and hungry as he often was at the end of the day's work, he devoted his leisure to the study of bricks and mortar, and out of his scanty pocket-money he bought for himself first a trowel ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, June 9, 1920 • Various
... on your account. He is going to lay a foundation-stone at Corte. I should fancy the ceremony will be very imposing, and I am very sorry not to see it. A gentleman in an embroidered coat and silk stockings and a white scarf, wielding a trowel—and a speech! And at the end of the performance manifold and reiterated shouts of 'God save the King.' I say again, sir, it will make you very vain to think I have written you four whole pages, and on that account I give ...
— Columba • Prosper Merimee
... the race of husbands, and how smoothly it makes the marital wheels go round. I don't mean false, blatant, absurd flattery, such as men often bestow on us when desirous to please, not realising that compliments laid on with a trowel are an insult to one's intelligence. Nothing of that kind, of course, but delicate, subtle, loving flattery. An attitude of gentle admiration toward your Perseus, subdued a little possibly for public use, but none the less markedly appreciative, will not only ...
— Modern marriage and how to bear it • Maud Churton Braby
... transplant, when a terrible catastrophe occurred—a little neighbor girl called on me, and, finding me gone, was right peeved. She entertained herself by uprooting my posies. With a complete thoroughness she mixed plants and dirt together, stirring water into the mixture with my trowel. If her grown-up cake-making is done as conscientiously as was that job, she'll be a wonderful pastry cook! I discovered the mischief while it was still fresh, and out of the wreckage salvaged a few brave seedlings. They pouted awhile ...
— I Married a Ranger • Dama Margaret Smith
... wasn't a trick in brick or stone That this young man hadn't seen or known; Nor there wasn't a tool from trowel to maul But this young man could use 'em all! Then up and spoke the plumbyers bold, Which was laying the pipes for the hot and cold: 'Since you with us have made so free, Will you kindly say what your name ...
— Rewards and Fairies • Rudyard Kipling
... monotonously from time to time, which the sportsman supposed to be a bird. It came from behind the great acclivities that ran opposite his place by the pools. Brendon suddenly perceived that it was no natural noise but arose from some human activity. It was, in fact, the musical note of a mason's trowel, and when presently it ceased, he was annoyed to hear heavy footsteps in ...
— The Red Redmaynes • Eden Phillpotts
... Perhaps—who knows?—he might be the stupidest mortal that ever dared to live, and then—yet not so stupid as the walls, and trees, and shrubs, while he can own a tongue to answer back. Ah! wretched slug, would you devour my tender opening leaves? Ugh! I cannot touch the slimy thing. Where has my trowel gone? I wish my ears had never heard his name,—Luttrell; a pretty name, too; but we all know how little is in that. I feel absurdly disappointed; and why? Because it is decreed that a man I never have known I never shall know. I doubt my brain is softening. But why has my tent been ...
— Molly Bawn • Margaret Wolfe Hamilton
... worst jobs that he had to do was when a new stock of white lead came in. This stuff came in wooden barrels containing two hundredweight, and he used to have to dig it out of these barrels with a trowel, and put it into a metal tank, where it was kept covered with water, and the empty barrels were ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... they were. But there is more spleen than sense in all this, I know—and back I go to the Encyclopaedia.' And back he went—that is the great point—with courage unabated and indomitable, labouring with sword in one hand and trowel in the other, until he had set the last ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 5: On Pattison's Memoirs • John Morley
... He was the kindest gardener that ever lived, I think, and I have seen a good many. He liked nothing better than to have all the five mice trotting at his heels while he went about his work. They might hide his shears, and run off with his trowel, and take his rake and hoe for hobbyhorses, but Tomty was never out of patience ...
— Five Mice in a Mouse-trap - by the Man in the Moon. • Laura E. Richards
... thought the coach would be ready, I walked on along the road to stretch by legs. I walked on and on until I came, almost unaware, to the site of the house that was never built. The tent was still there, in fact, it was a permanent camp, and I was rather surprised to see the man working with a trowel on a corner of the unfinished foundations of the house. At first I thought he was going to build a stone hut in the corner, but when I got close to him I saw that he was working carefully on the original plan of the building: he was building the unfinished parts of the foundation walls up to the ...
— Children of the Bush • Henry Lawson
... water through a rose nozzle. A bed of concrete 6 ins. thick was first laid, and on this a layer of rubble stones, no two stones being nearer together than 3 ins., nor nearer the forms than 3 ins. The stones were rammed and probed around with a trowel to leave no spaces. Over each layer of rubble, concrete was spread to a depth of 6 ins. The forms or molds for piers for a viaduct were simply large open boxes, the four sides of which could be taken apart. The depth of the boxes was uniform, and they ...
— Concrete Construction - Methods and Costs • Halbert P. Gillette
... His father, intending his fortune to build, In his youth would have taught him the trowel to wield. But the mortar of discipline never would stick, For his skull was secured by a facing of brick; And with all his endeavours of patience and pain, The skill of his sire ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett
... is of so much importance in this affair as variety. I would sometimes put on the turban of a Turk, and sometimes the half breeches of a Highlander. I would sometimes wear the lawn sleeves of a bishop, and sometimes the tye-wig of a barrister. A leathern apron and a trowel might upon occasion be of sovereign efficacy. The long beard and neglected dress of a Shylock should be admitted into the list. I would also occasionally lay aside the small clothes, and assume the ...
— Four Early Pamphlets • William Godwin
... arrived for each one to place his trowelful of mortar on the face of the large stone lying in the trench, in order that the other might be fitted and fastened to it. Ibarra handed the alcalde a mason's trowel, on the wide silver Made of which was engraved the date. But the alcalde first gave a harangue ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... eye-brows were an ebon black, as were his eyes; his features were hard and massive; his nose, which was somewhat hooked, but too much pointed, seemed as if, while in a plastic state, it had been sloped by a trowel towards one side of his face, a circumstance which, while taken in connection with his black whiskers that ran to a point near his mouth, and piercing eyes, that were too deeply and narrowly set, gave him, aided by his heavy eyebrows, an expression at once of great cruelty ...
— The Black Prophet: A Tale Of Irish Famine • William Carleton
... the dwarf mounted the high horse, and rode away complacent with the old hand laying the court butter on his back with a trowel. ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... till the rats ate them. I remembered the tale of the nun being walled up in a vault of her convent, brick by brick, till the last brick shut off the last glimmer of the bricklayer's lantern, till the last layer of mortar made for her the last sound she would hear, the patting clink of the trowel on the brick, before it was all horrible dark silence for ever. I wondered how many people had been silenced in that way. I wondered how long I should live, if that was ...
— Martin Hyde, The Duke's Messenger • John Masefield
... The garrison were strengthening their position by plastering and renewed renovation, and I doubt that by this time the original rafters are no longer to be seen. A plasterer's boy, with a fine sense of humor, stood clapping his trowel on his board, inside the house, while we debated retreat, and derisively invited us to enter: "Suoni pure, O signore! Questa e la famosa casa del gran pittore, l'immortale Tiziano,—suoni, signore!" (Ring, by all means, sir. This is the famous house of the great painter, the immortal ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... swore against drink of all sorts entirely. And, as I had occasionally served the masons, when I lived a labouring man in the county of Dublin, and knew something of that business, why, whatever I knew I made the most of, and a trowel felt no ways strange to me; so I went to work, and had higher wages at first than I deserved. The same with the two boys: one was as much of a blacksmith as would shoe a horse; and t'other a bit of a carpenter; and the one got plenty of work ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... preno. trickle : guteti. trifle : bagatelo, trivialajxo. tripe : tripo. triumph : triumf'i, -o. troop : trupo, bando. tropic : tropiko. trot : troti. trough : trogo. trousers : pantalono. trout : truto. trowel : trulo. tramp : (cards), atuto. trumpet : trumpeto. trunk : (animal) rostro; (tree) trunko; (box) kofro; (body) torso. trust : fidi. try : provi, peni. Tsar : Caro. tuber : tubero. tuft : tufo. tumbler : glaso. tumult : tumulto. tune : ario, melodio; ...
— The Esperanto Teacher - A Simple Course for Non-Grammarians • Helen Fryer
... be a hole dug for it, in the first place; you must take a trowel and make a hole for it—But your dress will be the waur!" he exclaimed, glancing at his little mistress's ...
— Melbourne House, Volume 2 • Susan Warner
... of cannon, the loud strains of martial music, and the cheers of her followers, the empress laid the first stone of the city of Caterinoslaw, and after her, the emperor took up the mortar and trowel, and laid the second one. He performed his part of the drama with becoming solemnity; but, about an hour later, as he was taking his customary afternoon walk with the French ambassador, M. de Sigur, ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... places that can still be seen. He passed his boyhood near Charing Cross—having been born in Hartshorn Lane, now Northumberland Street; he attended the parish school of St. Martin's-in-the-Fields; and persons who roam about Lincoln's Inn will call to mind that he helped to build it—a trowel in one hand and a volume of Horace in the other. His residence, in his day of fame, was outside the Temple Bar, but all that neighborhood ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume I. - Great Britain and Ireland • Various
... the spring he now dug a hole and worked water and clay together into mortar, then with a trowel cut out of a shingle, and mortar carried in an old bucket, he built a wall within the stakes, using sticks laid along the outside and stones set in mud till the front was closed up, except a small hole for a window and a large hole ...
— Two Little Savages • Ernest Thompson Seton
... mason uttered a shocking oath, in connection with the name of Mrs. Curtis, and started forward with his trowel as if he were ...
— Berties Home - or, the Way to be Happy • Madeline Leslie
... impressed with the value of these archaeological discoveries, detailed a man to superintend the exhumation, who proceeded to remove the earth from the mould, which he reached through a layer of charcoal, and then with a trowel excavated beneath it. The clay was not thoroughly baked, and no impression of the corpse was left, except of the forehead and that portion of the limbs between the ankles and the knees, and even these portions of the mould crumbled. The body had been placed east and ...
— An introduction to the mortuary customs of the North American Indians • H. C. Yarrow
... Army; in fact, of being almost everything but a tiler or plasterer. But this shrewd woman had evidently come to the conclusion that, if I did not work upon the housetops, I must perforce be an artist of the trowel. I assured her that I was as incapable of fixing a tile as of making ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... skeleton of a twenty-story office building in process of construction stood out black and bizarre. It flung up its beams and girders like stern and yet airy music, orderly, miraculously strong, and delicately powerful. From the lower stories, where masons made their music of trowel and hammer, to the top, where steam-riveters rapped out their chorus like giant locusts in a summer field, the great building lived and breathed as if all those human energies that went to its making flowed ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... the hub of pipe in place is filled with cement and the straight end of the next piece of pipe is laid in place, then more cement is placed into the hub until the space between the hub and the pipe is filled. In a trench, a trowel is rather unhandy to work with, while the hands can be used to better advantage. The cement can be forced into place with the hands and then surfaced with a trowel. The rest of the operation is to swab out the inside joint to remove any cement that perchance ...
— Elements of Plumbing • Samuel Dibble
... empire there are two processes—the building up, and the tearing down. The plow is no less essential than the trowel. The period after Boris had been for Russia the period of the wholesome plow. The harvest was far off. But the name Romanoff was going to stand for another Russia, not like the old Russia of Kief, nor yet the new Russia of Moscow; but another and a Europeanized ...
— A Short History of Russia • Mary Platt Parmele
... young girl, an elderly woman with a trowel and watering-pot, and a workman in overalls, who carried a spade and had perhaps been interrupted in digging a grave. The platform around the pump hardly gave standing room for a fourth. Putnam accordingly took his seat on a tool-chest near one of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... can save money by purchasing poor tools. It is quite impossible, because always one has either to buy new and better ones, or mend and remend the poor ones. The lad found out that a good trowel costs at least 50 cents although a smaller one called a transplanting trowel may be had for 15 cents; cast steel rake, 50 cents (10 teeth), 75 cents (14 teeth); hoe, 50 cents; Dutch hoe, four inches, 40 cents; spading fork, $1.25, ...
— The Library of Work and Play: Gardening and Farming. • Ellen Eddy Shaw
... criminal passion, but in nine cases out of ten these troubadours sang for their bread and butter. They lauded the seigneurs to the skies for their gestes of valour, and their ladies for their transcendent beauty; they laid on their colours with a trowel, and were paid for so doing. That some of them burnt their fingers in playing with fire one cannot doubt, but I hardly think that they set to work in their trifling with the intent of provoking blisters. The husbands of the much-lauded ladies were hardly likely to suffer this sort of fun to proceed ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould
... fact. I believe he had been knighted himself for storming the English grammar at the point of the pen, in a desperate address engrossed on vellum, on the occasion of the laying of the first stone of some building or other, and for handing some Royal Personage either the trowel or the mortar. Be that as it may, he had directed Mrs. Pocket to be brought up from her cradle as one who in the nature of things must marry a title, and who was to be guarded from the acquisition ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... lilac printed cotton sunbonnet, her skirts pinned up about her, was busy with a trowel, disordering certain flower-beds that presently the gardeners would ...
— The Imaginary Marriage • Henry St. John Cooper
... pincers of one of its legs to its side, detached a scale of wax, and immediately began to mince it with the tongue. During the operation, this organ was made to assume every variety of shape; sometimes it appeared like a trowel, then flattened like a spatula, and at other times like a pencil, ending in a point. The scale, moistened with a frothy liquid, became glutinous, and was drawn out like a riband. This bee then attached all the wax it could concoct to the vault ...
— Mysteries of Bee-keeping Explained • M. Quinby
... where, a few days earlier, I had been observing the labours and the surgery of the Mantis-killing Tachytes. My purpose was to collect a few cocoons of this Digger-wasp. The cocoons were turning up in abundance under my pocket-trowel, when Emile presented me with an unknown object. Absorbed in my task of collection, I slipped the find into my box without examining it further than with a rapid glance. We left the spot. Half-way home, ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... methods in use on large houses. Seventh grade boys have made such houses, using 3/8" material for the frames, tacking on wire netting and then plastering each side of the house in turn with concrete. The sides were given a pebble-dash surface, while the roof was finished with a steel trowel to give a smooth surface that will ...
— Bird Houses Boys Can Build • Albert F. Siepert
... the most elegant Tid-Bit; and when you drink together, offer him always the Place of Toast-maker; whether he be your Inferiour or your Equal, let him always choose before you, and be not ashamed to trowel him well ...
— The Lovers Assistant, or, New Art of Love • Henry Fielding
... I busied myself among the pile of bones of which I have before spoken. Throwing them aside, I soon uncovered a quantity of building stone and mortar. With these materials and with the aid of my trowel, I began vigorously to wall up ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... climbed back again to the summit of the roof, and started off desperately upon another voyage of discovery. This time he succeeded better than before. He found about a cupola a terrace which he had not earlier noticed, and on this terrace a hod of plaster, a trowel, and a ladder some seventy feet long. He saw his difficulties solved. He passed an end of rope about one of the rungs, laid the ladder flat along the slope of the roof, and then, still astride of the apex, he worked his way back, dragging the ladder with him, until ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... for the sake of finding out the secret of the order, run a very great risk of growing old under the trowel without ever realizing their purpose. Yet there is a secret, but it is so inviolable that it has never been confided or whispered to anyone. Those who stop at the outward crust of things imagine that the secret consists in words, in signs, or that the main point of it is to be found only in reaching ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... inhabit it is merely the matter of a walk in the neighbourhood. When removed from her own dwelling, which is turned topsy-turvy by my trowel, and placed in possession of the den produced by my art, the Lycosa at once disappears into that den. She does not come out again, seeks nothing better elsewhere. A large wire-gauze cover rests on the soil in ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... you received it? It is in 'the high Roman fashion,' and full of ferocious phantasy. As you could not well take up the matter with Paddy (being of the same nest), I have;—but I hope still that I have done justice to his great men and his good heart. As for * * *, you will find it laid on with a trowel. I delight in your 'fact ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron
... appeared like a heap or bundle of clothing near one of the beds, which, on lifting itself up, proved to be a tall slender lady of middle age, who, with her dress tucked neatly round her, a big print hood on her head, and a trowel in her hand, was busily administering such tender little attentions as mothers will lavish on their children, and garden lovers on their flowers. She was not alone in the garden, as we soon perceived. A shorter and stouter and younger lady sat knitting by the side of a gentleman ...
— Mrs. Overtheway's Remembrances • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... who otherwise must go in the Mud, it may be knee deep; but chiefly to keep in and contain their Water, which by the help of these Banks they overflow their Grounds with. These Banks they make as smooth with the backside of their Houghs, as a Bricklayer can smooth a Wall with his Trowel. For in this they are very neat. These Banks are usually not above a ...
— An Historical Relation Of The Island Ceylon In The East Indies • Robert Knox
... Top-knot, and the other chickens, and her dolls,—for Eyebright still played with dolls by fits and starts, and her grand plan for making "a cave" in the garden, in which to keep label-sticks and bits of string and her cherished trowel. ...
— Eyebright - A Story • Susan Coolidge
... traditions of Rome, and the laws of the empire; but as to Greek sophists and declaimers, he thought very much as old Cato did about them. The Greeks were a very clever people, unrivalled in the fine arts; let them keep to their strong point; they were inimitable with the chisel, the brush, the trowel, and the fingers; but he was not prepared to think much of their calamus or stylus, poetry excepted. What did they ever do but subvert received principles without substituting any others? And then they were so likely to take some odd turn themselves; you never could be sure ...
— Callista • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... all our commercial catastrophes, stripped of those local and incidental circumstances which vary from time to time: over-issues of money,—speculative prosperity,—all the world getting rich in the most agreeable manner,—fairy palaces rising on all sides, without the sound of trowel or hammer; then,—the day of adjustment,—the rapid contraction of the currency,—all the world getting poor in the most drastic and disagreeable manner,—and those fairy palaces, which rose under our very eyelids over-night, vanishing, like the palace of Aladdin from the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... throughout his varied experience of life, he had found flattery the most powerful weapon in a skilled hand, and that he had never known it fail. He related instances of the signal success which had followed its application with the trowel. He reminded his listeners of Lord Beaconsfield's famous saying, and chuckled over the unfortunate woman, "plain as a pike-staff," who had become his benefactress, in consequence of a discreet allusion to the "power of beauty" ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... seen how eagerly the ducks carried bricks. To complete the tale, the swallows came flying to the work, their beaks full of mortar and their trowel on their back, just the way little children ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... at Glendive Creek we found that Colonel Rice and his company of the Fifth Infantry, who had been sent there by General Mills, had built quite a good little fort with their trowel-bayonets—a weapon which Colonel Rice was the inventor of, and which is, by the way, a very useful implement of war, as it can be used for a shovel in throwing up intrenchments and can be profitably utilized in several other ...
— The Life of Hon. William F. Cody - Known as Buffalo Bill The Famous Hunter, Scout and Guide • William F. Cody
... fragmentary material that an old Italian well contains is extremely difficult if at all possible. After much debate it was agreed that after they struck pay dirt, each should dig in turn, each to have the bucketful that came under his trowel or fingers. Scattered fragments of the same pot and other complications were to be adjudicated by Mayhew, whose ignorance and disinterestedness were safe to assume. But the well gave up quantities of noncontentious matter before Mayhew's ...
— The Collectors • Frank Jewett Mather
... creatures have felled them ready for their use. They always work at night and in concert. Their long, sharp teeth are used for gnawing down the trees, but their mason-work is done entirely with their flat, trowel-like tails. In its natural state the fur is very durable, and is as full of long black hairs as that of the sable, but as sold, all these hairs have ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... building of our first 'igloo.' There is a good deal of difference of opinion as to the best implement with which to cut snow blocks. Cherry-Garrard had a knife which I designed and Lashly made, Wilson a saw, and Bowers a large trowel. I'm inclined to think the knife will prove most effective, but the others don't acknowledge it yet. As far as one can see at present this knife should have a longer handle and much coarser teeth in the saw edge—perhaps also the blade ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... almonds, with four to six bottles of scented water, and a little musk and amber, also forty pearls, two sapphires, a few garnets and rubies, with some gold thread, and above all a trough and a little silver trowel." Her father wondered at this extravagant demand, nevertheless he would not refuse his daughter; so he went to the fair, and on his return brought her all that ...
— Stories from Pentamerone • Giambattista Basile
... example,—in the field of Bricklaying, the Non-stooping Scaffold, the Packet and the Fountain Trowel were not invented until the analysis of bricklaying was made, and the synthesis of the chosen elements into standard methods made plain the need and ...
— The Psychology of Management - The Function of the Mind in Determining, Teaching and - Installing Methods of Least Waste • L. M. Gilbreth
... you out with a trowel to do that," said Mrs. Belgrove humorously. "But why does Garvington want ...
— Red Money • Fergus Hume
... is hard to be met with; but is lately cultivated in some Physick Gardens at Mitcham. It must be kept well weeded, and the top of the Bed, where it grows, must, when we cut it, be pricked up, a little, with a small Fork, or the Earth made fine with a Trowel; because the Runners, of this sort of Mint, shoot along upon the Surface of the Ground, and so at the Joints strike Root, which is contrary to other Sorts of Mint, which shoot their Runners ...
— The Country Housewife and Lady's Director - In the Management of a House, and the Delights and Profits of a Farm • Richard Bradley
... was raspberry toffee from Lisbeth, and the other, a curiously shaped one, was from Peter, and contained a trowel. Its somewhat prosaic appearance was relieved by the handle being decorated with Marjory's initial inside a heart of uncertain proportions, executed by poor old Peter's shaky hand ...
— Hunter's Marjory - A Story for Girls • Margaret Bruce Clarke
... and with a big cluster of radishes at the left side, and each of them carried a bunch of small salad and a darling little crystal-and-silver watering-pot (Portcullis's gifts). The Duke of Southlands gave his daughter away, and Juno insisted on his wearing a smock-frock and carrying a trowel, and just as the dear Bishop said, "Who giveth this woman?" the poor old darling dropped his trowel with a crash and rather ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 20, 1917 • Various
... little waves came lipping and whispering, and the low boom of the snow slides rolled through the chambered hollows of canyon and gorge. Absurd, wasn't it, but the Ranger was not dreaming about the bevelling trowel of the titan mountain gods? He went to sleep dreaming of the star visible from the other side of the Holy Cross, dreaming dreams that men and women have dreamed since time began; of drinking, drinking, and drinking yet again, of life and love and ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... bells, and a pattern of red eggs. To the left, the wall is covered with climbing plants, wild grapes, Virginia jessamine. In the middle is a sun-dial. There are many plants in pots. Your child is looking at the flowers. She shows them to her nurse—she is making holes in the earth with her trowel, and planting seeds. The nurse is raking the path. The young girl is pure as an angel, but the beginning of love is there, ...
— Ursula • Honore de Balzac
... plant up again by its leaves, it is not firm enough in the ground. If a man uses brain and eye, he can learn to work very rapidly. By one dexterous movement he scoops the excavation with a trowel. By a second movement, he makes the earth firm against the lower half of the roots. By a third movement, he fills the excavation and settles the plant into its final position. One workman will often plant twice as many as another, and not work any ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe
... full length, like hundreds of other motionless forms about them, but all were working busily. With a short trowel, the file leader scuffled the earth from under his body, taking care not to raise his arms, and gradually making a shallow trench deep enough to hide him. The others followed his example until the whole line ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell
... thereon, it would run off outwardly, carefully laying a layer of clay on the top of the wall, on which the brick may rest, and thereby prevent the brick from burning the still; carefully forming the brick with the trowel, so as to fit the wall and rest more safely—cautiously covering them well with clay, &c. and closing every crevice or aperture, to prevent smoak from coming thro' or the heat from deserting the flue till it passes to the chimney from the flue; then fill the still ...
— The Practical Distiller • Samuel McHarry
... part he could not borrow. Shakspeare will never be made by the study of Shakspeare. Do that which is assigned you, and you cannot hope too much or dare too much. There is at this moment for you an utterance brave and grand as that of the colossal chisel of Phidias, or trowel of the Egyptians, or the pen of Moses or Dante, but different from all these. Not possibly will the soul, all rich, all eloquent, with thousand-cloven tongue, deign to repeat itself; but if you can hear what these patriarchs say, surely you ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson |
