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More "Tinker" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Nobleman, gallant and bold; O was an Oysterman, who went about town; P was a Parson, and wore a black gown; Q was a Quack, with a wonderful pill; R was a Robber, who wanted to kill; S was a Sailor, who spent all he got; T was a Tinker, and mended a pot; U was an Usurer, a miserable elf; V was a Vintner, who drank all himself; W was a Watchman, who guarded the door; X was Expensive, and so became poor; Y was a Youth, that did not love school; Z was a Zany, a poor ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... some bacon," pursued Deborah, "only I don't know whether to cut the new flitch so soon; and there be some cabbages in the garden. Should I fry or boil them, Mistress Rose? The bottom is out of the frying-pan, and the tinker ...
— The Pigeon Pie • Charlotte M. Yonge
... enthusiastically. For the next few months he wrote with almost incredible swiftness, and by the time the theatre was opened, on August 23, 1722, he had finished five of his best plays, among which were Jeppe of the Hill (Jeppe paa Bjerget) and The Political Tinker (Den politiske Kandestober). During the six years in which the company eked out its precarious existence, Holberg produced twenty-six comedies, most of which were successfully performed. His literary fecundity seems ...
— Comedies • Ludvig Holberg
... and great. A wise doubtfulness prompts conservative minds to throw every mover for change upon the defensive, when liturgical interests are at stake. So many men are born into the world with a native disposition to tamper with and tinker all settled things, and so many more become persuaded, as time goes on, of a personal "mission" to pull down and remake whatever has been once built up, esteeming life a failure unless they have contrived to build each his own monument upon a clearing, that lovers of ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington
... remarked kindly. "Them shoulders o' yours'll give you particular hell to morrow. Why, you're like a boiled crawfish now. Hides like that o' yours," she added, testing with her finger and thumb the integument on my near flank, as I hastily placed my bare foot in the stirrup, "ain't worth a tinker's dam for standin' the sun." (For the information of people whose education may unhappily have been neglected, it will be right to mention that the little morsel of chewed bread which a tin-smith of the old school places ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... the gambler. "I don't even know what the fight was about, and I don't care a tinker's whoop either. I got you here to give you a chance to put Van Buren out of commission and make a ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... care a tinker's dam for me," said Farwell bluntly. "That's not saying what I think of her. I'm no ladies' man—don't pretend to be. Let that go. I suppose I'll be blamed for young McCrae's arrest. Well, I didn't know a thing about it. I've tried to give the family ...
— Desert Conquest - or, Precious Waters • A. M. Chisholm
... of the Heaven-born fiddler by Pate Bailey, a gypsy tinker and celestial violinist. Being asked for a test of proficiency on that instrument, he replied that no man is a fiddler "till he can gar ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... was a master of a tavern he married the daughter of a tinker, by whom he had three children. This marriage, according to the republican regulations, had only been celebrated by the municipality at Ajaccio; Fesch, therefore, upon again entering the bosom of the Church, left his municipal wife and children to shift for themselves, considering ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... and the Tanner of Tamworth" is a ballad of a kind once popular; there were "King Alfred and the Neatherd," "King Henry and the Miller," "King James I. and the Tinker," "King Henry VII. and the Cobbler," with a dozen more. "The Tanner of Tamworth" in another, perhaps older, form, as "The King and the Barker," was printed by Joseph Ritson ...
— A Bundle of Ballads • Various
... will cost me another ten to put it in shape, but after that it will do all right. Will you deliver it to a man that I send after it? I'll take it down to the Riverton shops and work on it. They let me tinker things there whenever ...
— The Hilltop Boys on the River • Cyril Burleigh
... the old saucepan that had been laid by until the tinker's next visit, and gave it to the Hillman. He ...
— The Child's World - Third Reader • Hetty Browne, Sarah Withers, W.K. Tate
... tinker's dam for the law," I continued. "Good enough! We'll take a leaf out of his book. To-morrow night you have an engagement—to ransack the ...
— The Pirate of Panama - A Tale of the Fight for Buried Treasure • William MacLeod Raine
... strong desire to lift his aunt and her children to a little higher plane. To this, hitherto, he had found an obstacle in the pride of her husband. Henry Martin was a tinsmith who had come to the city to work in a great factory for a little higher wages than he could get as a journeyman tinker in a country town. He did not refuse to let the children accept presents from "Cousin Charley," but he was not willing "to be beholden to any of his wife's folks," as he expressed it. He resented the fact that even in Cappadocia he had been somewhat outstripped by his brother-in-law, ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston
... strapped the bamboos to his back, the apex of the angle downwards, and one of the ends just peeping over each shoulder. In this way he would have provided himself with a water-vessel that for strength and lightness—the two great essentials—would have been superior to anything that either tinker or cooper could construct. ...
— The Plant Hunters - Adventures Among the Himalaya Mountains • Mayne Reid
... the churchwoman, he related how, when imprisoned for popping a toad into the soup, he had escaped over the leads, and had beaten a drum outside the barn, during a discourse of the godly tinker, John Bunyan, tramping and rattling so that all thought the troopers were come, and rushed out, tumbling one over the other, while he yelled out his "Ho! ho! ho!" from the haystack where he ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the world was made, and had been misunderstood from the beginning. He used the simplest means. His experiment was in a different way daily performed for him by nature. He was philosophically daring, indifferently a tinker with nature's terrific machinery; a knocker at the door of an august temple that men were never known to have entered; a mortal who smiled in the face of inscrutable and awful mystery, and who defied the lightning in a sense not ...
— Steam Steel and Electricity • James W. Steele
... is, violent blowing. Cairding however, is not unlikely the proper word, a caird being in Scotland the name of a tinker.—Ed.] ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... arts, bicycling, auto racing, kite flying, hiking, rock climbing, aviation, target-shooting, sailing, caving, juggling, skiing, skating (ice and roller). Hackers' delight in techno-toys also tends to draw them towards hobbies with nifty complicated equipment that they can tinker with. ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... stretched over it, which makes a particularly bulgy, uneven surface to stand dressing-tables and things on. The straw, too, is apt to stick out where it is least expected, and gives one rather the feeling of being a tinker sleeping in a barn. At night a tent is an awesome place. It is terrible to have no door to lock, and to be entirely at the mercy of anything that creeps and crawls; to have only a mosquito-net between you and an ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas
... wild by-ways of Donegal or Connemara, meet a procession composed of Patsy McCann the Tinker and the Ass and Mary with Finaun the Archangel, Caeltia the Seraph, Art the Cherub, Eileen ni Cooley (a savage lady of easy morals), Billy the Music, the Seraph Cuchulain and Brien O'Brien, a lost soul who had a threepenny-bit stolen on him by Cuchulain ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, November 18, 1914 • Various
... you another touch or coup de grace ... He really sometimes puts me in mind of Gil Blas; but he has not the sneer of the Frenchman, nor does he gild the bad. He has a touch of Bunyan, and, like that enthusiastic tinker, hammers away, a la Gitano, whenever he thinks he can thwack the Devil or his man-of-all-work on earth—the Pope. Therein he resembles my friend and everybody's friend—Punch—who, amidst all his adventures, never spares the black one. However, I am not going to review him now; for ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... hallalloo of fire in every street! Odsbobs! I have a mind to hang myself, To think I should a grandmother be made By such a rascal!—Sure the king forgets When in a pudding, by his mother put, The bastard, by a tinker, on a stile Was dropp'd.—O, good lord Grizzle! can I bear To see him from a pudding mount the throne? Or can, oh can, my Huncamunca bear To take a ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... twenty hearts to lose, I never could spare a bit of one of them for that good, gray, square, severe man. But different people have different tastes, and here is that little imp of a gipsy-tinker ready to turn slave for my master; and, odd enough, my master,—who, I should have said beforehand, would have made short work of imp, and imp's family, and have sent Hall, the Bang-beggar, after them in no time—my master, as they tell me, is in his way quite fond of the lad, and ...
— My Lady Ludlow • Elizabeth Gaskell
... he could talk, but not at all in French, but he was glad that the tinker spoke German, because otherwise he would not be able to understand ...
— What Sami Sings with the Birds • Johanna Spyri
... wonder at you, Mr. Burns, and the way you go about admiring every tinker-peddler who tosses a rhyme together. Ye've no sense of your own value at times. Do you know," she went on, fair glorious to see in her enthusiasm glowering down at him—"Do you know that when this man Shenstone's grave is as flat to the earth as my hand, and his ...
— Nancy Stair - A Novel • Elinor Macartney Lane
... observed at Zacatecas which recalled far-away Hong Kong, China. This was the prosecution of various trades in the open air. Thus the shoemaker was at work outside of his dwelling; the tailor, the barber, and the tinker adopted the same practice, quite possible even in the month of March in a land of such intense brightness and sunshine. We wandered hither and thither, charmed by the novelty and strangeness of everything; ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... travelling tinker. He would do a little gardening and farming at home for a while, and then go off about the country for a few days, mending people's pots and pans and kettles. Usually Sym left Emily Ann at home to keep the Little Red House company, but now and then Emily Ann ...
— A Book for Kids • C. J. (Clarence Michael James) Dennis
... being a Dom is "Domnipana." In English gypsy, the same words are expressed by Rom, romni, and romnipen. D, be it observed, very often changes to r in its transfer from Hindoo to Romany. Thus doi, "a wooden spoon," becomes in gypsy roi, a term known to every tinker in London. But, while this was probably the origin of the word Rom, there were subsequent reasons for its continuance. Among the Cophts, who were more abundant in Egypt when the first gypsies went there, the word for man is romi, and ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... his fair face crimsoning with vexation. "She seems to me one of those shallow women who would sooner flirt with a tinker than pass unnoticed by the male sex. I don't like her," he concluded, with ...
— The Silent House • Fergus Hume
... cunningly that it cannot be misinterpreted in terms of his will, he will denounce it as seditious blasphemy, or else disregard it as either crazy or totally unintelligible. Parliaments and synods may tinker as much as they please with their codes and creeds as circumstances alter the balance of classes and their interests; and, as a result of the tinkering, there may be an occasional illusion of moral evolution, as when the victory of the commercial caste over ...
— Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion • George Bernard Shaw
... come to the blessed truth that Christian morality does not say to us, 'Now begin, and work, and tinker away at yourselves, and try to get up some kind of excellence of character, and then come to God, and pray Him to accept you.' That is putting the cart before the horse. The order is reversed. We are to begin with taking our personal salvation ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... inside of the dog's collar. The next thing was to get Chance started on the road to the Concho. He rolled down his sleeves and strolled to the doorway. A Mexican sat smoking and watching the road. Sundown stepped past him and began to tinker with the gas-engine. Chance stood watching him. Presently the gas-engine started with a cough and splutter. Sundown walked to the door and seemed about to enter when the Mexican called to him and pointed ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs
... a weary stoop under the afternoon's sunshine. There was a flock of sheep straggling about the road, with a dog running himself into a fever in the endeavor to keep them decently together. There were some bricklayers just released from work—a tinker mending some kettles by the roadside; there was a dog-cart dashing down the road, carrying the master of the Audley hounds to his seven o'clock dinner; there were a dozen common village sights and sounds that mixed themselves up into a cheerful bustle and ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... far off are we from a revival of Danton's beautiful doctrine that, in order to consummate the regeneration of society, all conditions imposed upon the eligibility of citizens to act as judges ought to be immediately abolished, so that a tinker, or a butcher, or a bootblack, or a chiffonnier might be made a French magistrate just as well as a trained student of the laws? As you know, one of the first things Danton, as Minister of Justice, did was to carry through ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... it. But all the other things which we have laid out you may bring to me today or tomorrow." And he gave his name and address. Then he went back to the table to finish his beer. Only one of his former companions was sitting there, a master-tinker. ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... which habitually rises and fills the cavity of the mouth does so in response to a wrong mental concept of cause. The only way to correct this condition is to change the cause. The rigid tongue we see is effect, and to tinker with the effect while the cause remains is unnecessarily stupid. An impulse of tension has been directed to the tongue so often that the impulse and response have become simultaneous and automatic. The correction lies in directing an ...
— The Head Voice and Other Problems - Practical Talks on Singing • D. A. Clippinger
... pudding, and popped him into the pot to boil. The hot water made Tom kick and struggle; and his mother, seeing the pudding jump up and down in such a furious manner, thought it was bewitched; and a tinker coming by just at the time, she quickly gave him the pudding; he put it into ...
— The Fairy Book - The Best Popular Stories Selected and Rendered Anew • Dinah Maria Mulock (AKA Miss Mulock)
... wardrobe and turned every pocket inside out. It was not really a light; it made this light by flashing about so quickly, but when it came to rest for a second you saw it was a fairy, no longer than your hand, but still growing. It was a girl called Tinker Bell exquisitely gowned in a skeleton leaf, cut low and square, through which her figure could be seen to the best advantage. She ...
— Peter and Wendy • James Matthew Barrie
... disguised infidel, she was exposed to the temptations of a Moorish spy, and convicted mainly on the evidence furnished by certain Mussulman habits to which she adhered. Llorente reports a similar specimen case, vol. i. p. 442. The culprit was a tinker aged 71, accused in 1528 of abstaining from pork and wine, and using certain ablutions. He defended himself by pleading that, having been converted at the age of 45, it did not suit his taste to eat pork or drink wine, and that his trade obliged him to maintain cleanliness by frequent washing. ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... the disgusted skipper of the Wireless. "No use in my trying to tinker with the job. It will take a practical machinist to overhaul the plagued contraption. I guess you'll have to give us a tow to Memphis, where I can put a man to work getting this engine ...
— Motor Boat Boys Mississippi Cruise - or, The Dash for Dixie • Louis Arundel
... travelling umbrella-mender, fagoted on the back like the man in the moon of the nursery rhyme-book. He is followed at a short distance by a travelling tinker, swinging his live-coals in a sort of tin censer, and giving utterance to a hoarse and horrible cry, intelligible only to the cook who has a leaky sauce-pan. Then comes the chamois-leather woman, bundled about with damaged skins, in request for the polishing ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 448 - Volume 18, New Series, July 31, 1852 • Various
... back and we had found a bed-room for our visitor in Essex Street, he told us all of it. His name was Magwitch—Abel Magwitch—he called himself Provis now—and he had been left by a travelling tinker to grow up alone. "In jail and out of jail, in jail and out of jail—that's my life pretty much, down to such times as I got shipped off, arter Pip stood my friend." But there was a man who "set up fur a gentleman, named Compeyson," and this Compeyson's business was swindling, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol III • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... cobbler it should be my pride The best of all cobblers to be; If I was a tinker, no tinker beside Should mend an old kettle ...
— Childhood's Favorites and Fairy Stories - The Young Folks Treasury, Volume 1 • Various
... "this wounded leg, these crusted lips, this anxious, weary mind. Come away for a time, until your body becomes more habitable." And so she coaxes the mind away into the Nirvana of delirium, while the little cell-workers tinker and toil within to get things better for its homecoming. When you see the veil of cruelty which nature wears, try and peer through it, and you will sometimes catch a glimpse of a very homely, ...
— The Tragedy of The Korosko • Arthur Conan Doyle
... dear! its ma is making patty-cakes; and put it up there to be out of the way of Tom Tinker's dog. I'll soon hush it up," said the old woman; and, trotting it on her knee, she began ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... madam?" said the dame. "Was not my man yonder, Rob, the tinker's son, whom my father and brethren, the smiths down yonder at Buxton, thought but scorn of, but we'd taken a sup together at the Ebbing Well, and it played neither of us false, so we held out against 'em all, and when they saw there ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the porch Mrs. Hudson mounted grimly, followed by Babe. Sylvester stayed to tinker with the car, and Sheila, after a doubtful, tremulous moment, went slowly up the icy path after the ...
— Hidden Creek • Katharine Newlin Burt
... Mary Ellen, "I don't want to hurt ye, but it do make me heart-sick to see ye bashin' aitch other wid pokers for the sake av a bit girl that's not worth a tinker's curse to ye! Now thin—here's a piece of cowld puddin' to each av ye—sit on the durestep where the missus won't see ye, an' git ...
— Explorers of the Dawn • Mazo de la Roche
... Tibbards Richard Tibbet George Tibbs Henry Ticket Harvey Tiffman Andrew Tillen Jacob Tillen Peter Tillender Thomas Tillinghast David Tilmouse John Tilson Nicholas Tilson Grale Timcent George Timford Jeremiah Timrer Alexander Tindell James Tinker William Tinley Joseph Tinleys Anthony Tioffe Samuel Tippen Jean Tirve Stephen Tissina Michael Titcomb Moses Titcomb James Tobin Thomas Tobin (2) John Todd William Todd Thomas Tolley Francis Tollings Henry Tollmot Thomas Tomay James Tomkins Charles Tomped Benjamin Tompkins William ...
— American Prisoners of the Revolution • Danske Dandridge
... Sir Pitt Crawley. Reklect you owe me a pint for bringing down your luggage. He, he! Ask Tinker if I aynt. Mrs. Tinker, Miss Sharp; Miss Governess, Mrs. Charwoman. ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... account in getting a few extra dimes. They put a big chunk of iron in the mould and poured in the melted solder which enclosed it completely, so that when they presented the bright silvery bar to the old tinker he paid the price agreed upon and they divided the money between them, and then, in a secure place, they laughed till their sides ached at the good ...
— Death Valley in '49 • William Lewis Manly
... lives is still inscrutable to man. Is man the friend, or is he the patron only? Have they indeed forgotten nature's voice? or are those moments snatched from courtiership when they touch noses with the tinker's mongrel, the brief reward and pleasure of their artificial lives? Doubtless, when man shares with his dog the toils of a profession and the pleasures of an art, as with the shepherd or the poacher, the ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... find fault with that dispensation in particular. It was one of our calling that the Emperor so honoured, after all, when he might have anointed a tinker, or a ragman, or a street woman's pensioner even. Who knows but that we should have been king's too, but for my crooked legs and your ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... the calendar in Part Five. Yet those on the inside knew why very well. It was because Tom long ago, in his prehistoric youth, had learned that the way to secure verdicts was to appear not to care a tinker's dam whether the jury found the defendant guilty or not. He pretended never to know anything about any case in advance, to be in complete ignorance as to who the witnesses might be and to what they ...
— By Advice of Counsel • Arthur Train
... the spray of brilliant vermilion berries she fancied, saying meanwhile, "I wonder what he is? Tinker, tailor, ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... of peasants was established at Heilbrunn. The counts of Lowenstein were taken prisoners, dressed in a smock-frock, and then, a white staff having been placed in their hands, they were compelled to swear to the twelve articles. "Brother George, and thou, brother Albert," said a tinker of Ohringen to the counts of Hohenlohe who had gone to their camp, "swear to conduct yourselves as our brethren, for you also are now peasants; you are no longer lords." Equality of rank, the dream of many democrats, was established ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... derives it from the same root with the other jog, which means to shake, ("A. S. sceac-an, to shake, or shock, or shog.") Shog has nothing whatever to do with shaking, unless when Nym says to Pistol, "Will you shog off?" he may be said to have shaken him off. When the Tinker in Beaumont and Fletcher's "Coxcomb" says, "Come, prithee, let's shog off," what possible allusion to shaking is there, except, perhaps, to "shaking stumps"? The first jog and shog are identical in meaning and derivation, and may be traced, by ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... noticed, seated in the great chimney, a very tall old woman clad in a red cloak and a slouched bonnet, having all the appearance of a gipsy or tinker. She smoked silently at her clay pipe, while the doubtful-looking ...
— Red Cap Tales - Stolen from the Treasure Chest of the Wizard of the North • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... "You saucy tinker's apprentice, if you don't cease your jaw, I'll——" But here she gasped for breath, unable to hawk up any more words, for the last volley of O'Connell had nearly knocked ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous
... drawing his moral with his provoking imperturbability, "those men looked at each other, as they dripped, and said with the one voice: 'Ain't this a lesson? Don't swap horses crossing a stream!'"—(Heard by Superintendent Tinker, war telegrapher.) ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... not know, indeed, why we troubled our heads about the matter at all,' said the man in black; 'but when you talk about perverting the meaning of the text, you speak ignorantly, Mr. Tinker. When He whom you call the Saviour gave His followers the sop and bade them eat it, telling them it was His body, He delicately alluded to what it was incumbent upon them to do after His death, namely, to ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... out into the inclement darkness, and up to the topmost bough of the tree, which he must "touch" ere he can rest; and now, in the gloom of the memorable dingle, the horror of fear falls upon the amateur tinker, the Evil One grapples terribly with his soul, blots of foam fly from his lips, and he is dashed against the trees and stones. An adventure, truly, fit to stand with any of mediaeval legend, and compared with which the tremendous combat with Blazing Bosville, the Flaming Tinman, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... not, disconnect the ground wire and examine all connections. Also press the sounder of each instrument down and see if it springs back readily. It may be that some screw is too tight, or too loose, or that a spring has come off; tinker awhile and see if you cannot make the instrument work. If you are unable to do so, ask ...
— Common Science • Carleton W. Washburne
... Frank Brangwyn may fall upon unresponsive ears; yet he has a Continental reputation and is easily the foremost English impressionist. New York has seen but little of his work; if we mistake not, there was a large piece of his, a Gipsy Tinker in the open air, hung several seasons ago at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Mr. Kennedy shows extraordinary etchings of his at the Wunderlich Galleries. We call them extraordinary not alone because of their size, but ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... ingenuity of analogy, and in his forcible quaintness of style, as completely as he did in social status and in personal surroundings. In complete contrast to the romantic productions of the self-educated tinker of Bedford, the works of Walton and Evelyn were at any rate influenced by, though they can hardly be said to have been moulded upon, the style of the preceding age of old English prose writers ending with Milton. The influence of the latter is, indeed, plainly noticeable both in the diction and ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... operate one of the best known American cars everybody was enthusiastic to see him carry off the honors of the event in which he was entered. He was standing by the door of his garage watching his attendants tinker with his machine, when the scouts came up. The lads pushed their way through the crowd to reach the rope railing about the entrance to the garage, and when the tall racer saw them, he ...
— The Boy Scout Fire Fighters • Irving Crump
... coal-black, jet-black; fuliginous^, pitchy, sooty, swart, dusky, dingy, murky, Ethiopic; low-toned, low in tone; of the deepest dye. black as jet &c n., black as my hat, black as a shoe, black as a tinker's pot, black as November, black as thunder, black as midnight; nocturnal &c (dark) 421; nigrescent^; gray &c 432; obscure &c 421. Adv. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... picked out a few here," said Clark. "You know Kentucky breeds explorers. I have a good blacksmith, Shields, and Bill Bratton is another blacksmith—either can tinker a gun if need be. Then I have John Coalter, an active, strapping chap, and the two Fields boys, whom I know to be good men; and Charlie Floyd, Nate Pryor, and a couple of others—Warner and Whitehouse. We should get the rest at the forts around St. Louis. I want to take my boy York along—a negro ...
— The Magnificent Adventure - Being the Story of the World's Greatest Exploration and - the Romance of a Very Gallant Gentleman • Emerson Hough
... 'Tain't likely any one can git their jar in afore hern. I wouldn't advise nobody to nerve themselves up to it. There's been rumors," added Mr. Pawket, gravely—"there's been rumors as some one is tryin' to git up a rockery fer the vanilla. Now I wouldn't advise 'em to. The lady will want to tinker with that herself. But if everybody is itchin' to help, why don't they take up a nice collection er white door-knobs to trim ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... Tom's mouth, and prevented him from crying; but, on feeling the hot water, he kicked and struggled so much in the pot, that his mother thought that the pudding was bewitched, and, pulling it out of the pot, she threw it outside the door. A poor tinker, who was passing by, lifted up the pudding, and, putting it into his budget, he then walked off. As Tom had now got his mouth cleared of the batter, he then began to cry aloud, which so frightened the tinker that he flung down the pudding and ran away. The pudding being broke to ...
— English Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)
... begin to read the passage, where Mansie, simple soul that he was, was described as going into the byre in the morning to learn if the cow had calved during the night, and finding, on opening the door, the donkey of a traveling tinker, he turned and ran into the house, crying: "Mither! Mither! The coo has calved, an' it's ...
— The Underworld - The Story of Robert Sinclair, Miner • James C. Welsh
... was not sleepy at eight o'clock; he had been flying about while the others had been yawning before the fire. He would like to sit up just to see how much more solemn and stupid it would become as the night went on; he wanted to tinker his skates, to mend his sled, to finish that chapter. Why should he go away from that bright blaze, and the company that sat in its radiance, to the cold and solitude of his chamber? Why did n't the people who were sleepy go ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... place singularly favourable to every kind of intrigue and amusement; while the mild temper of the people and the watchfulness of the police prevented the public disorders that such license might have occasioned. These seeming anomalies abounded on every side. From the gaming-table where a tinker might set a ducat against a prince it was but a few steps to the Broglio, or arcade under the ducal palace, into which no plebeian might intrude while the nobility walked there. The great ladies, who were subject to strict sumptuary laws, and might not display their jewels or try the ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... hardships were surmounted and we were on the good and promised land, felt that a just tribute of respect to the day ought to be paid. There were in all, including women and children, 50 in number. The men under Capt. Tinker, ranged themselves on the beach and fired a Federal Salute of 15 rounds, and then the 16th in honor of New Conn. Drank several toasts. Closed with three cheers. Drank several pints of grog. Supped ...
— The Greatest Highway in the World • Anonymous
... a case of individual need is brought before them will hire girls at less than any one could exist on in decency. When they meet these same girls in the hall or when they come directly into contact with them in their work they may be polite enough, but their politeness is not worth a tinker's curse. Justice must come first. Only if the employer pays a fair day's wage can he expect a fair day's work. "Even then," he protests, "I can't get it." And this is, unfortunately, in large measure true. As Kipling said some few years ...
— The Book of Business Etiquette • Nella Henney
... of a wayside cross with a flock of geese feeding around him. Next I passed a bare-footed cantonnier breaking stones, and he told me that if I made haste I might reach Neuvic before dark. On the outskirts of a village—Roche-le-Peyroux—a wandering tinker and his boy were at work by the side of the road with fire and bellows, and I felt a trampish or romantic desire to stay with them awhile in the cheerful glow; but thinking of the coming night, I smothered ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... put on enough voltage to burn your brain out. Remember, I can read your dead brain as well as though it were alive, but I want your thoughts, as well as your knowledge, and I'm going to have them. If you give them voluntarily, I will tinker up a lifeboat that you can navigate back to your own world and let you go; if you resist I intend getting them anyway and you shall not leave this vessel alive. You may ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... benevolent dictatorships. The trouble with them is that it's up to the dictators to decide what's benevolent. And almost always, nepotism rears its head, favoritism of one sort or another. How long will it be before one of your moderate monks decides he'll moderately tinker with the tests, or whatever, just to be sure his favorite nephew makes the grade? A high I.Q. is no guarantee ...
— Ultima Thule • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... known, he was describing a particular characteristic of the Duke. Wellington, when in action, was the dumbest of dumb things, and it would have required a moral earthquake to get more than some curt order out of him. Even a "tinker's curse" or "a tuppenny damn" would have seemed loquacious in him on such an occasion. The not very sensational "Up Guards and at 'em!" was in later life disputed by the Duke. Under great pressure, the most he would admit was that he might ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... year, an old woman, named Marion Haw, was returned upon that, her native parish, from Glasgow. She had led a migratory life with her son—who was what he called a bell-hanger, but in fact a tinker of the worst grade—for many years, and was at last returned to the muckle town in a state of great destitution. She gave the parishioners a history of the Mysterious Bride, so plausibly correct, but withal ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... communications from Mark Twain that year deserve to be remembered. One of these; unsigned, was published in the Century Magazine, and expressed the need for a "universal tinker," the man who can accept a job in a large household or in a community as master of all trades, with sufficient knowledge of each to be ready to undertake whatever repairs are likely to be required in the ordinary household, such as—"to put in windowpanes, mend gas ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... parentage, his father being a tinker. At one time he was in the Parliamentary Army, and in 1645, was present at the siege of Leicester. Having left the army, he married. Then after a time of great spiritual agony and doubt, with quieter intervals, he became a member and then minister of the Baptist congregation at Bedford. His ...
— What to See in England • Gordon Home
... (sledge) in front was a single thong of sealskin with a loop on its end. This was called the "bridle." Each dog had an individual trace, its end passed through the loop in the bridle and securely tied. Tinker, the leading dog, was fully thirty-five feet from the komatik when his trace was stretched to its full length. He had the longest trace of all. He was trained to respond to shouted directions, turning to the right when "ouk" was called, or left for "rudder," ...
— Troop One of the Labrador • Dillon Wallace
... pieces when notified to pay your license-tax; if you can feel a quiet sense of pleasure when driving on a rough and hilly road, and never move a muscle of your visage when underneath you hear a tire explode; if you can plan a pleasant week-end journey and tinker at your car a day or so, then thrill with joy on that eventful morning to find no skill of yours can make it go; if you can gather up your wife and children, put on your glad rags, and start off for church, then have to wade around in greasy gearings and spoil the best of ...
— More Toasts • Marion Dix Mosher
... rumor, as she is wont in such cases, had adorned his early history with so many myths and portents, that Niebuhr himself could hardly have distinguished between the fable and the truth. It was said and believed that he was a foundling—a Gipsy's son, a wandering beggar, a tinker. Others had seen him in rags, selling pencils at the steps between the Pont-Neuf and the Pont-au-Change. Others, again, maintained that he had for years filled the canine office of guide to an old blind mendicant, ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... than justice, my good Master Heriot," continued the duke, in the same tone of irony; "you have a marvellous court-faction, to be the son of an Edinburgh tinker. Have the goodness to prefer me to the knowledge of the high-born nobleman who is honoured and advantaged by ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... | Porter Barber | Chinaman Coffeeman | Founder Porkshop-keeper | Grave-digger Cartwright | Tradesman Tinker, a brasier | Stockingmender Nailer ...
— English as she is spoke - or, A jest in sober earnest • Jose da Fonseca
... strongly recommend the audience to give their days and nights to the study of Bunyan and M'Cheyne. "Bunyan by all means," said I to myself, "but who is M'Cheyne that one should be mindful of him and put him for importance alongside of the immortal tinker?" ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... Ambrose inwardly wondered where the man could be hiding. Billingsfield was not, he believed, an easy place to hide in, for every ploughman knew his fellow, and a new face was always an object of suspicion. Not a gipsy tinker entered the village but what every one heard of it, and though tramps came through from time to time, it would be a difficult matter for one of them to remain two days in the place without attracting a great deal of attention. It was ...
— A Tale of a Lonely Parish • F. Marion Crawford
... into, sir. I found the garage all right, left her safe and sound, came back here, but after dinner thought I'd go round again to tinker a bit at the car in case of an early start to-morrow. When I got to the place there were three new fellows on duty, and they seemed astonished when they saw I intended to work on the Gloria. The chauffeur who looked after ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... the morning upon the Introduction to the Chronicles; it may be thought egotistical. Learned a bad accident had happened yesterday. A tinker (drunk I suppose) entered the stream opposite to Faldonside with an ass bearing his children. The ass was carried down by the force of the stream, and one of the little creatures was drowned; the ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... sentiment to take sides, and the bitterest of feeling was engendered. The raids of passing soldiers was the excuse for the organization, by both sides, of bands who claimed they were "Home Guards"—the Federals under "Tinker" Beaty, and the Confederates under Champ Ferguson. These bands, each striving for the mastery, soon developed into guerrillas of the worst type the war produced, ...
— Sergeant York And His People • Sam Cowan
... is still more remarkable than the play itself: a drunken tinker, removed in his sleep to a palace, where he is deceived into the belief of being a nobleman. The invention, however, is not Shakspeare's. Holberg has handled the same subject in a masterly manner, and with inimitable truth; but he has spun ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... been fool enough to fill the kettle before tramping off to the 'Ring of Bells'?" the good woman broke in. "Lord knows 'tisn' his way to be thoughtful, and when he tries it there's always a breakage. When I'd melted the ice, the thing began to leak like a sieve; and if this tinker fellow hadn't come along—by Providence, as you may call it—though I'd ha' been obliged to Providence for ...
— Hetty Wesley • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Lucius was a shiftless creature. It had long been the consensus of opinion—freely expressed throughout Tinkletown—that he did not amount to a tinker's dam. ...
— Anderson Crow, Detective • George Barr McCutcheon
... "I do want them—every tinker of them. Poor old girl, you never knew the fun of keeping a lot of men in a continual squirm. However, I think possibly what you call the ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various
... pitiful to see the hay afloat like water-weeds, and the green oats scarcely showing above the black floods. In two minutes after starting I was wet to the skin, and I thanked Providence I had left my little Dutch Horace behind me in the book-box. By three in the afternoon I was as unkempt as any tinker, my hair plastered over my eyes, and every fold of my coat ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... the close of our day-watch on deck, he approached Handy Solomon. It was at the end of ten days, on no one of which had the seaman failed to tinker away at his steel claw. Darrow balanced in front of him with ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... trades, as they have their bodies, he says, marred by their vulgar businesses, so they have their souls, too, bowed and broken by them. And if one of these uncomely people has a mind to seek self-culture and philosophy, Plato compares him to a bald little tinker,[117] who has scraped together money, and has got his release from service, and has had a bath, and bought a new coat, and is rigged out like a bridegroom about to marry the daughter of his master who has fallen ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... former relations with the other sex. What was most unusual for him, he was alarmed and depressed, at moments irritable. He regretted the capricious and apparently accidental impulse that had made him pretend to tinker with his automobile that day by the canal, that had led him to the incomparable idiocy of getting rid of Miss Ottway and installing the disturber of his ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... was a tinker—a travelling tinker. He would do a little gardening and farming at home for a while, and then go off about the country for a few days, mending people's pots and pans and kettles. Usually Sym left Emily Ann at home to keep the Little Red House company, ...
— A Book for Kids • C. J. (Clarence Michael James) Dennis
... is aluminum," said he, "or it wouldn't be worth a tinker's dam after all this time. But as it is, it's taken no harm that I can see. Wire braces all gone, rusted out and disappeared. Have to be rewired throughout, if I can find steel wire; if not, I'll use braided leather thongs. Petrol ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... justice of the peace; "you can shut up your school at five o'clock every night, and every cheesemonger and tinker in the place can do the same; but we've got no time we can call our own. Pull your chair up to the fire, old fellow. Let's see, what were we saying?" The servant appeared again at this point, and said—"Please, sir, they've got a couple ...
— Parkhurst Boys - And Other Stories of School Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... three or four years, 1899-1902 were passed between Paris and Ireland; Paris in the winter and spring and Ireland in the other seasons. He was at work on The Aran Islands, and on his three early one act plays, The Tinker's Wedding, Riders to the Sea, and The Shadow of the Glen. He came to London in the winter of 1902-3, where I saw him as I have described. London did not suit him and he did not stay long. He gave up his room in Paris at this time, with some searching of the heart; for at thirty one clings ...
— John M. Synge: A Few Personal Recollections, with Biographical Notes • John Masefield
... seriousness—for others, but never for himself. Tranquillity was to him instead of it. This philosophical levity of tranquillity, so to speak, is shown in his easy variety of pursuits. Printer, postmaster, almanac maker, essayist, chemist, orator, tinker, statesman, humorist, philosopher, parlor man, political economist, professor of housewifery, ambassador, projector, maxim-monger, herb-doctor, wit:—Jack of all trades, master of each and mastered by none—the type and genius of his land. Franklin was ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... the - in - do you mean by taking their gold-leaf? My -, are we a set of pirates to scrape the guts out of a Levantine bumboat? Look contrite, you butt-ended, broad-breeched, bottle-bellied, swivel-eyed son of a tinker, you! My Soul alive, can't I maintain discipline in my own ship without a blacksmith of a boiler-riveter putting me to shame before a yellow-nosed picaroon. Get off the staging, Mr. Davies, and go to the engine-room. Put down that leaf first, though, and leave the books ...
— This is "Part II" of Soldiers Three, we don't have "Part I" • Rudyard Kipling
... don't care a tinker's dam how you do it," he said. "Drink it all, if you want to. I'll take the biggest—that one under the milk-house." Whereat they jeered at him for wanting to be ...
— Good Indian • B. M. Bower
... well acquainted with you as he is with his dishas intimate as one of the beasts familiar to man which signify love, and with which his own trade is especially conversant. Who is he?why, he has gone the vole has been soldier, ballad-singer, travelling tinker, and is now a beggar. He is spoiled by our foolish gentry, who laugh at his jokes, and rehearse Edie Ochiltree's good thing's as regularly as ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... very hungry indeed. He had been going from place to place with his master, and now it was two long days since he had eaten a good dinner. His master was a poor tinker who traveled about the country and never stayed long in one place. Rover would have liked this if his master had been kind to him, but the dog was used only to ...
— Friends and Helpers • Sarah J. Eddy
... fetid atmosphere of taverns. There was an Allen-a-Dale in Robin Hood's gang; it was in the Bell Inn, at Gloucester, that George Whitefield, the most gifted of popular orators, was reared; and Bunyan's Muse found him at the disrespectable trade of a tinker, and amidst the clatter of pots, and pans, and vulgar curses, made her whisper audible in his ear, "Come up hither to the Mount of Vision—to ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside
... almost any day, an old man may be seen pushing a tinker's barrow. The small carriage is gay with yellow, red, and blue paint and bright with polished brass, and on a conspicuous place appear the words, 'Where will you spend Eternity?' The barrow-man has a pleasant, bearded face, and steady-gazing, merry, ...
— The Angel Adjutant of "Twice Born Men" • Minnie L. Carpenter
... it was for scientific reasons that I persuaded the old "Badger" to stand in with me in the matter. So we will tinker at the conduit-pipes a little, and dig up a little bit of the shore, and it shan't cost the town a sixpence. That will ...
— An Enemy of the People • Henrik Ibsen
... way. I know you don't care a tinker's damn for me in the way I care for you. But you can't deny that you do like me some. You wouldn't talk to me like you do and let me do things for you if you didn't. What I want you to promise is that whenever you ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... joined in having a good time at the tinker's expense, and pronounced him "the prince of good fellows." ...
— The Expressman and the Detective • Allan Pinkerton
... use and object of piston and cylinder and crank and joint and condenser—in short, fully to understand the underlying principle of its construction. He took it to pieces for cleaning whenever it was needful; he made working models of it after his old childish pattern; he even ventured to tinker it up when out of order on his own responsibility. Thus he learnt at last something of the theory of the steam-engine, and learnt also by the way a great deal about the general principles of mechanical science. ...
— Biographies of Working Men • Grant Allen
... ain't ashamed of owning that my father was just a travelling tinker, and when I was a little fellow I used to go round with him and see him do most things. It was from travelling through the country I learned to love it so. And my father, he was a thoughtful man, and when I used to ask where the tin came ...
— His Big Opportunity • Amy Le Feuvre
... assuredly take your orders," the landlady answered, bustling in with her hands full of leathern drinking-cups. "What is it that you drink, then? Beer for the lads of the forest, mead for the gleeman, strong waters for the tinker, and wine for the rest. It is an old custom of the house, young sir. It has been the use at the 'Pied Merlin' this many a year back that the company should drink to the health of the last comer. Is it your pleasure to ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Worked in the morning upon the Introduction to the Chronicles; it may be thought egotistical. Learned a bad accident had happened yesterday. A tinker (drunk I suppose) entered the stream opposite to Faldonside with an ass bearing his children. The ass was carried down by the force of the stream, and one of the little creatures was drowned; the other ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... he sits in as much stern state as the Old Red Lion of Brentford. Yes, he is my Lord Chief Justice Nevergrin! He cannot qualify, he! He is prime tinker to Madam Virtue, and carries no softening epithets in his budget. Folly is folly, and vice vice in his Good Friday vocabulary—Titles too are gilt gingerbread, dutch dolls, punch's puppet show. ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... the whole ground floor. In the front kitchen there was a tinker. The back kitchen was let to a bellows-mender. On the first floor came Ernest, with his two rooms which he furnished comfortably, for one must draw the line somewhere. The two upper floors were parcelled out among four different sets of lodgers: there was a tailor named Holt, a drunken ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... pedigree-tracers confine themselves to one line, or to a few lines. Burke will tell you that one of the great-great-grandfathers of the present Lord Foozlem was the First Baron; he is silent about his great-grandfather, the tinker, and his great-grandfather, the pettifogging country lawyer. Americans are far more apt to push their genealogical investigations in all directions, because they are prompted by a legitimate curiosity rather than by desire to prove a point, American ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... was unpacking and returned it to me under the misapprehension that I had written it. I wish I had. I suppose there must be something attractive about a fellow who has the courage to write a love letter on the back of a trunk tag, and who doesn't give a tinker's damn who finds it. But for my peace of mind, ask him not to leave another one around where I will come across ...
— When a Man Marries • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... of an early summer morning in the shade of a tree, eating fried bacon with a tinker, the thought came to me that I might some day write a book of my own: a book that should treat of the roads and by-roads, of trees, and wind in lonely places, of rapid brooks and lazy streams, of the glory of dawn, the glow of evening, and the purple solitude ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... one rule, that stood in place of many: To keep out of every business which it was possible for human wisdom to stave aside. 'What good will you get of going into that? Parliamentary criticism, argument and botheration? Leave well alone. And even leave ill alone:—are you the tradesman to tinker leaky vessels in England? You will not want for work. Mind your pudding, and say little!' At home and abroad, that was the safe secret. For, in Foreign Politics, his rule was analogous: 'Mind your own affairs. You are an Island, you can do without ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... when Mrs. Kilfoyle saw who Ody's companions were, she bade a regretful adieu to her hopes of recovering her stolen property. For how could she set him on the Tinker's felonious track without apprising them likewise? You might as well try to huroosh one chicken off a rafter and not scare the couple that were huddled beside it. The impossibility became more obvious presently as the constables, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... root with the other jog, which means to shake, ("A. S. sceac-an, to shake, or shock, or shog.") Shog has nothing whatever to do with shaking, unless when Nym says to Pistol, "Will you shog off?" he may be said to have shaken him off. When the Tinker in Beaumont and Fletcher's "Coxcomb" says, "Come, prithee, let's shog off," what possible allusion to shaking is there, except, perhaps, to "shaking stumps"? The first jog and shog are identical in meaning and derivation, and may be traced, by whosoever chooses, to ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... for his crimson barometer? It was the steam—the steam—that was going down; and what between the firemen going faint and the chief going silly, it was worse than a dog's life for him; he didn't care a tinker's curse how soon the whole show was blown out of the water. He seemed on the point of having a cry, but after regaining his breath he muttered darkly, "I'll faint them," and dashed off. He stopped upon the fiddle long enough to shake his fist at the unnatural daylight, and dropped into the ...
— Typhoon • Joseph Conrad
... meanwhile that Frank had made the big centre-table of plank, and the book-shelves as well. "He likes to tinker at such things," she said. "Whenever he gets blue or cross I set him to shifting the dresser or making a book-shelf, and he cheers up like mad. He's a regular kid anyway—always doing the things he ought not ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... his friends joined in having a good time at the tinker's expense, and pronounced him "the prince of ...
— The Expressman and the Detective • Allan Pinkerton
... The tinker, for such I supposed him to be, without altering his posture, raised his eyes, looked at me for a moment, gave a slight nod, and then once more fixed his eyes upon the table. I took a draught of the ale, which I found excellent; "won't you drink?" ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... of sixty, an Irishman who had served in the British Army in India with Havelock and Colin Campbell. He had bought a ranch in the West, but an accident to one of his eyes forced him to spend all his money to save the other one. He drifted in to New York, penniless and without a friend. Seeing a tinker mending umbrellas one day on the street, he sat down beside him and watched the process. In that way he ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine
... hated all the other boys who got under the wheels. Lord, Lord, how you did hate him! Phelps, here, is fond of saying that he could buy and sell us all out any time he's a mind to; but he knew Harve wouldn't have given a tinker's damn for his bank and all his cattlefarms put together; and a lack of appreciation, that ...
— Youth and the Bright Medusa • Willa Cather
... obstacles many and great. A wise doubtfulness prompts conservative minds to throw every mover for change upon the defensive, when liturgical interests are at stake. So many men are born into the world with a native disposition to tamper with and tinker all settled things, and so many more become persuaded, as time goes on, of a personal "mission" to pull down and remake whatever has been once built up, esteeming life a failure unless they have contrived to build each his own monument upon a clearing, that lovers of the old ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington
... letter; and I hope Mr. Rives will be able to tell me you are entirely restored. But our machines have now been running seventy or eighty years, and we must expect that, worn as they are, here a pivot, there a wheel, now a pinion, next a spring, will be giving way; and however we may tinker them up for a while, all will at length surcease motion. Our watches, with works of brass and steel, wear out within that period. Shall you and I last to see the course the seven-fold wonders of the times will take? The Attila of the age dethroned, the ruthless destroyer of ten millions of ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... we not, madam?" said the dame. "Was not my man yonder, Rob, the tinker's son, whom my father and brethren, the smiths down yonder at Buxton, thought but scorn of, but we'd taken a sup together at the Ebbing Well, and it played neither of us false, so we held out against 'em all, and when they saw there was no help for it, they gave Bob the second ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... invite an answer in a short space of time. Suffice it to say that the most important mental process, to my mind, is the development of a perception of beauty. All the perseverance in the study of music, all the application devoted to it, is not worth a tinker's dam, unless accompanied by this awakening to the perception of beauty. And with regard to the influence of teachers? Since all teachers vary greatly, the student should not limit himself to his own personal masters. The true student of Art should be able to derive ...
— Violin Mastery - Talks with Master Violinists and Teachers • Frederick H. Martens
... but not so very hard. I was under Her daughter, Miss Mollie. She liked me and always called me "Tinker". When she heard me crying and ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - From Interviews with Former Slaves - Florida Narratives • Works Projects Administration
... impudent publican which took place here yesterday may deserve the appellation. You may perhaps be more interested to hear that I sprained my foot, and am just recovering from the effects of the accident by means of opodeldoc which I bought at the tinker's. For all trades and professions here lie in a most delightful confusion. The druggist sells hats; the shoemaker is the sole bookseller, if that dignity may be allowed him on the strength of the three Welsh Bibles, and the guide to Caernarvon, ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... irritated. After he and Janet had explored the house and garden, there seemed nothing left to do for Oliver but to stroll up and down the drive, stare through the tall gates at the motors going by, or to spend hours in the garage, sitting on a box and watching Jennings, the chauffeur, tinker with the big car that was so seldom used. Janet was able to amuse herself better, but her brother, by the third day, had reached a state of disappointed boredom that was almost ready, at any small thing, ...
— The Windy Hill • Cornelia Meigs
... housemaids was found at an early day in "help," as it was called even then. Roger Williams, writing of his daughter, said: "She desires to spend some time in service & liked much Mrs. Brenton who wanted." John Tinker, who himself was help, wrote thus to John Winthrop; "Help is scarce, hard to get, difficult to please, uncertain, &c. Means runneth out and wages on & I cannot make choice of my help." Children of well-to-do citizens thus worked in domestic service. ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... suppose we'll be expected to stand around on one foot while you tinker with all those attachments and shutters and other ...
— The Merriweather Girls and the Mystery of the Queen's Fan • Lizette M. Edholm
... murrain to thee, goodman Grim, thy fire is colder than my halidome; the sun is so high it puts it out, I reckon. Here have I two iron pots, a plate from my master's best greaves, and a pair of spurs that want piecing, and I'm like to tinker them as I list on a cold stithy. Get out, thou"—Here he became aware of an additional inmate to Grim's dwelling; and this discovery for a while checked the copious torrent of Dan's eloquence. Shortly, Darby drew him aside, and from their looks it might be gathered that some scheme was ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... mend, restore, patch, tinker, revamp, darn, cobble, remodel; indemnify, redress, atone ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... awfully late. We sat and smoked on a siding while two accommodations and a freight dashed past. I think we must have broken something, and had to tinker up our engine. The conductor was soothing, ...
— Dear Enemy • Jean Webster
... the thing fer ye," Uncle Dick replied, leading the way from the cabin toward one of the out-buildings. "Hit's an ole coat. Dan left hit one hot day when he stopped in at my forge, to tinker the rivets to the cap o' the still. Hit was dum hot thet day, an' he left 'is coat. 'Twa'n't wuth comin' back fer. I 'low the smell's about all ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... a mistake trying to build their own cars," said Ernest. "More accidents come from that than people realize. While the war was going on, no one had time to tinker at building, but now half the chaps I know are studying up and attempting to ...
— Battling the Clouds - or, For a Comrade's Honor • Captain Frank Cobb
... cry of recognition, Mobray sprang forward, his hand outstretched. "Charlie!" he exclaimed. "Heavens, man, we have made a joke in the army of the appearance of thy troops, but I never thought to see the exquisite of the Mall in clothes not fit for a tinker." ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... beastly jungle-grass," he proceeded, "is the Wilderness of Nasty Possibilities. Hold up, Tinker, my lad, and get out of it as ...
— The Keeper of the Door • Ethel M. Dell
... was an Englishman, believed to be the son of a gipsy tinker. He said his youth was very ungodly; but he married a religious woman and early became a preacher. At the same time he began to write books of a religious nature. Because he preached at "unlawful ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... presume, intend to head the boarders as usual," remarked the doctor, with a quiet grin. "What is the extent of the damage? Here, sit down and let me have a look at it; don't be impatient; I'll undertake to tinker you up as good as new in two or three minutes," he continued, as I seated myself, and he began to sponge the blood away. "There is no great harm done, merely a simple laceration of the scalp. There, ...
— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood
... of England was John Bunyan. He was born in 1628, more than twenty years after Milton. His father was a tinker. A tinker! The word makes us think of ragged, weather-worn men and women who wander about the countryside. They carry bundles of old umbrellas, and sometimes a battered kettle or two. They live, who knows how? they sleep, who knows where? Sometimes ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... him," muttered Dorrimore between his set teeth. "That wouldn't matter a tinker's curse, but she's fooled us as well. Rofflash, I've a mind to pick a quarrel with the ...
— Madame Flirt - A Romance of 'The Beggar's Opera' • Charles E. Pearce
... us. As yet, of course, it is too soon to form plans for the future; but be assured that there will be no parting. You took me when I was a helpless baby; but for you I should have been a workhouse child, and might now be coming out of my apprenticeship to a tinker or a tailor. I owe all I have, all I am, to you; and whatever fortune befall me you will still be dad and mother. For a short time I must go to the hall, as Mr. Brook has invited me; and we shall have much to arrange and talk over. Afterwards I suppose I shall have to ...
— Facing Death - The Hero of the Vaughan Pit. A Tale of the Coal Mines • G. A. Henty
... fight a man for your life, or you'll be in the horse latitudes, as they call them, and no breeze stirring, and not a damned thing to do but holystone decks, the like of an old pauper that does be scrubbing a poorhouse floor. And you say: 'Sure I'd rather be a tinker traveling the roads, with his ass and cart and dog and woman, nor a galley-slave to this bastard of a mate that has no more feeling for a poor sailorman nor a hound has for a rabbit. It's a dog's life,' you say, 'and when we make ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... grateful to that article of his wife's apparel which the vulgar will call "stays." In earlier days a husband used to lock his wife in a pair of iron-bound corsets when he went away from home, keeping the key in his pocket, and thus not caring a tinker's cuss if his home were simply overflowing with handsome gentleman lodgers! The poor wife couldn't retaliate by locking her husband in such a virtuous prison, because men never wore such things—which, perhaps, was one or the reasons ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... helped many men in the intelligent formation of their character, and what higher praise could be given to any author? Butler will lie on our table all winter beside Bunyan; the bishop beside the tinker, the philosopher beside the poet, the moralist beside ...
— Bunyan Characters - First Series • Alexander Whyte
... ninety-nine of your qualities I do not care a tinker's curse; but for your palate you are to be ...
— I Saw Three Ships and Other Winter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... is observable in all the East The East is the fatherland of thieves, and Oriental annals teem with brilliant examples of their exploits. The story of Jacoub Ben-Laith, founder of the Soffarid dynasty,—otherwise, first of the Tinker-Kings of the larger part of Persia,—is especially excellent upon that proverbial "honor among thieves" of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... thirty-eighth year, he had written only six short plays, all between 1903 and 1909. Two of these, In the Shadow of the Glen and Riders to the Sea, contain only one act. The Tinker's Wedding has two acts, and ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... him whate'r he writ. His excellencies came, and were not sought, His words like casual atoms made a thought; Drew up themselves in rank and file, and writ, He wondering how the devil it were, such wit. Thus, like the drunken tinker in his play, He grew a prince, and never knew which way. He did not know what trope or figure meant, But to persuade is to be eloquent; So in this Caesar which this day you see, Tully ne'er spoke as he makes Anthony. Those ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 223, February 4, 1854 • Various
... tongues—some who have personal grievances. And there are always some people in every community who stand all ready to be led by the last brain with which they come in contact; or, if not that, they are sure to think exactly as Dr. Jones and Judge Tinker and Prof. Bolus do, without reason as to why or wherefore. This class is very easily managed. A little care, a judicious repetition of a sentence which fell from the doctor's or the judge's or the professor's lips, and which might have meant anything or nothing, by the slightest possible ...
— Divers Women • Pansy and Mrs. C.M. Livingston
... the baptism of Francois Xavier, tenth son of Pierre Lecour, master-butcher, of this Parish, and of his wife, Marie LeCoq. He had for godfather, Jean LeCoq, tinker, and for godmother, Therese, wife ...
— The False Chevalier - or, The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette • William Douw Lighthall
... her powder, and Stepney said with a laughing glance at Miss Bart: "I suppose he is thinking of marriage, and wants to tinker up the old ship before he ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... of battle and of the sea, with the desolateness of lonely wolds, with the passion of loyalty to a leader. Read "Deor's Lament," "Widsith," "The Wanderer," "The Sea-farer," or the battle-songs of Brunanburh and Maldon in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. [Footnote: See Cook and Tinker, Select Translations from Old English Poetry (Boston, 1902), and Pancoast and Spaeth, Early English Poems (New York, 1911).] The last strophe of "Deor's Lament," our oldest English lyric, ends with ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... afternoon when we met our third general, and this meeting was quite by chance. Coming back from a spin down the lines we stopped in a small village called Amifontaine, to let our chauffeur, known affectionately as The Human Rabbit, tinker with a leaky tire valve or something. A young officer came up through the dusk to find out who we were, and, having found out, he invited us into the chief house of the place, and there in a stuffy little French parlor we were ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... "I don't care a tinker's damn what you've done," he said forcibly. "Remember that! We're brothers, and I'll stick to you. If there's anything in life that I can do to help, I'll do it. If there isn't, well, I won't worry you, but you know you can ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... he would give you another touch or coup de grace ... He really sometimes puts me in mind of Gil Blas; but he has not the sneer of the Frenchman, nor does he gild the bad. He has a touch of Bunyan, and, like that enthusiastic tinker, hammers away, a la Gitano, whenever he thinks he can thwack the Devil or his man-of-all-work on earth—the Pope. Therein he resembles my friend and everybody's friend—Punch—who, amidst all his adventures, never spares the black one. However, I am not going to review him now; for I know that ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... fleshly, and official Bank-paper and State-paper Clothes) into the Man himself; and discern, it may be, in this or the other Dread Potentate, a more or less incompetent Digestive-apparatus; yet also an inscrutable venerable Mystery, in the meanest Tinker that ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... because he was so angry, and he spoke right out loud! He stood up and shook his fist at the Tinker. His head showed over the top of the wall. Eileen jerked ...
— The Irish Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... of the "unknown public," which, in a single phrase, and a sentence or two of explanation, tell a whole history. This is the class John Bunyan wrote for before the bishops had his Allegory in presentable calf and gold-leaf,—before England knew that her poor tinker had shaped a pictured urn for her full of such visions as no dreamer had seen since Dante. This is the class that believes in John Bright and Richard Cobden and all the defenders of true American principles. It absorbs intelligence as melting ice renders heat latent; there is no living power ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... one Stand-By left to him. He could prop himself up on the Bleachers with a bag of lubricated Pop-Corn between his Knees and hurl insulting Remarks at Honus Wagner, Joe Tinker and Ty Cobb. ...
— Knocking the Neighbors • George Ade
... Team Arrive at the Goal A Page from the Observation Book, December 17, 1911 At the South Pole, December 16 and 17, 1911 Mount Don Pedro Christophersen Framheim on the Return of the Polar Party Lindstrom in the Kitchen Farewell to the Barrier Bjaaland as Tinker Dogs Landed at Hobart for Dr. Mawson's Expedition Members of the Japanese Antarctic Expedition Lieutenant Prestrud An Original Inhabitant of the Antarctic Stubberud Reviews the Situation Camp on the Barrier: Eastern Expedition A Broken-off Cape Off ...
— The South Pole, Volumes 1 and 2 • Roald Amundsen
... intrigue and amusement; while the mild temper of the people and the watchfulness of the police prevented the public disorders that such license might have occasioned. These seeming anomalies abounded on every side. From the gaming-table where a tinker might set a ducat against a prince it was but a few steps to the Broglio, or arcade under the ducal palace, into which no plebeian might intrude while the nobility walked there. The great ladies, who were subject to strict ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... all right," snapped Ralph impatiently. "Say, you people, you'd better get out of the car, while I tinker ...
— The Border Boys Across the Frontier • Fremont B. Deering
... luck, sir," said the doctor; "I'm always late for a job. By-the-bye, I'll tell you an amusing fact of that musty piece of humanity, Miss Jinkins. Her niece was dangerously ill, and she had that licensed slaughterer from Killanmaul trying to tinker her up, till the poor girl was past all hope, and then she sends for me. She swore, some time ago, I shall never darken her doors; but when she began to apprehend that death was rather a darker gentleman than I, she tolerated my person. The ...
— Handy Andy, Volume One - A Tale of Irish Life, in Two Volumes • Samuel Lover
... remarkable than the play itself: a drunken tinker, removed in his sleep to a palace, where he is deceived into the belief of being a nobleman. The invention, however, is not Shakspeare's. Holberg has handled the same subject in a masterly manner, and with inimitable ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... he. "Stir your stumps. We can slip out before anybody else awakes, grab something to eat in the pantry, and go down to the shed and tinker on the plane. Come on, Bob, we can get in a couple of hours work ...
— The Radio Boys on the Mexican Border • Gerald Breckenridge
... Death The Trace of Cromwell Cromwell's Law Cromwell in Connacht A Worse than Cromwell The Battle of Aughrim The Stuarts Another Story Patrick Sarsfield Queen Anne Carolan's Song 'Ninety-Eight Denis Browne The Union Robert Emmet O'Connell's Birth The Tinker A Present His Strategy The Man was Going to be Hanged The Cup of the Sassanach The Thousand Fishers What the Old Women Saw O'Connell's Hat The Change He Made The Man He Brought to Justice The Binding His Monument A Praise Made for Daniel O'Connell by Old Women and They Begging at the Door Richard ...
— The Kiltartan History Book • Lady I. A. Gregory
... "I don't say it for a minute. I like your going. I wouldn't give a tinker's dam for you, whatever that is, if you didn't want to do something for those fellows over there. I won't even say to be careful, for you can't if you do your duty—only, don't you be too all-fired foolhardy, even for war ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... she never play'd, Or the odds and ends of a Tinker's Trade, Or little dirt pies and puddings made, Like children happy and squalid; The very puppet she had to pet, Like a bait for the "Nix my Dolly" set, Was ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... sat in the shadowy hollow of the orchestra, two obscure little shapes on the floor of the enormous cavern. The other was Talbot Potter's manager, Carson Tinker, a neat, grim, small old man with a definite appearance of having long ago learned that after a little while life will beat anybody's game, no matter how good. He observed the nervousness of the playwright, but without interest. He ...
— Harlequin and Columbine • Booth Tarkington
... wheelwright's, Mr. Carnegie pulled up at a spot by the wayside where an itinerant tinker sat in the shade with his brazier hot, doing a good stroke of work on the village kettles and pots: "Eh, Gampling, here you are again! They bade me at home look out for you and tell you to call. There is a whole regiment of ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... great difficulty against which all human advancement has to contend, that people can rarely be brought to question principles which have become a part and parcel of their everyday existence. There are plenty of individuals who are ready to tinker with existing institutions, and who erroneously dignify that process by the name of reform. But nothing is more despairing than the effort to convince conventionally brought up people that some cherished ...
— The Curse of Education • Harold E. Gorst
... sailor, in what a plight I've been! Tinker, tailor, oh what a sight I've seen! And I'm hitting the trail in the morning, boys, And you won't see my heels for dust; For it's "all day" with you When you answer the ...
— Rhymes of a Rolling Stone • Robert W. Service
... "Tinker," we found, meant Murre and Razor-Billed Auk. These are finely shaped birds, black above and white below, twice the size of a pigeon, and closely resembling each other, save in the bill. That of the murre is not noticeable; ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... own, but her own adventure. Beyond every corner there may be a tavern or a church wherein both the saint and the sinner may be entrapped and remolded. Beyond the skyline you may find a dynamite cartridge, a drunken tinker, a mad dog, or a shilling which some person has dropped; and any one of these unexpectednesses may be potent to urge the traveler down a side street and put a crook in the straight line which had been his life, and to which he had become miserably reconciled. The element of surprise ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... in the great chimney, a very tall old woman clad in a red cloak and a slouched bonnet, having all the appearance of a gipsy or tinker. She smoked silently at her clay pipe, while the doubtful-looking ...
— Red Cap Tales - Stolen from the Treasure Chest of the Wizard of the North • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... thus grow in spots; and like grease-spots, the spots spread. But we let them spread as little as possible: we keep unaltered as much of our old knowledge, as many of our old prejudices and beliefs, as we can. We patch and tinker more than we renew. The novelty soaks in; it stains the ancient mass; but it is also tinged by what absorbs it. Our past apperceives and co- operates; and in the new equilibrium in which each step forward in the process of learning terminates, it happens ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... arms for the patriots of Seventy-six, until what time the British destroyed his shop. Then he was a soldier. He suffered the horrors of Valley Forge; and before the conclusion of the peace he went abroad in the country as a tinker of clocks and watches. His peculiarity of manner and his mendicant character made him the butt of neighborhoods. In 1780 he was sent as a deputy-surveyor from Virginia into Kentucky, and after nearly two years spent in the country between the Kentucky and Green rivers, he went back to ...
— Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century - Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World • Various
... poor tinker passing by picked it up and put it in his wallet. But by this time Tom had got his mouth clear of the batter, and he began holloaing, and making such a to-do, that the tinker, even more frightened than Tom's mother had been, threw the pudding in the road, and ran away as fast as ...
— English Fairy Tales • Flora Annie Steel
... around him on Tom Tiddler's ground, and his glance at last encountered a dusky Tinker lying among the weeds and rank grass, in the shade of the dwelling-house. A rough walking-staff lay on the ground by his side, and his head rested on a small wallet. He met Mr. Traveller's eye without lifting up his head, merely depressing his chin a ...
— Tom Tiddler's Ground • Charles Dickens
... few here," said Clark. "You know Kentucky breeds explorers. I have a good blacksmith, Shields, and Bill Bratton is another blacksmith—either can tinker a gun if need be. Then I have John Coalter, an active, strapping chap, and the two Fields boys, whom I know to be good men; and Charlie Floyd, Nate Pryor, and a couple of others—Warner and Whitehouse. We should get the rest at the forts ...
— The Magnificent Adventure - Being the Story of the World's Greatest Exploration and - the Romance of a Very Gallant Gentleman • Emerson Hough
... his relations and dependants presented to them the more animated and interesting spectacle of a struggle for his usurped power. Richard perhaps, and the immediate friends of the deceased Protector, with such of Dryden's relations as were attached to his memory, may have thought, like the tinker at the Taming of the Shrew, that this same elegy was "marvellous good matter." It did not probably attract much general attention. The first edition, in 1659, is extremely rare: it was reprinted, however, along with those of Sprat and Waller, ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... at the still noon of night, The hallalloo of fire in every street! Odsbobs! I have a mind to hang myself, To think I should a grandmother be made By such a rascal!—Sure the king forgets When in a pudding, by his mother put, The bastard, by a tinker, on a stile Was dropp'd.—O, good lord Grizzle! can I bear To see him from a pudding mount the throne? Or can, oh can, my Huncamunca bear To take a pudding's ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... parts," he answered. "How does the old puzzle run? Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, ploughboy, gentleman, thief. I think I have played all those parts, and others, too. Fling beggar and pirate into the dish. But I tell you this, honest John, I have never played a part so dear to me as that of captain to this divine commander. ...
— The Lady of Loyalty House - A Novel • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... saw how near he had been to losing a wife and a fortune. Arrived off Isle of Day; Tarboe told Mr. Martin and his men that if they said "treasure-trove" till they left the island their live would not be worth "a tinker's damn." When the had sworn, he took them to Angel Point, fed then royally, gave them excellent liquor to drink, and sent them in a fishing-smack with Bissonnette to Quebec where, arriving, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... few—who is content, who has no treasure to guard, whose rights there is none to dispute; who is his own magistrate, postman, architect, carpenter, painter, boat-builder, boatman, tinker, goatherd, gardener, woodcutter, water-carrier, and general labourer; who has been compelled to chip the superfine edges of his sentiments with the repugnant craft of the butcher; who, heedless of rule ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... of hearing of this revolver when I shoot—are those we're going to play against. So far I've been completely in the dark. I know of no reason why I shouldn't go down there openly and be welcomed and given a good supper. And yet at the same time I know that my life wouldn't be worth a tinker's damn if I did go down. You can clear up the whole business, and that's what you're going to do. When I understand why I am scheduled to be murdered on sight I won't be handicapped as I now am. So go ahead and spiel. If you don't, I'll ...
— The Danger Trail • James Oliver Curwood
... hole in the bottom of my bath. Don't know who could have done it; most extraordinary, I assure you. One of those ungrateful blacks, I warrant. Going this way? I shall be glad of your company. Ah, do you happen to know of a tinker?" he asked, as together they ...
— An Arkansas Planter • Opie Percival Read
... say it!" he protested. "It's true! He's the finest chap in the world, all true gold and not a grain of dross. That's how it is we all knock under to him. Even Nap does that, though he doesn't care a tinker's curse for anyone else on ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell
... leg, these crusted lips, this anxious, weary mind. Come away for a time, until your body becomes more habitable." And so she coaxes the mind away into the Nirvana of delirium, while the little cell-workers tinker and toil within to get things better for its home-coming. When you see the veil of cruelty which nature wears, try and peer through it, and you will sometimes catch a glimpse of a ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle
... son of Thomas Bunnionn Junior and Margaret Bentley, was born 1628, in the quaint old village of Elstow, one mile southwest of Bedford, near the spot where, three hundred years before, his ancestor William Boynon resided. His father was a poor tinker or "braseyer," and his mother's lineage is unknown. He says,—"I never went to school to Aristotle or Plato, but was brought up at my father's house in a very mean condition, among a company of ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... interesting to ask if Henry Fielding, barrister, journalist, tinker of plays and man-about-town, would ever have turned novelist, had it not been for Richardson, his predecessor. So slight, so seemingly accidental, are the incidents which make or mar careers and change the ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... drowsy sort of place Rotherwood was! The wide village street seemed empty, with the exception of a black collie lying asleep in the middle of the road, and a patient donkey belonging to a travelling tinker. The clean, sleek country sparrows were enjoying a dust bath, and a long-legged chicken—evidently a straggler from the brood—was pecking fitfully at a cabbage stalk, unmindful of the alarmed ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... course of the hours and minutes, at the same time disclose the whole combination of springs and wheels whereby they are moved." A similar transparency of motive and purpose, of individual traits and spontaneous action, belongs to the Bible. From the hand of Shakspeare, "the lord and the tinker, the hero and the valet, come forth equally distinct and clear." In the Bible the various sorts of men are never confounded, but have the advantage of being exhibited by Nature herself, and are not a contrivance of the imagination. "Shylock," observes a recent critic, "seems ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... strange to them! Indeed, it must have seemed strange to anyone had they seen and heard me! There I was, with Johnson at my piano, like some wayside tinker setting up his cart and working at his trade! But I did not care for appearances—not a whit. For the moment I was care free, a wandering minstrel, like some troubadour of old, care free and happy in my song. I forgot the black shadow ...
— A Minstrel In France • Harry Lauder
... had a strong desire to lift his aunt and her children to a little higher plane. To this, hitherto, he had found an obstacle in the pride of her husband. Henry Martin was a tinsmith who had come to the city to work in a great factory for a little higher wages than he could get as a journeyman tinker in a country town. He did not refuse to let the children accept presents from "Cousin Charley," but he was not willing "to be beholden to any of his wife's folks," as he expressed it. He resented the fact that even in Cappadocia he had been somewhat ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston
... Lunardi, and is on the point of offering to the inhabitants—I beg your pardon, to the nobility and gentry of our neighbourhood—the spectacle of an ascension. As one of the gentry concerned I may be permitted to remark that I am unmoved. I care not a Tinker's Damn for his ascension. No more—I breathe it in your ear—does anybody else. The business is stale, sir, stale. Lunardi did it, and overdid it. A whimsical, fiddling, vain fellow, by all accounts—for ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the state of the colonies. If they are to be retained, they should be incorporated with Great Britain. The people should be made to feel, not that they are colonists, but Englishmen. They may tinker at constitutions as much as they please; the root of the evil lies deeper than statesmen are aware of. O'Connell, when he agitates for a repeal of the Union, if he really has no ulterior objects beyond that of an Irish Parliament, does not know what he is talking about. If his ...
— The Attache - or, Sam Slick in England, Complete • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... colour began to fade. He took to haunting department-store kitchenware sections. He would come home with a new kind of cream whipper, or a patent device for the bathroom. He would tinker happily with this, driving a nail, adjusting a screw. At such times he was even known to begin to whistle some scrap of a doleful tune such as he used to hum. But he would change, quickly, into something lovely. The price of butter, eggs, milk, cream and the like horrified ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... sable, swarthy, somber, dark, inky, ebony, ebon, atramentous^, jetty; coal-black, jet-black; fuliginous^, pitchy, sooty, swart, dusky, dingy, murky, Ethiopic; low-toned, low in tone; of the deepest dye. black as jet &c n., black as my hat, black as a shoe, black as a tinker's pot, black as November, black as thunder, black as midnight; nocturnal &c (dark) 421; nigrescent^; gray &c 432; obscure ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... rooted out. Still, however, a sufficient number remained to give occasional alarm and constant vexation. Some rude handicrafts were entirely resigned to these itinerants, particularly the art of trencher-making, of manufacturing horn-spoons, and the whole mystery of the tinker. To these they added a petty trade in the coarse sorts of earthenware. Such were their ostensible means of livelihood. Each tribe had usually some fixed place of rendezvous, which they occasionally occupied. ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... collar. The next thing was to get Chance started on the road to the Concho. He rolled down his sleeves and strolled to the doorway. A Mexican sat smoking and watching the road. Sundown stepped past him and began to tinker with the gas-engine. Chance stood watching him. Presently the gas-engine started with a cough and splutter. Sundown walked to the door and seemed about to enter when the Mexican called to him and pointed toward the distant tank. ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs
... patched or bandaged eyes; crippled ones, with wooden legs and crutches; diseased ones, with running sores peeping from ineffectual wrappings; there was a villain-looking pedlar with his pack; a knife-grinder, a tinker, and a barber-surgeon, with the implements of their trades; some of the females were hardly-grown girls, some were at prime, some were old and wrinkled hags, and all were loud, brazen, foul-mouthed; and all soiled and slatternly; there were three sore-faced ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... now in the power of any and every body to read what I so carefully hoarded even from my best friends, till this last month or two; and that a work which was so lately lodged, in all privacy, in my bureau, may now be seen by every butcher and baker, cobbler and tinker, throughout the three kingdoms, for ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... of a shop and stepped into her carriage. I swear I was all of a blaze at once. Then I met Zaleshoff—looking like a hair-dresser's assistant, got up as fine as I don't know who, while I looked like a tinker. 'Don't flatter yourself, my boy,' said he; 'she's not for such as you; she's a princess, she is, and her name is Nastasia Philipovna Barashkoff, and she lives with Totski, who wishes to get rid of her because he's growing rather old—fifty-five or so—and wants to marry a certain beauty, ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... was stoutly orthodox, averred that Caesar's conduct was justifiable, inasmuch as the man he barked at was one of a band of new-light fanatics who worshipped in the school- house, and the horse, moreover, was not shod at a respectable place, but at a tinker's shop in the verge of the township. A dog with such powers of discrimination certainly merits a place in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various
... condition depends, in turn, upon the previous habits and modes of life. These have engendered the diseased condition we see before us; and the only effective and rational way to stop the effects—the symptoms—is to stop the causes, to change the habits of life which have led to such results; and not to tinker with the effects. Even pain may be ignored to some extent; but pain is due to a certain pathological state which requires treatment. It is simply an indication of an existing bodily condition. What is the good of ignoring ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... cheering up a good deal, and that kept us busy. The cheering was great fun for us, because it consisted mostly of picnics and long, long walks,—the kind where you take a stick and a kit-bag and eat your lunch under a hedge, like a tinker. We also wrote a story which we used to put in instalments under her plate at breakfast every other day. We took turns writing the story, and Greg's instalments always made Aunt Ailsa the most cheered up of all. The story was much too long to put ...
— Us and the Bottleman • Edith Ballinger Price
... Doubleday, Page and Company for The Animals' New Year's Eve and Nils and the Bear from the Further Adventures of Nils by Selma Lagerlooef. The Youth's Companion for Chip's Thanksgiving, The Rescue of Old Glory, The Tinker's Willow, The Three Brothers, and Molly's Easter Hen. The Thomas Y. Crowell Company for The Bird, and The Gray Hare from The Long Exile by Count Lyof N. Tolstoi. The American Book Company for The Three Little Butterfly Brothers. ...
— Tell Me Another Story - The Book of Story Programs • Carolyn Sherwin Bailey
... it was broken right in the middle; through its four socketless eyes, neighboured by the nettle, peered the thistle,—the thistle! a forest of thistles!—and, to complete the degradation of the whole, those thistles had attracted the donkey of an itinerant tinker; and the irreverent animal was in the very act of taking his luncheon out of the eyes and ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... and hoarded his gold; N was a Nobleman, gallant and bold; O was an Oysterman, who went about town; P was a Parson, and wore a black gown; Q was a Quack, with a wonderful pill; R was a Robber, who wanted to kill; S was a Sailor, who spent all he got; T was a Tinker, and mended a pot; U was an Usurer, a miserable elf; V was a Vintner, who drank all himself; W was a Watchman, who guarded the door; X was Expensive, and so became poor; Y was a Youth, that did not love school; Z was a Zany, a ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... he could change Cosy Moments into a real live paper. He wondered that the idea had not occurred to him before. The trifling fact that the despised journal was the property of Mr. Benjamin White, and that he had no right whatever to tinker with it without that gentleman's approval, may have occurred to him, but, if it did, it occurred so momentarily that he did not notice it. In these crises ...
— Psmith, Journalist • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... lived in the city. He was a mechanic, having worked for years in the railroad shops. Some months previous he had been discharged, and since then he had operated a small "tinker" shop of his own. Uncle Jens lived in a small rented house. Uncle Ole's visits to his brother were far between. "Brother Jens is shiftless," Uncle ...
— Added Upon - A Story • Nephi Anderson
... John Tinker, governor 1740-1758. He came out in the Rose, Capt. Thomas Frankland, along with Peter Henry Bruce, the military engineer, and arrived at New Providence Apr. 21, 1741. According to Bruce, he had previously been factor to the South Sea Company at Panama, and governor ...
— Privateering and Piracy in the Colonial Period - Illustrative Documents • Various
... of cheese will do for me, because there are one or two little things to tinker up on the car, and an hour and a quarter isn't long. I think I shall bring my grub out of doors, and—But is anything ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... to gather the spray of brilliant vermilion berries she fancied, saying meanwhile, "I wonder what he is? Tinker, tailor, ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... because the meeting is on there day after to-morrow, and it won't wait until I can tell Mary Allen all about it! But if I don't straighten this matter out so that hereafter I can at least write her, or send her a wire, I'm no organizer at all and my chance with the Sayers Company isn't worth a tinker's curse." ...
— Mixed Faces • Roy Norton
... Sir Williams, myself, and Captn. Cock, and Captn. Tinker of the Covertine, which we are going to look upon, (being intended with these ships fitting for the East Indys) down to Deptford; and thence, after being on ship-board, to Woolwich, and there eat something. The Sir Williams being unwilling ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys
... is so," put in Fred Fairfield, in sincere tones; "that's why I'm specially interested in knowing just what you do to tinker up a rusty soul. Pardon my rude diction, but I am not aesthetic myself. However, ...
— Patty Blossom • Carolyn Wells
... still inscrutable to man. Is man the friend, or is he the patron only? Have they indeed forgotten nature's voice? or are those moments snatched from courtiership when they touch noses with the tinker's mongrel, the brief reward and pleasure of their artificial lives? Doubtless, when man shares with his dog the toils of a profession and the pleasures of an art, as with the shepherd or the poacher, the affection warms and strengthens till it fills the soul. But doubtless, also, the ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... not observing him, stirred him into the pudding, and popped him into the pot to boil. The hot water made Tom kick and struggle; and his mother, seeing the pudding jump up and down in such a furious manner, thought it was bewitched; and a tinker coming by just at the time, she quickly gave him the pudding, who put it into his budget ...
— Fairy Tales Every Child Should Know • Various
... uncle Hovenden!" shouted Robert Danforth from the forge, in a full, deep, merry voice, that made the roof re-echo. "And what says Miss Annie to that doctrine? She, I suppose, will think it a genteeler business to tinker up a lady's watch than to forge a horseshoe or ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... these scenes are very effective on the stage, but they are not of a sort to reveal Shakespeare's greatest qualities. The induction, the framework in which the play is set, is, however, quite another matter. The story of the drunken tinker, Sly, unfortunately omitted in many modern presentations, is a little masterpiece. A nobleman returning from the hunt finds Sly lying in a drunken stupor before an inn. The nobleman has Sly taken to his country house, has him dressed in rich clothing, has him awakened by ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... observed in the distance that there was something lying on the roadside. As he came nearer, he made it out to be a man prostrate on the grass, apparently asleep, and a few yards from where the man lay was a knife-grinder's wheel, and a few other articles in the use of a travelling tinker; a fire, nearly extinct, was throwing up a tiny column of smoke, and a saucepan, which appeared to have been upset, was lying beside it. There was something in the scene before him which created a suspicion in the mind of our hero that all was ...
— The Poacher - Joseph Rushbrook • Frederick Marryat
... you have never learned to use tools properly," said his father. "Where do you suppose I'd be now if I hadn't started out when I was a boy to tinker round a farm? That's where I got my manual training, and there isn't a course in the country that can equal it. I had to use my brains, too, as well as my hands, for very often the things I needed were not to be had and I was forced to make something else do. It was a ...
— The Story of Porcelain • Sara Ware Bassett
... particular about the comfortable arrangement of his part of the boat, as an old stage-driver is about the snugness of his box. When close to the whale, in the very death-lock of the fight, he handled his unpitying lance coolly and off-handedly, as a whistling tinker his hammer. He would hum over his old rigadig tunes while flank and flank with the most exasperated monster. Long usage had, for this Stubb, converted the jaws of death into an easy chair. What he thought of death itself, ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... cart and a poor, ill-fed beast harnessed to it, happened to be passing, and heard the little girl's words. He stared after her, for she seemed very small to speak so wisely, and the tinker did not, of course, know that she was only repeating what she had heard her ...
— Our Young Folks at Home and Abroad • Various
... sticking labels in a shoe-blacking factory. William Shakespeare's father made gloves. Benjamin Franklin was the son of a candlemaker. Daniel Defoe, who wrote that Robinson Crusoe you love so much, helped his father around the butcher shop. John Bunyan was a traveling tinker. And Christopher Columbus was the son of a wool comber, and himself worked before ...
— The Rich Little Poor Boy • Eleanor Gates
... Of course; it was for scientific reasons that I persuaded the old "Badger" to stand in with me in the matter. So we will tinker at the conduit-pipes a little, and dig up a little bit of the shore, and it shan't cost the town a sixpence. That ...
— An Enemy of the People • Henrik Ibsen
... this charge of supposed imitation, in which so much rests upon the very simplicity of the conception of the story, and has successfully shown that the tinker of Elstow could not have profited by one or two allegories in the French and Flemish languages—works which he could have had hardly a chance to meet with; which, if thrown in his way, he could not have read; and, finally, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XVII. No. 469. Saturday January 1, 1831 • Various
... here in this Godforsaken town, surrounded by strangers, and no relation of her own to be near her when her trouble comes!... There's times, John, when I wonder are you a man at all? Your mind is so set on yourself that you're like a lump of stone. You and your old books ... as if they matter a tinker's ...
— The Foolish Lovers • St. John G. Ervine
... very welcome, and I advanced to their chief tent. "But," said I to this man, "you have not the gipsy colour and features?" "O, no," he replied, "I am no gipsy—the people call us all gipsies—but I am by trade a tinker—I live in —— Court, Shoreditch, in the winter; and during the summer I travel the country, and get my livelihood by my trade." Looking at others of the group, who were sitting at the entrance of two tents, I traced two sets of features among ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... Bunyan was a tinker bold, His name we all delight in; All day he tinkered pots and pans, All night he stuck ...
— A Castle in Spain - A Novel • James De Mille
... poems, should have appreciated them, and with enthusiasm. Try to imagine Samson Agonistes put on the stage today; with no academical enthusiasts or eclat of classicism to back it; but just put on before thirty thousand sight-seers, learned and vulgar, statesman and cobbler, tinker and poet; the mob all there; the groundlings far out-numbering the elite:—and all not merely sitting out the play, but roused to a frenzy of enthusiasm; and Milton himself, present and acting, the hero of the day. That, despite Mr. Whistler ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... the wickedness of the tinker has been greatly over-charged; and it is taking the language of self-accusation too literally, to pronounce of John Bunyan that he was at any time depraved. The worst of what he was in his worst days is to be expressed in a ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
... the maid fetched the saucepan, which had been laid by till the tinker's next visit, and gave it to the dwarf, who thanked ...
— Old-Fashioned Fairy Tales • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... but it's a gran' bit. Listen to this," and he would begin to read the passage, where Mansie, simple soul that he was, was described as going into the byre in the morning to learn if the cow had calved during the night, and finding, on opening the door, the donkey of a traveling tinker, he turned and ran into the house, crying: "Mither! Mither! The coo has calved, ...
— The Underworld - The Story of Robert Sinclair, Miner • James C. Welsh
... Wastle dwalt on Tweed, The spot they ca'd it Linkumdoddie; Willie was a wabster guid, [weaver good] Cou'd stown a clue wi' ony body. [have stolen] He had a wife was dour and din, [stubborn, sallow] O, Tinkler Madgie was her mither; [Tinker] Sic a wife as Willie had, [Such] I wad na ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... Smiths, temperance Smiths and licensed victualler Smiths, Smiths with double-barrelled names and hyphens, Smiths with double-barrelled names without hyphens, Conservative Smiths and Radical Smiths, tinker Smiths, tailor Smiths, Smiths of Mercia, Smiths of Wessex,—all these and all other imaginable varieties of the tribe Smith would be, as it were, crystallized by an inexorable law forbidding the members of any of these groups to marry beyond the circle marked ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... away and walked across the yard toward the garage, head bowed. Tommy watched him. No doubt his father thought he would follow. He had always liked to hang about the garage, he and Frank, and watch his father tinker with the car. It had been one of the high lights of their daily life. But now old Frank was chained up—and as for him, he ...
— Frank of Freedom Hill • Samuel A. Derieux
... proceedings of Mazzini and Garibaldi drove him into the ranks of the conservatives, where he has remained ever since. Carlyle compared him to a man who had an old tin-kettle which he thought he would mend, but as soon as he began to tinker it the thing went to pieces in his hands. The Revolution of 1848 proved an unpractical experiment, but it opened the way for Victor Emanuel and a ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... mouth, and prevented him from crying; but, on feeling the hot water, he kicked and struggled so much in the pot, that his mother thought that the pudding was bewitched, and, pulling it out of the pot, she threw it outside the door. A poor tinker, who was passing by, lifted up the pudding, and, putting it into his budget, he then walked off. As Tom had now got his mouth cleared of the batter, he then began to cry aloud, which so frightened the tinker that he flung ...
— English Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)
... a tinker's damn what anybody says if you stand by me! In all this world there's just you—for me. There's never been anybody else—and there never will ...
— The Foolish Virgin • Thomas Dixon
... appeal to his better nature. "I don't know who the dickens you are. You may be the three wise men of Gotham who went to sea in a bowl rolled into one, for all I know. You may be any old thing. I don't give a tinker's cuss what you are. Under ordinary circumstances I've no doubt I should find you a very pleasant old gentleman, but under present conditions you are a ...
— Olympian Nights • John Kendrick Bangs
... off to the 'Ring of Bells'?" the good woman broke in. "Lord knows 'tisn' his way to be thoughtful, and when he tries it there's always a breakage. When I'd melted the ice, the thing began to leak like a sieve; and if this tinker fellow hadn't come along—by Providence, as you may call it—though I'd ha' been obliged to Providence for ...
— Hetty Wesley • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Foe, Akenside, and Kirke White were the sons of butchers; Bunyan was a tinker, and Joseph Lancaster a basket-maker. Among the great names identified with the invention of the steam- engine are those of Newcomen, Watt, and Stephenson; the first a blacksmith, the second a maker ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... religious literature! These people are always telling us that the English translated Bible is sufficient training for anyone in noble and appropriate diction; and so it is. Why, then, are they not trained? They are always telling us that Bunyan, the rude Midland tinker, is as much worth reading as Chaucer or Spenser; and so he is. Why, then, have they not read him? I cannot believe that anyone who had seen, even in a nightmare of the nursery, Apollyon straddling over the whole breadth of the way could ...
— Utopia of Usurers and other Essays • G. K. Chesterton
... the Marquesas and return to Papeete. I had no bother about clothes, as I was to be in the same climate, and in less formal circles even than in Tahiti. But I desired to carry with me a type-writer, and mine was out of order. There was no tinker of skill in Papeete, and I had about given up hope of repairs, ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... Fesch was a master of a tavern he married the daughter of a tinker, by whom he had three children. This marriage, according to the republican regulations, had only been celebrated by the municipality at Ajaccio; Fesch, therefore, upon again entering the bosom of the Church, left his municipal wife and children to shift for themselves, considering ...
— Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, Complete - Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London • Lewis Goldsmith
... Muriel gaily retorted. "Soldiers, sailors, tinkers, tailors, what a lot of words would fit in! I think 'my tinker-lad sounds best. Don't you?" ...
— Sylvie and Bruno • Lewis Carroll
... and most of all from the stormy thrashings of the few days before—the long journey, the want of reasonable sleep and food. There had come over all my spirit a kind of dwam, so that at times my head seemed as if it were stuffed with wool; what mattered was of no account, even if it were a tinker's death in the sheuch. No words will describe the feeling except to such as themselves have known it; it is the condition of the man dead with care and weariness so far as the body is concerned, and his spirit, sorry to part company, goes ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... the afternoon's sunshine. There was a flock of sheep straggling about the road, with a dog running himself into a fever in the endeavor to keep them decently together. There were some bricklayers just released from work—a tinker mending some kettles by the roadside; there was a dog-cart dashing down the road, carrying the master of the Audley hounds to his seven o'clock dinner; there were a dozen common village sights and sounds that mixed themselves ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... backwoodsman; he must make his own farm or his immediate community a self-sufficing unit; he must get from his own land bread and meat and clothing for his family; he must be stock-raiser, grain-grower, farrier, tinker, soap-maker, tanner, chandler—Jack-of-all-trades and master of none. With the railroad he gained access to markets and the opportunity to specialize in one kind of farming; he could now sell his produce and buy in exchange many ...
— The Agrarian Crusade - A Chronicle of the Farmer in Politics • Solon J. Buck
... rich!" Archie exclaimed, sitting upright for the first time and laughing immoderately. "The best thing I have heard. Ask Lady Jane, or Uncle John, or even Anthony, how they would like to have a McPherson turn baker, or tailor, or tinker." ...
— Bessie's Fortune - A Novel • Mary J. Holmes
... with care and anxiety, about this farming project of mine, that my muse has degenerated into the veriest prose-wench that ever picked cinders, or followed a tinker. When I am fairly got into the routine of business, I shall trouble you with a longer epistle; perhaps with some queries respecting farming; at present, the world sits such a load on my mind, that it has effaced almost every trace of the ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... Mr. Burns, and the way you go about admiring every tinker-peddler who tosses a rhyme together. Ye've no sense of your own value at times. Do you know," she went on, fair glorious to see in her enthusiasm glowering down at him—"Do you know that when this man Shenstone's ...
— Nancy Stair - A Novel • Elinor Macartney Lane
... of a Man (the woollen, and fleshly, and official Bank-paper and State-paper Clothes) into the Man himself; and discern, it may be, in this or the other Dread Potentate, a more or less incompetent Digestive-apparatus; yet also an inscrutable venerable Mystery, in the meanest Tinker that sees ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... pocket a parcel containing a cold chisel, small screw-wrench, file, and one or two other things that he'd bought that evening to tinker up the old printing press. I knew that, because I'd lent him a hand a few nights before, and he told me he'd have to get the tools. They found some scratches round the key-hole and knob of the office door ...
— Over the Sliprails • Henry Lawson
... should make friends where you could find them. I trust that it has done you no harm. Well, Prior, this day week the boy shall come to you. I must get befitting clothes for him, or the other pupils will think that he is the son of a hedge tinker." ...
— A March on London • G. A. Henty
... unfrequently happens that a tinker or coal heaver hears a sermon or falls in with a tract which alarms him about the state of his soul. If he be a man of excitable nerves and strong imagination, he thinks himself given over to the Evil Power. He doubts whether he has not committed the unpardonable sin. He imputes every wild fancy ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Solitude; and Jason Denor a Doctor of Padua takes notice of the same as a very absurd Error: Aristotle heretofore for a like fault reprehended the Megarensians, who observ'd no Decorum in their Theater, but brought in mean persons with a Train fit for a King and cloath'd a Cobler or Tinker in a Purple Robe: In vain doth Veratus in his Dispute against Jason Denor, to defend those elaborately exquisite discourses, and notable sublime sentences of his Pastor Fido, bring some lofty Idylliums of Theocritus, for those are not acknowledged ...
— De Carmine Pastorali (1684) • Rene Rapin
... his attempts to secure Robin and unable to find any one near there to serve a warrant upon him, the sheriff hired a Lincoln tinker, who, entering an inn, loudly boasted how cleverly he was going to accomplish his task. Among his listeners was the outlaw, who enticed the tinker to drink, and made him so drunk that he had no difficulty ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... out above all others in advertisements for help wanted. This is the land of hustle. Tinker, tailor, candlestick-maker; lawyer, merchant, priest; if you are not a "live-wire" you are not "help wanted"—"Cook wanted. On dairy farm, twelve miles from town. White, industrious. Must be a live-wire! One that can get results. No stick-in-the-muds ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... a cottage inn, and, as was his custom, called "House!" as loud as he could. Whilst drinking his beer he cheered the heart of the sorrowful Jack Slingsby by buying his whole tinker's stock-in-trade—beat, plant, pony, and all—concluding that "a tinker is his own master, a scholar is not." Poor Slingsby had been driven off the road by the great Flaming Tinman, "Black Jack," whose clan name was Anselo Herne, who, thrusting a Bible into Slingsby's mouth, forced him to swear ...
— Souvenir of the George Borrow Celebration - Norwich, July 5th, 1913 • James Hooper
... combination of springs and wheels whereby they are moved." A similar transparency of motive and purpose, of individual traits and spontaneous action, belongs to the Bible. From the hand of Shakspeare, "the lord and the tinker, the hero and the valet, come forth equally distinct and clear." In the Bible the various sorts of men are never confounded, but have the advantage of being exhibited by Nature herself, and are not a contrivance of the imagination. "Shylock," observes ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... decks like herrings in barrels. They crossed from one boat to another to reach the gangways, and one by one, interminably as it seemed, with rifle gripped and pack hunched, and steel hat clattering like a tinker's kettle, came down the inclined plank and lurched ashore. They were English lads from every country; Scots, Irish, Welsh, of every regiment; Australians, New-Zealanders, South Africans, Canadians, West Indian negroes of ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... early and vigorous growth eighty years ago. I rode in our family carriage to church with Sheldon Dibble and Reuben Tinker, who were just leaving Auburn Theological Seminary to go out as our pioneer missionaries to the Sandwich Islands. The Missionary Herald was taken in a great number of families and read with great avidity. Many of the readers were people who not only devoutly ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... lofty McDonough was, and too high-minded, bringing in a woman was maybe no lawful wife, or no honest child itself, but it might be a bychild or a tinker's brat, and he giving out no account of her generations or ...
— New Irish Comedies • Lady Augusta Gregory
... into the pudding, and popped him into the pot to boil. The hot water made Tom kick and struggle; and his mother, seeing the pudding jump up and down in such a furious manner, thought it was bewitched; and a tinker coming by just at the time, she quickly gave him the pudding; he put it into his ...
— The Fairy Book - The Best Popular Stories Selected and Rendered Anew • Dinah Maria Mulock (AKA Miss Mulock)
... you'd be to think queerer than welcome, Sarah Casey; but what will you gain dragging me to the priest this night, I'm saying, when it's new thoughts you'll be thinking at the dawn of day? SARAH — teasingly. — It's at the dawn of day I do be thinking I'd have a right to be going off to the rich tinker's do be travelling from Tibradden to the Tara Hill; for it'd be a fine life to be driving ...
— The Tinker's Wedding • J. M. Synge
... romantic temperament, in his richness of representation and ingenuity of analogy, and in his forcible quaintness of style, as completely as he did in social status and in personal surroundings. In complete contrast to the romantic productions of the self-educated tinker of Bedford, the works of Walton and Evelyn were at any rate influenced by, though they can hardly be said to have been moulded upon, the style of the preceding age of old English prose writers ending with Milton. The influence of the latter is, indeed, plainly ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... another touch or coup de grace ... He really sometimes puts me in mind of Gil Blas; but he has not the sneer of the Frenchman, nor does he gild the bad. He has a touch of Bunyan, and, like that enthusiastic tinker, hammers away, a la Gitano, whenever he thinks he can thwack the Devil or his man-of-all-work on earth—the Pope. Therein he resembles my friend and everybody's friend—Punch—who, amidst all his adventures, never spares ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... ask if Henry Fielding, barrister, journalist, tinker of plays and man-about-town, would ever have turned novelist, had it not been for Richardson, his predecessor. So slight, so seemingly accidental, are the incidents which make or mar careers and change the course of literary history. Certain it is that the immediate cause ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... Urchin is as ill carved as that Goblin painted. The grandam bear sure had blistered her tongue, and so left him unlicked. He looks like a snail with his house upon his back, or the Spirit of the Militia with a natural snapsack, and may serve both for tinker and budget too. Nature intended him to play at bowls, and therefore clapt a bias upon him. One would think a mole had crept into his carcass before 'tis laid in the churchyard, and rooted in it. He looks like the visible tie of AEneas bolstering up his father, or some beggarwoman endorsed with ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... cost me another ten to put it in shape, but after that it will do all right. Will you deliver it to a man that I send after it? I'll take it down to the Riverton shops and work on it. They let me tinker things there whenever I ...
— The Hilltop Boys on the River • Cyril Burleigh
... baronet, 'undone in the late rebellion,'—her father having in truth been a tailor,—and three of the Council, assuming to themselves an equal splendor of origin, are shown to have been, one 'a broken exciseman who came over a poor servant,' another a tinker transported for theft, and the third 'a common pickpocket often flogged at the cart's tail.' The ancestry of South Carolina will as little pass muster at the Herald's Visitation, though I hold them to have been more reputable, inasmuch as many of them were honest tradesmen and artisans, in ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... Akenside, and Kirke White were the sons of butchers; Bunyan was a tinker, and Joseph Lancaster a basket-maker. Among the great names identified with the invention of the steam- engine are those of Newcomen, Watt, and Stephenson; the first a blacksmith, the second a maker of mathematical instruments, and the third an engine-fireman. Huntingdon the preacher was originally ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... effect for cause. The tongue which habitually rises and fills the cavity of the mouth does so in response to a wrong mental concept of cause. The only way to correct this condition is to change the cause. The rigid tongue we see is effect, and to tinker with the effect while the cause remains is unnecessarily stupid. An impulse of tension has been directed to the tongue so often that the impulse and response have become simultaneous and automatic. The correction lies in directing an impulse of relaxation to it. When it responds to this impulse ...
— The Head Voice and Other Problems - Practical Talks on Singing • D. A. Clippinger
... whole ground floor. In the front kitchen there was a tinker. The back kitchen was let to a bellows-mender. On the first floor came Ernest, with his two rooms which he furnished comfortably, for one must draw the line somewhere. The two upper floors were parcelled out among four different sets ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... I says. 'I cal'late when it gets high enough them floats'll rise with it and lift the automobile up too. If she's anchored bow and stern she'll hold, unless it comes on to blow a gale, and to-morrow mornin' at low tide maybe you can tinker her up so ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various
... in men of science! The average man doesn't give a tinker's damn for progress or knowledge, not really. He wants only that he and his shall be ascendant at the center of things, the inevitable, the only possible goal of the non-science mind. Surely the history of science ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... what I call a success. I don't care a tinker's darn for the prizes, but the way you boys built up to the girls last night warmed the sluggish blood in my old veins. Even if Cotton did claim a dance or two with the oldest Vaux girl, if Theo and her don't make the riffle now—well, ...
— A Texas Matchmaker • Andy Adams
... air, or come singly to solicit my regard, I must own the secret purport of their lives is still inscrutable to man. Is man the friend, or is he the patron only? Have they indeed forgotten nature's voice? or are those moments snatched from courtiership when they touch noses with the tinker's mongrel, the brief reward and pleasure of their artificial lives? Doubtless, when man shares with his dog the toils of a profession and the pleasures of an art, as with the shepherd or the poacher, the affection warms and strengthens till it fills the soul. But doubtless, ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... question, Emma," reproved old Grandma Watterby severely. "Here, Betty, you sit next to me, and Bob can have Will's place. He's gone over to Flame City with a bolt he wants the blacksmith to tinker up." ...
— Betty Gordon at Boarding School - The Treasure of Indian Chasm • Alice Emerson
... all rort an' rubbish," he declared, in his broad, soft dialect. "I dozn't keer a tinker's baad 'apenny whether tha knaw 'ow to 'rite tha mizchief or to read it, or whether king o' England is eatin' 'umble pie to the U-nited States top man, or noa,—I keerz nawt aboot it, noben way or t'other. My boys ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... "He doesn't give a tinker's dam for the law," I continued. "Good enough! We'll take a leaf out of his book. To-morrow night you have an ...
— The Pirate of Panama - A Tale of the Fight for Buried Treasure • William MacLeod Raine
... brilliantly as Shakespeare has done in the case of the dandy Parolles, whose dress, by the way, only an archaeologist can understand; the fun of a master and servant exchanging coats in presence of the audience, of shipwrecked sailors squabbling over the division of a lot of fine clothes, and of a tinker dressed up like a duke while he is in his cups, may be regarded as part of that great career which costume has always played in comedy from the time of Aristophanes down to Mr. Gilbert; but nobody from the mere details of apparel and adornment has ever drawn such irony of contrast, such immediate ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... asks vainly concerning any master of literature, for genius is a thing which no theory can explain. It appears in the most unexpected places. An obscure Corsican lieutenant becomes Emperor of France, arbiter of Europe, and one of the three or four really great commanders of history; a tinker in Bedford County jail writes the greatest allegory in literature; and the son of two mediocre players develops into the first figure in American letters. Conversely, genius seldom appears where one would naturally look for ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson
... midnight hedge; again, a mysterious infatuation drives the wealthy idler from his bed out into the inclement darkness, and up to the topmost bough of the tree, which he must "touch" ere he can rest; and now, in the gloom of the memorable dingle, the horror of fear falls upon the amateur tinker, the Evil One grapples terribly with his soul, blots of foam fly from his lips, and he is dashed against the trees and stones. An adventure, truly, fit to stand with any of mediaeval legend, and compared with which the tremendous combat with Blazing Bosville, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... see—but there! she saw nothing, absolutely nothing—except the scraggy spruce tree in her tiny front yard and the lonely ten feet of walk bordering it. No one traversed that section of walk except old Mrs. Tinker, who was collecting subscriptions for new hymn books for the Come-Outer chapel. And Didama was particularly anxious NOT to ...
— Keziah Coffin • Joseph C. Lincoln
... can tinker up something in the operating room that'll turn out what will look like computation results. As far as anybody outside ourselves will know, Merlin will still be solving everybody's problems. We'll do like any fortuneteller; tell ...
— The Cosmic Computer • Henry Beam Piper
... which consisted of eight or ten men, was hardly ever together except at decisive moments, and we were usually scattered by twos and threes about the towns and villages. Each one of us pretended to have some trade. One was a tinker, another was a groom; I was supposed to peddle haberdashery, but I hardly ever showed myself in large places, on account of my unlucky business at Seville. One day, or rather one night, we were to meet ...
— Carmen • Prosper Merimee
... be expected to stand around on one foot while you tinker with all those attachments and shutters and other ...
— The Merriweather Girls and the Mystery of the Queen's Fan • Lizette M. Edholm
... the disuse of the turgidities and involutions which had marked the prose of the preachers and moralists of the times of James and Charles I.; scholars and men of letters were arising who would have taken John Bunyan, the unlettered tinker of Bedford, for their model rather than the learned ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... Pan; and such a pot it may be as he shall haue more servants then all the Pannes in a Tinker's shop. ...
— Old English Plays, Vol. I - A Collection of Old English Plays • Various
... a year to handle the calendar in Part Five. Yet those on the inside knew why very well. It was because Tom long ago, in his prehistoric youth, had learned that the way to secure verdicts was to appear not to care a tinker's dam whether the jury found the defendant guilty or not. He pretended never to know anything about any case in advance, to be in complete ignorance as to who the witnesses might be and to what they were going to testify, and to be terribly sorry to have to prosecute ...
— By Advice of Counsel • Arthur Train
... lassie's clavers, for Jean cam' in frae the stable, where she had nae right to be, except to be seein' her lad—they ha'e lads on the brain the lassies noo—and greetin' that young Dan had shamed her before the men, and a' because o' a tinker body like Belle here, although the great folk will treat her so kindly; no' that I mean her any harm," she added (erring on the safe side, for Belle's eyes had begun to glow finely); "and then in came Kate and Leezie wi' a tale o' a wean, tied in a ...
— The McBrides - A Romance of Arran • John Sillars
... Who's your sarvant now?' says the chap, docking up his chin as impident as a tinker's dog. I felt my fingers itching to give the fellow a polthogue[3] in the ear; but I thought I might as well keep myself paceable in a strange place—so I only gave him a contemptible look, and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, December 11, 1841 • Various
... seats and lounges, as they were very low, requiring an oriental squat at which I am not adept. I compromised by stretching out along a hard couch raised some six inches above the floor. There were no gadgets to tinker with, the place was to me barren of necessary appurtenances ... strange ...
— Valley of the Croen • Lee Tarbell
... recurring since the world was made, and had been misunderstood from the beginning. He used the simplest means. His experiment was in a different way daily performed for him by nature. He was philosophically daring, indifferently a tinker with nature's terrific machinery; a knocker at the door of an august temple that men were never known to have entered; a mortal who smiled in the face of inscrutable and awful mystery, and who defied ...
— Steam Steel and Electricity • James W. Steele
... established at Heilbrunn. The counts of Lowenstein were taken prisoners, dressed in a smock-frock, and then, a white staff having been placed in their hands, they were compelled to swear to the twelve articles. "Brother George, and thou, brother Albert," said a tinker of Ohringen to the counts of Hohenlohe who had gone to their camp, "swear to conduct yourselves as our brethren, for you also are now peasants; you are no longer lords." Equality of rank, the dream of many democrats, was established ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... serves to indicate that the theme of the taming of a wife is crude and primitive folk-farce, particularly suited to the taste of the drunken tinker ...
— Shakespeare Study Programs; The Comedies • Charlotte Porter and Helen A. Clarke
... sale. When a play was written for and bought by a manager, it became his absolute property. He could request the author to rewrite or modify passages deemed ineffective; he could even call in another man to tinker the work, unrestrained and unrebuked. It is supposed that Shakespeare first showed his great parts as a dramatist in improving other men's work for Manager Burbage, and that this constant exercise of talent upon reproductions, the most ...
— William Shakespeare - His Homes and Haunts • Samuel Levy Bensusan
... and shooting Smiths, temperance Smiths and licensed victualler Smiths, Smiths with double-barrelled names and hyphens, Smiths with double-barrelled names without hyphens, Conservative Smiths and Radical Smiths, tinker Smiths, tailor Smiths, Smiths of Mercia, Smiths of Wessex,—all these and all other imaginable varieties of the tribe Smith would be, as it were, crystallized by an inexorable law forbidding the members of any of these groups to marry beyond the circle marked out by the clan name.... Thus a Hyphen-Smith ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... an irreparable error in saying those ill-chosen words. This might mean a breach between them, and so make his position in the parish untenable. He had no wish to go elsewhere—where could he go? It mattered little what he was, tinker or tailor. He had now only to work his way back to the mind of the peasant; to be an animal with intelligence; to get close to mother earth, and move down the declivity of life with what natural wisdom were possible. It was his duty to adapt himself to the mind of such as this tailor; to ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... trying to build their own cars," said Ernest. "More accidents come from that than people realize. While the war was going on, no one had time to tinker at building, but now half the chaps I know are studying up and attempting ...
— Battling the Clouds - or, For a Comrade's Honor • Captain Frank Cobb
... here he could see the long garden. He was fond of his garden, and spent what few moments he could spare from work and games pottering about it. He had his views as to what the ideal garden should be, and he hoped in time to tinker his own three acres up to the desired standard. At present there remained much to be done. Why not, for instance, take away those laurels at the end of the lawn, and have a flower-bed there instead? Laurels lasted all the year round, true, whereas ...
— Mike • P. G. Wodehouse
... that is so," put in Fred Fairfield, in sincere tones; "that's why I'm specially interested in knowing just what you do to tinker up a rusty soul. Pardon my rude diction, but I am not aesthetic myself. However, I am ...
— Patty Blossom • Carolyn Wells
... and fetid atmosphere of taverns. There was an Allen-a-Dale in Robin Hood's gang; it was in the Bell Inn, at Gloucester, that George Whitefield, the most gifted of popular orators, was reared; and Bunyan's Muse found him at the disrespectable trade of a tinker, and amidst the clatter of pots, and pans, and vulgar curses, made her whisper audible in his ear, "Come up hither to the Mount of Vision—to the ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside
... was observed at Zacatecas which recalled far-away Hong Kong, China. This was the prosecution of various trades in the open air. Thus the shoemaker was at work outside of his dwelling; the tailor, the barber, and the tinker adopted the same practice, quite possible even in the month of March in a land of such intense brightness and sunshine. We wandered hither and thither, charmed by the novelty and strangeness of everything; not an object to remind one of ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... met each other, there was ever to be found the fierce wrangle of Remonstrant and Contra-Remonstrant, the hissing of red-hot theological rhetoric, the pelting of hostile texts. The blacksmith's iron cooled on the anvil, the tinker dropped a kettle half mended, the broker left a bargain unclinched, the Scheveningen fisherman in his wooden shoes forgot the cracks in his pinkie, while each paused to hold high converse with friend or foe on fate, free- will, or absolute foreknowledge; losing himself in wandering mazes whence ...
— Memoir of John Lothrop Motley, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... is field engineer, carpenter, bridge builder, the general maker, mender, patcher, splicer and tinker; cares for tools and trek-cart, mends the tents and clothing, ...
— Scouting For Girls, Official Handbook of the Girl Scouts • Girl Scouts
... Mathewsullin, as dry as a red herring, and as poor as a starved veezel — 0, Molly, hadst thou seen him come down the ladder, in a shurt so scanty, that it could not kiver his nakedness! — The young 'squire called him Dunquickset; but he looked for all the world like Cradoc-ap-Morgan, the ould tinker, that suffered at Abergany for steeling of kettle — Then he's a profane scuffle, and, as Mr Clinker says, no better than an impfiddle, continually playing upon the pyebill and the new-burth — I doubt he has as little manners ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... incessant talking, and the figures flitting about in the glare, reminded one of a crowded open-air market with flaring lamps and frequent coffee stalls. Kurnalpi was known at first as "Billy-Billy," or as "The Tinker's Rush"—the first name was supposed by some to be of native origin, by others to indicate the amount of tin used in the condensing plants—"Billy," translated for those to whom the bush is unfamiliar, meaning a tin pot for boiling tea ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie
... jungle-grass," he proceeded, "is the Wilderness of Nasty Possibilities. Hold up, Tinker, my lad, and get out of it as ...
— The Keeper of the Door • Ethel M. Dell
... presented to them the more animated and interesting spectacle of a struggle for his usurped power. Richard perhaps, and the immediate friends of the deceased Protector, with such of Dryden's relations as were attached to his memory, may have thought, like the tinker at the Taming of the Shrew, that this same elegy was "marvellous good matter." It did not probably attract much general attention. The first edition, in 1659, is extremely rare: it was reprinted, however, along with those of Sprat and Waller, in ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... my dear! its ma is making patty-cakes; and put it up there to be out of the way of Tom Tinker's dog. I'll soon hush it up," said the old woman; and, trotting it on her ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... looking for Peter's shadow, rummaged the wardrobe and turned every pocket inside out. It was not really a light; it made this light by flashing about so quickly, but when it came to rest for a second you saw it was a fairy, no longer than your hand, but still growing. It was a girl called Tinker Bell exquisitely gowned in a skeleton leaf, cut low and square, through which her figure could be seen to the best advantage. She was ...
— Peter and Wendy • James Matthew Barrie
... be mishandled too far. "This is too much," she says; "this wounded leg, these crusted lips, this anxious, weary mind. Come away for a time, until your body becomes more habitable." And so she coaxes the mind away into the Nirvana of delirium, while the little cell-workers tinker and toil within to get things better for its home-coming. When you see the veil of cruelty which nature wears, try and peer through it, and you will sometimes catch a glimpse of a very ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle
... left to him. He could prop himself up on the Bleachers with a bag of lubricated Pop-Corn between his Knees and hurl insulting Remarks at Honus Wagner, Joe Tinker and ...
— Knocking the Neighbors • George Ade
... Tilly, William Bradford, Christopher Martin, John Tilly, Edward Winslow, William Mullins, Francis Cooke, William Brewster, William White, Thomas Rogers, Isaac Allerton, Richard Warren, Thomas Tinker, Miles Standish, John Howland, John Ridgdale, John Alden, Steven Hopkins, Edward Fuller, John Turner, Digery Priest, Richard Clark, Francis Eaton, Thomas Williams, Richard Gardiner, James Chilton, ...
— Studies in Civics • James T. McCleary
... has carefully examined this charge of supposed imitation, in which so much rests upon the very simplicity of the conception of the story, and has successfully shown that the tinker of Elstow could not have profited by one or two allegories in the French and Flemish languages—works which he could have had hardly a chance to meet with; which, if thrown in his way, he could not have read; and, finally, which, if he had read them, could scarcely ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XVII. No. 469. Saturday January 1, 1831 • Various
... streets of Reading almost any day, an old man may be seen pushing a tinker's barrow. The small carriage is gay with yellow, red, and blue paint and bright with polished brass, and on a conspicuous place appear the words, 'Where will you spend Eternity?' The barrow-man has a pleasant, bearded face, and steady-gazing, merry, eyes, with ...
— The Angel Adjutant of "Twice Born Men" • Minnie L. Carpenter
... us in various pamphlets made abroad and secretly distributed that we should unite and form groups with the sole object of bringing about universal destruction. It's urged that, however much you tinker with the world, you can't make a good job of it, but that by cutting off a hundred million heads and so lightening one's burden, one can jump over the ditch more safely. A fine idea, no doubt, but quite as impracticable as Shigalov's ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... to be found on the roll of free miners—Garone, Clarke, Wytt, Nortone, Mitchell, Lumbart, Ocle, Barton, Heynes, Arminger, Rogers, Hathen, Miller, Croudfell, Dull, Loofe, Forthey, Walker, Tinker, Witch, Delewger, Doles, Hinde, Tellow, Backstar, Lawrence, Dolet, Caloe, Holt; in place of which names the following now occur—Baldwin, Cook, Dobbs, Hale, Jenkins, Kear, Morgan, Philipps, Harper, Davis, Meek, Brain, Jones, Jordan, ...
— The Forest of Dean - An Historical and Descriptive Account • H. G. Nicholls
... up," interrupted the gambler. "I don't even know what the fight was about, and I don't care a tinker's whoop either. I got you here to give you a chance to put Van Buren out of commission ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... he said. "It ain't just selfishness that makes me steer the course I'm runnin'. Course, Bos'n's got to be the world and all to me, and if she's taken away I don't know's I care a tinker's darn what happens afterwards. But, all the same, if her dad was a real man, sorry for what he's done and tryin' to make up for it—why, then, I cal'late I'm decent enough to take off my hat, hand her over, and say: 'God ...
— Cy Whittaker's Place • Joseph C. Lincoln
... Warwickshire rustic], who is dressed up as "My lord," for whom the play had been prepared. (In the writer's possession there is a very curious and absolutely unique masonic painting revealing "on the square" that the drunken tinker is Shakspeare and the ...
— Bacon is Shake-Speare • Sir Edwin Durning-Lawrence
... distant cottage, tenanted by a very aged, ignorant, and feudally loyal couple—a cottage sitting by the edge of a brown common—one of the few that the greedy hand of Tillage has yet spared—where geese may still stalk and hiss unreproved, and errant-tinker donkeys crop ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... Country. In Darrel, the clock tinker, wit, philosopher and man of mystery, is portrayed a force held in fetters and covered with obscurity, yet strong to make its way, ...
— The Black Box • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... usual, it was up to me. There wasn't no escapin' it. A man might just as well meet his fate smilin' as trailin' his lip on the ground, for my experiences teaches, dear friends and brothers, that Fate just naturally don't care a wooden-legged tinker's dam. ...
— Mr. Scraggs • Henry Wallace Phillips
... smothered by numbers as he was, the struggle for a time was by no means unequal, and more than once, with gigantic effort, he had all but flung off his captors. Perhaps, in the end, the task might even have been too much for the sheriff's party had it not been that a treacherous tinker, named Allan, with a hammer struck the old man a heavy blow on the face, fracturing the jaw and partially stunning him. Then, bound hand and foot, Auld Ringan was carried to Edinburgh. There, in the Tolbooth, ...
— Stories of the Border Marches • John Lang and Jean Lang
... PILGRIM'S PROGRESS, and HOLY WAR, are apparently little aware of the glowing genius, and fervent piety, and strong sense, and picturesque imagery, and racy, vigorous English, that mark the many other writings of the honored tinker of Elstow. These last, if less known than the story of the pilgrimage to the Celestial City, and of the siege and recovery of the good town of Mansoul, yet bear all of them the traces of the same vivid fancy, the same earnest heart, and the same robust ...
— The Riches of Bunyan • Jeremiah Rev. Chaplin
... fix it himself," explained Willie, immediately interpreting the interrogation. "Neither him or I were guns enough for the job. So Bob got somebody he knew of to tinker it up." ...
— Flood Tide • Sara Ware Bassett
... maid fetched the saucepan, which had been laid by until the tinker's next visit, and gave it to the Hillman, who thanked ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott
... and control himself, he would have developed personality, characteristics and aptitudes of his own, appropriate to a canine of high intelligence. As it is, there are false memories of aptitudes Homer never had nor could have. Physical limitations alone make some of them impossible. How could a dog tinker with machinery, for example? Yet I 'remember' working on machines of my own design. Homer's mind, in other words, remembers as first-person data experiences ...
— The Short Life • Francis Donovan
... grow in spots; and like grease-spots, the spots spread. But we let them spread as little as possible: we keep unaltered as much of our old knowledge, as many of our old prejudices and beliefs, as we can. We patch and tinker more than we renew. The novelty soaks in; it stains the ancient mass; but it is also tinged by what absorbs it. Our past apperceives and co- operates; and in the new equilibrium in which each step forward in the process of learning terminates, it ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... is an aeronaut. He apes the fame of a Lunardi, and is on the point of offering to the inhabitants—I beg your pardon, to the nobility and gentry of our neighbourhood—the spectacle of an ascension. As one of the gentry concerned I may be permitted to remark that I am unmoved. I care not a Tinker's Damn for his ascension. No more—I breathe it in your ear—does anybody else. The business is stale, sir, stale. Lunardi did it, and overdid it. A whimsical, fiddling, vain fellow, by all accounts—for I was at that time rocking in my cradle. But once was enough. If Lunardi went ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... you wanted to do was to get me out of a rut, as you called it," laughed Tom. "And you've done it—you and Mr. Peters together. It jolted up my brain, and I guess I can think better now. Come on back and watch me tinker away, Ned." ...
— Tom Swift and his Photo Telephone • Victor Appleton
... and employment in this world is very much in his own, or in the choice of such who are most nearly concerned for him; he therefore, that foresees that he is not likely to have the advantage of a continued education, he had much better commit himself to an approved-of cobbler or tinker, wherein he may be duly respected according to his office and condition of life; than to be only a disesteemed ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... from White Head Island is all good ground in summer for cod and for pollock, also, when the herring schools are on this ground. Currents are very heavy here. The ledges that make up this reef are more or less connected. Among these are Brazil Shoal, Tinker, Inner Diamond, Outer Diamond, Crawleys, Rans, Proprietor (Foul Ground), and the Old Proprietor. While virtually all this reef is pollock ground, Crawleys and Rans perhaps furnish the ...
— Fishing Grounds of the Gulf of Maine • Walter H. Rich
... if this be not the highest step of thraldome, there is no libertie or freedome. It is but a milde kind of subiection to be the seruant of one master at once, but when thou hast a thousand thousand masters, as the veriest botcher, tinker or cobler freeborne wil dominere ouer a forreiner, & think to bee his better or master in company: then shalt thou finde theres no such hell, as to leaue thy fathers house (thy natural habitation) to liue in the land of bondage. If thou doest but lend halfe a looke to ...
— The Vnfortunate Traveller, or The Life Of Jack Wilton - With An Essay On The Life And Writings Of Thomas Nash By Edmund Gosse • Thomas Nash
... succeed in proving), nor that the Bunyans came over with the Conqueror, nor that he was a gipsy, as others hold. On Dr. Brown's showing, Bunyan's ancestors lost their lands in process of time and change, and Bunyan's father was a tinker. He preferred to call himself a brazier—his was the rather unexpected trade to which Mr. Dick proposed apprenticing ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... left.] — I'll be telling him it's destroyed I am with the sight of you and the sound of your voice. Go off now after your wife, and if she beats you again, let you go after the tinker girls is above running the hills, or down among the sluts of the town, and you'll learn one day, maybe, the way a man should speak with a well-reared, civil girl the like of me. (She takes Timmy by the arm.) Come up now into the forge till he'll be gone down a bit on the road, for it's ...
— The Well of the Saints • J. M. Synge
... friends joined in having a good time at the tinker's expense, and pronounced him "the prince ...
— The Expressman and the Detective • Allan Pinkerton
... began to fade. He took to haunting department-store kitchenware sections. He would come home with a new kind of cream whipper, or a patent device for the bathroom. He would tinker happily with this, driving a nail, adjusting a screw. At such times he was even known to begin to whistle some scrap of a doleful tune such as he used to hum. But he would change, quickly, into something lovely. ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... floor is covered with straw, and then a carpet is stretched over it, which makes a particularly bulgy, uneven surface to stand dressing-tables and things on. The straw, too, is apt to stick out where it is least expected, and gives one rather the feeling of being a tinker sleeping in a barn. At night a tent is an awesome place. It is terrible to have no door to lock, and to be entirely at the mercy of anything that creeps and crawls; to have only a mosquito-net between you and an awful end. I woke last night to hear something ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas
... blazed forth, and I determined to save my country! Oh, my friend, I have been in such holes and corners; such filthy nooks and filthy corners; sweep offices and oyster cellars! 'I have sworn brother to a leash of drawers, and can drink with any tinker in his own language during my life,'—faugh! I shall not be able to bear the smell of small beer and tobacco for a month to come.... Truly this saving one's country is a nauseous piece of business, and if patriotism is such a dirty virtue,—prythee, ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... life now—didn't care about drinking any longer, nor yet about women, because of the thing that had happened, and so hadn't got any reasonable sort of use for money—he began to make it. That's the secret of success, that is. Because he didn't care what he called a tinker's cuss about being foreman he was made foreman—then, for the same reason, manager. Then he got sort of interested in seeing the money come in. He didn't want it himself, but it struck him that it wouldn't be a bad thing to pay back his mother and his sisters what they'd lost on ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... you let Skeets and me help you some? Skeets will be here again next week and I love to tinker and contrive and make all sorts of things; it'll be fun to see ...
— Radio Boys Cronies • Wayne Whipple and S. F. Aaron
... the French clergy as French citizens? How far off are we from a revival of Danton's beautiful doctrine that, in order to consummate the regeneration of society, all conditions imposed upon the eligibility of citizens to act as judges ought to be immediately abolished, so that a tinker, or a butcher, or a bootblack, or a chiffonnier might be made a French magistrate just as well as a trained student of the laws? As you know, one of the first things Danton, as Minister of Justice, did was to carry through the Convention ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... relation, is not he stark blind, that as he cannot himself distinguish of colours, so he would make us as mope-eyed in judging falsely of all love concerns, and wheedle us into a thinking that we are always in the right? Thus every Jack sticks to his own Jill; every tinker esteems his own trull; and the hob-nailed suiter prefers Joan the milk-maid before any of my lady's daughters. These things are true, and are ordinarily laughed at, and yet, however ridiculous they seem, it is hence only that all societies receive ...
— In Praise of Folly - Illustrated with Many Curious Cuts • Desiderius Erasmus
... of your qualities I do not care a tinker's curse: but as a man who, after three tumblers of neat brandy, can tell Marsala from Madeira you are ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 6, No. 5, April, 1896 • Various
... I wouldn't advise nobody to nerve themselves up to it. There's been rumors," added Mr. Pawket, gravely—"there's been rumors as some one is tryin' to git up a rockery fer the vanilla. Now I wouldn't advise 'em to. The lady will want to tinker with that herself. But if everybody is itchin' to help, why don't they take up a nice collection er white door-knobs to trim ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... hoarded his gold; N was a Nobleman, gallant and bold; O was an Oysterman, who went about town; P was a Parson, and wore a black gown; Q was a Quack, with a wonderful pill; R was a Robber, who wanted to kill; S was a Sailor, who spent all he got; T was a Tinker, and mended a pot; U was an Usurer, a miserable elf; V was a Vintner, who drank all himself; W was a Watchman, who guarded the door; X was Expensive, and so became poor; Y was a Youth, that did not love school; Z was a Zany, ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... plate-basket. With metal-workers we may also put Furber or Frobisher, i.e. furbisher, of armour, etc. Poyser, from poise, scales, is official. Two occupative names of Celtic origin are Gow, a smith, as in The Fair Maid of Perth, and Caird, a tinker— ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... know, indeed, why we troubled our heads about the matter at all," said the man in black; "but when you talk about perverting the meaning of the text, you speak ignorantly, Mr. Tinker; when he whom you call the Saviour gave his followers the sop, and bade them eat it, telling them it was his body, he delicately alluded to what it was incumbent upon them to do after his death, namely, to ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... master of a tavern he married the daughter of a tinker, by whom he had three children. This marriage, according to the republican regulations, had only been celebrated by the municipality at Ajaccio; Fesch, therefore, upon again entering the bosom of the Church, left his municipal wife and children to shift for themselves, considering himself still, ...
— Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, Complete - Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London • Lewis Goldsmith
... prisoner that they took, and they took part, as their politics inclined them, with either side. For a long time Ferguson hunted, or was hunted by, a man of his own order and nearly as notorious on the other side, namely, "Tinker Dave Beattie." On the evening of the 7th, we encamped in the vicinity of Livingston. Leaving early next morning, by midday we reached the Cumberland river at the ford near the small village of Selina. Here Colonel Morgan received ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke
... happens that a tinker or coal- heaver hears a sermon or falls in with a tract which alarms him about the state of his soul. If he be a man of excitable nerves and strong imagination, he thinks himself given over to the Evil ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the sheltering eaves of a half-burned house, and cold and miserable he sobbed himself to sleep. In the morning an itinerant tinker came by and touched by the child's distress, drew from him his unhappy story. He was a lonely old man, and offered to take Ben with him, an ...
— Philip Dru: Administrator • Edward Mandell House
... made your money. You've been telling that you got it in Africa, trading in diamonds. I've got a piece of paper in my pocket that blows up your lies like dynamite. You was in Australia all them years. By the Almighty! I'm going to sign up with the preacher, and I don't care a tinker's dam if you get the last cent I have, and send me up Riverhead way to the Poor Farm to eat off the county. Foreclose on my property! That ain't no more than you've been doing to others all your miserable life. It ain't ...
— Captain Pott's Minister • Francis L. Cooper
... in her eyes the night before to see how she would look, and as a result couldn't see anything nearer than across the room, some one read the letter aloud to her, and the whole story is out. One of the cats told Granger and the boy proposed to Allie to-day, to show her he didn't care a tinker's ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... of a lot of men who probably don't know any more about this here shooting of our dams than a hog does about a ruffled shirt. Meanwhile your drive hangs. Well? Well? Do you suppose the men who were back of that shooting, do you suppose Morrison and Daly give a tinker's dam how many men of theirs you lick? What they want is to hang our drive. If they hang our drive, it's cheap at the price of ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... is the only true basis of public prosperity. Still, ministers and moralists do but tinker at the regeneration of the world in merely recommending individual improvement. The most prolific cause of depravity is the social system that forms the character to what it is. The virtues, like plants, to flourish, must have a soil and air adapted to them. A plant ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... huntsman hunt the fox, That never wound his horn; It will bring the tinker to the stocks, ...
— Ancient Poems, Ballads and Songs of England • Robert Bell
... "If the tinker laves a sthroke of the pan on the misthress's dog, the Lord help him!" said Patsey, starting in pursuit of Lily, who, with tail tucked in and a wounded hind leg buckled up, was removing herself swiftly from the ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... we are willing to accept the test of Christianity which lies in its power to change men. I point to the persecutor on the road to Damascus. I point to the Bedfordshire tinker, to him that wrote Pilgrim's Progress. I point to the history of the Christian Church all down through the ages. I point to our mission fields to-day. I point to every mission hall, where earnest, honest men are working, and where, if you go and ask them, they ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... sprightly wit of the daughter. He now called a halt with his nonsense and gave a true account of the situation. His two companions were the sons of wealthy parents and one of them owned a beautiful motor launch which broke down while descending the river from Wiscasset. He had left the two trying to tinker it in shape, but had doubts of their success. In case they failed, it would be very pleasing to them if they could get supper and lodging in Beartown. Would the good woman advise them ...
— The Launch Boys' Adventures in Northern Waters • Edward S. Ellis
... French clergy as French citizens? How far off are we from a revival of Danton's beautiful doctrine that, in order to consummate the regeneration of society, all conditions imposed upon the eligibility of citizens to act as judges ought to be immediately abolished, so that a tinker, or a butcher, or a bootblack, or a chiffonnier might be made a French magistrate just as well as a trained student of the laws? As you know, one of the first things Danton, as Minister of Justice, did was to carry through the Convention his famous decree making this doctrine ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... kettle before tramping off to the 'Ring of Bells'?" the good woman broke in. "Lord knows 'tisn' his way to be thoughtful, and when he tries it there's always a breakage. When I'd melted the ice, the thing began to leak like a sieve; and if this tinker fellow hadn't come along—by Providence, as you may call it—though I'd ha' been obliged to Providence ...
— Hetty Wesley • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... it not unfrequently happens that a tinker or coal- heaver hears a sermon or falls in with a tract which alarms him about the state of his soul. If he be a man of excitable nerves and strong imagination, he thinks himself given over to the Evil Power. He doubts whether he has not committed ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... considerable land. His father had left it to him, but it was all swamp land, and so Hank's father, he hunted more'n he farmed, and Hank and his brothers done the same when he was a boy. But Hank, he learnt a little blacksmithing when he was growing up, cause he liked to tinker around and to show how stout he was. Then, when he married Elmira Appleton, he had to go to work practising that perfession reg'lar, because he never learnt nothing about farming. He'd sell fifteen or twenty acres, every now and then, and they'd be high times till he'd spent it up, and mebby Elmira ...
— Danny's Own Story • Don Marquis
... them—every tinker of them. Poor old girl, you never knew the fun of keeping a lot of men in a continual squirm. However, I think possibly what you call the 'right one' ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various
... Baxter and Howe must be added the name of a man far below them in station and in acquired knowledge, but in virtue their equal, and in genius their superior, John Bunyan. Bunyan had been bred a tinker, and had served as a private soldier in the parliamentary army. Early in his life he had been fearfully tortured by remorse for his youthful sins, the worst of which seem, however, to have been such as the world thinks venial. His keen ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... soldiers. Andrew Johnson was a tailor. Cardinal Wolsey, Defoe, and Kirke White were butchers' sons. Faraday was the son of a blacksmith, and his teacher, Humphry Davy, was an apprentice to an apothecary. Kepler was a waiter boy in a German hotel, Bunyan a tinker, Copernicus the son of a Polish baker. The boy Herschel played the oboe for his meals. Marshal Ney, the "bravest of the brave," rose from the ranks. His great industry gained for him the name of "The Indefatigable." Soult served fourteen ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... struggle for a time was by no means unequal, and more than once, with gigantic effort, he had all but flung off his captors. Perhaps, in the end, the task might even have been too much for the sheriff's party had it not been that a treacherous tinker, named Allan, with a hammer struck the old man a heavy blow on the face, fracturing the jaw and partially stunning him. Then, bound hand and foot, Auld Ringan was carried to Edinburgh. There, in the Tolbooth, he lay for eight long years, ...
— Stories of the Border Marches • John Lang and Jean Lang
... heard, at the still noon of night, The hallalloo of fire in every street! Odsbobs! I have a mind to hang myself, To think I should a grandmother be made By such a rascal!—Sure the king forgets When in a pudding, by his mother put, The bastard, by a tinker, on a stile Was dropp'd.—O, good lord Grizzle! can I bear To see him from a pudding mount the throne? Or can, oh can, my Huncamunca bear To take a pudding's offspring ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... uttered in the low argot of Paris, were much affected by them. They felt a pleasure in this sort of protest against the extreme refinement of society, just as the collegians of Oxford, trained beyond their natural capacity in morals, love to fall into slang and, like Prince Hal, talk to every tinker in ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... prison, but the charity of Christian people.' Sir Matthew Hale: 'Alas! poor woman.' Twisden: 'Poverty is your cloak, for I hear your husband is better maintained by running up and down a-preaching than by following his calling?' Sir Matthew Hale: 'What is his calling?' Elizabeth: 'A tinker, please you my Lord; and because he is a tinker, and a poor man, therefore he is despised and cannot have justice.' Sir Matthew Hale: 'I am truly sorry we can do you no good. Sitting here we can only act as the law gives us warrant; and we have no power to reverse ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... English literature, first saw the light in an humble cottage in an obscure Bedfordshire village. His father, Thomas Bunyan, though styling himself in his will by the more dignified title of "brazier," was more properly what is known as a "tinker"; "a mender of pots and kettles," according to Bunyan's contemporary biographer, Charles Doe. He was not, however, a mere tramp or vagrant, as travelling tinkers were and usually are still, much less a disreputable sot, a counterpart of Shakespeare's Christopher Sly, but a man with ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... otherwise be persuaded, and so the jest ended. [3311]Antiochus Epiphanes would often disguise himself, steal from his court, and go into merchants', goldsmiths', and other tradesmen's shops, sit and talk with them, and sometimes ride or walk alone, and fall aboard with any tinker, clown, serving man, carrier, or whomsoever he met first. Sometimes he did ex insperato give a poor fellow money, to see how he would look, or on set purpose lose his purse as he went, to watch who found it, and withal how he ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... OF THE SHREW is a play within a play. It is supposed to be a play acted for the benefit of Sly the tinker, who is made to believe himself a lord, when he wakes after a drunken brawl. The character of Sly and the remarks with which he accompanies the play are as good as the play itself. His answer when he is asked how he ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... ears into the batter, and his mother, not observing him, stirred him into the pudding, and popped him into the pot to boil. The hot water made Tom kick and struggle; and his mother, seeing the pudding jump up and down in such a furious manner, thought it was bewitched; and a tinker coming by just at the time, she quickly gave him the pudding; he put it into ...
— The Fairy Book - The Best Popular Stories Selected and Rendered Anew • Dinah Maria Mulock (AKA Miss Mulock)
... making himself up for a postman, and getting inside the up-town house in that capacity, trusting to his own skill to remain within until he had made the necessary investigations; while as for himself—well, he had no particular objections to entering temporarily upon the occupation of a tinker or a gatherer of old rags and bottles, with a disguise from his friend Williams, the costumer, and working the basement of the house on Prince Street, and the domestics therein employed, in one of those capacities. He had no doubt ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... time Joe brightened. He chewed his cud a second, and bubbled, "I've often thought of that! If I had the money, I'd go down to Tinker's Falls and open ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... for a pony, dear boy," grinned Beaumanoir. "There was a deuce of a shindy when three fat johnnies tried to pull me out of my compartment. I told 'em I didn't give a tinker's continental for their bally frontier, and then the band played. I slung one joker through the window. Good job it was open, or he might have been guillotined, ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... it's a gran' bit. Listen to this," and he would begin to read the passage, where Mansie, simple soul that he was, was described as going into the byre in the morning to learn if the cow had calved during the night, and finding, on opening the door, the donkey of a traveling tinker, he turned and ran into the house, crying: "Mither! Mither! The coo has calved, ...
— The Underworld - The Story of Robert Sinclair, Miner • James C. Welsh
... dandy Parolles, whose dress, by the way, only an archaeologist can understand; the fun of a master and servant exchanging coats in presence of the audience, of shipwrecked sailors squabbling over the division of a lot of fine clothes, and of a tinker dressed up like a duke while he is in his cups, may be regarded as part of that great career which costume has always played in comedy from the time of Aristophanes down to Mr. Gilbert; but nobody from the mere details ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... twelve hundred people in the world who understand pictures. The others pretend and don't care. Remember, I've seen twelve hundred men dead in toadstool-beds. It's only the voice of the tiniest little fraction of people that makes success. The real world doesn't care a tinker's—doesn't care a bit. For aught you or I know, every man in the world may be arguing with a Maisie of ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... she had been boasting all the way. The incredulous listeners, whom she had so annoyed, now revenged themselves by sundry depreciatory remarks on the appearance of this phoenix, whom they pronounced to have the air of a tinker or old clothesman, and by no means that of the hero he ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... Smiths and baking Smiths, hunting Smiths and shooting Smiths, temperance Smiths and licensed victualler Smiths, Smiths with double-barrelled names and hyphens, Smiths with double-barrelled names without hyphens, Conservative Smiths and Radical Smiths, tinker Smiths, tailor Smiths, Smiths of Mercia, Smiths of Wessex,—all these and all other imaginable varieties of the tribe Smith would be, as it were, crystallized by an inexorable law forbidding the ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... striving for personal popularity, catering to the meddler and busybody—a class who had no business of their own, but ever ready to attend to that of others. From a willing-to-be governed and peaceful city, discontent and confusion came. Every tinker, tailor or candle stick maker, every busybody in the city took it upon themselves, although without training, ability or experience, to advise how ...
— Watch Yourself Go By • Al. G. Field
... before—the long journey, the want of reasonable sleep and food. There had come over all my spirit a kind of dwam, so that at times my head seemed as if it were stuffed with wool; what mattered was of no account, even if it were a tinker's death in the sheuch. No words will describe the feeling except to such as themselves have known it; it is the condition of the man dead with care and weariness so far as the body is concerned, and his spirit, ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... critic of his comedies. It meant for England the disuse of the turgidities and involutions which had marked the prose of the preachers and moralists of the times of James and Charles I.; scholars and men of letters were arising who would have taken John Bunyan, the unlettered tinker of Bedford, for their model rather than the ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... a question of valuing some pictures; there is nobody but you in Paris who can tell a poor tinker-fellow like me how much he may give when he has not ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... this thesis in detail, so I will merely bid you note that aristocratic pedigree-tracers confine themselves to one line, or to a few lines. Burke will tell you that one of the great-great-grandfathers of the present Lord Foozlem was the First Baron; he is silent about his great-grandfather, the tinker, and his great-grandfather, the pettifogging country lawyer. Americans are far more apt to push their genealogical investigations in all directions, because they are prompted by a legitimate curiosity rather than by desire to prove a point, American genealogical research is biological, while ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... still wet with dew, and crossed by the shadows of the bare elms, Atherley's little sons, Harold and Denis, were playing with a very unlovely but much-beloved mongrel called Tip. They had bought him with their own pocket-money from a tinker who was ill-using him, and then claimed for him the hospitality of their parents; so, though Atherley often spoke of the dog as a disgrace to the household, he remained a member thereof, and received, from a family ...
— Cecilia de Noel • Lanoe Falconer
... about: "I know nothing of the girl, except what I gathered from your mother and sisters. You have not asked my advice. I don't suppose you want it, but if you do, here it is. If you love the girl and she is respectable, marry her if she is poor as poverty and the daughter of a tinker; but if you don't love her, and she's rich as a nabob, for thunder's ...
— Family Pride - Or, Purified by Suffering • Mary J. Holmes
... a character that has not had justice done him. He is the most romantic of mechanics. And what a list of companions he has—Quince the Carpenter, Snug the Joiner, Flute the Bellows- mender, Snout the Tinker, Starveling the Tailor; and then again, what a group of fairy attendants, Puck, Peaseblossom, Cobweb, Moth, and Mustard-seed! It has been observed that Shakespeare's characters are constructed upon deep physiological principles; and there is something in this play which looks very ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... kin tote ober to de 'Plot' an' tinker roun' thar wid de chilun. John's done boun' I shan't do no moah work, an' I can't stop still no how, for it 'pears like I'm dead ...
— The Harvest of Years • Martha Lewis Beckwith Ewell
... make it a point to be there, and as we've got some time to kill meanwhile, let's hop over to that nice landingplace at the foot of old Thunder top, and overhaul the machine again. There are a few things I'd like to tinker with, because I'm not quite pleased with the way they work; and you know, Andy, I'm a regular crank about having a ...
— The Aeroplane Boys Flight - A Hydroplane Roundup • John Luther Langworthy
... is made of either country. Strange to say the most perfect allegory in the English language was written by an almost illiterate and ignorant man, and written too, in a dungeon cell. In the "Pilgrim's Progress," Bunyan, the itinerant tinker, has given us by far the best allegory ever penned. Another good one is "The Faerie Queen" by ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... brought the old saucepan that had been laid by until the tinker's next visit, and gave it to the Hillman. He thanked her ...
— The Child's World - Third Reader • Hetty Browne, Sarah Withers, W.K. Tate
... of a belief, of that sentiment of the sublime before which all inequalities are leveled, that transport of conviction which seems superior to all laws of condition, under which debauchees have become martyrs; which made a tinker an artist and a camel-driver the founder of an empire. This was with Asa Skinner to-night, as he stood ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... their heads with a weary stoop under the afternoon's sunshine. There was a flock of sheep straggling about the road, with a dog running himself into a fever in the endeavor to keep them decently together. There were some bricklayers just released from work—a tinker mending some kettles by the roadside; there was a dog-cart dashing down the road, carrying the master of the Audley hounds to his seven o'clock dinner; there were a dozen common village sights and sounds that mixed themselves up into a cheerful ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... this property. Didn't you know? A frightfully energetic person; prosperous, too, for a wonder. But an absolute tinker, my dear. I shouldn't marry him—all his fair acres notwithstanding—if I were you. I don't think ...
— The Safety Curtain, and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... would have clothed his whole company gratuitously in drab. He is fond of fighting, and ready to take up the cudgels with any chance customer; but, somehow or other, he has invariably the worst of the encounter. Tinker, beggar-man, tanner, shepherd, and curtail friar, in succession, bring him to his knees, and his life would have been many times a forfeit, but for the timely assistance of his horn, which brought Little John ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... Miss Kingston professionally to play queens. Now in the modern drama there were no queens for her to play; and as to the older literature of our stage: did it not provoke the veteran actress in Sir Arthur Pinero's Trelawny of the Wells to declare that, as parts, queens are not worth a tinker's oath? Miss Kingston's comment on my suggestion, though more elegantly worded, was to the same effect; and it ended in my having to make good my advice by writing Great Catherine. History provided no other queen capable of standing up ...
— Great Catherine • George Bernard Shaw
... that John was not sleepy at eight o'clock; he had been flying about while the others had been yawning before the fire. He would like to sit up just to see how much more solemn and stupid it would become as the night went on; he wanted to tinker his skates, to mend his sled, to finish that chapter. Why should he go away from that bright blaze, and the company that sat in its radiance, to the cold and solitude of his chamber? Why did n't the people who were ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... think about? The children? The children. You don't care a tinker's cuss about the war. You don't care a damn what happens to me or anybody else. What does it matter who's wounded or who's killed, as long as it isn't ...
— The Tree of Heaven • May Sinclair
... for human wisdom to stave aside. 'What good will you get of going into that? Parliamentary criticism, argument and botheration? Leave well alone. And even leave ill alone:—are you the tradesman to tinker leaky vessels in England? You will not want for work. Mind your pudding, and say little!' At home and abroad, that was the safe secret. For, in Foreign Politics, his rule was analogous: 'Mind your own affairs. You are an Island, you can do without Foreign Politics; Peace, keep Peace with everybody: ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... good." Then in English, "Stand up, Mr. Davies. What the - in - do you mean by taking their gold-leaf? My -, are we a set of pirates to scrape the guts out of a Levantine bumboat? Look contrite, you butt-ended, broad-breeched, bottle-bellied, swivel-eyed son of a tinker, you! My Soul alive, can't I maintain discipline in my own ship without a blacksmith of a boiler-riveter putting me to shame before a yellow-nosed picaroon. Get off the staging, Mr. Davies, and go to the engine-room. Put down that leaf first, though, and leave the books where they are. I'll send ...
— This is "Part II" of Soldiers Three, we don't have "Part I" • Rudyard Kipling
... all sorts of useful material is because it is indeed the quintessence of the forest, of the forests of untold millenniums if it is coal tar. If you are acquainted with a village tinker, one of those all-round mechanics who still survive in this age of specialization and can mend anything from a baby-carriage to an automobile, you will know that he has on the floor of his back shop a heap of broken machinery from which ...
— Creative Chemistry - Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries • Edwin E. Slosson
... pick up an odd sixpence, or even less, wherever he could, till one day he fell in with Mick, who offered him his food and the chance of more by degrees, as he wanted a sharp lad to help him in his various trades—of pedlar, tinker, basket-maker, wicker-chair mender, etc., not to speak of poultry-stealing, orchard-robbing, and even child-thieving when he got a chance that seemed likely to ...
— "Us" - An Old Fashioned Story • Mary Louisa S. Molesworth
... suppose—tinkering round, as he does. The everlasting loafer, artist, tinker, poet, gardener. 'Pon my soul, he's like the game we used to do with cherry-stones round the pudding plate. Don't you know? Soldier, sailor, tinker, tailor, and all the rest. He's all those things, and has two pair of bags to his name, and lives in a cart, and's ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... was describing a particular characteristic of the Duke. Wellington, when in action, was the dumbest of dumb things, and it would have required a moral earthquake to get more than some curt order out of him. Even a "tinker's curse" or "a tuppenny damn" would have seemed loquacious in him on such an occasion. The not very sensational "Up Guards and at 'em!" was in later life disputed by the Duke. Under great pressure, the most he would admit was that he might possibly have ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... day their troubles were over, but as luck would have it, the tinker who was in the habit of working for the temple called in, and the priest suddenly bethought him that it was a pity to throw the kettle away for nothing, and that he might as well get a trifle for it, no matter how ...
— The Junior Classics, Volume 1 • Willam Patten
... devise a superhuman commandment so cunningly that it cannot be misinterpreted in terms of his will, he will denounce it as seditious blasphemy, or else disregard it as either crazy or totally unintelligible. Parliaments and synods may tinker as much as they please with their codes and creeds as circumstances alter the balance of classes and their interests; and, as a result of the tinkering, there may be an occasional illusion of moral evolution, as when the ...
— Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion • George Bernard Shaw
... up the story where his mother had left off; "then he went to a 'fair, thatched inn,' you know, and he sat drinking with the tinker, the peddler, and the beggar, when the two rich brothers from Fountains Abbey came out to start again on their journey to York. Little John thought there'd be some fun, and perhaps some good money for him, if he decided to go ...
— John and Betty's History Visit • Margaret Williamson
... aeronaut. He apes the fame of a Lunardi, and is on the point of offering to the inhabitants—I beg your pardon, to the nobility and gentry of our neighbourhood—the spectacle of an ascension. As one of the gentry concerned I may be permitted to remark that I am unmoved. I care not a Tinker's Damn for his ascension. No more—I breathe it in your ear—does anybody else. The business is stale, sir, stale. Lunardi did it, and overdid it. A whimsical, fiddling, vain fellow, by all accounts—for I was at that time rocking in my cradle. But once was enough. If Lunardi ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the fall, it adopted and sent to the States for ratification twelve amendments to the new Constitution. There were those who thought this action precipitate. Why tinker with a constitution which had hardly been tried? To all such Madison replied cogently that the amendments which his committee reported did not alter the framework of the instrument, but added only certain ...
— Union and Democracy • Allen Johnson
... the shadow of a fir-tree with his back to the house. From here he could see the long garden. He was fond of his garden, and spent what few moments he could spare from work and games pottering about it. He had his views as to what the ideal garden should be, and he hoped in time to tinker his own three acres up to the desired standard. At present there remained much to be done. Why not, for instance, take away those laurels at the end of the lawn, and have a flower-bed there instead? Laurels lasted all the year round, true, whereas flowers died and left ...
— Mike • P. G. Wodehouse
... the saucepan, which had been laid by till the tinker's next visit, and gave it to the dwarf, who ...
— Old-Fashioned Fairy Tales • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... he answered. "How does the old puzzle run? Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, ploughboy, gentleman, thief. I think I have played all those parts, and others, too. Fling beggar and pirate into the dish. But I tell you this, honest John, I have never ...
— The Lady of Loyalty House - A Novel • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... shall see that Tom sometimes met his match. In wandering one day in the forest he met a lusty tinker that had a good staff on his shoulder, and a great dog to ...
— More English Fairy Tales • Various
... they have their bodies, he says, marred by their vulgar businesses, so they have their souls, too, bowed and broken by them. And if one of these uncomely people has a mind to seek self-culture and philosophy, Plato compares him to a bald little tinker,[117] who has scraped together money, and has got his release from service, and has had a bath, and bought a new coat, and is rigged out like a bridegroom about to marry the daughter of his master who has fallen into poor and ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... in as much stern state as the Old Red Lion of Brentford. Yes, he is my Lord Chief Justice Nevergrin! He cannot qualify, he! He is prime tinker to Madam Virtue, and carries no softening epithets in his budget. Folly is folly, and vice vice in his Good Friday vocabulary—Titles too are gilt gingerbread, dutch dolls, punch's puppet show. A duke or a scavenger with him are exactly the same—Saving and excepting the aforesaid exceptions, ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... and Hell," which he published several years subsequent to this period, was not only well received by his country folk of Sutherland and Ross, but was said by competent judges to be really a not inadequate rendering of the meaning and spirit of the noble old tinker of Elstow. I, of course, could be no authority respecting the merits of a translation, the language of which I did not understand; but living much amid the literature of a time when almost every volume, whether the Virgil ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... the secret purport of their lives is still inscrutable to man. Is man the friend, or is he the patron only? Have they indeed forgotten nature's voice? or are those moments snatched from courtiership when they touch noses with the tinker's mongrel, the brief reward and pleasure of their artificial lives? Doubtless, when man shares with his dog the toils of a profession and the pleasures of an art, as with the shepherd or the poacher, the affection warms and strengthens till it fills the soul. But doubtless, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... say nothing: and if this be not the highest step of thraldome, there is no libertie or freedome. It is but a milde kind of subiection to be the seruant of one master at once, but when thou hast a thousand thousand masters, as the veriest botcher, tinker or cobler freeborne wil dominere ouer a forreiner, & think to bee his better or master in company: then shalt thou finde theres no such hell, as to leaue thy fathers house (thy natural habitation) to liue in the land of bondage. If thou doest ...
— The Vnfortunate Traveller, or The Life Of Jack Wilton - With An Essay On The Life And Writings Of Thomas Nash By Edmund Gosse • Thomas Nash
... "we can tinker up something in the operating room that'll turn out what will look like computation results. As far as anybody outside ourselves will know, Merlin will still be solving everybody's problems. We'll ...
— The Cosmic Computer • Henry Beam Piper
... and a stout one, A most courageous drinker, I doe excell, 'tis knowne full well, The Ratter, Tom, and Tinker. Still doe I cry, good your Worship good Sir, Bestow one small Denire, Sir [1] And brauely at the bousing Ken [2] He bouse it ...
— Musa Pedestris - Three Centuries of Canting Songs - and Slang Rhymes [1536 - 1896] • John S. Farmer
... imagine contained some humour. The farce, termed ballet, was a kind of pantomime, the childish incidents of which were sufficient to show the state of the dramatic art in Denmark, and the gross taste of the audience. A magician, in the disguise of a tinker, enters a cottage where the women are all busy ironing, and rubs a dirty frying-pan against the linen. The women raise a hue-and-cry, and dance after him, rousing their husbands, who join in the dance, but ...
— Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark • Mary Wollstonecraft
... ground floor. In the front kitchen there was a tinker. The back kitchen was let to a bellows-mender. On the first floor came Ernest, with his two rooms which he furnished comfortably, for one must draw the line somewhere. The two upper floors were parcelled out among ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... twins: God only knows which is which: The soul squats down in the flesh, like a tinker drunk in ...
— The Heptalogia • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... of it was that if Agrippa once got his hands on a clock it would never run as well as before, and afterward one had to let him tinker it at least once a year, or it would stop going altogether. The old man tried to do honest and conscientious work, but just the name he ruined ...
— The Emperor of Portugalia • Selma Lagerlof
... and Company for The Story of the First Thanksgiving, and Doll-in-the-Grass. Doubleday, Page and Company for The Animals' New Year's Eve and Nils and the Bear from the Further Adventures of Nils by Selma Lagerlooef. The Youth's Companion for Chip's Thanksgiving, The Rescue of Old Glory, The Tinker's Willow, The Three Brothers, and Molly's Easter Hen. The Thomas Y. Crowell Company for The Bird, and The Gray Hare from The Long Exile by Count Lyof N. Tolstoi. The American Book Company for The Three Little Butterfly Brothers. Little, Brown and Company for ...
— Tell Me Another Story - The Book of Story Programs • Carolyn Sherwin Bailey
... time disclose the whole combination of springs and wheels whereby they are moved." A similar transparency of motive and purpose, of individual traits and spontaneous action, belongs to the Bible. From the hand of Shakspeare, "the lord and the tinker, the hero and the valet, come forth equally distinct and clear." In the Bible the various sorts of men are never confounded, but have the advantage of being exhibited by Nature herself, and are not a contrivance ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... carefully examined this charge of supposed imitation, in which so much rests upon the very simplicity of the conception of the story, and has successfully shown that the tinker of Elstow could not have profited by one or two allegories in the French and Flemish languages—works which he could have had hardly a chance to meet with; which, if thrown in his way, he could not have read; and, finally, which, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XVII. No. 469. Saturday January 1, 1831 • Various
... was a drunken Warwickshire rustic], who is dressed up as "My lord," for whom the play had been prepared. (In the writer's possession there is a very curious and absolutely unique masonic painting revealing "on the square" that the drunken tinker is Shakspeare ...
— Bacon is Shake-Speare • Sir Edwin Durning-Lawrence
... that time could any further discovery be made as to what was become of Mr. Harrison. But it hath been said that during his restraint at Campden he told some (who pressed him to confess what he knew concerning his master) that a tinker had killed him; and to others he said that a gentleman's servant of the neighbourhood had robbed and murdered him; and others, again, he told that he was murdered and hid in a bean-rick in Campden, where ...
— Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences • Arthur L. Hayward
... was called from the plow to succeed Elijah. Joseph and Daniel were servants before they were made prime ministers. Martin Luther was a miner's son. Cardinal Wolsey was the son of a butcher. John Bunyan was a tinker. William Carey was a shoemaker. Jeremy Taylor was a barber. Dr. Livingstone was a weaver. Every man ought to engage in some kind of work, ...
— Sparkling Gems of Race Knowledge Worth Reading • Various
... if Henry Fielding, barrister, journalist, tinker of plays and man-about-town, would ever have turned novelist, had it not been for Richardson, his predecessor. So slight, so seemingly accidental, are the incidents which make or mar careers and change the course of literary history. Certain it is that the immediate cause of Fielding's first ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... a Jovial Tinker, Which was a good Ale drinker; He never was a Shrinker, Believe me this is true; And he came from the wild of Kent, When all his Money was gone and spent, Which made him look like a Jack-a-Lent, And Joan's ...
— Wit and Mirth: or Pills to Purge Melancholy, Vol. 5 of 6 • Various
... religious work ever published, full of genius and beauty, and a complete exhibition of the Calvinistic theology, and the experiences of the Christian life. This book shows the triumph of genius over learning, and the people's appreciation of exalted merit. Its author, an illiterate tinker, a travelling preacher, who spent the best part of his life between the houses of the poor and the county jails, the object of reproach and ignominy, now, however, takes a proud place, in the world's estimation, with the master minds ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... Allen-a-Dale in Robin Hood's gang; it was in the Bell Inn, at Gloucester, that George Whitefield, the most gifted of popular orators, was reared; and Bunyan's Muse found him at the disrespectable trade of a tinker, and amidst the clatter of pots, and pans, and vulgar curses, made her whisper audible in his ear, "Come up hither to the Mount of Vision—to the summit of ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside
... not unfrequently happens that a tinker or coal heaver hears a sermon or falls in with a tract which alarms him about the state of his soul. If he be a man of excitable nerves and strong imagination, he thinks himself given over to the Evil Power. He doubts whether he has not committed the unpardonable ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... mistake trying to build their own cars," said Ernest. "More accidents come from that than people realize. While the war was going on, no one had time to tinker at building, but now half the chaps I know are studying up and attempting to ...
— Battling the Clouds - or, For a Comrade's Honor • Captain Frank Cobb
... a shiftless creature. It had long been the consensus of opinion—freely expressed throughout Tinkletown—that he did not amount to a tinker's dam. ...
— Anderson Crow, Detective • George Barr McCutcheon
... world is very much in his own, or in the choice of such who are most nearly concerned for him; he therefore, that foresees that he is not likely to have the advantage of a continued education, he had much better commit himself to an approved-of cobbler or tinker, wherein he may be duly respected according to his office and condition of life; than to be only a disesteemed pettifogger or ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... phrase, and a sentence or two of explanation, tell a whole history. This is the class John Bunyan wrote for before the bishops had his Allegory in presentable calf and gold-leaf,—before England knew that her poor tinker had shaped a pictured urn for her full of such visions as no dreamer had seen since Dante. This is the class that believes in John Bright and Richard Cobden and all the defenders of true American principles. It absorbs intelligence as melting ice renders heat latent; there is no living power ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... tell Mary Allen all about it! But if I don't straighten this matter out so that hereafter I can at least write her, or send her a wire, I'm no organizer at all and my chance with the Sayers Company isn't worth a tinker's curse." ...
— Mixed Faces • Roy Norton
... belladonna in her eyes the night before to see how she would look, and as a result couldn't see anything nearer than across the room, some one read the letter aloud to her, and the whole story is out. One of the cats told Granger and the boy proposed to Allie to-day, to show her he didn't care a tinker's dam ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... you may or not—I don't care! In fact I don't give a tinker's damn! If this thing is really decreed in the council of God, as the song has it—I want a dismissal in all due form: I refuse to be just coolly shunted off.—Rose, is there anything in the past for which I need to ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume II • Gerhart Hauptmann
... He was an artist first and last, and as an artist he bent and shaped the rough material, selecting with great fastidiousness, so that in his plays every speech is, as he himself declared all good speech should be, "as fully flavored as a nut or apple." Even in The Tinker's Wedding (1907), possibly the least important of his plays, one ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... inevitably retained stuffy old Tom Hingman at seventy-five hundred dollars a year to handle the calendar in Part Five. Yet those on the inside knew why very well. It was because Tom long ago, in his prehistoric youth, had learned that the way to secure verdicts was to appear not to care a tinker's dam whether the jury found the defendant guilty or not. He pretended never to know anything about any case in advance, to be in complete ignorance as to who the witnesses might be and to what they were going to testify, and to be ...
— By Advice of Counsel • Arthur Train
... thing fer ye," Uncle Dick replied, leading the way from the cabin toward one of the out-buildings. "Hit's an ole coat. Dan left hit one hot day when he stopped in at my forge, to tinker the rivets to the cap o' the still. Hit was dum hot thet day, an' he left 'is coat. 'Twa'n't wuth comin' back fer. I 'low the smell's about ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... steps on the grass outside. Don't I know that his being there is a compromise, and that he stands before me an Act of Parliament? That the church he occupies was built for other worship? That the Methodist chapel is next door; and that Bunyan the tinker is bawling out the tidings of damnation on the common hard by? Yes, I am a Sadducee; and I take things as I find them, and the world, and the Acts of Parliament of the world, as they are; and as I intend to take a wife, if I find one—not to be madly in love and ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... so easily; the lad, from sport or love of mischief, shook the ladder a good deal as he ascended, and seemed to enjoy the terror of young Butler, so that, when they had both come up, they looked on each other with no friendly eyes. Neither, however, spoke. The young caird, or tinker, or gipsy, with a good deal of attention, assisted Lady Staunton up a very perilous ascent which she had still to encounter, and they were followed by David Butler, until all three stood clear of the ravine on the side of a mountain, whose sides were covered ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... my book without one word in it of John Bunyan, the tinker, probably the gipsy, who although born only and not made a poet, like his great brother, John Milton, has uttered in prose a wealth of poetic thought. He was born in 1628, twenty years after Milton. I must not, however, remark on this noble Bohemian of literature and prophecy; but ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... There were never any humane wars but the religious wars. For these men were fighting for something that claimed, at least, to be the happiness of a man, the virtue of a man. A Crusader thought, at least, that Islam hurt the soul of every man, king or tinker, that it could really capture. I think Buck and Barker and these rich vultures hurt the soul of every man, hurt every inch of the ground, hurt every brick of the houses, that they can really capture. Do you think I have no right to fight for Notting Hill, ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... your life, or you'll be in the horse latitudes, as they call them, and no breeze stirring, and not a damned thing to do but holystone decks, the like of an old pauper that does be scrubbing a poorhouse floor. And you say: 'Sure I'd rather be a tinker traveling the roads, with his ass and cart and dog and woman, nor a galley-slave to this bastard of a mate that has no more feeling for a poor sailorman nor a hound has for a rabbit. It's a dog's life,' you say, 'and when we ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... himself. Tranquillity was to him instead of it. This philosophical levity of tranquillity, so to speak, is shown in his easy variety of pursuits. Printer, postmaster, almanac maker, essayist, chemist, orator, tinker, statesman, humorist, philosopher, parlor man, political economist, professor of housewifery, ambassador, projector, maxim-monger, herb-doctor, wit:—Jack of all trades, master of each and mastered by none—the type and genius of his land. Franklin ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... seated in the great chimney, a very tall old woman clad in a red cloak and a slouched bonnet, having all the appearance of a gipsy or tinker. She smoked silently at her clay pipe, while the doubtful-looking ...
— Red Cap Tales - Stolen from the Treasure Chest of the Wizard of the North • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... to have half again as much as any of the others, though this was really all his own doing. Besides his usual share of the luggage he had pots and pans and skillets sticking out in all directions, so that he presented the appearance of a traveling tinker. ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts Snowbound - A Tour on Skates and Iceboats • George A. Warren
... surrounded by strangers, and no relation of her own to be near her when her trouble comes!... There's times, John, when I wonder are you a man at all? Your mind is so set on yourself that you're like a lump of stone. You and your old books ... as if they matter a tinker's curse to anybody!..." ...
— The Foolish Lovers • St. John G. Ervine
... now," replied the disgusted skipper of the Wireless. "No use in my trying to tinker with the job. It will take a practical machinist to overhaul the plagued contraption. I guess you'll have to give us a tow to Memphis, where I can put a man to work getting this engine in ...
— Motor Boat Boys Mississippi Cruise - or, The Dash for Dixie • Louis Arundel
... M was a Miser, and hoarded his gold; N was a Nobleman, gallant and bold; O was an Oysterman, who went about town; P was a Parson, and wore a black gown; Q was a Quack, with a wonderful pill; R was a Robber, who wanted to kill; S was a Sailor, who spent all he got; T was a Tinker, and mended a pot; U was an Usurer, a miserable elf; V was a Vintner, who drank all himself; W was a Watchman, who guarded the door; X was Expensive, and so became poor; Y was a Youth, that did not love school; Z was a Zany, a poor ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... an Irish auctioneer at Kingston, some years ago, called Paddy Moran, whom all the world, priest and parson, minister and methodist, soldier and sailor, tinker and tailor, went to hear when he ...
— Canada and the Canadians - Volume I • Sir Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... moment a wagon of singular appearance drew up before my windows. I knew it well enough: it was the vehicle of a handy, convenient man who came along every other morning to pick up odd jobs from me and my neighbors. He could tinker, carpenter, mend harness: his wife, seated in the wagon by his side, was good at a button, or could descend and help Josephine with her ironing. A visit at this hour, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various
... feeling the hot water, he kicked and struggled so much in the pot, that his mother thought that the pudding was bewitched, and, pulling it out of the pot, she threw it outside the door. A poor tinker, who was passing by, lifted up the pudding, and, putting it into his budget, he then walked off. As Tom had now got his mouth cleared of the batter, he then began to cry aloud, which so frightened the tinker that he flung down the pudding and ran away. The pudding being broke to pieces by ...
— English Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)
... anything else under God's Heaven, and had the same crank health, I should make an even zero. If I had, with my present knowledge, twelve months of my old health, I would, could, and should do something neat. As it is, I have to tinker at my things in little sittings; and the rent, or the butcher, or something, is always calling me off to rattle up a pot-boiler. And then comes a back- set of my health, and I have to twiddle my fingers and ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... engineer in all the navies o' the world would take a month to tinker with her, even if he didn't have to send to Bombay for ...
— Told in the East • Talbot Mundy
... while the tinker fell asleep, Robin made haste away, And left the tinker in the lurch, For the great shot ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... White Head Island is all good ground in summer for cod and for pollock, also, when the herring schools are on this ground. Currents are very heavy here. The ledges that make up this reef are more or less connected. Among these are Brazil Shoal, Tinker, Inner Diamond, Outer Diamond, Crawleys, Rans, Proprietor (Foul Ground), and the Old Proprietor. While virtually all this reef is pollock ground, Crawleys and Rans ...
— Fishing Grounds of the Gulf of Maine • Walter H. Rich
... for ninety-nine of your qualities I do not care a tinker's curse: but as a man who, after three tumblers of neat brandy, can tell Marsala from Madeira you are to ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 6, No. 5, April, 1896 • Various
... sink our vessel. Alas! Friar John, my father, my friend, confession. Here I am down on my knees; confiteor; your holy blessing. Come hither and be damned, thou pitiful devil, and help us, said Friar John (who fell a-swearing and cursing like a tinker), in the name of thirty legions of black devils, come; will you come? Do not let us swear at this time, said Panurge; holy father, my friend, do not swear, I beseech you; to-morrow as much as you please. Holos, holos, alas! our ship leaks. I drown, alas, ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... men from the Warwick first saw her, she was swarming with workmen. They continued to cover her over, and to make impossible any drill or exercise upon her. Hammer, hammer upon belated plates from the Tredegar! Tinker, tinker with the poor old engines! Make shift here and make shift there; work through the day and work through the night, for there was a rumour abroad that the Ericsson, that we knew was building, was coming down the ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... One hundred years after Wiclif it yet speaks his language in large part, for that part had really lived. In the Bibliotheca Pastorum Ruskin makes comment on Sir Philip Sidney and his metrical version of the Psalms in these words: "Sir Philip Sidney will use any cow-boy or tinker words if they only help him to say precisely in English what David said in Hebrew; impressed the while himself so vividly of the majesty of the thought itself that no tinker's language can lower it or vulgarize it in his mind." The King James translators were most eager to say what the original ...
— The Greatest English Classic A Study of the King James Version of • Cleland Boyd McAfee
... arrested for a few unimportant and absurd things—but who cares? Munn will probably sue us; who cares? At any rate, we're reasonably certain of a double-leaded column in the yellow press; but do you give a tinker's damn?" ...
— A Young Man in a Hurry - and Other Short Stories • Robert W. Chambers
... ourselves into it, and hence are in two cases at the same time, and it is doubly difficult to get out. In sane moments we regard only the facts, the case that is. Say what you have to say, not what you ought. Any truth is better than make-believe. Tom Hyde, the tinker, standing on the gallows, was asked if he had anything to say. "Tell the tailors," said he, "to remember to make a knot in their thread before they take the first stitch." His companion's ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... put Furber or Frobisher, i.e. furbisher, of armour, etc. Poyser, from poise, scales, is official. Two occupative names of Celtic origin are Gow, a smith, as in The Fair Maid of Perth, and Caird, a tinker— ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... observed the justice of the peace; "you can shut up your school at five o'clock every night, and every cheesemonger and tinker in the place can do the same; but we've got no time we can call our own. Pull your chair up to the fire, old fellow. Let's see, what were we saying?" The servant appeared again at this point, and said—"Please, sir, they've ...
— Parkhurst Boys - And Other Stories of School Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... eases her but on account of the gale being bound to slacken down soon; and if we run down to a lower latitude, as I have frequently done in this part of the ocean before, we will probably get fine weather and be able to tinker up the old craft and make her look ...
— The Wreck of the Nancy Bell - Cast Away on Kerguelen Land • J. C. Hutcheson
... ground of all the pirates of the Spanish Main? Morgan was here. Blackbeard was here. The very governors themselves were little better than pirates. This room we are sitting in was the den of one of the biggest rogues of them all—John Tinker—the governor when Bruce was here building Fort Montague, at the east end yonder; building it against pirates, and little else but pirates at the Government House all the time. A great old time Tinker gave the poor fellow. You can read all ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne
... why we troubled our heads about the matter at all," said the man in black; "but when you talk about perverting the meaning of the text, you speak ignorantly, Mr. Tinker; when he whom you call the Saviour gave his followers the sop, and bade them eat it, telling them it was his body, he delicately alluded to what it was incumbent upon them to do after his death, namely, to ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... town. The silence in the early morning was something which could be felt—not a footstep, not a rolling wheel. Window-blinds were mostly down—on the windows provided with them. Even in Bell's Wynd there was not the noise of the week. Only a tinker family squabbled over the remains of the deep drinking of the night before. But then, what could Bell's Wynd expect—to ...
— The Lilac Sunbonnet • S.R. Crockett
... he declared. "I don't say it for a minute. I like your going. I wouldn't give a tinker's dam for you, whatever that is, if you didn't want to do something for those fellows over there. I won't even say to be careful, for you can't if you do your duty—only, don't you be too all-fired foolhardy, ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... veezel — 0, Molly, hadst thou seen him come down the ladder, in a shurt so scanty, that it could not kiver his nakedness! — The young 'squire called him Dunquickset; but he looked for all the world like Cradoc-ap-Morgan, the ould tinker, that suffered at Abergany for steeling of kettle — Then he's a profane scuffle, and, as Mr Clinker says, no better than an impfiddle, continually playing upon the pyebill and the new-burth — I doubt he has ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... side glances at the drunkard manufacturing machine behind her. That confounded pot, as round as the stomach of a tinker's fat wife, with its nose that was so long and twisted, sent a shiver down her back, a fear mingled with a desire. Yes, one might have thought it the metal pluck of some big wicked woman, of some witch who ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... said he. "Stir your stumps. We can slip out before anybody else awakes, grab something to eat in the pantry, and go down to the shed and tinker on the plane. Come on, Bob, we can get in a couple of hours work before going ...
— The Radio Boys on the Mexican Border • Gerald Breckenridge
... with the Chinese. The turquoise, the emerald, the sapphire, the ruby and the other precious stones with colour have, therefore, always graced the tables of the bazars in the capital, while the diamond until very recently was relegated to the point of the tinker's drill. ...
— Court Life in China • Isaac Taylor Headland
... hogs was killed at de time. Lots o' sheep and goats was also killed. All our meat was raised, and us wore wooden-bottom shoes. Raised all de wheat and corn. Hogs, cows, goats and sheep jes' run wild on Tinker and Brushy Fork Creeks. On Sat'day us git one peck meal; three pounds o' meat and one-half gallon black molasses fer a person; and dat's lot mo' dan dey gits in dese days and times. Sunday morning, us git two, or maybe three pounds o' flour. Didn't know nothing ...
— Slave Narratives Vol. XIV. South Carolina, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... did for John Bunyan—how He made one of the mightiest instruments for good the world ever saw, out of that swearing Bedford tinker. If we had a telescope which would enable us to look into heaven as Stephen did, I can imagine we should see the thief, who believed in Jesus while on the cross, very near the throne. Ask him how he got there; ...
— Sovereign Grace - Its Source, Its Nature and Its Effects • Dwight Moody
... the Commonwealth. The earliest person of note connected with this religious body being John Bunyon, author of The Pilgrim's Progress, {84a} who espoused the cause of the Parliament against Charles I. He first preached in Bedford, where he was a tinker by trade, in the year 1655, visiting various other parts of the country in succeeding years, until he died, August 31st, 1688, and ...
— A History of Horncastle - from the earliest period to the present time • James Conway Walter
... is, but there's some deficiency in Jan; something wanting. You know he generally chooses to come here by the back door: this day, because he had got the black kettle in his hand like a travelling tinker, he must go out by the front. He did! It saved him a few steps, and he went out without a blush. Out of my house, Lionel! Nobody ever lived, I am certain, who possessed so little innate notion of the ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood
... and let me say this much, Oscar: the humdrum farm-life, as I've heard you call it behind my back"—Dr. Willett smiled somewhat sadly—"won't be so humdrum as you think, if you make of it a life work—a something to be handled nobly, and made the most of. A tinker's life could be hardly humdrum ...
— The Heiress of Wyvern Court • Emilie Searchfield
... with a handkerchief tied over my face and the sun-cover of my umbrella folded and tied over my hat, for the sun was very fierce. The queerest figure of all was the would-be guide. With his one eye, his gaunt, lean form, and his torn clothes, he looked more like a strolling tinker than the honest worthy settler that he is. He bestrode rather than rode a gaunt mule, whose tail had all been shaven off, except a turf for a tassel at the end. Two flour bags which leaked were tied on behind the saddle, two ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... not he stark blind, that as he cannot himself distinguish of colours, so he would make us as mope-eyed in judging falsely of all love concerns, and wheedle us into a thinking that we are always in the right? Thus every Jack sticks to his own Jill; every tinker esteems his own trull; and the hob-nailed suiter prefers Joan the milk-maid before any of my lady's daughters. These things are true, and are ordinarily laughed at, and yet, however ridiculous they seem, it is hence ...
— In Praise of Folly - Illustrated with Many Curious Cuts • Desiderius Erasmus
... "Warwickshire" rustic [Shakspeare was a drunken Warwickshire rustic], who is dressed up as "My lord," for whom the play had been prepared. (In the writer's possession there is a very curious and absolutely unique masonic painting revealing "on the square" that the drunken tinker is ...
— Bacon is Shake-Speare • Sir Edwin Durning-Lawrence
... the same as a very absurd Error: Aristotle heretofore for a like fault reprehended the Megarensians, who observ'd no Decorum in their Theater, but brought in mean persons with a Train fit for a King and cloath'd a Cobler or Tinker in a Purple Robe: In vain doth Veratus in his Dispute against Jason Denor, to defend those elaborately exquisite discourses, and notable sublime sentences of his Pastor Fido, bring some lofty Idylliums of Theocritus, for those are not acknowledged to be Pastoral; ...
— De Carmine Pastorali (1684) • Rene Rapin
... advice, sir, you'll have nothing to do with him. Keep your hand out o' the pot; there's no man can skim boiling lead with his hand and not burn his fingers—but a tinker." ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... thesis in detail, so I will merely bid you note that aristocratic pedigree-tracers confine themselves to one line, or to a few lines. Burke will tell you that one of the great-great-grandfathers of the present Lord Foozlem was the First Baron; he is silent about his great-grandfather, the tinker, and his great-grandfather, the pettifogging country lawyer. Americans are far more apt to push their genealogical investigations in all directions, because they are prompted by a legitimate curiosity rather than by desire to prove a point, American genealogical research is biological, ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... stands out above all others in advertisements for help wanted. This is the land of hustle. Tinker, tailor, candlestick-maker; lawyer, merchant, priest; if you are not a "live-wire" you are not "help wanted"—"Cook wanted. On dairy farm, twelve miles from town. White, industrious. Must be a live-wire! One that can get results. No ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... relations with the other sex. What was most unusual for him, he was alarmed and depressed, at moments irritable. He regretted the capricious and apparently accidental impulse that had made him pretend to tinker with his automobile that day by the canal, that had led him to the incomparable idiocy of getting rid of Miss Ottway and installing the disturber of his ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... enjoyment out of play periods, Jimmy took to staying in. The permissive school encouraged it; if Jimmy Holden preferred to tinker with a typewriter instead of playing noisy games, his teacher saw no wrong in it—for his Third Grade teacher was something of an ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith
... His most intimate friend at Eton was a boy named Price, who was considered one of the best classical scholars amongst us. At his tutor, Bethell's, where he lodged, he attempted many mechanical and scientific experiments. By the aid of a common tinker, he contrived to make something like a steam-engine, which, unfortunately, one day suddenly exploded; to the great consternation of the neighbourhood and to the imminent danger of a severe flogging ...
— Reminiscences of Captain Gronow • Rees Howell Gronow
... are due to Dr. Robert K. Root and Dr. Chauncey B. Tinker of Yale University, and to Dr. Charles H. Whitman of Lehigh University, for examining part of the work in manuscript, and to Dr. Albert S. Cook of Yale University for a ...
— The Elene of Cynewulf • Cynewulf
... the last moment. Every now and then a well-dressed man hurries past into the booking-office and takes his ticket with a sheepish air as if he was pawning his watch. Sailors arrive with their chests and hammocks. The other day we had the pleasure of meeting a travelling tinker with the instruments of his craft neatly packed; two gentlemen, whose closely cropped hair and pale plump complexion betokened a recent residence in some gaol or philanthropic institution; an economical baronet, of ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... Stand-By left to him. He could prop himself up on the Bleachers with a bag of lubricated Pop-Corn between his Knees and hurl insulting Remarks at Honus Wagner, Joe Tinker and ...
— Knocking the Neighbors • George Ade
... this," and he would begin to read the passage, where Mansie, simple soul that he was, was described as going into the byre in the morning to learn if the cow had calved during the night, and finding, on opening the door, the donkey of a traveling tinker, he turned and ran into the house, crying: "Mither! Mither! The coo has calved, an' ...
— The Underworld - The Story of Robert Sinclair, Miner • James C. Welsh
... play'd, Or the odds and ends of a Tinker's Trade, Or little dirt pies and puddings made, Like children happy and squalid; The very puppet she had to pet, Like a bait for the "Nix my Dolly" set, Was a Dolly ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... every body to read what I so carefully hoarded even from my best friends, till this last month or two; and that a work which was so lately lodged, in all privacy, in my bureau, may now be seen by every butcher and baker, cobbler and tinker, throughout the three kingdoms, for ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... the most intense wistfulness and yearning. Let me cite three instances—each as unlike the others as it could possibly be—in order to show that all sorts and conditions of men have at some time felt as Dr. Blund felt in those last hours of his. John Bunyan, the tinker of Bedford, was born in the seventeenth century; the Duke of Wellington, soldier and statesman, was born in the eighteenth century; Frederick Charrington, the London brewer, was born in the nineteenth century. From a great cloud ...
— A Handful of Stars - Texts That Have Moved Great Minds • Frank W. Boreham
... gambler. "I don't even know what the fight was about, and I don't care a tinker's whoop either. I got you here to give you a chance to put Van Buren out of commission and ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... the whole combination of springs and wheels whereby they are moved." A similar transparency of motive and purpose, of individual traits and spontaneous action, belongs to the Bible. From the hand of Shakspeare, "the lord and the tinker, the hero and the valet, come forth equally distinct and clear." In the Bible the various sorts of men are never confounded, but have the advantage of being exhibited by Nature herself, and are not a contrivance ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... Smiths and shooting Smiths, temperance Smiths and licensed victualler Smiths, Smiths with double-barrelled names and hyphens, Smiths with double-barrelled names without hyphens, Conservative Smiths and Radical Smiths, tinker Smiths, tailor Smiths, Smiths of Mercia, Smiths of Wessex,—all these and all other imaginable varieties of the tribe Smith would be, as it were, crystallized by an inexorable law forbidding the members of any of these groups to marry beyond the circle marked out by the clan name.... ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... was very hungry indeed. He had been going from place to place with his master, and now it was two long days since he had eaten a good dinner. His master was a poor tinker who traveled about the country and never stayed long in one place. Rover would have liked this if his master had been kind to him, but the dog was used only to ...
— Friends and Helpers • Sarah J. Eddy
... maintained by AEtius, on whom the zeal of his adversaries bestowed the surname of the Atheist. His restless and aspiring spirit urged him to try almost every profession of human life. He was successively a slave, or at least a husbandman, a travelling tinker, a goldsmith, a physician, a schoolmaster, a theologian, and at last the apostle of a new church, which was propagated by the abilities of his disciple Eunomius. Armed with texts of Scripture, and with captious syllogisms from ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... Fable. Christopher Sly, a tinker lying drunk by a tavern, is found by a lord, who causes him to be put to bed and treated, on waking, as a nobleman newly cured of madness. Part of the treatment is the performance of this play ...
— William Shakespeare • John Masefield
... characteristics and aptitudes of his own, appropriate to a canine of high intelligence. As it is, there are false memories of aptitudes Homer never had nor could have. Physical limitations alone make some of them impossible. How could a dog tinker with machinery, for example? Yet I 'remember' working on machines of my own design. Homer's mind, in other words, remembers as first-person data experiences ...
— The Short Life • Francis Donovan
... gain dragging me to the priest this night, I'm saying, when it's new thoughts you'll be thinking at the dawn of day? SARAH — teasingly. — It's at the dawn of day I do be thinking I'd have a right to be going off to the rich tinker's do be travelling from Tibradden to the Tara Hill; for it'd be a fine life to be ...
— The Tinker's Wedding • J. M. Synge
... was natural that you, having no associates of your own rank, should make friends where you could find them. I trust that it has done you no harm. Well, Prior, this day week the boy shall come to you. I must get befitting clothes for him, or the other pupils will think that he is the son of a hedge tinker." ...
— A March on London • G. A. Henty
... that a policeman considers that every man in the street would be properly "run in," if only all the truth about the man had been known. The tinker thinks that every pot is unsound. The cobbler doubts the stability of every shoe. So at last it grew to be the case with Thackeray. There was more hope that the city should be saved because of its ten just men, than for society, if society were to depend on ten who were not snobs. All this arose ...
— Thackeray • Anthony Trollope
... latitudes, as they call them, and no breeze stirring, and not a damned thing to do but holystone decks, the like of an old pauper that does be scrubbing a poorhouse floor. And you say: 'Sure I'd rather be a tinker traveling the roads, with his ass and cart and dog and woman, nor a galley-slave to this bastard of a mate that has no more feeling for a poor sailorman nor a hound has for a rabbit. It's a dog's life,' you say, 'and when we make ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... poor woman.' Twisden: 'Poverty is your cloak, for I hear your husband is better maintained by running up and down a-preaching than by following his calling?' Sir Matthew Hale: 'What is his calling?' Elizabeth: 'A tinker, please you my Lord; and because he is a tinker, and a poor man, therefore he is despised and cannot have justice.' Sir Matthew Hale: 'I am truly sorry we can do you no good. Sitting here we can only act as the law gives us warrant; and we have no power to reverse the sentence, although ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... place the baptism of Francois Xavier, tenth son of Pierre Lecour, master-butcher, of this Parish, and of his wife, Marie LeCoq. He had for godfather, Jean LeCoq, tinker, and for godmother, Therese, wife of Louis Bossu, ...
— The False Chevalier - or, The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette • William Douw Lighthall
... sir, is an aeronaut. He apes the fame of a Lunardi, and is on the point of offering to the inhabitants—I beg your pardon, to the nobility and gentry of our neighbourhood—the spectacle of an ascension. As one of the gentry concerned I may be permitted to remark that I am unmoved. I care not a Tinker's Damn for his ascension. No more—I breathe it in your ear—does anybody else. The business is stale, sir, stale. Lunardi did it, and overdid it. A whimsical, fiddling, vain fellow, by all accounts—for I was at that time rocking in my cradle. But ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... desolateness of lonely wolds, with the passion of loyalty to a leader. Read "Deor's Lament," "Widsith," "The Wanderer," "The Sea-farer," or the battle-songs of Brunanburh and Maldon in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. [Footnote: See Cook and Tinker, Select Translations from Old English Poetry (Boston, 1902), and Pancoast and Spaeth, Early English Poems (New York, 1911).] The last strophe of "Deor's Lament," our oldest English lyric, ends with ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... of the daughter. He now called a halt with his nonsense and gave a true account of the situation. His two companions were the sons of wealthy parents and one of them owned a beautiful motor launch which broke down while descending the river from Wiscasset. He had left the two trying to tinker it in shape, but had doubts of their success. In case they failed, it would be very pleasing to them if they could get supper and lodging in Beartown. Would the good woman advise ...
— The Launch Boys' Adventures in Northern Waters • Edward S. Ellis
... last? why, who but yourself—who on earth but yourself? The parson is a good man and a great preacher, and I'll knock anybody down who says to the contrary; and I mention him first, because why; he's a gentleman, and you a tinker. But I am by no means sure you are not the best friend of the two; for I doubt, do you see, whether I should have had the fifty pounds but for you. You persuaded me to give up that silly drink they call sherry, and drink ale; and what was it but drinking ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... me once, but not so very hard. I was under Her daughter, Miss Mollie. She liked me and always called me "Tinker". When she heard me crying and goin' on, ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - From Interviews with Former Slaves - Florida Narratives • Works Projects Administration
... sat of an early summer morning in the shade of a tree, eating fried bacon with a tinker, the thought came to me that I might some day write a book of my own: a book that should treat of the roads and by-roads, of trees, and wind in lonely places, of rapid brooks and lazy streams, of the glory of dawn, the glow of evening, and ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... add but a word or two more. I am criticised for the expression tinker up in the preface. Is this one of those that you object to? I own I think such a low expression, placed to ridicule an absurd instance of wise folly, very forcible. Replace it with an elevated word or phrase, and to my conception it becomes ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... breaking them, mark me—there'll be no eggs to break. We shall be all park and suburb. The real men on the land, what few are left, are dumb and helpless; and these fellows here for one reason or another don't mean business—they'll talk and tinker and top-dress—that's all. Does your father take any interest in this? He could write ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... said Mary Ellen, "I don't want to hurt ye, but it do make me heart-sick to see ye bashin' aitch other wid pokers for the sake av a bit girl that's not worth a tinker's curse to ye! Now thin—here's a piece of cowld puddin' to each av ye—sit on the durestep where the missus won't see ye, an' ...
— Explorers of the Dawn • Mazo de la Roche
... fervently religious and romantic temperament, in his richness of representation and ingenuity of analogy, and in his forcible quaintness of style, as completely as he did in social status and in personal surroundings. In complete contrast to the romantic productions of the self-educated tinker of Bedford, the works of Walton and Evelyn were at any rate influenced by, though they can hardly be said to have been moulded upon, the style of the preceding age of old English prose writers ending with Milton. The influence ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... touch or coup de grace ... He really sometimes puts me in mind of Gil Blas; but he has not the sneer of the Frenchman, nor does he gild the bad. He has a touch of Bunyan, and, like that enthusiastic tinker, hammers away, a la Gitano, whenever he thinks he can thwack the Devil or his man-of-all-work on earth—the Pope. Therein he resembles my friend and everybody's friend—Punch—who, amidst all his adventures, never spares the black ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... now, I don't find fault with that dispensation in particular. It was one of our calling that the Emperor so honoured, after all, when he might have anointed a tinker, or a ragman, or a street woman's pensioner even. Who knows but that we should have been king's too, but for my crooked legs and your ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... considerin'," said the captain, addressing me, "what's the best thing to do with yer boat; there's no use tryin' to tinker her up, for she has got a bad hole in her, and it is our fault, too. One of the iron bands on our rudder got broke and sprung out a good while ago, and it must have been the sharp end of that which punched ...
— The House of Martha • Frank R. Stockton
... that Frank had made the big centre-table of plank, and the book-shelves as well. "He likes to tinker at such things," she said. "Whenever he gets blue or cross I set him to shifting the dresser or making a book-shelf, and he cheers up like mad. He's a regular kid anyway—always doing the things ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... and turned every pocket inside out. It was not really a light; it made this light by flashing about so quickly, but when it came to rest for a second you saw it was a fairy, no longer than your hand, but still growing. It was a girl called Tinker Bell exquisitely gowned in a skeleton leaf, cut low and square, through which her figure could be seen to the best advantage. She was slightly ...
— Peter and Wendy • James Matthew Barrie
... the lad, from sport or love of mischief, shook the ladder a good deal as he ascended, and seemed to enjoy the terror of young Butler, so that, when they had both come up, they looked on each other with no friendly eyes. Neither, however, spoke. The young caird, or tinker, or gipsy, with a good deal of attention, assisted Lady Staunton up a very perilous ascent which she had still to encounter, and they were followed by David Butler, until all three stood clear of the ravine on the side of a mountain, whose ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... Pitt Crawley. Reklect you owe me a pint for bringing down your luggage. He, he! Ask Tinker if I aynt. Mrs. Tinker, Miss Sharp; Miss Governess, ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... down to latitude 38 deg. degrees 10'. Farther south the eruptions diminished greatly in intensity.... Along the first summit of the range west of Tahoe the greatest number of vents are found. Beginning at Webber Lake on the north, they include Mount Lola, Castle Peak, Mount Lincoln, Tinker Knob, Mount Mildred and Twin Peak. The andesite masses here in places attain a thickness of 2000 feet. An interval followed in the northern part of the Pyramid Peak quadrangle where no important volcanoes were located, but they appear again in full force in Alpine County. ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... must know, Tom Hickathrift had secured to himself a trusty friend and comrade, almost his equal in strength and courage, for though he was but a tinker, yet he was a great and lusty one. Now the sheriff of the country came to Tom, under cover of night, full of fear and trembling, and begged his aid and protection against the rebels, "else," said he, "we be all dead men!" Tom, nothing loth, called his friend the tinker, and as soon as it ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 2 (of 12) • Various
... when we met our third general, and this meeting was quite by chance. Coming back from a spin down the lines we stopped in a small village called Amifontaine, to let our chauffeur, known affectionately as The Human Rabbit, tinker with a leaky tire valve or something. A young officer came up through the dusk to find out who we were, and, having found out, he invited us into the chief house of the place, and there in a stuffy little French parlor we were introduced in due form to General d'Elsa, ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... maid fetched the saucepan, which had been laid by till the tinker's next visit, and gave it to the dwarf, who thanked her, and ...
— Old-Fashioned Fairy Tales • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... throttle or be throttled. You gamble on our winning. And we shall win; we shall win. And you will profit. And when we have won a victory only one shade less terrible than defeat, then you think you will come in and tinker with our peace. Bleed us a little more ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... step of a wayside cross with a flock of geese feeding around him. Next I passed a bare-footed cantonnier breaking stones, and he told me that if I made haste I might reach Neuvic before dark. On the outskirts of a village—Roche-le-Peyroux—a wandering tinker and his boy were at work by the side of the road with fire and bellows, and I felt a trampish or romantic desire to stay with them awhile in the cheerful glow; but thinking of the coming night, I smothered ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... a cobbler it should be my pride The best of all cobblers to be; If I was a tinker, no tinker beside Should mend an ...
— Childhood's Favorites and Fairy Stories - The Young Folks Treasury, Volume 1 • Various
... straight talk of the most respectable folk would be altogether out of the question. I must confine myself to the statement that Mrs Bray had found few beyond reproach, and "the latest," as she termed it, concerned one Dr Tinker, whose wife—known colloquially as the old Tinkeress—had recently administered a public horsewhipping to a young lady whom the doctor had too ardently admired. Mrs Bray had only just unearthed the facts that day, and was overwhelmingly ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... born at Elstow, near Bedford, in 1628. His father was a brazier or tinker, and brought up his son as a craftsman of like occupation. There is no evidence for the gipsy origin of the house of Bunyan; and though extremely poor, John's father gave his son such an education as poor men could then obtain for their children. He was sent to school ...
— Life of Bunyan • Rev. James Hamilton
... suppose a case, and put ourselves into it, and hence are in two cases at the same time, and it is doubly difficult to get out. In sane moments we regard only the facts, the case that is. Say what you have to say, not what you ought. Any truth is better than make-believe. Tom Hyde, the tinker, standing on the gallows, was asked if he had anything to say. "Tell the tailors," said he, "to remember to make a knot in their thread before they take the first stitch." His companion's ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... were worth returning to. As for the diary of Madame d'Arblay, it reproduces so admirably the struggles of a bright spirit against the dullest of all atmospheres, that it seems like a new discovery in psychology. And now comes Professor Tinker's "Young Boswell" and those precious diaries including that of Mrs. Pepys by a certain E. Barrington. Life ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... that the most important mental process, to my mind, is the development of a perception of beauty. All the perseverance in the study of music, all the application devoted to it, is not worth a tinker's dam, unless accompanied by this awakening to the perception of beauty. And with regard to the influence of teachers? Since all teachers vary greatly, the student should not limit himself to his own personal masters. The true student of Art should be ...
— Violin Mastery - Talks with Master Violinists and Teachers • Frederick H. Martens
... damsel, who will be most willing to wait on thee, and be thy bow-bearer.—Only, for her mother's sake, let there pass some slight form of marriage between you—Ye need no license or priest in these happy days, but may be buckled like beggars in a ditch, with a hedge for a church-roof, and a tinker for a priest. I crave pardon of you for making such an officious and simple request—perhaps you are a ranter—or one of the family of Love, or hold marriage rites as unnecessary, as Knipperdoling, or Jack ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... singly to solicit my regard, I must own the secret purport of their lives is still inscrutable to man. Is man the friend, or is he the patron only? Have they indeed forgotten nature's voice? or are those moments snatched from courtiership when they touch noses with the tinker's mongrel, the brief reward and pleasure of their artificial lives? Doubtless, when man shares with his dog the toils of a profession and the pleasures of an art, as with the shepherd or the poacher, ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... interesting spectacle of a struggle for his usurped power. Richard perhaps, and the immediate friends of the deceased Protector, with such of Dryden's relations as were attached to his memory, may have thought, like the tinker at the Taming of the Shrew, that this same elegy was "marvellous good matter." It did not probably attract much general attention. The first edition, in 1659, is extremely rare: it was reprinted, however, along with those of Sprat and Waller, in the course of the ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... can git their jar in afore hern. I wouldn't advise nobody to nerve themselves up to it. There's been rumors," added Mr. Pawket, gravely—"there's been rumors as some one is tryin' to git up a rockery fer the vanilla. Now I wouldn't advise 'em to. The lady will want to tinker with that herself. But if everybody is itchin' to help, why don't they take up a nice collection er white door-knobs to trim up the ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... a similar manner, the altogether different gift of the divine, life-giving Spirit follows no lines that Churches or institutions draw. It falls upon an Augustinian monk in a convent, and he shakes Europe. It falls upon a tinker in Bedford gaol, and he writes Pilgrim's Progress. It falls upon a cobbler in Kettering, and he founds modern Christian missions. It blows 'where it listeth,' sovereignly indifferent to the expectations and limitations and the externalisms, even of organised Christianity, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... and operate upon, if it was nothing more than to clean and oil one. This business occupied my entire time and attention for nearly three months. Then I repaired iron bedsteads, did other iron work, and I was the general tinker of the prison. ...
— Seven Wives and Seven Prisons • L.A. Abbott
... with a grave countenance, and then went on: "I'm very sorry to see such an alteration in your temper of late; you were always fiery, but now you are grown as crabbed as old Periwinkle the drunken tinker, on whom you and I (God forgive us!) played so many unlucky tricks while we were at school—but I will no longer detain you in suspense, because (doubtless) nothing is more uneasy than doubt—Dubio procul dubio nil dubius. My friend or relation, ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett
... again as much as any of the others, though this was really all his own doing. Besides his usual share of the luggage he had pots and pans and skillets sticking out in all directions, so that he presented the appearance of a traveling tinker. ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts Snowbound - A Tour on Skates and Iceboats • George A. Warren
... much beyond the measure of tall women, called at the door. She had on a very long brown cloak, and a very white cap, without bonnet. Her face was brown, but it had plainly once been fair. She led a little barefooted child about two years old by the hand, and said her husband, who was a tinker, was gone before with the other children. I gave her a piece of bread. Afterwards, on my road to Ambleside, beside the bridge at Rydal, I saw her husband sitting at the roadside, his two asses standing beside him, and the two young children at ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... seem like Marse have all de trouble in de world. He boy, Ned, die in de war and William, what name for he pa, drink bad all de time. And after de war dem Ku Kluxers what wear de false faces try to tinker with Marse's niggers. One day Uncle Dave start to town and a Kluxer ask him where am he pass. Dat Kluxer clout him but Uncle Dave outrun him in de cane. Marse grab de hoss and go 'rest dat man and Marse a jedge and he make dat man pay de fine for hittin' Uncle Dave. ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Texas Narratives, Part 1 • Works Projects Administration
... O yes! By command of her Highness! Lost, stolen, or strayed, Gone to the dogs or mislaid, Her Highness' splendid ruby. Whoso finds it—wit or booby, Tinker, tailor, soldier, lord— Let him ask what he will, he shall ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... In a minute I would. And there isn't a mechanic in that entire club that wouldn't. There isn't a lawyer, doctor, editor, author, tinker, loafer, railroad president, saint-land, there isn't a human being in the United States that wouldn't jump ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... time was by no means unequal, and more than once, with gigantic effort, he had all but flung off his captors. Perhaps, in the end, the task might even have been too much for the sheriff's party had it not been that a treacherous tinker, named Allan, with a hammer struck the old man a heavy blow on the face, fracturing the jaw and partially stunning him. Then, bound hand and foot, Auld Ringan was carried to Edinburgh. There, in the Tolbooth, he lay for eight long years, suffering ...
— Stories of the Border Marches • John Lang and Jean Lang
... to fade. He took to haunting department-store kitchenware sections. He would come home with a new kind of cream whipper, or a patent device for the bathroom. He would tinker happily with this, driving a nail, adjusting a screw. At such times he was even known to begin to whistle some scrap of a doleful tune such as he used to hum. But he would change, quickly, into something lovely. The price of butter, eggs, milk, cream ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... from a revival of Danton's beautiful doctrine that, in order to consummate the regeneration of society, all conditions imposed upon the eligibility of citizens to act as judges ought to be immediately abolished, so that a tinker, or a butcher, or a bootblack, or a chiffonnier might be made a French magistrate just as well as a trained student of the laws? As you know, one of the first things Danton, as Minister of Justice, did was to carry through the Convention his famous ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... soldier and a sailor, A tinker and a tailor, &c. Another specimen of his wit is furnished by the following epigram of the five reasons for ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... the North Country. In Darrel, the clock tinker, wit, philosopher and man of mystery, is portrayed a force held in fetters and covered with obscurity, yet strong to make its way, and ...
— The Black Box • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... own, or in the choice of such who are most nearly concerned for him; he therefore, that foresees that he is not likely to have the advantage of a continued education, he had much better commit himself to an approved-of cobbler or tinker, wherein he may be duly respected according to his office and condition of life; than to be only a disesteemed pettifogger or ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... not a habitable house left in Peronne. The sixteenth century church of St. Jean is but a relic. W. Beach Thomas wrote after the retreat that nothing was left that was valuable enough to be worth collection by a penny tinker or a rag-and-bone merchant. Foul what you cannot have, was ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller
... love of liberty nor the spur of ambition could induce him to forego his plain preaching in public places. He had so forgotten his early education that his wife had to teach him again to read and write. It was the enthusiasm of conviction which enabled this poor, ignorant, despised Bedford tinker to write his immortal allegory with such fascination that a whole ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... there were blind mendicants, with patched or bandaged eyes; crippled ones, with wooden legs and crutches; diseased ones, with running sores peeping from ineffectual wrappings; there was a villain-looking pedlar with his pack; a knife-grinder, a tinker, and a barber-surgeon, with the implements of their trades; some of the females were hardly-grown girls, some were at prime, some were old and wrinkled hags, and all were loud, brazen, foul-mouthed; and all soiled and slatternly; there were ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... peaceably to their homes. The house of the collector for Fayette and Washington counties was burned, and warnings were given to those who were disposed to submit to the law. The disaffected were called "Tom the tinker" men, from the signature affixed to the threatening notices. From a passage in one of Gallatin's letters it appears that there was a person of that name, a New England man, who had been concerned in Shays's insurrection. Liberty poles, with the device, "An equal tax and ...
— Albert Gallatin - American Statesmen Series, Vol. XIII • John Austin Stevens
... if he were to alight here some crisp morning in one of his unearthly machines. For we are a reactionary people in matters of religion and education; and our very "speech betrays us," belonging as so many of its expressions do to the days when the Pilgrims went up to Canterbury, or a certain Tinker wrote of another and more distant pilgrimage to ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... the men of that day was Edward Dowling. As a tinker he wandered about distributing tracts, speaking the word in truth, and returning during the winter to be factotum in the tower. In that kindly old soul few guessed the old fighter in India. Did he really know the place where priceless treasures were ...
— The Kirk on Rutgers Farm • Frederick Bruckbauer
... great Puritan writer of England was John Bunyan. He was born in 1628, more than twenty years after Milton. His father was a tinker. A tinker! The word makes us think of ragged, weather-worn men and women who wander about the countryside. They carry bundles of old umbrellas, and sometimes a battered kettle or two. They live, who knows how? they sleep, who knows where? Sometimes in our walks we come across a charred ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... arch neck'd, with tails erect And gold upon their blinkers; And by their side an ass I spied; It was a travelling tinker's. ...
— Fly Leaves • C. S. Calverley
... much," she says; "this wounded leg, these crusted lips, this anxious, weary mind. Come away for a time, until your body becomes more habitable." And so she coaxes the mind away into the Nirvana of delirium, while the little cell-workers tinker and toil within to get things better for its home-coming. When you see the veil of cruelty which nature wears, try and peer through it, and you will sometimes catch a glimpse of a ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle
... is a character that has not had justice done him. He is the most romantic of mechanics. And what a list of companions he has—Quince the Carpenter, Snug the Joiner, Flute the Bellows- mender, Snout the Tinker, Starveling the Tailor; and then again, what a group of fairy attendants, Puck, Peaseblossom, Cobweb, Moth, and Mustard-seed! It has been observed that Shakespeare's characters are constructed upon deep physiological ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... "Jugville," as he had named it, years before, in derision. He was a mile and a half from home, and paused a moment to sit on the platform in front of "Marlow's Hotel," and rest. The loungers were present in more than usual force,—Jo and Biather Alexander, old Neaze Savage, old Cal Chase, Tinker,—any number of old ...
— Bart Ridgeley - A Story of Northern Ohio • A. G. Riddle
... thou seen him come down the ladder, in a shurt so scanty, that it could not kiver his nakedness! — The young 'squire called him Dunquickset; but he looked for all the world like Cradoc-ap-Morgan, the ould tinker, that suffered at Abergany for steeling of kettle — Then he's a profane scuffle, and, as Mr Clinker says, no better than an impfiddle, continually playing upon the pyebill and the new-burth — I doubt he has as little manners as money; ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... the drunkard manufacturing machine behind her. That confounded pot, as round as the stomach of a tinker's fat wife, with its nose that was so long and twisted, sent a shiver down her back, a fear mingled with a desire. Yes, one might have thought it the metal pluck of some big wicked woman, of some ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... out Burnett. "I don't give a tinker's damn about his voice. It's up to me to run the dwarf to earth, and I'm goin' ...
— The Secret of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... took, and they took part, as their politics inclined them, with either side. For a long time Ferguson hunted, or was hunted by, a man of his own order and nearly as notorious on the other side, namely, "Tinker Dave Beattie." On the evening of the 7th, we encamped in the vicinity of Livingston. Leaving early next morning, by midday we reached the Cumberland river at the ford near the small village of Selina. Here Colonel Morgan received positive information of the strength and position of ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke
... a community because we believe in our hearts that we aren't a community. What does Jones or Smith or Robinson or anybody else really care for Italian Bar as a place; or, indeed, for California as a place? Not a tinker's damn! He came out here in the first place to make his pile, and in the second place to have a good time. He isn't dependent on any one's good opinion, as he used to be at home. He refuses to be bothered with responsibilities and he doesn't need to be. Why ...
— Gold • Stewart White
... thought he, why may not I?—cannot I be as useful as them? besides I can—but these men sing, I suppose—do not they sing John, much better than me?" "Noa, I tell thee they doan't: sing better than thee! they can't sing at all. A tinker's jackass is as good at it as any of them I see here. When they are on the stage (I went three or four times with our Sall to the play) od rot 'un—they make a noise by way of a song, and the musicianers sing for ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 4, April 1810 • Various
... Porter Barber | Chinaman Coffeeman | Founder Porkshop-keeper | Grave-digger Cartwright | Tradesman Tinker, a brasier ...
— English as she is spoke - or, A jest in sober earnest • Jose da Fonseca
... popular fancy of a shibboleth-crazy nation, and provided pap for the fanciful, for the theorists, for the flabby idealists and doctrinaires. If I melt lead and iron and copper and silver and gold in the same pot, I get a bastard metal, do I not? It is not, as a fused product, worth a tinker's hoot. Why, even Zangwill is not an advocate of the melting-pot. He is a Jew, proud of it, and extremely solicitous for the welfare of the Jewish race. He is a Zionist—a leader of the movement to crowd the Arabs out of Palestine and repopulate that country ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
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