"Tinkering" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... frantic immediacy. Not only are we not sufficiently dealing with the Gospel as a universal code, but, as both cause and effect of this, we are not applying it to the inclusive life of our generation. We are tinkering here and patching there, but attempting no grand evaluation. We have already granted that sweeping generalizations, inclusive estimates, are as difficult as they are audacious. Yet we have also seen that these grand evaluations are of the very ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... an e, only to end by substituting, and without being aware, the still remoter letter u), the consequence must be that the whole language would go to wreck. Nine names out of every ten would need tinkering. 'London,' for instance, no more receives the normal sound of the o in either of its syllables than does the e in 'Derby.' The normal sound of the o is that heard in 'song,' 'romp,' 'homage,' 'drop.' Nevertheless, the sound given to the o in 'London,' 'Cromwell,' etc., ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... other abominable, low, cunning craft that ignorance and idleness can devise, they practise. In some instances these things are carried out to such a pitch as to render them more like imbeciles than human beings endowed with reason. Chair-mending, tinkering, and hawking are in many instances used only as a 'blind;' while the women and children go about the country begging and fortune-telling, bringing to their heathenish tents sufficient to keep the family. The poor women are ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... refused to let the second go abroad. M. Mynas forwarded a transcript which he sold to the British Museum. It was after examination pronounced to be the work of a forger, and not even what it purported to be—the tinkering of a writer who had turned the original of Babrius into barbarous Greek and halting metre. Suggestions were made that the forger was Mynas himself. And there were scholars who accounted ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... testing each separate piece of apparatus. He found that, with a little tinkering, all the machinery would work well. Meanwhile the gas continued to fill the bag, until it was tugging at the net and cords that fastened it to the airship. But all the lifting power that could be produced from the machine would not elevate the Monarch ...
— Through the Air to the North Pole - or The Wonderful Cruise of the Electric Monarch • Roy Rockwood
... turbine is simple in design and construction and does not require constant tinkering and adjustment of valve gears or taking up of wear in the running parts, it is like any other piece of fine machinery in that it should receive intelligent and careful attention from the operator by inspection of the ...
— Steam Turbines - A Book of Instruction for the Adjustment and Operation of - the Principal Types of this Class of Prime Movers • Hubert E. Collins
... to be a very hard one. Although naturally kind-hearted, active, and intelligent, he lacked strength of will to resist temptation, and had therefore fallen a victim to intemperance. He had lost his place as foreman of the great machine-shop, and what money he now earned came from odd jobs of tinkering which he was able to do here and there at private houses; for Tom was a genius as well as a mechanic, and when his head was steady enough, he could mend a clock or clean a watch as well as he could set up and regulate a steam-engine, and this latter he could ...
— Choice Readings for the Home Circle • Anonymous
... from sea-fish to beef, may be bought at the lowest prices, and the people are consequently well-developed and of a high stomach. They demand ten shillings for tinkering a jammed lock of a trunk; they receive sixteen shillings a day for working as carpenters; they spend many sixpences on very bad cigars, which the poorest of them smoke, and they go mad over a prize-fight. ...
— American Notes • Rudyard Kipling
... good enough. Letters that ought to be postponed until others are written, letters to friends that never dun, books that don't bear on anything, books that no one has asked one to read, calls on unexpecting people, bills that might just as well wait, tinkering around the house on the wrong things, the right ones, perfectly helpless, standing by. Sitting with one's feet a little too high (if possible on one's working desk), being a little foolish and liking it—making poor puns, enjoying one's bad grammar—a day, ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... made several attempts and enclose the final result. I think the substance is all right, and though the form might certainly be improved, I leave that to you. When I get to a certain point of tinkering my phrases I have to put them aside for a ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... attitude, of a change in our laws and in our judgments strictly parallel to several we have considered. Once more I am convinced of the poverty, and selfishness, and the immorality of our views. Nor do I find great improvement to-day over yesterday. There is much talk and some tinkering, but though our judgments are less harsh, still we are choked with the weeds of false sentiment and feminine egoism. We fail to attack straight ...
— Women's Wild Oats - Essays on the Re-fixing of Moral Standards • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... to Liberalism, but is shrewd enough to have a moderate Liberal among his kingly advisers; for William realizes the political weakness of further constitution-tinkering. ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... human factory receives less attention than does the commercial. Soon, all too soon, the silver cord is loosed and the golden bowl broken, and just before that event, frightened, but too late, we do a little more tinkering under a doctor's direction, and spill the contents—of the golden bowl with which we were so careless—spill it into another world, to ...
— Intestinal Ills • Alcinous Burton Jamison
... a dandy plan, while I was tinkering on the auto," remarked Mr. Sealman in an engaging manner. "What do you say to doing a tour of the Missions? You know, I guess, there's a chain of 'em, and the fine thing it would be to see the lot by road! I tell you, this little auto's going to be ...
— The Port of Adventure • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... Helen had learned to know already, came out from the living-room, hat in hand, carrying a pair of spurs he had been tinkering with. ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... Hebrew psalter in hand, and trotted in warm haste over the rough roads of Shemitic roots and metrical psalmody. Other divines rode behind, and after cutting and slashing, mending and patching, twisting and turning, finally produced what must ever remain the most unique specimen of poetical tinkering ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... show me the way down, I haven't felt that we were safe here. Therefore I say all aboard just as soon as we can be loaded in — what is that?" as a sharp staccato of shocks rose from Brodno's machine, the result of his tinkering with his air-exhaust. Even as he made haste to stop them, time being all important, Byers was placing the two women in ...
— Our Pilots in the Air • Captain William B. Perry
... in the pool, swimming and diving and slapping the surface with their tails with a noise like that of an osprey when he strikes the water in diving for a fish. But though they had time for play, they were busy folk, the beavers. Some of them were constantly patching and tinkering at the dam, and some always at work, except when the sun was up, one relieving another, gnawing their way with little tiny bites steadily through one of the great trees that stood by the water's edge, and always gnawing it so that when, after weeks of ...
— Bear Brownie - The Life of a Bear • H. P. Robinson
... you to make me a visit. Sylvia must be pretty tired after her long, busy year and I have been tinkering the house here a little bit so you can both be perfectly comfortable. It's not so lonely as you might think, as my farm borders Lake Waupegan, and the young people have gay times. My niece, Mrs. Bassett, ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... and fill her up and she'll be all right, eh?" said Chamberlain, but Hand kept on tinkering. The sudden neighing and plunging of Little Simon's poor tormented horse gave warning of the sheriff, crashing from the underbrush directly into ...
— The Stolen Singer • Martha Idell Fletcher Bellinger
... finished his mysterious tinkering and rose from his dusty job to brush off his clothes, he remarked, "There, now you may have your heart's desire, Dillon, if all you want to do is to watch ...
— Guy Garrick • Arthur B. Reeve
... and feed bins, a small room where the former owner had done his "tinkering and odd jobs," and many other places where someone might have hidden. But no one could be found. No farm animal had made the noise, that was evident, for Sandy could account for all the larger stock on the place, and it must have been a body of considerable ...
— The Moving Picture Girls at Oak Farm - or, Queer Happenings While Taking Rural Plays • Laura Lee Hope
... quite hot. If you have brought up a family for years on the proceeds of such jobs as driving a ten-penny nail in here or there, tinkering a hole in a cottage roof, knocking up a shelf in the vicarage kitchen, and mending a panel of fence, to be suddenly confronted with a proposal to engage workmen and undertake "contracts" is shortening to the breath and ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... stopped the car suddenly and got out. Ruth looked ahead with curiosity. The road seemed rather smooth and quite unoccupied. There was a group of trees, tortured by gunfire, which hid a turn in the track and what lay beyond. Charlie was tinkering with the ...
— Ruth Fielding at the War Front - or, The Hunt for the Lost Soldier • Alice B. Emerson
... Several bills tinkering at the patent laws are before Congress, and one of these (House Bill, No. 3,370) passed the House on the 30th ult. It has one section that may be made to work great harm to inventors, as it prevents infringers being sued for more than one year's damages previous to notice ...
— Scientific American, Volume XXXVI., No. 8, February 24, 1877 • Various
... Add to this, that now and then there is to be found in a printing-house a presumptuous intermeddler, who will fancy himself a poet too, and what is still worse, a better than he that employs him. The consequence is, that with cobbling, and tinkering, and patching on here and there a shred of his own, he makes such a difference between the original and the copy, that an author can not know his own work again. Now, as I choose to be responsible for nobody's dulness but my own, I am a little comforted when I reflect that ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various
... experience, or perhaps more quickly by experimenting a bit with one or two of the simple expedients which I shall try to show are based on the wood fire's way of working. While there are those who would not for worlds give up the pleasure of tinkering with the tongs and poker while the fire burns, it will perhaps not detract from this enjoyment if the tinkering is not actually the result of necessity to keep the logs burning. Fire-mending is a delightful recreation only ...
— Making a Fireplace • Henry H. Saylor
... sometimes, if she starts missing, the way she did when we were up there, you can fix things and avoid a lot of trouble by a little timely tinkering. I was up once when my engine began missing that way, and I didn't pay any attention to it. Then, about twenty minutes later, she went dead on me while I was over the water, and I had to drop, whether I wanted to or not. The water was cold, ...
— The Boy Scout Automobilists - or, Jack Danby in the Woods • Robert Maitland
... court-houses and churches and sanitariums, and lawyers, doctors and preachers become necessary, all being the inventions of our lack of wisdom." And the man knew, for he had just been through the alimony court, turned out of church, and was on his way to a winter resort for the tinkering ...
— Oklahoma Sunshine • Freeman E. (Freeman Edwin) Miller
... them to be human? The fiends seize you, boy! you have even been tinkering with my heroine's personal appearance; what is this you have been doing to ...
— Tommy and Grizel • J.M. Barrie
... Lower. Newhaven has little to show the visitor beyond the small Norman church which has a chancel apse at the east of the tower. This portion is interesting but the nave has suffered from ignorant tinkering under the alias of "restoration." In the churchyard is a monument to those who perished in the wreck of the "Brazen" sloop of war in 1800 off the harbour, and another to a local brewer of the one-time famous "Tipper" ale, made from brackish water. The town was once called Meeching; ...
— Seaward Sussex - The South Downs from End to End • Edric Holmes
... that has seen much legitimate "tinkering," not of the restorer's brand but of the sort that delights the antiquary. The earliest work is very early Norman. This is seen in the chancel arch and then we come down through the various stages of architectural history—Early English ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes
... sentences, fragments of words and phrases spoken by Brentwick and the mechanician, were flung back past his ears by the rushing wind. Shielding his eyes he could see dimly that the mechanician was tinkering (apparently) with the driving gear. Then, their pace continuing steadily to abate, he heard Brentwick fling at the man a sharp-toned and querulously impatient question: What was the trouble? His reply came in a single ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... 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. By being first-class barbers, tinkers, shoemakers, rail-splitters, tanners, they acquired the power which enabled them to become great inventors, authors, statesmen, generals. John Kay, the inventor ...
— An Iron Will • Orison Swett Marden
... for this view of her husband's mental processes. She watched them, as it were, through a glass in the side of his head, and incidentally derived infinite amusement therefrom. With instinctive wisdom she refrained from tinkering. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... Let me a little open that scripture to you: 'As every man hath received the gift'; that is, said he, as every one hath received a trade, so let him follow it. If any man have received a gift of tinkering, as thou hast done, let him follow his tinkering. And so other men their trades; and the ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... not check his teasing for a car of his own. However lax he might be about early rising and the prosody of Vergil, he was tireless in tinkering. With three other boys he bought a rheumatic Ford chassis, built an amazing racer-body out of tin and pine, went skidding round corners in the perilous craft, and sold it at a profit. Babbitt gave him a motor-cycle, and every Saturday afternoon, with seven sandwiches ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... we descended into Panama by the train-guard short-cut and across the bridge that humps its back over the P. R. R. like a cat in unsocial mood, and on through Caledonia out along the beach sands past the old iron hulls about which Panamanian laborers are always tinkering under the impression that they are working. This time we walked. I don't recall now whether it was quarter-cracks, or the Lieutenant hadn't slept well—no, it couldn't have been that, for the Lieutenant never ...
— Zone Policeman 88 - A Close Range Study of the Panama Canal and its Workers • Harry A. Franck
... Tarzan. "Once in the left shoulder, and again in the left side—both flesh wounds, I think." But the doctor insisted upon stretching him upon the sward, and tinkering with him until the wounds were cleansed and the flow of ...
— The Return of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... between him and Thomas Jefferson, as they had many tastes in common. Both were performers on the violin and used to accompany each other, and both were fond of tinkering. Jefferson, you remember, was of a very inventive turn of mind. During this time he thought of an air-tight stove and got Mr. Foxall to make some according to his ideas, but they did not work out ...
— A Portrait of Old George Town • Grace Dunlop Ecker
... is really due to Kepler, half a century after the death of Copernicus, but much credit is due to the latter for his successful attempt to provide a real alternative for the Ptolemaic system, instead of tinkering with it. The old geocentric system once shaken, the way was gradually smoothed for the heliocentric system, which Copernicus, still hampered by tradition, did not quite reach. He was hardly a practical ...
— Kepler • Walter W. Bryant
... the army was disbanded, and Bunyan went back to Elstow village and his tinkering, his bell-ringing, his dancing with the girls, his playing at "cat" on a ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... had finished his tinkering, "he's paralyzed from the waist down. Let this one try and get away ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... purposes for which they were built, would several times over have paid for themselves. But war gave them no time to pay even for their tires. You saw them by the roadside, cast aside like empty cigarette-boxes. A few hours' tinkering would have set them right. They were still good for years of service. But an army in retreat or in pursuit has no time to waste in repairing motors. To waste the ...
— With the Allies • Richard Harding Davis
... Tinkering, doctoring, shifting, deranging, Urged by a constant satiety on, Ever the new for the newer exchanging, Hazarding ever the gains we ...
— Lyra Frivola • A. D. Godley
... it," commented Kennedy, still tinkering with the record. "Yet it does not mean that because we have new ideas, they abolish the old. Often they only explain, amplify, supplement. For instance," he said, looking up at Edith Atherton, "take heredity. Our knowledge seems new, but is it? Marriages have always been dictated ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... there was many a serviceable brick wasted in Nineveh because finicky persons must needs be deleting here and there a phrase in favor of its cuneatic synonym; and it is not improbable that when the outworn sun expires in clinkers its final ray will gild such zealots tinkering with their "style." Some few there must be in every age and every land of whom life claims nothing very insistently save that they write ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... the Arrow spinning through the water, failed utterly to put way upon our cranky tub; and every day the carpenter was growing more persistent in his complaints. At last Captain Keogh ordered him to do what he pleased so long as he held his peace, whereupon the sound of hammering and tinkering might be heard for a day ...
— Kilgorman - A Story of Ireland in 1798 • Talbot Baines Reed
... to the Aegis hangar, where he found Grimshaw tinkering over a broken airplane wing. Mr. King had a desk in one corner of what ...
— Dave Dashaway and his Hydroplane • Roy Rockwood
... quailing spirit, devoted himself to the manufacture of strange cakes, which at tea-time he would deposit smoking hot in front of Seraphina's place. After each such exploit, he appeared amazed at his audacity in taking so much upon himself. The carpenter took more than a day, tinkering at an old ship's boat. He was a Shetlander—a sort of shaggy hyperborean giant with a forbidding face, an appraising, contemplative manner, and many nails in his mouth. At last the time came when he, too, approached our oblivion from behind, with a large ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... fair to the democrats to say it is no act of theirs; they inherited the misfortune, and are likely to keep it, as it is one of the fundamental principles of their Constitution, and they have a salutary dread—much to their praise—of tinkering up any flaw they find in that document, lest in mending one hole they make two. They have, as a nation, so greatly prospered under its combined enactments, and possess such an unlimited independence in their individual States, that although the exclusion ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... his digging and returned to the Ford, still determined to carry on the bluff and pretend that much tinkering was necessary before he could travel further. With a great show of industry he rummaged for pliers and wrenches, removed the hood from the motor and squinted ...
— The Trail of the White Mule • B. M. Bower
... democracies; and weighs things down;—and you cast about for new methods of reform. Democratic government, somehow, does nothing of what was expected of it; is not the panacea;—you see that, to bring the chaos of affairs into order, you must stop all this jabber and tinkering, and set up some undivided council,—some Man, for God's sake!—a Dictator who can keep his own and other people's mouths shut and hands busy, and get things done unimpeded. So you make one more grand reform for the sake of efficiency, and set ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... not to meddle nor make with Huckster Hedinn, saying he is a rude unfriendly fellow. Next morning thou must be off early and go to the farm nearest Hrutstede. There thou must offer thy goods for sale, praising up all that is worst, and tinkering up the faults. The master of the house will pry about and find out the faults. Thou must snatch the wares away from him, and speak ill to him. He will say, 'twas not to be hoped that thou wouldst behave well to him, when thou behavest ill to every one else. Then thou shalt ...
— Njal's Saga • Unknown Icelanders
... curbs, where they had been handpushed under direction from the traffic squad, stood an unbroken line of automobiles. And the hood of each was raised for the eager tinkering of its chauffeur. Past them streamed the horses, and the faces of their drivers were illumined by ...
— The Sign at Six • Stewart Edward White
... reply to this; instead, he bent over Hal who was still tinkering with the engine ...
— The Boy Allies At Verdun • Clair W. Hayes
... Gypsies who would be inclined to profit by any judicious and kind exertions made on their behalf. There are already several families of them within my knowledge, who reside in houses during the winter, and travel about only in the summer. Their means of subsistence are tinkering, and fiddling at feasts and fairs; by which some, I believe, make a good deal of money, which helps them out in the winter, when there is ...
— A Historical Survey of the Customs, Habits, & Present State of the Gypsies • John Hoyland
... must be closely covered with old muslin or ticking. The family tool chest seems to fit into the attic, as well as the small boxes of nails, rolls of wire, screws, bolts, and the hundred odds and ends of hardware which the lord of the house must be able to lay his hand on when he wants to do any tinkering about the place. A semiannual sweeping, mopping, and dusting will keep the attic in good condition if thoroughly done, with the help of the "place for everything, and everything in its place," a precept as well as an example which has entered prominently into the upbringing of most of us. Here ...
— The Complete Home • Various
... two hours they were ready to submerge again. Zimby Cox joined the crew. Bud suggested taking along hydrolungs in case of any need for tinkering with ...
— Tom Swift and the Electronic Hydrolung • Victor Appleton
... their zeal for the purity of the text, are almost as hard upon Percy as Ritson himself was. They say that he polished "The Heir of Linne" till he could see his own face in it; and swelled out its 126 lines to 216—"a fine flood of ballad and water."[38] The result of this piecing and tinkering in "Sir Cauline"—which Wordsworth thought exquisite—they regard as a heap of tinsel, though they acknowledge that "these additional stanzas show, indeed, an extensive acquaintance with old balladry and ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... is unlikely that a respectable woman would have become his wife when he was a mere boy. His sins, whatever these were, had not injured his outward circumstances; it is clear that all along he worked skilfully and industriously at his tinkering business. He had none of the habits which bring men to beggary. From the beginning of his life to the end of it he was a prudent, careful man, and, considering the station to which he belonged, ...
— Bunyan • James Anthony Froude
... than anything else," replied he. "You see one of the instruments at the school gave out and they set me to tinkering at it. In that way I got tremendously interested in it. Afterward some of us fellows did some experimenting and managed to concoct a crude one in the laboratory. It wasn't much of a telephone but we finally got ...
— Ted and the Telephone • Sara Ware Bassett
... Parliament, was to produce the greatest commercial revival, the greatest access of working prosperity, Britain had ever known. Two main causes were at work here; and the first of them, undoubtedly, was the protection afforded to our industries by Imperial preference. The time for tinkering with half-measures had gone by, and, accordingly, the fiscal belt with which the first really Imperial Parliament girdled the Empire was made broad and strong. The effect of its application was gradual, but unmistakable; its benefits grew daily more apparent as the ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... convince them of that. They carry on the prejudices and hatred of generations. I have accused some of them of being actively pro-German; of tinkering with German money ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... inside the station. It takes a soldo to get in, and Luigi has but few of them, but he is always there. His gondola is moored to the landing steps outside—a black swan of a boat, all morocco cushions and silk fringes; the product of a thousand years of tinkering by the most fastidious and luxurious people of ancient or modern times, and still to-day the most comfortable conveyance known ...
— The Parthenon By Way Of Papendrecht - 1909 • F. Hopkinson Smith
... been playing the pigeon, and some one plucked ye?" she asked, and went on without waiting for his answer. "Never mind! We'll sharpen up our wits afresh and earn a breakfast. Are ye handy at tinkering, now?" ...
— Seven Miles to Arden • Ruth Sawyer
... frozen on its way up the canal. On its deck a woman, with arms akimbo, stood over a man seated and tinkering at a kettle. ...
— Hetty Wesley • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... if anything were wanted; and if a bell was cracked, or if a new one was desired, he would dig a mould in a neighbouring field, build a fire, collect his metal and perform the task on the spot. Waylett's business might be called the higher tinkering. Sussex has some forty of his bells. He cast the Steyning peal in 1724, and earlier in the same year he had made a stay at Lewes, erecting a furnace there, as Benvenuto Cellini tells us he used to do, and remedying defective peals all around. Among others ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... it is," exclaimed the lawyer, slapping the table to add emphasis to his words. "That is the pity of it! If people who have no knowledge of law would only refrain from tinkering at their wills, what a world of ...
— The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman
... pans! All the broad earth is the tinkering man's— The green leafy lane or the fields are his home, The road or the river, where'er he way roam. He roves for a living and rests where he can. Then bring out your kettle! ...
— A Book for Kids • C. J. (Clarence Michael James) Dennis
... never accept the altering of the shapes of workers, the tinkering with the hereditary form of their children, the artificial grafting upon our race of revolting and unnecessary form changes. Your whole science is a degeneration of wisdom into evil, tampering with life itself. You are horrors, and ...
— Valley of the Croen • Lee Tarbell
... men say. I do not suppose that I shall be all happy—not even with your love. When things have once gone wrong they cannot be mended without showing the patches. But yet men stay the hand of ruin for a while, tinkering here and putting in a nail there, stitching and cobbling; and so things are kept together. It must be so for you and me. Give me your hand, Julia, for I have never deceived you, and you need not fear that I shall do so now. ...
— The Claverings • Anthony Trollope
... westward from the valley of the Indus about A.D. 1000, and to have reached Europe in the 14th century, and to owe their name gypsies to their supposed origin in Egypt. They in general adhere to their unsettled habits wherever they go, show the same tastes, and follow the same pursuits, such as tinkering, mat-making, basket-making, fortune-telling. On their first appearance they were mere vagabonds ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... "Knapp, stop tinkering those bolts about, and stand back till I give the word! Now, Blob, listen here!—Knapp and I are going through this door down the drain. You'll stand here with the lantern, and light ...
— The Gentleman - A Romance of the Sea • Alfred Ollivant
... lessening of the distance between the two boats made it possible to distinguish the disabled speeder more clearly, Orme saw that the Japanese was still tinkering with the motor. He was busying himself as though he realized that he had no hope of escape unless he could start ...
— The Girl and The Bill - An American Story of Mystery, Romance and Adventure • Bannister Merwin
... squares, and the old familiar damp and stench in the deep narrow streets. But some charm had gone out of all this. The artisans coming to the doors of their shallow booths for the light on some bit of carpentering, or cobbling, or tinkering; the crowds swarming through the middle of the streets on perfect terms with the wine-carts and cab horses; the ineffective grandiosity of the palaces huddled upon the crooked thoroughfares; the slight but insinuating cold of the southern winter, gathering in the shade ...
— Indian Summer • William D. Howells
... lines social progress has led to the initiation of movements for the improvement of public health. But they are still incomplete and imperfectly co-ordinated. We have never realised that the great questions of health cannot safely be left to municipal tinkering and the patronage of Bumbledom. The result is chaos and a terrible waste, not only of what we call "hard cash," but also of sensitive flesh and blood. Health, there cannot be the slightest doubt, is a vastly more fundamental and important matter than education, to say nothing of such minor ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... Roger muttered, as he worked over it. "It turns as hard as if some one has been tinkering with it." By using both hands he forced it round ...
— The Mutineers • Charles Boardman Hawes
... possession of the sick man's soul, or to the powerful influence of some conjunction of the planets, or to the new-fangled power of electricity which Dr. Franklin had just discovered and was making so much talk about, and was so recklessly tinkering with in Philadelphia at that very time. The doctor had strongly disapproved of Franklin's reprehensible and meddlesome boldness, but he felt that it was best, nevertheless, to write and obtain the philosopher's advice as to the feasibility, advisability, and the best convenience ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... was a looser fit for him than that conduit was for me, and there were twelve feet of conduit; good long strait-jacket, but I've been in it a lot of times now, and feel quite at home. You see, the job couldn't be done in one go, for I had to make the hole under the fountain bigger, and I've been tinkering away for nearly a week, o' nights when the water was stopped. And if I'd come up at last, like a demon in a pantomime, to find I'd had my trouble for my pains, I can't say what I should have turned my ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... Bland to tell us of all the welter of loan-mongering, rococo constitution-tinkering, Confucianism, and genuine if at times misdirected philanthropy, which is now seething ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... much cleaning to be done about the fish stage and cabin. Then there was Skipper Zeb's big trap boat to make ready for the voyage up the bay. A mast step had to be repaired, sails mended, and no end of tinkering before it ...
— Left on the Labrador - A Tale of Adventure Down North • Dillon Wallace
... meddling with an engine comes next in the list of bad habits. The tinkering engineer never knows whether his engine is in good shape or not, and the chances are that if he should get it in good shape he would not know enough to let it alone. If anything does actually get wrong with your engine, do not be afraid to take hold of it, for something ...
— Rough and Tumble Engineering • James H. Maggard
... deepened by providential escapes from accidents which threatened his life—"judgments mixed with mercy" he terms them,—which made him feel that he was not utterly forsaken of God. Twice he narrowly escaped drowning; once in "Bedford river"—the Ouse; once in "a creek of the sea," his tinkering rounds having, perhaps, carried him as far northward as the tidal inlets of the Wash in the neighbourhood of Spalding or Lynn, or to the estuaries of the Stour and Orwell to the east. At another time, in his wild contempt of danger, he tore out, while his companions ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... Fourth he had stayed at home, tinkering up his machinery, making ready for haying that was soon to occupy all his waking hours,—and they would be as many as daylight would give him. He had been doing something to an old mower that should have gone to the junk heap long ago, and with ...
— Rim o' the World • B. M. Bower
... "Certainly their tinkering isn't up to much. But I'm afraid there's more wrong with Roy than mere doctoring can touch. Still—he doesn't seem keen on ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... furnished with a pipe, which he smoked slowly and thoughtfully; half-a-dozen men were in the fore-rigging, making believe to repair damages up aloft; and soon after four more were sent up to begin tinkering at the topmast, which they made great efforts to lower down on deck, but ...
— Blue Jackets - The Log of the Teaser • George Manville Fenn
... reply, with emphasis. And no sooner are the words out of my mouth than I see that I have already transgressed my mother's commands, and given vent to one of "my unlucky things." I stand silent and ashamed, reflecting that no after-tinkering will mend my ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... whispered sharply—"Not that, you slut! Get the old one out of the cupboard. It leaks, and the Hillmen are so neat, and such nimble workers, that they are sure to mend it before they send it home. So one obliges the Good People, and saves sixpence in tinkering. But you'll never learn to be notable whilst your head is on ...
— Old-Fashioned Fairy Tales • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... particularly stupid, and he was so willing and anxious to learn, that his ill-success seemed a reason for pity rather than for wrath. Grim Norvold, Bonnyboy's father, was by trade a carpenter, and handy as he was at all kinds of tinkering, he found it particularly exasperating to have a son who was so left-handed. There was scarcely anything Grim could not do. He could take a watch apart and put it together again; he could mend a harness if necessary; he could make a wagon; nay, he could even doctor a horse when it got spavin ...
— Boyhood in Norway • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... days. I cannot, of course, resist his request for a letter to you, nor let pass the occasion of a greeting. Health, Joy, and Peace be with you! I hope you sit still yet, and do not hastily meditate new labors. Phidias need not be always tinkering. Sit still like an Egyptian. Somebody told me the other day that your friends here might have made a sum for the author by publishing Sartor themselves, instead of leaving it with a bookseller. Instantly I wondered ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... cross-roads half a mile from the foot of Crow's Mountain, he encountered two men tinkering with the engine of a big automobile. They stopped him and inquired if there was a garage nearby. While he was directing them to Pete Olsen's in town, he espied two more men reposing in the shade of a ...
— Anderson Crow, Detective • George Barr McCutcheon
... attractions. Among them was Charlie's "maginary." It was a box covered with white cloth, a piece of workmanship at which Charlie had been secretly tinkering for two days. It was labeled "A Distant Cousin of the White Elephant of Siam. Price to see, three cents, and don't tell when you've ...
— The Knights of the White Shield - Up-the-Ladder Club Series, Round One Play • Edward A. Rand
... and approached Warren Hatch, who was standing and frowningly watching the efforts of the one who was tinkering at the automobile. ...
— Frank Merriwell's Pursuit - How to Win • Burt L. Standish
... sanctity of treaties and for the protection of Nationalities has been going on, have deepened the mistrust. A frank and courageous statesmanship applied to the honest carrying out of large reforms too long delayed can alone remove it. The time for political tinkering is past; the time for wise and definite changes ...
— The Case For India • Annie Besant
... dear boy; but don't suppose that every day I am got up in this style. It is only in honour of your visit, and as soon as you are gone, I doff my doublet and hose, put on an old coat, and go down into my workshop, where I have a little tinkering to do with one of the electric wires which has gone wrong, and threatens to burn up the premises. So glad to see you. Always think these informal conferences between individual members of the two Houses are not only personally agreeable, but may be fraught with the greatest ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, January 25th, 1890 • Various
... bed that night, Blix sought out her father, who was still sitting up tinkering with the cuckoo clock, which he had taken all to pieces under the pretext that it was out of order and ...
— Blix • Frank Norris
... It was on the second day after the killing of the rhinoceroses that, as Tom was tinkering away in the engine-room of the airship, and thinking that perhaps they had better get under way, that a loud shouting ...
— Tom Swift and his Electric Rifle • Victor Appleton
... Sycamore; thought he'd let bygones be bygones when it came to straight business, but, by George, he didn't even answer my letter! Cold as a frozen lobster, and always was! You see I thought it was all on the level—his tinkering with the traction company—but he's in on the shrewdest piece of high finance that was ever put over in Indiana. Talk about my lamented brother Samuel—Sam ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... hitherto been merely playing at—a tinker or a gypsy? But I soon saw that I was not fitted to become either in reality. It was much more agreeable to play the gypsy or the tinker, than to become either in reality. I had seen enough of gypsying and tinkering to be convinced of that. All of a sudden the idea of tilling the soil came into my head; tilling the soil was a healthful and noble pursuit! but my idea of tilling the soil had no connection with Britain; for I could only expect ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... our own history," he continued, in a tone which had in it a shade of melancholy, "you see from 1823 to the eve of 1848 the Diet had been tinkering at reform in a half-hearted sort of way, but the Paris revolution let loose the whirlwind, and events were precipitated. I need not tell you there was a standing quarrel between us and the reactionary rulers in Vienna. It was the deceitful policy of ...
— Round About the Carpathians • Andrew F. Crosse
... them, fifteen soldiers, a subaltern and a young beardless officer. The officer lay in front of the fire looking intently into the flames. The soldiers were tinkering with the firearms in ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various
... only glued together by the rust. "You shouldn't make me laugh so much, Tommy," he would say. "I am afraid I'll shake the sternpost out of her." And, as Hemstead went to and fro with his tool-basket on an endless round of tinkering, Wicks lost no opportunity of chaffing him upon his duties. "If you'd turn to at sailoring or washing paint or something useful, now," he would say, "I could see the fun of it. But to be mending things that ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and tramped, till I was nearly mad with tramping, and nothing came of it. I got down into Ecuador, and there it was worse than ever. Sometimes I'd get a bit of tinkering to do,—I'm a pretty fair tinker,—or an errand to run, or a pigstye to clean out; sometimes I did—oh, I hardly know what. And ...
— The Gadfly • E. L. Voynich
... up at the broken facade of the chateau, around at the trees that environed the walls and in some places pushed their branches through openings, then at some of my men, who had been mending their clothes or tinkering at their weapons. ...
— An Enemy To The King • Robert Neilson Stephens
... man stood in silence, then with a rush, he stumbled down the hatchway, and in another moment Dave heard him tinkering away at ...
— Lost In The Air • Roy J. Snell
... worst of it in life; he had known more than one good fellow who had begun to go down hill from the day he was married, and if girls would only take the trouble to fit themselves for their indoor business the world would be a vastly more comfortable place. And as for their tinkering at the laws, such projects should ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... tinkering absent-mindedly with one of the wagons in the back lot, and the men were standing about idly, waiting for orders, when Barker came out of the main tent ...
— Polly of the Circus • Margaret Mayo
... her haste—then adding that she was not quite sure if they had progressed so rapidly as before; blushingly correcting herself at this point and that, in the tinkering manner of a nervous organization aiming at nicety ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... the tariff free from party politics and lay the foundation for a durable system of national taxation, upon which domestic industries may be founded without the hazard which they now encounter every year or two by "tinkering with the tariff." ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... in the tomb; but Christ is soon coming into his kingdom. Then the thief will be remembered, be raised from the dead, and be with Christ in that paradise into which he will then introduce all his people. Thus all is as clear as a sunbeam, when the text is freed from the bungling tinkering of men. ...
— Modern Spiritualism • Uriah Smith
... dust!" said Bob suddenly, glancing up from his tinkering. "Some one is going somewhere in a hurry. He's stopping. Why, ...
— Betty Gordon in the Land of Oil - The Farm That Was Worth a Fortune • Alice B. Emerson
... It is by education that the American is trained for such democracy as he possesses; and it is by better education that he proposes to better his democracy. Men are uplifted by education much more surely than they are by any tinkering with laws and institutions, because the work of education leavens the actual social substance. It helps to give the individual himself those qualities without which no institutions, however excellent, are of any use, and with ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... conclude to face the elements and take my chances of finding some other shelter farther ahead rather than endure their vociferous onslaughts any longer. They all three come out to see what is going to happen, and I am not ashamed to admit that I stand tinkering around the bicycle in the pelting rain longer than is necessary before mounting, in order to keep them out in it and get them wet through, if possible, in revenge for having practically ousted me from the culvert, and since I have a water-proof, and they have ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... take a run down to Bluewater Bill's myself to-night," he said to himself as he prepared to go to work on the aeroplane, at which Le Blanc had been busy tinkering during the boys' talk. ...
— The Boy Aviators' Treasure Quest • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... mental habits. These may furnish a theatre and properties for our drama; but they offer no hint of its plot and meaning. A great imaginative apathy has fallen on the mind. One-half the learned world is amused in tinkering obsolete armour, as Don Quixote did his helmet; deputing it, after a series of catastrophes, to be at last sound and invulnerable. The other half, the naturalists who have studied psychology and evolution, look at life from the outside, and the processes ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... darkness flowed back upon my mind and thought. A silence followed. I heard the wind in the poplar overhead. The doctor moved impatiently, coming a few steps nearer, then turning away again. I heard the sounds of tinkering with metal that the driver made ten yards behind us. I turned angrily to make a sign—when Marion's low voice, again more like the murmur of the wind than a living voice, rose into ...
— The Garden of Survival • Algernon Blackwood
... for himself, "and much obliged to you both for tinkering me up. Miss Gower ought ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... and leaky, the drains defective, the doors and windows ill-fitting and the rooms badly shaped and draughty. If you were asked to name, in a word, the cause of the ill-health of the people who lived there you would say—the house. All the tinkering in the world would not make that house fit to live in; the only thing to do with it would be to pull it down and build another. Well, we're all living in a house called the Money System; and as a result most of us are suffering ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... admirably complete and explicit handbook for boys who fall under the spell of experimenting and "tinkering" with electrical apparatus. Simple explanations of the principles involved make the ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Life-Savers • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... Lady Hannah, vanished behind the corrugated partition that separated the office from the printing-room, and presently came back in inky shirt-sleeves with a smear of lubricating-oil upon his forehead, and laid the wet slips upon the Editorial table. Then he went back, and fell to tinkering at his machine. Lady Hannah corrected her proof. When she had done she looked at her wrist-watch. In ten minutes Supreme Authority would descend the ladder, wield the Blue Pencil, and depart. Would he have mercy and not ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... say, may be 'forced down or stirred up,' and in either case the issue is fatal. Yao made the people too happy, so they were not satisfied. Chieh made them too wretched, so they grew discontented. Then every one began to argue about the best way of tinkering up society. 'It is quite clear that something must be done,' they said to each other, and there was a general rush for knowledge. The results were so dreadful that the Government of the day had to bring ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... we get hold of a watch which has thin pallet arms, or stones, if they are exposed pallets, and the escape was designed for pallets with thick arms. There is no sort of tinkering we can do to give such a watch a good motion, except to change either the escape wheel or the pallets. If we know enough of the lever escapement to set about it with skill and judgment, the matter is soon put to rights; but otherwise we can look and squint, open and close the ...
— Watch and Clock Escapements • Anonymous
... dream that the family was living on an average income of less than sixpence a head per week. But I know how hard some decent folk will struggle with the bitterest poverty before they will give in to it. The old man came in whilst I was there. He sat down in one corner, quietly tinkering away at something he had in his hands. His old corduroy trousers were well patched, and just new washed. He had very little to say to us, except that "He could like to get summat to do; for he wur tired o' walkin' abeawt." Another case was that of a poor widow woman, with five young children. ...
— Home-Life of the Lancashire Factory Folk during the Cotton Famine • Edwin Waugh
... most unpleasant-looking webbed claws fully eight feet long. The bony framework of the head, too, resembled something between a crocodile and a monstrous snapping-turtle. The walls of the shanty were hung with drawings and blue prints. A man dressed in white linen was tinkering with the ...
— In Search of the Unknown • Robert W. Chambers
... strange that of all men sailors should be tinkering at their last wills and testaments, but there are no people in the world more fond of that diversion. This was the fourth time in my nautical life that I had done the same thing. After the ceremony was concluded upon the present occasion, I felt all the easier; a stone ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... despatch she set down the tray and rushed out to the gravel path, calling loudly to Flora. Flora, arrayed in a greasy blue overall, came hurrying from the garage where she had been spending the day tinkering ...
— Men of Affairs • Roland Pertwee
... amateur play—any less effective or less lasting than the skill acquired in sewing yards of stitches or sawing yards of board just for "exercise" in a class? On the contrary, other things being equal, arithmetic and authors and sewing and tinkering can be made both more effective and more lasting when associated with pleasurable feelings than when performed under strain, compulsion and resentment. If it is only a question of "learning" this or that, there is no doubt that the pleasant way is in every ...
— Your Child: Today and Tomorrow • Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg
... is simply this," she said: "I've been tinkering with that machine gun most of the day, and my conviction is that it will work. You simply turn a handle like a hand sewing machine. As soon as you hear me starting it you leave the church by that shell hole at the back and go as rapidly as possible back to ...
— More Tish • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... together so that it would keep time. By the time I was fifteen I could do almost anything in watch repairing—although my tools were of the crudest. There is an immense amount to be learned simply by tinkering with things. It is not possible to learn from books how everything is made—and a real mechanic ought to know how nearly everything is made. Machines are to a mechanic what books are to a writer. He gets ideas from ...
— My Life and Work • Henry Ford
... lessen it; but, to be sure, it was grown to a sauciness that did call for a decenter veil. I do not think they have found out a good cure; and I am of opinion, too, that flagrancy proceeds from national depravity, which tinkering one branch will not remedy. Perhaps polished manners are a better proof of virtue in an age than of vice, though system-makers do not hold so: at least, decency has seldom been the symptom of a ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume II • Horace Walpole
... management of the public debt, approving all the important suggestions of the secretary of the treasury, and recognizing the proper protection of American industry. He is in favor of the great interests of labor, and opposed to such tinkering with the tariff as will make vain the toil of the industrious farmer, paralyze the arm of the sturdy mechanic, strike down the hand of the hardy laborer, stop the spindle, hush the loom, extinguish the furnace-fires, and degrade all ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 5, May, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... over, Mr. Harbison and I remained on terms of armed neutrality. And Max still hunted for Anne's pearls, using them, the men declared, as a good excuse to avoid tinkering with the furnace or repairing the dumb waiter, which took the queerest notions, and stopped once, half-way up from the kitchen, for an hour, with the dinner on it. Anyhow, Max was searching the house systematically, armed ...
— When a Man Marries • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... tramp handicraft men. Are they not all over England, in this Midsummer time? Where does the lark sing, the corn grow, the mill turn, the river run, and they are not among the lights and shadows, tinkering, chair-mending, umbrella-mending, clock-mending, knife-grinding? Surely, a pleasant thing, if we were in that condition of life, to grind our way through Kent, Sussex, and Surrey. For the worst six ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... is left out in the cold, and even cotton languishes. If the Chancellor of the Exchequer put up titles to auction, while abolishing the legislative function of the Lords, there would be millions in it. But as we English are not logical, our mending would probably resolve itself into fatuous tinkering. We might get rid of the sons, but leave the fathers. We might flood the Lords with life peers, but leave the veto. Such tactics are too Britannic. ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen
... has some very suggestive sentences in this line of thought in a sermon on "The Regenerative Force of the Gospel." His words are: "Christ never patches. The Gospel is not here to mend people. Regeneration is not a scheme of moral tinkering and ethical cobbling. In the Gospel, we move into a new world and under a new scheme. The Gospel does not classify with other ...
— The American Missionary, Vol. 43, No. 9, September, 1889 • Various
... and ashes. My unfortunate workman, having blundered on for certain millions of years tinkering and patching and improving his dismal colony, will give the thing up; and God will laugh and show him the mistakes and then blot the essay out, as a master runs his pen through the errors in a pupil's exercise. The earth grows cold at last, and the herds of humanity die, and the countless ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... the date of 1662; but the verses must undoubtedly have been some years earlier, before the publication of his first tract. These curious inscriptions must have been Bunyan's first attempts in verse: he had, no doubt, found difficulty enough in tinkering them to make him proud of his work when it was done; otherwise, he would not have written them in a book which was the most valuable of all his goods and chattels. In later days, he seems to have taken this book for his art of poetry. His verses are something ...
— Books and Authors - Curious Facts and Characteristic Sketches • Anonymous
... and tinkering too. The forest birds liked to hear me just the same as those canaries. Especially the tinkering. They'd crowd about and sing fit to burst their throats—wood-thrushes, finches, and all sorts. Then, I used to stop at village ...
— Explorers of the Dawn • Mazo de la Roche
... Lenore saw Jake's hand go to her father's shoulder. "Boss," he whispered, "we can't ketch thet car now." Anderson resigned himself, averted his face so that he could not see Nash, who was tinkering with the engine. Lenore believed then that Nash had deliberately stalled the engine or disordered something, so as to permit the escape of the strange car ahead. She saw it turn off the long, straight road ahead and disappear to the right. After ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... mechanics; I recognize as a distinct boon the fact that I am awkward in the use of tools, and the further fact that I have no ambition in the direction of mechanical endeavor has doubtless saved me many a bruised thumb and a vast amount of hard labor. When I see my neighbors tinkering away at their storm windows and garbage boxes and grape vine trellises and dog kennels and window screens and front gates, I do not neglect to thank heaven that Alice has the best of reasons for not asking me to engage in similar odd jobs about ...
— The House - An Episode in the Lives of Reuben Baker, Astronomer, and of His Wife, Alice • Eugene Field
... boobs, and let a regular fellow talk," chided Bob. "What I was going to say was that while I was tinkering with the set I disconnected the ground wire. Of course I thought that would put the receiver out of business for the time, and I was almost knocked silly when I found that I could hear the concert that was going on just about as well as though ...
— The Radio Boys Trailing a Voice - or, Solving a Wireless Mystery • Allen Chapman
... that freedom shall have all its rights recognised and respected." Speech of Charles L. Beale of Kinderhook.—Ibid., p. 974. "We of the North are called upon to save the Union by making concessions and giving new guarantees to the South.... But I am opposed to tinkering with the Constitution, especially in these exciting times. I am satisfied with it as it is." Speech of Alfred Ely of Rochester.—Ibid., Appendix, p. 243. "I should be opposed to any alteration of the Constitution which would extend the area of slavery." Speech of Luther C. Carter ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... the other hand, steals his dinner, I recognize the importance of the difference; but if the rich man plunders the community by exorbitant profits, or speculation with other people's money, while the gipsy adds a fowl or two to the produce of his tinkering; or, once again, if the gipsy is as honest as the honest citizen, which is not so rare a case by any means as people imagine, I return to my question: Wherein, I say, is the warm house, the windows hung with purple, and the table covered with fine linen, more divine ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... is more annoying than a mysterious elder brother. That Ken was tinkering at the Flying Dutchman (as he had immediately called the power-boat, on account of its ghostly associations) was evident to his brother and sister, but why he should be doing ...
— The Happy Venture • Edith Ballinger Price
... were returning from a rather hurried excursion to a near-by town when they came face to face with the motorcyclist. His motor had evidently stalled, and he was standing in the middle of the road tinkering with it. ...
— The Outdoor Girls at the Hostess House • Laura Lee Hope
... returned. "Yes, I feel actually comfortable once more. Don Manuel has dressed and bound up my wounds, applying soothing salves to them, and altogether tinkering me up until I am pretty nearly as good as new. But, Hawkesley, my dear boy, are we in our sober senses, or is this only a delightful dream? I can scarcely realise that I am awake; that we are actually among our fellow-men once more; and that I am surrounded by the walls and sheltered ...
— The Congo Rovers - A Story of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... Wordsworth's 'Excursion' suggested by Coleridge, but luckily quite beyond all the resources of tinkering open to William Wordsworth, is—in the choice of a Pedlar as the presiding character who connects the shifting scenes and persons in the 'Excursion.' Why should not some man of more authentic station have been complimented with that place, ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... he had been talking he had been tinkering with the motor, which was having a little balky spell. At his last words Jerry spoke ...
— The Boy Scouts of the Air on Lost Island • Gordon Stuart
... plenty of soft material to feed into the transmission case. The car pulled unsteadily and stopped. The boys cautiously replaced the board in the floor and awaited developments. They could hear J. Jervice tinkering around, examining brakes and wheels and everything ...
— The Boy Scout Treasure Hunters - The Lost Treasure of Buffalo Hollow • Charles Henry Lerrigo |
