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More "Mechanic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Mr. Geary's chief complaint against the Chinese was that they work too cheaply, are too industrious, and do not eat as much as an American. He obtained his information from Consul Bedloe, of Amoy. He says the average earnings of the Chinese adult employed as mechanic or laborer (in China) is five dollars per month, and states that this is ten per cent above the average wages ...
— As A Chinaman Saw Us - Passages from his Letters to a Friend at Home • Anonymous
... that we five men of Dr. Mawson's Expedition were landed on December 22, 1911, with a programme of work outlined by our leader. H. Hamilton was biologist, L. R. Blake surveyor and geologist, C. A. Sandell and A. J. Sawyer were wireless operators, the former being also a mechanic, and I was appointed meteorologist and leader of ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... same way with regard to an unclear drawing, a new road, some bodily activity, etc. Anybody who has not acquired the habit might have to take all day to learn the business of dressing and undressing himself. And how difficult it is just to walk, a thing we do unconsciously, is confirmed by the mechanic who wants ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... rode towards Courthorne's homestead, and found its owner stripping a binder. Pieces of the machine lay all around him, and from the fashion in which he handled them it was evident that he was capable of doing what the other men at Silverdale left to the mechanic at the settlement. Payne wondered, as he watched him, who had taught the gambler to use spanner ...
— Winston of the Prairie • Harold Bindloss
... workmanship and materials can be used to an equal advantage with those of first class. To slight work and yet do it justice; to give it all the strength and endurance necessary, requires one of skillful acquirements. A mechanic may persuade a proprietor into many a long day's work, as it pays well to nurse good jobs when other work is slack, but an architect who understands such things would save ...
— Woodward's Country Homes • George E. Woodward
... social smile, Released from day and its attendant toil, And draws his household round their evening fire, And tells the ofttold tales that never tire; Or, where the town's blue turrets dimly rise, And manufacture taints the ambient skies, The pale mechanic leaves the labouring loom, The air-pent hold, the pestilential room, And rushes out, impatient to begin The stated course of customary sin: Now, now my solitary way I bend Where solemn groves in awful state impend: And cliffs, ...
— The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White - With a Memoir by Sir Harris Nicolas • Henry Kirke White
... permanency, since it seems to be the only possible thing, but you know my heart isn't really in newspaper work. The plain truth is I don't like it, although I do my best. You know Father always said I was a born mechanic. If I only could get a position somewhere among machinery—that would be my choice. There's one vacant in the Steel and Iron Works at Bancroft—but of course I've no chance ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1907 to 1908 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... is paid chiefly by those who can afford to add foreign luxuries to domestic comforts, being collected on our seaboard and frontiers only, and incorporated with the transactions of our mercantile citizens, it may be the pleasure and the pride of an American to ask, What farmer, what mechanic, what laborer ever sees a taxgatherer of the United States? These contributions enable us to support the current expenses of the Government, to fulfill contracts with foreign nations, to extinguish the native ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... comforted herself with the thought that good cooks were exceedingly scarce—so scarce, in fact, that even a cook with impedimenta in the shape of a small son might be reasonably certain of prompt and well-paid employment. Picturing herself as a kitchen mechanic brought a wry smile to her sweet face, but—it was honorable employment and she preferred it to being a waitress or an underfed and underpaid saleswoman in a department store. For she could cook wonderfully well and she knew ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... a few months afterwards—said she had no need for it," replied Peters. "I kept Phillipe on because he was a better mechanic than the other man. There ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... that a taxidermist should receive at least as much as a skilled mechanic and the experts both in commercial and museum work are ...
— Home Taxidermy for Pleasure and Profit • Albert B. Farnham
... of the column, "the Corinthian capital of polished society;" they appealed to prejudices without number, to old attachments and young hopes; to the expectation of thousands who might one day become peers; they set up as a scarecrow, the spectre of all that was sordid, mechanic and ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... horseback, Watt arrived in London, a stranger in a strange land, unknowing and unknown. But the fates had been kind for, burdened with neither wealth nor rank, this poor would-be skilled mechanic was to have a fair chance by beginning at the bottom among his fellows, the sternest yet finest of all schools to call forth and strengthen inherent qualities, and impel a poor young man to put forth his utmost ...
— James Watt • Andrew Carnegie
... grant was made to provide for "the endowment, support and maintenance of at least one college, where the leading object should be, without excluding other scientific and classical studies, and including military tactics, to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and mechanic arts, in such manner as the legislature of the States may prescribe, in order to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions of life." This act was supplemented in 1890 by an additional provision ...
— Colleges in America • John Marshall Barker
... wearing apparel, beds and bedding of the debtor, whatever his calling; and also the farming utensils and implements of husbandry of the farmer, two beasts of burden employed by him, and one cart or wagon; the tools and implements of a mechanic or artisan necessary to carry on his trade; the instruments and chests of a surgeon, physician, surveyor, and dentist; the law libraries of an attorney and counsellor; the cabin or dwelling of a miner, and his pick, rocker, wheelbarrow, and other implements ...
— Personal Reminiscences of Early Days in California with Other Sketches; To Which Is Added the Story of His Attempted Assassination by a Former Associate on the Supreme Bench of the State • Stephen Field; George C. Gorham
... and Mistakes of the Press". Over the 'nom de guerre' of 'Papyrius Cursor,' a real Roman name, but as happy in its applicability as Thackeray's 'Manlius Pennialinus,' Whitefoord contributed many specimens of this mechanic wit to 'The Public Advertiser'. The 'Cross Readings' were obtained by taking two or three columns of a newspaper horizontally and 'onwards' instead of ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... people is to go deeper, excavate their sensory impressions, play on their subconscious nerves, use liver pills or have a kidney taken out to convince them. Talk with almost any man of a certain type, no matter what he is, a banker, a lawyer, or a mechanic, after he is thirty years old, and his mind cannot really be budged. He is not really listening to you when you criticize him or differ ...
— The Ghost in the White House • Gerald Stanley Lee
... not inspiring. A machinist, or a mechanic, or a day laborer might have found a foot-hold. A man without handicraft was not in request in Stillwater. "What is your trade?" was the staggering question that met Richard at the threshold. He went from workshop to workshop, confidently and cheerfully at first, whistling softly between ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... innovations and reforms, was vindicated. For breadth of design and statesmanship there was not one sovereign in the coalition who could compare with this man who, Bishop Burnet thought, was better fitted for a mechanic than a Prince—and ...
— A Short History of Russia • Mary Platt Parmele
... not end by Nelson's urn Where an immortal England sits— Nor where your tall young men in turn Drank death like wine at Austerlitz. And when the pedants bade us mark What cold mechanic happenings Must come; our souls said in the dark, "Belike; but there ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... special efforts made by dualists to draw our attention here to the "wisdom of the Creator" and the design visible in his works. As a matter of fact, you will discover, on mature reflection, that on this theory the Creator is at bottom only playing the part of a clever mechanic or watch-maker; all these familiar teleological ideas of Creator and creation are based, in the long run, on a similar ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.2 • Ernst Haeckel
... Civil War and the Commonwealth caused great confusion and many defects in the registers. Very often the rector was turned out of his parish; the intruding minister, often an ignorant mechanic, cared naught for registers. Registrars were appointed in each parish who could scarcely sign their names, much less enter a baptism. Hence we find very frequent gaps in the books from 1643 to 1660. At Tarporley, Cheshire, ...
— Vanishing England • P. H. Ditchfield
... navigation has been still more recently ascertained. When it was first proposed, Sir Joseph Banks, President of the Royal Society, said: "It is a pretty plan, but there is just one point overlooked: that the steam-engine requires a firm basis on which to work." Symington, the practical mechanic, put this theory to the test by his successful experiments, first on Dalswinton Lake, and then on the Forth and Clyde Canal. Fulton and Bell afterwards showed the power of steamboats in navigating the rivers of America ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles
... Astra had been turned over to Maintenance. Maintenance asked no questions. It was that department's job to take the ship apart, fix what needed fixing, and put it. Ten minutes later Jacobs saw Armando Gomez was the mechanic detailed to check the ...
— Daughters of Doom • Herbert B. Livingston
... 1870, that Harte in the make-up of the Overland found an awkward space too much for an ordinary poem. An associate suggested that he write something to fit the gap; but Harte was not given to dashing off to order, nor to writing a given number of inches of poetry. He was not a literary mechanic, nor could he command his moods. However, he handed his friend a bundle of manuscript to see if there was anything that he thought would do, and very soon a neat draft was found bearing the title "On the Sinfulness of Ah Sin as Reported by Truthful James." ...
— A Backward Glance at Eighty • Charles A. Murdock
... against all this were operating steadily two tremendous forces. In the race for industrial advantage which is at last the decisive test, free society was superior to slave society by as much as the freeman is superior to the slave. The advantage of the Northern farmer or mechanic over the negro slave was the measure of the advantage of the North over the South. In increase of wealth; in variety, intensity, and productiveness of social life; in immigration; in intellectual progress, the free States outstripped ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... as to the abstract question, who first conceived the principle involved in sewing by machinery, or in respect to who first constructed a machine that would fulfill that idea; but so far as great results are concerned the world must be considered as indebted to Elias Howe, Jr., a New England mechanic, born and reared in obscurity, and at an early age thrown upon his own resources. He was born at Spencer, Massachusetts, July 9th, 1819. His father was a farmer and miller, but at sixteen he left home, engaging in a cotton mill. Space will not permit us to follow him through ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... teaching of this Blessed Father in his Philothea, where he says, "It is an error, nay, a heresy, to wish to exclude the highest holiness of life from the soldier's barrack, the mechanic's workshop, the courts of princes, or the ...
— The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales • Jean Pierre Camus
... circumstances such as to encourage them in such a work. We cannot begin too early to give them a bent towards culture which shall abide by them and raise them above the work-a-day world which will demand so large a share of their time and strength. The mechanic, the farmer, the man in any walk of life, who has early formed good habits of reading, is the one who will magnify his calling, and occupy the highest positions in it. And to the thousands of young people, in whose homes there is none of the atmosphere of culture or of the ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine
... two of these settlers at hazard upon their holdings, and, although the year had been adverse, found them happy and hopeful. No. 1, who had been a mechanic, proposed to increase his earnings by mending bicycles. No. 2 was an agriculturist pure and simple, and showed me his fowls and pigs with pride. Here, however, I found a little rift within the rural lute, for on asking him how his wife liked the life he replied after a ...
— Regeneration • H. Rider Haggard
... Whose every sentence Fashion makes a law; Who on mere credit his vain trophies rears, And founds his merit on our servile fears; Then we discard the workings of the heart, And nature's banish'd by mechanic art; Then, deeply read, our reading must be shown; Vain is that knowledge which remains unknown: Then Ostentation marches to our aid, And letter'd Pride stalks forth in full parade; 40 Beneath their care behold the work refine, Pointed each sentence, ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... that season for the habitant one of severe labour. Winter, though it has its own labours, such as cutting wood, is the great season of social intercourse. For a long time the habitant would not consider a mechanic his social equal; perhaps, still, the daughters of a farmer would spurn the advances of the village carpenter. But whatever the social distinctions, baptisms, marriages, anniversaries, are made ...
— A Canadian Manor and Its Seigneurs - The Story of a Hundred Years, 1761-1861 • George M. Wrong
... thou? Thou, an Egyptian puppet, shall be shown In Rome as well as I. Mechanic slaves, With greasy aprons, rules, and hammers, shall Uplift us to the view. In their thick breaths, Rank of gross diet, shall we be enclouded, And forc'd to drink ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... countries;—rushing out from their stone towers ("walls fourteen feet thick"), to seize any herd of "six hundred swine," any convoy of Lubeck or Hamburg merchant-goods, that had not contented them in passing. What were pedlers and mechanic fellows made for, if not to be plundered when needful? Arbitrary rule, on the part of these Noble Robber-Lords! And then much of the Crown-Domains had gone to the chief of them,—pawned (and the pawn-ticket lost, so to speak), or sold for what trifle of ready money was to be had, ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. III. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Hohenzollerns In Brandenburg—1412-1718 • Thomas Carlyle
... to better. Naught care I, or know I, or should or could I trow, being a man of poetical turn and no base mechanic—no offence meant to yourself, Master Droop. But this I do say—and now mark me well—I say—and dare maintain it (and all shall tell ye that is a fair maintenance and a good champion), that for a sure and favorable inductance to the favors of the court there's no man living takes the ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... faculty, nor stoop to any condescension, by which the horrors of his fate might be assuaged: he scorns to execute the lowest offices of menial services, particularly in attending those who are the objects of contempt or abhorrence; he is incapable of exercising any mechanic art, which might afford a happy though a scanty independence: shrunk within his dismal cell, surrounded by haggard poverty, and her gaunt attendants, hollow-eyed famine, shivering cold, and wan disease, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... solitude has aged him, or the abuse of his gift of comprehension. He scrutinizes the thought of every one, yet without definite aim or system. The pickaxe of his criticism demolishes, it never constructs. Thus his lassitude is that of a mechanic, not of an architect. The eyes, of a pale blue, once brilliant, are clouded now by some hidden pain, or dulled by gloomy sadness. Excesses have laid dark tints above the eyelids; the temples have lost their freshness. The chin, of incomparable distinction, ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... a blacksmith. He was much more-a natural amateur mechanic-the only man in those early days in the little town of Warren, who could successfully tinker sewing-machines, repair clocks, or make a new casting for a broken Franklin heater. He was a hale, ruddy man who lived, worked and died with much peace. There were girls, but David ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll
... bravery, when not reinforced by other qualities, is of less and less consequence. The bold, adventurous youth who, years ago, would have been an embryo Murat, Messina, Espartero or Prim, would be rejected today to make room for a mechanic who had the skill to operate a machine, or for an aviator or an engineer who might be capable of solving in a crisis a problem of ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... my journey, yet I would not forget that it was the people and their fathers' deeds and sufferings that had led me to undertake this rather fatiguing enterprise; and long before I reached the Barricata, or Pra del Torno, I had a great enjoyment in being taken by a Vaudois mechanic, who left his work at Angrogna, and would have no acknowledgment but my thanks, in order to show me one of those wonderful hiding-places in the very heart of the mountains, where the God of the hill ...
— The Vaudois of Piedmont - A Visit to their Valleys • John Napper Worsfold
... "insolent Greece or haughty Rome," that passed current among us—Peter Wilkins—the Adventures of the Hon. Capt. Robert Boyle—the Fortunate Blue Coat Boy—and the like. Or we cultivated a turn for mechanic or scientific operations; making little sun-dials of paper; or weaving those ingenious parentheses, called cat-cradles; or making dry peas to dance upon the end of a tin pipe; or studying the art military ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... place. Why should he be reared as a gentleman—he, a poor waif of the sea? Probably he is the son of some low mechanic, perhaps of a Northern mudsill, and my aunt—think of it, my aunt—must bring him up as a Southern gentleman!" The young man leaped up and began to pace the boathouse floor nervously. "I suppose she'll leave him a large legacy in ...
— Young Captain Jack - The Son of a Soldier • Horatio Alger and Arthur M. Winfield
... temporarily impossible, so the trio gazed eagerly around them. Just ahead, sat a shop girl in a shabby best dress, with a head of blonde, mismatched hair, and beside her, her escort, an Irish mechanic, who shifted his head from time to time as the unaccustomed collar scraped his neck. Across the aisle was a family of towheaded Swedes, the father self-conscious in his carefully pressed black suit; the mother, watchful of her two mischievous, blue-eyed urchins. Young gallants of the neighborhood ...
— A Son of the City - A Story of Boy Life • Herman Gastrell Seely
... stone-cutter, but his sons had both completed their education in good schools in Alexandria. The elder, Antonius, who already had a house of his own and a wife and children, was an architect and artist-mechanic; the younger, Polykarp, was a gifted young sculptor. The noble church of the oasis-city had been built under the direction of the elder; Polykarp, who had only come home a month since, was preparing to establish and carry on works of great extent in his father's quarries, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... adds, "It is said he died in an hospital at Paris in 1740:" and observes that Le Blon was "very far from young when he knew him, but of surprising vivacity and volubility, and with a head admirably mechanic, but an universal projector, and with at least one of the qualities that attend that vocation, either a dupe or a cheat; I think," he continues, "the former, though, as most of his projects ended in air, the sufferers ...
— A Walk from London to Fulham • Thomas Crofton Croker
... secure. Great lenses are so sensitive that one cannot go near them without throwing them discernibly out of shape. It were easy to show that there is no solid earth nor immovable mountains. I came away saying to my friend, "I am glad God lets you into so much of his finest thinking." He is a mechanic, not a theologian. This foremost man in the world in his fine department was lately but a "greasy mechanic," an engineer in ...
— Among the Forces • Henry White Warren
... motor car from the point of view of absolute control of it at every moment, the first thought of the mechanic is an adequate brake and an efficient regulator of speed, instruments antagonistic, but necessary to work simultaneously or alternately. The involuntary or vegetative nervous system is built upon the same principle. It supplies every organ ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... conducting them; but they should recollect that competency cannot be obtained without labour. Every trade—every profession in this respect, is subject to the same law—the lawyer, the physician, the tradesman, and the mechanic. This labour is required at our hands, even in an old community; how much more then is it called for in a new, where the ingenuity of men is put to trial to secure those means of accomplishing their ends which here are abundant. Now, it appears to me but consistent, that he who is obliged ...
— Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia, Complete • Charles Sturt
... trustful sympathy showed, without word said, that he, if no other, believed nothing to her disadvantage, but was as much her humble friend as ever; and to the hitherto self-reliant damsel, the blessedness of human sympathy, embodied in the looks and tones of the hard-handed mechanic, brought such healing and such schooling together, that for a long time she never said her prayers by her bedside without ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... could be entered upon. As then organized—in the autumn of 1878—a superintendent of the workshop had general direction of the trade department of the school. He was instructed to submit to the writer plans, in detail, for a regular course of shop instruction, and was given as assistants a skilled mechanic of unusual experience and ability, whose compensation was paid from the mechanical laboratory funds, and guaranteed by the writer personally, and another aid whose services were paid for partly by the Institute and partly ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 433, April 19, 1884 • Various
... ever. From the affectation of cosmopolitan indifference not AEschylus, not Pindar, not Dante's very self was more alien or more free than Shakespeare; but there was nothing of the dry Tyrtaean twang, the dull mechanic resonance as of wooden echoes from a platform, in the great historic chord of his lyre. "He is very English, too English, even," says the Master on whom his enemies alone—assuredly not his most loving, ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... what? A faint murmur of interest rose as the last wrappings fell aside and revealed a somewhat-the-worse-for-wear typewriter. People glanced from it to the witness: some of those present recognized him as a young mechanic, a native of Hathelsborough, who had gone, a few years previously, to work in the neighbouring manufacturing city of Clothford—such began to ask themselves what he could have to do with this case and waited eagerly for ...
— In the Mayor's Parlour • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
... would be sold "at vendue," or, as we say, at auction; that a reward of five pistoles would be paid for the arrest of "a lusty negroe man" or an "indented servant" or an "apprentice lad," who had run away from his owner or master. Very rarely is a call made for a mechanic or a workman of ...
— A School History of the United States • John Bach McMaster
... But he did get from his father a capacity for the knowing and handling of machinery, which amounted almost to genius. Of the father's steadiness under the grind of daily work which had made him the head mechanic in the Mill, Tony possessed not a tittle. What he could get easily he got, and getting this fancied himself richly endowed, knowing not how slight and superficial is the equipment for life's stern fight that comes without sweat of brain and body. His cleverness deceived first himself and then his ...
— To Him That Hath - A Novel Of The West Of Today • Ralph Connor
... of the places where he taught are not known to me, though doubtless there is many an Ohio farmer, or mechanic, or, perchance, professional man, who is able to boast that he was partially educated by a President ...
— From Canal Boy to President - Or The Boyhood and Manhood of James A. Garfield • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... first volume is all story and adventure, those that follow it will not be wholly given up to the details of the mechanic arts. The captain has a steam-yacht; and the hero of the first story has a fine sailboat, to say nothing of a whole fleet of other craft belonging to the nabob. The boys are not of the tame sort: they are not of the humdrum kind, and they are inclined to make things lively. In fact, they ...
— All Adrift - or The Goldwing Club • Oliver Optic
... me to any treacherous machination against either thy person or thy property. Thy daughter I loved, and love and shall ever love, because I deem her worthy of my love, and, if I dealt with her after a fashion which to the mechanic mind seems hardly honourable, I did but commit that fault which is ever congenial to youth, which can never be eradicated so long as youth continues, and which, if the aged would but remember that they were once young and would measure the delinquencies of others by their own and their own ...
— The Decameron, Volume I • Giovanni Boccaccio
... "Farmers' High School," which later became the Pennsylvania State College, was opened in central Pennsylvania. In 1862, in the midst of the greatest civil war in history, the American Congress passed the very important Morrill Act, which provided for the creation of a college to teach agriculture, mechanic arts, and military science in each of the American States. It was a decade before many of these institutions opened, and for a time they amounted to but little. They had but few students, little money, and the instruction ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... our "good society" and "fashionable world" every baseness and vulgarity that is invented outre mer, particularly in Paris. One woman returns to smoke cigars, in a magnificent home erected by a lucky mechanic or shopkeeper, as if such an indecency had ever been tolerated among the well-born and well-bred people of the social metropolis. Others, copying from their probable associates abroad, introduce obscene dances, ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... Lincolnshire. It was headed by Dr. Mackrel, prior of Barlings, who was disguised like a mean mechanic, and who bore the name of Captain Cobler. This tumultuary army amounted to above twenty thousand men;[**] but notwithstanding their number, they showed little disposition of proceeding to extremities against the king, and seemed ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part C. - From Henry VII. to Mary • David Hume
... business; but I was mistaken. Lord Edward was a sailor every inch of him: he knew a ship from stem to stern, understood the characters of seamen, and gained their confidence. He was, besides, a good mechanic—a carpenter, rope-maker, sail-maker, and cooper. He could hand, reef, and steer, knot and splice; but he was no orator: he read little, and spoke less. He was a man of no show. He was good-tempered, honest, and unsophisticated, ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat
... and good qualities to their children. But in the matter of procuring a livelihood let us, for their own good, induce them to lay aside the bow and fish-spear, and, in lieu thereof, put their hand to the plough, or make them wield the tool of the mechanic. ...
— Missionary Work Among The Ojebway Indians • Edward Francis Wilson
... fell ill on the 4th September. Skilled labour such as theirs could not readily be replaced in the circumstances, and every hour of the now far advanced season had become precious. Smeaton had set his heart on "showing a light" that year. In this difficulty, being a skilled mechanic himself, he threw off his coat and set ...
— The Story of the Rock • R.M. Ballantyne
... too, and she remembered that the front door opened directly into the parlor and the side entrance was popularly used instead. But a strange sister-in-law opened the side door. Maggie was married and living in Cincinnati. Oh, fine—a master mechanic, and there were twins. She started back toward Finley's, thinking of Gerald, and halfway she ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst
... miscreant who launched the slander. He deserves it for a long course of dastardly and venomous attacks, not merely upon Goldsmith, but upon most of the successful authors of the day. His name was Kenrick. He was originally a mechanic, but, possessing some degree of talent and industry, applied himself to literature as a profession. This he pursued for many years, and tried his hand in every department of prose and poetry; he wrote plays and satires, philosophical tracts, critical dissertations, ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... continual struggle of nature to write herself in the life and work of man, the power of beauty struggling to manifest itself, the harmony that is always desiring to make itself known. To the merchant there are the great laws of trade, of which his works are but the immediate expression. To the mechanic there are the continual forces of nature, gravitation uttering itself in all its majesty, made no less majestic because it simply takes its expression for the moment in some particular exercise of his art. To the ship that sails upon the sea there are the everlasting winds that come out of the ...
— Addresses • Phillips Brooks
... whistle came, faintly, and with something tremulous in its note; for the adventure, though it offered little novelty to the experience of the Scotland Yard man, was dangerously unique from the mechanic's point of view. But where the Right Hon. Walter Belford led it was impolitic, if not impossible, to decline to follow. Yet, the whistle spoke of a man not over-confident. "Severac Bablon" was a ...
— The Sins of Severac Bablon • Sax Rohmer
... republic almost invincible, could make but a very feeble impression on the mercenary servants of a despotic prince; and it became necessary to supply that defect by other motives, of a different, but not less forcible nature—honor and religion. The peasant, or mechanic, imbibed the useful prejudice that he was advanced to the more dignified profession of arms, in which his rank and reputation would depend on his own valor; and that, although the prowess of a private soldier ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... sister, He will help you at the washboard and the kitchen-sink as gladly as at the hour of prayer. Yes, busy mechanic, He will go with you and help you to swing the hammer, or handle the saw, or hold the plow in the toil of life, and you shall be a better mechanic, a more skilled workman, and a more successful man, because ...
— Days of Heaven Upon Earth • Rev. A. B. Simpson
... in the evening the signal bell for landing on the rock was again rung, when every man was at his quarters. In this service it was thought more appropriate to use the bell than to pipe to quarters, as the use of this instrument is less known to the mechanic than the sound of the bell. The landing, as in the morning, was at the eastern harbour. During this tide the seaweed was pretty well cleared from the site of the operations, and also from the tracks leading to the different ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... limited only to his profession, the deserving in all sciences had not only free access to him, but always found a welcome reception, and at his table might daily be seen together the naturalist, the antiquarian, the mathematician, and the mechanic, with all whom he was capable of conversing in their respective terms; here might be seen united the magnificence of a prince, with ...
— Medica Sacra - or a Commentary on on the Most Remarkable Diseases Mentioned - in the Holy Scriptures • Richard Mead
... free display, by representing the assemblages, and the fashion of discourse and manners, at fairs, revels, and other rendezvous of amusement; or in the field of rural employment, or on the village green, or in front of the mechanic's workshop. They could recount various anecdotes characteristic of the times; and repeat short dialogues, or single sayings, which expressed the very essence of what was to the population of the township or province instead of law ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... unorganized myriads that one can cover by the phrase "mechanics and engineers," if one uses it in its widest possible sense. At present it would be almost impossible to describe such a thing as a typical engineer, to predicate any universally applicable characteristic of the engineer and mechanic. The black-faced, oily man one figures emerging from the engine-room serves well enough, until one recalls the sanitary engineer with his additions of crockery and plumbing, the electrical engineer with his little tests and wires, the mining engineer, the railway maker, the motor ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... were all for Waller and Dryden. 'Chevy Chace' and 'Johnny Armstrong' were dear to Walton as to Scott, but through a century these old favourites were to be neglected, save by Mr. Pepys and Addison. Indeed, there is no more curious proof of the great unhappy change then coming to make poetry a mechanic art, than the circumstance that Walton is much nearer to us, in his likings, than to the men between 1670 and 1770. Gay was to sing of angling, but in 'the strong lines that are now in fashion.' All this while Piscator has been angling with worm and minnow to no purpose, though he picks up ...
— Andrew Lang's Introduction to The Compleat Angler • Andrew Lang
... here that Shakespeare lends Cleopatra, as he afterwards lent Coriolanus, his own delicate senses and neuropathic loathing for mechanic slaves with "greasy aprons" and "thick breaths rank of gross diet"; it is Shakespeare too and not Cleopatra who speaks of death as bringing "liberty." In "Cymbeline," Shakespeare's mask Posthumus dwells on the same idea. But these lapses are momentary; ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... two later, as Rainham sat in his river-bound office struggling, by way of luncheon, with the most primitive of chops, his eyes, wandering away from a somewhat mechanic scrutiny of the Shipping Gazette, fell upon the ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... classes of your country. The possessions of the Church menaced and presented as an allurement to revolution and anarchy; the fortunes of rich proprietors pointed out for plunder of armed ruffians; and merchants and the mechanic, the husbandman and the manufacturer, burdened with contributions, excises, monopolies, duties on consumption, surrounded by officers and collectors of these odious internal customs; the man of letters and the legislator, the freeman ...
— General Scott • General Marcus J. Wright
... a capacity to augment them to an indefinite extent; raising within the country aliment of every kind to an amount far exceeding the demand for home consumption, even in the most unfavorable years, and to be obtained always at a very moderate price; skilled also, as our people are, in the mechanic arts and in every improvement calculated to lessen the demand for and the price of labor, it is manifest that their success in every branch of domestic industry may and will be carried, under the encouragement given by the present ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 1 (of 3) of Volume 2: James Monroe • James D. Richardson
... Snake, even in Snake form, if he had a sword ... but what is a carbine, even a loaded Martini-Henry carbine with its good soft man-stopping slug? There are no traditions to a carbine—nothing of the Spirit of one's Ancestors in one—a vile mechanic thing of villainous saltpetre. How should the Snake fear that? Now a sword was different. It stood for human war and human courage and human deeds from the mistiest past, and behind it must be a weight of human wrath, feats, and tradition ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... Battery D took occasion to celebrate. The battery kitchen had been thoroughly renovated by Mechanic Grover C. Rothacker and Mechanic Conrad A. Balliet, both of Hazleton, Penna., the renovation placing it in the class of "The best kitchen and mess hall in camp," to quote the words of Major General Joseph E. Kuhn, divisional ...
— The Delta of the Triple Elevens - The History of Battery D, 311th Field Artillery US Army, - American Expeditionary Forces • William Elmer Bachman
... which the mother of a family, as well as a teacher or writer, is most sure to apply practically in her vocation. The last word on this aspect of the subject was said by a woman in a small Maine town. Her father had been a day laborer, her husband was a mechanic. She had five children, and, of course, did all the house-work. She also belonged to a club which studied French history. To a foolish expression of surprise that with all her little children she could find time to write a paper on Louis XVI she retorted ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... strong as a blacksmith's. They were two strong, athletic fellows, who showed in all their movements that elasticity and grace of limb which can only be acquired by exercise and which is so different to the deformity with which monotonous heavy work stamps the mechanic. ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... know Deadwood Dick, or he would never have placed his life in jeopardy by performing an act so uninteresting to the party in question. Hugh Vansevere; let me see—I don't think I've got that registered in my collection of appellatives. Perhaps he is a new tool in the employ of the old mechanic." ...
— Deadwood Dick, The Prince of the Road - or, The Black Rider of the Black Hills • Edward L. Wheeler
... should be conversant with Mechanics, and with what are called the Mechanic Powers. Certainly no species of knowledge is better suited to the taste and capacity of youth, and yet it seldom forms a part of early instruction. Every body talks of the lever, the wedge, and the pulley, but most people perceive, that the notions ...
— Practical Education, Volume II • Maria Edgeworth
... of Ockham's eccentricities. He had a body that required a more vigorous animal life than his station gave scope for, and this had often led him to seek it in what the world calls low society; that he had been to sea as a sailor, and was now working as a mechanic on the iron work of 'The Great Eastern.' He had laid aside his title, and went in daily with the other workmen, requesting them to call him ...
— Lady Byron Vindicated • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... discovers that the blood is not stationary but circulates, if Copernicus discovers that the earth goes round the sun and not the sun round the earth, those discoveries can easily be communicated in the most abbreviated form. If a mechanic invents an improvement on the telephone, or a social reformer puts some good usage in the place of a bad one, in a few years we shall probably all be using the improvement without even knowing what it is or saying Thank you. We may be ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... and are rather a poor attempt at burlesque humor—their chief feature being a pretended illiteracy —they would seem to bear no relation to this collection. He roomed that winter with a rugged, self-educated Scotchman—a mechanic, but a man of books and philosophies, who left an impress ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... plan expressed considerable anxiety lest a colored mechanic with all colored assistants should not prove equal to so large and important an undertaking. The result shows how unfounded were ...
— The American Missionary, Vol. 43, No. 7, July, 1889 • Various
... steadily, for a life-time, with the artisan's skilful hand, he labored at the craft. He is the very antithesis of the erraticisms and irregularities of genius. He went to his daily stint of work, by night and day, on sea or land, exactly as the merchant goes to his office, the mechanic to his shop. He wrote with a watch before him, two hundred and fifty words to fifteen minutes. But he had the most unusual faculty of direct, unprejudiced, clear observation; he trained himself to set down what he saw and to remember it. And he also had the constructive ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... land in spite of all other creditors. His store-bills or other debts may run up to hundreds of dollars, but his homestead cannot be taken to satisfy them by any process of law. This is the homestead law of the State. A single exception is made in favor of one creditor: the mechanic who has erected the buildings can hold what is called a mechanic's lien upon the property until his claim is satisfied. Advantage is often taken of this law for the purpose of defrauding creditors. In one instance a merchant who owned a good residence in a city and a valuable store-property, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... the room, mounted his steed, and rode through the town towards the bridge. He was compelled to ride slowly through the streets, for he was recognised; and cheapman and mechanic rushed from house and from stall to hail the Man of the Land ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... apply for a position as mechanic's assistant in the electrical department of your shops. I am nineteen years old, and in good physical condition. On June 6 I shall graduate from Carthage High School, and after that date ...
— The Century Handbook of Writing • Garland Greever
... and brain, A use in measured language lies; The sad mechanic exercise, Like dull ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... had the same experience yourself many times. It all goes to show that if we are awake four times as long as usual, we do not make up for it by sleeping four times as long, but four times as soundly, as customary. The hard-working mechanic requires no more hours of sleep than the corner loafer, the active man of affairs no more ...
— Initiative Psychic Energy • Warren Hilton
... was apt to be poisoned at its source by questions of class; and I think it might have been in the talk about precedence, and who should be what, that my boy first heard that such and such a girl's father was a mechanic, and that it was somehow dishonorable to be a mechanic. He did not know why, and he has never since known why, but the girls then knew why, and the women seem to know now. He was asked to be one of the boys who held the ...
— A Boy's Town • W. D. Howells
... done all this myself, without the voluntary help of any human being. I have used men as the mechanic uses tools, making them do his work, or as the potter uses clay, ...
— Victor's Triumph - Sequel to A Beautiful Fiend • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... then he would naturally be conducted to the boiler, steam chest, shafts, and every part that belongs to a completed engine. To know that they are straight and in place as shown upon the plan and described by the specification, he has done all that is required of a master mechanic. Then it goes into the hands of the engineer, who waters, fires and conducts this artificial being on its journey. You as Osteopathic machinists can go no farther than to adjust the abnormal condition, in which you find the afflicted. Nature ...
— Philosophy of Osteopathy • Andrew T. Still
... given to the public, it began to be improved in various ways. Henry Stones, a mechanic of Horwich, near Bolton, substituted metal drawing rollers for Crompton's crude wooden rollers, doubtless copying the idea from Arkwright's ...
— The Story of the Cotton Plant • Frederick Wilkinson
... noon tomorrow, and keep it up till he gets an answer. Or, better, tell him to run his conveyer to his First Level terminal, and bring with him an extra suit of clothes appropriate to the role of journeyman-mechanic. I'll want to talk to him, and furnish him with special equipment. Got all that? Well, carry on with it, and bring your own paratimers, priests and mining operators, back with you as soon as you've taken care ...
— Temple Trouble • Henry Beam Piper
... a mechanic of some education, stirred to the heart by the abuses he saw, made an exhaustive examination of the New England mills; and he gives many details of the hours of labor, the wages of employees, and the abuses of power which he found everywhere among unscrupulous ...
— Women Wage-Earners - Their Past, Their Present, and Their Future • Helen Campbell
... would agree to let him go where and when he pleased without further pursuit from me, if he would let me install a telautograph in a neutral place which he could select and the other end in this laboratory. I myself do not know where the other place is. Only a mechanic sworn to secrecy knows and neither Murtha nor myself know him. If Murtha comes across, I have given my word of honour that before the world he shall remain a dead man, free to go where he pleases and enjoy such of his fortune as he was able to fix so that he could carry it ...
— The Ear in the Wall • Arthur B. Reeve
... me have some food," Evans continued. "I'm getting short of that. And you might have someone send out a mechanic with parts to fix my tractor. Then maybe you'll let me use your radio to file ...
— All Day September • Roger Kuykendall
... from a sub-base on his sole expeditions to chart the various mountains and ranges in the islands off north-east King Charles Land, within the Arctic Circle. He had only one partner, a mechanic, who stayed behind on his shorter trips. And therefore all manner of emergency devices were stowed in the cockpit of his plane: a tiny folding tent, an amazingly light sled, a large store of compressed food—and a large vial of Kundrenaline and a ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... because the theme is historical or realistic; whilst in stories of love and courtship as that of Rose-in-hood, the proportion may rise to one-fifth of the whole. And this is true to nature. Love, as Addison said, makes even the mechanic (the British mechanic!) poetical, and Joe Hume of material memory once fought a duel about a fair object ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... passions only operate occasionally, the interested find the object of their ordinary cares; their motive to the practice of mechanic and commercial arts; their temptation to trespass on the laws of justice; and, when extremely corrupted, the price of their prostitutions, and the standard of their opinions on the subject of good and of evil. Under this influence, ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... the quince sauce. Even apples were luxuries we could not have and we greatly missed them. We cleared new ground, sowed turnip seed, dragged it in and raised some very large nice turnips. At this time there was not a wagon in the neighborhood, but Mr. Traverse, being a mechanic and ingenious, cut down a tree, sawed oft two short logs, used them for hubs and made the wheels for a cart. These he took to Dearbornville and had them ironed oft. He made the body himself and then had an ...
— The Bark Covered House • William Nowlin
... sent with me were not added to the funds of the establishment, but generously employed for my benefit by the governors, who were pleased with my conduct, and thought highly of my abilities. Instead of being bound 'prentice to a cordwainer or some other mechanic, by the influence of the governors, added to the fifty pounds and interest, as a premium, I was taken by an apothecary, who engaged to bring me up to the profession. And now, that I am out of the Foundling, we must not travel ...
— Japhet, In Search Of A Father • Frederick Marryat
... regard to their domestics extends simply to the things they have contracted to do and the hours during which they have contracted to serve; otherwise than this, they have no more right to interfere with them in the disposal of their time than with any mechanic whom they employ. They have, indeed, a right to regulate the hours of their own household, and servants can choose between conformity to these hours and the loss of their situation; but, within reasonable limits, their right to come and go at their own discretion, in their own ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... have it cheaply; and the selling price depends on the relation between the necessity to buy on one hand, or to sell on the other. Diminish suddenly and largely the competition for the purchase of food, and the farmer becomes the prey of the mechanic. Increase it suddenly and largely, and the mechanic becomes the prey of the farmer; whereas a gradual and gentle increase in the demand for food is accompanied by a similar increase in the demand for the products of the loom and the anvil, and both ...
— The trade, domestic and foreign • Henry Charles Carey
... who was a member of Grace Church, but who lived in another part of the city, was advised by Dr. Conwell to start a mission in his neighborhood. The mechanic pleaded ignorance and his inability to acquire sufficient education to enable him to do any kind of Christian work. On Sunday morning Dr. Conwell wove into his sermon an historical sketch of Elihu Burritt, that poor boy with meagre school advantages, who bound out to a blacksmith, ...
— Russell H. Conwell • Agnes Rush Burr
... by the mighty progress of this new element, this outpouring of wealth as from some unseen source; and in many instances their names only are recognised in these old and rickety mansions, now the habitation of the mechanic and the plebeian. ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... have, in fact, heard this very criticism reiterated by various authorities ever since those prehistoric days when we began to lisp in numbers. Yet somehow we perversely continue to "mosaic" along in the same old way! But then, we have never claimed to possess "true art"; we are merely a metrical mechanic. "A New Point of View In Home Economics", a clever article by Miss Eleanor Barnhart, concludes ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... the city I found a little boy, three years old perhaps, half frantic with terror, and crying to every one for his "Mammy." This was about eleven, mark you. People stopped and spoke to him, and then went on, leaving him more frightened than before. But I and a good-humoured mechanic came up together; and I instantly developed a latent faculty for setting the hearts of children at rest. Master Tommy Murphy (such was his name) soon stopped crying, and allowed me to take him up and carry him; and the mechanic and I trudged away along Princes Street to find ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... fine old trees, the majestic building at their feet, with the noble river beyond, glistening in the moonlight, appear in all their beauty, and under their most favourable aspect; the voices of the boys, singing their evening hymn, are borne gently on the air; and the humblest mechanic who has been lingering on the grass so pleasant to the feet that beat the same dull round from week to week in the paved streets of London, feels proud to think as he surveys the scene before him, that he belongs to the country which has selected such a spot as a retreat for its oldest ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... to send the fugitives to Canada. I don't know much of this Province but I beleaves that there is Rome enough for the colored and whites of the United States. We wants farmers mechanic men of all qualification &c., if they are not made we will make them, if we cannot make the old, we will ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... and nephew having no such talents, we must do the best we can," Mr. Ffrench stated, with his most precise coldness. "Being well-born and well-bred, he has no taste for a mechanic's labor or for circus performances with automobiles in public. Who ...
— The Flying Mercury • Eleanor M. Ingram
... they disdained the language and the sciences of the Greeks; and the vain sophist, or grave philosopher, who had enjoyed the flattering applause of the schools, was mortified to find that his robust servant was a captive of more value and importance than himself. The mechanic arts were encouraged and esteemed, as they tended to satisfy the wants of the Huns. An architect in the service of Onegesius, one of the favorites of Attila, was employed to construct a bath; but this work was a rare example of private luxury; and the trades of the smith, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... the passion for work of the true artist. Until he laid aside his pencil from illness, at the age of sixty-six, he was constantly in his painting-room from ten till four, daily, "laboring" as he himself said, "as hard as a mechanic working for ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.
... armchair, sipped his rare old wine. It was three years all but a day since he had parted from Charlie Osborne on Charing Cross Station, and set out with eighteenpence in his pocket to seek his fortune. In that brief time he had rapidly risen to wealth and distinction. Three years ago he was a penniless mechanic, forsaken by Fortune and discontented with his life; to-day he was a rich man, smiled on and courted by Fortune and envied by all her minions, and still he was ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 28, April 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... such as was never before seen or heard out of Bedlam. There are men who are known to have murdered their companions, and who boast of it. With these the English farm labourer, the riotous and ignorant mechanic, the victim of perjury or mistake, are indiscriminately herded. With them are mixed Chinamen from Hong Kong, the Aborigines of New Holland, West Indian blacks, Greeks, Caffres, and Malays, soldiers for desertion, ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... committee is impressed with the belief that this is an utterly vicious system, and that it is responsible for much of the ill-feeling and bad blood displayed by the working classes. No self-respecting laborer or mechanic likes to feel that the man beside him may be a spy from a detective agency, and especially so when the laboring man is utterly at the mercy of the detective, who can report whatever he pleases, be it true or false....[20] Whether ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... is not written for the specialist, but for that restless, seething multitude known as "the masses." It is written for busy people, for workers, such as the shop-girl, the factory-girl, the clerk, the mechanic, the farmer, the merchant, and the busy housewife; but ministers, lawyers, and doctors may find food for thought within ...
— A California Girl • Edward Eldridge
... armory would be incomplete without some allusion to the inventor of the machinery for turning irregular forms adapted to the manufacture of gun-stocks. This was the invention of Thomas Blanchard, then a citizen of Springfield and now of Boston,—whose reputation as a mechanic has since become world-wide,—and was first introduced into the armory about the year 1820. Before this the stocks were all worked and fitted by hand; but the marvellous ingenuity of this machinery ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... fanciful hero, That my heart has pictured so fair: I must stoop from my realm of wild fancy, And take what may fall to my share. Some plain, honest, working mechanic, May be the prize I may call mine, But if shaped like a man he'll be better, Nor ...
— Yorkshire Lyrics • John Hartley
... the tomb of some Scandinavian chief, interred with his arms and his wealth, perhaps also with his immolated wife, that what he loved best in life might not in death be divided from him? or was it the abode of penance chosen by some devoted anchorite of later days? or the idle work of some wandering mechanic, whom chance, and whim, and leisure, had thrust upon such an undertaking?" What follows this sober passage is the work of the poet. "Sleep," continues Norna, "had gradually crept upon me among my lucubrations, when I was startled ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... years ago at a suburban book stall, a perfect copy of Moxon's Mechanic Exercises, now a scarce work. The volumes were uncut, and had the original marble covers. They looked so attractive in their old fashioned dress, that I at once determined to preserve it. My binder soon made for ...
— Enemies of Books • William Blades
... with an eye to the delights of oratory. There were near a dozen present, all men, and (as Joseph exulted to perceive) all working men. Often already had he seen cause to bless that appetite for disconnected fact and rotatory argument which is so marked a character of the mechanic. But even an audience of working men has to be courted, and there was no man more deeply versed in the necessary arts than Joseph Finsbury. He placed his glasses on his nose, drew from his pocket a bundle of papers, and spread them before him on a table. He crumpled them, he smoothed them out; ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... pet dream for you—you will never know how often I have dreamed it, Allyn—and let you throw over the idea of being a doctor, I shall expect you to keep on for two more years in your school and to take a good stand there. A mechanic should be as well-balanced mentally as a doctor. I want you to know some classics, some history. Then, after that, if you still feel the same way about this, you may fit for any of the good technological schools you may choose, and I will do all I can to help you carry out your plans for your ...
— Phebe, Her Profession - A Sequel to Teddy: Her Book • Anna Chapin Ray
... soon the armoured floor was echoing to the "roarin' game," the largest, noblest, brotherliest game known to mortal men. The laird and the cottar were there, the homely shepherd and the village snab who cobbled his shoes, the banker and the carter, the manufacturer and the mechanic—all on that oft-quoted platform which is ...
— St. Cuthbert's • Robert E. Knowles
... as old as the thirteenth century, is visibly borrowed from the mechanic corporations; in which an apprentice, after serving his time, obtains a testimonial of his skill, and a licence to practise his trade and mystery. It is not my design to depreciate those honours, which could never gratify or disappoint my ambition; ...
— Memoirs of My Life and Writings • Edward Gibbon
... could build in another way. He was also clever in his business. When his apprenticeship was over he strapped on his knapsack, and sang the mechanic's song:— ...
— The Sand-Hills of Jutland • Hans Christian Andersen
... to gaze curiously at them from the row of hangars. The mechanic, starting back on foot, the four people getting out of the car, the big ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... these iron pathways will enable us to command." And again,—"We have spoken of vehicles travelling at twenty miles an hour; but we see no reason for thinking that, in the progress of improvement, a much higher velocity might not be found practicable; and in twenty years hence a shopkeeper or mechanic, on the most ordinary occasion, may probably travel with a speed that would leave the fleetest courser behind." Wonderful words these! At a first glance we may not deem them so, being so familiar with the ideas which they convey, but our estimate of them will be more just if we ...
— The Iron Horse • R.M. Ballantyne
... that to call this force into the open field,—to take the mechanic from his shop, the merchant from his counter, the farmer from his plough,—will necessarily be attended with an immense sacrifice of human life. The lives lost on the battle-field are not the only ones; militia, being unaccustomed to exposure, and unable to supply their own wants with ...
— Elements of Military Art and Science • Henry Wager Halleck
... seat upon a pile of lumber, bolted the last of his pie, and leaned over the hood of the specially designed racer interested only in its peculiarities, and entirely indifferent to the respectful young owner, who was aware that he knew far less about it than this mechanic did. Sauntering back to his work in the autumn sunlight, Wolf had followed the youthful millionaire by not even a thought. If he had done so, it might have been a half-contemptuous decision that a man who knew so little of engines ought not to drive ...
— The Beloved Woman • Kathleen Norris
... full, however. His mechanic had seen to that. And the engine responded beautifully to ...
— The Boy Scouts on the Trail • George Durston
... The young mechanic by the rail—he of the overalls and keen blue eyes—turned toward the bows, picked up a canvas bag of tools and stood there waiting with ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... period, and of the "marling-spike seaman;" not that I, always clumsy with my fingers, had any promise of ever distinguishing myself with the marling-spike. This expressive phrase, derived from its chief tool, characterized the whole professional equipment of the then mechanic of the sea, of the man who, given the necessary rope-yarns, and the spars shaped by a carpenter, could take a bare hull as she lay for the first time quietly at anchor from the impetus of her launch, and equip her for sea without other assistance; "parbuckle" on board her spars lying alongside her ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... and Schiffler, we had the best talent of that day—Linville an engineer, Piper a hustling, active mechanic, and Schiffler sure and steady. Colonel Piper was an exceptional man. I heard President Thomson of the Pennsylvania once say he would rather have him at a burnt bridge than all the engineering corps. There was one subject ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie • Andrew Carnegie
... Fearon, &c. It is entitled "A Visit to North America and the English Settlements in Illinois, with a winter residence in Philadelphia; solely to ascertain the actual prosperity of the Emigrating Agriculturist, Mechanic, and Commercial Speculator"—by Adlard Welby, Esquire, of South Rauceby, Lincolnshire. This esquire has said enough, should he be believed, to settle ultimately the point of the truth or falsehood of Godwin's notable doctrine, that we owe the increase ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 6: Literary Curiosities - Gleanings Chiefly from Old Newspapers of Boston and Salem, Massachusetts • Henry M. Brooks
... as to the personality of the author of this epoch-making statement. Joyce-Armstrong, according to the few friends who really knew something of the man, was a poet and a dreamer, as well as a mechanic and an inventor. He was a man of considerable wealth, much of which he had spent in the pursuit of his aeronautical hobby. He had four private aeroplanes in his hangars near Devizes, and is said to have made no fewer than one hundred and seventy ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... troubles Wood, who was of a sensitive temperament and very anxious to retain high-class men in the Force. And so he refers to it again in the following year and says that a constable who was a skilled mechanic and was saving the country great expense by looking after the manufacture of stove pipes, tinware, etc., had been offered as much an hour by town merchants as he was getting in a day in the corps on the scale allowed by the Police Act. And Wood, who feels keenly for the men, says, ...
— Policing the Plains - Being the Real-Life Record of the Famous North-West Mounted Police • R.G. MacBeth
... and the resources of mind that many an artisan is forced to exert to provide daily bread for himself and family; or many a shopkeeper to keep his connection together, and himself out of the workhouse. Why should the exertions of intellect be termed low, in the case of the mechanic, and vast, profound, and glorious, in that of the minister? It is the same precious gift of a beneficent power to all his creatures. As well may the sun be voted as excessively vulgar, because it, like intellect, ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... health of Monsieur Servien, your venerable father," he cried. "He enjoys a green and flourishing old age, at least I hope so; he is a man superior to his mechanic and mercantile condition by the benevolence of his behaviour to needy men of letters. And your respected aunt? She still knits stockings with the same zeal as of yore? At least I hope so. A lady of an austere virtue. I conjecture you are wishing ...
— The Aspirations of Jean Servien • Anatole France
... "But let's not follow up that philosophy. We're getting into deep water. Let's wade ashore. We'll say whatever is is right, and let it go at that. It will be quite all right for you to offer me a cup of tea, if your kitchen mechanic will condescend. That Chink of mine is having a holiday with my shotgun, trying to bag a brace of grouse for dinner. So I throw myself ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... summer makes that season for the habitant one of severe labour. Winter, though it has its own labours, such as cutting wood, is the great season of social intercourse. For a long time the habitant would not consider a mechanic his social equal; perhaps, still, the daughters of a farmer would spurn the advances of the village carpenter. But whatever the social distinctions, baptisms, marriages, anniversaries, are made the occasions ...
— A Canadian Manor and Its Seigneurs - The Story of a Hundred Years, 1761-1861 • George M. Wrong
... has the same rights which every other gentleman possesses, and of which his profession has not even the remotest tendency to deprive him, to be treated with politeness and respect; that he has the same right as every other man in society, as the merchant, the mechanic, or the farmer, to prosecute his business unmolested; shielded by the same laws which protect them from the attacks of malicious libellers out of the theatre, and the insults of capricious Ignorance ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... vicissitude of fate. I was disposed to concur with this opinion, and actually conjured him to make me his confidant, with such protestations as left him no room to doubt my honour and beneficence; but he still persisted in declaring himself the son of an obscure mechanic in Bohemia; an origin to which surely no man would pretend who had the least claim to nobility of birth. While I was thus undeceived in my conjecture touching his birth and quality, I was confirmed ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... the more peaceful pursuits of philosophy and science. Take, for instance, the great names of Bacon, the father of modern philosophy, and of Worcester, Boyle, Cavendish, Talbot, and Rosse, in science. The last named may be regarded as the great mechanic of the peerage; a man who, if he had not been born a peer, would probably have taken the highest rank as an inventor. So thorough is his knowledge of smith-work that he is said to have been pressed on one occasion to accept the foremanship of a large workshop, ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... his just praise to the man who has attained any kind of excellence without having had the same advantages as others whom, nevertheless, he has equalled or surpassed, let us not be betrayed into undervaluing the mechanic's careful training to his business, the thorough and laborious education of the ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... men are brought into frequent contact with each other—and the trader is in constant intercourse with his customers—and the mechanic is associated with those employed with him in the shops—the farmer spends most of his time with his family, and with his flocks and herds, and sees comparatively little of others. The Agricultural Fair brings—or should bring—all the farmers ...
— Address delivered by Hon. Henry H. Crapo, Governor of Michigan, before the Central Michigan Agricultural Society, at their Sheep-shearing Exhibition held at the Agricultural College Farm, on Thursday, • Henry Howland Crapo
... Venice. In short, do everything that may contribute to your improvement, and I shall rejoice to see you what Providence intended you, a very great man. This you were, in your ideas, before you quitted this; you best know how far you have studied, that is, practised the mechanic; despised nothing till you had tried it; practised dissections with your own hands, painted from nature as well as from the statues, and portrait as well as history, and this frequently. If you have done all this, as I trust you have, you want nothing ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... triple crown and keys, and fanned by peacock tails; scarlet-matted and caped cardinals, mitred and crosiered bishops, crowned and sceptred kings, ermined dukes, steel-clad knights, gowned lawyers, square-capped priests, cowled monks, and friars of every degree—nay, the mechanic with his tools, the peasant with his spade, even the beggar within his dish; old men, and children of every age; and women too of all grades—the tower-crowned queen, the beplumed dame, the lofty abbess, the veiled nun, the bourgeoise, ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... every man has in view, whether he be farmer, mechanic, preacher, editor, or tramp, ...
— Peck's Compendium of Fun • George W. Peck
... blacksmith in Philadelphia who was a member of Grace Church, but who lived in another part of the city, was advised by Dr. Conwell to start a mission in his neighborhood. The mechanic pleaded ignorance and his inability to acquire sufficient education to enable him to do any kind of Christian work. On Sunday morning Dr. Conwell wove into his sermon an historical sketch of Elihu Burritt, that poor boy with meagre school advantages, who bound out to a blacksmith, at the ...
— Russell H. Conwell • Agnes Rush Burr
... asked June, perking up her head in quick interest from her task of hammering together the seams of a leaky new tin cup. She had it over a projecting end of one of the trestles, and was going about it like a mechanic. ...
— Claim Number One • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... and not in combating error. Christ comes into a world lying in wickedness—besotted by it, plagued and tormented by it; full of abominations starting boldly out without pretense of concealment, from every phase of private, social and civil life. But he does not approach these as a mechanic would an old building, saying, "this beam is rotten and must come down; this roof is decayed and must be stripped off; this floor is unsafe and must be pulled up." He does not propose to his disciples to enter ...
— Amusement: A Force in Christian Training • Rev. Marvin R. Vincent.
... nature is open to many objections, even if it were only a question of inorganised matter. Simple physics already betoken the insufficiency of a purely mechanic conception. The stream of phenomena flows in an irreversible direction and obeys a determined rhythm. "If I wish to prepare myself a glass of sugar and water, I may do what I like, but I must wait for my sugar to melt." ("Creative Evolution", page 10.) Here are facts which ...
— A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson • Edouard le Roy
... did not sell candy. Once she suggested that he should learn a trade, to which Master Simon always replied, that he was born to be a gentleman, and would never voluntarily demean himself by pursuing a degrading occupation. He was above being a mechanic, and he would never soil his hands with dirty work. Katy began to think he was really a fool. She could scarcely think him "poor and proud"; he ...
— Poor and Proud - or The Fortunes of Katy Redburn • Oliver Optic
... youth, 'the Devoy,' the head of one of the most powerful and distinguished of our septs, was a blacksmith, I have often seen a mechanic, named James Dungan, who was said to be a descendant of James Dungan, Earl of Limerick; and 'the Chevers' (Lord Mount Leinster) was the clerk of Mrs. Byrnes, who carried on the business of ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... wooden watch without the slightest knowledge of mechanism; and while a shepherd, studying, like an ancient Chaldean, the phenomena of the heavens, on a celestial globe formed by his own hand. That great mechanic, SMEATON, when a child, disdained the ordinary playthings of his age; he collected the tools of workmen, observed them at their work, and asked questions till he could work himself. One day, having watched ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... A carpenter's apprentice! a mechanic, Whom we have seen at work here in the town Day after day; a stripling without learning, Shall he pretend to unfold the Word of God To men grown old ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... has been one of marvelous inventions in steam, in electricity, in the machinery which has made nearly every mechanic and operative an engineer, which is driving the horse from the streets and the farms, and which enables one factory hand to produce as much as three ...
— The Land We Live In - The Story of Our Country • Henry Mann
... the mutual interdependence of the mechanic arts, I may mention that in Italy, where stone, brick, and plaster are almost the only materials used in architecture, and where the "hollow ware" kitchen implements are of copper or of clay, the ordinary tools for working wood are of a very inferior description, and the locust timber ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... dissatisfied, scolded me frequently and threatened to make a mechanic of me. I didn't dare say how happy that would have made me. I should have liked nothing better than to become a turner or a compositor. But my father was much too proud ever to have permitted such a thing. Finally a public examination at school, which they had persuaded him to attend in ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... be committed in the official management of the roads themselves. Of course it is well understood that it pays a railroad to have in its employ men who are temperate, honest and Christian. So I have no doubt the master mechanic will have the same courtesy shown him in the use of the room. But what I want you to do, Mr. Maxwell, is to see that my plan is carried out. Will you? You understand what it was in general. You made a very favorable impression on the men. Go down there as often as ...
— In His Steps • Charles M. Sheldon
... gentleman's taste, but he was too shrewd a knave to press his point. Honesty was his best policy. He did demand hotly that I should be taken in charge, but I had the better of him in French, and after a moment he let that iron go. He fought very hard for the services of a mechanic, but I was determined that the engine should remain out of action, and, calling for volunteers upon the crowd of unlookers, soon satisfied the gendarme that to push the car to the station was ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates
... to see a man standing near one of the entrances to the projectile—an entrance that would be closed when the Annihilator was finished. The man was a stranger, and from his appearance Jack judged that he was a mechanic. ...
— Through Space to Mars • Roy Rockwood
... perfectly beautiful mechanic. You ought to see how respectful they are to him at the garage—especially, when there's a French ...
— The Motormaniacs • Lloyd Osbourne
... of first rate ability, till some accident or chance [10] discussion have roused their attention, and put them on their guard. And hence individuals below mediocrity not less in natural power than in acquired knowledge; nay, bunglers who have failed in the lowest mechanic crafts, and whose presumption is in due proportion to their want of sense and sensibility; men, who being first scribblers from idleness and ignorance, next become libellers from envy and malevolence,—have been able to drive a successful trade ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... burthen your lordship with more of them, for I write to a master who understands them better than myself; but I may safely conclude them to be great beauties. I might descend also to the mechanic beauties of heroic verse; but we have yet no English Prosodia, not so much as a tolerable dictionary or a grammar (so that our language is in a manner barbarous); and what Government will encourage any one, or more, who are capable of refining it, I know not: but nothing ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden
... the form demanded by Stephenson, by Fulton, by the whole industrial world, for use on railway and steamboat, and in mill and factory, throughout the civilized countries of the globe. It was this great mechanic who showed how it might be made to do its work with least expense, with highest efficiency, with greatest regularity, with utmost concentration ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 803, May 23, 1891 • Various
... would favor those most adapted to excel by circumstance and nature. At this day, there is a vast increase of knowledge spread over all society, compared with that in the Middle Ages; but is there not a still greater distinction between the highly-educated gentleman and the intelligent mechanic, than there was then between the baron who could not sign his name and the churl at the plow? between the accomplished statesman, versed in all historical lore, and the voter whose politics are formed by his newspaper, than there was between the legislator ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... out of the hut to work—on the land, with cattle, with wood, stone and iron. He was honest, careful, and laborious. While still a lad of five he had, while driving from the station, helped a stranger in a mechanic's overalls to a seat; the man had told him all were equal in the sight of God, that the land belonged to the peasants, that the proprieters had stolen it from them, and that a time would come when he would ...
— Tales of the Wilderness • Boris Pilniak
... the man of letters must in some way reconcile himself to the paradox that he is at once the acolyte and the rival of the ancients. Young is optimistic enough to believe that it is possible to surpass them. In the mechanic arts, he complains, men are always attempting to go beyond their predecessors; in the liberal arts, they merely try to follow them. The analogy between the continuous advance of science and a possible continuous advance in literature is perhaps, ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... of the tools with which society does its work, and is the means relied upon for the production of livelihood. Like the axe of the woodsman or the lathe of the mechanic, the social tools and machinery must be kept in effective working order if society is to receive a return for its outlay of labor and materials. Three items enter into the maintenance of this efficiency: (a) current repairs, (b) periodic rebuilding, and (c) ...
— The Next Step - A Plan for Economic World Federation • Scott Nearing
... young mechanic, with a good trade and the ability to earn a comfortable living. But Mr. Crawford's objection to him was well founded, and it would have been better for Fanny if she had permitted it to influence her; for the young man was idle in his habits, and Mr. Crawford too clearly saw that ...
— The Lights and Shadows of Real Life • T.S. Arthur
... happiest circumstances which may befall him, is bound to earn his bread. The young woman is only so bound when happy circumstances do not befall her. Should we endeavor to make the recurrence of unhappy circumstances more general or less so? What does any tradesman, any professional man, any mechanic wish for his children? Is it not this, that his sons shall go forth and earn their bread, and that his daughters shall remain with him till they are married? Is not that the mother's wish? Is it not notorious that such is the wish of us all as ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope
... involved in sewing by machinery, or in respect to who first constructed a machine that would fulfill that idea; but so far as great results are concerned the world must be considered as indebted to Elias Howe, Jr., a New England mechanic, born and reared in obscurity, and at an early age thrown upon his own resources. He was born at Spencer, Massachusetts, July 9th, 1819. His father was a farmer and miller, but at sixteen he left home, engaging in ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... and Heron, of Alexandria, to whom we always have to have recourse when we desire accurate information as to the mechanic arts of antiquity, both composed treatises on puppet shows. That of Philo is lost, but Heron's treatise has been preserved to us, and has recently been translated in ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 385, May 19, 1883 • Various
... occurred in Hartford. There had been a report of a strange man seen about the Clemens place, thought to be a prospecting burglar, and Clemens went over to investigate. A little searching inquiry revealed that the man was not a burglar, but a mechanic out of employment, a lover of one of the house-maids, who had given him food and shelter on the premises, intending no real harm. When the girl found that her secret was discovered, she protested that he was her fiance, though she said he appeared lately to have changed his mind ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... Fourteenth Century " a rich Bourgeoise, of a Peasant-woman, and of a Lady of the Nobility, Fourteenth Century " a Young Nobleman and of a Bourgeois, Fourteenth Century " a Bourgeois or Merchant, of a Nobleman, and of a Lady of the Court or rich Bourgeoise, Fifteenth Century " a Mechanic's Wife and a rich Bourgeois, Fifteenth Century " Young Noblemen of the Court of Charles VIII " a Nobleman, a Bourgeois, and a Noble Lady, of the time of Louis XII " a rich Bourgeoise and a Nobleman, time of Francis I Counter-seal of the Butchers of Bruges in 1356 Country Life Cour des Miracles ...
— Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period • Paul Lacroix
... negroes at Batavia are mostly Mahomedans, who come chiefly from Bengal, dressing like the Malays, and living in the same quarter of the city. Some of them work at different mechanic trades, and others are a kind of pedlars; but the most considerable of them trade in stones for buildings, which they bring from ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... of it, and above all the two ostrich poults, one at the head, and the other at the foot of the table, exclaims, "Well! if he a'n't bang up, I don't know who be; why he beats my lord hollow!" The mechanic of the borough town, who sees him dashing through the streets in an open landau, drawn by four milk-white horses, amidst his attendant out-riders; his wife, a monster of a woman, by his side, stout as the wife of Tamerlane, who weighed twenty stone, and bedizened ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... drilled incessantly: the Salem Light Infantry, the Mechanic Light Infantry, the Salem Cadets and Independents and a squad of the Salem Artillery might be seen at any hour of the morning or early evening smartly marching and countermarching, led by Flag's or the Salem ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... was a seeming misfortune," agreed the Tin Man, "for a one-legged woodchopper is of little use in his trade. But I would not allow the Witch to conquer me so easily. I knew a very skillful mechanic at the other side of the forest, who was my friend, so I hopped on one leg to him and asked him to help me. He soon made me a new leg out of tin and fastened it cleverly to my meat body. It had joints at the knee and at the ankle and ...
— The Tin Woodman of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... while other passions only operate occasionally, the interested find the object of their ordinary cares; their motive to the practice of mechanic and commercial arts; their temptation to trespass on the laws of justice; and, when extremely corrupted, the price of their prostitutions, and the standard of their opinions on the subject of good and of evil. Under this influence, they would enter, if not ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... a town, and my father was petitioned to lay one out at the mouth of Ryerse Creek, and was at last prevailed upon to do so, and called it Clarence. The first applicant for a lot was a Mr. Corklin, a very good blacksmith, a mechanic that was very much wanted in the settlement. He was a very intelligent young man for his class, and a great favourite with everyone, although he had one fault, that of indulging in strong drinks occasionally. He bargained ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 2 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Edgerton Ryerson
... for carrying these powers into execution—if these powers and others enumerated in the Constitution may be effectually brought into action by laws promoting the improvement of agriculture, commerce, and manufactures, the cultivation and encouragement of the mechanic and of the elegant arts, the advancement of literature, and the progress of the sciences, ornamental and profound, to refrain from exercising them for the benefit of the people themselves would be to hide in the earth the talent committed to ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters,—a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man.... Man is thus metamorphosed into a thing, into many things.... The priest becomes a form; the attorney a statute book; the mechanic a machine; the sailor a rope of ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... greatly obliged to thee, as well as Mark," said the Doctor. "The two jobs make a fine start for a young mechanic, and I hope he'll do as well as he's been done by: there's luck in a good beginning. By the bye, has thee heard anything more ...
— The Story Of Kennett • Bayard Taylor
... whose adoration made amends for his lack of romance. Maud knew she was not liked in the school, and being, of course, unable to attribute it to any fault of her own, she ascribed it to the fact that her father was a mechanic and poor. This thought did not tend to make her home happier. She passed much of her time in her own bedroom, looking out of her window on the lake, weaving visions of ignoble wealth and fashion out of the mists of the morning sky and the purple and gold that made ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
... which may be included in the category of trade memorials, though its subject was not a mechanic. Mr. John Cade was a schoolmaster at Beckenham, and appears to have been well liked by his pupils, who, when he prematurely died, placed a complimentary epitaph over his grave. The means by which he had imparted knowledge are displayed ...
— In Search Of Gravestones Old And Curious • W.T. (William Thomas) Vincent
... almost face the Snake, even in Snake form, if he had a sword ... but what is a carbine, even a loaded Martini-Henry carbine with its good soft man-stopping slug? There are no traditions to a carbine—nothing of the Spirit of one's Ancestors in one—a vile mechanic thing of villainous saltpetre. How should the Snake fear that? Now a sword was different. It stood for human war and human courage and human deeds from the mistiest past, and behind it must be a weight of human wrath, feats, and tradition ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... importer, or manufacturer, he imagines he is also greater in ability, and he has no hesitancy in advising these poor devils about their business. I was selling scythes several years ago, and worked for just such a man as I have been describing. He was a good mechanic, but pig-headed; goods must be made and finished a certain way, because that was the way they had been made for thirty years. The result was we were losing our trade. I knew he was blaming me for the trade falling off, so I ...
— A Man of Samples • Wm. H. Maher
... prepared and preconceived questions—yet still they would not have been talked of or described as instances of luck, but as the natural results of his admitted genius and known skill. But should an accident have disclosed similar discoveries to a mechanic at Birmingham or Sheffield, and if the man should grow rich in consequence, and partly by the envy of his neighbors and partly with good reason, be considered by them as a man below par in the general powers of his ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... a burlesque upon monarchy. It puts it in the most ridiculous light, by presenting it as an office which any child or idiot may fill. It requires some talents to be a common mechanic; but to be a king requires only the animal figure of man—a sort of breathing automaton. This sort of superstition may last a few years more, but it cannot long resist the awakened reason ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... guns. Here, then, is a fleet, built and ready for service, which is many times stronger than that which we have been able to gather after eighteen months of constant and strenuous effort. And behind this array there is a community essentially mercantile, unsurpassed in mechanic skill and productiveness, and full of sailors of the best stamp. What tremendous elements of naval power are these! One does not wonder that the remark often made is so nearly true,—that, if there is any trouble in the farthest port on the globe, in a few hours you will see a ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... from the roots of the forest, if not administered otherwise. At this time he assumed the name of Matthias, called himself a Jew, and set out on a mission, taking a western course, and visiting a brother at Rochester, a skillful mechanic, since dead. Leaving his brother, he proceeded on his mission over the Northern States, occasionally returning ...
— The Narrative of Sojourner Truth • Sojourner Truth
... following papers: 'An Inquiry as to Whether Diptheria has anything to do with the Migration of the Swallow,' 'On the possibility of straightening the curve of the African Shin Bone.' 'On Marine Plants and Deep Sea Currents.' 'On the Laws of Mechanics, with observations on the Mechanic's Lien Law and the By-Laws of Trades Unions.' 'Some Reflections on Reflection.' 'The Connection between Mathematics and Versification, as illustrated by LOGARHYTHMS.' 'Minute Experiments with the Hour-Glass,' and 'Important ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 26, September 24, 1870 • Various
... had proved to demonstration, in the most logical manner, that farmers were fools. Well, no doubt, all the world agreed with him, for everybody thought he could teach the farmer. The chemist, the grocer, the baker, the banker, the wine merchant, the lawyer, the doctor, the clerk, the mechanic, the merchant, the editor, the printer, the stockbroker, the colliery owner, the ironmaster, the clergyman, and the Methodist preacher, the very cabmen and railway porters, policemen, and no doubt the crossing-sweepers—to use an expressive Americanism, ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... came to inspect and admire the fruits of his ingenuity, were the cause of his poverty, we cannot undertake to determine—but perhaps various causes combined to keep his finances low; and it was quite as notorious in the city that Amos Sparks was a poor man, as that he was an ingenious mechanic. But his business was sufficient for the supply of his wants and those of his family, and so he studied and worked ...
— Tales for Young and Old • Various
... and agriculture were united under one superintendance in conformity with the established laws of the country, the mechanic arts among the natives have arrived at a greater degree of perfection than any situation I have visited upon the Windward Coast; and had the intellectual powers of their minds been more amply considered and cultivated, they would have exhibited an uncontrovertible example of the capacity and intelligence ...
— Observations Upon The Windward Coast Of Africa • Joseph Corry
... a few instances, all taken from Bozzano's Des Phenomenes premonitoires. We read there of a funeral procession seen on a high-road several days before it actually passed that way; or, again, of a young mechanic who, in the beginning of November, dreamt that he came home at half-past five in the afternoon and saw his sister's little girl run over by a tram-car while crossing the street in front of the house. He told his dream, in great distress; and, on the 13th of the same month, in spite ...
— The Unknown Guest • Maurice Maeterlinck
... Ireland?" said I to a decent-looking man, seemingly a mechanic, who stood near me, and was also looking at them, but ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... manuscript have been reviewed by Dr. Samuel Calvin and Dr. Frank M. Wilder of the State University of Iowa; Dr. S. W. Beyer of the Iowa College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts; Dr. U. S. Grant of Northwestern University; Professor J. A. Udden of Augustana College, Illinois; Dr. C. H. Gordon of the New Mexico State School of Mines; Principal Maurice Ricker of the High School, Burlington, Iowa; and the following former students of the author who are engaged ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton
... the foul and withering breath of infidelity and materialism, let us leave the busy arena of commerce, men are gloating over gain and gold in their hidden corners; let us rest with that sturdy, active, middle-class, where the mechanic's ingenious conceptions puzzle and captivate the most listless observer; let us watch the busy minds and busier fingers of those men, so fascinated by their daily toil, that all the world outside their own great pursuits has become a power beyond them, ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... valuable. I have never seen the hour when I felt like moving that precious collection. Besides, I am a man of the people. I like the working class, and am willing to be thought one of them. I can find time to talk to a hard-pushed mechanic as easily as to such members of the moneyed class as I encounter on stray evenings at the Hotel Clermont. I have led—I may say that I am leading—a double life; but of neither am I ashamed, nor have I cause to be. Love drove me to ape the gentleman in the halls of ...
— Initials Only • Anna Katharine Green
... department of study. One guide may be fully competent to make a list of works in history or biography, but may lack experience in philosophy or in art; while, on the other hand, the regimen prescribed for the country curate would hardly be appropriate for the mechanic or the soldier. ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... preach the duty which devolves upon every person, to labor for the increase of his knowledge and the general improvement of his mind. We have heard him say on the platform of his church, that it was disgraceful to any mechanic or clerk to let such a picture as the Heart of the Andes be exhibited for twenty-five cents, and not go and see it. Probably there is not one honest clergyman in the country who does not fairly earn his livelihood by the good he does, or by the evil he ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... have a commonwealth that is not altogether mechanic? or what comparison is there of such commonwealths as are, or come nearest to mechanic—for example, Athens, Switzerland, Holland, to Lacedaemon, Rome, and Venice, plumed with their aristocracies? Your ...
— The Commonwealth of Oceana • James Harrington
... boy or mechanic—this story has special charm, perhaps, but to every reader its mystery ...
— A Sweet Little Maid • Amy E. Blanchard
... in the production by them of the three presses from which Uber Land und Meer and Die Illustrirte Welt are to-day issued. As a whole and in detail, as well as in its productions, the press is the marvel of mechanic ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 417 • Various
... issued a patent for Sir John Shorter to be lord mayor for the year ensuing. Shorter was a dissenter—"an Anabaptist, a very odd ignorant person, a mechanic, I think," wrote Evelyn(1592) of him—and on that account a clause was inserted in his commission permitting him to have any preacher he might choose.(1593) His granddaughter was married to Sir Robert Walpole. He was at one time alderman ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume II • Reginald R. Sharpe
... citizenship of his ideal state on the ground that they are debarred by their occupation from the characteristic excellence of man. And Plato, though here as elsewhere he pushes the normal view to excess, yet, in his insistence on the gulf that separates the citizen from the mechanic and the trader, is in sympathy with the general current of Greek ideas. His ideal state is one which depends mainly on agriculture; in which commerce and exchange are reduced to the smallest possible dimensions; in which every ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... strangest inconsistency my dear father, a genuine republican at heart (for all his fancied loyalty to the white lily of the Bourbons), a would-be scientist, who in reality was far more impressed by a clever and industrious French mechanic than by a prince (and would, I think, have preferred the former's friendship and society), yet took both a pleasure and a pride in his quaint old parchments and obscure quarterings. So would I, perhaps, if things had gone differently with me—for what true democrat, however intolerant ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... "Cross-Readings, Ship-News, and Mistakes of the Press". Over the 'nom de guerre' of 'Papyrius Cursor,' a real Roman name, but as happy in its applicability as Thackeray's 'Manlius Pennialinus,' Whitefoord contributed many specimens of this mechanic wit to 'The Public Advertiser'. The 'Cross Readings' were obtained by taking two or three columns of a newspaper horizontally and 'onwards' instead of 'vertically' ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... Mechanic soul, thou must not only do With Martha, but with Mary ponder too; Happy's the home where these fair sisters vary; But most, when ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... will see, Lily," he said. "I shall do something some day. I'm a bit of a mechanic, a bit of an electrician, that is to say, a bit of a wizard. Others have started lower down ...
— The Bill-Toppers • Andre Castaigne
... his hire. A man who produces an available "article" for a newspaper or a periodical, is as properly entitled to a pecuniary recompense, as a doctor, or a lawyer, or a clergy-man, for professional services; or, as a merchant or a mechanic for his transferable property. This is a simple proposition, which nobody disputes. The rate of such compensation must be a matter of agreement. As between author and publisher, custom seems to have fixed on what ...
— Gifts of Genius - A Miscellany of Prose and Poetry by American Authors • Various
... knowledge; hence, misdirected. We have the most indifferent domestic service in the world, but we employ, as a rule, too few servants, such as they are. It is considered altogether sensible and becoming for the mechanic's wife to do her own housework as a bride and as a matron of years. Unless her husband prospers rapidly she is accounted "shiftless" should she hire a washerwoman, while to "keep a girl" is extravagance, or a significant stride toward gentility. The wife of the English joiner or mason or small ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... a key is lost it takes a skilful mechanic half-a-day to cut his way in. Then you must remember that clients of a safe-deposit are not multitudinous. All are known more or less by sight to the officials there, and a stranger would receive ...
— Four Max Carrados Detective Stories • Ernest Bramah
... of his crime, forgetting his cowardice, and making moral resolutions with himself, that, should he escape now, he will execute the next burglary in a safe and virtuous state of sobriety. But we need not proceed: there was the idle and drunken mechanic, or, perhaps, the wife, whose Saturday night visits to the tap-room in order to fetch him home, or to rescue the wages of his industry from the publican, ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... idea. And so it came that we five men of Dr. Mawson's Expedition were landed on December 22, 1911, with a programme of work outlined by our leader. H. Hamilton was biologist, L. R. Blake surveyor and geologist, C. A. Sandell and A. J. Sawyer were wireless operators, the former being also a mechanic, and I was appointed meteorologist and leader of ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... Mr. Webster delivered an address before the Mechanics' Institute in Boston, on "Science in connection with the Mechanic Arts," a subject which was outside of his usual lines of thought, and offered no especial attractions to him. This oration is graceful and strong, and possesses sufficient and appropriate eloquence. It is chiefly interesting, however, ...
— Daniel Webster • Henry Cabot Lodge
... while grooming the roller that it struck him his own appearance was unusual for a highway mechanic. He was still wearing the famous floorwalker suit, which he had punctiliously donned every Sunday for chapel. But he had had to flee without a hat—even without his luggage, which was neatly packed in a bag in the vestry. That, he felt sure, Mr. Poodle had already burst ...
— Where the Blue Begins • Christopher Morley
... underwriter, to be a real one," he went on, "should be a chemist, financier, mechanic, lawyer, engineer, and diplomat, and a dash of a clairvoyant, too. He should know everybody's business, including his own. Consider what he is expected to know: there is no class of industry which ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... old belief that the worker must go through all possible experiences in order to acquire "judgment" as to best methods. If the worker must pass through all the stages of the training of the old-fashioned mechanic, and this is seriously advocated by some, he may fail to reach the higher planes of knowledge afforded by training under Scientific Management, by reason of sheer lack of time. If, therefore, by artificial conditions caused by united agreement and collective bargaining, ...
— The Psychology of Management - The Function of the Mind in Determining, Teaching and - Installing Methods of Least Waste • L. M. Gilbreth
... the year 1777 that occurred the first attempt to use gunpowder in the shape of a submarine torpedo. This device, which to-day threatens to overturn all established ideas of naval organization and architecture, originated with a clever Connecticut mechanic named David Bushnell. His invention covered not only submarine torpedoes, to be launched against a vessel, but a submarine boat in which an adventurous navigator might undertake to go beneath the hull of a man-of-war, and ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 1 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... only a pose, she decided. Yet what made him so stupidly commonplace, and so dense? She hated to be robbed of her enthusiasm for an artistic bric-a-brac of emotion; and here he was, like some sordid mechanic who would not talk ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... large and small, struck off in large numbers, are not church ornaments like frescoes or pictures, nor aids to monastic devotion like Angelico's Gospel histories at St. Mark's—they are illustrations to the book which every one is reading, things to be framed in the chamber of every burgher or mechanic, to be slipped into the prayer-book of every housewife, to be conned over during the long afternoons, by the children near the big stove or among the gooseberry bushes of the garden. And they are, therefore, much more than the Giottesque inventions, ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... and utensils of Indian life, consisted of a hatchet, a knife, a file, and an awl obtained from the stores of the Hudson's Bay Company. In the use of these tools they were so dexterous that everything they manufactured was done with a neatness which could not be excelled by the most expert mechanic. These northern canoes were flat-bottomed, with straight, upright sides, and sharp prow and peak. The stern part of the canoe was wider than the rest in order to receive the baggage. The average length ...
— Pioneers in Canada • Sir Harry Johnston
... thought, a good deal excited at the prospect of spiritual revelations. Her neighbor was a pallid, care-worn young woman, with very red lips, and large brown eyes of great beauty. She was, as I learned afterwards, a magnetic patient of the doctor, and had deserted her husband, a master mechanic, to follow this new light. The others were, like myself, strangers brought hither by mere curiosity. One of them was a lady in deep black, closely veiled. Beyond her, and opposite to me, sat the sergeant, and next to him the medium, a man named ...
— The Autobiography of a Quack And The Case Of George Dedlow • S. Weir Mitchell
... machine and other instruments of domestic labor kept for actual use; the necessary provisions and fuel for the use of the family for six months; the proper tools, instruments or books of the debtor, if a farmer, mechanic, surveyor, clergyman, lawyer, physician, teacher or professor; the horse or the team consisting of not more than two horses or mules, or two yoke of cattle, and the wagon or other vehicle with the proper harness or tackle, by the use of which the debtor, if ...
— Legal Status Of Women In Iowa • Jennie Lansley Wilson
... sauce. Even apples were luxuries we could not have and we greatly missed them. We cleared new ground, sowed turnip seed, dragged it in and raised some very large nice turnips. At this time there was not a wagon in the neighborhood, but Mr. Traverse, being a mechanic and ingenious, cut down a tree, sawed oft two short logs, used them for hubs and made the wheels for a cart. These he took to Dearbornville and had them ironed oft. He made the body himself and then had an ox-cart. This was the only wheeled vehicle in the place for some years. ...
— The Bark Covered House • William Nowlin
... already on his way back to camp. So I finally turned back for our camp, having to fly very low and against a strong northern wind, on account of low clouds just forming. I got back at a quarter to eleven and my first question to my mechanic was: "Has ...
— Flying for France • James R. McConnell
... rushing out from their stone towers ("walls fourteen feet thick"), to seize any herd of "six hundred swine," and convoy of Luebeck or Hamburg merchant goods, that had not contented them in passing. What were pedlers and mechanic fellows made for, if not to be plundered when needful? Arbitrary rule, on the part of these noble robber lords! And then much of the crown domains had gone to the chief of them—pawned (and the pawn-ticket ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... were as empty as a vessel with a swept hold. On the wharf, itself, I saw a man who had been second-mate of the Tontine, the little ship in which I had sailed when I first ran from the Sterling. He was now master of a brig called the Mechanic, that was loading near by, for Trinidad de Cuba. He heard my story, and shipped me on the spot, at nine dollars a month, as a forward hand. I began to think I was born to bad luck, and being almost naked, was in nowise particular what became of me. I had not the means of getting a mate's ...
— Ned Myers • James Fenimore Cooper
... are a great company. Elizabeth Barrett Browning exclaiming, "I have not used half the powers God has given me," poets dying ere the day was half done; the inventors and reformers denied their ideals; obscure and humble workmen—the mechanic who emancipates man by his machine; the artisan whose conveniences are endless benefactions to our homes; the smith whose honest anchor holds the ship in time of storm—all these labored and died without seeing the fruitage, but other ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... The mechanic, farmer, apprentice, clerk, merchant, and a large circle of readers outside of these classes will find in the volume a wide range of counsel and advice, presented in perspicuous language, and marked throughout by vigorous good sense; ...
— Harper's Young People, February 24, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... wide, new world of the West there were but few artificial needs, and the differentiation of industries was alike impossible and undesired. Each man was his own cook, his own tailor, his own mechanic in the simple ways demanded by the surroundings about him. Each man was as good as his neighbour, for his neighbour as well as himself perforce practised a half-dozen crafts and suffered therefrom neither in his own esteem nor that of those about him. The specialists ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough
... O Rama, to these words, and having listened, do what is proper! If, at thy command, I get a way for the passage of thy army, others then, from strength of their bows, will command me to do the same! In thy army there is a monkey of the name of Nala, who is a skilful mechanic. And endued with great strength, Nala is the son of Tashtri, the divine artificer of the Universe. And whether it is wood, or grass or stone, that he will throw into my waters, I will support the same on ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... have sighed Had he seen far enough, And in the same inevitable stuff Discovered an odd reason too for pride In being what he must have been by laws Infrangible and for no kind of cause. Deterred by no confusion or surprise He may have seen with his mechanic eyes A world without a meaning, and had room, Alone amid magnificence and doom, To build himself an airy monument That should, or fail him in his vague intent, Outlast an accidental universe— To call it nothing worse— Or, by ...
— The Man Against the Sky • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... eyes met Phillips'. "Louis Phillips, age twenty-six, five-ten, one-eighty. Hair brown, eyes brown, complexion darkly tanned—that was before Luna, wasn't it, Phillips? Convicted of unjustified homicide, having assaulted a jet mechanic so as to cause death. ...
— This World Must Die! • Horace Brown Fyfe
... education for which he is not fitted and which he cannot assimilate, and it often results in putting a man into a position in life for which he is entirely unadapted. The student should be made to realize that all labor is honorable, and that it is far better {63} to be a successful mechanic, laborer, or clerk than an unsuccessful or incompetent lawyer, physician, or engineer. For every man there is some work which he is better fitted to do than anything else, and which he can do with reasonable ...
— How to Study • George Fillmore Swain
... doubtless, in many important details not yet adapted for the practical uses to which Adam designed its application. But as a mere model, as a marvellous essay, for the suggestion of gigantic results, it was, perhaps, to the full as effective as the ingenuity of a mechanic of our own day could construct. It is true that it was crowded with unnecessary cylinders, slides, cocks, and wheals—hideous and clumsy to the eye—but through this intricacy the great simple design accomplished its ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... anything to him, but I was certain that my guess was correct. His mother was the daughter of a valet de chambre, and his father was a poor mechanic. I asked the young man if he were called count at the embassy, and he said he bore the title in virtue of a warrant from the elector-palatine. My question skewed him that I knew his origin, and he began to speak openly to me; and knowing that ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... "I have bad news for you, Orps. Tom and Fred have gone West." It was bad news. Tom and Fred, two gallant hearts, dead! I was told afterwards how it happened. One of the last days of the fighting, Fred went out to test his machine with his mechanic. He taxied off down the aerodrome, which was a huge old Boche one that his squadron had moved forward to. As he was taxi-ing he hit a Boche booby trap, planted in the ground, and up went the machine and fell in flames. The ...
— An Onlooker in France 1917-1919 • William Orpen
... Penitentiary was one day putting locks on the doors of all the cells when a mechanic said ...
— Fantastic Fables • Ambrose Bierce
... drawbacks my suburban residence is charming. To the serious poet, and writer of elegiac verses, the aspect of Nature, viewed from my veranda, is suggestive. I myself have experienced moments when the "sad mechanic exercise" of verse would have been of infinite relief. The following stanzas, by a young friend who has been stopping with me for the benefit of his health, addressed to a duck that frequented a small pond in the vicinity of my mansion, ...
— Urban Sketches • Bret Harte
... that the story should be told here. Whitney, the inventor of the gin, was born in Massachusetts in 1765, in very poor circumstances. While the War of the Revolution was going on, he was earning his living by making nails by hand. He was such an apt mechanic that he was able to make and save enough money to pay his way through Yale College, where he graduated in 1792. In that year he engaged himself to come to Georgia as a private tutor in the family of a gentleman of Savannah; but when he reached that city, ...
— Stories Of Georgia - 1896 • Joel Chandler Harris
... leap. The mastery of electricity based on that of fire. Electricity vastly wider of range than heat: it is energy in its most available and desirable phase. The telegraph and the telephone contrasted with the signal fire. Electricity as the servant of mechanic and engineer. Household uses of the current. Electricity as an agent of research now examines Nature in fresh aspects. The investigator and the commercial exploiter render aid to one another. Social benefits of electricity, in telegraphy, in quick travel. ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - Invention and Discovery • Various
... and the old, the learned doctor and the practical mechanic, for the defense of Freedom—a magnet that drew both Pomeroy and Warren to that since-famous redoubt on the summit of Breed's Hill. They offered their services to Colonel Prescott, and he gladly accepted them, demurring as to Warren, ...
— "Old Put" The Patriot • Frederick A. Ober
... "I desire that thou shalt enter as one of my clerks; but first it is my will that, as the great and good proprietary decreed, thou shouldst acquire some mechanic trade; I care ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell
... the most engaging grocery boy with red hair and a heart-twisting grin. I'm not sure I wasn't considering him when I turned kitchen mechanic. Denny Dolan is his name and God ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... followed his employer's to-and-fro striding as a cat's follows a pendulum, but without the cat's curiosity about a pendulum. He never interrupted when Potter was speaking; and Canby noticed that whenever Potter talked at any length Tinker looked thoughtful and distant, like a mechanic so accustomed to the whirr and thunder of the machine-shop that he may indulge in reveries there. After a moment or two the old fellow ceased to follow the pendulum stride, and turned to ...
— Harlequin and Columbine • Booth Tarkington
... necessary to set it in motion by water, and here was the difficulty. Fritz made several models from the thin wood of our chests, and the wheels of our guns, but they were too small. In the mean time, the mind of my young mechanic was exercised, his ideas were enlarged and improved; and, as this science was so necessary in our situation, I allowed him to go on with his experiments. Notwithstanding the rain, protected by my cloak, he went several times to the cascade to look out for a place where he should place ...
— The Swiss Family Robinson; or Adventures in a Desert Island • Johann David Wyss
... mechanical causes." This difficulty is overcome by the doctrine of evolution. "Through the theory of descent, we are for the first time able to establish the monistic doctrine of the unity of nature, that a mechanic-causal explanation of the most complicated organisms, e. g. the formation and constitution of the organs of sense, have no more difficulty for the common understanding, than the mechanical explanation of any physical process, as, for ...
— What is Darwinism? • Charles Hodge
... evidence of far-sighted judgment or conscious power, while it has shown decided glimpses of weakness and indecision. Indeed, how can an army like theirs be strong? Its members mostly unaccustomed to steady exertion or precise organization; without mechanic skill or invention; without cash or credit; fettered in their movements by the limited rolling stock of their scanty railways; tethered to their own homes by the fear of insurrection;—what element of solid strength have they, to set against these ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... shot, and snow-shoes from the sinews of deer stretched on a frame composed of strips of hard wood. She also felled trees for fuel and lined the walls of the cabin with deer and bear skins; she was the most skilful mechanic of the party, and having fitted runners of hickory to one of the boats she rigged a sail of soft skins sewed together, and once in November, after the river was frozen, and when the wind blew strongly from the northwest, the whole ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... letter to Godwin above. Lamb and Scott never met. Talfourd, however, tells us that "he used to speak with gratitude and pleasure of the circumstances under which he saw him once in Fleet-street. A man, in the dress of a mechanic, stopped him just at Inner Temple-gate, and said, touching his hat, 'I beg your pardon, sir, but perhaps you would like to see Sir Walter Scott; that is he just crossing the road;' and Lamb stammered out his hearty thanks ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... uttered by the artist, the mechanic, and husbandman."—Chazotte's Essay, p. 24. "They may be divided into four classes—the Humanists, Philanthropists, Pestalozzian and the Productive Schools."—Smith's New Gram., p. iii. "Verbs ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... life to the wheel of change! to forsake the furrow for the highway, the rooted soil for the flying dust, the here for the there; imagining that somehow a car is more than a plough, that going is the last word in living—demountable rims and non-skid tires, the great gift of the God Mechanic, being the 1916 model of the wings ...
— The Hills of Hingham • Dallas Lore Sharp
... was to be expected that he would be eccentric as he always was. He was not an expert mechanic, but he knew something of machinery and was of considerable help to Tom in the rush work on the airship. He would hear the dinner bell ring, and ...
— Tom Swift and his Electric Rifle • Victor Appleton
... a seeming misfortune," agreed the Tin Man, "for a one-legged woodchopper is of little use in his trade. But I would not allow the Witch to conquer me so easily. I knew a very skillful mechanic at the other side of the forest, who was my friend, so I hopped on one leg to him and asked him to help me. He soon made me a new leg out of tin and fastened it cleverly to my meat body. It had joints at the knee and at ...
— The Tin Woodman of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... sides nothing of philosophy remains but the name, and this is become the subject of the vilest prostitution; since it is not only engrossed by the naturalist, chemist, and anatomist, but is usurped by the mechanic in every trifling invention, and made subservient to the lucre of traffic and merchandise. There cannot surely be a greater proof of the degeneracy of the times than so unparalleled a degradation and so barbarous a perversion of terms. ...
— An Essay on the Beautiful - From the Greek of Plotinus • Plotinus
... honour, that they were always properly clothed, and behaved with the utmost decorum; justly deserving all commendation, for a bashfulness and modesty becoming their sex: and this was the more meritorious in them, as the male inhabitants discovered no sense of shame. In their manufactures and mechanic arts, these people have arrived to a greater degree of extent and ingenuity, both with regard to the design and the execution, than could have been expected from their natural disposition, and the little ...
— Narrative of the Voyages Round The World, • A. Kippis
... surveyor, smiling across at me. "Now, I'm a mechanic, and look at it in a practical way. To me it's a tremendous display of power, which is irresistible, even though it works mighty slowly. Sun, wind, and frost, all doing their share in rubbing out broad valleys and wearing down ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... tenant farmers, and younger sons of the laboring classes and small merchants. No matter how large the population may be, always there are positions of employment with a normal wage; but when the younger sons of a mechanic or other working man grow to maturity where there is only one wage-producing employment available to the family, the younger sons must seek a living from other sources. Farms cannot be reduced below the number of acres required to support one family. ...
— Religious Life of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century - The Faith of Our Fathers • George MacLaren Brydon
... that this new method of aerial navigation had thoroughly aroused the excitability of the French nation, so that thousands of people were met together just outside Paris on the 17th December to see Professor Charles and his mechanic, Robelt, ascend in their new craft. The ascent was successful in every way; the intrepid aeronauts, who carried a barometer, found that they had quickly reached an ...
— The Mastery of the Air • William J. Claxton
... a king; while to practical purpose itself, that larger and more profound invention, which poetry stimulates, supplied the grand design and the subtle view,—leading him beyond the mere ingenuity of the mechanic, and habituating him to regard the inert force of the matter at his command with the ambition of the Discoverer. But, above all, the discontent that was within him finding a vent, not in deliberate war upon this ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... not modern civilization, with its attendant complexities, rivalries, and jealousies, provocative of quarrels rather than the reverse? In what respect is modern civilization better than past civilization, except in material conveniences due to material improvements in the mechanic arts? Are we any more artistic, strong, or beautiful than the Greeks in their palmy days? Are we braver than the Spartans, more honest than the Chinese, more spiritual than the Hindoos, more religious than the Puritans? Is not the superior civilization of the present day ...
— The Navy as a Fighting Machine • Bradley A. Fiske
... young woman is only so bound when happy circumstances do not befall her. Should we endeavor to make the recurrence of unhappy circumstances more general or less so? What does any tradesman, any professional man, any mechanic wish for his children? Is it not this, that his sons shall go forth and earn their bread, and that his daughters shall remain with him till they are married? Is not that the mother's wish? Is it not notorious ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope
... than, may be well defrayed and reimbursed by one year's revenue of an ordinary good benefice? If they had then means of breeding from their parents, 'tis likely they have more now; and, if they have, it needs must be mechanic and uningenuous in them to bring a bill of charges for the learning of those liberal Arts and Sciences which they have learnt (if they have indeed learnt them, as they seldom have) to their own benefit and accomplishment. But they will say 'We had betaken us to some other trade or ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... of a mechanic in relation to a certain piece of work, I called upon one in my neighborhood, then in the employment of a gentleman, and was informed, on stating my object, that as he should be through with his present engagement on the evening of a certain day, he would commence ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various
... have been so far off the mark. The man with whom he was spending the evening in that cafe was a mechanic from Kroten." ...
— The Great Prince Shan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... descending to the position of dogs, fallen in virtue and devoid of all religious observances. He who takes food from a physician takes that which is no better than excrement; the food of a harlot is like urine; that of a skilled mechanic is like blood. If a Brahmana approved by the good, takes the food of one who lives by his learning, he is regarded as taking the food of a Sudra. All good men should forego such food. The food of a person who is censured by all is said to be like a draught from a pool of blood. The acceptance ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... at once of all lawful defence; and, on Sunday, the day after the Chief Justice's departure, Apia was in consequence startled with strange news. Dynamite bought from the wrecker ship, an electrical machine and a mechanic hired, the prison mined, and a letter despatched to the people of Manono advising them of the fact, and announcing that if any rescue were attempted prison and prisoners should be blown up—such were the voices of rumour; and the design appearing equally feeble, reckless, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... view of turning out Government officials. On the contrary, I want to see the average graduate prepared to do his work in some capacity in civil life, without any regard to any aid whatever received from or any salary drawn from the Government. If a man is a good engineer, a good mechanic, a good agriculturist, if he is trained so that he becomes a really good merchant, he is, in his place, the best type of citizen. It is a misfortune in any country, American, European, or African, to have the idea grow that the average educated man must ...
— African and European Addresses • Theodore Roosevelt
... Corinthian capital of polished society;" they appealed to prejudices without number, to old attachments and young hopes; to the expectation of thousands who might one day become peers; they set up as a scarecrow, the spectre of all that was sordid, mechanic and base in the ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... taken for the season a small house in Hertford Street, 31, which belongs to Lady Byron, who has fitted it up for her grand-daughter, Lady Annabella King. . . . The eldest brother, Lord Ockham, is a mechanic, and is now working in a machine-shop in Blackwall Island, where he lives. This eccentric course is rather, I fear, the development of a propensity for low company and pursuits than from anything Peter the Greatish there is about him. His father, who is the quintessence of aristocracy, ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... town whether the former vote in placing said meeting-house should be altered." After some wrangling, it was decided by a vote of forty-four to thirty "to place the new meeting-house at the crotch of the roads, near Capt. William Brown's house" (very near the present junction of Main, Mechanic, and Academy Streets). This decision was final. It is rather difficult to see how it happened to be, for this site was a little east of the town land. The opposition put in one final blow in this way. It was designed to have the house face directly "down street" and the ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, February, 1886. - The Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 2, February, 1886. • Various
... declaring that the Negro had to leave or that they would. The unfortunate "intruder" was accordingly dismissed. He then entered the employ of a slaveholder, who at the close of the Negro's two years of service at common labor discovered that the black was a mechanic. The employer then procured work for him as a rough carpenter. By dint of perseverance and industry this Negro within a few years became a master workman, employing at times six or eight men, but he never received a single job of work from a native-born ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Vol. I. Jan. 1916 • Various
... person shall ever be qualified for the employments to which he is educated, is very different in different occupations. In the greatest part of mechanic trades success is almost certain; but very uncertain in the liberal professions. Put your son apprentice to a shoemaker, there is little doubt of his learning to make a pair of shoes; but send him to study the law, it as at least twenty to one ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... do?" he went on. "There is nothing you can do! I am an engineer. I am a man of an assured position, but before they gave me a railway-line I was for years in harness; I have been a practical mechanic. For two years I worked in Belgium as an oiler. You can judge for yourself, my dear fellow, what kind of ...
— The Chorus Girl and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... part of British America, as far from New York as Texas is from Mexico. I do not need to tell you that Austin's colonists are a band of choice spirits, hardy working men, trained in the district schools of New England and New York—nearly every one of them a farmer or mechanic." ...
— Remember the Alamo • Amelia E. Barr
... rent such a house as I have here described for a good deal less than one-tenth of his income. What is the ordinary proportion between the house-rent and the income of a respectable tradesman or mechanic in New York? But the Anzin workman who rents such a house as this on such terms, enjoys also free fuel, free medical attendance, ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... one of the tools with which society does its work, and is the means relied upon for the production of livelihood. Like the axe of the woodsman or the lathe of the mechanic, the social tools and machinery must be kept in effective working order if society is to receive a return for its outlay of labor and materials. Three items enter into the maintenance of this efficiency: ...
— The Next Step - A Plan for Economic World Federation • Scott Nearing
... religion—became much interested in the New Church. I furnished them suitable reading matter and visited them occasionally. Within a year they united with our Society. The man had formerly been a drinking man, but had ceased entirely. They were regular attendants on our church services. He was a mechanic. His well-behaved life restored public confidence in him, and he soon found constant employment at his trade. After about two years he felt a desire to take the Lord's Supper. I did not dissuade him; for, as he had abstained ...
— Personal Experience of a Physician • John Ellis
... for life. One case of a mulatto, a slave, may be here mentioned. A mulatto called Middleton was convicted at Montreal in 1781 of a felony (probably larceny) which carried the sentence of death. He was an expert mechanic of a class of men much in demand in the army and he was given a pardon conditioned upon his enlisting for life. He chose the Second Batallion of Sir John Johnson's Royal American Regiment then in Quebec and was handed over by Sheriff Gray ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various
... Then—"Well, here comes your mechanic, Norman, so your ship must be ready. I'll go with you. It's an event to see two Columbuses starting for ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930 • Various
... of. And good picked-shots have in common everywhere certain qualities, probably developed by the life in the open, and the unique influences of woodland and upland hunting. They are generous, and large in spirit, and absolutely democratic—the millionaire and the mechanic meet on equal ground—and deliberate in humour, and dry of wit. The quiet chaffing, tolerant, good-humoured, genuine intercourse of hunters cannot be matched ...
— The Adventures of Bobby Orde • Stewart Edward White
... up her basket; she had not risen from her chair, however, but held it on her knees with a dreary look in her eyes, as if the words of the young mechanic had awakened in her mind strange thoughts of a ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... time upon the surface of this earth is to dissolve certain substances, to disunite the solid bodies which are not soluble, but which, in having been consolidated by fusion, are naturally separated by veins and cutters, and to carry those detached bodies, by the mechanic force of moving water, successively from stage to stage, from places of a higher ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 2 (of 4) • James Hutton
... th' ladies? Faith, I do not. Ye needn't think I'm proud iv me business. I only took to it because I am too selfish to be a mechanic an' too tender-hearted to be a banker or a lawyer. No, sir, I wudden't care a sthraw if all th' dhrink in th' wurruld was dumped to-morrah into th' Atlantic Ocean, although f'r a week or two afther it ...
— Mr. Dooley Says • Finley Dunne
... the health of Monsieur Servien, your venerable father," he cried. "He enjoys a green and flourishing old age, at least I hope so; he is a man superior to his mechanic and mercantile condition by the benevolence of his behaviour to needy men of letters. And your respected aunt? She still knits stockings with the same zeal as of yore? At least I hope so. A lady of an austere virtue. I conjecture ...
— The Aspirations of Jean Servien • Anatole France
... meanest of our species are the most strongly addicted to this vice—men who are a scandal to their sex, and women who disgrace human nature; for the basest mechanic is so far from being exempt that he is generally the most guilty of it. It visits ale-houses and gin-shops, and whistles in the empty heads of fidlers, mountebanks, ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... A mechanic, or a man in any small line of business, must trust his wife with the disbursement of a certain part of the family income. It passes through her hands in the way of housekeeping, and the management of it exercises and develops her faculties; but the wife of the farmer ...
— How to make rugs • Candace Wheeler
... is what can be done by SIMPLE methods. But nowadays every one is a mechanic, and wants to open that money chest with an instrument instead of simply. For that purpose he hies him to England. Yes, THAT is the thing to do. What folly!" Kostanzhoglo spat and added: "Yet when he returns from ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... for the man who owned it, and the man who owned it, being a little short of wind and a trifle weak in his legs, had decided to sell and retire. Billy had become the purchaser, and not without many qualms and doubts as to the wisdom of assuming such heavy responsibilities. Billy knew he was a good mechanic, and could put a tire on a wheel or a shoe on a horse as quickly and as well as the next man. But it took a good big pile of dollars, as Billy counted dollars, to get those forges, and before he turned them over to ...
— Tin-Types Taken in the Streets of New York • Lemuel Ely Quigg
... The last mechanic was picking up his tools and was about ready to leave. Otherwise, they were alone, except for the guard ...
— A Fine Fix • R. C. Noll
... facts which exist and are revealed to us reach us by the testimony of the consciousness, and are, consequently, facts of consciousness. If I look at a locomotive, and analyse its machinery, I act like a mechanic; if I study under the microscope the structure of infusoria, I practise biology; and yet the sight of the locomotive, the perception of the infusoria, are just facts of consciousness, and should belong to psychology, if one takes literally the above definition, ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... Every mechanic who has had anything to do with the hardening of tools knows how necessary it is to take a cut from the surface of the bar that is to be hardened. The reason is that in the process of making the steel its outer surface ...
— The Working of Steel - Annealing, Heat Treating and Hardening of Carbon and Alloy Steel • Fred H. Colvin
... Dick, or he would never have placed his life in jeopardy by performing an act so uninteresting to the party in question. Hugh Vansevere; let me see—I don't think I've got that registered in my collection of appellatives. Perhaps he is a new tool in the employ of the old mechanic." ...
— Deadwood Dick, The Prince of the Road - or, The Black Rider of the Black Hills • Edward L. Wheeler
... inviting me to be the first to fly over Sydney, and asking me to go out to the Ascot Race Course at about eleven o'clock, where the machine was quartered. I drove out, and on my arrival I was told that the pilot was away but that the mechanic, a young Scotsman of about twenty years of age, who had a pilot's certificate, was available if I wished to trust myself to him. I certainly felt rather doubtful on the point when I looked at the youth, especially as he had not been up in it himself ...
— The Chronicles of a Gay Gordon • Jose Maria Gordon
... directions for obtaining United States patents, sent free. A handsomely bound Reference Book, gilt edges, contains 140 pages and many engravings and tables important to every patentee and mechanic, and is a useful handbook of reference for everybody. ...
— Scientific American, Volume XXXVI., No. 8, February 24, 1877 • Various
... on punctuation] an engineering standpoint, or the standpoint of the mechanic or artisan, there is absolutely no suggestion of betterment to be made, for the feather is an exact, perfectly finished product. Its long central quill tapers from base to point with geometric precision, thereby giving perfect resistance to bending force, ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner
... dwells amidst the Royal Family; He every day, from king to king can walk, Of all our Harries, all our Edwards talk, And get by speaking truth of monarchs dead, What few can of the living, ease and bread." "Lord, sir, a mere mechanic! strangely low, And coarse of phrase—your English all are so. How elegant your Frenchmen?" "Mine, d'ye mean? I have but one, I hope the fellow's clean." "Oh! sir, politely so! nay, let me die, Your only wearing is your Paduasoy." "Not, sir, my only, I have better still, And this you see ...
— Essay on Man - Moral Essays and Satires • Alexander Pope
... was the kitchen mechanic, she says the perfessor's wife's been over to her mother's while this smallpox has been going on, and they is a nurse in the house looking after Miss Margery, the little kid that's sick. And Biddy, ...
— Danny's Own Story • Don Marquis
... a wooden watch without the slightest knowledge of mechanism; and while a shepherd, studying, like an ancient Chaldean, the phenomena of the heavens, on a celestial globe formed by his own hand. That great mechanic, SMEATON, when a child, disdained the ordinary playthings of his age; he collected the tools of workmen, observed them at their work, and asked questions till he could work himself. One day, having watched some millwrights, the child was shortly after, to the distress ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... really society event museum penal recess superior feline nausea precedence resource theater frequent negro precise sacrilegious theology mechanic notoriety pretense secretary veto ...
— Orthography - As Outlined in the State Course of Study for Illinois • Elmer W. Cavins
... of the mutual interdependence of the mechanic arts, I may mention that in Italy, where stone, brick, and plaster are almost the only materials used in architecture, and where the "hollow ware" kitchen implements are of copper or of clay, the ordinary tools for working ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... all in the leather uniforms with caps and goggles to match, were mounting the machines nearest. Blaine, having donned his rig on the run, as it were, was already in a triplane much like the one he had last used. Turning to the mechanic, ...
— Our Pilots in the Air • Captain William B. Perry
... having no such talents, we must do the best we can," Mr. Ffrench stated, with his most precise coldness. "Being well-born and well-bred, he has no taste for a mechanic's labor or for circus performances with automobiles in public. ...
— The Flying Mercury • Eleanor M. Ingram
... to be artificial, we are led into a vast field of conjecture. Were they made by the present race of savages, who are ignorant of all the mechanic arts, and disinclined to labor? If so, what inducement could have been placed before them, sufficiently powerful, to break down the barriers of nature, and bring men habitually indolent, to so herculean a task? The Indian, as we see him now, never works. He is the sovereign of ...
— The Emigrant - or Reflections While Descending the Ohio • Frederick William Thomas
... striding as a cat's follows a pendulum, but without the cat's curiosity about a pendulum. He never interrupted when Potter was speaking; and Canby noticed that whenever Potter talked at any length Tinker looked thoughtful and distant, like a mechanic so accustomed to the whirr and thunder of the machine-shop that he may indulge in reveries there. After a moment or two the old fellow ceased to follow the pendulum stride, and turned ...
— Harlequin and Columbine • Booth Tarkington
... transportation were for military men, all roads ended at the railroad stations. The heavy trucks of the administration, filled with sacks, were saluted with general enthusiasm. "Hurrah for the army!" The soldiers in mechanic's garb, on top of the swaying pyramid, replied to the cheers, waving their arms and uttering shouts that nobody pretended ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... Tredgold found that 43 couples of the parasitic class averaged 7.4 children per family, while 91 respectable couples from the working class averaged only 3.7 per family. Mr. Sidney Webb examined the statistics of the Hearts of Oak Benefit Society, which is patronised by the best type of mechanic, and found that the birth-rate among its members has fallen 46 per cent, between 1881 and 1901; or, taking the whole period between 1880 and 1904, the falling off is 52 per cent. This decline proves that the period of industrial expansion in England is nearly over. ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... a great city are a never-failing source of amusement to the man whose sympathies are hospitable enough to embrace all his kind, and who, refined though he may be himself, will not sneer at the humble wit or grotesque peculiarities of the boozing mechanic, the squalid beggar, the vicious urchin, and all the motley group of the idle, the reckless, and the imitative that swarm in the alleys and broadways of a metropolis. He who walks through a great city to find subjects ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... considerations, to prevent physical society from ceasing for a moment in time, while the moral society is being formed in the idea; in other words, to prevent its existence from being placed in jeopardy for the sake of the moral dignity of man. When the mechanic has to mend a watch he lets the wheels run out; but the living watchworks of the state have to be repaired while they act, and a wheel has to be exchanged for another during its revolutions. Accordingly props must be sought for to support society and keep it going while it is made independent of ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... for the nonce the triplet and alexandrine by which Dryden frequently varied the couplet. Pope himself added a greater neatness and polish to Dryden's verse and brought the system to such monotonous perfection that he "made poetry a mere mechanic art." ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... making such kindly efforts to relieve his distress, it is necessary to take a twenty-year glance backward. At that time Aleck Fifield, a Yankee jack-of-all-trades, who had been by turns a school-teacher, sailor, mechanic, boat-builder, and several other things as well, found himself employed as stage-carpenter in a Boston theatre. He had always been possessed of artistic tastes, though they had never carried him beyond sign-painting, and of dramatic longings, which had thus ...
— Raftmates - A Story of the Great River • Kirk Munroe
... unskilled. We will not and cannot compete with other races who have a large and influential class of artisans and mechanics, and having received higher remuneration for labor, have paved the way for themselves or offsprings from the mechanic to the merchant or to the professional. These three factors, linked and interlinked, an ascending chain will be strong in its ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... king had issued a patent for Sir John Shorter to be lord mayor for the year ensuing. Shorter was a dissenter—"an Anabaptist, a very odd ignorant person, a mechanic, I think," wrote Evelyn(1592) of him—and on that account a clause was inserted in his commission permitting him to have any preacher he might choose.(1593) His granddaughter was married to Sir Robert Walpole. He was at one time ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume II • Reginald R. Sharpe
... trust any of his work, and the new comer was obliged to learn his practical experience at that establishment, where he was known as the mechanical engineer, by having all his work done over by the pattern maker or others, under the eye of the superintendent or master mechanic, and be subjected all the time to the jealousies and annoyances incident to such a method ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 623, December 10, 1887 • Various
... there is a print of him, supposed to be by Reginald Elstracke, pulling the press with his own hand, as it works off the sheets of his scarce edition of the Augsburg Confession. He was a chemist as well as a good mechanic, and either of these qualities in this country was at that time sufficient to constitute a white witch at least. This superstitious old writer had heard all this, and probably believed it, and in his sleep ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... keep the figure whole—was a letter from his father, a letter longer than the commonplace chronicles, and painfully written with the mechanic hand on both sides of a company letter-head. Caleb Gordon wrote chiefly of business. Mutterings of the storm of financial depression were already in the air. Iron, more sensitive than the stock-market, was the barometer, and its readings ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... spoken of vehicles travelling at twenty miles an hour; but we see no reason for thinking that, in the progress of improvement, a much higher velocity might not be found practicable; and in twenty years hence a shopkeeper or mechanic, on the most ordinary occasion, may probably travel with a speed that would leave the fleetest courser behind." Wonderful words these! At a first glance we may not deem them so, being so familiar with the ...
— The Iron Horse • R.M. Ballantyne
... Constitution. His influence was felt through the whole of this long period. Nor was it confined to affairs alone. He took part in all the intellectual action of his countrymen. He was an adept in science, an ingenious mechanic, and a contributor to literature. He stimulated adventure, and was the judicious patron of architecture and the fine arts. More than any man of his day, to the labors of a practical statesman he brought a mind disciplined by a liberal philosophy; ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... active man, gifted with various talents. The two friends applied to Parliament for a prolongation of privilege, since Watt's patent, dated 1769, had only a few more years to run. The bill gave rise to the most animated discussion. The celebrated mechanic wrote as follows to his aged father: "This business could not be carried on without great expense and anxiety. Without the aid of some warm-hearted friends we should not have succeeded, for several of the most powerful in the House of Commons were opposed to us." It ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... being made to raise the status of the mechanic by means of lectures, reading-rooms, and recreation, but, whilst the hours of labour remain what we find them, little good can be effected. A devoted lady, who has spent her whole life in her native town, has done much for the female part of the manufacturing population by means of ...
— Holidays in Eastern France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... the trio gazed eagerly around them. Just ahead, sat a shop girl in a shabby best dress, with a head of blonde, mismatched hair, and beside her, her escort, an Irish mechanic, who shifted his head from time to time as the unaccustomed collar scraped his neck. Across the aisle was a family of towheaded Swedes, the father self-conscious in his carefully pressed black suit; the mother, watchful of her two mischievous, blue-eyed urchins. Young gallants of the neighborhood ...
— A Son of the City - A Story of Boy Life • Herman Gastrell Seely
... I know something of stage-coaches—or, at least, of diligences. Their effect on the men employed about them ought to decide the superiority of steam without further argument. I have never observed an engine-driver who did not seem an exceptionally intelligent mechanic, while the very writers and artists who have preserved the memory of the coaching days for us do not appear to have taken coachmen seriously, or to have regarded them as responsible and civilized men. Abuse of the railway ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... which rivals the volumes of our old friends Weld, Ashe, Fearon, &c. It is entitled "A Visit to North America and the English Settlements in Illinois, with a winter residence in Philadelphia; solely to ascertain the actual prosperity of the Emigrating Agriculturist, Mechanic, and Commercial Speculator"—by Adlard Welby, Esquire, of South Rauceby, Lincolnshire. This esquire has said enough, should he be believed, to settle ultimately the point of the truth or falsehood of Godwin's ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 6: Literary Curiosities - Gleanings Chiefly from Old Newspapers of Boston and Salem, Massachusetts • Henry M. Brooks
... the domestic arts in England. The Queen was of the Medici family, Italian literature was in vogue, and Italian artists therefore would probably have been encouraged to come over and instruct our workmen. The King himself was an excellent mechanic, and boasted that he could earn his living at almost any trade save the making of hangings. His father had established the tapestry works at Mortlake; he himself had bought the Raffaele Cartoons to encourage the work—and much was to be hoped from a monarch who had the ...
— Illustrated History of Furniture - From the Earliest to the Present Time • Frederick Litchfield
... was standing a contested election at Bristol. The gentleman put the question to me upon the hustings, whether I had not, or whether my father had not, sold his wheat for fifty pounds a load in Marlborough market? I was saved the trouble of an answer by the observation of a sensible, shrewd mechanic, a freeman of that city; who said, "Well, and suppose he did, what has that to do with the merit or demerit of a representative who is contending for our rights and liberties? Was Mr. Hunt not justified in selling ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 1 • Henry Hunt
... as necessary for the perfecting of any of the arts is, a fair and honest application of the successive discoveries of science to its improvement.—This has been the uniform practice in those arts which have of late been making such rapid progress. The artist and mechanic are never indifferent to the various improvements which are taking place around them; nor do they ever stand apart, till they are forced upon their notice by third parties, or public notoriety. There is, in the case of the manufacturer, ...
— A Practical Enquiry into the Philosophy of Education • James Gall
... as by torture, unequivocal answers to prepared and preconceived questions—yet still they would not have been talked of or described, as instances of LUCK, but as the natural results of his admitted genius and known skill. But should an accident have disclosed similar discoveries to a mechanic at Birmingham or Sheffield, and if the man should grow rich in consequence, and partly by the envy of his neighbours, and partly with good reason, be considered by them as a man below par in the general powers of his understanding; then, "Oh, what a lucky fellow! Well, ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... him on his own resources, sharpen his wits, and render him fertile in expedients. He had been a foundling, and knew no more of his parentage than a young ostrich, that springs from the deserted egg in the sand. He was left, when an infant, at the door of a poor mechanic, in Boston, by the name of Burt, and by him transferred to the almshouse, where he was called after the name of his finder, with the pet name of Barty, given him by his nurse. Here he was kept till he was four or five years old, when he was given ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... jests of him for the jacks and upstarts, we all know it savoured more of emulation, and his honour than of truth; and it is a certain note of the times, that the Queen, in her choice, never took in her favour a mere viewed man, or a mechanic, as Comines observes of Lewis XI., who did serve himself with persons of unknown parents, such as were Oliver, the barber, whom he created Earl of Dunoyes, and made him EX SECRETIS CONSILIIS, and alone ...
— Travels in England and Fragmenta Regalia • Paul Hentzner and Sir Robert Naunton
... he said, he had chanced to arrest an Irish mechanic who, during the season, had been employed at the neighboring hotel in replacing some plaster that had fallen by reason of leakage. Since then, a hard drinking man, he had been idly loafing, occasionally jobbing, about ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... sleep, from the gloom of motion, sound- lessly, somnambule Moans and booms the soul of a people imprisoned, asleep in the rule Of the strong machine that runs mesmeric, booming the spell of its word Upon them and moving them helpless, mechanic, their ...
— New Poems • D. H. Lawrence
... country could not get civilians to do it at the remuneration offered. The whole thing troubles Wood, who was of a sensitive temperament and very anxious to retain high-class men in the Force. And so he refers to it again in the following year and says that a constable who was a skilled mechanic and was saving the country great expense by looking after the manufacture of stove pipes, tinware, etc., had been offered as much an hour by town merchants as he was getting in a day in the corps on the scale allowed by the Police Act. And Wood, ...
— Policing the Plains - Being the Real-Life Record of the Famous North-West Mounted Police • R.G. MacBeth
... Test. Filing an Irregular Block. Filing a Bar Straight. Filing Bar with Parallel Sides. Surfacing Off Disks. True Surfacing. Precision Tools. Test of the Mechanic. Test Suggestions. Use of the Dividers. Cutting a Key-way. Key-way Difficulties. Filing Metal Round. Kinds of Files. Cotter-file. Square. Pinion. Half-round. Round. Triangular. Equalizing. Cross. Slitting. Character of File Tooth. Double Cut. Float-cut. Rasp Cut. Holding ...
— Practical Mechanics for Boys • J. S. Zerbe
... to draw the holy numbers, and a holy old priest to oversee and bless the whole precious business. The blessing of the devil would have been more appropriate, for the lotteries are the curse of Italy. What the Anglo-American mechanic puts into a savings bank, the Italian invests in lotteries. In Naples there are now fourteen tickets sold per annum for the gross amount of the population, and in ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... a curious transformation among the Kalmuks. In the 9th Relation of Siddhi Kur (a Mongolian version of the Vampyre Tales) six youths are companions: an astrologer, a smith, a doctor, a mechanic, a painter, and a rich man's son. At the mouth of a great river each plants a tree of life and separates, taking different roads, having agreed to meet again at the same spot, when if the tree of any of them is found to be withered it will be a token that he is dead. The rich man's ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... good deal more than his seventeen years, for he had worked his own way in the world and his face had a serious air of responsibility. He wore a smudgy mechanic's cap and greasy overalls, and from his keen gray eyes, determined mouth and chin, and straight black hair, an observer might have deduced that he could be a hard worker and a stubborn fighter if ...
— The Pirate Shark • Elliott Whitney
... gentlemen behind counters lying, authors in the street with spectacles, George Dyers (you may know them by their gait), lamps lit at night, pastry-cooks' and silversmiths' shops, beautiful Quakers of Pentonville, noise of coaches, drowsy cry of mechanic watchman at night, with bucks reeling home drunk; if you happen to wake at midnight, cries of "Fire!" and "Stop, thief!" inns of court, with their learned air, and halls, and butteries, just like Cambridge colleges; old book-stalls, Jeremy Taylors, Burtons ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... round resorted to Minuit for repairs, but he generally came himself along the roads fortuitously about the time anybody's dials stood still. He was almost equal as a weather prophet to his fame as a mechanic, and as his broad, fat face, blue eyes, and portly body passed some farmer's gate, the cheery cry would ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... arrived at eleven o'clock next morning in the small car, armed with his master's instructions. He paid the hotel bill, chartered a taxi, in which he dispatched Lilias, Dulcie, Roland, Bevis and Clifford, straight for home, then, engaging a mechanic from a garage, and taking Everard as guide, he started up the hill in the pouring rain to find the abandoned car. It needed several hours' attention before it could be induced to start, and it was not until evening ...
— The Princess of the School • Angela Brazil
... little that she can spare, and that which she has begged of her wealthier neighbors,—the spirit of that poor seamstress who snatches an hour daily from her exhausting toil to sew for the soldiers,—the spirit of that mechanic, who, having nothing to give, makes boxes in his evening leisure, and sells them for the soldiers,—the spirit of the brooks, that never hesitate between up-hill and down, because "all the rivers run into the sea, yet the sea is never full,"—the spirit of all who ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... he had parted from Charlie Osborne on Charing Cross Station, and set out with eighteenpence in his pocket to seek his fortune. In that brief time he had rapidly risen to wealth and distinction. Three years ago he was a penniless mechanic, forsaken by Fortune and discontented with his life; to-day he was a rich man, smiled on and courted by Fortune and envied by all her minions, and still he was ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 28, April 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... had been sitting in the back part of old Kumme's bicycle-shop, filling his pipe from the tobacco-pouch of a personal friend of the Kaiser. He had called this personal friend of the Kaiser a fool and a jackass, informing him that a real mechanic could put a ball-bearing together while he, the personal friend of the Kaiser, was spitting on his hands. ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... tarries in her place And I paint the beauteous face Of the maiden, that I lost, In my inner eyes again, Lest my heart be overborne, By the thing I hold in scorn, By a dull mechanic ghost And ...
— The Suppressed Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... same strain. He was the type of the Belleville agitator, a lazy, dissipated mechanic, perverting his fellow workmen, constantly spouting the ill-digested odds and ends of political harangues that he had heard, belching forth in the same breath the loftiest sentiments and the most asinine revolutionary clap-trap. ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... speaker, not because the request was unusual, but because the applicant for aid had not acquired the beggar's whine. He was a large, powerful man, evidently a mechanic, for every trade leaves its peculiar stamp upon ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... the prospect of spiritual revelations. Her neighbor was a pallid, care-worn young woman, with very red lips, and large brown eyes of great beauty. She was, as I learned afterwards, a magnetic patient of the doctor, and had deserted her husband, a master mechanic, to follow this new light. The others were, like myself, strangers brought hither by mere curiosity. One of them was a lady in deep black, closely veiled. Beyond her, and opposite to me, sat the sergeant, and next to him the medium, a man named Brink. He wore a good ...
— The Autobiography of a Quack And The Case Of George Dedlow • S. Weir Mitchell
... of New Mexico, accepting the benefits of the act of Congress approved the 2d of July last, entitled "An act donating public lands to the several States and Territories which may provide colleges for the benefit of agriculture and the mechanic arts." ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Lincoln - Section 1 (of 2) of Volume 6: Abraham Lincoln • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... the "Goat and Compasses." As he went out of the public-house, an elderly man, in the dress of a mechanic, who had been lounging in the bar, followed him into the street, and kept behind him until he entered Hyde Park, to cross to the Edgware Road; there the man fell back ...
— Run to Earth - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... last of his pie, and leaned over the hood of the specially designed racer interested only in its peculiarities, and entirely indifferent to the respectful young owner, who was aware that he knew far less about it than this mechanic did. Sauntering back to his work in the autumn sunlight, Wolf had followed the youthful millionaire by not even a thought. If he had done so, it might have been a half-contemptuous decision that a man who knew so little of engines ought not ...
— The Beloved Woman • Kathleen Norris
... apprehensions, while other passions only operate occasionally, the interested find the object of their ordinary cares; their motive to the practice of mechanic and commercial arts; their temptation to trespass on the laws of justice; and, when extremely corrupted, the price of their prostitutions, and the standard of their opinions on the subject of good and of evil. Under this influence, they would enter, if not restrained by the laws of civil society, ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... crosses, relics, crucifixes, Beads, pictures, rosaries, and pixes,— The tools of working our salvation By mere mechanic operation. ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... Once she suggested that he should learn a trade, to which Master Simon always replied, that he was born to be a gentleman, and would never voluntarily demean himself by pursuing a degrading occupation. He was above being a mechanic, and he would never soil his hands with dirty work. Katy began to think he was really a fool. She could scarcely think him "poor and proud"; he was only poor ...
— Poor and Proud - or The Fortunes of Katy Redburn • Oliver Optic
... 2. The mechanic's dark little third-story room, seen in a flash from the Elevated Railway train; the sewing-machine in a corner; the small cook-stove; the whole family eating cabbage around a kerosene lamp; of the clatter and roar and groaning wail of the Elevated ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... get in a blow! And sometimes they did get it in, when the Germans least thought it was coming. When a skipper suddenly found a German U-boat (Unterseeboot or under-sea-boat) rising beside him, just as his engine-room mechanic had come up with a hammer in his hand, he called out, "look sharp and blind her!" Without a moment's hesitation the mechanic jumped on her deck and smashed her periscope to pieces, thus leaving her the ...
— Flag and Fleet - How the British Navy Won the Freedom of the Seas • William Wood
... woman, you don't know a generator from a differential." Not unreasonably was Ted lofty with her. He was a natural mechanic, a maker and tinkerer of machines; he lisped in blueprints ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... doctors, shopkeepers and manufacturers, but the laborers and mechanics. Does not this seem natural? The former work mainly with their head; when their daily duties are over the brain is often exhausted, and of their leisure time much must be devoted to air and exercise. The laborer and mechanic, on the contrary, besides working often for much shorter hours, have in their work-time taken sufficient bodily exercise, and could therefore give any leisure they might have to reading and study. They have not done so as yet, it is true; but this ...
— The Pleasures of Life • Sir John Lubbock
... of the Civil War and the Commonwealth caused great confusion and many defects in the registers. Very often the rector was turned out of his parish; the intruding minister, often an ignorant mechanic, cared naught for registers. Registrars were appointed in each parish who could scarcely sign their names, much less enter a baptism. Hence we find very frequent gaps in the books from 1643 to 1660. At Tarporley, Cheshire, there is a break ...
— Vanishing England • P. H. Ditchfield
... understand the second, I must inform you, it is usual for boys, who expect christmas boxes, to present their masters' customers with a copy of verses, expressive of their good wishes, &c. The call-boy of the theatre, (a mechanic's son of this town,) had the following verses written in the usual style by the poet commonly employed on these occasions, and when printed, delivered one ...
— Travels in the United States of America • William Priest
... no head for mechanics, but Overholt had already made an invention which was considered very successful, though he had got little or nothing for it. The mechanic who had helped him in its construction had stolen his principal idea before the device was patented, and had taken out a patent for a cheap little article which every one at once used, and which made a fortune for him. Overholt's instrument took its place in every laboratory in the world; but the ...
— The Little City Of Hope - A Christmas Story • F. Marion Crawford
... magistrates. They were divided into three classes:[7] the bard proper, whose province was philosophy and poetry; the Druid, or minister of religion; and the ovate, or mechanic and artist. These classes were all ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 573, October 27, 1832 • Various
... always cleanly dressed, intelligent, and respectful. I remember, however, one morning, when the ice storm of the preceding night had made the sidewalks glistening, smiling and impassable, to have journeyed down the middle of Twelfth Street with a mechanic so sooty as to absolutely leave a legible track in the snowy pathway. He was the fireman attending the engine in a noted manufactory, and in our brief conversation he told me many facts regarding his profession which ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... chief of police, an American soldier of fortune named Lee Christmas. He was a man nearing fifty, totally devoid of all the embroidery of life, golden toothed and graying at the temples, but still hardy and of youthful vigor, of the dress and manner of a well-paid American mechanic, who sat chewing his black cigar as complacently as if he were still at his throttle on the railroad of Guatemala. Following the latest revolution he had reorganized what, to use his own words, had been "a bunch of barefooted ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... priestly office: the fanaticism of the Independents, exalted to a higher pitch, abolished ecclesiastical government, disdained creeds and systems, neglected every ceremony, and confounded all ranks and orders. The soldier, the merchant, the mechanic, indulging the fervors of zeal, and guided by the illapses of the spirit, resigned himself to an inward and superior direction, and was consecrated, in a manner, by an immediate intercourse and ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume
... discernibly out of shape. It were easy to show that there is no solid earth nor immovable mountains. I came away saying to my friend, "I am glad God lets you into so much of his finest thinking." He is a mechanic, not a theologian. This foremost man in the world in his fine department was lately but a "greasy mechanic," an engineer ...
— Among the Forces • Henry White Warren
... was in Lincolnshire. It was headed by Dr. Mackrel, prior of Barlings, who was disguised like a mean mechanic, and who bore the name of Captain Cobler. This tumultuary army amounted to above twenty thousand men;[**] but notwithstanding their number, they showed little disposition of proceeding to extremities against the king, and seemed ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part C. - From Henry VII. to Mary • David Hume
... advantages of him whose melancholy career I have painted. He was the son of parents who possessed but little means, and who could afford him no assistance after the days of childhood. He was early placed to the hard labor of a mechanic. But he did not sink into lewdness and vice, under the pressure of his adverse circumstances. He would not spend his leisure hours at public resorts, in the midst of the profligate and reckless. Each moment of respite from labor, he applied himself to study and the improvement ...
— Golden Steps to Respectability, Usefulness and Happiness • John Mather Austin
... There had been a report of a strange man seen about the Clemens place, thought to be a prospecting burglar, and Clemens went over to investigate. A little searching inquiry revealed that the man was not a burglar, but a mechanic out of employment, a lover of one of the house-maids, who had given him food and shelter on the premises, intending no real harm. When the girl found that her secret was discovered, she protested that he was her fiance, though she ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... Union; but how is the inferior force of four hundred thousand to be clad, fed, and paid by the exhausted Confederacy, with a white population less than one-sixth of that opposed to them, without commerce and the mechanic arts, and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 60, October 1862 • Various
... of bridges. The various exigencies to be met, the possible triumphs to be achieved, the experiments as to form, material, security, and grace, have been prolific causes of inspiration and disappointment. In this branch of economy, the mechanic and the mathematician fairly meet; and it requires a rare union of ability in both vocations to arrive at original results in this sphere. To invent a bridge, through the application of a scientific principle by a novel method, is one ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... from the haunts of men out to Sandtown-by-the-Puddle we blame them that they do not rush to join us. Most of them would be happier in penal servitude than in the country. The work is as hard and requires as much skill as a mechanic's work, besides personal qualities that are demanded of no mechanic, and commands half ...
— Three Acres and Liberty • Bolton Hall
... there is no distinction or subordination left — The different departments of life are jumbled together — The hod-carrier, the low mechanic, the tapster, the publican, the shopkeeper, the pettifogger, the citizen, and courtier, all tread upon the kibes of one another: actuated by the demons of profligacy and licentiousness, they are seen every where rambling, riding, rolling, rushing, ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... with all the world. Their thoughts—if they have any, and doubtless they have, a good many of them—are those of the most tranquil and placid nature. Perhaps they are edifying each other with reflections on the great advantages of the mechanic arts, and the art of making earthen ware in particular. The old cow is a genuine philosopher. She makes the best of every thing. Seldom, very seldom, does she allow herself to get excited. As for being angry, she makes such ...
— Stories about Animals: with Pictures to Match • Francis C. Woodworth
... saw the rice farmer and his wife and children working in the paddy fields as long as they could see. These people do not work with the fierce energy of the American mechanic, but their workday is from twelve to fourteen hours and, considering these long hours, they show ...
— The Critic in the Orient • George Hamlin Fitch
... was born on the 29th September, 1802, in the parish of Glencairn, and county of Dumfries. He first wrote verses while apprenticed to a mechanic in a neighbouring parish. In his nineteenth year he published a volume of poems, which excited some attention, and led to his connexion with the newspaper press. He became a regular contributor to the ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume VI - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... as warmly discussed as at home. We have now before us a little volume by the philosopher and historian, Zschokke, which, in the form of a fictitious narrative, treats very fully of the status of the mechanic in Fatherland; and we are tempted to cull a few extracts which may afford the reader materials ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 436 - Volume 17, New Series, May 8, 1852 • Various
... I tried 'em; they fit. But he won't need shoes this winter; he's better off without 'em. If a bunglin' mechanic over thar will leave his feet alone he'll be all ...
— David Lannarck, Midget - An Adventure Story • George S. Harney
... branches of the plumber's craft, viz., joint wiping, pipe bending and lead burning.... 'Hints' are the most useful things to an apprentice, and there are many in this work which are not to be found in some of the text-books."—English Mechanic. ...
— The Dyeing of Cotton Fabrics - A Practical Handbook for the Dyer and Student • Franklin Beech
... railroad and bridge building. Axemen were at work getting out timber for bridges, and cutting fuel for locomotives and cars. Thus every branch of railroad building, making tools to work with, and supplying the workmen with food, was all going on at once, and without the aid of a mechanic or workman except what the command itself furnished. General Dodge had the work assigned to him finished within forty days after receiving his orders. The number of bridges to rebuild was 182, many of them over deep and wide chasms. The ...
— The Battle of Atlanta - and Other Campaigns, Addresses, Etc. • Grenville M. Dodge
... merely that the boy shall grow up wholesomely and happily, showing such superiority as there may be in him when the fitting time and opportunity present themselves. He will not attempt to make a musician of an unmusical child, nor a mechanic of an artistic child. He will not object to the brilliant and impractical dreams of the young inventor, but will help to make them practicable; and though he may squirm at some of the investigations of the budding scientist, he will ...
— Study of Child Life • Marion Foster Washburne
... sighed Had he seen far enough, And in the same inevitable stuff Discovered an odd reason too for pride In being what he must have been by laws Infrangible and for no kind of cause. Deterred by no confusion or surprise He may have seen with his mechanic eyes A world without a meaning, and had room, Alone amid magnificence and doom, To build himself an airy monument That should, or fail him in his vague intent, Outlast an accidental universe— To call it nothing worse— Or, by the burrowing guile Of Time disintegrated ...
— The Man Against the Sky • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... the horrid contrivance correctly going again without imposing upon us the misery of slowly working through an almost endless series of, as it were, historical chimes. I agree that my premises were faulty, far too lightly supported, but my mind leapt to the deduction that the mechanic in this connection could be none other than Banks. And granting that, the further inferences were, undoubtedly, important. For as I saw them they pointed infallibly to the conclusion that Banks had accepted once more the yoke of servitude; that he had made his exit through the servants' ...
— The Jervaise Comedy • J. D. Beresford
... that it is extraordinarily slender, and free from projections, and of unusual materials. You also see that it was obviously not made by an ordinary dagger-maker; that, in spite of the Italian word scrawled on it, there is plainly written all over it 'British mechanic.' The blade is made from a strip of common three-quarter-inch tool steel; the hilt is turned from an aluminium rod; and there is not a line of engraving on it that could not be produced in a lathe by any engineer's apprentice. Even the boss at the top is mechanical, ...
— John Thorndyke's Cases • R. Austin Freeman
... and Chester out in the mischievous moonlight.' Wasn't I the wily old hound! Nettie sort of lingered to hear Wilbur, who was going good by this time. 'One must be the soul behind the wood and wire,' he says; 'one rather feels just that, or one remains merely a brutal mechanic.' ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... to put down his mechanic's straw-bag upon the hall-table, which he did with great care, as if it were of priceless stuff and contained fragile articles; having done this, he posed himself with one elbow resting on the post at the foot of the staircase, like ...
— The Talking Horse - And Other Tales • F. Anstey
... over this nervous passion for a man of whom so little was known. The ultimate result was that Car'line's manly and simple wooer Edward found his suit becoming practically hopeless. He was a respectable mechanic, in a far sounder position than Mop the nominal horse-doctor; but when, before leaving her, Ned put his flat and final question, would she marry him, then and there, now or never, it was with little expectation of obtaining more than the negative she gave him. Though her father supported ...
— Life's Little Ironies - A set of tales with some colloquial sketches entitled A Few Crusted Characters • Thomas Hardy
... directs the hands. An intelligent man has an advantage over one who is ignorant, whether he is a farmer, or mechanic, or merchant, and is surer of success in ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 1, January 5, 1884. - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... at, and labors for no other object but that of attaining perfection in his art, should not I, whose main business, according to the example of my father and my ancestors, is the advancement and right administration of government, be confessing myself more indolent than any common mechanic if I were to bestow on this noblest of sciences less attention and labor than they devote to their insignificant trades? However, I am neither entirely satisfied with the decisions which the greatest and wisest men of Greece have left us; nor, ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... I thought a very great deal of his poem, and what I thought I said; and he, on the other hand, evidently regarded me as a lad of extraordinary taste and discernment for my years. There was another mechanic in the neighbourhood,—a house-carpenter, who, though not a poet, was deeply read in books of all kinds, from the plays of Farquhar to the sermons of Flavel; and as both his father and grandfather—the latter, by the way, a Porteous-mob man, and the former ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... topographical interest of my journey, yet I would not forget that it was the people and their fathers' deeds and sufferings that had led me to undertake this rather fatiguing enterprise; and long before I reached the Barricata, or Pra del Torno, I had a great enjoyment in being taken by a Vaudois mechanic, who left his work at Angrogna, and would have no acknowledgment but my thanks, in order to show me one of those wonderful hiding-places in the very heart of the mountains, where the God of the hill and of the Vaudois so effectively succoured his people. The particular cavern I was ...
— The Vaudois of Piedmont - A Visit to their Valleys • John Napper Worsfold
... shirt-sleeves, his hands in his pockets, was standing, his back against the bench, surveying, with something of a mechanic's eye, the frame of a boat which was ...
— The Village Convict - First published in the "Century Magazine" • Heman White Chaplin
... from towns,—for Hartford was only a village then,—the demands of farming life determined the round of days. Every one from childhood fell of necessity into his or her place as one of the workers, out doors and in, and the simplicity of the social organization made the farmer a mechanic as well. There was the blacksmith's shop, where a rudely trained skill supplied the more special needs; but the farmer himself not only used his tools, but mended and to some extent made them; he was carpenter also, and shoemaker, and, in general, necessity had taught his hands ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder
... "He's a great chap, Mr. Dick is! About your age, too, I guess. Quite a mechanic and always tinkering with tools and machinery. If there's anything wrong with the motor boat he can usually fix her up all right. As for mending a car, he beats all the chauffeurs out. They know it and have to say so. ...
— Walter and the Wireless • Sara Ware Bassett
... a steam-driven screw opened a new era in maritime history, the "practical man" in the engineering trade was an uneducated savage. Possessing no trade union, no voice in Parliament, no means of educating himself in the intricate theory of the machinery he helped to build, the mechanic of sixty years ago was regarded by those above him in the social scale merely as a "hand." When, therefore, steamships became common, and men were needed to operate and care for the propelling mechanism, they were ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... suburban residence is charming. To the serious poet, and writer of elegiac verses, the aspect of Nature, viewed from my veranda, is suggestive. I myself have experienced moments when the "sad mechanic exercise" of verse would have been of infinite relief. The following stanzas, by a young friend who has been stopping with me for the benefit of his health, addressed to a duck that frequented a small pond ...
— Urban Sketches • Bret Harte
... not aware that his grandfather had once been a poor mechanic, or rather he ignored it. He chose to consider that he had sprung from a long line of wealthy ancestors. His father heard with pleasure that Herbert was not likely to realize any money at present for his services. Already he felt that the little cottage was as good as his. It was only a week ...
— Herbert Carter's Legacy • Horatio Alger
... Camarines; and the people, though idle, are more modest, more honorable, more obliging, and of cleaner habits, than the inhabitants of South Luzon. Through the courtesy of the governor I quickly obtained a roomy dwelling, and a servant who understood Spanish. [An ingenious mechanic.] Here I also met a very intelligent Filipino who had acquired great skill in a large variety of crafts. With the simplest tools he improved in many points on my instruments and apparatus, the purpose of which he quickly comprehended to my entire satisfaction, ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... ADMIRABLY suited to the needs of the practical mechanic.... It is free from any elaborate theoretical discussions, and the explanations of the various types of valve-gear are accompanied by diagrams which render them ...
— A Textbook of Assaying: For the Use of Those Connected with Mines. • Cornelius Beringer and John Jacob Beringer
... laborers or to make them feel that, having a grievance, as they alleged, they must be specially favored. Since Labor is, or should be, common to all men, Roosevelt believed that every laborer, whether farmer or mechanic, employer or employee, merchant or financier, should stand erect and look every other man straight in the eyes, and neither look up nor down, but with level gaze, fearless, uncringing, uncondescending. The laws he proposed, ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... sugar-canes—a convincing proof that they grew in the neighbourhood. We all tried them; and for several days each member of our community was to be seen walking about with a piece of sugar-cane in his mouth. Sambo was an ingenious mechanic, and forthwith set to work to construct a sugar manufactory. It was very simple, consisting of a number of our largest clay pots for boiling the juice, and a long trough with sides, and a board ...
— The Wanderers - Adventures in the Wilds of Trinidad and Orinoco • W.H.G. Kingston
... was a mechanic and a Wesleyan, in virtue of which latter connection, and a Christian spirit, he had been made a local preacher. He was on his way to offer his services as a watcher by the ...
— The Settler and the Savage • R.M. Ballantyne
... perhaps also with his immolated wife, that what he loved best in life might not in death be divided from him? or was it the abode of penance chosen by some devoted anchorite of later days? or the idle work of some wandering mechanic, whom chance, and whim, and leisure, had thrust upon such an undertaking?" What follows this sober passage is the work of the poet. "Sleep," continues Norna, "had gradually crept upon me among my lucubrations, when I was startled from my slumbers by a second clap of thunder, and when I awoke, I ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... advantage of it to that book." Some of the sentiments of the book which particularly impressed him were as follows: "It is possible that the wisdom of a poor man may start a proposal that may save a city, save a nation." "A mean (humble) mechanic,—who can tell what an engine of good he may be, if humbly and wisely applied unto it?" "The remembrance of having been the man that first moved a good law, were better than a statue erected for one's memory." These, and similar thoughts, stimulated ...
— The Printer Boy. - Or How Benjamin Franklin Made His Mark. An Example for Youth. • William M. Thayer
... few years the instruments of precision have so multiplied that a well-trained consultant may be called on to know and handle as many tools as a mechanic. Their use, the exactness they teach and demand, the increasing refinement in drugs, and our ability to give them in condensed forms, all tend towards making the physician more accurate, and by overtaxing him, owing to the time all such methodical studies ...
— Doctor and Patient • S. Weir Mitchell
... between the citizens of Buffalo and the foreign population, that a combination was formed called the "American League." The members of this League entered into a solemn compact to stand together and fight together for the rights of Americans. This constable was at the time an humble mechanic in Buffalo, and he said that he constantly met Mr. Fillmore (who was a member of that League with him) at the Council Room. Thus you see that those who would arrogate to themselves the title of Americans, ...
— Americanism Contrasted with Foreignism, Romanism, and Bogus Democracy in the Light of Reason, History, and Scripture; • William Gannaway Brownlow
... yet symbolic; and the file had its pathetic history. It was given to him unexpectedly one evening, by a quiet, pale-faced girl. The poor creature had come out to the mines to join one of his fellow convicts, a delicate young man, a mechanic and a social democrat, with broad cheekbones and large staring eyes. She had worked her way across half Russia and nearly the whole of Siberia to be near him, and, as it seems, with the hope of helping him to escape. But ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... when not reinforced by other qualities, is of less and less consequence. The bold, adventurous youth who, years ago, would have been an embryo Murat, Messina, Espartero or Prim, would be rejected today to make room for a mechanic who had the skill to operate a machine, or for an aviator or an engineer who might be capable of solving in a crisis ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... of God. It may be said, indeed, that to consult the caprices and associations of the human mind, is to lower the dignity of religion; but surely a good end must justify any means which are not in themselves culpable or ridiculous. The mechanic, for instance, in returning from his daily labour, enters an open church from accident or curiosity, crosses himself from habit, and is led on by the momentary feeling of reverence which that act must generally awaken, to employ five minutes in his devotions, a well spent portion of ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... had enshrined the deepest memories of his own childhood and youth. Like David Copperfield, he had known what it was to be a poor, neglected lad, set to rough, uncongenial work, with no more than a mechanic's surroundings and outlook, and having to fend for himself in the miry ways of the great city. Like David Copperfield, he had formed a very early acquaintance with debts and duns, and been initiated into the mysteries and sad expedients of shabby poverty. Like ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... Jacobin program, all Frenchmen must be recast[41147] in one uniform mold; they must be taken when small; all must be subject to the same enforced education, that of a mechanic, rustic and soldier's boy. Be warned, ye adults, by the guillotine, reform yourselves beforehand according to the prescribed pattern! No more costly, elegant or delicate crystal or gold vases! All are ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... recently seen a model of a new Steam Printing Press, the invention of Mr. Wm. W. Marston, a young and ingenious mechanic of this city. A mass of other matters prevents our giving a description at present; we shall probably procure an engraving, however, and publish a full description ...
— Scientific American magazine Vol 2. No. 3 Oct 10 1846 • Various
... him to co-operate with us. Tell him to start calling Zurb temple on his radio about noon tomorrow, and keep it up till he gets an answer. Or, better, tell him to run his conveyer to his First Level terminal, and bring with him an extra suit of clothes appropriate to the role of journeyman-mechanic. I'll want to talk to him, and furnish him with special equipment. Got all that? Well, carry on with it, and bring your own paratimers, priests and mining operators, back with you as soon as you've taken care of everything. Brannad, you come with me, now. We're returning to First Level immediately. ...
— Temple Trouble • Henry Beam Piper
... composed any poetry, worth calling poetry, produced a minister worthy of much note—at least, I can only hear of one or two. They have fine voices as a rule, and except some half-dozen Gipsies no first-rate musicians have sprung from their midst. No engineer, no mechanic—in fact, no nothing. The highest state of their manufacturing skill has been to make a few slippers for the feet, as some of them are doing at Lynn; skewers to stick into meat, for which they have done ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... always meagre. One of these winters he occupied a small frame house, unfurnished in the second story. The general could get along with the meagre comforts, but he desired better accommodations for his wife. So he sent for a young mechanic and fellow-apprentice. ...
— From Farm House to the White House • William M. Thayer
... the services of a mechanic in relation to a certain piece of work, I called upon one in my neighborhood, then in the employment of a gentleman, and was informed, on stating my object, that as he should be through with his present ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various
... struggle of nature to write herself in the life and work of man, the power of beauty struggling to manifest itself, the harmony that is always desiring to make itself known. To the merchant there are the great laws of trade, of which his works are but the immediate expression. To the mechanic there are the continual forces of nature, gravitation uttering itself in all its majesty, made no less majestic because it simply takes its expression for the moment in some particular exercise of his art. To the ship that sails upon the sea there are the ...
— Addresses • Phillips Brooks
... introduce you to a good cloth mechanic. Go to him at once and get one suit for dinner and perhaps two for the street. It costs money to be a gentleman here. It's a fine art. While you are in London you'll have to get the uniform and fall in line and go through the evolutions or ...
— In the Days of Poor Richard • Irving Bacheller
... terms uttered by the artist, the mechanic, and husbandman."—Chazotte's Essay, p. 24. "They may be divided into four classes—the Humanists, Philanthropists, Pestalozzian and the Productive Schools."—Smith's New Gram., p. iii. "Verbs have six tenses, the Present, the Imperfect, the ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... Panic seems to have marked them for her own; they despaired at once of all lawful defence; and, on Sunday, the day after the Chief Justice's departure, Apia was in consequence startled with strange news. Dynamite bought from the wrecker ship, an electrical machine and a mechanic hired, the prison mined, and a letter despatched to the people of Manono advising them of the fact, and announcing that if any rescue were attempted prison and prisoners should be blown up—such were the voices of rumour; and the design appearing ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... were then frequented by men who came, not to talk, but to read; the smaller tradesmen and the better class of mechanic now came to the coffee-house, called for a cup of coffee, and with it the daily paper, which they could not afford to take in. Every coffee-house took three or four papers; there seems to have been in this latter phase of the once social institution no general conversation. ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... or endeavouring to move the passions; his genius was too sullen and saturnine to do it gracefully, especially when he knew he came after those who had performed both to such an height. Humour was his proper sphere, and in that he delighted most to represent mechanic people. He was deeply conversant in the ancients, both Greek and Latin, and he borrowed boldly from them. There is scarce a poet or historian among the Roman authors of those times, whom he has not ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... said I. 'No, none else, except a poor simple mechanic, and some common company, who soon ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... outside the window at the end of the corridor. It seemed as though a fierce chase had begun after the fugitive Englishman, for yet another man, a thin, respectably-dressed mechanic, had run along and slipped out of the window with ease as though acquired ...
— Hushed Up - A Mystery of London • William Le Queux
... quality of all building materials, and where inferior workmanship and materials can be used to an equal advantage with those of first class. To slight work and yet do it justice; to give it all the strength and endurance necessary, requires one of skillful acquirements. A mechanic may persuade a proprietor into many a long day's work, as it pays well to nurse good jobs when other work is slack, but an architect who understands such things would save the value ...
— Woodward's Country Homes • George E. Woodward
... prejudices and pride of order, on the one hand, and incapacitated by ignorance on the other, have ever been the earliest and best friends of progress in any science. Here you find the retired scholar, the thoughtful and independent farmer, the skilful mechanic, the enlightened merchant, the curious traveller, the inquisitive philosopher—all fitted, beyond those of either extreme, for exercising a sound judgment upon such questions, and all more interested in them. ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... a situation, where knowledge of the mechanic arts afforded the surest recommendation to notice, it may be easily conceived, that attention to the parade duty of the troops, gradually diminished. Now were to be seen officers and soldiers not "trailing the puissant pike" but felling the ponderous gum-tree, or breaking the ...
— A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson • Watkin Tench
... way he managed to lay aside quite a little sum of money, besides paying his interest to Arthur, and when Maude came home from Europe in March he felt himself warranted in beginning to raise the roof. He was naturally a mechanic, and would have made a splendid carpenter; he was also something of an architect, and sketched upon paper the changes he proposed making. The roof was to be raised over Jerrie's room; there was to be a pretty bay-window at the south, commanding ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes
... circumcision, however, never took place, as it is most likely that in the privacy of his chamber his Majesty worked, like many a plebeian or man of low degree had done before him and has done since, to bring a refractory prepuce to terms. The king was somewhat of a mechanic, as his skill as a locksmith has passed into history; so that it is not unlikely that, with what little information he had on the subject, he managed to sufficiently dilate, by scarification and stretching, the preputial opening, as from the year ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... the idea of a peasant or mechanic being a legislator, what vast education is requisite to enable him to judge amongst his neighbours which is most qualified by his industry and integrity to be intrusted with the care of the interests of himself ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... find in his administration is due to the ability and energy of his accomplished premier, Phya Kralahome, and even his strength has been wasted. The native arts and literature have retrograded; in the mechanic arts much has been lost; and the whole nation ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... is true, be squeamish, and fear to let the unsavoury reek of tabac-de-caporal, or the odours of potato brandy and logwood wine come betwixt the wind and his nobility. Neither must he dread contact with the mechanic's blouse, with the cotton gown of the grisette, or the velveteen vest of the titi of the Boulevards; he must even make up his mind to see his neighbour, dispensing with his upper garment, exhibit his brawny arms in shirt sleeves of questionable purity. If he dare encounter ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... little boy, three years old perhaps, half frantic with terror, and crying to every one for his "Mammy." This was about eleven, mark you. People stopped and spoke to him, and then went on, leaving him more frightened than before. But I and a good-humoured mechanic came up together; and I instantly developed a latent faculty for setting the hearts of children at rest. Master Tommy Murphy (such was his name) soon stopped crying, and allowed me to take him up and carry him; and the mechanic and I trudged away along ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Can't I be of use to you in some way? The reason I wanted to look at this loom was that I saw your last two strokes with the bar as I came up, and I recognized what a tremendous push you had to give. I'm something of a mechanic and I wondered if I couldn't do a bit of oiling, perhaps, to make it easier. I'm ...
— Under the Country Sky • Grace S. Richmond
... suicide by an animal instinct, and walked along the quays, feeling my weakness, but unable to conquer it. In a few more moments I should have thrown myself into the water, when I ran against an individual dressed like a simple mechanic, and who, recognising me, threw himself on my neck, and cried, 'Is it you, Napoleon? what joy to see you again!' It was Demasis, a former comrade of mine in the artillery regiment. He had emigrated, and had returned to France in disguise, to see his aged mother. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... a monkey; a wandering musician with a harp; a man with a hammer who had been engaged in breaking stones; a Punch and Judy party, consisting of a man, woman, and boy, with their Toby-dog; five christy minstrels in their war paint; a respectable looking mechanic with his wife and three children who were tramping from one place to another in search of work; and a blind beggar; and all these were seated in more or less awkward and constrained attitudes on easy-chairs, covered with satin, velvet, ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... stone which may be included in the category of trade memorials, though its subject was not a mechanic. Mr. John Cade was a schoolmaster at Beckenham, and appears to have been well liked by his pupils, who, when he prematurely died, placed a complimentary epitaph over his grave. The means by which he had imparted knowledge are displayed ...
— In Search Of Gravestones Old And Curious • W.T. (William Thomas) Vincent
... look at that press, my dears," said Mr. Merrick. "I'm something of a mechanic myself, or was in my young days, and I may be able to work this thing until we can get ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces on Vacation • Edith Van Dyne
... right hand, with an extensive view over Hunter's nursery grounds, and on the left is Hockley abbey: this building was erected upon a piece of waste, boggy land, about the 1779, by Mr. Richard Ford, an ingenious mechanic of Birmingham, who, among other things, invented a one-wheel carriage, which he constructed entirely of iron; and for his ingenuity in the formation of that vehicle, the society of arts presented him with their gold ...
— A Description of Modern Birmingham • Charles Pye
... educational advantages—be that as it may, the children of the one go to school, and become qualified for the duties of life. One daughter becomes school-teacher, another a mantua-maker, and a third a fancy shop-keeper; while one son becomes a farmer, another a merchant, and a third a mechanic. All enter into business with fine prospects, marry respectably, and settle down in domestic comfort—while the six sons and daughters of the other family, grow up without educational and business qualifications, ...
— The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States • Martin R. Delany
... Saint George in the picture, endeavoured to curb the ardour of the flying, steel-tipped pinions with which they thundered along the ground. Alas! there was nothing now but motor-cars driven each by a moustached mechanic, with a tall footman towering by his side. I wished to hold before my bodily eyes, that I might know whether they were indeed as charming as they appeared to the eyes of memory, little hats, so low-crowned as to seem no more than garlands about the brows of ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... throwing them discernibly out of shape. It were easy to show that there is no solid earth nor immovable mountains. I came away saying to my friend, "I am glad God lets you into so much of his finest thinking." He is a mechanic, not a theologian. This foremost man in the world in his fine department was lately but a "greasy mechanic," an engineer in ...
— Among the Forces • Henry White Warren
... that Franklin should be sent to England, no longer as an agent, but as the general representative of the States. In this character he arrived in London about forty years after his first appearance in that city as a distressed mechanic. His own mind was strongly impressed by the contrast; he went to the printing-office where he had worked, introduced himself to the men employed there, and joined in a little festival in honor of printing. He officially presented to Mr. Grenville a petition against the ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... provision secures to the State banks a legal privilege in the Bank of the United States which is withheld from all private citizens. If a State bank in Philadelphia owe the Bank of the United States and have notes issued by the St. Louis branch, it can pay the debt with those notes, but if a merchant, mechanic, or other private citizen be in like circumstances he can not by law pay his debt with those notes, but must sell them at a discount or send them to St. Louis to be cashed. This boon conceded to the State ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, - Vol. 2, Part 3, Andrew Jackson, 1st term • Edited by James D. Richardson
... that I have not exactly kept to the three mechanic rules of unity. I knew them, and had them in my eye, but followed them only at a distance; for the genius of the English cannot bear too regular a play: we are given to variety, even to a debauchery of pleasure. My scenes are therefore sometimes broken, because my underplot required them ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... real. His angels! silly creatures who could sing And sing again, and delicately fling The smoky censer, bow and stand aside All mute in adoration: thronging wide, Till nowhere could He look but soon He saw An angel bending humbly to the law Mechanic; knowing nothing more of pain, Than when they were forbid to sing again, Or swing anew the censer, or bow down In humble adoration of His frown. This was the thought in Eden as He trod— ... It is a lonely thing to be ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various
... other menial services, humiliating to themselves, and latterly felt as no less humiliating to the general name and interests of learning. The better taste, or rather the relaxing pressure of aristocratic prejudice, arising from the vast diffusion of trade and the higher branches of mechanic art, have gradually caused these functions of the order (even where the law would not permit the extinction of the order) to become obsolete. In my time, I was acquainted with two servitors: but one of them was rapidly pushed forward into a higher ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... glimpse of the belated engine. When the rays of its electric headlight pierced the Western night they shouted like boys, ran to the telephones, and while the roundhouse, the superintendent, and the master-mechanic were getting the news the Special engine steamed slowly into sight through the whirling snow and stopped at the semaphore. So a liner shaken in the teeth of a winter storm, battered by heading seas, and swept by stiffening spray, rides at last, ...
— The Daughter of a Magnate • Frank H. Spearman
... soon afterwards sat down and thought again. To become a doctor? But to do that one must pass an examination in Latin; besides, she had an invincible repugnance to corpses and disease. It would be nice to become a mechanic, a judge, a commander of a steamer, a scientist; to do something into which she could put all her powers, physical and spiritual, and to be tired out and sleep soundly at night; to give up her life to something that would make ...
— The Duel and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... 1842 in a manner which might well be termed savage. He arraigned the manufacturers as enjoying unfair advantages,—advantages held, as he endeavored to demonstrate, at the expense and to the detriment of the agriculturist, the mechanic, the merchant, the ship-owner, the sailor, and indeed of almost every industrial class. In reading Mr. Walker's report a third of a century after it was made, one might imagine that the supporters of the tariff of 1842 were engaged in a conspiracy ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... comforts, being collected on our seaboard and frontiers only, and incorporated with the transactions of our mercantile citizens, it may be the pleasure and the pride of an American to ask, What farmer, what mechanic, what laborer ever sees a taxgatherer of the United States? These contributions enable us to support the current expenses of the Government, to fulfill contracts with foreign nations, to extinguish the native right of soil within our limits, to ...
— United States Presidents' Inaugural Speeches - From Washington to George W. Bush • Various
... curious messy mixture he encountered nearer home. His sister Marian had been keeping company with an industrious young mechanic, of German extraction, who, after thoroughly learning the trade, had set up for himself in a bicycle-repair shop. Also, having got the agency for a low-grade make of wheel, he was prosperous. Marian had called on Martin in his room a short time before to announce ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... styles of picket, and other fancy fences for front yards, &c., it is more the province of the architect or the mechanic to treat. Styles vary and are constantly increasing in number. The great point to be secured in all such, to render them most durable, is to have the smallest possible points of contact. A picket fence with ...
— Soil Culture • J. H. Walden
... will of nature that man should owe to himself alone everything which transcends the mere mechanic constitution of his animal existence, and that he should be susceptible of no other happiness or perfection than what he has created for himself, instinct apart, through his ...
— Colloquies on Society • Robert Southey
... fallacy of making things stronger by simply adding iron. To illustrate what I think a much better way, I have had made these crude models (see Fig. 1), for the full force of which, as I said before, I am indebted to John Richards; and I would here add that the mechanic who has never learned anything from John Richards is either a very good or very poor one, or has never read what John Richards has written or heard what ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 643, April 28, 1888 • Various
... consists entirely of interference. There is, in the first place, the interference of the parent, who insists upon an artistic boy becoming a banker, puts an incipient tradesman into the army, or tries to make a scholar out of a mechanic. Then there comes the interference of the schoolmaster, who has his favourite recipe of Latin verses, quadratic equations, and what not, to stuff into every head he can get hold of for a few terms. Lastly appears the Government, which declares that nobody shall enter the ...
— The Curse of Education • Harold E. Gorst
... he could be believed, he found a variety of material in this old collection. To a credulous and weak acquaintance, Mr. Burgum, he went, beaming with joy, to present the pedigree and illuminated arms of the de Bergham family—tracing the honest mechanic's descent to a noble house which crossed the Channel with William the Conqueror. The delighted Burgum gave him a crown, and Chatterton, pocketing the money, lampooned his ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... any particular person shall ever be qualified for the employments to which he is educated, is very different in different occupations. In the greatest part of mechanic trades success is almost certain; but very uncertain in the liberal professions. Put your son apprentice to a shoemaker, there is little doubt of his learning to make a pair of shoes; but send him to study the law, it as at least twenty to one if ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... mechanical pursuits. Not only had he the qualifications of a scientific engineer, but he had the manual dexterity which qualified him personally to carry out many practical arts. Lord Rosse was, in fact, a skilful mechanic, an experienced founder, and an ingenious optician. His acquaintances were largely among those who were interested in mechanical pursuits, and it was his delight to visit the works or engineering establishments where refined ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... on literary topics, religion, morality, belles-lettres, etc., and to this conversation my mind owed its first bias towards such subjects in which they were all my superiors, I never having attended a college, and being then but a mechanic."[74] According to this account religion was not proscribed, but Professor Traill's assertion is so explicit that probably Watt's recollection errs. It is, however, another sign of the liberal spirit that then animated these Glasgow ...
— Life of Adam Smith • John Rae
... can build a good ship is not to be laughed at by any mechanic or architect, no matter how tall or ...
— Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy • Frank Richard Stockton
... too. There are some pieces of boards in the cellar. Take them and nail a sort of snow shovel together. Never mind if it's a bit rough, it'll be easier than clearing off the whole mass of snow with common spades or brooms. If you don't know how, ask mother. She's as handy as a master mechanic, any day. Then pitch in on our own front steps. Make a path for misery to enter, if need be, and for comfort ...
— Divided Skates • Evelyn Raymond
... characteristic of the French-Canadian habitant. But he did get from his father a capacity for the knowing and handling of machinery, which amounted almost to genius. Of the father's steadiness under the grind of daily work which had made him the head mechanic in the Mill, Tony possessed not a tittle. What he could get easily he got, and getting this fancied himself richly endowed, knowing not how slight and superficial is the equipment for life's stern fight that comes without ...
— To Him That Hath - A Novel Of The West Of Today • Ralph Connor
... contribute to your improvement, and I shall rejoice to see you what Providence intended you, a very great man. This you were, in your ideas, before you quitted this; you best know how far you have studied, that is, practised the mechanic; despised nothing till you had tried it; practised dissections with your own hands, painted from nature as well as from the statues, and portrait as well as history, and this frequently. If you have done all this, ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... may easily earn 1,350 francs a year, so that he may rent such a house as I have here described for a good deal less than one-tenth of his income. What is the ordinary proportion between the house-rent and the income of a respectable tradesman or mechanic in New York? But the Anzin workman who rents such a house as this on such terms, enjoys also free fuel, free medical attendance, ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... whether you starve or not. My lords, this age is so familiar grown, That the low peasant hardly doffs his hat, Unless you beat him; and the raw mechanic Elbows the noble in the public streets. [To the Citizens.] Still as our gentle Duchess has so prayed us, And to refuse so beautiful a beggar Were to lack both courtesy and love, Touching your grievances, ...
— The Duchess of Padua • Oscar Wilde
... away, and was sailing above a desert which, from the height it had attained, looked little more than a small stretch of sand such as children play upon by the sea. Its speed gradually slackened—and its occupants, Morgana, the Marchese Rivardi and their expert mechanic, Gaspard, gazed down on the unfolding panorama below them with close and eager interest. There was nothing much to see. Every sign of humanity seemed blotted out. The red sky burning on the little stretch of ...
— The Secret Power • Marie Corelli
... The landed aristocrat with his laces and ruffles, his silks and his gold and silver ornaments and his expensive tableware, his consciously superior air and tone of grandiose authority, was far removed in established position from the mechanic or the laborer with his coarse clothes and mean habitation. Laws were long in force in various provinces which prohibited the common people from wearing gold and silver lace, silks and ornaments. Bellomont noted the sense of deep ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... himself into a better practice. The lawyer expected to get large fees from avaricious and contentious church litigants. For church members will engage in lawsuits, the authority of John Wesley, and the still higher authority of St. Paul to the contrary, notwithstanding. The mechanic too, must have the patronage and influence of the church. Neighbor B., over the way, is a regular church member in good standing; and I must become one too, in order to compete with him in business. Dear me, says the farmer to his beloved spouse, don't you see that we are raising a large ...
— A Review of Uncle Tom's Cabin - or, An Essay on Slavery • A. Woodward
... sooner or later, after they have been submitted to the infallible test of experience, when they have passed the fiery ordeal of truth, extend widely their salutary effects, become extremely beneficial to society, highly advantageous to individuals. The geometrician, the chemist, the mechanic, the natural philosopher, the civilian, the artizan himself, are industriously employed, either in their closets, or in their workshops, seeking the means to serve society, each in his sphere: nevertheless, not one of their sciences or professions ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 2 • Baron D'Holbach
... exercise great influence upon the system. It is by their contraction that we are enabled to pursue different employments. By their action the farmer cultivates his fields, the mechanic wields his tools, the sportsman pursues his game, the orator gives utterance to his thoughts, the lady sweeps the keys of the piano, and the young are whirled in the mazy dance. As the muscles bear so intimate a relation to the pleasures and employments of ...
— A Treatise on Anatomy, Physiology, and Hygiene (Revised Edition) • Calvin Cutter
... resided for a time in Florence, Massachusetts, and then purchased a small house in Essex Street, Boston, which has since been torn down to make room for the extension of Harrison Avenue. It was a house of very small dimensions, such as is commonly occupied by a mechanic's family; but possessed the advantage of admitting as much sunshine as possible into Mrs. Phillips' lonely chamber, which was probably his reason for selecting it. He wished to live economically in order to save money for the cause of freedom, and ...
— Sketches from Concord and Appledore • Frank Preston Stearns
... start. As is often her way with those from whom she means, later, to exact a heavy toll, Fate smiled upon the good-looking young man who faced her so gaily. He got one post after another: secretary, mechanic, groom—for he was equally clever with hands and head. In this or that capacity he travelled quite extensively for some years, and finally, having a natural bent for languages, came to Rome in the position of courier to a rich American ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... 150! M. Charriere in fact possesses one quality which generally ensures success, a passion for his art; he is not to be regarded simply as a vender of cutlery, but as one possessing a scientific knowledge of his profession, and as a mechanic of considerable talent. To recapitulate all his inventions, with their respective merits, and the approbatory letters that he has received from different academical institutions, would half fill my little volume; suffice it ...
— How to Enjoy Paris in 1842 • F. Herve
... thousands of men were without employment and anxious to secure work, and secondarily for the reason that skilled labor was not an essential factor. Most of the work is done by machinery and in a short period of time a mechanic of ordinary intelligence will become proficient in running a machine. The necessary trained labor could be secured without difficulty. Numbers of highly trained employes at Government arsenals are now with private arms and ammunition concerns. The labor problem therefore was negligible. ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... "that a good job can't be done with bad tools,—that split shows it. No doubt the man who made it excused himself by saying that he was never intended for a mechanic. But that was a poor excuse for being without a gimlet. Every man or boy has some mechanical ability, and exercising that ability, with first-rate tools, will generally make him a good workman. Now as to what odd ...
— Our Young Folks—Vol. I, No. II, February 1865 - An Illustrated Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... had the good fortune to see M. Xambotte at work. His reputation as a surgeon is worldwide, and it was pleasant to find that his dexterity as an operator was equal to his reputation. It is not always the case. He is an expert mechanic, and himself makes most of the very ingenious instruments which he uses. He was fixing a fractured femur with silver wires, and one could see the skilled workman in all that he did. There is no training-ground for one's hands like a carpenter's bench, and the embryo surgeon might do much ...
— A Surgeon in Belgium • Henry Sessions Souttar
... genius, and taste among the English, are but different appellations of the same thing. It is this intellectual dignity, they say, that ennobles the painter's art; that lays the line between him and the mere mechanic; and produces those great effects in an instant, which eloquence and poetry, by slow and repeated efforts, are ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... difference. But please note that when a man is charged before a modern tribunal (to take a case that happened the other day) of having asserted and maintained that he was an officer returned from the front to receive the Victoria Cross at the hands of the King, although he was in fact a mechanic, nobody thinks of treating him as afflicted with a delusion. He is punished for false pretences, because his assertion is credible and therefore misleading. Just so, the claim to divinity made by Jesus was to the High Priest, who looked forward to ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... them in the choice of their leaders, and in other important concerns. Their dress and manners are similar to those of the society of Friends; hence they are often called Shaking Quakers. They display great skill and science in agriculture, horticulture, and the mechanic arts; and their honesty, industry, hospitality, and neatness, are proverbial. These people choose their locations with great taste and judgment. A Shaker village always presents a ...
— The Book of Religions • John Hayward
... and a noble bridge now spans its rapid waters. It has seen the destruction of two log-bridges, but this new, substantial, imposing structure bids fair to stand from generation to generation. The Indian regards it with stupid wonder: he is no mechanic; his simple canoe of birch bark is his only notion of communication from one shore to another. The towns-people and country settlers view it with pride and satisfaction, as a means of commerce and agricultural advantage. That lonely hill, from which Catharine viewed the rapid-flowing river ...
— Canadian Crusoes - A Tale of The Rice Lake Plains • Catharine Parr Traill
... kindness. Instead of running in debt, as in New York, she was able to save the greater part of her wages, and in two years had enough ahead to take time to learn the dressmakers' trade thoroughly, for which she had a taste. But a sensible young mechanic, who had long been attentive, at last persuaded her to ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... work there for all day to-morrow, Colonel,' said the chief mechanic, after inspecting the leaks. 'We won't be able to get away before the day after to-morrow. And, if we're to do that, these lazy soldiers mustn't loaf on ...
— Atlantida • Pierre Benoit
... the question, whether the government should render some kindly service to the Papagoes or to the Pimas and Maricopas, in the way of assisting them to self-maintenance, or of providing instruction in letters or in the mechanic arts, to the general voice of the people of Arizona, as to any missionary association in New York or Boston the coming May. When the press of Arizona cry out against the Indian policy of the government, and denounce Eastern philanthropy, they have ...
— The Indian Question (1874) • Francis A. Walker
... found at last that none of these are the most important of all. There is another section to "The Services of Supplies," and that is more important than the mechanic behind the pilot, more important than the man who assembles the motor trucks and the ambulances in France, more important than the ship-builders, more important than the lawmakers themselves, more important even than the President, more important than that ...
— Soldier Silhouettes on our Front • William L. Stidger
... machine ship is working at a lathe. An officer of the company comes into the shop, a gentleman in white collar and good clothes! He stands behind the mechanic and "curses him out" because his work is inefficient. When he turns away, the man at the lathe says, "Who was that guy anyway? What business has he to teach me my job?" Instead of accepting the criticism, he resents what he considers ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... generally by some royal road to knowledge, which saves them the dire necessity of real work,—a sort of feminine hop-skip-and-jump into science or mechanical skill,—nothing like the uncompromising hard labor to which the boy is put who would be a mechanic or farmer, a ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... in a simple, concise form, not only the fundamentals which every mechanic should learn to know, but it defines every structural form used in this art, and illustrates all terms it is necessary to use in the employment of carpentry. A full chapter is devoted to drawings practically applied. All terms are diagrammed and defined, so that the mind ...
— Carpentry for Boys • J. S. Zerbe
... companions, who estimated the punishment at seven or fourteen days. A good many of these had gaol experiences, and I am forced to admit that the decent folk on tramp were few in number. But the occasional honest mechanic or skilled workman in search ...
— The Making Of A Novelist - An Experiment In Autobiography • David Christie Murray
... To suppose that this faculty is one which only poets and artists need, is to take a shallow and partial view. The historian, the student of Nature, the statesman, the minister of religion, the teacher, the mechanic even, if they are to do good work, must possess imagination, which is at once an intellectual, a moral, and a religious faculty. It is the mother and mistress of faith, hope, and love. It is the source of great thoughts, of high aspirations, and ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... smallest possible sum, will claim credit for their profusion, and harass the General Government for increased supplies. Practically there would soon be but one taxing power, and that vested in a body of men far removed from the people, in which the farming and mechanic interests would scarcely be represented. The States would gradually lose their purity as well as their independence; they would not dare to murmur at the proceedings of the General Government, lest they should lose their supplies; all would be merged in a practical consolidation, ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 1 (of 2) of Volume 3: Andrew Jackson (Second Term) • James D. Richardson
... the courage of his subjects, by the example of manly virtue; to banish luxury from the court and from the camp; to substitute, in the place of the Barbarian mercenaries, an army of men, interested in the defence of their laws and of their property; to force, in such a moment of public danger, the mechanic from his shop, and the philosopher from his school; to rouse the indolent citizen from his dream of pleasure, and to arm, for the protection of agriculture, the hands of the laborious husbandman. At the head of such ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... written for the specialist, but for that restless, seething multitude known as "the masses." It is written for busy people, for workers, such as the shop-girl, the factory-girl, the clerk, the mechanic, the farmer, the merchant, and the busy housewife; but ministers, lawyers, and doctors may find food for ...
— A California Girl • Edward Eldridge
... after the gasolene car that was almost hidden from sight in a cloud of dust. Faster and faster went Tom's car. The young inventor was listening with critical ear to the song of the machinery. He wanted to learn if it was running sweet and true, for that is how a careful mechanic tests his apparatus. Foot by foot the distance between the two cars lessened. Now the electric was lapping the rear wheels of the gasolene machine, but the driver did not know it. His whole attention was on the road ahead ...
— Tom Swift and his Electric Runabout - or, The Speediest Car on the Road • Victor Appleton
... completed. Car-builders were set to work repairing the locomotives and cars. Thus every branch of railroad building, making tools to work with, and supplying the workmen with food, was all going on at once, and without the aid of a mechanic or laborer except what the command itself furnished. But rails and cars the men could not make without material, and there was not enough rolling stock to keep the road we already had worked to its full capacity. There were no rails except those in use. ...
— Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, Complete • Ulysses S. Grant
... Lawanne declared. "But let's not follow up that philosophy. We're getting into deep water. Let's wade ashore. We'll say whatever is is right, and let it go at that. It will be quite all right for you to offer me a cup of tea, if your kitchen mechanic will condescend. That Chink of mine is having a holiday with my shotgun, trying to bag a brace of grouse for dinner. So I throw ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... has no regard, alas, my maiden, For love and loss like mine - No sympathy with mind-sight memory-laden; Only with fickle eyne. To her mechanic artistry My dreams are all unknown, And why I wish that thou couldst be ...
— Wessex Poems and Other Verses • Thomas Hardy
... island, but many of them were mere vagabonds, who remained there in hopes of leading a lazy and an easy life. For such Tamaahmaah had a great contempt; those only had his esteem and countenance who knew some trade or mechanic art, ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving
... walking monsters,—a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man.... Man is thus metamorphosed into a thing, into many things.... The priest becomes a form; the attorney a statute book; the mechanic a machine; the sailor ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
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