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More "Nail" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... away gaily to Sara, giving her vivacious thumb-nail portraits of her future neighbours—the people Selwyn had described as ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... thousands of Pheasants, Partridges and Wood-cocks. His Stable Doors are patched with Noses that belonged to Foxes of the Knight's own hunting down. Sir ROGER shewed me one of them that for Distinction sake has a Brass Nail struck through it, which cost him about fifteen Hours riding, carried him through half a dozen Counties, killed him a Brace of Geldings, and lost above half his Dogs. This the Knight looks upon as one of the greatest Exploits of his Life. The perverse Widow, whom I have given ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... is, there is no doubt about it. He's as dead as a door-nail. Well, Halil, that was a fine blow of yours I must say. By the Prophet! one does not see a blow like that every day. With your bare hand too! To kill a man with nothing but your empty fist! If a cannon-ball ...
— Halil the Pedlar - A Tale of Old Stambul • Mr Jkai
... sauntered down to the door, peered at the woodwork as though examining it, scratched with his finger-nail, and then began to ...
— Don Strong, Patrol Leader • William Heyliger
... "Nail him where he is!" Em cried excitedly; "he's getting up on you." Gordon's hands moved uncertainly upward on the chair; his knees rose from the floor. A shower of blows fell on him; the woman beat him with her pudgy fists; Mr. Ottinger was kicking at him; Jake was weeping, and ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... Master Jack Dillard gits de 'state," she proceeded, as though she had not heard my eager question, "wy, den Sabra Smif am as dead as a door-nail from dis time to de day ob judgment, an' de ole man'll have to git anoder 'fectionate companion. I'se mity sorry for de poor ole soul, but I a'n't gwine to put myself in Jack Dillard's claws, not ef I knows ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... floor of the hut with Captain Dieppe on the top of him—Dieppe, dusty, dirty, panting, bleeding freely from a bullet graze on the top of the left ear, and with one leg of his trousers slit from ankle to knee by a rusty nail, that had also ploughed a nasty furrow up his leg. But now he seized Guillaume's revolver, and dragged the old fellow out of the hut. Then he sat down on his chest, pinning his arms together on ...
— Captain Dieppe • Anthony Hope
... they are fighting tooth and nail to get possession of something which I might be only too glad ...
— The Rover Boys in the Land of Luck - Stirring Adventures in the Oil Fields • Edward Stratemeyer
... exultant—reviewing the advance of the cause from its first despised beginning to its present position, where, she alleged, it commanded the attention of the world. She spoke in her usual pungent, vehement style, hitting the nail on the head every time, and driving it in up to the head. Indeed, it seems to me, that while Lucretia Mott may be said to be the soul of this movement, and Mrs. Stanton the mind, the "swift, keen intelligence," ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... poor little Molly. It wasn't that I am so helpful, but that "fools rush in where angels fear to tread." It was Mrs. O'Shaughnessy who was the real help. She is a woman of great courage and decision and of splendid sense and judgment. A few days ago a man she had working for her got his finger-nail mashed off and neglected to care for it. Mrs. O'Shaughnessy examined it and found that gangrene had set in. She didn't tell him, but made various preparations and then told him she had heard that if there ...
— Letters of a Woman Homesteader • Elinore Pruitt Stewart
... of agaric, moss and fern, [1] Who forged a thousand theories of the rocks, Who taught me how to skate, to row, to swim, Who read me rhymes elaborately good, His own—I call'd him Crichton, for he seem'd All-perfect, finish'd to the finger nail.[2] And once I ask'd him of his early life, And his first passion; and he answer'd me; And well his words became him: was he not A full-cell'd honeycomb of eloquence Stored from all flowers? ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson
... are made of many woods, Of ash, of oak, and maple; Well seasoned is this stock of goods, Some kinds are very staple. Some are made with iron plates, To clinch the screw or nail, But when we would a peg shoe make, To use these plates would fail. Made, also, for men and boys, Women and girls, for each Has on this art a special claim, Their feet to train and teach. To dwell here longer would not do, The last ...
— How to Make a Shoe • Jno. P. Headley
... thought had flung to the weapons, too. She had taken off her pistol when she had been nursing Bill and hadn't put it on since. Quietly, so as not to attract attention, she glanced about to locate it. It was hanging on a nail at the opposite end of the table,—and Joe stood just beside it. She had no desire to waken his suspicions of her fear. She knew she must put up a bold front, at least. Nevertheless her fingers longed for the comforting feel of its butt. She resolved to watch for a ...
— The Snowshoe Trail • Edison Marshall
... Siyatelstvo," he whispered, as he kissed Paul's hand. And then in perfect silence they began to ascend a path. Presently it stopped abruptly. They had come up perhaps not fifty feet, when their way was barred by a great nail-studded door. ...
— Three Weeks • Elinor Glyn
... the young princes, with many other nobles and ladies, all came and gathered round the Emperor and watched me while I ate. His Majesty was taller than any of the others; that is to say, he stood about the breadth of my nail above the heads of his people. He was handsome and well made and had an air of great dignity. I heard that he had reigned seven years, and had been victorious, and that ...
— The Elson Readers, Book 5 • William H. Elson and Christine M. Keck
... ingenious contrivance of the ancient artist. The orbit has been cut out from the stone, the hollow being filled with an eye composed of enamel, white and black. The edges of the eyelids are of bronze, and a small silver nail inserted behind the iris receives and reflects the light in such wise as to imitate the light of life. The contours of the flesh are somewhat full and wanting in firmness, as would be the case in middle life, if the man's occupation debarred him from active exercise. The forms of the arm and ...
— Manual Of Egyptian Archaeology And Guide To The Study Of Antiquities In Egypt • Gaston Camille Charles Maspero
... music was the only touchstone; through the piano-player there is added the fascination of being yourself a participator in producing the music you hear. When Theodore Thomas said "Nothing so awakens interest in music as helping to make it," he hit the nail on the head. "After playing all this music I want to go to concerts next winter. I'd like to hear how the 'Fifth Symphony' sounds on the orchestra," said my little girl after the pianola had been in the house only a week. "All this music?" Yes indeed. ...
— The Pianolist - A Guide for Pianola Players • Gustav Kobb
... which are considered the birthright of the New Englander. He had not the mechanical turn of the whittling Yankee. I once questioned him about his manual dexterity, and he told me he could split a shingle four ways with one nail, —which, as the intention is not to split it at all in fastening it to the roof of a house or elsewhere, I took to be a confession of inaptitude for mechanical works. He does not seem to have been ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... week! I can't do that: they'd have the black spot on me by then. The lubbers is going about to get the wind of me this blessed moment; lubbers as couldn't keep what they got, and want to nail what is another's. Is that seamanly behaviour, now, I want to know? But I'm a saving soul. I never wasted good money of mine; nor lost it neither; and I'll trick 'em again. I'm not afraid on 'em. I'll shake out another reef, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... it is not the custom for women to live altogether with men. Now, what I wish is, that the hinder part of the cabin, where you used to stow away your dried birds, should be made over to me. We have oars with which we can make a division, and then nail up seal skins, so that I may have that part of the cabin to myself. Now, do you ...
— The Little Savage • Captain Marryat
... preserved fresh on their stalks for more than two months, and for several days when plucked off. This plant may be transported to almost any distance; and will produce flowers annually, if merely hung up on a nail. ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 5 • Robert Kerr
... a long-drawn guttural sound of mingled pain and satisfaction. This operation he repeated several times. On my inquiring the meaning of his strange conduct, he only said, 'Me carpenter-make 'em' ('I am mending my foot'), and then showed me his charred great toe, the nail of which had been torn off by a tea-tree stump, in which it had been caught during the journey, and the pain of which he had borne with stoical composure until the evening, when he had an opportunity of cauterizing the wound in the primitive manner ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... projects every one of which is a life job for a man, especially when you cannot get the men, and when you do get them they do not stay on the job for life. So there is the great difficulty. Mr. Littlepage has hit the nail on the head. The Department of Agriculture is not well organized but it is not an easy thing to organize experimental work on at least 150 different kinds of industries with the money and the men we have. The fact that the investigations require the men to be on the land close to their work ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Eleventh Annual Meeting - Washington, D. C. October 7 AND 8, 1920 • Various
... of tools was gained, besides room for a desk containing the government working drawings and specifications, pay-rolls, etc. In addition to its door, fastened at night with a padlock, and its one glass window, secured by a ten-penny nail, the shanty had a flap-window, hinged at the bottom. When this was propped up with a barrel stave it made a counter from which to pay the men, the paymaster ...
— Tom Grogan • F. Hopkinson Smith
... he brought himself to make any for Eudoxia Pence. He came to see a great deal of the Bunnies; in a month or two he quite had the run of the place. There were friendly fellows who heaved big lumps of clay upon huge nail-studded scantlings, and nice little girls who designed book-plates, and more mature ones who painted miniatures, and many earnest, earnest persons of both sexes who were hurrying, hurrying ahead on their ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... submarine world was almost deserted (except by a huge lobster and a shark, who were drinking lemonade) when Grover entered upon his quest for the vanished water-nymph. He investigated two or three grottoes, with no result except to tear his cloak on an exposed nail and knock a hole in his helmet. He was just about to resort to a classical imprecation, when the necessity for it was suddenly dissipated. There stood the daughter of Rhine, wonderful to behold, in sweet converse with her chaperone, the black domino. ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various
... the treatment is different. But oh! Grantley, I wish I had that Scotch-gray confidence in myself that you have. If you were a doctor you would tell a man he had typhoid, and he'd proceed to have it, even if he had only set out to have an ingrowing toe-nail. But my patients have a decided will of their own. There's young Ab Cowan—they sent for me last night to go out to see him. He has a bad attack of quinsy, but it is the strangest ...
— Sowing Seeds in Danny • Nellie L. McClung
... dissolution than to respect the departed. Julian could not help smiling at the child's evident discomfiture as he pursued his way towards Grosvenor Place. On one of the doorsteps of the big houses that drive respect like a sharp nail into the hearts of the poor passers-by, a ragged old woman was tumultuously squatting. Her gin-soddened face came, like a scarlet cloud, to the view from the embrace of a vagabond black bonnet, braided with rags, viciously glittering here and there with the stray bugles which survived from some ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... are. I was afraid that Martha had had an accident with the fungi, and had prepared a substitute from my old shooting boots, but I can't see either eyelet or nail. Can you?" ...
— The Weathercock - Being the Adventures of a Boy with a Bias • George Manville Fenn
... you can drive without a whip or reins?" asked Laddie again. "The answer is a nail. You can ...
— Six Little Bunkers at Uncle Fred's • Laura Lee Hope
... concern that was now upon me, put an end to all invention, and to all the contrivances that I had laid for my future accommodations and conveniences. I had the care of my safety more now upon my hands than that of my food. I cared not to drive a nail, or chop a stick of wood now, for fear the noise I might make should be heard: much less would I fire a gun for the same reason: and above all I was intolerably uneasy at making any fire, lest ...
— Robinson Crusoe • Daniel Defoe
... were comfortably at rest, "I can't help but get angry at the women as I walk about, for I do see them do so much foolishness. Why, to-day I saw one crazy for souvenirs, and I believe she thought everything was a souvenir. I saw her pick up a nail and put it into her handbag, and when she came up to the Pennsylvania coal monument in the Mining building, she commenced putting pieces of the coal in her pocket. Then one of the working men played really a mean joke on her. He came up with a lump as big as a water ...
— The Adventures of Uncle Jeremiah and Family at the Great Fair - Their Observations and Triumphs • Charles McCellan Stevens (AKA 'Quondam')
... could be found to make a coffin for the body of the dead General. The old servant of the Ursulines, faithful to the last, went hither and thither and collected a few planks and nails, and the midshipmen and Colin assisted her to nail together a rude coffin in which the body was presently laid. It must be buried that same evening, for none knew from hour to hour what was in store for the city. But no pomp or circumstance could attend the funeral; and indeed no one could be found ...
— French and English - A Story of the Struggle in America • Evelyn Everett-Green
... at his funny work," suggested Shelley, hitting the nail directly on the head, as ...
— The Rover Boys on Treasure Isle - or The Strange Cruise of the Steam Yacht. • Edward Stratemeyer (AKA Arthur M. Winfield)
... her shattered hulk Should sink beneath the wave; Her thunders shook the mighty deep, And there should be her grave; Nail to the mast her holy flag, Set every threadbare sail, And give her to the god of storms, ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... "Fight us tooth and nail though you may, we intend to have you married. You have happened upon us by chance, and you shall have no reason to repent of it. We are in earnest on ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... upon him by the press, by many of his friends, and by such a man as Emerson, whom he deeply reverenced, to change or omit certain passages from his poems, seems only to have served as the opposing hammer that clinched the nail. The louder the outcry the more deeply he felt it his duty to stand by his first convictions. The fierce and scornful opposition to his sex poems, and to his methods and aims generally, was probably more confirmatory ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... wing feathers short, arched, much hidden in the soft downy plumage; barely capable of flight; tail short, generally formed of 16 feathers, developed at a late period in the young males; legs thick, feathered; spurs short, thick; nail of middle toe flat and broad; an additional toe not rarely developed; skin yellowish. Comb and wattle well developed. Skull with deep medial furrow; occipital foramen, sub- triangular, vertically elongated. Voice peculiar. Eggs rough, buff- coloured. ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... to say, Jack breaks plates, dishes and cups with a perfectly easy and unembarrassed conscience, and is already far too civilized to care in the least for his misfortunes in that line. Whenever a fowl is killed—and I came upon Jack slowly putting one to death the other day with a pair of nail-scissors—he possesses himself of a small store of feathers, which he wears tastefully placed over his left ear. A gay ribbon, worn like a bandeau across the forehead, is what he really loves. Jack is very proud of a tawdry ribbon of many colors with a golden ground which ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... entitled the bridge of the King's Garden [du Jardin du Roi], a double enigma, which disguised the bridge of Austerlitz and the Jardin des Plantes at one stroke. Louis XVIII., much preoccupied while annotating Horace with the corner of his finger-nail, heroes who have become emperors, and makers of wooden shoes who have become dauphins, had two anxieties,—Napoleon and Mathurin Bruneau. The French Academy had given for its prize subject, The Happiness ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... thar's to be any whippin', ur tarrin' an' featherin' in this case, I'm agin it tooth an' toe-nail. Cap Westerfelt's boy sha'n't have a hair o' his head fetched on sech flimsy evidence as we've had while I'm alive. You kin think what you please o' me. I've got too much faith in the Westerfelt ...
— Westerfelt • Will N. Harben
... Rome at the head of 150,000 men. Belisarius, in the three months, had done his best to repair the walls, the towers, and the gates of the city. He had also laid up provisions. He dug trenches round the least defended spots, and had constructed great machines which shot bolts strong enough to nail an armoured man to a tree. Vitiges approached from the Anio, and made a desperate attempt to storm the city at once. Having failed in this, through the great courage and skill of Belisarius, and ...
— The Formation of Christendom, Volume VI - The Holy See and the Wandering of the Nations, from St. Leo I to St. Gregory I • Thomas W. (Thomas William) Allies
... 'em talk about a little winder and a shed, and when they'd gone I found it and come in. The glass was broke, and I only pulled the nail out. I haven't done a mite of harm sleepin' here two nights. I was so tuckered out I couldn't go on nohow, though ...
— Under the Lilacs • Louisa May Alcott
... passed his legs over he gave a feeble moan and then.... flopper-ti flop, flopper-ti flop, he crashed down the other side and ended with a dull thud on the ground. On the other side there he was dead as a door-nail and all covered with blood. It was our first proper work. But he was not a soldier, he was a Boxer; and in place of the former incomplete attire of red sashes and strings, this true patriot wore a long red tunic edged with blue, and had his head tied up in the regulation ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... blaze they struck was truly startling. It was a little silver birch tree with the stem painted entirely red. Nailed to it with a big rusty nail was a piece of cardboard. At the top ...
— The Camp Fire Girls in the Maine Woods - Or, The Winnebagos Go Camping • Hildegard G. Frey
... before the caste committee, and a divorced woman is at liberty to marry again. The Nais worship all the ordinary Hindu deities. On the Dasahra and Diwali festivals they wash and revere their implements, the razor, scissors and nail-pruners. They pay regard to omens. It is unpropitious to sneeze or hear the report of a gun when about to commence any business; and when a man is starting on a journey, if a cat, a squirrel, a hare or a snake should cross the road in front of him he will give it up and return ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... situation in this light, modern business has largely solved the age-long problem of producing and distributing the material necessities and amenities of life; and nothing remains except to perfect the system in detail, develop its further potentialities, and fight tooth and nail those who are led by lack of personal success or a maudlin sympathy for the incompetent to attack ...
— The Mind in the Making - The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform • James Harvey Robinson
... sail for'ard," observed Willy Dicey to Harry. "Don't you think we can manage to nail it on round the stern and quarters? I saw some tools put into the boat, and one of the carpenter's mates is ...
— The Voyages of the Ranger and Crusader - And what befell their Passengers and Crews. • W.H.G. Kingston
... the shingle, so gently that not a pebble was disturbed. He rose, a gaunt scarecrow, stepped off, and drew the shallow craft somewhat further up the sloping beach. Then he helped Iris to her feet. She became conscious at once that his thumb-nail was of extraordinary length, and—so strangely constituted is human nature—this peculiarity made a ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... leaves to the inside edges of the diamonds in long twisted stitches, rows of button-hole stitches, or any kind of lace-work. After being washed and starched, the collar ought to be pressed on the wrong side with the head of a round nail warmed ...
— The Lady's Album of Fancy Work for 1850 • Unknown
... as one nail by strength drives out another, So the remembrance of my former love Is by a newer object quite forgotten. Two Gentlemen of Verona, Act ii. ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various
... dare do it," she answered, with such fine intrepidity that I was silent, and began to crease patterns on the cloth with my thumb nail. ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... Molly made a deep mark in the paper under them with her nail; so deep as to signify that she meant to have them for present study or future reference or both. Then, as Molly seemed to have said her say, Daisy said no more and ...
— Melbourne House • Elizabeth Wetherell
... advantage. I could have settled in San Francisco for life with the certainty of securing a handsome annual income. I never feared coming to want. If I had lost my money and all other resources had failed, I was not afraid to make a horse-nail or turn a horse-shoe with the best blacksmith in California, and I could have got my living, as I did for many a year, at ...
— Seven Wives and Seven Prisons • L.A. Abbott
... best refuge was now to place his back against an oak, and defend himself with his sword. The felon knight, who had taken another spear, watching the moment when his formidable antagonist was most closely pressed, galloped against him in hopes to nail him with his lance against the tree; but Wamba, springing forward in good time, checked the fatal career of the Blue Knight, by hamstringing his horse with a stroke of his sword; and horse and man went heavily to the ground. Almost immediately ...
— The Junior Classics, V5 • Edited by William Patten
... unwillingness to be seen in their vicinity, and a casual inspection of the records of the Auxiliary Patrol probably locked up somewhere in Whitehall. Some day these records may be made public, and then we shall read of happenings which will cause us to hold our breath, and our hair to bristle like a nail-brush. Who has not heard the story of the unarmed fishing boat which attacked a hostile periscope with nothing more formidable than a coal hammer, or the ex-fisherman who attempted to cloud Fritz's vision with ...
— Stand By! - Naval Sketches and Stories • Henry Taprell Dorling
... but widely known brotherhood appeared to pass their time on street corners arrayed like the lilies of the conservatory and busy with nail files and penknives. Thus displayed as a guarantee of good faith, they carried on an innocuous conversation in a 200-word vocabulary, to the casual observer as innocent and immaterial as that heard in clubs ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... to interfere: the hoof required no special attention. Almost every horse-hoof in a large circuit of miles was known to him—as well, he would remark, as the nail of his own thumb. ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... more, shaking with merriment like a jolly old fellow amused by a funny story, he took his departure, not forgetting, however, to set his great hob-nail boots on each of the compromising footprints which his son had ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc
... hither," she cried. "See." And she showed them nail-marks on her naked flesh. "Last night my father's ghostly hands dragged ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... legends, by tales and poems, allegories, ethical reflections, and historical reminiscences. For it, the Bible was not only the supreme law, from whose behests there was no appeal, but also "a golden nail upon which" the Haggada "hung its gorgeous tapestries," so that the Bible word was the introduction, refrain, text, and subject of the poetical glosses of the Talmud. It was the province of the Halacha to build, upon the foundation of biblical law, a legal ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... drop the bolt, and securely nail The horse-shoe over the door; 'T is a wise precaution; and, if it should ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... perversissimi; regnat superbia, ardet avaritia, invidia corrodit singulos, luxuria diffamat totam illam curiam, gula in omnibus dominatur." It was not the charge of magic alone that brought Roger Bacon's works into discredit with the Church, and caused a nail to be driven through their covers to keep the dangerous pages ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... but you yourself selected it for me. You know that we give a party to-morrow to celebrate the birthday of the crown prince, and I wished to wear that dress. Now, I knew what no one else knew, that the last time I wore it I had torn it by a nail in the wall, on crossing the corridor. If I had informed my maid of this mishap, I should have been unable to wear it again, for custom, I believe, forbids queens to wear mended dresses. I was, however, bent on saving it. For this purpose I took ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... were so inclined), and whether his hosts had slept well. He glanced at his watch—it was still early—and began to wash and dress. His water was ready, and everything on the washing-stand and dressing-table was ready for use and properly laid out—his soap, his tooth and hair brushes, his nail scissors and files. He washed his hands and face in a leisurely fashion, cleaned and manicured his nails, pushed back the skin with the towel, and sponged his stout white body from head to foot. Then he began to brush his hair. Standing in front of the mirror, he first brushed his curly ...
— The Forged Coupon and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... the whole group of girls; but it was to Tilly she addressed herself, and by Tilly's side she seated herself. It was in doing this that the delicate material of her dress caught in a protruding nail in the splint piazza chair ...
— A Flock of Girls and Boys • Nora Perry
... "Ah! vous m'avez ecrit une lettre charmante." This was all the preliminary of our talk, which then went on as if we had always known one another.... Her way of talking is just like her writing—lively, picturesque, with an undertone of deep feeling, and the same happiness in striking the nail on the head every now and then with a blow.... I heartily enjoyed the sense of so rich, so prolific, so ardent a genius. I liked the woman in her, too, very much; I never liked a woman better.... For the rest, she holds her place in the literary ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... that still felt his life in every limb, a boy devoured with fantastic ambitions. He had a genius within that smothered and struggled till it all but perished unexpressed. It lived only enough to be an anguish. It hurt him like a hidden, unmentioned ingrowing toe nail that cuts and bleeds and excruciates the fleet member it ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... was laughing softly as a boy in the midst of a prank, and busily throwing off the robe of serge. Fumbling through the night he located the shirt and overalls he had seen hanging from a nail on the wall. Into these he slipped, leaned to kiss the chill, damp forehead of the sleeper, and then went out under the ...
— Riders of the Silences • John Frederick
... capacity, the prosecution and accomplishment of the necessary work formerly proposed; and which they could not but judge the Lord still called them unto, while after all the above-mentioned breaches made upon them, he still continued to give them a nail in his holy place, and a wall in Judah and Jerusalem, Ezra ix, 8, 9, they therefore again laid their appointments upon some others to prepare a draft of An Act, Declaration, and Testimony, &c., and which, under ...
— Act, Declaration, & Testimony for the Whole of our Covenanted Reformation, as Attained to, and Established in Britain and Ireland; Particularly Betwixt the Years 1638 and 1649, Inclusive • The Reformed Presbytery
... and the others watched him, he was evidently nervous, and fumbled. Then he tried to open it with his teeth, but the spring was strong, and he had to alter his tactics and begin to open it with his forefinger and thumb nail, and still it seemed as if he could not get it open; and all the time the boat was rapidly setting nearer. In another few seconds it would be alongside, and the Americans would be on board, five against two, unless Taters made a brave defence. There were a couple of dozen blacks on deck, but ...
— The Black Bar • George Manville Fenn
... the parchment can be crumbled between the fingers, and the bean within is too hard to be dented by finger nail or teeth. ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... to me in a very feeling manner. Although she was an entire stranger, she spoke so pointedly to my state of mind, and expressed the reward of faithfulness in such encouraging terms, that my feelings were in nowise able to resist the power which attended, but I was forced to acknowledge it as a nail fastened in a ...
— Memoir and Diary of John Yeardley, Minister of the Gospel • John Yeardley
... for ordinary work a small pair with fine sharp points, for gold work small ones with strong points similar to nail scissors, and for cutting-out purposes a large pair with one rounded ...
— Embroidery and Tapestry Weaving • Grace Christie
... but instead of getting up and going away, he put his elbows on the table and pressed his head in his hands. He felt as if a nail were being driven into his skull. A strange idea suddenly occurred to him, to get up at once, to go up to Nikodim Fomitch, and tell him everything that had happened yesterday, and then to go with him to his lodgings and to show him the things in the hole ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... scientific, and medical study! Ah! she, Rosita, had heard of such cases before. Had not a paternal ancestor of hers, one Don Diego Castro, believed he had discovered the elixir of youth. Had he not to that end refused even to wash him the hand, to cut him the nail of the finger and the hair of the head! Exalted by that discovery, had he not been unsparingly uncomplimentary to all humanity, especially to the weaker sex? Even ...
— The Argonauts of North Liberty • Bret Harte
... ridiculous performances of Chord. Once I thought she looked squarely at me, and my heart beat like a drum so loudly that I thought people must hear. But her glance wandered on casually over the throng, and then I felt truly insignificant, like a man who could hide behind the nail of his own thumb. ...
— The O'Ruddy - A Romance • Stephen Crane
... opened and Dr. Albant, a handsome old man, entered with smiles and nods. He removed his coat and tied on a large apron. Trying the edge of his scalpel on his nail, he turned to the students and physicians, and began to talk of the German method ...
— The Son of Monte Cristo • Jules Lermina
... which has once been forced into any particular train, can scarcely give it up as hopeless. One day I chanced to observe a nail trodden into the mud floor at no great distance from me. I seized upon this new treasure, and found that I could unlock with it the padlock that fastened me to the staple in the floor. By this means I had the pitiful consolation of being able to range, without constraint, the miserable ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... with Thomas, and holding up his dry, hooked forefinger, with its long, dirty nail, in warning, would ...
— The Crushed Flower and Other Stories • Leonid Andreyev
... glass, white as a bell flower, she had a breast and head joined by a noble poised throat, which baited the very hook of love. Upon her lily finger she wore a red and golden ring. Even her frock was a miracle of millinery. This lovely creature, complete to a nail, much disturbed the mind of Hugh, and played her pretty tricks upon her unexercised pastor: now demure, now smiling, now darting soft glances, now reining in her eyes. But he, good man, was rock or diamond. At last the fair creature actually stroked his arm, and then Hugh ...
— Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln - A Short Story of One of the Makers of Mediaeval England • Charles L. Marson
... silk stockings, several mysterious under garments (from the same source); one cigarette tin containing sewing materials, buttons of all sorts and sizes nine empty cotton-reels, three spools from a sewing-machine, one pair nail-scissors (broken); one cigar-box containing several yards of tape (varying widths), cuttings of many different materials, one button-hook, one tin-opener and corkscrew combined, one silver thimble, one ditto (horn), one Chinese pipe; one packet of tea, one ditto sugar, one tin condensed ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 15, 1919 • Various
... the old houses are entered by Gothic doorways, and the oak doors are studded with large nail-heads. The locks and bolts are of mediaeval workmanship. Sometimes you see an iron ring hanging to a string that has been passed through a hole in the door. It is just such a string as Little Red Riding-hood (an ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... never went aside for any impediment. One ceased his movements altogether just before the mid-watch. At sunrise I found him butted like a battering-ram against the immovable foot of the foremast, and still striving, tooth and nail, to force the impossible passage. That these tortoises are the victims of a penal, or malignant, or perhaps a downright diabolical enchanter, seems in nothing more likely than in that strange infatuation of hopeless toil which so often possesses ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... be so good as to remember what a hang-nail is like? or a grain of dust in your eye? or a blister on your heel? or a corn on your toe? and then reflect what the word "torture" implies, when it meant all that the most devilish cruelty could invent. Savonarola! good gracious me! I would have canted and recanted, and called black white, ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... wig of short, coarse, red hair, which he took off with his hat, and hung upon a nail. Having adopted in its place a dirty cotton nightcap, and groped about in the dark till he found a remnant of candle, he knocked at the partition which divided the two garrets, and inquired, in a loud voice, whether Mr Noggs ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... your big fellow in his football suit,' said Jim. 'The biggest part of him is hanging up in there on a nail.' ...
— Football Days - Memories of the Game and of the Men behind the Ball • William H. Edwards
... to the tool-house at the bottom of the garden, and there, tied to a nail in the wall, was a pretty little black-and-tan ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... tell you that the severity of the weather, and the heat of the intolerable furnaces, dry the hair and break the nails of strangers? There is not a complete nail in the whole British suite, and my hair cracks again when I brush it. (I am losing my hair with great rapidity, and what I don't lose ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 2 (of 3), 1857-1870 • Charles Dickens
... Why, dis berry curous sarcumstance, pon my word—dare's a great big nail in de skull, what fastens ob ...
— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith
... and Tomio joined them, from the observatory. Tomio said, that she was related to Tarrao; and brought him a present of a long nail, at the same time complimenting ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... provinces, and especially at Matelle, the colours being mixed with a resinous exudation collected from a shrub called by the Singhalese Wael-koep-petya (Croton lacciferum). The coloured varnish thus prepared is formed into films and threads chiefly by aid of the thumb-nail of the left hand, which is kept long and uncut for the purpose. It is then applied by heat and polished. It is chiefly employed in ornamenting the covers of books, walking-sticks, the shafts of spears, and the handles of fans for the priesthood. The Burmese artists who make the japanned ware of ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... room, looking out over the school grounds. There were a couple of deal tables, two empty bookcases, and a looking-glass, hung on a nail. ...
— Mike • P. G. Wodehouse
... supplying the buffalo for Bronx Park. I rounded up a magnificent 'king' buffalo bull, belligerent enough to fight a battleship. When I rode after him the cowmen said I was as good as killed. I made a lance by driving a nail into the end of a short pole and sharpening it. After he had chased me, I wheeled my broncho, and hurled the lance into his back, ripping a wound as long as my hand. That put the fear of Providence into him and took ...
— The Last of the Plainsmen • Zane Grey
... but in the ability to discover facts by personal observation and investigation and in the power to use these facts in deducing new conclusions and establishing fundamental principles. There is no comparison between the value of a ton of horseshoe nails and the ability to make a single nail. ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... is seldom served at table sliced in its crude state. It is principally grown for pickling: for which purpose it should be plucked when about half grown, or while the skin is tender, and can be easily broken by the nail. As the season of maturity approaches, the rind gradually hardens, and the fruit becomes worthless. In all stages of its growth, the flesh is comparatively spongy; and, in the process of pickling, absorbs a ...
— The Field and Garden Vegetables of America • Fearing Burr
... hang by the wall, And Dick the shepherd blows his nail, And Tom bears logs into the hall, And milk comes frozen home in pail, When blood is nipp'd and ways be foul, Then nightly sings the staring owl, Tu whit, Tu whu, a merry note While greasy Joan ...
— Penny Plain • Anna Buchan (writing as O. Douglas)
... dinner of the day; And Juan took his place, he knew not where, Confused, in the confusion, and distrait, And sitting as if nail'd upon his chair: Though knives and forks clank'd round as in a fray, He seem'd unconscious of all passing there, Till some one, with a groan, exprest a wish (Unheeded twice) to have ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... His right arm bone is however preserved separate in a glass case. The sword of this prince too, and the Imperial crown is to be seen here. The sacristan next proceeded to show to us the other relics, but having begun with the exhibition of a rag dipped in the sweat of Jesus Christ and a nail of the Holy Cross, we began to think we had seen enough and went away perfectly satisfied. There is no other monument in honour of Charlemagne, but a plain stone on the floor of the Church with the simple inscription "Carolo Magno." On going out ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... all the window-soles whitewashed over with frost rind in the mornings, that as I was going out in the dark, before lying down in my bed, to give a look into the hen-house, and lock the coal-cellar, so that I might hang the bit key on the nail behind our room window-shutter, I happened to give a keek in, and, lo and behold! the awful apparition of a man with a yellow jacket, lying sound asleep on a great lump of parrot-coal in ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - tailor in Dalkeith • D. M. Moir
... way, I'm thinkin'," the little man replied. "Gin ye haud Shep's the guilty one I wad, by all manner o' means—or shootin'd be aiblins better. If not, why"—he shrugged his shoulders significantly; and having shown his hand and driven the nail well home, the little man left ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant
... had a minstrel show, wearing masks of black cambric, with red mouths painted on them; you should have seen us, all in a dusky semicircle, seated on boards supported by nail-kegs: it was a scene better imagined than described. This is certainly the ideal way to live in summer-time, and we should be perfectly happy and content if you could only shake off your troublesome cough and come to share our pleasure. We feel incomplete without you; and no ...
— A Summer in a Canyon: A California Story • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... the nails are really parts of the outer skin, which is curiously changed and hardened. The nails lie upon the surface of the true skin and grow from the under side as well as from the little fold of skin at the root of the nail. They are made to give firmness and protection to the ends of the fingers and toes. The nails of the fingers are also useful in picking up small objects and in many ...
— First Book in Physiology and Hygiene • J.H. Kellogg
... dead, sir!" was his criticism, "dead as a door nail! All the medicine in the shop wouldn't kindle one spark of ...
— The Midnight Queen • May Agnes Fleming
... great head on you, old chap," he said, affectionately. "It certainly seems as though you have hit the nail on the head this time. I understand, now, why their leader was so anxious to have us move away. They expect to encounter the Indians somewhere in this neighborhood and they do not want any witnesses. What shall ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... your noble profession! I think every Scotch gardener of you believes himself a gentleman, simply because he can nail a few stripes of old blanket against a wall. How did you come by this ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... edicts of the Emperor in this matter of faith had been despised, scorned, ridiculed, and derided by the Lutherans. (Foerstemann, 2, 190.) Such were the miserable arguments with which the Romanists defended their treachery. Luther certainly hit the nail on the head when he wrote that the Romanists refused to deliver the Confutation "because their consciences felt very well that it was a corrupt, futile, and frigid affair, of which they would have to be ashamed in case it should become public and ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... by subscription; but compliments lord Jefferies for so pious an undertaking. He also says, that the cause of Dryden's death was an inflammation in his toe, occasioned by the flesh growing over the nail, which, being neglected, produced a ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... which appear to be innocent. A knife or a nail file can be carried normally on your person; either is a multi-purpose instrument for creating damage. Matches, pebbles, hair, salt, nails, and dozens of other destructive agents can be carried or kept in your living quarters without exciting any suspicion whatever. If you are a worker in a particular ...
— Simple Sabotage Field Manual • Strategic Services
... strong and tender tie so long existing between us? My affection, my gratitude, all warred against the idea of working with those who wronged him so bitterly. But the cry of starving children was ever in my ears; the sobs of women poisoned in lead works, exhausted in nail works, driven to prostitution by starvation, made old and haggard by ceaseless work. I saw their misery was the result of an evil system, was inseparable from private ownership of the instruments of wealth production; that while the worker was himself but an instrument, ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... Toby, taking his pipe from his mouth, and striking the head of it two or three times upon the nail of his left thumb, as he began his sentence,—I think, says he:—But to enter rightly into my uncle Toby's sentiments upon this matter, you must be made to enter first a little into his character, the out-lines of which I shall just give you, ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... was dignified and businesslike, and if a smile hovered about her lips as they explored the odd little house, it did not go beyond the bounds of a polite interest. At length she seated herself on an empty nail keg in the shop, and became absorbed in thought. The agent leaned against the ...
— The Pleasant Street Partnership - A Neighborhood Story • Mary F. Leonard
... San Pedro de Cardena, the Cid embraced his wife Ximena and his two daughters, and left them in the protection of the abbot, to whom he promised recompense. Hard was the pain of parting as when the finger nail is torn away from the flesh, but a banished man has no choice. And as they passed the night at Higeruela a sweet vision promising success comforted the Cid in his slumbers; and many from Castile, who heard of the departure of the hero, sought his ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... best. It is the law of good economy to make the best of everything. How much more to make the best of every creature! Therefore, when your pauper comes to you and asks for bread, ask of him instantly—What faculty have you? What can you do best? Can you drive a nail into wood? Go and mend the parish fences. Can you lay a brick? Mend the walls of the cottages where the wind comes in. Can you lift a spadeful of earth? Turn this field up three feet deep all over. Can you only drag a weight with your shoulders? ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... of your talk to boys on Sexual Hygiene. I listened with the greatest of interest to your presentation before the Boys' Conference at Lake Geneva the past summer and it seemed to me that both in substance and in form of presentation you hit the nail on the head in a way I had never before seen it done. I believe that your contribution to boys in this direction is to be even greater than that which you have ...
— The Biology, Physiology and Sociology of Reproduction - Also Sexual Hygiene with Special Reference to the Male • Winfield S. Hall
... ready to signify his good will and interest in his neighbors' advancing fortunes, by driving a nail at a ship-building or a pin at a house-raising, by laying a stone in a wall or a foundation of a house, the latter, apparently, in the case of some very humble homes. He, the Judge of the Supreme Court, served on the watch, walking and guarding ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... art is as dead as the proverbial door-nail; whether or not it ever regains its position as a craft is a matter of conjecture. Personally, I incline to the belief that it is absolutely extinct. The death-knell rang for all time when the sewing-machine was invented. The machine has been a very doubtful blessing, ...
— Chats on Old Lace and Needlework • Emily Leigh Lowes
... importance of the step that his Majesty had taken—that this is, in fact, the Conservatives' last cast—and that he (the King) is resolved neither to flinch nor falter, but having embarked with them, to nail his flag to the mast and put forth all the constitutional authority of the Crown in support of the Government he is about to form. I am strongly inclined to think that this determination, when properly ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... it as he passed, a fond admiring glance. He knew every grey stone in its walls, and every pane of glass in its narrow windows. He had not built it with his own hands but his heart had been in the laying of every stone and the driving of every nail in it. And that was true of the house as well. He had only time for a glance. For through the close there came a shout, and ...
— Allison Bain - By a Way she knew not • Margaret Murray Robertson
... one of 'God Bless our Sunday School,'" cried Tom. "Oh, look, there are three of them. If we nail them upside down they will look all right. ...
— Anxious Audrey • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... which are always associated with widowhood in low life. It is only in higher circles that women can lose their husbands and yet remain bewitching. The late Mr. Drabdump had scratched the base of his thumb with a rusty nail, and Mrs. Drabdump's foreboding that he would die of lockjaw had not prevented her wrestling day and night with the shadow of Death, as she had wrestled with it vainly twice before, when Katie died of diphtheria and little Johnny of scarlet fever. Perhaps it is from ...
— The Big Bow Mystery • I. Zangwill
... known as carbuncles, and if they occur on the fingers or toes they are described as whitlows. It is often the friction of a frayed-out collar or cuff, of tight waist clothing, or, in the case of whitlows, the introduction of some irritant or poison between the nail and the skin that determines the precise site at which they ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various
... the lameness in the same foot what we said were lame, sir, and he took off the shoe, but he said as how it were all right, and no fault of the shoeing. He didn't know but a nail might have gone too deep, sir, but he ...
— Frank Merriwell's Races • Burt L. Standish
... was a spot where the narrow road emerged suddenly on to an immense plain, closed at the horizon by strips of forest over which rose and stood alone the fine point of Saint-Hilaire's steeple, but so sharpened and so pink that it seemed to be no more than sketched on the sky by the finger-nail of a painter anxious to give to such a landscape, to so pure a piece of 'nature,' this little sign of art, this single indication of human existence. As one drew near it and could make out the remains of the square tower, half in ruins, which still stood by its side, though ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... he had continued his work as long as his rude spade was adequate to a disturbance of the soil. The boy looked up as the gate latch clicked, and stood surveying Lyman with his feet far apart and his hands in his pockets. Lyman spoke to him, and bringing a nail out of his pocket he held it out to the visitor as an offering of his hospitality. Lyman tossed him a piece of money; he caught it up and with a shout he disappeared in the shrubbery. The visitor's knock ...
— Old Ebenezer • Opie Read
... them for use against the French. The carpenter of the ship was endeavouring to get the fuses out of the loaded shells with an auger, and a middy undertook to assist him, in characteristic middy fashion, with a mallet and a spike-nail. A huge shell under his treatment suddenly exploded on the quarter-deck of the Theseus, and the other sixty-nine shells followed suit. The too ingenious middy disappeared into space; forty seamen, with Captain Miller himself, were killed; and forty-seven, including ...
— Deeds that Won the Empire - Historic Battle Scenes • W. H. Fitchett
... trust my own taste," I said. I got a brass-headed nail and a hammer, and began. Eliza said afterward that she had known the chair would break before ...
— Eliza • Barry Pain
... heads, and bosses of foliage, ornament the junction of these mouldings. Above these the cornice and parapet rest upon blocks bearing the nail-head ornament. ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Carlisle - A Description of Its Fabric and A Brief History of the Episcopal See • C. King Eley
... nail square on the head!" he exclaimed admiringly. "Them's my own opinions to a T. I've told the boys so a hunderd times, but they can't git it. Wasn't Ol' Swal-lertail hand-in-glove wi' that slick Mister Joselyn, who they ...
— Mary Louise in the Country • L. Frank Baum (AKA Edith Van Dyne)
... old woman, a ragged, grey-haired and dirty figure, walked slowly up the rickety wooden stair and entered a bare room behind and below the shop and to the immediate left of the den of the opium-smoker. This room, which was windowless, was lighted by a tin paraffin lamp hung upon a nail in the dirty plaster wall. The floor presented a litter of straw, paper and broken packing-cases. Two steps led up to a second door, a square heavy door of great strength. The old woman, by means of a key which she carried, was about to open this door when it was opened from ...
— The Golden Scorpion • Sax Rohmer
... poh! That is just one of Tim's large stories. I do assure you it was not, at first, bigger than my thumb nail, and I am certain it has ...
— McGuffey's Fourth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... next you drink, Do me the gentleness to think That every drop of drink accursed Makes Christ within you die of thirst; That every dirty word you say Is one more flint upon His way, Another thorn about His head, Another mock by where He tread; Another nail another cross; All that you ...
— Giant Hours With Poet Preachers • William L. Stidger
... an old Impala ram from behind a mimosa thorn. He ran straight for the waggon, and it was not till he was passing within a few feet of it that I could get a decent shot at him. Then I pulled, and caught him half-way down the spine. Over he went, dead as a door-nail, and a pretty shot it was, though I ought not to say it. This little incident put me into rather a better humour, especially as the buck had rolled right against the after-part of the waggon, so I had only to gut him, fix a reim round his legs, and haul him up. By ...
— Long Odds • H. Rider Haggard
... 'n out flat like an' nail un down to bottom, 'long wi' oakum an' drop o' white lead—what ...
— A Tall Ship - On Other Naval Occasions • Sir Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... woman who is struck by a ruffian to strike him again; or if she cannot clench her fists, and he advises all women in these singular times to learn to clench their fists, to go at him with tooth and nail, and not to be afraid of the result, for any fellow who is dastard enough to strike a woman, would allow himself to be beaten by a woman, were she to make at him in self-defence, even if, instead of possessing the stately height and athletic proportions of the aforesaid Isopel, she were as diminutive ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... nothin' to a time I had in a brig off Hatteras," observed Teddy, who had somewhat recovered his composure; "we had to cut away both masts, you persave, and to scud under a scupper nail driv into the deck, wid a man ready to drive it ...
— Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXII No. 4, April 1848 • Various
... the region about Treves, a malady known as night-grip (Nachtgriff) is ascertained to be present by the following procedure: "Draw the sick man's belt about his naked body lengthwise and breadthwise, then take it off and hang it on a nail with the words 'O God, I pray thee, by the three virgins, Margarita, Maria Magdalena, and Ursula, be pleased to vouchsafe a sign upon the sick man, if he have the nightgrip or no'; then measure again, and if the belt be shorter than before, it is a sign of the said sickness." In the Liegnitz ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... said no word, and she simply screamed. I dragged her over the floor, sometimes in the water and sometimes out of it. I got the dining-room door open and set her on the stairs. They were in a topsy-turvy condition, but they were dry. I found a lantern which hung on a nail, with a match-box under it, and I struck a light. Then I scrambled back and ...
— Rudder Grange • Frank R. Stockton
... close odour which had always been present when the room was occupied by the immaculate Ellen and her predecessors. Now there was only the fresh feeling of salt air, mingled with a very faint fragrance of violets which came either from the soap or from the powder on the toilet table. A nail-polisher lay on the looking-glass, hastily thrown down; and that also witnessed to that bodily self-respect which Caroline shared with nearly all those other girls in Thorhaven who would have been in domestic service ten years ago, but now ...
— The Privet Hedge • J. E. Buckrose
... could have Conversation with such Shadows often. I think you have hit the Nail on the Head: But here is one that has lived a Batchelor, and not of the Number of Saints, who have made themselves Eunuchs for the Sake of the Kingdom of God but was made so by force, to gratify our Bellies, till God shall ...
— Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I. • Erasmus
... has alarmed a family more than a band of robbers; nay, the voice of a cricket hath struck more terror than the roaring of a lion. There is nothing so inconsiderable, which may not appear dreadful to an imagination that is filled with omens and prognostics. A rusty nail, or a crooked pin, ...
— Apparitions; or, The Mystery of Ghosts, Hobgoblins, and Haunted Houses Developed • Joseph Taylor
... glass door to the kitchen, wherein I hear the drip of water. I see a room whose curtains invest it with broidered light. There is a bed in it, with a cover of sky-blue satinette shining like the blue of a chromo. It is Marie's room! Her gray silk hat, rose-trimmed, hangs from a nail on the flowery paper. She has not worn it since my aunt's death; and alongside hang black dresses. I enter this bright blue sanctuary, inhabited only by a cold and snow-like light, and orderly and chaste as ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... falls short of the speaker's idea. Dacier has given an account of the laticlave, which has been well received by the learned. He tells us, that whatever was made to be put on another thing, was called clavus, not because it had any resemblance to a nail, but because it was made an adjunct to another subject. In fact, the clavi were purple galloons, with which the Romans bordered the fore part of the tunic, on both sides, and when drawn close together, they formed an ornament in the middle of the vestment. It was, ...
— A Dialogue Concerning Oratory, Or The Causes Of Corrupt Eloquence • Cornelius Tacitus
... or—my tongue faltered—two years; whereupon the Moldavian clerk made more signs than before, and yet more unintelligible; as I persisted, however, he flung down his pen, and, putting his thumb into his mouth, moved it rapidly, causing the nail to sound against the lower jaw; whereupon I saw that he was dumb, and hurried away, for I had always entertained a horror of dumb people, having once heard my another say, when I was a child, that dumb people were half ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... Seffy,"—and the happy father turned to the happy son and hugged him, "don't you efer forgit that she's a feather-head and got a bright red temper like her daddy! And they both work mighty bad together sometimes. When you get her at the right place onct—well, nail her down—hand and feet—so's she can't git away. When she gits mad her little brain evaporates, and if she had a knife she'd go round stabbing her best friends—that's the only sing that safes her—yas, and us!—no knife. If she had a knife it ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume II. (of X.) • Various
... "See." And she showed them nail-marks on her naked flesh. "Last night my father's ghostly hands dragged me from ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... staining the paper with the blood which flows from his wounds, not yet healed: he uses arquebus powder for ink, and the earth for a table." This particular early American writer, besides having his hand split and now one finger-nail or joint burned off and now another, his hair and beard pulled out, his flesh burned with live coals and red-hot stones, was hung up by the feet, had food for dogs placed upon his body that they might lacerate him as they ate, but finally escaped death itself through sale ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... there was eagerness in her tone. Remarking this, I decided to give another and closer look at the floor and the nails. I found the latter had not been properly inserted; or rather that there were two indentations for every nail, a deep one and one quite shallow. This caused me to make some examination of the others, those which had not been drawn from the floor, and I found that one or two of them were equally insecure, but not all; only those about ...
— The Millionaire Baby • Anna Katharine Green
... their vicinity, and a casual inspection of the records of the Auxiliary Patrol probably locked up somewhere in Whitehall. Some day these records may be made public, and then we shall read of happenings which will cause us to hold our breath, and our hair to bristle like a nail-brush. Who has not heard the story of the unarmed fishing boat which attacked a hostile periscope with nothing more formidable than a coal hammer, or the ex-fisherman who attempted to cloud Fritz's vision with a ...
— Stand By! - Naval Sketches and Stories • Henry Taprell Dorling
... square document came, Cousin Dempster said at once that he would accept, and I, who had done honors with Mrs. President, made up my mind there, right on the nail, to do just as much for the ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens
... set eyes on this, I said to myself 'What ho!' or words to that effect, I rather think this will add a touch of distinction to the home, yes, no? I'll hang it up, shall I? 'Phone down to the office, light of my soul, and tell them to send up a nail, a bit of ...
— Indiscretions of Archie • P. G. Wodehouse
... out. Grace came flying back to the front, and drew the bolt softly. But as she did so she heard a hammering, and found the door was fast. Unluckily, Hope's tool-basket was on the window-ledge, and Monckton drove a heavy nail obliquely through the bottom of the door, and it was immovable. Then Mary slipped with cat-like step to the window, and had her hand on the sill to vault clean out into the road; she was perfectly ...
— A Perilous Secret • Charles Reade
... one of his manuscript Diaries, there is the following entry, which marks his curious minute attention: 'July 26, 1768. I shaved my nail by accident in whetting the knife, about an eighth of an inch from the bottom, and about a fourth from the top. This I measure that I may know the growth of nails; the whole is about five eighths of ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... to her. "You shouldn't, I say, go and bang your head against a nail!" she then vehemently exclaimed. "Were our old ancestor separated from Yan Yang, she wouldn't even touch her rice! How ever could she reconcile herself to part from her? Besides, our worthy senior has time and again said, in the course of a chat, 'that she can't see the ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... levied by roving commanders, and even by respectable generals of all nations. A hamlet, cluster of farm-houses, country district, or wealthy city, in order to escape being burned and ravaged, as the penalty of having fallen into a conqueror's hands, paid a heavy sum of ready money on the nail at command of the conqueror. The free companions of the sixteenth century drove a lucrative business in this particular branch of industry; and when to this was added the more direct profits derived from actual plunder, sack, and ransoming, it was natural that a large ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... the back wall and hung it over a nail. The nail was straight, and the pail flaring. The pail fell. Jimmy kicked it across the room, and then gathered it up, and drove a dent in it with his heel that would hold over the nail. Then he went back to the Thread Man. "Theresh ...
— At the Foot of the Rainbow • Gene Stratton-Porter
... recorded as examples for our imitation. The prophet who hewed in pieces a captive king, the rebel general who gave the blood of a queen to the dogs, the matron who, in defiance of plighted faith, and of the laws of eastern hospitality, drove the nail into the brain of the fugitive ally who had just fed at her board, and who was sleeping under the shadow of her tent, were proposed as models to Christians suffering under the tyranny of princes and prelates. Morals and manners were subjected to a code resembling that of the synagogue, ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... dey a white man. He had a gif'. I don't care what kind of animal, a dog or a hoss, dat man he work on it and it never leave you or you house. If anybody have toothache or earache he take a brand new nail what ain't never work befo' and work dat round you tooth or ear. Dat break up de toothache or earache right away. He have li'l prayer he say. I don't know what ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves. - Texas Narratives, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... got the personality, all right! He'll do! But what's his idea in being so reluctant? Didn't the offer strike him as big enough, or what's the matter? I must say I don't like to wait. When I find a man I like to nail him. What's the idea, Thomas? Has he got something else up ...
— The Witness • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... house for the night. The work was a simple one: she set her knee against the door to shut it more firmly, and worked an old nail into the latch. Then she shook down the scant cotton curtains that were twisted aside from the windows. There were three windows, two in the living-room (which was also kitchen and beer-saloon) and one in the bedroom; that was the whole of the house. There was not an article ...
— The Zeit-Geist • Lily Dougall
... ways. I dunno," said Pliny, impartially. "Anyhow, Abner he lets on public and constant that he's a-goin' to nail Asa's hide to the barn door.... It's one good, healthy hate betwixt ...
— Scattergood Baines • Clarence Budington Kelland
... open, fer he's crazy as a loon, an' he'll kill anny one that crosses his trail. An' didn't I notice just this marnin' that his rifle was gone wit' him—me dom eyes bein' so near blind thot I c'uldn't see in the corner where it was, an' only fer wantin' a belt that hung on a nail there, I w'uldn't av been feelin' around at all where the gun sh'uld be standin'. An' it's gone, an' I mind me now the talk he was makin' about sphies in the woods, an' thot the gurrl had betther look out, an' the feller up on the peak had betther look out, an' me thinkin' he was talkin' ...
— The Lookout Man • B. M. Bower
... me for several hours past) that I had caught a tremendous cold, and should probably awaken, at the blast of the horn, a fit subject for a hospital. The night proved a feverish one. During the greater part of it, I was in that vilest of states when a fixed idea remains in the mind, like the nail in Sisera's brain, while innumerable other ideas go and come, and flutter to and fro, combining constant transition with intolerable sameness. Had I made a record of that night's half-waking dreams, it is my belief that ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Human health—how transparent is its economy under ordinary circumstances! abstinence and cleanliness, labor and rest, these simple laws, observed in just proportions, laws that may be engrossed upon a finger nail, are sufficient, on the whole, to maintain the equilibrium of pleasurable existence. Yet, if once that equilibrium is disturbed, where is the science oftentimes deep enough to rectify the unfathomable watch-work? Even the simplicities ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... his sword, his chest heaving with his panting breaths. He was naturally as fleet as the swift-footed Achilles, but the winter had told upon him, and the haste with which he had rushed to the rescue left him breathless and speechless, while he seemed as it were to nail the two lads to the spot by his steady gaze of mingled ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... They exist nearly every place and carry a particularly malicious germ that gives one "tick fever." It is not a deadly fever, but it is recurrent and weakening. There are all kinds of ticks, from little red ones no bigger than a grain of pepper to big fat ones the size of a finger-nail, that are exactly the color of the ground. They seem to have immortal life, for they can exist for a long time without food. Doctor Ward told us of some that he had put in a box, where they lived four years without ...
— In Africa - Hunting Adventures in the Big Game Country • John T. McCutcheon
... sickened me at first, for after all, I could not look upon them as other than men, even though they were only the length of my thumb-nail. I walked a few steps forward, and in all directions I could see swarms of the little creatures running. Then the memory of my coming departure from this world with Lylda, and my promise to the king to rid his land once for ...
— The Girl in the Golden Atom • Raymond King Cummings
... the figurehead of the old sloop Faith and Prudence. It is the image of a man, with a nose not unlike the one Master Lillie carries on his face. Let us saw the head off, nail it to a pole, and set it up in front of his shop with a notice attached warning all honest citizens against ...
— Under the Liberty Tree - A Story of The 'Boston Massacre' • James Otis
... 2d. The statue of Paris, presenting the apple to Venus. 3d. An immense bronze pyramid, crowned by a female figure, which turned with the wind. 4th. The colossal statue of Bellerophon, in bronze, which was broken down and cast into the furnace. Under the inner nail of the horse's hind foot on the left side, was found a seal wrapped in a woollen cloth. 5th. A figure of Hercules, by Lysimachus, of such vast dimensions that the thumb was equal in circumference to the waist of a man. 6th. The Ass and his Driver, cast by order of Augustus after the battle ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... came back to wed the princess. Alas for the poor suitors! The beetle whizzed off to a house near by through the paper windows of which light glimmered. So full was he of his passion that thinking nothing of wood or iron, he dashed his head against a nail, and fell dead ...
— Japanese Fairy World - Stories from the Wonder-Lore of Japan • William Elliot Griffis
... blacksmith captured a hind foot of the white mare's and held it between his knees. Then he began to nail ...
— The Tale of Pony Twinkleheels • Arthur Scott Bailey
... been called upon to condense those vague meditations and emotions into a sentence, I would have borrowed what Vohrenlorf had said to me when we were with the Bartensteins. He did not often hit the nail exactly on the head, but just now I could give no better summary of all I felt than his soberly optimistic reminder: "Ah, well, even if it should be ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... exactly the right degree. Such thermometers are made of wood, brass, or copper, and the degrees on them should mark not less than 350 deg.. A thermometer always should be gently lowered into the boiling sugar. When not in use, it should be kept hanging on a nail or hook. When required for candy making, place thermometer in pitcher of warm water, so that it may rise gradually, and return it to the warm water on removing it from the hot candy. This dissolves the clinging candy and ...
— The Story of Crisco • Marion Harris Neil
... thing human nature is!" she commented, when he had made an end. "My better judgment says you were all kinds of a somebody for not clinching the nail when you had it so well driven home. And yet I can't help admiring your exalted fanaticism. I do love consistency, and the courage of it. But tell me, if you can, how far these fair-fighting scruples of yours ...
— The Grafters • Francis Lynde
... in a MS. note on Piozzi Letters, i. 219, says:—'Johnson would have made an excellent Spanish inquisitor. To his shame be it said, he always was tooth and nail ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... help of the LORD, To the help of the LORD against the mighty. Blessed above women Shall Jael the wife of Heber the Kenite be, Blessed shall she be above women in the tent! He asked water, and she gave him milk; She brought forth butter in a lordly dish. She put her hand to the nail, And her right hand to the workmen's hammer; And with the hammer she smote Sisera, she smote off his head, When she had pierced and stricken through his temples. At her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay down: At her ...
— Notable Women of Olden Time • Anonymous
... came paddling after a chicken-bone, put to rout by a satanic sculpin, whereat an eel swiftly snaked the prize away, and the frost-fish, collecting at a chance of civil war, mingled in the melee, tooth and nail, or rather fin and tail. Then the vapors would darken round them again, till, with the stray rays caught and refracted in their fleece, it seemed like living in an opal full of cloudy color and fire. Far off they heard the great ground-swell of the surf upon the beach, or ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... arrers shot from a bow. The boys used to collect by the side o' that there flume to see me ride a log down, an' I've watched 'em drop in a dead faint when I spun by the crowd; but land! you can't drownd some folks, not without you tie nail-kags to their head an' feet an' drop 'em in the falls; I've rid logs down the b'ilin'est rapids o' the Kennebec an' never lost my head. I remember well the year o' the gre't freshet, ...
— Homespun Tales • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... of the way in which such legends grow, that it is only the latest of these authorities, Hsuean Tsang, who says that, though ostensibly approaching the Buddha with a view to reconciliation, Devadatta had concealed poison in his nail with the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... part of that dwelling had been planned with a direct reference to her and her tastes; that not a curtain, or a carpet, or a picture had been purchased without Melinda's having said she believed Ethie would approve it. Every stone, and plank and tack, and nail had in it a thought of the Ethie whose coming back had been speculated upon and planned in so many different ways, but never in this way—never just as it had finally occurred, with Richard gone, and no one there to welcome her, save the servants in the kitchen, who, while she ...
— Ethelyn's Mistake • Mary Jane Holmes
... oversee, and stops short at his man. It is a rare pleasure to serve him, which all laborers know. I am not a little pained by the other kind of treatment. It is as if, after the friendliest and most ennobling intercourse, your Friend should use you as a hammer, and drive a nail with your head, all in good faith; notwithstanding that you are a tolerable carpenter, as well as his good Friend, and would use a hammer cheerfully in his service. This want of perception is a defect which all the virtues of the heart ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... with a contribution from the first impecunious painter in payment of an overdue board-bill, his painting being hung on a nail beside the clock. Now; all over the walls—above the sideboard with its pewter plates and queer mugs; over the mantel holding the Delft, and between the squat windows—are pinned, tacked, pasted and hung—singly and in groups—sketches in oil, pastel, ...
— The Veiled Lady - and Other Men and Women • F. Hopkinson Smith
... divested themselves sufficiently he led Priam forwards into another great chamber evidently meant to recall the baths of Carcalla. In gigantic basins chiselled out of solid granite, Priam scrubbed his finger-nails with a nail-brush larger than he had previously encountered, even in nightmares, and an attendant brushed his coat with a utensil that resembled a weapon of offence ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... milkman, to see me home with the lantern, but I wouldn't let him 'cause of his sore throat. Throat!—no, it wasn't his throat as was rare sore—it was—no, it wasn't—yes, it was—it was his toe as was sore. His big toe. A nail out of his boot had got into it. I told him he'd be sure to have a bad toe, if he didn't go to church more regular, but he wouldn't listen; and so my words come'd true. But, as I was a-saying, I wouldn't let him light me with the lantern by reason ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... hit the nail on the head, friend Valentine," said Van Stingey. "I will take charge on them, and take them to that gentleman's house, in W—— county, who was here last week looking for a boy and a girl to raise; and mebbee ...
— The Cross and the Shamrock • Hugh Quigley
... dangerous "if Dr. Taylor should be provoked to prove in print what he only dropped in conversation." How innocent was this gentleman of the arts and stratagems of logomachy, or book-wars! The proof would not have altered the cause: Hurd would have disputed it tooth and nail; Warburton was running greater risks, every day of his life, than any he was likely to receive from this flourish in the air. The great purpose was to make the Chancellor of Lincoln the butt of his ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... rejoinders to Lois's remarks were more or less at random. Vital questions were pounding through his brain and demanding an answer. Who knew but that with regard to Rosie she was right—and yet wrong? Women, with their remarkable powers of divination, didn't always hit the nail directly on the head. It might be the case with Lois now. She might be right in her surmise that Rosie was in love, and mistaken in those light and cruel words: "Oh, not with you!" He didn't suppose it was with him. And yet ... ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... In this state-chamber, dying by degrees, Hours and long hours in the dead night, I ask "Do I live, am I dead?" Peace, peace seems all. Saint Praxed's ever was the church for peace; And so, about this tomb of mine. I fought With tooth and nail to save my niche, ye know: —Old Gandolf cozened me, despite my care; Shrewd was that snatch from out the corner South He graced his carrion with, God curse the same! Yet still my niche is not so cramped but thence One sees the pulpit o' the epistle-side, And somewhat of the choir, ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... Great-Heart? "To lift Today above the Past; To make Tomorrow sure and fast; To nail God's colors to the mast." Then God go ...
— Winning a Cause - World War Stories • John Gilbert Thompson and Inez Bigwood
... on for a couple of hours, when Ebenezer threw down his pick, seated himself with his back against a pillar of coal, one of those left to support the roof, and took from his trousers pocket a steel tobacco-box, a black short pipe, and a nail. ...
— Son Philip • George Manville Fenn
... over on that nail," said Grandpa Brown, pointing to one behind the stove. "And you can wash at the sink to-night. Now you two tots had better go to bed!" grandpa went on, as he saw Bunny and Sue standing with their backs against the ...
— Bunny Brown and His Sister Sue Playing Circus • Laura Lee Hope
... astern, and the ARLA was sliding along through a summer sea toward the wooded ranges of Malaita. The helmsman who so attracted Bertie's eyes sported a ten penny nail, stuck skewerwise through his nose. About his neck was a string of pants buttons. Thrust through holes in his ears were a can opener, the broken handle of a toothbrush, a clay pipe, the brass wheel of an alarm clock, ...
— South Sea Tales • Jack London
... him, screaming, and in a moment they were at it, tooth and nail, heaping up old scores, producing fact after fact to prove, the one to the other, false friendship, lying manners, deceitful promises, perjured records. Vera tried to interrupt, Markovitch said something, I began a remonstrance—in a moment we were all ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... I'll go. If you can stand for me, I'll stand for the full- dress suits of clothes and the finger-nail women. Anyhow, it won't ...
— The Silver Horde • Rex Beach
... daintily through the crowd, and Mr. Lessing, who was seated at the end of one of the desks, stood up to let her pass. May's skirt caught against a nail, as she followed, and Paul bent to set it free; but as May turned smiling to thank him, it gave her a faint shock of surprise to read the dislike that found expression in his eyes. Her smile faded, and she passed on her way with ...
— The Village by the River • H. Louisa Bedford
... more. The man stood at my side, staring at the ground and fidgeting, and biting his finger-nail in that disagreeable way he has. Then he said, 'Lady Pinkerton, ...
— Potterism - A Tragi-Farcical Tract • Rose Macaulay
... English shall we leuie, Whose armes were moulded in their Mothers wombe, To chace these Pagans in those holy Fields, Ouer whose Acres walk'd those blessed feete Which fourteene hundred yeares ago were nail'd For our aduantage on the bitter Crosse. But this our purpose is a tweluemonth old, And bootlesse 'tis to tell you we will go: Therefore we meete not now. Then let me heare Of you my gentle Cousin Westmerland, What yesternight our Councell ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... flowers and leaves to the inside edges of the diamonds in long twisted stitches, rows of button-hole stitches, or any kind of lace-work. After being washed and starched, the collar ought to be pressed on the wrong side with the head of a round nail warmed ...
— The Lady's Album of Fancy Work for 1850 • Unknown
... the infliction of pain upon animals. I do not remember how I first discovered that they could be evoked in this way, but I can clearly recollect many of my efforts to arouse this pleasurable excitement by abusing the dog or the cats, or by prodding the calves with a nail set in the end of a broom handle. I seldom manipulated my genitals at this time, and when I did it was for the purpose of causing sexual excitement ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... administered a fatherly rebuke in the shape of a boxed ear, which had no other effect than the eliciting from the child the outcry, "Let me be, old doctor, you!" if, indeed, we except the long scratch made upon his hand by the little sharp nail of his stepdaughter. ...
— Cousin Maude • Mary J. Holmes
... retainers and lackeys, of busy stables and a hundred windows lighted after dark. His round eyes did not meet the direct glance fixed on his face, but wandered from one object to another in the room, finally lighting on the great key of the chateau gate, which hung on a nail ...
— The Last Hope • Henry Seton Merriman
... abundant opportunities to do so," suggested the doctor. "A couple of them up in the maintop, or even in the cross-trees, could shake props, 'odd or even,' and play other games of chance, without being seen. I don't think you have hit the nail on the head yet, ...
— Outward Bound - Or, Young America Afloat • Oliver Optic
... let it not be without, nor within the hollow of the side of the Wheel; nor above, nor below the hollow at the bottom of the Wheel. Now the bigger a Wheel is, if the Frame will permit, the bell will go the better; when the wheel is new, nail Stays from the Stock to each Spoke, ...
— Tintinnalogia, or, the Art of Ringing - Wherein is laid down plain and easie Rules for Ringing all - sorts of Plain Changes • Richard Duckworth and Fabian Stedman
... you can use any natural leaf, forming the creases in wax with thumb nail or needle. To put the flowers together, or the leaves on the stem, hold in the hand until warm enough to stick. If the sheeted wax is to be used in summer, put in a little Balsam of Fir to make it hard. If for winter, none will ...
— One Thousand Secrets of Wise and Rich Men Revealed • C. A. Bogardus
... nervures proceeds the species of puffing sound which I have compared to the hissing of an adder in a posture of defence. To imitate this curious sound it is enough rapidly to stroke the upper face of an outstretched wing with the tip of the finger-nail. ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... and entered, Garth following in stony silence. It was dark within the long, narrow room, although the starlight gleamed feebly through the dirty window panes. Wayne found the lantern upon the nail where it had hung when he was a boy, lighted it, and turned the wick low so that there was only a wan light ...
— The Short Cut • Jackson Gregory
... At length the last nail was driven, and seated on the box he put his hand into an inner pocket to find his note-book, then incontinently fainted. I struggled to my feet and sprinkled water over his face till he revived and rolled on to the floor, where presently he sank into sleep or torpor. ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard
... editor of the Express, "had a Crown grant of the whole of Moneida Reservation at one time. Government actually bought it back from him to settle the Indians there. He was a well-known Family Compact man, and fought tooth and nail for ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... there, in its place: We opened it by the tapers' shine: The gems were all unchanged: the face Was—neither his nor mine. "One nail drives out another, at least! The face of the portrait there," I cried, "Is our friend's, the Raphael-faced young Priest, Who confessed ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... ill-faur'd enew to scare Satan himsel', for that matter; though it's true what you say. Ay, ye're reet tul a trippet, thar; for Beelzebub dar'n't show his snout inside the church, not the length o' the black o' my nail." ...
— Madam Crowl's Ghost and The Dead Sexton • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... across one of these continually-occurring streams, he would throw a hastily-felled tree, over which, glazed as it was by a night's rain or by the humidity of the forest, he would invite the travelers to pass. Sometimes, to a couple of logs rotting on the banks he would nail cross-strips like the rungs of a ladder, and, while the torrent boiled at a distance below, pass jauntily with his Indians, more sure-footed than goats. The wider the abyss the more insecure the causeway; and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 11, - No. 22, January, 1873 • Various
... speaking the language of Otaheite. As the Englishmen proceeded, other canoes appeared, bringing with them roasted pigs and very fine potatoes. The Captain says: "Several small pigs were purchased for a six-penny nail, so that we again found ourselves in a land of plenty. The natives were gentle and polite, asking whether they might sit down, whether they might spit on the deck, and the like. An order restricting the men going ashore was issued that I might do everything ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... his myrmidons! The abandoned and wandering mother never clasped her child more fondly to her bosom, nor gazed upon his features with more passionate visions for the future. And what had so enchanted the poor prisoner, so deluded the poor maniac? A large nail! He had found it accidentally in the garden; he had hoarded it for weeks,—it had inspired him with the hope of liberty. Often, in the days far gone, he had read of the wonders that had been effected, of the stones removed, and the bars filed, by the self-same kind of implement. ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book VIII • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... your past failures, and acknowledge them; look at your present and future difficulties, count them up and face them every one, and admit that they are more than you can hope to conquer; but then look at the dying Son of God, your Saviour—the Man with the seamless robe, the crown of thorns, and the nail-prints; look at the fountain of His Blood; look at His word; look at the Almighty Holy Ghost, who will dwell within you, if you but trust and obey, and cry out: "It shall be done! The mountain shall ...
— When the Holy Ghost is Come • Col. S. L. Brengle
... purple kimono, resplendent with green roses and bands, caused her to look like a great rag-doll with most of the sawdust missing. The others of the party arranged themselves on cushions and chairs about her, ready to fall, tooth and nail, upon the remains of the roast chicken. Azzie would not eat, but kept her hand hidden in the folds of ...
— Elizabeth Hobart at Exeter Hall • Jean K. Baird
... all the deliberate coolness of a parade: halting at every favourable spot, and renewing their cannonade. "What," exclaimed Napoleon, "no results! not a gun! not a prisoner!—these people will not leave me so much as a nail." During the whole day he urged the pursuit with impetuous rage, reproaching even his chosen generals as "creeping scoundrels," and exposing his own person in the very hottest of the fire. By his side was Duroc, the grand master of the palace, his dearest—many said, ere now, his ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart
... celestial and terrestrial things, produced both by nature and art, are so given that I was astonished when I saw a fish which was like a bishop, one like a chain, another like a garment, a fourth like a nail, a fifth like a star, and others like images of those things existing among us, the relation in each case being completely manifest. There are sea-urchins to be seen, and the purple shell-fish and mussels; and whatever the watery world possesses worthy of being known is there fully shown in ...
— The City of the Sun • Tommaso Campanells
... the moment its later organ, the Sentinel, began advocating the general regulation of prices. With ruin staring them in the face, these devotees of tradition could only reiterate their ancient formulas, nail their colors to the mast, end go down, satisfied that, if they failed with these principles, they would have failed still more terribly without them. Confronting the practical question how to prevent speculators from charging 400 per cent profit, these men turned grim ...
— The Day of the Confederacy - A Chronicle of the Embattled South, Volume 30 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... discovered that the beauty of the foot was spoilt, in this case, by a singular defect. The two toes were bound together by a flexible web, or membrane, which held them to each other as high as the insertion of the nail on either side. ...
— The Fallen Leaves • Wilkie Collins
... hob," said the Thin Woman. "You can get it for yourself. I would not move the breadth of my nail if you were dying of hunger. I hope there's lumps in it. A Leprecaun from Gort na Cloca Mora was here to-day. They'll give it to you for robbing their pot of gold. You old thief, you! you lobeared, ...
— The Crock of Gold • James Stephens
... his fingers. "What have you to do here? By your dress you should be one of those cursed clerks who overrun the land like vile rats, poking and prying into other men's concerns, too caitiff to fight and too lazy to work. By the rood! if I had my will upon ye, I should nail you upon the abbey doors, as they hang vermin before their holes. Art neither man nor woman, young shaveling. Get thee back to thy fellows ere I lay hands upon you: for your foot is on my land, and I may slay ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... wealth was any reason why he should hold aloof or consider himself above his neighbours, whose patronage had been the foundation of his fortune. He was given an old arm-chair while the others sat upon soap-boxes and nail-kegs. Cobb's Twins, William and James, were there, Emmanuel Howe, the minister's son, and Bob Wood who still sang bass ...
— The Further Adventures of Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks • Charles Felton Pidgin
... us, my friends," says Chadband, "a Gentile and a heathen, a dweller in the tents of Tom-all-Alone's and a mover-on upon the surface of the earth. We have here among us, my friends," and Mr. Chadband, untwisting the point with his dirty thumb-nail, bestows an oily smile on Mr. Snagsby, signifying that he will throw him an argumentative back-fall presently if he be not already down, "a brother and a boy. Devoid of parents, devoid of relations, devoid of flocks and herds, devoid ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... spread at the heels, nor rasped about the nail holes; use the liquid, and apply it according to directions. For hoof bound or tender feet, apply it all around the top of the hoof down one inch every day. First have a stiff shoe on the foot, and cleanse the cut or cork. Never cut ...
— Young's Demonstrative Translation of Scientific Secrets • Daniel Young
... his chair again, and I was satisfied that I had hit the nail on the head. He gasped and trembled, but, fortunately for him, we were alone in ...
— Desk and Debit - or, The Catastrophes of a Clerk • Oliver Optic
... revenues justified a diminution of taxation; war, which was imminent at the moment of the duke's fall, seemed to be escaped; the Bishop of Frejus became Cardinal Fleury; the court of Rome paid on the nail for the service rendered it by the new minister in freeing the clergy from the tax of the fiftieth (impot du cinquantieme). "Consecrated to God, and kept aloof from the commerce of men," had been Fleury's expression, "the dues of the church are irrevocable, and cannot be subject to ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... to a toilet counter, and she bought the proper hair soap, also a nail file, and cold cream, for use after windy days. Then they left her with the experienced clerk, and when at last Wesley found her she was loaded with bundles and the light of other days was in her beautiful eyes. Wesley ...
— A Girl Of The Limberlost • Gene Stratton Porter
... thy way, With well-timed oars before the royal barge, Swell'd with the pride of thy celestial charge; 40 And big with hymn, commander of an host, The like was ne'er in Epsom blankets toss'd. Methinks I see the new Arion sail, The lute still trembling underneath thy nail. At thy well-sharpen'd thumb, from shore to shore The trebles squeak for fear, the basses roar: Echoes from Pissing-Alley, Shadwell call, And Shadwell they resound from Aston-Hall. About thy boat the little fishes throng, As at the morning toast that floats along. 50 Sometimes, ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... cheerful of countenance at his pleasure, ready of speech, fiery in spirit, and as resolute in every bodily action as he was in mind; he felt towards others as he did towards Domenico, and, if he saw some error in the works of other craftsmen, he was wont to mark it secretly with his nail. And in his youth, when his works were criticized in any respect, he would give the critics to know by means of blows and insults that he was ever able and willing to take revenge in one way or another ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 3 (of 10), Filarete and Simone to Mantegna • Giorgio Vasari
... from this germ of purity how numerous the progeny of errors and superstitions! Men, in their admiration of the great, and of all that appertained to them, have forgotten that goodness is a component part of true greatness, and have made fools of themselves for the jaw-bone of a saint, the toe-nail of an apostle, the handkerchief a king blew his nose in, or the rope that hanged a criminal. Desiring to rescue some slight token from the graves of their predecessors, they have confounded the famous and the infamous, the renowned and the notorious. ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... prehistoric man. That part of their adventures is a record that exceeds the wildest darings of fiction. Their boats were called kotches. They were some sixty feet long, flat bottomed, planked with green timber. Not a nail was used. Where were nails to come from six thousand miles across the frozen tundras? Indeed, iron was so scarce that at a later day when ships with nails ventured on {296} these seas natives were detected diving below to pull ...
— Vikings of the Pacific - The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward • Agnes C. Laut
... him!" said the gambler, catching the last word. "But some one was bound to try this dodge sooner or later. Why, as far back as I can remember, people said he kept his money hidden away at the bottom of nail kegs and under heaps of scrap-iron." He took a cigar from his pocket, bit off the end, and struck a match. "Well, I wouldn't want to be the other fellow, Colonel; I'd be in all kinds of a panic; it takes nerve for a job ...
— The Just and the Unjust • Vaughan Kester
... upon as still existing, and he may be affected by the conduct shown towards it. This applies with special force to such objects as articles of clothing, and still more to footprints and to spittle, hair, nail-parings and excrement. Injury to these with malicious intent will hurt him from whom they are derived. In the same way a personal name is looked upon as inseparable from its owner; and savages are frequently careful to guard the knowledge of their true names ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... rather genius, in whose hand a jews-harp is the lyre of Orpheus, a fiddle the harp of David, a chisel a hewer of heroic forms, a brush or a pen the scepter of souls, and, alas! a nail ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... into town. Here Marina entered a co-operative grocery store, where she was going to give an order for a quarter's supplies. She was her mother's housekeeper, and had an incredible knowledge of groceries, as well as a severely practical mind: she stuck her finger-nail into butter, tasted cheeses off the blade of a knife, ran her hands through currants, nibbled biscuits, discussed brands of burgundy and desiccated soups—Laura meanwhile looking on, from a high, uncomfortable ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... ones that I anticipated would go against it tooth and nail. And Mr. Glentworth—surely he ...
— The Garies and Their Friends • Frank J. Webb
... spoke he snapped the card with his thumb-nail and it fluttered with quivering hues like a humming-bird hovering over a flower. He seemed to await a ...
— The Moon Metal • Garrett P. Serviss
... there to the god. There was a man then of Halicarnassos, whose name was Agasicles, who being a victor paid no regard to this rule, but carried away the tripod to his own house and hung it up there upon a nail. On this ground the other five cities, Lindos, Ialysos and Cameiros, Cos and Cnidos, excluded the sixth city Halicarnassos from sharing in ...
— The History Of Herodotus - Volume 1(of 2) • Herodotus
... difficulty between you boys about a nail to hang your hats upon. I suppose each of you think it ...
— The Teacher • Jacob Abbott
... are still in existence, for quite other appellations are sounding in my ears, each one of which, to the number of some hundred, signifies at least twenty yards in width, to say nothing of the length. For my part, I have already, notwithstanding the approach of winter, put up a big nail in the garret, on which to hang my bands and surplice. Listen, then, to the conclusion of your father. Give all possible care to your affairs in Munich, put them in perfect order, leave nothing to be done, and leave nothing behind ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... they would not take him among them till he had made a leap over a stick the height of himself, and till he had stooped under one the height of his knee, and till he had taken a thorn out from his foot with his nail, and he running his fastest. But if he had done all these things, he was ...
— Gods and Fighting Men • Lady I. A. Gregory
... Everybody I knowed was in debt, and had been in debt for some time, and was getting further in every week. The shopkeepers up at Merthyr were getting uneasy about their money, and besides saying plump out to some of us that we couldn't have any more bread, or that, without money down on the nail, they served out all round summonses to what was called the Court of Requests. That was all very well, but as we couldn't get enough to eat from day to day upon our wages, it was pretty certain we couldn't go and pay up arrears. ...
— Faces and Places • Henry William Lucy
... The dishonest valet was apprehended, and the property recovered. Then he complained, the tale goes on to say, of pain in one of his feet; his boot was found to be full of blood. The servant had placed a nail in his master's boot, which had been driven into the flesh. He fainted from loss of blood, fell into a violent fever, and died in a few days. This, at least, is believed to be certain: that he perished in early manhood—almost before time was given him to repent of the follies ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... hold hard. Tear holes big enough for the man with the ball to get through. Don't be afraid. Ends, you want to get down like lightning on kicks. Nail in his tracks the man who catches the ball, but don't, for the love of the pigskin, touch him until he has it, or you'll be offside. Watch out for fake kicks, forward passes, double passes—watch out for all tricks. If there's a fumble, fall on the ball and stay there, unless you ...
— Tom Fairfield's Pluck and Luck • Allen Chapman
... trinitatis," thus declaring to whom the building should be dedicated; and the roof, which, though prepared for a distant edifice, felt that it would be best at Fecamp, and actually, of its own accord, undertook a voyage by sea, and landed, without the displacing of a single nail, upon the sea-coast near the town. All these contes devots, and many others, you will find recorded in the Neustria Pia[31]. I will only detain you with a few words more upon the subject of the precious blood, a matter too important to be thus hastily dismissed. ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. I. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... their nest in a stable belonging to a lady of his acquaintance. The female laid her eggs, and was about to brood them: some days elapsed, and the people saw the female still sitting on the eggs, but the male, flying about the nest, and sometimes settling on a nail, was herd to utter a very plaintive note, which betrayed his uneasiness. On a nearer examination the female was found dead on the nest, and, on her being removed, the male took his seat upon the eggs; ...
— Domestic pleasures - or, the happy fire-side • F. B. Vaux
... only recently been discovered. There are remains of two Norman doors, the lower, with enriched mouldings and shaft, being considerably later in date than the round arch above it. This latter has the nail-head ornament. The northern end of the arch is concealed, as well as the eastern end of the adjoining door into the south aisle, by a mass of masonry ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Ely • W. D. Sweeting
... thinkin'," the little man replied. "Gin ye haud Shep's the guilty one I wad, by all manner o' means—or shootin'd be aiblins better. If not, why"—he shrugged his shoulders significantly; and having shown his hand and driven the nail well home, the ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant
... entered the library, for, after smashing the pane in the assumption that the bolt was shot, he had had no difficulty in pushing up the window. Hartley Parrish had opened the window himself, for on the nail of the middle finger of his left hand Robin had seen, with the aid of the magnifying-glass, a tiny fragment ...
— The Yellow Streak • Williams, Valentine
... The hunters led the way, with a lamp; the Count and St. Foix, who wished to please their hosts by some instances of familiarity, carried each a seat, and Blanche followed, with faltering steps. As she passed on, part of her dress caught on a nail in the wall, and, while she stopped, somewhat too scrupulously, to disengage it, the Count, who was talking to St. Foix, and neither of whom observed the circumstance, followed their conductor round an abrupt angle of the passage, ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... had his soldiers all in trim and was about to leave Fort Union, Kit Carson, who had been watching him from a nail keg upon which he was sitting, came up to him and slapped Willis' horse on the hip, saying: "Willis, I guess I had better go with you; if you go down there alone, them red devils will never let you return." ...
— The Second William Penn - A true account of incidents that happened along the - old Santa Fe Trail • William H. Ryus
... lower lip, and bending a little, began to scratch with her nail the patterns of ice that covered the window-pane. I went hastily into the next room, and sending my servant away, came back at once and lighted another candle. I had no clear idea why I was doing all this.... I was greatly ...
— The Jew And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... of the other side. In this way the load is started from the woodshed toward the parlor. Going through the door, the head of the family will carefully swing his side of the stove around and jam his thumb nail against the door post. This part of the ceremony is never omitted. Having got the family comfort in place, the next thing is to find the legs. Two of these are left inside the stove since the spring ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... and merely nodded to her, Eleanore's eyes fell on the mask of Zingarella. She stepped up, took it down from the nail on the wall, and examined it in ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... troublesome and often painful affection. The edges or sides of the nail are disposed to turn down and grow into the flesh, giving rise to inflammation, ulceration, and often great pain and suffering. The best remedy I have ever known in this difficulty is to scrape with some sharp-pointed instrument, as the point of a penknife, ...
— The Ladies Book of Useful Information - Compiled from many sources • Anonymous
... got a great head on you, old chap," he said, affectionately. "It certainly seems as though you have hit the nail on the head this time. I understand, now, why their leader was so anxious to have us move away. They expect to encounter the Indians somewhere in this neighborhood and they do not want any witnesses. What shall we ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... can be crumbled between the fingers, and the bean within is too hard to be dented by finger nail or teeth. ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... got on to a piece of bottom where the trees were small and scarce—now, thinks I, old fellow, I'll have you. So I trotted off at a pace sufficient to let my follower gain on me, and when he had got just about near enough, I wheeled and fired, and down I brought him, dead as a door nail, at ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... angels fear to tread." It was Mrs. O'Shaughnessy who was the real help. She is a woman of great courage and decision and of splendid sense and judgment. A few days ago a man she had working for her got his finger-nail mashed off and neglected to care for it. Mrs. O'Shaughnessy examined it and found that gangrene had set in. She didn't tell him, but made various preparations and then told him she had heard that if there was danger of blood-poisoning ...
— Letters of a Woman Homesteader • Elinore Pruitt Stewart
... first pail on the right hand side. But be careful, sir; there's a nail sticking out of the post there. The wind tore off a ...
— The Case of the Golden Bullet • Grace Isabel Colbron, and Augusta Groner
... with a yell, and seized him, and threw him suddenly on his back. And he knelt on his throat, like a very mountain, and taking from his waist a knife, he plunged it, with blows like those of a carpenter that hammers in a nail, over and over ...
— Bubbles of the Foam • Unknown
... better be a goal-keeper," advised Ella, wisely; "you have no running to do until the ball comes your way, and then at it you go, tooth and nail! Stop it somehow—anyhow—with your hands, your feet, your skirt, your stick. I believe there is an etiquette about it, don't you know, as there is about all those things, and that it's more swagger to stop it one way than another, but the main thing is to stop it ...
— Tom and Some Other Girls - A Public School Story • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... where everything was sold, from a nail or a spool of 'slack' to a keg of spirits or an almanac: sold for money when it could be had, for flour or wool or potash when it couldn't; likewise a post-office, whither a stage came once a week with an odd passenger, or an odd dozen of newspapers and letters; likewise the ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... his head and taking a cap that matched his plaid coat from a nail on the wall, he winked at Sam. "Come on, Old Top. I've got to get ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson
... the aspen leaves are no bigger than your nail, Is the time to look out for truff ...
— Notes and Queries, Issue No. 61, December 28, 1850 • Various
... all, for his gentleness of manner, general neatness and capacity, and the good taste which he gave to his dishes. In fact, she confessed one day to Lionel, privately in a moment of confidence, that rather than lose him, she would herself carve a joss stick and nail it up in the kitchen; which concession proves the liberalizing and widening effect of necessity upon the human mind. But this ...
— In the High Valley - Being the fifth and last volume of the Katy Did series • Susan Coolidge
... on its nail; the recorder is covered with dust; no one bothers about either Europe or Asia. What chiefly concerns the few white men who are able to live in Central Australia are the price of stock, the best place to ...
— In the Musgrave Ranges • Jim Bushman
... opened his desk, took off his coat and hung it on a nail, after his custom, thereafter seating himself at his desk, with the official cough which signified that the campaign of the day had begun. He turned over the papers for a moment, and remarked absent-mindedly, and more to be polite than because the ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough
... Waghorn, more comfortable than could have been hoped for from its exterior. The greatest annoyance we sustained was from the dust, which was brought in by a very strong wind through the lattices. I endeavoured to remedy this evil, in some degree, by directing the servants of the house to nail a sheet across the upper portion of the perforated wood-work. The windows of our chamber commanded as good a view of Suez as the place afforded; one at the side overlooked an irregular open space, which stretched between the house and the sea. At some distance opposite, there were one or two ...
— Notes of an Overland Journey Through France and Egypt to Bombay • Miss Emma Roberts
... gestures, Dona Rita was heard again. "It may have been as near coming to pass as this." She showed me the breadth of her little finger nail. "Yes, as near as that. Why? How? Just like that, for nothing. Because it had come up. Because a wild notion had entered a practical old woman's head. Yes. And the best of it is that I have nothing to complain of. Had I surrendered I would have been perfectly safe with these two. ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... chorus of praise. This fierce invective stands upon an altar at Rome:[31] "Here for all time has been set down in writing the shameful record of the freedwoman Acte, of poisoned mind, and treacherous, cunning, and hard-hearted. Oh! for a nail, and a hempen rope to choke her, and flaming pitch to burn ...
— The Common People of Ancient Rome - Studies of Roman Life and Literature • Frank Frost Abbott
... looked through the contents of the bureau more than once; but today, on removing the last bundle of letters from one of the compartments, she saw what she had never seen before, a small nick in the wood, made in the shape of a thumb-nail, evidently intended as a means of pushing aside the movable back of the compartment. In her examination hitherto she had not found such a letter as Mr. Pittman had described—perhaps there might be more letters behind this slide. ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... many woods, Of ash, of oak, and maple; Well seasoned is this stock of goods, Some kinds are very staple. Some are made with iron plates, To clinch the screw or nail, But when we would a peg shoe make, To use these plates would fail. Made, also, for men and boys, Women and girls, for each Has on this art a special claim, Their feet to train and teach. To dwell here longer would not do, The last we want's in the hand; ...
— How to Make a Shoe • Jno. P. Headley
... moment I heard his voice I knew that it was Hans), "did you dare to call the Baas a thief? Yes, a thief, O Rooter in the mud, O Feeder on filth and worms, O Hog of the gutter—the Baas, the clipping of whose nail is worth more than you and all your family, he whose honour is as clear as the sunlight and whose heart is cleaner than the white ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard
... he said, as Mr. Spriggs came down and took his hat from a nail; "about a couple of inches shorter than yourself and not near so much ...
— Short Cruises • W.W. Jacobs
... braved. Then we should have a legitimate cause of war;—then the heart of every Briton would burn with indignation, and his hand be stretched forth in defence of his country. If our flag is to be insulted, let us nail it to the top-mast of the nation; there let it fly while we shed the last drop of our blood in protecting it, and let it be degraded only when ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... the nail on the head, that's what you did, dearie! You go on and talk. A fellow like myself isn't so handy with his tongue! But he feels it just ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... to their dismay, they found that the hinges, instead of being on the outside of the trunk, were arranged differently, and they could not get at them. Again it was John who suggested a plan whereby they could accomplish their desires. "Just take a nail," he said, "and turn the head of it around in the lock. I've watched my father do that, and he ...
— How John Became a Man • Isabel C. Byrum
... fastened his blanket to a nail away up in the topmost rafter of the cabin, and here he left ...
— Buffalo Roost • F. H. Cheley
... brought him into contact with them. He viewed uneasily the last outcome of progress and the vastly increased facilities for instruction of the juvenile population. The age was sufficiently godless, in his judgment; and he had found that a Board School education was the first nail in the coffin ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... express my appreciation of your talk to boys on Sexual Hygiene. I listened with the greatest of interest to your presentation before the Boys' Conference at Lake Geneva the past summer and it seemed to me that both in substance and in form of presentation you hit the nail on the head in a way I had never before seen it done. I believe that your contribution to boys in this direction is to be even greater than that which you have been making ...
— The Biology, Physiology and Sociology of Reproduction - Also Sexual Hygiene with Special Reference to the Male • Winfield S. Hall
... Palmerston Group they found, amongst other things drifted over the reef, some planks, one of which was very thick, with trunnell holes in it, and a piece of moulding from some ship's upper works, painted yellow, with nail holes showing signs of iron rust: probably the remains of some wrecked European ship. At Comango, where they anchored on ...
— The Life of Captain James Cook • Arthur Kitson
... his question. Most people thought Buster Bumblebee a stupid fellow. Many people paid little heed to him. Yet strange to say, he often hit the nail on the head, so to speak. And this time he made Mrs. Ladybug somewhat uncomfortable. She had had no invitation to spend the winter in the fine, big house. But she didn't care to have her neighbors ...
— The Tale of Mrs. Ladybug • Arthur Scott Bailey
... that "a whole printed sheet of a newspaper may be represented on the retina on less surface than that of a finger nail; and yet not only shall every word and letter be separately perceivable, but even any imperfection of a single letter. Or, more wonderful still, when at night an eye is turned up to the blue vault of heaven, there is portrayed on the little concave of the retina the ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... loved bright colours; and the faint reflection they threw on his pale, thin face, made it look more delicate than it would have seemed in pure daylight. Two or three bookshelves, suspended by cords from a nail in the wall, contained a collection of books, poverty-stricken as to numbers, with but few to fill up the chronological gap between the Greek New Testament and stray volumes of the poets of the present ...
— Adela Cathcart, Vol. 1 • George MacDonald
... thee is courteous deed, But I to thee repeat more plain and clear, Thou ill wouldst aught design against that steed, For, while I an avenging sabre rear, This I prohibit thee, and, should it need, And every better means of battle fail, With thee for this would battle, tooth and nail." ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... There are a tribe of us, to begin with; then our family has been here for ages, and we have plenty of 'spondulics,' so we can rather lord it over the other fellows, and do as we like. There, ma'am, you can hang your smashed glass on that nail and do up your back hair as fine as you please. You can have a blue blanket or a red one, and a straw pillow or an air cushion for your head, whichever you like. You can trim up to any extent, and be as free and easy as squaws ...
— Eight Cousins • Louisa M. Alcott
... few of us who chanced to be near the captain on the smaller deck above, heard him quietly say, "Turn on the searchlight." Almost instantly an intense white light shone full on the stranger-boat, bringing it to view so distinctly that we could almost count the nail-heads, and the strands in ...
— Quiet Talks on Power • S.D. Gordon
... to Edinburgh. None the less the invitation should have been sent. Besides, the resources of aviation might have surmounted the difficulty. In any case this deplorable oversight has knocked one more nail in the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 21, 1920 • Various
... plants hitherto unknown to me,—among others, a peculiar bulb, from which I had prepared excellent arrowroot. This produced several tubers resembling sweet potatoes, but exceedingly long and thin; it was known by the Arabs as "baboon." I pierced with a nail a sheet of tin from the lining of a packing case, and I quickly improvised a grater, upon which I reduced the bulb to pulp. This I washed in water, and when strained through cotton cloth, it was allowed to settle ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker
... clock on the wall, but, alas! it was still a long way from six o'clock. At last, however, while he was still reading, the clock did strike six. Margari instantly stood up in the middle of a sentence, marked the passage with his thumb-nail so as to know at what word to begin again on the following evening, turned down the ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... will need to put up slat supports to tie the buds to. Take slats one by two inches and twelve feet long. Nail these to the sides of the limbs so they will extend six to eight feet above. Keep buds and grafts tied up every week or ten days during ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Fifth Annual Meeting - Evansville, Indiana, August 20 and 21, 1914 • Various
... 150,000 men. Belisarius, in the three months, had done his best to repair the walls, the towers, and the gates of the city. He had also laid up provisions. He dug trenches round the least defended spots, and had constructed great machines which shot bolts strong enough to nail an armoured man to a tree. Vitiges approached from the Anio, and made a desperate attempt to storm the city at once. Having failed in this, through the great courage and skill of Belisarius, and being unable, ...
— The Formation of Christendom, Volume VI - The Holy See and the Wandering of the Nations, from St. Leo I to St. Gregory I • Thomas W. (Thomas William) Allies
... object of selecting an old-line Whig and an old-line Democrat, was to nail to the counter the charge that the American party is the Whig party in disguise, and to induce, if possible, conservative men of both the old parties to unite and rescue the country from ...
— Americanism Contrasted with Foreignism, Romanism, and Bogus Democracy in the Light of Reason, History, and Scripture; • William Gannaway Brownlow
... big things"—Claude shifted in his chair, stretched out his legs and drew them up—"I told him about them and how strong they were. 'What subjects does he treat?' he said. I told him. At least, I began to tell him. 'Oh, Lord!' he said, stopping me on the nail—but you know how busy he is. He can't waste time. And he's out for the goods, you know—'Oh, Lord!' he said. 'Don't bother me with the Bible. The time for oratorio has gone to join Holy Moses!' I tried ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... the whole thing were a delusion, brought on by the nervous excitement of our skirmish, when a new marvel overtook me. From over my head there suddenly sounded a sharp, tinkling sound, like that produced by an empty glass when flipped by the nail, ...
— The Mystery of Cloomber • Arthur Conan Doyle
... foot, knocking him down and rendering him insensible. The brute then sprang forward and placed one of his hind feet on Mr. Stuart's right hand, and, rearing again, dislocated two joints of his first finger, tearing the flesh and nail from it, and injuring the bone to such an extent that amputation of the finger was at first thought unavoidable. By careful treatment, however, it was unnecessary to resort to such a course, and in five ...
— Explorations in Australia, The Journals of John McDouall Stuart • John McDouall Stuart
... lift the door. My first effort was successless. Every inspiration was quicker and more difficult than the former. As my terror, so my strength and my exertions increased. Finally my trembling hand lighted on a nail that was imperfectly driven into the wood, and which, by affording me a firmer hold, enabled me at length to raise it, and to inhale the air ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... by himself for a five-mile walk, leaving Daphne, Valentia and Harry in the garden, but a nail in his boot hurt so much that, after the first half-mile, Romer decided he couldn't stand it any longer, and would walk back, go quietly in, and then surprise them by coming ...
— The Limit • Ada Leverson
... feet spread at the heels, nor rasped about the nail holes; use the liquid, and apply it according to directions. For hoof bound or tender feet, apply it all around the top of the hoof down one inch every day. First have a stiff shoe on the foot, and cleanse the cut or cork. Never cut or burn ...
— Young's Demonstrative Translation of Scientific Secrets • Daniel Young
... and the Army he commanded were not successful in actually turning the enemy's flank and compelling his retreat, I believe that history will assign to this great General the honour of commanding the Army which drove the first big nail into the German coffin, for it was the Army which struck the blow that changed the line of battle from "east and west" to "north and south." De Castelnau, by the fine leading of that Army, built the first section ...
— 1914 • John French, Viscount of Ypres
... them we went, followed by the 'Culloden,' 'Blenheim,' and 'Diadem.' The 'Captain' was in the rear of the British line; but by the manoeuvre just performed, we came up with the Spaniards, and in a short time we and the 'Blenheim' were tooth and nail with no less than seven Spanish line-of-battle ships—one, the 'Santissima Trinidade,' of 130 guns, and the 'San Josef' and 'Salvador del Mundo' of 112, the others being of 80 and 74 guns. For nearly an hour we pounded away at them, till Captain Collingwood, in the 'Excellent,' ...
— The Grateful Indian - And other Stories • W.H.G. Kingston
... end. The experienced stockman can do powerful execution with these whips, one blow from which is sufficient to cut a slice out of the beast's hide, and I have seen an expert cut from top to bottom the side of a nail can with a single ...
— Five Years in New Zealand - 1859 to 1864 • Robert B. Booth
... Angus, working away at his job in the new International Hotel at Wallace. Graining a door in the dining-room he was, with a ham rind and a stocking over one thumb nail, doing little curlicues in the brown wet paint to make it look like what the wood was at first before it was painted at all. 'Well,' he says, 'I suspected from the assays that we might get a bit more, but if he had experts ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... now that the nail was driven home, he would clinch it on the other side and make it stay forever. He moved a reconsideration of the vote by which the bill had passed. The motion was lost, of course, and the great Industrial University act was an accomplished fact as far as ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner
... furious: he foams like a wild boar, rolls his eyes, gnashes his teeth, and rushes on his antagonist with the fury of a beast of prey. In the winter of 1840, a quarrel arose between two individuals about the sex, which led to a fight; the struggle was continued for a time with tooth and nail; when one of the parties at length got hold of his knife, and stabbed his adversary in the belly. The bowels protruded, yet the wounded man never desisted, until loss of blood and repeated stabs compelled him ...
— Notes of a Twenty-Five Years' Service in the Hudson's Bay Territory - Volume II. (of 2) • John M'lean
... Spectator, "you said in your famous speech before the Society for the Prevention of the Protrusion of Nail Heads from Plank Sidewalks that Kings were blood-smeared oppressors and ...
— Fantastic Fables • Ambrose Bierce
... had flung to the weapons, too. She had taken off her pistol when she had been nursing Bill and hadn't put it on since. Quietly, so as not to attract attention, she glanced about to locate it. It was hanging on a nail at the opposite end of the table,—and Joe stood just beside it. She had no desire to waken his suspicions of her fear. She knew she must put up a bold front, at least. Nevertheless her fingers longed for the ...
— The Snowshoe Trail • Edison Marshall
... the Clavie" has been celebrated from time immemorial on Hogmanay, the last day of December. A tar-barrel is sawn in two, one half of it is set on the top of a stout pole, and filled with tar and other combustibles. The half-barrel is fastened to the pole by means of a long nail, which is made for the purpose and furnished gratuitously by the village blacksmith. The nail must be knocked in with a stone; the use of a hammer is forbidden. When the shades of evening have begun to fall, the Clavie, as it is ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... Sir, in this matter I have no intention of troubling anyone for advice. You will pardon me, I am sure"—here he became singularly persuasive—"but I have ventured to nail that pigtail fast, and have assumed the somewhat onerous obligation of guarding it. So it is quite impossible to act on ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... plague of all, however, are the sand-fleas, which attach themselves to one's toes, underneath the nail, or sometimes to the soles of the feet. When a person feels an irritation in these parts, he must immediately look at the place; and if he discern a tiny black point, surrounded by a small white ring, the former is the chigoe, or sand- flea, and the latter the eggs ...
— The Story of Ida Pfeiffer - and Her Travels in Many Lands • Anonymous
... her finger nail and read quickly and carelessly like a little girl in a hurry. He offered to hear her her words. She passed him the book and got up to repeat what she had learned. She floundered and would repeat the end of one ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... he says to himself, "I must nail my boards together." So he puts the boards that are going to make the top together and he takes a nail and then ...
— Here and Now Story Book - Two- to seven-year-olds • Lucy Sprague Mitchell
... conclusively enough—but if Penreath was the murderer where had he got the umbrella with which he shielded himself from the storm? The fact that the murderer carried an umbrella is proved by the discovery of a small patch of umbrella silk which had got caught on a nail by the window. Again, why should a man, getting from one window to another, bother about using an umbrella for a journey of a few feet only? He would know that he could not use it when carrying the body to the pit, for that task would require ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... keenest eye could discover The sign of the sloth on you, From the last mane-lock laid over To the last nail tight in the shoe; A blast, and your ranks stood ready; A shout, and your saddles filled; A wave, and your troop was ready To ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 9, 1917 • Various
... raising the hatch leading to the fore-peak he saw that the place was nearly full of water. His exploration of the forecastle ended here; and he was about to proceed on deck when he caught sight of a fishing-line suspended on a nail inside one of the bunks. This fishing-line he at once secured and took on deck with him laying it down on top of the carpenter's tool-chest so that it might not be forgotten when he ...
— The Missing Merchantman • Harry Collingwood
... message from Teppahoo to acquaint me the heifer was brought to Matavai. I immediately went on shore and found that he had been as good as his word. The purchase money was paid, which consisted of a shirt, a hatchet, a spike nail, a knife, a pair of scissors, a gimlet, and file; to which was added a small quantity of loaf-sugar. Teppahoo appeared well pleased with his bargain; and I sent the heifer to Poeeno's residence near which ...
— A Voyage to the South Sea • William Bligh
... 'Another grand day, mam!' I assented, though I could not for the life of me remember when the last one occurred. However, dreary as the weather may be, one cannot be dull when doing one's morning round of shopping in Pettybaw or Strathdee. I have only to give you thumb-nail sketches of our favourite tradespeople to ...
— Penelope's Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... temperatures between 32 deg.F. and 45 deg.F. It has been found that a nearly air-tight container is required in order to maintain a relative humidity of 100% and prevent too much drying of the nuts. A 50-pound tin lard can with one 20d nail hole in the side near the lid has proven to be a good container for large quantities and these same cans also make good shipping containers merely by wiring on the lids. One-gallon friction top syrup cans ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Incorporated 39th Annual Report - at Norris, Tenn. September 13-15 1948 • Various
... foot to the heel, or even to the leg (Fig. 20). There is often a history of some slight injury preceding its onset. The vitality of the tissues is so low that the balance between life and death may be turned by the most trivial injury, such as a cut while paring a toe-nail or a corn, a blister caused by an ill-fitting shoe or the contact of a hot-bottle. In some cases the actual gangrene is determined by thrombosis of the popliteal or tibial arteries, which are already ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... passed within range of the party by the sledge. The owl kept above her as she ran. A dozen leaps was all the hare ever made. A loud crack was heard, and she was seen to spring up and fall back upon the snow, dead as a door-nail. Like an echo another crack followed—a wild scream rang through the air, and the great white owl fell fluttering to the earth. The reports were not of a rifle. They were the louder detonations of a shot gun. ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... coarse wool of the socks irritated her fingers. It caught in a split nail, setting ...
— Mary Olivier: A Life • May Sinclair
... It grows continuously from the roots like the latter, and in many respects corresponds, save that the free end is always fringed. Baleen, therefore, though varying from a few inches to a number of feet long, in fact approximates to a series of, so to say, mouth nail-plates, which laminae have a somewhat transverse position to the cavity of the mouth, and thus their inner split edges and lower free ends cause the mouth to appear as a great hairy archway, shallower in front and deeper behind" (Cassell's ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... measured by a common dynamometer (Fig. 38), which the patient is requested to grasp with all his might. Compressive strength is tested by compressing the oval. In order to test tractive strength, the dynamometer is fastened to a nail at the point C, and the patient pulls with all his strength at D. The effort is registered on a graduated scale and is of importance for detecting left-handedness and measuring the extraordinary force that is displayed in certain ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero
... perhaps, the Contemptible One; but most often Vana Pois, the Old Boy; God being frequently called Vana Isa, the Old Father. He dwells in the underground kingdom, and has three daughters, or foster-daughters; a hat of invisibility, composed of nail-parings; a bridge-building wand, and a sword. He has also much gold and silver plate, and ducks and geese with gold and silver plumage. These treasures are often carried off by enterprising heroes. The maidens whom the Kalevipoeg found in the palace of Sarvik do not appear to have ...
— The Hero of Esthonia and Other Studies in the Romantic Literature of That Country • William Forsell Kirby
... from mules, and every animal was sent to our remudas under herd. The accoutrements were stacked inside the gate like haycocks, with slickers thrown over them; the carbines were thrown on the gallery, and from every nail, peg, or hook on the wall belts and six-shooters hung in groups. These rangers were just ordinary looking men, and might have been mistaken for an outfit of cow hands. In age they ranged from a smiling youth of twenty to grizzled ...
— A Texas Matchmaker • Andy Adams
... truth is that it is clay merely;' which passage again has reference to the material cause. The text adds a few more illustrative instances of similar nature, 'As by one nugget of gold all that is made of gold is known; as by one pair of nail-scissors all that is made of iron is known.'—Similar promissory statements are made in other places also, for instance, 'What is that through which if it is known everything else becomes known?' (Mu. Up. I, 1, 3.) An illustrative instance ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sankaracarya - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 1 • George Thibaut
... parting; retracing then his steps, he got over the hedge which divided his mother's little garden from the road, and softly opening the door that led to the little room in which he had been accustomed to sleep, and where he had kept his treasured letters, he took the little pouch from the nail on which it hung, and was hastening away—when the sound of his mother's voice struck his ear. She was weeping—but in the midst of her tears was she also praying for her son. "Oh, good Lord," she said, "protect my child from the dangers of the world. ...
— The Young Emigrants; Madelaine Tube; The Boy and the Book; and - Crystal Palace • Susan Anne Livingston Ridley Sedgwick
... the charms of the open air and the crowd, some such little raft in the wreck, some occasional opportunity like that of Tuesday, has been present to me these two days as better than nothing. But if our friends are so accountable to this house of course there's no more to be said. And it's one more nail, thank God, in the coffin of our odious delay." He was but too glad without more ado to point the moral. "Now I hope you see we can't work ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... Majesty's subjects. The moment you shake hands with them, you feel in the firm flesh of palm and finger that their heart's-blood circulates purely and freely from the point of the highest hair on the apex of the pericranium, to the edge of the nail on the large toe of the right foot. Their eyes are as clear as unclouded skies—the apples on their cheeks are like those on the tree—what need, in either case, of rubbing off dust or dew with a towel? What though, from sleeping without a nightcap, their hair may be a little ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... Give it to him, Nora; it's on a nail by the white boards. I hung it up this morning, for the pig with the black feet ...
— The Atlantic Book of Modern Plays • Various
... they gathered up their supplies and moved along the hollow to where a passage had been cut through. They had gone barely a hundred yards when a screech, like a buzz-saw when it strikes a nail, sounded overhead. Looking up they saw a black disk hurtling through the air, to drop almost where they had been standing a moment before. There was a terrific explosion that sent debris to their ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces in the Red Cross • Edith Van Dyne
... any extra clothing, Joe and I followed my father through the kitchen, I grabbing a revolver from its nail in the wall, and Joe snatching down the great eight-bore duck-gun and slipping into it two cartridges prepared for this very contingency, each cartridge containing twelve buck-shot and a big spherical bullet—a ...
— The Boys of Crawford's Basin - The Story of a Mountain Ranch in the Early Days of Colorado • Sidford F. Hamp
... years; But love, whose speechless ecstasy Had overborne the finite, now Throbs through thy being, pure and free, And burns upon thy radiant brow. For thou those hands' dear clasp hast felt, Where still the nail-prints are displayed; And thou before that face hast knelt, Which wears the scars the thorns ...
— Catharine • Nehemiah Adams
... ghost could do no less than make his appearance, and he arose from his place of partial concealment as majestically as he could, considering the fact that the sheet had been caught upon a nail, and he was obliged to stoop two or three times to unfasten it. But he did succeed in rising at last, and then, to make himself look as much like a spectre as possible, he held both arms straight out as he walked slowly down ...
— Left Behind - or, Ten Days a Newsboy • James Otis
... him warmly on the back). My dear chap, you've just hit the nail plumb on the right head. That's what I've said all along. The whole country's being simply ruined with all these blessed Councils. Every man will have to be his own Council before long, if they go on making Councils ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 29, 1893 • Various
... lampade terras," continued Brother Emmanuel, inexorably running his horny finger-nail beneath the line, "humentemque Aurora polo dimoverat umbram—" the lesson ...
— Otto of the Silver Hand • Howard Pyle
... these towns they pursued means of 'pacification' resembling those employed at Brescia. All who possessed what by a fiction could be called arms were summarily slaughtered. At Ancona, a woman of bad character hid a rusty nail in the bed of her husband, whom she wished to get rid of; she then denounced him to the military tribunal, and two hours later an English family, whose house was near the barracks, heard the ring of the volley of musketry which despatched him. Austria had also occupied the Grand Duchy of ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... the Prince with the Lip's Power is in, to make such a huff at this Time, shall come under Examination by and by; in the mean time the Solunarians have clench'd the Nail, and secur'd the War to last as long ...
— The Consolidator • Daniel Defoe
... disposed themselves on the sunny grass, in the various attitudes of severe inattention which youth assumes when listening to a story. Sweetheart pored into the depths of a buttercup. Hugh John scratched the freestone of a half-buried tomb with a nail till told to stop. Sir Toady Lion, having a "pinch-bug" coralled in his palms, sat regarding it cautiously between his thumbs. Only Maid Margaret, her dimpled chin on her knuckles, sat looking upward in rapt attention. For her there was no joy like that of a story. Only, she was ...
— Red Cap Tales - Stolen from the Treasure Chest of the Wizard of the North • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... programmed for that afternoon—the modest enterprise of an obscure piano-forte teacher, who could only venture to address pupils, patrons, and friends. What did he promise? Among other things, music from "Lucia," music from "Norma," music from "Ernani." Teresa made another approving mark with her thumb-nail; and Carmina ...
— Heart and Science - A Story of the Present Time • Wilkie Collins
... been very well. Where is it that you suffer?" he asked sympathetically. "I think it is worst when it seems to be in the very centre of one's head, like a red-hot nail being driven in with a hammer—is that like what ...
— A Tale of a Lonely Parish • F. Marion Crawford
... always talk in strict logical sequence. He must search about for the right nail till he has found it, and then drive ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford
... from the nail, she paused a moment before plunging it into the water pail; paused, and leaning her elbow on a corner of the shelf over the sink, looked steadfastly out ...
— The Story Of Waitstill Baxter • By Kate Douglas Wiggin
... burning pains of the frost-bites, exhaustion did its work, and the man slept. He waited for some moments listening to the heavy, regular breathing, then he turned to his companions and spoke long and earnestly in a curious tongue. One of the Eskimos rose and removed a piece of bacon from a nail in the wall. This he placed in the camp-kettle on the stove. Then he took a tin billy and dipped it full from a bucket containing beans that had been set to soak. These also went into the camp-kettle. Then the fellow threw himself down again upon his blankets, and, for some time, ...
— The Hound From The North • Ridgwell Cullum
... have spent their lives in the atmosphere of the law courts. The aptitude with which the right word always comes to his lips—his magnificent composure, and, at the same time, his power of striking the nail right on the head and right into the head—all these things come out on an occasion such as that of April 24th. Very quietly, but very significantly, he told the story of the riots; and very quietly and very significantly he spoke of the ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... trick of that workbox of old. It brought back her early childhood to find the key concealed in a little slot beneath it; hidden behind a corner of green cloth beyond suspicion; that opened, for all that, when the edge was coaxed with a finger-nail. It had been her first experience of a secret, and a fascination hung about it still. That confused image of a second mother, growing dimmer year by year in spite of a perfunctory system of messages maintained in the correspondence of the ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... mother, wrings my very soul. Silk hat, ruffled shirt, silver-buckled shoes, kid gloves, cane, velvet suit, with one two-inch pocket which is an insult to his sex,—how I pity the pathetic little caricature! Not a spot has he to locate a top, or a marble, or a nail, or a string, or a knife, or a cooky, or a nut; but as a bloodless substitute for these necessities of existence, he has a toy watch (that will not go) and an embroidered handkerchief with ...
— Children's Rights and Others • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... casements it even looked at times as if they were a new species of Indian, collecting political scalps! All manner of people accused them of all manner of things. In the East they were called "blacksmith-shop politicians, nail-keg economists, grousers and soreheads"; in the West they were dubbed "corner-grocer statesmen and political ...
— Deep Furrows • Hopkins Moorhouse
... and there an area window rattled dolorously. I carried a tape-line with me and made measurements of the length and depth of the corridor and of the chambers that were set off from it. These figures I entered in my note-book for further use, and sat down on an empty nail-keg to reflect. The place was certainly substantial; the candle at my feet burned steadily with no hint of a draft; but I saw no solution of my problem. All the doors along the corridor were open, or yielded readily to ...
— The House of a Thousand Candles • Meredith Nicholson
... cruelty" were "in their habitations[604].") O no! It was because she beheld in the slumbering captain at once the enemy of her own afflicted race,—and of GOD'S oppressed people,—and above all of GOD Himself. That was why "she put her hand to the nail, and her right hand to the workman's hammer!" ... The fight, you are requested to remember, had been a tremendous fight; and the battle, as she thought, was yet raging. Reuben, and Dan, and Asher had kept aloof from the encounter;—the first, in his rich pasture-land east of the Jordan, ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... prints could be written on my thumb nail. But I made a long and dangerous shot, by looking wise and asking if he thought Matahei compared favorably with Moronobo as painters of the same era. I choked off a gasp when I said it, for I would have you ...
— The Lady and Sada San - A Sequel to The Lady of the Decoration • Frances Little
... long-drawn guttural sound of mingled pain and satisfaction. This operation he repeated several times. On my inquiring the meaning of his strange conduct, he only said, 'Me carpenter-make 'em' ('I am mending my foot'), and then showed me his charred great toe, the nail of which had been torn off by a tea-tree stump, in which it had been caught during the journey, and the pain of which he had borne with stoical composure until the evening, when he had an opportunity of cauterizing the wound in ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... "Only started another nail," answered Jim. "I suppose that will turn black now and begin to come off. That'll make the third I've lost this year. Lucky it was on the ...
— The Rushton Boys at Rally Hall - Or, Great Days in School and Out • Spencer Davenport
... long way off, between d'Adhemar and Laferte; while Palaiseau snorted and sniffed himself to sleep in the bed next mine, and Rapaud still tried to read the immortal works of the elder Dumas by the light of a little oil-lamp six yards off, suspended from a nail in the ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... awful. Judith, Jael, Delilah, and Athaliah were not mythical. Is there a man who has not wakened from dreams, to find that the woman he trusted has stolen his strength or is just about to hammer the great nail home ...
— Fair Margaret - A Portrait • Francis Marion Crawford
... would come a hot bath at the hotel—a tremendous scrubbing, and a "rub down," with a big towel—haircuttings, and shaving, and nail cleanings! Then he would get into mufti. He chose, after a careful review, a lounge suit of a grey-blue colour that had been fashionable that summer. It was light, and he had always liked the feel of it on his shoulders. He chose the shirt, collar and tie to go with it. He imagined himself ...
— "Contemptible" • "Casualty"
... far away Where sleep the good and brave, But a better place ye have named for me Than by my father's grave. For truth and right, 'gainst treason's might, This hand has always striven, And ye raise it up for a witness still In the eye of earth and heaven. Then nail my head on yonder tower— Give every town a limb— And God who made shall gather them: I go ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 8 • Various
... little more than huge masses of very hard seeds buried in pulp of exquisite taste. The sapota, or sapodtilla, is less characterized by stoniness, and one soon learns to like it. It has large flat seeds, which can be split into two with the finger-nail; and a fine white skin lies between these two halves. It requires some skill to remove entire this little skin, or pellicle, without breaking it: to do so is said to be a test of affection. Perhaps this bit of folk-lore was suggested by the shape of the pellicle, which ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... upon my skirts, haling me back to work, and denouncing me to the world as a fugitive from my public duties, I shall not feel myself called upon to contradict him. As often as he nails me with the charge of being a skulker from work in meditatione fugae, I shall turn round and nail him with the charge of harbouring an intense admiration for me, and putting a most hyperbolical value upon my services; or else why should he give himself so much trouble, after so many months are gone by, in pursuing and recapturing me? On this principle, I shall ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... a terrible struggle trying to climb the high overhanging sides of the batilla in the face of such tooth and nail opposition, the beggars fighting, as Mr Gresham had ...
— Young Tom Bowling - The Boys of the British Navy • J.C. Hutcheson
... was ornamented. At first, she could not think how the squaws worked with the quills, as they could not possibly thread them through the eye of a needle; but her nurse told her that when they want to work any pattern in birch-bark, they trace it with some sharp-pointed instrument, such as a nail, or bodkin, or even a sharp thorn; with which they pierce holes close together round the edge of the leaf, or blade, or bird they have drawn out on the birch-bark; into these holes they insert one end of the quill, the other end is then drawn through the ...
— Lady Mary and her Nurse • Catharine Parr Traill
... antiquity to a merely middle-aged bottle, only served to heighten the general resemblance to a prison door; a resemblance further heightened by the trefoil-shaped iron-work, the formidable hinges, the clumsy nail-heads. A miser, or a pamphleteer at strife with the world at large, must surely have invented these fortifications. A leaden sink, which received the waste water of the household, contributed its quota to the fetid atmosphere of the staircase, and the ceiling was covered ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... sound was uttered, a cause for suppressing it rushed upon his mind. At length, when he had patched a considerable rent, and was beginning to mend another, his feelings appeared altogether to derange the power of attention necessary for his work. The piece of wood which he was about to nail on was at first too long; then he sawed it off too short, then chose another equally ill adapted for the purpose. At length, throwing it down in anger, after wiping his dim eye with his quivering hand, he exclaimed, ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... aloud to see that here was that happy and comic thing a Dogberry, a simple soul who gilds employment in some mean and tedious capacity by conceiving it as a position of power over great issues. He took a large key down from a nail on the wall and exclaimed, "I'll take you myself!" and she perceived that he was going to do something which he should have delegated to a porter, so that he might continue to display himself and his ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... what I took to when I entered upon this farm, and in the improvement which I had made in cultivation, stock, &c. I sold my lease for two thousand pounds, and the valuations were to the amount of six thousand more; the whole sum being eight thousand pounds, which was paid me on the nail, by Richard Crawshaw, Esq. the present proprietor; and I took my leave of Rowfant, bearing away with me two thousand pounds more than I carried thither. This was such an occurrence as had never been known, in the memory of man, to have happened to any stranger that had ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 3 • Henry Hunt
... fig. 842, is worn on the forefinger of the right hand, formed of a small plate of sheet brass, rolled up but not joined, so as to fit any finger; it is open at the top like a tailor's thimble and has a little notch on the side which is placed above the nail, and in which you lay the tambour needle whilst you work. From the thimble being cut slightly slanting at the top, it follows that the inside where the two ends meet is a little ...
— Encyclopedia of Needlework • Therese de Dillmont
... and Carboy's. The young gentleman showed me through an outer office into Mr. Kenge's room—there was no one in it—and politely put an arm-chair for me by the fire. He then called my attention to a little looking-glass hanging from a nail on one side of ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... laughing softly as a boy in the midst of a prank, and busily throwing off the robe of serge. Fumbling through the night he located the shirt and trousers he had seen hanging from a nail on the wall. Into these he slipped, and then went out ...
— Riders of the Silences • Max Brand
... appears in any part of the head, usually one-sided, or it may be all over the head, which feels enlarged and sometimes as if a band was around it. The least mental effort makes it worse. Sometimes there is a feeling as if a nail was being driven into the head; head is too big; eyes feel heavy and the lids droop; sees double; hard to keep eyes open. This kind of headache, or sick-headache, can be brought on suddenly by womb trouble, ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... luik like that; I ken my Bible no that ill!" she added, catching a glimmer of surprise on Donal's countenance. "But for that Maister Scletter—dod! I wadna be sair upon 'im—but gien he be fit to caw a nail here an' a nail there, an fix a sklet or twa, creepin' upo' the riggin' o' the kirk, I'm weel sure he's nae wise maister-builder fit to lay ony fundation.—Ay! I tellt ye I kent my beuk no that ill!" she added with some triumph; then resumed: "What the waur wad he or she or ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... man added: "Germany stands for nearly everything we Americans are opposed to, tooth and nail. We just loathe militarism. Conscription's a thing we abominate. And feudalism is more dead over here than in any country in ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... of making nail-holes in the shoe seemed to engross the taciturn young smith's attention for the next ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... "Kuta'ah": lit. a bit cut off, fragment, nail- paring, and here un diminutif. I have described this scene in Pilgrimage iii. 68. Latro often says, "Thy gear is wanted by the daughter of my paternal uncle" (wife), and thus parades his politeness by asking in ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... religious freedom, this Cathedral draws on the credulity of the people by its supposititious relics—such as a nail of the true cross, which is carried in procession every third of May; the cradle and swaddling clothes of the infant Christ; part of the towel with which He wiped His disciples' feet; four thorns from His crown; ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... Jack Dillard gits de 'state," she proceeded, as though she had not heard my eager question, "wy, den Sabra Smif am as dead as a door-nail from dis time to de day ob judgment, an' de ole man 'll have to git anoder 'fectionate companion, I'se mity sorry for de poor ole soul, but I a'n't gwine to put myself in Jack Dillard's claws, not ef I knows myself. He's one ob dem young wite sort wat lubs de ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield
... engaged in the occupation of nail-making. They work in glass-houses, glue-works, nursery-gardens, at ordinary farm-work. On some of the canals they manage the boats, open the locks, drive the horses, and sometimes even draw the boats with the line across their shoulders. In short, wherever the lowest and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... They deal, not only with pence and half-pence, but with farthings and half-farthings, and were compiled from the tablets or small account-books posted up from day to day and hour to hour. They give the price of every nail hammered into a wall, and rarely omit the cost of the parchment on which the roll itself is written. The men must have been very busy, or, if you prefer it, very fussy— certainly they could not have been idle to have kept ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... a hill called Calvary, they laid the cross down on the ground, and stripped Jesus of his clothes. They put Jesus on the cross, and stretched out his arms. They drove a nail through each hand, and one through his feet, fastening him to the cross. Then they stood the cross upright, and let Jesus hang there. On the top of it was written: "This is the King of the Jews." There was a cross on either side of him, ...
— The King Nobody Wanted • Norman F. Langford
... a bird-shop, and offered, in writing, to barter himself against old clothes, empty bottles, or even kitchen stuff. Surely a low thing and a depraved taste in any finch! I bought that goldfinch for money. He was sent home, and hung upon a nail over against my table. He lived outside a counterfeit dwelling- house, supposed (as I argued) to be a dyer's; otherwise it would have been impossible to account for his perch sticking out of the garret window. From the time of his ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... pieces of cloth served as coverlids. The pillow was a curious affair, being a thick piece of bamboo, about four feet long, on little legs. We were shown into one of these rooms, and a sign made to us to go to sleep. Even the largest houses have not a nail in them, but are fastened together with sennit, which is a line made from the root of a tree. I may say that everything is fastened with sennit—canoes, as well as houses—so that large quantities ...
— Taking Tales - Instructive and Entertaining Reading • W.H.G. Kingston
... of the Iron Men of Congress. Does he mean the Cast-iron members or the Pig-iron members? For instance there are the rusty Heavy-weights, and then there are the fellows who are greedy about Tariff. Members of the scrap-iron and ten-penny nail order are, of course, not alluded to. All these are iron men, but, as every body knows, are not men of Iron. In view of its rusty legislation and legislators, we recommend Congress to hang out a sign—"Highest prices ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 9, May 28, 1870 • Various
... print what he only dropped in conversation." How innocent was this gentleman of the arts and stratagems of logomachy, or book-wars! The proof would not have altered the cause: Hurd would have disputed it tooth and nail; Warburton was running greater risks, every day of his life, than any he was likely to receive from this flourish in the air. The great purpose was to make the Chancellor of Lincoln the butt of his sarcastic pleasantry; and this object was secured by Warburton's ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... which the White Lady sleeps until it pleases her to walk, and that, while she is walking, it will certainly not be found at its place. Did I not report to your excellency six months since that the portrait had again broken the nail and fallen? It was an entirely new nail, count, so firm and strong, that half a regiment of French soldiers might have been hung upon it at the same time; I had had the nail made by the blacksmith, and the mason fixed ...
— NAPOLEON AND BLUCHER • L. Muhlbach
... no use," he said, "I am very old, and the poison has killed me. My brain is already growing numb, and I must act quickly, Look on that nail behind the door and you will find the door key. ...
— The Enchanted Island • Fannie Louise Apjohn
... Philadelphia and rode to and from Mount Vernon, occasionally suffering an upset on the wretched roads. It was strong and of good workmanship and its maker heard with pride that it had made the long southern tour of 1791 without starting a nail or a screw. This coach was purchased at the sale of the General's effects by George Washington Parke Custis and later in a curious manner fell into the possession of Bishop Meade, who ultimately made it up into walking sticks, picture frames, ...
— George Washington: Farmer • Paul Leland Haworth
... one of the large floating decoys made of cork and canvas, and painted black, and drawing a nail from the broken boat, fastened it to the end of a strip from the bottom—in fact, one of the runners. This was planted beside the strip, sustaining the record contained in the copper case, and formed a beacon, easily distinguished against ...
— Adrift in the Ice-Fields • Charles W. Hall
... of Signora Mimi Aguglia Ferrau and Signor Grasso. The others form a very good company, but it is only in respect of these two that one employs the word "genius," which cautious writers use very rarely, though there are journalists who lavish it upon everybody a thumb-nail's ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... off; but early on the third morning there were several came off with debashees (merchants) on board. They brought such things as might be wanted by the ship's company and officers. Their boats are made to carry passengers and cargo. There is not a vestige of a nail to be seen in them, their seams, instead of being nailed, are sewed together with coir rope; and they are generally manned ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to India; of a Shipwreck on board the Lady Castlereagh; and a Description of New South Wales • W. B. Cramp
... Scotty waited as patiently as possible. Scotty, the more relaxed of the pair, borrowed a copy of a style manual and studied it with apparent interest. Rick watched him, envious as always of his pal's ability to let time pass without floor pacing, nail chewing, or ...
— The Electronic Mind Reader • John Blaine
... Haskins, after some argument and much suggestion, was entitled "Claw-Hammer." Such titles as "Deer-Foot," "Rail-Hopper," "Back-Flip Bill," "Wind-Splitter," and the like were discarded in favor of "Claw-Hammer"—for the unfortunate Bill had stepped on a rusty nail in his recent exodus from the lion's den, and was at the time suffering from a swollen and inflamed foot—really a serious injury, although scoffed at by the good-natured Bill himself despite Mrs. Bailey's solicitude and ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... this weapon. Of course it was already loaded, but, lest the night-dew might have damped the priming, he threw up the pan-cover, with his thumb-nail scraped out the powder, and then poured in a fresh supply from his horn. This he adjusted with his picker, taking care that a portion of it should pass into the touch-hole, and communicate with the charge inside. The steel was then returned to its place, and the flint duly looked ...
— The White Chief - A Legend of Northern Mexico • Mayne Reid
... spot, Herne took down a large key from a nail in the wall, against which it hung, and ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth
... you, Eva?' whispered Laura, reprovingly; but Lady Eveleen only shook her head at her, and declaring she saw a dangerous nail sticking out, began to hammer it in with such good will, that Charles stopped his ears, and told her it was worse than her tongue. 'Go on ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... entertained you in the sitting room with its stiff, leather-covered furniture, the brass-headed tacks whereof sparkled like so many stars—a cleanliness that bade you farewell in the spotless stretch of sand-sprinkled hallway, the wooden floor of which was worn into knobs around the nail heads by the countless scourings and scrubbings to which it had been subjected and which left behind them an all-pervading faint, fragrant odor of soap ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard Pyle
... The enormously long nail of his right index finger rested upon the opened page of the book, to which he seemed constantly to refer, dividing his attention between the volume, the contents of the test-tube, and the progress of a second experiment, or possibly a part of the ...
— The Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... all the other people, also busy collecting themselves, who went up with me in the "bang," by keeping on demanding of them the information, "Excuse me, but have you by any chance seen anything of a big-toe nail knocking about?" I always feel so sorry for those Egyptian princesses whose teeth and hair, whose jewels and old bones, proved such an irresistible attraction to the New Zealand and Australian soldiers when they were in camp near Cairo, that they stole ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... not of the humble sort, is the most self-conceited thing alive. He can no more take in the idea that your objection to him is he than a board can draw a nail into itself. You've ...
— John March, Southerner • George W. Cable
... going to replace them on the Altar, I asked if I might touch the precious treasures. He said I might do so, but was doubtful if I should succeed; however, I put my little finger into one of the openings of the reliquary and was able to touch the Sacred Nail once hallowed by the Blood of Our Saviour. You see I behaved towards Him like a child who thinks it may do as it pleases and looks on its Father's ...
— The Story of a Soul (L'Histoire d'une Ame): The Autobiography of St. Therese of Lisieux • Therese Martin (of Lisieux)
... in that condition of mind when a man does not know what to think of any particular event. The bee-hunter, quick-witted, and managing for his life, was not slow to perceive the advantage he had gained, and he proceeded at once to clinch the nail he had so skilfully driven. Turning from Cloud to the head-chief of the party, a warrior whom he had no difficulty in recognizing, after having so long watched his movements in the earlier part of the night, he pushed the same subject a ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper
... loosely upon the living-room floor, littered about with bits of leather and buckles; from a nail hung a rusty, long-rowelled Mexican spur; on the hearth-stone were many cigarette stumps and an occasional cigar-end. An open door showed a tumbled bed, the ...
— Man to Man • Jackson Gregory
... to speculation these days, passed by the window without looking up. He put his wooden buck down, and, hanging his saw on a nail on the side of ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... cover of darkness, the Germans had been labouring on that redoubt, thinking that they were unobserved. They had kept extremely quiet, too, slipping their spades into the earth softly and hammering a nail ever so lightly; and, of course, the redoubt was placed behind a screen of foliage which hid it from the view of the British trenches. Such is the hide-and-seek ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... proud of having one long nail on the little finger, to show that they do not labor like the poor, for if they did, the nail would break. Men in China wear necklaces ...
— Far Off • Favell Lee Mortimer
... corridor. She had resolutely refrained from looking at the little jewelled casket, engraved "From Lucy to Rita," which lay in her make-up box upon the table. But the imminence of an ordeal which she dreaded intensely weakened her resolution. She swiftly dipped a little nail-file into the white powder which the box contained, and when Pyne came in she turned to ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... into the chair, in a formal public paper, denounced the practice of appointing members of Congress to office. He said, that, if that practice continued, corruption would become the order of the day; and, as if to fasten and nail down his own consistency to that point, he declared that it was due to himself to practise what he recommended to others. Yet, Sir, as soon as he was in power, these fastenings gave way, the nails all flew, and the promised consistency remains ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... occasion of Captain Owen visiting the brother of the King of Baracouta, a calabash of palm-wine was produced, which, in consequence of some imperfection in the vessel, leaked out its contents; in order to cure this defect, the hospitable chief took off his hat, and, scraping with his thumb-nail a portion of the clay and grease from his head, effectually checked further leakage, with ...
— A Voyage Round the World, Vol. I (of ?) • James Holman
... think she might! She knows I'm hungry, and that makes her be as slow as a board nail!—I'll tell you what I wish, Prudy. I wish the whole world was a 'normous cling-stone peach, so I could keep eating for always, and never come to ...
— Dotty Dimple At Home • Sophie May
... Lord Chatham (S538), was one of the warmest friends that America had; but he openly advocated this narrow policy, saying that if British interests demanded it he would not permit the colonists to make so much as a "horseshoe nail." Adam Smith, an eminent English political economist of that day, vehemently condemned the British Government's colonial mercantile system as suicidal; but his condemnation came too late to have any effect. ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... standing still, and the walls falling at the blowing of horns? A. "They may be legends, myths, poems, or what they will, but they are not the Word of God. So I say again, it was not the God and Father of us all who inspired the woman to drive that nail crashing through the king's temple after she had given him that bowl of milk and bid him sleep in safety, but a very mean Devil of hatred and revenge that I should hardly expect to find in a squaw on the plains. ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... try. But they wouldn't listen. And they wouldn't let me carry anything. They slung their packs on their backs, we crossed the creek on some stones, and taking the trail on the other side we followed fast and steady, the horse's hoof-prints pointing up the creek. One shoe had a bent nail-head. ...
— Pluck on the Long Trail - Boy Scouts in the Rockies • Edwin L. Sabin
... their cautious advance. One of them, armed with a very primitive harpoon—a long nail at the end of a stick—kept himself in the bow of the boat, while the other two noiselessly paddled on. They waited till the necessity of breathing would bring the manatees up again. In ten minutes or thereabouts the animals ...
— Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon • Jules Verne
... of Lime.—Found imbedded in the alluvial soil forming the banks of the Darling river. Occurring in a regular vein. Soft, yielding to the nail; not acted on ...
— Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia, Complete • Charles Sturt
... Morrison, laughing. "Molly's hit the nail squarely. Your modern, economic spasms over the organization of industrialism are out of place in that delightful, eighteenth century, plain old interior. They threw their ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... any more prey? With ferret quickness eyes swept the range of vision. Out of an orchard into the stubble of a wheat-field broke a panicky mass; a score or more of men who had lost their officer and their heads presumably. They were the nail under the hammer, a brown ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... soft earth of the Catacombs, the stuff you would scratch off the damp walls with your nail; rotting stone, rotting bone: the very soil of Rome lilackish like cocoa, friable, light, which used somehow to give me the horrors already as a child; the soil in which the gardener of S. Saba grows his pinks and freesias without ...
— The Spirit of Rome • Vernon Lee
... and hold on good authority, that when King Francis I. had left Madame de Chateaubriant, his favourite mistress, to take Madame d'Etampes, as one nail drives out another, Madame d'Etampes begged the King to take back from the said Madame de Chateaubriant all the finest jewels that he had given her, not on account of their cost and value, for pearls and precious stones were not then so fashionable as they have ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. I. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... blown out with gunpowder, and the other did but glimmer in its socket. Turning it upward as he spoke, it was his delight to tell of cruises against the French and battles with his own shipmates, when he and an antagonist used to be seated astride of a sailor's chest, each fastened down by a spike-nail through his trousers, and there to fight it out. Sometimes he expatiated on the delicious flavor of the hagden, a greasy and goose-like fowl which the sailors catch with hook and line on the Grand Banks. He dwelt with rapture on ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... inclined to be thus easily driven from the field. "You have hit the nail upon the head," said he, with an assumed expression of respect for the decision of his uncle, "and it is by the means of that very trait of character which you have mentioned, that I hope to work ...
— The Home in the Valley • Emilie F. Carlen
... virtually proscribed by the King. Then, as at a later date in the history of the Georges, those who favored and were favored by the Prince were looking out with anxious hope for the King's death. When "the old King is dead as nail in door," then indeed each leading supporter of the new king believed he could say with Falstaff, "The laws of England are at my commandment; happy are they which have been my friends." Pulteney and his supporters were among the friends and favorites ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... to her feet; wondering still more, followed his lead down the path to the stable. At the door the Indian whistled. But there was no response, no shaggy grey answering shadow. A lantern hung from a nail near at hand. In silence the man lit it and again led the way within. The mouse-coloured broncho and its darker mate were asleep, but at the interruption they awoke and looked about curiously. Otherwise there was no move. Look where one would within the building, there was no ...
— Where the Trail Divides • Will Lillibridge
... the fact that, little by little, this prestige is being destroyed by their own actions among the Chinese people, each crisis then becomes more accentuated or difficult to surmount, as the Central Government know each concession is another nail in their coffin. The Central Government fear that the taking up of a spirited position by any pre-eminent Chinese would carry the Chinese people with him, and therefore the Central Government endeavour to keep up appearances, and to skirt the precipice of war as near as they possibly can, while ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume II • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... fear, staring into the outer gloom. It was just at the turn of the darkness when things are outlined though still colorless and shadowy, and I could see the delicate frame opposite me suspended by invisible cords from an invisible nail—that cursed thing that had haunted me in my sleep and reduced me ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... Rouen as the best, though there is a shorter cut, and about two kilometres beyond the quaint old city, just as it was getting light, I got a puncture on the off back tyre. A horse-nail it proved, and in twenty minutes I was on the road again, running at the highest speed I dared along the Seine valley towards Paris. The wind had dropped with the dawn, and the snow-clouds had dispersed with the daybreak. ...
— The Count's Chauffeur • William Le Queux
... white hats. Hans carried a light fowling-piece, while Hendrik's gun was a stout rifle of the kind known as a "yager"—an excellent gun for large game. In this piece Hendrik had great pride, and had learnt to drive a nail with it at nearly a hundred paces. Hendrik was par excellence the marksman of the party. Each of the boys also carried a large crescent-shaped powder-horn, with a pouch for bullets; and over the saddle of each was strapped the robe or kaross, differing only from their father's in that his was ...
— The Bush Boys - History and Adventures of a Cape Farmer and his Family • Captain Mayne Reid
... By no means a scaly idea. I rather fancy, Comrade Bannister, that you have whanged the nail on the head. Is he strong on any particular team? I mean, have you ever heard him, in the intervals of business worries, stamping on his desk and yelling, "Buck up Cottagers!" or "Lay 'em out, Pensioners!" or anything like that? One moment.' Psmith held up his hand. 'I will get my ...
— Psmith in the City • P. G. Wodehouse
... League which called itself Anti-State Communist, a name invented by Mr. Joseph Lane of that body. William Morris, who was really a free democrat of the Kropotkin type, backed up Lane, and went for us tooth and nail. Records of our warfare may be found in the volumes of the extinct magazine called 'To-day,' which was then edited by Hubert Bland; and they are by no means bad reading. We soon began to see that at the debates the opposition to us came from members of the Socialist ...
— The History of the Fabian Society • Edward R. Pease
... once said to me. Knowing his kindly nature, I was surprised at his words. It is hard to judge between parents and children. 'A great ravine starts from a little rift,' Alexey Sergeitch said to me once in this connection: 'a wound a yard wide may heal; but once cut off even a finger nail, it will ...
— A Desperate Character and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... speak not of inscriptions cut in stone, and affixed to temples and other public buildings, but such as were either painted, scrawled in charcoal and other substances, or scratched with a sharp point, such as a nail or knife, on the stucco of walls and pillars. Such inscriptions afford us a peep both into the public and the domestic life of the Pompeians. Advertisements of a political character were commonly painted on the exterior walls in large letters in black and red paint; poetical effusions or pasquinades, ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... we mean to be a moral country? Very well, then so let our representatives be, I say. And if I hear nothing against your morals, Mr. Commander, I don't say you shan't have my vote. I mean to deliberate. You young nobs capering over our heads—I nail you down to morals. Politics secondary. Adew, as the dying spirit ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... were seen. Some chiefs of Vanar mothers came, Some of she-bear and minstrel dame, Skilled in all arms in battle's shock, The brandished tree, the loosened rock; And prompt, should other weapons fail, To fight and slay with tooth and nail. Their strength could shake the hills amain. And rend the rooted trees in twain, Disturb with their impetuous sweep The Rivers' Lord, the Ocean deep, Rend with their feet the seated ground, And pass wide floods with airy bound— Or forcing ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson
... of the Catacombs, the stuff you would scratch off the damp walls with your nail; rotting stone, rotting bone: the very soil of Rome lilackish like cocoa, friable, light, which used somehow to give me the horrors already as a child; the soil in which the gardener of S. Saba grows his pinks and freesias without ...
— The Spirit of Rome • Vernon Lee
... huge lobster and a shark, who were drinking lemonade) when Grover entered upon his quest for the vanished water-nymph. He investigated two or three grottoes, with no result except to tear his cloak on an exposed nail and knock a hole in his helmet. He was just about to resort to a classical imprecation, when the necessity for it was suddenly dissipated. There stood the daughter of Rhine, wonderful to behold, in sweet converse with her chaperone, the black domino. The young man lost no time ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various
... circumspection and care, even in the smallest matters; because sometimes, A little neglect may breed great mischief; adding, For want of a nail, the shoe was lost; for want of a shoe, the horse was lost; and for want of a horse, the rider was lost; being overtaken, and slain by the enemy. All for want of care about a ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... with striking local peculiarities in the time of Strabo (XVII, 1, Sec. 46), and traces of it seem to have been found in Greece among the Locrians (Vurtheim, De Aiacis origine, Leyden, 1907). Every Algerian traveler knows how the girls of the Ouled-Nail earn their dowry in the ksours and the cities, before they go back to their tribes to marry, and Doutte (Notes sur l'Islam maghrebien, les Marabouts, Extr. Rev. hist. des relig., XL-XLI, Paris, 1900), has connected these usages with the old Semitic prostitution, ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... he discover that the nail of the forefinger on his right hand had been torn out by the quick, probably during his endeavors to grasp the unsteady support which contributed so materially to his escape. It still hung by a shred and hindered the free use of his hand. Without any ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... for it as they go; and once the talk is launched, they are assured of honest dealing from an adversary eager like themselves. The aboriginal man within us, the cave-dweller, still lusty as when he fought tooth and nail for roots and berries, scents this kind of equal battle from afar; it is like his old primaeval days upon the crags, a return to the sincerity of savage life from the comfortable fictions of the civilised. ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... tremble incessantly. In another part was a little patch of mossy meadow, and again there were decaying logs out of which sprang various ferns in wild luxuriance, as one has seen them in deeply-shaded, low-lying woods. The maiden-hair fern was here seen ranging from leaves as large as one's thumb-nail to a species with leaves the size of pin-heads. There was a charming harmony in the whole arrangement; nothing seemed abrupt, each effect blended gracefully with those surrounding it, like well-balanced colors in ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... had clothed him All in a suit of mail, Still came they, wild-eyed, looking For space to drive a nail. Whenever Teuton airmen Slay boys and girls at play, Or U-boats, drowning ...
— ANTHOLOGY OF MASSACHUSETTS POETS • WILLIAM STANLEY BRAITHWAITE
... led her up to the side of the room, and bade her put her fingers into some holes in the wall just large enough to admit them. She obeyed but immediately drew them back with a loud shriek. I looked to see what was the matter with her, and lo! every nail was torn from her fingers, which were bleeding profusely. How it was done, I do not know. Certainly, there was no visible cause for such a surprising effect. In all probability the fingers came in contact with the spring of some machine on the other side, or within the wall to which some sharp instrument ...
— Life in the Grey Nunnery at Montreal • Sarah J Richardson
... wall, but nothing else relieved its blank, whitewashed monotony. The one photograph of his father which had once been fastened above the mantelpiece had been taken down months before and the hole made by the nail carefully and methodically filled and painted over. The room typified the man in its painful order, its painful whitewashed cleanliness, its rigid plainness. But the garden was the symbol of the hidden possibility in him, the corner of warm, impulsive feeling which the world had ...
— The Native Born - or, The Rajah's People • I. A. R. Wylie
... splice, swathe, gird, tether, moor, picket, harness, chain; fetter &c (restrain) 751; lock, latch, belay, brace, hook, grapple, leash, couple, accouple^, link, yoke, bracket; marry &c (wed) 903; bridge over, span. braze; pin, nail, bolt, hasp, clasp, clamp, crimp, screw, rivet; impact, solder, set; weld together, fuse together; wedge, rabbet, mortise, miter, jam, dovetail, enchase^; graft, ingraft^, inosculate^; entwine, intwine^; interlink, interlace, intertwine, intertwist^, interweave; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... Poet, or a vicious Player; but this is a Surmise which has no Foundation: his Stroaks are always just, and his Admonitions seasonable; he does not deal about his Blows at Random, but always hits the right Nail upon the Head. [The [3]] inexpressible Force wherewith he lays them on, sufficiently shows the Evidence and Strength of his Conviction. His Zeal for a good Author is indeed outrageous, and breaks down every Fence and Partition, every Board and Plank, that stands ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... and the practical inventive power of America. Potugin says that he had just visited the exposition at the Crystal Palace in London, and that he reflected that "our dear mother, Holy Russia, could go and hide herself in the lower regions, without disarranging a single nail in the place." Not a single thing in the whole vast exhibition had been invented by a Russian. Even the Sandwich Islanders had contributed something to the show. At another place in the story he declares that his father bought a Russian threshing machine, which remained five years useless in the ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... presenting himself to his own walls and accepting their silent recognition. Then, hearing Charlotte upstairs, he went back into the kitchen, as straight as if he had meant to go there all the time and had merely idled on these delaying quests, and up to the nail by the shed door where the key always hung, the key to Old Crow's hut. He took it off the nail, dropped it in his pocket, got a leather jacket from the hall and went out into the road. As he went, he heard Jerry moving about in the barn and walked the faster, not to be halted or offered friendly ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... in the whole affair? I receive a certain good in lieu of what has long ceased to have any charms for me. The evil consists in the idea alone, and it will be a secret between me and my wife. But, stating the case fairly, can I arrive at so high a distinction at a cheaper rate? Will it not be a nail in the alderman's coffin; and what will the citizens not say when they see that his imperial majesty knows how to value me? Shall I not get every thing into my power, and revenge myself on those who have thwarted and contradicted me? Ho! ho! Mr. Mayor; be no fool; seize ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger
... given you this pleasure, and had not our helpers been so many, we could never have made the place so beautiful. Before the general dancing begins there will be a double quadrille of honor, in which all those will take part who have driven a nail, papered or painted a wall, dug a spadeful of earth, or done any work in ...
— Mother Carey's Chickens • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... the Brums had a bad name for rioting, and when the list is looked over many may think it not undeserved.—In July, 1715, the Old Meeting House was destroyed in a riot.—In 1737 the nail-makers from Worcestershire marched into this town and forced the ironmongers to sign a paper allowing an advance in prices.—Some bigoted brutes got up an anti-Methodist movement in 1751, which culminated in a general riot on Oct. 19, ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell
... a young girl; who, if she did not throw herself at my head, stopped short, less I think, from human respect, than from one of those movements of profound surprise which affect the limbs, creep down the length of the spine, and cease only in the sole of the feet, to nail you to the ground. I have often produced effects of this nature, a sort of animal magnetism which becomes enormously powerful when the relations are reciprocally precise. But, my dear fellow, this was not stupefaction, nor was she a common girl. Morally speaking, her face seemed ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... for over an hour in the snow where he had dropped a piece of cheese some days before, in the hopes of finding a few crumbs. He was rewarded by coming across a piece as big as his thumb- nail, and considered it ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... in we got into the centre seat. "What is this all round?" "Thick drugget, sir; they nail it round in winter to keep the cold out."—Thank Heaven, it is only nailed at the bottom. Suffocation began; down goes my window. Presently a sixteen-stone kind of overgrown Pickwickian "Fat Boy," sitting opposite me, exclaims aloud, with a polar ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... wearying round of monotonous details, you have mingled the elements out of which a cataclysm sometimes comes. These are the men who, with the very best intentions in the world, fail to appear with the horseshoe nail at the correct moment. To be there, at that time, with the horseshoe nail is their duty. Nothing greater than that is expected of them. Yet, because their minds grasp the great movements of armies ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... and the crowd, some such little raft in the wreck, some occasional opportunity like that of Tuesday, has been present to me these two days as better than nothing. But if our friends are so accountable to this house of course there's no more to be said. And it's one more nail, thank God, in the coffin of our odious delay." He was but too glad without more ado to point the moral. "Now I hope you see ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... thou wishest. They repair thy car, leaving aside all unserviceable pieces: they nail ...
— Egyptian Literature
... he said. "A reward will be paid right down on the nail when a confession is filed with the prisoner. Now ...
— Boy Scouts in Mexico; or On Guard with Uncle Sam • G. Harvey Ralphson
... bone of the five metacarpal bones, which support the palm of the hand in ourselves. The "pastern," "coronary," and "coffin" bones of veterinarians answer to the joints of our middle fingers, while the hoof is simply a greatly enlarged and thickened nail. But if what lies below the horse's "knee" thus corresponds to the middle finger in ourselves, what has become of the four other fingers or digits? We find in the places of the second and fourth digits only two slender ...
— American Addresses, with a Lecture on the Study of Biology • Tomas Henry Huxley
... in the nature of things that you and I could ever agree on paper, touching a certain Chuzzlewitian question whereupon F—— tells me you have remarks to make, I should immediately walk into the same, tooth and nail. But as I don't, I won't. Contenting myself with this prediction, that one of these years and days, you will write or say to me: "My dear Dickens, you were right, though rough, and did a world of good, though you got most thoroughly hated for it." ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 3 (of 3), 1836-1870 • Charles Dickens
... with a fat baby in her arms. Mechanically she unloosened the pail from the bent nail on the end of the pole and put it down, watching the man as he unwound the reins from the hook. Again the long-eared animals stretched their muscles at his hoarse command. He paid no more attention to the woman, who, seated on a pile of planks, ...
— From the Valley of the Missing • Grace Miller White
... the shadow-filled angle where he stood concealed could examine at his ease the proud and charming face of which he had before obtained only a hurried glimpse; that rounded neck, at once delicate and powerful, whereon Aphrodite had traced with the nail of her little finger those three faint lines which are still at this very day known as the 'necklace of Venus'; that white nape on whose alabaster surface little wild rebellious curls were disporting and entwining themselves; those silver shoulders, half rising ...
— King Candaules • Theophile Gautier
... right to redeem them at any time before the end of the term, on the payment of costs and fifty-per-cent interest. In Stover's pocket was a new fountain pen, a box of elastics, a pair of Boston garters and a patent nail clipper. Only the limits of his exchequer had prohibited his availing himself of the opportunity to purchase, at a tremendous bargain, a pair of snow-shoes, a tobogganing cap and a pair of corduroy ...
— The Varmint • Owen Johnson
... an equal price for their green fish with those who sell them on the nail?-Sometimes, if a heavy fishing comes in, the men will only get a few shillings per cran for them; and it is that uncertainty with regard to the price which they may get that makes a great many of the northern fishermen agree by a stated ...
— Second Shetland Truck System Report • William Guthrie
... afterwards; and it is observed by Dr. Plot ("Phil. Trans." for 1691), in his discourse on the most seasonable time for felling timber, written by the advice of Pepys, that after forty-seven years, "all the ancient timber then remaining in her, it was no easy matter to drive a nail into it" ("Quarterly Review," vol. viii., ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... ended thus his tale, Then rising took down from its nail The sword that hung there, dim with dust, And cleaving to its sheath with rust, And said, "This sword was in the fight." The Poet seized it, and exclaimed, "It is the sword of a good knight, Though homespun was his coat-of-mail; What ...
— Tales of a Wayside Inn • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... it did happen. Would he bleed if a nail say cut him in the knocking about? He would and he wouldn't, I suppose. Depends on where. The circulation stops. Still some might ooze out of an artery. It would be better to bury them in red: a ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... you'd neither be happy, unless something was undertaken. But attempt nothing heedlessly—I didn't expect you'd quit the lake, while my matter remained in unsartainty, but remember, Sarpent, that no torments that Mingo ingenuity can invent, no ta'ntings and revilings; no burnings and roastings and nail-tearings, nor any other onhuman contrivances can so soon break down my spirit, as to find that you and Hist have fallen into the power of the inimy in striving to ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... two of the more important. The prosimii, or "half apes," including the lemurs, are nearly all arboreal forms. Perhaps they were driven to this life by their more powerful competitors. The arboreal life developed the fingers and toes, and most of these end, not with a claw, but with a nail. The little group has much diversity of structure, and at present finds its home mainly in Madagascar; though in earlier times apparently occurring all over the globe. The brain is more highly developed than in the average mammal, but far inferior to that of the apes. ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... another nail," answered Jim. "I suppose that will turn black now and begin to come off. That'll make the third I've lost this year. Lucky it was on ...
— The Rushton Boys at Rally Hall - Or, Great Days in School and Out • Spencer Davenport
... morning, then we do a wrong to the whole body of officers and gentlemen in the Army. The officers of our service have always had to stand a lot of abuse from a certain kind of so-called newspapers. It's time to stop it by hitting any nail that shows its head. We owe it ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys as Lieutenants - or, Serving Old Glory as Line Officers • H. Irving Hancock
... below. Roof, floor, walls, and (wooden) windows, all were amply provided with cracks and knot-holes, through which the wind roved at its will. A wretched fire was smoldering on the hearth, and a candle was burning in a tin cup hanging by its handle on a nail in the wall, which, set it where we would, flickered in the wind. And when our supper came, fricassee, boiled chicken, roast hare, omelette, bread, cheese, figs, and wine—for such a bill of fare had Dhemetri made ready for us—we swallowed it hastily, huddled ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... five hundred yards away; and here this lad—taking a snap shot, and merely allowing for speed and elevation by instinct, for he did not put up his sights—had knocked the bull over as dead as a door-nail. Well, I made no further remark, as the occasion was too solemn for talking, but merely led the way to where the koodoo had fallen. There he lay, beautiful and quite still; and there, high up, about ...
— A Tale of Three Lions • H. Rider Haggard
... then a year ago he could still call up the horror of the communal plunge at his earlier lodgings: the listening for other bathers, the dodging of shrouded ladies in "crimping"-pins, the cold wait on the landing, the reluctant descent into a blotchy tin bath, and the effort to identify one's soap and nail-brush among the promiscuous implements of ablution. That memory had faded now, and Betton saw only the dark hours to which his blue and white temple of refreshment formed a kind of glittering antechamber. For after his bath came his breakfast, ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... the two rooms we fastened a large flat piece of pink coral, a present given me by Captain Reid when we were on the Equator. We have had the carpenter put up shelves in one corner of the room and on two sides of one of the windows. I also had him nail some boards together in the form of a couch, upon which I have laid a mattress covered by a shawl. On the table an old pink cloth is spread, and when we light the lamp and set the little Japanese burner to smoking buhach—for, alas, there are mosquitoes—we feel ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... cobbler's, and his was a stall. I don't quite know what that is; but it isn't a house, and it served him for parlour and kitchen and all. Father says that whilst he is about it, he thinks he shall add on a wing; And brother Bill says he'll nail my Doll's House on the top of an old tea-chest, which will come ...
— Verses for Children - and Songs for Music • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... the glad tidings of the Gospel and the blessings that go with it? Because the world is the devil's. Under his direction the world persecutes the Gospel and would if it could nail again Christ, the Son of God, to the Cross although He gave Himself into death for the sins of the world. The world dwells in ...
— Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians • Martin Luther
... from his pocket, and crossed to the desk. He sat down, and took up a quill. "You can prove this, of course?" he said, testing the point of his quill upon his thumb-nail. ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... women engaged in the occupation of nail-making. They work in glass-houses, glue-works, nursery-gardens, at ordinary farm-work. On some of the canals they manage the boats, open the locks, drive the horses, and sometimes even draw the boats with the line across their shoulders. In short, wherever the lowest and dirtiest ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... it!" Marion wound the string of her vanity bag so tightly round and round her index finger that her pink, polished nail turned purple. She next unwound the string and rubbed the nail solicitously. "Just because we're down there at Toll-Gate doesn't mean you aren't safe up here. Why, you're safer, really. Because if any one got track of you, we'd hear of ...
— The Lookout Man • B. M. Bower
... making out the accounts, a matter dreaded by all the family. Ellen and Alfred both used to do the sums; but as they never made them the same, Mrs. King always went by some reckoning of her own by pencil dots on her thumb-nail, which took an enormous time, but never went wrong. So the slate and the books came up after tea, one night, and Ellen set to work with her mother to pick out every one's bill. There might be about eight customers who had Christmas bills; but many an accountant in a London shop would think eight ...
— Friarswood Post-Office • Charlotte M. Yonge
... resist any encroachment on what they consider their rights. If an attempt is made to raise their rent, even equitably, the land having increased in value, they will resist the attempt 'tooth and nail,' and take every advantage the law affords to oppose it. They are very fond of litigation, and are mostly able to afford the expense of a lawsuit. I generally found it answer better to call them together and reason quietly with them, submitting ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... stood, and the drift wood collected to dry in the sun in order that it might serve to form a beacon-fire at night. The first thing to be done was to caulk the boat. Mr Scoones and the carpenter's mate undertook to do this and to nail such planks as had been started, which was no easy matter, as not a stone could be found, and they had only the handles of their knives. But patience and perseverance had overcome greater difficulties ...
— Owen Hartley; or, Ups and Downs - A Tale of Land and Sea • William H. G. Kingston
... the father of his wife's child, but would travel a thousand miles, and consume months, in investigating which son of Noah it was that first landed on the coast of Munster. He would give a hundred guineas from the mint for a piece of old decayed copper no bigger than his nail, provided it had aukward characters upon it, too much defaced to be read. The whole stock of a great bookseller was, in his eyes, a cheap exchange for a shred of parchment, containing half a homily written by St. Patrick. He would have gratefully ...
— Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist - (A Fragment) • Charles Brockden Brown
... hits the nail on the head when, in commenting on the existing abuses of kicking and dirty ball playing in the League arena, he says: "If the club owners would take the initiative in enforcing decorum upon their players, upon pain of fine or suspension, instead of shifting the burden and onus upon the ...
— Spalding's Baseball Guide and Official League Book for 1895 • Edited by Henry Chadwick
... inaudible question was answered in the affirmative, and Olga was entering, when the skirt of her dress was held by a projecting nail, and in disengaging it, she caught a glimpse of the astonished countenance beneath the steps. She paused, leaned over the balustrade, threw up both hands with a warning gesture, then laid her finger on her lips, and hurried in, closing the ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... and I intend to be with you on the seventeenth or eighteenth; but as we are wandering swains, we do not drive one nail into one day of the almanack irremovably. Our first stage is to Bleckley, the parsonage of venerable Cole, the antiquarian of Cambridge. Bleckley lies by Fenny Stratford; now can you direct us how to make Horton(302) in our way from ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... striking example of the way in which such legends grow, that it is only the latest of these authorities, Hsuean Tsang, who says that, though ostensibly approaching the Buddha with a view to reconciliation, Devadatta had concealed poison in his nail with the object ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... you are all right, sir," resumed his little cat-like tormentor, letting him go a little way, to nail him again by-and-bye: "You have cooked the books in time: and Cocker was a fool to you. 'Twill be all down in black and white. Great sacrifices: no reserve: creditors take everything; dividend fourpence in the pound, furniture of house and bank, Mrs. Hardie's portrait, and down to ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... lamp and a wooden club, and began to test the prow and light up the boarding, and thump it well, and go over the planks one by one. And in this way he went over every bit of the boat from stem to stern, both above and below. There was not a nail or a rivet that he really ...
— Weird Tales from Northern Seas • Jonas Lie
... keep the muscles of his mind in exercise on a cold day, and his rapid intellect may have run away from his hearer, trampling on the conventions and platitudes in its course; but Mr. Hogg does not think he had fixed notions concerning anything. The poet did not nail his colors with a cheer to the mast of any of the great questions of the day, ethical or social, and therefore suffered the disparagements of those intelligent friends of his who have been taught to consider a well-defined rigidity of conviction and maintenance, in the ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... denunciations of the practice of employing the Indian tribes in our army, arising from the fact that the orator handled the subject with clean hands. Colonel Barre, excited by it, declared that if it were printed and published he would nail it on every church-door by the side of the king's proclamation for a general fast; and Governor Johnson said it was fortunate for Lord North and Germaine that the galleries had been cleared before the speech was uttered, as the indignation ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... time to looking at her empty chair than to his food. He never came out on the veranda without glancing first of all at her grass house in the corner of the compound; and one evening, idly knocking the balls about on the billiard table, he came to himself to find himself standing staring at the nail upon which from the first she had hung her ...
— Adventure • Jack London
... I can't do that: they'd have the black spot on me by then. The lubbers is going about to get the wind of me this blessed moment; lubbers as couldn't keep what they got, and want to nail what is another's. Is that seamanly behaviour, now, I want to know? But I'm a saving soul. I never wasted good money of mine; nor lost it neither; and I'll trick 'em again. I'm not afraid on 'em. I'll shake out another reef, matey, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... supported by a non-conductor, for if not, the electric current would pass into the earth by the first post and never reach its final destination. Glass being an insulator, it was found that, if a glass bottle was filled with water, and then corked up with a cork, through which a nail was passed so that the top of it touched the water, it would receive and retain a charge as long as it was held in the hand; and this observation led to an invention of some account in the subsequent applications of electricity, known, from the place of its ...
— Lectures on Popular and Scientific Subjects • John Sutherland Sinclair, Earl of Caithness
... law. In the first place, while making a hobble peg, while Carmichael and Robinson were away after the horses, the little piece of wood slipped out of my hand, and the sharp blade of the knife went through the top and nail of my third finger and stuck in the end of my thumb. The cut bled profusely, and it took me till the horses came to sew my mutilated digits up. It was late when we left this waterless spot. As there was a hill with a prepossessing gorge, I left Carmichael and Robinson ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... hind toe, of this bird appears to be more closely united to the fore toes, and to be situated more in front than is usual among the Terns: it is also to be observed, that the side of the nail of the middle toe is considerably dilated, although not serrated, similar to what is observed among the Pelecanidae. These characters offer a corroboration of the affinity of the Sternae to the family of the Pelecanidae, and particularly to ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia] [Volume 2 of 2] • Phillip Parker King
... esteemed. He had the whimsical illusion of having been introduced into the world in the form of a salmon, and caught by some fisherman off Kinsale. He was found one morning hanging by a strip of his blanket to an old mop nail, which he had fixed between the partition boards of his cell, having taken the precaution of laying his mattress under him to prevent noise in ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... be no objection made on the part of his temporary master, Mr. Cruickshanks assured him that Cairnvreckan, a village which they were about to enter, was happy in an excellent blacksmith; 'but as he was a professor, he would drive a nail for no man on the Sabbath or kirk-fast, unless it were in a case of absolute necessity, for which he always charged sixpence each shoe.' The most important part of this communication, in the opinion of the speaker, made a very slight impression on the hearer, who only internally wondered ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... busy Jack Frost was! No one saw him swing a hammer; no one heard him drive a nail: but, by the time morning had come, he had laid right across the ponds and the river a floor of ice smoother than any wooden floor ever put down by ...
— The Nursery, December 1873, Vol. XIV. No. 6 • Various
... narrator, while the four disposed themselves on the sunny grass, in the various attitudes of severe inattention which youth assumes when listening to a story. Sweetheart pored into the depths of a buttercup. Hugh John scratched the freestone of a half-buried tomb with a nail till told to stop. Sir Toady Lion, having a "pinch-bug" coralled in his palms, sat regarding it cautiously between his thumbs. Only Maid Margaret, her dimpled chin on her knuckles, sat looking upward in rapt attention. For her ...
— Red Cap Tales - Stolen from the Treasure Chest of the Wizard of the North • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... reached the palace at last, but there fresh efforts were required of him, for the entrances were defended by bats and owls and ravens. But even the boldest of these was torn to pieces by the dragon, who attacked them tooth and nail. The queen, too, who was a spectator of this savage fight, kicked down chunks of the wall, and armed with these helped her dear husband in the fray. Victory at length rested with them, and as they flew to one another's arms, the enchantment was brought to an ...
— Old-Time Stories • Charles Perrault
... punished. When the new laws regarding bribery came to take that shape the hearts of members revolted from the cruelty,—the hearts even of members on the other side of the House. As long as a seat was in question the battle should of course be fought to the nail. Every kind of accusation might then be lavished without restraint, and every evil practice imputed. It had been known to all the world,—known as a thing that was a matter of course,—that at every election Mr. ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... generation of a female. A little over three inches from the anus was a rudimentary limb with a movable articulation; it measured five inches in length and tapered to a fine point, being furnished with a distinct nail, and it contracted strongly to irritation. Marie, the left child, was of fair complexion and more strongly developed than Rosa. The sensations of hunger and thirst were not experienced at the same time, and one might be asleep while the other was crying. The pulsations and the respiratory movements ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... however, the old statesman died, and his fiddle was heard no more across the valley in the quiet of the evening, but was left untouched for the dust to gather on it where he himself had hung it on the nail in the kitchen under his hat. Then when life seemed to the forlorn girl a wide blank, a world without a sun in it, Angus Ray went over for the first time as a suitor to the cottage under Castenand, and put his hand in hers ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine
... of curiosity, not unmingled, let us hope, with sympathy, the place of confinement allotted to debtors in this city, may, and I trust will, Ponder, as he traces on its wall, inscribed with a rusty nail, ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... the green room there he found Peddle, who welcomed him with tears of joy and a display of all the finikin luxuries of the toilet and adornment which he had left behind at Denby Hall. There were pots of pomade and face-cream, and nail-polish; bottles of hair-wash and tooth-wash; little boxes and brushes for the moustache, half a dozen gleaming razors, an array of brushes and combs and manicure-set in tortoise-shell with his crest in silver, bottles of scent ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... describe every nook of that darling old house, and every thing surrounding it, from its old-fashioned chimneys—wherein the domestic swallows have sung their little ones to sleep each successive summer, time out of mind—to the unseemly nail that projected its Judas-point from one of the crosspieces of that same little gate, and which always contrived to give a triangular tear to my flying robes every time they fluttered through that dear ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various
... the new division of the line. Nairobi was to be the headquarters of the Railway Administration, so there was an immense amount of work to be done in converting an absolutely bare plain, three hundred and twenty-seven miles from the nearest place where even a nail could be purchased, into a busy railway centre. Roads and bridges had to be constructed, houses and work-shops built, turntables and station quarters erected, a water supply laid on, and a hundred and one other things done which go to the making of a railway township. Wonderfully ...
— The Man-eaters of Tsavo and Other East African Adventures • J. H. Patterson
... there was nothing for it but to get the supper over as quickly as possible; and as they had been walking a great many miles, and had fasted since the middle of the day, they did no great violence to their own inclinations in falling on it tooth and nail. It took rather longer to get through than might have been expected; for, half-a-dozen times, when they thought they had finished, Mrs Lupin exposed the fallacy of that impression triumphantly. But at last, in the course ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... combination with these simple articles of furniture are few and somewhat rudely shaped. A jug with a long neck, an angular handle, and a pointed bottom, is common: it usually hangs from a nail or hook inserted into the tent-pole. Vases and bowls of a simple form occur, but are less frequent. The men are seen with knives in their hands, and appear sometimes to be preparing food for their meals; but the form of the knife is marked very indistinctly. ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 2. (of 7): Assyria • George Rawlinson
... a picture by Mignard representing Mary giving some of her milk to St. Bernard. At the commencement of the chancel, near the cupola, is the chapel in which the reliquaries are kept. Among them are the skull and bones of St Siffrein, and the nail that pierced the right hand of J. C. on the Cross. In the chancel is a "Coronation" of Mary painted on wood, 15th cent., and behind the altar another "Coronation" by P. Veronese. In the foreground are Saints Laurence and Siffrein. Adjoining is the Palais de Justice, 1640, ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black
... "that is my thesis, which I shall nail up over the mantel-piece there, as Luther nailed his to the church-door. It is time to rake up the fire now; but to-morrow night I will give you a paper on the Economy ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... neck is not always thin. Catch Atkinson here in a roaring soliloquy, and you shall see his red neck distended as a bladder, with a mighty grumbling and grunting. This by the way. The neck makes nothing of the domino difficulty, or the tenpenny nail difficulty, or the door-knob difficulty, or the broken bottle difficulty—which are not difficulties to the camel-goose. On the contrary, the neck revels in them and keeps the dainties as long as possible. Give Pontius Pilate, ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 25, January 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... been accomplished during Jennie's absence, and the broad veranda was like a sylvan bower, the last nail having just been driven, the last wreath and festoon put in place; while the Seabrooks were on the point of going home to dinner as the carriage stopped ...
— Katherine's Sheaves • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... ago stopped her work and was sitting huddled in the doorway on a nail-keg with weary, folded hands and a strange wistfulness on her apathetic face. A fine silence had settled over the group as the girl, recognizing her power, and the pleasure she was giving, sang ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill
... stammered, 'Jesus is nailed to the cross. The nails are hammered through His outspread hands. A single nail suffices for his feet, whose bones split asunder. He, Himself, while His flesh quivers with pain, fixes His eyes upon heaven and smiles.... Jesus is crucified between two thieves. The weight of His body terribly aggravates ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... by Joe Braman's landing, they saw Joe go into the house, and return with a hammer and some nails, with which he proceeded to nail a piece of board over the fracture in the ...
— The Boat Club - or, The Bunkers of Rippleton • Oliver Optic
... proudly displayed a galaxy of fittings from a dressing-bag, the best, no doubt, that poor bombarded Bar-le-Duc could produce in war time. There were ivory-backed hair and clothes brushes; a comb; bottles filled with white face-wash and perfume; a manicure-set, with pink salve and nail-powder; a tray decked out with every size of hairpin; a cushion bristling with pins of many-coloured heads; boxes of rouge, a hare's-foot to put it on with; face-powder in several tints; swan's-down puffs; black pencils for the eyebrows and blue for the ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... this situation, sent, as was usual, to his godfathers, John London and Stephen Nail, for their protections. They went, but were refused admittance to him. At length he sent for Mr. Granville Sharp: the latter went, but they still refused access to the prisoner. He insisted, however, upon seeing him, and charged ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the - Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament (1839) • Thomas Clarkson
... in saying this, had hit the nail fairly on the head, although he had not intelligently probed the truth to the bottom. In fact a great deal of the friendship which drew these young men together was the result of their great dissimilarity of character. They acted on each other somewhat after the fashion of a well-adjusted ...
— Charlie to the Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... not content with half. You want everything,—all the new states must abolish slavery. And after a while you will overwhelm us, and ruin us, and make us paupers. Do you wonder that we contend for our rights, tooth and nail? They are our rights." ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... would perhaps normally constitute no provocation. Many times the mental activity seems to be remote and incidental, and the mind retains in the morning nothing except, perhaps, a peculiar dress pattern, the shape of a finger-nail, the back of a neck, the toss of a head, the movement of a foot, or the dressing of the hair. In such cases, these images stand out for a time with the distinctness of a cameo, and suggest that the origin of erotic fetichisms is largely to be found in sexual dreams. Very rarely is there ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... end my days, midst boon companions merry, Place at my lips a lusty flask replete with sparkling sherry, That angels, hov'ring round, may cry, when I lie dead as door-nail, 'Rise, genial deacon, rise, and drink of the well of ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... me sometimes, when I think I'm getting yellow and peaked. But it's a whole lot of potions and powders just to have you here. All the same, I had another little nail to drive in importing you. I've got an old boy picked out—the baron we call him. He's a worthy soul—upright and straight walking as you please, so it needn't be any obstacle to you that he owns a whole ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various
... says Angus, working away at his job in the new International Hotel at Wallace. Graining a door in the dining-room he was, with a ham rind and a stocking over one thumb nail, doing little curlicues in the brown wet paint to make it look like what the wood was at first before it was painted at all. 'Well,' he says, 'I suspected from the assays that we might get a bit more, but if he had experts with him you better let him have it for twelve ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... money should go for a life-membership in the society for Miss Jaynes,' says I; 'and I don't like to encourage anybody in goin' round beggin' for money to buy her own promotion to a high seat in the synagogue.'—You ought to seen Miss Jaynes's face then! It was redder'n any beet, for I'd hit the nail square on the head, as it happened, and the ladies could scurcely keep from smilin'.—'Then,' says I, 'I shouldn't be my father's daughter, if I'd give a cent for a preacher that isn't smart enough to get his own livin' and pay for his own clothes and eddication. To ask poor ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... skirt, a business woman's white shirt-waist, and stout walking boots, her hair brushed flat and tidily back and fastened as though for riding, her face and hands redolent of soap. No powder, not a nail manicured. Had she been a girl earning her living, she could not have been more suitably dressed, but her millions and her palace background demand that her clothes be ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... Richard Steele!" he said, "for three months past me and my men has been a-working in this theatre, and we've never seen the colour of your honour's money: we will be very much obliged if you'll pay it directly, for until you do we won't drive in another nail." Sir Richard said that his friend's elocution was perfect, but that he ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... an immense plain, closed at the horizon by strips of forest over which rose and stood alone the fine point of Saint-Hilaire's steeple, but so sharpened and so pink that it seemed to be no more than sketched on the sky by the finger-nail of a painter anxious to give to such a landscape, to so pure a piece of 'nature,' this little sign of art, this single indication of human existence. As one drew near it and could make out the remains of the square tower, ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... and a cracked looking-glass propped against a roll of bedding, and a razor which needed honing. In turning his head to look at Tom he nicked his chin and while he stopped the bleeding with a bit of old newspaper the size of a small finger-nail he congratulated himself in the mistaken belief that Tom had not ...
— Rim o' the World • B. M. Bower
... was a neat, hair-triggered Billinghurst, carrying sixty round balls to the pound, a muzzle-loader, of course, and a nail-driver. I made just three shots in ten days, and each shot stood for a plump young deer in the "short blue." It seemed wicked to murder such a bright, graceful animal, when no more than the loins and a couple of slices from the ham could ...
— Woodcraft • George W. Sears
... were silent. He let himself into the house with a latch-key, and groped his way up the creaking unlit staircase. On entering his room, the draught between the open window and the door set all his papers whirling from his writing-table, and, by a strange accident, dislodged his crucifix from its nail. It fell to the ground, and when he picked it up, the small Figure was broken. This accident seemed an ill omen, but he put it from his thoughts, and scrawled a hasty letter to Charles Aumerle, asking him to be his second. This he delivered himself at Aumerle's chambers in St. ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... supernaculum, consisted in turning down the cup upon the thumb-nail of the drinker after his pledge, when, if duly quaffed off, no drop of liquor ought ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... leapt forward indignantly and caught one of these ruffians a blow on the back of the neck that sent him down like an ox. Upon this the other three dropped their sport and fell upon him, like angry women, tooth and nail. Nobody interfered. He was driven back against the wall, where he leant, just contriving to keep his adversaries at arm's length with his fists, and feeling, now that the first spurt of wrath had left him, that within three minutes he must ...
— The Blue Pavilions • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... once; but though sore wounded it got to the bury, and, struggling in, the arrow caught the side of the hole and was drawn out. Indeed, a nail filed sharp is not of much avail as an arrowhead; you must have it barbed, and that was a little beyond our skill. Ikey the blacksmith had forged us a spearhead after a sketch from a picture of a Greek warrior; and a rake-handle ...
— The Amateur Poacher • Richard Jefferies
... is a thorough Stoic when he says (Phaedo 83) that every pleasure and pain comes with a nail to pin down the soul to the body and make it corporeal. His Stoicism appears in his denunciation of the ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... in squeezing through a hole in the floor way over in one corner, a hole that Farmer Brown's boy had intended to nail a board over long before. Unc' Billy knew that Bowser couldn't get through that, even if he did manage to dig his way under the henhouse. Once through that and fairly in the henhouse, Unc' Billy drew a long breath. He felt safe for the time being, anyway, and he didn't propose ...
— The Adventures of Jimmy Skunk • Thornton W. Burgess
... consequence is death, and to my eyes, the pretty maid who thwarts her mother with such taking graces on a question of a ball, drips no less visibly with human gore than such a murderer as yourself. Do I say that I follow sins? I follow virtues also. They differ not by the thickness of a nail; they are both scythes for the reaping angel of Death. Evil, for which I live, consists not in action but in character. The bad man is dear to me, not the bad act, whose fruits, if we could follow them far enough down the hurtling cataract ...
— Stories By English Authors: Germany • Various
... lord, the mark upon thy brow is yet No broader than my little finger-nail. Thy force is not abated, and thy step Is firm. Wilt thou surrender to the enemy Before thy strength is touched? Why, let me put A drop of courage from my breast in thine! There is a hope for thee. The ...
— The Poems of Henry Van Dyke • Henry Van Dyke
... Colonial troops in plain clothes, together with the regular troops led by officers with drawn swords and overdrawn salaries. The regular general, seeing that the battle was lost, excused himself and retired to his tent, owing to an ingrowing nail which had annoyed him all day. Lyman, the Colonial officer now took command, and wrung victory from the reluctant jaws of defeat. For this Johnson, the English general, received twenty-five thousand dollars and a baronetcy, while Lyman received a plated butter-dish ...
— Comic History of the United States • Bill Nye
... with your well-fed look And your coat of dapper fit, Will you recommend me a decent book With nothing of War in it?" Then you smile as you polish a finger-nail, And your eyes serenely roam, And you suavely hand me a thrilling tale By a man who stayed ...
— Ballads of a Bohemian • Robert W. Service
... stately aldermanic flounder, that came paddling after a chicken-bone, put to rout by a satanic sculpin, whereat an eel swiftly snaked the prize away, and the frost-fish, collecting at a chance of civil war, mingled in the melee, tooth and nail, or rather fin and tail. Then the vapors would darken round them again, till, with the stray rays caught and refracted in their fleece, it seemed like living in an opal full of cloudy color and fire. Far off they heard the great ground-swell of the surf upon ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... lilac bush had intruded into the porch. It directly indicated me with a black finger. What did it want? I looked intently, sure that an omen was here. Aha! So that was it! The twig was showing me that it had a green nail. ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson
... the boot-leggers go it on their own hook for a while. We are watching for you. It's only a matter of time till somebody takes you in, because your whisky is making lots of nasty work for us these days, and we've got orders from the big chief to nail you if there's a show. I'm passing up this little affair to-day. That doesn't count. But the next time you cross the river with a four-horse load of it I'll be on you like a wolf. If I don't, some other fellow will. ...
— Raw Gold - A Novel • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... I have been ever so foolish. Just now I can hear Daddy and Mr. Barnett saying good night, and I know that they have been fighting tooth and nail over that chess board. And I hear Mr. Barnett thanking Daddy, in a voice that is all choked up with emotion. I am so glad to think the dear little man is happy. Isn't it too bad, Aunt Jennie, that we can't all ...
— Sweetapple Cove • George van Schaick
... foot of the tower, he drove a nail into the wall. Then he tied one end of his rope to this spike. In this way he succeeded in making a complete ladder of nails and rope to the top of the tower. He looked for Clotilde, who met him with her ...
— Filipino Popular Tales • Dean S. Fansler
... one yet!" shrieked one of the coachers. "Nail the game right here, fellows. It's easy! ...
— Rival Pitchers of Oakdale • Morgan Scott
... wonder you're cold. That stage fire of yours can't warm all outdoors. I'll send for some window strips and nail you up." ...
— Mrs. Red Pepper • Grace S. Richmond
... for the night. The work was a simple one: she set her knee against the door to shut it more firmly, and worked an old nail into the latch. Then she shook down the scant cotton curtains that were twisted aside from the windows. There were three windows, two in the living-room (which was also kitchen and beer-saloon) ...
— The Zeit-Geist • Lily Dougall
... o' the house ... [In a voice choked by tears.] I was born here, and here my father sat at his loom for more than forty year. Many was the time he said to mother: Mother, when I'm gone, keep hold o' the house. I've worked hard for it. Every nail means a night's weavin', every plank a year's dry bread. A man would think ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume I • Gerhart Hauptmann
... cities, since each had to house 40,000 men—were built in ninety days from the driving of the first nail, complete in every municipal detail, a feat declared impossible, and which will stand for all time as a ...
— Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him • Joseph P. Tumulty
... will take yours to an extent," replied Howland, pouring the coffee. Suddenly he picked up the revolver. "You never saw me shoot, did you? See that cup over there?" He pointed to a small tin pack-cup hanging to a nail on the wall a dozen paces from them. Three times without missing he drove bullets through it, and smiled ...
— The Danger Trail • James Oliver Curwood
... under whose blessed cross We are impressed and engaged to fight— Forthwith a power of English shall we levy, To chase these pagans in those holy fields Over whose acres walk'd those blessed feet Which fourteen hundred years ago were nail'd For our advantage on the bitter cross. But this our purpose now is twelvemonth old, And bootless 'tis to tell you we will go: Therefore we meet not now.—Then let me hear Of you, my gentle cousin ...
— King Henry IV, The First Part • William Shakespeare [Hudson edition]
... padlocks; then you will see a tower, and in it the Love of the three Oranges. When you reach that place, take this tallow and anoint well the rusty padlocks; and when you have ascended the tower, you will find the oranges hanging from a nail. There you will also find an old woman who has a son who is an ogre and has eaten all the Christians who have come there; you see, you must be ...
— Italian Popular Tales • Thomas Frederick Crane
... have not commentaries and expositions; pray and read, and read and pray; for a little from God is better than a great deal from men. Also, what is from men is uncertain, and is often lost and tumbled over and over by men; but what is from God is fixed as a nail in a sure place. I know there are [peculiar] times of temptation, but I speak now as to the common course of Christianity. There is nothing that so abides with us as what we receive from God; and the reason why Christians at this day ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... in strict logical sequence. He must search about for the right nail till he has found it, and then drive ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford
... overwhelming superior force, but General Korniloff, the commander, with a desperate effort and no little skill, succeeded in hacking his way through the enemy's lines and bringing a large portion of his force safely out of the trap. Inch by inch the Russian rear guards retreated, fighting tooth and nail to hold the pass while their comrades escaped. No less brave were the repeated charges made by the Austrians—clambering over rocks, around narrow pathways hanging high in the air, dizzy precipices ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 12) - Neuve Chapelle, Battle of Ypres, Przemysl, Mazurian Lakes • Francis J. Reynolds, Allen L. Churchill, and Francis Trevelyan
... sleepy and the carriage very noisy; and take it altogether, what a farce life is sometimes! the intercourse of human beings outsides touching outsides, the heart and soul lying to all intents and purposes as dead as a door-nail. Do you ever feel mentally and spiritually alone in ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... finished his work and dispatched the team, the three partners went into the private office, which was monopolized by Mr. Strout. It contained one desk and two chairs. Hiram brought in an empty nail keg and ...
— The Further Adventures of Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks • Charles Felton Pidgin
... with his friend the Lascar, but this fault was soon remedied, and he was seized and searched, without anything being found which could incriminate him. There were, it is true, some blood-stains upon his right shirt-sleeve, but he pointed to his ring-finger, which had been cut near the nail, and explained that the bleeding came from there, adding that he had been to the window not long before, and that the stains which had been observed there came doubtless from the same source. He denied strenuously having ever seen Mr. Neville St. Clair and swore that the presence of ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... that thumb again anywhere. It was flat like the head of a snake, and the nail was no larger than a pea—a thumb that had evidently been cruelly smashed at one time. The owner of the thumb might have been a common burglar, but in the light of recent events David was not inclined to think so. At any rate he felt disposed to give his theory every chance. He saw a long, ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... perfect devil at philosophy already,' observed Shubin, making deep lines in the clay with his nail. 'What does he want ...
— On the Eve • Ivan Turgenev
... circle, or succession of circles, from centre to circumference, with a great variety of brilliant colors imperceptibly shading into each other. This having been made entirely by hand, with no implement but a common cut nail, the process is of course too slow to be valuable; but the result attained may very probably afford useful hints and suggestions to inventors of weaving machinery.—I think the display of Flint Glass by the Brooklyn Company is equal in purity and fineness to any other plain Glass in the Exhibition, ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... hastily laid her hat on one chair and her cloak on the other. This action compelled the man to place his clothes on the couch or on one of the chairs by the folding doors. When all was ready, one of the operators scratched lightly on the door with his finger-nail, to warn the woman he was about to enter the room. The next moment the man boldly opened the door wide, removed the chair out of his way, and glided rapidly to the other chair, on which the man's clothes lay. At this moment ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... said, "that you've taken a line of your own, Eustace. I've nothing to say against that; in fact, quite the contrary. But remember this, my dear, however you may change you mustn't wobble. Only one thing counts in that place, hitting the same nail on the head with the same hammer all the time. You aren't ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... any natural leaf, forming the creases in wax with the thumb nail or a needle. To put the flowers together, or the leaves on to the stem, hold in the hand until warm enough to stick. If the sheeted wax is to be used in summer, put in a little balsam of fir to make it hard. If for winter, none will ...
— The Ladies Book of Useful Information - Compiled from many sources • Anonymous
... found to make a coffin for the body of the dead General. The old servant of the Ursulines, faithful to the last, went hither and thither and collected a few planks and nails, and the midshipmen and Colin assisted her to nail together a rude coffin in which the body was presently laid. It must be buried that same evening, for none knew from hour to hour what was in store for the city. But no pomp or circumstance could attend the funeral; and indeed no ...
— French and English - A Story of the Struggle in America • Evelyn Everett-Green
... cried. Then ensued a quarrel, bitter, terrible, between two beings who so short a while before had loved so madly. The quarrel ended by the man giving in, as usual, but the wrangle pierced one more nail in his ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... compensation for the lack of London mud, London fog, and London illustrations of practical Christianity in the Isle of Dogs and the Bermondsey purlieus. I don't know whether I am knocking the last nail into the completed coffin of my own contention, but I believe every right-minded man returns from the Tropics a good deal more of a Communist than when he ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... them the example by taking down his own pipe from a nail in the wall, and proceeding to fill it. Having done so, he took a piece of glowing charcoal from the fire, and, placing it on the bowl, began to smoke, glancing the while, with an amused expression on his grave face, at the trappers, who, while filling ...
— The Wild Man of the West - A Tale of the Rocky Mountains • R.M. Ballantyne
... extricate myself as speedily as possible. I attempted to lift the door. My first effort was successless. Every inspiration was quicker and more difficult than the former. As my terror, so my strength and my exertions increased. Finally my trembling hand lighted on a nail that was imperfectly driven into the wood, and which, by affording me a firmer hold, enabled me at length to raise it, and to inhale ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... occupied respectively at the time by the first and third assistant engineers; then he screwed the cleats into place at top and bottom, so the scantling could not slip. Not for worlds would he have used a hammer to nail them into place, for that would have spoiled the surprise for the objects of his attentions. Throughout the entire operation he was as silent as a burglar, although by way of additional precaution the captain stood by with ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne
... the shell. Let it be remembered that the foot of the horse, which seems so different from a man's hand, is, nevertheless, as M. Daubenton has pointed out, composed of the same bones, and that we have at the end of each of our fingers a nail corresponding to the hoof of a horse's foot. Judge, then, whether this hidden resemblance is not more marvellous than any outward differences—whether this constancy to a single plan of structure which we ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... artificial feeding for cattle has been resorted to, and compelled the farmer to grow root crops. Perhaps, in the present condition of the market for beasts and grain the nimble-minded Celt is hitting the right nail on the head, and cattle and dairy farms are the future of the agriculturist, who will compete against American meat with English produce fed upon English grass and roots, and upon maize imported from the New ...
— Disturbed Ireland - Being the Letters Written During the Winter of 1880-81. • Bernard H. Becker
... was off the hinges, and Lucy's muslin was torn upon a nail as she passed through, while the long fringe of her fleecy shawl was caught in the tall tufts of thistle growing by the path. In a muddy pool of water a few rods from the house a flock of ducks ...
— The Rector of St. Mark's • Mary J. Holmes
... tumult rose to a riot; Reds and Blues rushed from the upper tiers, down the ranks of the podium and into the dusty race-course; falling on each other tooth and nail like wild beasts; and the bloody fray—no uncommon termination to the day, even in more peaceful times—lasted till the Imperial ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... so much of the ancient road as lay between Mitcheldean and Nail Bridge was discarded for the present one, which ascends the Stenders Hill by a more even slope, and avoids the abrupt rise of Harrow Hill. The old line may yet be traced, and Nail Bridge remains; in allusion to which improvements the following advertisement appeared ...
— The Forest of Dean - An Historical and Descriptive Account • H. G. Nicholls
... saw her. His color rose and he began to mark up the table with his thumb nail. I could see he felt his fix. The girl—Indian right through—showed no surprise at seeing him there, but that did not mean she would keep her mouth shut about it next ...
— The Moccasin Maker • E. Pauline Johnson
... sides are nailed up to the edges to the posts, or the lid or bottom may part by the side splitting. See that all nails—except for the lid—are driven slanting alternately one way and reversed, this prevents sides or bottom drawing off. Nail the lid with many short nails, so that it can be ...
— How to Observe in Archaeology • Various
... They were to receive the blood of the burnt-offerings in basins and sprinkle it around about the altar, arrange the wood and the fire, and to burn the parts of the sacrifices. If the burnt sacrifices were of doves, the priest was to nip off the head with the finger nail, squeeze out the blood on the edge of the altar, pluck off the feathers, and throw them with the crop into the ash-pit, divide down the wings, and then completely burn it. He was to offer a lamb every morning and evening, and a double number on the Sabbath, the burnt-offerings ...
— Conversion of a High Priest into a Christian Worker • Meletios Golden
... we shall see," said Dr Budge, reaching up to hang the cage on its old nail in the window. "At any rate I am very much obliged to you, and to David, and to Andrew—a friend in need is ...
— Penelope and the Others - Story of Five Country Children • Amy Walton
... the poor sailor lads on their guard, was never known. But on a Saturday night, as I was on the eve of stepping into my bed, I shall never forget it—Mrs Pawkie was already in, and as sound as a door-nail—and I was just crooking my mouth to blow out the candle, when I heard a rap. As our bed-room window was over the door, I looked out. It was a dark night; but I could see by a glaik of light from a neighbour's window, ...
— The Provost • John Galt
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