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More "Prop" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... indeed is the philanthropic field! It may be urged that the daily vocation of life is one thing, and the work of philanthropy quite another. I have no sympathy with this notion. The man who plans to do all his giving on Sunday is a poor prop for the institutions of ...
— Random Reminiscences of Men and Events • John D. Rockefeller
... noble brother murthered by the King, Oh what may I doe, to revenge thy death? The Kings alone, it cannot satisfie. Sweet Duke of Guise our prop to leane upon, Now thou art dead, heere is no stay for us: I am thy brother, and ile revenge thy death, And roote Valois's line from forth of France, And beate proud Burbon to his native home, That basely seekes ...
— Massacre at Paris • Christopher Marlowe
... beautiful valley, nine miles from Natchez, and near the Mississippi River. The once unshorn face of nature had given way, and the farm now blossomed with a splendid harvest. The neat cottage stood in a grove, where Lombardy poplars lift their tops almost to prop the skies, where the willow, locust, and horse-chestnut trees spread forth their branches, and flowers never ceased ...
— Clotelle - The Colored Heroine • William Wells Brown
... her to a sitting posture, while Henri placed two pillows behind her to prop her up; and then, with the napkin spread before her and a plate on her ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... to Asahel, was by the law and custom of the country the avenger of his blood. For some time afterwards the war was carried on, the advantage being invariably on the side of David. At length Ishbaal lost the main prop of his tottering cause by remonstrating with Abner for marrying Rizpah, one of Saul's concubines, an alliance which, according to Oriental notions, implied pretensions to the throne (cp. 2 Sam. xvi. 21 sqq.; 1 Kings ii. 21 sqq.). Abner was indignant at ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... son, my son," cried the old man in despair, "how cruel is the fate that has robbed me of you, the only prop of my declining years! Oh, my boy, my boy, would that I had not sent you on so perilous a journey! Who now will look after my grave when ...
— A Chinese Wonder Book • Norman Hinsdale Pitman
... "What isn't generally realized is that it's a dangerous prop'sition to invade the rights of personal liberty. Now, take this for instance: The King of—Bavaria? I think it was Bavaria—yes, Bavaria, it was—in 1862, March, 1862, he issued a proclamation against public grazing of live-stock. The peasantry ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... filling it up with such a load of bricks and mortar that the first floor was on the point of becoming the ground one; and, having only a choice of evils, on such an emergency, we, as usual, adopted that which appeared to us to be the least, cutting down the only two fruit-trees in the garden to prop it up with. We were rather on doubtful terms with the landlord before, but this put us all square—no ...
— Adventures in the Rifle Brigade, in the Peninsula, France, and the Netherlands - from 1809 to 1815 • Captain J. Kincaid
... betray his self-conceit; so that though he is surrounded by flatterers, he has no friend; no one dare tell him of his faults, but all seek to profit by his follies. I am no pretender to prophecy; I know my own house totters in this storm, and I have more need to prop and secure it than to concern myself as to what will befall my neighbours. Sir William Waverly and I have chosen two different methods of steering our barks; probably both may end in shipwreck, but my eyes are fixed on the pole-star in the heavens, ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... the wood the track became worse and worse. The rough-hewn runners constantly sank into snow-drifts and the sledge canted over, so that the poor man, trembling with fear and cold, had to prop it up with all his strength. If his twisted foot gave way, there was an end ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various
... present. He was not aware that Miss Mally had an orthodox corn, or bunyan, that could as little bear a touch from the royne-slippers of philosophy, as the inflamed gout of polemical controversy, which had gumfiated every mental joint and member of that zealous prop of the Relief Kirk. This was indeed the tender point of Miss Mally's character; for she was left unplucked on the stalk of single blessedness, owing entirely to a conversation on this very subject with the only lover she ever had, Mr. Dalgliesh, ...
— The Ayrshire Legatees • John Galt
... was not in our power to overturn the bad institutions which lately afflicted our country, without shocks which have loosened the foundations of government. Now that those institutions have fallen, we must hasten to prop the edifice which it was lately our duty to batter. Henceforth it will be our wisdom to look with jealousy on schemes of innovation, and to guard from encroachment all the prerogatives with which the law has, for the public good, ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... to the stables, and returned in a few seconds with a clothes-prop, with which he dealt the disturber of our peace a few rapid, but vigorous, blows, breaking its spine in several places. Then the step-ladder was brought out, and Ted, seizing the reptile by the tail, uncoiled ...
— Amona; The Child; And The Beast; And Others - From "The Strange Adventure Of James Shervinton and Other - Stories" - 1902 • Louis Becke
... trade or property at such a crisis?" interrupted an enthusiast, in figured trowsers and a gay cravat. "Our beloved Union must and shall be preserved. The fabric that our fathers reared for us must not be allowed to crumble. We will prop it with our mangled bodies," and he brushed a speck of dust from the fine ...
— Fort Lafayette or, Love and Secession • Benjamin Wood
... Pretender, and how little influence he could obtain over the Jacobite counsels. The hopeless Rebellion of 1715, in Scotland, Bolingbroke laboured in vain to delay until there might be some chance of success. The death of Louis XIV., on the 1st of September in that year, had removed the last prop of a falling cause. ...
— Letters to Sir William Windham and Mr. Pope • Lord Bolingbroke
... bad to worse it shifted.—Cephas came; He came, who was the Holy Spirit's vessel, Barefoot and lean, eating their bread, as chanc'd, At the first table. Modern Shepherd's need Those who on either hand may prop and lead them, So burly are they grown: and from behind Others to hoist them. Down the palfrey's sides Spread their broad mantles, so as both the beasts Are cover'd with one skin. O patience! thou That lookst ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... fully conscious of the evil. He recognized that the fault of the government lay in the fact that it did not govern, and he deplored that his own function, in a decadent age, was but "to prop up mouldering institutions." He was not constitutionally averse from change; and he was too clear-sighted not to see that, sooner or later, change was inevitable. But his interest was in the fascinating game of diplomacy; he was ambitious of playing the leading part on the great stage ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... miss the minute divisions, subdivisions, and definitions, the lettered and numbered headings, the variations of type, and all the other mechanical artifices on which they are accustomed to prop their minds. But my main desire has been to make them conceive, and, if possible, reproduce sympathetically in their imagination, the mental life of their pupil as the sort of active unity which he himself feels it to be. He doesn't ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... of the moorland into a lovely and fertile valley, where, quite unexpectedly, we came upon Bylands Abbey, the rival of Rievaulx, but far more fallen into decay. It stood alone in the midst of the wide valley; no caretaker hindered our steps to its precincts and no effort had been made to prop its crumbling walls or to stay the green ruin creeping over it. The fragment of its great eastern window, still standing, was its most imposing feature and showed that it had been a church of no mean architectural pretension. The locality, it would seem, was well supplied ...
— British Highways And Byways From A Motor Car - Being A Record Of A Five Thousand Mile Tour In England, - Wales And Scotland • Thomas D. Murphy
... Should I then boast! where lies that foot of ground Within his whole Realm, that I have not past, Fighting and conquering; Far then from me Be ostentation. I could tell the world How I have laid his Kingdom desolate By this sole Arm prop't by divinity, Stript him out of his glories, and have sent The pride of all his youth to people graves, And made his Virgins languish for their Loves, If I would brag, should I that have the power To teach the Neighbour world humility, Mix ...
— A King, and No King • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
... had sat down upon the ground, the better to prop the poor lad, "his hand twitches! he lives! oh, sir, he lives! Whose boy is he?" (to the people, who came hurrying and gathering to the spot at the ...
— Ruth • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... arrived beneath the beech. "I see nothing," said Herr von S. "You must step over there, right here on this spot!" Yes, it was true; the Baron recognized his own old shoes. "God, it is John! Prop up the ladder!—so—now down—gently, gently! Don't let him fall! Good heaven, the worms are at him already! But loose the knot anyway, and his necktie!" A broad scar was visible; the Baron drew back. "Good God!" he said; he bent over the body again, examined the scar with great care, and ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... been sent by Sir Colin to report what was going on in the interior of the Kaisarbagh) appeared on the roof. Once more I picked up the colour, and found that this time the staff had been broken in two. Notwithstanding, I managed to prop it up a third time on the turret, and it was not again hit, though the enemy continued to fire ...
— Forty-one years in India - From Subaltern To Commander-In-Chief • Frederick Sleigh Roberts
... declare that all supports must be suppressed? [A pause] Religion is a prop. It soothes—consoles. He ...
— Woman on Her Own, False Gods & The Red Robe - Three Plays By Brieux • Eugene Brieux
... more with their toes than their fingers, and, on the whole, presented a picture of contentment and comfort. We Europeans had to use the lady elephant, as being the tamer of the two. On her back there were two little benches with sloping seats on both sides, and not the slightest prop for our backs. The wretched, undergrown youngsters seen in European circuses give no idea of the real size of this noble beast. The mahout, or driver, placed himself between the huge animal's ears whilst ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... one; Church, state, and faction wrestle in the dark, Tossed by the deluge in their common ark. Shorn of her bishops, banks, and dividends, Another Babel soars—but Britain ends. And why? to pamper the self-seeking wants, 650 And prop the hill of these agrarian ants. "Go to these ants, thou sluggard, and be wise;" Admire their patience through each sacrifice, Till taught to feel the lesson of their pride, The price of taxes and of homicide; Admire their ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... Rothenburger Krug and the Staffelstein, with their "property" students, cheeks scarred with red ink, singing "Heidelberg" (from "The Prince of Pilsen") for the edification and impression of foreign visitors, and fiercely and frequently challenging other prop. students to immediate duel. The girls, alas, in these places are not unlovely. Well do I remember the dainty Elsa of the Hopfenbluethe, she of face kissed by the Prussian dawn, and employed at sixteen marks the week to wink dramatically at the old roues and give the resort "an air." Well ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... front windows, some of them, were shattered and open, and others were boarded up. Trees and shrubbery were growing neglected, so as quite to block up the lower part. There was an aged barn near at hand, so ruinous that it had been necessary to prop it up. There were two old carts, both of which had lost a wheel. Everything was in keeping. At first I supposed that there would be no inhabitants in such a dilapidated place; but, passing on, I looked back, and saw a decrepit and infirm old ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 2. • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... slender pittance on which he was doomed to subsist till Christmas. Happily that festive season was only a few weeks away now, and then how delighted he should be to send home a round half of his income, and convince himself he was after all a main prop to that dear distant ...
— Reginald Cruden - A Tale of City Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... it was called, was situated in a beautiful valley nine miles from Natchez, and near the river Mississippi. The once unshorn face of nature had given way, and now the farm blossomed with a splendid harvest, the neat cottage stood in a grove where Lombardy poplars lift their tufted tops almost to prop the skies; the willow, locust, and horse-chestnut spread their branches, and flowers never cease to blossom. This was the parson's country house, where the family spent only two ...
— Clotel; or, The President's Daughter • William Wells Brown
... prop during the years of agony and disaster, Lloyd George is, in the last analysis, merely an eloquent and spectacular politician with the genius of opportunism. One reason why he holds his post is that there is no one to take his place,—another ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson
... sect he belongs to, or what creed he believes: but I look on the man who is firmly persuaded of infinite Wisdom and Goodness superintending and directing every circumstance that can happen in his lot—I felicitate such a man for having a solid foundation for his mental enjoyment; a firm prop and sure stay, in the hour of difficulty, trouble, and distress; and a never-failing anchor of hope when he ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... desolate, and as I sat down by the toilet table, such sad eyes looked into mine from the depths of the mirror, that a curious self-pitying feeling made me prop my chin on my hands and exchange looks of silent sympathy with ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII, No. 354, October 9, 1886 • Various
... he is lean and he is sick; His body, dwindled and awry, Rests upon ankles swoln and thick; 35 His legs are thin and dry. One prop he has, and only one, His wife, an aged woman, Lives with him, near the waterfall, Upon the village Common. ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth - Volume 1 of 8 • Edited by William Knight
... to remind him that though he might be only answerable to himself at St. Kitt's, killing became murder upon the high seas. In politics he was, as became his official position, a stout prop of the House of Hanover, and he swore in his cups that he had never met a Jacobite without pistolling him where he stood. Yet for all his vapouring and his violence he was so good a companion, with such a stream of strange anecdote and reminiscence, that Scarrow ...
— The Green Flag • Arthur Conan Doyle
... land is his; the other sees himself as a merchant, with a heavy golden chain on his paunch, standing at his shop-door; the third means to cultivate black roses and incidentally become a millionaire—and this castle in the air we cherish, and care for, and prop up, and support as long as we live, and for the most part we do not in the least notice that it has long since collapsed beyond repair. I have long thought I must tell you this some time, in order that you might know it and thank ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... rings in largesse, When the fight's red rain-drops fell, Bright of face, with heart-strings hardy, Hogni's father met his fate; Then his brow with helmet shrouding, Bearing battle-shield, he spake, "I will die the prop of battle, Sooner die than yield an inch. Yes, sooner die than ...
— The story of Burnt Njal - From the Icelandic of the Njals Saga • Anonymous
... considered it necessary, aye, had it organized by the State, as well in Greece as in Rome. What views existed on the subject during the Middle Ages has likewise been described. Even St. Augustine, who, next to St. Paul, must be looked upon as the most important prop of Christendom, and who diligently preached asceticism, could not refrain from exclaiming: "Suppress the public girls, and the violence of passion will knock everything of a heap." The provincial Council of Milan, in 1665, expressed itself in ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... be well for us all if we could have our legs stretched out and go with our heads two or three bracci foremost! It's ill standing upright with hunger to prop you." ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... to be an accident here," declared the girl aloud. "I wonder the company doesn't send out men to fix it. Although I guess they could not prop up that pole. It ...
— Betty Gordon at Mountain Camp • Alice B. Emerson
... passage of the savages, to the frontier of Virginia. An army of six hundred men, principally Indians, led on by Hamilton, the governor of Detroit—a man at once bold and active, yet blood-thirsty and cruel, and well known as a chief instigator of the savages to war, and as a stay and prop of tories—left Detroit and proceeded towards the theatre of Clarke's renown. With this force, he calculated on being able to effect his purpose as regarded Col. Clarke and his little band of bold and daring adventurers, and to spread devastation ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... you what I will do; I will go down and ask grandma what she thinks would be best for you. Would you like to sit up in bed? I can put something over your shoulders and prop you up with pillows, or how would you like to get into my bed? There is more room and you can look out of the window. I will bundle you up ...
— A Dear Little Girl's Thanksgiving Holidays • Amy E. Blanchard
... lakes, and ponds are endowed with added beauty from the lovely names they wear—a tragic yet a charming legacy from Kanonsis and Kanonsionni, the brave and mighty people of the Long House, and those outside its walls who helped to prop or ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... not having availed himself at a crisis like the one in which he was called upon to act, rendered his conduct doubtful, and all his intended operations suspicious to both parties, whether his feelings were really inclined to prop up the fallen kingly authority, or his newly-acquired republican principles prompted him to become the head of the democratical party, for no one can see into the hearts of men; his popularity from that moment ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... that it is part of a semi-religious rite, on the analogy of the Freemasons' special handshake and the like. Nor do I altogether agree with the authorities who allege that man, when standing up, needs something as a prop or support. There is a shadow of reason, I grant, in this supposition, but after years of keen observation I am inclined to think that the umpire keeps his bat by him, firstly, in order that no unlicensed hand shall commandeer it unbeknownst, and secondly, ...
— Tales of St. Austin's • P. G. Wodehouse
... has his house, his orchard, his road-side trees, so laden with fruit, that if he did not carefully prop up, and tie together, and in many places hold the boughs together with wooden clamps, they would be torn asunder by their own weight. He has his corn-plot, his plot for mangel-wurzel or hay, for potatoes, for hemp, etc. He is his own master, and he therefore, and every branch of his family, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... KEW by Thames's glittering side; Obedient sails from realms unfurrow'd bring For her the unnam'd progeny of spring; 565 Attendant Nymphs her dulcet mandates hear, And nurse in fostering arms the tender year, Plant the young bulb, inhume the living seed, Prop the weak stem, the erring tendril lead; Or fan in glass-built fanes the stranger flowers 570 With milder gales, and steep with warmer showers. Delighted Thames through tropic umbrage glides, And flowers antarctic, bending o'er his tides; Drinks the new tints, ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... who was like iron with mob and mutiny, was pitiably helpless before such a prop of the aristocracy. He flew into a rage, and rated the landlord in Scotch and English, and I was fain to put my tongue in my cheek and turn my back that my laughter might ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... he had read the Bible touching the duties of children to their parents, instanced the fact that Paul's dear mother would probably pine away and die, and ended with a pathetic reference to losing the prop of his old age. Paul listened respectfully and held to his own opinion. In defence of the ...
— The Opal Serpent • Fergus Hume
... announced himself as the enemy of Greece, and the prop of the Ottoman Empire. At the subscription ball given at the Opera in Berlin, did he not walk arm-in-arm with Ghalik Bey, the Turkish Ambassador, and authorise him to telegraph to the Sultan that, under existing conditions, he might count upon his ...
— The Schemes of the Kaiser • Juliette Adam
... which I had arrived concerning the books of the Bible. I conceived myself to be resting under an Indian Figtree, which is supported by certain grand stems, but also lets down to the earth many small branches, which seem to the eye to prop the tree, but in fact are supported by it. If they were cut away, the tree would not be less strong. So neither was the tree of Christianity weakened by the loss of its apparent props. I might still enjoy its shade, and eat of its fruits, and bless ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... the line shuffled restlessly; some stood rigidly quiet. One had brought a camp stool; many were seated on the steps. Beyond, where the line passed an open lot, a wooden fence afforded a convenient prop. One read a book, another a paper. Three were studying what was probably the score of the symphony or of the concerto they expected to hear ...
— Miss Billy's Decision • Eleanor H. Porter
... iron garden nails, an inch and a quarter long and 1/8 in. thick in the middle. These I weighed, and selected such as were nearly of the same weight. I then arranged matters so that by removing a prop I could cause the blunt edge of a steel chisel weighted to 4lb. 2oz., to fall from a given height upon the middle of the nail as it was supported from each end, 1-1/16 in. asunder. In order to secure the absolute fairness of the trials, the nails were taken at random, and an experiment with ...
— Scientific American, Volume XXIV., No. 12, March 18, 1871 • Various
... proprietor of the famous Marble Soap. Jowett spent on advertising every year a quarter of a million, it was said. Jowett was the stay and prop of periodical literature. New papers that secured the Marble Soap advertisement lived and prospered; the new paper to which it was denied languished and died. Jowett, and how to get hold of him; Jowett, and how to get round him, formed ...
— Tommy and Co. • Jerome K. Jerome
... astonishment, he sprang to the side of the idol, and pushing it away from the stones against which it rested, endeavoured to make it stand upon its legs. But the divinity had lost the use of them altogether; and while Kory-Kory was trying to prop it up, placing a stick between it and the pi-pi, the monster fell clumsily to the ground, and would have infallibly have broken its neck had not Kory-Kory providentially broken its fall by receiving ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... with, and only finds itself at ease in systematic opposition. If it were not for this, the high towers and rotten places of the world would fall before the battering-ram of his hard-headed reasoning; but if he once found them tottering, he would apply his strength to prop them up, and disappoint the expectations of his followers. He cannot agree to anything established, nor to set up anything else in its stead. While it is established, he presses hard against it, because it presses upon him, at least in imagination. Let it ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... heavy, that when they galloped at each other with big clothes-prop things, and one of 'em was knocked off his horse, and lay flat on the ground, he couldn't get up again without his squires ...
— The Weathercock - Being the Adventures of a Boy with a Bias • George Manville Fenn
... Haden said emphatically. "It's t' first time as e'er I heard o' t' right man being picked out wi'out a question o' age. I know him, and I tell 'ee, he mayn't know t' best place for putting in a prop, or of timbering in loose ground, as well as us as is old enough to be his fathers; but he knows as much about t' book learning of a mine as one of the government inspector chaps. You mightn't think it pleasant for me, ...
— Facing Death - The Hero of the Vaughan Pit. A Tale of the Coal Mines • G. A. Henty
... big lights jarred finally off and the director said, "That's all, boys." Then he turned to call, "Jimmie! Hey, Jimmie! Where's that prop-rustler gone to now?" ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... while, Jack," I replied. "He might prop a little, certainly; but it's only playfulness." So I swung into the deep seat of the stolen saddle, and lightly touched the lotus-loving Memphian ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... know that it is salt; nor need a critic dissect a whole system after proving that its premises are rotten. I shall accordingly confine myself to a few of the points that captivate beginners most; and assume that if they break down, so must the system which they prop. ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... designate those in which people receive more from others than they give), who had lost them, and who wished to occupy them again. To one, two hundred rubles were indispensable, in order that he might prop up a failing business, and complete the education of his children which had been begun; another wanted a photographic outfit; a third wanted his debts paid, and respectable clothing purchased for him; a fourth needed a piano, in order to perfect himself and support his family by giving lessons. ...
— What To Do? - thoughts evoked by the census of Moscow • Count Lyof N. Tolstoi
... than that," he was told. "And here's the very prop to slip down through that opening. I think I can reach it right now, if you stop the work ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts Snowbound - A Tour on Skates and Iceboats • George A. Warren
... also, what he seems still more proud of, a lord of parliament; but I will front him in both capacities, and frankly tell him, that in the first he is a burthen to his own estate, and not a benefactor; and in the second, a peer but not a prop. ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol I, No. 2, February 1810 • Samuel James Arnold
... managed to prop a sack against the small cobwebbed window, fastened the door with a rusty bolt, and brought out an electric torch he ...
— Harvest • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... husband and wife would have been at once in each other's arms. And at the moment she thought of all that they had lost. To her her child had been all and everything. To him he had been his heir and the prop of his house. The boy had been the only link that had still bound them together. Now he was gone, and there was no longer any link between them. He was gone, and she had nothing left to her. He was gone, and the father was so alone in the world, without any heir and ...
— The Claverings • Anthony Trollope
... had befallen the aged apple-tree in which his palace stood contributed to this depression of mind. The gale had cracked a very large bough, which, having shown signs of weakness, had for many years been supported by a prop carefully put up by the farmer. But whether the prop in course of time had decayed at the line where the air and earth exercise their corroding influence upon wood; or whether the bough had stiffened with age, and could not swing easily to the wind; or whether, as seems most likely, ...
— Wood Magic - A Fable • Richard Jefferies
... intersections at n being composed of two compound derived shadows, forms a compound shadow and not a simple one, as happens with other intersections of compound shadows. This occurs, according to the 2nd [diagram] of this [prop.] which says:—The intersection of derived shadows when produced by the intersection of columnar shadows caused by a single light does not produce a simple shadow. And this is the corollary of the 1st [prop.] which says:—The intersection ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... Yes, and Catiline too; Though story wrong his fame; for he conspired To prop the reeling glory of his country, ...
— Venice Preserved - A Tragedy in Five Acts • Thomas Otway
... letter, my dear fellow. It's less pessimistic than I expected, and gives me the impression that I may regard you as a Prop. I shall follow your advice rigidly, though I must juggle some of the details, as Caspian has taken advantage of the poor little girl's love for her father, and practically (from what I understand) blackmailed her into promising to marry him. Mrs. Winston is ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)
... tag; tooth; hook, hook and eye; lock, holdfast^, padlock, rivet; anchor, grappling iron, trennel^, stake, post. cement, glue, gum, paste, size, wafer, solder, lute, putty, birdlime, mortar, stucco, plaster, grout; viscum^. shackle, rein &c (means of restraint) 752; prop &c (support) 215. V. bridge over, span; connect &c ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... wouldn't astonish me, if they should pronounce the whole apparatus of the State rotten from top to bottom, and only kept from falling to pieces by all sorts of ingenious contrivances of an external and temporary nature,—here a wheel, or pivot, or spring to be replaced,—there a prop or buttress to be set up,—here a pipe choked up,—there a boiler burst,—and so on, from one end of the works to the other. However, the machine keeps a-going, and many ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... Pteris in abundance. Hymenophyllum, Davallia atrata, Diplazium, Begonia Malabarica? Bambusa spiculis hispidis, Hypni sp. spinivenio prop. Dicranum glaucum, etc. etc. A fine ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... of the fortification walls. Then, as the lower layers of bricks became saturated and refused their support to the rows above, the wall began to crack and soon to totter to its fall. The citizens for some time tried to prop it with pieces of timber, and used other devices to avert the imminent ruin of their tower; but finding themselves overmatched by the water, and in dread lest the fall at some point or other of the circular wall (9) might deliver them captive to the spear of the enemy, they signified their ...
— Hellenica • Xenophon
... coat on that dresser, my man, will you?' he says. 'Now lift him gently. Don't wake him. He's set his course for the Old Country.... Now just lay me on the floor, and prop me up against ...
— The Gentleman - A Romance of the Sea • Alfred Ollivant
... of human thinking. Not the practical necessity, but the internal consistency of this notion, and the original right to such a notion, was the point of inquisition. For, attend, courteous reader, and three separate propositions will set before your eyes the difficulty. First Prop., which, for the sake of greater precision, permit me to throw into Latin:—Non datur aliquid [A] quo posito ponitur aliud [B] a priori; that is, in other words, You cannot lay your hands upon that one object or phenomenon [A] in the whole circle of ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... British superiority in manufactures the Great Exhibition was a great success; but as heralding an era of universal peace it was a mournful failure. Three years later England, France, and Sardinia were fighting Russia to prop the rotten empire of the Turk. Then came the Great Mutiny; then the four years of fratricidal strife between the Northern and Southern States; then the war of Prussia and Austria; then the overthrow of France by Germany. All these events had their influence ...
— The Winning of Popular Government - A Chronicle of the Union of 1841 • Archibald Macmechan
... delighting in it, asking nothing better than to be philandering with Laetitia, or escorting Laetitia, or gazing at Laetitia. That did make you angry enough with a man to hate a man. It was like seeing a good book—as it might be "Lombard Street"—used to prop a table leg; or a jolly dog—as the dearest Scotch terrier once brought to the boarding house—led for a walk on a leash by an old maiden mistress and wearing a lapdog's flannel coat with ribbon bows ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson
... staring at the open passage and prostrate door as if he saw them for the first time, then proceeded to examine the hinges. They were broken; the half of each remained fast to the door-post, the other half to the door. New hinges were necessary; in the meantime he must prop it up. This he did; and before he left the room, as it was much in want of fresh air, ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... still lay in the chamois bag against her bosom, but the additional five dollars a week on to her salary was a saving prop against the not infrequent sag of ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... live at the Red House at Christmas. After the holidays the girls went to the Blackheath High School, and we boys went to the Prop. (that means the Proprietary School). And we had to swot rather during term; but about Easter we knew the deceitfulness of riches in the vac., when there was nothing much on, like pantomimes and things. Then there was the summer term, and ...
— The Wouldbegoods • E. Nesbit
... reconciled through the blood of the everlasting covenant,—resting sweetly on the bosom, and the work of Jesus,—to Him committing thine eternal all. My soul! stay thyself on God, that so this blessed peace may be thine. Thou hast tried the world. It has deceived thee. Prop after prop of earthly scaffolding has yielded, and tottered, and fallen. Has thy God ever done so? Ah! this false and counterfeit world-peace may do well for the world's work, and the world's day of prosperity. But test it in the hour of sorrow; and what can it do for thee when most ...
— The Faithful Promiser • John Ross Macduff
... course, knocked away the chief prop which sustained the Alderman, and when the news of its passage reached Philadelphia, Tom was the most indignant man that had been seen there ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... of my little flock, the loveliest and the last, 'Tis sweet to dream what thou may'st be, when long, long years have past; To think when time hath blanched my hair, and others leave my side, Thou may'st be still my prop and stay, my blessing ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various
... Winter fled afar To hills that prop the polar star; And loves on deer-borne car to ride With barren darkness at his side Round the shore where loud Lofoden Whirls to death the roaring whale, Round the hall where Runic Odin Howls his war-song to the gale— ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... Dunster's remonstrances, and commendations of tea, David would reply, "Botheration, Betty, wench! Dunna tell me about thy tea and such-like pig's-wesh. It's all very well for women; but a man, Betty, a man mun ha' a sup of real stingo, lass. He mun ha' summut to prop his ribs out, lass, as he delves through th' chert and tood-stone. When tha weylds th' maundrel (the pick), and I wesh th' dishes, tha shall ha' th' drink, my wench, and I'll ha' th' tea. Till then, prithee let me aloon, and ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... total eclipse, I may say. The fact is, my head is so heavy, that it rolls about on my shoulders; and I must have a stiffener down my throat to prop it up. So, Moonshine, shine out, ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat
... are living here!... Such precision! Such practical ability!... They must appreciate you, they must understand you. If there's anything I can do, believe me ... oh, I love young people! I'm in love with young people! The younger generation are the one prop of our suffering country. Her ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... whatever excited your uneasiness, might best operate in silence: but, alas! your affliction seems only to augment,-your health declines,-your look alters!-Oh, Evelina, my aged heart bleeds to see the change!-bleeds to behold the darling it had cherished, the prop it had reared for its support, when bowed down by years and infirmities, sinking itself under the pressure of internal grief!-struggling to hide what it should seek to participate!-But go, my dear, go to your own ...
— Evelina • Fanny Burney
... now very anxious to come to some amicable understanding with the Government, and, if possible, to prop up the concern. They are very angry with their more violent compeers (Grote, Leader, &c.), and Fonblanque told me last night that they would take the slightest concessions, the least thing that would satisfy ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... I am sure you would not," said Mistress Anerley, getting up a smile, yet freshening his perception of a tear as well—"you would never have the heart to destroy that poor old couple by striking the last prop from under them. By the will of the Lord they are broken down enough. They are quietly hobbling to their graves, and would you be the man to come and knock them on ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... the night, and from this usually learn that the proper treatment is rest. When it is absolutely impossible to remain in bed long enough for the swelling to disappear, the next best plan is to accept every opportunity, during the day, to sit down and prop up the feet. ...
— The Prospective Mother - A Handbook for Women During Pregnancy • J. Morris Slemons
... by a word or a look from her. Hetty's sphere of comparison was not large, but she couldn't help perceiving that Adam was "something like" a man; always knew what to say about things, could tell her uncle how to prop the hovel, and had mended the churn in no time; knew, with only looking at it, the value of the chestnut-tree that was blown down, and why the damp came in the walls, and what they must do to stop the rats; ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... "We cannot confine the right of chusing a minister to the male communicants alone, but we think that every baptized adult person who contributes to the maintenance, should have a vote in electing." [Footnote: History of Brattle St. Church, p. 25, Prop. 16.] ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... which have been urged against this narrative are not serious." [135:1] They have been considered so by men like Keim, Schuerer, Lipsius, and Holtzmann. The account has too much need to be propped up itself to be of much use as a prop for the Gospels. Dr. Lightfoot points out that an "idea of literal conformity to the life and Passion of Christ runs through the document," [135:2] and it is chiefly on the fact that "most of the incidents have their counterparts in the circumstances of the Passion, as ...
— A Reply to Dr. Lightfoot's Essays • Walter R. Cassels
... perfect form had better be an inch and a half or even two inches in diameter; but, as a rule, they should not be of a larger size, for the reason that the amount of water that they may be expected to carry will not be sufficient to keep them prop erly freed from silt unless the flow is concentrated ...
— Village Improvements and Farm Villages • George E. Waring
... upon an innocent creature; for what it is really doing is breathing, not drinking. Even a frog, which has nostrils opening into its throat, still has to swallow its air in gulps, as you can see by watching its throat when it is sitting quietly. And, strange as it may seem, if you prop its mouth open, it will suffocate, because it can ...
— A Handbook of Health • Woods Hutchinson
... qualities check its rise, and depress it in its ascent, and render it like a weak traveller, that often sits down and then goes on again. And therefore the ivy requires something to twine about, and needs a prop; for it is not able to sustain and direct its own branches, because it wants heat, which naturally tends upward. The snow is melted by the wetness of the leaf, for water destroys it easily, passing through the thin contexture, it ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... the high contracting parties was wordy, bristled with the gesticulations of two pair of hands, and was commented on by all the guests in the "Fiore del Marinajo." The girl, said Don Urbano, was the very pride of his eye, prop of his failing years, a little mother to the children. She had had a most pious bringing-up, never missed the Rosary, knew the Little Hours of the Virgin, could do sums with notches in a stick, market like a Jew's housekeeper, ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... the lowermost and pitching him forward. He clamped his broadbrim on his head with one hand and steadied his holster with the other, straightened up with half-stifled expletive, and the next minute was swarming up the slender iron rungs of the signal-ladder. "He's got to prop it up where it belongs," said the sergeant. "Reckon he must have shot the wire that held it." And of a truth the wire was severed. But when Cullin turned back to his train with the mystery cleared, the sight and sound of new commotion blocked ...
— To The Front - A Sequel to Cadet Days • Charles King
... triumphant far and near, Do make bad men to shrink with coward fear, And God's own Catholic church to fructify. In armor clad, like maddened Mars he moves; The trembling Huguenot cowers at his glance; A prop for holy church is his good lance; His eye is ever mild to those ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume IV. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... strife. It must turn from that Slave Oligarchy which now controls the Republic, and refuse to be its tool. Let its power be stretched forth toward this distant Territory, not to bind, but to unbind; not for the oppression of the weak, but for the subversion of the tyrannical; not for the prop and maintenance of a revolting Usurpation, but ...
— American Eloquence, Volume III. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various
... account, we cannot fail to see the wisdom, foresight, and comparative strictness[251] with which the bishops carried out the great revolution that so depotentiated the Church as to make her capable of becoming a prop of civic society and of the state, without forcing any great changes upon them.[252] In learning to look upon the Church as a training school for salvation, provided with penalties and gifts of grace, and in giving ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 2 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... in Heaven and on earth; for, believe me, true worldly happiness and heavenly happiness are to be found on exactly the same road. Believe me: the dear God has brought you together to help each other gain Heaven, to be prop and staff to each other on the narrow, toilsome way that leads to eternal life, to level and lighten that way for each other through love, meekness, and long-suffering—for it is rough and thorny. Now when gloomy days come, when faults break out in one or the ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... would gain by it. To-day I have five hundred men in my employ, who are poorly paid, but who pursue the work with an enthusiasm which possibly may be born of fear. These men enter every shade and grade of society; some even are pillars of the most exclusive social temples; others are the prop and pride of the financial world; still others, hold undisputed sway among the 'Fancy and the Talent.' I choose them at my leisure from those who reply to my advertisements. It is easy enough, they are all cowards. I could treble the number in twenty days if I wished. So you see, ...
— The King In Yellow • Robert W. Chambers
... shallow pretender to a Master in Science as this remarkable production, in which one of the most exact of observers, most cautious of reasoners, and most candid of expositors, of this or any other age, is held up to scorn as a "flighty" person, who endeavours "to prop up his utterly rotten fabric of guess and speculation," and whose "mode of dealing with nature" is reprobated as "utterly dishonourable to Natural Science." And all this high and mighty talk, which ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... progeny is considered a blessing, as being likely to prop the declining years of their parents, but in Dahomy, children are taken from their mothers at an early age, and distributed in villages remote from the places of their nativity, where they remain with but little chance of being ever seen, ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... around the sun, which in turn is only one of countless suns—for every star is a sun. Now Newton wondered what held these mighty spheres in their places in space, for they appeared to move in definite and well-regulated orbits without any visible support or prop. It is alleged that the answer to the problem was suggested by the great philosopher's observation of a falling apple. The same invisible force that made the apple fall to the ground must, he is said to have reasoned, control the moon, sun, and stars. The earth ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... a chamber darkened as hers had been, he was lying now, worn out with constant anxiety and watching. When Nina left, his prop was gone, and the fever which had lain in wait for him so long, kindled within his veins a fire like to that which had burned in Edith's, but his strong, muscular frame met it fiercely, and the ...
— Darkness and Daylight • Mary J. Holmes
... will be fruitful rather than merely helpful. I would lecture for a school when I would not for a distressed author; and would have helped De Marvy to perfect his invention, but not—unless I had no other object—his widow after he was gone. In a word, I like to prop the falling more than to ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... would he survive his loss. Other fathers may be devoted to their sons: his devotion was something more than theirs. How should it be otherwise? In him, and in him alone, the father saw the zealous guardian of his lawless rule, the champion of his old age, the sole prop of tyranny. If grief did not kill him on the spot, despair, I knew, must do so; there could be no further joy in life for him when his protector was slain. Nature, grief, despair, foreboding, terror,—these ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... same proportions be found to hold good with respect to thin plates of a denser medium, which is, indeed, not improbable, it will be necessary to adopt the connected demonstrations of Prop. IV., but, at any rate, if a thin plate be interposed between a rarer and a denser medium, the colors by reflection and transmission may ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... the case. If the Tritons of the Solway shall proceed to pull down honest Joshua's tide-nets, I am neither Quixote enough in disposition, nor Goliath enough in person, to attempt their protection. I have no idea of attempting to prop a falling house by putting my shoulders against it. And indeed, Joshua gave me a hint that the company which he belongs to, injured in the way threatened (some of them being men who thought after the fashion of the world), would pursue the rioters at law, and recover damages, in which ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... the confusion of the wearied ones of Slade—and they of the Schools, accustomed to the culture of Colvin, whose polished scalp I with difficulty collected, ceasing to distinguish between the quick and the dead, will probably prop up our late 'Arry as professor, long to remain undetected in ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... favor," laughed the monarch. "I ever prefer sober manhood to callow youth about me. The one is a prop, stanch, tried; the other a reed that bends this way and that, or breaks when ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... the spade, has discharged a more pressing debt to the country by levelling with the dust at least one insolent and murderous Invader;—these have attested the efficacy of the passions which we have been contemplating—that the will of good men is not a vain impulse, heroic desires a delusive prop;—have proved that the condition of human affairs is not so forlorn and desperate, but that there are golden opportunities when the dictates of justice may be unrelentingly enforced, and the beauty of the inner mind substantiated in the outward act;—for ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... dust, removing the dust and inspecting them at intervals. Discovering nothing amiss, we returned to the old temple, and at its doorway met the mountaineer, Japhet, who throughout all these proceedings had been our prop and stay. Indeed, without his help and that of his authority over the Abati the mine could never have been completed, at ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard
... behind! He sets them sure, where'er their lordships run, Close at their elbows, as a morning dun; As if their grandeur, by contagion, wrought, And fame was, like a fever, to be caught: But after seven years' dance, from place to place, The(13) Dane is more familiar with his grace. Who'd be a crutch to prop a rotten peer; Or living pendant dangling at his ear, For ever whisp'ring secrets, which were blown For months before, by trumpets, thro' the town? Who'd be a glass, with flattering grimace, Still to reflect the temper of his face; Or happy pin to stick upon his sleeve, ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young
... books and antiquities and rare marble fragments, in a spacious room surrounded with laden shelves, Romola was his daily companion and assistant. There was a time when he had hoped that his son, Dino, would have followed in his steps, to be the prop of his age, and to take up and continue his scholarly labours after he was dead. But Dino had failed him; Dino had given himself up to religion and entered the priesthood, and the passion of Bardo's resentment had flamed into fierce hatred towards this recreant son of his, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... Prop. In faith I am not, Publius; nor I cannot. Sick minds are like sick men that burn with fevers, Who when they drink, please but a present taste, And after bear a more impatient fit. Pray let me leave you; I offend you all, And ...
— The Poetaster - Or, His Arraignment • Ben Jonson
... venture the rich freightage of your happiness in crazy vessels. If you do, be sure that, somewhere or other, before your life is ended, the poor frail craft will strike on some black rock rising sheer from the depths, and will grind itself to chips there. If your life twines round any prop but God your strength, be sure that, some time or other, the stay to which its tendrils cling will be plucked up, and the poor vine will be lacerated, its clusters crushed, and its sap ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... is incomprehensible. The one key to it is his persistent cultivation of Bonar Law, who in the Coalition was the great prop to the Premier. Beaverbrook hugely admires Lloyd George. He reverences Bonar Law. The Premier and himself had too many points, though not characteristics, in common to become running mates. Intimately congenial to the Unionist leader, Aitken was ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... marvelling he spake, and added furthermore: "Marcellus lo! neath Spoils of Spoils how great and glad he goes, And overtops all heroes there, the vanquisher of foes: Yea, he shall prop the Roman weal when tumult troubleth all, And ride amid the Punic ranks, and crush the rising Gaul, And hang in sire Quirinus' house ...
— The AEneids of Virgil - Done into English Verse • Virgil
... a sob, half a sigh, escaped the lawyer's lips. "A spirit like hers needs no other prop than her ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... The government is convinced that it depends for its salvation wholly on them, that it is sustained because they uphold it, and that the day on which they cease to support it, it will fall like a manikin that has lost its prop. They intimidate the government with an uprising of the people and the people with the forces of the government, whence originates a simple game, very much like what happens to timid persons when they visit gloomy places, ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... constantly kept before the public, that we do not seek to prop up woman; we only ask for her space to let her grow. Governments are not made; they grow. They are not buildings like this, with dome and pillars; they are oaks, with roots and branches, and they grow, by God's blessing, in the soil He gives to them. Now ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... magnified. But the mournful looking trees along the coast and all about Hilo are mostly the Pandanus odoratissimus, a spreading and branching tree which grows fully twenty-five feet high, supports itself among inaccessible rocks by its prop-like roots, and is one of the first plants to appear on the newly-formed Pacific islands. {62} Its foliage is singularly dense, although it is borne in tufts of a quantity of long yucca-like leaves on the branches. The shape of the tree is usually circular. The mournful look ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... destitute of trick and artifice. He seemed come upon the stage to do the poet's message simply, and he did it with as genuine fidelity as the nuncios in Homer deliver the errands of the gods. He let the passion or the sentiment do its own work without prop or bolstering. He would have scorned to mountebank it; and betrayed none of that cleverness which is the bane of serious acting. For this reason, his Iago was the only endurable one which I remember to have seen. ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... Johnson despondingly; "first one prop's taken away, and then another; and after a bit the roof'll fall in, and make an end ...
— Frank Oldfield - Lost and Found • T.P. Wilson
... did notice them, seeing that I had to prop him up—me and Murcher between us. He was a long chap, with a red face, the lower part ...
— A Study In Scarlet • Arthur Conan Doyle
... When Judson was appointed to take charge of the thing on her little trip of six or seven thousand miles southward, his first remark as he went to look her over in dock was, "Bai Jove, that topmast wants staying forward!" The topmast was a stick about as thick as a clothes-prop, but the flat-iron was Judson's first command, and he would not have exchanged his position for second post on the "Anson" or the "Howe". He navigated her, under convoy, tenderly and lovingly to ...
— This is "Part II" of Soldiers Three, we don't have "Part I" • Rudyard Kipling
... to think of myself as alone." The strong lines in Scarborough's face were in evidence. "But it would disturb me if I were propped up and weren't sure I could stand alone. I'm afraid to lean on any one or anything—my prop might give way. And I don't want any friends or any associates who value me for any other reason than what I myself am. I purpose never to 'belong' to anything ...
— The Cost • David Graham Phillips
... not wish to see. In his metaphysic, will is placed above intelligence, and in his personality the character is superior to the understanding, as one might logically expect. And the consequence is, that he may prop up what is tottering, but he makes no conquests; he may help to preserve existing truths and beliefs, but he is destitute of initiative or vivifying power. He is a moralizing but not a suggestive or stimulating influence. A popularizer, apologist and orator of the greatest merit, he is a schoolman ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... which George could think only of the ghastly figure on the sofa. She sat upright, generally, against a prop of cushions, dressed in a white French tea-gown, slim enough to begin, with, but far too large now for the shrunk form—a bright spot of rouge on either pinched cheek, and the dyed "fringe" and "coils" covering all the once shapely head. ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the word which is here translated prowess, e.g. cobnet, colwed, eofned, but all of them are capable of that construction, thus "cobnet" comes from cobiaw, to thump, "colwed," from col a sting, or a prop, whilst "eofned" ...
— Y Gododin - A Poem on the Battle of Cattraeth • Aneurin
... somebody is going to introduce a new plank into the platform, and if he does, the Union must tumble down; until at last I begin to think it is such a rickety old platform that it is impossible to prop it up. But then I bring my own judgment to bear, instead of relying on witnesses, and I come to the conclusion that the Union is strong and safe—strong in its power as well as in the affections of ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay
... at his men. They were not disposed to second him yet. They one and all approved his personal battle with Fate, and never more admired him and felt his power; but the affair was exciting, and they were not the pillars to prop ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... sah, and ebber hab been, and ebber will be. Don't t'ink, Masser Mile, I marry ole Cupid, myself, if anoder prop'r connection offer in 'e family; but I prefar him, to marry ...
— Miles Wallingford - Sequel to "Afloat and Ashore" • James Fenimore Cooper
... in these ungovernable times, than attempt to prove its weaknesses inherent; to look obstinately at the golden side only of the double-wielded shield: instead of picking away at a soft stone in constitutional foundations, our feeble wish magnanimously prefers to prop it and plaster it, flinging away that injurious pick-axe. The title of this once-considered lucubration is far too suggestive to carping minds of more than the much that it means, to be without objection: nevertheless, I did begin, and therefore, always under shelter of a domino, and protesting ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... leaf sheath, but lets it run down the outside to the root where it is needed. As the plant gets older and taller, new roots come out from the node next above the root and sometimes from the second node above. These prop-roots are needed for support as the stalk lengthens, and they ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Nature Study • Ontario Ministry of Education
... some time since, Endeavour'd vainly to convince A hungry fisherman Of his unfitness for the frying-pan. The fisherman had reason good— The troutling did the best he could— Both argued for their lives. Now, if my present purpose thrives, I'll prop my former proposition By building on a small addition. A certain wolf, in point of wit The prudent fisher's opposite, A dog once finding far astray, Prepared to take him as his prey. The dog his ...
— A Hundred Fables of La Fontaine • Jean de La Fontaine
... winding road that tumbles down to some Cotswold village. Let an inn parlour lie behind red curtains, and a table be drawn toward the fire. Let there be a loin of cold beef, an elbow of yellow cheese, a tankard of dog's nose. Then may we prop our Bacon's Essays against the pewter and study those mellow words: "Certainly it is heaven upon earth to have a man's mind move in charity, rest in providence, and turn upon the poles of truth." Haec studio, ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... three of the state elephants, with sufficient troops to form an imposing escort, and at the same time to make opposition useless. A letter couched in terms of the utmost friendliness, conferring upon the Prince the title of Prop-of-the-Kingdom, will be ready in a short time for her Highness's signature, and I shall present it with the patent of investiture and the khilat. Other khilats are being prepared in readiness for a durbar to-night, at which the Rajah will confer them upon the councillors offended ...
— The Path to Honour • Sydney C. Grier
... experiences, in welcoming what is pleasant, what feeds our vanity and self-satisfaction, what gives one, like the rich fool, the sense of false security of goods stored up for the years? We are set in life to feel insecure, or at all events to gain stability and security of soul, not to prop up our failing and timid senses upon the pillows of wealth and ease and circumstance. The man whom I entirely envy is the man who walks into the dark valley of misfortune or sickness or grief, or the shadow of death, with a curious and inexpressible zest for facing and interrogating ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... the work we discern most distinctly in the constant, often—most decidedly, doubtless, in the case of the Aquitanian expedition (III. XI. The Censorship A Prop of the Nobility)— not successful, justification of every single act of war as a defensive measure which the state of things had rendered inevitable. That the adversaries of Caesar censured his attacks on the Celts and Germans above all as unprovoked, ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... round the waterhole with a clothes prop, and made good time, too; but we got across and ...
— Over the Sliprails • Henry Lawson
... ready for sleep. Then, as ever, he would prop himself up in bed, light his pipe, and lose himself in English or French history until sleep conquered. His room-mate did not approve of this habit; it interfered with his own rest, and with his fiendish tendency to mischief he found reprisal ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... resuscitated for a time. We had a powerful set of pulley tackle by which, when made fast to a neighbouring tree, they could be restored to the perpendicular, after enlarging the hole left by the roots, making the ground firm again round the tree, and placing a strong sloping prop to take the weight on the weak side; good yields would then often continue for ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... woods with me, gunning and trouting. I taught her how to skate when she was a mere baby. I often said she was all the brother I had in the world! She can remember now how I used to wrap her in shawls, and prop her up on the woodpile, while ...
— Little Prudy's Sister Susy • Sophie May
... propriety of at once fixing the Chilian Government upon a base not to be shaken by the fall of the present tyranny in Peru, of which there are not only indications, but the result is inevitable—unless, indeed, the mischievous counsels of vain and mercenary men can suffice to prop up a fabric of the most barbarous political architecture, serving as a screen from whence to dart their weapons against the heart of liberty. Thank God, my hands are free from the stain of labouring in any such work; and having finished all you gave me to do, I may now rest ...
— The Life of Thomas, Lord Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald, G.C.B., Admiral of the Red, Rear-Admiral of the Fleet, Etc., Etc. • Thomas Cochrane, Earl of Dundonald
... into the obscurity of the river Yuan (in Honan), I had no appetite for the political affairs of the country. As the result of the revolution in Hsin Hai, I was by mistake elected by the people. Reluctantly I came out of my retirement and endeavoured to prop up the tottering structure. I cared for nothing, but the salvation of the country. A perusal of our history of several thousand years will reveal in vivid manner the sad fate of the descendants of ancient kings and emperors. What then could have prompted me ...
— The Fight For The Republic in China • Bertram Lenox Putnam Weale
... us in each shift, to drive, and, if necessary, prop the roof, with some of the natives to carry out the earth. If we have three shifts, each shift would go on twice in the twenty-four hours; that would be four hours on and ...
— Rujub, the Juggler • G. A. Henty
... Louis Quinze drawing-room without having, as he would have described it, done anything but give the lady of the scene a superior chance not to betray a defeated hope—not, that is, to fail of the famous "pride" mostly supposed to prop even the most infatuated women at such junctures; by which chance, to do her justice, she had thoroughly seemed to profit. But he finally rose from his later station with a feeling of better success. ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James
... beloved son, he whose birth made all my happiness, whose infancy and growing years were all my occupation, whose youth was my pride and consolation, and who would, as I hoped, be the prop of my old age, no longer lives. He has been taken from us in the midst of completed happiness, and of the happiest prospects of the future, whilst each day he gained in virtue, in understanding, in wisdom, following the footsteps of his noble and excellent ...
— France in the Nineteenth Century • Elizabeth Latimer
... seem that to be created does not belong to composite and subsisting things. For in the book, De Causis (prop. iv) it is said, "The first of creatures is being." But the being of a thing created is not subsisting. Therefore creation properly speaking does not belong to subsisting ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... 1: The higher a virtue is, the greater the number of things to which it extends, as stated in De Causis, prop. x, xvii. Wherefore from the very fact that wisdom as a gift is more excellent than wisdom as an intellectual virtue, since it attains to God more intimately by a kind of union of the soul with Him, it is able ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... faculty in a healthy state, and cause it to know its duties. Dante, in the fierce egotism of his passions, and the strange identification of his knowledge with all that was knowable, would fain have made his poetry both a sword against individuals, and a prop for the support of the superstition that corrupted them. This was reversing the duty of a Christian and a great man; and there happen to be existing reasons why it is salutary to chew that he had no right to do so, and must not ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... them they might force it down his throat if they could raise his head. So they used a hand lever and a prop to elevate the muzzle, and were about to try another inpour, when Buck leaped to his feet, and behaving like one who has been shamming, made at full gallop for the stable, nor stopped till safely in his stall, where at once he dropped in all the evident agony ...
— Rolf In The Woods • Ernest Thompson Seton
... some juggler whose performance had given him the idea. So," continued Jones, producing a specimen of his advertisements in the theatrical publications, "I set out to find what professional had sold a 'prop', to an amateur. I found the sale had been made at Marsfield, Ohio, late in November of last year, by a 'Slippery Sam,' termed 'The Elusive Edwardes.' On November twenty-eighth of last year Mr. Harvey M. Greene, of Richmond, Virginia, was registered at the principal, in fact the only decent hotel, ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... roof without any brackets or pillars, on a new principle! The only comfort I had was in stumbling at length on the builder, and finding him a plain practical north-countryman with a foot rule in his pocket. I took him aside, and asked him should we, or could we, prop up any weak part of the place: especially the dressing-rooms, which were under our stage, the weight of which must be heavy on a new floor, and dripping wet walls. He told me there wasn't a stronger building in the world; and that, to allay the apprehension, they had opened it, on Thursday ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... seized upon the right hand of the King, which, as he assumed his wonted posture, had been employed in dragging the covering of his couch, and gradually pulling it to her with a force which was resisted, though but faintly, she possessed herself of that arm, the prop of Christendom and the dread of Heathenesse, and imprisoning its strength in both her little fairy hands, she bent upon it her brow, and united ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... my old St. Louis patrons, called to see me, and on broaching the cause of my grief, she condoled with me. She knew that I had looked forward to the day when my son would be a support to me—knew that he was to become the prop and main-stay of my old age, and knowing this, she advised me to apply for a pension. I disliked the idea very much, and told her so—told her that I did not want to make money out of his death. She explained away all of my objections—argued that Congress ...
— Behind the Scenes - or, Thirty years a slave, and Four Years in the White House • Elizabeth Keckley
... leaders of the opposite parties, for Joab, as next of kin to Asahel, was by the law and custom of the country the avenger of his blood. For some time afterwards the war was carried on, the advantage being invariably on the side of David. At length Ishbaal lost the main prop of his tottering cause by remonstrating with Abner for marrying Rizpah, one of Saul's concubines, an alliance which, according to Oriental notions, implied pretensions to the throne (cp. 2 Sam. xvi. 21 sqq.; 1 Kings ii. 21 sqq.). Abner was indignant at the deserved rebuke, and immediately ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... the eloquent pontiff (and Urban II. was one of the most eloquent men of the day), "you, who hear me, and who have received the true faith, and been endowed by God with power, and strength, and greatness of soul,—whose ancestors have been the prop of Christendom, and whose kings have put a barrier against the progress of the infidel,—I call upon you to wipe off these impurities from the face of the earth, and lift your oppressed fellow-Christians from the depths into ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... plain of anguish. "How am I to be sustained through this dreary journey of life?" she exclaimed. Upon this question she felt, more poignantly than ever, her loss of innocence: innocence would have been her support, but, in place of this best prop to the afflicted, guilt flashed on her memory every time she ...
— Nature and Art • Mrs. Inchbald
... my faith is strong, His arm is my almighty prop: Be glad, my heart; rejoice, my tongue, My dying flesh ...
— The Psalms of David - Imitated in the Language of The New Testament - And Applied to The Christian State and Worship • Isaac Watts
... replied, "for now I will call you so, your grief, though deep and poignant, will pass away in time, but mine will abide with me whilst I stay here. That period, however, will not be long; the prop of my existence, the source of my happiness, is gone; and I will never know what happiness is until I rejoin her and her blessed mother. Good-by, my daughter; I will have neither reply nor remonstrance, nor will I be moved by any ...
— The Evil Eye; Or, The Black Spector - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... at its remoter margin into commerce should be the absolute world-ruler, is of course a very considerable over-belief. Over-belief as it is, though, it is an article of almost every one's religion. Most of us pretend in some way to prop it upon our philosophy, but the philosophy itself is really propped upon this faith. What is this but to say that Religion, in her fullest exercise of function, is not a mere illumination of facts already elsewhere ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... this same poet my sad chance discern'd?" 10 I durst the great celestial battles tell, Hundred-hand Gyges, and had done it well; With Earth's revenge, and how Olympus top High Ossa bore, Mount Pelion up to prop; Jove and Jove's thunderbolts I had in hand, Which for[236] his heaven fell on the giants' band. My wench her door shut, Jove's affairs I left, Even Jove himself out of my wit was reft. Pardon me, Jove! thy ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe
... I had lost a stay or prop," replied Mrs Seagrave. "So accustomed have I been to look to him for advice since we have been on this island. Had he not been thus snatched from us—had he been spared to us a few years, and had we been permitted to surround his ...
— Masterman Ready - The Wreck of the "Pacific" • Captain Frederick Marryat
... Federation of Workers Trade Unions or FOS; Autonomous Haitian Workers or CATH; National Popular Assembly or APN; Papaye Peasants Movement or MPP; Popular Organizations Gathering Power or PROP ...
— The 1999 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... condition of this most interesting monument of an age which has utterly passed away? If there is any building in the world which belongs wholly to the past, towards which the duty of the present is simply to preserve, to guard every stone, to prop if need be, but to disturb nothing, to stay from falling as long as human power can stay it, but to abstain from supplanting one jot or one tittle of the ancient work by the most perfect of modern copies—it is surely the ...
— Sketches of Travel in Normandy and Maine • Edward A. Freeman
... municipal corporation; hence the town hall is scarcely needed save for some itinerant Thespians, an occasional public meeting, or as a storehouse of rubbish. It begins to fall into decay, and the decayed town is not rich enough, or public-spirited enough, to prop its weakened timbers. For the sake of the safety of the public it has to ...
— Vanishing England • P. H. Ditchfield
... doubt ye are the people: Wisdom's flame Springs from your cannon—yea from yours alone. God needs your dripping lance to prop His throne; Your gleeful torch His glory to proclaim. No doubt ye are the people: far from shame Your Captains who deface the sculptured stone Which by the labor and the blood and bone Of pious millions ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... in your favor," laughed the monarch. "I ever prefer sober manhood to callow youth about me. The one is a prop, stanch, tried; the other a reed that bends this way and that, or breaks when you ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... gentleman had been led tottering into the adjacent parlor, which was fitted up as his bedroom, and placed comfortably on a high prop of pillows, Marcus drew out his watch, made an amiable pretence of very important business down town, and bade his ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... three degrees: sanctification, sanctity of life, holiness. Holiness is ascribed to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. And since here the Holy Spirit is not mentioned, but the spirit of holiness (prop. sanctity, hagiosune), we must further inquire what this remarkable expression denotes. The name spirit is expressly and very frequently given to the Holy Spirit; but God is also called a spirit; and the Lord Jesus Christ is called a spirit, but in contrast to ...
— Holy in Christ - Thoughts on the Calling of God's Children to be Holy as He is Holy • Andrew Murray
... that urge the old medicament, Whose fusty vials have long dried impotent, Why prop ye meretricious things, Denounce the sane as vicious things, And call outworn ...
— Late Lyrics and Earlier • Thomas Hardy
... surmised pretty nearly the truth. Speedily dismounting, he told the servants to prop him up. "Uncle Hsueeh," he laughed, "you daily go in for lewd dalliance; but have you to-day come to dissipate in a reed-covered pit? The King of the dragons in this pit must have also fallen in love with your charms, and enticed you to become ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... effects of over-confidence, kept his man at fighting edge by a little judicious pessimism now and then, and rumors of the popularity of Purplevein among the hard drinkers. Day after day Quimbleton and Miss Chuff, after a little psychic communing, would prop the editor among cushions in the big gray limousine and spin him about the city and suburbs to bow, smile, say a few automatic words and pass on. Over the car floated a big banner with the words: Let Bleak Do Your Drinking For You: He Knows How. ...
— In the Sweet Dry and Dry • Christopher Morley
... a stop after running a few yards further. But finding that no lives were lost, it put on steam and disappeared on its course, and Zene and his trembling assistant were trying to prop up one corner of the wagon when Grandma Padgett brought her spectacles to ...
— Old Caravan Days • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... that poor consolation had been wrenched from him. For, when he saw that swift, limpid, upward look that she gave the man when he took her hand, he knew himself to be forgotten. Once that same look had been raised to him, and he had gauged its meaning. Indeed, his conceit had crumbled; its last prop was gone. Why had it ended thus? There had been no quarrel between ...
— Waifs and Strays - Part 1 • O. Henry
... war in a remote country, in spite of the violent opposition made by a powerful faction at home, which refused him supplies of every kind, and thwarted him on all occasions; it may be affirmed, that Hannibal, during the whole series of this war, seemed the only prop of the state, and the soul of every part of the empire of the Carthaginians, who could never believe themselves conquered, till Hannibal confessed that he himself ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... life. Poetry was the basis of their education, the guide and commentary of their practice, the inspiration of their speculative thought. If they have a proposition to advance, they must back it by a citation: if they have a counsel to offer, they must prop it with a verse. Not only for delight, but for inspiration, warning and example, they were steeped from childhood onwards in an ocean of melodious discourse; their national epics were to them what the Bible was to ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... Pine, the Cedar proud and tall, The Vine-prop Elm, the Poplar never dry, The Builder Oak, sole King of Forests all. The Aspine good for Staves, the Cypress Funeral. The Laurel, Meed of mighty Conquerors, And Poets sage; the Fir that weepeth still, The Willow worn of forlorn Paramours, The Yew obedient to the ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... in these registrations of the day's doings need do no one hurt. Surely, one newspaper is enough for any man to prop against his morning water-bottle to fend off the smiling hatred of his wife's glance. If he be foolish enough to read four he is no wiser than ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... elder pupils. The school-room stands where it did, looking into a discolored, dingy garden, in the passage leading from Fetter Lane into Bartlett's Buildings. It is still a school,—though the main prop, alas! has fallen so ingloriously,—and bears a Latin inscription over the entrance in the lane, which was unknown in our humbler times. Heaven knows what "languages" were taught in it then! I am ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... ensue; Though it might aggrandise the state, Could private luxury dine on plate? Kings might indeed their friends reward, But ministers find less regard. Informers, sycophants, and spies, Would not augment the year's supplies. 40 Perhaps, too, take away this prop, An annual job or two might drop. Besides, if pensions were denied, Could avarice support its pride? It might even ministers confound, And yet the state be safe and sound. I care not though 'tis understood I only mean my country's ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... after a moment he said, "If you take away one prop, old chap, you must provide another. A broken thing can't stand alone. But need we discuss it now? As I told you, she is coming out presently, and this glorious air is bound to make a difference to her. It tastes ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell
... vine is a creeper with a knotty stem that if unpruned will reach the height of near thirty feet, but in order to render the vines more productive they are kept down to about a dozen or fifteen feet, and each is trained over a separate pole or prop. At each joint of the stem the plant puts out its fibrous tendrils, grasping the prop, and so climbing to the top. Whenever a vine happens to trail on the ground these tendrils, like strawberry "runners," ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various
... of ancient authority, of which he retrospectively took possession, he boldly invoked the highest reasons and the most venerated names, in order to justify an arbitrary resolution, and the grasping selfishness which swayed his mind. It was the practice of the French Revolution to prop up its violent and despotic proceedings by the loftiest principles; the Emperor Napoleon had not forgotten ...
— Worlds Best Histories - France Vol 7 • M. Guizot and Madame Guizot De Witt
... if we understand God to be the cause of all things, we do for that very reason consider Him to be the cause of sorrow. But I reply that in so far as we understand the causes of sorrow, it ceases to be a passion (Prop. 3, pt. 5), that is to say (Prop. 59, pt. 3) it ceases to be a sorrow; and therefore in so far as we understand God to be the cause of sorrow do we rejoice." The third proposition of the fifth part which he quotes merely proves that in so far as we understand passion ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford
... never keep to anything long. Variety is the mother of Enjoyment. At Ems I shall not be a conjuror: but I never part with my box. It takes no more room than one of those medicine chests, which I dare say you have got with you in your carriage, to prop up your couple of ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... its memory as a period of his existence most interesting and fascinating." "In life," he told her, "one must have for one's thoughts a sacred depository, and Lord Beaconsfield ever presumes to seek that in his Sovereign Mistress." She was not only his own solitary support; she was the one prop of the State. "If your Majesty is ill," he wrote during a grave political crisis, "he is sure he will himself break down. All, really, depends upon your Majesty." "He lives only for Her," he asseverated, "and works only for Her, and without Her all is lost." When her birthday came he produced an ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey
... my life and all; pardon not that: You take my house when you do take the prop That doth sustain my house; you take my life When you do take the ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... and in making toast before a blazing fire, stand the wire toaster upright before the fire and prop ...
— Scouting For Girls, Official Handbook of the Girl Scouts • Girl Scouts
... refuse to be its tool. Let its power be stretched forth toward this distant Territory, not to bind, but to unbind; not for the oppression of the weak, but for the subversion of the tyrannical; not for the prop and maintenance of a revolting Usurpation, but for ...
— American Eloquence, Volume III. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various
... 'main prop,' George, the eldest boy, "that gentleman who gave me the half dollar for going to the bank for him, last week,—you know him we washed for at the United States Hotel,—said he was to be here again to-morrow. I was to call for his clothes; so I will go, mother, to-morrow; ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... has announced himself as the enemy of Greece, and the prop of the Ottoman Empire. At the subscription ball given at the Opera in Berlin, did he not walk arm-in-arm with Ghalik Bey, the Turkish Ambassador, and authorise him to telegraph to the Sultan that, under existing conditions, he might count upon his sense ...
— The Schemes of the Kaiser • Juliette Adam
... quite so regardless of consequences, his brother Dominick arose and endeavoured to prop the weak part of the structure with an ...
— The Island Queen • R.M. Ballantyne
... if Miss Howe had not been a Protestant and so impervious he would have excommunicated her—and as he looked his movement imperceptibly changed to afford him a better place. He put an undecided hand upon a prop of the box that rose behind Alicia's shoulder, and so stood leaning and looking, more conspicuous in the straight lines and short shoulder-cape of the frock of his Order than he knew. Hilda, in one of those impenetrable ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... by it, because I saw that the powers of the performers were being relaxed by eternal repetition, and it was now evident that I must trust to my own ability to pull the matter quickly through as I thought best. But it was not the fatigue due to this system that finally made Niemann, the main prop in my work, recoil from the task which at the start he had undertaken with an energy full of promise. He had been informed that there was a conspiracy to ruin my work. From this time forward he was a victim to a despondency to which, ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... heaven, and cried, "Thy will be done!" But, oh! the father no such solace found— Dark, cheerless anguish wrapt his spirit round; He was a stranger to the Christian's hope, And in bereavement's hour he sought a prop On which his pierced and stricken soul might lean; Yet, as he sought it, doubts would intervene— Doubts which for years had clouded o'er his soul— Doubts that, with prayers he struggled to control; For though a grounded faith he ne'er had known, He was no prayerless man; but ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume XXIV. • Revised by Alexander Leighton
... at the moment of their interment and install them in glass tubes with a few tiny bits of paper which will serve them as a prop. There is no sand, no building-material other than the creature's spittle and my very few shreds of paper. Under these conditions can the pill-shaped cell ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... hope he will recover. Just imagine, general; he was found by the road, and brought home with a dagger in his breast, like a prop ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas, pere
... better be off! Wander over the face of the earth, young sirs, like vagabonds as you are, and do not presume to remain in a spot which is hallowed by the grey hairs of the patriarchal gentleman to whose tottering limbs I have the honour to act as an unworthy, but I hope an unassuming, prop and staff. And you, my tender sir,' said Mr Pecksniff, addressing himself in a tone of gentle remonstrance to the old man, 'how could you ever leave me, though even for this short period! You have absented ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... light there is, in any house, save presence of the master— So runs the saw, ye aged men! and truth it says indeed— On you I call, the wise and true, to ward us from disaster, For all my hope is fixed on you, to prop us ...
— Suppliant Maidens and Other Plays • AEschylus
... antiquities and rare marble fragments, in a spacious room surrounded with laden shelves, Romola was his daily companion and assistant. There was a time when he had hoped that his son, Dino, would have followed in his steps, to be the prop of his age, and to take up and continue his scholarly labours after he was dead. But Dino had failed him; Dino had given himself up to religion and entered the priesthood, and the passion of Bardo's resentment had flamed into fierce ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... Mr. Wells?" said Wyngate, with affected politeness; "or possibly your uncle may have been English, and a title goes with the 'prop,' and you may be Lord Wells, or Very ...
— Openings in the Old Trail • Bret Harte
... the millionaires, the parvenus, the great capitalists, enriched in the provinces. A part of the nobility, after having long despised them, sets itself to fraternise with them, to marry their wealthy daughters, cause them to share power; seeks to prop with their millions the pre-eminence of its own rank, menaced by the discontent, the spirit of revolt, the growing pride, of the middle class. Meanwhile, another part of the aristocracy, either too haughty ...
— Characters and events of Roman History • Guglielmo Ferrero
... this: True friendship is a goodly thing and a rare in this world, and, therefore, to be treasured; 'tis thing no man may buy or seek, since itself is seeker and cometh of itself; 'tis a prop—a staff in stony ways, a shield 'gainst foes, a light i' the dark. So do I love friendship, Robin, and thou'rt my friend, yet must leave thee, though friendship ...
— The Geste of Duke Jocelyn • Jeffery Farnol
... believed in my father's love for me; and I think now that you were more to me than I realized. But, Roderick, have you ever watched a woodman in the forest chopping down a tree? And have you ever seen that tree fall, when its natural prop was stolen away by the sharp edge of the axe? It may have taken that tree a hundred, or a thousand years to grow; but when it crashes down, it is gone forever. A little, puny man has gone into the forest with an axe ...
— The Last Woman • Ross Beeckman
... uncomfortable lodging, it being a perfect swamp; and we had nothing to cover us, though it rained very hard. The Indians were little better off than we, as there was no wood here to make their wigwams; so that all they could do was to prop up the bark they carry in the bottom of their canoes with their oars, and shelter themselves as well as they could to leeward of it. They, knowing the difficulties that were to be encountered here, had provided themselves with some seal; but we had not the least ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 17 • Robert Kerr
... took a few handfuls of wheat, which they scattered upon the ground; and, as Maggie could sew better than the boys, she strung some grains of wheat on a small thread. This was tied to a slender prop which held up the cover of the trap, which was made by putting four blocks together in the shape of a box. In it was a handful of wheat. When all was ready the children hid behind some shrubbery and watched and waited the result. They whispered to each ...
— Golden Moments - Bright Stories for Young Folks • Anonymous
... window," he exclaimed. "Let us shut the window quick," he added impatiently; and then creeping softly up to the place, he took hold of the prop which held the shutter up, and gently drawing it in, he let the shutter ...
— Stuyvesant - A Franconia Story • Jacob Abbott
... to be? That thought made me furious: for the third time I approached the hand with my own: I clasped it, and at the same instant I tried to rise, to draw this dead body towards me, and be certain of the hideous crime. But, as I strove to prop myself on my left elbow, the cold hand I was clasping became alive, and was withdrawn—and I knew that instant, to my utter astonishment, that I held none other than my own left hand, which, lying stiffened on the hard floor, had lost heat ...
— The True Story Book • Andrew Lang
... the speaker, "behold all the tribes of our league assembled!"—and he named them one by one. "We are but a handful; you are the prop and stay of this nation. A thunderbolt has fallen from the sky, and rent a chasm in the earth. We shall fall into it, if you do not support us. Take pity on us. We are here, not so much to speak as to weep over our loss and yours. Our country is but a skeleton, without flesh, veins, sinews, ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman
... strengthen the old notion, that it was of no use for us to enlarge our markets unless other countries did so also at the same time and in the same way; and in condemning all reduction of import duties that was not based on "reciprocity," he certainly added all the weight of his authority to prop up a system whose injurious influence has affected the very vitality of our social state, and whose overthrow will yet require no small amount ...
— The Economist - Volume 1, No. 3 • Various
... the room and the bed with flowers, they brush away the dark soft hair, they array her in a dainty embroidered night-robe, and prop her up with pillows. There is the fever fire on her wan cheeks, the fever fire in her shining eyes. But she is unutterably happy—you have but to look into her face to see that. Death is ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... abandoned coal shaft. Jones recognized this as his opportunity, and taking his lasso and an extra rope, he crawled into the hole. Not fifteen feet from the opening sat one of the cougars, snarling and spitting. Jones promptly lassoed it, passed his end of the lasso round a side prop of the shaft, and out to the soldiers who had followed him. Instructing them not to pull till he called, he cautiously began to crawl by the cougar, with the intention of getting farther back and roping its hind leg, so as to prevent disaster when the soldiers ...
— The Last of the Plainsmen • Zane Grey
... first mistook it for the application of drumsticks to the head of an empty barrel. This uncommon speed, however, was attended with a misfortune; he chanced to overlook a small defect in one of the steps, and his prop plunging into a hole, he fell backwards, to the imminent danger of his life. Tom was luckily at his back, and sustained him in his arms, so as that he escaped without any other damage than the loss of his ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... behold the full-mapped mind Of his opponent, Marmont arrows forth Aide after aide towards the forest's rim, To spirit on his troops emerging thence, And prop the lone division Thomiere, For whose recall his voice has rung in vain. Wellington mounts and seeks out Pakenham, Who pushes to the arena from the right, And, spurting to the left of Marmont's line, ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... Sweet—A lump of charcoal should be placed in the refrigerator to keep it sweet. When putting your best tea or coffee urn away, drop a small piece of charcoal in it and prop the lid ...
— Fowler's Household Helps • A. L. Fowler
... displayed the force of many sympathies. Our moral sentiment is itself a feeling chiefly of that nature, and our regard to a character with others seems to arise only from a care of preserving a character with ourselves; and in order to attain this end, we find it necessary to prop our tottering judgement on ...
— An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals • David Hume
... spirits drop. I saw those of Hepatica and the Skeptic and the Philosopher drop, although they made haste to prop their countenances ...
— A Court of Inquiry • Grace S. Richmond
... appear; O'er hills and vales perennial gardens run, Cities unwall'd stand sparkling to the sun; The streams all freighted from the bounteous plain Swell with the load and labor to the main, Whose stormless waves command a steadier gale And prop the pinions of a bolder sail: Sway'd with the floating weight each ocean toils, And joyous nature's ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... to convince A hungry fisherman Of his unfitness for the frying-pan. The fisherman had reason good— The troutling did the best he could— Both argued for their lives. Now, if my present purpose thrives, I'll prop my former proposition By building on a small addition. A certain wolf, in point of wit The prudent fisher's opposite, A dog once finding far astray, Prepared to take him as his prey. The dog his leanness pled; "Your lordship, sure," he said, "Cannot be very ...
— A Hundred Fables of La Fontaine • Jean de La Fontaine
... lodge, remain, continue, abide; support, prop, buttress, brace, uphold, strengthen; delay, obstruct, hinder, restrain, appease, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... most urgent wants indeed, Mrs. Haller has relieved; but whether she has or could have given as much as would purchase liberty for the son, the prop of ...
— The Stranger - A Drama, in Five Acts • August von Kotzebue
... Paul, who was like iron with mob and mutiny, was pitiably helpless before such a prop of the aristocracy. He flew into a rage, and rated the landlord in Scotch and English, and I was fain to put my tongue in my cheek and turn my back that my laughter might not anger ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... directors were due to the machinations of that sly and persuasive old dog, Colonel Mapleson. Nilsson had but one rival, and she was Mme. Patti. Her Colonel Mapleson had secured; not only her, but, report said, Scalchi, Tremelli, and Tamagno also. Mme. Scalchi had been a strong prop of the first Metropolitan season, and Tremelli and Tamagno, though they had not been heard in America, had names to conjure with. Tremelli never came, and it was not until 1890, when Mr. Abbey was again in the traces of an Italian opera manager, and was exploiting ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... your letter. The man's waiting for it. That's why I ran all the way up here." By this it may be seen that Betty had lost all her awe of the young soldier. Maybe it left her when he doffed his uniform. "Here's your crutch. Doesn't it hurt you to stand alone?" She reached him the despised prop. ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... are exhausted. The next day, she is dead. The eggs are dabbed in a continuous layer, at the entrance to the throat, at the root of the tongue, on the membrane of the palate. Their number appears considerable; the whole inside of the gullet is white with them. I fix a little wooden prop between the two mandibles of the beak, to keep them open and enable me to see ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... regular trade in these things, I figured that he probably bought it from some juggler whose performance had given him the idea. So," continued Jones, producing a specimen of his advertisements in the theatrical publications, "I set out to find what professional had sold a 'prop', to an amateur. I found the sale had been made at Marsfield, Ohio, late in November of last year, by a 'Slippery Sam,' termed 'The Elusive Edwardes.' On November twenty-eighth of last year Mr. Harvey M. Greene, of Richmond, Virginia, was registered at the principal, in fact the only decent ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... a Pithaeo editis, carmen in laudem Solis; quod eum esse Liberum, et Cererem, et Jovem statuit. Huetius. Demonst. Evang. Prop. 4. p. 142. ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume II. (of VI.) • Jacob Bryant
... tired and went off to bed. I was tired, right enough, but I was something else too. All that business about the girl I meant to find and marry may sound like a child's silly game to you, but it had been more than a game to me. It had been a solid prop to hold to in ugly places where a man might slip if he had not clean love and a girl in his head. And now, at seven-and-twenty, I wanted my child's game to come true: just my own fire, and my own girl, and a life that held ...
— The La Chance Mine Mystery • Susan Carleton Jones
... her back was fetching from the clothes-prop a waterglobe upon its stand; she set it down on the table before the rush-light, moving on tiptoe, for to her the writing of a letter was a sort of necromancy, and she was distressed for Katharine's sake. She had heard ...
— The Fifth Queen • Ford Madox Ford
... round arch of a given span can be only half as high as it is wide, but the pointed arch may have a great diversity of proportions. The development of the Gothic style was greatly forwarded by the invention of the "flying buttress." By means of this graceful outside prop it became possible to lighten the masonry of the hitherto massive walls and pierce them with great windows which let a flood of light ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... Center, which is not much of a center, Miss Dawes alighted from the buggy and entered a building bearing a sign with the words "Metropolitan Variety Store, Joshua Atwood, Prop'r, Groceries, Coal, Dry Goods, Insurance, Boots and Shoes, Garden Seeds, etc." A smaller sign beneath this was lettered "Justice of the Peace," and one below that ...
— Cy Whittaker's Place • Joseph C. Lincoln
... Rebel Troops, And strait with me to Abdelazer's Tent, Where all his Claims he shall resign to you, Both in my self, the Kingdom, and the Crown: You being departed, thousands more will leave him, And you're alone the Prop to ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. II • Aphra Behn
... Lordship read in my partial defence of Kilkee, a slight attempt to prop up my own case, and felt confused and embarrassed beyond ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... old-fashioned expression of wifely pride and womanly tenderness in the fine old lady, who forgot her own gifts, and felt only humility and gratitude to the man who had found in her a comrade in intellectual pursuits, as well as a helpmeet at home and a gentle prop for ...
— A Garland for Girls • Louisa May Alcott
... reeling, and ready to fall at the least touch; also the childish amusement of riding upon the two ends of a plank, poised upon the prop underneath its centre, called also see-saw. Perhaps tatter is a rustic pronunciation ...
— 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue • Captain Grose et al.
... projector, proprietor, and editor, was Mr. Gilbert a Beckett, whose name—with those of men of vastly superior literary attainments—was associated in after years with the early fortunes of Punch. The literary part of the performance was indeed sorry stuff,—the main stay and prop of the paper from its very commencement was Seymour, whose drawings however suffered severely at the hands of the engraver and paper maker. An eccentricity of the publication perhaps deserves notice. It professed to look with sovereign contempt ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... frequented the Elysee, but without giving his adherence. He promised his support to General Bedeau, who counted upon him. At daybreak on the 2d of December some one came to waken X. It was Edgar Ney. X. was a prop for the coup d'etat, but would he consent? Edgar Ney explained the affair to him, and left him only after seeing him leave the barracks of the Rue Verte at the head of the first regiment. X. took up his position at the Place de la Madeleine. ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... densely populated rural communities. Uzbekistan is now the world's third largest cotton exporter, a major producer of gold and natural gas, and a regionally significant producer of chemicals and machinery. Following independence in December 1991, the government sought to prop up its Soviet-style command economy with subsidies and tight controls on production and prices. Faced with high rates of inflation, however, the government began to reform in mid-1994, by introducing tighter ...
— The 1998 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... proximity. One of them did not hesitate to thrust a book into my hands, saying, "Give that to that fellow over there, will you?" while another of them exclaimed as he pushed past me, "By your leave, young fellow!" and a third made use of my shoulder as a prop when he wanted to scramble over a desk. All this seemed to me a little rough and unpleasant, for I looked upon myself as immensely superior to such fellows, and considered that they ought not to treat me with such familiarity. At length, the names began to be called out. The gymnasium men walked ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy
... they used to turn pots down at night so that they could pray. They had big pots then—big enough for you to get into yourself. I've seen some of them big old pots and got under 'em myself. You could get under one and pray if you wanted to. You wouldn't have to prop them up to send your voice in 'em from the outside. The thing that the handle hooks into makes them tilt up on one side so that you could get down on your hands and knees and pray with your mouth close to the opening if you wanted to. Anyway, ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Arkansas Narratives Part 3 • Works Projects Administration
... Smith choked, and reached for a tent prop. The next moment his hand was at the Indian's throat. With a quick twist of his collar band he shut off the Siwash's wind, choking ...
— The Last Spike - And Other Railroad Stories • Cy Warman
... of Rose from the neighborhood of Ivy Cliff greatly disturbed the even-going tenor of Irene's life. It withdrew also a prop on which she had leaned often in times of weakness, which would recur ...
— After the Storm • T. S. Arthur
... creatures who can manage their own concerns and those of other folks into the bargain. She was a notable housewife; her work was always done and well done; she "ran" the Sewing Circle, helped run the Sunday-school, and was the strongest prop of the Church Aid Society and Foreign Missions Auxiliary. Yet with all this Mrs. Rachel found abundant time to sit for hours at her kitchen window, knitting "cotton warp" quilts—she had knitted sixteen of them, ...
— Anne Of Green Gables • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... of the state, would have been delighted with the marrying tendencies of the chapel people. A venerable old gentleman—a great pillar of the body—after the decease of his first wife married her sister, and again, upon her removal, married his cook. Another great prop—elderly indeed, but still upright and iron-grey, a most powerfully made man, who always spoke as if his words were indeed law—rule-of-thumb law—has married three sisters in succession, and has had offspring by all. Their exact degrees of consanguinity I cannot tell ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... care of her young brothers, patient with 'em always, ready to mend bad rents in their clothin' and their behavior—tryin' to prop up their habits and their morals, givin' 'em all the schoolin' she could, givin' 'em all a good trade, all but the youngest, him she kep with her always till the Lord took him (scarlet fever), took him to learn the mysterius trade ...
— Samantha Among the Brethren, Complete • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)
... hubs of logs from the "Settler's ellum,"— Last of its timber,—they couldn't sell 'em, Never an axe had seen their chips, And the wedges flew from between their lips, Their blunt ends frizzled like celery-tips; Step and prop-iron, bolt and screw, Spring, tire, axle, and linchpin too, Steel of the finest, bright and blue; Thoroughbrace bison-skin, thick and wide; Boot, top, dasher, from tough old hide Found in the pit when the tanner died. That was the way he "put her through." There! said ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various
... self-complacency there may be in their outward bearing, it is visible enough, by their feverish jealousy of each other, how little confidence they have in the sterling value of their several doings. Conceit may puff a man up, but never prop him up; and there is too visible distress and hopelessness in men's aspects to admit of the supposition that they have any stable ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... you have given us ALL, and your prop has been taken away, you are justly entitled ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott
... my unfortunate old age, whose prop And only staff is gone, dead ere I die! These should have been his tears, and I have been That body to ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume 5 (of 18) - Amboyna; The state of Innocence; Aureng-Zebe; All for Love • John Dryden
... This prop is not found in the natural character of man, who, being selfish and violent, directs his energies rather to the destruction than to the preservation of society. Nor is it found in his moral character, which ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... ground, crossed the rails in the fortunate shadow of one of the posts. There he found a place where, with his back to a pole-prop right at this curve in the trolley system, the ...
— Tom Swift and his Electric Locomotive - or, Two Miles a Minute on the Rails • Victor Appleton
... may be compared to the efforts of a man to prop up his falling house who so surrounds it and fills it with props and buttresses and planks and scaffolding that he manages to keep the house standing only by making it impossible ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... excite envy, or to purchase attention. Her husband, her children, are no more!—one, one only comfort remains—one friend, one solace in adversity—one ray of light in the dark hour! Amidst universal desertion, RUTH has not forsaken her; but is become her joy in sorrow, her companion in solitude, her prop in decrepit age! Can we wonder that she wishes to discard a name which awakened such recollections, and only recalled the dream of happiness? "Call me not Naomi,—call me Mara; for the Almighty hath dealt very bitterly with me. I went out full, ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... movements,' and I sympathise with all that is said in favour of them. But I would remind you that the precursor of every genuine forward movement is a Godward movement, and that it is worse than useless to talk about lengthening the cords unless you begin with strengthening the stakes. The little prop that holds up the bell-tent that will contain half-a- dozen soldiers will be all too weak for the great one that will cover a company. And the fault of some Christian people is that they set themselves to work upon ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... heads of noble Rhodians, which had struck A general sorrow 'mongst the knights. All look Who next the lists should enter; each desires The task were his, but honour now requires A spirit more than vulgar, or she dies The next attempt, their valour's sacrifice; To prop whose ruins, chosen by the free Consent of all, Argalia comes to be Their happy champion. Truce proclaimed, until The combat ends, the expecting people fill The spacious battlements; the Turks forsake Their tents, of whom ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... prisoners. The sight of these enemy soldiers in greenish and red rags gives us an impression of power, of victory. Some voices question them in passing. They are dismayed and stupefied; the fists that prop up their yellow cheekbones protrude triangular caricatures of features. Sometimes, at the cut of a frank question, they show signs of lifting their heads, and awkwardly try to give vent ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... fer a lantern, Besides, the moonlight was bright enough in all conscience. Then I scooped that awful thing up in th' spade. I had a sight o' trouble doin' it. It slid off, and tipped over, and I couldn't bear Ev'n to touch it with my foot to prop it, But I done it somehow. Then I carried it off be'ind the barn, Clost to an old apple-tree Where you couldn't see from the house, An' I ...
— Men, Women and Ghosts • Amy Lowell
... pleasure." Mr. Tatt waits, and the train comes in, and then Witchem and me go off with him to the Hotel. Mr. Tatt he's got up quite regardless of expense, for the occasion; and in his shirt-front there's a beautiful diamond prop, cost him fifteen or twenty pound - a very handsome pin indeed. We drink our sherry at the bar, and have had our three or four glasses, when Witchem cries suddenly, "Look out, Mr. Wield! stand fast!" and a dash is made into the place by the Swell ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... purpose is right. The comprehension of my teachings would enable any one to prove these books to be filled with blessings for the whole human family. Fatiguing Bible translations and voluminous commentaries are employed to explain and prop old creeds, and they have the civil and religious arms in their defense; then why should not these be equally extended to support the Christianity that heals the sick? The notions of personality to be found in creeds are far more mystic than ...
— No and Yes • Mary Baker Eddy
... the waterhole with a clothes prop, and made good time, too; but we got across and away ...
— Over the Sliprails • Henry Lawson
... the midst of a not unpleasing picture of herself as the wise, considerate prop of the whole family, looked up to by her parents, leant upon by Lady Myrtle, a Lady Bountiful to all within her reach, a——But here I think her imaginings probably faded into the ...
— Robin Redbreast - A Story for Girls • Mary Louisa Molesworth
... and not in great pain. I'm not much of a prop to lean on, but I think we can make ...
— The Trumpeter Swan • Temple Bailey
... 3d of March, 1754, Mr. Pelham, the Prime Minister, died, and, had Murray's ambition soared in that direction, he might at once have stepped into the vacant office. He had long been the prop of the Ministry in the House of Commons, and was by far the most sagacious member of the Government. Throughout his Parliamentary career, what has happily been called his "clear, placid, mellow splendor" had suffered no tarnish, and had not been obscured by a single ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... of the word which is here translated prowess, e.g. cobnet, colwed, eofned, but all of them are capable of that construction, thus "cobnet" comes from cobiaw, to thump, "colwed," from col a sting, or a prop, ...
— Y Gododin - A Poem on the Battle of Cattraeth • Aneurin
... arrival? I say no. He is the lord of land—and is also, what he seems still more proud of, a lord of parliament; but I will front him in both capacities, and frankly tell him, that in the first he is a burthen to his own estate, and not a benefactor; and in the second, a peer but not a prop. ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol I, No. 2, February 1810 • Samuel James Arnold
... to pieces of which gives the greatest revulsion to the frame. This depth of nature, this force of passion, this tug and war of the elements of our being, this firm faith in filial piety, and the giddy anarchy and whirling tumult of the thoughts at finding this prop failing it, the contrast between the fixed, immoveable basis of natural affection, and the rapid, irregular starts of imagination, suddenly wrenched from all its accustomed holds and resting-places ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... country. We don't build a house by way of experiment and live in it a few years, then tear it down and build another. We live in a house till it cracks, and then we plaster it over; then it totters, and we prop it up; then it rocks, and we rope it down; then it sprawls, and we clamp it; then it crumbles, and we have a new underpinning,—but keep living in it all the time. To know what moving really means, you must move from just such a rickety-rackety ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... if they persisted in abusing Sumner he should be obliged to leave their company; Sumner being looked upon by the Democrats and more timid Republicans as the chief obstacle to pacification; as if any one man could prop a house up when it was about to fall. After the War began, this naturally came to an end, and Sumner was afterwards invited to join the Club, with what satisfaction to Hoar, Lowell, and Holmes it might be considering ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... exclaimed Fulk. "Thou art a youth of promise, and wilt well be a prop to our grandson's English throne. Thou shalt take knighthood from mine own hand as thy prowess well deserveth. And thou, fair damsel, here is one whom we could scarce hold back from rushing with single ...
— More Bywords • Charlotte M. Yonge
... start Nor shed one teardrop, as your ships depart. Ye love-charmed bowers of Spain! your Houris' eyes Are rayless now—for brighter lustre vies! Ye, boundless plains, and giant hills, that rise In craggy pride, and prop Columbia's skies, Ye view your maddened sons, with guilty haste, Roll from your shores and tempt the watery waste— Forgotten every claim that Virtue knows, Despised the scenes, where early childhood rose, Swift to the land of gold, they, joyful, ...
— Lays of Ancient Virginia, and Other Poems • James Avis Bartley
... deeply, then drew off a small, worn, gold ring which had lost its "set," and laid it in the man's hand, saying, "That's all the prop'ty I've got except eight hens which I gave Gail for those I poisoned. It had a ruby in it once, but the old rooster picked it out and et it. I used to have two bunnies, too, but last Christmas the German kids ate Winkum and Blinkum ...
— At the Little Brown House • Ruth Alberta Brown
... bold attempt, then, on the part of Reid and Stewart (for Stewart adopts the doctrine which he reports) to prop their tottering analysis on direct observation and experience, must be pronounced a failure. Reid's "plain statement of fact" is not a true statement of observed fact; it is a vicious statement of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... Mally had an orthodox corn, or bunyan, that could as little bear a touch from the royne-slippers of philosophy, as the inflamed gout of polemical controversy, which had gumfiated every mental joint and member of that zealous prop of the Relief Kirk. This was indeed the tender point of Miss Mally's character; for she was left unplucked on the stalk of single blessedness, owing entirely to a conversation on this very subject with the only lover she ever had, Mr. Dalgliesh, ...
— The Ayrshire Legatees • John Galt
... But when we ascend from the conception of a bare physical maintenance for an average family to such a wage as would provide the real minimum requirements of a civilized life and meet all its contingencies without having to lean on any external prop, we should have to make additions to Mr. Rowntree's figure which have not yet been computed, but as to which it is probably well within the mark to say that none but the most highly skilled artisans are able to earn a remuneration ...
— Liberalism • L. T. Hobhouse
... his reedy staccato voice, that gave polish and relief to every syllable, tried to come to her aid by questioning her affably about her family and the friends she had made in New York. But the caryatid-parent, who exists simply as a filial prop, is not a fruitful theme, and Undine, called on for the first time to view her own progenitors as a subject of conversation, was struck by their lack of points. She had never paused to consider what her father and mother were "interested" in, and, challenged to specify, could have named—with sincerity—only ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... mountains, valleys, rivers, lakes, and ponds are endowed with added beauty from the lovely names they wear—a tragic yet a charming legacy from Kanonsis and Kanonsionni, the brave and mighty people of the Long House, and those outside its walls who helped to prop or undermine ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... shrivelled with care, every appetite dried up. So learning devastates the scholar, is another plague of wealth, and our goodness turns out to be a hasty mistake. Is order disorder, then? Are we fools of fate? Is there only power enough to prop up this rickety old system, to keep it running and hold our noses to the grindstone? No man believes it: the madness of Time has method ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... "Prop me up against this tree, Trent—and listen," Monty whispered. "Don't fritter away the little ...
— A Millionaire of Yesterday • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... when perched on the top of his chariot, it looked like the image of the all-destroying fire. And the presiding deity of the power which conduces to the victory of the god, and which is the director of the exertions of all creatures, and constitutes their glory, prop and refuge, advanced before him. And a mysterious charm entered into his constitution, the charm which manifests its powers on the battlefield. Beauty, strength, piety, power, might, truthfulness, rectitude, devotion to ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 2 • Translated by Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... insolence of a shallow pretender to a Master in Science as this remarkable production, in which one of the most exact of observers, most cautious of reasoners, and most candid of expositors, of this or any other age, is held up to scorn as a "flighty" person, who endeavours "to prop up his utterly rotten fabric of guess and speculation," and whose "mode of dealing with nature" is reprobated as "utterly dishonourable to Natural Science." And all this high and mighty talk, which would have been indecent in one of Mr. Darwin's equals, proceeds ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... ambitious little head. Yes, father would see that he was right in trusting her; Nell would discover that there was no one so clever as Polly; Mrs. Power would cease to defy her; Alice would obey her cheerfully; in short, she would be the mainstay and prop of ...
— Polly - A New-Fashioned Girl • L. T. Meade
... Shade looked sidewise sometimes at his companion as he asked the news of their mutual friends, and she answered. Yet when he got, along with her mild responses, one of those glances, he was himself strangely subdued by it, and fain to prop his leaning prejudices by contrasting her scant print gown, her slat sunbonnet, and cowhide shoes with the apparel of the humblest in the village which ...
— The Power and the Glory • Grace MacGowan Cooke
... headquarters-on-the-field at the head of Shonoho Canyon; and at that hour Evan Blount, blinking dizzily, and with his head bandaged and throbbing as if the premier company of all the African tom-tom symphonists were making free with it, was letting Mrs. Honoria beat up his pillows and prop him with them, so that the drum-beating clamor might be minimized ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... to behold the full-mapped mind Of his opponent, Marmont arrows forth Aide after aide towards the forest's rim, To spirit on his troops emerging thence, And prop the lone division Thomiere, For whose recall his voice has rung in vain. Wellington mounts and seeks out Pakenham, Who pushes to the arena from the right, And, spurting to the left of Marmont's line, Shakes Thomiere ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... much behind us as we advance. We first throw away the tales along with the rattles of our nurses: those of the priest keep their hold a little longer; those of our governors the longest of all. But the passions which prop these opinions are withdrawn one after another; and the cool light of reason, at the setting of our life, shows us what a false splendor played upon these objects during our more sanguine seasons. Happy, my lord, if instructed by my experience, and even by my errors, you come early to make such an ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... at some distance, and our path took us by flower-beds where some exquisite little toys were growing, and a hot-bed where new varieties were being prop—propagated. Pretty soon we came to a plantation of young trees, with rattles, and rubber balls, and ivory rings growing on the branches, and as we went past they rang and bounded about in the merriest sort ...
— Lill's Travels in Santa Claus Land and other Stories • Ellis Towne, Sophie May and Ella Farman
... was answered that the faith would be safely retained by the masses. The maxim that the voice of the people is the voice of God is as old as Alcuin; it was renewed by some of the greatest writers anterior to democracy, by Hooker and Bossuet, and it was employed in our day by Newman to prop his theory of development. Rousseau applied it to ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... the difference, and I sent a courier back to the general, with my compliments, and with the information that at precisely eight o clock and twenty-seven minutes he could start across. Then we fell to work. Large, long trees were cut for stringers, and hewn square, posts were made to prop up the stringers, though the stringers would have held any weight. Then small trees were cut and flattened on two sides, for the road-bed, holes bored in them and pegs made to drive through them into the stringers. A lot of cavalry soldiers never worked as those ...
— How Private George W. Peck Put Down The Rebellion - or, The Funny Experiences of a Raw Recruit - 1887 • George W. Peck
... considering what we choose to pay, not what a disinterested court might consider adequate, for the good-will of the United States of Colombia, a good-will desired solely and entirely for an additional safeguard to the Panama Canal and a prop to the policy or doctrine substituted by the present Administration for the moribund ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... running, At the tipsy-topsy Tunning Of Mistress Eleanor Rumming! How for poor Philip Sparrow Was murdered at Carow, How our hearts he does harrow Jest and grief mingle In this jangle-jingle, For he will not stop To sweep nor mop, To prune nor prop, To cut each phrase up Like beef when we sup, Nor sip at each line As at brandy-wine, Or port when we dine. But angrily, wittily, Tenderly, prettily, Laughingly, learnedly, Sadly, madly, Helter-skelter John Rhymes serenely on, As English ...
— Fairies and Fusiliers • Robert Graves
... her on additionally in the midst of all this was the remembrance of the cardinal. What must the mistrustful, restless, suspicious cardinal think of her silence—the cardinal, not merely her only support, her only prop, her only protector at present, but still further, the principal instrument of her future fortune and vengeance? She knew him; she knew that at her return from a fruitless journey it would be in vain to tell him of her imprisonment, ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... particular crisis was irreparable. One after one, all the agents and tools by whom he could hope to work upon the counsels of the Klosterheim authorities had been removed. Losing their influence, he had lost every prop of his own. Nor was this all; he was reproached by the general voice of the city as the original cause of a calamity which he had since shown himself impotent to redress. He it was, and his cause, which had drawn upon the people ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... staircase with such velocity, that they at first mistook it for the application of drumsticks to the head of an empty barrel. This uncommon speed, however, was attended with a misfortune; he chanced to overlook a small defect in one of the steps, and his prop plunging into a hole, he fell backwards, to the imminent danger of his life. Tom was luckily at his back, and sustained him in his arms, so as that he escaped without any other damage than the loss of his wooden ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... than a torpedo-boat. When Judson was appointed to take charge of the thing on her little trip of six or seven thousand miles southward, his first remark as he went to look her over in dock was, "Bai Jove, that topmast wants staying forward!" The topmast was a stick about as thick as a clothes-prop, but the flat-iron was Judson's first command, and he would not have exchanged his position for second post on the "Anson" or the "Howe". He navigated her, under convoy, tenderly and lovingly to the Cape (the ...
— This is "Part II" of Soldiers Three, we don't have "Part I" • Rudyard Kipling
... has doubtless often happened to persons of vivid imagination and susceptible nerves, that talking of the devil has caused them to fancy they saw him; as even in our more incredulous days, listening to ghost stories predisposes us to see ghosts; and thus, as a prop to the a priori fallacy, there might come to be added an auxiliary fallacy of malobservation, with one of false generalization grounded on it. Fallacies of different orders often herd or cluster together ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... fer him, an' hurrah fer him, an' whar's yer promise' lan'? Little you know 'bout Scripter when you say he secon' Moses. Don' want no more sich Moseses in dis town. Dey wouldn't lebe a brick heah ef dey could take dem off. He'n his tribe got away wid 'bout all ole Missus' and young Missus' prop'ty in my 'pinion. Anyhow I feels it in my bones dey's poah, an' I mus' try an' fin' out. Dey's so proud dey'd starbe fore dey'd ...
— The Earth Trembled • E.P. Roe
... dollar—an' he toled me, th' 'ministratur hadent sot yit, an' he cudent dew nuthin til he hed. Ses I: 'ye mean th' 'ooman's got ter gwo ter th' hi'est bider?' 'Yas,' he sed, 'the Cunel's got dets, an' the've got ter bee pade, an' th' persoonel prop'ty muste bee sold ter dew it.' Then I sed, 'twud bee sum time fore thet war dun, an' the 'ooman's 'most ded an' uv no use now; 'what'll ye hire har tur me fur.' He sed a hun'red for sicks months. I planked down the money ter onst, ...
— Among the Pines - or, South in Secession Time • James R. Gilmore
... Even a frog, which has nostrils opening into its throat, still has to swallow its air in gulps, as you can see by watching its throat when it is sitting quietly. And, strange as it may seem, if you prop its mouth open, it will suffocate, because it can ...
— A Handbook of Health • Woods Hutchinson
... champion of the men of Ireland, their prop in the middle of the fight; you were the head of every battle; your ways ...
— Gods and Fighting Men • Lady I. A. Gregory
... her 'main prop,' George, the eldest boy, "that gentleman who gave me the half dollar for going to the bank for him, last week,—you know him we washed for at the United States Hotel,—said he was to be here again to-morrow. I was to call for ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... some time in the winter. Everybody knows that comical devil wanted lion's Head to burn up so 't he could build new, and I presume there a'n't a man, woman, or child anywhere round but what believes I set her on fire. Hired to do it. Now, see? Jeff off in Europe; daytime; no lives lost; prop'ty total loss. 's a clear case. Heigh? I tell you, I'm afraid I've ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... Joab, as next of kin to Asahel, was by the law and custom of the country the avenger of his blood. For some time afterwards the war was carried on, the advantage being invariably on the side of David. At length Ishbaal lost the main prop of his tottering cause by remonstrating with Abner for marrying Rizpah, one of Saul's concubines, an alliance which, according to Oriental notions, implied pretensions to the throne (cp. 2 Sam. xvi. 21 sqq.; 1 Kings ii. 21 sqq.). Abner was indignant ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... Leipzig; he could not put his finger on a single person remaining with whom he had had a nearer acquaintance. No one was left to comment on what he did and how he lived. And this knowledge withdrew the last prop from his sense of propriety. He ceased to face the trouble that care for his person implied, just as he gave up raising the lid of the piano and making a needless pretence of work. Openly now, he took up his abode in the BRUDERSTRASSE, where ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... free to live in Europe. She was a partner with a partner's obligations. To desert Mortimer would not only be to banish him from Ballinger House to dreary bachelor quarters, with none of the comforts and little luxuries he intensely loved, but it would also deprive him of his surest social prop. People had accepted him and liked him as well as they liked the totally uninteresting of the good old stock; but many would drift into the habit of not inviting him to anything but large dances, if his wife were absent. Alexina knew that her invitations to all important ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... populated rural communities. Uzbekistan is now the world's third largest cotton exporter, a major producer of gold and natural gas, and a regionally significant producer of chemicals and machinery. Following independence in December 1991, the government sought to prop up its Soviet-style command economy with subsidies and tight controls on production and prices. Faced with high rates of inflation, however, the government began to reform in mid-1994, by introducing ...
— The 1998 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... down private houses adjoining to the temples of the gods, prop up such parts as are contiguous to them; so, in undermining bashfulness, due regard is to be had to adjacent modesty, good-nature ...
— Many Thoughts of Many Minds - A Treasury of Quotations from the Literature of Every Land and Every Age • Various
... me, and not without reason, too, for if I had been under it, I had never wanted a gravedigger. I had now a great deal of work to do over again, for I had the loose earth to carry out; and, which was of more importance, I had the ceiling to prop up, so that I might be sure ...
— Robinson Crusoe • Daniel Defoe
... growl and flung herself against the door, making it fairly crack; it seemed as if the door would be broken in. Sullivan and Jason hurriedly knocked their slab bed to pieces and used the slats and heavy sides to prop and strengthen the door. The bears kept surging and clawing at the door, and while the prospectors were spiking the braces against it and giving their entire attention to it, they suddenly felt the cabin shake and heard the logs strain ...
— Wild Life on the Rockies • Enos A. Mills
... heart is the sight that God hath given him, a sight of the uncleanness of his best performance; the former sight of his immoralities did somewhat distress him, and make him betake himself to his own good deeds to ease his conscience, wherefore this was his prop, his stay; but behold, now God hath taken this from under him, and now he falls; wherefore his best doth also now forsake him, and flies away like the morning dew, or a bird, or as the chaff that is driven with the whirlwind, and the smoke out of a chimney (Hosea 9:11; ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... good 'un. I've known 'im from a lad; 'Twas me as taught 'im ridin', an' 'e rides uncommon bad; And he says—But 'ark an' listen! There's an 'orn! I 'eard it blow; Pull the blind from off the winder! Prop me ...
— Songs of Action • Arthur Conan Doyle
... curve, would inevitably be broken, did not a ligament, which the Indians call a drop of water—goutte d'eau—fall from the tree and take root in the earth; there it swells, and grows in proportion with the size of the branch, and acts to it as a living prop. Besides which, around the trunk, and at a considerable distance from the ground, are natural supports, which rise up in points or spirals to about the middle of the trunk. Has not the Grand Architect ...
— Adventures in the Philippine Islands • Paul P. de La Gironiere
... it might aggrandise the state, Could private luxury dine on plate? Kings might indeed their friends reward, But ministers find less regard. Informers, sycophants, and spies, Would not augment the year's supplies. 40 Perhaps, too, take away this prop, An annual job or two might drop. Besides, if pensions were denied, Could avarice support its pride? It might even ministers confound, And yet the state be safe and sound. I care not though 'tis understood I only mean my country's good: And (let who will my freedom blame) ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... she bought a photograph frame which had lost its prop in an unequal contest with a tea-tray which had collapsed from the heartiness of the Rector's clapping at the conclusion of the Countess's speech; and a Noah's Ark from which the star performer and his very ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Dec. 19, 1917 • Various
... Sheriff Court. Before Sheriff Gillespie. John Young, a pit-head worker, pleaded guilty to assaulting Alexander Storrar by beating him about the head and body with his fists, throwing him on the ground, and also striking him with a pit prop. Fined 1 pound. ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... father's old broadsword—suspended it by a belt round his waist, and seldom stirred without it. He was a sweet boy and a gentle if spoken fair, but cross him and he was a born devil. "In a word," she said, bursting into tears, "deprive me of Edward, good father, and ye bereave my house of prop and pillar; for my heart tells me that Halbert will take to his father's gates, ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... litigation in which the citizen Indian figures as a party defendant and in a more widespread disposition to levy local taxation upon his personalty, but in a decision of the United States Supreme Court which struck away the main prop on which has hitherto rested the Government's benevolent effort to protect him against the evils of intemperance. The court holds, in effect, that when an Indian becomes, by virtue of an allotment of land to him, a citizen of the State in ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... and desolate places of the world, are the true saints. Nothing else will do in its place. Not Churches, nor creeds, nor rituals, nor respectabilities. Without it we are not friends of Christ, nor co-workers with God. Without it we deepen the channels of human woe, and prop the strong-holds of wickedness. Without it, whatever we may not be, we are Allies of the Tempter. The Saviour says to each of us to-day, placed amidst these antagonistic forces of Life—"He that is not with me is ...
— Humanity in the City • E. H. Chapin
... alone in her lowly cabin. She had hoped for a prop and stay in her advancing years. The little boy was always active, kind and helpful. Her tears fall as she speaks of her loss, yet with an upward glance she says: 'He's gone to a better worl'. There's nary night, nor sin, nor ...
— The American Missionary - Vol. 44, No. 3, March, 1890 • Various
... authorities—on the economy effected to the State by those whom I can conscientiously reject. Owing to the malignant Tsin Lung's sinister dexterity these form an ever-decreasing band, so that you may now be fittingly deemed the chief prop of a virtuous but poverty-afflicted line. When you reflect that for the past eleven years you have thus really had the honour of providing the engaging Fa Fei with all the necessities of her very ornamental existence you will see that you already possess ...
— Kai Lung's Golden Hours • Ernest Bramah
... makes a difference," Phil argued. "If you want to write Braille with it,—which seems unlikely,—I'll consider. But if you want it to prop open the door with, or crack nuts on, or something, you can't ...
— The Happy Venture • Edith Ballinger Price
... looked down at me, and then he went back up stairs a-follered by the flunk, which last pretty soon came down ag'in an' told me I was to go up. I don't think I ever felt so much like a wringed-out dish-cloth as I did when I went up them palatial stairs. But I tried to think of things that would prop me up. P'r'aps, I thought, my ancient ancestors came to this land with his'n; who knows? An' I might 'a' been switched off on some female line, an' so lost the name an' estates. At any rate, be brave! With such thoughts as these I tried to stiffen my legs, figgeratively speakin'. ...
— The Rudder Grangers Abroad and Other Stories • Frank R. Stockton
... correctly? He turned to Proposition xxxiii. "If we love a thing which is like ourselves we endeavor as much as possible to make it love us in return." His eye ran over the proof with its impressive summing-up. "Or in other words (Schol. Prop, xiii., pt. 3), we try to make it love us in return." Unimpeachable logic, but was it true? Had he tried to make Klaartje love him in return? Not unless one counted the semi-conscious advances of wit-combats ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... had "got out" with a few further remarks uncomplimentary to American women, and the damage was done. Ernestine could not be made to see that with the departure of the pastry-cook, the last substantial prop to Milly's ...
— One Woman's Life • Robert Herrick
... Achilles' love: he bore To Aulis and the dark ship-clutching shore, He held above the altar-flame, and smote, Cool as one reaping, through the strained throat, My white Iphigenia.... Had it been To save some falling city, leaguered in With foemen; to prop up our castle towers, And rescue other children that were ours, Giving one life for many, by God's laws I had forgiven all! Not so. Because Helen was wanton, and her master knew No curb for her: for that, for that, he slew My daughter!—Even then, ...
— The Electra of Euripides • Euripides
... immorality to Christian congregations; that, instead of the saving morality of the Gospel of Christ, which rests upon revealed mysteries and supernatural gifts, it is offering us that same old array of the natural virtues or qualities which helped, for a while, like rotten pillars, to prop up the heathen nations of old. It must, then, be evident to every man of common sense that the reading of the Bible alone, though it be the Word of God, will not counterbalance the results of Pagan education. Indeed the ...
— Public School Education • Michael Mueller
... the King. Gondomar rather belonged to the party who looked for the welfare of the Spanish monarchy in the maintenance of peace, especially with England. The scheme of the marriage was part of the system of powerful alliances by which it was sought to prop the greatness of Spain. Even the uncertain rumour of this scheme, which was instantly propagated, sufficed to agitate the Protestant party in Europe and in England itself. The King declared that he moved only with leaden foot towards the proposal which had been made to him; and that, ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... persons who had once occupied privileged positions (I thus designate those in which people receive more from others than they give), who had lost them, and who wished to occupy them again. To one, two hundred rubles were indispensable, in order that he might prop up a failing business, and complete the education of his children which had been begun; another wanted a photographic outfit; a third wanted his debts paid, and respectable clothing purchased for him; a fourth needed a piano, in order to perfect ...
— The Moscow Census - From "What to do?" • Lyof N. Tolstoi
... measure, was the privilege of trading to the English plantations; yet, excepting Glasgow and Dumfries, I don't know any other Scotch towns concerned in that traffick. In other respects, I conceive the Scots were losers by the union. — They lost the independency of their state, the greatest prop of national spirit; they lost their parliament, and their courts of justice were subjected to the revision and supremacy of ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... on the table while one is eating. To sit with the left elbow propped on the table while eating with the right hand (unless one is alone and ill), or to prop the right one on the table while lifting the fork or glass to the mouth, must ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... every day I talk with you, and of you, in my heart; and I need only set down what that is thinking of. The nearer I find myself verging to that period of life which is to be labour and sorrow, the more I prop myself upon those few supports that are left me. People in this state are like props indeed; they cannot stand alone, but two or more of them can stand, leaning and bearing upon one another. I wish you and I might pass this part of life together. My only necessary ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... after this, falling into ill-health, he was sent at great expense to a more favourable climate; and then I think his perplexities were thickest. When he thought of all the other young men of singular promise, upright, good, the prop of families, who must remain at home to die, and with all their possibilities be lost to life and mankind; and how he, by one more unmerited favour, was chosen out from all these others to survive; he felt ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... vagabonds as you are, and do not presume to remain in a spot which is hallowed by the grey hairs of the patriarchal gentleman to whose tottering limbs I have the honour to act as an unworthy, but I hope an unassuming, prop and staff. And you, my tender sir,' said Mr Pecksniff, addressing himself in a tone of gentle remonstrance to the old man, 'how could you ever leave me, though even for this short period! You have absented yourself, ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... charms on earth, that I, reminded By them, might be consoled though you depart; But vainly! Far from you, by sorrow blinded, I find no prop of comfort for ...
— Translations of Shakuntala and Other Works • Kaalidaasa
... the great pity I have for him. He is weak and helpless, almost child-like in his dependence on me. I am the prop which holds up the last shreds of his self-respect. If I left him, he would drift lower and lower, I know it. Sometimes I pass some awful creature staggering along the sidewalks. He is dirty and uncared for. Long matted hair falls across his bleared and sunken eyes. I say to myself: 'But for ...
— Possessed • Cleveland Moffett
... him in action against a king's ship, and all his wild nonsense is apt to delude ye into thinkin' him a drunken play-actor. But you will never take him alive, so long as those bandy legs have strength to prop him up." ...
— Blackbeard: Buccaneer • Ralph D. Paine
... Firgrove, which was only about a mile from the village. But Joe and Moll would be sure to follow them, in order to make an attempt to recover their captives. Several times before Joe had tried to kidnap an attractive smart child whom he could train to be a sort of golden prop upon which his laziness could lean, but hitherto he had always been balked in his purpose. He would be furiously angry, Bambo knew, when he discovered that, just when a life of ease and idleness such as he had longed for seemed certain in the near future, he was ...
— Two Little Travellers - A Story for Girls • Frances Browne Arthur
... was a fine-looking man to just below his hips, and there he had been razed, as he called it to Aleck Donne, while the most peculiar thing about him as he toddled along was what at first sight looked like a prop, which extended from just beneath his head nearly to the ground, as if to enable him to stand, tripod-fashion, steadily on a windy day. But it was nothing of the sort, being only his pigtail carefully ...
— The Lost Middy - Being the Secret of the Smugglers' Gap • George Manville Fenn
... better if I had brought her with me," he said, as he read extracts; "she's a little thing, Gordon, but she's a wonder. And she's the prop on ...
— Contrary Mary • Temple Bailey
... dogged male determination to over-ride all obstacles, whether feminine or financial. And pretty Belinda Bolingbroke, being alone and unsupported by other suitors at the instant, had entwined herself instinctively around the nearest male prop that offered. It had been one of those marriages of opposites which people (ignoring the salient fact that love has about as much part in it as it has in the pursuit of a spring chicken by a hawk) speak of with sentiment as "a triumph of love over differences." Even in the first days of their engagement, ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... the church wore the papal tiara or the English crown. Two hundred years after Wyckliff, in 1582, laws were still fulminated against "divers false and perverse people of certain new sects," for Protestant England would support but one form of religion as the moral prop of the state. She regarded all innovations as questionable, or wholly evil, and their authors as dangerous men. Chief among the latter was Robert Browne. But before Browne's advent and in the days of Henry ...
— The Development of Religious Liberty in Connecticut • M. Louise Greene, Ph. D.
... were before the door, and we drove up the mountain, took the little narrow-gage railroad which is there to carry the logs down to the lake. Sitting on the front logs, we rode down the mountain. The big beams of timber are brought to the mines in order to prop up the places where the ore has been taken out. These logs do a lot of traveling. They are cut on the other side of Lake Tahoe, dragged over the lake by a tug, sawed the right length by a sawing-mill, then carried up the mountain by ...
— The Sunny Side of Diplomatic Life, 1875-1912 • Lillie DeHegermann-Lindencrone
... full performance, honour that As won, which aye love worketh at! It is but as the pedigree Of perfectness which is to be That our best good can honour claim; Yet honour to deny were shame And robbery: for it is the mould Wherein to beauty runs the gold Of good intention, and the prop That lifts to the sun the earth-drawn crop Of human sensibilities. Such honour, with a conduct wise In common things, as, not to steep The lofty mind of love in sleep Of over much familiarness; Not to degrade its kind caress, As those do that can feel no more, ...
— The Victories of Love - and Other Poems • Coventry Patmore
... with these," urged Eph, placing the tray on the cabin table. "Wait a minute. I'll prop you up and put a pillow at ...
— The Submarine Boys and the Middies - The Prize Detail at Annapolis • Victor G. Durham
... mended the broken lights in the kitchen windows, and got rid of all the old hats and bonnets that had been stuffed into them. He put on new buttons to keep up the sashes, and so banished the big sticks from the wood-pile that had been used to prop them up. He said they were too ...
— Our Young Folks, Vol 1, No. 1 - An Illustrated Magazine • Various
... the hotel within five feet of the chimney and dropped so low that his prop wash flattened the reeds in the marsh. Then, climbing again, he swung wide and went over Seaford at a legal altitude. He was, even the critical Gus admitted, a safe-and-sane flier, but the temptation to get back at Carrots Kelso a little was too much. High over the town, he turned to Scotty. "I ...
— Smugglers' Reef • John Blaine
... Indeed, there was a general chorus of commiseration, which Burt brought to a prosaic conclusion by saying: "Crocodile tears, every one. You'll all enjoy the pot-pie to-morrow with great gusto. By the way, I'll prop up one of these little fellows at the foot of Ned's crib, and in the morning he'll think that the original 'Br'er Rabbit' has hopped out of Uncle Remus's stories to make him ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... his opportunity, and taking his lasso and an extra rope, he crawled into the hole. Not fifteen feet from the opening sat one of the cougars, snarling and spitting. Jones promptly lassoed it, passed his end of the lasso round a side prop of the shaft, and out to the soldiers who had followed him. Instructing them not to pull till he called, he cautiously began to crawl by the cougar, with the intention of getting farther back and roping its hind leg, so as to prevent disaster ...
— The Last of the Plainsmen • Zane Grey
... pray to the Spirit of Life, who is said to inhabit that spot. The Spirit of Life appears; also Death—uninvited. They are (supposably) invisible. Death, tall, black-robed, corpse-faced, stands motionless and waits. The aged couple pray to the Spirit of Life for a means to prop up their existence and continue it. Their prayer fails. The Spirit of Life prophesies Zoe's martyrdom; it will take place before night. Soon Appelles arrives, young and vigorous and full of enthusiasm: he has led a host against ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Sioux would wreak swift vengeance could not be doubted. As soon as the murderous work was over, guides were with difficulty engaged. Having fitted up a sort of prop in which I could tie Hamilton to the saddle, I saw both Father Holland and Eric set out for Red ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... majority of its members grew more radical. Necker trimmed to their demands, but lost popularity by his monotonous calls for money, and fell in September, reaching his home on Lake Leman only with the greatest difficulty. Mirabeau succeeded him as the sole possible prop to the tottering throne. Under his leadership the moderate monarchists, or Feuillants, as they were later called, from the convent of that order to which they withdrew, seceded from the Jacobins, and before the Assembly had ceased its work the nation was cleft ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... an offer at the Hippodrome to walk in front of an Elephant, waving a prop Palm, but she spurned it, because she was ready to do Desdemona at a ...
— Knocking the Neighbors • George Ade
... two-story, wooden house, dark and weather-beaten. The front windows, some of them, were shattered and open, and others were boarded up. Trees and shrubbery were growing neglected, so as quite to block up the lower part. There was an aged barn near at hand, so ruinous that it had been necessary to prop it up. There were two old carts, both of which had lost a wheel. Everything was in keeping. At first I supposed that there would be no inhabitants in such a dilapidated place; but, passing on, I looked back, and saw a decrepit and ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 2. • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... stalks last several years, bearing fruit. The bean vines are thicker than a man's arm, and run to the top of the highest trees. Peach trees are abundant, and bear fruit equal to the best which can be found in France. They are often so loaded, in the gardens of the Indians, that they have to prop up the branches. There are whole forests of mulberries, whose ripened fruit we began to eat in the month of May. Plums are found in great variety, many of which are not known in Europe. Grapevines and pomegranates are common. ...
— The Adventures of the Chevalier De La Salle and His Companions, in Their Explorations of the Prairies, Forests, Lakes, and Rivers, of the New World, and Their Interviews with the Savage Tribes, Two Hu • John S. C. Abbott
... from yon fountain?" [S] Thou, my Friend! art one 210 More deeply read in thy own thoughts; to thee Science appears but what in truth she is, Not as our glory and our absolute boast, But as a succedaneum, and a prop To our infirmity. No officious slave 215 Art thou of that false secondary power By which we multiply distinctions; then, Deem that our puny boundaries are things That we perceive, and not that we have made. To thee, unblinded by these formal ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... There he will feel the whole splendid barbaric story for himself: the flocks of Abraham and Laban: the trek of Jacob's sons to Egypt for corn: the figures of Rebekah at the well, Ruth at the gleaning, and Rispah beneath the gibbet: Sisera bowing in weariness: Saul—great Saul—by the tent-prop with the jewels ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... wood, like the derrick of a crane. Altogether, it had many marks of ruin; it was a house for the rats to desert; and nothing but its excellent brightness—the window-glass polished and shining, the paint well scoured, the brasses radiant, the very prop all wreathed about with climbing flowers—nothing but its air of a well-tended, smiling veteran, sitting, crutch and all, in the sunny corner of a garden, marked it as a house for comfortable people to inhabit. In poor or idle management it would soon have ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a sitting posture, while Henri placed two pillows behind her to prop her up; and then, with the napkin spread before her and a plate on her knees, ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... things, {19b} when one action can make so many historians. This puts me in mind of what happened at Sinope. {20a} When the Corinthians heard that Philip was going to attack them, they were all alarmed, and fell to work, some brushing up their arms, others bringing stones to prop up their walls and defend their bulwarks, every one, in short, lending a hand. Diogenes observing this, and having nothing to do (for nobody employed him), tucked up his robe, and, with all his might, fell a rolling ...
— Trips to the Moon • Lucian
... and twenty-two dollars still lay in the chamois bag against her bosom, but the additional five dollars a week on to her salary was a saving prop against the not infrequent sag ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... himself at a crisis like the one in which he was called upon to act, rendered his conduct doubtful, and all his intended operations suspicious to both parties, whether his feelings were really inclined to prop up the fallen kingly authority, or his newly-acquired republican principles prompted him to become the head of the democratical party, for no one can see into the hearts of men; his popularity from ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... having retired into the obscurity of the river Yuan (in Honan), I had no appetite for the political affairs of the country. As the result of the revolution in Hsin Hai, I was by mistake elected by the people. Reluctantly I came out of my retirement and endeavoured to prop up the tottering structure. I cared for nothing, but the salvation of the country. A perusal of our history of several thousand years will reveal in vivid manner the sad fate of the descendants of ancient kings and emperors. What then ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... but luxuriant hop Around a cankered stem should twine, What Kentish boor would tear away the prop So roughly as to wound, nay, ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... years. He needed her; alone, broken, wrecked among his dreams, he needed her. He had recovered consciousness almost at once, and his first words were a curse on the man who had aimed so badly. He could talk but little, but he declared that he would rip the bandages if they did not prop his pillows so he could see the bay. The second time he woke he saw Hildegarde. She smiled brokenly, but he turned his ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... property & demand for it the protection afforded by the Const^n. It became, in course of time, a matter of dispute whether the South could take their slaves there as property. (As a matter of course this arose from jealousy—the N. having no such prop, to take.) This great quest. was decided, however, by the Chief Justice in the highest Tribunal in the world, in favor of the South; viz. that slaves were property. I refer to the "Dred Scott" Case. This should have been sufficient, as it came from the highest authority in the Gov^t. ...
— Letters of Ulysses S. Grant to His Father and His Youngest Sister, - 1857-78 • Ulysses S. Grant
... Old Calabar river, but we found the tide stronger than the wind, and that it had carried us on a mud-flat off little Quay river, which, at about half ebb left the schooner aground, this obliged us to get some spars out, to prop her up on each side. At which time we were in the following situation: West point of Old Calabar river, W. by S. Fish Town point N. by W. 1/2 W. and the entrance of little Quay river N.N.E. At 5 in the afternoon we got the spars in and laid a small anchor out, with the assistance ...
— A Voyage Round the World, Vol. I (of ?) • James Holman
... imagined that the hour of their triumph was at hand. They did not know on what a treacherous prop they were leaning, or what sore trials were yet in store for them ere that triumph should be gained. They knew the regent to be weak and timid; they did not know him to be deceitful—so deceitful that, within six weeks after the last of the messengers were despatched ...
— The Scottish Reformation - Its Epochs, Episodes, Leaders, and Distinctive Characteristics • Alexander F. Mitchell
... governing those who are not Siegfrieds or risking destruction at their hands. And this dilemma will persist until Wotan's inspiration comes to our governors, and they see that their business is not the devising of laws and institutions to prop up the weaknesses of mobs and secure the survival of the unfittest, but the breeding of men whose wills and intelligences may be depended on to produce spontaneously the social well-being our clumsy laws now aim at and miss. The majority of men at present in Europe have no business ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw
... succession, arose a series of military leaders who aimed to secure by the sword what was no longer to be obtained through constitutional and legal means. Marius, a great general but no politician, could only break down and destroy. Sulla, a sincere but narrow-minded statesman, could do no more than prop up the structure— already tottering—of senatorial rule. Pompey soon undid that work and left the constitution to become again the sport of rival soldiers. Caesar, triumphing over Pompey, gained a position of unchallenged supremacy. ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... from that Slave Oligarchy which now controls the Republic, and refuse to be its tool. Let its power be stretched forth toward this distant Territory, not to bind, but to unbind; not for the oppression of the weak, but for the subversion of the tyrannical; not for the prop and maintenance of a revolting Usurpation, but for the confirmation ...
— American Eloquence, Volume III. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various
... 2. Prop open the mouth by means of some form of gag; seize the tongue with a pair of forceps and draw ...
— The Elements of Bacteriological Technique • John William Henry Eyre
... "will this unnatural prejudice against the respectability of female labor ever die out? You know that I am to be a sewing-girl, not from choice, like you, but from necessity. You learn the use of a machine only as a prop to lean upon in a very remote contingency; I, to make it the staff for all my future life. You will continue to be a lady,—indeed, Miss Effie, you never can be anything else,—but I shall be only a sewing-girl. The prejudice will ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... twenty-three years since we have seen each other. My marriage was the occasion of our last interview, after which we parted, and both of us were happy. Assuredly I could not then foresee that you would one day be the prop of the family whose prosperity you ...
— Eugenie Grandet • Honore de Balzac
... No one was glad to find that it was he, not even Nat; for, spite of all his faults, and they were many, every one liked Dan now, because under his rough exterior lay some of the manly virtues which we most admire and love. Mrs. Jo had been the chief prop, as well as cultivator, of Dan; and she took it sadly to heart that her last and most interesting boy had turned out so ill. The theft was bad, but the lying about it, and allowing another to suffer so ...
— Little Men - Life at Plumfield With Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... the workmen of the present day. For whatever appearance of self-complacency there may be in their outward bearing, it is visible enough, by their feverish jealousy of each other, how little confidence they have in the sterling value of their several doings. Conceit may puff a man up, but never prop him up; and there is too visible distress and hopelessness in men's aspects to admit of the supposition that they have any stable support ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... and, even in their darkest hours, he had laughed at her dread of the workhouse, and assured her that while head and hands remained to him she need not fear, but should enjoy the independence of a home. Now this sole prop and stay was gone—gone, just as the black cloud had ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... don't!" she cried. "You may flout our beliefs,—but wouldn't you like to bolster up your report with an endorsement by the wife of a clergyman! It sounds so respectable and sane, doesn't it? No, sir! You can't prop up your wild-eyed theories against the good black of one minister's coat. Not by any means! I think myself that you have probably stumbled on the truth about Willem's mother; but that doesn't prove there's anything in all your notions, for that child ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm - Novelised From the Play • David Belasco
... Honor? Is it that you thought would plase me, Honor?—To lave your father alone in his ould age, after all the slaving he got and was willing to undergo, whilst ever he had strength, early and late, to make a little portion for you, Honor,—you, that I reckoned upon for the prop and pride of my ould age—and you expect you'd plase ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth
... picking her up. "There, you sit down next time, and I'll prop up the pole with a rock—this way. There, now, you hold it a little easy, and when you feel a nibble you ...
— Little Prudy • Sophie May
... the lower sash. He managed to open it some ten inches, and then, as a protest against this interference with its gradual decay, the sash-cord broke. He heard with a jump of the heart the weight thud down behind the woodwork: then, as he groped hastily behind him for a brick, to prop the sash, it came down with a run, and closed its descent with a jar that shook out two of its bottle panes to drop into the water that rushed below. Prompt upon this came a flutter and scurry of wings in water, and a wild ...
— Nicky-Nan, Reservist • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... of the arrival of Sir Arthur St. Ives, and his daughter; I believe it was in the postscript; and that I was immediately going to—Pshaw! I am beginning my story now at the wrong end. It is throughout exceedingly whimsical. Listen, and let amazement prop your ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... gentleman was a good friend of mine, but it would have required a bolder man than I was at that time to ask him for the gift of his niece, who was the head of his household, and, according to his own frequent statement, the main prop of his declining years. Had Madeline acquiesced in my general views on the subject, I might have felt encouraged to open the matter to Mr. Hinckman, but, as I said before, I had never asked her whether or not she would be mine. I thought ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 2 • Various
... Woodpeckers do not perch in the true sense—they rest either against a tree-trunk or on a limb, and even sleep in these positions. They almost all have four toes, two in front and two behind, and the strong pair of hind toes prop them up when they climb the trunks of trees, or when they stop to bore for their food. They also have stiff, pointed tail-feathers that they press against the upright trunks of trees to keep themselves in place, the same as Swifts do inside chimneys, ...
— Citizen Bird • Mabel Osgood Wright and Elliott Coues
... savages. While this clashing of one object against another could not be called the beginning of music, and while it could not be said to originate a musical instrument, it did, nevertheless, bring into existence music's greatest prop, rhythm, an ally without which music would seem to be impossible. It is hardly necessary to go into this point in detail. Suffice it to say that the sense of rhythm is highly developed even among those savage tribes which stand the lowest in the scale of civilization to-day, ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... had plenty of color and she held to the cat as an embarrassed actor does to a prop. "I tried to see you one day at Keefe, but you ...
— In Apple-Blossom Time - A Fairy-Tale to Date • Clara Louise Burnham
... his own strength to the effort, and succeeded in raising the lid against the timbers of the house, where he took care to secure it by a sufficient prop. Judith fairly trembled as she cast her first glance at the interior, and she felt a temporary relief in discovering that a piece of canvas, that was carefully tucked in around the edges, effectually concealed all beneath it. The ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... I found my friend bolstered upright in bed, with a small two-legged crutch at hand to prop his head on when he became weary of the perpendicular position. This had been his attitude for fifty days. Whether from its impeding his circulation, the distribution of his nervous currents, or both, the prostrate posture invariably brought on cessation of the heart—and the sense of intolerable ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... haue herkned & herde of mony hy[gh]e clerke[gh], & als i{n} resou{n}e[gh] of ry[gh]t red hit my seluen, [Sidenote: The high Prince of all is displeased with those who work wickedly.] {a}t at ilk prop{er} prynce at paradys welde[gh] Is displesed at vch a poy{n}t at plyes to scae. 196 Bot neu{er} [gh]et i{n} no boke breued I herde at eu{er} he wrek so wy{er}ly on werk at he made, Ne venged for no vilt of vice ne sy{n}ne, Ne so hastyfly wat[gh] hot for hatel of his wylle, 200 ...
— Early English Alliterative Poems - in the West-Midland Dialect of the Fourteenth Century • Various
... the flat of his massive hand. "You'll work another period, sewer rat, if I have to prop you up!" ...
— Vulcan's Workshop • Harl Vincent
... animation, confidence, and love. I have the strong delight that beats within the bosom of the boy who has the parents' trusty smile for ever on him. I dream of pouring happiness into those fond hearts—of growing up to be their prop and staff in their decline. I pierce into the future, and behold myself the esteemed and honoured amongst men—the patient, well-rewarded scholar—the cherished and the cherisher of the dear authors of my life—all brightness—all glory—all unsullied joy. The child touches my wet cheek, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... down inside the leaf sheath, but lets it run down the outside to the root where it is needed. As the plant gets older and taller, new roots come out from the node next above the root and sometimes from the second node above. These prop-roots are needed for support as the stalk lengthens, and they also reinforce the ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Nature Study • Ontario Ministry of Education
... descendest, it is from me that thou art sprung. Thy first combat [lit. sword-stroke] equals all of mine, and thy youth, fired with a splendid enthusiasm, by this great proof equals [or, reaches to] my renown. Prop of mine age, and sum of my happiness, touch these white hairs, to which thou restorest honor! Come, kiss this cheek, and recognize the place on which was branded the insult which ...
— The Cid • Pierre Corneille
... their chips, And the wedges flew from between their lips; Their blunt ends frizzled like celery-tips; Step and prop-iron, bolt and screw, Spring, tire, axle, and linch-pin too, Steel of the finest, bright and blue; Thorough-broke bison-skin, thick and wide; Boot, top, dasher, from tough old hide Found in the pit when the tanner died. That was the way he "put her through"— ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... them, were shattered and open, and others were boarded up. Trees and shrubbery were growing neglected, so as quite to block up the lower part. There was an aged barn near at hand, so ruinous that it had been necessary to prop it up. There were two old carts, both of which had lost a wheel. Everything was in keeping. At first I supposed that there would be no inhabitants in such a dilapidated place; but, passing on, I looked back, and saw a decrepit and infirm old man ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 2. • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... cannot confine the right of chusing a minister to the male communicants alone, but we think that every baptized adult person who contributes to the maintenance, should have a vote in electing." [Footnote: History of Brattle St. Church, p. 25, Prop. 16.] ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... and master, 'The humble inferior who presumes to address the prop of the true faith, the terror of infidels, and the refuge of the sinner, begs leave to lay before him, that after having encountered a thousand difficulties, he has at length succeeded in getting from the peasantry of his villages one hundred tomauns ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... traverses, a barren plain of scrub, and so reaches the pine plantation belonging to the Monastery of St. Michael the Archangel where the latter is lurking behind a screen of old red spruces of which the denseness seems to prop the very heavens, and which on clear, sunny days can be seen rising to mark the spot whence the monastery's crosses, like the gilded birds of the forest of eternal silence, scintillate a ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... him, and asked: "Do you think that we may take this pole? It seems to me as though some wood-cutter had left it here to prop a tree." ...
— After Long Years and Other Stories • Translated from the German by Sophie A. Miller and Agnes M. Dunne
... trunk of a tree than most. Yes, I want you to go for three reasons. First, that you may satisfy your soul on certain matters and I would help you to do so. Secondly, because I want to satisfy mine, and thirdly, because I know that you will come back safe to be a prop to me in things that will happen in days unborn. Otherwise I would have told you nothing of this story, since it is necessary to me that you should ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... Adolphe said eagerly; "I have an idea! The hatches are covered with tarpaulin. If you could hide in the forecastle during the night you might cut away all the top underneath the tarpaulin and prop it up, so that if anyone trod on it in the morning they would not notice what had been done. Then when they have pushed off you could knock away the props, the board would tumble down, and there would ...
— In the Reign of Terror - The Adventures of a Westminster Boy • G. A. Henty
... pluralities subside to one; Church, state, and faction wrestle in the dark, Tossed by the deluge in their common ark. Shorn of her bishops, banks, and dividends, Another Babel soars—but Britain ends. And why? to pamper the self-seeking wants, 650 And prop the hill of these agrarian ants. "Go to these ants, thou sluggard, and be wise;" Admire their patience through each sacrifice, Till taught to feel the lesson of their pride, The price of taxes and of homicide; Admire ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... off early on the next morning, and got to the summit of the pass without difficulty. It gave me my first experience of considerable slopes of hard, steep snow, and, like all beginners, I endeavored to prop myself up with my stick, and kept it outside, instead of holding it between myself and the slope, and leaning upon it, as should have ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume VI • Various
... foundations of the fortification walls. Then, as the lower layers of bricks became saturated and refused their support to the rows above, the wall began to crack and soon to totter to its fall. The citizens for some time tried to prop it with pieces of timber, and used other devices to avert the imminent ruin of their tower; but finding themselves overmatched by the water, and in dread lest the fall at some point or other of the circular ...
— Hellenica • Xenophon
... maid behind her back was fetching from the clothes-prop a waterglobe upon its stand; she set it down on the table before the rush-light, moving on tiptoe, for to her the writing of a letter was a sort of necromancy, and she was distressed for Katharine's sake. She had heard that to write at night would make a woman ...
— The Fifth Queen • Ford Madox Ford
... that he should know me. I asked him, as carelessly as I could, how the old miller was now? He told me he was dead. This realization of the worst apprehensions caused by his long silence shocked me inexpressibly. It seemed as though every prop gave way from under me. I had been talking to Amante only that very day of the safety and comfort of the home that awaited her in my father's house; of the gratitude which the old man would feel towards her; and how there, in ...
— Curious, if True - Strange Tales • Elizabeth Gaskell
... on his back, on a heap of fresh straw, in a close and filthy mud-built hut. Under his aching neck a wooden pillow or prop of native make supported his head. Two women and a man bent over him and smiled. Their faces, though black, were far from unkindly. They were pleased to see him stare about with such meaning in his eyes. They were friendly, no doubt. They seemed really ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen
... you," said he, "but my time here is very short, and your well-meant efforts for my relief are not only useless, but they also increase my suffering. You are, I presume, from some ship which has come up with us since those fiends left. Kindly prop me up a little higher on the sofa, gentlemen, if you please, and I will endeavour to tell you what has happened ...
— For Treasure Bound • Harry Collingwood
... a hooded kirtle girded around him reaching down to his calves; a straightsword with ornaments of walrus-tooth on his left thigh." "But who might he be?" [LL.fo.98b.] asked Ailill of Fergus. "I know him indeed," Fergus made answer. "He is the prop of battle; [2]he is the wild heat of anger; he is the daring of every battle;[2] he is the triumph of every combat; he is the tool that pierces, is the man who comes thither. Connud macMorna, from the Callann in the north, is the ...
— The Ancient Irish Epic Tale Tain Bo Cualnge • Unknown
... looked sidewise sometimes at his companion as he asked the news of their mutual friends, and she answered. Yet when he got, along with her mild responses, one of those glances, he was himself strangely subdued by it, and fain to prop his leaning prejudices by contrasting her scant print gown, her slat sunbonnet, and cowhide shoes with the apparel of the humblest in the ...
— The Power and the Glory • Grace MacGowan Cooke
... again seated there. We can afford to bide our time, and assuredly it will not be long before a party is formed against Warwick. Until then we must bear everything. Our interests are the same. If he is content to remain a prop to the throne, and not to eclipse it, the memory of the past will not stand between us, and I shall regard him as the weapon that has beaten down the House of York and restored us to our own, and shall give him my confidence and friendship. If, on the other hand, he assumes too much, and ...
— A Knight of the White Cross • G.A. Henty
... table decoration, and given a few other hasty instructions, I dashed off to keep my appointment at the Stadhuis. On the way I consoled myself with the reflection that it's an ill wind which blows nobody good. I had been bereaved of Jan as a prop, but I might make use of him and his friends by-and-by as one of the sights of Leiden, and I would take advantage of my knowledge of the usual program on such festive nights as this for ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... with awakened curiosity. This agreement was an unexpected prop for him. "You, too, think it a perfect likeness?" he asked her. Her old blue eyes, old in the antique tranquillity of their regard, yet still of such a vivid, unfaded turquoise, turned on him and again he had that impression of ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... attention to the room which was kitchen and dining-room in one. From a neat chest of drawers she drew her best and only white table-cloth and spread it on the table. The table was a little rickety in one leg, but several folds of newspaper acted as a splendid prop, and quite removed the difficulty. Her supply of china and silver was scarce, but it would do with washing between courses. Four chairs were all she had, but they were quite enough as her guests numbered four. An empty ...
— Virginia of Elk Creek Valley • Mary Ellen Chase
... toward them hatless, but trailing a stick that had been the prop of his later convalescence. His blue serge coat, a negligee shirt and duck trousers had been drawn a few days before from the trunks brought by Oscar from the bungalow. He was clean-shaven for the first time since his illness, and the two men looked at him ...
— The Port of Missing Men • Meredith Nicholson
... companion thus unwittingly revealed a strong phase of her character. She saw that her tendency was to lean upon the nearest prop; and, as to be "forewarned is to be forearmed," she ...
— Katherine's Sheaves • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... others rather than for himself. Parts of the passionate rebuke which suffering and indignation had forced from him remained branded upon her memory; and she wept in shame, feeling her helplessness, her ignorance, her inexperience, feeling that she had no longer any sure support or prop. For how could she trust those who had drawn her into this hideous, this cruel business? Who, taking advantage at once of her wounded vanity, and her affection for her brother, had led her to this act, from which she now shrank ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman
... pass'd through Caesar, But we must follow where his fortune leads us; All provident Princes measure their intents According to their power, and so dispose them: And thinkst thou (Ptolomy) that thou canst prop His Ruines, under whom sad Rome now suffers? Or 'tempt the Conquerours force when 'tis confirm'd? Shall we, that in the Battail sate as Neuters Serve him that's overcome? No, no, he's lost. And though 'tis noble to a ...
— The False One • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
... supply, helping to control inflation, but it also caused high interest rates and led to operating losses for the bank. Early in 1998, it relaxed its monetary policy in an effort to correct these problems, but increased pressure on the quetzal has prompted the bank to intervene to prop ...
— The 1998 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... watch, his horse, and any sum of money they should name. They rejected his offers with indignation; and the gold that could seduce a man high in the esteem and confidence of his country, who had the remembrance of his past exploits, the motives of present reputation and future glory to prop his integrity, had no charms for three simple peasants, leaning only on their virtue, and a ...
— The Land We Live In - The Story of Our Country • Henry Mann
... woman; the clap-trappery of the oracles, miracles, and wonders. He had discovered that her "divine intuitions" were mere shrewd guesses, where they had any meaning at all; that her eloquent silences were screens for ignorance or boredom—and so on through the list of legends that prop the feminist cult. ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... to do this, to enter into these governments, and, by persuasion, by numbers, and by new laws, to establish a new State. Comrades, do not follow this line of march, for we would perish in following it in Belgium or in France as elsewhere. Rather let us leave these governments to rot away and not prop them up with our morality. This is the reason: the International is and must be a State within States. Let these States march on as they like, even to the point where our State is the strongest. Then, on their ruins, we will place ours, all prepared, all made ready, such as it exists in each section."[12] ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... entreaty and reproof, besought his friend to attend to his real interests, resolutely to avoid those fascinations which in fact were fast deserting him, and to spend his great powers on a worthy field, in which he, his sovereign, would be his prop, his stay, and his pioneer. My father felt this kindness; for a moment ambitious dreams floated before him; and he thought that it would be well to exchange his present pursuits for nobler duties. With sincerity and fervour he gave the required promise: as a pledge ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... their lives. But when we ascend from the conception of a bare physical maintenance for an average family to such a wage as would provide the real minimum requirements of a civilized life and meet all its contingencies without having to lean on any external prop, we should have to make additions to Mr. Rowntree's figure which have not yet been computed, but as to which it is probably well within the mark to say that none but the most highly skilled artisans are able to ...
— Liberalism • L. T. Hobhouse
... his countrymen knew that the bayonets of his soldiers were the actual mainstay of his pretentious title. Neither his earlier career nor the size of his following was sufficiently impressive to assure him popular support if the military prop gave way. His lavish expenditures, furthermore, and his arbitrary replacement of the Congress by a docile body which would authorize forced loans at his command, steadily undermined his position. Apart from the faults of Iturbide himself, ...
— The Hispanic Nations of the New World - Volume 50 in The Chronicles Of America Series • William R. Shepherd
... met, Mexican or Indian, was his habit, one that might have begotten a measure of contempt in the beholder, had the Father not possessed a sternness, latent for the most part, it is true, but which could, on occasion, be evoked to prop up the apparently tottering respect due him. Father Uria was fond, too, of company, not only for its own sake, but because it gave him an excuse for the pleasures of the table, and, in especial, for enjoying the delights of the wine made at Mission San Gabriel, ...
— Old Mission Stories of California • Charles Franklin Carter
... to suppose that this illness, like all her former ones, will be but temporary; but I cannot always feel so. Meantime she is dead to me and I miss a prop. All my strength is gone, and I am like a fool, bereft of her co-operation. I dare not think, lest I should think wrong; so used am I to look up to her in the least and the biggest perplexity. To say all that I know of her would ...
— Charles Lamb • Walter Jerrold
... and certainly could not have said when the change had come, she was not now particularly unhappy. It was an alleviation that her mother was more of an invalid, so that some of the responsibilities of the household devolved on her, and her mother leaned on her a little. She was certainly not the prop of the house, or the lodestar to which they all turned for guidance, none of the satisfactory things women are called in poetry, but she was not such an odd-man-out ...
— The Third Miss Symons • Flora Macdonald Mayor
... Tell it!" And Nan settled herself more comfortably against the governess' knee quite as if that person were, in reality, her prop and stay, instead of being only some one she "sort of ...
— The Governess • Julie M. Lippmann
... that swearing made a flaw? 170 For Protestant Religion vow, That did that vowing disallow? For Privilege of Parliament, In which that swearing made a rent? And since, of all the three, not one 175 Is left in being, 'tis well known. Did they not swear, in express words, To prop and back the House of Lords, And after turn'd out the whole House-full Of Peers, as dang'rous and unusefull? 180 So CROMWELL, with deep oaths and vows, Swore all the Commons out o' th' House; Vow'd that the red-coats would disband, Ay, marry wou'd they, ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... is the condition of this most interesting monument of an age which has utterly passed away? If there is any building in the world which belongs wholly to the past, towards which the duty of the present is simply to preserve, to guard every stone, to prop if need be, but to disturb nothing, to stay from falling as long as human power can stay it, but to abstain from supplanting one jot or one tittle of the ancient work by the most perfect of modern copies—it is surely ...
— Sketches of Travel in Normandy and Maine • Edward A. Freeman
... a part of the plateau which was invisible from the plain, and here in feverish haste they built a little cairn. Many flaky slabs of stone were lying about, and it did not take long to prop the largest of these against a rock, so as to make a lean-to, and then to put two side-pieces to complete it. The slabs were of the same colour as the rock, so that to a casual glance the hiding-place was not very visible. The two ladies were squeezed into this, and they crouched together, Sadie's ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle
... a mother's care? In the name of God, assist me to snatch her from destruction! Let me but give her an education—let me but prepare her body and mind to encounter the ills which await her sex, and I will teach her to consider you as her second mother, and herself as the prop of your age. Yes, Jemima, look at me—observe me closely, and read my very soul; you merit a better fate;" she held out her hand with a firm gesture of assurance; "and I will procure it for you, as a testimony of my esteem, as well ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft
... one of our Judges of the Admiraltry, & seconded by another—there is also the Solicitor General (a Wedderburne in Principle but not equal to him in Ability) the Advocate General &c &c. The whole Design of these Addresses is to prop ...
— The Writings of Samuel Adams, vol. III. • Samuel Adams
... world he conquered with a sage's eye, As with a soldier's spirit; but a scene More awful opens: ancient world, adieu! Adieu, cloud-piercing pillars, erst its bounds; 30 And thou, whose aged head once seemed to prop The heavens, huge Atlas, sinking fast, adieu! What though the seas with wilder fury rave, Through their deserted realm; though the dread Cape,[181] Sole-frowning o'er the war of waves below, That bar the seaman's search, ...
— The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles, Vol. 1 • William Lisle Bowles
... profession, it is the art of lying. Never during a prolonged acquaintance with brothels and houses of bad repute have we encountered a truth-loving prostitute. Gorki, however, needed her for his work. Her confession removes the last obstacle to the confession of the murderer. It cuts away the last prop beneath ...
— Maxim Gorki • Hans Ostwald
... ovaries are exhausted. The next day, she is dead. The eggs are dabbed in a continuous layer, at the entrance to the throat, at the root of the tongue, on the membrane of the palate. Their number appears considerable; the whole inside of the gullet is white with them. I fix a little wooden prop between the two mandibles of the beak, to keep them open and enable ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... said, would be matter of future deliberation. The object he had in view was, in the words of Mr. Fox, "not to pull down, but to work upon our constitution; to examine it with care and reverence; to repair it where decayed; to amend it where defective; to prop it where it wanted support; and to adapt it to the purposes of the present time, as our ancestors had done from generation to generation, and always transmitted it not only unimpaired, but improved, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... considered foolish— Today I am not going to the restaurant. I am after all this time weary of the waiters, Who scornfully bring us, with their smug grimaces, Dark beer and make us so confused That we cannot find our home And we must Use the foolish street lights To prop ourselves up with weak hands. Today I have bigger things in mind— Ah, I shall find out the meaning of existence. And in the evening I shall do some roller skating Or go at some ...
— The Verse of Alfred Lichtenstein • Alfred Lichtenstein
... with added beauty from the lovely names they wear—a tragic yet a charming legacy from Kanonsis and Kanonsionni, the brave and mighty people of the Long House, and those outside its walls who helped to prop or undermine it, ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... he places stone on stone; He scatters seed: you are at once the prop Among the long roots of his fragile crop. You manufacture for him, and insure House, harvest, implement and furniture, And hold ...
— Georgian Poetry 1918-19 • Various
... and antiquities and rare marble fragments, in a spacious room surrounded with laden shelves, Romola was his daily companion and assistant. There was a time when he had hoped that his son, Dino, would have followed in his steps, to be the prop of his age, and to take up and continue his scholarly labours after he was dead. But Dino had failed him; Dino had given himself up to religion and entered the priesthood, and the passion of Bardo's resentment had flamed into fierce hatred towards this recreant son of his, and none dared so ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... right. We saw Jim suddenly reach over as the horses were going stride and stride; saw him lift Miss Falkland from her saddle as if she had been a child and place her before him; saw the brown horse prop, and swing round on his haunches in a way that showed he had not been called the crack 'cutting-out' horse on a big cattle run for nothing. We saw Jim jump to the ground and lift the young lady down. We saw only ...
— Robbery Under Arms • Thomas Alexander Browne, AKA Rolf Boldrewood
... make no difference whether we were in or out of the wood, and we might see either emigrants to California moving west, or the post to one of the forts, and thus obtain assistance. Obed and I soon got up the tent. I sat down, and he made his shoulders serve as a prop while I stuck in the pole, and thus in a few minutes we had a comfortable ...
— Dick Onslow - Among the Redskins • W.H.G. Kingston
... the tender age of four years, having no brothers or sisters to prop me round with young affections and sympathies, I fell into three pairs of hands, excellent in their way, but peculiar. Patience, Eunice, and Mary Ann Pettibone were my aunts on my father's side. All my mother's relations kept shady when the lonely orphan looked ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... masters. Situated as Bacon was, it was scarcely possible for him to shape his course so as not to give one or both of his employers reason to complain. For a time he acted as fairly as, in circumstances so embarrassing, could reasonably be expected. At length he found that, while he was trying to prop the fortunes of another, he was in danger of shaking his own. He had disobliged both the parties whom he wished to reconcile. Essex thought him wanting in zeal as a friend: Elizabeth thought him wanting in duty as a subject. The Earl looked ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... any form of government are inauspicious to liberty, and which are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty; in this sense it is that your union ought to be considered as a main prop of your liberty, and that the love of the one ought to endear to you ...
— From Farm House to the White House • William M. Thayer
... a son, She looked to heaven, and cried, "Thy will be done!" But, oh! the father no such solace found— Dark, cheerless anguish wrapt his spirit round; He was a stranger to the Christian's hope, And in bereavement's hour he sought a prop On which his pierced and stricken soul might lean; Yet, as he sought it, doubts would intervene— Doubts which for years had clouded o'er his soul— Doubts that, with prayers he struggled to control; ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume XXIV. • Revised by Alexander Leighton
... changes, reverses, extravagance, and extraordinary governmental expenditure, the bank was considered the prop of national finance. The French Revolution and its consequent war with England led to many heavy outlays by the British Government. In 1795 the bank desired the chancellor of the exchequer to make his arrangements for the year without 'any further ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. IV. October, 1863, No. IV. - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... oxen, we drove on after our companions. We had not gone a mile, when the shoeing of one of the wheels—that had shrunk from the extreme dryness of the atmosphere— rolled off; and the felloes came very near flying asunder. We were luckily able to prevent this, by suddenly stopping, and setting a prop under the body of the wagon. This, as you may perceive, was a much more serious accident than the breaking of the tongue; and at first I thought of galloping forward, and asking some of our companions to come back to my assistance. But in consequence ...
— The Desert Home - The Adventures of a Lost Family in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... me, I was little better than light-headed. I now am calm, but sadly taken down, and flat. I have every reason to suppose that this illness, like all her former ones, will be but temporary; but I cannot always feel so. Meantime she is dead to me, and I miss a prop. All my strength is gone, and I am like a [fool, ber]eft of her co-operation. I dare not think, lest I [should think] wrong; so used am I to look up to her [in the least] and the biggest perplexity. To say all that [I know of her] would be more than I think any body could [believe ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... remove them—if the King set so little value on his promise—a promise now known to the whole city, and which he must in self-defence now speak openly of, he foresaw the speedy downfall of the kingdom. Who, he asked, will subject themselves to be deceived in an endeavour to prop it up by the removal of those who were living on its heart's blood, or be made liars by reporting promises never to be ...
— A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, Volumes I & II • William Sleeman
... more—disband your Rebel Troops, And strait with me to Abdelazer's Tent, Where all his Claims he shall resign to you, Both in my self, the Kingdom, and the Crown: You being departed, thousands more will leave him, And you're alone the Prop to his Rebellion. ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. II • Aphra Behn
... it turn inward or outward, the Button will not go so far, the strait Line being the shortest; besides the Body would be uncovered, for by carrying the Foot inwards, the Flank is exposed, and by carrying it outwards the Front of the Body, and the Body is thereby weakened; the Prop and the Body being obliged to form an Angle instead of a strait Line, from the Heel of the Left Foot to the Point or Button of ...
— The Art of Fencing - The Use of the Small Sword • Monsieur L'Abbat
... and species of prop or association or support which threw the responsibility upon civilisation or society, or anything but the individual conscience. He has often been called a prophet. The real ground of the truth of ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... notions with regard to domestic happiness, and had he been poor and dependent upon his own exertions he might have been an average husband; at least he would have gotten on well with Ethelyn, whose stronger nature would have upheld his and been like a supporting prop to a feeble timber. As it was, he drew many pleasing pictures of the home which was to be his and Ethie's. Now it was in the city, near to his mother's and Mrs. General Tophevie, his mother's intimate friend, whose house was the open sesame to the creme de la creme of ...
— Ethelyn's Mistake • Mary Jane Holmes
... asparagus; and now—taste it. I told him not to put too much sugar, and he has put none. Thus it is with mankind,—ever in extremes, and consequently ever in error. Thus it was that Luther said, so felicitously and so truly, that the human mind was like a drunken peasant on horseback: prop it on one side, and it falls on ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... two hundred cubits. As it bent on one side towards the southeast, the king, fearing it would fall, propped it with a post eight or nine spans around. The tree began to grow at the very heart of the prop, where it met the trunk; a shoot pierced through the post, and went down to the ground, where it entered and formed roots, that rose to the surface and were about four spans round. Although the post was split in the middle, the outer portions ...
— Chinese Literature • Anonymous
... Phoenicians. These persons had brought a cargo of natrum, which is the subcarbonate of soda, to the Syrian coast in the vicinity of Acre, and had gone ashore at the mouth of the river Belus to cook their dinner. Having lighted a fire upon the sand, they looked about for some stones to prop up their cooking utensils, but finding none, or none convenient for the purpose, they bethought themselves of utilising for the occasion some of the blocks of natrum with which their ship was laden. These were ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... a lever about a wheelbarrow?' said his father. 'O yes, sir,' said JAMES. 'The axle; and the wheel is the prop, the load is the weight, and the ...
— Punchinello Vol. 1, No. 21, August 20, 1870 • Various
... as was the case with a certain gallant captain renowned in song? Neither the one nor the other. The simple fact was, that Sir Francis Levison was in a state of pecuniary embarrassment, and required something to prop him up—some snug sinecure—plenty to get and nothing ...
— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood
... finds that this and the other little prop has been added, where possibility allowed. Civil-list and Privy-purse were from of old well cared for. King's Constitutional Guard, Eighteen hundred loyal men from the Eighty-three Departments, under a loyal Duke de Brissac; this, with trustworthy Swiss besides, is of itself ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... a stone and I'll prop it up," requested Hippy. The guide did so, and Lieutenant Wingate dropped the stone beside it, after straightening up the ...
— Grace Harlowe's Overland Riders on the Great American Desert • Jessie Graham Flower
... blessed the dear child as they called her, who planned for their comfort when the blasts of winter were raging around their homes. Before her great trial she had found her enjoyment more in her intellectual than spiritual life, but when every earthly prop was torn away, she learned to lean her fainting head on Christ the corner-stone and the language of her heart was "Nearer to thee, e'en though it be a cross that raiseth me." In surrendering her life she found a new life and more abundant ...
— Trial and Triumph • Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
... contending any longer in a cause where she had met with nothing but misfortunes of her own procuring, left the kingdom likewise, and retired to her husband. Nor was this the only good fortune that befell Stephen; for before the year ended, the main prop and pillar of his enemies was taken away by death; this was Robert Earl of Gloucester, than whom there have been few private persons known in the world that deserve a fairer place and character in the registers of time, for ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. X. • Jonathan Swift
... all of wood; how he has bent the lower planks so as to give the idea of the building lapping over the pivot on which it rests inside; and how, finally, he has insisted on the great leverage of the beam behind it, while Stanfield's lever looks more like a prop than a thing to turn the roof with. And he has done all this fearlessly, though none of these elements of form are pleasant ones in themselves, but tend, on the whole, to give a somewhat mean and ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... instruments that threw the turnspit out of employment (and have well-nigh banished him from the face of the earth), cook the Jack hare, which we bring in in the pocket of our shooting-jacket. We wear jack-boots, and draw them off with boot-jacks; prop up our houses with jack-screws; wipe our hands on jack-towels; drink out of black-jacks, and wear them on our backs too, at least our ancestors did; while flap-jacks[3] gave a relish to their Lenten diet, jack-of-the-clock[4] told them the hour; Jack priests held ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 179. Saturday, April 2, 1853. • Various
... bad patch, Nan," he said abruptly. "Ef things kep hittin' their present gait, why, I don't jest see wher' we're to strike bottom. The pinch ain't yet, but you can't never kick out a prop without shakin' the whole darned buildin' mighty bad. An' that's how the Obar's fixed. Ther's a mighty big punch gone plumb out o' Jeff's fight, an', well, I guess we're needin' all our punch to fix the things crowdin' ...
— The Forfeit • Ridgwell Cullum
... consulting him about the purchase of some old furniture in London he wrote: "There is a chair (without a bottom) at a shop near the office, which I think would suit you. It cannot stand of itself, but will almost seat somebody, if you put it in a corner, and prop one leg up with two wedges and cut another leg off, The proprietor asks L20, but says he admires literature and would take L18. He is of republican principles and I think would take L17 19s. 6d. from a cousin; shall I secure this prize? It is very ugly and wormy, ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... reckons on; rather, if one may trust the manner of his setting to work, he would propound his doctrine to the class. Always to be found, of spirits instructed up to a certain height and there resting—vines that run up a prop and there tangle and grow to a knot—which want supplying with fresh poles; so the provident man brings his bundle into the grounds, and sticks them in laterally or a-top of the others, as the case requires, and all the old stocks go on growing again—but here, with us, whoever wanted Chaucer, ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... much importuning I was constrain'd to wear the hat that still From bad to worse it shifted.—Cephas came; He came, who was the Holy Spirit's vessel, Barefoot and lean, eating their bread, as chanc'd, At the first table. Modern Shepherd's need Those who on either hand may prop and lead them, So burly are they grown: and from behind Others to hoist them. Down the palfrey's sides Spread their broad mantles, so as both the beasts Are cover'd with one skin. O patience! thou That lookst on this and ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... in which it occurred to him to give vent to his surprise, was to prop his back against the shop door, and indulge in a soft, prolonged whistle. He could not take his eyes from Jenkins's face. "Is it you, or your shadow, Jenkins?" he asked, making room for the invalid ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood
... train comes in; but after that, we will with pleasure." Mr. Tatt waits, and the train comes in, and then Witchem and me go off with him to the Hotel. Mr. Tatt he's got up quite regardless of expense, for the occasion; and in his shirt-front there's a beautiful diamond prop, cost him fifteen or twenty pound - a very handsome pin indeed. We drink our sherry at the bar, and have had our three or four glasses, when Witchem cries suddenly, "Look out, Mr. Wield! stand fast!" and a dash is made ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... right in considering Moses a Schlemihl in comparison with many a fellow-immigrant, who brought indefatigable hand and subtle brain to the struggle for existence, and discarded the prop of charity as soon as he ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... hanging limply from a lance stuck in the chalk-bank near a roughly-contrived tarpaulin and pit-prop shelter revealed the infantry brigadier's headquarters. The Brigade signalling officer hailed me from a dug-out that flew the blue and white of the signalling company. Outside the brigade-major's hut I found Captain Drysdale of D Battery, and two other gunner officers. "We ...
— Pushed and the Return Push • George Herbert Fosdike Nichols, (AKA Quex)
... little influence he could obtain over the Jacobite counsels. The hopeless Rebellion of 1715, in Scotland, Bolingbroke laboured in vain to delay until there might be some chance of success. The death of Louis XIV., on the 1st of September in that year, had removed the last prop of a falling cause. ...
— Letters to Sir William Windham and Mr. Pope • Lord Bolingbroke
... administered by a plurality of persons, the whole power and authority belonging to it was, on particular occasions, committed to one; and upon great alarms, when the political fabric was shaken or endangered, a monarchical power has been applied, like a prop, to secure the state against the rage of the tempest. Thus were the dictators occasionally named at Rome, and the stadtholders in the United Provinces; and thus, in mixed governments, the royal prerogative is occasionally enlarged, by the temporary suspension of laws, ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... a dangerous age," said the doctor gravely. "Do you have a cough? Heartburn after dinner? Prop up on pillows at night? Just as I thought! And no checkup for ten ...
— An Ounce of Cure • Alan Edward Nourse
... composed of two long poles. The heels of the two foremost were fitted in a pair of bits in the deck, through which ran a piece of horizontal timber, on which they worked; so that they could be raised or depressed at pleasure. The after pole was shorter than the others, and served as a prop to them. When the pirates intend to board an enemy, they allow this mast to fall over the bows, and it serves them as a ladder to climb on to her decks. They were steered in a curious way, by two broad-bladed oars running through the counter at either quarter. A broad platform ...
— Mark Seaworth • William H.G. Kingston
... in the affirmative: and then another question arises; whether this House stands firm upon its ancient foundations, and is not, by time and accidents, so declined from its perpendicular as to want the hand of the wise and experienced architects of the day to set it upright again, and to prop and buttress it up for duration;—whether it continues true to the principles upon which it has hitherto stood;—whether this be de facto the Constitution of the House of Commons as it has been since the time ...
— Thoughts on the Present Discontents - and Speeches • Edmund Burke
... dark, gaunt house on Usher's Island, the upper part of which they had rented from Mr. Fulham, the corn-factor on the ground floor. That was a good thirty years ago if it was a day. Mary Jane, who was then a little girl in short clothes, was now the main prop of the household, for she had the organ in Haddington Road. She had been through the Academy and gave a pupils' concert every year in the upper room of the Antient Concert Rooms. Many of her pupils belonged to the better-class families on the Kingstown and Dalkey line. Old as they ...
— Dubliners • James Joyce
... condition of things then prevalent, could scarcely even be termed Loyalists. Writing in 1812, Charles Knight, the historian, described the fierce national struggle of the previous twenty years with Napoleon and expressed a longing wish for the prop of a sincere and spontaneous loyalty to the throne in the critical times that were to follow. But such a sentiment of loyalty was not then expressed, and could hardly have been publicly evoked by a ruler of the type of George IV., whether ...
— The Life of King Edward VII - with a sketch of the career of King George V • J. Castell Hopkins
... down and jerked a prop over. Again, and again.... The motor caught. He went plunging to the other. Minutes.... They caught. He throttled them down to the proper warming up roaring, while the air in ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930 • Various
... alternative of governing those who are not Siegfrieds or risking destruction at their hands. And this dilemma will persist until Wotan's inspiration comes to our governors, and they see that their business is not the devising of laws and institutions to prop up the weaknesses of mobs and secure the survival of the unfittest, but the breeding of men whose wills and intelligences may be depended on to produce spontaneously the social well-being our clumsy laws now aim at and miss. The majority of men at present in Europe ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw
... restoration of China's authority. Amursana, however, considered that the presence of this force detracted from the dignity of his position. Having risen to the greatness he coveted, Amursana meditated casting aside the prop by which he had risen; but before he took an irretraceable step he resolved to make use of the Chinese forces for extending his authority south of the Tian Shan range into Kashgaria. With some hesitation Panti lent him 500 Chinese soldiers, ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... sadly on the fluted edges Of pillars once the prop and pride of palace ledges, Now smear'd with damp decay and sunk in ...
— Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... vivid imagination and susceptible nerves, that talking of the devil has caused them to fancy they saw him; as even in our more incredulous days, listening to ghost stories predisposes us to see ghosts; and thus, as a prop to the a priori fallacy, there might come to be added an auxiliary fallacy of malobservation, with one of false generalization grounded on it. Fallacies of different orders often herd or cluster together in this fashion, ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... disturb me to think of myself as alone." The strong lines in Scarborough's face were in evidence. "But it would disturb me if I were propped up and weren't sure I could stand alone. I'm afraid to lean on any one or anything—my prop might give way. And I don't want any friends or any associates who value me for any other reason than what I myself am. I purpose never to ...
— The Cost • David Graham Phillips
... the coal, and the bark of their trunks is often found in the clays above, squeezed flat in lengths of 30, 60, or 70 feet. Sometimes, instead of being flat the bark is still in the shape of a trunk, and the interior is filled with sane; and then the trunk is very heavy, and if the miners do not prop the roof up well it falls down and kills those beneath it. Stigmaria is the root of the Sigillaria, and is found in the clays below the coal. Botanists are not yet quite certain about the seed-cases of this tree, but Mr. Carruthers believes that they grew inside the base of the leaves, as they ...
— The Fairy-Land of Science • Arabella B. Buckley
... Olaf Gueldmar,—strong in the strength of the Lord, I dare to set foot upon your accursed threshold, and once more make my just demand. Give me back the child of my dead daughter! . . . restore to me the erring creature who should be the prop of my defenceless age, had not your pagan spells alienated her from me,—release her,—and bid her return with me to my desolate hearth and home. This done,—I will stay the tempest that threatens your habitation—I ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... on additionally in the midst of all this was the remembrance of the cardinal. What must the mistrustful, restless, suspicious cardinal think of her silence—the cardinal, not merely her only support, her only prop, her only protector at present, but still further, the principal instrument of her future fortune and vengeance? She knew him; she knew that at her return from a fruitless journey it would be in vain to tell him of her ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... the presiding officer; and she was not sorry to see that the dapper young Senator from Iowa came at once and stood in the open space before the president's desk to exhibit his feet as soon as she entered the gallery, whereas she had early learned from common report that his usual custom was to prop them on his desk and enjoy them himself with a selfish ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... valley, where, quite unexpectedly, we came upon Bylands Abbey, the rival of Rievaulx, but far more fallen into decay. It stood alone in the midst of the wide valley; no caretaker hindered our steps to its precincts and no effort had been made to prop its crumbling walls or to stay the green ruin creeping over it. The fragment of its great eastern window, still standing, was its most imposing feature and showed that it had been a church of no mean ...
— British Highways And Byways From A Motor Car - Being A Record Of A Five Thousand Mile Tour In England, - Wales And Scotland • Thomas D. Murphy
... when I feel your hair under my fingers, I shiver; a heavenly joy comes over me, and I say to myself, In all this world of darkness which encompasses me, in this universe of solitude, in this great obscurity of ruin in which I am, in this quaking fear of myself and of everything, I have one prop; and he is there. It is ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... unfitness for the frying-pan. That controversy made it plain That letting go a good secure, In hope of future gain, Is but imprudence pure. The fisherman had reason good— The troutling did the best he could— Both argued for their lives. Now, if my present purpose thrives, I'll prop my former proposition By building on a small addition. A certain wolf, in point of wit The prudent fisher's opposite, A dog once finding far astray, Prepared to take him as his prey. The dog his leanness pled; 'Your lordship, sure,' he said, 'Cannot be very eager To eat a dog so ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... six or seven steps. Again he was an unregarded and negligible spectator. I presume he missed Johnny's hand in Albert's, and Johnny's pressure on Albert's shoulder—the one with the stain; and I hope he did. It was the hand of the stronger, taking possession. "My prop, my future mainstay!" ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller
... know 'bout Scripter when you say he secon' Moses. Don' want no more sich Moseses in dis town. Dey wouldn't lebe a brick heah ef dey could take dem off. He'n his tribe got away wid 'bout all ole Missus' and young Missus' prop'ty in my 'pinion. Anyhow I feels it in my bones dey's poah, an' I mus' try an' fin' out. Dey's so proud dey'd starbe fore ...
— The Earth Trembled • E.P. Roe
... be? That thought made me furious: for the third time I approached the hand with my own: I clasped it, and at the same instant I tried to rise, to draw this dead body towards me, and be certain of the hideous crime. But, as I strove to prop myself on my left elbow, the cold hand I was clasping became alive, and was withdrawn—and I knew that instant, to my utter astonishment, that I held none other than my own left hand, which, lying stiffened on the hard floor, had ...
— The True Story Book • Andrew Lang
... congratulate you, sir, on being without reproach in your business relations. You will suit me to a nicety. I lost two years ago the old man who sat at this desk for the last forty years. He was the only friend I had in the wide earth. He was my prop and support, and now that he is gone, I feel tottering and weak. I want some one to assist me in the cares of my immense business; a partner, young, active, and possessed of just the ...
— May Brooke • Anna H. Dorsey
... hot blood gets together and there's nobody by. They may mean to be straight enough, but before they knows where they are, nature's took hold of them, and there they are.... But even supposin' that 'asn't happened, I don't know as I'm much better off. That girl was the very prop of my business; she's gone, never to return, accordin' to her own account. As to this marryin' business, that may seem to you, Archdeacon, to improve things, but I'm not so sure that it does after all. You may be all very 'igh and mighty in your way, but I'm thinkin' of myself ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... him when he stands, as you say, beside the throne, once your father is again seated there. We can afford to bide our time, and assuredly it will not be long before a party is formed against Warwick. Until then we must bear everything. Our interests are the same. If he is content to remain a prop to the throne, and not to eclipse it, the memory of the past will not stand between us, and I shall regard him as the weapon that has beaten down the House of York and restored us to our own, and shall give him my confidence and friendship. ...
— A Knight of the White Cross • G.A. Henty
... game for food. Chief of their traps was the dead-fall, made by propping up one end of a short piece of puncheon or hewed plank, in such a way that it would fall upon the animal which attempted to secure the bait placed on a trigger beneath it. This trigger was a part of the prop under the puncheon and gave way at the slightest jar. As the plank fell it caught the creature which had disturbed it, and being weighted down with stones, ...
— Far Past the Frontier • James A. Braden
... wife and children, all the money I had earned and could earn by my night labor was consumed, till I found myself reduced to five dollars, and this I lost one day in going to the plantation. My light of hope now went out. My prop seemed to have given way from under me. Sunk in the very night of despair respecting my freedom, I discovered myself, as though I had never known it before, a husband, the father of two children, a family looking up to me for bread, and I a slave, penniless, and well watched by my master, his wife ...
— The Narrative of Lunsford Lane, Formerly of Raleigh, N.C. • Lunsford Lane
... he was kind," began Polly, in a soothing tone; but Tom cried out, remorsefully, "That 's what knocks me over! Just when I ought to be a pride and a prop to him, I bring him my debts and disgrace, and he never says a word of blame. It 's no use, I can't stand it!" and Tom's head went down again with something very like a sob, that would come in spite of manful ...
— An Old-fashioned Girl • Louisa May Alcott
... she were still the dupe of his stoicism. Stanwell was sure that the sculptor would take no one into his confidence, and least of all his sister, whose faith in his artistic independence was the chief prop of that tottering pose. Kate's penetration was not great, and Stanwell recalled the incredulous smile with which she had heard him defend poor Mungold's "sincerity" against Caspar's assaults; but she had the insight of the heart, and where her brother's happiness ...
— The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... much delighted with the white flowers. We resolved then to educate our daughter piously, and prayed fervently to God that she, who was then as full of promise as the blossoms on the tree, might by his grace one day be the prop of our old age. That prayer is now fulfilled beyond our fondest anticipations. Praise for ever be to the ...
— Among the Trees at Elmridge • Ella Rodman Church
... top of the ball," said Professor Lucifer, simply. "That is surely wrong. The ball should be on top of the cross. The cross is a mere barbaric prop; the ball is perfection. The cross at its best is but the bitter tree of man's history; the ball is the rounded, the ripe and final fruit. And the fruit should be at the top of the tree, not ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... to be shaken by the fall of the present tyranny in Peru, of which there are not only indications, but the result is inevitable—unless, indeed, the mischievous counsels of vain and mercenary men can suffice to prop up a fabric of the most barbarous political architecture, serving as a screen from whence to dart their weapons against the heart of liberty. Thank God, my hands are free from the stain of labouring in any such work; and having finished all you gave me to ...
— The Life of Thomas, Lord Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald, G.C.B., Admiral of the Red, Rear-Admiral of the Fleet, Etc., Etc. • Thomas Cochrane, Earl of Dundonald
... that kind, too, but we've got to prop up feeling with a power of work and patience and danger, and it's likely too, Will, that it will be a long time before we reach the end of the ...
— The Great Sioux Trail - A Story of Mountain and Plain • Joseph Altsheler
... are rewarded! She of both is now discarded, Who to both had been so late Their support in low estate, All their comfort, and their stay— Now of both is cast away. But the league her presence cherish'd, Losing its best prop, soon perish'd; She, that was a link to either, To keep them and it together, Being gone, the two (no wonder) That were left, soon fell asunder;— Some civilities were kept, But the heart of friendship slept; Love with hollow ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... access of litigation in which the citizen Indian figures as a party defendant and in a more widespread disposition to levy local taxation upon his personalty, but in a decision of the United States Supreme Court which struck away the main prop on which has hitherto rested the Government's benevolent effort to protect him against the evils of intemperance. The court holds, in effect, that when an Indian becomes, by virtue of an allotment of land to him, a citizen of the State in which his land is ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... every reason to suppose that this illness, like all her former ones, will be but temporary; but I cannot always feel so. Meantime she is dead to me and I miss a prop. All my strength is gone, and I am like a fool, bereft of her co-operation. I dare not think, lest I should think wrong; so used am I to look up to her in the least and the biggest perplexity. To say all ...
— Charles Lamb • Walter Jerrold
... the consequences. Mr. Graylock is in a bad box. His creditors are pushing him hard, and I think that to-morrow his house will be in the hands of the courts. He declares that he was holding those securities to prop up his business at the last hour; but Mr. Goodwyn has admitted to me that they would have been only a drop in the bucket; that the failure was bound to come. Now you can see what object he would have in taking the papers after they had been examined by the cashier; and in getting ...
— Dick the Bank Boy - Or, A Missing Fortune • Frank V. Webster
... she cried. "You may flout our beliefs,—but wouldn't you like to bolster up your report with an endorsement by the wife of a clergyman! It sounds so respectable and sane, doesn't it? No, sir! You can't prop up your wild-eyed theories against the good black of one minister's coat. Not by any means! I think myself that you have probably stumbled on the truth about Willem's mother; but that doesn't prove ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm - Novelised From the Play • David Belasco
... carved-up and bloody madman have taught me that I am not made for such work and such sights. I could never be at home in that trade. Face swords and the big guns and death? It isn't in me. No, no; count me out. And besides, I'm the eldest son, and deputy prop and protector of the family. Since you are going to carry Jean and Pierre to the wars, somebody must be left behind to take care of our Joan and her sister. I shall stay at home, and grow old in peace ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc - Volume 1 (of 2) • Mark Twain
... the rest of his earthly pilgrimage with only a leg and a half—let the added half be of what material it might. And his excitement may be better imagined than described when, one afternoon, the surgeon came in with a most wonderful object in his arms—a lovely prop of bright, black, burnished wood, set off with steel couplings and the most fascinating straps you ever saw. And the best of all was the socket, in which his soft white stump fitted as comfortably as though they had been made for one another—as, ...
— Austin and His Friends • Frederic H. Balfour
... various readings of the word which is here translated prowess, e.g. cobnet, colwed, eofned, but all of them are capable of that construction, thus "cobnet" comes from cobiaw, to thump, "colwed," from col a sting, or a prop, whilst "eofned" literally ...
— Y Gododin - A Poem on the Battle of Cattraeth • Aneurin
... nightfall," he replied. "In passing across this open ground we should lose many men from the cannon shots, and with so small a force remaining, might not be able to resist the onrush of so great numbers. Let us prepare, however, to prop up the gates should they fall, and tonight we ...
— Under Drake's Flag - A Tale of the Spanish Main • G. A. Henty
... bad faith kept up by his affection, he sought in everything that he saw, heard, or read, for arguments to prop up his will to believe in the holiness of the cause, for everything which went to prove that the enemy alone had wanted war, was the sole enemy of peace, and that to make war on the enemy was ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain
... for my stature, I keep me on the shore; and this knowledge that a man can proceed no further, is one effect of its virtue, yes, one of those of which it is most proud. One while in an idle and frivolous subject, I try to find out matter whereof to compose a body, and then to prop and support it; another while, I employ it in a noble subject, one that has been tossed and tumbled by a thousand hands, wherein a man can scarce possibly introduce anything of his own, the way being so beaten on every side that he must of necessity walk in the steps of another: ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... your favor," laughed the monarch. "I ever prefer sober manhood to callow youth about me. The one is a prop, stanch, tried; the other a reed that bends this way and that, or breaks when you press ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... her like a dog in a leash to the tent, and tied the other end of the string to the scull, which was the tent's main prop and support. ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... saying things to him which he should not have said. But his retainer took it all in the day's work, and never bore malice, continuing in his own cadging pigheaded sort of way to labour early and late to prop up his master's broken fortunes. "Lord, sir," as he once said to Harold Quaritch when the Colonel condoled with him after a violent and unjust onslaught made by the Squire in his presence, "Lord, sir, that ...
— Colonel Quaritch, V.C. - A Tale of Country Life • H. Rider Haggard
... that God has given him—a sight of the uncleanness of his best performance. The former sight of his immoralities did somewhat distress him, and make him betake himself to his own good deeds to ease his conscience; wherefore this was his prop, his stay. But behold, now God has taken this from under him, and now he falls. Wherefore his best doth also now forsake him, and fly away ...
— The Riches of Bunyan • Jeremiah Rev. Chaplin
... there anything like a lever about a wheelbarrow?' said his father. 'O yes, sir,' said JAMES. 'The axle; and the wheel is the prop, the load is the weight, and the power ...
— Punchinello Vol. 1, No. 21, August 20, 1870 • Various
... the medicine-man, and he has done his utmost; he is powerless, his art useless. What he did was done in the conviction that spiritual influences, however grossly conceived and coarsely applied, could compel the soul to master the body's ailment, could prop up the sinking machinery and strengthen the motive power without regard to its decaying tools. To-day, provided the body is helped along with physical means, the soul would remain against its will, or against the will of what stands in closer ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier
... Eve, would not have been lonelier in a desert. The signs of Christmas preparation and the sounds of Christmas cheer but made him lonelier. For years, flying from the Furies, he had immersed himself in work and so, in part, had forgotten his troubles; but the removal of this prop let him ...
— The Christmas Peace - 1908 • Thomas Nelson Page
... not come deg.? The messenger was sure— Prop me upon the pillows once again— Raise me, my page! this cannot long endure. —Christ, what a night! how the sleet whips the pane! What lights will those out to the northward ...
— Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum and Other Poems • Matthew Arnold
... better than any bonds. At first, Helen seemed unconscious of it, as she stood rigid and motionless, with her wild eyes dumbly imploring help of earth and heaven. Suddenly both strength and excitement seemed to leave her, and she would have fallen but for the living, loving prop ...
— Work: A Story of Experience • Louisa May Alcott
... their heritors in sorrow are crying still. Now it is a bed-ridden mother bewailing her only son, "the principal prop and stay of her old age"; again a wife, left destitute "with three hopeful babes, and pregnant." And here, bringing up the rear of the sad procession—lending to it, moreover, a touch of humour in itself not ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... that her life was in my hands, and that it depended, not on that prompt action which was the one course I had contemplated, but on twenty-four hours of resolute inactivity! I would not think it. I refused the condition. It took away my one prop, my one stay, that prospect of immediate measures which alone preserved in me such coolness as I had retained until now. I was cool no longer; where I had relied on practical direction I was baffled and hindered and driven mad; on my honor believe I was little less ...
— Dead Men Tell No Tales • E. W. Hornung
... The hosts of law and order with his eyes By anger cleared, and him the liberal cause Acclaimed as nominee to the mayoralty To vanquish A. D. Blood. But as the war Waged bitterly for votes and rumors flew About the bank, and of the heavy loans Which Rhodes, son had made to prop his loss In wheat, and many drew their coin and left The bank of Rhodes more hollow, with the talk Among the liberals of another bank Soon to be chartered, lo, the bubble burst 'Mid cries and curses; but the ...
— Spoon River Anthology • Edgar Lee Masters
... all, save the moon and the empty sky. He had heard the rush of the prop-wash, but he had seen nothing, heard nothing else. Incredible as it seemed, the pilot was flying a plane that had attained not merely invisibility but complete ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, October, 1930 • Various
... liable to mislead, amidst appearances sometimes dubious, vicissitudes of fortune often discouraging, in situations in which not infrequently want of success has countenanced the spirit of criticism, the constancy of your support was the essential prop of the efforts, and the guaranty of the plans by which they were effected. Profoundly penetrated with this idea, I shall carry it with me to my grave, as a strong incitement to unceasing vows that Heaven may continue ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... ladders, each of which had only two canes somewhat more than eight brazas in length: the steps consisted of strips and slips cut from the said cane. They were used in decorating the church and each one would sustain at its top two or three men; they were erected without any prop being needed to sustain them. Each cane was at the lowest part about three palmos in circumference, which crosswise or in diameter would be about one palmo. [47] These ladders are well adapted to such needs, for being, as they are, strong and yet hollow, they are not very ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XII, 1601-1604 • Edited by Blair and Robertson
... sleeper settled there. Never was more eccentric attitude adopted for a night's rest! The mandibles bite right into the lavender-stem. Its square shape supplies a firmer hold than a round stalk would do. With this one and only prop, the animal's body juts out stiffly, at full length, with legs folded. It forms a right angle with the supporting axis, so much so that the whole weight of the insect, which has turned itself into the arm of a lever ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... lasses, could be made to turn pale or red any day by a word or a look from her. Hetty's sphere of comparison was not large, but she couldn't help perceiving that Adam was "something like" a man; always knew what to say about things, could tell her uncle how to prop the hovel, and had mended the churn in no time; knew, with only looking at it, the value of the chestnut-tree that was blown down, and why the damp came in the walls, and what they must do to stop the rats; ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... functions, and the foinest pisintry in the wuruld would instantly rebel against such a nonentity. The farmers remember the oft-repeated statements of Mr. Timothy Healy to the effect that "landlordism is the prop of the British Government, and it is that we want to kick away." And the benefit accruing from this vigorous action was by the same eloquent patriot very plainly stated. "The people of this country ought ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... me, as sincerely as I have believed in my father's love for me; and I think now that you were more to me than I realized. But, Roderick, have you ever watched a woodman in the forest chopping down a tree? And have you ever seen that tree fall, when its natural prop was stolen away by the sharp edge of the axe? It may have taken that tree a hundred, or a thousand years to grow; but when it crashes down, it is gone forever. A little, puny man has gone into the forest with an axe upon his shoulder, and has ruthlessly attacked one of God's greatest ...
— The Last Woman • Ross Beeckman
... fragrancy upon the recollection of the elder pupils. The school-room stands where it did, looking into a discolored, dingy garden, in the passage leading from Fetter Lane into Bartlett's Buildings. It is still a school,—though the main prop, alas! has fallen so ingloriously,—and bears a Latin inscription over the entrance in the lane, which was unknown in our humbler times. Heaven knows what "languages" were taught in it then! I am sure that neither my sister nor myself brought ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... knew very well that Kate was merely propping her hope with the statement, but she was glad enough to accept the prop for her own hopes. So they talked desultorily and with that arms-length amiability which is the small currency of polite conversation between two strange women, and Mrs. Singleton Corey laid aside her dignity with her fur-lined coat, and made tea ...
— The Lookout Man • B. M. Bower
... Lean times and foreign wars should minds unite; When poor, men mutter, but they seldom fight. O holy Alha! that I live to see Thy Granadines assist their enemy! You fight the christians' battles; every life You lavish thus, in this intestine strife, Does from our weak foundations take one prop, Which helped to ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Volume 4 (of 18) - Almanzor And Almahide, Marriage-a-la-Mode, The Assignation • John Dryden
... player who handles his pawns wisely, Eudemius began to conjure up hopes which, in spite of himself, he knew might never see fulfilment. The more he saw of Marius, the more he coveted his strength to prop his dying house. His fortune would be safe in Marius's hands, his name would be safe in Marius's keeping. For with all his faults Marius had a soldier's honor, and could guard what was given to his charge. Forthwith, then, Eudemius began to lay silent plans; to scheme indirectly, ...
— Nicanor - Teller of Tales - A Story of Roman Britain • C. Bryson Taylor
... arrived at some lines of big stones, that must have belonged to some town of enormous or incalculable antiquity; and this, they told us, was Hharrasheh. As for columns, the people told us to stoop into a cavern; but there we could perceive nothing but a piece of the rock remaining as a prop in the middle. "Well, now for the figures of the children of men." The people looked furious, and screamed. They gathered round us with their guns; but Asaad insisted; so a detachment of them led us down the side of a bare ...
— Byeways in Palestine • James Finn
... frontier is, not that they insisted on their rights, but that they were guilty of treachery to both friend and foe. The success of the British was incompatible with the good of mankind in general, and of the English-speaking races in particular; for they strove to prop up savagery, and to bar the westward march of the settler-folk whose destiny it was to make ready the continent for civilization. But the British cannot be seriously blamed because they failed to see this. Their fault lay in their aiding and encouraging ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Four - Louisiana and the Northwest, 1791-1807 • Theodore Roosevelt
... enough. The deputation broke up at once; but with how many lamentations over this unexpected reception, given by one whom they had reckoned upon as the chief stay and prop of their sect. ...
— The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales • Jean Pierre Camus
... of charcoal should be placed in the refrigerator to keep it sweet. When putting your best tea or coffee urn away, drop a small piece of charcoal in it and prop the lid open ...
— Fowler's Household Helps • A. L. Fowler
... damaged. Thus the interior of the peg-box will be found a convenient position from which to build a support that shall reach up underneath the volute or under turn of the scroll. Having well tried the parts as to the fitting, the support or prop may be secured or glued in roughly to the lower surface of the peg-box—presuming of course that the pegs have all been removed—and left to dry hard. When so the parts had better be tried for fitting again, and if any little ...
— The Repairing & Restoration of Violins - 'The Strad' Library, No. XII. • Horace Petherick
... hate to harrify your heart. The Doctor comforted her all he could, and tole her bizness of importance had done kept you South. Miss Ellie axed how long she could live; he said only a few hours. She begged him to prop her up, so she could write a few words. He says he held the paper for her, and she wrote a little, and rested; and then she wrote a little mere and fell back speechless. He pat the piece of paper in a invellop and sealed it, and axed her if ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... sir?" asked one, drawing forward the battered wicker arm-chair. "It's all right as long as you don't lean back—but if you do we must prop it against the table." He suited the action to the words, and the guest sat down ...
— The Long Trick • Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... it organized by the State, as well in Greece as in Rome. What views existed on the subject during the Middle Ages has likewise been described. Even St. Augustine, who, next to St. Paul, must be looked upon as the most important prop of Christendom, and who diligently preached asceticism, could not refrain from exclaiming: "Suppress the public girls, and the violence of passion will knock everything of a heap." The provincial Council of Milan, in 1665, expressed ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... received a summons to his sister, who lived with her mother in the little country town. There he was witness to a short, sharp contest with pneumonia; then came a defeat; and then a quiet burial in the village churchyard; next a sinking from hour to hour of the invalid mother whose prop and stay had been taken from beneath her; a second calling of friends to the stricken home; and ere two weeks of absence had been told, Steve found himself alone in the world, as far as any near of kin ...
— The Gentle Art of Cooking Wives • Elizabeth Strong Worthington
... passions, agitated in every direction, were liable to mislead— amidst appearances sometimes dubious—vicissitudes of fortune often discouraging—in situations in which not unfrequently want of success has countenanced the spirit of criticism—the constancy of your support was the essential prop of the efforts and a guarantee of the plans by which they were effected. Profoundly penetrated with this idea, I shall carry it with me to my grave, as a strong incitement to unceasing wishes, that Heaven may continue to you the choicest ...
— Life And Times Of Washington, Volume 2 • John Frederick Schroeder and Benson John Lossing
... his timid homekeeping countrymen, and giving careful measurements of everything measurable—the masts of the steamers, the length of the wharves, the height of the Arc de Triomphe, as if in some mysterious way statistics could prove a prop to the faint-hearted. Of the four lads in the "experiment," two afterwards filled high diplomatic posts. A certain Fang I was made Charge d'Affaires in London and later Consul-General in Singapore, while Chang Teh Ming was made Minister Plenipotentiary ...
— Sir Robert Hart - The Romance of a Great Career, 2nd Edition • Juliet Bredon
... pantaloons, who agreed to take me to the village of Val Tournanche. We set off early on the next morning, and got to the summit of the pass without difficulty. It gave me my first experience of considerable slopes of hard, steep snow, and, like all beginners, I endeavored to prop myself up with my stick, and kept it outside, instead of holding it between myself and the slope, and leaning upon it, as should ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume VI • Various
... wrenched from him. For, when he saw that swift, limpid, upward look that she gave the man when he took her hand, he knew himself to be forgotten. Once that same look had been raised to him, and he had gauged its meaning. Indeed, his conceit had crumbled; its last prop was gone. Why had it ended thus? There had been no ...
— Waifs and Strays - Part 1 • O. Henry
... mortal life, through much importuning I was constrain'd to wear the hat that still From bad to worse it shifted.—Cephas came; He came, who was the Holy Spirit's vessel, Barefoot and lean, eating their bread, as chanc'd, At the first table. Modern Shepherd's need Those who on either hand may prop and lead them, So burly are they grown: and from behind Others to hoist them. Down the palfrey's sides Spread their broad mantles, so as both the beasts Are cover'd with one skin. O patience! thou That lookst on this and doth endure so long." I at those accents saw the splendours ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... eternal repetition, and it was now evident that I must trust to my own ability to pull the matter quickly through as I thought best. But it was not the fatigue due to this system that finally made Niemann, the main prop in my work, recoil from the task which at the start he had undertaken with an energy full of promise. He had been informed that there was a conspiracy to ruin my work. From this time forward he was a victim to a despondency to which, in his relations with me, ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... surrounded with high stone-walls, or ditches, planted with a kind of cane or large reed, which answers many purposes in this country. The leaves of it afford sustenance to the asses, and the canes not only serve as fences to the inclosures; but are used to prop the vines and pease, and to build habitations for the silkworms: they are formed into arbours, and wore as walking-staves. All these gardens are watered by little rills that come from the mountains, particularly, by the small branches of the two sources which I ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... asserted, ignoring the fact that his rising from the ground to an erect posture was entirely due to the combined efforts of Halfman and Evander, one on each side, and then, when he did get to his feet, he was only able to retain the perpendicular by leaning heavily upon Halfman as a steady prop. From under his bandaged forehead his pale-blue eyes regarded Evander with ...
— The Lady of Loyalty House - A Novel • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... of the chivalrous past, was a source of still more satisfaction to the baron than he cared to avow. The congratulations of his numerous acquaintance pleased him, and he felt it a prop to his self-respect, which it often needed. A week later, Ehrenthal came on his way to the neighboring village to offer his congratulations too, and just as he was making his final bow he said, "You had once a notion, baron, of setting up a beet-root-sugar ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... generous patronage. {74} 'I know not how I shall offend,' Shakespeare now wrote to him, 'in dedicating my unpolished lines to your lordship, nor how the world will censure me for choosing so strong a prop to support so weak a burden. . . . But if the first heir of my invention prove deformed, I shall be sorry it had so noble a godfather.' 'The first heir of my invention' implies that the poem was written, or at least designed, before Shakespeare's dramatic work. It ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... fits a little Shrine, A little Prop best fits a little Vine, As my small Cruse best fits my ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various
... ask. Apropos of everything, and of nothing; apropos of the Oudenarde tower, which was falling, and which some wished to pull down, and others to prop up; apropos of the police regulations issued by the council, which some obstinate citizens threatened to resist; apropos of the sweeping of the gutters, repairing the sewers, and so on. Nor did the enraged orators confine themselves to the internal ...
— A Winter Amid the Ice - and Other Thrilling Stories • Jules Verne
... Troops, And strait with me to Abdelazer's Tent, Where all his Claims he shall resign to you, Both in my self, the Kingdom, and the Crown: You being departed, thousands more will leave him, And you're alone the Prop to his Rebellion. ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. II • Aphra Behn
... redoubtable janissary who fought against Europeans; these troops, who were not allowed to marry, gave an absolute obedience. They were perhaps the finest infantry in the world—for two hundred years they formed the strongest prop of the Turkish Empire. Paulus Jovius, the historian, says that in 1531 nearly the whole corps of janissaries spoke Slav. Other young men were received into the Government offices—the Porte, until the end of the seventeenth century, used the Serbian ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 • Henry Baerlein
... State has lost its prop, and therefore it is toppling over; the State has an enemy that has grown too strong for it. Restore the prop, which is the nobility, and crush the enemy, ...
— Master Olof - A Drama in Five Acts • August Strindberg
... self-sufficingness, they must have the countenance of others. It is these pressing needs that will hurry the primates to build, out of each shred of truth they can possibly twist to their purpose, and out of imaginings that will impress them because they are vast, deity after deity to prop up their souls. ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day Jr.
... persons, the whole power and authority belonging to it was, on particular occasions, committed to one; and upon great alarms, when the political fabric was shaken or endangered, a monarchical power has been applied, like a prop, to secure the state against the rage of the tempest. Thus were the dictators occasionally named at Rome, and the stadtholders in the United Provinces; and thus, in mixed governments, the royal prerogative ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... the very attitude of confident dependence takes the strain off a man. To feel that I am leaning hard upon a firm prop, to devolve responsibility, to put the reins into another's hand, to give the helm into another steersman's grasp, whilst I may lie down and rest, that is blessedness, though there be a storm. In the story of frontier warfare we ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... goatee. He stared wildly. His jaw dropped. "W'y, Lawd!" he breathed perplexedly, and his chest heaved beneath the grey flannel of his shirt. Slowly he hobbled forward in his bare feet, using the gun for a prop. Before the pole, he halted, and began tousling his grizzled crown with trembling fingers. Overhead, the scalp-weighted rag swung to and fro in the breeze, ...
— The Plow-Woman • Eleanor Gates
... wooden tenements. Some of them were built on piles, and seemed to stand on stilts, holding their draggled skirts out of the mud of their untidy yards: some sagged on rotting sills, leaning shoulder to shoulder as if to prop one another up. From each front door a shaky flight of steps ran down to the unpaved sidewalk, where pigs and children and hens, and the daily tramp of feet to and from the Maitland Works, had beaten the earth into a hard, black surface—or a soft, black surface, ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland
... that it is salt; nor need a critic dissect a whole system after proving that its premises are rotten. I shall accordingly confine myself to a few of the points that captivate beginners most; and assume that if they break down, so must the system which they prop. ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... Mother Katharine's eyes as she kissed her son; old Gottlieb said: "Philip, you are the prop and stay of our old age. Continue to be honest and good, and to love your parents, so will a blessing rest on you. I can give you nothing for a New Year's gift, but a prayer that you may keep your heart pure and true—this is in your power—you ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: German • Various
... slipped off his own sun-faded coat and rolled the sleeves of his flannel shirt above his elbows, and then, with shoulder thrusting up; and arms straining, he heaved the car high enough so that the flabby gentleman could set the prop under the axle. And when the gentleman began to dust his gloves and to search for spots on his gray immaculateness, Farr dug tools from the box and proceeded to the work of replacing ...
— The Landloper - The Romance Of A Man On Foot • Holman Day
... Bridge, made all of golde, Over the sea from one to other side, Withouten prop or pillour it t'upholde, But like the coloured rainbowe arched wide: 550 Not that great arche which Traian edifide, To be a wonder to all age ensuing, Was matchable to this ...
— The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, Volume 5 • Edmund Spenser
... a dud bus—only does seventy-five on the ceiling. Too much stagger, and prop stops on a spin. Besides, I never did care for rotaries. Full of ...
— Mr. Punch's History of the Great War • Punch
... That was the prop to his fame—that he had broken Jim Wilder's outlaw. Certainly he was admired and commended for the unhesitating action he had taken in avenging the death of his friend, but in that he had done only what was expected of any man worthy ...
— The Duke Of Chimney Butte • G. W. Ogden
... down, he would have followed the lecturer with ease, and would have understood all his subsequent reasoning. If a child attempts to push any thing heavier than himself, his feet slide away from it, and the object can be moved only at intervals, and by sudden starts; but if he be desired to prop his feet against the wall, he finds it easy to push what before eluded his little strength. Here the use of a fulcrum, or fixed point, by means of which bodies may be moved, is distinctly understood. If two boys lay a board across a narrow block of wood, or stone, and balance each ...
— Practical Education, Volume II • Maria Edgeworth
... time the wind blows hard.— (Frontenac au Ministre, 15 Septembre, 1692). A misunderstanding with the Intendant, who had control of the money, interrupted the work. Frontenac writes the next year that he had been "obliged to send for carpenters during the night, to prop up the chateau, lest he should be crushed under the ruins." The wall of the fort was, however, strengthened, and partly rebuilt to the height of sixteen feet, at a cost of 13,629 francs. It was a time of war, and a fresh attack was expected from the ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... expenses of Daniel's education. The farm was heavily mortgaged, and Ebenezer Webster knew that he was old before his time and not destined to many more years of life. With the perfect and self-sacrificing courage which he always showed, he did not shrink from this new demand, although Ezekiel was the prop and mainstay of the house. He did not think for a moment of himself, yet, while he gave his consent, he made it conditional on that of the mother and daughters whom he felt he was soon to leave. But Mrs. Webster had the same spirit as her ...
— Daniel Webster • Henry Cabot Lodge
... broken lights in the kitchen windows, and got rid of all the old hats and bonnets that had been stuffed into them. He put on new buttons to keep up the sashes, and so banished the big sticks from the wood-pile that had been used to prop them up. He said they were too ...
— Our Young Folks, Vol 1, No. 1 - An Illustrated Magazine • Various
... indicates a tremendous flaw; the speech of Sir Robert Peel betrays an irreparable bulge; the sudden conversions to free-trade principles of officials and place-holders show a general outpouring at opening rents and crannies: depend on it, Protectionists, your dam-dyke, patch or prop it as you please, is on the eve of destruction; yet a very little longer, and it will be hurtling ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... their Instruments; to prop Their Mighty Cause, and Israels Murmurs stop; They find a sort of Academick Tools; Who by the Politick Doctrine of their Schools, Betwixt Reward, Pride, Avarice, Hope and Fear, Prizing their Heav'n ...
— Anti-Achitophel (1682) - Three Verse Replies to Absalom and Achitophel by John Dryden • Elkanah Settle et al.
... to prop up another, and that in turn mortgaged to save a third. Like links in a chain. Any chain is only as strong as its weakest link, remember. And we've got the links. Look at these, please." ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... shall do, for we ain't talked it over much yet, but with church twice on Sunday and prayer-meetin' Wednesday evenings, and the sewin' circle on Friday, and two New York papers every week, and Miriam, and all your pa's books to prop up against the lamp, I don't reckon I'll get so dreadful lonesome. I've thought some of gettin' myself a cat. There's somethin' mighty comfortable and heartenin' about a cup of hot tea and the sound of purrin' close by. And on ...
— Flower of the Dusk • Myrtle Reed
... of many similar bodies moving around the sun, which in turn is only one of countless suns—for every star is a sun. Now Newton wondered what held these mighty spheres in their places in space, for they appeared to move in definite and well-regulated orbits without any visible support or prop. It is alleged that the answer to the problem was suggested by the great philosopher's observation of a falling apple. The same invisible force that made the apple fall to the ground must, he is said to have reasoned, control the moon, sun, and stars. The earth is pulled toward ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... that luxury is specifically cheaper than comfort (and they regard them as independent, if not incompatible terms); and more than this, that comfort is, after all, but an irrelevant and dispensable corollary to gentility, while luxury is its main prop and stay. Furthermore, that improvidence is a virtue of such lustre, that itself or its likeness is essential to the very existence of respectability; and, by carrying out this proposition, that in order ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, October 2, 1841 • Various
... for, my dearie?" asked her mother, standing behind her as a prop, while the thin fingers did their work so willingly that not ...
— Jack and Jill • Louisa May Alcott
... not my learning Rhetorick wit so large, Hath now the power, death's warfare to discharge, It's not my goodly state, nor bed of downs That can refresh, or ease, if Conscience frown, Nor from Alliance can I now have hope, But what I have done well that is my prop; He that in youth is Godly, wise and sage, Provides a staff then to support his Age. Mutations great, some joyful and some sad, In this short pilgrimage I oft have had; Sometimes the Heavens with plenty smiled on me, Sometime ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... fortification walls. Then, as the lower layers of bricks became saturated and refused their support to the rows above, the wall began to crack and soon to totter to its fall. The citizens for some time tried to prop it with pieces of timber, and used other devices to avert the imminent ruin of their tower; but finding themselves overmatched by the water, and in dread lest the fall at some point or other of the circular wall ...
— Hellenica • Xenophon
... that his Lordship read in my partial defence of Kilkee, a slight attempt to prop up my own case, and felt confused and embarrassed ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... drew off a small, worn, gold ring which had lost its "set," and laid it in the man's hand, saying, "That's all the prop'ty I've got except eight hens which I gave Gail for those I poisoned. It had a ruby in it once, but the old rooster picked it out and et it. I used to have two bunnies, too, but last Christmas the German kids ate ...
— At the Little Brown House • Ruth Alberta Brown
... True friendship is a goodly thing and a rare in this world, and, therefore, to be treasured; 'tis thing no man may buy or seek, since itself is seeker and cometh of itself; 'tis a prop—a staff in stony ways, a shield 'gainst foes, a light i' the dark. So do I love friendship, Robin, and thou'rt my friend, yet must leave thee, ...
— The Geste of Duke Jocelyn • Jeffery Farnol
... after becoming a cripple in his service. He resolved to go to Paris, to declare his need to the king, and to implore the royal bounty. This journey was the last hope of the family, and my father was just entering on it when my mother sickened and died. She was the prop, the right arm of my father; she was the nurse, the teacher of his poor boy; now he had no hope more, except in the favor of the king and in death. The last valuables were sold, and father and son journeyed to Paris: an invalid whose bravery had cost him an arm, and whose tears ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach
... will miss the minute divisions, subdivisions, and definitions, the lettered and numbered headings, the variations of type, and all the other mechanical artifices on which they are accustomed to prop their minds. But my main desire has been to make them conceive, and, if possible, reproduce sympathetically in their imagination, the mental life of their pupil as the sort of active unity which he himself feels it to be. He doesn't chop himself into distinct processes and compartments; ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... back in his chair, pale as ashes. All was lost, then. Cora had betrayed him! But he resolved not to commit himself. Perhaps Madeline had only verbal information. While he was trying to frame a speech, however, she knocked this last prop ...
— Madeline Payne, the Detective's Daughter • Lawrence L. Lynch
... What dreadful mischiefs would ensue; Though it might aggrandise the state, Could private luxury dine on plate? Kings might indeed their friends reward, But ministers find less regard. Informers, sycophants, and spies, Would not augment the year's supplies. 40 Perhaps, too, take away this prop, An annual job or two might drop. Besides, if pensions were denied, Could avarice support its pride? It might even ministers confound, And yet the state be safe and sound. I care not though 'tis understood I only mean my country's ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... lessened against the sky in Henchard's eyes; his exertions for Farfrae's good had been in vain. Over this repentant sinner, at least, there was to be no joy in heaven. He cursed himself like a less scrupulous Job, as a vehement man will do when he loses self-respect, the last mental prop under poverty. To this he had come after a time of emotional darkness of which the adjoining woodland shade afforded inadequate illustration. Presently he began to walk back again along the way by ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... differently in the country. We don't build a house by way of experiment and live in it a few years, then tear it down and build another. We live in a house till it cracks, and then we plaster it over; then it totters, and we prop it up; then it rocks, and we rope it down; then it sprawls, and we clamp it; then it crumbles, and we have a new underpinning,—but keep living in it all the time. To know what moving really means, you must move from just such a rickety-rackety old farmhouse, where you have clung and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... while a poor sister's destitute. My heart bleeds for her! and till I see her sorrows moderated, love has no joys for me. Lew. Can I be less a friend by being a brother? I would not say an unkind thing; but the pillar of your house is shaken. Prop it with another, and it shall stand firm again. You ...
— The Gamester (1753) • Edward Moore
... and MSS. E, A, and I, is this marginal note—"This is to be understood of circumstance of worldlie men, and not of them of God; for the neirer that men draw to God, we ar bound the more to love them." Also a similar note to page 24, Prop. IV., "Christ is the ende and fulfillinge of the lawe to everie one ...
— The Works of John Knox, Vol. 1 (of 6) • John Knox
... of form merely, shape the substances they deal with; but construct or arrange them with a view to the resistance of some external force. We construct, for instance, a table with a flat top, and some support of prop, or leg, proportioned in strength to such weights as the table is intended to carry. We construct a ship out of planks, or plates of iron, with reference to certain forces of impact to be sustained, and of inertia to be overcome; or we construct a wall or roof with distinct ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... half-boiled cauliflowers! Never mind, it will be all the better background. Now, I saw a majestic lady reposing somewhere. There, let her sit against it. Oh, she mustn't flop over. Here, that match-box, is it? I pity the person deluded enough to use it! Prop her up with it. Now then, let us have a presentation of ladies-she's a governor's wife in the colonies, you see. Never mind costumes, they may be queer. All that will stand or kneel-that's right. Those that can ...
— The Long Vacation • Charlotte M. Yonge
... woke, and glad enough was she of his human company. They breakfasted upon some biscuits and water, and afterwards, while Mr. Clifford watched near the entrance with his rifle, Benita set to work to arrange their belongings. The tent she managed to prop up against the wall of the cave by help of some of the wood which they had carried in. Beneath it she spread their blankets, that it might serve as a sleeping place for them both, and outside placed the food ...
— Benita, An African Romance • H. Rider Haggard
... are not likely to make a demand for the song. What you have to remember, my dear sir, if you wish to achieve success, is that music, if it is to sell, must appeal to the average amateur young person. The average amateur young person is the main prop of music in ...
— Merely Mary Ann • Israel Zangwill
... abolish religion, that it "would try to put laziness, thriftlessness, and inefficiency on a par with industry, thrift, and efficiency, that it would strive to break up not merely private property, but, what is far more important, the home, the chief prop upon which ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... vastly more potential than the expression of any political platform. The paramount duty of Congress is to stop deficiencies by the restoration of that protective legislation which has always been the firmest prop of the Treasury. The passage of such a law or laws would strengthen the credit of the Government both at home and abroad, and go far toward stopping the drain upon the gold reserve held for the redemption of our currency, ...
— Messages and Papers of William McKinley V.2. • William McKinley
... the character of the dwellers therein. The cheeky-looking villa, with its superabundance of ornament, is a monument in masonry to the successful mining jobber on a small scale. The solemn-looking, solid dwelling, standing in its own grounds, where every flower bush has its individual prop, where the lawn is trimmed with mathematical exactitude, and not one vagrant leaf is allowed to stray, speaks with a kind of brick-and-mortar eloquence of virtue that has never grasped the sublime fulness of the Scriptural text which saith: "The way of transgressors ...
— Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa (1899-1900) - Letters from the Front • A. G. Hales
... three children; Val, late of the Dorchester Regiment, Rowsley an Artillery lieutenant two years younger, and Isabel the curate, a tall slip of a girl of nineteen. They were all beloved, but Val was the prop of the family and the pride of his father's heart. Invalided out of the Army after six weeks' fighting, with an honourable distinction and an irremediably shattered arm, he had been given the agency of the Wanhope property, and lived ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... come, she was not now particularly unhappy. It was an alleviation that her mother was more of an invalid, so that some of the responsibilities of the household devolved on her, and her mother leaned on her a little. She was certainly not the prop of the house, or the lodestar to which they all turned for guidance, none of the satisfactory things women are called in poetry, but she was not such an odd-man-out as she ...
— The Third Miss Symons • Flora Macdonald Mayor
... affected by the special conclusions at which I had arrived concerning the books of the Bible. I conceived myself to be resting under an Indian Figtree, which is supported by certain grand stems, but also lets down to the earth many small branches, which seem to the eye to prop the tree, but in fact are supported by it. If they were cut away, the tree would not be less strong. So neither was the tree of Christianity weakened by the loss of its apparent props. I might still enjoy its shade, and eat of its fruits, and bless ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... work with his home helpers, assisted by Dr. Spencer; but the work of composition seemed to make the ground give way under their feet, and a few adroit remarks from Dr. Spencer finally showed him and Ethel that they had not yet attained the prop for the lever that was to move the world. He gave it up, but still he did not quite forgive Tom for having been so easily convinced, and ready to be ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... more than a place to live in. To protect the house against the hazardous affects of imperilling winds, long poles are made to prop ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves • Works Projects Administration
... were out of the wood the track became worse and worse. The rough-hewn runners constantly sank into snow-drifts and the sledge canted over, so that the poor man, trembling with fear and cold, had to prop it up with all his strength. If his twisted foot gave way, there was an end to him and ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various
... which seemed to have vanished out of the world. In ancient times it was natural to the old builders if they had, say, a barn to build, to make it strong and seemly and graceful; to buttress it with stone, to bestow care and thought upon coign and window-ledge and dripstone, to prop the roof on firm and shapely beams, and to cover it with honest stone tiles, each one of which had an individuality of its own. But now he saw that if people built naturally, they ran up flimsy walls of brick, tied ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... case. If the Tritons of the Solway shall proceed to pull down honest Joshua's tide-nets, I am neither Quixote enough in disposition, nor Goliath enough in person, to attempt their protection. I have no idea of attempting to prop a falling house by putting my shoulders against it. And indeed, Joshua gave me a hint that the company which he belongs to, injured in the way threatened (some of them being men who thought after the fashion of ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... 'Prop me up: if I lie so low I shall get bad again. If you had a touch of this asthma you'd know what it is ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... and I'll prop it up," requested Hippy. The guide did so, and Lieutenant Wingate dropped the stone beside it, after straightening up ...
— Grace Harlowe's Overland Riders on the Great American Desert • Jessie Graham Flower
... white of her great sorrow, and Ernest felt as he walked along by her side that she seemed to lean upon him naturally now; the loss of her main support and chief advisor in life seemed to draw her closer and closer every day to her one remaining prop and future husband. ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... as I took yer that night, Master Nic, and then work your way up for a hour or so, and all under they tree-ferns you'll find pools and pools with lots o' fish in 'em; but I don't know how you're going to get on with that long thin clothes-prop of a thing. But, there, you're a gen'leman, and I s'pose you ...
— First in the Field - A Story of New South Wales • George Manville Fenn
... was planted against the wall outside that raving chamber, at the salient angle of a common prop or buttress. The edge of a shoulder and a heel were the supports to him sideways in his distorted attitude. His wall arm hung dead beside his pendent frock-coat; the hair of his head had gone to wildness, like a field of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... towards Sunch'ston. My father never took his eyes off him till he was out of sight, but the boy did not look round. When he could see him no more, my father with faltering gait, and feeling as though a prop had suddenly been taken from under him, began to follow the stream down towards his ...
— Erewhon Revisited • Samuel Butler
... sire has died, As falls the oak, to rise no more, Because his son, his prop, his pride, Breathed out his last all red with gore. No more on earth, at morn, at eve, Shall age and youth, entwined as one— Nor father, son, for either grieve— Life's work, alas, for both ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... "And suppose we prop up two or three pieces of fallen tree trunk before it," added Robert. "Warriors watching on the opposite slopes will take them for our figures and will not dream ...
— The Masters of the Peaks - A Story of the Great North Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... the head of the church wore the papal tiara or the English crown. Two hundred years after Wyckliff, in 1582, laws were still fulminated against "divers false and perverse people of certain new sects," for Protestant England would support but one form of religion as the moral prop of the state. She regarded all innovations as questionable, or wholly evil, and their authors as dangerous men. Chief among the latter was Robert Browne. But before Browne's advent and in the days of Henry the ...
— The Development of Religious Liberty in Connecticut • M. Louise Greene, Ph. D.
... stakes, and framed in each was a human skeleton, picked clean. With a shiver he remembered travellers' tales on the steamers of how these things were done. But then the blacks put down other stakes so as to confine his head in one position, and were proceeding to prop open his mouth with a piece of wood, when suddenly there seemed to be a hitch ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... the highly-puissant son of Vasudeva (Krishna) also addressed him. Knowing the king, the son of Pritha, afflicted in mind, and bereft of his relatives and kinsmen slain in battle, and appearing crest-fallen like the sun darkened eclipse, or fire smothered by smoke, that prop of the Vrishni race (Krishna), comforting the son of Dharma, essayed to address ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... enough to share that feeling, but with the addition of a man's half-unconscious selfishness. I needed her indomitable frailness to prop my grosser strength. I needed that something not wholly of this world, which women's more exalted nature infuses into their passions, into their sorrows, into their joys; as if their adventurous souls had the power to range beyond the orbit of the earth for the gathering of ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... elephants, with sufficient troops to form an imposing escort, and at the same time to make opposition useless. A letter couched in terms of the utmost friendliness, conferring upon the Prince the title of Prop-of-the-Kingdom, will be ready in a short time for her Highness's signature, and I shall present it with the patent of investiture and the khilat. Other khilats are being prepared in readiness ...
— The Path to Honour • Sydney C. Grier
... is convinced that it depends for its salvation wholly on them, that it is sustained because they uphold it, and that the day on which they cease to support it, it will fall like a manikin that has lost its prop. They intimidate the government with an uprising of the people and the people with the forces of the government, whence originates a simple game, very much like what happens to timid persons when they visit gloomy places, taking for ghosts their own shadows and for strange ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... is up so early," murmured Adams, rousing himself and using his elbow as a prop while ...
— The Lonely Island - The Refuge of the Mutineers • R.M. Ballantyne
... Changarnier's influence decreased, and X.'s enthusiasm abated. X. then frequented the Elysee, but without giving his adherence. He promised his support to General Bedeau, who counted upon him. At daybreak on the 2d of December some one came to waken X. It was Edgar Ney. X. was a prop for the coup d'etat, but would he consent? Edgar Ney explained the affair to him, and left him only after seeing him leave the barracks of the Rue Verte at the head of the first regiment. X. took up his position at the Place de la Madeleine. As he arrived there La Rochejaquelein, thrust back from ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... that the ring must be there and bade him seek everywhere; but he replied that he found it not and making a show of seeking it, kept them in play awhile. At last, the two rogues, who were no less wily than himself, bidding him seek well the while, took occasion to pull away the prop that held up the lid and made off, leaving him ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... directed towards the regeneration of Syria and Palestine, there cannot be a doubt but that, under the blessing of the Most High, those countries would amply repay the undertaking, and that you would end by obtaining the sovereignty of at least Palestine. That the present attempt to prop up the Turkish Empire as at present constituted is a miserable failure, we who see what is going on around us must at once acknowledge. What turn events will take no one can possibly tell, but of this I am perfectly certain that these countries ...
— Notes on the Diplomatic History of the Jewish Question • Lucien Wolf
... painfully sank to his heart, and was chill as a stone. And so again, again deceit; no, worse than deceit—lying and baseness... and life shattered, everything torn up by its roots utterly, and the sole thing which he could cling to, the last prop, in fragments too. In Litvinov's soul rose, like sudden gusts of wind before a storm, momentary impulses ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VIII • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... wheels whenever they should get entangled, also, to be himself the drag, to prevent our too rapid descent. Such generosity deserved trust; however, we women could not be persuaded to render it. We got out and admired, from afar, the process. Left by our guide—and prop! we found ourselves in a wide field, where, by playful quips and turns, an endless "creek," seemed to divert itself with our attempts to cross it. Failing in this, the next best was to whirl down a steep ...
— Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 • S.M. Fuller
... Radicals are now very anxious to come to some amicable understanding with the Government, and, if possible, to prop up the concern. They are very angry with their more violent compeers (Grote, Leader, &c.), and Fonblanque told me last night that they would take the slightest concessions, the least thing that would satisfy their constituencies, but that something they must have, ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... bloody tribunal. The people beheld with dismay these new servants of arbitrary power and of persecution. The nobility saw in it nothing but a strengthening of the royal authority by the addition of fourteen votes in the states' assembly, and a withdrawal of the firmest prop of their freedom, the balance of the royal and the civil power. The old bishops complained of the diminution of their incomes and the circumscription of their sees; the abbots and monks had not only lost power and income, but had received in exchange rigid censors of their morals. Noble and simple, ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... raise himself a little. "Prop me up," he said. "I speak with difficulty—I have something ...
— Mugby Junction • Charles Dickens
... us then!" quoth Jorian; "it is past eleven o' the clock, and as I know them man by man, there will not be so much as one left able to prop ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
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