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More "Tinker" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... you see—it's a tract of unenclosed land. It's dangerous to cross, except by the paths—it's honeycombed all over with disused lead-mines—some of the old shafts are a tremendous depth. All the same, you see, there's some tinker chap, or some gipsies, camped out down there and got a fire. That old ruin, up on the crag there, is called Ellersdeane Tower—one of Lord Ellersdeane's ancestors built it for an observatory—this path'll lead us ...
— The Chestermarke Instinct • J. S. Fletcher
... up an odd sixpence, or even less, wherever he could, till one day he fell in with Mick, who offered him his food and the chance of more by degrees, as he wanted a sharp lad to help him in his various trades—of pedlar, tinker, basket-maker, wicker-chair mender, etc., not to speak of poultry-stealing, orchard-robbing, and even child-thieving when he got a chance that seemed likely to ...
— "Us" - An Old Fashioned Story • Mary Louisa S. Molesworth
... cobbler it should be my pride The best of all cobblers to be; If I was a tinker, no tinker beside Should mend an old ...
— Childhood's Favorites and Fairy Stories - The Young Folks Treasury, Volume 1 • Various
... Henry Ticket Harvey Tiffman Andrew Tillen Jacob Tillen Peter Tillender Thomas Tillinghast David Tilmouse John Tilson Nicholas Tilson Grale Timcent George Timford Jeremiah Timrer Alexander Tindell James Tinker William Tinley Joseph Tinleys Anthony Tioffe Samuel Tippen Jean Tirve Stephen Tissina Michael Titcomb Moses Titcomb James Tobin Thomas Tobin (2) John Todd William Todd Thomas Tolley Francis Tollings Henry Tollmot Thomas Tomay James ...
— American Prisoners of the Revolution • Danske Dandridge
... coach with Commissioner Middleton, Captain Tinker, and Mr. Huchinson, and out towards Chatham, and dined at Dartford, where we staid an hour or two, it being a cold day; and so on, and got to Chatham just at night, with very good discourse by the way, but mostly of matters of religion, wherein ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys
... it. But all the other things which we have laid out you may bring to me today or tomorrow." And he gave his name and address. Then he went back to the table to finish his beer. Only one of his former companions was sitting there, a master-tinker. ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... comfortable in the seats and lounges, as they were very low, requiring an oriental squat at which I am not adept. I compromised by stretching out along a hard couch raised some six inches above the floor. There were no gadgets to tinker with, the place was to me barren of necessary appurtenances ... ...
— Valley of the Croen • Lee Tarbell
... a master of a tavern he married the daughter of a tinker, by whom he had three children. This marriage, according to the republican regulations, had only been celebrated by the municipality at Ajaccio; Fesch, therefore, upon again entering the bosom of the Church, left his municipal wife and children to shift for themselves, considering himself still, ...
— Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, Complete - Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London • Lewis Goldsmith
... drowsy sort of place Rotherwood was! The wide village street seemed empty, with the exception of a black collie lying asleep in the middle of the road, and a patient donkey belonging to a travelling tinker. The clean, sleek country sparrows were enjoying a dust bath, and a long-legged chicken—evidently a straggler from the brood—was pecking fitfully at a cabbage stalk, unmindful of the alarmed clucking ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... gambler. "I don't even know what the fight was about, and I don't care a tinker's whoop either. I got you here to give you a chance to put Van Buren out of commission and ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... snapped Ralph impatiently. "Say, you people, you'd better get out of the car, while I tinker this up." ...
— The Border Boys Across the Frontier • Fremont B. Deering
... religious writer in the English language, was born at Elstow, about a mile from Bedford, in the year 1628. He may be said to have been born a tinker. The tinkers then formed an hereditary caste, which was held in no high estimation. They were generally vagrants and pilferers, and were often confounded with the gipsies, whom in truth they nearly ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 3. (of 4) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... In their stead came a crop of office holders who, striving for personal popularity, catering to the meddler and busybody—a class who had no business of their own, but ever ready to attend to that of others. From a willing-to-be governed and peaceful city, discontent and confusion came. Every tinker, tailor or candle stick maker, every busybody in the city took it upon themselves, although without training, ability or experience, to advise how the ...
— Watch Yourself Go By • Al. G. Field
... so scared!" said Gribble, kindly. "It's only a broken bone or so." As this consoling assurance seemed not to lessen Jane's alarm, he went on cheerfully to say, "There isn't one in my body hasn't been splintered by these broncos! Tinker 'em up and they're better than new. Here's doc coming lickety-switch! He'll tell you ...
— A Prairie Infanta • Eva Wilder Brodhead
... recommended Miss Kingston professionally to play queens. Now in the modern drama there were no queens for her to play; and as to the older literature of our stage: did it not provoke the veteran actress in Sir Arthur Pinero's Trelawny of the Wells to declare that, as parts, queens are not worth a tinker's oath? Miss Kingston's comment on my suggestion, though more elegantly worded, was to the same effect; and it ended in my having to make good my advice by writing Great Catherine. History provided no other queen capable of standing up to our ...
— Great Catherine • George Bernard Shaw
... young lady's reticule from her arm in Broadway and got clear off with it; but upon examining my prize, I found it contained nothing but a handkerchief and some letters. The wipe I kept for my own use; as for the letters, here they are—they are not worth a tinker's d——n, for they are all ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... as Ludman's dog, who leaned against the wall to bark. As lazy as the tinker, who laid ...
— 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue • Captain Grose et al.
... beginners, whose plays, without reshaping in collaboration, might never win their way to the boards. But I have not the space for it all, and I must content myself with that portion of it in which Mr. Yeats confesses that belief of his in the rapprochement of scholar and tinker that one notes so often in Irish life. Speaking of Lady Gregory's rewriting of "Where there is Nothing" into "The Unicorn from the ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... characteristics and aptitudes of his own, appropriate to a canine of high intelligence. As it is, there are false memories of aptitudes Homer never had nor could have. Physical limitations alone make some of them impossible. How could a dog tinker with machinery, for example? Yet I 'remember' working on machines of my own design. Homer's mind, in other words, remembers as first-person data experiences ...
— The Short Life • Francis Donovan
... days and nights to the study of Bunyan and M'Cheyne. "Bunyan by all means," said I to myself, "but who is M'Cheyne that one should be mindful of him and put him for importance alongside of the immortal tinker?" ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... Donovan. Who's your sarvant now?' says the chap, docking up his chin as impident as a tinker's dog. I felt my fingers itching to give the fellow a polthogue[3] in the ear; but I thought I might as well keep myself paceable in a strange place—so I only gave him a contemptible look, and turned my back ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... them make up the volume. They are all examples of the same gentle and painstaking craft that their writers have before now exhibited elsewhere. Here are no sensational happenings; the drama of the tales is wholly emotional. My own favourites are the first, called "The Little Tinker," a half-ironical study of the temptation of a tramp mother to surrender her child to the blessings of civilisation; and how, by the intervention of a terrible old woman, the queen of the tribe, this momentary weakness was overcome. ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 152, Feb. 7, 1917 • Various
... The sun breaks o'er Calvano; He strikes the great gloom 230 And flutters it o'er the mount's summit In airy gold fume. All is over. Look out, see the gipsy, Our tinker and smith, Has arrived, set up bellows and forge, And down-squatted forthwith To his hammering, under the wall there; One eye keeps aloof The urchins that itch to be putting His jews'-harps to proof, 240 While the other, thro' locks of curled wire, Is ...
— Dramatic Romances • Robert Browning
... and a belle, a goat and a carriage, They all set off to the tinker's marriage. Two three-cornered hats, and one with a feather, They looked very fine in the sweet summer weather. But the carriage turned over, the poor goat shied, The little belle laughed, the silly beaux cried, And the tinker fumed, "Oh, why do they tarry? And why ...
— Very Short Stories and Verses For Children • Mrs. W. K. Clifford
... were filled with such men, who murdered every prisoner that they took, and they took part, as their politics inclined them, with either side. For a long time Ferguson hunted, or was hunted by, a man of his own order and nearly as notorious on the other side, namely, "Tinker Dave Beattie." On the evening of the 7th, we encamped in the vicinity of Livingston. Leaving early next morning, by midday we reached the Cumberland river at the ford near the small village of Selina. Here Colonel Morgan received positive ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke
... undone, child, I should not think the bag of gold, and another into the bargain, too high a price to pay for it. What is the use of a house filled with fine furniture when the heart is so full of sorrow? At home we all eat together out of a cracked clay dish across which a tinker had drawn a wire, with rude wooden spoons made by my father, yet how we all relished it!—what more ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... the store was beginning. Steam was up in the engine, and the coffee-mills were grinding merrily. Mr. Gifford and all his clerks were busied with other matters, and Jack was left to tinker away at the Alligator press. "She's ready to run. I'll start ...
— Crowded Out o' Crofield - or, The Boy who made his Way • William O. Stoddard
... was observed at Zacatecas which recalled far-away Hong Kong, China. This was the prosecution of various trades in the open air. Thus the shoemaker was at work outside of his dwelling; the tailor, the barber, and the tinker adopted the same practice, quite possible even in the month of March in a land of such intense brightness and sunshine. We wandered hither and thither, charmed by the novelty and strangeness of everything; not an object to remind one of home, ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... men of science! The average man doesn't give a tinker's damn for progress or knowledge, not really. He wants only that he and his shall be ascendant at the center of things, the inevitable, the only possible goal of the non-science mind. Surely the history of ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... surprise, one that afforded both MacRae and me considerable food for thought; Horner, the wagon-boss, a man I knew well, frankly declared that no one at Fort Walsh had heard that we were accused of robbery and murder. For that matter, he said, he didn't care a tinker's dam if we were; he had grub and bedding and we were welcome ...
— Raw Gold - A Novel • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... several years subsequent to this period, was not only well received by his country folk of Sutherland and Ross, but was said by competent judges to be really a not inadequate rendering of the meaning and spirit of the noble old tinker of Elstow. I, of course, could be no authority respecting the merits of a translation, the language of which I did not understand; but living much amid the literature of a time when almost every volume, whether the Virgil of a Dryden, or the Meditations of a Hervey, was ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... temperament, in his richness of representation and ingenuity of analogy, and in his forcible quaintness of style, as completely as he did in social status and in personal surroundings. In complete contrast to the romantic productions of the self-educated tinker of Bedford, the works of Walton and Evelyn were at any rate influenced by, though they can hardly be said to have been moulded upon, the style of the preceding age of old English prose writers ending with Milton. The influence of ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... lord and boor, Hark to the blast of War! Tinker and tailor and millionaire, Actor in triumph and priest in prayer, Comrades now in the hell out there, Sweep to the ...
— Rhymes of a Red Cross Man • Robert W. Service
... "She doesn't care a tinker's dam for me," said Farwell bluntly. "That's not saying what I think of her. I'm no ladies' man—don't pretend to be. Let that go. I suppose I'll be blamed for young McCrae's arrest. Well, I didn't know a thing about it. I've tried to give the family ...
— Desert Conquest - or, Precious Waters • A. M. Chisholm
... umbrella-mender, fagoted on the back like the man in the moon of the nursery rhyme-book. He is followed at a short distance by a travelling tinker, swinging his live-coals in a sort of tin censer, and giving utterance to a hoarse and horrible cry, intelligible only to the cook who has a leaky sauce-pan. Then comes the chamois-leather woman, bundled about with damaged skins, in request for the polishing ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 448 - Volume 18, New Series, July 31, 1852 • Various
... affairs would be changed. He 'lowed that they'd make it a point to put a tax on wagons not made in the state. Well, they got in, and about all they did was to fight the railroads, tear the digest to pieces and tinker with the marriage law, as some of you folks in Old Ebenezer have good cause to know. Why, if you read the papers at the time, you recollect that one old feller from Blaxon county said that marriage license was an outrage—'lowed, he did, that there wa'n't no license ...
— Old Ebenezer • Opie Read
... hammering the incessant talking, and the figures flitting about in the glare, reminded one of a crowded open-air market with flaring lamps and frequent coffee stalls. Kurnalpi was known at first as "Billy-Billy," or as "The Tinker's Rush"—the first name was supposed by some to be of native origin, by others to indicate the amount of tin used in the condensing plants—"Billy," translated for those to whom the bush is unfamiliar, meaning a tin pot for boiling tea ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie
... on Tweed, The spot they ca'd it Linkumdoddie; Willie was a wabster guid, [weaver good] Cou'd stown a clue wi' ony body. [have stolen] He had a wife was dour and din, [stubborn, sallow] O, Tinkler Madgie was her mither; [Tinker] Sic a wife as Willie had, [Such] I wad na ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... the bottles thrown out; the procession had drawn up at a dozen villages on the way; the perspiring tipsters, with whom "things hadn't panned out well," had forgotten their disappointments and "didn't care a tinker's! cuss"; every woman in a barrow had her head-gear in confusion, and she was singing in a drunken wail. Nevertheless Drake, who was laughing and talking constantly, said it was the quietest Derby night he had ever seen, and he couldn't tell ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... they forced it into a box, intending to carry it off and throw it away in some distant place, so that they might be no more plagued by the goblin. For this day their troubles were over; but, as luck would have it, the tinker who was in the habit of working for the temple called in, and the priest suddenly bethought him that it was a pity to throw the kettle away for nothing, and that he might as well get a trifle for it, no matter how small. So he ...
— Tales of Old Japan • Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford
... soldiers. Cardinal Wolsey, Defoe, and Kirke White were butchers' sons. Faraday was the son of a hostler, and his teacher, Humphry Davy, was an apprentice to an apothecary. Kepler was a waiter boy in a German hotel, Bunyan a tinker, Copernicus the son of a Polish baker. They rose by being greater than their callings, as Arkwright rose above mere barbering, Bunyan above tinkering, Wilson above shoemaking, Lincoln above rail-splitting, and Grant above tanning. ...
— An Iron Will • Orison Swett Marden
... be arrested for a few unimportant and absurd things—but who cares? Munn will probably sue us; who cares? At any rate, we're reasonably certain of a double-leaded column in the yellow press; but do you give a tinker's damn?" ...
— A Young Man in a Hurry - and Other Short Stories • Robert W. Chambers
... — [taking men to the right stealthily.] — Do you know what? That man's raving from his wound to-day, for I met him a while since telling a rambling tale of a tinker had him destroyed. Then he heard of Christy's deed, and he up and says it was his son had cracked his skull. O isn't madness a fright, for he'll go killing someone yet, and he thinking it's the man has struck ...
— The Playboy of the Western World • J. M. Synge
... Lucius was a shiftless creature. It had long been the consensus of opinion—freely expressed throughout Tinkletown—that he did not amount to a tinker's dam. ...
— Anderson Crow, Detective • George Barr McCutcheon
... how many things had bad names undeservedly, and how easy it was to give bad names, and did he not think that if he and I were persistently to whisper in the village that any weird-looking old drunken tinker of the neighbourhood had sold himself to the Devil, he would come in time to be suspected of that commercial venture! All this wise talk was perfectly ineffective with the landlord, I am bound to confess, and was as dead a failure as ever I made ...
— The Signal-Man #33 • Charles Dickens
... Then he became a gunsmith, making arms for the patriots of Seventy-six, until what time the British destroyed his shop. Then he was a soldier. He suffered the horrors of Valley Forge; and before the conclusion of the peace he went abroad in the country as a tinker of clocks and watches. His peculiarity of manner and his mendicant character made him the butt of neighborhoods. In 1780 he was sent as a deputy-surveyor from Virginia into Kentucky, and after nearly two ...
— Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century - Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World • Various
... He did for John Bunyan—how He made one of the mightiest instruments for good the world ever saw, out of that swearing Bedford tinker. If we had a telescope which would enable us to look into heaven as Stephen did, I can imagine we should see the thief, who believed in Jesus while on the cross, very near the throne. Ask him how he got there; and he would tell you it was through ...
— Sovereign Grace - Its Source, Its Nature and Its Effects • Dwight Moody
... was held between the two men who had surprised the burglars, and a travelling tinker who had been sleeping in an outhouse, and who had been roused, together with his two mongrel curs, to join in the pursuit. Mr. Giles acted in the double capacity of butler and steward to the old lady of the mansion; Brittles was a lad of all-work: ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... consisted of eight or ten men, was hardly ever together except at decisive moments, and we were usually scattered by twos and threes about the towns and villages. Each one of us pretended to have some trade. One was a tinker, another was a groom; I was supposed to peddle haberdashery, but I hardly ever showed myself in large places, on account of my unlucky business at Seville. One day, or rather one night, we were to meet below Veger. El Dancaire and I got there ...
— Carmen • Prosper Merimee
... worshipped him: for the second, John Bright would have clothed his whole company gratuitously in drab. He is fond of fighting, and ready to take up the cudgels with any chance customer; but, somehow or other, he has invariably the worst of the encounter. Tinker, beggar-man, tanner, shepherd, and curtail friar, in succession, bring him to his knees, and his life would have been many times a forfeit, but for the timely assistance of his horn, which brought Little John and the rest to the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... another well compounded punch, which the general ordered without delay. "I tell you, sir," Mr. Tickler resumed, "he is an oily gentleman in very shabby clothes, and might be easily mistaken for a cross between a toper and a tinker. Lacking capacity for any other business, he forms a cheap connection with the press, where his first office would seem to be that of sitting in judgment upon literature. Indeed, I have seldom seen a more shabby gentleman set ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... chap who owns this property. Didn't you know? A frightfully energetic person; prosperous, too, for a wonder. But an absolute tinker, my dear. I shouldn't marry him—all his fair acres notwithstanding—if I were you. I don't think the county ...
— The Safety Curtain, and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... the squire and tinker Wood Gravely consulting Ireland's good, Together mingled in a mass Smith's dust, and copper, lead, and brass; The mixture thus by chemic art United close in ev'ry part, In fillets roll'd, or cut in pieces, Appear'd like one continued ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... Smiths, temperance Smiths and licensed victualler Smiths, Smiths with double-barrelled names and hyphens, Smiths with double-barrelled names without hyphens, Conservative Smiths and Radical Smiths, tinker Smiths, tailor Smiths, Smiths of Mercia, Smiths of Wessex,—all these and all other imaginable varieties of the tribe Smith would be, as it were, crystallized by an inexorable law forbidding the members of any of these groups to marry beyond the ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... a question of valuing some pictures; there is nobody but you in Paris who can tell a poor tinker-fellow like me how much he may give when he has not ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... skills: martial arts, bicycling, auto racing, kite flying, hiking, rock climbing, aviation, target-shooting, sailing, caving, juggling, skiing, skating (ice and roller). Hackers' delight in techno-toys also tends to draw them towards hobbies with nifty complicated equipment that they can tinker with. ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... returning to. As for the diary of Madame d'Arblay, it reproduces so admirably the struggles of a bright spirit against the dullest of all atmospheres, that it seems like a new discovery in psychology. And now comes Professor Tinker's "Young Boswell" and those precious diaries including that of Mrs. Pepys by a certain E. Barrington. Life ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... of your qualities I do not care a tinker's curse: but as a man who, after three tumblers of neat brandy, can tell Marsala from Madeira you are ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 6, No. 5, April, 1896 • Various
... favourable to every kind of intrigue and amusement; while the mild temper of the people and the watchfulness of the police prevented the public disorders that such license might have occasioned. These seeming anomalies abounded on every side. From the gaming-table where a tinker might set a ducat against a prince it was but a few steps to the Broglio, or arcade under the ducal palace, into which no plebeian might intrude while the nobility walked there. The great ladies, who were subject to strict sumptuary laws, and might not display their jewels or try the new French ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... speech of Mr. Valiant-for-Truth carried its cachet with it. The stiff, awkward figure had changed. The preacher's sincerity had lent him dignity, and his simple use of a simple tinker's words had suddenly uplifted him ...
— Gordon Keith • Thomas Nelson Page
... and walked across the yard toward the garage, head bowed. Tommy watched him. No doubt his father thought he would follow. He had always liked to hang about the garage, he and Frank, and watch his father tinker with the car. It had been one of the high lights of their daily life. But now old Frank was chained up—and as for him, he didn't care anything ...
— Frank of Freedom Hill • Samuel A. Derieux
... feeding around him. Next I passed a bare-footed cantonnier breaking stones, and he told me that if I made haste I might reach Neuvic before dark. On the outskirts of a village—Roche-le-Peyroux—a wandering tinker and his boy were at work by the side of the road with fire and bellows, and I felt a trampish or romantic desire to stay with them awhile in the cheerful glow; but thinking of the coming night, I smothered ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... involved to invite an answer in a short space of time. Suffice it to say that the most important mental process, to my mind, is the development of a perception of beauty. All the perseverance in the study of music, all the application devoted to it, is not worth a tinker's dam, unless accompanied by this awakening to the perception of beauty. And with regard to the influence of teachers? Since all teachers vary greatly, the student should not limit himself to his own personal masters. The true student of Art should be able to derive ...
— Violin Mastery - Talks with Master Violinists and Teachers • Frederick H. Martens
... "I don't say it for a minute. I like your going. I wouldn't give a tinker's dam for you, whatever that is, if you didn't want to do something for those fellows over there. I won't even say to be careful, for you can't if you do your duty—only, don't you be too all-fired foolhardy, even for ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... baptism of Francois Xavier, tenth son of Pierre Lecour, master-butcher, of this Parish, and of his wife, Marie LeCoq. He had for godfather, Jean LeCoq, tinker, and for godmother, Therese, wife of Louis Bossu, ...
— The False Chevalier - or, The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette • William Douw Lighthall
... willing to wait on thee, and be thy bow-bearer.—Only, for her mother's sake, let there pass some slight form of marriage between you—Ye need no license or priest in these happy days, but may be buckled like beggars in a ditch, with a hedge for a church-roof, and a tinker for a priest. I crave pardon of you for making such an officious and simple request—perhaps you are a ranter—or one of the family of Love, or hold marriage rites as unnecessary, as ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... it, and hence are in two cases at the same time, and it is doubly difficult to get out. In sane moments we regard only the facts, the case that is. Say what you have to say, not what you ought. Any truth is better than make-believe. Tom Hyde, the tinker, standing on the gallows, was asked if he had anything to say. "Tell the tailors," said he, "to remember to make a knot in their thread before they take the first stitch." His companion's prayer ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... Pole: Oscar Wisting and His Team Arrive at the Goal A Page from the Observation Book, December 17, 1911 At the South Pole, December 16 and 17, 1911 Mount Don Pedro Christophersen Framheim on the Return of the Polar Party Lindstrom in the Kitchen Farewell to the Barrier Bjaaland as Tinker Dogs Landed at Hobart for Dr. Mawson's Expedition Members of the Japanese Antarctic Expedition Lieutenant Prestrud An Original Inhabitant of the Antarctic Stubberud Reviews the Situation Camp on the Barrier: Eastern Expedition A Broken-off Cape Off to the East The Junction of the ...
— The South Pole, Volumes 1 and 2 • Roald Amundsen
... Captain no sooner had finger'd the cole, But he hies him abroad with his good Madam Vole- Where, like a true tinker, he managed this metal, And while he stopp'd one hole, ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... adorned her head. And my satisfaction was complete when my profound erudition enabled me to read for her on Sabbath afternoons that most wonderful of all stories, the Pilgrim's Progress. Nor was it uninstructive, or a slight tribute to the genius of the immortal tinker—could I but have appreciated it—to observe the varied emotions excited within her breast by the recital of those fearful conflicts by the way, and of the unspeakable glories of the celestial City, within whose portals of pearl I trust her faithful soul ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... much," she says; "this wounded leg, these crusted lips, this anxious, weary mind. Come away for a time, until your body becomes more habitable." And so she coaxes the mind away into the Nirvana of delirium, while the little cell-workers tinker and toil within to get things better for its homecoming. When you see the veil of cruelty which nature wears, try and peer through it, and you will sometimes catch a glimpse of a very homely, ...
— The Tragedy of The Korosko • Arthur Conan Doyle
... hallalloo of fire in every street! Odsbobs! I have a mind to hang myself, To think I should a grandmother be made By such a rascal!—Sure the king forgets When in a pudding, by his mother put, The bastard, by a tinker, on a stile Was dropp'd.—O, good lord Grizzle! can I bear To see him from a pudding mount the throne? Or can, oh can, my Huncamunca bear To take a pudding's offspring ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... What would you make me mad? Am not I Christopher Slie, old Slies sonne of Burton-heath, by byrth a Pedler, by education a Cardmaker, by transmutation a Beare-heard, and now by present profession a Tinker. Aske Marrian Hacket the fat Alewife of Wincot, if shee know me not: if she say I am not xiiii.d. on the score for sheere Ale, score me vp for the lyingst knaue in Christen dome. What I am not bestraught: here's- 3.Man. Oh this it is that ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... Thought I'd got a job to tinker him up; but he only wants a bit of comforting, to show ...
— In Honour's Cause - A Tale of the Days of George the First • George Manville Fenn
... those suggestions, like Lord Brougham's of the "unknown public," which, in a single phrase, and a sentence or two of explanation, tell a whole history. This is the class John Bunyan wrote for before the bishops had his Allegory in presentable calf and gold-leaf,—before England knew that her poor tinker had shaped a pictured urn for her full of such visions as no dreamer had seen since Dante. This is the class that believes in John Bright and Richard Cobden and all the defenders of true American principles. It absorbs intelligence as melting ice renders heat latent; there is no living ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... make you laugh To hear how Honesty was entertain'd. Poor, lame, and blind, when I came once ashore, Lord! how they came in flocks to visit me; The shepherd with his hook, and thrasher with his flail, The very pedlar with his dog, and the tinker with his mail: Then comes a soldier counterfeit, and with him was his jug,[291] And Will, the whipper of the dogs, had got a bouncing trug; And cogging Dick was in the crew that swore he came from France: He swore that in the king's defence he lost his arm by chance; ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VI • Robert Dodsley
... public stage, thought he, why may not I?—cannot I be as useful as them? besides I can—but these men sing, I suppose—do not they sing John, much better than me?" "Noa, I tell thee they doan't: sing better than thee! they can't sing at all. A tinker's jackass is as good at it as any of them I see here. When they are on the stage (I went three or four times with our Sall to the play) od rot 'un—they make a noise by way of a song, and the musicianers sing for them on their fiddles." The man to whom honest John alluded, arrived ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 4, April 1810 • Various
... touch or coup de grace ... He really sometimes puts me in mind of Gil Blas; but he has not the sneer of the Frenchman, nor does he gild the bad. He has a touch of Bunyan, and, like that enthusiastic tinker, hammers away, a la Gitano, whenever he thinks he can thwack the Devil or his man-of-all-work on earth—the Pope. Therein he resembles my friend and everybody's friend—Punch—who, amidst all his adventures, never spares the black one. However, I am not going to review him now; for I know that ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... startling invention. He wins back his stolen bride, Lily-White (impersonated by Mae Marsh). It is a Griffith masterpiece, and every actor does sound work. The audience, mechanical Americans, fond of crawling on their stomachs to tinker their automobiles, are eager over the evolution of the first weapon from a stick to a hammer. They are as full of curiosity as they could well be over the history of Langley or ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... every fibre of the national life," and that they constitute the "fundamental cause of the longevity of China's social structure and of the innate strength of her civilisation." He refuses to believe that Young China, which is imbued with "a doctrinaire spirit of political speculation," though it may tinker with the superstructure, will be able seriously to shake the foundations of this hoary edifice. He has watched the opinions and activities in every province from the beginning of the present revolution, and he "is compelled to the conviction that salvation ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... out of every business which it was possible for human wisdom to stave aside. 'What good will you get of going into that? Parliamentary criticism, argument and botheration? Leave well alone. And even leave ill alone:—are you the tradesman to tinker leaky vessels in England? You will not want for work. Mind your pudding, and say little!' At home and abroad, that was the safe secret. For, in Foreign Politics, his rule was analogous: 'Mind your own affairs. You are an Island, you can do without Foreign Politics; ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... tinker's hang what Thirkle says!" cried Buckrow, throwing down his end of the sack. "I'm here to say gold will rust if it's kept wet, and that's an end of it. Gold do rust, Thirkle or no ...
— The Devil's Admiral • Frederick Ferdinand Moore
... tiny city merely seemed asleep behind its drawn blinds and its closed shutters. At the corner of the square in front of the chateau the old vegetable vendor still sold her products seated beneath her patched red cotton parasol; the Great Dane watchdog lay in exactly the same place on the tinker's doorstep. Around the high church tower the crows circled and cawed as usual, while the bell of its clock which, as we passed, slowly struck three, was echoed by the distant hills with ...
— With Those Who Wait • Frances Wilson Huard
... Rover was very hungry indeed. He had been going from place to place with his master, and now it was two long days since he had eaten a good dinner. His master was a poor tinker who traveled about the country and never stayed long in one place. Rover would have liked this if his master had been kind to him, but the dog was used only to blows ...
— Friends and Helpers • Sarah J. Eddy
... noticed, seated in the great chimney, a very tall old woman clad in a red cloak and a slouched bonnet, having all the appearance of a gipsy or tinker. She smoked silently at her clay pipe, while the doubtful-looking ...
— Red Cap Tales - Stolen from the Treasure Chest of the Wizard of the North • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... Cleveland, Ohio, then," said Fitz, "'n' Euclid Avenue, 'n' Wade Park, 'n' the cannons in the square, 'n' the breakwater, 'n' never eat Silverthorn's potatoes at Rocky River, 'n' never went to a picnic at Tinker's Creek, 'n' never saw ...
— The Spread Eagle and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... character in a wife. If she do not sustain and elevate what is highest in his nature, she will speedily reduce him to her own level. Thus a wife may be the making or the unmaking of the best of men. An illustration of this power is furnished in the life of Bunyan, the profligate tinker, who had the good fortune to marry, in early life, a worthy young ...
— How to Get on in the World - A Ladder to Practical Success • Major A.R. Calhoon
... mouth, and prevented him from crying; but, on feeling the hot water, he kicked and struggled so much in the pot, that his mother thought that the pudding was bewitched, and, pulling it out of the pot, she threw it outside the door. A poor tinker, who was passing by, lifted up the pudding, and, putting it into his budget, he then walked off. As Tom had now got his mouth cleared of the batter, he then began to cry aloud, which so frightened the tinker that he flung down the pudding and ran away. The pudding ...
— English Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)
... me into a scrape too! They won't let me off as easy as they do you. I shall be sent off to learn to be a tinker, or a blacksmith." ...
— Work and Win - or, Noddy Newman on a Cruise • Oliver Optic
... handkerchief tied over my face and the sun-cover of my umbrella folded and tied over my hat, for the sun was very fierce. The queerest figure of all was the would-be guide. With his one eye, his gaunt, lean form, and his torn clothes, he looked more like a strolling tinker than the honest worthy settler that he is. He bestrode rather than rode a gaunt mule, whose tail had all been shaven off, except a turf for a tassel at the end. Two flour bags which leaked were tied on behind ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... give a tinker's dam if he's had all the training in creation, he can't lick Mack McGowan ...
— Captain Pott's Minister • Francis L. Cooper
... we don't mean to sit around here an hour or two, just watchin' you tinker with that silly old bow and stick, twirling away like you had to saw through to China. How about that, Thad?" and Bumpus turned appealingly toward the patrol leader, well knowing that whatever he said ...
— The Boy Scouts in the Maine Woods - The New Test for the Silver Fox Patrol • Herbert Carter
... good puff!" prompted Marjorie. "Then we can count how many you've blown out. Five! This year, next year, some time, never! This year! Goody! You'll have to be quick about it. It's almost time to be putting up the banns. Now again. Tinker, tailor, soldier! Lucky you! My plum stones generally give me beggar-man or thief. Silk, satin, muslin, rags; silk, satin! You've got all the luck to-night. Coach, carriage! You're not blowing fair, Renie! You did that on purpose so that it shouldn't ...
— A Patriotic Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... to thee, goodman Grim, thy fire is colder than my halidome; the sun is so high it puts it out, I reckon. Here have I two iron pots, a plate from my master's best greaves, and a pair of spurs that want piecing, and I'm like to tinker them as I list on a cold stithy. Get out, thou"—Here he became aware of an additional inmate to Grim's dwelling; and this discovery for a while checked the copious torrent of Dan's eloquence. Shortly, Darby drew him aside, and from their looks it might ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... father had left it to him, but it was all swamp land, and so Hank's father, he hunted more'n he farmed, and Hank and his brothers done the same when he was a boy. But Hank, he learnt a little blacksmithing when he was growing up, cause he liked to tinker around and to show how stout he was. Then, when he married Elmira Appleton, he had to go to work practising that perfession reg'lar, because he never learnt nothing about farming. He'd sell fifteen or twenty acres, every ...
— Danny's Own Story • Don Marquis
... President, drawing his moral with his provoking imperturbability, "those men looked at each other, as they dripped, and said with the one voice: 'Ain't this a lesson? Don't swap horses crossing a stream!'"—(Heard by Superintendent Tinker, war telegrapher.) ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... that I had nearly every lock in the prison to take off and operate upon, if it was nothing more than to clean and oil one. This business occupied my entire time and attention for nearly three months. Then I repaired iron bedsteads, did other iron work, and I was the general tinker of the prison. ...
— Seven Wives and Seven Prisons • L.A. Abbott
... Reading almost any day, an old man may be seen pushing a tinker's barrow. The small carriage is gay with yellow, red, and blue paint and bright with polished brass, and on a conspicuous place appear the words, 'Where will you spend Eternity?' The barrow-man has a pleasant, bearded face, and steady-gazing, merry, eyes, with a cheerful nod and ...
— The Angel Adjutant of "Twice Born Men" • Minnie L. Carpenter
... don't care a tinker's dam how you do it," he said. "Drink it all, if you want to. I'll take the biggest—that one under the milk-house." Whereat they jeered at him for wanting to be close ...
— Good Indian • B. M. Bower
... have all de trouble in de world. He boy, Ned, die in de war and William, what name for he pa, drink bad all de time. And after de war dem Ku Kluxers what wear de false faces try to tinker with Marse's niggers. One day Uncle Dave start to town and a Kluxer ask him where am he pass. Dat Kluxer clout him but Uncle Dave outrun him in de cane. Marse grab de hoss and go 'rest dat man and Marse a jedge and he make dat man pay de fine for hittin' Uncle Dave. After dey hears of dat, ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Texas Narratives, Part 1 • Works Projects Administration
... that I do not take my astronomical clock to pieces. She supposes that because I am an astronomer, I must be able to be a clock-maker, while I do not handle a tool if I can help it! She did not expect to take her piano to pieces because she was musical! She was as careful not to tinker it as I was not to tinker the clock, which only an expert in clock-making was ...
— Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals • Maria Mitchell
... read Chauncey B. Tinker, "In Praise of Nursery Lore," Unpopular Review, Vol. VI, p. 338 (Oct.-Dec., 1916). For a most satisfactory presentation of the whole subject read chap. x, "Mother Goose," in Field. For the origin of Mother Goose as a character consult Lang's introduction ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... may fall upon unresponsive ears; yet he has a Continental reputation and is easily the foremost English impressionist. New York has seen but little of his work; if we mistake not, there was a large piece of his, a Gipsy Tinker in the open air, hung several seasons ago at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Mr. Kennedy shows extraordinary etchings of his at the Wunderlich Galleries. We call them extraordinary not alone because of their size, but also because Brangwyn is practically the first among latter-day ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... "cane-bottom," where she would inadvertently learn items of interest with regard to "yon Cassius," or "bluff Harry," or a certain young lady who was described as being "little" but "fierce,"—a good deal like Molly Tinker whose "man" kept the "Golden Glory Saloon." On one occasion a rattlesnake lifted its head drowzily from behind a rock near by, and was despatched offhand by Simon. It was this exploit which filled ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... one could exist on in decency. When they meet these same girls in the hall or when they come directly into contact with them in their work they may be polite enough, but their politeness is not worth a tinker's curse. Justice must come first. Only if the employer pays a fair day's wage can he expect a fair day's work. "Even then," he protests, "I can't get it." And this is, unfortunately, in large measure true. As Kipling said some few years ago, and it ...
— The Book of Business Etiquette • Nella Henney
... of the sea, with the desolateness of lonely wolds, with the passion of loyalty to a leader. Read "Deor's Lament," "Widsith," "The Wanderer," "The Sea-farer," or the battle-songs of Brunanburh and Maldon in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. [Footnote: See Cook and Tinker, Select Translations from Old English Poetry (Boston, 1902), and Pancoast and Spaeth, Early English Poems (New York, 1911).] The last strophe of "Deor's Lament," our oldest English lyric, ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... hadn't an object in life now—didn't care about drinking any longer, nor yet about women, because of the thing that had happened, and so hadn't got any reasonable sort of use for money—he began to make it. That's the secret of success, that is. Because he didn't care what he called a tinker's cuss about being foreman he was made foreman—then, for the same reason, manager. Then he got sort of interested in seeing the money come in. He didn't want it himself, but it struck him that it wouldn't be a bad thing to pay ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... coat! That's what it is surely, but that old coat cost me a good friend, it did. Poor old Tinker was worth more than a dozen coats." So said Eli Watton, as he put the old coat over his shoulders, and settled himself in his donkey-cart with a man by his side who ...
— Golden Moments - Bright Stories for Young Folks • Anonymous
... to appeal to his better nature. "I don't know who the dickens you are. You may be the three wise men of Gotham who went to sea in a bowl rolled into one, for all I know. You may be any old thing. I don't give a tinker's cuss what you are. Under ordinary circumstances I've no doubt I should find you a very pleasant old gentleman, but under present conditions you ...
— Olympian Nights • John Kendrick Bangs
... the carpenter, Snug the joiner. Bottom the weaver. Flute the bellows-mender. Snout the tinker, and Starveling the taylor] In this scene Shakespeare takes advantage of his knowledge of the theatre, to ridicule the prejudices and competitions of the players. Bottom, who is generally acknowledged ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... "You saucy tinker's apprentice, if you don't cease your jaw, I'll——" But here she gasped for breath, unable to hawk up any more words, for the last volley of O'Connell had nearly knocked the wind ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous
... cried, breathing quite hard. "A place where they—" he broke off. "And you're Jeremy Ammidon's granddaughter! By heaven, it would make a coolie laugh. It's like William, who never would go to sea, to have four daughters in place of a son. I'm done with you; go tinker on the piano." They got down from their chairs and departed with an only half concealed eagerness. "Do you think he means it," Janet asked hopefully, "and he'll never have ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... travelling tinker. He would do a little gardening and farming at home for a while, and then go off about the country for a few days, mending people's pots and pans and kettles. Usually Sym left Emily Ann at home to keep the Little Red House company, but now and then Emily Ann went with Sym for a trip, and ...
— A Book for Kids • C. J. (Clarence Michael James) Dennis
... one, is Curley Tinker. And there you have the whole outfit. I'll introduce you to them if you like," ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in Alaska - The Gold Diggers of Taku Pass • Frank Gee Patchin
... the medicine-man. And a marvelous earnest fraud he is, doing his best. He is really wonderful as a mechanic of the human system. But the life within us fails more and more, while we marvelously tinker at the engines. Doctors are ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... India with Havelock and Colin Campbell. He had bought a ranch in the West, but an accident to one of his eyes forced him to spend all his money to save the other one. He drifted in to New York, penniless and without a friend. Seeing a tinker mending umbrellas one day on the street, he sat down beside him and watched the process. In that way he learned something ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine
... John Bunyan was a poor tinker, a mender of pots and kettles, working sometimes in his own house and sometimes in the homes of others. His son followed the same occupation and did his work well. Even after he became a popular preacher ...
— Journeys Through Bookland - Volume Four • Charles H. Sylvester
... "You didn't happen to hear what Frankie told me from the flagship, did you? His last instructions, and I've logged them here in shorthand, were"—he opened a neat pocket-book—"'Get out of this and conduct your own damned manoeuvres in your own damned tinker fashion! You're a disgrace to the Service, and your ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling
... for Indian housemaids was found at an early day in "help," as it was called even then. Roger Williams, writing of his daughter, said: "She desires to spend some time in service & liked much Mrs. Brenton who wanted." John Tinker, who himself was help, wrote thus to John Winthrop; "Help is scarce, hard to get, difficult to please, uncertain, &c. Means runneth out and wages on & I cannot make choice of my help." Children of well-to-do citizens thus worked in domestic service. ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... Burnett. "I don't give a tinker's damn about his voice. It's up to me to run the dwarf to earth, and I'm goin' to ...
— The Secret of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... when we met our third general, and this meeting was quite by chance. Coming back from a spin down the lines we stopped in a small village called Amifontaine, to let our chauffeur, known affectionately as The Human Rabbit, tinker with a leaky tire valve or something. A young officer came up through the dusk to find out who we were, and, having found out, he invited us into the chief house of the place, and there in a stuffy little French parlor we were introduced in due form ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... round, as he does. The everlasting loafer, artist, tinker, poet, gardener. 'Pon my soul, he's like the game we used to do with cherry-stones round the pudding plate. Don't you know? Soldier, sailor, tinker, tailor, and all the rest. He's all those things, and has two pair of bags to his name, and lives in a cart, and's a ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... four years, 1899-1902 were passed between Paris and Ireland; Paris in the winter and spring and Ireland in the other seasons. He was at work on The Aran Islands, and on his three early one act plays, The Tinker's Wedding, Riders to the Sea, and The Shadow of the Glen. He came to London in the winter of 1902-3, where I saw him as I have described. London did not suit him and he did not stay long. He gave up his room in Paris at this time, with ...
— John M. Synge: A Few Personal Recollections, with Biographical Notes • John Masefield
... and the Tanner of Tamworth" is a ballad of a kind once popular; there were "King Alfred and the Neatherd," "King Henry and the Miller," "King James I. and the Tinker," "King Henry VII. and the Cobbler," with a dozen more. "The Tanner of Tamworth" in another, perhaps older, form, as "The King and the Barker," was printed by Joseph Ritson in his "Ancient ...
— A Bundle of Ballads • Various
... he snapped out. "I don't begrudge the poor devils their soup. What I feel is this: If she'd cared a tinker's damn for me she'd never have gone. ...
— The Amazing Interlude • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... weary stoop under the afternoon's sunshine. There was a flock of sheep straggling about the road, with a dog running himself into a fever in the endeavor to keep them decently together. There were some bricklayers just released from work—a tinker mending some kettles by the roadside; there was a dog-cart dashing down the road, carrying the master of the Audley hounds to his seven o'clock dinner; there were a dozen common village sights and sounds that mixed themselves up into a cheerful ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... his machine. When the accident occurred, through no fault of mine, I was, fortunately, the only person injured; but my employer was so incensed over the damage to his automobile that he never even sent to inquire whether I lived or died. At a charity hospital they tried to mend my breaks and tinker up my anatomy. My shoulder-blade was shattered, my arm broken in three places, and four ribs were crashed in. The wounds in my head are mere abrasions of the scalp, and not serious. But it has taken me a long time ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces at Millville • Edith Van Dyne
... hastily scrawled a note to Corliss. Later he tied the note to the inside of the dog's collar. The next thing was to get Chance started on the road to the Concho. He rolled down his sleeves and strolled to the doorway. A Mexican sat smoking and watching the road. Sundown stepped past him and began to tinker with the gas-engine. Chance stood watching him. Presently the gas-engine started with a cough and splutter. Sundown walked to the door and seemed about to enter when the Mexican called to him and pointed toward the ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs
... cared for his crimson barometer? It was the steam—the steam—that was going down; and what between the firemen going faint and the chief going silly, it was worse than a dog's life for him; he didn't care a tinker's curse how soon the whole show was blown out of the water. He seemed on the point of having a cry, but after regaining his breath he muttered darkly, "I'll faint them," and dashed off. He stopped upon the fiddle long enough to shake his fist at the unnatural daylight, and dropped into ...
— Typhoon • Joseph Conrad
... remain a backwoodsman; he must make his own farm or his immediate community a self-sufficing unit; he must get from his own land bread and meat and clothing for his family; he must be stock-raiser, grain-grower, farrier, tinker, soap-maker, tanner, chandler—Jack-of-all-trades and master of none. With the railroad he gained access to markets and the opportunity to specialize in one kind of farming; he could now sell his produce and buy in exchange many of the articles he had previously made for himself ...
— The Agrarian Crusade - A Chronicle of the Farmer in Politics • Solon J. Buck
... we are driving a badly-designed, unimpressive new street or two, with no expansive sense of imperial greatness, through the hopelessly congested and most squalid quarters. But that is all. No grand, systematic, reconstructive plan, no rising to the height of the occasion and the Empire! You tinker away at a Shaftesbury Avenue. Parochial, all of it. And there you get the real secret of our futile attempts at making a town out of our squalid village. The fault lies all at the door of the old Corporation, and of the people who made and still make the old Corporation ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen
... "but I should think you might. It would be at least refreshing to have you, or someone, demonstrate what Christianity is. It would be good for our souls. Instead," she added bitterly, "instead, you select one little thing here, and one little thing there, and putter, and tinker, and temporize, and gloss over, and build big churches, with mortgages and taxes and insurance to pay, in the name of Christianity! If I were little Annie Smith, down in the village here, I could get a divorce for twenty-five ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... permitted me to see coarse red hair, a broad face, grey eyes, a snubbed nose, blubber lips and great white teeth—the eyes were staring intently at me. I stopped and stared too, and at last thought I recognised the features of the uncouth girl I had seen on the green near Chester with the Irish tinker ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... came out of a shop and stepped into her carriage. I swear I was all of a blaze at once. Then I met Zaleshoff—looking like a hair-dresser's assistant, got up as fine as I don't know who, while I looked like a tinker. 'Don't flatter yourself, my boy,' said he; 'she's not for such as you; she's a princess, she is, and her name is Nastasia Philipovna Barashkoff, and she lives with Totski, who wishes to get rid of her because he's growing rather old—fifty-five or so—and wants ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... of the porch Mrs. Hudson mounted grimly, followed by Babe. Sylvester stayed to tinker with the car, and Sheila, after a doubtful, tremulous moment, went slowly up the icy path ...
— Hidden Creek • Katharine Newlin Burt
... fell asleep, Robin made haste away, And left the tinker in the lurch, For the great ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... set to work to dress for the part. I opened the collar of my shirt—it was a vulgar blue-and-white check such as ploughmen wear—and revealed a neck as brown as any tinker's. I rolled up my sleeves, and there was a forearm which might have been a blacksmith's, sunburnt and rough with old scars. I got my boots and trouser-legs all white from the dust of the road, and hitched up my trousers, tying them ...
— The Thirty-nine Steps • John Buchan
... from Mark Twain that year deserve to be remembered. One of these; unsigned, was published in the Century Magazine, and expressed the need for a "universal tinker," the man who can accept a job in a large household or in a community as master of all trades, with sufficient knowledge of each to be ready to undertake whatever repairs are likely to be required in the ordinary household, such ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... try anything ye choose to put us at. I had a brother once who was a sort of tinker to trade, an' great at mendin' pots, pans, old umbrellas, and the like. I wos used to help him when a boy. P'r'aps if yer honour, now, has got a old umbrella as wants refittin', I might try ...
— The Battle and the Breeze • R.M. Ballantyne
... looking probably the same as three hundred thousand years ago. The little streets, so narrow in places that the houses almost touched and a carriage could not pass! That strange medley of sounds and smells and noises! Here a tinker mending his pans on the sidewalk! There a dentist, pulling a tooth in the open street, jugglers performing their tricks, snake charmers ...
— Baseball Joe Around the World - Pitching on a Grand Tour • Lester Chadwick
... care a tinker's damn what you've done," he said forcibly. "Remember that! We're brothers, and I'll stick to you. If there's anything in life that I can do to help, I'll do it. If there isn't, well, I won't worry you, but you know you can count on ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... finding no virtue proof against your attacks.' 'How mistaken!' interrupts the general; 'to conquer whole cities, to destroy whole armies, to ruin all provinces, THAT indeed brings REAL honour.' The man of learning places his renown in the number of pages which he has either written or read; the tinker, in the number of pots and kettles which he has made or mended; the nun, in the number of GOOD things which she has done, or BAD things which she has resisted; the coquette, in the list of her admirers; the Republic, in the ...
— The Bravo of Venice - A Romance • M. G. Lewis
... seated in the great chimney, a very tall old woman clad in a red cloak and a slouched bonnet, having all the appearance of a gipsy or tinker. She smoked silently at her clay pipe, while the doubtful-looking ...
— Red Cap Tales - Stolen from the Treasure Chest of the Wizard of the North • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... hundred dollars a year to handle the calendar in Part Five. Yet those on the inside knew why very well. It was because Tom long ago, in his prehistoric youth, had learned that the way to secure verdicts was to appear not to care a tinker's dam whether the jury found the defendant guilty or not. He pretended never to know anything about any case in advance, to be in complete ignorance as to who the witnesses might be and to what they were going to testify, and to be terribly sorry to have to prosecute ...
— By Advice of Counsel • Arthur Train
... tongue which habitually rises and fills the cavity of the mouth does so in response to a wrong mental concept of cause. The only way to correct this condition is to change the cause. The rigid tongue we see is effect, and to tinker with the effect while the cause remains is unnecessarily stupid. An impulse of tension has been directed to the tongue so often that the impulse and response have become simultaneous and automatic. The correction lies in directing an impulse of relaxation to it. ...
— The Head Voice and Other Problems - Practical Talks on Singing • D. A. Clippinger
... Miller masons. Dante and Descartes were soldiers. Cardinal Wolsey, Defoe, and Kirke White were butchers' sons. Faraday was the son of a hostler, and his teacher, Humphry Davy, was an apprentice to an apothecary. Kepler was a waiter boy in a German hotel, Bunyan a tinker, Copernicus the son of a Polish baker. They rose by being greater than their callings, as Arkwright rose above mere barbering, Bunyan above tinkering, Wilson above shoemaking, Lincoln above rail-splitting, and Grant above tanning. ...
— An Iron Will • Orison Swett Marden
... too much," she says; "this wounded leg, these crusted lips, this anxious, weary mind. Come away for a time, until your body becomes more habitable." And so she coaxes the mind away into the Nirvana of delirium, while the little cell-workers tinker and toil within to get things better for its home-coming. When you see the veil of cruelty which nature wears, try and peer through it, and you will sometimes catch a glimpse of a ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle
... town, surrounded by strangers, and no relation of her own to be near her when her trouble comes!... There's times, John, when I wonder are you a man at all? Your mind is so set on yourself that you're like a lump of stone. You and your old books ... as if they matter a tinker's curse to anybody!..." ...
— The Foolish Lovers • St. John G. Ervine
... Mrs. Slater had been girls together and sat in school with arms entwined and wove romances of the future, rosy-hued and golden. When they consulted the oracle of "Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief," the buttons on her gray winsey dress had declared in favour of the "rich man." Then she had dreamed dreams of silks and satins and prancing steeds and liveried servants, and ease, and happiness—dreams which ...
— Sowing Seeds in Danny • Nellie L. McClung
... have been able to screw up to you for this month, and I may add that it is not only more than you deserve, but just about more than I was equal to. I have been and am entirely useless; just able to tinker at my Grandfather. The three chapters - perhaps also a little of the fourth - will come home to you next mail by the hand of my cousin Graham Balfour, a very nice fellow whom I recommend to you warmly - and whom I think you will like. This will give you ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... resolved to appeal to his better nature. "I don't know who the dickens you are. You may be the three wise men of Gotham who went to sea in a bowl rolled into one, for all I know. You may be any old thing. I don't give a tinker's cuss what you are. Under ordinary circumstances I've no doubt I should find you a very pleasant old gentleman, but under present conditions you ...
— Olympian Nights • John Kendrick Bangs
... enough to fill the kettle before tramping off to the 'Ring of Bells'?" the good woman broke in. "Lord knows 'tisn' his way to be thoughtful, and when he tries it there's always a breakage. When I'd melted the ice, the thing began to leak like a sieve; and if this tinker fellow hadn't come along—by Providence, as you may call it—though I'd ha' been obliged to Providence for ...
— Hetty Wesley • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... would you make me mad? Am not I Christopher Sly, old Sly's son of Burton-heath; by birth a pedlar, by education a card-maker, by transmutation a bear-herd, and now by present profession a tinker? Ask Marian Hacket, the fat ale-wife of Wincot, if she know me not: if she say I am not fourteen pence on the score for sheer ale, score me up for the lyingest knave in Christendom. What! I am not ...
— The Taming of the Shrew • William Shakespeare [Craig, Oxford edition]
... Mark Twain that year deserve to be remembered. One of these; unsigned, was published in the Century Magazine, and expressed the need for a "universal tinker," the man who can accept a job in a large household or in a community as master of all trades, with sufficient knowledge of each to be ready to undertake whatever repairs are likely to be required in the ordinary household, ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... tar supplies all sorts of useful material is because it is indeed the quintessence of the forest, of the forests of untold millenniums if it is coal tar. If you are acquainted with a village tinker, one of those all-round mechanics who still survive in this age of specialization and can mend anything from a baby-carriage to an automobile, you will know that he has on the floor of his back shop a heap of broken machinery from which ...
— Creative Chemistry - Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries • Edwin E. Slosson
... know that he was of Norman descent (as Dr. Brown seems to succeed in proving), nor that the Bunyans came over with the Conqueror, nor that he was a gipsy, as others hold. On Dr. Brown's showing, Bunyan's ancestors lost their lands in process of time and change, and Bunyan's father was a tinker. He preferred to call himself a brazier—his was the rather unexpected trade to which Mr. Dick proposed apprenticing ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... is aluminum," said he, "or it wouldn't be worth a tinker's dam after all this time. But as it is, it's taken no harm that I can see. Wire braces all gone, rusted out and disappeared. Have to be rewired throughout, if I can find steel wire; if not, I'll use braided leather thongs. Petrol tank and feed pipe O. K. Girder boom needs a little attention. ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... such a mistake trying to build their own cars," said Ernest. "More accidents come from that than people realize. While the war was going on, no one had time to tinker at building, but now half the chaps I know are studying up and attempting to ...
— Battling the Clouds - or, For a Comrade's Honor • Captain Frank Cobb
... barbers, curriers, smiths, carpenters, bricklayers, sculptors, cooks, and tailors. When afflicted with Mercury or the moon, he denotes thieves, hangmen, and 'all cut throat people.' In fact, except the ploughboy, who belongs to Saturn, all the members of the old septet, 'tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, apothecary, ploughboy, thief,' are favourites with Mars. The planet's influence is not quite so evil as Saturn's, nor are the effects produced by it so long-lasting. 'The influence of Saturn,' says an astrologer, 'may be compared to a lingering ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... you let Skeets and me help you some? Skeets will be here again next week and I love to tinker and contrive and make all sorts of things; it'll be fun to see the radio ...
— Radio Boys Cronies • Wayne Whipple and S. F. Aaron
... recognition since Mr. Froude drew the attention of the general reader to it in his book on Bunyan, in the "English Men of Letters" series, five-and-twenty years ago: but it must have struck careful readers of the great tinker's minor works long before. Indeed there are very good internal reasons for thinking that no less a person than Thackeray must have known Mr. Badman. This wonderful little sketch, however—the related history of a man who is an utter ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... you note that aristocratic pedigree-tracers confine themselves to one line, or to a few lines. Burke will tell you that one of the great-great-grandfathers of the present Lord Foozlem was the First Baron; he is silent about his great-grandfather, the tinker, and his great-grandfather, the pettifogging country lawyer. Americans are far more apt to push their genealogical investigations in all directions, because they are prompted by a legitimate curiosity rather than by ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... a bent scarecrow of a fellow, was effecting repairs to his nag's harness with a piece of string. Evening was setting in, and the south-east wind swept a grey haze across the coast road and sombre marshes. The tinker completed first-aid to the harness, and stood at the front of the cart to light his lamps. The first match blew out, and he came closer to the body of the vehicle ...
— A Tall Ship - On Other Naval Occasions • Sir Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... we will allow her time enough, after giving mankind the inspired tinker who painted the Christian's life as that of a hunted animal, "never long at ease," desponding, despairing, on the verge of self-murder,—painted it with an originality, a vividness, a power and a sweetness, too, that rank him with the great authors of all time,—kind Nature, ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... into a box, intending to carry it off and throw it away in some distant place, so that they might be no more plagued by the goblin. For this day their troubles were over; but, as luck would have it, the tinker who was in the habit of working for the temple called in, and the priest suddenly bethought him that it was a pity to throw the kettle away for nothing, and that he might as well get a trifle for it, no matter how small. So he brought out the kettle, which had resumed its former ...
— Tales of Old Japan • Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford
... from the time of the Commonwealth. The earliest person of note connected with this religious body being John Bunyon, author of The Pilgrim's Progress, {84a} who espoused the cause of the Parliament against Charles I. He first preached in Bedford, where he was a tinker by trade, in the year 1655, visiting various other parts of the country in succeeding years, until he died, August 31st, 1688, and was buried ...
— A History of Horncastle - from the earliest period to the present time • James Conway Walter
... character that has not had justice done him. He is the most romantic of mechanics. And what a list of companions he has—Quince the Carpenter, Snug the Joiner, Flute the Bellows- mender, Snout the Tinker, Starveling the Tailor; and then again, what a group of fairy attendants, Puck, Peaseblossom, Cobweb, Moth, and Mustard-seed! It has been observed that Shakespeare's characters are constructed upon deep physiological principles; and there ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... neck'd, with tails erect And gold upon their blinkers; And by their side an ass I spied; It was a travelling tinker's. ...
— Fly Leaves • C. S. Calverley
... brought the old saucepan that had been laid by until the tinker's next visit, and gave it to the Hillman. He ...
— The Child's World - Third Reader • Hetty Browne, Sarah Withers, W.K. Tate
... for the fanciful, for the theorists, for the flabby idealists and doctrinaires. If I melt lead and iron and copper and silver and gold in the same pot, I get a bastard metal, do I not? It is not, as a fused product, worth a tinker's hoot. Why, even Zangwill is not an advocate of the melting-pot. He is a Jew, proud of it, and extremely solicitous for the welfare of the Jewish race. He is a Zionist—a leader of the movement to crowd the Arabs out ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... know that his being there is a compromise, and that he stands before me an Act of Parliament? That the church he occupies was built for other worship? That the Methodist chapel is next door; and that Bunyan the tinker is bawling out the tidings of damnation on the common hard by? Yes, I am a Sadducee; and I take things as I find them, and the world, and the Acts of Parliament of the world, as they are; and as I intend to take a wife, if I find ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... village about one mile south of Bedford, was Bunyan's birthplace. The house is still pointed out, though a new front has been put into it, and it is a very small building, suitable to the tinker's humble estate. The village-green where he played is near by, alongside the churchyard wall; the church, which has been little changed, stands on the farther side of the yard, with a massive tower at the north-western angle, looking more like a fortress than a religious edifice. The bells are still ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... Indian housemaids was found at an early day in "help," as it was called even then. Roger Williams, writing of his daughter, said: "She desires to spend some time in service & liked much Mrs. Brenton who wanted." John Tinker, who himself was help, wrote thus to John Winthrop; "Help is scarce, hard to get, difficult to please, uncertain, &c. Means runneth out and wages on & I cannot make choice of my help." Children of well-to-do citizens thus worked in domestic service. Members of the family ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... instrument, and press the key. Does the other instrument click? If not, disconnect the ground wire and examine all connections. Also press the sounder of each instrument down and see if it springs back readily. It may be that some screw is too tight, or too loose, or that a spring has come off; tinker awhile and see if you cannot make the instrument work. If you are unable to do so, ask ...
— Common Science • Carleton W. Washburne
... lands, trades, places, honors, preferments, states, lusts, pleasures; and delights of all sorts, as bawds, wives, husbands, children, masters, servants, lives, blood, bodies, souls, greenbacks, pearls, precious stones, and what not." The eye of the inspired tinker had pierced the darkness of two hundred years, and seen what was to come. The martial tread of hundreds of volunteer generals, just disbanded, resounded in the streets. Gorged with loot, they spent it as lavishly as Morgan's buccaneers ...
— Destruction and Reconstruction: - Personal Experiences of the Late War • Richard Taylor
... his fair face crimsoning with vexation. "She seems to me one of those shallow women who would sooner flirt with a tinker than pass unnoticed by the male sex. I don't like her," he ...
— The Silent House • Fergus Hume
... the story thought that Spare must be mad, and nobody would take up with him but a lame tinker, a beggar boy, and a poor woman, who was looked upon as a witch because she was old and ugly. As for Scrub, he went with Fairfeather to a cottage close by that of the new cobbler, and quite as fine. ...
— Granny's Wonderful Chair • Frances Browne
... was, the struggle for a time was by no means unequal, and more than once, with gigantic effort, he had all but flung off his captors. Perhaps, in the end, the task might even have been too much for the sheriff's party had it not been that a treacherous tinker, named Allan, with a hammer struck the old man a heavy blow on the face, fracturing the jaw and partially stunning him. Then, bound hand and foot, Auld Ringan was carried to Edinburgh. There, in the Tolbooth, he lay for ...
— Stories of the Border Marches • John Lang and Jean Lang
... had considerable land. His father had left it to him, but it was all swamp land, and so Hank's father, he hunted more'n he farmed, and Hank and his brothers done the same when he was a boy. But Hank, he learnt a little blacksmithing when he was growing up, cause he liked to tinker around and to show how stout he was. Then, when he married Elmira Appleton, he had to go to work practising that perfession reg'lar, because he never learnt nothing about farming. He'd sell fifteen or twenty acres, every now and then, and they'd be high times till he'd spent it up, ...
— Danny's Own Story • Don Marquis
... ballet, was a kind of pantomime, the childish incidents of which were sufficient to show the state of the dramatic art in Denmark, and the gross taste of the audience. A magician, in the disguise of a tinker, enters a cottage where the women are all busy ironing, and rubs a dirty frying-pan against the linen. The women raise a hue-and-cry, and dance after him, rousing their husbands, who join in the dance, ...
— Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark • Mary Wollstonecraft
... weeks I was so exhausted with sheer hunger that I could hardly stand on my legs. One day, when my miserable, covetous thief of a master had gone out, an angel, in the likeness of a tinker, knocked at the door, and inquired whether I had anything to mend. Suddenly a light flashed upon me. "I have lost the key of this chest," said I, "can you fit it?" He drew forth a bunch of keys, fitted it, and lo! the lid of the chest arose. "I have no money," I said to my ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VI. • Various
... Chinese. The turquoise, the emerald, the sapphire, the ruby and the other precious stones with colour have, therefore, always graced the tables of the bazars in the capital, while the diamond until very recently was relegated to the point of the tinker's drill. ...
— Court Life in China • Isaac Taylor Headland
... observed at Zacatecas which recalled far-away Hong Kong, China. This was the prosecution of various trades in the open air. Thus the shoemaker was at work outside of his dwelling; the tailor, the barber, and the tinker adopted the same practice, quite possible even in the month of March in a land of such intense brightness and sunshine. We wandered hither and thither, charmed by the novelty and strangeness of everything; not an object to remind one of home, but only of the far East. The swarthy ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... gather the spray of brilliant vermilion berries she fancied, saying meanwhile, "I wonder what he is? Tinker, ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... bridals; wherever and whenever human creatures met each other, there was ever to be found the fierce wrangle of Remonstrant and Contra-Remonstrant, the hissing of red-hot theological rhetoric, the pelting of hostile texts. The blacksmith's iron cooled on the anvil, the tinker dropped a kettle half mended, the broker left a bargain unclinched, the Scheveningen fisherman in his wooden shoes forgot the cracks in his pinkie, while each paused to hold high converse with friend or foe on fate, free- will, or absolute foreknowledge; losing himself in wandering mazes ...
— Memoir of John Lothrop Motley, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... "If the tinker laves a sthroke of the pan on the misthress's dog, the Lord help him!" said Patsey, starting in pursuit of Lily, who, with tail tucked in and a wounded hind leg buckled up, was removing herself swiftly from the ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... an early summer morning in the shade of a tree, eating fried bacon with a tinker, the thought came to me that I might some day write a book of my own: a book that should treat of the roads and by-roads, of trees, and wind in lonely places, of rapid brooks and lazy streams, of the glory of dawn, the glow of evening, and the purple solitude of ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... respectable and aristocratic; and there one don't get sent to a place unmentionable, ten times an hour, by some inspired tinker. Beside, country people like the Doctor to go to church with their betters; and the very fellows who go to the Methodist meeting themselves would think it infra dig. in me to walk in there. Now, good-bye—though I haven't introduced myself—not ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... remained to give occasional alarm and constant vexation. Some rude handicrafts were entirely resigned to these itinerants, particularly the art of trencher-making, of manufacturing horn-spoons, and the whole mystery of the tinker. To these they added a petty trade in the coarse sorts of earthenware. Such were their ostensible means of livelihood. Each tribe had usually some fixed place of rendezvous, which they occasionally occupied. and ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... wagon of singular appearance drew up before my windows. I knew it well enough: it was the vehicle of a handy, convenient man who came along every other morning to pick up odd jobs from me and my neighbors. He could tinker, carpenter, mend harness: his wife, seated in the wagon by his side, was good at a button, or could descend and help Josephine with her ironing. A visit at this hour, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various
... to make it a point to be there, and as we've got some time to kill meanwhile, let's hop over to that nice landingplace at the foot of old Thunder top, and overhaul the machine again. There are a few things I'd like to tinker with, because I'm not quite pleased with the way they work; and you know, Andy, I'm a regular crank about having a motor ...
— The Aeroplane Boys Flight - A Hydroplane Roundup • John Luther Langworthy
... and shooting Smiths, temperance Smiths and licensed victualler Smiths, Smiths with double-barrelled names and hyphens, Smiths with double-barrelled names without hyphens, Conservative Smiths and Radical Smiths, tinker Smiths, tailor Smiths, Smiths of Mercia, Smiths of Wessex,—all these and all other imaginable varieties of the tribe Smith would be, as it were, crystallized by an inexorable law forbidding the members of any of these groups to marry beyond the circle marked out by the clan name.... ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... it for a pony, dear boy," grinned Beaumanoir. "There was a deuce of a shindy when three fat johnnies tried to pull me out of my compartment. I told 'em I didn't give a tinker's continental for their bally frontier, and then the band played. I slung one joker through the window. Good job it was open, or he might ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... ravine. The question was raised whether it was not a will-o'-the-wisp that had misled the old man. A woman alleged that she had spoken with a shepherd who declared he had heard a cry for help; this, it is true, occurred about midnight, and Fualdes had left his house at eight o'clock. A stout tinker contended that the darkness had not been as dense as all believed; he himself had crossed the fields, on his way from La Valette, at nine o'clock, and the moon was then shining. The inspector of customs took ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... describes, are endured upon a public stage, thought he, why may not I?—cannot I be as useful as them? besides I can—but these men sing, I suppose—do not they sing John, much better than me?" "Noa, I tell thee they doan't: sing better than thee! they can't sing at all. A tinker's jackass is as good at it as any of them I see here. When they are on the stage (I went three or four times with our Sall to the play) od rot 'un—they make a noise by way of a song, and the musicianers sing for them on their fiddles." The man to whom honest John ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 4, April 1810 • Various
... hearts to lose, I never could spare a bit of one of them for that good, gray, square, severe man. But different people have different tastes, and here is that little imp of a gipsy-tinker ready to turn slave for my master; and, odd enough, my master,—who, I should have said beforehand, would have made short work of imp, and imp's family, and have sent Hall, the Bang-beggar, after them in no time—my master, as they tell me, is in his way ...
— My Lady Ludlow • Elizabeth Gaskell
... Thanksgiving, and Doll-in-the-Grass. Doubleday, Page and Company for The Animals' New Year's Eve and Nils and the Bear from the Further Adventures of Nils by Selma Lagerlooef. The Youth's Companion for Chip's Thanksgiving, The Rescue of Old Glory, The Tinker's Willow, The Three Brothers, and Molly's Easter Hen. The Thomas Y. Crowell Company for The Bird, and The Gray Hare from The Long Exile by Count Lyof N. Tolstoi. The American Book Company for The Three Little Butterfly Brothers. Little, Brown and Company for How Peter Rabbit Got His ...
— Tell Me Another Story - The Book of Story Programs • Carolyn Sherwin Bailey
... singularly favourable to every kind of intrigue and amusement; while the mild temper of the people and the watchfulness of the police prevented the public disorders that such license might have occasioned. These seeming anomalies abounded on every side. From the gaming-table where a tinker might set a ducat against a prince it was but a few steps to the Broglio, or arcade under the ducal palace, into which no plebeian might intrude while the nobility walked there. The great ladies, who were subject to strict sumptuary laws, and might not display ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... abroad, I suppose—tinkering round, as he does. The everlasting loafer, artist, tinker, poet, gardener. 'Pon my soul, he's like the game we used to do with cherry-stones round the pudding plate. Don't you know? Soldier, sailor, tinker, tailor, and all the rest. He's all those things, ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... to head the boarders as usual," remarked the doctor, with a quiet grin. "What is the extent of the damage? Here, sit down and let me have a look at it; don't be impatient; I'll undertake to tinker you up as good as new in two or three minutes," he continued, as I seated myself, and he began to sponge the blood away. "There is no great harm done, merely a simple laceration of the scalp. There, I think that will keep the top of your head from blowing off, until after you have demolished ...
— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood
... how near he had been to losing a wife and a fortune. Arrived off Isle of Day; Tarboe told Mr. Martin and his men that if they said "treasure-trove" till they left the island their live would not be worth "a tinker's damn." When the had sworn, he took them to Angel Point, fed then royally, gave them excellent liquor to drink, and sent them in a fishing-smack with Bissonnette to Quebec where, arriving, they told ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... a struggle for his usurped power. Richard perhaps, and the immediate friends of the deceased Protector, with such of Dryden's relations as were attached to his memory, may have thought, like the tinker at the Taming of the Shrew, that this same elegy was "marvellous good matter." It did not probably attract much general attention. The first edition, in 1659, is extremely rare: it was reprinted, however, along with those of Sprat and Waller, in the course of the ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... the sheltering eaves of a half-burned house, and cold and miserable he sobbed himself to sleep. In the morning an itinerant tinker came by and touched by the child's distress, drew from him his unhappy story. He was a lonely old man, and offered to take Ben with him, an ...
— Philip Dru: Administrator • Edward Mandell House
... a tinker—a travelling tinker. He would do a little gardening and farming at home for a while, and then go off about the country for a few days, mending people's pots and pans and kettles. Usually Sym left Emily Ann at home ...
— A Book for Kids • C. J. (Clarence Michael James) Dennis
... off are we from a revival of Danton's beautiful doctrine that, in order to consummate the regeneration of society, all conditions imposed upon the eligibility of citizens to act as judges ought to be immediately abolished, so that a tinker, or a butcher, or a bootblack, or a chiffonnier might be made a French magistrate just as well as a trained student of the laws? As you know, one of the first things Danton, as Minister of Justice, did was to carry through ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... way and another," Joe said, "but I don't know much of parsons. Somehow they haven't been in my line; but if I had to choose between being a parson or a doctor, I'd take the doctor by long odds. You see the world's pretty much of a hospital as far as he's concerned, and when he can't tinker a man up, he lets him slide off and nobody minds; but the parson's different. When a man takes sick he looks kind of friendly on the doctor, because, you see, he expects him to cure him; but when the parson comes, he tells him what a miserable ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 7 • Various
... the subject, divagating as we went, and had a nice little sentimental conversation. There are depths of human feeling I should never have suspected in this lazy panther of a woman, and although she openly avows having no more education than a tinker's dog, she can talk with considerable force and ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... of the hours and minutes, at the same time disclose the whole combination of springs and wheels whereby they are moved." A similar transparency of motive and purpose, of individual traits and spontaneous action, belongs to the Bible. From the hand of Shakspeare, "the lord and the tinker, the hero and the valet, come forth equally distinct and clear." In the Bible the various sorts of men are never confounded, but have the advantage of being exhibited by Nature herself, and are not a contrivance ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... had adorned his early history with so many myths and portents, that Niebuhr himself could hardly have distinguished between the fable and the truth. It was said and believed that he was a foundling—a Gipsy's son, a wandering beggar, a tinker. Others had seen him in rags, selling pencils at the steps between the Pont-Neuf and the Pont-au-Change. Others, again, maintained that he had for years filled the canine office of guide to an old blind mendicant, whose beat was about the ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... his gold; N was a Nobleman, gallant and bold; O was an Oysterman, who went about town; P was a Parson, and wore a black gown; Q was a Quack, with a wonderful pill; R was a Robber, who wanted to kill; S was a Sailor, who spent all he got; T was a Tinker, and mended a pot; U was an Usurer, a miserable elf; V was a Vintner, who drank all himself; W was a Watchman, who guarded the door; X was Expensive, and so became poor; Y was a Youth, that did not love school; Z was a Zany, a poor ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... one Stand-By left to him. He could prop himself up on the Bleachers with a bag of lubricated Pop-Corn between his Knees and hurl insulting Remarks at Honus Wagner, Joe Tinker and Ty Cobb. ...
— Knocking the Neighbors • George Ade
... Tanner of Tamworth" is a ballad of a kind once popular; there were "King Alfred and the Neatherd," "King Henry and the Miller," "King James I. and the Tinker," "King Henry VII. and the Cobbler," with a dozen more. "The Tanner of Tamworth" in another, perhaps older, form, as "The King and the Barker," was printed by Joseph Ritson in ...
— A Bundle of Ballads • Various
... not stir. "You whale daylights out of a lot of men who probably don't know any more about this here shooting of our dams than a hog does about a ruffled shirt. Meanwhile your drive hangs. Well? Well? Do you suppose the men who were back of that shooting, do you suppose Morrison and Daly give a tinker's dam how many men of theirs you lick? What they want is to hang our drive. If they hang our drive, it's cheap at the price of ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... observes: "It is said, and I believe with truth, that at this time (the middle of the sixteenth century) there was not a private builder between London Bridge and Gravesend, who could lay down a ship in the mould left from a Navy Board's draught, without applying to a tinker who lived ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles
... dear! its ma is making patty-cakes; and put it up there to be out of the way of Tom Tinker's dog. I'll soon hush it up," said the old woman; and, trotting it on her ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... a husband, too, has every reason to be grateful to that article of his wife's apparel which the vulgar will call "stays." In earlier days a husband used to lock his wife in a pair of iron-bound corsets when he went away from home, keeping the key in his pocket, and thus not caring a tinker's cuss if his home were simply overflowing with handsome gentleman lodgers! The poor wife couldn't retaliate by locking her husband in such a virtuous prison, because men never wore such things—which, perhaps, was one or the reasons ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... colour began to fade. He took to haunting department-store kitchenware sections. He would come home with a new kind of cream whipper, or a patent device for the bathroom. He would tinker happily with this, driving a nail, adjusting a screw. At such times he was even known to begin to whistle some scrap of a doleful tune such as he used to hum. But he would change, quickly, into something lovely. The price of butter, ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... Fesch was a master of a tavern he married the daughter of a tinker, by whom he had three children. This marriage, according to the republican regulations, had only been celebrated by the municipality at Ajaccio; Fesch, therefore, upon again entering the bosom of the Church, left his municipal wife ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... will be recollected, was born in 1628, at Elstow, near Bedford, where the cottage stood in its original state till within these few years. It has latterly been new fronted, but the interior remains nearly as in Bunyan's time. He was the son of a tinker, and followed his father's trade; and at Elstow are the remains of a closet in which, in early life, he carried on business. During the civil war he served as a soldier in the parliament army; and subsequently joined a society of Anabaptists at Bedford, and became their public teacher. Soon ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 368, May 2, 1829 • Various
... 'Tain't likely any one can git their jar in afore hern. I wouldn't advise nobody to nerve themselves up to it. There's been rumors," added Mr. Pawket, gravely—"there's been rumors as some one is tryin' to git up a rockery fer the vanilla. Now I wouldn't advise 'em to. The lady will want to tinker with that herself. But if everybody is itchin' to help, why don't they take up a nice collection er white door-knobs to trim ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... she appeared to be even more after the tinker type than Darby. Her cotton frock had once upon a time been pink and pretty as a double daisy. Now it was washed-out, worn, and, sad to say, in several places torn. At different points the skirt had rebelliously escaped from the confinement of gathers round the waist; the back gaped open where in ...
— Two Little Travellers - A Story for Girls • Frances Browne Arthur
... "Byfield, sir, is an aeronaut. He apes the fame of a Lunardi, and is on the point of offering to the inhabitants—I beg your pardon, to the nobility and gentry of our neighbourhood—the spectacle of an ascension. As one of the gentry concerned, I may be permitted to remark that I am unmoved. I care not a Tinker's Damn for his ascension. No more—I breathe in your ear—does anybody else. The business is stale, sir, stale. Lunardi did it, and overdid it. A whimsical, fiddling, vain fellow, by all accounts—for I was at that time rocking in my cradle. But once was enough. If Lunardi went up and came down, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... them in his fervently religious and romantic temperament, in his richness of representation and ingenuity of analogy, and in his forcible quaintness of style, as completely as he did in social status and in personal surroundings. In complete contrast to the romantic productions of the self-educated tinker of Bedford, the works of Walton and Evelyn were at any rate influenced by, though they can hardly be said to have been moulded upon, the style of the preceding age of old English prose writers ending with Milton. The influence ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... reproved old Grandma Watterby severely. "Here, Betty, you sit next to me, and Bob can have Will's place. He's gone over to Flame City with a bolt he wants the blacksmith to tinker up." ...
— Betty Gordon at Boarding School - The Treasure of Indian Chasm • Alice Emerson
... him perfectly friendless and penniless, so that he was glad to pick up an odd sixpence, or even less, wherever he could, till one day he fell in with Mick, who offered him his food and the chance of more by degrees, as he wanted a sharp lad to help him in his various trades—of pedlar, tinker, basket-maker, wicker-chair mender, etc., not to speak of poultry-stealing, orchard-robbing, and even child-thieving when he got a chance that seemed likely ...
— "Us" - An Old Fashioned Story • Mary Louisa S. Molesworth
... Lappo Lappi, called by his friends the careless, the happy-go-lucky, the devil-may-take-it, the God-knows-what. Called by his enemies drinker, swinker, tumbler, tinker, swiver. Called by many women that liked him pretty fellow, witty fellow, light fellow, bright fellow, bad fellow, mad fellow, and the like. Called by some women who once loved him Lapinello, Lappinaccio, little Lappo. Called now in God as a good religious should be, Lappentarius, from a sweet ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... Mathewsullin, as dry as a red herring, and as poor as a starved veezel — 0, Molly, hadst thou seen him come down the ladder, in a shurt so scanty, that it could not kiver his nakedness! — The young 'squire called him Dunquickset; but he looked for all the world like Cradoc-ap-Morgan, the ould tinker, that suffered at Abergany for steeling of kettle — Then he's a profane scuffle, and, as Mr Clinker says, no better than an impfiddle, continually playing upon the pyebill and the new-burth — I doubt he has as little manners as money; for he can't say a civil word, ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... sweat-roughened neck. "Yes, he's a good little horse, and I beg his pardon for what I said," I owned, still with the ache just back of my palate. "But he can't carry us both, Frosty; I'll just have to tinker up this old skate, and make ...
— The Range Dwellers • B. M. Bower
... fair to them to say they are not sordid. They care no more for the financial exhaustion of a nation than for the slaughter of its young men. "An old soldier like me," said Napoleon, "does not care a tinker's damn for the death of a million men." Neither does he care for the collapse ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... douce, respectable mediocrities that we are — which of us but might recall some fearful outbreak whose details are mercifully unknown to the household that calls us breadwinner and chief? What marvel that up yonder the Hunter smiles? When he knows that every one in his ken, the tinker with the statesman, has caught his bugle blast and gone forth on ...
— Pagan Papers • Kenneth Grahame
... contribution. How do I know it was? It never reached us. It's Nickleby's money and its loss is his funeral. Go and report to him and try to understand the meaning of the word 'loyalty.' Our party doesn't care a tinker's dam who has had, now has, or will have that envelope. And if you want to get thrown out by the scruff of the neck just try going to headquarters ...
— Every Man for Himself • Hopkins Moorhouse
... bordered by trees or a high hedge, so that it could not have been some trick of the moonlight. One of the girls described the appearance of the figure to a local workman, who said, "It is very like a tinker who was found dead in that forge about six ...
— True Irish Ghost Stories • St John D Seymour
... belle, a goat and a carriage, They all set off to the tinker's marriage. Two three-cornered hats, and one with a feather, They looked very fine in the sweet summer weather. But the carriage turned over, the poor goat shied, The little belle laughed, the silly beaux cried, And the tinker fumed, "Oh, why do they tarry? And why don't they come to see me marry? ...
— Very Short Stories and Verses For Children • Mrs. W. K. Clifford
... all others in advertisements for help wanted. This is the land of hustle. Tinker, tailor, candlestick-maker; lawyer, merchant, priest; if you are not a "live-wire" you are not "help wanted"—"Cook wanted. On dairy farm, twelve miles from town. White, industrious. Must be a live-wire! One that can get results. No ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... not a very merry company under the wagon tilt. There was a Tinker, with all his accoutrements of pots and kettles about him, who was lazy, as most Tinkers are when not at hard work, and lay on his back chewing straw, and cursing me fiercely whenever I moved. There was a Welsh gentleman, very ragged and dirty, with a wife raggeder and dirtier than ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 1 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... farmers into the legislature, the condition of affairs would be changed. He 'lowed that they'd make it a point to put a tax on wagons not made in the state. Well, they got in, and about all they did was to fight the railroads, tear the digest to pieces and tinker with the marriage law, as some of you folks in Old Ebenezer have good cause to know. Why, if you read the papers at the time, you recollect that one old feller from Blaxon county said that marriage license ...
— Old Ebenezer • Opie Read
... sudden flare of friendliness, "I am no baby-eater! Put a peg in that! Shiver my soul if this is a way to welcome friends! Come aboard all of you and test the Canary we got in the hold of a fine Spanish galleon last week! Such a top-heavy ship, with sails like a tinker's tatters, you never saw! And her hold running over with Canary and Madeira—oh! Come ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut
... This obvious consequence was maintained by Aetius, [67] on whom the zeal of his adversaries bestowed the surname of the Atheist. His restless and aspiring spirit urged him to try almost every profession of human life. He was successively a slave, or at least a husbandman, a travelling tinker, a goldsmith, a physician, a schoolmaster, a theologian, and at last the apostle of a new church, which was propagated by the abilities of his disciple Eunomius. [68] Armed with texts of Scripture, and with captious syllogisms from ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... from the Observation Book, December 17, 1911 At the South Pole, December 16 and 17, 1911 Mount Don Pedro Christophersen Framheim on the Return of the Polar Party Lindstrom in the Kitchen Farewell to the Barrier Bjaaland as Tinker Dogs Landed at Hobart for Dr. Mawson's Expedition Members of the Japanese Antarctic Expedition Lieutenant Prestrud An Original Inhabitant of the Antarctic Stubberud Reviews the Situation Camp on the Barrier: Eastern Expedition A Broken-off ...
— The South Pole, Volumes 1 and 2 • Roald Amundsen
... of the North Country. In Darrel, the clock tinker, wit, philosopher and man of mystery, is portrayed a force held in fetters and covered with obscurity, yet strong to make ...
— The Black Box • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... with enthusiasm. Try to imagine Samson Agonistes put on the stage today; with no academical enthusiasts or eclat of classicism to back it; but just put on before thirty thousand sight-seers, learned and vulgar, statesman and cobbler, tinker and poet; the mob all there; the groundlings far out-numbering the elite:—and all not merely sitting out the play, but roused to a frenzy of enthusiasm; and Milton himself, present and acting, the hero of the day. That, despite Mr. Whistler and the Ten ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... rummaged the wardrobe and turned every pocket inside out. It was not really a light; it made this light by flashing about so quickly, but when it came to rest for a second you saw it was a fairy, no longer than your hand, but still growing. It was a girl called Tinker Bell exquisitely gowned in a skeleton leaf, cut low and square, through which her figure could be seen to the best advantage. She was ...
— Peter and Wendy • James Matthew Barrie
... [That is, violent blowing. Cairding however, is not unlikely the proper word, a caird being in Scotland the name of a tinker.—Ed.] ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... knew all the people: the old cobbler, who sat next her, and chattered all day long like a magpie; the tinker, who had come up many a summer night to drink a-glass with Antoine; the Cheap John, who cheated everybody else, but who had always given her a toy or a trinket at every Fete Dieu all the summers she had known; the little old woman, sour as a crab, who sold ...
— Bebee • Ouida
... soldier and a sailor, A tinker and a tailor, &c. Another specimen of his wit is furnished by the following epigram of the five ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... but lately on the fugitive page of a minor magazine: 'For our part, the drunken tinker [Christopher Sly] is the most real personage of the piece, and not without some hints of the pathos that is worked out more fully, though by different ways, in Bottom and Malvolio.' Has it indeed come to this? Have the Zeitgeist ...
— The Rhythm of Life • Alice Meynell
... travelling umbrella-mender, fagoted on the back like the man in the moon of the nursery rhyme-book. He is followed at a short distance by a travelling tinker, swinging his live-coals in a sort of tin censer, and giving utterance to a hoarse and horrible cry, intelligible only to the cook who has a leaky sauce-pan. Then comes the chamois-leather woman, bundled about with damaged skins, in request for the polishing of plate and plated ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 448 - Volume 18, New Series, July 31, 1852 • Various
... Bunyan was a tinker bold, His name we all delight in; All day he tinkered pots and pans, All night he stuck ...
— A Castle in Spain - A Novel • James De Mille
... what will you gain dragging me to the priest this night, I'm saying, when it's new thoughts you'll be thinking at the dawn of day? SARAH — teasingly. — It's at the dawn of day I do be thinking I'd have a right to be going off to the rich tinker's do be travelling from Tibradden to the Tara Hill; for it'd be a fine life to ...
— The Tinker's Wedding • J. M. Synge
... by them. They felt a pleasure in this sort of protest against the extreme refinement of society, just as the collegians of Oxford, trained beyond their natural capacity in morals, love to fall into slang and, like Prince Hal, talk to every tinker in ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... even after many days, the man here began to grow good and humble. His dull unimaginative nature, a perfect lumber room of the world and its rusting affairs, had received a gift in a dream—a truth from the lips of the Lord, remodelled in the brain and heart of the tinker of Elstow, and sent forth in his wondrous parable to be pictured and printed, and lie in old Hector Crathie's cottage, that it might enter and lie in young Hector Crathie's brain until he grew old and had done wrong enough to heed it, when it rose upon him ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... begin to read the passage, where Mansie, simple soul that he was, was described as going into the byre in the morning to learn if the cow had calved during the night, and finding, on opening the door, the donkey of a traveling tinker, he turned and ran into the house, crying: "Mither! Mither! The coo has calved, an' it's ...
— The Underworld - The Story of Robert Sinclair, Miner • James C. Welsh
... not unearnestly, with every sort of reverend person I can get to talk to me—from the Bishop of Strasburg (as good a specimen of a town bishop as I have known), with whom I was studying ecstatic paintings in the year 1850—down to the simplest traveling tinker inclined Gospelwards, whom I perceive to be sincere, and your correspondent will perceive that my rapid numerical expression must be far beneath the truth. He subjoins his more rational doubt of my acquaintance with many town missionaries; ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... do what he likes, tinker and spoil the instrument, destroy my papers,—anything, so that he will stay there and leave ...
— Two on a Tower • Thomas Hardy
... dawned dismally. Miss Rawlins and her companions were to go on by post cart, and their conveyance arrived first, only two and a half hours late. It was a sort of tinker's tent on four rickety wheels. There seemed to be barely room for one within the dark interior, but both Miss Rawlins and the little Russian climbed in somehow. Charlie, the orderly, clung on by his eyelids in front, and off they went. We last saw two faces ...
— The Luck of Thirteen - Wanderings and Flight through Montenegro and Serbia • Jan Gordon
... The tinker, for such I supposed him to be, without altering his posture, raised his eyes, looked at me for a moment, gave a slight nod, and then once more fixed his eyes upon the table. I took a draught of the ale, which I found ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... "Pilgrim's Progress," born in Elstow, near Bedford, the son of a tinker, and bred himself to that humble craft; he was early visited with religious convictions, and brought, after a time of resistance to them, to an earnest faith in the gospel of Christ, his witness for which to his poor neighbours led to his imprisonment, an imprisonment ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... responsible for grouping these three sonnets under this heading. The second one beginning "What is't to live" appears in Butler's Note-Book with the remark, "This wants much tinkering, but I cannot tinker it"—meaning that he was too much occupied with other things. He left the second line of the third of these ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... you are right," he replied. "Look here," he went on, raising his voice. "There is no occasion to have such a lot in this business; Jake Watson, Bill the Tinker, and me are quite enough to carry him to his bed. I reckon the rest had better make themselves scarce when the times comes, go home, and keep their mouths shut. I need not say that anyone who lets his tongue wag about ...
— Colonel Thorndyke's Secret • G. A. Henty
... making arms for the patriots of Seventy-six, until what time the British destroyed his shop. Then he was a soldier. He suffered the horrors of Valley Forge; and before the conclusion of the peace he went abroad in the country as a tinker of clocks and watches. His peculiarity of manner and his mendicant character made him the butt of neighborhoods. In 1780 he was sent as a deputy-surveyor from Virginia into Kentucky, and after nearly two years spent in the ...
— Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century - Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World • Various
... have a regular joyous picnic on provisions brought from home. This was the life of a farmer before the days of railroads, and I am not sure but it was a more happy one than now. Then the village blacksmith or shoemaker, the tinker, the carpenter and the mechanic of every trade had his shop and was a far more important and independent citizen than now, when grouped into large manufacturing ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... and returned with a screwdriver. While Sutter looked on with apprehensive eyes, he began to tinker with the wiring. Suddenly there was a dull report and a flash of flame. Travail jerked his arm back as a thin streamer of smoke and the smell of burning insulation ...
— Made in Tanganyika • Carl Richard Jacobi
... prosecute, not our own, but her own adventure. Beyond every corner there may be a tavern or a church wherein both the saint and the sinner may be entrapped and remolded. Beyond the skyline you may find a dynamite cartridge, a drunken tinker, a mad dog, or a shilling which some person has dropped; and any one of these unexpectednesses may be potent to urge the traveler down a side street and put a crook in the straight line which had been his life, and to which he had become miserably reconciled. The ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... over head and ears into the batter, and his mother not observing him, stirred him into the pudding, and popped him into the pot to boil. The hot water made Tom kick and struggle; and his mother, seeing the pudding jump up and down in such a furious manner, thought it was bewitched; and a tinker coming by just at the time, she quickly gave him the pudding, who put it into ...
— Fairy Tales Every Child Should Know • Various
... around me. We were the usual crowd of mixed humanity—tinkers, tailors, soldiers, sailors, with our cousins, and our sisters, and our wives. So many of our eyes were wet with tears. Miss Butcher could hardly repress her sobs. Young Mr. Tinker, his face hidden behind his programme, pretended to be blowing his nose. Mrs. Apothecary's large bosom heaved with heartfelt sighs. The retired Colonel sniffed audibly. Sadness rested on our souls. It might ...
— The Angel and the Author - and Others • Jerome K. Jerome
... thesis in detail, so I will merely bid you note that aristocratic pedigree-tracers confine themselves to one line, or to a few lines. Burke will tell you that one of the great-great-grandfathers of the present Lord Foozlem was the First Baron; he is silent about his great-grandfather, the tinker, and his great-grandfather, the pettifogging country lawyer. Americans are far more apt to push their genealogical investigations in all directions, because they are prompted by a legitimate curiosity rather than by desire to prove a point, American genealogical research is biological, while ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... or madmen? Her port is all to make? You're manned by Truth and Science, and you steam for steaming's sake? Well, tinker up your engines — you know your business best — She's taking tired people to ...
— Verses 1889-1896 • Rudyard Kipling
... of Reading almost any day, an old man may be seen pushing a tinker's barrow. The small carriage is gay with yellow, red, and blue paint and bright with polished brass, and on a conspicuous place appear the words, 'Where will you spend Eternity?' The barrow-man has a pleasant, bearded face, and steady-gazing, merry, eyes, with a cheerful nod and word for every ...
— The Angel Adjutant of "Twice Born Men" • Minnie L. Carpenter
... from Cambridge to the Christian Observer, very feelingly states the case of a Gypsey family, the father of which, being a travelling tinker and fiddler, intimated, he would be glad to have all his children brought up to some other mode of life, and even to embrace some other himself; but he finds a difficulty in it. Not having been brought up in husbandry, he could ...
— A Historical Survey of the Customs, Habits, & Present State of the Gypsies • John Hoyland
... retained stuffy old Tom Hingman at seventy-five hundred dollars a year to handle the calendar in Part Five. Yet those on the inside knew why very well. It was because Tom long ago, in his prehistoric youth, had learned that the way to secure verdicts was to appear not to care a tinker's dam whether the jury found the defendant guilty or not. He pretended never to know anything about any case in advance, to be in complete ignorance as to who the witnesses might be and to what they were going to testify, and to be terribly sorry to have to prosecute the ...
— By Advice of Counsel • Arthur Train
... collar. The next thing was to get Chance started on the road to the Concho. He rolled down his sleeves and strolled to the doorway. A Mexican sat smoking and watching the road. Sundown stepped past him and began to tinker with the gas-engine. Chance stood watching him. Presently the gas-engine started with a cough and splutter. Sundown walked to the door and seemed about to enter when the Mexican called to him and pointed toward the distant tank. Water was pouring over its rim. "Gee Gosh!" exclaimed ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs
... recommend the audience to give their days and nights to the study of Bunyan and M'Cheyne. "Bunyan by all means," said I to myself, "but who is M'Cheyne that one should be mindful of him and put him for importance alongside of the immortal tinker?" ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... employment in this world is very much in his own, or in the choice of such who are most nearly concerned for him; he therefore, that foresees that he is not likely to have the advantage of a continued education, he had much better commit himself to an approved-of cobbler or tinker, wherein he may be duly respected according to his office and condition of life; than to be only a disesteemed pettifogger ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... porch Mrs. Hudson mounted grimly, followed by Babe. Sylvester stayed to tinker with the car, and Sheila, after a doubtful, tremulous moment, went slowly up the icy path ...
— Hidden Creek • Katharine Newlin Burt
... and humble. His dull unimaginative nature, a perfect lumber room of the world and its rusting affairs, had received a gift in a dream—a truth from the lips of the Lord, remodelled in the brain and heart of the tinker of Elstow, and sent forth in his wondrous parable to be pictured and printed, and lie in old Hector Crathie's cottage, that it might enter and lie in young Hector Crathie's brain until he grew old and had done wrong enough to heed it, when it rose upon him in a dream, and had its way. Henceforth ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... Stratford-on-Avon, or on a ploughman in Ayrshire, so, in a similar manner, the altogether different gift of the divine, life-giving Spirit follows no lines that Churches or institutions draw. It falls upon an Augustinian monk in a convent, and he shakes Europe. It falls upon a tinker in Bedford gaol, and he writes Pilgrim's Progress. It falls upon a cobbler in Kettering, and he founds modern Christian missions. It blows 'where it listeth,' sovereignly indifferent to the expectations and limitations ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... with a new and more bird-like aeroplane with wing curvatures studied from Lilienthal, Pilcher and Phillips, that I thought would give a different rhythm for the pitching oscillations than anything I'd had before. I was soaring my long course from the framework on the old barrow by my sheds down to Tinker's Corner. It is a clear stretch of downland, except for two or three thickets of box and thorn to the right of my course; one transverse trough, in which there is bush and a small rabbit warren, comes in from the east. I had started, and was very intent on the peculiar ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... not, madam?" said the dame. "Was not my man yonder, Rob, the tinker's son, whom my father and brethren, the smiths down yonder at Buxton, thought but scorn of, but we'd taken a sup together at the Ebbing Well, and it played neither of us false, so we held out against 'em all, and when they saw ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... stream must remain a backwoodsman; he must make his own farm or his immediate community a self-sufficing unit; he must get from his own land bread and meat and clothing for his family; he must be stock-raiser, grain-grower, farrier, tinker, soap-maker, tanner, chandler—Jack-of-all-trades and master of none. With the railroad he gained access to markets and the opportunity to specialize in one kind of farming; he could now sell his produce and buy in exchange many of the articles he had previously ...
— The Agrarian Crusade - A Chronicle of the Farmer in Politics • Solon J. Buck
... far. "This is too much," she says; "this wounded leg, these crusted lips, this anxious, weary mind. Come away for a time, until your body becomes more habitable." And so she coaxes the mind away into the Nirvana of delirium, while the little cell-workers tinker and toil within to get things better for its home-coming. When you see the veil of cruelty which nature wears, try and peer through it, and you will sometimes catch a glimpse of a ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle
... where you could find them. I trust that it has done you no harm. Well, Prior, this day week the boy shall come to you. I must get befitting clothes for him, or the other pupils will think that he is the son of a hedge tinker." ...
— A March on London • G. A. Henty
... of his story next day, and when Herbert came back and we had found a bed-room for our visitor in Essex Street, he told us all of it. His name was Magwitch—Abel Magwitch—he called himself Provis now—and he had been left by a travelling tinker to grow up alone. "In jail and out of jail, in jail and out of jail—that's my life pretty much, down to such times as I got shipped off, arter Pip stood my friend." But there was a man who "set up fur a gentleman, named Compeyson," and this Compeyson's ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol III • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... over, and Bunyan, though hardly twenty, found himself married in 1645 to a "godly" wife as young and penniless as himself. So poor were the young couple that they could scarce muster a spoon and a plate between them; and the poverty of their home deepened perhaps the gloom of the young tinker's restlessness and religious depression. His wife did what she could to comfort him, teaching him again to read and write for he had forgotten his school-learning, and reading with him in two little "godly" books which formed his library. But darkness only gathered the thicker round his ...
— History of the English People, Volume VI (of 8) - Puritan England, 1642-1660; The Revolution, 1660-1683 • John Richard Green
... particular characteristic of the Duke. Wellington, when in action, was the dumbest of dumb things, and it would have required a moral earthquake to get more than some curt order out of him. Even a "tinker's curse" or "a tuppenny damn" would have seemed loquacious in him on such an occasion. The not very sensational "Up Guards and at 'em!" was in later life disputed by the Duke. Under great pressure, the most he would admit was that ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... there seemed nothing left to do for Oliver but to stroll up and down the drive, stare through the tall gates at the motors going by, or to spend hours in the garage, sitting on a box and watching Jennings, the chauffeur, tinker with the big car that was so seldom used. Janet was able to amuse herself better, but her brother, by the third day, had reached a state of disappointed boredom that was almost ready, at any small thing, to flare out into open revolt. The very small thing ...
— The Windy Hill • Cornelia Meigs
... love of liberty nor the spur of ambition could induce him to forego his plain preaching in public places. He had so forgotten his early education that his wife had to teach him again to read and write. It was the enthusiasm of conviction which enabled this poor, ignorant, despised Bedford tinker to write his immortal allegory with such fascination that a whole world ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... lucky; any other engineer in all the navies o' the world would take a month to tinker with her, even if he didn't have to send to Bombay for a ...
— Told in the East • Talbot Mundy
... or bandaged eyes; crippled ones, with wooden legs and crutches; diseased ones, with running sores peeping from ineffectual wrappings; there was a villain-looking pedlar with his pack; a knife-grinder, a tinker, and a barber-surgeon, with the implements of their trades; some of the females were hardly-grown girls, some were at prime, some were old and wrinkled hags, and all were loud, brazen, foul-mouthed; and all soiled and slatternly; there were three ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... thing fer ye," Uncle Dick replied, leading the way from the cabin toward one of the out-buildings. "Hit's an ole coat. Dan left hit one hot day when he stopped in at my forge, to tinker the rivets to the cap o' the still. Hit was dum hot thet day, an' he left 'is coat. 'Twa'n't wuth comin' back fer. I 'low the smell's about all thet's left ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... we are willing to accept the test of Christianity which lies in its power to change men. I point to the persecutor on the road to Damascus. I point to the Bedfordshire tinker, to him that wrote Pilgrim's Progress. I point to the history of the Christian Church all down through the ages. I point to our mission fields to-day. I point to every mission hall, where earnest, honest men are working, and where, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... in so densely crowded with the human freight that the men were wedged together on the decks like herrings in barrels. They crossed from one boat to another to reach the gangways, and one by one, interminably as it seemed, with rifle gripped and pack hunched, and steel hat clattering like a tinker's kettle, came down the inclined plank and lurched ashore. They were English lads from every country; Scots, Irish, Welsh, of every regiment; Australians, New-Zealanders, South Africans, Canadians, West Indian negroes of the Garrison Artillery; Sikhs, Pathans, and Dogras of the Indian Cavalry. ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... town. The silence in the early morning was something which could be felt—not a footstep, not a rolling wheel. Window-blinds were mostly down—on the windows provided with them. Even in Bell's Wynd there was not the noise of the week. Only a tinker family squabbled over the remains of the deep drinking of the night before. But then, what could Bell's Wynd ...
— The Lilac Sunbonnet • S.R. Crockett
... State-paper Clothes) into the Man himself; and discern, it may be, in this or the other Dread Potentate, a more or less incompetent Digestive-apparatus; yet also an inscrutable venerable Mystery, in the meanest Tinker ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... a last resource, were worth returning to. As for the diary of Madame d'Arblay, it reproduces so admirably the struggles of a bright spirit against the dullest of all atmospheres, that it seems like a new discovery in psychology. And now comes Professor Tinker's "Young Boswell" and those precious diaries including that of Mrs. Pepys by a certain E. Barrington. Life ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... revival of Danton's beautiful doctrine that, in order to consummate the regeneration of society, all conditions imposed upon the eligibility of citizens to act as judges ought to be immediately abolished, so that a tinker, or a butcher, or a bootblack, or a chiffonnier might be made a French magistrate just as well as a trained student of the laws? As you know, one of the first things Danton, as Minister of Justice, did was to carry through the Convention ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... prompts conservative minds to throw every mover for change upon the defensive, when liturgical interests are at stake. So many men are born into the world with a native disposition to tamper with and tinker all settled things, and so many more become persuaded, as time goes on, of a personal "mission" to pull down and remake whatever has been once built up, esteeming life a failure unless they have contrived to build each his own monument upon a clearing, that lovers of the old ways are ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington
... a belle, a goat and a carriage, They all set off to the tinker's marriage. Two three-cornered hats, and one with a feather, They looked very fine in the sweet summer weather. But the carriage turned over, the poor goat shied, The little belle laughed, the silly beaux cried, And the tinker fumed, ...
— Very Short Stories and Verses For Children • Mrs. W. K. Clifford
... "I'm no tinker by trade, King O'Toole; I've a better trade than a tinker," says he—"what would you say," says he, "if I made your old goose as ...
— Celtic Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)
... I?—cannot I be as useful as them? besides I can—but these men sing, I suppose—do not they sing John, much better than me?" "Noa, I tell thee they doan't: sing better than thee! they can't sing at all. A tinker's jackass is as good at it as any of them I see here. When they are on the stage (I went three or four times with our Sall to the play) od rot 'un—they make a noise by way of a song, and the musicianers sing ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 4, April 1810 • Various
... out a few here," said Clark. "You know Kentucky breeds explorers. I have a good blacksmith, Shields, and Bill Bratton is another blacksmith—either can tinker a gun if need be. Then I have John Coalter, an active, strapping chap, and the two Fields boys, whom I know to be good men; and Charlie Floyd, Nate Pryor, and a couple of others—Warner and Whitehouse. We should get ...
— The Magnificent Adventure - Being the Story of the World's Greatest Exploration and - the Romance of a Very Gallant Gentleman • Emerson Hough
... American authors. Mary, there, devours Cooper's novels with a ravenous appetite with which I have no sympathy. The only American book I ever read twice was the Journal of Edward Woolman, a Quaker preacher and tinker, whose character is one of the finest I ever met. He tells a story or two about negro slaves that brought the tears into my eyes. I can read no prose now, though Hazlitt sometimes, to be sure—but then Hazlitt is worth all the modern prose-writers ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... a rule they had no time left in which to learn anything whatever of the progress of their own age, or the nineteenth-century development of the Empire. At that time a national schoolboy destined to earn his living as a soldier or a sailor, or a tinker or a tailor, sometimes knew a little of the Saxon kings of England, or even a few dates connected with the Norman Conquest, and the fact that Henry VIII. had six wives. But he had never heard of the Reform Bill, and knew nothing whatever ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... high-crowned hat on his head, he made a figure so comical that even Hogarth's humour can scarcely parallel; yet our hero thought himself of something else to render his disguise more impenetrable: he therefore borrowed a little hump-backed child of a tinker, and two more of some others of his community. There remained now only in what situation to place the children, and it was quickly resolved to tie two to his back, and to take ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Bampfylde Moore Carew • Unknown
... as a starved veezel — 0, Molly, hadst thou seen him come down the ladder, in a shurt so scanty, that it could not kiver his nakedness! — The young 'squire called him Dunquickset; but he looked for all the world like Cradoc-ap-Morgan, the ould tinker, that suffered at Abergany for steeling of kettle — Then he's a profane scuffle, and, as Mr Clinker says, no better than an impfiddle, continually playing upon the pyebill and the new-burth — I doubt he has as little manners as money; for he can't say a civil word, much more ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... Rogue and a stout one, A most courageous drinker, I doe excell, 'tis knowne full well, The Ratter, Tom, and Tinker. Still doe I cry, good your Worship good Sir, Bestow one small Denire, Sir [1] And brauely at the bousing Ken [2] He bouse it all ...
— Musa Pedestris - Three Centuries of Canting Songs - and Slang Rhymes [1536 - 1896] • John S. Farmer
... developed personality, characteristics and aptitudes of his own, appropriate to a canine of high intelligence. As it is, there are false memories of aptitudes Homer never had nor could have. Physical limitations alone make some of them impossible. How could a dog tinker with machinery, for example? Yet I 'remember' working on machines of my own design. Homer's mind, in other words, remembers as first-person ...
— The Short Life • Francis Donovan
... trying to build their own cars," said Ernest. "More accidents come from that than people realize. While the war was going on, no one had time to tinker at building, but now half the chaps I know are studying up and attempting to ...
— Battling the Clouds - or, For a Comrade's Honor • Captain Frank Cobb
... Part of this Canto is the Relation of our Hero's being put into a Pudding, and convey'd away in a Tinker's Budget; which is design'd by our Author to prove, if it is understood literally, That the greatest Men are subject to Misfortunes. But it is thought by Dr. B—tly to be all Mythology, and to contain the Doctrine ...
— Parodies of Ballad Criticism (1711-1787) • William Wagstaffe
... more the tinker's way Mended and patched from day to day, Content with piecing part with part, But took the mighty problem whole, Beginning with the human heart: For noble rulers make in vain Unselfish laws for selfish men, ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson, an Elegy; And Other Poems • Richard Le Gallienne
... peasants was established at Heilbrunn. The counts of Lowenstein were taken prisoners, dressed in a smock-frock, and then, a white staff having been placed in their hands, they were compelled to swear to the twelve articles. "Brother George, and thou, brother Albert," said a tinker of Ohringen to the counts of Hohenlohe who had gone to their camp, "swear to conduct yourselves as our brethren, for you also are now peasants; you are no longer lords." Equality of rank, the dream of many democrats, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... cut, have always been more popular with the Chinese. The turquoise, the emerald, the sapphire, the ruby and the other precious stones with colour have, therefore, always graced the tables of the bazars in the capital, while the diamond until very recently was relegated to the point of the tinker's drill. ...
— Court Life in China • Isaac Taylor Headland
... that if Agrippa once got his hands on a clock it would never run as well as before, and afterward one had to let him tinker it at least once a year, or it would stop going altogether. The old man tried to do honest and conscientious work, but just the name he ruined all the ...
— The Emperor of Portugalia • Selma Lagerlof
... Tinker, Which was a good Ale drinker; He never was a Shrinker, Believe me this is true; And he came from the wild of Kent, When all his Money was gone and spent, Which made him look like a Jack-a-Lent, And Joan's ...
— Wit and Mirth: or Pills to Purge Melancholy, Vol. 5 of 6 • Various
... not he stark blind, that as he cannot himself distinguish of colours, so he would make us as mope-eyed in judging falsely of all love concerns, and wheedle us into a thinking that we are always in the right? Thus every Jack sticks to his own Jill; every tinker esteems his own trull; and the hob-nailed suiter prefers Joan the milk-maid before any of my lady's daughters. These things are true, and are ordinarily laughed at, and yet, however ridiculous they seem, it is hence only that all societies ...
— In Praise of Folly - Illustrated with Many Curious Cuts • Desiderius Erasmus
... replied the disgusted skipper of the Wireless. "No use in my trying to tinker with the job. It will take a practical machinist to overhaul the plagued contraption. I guess you'll have to give us a tow to Memphis, where I can put a man to work getting this engine in some ...
— Motor Boat Boys Mississippi Cruise - or, The Dash for Dixie • Louis Arundel
... I would. And there isn't a mechanic in that entire club that wouldn't. There isn't a lawyer, doctor, editor, author, tinker, loafer, railroad president, saint-land, there isn't a human being in the United States that ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... which consisted of eight or ten men, was hardly ever together except at decisive moments, and we were usually scattered by twos and threes about the towns and villages. Each one of us pretended to have some trade. One was a tinker, another was a groom; I was supposed to peddle haberdashery, but I hardly ever showed myself in large places, on account of my unlucky business at Seville. One day, or rather one night, we were to meet below Veger. El Dancaire ...
— Carmen • Prosper Merimee
... your stumps. We can slip out before anybody else awakes, grab something to eat in the pantry, and go down to the shed and tinker on the plane. Come on, Bob, we can get in a couple of hours work before ...
— The Radio Boys on the Mexican Border • Gerald Breckenridge
... uproar, the Rector entered the village, and was coming full upon Scourhill and his retinue when the ass made a sudden halt before the door of a tinker, its master, and threw its rider upon a large heap of mire. The youth instantly started up, and, without ever looking behind him to thank his attendants for the procession, he ran home to ...
— Forgotten Tales of Long Ago • E. V. Lucas
... the look-out. Mr. Ambrose inwardly wondered where the man could be hiding. Billingsfield was not, he believed, an easy place to hide in, for every ploughman knew his fellow, and a new face was always an object of suspicion. Not a gipsy tinker entered the village but what every one heard of it, and though tramps came through from time to time, it would be a difficult matter for one of them to remain two days in the place without attracting a great deal of attention. It was possible that Walter ...
— A Tale of a Lonely Parish • F. Marion Crawford
... bridge—you can stand by me and see me win—or perhaps you'd like a side bet. Then we might turn into the park to give the girls a treat—eh, what?—and go on to the New Bridge Club to dress. After that there's the old sporting shanty and a bit of a mill between Neddy Tinker and Marsh Hill. You never saw a fight, I suppose? Man, but your ...
— Aladdin of London - or Lodestar • Sir Max Pemberton
... don't find fault with that dispensation in particular. It was one of our calling that the Emperor so honoured, after all, when he might have anointed a tinker, or a ragman, or a street woman's pensioner even. Who knows but that we should have been king's too, but for my crooked legs and your ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... Ship! I've loved and left more of them than I can remember. I've been nearly everything you can think of but a tinker or a soldier; I've been a boundary rider; I've sheared sheep and humped my swag and harpooned a whale; I've rigged ships and skinned dead bullocks and prospected for gold—and turned my back on more money than the old man would have scraped together ...
— One Day More - A Play In One Act • Joseph Conrad
... was. Lavengro flies from London and hack authorship, and takes to the roads from fear of consumption; it is expensive to put up at inns, and even at public- houses, and Lavengro has not much money; so he buys a tinker's cart and apparatus, and sets up as tinker, and subsequently as blacksmith; a person living in a tent, or in anything else, must do something or go mad; Lavengro had a mind, as he himself well knew, with some slight tendency to madness, ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... went by at a gallop, never pulling up while in sight of me. Then I passed the cow and went on, stopping an hour later at a lonely log house, where I found French people, and a welcome that included moose meat, a cup of coffee, and fried potatoes. Leaving, I rode some miles with a travelling tinker, a voluble, well-meaning youth who took a liking for me, and went far out of his way to help me on. He blushed proudly when, stopping to mend a pot for the cook at a camp of militia, they inquired if ...
— D'Ri and I • Irving Bacheller
... "Too hard. He had no right to be carryin' all that tinker's stuff. That man of yours, my girl, oughtn't to be let ...
— Love of Brothers • Katharine Tynan
... influences lay in the past belong by their date to this period. John Bunyan, a poor tinker, whose reading was almost wholly in the Bible and Fox's Book of Martyrs, imprisoned for twelve years in Bedford jail for preaching at conventicles, wrote and, in 1678, published his Pilgrim's Progress, the greatest of religious allegories. Bunyan's spiritual ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... his adversaries bestowed the surname of the Atheist. His restless and aspiring spirit urged him to try almost every profession of human life. He was successively a slave, or at least a husbandman, a travelling tinker, a goldsmith, a physician, a schoolmaster, a theologian, and at last the apostle of a new church, which was propagated by the abilities of his disciple Eunomius. Armed with texts of Scripture, and with ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... throw it on the screen of your own accord. If you don't, I'll put on enough voltage to burn your brain out. Remember, I can read your dead brain as well as though it were alive, but I want your thoughts, as well as your knowledge, and I'm going to have them. If you give them voluntarily, I will tinker up a lifeboat that you can navigate back to your own world and let you go; if you resist I intend getting them anyway and you shall not leave this vessel alive. You may ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... the still noon of night, The hallalloo of fire in every street! Odsbobs! I have a mind to hang myself, To think I should a grandmother be made By such a rascal!—Sure the king forgets When in a pudding, by his mother put, The bastard, by a tinker, on a stile Was dropp'd.—O, good lord Grizzle! can I bear To see him from a pudding mount the throne? Or can, oh can, my Huncamunca bear To take a pudding's ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... mentioned in your letter; and I hope Mr. Rives will be able to tell me you are entirely restored. But our machines have now been running seventy or eighty years, and we must expect that, worn as they are, here a pivot, there a wheel, now a pinion, next a spring, will be giving way; and however we may tinker them up for a while, all will at length surcease motion. Our watches, with works of brass and steel, wear out within that period. Shall you and I last to see the course the seven-fold wonders of the times will take? The Attila of the ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... women, called at the door. She had on a very long brown cloak, and a very white cap, without bonnet. Her face was brown, but it had plainly once been fair. She led a little barefooted child about two years old by the hand, and said her husband, who was a tinker, was gone before with the other children. I gave her a piece of bread. Afterwards, on my road to Ambleside, beside the bridge at Rydal, I saw her husband sitting at the roadside, his two asses standing beside ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... peace, and bein' tarrified—for I don't hold with old women—I laid a task on her which I thought 'ud silence her. I never reckoned the old scrattle 'ud risk her neckbone at Lewes Assizes for your sake, Miss Phil. But she did. She up an' stole, I tell ye, as cheerful as a tinker. You might ha' knocked me down with any one of them liddle spoons when she brung 'em in ...
— Rewards and Fairies • Rudyard Kipling
... it was for scientific reasons that I persuaded the old "Badger" to stand in with me in the matter. So we will tinker at the conduit-pipes a little, and dig up a little bit of the shore, and it shan't cost the town a sixpence. That will ...
— An Enemy of the People • Henrik Ibsen
... began to fade. He took to haunting department-store kitchenware sections. He would come home with a new kind of cream whipper, or a patent device for the bathroom. He would tinker happily with this, driving a nail, adjusting a screw. At such times he was even known to begin to whistle some scrap of a doleful tune such as he used to hum. But he would change, quickly, into something lovely. ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... cost me another ten to put it in shape, but after that it will do all right. Will you deliver it to a man that I send after it? I'll take it down to the Riverton shops and work on it. They let me tinker things there whenever ...
— The Hilltop Boys on the River • Cyril Burleigh
... all examples of the same gentle and painstaking craft that their writers have before now exhibited elsewhere. Here are no sensational happenings; the drama of the tales is wholly emotional. My own favourites are the first, called "The Little Tinker," a half-ironical study of the temptation of a tramp mother to surrender her child to the blessings of civilisation; and how, by the intervention of a terrible old woman, the queen of the tribe, this ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 152, Feb. 7, 1917 • Various
... man. For Asa Skinner was a man possessed of a belief, of that sentiment of the sublime before which all inequalities are leveled, that transport of conviction which seems superior to all laws of condition, under which debauchees have become martyrs; which made a tinker an artist and a camel-driver the founder of an empire. This was with Asa Skinner to-night, as he stood ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... why tar supplies all sorts of useful material is because it is indeed the quintessence of the forest, of the forests of untold millenniums if it is coal tar. If you are acquainted with a village tinker, one of those all-round mechanics who still survive in this age of specialization and can mend anything from a baby-carriage to an automobile, you will know that he has on the floor of his back shop a heap of broken machinery from which he can get almost anything ...
— Creative Chemistry - Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries • Edwin E. Slosson
... sufficient number remained to give occasional alarm and constant vexation. Some rude handicrafts were entirely resigned to these itinerants, particularly the art of trencher-making, of manufacturing horn-spoons, and the whole mystery of the tinker. To these they added a petty trade in the coarse sorts of earthenware. Such were their ostensible means of livelihood. Each tribe had usually some fixed place of rendezvous, which they occasionally occupied. and considered as their standing camp, and in ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... work on hand than to tinker with their constitution. At the root of their troubles had been the neglect of the Bible. In order, therefore, to restore the Bible to its proper position in Church esteem, the Brethren now established the Theological College at Gnadenfeld (1818). There John Plitt took the training ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... Skeets and me help you some? Skeets will be here again next week and I love to tinker and contrive and make all sorts of things; it'll be fun to ...
— Radio Boys Cronies • Wayne Whipple and S. F. Aaron
... about women, because of the thing that had happened, and so hadn't got any reasonable sort of use for money—he began to make it. That's the secret of success, that is. Because he didn't care what he called a tinker's cuss about being foreman he was made foreman—then, for the same reason, manager. Then he got sort of interested in seeing the money come in. He didn't want it himself, but it struck him that it wouldn't be a bad thing to pay back his mother and his sisters ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... movement of the scenes in which they appear. Some of these scenes are very effective on the stage, but they are not of a sort to reveal Shakespeare's greatest qualities. The induction, the framework in which the play is set, is, however, quite another matter. The story of the drunken tinker, Sly, unfortunately omitted in many modern presentations, is a little masterpiece. A nobleman returning from the hunt finds Sly lying in a drunken stupor before an inn. The nobleman has Sly taken to his country house, has him dressed in rich clothing, has him awakened by servants ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... an alehouse under Cotswold, He had made sure of his very Cleopatra, Drunk with enormous, salvation-contemning Love for a tinker. ...
— The Years Between • Rudyard Kipling
... refuse, are employed in the production of the prussiate of potash, that beautiful, yellow, crystallized salt, which is exhibited in the shops of some of our chemists. The worn-out saucepans and tinware of our kitchens, when beyond the reach of the tinker's art, are not utterly worthless. We sometimes meet carts loaded with old tin kettles and worn-out iron coal-skuttles traversing our streets. These have not yet completed their useful course; the less corroded parts are cut into strips, punched ...
— On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures • Charles Babbage
... of springs and wheels whereby they are moved." A similar transparency of motive and purpose, of individual traits and spontaneous action, belongs to the Bible. From the hand of Shakspeare, "the lord and the tinker, the hero and the valet, come forth equally distinct and clear." In the Bible the various sorts of men are never confounded, but have the advantage of being exhibited by Nature herself, and are not a contrivance of the imagination. "Shylock," observes a recent critic, "seems so much a man ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... But James, with a glance at his father, who was stoutly orthodox, averred that Caesar's conduct was justifiable, inasmuch as the man he barked at was one of a band of new-light fanatics who worshipped in the school- house, and the horse, moreover, was not shod at a respectable place, but at a tinker's shop in the verge of the township. A dog with such powers of discrimination certainly merits a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various
... of Baxter and Howe must be added the name of a man far below them in station and in acquired knowledge, but in virtue their equal, and in genius their superior, John Bunyan. Bunyan had been bred a tinker, and had served as a private soldier in the parliamentary army. Early in his life he had been fearfully tortured by remorse for his youthful sins, the worst of which seem, however, to have been such as the world thinks venial. His keen ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... solicit my regard, I must own the secret purport of their lives is still inscrutable to man. Is man the friend, or is he the patron only? Have they indeed forgotten nature's voice? or are those moments snatched from courtiership when they touch noses with the tinker's mongrel, the brief reward and pleasure of their artificial lives? Doubtless, when man shares with his dog the toils of a profession and the pleasures of an art, as with the shepherd or the poacher, the affection warms and strengthens ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... his own nature into every ordinance: if you devise a superhuman commandment so cunningly that it cannot be misinterpreted in terms of his will, he will denounce it as seditious blasphemy, or else disregard it as either crazy or totally unintelligible. Parliaments and synods may tinker as much as they please with their codes and creeds as circumstances alter the balance of classes and their interests; and, as a result of the tinkering, there may be an occasional illusion of moral evolution, as when ...
— Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion • George Bernard Shaw
... if we will allow her time enough, after giving mankind the inspired tinker who painted the Christian's life as that of a hunted animal, "never long at ease," desponding, despairing, on the verge of self-murder,—painted it with an originality, a vividness, a power and a sweetness, too, that ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... morning upon the Introduction to the Chronicles; it may be thought egotistical. Learned a bad accident had happened yesterday. A tinker (drunk I suppose) entered the stream opposite to Faldonside with an ass bearing his children. The ass was carried down by the force of the stream, and one of the little creatures was drowned; the other was brought out alive, poor innocent, clinging to the ass. It had floated ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... of thought and feeling which, whatever they may be worth, are his own, without a parental anxiety in regard to the fate of his offspring. And there are few prefaces which do not in some way betray this nervousness. I confess to a respect for even the prefatory doggerel of good Tinker Bunyan—a respect for his paternal tenderness toward his book, not at all for his villainous rhyming. When I saw, the other day, the white handkerchiefs of my children waving an adieu as they sailed away from me, a profound anxiety ...
— The End Of The World - A Love Story • Edward Eggleston
... never learned to use tools properly," said his father. "Where do you suppose I'd be now if I hadn't started out when I was a boy to tinker round a farm? That's where I got my manual training, and there isn't a course in the country that can equal it. I had to use my brains, too, as well as my hands, for very often the things I needed were not to be had and I was forced ...
— The Story of Porcelain • Sara Ware Bassett
... his future son-in-law, and summoned the wise men of his court to ask if there was no way out of the difficulty. The council at once decided that Canetella was far too dainty a morsel for the mouth of such a travelling tinker, and advised the king to offer Moscione a present of gold, which no doubt a beggar like him would prefer to all ...
— The Grey Fairy Book • Various
... take my advice, sir, you'll have nothing to do with him. Keep your hand out o' the pot; there's no man can skim boiling lead with his hand and not burn his fingers—but a tinker." ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... shook the ladder a good deal as he ascended, and seemed to enjoy the terror of young Butler, so that, when they had both come up, they looked on each other with no friendly eyes. Neither, however, spoke. The young caird, or tinker, or gipsy, with a good deal of attention, assisted Lady Staunton up a very perilous ascent which she had still to encounter, and they were followed by David Butler, until all three stood clear of the ravine on the side of a mountain, whose ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... watch-maker. Then he became a gunsmith, making arms for the patriots of Seventy-six, until what time the British destroyed his shop. Then he was a soldier. He suffered the horrors of Valley Forge; and before the conclusion of the peace he went abroad in the country as a tinker of clocks and watches. His peculiarity of manner and his mendicant character made him the butt of neighborhoods. In 1780 he was sent as a deputy-surveyor from Virginia into Kentucky, and after nearly two years spent in the country between the Kentucky and Green rivers, he went back to Philadelphia. ...
— Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century - Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World • Various
... my time I have seen a boy do wonders. Robin, the red tinker, had a boy Would ha run ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... Company for The Story of the First Thanksgiving, and Doll-in-the-Grass. Doubleday, Page and Company for The Animals' New Year's Eve and Nils and the Bear from the Further Adventures of Nils by Selma Lagerlooef. The Youth's Companion for Chip's Thanksgiving, The Rescue of Old Glory, The Tinker's Willow, The Three Brothers, and Molly's Easter Hen. The Thomas Y. Crowell Company for The Bird, and The Gray Hare from The Long Exile by Count Lyof N. Tolstoi. The American Book Company for The Three Little Butterfly Brothers. Little, Brown and Company ...
— Tell Me Another Story - The Book of Story Programs • Carolyn Sherwin Bailey
... considerin'," said the captain, addressing me, "what's the best thing to do with yer boat; there's no use tryin' to tinker her up, for she has got a bad hole in her, and it is our fault, too. One of the iron bands on our rudder got broke and sprung out a good while ago, and it must have been the sharp end of that which punched into yer boat ...
— The House of Martha • Frank R. Stockton
... temper of the people and the watchfulness of the police prevented the public disorders that such license might have occasioned. These seeming anomalies abounded on every side. From the gaming-table where a tinker might set a ducat against a prince it was but a few steps to the Broglio, or arcade under the ducal palace, into which no plebeian might intrude while the nobility walked there. The great ladies, who were subject to strict sumptuary laws, and ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... came the tug of war. My patriotism then blazed forth, and I determined to save my country! Oh, my friend, I have been in such holes and corners; such filthy nooks and filthy corners; sweep offices and oyster cellars! 'I have sworn brother to a leash of drawers, and can drink with any tinker in his own language during my life,'—faugh! I shall not be able to bear the smell of small beer and tobacco for a month to come.... Truly this saving one's country is a nauseous piece of business, and if patriotism is such a dirty virtue,—prythee, ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... hoarded his gold; N was a Nobleman, gallant and bold; O was an Oysterman, who went about town; P was a Parson, and wore a black gown; Q was a Quack, with a wonderful pill; R was a Robber, who wanted to kill; S was a Sailor, who spent all he got; T was a Tinker, and mended a pot; U was an Usurer, a miserable elf; V was a Vintner, who drank all himself; W was a Watchman, who guarded the door; X was Expensive, and so became poor; Y was a Youth, that did not love school; Z was a ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... and make her bed, and wash her clothes, while she earns money to spend on herself? And she is doing everything in her power to keep me at it, because she likes what she is doing and what it brings her, and she doesn't give a tinker whether I like what I am doing or not; or whether I get anything I want out of it or not; or whether I miss getting off to Normal on time or not. She is blame selfish, that's what she is, so she won't like the jolt she's ...
— A Daughter of the Land • Gene Stratton-Porter
... the Carpenter, Snug the Ioyner, Bottome the Weauer, Flute the bellowes-mender, Snout the Tinker, and Starueling the Taylor. ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... was that when Mrs. Kilfoyle saw who Ody's companions were, she bade a regretful adieu to her hopes of recovering her stolen property. For how could she set him on the Tinker's felonious track without apprising them likewise? You might as well try to huroosh one chicken off a rafter and not scare the couple that were huddled beside it. The impossibility became more obvious presently as the constables, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... Peter's shadow, rummaged the wardrobe and turned every pocket inside out. It was not really a light; it made this light by flashing about so quickly, but when it came to rest for a second you saw it was a fairy, no longer than your hand, but still growing. It was a girl called Tinker Bell exquisitely gowned in a skeleton leaf, cut low and square, through which her figure could be seen to the best advantage. She ...
— Peter and Wendy • James Matthew Barrie
... it not unfrequently happens that a tinker or coal heaver hears a sermon or falls in with a tract which alarms him about the state of his soul. If he be a man of excitable nerves and strong imagination, he thinks himself given over to the Evil Power. He ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... modern drama there were no queens for her to play; and as to the older literature of our stage: did it not provoke the veteran actress in Sir Arthur Pinero's Trelawny of the Wells to declare that, as parts, queens are not worth a tinker's oath? Miss Kingston's comment on my suggestion, though more elegantly worded, was to the same effect; and it ended in my having to make good my advice by writing Great Catherine. History provided no other queen capable of standing ...
— Great Catherine • George Bernard Shaw
... to puzzle out his philosophy. For the ordinary French philosophy of the war is very simple. They have no high-falutin, altruistic ideas of improving the Boche. They don't care a tinker's curse what happens to the unholy brood beyond the Rhine, so long as they are beaten, humiliated, subjected: so long as there is no chance of their ever deflowering again with their brutality the sacred soil of France. The French mind cannot conceive the idea of ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... too lofty McDonough was, and too high-minded, bringing in a woman was maybe no lawful wife, or no honest child itself, but it might be a bychild or a tinker's brat, and he giving out no account of her generations or ...
— New Irish Comedies • Lady Augusta Gregory
... before them will hire girls at less than any one could exist on in decency. When they meet these same girls in the hall or when they come directly into contact with them in their work they may be polite enough, but their politeness is not worth a tinker's curse. Justice must come first. Only if the employer pays a fair day's wage can he expect a fair day's work. "Even then," he protests, "I can't get it." And this is, unfortunately, in large measure true. As Kipling said some few years ago, ...
— The Book of Business Etiquette • Nella Henney
... seem like Marse have all de trouble in de world. He boy, Ned, die in de war and William, what name for he pa, drink bad all de time. And after de war dem Ku Kluxers what wear de false faces try to tinker with Marse's niggers. One day Uncle Dave start to town and a Kluxer ask him where am he pass. Dat Kluxer clout him but Uncle Dave outrun him in de cane. Marse grab de hoss and go 'rest dat man and Marse a jedge and ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Texas Narratives, Part 1 • Works Projects Administration
... snapped out. "I don't begrudge the poor devils their soup. What I feel is this: If she'd cared a tinker's damn for me she'd never have ...
— The Amazing Interlude • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... pass that on a certain day Festus Clasby was passing through the outskirts of the nearest country town on his homeward journey, his cart laden with provisions. At the same moment the spare figure of a tinker whose name was Mac-an-Ward, the Son of the Bard, veered around the corner of a street with a new tin can under his arm. It was the Can with the ...
— Waysiders • Seumas O'Kelly
... at the village of Elstow, just outside of Bedford, in central England. After very slight schooling and some practice at his father's trade of tinker, he was in 1644 drafted for two years and a half into garrison service in the Parliamentary army. Released from this occupation, he married a poor but excellent wife and worked at his trade; but the important experiences of his life were the religious ones. Endowed by nature with ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... countryside cottage, I saw scrawled over the door, "Good beer sold here." Being overcome with thirst, I went in to taste the beverage. Along the wall opposite where I sat in the well-sanded kitchen was the most disconsolate family I had ever seen, consisting of a tinker, his wife, a pretty-looking woman, who had evidently been crying, and a ragged boy and girl. I treated them to a large measure of beer, and in a few minutes the tinker was telling me his history. That conversation ended very curiously, for I purchased ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... of letters, of printing, of critics; wars, revolutions, factions, and other causes, occasioned these defects in ancient history. Chronology and astronomy are forced to tinker up and reconcile, as well as they can, those uncertainties. This satisfies the learned—but what should we think of the reign of George the Second, to be calculated two thousand years hence by eclipses, ...
— Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third • Horace Walpole
... joined in having a good time at the tinker's expense, and pronounced him "the prince of good ...
— The Expressman and the Detective • Allan Pinkerton
... young tinker-woman, with an orange-coloured kerchief about her head, appears in the doorway with ...
— Krindlesyke • Wilfrid Wilson Gibson
... their united efforts, they forced it into a box, intending to carry it off and throw it away in some distant place, so that they might be no more plagued by the goblin. For this day their troubles were over; but, as luck would have it, the tinker who was in the habit of working for the temple called in, and the priest suddenly bethought him that it was a pity to throw the kettle away for nothing, and that he might as well get a trifle for it, no matter ...
— Tales of Old Japan • Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford
... those young fellows had not made asses of themselves. What's to be done? Tenant certainly has a large amount of individual property. It is worth saving. Respectable old name—if he keeps his money. (Hiram smiled grimly.) I will step round at once and offer my services, before other folks begin to tinker with him.' ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... stroke of the mallet denoted the presence of the carpenter; and the sharper clink of a hammer told of old Fogy, the family "milliner," being at work; but it was not on millinery Fogy was now employed, though neither was it legitimate tinker's work. He was scrolling out with his shears, and beating into form, a plate of tin, to serve for the shield on O'Grady's coffin, which was to record his name, age, and day of departure; and this was the second ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover
... was a tinker—a travelling tinker. He would do a little gardening and farming at home for a while, and then go off about the country for a few days, mending people's pots and pans and kettles. Usually Sym left Emily Ann at home to keep the Little Red House company, but now ...
— A Book for Kids • C. J. (Clarence Michael James) Dennis
... misapprehension that I had written it. I wish I had. I suppose there must be something attractive about a fellow who has the courage to write a love letter on the back of a trunk tag, and who doesn't give a tinker's damn who finds it. But for my peace of mind, ask him not to leave another one around where I will ...
— When a Man Marries • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... for ninety-nine of your qualities I do not care a tinker's curse; but for your palate you are to ...
— I Saw Three Ships and Other Winter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... not have it. But all the other things which we have laid out you may bring to me today or tomorrow." And he gave his name and address. Then he went back to the table to finish his beer. Only one of his former companions was sitting there, a master-tinker. ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... as a community," he stated, "and we shirk our duty as a community because we believe in our hearts that we aren't a community. What does Jones or Smith or Robinson or anybody else really care for Italian Bar as a place; or, indeed, for California as a place? Not a tinker's damn! He came out here in the first place to make his pile, and in the second place to have a good time. He isn't dependent on any one's good opinion, as he used to be at home. He refuses to be bothered with responsibilities and ...
— Gold • Stewart White
... "There's a Tinker's boy in the town," said the Innkeeper, darkly, "and he's always looking out for Hedgehogs—I shouldn't be surprised if he heard ...
— Soap-Bubble Stories - For Children • Fanny Barry
... face crimsoning with vexation. "She seems to me one of those shallow women who would sooner flirt with a tinker than pass unnoticed by the male sex. I don't like her," ...
— The Silent House • Fergus Hume
... ye," Uncle Dick replied, leading the way from the cabin toward one of the out-buildings. "Hit's an ole coat. Dan left hit one hot day when he stopped in at my forge, to tinker the rivets to the cap o' the still. Hit was dum hot thet day, an' he left 'is coat. 'Twa'n't wuth comin' back fer. I 'low the smell's about all ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... the desolateness of lonely wolds, with the passion of loyalty to a leader. Read "Deor's Lament," "Widsith," "The Wanderer," "The Sea-farer," or the battle-songs of Brunanburh and Maldon in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. [Footnote: See Cook and Tinker, Select Translations from Old English Poetry (Boston, 1902), and Pancoast and Spaeth, Early English Poems (New York, 1911).] The last strophe of "Deor's Lament," our oldest English lyric, ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... have done original work will tell us that it is easier to do good work by striking out on new lines than it is to follow the work of others, or even to tinker over some of their own inventions of other years. It requires more ability to take up the work of another and change it, than to start out in ...
— Industrial Progress and Human Economics • James Hartness
... piston and cylinder and crank and joint and condenser—in short, fully to understand the underlying principle of its construction. He took it to pieces for cleaning whenever it was needful; he made working models of it after his old childish pattern; he even ventured to tinker it up when out of order on his own responsibility. Thus he learnt at last something of the theory of the steam-engine, and learnt also by the way a great deal about the general principles of mechanical ...
— Biographies of Working Men • Grant Allen
... fir-tree with his back to the house. From here he could see the long garden. He was fond of his garden, and spent what few moments he could spare from work and games pottering about it. He had his views as to what the ideal garden should be, and he hoped in time to tinker his own three acres up to the desired standard. At present there remained much to be done. Why not, for instance, take away those laurels at the end of the lawn, and have a flower-bed there instead? Laurels lasted ...
— Mike • P. G. Wodehouse
... Akenside, and Kirke White were the sons of butchers; Bunyan was a tinker, and Joseph Lancaster a basket-maker. Among the great names identified with the invention of the steam- engine are those of Newcomen, Watt, and Stephenson; the first a blacksmith, the second a maker ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... old sites and buildings may be here mentioned. The County Court occupies what was then a tinker's shop and a farm-yard behind; the pedal stone of the ancient Cross, now in the Institute garden, was then at the back entrance to the Bull Yard, near Mr. Innes' shop, having been removed from the Cross a few years before; the market place ...
— Fragments of Two Centuries - Glimpses of Country Life when George III. was King • Alfred Kingston
... forgets nothing. That which has been, is.' His eye fell on something bright in the field beyond. He would see what it was, and crossed the earthen dyke. It shone like a little moon in the grass. By humouring the reflection he reached it. It was only a cutting of white iron, left by some tinker. He walked on over the field, thinking of Shargar's mother. If he could but find her! He walked on and on. He had no inclination to go home. The solitariness of the night, the uncanniness of the moon, prevents most people from wandering far: Robert had learned long ago to love the night, ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... Hale: 'Alas! poor woman.' Twisden: 'Poverty is your cloak, for I hear your husband is better maintained by running up and down a-preaching than by following his calling?' Sir Matthew Hale: 'What is his calling?' Elizabeth: 'A tinker, please you my Lord; and because he is a tinker, and a poor man, therefore he is despised and cannot have justice.' Sir Matthew Hale: 'I am truly sorry we can do you no good. Sitting here we can only act as the law gives us warrant; and we have no power to reverse ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... the wimmen: an' how on earth did old Tinker ever get away from Mrs Tinker for that length of time? You'll never see one of them kind of wimmen at anythink that makes for progress. That's the way they make theirselves superior to the likes of you an' me—by never doin' nothink only for theirselves. 'Oh, we've got all we want as it is, ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... at the still noon of night, The hallalloo of fire in every street! Odsbobs! I have a mind to hang myself, To think I should a grandmother be made By such a rascal!—Sure the king forgets When in a pudding, by his mother put, The bastard, by a tinker, on a stile Was dropp'd.—O, good lord Grizzle! can I bear To see him from a pudding mount the throne? Or can, oh can, my Huncamunca bear To take a ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... fathomless eyes while I tried to make head or tail of his discourse. When we were alone, my wife and I used to speculate at times on his probable profession. Was he a merchant?—an aged mariner?—a tinker, tailor, beggarman, thief? We could never decide, ...
— Noughts and Crosses • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... the end of it; so Michael Stein's smithy is turned into a perfect armoury, and he and his two sons are at work at the anvil morning, noon, and night: they made Annot blow the bellows this morning, till she looks for all the world like a tinker's wife." ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope
... and tied over my hat, for the sun was very fierce. The queerest figure of all was the would-be guide. With his one eye, his gaunt, lean form, and his torn clothes, he looked more like a strolling tinker than the honest worthy settler that he is. He bestrode rather than rode a gaunt mule, whose tail had all been shaven off, except a turf for a tassel at the end. Two flour bags which leaked were tied on behind the saddle, two quilts were under it, and my canvas ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... or you'll be in the horse latitudes, as they call them, and no breeze stirring, and not a damned thing to do but holystone decks, the like of an old pauper that does be scrubbing a poorhouse floor. And you say: 'Sure I'd rather be a tinker traveling the roads, with his ass and cart and dog and woman, nor a galley-slave to this bastard of a mate that has no more feeling for a poor sailorman nor a hound has for a rabbit. It's a dog's life,' you say, 'and when we make ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... trouble with them is that it's up to the dictators to decide what's benevolent. And almost always, nepotism rears its head, favoritism of one sort or another. How long will it be before one of your moderate monks decides he'll moderately tinker with the tests, or whatever, just to be sure his favorite nephew makes the grade? A high I.Q. is no ...
— Ultima Thule • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... (1628-1688) was an Englishman, believed to be the son of a gipsy tinker. He said his youth was very ungodly; but he married a religious woman and early became a preacher. At the same time he began to write books of a religious nature. Because he preached at "unlawful meetings" ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... willing to accept the test of Christianity which lies in its power to change men. I point to the persecutor on the road to Damascus. I point to the Bedfordshire tinker, to him that wrote Pilgrim's Progress. I point to the history of the Christian Church all down through the ages. I point to our mission fields to-day. I point to every mission hall, where earnest, honest men are working, and where, if you go and ask them, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... "Tinker," we found, meant Murre and Razor-Billed Auk. These are finely shaped birds, black above and white below, twice the size of a pigeon, and closely resembling each other, save in the bill. That of the murre is not noticeable; but the other's is singularly shaped, and marked ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... due to Dr. Robert K. Root and Dr. Chauncey B. Tinker of Yale University, and to Dr. Charles H. Whitman of Lehigh University, for examining part of the work in manuscript, and to Dr. Albert S. Cook of Yale University for a ...
— The Elene of Cynewulf • Cynewulf
... and employment in this world is very much in his own, or in the choice of such who are most nearly concerned for him; he therefore, that foresees that he is not likely to have the advantage of a continued education, he had much better commit himself to an approved-of cobbler or tinker, wherein he may be duly respected according to his office and condition of life; than to be only a disesteemed pettifogger or ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... step of thraldome, there is no libertie or freedome. It is but a milde kind of subiection to be the seruant of one master at once, but when thou hast a thousand thousand masters, as the veriest botcher, tinker or cobler freeborne wil dominere ouer a forreiner, & think to bee his better or master in company: then shalt thou finde theres no such hell, as to leaue thy fathers house (thy natural habitation) to liue in the land of bondage. If thou doest but lend halfe a looke to a Romans or Italians ...
— The Vnfortunate Traveller, or The Life Of Jack Wilton - With An Essay On The Life And Writings Of Thomas Nash By Edmund Gosse • Thomas Nash
... in spots; and like grease-spots, the spots spread. But we let them spread as little as possible: we keep unaltered as much of our old knowledge, as many of our old prejudices and beliefs, as we can. We patch and tinker more than we renew. The novelty soaks in; it stains the ancient mass; but it is also tinged by what absorbs it. Our past apperceives and co- operates; and in the new equilibrium in which each step forward in the process of learning terminates, ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... he had been reading from The Pilgrim's Progress, a book which Mrs. Churton had put in her hands, and helped her to understand. She did not know that he was putting an interpretation of his own on the allegory which might have made the glorious Bedford tinker clench his skeleton fist and hammer a loud ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... French clergy as French citizens? How far off are we from a revival of Danton's beautiful doctrine that, in order to consummate the regeneration of society, all conditions imposed upon the eligibility of citizens to act as judges ought to be immediately abolished, so that a tinker, or a butcher, or a bootblack, or a chiffonnier might be made a French magistrate just as well as a trained student of the laws? As you know, one of the first things Danton, as Minister of Justice, did was to carry through the Convention his famous ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... of the Russian, Austrian, English, Welsh, and American Gypsies; together with Papers on the Gypsies in the East, Gypsy Names and Family Characteristics, the Origin of the Gypsies, a Gypsy Magic Spell, Shelta, the Tinker's Talk; beside Gypsy Stories in Romany, with Translations. In one volume, crown 8vo, red ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... quite hard. "A place where they—" he broke off. "And you're Jeremy Ammidon's granddaughter! By heaven, it would make a coolie laugh. It's like William, who never would go to sea, to have four daughters in place of a son. I'm done with you; go tinker on the piano." They got down from their chairs and departed with an only half concealed eagerness. "Do you think he means it," Janet asked hopefully, "and he'll never have any ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... the lane's entrance, slackening oft his pace, Would Ambrose send a loving look before; Conceiting the caged blackbird at the door, The very blackbird, strain'd its little throat In welcome, with a more rejoicing note; And honest Tinker! dog of doubtful breed, All bristle, back, and tail, but "good at need," Pleasant his greeting to the accustomed ear; But of all welcomes pleasantest, most dear, The ringing voices, like sweet silver bells, Of his two little ones. How fondly swells The father's heart, as, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... the stable as the best sleeping accommodations the village gasthaus affords. True, I am assigned the place of honor in the manger, which, though uncomfortably narrow and confining, is perhaps better accommodation, after all, than the peregrinating tinker and three other likely-looking characters are enjoying on the bare floor. Some of these companions, upon retiring, pray aloud at unseemly length, and one of them, at least, keeps it up in his sleep at frequent intervals through the night; horses and work-cattle are rattling ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... was a favorite residence of the Indians. According to the History of Dunstable, "About 1663, the eldest son of Passaconaway [Chief of the Penacooks] was thrown into jail for a debt of (pounds)45, due to John Tinker, by one of his tribe, and which he had promised verbally should be paid. To relieve him from his imprisonment, his brother Wannalancet and others, who owned Wicasuck Island, sold it and paid the debt." It ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... experiencing strange symptoms of an intensity out of all proportion to that of former relations with the other sex. What was most unusual for him, he was alarmed and depressed, at moments irritable. He regretted the capricious and apparently accidental impulse that had made him pretend to tinker with his automobile that day by the canal, that had led him to the incomparable idiocy of getting rid of Miss Ottway and installing the disturber of his peace as his ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... was for scientific reasons that I persuaded the old "Badger" to stand in with me in the matter. So we will tinker at the conduit-pipes a little, and dig up a little bit of the shore, and it shan't cost the town a sixpence. That ...
— An Enemy of the People • Henrik Ibsen
... numbers as he was, the struggle for a time was by no means unequal, and more than once, with gigantic effort, he had all but flung off his captors. Perhaps, in the end, the task might even have been too much for the sheriff's party had it not been that a treacherous tinker, named Allan, with a hammer struck the old man a heavy blow on the face, fracturing the jaw and partially stunning him. Then, bound hand and foot, Auld Ringan was carried to Edinburgh. There, in the Tolbooth, he lay for eight long years, suffering tortures, ...
— Stories of the Border Marches • John Lang and Jean Lang
... babe who was destined to leave so imperishable a name in English literature, first saw the light in an humble cottage in an obscure Bedfordshire village. His father, Thomas Bunyan, though styling himself in his will by the more dignified title of "brazier," was more properly what is known as a "tinker"; "a mender of pots and kettles," according to Bunyan's contemporary biographer, Charles Doe. He was not, however, a mere tramp or vagrant, as travelling tinkers were and usually are still, much less a disreputable sot, a counterpart of Shakespeare's Christopher Sly, but ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... silly question, Emma," reproved old Grandma Watterby severely. "Here, Betty, you sit next to me, and Bob can have Will's place. He's gone over to Flame City with a bolt he wants the blacksmith to tinker up." ...
— Betty Gordon at Boarding School - The Treasure of Indian Chasm • Alice Emerson
... grating sound of the saw, the whistling of the plane, and the stroke of the mallet denoted the presence of the carpenter; and the sharper clink of a hammer told of old Fogy, the family "milliner," being at work; but it was not on millinery Fogy was now employed, though neither was it legitimate tinker's work. He was scrolling out with his shears, and beating into form, a plate of tin, to serve for the shield on O'Grady's coffin, which was to record his name, age, and day of departure; and this was the second plate on which the old man worked, for one was already finished in ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover
... Miser, and hoarded his gold; N was a Nobleman, gallant and bold; O was an Oysterman, who went about town; P was a Parson, and wore a black gown; Q was a Quack, with a wonderful pill; R was a Robber, who wanted to kill; S was a Sailor, who spent all he got; T was a Tinker, and mended a pot; U was an Usurer, a miserable elf; V was a Vintner, who drank all himself; W was a Watchman, who guarded the door; X was Expensive, and so became poor; Y was a Youth, that did not love school; Z was a Zany, a poor ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... moving. An outrage has been committed. During the night someone punched a hole in the bottom of my bath. Don't know who could have done it; most extraordinary, I assure you. One of those ungrateful blacks, I warrant. Going this way? I shall be glad of your company. Ah, do you happen to know of a tinker?" he asked, as together they ...
— An Arkansas Planter • Opie Percival Read
... sailor, A tinker and a tailor, Had once a doubtful strife, sir, To make a maid a wife, sir, Whose name was Buxom Joan. For now the time was ended, When she no more intended To lick her lips at men, sir, And gnaw the sheets in vain, sir, And lie ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... ninety-nine of your qualities I do not care a tinker's curse: but as a man who, after three tumblers of neat brandy, can tell Marsala from Madeira you are to be taken ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 6, No. 5, April, 1896 • Various
... Poetry. The Seafarer, Love Letter (Husband's Message), Battle of Brunanburh, Deor's Lament, Riddles, Exodus, The Christ, Andreas, Dream of the Rood, extracts in Cook and Tinker's Translations from Old English Poetry[39] (Ginn and Company); Judith, translation by A.S. Cook. Good selections are found also in Brooke's History of Early English Literature, and Morley's English Writers, ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... they hoped to put to account in getting a few extra dimes. They put a big chunk of iron in the mould and poured in the melted solder which enclosed it completely, so that when they presented the bright silvery bar to the old tinker he paid the price agreed upon and they divided the money between them, and then, in a secure place, they laughed till their sides ached at the good joke ...
— Death Valley in '49 • William Lewis Manly
... point!" he snapped out. "I don't begrudge the poor devils their soup. What I feel is this: If she'd cared a tinker's damn for me she'd never have gone. ...
— The Amazing Interlude • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... eaves of a half-burned house, and cold and miserable he sobbed himself to sleep. In the morning an itinerant tinker came by and touched by the child's distress, drew from him his unhappy story. He was a lonely old man, and offered to take Ben with him, an offer which ...
— Philip Dru: Administrator • Edward Mandell House
... religious and romantic temperament, in his richness of representation and ingenuity of analogy, and in his forcible quaintness of style, as completely as he did in social status and in personal surroundings. In complete contrast to the romantic productions of the self-educated tinker of Bedford, the works of Walton and Evelyn were at any rate influenced by, though they can hardly be said to have been moulded upon, the style of the preceding age of old English prose writers ending with Milton. The influence of the latter is, indeed, ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... blazed forth, and I determined to save my country! Oh, my friend, I have been in such holes and corners; such filthy nooks and filthy corners; sweep offices and oyster cellars! 'I have sworn brother to a leash of drawers, and can drink with any tinker in his own language during my life,'—faugh! I shall not be able to bear the smell of small beer and tobacco for a month to come.... Truly this saving one's country is a nauseous piece of business, and if patriotism is such a dirty ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... close of our day-watch on deck, he approached Handy Solomon. It was at the end of ten days, on no one of which had the seaman failed to tinker away at his steel claw. Darrow balanced in front of him with ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... desire to lift his aunt and her children to a little higher plane. To this, hitherto, he had found an obstacle in the pride of her husband. Henry Martin was a tinsmith who had come to the city to work in a great factory for a little higher wages than he could get as a journeyman tinker in a country town. He did not refuse to let the children accept presents from "Cousin Charley," but he was not willing "to be beholden to any of his wife's folks," as he expressed it. He resented the fact that even in Cappadocia he had been somewhat ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston
... tender way. I'd bathe my soul in sunshine every mornin', and I'd bend My back to pick the roses; Oh, I'd be a watchful friend To everything around the place, an' in the twilight gloam I'd thank the Lord for lettin' me jes' tinker 'round ...
— The Path to Home • Edgar A. Guest
... still more remarkable than the play itself: a drunken tinker, removed in his sleep to a palace, where he is deceived into the belief of being a nobleman. The invention, however, is not Shakspeare's. Holberg has handled the same subject in a masterly manner, and with inimitable truth; but he has spun it out to five acts, for which such ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... house, first, to pick up Father," replied Bob. "He is going to tinker up and whitewash some of the fences this morning. And Ma said she wanted to say 'hello' to you all. I thought you'd like to play down along the brook, and I can drive you there, because Father wants to work on ...
— Sunny Boy and His Playmates • Ramy Allison White
... cobbler's stall rather than from the schools of law. Now, one of these being come hither for Provost, among the many judges whom he brought with him was one who styled himself Messer Niccola da San Lepidio and who had more the air of a tinker than of aught else, and he was set with other judges to hear criminal causes. As it oft happeneth that, for all the townsfolk have nought in the world to do at the courts of law, yet bytimes they go thither, it befell that ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... shake hands with the clergyman as he steps on the grass outside. Don't I know that his being there is a compromise, and that he stands before me an Act of Parliament? That the church he occupies was built for other worship? That the Methodist chapel is next door; and that Bunyan the tinker is bawling out the tidings of damnation on the common hard by? Yes, I am a Sadducee; and I take things as I find them, and the world, and the Acts of Parliament of the world, as they are; and as I intend to take a wife, if I find one—not to be madly ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... dwalt on Tweed, The spot they ca'd it Linkumdoddie; Willie was a wabster guid, [weaver good] Cou'd stown a clue wi' ony body. [have stolen] He had a wife was dour and din, [stubborn, sallow] O, Tinkler Madgie was her mither; [Tinker] Sic a wife as Willie had, [Such] I wad na gie ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... Henry and my brother George belong to a boat-club. 2. The author of Pilgrim's Progress, John Bunyan, was the son of a tinker. 3. Shakespeare, the great dramatist, was careless of his literary reputation. 4. The conqueror of Mexico, Cortez, was cruel in his treatment of Montezuma. 5. Pizarro, the conqueror of Peru, was a Spaniard. 6. The Emperors ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... usual, it was up to me. There wasn't no escapin' it. A man might just as well meet his fate smilin' as trailin' his lip on the ground, for my experiences teaches, dear friends and brothers, that Fate just naturally don't care a wooden-legged tinker's dam. ...
— Mr. Scraggs • Henry Wallace Phillips
... "give an account of yourself. Who are you and what are you doing here? But that is a foolish question; I know already that you are a Bohemian and a journeyman tinker." ...
— A Cigarette-Maker's Romance • F. Marion Crawford
... Jew and the Gypsy at his side—but the life of a man was a different matter. Nor was the task eased by his exceptional memory. He claimed, as has been seen, to remember the look of the viper seen in his third year. Later, in "Lavengro," he meets a tinker and buys his stock-in-trade to set himself up with. The tinker tries to put him off by tales of the Blazing Tinman who has driven him from his beat. Borrow answers that he can manage the Tinman one way or other, saying, "I know all kinds of strange words and ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... wardrobe and turned every pocket inside out. It was not really a light; it made this light by flashing about so quickly, but when it came to rest for a second you saw it was a fairy, no longer than your hand, but still growing. It was a girl called Tinker Bell exquisitely gowned in a skeleton leaf, cut low and square, through which her figure could be seen to the best advantage. She was slightly inclined ...
— Peter and Wendy • James Matthew Barrie
... goodman Grim, thy fire is colder than my halidome; the sun is so high it puts it out, I reckon. Here have I two iron pots, a plate from my master's best greaves, and a pair of spurs that want piecing, and I'm like to tinker them as I list on a cold stithy. Get out, thou"—Here he became aware of an additional inmate to Grim's dwelling; and this discovery for a while checked the copious torrent of Dan's eloquence. Shortly, Darby ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... Mrs. Kilfoyle saw who Ody's companions were, she bade a regretful adieu to her hopes of recovering her stolen property. For how could she set him on the Tinker's felonious track without apprising them likewise? You might as well try to huroosh one chicken off a rafter and not scare the couple that were huddled beside it. The impossibility became more obvious presently as the constables, striding quickly down to where the group ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... cheering up a good deal, and that kept us busy. The cheering was great fun for us, because it consisted mostly of picnics and long, long walks,—the kind where you take a stick and a kit-bag and eat your lunch under a hedge, like a tinker. We also wrote a story which we used to put in instalments under her plate at breakfast every other day. We took turns writing the story, and Greg's instalments always made Aunt Ailsa the most cheered up of all. The story was much too long ...
— Us and the Bottleman • Edith Ballinger Price
... B. Tinker, "In Praise of Nursery Lore," Unpopular Review, Vol. VI, p. 338 (Oct.-Dec., 1916). For a most satisfactory presentation of the whole subject read chap. x, "Mother Goose," in Field. For the origin of Mother Goose as a character consult Lang's introduction to his edition ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... marred by their vulgar businesses, so they have their souls, too, bowed and broken by them. And if one of these uncomely people has a mind to seek self-culture and philosophy, Plato compares him to a bald little tinker,[117] who has scraped together money, and has got his release from service, and has had a bath, and bought a new coat, and is rigged out like a bridegroom about to marry the daughter of his master who has fallen into ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... Government's business. Understand that clearly. You say it was a campaign-fund contribution. How do I know it was? It never reached us. It's Nickleby's money and its loss is his funeral. Go and report to him and try to understand the meaning of the word 'loyalty.' Our party doesn't care a tinker's dam who has had, now has, or will have that envelope. And if you want to get thrown out by the scruff of the neck just try going to ...
— Every Man for Himself • Hopkins Moorhouse
... interrupted the gambler. "I don't even know what the fight was about, and I don't care a tinker's whoop either. I got you here to give you a chance to put Van Buren out of commission and make ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... They felt a pleasure in this sort of protest against the extreme refinement of society, just as the collegians of Oxford, trained beyond their natural capacity in morals, love to fall into slang and, like Prince Hal, talk to every tinker in his own tongue. ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... about, And grew so common thro' the land, That scarce a tinker could walk out, Without a mirror ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... this, that if I were anything else under God's Heaven, and had the same crank health, I should make an even zero. If I had, with my present knowledge, twelve months of my old health, I would, could, and should do something neat. As it is, I have to tinker at my things in little sittings; and the rent, or the butcher, or something, is always calling me off to rattle up a pot-boiler. And then comes a back- set of my health, and I have to twiddle ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... ago there dwelt in Athens a fruit-dealer of the name of Kimon, who was possessed of two daughters,—the one named Helen and the other Xanthippe. At the age of twenty, Helen was wed to Aristagoras the tinker, and went with him to abide in his humble dwelling in the suburbs of Athens, about one parasang's ...
— Second Book of Tales • Eugene Field
... occupied the whole ground floor. In the front kitchen there was a tinker. The back kitchen was let to a bellows-mender. On the first floor came Ernest, with his two rooms which he furnished comfortably, for one must draw the line somewhere. The two upper floors were parcelled out among four different sets of lodgers: there was a tailor named Holt, a drunken ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... definition of the Heaven-born fiddler by Pate Bailey, a gypsy tinker and celestial violinist. Being asked for a test of proficiency on that instrument, he replied that no man is a fiddler "till he can gar ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... upon all sorts of trivial distinctions. Brewing Smiths and baking Smiths, hunting Smiths and shooting Smiths, temperance Smiths and licensed victualler Smiths, Smiths with double-barrelled names and hyphens, Smiths with double-barrelled names without hyphens, Conservative Smiths and Radical Smiths, tinker Smiths, tailor Smiths, Smiths of Mercia, Smiths of Wessex,—all these and all other imaginable varieties of the tribe Smith would be, as it were, crystallized by an inexorable law forbidding the members of any of these groups to marry beyond the circle marked out by the clan name.... ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... "I will tinker this little toy of your body for you; then run along down there and play with your ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... [taking men to the right stealthily.] — Do you know what? That man's raving from his wound to-day, for I met him a while since telling a rambling tale of a tinker had him destroyed. Then he heard of Christy's deed, and he up and says it was his son had cracked his skull. O isn't madness a fright, for he'll go killing someone yet, and he thinking it's the man has ...
— The Playboy of the Western World • J. M. Synge
... squire and tinker Wood Gravely consulting Ireland's good, Together mingled in a mass Smith's dust, and copper, lead, and brass; The mixture thus by chemic art United close in ev'ry part, In fillets roll'd, or cut in pieces, Appear'd like one continued species; And, by the forming engine struck, On all the ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... Clapham. The municipal authorities generally notice the wheels attached to the new cottage, and therefore do not fall into the error. The gipsy may halt in a particular parish, but he is not as a rule immediately made a parish councillor. The cases in which a travelling tinker has been suddenly made the mayor of an important industrial town must be comparatively rare. And if the poor vagabonds of the Romany blood are bullied by mayors and magistrates, kicked off the land by landlords, pursued by policemen ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... the "Pilgrim's Progress," born in Elstow, near Bedford, the son of a tinker, and bred himself to that humble craft; he was early visited with religious convictions, and brought, after a time of resistance to them, to an earnest faith in the gospel of Christ, his witness for which to his poor neighbours led to his imprisonment, an imprisonment ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... the book of Lappo Lappi, called by his friends the careless, the happy-go-lucky, the devil-may-take-it, the God-knows-what. Called by his enemies drinker, swinker, tumbler, tinker, swiver. Called by many women that liked him pretty fellow, witty fellow, light fellow, bright fellow, bad fellow, mad fellow, and the like. Called by some women who once loved him Lapinello, Lappinaccio, little Lappo. Called now in God as a good religious should ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... make me mad? Am not I Christopher Sly, old Sly's son of Burton-heath; by birth a pedlar, by education a card-maker, by transmutation a bear-herd, and now by present profession a tinker? Ask Marian Hacket, the fat ale-wife of Wincot, if she know me not: if she say I am not fourteen pence on the score for sheer ale, score me up for the lyingest knave in Christendom. What! I am not ...
— The Taming of the Shrew • William Shakespeare [Craig, Oxford edition]
... burials, christenings, or bridals; wherever and whenever human creatures met each other, there was ever to be found the fierce wrangle of Remonstrant and Contra-Remonstrant, the hissing of red-hot theological rhetoric, the pelting of hostile texts. The blacksmith's iron cooled on the anvil, the tinker dropped a kettle half mended, the broker left a bargain unclinched, the Scheveningen fisherman in his wooden shoes forgot the cracks in his pinkie, while each paused to hold high converse with friend or foe on fate, free- will, or absolute ...
— Memoir of John Lothrop Motley, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... Denor a Doctor of Padua takes notice of the same as a very absurd Error: Aristotle heretofore for a like fault reprehended the Megarensians, who observ'd no Decorum in their Theater, but brought in mean persons with a Train fit for a King and cloath'd a Cobler or Tinker in a Purple Robe: In vain doth Veratus in his Dispute against Jason Denor, to defend those elaborately exquisite discourses, and notable sublime sentences of his Pastor Fido, bring some lofty Idylliums of ...
— De Carmine Pastorali (1684) • Rene Rapin
... Leddy; it's juist the lassie's clavers, for Jean cam' in frae the stable, where she had nae right to be, except to be seein' her lad—they ha'e lads on the brain the lassies noo—and greetin' that young Dan had shamed her before the men, and a' because o' a tinker body like Belle here, although the great folk will treat her so kindly; no' that I mean her any harm," she added (erring on the safe side, for Belle's eyes had begun to glow finely); "and then in came Kate and Leezie wi' a tale o' a wean, tied in a tartan shawl, lying in ...
— The McBrides - A Romance of Arran • John Sillars
... examples of the same gentle and painstaking craft that their writers have before now exhibited elsewhere. Here are no sensational happenings; the drama of the tales is wholly emotional. My own favourites are the first, called "The Little Tinker," a half-ironical study of the temptation of a tramp mother to surrender her child to the blessings of civilisation; and how, by the intervention of a terrible old woman, the queen of the tribe, this momentary ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 152, Feb. 7, 1917 • Various
... this uproar, the Rector entered the village, and was coming full upon Scourhill and his retinue when the ass made a sudden halt before the door of a tinker, its master, and threw its rider upon a large heap of mire. The youth instantly started up, and, without ever looking behind him to thank his attendants for the procession, he ...
— Forgotten Tales of Long Ago • E. V. Lucas
... a piece of cheese will do for me, because there are one or two little things to tinker up on the car, and an hour and a quarter isn't long. I think I shall bring my grub out of doors, and—But is anything ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... said Mrs. Duff-Whalley, "if you call that attractive. Jean doesn't know how to keep her place with people at all. I saw her walking beside a tinker woman the other day, helping her with her bundle; and I'm sure I've simply had to give up calling at The Rigs, for you never knew who you would have to shake hands with. I'm sorry for Jean, poor little soul. It seems a pity that there is no one to dress ...
— Penny Plain • Anna Buchan (writing as O. Douglas)
... stage, thought he, why may not I?—cannot I be as useful as them? besides I can—but these men sing, I suppose—do not they sing John, much better than me?" "Noa, I tell thee they doan't: sing better than thee! they can't sing at all. A tinker's jackass is as good at it as any of them I see here. When they are on the stage (I went three or four times with our Sall to the play) od rot 'un—they make a noise by way of a song, and the musicianers sing for them on their fiddles." The man to whom honest John alluded, arrived from Bath ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 4, April 1810 • Various
... answered. "How does the old puzzle run? Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, ploughboy, gentleman, thief. I think I have played all those parts, and others, too. Fling beggar and pirate into the dish. But I tell you this, honest John, I have never played a part so dear to me as that of captain to this divine ...
— The Lady of Loyalty House - A Novel • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... likely any one can git their jar in afore hern. I wouldn't advise nobody to nerve themselves up to it. There's been rumors," added Mr. Pawket, gravely—"there's been rumors as some one is tryin' to git up a rockery fer the vanilla. Now I wouldn't advise 'em to. The lady will want to tinker with that herself. But if everybody is itchin' to help, why don't they take up a nice collection er white door-knobs to trim ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... sport or love of mischief, shook the ladder a good deal as he ascended, and seemed to enjoy the terror of young Butler, so that, when they had both come up, they looked on each other with no friendly eyes. Neither, however, spoke. The young caird, or tinker, or gipsy, with a good deal of attention, assisted Lady Staunton up a very perilous ascent which she had still to encounter, and they were followed by David Butler, until all three stood clear of the ravine on ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... he proceeded, "is the Wilderness of Nasty Possibilities. Hold up, Tinker, my lad, and get out of it as fast as ...
— The Keeper of the Door • Ethel M. Dell
... into it, and hence are in two cases at the same time, and it is doubly difficult to get out. In sane moments we regard only the facts, the case that is. Say what you have to say, not what you ought. Any truth is better than make-believe. Tom Hyde, the tinker, standing on the gallows, was asked if he had anything to say. "Tell the tailors," said he, "to remember to make a knot in their thread before they take the first stitch." ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... Tom Hingman at seventy-five hundred dollars a year to handle the calendar in Part Five. Yet those on the inside knew why very well. It was because Tom long ago, in his prehistoric youth, had learned that the way to secure verdicts was to appear not to care a tinker's dam whether the jury found the defendant guilty or not. He pretended never to know anything about any case in advance, to be in complete ignorance as to who the witnesses might be and to what they were going to testify, and to be terribly sorry to have to ...
— By Advice of Counsel • Arthur Train
... disgusted skipper of the Wireless. "No use in my trying to tinker with the job. It will take a practical machinist to overhaul the plagued contraption. I guess you'll have to give us a tow to Memphis, where I can put a man to work getting this engine ...
— Motor Boat Boys Mississippi Cruise - or, The Dash for Dixie • Louis Arundel
... was not sleepy at eight o'clock; he had been flying about while the others had been yawning before the fire. He would like to sit up just to see how much more solemn and stupid it would become as the night went on; he wanted to tinker his skates, to mend his sled, to finish that chapter. Why should he go away from that bright blaze, and the company that sat in its radiance, to the cold and solitude of his chamber? Why did n't the people who ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... above all others in advertisements for help wanted. This is the land of hustle. Tinker, tailor, candlestick-maker; lawyer, merchant, priest; if you are not a "live-wire" you are not "help wanted"—"Cook wanted. On dairy farm, twelve miles from town. White, industrious. Must be a live-wire! One that can get results. No stick-in-the-muds ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... Swift, John Locke who contributed to philosophy his Essay Concerning the Human Understanding, the two diarists Evelyn and Pepys, and the critics Rymer and Langbaine; there was Isaac Newton, who expounded in his Principia, 1687, the laws of gravitation; and there was the preaching tinker, who, confined in Bedford jail, gave to the world in 1678 one of ...
— Palamon and Arcite • John Dryden
... sort of place Rotherwood was! The wide village street seemed empty, with the exception of a black collie lying asleep in the middle of the road, and a patient donkey belonging to a travelling tinker. The clean, sleek country sparrows were enjoying a dust bath, and a long-legged chicken—evidently a straggler from the brood—was pecking fitfully at a cabbage stalk, unmindful of the alarmed clucking of ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... doubtfulness prompts conservative minds to throw every mover for change upon the defensive, when liturgical interests are at stake. So many men are born into the world with a native disposition to tamper with and tinker all settled things, and so many more become persuaded, as time goes on, of a personal "mission" to pull down and remake whatever has been once built up, esteeming life a failure unless they have contrived to build each his own monument upon a clearing, that lovers of the old ways are ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington
... of their position as self-constituted defenders of the world's last hope,—the United States of America, and possibly Texas. They look out with honest, citizen faces under their leathern visors (their ferocity being mostly the work of the tailor and tinker), and, I doubt not, are at this moment as innocent of bloodthirstiness as yonder worthy tiller of the Tewksbury Hills, who sits quietly in his wagon dispensing apples and turnips without so much ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... this queer household, a degree of refinement superior to that of her surroundings. After describing the daily dinner-party in the kitchen—master, mistress, servants, with an occasional "travelling rat-catcher or tinker"—he skilfully points out that his mother's feelings must have resembled those of the boarding-school miss in his father's "Widow's Tale" when subjected to a ...
— Crabbe, (George) - English Men of Letters Series • Alfred Ainger
... "This is too much," she says; "this wounded leg, these crusted lips, this anxious, weary mind. Come away for a time, until your body becomes more habitable." And so she coaxes the mind away into the Nirvana of delirium, while the little cell-workers tinker and toil within to get things better for its home-coming. When you see the veil of cruelty which nature wears, try and peer through it, and you will sometimes catch a glimpse of a very ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle
... drives the wealthy idler from his bed out into the inclement darkness, and up to the topmost bough of the tree, which he must "touch" ere he can rest; and now, in the gloom of the memorable dingle, the horror of fear falls upon the amateur tinker, the Evil One grapples terribly with his soul, blots of foam fly from his lips, and he is dashed against the trees and stones. An adventure, truly, fit to stand with any of mediaeval legend, and compared with which the tremendous combat with Blazing Bosville, the Flaming Tinman, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... either country. Strange to say the most perfect allegory in the English language was written by an almost illiterate and ignorant man, and written too, in a dungeon cell. In the "Pilgrim's Progress," Bunyan, the itinerant tinker, has given us by far the best allegory ever penned. Another good one is "The Faerie ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... you understand, Peabody," he said. "It ain't just selfishness that makes me steer the course I'm runnin'. Course, Bos'n's got to be the world and all to me, and if she's taken away I don't know's I care a tinker's darn what happens afterwards. But, all the same, if her dad was a real man, sorry for what he's done and tryin' to make up for it—why, then, I cal'late I'm decent enough to take off my hat, hand ...
— Cy Whittaker's Place • Joseph C. Lincoln
... and we were on the good and promised land, felt that a just tribute of respect to the day ought to be paid. There were in all, including women and children, fifty in number. The men, under Captain Tinker, ranged themselves on the beach and fired a federal salute of fifteen rounds, and then the sixteenth in honor of New Connecticut. Drank several toasts.... Closed with three cheers. Drank several pails of grog. Supped and ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells
... this, of course, is another matter. Mrs. Hedgehog and I had never seen tinkers, and we resolved to take an early opportunity some evening of sending the seven urchins down to the burdock plantations to pick snails, whilst we paid a cautious visit to the tinker camp. ...
— Brothers of Pity and Other Tales of Beasts and Men • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... floods. In two minutes after starting I was wet to the skin, and I thanked Providence I had left my little Dutch Horace behind me in the book-box. By three in the afternoon I was as unkempt as any tinker, my hair plastered over my eyes, and every fold of my coat running like ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... religion, his insistence on courage as the virtue of virtues, his estimate of the career of the conventionally respectable and sensible Worldly Wiseman as no better at bottom than the life and death of Mr Badman: all this, expressed by Bunyan in the terms of a tinker's theology, is what Nietzsche has expressed in terms of post-Darwinian, post-Schopenhaurian philosophy; Wagner in terms of polytheistic mythology; and Ibsen in terms of mid-XIX century Parisian dramaturgy. Nothing is new in these matters except their novelties: for instance, it is a novelty to call ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... druggist, Thomas Carlyle and Hugh Miller masons. Dante and Descartes were soldiers. Cardinal Wolsey, Defoe, and Kirke White were butchers' sons. Faraday was the son of a hostler, and his teacher, Humphry Davy, was an apprentice to an apothecary. Kepler was a waiter boy in a German hotel, Bunyan a tinker, Copernicus the son of a Polish baker. They rose by being greater than their callings, as Arkwright rose above mere barbering, Bunyan above tinkering, Wilson above shoemaking, Lincoln above rail-splitting, ...
— An Iron Will • Orison Swett Marden
... them, and with enthusiasm. Try to imagine Samson Agonistes put on the stage today; with no academical enthusiasts or eclat of classicism to back it; but just put on before thirty thousand sight-seers, learned and vulgar, statesman and cobbler, tinker and poet; the mob all there; the groundlings far out-numbering the elite:—and all not merely sitting out the play, but roused to a frenzy of enthusiasm; and Milton himself, present and acting, the hero ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... in their early and vigorous growth eighty years ago. I rode in our family carriage to church with Sheldon Dibble and Reuben Tinker, who were just leaving Auburn Theological Seminary to go out as our pioneer missionaries to the Sandwich Islands. The Missionary Herald was taken in a great number of families and read with great avidity. Many of the readers were people who not only devoutly prayed "Thy Kingdom come," but who were ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... fancied there were only two men of genius in the reign of Charles II., viz., Milton and the tinker Bunyan. ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... his birth, although from circumstances most easily ascertained, even the assistant-overseer did not take the trouble to make himself acquainted. He was a parish child born in the workhouse, the offspring of a half-witted orphan girl and a sturdy vagrant, partly tinker, partly ballad-singer, who took good care to disappear before the strong arm of justice, in the shape of a tardy warrant and a halting constable, could contrive to intercept his flight. He joined, it was said, a tribe of gipsies, to whom he was suspected to have ...
— Jesse Cliffe • Mary Russell Mitford
... that works for certain purposes sent a smart shower from the sinking sun, and the wet sent two strangers for shelter in the lane behind the hedge where the boys reclined. One was a travelling tinker, who lit a pipe and spread a tawny umbrella. The other was a burly young countryman, pipeless and tentless. They saluted with a nod, and began recounting for each other's benefit the daylong-doings of the weather, as it had affected their individual ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Corliss. Later he tied the note to the inside of the dog's collar. The next thing was to get Chance started on the road to the Concho. He rolled down his sleeves and strolled to the doorway. A Mexican sat smoking and watching the road. Sundown stepped past him and began to tinker with the gas-engine. Chance stood watching him. Presently the gas-engine started with a cough and splutter. Sundown walked to the door and seemed about to enter when the Mexican called to him and pointed toward the distant ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs
... year, have been in search of a particular rock, somewhere on the mountains in the vicinity of Shelburne Falls, which is supposed to contain some valuable ore; but they cannot find it. One man in the bar-room observed that it must be enchanted; and spoke of a tinker, during the Revolutionary War, who met with a somewhat similar instance. Roaming along the Hudson River, he came to a precipice which had some bunches of singular appearance embossed upon it. He knocked off one of the hunches, and carrying it home, or to a camp, or wherever ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... continued, "we can tinker up something in the operating room that'll turn out what will look like computation results. As far as anybody outside ourselves will know, Merlin will still be solving everybody's problems. We'll do like any fortuneteller; tell the customer what he wants ...
— The Cosmic Computer • Henry Beam Piper
... as a red herring, and as poor as a starved veezel — 0, Molly, hadst thou seen him come down the ladder, in a shurt so scanty, that it could not kiver his nakedness! — The young 'squire called him Dunquickset; but he looked for all the world like Cradoc-ap-Morgan, the ould tinker, that suffered at Abergany for steeling of kettle — Then he's a profane scuffle, and, as Mr Clinker says, no better than an impfiddle, continually playing upon the pyebill and the new-burth — I doubt he has as little manners as money; for he can't say a civil word, much more make me ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... got in the hole the wilder he played the game: there was times when I didn't believe he cared a tinker's damn what happened. Whenever he needed any cash all he had to do was soak another plaster on the ranch, borrow again from his father. An' ol' Number Ten is plastered thick now, Steve; right square up ...
— Man to Man • Jackson Gregory
... understand pictures. The others pretend and don't care. Remember, I've seen twelve hundred men dead in toadstool-beds. It's only the voice of the tiniest little fraction of people that makes success. The real world doesn't care a tinker's—doesn't care a bit. For aught you or I know, every man in the world may be arguing with a Maisie of ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... the navy, observes: "It is said, and I believe with truth, that at this time (the middle of the sixteenth century) there was not a private builder between London Bridge and Gravesend, who could lay down a ship in the mould left from a Navy Board's draught, without applying to a tinker who ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles
... entertain'd. Poor, lame, and blind, when I came once ashore, Lord! how they came in flocks to visit me; The shepherd with his hook, and thrasher with his flail, The very pedlar with his dog, and the tinker with his mail: Then comes a soldier counterfeit, and with him was his jug,[291] And Will, the whipper of the dogs, had got a bouncing trug; And cogging Dick was in the crew that swore he came from France: He swore that in ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VI • Robert Dodsley
... shiftless creature. It had long been the consensus of opinion—freely expressed throughout Tinkletown—that he did not amount to a tinker's dam. ...
— Anderson Crow, Detective • George Barr McCutcheon
... while I live I shall remember that. But he is a selfish beggar. He hasn't the instinct for team play. He hasn't the idea of responsibility for the team. He gets so that he can not make himself do what he just doesn't feel like doing. He doesn't care a tinker's curse for the other fellows in ...
— To Him That Hath - A Novel Of The West Of Today • Ralph Connor
... he mused. "Your old man's a bum, a useless tinker. He thought he could send Man to the stars on a string of helium nuclei. Oh, he was smart. Thought of everything. Auxiliary jets to kick off the negative charge, bigger mercury vapor banks—a fine straight thrust of positive ...
— Teething Ring • James Causey
... the kitchen and returned with a screwdriver. While Sutter looked on with apprehensive eyes, he began to tinker with the wiring. Suddenly there was a dull report and a flash of flame. Travail jerked his arm back as a thin streamer of smoke and the smell of burning ...
— Made in Tanganyika • Carl Richard Jacobi
... the inhabitants—I beg your pardon, to the nobility and gentry of our neighbourhood—the spectacle of an ascension. As one of the gentry concerned I may be permitted to remark that I am unmoved. I care not a Tinker's Damn for his ascension. No more—I breathe it in your ear—does anybody else. The business is stale, sir, stale. Lunardi did it, and overdid it. A whimsical, fiddling, vain fellow, by all accounts—for I was at that ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... badly-designed, unimpressive new street or two, with no expansive sense of imperial greatness, through the hopelessly congested and most squalid quarters. But that is all. No grand, systematic, reconstructive plan, no rising to the height of the occasion and the Empire! You tinker away at a Shaftesbury Avenue. Parochial, all of it. And there you get the real secret of our futile attempts at making a town out of our squalid village. The fault lies all at the door of the old Corporation, and of the people who ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen
... or not—I don't care! In fact I don't give a tinker's damn! If this thing is really decreed in the council of God, as the song has it—I want a dismissal in all due form: I refuse to be just coolly shunted off.—Rose, is there anything in the past for which I need to ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume II • Gerhart Hauptmann
... higher plane. To this, hitherto, he had found an obstacle in the pride of her husband. Henry Martin was a tinsmith who had come to the city to work in a great factory for a little higher wages than he could get as a journeyman tinker in a country town. He did not refuse to let the children accept presents from "Cousin Charley," but he was not willing "to be beholden to any of his wife's folks," as he expressed it. He resented the fact that even in Cappadocia he had been somewhat ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston
... be in the playground, whither they invite me. Harold Skimpole is fettered—by what? By items! I regret my incapacity for details. It may be the tinker or the tailor at whose suit I am detained. I am certain it is not at that of the soldier, or the sailor, or the ploughboy, or the thief. But, for the apothecary— why, yes—it MAY be the apothecary! In ...
— Old Friends - Essays in Epistolary Parody • Andrew Lang
... the drunkard manufacturing machine behind her. That confounded pot, as round as the stomach of a tinker's fat wife, with its nose that was so long and twisted, sent a shiver down her back, a fear mingled with a desire. Yes, one might have thought it the metal pluck of some big wicked woman, of some ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... Brewing Smiths and baking Smiths, hunting Smiths and shooting Smiths, temperance Smiths and licensed victualler Smiths, Smiths with double-barrelled names and hyphens, Smiths with double-barrelled names without hyphens, Conservative Smiths and Radical Smiths, tinker Smiths, tailor Smiths, Smiths of Mercia, Smiths of Wessex,—all these and all other imaginable varieties of the tribe Smith would be, as it were, crystallized by an inexorable law forbidding the members of any of these groups to marry beyond the circle marked out by the clan name.... Thus ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... by this time, and owing to some breakage we had to stop, as we drew close to the town. We left the driver, however, to tinker about with the old Ford, and plunged into the wilds, Brown being particularly anxious to see what all the smoke ...
— A Dweller in Mesopotamia - Being the Adventures of an Official Artist in the Garden of Eden • Donald Maxwell
... with the love of battle and of the sea, with the desolateness of lonely wolds, with the passion of loyalty to a leader. Read "Deor's Lament," "Widsith," "The Wanderer," "The Sea-farer," or the battle-songs of Brunanburh and Maldon in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. [Footnote: See Cook and Tinker, Select Translations from Old English Poetry (Boston, 1902), and Pancoast and Spaeth, Early English Poems (New York, 1911).] The last strophe of "Deor's Lament," our oldest English lyric, ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... Tom's mouth, and prevented him from crying; but, on feeling the hot water, he kicked and struggled so much in the pot, that his mother thought that the pudding was bewitched, and, pulling it out of the pot, she threw it outside the door. A poor tinker, who was passing by, lifted up the pudding, and, putting it into his budget, he then walked off. As Tom had now got his mouth cleared of the batter, he then began to cry aloud, which so frightened ...
— English Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)
... the point!" he snapped out. "I don't begrudge the poor devils their soup. What I feel is this: If she'd cared a tinker's damn for me she'd never have gone. ...
— The Amazing Interlude • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... purpose. But I would ask when was the time when Bunyan "was nearly persuaded to be of Hobbes' opinion?" If he is the author and speaks the truth (and he is notoriously truthful), it must have been in early youth; but surely the philosopher of Malmesbury could not know an obscure tinker. Bunyan cannot speak metaphorically, for he had not read the Leviathan, since he mentions that his only reading in early life, i.e. when he was likely to have embraced freethinking, was the Practice of Piety, ...
— Notes and Queries, Issue No. 61, December 28, 1850 • Various
... that," she said good-humouredly. "My only skirt, friends. She can't turn me out in my petticoat, can she? Oh, leave it alone, garcong; it doesn't matter a tinker's curse——" ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... like a foghorn and bolted. It returned twenty-four hours later with its tail between its legs, a convinced pacifist. The disgusted O'Brien at once changed its name to Bertrand Russell, after some philosopher who palliates German methods of warfare, and gave it to a tinker. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 6, 1917 • Various
... in prison, but the charity of Christian people.' Sir Matthew Hale: 'Alas! poor woman.' Twisden: 'Poverty is your cloak, for I hear your husband is better maintained by running up and down a-preaching than by following his calling?' Sir Matthew Hale: 'What is his calling?' Elizabeth: 'A tinker, please you my Lord; and because he is a tinker, and a poor man, therefore he is despised and cannot have justice.' Sir Matthew Hale: 'I am truly sorry we can do you no good. Sitting here we can only act as the law gives us warrant; ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... Molly, hadst thou seen him come down the ladder, in a shurt so scanty, that it could not kiver his nakedness! — The young 'squire called him Dunquickset; but he looked for all the world like Cradoc-ap-Morgan, the ould tinker, that suffered at Abergany for steeling of kettle — Then he's a profane scuffle, and, as Mr Clinker says, no better than an impfiddle, continually playing upon the pyebill and the new-burth — I doubt he has as little manners as money; for he can't say a civil word, much more make ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... "I don't care a tinker's damn what you've done," he said forcibly. "Remember that! We're brothers, and I'll stick to you. If there's anything in life that I can do to help, I'll do it. If there isn't, well, I won't worry you, but you know you can count ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... of him. I put out my hand and laid it on Spikes' wet, sweat-roughened neck. "Yes, he's a good little horse, and I beg his pardon for what I said," I owned, still with the ache just back of my palate. "But he can't carry us both, Frosty; I'll just have to tinker up this old skate, ...
— The Range Dwellers • B. M. Bower
... about where you made your money. You've been telling that you got it in Africa, trading in diamonds. I've got a piece of paper in my pocket that blows up your lies like dynamite. You was in Australia all them years. By the Almighty! I'm going to sign up with the preacher, and I don't care a tinker's dam if you get the last cent I have, and send me up Riverhead way to the Poor Farm to eat off the county. Foreclose on my property! That ain't no more than you've been doing to others all your miserable ...
— Captain Pott's Minister • Francis L. Cooper
... of Frank Brangwyn may fall upon unresponsive ears; yet he has a Continental reputation and is easily the foremost English impressionist. New York has seen but little of his work; if we mistake not, there was a large piece of his, a Gipsy Tinker in the open air, hung several seasons ago at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Mr. Kennedy shows extraordinary etchings of his at the Wunderlich Galleries. We call them extraordinary not alone because of their size, but also because Brangwyn is practically the first among latter-day ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... disclose the whole combination of springs and wheels whereby they are moved." A similar transparency of motive and purpose, of individual traits and spontaneous action, belongs to the Bible. From the hand of Shakspeare, "the lord and the tinker, the hero and the valet, come forth equally distinct and clear." In the Bible the various sorts of men are never confounded, but have the advantage of being exhibited by Nature herself, and are not a contrivance of the imagination. "Shylock," observes a recent critic, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... say it!" he protested. "It's true! He's the finest chap in the world, all true gold and not a grain of dross. That's how it is we all knock under to him. Even Nap does that, though he doesn't care a tinker's curse for anyone else on ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell
... tremendous poems, should have appreciated them, and with enthusiasm. Try to imagine Samson Agonistes put on the stage today; with no academical enthusiasts or eclat of classicism to back it; but just put on before thirty thousand sight-seers, learned and vulgar, statesman and cobbler, tinker and poet; the mob all there; the groundlings far out-numbering the elite:—and all not merely sitting out the play, but roused to a frenzy of enthusiasm; and Milton himself, present and acting, the hero of the day. That, despite Mr. Whistler and the Ten O'Clock—seems ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... geese feeding around him. Next I passed a bare-footed cantonnier breaking stones, and he told me that if I made haste I might reach Neuvic before dark. On the outskirts of a village—Roche-le-Peyroux—a wandering tinker and his boy were at work by the side of the road with fire and bellows, and I felt a trampish or romantic desire to stay with them awhile in the cheerful glow; but thinking of the coming night, ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... live near a navigable stream must remain a backwoodsman; he must make his own farm or his immediate community a self-sufficing unit; he must get from his own land bread and meat and clothing for his family; he must be stock-raiser, grain-grower, farrier, tinker, soap-maker, tanner, chandler—Jack-of-all-trades and master of none. With the railroad he gained access to markets and the opportunity to specialize in one kind of farming; he could now sell his produce and buy in exchange many of the articles he had previously made for himself ...
— The Agrarian Crusade - A Chronicle of the Farmer in Politics • Solon J. Buck
... Mary Ellen, "I don't want to hurt ye, but it do make me heart-sick to see ye bashin' aitch other wid pokers for the sake av a bit girl that's not worth a tinker's curse to ye! Now thin—here's a piece of cowld puddin' to each av ye—sit on the durestep where the missus won't see ye, an' git outside ...
— Explorers of the Dawn • Mazo de la Roche
... fine hair, and a very peculiar shrill voice and laugh. His most intimate friend at Eton was a boy named Price, who was considered one of the best classical scholars amongst us. At his tutor, Bethell's, where he lodged, he attempted many mechanical and scientific experiments. By the aid of a common tinker, he contrived to make something like a steam-engine, which, unfortunately, one day suddenly exploded; to the great consternation of the neighbourhood and to the imminent danger of a severe ...
— Reminiscences of Captain Gronow • Rees Howell Gronow
... you have never learned to use tools properly," said his father. "Where do you suppose I'd be now if I hadn't started out when I was a boy to tinker round a farm? That's where I got my manual training, and there isn't a course in the country that can equal it. I had to use my brains, too, as well as my hands, for very often the things I needed were not to be had and I was forced to make something else do. It was a great education, I ...
— The Story of Porcelain • Sara Ware Bassett
... author of the "Pilgrim's Progress," born in Elstow, near Bedford, the son of a tinker, and bred himself to that humble craft; he was early visited with religious convictions, and brought, after a time of resistance to them, to an earnest faith in the gospel of Christ, his witness for which to his poor neighbours led to his imprisonment, an imprisonment ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... done no harm," he said; "we were simply cruising about when we saw murder done. We arrived too late to prevent it, but Tinker was pleased to take it upon himself to avenge the murdered woman, for a woman it was, as we could tell from her shrieks as the sack went under and stifled ...
— Jack Harkaway's Boy Tinker Among The Turks - Book Number Fifteen in the Jack Harkaway Series • Bracebridge Hemyng
... it was that if Agrippa once got his hands on a clock it would never run as well as before, and afterward one had to let him tinker it at least once a year, or it would stop going altogether. The old man tried to do honest and conscientious work, but just the name he ruined all the ...
— The Emperor of Portugalia • Selma Lagerlof
... no fault of mine, I was, fortunately, the only person injured; but my employer was so incensed over the damage to his automobile that he never even sent to inquire whether I lived or died. At a charity hospital they tried to mend my breaks and tinker up my anatomy. My shoulder-blade was shattered, my arm broken in three places, and four ribs were crashed in. The wounds in my head are mere abrasions of the scalp, and not serious. But it has taken me a long time to mend, and the crowded, stuffy hospital ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces at Millville • Edith Van Dyne
... this hyar," he began again, with a twinkle in his eye. "Thar was an old fellar had a ranch in Chevelon Canyon, an' he was always bein' pestered by mountain lions. His name was Bill Tinker. Now Bill was no sort of a hunter, fact was he was afeerd of lions an' bears, but he shore did git riled when any critters rustled around his cabin. One day in the fall he comes home an' seen a big she-lion sneakin' around. He grabbed a club, ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... the rough material, selecting with great fastidiousness, so that in his plays every speech is, as he himself declared all good speech should be, "as fully flavored as a nut or apple." Even in The Tinker's Wedding (1907), possibly the least important of his plays, one is ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... "Something like a tinker's job on an iron kittle, son," he commented. "You must have been born with some of the instincts of a plumber. Keep on the way you're operating ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... READING. Miscellaneous Poetry. The Seafarer, Love Letter (Husband's Message), Battle of Brunanburh, Deor's Lament, Riddles, Exodus, The Christ, Andreas, Dream of the Rood, extracts in Cook and Tinker's Translations from Old English Poetry[39] (Ginn and Company); Judith, translation by A.S. Cook. Good selections are found also in Brooke's History of Early English Literature, and Morley's English Writers, vols. 1 ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... never win their way to the boards. But I have not the space for it all, and I must content myself with that portion of it in which Mr. Yeats confesses that belief of his in the rapprochement of scholar and tinker that one notes so often in Irish life. Speaking of Lady Gregory's rewriting of "Where there is Nothing" into "The Unicorn from ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... advocate, and judge, too, that will conquer the devil, and put to shame his agents, and secure the stake, which is heaven, and the salvation of the soul? Let the child alone," said he, boldly, "as you see she doesn't want your biblical pills, or, 'be the tinker that mended Fion-vic Couls' pot,' I will turn you out of doors, if I were to hang for it after. Let the child alone ...
— The Cross and the Shamrock • Hugh Quigley
... officer, but what he did not catch. If he had only known, he was describing a particular characteristic of the Duke. Wellington, when in action, was the dumbest of dumb things, and it would have required a moral earthquake to get more than some curt order out of him. Even a "tinker's curse" or "a tuppenny damn" would have seemed loquacious in him on such an occasion. The not very sensational "Up Guards and at 'em!" was in later life disputed by the Duke. Under great pressure, the most he would admit was that he might possibly have said it, though he did not ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... there dwelt in Athens a fruit-dealer of the name of Kimon, who was possessed of two daughters,—the one named Helen and the other Xanthippe. At the age of twenty, Helen was wed to Aristagoras the tinker, and went with him to abide in his humble dwelling in the suburbs of Athens, about one parasang's distance ...
— Second Book of Tales • Eugene Field
... between a drunken attorney and an impudent publican which took place here yesterday may deserve the appellation. You may perhaps be more interested to hear that I sprained my foot, and am just recovering from the effects of the accident by means of opodeldoc which I bought at the tinker's. For all trades and professions here lie in a most delightful confusion. The druggist sells hats; the shoemaker is the sole bookseller, if that dignity may be allowed him on the strength of the three Welsh Bibles, ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... every kind of intrigue and amusement; while the mild temper of the people and the watchfulness of the police prevented the public disorders that such license might have occasioned. These seeming anomalies abounded on every side. From the gaming-table where a tinker might set a ducat against a prince it was but a few steps to the Broglio, or arcade under the ducal palace, into which no plebeian might intrude while the nobility walked there. The great ladies, ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... a cobbler it should be my pride The best of all cobblers to be; If I was a tinker, no tinker beside Should mend ...
— Childhood's Favorites and Fairy Stories - The Young Folks Treasury, Volume 1 • Various
... Concerning the Human Understanding, the two diarists Evelyn and Pepys, and the critics Rymer and Langbaine; there was Isaac Newton, who expounded in his Principia, 1687, the laws of gravitation; and there was the preaching tinker, who, confined in Bedford jail, gave to the world in 1678 one of its greatest allegories, ...
— Palamon and Arcite • John Dryden
... dollars a year to handle the calendar in Part Five. Yet those on the inside knew why very well. It was because Tom long ago, in his prehistoric youth, had learned that the way to secure verdicts was to appear not to care a tinker's dam whether the jury found the defendant guilty or not. He pretended never to know anything about any case in advance, to be in complete ignorance as to who the witnesses might be and to what they were going to testify, and to be terribly sorry to have to prosecute the unfortunate ...
— By Advice of Counsel • Arthur Train
... "A fact—a solid fact at last, in this sea of fiction. What a slip! I was beginning to fancy you quite a consistent fairy-tale tinker, Blossom. Take that last touch about her signalling Cochise. She sent a ...
— Bloom of Cactus • Robert Ames Bennet
... swarthy, somber, dark, inky, ebony, ebon, atramentous^, jetty; coal-black, jet-black; fuliginous^, pitchy, sooty, swart, dusky, dingy, murky, Ethiopic; low-toned, low in tone; of the deepest dye. black as jet &c n., black as my hat, black as a shoe, black as a tinker's pot, black as November, black as thunder, black as midnight; nocturnal &c (dark) 421; nigrescent^; gray &c 432; obscure &c 421. Adv. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... only true basis of public prosperity. Still, ministers and moralists do but tinker at the regeneration of the world in merely recommending individual improvement. The most prolific cause of depravity is the social system that forms the character to what it is. The virtues, like plants, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... in the scientific and philosophical ideas of the day, believing that while history and the past were delegated to the control of the unsophisticated whose ways were superstitious and outdated, the present contains truth in its pure form. Reform and revolution are their watchwords, for they tinker with the very foundations of society and life in an attempt to cultivate it. Zimri is their Lord, of the Future, and they follow him loosely, for he doesn't require the strict adhesion that Onan does, which suits their independent and relaxed ...
— The Revolutions of Time • Jonathan Dunn
... in his face, (Silent heart-homage—plant of special grace!) At the lane's entrance, slackening oft his pace, Would Ambrose send a loving look before; Conceiting the caged blackbird at the door, The very blackbird, strain'd its little throat In welcome, with a more rejoicing note; And honest Tinker! dog of doubtful breed, All bristle, back, and tail, but "good at need," Pleasant his greeting to the accustomed ear; But of all welcomes pleasantest, most dear, The ringing voices, like sweet silver bells, Of his two little ones. How fondly swells The father's ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... humble. His dull unimaginative nature, a perfect lumber room of the world and its rusting affairs, had received a gift in a dream—a truth from the lips of the Lord, remodelled in the brain and heart of the tinker of Elstow, and sent forth in his wondrous parable to be pictured and printed, and lie in old Hector Crathie's cottage, that it might enter and lie in young Hector Crathie's brain until he grew old and had done wrong enough to heed it, when it rose upon him in a dream, ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... spirit are twins: God only knows which is which: The soul squats down in the flesh, like a tinker drunk in ...
— The Heptalogia • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... and aptitudes of his own, appropriate to a canine of high intelligence. As it is, there are false memories of aptitudes Homer never had nor could have. Physical limitations alone make some of them impossible. How could a dog tinker with machinery, for example? Yet I 'remember' working on machines of my own design. Homer's mind, in other words, remembers as first-person data experiences it ...
— The Short Life • Francis Donovan
... I had twenty hearts to lose, I never could spare a bit of one of them for that good, gray, square, severe man. But different people have different tastes, and here is that little imp of a gipsy-tinker ready to turn slave for my master; and, odd enough, my master,—who, I should have said beforehand, would have made short work of imp, and imp's family, and have sent Hall, the Bang-beggar, after them in no time—my master, ...
— My Lady Ludlow • Elizabeth Gaskell
... although from circumstances most easily ascertained, even the assistant-overseer did not take the trouble to make himself acquainted. He was a parish child born in the workhouse, the offspring of a half-witted orphan girl and a sturdy vagrant, partly tinker, partly ballad-singer, who took good care to disappear before the strong arm of justice, in the shape of a tardy warrant and a halting constable, could contrive to intercept his flight. He joined, it was said, a tribe of gipsies, to whom he was suspected to have ...
— Jesse Cliffe • Mary Russell Mitford
... aristocratic pedigree-tracers confine themselves to one line, or to a few lines. Burke will tell you that one of the great-great-grandfathers of the present Lord Foozlem was the First Baron; he is silent about his great-grandfather, the tinker, and his great-grandfather, the pettifogging country lawyer. Americans are far more apt to push their genealogical investigations in all directions, because they are prompted by a legitimate curiosity rather than by desire to prove a point, ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... plate-basket. With metal-workers we may also put Furber or Frobisher, i.e. furbisher, of armour, etc. Poyser, from poise, scales, is official. Two occupative names of Celtic origin are Gow, a smith, as in The Fair Maid of Perth, and Caird, a tinker— ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... and it is doubly difficult to get out. In sane moments we regard only the facts, the case that is. Say what you have to say, not what you ought. Any truth is better than make-believe. Tom Hyde, the tinker, standing on the gallows, was asked if he had anything to say. "Tell the tailors," said he, "to remember to make a knot in their thread before they take the first stitch." His ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... names of Baxter and Howe must be added the name of a man far below them in station and in acquired knowledge, but in virtue their equal, and in genius their superior, John Bunyan. Bunyan had been bred a tinker, and had served as a private soldier in the parliamentary army. Early in his life he had been fearfully tortured by remorse for his youthful sins, the worst of which seem, however, to have been such as the world thinks venial. ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... sunshine. There was a flock of sheep straggling about the road, with a dog running himself into a fever in the endeavor to keep them decently together. There were some bricklayers just released from work—a tinker mending some kettles by the roadside; there was a dog-cart dashing down the road, carrying the master of the Audley hounds to his seven o'clock dinner; there were a dozen common village sights and sounds that mixed themselves up into a cheerful bustle and confusion; ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... said, "so you are leaving. Well, I don't blame you, nor wish you to remain. After all, it is no use trying to tinker up our rotten system, or to prop up society with such wretched supports as our friend here," and he pointed at Short. "What we need is to get round them by our insidious means, and then go ...
— A Girl Among the Anarchists • Isabel Meredith
... that for ninety-nine of your qualities I do not care a tinker's curse; but for your palate you are to ...
— I Saw Three Ships and Other Winter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... fer ye," Uncle Dick replied, leading the way from the cabin toward one of the out-buildings. "Hit's an ole coat. Dan left hit one hot day when he stopped in at my forge, to tinker the rivets to the cap o' the still. Hit was dum hot thet day, an' he left 'is coat. 'Twa'n't wuth comin' back fer. I 'low the smell's about ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... convincing power in the man. For Asa Skinner was a man possessed of a belief, of that sentiment of the sublime before which all inequalities are leveled, that transport of conviction which seems superior to all laws of condition, under which debauchees have become martyrs; which made a tinker an artist and a camel-driver the founder of an empire. This was with Asa Skinner to-night, as he stood proclaiming the vengeance ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... matter compassed about with obstacles many and great. A wise doubtfulness prompts conservative minds to throw every mover for change upon the defensive, when liturgical interests are at stake. So many men are born into the world with a native disposition to tamper with and tinker all settled things, and so many more become persuaded, as time goes on, of a personal "mission" to pull down and remake whatever has been once built up, esteeming life a failure unless they have contrived to build each his own monument upon a clearing, that lovers of ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington
... supper, and we don't mean to sit around here an hour or two, just watchin' you tinker with that silly old bow and stick, twirling away like you had to saw through to China. How about that, Thad?" and Bumpus turned appealingly toward the patrol leader, well knowing that whatever ...
— The Boy Scouts in the Maine Woods - The New Test for the Silver Fox Patrol • Herbert Carter
... is not he stark blind, that as he cannot himself distinguish of colours, so he would make us as mope-eyed in judging falsely of all love concerns, and wheedle us into a thinking that we are always in the right? Thus every Jack sticks to his own Jill; every tinker esteems his own trull; and the hob-nailed suiter prefers Joan the milk-maid before any of my lady's daughters. These things are true, and are ordinarily laughed at, and yet, however ridiculous they seem, ...
— In Praise of Folly - Illustrated with Many Curious Cuts • Desiderius Erasmus
... great Puritan writer of England was John Bunyan. He was born in 1628, more than twenty years after Milton. His father was a tinker. A tinker! The word makes us think of ragged, weather-worn men and women who wander about the countryside. They carry bundles of old umbrellas, and sometimes a battered kettle or two. They live, who knows how? they sleep, who knows where? Sometimes in our walks we come across a charred round patch ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... the proper way to live. Old Hiram has an anvil and an amateur forge. He can tinker up almost anything, and that eliminates the blacksmith. Howard has a bench, saws, hammers, and other tools, and that eliminates the carpenter. The women eliminate the baker, the soap boiler, and a lot ...
— In the Midst of Alarms • Robert Barr
... work in the fields, sends rain to stop the ploughing, or a frost to hurry the apple harvest. Everything is full of adventure and vicissitude! A man who has been a farmer for two hours at the mowing must suddenly turn blacksmith when his machine breaks down and tinker with wrench and hammer; and later in the day he becomes dairyman, farrier, harness-maker, merchant. No kind of wheat but is grist to his mill, no knowledge that he cannot use! And who is freer to be a citizen than he: freer to take his part in town meeting and serve his ...
— Great Possessions • David Grayson
... Country. In Darrel, the clock tinker, wit, philosopher and man of mystery, is portrayed a force held in fetters and covered with obscurity, yet strong to make its ...
— The Black Box • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... his own insignificance when he stood in the presence of the banker's clerk. If such an astonishing combination of talent as Mr. Wittleworth possessed could be purchased for five dollars a week, what could he, who was only a mere tinker, expect to obtain? Half that sum would have been an extravagant valuation of his own services, under ordinary circumstances. But beneath the burden which now rested upon him, he felt an inspiration which had never before fired his soul; he felt ...
— Make or Break - or, The Rich Man's Daughter • Oliver Optic
... anybody's joke but his own. Now, the said merriment of the Reverend Father I felt as contributing to make me look exceedingly ridiculous and sheepish. "So," says he, "you have fallen foul of Nell M'Collum, the most notorious shuler in the province! a gipsy, a fortuneteller, and a tinker's widow; but rest contented, you are not the first she has gulled—but beware the next time."—"There is no danger of that," said I, with ...
— The Station; The Party Fight And Funeral; The Lough Derg Pilgrim • William Carleton
... wickedness of the tinker has been greatly over-charged; and it is taking the language of self-accusation too literally, to pronounce of John Bunyan that he was at any time depraved. The worst of what he was in his worst days is to be expressed in a single word ... he ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
... I have seen a boy do wonders. Robin, the red tinker, had a boy Would ha run through a cat-hole. ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... Poor Boy, "there's got to be a sawmill with a red roof and flower-boxes in the windows, and this is just the place for it or I'm very much mistaken.... I wonder ... I wish to the deuce Mr. Tinker was here, he's the best man we've got on water-power. The woods are full of trees that ought to be cut for the benefit of the others. Yardsley was showing me about them only yesterday. But this is ...
— If You Touch Them They Vanish • Gouverneur Morris
... afternoon when we met our third general, and this meeting was quite by chance. Coming back from a spin down the lines we stopped in a small village called Amifontaine, to let our chauffeur, known affectionately as The Human Rabbit, tinker with a leaky tire valve or something. A young officer came up through the dusk to find out who we were, and, having found out, he invited us into the chief house of the place, and there in a stuffy little French parlor we were introduced in due ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... so many myths and portents, that Niebuhr himself could hardly have distinguished between the fable and the truth. It was said and believed that he was a foundling—a Gipsy's son, a wandering beggar, a tinker. Others had seen him in rags, selling pencils at the steps between the Pont-Neuf and the Pont-au-Change. Others, again, maintained that he had for years filled the canine office of guide to an old blind mendicant, whose beat ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... to be even more after the tinker type than Darby. Her cotton frock had once upon a time been pink and pretty as a double daisy. Now it was washed-out, worn, and, sad to say, in several places torn. At different points the skirt had rebelliously escaped from the ...
— Two Little Travellers - A Story for Girls • Frances Browne Arthur
... how it is, but there's some deficiency in Jan; something wanting. You know he generally chooses to come here by the back door: this day, because he had got the black kettle in his hand like a travelling tinker, he must go out by the front. He did! It saved him a few steps, and he went out without a blush. Out of my house, Lionel! Nobody ever lived, I am certain, who possessed so little innate notion of the decencies of life as Jan. Had he met a carriage full of visitors in ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood
... to me under the misapprehension that I had written it. I wish I had. I suppose there must be something attractive about a fellow who has the courage to write a love letter on the back of a trunk tag, and who doesn't give a tinker's damn who finds it. But for my peace of mind, ask him not to leave another one around where I will come across ...
— When a Man Marries • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... authority—namely, the authority of three tinkers who were unanimous—that, if sometimes there is a little treachery of this kind amongst the profession, it is no more than would be pronounced 'in reason' by all candid men. And certainly, said one of the three, you wouldn't look for perfection in a tinker? Undoubtedly a seraphic tinker would be an unreasonable postulate; though, perhaps, the man in all England that came nearest to the seraphic character in one century was a tinker—namely, John Bunyan. But, as my triad of tinkers ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... eyes of the law I'm guilty of wreckin' this plant but in fact I only put on the finishin' touches. I've shortened your misery, Burt, I've saved you money, for otherwise you'd have gone tryin' to tinker it up. Don't do it. Take it from me it isn't worth it. From start to finish you've ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart
... orthodox, averred that Caesar's conduct was justifiable, inasmuch as the man he barked at was one of a band of new-light fanatics who worshipped in the school- house, and the horse, moreover, was not shod at a respectable place, but at a tinker's shop in the verge of the township. A dog with such powers of discrimination certainly merits a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various
... character of the country, though it was clear, from what had actually been accomplished, that it would have been both possible and profitable to attempt much more, if the nation's energy could have been secured for the work. But it is hard to tinker at details when you are kept in a perpetual fever by a question of life and death, and the great preliminary questions of national unity and self-government remained ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth
... as they call them, and no breeze stirring, and not a damned thing to do but holystone decks, the like of an old pauper that does be scrubbing a poorhouse floor. And you say: 'Sure I'd rather be a tinker traveling the roads, with his ass and cart and dog and woman, nor a galley-slave to this bastard of a mate that has no more feeling for a poor sailorman nor a hound has for a rabbit. It's a dog's life,' you say, 'and when ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... in the great chimney, a very tall old woman clad in a red cloak and a slouched bonnet, having all the appearance of a gipsy or tinker. She smoked silently at her clay pipe, while the doubtful-looking landlady went ...
— Red Cap Tales - Stolen from the Treasure Chest of the Wizard of the North • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... Wastle dwalt on Tweed, The spot they ca'd it Linkumdoddie; Willie was a wabster guid, [weaver good] Cou'd stown a clue wi' ony body. [have stolen] He had a wife was dour and din, [stubborn, sallow] O, Tinkler Madgie was her mither; [Tinker] Sic a wife as Willie had, [Such] I wad na ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... you. I'm going to do the same as you, and tinker with my machine. If, as you say, we're likely to be on the job again soon, I don't want too take any chances either. Where's that mechanician of mine? There was something wrong with my joy stick, ...
— Air Service Boys in the Big Battle • Charles Amory Beach
... "London-folk care nothing for us, and we care nothing for them. But Swift Nicks does matter. We want him hung. No man about here with any sense bothers about your politics except at election-times, when politics means a belly full of beer and a fist full of guineas for every damned tinker and tallow-chandler in Leicester. But you, or that bloody villain Swift Nicks, if you a'nt him, keep us sweating-cold o' nights. To hell with your politics! ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... breathing quite hard. "A place where they—" he broke off. "And you're Jeremy Ammidon's granddaughter! By heaven, it would make a coolie laugh. It's like William, who never would go to sea, to have four daughters in place of a son. I'm done with you; go tinker on the piano." They got down from their chairs and departed with an only half concealed eagerness. "Do you think he means it," Janet asked hopefully, "and he'll never have ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... are due to Dr. Robert K. Root and Dr. Chauncey B. Tinker of Yale University, and to Dr. Charles H. Whitman of Lehigh University, for examining part of the work in manuscript, and to Dr. Albert S. Cook of Yale University for a careful reading ...
— The Elene of Cynewulf • Cynewulf
... funny fellow, an Irish auctioneer at Kingston, some years ago, called Paddy Moran, whom all the world, priest and parson, minister and methodist, soldier and sailor, tinker and tailor, went to hear ...
— Canada and the Canadians - Volume I • Sir Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... a character that has not had justice done him. He is the most romantic of mechanics. And what a list of companions he has—Quince the Carpenter, Snug the Joiner, Flute the Bellows- mender, Snout the Tinker, Starveling the Tailor; and then again, what a group of fairy attendants, Puck, Peaseblossom, Cobweb, Moth, and Mustard-seed! It has been observed that Shakespeare's characters are constructed upon deep physiological principles; and there is something ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
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