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More "Plumb" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... hanged, With voice so piercing shrill he twanged The word of luckless sound, His beast sprang forward at the cry, And plumb the priest dropped down from high Into ...
— Song and Legend From the Middle Ages • William D. McClintock and Porter Lander McClintock
... drew back, leaving the old man absorbed in ecstasy, and tried to see if the light, falling plumb upon the canvas at which he pointed, had neutralized all effects. They examined the picture, moving from right to left, standing directly before it, bending, ...
— The Hidden Masterpiece • Honore de Balzac
... imps; I'd a heap rather play with a rattlesnake than him." He paused, to assure him self that Sikes was safely out of hearing. "I thought maybe I better tell yer while I had a chance. That fellar is plumb ...
— The Strange Case of Cavendish • Randall Parrish
... nature. I cannot doubt that the high laws which each man sees implicated in those processes with which he is conversant, the stern ethics which sparkle on his chisel-edge, which are measured out by his plumb and foot-rule, which stand as manifest in the footing of the shop-bill as in the history of a state,—do recommend to him his trade, and though seldom named, exalt ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... "They're plumb sure ter pass through One Tree Gulch," he declared. "We c'n overtake them in the defile, goin' by way of Poison Spider Creek and the old Buffalo Trail, droppin' on 'em when they least ...
— Kiddie the Scout • Robert Leighton
... swinging stars shall plumb The silence of the sky. And herds Of plumed winds like huntsmen come To hunt with dreams the restless birds. To-night the moon shall strike you dumb, Oh words, ...
— Twenty • Stella Benson
... an' jump into the pond, swim out there an' tow the boy in! Yes, ma'am, he saved that boy's life then an' no mistake. That man can read me to sleep with poetry any night he has a mind to. He's a plumb fine ...
— Parnassus on Wheels • Christopher Morley
... foundation of stones or a series of stone piles, but if you use stones and expect your house to remain plumb where the winters are severe you must dig holes for them at least three feet deep in order to go below the frost-line. Fill these holes with broken stone, on top of which you can make your pile of stones to act as support for the sills; but the simplest ...
— Shelters, Shacks and Shanties • D.C. Beard
... good luck if you'd git plumb drownded, you white-livered son of misery. Whatever in Gawd A'mighty's world you was borned for certainly is more'n I can tell—and I your Maw at that, that ...
— The Way of a Man • Emerson Hough
... but it makes a lot of difference what the motive is, and you've suffered your share of punishment, too. It's the right of every man to begin afresh. Avoid mud and give yo' horse a firm take-off, and he'll leap as clean as a whistle for you. Lawd, Ah'm getting plumb religious," he ejaculated, ...
— A Tar-Heel Baron • Mabell Shippie Clarke Pelton
... with pendulous and protuberant abdomens as the result of feebleness of the hypogastric muscles, to accumulation of fat under the skin and in the omentum, and to dilation of the stomach and intestines. In the "wall exercise," the patient stands erect against an absolutely straight and plumb wall, lifts his hands (carrying a weight) straight over the head, and causes them to describe a semicircle forward. Zantz particularly insists upon arm and leg exercise for the obese, especially the former, since with the same amount of effort a larger amount of oxygen is consumed ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 821, Sep. 26, 1891 • Various
... anything. I hadn't slept worth speaking of for three nights. The whole game was up for me. I was worse than ruined. I had half a crown in my pocket. I had ten or twelve pounds in the bank—and they wouldn't let me overdraw a farthing. I tell you, I was just plumb busted. ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... a man might do worse than locate that Native Son for a silver mine," Cal began, eyeing the interloper scornfully. "It's plumb wicked to ride around with all that wealth and fussy stuff. He must 'a' robbed a bank and put the money ...
— Flying U Ranch • B. M. Bower
... mampalam (Mangifera indica, L.) is well known to be a rich, high-flavoured fruit of the plumb kind, and is found here in great perfection; but there are many inferior varieties beside the ambachang, or Mangifera ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... the straight, new ruler of the present; Old Age, by the frayed and patched plumb-line of ...
— More Toasts • Marion Dix Mosher
... Nick will look when he shows his face again. Chances are he'll stick to his house all day Saturday and Sunday; and when school opens on Monday prepare to listen to a tough story of how he got up in the night and in the dark ran plumb up against a half-open door, which would account for his black eye and swollen face. Oh! I know, because I've spun that ...
— The Chums of Scranton High - Hugh Morgan's Uphill Fight • Donald Ferguson
... reserve of forty rifles, not one of the hunters has nerve enough to shoot unless officially authorized or personally desirous of visiting the silver-mines of Siberia. Crack! thug! The smoke clears away. By Jove! his imperial majesty has done it cleverly; hit the brute plumb on the os frontis, or through the heart, it makes no difference which. Down drops Bruin, kicking and tearing up the earth at a dreadful rate; cheers rend the welkin; pots, pans, and kettles are banged. ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... shovels, and picks; narrow finishing spades, a finishing scoop, a tile pick, a scraper for filling the ditches, a heavy wooden maul for compacting the bottom filling, half a dozen boning-rods, a measuring rod, and a plumb rod. These should all be on hand at the outset, so that no delay in the work may result from ...
— Draining for Profit, and Draining for Health • George E. Waring
... he had struck the shelter of the camp he was again in pursuit. His blood leaped a little excitedly when he found that Scottie Deane's trail was now almost as straight as a plumb-line and that the sledge no longer became entangled in hidden windfalls and brush. It was proof that it was light when Deane and Isobel had left their camp. Isobel was walking now, and their sledge was traveling faster. Billy encouraged his own pace, and over two or three open spaces he broke ...
— Isobel • James Oliver Curwood
... and two or three Indians on the front porch did not even turn their heads to see what was going on inside. Talpers's clerk was out and Andy Wolters had just departed, after reporting to the trader that the half-breed had seemed "plumb uneasy out there in the brush." Andy had not told Bill the cause of McFann's uneasiness, but on that point the trader was soon ...
— Mystery Ranch • Arthur Chapman
... all. Are any of you younger people old enough to remember that Irishman's house on the marsh at Cambridgeport, which house he built from drain to chimney-top with his own hands? It took him a good many years to build it, and one could see that it was a little out of plumb, and a little wavy in outline, and a little queer and uncertain in general aspect. A regular hand could certainly have built a better house; but it was a very good house for a "self-made" carpenter's house, and people ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... was dark the time to slumber, But to hold Freedom's columns all star-plumb! Yours was a watery grave, but Martyrdom And, hence, your resurrection with the number, Whose greatness greatens, as the Ages come To know why their pathway, no ...
— Freedom, Truth and Beauty • Edward Doyle
... one to the left, one little one farther on, right plumb ahead, and another small one lower down on my right 'and. I see 'em as well as you," confirmed the stoker in troubled accents. "And that's how that young nipper thinks to get off a licking from ...
— Golden Stories - A Selection of the Best Fiction by the Foremost Writers • Various
... was Aleck Pop's comment. "I was finkin' dat rascal was plumb dead, suah. And Dan, too! Suah yo' ...
— The Rover Boys on the Great Lakes • Arthur M. Winfield
... stands alone and rigid and should be viewed from all sides to correct any errors. It should not be too high, front or rear, and also having the back-board perfectly vertical or plumb. Insert two pieces of rod in the opening at the back of the skull and fasten them there by mixing enough plaster of paris and water to fill the cavity, to the consistency of molasses and ...
— Home Taxidermy for Pleasure and Profit • Albert B. Farnham
... he jibed when he could speak. "You must figger I'm plumb loco. Any fool ought to know anybody would hold off till you located the mine. Even supposing I was going to plant you, I'd wait, wouldn't ...
— Bloom of Cactus • Robert Ames Bennet
... of here, Allen. If you think you can marry Morton Bassett's daughter with that kind of a scandal in your pocket, I tell you you're mad—you've plumb gone insane! Great God, boy, you don't know the meaning of the words you use. You handle that thing like a child with a loaded pistol. Don't you see what that would mean—to Marian, to Blackford, to Mrs. Bassett—to Aunt Sally! Now, you want my advice, or you said you did, and I'm going to give you ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... Judith who had actually turned over. "Don't wake her, this really is a secret. Girlie," dragging Jane down into a chair, "have you noticed that ugly, fat, common country girl, with the wire hair and gimlet eyes? Well, she came in, pushed her way in really, and squatted down plumb in my best Sheraton chair. The size of her!" (This with seething indignation.) "I was so provoked—why, Jane, what is the matter? You are frightened or nervous or something. Have you seen a ...
— Jane Allen: Junior • Edith Bancroft
... slabs, still stood about fifteen feet high and fifteen inches thick. The dimensions on the ground were 12 x 22 feet outside. It had been of two or three stories, and exhibited considerable skill on the part of the builders, the corners being plumb and square. Under the brink of the cliff was a sort of gallery formed by the erosion of a soft shale between heavy sandstone beds, forming a floor and roof about eight or ten feet wide, separated by six or seven feet in vertical height. A wall had been carried along the outer edge, ...
— A Canyon Voyage • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... cried Mr. Snawdor, hysterically. "I can't stand it any longer. I'm a plumb failure and I ain't goin' to ever be anything else. If your maw had taken care of what I had, we wouldn't have been where we are at. Look at the way we live! Like pigs in a pen! We're nothing but pore white trash; that's ...
— Calvary Alley • Alice Hegan Rice
... may not, have been one of the fifteen. I'm not quite clear on that point. Indeed I'm somewhat muddled in the main; but I suspect the SQUIRE is up to some deed of infamy, and I have done my best to plumb its slimy depths." ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, May 27, 1893 • Various
... yo' quit pesterin' 'bout thet. Them young-uns 'druther sleep out'n in, any time. Ef I'd let 'em they'd grow up plumb wild. When yo've got worshed up come on right in the kitchen an' set by. Us Wattses is plain folks an' don't pile on no dog. We've et an' got through, but yo' take all the time yo're a mind to, an' me an' Microby Dandeline 'll set by an' yo' ...
— The Gold Girl • James B. Hendryx
... dreams. And down in the middle of Morgantown is the buryin'-ground. I've ridden past it a thousand times an' watched a corner plot, where the grass grows quicker than it does anywheres else in the cemetery. Pierre, I'd die plumb easy if I knew I was goin' to sleep the rest of time ...
— Riders of the Silences • John Frederick
... home!" laughed the cow-boy. "You just light down and we'll trail over to Chola Charley's and prospect a tub of frijoles. The dinner-bell when you are broke is plumb correct. Got any more of that po'try ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs
... down in an earthen excavation under the depot platform when I arrived, measuring and calculating with his plumb-bob and level, and when I looked in on him hopefully ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... She was the speediest girl on the main floor, and now that she's come into those five hundred, instead of planting it for a rainy day, she's quit work and gone plumb ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... we love to watch the ebbing of population, the dwindling from groves of chimneys and worlds of bricks and mortar to tricksy cottages marshalled with the plumb-line, or sprinkled over "farmy fields" facing Macadamized roads, and collecting more dust in one month than would have ransomed all the captive kings of history, sacred or profane. There we love to trace the ramifications ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 13, No. 363, Saturday, March 28, 1829 • Various
... there is also another pair of symbols describing the futility of the wicked. The wicked is "as a bowing wall." The wall is out of perpendicular, out of conformity with the truth of the plumb-line, and it will assuredly topple into ruin. So is it with the wicked: he is building awry, and he will fall into moral disaster. He is also "as a tottering fence." The wind and the rain dislodge the fence, it rots at its foundations, ...
— My Daily Meditation for the Circling Year • John Henry Jowett
... Mabel." He nodded courteously to the waitress. "Harry, we had the dustiest trip I ever seen in my life," he added, as with his companions he left the table. "The old Ogallala trail wasn't a marker to it. Why, the dust was a mile deep. My tonsils are plumb full of ...
— Laramie Holds the Range • Frank H. Spearman
... toot that old horn good an' loud, so as everybody'll know we're a-comin'." As the automobile moved away he beamed with proud satisfaction. "Some swells we are—heh? Skinny an' Chuck an' the gang'll be plumb crazy when they see us. Some ...
— Helen of the Old House • Harold Bell Wright
... he turned to unharness and feed his other dogs. And again, "Well!" And then, after a pause: "Now I know you're plumb crazy. But all the same—Well, it's got me properly beat. Anyhow, crazy or no, I guess you're meat just the same, an', by the great Geewhillikins! you'll be dead meat, an' digested meat at that, before you're an hour older, my son, if I know anything o' wolves." Later, as he ...
— Jan - A Dog and a Romance • A. J. Dawson
... permanent central calm, who could say? Certainly nobody knew or was likely to know; for the Master of Saint Bede's was a person, the depth of whose nature could not be fathomed easily with any line. Possibly because, old as he was, it happened, as does happen in some lives, that the right plumb-line, by the right hand, had ...
— Christian's Mistake • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... gasped Captain Wass. "She's a-going to tramp him plumb underfoot—unless she's going to get up a little more speed and jump over him!" he ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... of such a solid layer of savagery beneath the surface of society, and unaffected by the superficial changes of religion and culture, has upon the future of humanity. The dispassionate observer, whose studies have led him to plumb its depths, can hardly regard it otherwise than as a standing menace to civilisation. We seem to move on a thin crust which may at any moment be rent by the subterranean forces slumbering below. From time to time a hollow murmur underground or a sudden spirt of flame into the air tells ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... of the wall the ladder that led to one of these houses was 60 feet long, but it was not quite upright, and the tree was growing at some little distance from the bottom of the rock, and the distance by a plumb line from the floor of the verandah to the ground on the lower side of the tree was 94 feet. The floor of the house, which is made first, was 23 feet long and about 11 broad; a narrow verandah is left at each end, and the inside length ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... accomplish their overthrow. And,—what is completely analogous,—in Amos vii. 1-3, the prophet beholds the approaching divine judgment under the image of a swarm of locusts, just as, in ver. 4, under that of a fire, and in ver. 7, under that of a plumb-line. All these three images are in substance identical; their meaning is expressed in ver. 9 by the words: "The high places of Isaac shall be desolate, and the sanctuaries of Israel shall be destroyed." The locusts denote destroying hostile armies; the fire denotes war; ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg
... If he dare venture; hang him, plumb porredge, He wrastle? he rost eggs! Come, lets be gon, ...
— The Two Noble Kinsmen • William Shakespeare and John Fletcher [Apocrypha]
... him slipped out of plumb. The sky and the lawn seemed to alter positions, to rotate madly as in a vortex. The whirling ceased and the next instant Sutter stood on the shore of a lonely sea with a tawny width of sand stretching out before him and the waves ...
— Made in Tanganyika • Carl Richard Jacobi
... he located the line across the floorjoists overhead, where rested the partition separating the dining-room from the parlour. Finding the middle of this line, he dropped an improvised plumb-line to the ground; and from this spot as centre, using a string about ten feet long, he described a circle on the earth. Then, referring to his calculations, he proceeded to locate several points with small ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... of playing a big game. But when it comes down to a short-bit, fresh-water sewing-circle like Plato College, where an imitation scholar teaches you imitation translations of useless classics, and amble-footed girls teach you imitation party manners that 'd make you just as plumb ridic'lous in a real salon as they would in a lumber-camp, why——Oh, sa-a-a-y! I've got it. Girls, eh? What girl 've you been falling in love with to get this ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... be ashamed of a harelip and warts in New Mexico. But you got me wrong; I'm plumb proud of you, and just to prove it I aim to make you carry our bank-roll in your name. That's how she stands at the bank, and that's how she's goin' to stand. From time to time you can gimme a check for what you think I'm wuth. Now then, do with me as you will; ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... where we c'n sit an' study natur' a bit, before we turns back. An' thinkin' it's safe t' do so, I lets go o' Bull's halter. An' while I'm studyin' an' takin' a nip from a flask I happens t' have in my jeans, I forgets Bull for a minit, an' when I looks up, he's plumb absent. ...
— Injun and Whitey to the Rescue • William S. Hart
... saying, "I cannot fight a monk," and sheathed his sword. He did not love monks, none of his house did. He had seen the new gallows, could measure the build of the fellow in the quarry; and though he could not plumb the girl's soul through her misty eyes, he could read her shaking lips and clinging hands; he could see, and be shocked to see, how young she was to be acquainted with grief, and with sin how likely familiar. The hint of the thing revolted him; ...
— The Forest Lovers • Maurice Hewlett
... Clemens, you can start at the front door and you can go plumb to the upper gate and tread on one ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... anarchy, by the occult influence of the avengers of Jacques du Molay and the continuers of the schismatic work of the Temple. Instead of avenging the death of Hiram, they have avenged his assassins. The anarchists have taken the plumb-line, the square, and the mallet and have written on them liberty, equality, fraternity. That is to say, liberty for envyings, equality in degradation, fraternity for destruction. Those are the men whom the Church has justly condemned and that she ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... discovered new charms in Angela; here some hidden knowledge, there an unsuspected grace, and everywhere an all-embracing charity and love. Day by day he gazed deeper into the depths of her mind, and still there were more to plumb. For it was a storehouse of noble thoughts and high ambitions—ambitions, many of which could only find fulfilment in another world than this. And, the more he saw of her, the prouder he was to think that such a perfect creature should so dearly love himself; ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... forward studying the foot print, "it's a mighty good bet I could tell what she looks like from the shape of her head to the colour of her eyes! Now, what do you suppose she's tackling? Something that Mr. Templeton says is plumb foolish ...
— Six Feet Four • Jackson Gregory
... was. She hadn't shifted but very little. The brook had gulled out the bank a piece under one eend o' the plank, so's she was liable to tilt ye sideways if you wasn't careful. But I pooked three-four bricks under her, an' she was all plumb again.' ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling
... life in them, the presence of the creative one, would ever be plain to him. In the Perfect, would familiarity ever destroy wonder at things essentially wonderful because essentially divine? To cease to wonder is to fall plumb-down from the childlike to the commonplace—the most undivine of all moods intellectual. Our nature can never be at home among things that are not wonderful ...
— Hope of the Gospel • George MacDonald
... bein' in too much o' a hurry," said Mr. Dillon. "That mine ain't goin' to walk away, and Abe Blower an' those with him ain't goin' to find it right plumb to onct, believe me! I guess the only reason those others hurried so was because they feared you would come along and queer ...
— Dave Porter in the Gold Fields - The Search for the Landslide Mine • Edward Stratemeyer
... addition, he had come to feel that the Senate was becoming less and less desirable each year, and began to lose interest in it. He did not like the rough-and-tumble methods of debate of a number of Western Senators who were coming to take a more prominent place in the Senate. On one occasion Senator Plumb, of Kansas, attacked Senator Edmunds most violently, and ...
— Fifty Years of Public Service • Shelby M. Cullom
... quick enough if she'd have him, but barrin' her, he hangs to Marg so as ter be nigh Nella-Rose in any case. And right here Burke Lawson figgers. Burke's got two naturs, same as old Satan. Marg can play on one and get him plumb riled up to anythin'; Nella-Rose can twist him around her finger and make him act ...
— The Man Thou Gavest • Harriet T. Comstock
... place, seven great roads go out like the seven rays of a star, plumb straight, darting along the line, across the vast, bare fields of Flanders, past and along the many isolated woods of the provinces, and making to great capitals far off—to Cologne, to Paris, to Treves, and to the ports of ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... and I'd just like to have it the worst kind, especially that head, with the six-pronged antlers on it. But if you thought that proposition a little too risky, Thad, why we might conclude to wait around, keeping under cover, till it got plumb dark. Then we could carry off as much of the buck as we could tote, including the head; and them fellers not be any the wiser for it, till it was too late to follow ...
— The Boy Scouts in the Maine Woods - The New Test for the Silver Fox Patrol • Herbert Carter
... that these inspirational thoughts aren't actually our own. They SEEM different, but that may be because they arise in some part of our deep subconscious thought processes. I've been trying to extend my sense of awareness in order to reach into my subconscious mind and actually plumb it to its depths. One thing I've found is that most of my REAL thinking goes on there, and only rises to the surface of consciousness when it is completed! That lends probability to the theory that ALL such voices of ...
— The Unthinking Destroyer • Roger Phillips
... for me. Her brother and uncles were but my pioneers: her father stormed as I directed him to storm: Mrs. Howe was acted by the springs I set at work; her daughter was moving for me, yet imagined herself plumb against me: and the dear creature herself had already run her stubborn neck into my gin, and knew not that she was caught, for I had not drawn my sprindges close about her—And just as all this was completed, ...
— Clarissa, Volume 3 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... inscribed on it the name of the founder, date, &c. Being furnished with a trowel and mortar by the master mason, Mr. John Holme, he spread it; another massy stone was then let down upon the first, and adjusted to its position, Mr. Wordsworth handling the rule, plumb-line, and mallet, and patting the stone he retired. The Rev. R.P. Graves next offered up the following prayer for the welfare and success of the undertaking: "The foundation-stone of the new parochial school-house of Bowness being now laid, it remains ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... of innumerable waters. What is remarkable in the scenery is, that its sublimity is an inversion of the sublimity of almost all other grand scenery. It is not so much the heights that are prodigious as the abysses. At certain points in the course of the Colorado of the West you can drop a plumb line six thousand feet before it will reach the bosom of the current; and you can only gain the water level by turning backward for scores of miles and winding laboriously down some subsidiary canon, itself a ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... school-miss Alfred vent her chaste delight On darling rooms, so warm and bright;[43] Chant 'I am weary' in infectious strain, And 'catch the blue-fly singing on the pane;' Though praised by critics and adored by Blues, Though Peel with pudding plumb the puling muse; Though Theban taste the Saxon purse controls, And pensions ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... oil!" Chow said. "You looked so pale an' pasty, you had me plumb scared, Tom! I couldn't wake you nohow!" Worriedly the cook added, "What you need is a good beefsteak and some sunshine. You ...
— Tom Swift and the Electronic Hydrolung • Victor Appleton
... finished 'fore night, dey kept right on at it by moonlight. One man wuked so hard tryin' to beat de others dat when he went to de spring for some water, he tuk one drink, raised his haid quick lak, and died right dar. He was plumb daid when dey picked ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - Volume II. Arkansas Narratives. Part I • Work Projects Administration
... of hounds, too, and we can drive pig in the woods, and if we want big game there are the Mangwe flats at our feet. I tell you I'll make such a country-house as nobody ever dreamed of. A man will come plumb out of stark savagery into lawns and rose-gardens." Lawson flung himself into his chair again and smiled dreamily at ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... gizzard out of you, you low-down, dried-up, whisker-faced, mutton-eatin' butcher, you! I goes to you and makes you a square offer and you come pussy-footin' in and steals me ranch when I ain't there! If Jack Corliss don't run you plumb off the edge afore to-morrow night, I'll sure see if there's any law—" and Sundown paused ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs
... to play something," a man they called Day interpreted. "Hen's loco on music. If you can sing and play both, Hen'll set and listen till plumb daylight and ...
— Cow-Country • B. M. Bower
... on the best building the Ecole des Beaux Arts can build, the charge for repairs is not to be wholly ignored, and at least the Cathedral of Chartres, in spite of terribly hard usage, is as solid to-day as when it was built, and as plumb, without crack or crevice. Even the towering fragment at Beauvais, poorly built from the first, which has broken down oftener than most Gothic structures, and seems ready to crumble again whenever the wind ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... could not leave the ladder where it was, and it was nearly twice my height. I struck a match and lit up a sufficient perspective of lumber and cobwebs to reassure me. The loft was long enough, and the trap-door plumb under the apex of the roof, whereas I had stepped sideways off the ladder. It was to be got up, and I got it up, though not by any means as silently as I could have wished. I knelt and listened at the open trap-door for a good minute before closing it with great caution, a ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung
... us than the rigidly geometrical. The same experience has taught us that the curvilinear forms are closer to life than the angular; hence again the tendency, for aesthetic purposes, to introduce minute departures from the plumb-line and rule. There is, however, a type of life specifically human, the life of reason, which is best symbolized by mathematical relations; hence the Greeks, and all those who have followed the classical ideal, all who ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... with the men into the fields—those two girls—and worked like men. At dark they got supper ready, and after the men went to bed they worked on—washing dishes and clearing up the kitchen. They took it turn about getting supper, and sometimes, one said, she was "so plumb tuckered out that she'd drap on the bed and go to sleep ruther than eat her own supper." No wonder poor Tom had to go back to the asylum. All the while the two girls stood by the fire looking, politely but minutely, ...
— A Knight of the Cumberland • John Fox Jr.
... satisfaction when he looked up at the rear facade of Miller's Folly. Near the edge of the roof, was a chimney. A plumb line dropped from the center of the chimney would drop about three feet to the right of the only window ...
— Death Points a Finger • Will Levinrew
... could on earth but few men. Firm laid across the torrent's course, Their work withstands its mighty force, So damming it from shore to shore, That, gliding smoothly o'er, In even sheets the waters pour. Their work, as it proceeds, they grade and bevel, Or bring it up to plumb or level; First lay their logs, and then with mortar smear, As if directed by an engineer. Each labours for the public good; The old command, the youthful brood Cut down, and shape, and place the wood. Compared with theirs, e'en Plato's model state ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... Talmudic tendencies; he must acquaint himself with the heretical leanings of a certain era, and the shadow cast upon the page by apocryphal tradition. In philosophy he is still worse off, because he must plumb the depths of metaphysical jargon and master the ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... landsman sufficiently daunting while it lasted. Late in the afternoon I thrust my head up for a look around. We were weltering along in horrible forty-foot seas, over which our bulwarks tilted at times until from the companion hatchway I stared plumb into the grey sliding chasms, and felt like a fly on the wall. The Lady Nepean hurled her old timbers along under close-reefed maintopsail, and a rag of a foresail only. The captain had housed topgallant masts and lashed his guns inboard; ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... his sight, there they stood all of them, in two rows; and we could say nothing on both sides, but God bless you! and God bless you! But Harry carried my own bundle, my third bundle, as I was used to call it, to the coach, with some plumb-cake, and diet-bread, made for me over-night, and some sweet-meats, and six bottles of Canary wine, which Mrs. Jervis would make me take in a basket, to cheer our hearts now and then, when we got together, ...
— Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded • Samuel Richardson
... site this morning, eh? Wish it well for me. If I've got to be civilized I'm going to be plumb ...
— The Young Alaskans in the Rockies • Emerson Hough
... piling up against each other like sin, she came over and sat down beside me and began to feed me. She did that, Alan—fed me. When the lightning fired up, I could see her eyes shining and her lips smilin' as if all that hell about us made her happy, and I thought she was plumb crazy. Before I knew it she was telling me how you pointed me out to her in the smoking-room, and how happy she was that I was goin' her way. Her way, mind you, Alan, not mine. And that's just the way she's kept me goin' up to the minute you hove ...
— The Alaskan • James Oliver Curwood
... day, sky an' sunshine, an' the temper o' the breeze. Here's the weather I would fashion could I run things as I please— Beauty dancin' all around me, music ringin' everywhere, Like a weddin' celebration. Why, I've plumb fergot my care An' the tasks I should be doin' fer the rainy days to be, While I'm huggin' the delusion that God made ...
— All That Matters • Edgar A. Guest
... office and informed me he was, plumb weary of the life of a bon vivant and was anxious to get to sea again. So I made him master of a new steamer we acquired recently, and he's gone out to Vladivostok with ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne
... a plumb out opinion—because it nearly always ruins your reputation as a prophet. But Bob ain't nobody's fool. And he's white from his heels to his eyeballs—everything except ...
— The Desert Fiddler • William H. Hamby
... already well known by his service in the Senate, now returned from Iowa.—Preston B. Plumb of Kansas, who had been printer, editor, soldier in the civil war with the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel, member of the Bar, reporter of the Supreme Court of his State, Speaker of the House of Representatives of Kansas, now succeeded James M. ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... with Gresham," we are told remain, "those of Plumbe are gone." Sylvester's "Triumph of Faith" is consecrated "to the grateful memory of the first kind fosterer of our tender Muses, by my never sufficiently honoured dear uncle, W. Plumb, Esq." It is not our intention to linger over the recollections connected with the age of Elizabeth in Fulham Fields or at North End, although there can be no doubt that a little research might bring ...
— A Walk from London to Fulham • Thomas Crofton Croker
... "Whig Rose," and "Radical Rose" are all suggestive of the great discussion over slavery. Of the last name, an old lady, famous for her quilt making, said: "Here's my 'Radical Rose.' I reckon you've heard I was the first human that ever put black in a Radical Rose. Thar hit is, right plumb in the middle. Well, whenever you see black in a Radical Rose you can know hit war made atter the second year of the war (Civil War). Hit was this way, ever' man war a-talkin' about the Radicals and all the women tuk to makin' Radical ...
— Quilts - Their Story and How to Make Them • Marie D. Webster
... prepared to be even more sotto-voce and to plumb a much profounder mystery. His eye rested on the perambulator; he leant a little nearer to the ear.... But ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... imperforation[obs3], imperviousness &c. adj.; impermeability; stopper &c. 263. V. close, occlude, plug; block up, stop up, fill up, bung up, cork up, button up, stuff up, shut up, dam up; blockade, obstruct &c. (hinder) 706; bar, bolt, stop, seal, plumb; choke, throttle; ram down, dam, cram; trap, clinch; put to the door, shut the door. Adj. closed &c. v.; shut, operculated[obs3]; unopened. unpierced[obs3], imporous[obs3], caecal[Med]; closable; imperforate, impervious, impermeable; impenetrable; impassable, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... the oak, the plumb-tree and the holme, The stock-dove and the blackbird should not come, Whose mooting on the trees does make to grow ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... camera itself will do if perpendicular to the base. Then, having two musket bullets attached to a silk thread, simply hang them over the camera, and everything required will be attained much quicker by these plumb-lines, and with accuracy equal to the spirit-levels. The advantage of the simple contrivance of two bullets suspended by threads is, that when the thread is laid across the camera, it is at once seen whether the thread touches all the way down both sides; if not, one or other side ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 184, May 7, 1853 • Various
... peculiarities except that something, excitement or a sudden jostle or something, had pushed Aurora's rippling black locks to one side, with the result that the part which divided the ripples, instead of descending plumb-line fashion from the crown of the head to a point directly in the center of the forehead, now had a diagonal twist and ended over the left eye. The effect was rather astonishing, as if the upper section of the lady's head had ...
— Fair Harbor • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... says nothin',—jest sets there like he was froze plumb stiff an' couldn't stir a eyelid—sets there, starin' straight ahead down the flume. Looks like his face is caught in the ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... got much appetite. But when he's eatin' good his legs is jest great. Why, there ain't no other dog in Golconda that's got as strong legs as Baldy when he's—when he's eatin' good," he repeated hastily. "An' Golconda's plumb ...
— Baldy of Nome • Esther Birdsall Darling
... plumb forget, wuz pore white trash an' he wuz meaner dan de meanest nigger. Anyhow I wuz too little ter do much wuck so I played a heap an' ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States • Various
... that is, as architects build, by plumb line and level. Trinculo picks up the word line and makes a ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... tied up on the Two-Bar and muzzled, for you're plumb mad, McNair! It's just that kind of firebrand talk that's hurting our cause. The farmers have got enough enemies now, God knows, without making a lot of new ones. Doggone your hide, Mac, what're you trying to do?—Stir up another rebellion like that ...
— Deep Furrows • Hopkins Moorhouse
... a moment a thought had all but swept her off her feet; yet she realized instantly that this thought was futile. Warrington did not love her; and there was nothing to do but to follow out the course she had planned. She had come to him that night with a single purpose in mind: to plumb the very heart of this man who was an enigma to every woman he met. She had plumbed it. Warrington loved nobody but Warrington and pleasure. Oh, he was capable of the grand passion, she very well knew, but the woman to arouse it had ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath
... tell you I shook hands with this boy an' was plumb glad to meet him?" demanded Laddy, with considerable heat. Manifestly he had been affronted. "Tom Beldin', he's a gentleman, an' he could lick you in—in half a second. How ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... National Bank, and in its place a chaste Greek Temple of a building looks rather contemptuously down its classic columns upon the farmer's wagons drawn up along the curb. If Fanny Brandeis' sense of proportion had not been out of plumb she might have realized that, to Winnebago, the new First National Bank building was as significant and epochal as had been the Woolworth Building to ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... mighty-mouthed hollow That's plumb-full of hush to the brim; I've watched the big, husky sun wallow In crimson and gold, and grow dim, Till the moon set the pearly peaks gleaming, And the stars tumbled out, neck and crop; And I've thought that I surely was dreaming, With the peace o' ...
— The Spell of the Yukon • Robert Service
... 'Well,' says she, 'Huldy Peters is well enough at her trade. I never denied that, though I do say I never did believe in her way o' makin' button-holes; and I must say, if 'twas the dearest friend I hed, that I thought Huldy tryin' to fit Mis' Kit-tridge's plumb-colored silk was a clear piece o' presumption; the silk was jist spiled, so 'twarn't fit to come into the meetin'-house. I must say, Huldy's a gal that's always too ventersome about takin' 'spon-sibilities ...
— Oldtown Fireside Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... spirits winged their way down into those dark and intuitive depths of her mind she had never found time to plumb. She knew that the hour of dawn was always still, but she had never imagined a stillness so complete, so final as this. Nor was there any fresh lightness in the morning air. It seemed to press downward like an enormous invisible bat; or like the shade of buried cities, vain outcroppings of ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... sees it in motion, and sees its resistless might in the passive wrecks that follow the uproar. And this from a piece of marble, cold, immovable, lifeless! Surely there is that in man, which the senses cannot reach, nor the plumb of the ...
— Lectures on Art • Washington Allston
... ashamed of a harelip and warts in New Mexico. But you got me wrong; I'm plumb proud of you, and just to prove it I aim to make you carry our bank-roll in your name. That's how she stands at the bank, and that's how she's goin' to stand. From time to time you can gimme a check for what you think I'm wuth. Now ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... our drag-rope as it trailed along the ground when we were quite near the earth, and held on with his teeth though we pulled him along over the stubble on his back, and never let go until we had jerked him plumb over ...
— Illustrated Science for Boys and Girls • Anonymous
... caught all the tones they gave out. He gathered knowledge like a true and indefatigable political bee. This walking Bayle dictionary did not act, however, like that famous lexicon; he did not report all opinions without drawing his own conclusions; he had the talent of a fly which drops plumb upon the best bit of meat in the middle of a kitchen. In this way he came to be regarded as an indispensable helper to statesmen. A belief in his capacity had taken such deep root in all minds that the ...
— Bureaucracy • Honore de Balzac
... to the right from his house, going west. It's an unused bye-road and it runs plumb into my cabin. There's a frying pan there ... and some flour ... and bacon ... tell you what ... it's been broken into several times. I'll consider it worth while if you go and live there, and I get no rent from you for it nor the room ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... to come sometime, Bound to come, I suppose. 'Tis a poor thing For us, to fall plumb in the chance of it; But, now or another time, 'twas bound to be.— I have been thinking back. When I was a lad I was delighted with my life: there seemed Naught but things to enjoy. Say we were bathing: There'ld be the cool smell of ...
— Georgian Poetry 1913-15 • Edited by E. M. (Sir Edward Howard Marsh)
... "Plumb nervousness," said Buck. "Same as if I was pulling up to the start with fifty thousand on the nag. I want to ask your advice, A. A. Just a little private matter. Oh, nothing serious. Nothing like that, you know. I just thought maybe you'd—Gosh, I never saw it snow ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... Flint Kreeger an' the rest. I tell yuh, I'm dead sick of being spied on, an' plotted against, an' never knowin' when yuh may get a knife in the back, or stop a bullet. I hate to leave Bud, but he's so plumb set on—" ...
— Shoe-Bar Stratton • Joseph Bushnell Ames
... bounds of truth. Chappaz Nicolai, whose name the maire had written in my note-book, that there might be no mistake, appeared to be of that peculiar mental calibre which warrants Yorkshire peasants in describing a man as 'half-rocked,' or 'not plumb.' His wife, on the other hand, was one of those neat, gentle, sensible women, of whom one wonders how they ever came to marry such thick-lipped and blear-eyed men. Between them they informed me that if I did not object to share a room, I could be taken in; otherwise—maire or no maire—not. ...
— Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland • George Forrest Browne
... expell'd. Hapless mariners are they, Who beguil'd (as seamen say), Deeming him some rock or island, Footing sure, safe spot, and dry land, Anchor in his scaly rind; Soon the difference they find; Sudden plumb, he sinks beneath them; Does to ruthless seas ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... one o' them Tollivers gits white about the mouth, an' thar eyes gits to blazin' and they KEEPS QUIET—they're plumb out o' reach o' the Almighty hisself. June skeered me. But you mustn't blame her jes' now. You see, you got up that guard. You ketched Rufe and hung him, and she can't help thinkin' if you hadn't done that, her old daddy wouldn't be in thar on his back nigh to death. ...
— The Trail of the Lonesome Pine • John Fox, Jr.
... That willing lad of yours has plumb knocked the answer out of my noodle. Maybe you're thinking of some one else, Buck." Dingwell looked up at him with an innocent, ...
— The Sheriff's Son • William MacLeod Raine
... Hope are encouraging. Our Christian Endeavor Society has a large membership, and is a power for good. But while we rejoice over these places that have these helps we think of the hundreds of counties along this mountain range that have no such helps. Senator Plumb has stated that the assessment in Alabama for pistols, guns and dirks is four times that on farming implements, and Kentucky's record of crime is far worse than Alabama's. Who of us can say that he is innocent ...
— American Missionary, Volume 43, No. 1, January, 1889 • Various
... ejaculated, mournfully; "bot' tumbs up! but it's a pity. Carson's an Irish gintleman, an' if I could till him ye was a gurl, he'd knock the head plumb off any b'y that 'ud bother ye. Ye'd git ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser
... I give her the name, myself," he observed, at last. "Seein' I just got her a week ago last Saturday. I ASKED Casper Hoyt what under the canopy possessed him to give her a name like that. Said his father named her. Well, I thought his father must be plumb foolish, or something, but I didn't like to say so to HIM. Seems too bad to waste them gilt letters, or I'd a-had another name on her 'fore this. I wanted to use as many of them letters as I could, an' I thought of callin' her for my ...
— The Voyage of the Hoppergrass • Edmund Lester Pearson
... the Asquam Utility Emporium. And have you remarked the chairs? Mrs. Hopkins sent those, too. They were in her corn-crib,—on the rafters,—and she said if we didn't see convenient to bring 'em back, never mind, 'cause she was plumb tired of clutterin' 'em round from ...
— The Happy Venture • Edith Ballinger Price
... But none of these tricks will answer with t'other, who misses the whipping off the end of a gasket, as soon as any first luff of us all. And so I'll just go about the business in earnest; get the carpenter up with his plumb-bob, and set every thing as straight up-and-down as the ...
— The Two Admirals • J. Fenimore Cooper
... you eat your dinner that day, Sir?' JOHNSON. 'Yes, Sir; and eat it as if he were eating it with me. Why, there's Baretti, who is to be tried for his life to-morrow, friends have risen up for him on every side; yet if he should be hanged, none of them will eat a slice of plumb-pudding the less. Sir, that sympathetic feeling goes a very little way in ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... takin' a candy sucker from a baby. 'Curly' let go of that 'six' like he was plumb tired of it, and the kid welted him over the ear just oncet. Then he turned on the room; and right there my heart went out to him. He took in the line up at ...
— Pardners • Rex Beach
... 1745-6. For one thing, almost without exception, the representative peers were dependent on governmental subsidies and this dependence increased during the course of the eighteenth century (see J. H. Plumb, The Growth of Political Stability in England [London: Penguin, 1973], p. 180; and Geoffrey Holmes, British Politics in the Age of Anne [London: Macmillan, 1967], p. 393). The practice of electing a representative peerage for Scotland was discontinued ...
— Atalantis Major • Daniel Defoe
... to his associates as a man of splendid and many-sided vitality. A college classmate, Dr. John Denison, graphically describes him, "A sort of cataclysm of health, like other cyclones from the South seas"; what the Tennessee mountaineers call "plumb survigrous"; an islander, with the high courage and jollity of the tar; "a kind of mental as well as physical amphibiousness." Extraordinary in his training and versatility; able to "manage a boat in a storm, teach a school, edit a newspaper, assist in carrying ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... his way, scraping alongside the big barges which delivered coal from the distant mines to the docks along the river front. At last he found an opening and pushed through. A moment later they were riding under the stern of a broad, cargoless barge, plumb up against the water-lapped piles ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... increases during the fall, the direct line of flight becomes more pronounced until at last they assume a vertical direction free from all wobbling, so that when they alight upon the target they are quite plumb. ...
— Aeroplanes and Dirigibles of War • Frederick A. Talbot
... crash, but it was the spirit of my team that thrilled me. Next to that the work of my new find absorbed me. I gloated over his easy, deceiving swing. I rose out of my seat when he threw that straight fast ball, swift as a bullet, true as a plumb line. And when those hard-hitting, sure bunting Bisons chopped in vain at the wonderful drop, I choked back a wild yell. For Rube meant the world to ...
— The Redheaded Outfield and Other Baseball Stories • Zane Grey
... shall the soul thereby Unto the All draw nigh? Shall it avail to plumb the mystic deeps Of flowery beauty, scale the icy steeps Of perilous thought, thy hidden Face to find, Or tread the starry paths to the utmost verge of the sky? Nay, groping dull and blind Within the sheltering dimness of thy wings— Shade that their splendour flings Athwart Eternity— We, out ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... just plumb ruined. He said he'd snatch Ikey bald-headed, and do a lot of other things to him, if he didn't walk right out into State street and bring back that Little Brass God. Holy Moses! You ought to have seen how scared Little ...
— Boy Scouts in Northern Wilds • Archibald Lee Fletcher
... Aleck Pop's comment. "I was finkin' dat rascal was plumb dead, suah. And Dan, too! Suah yo' didn't ...
— The Rover Boys on the Great Lakes • Arthur M. Winfield
... chuckled Jerry. "But, if she was scar't, she warn't plumb stunned in her tracks—no, sir! She gave a leap for the door and she swung it shut right against Mr. B'ar's nose. ...
— Ruth Fielding at Snow Camp • Alice Emerson
... foots it up with wonderful speed and certainty, and comes down again in the same manner, bringing his gourd full of liquor on his arm. Among their fruits are many kinds of plumbs; one like a wheaten plumb is wholesome and savoury; likewise a black one, as large as a horse plumb, which is much esteemed, and has an aromatic flavour. A kind called mansamilbas, resembling a wheaten plumb, is very dangerous, as is likewise the sap ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. VIII. • Robert Kerr
... car coming along about that time. The skipper yelled to me to ease off the larboard stay. Now, I might know something about mince pie, but a larboard stay is not my long and hasty. Then some one pushed me aside, and succeeded in putting things in such excellent shape that we ran plumb through the ...
— Billy Baxter's Letters • William J. Kountz, Jr.
... when once the wheels are loosed, How nimbly, with what swift activity. I think, 'tis strange that men should ever sleep, There are so many things to think upon, So many deeds, so many thoughts to weigh, To pierce, and plumb them to the silent depth. Yet in that thought I do rebuke myself, Too little given to probe the inner heart, But rather wont, with the luxurious eye, To catch from life it's outer loveliness, Such things ...
— Among the Millet and Other Poems • Archibald Lampman
... dead man and his heirs was certainly much older than any form of Testament or phase of Testamentary jurisprudence. This indeed is the proper moment for suggesting a doubt which will press on us with greater force the further we plumb the depths of this subject,—whether wills would ever have come into being at all if it had not been for these remarkable ideas connected with universal succession. Testamentary law is the application of a principle which may be explained on a variety of ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... trigonometry may calculate the heights and distances of objects, the latitude and longitude of a place, the amount any body is lightened by the centrifugal force due to rotation, the deviation of a plumb-line from a true ...
— General Science • Bertha M. Clark
... in the United States in 1837-1839 and in England in 1864-1866, large houses and powerful institutions of credit had maintained a whole scaffolding of speculation which was already out of plumb, but still able to stand upright through the general effect of the parts which connected them, and in this unstable equilibrium it sufficed for a single one to detach itself in order to overthrow the whole edifice at a juncture at which it was ...
— A Brief History of Panics • Clement Juglar
... savages to other islands in sight, and sent some armed men on shore, with orders to keep pretty near us, and to run close along shore in the boats. But they returned without success. This island we called Plumb Island, from its bearing an austere, astringent kind of fruit, resembling plumbs, but not ...
— Voyage of H.M.S. Pandora - Despatched to Arrest the Mutineers of the 'Bounty' in the - South Seas, 1790-1791 • Edward Edwards
... matters of knowledge, and then to study the art and science of teaching these facts to others. Instead of coming with their brick and mortar ready prepared, that they may be instructed in the use of the trowel and the plumb-line, they have to make their brick and mix their mortar after they enter the institution. This is undoubtedly a drawback and a misfortune. But it cannot be helped at present. All we can do is to define clearly the true idea of the Teachers' ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart
... to the deep creek bank. A yard or two farther and the brown horse and his burden must have gone over the terrible drop, as straight as a plumb-line, on to the awful rocks below. We could see where the brown had torn up the turf as he struck all four hoofs deep into it at once. Indeed, he had been newly shod, a freak of Jim's about a bet with a travelling blacksmith. Then ...
— Robbery Under Arms • Thomas Alexander Browne, AKA Rolf Boldrewood
... Bibb come out and told us we was free. That is how I came to know it. He came out there on the farm and said, 'Well, you all free as I am. You can stay here if you want to or you can go somewhere else.' We stayed. Mama stayed there on the farm plumb till she come to town. I don't know how many years. I was there in town and so she come onto town later. Moved in with the people she was with. They gave up their place. I was nineteen years old when I left the country. My mother gave me her consent,—to marry then, ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Arkansas Narratives Part 3 • Works Projects Administration
... white folks! Here I is done drapped plumb off'n my subject; but a old man's mind will jes' run waa'ry at times. Me and Joe, Alex's son, went to see de officer 'bout gitting Joe's pa buried. He 'lowed dat Alex's body was riddled wid bullets; so we took him and put his bones ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves • Works Projects Administration
... twenty-four stanzas to it; an' while these interlopin' selectmen sets thar lookin' owley an' sagacious, I'd wallop loose with the twenty-four verses, stampin' up and down, an' accompanyin' said recitations with sech a multitood of reckless gestures, it comes plenty clost to backin' everybody plumb outen the ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various
... She hadn't shifted but very little. The brook had gulled out the bank a piece under one eend o' the plank, so's she was liable to tilt ye sideways if you wasn't careful. But I pooked three-four bricks under her, an' she was all plumb again.' ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling
... of humanity had a spell for those who heard him speak. There was no subject, moral, intellectual, or philosophic too remote or too profound for him to measure it at a moment's notice, with the ever-ready, fallacious plumb-line of his brilliant vanity. He would talk for hours: be eloquent, convincing, almost noble; and afterwards accompany his audience to the ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... their errors are all forgiven. It is their best part only that remains unrealised and unread, their purest aspirations which we follow with leaden wings, their deepest thoughts that we still strive to plumb with the short line of our imagination or experience, and to weigh ...
— Stella Fregelius • H. Rider Haggard
... where we were was plumb full of live things—striped chipmunks, and pine squirrels, and woodpecker families. Fitzpatrick started in to take chipmunk pictures—and you ought to see how he can manage a camera with one hand. He holds it between his ...
— Pluck on the Long Trail - Boy Scouts in the Rockies • Edwin L. Sabin
... in a low, musical murmur. "Hit's plumb dead beautiful!" Her eyes were glowing with ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... scraped cleaner and cleaner, till the last polishes him as smooth as a yearling baby. Having thus reached the lower end of the table, there are a quantity of hooks fitted to strong wooden arms, which revolve round a stout pillar, and which, in describing the circle, plumb the lower end of the table. On these piggy is hooked, and the operation of cutting open and cleansing is performed—at the rate of three a minute—by operators steeped in blood, and standing in an ocean ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... projected towards the captain, quite out of line, while the barrel rested on his own shoulder. Still, as his arms were extended to the utmost, the county Leitrim-man fancied he was performing much better than common. Jamie had correct notions of the perpendicular, from having used the plumb-bob so much, though even he made the trifling mistake of presenting arms with the lock outwards. As for the Yankees, they were all tolerably exact, in everything but time, and the line; bringing their pieces down, one after another, much as ...
— Wyandotte • James Fenimore Cooper
... straighten the axle, while you see what ails that cussed motor. Good golly! We'll be here all night at this rate. And if we keep on hopping over this field like a lame crow, we'll be plumb outa gas. For a mechanic that can make a motor, Bland, you sure ain't ...
— The Thunder Bird • B. M. Bower
... when the workers are returning home; they drifted along singly and in crowds, stooping and loitering, shuffling a little after the fatigue of the day. There was a whole new world out here, quite different from that of the "Ark." The houses were new and orderly, built with level and plumb-line; the men went their appointed ways, and one could see at a glance what ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... all right, all right," murmured Cousin Egbert in a sort of ecstasy, as we drew up at the Floud home. "And yet one of them guys back there called him a typical Britisher. You bet I shut him up quick—saying a thing like that about a plumb stranger. I'd 'a' mixed it with him right there except I thought it was better to have things nice and not start something the minute ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... here, Allen. If you think you can marry Morton Bassett's daughter with that kind of a scandal in your pocket, I tell you you're mad—you've plumb gone insane! Great God, boy, you don't know the meaning of the words you use. You handle that thing like a child with a loaded pistol. Don't you see what that would mean—to Marian, to Blackford, ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... practically destroyed; the others were not much injured, but no longer plumb, as they undoubtedly were when constructed. The east wall was in best condition; the outer face was nearly vertical; the top of the highest stone remaining in it was 28 inches above the bottom of the lowest. The general appearance of the ...
— Archeological Investigations - Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 76 • Gerard Fowke
... next fortnight, poor Vane thought he had pretty well fathomed this extraordinary woman's character. Plumb the Atlantic with an eighty-fathom ...
— Peg Woffington • Charles Reade
... of you and me, As the two gifts they want, Say Classic lore and Cookery Are things for which they pant; Believe me, my dear Heptarchy, They plumb ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, September 17, 1892 • Various
... sullenly. "Mebbe young Dave Steele as come back from ther' with a hole in his head that left him plumb crazy ever since till he died, 'cos o' some racket he had wi' Jake—mebbe that's out of a dime fiction. Say, you git right to it, an' kep on sousin' whisky, Slum Ranks. You ken do that—you can't tell me 'bout ...
— The Night Riders - A Romance of Early Montana • Ridgwell Cullum
... natur' a bit, before we turns back. An' thinkin' it's safe t' do so, I lets go o' Bull's halter. An' while I'm studyin' an' takin' a nip from a flask I happens t' have in my jeans, I forgets Bull for a minit, an' when I looks up, he's plumb absent. ...
— Injun and Whitey to the Rescue • William S. Hart
... front wheel and prodigious feats of balancing, squeezing out of the machine's momentum the last possible fraction of an inch. There was a magnificent distance record when, on one single occasion only, he had been deposited plumb in line with his own gate; and there was a divertingly lamentable shortage record, touched on more than one occasion, when he had come to ground plumb in line with the gate of Mr. Fargus, his neighbour on ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... more ways than one, for I could not leave the ladder where it was, and it was nearly twice my height. I struck a match and lit up a sufficient perspective of lumber and cobwebs to reassure me. The loft was long enough, and the trap-door plumb under the apex of the roof, whereas I had stepped sideways off the ladder. It was to be got up, and I got it up, though not by any means as silently as I could have wished. I knelt and listened at the open trap-door for a good minute before closing it ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung
... Willis as he turned to unharness and feed his other dogs. And again, "Well!" And then, after a pause: "Now I know you're plumb crazy. But all the same—Well, it's got me properly beat. Anyhow, crazy or no, I guess you're meat just the same, an', by the great Geewhillikins! you'll be dead meat, an' digested meat at that, before you're an hour older, my son, if I know anything o' wolves." Later, as he proceeded to thaw ...
— Jan - A Dog and a Romance • A. J. Dawson
... seemed to have a sense of humour. I felt sure that he, at least, was plumb straight. 'Sure, doc,' I said, 'I'm sorry about the tree, and I guess the new bulbs will be on me. But perhaps you'd like to know what I was doing in your garden?' 'I think the facts do call for an explanation,' he replied. 'Well, to begin ...
— The Secret Adversary • Agatha Christie
... you would you just as lief drive slower," he said with a grin to the chauffeur as he descended to the safety of the sidewalk. "I ain't awful hardy, an' I sure was plumb scared." ...
— The Big-Town Round-Up • William MacLeod Raine
... for some time he continued: "The door jamb is built in vertically; that is sure. A string, or piece of thread will make a plumb-bob; here it is: now let us see; according to the plumb line the boat is at an angle of 33 degrees, as nearly as our imperfect device indicates. There, now this line A shows the top of the boat and B the base of the conning tower. A line C, ...
— The Boy Volunteers with the Submarine Fleet • Kenneth Ward
... but few men. Firm laid across the torrent's course, Their work withstands its mighty force, So damming it from shore to shore, That, gliding smoothly o'er, In even sheets the waters pour. Their work, as it proceeds, they grade and bevel, Or bring it up to plumb or level; First lay their logs, and then with mortar smear, As if directed by an engineer. Each labours for the public good; The old command, the youthful brood Cut down, and shape, and place the wood. Compared with theirs, e'en Plato's model state ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... round-up had started; so Sylvane gave me his horse, Baldy, which sometimes bucked but never went over backwards, and he got on the now rearisen Ben Butler. To my discomfiture Ben started quietly beside us, while Sylvane remarked, "Why, there's nothing the matter with this horse; he's a plumb gentle horse." Then Ben fell slightly behind and I heard Sylvane again, "That's all right! Come along! Here, you! Go on, you! Hi, hi, fellows, help me out! he's lying on me!" Sure enough, he was; and when we dragged ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... of some sort necessarily take place? What would support the present frail foundations of the city buildings, which seem to be now sustained by hydraulic pressure? Even as it is, no heavy structure can be found in the limits of the capital which is not more or less out of plumb, in emulation of the leaning tower of Pisa. The thick walls of the Iturbide Hotel are so full of cracks and crevices, caused by the settling here and there of its insecure foundation, as to cause anxiety and constant remark among its ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... I'll be darned if the changeablest one ain't the kind to hold a feller longest. But it's h—l. I was married onct. Not any more for mine! A pal I had used to say thet whiskey riled him, thet rattlesnake pisen het up his blood some, but it took a woman to make him plumb bad. D—n if it ain't so. When there's a woman around there's somethin' allus ...
— The Heritage of the Desert • Zane Grey
... said the man with the wagon. "I thought I knew these here woods pretty well, but I'm blamed if I know where we are now. Everything looks turned around; I'd swear now, that that was the west over there, yet there is the sun a-risin' as big as life. I'm plumb addled!" ...
— The Camp Fire Girls in the Maine Woods - Or, The Winnebagos Go Camping • Hildegard G. Frey
... melt lead or pewter. But he succeeded at last, melting down all his spare change to make the small, shining bullet. This was rammed down his gun, a deliberate aim taken, and Dick announced that it had struck the mark plumb in the ...
— The Riflemen of the Miami • Edward S. Ellis
... different!" She nodded her lovely head in firm conviction. "It's heaps different and I'm goin' to know more about such things as clo'es. I ain't plumb poverty poor, like lots o' folks, here in th' mountings. I got land down in th' valley I get rent from—fifty dollars, every year! I'm goin' to ...
— In Old Kentucky • Edward Marshall and Charles T. Dazey
... he pleaded, "you've drubbed him enough. Shake me if you ain't through yet. You'll have him plumb addled! Really, we were just in for some fun. We never dreamed the kids would scare so easy. That's only vegetable dye on Rosslyn's head. He thought we had scalped him, but we didn't mean ...
— Tabitha's Vacation • Ruth Alberta Brown
... ship. These were removed, and a heavy trap door, upon which the foot of the flagstaff rested, was its only support. A massive bolt alone held the trap in place. Will and the Professor were by the ice shaft, watching the plumb-line. At a signal, the Doctor struck the bolt a heavy blow with a sledge, the trap fell, and the beautiful mast shot like a flash of lightning down through the frosty atmosphere, entered the ice hole precisely in the center, and sank to the depth of 35 feet into the snow, which, added ...
— Doctor Jones' Picnic • S. E. Chapman
... surfaces as well as the bearing due to taper in piles, and lastly the resistance offered by binding, enter into the determination of so-called skin friction formulas. The essential condition of sinking a caisson is keeping it plumb; and binding, which is another way of writing increased bearing value, will oftentimes be fatal ...
— Pressure, Resistance, and Stability of Earth • J. C. Meem
... who could say? Certainly nobody knew or was likely to know; for the Master of Saint Bede's was a person, the depth of whose nature could not be fathomed easily with any line. Possibly because, old as he was, it happened, as does happen in some lives, that the right plumb-line, by the right hand, had never ...
— Christian's Mistake • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... frenzy, I popped off the crackers and dropped my cigar into Vesuvius. I tell you he was worth four and eightpence, and the man was right when he said there wasn't his match in London. I doubt if there was his match anywhere for being plumb- full of red balls and green balls and blue balls and crimson stars and fizzlegigs and whole torrents of tiny crackers and chase-me- quicks, and when you about thought he was never going to stop he shot up a silver spray and ...
— Love, The Fiddler • Lloyd Osbourne
... Above all, beware of trusting to the supposed verticals or horizontals in built work, especially in tracery. A thing may be theoretically and intentionally at a certain angle, but actually at quite a different one. If level is important, take it yourself with spirit-level and plumb-line. ...
— Stained Glass Work - A text-book for students and workers in glass • C. W. Whall
... tellin' about the next couple of hours. 'Cordin' to my reckonin' they was years and we'd ought to have sailed plumb through the broadside of the Cape, and be makin' a quick run for Africy. But at last we got into smoother water, and then, right acrost our bows, showed up a white strip. The fog had pretty well blowed clear and I could ...
— The Depot Master • Joseph C. Lincoln
... founder, date, &c. Being furnished with a trowel and mortar by the master mason, Mr. John Holme, he spread it; another massy stone was then let down upon the first, and adjusted to its position, Mr. Wordsworth handling the rule, plumb-line, and mallet, and patting the stone he retired. The Rev. R.P. Graves next offered up the following prayer for the welfare and success of the undertaking: "The foundation-stone of the new parochial school-house of Bowness being now laid, it remains that, as your minister, ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... gruffly. "You Mr. Krootzer? Wot? Yes? Well, this kid comes to the station-house and hollers that she's stole a ring and somebody that ain't had anything to do with it is gettin' pinched fer stealin' it. The kid acts plumb bug-house, but Sarge he says fer me to come around and see wot's up. Wot is she, dippy? Did she re'ly steal a di'mond? This don't look like wot you'd call a likely place to find ...
— The Old Flute-Player - A Romance of To-day • Edward Marshall and Charles T. Dazey
... make that start for home and mother and supper right now; or are we going to stay here till she gets plumb dark?" asked Fritz, impatiently, moving his feet out of the way every time anyone approached too closely, as though possessed by a fear lest he be tempted ...
— Boy Scouts on a Long Hike - Or, To the Rescue in the Black Water Swamps • Archibald Lee Fletcher
... according to the rules of perfection; but yet it is chance alone made it. Among so many pieces of marble there was one that formed itself of its own accord in this manner; the rains and winds have loosened it from the mountains; a violent storm has thrown it plumb upright on this pedestal, which had prepared itself to support it in this place. It is a perfect Apollo, like that of Belvedere; a Venus that equals that of the Medicis; an Hercules, like that of Farnese. You would think, it is true, that this figure walks, lives, ...
— The Existence of God • Francois de Salignac de La Mothe- Fenelon
... of flesh than he was. He was walkin' along up Fifth Avenue with Florrie Spencer—I'll always call her Florrie Spencer I don't care how many times she marries—and everybody in the street turned right plumb round to look at 'em. She's prettier than she ever was, ain't she? And such a fit as her dress was! One of them trailin' black things that fit as tight as wax over the hips and flares out all round the feet. She was holdin' ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... from the quantity of water shipped over all, the carpenter disengaged the rope-yarn from the rule, drew another from the junk lying on the deck, which the seamen were working up, and then carefully proceeded to plumb the well. He hauled it up, and, looking at it for some moments aghast, exclaimed, 'Seven feet water ...
— The Pirate and The Three Cutters • Frederick Marryat
... mass Called "work" must sentence pass Things done, that took the eye and had the price.... But all, the world's coarse thumb And finger failed to plumb, So passed in making up the main account; All instincts immature, All purposes unsure, That weighed not as his work, yet ...
— Woodrow Wilson and the World War - A Chronicle of Our Own Times. • Charles Seymour
... painters drew back, leaving the old man absorbed in ecstasy, and tried to see if the light, falling plumb upon the canvas at which he pointed, had neutralized all effects. They examined the picture, moving from right to left, standing directly before it, bending, ...
— The Hidden Masterpiece • Honore de Balzac
... Yet should not ceaseless hunt about the room To catch each straggling pin to make a plumb: Too oft Economy's an iron vice, That squeezes even the little guts of mice, That peep with fearful eyes, ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... fifteen feet high and fifteen inches thick. The dimensions on the ground were 12 x 22 feet outside. It had been of two or three stories, and exhibited considerable skill on the part of the builders, the corners being plumb and square. Under the brink of the cliff was a sort of gallery formed by the erosion of a soft shale between heavy sandstone beds, forming a floor and roof about eight or ten feet wide, separated by six or seven feet in vertical height. A wall had been carried along ...
— A Canyon Voyage • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... once hard at work with charcoal and board and plumb-line, a house-maid posing for her with a broom. He congratulated himself that his little sermon on the advantages of occupation as a cure for discontent had borne fruit so speedy and ...
— The Incomplete Amorist • E. Nesbit
... feel that the Senate was becoming less and less desirable each year, and began to lose interest in it. He did not like the rough-and-tumble methods of debate of a number of Western Senators who were coming to take a more prominent place in the Senate. On one occasion Senator Plumb, of Kansas, attacked Senator Edmunds most violently, and ...
— Fifty Years of Public Service • Shelby M. Cullom
... and Mrs. Chase. Nor did he notice individual peculiarities except that something, excitement or a sudden jostle or something, had pushed Aurora's rippling black locks to one side, with the result that the part which divided the ripples, instead of descending plumb-line fashion from the crown of the head to a point directly in the center of the forehead, now had a diagonal twist and ended over the left eye. The effect was rather astonishing, as if the upper section of the lady's head ...
— Fair Harbor • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... declamatory kind of Lady Macbeth who had stepped into the role flatly on a No. 7 last, rather than from a Juliette who had fattened into the part; that congenial stateliness now thrown completely out of plumb by a violent limp, which, resulting from a railway accident, threw out her entire left leg ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... the finer material to a height of nearly twenty-four feet, which is quite enough to account for Xenophon's statement. As for his dimensions, they should not be taken too literally. In their rapid and anxious march the Greek commanders had no time to wield the plumb-line or the measuring-chain; they must have trusted mainly to their eyes in arriving at a notion of the true size of the buildings by which their attention was attracted. The tower at Nimroud must have been about 150 feet square, measured along its plinth; the ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... say a cat's a plumb fool," declared Cap'n Amazon. "They'll desert ship as soon as wink. Treacherous critters, the hull tribe. Why, when I was up country in Cuba once, I stopped at a man's hacienda and he had a tame wildcat—had had it from a kitten. Brought it up ...
— Cap'n Abe, Storekeeper • James A. Cooper
... find out," said the captain. "At least we can't sink, for we're right on shore," and as he spoke the fog blew away for a moment, showing a bleak shore of rocks with hemlock trees a little way up from the beach. "Yes, sir, we ran plumb on the rocks!" muttered Captain Craig, as he stood up and tried to peer through the fog that ...
— The Bobbsey Twins at the County Fair • Laura Lee Hope
... big stones and packed them in mortar; he had laid them true by the plumb-line; Blenkiron's brother, the stonemason, couldn't have built a ...
— Mary Olivier: A Life • May Sinclair
... hosses. Shore 'nough, one of 'em was still hitched to the fence, an' t'other was gone. We stood around a minute or two examinin' the hoss an' then pa says let's go up the road aways an' see if we c'n see anything. An' by gosh, we hadn't gone more'n fifty feet afore we come plumb on a man layin' in the middle of the road. Pa shook him an' he didn't let out a sound. He was warm but deader'n a tombstone. I wuz fer leavin' him there till we c'd git the coroner, but pa says no. We'd carry him down to our porch, an' lay him there, so's he'd be out o' danger. Ma an' the kids ...
— Green Fancy • George Barr McCutcheon
... That subtle ineradicable longing For tender comradeship? It is because I cannot all at once, Through the half-lights and phantom-haunted mists That separate and enshroud us life from life, Discern the nearness or the strangeness of thy paths Nor plumb thy depths. I am like one that comes alone at night To a strange stream, and by an unknown ford Stands, and for a moment yearns and shrinks, Being ignorant of the water, though so quiet it is, So softly murmurous, So silvered by the ...
— Alcyone • Archibald Lampman
... evidently endeavoring to shore up the walls of the falling temple. He sees the cracks; he knows that the building is out of plumb; he feels that the foundation is insecure. Lies can take the place of stones only so long as they are thoroughly believed. Mr. Beecher is trying to do something to harmonize superstition and science. He is reading between the lines. ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... hitherto escaped her notice. She was at last convinced that she had to contend with a man, a man who had dealt with both men and women. How deep was he? Could honors, such as she could give, and money plumb the depths?... He was an American. She smiled the smile ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... eagerly, "Just you take us all 'round the Flats, mister, so's folks can see. An'—an', mind yer, toot that old horn good an' loud, so as everybody'll know we're a-comin'." As the automobile moved away he beamed with proud satisfaction. "Some swells we are—heh? Skinny an' Chuck an' the gang'll be plumb crazy when they see us. Some ...
— Helen of the Old House • Harold Bell Wright
... Waldemar watched Average Jones place the ladder against the outside of the pole, mount, nail up the sign, drop a plumb-line, improvised from a key and a length of string, to the ground, set a careful knot in the string ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... eyes were vitriolic with disgust. "I sabe what you are hintin' at when you gas of morals—which I'm a heap acquainted with because I ain't got none to speak of. But I'm plumb flabbergasted when you go to connectin' a battleship with anything that's got a whole lot to do with morals. Accordin' to my schoolin', a monitor is a thing which blows the ...
— The Trail Horde • Charles Alden Seltzer
... the appearance of an infinite number of rocks cut into conical forms, and built one upon another to a prodigious height. Upon a nearer view, each cone appeared of itself a mountain; and the tout ensemble compose an enormous mass of the Lundus Helmonti, or plumb-pudding stone, fourteen miles in circumference, and what the Spaniards call two leagues in height. As it is like unto no other mountain, so it stands quite unconnected with any, though not very distant from some very lofty ones. Near the ...
— A Year's Journey through France and Part of Spain, 1777 - Volume 1 (of 2) • Philip Thicknesse
... retain its footing; yet there he stands, firm and secure as the rock itself, his fore feet planted close together, the fore legs rigid and straight as the shaft of a lance, while the hind legs pose easily in attendance upon them. "The cimmaron always strikes plumb-centre, and he never makes a mistake," is Mr. Kemeys's laconic comment; and we can recognize the truth of the observation in this image. Perfectly at home and comfortable on its almost impossible perch, the cimmaron curves its great neck and turns its head upward, ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... Buck, whose mildness of the last question had been merely the cover for a bursting wrath that now sent his voice booming, "maybe you know a whole pile, boy—I hear Jasper has give you consid'able education—but what you know is plumb wasted on me. Understand? As for lookin' up another blacksmith, you ought to know they ain't another shop in ten miles. You'll do this job, and you'll do it my way. Maybe you got ...
— Way of the Lawless • Max Brand
... his strength jerked it toward him. A square in the floor opened as the trap was flapped back upon its hinges, and through the opening the haltered form shot straight downward to bring up with a great jerk, and after that to dangle like a plumb-bob on a string. Under the quick strain the gallows-arm creaked and whined; in the silence which followed the hangman was heard to exhale his breath in a vast puff of relief. His hand went up to his forehead to wipe beads of sweat which for all that the morning was cool almost to coldness, had ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... lookin'-glass," said Signor Anaconda, now in the pale blue tights of a "ground and lofty" tumbler. "You'll keel over again, plumb dead." ...
— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon
... mercy, white folks! Here I is done drapped plumb off'n my subject; but a old man's mind will jes' run waa'ry at times. Me and Joe, Alex's son, went to see de officer 'bout gitting Joe's pa buried. He 'lowed dat Alex's body was riddled wid bullets; so we took him and put ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves • Works Projects Administration
... raised his hand in weary protest, as he smiled apologetically at the court. "Darned if I didn't plumb forget one thing," he said. "We got to swear in these witnesses before they can chatter. Is there anybody got a Bible around 'em? Nope? Montana, I wished you'd lope over to that house and see what they got in the ...
— The Rangeland Avenger • Max Brand
... just yo' quit pesterin' 'bout thet. Them young-uns 'druther sleep out'n in, any time. Ef I'd let 'em they'd grow up plumb wild. When yo've got worshed up come on right in the kitchen an' set by. Us Wattses is plain folks an' don't pile on no dog. We've et an' got through, but yo' take all the time yo're a mind to, an' me ...
— The Gold Girl • James B. Hendryx
... and "minnies" were constantly stealing over with evil intent to batter down our flimsy breastworks. Battalion H.Q. and the signallers will probably not easily forget the morning when they found themselves the objective in this kind of work. One shot dropped plumb on the H.Q. concrete shelter, half removing the roof and scattering the contents of the orderly room in a disrespectful manner, whilst the next one pushed in the signaller's dug-out, wounding L.-Cpl. Wild. It was the sang-froid ...
— The Seventh Manchesters - July 1916 to March 1919 • S. J. Wilson
... wretched, allegoric machinery; (2) at the transmogrification of the fanatic Virago into a modern novel-pawing proselyte of the Age of Reason—a Tom Paine in petticoats; (3) at the utter want of all rhythm in the verse, the monotony and dead plumb-down of the pauses, and at the absence of all bone, muscle, and sinew ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... suspected, how innocent must look the sun-bathed shore of Africa to the Christian skipper's diligently searching spy-glass. And there from his height, like the hawk they had dubbed him, poised in the cobalt heavens to plumb down upon his prey, he watched the great white ship and waited until she should come within ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... dropped clean down, soft and plumb, into the water. Gudrun was swaying violently in her boat, the agitated water shook with transient lights, she realised that it was faintly moonlight, and that he was gone. So it was possible to be gone. A terrible sense of fatality robbed her of all feeling and thought. ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... must count the number of heads, and explained to her the advantage of the plumb-line in determining the action of the figure. Mildred was much interested; she wondered if she would be able to put the instruction she was receiving into practice, and was disappointed when the model got down from the table and ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... sky an' sunshine, an' the temper o' the breeze— Here's the weather I would fashion could I run things as I please: Beauty dancin' all around me, music ringin' everywhere, Like a weddin' celebration—why, I've plumb fergot my care An' the tasks I should be doin' fer the rainy days to be, While I'm huggin' the delusion that God ...
— When Day is Done • Edgar A. Guest
... do fo yo', Mahstah Majah. Ah steddied huh all out twell she's plumb systemous. Miss Cahline sh' ain't wantin' huh breakfus' twell yo's done, an' she'll tek huh dinneh uhliah. Ah manage, Mahstah Majah. Ah mek all mah reddiments, yes, seh—yo's go'n' a' be jes' lahk mah ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... dorg!" he hissed. Snatchet did not cease growling, and the baring of his teeth sent Lem back a step or two. "If he bites me, Flea, I'll knock his brains clean plumb out of him!" ...
— From the Valley of the Missing • Grace Miller White
... nothin' lef for me to do but to come out here in this ol' woodshed where nobody wouldn't see me ac' like a plumb baby. ...
— Sonny, A Christmas Guest • Ruth McEnery Stuart
... being used—and placed in position on the top forms, their bottom edges being carefully set flush with the top edge of the form already in position, and then bolted to it. On the outside, the column forms, and on the inside, the wedge and key sections were set last. A 3-lb. plumb-bob on a fine line was suspended from the inner scaffold and carefully centered over a point set in the rock at the base. This line was in the exact center of the tower, and the tops of all the forms, after each shift, were carefully ...
— Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, Vol. LXX, Dec. 1910 - A Concrete Water Tower, Paper No. 1173 • A. Kempkey
... is. He goes that way all the time. An' he's a right good shot, the boys say. If there's some real sour blood stirred up between him an' you there's no use bein' a plumb fool, is there? The store's apt to be open yet; there's a firs'-class double-barrel shot-gun, secon'-hand but as good as new, in the window. Only seven dollars ...
— Man to Man • Jackson Gregory
... getaway, and we're plumb wore out. Our play isn't to hike out like we were scared stiff of something. What we want to do is to act as if we could look every darned citizen in the face. Mac's ...
— Crooked Trails and Straight • William MacLeod Raine
... tree; they had a fine bloom on them, and were very tempting to the eye. George loved plumbs above all other fruit, and he walked very slowly from the parlour with his eyes fixed on the basket. The longer he looked, the more he wished to taste them. One plumb, he thought, would not be missed; and as he put his hand in to take that one, two others lay close under his fingers. It was as easy to take three as one, and the three plumbs were taken and put into his pocket. When he reached the hall door and gave the basket back to ...
— The Bad Family and Other Stories • Mrs. Fenwick
... note, and as he put it in his vest pocket he felt the proud beat of his heart. Fifteen minutes later when the convention adjourned for noon, Nathan and Morty Sands ran plumb into Thomas Van Dorn, sitting in the back room of the bank, wet eyed and blubbering. The Judge was slumped over the big, shining table, his jaws trembling, his hands fumbling the ink stands and paper weights. His eyes were staring and nervous, and beside him a whiskey bottle ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... all walked forward to the deep creek bank. A yard or two farther and the brown horse and his burden must have gone over the terrible drop, as straight as a plumb-line, on to the awful rocks below. We could see where the brown had torn up the turf as he struck all four hoofs deep into it at once. Indeed, he had been newly shod, a freak of Jim's about a bet with a travelling blacksmith. Then the other tracks, the long score on the brink—over ...
— Robbery Under Arms • Thomas Alexander Browne, AKA Rolf Boldrewood
... balanced his brief pleasure of an hour with his little boy by an added gentleness to his wife—perhaps a bunch of violets, bought at the florist's on Maple Street where Lily got her flower pots or her bulbs. He was very lonely, and increasingly bothered about Jacky. ... "Lily will let him go plumb to hell. But I put him on the toboggan! ... I'm responsible for his existence," he used to think. And sometimes he repeated the words he had spoken that night when he had felt the first stir of fatherhood, "My ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... Mack joined in vehemently. Then he added, with a grin, "The Judge has plumb ruined our quiet little expedition anyhow. And after two weeks of him and Curly, I'm darn glad to see you, ...
— The Enchanted Canyon • Honore Willsie Morrow
... speaking of for three nights. The whole game was up for me. I was worse than ruined. I had half a crown in my pocket. I had ten or twelve pounds in the bank—and they wouldn't let me overdraw a farthing. I tell you, I was just plumb busted. ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... said meditatively, "plumb true; but it's too small to drop a man. I guess it wouldn't stop any ...
— Elder Conklin and Other Stories • Frank Harris
... me why I call it a coup d'etat?" Arobin had put on his coat, and he stood before her and asked if his cravat was plumb. She told him it was, looking no higher than the ...
— The Awakening and Selected Short Stories • Kate Chopin
... nex' mawnin' Marse John had his black hoss saddled, an' I held de stir'up fur him to git on, an' he rode ober to de Barbour plantation an' didn't come back till plumb black night. When he come up I held de lantern so I could see his face, for I wa'n't easy in my mind all day; but it was all bright an' shinin' ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... ever knowed worth trubblin' about was a woman. Used ter knit while she watched the woollies. Knit me a sweater—plumb useless waste of time an' yarn. If I'd taken it I'd have had to take her along with it. Wimmen is sure persistent. Seems like I must look like a dogie to most of 'em. They're allus wantin' to marry me an' mother me. I sure hope this one don't turn out ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... vent her chaste delight On darling rooms, so warm and bright;[43] Chant 'I am weary' in infectious strain, And 'catch the blue-fly singing on the pane;' Though praised by critics and adored by Blues, Though Peel with pudding plumb the puling muse; Though Theban taste the Saxon purse controls, And pensions Tennyson ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... his affection for her had been interested, though even in her wrath she admits that he really loved her husband; he cared less for her conversation, which she had fancied necessary to his existence, than for her "roast beef and plumb pudden," which he now devours too "dirtily for endurance." She was fully resolved to go, and yet she could not bear that her going should fail to torture the friend whom for eighteen years she had ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... route of the expedition with a brother simpleton. A little farther on the woman suddenly remembered that another uncle, who did not stand up quite so "stret fur the kentry," and, consequently, had a house still standing up for him, lived "plumb up thet 'ar' hill ter the right o' the high-road." She was set down, the column moved on, and—Streight's well planned expedition miscarried. But no one wasted a thought on the forlorn woman and the sallow baby whose skinny faces were so ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... rivers—Amazon, Orinoco, and Essequibo. Hillhouse and Schombergh describe the side of the mountain as composed of cliffs, fifteen hundred feet in height, of compact sandstone, as perpendicular as if erected with the plumb-line, and overhung in part with low shrubs. Though distant, they appear as if in dangerous proximity. Around are detached masses, apparently torn from those gigantic walls of nature; and every moment it seems as if one of them would block up the path, or cut off all retreat. In places the channel ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... Fowl. Observe the Evening is best before Sun-set. Stake down your Nets on each side the River half a foot within the Water, the lower part so plumb'd as to sink no further; the upper Slantwise shoaling against, but not touching by two foot, the water, and the Strings which bear up this upper side fastned to small yielding sticks prickt in the Bank, that as the Fowl strike may ply to the Nets to intangle them. And thus lay your ...
— The School of Recreation (1696 edition) • Robert Howlett
... above the mouth of Muskingum, making batteaux to go five million miles south of the jumping-off place of creation! Will I go with you, friends and fellow-citizens? No, not by a jugful. Do you think Byle is a plumb fool? I wouldn't mind going on a voyage with the madam and the young ones, but not with such an addle-pate as the near-sighted. Nor with Colonel Hoop Snake! No, there's no use arguing; I tell you once for all, I won't go. I'd ...
— A Dream of Empire - Or, The House of Blennerhassett • William Henry Venable
... couldn't tell it from the real thing! Believe me, Bud's some pickled bum, these days. I run across him up in the mountains, a month or so ago. Honest, I was knocked plumb silly—much as I knew about Bud that you never knew, I never thought he'd turn out quite so—" Joe paused, with a perfect imitation of distaste for his subject. "Say, this is great, out here," he murmured, tucking the robe around her with that tender protectiveness ...
— Cabin Fever • B. M. Bower
... our St. Botolph's. ... Such a verdant covert wood Stothard might paint for the haunting of Dioneus, Pamphillus, and Fiammetta as they walk in the novel of Boccacce. The ground shadowed with bluebells, even to the formation of a plumb-like bloom upon its little knolls and ridges; and ever through the dell windeth a little path chequered with the shades of aspens and ashes and the most verdant and lively of all the family of trees. Here a broad, rude stone steppeth over a lazy spring, oozing its way into ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... and she was scared of the thunder and lightning. That's every word of sense I could get outa her. She ain't altogether ignorant—she knows how to climb on a horse, anyway, and she kicked about having to ride sideways on account of her skirts. She was plumb out of her head, and talked wild, but she handled her reins like a rider. And she never mentioned Bob, nor anybody else excepting some fellow she called Charlie. She thought I was him, but she only talked to me friendly. She didn't pull ...
— Sawtooth Ranch • B. M. Bower
... simple as that. He was an Italian colored man, black bearded, and shaped like Caruso, only more so, if that is possible; and he sang, because he was a singing machine, but he couldn't have talked. I'll bet on that. He was too plumb afraid. ...
— IT and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... instruments. Each was carefully secured so that no rude handling would harm it, and all shining and glistening brilliantly as if kept with the most exquisite care. Mr. Franklin unfastened a small brass telescope, mounted upon a stand, with a compass, levels, plumb line, ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... became imperative. But the East was inconvenient for solitary ramble; native servants had a disconcerting habit of lying down to sleep wherever drowsiness overcame them, and it was not very long since she had slid down from her balcony and landed plumb on a slumbering bundle of humanity who had roused half the hotel with his howls. She leant far over the rail, trying to see into the verandah below, and she thought she caught a glimpse of white drapery. ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... it's plumb dark in here, though!" protested Lil Artha, after he had knocked his shins twice against some projection, and even slammed into a post that chanced to be ...
— Afloat - or, Adventures on Watery Trails • Alan Douglas
... their change of countenance and subsequent composure when they scented opposition on the part of the examining magistrate. When her husband unveiled the thoughts in the back of his own mind, she had tried to plumb the depths of hate in du Croisier's adherents. She wanted to find out how du Croisier had gained over this deputy public prosecutor, who had acted so promptly and so directly in opposition to the views of ...
— The Collection of Antiquities • Honore de Balzac
... very few men can grasp or comprehend in what relation a plumb line stands to the sciences, or to the nations of this earth, at the present time, by giving the correct interpretation of Christian, Hebrew, & Mohammedian prophesy, this work presents a system ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb
... what she'd been used to. Those were early days, and it was a new country, where a person didn't know much about his neighbor's past and cared less; and, although there were a heap of girls thereabouts, they were the kind you'll always find in such communities, while this one was plumb different. Man! Man! But she was different. She was a WOMAN! Two fellows fell in love with her. One of them lived in the same camp as her, and he was a good man, leastways everybody said he was, but he wasn't wise to all the fancy tricks ...
— The Barrier • Rex Beach
... name I'se plumb forget, wuz pore white trash an' he wuz meaner dan de meanest nigger. Anyhow I wuz too little ter do much wuck so I played a heap an' I had a ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States • Various
... uncertain quantity. Sometimes he could get it at the expense of pitch, sometimes at the expense of pace. Some days he could get all three, and then he was an uncommonly bad man to face on anything but a plumb wicket. ...
— Mike • P. G. Wodehouse
... scene before him slipped out of plumb. The sky and the lawn seemed to alter positions, to rotate madly as in a vortex. The whirling ceased and the next instant Sutter stood on the shore of a lonely sea with a tawny width of sand stretching out before him and the ...
— Made in Tanganyika • Carl Richard Jacobi
... "Barry Lyndon" a second time; but those who are nervous should screw their courage to the sticking-place, and give grave attention to that awful moral lesson, for all of us have a little of Barry in our composition. Thackeray's sudden inspiration enabled him to plumb the deeps of the scoundrel nature, and he saw with the eye of genius that the very quality which makes a bad man dangerous is his belief in his own goodness. If you look at the appalling narrative of Lyndon's life in this ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... Hines, who succeeded McAdoo. Meanwhile the Brotherhoods, through their counsel, laid before the congressional committee a plan for the government ownership and joint operation of the roads, known as the Plumb plan, and the American people are now face to face with an issue which will bring to a head the paramount question of the relation of employees on government works to the Government and ...
— The Armies of Labor - Volume 40 in The Chronicles Of America Series • Samuel P. Orth
... at the Asquam Utility Emporium. And have you remarked the chairs? Mrs. Hopkins sent those, too. They were in her corn-crib,—on the rafters,—and she said if we didn't see convenient to bring 'em back, never mind, 'cause she was plumb tired of clutterin' 'em round from here ...
— The Happy Venture • Edith Ballinger Price
... an' so is her greaser husband. Down at the bunk-house it's the same way, with Slim, an' Flint Kreeger an' the rest. I tell yuh, I'm dead sick of being spied on, an' plotted against, an' never knowin' when yuh may get a knife in the back, or stop a bullet. I hate to leave Bud, but he's so plumb set on—" ...
— Shoe-Bar Stratton • Joseph Bushnell Ames
... stick of the furniture more than half paid for already! I didn't tell you how well we're doing at the store. Say, golly, I sure did have a time training Lena to play the game, like she didn't know us. She thought I was plumb nutty, ...
— The Innocents - A Story for Lovers • Sinclair Lewis
... they're all plumb crazy, and a fool and his money is soon parted—this being a saying he must have learned at the age of three and has never forgotten a word of—and he comes up to the house to see me. Mebbe he wanted to find out if I had really ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... bitterly. "Precious scientific men! Villainous old hombogues! The whole set not worth a straw! I hope to gracious, since we must fall, that we shall drop down plumb on Cambridge Observatory, and not leave a single one of the miserable old women, called professors, alive in ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... it in," clamoured the other, shaking his fists, "and don't call me Buck and I'll do as I please. I WILL go back home. I'll get plumb out of here. Sorry I came. Sorry I ever lent myself to such a disgusting, dishonest, dirty bribery game as this all to-night. I won't put a dime into ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... ain't the kind to hold a feller longest. But it's h—l. I was married onct. Not any more for mine! A pal I had used to say thet whiskey riled him, thet rattlesnake pisen het up his blood some, but it took a woman to make him plumb bad. D—n if it ain't so. When there's a woman around ...
— The Heritage of the Desert • Zane Grey
... with satisfaction when he looked up at the rear facade of Miller's Folly. Near the edge of the roof, was a chimney. A plumb line dropped from the center of the chimney would drop about three feet to the right of the only window ...
— Death Points a Finger • Will Levinrew
... fell plumb into this snare; and when, by the simplicity, as he imagined, of the husband, he became acquainted with the wife, he was so extravagantly charmed with her person, that he resolved, whatever was the cost or the ...
— Amelia (Complete) • Henry Fielding
... dripping from it. Imagining that it must have been wet from the quantity of water shipped over all, the carpenter disengaged the rope-yarn from the rule, drew another from the junk lying on the deck, which the seamen were working up, and then carefully proceeded to plumb the well. He hauled it up, and, looking at it for some moments aghast, exclaimed, 'Seven feet water in the hold, ...
— The Pirate and The Three Cutters • Frederick Marryat
... which is quite enough to account for Xenophon's statement. As for his dimensions, they should not be taken too literally. In their rapid and anxious march the Greek commanders had no time to wield the plumb-line or the measuring-chain; they must have trusted mainly to their eyes in arriving at a notion of the true size of the buildings by which their attention was attracted. The tower at Nimroud must have been about 150 feet square, measured along its ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... and leadin' children. My sakes! but I did want to run some bullets and fill my old horn with powder for the consolation of Israel! They're lyin' out over there in the slough now, as many as ain't gone to glory. It made me jest plumb murderous!" ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... water, water, draught, submersion; plummet, sound, probe; sounding rod, sounding line; lead. bathymetry. [instrument to measure depth] sonar, side-looking sonar; bathometer[obs3]. V. be deep &c. adj.; render deep &c. adj.; deepen. plunge &c. 310; sound, fathom, plumb, cast the lead, heave the lead, take soundings, make soundings; dig &c. (excavate) 252. Adj. deep, deep seated; profound, sunk, buried; submerged &c. 310; subaqueous, submarine, subterranean, subterraneous, subterrene[obs3]; underground. bottomless, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... god, the greater the slave; and so it was that, falling plumb down from that skyey exaltation, human again with the weakness that follows divine moments, Antony returned from the morning ...
— The Worshipper of the Image • Richard Le Gallienne
... of his thoughts. "I've gone all out over this case. I saw, the minute they briefed me, that one tiny flaw, his neglect to take up that option—you remember, I told you—right down at the bottom of the whole tangle, and I went plumb down for it and hung on to it and fought it up like, like a diver coming up ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson
... San Antonio River. It had been over a year since I had seen the family, and on reaching the ranch, my father gruffly noticed me, but my mother and sisters received me with open arms. I was a mature man of twenty-eight at the time, mustached, and stood six feet to a plumb-line. The family were cognizant of my checkered past, and although never mentioning it, it seemed as if my misfortunes had elevated me in the estimation of my sisters, while to my mother I ...
— The Outlet • Andy Adams
... askin' you would you just as lief drive slower," he said with a grin to the chauffeur as he descended to the safety of the sidewalk. "I ain't awful hardy, an' I sure was plumb scared." ...
— The Big-Town Round-Up • William MacLeod Raine
... he said. "For the miracle to happen, in fact, the sieve must be held as level as the top rail of a mason's T-shaped plumb-line frame, and as steady as if clamped in a vise. For a woman to carry water in a sieve the weather must be dry, for in damp weather the water would run through the meshes, even if the threads or wires were just oily enough and not too oily, even if the meshes were just the right ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... about it; he must unravel Rabbinical and Talmudic tendencies; he must acquaint himself with the heretical leanings of a certain era, and the shadow cast upon the page by apocryphal tradition. In philosophy he is still worse off, because he must plumb the depths of metaphysical jargon and master ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... was all in vain. He could see a long way, and sometimes it almost seemed as if he saw farther than at others; but lower down there was always that purply transparent blackness into which his eyesight plunged, but could not quite plumb. ...
— The Crystal Hunters - A Boy's Adventures in the Higher Alps • George Manville Fenn
... for the Master of Saint Bede's was a person, the depth of whose nature could not be fathomed easily with any line. Possibly because, old as he was, it happened, as does happen in some lives, that the right plumb-line, by the right hand, had ...
— Christian's Mistake • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... inversion of the sublimity of almost all other grand scenery. It is not so much the heights that are prodigious as the abysses. At certain points in the course of the Colorado of the West you can drop a plumb line six thousand feet before it will reach the bosom of the current; and you can only gain the water level by turning backward for scores of miles and winding laboriously down some subsidiary canon, itself a ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... beneficial for the cavalry, in which he felt much the same special interest that I did in the artillery. So a sort of alliance, offensive and defensive, was formed, which included as its most active and influential member Senator Plumb of Kansas, to obtain the necessary funds and build a suitable post and establish at Fort Riley a school of cavalry and light artillery. The result finally attained, when I was in command of the army, is well known, and is an honor to ...
— Forty-Six Years in the Army • John M. Schofield
... and equipments of these warrior men were like those of the white hunters. They have long since discarded the bow; and in the management of the rifle most of them can "draw a bead" and hit "plumb centre" with any of their mountain associates. In addition to the firelock and knife, I noticed that they still carried the ancient weapon of their race, ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid
... levitts in honour of the morning. At 10 wee goe to prayers and sermon; text, Zacc. ix. 9. Our Captaine had all his officers and gentlemen to dinner with him, where wee had excellent good fayre: a ribb of beife, plumb-puddings, minct pyes, &c. and plenty of good wines of severall sorts; dranke healths to the King, to our wives and friends, and ended the day with ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... upon to come with our little vessels to measure the contents of the great ocean, to plumb with our short lines the infinite abyss, and not only to estimate the quantity but the quality of that love, which, in both respects, surpasses all our means ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... arbitrary King: a florid-complexioned stout-built man; of serious, sincere, authoritative face; his attitudes and equipments very Spartan in type. Man of short firm stature; stands (in Pesne's best Portraits of him) at his ease, and yet like a tower. Most solid; "plumb and rather more;" eyes steadfastly awake; cheeks slightly compressed, too, which fling the mouth rather forward; as if asking silently, "Anything astir, then? All right here?" Face, figure and bearing, all in him is expressive of robust ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume IV. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Friedrich's Apprenticeship, First Stage—1713-1728 • Thomas Carlyle
... sail-broad vans He spread for flight, and, in the surging smoke Uplifted, spurns the ground; thence many a league, As in a cloudy chair, ascending rides Audacious; but, that seat soon failing, meets A vast vacuity. All unawares, Fluttering his pennons vain, plumb-down he drops Ten thousand fathom deep, and to this hour Down had been falling, had not, by ill chance, The strong rebuff of some tumultuous cloud, Instinct with fire and nitre, hurried him As many miles aloft. That fury stayed— Quenched ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... my patient?" he inquired. "Plumb well, of course. And how about this new one—I thought I fixed him up before he came home. I've been grunting at Eleazar all the way, telling him it's all foolishness, my coming away out here—he could have fixed ...
— The Purchase Price • Emerson Hough
... Thick feet that woman has in the white stockings. Hope the rain mucks them up on her. Countrybred chawbacon. All the beef to the heels were in. Always gives a woman clumsy feet. Molly looks out of plumb. ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... wear his purple. And the night disgorged Its empires, till, O, like the swirl of dust Around their marching legions, that dim cloud Of doubt closed round him. Was there any man So sure of heart and brain as to record The simple truth of things himself had seen? Then who could plumb that night? The work broke off! He knew that he was wrong. I knew it, too! Once more that stately structure of his dreams Melted like mist. His eagles perished like clouds. Death wound a thin horn through the centuries. The grave resumed his forlorn emperors. His empires crumbled back to a little ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... was so skeered for fear Ah wouldn't qualify fo' de position ob 'sistant physicum janitor dat Ah jes' scratched gravel night an' day, and it wa'n't long before the reduction of the pain in mah muscles begun to took place. I was plumb busted when Marsa Frank gib me dat position. Ah didn't hab a cent about me. Eber hear ob a coon what didn't hab a cent about him? Yah! yah! yah! Well, sah, dat was my condition. Now, sah, Ah'ze rich. Ah'ze gut eleben dol's ...
— Frank Merriwell's Son - A Chip Off the Old Block • Burt L. Standish
... like this; I was riding the flat by Antelope Springs and I sees a lump on the dry mud inside the rush belt. I knowed I never seen that before, so I rides up, thinking it might be some of our stock, an' seen it was a horse lying plumb flat. The wind was blowing like—from him to me, so I rides up close and seen it was the Pacer, dead as a mackerel. Still, he didn't look swelled or cut, and there wa'n't no smell, an' I didn't know what to think till ...
— Wild Animals I Have Known • Ernest Thompson Seton
... seas. Surely, you will now float serenely down the eternities! But by-and-by there is a kink. You find, that, though the line runs off so fast, it does not go down,—it only floats out. A current has caught it and bears it on horizontally. It does not sink plumb. You have been deceived. Your grand Pacific Ocean is nothing but a shallow little brook that you can ford all the year round, if it does not utterly dry up in the summer heats, when you want it most; or, at best, it is a fussy little tormenting river, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... Come, Gracie! In the midst of death we are in life! Nollie was a plumb little idiot. But it's the war—the war! Your father must get used to it; it's a rare chance ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... grub, an' not trouble, I reckon you'd better hang up out here," Stevens was saying, as he mounted. "You see, towns an' sheriffs an' rangers are always lookin' fer new fellers gone bad. They sort of forget most of the old boys, except those as are plumb bad. Now, nobody in Mercer will take notice of me. Reckon there's been a thousand men run into the river country to become outlaws since yours truly. You jest wait here an' be ready to ride hard. Mebbe my besettin' sin ...
— The Lone Star Ranger • Zane Grey
... Mulligan's are warned'—hum! I wonder why 'warned'?—'are warned that all rents will be re-dooced by fifty per cent!' Fifty per cent!" she repeated in a dreamy rapture, "which is jest half, y' see. An', Mr. Geoffrey, that's jest what's got me plumb scared—it's all so unnacheral. I've heard o' rents bein' rose—constant, but who ever heard of 'em bein' took down before? Well, well! My land! ...
— The Definite Object - A Romance of New York • Jeffery Farnol
... monoliths standing out in the blue-green water and all ringing and singing to the chime of the sea. Inland, canons of night and shoulders of dolerite and plains where nothing grew leading to great level bastions, fortifications that seemed built by rule and plumb line, with the markings of the basalt visible through the clear air. Basalt has that terrible peculiarity. It seems the work of a hand, it makes castles and fortifications whose ruled markings bear ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... metal that had ever been known. It was he who taught the people how to build better houses and how to hang 5 their doors on hinges and how to support the roofs with pillars and posts. He was the first to fasten things together with glue; he invented the plumb line and the auger; and he showed seamen how to put up masts in their ships and how to rig the sails to them with ropes. He 10 built a stone palace for AEgeus, the young king of Athens, and beautified the Temple of Athena which ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... that you were a physician," said Rosalie, "but there's one place I got you plumb wrong. I thought it was business troubles. So the trouble's your heart and affections! It's that big-eyed blonde niece of Markham's, of course. Well, you ain't the first. The best way to bring the young men like a flock of blackbirds is to shut a ...
— The House of Mystery • William Henry Irwin
... Brussels and in the United States in 1837-1839 and in England in 1864-1866, large houses and powerful institutions of credit had maintained a whole scaffolding of speculation which was already out of plumb, but still able to stand upright through the general effect of the parts which connected them, and in this unstable equilibrium it sufficed for a single one to detach itself in order to overthrow the whole edifice at a juncture at which it was hoped it would continue to stand and even ...
— A Brief History of Panics • Clement Juglar
... that you're on the hard luck tack," quoth Ben, "there was the Junior, of New Bedford. I've heard my uncle tell of her. Out a year and two months and put back to port clean—and the crew plumb ...
— Swept Out to Sea - Clint Webb Among the Whalers • W. Bertram Foster
... might slip around and gather up their guns," said Pringle. "Pick out one for yourself. I left yours where I threw it when I picked it out of your belt. I meant to knock you out, Chris—there wasn't any other way; but I didn't mean to plumb kill you. You hit your head on a rock when you fell. It wouldn't have done any good to have got the drop on you. You had made up your mind not to surrender. You would have shot anyhow; and, of course, I couldn't shoot. I'd just have got myself killed for nothing. No good to play ...
— The Desire of the Moth; and The Come On • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... scorch the sky, Their mining arts the staunch besiegers ply, Delve from the bank of York, and gallery far, Deep subterranean, to the mount of war; Beneath the ditch, thro rocks and fens they go, Scoop the dark chamber plumb beneath the foe; There lodge their tons of powder and retire, Mure the dread passage, wave the fatal fire, Send a swift messenger to warn the foe To seek his safety and the post forgo. A taunting answer comes; he dares defy To spring the mine and all its AEtnas ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... of pain are unequal: different natures hold different capacities. A trouble that seems very real at the time, and full of stings, may be found later on to be largely alloyed by wounded self-love and frustrated vanity. Sound it with the plumb-line of experience, of time, of wakening hopefulness, and it may sink fathoms, and by and by end in nothingness, or perhaps more truly in just a sense of salt bitterness between the teeth, as when one ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... he admitted, "I—I wouldn't wonder if 'twas account of you, Imogene. Hannah knows I—I like you fust rate, that we're good friends, I mean. She's—well, consarn it all!—she's jealous, that's what's the matter. She's awful silly that way. I can't so much as look at a woman, but she acts like a plumb idiot. Take that Abbie Larkin, for instance. One time she—ho, ho! I did kind of get ahead ...
— Thankful's Inheritance • Joseph C. Lincoln
... there are unspeakable things that writhe. His plumb-line touches them and they squirm. He bends his head from the clouds to do it. Is it ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... "She'll be plumb ruined—follerin' them foreign styles. The Uhmerican people ain't got no right to adopt none of them new-fangled notions." Weaver stared glumly into the ...
— 'Firebrand' Trevison • Charles Alden Seltzer
... low dilutionists. The first question he asked my daughter was if she wore high heels; he said he would not attempt to cure any woman of any disease so long as she was perched on her toes with her spine out of plumb. His advice to me was to get out of the London fogs as quickly as possible. No one who has not suffered a London fog can imagine the terrible gloom that pervades everywhere. One can see nothing out of the windows but a dense black smoke. Drivers carry flambeaux in the streets to avoid running ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... to plumb the depths of irony and mockery. She could not make a move as Gypsy Nan. It would only result in their turning upon her, of the discovery that she was not Gypsy Nan at all, of the almost certainty that it would cost her her own life without saving the Sparrow's. That ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... I go to sea, I go as a simple sailor, right before the mast, plumb down into the forecastle, aloft there to the royal mast-head. True, they rather order me about some, and make me jump from spar to spar, like a grasshopper in a May meadow. And at first, this sort of thing is unpleasant enough. It touches one's sense of honour, particularly if ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... small (Water) Fowl. Observe the Evening is best before Sun-set. Stake down your Nets on each side the River half a foot within the Water, the lower part so plumb'd as to sink no further; the upper Slantwise shoaling against, but not touching by two foot, the water, and the Strings which bear up this upper side fastned to small yielding sticks prickt in the Bank, that as the Fowl strike may ply ...
— The School of Recreation (1696 edition) • Robert Howlett
... but when he wishes to drive a tunnel in any given direction he is obliged to avail himself of levels, compasses, plumb-lines, and all the paraphernalia of the engineer. Yet, with nothing to direct it except instinct, the water-vole can, though working in darkness, drive its burrow in any direction and emerge from the ground exactly at the ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII, No. 355, October 16, 1886 • Various
... well-situated—on the side of the promenade nearest to the bath. Diphilus had placed the columns out of the perpendicular, and not opposite each other. These, of course, he shall take down; he will learn some day to use the plumb-line and measure. On the whole, I hope Diphilus's work will be completed in a few months: for Caesius, who was with me at the time, keeps a very sharp look-out ...
— The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 - The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... scaffolding to buttress up one of the walls of the old manse. The heritors marvelled a little at the strange request, but, glad of being saved from the cost of a new building, authorised the buying of some sturdy joists to prop up a wall that the minister averred was off the plumb. No sooner was the buttressing timber in position than Mr. Rogers appeared with a violent complaint in the Sheriff Court, declaring that the manse was like to fall about his ears, and that the heritors had palpably admitted the ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... from a window. An enormous crowd was collecting, watching the big building swinging a foot out of plumb like a giant pendulum. The crowd was growing. Should the building fall the loss of life would be appalling. It was mid-morning. The interior of the building teemed with thousands of workers, for all floors above the third ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... the ground there, utterly exhausted with my struggle against the wind, and with bearing the fathoms and fathoms of the heavily-leaded plumb-line ...
— The World of Romance - being Contributions to The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, 1856 • William Morris
... beautifully moulded; in figure rather small. Her face was a most perfect book of cleverness, yet she was fair, too, beyond belief, with hair of a lovely ruddiness, cut short in the new fashion, and bunching on her shoulders. And eyes! Gods! who could plumb the depths of Phorenice's eyes, or find in mere tint a trace of their ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
... "Scared—scared plumb stiff—what say? I caught Marthy nodding at Ruth and Ruthy looking hard at Marthy, and then both of 'em went to the kitchen to talk over calling up Emmy and putting out fly poison for the women ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... any length of line which may be taken on the tracing-board as a base for elevation, an Equilateral Triangle will be found whose sides are of course all equal and therefore known, as they are equal to the base, and whose line joining apex to centre of base is a true Plumb line, forming at its foot the perfect right angle, so important in the laying of every stone ...
— Science and the Infinite - or Through a Window in the Blank Wall • Sydney T. Klein
... told Edwin to follow him into the shop. Several hours of miscellaneous consultative pottering had passed between Darius and his compositors round and about the new printing machine, which was once more plumb and ready for action. For considerably over a week Edwin had been on his father's general staff without any definite task or occupation having been assigned to him. His father had been too excitedly preoccupied with the arrival and erection ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... for you was dark the time to slumber, But to hold Freedom's columns all star-plumb! Yours was a watery grave, but Martyrdom And, hence, your resurrection with the number, Whose greatness greatens, as the Ages come To know why their pathway, no ...
— Freedom, Truth and Beauty • Edward Doyle
... working so hard. Gussie'll be up d'reckly with the 'reshments. I told her to make a whale of a batch of cookies and gallons of lemonade. We need something after finishing that job. But we've got most of the stuff stuck in somewhere and the books are plumb ...
— Heart of Gold • Ruth Alberta Brown
... intense wriggling of his front wheel and prodigious feats of balancing, squeezing out of the machine's momentum the last possible fraction of an inch. There was a magnificent distance record when, on one single occasion only, he had been deposited plumb in line with his own gate; and there was a divertingly lamentable shortage record, touched on more than one occasion, when he had come to ground plumb in line with the gate of Mr. Fargus, his ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... they watched him picking out the mortar from between two big stones with his knife. In five minutes he had it loose, and, grasping it with both hands, he pushed it close to the edge, and then peeped over. The soldier was some yards from the plumb. Jack looked down at the shrubbery for guidance. The smith raised his hand to signify patience. Jack waited. Breathlessly the ambushed party watched the two soldiers, who were now talking together. Would they never return to their doors? Five anxious minutes passed, and then, ...
— The Slowcoach • E. V. Lucas
... JOHNSON. 'Yes, Sir; and eat it as if he were eating it with me. Why, there's Baretti, who is to be tried for his life to-morrow, friends have risen up for him on every side; yet if he should be hanged, none of them will eat a slice of plumb-pudding the less. Sir, that sympathetic feeling goes a very little way in depressing ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... which he leans his back, and jerking up his withe before him, he foots it up with wonderful speed and certainty, and comes down again in the same manner, bringing his gourd full of liquor on his arm. Among their fruits are many kinds of plumbs; one like a wheaten plumb is wholesome and savoury; likewise a black one, as large as a horse plumb, which is much esteemed, and has an aromatic flavour. A kind called mansamilbas, resembling a wheaten plumb, is very dangerous, as is likewise the sap of the boughs, which is ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. VIII. • Robert Kerr
... waited with untroubled eyes which seemed to plumb his heart and to appraise all which Perion had ever thought or longed for since the day that Perion was born; and she was as beautiful, it seemed to him, as the untroubled, gracious angels are, and ...
— Domnei • James Branch Cabell et al
... a cat's a plumb fool," declared Cap'n Amazon. "They'll desert ship as soon as wink. Treacherous critters, the hull tribe. Why, when I was up country in Cuba once, I stopped at a man's hacienda and he had a tame wildcat—had had it from a kitten. Brought it ...
— Cap'n Abe, Storekeeper • James A. Cooper
... stood in some mighty-mouthed hollow That's plumb-full of hush to the brim; I've watched the big, husky sun wallow In crimson and gold, and grow dim, Till the moon set the pearly peaks gleaming, And the stars tumbled out, neck and crop; And I've thought that I surely was dreaming, With the peace o' ...
— Songs of a Sourdough • Robert W. Service
... gaping window; the step was broken leading to the sill, and some of the weather-boarding had rotted from the skeleton. The old end-chimney bore it toughly up, however, and the low brick props under the corners stood plumb. Within lay a single room with open beams, a sort of cupboard stairway projecting over the fireplace, and another door and window were in the rear. Before this fireplace sat Meshach Milburn on an old chair, fairly revealed by the light of some of the burning weather-boarding he had thrown ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... some recently converted Papists from among the Sourcraut tenantry. All drew back in horror, to let one so anathematised pass without contact. I coiled myself up near a droll-looking little postilion, who, while turning up the whites of his eyes, was coaxing me to him with a fragment of plumb-cake, which he had stolen from the banquet-table. Dr. Direful returned to the centre of the room, and mounted a desk to commence his lecture. The auditory crowded and cowered timidly round him, while he, looking down on them with a wrathful and contemptuous glance, was about ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, Number 489, Saturday, May 14, 1831 • Various
... conscious of his love for Katiousha; especially if it were sought to persuade him that he could and must not link his fate to that of the girl, he would very likely have decided in his plumb-line mind that there was no reason why he should not marry her, no matter who she was, provided he loved her. But the aunts did not speak of their fears, and he departed without knowing that he was ...
— The Awakening - The Resurrection • Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy
... we were wise—which God knows we are not— (Notice I call on God!) we'd plumb this riddle Not in the world we see, but in ourselves. These brains of ours—these delicate spinal clusters— Have limits: why not learn them, learn their cravings? Which of the two minds, yours or mine, is sound? Yours, which scorned the world that gave it freedom, Until you ...
— The House of Dust - A Symphony • Conrad Aiken
... boy with a gun, and nobody knows what'll happen when it goes off. If he can't find Reddy Fox, just as likely as not he'll point it at somebody else just fo' fun. Ah hope he doan meet up with mah ol' woman or any of mah li'l' pickaninnies. Ah'm plumb afraid of a boy with a gun, Ah am. 'Pears like he doan have any sense. Ah reckon Ah better be moving along right smart and tell mah family to stay right close in the ol' hollow tree," muttered Unc' ...
— The Adventures of Reddy Fox • Thornton W. Burgess
... was nigh wo'n out w'en he come to his house. He opens the doh quick an' slams it shut; den he heahs de cat a-scratchin' on de doh an kinda' sniffin' 'bout, an' Lijah, he lays down on de bed plumb wo'n out. ...
— The Cat in Grandfather's House • Carl Henry Grabo
... have been one of the fifteen. I'm not quite clear on that point. Indeed I'm somewhat muddled in the main; but I suspect the SQUIRE is up to some deed of infamy, and I have done my best to plumb its slimy depths." ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, May 27, 1893 • Various
... "I'm glad you've come home at last. I was plumb scared something had happened to you. Such a shaking and rumbling and rattling I never did hear! Did you ...
— The Man Who Rocked the Earth • Arthur Train
... I was plumb scared myself. I heard Liza—that's our young-un, Liza Grace, that got married to the Taylor boy. I heard her crying on the stoop, and she came flying out with her pinny all black and hollered to Marthy that ...
— Year of the Big Thaw • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... him shout. "I give him one plumb in the eye! A fine shot! And we hit him besides with the boat. I guess ...
— Five Thousand Miles Underground • Roy Rockwood
... Johnny the unpoetical hesitated, perplexed. Philosophy was not in his line. "'Tisn't too bad," he said, suddenly aware of the beauty of the scene, and then the tradesman came to the surface. "I reckon MY job'll be a bit more on the plumb, though," he chuckled, and, delighted with his little joke, shouldered his axe and walked towards one of the marked trees, while Dan speculated aloud on the chances a man had of "getting off alive" if a tree fell ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... with glass door-knobs and a laundry-chute, and a brood to rear, and a hard-working husband to cook for. And as the kiddies get older, I imagine, I'll not be troubled by this terrible feeling of loneliness which has been weighing like a plumb-bob on my heart for the last few days. I wish Dinky-Dunk didn't have to be so ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... are no worse off, not knowing who your father was than to know he was so mean that you are glad he's dead. Your way leaves you hoping that he was just awful nice, and got killed, or was taken sick or something; my way, there ain't no doubts in your mind. You are plumb sure he wasn't decent. Don't you ...
— Michael O'Halloran • Gene Stratton-Porter
... whose mildness of the last question had been merely the cover for a bursting wrath that now sent his voice booming, "maybe you know a whole pile, boy—I hear Jasper has give you consid'able education—but what you know is plumb wasted on me. Understand? As for lookin' up another blacksmith, you ought to know they ain't another shop in ten miles. You'll do this job, and you'll do it my way. Maybe you got another ...
— Way of the Lawless • Max Brand
... something beneficial for the cavalry, in which he felt much the same special interest that I did in the artillery. So a sort of alliance, offensive and defensive, was formed, which included as its most active and influential member Senator Plumb of Kansas, to obtain the necessary funds and build a suitable post and establish at Fort Riley a school of cavalry and light artillery. The result finally attained, when I was in command of the army, is well known, and is an honor to ...
— Forty-Six Years in the Army • John M. Schofield
... name to Cally; she had willed it so, and so it had been. Now, in his own poor scrawl, the ghost of a lover too roughly discarded rose and walked again. And beneath the cheap writing and the unrestrained self-pity, she seemed to plumb for the first time the depths of the boy's present misery. The old story, having struck him down once, had hunted him out and struck him down again. Where now would ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... "'Er? Plumb daft! Of course, as Mother 'Oward says, there 's times when she 's straight—but they don't last long. And, if she 'd given 'er testimony in writing, Mother 'Oward says it all might 'ave been different, and we 'd not 'ave 'ad anything ...
— The Cross-Cut • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... to carry it on horses over into Ohio to get it milled. Took Pa five days to make the trip; an' then the blame old squaws 'ud come, an' Ma 'ud be compelled to hand over to 'em her big white loaves. Jest about set her plumb crazy. Used to get up in the night, an' fix her yeast, an' bake, an' let the oven cool, an' hide the bread out in the wheat bin, an' get the smell of it all out o' the house by good daylight, so's 'at she could say there wasn't a loaf in the cabin. Oh! if it's good pickin' you're after, they's ...
— The Song of the Cardinal • Gene Stratton-Porter
... I looked at that letter it sure made me plumb mad. And I looked at it a hundred times a day and come near tearing it up every time. ...
— Ronicky Doone • Max Brand
... Longman've failed a lot sence Myry an' Ezry died," agreed Jake. "An' no wonder! Them two didn't amount to much to my way o' thinkin', but their pa an' ma set considerable store by 'em ... Ben Letts were a bad 'un, too. It used to make me plumb ugly to see 'im botherin' Tess when ye was shet up, Orn, an' him all the time the daddy of ...
— The Secret of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... she allus was. She hadn't shifted but very little. The brook had gulled out the bank a piece under one eend o' the plank, so's she was liable to tilt ye sideways if you wasn't careful. But I pooked three-four bricks under her, an' she was all plumb again.' ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling
... alembic he has made out of the law broken up and recast by him for that purpose, twisted, drawn out, and coiled up in serpentine and labyrinthine folds. For as the sweet juices of the grape, the peach, the apple, pear, or plumb may be fermented, and then distilled into the most deadly intoxicating draught to madden man and infuriate woman, so by the sophistry of a State's Attorney and a Court Judge, well trained for this work, out of innocent actions, and honest, manly ...
— The Trial of Theodore Parker • Theodore Parker
... than most humans," said Mary Vance. "Well, did we any of us ever think we'd live to see this day? I bawled all night to think of Jem and Jerry going like this. I think they're plumb deranged. Miller got a maggot in his head about going but I soon talked him out of it—likewise his aunt said a few touching things. For once in our lives Kitty Alec and I agree. It's a miracle that isn't likely to happen again. ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... sheriff, as the applause of murmurs fell off. "And from yarns like that one you wouldn't never figure it that I was the son of a minister brung up plumb ...
— Black Jack • Max Brand
... Emperor's forces. Say you forgive me, Peachey.'—'I do,' says Peachey. 'Fully and freely do I forgive you, Dan.'—'Shake hands, Peachey,' says he. 'I'm going now.' Out he goes, looking neither right nor left, and when he was plumb in the middle of those dizzy dancing ropes,—'Cut, you beggars,' he shouts; and they cut, and old Dan fell, turning round and round and round, twenty thousand miles, for he took half an hour to fall till he struck the water, and I could see his body caught on a rock with the gold ...
— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith
... this afternoon," he told me later in the hansom. "With a pitch to help me, I'd have done something big; as it is, three for forty-one, out of the four that fell, isn't so bad for a slow bowler on a plumb wicket against those fellows. But I felt venomous! Nothing riles me more than being asked about for my cricket as though I were ...
— The Amateur Cracksman • E. W. Hornung
... replied Daly, then with a sudden change of humor, "and now I'll do a little talking. I've listened to you just as long as I'm going to. I have Radway's contract in that safe and I live up to it. I'll thank you to go plumb to hell!" ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... on the vulgar mass Called 'work,' must sentence pass, Things done that took the eye and had the price.... But all the world's coarse thumb And finger failed to plumb.... Thoughts hardly to be packed Into a narrow act, Fancies that broke through language and escaped: All I could never be, All men ignored in me, This, I was worth to God, whose wheel the ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... never could figure out until Grandma Thorndyke told me it was oil. A castor was a sort of title of nobility, and this one always lifted me in the opinions of every one that sat down at my table. Magnus said he was sure Christina would be tickled yust plumb to death with it. Ah! Christina was a wonderful legal fiction, as N.V. calls it. How many times Virginia's ears must have burned as we tenderly discussed the poor yellow-haired peasant girl far off ...
— Vandemark's Folly • Herbert Quick
... Joe Ferris, who had started on the hunt with misgivings, had no misgivings whatever now. He confided in Lincoln, not without a touch of pride in his new acquaintance, that this was a new variety of tenderfoot, altogether a "plumb ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn
... yo ain't. Yo been plumb bad, an' I feel jest like I uster when yo was er little trick an' I tuk yo 'cross my knee an' ...
— The Calling Of Dan Matthews • Harold Bell Wright
... purple. And the night disgorged Its empires, till, O, like the swirl of dust Around their marching legions, that dim cloud Of doubt closed round him. Was there any man So sure of heart and brain as to record The simple truth of things himself had seen? Then who could plumb that night? The work broke off! He knew that he was wrong. I knew it, too! Once more that stately structure of his dreams Melted like mist. His eagles perished like clouds. Death wound a thin horn through the centuries. The grave resumed his forlorn ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... audible; the startled imagination hears it in its rage, sees it in motion, and sees its resistless might in the passive wrecks that follow the uproar. And this from a piece of marble, cold, immovable, lifeless! Surely there is that in man, which the senses cannot reach, nor the plumb of the understanding sound. ...
— Lectures on Art • Washington Allston
... I don't reckon that I'll be leavin' here in a hurry. Didn't the old man tell you I could stay here a year? What's the use of me goin' now, just when you're goin' to start to reform me? Why," he finished, surveying her with interest; "I reckon the old man would be plumb tickled to see the way you're carryin' on—obeyin' his last wishes." He rested his head on ...
— The Boss of the Lazy Y • Charles Alden Seltzer
... located the line across the floorjoists overhead, where rested the partition separating the dining-room from the parlour. Finding the middle of this line, he dropped an improvised plumb-line to the ground; and from this spot as centre, using a string about ten feet long, he described a circle on the earth. Then, referring to his calculations, he proceeded to locate several points with ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... up the big stones and packed them in mortar; he had laid them true by the plumb-line; Blenkiron's brother, the stonemason, couldn't have built a ...
— Mary Olivier: A Life • May Sinclair
... get this inimitable creature, absolutely into my power. Every thing made for me. Her brother and uncles were but my pioneers: her father stormed as I directed him to storm: Mrs. Howe was acted by the springs I set at work; her daughter was moving for me, yet imagined herself plumb against me: and the dear creature herself had already run her stubborn neck into my gin, and knew not that she was caught, for I had not drawn my sprindges close about her—And just as all this was completed, wouldst ...
— Clarissa, Volume 3 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... either with paint or pencil; or the ends of the camera itself will do if perpendicular to the base. Then, having two musket bullets attached to a silk thread, simply hang them over the camera, and everything required will be attained much quicker by these plumb-lines, and with accuracy equal to the spirit-levels. The advantage of the simple contrivance of two bullets suspended by threads is, that when the thread is laid across the camera, it is at once seen whether the thread touches all the way down both sides; if not, one or other side of the camera ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 184, May 7, 1853 • Various
... little visitor came slowly and inexorably onward. Then came three resounding crashes as the bombs dropped. One got the corner of a hangar and demolished it. Another burst into the open and did no damage, but the third fell plumb between two machines waiting to go up and ...
— Tam O' The Scoots • Edgar Wallace
... due to taper in piles, and lastly the resistance offered by binding, enter into the determination of so-called skin friction formulas. The essential condition of sinking a caisson is keeping it plumb; and binding, which is another way of writing increased bearing value, will oftentimes be ...
— Pressure, Resistance, and Stability of Earth • J. C. Meem
... my new friend reproached me. "Well, I don't; and neither did the folks who had cabins taken and who threw them up last week when they heard how the San Pietro went down on this same route. We're five plumb idiots—that's what we are—five crazy lunatics! I'd never have come a step, not with wild horses dragging me if it hadn't been for Jim Furman being pretty near popeyed, looking for a chance to cut me out and sail. We've got fifteen hundred reservists downstairs, and ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... was up here three or four years ago," answered his cousin, who, as my old readers know, was a natural-born hunter and woodsman. "Got a deer right over yonder." And he pointed with his hand. "The one I hit plumb in the left eye." ...
— On the Trail of Pontiac • Edward Stratemeyer
... then it's because our tongues were too busy otherwise," Hal answered. "Noll, I congratulate you from the bottom of my heart, for you're plumb wild to ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys as Sergeants - or, Handling Their First Real Commands • H. Irving Hancock
... you was to get a leg over a bronc', and the bronc' should find it out—Say, I've got a li'l' blue horse out on my place in the Antelopes that'd plumb give his ears to have you try it; he shore would. You take my advice, and don't you go huntin' a job night-ridin' in the greasewood hills. Don't you ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... through his basement, and that added many hundred dollars to the cost of building the party wall; the fire and telephone companies were continually fussing around and demanding indemnity because their poles and hydrants got knocked out of plumb; the thousands of gallons of dirty water pumped from the job into the city sewers clogged them up, and the city sued for several thousand dollars' damages; one day the car-tracks in front of the lot settled and valuable time was lost ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... little while one of them bursts from its cell with a horrible yell and in the lulls between pangs you go forth among men with the haunted look in your eye of one who is listening for the footfalls of a dread apparition, and one half of your head is puffed out of plumb as though you were engaged in the whimsical idea of holding an egg plant in the side of your jaw. A kind friend meets you, and, speaking with that high courage and that lofty spirit of sacrifice which a kind friend always exhibits when it's your tooth that is kicking up the rumpus and not ...
— Cobb's Anatomy • Irvin S. Cobb
... turned to unharness and feed his other dogs. And again, "Well!" And then, after a pause: "Now I know you're plumb crazy. But all the same—Well, it's got me properly beat. Anyhow, crazy or no, I guess you're meat just the same, an', by the great Geewhillikins! you'll be dead meat, an' digested meat at that, before you're an hour older, my son, if I know ...
— Jan - A Dog and a Romance • A. J. Dawson
... lumber-mill that had once kept it busy was burned down, and the business had slipped away to the prosperous neighbouring town of Machias. There were nice old houses with tall pillars in front of them, now falling into decay and slipping out of plumb. There were shops that had evidently been closed for years, with not even a sign "To Let" in the windows. Our dinner was cooked for us in a boarding-house, by a brisk young lady of about fifteen years, whose mother ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke
... goes plumb crazy! Men throws their hats away, 'n' dances around, yellin' till they can't whisper! Miss Goodloe is shakin' so I has to hold ...
— Blister Jones • John Taintor Foote
... the real bird, talkin'. An old gobbler is tellin' his hens that day is comin'. It's a plumb waste on his part, because they know it theirselves, but he must jest let 'em know what a smart bird he is. An' it's that pride uv his that will be his ruin. Git up, Paul; we must have him an' one uv his ...
— The Forest Runners - A Story of the Great War Trail in Early Kentucky • Joseph A. Altsheler
... rode and pondered she came near to the little house on the village street where Cherry lived, a house set out plumb with the sidewalk, and a little gate at the side to go round to the back door where the family lived, the front room being the tailor shop. As she drew near she looked up and was sure she saw Cherry ...
— The City of Fire • Grace Livingston Hill
... intimacy with that exalted personage to the very furthest bounds of truth. Chappaz Nicolai, whose name the maire had written in my note-book, that there might be no mistake, appeared to be of that peculiar mental calibre which warrants Yorkshire peasants in describing a man as 'half-rocked,' or 'not plumb.' His wife, on the other hand, was one of those neat, gentle, sensible women, of whom one wonders how they ever came to marry such thick-lipped and blear-eyed men. Between them they informed me that if I did not object to share a room, I could be taken in; otherwise—maire or no maire—not. ...
— Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland • George Forrest Browne
... a term applied to surfaces that are parallel to that of still water, or perpendicular to the direction of the plumb-line; and when it is desired to ascertain the altitude of any specified locality, the level of the ocean's surface is always taken as the standard from which such reckoning ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls - Volume VIII, No 25: May 21, 1887 • Various
... spent an arduous half-day hoisting it into an upright position, and securing it there with more stays. It took the eccentric building a long time to decide upon its next move; then it suddenly lurched forward a foot or more, and after that slipped an inch or two farther out of plumb every day. But the ingenuity of Waddy was not exhausted: a few hundred feet of rope and a winch were borrowed from the Peep o' Day; the rope was run round the schoolhouse, and the building was promptly hauled back into shape and fastened down with long timbers running from its ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... down the eternities! But by-and-by there is a kink. You find, that, though the line runs off so fast, it does not go down,—it only floats out. A current has caught it and bears it on horizontally. It does not sink plumb. You have been deceived. Your grand Pacific Ocean is nothing but a shallow little brook that you can ford all the year round, if it does not utterly dry up in the summer heats, when you want it most; or, at best, it is a fussy little ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... Government—even at the trial of Lord Lovat in 1745-6. For one thing, almost without exception, the representative peers were dependent on governmental subsidies and this dependence increased during the course of the eighteenth century (see J. H. Plumb, The Growth of Political Stability in England [London: Penguin, 1973], p. 180; and Geoffrey Holmes, British Politics in the Age of Anne [London: Macmillan, 1967], p. 393). The practice of electing a representative peerage for Scotland was ...
— Atalantis Major • Daniel Defoe
... struck the shelter of the camp he was again in pursuit. His blood leaped a little excitedly when he found that Scottie Deane's trail was now almost as straight as a plumb-line and that the sledge no longer became entangled in hidden windfalls and brush. It was proof that it was light when Deane and Isobel had left their camp. Isobel was walking now, and their sledge was traveling faster. Billy encouraged ...
— Isobel • James Oliver Curwood
... quantity. Sometimes he could get it at the expense of pitch, sometimes at the expense of pace. Some days he could get all three, and then he was an uncommonly bad man to face on anything but a plumb wicket. ...
— Mike • P. G. Wodehouse
... the principal are plantains, of which they have fifteen different sorts or varieties; breadfruit; two sorts of fruit found at Otaheite, and known there under the names of jambu and geevee; the latter a kind of plumb; and vast numbers of shaddocks, which, however, are found as often in a ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 15 (of 18) • Robert Kerr
... hit the bull's-eye plumb center when you say that, Hugh. I just made up my mind that I was too young to bother my brains over a man's work and go to high school at the same time. My lessons aren't any too good as it is, and they'd get so rotten bad soon I'd be ...
— The Boy Scouts of the Flying Squadron • Robert Shaler
... they're hungrier 'n you are and I'll go see 't they're fed. But hear me! Not another mite o' foolin' with serious things till Dan Ford gets back an' takes the reins into his own hands. 'Twas the mercy of Providence—nothin' else—that that jabberin' shallow-pate Mateo wasn't killed plumb out. Silent Pete's used to grizzlies. He's used to killin' 'em. It's his trade, a deal more 'n 'tis to tend horseflesh. I wouldn't like to stand as nigh hand to his gun as that Greaser did last night. Now, ...
— Dorothy on a Ranch • Evelyn Raymond
... is evidently endeavoring to shore up the walls of the falling temple. He sees the cracks; he knows that the building is out of plumb; he feels that the foundation is insecure. Lies can take the place of stones only so long as they are thoroughly believed. Mr. Beecher is trying to do something to harmonize superstition and science. He is reading between the lines. He ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... to say to you. And you've been saying to yourself you're durned if she cares, and you're durned if you care. And all the time you feel so bad about it that you must go and do something wicked right away. And taking off your hat to me was your idea of just about the razzlingest, dazzlingest, plumb wickedest thing you could figure ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... for a killing to-day," said Old Man Curry. "Well, she'll have 'Lisha to beat, I reckon. And all he's runnin' for is the purse, Frank, like you said. I did my best to bet 'em until the price got too plumb ridiculous, but the children of Israel wouldn't take ...
— Old Man Curry - Race Track Stories • Charles E. (Charles Emmett) Van Loan
... was a-saying. Them Injuns fixed up an ambushment, blazed in a volley at the clostest sort o' range, and followed it up with a tomahawk and knife rush,—lessen that there Afrikin was too plumb daddled to tell any truth, whatsomedever. And, spite of all this here rampaging, they never drawed a single drop o' blood in the whole enduring scrimmage! Mighty cur'is, that; ain't it, now? And that ain't all: some o' them same Injuns, or ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde
... these muscle-joint experiences, the eye is also being trained. The position of the image on the retina comes to stand for direction, and the eye finally develops so remarkable a power of perceiving direction that a picture hung a half inch out of plumb is a source of annoyance. The ear develops some skill in the perception of direction, but is less dependable ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts
... man once gave vast publicity to the story that at last a use had been found for the Badger, with his mania for digging holes in the ground. By kindness and care and the help of an attached little steam-gauge speedometer plumb compass, that gave accurate aim, improved perpendicularity, and increased efficiency to the efforts of the strenuous excavator, he had been able to produce a dirigible Badger that was certain to displace all other ...
— Wild Animals at Home • Ernest Thompson Seton
... the gate, out of his sight, there they stood all of them, in two rows; and we could say nothing on both sides, but God bless you! and God bless you! But Harry carried my own bundle, my third bundle, as I was used to call it, to the coach, with some plumb-cake, and diet-bread, made for me over-night, and some sweet-meats, and six bottles of Canary wine, which Mrs. Jervis would make me take in a basket, to cheer our hearts now and then, when we got together, as she said. And I kissed all ...
— Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded • Samuel Richardson
... any othah time o' yeah. De bacon smell ez callin'-like, de kittle rock an' sing, De same way in de wintah dat dey do it in de spring; Dey ain't no use in mopin' 'round an' lookin' mad an' glum Erbout de wintah season, fu' hit's des plumb ...
— The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... got to have one good fight to save a lot of others an' this is the day you're goin' to have it. After school you've got to smash Jimmy Marquess a wallop on his front teeth an' if you don't shake 'em plumb loose I'm goin' to take you back in the woods an' give you a revelation in lickin's that'll linger with you for years." Ham paused and then added ominously, "Now you can do just exactly as you like. I don't want to try to influence ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... to a rock, where we c'n sit an' study natur' a bit, before we turns back. An' thinkin' it's safe t' do so, I lets go o' Bull's halter. An' while I'm studyin' an' takin' a nip from a flask I happens t' have in my jeans, I forgets Bull for a minit, an' when I looks up, he's plumb absent. ...
— Injun and Whitey to the Rescue • William S. Hart
... salt of the earth), are simply diseases that should be treated with pills and powders instead of with penitentiaries and whipping-posts. Now if a man will steal a saw-mill and go back after the site simply because his pericardium is out of plumb or his liver has gone into politics; will nurse a juicy old jag until it develops into a combined museum and menagerie, because his circulation has slipped an eccentric or his stomach got out of its natural orbit, I submit, in all seriousness that he ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... whole of its substructure is cased with the finer material to a height of nearly twenty-four feet, which is quite enough to account for Xenophon's statement. As for his dimensions, they should not be taken too literally. In their rapid and anxious march the Greek commanders had no time to wield the plumb-line or the measuring-chain; they must have trusted mainly to their eyes in arriving at a notion of the true size of the buildings by which their attention was attracted. The tower at Nimroud must have been about 150 feet square, measured along its plinth; the ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... still hitched to the fence, an' t'other was gone. We stood around a minute or two examinin' the hoss an' then pa says let's go up the road aways an' see if we c'n see anything. An' by gosh, we hadn't gone more'n fifty feet afore we come plumb on a man layin' in the middle of the road. Pa shook him an' he didn't let out a sound. He was warm but deader'n a tombstone. I wuz fer leavin' him there till we c'd git the coroner, but pa says no. We'd carry him down to our porch, an' lay him there, so's he'd be out o' danger. Ma ...
— Green Fancy • George Barr McCutcheon
... the vulgar mass Called "work" must sentence pass Things done, that took the eye and had the price.... But all, the world's coarse thumb And finger failed to plumb, So passed in making up the main account; All instincts immature, All purposes unsure, That weighed not as his work, yet swelled ...
— Woodrow Wilson and the World War - A Chronicle of Our Own Times. • Charles Seymour
... dinner that day, Sir?' JOHNSON. 'Yes, Sir; and eat it as if he were eating it with me. Why, there's Baretti, who is to be tried for his life to-morrow, friends have risen up for him on every side; yet if he should be hanged, none of them will eat a slice of plumb-pudding the less. Sir, that sympathetic feeling goes a very little way in ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... Johnny promptly. "Let's be plumb vulgar about it." And he thrust a big roll of bills into ...
— Five Thousand an Hour - How Johnny Gamble Won the Heiress • George Randolph Chester
... lef for me to do but to come out here in this ol' woodshed where nobody wouldn't see me ac' like a plumb baby. ...
— Sonny, A Christmas Guest • Ruth McEnery Stuart
... he had been before the quarrel and its reconciliation, did not seem to feel for Lionel the active interest which Lionel felt for him. He did not, as most clever men are apt to do in their intercourse with youth, attempt to draw him out, plumb his intellect, or guide his tastes. If he was at times instructive, it was because talk fell on subjects on which it pleased himself to touch, and in which he could not speak without involuntarily instructing. Nor did he ever allure the boy to talk of his school-days, of his friends, ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... straight while you're about it," she continued. "It comes plumb from the roots, and I don't want to have to look at a wild-growing vine right here under my window for all my eighty-second and ...
— Rose of Old Harpeth • Maria Thompson Daviess
... a new tradition of poetic comedy it is difficult at present to say, but we shall assuredly never have it until we realise that comedy is built upon everlasting foundations in the nature of things, that it is not a thing too light to capture, but too deep to plumb. Monsieur Rostand, in his description of the Battle of Wagram, does not shrink from bringing about the Duke's ears the frightful voices of actual battle, of men torn by crows, and suffocated with blood, but when the Duke, terrified at these dreadful ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... answered," he said. "For the miracle to happen, in fact, the sieve must be held as level as the top rail of a mason's T-shaped plumb-line frame, and as steady as if clamped in a vise. For a woman to carry water in a sieve the weather must be dry, for in damp weather the water would run through the meshes, even if the threads or wires were just oily enough and not too oily, ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... to follow the same army to certain other strongholds, his evil fortune would have it that he should be killed while attempting to measure certain heights at a difficult point; for when he had put his head out beyond the wall in order to let a plumb-line down, a priest who was with the enemy (who feared the genius of Cecca more than the might of the whole camp) discharged a catapult at him and fixed a great dart in his head, insomuch that the poor fellow died on the spot. The fate and the ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 3 (of 10), Filarete and Simone to Mantegna • Giorgio Vasari
... me. You see, you picked me up when I was down and out. You passed me a hand when there wasn't a hope left me but a stretch of penitentiary. I fought that darn lumber-jack to a finish, which is mostly my way in things. And it was plumb bad luck that he went out by accident. Well, it don't matter. It was you who got me clear away when they'd got the penitentiary gates wide open waiting for me, and it's a thing I can't never forget. I'm out for you all the time, and I want you to ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum
... He was an Italian colored man, black bearded, and shaped like Caruso, only more so, if that is possible; and he sang, because he was a singing machine, but he couldn't have talked. I'll bet on that. He was too plumb afraid. ...
— IT and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... Originally among us, besides Hips and Haws, Acorns and Pig-Nutts, with other Delicates of the like Nature; That our Climate of itself, and without the Assistances of Art, can make no further Advances towards a Plumb than to a Sloe, and carries an Apple to no greater a Perfection than a Crab: That [our [2]] Melons, our Peaches, our Figs, our Apricots, and Cherries, are Strangers among us, imported in different Ages, ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... Are you converted? That life is yours to control. Take the tiller, then, and for an hour be a god! For indeed you shall be a god, and of the very earliest. The centuries shall run out with the chain as you slip moorings—run out and drop from you, plumb, and leave you free, winged! Or if you cannot forget in a moment the times to which you were born, each wave shall turn back a page as it rolls past to break on the shore towards which you revert no ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... homestead of the family. It was unspeakably decrepit and fallen from a former high estate. The old house presented to Maria's fancy something in itself degraded and loathsome. It seemed to partake actually of the character of its inmates—to be stained and swollen and out of plumb with unmentionable sins of degeneration. It was a very poisonous fungus of a house, with blotches of paint here and there, with its front portico supported drunkenly on swaying pillars, with its roof hollowed about the chimney, with great stains here and there ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... he knows. They don't just cover HIS world. One will be too dapper, another too pedantic, a third too much of a job-lot of opinions, a fourth too morbid, and a fifth too artificial, or what not. At any rate he and we know offhand that such philosophies are out of plumb and out of key and out of 'whack,' and have no business to speak up in the universe's name. Plato, Locke, Spinoza, Mill, Caird, Hegel—I prudently avoid names nearer home!—I am sure that to many of you, my hearers, these names are little more than reminders ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... in weary protest, as he smiled apologetically at the court. "Darned if I didn't plumb forget one thing," he said. "We got to swear in these witnesses before they can chatter. Is there anybody got a Bible around 'em? Nope? Montana, I wished you'd lope over to that house and see what they got in ...
— The Rangeland Avenger • Max Brand
... it from the far town. He held his breath as he threw open the lid. There they lay, the half-forgotten symbols of his old life. Worn mallets, chisels, the head of a broken hod with the plaster still caked into it, a short broad shovel for mixing mortar, a trowel, a spirit level, a plumb, all wrapped loosely in a worn leather apron. He took the mallets in his hand and turned them about with the quick little jerks that came so naturally to him. Strength for the work had come into his arms. All the old ambitions which he ...
— Waysiders • Seumas O'Kelly
... confess I was walking, and thinking as I walked, with shoulders bent and head forward. At once I straightened up and looked about to see who was speaking. It was the voice of a pine tree, growing hard by the path, tall and straight as a plumb line. "Thank you," I said to ...
— The Children's Six Minutes • Bruce S. Wright
... machinery; (2) at the transmogrification of the fanatic virago into a modern novel-pawing proselyte of the "Age of Reason,"—a Tom Paine in petticoats; (3) at the utter want of all rhythm in the verse, the monotony and dead plumb-down of the pauses, and the absence of all bone, muscle, and sinew ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... had once kept it busy was burned down, and the business had slipped away to the prosperous neighbouring town of Machias. There were nice old houses with tall pillars in front of them, now falling into decay and slipping out of plumb. There were shops that had evidently been closed for years, with not even a sign "To Let" in the windows. Our dinner was cooked for us in a boarding-house, by a brisk young lady of about fifteen years, whose mother had gone to Machias for a day in ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke
... I see a difference; there's red blood in you. But don't take me wrong. Peter's a white man, straight as a plumb-line, one of the best; he's a year the younger of us, but when the old man died he brought me up. There are two kinds of Askews and I belong to the other lot. I don't know why they called you ...
— The Buccaneer Farmer - Published In England Under The Title "Askew's Victory" • Harold Bindloss
... or the principle by which all bodies mutually tend towards each other; the great agent in nature's wonderful operations.—Attraction of mountains, the deviating influence exercised on the plumb-line by the vicinity of high land. But exerting also a marvellous effect on all floating bodies, for every seaman knows that a ship stands inshore faster than she stands out, the ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... you desire that your Senators, INGALLS and PLUMB, and your seven Congressmen shall vote for the sixteenth amendment to ...
— Debate On Woman Suffrage In The Senate Of The United States, - 2d Session, 49th Congress, December 8, 1886, And January 25, 1887 • Henry W. Blair, J.E. Brown, J.N. Dolph, G.G. Vest, Geo. F. Hoar.
... remember that Irishman's house on the marsh at Cambridgeport, which house he built from drain to chimney-top with his own hands? It took him a good many years to build it, and one could see that it was a little out of plumb, and a little wavy in outline, and a little queer and uncertain in general aspect. A regular hand could certainly have built a better house; but it was a very good house for a "self-made" carpenter's house, and people praised it, and said how remarkably well the Irishman had succeeded. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... inserted as required, the vaults were thrown, and the whole building was left to settle down. Owing to the enormous amount of mortar used this settling must have been very considerable, and explains why hardly a plumb wall exists in Constantinople, and why so many vaults show a pronounced sinking in at the crown or have fallen in and have been rebuilt. After the walls had set the marble facings, mosaic, and colour were ...
— Byzantine Churches in Constantinople - Their History and Architecture • Alexander Van Millingen
... eyes, which were puzzled, but diverted from pain. "I didn't savvy what you meant when you talked about what a woman's work rightly was. An' I'm so awful ignorant, you know so awful much. It scares me, plumb scares me, to think how much you know, more than Mr. Holliwell! Such books an' books an' books! An' writin' too. You see I'd be no help nor company fer you. I'd like to listen to you. I'd listen all day long, but I'd not be understandin'. No more than I ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt
... if I don't talk so good, 'cause I's been feelin' poorly for a spell and I ain't so young no more. Law me, when I think back what I used to do, and now it's all I can do to hobble 'round a little. Why, Miss Olivia, my mistress, used to put a glass plumb full of water on my head and then have me waltz 'round the room, and I'd dance so smoothlike, I don't ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Texas Narratives, Part 1 • Works Projects Administration
... was that Herrick, with all his sympathy, all his intuition, failed to plumb the shallows of Toni's mind. He gave her Rossetti when he should have given her Ella Wheeler Wilcox; and George Eliot when he should have introduced her to Jane Austen and her gentle sister, Miss Burney. ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... thicknesse of halfe the earth is (as shall be shewed) about 4000 miles, now the plumb height of the highest mountaines is not accounted aboue a mile and a halfe, or two miles at the most. Now betweene two miles and foure thousand, there is no sensible proportion, and a line that is foure thousand and two miles long, will not seeme sensibly longer then that which is foure thousand; ...
— A Briefe Introduction to Geography • William Pemble
... contented. She would never love him the way she used to. Her fantastics [Transcriber's note: fantasies?] had taken the beauty plumb out of their lives. But something remained. A loving husband, an unloving, but naturally kind, good-natured and affectionate wife, trying to do her duty by the two children that were and the ...
— We Three • Gouverneur Morris
... mode, as taken from Steele's "Shipmaster's Assistant," was this: Drop plumb-line over stem of ship and measure distance between such line and the after part of the stern port at the load water-mark; then measure from top of said plumb-line in parallel direction with the water to perpendicular point immediately over the load water-mark of the ...
— The Naval War of 1812 • Theodore Roosevelt
... laughed the cow-boy. "You just light down and we'll trail over to Chola Charley's and prospect a tub of frijoles. The dinner-bell when you are broke is plumb correct. Got any more of that po'try broke ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs
... the notion of speeding you up a bit," he said, "because I felt plumb sure that there wasn't a live man in the place, nothing but a crowd ...
— General John Regan - 1913 • George A. Birmingham
... heavy lid, sliding it to one side. How deep was the black chasm beneath he could not even guess. Doubtless it led into a coal bunker, or it might open over a pit of great depth. There was no way to discover other than to plumb the abyss with his body. Above was ...
— The Mad King • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... bursting shell, but the little visitor came slowly and inexorably onward. Then came three resounding crashes as the bombs dropped. One got the corner of a hangar and demolished it. Another burst into the open and did no damage, but the third fell plumb between two machines waiting to go up and left them tangled ...
— Tam O' The Scoots • Edgar Wallace
... I should have sent her away the very first night. I'm getting to depend on her. I'm plumb foolish about her now—can't let her out of my sight; and yet I'm off my feed worryin' over her. Gregg is getting dangerous—you can't fool me when it comes to men. Curse 'em, they're all alike—beasts, ...
— Cavanaugh: Forest Ranger - A Romance of the Mountain West • Hamlin Garland
... pinched," says he, "and someone should be lynched. The cost of living is so high that it's economy to die; and death is so expensive, then, that corpses want to live again. The trusts have robbed us left and right, and there's no remedy in sight; the government is out of plumb and should be knocked to ...
— Rippling Rhymes • Walt Mason
... not for you was dark the time to slumber, But to hold Freedom's columns all star-plumb! Yours was a watery grave, but Martyrdom And, hence, your resurrection with the number, Whose greatness greatens, as the Ages come To know why their pathway, no ...
— Freedom, Truth and Beauty • Edward Doyle
... have him, but barrin' her, he hangs to Marg so as ter be nigh Nella-Rose in any case. And right here Burke Lawson figgers. Burke's got two naturs, same as old Satan. Marg can play on one and get him plumb riled up to anythin'; Nella-Rose can twist him around her finger and make him act like ...
— The Man Thou Gavest • Harriet T. Comstock
... violent comrade. Fact! expecting any day that the workers will take things over and he'll come into money—money the interests have kept him out of. He kind of licks his chops when he talks about it. Never heard him talk about his wife's share, though. Say, that brother of yours is making a plumb ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... dryly, "the gent went by here maybe two hours gone headin' south. He was goin' steady but he don't seem worried none as I noticed. If you want him right bad I reckon you can run him down. As for me I'm plumb neutral in this combat. I ain't lost ...
— Louisiana Lou • William West Winter
... Dr. Wangbanger once had an audience with Mr. William Whiffletree in regard to one of Mr. Whiffletree's molars which Bill thought had a "speck" on it, he soon convinced the victim that the said molar not only was specked, but out of the dead plumb of its nearest neighbor at least the 84th part ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... God! how far that day She fell—from hope and promise plumb, To deeps where lips forget ...
— A Cluster of Grapes - A Book of Twentieth Century Poetry • Various
... smooth as a yearling baby. Having thus reached the lower end of the table, there are a quantity of hooks fitted to strong wooden arms, which revolve round a stout pillar, and which, in describing the circle, plumb the lower end of the table. On these piggy is hooked, and the operation of cutting open and cleansing is performed—at the rate of three a minute—by operators steeped in blood, and standing in an ocean of the same, despite the eternal buckets of water with which a host of boys ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... announced, half-aloud. "I'm shore a plumb fool." Then she turned and disappeared in the deep cleft between the gigantic bowlder upon which she had been sitting and another—small only by comparison. There, ten feet down, in a narrow alley littered with ragged stones, lay the crumpled body ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... And the Captain is no better! And just look at the accommodations—three stewards and a woman! What's that to look after thirty-five passengers? Half the time I have to wait an hour to get something to eat—such as it is. And my bunk wasn't made up yesterday until plumb night. That bunch in the steerage must ...
— A List To Starboard - 1909 • F. Hopkinson Smith
... which conferred upon him no power for being or doing what it required. It is like a looking-glass placed before a child to show him that his face is soiled, but having no power to cleanse that face. It was like a plumb- line applied to a leaning wall, which shows how far it deviates from the perpendicular, but which has no power to make it upright. Nay, it even comes to pass that in consequence of inbred sin, the law multiplies offences. It causes sin to abound. We find even in most children a disposition that ...
— The Theology of Holiness • Dougan Clark
... world to preclude all kindness It is the need of it,—it is this sad, self-defeating dependence. Why is this, Eustace? Myself, were I stronger, I think I could tell you. But it is odd when it comes. So plumb I the deeps of depression, Daily in deeper, and find no support, no will, no purpose. All my old strengths are gone. And yet I shall have to do something. Ah, the key of our life, that passes all wards, opens all locks, Is not I WILL, but I MUST. I ...
— Amours de Voyage • Arthur Hugh Clough
... is no chance of hit or miss ... it is inevitable as life ... it is as exact and plumb as gravitation. From the eyesight proceeds another eyesight and from the hearing proceeds another hearing and from the voice proceeds another voice eternally curious of the harmony of things with man. To these respond perfections not only in the committees that were supposed ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... no chance of hit or miss—it is inevitable as life—it is exact and plumb as gravitation. From the eyesight proceeds another eyesight, and from the hearing proceeds another hearing, and from the voice proceeds another voice, eternally curious of the harmony of things with man. To these respond perfections, not only in the committees that were supposed to stand for the ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman
... Wass. "She's a-going to tramp him plumb underfoot—unless she's going to get up a little more speed and jump over him!" he ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... purchased judge distils out of an honest or a doubtful deed, in the alembic he has made out of the law broken up and recast by him for that purpose, twisted, drawn out, and coiled up in serpentine and labyrinthine folds. For as the sweet juices of the grape, the peach, the apple, pear, or plumb may be fermented, and then distilled into the most deadly intoxicating draught to madden man and infuriate woman, so by the sophistry of a State's Attorney and a Court Judge, well trained for this work, out of innocent actions, and honest, manly ...
— The Trial of Theodore Parker • Theodore Parker
... am," she insists. "I'm plumb scared at the thought of mixin' with folks like that—just plumb scared. And, as you know, Mr. Leavitt, it's the first time in my life I've ever been ...
— Shorty McCabe on the Job • Sewell Ford
... . Nicky-Nan at any rate let the thought of it slip into the sea of his private trouble. It was as though he had hauled up some other man's "sinker" and, discovering his mistake, let it drop back plumb. ...
— Nicky-Nan, Reservist • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... ledge up and down the gulch and to estimate the probable extent of that pay streak. Then he gave it up in self-defense. "I've got to watch my dodgers," he admonished himself, "or I'll go plumb loco and imagine I'm a millionaire. I'll pan what I can get at and let it go at that. And I've got to count what gold shows up in the sack—and no more. Good Lord! I can't afford to make a fool of myself at this stage of the game! I've got to sit right down on ...
— The Ranch at the Wolverine • B. M. Bower
... measuring. First he located the line across the floorjoists overhead, where rested the partition separating the dining-room from the parlour. Finding the middle of this line, he dropped an improvised plumb-line to the ground; and from this spot as centre, using a string about ten feet long, he described a circle on the earth. Then, referring to his calculations, he proceeded to locate several points with small stakes pressed into the soil. Then he ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... sharp looking after Nobody talks much that does n't say unwise things Not love in word, neither in tongue, but in deed and in truth Notion of private property in truth Only condition of peace in this world is to have no ideas Opinions Out of plumb when they sit side by side Overestimate of our special individuality Pathological piety Perpetual insult to mediocrity Plenty of praying rogues and swearing saints in the world Presumption in favor of any particular belief Pseudo-science Question everything Saying ...
— Widger's Quotations from the Works of Oliver W. Holmes, Sr. • David Widger
... hitherward I come, Before this same old Time shall strike me numb, To carry it out."—"Strange, this is!" said the other; "What mind shall plumb ...
— Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries, with - Miscellaneous Pieces • Thomas Hardy
... first part and the cricket match in the second. After commenting upon the truth of the former description, he went on to criticize the latter. Do you remember that match? You do? Very well. You recall how Tom wins the toss on a plumb wicket?' ...
— Tales of St. Austin's • P. G. Wodehouse
... was always your great fault—trying to plumb shallows and to take high dives into ...
— The Woman With The Fan • Robert Hichens
... die, Half-rotten and without an eye, Lies hereabout; and for to pave The excellency of this cave, Squirrels' and children's teeth, late shed, Are neatly here inchequered With brownest toadstones, and the gum That shines upon the bluer plumb. ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... any picnic, boys," he said. "We've got to take our time and keep our eyes open. Dakota ain't no spring chicken, and if he don't want to come with us peaceable, he'll make things plumb lively." ...
— The Trail to Yesterday • Charles Alden Seltzer
... commence active operations at once, or obtain a new charter. After a blessed season of prayer and counseling together in the board meeting held January 29, there being present only the members of the board at that time, Mrs. Plumb offered to advance $3,500, if necessary, toward the expenses for the first year. We accepted it with great thankfulness, rented a building the 15th of March, 1886, and formally opened the National Temperance Hospital on ...
— Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine, How and Why - What Medical Writers Say • Martha M. Allen
... did say a cat's a plumb fool," declared Cap'n Amazon. "They'll desert ship as soon as wink. Treacherous critters, the hull tribe. Why, when I was up country in Cuba once, I stopped at a man's hacienda and he had a tame wildcat—had had it from a kitten. Brought it ...
— Cap'n Abe, Storekeeper • James A. Cooper
... the big stones and packed them in mortar; he had laid them true by the plumb-line; Blenkiron's brother, the stonemason, couldn't have ...
— Mary Olivier: A Life • May Sinclair
... up!" cries a little old man with lively and intelligent features, who has for a cane a copper-bound rule around which is wound the cord of a plumb-bob. This is the foreman of the work, Nor Juan, architect, mason, carpenter, painter, locksmith, stonecutter, and, on occasions, sculptor. "It must be finished right now! Tomorrow there'll be no work and the day after ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... ladder. The man in front of Nat ducked his head; Nat ducked too; but the body slid sideways before it reached them and dropped plumb—the inert lump which had been Dave McInnes. His shako, spinning straight down the ladder, struck Nat on the shoulder and leaped off it down ...
— The Laird's Luck • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... answered the Arizonian in disgust. "I missed him a mile, but he was so plumb discouraged with the heat and with running his laigs off that he up and laid down and handed in his checks. He's the only Spaniard I've got to my credit and Mr. Blythe here always claimed half of him ...
— The Pirate of Panama - A Tale of the Fight for Buried Treasure • William MacLeod Raine
... carried on beds, mothers luggin' babies and leadin' children. My sakes! but I did want to run some bullets and fill my old horn with powder for the consolation of Israel! They're lyin' out over there in the slough now, as many as ain't gone to glory. It made me jest plumb murderous!" ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... as he could find suitable anchorage, the captain hastened to avail himself of the resources for feeding his crew, which the country furnished in fowls, fish, and vegetables, whilst he himself, generally with the plumb-line in his hand, traversed the environs of the bay. He met only a few natives, with whom he had little intercourse. But one family becoming somewhat familiarized, established itself a hundred yards from the landing-place. Cook gave a concert ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... troops, I learned that Lieut. K. Oscar Broady, a recent graduate of Madison University, who had seen some military service in Sweden, his native country, was raising a Company for the War, in which many Hamilton and Sherburne men were enrolled. Isaac Plumb, one of my most-thought-of friends, was in the number; there were others—Edgar Willey, Israel O. Foote, Fred Ames, and more whose names I do not now recall. I decided to wait no longer, but seek the enemy with the men of ...
— Personal Recollections of the War of 1861 • Charles Augustus Fuller
... clearly conscious of his love for Katiousha; especially if it were sought to persuade him that he could and must not link his fate to that of the girl, he would very likely have decided in his plumb-line mind that there was no reason why he should not marry her, no matter who she was, provided he loved her. But the aunts did not speak of their fears, and he departed without knowing that he was enamored ...
— The Awakening - The Resurrection • Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy
... had my reasons, George. But I don't mean to go into 'em. All that's dead and gone. There was a pack of fellows then on my shoulders—I was plumb tired of 'em. I had to get rid of—I did get rid of 'em—and you, too. I knew you were inquiring after me, and I didn't want inquiries. They didn't suit me. You may conclude what you like. I tell you those times are dead and gone. But it seemed to me that Robert Anderson was best ...
— Lady Merton, Colonist • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... seen objections, you never would have caught Mrs. Van Astrachan going; for she was one of your full-blooded women, who never in her life engaged to do a thing she didn't mean to do: and having promised in the marriage service to obey her husband, she obeyed him plumb, with the air of a person who is fulfilling the prophecies; though her chances in this way were very small, as Mr. Van Astrachan generally called her "ma," and obeyed all her orders with a stolid precision quite ...
— Pink and White Tyranny - A Society Novel • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... nigh wo'n out w'en he come to his house. He opens the doh quick an' slams it shut; den he heahs de cat a-scratchin' on de doh an kinda' sniffin' 'bout, an' Lijah, he lays down on de bed plumb wo'n out. ...
— The Cat in Grandfather's House • Carl Henry Grabo
... eyes. Close 'em, and I know I'll go to sleep an' have good dreams. And down in the middle of Morgantown is the buryin'-ground. I've ridden past it a thousand times an' watched a corner plot, where the grass grows quicker than it does anywheres else in the cemetery. Pierre, I'd die plumb easy if I knew I was goin' to sleep the rest of time ...
— Riders of the Silences • John Frederick
... no such power, but when he wishes to drive a tunnel in any given direction he is obliged to avail himself of levels, compasses, plumb-lines, and all the paraphernalia of the engineer. Yet, with nothing to direct it except instinct, the water-vole can, though working in darkness, drive its burrow in any direction and emerge from the ground exactly at the ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII, No. 355, October 16, 1886 • Various
... and practices prevalent in different ages of the Church; but he calls attention to the fact that the dominant note of one age is not always the same as that in another. And in using the words criterion and test, descriptive of the Church, he would convey their full meaning: not merely a plumb-line for the rising wall but divine accuracy itself made external. His outer criterion is to the inner life what articulate speech ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... of the last question had been merely the cover for a bursting wrath that now sent his voice booming, "maybe you know a whole pile, boy—I hear Jasper has give you consid'able education—but what you know is plumb wasted on me. Understand? As for lookin' up another blacksmith, you ought to know they ain't another shop in ten miles. You'll do this job, and you'll do it my way. Maybe you got another ...
— Way of the Lawless • Max Brand
... which the coating was thin, they grounded the Callisto, and stepped out for the first time in several days. The air was so still that a small piece of paper released at a height of six feet sank slowly and went as straight as the string of a plumb-line. The sun was bisected by the line of the horizon, and appeared to be moving about them in a circle, with only its upper half visible. As Jupiter's northern hemisphere was passing through its autumnal equinox, they concluded they ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor
... his most mysterious air of business, told Edwin to follow him into the shop. Several hours of miscellaneous consultative pottering had passed between Darius and his compositors round and about the new printing machine, which was once more plumb and ready for action. For considerably over a week Edwin had been on his father's general staff without any definite task or occupation having been assigned to him. His father had been too excitedly preoccupied with the arrival ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... chuckled the shock-headed young man, "he's gone plumb crazy over it. You can't make him listen ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... Conscience, the primary moral element. If I were asked to specify in what quarter lie the grounds of darkest dread, respecting the America of our hopes, I should have to point to this particular. I should demand the invariable application to individuality, this day and any day, of that old, ever-true plumb-rule of persons, eras, nations. Our triumphant modern civilizee, with his all-schooling and his wondrous appliances, will still show himself but an amputation while this deficiency remains. Beyond, (assuming a more hopeful tone,) the vertebration ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... do you?" my new friend reproached me. "Well, I don't; and neither did the folks who had cabins taken and who threw them up last week when they heard how the San Pietro went down on this same route. We're five plumb idiots—that's what we are—five crazy lunatics! I'd never have come a step, not with wild horses dragging me if it hadn't been for Jim Furman being pretty near popeyed, looking for a chance to cut me out and sail. We've got fifteen hundred reservists ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... symbolize life to us than the rigidly geometrical. The same experience has taught us that the curvilinear forms are closer to life than the angular; hence again the tendency, for aesthetic purposes, to introduce minute departures from the plumb-line and rule. There is, however, a type of life specifically human, the life of reason, which is best symbolized by mathematical relations; hence the Greeks, and all those who have followed the classical ideal, all who have had a passion for reason, have felt the ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... are unspeakable things that writhe. His plumb-line touches them and they squirm. He bends his head from the clouds to do it. Is it ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... he sat among the pillars of the hall, upon his throne of beaten gold, and around him stood the speaking statues which Daidalos had made by his skill. For Daidalos was the most cunning of all Athenians, and he first invented the plumb-line, and the auger, and glue, and many a tool with which wood is wrought. And he first set up masts in ships, and yards, and his son made sails for them: but Perdix his nephew excelled him; for he first ...
— The Heroes • Charles Kingsley
... equipments of these warrior men were like those of the white hunters. They have long since discarded the bow; and in the management of the rifle most of them can "draw a bead" and hit "plumb centre" with any of their mountain associates. In addition to the firelock and knife, I noticed that they still carried the ancient weapon of their ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid
... Larkin's: "Yes, rustlers were never so bad as they are now. It's got so in this State that the thieves have got more cows among 'em than the regular cowmen. An' that ain't all. They've got an organization that we can't touch. We're plumb locoed with their devilment. That's the second bunch cut out of ...
— The Free Range • Francis William Sullivan
... Fisbee," he said, morosely, after a series of efforts that littered the floor in every direction. "I'm a born compositor, and I can't shift my trade. I stood the pace fairly for a week, but I'll have to give up; I'm run plumb dry. I only hope they won't show him our Saturday with your three columns of 'A Word of the Lotus Motive,' reprinted from February. I begin to sympathize with the boss, because I know what he felt when I ballyragged him for copy. ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington
... facts as matters of knowledge, and then to study the art and science of teaching these facts to others. Instead of coming with their brick and mortar ready prepared, that they may be instructed in the use of the trowel and the plumb-line, they have to make their brick and mix their mortar after they enter the institution. This is undoubtedly a drawback and a misfortune. But it cannot be helped at present. All we can do is to define clearly the true idea of the Teachers' School, ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart
... because we have travelled so fast," answered the raven. "In your world you cannot pull up the plumb-line you call gravitation, and let the world spin round under your feet! But here is my wife's house! She is very good to let me live with her, and call it the ...
— Lilith • George MacDonald
... Average Jones place the ladder against the outside of the pole, mount, nail up the sign, drop a plumb-line, improvised from a key and a length of string, to the ground, set a careful knot in the string and return ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... Tenderfoot, I'm fed up with her. But I'm like that: I just can't tell her so. I'm not brave enough to tell her to go plumb to hell. That's the way I am, see? When I like a woman, I get plain silly; and if she doesn't start something, I've not got the courage to do anything myself." He sighed. "There's Camilla at the ranch for instance.... Now, she's not much on looks, I know, but there's ...
— The Underdogs • Mariano Azuela
... of the world,' she said. 'I had no time. I knew it was right out there, anywhere, all around the cabin, but there was always the bread to set, the scrubbin' and the washin' and the work that was never done. I used to be plumb sick at times, jes' to get out into it all, especially in the spring when the songs of the birds drove me most clean crazy. I wanted to run out through the long pasture grass, wetting my legs with the dew of it, and ...
— The Night-Born • Jack London
... at Fort McMurray, Jiarobia said to me: "Dat man is the biggest awful liar on de river. You should hear him talk. 'One day,' he said, 'dere was a big stone floating up de muddy river and on it was tree men, and one was blind and one was plumb naked and one had no arms nor legs, and de blind man he looks down on bottom of river an see a gold watch, an de cripple he reach out and get it, and de naked man he put it in his pocket.' Now any man talk dat way ...
— The Arctic Prairies • Ernest Thompson Seton
... Weighed and Its Density and Mass Computed.—The density, mass, or weight of the earth was found by the observed force of attraction of a known mass of lead or iron for another mass; or of a mountain by the deflection of a torsion thread or plumb line. In this manner the mean density of the earth has been found to be from 4.71 to 6.56 times the weight of water, 5.66 being accredited as the most reliable. The weight of a cubic foot of water being known, and the contents of the earth being computed in cubic feet, we ...
— Burroughs' Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889 • Barkham Burroughs
... threw the rope over an oak limb, and directed The Lifter to stand 'plumb under.' Murfrey now tightened the rope but he could not raise The Lifter from ...
— The Four Canadian Highwaymen • Joseph Edmund Collins
... done it, but I was plumb mad. I pulled a San Augustine paper out of my hip-pocket, and showed him an item. It was a half a column about the marriage of ...
— Options • O. Henry
... about that time. The skipper yelled to me to ease off the larboard stay. Now, I might know something about mince pie, but a larboard stay is not my long and hasty. Then some one pushed me aside, and succeeded in putting things in such excellent shape that we ran plumb through the dock. ...
— Billy Baxter's Letters • William J. Kountz, Jr.
... where a person didn't know much about his neighbor's past and cared less; and, although there were a heap of girls thereabouts, they were the kind you'll always find in such communities, while this one was plumb different. Man! Man! But she was different. She was a WOMAN! Two fellows fell in love with her. One of them lived in the same camp as her, and he was a good man, leastways everybody said he was, but he wasn't wise to all the fancy tricks that pretty women hanker after; and, it being his first ...
— The Barrier • Rex Beach
... whah Mahs Hudson libs? Dey's a turkey dah dat gibs Me a heap o' trouble. Some day Hudson g'ine to miss Dat owdashus fowl o' his; I's g'ine ober dah an' twis' 'At gobbler's nake plumb double. ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... a foundation of stones or a series of stone piles, but if you use stones and expect your house to remain plumb where the winters are severe you must dig holes for them at least three feet deep in order to go below the frost-line. Fill these holes with broken stone, on top of which you can make your pile of stones to act as support for the sills; but the simplest method is ...
— Shelters, Shacks and Shanties • D.C. Beard
... you think so?" She looked at him wistfully. "I'd try awful hard not to make breaks," she went on, "and make 'em feel like cachin' me in the cellar when they saw company comin'. It's just plumb awful to be lonesome here, like I am sometimes; to be homesick for something or somebody—for other kind of folks besides Injuns and grub-liners, and Schoolmarms that look at you as if you was a new, queer kind of bug, and laugh at you with ...
— 'Me-Smith' • Caroline Lockhart
... corresponding to the old conception of patron saints. If they did there would be a Patron Saint of Plumbers, and this would alone be a revolution, for it would force the individual craftsman to believe that there was once a perfect being who did actually plumb. ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... all parts, and when in normal condition the mind and wisdom of God is satisfied that the machine will go on and build and run according to the plan and specification. If this be true as nature proves at every point and principle, what can man do farther than plumb, line up, and trust to nature to get results desired, "life and health?" Can we add or suggest any improvement? If not, what is left for us to do is to keep bells, batteries and wires in normal place and trust to normal law as given ...
— Philosophy of Osteopathy • Andrew T. Still
... "It's a plumb sight worse," the other answered. "I ain't never been no further north 'n Thunder Cape, jest by Nipigon. An' what's more, I ain't goin'! But even up there, the ice freezes solid 'n' you kin do somethin' with it. Mush-ice never gits solid, but like some ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Life-Savers • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... English figures not only of fiction but of letters. But in the most recent years, again a change has come: the pendulum has swung back, as it always does when an excessive movement carries it too far beyond the plumb line. Dickens has found valiant, critical defenders; he has risen fast in thoughtful so well as popular estimation (although with the public he has scarcely fluctuated in favor) until he now enjoys a sort of resurrection of popularity. What is the cause of this to-and-fro ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... gravel creaked beneath his feet), and the baobab giant in its mignonette pot, the comfort of that cabbage-rabbit burrow wrapped him like a security after all his dangers and adversities... But the bells, those cursed bells, tolled louder than ever; their black heavy notes fell plumb upon his heart and crushed it again. In funereal fashion they were saying to him: "Cain, what hast thou done with thy brother? Tartarin, where is Bompard?" Then, without courage to take one step, he sat down upon the hot coping of the little basin ...
— Tartarin On The Alps • Alphonse Daudet
... heaped in frightful disorder. When, closing my eyes, I contemplate these results of the convulsion of the soil in my mind's eye, when I hear the screaming of the eagles, which go wheeling through the bottomless abysses, whose inky shadows the eye dares hardly plumb, vertigo seizes me, and I open my eyes to reassure ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... it had been done with a knife, doesn't it? Alpine crags seem vertical but are nearly always inclined; their primary rock, you know, cannot flake off abruptly like this tufa. This is a genuine precipice. Plumb!" ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... he asked himself in wonderment. "Am mah eardrum done gone busted? Moke, yo' am plumb ...
— The Young Engineers on the Gulf - The Dread Mystery of the Million Dollar Breakwater • H. Irving Hancock
... there employed whose touch is like the stroke of an artist. He handled each brick as if it were porcelain, balanced it carefully in his hand, measured with his eye just the amount of mortar which it needed, and dropped the block into its bed, without staining its edge, without varying from the plumb line, by a stroke of hand-craft as true as the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 497, July 11, 1885 • Various
... anything. We'll have a pack of hounds, too, and we can drive pig in the woods, and if we want big game there are the Mangwe flats at our feet. I tell you I'll make such a country-house as nobody ever dreamed of. A man will come plumb out of stark savagery into lawns and rose-gardens." Lawson flung himself into his chair again and smiled dreamily ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... flower tubes than the Wild Bergamot's the Bee Balm belies its name, for, however frequently bees may come about for nectar when it rises high, only long-tongued bumblebees could get enough to compensate for their trouble. Butterflies, which suck with their wings in motion, plumb the depths. The ruby-throated humming bird—to which the Brazilian salvia of our gardens has adapted itself—flashes about these whorls of Indian plumes just as frequently—of course transferring pollen on his needle-like bill as he darts from flower to flower. Even the protruding stamens ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... at that moment the avenger was at hand on its north-eastern border, the Assyrian appointed to carry out sentence upon it.* Then follow visions, each one of which tends to deepen the effect of the seer's words—a cloud of locusts,** a devouring fire,*** a plumb-line in the hands of the Lord,**** a basket laden with summer fruits—till at last the whole people of Israel take refuge in their temple, vainly hoping that there they may escape from the vengeance of the Eternal. "There shall not one of them flee away, and there shall not one of them ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 7 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... an earthen excavation under the depot platform when I arrived, measuring and calculating with his plumb-bob and level, and when I looked in on him hopefully he ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... able to state my position definitely." Lanyard got up and grinned provokingly down at the group. "You can—all four of you—go plumb to hell!" ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... at de sawmill had des got de big log on de kerridge, en wuz start-in' up de saw, w'en dey seed a 'oman runnin' up de hill, all out er bref, cryin' en gwine on des lack she wuz plumb 'stracted. It wuz Tenie; she come right inter de mill, en th'owed herse'f on de log, right in front er de saw, a-hollerin' en cryin' ter her Sandy ter fergib her, en not ter think hard er her, fer it wa'n't no fault er hern. Den Tenie ...
— The Conjure Woman • Charles W. Chesnutt
... matter, the sight is heart sickening! There Sambo and his woman, dressed to death, strut along with heads erect, looking as important as though they owned the city, or, astride their bicycles, they'll ride plumb over you. But we have put a stop to Nigger high-stepping for a while at least, thanks to our true and patriotic men, blue-blooded Southern gentlemen." "And our boys, who did so nobly!" chimed in Mrs. Engel. "Yes! yes!" exclaimed ...
— Hanover; Or The Persecution of the Lowly - A Story of the Wilmington Massacre. • David Bryant Fulton
... to his knees in grass. The captain of the Burtington team was the local publican, a hearty man who told us in the same breath that he was very glad to see us, and that he had played cricket for thirty years, boy and man. His name was Plumb, and I liked him very much; he played in both braces and a belt, because he told us belts were ticklish things and braces sometimes burst. I answered that it was always well to be on the safe side, and we had quite a confidential talk, until Lambert and Dennison came ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... in some mighty-mouthed hollow That's plumb-full of hush to the brim; I've watched the big, husky sun wallow In crimson and gold, and grow dim, Till the moon set the pearly peaks gleaming, And the stars tumbled out, neck and crop; And I've thought that I surely was dreaming, With the peace o' ...
— Songs of a Sourdough • Robert W. Service
... the next couple of hours. 'Cordin' to my reckonin' they was years and we'd ought to have sailed plumb through the broadside of the Cape, and be makin' a quick run for Africy. But at last we got into smoother water, and then, right acrost our bows, showed up a white strip. The fog had pretty well blowed clear and I could ...
— The Depot Master • Joseph C. Lincoln
... another man. He didn't even look the same. Sich eyes! Al'ays looking past ye at something behind ye. They'd give anyone creeps. He never had any notion of flesh-and-blood women after that—said a man wouldn't, after seeing Isabel. His life was plumb ruined. Lucky he died young. I hated to be in the same room with him—he wa'n't canny, that was all there was to it. You keep away from that grave—you don't want to look odder than ye are by nature. And when ye git married, ye'll have to give up ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... much as them cattlemen," declaimed one grizzled veteran waving his pipe. "I come to these mountains first in sixty-six, and the sheep was bad enough then, but you always had some horse meadows. Now they're just plumb overrunning the country. There's thousands and thousands of folks that come in camping, and about a dozen of these yere cattlemen. They got no right to ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... this new book the whole world makes such a rout about?— Oh! 'tis out of all plumb, my lord,—quite an irregular thing; not one of the angles at the four corners was a right angle. I had my rule and compasses, my lord, in ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat
... thoughts aren't actually our own. They SEEM different, but that may be because they arise in some part of our deep subconscious thought processes. I've been trying to extend my sense of awareness in order to reach into my subconscious mind and actually plumb it to its depths. One thing I've found is that most of my REAL thinking goes on there, and only rises to the surface of consciousness when it is completed! That lends probability to the theory that ALL such voices of inspiration ...
— The Unthinking Destroyer • Roger Phillips
... his pinions vain, plumb down he drops, Ten thousand fathom deep, and to this hour Down had been falling had not, by ill chance, The strong rebuff of some tumultuous cloud. Instinct with fire and niter, hurried him As many miles aloft; that fury stayed, Quenched in a boggy ...
— Other Worlds - Their Nature, Possibilities and Habitability in the Light of the Latest Discoveries • Garrett P. Serviss
... same period as the Guildhall, is curiously similar in its interior, having only a nave and aisles. The stone pillars are so slight that they are scarcely of much greater diameter than the wooden ones in the civic structure, and some of them are perilously out of plumb. There is much ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... each time we got through. Twice I almost had reason to reverse my impression of the power of water. First the stern rose up in front of me, as if squaring off at the tops of the cliffs, then descended, until it seemed to be trying to plumb the depths of the river. The waves, rolling over me, almost knocked me out of the boat, I lost my hold on the oars and grabbed the sides of the boat; then, regaining the oars, I finished the run by pulling with the bow headed downstream, for the boat had "swapped ...
— Through the Grand Canyon from Wyoming to Mexico • E. L. Kolb
... "Hello, dere, foolish! What yo' think Ah am anyhow? To' must think Ah'm plumb crazy," and Sam looked pityingly at George. "Ob co'se Ah wouldn't nebber lif' mah ...
— The Go Ahead Boys and the Treasure Cave • Ross Kay
... Miss Snowden and Mrs. Chase. Nor did he notice individual peculiarities except that something, excitement or a sudden jostle or something, had pushed Aurora's rippling black locks to one side, with the result that the part which divided the ripples, instead of descending plumb-line fashion from the crown of the head to a point directly in the center of the forehead, now had a diagonal twist and ended over the left eye. The effect was rather astonishing, as if the upper section of the lady's head ...
— Fair Harbor • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... get out of here, Allen. If you think you can marry Morton Bassett's daughter with that kind of a scandal in your pocket, I tell you you're mad—you've plumb gone insane! Great God, boy, you don't know the meaning of the words you use. You handle that thing like a child with a loaded pistol. Don't you see what that would mean—to Marian, to Blackford, ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... on end upon the hero's cranium, with its mighty mane of blue wool bristling out in the spray and breeze. Position Fourth: at six in the afternoon, with the Corsican coast in view; the unfortunate chechia hangs over the ship's side, and lamentably stares down as though to plumb the depths of ocean. Finally and lastly, the Fifth Position: at the back of a narrow state-room, in a box-bed so small it seemed one drawer in a nest of them, something shapeless rolled on the pillow with moans of desolation. This was the fez—the fez so defiant ...
— Tartarin of Tarascon • Alphonse Daudet
... in vain. He could see a long way, and sometimes it almost seemed as if he saw farther than at others; but lower down there was always that purply transparent blackness into which his eyesight plunged, but could not quite plumb. ...
— The Crystal Hunters - A Boy's Adventures in the Higher Alps • George Manville Fenn
... her strange Nesta, one thing was clear: she did not love the man: and Nataly tasted gladness in that, from the cup of poisonous regrets at the thought. Her girl's heart would not be broken. But if he so strongly loved her, as to hold to this engagement? . . . It might then be worse. She dropped a plumb-line into the young man, sounding him by what she knew of him and judged. She had to revert to Nesta's charm, for the assurance of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... interiors of these buildings arrests the observer's attention, and, indeed, fills him with amazement, as does their construction in general. What instruments of precision did a rude people possess who could raise such walls, angles, monoliths, true and plumb as the work of ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... give her the name, myself," he observed, at last. "Seein' I just got her a week ago last Saturday. I ASKED Casper Hoyt what under the canopy possessed him to give her a name like that. Said his father named her. Well, I thought his father must be plumb foolish, or something, but I didn't like to say so to HIM. Seems too bad to waste them gilt letters, or I'd a-had another name on her 'fore this. I wanted to use as many of them letters as I could, an' I thought of callin' her for my aunt, ...
— The Voyage of the Hoppergrass • Edmund Lester Pearson
... the floor carpet to assist him in his explanations. Master to the candidate, "Brother, as you are dressed, it is necessary you should have tools to work with; I will, therefore, present you with the tools of a Fellow Craft Mason. They are the Plumb, Square, and Level. The Plumb is an instrument made use of by operative masons to raise perpendiculars; the Square, to square their work; and the Level, to lay horizontals; but we, as Free and Accepted Masons, are taught ...
— The Mysteries of Free Masonry - Containing All the Degrees of the Order Conferred in a Master's Lodge • William Morgan
... Grade, a mile and a half from the summit: Black as your hat was the night, and never a star in the heavens. Thundering down the grade, the gravel and stones we sent flying Over the precipice side,—a thousand feet plumb to the bottom. ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte
... warned Dextry. "I've seen men get plumb drunk on mountain air. Don't expand too strong in one spot." He went back abruptly to his pipe, its villanous fumes promptly averting any danger of the air's too ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... seed a man 'at went so plumb dumb crazy over a few gold nuggets as him. 'T was here at the old cabin he met his pard, an' they made plans fer a great minin' company. Of all the fellers they was settin' up machinery in the mines a dozen years ago, this feller was the best o' the lot. Why, oncet he ...
— Buffalo Roost • F. H. Cheley
... "Let it go plumb to hell!" returned Judith. "Scott's the one should have been shot, for sending you out ...
— Judith of the Godless Valley • Honore Willsie
... bein' sent for a killing to-day," said Old Man Curry. "Well, she'll have 'Lisha to beat, I reckon. And all he's runnin' for is the purse, Frank, like you said. I did my best to bet 'em until the price got too plumb ridiculous, but the children of Israel wouldn't ...
— Old Man Curry - Race Track Stories • Charles E. (Charles Emmett) Van Loan
... vertical plane which contains the style; and the most simple way of drawing it on the dial will be by suspending a plummet from some point of the style whence it may hang freely, and waiting until the shadows of both style and plumb-line coincide on the dial. This single shadow will be the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... about your adventures, and watch out, because the first lie you tell—" The justice held up a warning finger. "Now answer me this, never mind anything else; we'll drop a plumb-line right down to the bottom of this thing and have no ...
— Pee-wee Harris on the Trail • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... Vannes He spreads for flight, and in the surging smoak Uplifted spurns the ground, thence many a League As in a cloudy Chair ascending rides 930 Audacious, but that seat soon failing, meets A vast vacuitie: all unawares Fluttring his pennons vain plumb down he drops Ten thousand fadom deep, and to this hour Down had been falling, had not by ill chance The strong rebuff of som tumultuous cloud Instinct with Fire and Nitre hurried him As many miles aloft: that furie stay'd, Quencht in a Boggie ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... to himself, with a slight duck of the head of careless acknowledgment. Then he glanced with slumbering anger at the stove. "Smoke, we'll have to dig up a new stove. That fire-box is burned plumb into the oven so ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... appreciation, believe me. But I've a young lady here who is 'plumb crazy' over posies and, coming along on the steamer, I promised her a glimpse of some of Yarmouth's garden 'cosy corners.' I know none lovelier than your own; and as for your window-plants—I'm afraid if we don't take her away from temptation ...
— Dorothy's Travels • Evelyn Raymond
... "It's been a shy kind o' moon to-night, an' it's a gittin' so much shyer that it's plumb afraid to show its face. In three minutes it will hide behind a big cloud that's edgin' up over thar, an' we won't see it no ...
— The Free Rangers - A Story of the Early Days Along the Mississippi • Joseph A. Altsheler
... round to see him close. He was plumb sober, and his face was solemn, like it was the time I caught ...
— The Man Next Door • Emerson Hough
... walls here were lined completely with small flat bricks, and looked much the same all round. I examined these bricks as closely as I might, and took course by course, looking first at the north side where the plumb-line hung, and afterwards turning round in the bucket till I was afraid of getting giddy; but to little purpose. They could see my candle moving round and round from the well-top, and knew no doubt ...
— Moonfleet • J. Meade Falkner
... Jake retorted with vigor. "Usedn't you to keep me awake praying for her—hollerin' at God to forgive her? Didn't you, or did you?" No answer. "And you think this is her!" The ridiculousness of the fantasy smote him. "Say, you must 'a' went plumb nutty! Bendin' over that tub must 'a' gave you a rush of brains to ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... he said. There was laughter in his eyes but not in his tone. "We got him plumb at the game. He was chock full of kerosene and tinder, and he'd fired the patch in several places. We were on it quick. We beat the fire in seconds. As for him, why, I guess his Ma's going to forget him right away. Leastways I hope so. He went out like the snuff of a lucifer, and his body's likely ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum
... guard! if thou hadst life like me, What pleasure would thy toils reward beneath the deep-green sea! O deep sea-diver, who might then behold such sights as thou?— The hoary monster's palaces!—Methinks what joy 'twere now To go plumb-plunging down, amid the assembly of the whales, And feel the churned sea round me boil beneath their scourging tails! Then deep in tangle-woods to fight the fierce sea-unicorn, And send him foiled and bellowing back, ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... Captain Wass. "She's a-going to tramp him plumb underfoot—unless she's going to get up a little more speed and jump over him!" he added, ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... head, two of them white and the other of a rusty red. The air was full of flying metal, and the road, as we were told afterwards by an observer, was all churned up by it. The metal base of one of the shells was found plumb in the middle of the road just where our motor had been. There is no use telling me Austrian gunners can't ...
— A Visit to Three Fronts • Arthur Conan Doyle
... from the butt of his ivory-handled gun. The Texan had pulled his other revolver with the bewildering speed of a magician. Goliday was covered, "plumb center." ...
— Kid Wolf of Texas - A Western Story • Ward M. Stevens
... her to spell words of one syllable, and she soon set up pear, plumb, top, ball, pin, puss, dog, hog, fawn, buck, doe, lamb, sheep, ram, cow, bull, ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 3 (of 12) - Classic Tales And Old-Fashioned Stories • Various
... laughed, saying, "I cannot fight a monk," and sheathed his sword. He did not love monks, none of his house did. He had seen the new gallows, could measure the build of the fellow in the quarry; and though he could not plumb the girl's soul through her misty eyes, he could read her shaking lips and clinging hands; he could see, and be shocked to see, how young she was to be acquainted with grief, and with sin how likely familiar. ...
— The Forest Lovers • Maurice Hewlett
... curiosity Waldemar watched Average Jones place the ladder against the outside of the pole, mount, nail up the sign, drop a plumb-line, improvised from a key and a length of string, to the ground, set a careful knot in the ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... out of the woods. The path now led along the edge of a precipice descending sheer to the uppermost terrace of the valley he had left. The valley was but a cleft in the mass of the mountain: a little way over sank its other wall, steep as a plumb-line could have made it, of solid rock. On his right lay green fields of clover and strange grasses. Ever and anon from the cleft steamed up great blinding clouds of mist, which now wandered about over the nations of rocks on ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... killed th' man, an' so it might prove nuthin'; but, right whar th' grass was tread up th' worst on th' spot whar we saw th' man killed, I found this—" and the hand came out of the pocket and was extended toward the alcalde, holding on its palm a button. "Now I'd plumb forgot all about th' findin' of this button, not settin' any store on it, when, jest as I was a-leavin' th' witness stand, th' thought popped intew my head, that, if th' prisoners happened tew have on th' same clothes they ...
— The Cave of Gold - A Tale of California in '49 • Everett McNeil
... Say, didn't I tell you I shook hands with this boy an' was plumb glad to meet him?" demanded Laddy, with considerable heat. Manifestly he had been affronted. "Tom Beldin', he's a gentleman, an' he could lick you in—in half a second. ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... big lumber-mill that had once kept it busy was burned down, and the business had slipped away to the prosperous neighbouring town of Machias. There were nice old houses with tall pillars in front of them, now falling into decay and slipping out of plumb. There were shops that had evidently been closed for years, with not even a sign "To Let" in the windows. Our dinner was cooked for us in a boarding-house, by a brisk young lady of about fifteen years, whose mother ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke
... guest's susceptibilities than he had been before the quarrel and its reconciliation, did not seem to feel for Lionel the active interest which Lionel felt for him. He did not, as most clever men are apt to do in their intercourse with youth, attempt to draw him out, plumb his intellect, or guide his tastes. If he was at times instructive, it was because talk fell on subjects on which it pleased himself to touch, and in which he could not speak without involuntarily instructing. Nor did he ever allure the boy to talk of his ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... sun was the matter with that kid, and advised his frantic parents to throw water in his face. Chip told her exactly what he had told the Old Man, in exactly the same tone; so the Countess retreated, declaring that he wouldn't be let to act that way if he was her kid, and that he was plumb ...
— The Flying U's Last Stand • B. M. Bower
... Nicolai, whose name the maire had written in my note-book, that there might be no mistake, appeared to be of that peculiar mental calibre which warrants Yorkshire peasants in describing a man as 'half-rocked,' or 'not plumb.' His wife, on the other hand, was one of those neat, gentle, sensible women, of whom one wonders how they ever came to marry such thick-lipped and blear-eyed men. Between them they informed me that if I did not object to share a room, I could be ...
— Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland • George Forrest Browne
... the little procession set off. Mr. Poyser was in his Sunday suit of drab, with a red-and-green waistcoat and a green watch-ribbon having a large cornelian seal attached, pendant like a plumb-line from that promontory where his watch-pocket was situated; a silk handkerchief of a yellow tone round his neck; and excellent grey ribbed stockings, knitted by Mrs. Poyser's own hand, setting off ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... shine out, when thought is sharply stirred; How the mind works, when once the wheels are loosed, How nimbly, with what swift activity. I think, 'tis strange that men should ever sleep, There are so many things to think upon, So many deeds, so many thoughts to weigh, To pierce, and plumb them to the silent depth. Yet in that thought I do rebuke myself, Too little given to probe the inner heart, But rather wont, with the luxurious eye, To catch from life it's outer loveliness, Such things as do ...
— Among the Millet and Other Poems • Archibald Lampman
... reckon,' he went on, 'that it wants a good old-fashioned copper-bottomed miracle to get us out of this fix. It's plumb against all my principles. I've spent my life using the talents God gave me to keep things from getting to the point of rude violence, and so far I've succeeded. But now you come along, Major, and you hustle a respectable middle-aged citizen into an aboriginal mix-up. It's mighty indelicate. I ...
— Greenmantle • John Buchan
... like a hot corn pone. He'd take Nella-Rose quick enough if she'd have him, but barrin' her, he hangs to Marg so as ter be nigh Nella-Rose in any case. And right here Burke Lawson figgers. Burke's got two naturs, same as old Satan. Marg can play on one and get him plumb riled up to anythin'; Nella-Rose can twist him around her finger and make him act like ...
— The Man Thou Gavest • Harriet T. Comstock
... we saw an aeroplane falling. At first it was hard to believe it was not doing some patent stunt. Instead of coming down plumb as one would imagine, it fell first this way and then that, like a piece of paper fluttering down from a window. As it got nearer the earth though where the currents of air were not so powerful, it plunged straight downwards. Crowds witnessed the ...
— Fanny Goes to War • Pat Beauchamp
... used—and placed in position on the top forms, their bottom edges being carefully set flush with the top edge of the form already in position, and then bolted to it. On the outside, the column forms, and on the inside, the wedge and key sections were set last. A 3-lb. plumb-bob on a fine line was suspended from the inner scaffold and carefully centered over a point set in the rock at the base. This line was in the exact center of the tower, and the tops of all the forms, after each shift, were carefully set ...
— Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, Vol. LXX, Dec. 1910 - A Concrete Water Tower, Paper No. 1173 • A. Kempkey
... flame did they go plunging down the depths, gyrating like mad comets with long smoke-trailers and redly licking manes of fire. Not in shattered fragments did they burst and plumb the abyss. No; quite intact, unharmed, but ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... and must be carried on with as much care as a mason would give to the laying of the walls of a structure designed to stand for years. The mason knows that if he does not lay his foundations deep and firm, that if the walls are not kept straight and plumb, that if he puts faulty bricks or stones in the walls, the building will not be a success. The work at every stage must be a success or the completed structure must ...
— The Girl Wanted • Nixon Waterman
... arrangements for a prolonged absence, as also to communicate with Mr. Campbell, who was still at his home in Hamilton, Ohio. By correspondence we agreed to meet in New York, November 8th, he accompanied by Mr. Plumb, secretary of legation, and I ...
— The Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman, Complete • William T. Sherman
... in too much o' a hurry," said Mr. Dillon. "That mine ain't goin' to walk away, and Abe Blower an' those with him ain't goin' to find it right plumb to onct, believe me! I guess the only reason those others hurried so was because they feared you would come along and queer their ...
— Dave Porter in the Gold Fields - The Search for the Landslide Mine • Edward Stratemeyer
... she insists. "I'm plumb scared at the thought of mixin' with folks like that—just plumb scared. And, as you know, Mr. Leavitt, it's the first time in my life I've ever ...
— Shorty McCabe on the Job • Sewell Ford
... right, all right," murmured Cousin Egbert in a sort of ecstasy, as we drew up at the Floud home. "And yet one of them guys back there called him a typical Britisher. You bet I shut him up quick—saying a thing like that about a plumb stranger. I'd 'a' mixed it with him right there except I thought it was better to have things nice and not start something the minute the Judge ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... shoot straight while you're about it," she continued. "It comes plumb from the roots, and I don't want to have to look at a wild-growing vine right here under my window for all my eighty-second ...
— Rose of Old Harpeth • Maria Thompson Daviess
... quit pesterin' 'bout thet. Them young-uns 'druther sleep out'n in, any time. Ef I'd let 'em they'd grow up plumb wild. When yo've got worshed up come on right in the kitchen an' set by. Us Wattses is plain folks an' don't pile on no dog. We've et an' got through, but yo' take all the time yo're a mind to, an' me an' Microby Dandeline 'll set by an' yo' c'n tell us who yo' be, ef yo're a mind to, ...
— The Gold Girl • James B. Hendryx
... Polly Ann had seed him in Hazlan (which she hadn't, of co'se), an' had said p'int-blank that he was the likeliest feller she'd seed in them mountains. An' he tol' Polly Ann that Jeb was ravin' crazy 'bout her. The pure misery of it jes made him plumb delirious, Abe said; an' 'f Polly Ann wanted to find her match fer languige an' talkin' out peert—well, she jes ought to strike Jeb Somers. Fact is, stranger, Jeb Somers air might' nigh a idgit; but Jeb 'lowed he'd rack right over ...
— 'Hell fer Sartain' and Other Stories • John Fox, Jr.
... my reasons, George. But I don't mean to go into 'em. All that's dead and gone. There was a pack of fellows then on my shoulders—I was plumb tired of 'em. I had to get rid of—I did get rid of 'em—and you, too. I knew you were inquiring after me, and I didn't want inquiries. They didn't suit me. You may conclude what you like. I tell you ...
— Lady Merton, Colonist • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... do something beneficial for the cavalry, in which he felt much the same special interest that I did in the artillery. So a sort of alliance, offensive and defensive, was formed, which included as its most active and influential member Senator Plumb of Kansas, to obtain the necessary funds and build a suitable post and establish at Fort Riley a school of cavalry and light artillery. The result finally attained, when I was in command of the army, is well known, and is an honor to ...
— Forty-Six Years in the Army • John M. Schofield
... free stepper in the mazes of the dance, and once, when she was balancing partners with Doodums, she kicked out sort of playful to give him a love pat and fetched him a clip with her tootsey that gave him water on the kneepan. It ought to have been a warning to Doodums, but he was plumb infatuated, and went around pretending that he'd been kicked by a horse. After that the boys used to make Honeybunch mighty mad when she came out of dark corners with Doodums, by feeling him to see if any of his ribs were broken. ...
— Old Gorgon Graham - More Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son • George Horace Lorimer
... is Boone Island light; You might mistake it for a ship, Only it stands too plumb upright, And like the others does not slip Behind the sea's unsteady brink; Though, if a cloud-shade chance to dip Upon it a moment, 'twill suddenly sink, Levelled and lost in the darkened main, Till the sun builds ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... mother-in-law come t' see 'em and staid a long time and was awful cross and Uncle Billy got tired of it and took and put a wad of cotton in her ear trumpet so she couldn't hear a thing, and she thought she was goin' plumb deef and left that day fer home to see her doctor. Wasn't that cute ...
— The Fotygraft Album - Shown to the New Neighbor by Rebecca Sparks Peters Aged Eleven • Frank Wing
... conical forms, and built one upon another to a prodigious height. Upon a nearer view, each cone appeared of itself a mountain; and the tout ensemble compose an enormous mass of the Lundus Helmonti, or plumb-pudding stone, fourteen miles in circumference, and what the Spaniards call two leagues in height. As it is like unto no other mountain, so it stands quite unconnected with any, though not very distant from some very lofty ones. Near the base of it, on the south side, are two villages, ...
— A Year's Journey through France and Part of Spain, 1777 - Volume 1 (of 2) • Philip Thicknesse
... drive her. I took particular pains to get the measurements of her mainmast while it lay on the dock under the shears. It was eighty-seven feet—and she only a hundred and ten feet over all—and it stepped plumb in the middle of her, further forward than a mainmast was generally put in a fisherman. To that was shackled a seventy-five foot boom, and eighty-odd tons of pig-iron were cemented close down to her keel, and that floored over and stanchioned snug. For the rest, she was very ...
— The Seiners • James B. (James Brendan) Connolly
... mildness of the last question had been merely the cover for a bursting wrath that now sent his voice booming, "maybe you know a whole pile, boy—I hear Jasper has give you consid'able education—but what you know is plumb wasted on me. Understand? As for lookin' up another blacksmith, you ought to know they ain't another shop in ten miles. You'll do this job, and you'll do it my way. Maybe you got another way ...
— Way of the Lawless • Max Brand
... the train was held up, robbed, and burned by a band of Sioux. Bradford and the train crew were rescued by General Dodge himself, who happened to be following them with his "arsenal" car, and who heard at Plumb Creek of the fight and of the last stand that Bradford and his handful of men were making in the way car, which they had detached and pushed back from the burning train. Such cool heroism as Bradford ...
— The Last Spike - And Other Railroad Stories • Cy Warman
... was named Luvenia Polk. She got plumb away and stayed away. On account of that, I was raised by my mother. She went to Atchison, Kansas—rode all through them woods on that cow. Tore her clothes all off on ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves: Volume II, Arkansas Narratives, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... kill't. Just hidin' out in the woods, and mostly from each other. It's a turrible thing." He looked down at himself with a wry grimace. "Not outta shame," he added. "We've seen naked bodies before. Just plumb scared, I guess." ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... mortar from between two big stones with his knife. In five minutes he had it loose, and, grasping it with both hands, he pushed it close to the edge, and then peeped over. The soldier was some yards from the plumb. Jack looked down at the shrubbery for guidance. The smith raised his hand to signify patience. Jack waited. Breathlessly the ambushed party watched the two soldiers, who were now talking together. Would they never return to their doors? ...
— The Slowcoach • E. V. Lucas
... gloves, And all the et cetera which crown people's loves; A magnificent bride-cake comes home from the baker. And lastly appears, from the German Long Acre, That shaft which, the sharpest in all Cupid's quiver is, A plumb-color'd coach, and ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... wouldn't wonder if 'twas account of you, Imogene. Hannah knows I—I like you fust rate, that we're good friends, I mean. She's—well, consarn it all!—she's jealous, that's what's the matter. She's awful silly that way. I can't so much as look at a woman, but she acts like a plumb idiot. Take that Abbie Larkin, for instance. One time she—ho, ho! I did kind of get ...
— Thankful's Inheritance • Joseph C. Lincoln
... hit them. But, this is goin' to get monotonous sometime an' I'll want to leave here. They've got my horse, an' it's a cinch I ain't goin' away afoot. Guess I'll have to borrow one like Ol' Bat did down to Las Vegas an' get plumb out of the country. An' there's another reason I can't linger to get venerable amongst my present peaceful surroundin's. When Ol' Bat finds I've quit the outfit he'll trail me down, just as sure as I'm goin' to take another drink, ...
— Prairie Flowers • James B. Hendryx
... "I plumb forgot what I come over here for. They's goin' to be a dance over to town, an' I come to tell you about it. O' course ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough
... heavy trench-mortar work by the Hun, and "minnies" were constantly stealing over with evil intent to batter down our flimsy breastworks. Battalion H.Q. and the signallers will probably not easily forget the morning when they found themselves the objective in this kind of work. One shot dropped plumb on the H.Q. concrete shelter, half removing the roof and scattering the contents of the orderly room in a disrespectful manner, whilst the next one pushed in the signaller's dug-out, wounding L.-Cpl. Wild. It was the sang-froid of a/R.S.M. Clough on this occasion, ...
— The Seventh Manchesters - July 1916 to March 1919 • S. J. Wilson
... I put it? That willing lad of yours has plumb knocked the answer out of my noodle. Maybe you're thinking of some one else, Buck." Dingwell looked up at him with an ...
— The Sheriff's Son • William MacLeod Raine
... I killed him," continued Mrs. Wiggs, calmly. "The doctor an' ever'body said so. He was jes' gitten over typhoid, an' I give him pork an' beans. He was a wonderful man! Kept his senses plumb to the end. I remember his very las' words. I was settin' by him, waitin' fer the doctor to git there, an' I kep' saying 'Oh, Mr. Wiggs! You don't think you are dying do you?' an' he answered up jes' as natural an' fretful-like, 'Good lan', Nancy! How do I know? I ain't never died before.' ...
— Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch • Alice Caldwell Hegan
... by a shot, broke off near the head, the bow lifted from the waves, and then came the end. Suddenly assuming a perpendicular position, caused by the falling aft of the battery and stores, straight as a plumb-line, stern first, she went down, the jibboom being the last to appear above water. Down sank the terror of merchantmen, riddled through and through, and as she disappeared to her last resting place, not a cheer arose from the victors. To borrow the language of the ...
— The Story of the Kearsarge and Alabama • A. K. Browne
... the British prisoners; such is the difference in the two countries in point of cheap food. On thanksgiving days, and on Christmas days, and such like holy days, we, in America, used to treat these European prisoners with geese, turkies, and plumb pudding. Many of these fellows declared that they never in their lives sat down to a table to a roasted turkey, or even a roasted goose. It is a fact, that when the time approached for drafting the British prisoners ...
— A Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts, 2nd ed. • Benjamin Waterhouse
... down to this office and informed me he was, plumb weary of the life of a bon vivant and was anxious to get to sea again. So I made him master of a new steamer we acquired recently, and he's gone out to Vladivostok with munitions ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne
... hundred tailors were employed in the same manner to make me clothes; but they had another contrivance for taking my measure. I kneeled down, and they raised a ladder from the ground to my neck; upon this ladder one of them mounted, and let fall a plumb-line from my collar to the floor, which just answered the length of my coat: but my waist and arms I measured myself. When my clothes were finished, which was done in my house (for the largest of theirs would ...
— Gulliver's Travels - into several remote nations of the world • Jonathan Swift
... sea, I go as a simple sailor, right before the mast, plumb down into the forecastle, aloft there to the royal mast-head. True, they rather order me about some, and make me jump from spar to spar, like a grasshopper in a May meadow. And at first, this sort of thing is unpleasant enough. It touches ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... grave To wear his purple. And the night disgorged Its empires, till, O, like the swirl of dust Around their marching legions, that dim cloud Of doubt closed round him. Was there any man So sure of heart and brain as to record The simple truth of things himself had seen? Then who could plumb that night? The work broke off! He knew that he was wrong. I knew it, too! Once more that stately structure of his dreams Melted like mist. His eagles perished like clouds. Death wound a thin horn through the centuries. The grave resumed his forlorn emperors. His empires crumbled back to a little ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... to trace the ledge up and down the gulch and to estimate the probable extent of that pay streak. Then he gave it up in self-defense. "I've got to watch my dodgers," he admonished himself, "or I'll go plumb loco and imagine I'm a millionaire. I'll pan what I can get at and let it go at that. And I've got to count what gold shows up in the sack—and no more. Good Lord! I can't afford to make a fool of myself at this stage of the game! I've got to sit right down on my imagination ...
— The Ranch at the Wolverine • B. M. Bower
... pleaded, "you've drubbed him enough. Shake me if you ain't through yet. You'll have him plumb addled! Really, we were just in for some fun. We never dreamed the kids would scare so easy. That's only vegetable dye on Rosslyn's head. He thought we had scalped him, but we ...
— Tabitha's Vacation • Ruth Alberta Brown
... what it is given to very few men to see. From horizon to horizon, as if built by plumb, line and square, stretched a glittering wall, reaching from the forest to the sky. The base of this wall was lost in snow-white billows of ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... more uncertain quantity. Sometimes he could get it at the expense of pitch, sometimes at the expense of pace. Some days he could get all three, and then he was an uncommonly bad man to face on anything but a plumb wicket. ...
— Mike • P. G. Wodehouse
... with a gun, and nobody knows what'll happen when it goes off. If he can't find Reddy Fox, just as likely as not he'll point it at somebody else just fo' fun. Ah hope he doan meet up with mah ol' woman or any of mah li'l' pickaninnies. Ah'm plumb afraid of a boy with a gun, Ah am. 'Pears like he doan have any sense. Ah reckon Ah better be moving along right smart and tell mah family to stay right close in the ol' hollow tree," muttered Unc' Billy Possum, slipping out from his ...
— The Adventures of Reddy Fox • Thornton W. Burgess
... and were very tempting to the eye. George loved plumbs above all other fruit, and he walked very slowly from the parlour with his eyes fixed on the basket. The longer he looked, the more he wished to taste them. One plumb, he thought, would not be missed; and as he put his hand in to take that one, two others lay close under his fingers. It was as easy to take three as one, and the three plumbs were taken and put into his pocket. When he reached the hall door and gave the basket ...
— The Bad Family and Other Stories • Mrs. Fenwick
... cross foaming burns, level enough for a hundred yards canter, then down, and up, hill sides in zigzags, here and there wet and muddy with uncertain footing, through groves of bamboos and under splendid forest trees, some creepers hanging a hundred feet straight as plumb lines, others twisted like wrecked ships' cables, and flowering trees, with delicious scent every hundred yards or so. We felt inclined to stop and look, and sketch vistas of sunlit foliage through shadowy aisles of ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... unless officially authorized or personally desirous of visiting the silver-mines of Siberia. Crack! thug! The smoke clears away. By Jove! his imperial majesty has done it cleverly; hit the brute plumb on the os frontis, or through the heart, it makes no difference which. Down drops Bruin, kicking and tearing up the earth at a dreadful rate; cheers rend the welkin; pots, pans, and kettles are banged. High above all rises the ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... with their old world musical taste, would consider the musical gymnastics of the demented drummer in the orchestra, then survey the swaying Americans and come to the conclusion that the world had gone plumb ...
— "And they thought we wouldn't fight" • Floyd Gibbons
... a lot in a hundred years and I don't know just where we are. I'm only guessing, doing dead reckoning on our motor speed. But we ought to see the place I've got in mind, before plumb dark." ...
— The Young Alaskans on the Missouri • Emerson Hough
... wouldn't a made this trip for money if I wasn't so plumb anxious to see how Dubois saves that flour gold. You take one of these here 'canucks' and he's blamed near as good if not a better placer miner than a Chink; more ingenious and just as savin'. Say, Baldy, will you keep off my heels? If I have to tell you again ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... rather alarming theory, particularly if it be true, as it is said to be, that since 1880 the towers have perceptibly come out of plumb. ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... she had willed it so, and so it had been. Now, in his own poor scrawl, the ghost of a lover too roughly discarded rose and walked again. And beneath the cheap writing and the unrestrained self-pity, she seemed to plumb for the first time the depths of the boy's present misery. The old story, having struck him down once, had hunted him out and struck him down again. Where now ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... always passes through it. These are resultants of the relative moments of the molecules. If a body is suspended, as by a string, the centre of gravity always lies vertically under its point of suspension. By two trials the point of intersection of plumb lines from the point of suspension being determined the centre of gravity is known. The vertical from the point of support coincides with ...
— The Standard Electrical Dictionary - A Popular Dictionary of Words and Terms Used in the Practice - of Electrical Engineering • T. O'Conor Slone
... the school question, anyway. My woman says she sha'n't let our Helen go ter school again this winter, for she's got one cold right on top of another las' year. It's a plumb shame." ...
— Janice Day at Poketown • Helen Beecher Long
... face again. Chances are he'll stick to his house all day Saturday and Sunday; and when school opens on Monday prepare to listen to a tough story of how he got up in the night and in the dark ran plumb up against a half-open door, which would account for his black eye and swollen face. Oh! I know, because I've spun that ...
— The Chums of Scranton High - Hugh Morgan's Uphill Fight • Donald Ferguson
... the original old homestead of the family. It was unspeakably decrepit and fallen from a former high estate. The old house presented to Maria's fancy something in itself degraded and loathsome. It seemed to partake actually of the character of its inmates—to be stained and swollen and out of plumb with unmentionable sins of degeneration. It was a very poisonous fungus of a house, with blotches of paint here and there, with its front portico supported drunkenly on swaying pillars, with its roof hollowed about the chimney, with great stains here and there upon the walls, which seemed ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... Cole, between disgust and embarrassment. "I always claimed to be a white man, didn't I? You can't give a fellow credit for doin' the thing he'd rather do than anything else. But prod a peg in this. I'm gonna make that li'l' girl plumb happy. She thinks she won't be, that she's lost the right to be. She's 'way off, I can see her perkin' up already. I got a real honest-to-God laugh outa ...
— Tangled Trails - A Western Detective Story • William MacLeod Raine
... you're durned if you care. And all the time you feel so bad about it that you must go and do something wicked right away. And taking off your hat to me was your idea of just about the razzlingest, dazzlingest, plumb wickedest thing you could ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... jus' plumb broke Old Marse up. It wasn't long till he moved into Tyler and left my paw runnin' the farm on a halfance with him and the niggers workers. He didn't live long, but I forgits jus' how long. But when Mr. Bob heired the old place, he 'lowed ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves. - Texas Narratives, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... had hitherto escaped her notice. She was at last convinced that she had to contend with a man, a man who had dealt with both men and women. How deep was he? Could honors, such as she could give, and money plumb the depths?... He was an American. She ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... longer ate snails, they were quite extinct; but the burdocks were not extinct, they grew and grew all over the walks and all the beds; they could not get the mastery over them—it was a whole forest of burdocks. Here and there stood an apple and a plumb-tree, or else one never would have thought that it was a garden; all was burdocks, and there lived the ...
— A Christmas Greeting • Hans Christian Andersen
... got to be as hard and tough as leather, to be able to go for days without food or drink, to know the country well, to sleep when he does sleep with his ears open, to be up to every red skin trick, to be able to shoot straight enough to hit a man plumb centre at three hundred yards at least, and to hit a dollar at twenty yards sartin with his six-shooter. If you feel as you have got all them qualifications you can start off as soon as you like, and the chances aren't more'n twenty to one agin your ...
— In The Heart Of The Rockies • G. A. Henty
... likely to know; for the Master of Saint Bede's was a person, the depth of whose nature could not be fathomed easily with any line. Possibly because, old as he was, it happened, as does happen in some lives, that the right plumb-line, by the right hand, ...
— Christian's Mistake • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... that the Senate was becoming less and less desirable each year, and began to lose interest in it. He did not like the rough-and-tumble methods of debate of a number of Western Senators who were coming to take a more prominent place in the Senate. On one occasion Senator Plumb, of Kansas, attacked Senator Edmunds most violently, and without any ...
— Fifty Years of Public Service • Shelby M. Cullom
... but I was plumb mad. I pulled a San Augustine paper out of my hip-pocket, and showed him an item. It was a half a column about the marriage of Myra ...
— Options • O. Henry
... retorted Furlong. "He's above such jobs. No, sir! This afternoon Jessup ran plumb into Mr. Ellis when that little beast bunkie of the other beast, Mr. Briggs, was just in the act of dropping soft soap into the shoes that Aldrich will ...
— Dick Prescott's Second Year at West Point - Finding the Glory of the Soldier's Life • H. Irving Hancock
... thereabouts; this is filled with stiff, well-worked mud, which is dumped in by bucketsful and continually tramped by barefooted laborers; harder bricks are used for the doorways and windows. The bricklayer uses mud for mortar and his hands for a trowel; he works without either level or plumb-line, and keeps up a doleful, melancholy chant from morning to night. The mortar is handed to him by an assistant by handsful; every workman is smeared and spattered with mud from head to foot, as though glorying in covering themselves ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... This muchacho evidently had spirit. Pete's invention, made on the spur of the moment, had hit "plumb center," as he told himself. For Montoya immediately became gracious, proffered Pete tobacco and papers, and suggested coffee, which the young Mexican made while Pete and the old man chatted. Pete was deeply impressed by his reception. He felt that he had made a hit with Montoya—and that the ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... Joe, catching the boy's arm in a friendly grip, with an odd respect in his touch, which marked the admission of young Farrar into the brotherhood of hunters. "I hadn't a charge left, an' not even my hunting-knife. Lots o' city swells 'u'd have been plumb scared before a growler like that,"—touching Bruin's carcass with his foot,—"even if they had a small arsenal to back 'em up. They'd have dropped rifle and cartridges, and hugged the nearest trunk. I've seen fellers do it scores o' times, bless ye! after they came out here rigged ...
— Camp and Trail - A Story of the Maine Woods • Isabel Hornibrook
... teeth, if you please, and dragged far out on the giddiest of yards, and after being wormed and twisted about through all sorts of intricacies—turning abrupt corners at the abruptest of angles—is to be dropped, clear of all obstructions, in a straight plumb-line right down to the deck. In the course of this business, there is a multitude of sheeve-holes and blocks, through which you must pass it; often the rope is a very tight fit, so as to make it like threading a fine cambric needle with rather coarse thread. ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... N. 80 W. 3 ms to a pt. on S. S. passed a Isd. Called Sheeco Islan wind from the N W Camped in a Prarie on the L. S., Capt Lewis & my Self Walked out 3 ms. found the Country roleing open & rich, with plenty of water, great qts of Deer I discovered a Plumb which grows on bushes the hight of Hasle, those plumbs are in great numbers, the bushes beare Verry full, about double the Sise of the wild plumb Called the Osage Plumb & am told they ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al
... you teches him, we's gone—we's gone sho'! I ain't gwine anear him, not for nothin' in dis worl'. Mars Tom, he's plumb crazy." ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... talking rapidly of data which he had derived from his metric photograph, from plumb line, level, compass, and tape, astronomical triangle, vertices, zenith, pole and sun, declination, azimuth, solar time, parallactic angles, refraction, and a ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve
... faine this womans secretarie knowe, Lett him attend the markes that I shall showe: He is a youth almost two handfulls highe, Streight, round, and plumb, yett ...
— The Choise of Valentines - Or the Merie Ballad of Nash His Dildo • Thomas Nash
... he at last understood the character of this funereal, termite-like labour—these chance burrowings continued according to requirements, without art, method, or symmetry. The rugged soil was ever ascending and descending, the sides of the gallery snaked: neither plumb-line nor square had been used. All this, indeed, had simply been a work of charity and necessity, wrought by simple, willing grave-diggers, illiterate craftsmen, with the clumsy handiwork of the decline and fall. Proof thereof was furnished by the inscriptions and ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... popped off the crackers and dropped my cigar into Vesuvius. I tell you he was worth four and eightpence, and the man was right when he said there wasn't his match in London. I doubt if there was his match anywhere for being plumb- full of red balls and green balls and blue balls and crimson stars and fizzlegigs and whole torrents of tiny crackers and chase-me- quicks, and when you about thought he was never going to stop he shot up a silver spray and a gold spray ...
— Love, The Fiddler • Lloyd Osbourne
... funny thing," said Shoop as he mounted. "Now, if I was to tell that dog he was gettin' too old to ramble with me, he'd feel plumb sick and no account. But when I tell him he's got to do somethin'—like watchin' the house—he thinks it's a reg'lar job. He's gettin' old, but, just like folks, he wants to think he's some use. You can't tell me dogs don't know. Why, I've seen ...
— Jim Waring of Sonora-Town - Tang of Life • Knibbs, Henry Herbert
... beauty is no chance of hit or miss—it is inevitable as life—it is exact and plumb as gravitation. From the eyesight proceeds another eyesight, and from the hearing proceeds another hearing, and from the voice proceeds another voice, eternally curious of the harmony of things with man. To these respond perfections, not only in the committees that were supposed ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman
... nodded with satisfaction when he looked up at the rear facade of Miller's Folly. Near the edge of the roof, was a chimney. A plumb line dropped from the center of the chimney would drop about three feet to the right of the only window ...
— Death Points a Finger • Will Levinrew
... that on Monday next, at the Theatre Royal, Drury-Lane, will be performed The Lying Valet, and that Mr. Steevens, at the particular desire of some persons of quality, is to act the part of Justice Guttle; in which character he will devour twelve pounds of plumb cake at three mouthfuls." ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 10, No. 279, October 20, 1827 • Various
... flight, by means of which he could shoot, meteor-like, across the sky, and pass swiftly from place to place, and with it such perfect control over all his organs, such marvellous certitude in all his motions, as to be able to drop himself plumb down from the tallest tree-top or out of the void air, on to a slender spray, and scarcely cause its leaves to tremble. Now, on this morning, he lies stiff and motionless; if you were to take him up and drop him from your hand, he would fall to the ground like a stone or a lump of ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... much wheat, an' had to carry it on horses over into Ohio to get it milled. Took Pa five days to make the trip; an' then the blame old squaws 'ud come, an' Ma 'ud be compelled to hand over to 'em her big white loaves. Jest about set her plumb crazy. Used to get up in the night, an' fix her yeast, an' bake, an' let the oven cool, an' hide the bread out in the wheat bin, an' get the smell of it all out o' the house by good daylight, so's ...
— The Song of the Cardinal • Gene Stratton-Porter
... herself, old Suffolk would have rung with the marvels that were thus revealed. Not only would an unknown sealing-island been laid before the East-enders, but twenty such islands, and keys without number, each of which contained more hidden treasure than 'Gar'ner's Island,' Oyster Pond, the Plumb and Fisher's, and all the coasts of the Sound put together; enriched as each and all of these places were thought to be, by the hidden ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper
... we call it," he said presently. Then he shook his head. The smile had passed out of his eyes. "No. It's a dandy notion. But—it's not true. They'd starve plumb to death. You see, Julyman, they're human folks—the ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... coach," said Cowan, "and a nice chap when you get to know him; no frills on him, you know. And he's plumb full of pluck. They say that once when he played here at half-back he got the ball on Robinson's forty yards and walked down the field and over the line for a touch-down with half the Robinson team hanging on to his legs, ...
— Behind the Line • Ralph Henry Barbour
... he'd be hailing us, and ask 'what brig's that?' But none of these tricks will answer with t'other, who misses the whipping off the end of a gasket, as soon as any first luff of us all. And so I'll just go about the business in earnest; get the carpenter up with his plumb-bob, and set every thing as straight up-and-down as the back of ...
— The Two Admirals • J. Fenimore Cooper
... that the water was dripping from it. Imagining that it must have been wet from the quantity of water shipped over all, the carpenter disengaged the rope-yarn from the rule, drew another from the junk lying on the deck, which the seamen were working up, and then carefully proceeded to plumb the well. He hauled it up, and, looking at it for some moments aghast, exclaimed, 'Seven feet water in the ...
— The Pirate and The Three Cutters • Frederick Marryat
... "because already the sun is setting, and before long it'll be getting plumb dark. Luckily enough we thought to fetch that lantern along with us, though, and a supply ...
— Jack Winters' Campmates • Mark Overton
... of Olympus' crest at the temple of Pythian Apollo consists of (measured by the plumb line) ten stades, and besides a hundred feet all but four. It was Xenagoras, the son of Eumelus, who discovered its height. King Apollo, hail to thee; be ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... and to cover a wide area. As the rotary motion of the arrows increases during the fall, the direct line of flight becomes more pronounced until at last they assume a vertical direction free from all wobbling, so that when they alight upon the target they are quite plumb. ...
— Aeroplanes and Dirigibles of War • Frederick A. Talbot
... drank his liquor and refilled the glass. "Most fat men," he imparted irrelevantly, "are plumb mindful that they're easy hit, an' consequent they're cheerful-hearted an' friendly. Likewise, they mind their own business, which is also why they've be'n let grow to onhuman proportions. But, not to seem oncivil to a stranger, an' by way of gettin' acquainted, I'll leak it out that it ain't no ...
— The Texan - A Story of the Cattle Country • James B. Hendryx
... village is composed of leaning shacks blown out of plumb by heavy winds. Along the beach on bamboo racks the nets are hanging out to dry. At night the little fleet puts out for Punta Gorda, where a ruined watch-tower—a protection against Moro pirates—stands half hidden among creeping vines. The nets are floated upon husks ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert
... which had seen better days. The big lumber-mill that had once kept it busy was burned down, and the business had slipped away to the prosperous neighbouring town of Machias. There were nice old houses with tall pillars in front of them, now falling into decay and slipping out of plumb. There were shops that had evidently been closed for years, with not even a sign "To Let" in the windows. Our dinner was cooked for us in a boarding-house, by a brisk young lady of about fifteen years, whose mother had gone to Machias ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke
... of gravity would give it, if uncontrolled. It is governed by the action of the spinnerets, which contract or expand their pores, or close them entirely, at the faller's pleasure. And so, with gentle moderation, she pays out this living plumb-line, of which my lantern clearly shows me the plumb, but not always the line. The great squab seems at such times to be sprawling in space, without the ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... closing my eyes, I contemplate these results of the convulsion of the soil in my mind's eye, when I hear the screaming of the eagles, which go wheeling through the bottomless abysses, whose inky shadows the eye dares hardly plumb, vertigo seizes me, and I open my eyes to reassure myself ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... flecked with the smoke of bursting shell, but the little visitor came slowly and inexorably onward. Then came three resounding crashes as the bombs dropped. One got the corner of a hangar and demolished it. Another burst into the open and did no damage, but the third fell plumb between two machines waiting to go up and left them ...
— Tam O' The Scoots • Edgar Wallace
... of holly in their bosoms and button holes, walked from the church to the Grove; and there partook, as they had been invited to do, of beef and pudding, and good home-brewed beer. The young Mortimers waited upon them at dinner, and before they left the Lodge, presented them each with a plumb cake; and Mrs. Mortimer gave them each an amusing little book to read to themselves and their parents, who had not like themselves possessed the advantages ...
— Christmas, A Happy Time - A Tale, Calculated for the Amusement and Instruction of Young Persons • Miss Mant
... from her eyes, which were puzzled, but diverted from pain. "I didn't savvy what you meant when you talked about what a woman's work rightly was. An' I'm so awful ignorant, you know so awful much. It scares me, plumb scares me, to think how much you know, more than Mr. Holliwell! Such books an' books an' books! An' writin' too. You see I'd be no help nor company fer you. I'd like to listen to you. I'd listen all day long, but I'd not be understandin'. No more ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt
... diatribe against Jesuitism in the Latter-Day Pamphlets,[20] one of the most unfeignedly coarse and virulent bits of invective in the language, points plumb in the same direction. It is grossly unjust, because it takes for granted that Loyola and all Jesuits were deliberately conscious of imposture and falsehood, knowingly embraced the cause of Beelzebub, and resolutely propagated it. It is one thing ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley
... heaved up the big stones and packed them in mortar; he had laid them true by the plumb-line; Blenkiron's brother, the stonemason, couldn't ...
— Mary Olivier: A Life • May Sinclair
... an honest employ from London, aboard of the Princess, Captain Plumb, commander, of which ship he was second mate. He left England November, 1719, and arrived at Guinea about February following and being at Anamaboe, taking in slaves for the West Indies, was taken in the said ship by Captain Howel Davis. In the beginning he was very averse to this sort ...
— Great Pirate Stories • Various
... job hadn't been finished 'fore night, dey kept right on at it by moonlight. One man wuked so hard tryin' to beat de others dat when he went to de spring for some water, he tuk one drink, raised his haid quick lak, and died right dar. He was plumb daid when dey picked ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - Volume II. Arkansas Narratives. Part I • Work Projects Administration
... the evening I had the chance to question Luke, and he declared that he had neither noticed nor touched it." We could only exchange, on this, one of our deeper mutual soundings, and it was Mrs. Grose who first brought up the plumb with ...
— The Turn of the Screw • Henry James
... the heavy lid, sliding it to one side. How deep was the black chasm beneath he could not even guess. Doubtless it led into a coal bunker, or it might open over a pit of great depth. There was no way to discover other than to plumb the abyss with his body. Above was ...
— The Mad King • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... monkey and the man, and the transition seemed to have been easy and natural. In a word, he looked like a monkey in the face, while no one could possibly have suspected that he was one. Above his mouth his face abruptly receded, so that the end of his nose was not far from plumb with his lips. In the middle of his forehead the hair seemed to grow down to the bridge of his nose. A stranger, who was not of a melancholy turn of mind, could hardly have refrained from laughing when looking at him for the first time. But Bobtail did not laugh, for Monkey was a friend, and a ...
— Little Bobtail - or The Wreck of the Penobscot. • Oliver Optic
... more, but only lay there mute and motionless; and from his look one might plumb the sorrows of his soul and know how shocked he was, and how grieved and heartstricken! Love's young dream was o'er! He had thought she loved him, but now he knew better. Their marriage had been a ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... carried aloft, in your teeth, if you please, and dragged far out on the giddiest of yards, and after being wormed and twisted about through all sorts of intricacies—turning abrupt corners at the abruptest of angles—is to be dropped, clear of all obstructions, in a straight plumb-line right down to the deck. In the course of this business, there is a multitude of sheeve-holes and blocks, through which you must pass it; often the rope is a very tight fit, so as to make it like threading a fine cambric needle with rather coarse thread. Indeed, it ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... earthquakes do to buildings is in most cases due to the fact that they sway their walls out of plumb, so that they are no longer in position to support the weight which they have to bear. The amount of this swaying is naturally very much greater than that which the earth itself experiences in the movement. A building of any height with its walls unsupported by neighbouring structures may find its ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... the Mason-bee is building, the antennae are constantly feeling, fumbling and exploring, superintending, as it were, the finishing touches given to the work. They are her instruments of precision; they represent the builder's compasses, square, level and plumb-line. ...
— The Mason-bees • J. Henri Fabre
... wall the ladder that led to one of these houses was 60 feet long, but it was not quite upright, and the tree was growing at some little distance from the bottom of the rock, and the distance by a plumb line from the floor of the verandah to the ground on the lower side of the tree was 94 feet. The floor of the house, which is made first, was 23 feet long and about 11 broad; a narrow verandah is left at each end, and the ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... necessarily appear very benign, notwithstanding the inclemency of the weather; for in such cases there will be frequent conjunctions of sirloins and ribs of beef; aspects of legs and shoulders of mutton, with refrenations of loins of veal, shining near the watery triplicity of plumb-porridge—together with trine and sextile of minced pies; collared brawn from the Ursus major, and sturgeon from Pisces—all for the honour of Christmas: and I think it is a much pleasanter sight than a Covent-Garden comedy, to see a dozen ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... astrolabe be suspended so that it shall hang plumb. Direct the index or diopter to the sun at noon, so that the same ray of light may shine through both holes in the two tablets or pinules on the diopter, and the diopter will point to the degree of the sun's meridian altitude indicated on the outer ...
— Voyages of Samuel de Champlain V3 • Samuel de Champlain
... useful broom; Yet should not ceaseless hunt about the room To catch each straggling pin to make a plumb: Too oft Economy's an iron vice, That squeezes even the little guts of mice, That peep with fearful eyes, ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... "I am the way." As such, he is so narrow that, as the prophet represents, it is as if a fire of destruction were on the one hand and a flood of wrath on the other. Ah, Brethren, the truth can never be made to bend. It is as the builder's line to the foundation; and as the plumb line to the column. ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline
... though, If he dare venture; hang him, plumb porredge, He wrastle? he rost eggs! Come, lets ...
— The Two Noble Kinsmen • William Shakespeare and John Fletcher [Apocrypha]
... loved her, she declares; his affection for her had been interested, though even in her wrath she admits that he really loved her husband; he cared less for her conversation, which she had fancied necessary to his existence, than for her "roast beef and plumb pudden," which he now devours too "dirtily for endurance." She was fully resolved to go, and yet she could not bear that her going should fail to torture the friend whom for eighteen years she had ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... vulgar mass Called "work" must sentence pass Things done, that took the eye and had the price.... But all, the world's coarse thumb And finger failed to plumb, So passed in making up the main account; All instincts immature, All purposes unsure, That weighed not as his work, yet ...
— Woodrow Wilson and the World War - A Chronicle of Our Own Times. • Charles Seymour
... the sacred name of Time are you meanin' to do with that dummy? For the good land's sake! Have you gone plumb crazy, or what? Put ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... power, but when he wishes to drive a tunnel in any given direction he is obliged to avail himself of levels, compasses, plumb-lines, and all the paraphernalia of the engineer. Yet, with nothing to direct it except instinct, the water-vole can, though working in darkness, drive its burrow in any direction and emerge from the ground exactly at the spot which it ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII, No. 355, October 16, 1886 • Various
... he went on, after a pause. "I ain't got it right. The fall knocked you plumb out. ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... man with the wagon. "I thought I knew these here woods pretty well, but I'm blamed if I know where we are now. Everything looks turned around; I'd swear now, that that was the west over there, yet there is the sun a-risin' as big as life. I'm plumb addled!" ...
— The Camp Fire Girls in the Maine Woods - Or, The Winnebagos Go Camping • Hildegard G. Frey
... said the young inventor as he re-entered the library a few minutes later, "when you warp the wing tips in making a spiral ascent it throws your tail wings out of plumb, and so—" ...
— Tom Swift and his Sky Racer - or, The Quickest Flight on Record • Victor Appleton
... had really some apprehension of treachery from thee; which made me so miserably evade; for else, I could as safely have sworn to the truth of this, as to that of the former: but she pressing me still for a categorical answer, I ventured plumb; and swore to it, [lover's oaths, Jack!] that they were really and truly Lady Betty Lawrance and my ...
— Clarissa, Volume 6 (of 9) - The History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... last privilege of danger that shams should vanish. Yet we plumb the depths of absurdity when we contest the right of any woman, even a young and unmarried one, to appreciate all that a brave man has done and is doing ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... greatest of all modern draughtsmen used. Ingres, then, with all his freedom, vivacity, and accuracy of control over the point he employed to draw with, still found it useful to have a straight line ruled on his paper as a student does, and may often even have resorted to the plumb-line. It enabled his eye to test the subtlest deviations in the other lines with which he was creating the balance, swing or stability of a figure. Rules of art are, like this straight line, dead and powerless in themselves: they help both creator and lover to ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... ineradicable longing For tender comradeship? It is because I cannot all at once, Through the half-lights and phantom-haunted mists That separate and enshroud us life from life, Discern the nearness or the strangeness of thy paths Nor plumb thy depths. I am like one that comes alone at night To a strange stream, and by an unknown ford Stands, and for a moment yearns and shrinks, Being ignorant of the water, though so quiet it is, So softly murmurous, So silvered ...
— Alcyone • Archibald Lampman
... know half he's give. But it's a heap, Lord knows! And then he's foolish—plumb foolish." He rested his arms on his legs, leaning forward. "How much d'you s'pose he give me for that land—from here to my house?" He pointed ...
— Uncle William - The Man Who Was Shif'less • Jennette Lee
... allus was. She hadn't shifted but very little. The brook had gulled out the bank a piece under one eend o' the plank, so's she was liable to tilt ye sideways if you wasn't careful. But I pooked three-four bricks under her, an' she was all plumb again.' ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling
... schoolboy, wretched, allegoric machinery; (2) at the transmogrification of the fanatic virago into a modern novel-pawing proselyte of the "Age of Reason,"—a Tom Paine in petticoats; (3) at the utter want of all rhythm in the verse, the monotony and dead plumb-down of the pauses, and the absence of all bone, muscle, and sinew ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... had known desolation, but it had seldom been desolation of spirit. It had never been desolation like this. He tried to plumb it, to its deepest meaning, but consciousness seemed to have no line long enough. He only knew that his world had ended. He saw himself as the thing that life had at last left him—a solitary and unsatisfied man, a man without an aim, ...
— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer
... them. Plumb dissatisfied with me, ain't you? Makes me feel awful bad." Jim was sailing into the full tide of his sarcasm when Keller touched him ...
— Mavericks • William MacLeod Raine
... Van Astrachan going; for she was one of your full-blooded women, who never in her life engaged to do a thing she didn't mean to do: and having promised in the marriage service to obey her husband, she obeyed him plumb, with the air of a person who is fulfilling the prophecies; though her chances in this way were very small, as Mr. Van Astrachan generally called her "ma," and obeyed all her orders with a stolid precision quite edifying to behold. He took her advice always, and was often heard naively to remark ...
— Pink and White Tyranny - A Society Novel • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... Ecole des Beaux Arts can build, the charge for repairs is not to be wholly ignored, and at least the Cathedral of Chartres, in spite of terribly hard usage, is as solid to-day as when it was built, and as plumb, without crack or crevice. Even the towering fragment at Beauvais, poorly built from the first, which has broken down oftener than most Gothic structures, and seems ready to crumble again whenever the wind blows over its windy plains, has managed to survive, after a fashion, six or seven ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... the lever-bar, and with all his strength jerked it toward him. A square in the floor opened as the trap was flapped back upon its hinges, and through the opening the haltered form shot straight downward to bring up with a great jerk, and after that to dangle like a plumb-bob on a string. Under the quick strain the gallows-arm creaked and whined; in the silence which followed the hangman was heard to exhale his breath in a vast puff of relief. His hand went up to his forehead to wipe beads of sweat which for all that the morning was ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... looking at the teamsters as of no particular account when they walked out, but when they wouldn't work, they became the most important part of the show, and after the show was over the managers who had told the striking teamsters to go plumb, found that they had gone plumb, and they had to rush all over Pittsburg and find them, and grant their demands, and get them ...
— Peck's Bad Boy at the Circus • George W. Peck
... ever have in England a new tradition of poetic comedy it is difficult at present to say, but we shall assuredly never have it until we realise that comedy is built upon everlasting foundations in the nature of things, that it is not a thing too light to capture, but too deep to plumb. Monsieur Rostand, in his description of the Battle of Wagram, does not shrink from bringing about the Duke's ears the frightful voices of actual battle, of men torn by crows, and suffocated with blood, but when the Duke, terrified ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... the midst of death we are in life! Nollie was a plumb little idiot. But it's the war—the war! Your father must get used to it; it's a rare chance for ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... be blockaded with a dank, dripping mass of shrubbery set plumb against the windows, keeping out light and air. There shall be room all round it for breezes to sweep, and sunshine to sweeten and dry and vivify; and I would warn all good souls who begin life by setting out two little evergreen-trees within a foot of each of their ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... Angela; here some hidden knowledge, there an unsuspected grace, and everywhere an all-embracing charity and love. Day by day he gazed deeper into the depths of her mind, and still there were more to plumb. For it was a storehouse of noble thoughts and high ambitions—ambitions, many of which could only find fulfilment in another world than this. And, the more he saw of her, the prouder he was to think that such a perfect creature should so dearly love himself; and with the greater ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... durned if she cares, and you're durned if you care. And all the time you feel so bad about it that you must go and do something wicked right away. And taking off your hat to me was your idea of just about the razzlingest, dazzlingest, plumb wickedest thing you ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... moment, he had dropped clean down, soft and plumb, into the water. Gudrun was swaying violently in her boat, the agitated water shook with transient lights, she realised that it was faintly moonlight, and that he was gone. So it was possible to be gone. A terrible sense of fatality robbed her of all feeling and thought. ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... "The Escurial!" says Brantome, "what of that? See how long it was of building? Good workmen like to be quick finished. With our king it was otherwise. Take Fontainebleau and Chambord. When they were projected, when once the plumb-line, and the compass, and the square, and the hammer were on the spot, then in a few years we saw the ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... were removed, and a heavy trap door, upon which the foot of the flagstaff rested, was its only support. A massive bolt alone held the trap in place. Will and the Professor were by the ice shaft, watching the plumb-line. At a signal, the Doctor struck the bolt a heavy blow with a sledge, the trap fell, and the beautiful mast shot like a flash of lightning down through the frosty atmosphere, entered the ice hole precisely in the center, and sank ...
— Doctor Jones' Picnic • S. E. Chapman
... force to fly, his will to see, His heart enlarged beyond its ribbed domain, Had come of many a grip in mastery, Which held conjoined the hostile rival twain, And of his bosom made him lord, to keep The starry roof of his unruffled frame Awake to earth, to heaven, and plumb the deep Below, above, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... 'Would you eat your dinner that day, Sir?' JOHNSON. 'Yes, Sir; and eat it as if he were eating it with me. Why, there's Baretti, who is to be tried for his life to-morrow, friends have risen up for him on every side; yet if he should be hanged, none of them will eat a slice of plumb-pudding the less. Sir, that sympathetic feeling goes a very little way in ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... each brick as if it were porcelain, balanced it carefully in his hand, measured with his eye just the amount of mortar which it needed, and dropped the block into its bed, without staining its edge, without varying from the plumb line, by a stroke of hand-craft as true as the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 497, July 11, 1885 • Various
... so simple as that. He was an Italian colored man, black bearded, and shaped like Caruso, only more so, if that is possible; and he sang, because he was a singing machine, but he couldn't have talked. I'll bet on that. He was too plumb afraid. ...
— IT and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... earth, only not a circle, but seemingly almost square with rounded corners. Round its path on the veldt there is a broad wash of dusty gold. A lot of us came out of the tents, and were spell-bound by the sight. Every evening the sun goes down plumb into the veldt out of a cloudless sky, and comes up just so in the morning. While he is gone it is bitterly cold now, always with hard frost, but in the middle of the day often very hot. I have never known such extremes ...
— In the Ranks of the C.I.V. • Erskine Childers
... brick walls, however, no deduction is made provided that they are still standing plumb, but they are always valued at what they cost to build. Hence in some states we may see public buildings and private houses, as well as those of kings, built of brick: in Athens, for example, the part of the wall which faces Mt. Hymettus and Pentelicus; at Patras, the cellae ...
— Ten Books on Architecture • Vitruvius
... long enough for any general good unless the licking is based on principle and the principle is thereby established as right! Now let me tell you, Governor North. You can't fool those Legion boys outside. They have come home with new conceptions of what is a square deal. They're plumb on to the old-fashioned tricks in cheap politics. They're not letting officeholders play checkers ...
— All-Wool Morrison • Holman Day
... time you learned. I'll talk to you plumb an' plain, Henry. I'll not let you seduce a girl on my land, do you hear? They can do that sort of thing in England, if they like ... it's nothin' to me what the English do ... but by God I'll not have a girl on my land ruined by you or ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... said Shoop as he mounted. "Now, if I was to tell that dog he was gettin' too old to ramble with me, he'd feel plumb sick and no account. But when I tell him he's got to do somethin'—like watchin' the house—he thinks it's a reg'lar job. He's gettin' old, but, just like folks, he wants to think he's some use. You can't tell me dogs don't know. Why, I've seen young folks ...
— Jim Waring of Sonora-Town - Tang of Life • Knibbs, Henry Herbert
... Lochleven trout in these streams,—at 6,000 feet you can do anything. We'll have a pack of hounds, too, and we can drive pig in the woods, and if we want big game there are the Mangwe flats at our feet. I tell you I'll make such a country-house as nobody ever dreamed of. A man will come plumb out of stark savagery into lawns and rose-gardens." Lawson flung himself into his chair again and ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... were employed in the same manner to make me clothes; but they had another contrivance for taking my measure. I kneeled down, and they raised a ladder from the ground to my neck; upon this ladder one of them mounted, and let fall a plumb-line from my collar to the floor, which just answered the length of my coat; but my waist and arms I measured myself. When my clothes were finished, which was done in my house (for the largest of theirs would not have been ...
— Gulliver's Travels - Into Several Remote Regions of the World • Jonathan Swift
... play something," a man they called Day interpreted. "Hen's loco on music. If you can sing and play both, Hen'll set and listen till plumb daylight and never ...
— Cow-Country • B. M. Bower
... said the Doctor, leaning over to knock the ashes from his pipe. "I'm plumb certain she cares for you, and just as certain that you're making a mistake by running away." He stood up and scowled fiercely at the moon. "Well, I must be off. I'll see you to-morrow. You're not going until afternoon, ...
— The Lilac Girl • Ralph Henry Barbour
... Her brother and uncles were but my pioneers: her father stormed as I directed him to storm: Mrs. Howe was acted by the springs I set at work; her daughter was moving for me, yet imagined herself plumb against me: and the dear creature herself had already run her stubborn neck into my gin, and knew not that she was caught, for I had not drawn my sprindges close about her—And just as all this was completed, wouldst thou believe, that I should be my own enemy, and her ...
— Clarissa, Volume 3 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... picks on a kid that's yeller. You've got to have one good fight to save a lot of others an' this is the day you're goin' to have it. After school you've got to smash Jimmy Marquess a wallop on his front teeth an' if you don't shake 'em plumb loose I'm goin' to take you back in the woods an' give you a revelation in lickin's that'll linger with you for years." Ham paused and then added ominously, "Now you can do just exactly as you like. I don't want to try to influence ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... can compass this vast dominion, and no intellect can plumb its soundings or prophesy of its upshot. Who could have foretold what has already happened on this continent, had he stood with the Pilgrim Fathers on Plymouth Rock, that memorable day of the landing? Looking back to that great epoch in American history, we have no ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... cushion for her about the size of a marrow pea; tho' to speak the truth, as so many nerves did terminate all in that one place,—'twas no bad conjecture;—and my father had certainly fallen with that great philosopher plumb into the centre of the mistake, had it not been for my uncle Toby, who rescued him out of it, by a story he told him of a Walloon officer at the battle of Landen, who had one part of his brain shot away by a musket-ball,—and another part ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... than the wild bergamot's (q.v.), the bee balm belies its name, for, however frequently bees may come about for nectar when it rises high, only long-tongued bumblebees could get enough to compensate for their trouble. Butterflies, which suck with their wings in motion plumb the depths. The ruby-throated hummingbird - to which the Brazilian salvia of our gardens has adapted itself - flashes about these whorls of Indian plumes just as frequently - of course transferring pollen on his needle-like bill as he darts from flower ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... main walls were built in brick, the columns were inserted as required, the vaults were thrown, and the whole building was left to settle down. Owing to the enormous amount of mortar used this settling must have been very considerable, and explains why hardly a plumb wall exists in Constantinople, and why so many vaults show a pronounced sinking in at the crown or have fallen in and have been rebuilt. After the walls had set the marble facings, mosaic, and colour were applied and could ...
— Byzantine Churches in Constantinople - Their History and Architecture • Alexander Van Millingen
... and ask 'what brig's that?' But none of these tricks will answer with t'other, who misses the whipping off the end of a gasket, as soon as any first luff of us all. And so I'll just go about the business in earnest; get the carpenter up with his plumb-bob, and set every thing as straight up-and-down as the back of ...
— The Two Admirals • J. Fenimore Cooper
... secretarie knowe, Lett him attend the markes that I shall showe: He is a youth almost two handfulls highe, Streight, round, and plumb, yett ...
— The Choise of Valentines - Or the Merie Ballad of Nash His Dildo • Thomas Nash
... was thinkin'—well, I tell you. Might's well out with it first as last. I d' know's I ort to say so, but this here district No. 34 is a poot' tol'able hard school to teach. Ya-uss. A poot-ty tol'able hard school to teach. Now, that's jist the plumb facts in the matter. We've had four try it this winter a'ready. One of 'em stuck it out four weeks—I jimminy! he had grit, that feller had. The balance of 'em didn't take so long to make up their minds. Well, now, if you're a mind to try it—I was goin' ...
— Back Home • Eugene Wood
... Thompson was the most popular engineer who could be found for this work. He did not bother himself much about details or practicabilities of location, but ran merrily along, sighting from the top of one divide to the top of another, and striking "plumb" every town site and big plantation within twenty or thirty miles of his route. In his own language he "just ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner
... And so, while she held Legree's dog, whom the sound inflamed to frenzy, I popped off the crackers and dropped my cigar into Vesuvius. I tell you he was worth four and eightpence, and the man was right when he said there wasn't his match in London. I doubt if there was his match anywhere for being plumb- full of red balls and green balls and blue balls and crimson stars and fizzlegigs and whole torrents of tiny crackers and chase-me- quicks, and when you about thought he was never going to stop he shot up ...
— Love, The Fiddler • Lloyd Osbourne
... tendencies; he must acquaint himself with the heretical leanings of a certain era, and the shadow cast upon the page by apocryphal tradition. In philosophy he is still worse off, because he must plumb the depths of metaphysical jargon and master the ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... dat one ever did see. At dat time Claude, he 'bout two year old and Clarence, he 'bout four er mebbe little less. Ella, she worked in da house cooking for Miss Fannie an' nussin' de chillun and she plumb crazy 'bout de chillun an' dey just as satisfied wid her as dey was wid dere mama and Ella thought more dem chillun dan she did anybody. She just crazy 'bout dem boys. Mars Luch, he gibe me job right 'way sort flunkying for him and hostling at de lot an' barn and ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - Volume II. Arkansas Narratives. Part I • Work Projects Administration
... yet," was Aleck Pop's comment. "I was finkin' dat rascal was plumb dead, suah. And Dan, too! Suah yo' didn't see ...
— The Rover Boys on the Great Lakes • Arthur M. Winfield
... the deflection of plumb lines from the vertical, by the action of mountains. The attraction of a projecting mass of known bulk and density, with one whose bulk alone is known, is thus determined, and hence the density of the latter ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... "They plumb e't all the bacon and prunes and sugar and dog-food," Elijah reported, "and gosh darn my buttons, if they didn't gnaw open the sacks and scatter the flour and beans and rice from Dan to Beersheba. I found empty sacks where they'd dragged them a ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... Mr. Snawdor, hysterically. "I can't stand it any longer. I'm a plumb failure and I ain't goin' to ever be anything else. If your maw had taken care of what I had, we wouldn't have been where we are at. Look at the way we live! Like pigs in a pen! We're nothing but pore white trash; ...
— Calvary Alley • Alice Hegan Rice
... lays it down; an' he never hedges the bluff for so much as a single chip. He insists that you can't put a bet on women; that you can bet on hosses or kyards or 'lections, but not on women—women bein' too plumb oncertain. As I reads along, I can't he'p feelin' that somehow this philosophic party must have knowed ...
— Faro Nell and Her Friends - Wolfville Stories • Alfred Henry Lewis
... door shut abruptly. Lena's too thin boots, out of plumb, suddenly slipped on a half-formed piece of ice. She made a desperate grab at the smooth surface of the window and then came ignominiously down—not wholly ignominiously, however, since her accident brought to her aid the ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... the plumb line figure of her neighbour appeared, ushered in by her husband, and received her with a somewhat embarrassed empressement, arising from the consciousness of goodwill disturbed by the fear of imputed meddlesomeness. She knew the inward justice of Miss Horn, however, and relied ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... resolution to submit to the State Legislatures an amendment to the Federal Constitution forbidding the disfranchisement of United States citizens on account of sex, which resulted in 16 yeas, 34 nays, 26 absent.[61] Of the absentees Senators Chace, Dawes, Plumb and Stanford announced that they would have voted "yea;" Jones of Arkansas and Butler that they would ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... my poor beautiful cousin was falling day by day deeper into an abyss of love from which she could in no way extricate herself. In short, level-headed Frances had got far out of plumb, and, though she struggled desperately, she could not right herself, nor could any one help her. I fully realized that the small amount of self-restraint and passivity she still retained would give way to disastrous activity when the time should come for ...
— The Touchstone of Fortune • Charles Major
... his hams beside an emergency 'chute opening on the deck of the Penguin's weather observatory. He was letting down a spliced beryllium plumb line, his gaze riveted on the slowly turning horizontal drum of a windlass which contained more than two hundred feet of gleaming ...
— The Sky Trap • Frank Belknap Long
... lecture on the law pertaining to the recovery of lost property, and closed the deal. Whereupon the wood-hauler unharnessed Pat, bestowed him smilingly upon Helen, and took himself off, evidently in quest of another horse, for he headed straight as a plumb-line for the city pound. ...
— Bred of the Desert - A Horse and a Romance • Marcus Horton
... not have dwell'd, But in one have been expell'd. Hapless mariners are they, Who beguil'd (as seamen say), Deeming him some rock or island, Footing sure, safe spot, and dry land, Anchor in his scaly rind; Soon the difference they find; Sudden plumb, he sinks beneath them; Does to ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... turn to the right from his house, going west. It's an unused bye-road and it runs plumb into my cabin. There's a frying pan there ... and some flour ... and bacon ... tell you what ... it's been broken into several times. I'll consider it worth while if you go and live there, and I get no rent from you for it nor the room upstairs ... you'll be alone, God knows—excepting ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... come up on the stoop and keep me company," continued Mrs. Clover; "I'm plumb tired of sitting round all alone. Moon'll be up before long; it's a purty sight, ...
— The Bandbox • Louis Joseph Vance
... out of here, Allen. If you think you can marry Morton Bassett's daughter with that kind of a scandal in your pocket, I tell you you're mad—you've plumb gone insane! Great God, boy, you don't know the meaning of the words you use. You handle that thing like a child with a loaded pistol. Don't you see what that would mean—to Marian, to Blackford, to Mrs. Bassett—to ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... that man's doin's he might ha' lit fire-crackers on my saddle. Then we went out jest's if a kiss was nothin', an' I wasn't three strides into my gait 'fore I felt the boss knoo his business, an' was trustin' me. So I studied to please him, an' he never took the whip from the dash—a whip drives me plumb distracted—an' the upshot was that—waal, I've come up the Back Pasture to-day, an' the coupe's tipped clear over twice, an' I've waited till 'twuz fixed each time. You kin judge for yourselves. I don't set up to be no better ...
— The Day's Work, Volume 1 • Rudyard Kipling
... howl. After you got under way they began to drift before the wind. We fought them all night, and if we'd let them go they'd been plumb into Colorado by this time. I don't want any more ...
— Ted Strong in Montana - With Lariat and Spur • Edward C. Taylor
... man. He seemed to have a sense of humour. I felt sure that he, at least, was plumb straight. 'Sure, doc,' I said, 'I'm sorry about the tree, and I guess the new bulbs will be on me. But perhaps you'd like to know what I was doing in your garden?' 'I think the facts do call for an ...
— The Secret Adversary • Agatha Christie
... place N. 80 W. 3 ms to a pt. on S. S. passed a Isd. Called Sheeco Islan wind from the N W Camped in a Prarie on the L. S., Capt Lewis & my Self Walked out 3 ms. found the Country roleing open & rich, with plenty of water, great qts of Deer I discovered a Plumb which grows on bushes the hight of Hasle, those plumbs are in great numbers, the bushes beare Verry full, about double the Sise of the wild plumb Called the Osage Plumb & am ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al
... very well for a man to make a plumb fool of himself and waste his life if he's a-mind to, but he ain't got any business to drag other folks along with him. If I hadn't a-been a fool among fools I might a-been sittin' beside my little girl this minute, and not ...
— Peggy Stewart at School • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... to school when I got her; she was plumb ignorant. But she's got all the airs of a fine lady now. Sometimes I go without sugar, but Bessie ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach
... Just hidin' out in the woods, and mostly from each other. It's a turrible thing." He looked down at himself with a wry grimace. "Not outta shame," he added. "We've seen naked bodies before. Just plumb scared, I guess." ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... sometimes bucked but never went over backwards, and he got on the now rearisen Ben Butler. To my discomfiture Ben started quietly beside us, while Sylvane remarked, "Why, there's nothing the matter with this horse; he's a plumb gentle horse." Then Ben fell slightly behind and I heard Sylvane again, "That's all right! Come along! Here, you! Go on, you! Hi, hi, fellows, help me out! he's lying on me!" Sure enough, he was; and when we dragged Sylvane ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... God knows we are not— (Notice I call on God!) we'd plumb this riddle Not in the world we see, but in ourselves. These brains of ours—these delicate spinal clusters— Have limits: why not learn them, learn their cravings? Which of the two minds, yours or mine, is sound? Yours, which scorned the ...
— The House of Dust - A Symphony • Conrad Aiken
... It seemed to plumb the depths of irony and mockery. She could not make a move as Gypsy Nan. It would only result in their turning upon her, of the discovery that she was not Gypsy Nan at all, of the almost certainty that it would cost her her own life without saving the Sparrow's. That way was closed to her from ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... is a term applied to surfaces that are parallel to that of still water, or perpendicular to the direction of the plumb-line; and when it is desired to ascertain the altitude of any specified locality, the level of the ocean's surface is always taken as the standard from which such ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls - Volume VIII, No 25: May 21, 1887 • Various
... of the identity between the dead man and his heirs was certainly much older than any form of Testament or phase of Testamentary jurisprudence. This indeed is the proper moment for suggesting a doubt which will press on us with greater force the further we plumb the depths of this subject,—whether wills would ever have come into being at all if it had not been for these remarkable ideas connected with universal succession. Testamentary law is the application of a principle ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... I'se plumb forget, wuz pore white trash an' he wuz meaner dan de meanest nigger. Anyhow I wuz too little ter do much wuck so I played a heap an' I had a ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States • Various
... Jed said happily. "Most plumb forgot fer a couple o' weeks now, what with us bein' so consarned busy. It wuz purely fine ...
— Sonny • Rick Raphael
... hear thet name? I got a plumb good memory fer names an' faces. 'Pears I heerd thet name in Cheyenne, last summer.... I got it. Cowpuncher named Panhandle rode down street draggin' a bolt of red calico thet unwound an' stampeded all the hosses. Might thet lad have happened ...
— Valley of Wild Horses • Zane Grey
... of his guns, en' heard his shots jest the very littlest instant before I heard the shots of the riders. An' when I turned, Wright an' Carter was down, en' Jengessen, who's tough like a steer, was pullin' the trigger of a wabblin' gun. But it was plain he was shot through, plumb center. An' sudden he fell with a crash, an' his gun clattered ...
— Riders of the Purple Sage • Zane Grey
... this up at the house." Johnny the unpoetical hesitated, perplexed. Philosophy was not in his line. "'Tisn't too bad," he said, suddenly aware of the beauty of the scene, and then the tradesman came to the surface. "I reckon MY job'll be a bit more on the plumb, though," he chuckled, and, delighted with his little joke, shouldered his axe and walked towards one of the marked trees, while Dan speculated aloud on the chances a man had of "getting off alive" if a tree ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... the driver in his slow way, "hit was like this. That there saloon were plumb full of sailor-men all exceptin' you an' me. I was a heap admirin' of the way you handled that big hombre what opened the meetin' and also his two pardners, who aimed to back his play. Hit was sure pretty work. The rest of the crowd sort o' ...
— The Winning of Barbara Worth • Harold B Wright
... stated. "Not one little wrangle, even. Of course I was expectin' it. I've watched 'em come around too many times not to know how they can cuss a man cold one minute, and then make him plumb ashamed of mankind in general, with beggin' and pleadin'. I just beat him to it the morning he woke up; I told him what he could have, and what he couldn't, and he took it calmly enough. He just set ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans
... manners nowadays," the sheriff commented. "Course, these here black ones never was much different from pigs. But take grizzlies. When I come West with my old people, a little shaver just able to set a pony, they was plumb sassy. I never did see such biggotty-actin' critters. Britch-loaders hadn't been in so durn long, and men didn't go huntin' grizzlies with the little old pea rifle just for fun. They was range bosses, and they ...
— Desert Conquest - or, Precious Waters • A. M. Chisholm
... the speaker's smiling face and twinkling eyes and laughed. "Well, yo're the foreman if you owns that badge," grinned Hopalong, cheerfully. "We don't need no guns, nohow, in this town, we don't. Plumb forgot we was toting them. But mebby you can tell us where lawyer Jeremiah T. Jones grazes ...
— Bar-20 Days • Clarence E. Mulford
... the mischief to get them doctors to let me come," chortled Tyke, evidently delighted by the warmth of the greeting. "They told me I was jest plumb crazy to think of it. But after Allen, here, left me last night I got so lonesome an' restless there was no holding me. Seemed like I'd go wild if I'd had to stay in that sick-bay while you fellers were sniffing the sea air. So I jest reared up on my hind legs, as you might say, ...
— Doubloons—and the Girl • John Maxwell Forbes
... upon me at breakfast. She was quiet and answered my questions in monosyllables. Presently she laid something at the side of my plate. It was my pipe. I looked at her, but the leads of my eyes could not plumb the depths ...
— Arms and the Woman • Harold MacGrath
... me. 'Nemo repente fuit turpissimus' one used to think; yet that boy has dropped from the society of such a noble fellow as Power, with his exquisite mind and manners, plumb into the abyss of intimacy with Harpour. There must be ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... slip of humanity had a spell for those who heard him speak. There was no subject, moral, intellectual, or philosophic too remote or too profound for him to measure it at a moment's notice, with the ever-ready, fallacious plumb-line of his brilliant vanity. He would talk for hours: be eloquent, convincing, almost noble; and afterwards accompany his audience ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... if they had left me where they left you last night, and you a plumb stranger, I'd rared and pitched a little myself," continued the man. ...
— Forty Minutes Late - 1909 • F. Hopkinson Smith
... their bellies and their kegs, hoping to last through, but they sure found it drier than cork legs, and generally long before they hit the Springs their tongues was hangin' out a foot. You see, for all their plumb nerve in comin' so far, the most of them didn't know sic 'em. They were plumb innocent in regard to savin' their water, and Injins, and such; and the long-haired buckskin fakes they picked up at Santa Fe for guides ...
— Arizona Nights • Stewart Edward White
... probably great, but, on the best building the Ecole des Beaux Arts can build, the charge for repairs is not to be wholly ignored, and at least the Cathedral of Chartres, in spite of terribly hard usage, is as solid to-day as when it was built, and as plumb, without crack or crevice. Even the towering fragment at Beauvais, poorly built from the first, which has broken down oftener than most Gothic structures, and seems ready to crumble again whenever the wind blows over its ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... have done it, but I was plumb mad. I pulled a San Augustine paper out of my hip-pocket, and showed him an item. It was a half a column about the marriage of Myra Allison and ...
— Options • O. Henry
... as if he were eating it with me. Why, there's Baretti, who is to be tried for his life to-morrow, friends have risen up for him on every side; yet if he should be hanged, none of them will eat a slice of plumb-pudding the less. Sir, that sympathetic feeling goes a very little way ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... later, on the failure of a conspiracy of revenge by the queen and the Orleans party, to grant full pardon for a deed "committed for the welfare of the kingdom." The cutting of the Rue Etienne Marcel has exposed the strong machicolated tower still bearing the arms of Burgundy (two planes and a plumb line), which Jean sans Peur built to fortify the Hotel de Bourgogne, as a defence and refuge against the Orleans faction and the people of Paris. The Orleans family had for arms a knotted stick, with the device "Je l'ennuis": the Burgundian ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... contrast, or a more extraordinary confrontation. On one side precision, foresight, geometry, prudence, a retreat assured, reserves prepared, an obstinate coolness, an imperturbable method, strategy profiting by the ground, tactics balancing battalions, carnage measured by a plumb-line, war regulated watch in hand, nothing left voluntarily to accident, old classic courage and absolute correctness. On the other side we have intuition, divination, military strangeness, superhuman instinct, a flashing glance; something that gazes like the eagle ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... his hand in weary protest, as he smiled apologetically at the court. "Darned if I didn't plumb forget one thing," he said. "We got to swear in these witnesses before they can chatter. Is there anybody got a Bible around 'em? Nope? Montana, I wished you'd lope over to that house and see what they got in the ...
— The Rangeland Avenger • Max Brand
... sech a mighty job at last. But law, if it hed been Peter Birt 'stid of me, that thar wild tur-r-key would hev laid on this hyar ledge plumb till the Jedgmint Day!" ...
— The Literary World Seventh Reader • Various
... perceived that the water was dripping from it. Imagining that it must have been wet from the quantity of water shipped over all, the carpenter disengaged the rope-yarn from the rule, drew another from the junk lying on the deck, which the seamen were working up, and then carefully proceeded to plumb the well. He hauled it up, and, looking at it for some moments aghast, exclaimed, 'Seven feet water ...
— The Pirate and The Three Cutters • Frederick Marryat
... the world's coarse thumb And finger failed to plumb, So passed in making up the main account; All instincts immature, All purposes unsure, That weighed not as his work, yet swelled ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... bills, which was useful seeing I had my young cousin's—you know, young Will Henderson, of Barnriff; he's a trapper now—education on my hands. Just as things were good and dollars were coming plenty the enterprise bust. I was out—plumb out. I hunched up for another kick. I had a dandy patent that was to do big things. I got together a syndicate to run it. I'd got a big car built to demonstrate my patent, and it represented all I had in the world. It was to be on the race-track. Say, ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... he did not want to stand up to his knees in grass. The captain of the Burtington team was the local publican, a hearty man who told us in the same breath that he was very glad to see us, and that he had played cricket for thirty years, boy and man. His name was Plumb, and I liked him very much; he played in both braces and a belt, because he told us belts were ticklish things and braces sometimes burst. I answered that it was always well to be on the safe side, and we had quite a confidential talk, until Lambert and Dennison came up and interrupted us. ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... way, then it's because our tongues were too busy otherwise," Hal answered. "Noll, I congratulate you from the bottom of my heart, for you're plumb wild to ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys as Sergeants - or, Handling Their First Real Commands • H. Irving Hancock
... consider what bearing the permanent existence of such a solid layer of savagery beneath the surface of society, and unaffected by the superficial changes of religion and culture, has upon the future of humanity. The dispassionate observer, whose studies have led him to plumb its depths, can hardly regard it otherwise than as a standing menace to civilisation. We seem to move on a thin crust which may at any moment be rent by the subterranean forces slumbering below. From time to time ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... sees its resistless might in the passive wrecks that follow the uproar. And this from a piece of marble, cold, immovable, lifeless! Surely there is that in man, which the senses cannot reach, nor the plumb of ...
— Lectures on Art • Washington Allston
... "Sure I know them. Plumb dissatisfied with me, ain't you? Makes me feel awful bad." Jim was sailing into the full tide of his sarcasm when Keller touched him ...
— Mavericks • William MacLeod Raine
... back an issue or two, we note a letter from Edwin Magnuson, a deluded denizen of Duluth, who says he's plumb disgusted because Astounding Stories receives far more bouquets than brickbats, when according to him the mag deserves to be panned plenty. Get in step, Edwin, you're ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... they have first to learn the facts as matters of knowledge, and then to study the art and science of teaching these facts to others. Instead of coming with their brick and mortar ready prepared, that they may be instructed in the use of the trowel and the plumb-line, they have to make their brick and mix their mortar after they enter the institution. This is undoubtedly a drawback and a misfortune. But it cannot be helped at present. All we can do is to define clearly the true idea of the Teachers' School, and then to work towards it as fast and ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart
... were taking, he already asked himself to whom he and his could have recourse, of whom he could ask shelter and subsistence for his old age; and having looked and searched thoroughly all around, he found himself actually destitute and RUINED. For, "to let a man's self fall plumb down, and from so great a height, it ought to be in the arms of a solid, vigorous, and fortunate friendship. They are very rare, if there be any." Speaking in such a manner, we perceive that La Boetie had been some time dead. Then he felt that he must after all rely on himself in his distress, ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... him. He was about as interesting as a pound of baking powder. What with fishing for his Bradstreet rating, and inventing lies to keep him from going out and seeing the town, and watching the horizon for predatory Alfalfa Delts and Chi Yis, we were plumb worn out. We were so skittish that, when the bell rang about eight o'clock, we let it ring four times more before we answered it; and when the ringer claimed to be an Eta Bita Pie from Muggledorfer who had come over ...
— At Good Old Siwash • George Fitch
... sergeants, drivers, the six-horse teams leaning on the firm traces, the big wheels clucking, the long Napoleons shining like gold, and the cannoneers—oh, God bless the lads!—planted on limbers and caissons, with arms tight folded and backs as plumb as the meridian. Now three of the pieces, half the battery, ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... now able to state my position definitely." Lanyard got up and grinned provokingly down at the group. "You can—all four of you—go plumb to hell!" ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... had mailed my other letter I was afraid that you would think me plumb bold about the little Bo-Peep, and was a heap sorrier than you can think. If you only knew the hardships these poor men endure. They go two together and sometimes it is months before they see another soul, and rarely ever a woman. I wouldn't act ...
— Letters of a Woman Homesteader • Elinore Pruitt Stewart
... built work, especially in tracery. A thing may be theoretically and intentionally at a certain angle, but actually at quite a different one. If level is important, take it yourself with spirit-level and plumb-line. ...
— Stained Glass Work - A text-book for students and workers in glass • C. W. Whall
... barrel rested on his own shoulder. Still, as his arms were extended to the utmost, the county Leitrim-man fancied he was performing much better than common. Jamie had correct notions of the perpendicular, from having used the plumb-bob so much, though even he made the trifling mistake of presenting arms with the lock outwards. As for the Yankees, they were all tolerably exact, in everything but time, and the line; bringing their pieces down, one after another, much as they were ...
— Wyandotte • James Fenimore Cooper
... all right," nodded Lieutenant Danvers, thoughtfully. "The risky part is in trying to run over that derelict's sunken hull in order to locate it and make your soundings. Now, you run a big chance of running plumb on to some other stump of a mast. The 'Hastings' may easily get an injury, from the stump of another mast, that may tear a real hole in our plates and send us all ...
— The Submarine Boys' Lightning Cruise - The Young Kings of the Deep • Victor G. Durham
... if you assume a vertical line drawn from A, the positions of B, C, D, and E can be observed in relation to it by noting the height and length of horizontal lines drawn from them to this vertical line. This vertical can be drawn by holding a plumb line at arm's length (closing one eye, of course) and bringing it to a position where it will cover the point A on your subject. The position of the other points on either side of this vertical line can then be observed. Or a knitting-needle can be held vertically before you at arm's length, giving ...
— The Practice and Science Of Drawing • Harold Speed
... feet and the crash, but it was the spirit of my team that thrilled me. Next to that the work of my new find absorbed me. I gloated over his easy, deceiving swing. I rose out of my seat when he threw that straight fast ball, swift as a bullet, true as a plumb line. And when those hard-hitting, sure bunting Bisons chopped in vain at the wonderful drop, I choked back a wild yell. For Rube meant the world ...
— The Redheaded Outfield and Other Baseball Stories • Zane Grey
... is any one thing in the world to preclude all kindness It is the need of it,—it is this sad, self-defeating dependence. Why is this, Eustace? Myself, were I stronger, I think I could tell you. But it is odd when it comes. So plumb I the deeps of depression, Daily in deeper, and find no support, no will, no purpose. All my old strengths are gone. And yet I shall have to do something. Ah, the key of our life, that passes all wards, opens all ...
— Amours de Voyage • Arthur Hugh Clough
... that is dropt in those furrows of fear, Will lift to the sun neither blade nor ear. Down it drops plumb, Where no spring times come; And here there needeth no harrowing gear: Wheat nor poppy nor any leaf Will cover this naked ground ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... durin' the day, an' she used to take 'er fancy-work an' set in the shady holler at the gum spring, whar yore pa went to water his hoss. Of course, she never keerd a cent fer him, but I reckon to pass the time away she got to makin' eyes at him. Anyway, it driv' 'im plumb crazy. I never knowed about it till the summer was mighty nigh over, an' I wouldn't 'a' diskivered it then if I hadn't 'a' noticed that he had made powerful little headway ploughin' in the field whar he claimed to be at work. She wasn't ...
— Westerfelt • Will N. Harben
... "Well enough—true by plumb an' rule, of course; but there's no spontaneeity yet." He turned to the girl. "Take my word, Miss Frazier, and maybe ye'll comprehend later, even after a pretty girl's christened a ship it does not follow that there's such a thing as a ship under ...
— McClure's Magazine, March, 1896, Vol. VI., No. 4. • Various
... Ay plumb forget about te tarn jung yack-ass Harlan. He coom in har dis noon time drunk like hal, wit t'ree bottle of hootch. He tal me he iss lonesome. He iss drunk now, Chief. He can't ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby
... Daly, then with a sudden change of humor, "and now I'll do a little talking. I've listened to you just as long as I'm going to. I have Radway's contract in that safe and I live up to it. I'll thank you to go plumb to hell!" ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... a more uncertain quantity. Sometimes he could get it at the expense of pitch, sometimes at the expense of pace. Some days he could get all three, and then he was an uncommonly bad man to face on anything but a plumb wicket. ...
— Mike • P. G. Wodehouse
... an' some say as when he wants t' git som wha' in a hurry he jest grabs aholt o' the feet o' tha' there thunder bird and she flies off with him and draps him anywha' he asks her to—Nope, I hain't seen none of these things myself but others say they has, an' believe me, I'm plumb cautious when travelin' these parts alone. Howsomever, he hain't yet skeered me 'nough to make my ha'r come out by the roots," said Pete with a yawn. "There, kick that back log over so's the fire can lick at t'other ...
— The Black Wolf Pack • Dan Beard
... sentiment offer nothing corresponding to the old conception of patron saints. If they did there would be a Patron Saint of Plumbers, and this would alone be a revolution, for it would force the individual craftsman to believe that there was once a perfect being who did actually plumb. ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... was very carefully overhauling. And while this was doing, four of the hands came along with a twenty-five-foot ladder, heavily weighted at the bottom with pigs of iron ballast, which Cunningham had caused to be constructed; and this they launched over the side, allowing it to hang plumb up and down, well secured, just abaft the main rigging. This was for Cunningham to descend by; and upon looking over the side I saw that it reached to within about four feet of the surface of the oyster bed. The getting of Cunningham into his suit, and the arranging of all the preliminaries, ...
— Turned Adrift • Harry Collingwood
... fact that the eye and hand need such guides shows how untrustworthy the senses are. A similar argument occurs in Luc. 86. Perpendiculum is a plumb line, norma a mason's square, the word being probably a corruption of the Greek [Greek: gnomon] (Curt. Grundz p. 169, ed. ...
— Academica • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... let me," said Tito, on the defensive. "I tolt him it was all right, but he just stood up there cursin' me. And then he got to throwin' things, almost had me here"—he put his hand against his ear—"like he was plumb crazy. But I guess he wasn't, for he wouldn't give me ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... every word of that yarn, even if a plumb stranger told it to me," declared Hazelton. "It has all the earmarks of truth. It's a complete story of just what Bert Dodge would do in one form or another, in any ...
— Dick Prescott's Third Year at West Point - Standing Firm for Flag and Honor • H. Irving Hancock
... find suitable anchorage, the captain hastened to avail himself of the resources for feeding his crew, which the country furnished in fowls, fish, and vegetables, whilst he himself, generally with the plumb-line in his hand, traversed the environs of the bay. He met only a few natives, with whom he had little intercourse. But one family becoming somewhat familiarized, established itself a hundred yards from the landing-place. Cook gave a concert ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... so's folks can see. An'—an', mind yer, toot that old horn good an' loud, so as everybody'll know we're a-comin'." As the automobile moved away he beamed with proud satisfaction. "Some swells we are—heh? Skinny an' Chuck an' the gang'll be plumb crazy when they see us. Some class, I'll tell ...
— Helen of the Old House • Harold Bell Wright
... come to Bale, you should take rooms on the river, or stand on the bridge at evening, and have a sunset of gold and crimson streaming down upon the wide and strong Rhine, where it rushes between the houses built plumb up to it, or you will not care much for the city. And yet it is pleasant on the high ground, where are some stately buildings, and where new gardens are laid out, and where the American consul on the Fourth of July flies our flag over the balcony of a little cottage smothered in vines and gay ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... that start for home and mother and supper right now; or are we going to stay here till she gets plumb dark?" asked Fritz, impatiently, moving his feet out of the way every time anyone approached too closely, as though possessed by a fear lest he be tempted to ...
— Boy Scouts on a Long Hike - Or, To the Rescue in the Black Water Swamps • Archibald Lee Fletcher
... is the first colored graduate of West Point. He went to the institution from Georgia, and graduated last June, fifty-fifth in a class of seventy-six. There is a preponderance of white blood in his veins, and in general appearance, except for color, he is a perfect image of Senator Plumb of Kansas. He reports that since he has struck the South he has been treated like a gentleman, which is something different from his experience in the North. He made the acquaintance of Senator Maxey at West Point— the Senator himself being a graduate ...
— Henry Ossian Flipper, The Colored Cadet at West Point • Henry Ossian Flipper
... not here now;' continued the corporal, 'and are we not'—(dropping his hat plumb upon the ground—and pausing, before he pronounced the word)—'gone! in a moment?' The descent of the hat was as if a heavy lump of clay had been kneaded into the crown of it.—Nothing could have expressed the sentiment ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... the cowboy, energetically. "But jest why he should reckon such a thing wuth shucks I can't tell ye. But he sent me out to bring you back to the ranch house like two-forty. I seen that he was plumb locoed, and some excited by the news, whatever it ...
— The Saddle Boys in the Grand Canyon - or The Hermit of the Cave • James Carson
... getting hurt and staying home for weeks. I think he welcomed sickness just so he could hide at home safe." There were tears of another sort in Miss Schmitt's eyes now. Kessler thought he detected a brightness in his wife's eyes. "No," Miss Schmitt said, "Bob was afraid of life. Just plumb scared." She refused to let the tears flow. "Oh, but I'm being a terrible hostess! I have so few visitors now. How about some ...
— The Last Straw • William J. Smith
... frame of mind, delegates found it easy to nominate Horatio Seymour for governor and Sanford E. Church for lieutenant-governor. The next day the Abolitionists, tired of their union with Hunkers and Barnburners, nominated William L. Chaplin and Joseph Plumb. ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... of England, and told me, with great satisfaction, that he believed it already began to take effect, for that a rigid dissenter who chanced to dine at his house on Christmas day, had been observed to eat very plentifully of his plumb-porridge. ...
— The Coverley Papers • Various
... to this office and informed me he was, plumb weary of the life of a bon vivant and was anxious to get to sea again. So I made him master of a new steamer we acquired recently, and he's gone out to Vladivostok with munitions for ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne
... the time that she made him think she was running away from me. It did look that way, when she stopped as soon as she met him; I can't swear right now whether Tejon was running away, or whether he was just simply running!" He laughed ruefully. "She's an awful little tease—just plumb full of the old Nick, even if she does look as innocent and as meek as their pictures of the Virgin Mary. She had us both guessing, let me tell you! He was pretty blamed insulting, though, and I'd have ...
— The Gringos • B. M. Bower
... Curly," he said kindly. Then he laid his rifle on the table and pointed at it. "The magazine's loaded plumb up. Guess no man has a right to give up his life without a kick. That'll help you if they come along—which they won't. Maybe Buck'll be along directly. Don't shoot him down. Anyway he's got Caesar with him—so you'll know. I'm going down to ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... to be carried aloft, in your teeth, if you please, and dragged far out on the giddiest of yards, and after being wormed and twisted about through all sorts of intricacies—turning abrupt corners at the abruptest of angles—is to be dropped, clear of all obstructions, in a straight plumb-line right down to the deck. In the course of this business, there is a multitude of sheeve-holes and blocks, through which you must pass it; often the rope is a very tight fit, so as to make it like threading a fine cambric needle with ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... mattock and death's head, but with spirit-level and measuring-cord. They were levelling a stretch of newly-turned and smoothed ground, and they pointed with pride to the portion of the work already accomplished, serried rows of spick-and-span headstones, all "plumb," as they explained, and freshly scraped—not a sign of caressing moss or a tendril of vine to be seen. A neat job, if there ever was one. We should have seen the yard before they had taken it in hand! There wasn't a stone that was straight, and the ...
— October Vagabonds • Richard Le Gallienne
... get out uh town," he urged, when he had found him. "It's a kinda small burg, and at the rate the Pilgrim is swelling up over what he done, there won't be room for nobody but him in another hour. He's making me plumb nervous and afraid to be around ...
— The Long Shadow • B. M. Bower
... killed Nathan B. Robinson at the Reidhead place and shot Emer Plumb at Walnut Springs, during a period of general Indian unrest. Soon thereafter, President Smith advised the settlers that they had better look for other locations, as the ground ...
— Mormon Settlement in Arizona • James H. McClintock
... me this, general, ter take ter you, an' she would hev it, though I told her she'd no business ter be botherin' yer with sich plumb foolishness." ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... the greater the slave; and so it was that, falling plumb down from that skyey exaltation, human again with the weakness that follows divine moments, Antony returned from the morning ...
— The Worshipper of the Image • Richard Le Gallienne
... hardwood is fixed vertically in the ground; it is carefully adjusted with the aid of plumb lines, and the possibility of its sinking deeper into the earth is prevented by passing its lower end through a hole in a board laid horizontally on the ground, its surface flush with the surface of the ground which is carefully smoothed. The pole is provided with a shoulder which ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... longing For tender comradeship? It is because I cannot all at once, Through the half-lights and phantom-haunted mists That separate and enshroud us life from life, Discern the nearness or the strangeness of thy paths Nor plumb thy depths. I am like one that comes alone at night To a strange stream, and by an unknown ford Stands, and for a moment yearns and shrinks, Being ignorant of the water, though so quiet it is, So softly murmurous, So ...
— Alcyone • Archibald Lampman
... ye, Toby," said Bud, as he wrenched a huge mouthful from one of the "hanks" to test the quality. "But I'll tell ye what's a fact. When I come home tonight, after a meetin' of that there Committee of Safety I was tellin' you about, I found that I had plumb disremembered to fetch along the bacon, meal, an' taters that my wife done told me to bring, an' so I thought I would jest run over an' see if I couldn't borry some of you to last ...
— True To His Colors • Harry Castlemon
... by the garrison, and scouts were sent up the Hockhocking, in order to ascertain the strength of the foe, and the probable point of attack. In the month of October, and on one of the balmiest days of our Indian summer, two men could have been seen emerging out of the thick plumb and hazel bushes skirting the prairie, and stealthily climbing the eastern declivity of that most remarkable promontory, now known as Mount Pleasant, whose western summit gives a commanding view to the eye of what is doing on the prairie. This eminence ...
— Heroes and Hunters of the West • Anonymous
... your Christmas box, Sweet plumb cakes and money, Delicate Holland smocks, Kisses ...
— A Righte Merrie Christmasse - The Story of Christ-Tide • John Ashton
... a half Oily Jones was on the floor an' Husky on top askin' somebody kindly to pass him a butcher knife. What's he do but plumb hack off all of Oily Jones' long hair. 'Now howl, damn you, howl,' ...
— The Turtles of Tasman • Jack London
... them white and the other of a rusty red. The air was full of flying metal, and the road, as we were told afterwards by an observer, was all churned up by it. The metal base of one of the shells was found plumb in the middle of the road just where our motor had been. There is no use telling me Austrian gunners can't shoot. ...
— A Visit to Three Fronts • Arthur Conan Doyle
... lose us in it. While we are seeing them, you can bet they are seeing us! There hasn't been a yard for a mile back, where the hoof tracks weren't bloody. They'll lose a horse if they keep on to-day: then, they'll be without a packer; but if they are plumb up against it, why don't they face round and fight? They are three to our two? They could hide behind any of these sand rolls and pot us crossing the sinks; but if they are not at the end of their tether, why don't they hustle and get out of sight? If they aren't played out, ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... Fort McMurray, Jiarobia said to me: "Dat man is the biggest awful liar on de river. You should hear him talk. 'One day,' he said, 'dere was a big stone floating up de muddy river and on it was tree men, and one was blind and one was plumb naked and one had no arms nor legs, and de blind man he looks down on bottom of river an see a gold watch, an de cripple he reach out and get it, and de naked man he put it in his pocket.' Now any man talk dat way he one most awful liar, it is not possible, any ...
— The Arctic Prairies • Ernest Thompson Seton
... best, of course," he said shortly, "but if you don't work today, Gilbert, you're plumb out of it. I can't keep your place open for you forever, you know. What do you say? Want ...
— Left Guard Gilbert • Ralph Henry Barbour
... but simply judicious and careful piling.[107] In performing it, great attention has been paid to having the vertical surfaces as nearly as possible vertical; but this end could be reached without the use of the plumb-line, and with the aid of mere ordinary eyesight, for the rooms are so small, and the partitions so thin, that anything not "true" could, and can yet be, "shoved" into position by a mere steady, slow push; carefully watched on the opposite side. The same applies to the angles, although ...
— Historical Introduction to Studies Among the Sedentary Indians of New Mexico; Report on the Ruins of the Pueblo of Pecos • Adolphus Bandelier
... the tempest, and standing on end upon the hero's cranium, with its mighty mane of blue wool bristling out in the spray and breeze. Position Fourth: at six in the afternoon, with the Corsican coast in view; the unfortunate chechia hangs over the ship's side, and lamentably stares down as though to plumb the depths of ocean. Finally and lastly, the Fifth Position: at the back of a narrow state-room, in a box-bed so small it seemed one drawer in a nest of them, something shapeless rolled on the pillow with moans of desolation. This was the fez—the fez so defiant at the ...
— Tartarin of Tarascon • Alphonse Daudet
... what in the sacred name of Time are you meanin' to do with that dummy? For the good land's sake! Have you gone plumb crazy, or ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... to be as hard and tough as leather, to be able to go for days without food or drink, to know the country well, to sleep when he does sleep with his ears open, to be up to every red skin trick, to be able to shoot straight enough to hit a man plumb centre at three hundred yards at least, and to hit a dollar at twenty yards sartin with his six-shooter. If you feel as you have got all them qualifications you can start off as soon as you like, and the chances aren't more'n twenty to ...
— In The Heart Of The Rockies • G. A. Henty
... from the direction B,—theoretically a straight, horizontal line, though it curves over the knoll. You noticed how, coming down the slope ahead of you, I held my end of the chain up from the ground, to make it horizontal, and then with my plumb-line found the corresponding point in the ground, to start fresh from. That was to get the measurement of a horizontal line; for if you measure all the ups and downs of hills and hollows, you'll find your surveying will come out ...
— The Young Surveyor; - or Jack on the Prairies • J. T. Trowbridge
... Here I is done drapped plumb off'n my subject; but a old man's mind will jes' run waa'ry at times. Me and Joe, Alex's son, went to see de officer 'bout gitting Joe's pa buried. He 'lowed dat Alex's body was riddled wid bullets; so we took him ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves • Works Projects Administration
... do anything. We'll have a pack of hounds, too, and we can drive pig in the woods, and if we want big game there are the Mangwe flats at our feet. I tell you I'll make such a country-house as nobody ever dreamed of. A man will come plumb out of stark savagery into lawns and rose-gardens." Lawson flung himself into his chair again and smiled dreamily at ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... you can't talk to him. He's a convicted man. Here? How do you know he's here? No—I wouldn't let you talk to him if he was. Who are you, anyway? What's that—you threaten him—you threaten me? You'll get us both, will you? Well, I want to tell you, you can go plumb—the deuce! The fellow's cut ...
— The Ear in the Wall • Arthur B. Reeve
... spacious and well-situated—on the side of the promenade nearest to the bath. Diphilus had placed the columns out of the perpendicular, and not opposite each other. These, of course, he shall take down; he will learn some day to use the plumb-line and measure. On the whole, I hope Diphilus's work will be completed in a few months: for Caesius, who was with me at the time, keeps a ...
— The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 - The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... navigators, it is impossible to sound great depths. Scientific men have, therefore, taxed their brains to invent instruments for sounding the deep sea—for touching the bottom in what sailors call "blue water." Some have tried it with a silk thread as a plumb-line, some with spun-yarn threads, and various other materials and contrivances. It has even been tried by exploding petards and ringing bells in the deep sea, when it was supposed that an echo or reverberation might be heard, and, from the known rate at which sound travels ...
— The Ocean and its Wonders • R.M. Ballantyne
... It was always your great fault—trying to plumb shallows and to take high dives into water half ...
— The Woman With The Fan • Robert Hichens
... Charlie on the third day, as he thawed out a gourd full of water that had frozen overnight, "that we could load up the wagons with green stuff when we go through here. That last village we came through was plumb ...
— The Rogue Elephant - The Boys' Big Game Series • Elliott Whitney
... beside a salt-lick. Jim got into their camp while I was lying shivering in the cane, and blessed if he didn't snake back four of our hosses and our three best Deckards. Tha's craft for ye. By sunrise we was riding south on the Warriors' Path but the hosses was plumb tired, and afore midday them pizonous Shawnees had cotched up with us. I can tell ye, neighbours, the hair riz on my head, for I expected nothing better than a bloody sculp and six feet of earth.... But them redskins didn't hurt us. And why, says ye? 'Cos they was scared of Jim. ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... like a marble hill. And he sat among the pillars of the hall, upon his throne of beaten gold, and around him stood the speaking statues which Daidalos had made by his skill. For Daidalos was the most cunning of all Athenians, and he first invented the plumb-line, and the auger, and glue, and many a tool with which wood is wrought. And he first set up masts in ships, and yards, and his son made sails for them: but Perdix his nephew excelled him; for he first invented ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... in the right direction for rain," the Oregonian would say. "Keep right on to Yamhill and you'll soon be damp enough. It rains there more than twelve months in the year; at least, no saying but it will. I've just come from there, plumb drownded out, and I told my wife to jump into the wagon and we should start out and see if we couldn't find a dry day somewhere. Last fall the hay was out and the wood was out, and the cabin leaked, and I made up my mind to ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir
... plain so far as the anterior (front) attachments of parts to the thyroid cartilage are concerned. It will be understood that the inner anterior surface is meant, and that by "middle line" is intended the middle line of the body, the imaginary vertical diameter passing like a plumb-line from the middle plane of the head, let us suppose, downward just in ...
— Voice Production in Singing and Speaking - Based on Scientific Principles (Fourth Edition, Revised and Enlarged) • Wesley Mills
... slicing, and charging the pots. The upper pot is open at the top, but the lower one has a cover, with hinged doors; and from the top of the cover a funnel is carried to a set of condensers. At a convenient distance from the two pots is placed a steam or hydraulic crane, so arranged that it can plumb each pot, and also the large moulds which are placed at either side of the lower pot. The mode ...
— Scientific American Suppl. No. 299 • Various
... weight abandoned to itself and falling from a certain height, should follow the vertical if the Earth were motionless. Experiment, frequently repeated, shows a slight deviation to the East, of the plumb-line that marks the vertical. We more especially observed this at the Pantheon ...
— Astronomy for Amateurs • Camille Flammarion
... alarming theory, particularly if it be true, as it is said to be, that since 1880 the towers have perceptibly come out of plumb. ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... your mouth like sugar. An' I'll be darned if the changeablest one ain't the kind to hold a feller longest. But it's h—l. I was married onct. Not any more for mine! A pal I had used to say thet whiskey riled him, thet rattlesnake pisen het up his blood some, but it took a woman to make him plumb bad. D—n if it ain't so. When there's a woman around there's ...
— The Heritage of the Desert • Zane Grey
... dowered with the grandeur and repose of mountains, together with the finely chiseled carving and modeling of man's temples and palaces, and often, to a considerable extent, with their symmetry. Some, closely observed, look like ruins; but even these stand plumb and true, and show architectural forms loaded with lines strictly regular and decorative, and all are arrayed in colors that storms and time seem only to brighten. They are not placed in regular rows in line with the river, but "a' through ither," as the Scotch say, in lavish, exuberant crowds, as ...
— The Grand Canon of the Colorado • John Muir
... bloom on them, and were very tempting to the eye. George loved plumbs above all other fruit, and he walked very slowly from the parlour with his eyes fixed on the basket. The longer he looked, the more he wished to taste them. One plumb, he thought, would not be missed; and as he put his hand in to take that one, two others lay close under his fingers. It was as easy to take three as one, and the three plumbs were taken and put into his pocket. When he reached ...
— The Bad Family and Other Stories • Mrs. Fenwick
... moral tome, an' no prevarication. It was plumb drippin' with moral from start to finish. You see Eve she set the ball a-rollin' when she swiped them apples. That was where she done dead wrong, and that was the 'Sin' as mentioned in the name of the book, an' old W. P. ...
— Kilo - Being the Love Story of Eliph' Hewlitt Book Agent • Ellis Parker Butler
... some time he continued: "The door jamb is built in vertically; that is sure. A string, or piece of thread will make a plumb-bob; here it is: now let us see; according to the plumb line the boat is at an angle of 33 degrees, as nearly as our imperfect device indicates. There, now this line A shows the top of the boat and ...
— The Boy Volunteers with the Submarine Fleet • Kenneth Ward
... sky an' sunshine, an' the temper o' the breeze. Here's the weather I would fashion could I run things as I please— Beauty dancin' all around me, music ringin' everywhere, Like a weddin' celebration. Why, I've plumb fergot my care An' the tasks I should be doin' fer the rainy days to be, While I'm huggin' the delusion that God made this day ...
— All That Matters • Edgar A. Guest
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