"Makeshift" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the cause, it says to the patient: "You have no pain. You are not tired. You will sleep to-night. You will be cheerful." Sometimes the suggestion works and sometimes it does not, but at best the relief is likely to be a mere temporary makeshift. The symptom may be relieved, but the character is not changed and therefore no permanent relief is assured. It is far better for a nervous person to say to himself, "There is something wrong and I am going ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury
... recognized that Bonbright and herself were embarked on one of these unstable, experimental craft. She saw, as he did not, that it was unseaworthy and must founder at the first touch of storm. She pinned no false hopes to it; recognized it as a makeshift, welcome to her only as a reprieve—and that it must soon be discarded for a vessel whose planking was reality and whose sails were woven of ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... but to daffodils or carnations or dahlias, or to the plants of sweet scent and pleasant names, like rosemary and lavender, and balm, and mignonette. And not seldom a weekly tenant, desirous of beauty, goes farther, takes his chance of losing his pains; nails up against his doorway some makeshift structure of fir-poles to be a porch, sowing nasturtiums or sweet-peas to cover it with their short-lived beauty; or he marks out under his window some little trumpery border to serve instead of a box-hedge ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... no such ship was in existence. The light cruiser H.M.S. Hermes had been adapted for seaplane carrying and had operated with the fleet during the naval manoeuvres of July 1913, but this was no more than a makeshift. The Hermes was refitted and re-commissioned in October 1914 to carry three seaplanes, and at the end of that month was sunk by a torpedo from an enemy submarine on her passage from ...
— The War in the Air; Vol. 1 - The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force • Walter Raleigh
... even at the price of precious blood, the free peoples of the earth must ward off from them; for, makeshift and stop-gap as it is, it does not even succeed in what it tries to do. It does not last. Have we not seen that it does not, cannot last? How can it last? This falsehood, like all falsehoods, must collapse at one touch of Ithuriel's spear ...
— Historical Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... spar, and this was a great assistance in strengthening it. The raft, however, without the means of guiding it, would be of little use. They had, therefore, to construct a couple of paddles and a rudder, and they then found that, with the help of two small spars, they could form a makeshift mast and yard, their shirts and pocket-handkerchiefs fastened together forming a sail. This would carry them to the rock, as the wind was off the shore, and they must trust to the assistance of their friends to get back. What was their disappointment, on stepping on ...
— Paul Gerrard - The Cabin Boy • W.H.G. Kingston
... down on one side, and the little mare, with her feet planted resolutely, would wait for me to perform my part by getting that bearskin back in its proper place on the McClellan saddle which I was using as a makeshift pack saddle. The feat of killing the bear the previous day sank into nothing compared with the feat of making the bearskin ride properly as a pack on ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... had reasoned, the Doctor had been willing instantly to abandon this nostrum when the harm done by it was concretely brought home to him. Though this argument had fallen far short of reconciling Hal to the Surtaine standards, nevertheless it had served as a makeshift to justify in part his abandonment of the hard-won principles of the "Clarion," a surrender necessary for the saving of a loved and honored father in whose essential goodness he ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... were heaped on the floor in sight of the pale little Skeezucks, who clung unfailingly, through it all, to the funny makeshift of a doll that "Bruvver Jim" had placed in his keeping. He appeared not at all to comprehend the meaning of the gifts the men had brought, or to know their purpose. That never a genuinely happy Christmas had brightened his little, ...
— Bruvver Jim's Baby • Philip Verrill Mighels
... there was not one case without its complication, either in the shape of argument for increased liability or claim for compensation. It was makeshift everywhere, and Dick could not but ask himself whether any tenant on the estate really knew how far he was hopelessly in debt or a solvent man? It only needed Peter Gill's peculiar mode of collecting the moneys due, and ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... or Devonian period such as existed on earth, though, if consistent with its size, it should be on a vastly larger scale," said the doctor. "I never believed in the theory," he continued, "that the larger the planet the smaller should be its inhabitants, and always considered it a makeshift, put forward in the absence of definite knowledge, the idea being apparently that the weight of very large creatures would be too great for their strength. Of the fact that mastodons and creatures far larger than any now ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... their needs, so wasteful of labour and so devoid of beauty as this was, and it is only now as I describe this that I find myself thinking of the essential absurdity of an intelligent community living in such makeshift homes. It strikes me now as the next thing to ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... at me earnestly. "I love the country," he said; "it's fed me and harbored me. But I wouldn't lift a finger to put a single patch on this makeshift of a government; I wouldn't stave off the crash if I could. And it's coming! You and I have seen something of the rottenness of the underpinning which props up empires. You and I, Scarlett, have learned a few of the shameful secrets which even an ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... It is sufficient to say that nearly all, if not all, of them succumbed to the financial disasters in 1857-58, and there was no banking worthy of the name until the passage of the banking law of July 26, 1858. But this act was a mere makeshift to meet a financial emergency, and it was not based upon sound financial principles. It allowed the organization of banks and the issue of circulating bank notes upon securities that were capable of being fraudulently overvalued by misrepresentation, and, as a matter of course, advantage was taken ...
— The History of Minnesota and Tales of the Frontier • Charles E. Flandrau
... that every system of insurance or of subsidy, or of occasional aid to any member of the family, should tend directly and powerfully toward and not away from thrift, work capacity, and sound business principles. Society-at-large must now make good in some makeshift fashion for many social failures of the past, but its main currents of pressure upon the individual life should be in the production of a line of normal and successful men and women, rather than attempts to make all share alike, whatever their personal quality, when old age ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... lover can find any ground at all for serenity in the tide of an elderly rival's success, he finds it in the fact itself of that ancientness. The other side seems less a rival than a makeshift. But Christopher no longer felt this, and the significant signs before his eyes of the imminence of Ethelberta's union with this old hero filled him with restless dread. True, the gentleman, as he appeared illuminated by the ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... Technical Definitions, Information on Raising and Keeping Troops, Actual Service, including Makeshift and Improved Material, and Law, Government, Regulation, and Administration relating to Land Forces. By Colonel H.L. Scott, Inspector General U.S.A. New York. D. Van Nostrand. 8vo. pp. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... Islands. Many of them had been gamekeepers and hence were accustomed to outdoor life and the handling of guns, all of which aided them in saving the remnant of their command. They had been ordered to take some cottages, occupied by German soldiers as a makeshift fortification. The Cameronians on the way to the attack fell into a ditch which was both deep and wide. It was necessary for them to swim to get across the ditch in some places. In the meantime Highlanders were being slain by German shells and the rifle fire that the men ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... ford, a makeshift boat was constructed with the aid of the serviceable tarpaulin, and the Hume was crossed, close to the site of the present town of Albury. Still passing through good pastoral land, watered by numerous creeks, they crossed a river which was ...
— The Explorers of Australia and their Life-work • Ernest Favenc
... and you winced a little; but this was rarely, for you were very nearly, oh, very nearly an animal, your temperament and intelligence were just those of a dog that has picked up a master, not a real master, but a makeshift master who may turn it out at any moment. Dickens would sentimentalise or laugh over you; I do neither. I merely recognise you as one of the facts of civilisation. You looked—well, to be candid,—you looked neither young nor ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... turtle? I'll have no upstart spilling his chemicals here, or devilling the stars from a seat on my roof." "Last autumn," said I, "David Claridge was housed here. Thy palace was a prison then." "I know well of that. Haven't I found his records here? And do you think his makeshift lordship did not remind me?" "Records? What records, Soolsby?" asked I, most curious. "Writings of his thoughts which he forgot— food for mind and body left in the cupboard." "Give them to me upon this instant, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... lack of fixed military leadership, the insufficiency of their generals, the total uselessness of their admirals. In part these evils were remedied by energy and good fortune; as was the case with the want of a fleet. That mighty creation, however, was but a grand makeshift, and always remained so. A Roman fleet was formed, but it was rendered national only in name, and was always treated with the affection of a stepmother; the naval service continued to be little esteemed ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... selected the best site for the building; and the skipper having caused a lot of timber to be placed in the boat, a makeshift cottage was hastily run up, the walls being of blocks of stone without and of wood inside. The islander then thatched this neatly with tussock-grass, which grew all up the face of the cliff, where, as he showed the brothers, it could ...
— Fritz and Eric - The Brother Crusoes • John Conroy Hutcheson
... makeshift plan I proceeded to execute. Transporting the material to the middle of the weed-grown space, I covered it lightly with twigs and various articles of loose rubbish. It was now quite invisible, and I was turning away to go when suddenly I bethought ...
— The Uttermost Farthing - A Savant's Vendetta • R. Austin Freeman
... have hers show the effect of housework, when that means scrubbing the floor and cleaning the stove. Gloves? Ah, well, James Nasmyth once wrote: "Kid-gloves are great non-conductors of knowledge." I believe that gloves of any kind are a makeshift in real cleaning of dirty corners; but there should not be ...
— The Cost of Shelter • Ellen H. Richards
... space, past the point of no return, all the doubts that I had dismissed fought for attention. The plan that had seemed so clear and logical now began to look like a patched and crazy makeshift. ...
— The Misplaced Battleship • Harry Harrison (AKA Henry Maxwell Dempsey)
... with the full power of Alpha and Beta Centauri beating down was like stepping into a river of fire. Even with the cooling unit in his suit, Terrence was aware of the searing heat that filled the parade ground. Looking off across the makeshift native huts, he could see the bright sides of a huge space ship-like object. The big dirigible Sun Maid was lying in an open field. It's a funny world, he thought to himself, where you have to use dirigibles for planetary travel. But ...
— Narakan Rifles, About Face! • Jan Smith
... either of the others, was forced to give way. Fidelity of representation was less their object than beauty; with us it is exactly the reverse. On this principle, the use of masks, which appears astonishing to us, was not only justifiable, but absolutely essential; far from considering them as a makeshift, the Greeks would certainly, and with justice too, have looked upon it as a makeshift to be obliged to allow a player with vulgar, ignoble, or strongly marked features, to represent an Apollo or a Hercules; nay, rather they would have deemed it downright profanation. ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... ten years and apparently as a yearly office, so that he became Dictator IV. in May 45 B.C. Finally, before the 15th of February 44 B.C., this was exchanged for a life-dictatorship. Not only was this a contradiction in terms, since the dictatorship was by tradition a makeshift justified only when the state had to be carried through a serious crisis, but it involved military rule in Italy and the permanent suspension of the constitutional guarantees, such as intercessio and provocatio, by which the liberties of Romans were protected. That Caesar held the imperium ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... shall give in the first column the word with its literary spelling, in the second Mr. Jones' phonetic representation of it, and in the third column an attempt to represent that sound to the eye of those who cannot read the phonetic script, using such makeshift spellings as may be found in any novel where the pronunciation of ...
— Society for Pure English, Tract 2, on English Homophones • Robert Bridges
... my duty. Horsham ... here you have Cantelupe who won't stand in with the man, and Percival who won't stand in with his measure, while I would sooner stand in with neither. Isn't it better to face the situation now than take trouble to form the most makeshift of Cabinets, and if that doesn't go to pieces, be voted down in the ...
— Waste - A Tragedy, In Four Acts • Granville Barker
... morning Mike went to work again. He showed Thompson how to arrange a mattress of hemlock boughs on the bed frame. It was a simple enough makeshift, soft and springy when Thompson spread his bedding over it. Then Mike superintended the final disposition of his supplies so that there would be some semblance of order instead of an indiscriminately mixed pile in which the article wanted ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... same time, that this, its conception of him, was utterly inadequate, although the best its inferior nature allowed it to form. For if, instead of so conceiving of its maker, it refused to make use of these relative perfections as a makeshift, and so necessarily thought of him as amorphous metal, or mere oil, or by the help of any other inferior conception which a watch might be imagined capable of entertaining, that watch would he wrong indeed. For man ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... addition to our store, must prove beneficial to the thrifty amateur. My object in writing these articles is not to deprive the mechanic of any portion of his legitimate occupation, but to assist those who live at a distance too great to be able to employ him, and who necessarily prefer any makeshift to the inconvenience of sending miles, and being without for days, an article which might possibly be set right in ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 561, October 2, 1886 • Various
... cook, who was very stout and a little middle-aged, would always use flavouring sauces from the grocer's rather than walk up to the garden, where we have a most seductive herb bed," said Mrs. Wilding; "and then, again, the love of the English for pungent-made sauces is another reason for this makeshift practice. 'Oh, a table-spoonful of somebody's sauce will do for the flavouring,' and in goes the sauce, and the flavouring is supposed to be complete. People who eat their chops, and steaks, and fish, and game, after having smothered the natural flavour ...
— The Cook's Decameron: A Study in Taste: - Containing Over Two Hundred Recipes For Italian Dishes • Mrs. W. G. Waters
... arrangements for the feeding of these men, all of whom were more or less badly wounded; and at first, when we heard at the hospital that a train was about to be made up, we took down all the soup and coffee we could manage to spare in big pails and jugs. But this was a mere makeshift, and was superseded very soon by a more up-to-date arrangement. A proper soup-kitchen was established at the station, with huge boilers full of soup and coffee always ready, and after that it was never necessary for a wounded soldier to leave Furnes hungry. All this was due ...
— A Surgeon in Belgium • Henry Sessions Souttar
... population. They adopted the Latin language; they forsook Arianism for Catholicism; they accommodated themselves to city life; they were liberal patrons of Italian art and industry. Although they introduced a strictly Teutonic form of administration, their rule compared not unfavourably with the makeshift methods of Byzantine statesmanship. In Imperial Italy we see the strange spectacle of a military despotism tempered by the usurped privileges and jurisdictions of the great proprietors, or by the ill-defined temporal pretensions ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis
... see how my picture turned out, Jack," said Billy Manners after supper when it was quite dark. "Then I want to get the laugh on those fellows that said my makeshift was no good. I know ...
— The Hilltop Boys - A Story of School Life • Cyril Burleigh
... paused and looked into the next compartment. From the opposite side, he saw another hatch partially open and the outline of Roger's head and shoulders. Between them, a man was bending over a makeshift desk, copying information from a calculator and a set of blueprints. Tom nodded across to Roger and they both stepped into the compartment at ...
— Sabotage in Space • Carey Rockwell
... years the shallowness of passion had seemed its crowning insult, and over the absolute sincerity of her own nature the primal emotion she had heard in Christopher's voice exerted a compelling charm. The makeshift of a conventional marriage had failed her utterly; her soul had rejected the woman's usual cheap compromise with externals; and in her almost puritan scorn of the vanities by which she was surrounded she had attained the moral elevation which comes to those who live by an inner standard of purity ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... see," said Thorndyke. "Here is a makeshift cartridge of Polton's manufacture, containing an eighth charge of smokeless powder for a ...
— John Thorndyke's Cases • R. Austin Freeman
... them, Sabina? You're possessed, as you always were, with the significance of legal marriage. You don't know that marriage is merely a human contrivance and, nine times out of ten, an infernally clumsy makeshift and a long-drawn pretence. Like every other human shift, it is a thing that gets out-grown by the advance of humanity towards higher ideals and cleaner liberties. We are approaching a time when the edifice will be shaken to its mouldering foundations, ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... has released his will and love from the vast Ceremonial of wonder, from the deep Poem of Being, into some particular detail of life wherein he hopes to achieve comfort or at least shun pain. Not so, the artist. In the moment when he elects to avoid by whatever makeshift the raw agony of life, he ceases to be fit to create. He must face experience forever freshly: reduce life each day anew to chaos and remould it into order. He must be always a willing virgin, given up to life and so ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... passed in camp Marion learned many things that were to be of incalculable value to her one day, though she never could have guessed that all this too, like the encounter in the Forbidden Pasture, had been ordered in the Beginning, details in the Scheme of Things. She learned surprising secrets of makeshift cookery; she learned the Indian's lesson of a very little fire; she learned the mountaineer's economy of matches and like precious articles. She fished in the small pools that lay hidden away in dark recesses of the forest, practised shooting with her rifle, and on the third day, in the timber ...
— The Heart of Thunder Mountain • Edfrid A. Bingham
... 1894, and taking advantage of that fact Mr. Walter Damrosch arranged two performances of "Die Walkre," in the Carnegie Music Hall, for the benefit of local charities. They were slipshod affairs, with makeshift scenery and a stage not at all adapted for theatrical performances; but the public rose at them, as the phrase goes, and Mr. Damrosch felt emboldened to give a representation of "Gtterdmmerung," with the same principals at the Metropolitan ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... sparks escape into a bundle of straw, which kindling quickly, spread the conflagration over every part of their poor mansion, till it was reduced to ashes. Together with the cottage (a sorry antediluvian makeshift of a building, you may think it), what was of much more importance, a fine litter of young pigs, no less than nine in number, perished. China pigs [Footnote: China pigs. What adjective would we use now?] have been esteemed a luxury ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... talent at the service of the arc light and the lens. Aubrey felt a serene and intimate pleasure in watching them from a seat beside Titania. He knew that the breakfast table scene shadowed before them was only a makeshift section of lath propped up in some barnlike motion picture studio; yet his rocketing fancy imagined it as some arcadian suburb where he and Titania, by a jugglery of benign fate, were bungalowed together. Young men have a pioneering imagination: ...
— The Haunted Bookshop • Christopher Morley
... down and being reflected up in a way that was almost unbearable; even Tom riding with his mouth open, panting like a dog, his face coated with perspiration and dust; while when at night we had stopped at some wretched makeshift of an inn—a hut generally where a grass hammock and a little lukewarm water was the total accommodation—a wash or bath of any kind had been quite out of the question. But now, as we were descending a steep mountain-side, it seemed as if we ...
— The Golden Magnet • George Manville Fenn
... with sawdust or sheets of slag-wool laid on boarding nailed to fillets on the joists. The sawdust should be filled up to the top of the joists; over this a layer of thick felt, and the boarding above. This, however, is only a makeshift when compared with a ...
— The Turkish Bath - Its Design and Construction • Robert Owen Allsop
... he was acquainted with the formalities proper to the ceremony of tasting. He filled his makeshift glass, he held it up to the light, and looked at the wine severely; he moved the tumbler to and fro under his nose, and smelt at it again and again; he paused and reflected; he tasted the claret as cautiously as if he feared it might be poisoned; he smacked his lips, and ...
— Blind Love • Wilkie Collins
... will contrast, perhaps, as is often done, a picture of the landscape with the landscape Itself. The picture, they will say, however beautiful, is not a 'natural' Good, not a real Good, not a Good in its own right; it is a kind of makeshift produced by human effort, beautiful, if you will, admirable, if you will, to be sought, to be cherished, to be loved in default of a better, with the best faculties of brain and soul, but still not that ultimate ...
— The Meaning of Good—A Dialogue • G. Lowes Dickinson
... half-an-hour after the first stroke of the hurricane the schooner was pitching bows under, and shipping increasing quantities of water at every plunge. And now, as we once more bestirred ourselves, we were confronted with a fresh calamity. For our makeshift protection of the damaged companion and skylight, as well as the fore-scuttle, had been swept away, probably at the first stroke of the hurricane, although not one of us had observed it, and already vast quantities of water were pouring into the little ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood
... of the rulership of Afghanistan may have been adopted as the only policy which afforded even a remote possibility of tranquillity. But it was essentially a policy of speculative makeshift. The retributive and punitive object of the swift march on Cabul can scarcely be regarded as having been fulfilled by the execution of a number of subordinate participants and accessories in the destruction of the mission and by the voluntary abdication of Yakoub Khan. That the Afghan 'authorities, ...
— The Afghan Wars 1839-42 and 1878-80 • Archibald Forbes
... house, each owner must cope with the question for himself. He cannot leave it to chance or delude himself that any old system will serve. Some hot August day when his house is filled with guests, the makeshift disposal system will suddenly cease to function and an otherwise tactful guest will ask whether that queer smell is just part of the regular country ...
— If You're Going to Live in the Country • Thomas H. Ormsbee and Richmond Huntley
... sovereign, as the temporal authority ordained by God, had been requested to render this service to the gospel, out of Christian charity, since, in his capacity as civil ruler, he was under no obligation to do so. In like manner, Luther afterwards described the Evangelical sovereigns as 'Makeshift-bishops' (Nothbischofe). At the same time the instructions for visitation introduced now in the smaller districts the office of superintendent as ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... practically safe, although the British held Newport; and all the country south of the Delaware was free from them. The perplexities and discouragements of Washington were great indeed, while he stubbornly held the field with a beggarly makeshift for an army and sturdily continued his appeals to Congress and to the country for men, arms, and clothing; yet only New York City and New Jersey were really in the possession of the enemy. It was one thing for England to occupy a few cities, and quite another to ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XI • John Lord
... monologue. Almost as if they had known the horror of infinite flatness that is all about the literature of the Middle Ages, as if there had fallen upon them, in that Alean plain, the shadow of the enormous beast out of Aristotle's Poetics, they chose to renounce all superfluity, and throw away the makeshift wedges and supports by which an epic is held up. In this way they did great things, and Volosp (the Sibyl's Prophecy) is their reward. To write out in full the story of the Volsungs and Niblungs was left to the prose compilers of the ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... very few minutes there was little doubt about its being a genuine bonfire and no paltry makeshift. Selina, a Maenad now, hatless and tossing disordered locks, all the dross of the young lady purged out of her, stalked around the pyre of her own purloining, or prodded it with a pea-stick. And as she prodded she murmured at intervals, "I KNEW there was ...
— Dream Days • Kenneth Grahame
... "lock-up rule" at twelve o'clock, are absent in Dublin not only at Trinity, but at the University College, where one can only suppose its absence to be due to the unorganised condition of a small and temporary makeshift. Not only, however, for the exercise of disciplinary control, but also because of the close association of men with each other which residence ensures, is this to be regarded as the best means of getting the heart ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell
... relief than they had experienced in many a day. Now at last they saw a feasible plan for leaving the island upon a seaworthy craft. There would be no more hard labour at ship-building, and no risking their lives upon a crudely built makeshift that would be quite as likely to go to the bottom as it would to reach ...
— The Beasts of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... startling. The tele-columnist was a tall, dour and bushy-browed man who took a perverse sort of pride in the impression he gave of shabbiness. He slouched wordlessly into the room, hands thrust deep in the pockets of a makeshift jacket. But there was nothing shabby about the man's perceptive and analytic mind, Beardsley remembered; true, Pederson had fallen from the heights since the ECAIAC debacle, but his retirement from the limelight was more studied than sullen and could only have been his own choosing. ...
— We're Friends, Now • Henry Hasse
... soul—doubtless connected with the Physics Department—had by means of a railing insured himself against the painful mortification of an icy step. Walking is never good in Tutors' Lane during the winter. Cement walks are not laid, and temporary boards smack a little too much of a makeshift. Arctics are the invariable rule, but even so the going is not easy, and it is particularly bad at this time of year, for now it is that arctics, which never seem able to last through a winter, suddenly give out at the heel and fill ...
— Tutors' Lane • Wilmarth Lewis
... Then I managed to get a candle, and cut a piece off, and rigged it up with paper inside the binnacle. This answered for about ten minutes, but finding it was again flickering, I opened the tin door, and found all the candle had melted into bright liquid oil; so this makeshift was a failure. However, another candle was cut, and the door being left open to keep it cool, with this lame light I worked on bravely, but very determined for the rest of my sailing days to have the oil bottle always ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor
... this, but he was certainly impressed. His demeanour suggested that he had met autocrats before but never such a thorough autocrat as I. For the rest of my time there I pressed my trousers in the usual way, well knowing that he would regard the process not as the makeshift of a valetless pauper but as the eccentricity of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 29, 1914 • Various
... serious response. "At best, that would have been only a makeshift—putting off the evil day. No; this thing must be fought out, once for all. We are running at a loss. To take money from you would be merely to waste it. Let me tell you, too, that there isn't a chance in the world ...
— Making People Happy • Thompson Buchanan
... animated body. His theory is like an ingenious system of canal locks for letting divine personality descend from the upper to the lower waters. The ingenuity displayed in it condemns it. It is an artificial makeshift. The psychology on which it rests is antiquated. The picture of Christ it presents does not correspond to the recorded facts of His life. Christ's human nature, as chiselled by the Apollinarian sculptor, is a torso. Such ...
— Monophysitism Past and Present - A Study in Christology • A. A. Luce
... apology, plea, exoneration, palliation, extenuation, pardon; subterfuge, evasion, pretext, makeshift. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... had gone to bed grumbling and threatening when no mail had arrived and no wages were paid. The manager and his assistants were still up, however, perplexed and worried that, for the first time, old Maurice Delorme had failed to reach the camp with the company's money bags. But up the rough makeshift of a road came those galloping hoofs, halting before the primitive post office, while the crowd gathered and welcomed a strange trio. The manager himself lifted poor, stiff, tired "Little" Maurice from the back of an equally stiff, tired mountain pony, ...
— The Shagganappi • E. Pauline Johnson
... an easy one. Russell had been seen freely in the makeshift saloons and other places on both sides of the street. It seemed, from what they could glean and put together, that he had stopped drinking when he had arrived at a certain point in his boasting and had announced ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... winter, he caught his snowshoe on a buried branch and fell forward, breaking the frame. In his angry impatience he attempted no more than a temporary repair of the damage, such as he thought might see him to the end of his journey. But the poor makeshift broke down before he had gone a mile. There was nothing for him to do but to stop long enough to make a good job of it, which he did by chopping out a piece of ash, whittling down a couple of thin but tough strips, and splicing the break securely with the strong "salmon ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... testimony from the most competent of observers that there is no physical evidence whatever to lead any one to say that a ponderous scale of the earth's crust was really pushed up on top of other portions, as this makeshift theory of "thrust faults" involves. The fossils are here in the wrong order, just as in the case at Glarus; that is all. The facts seem to be a flat contradiction to the theory of definite successive ages, and to save the theory this explanation of a "thrust fault" is ...
— Q. E. D., or New Light on the Doctrine of Creation • George McCready Price
... the air; she does not create an organ specially for this purpose, but utilises the moist gill-chamber (e.g., in Anabas scandens), modifying it in certain ways so that the fish can take advantage of the oxygen it contains. But this gill-chamber lung is at best a makeshift, and when she comes to the more definitely terrestrial Amphibia Nature gives up the attempt to use the gill-chamber as a lung, and creates a new organ, the true vertebrate lung, specially adapted ...
— Form and Function - A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology • E. S. (Edward Stuart) Russell
... that she knew, too, what it was to want something and not to have it, though perhaps she had not known it as cruelly as Beryl had, for Jimmie had always contrived to cover their bleak moments with a makeshift contentment. "Oh, Beryl, honestly I know just how you feel. I wish I could help you. Maybe I can. My allowance seems awfully big and I can't ...
— Red-Robin • Jane Abbott
... set foot against the makeshift door, and away it went, as he had predicted. Crashing on the steps as it fell, it turned over, and a great splash arose at ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... wondering where Merrihew was. They had threshed continental politics, engineering, art and the relative crafts, precious stones, astronomy and the applied sciences, music, horses, and geology, with long pauses in between. Both knew instinctively that this learned discourse was but a makeshift, a circuitous route past danger-points. "Have you ever heard of telling fortunes ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... after the strain of the preceding days—overtook us, but the rising tide, coming farther up the beach than it had done on the day before, forced us to labour at the boats, which we hauled slowly to a higher ledge. We found it necessary to move our makeshift camp nearer the cliff. I portioned out the available ground for the tents, the galley, and other purposes, as every foot was of value. When night arrived the 'Stancomb Wills' was still away, so I had a blubber-flare lit at the head of ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... decent man does not understand that to marry the woman he loves, as early as he can, is the most desirable of all goals; when the ordinary woman does not understand that all other forms of life are but makeshift substitutes for the life of the wife, the mother of healthy children; then the State ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... Lutherans, the final draft of the Confutation, too, was a miserable makeshift. True, its tone was moderate, and, with few exceptions, personal defamations were omitted. The arrangement of subjects was essentially the same as in the Augustana. Still it was not what it pretended to be. It was no serious attempt ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... makeshift expedients!" Her unavoidable eyes bit into mine. "What is a fertilizer? A tidbit, a pap, a lollypop. Indians use fish; Chinese, nightsoil; agricultural chemists concoct tasty tonics of nitrogen and potash—where's your progress? Putting a mechanical whip on a buggy instead of ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... for them in the long watches of the night; the magnificent oars; the new sheets and sails—everything spick and span. And this great mass of ruddy netting lying in the shed, with its perfect floats and accurate sinkers—this was not like the makeshift that had captured ...
— The Beautiful Wretch; The Pupil of Aurelius; and The Four Macnicols • William Black
... new order as pictured above, government, such as we know it, would gradually disappear. In an era of science and justice this makeshift institution, having lost its usefulness, would ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... in the deep grass to my right. I turned and saw Kearny coming toward me. He was ragged and dew-drenched and limping. His hat and one boot were gone. About one foot he had tied some makeshift of cloth and grass. But his manner as he approached was that of a man who knows his own virtues well enough to be ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... whole passage, and what follows, is really imaginative and picturesque, but spoilt by carelessness, carelessness, carelessness. Either write verses, we say again, or prose. And unless the metre and accent coincide with the sense, and make music when read merely as prose is read, the lines are a makeshift and a failure, and neither worth writing or reading, though they were as fanciful and overloaded as Mr. Browning's, or as grandiloquent and sugary as Mr. ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, August 1850 - of Literature, Science and Art. • Various
... sign) the only hotel in the camp. A barroom with a dancing-floor. A cook who plays the violin. A popular place. Clinking glasses and swaggering drinkers. "No place for a lady". The log-cabin residence. Its primitive, makeshift furnishings. The library. No churches, society, etc. "No vegetables but potatoes and onions, no milk, ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... detective was at this minute doubled up in a large box that was stowed away under a sort of makeshift counter. He had hurriedly concealed himself in this manner during the absence of the ...
— The Boy Broker - Among the Kings of Wall Street • Frank A. Munsey
... establishment—or, at any rate, to act as the only mistress which the establishment possessed. This advent greatly changed the tenor of the doctor's ways. He had been before pure bachelor; not a room in his house had been comfortably furnished; he at first commenced in a makeshift sort of way, because he had not at his command the means of commencing otherwise; and he had gone on in the same fashion, because the exact time had never come at which it was imperative in him to set his house in order. ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope
... Looking up, he had seen the drum, and there was no more cable on the drum to be unwound. The car could descend no farther. His feet were as wet as they could get. Unless the river rose to unbelievable height, he could not be drowned in the makeshift oubliette, unless he voluntarily lay down in the shallow water and inhaled it. He worked on the panel slowly, but with the earnestness of a very angry victim of a hoax. The panel fell outward with a splash, and floated away. Philo Gubb bent sideways and squeezed out of the small ...
— Philo Gubb Correspondence-School Detective • Ellis Parker Butler
... narrowed at bow and stern, forty feet by six, with a crew of four men and a pilot, provided with oars, sails, and iron-shod poles for pushing. They continued to carry, in cargoes of five tons, all the merchandise that passed to Upper Canada. Sometimes these boats were provided with a makeshift upper cabin, which consisted of an awning of oilcloth, supported on hoops like the roof of an American, Quaker, or gipsy waggon. If further provided with half a dozen chairs and a table, this cabin was deemed the height of primitive luxury. The batteaux went in brigades, which ...
— Life in Canada Fifty Years Ago • Canniff Haight
... still lying on the makeshift bed, her eyes closed. She looked more beautiful and defenseless than ever, and Malone wanted to do something big and terrible to all the Russians who had tried to take her away or dope her. With difficulty, he restrained himself. "How is ...
— Supermind • Gordon Randall Garrett
... impregnable. The narrow isthmus which was the only approach to the town was defended by three heavy guns, the ships in the river were ready to give support, the Back Creek and a series of marshes protected the north shore. But Bacon was not discouraged. All night long his men labored to throw up a makeshift fortress of "trees, bush and earth" facing the isthmus, as a protection should Berkeley's force sally out. When the governor saw what was going on he ordered the ships and shallops to move up to fire on the ...
— Bacon's Rebellion, 1676 • Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker
... window, the lower sash of which was up, and gazed out—down into that dust-fogged, noisy, turbulent main street, of floury human beings and grime-smeared beasts almost within touch, boiling about through the narrow lane between the placarded makeshift structures. I lifted my smarting eyes, and across the hot sheet-iron roofs I saw the country south—a white-blotched reddish desert stretching on, desolate, lifeless under the sunset, to a range of stark ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... atmosphere to develop. Of course, with closer intimacy, there were temperamental adjustments, as always, but they came easily. The household machinery ran smoothly, almost from the first, because there was a machine, properly set up, operated and adjusted—rather than an uncertain makeshift. ...
— American Cookery - November, 1921 • Various
... Ormond from his end of the table. "Does Harry know anything about it?" he added, alluding to a boy who had come in as a makeshift to clean knives and boots since the departure of ...
— Under Padlock and Seal • Charles Harold Avery
... flag at the gaff-end wore a makeshift, slovenly air. It was a square section of the bark's foreroyal, painted black around the skull-and-cross-bones design, which had been left the original hue of the canvas. The port-holes were equally slovenly in appearance, being cut through between stanchions with axes instead of saws; and ...
— "Where Angels Fear to Tread" and Other Stories of the Sea • Morgan Robertson
... it to see if it works. It does, although the end which I installed down below was necessarily only a makeshift. It is not this red light with the shrill bell that we are interested in. It is the green light and the low-toned ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve
... long-standing lack of a suitable medium which would permit the making of finer paintings, other than wall and decorative paintings. The old tempera medium was hardly suited to finer work, since it was a makeshift of very inadequate working qualities. Briefly, the method consisted of mixing any pigment or paint in powder form with any suitable sticky substance which would make it adhere to a surface. Sticky substances frequently used were the tree gums collected from ...
— The Galleries of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... baldness and exuberant, decorated, swaggering boldness (for Charlotte's style was never bolder than when she was essaying the impossible) alone betrayed the hand of an innocent woman. Curious that these makeshift passages with their obviously second-hand material, their palpably alien mise en scene, should ever have suggested a personal experience and provoked The Quarterly to its infamous and immortal utterance: "If we ascribe the book to a woman at ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... these exhibits from the vegetable kingdom were attached to the seafloor by only the most makeshift methods. They had no roots and didn't care which solid objects secured them, sand, shells, husks, or pebbles; they didn't ask their hosts for sustenance, just a point of purchase. These plants are entirely self-propagating, ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... least part of an apprenticeship to it, and that is—build a boat. He can repair a damaged boat, I grant you, put in a new plank, or replace a damaged timber. But to build a boat, as we understand the term, is altogether beyond him. The best that he can do is to construct some sort of a makeshift; and the problem that now confronted me was, what form was my makeshift ...
— The First Mate - The Story of a Strange Cruise • Harry Collingwood
... there must have been thirty thousand people camped round the lake. The night was ablaze with countless camp-fires, the day a buzz of busy toil. Everywhere you heard the racket of hammer and saw, beheld men in feverish haste over their boat-building. There were many fine boats, but the crude makeshift effort of the amateur predominated. Some of them, indeed, had no more shape than a packing-case, and not a few resembled a coffin. Anything that would float and keep out ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... and high spirits of the boys made up for all defects in the playing field. It is safe to say that no highly paid athlete, prancing over the velvet sward of major league grounds, got so much real fun out of the game as these lads with their makeshift diamond. ...
— The Rushton Boys at Rally Hall - Or, Great Days in School and Out • Spencer Davenport
... "we COULD get this thing up beautifully, with canopies and flags of the four colours, and turkey red strips down these paths and all that. But this will do for a makeshift game." ...
— Patty's Butterfly Days • Carolyn Wells
... it does," answered Jack's sister. "It was a sort of makeshift, anyhow. Jack only got her running because someone said it couldn't be done—it was a sort of dare. But the poor old boat seems to suffer from some intermittent fever. It runs one day and ...
— The Motor Girls on Crystal Bay - The Secret of the Red Oar • Margaret Penrose
... to the freight service, although he had had opportunities to go into the passenger service at higher pay. He always regarded railroading as a temporary makeshift, until he "got into something," and he disliked the passenger service. No brass buttons for him, he said; too much like a livery. While he was railroading he would wear a jumper, ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... stilting the smaller arches to raise their crowns to the level of those of the larger arches was in constant use in Byzantine and early Romanesque architecture, in the kind of manner shown in the sketch, Fig. 99; and a very clumsy and makeshift method of dealing with the problem it is; but something of the kind was inevitable as long as nothing but the round arch was available for covering contiguous spaces of different widths. The whole of these difficulties were approximately got over in theory, and ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 647, May 26, 1888 • Various
... composed almost entirely of dry grass; there was hardly a trace of mud in it, hence it was flexible and yielding, and had no grip of the branches. It was evidently the second nest of the pair this season, and the second nest in summer of any species of bird is frailer and more of a makeshift than the first nest in spring. Comparatively few of our birds attempt to bring off a second brood unless the first attempt has been defeated, but the robin is sure to bring off two, and may bring off three. But the robin is a hustler, probably the most enterprising of all our birds. I recall a mother ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs
... long time in the dry air of the empty hall. Rynason saw from the corner of his eye one of the dark little scavengers darting out of a gaping window. He could almost hear, it seemed, the noise of the brawling, makeshift town the Earthmen had established a little less than a mile away from the Hirlaji ruins, where already the nomads and adventurers and drifters had erected a cluster of prefab metal buildings and ...
— Warlord of Kor • Terry Gene Carr
... the policy of this Administration henceforth not to recognize any Central American government that is not formed along constitutional lines. Anything else would be a makeshift policy. As you know, revolutions and assassinations in order to obtain control of governments are instituted almost wholly for the purpose of loot and when it is found that these methods will not bring the ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... to his work it takes an accidental and contingent character, it becomes a mere makeshift arrangement; it is deserted and left in ruins when necessity changes its course. But when his work is the outcome of joy, the forms that it takes have the elements of immortality. The immortal in man imparts to it its own quality ...
— Sadhana - The Realisation of Life • Rabindranath Tagore
... field equipment, stepping swiftly along the narrow, stone-paved street, heads down, unheeding the jagged ruin of small shops and dwellings that flanked the way. Reaching the square, they turned to cross a makeshift bridge—beside one of stone that had spanned the little river but now lay broken in its shallow bed. Beyond this stream they followed a white road that wound gently up a sere hill between rows of blasted poplars. At the top of the rise two shining ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... politician visibly asserted itself. One can hardly acquit him of having lacked the moral courage to disregard the veto of interested statesmen and governments and to appeal directly to the peoples when the consequence of this attitude would have been the sacrifice of the makeshift of a Covenant which he was ultimately content to accept as a substitute for the complete reinstatement of nations in their rights ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... of great prose. With the exception of Henry James and Hawthorne, Poe is our only master of pure prose. We lament our dearth of poets. With the exception of Lowell, Poe is our only great poet. Poe found short story writing a bungling makeshift. He left it a perfect art. He wrote the first perfect short stories in the English language. He first gave the short story purpose, method, and artistic form. In a careless reading one can not realize the wonderful literary art, the cunning devices, ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... countries have been the best fitted by their natural resources to do without artificial stimulation, in spite of which fact they still cling, after one hundred and thirty-five years, to the easy and plausible tariff makeshift. Washington himself believed that the tariff should so promote industries as to provide for whatever the country needed in time ...
— George Washington • William Roscoe Thayer
... arts. It was not that he had anything so wonderful, or even comparable to the collection of his laboratory. But as I ran my eye over the box I would have wagered that from the contents he might have made shift to duplicate in some makeshift form almost anything that he might need. It was truly amazing, representing in miniature his study of crime ...
— The Treasure-Train • Arthur B. Reeve
... undermining society. Mr. M. G. Cunniff, who lately made an intimate study of trade-unionism, says: "All through the unions socialism filters. Almost every other man is a socialist, preaching that unionism is but a makeshift." "Malthus be damned," they told him, "for the good time was coming when every man should be able to rear his family in comfort." In one union, with two thousand members, Mr. Cunniff found every man a socialist, and from ...
— War of the Classes • Jack London
... going to be so keenly disappointed. You won't do any pitching against Wyndham, that's a cinch. Eliot has been forced to take you up as a makeshift since losing Springer, but you'll be used only in the minor games. Grant will do all the heavy work in the big games, and get all the glory. The first time I heard you talk, Hook, I thought you had some real spirit; but I've found ...
— Rival Pitchers of Oakdale • Morgan Scott
... were no longer there to stop it, and not meeting with the expected resistance, the unfortunate waiter fell full length into the room. It had never entered his head that so much trouble might be saved by means of a hammer and half a dozen tacks, until his fall taught him that makeshift is a very unprofitable kind of shift. There are a good many houses in England where a similar practical lesson might be ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous
... this, the first number, that they at first intended to name their paper The Anglo-American, but on second thought changed it to the Victoria Gazette, as more appropriate. The editors and proprietors were Williston & Bartlett, and the paper was a semi-weekly. To show the primitive and makeshift nature of things in early Victoria I will quote the first local item: "It is cheering to note the increase in frame and canvas buildings ...
— Some Reminiscences of old Victoria • Edgar Fawcett
... administration, his financial and judicial reforms, his encouragement of industry and commerce. "He effected," says Lavallee, "attempted, or projected, all the innovations of modern France." Diplomacy, the modern makeshift for the international office of the mediaeval papacy, dates from him. Historians have dwelt on his cruelty, perfidy, and superstition.[12] Turbulent nobles, like St. Pol and Armagnac, were brought ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... his opinion, such as it is, when it reaches the reader, will truthfully express either painter or critic. Such are the limitations of one art when it comes to deal with the ideas or material of another. Criticism is at two removes from its theme. Therefore criticism is a makeshift. Therefore, let critics be modest and allow criticism ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... Among the Greeks and Romans, sacrifices for propitiation of the Dii Manes, or souls of the dead heroes; for the pious ancients could not invent enough gods to satisfy their spiritual needs, and had to have a number of makeshift deities, or, as a sailor might say, jury-gods, which they made out of the most unpromising materials. It was while sacrificing a bullock to the spirit of Agamemnon that Laiaides, a priest of Aulis, was favored with an audience of that illustrious ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... her followers out of the east door towards the river; wheeling when she reached a little wind-row of rotted timbers. This chaos had once stood up in order, forming makeshift bastions for the fort, and supporting cannon. Such boards and posts as the negroes had not carried off lay now along the river brink, and the Okaw was steadily undermining that brink as it had already undermined and carried ...
— Old Kaskaskia • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... elements of coast defence—guns, lines of torpedoes, torpedo-boats. Of these none can be extemporized, with the possible exception of the last, and that would be only a makeshift. To go into details would exceed the limits of an article,—require a brief treatise. Suffice it to say, without the first two, coast cities are open to bombardment; without the last, they can be blockaded freely, unless relieved by the sea-going ...
— The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future • A. T. Mahan
... I said; and on that she held the door open that I might enter. But I was not half-way across the room before she had passed me, and was again between me and the wretched makeshift pallet. Nay, when I stood and looked down at him, as he moaned and rolled in senseless agony, with livid face and distorted features (which the cold grey light of that miserable room rendered doubly appalling), she hung over him and fenced him ...
— A Gentleman of France • Stanley Weyman
... clasped her hands in silent admiration of the picture. It was wonderful how the moonlight transformed everything. Here was the living, breathing poem itself before her. She forgot it was Lloyd and Malcolm posing in makeshift costumes on a calico-covered dry goods box. It seemed the barge itself, draped all in blackest samite, going upward with the flood, that day that there was dole in Astolat. While she gazed like one in a dream, Lloyd half-opened her eyes, to peep at ...
— The Little Colonel: Maid of Honor • Annie Fellows Johnston
... But the 'state satirist' is always on the heels of the poet; and imagination, whenever it appears for a moment, is led away into bondage by the spirit of the fantastic, which is its prose equivalent or makeshift. It is the fantastic that Ibsen generally gives us in the place of imagination; and the fantastic is a kind of rhetoric, manufactured by the will, and has no ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... youse depreciate yourself to all dem. Jus' youse put on de pootiest dress youse hab an' do ole Sukey proud." Then, as she helped Janice to bedeck herself she poured out the story of their makeshift life, telling how, with what had been left of the poultry, and with the products of the small patch of the garden they had been able to till, the two slaves had managed to live the year through, taking the best care they could of their master's property, ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... a few shells during the day. They would level our sandbag breastworks and blow our frail shelters to smithereens. We had no dugouts and no communication trenches. With a shell of tremendous power they would rip up yards of our makeshift defenses and kill half a dozen of our boys. Sometimes we would groan aloud and pray to see a few German legs and arms fly to the four winds as compensation. But no. We would wire back to artillery headquarters: "For God's sake, send over a few shells, even one shell, to silence ...
— Private Peat • Harold R. Peat
... magnificence is reserved for a Cardinal (Gregory XVI. who had been a Camaldolese frequently came here), or a travelling Bishop and his suite, or a heretic English or American milord! But not for any daughter of Eve! And the makeshift room over a carpenter's shop, which is called the forestieria, has been devoted to the purpose only in consequence of the incomprehensible mania of female English heretics for visiting the disciples of St. Romuald. And there the food supplied from the convent can be brought to them. ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... with the cottage,—a sorry, antediluvian makeshift of a building, you may think it,—what was of much more importance, a fine litter of newborn pigs, no less than nine in number, perished. China pigs have been esteemed a luxury all over the East from the remotest periods ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... If I cannot have that girl I would rather die than not. I don't propose to respect your little fancies. If anything goes wrong you shall not live five minutes. This is a rude makeshift of a weapon, and it may quite conceivably be painful to kill you. But I will. It is unusual, I know, nowadays to do things like this—mainly because there is so little in life that ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... jurisdiction of the other shall suffer no diminution of the rights and privileges they have hitherto enjoyed. But however necessary such an expedient may have been to tide over the grave emergencies of the situation, it is at best but an unsatisfactory makeshift, which should not be suffered to delay the speedy and complete establishment of the frontier line to which we are entitled under the Russo-American treaty for ...
— Messages and Papers of William McKinley V.2. • William McKinley
... music of "The Star-Spangled Banner" fully express what we feel while we are trying to sing it, as the "Marseillaise," for example, does express the very spirit of revolutionary republicanism. But in true pioneer fashion we get along with a makeshift until something better turns up. The lyric and narrative verse of the Civil War itself was great in quantity, and not more inferior in quality than the war verse of other nations has often proved to be when read after the immediate occasion for it has passed. Single ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... the first glance, seems rather complicated. For that matter, it is only a makeshift; but how could one find anything better? The unfortunate horse, who is almost voiceless, has only one way in which to express himself: a clumsy hoof, which was not created to put thought into words. It became necessary, therefore, to contrive, ...
— The Unknown Guest • Maurice Maeterlinck
... splendidly equipped. They were able to obtain any amount of the finest guns, rifles, and ammunition of war from the workshops of Europe; while the Confederates, cut off from the world, had to rely solely upon the makeshift factories they had set up, and upon the guns and stores ...
— With Lee in Virginia - A Story of the American Civil War • G. A. Henty
... madam," Santa Fe went on, "are just our own makeshift imitations of what you are familiar with—building-blocks, and alphabet-blocks, and dissected pictures, and that sort of thing. Our local carpenter made the blocks for us, and we put on the lettering ourselves—as, indeed, its poor quality shows. ...
— Santa Fe's Partner - Being Some Memorials of Events in a New-Mexican Track-end Town • Thomas A. Janvier
... later, with a gendarme on either step, we picked up an anxious Adele. Then we filled up with petrol, had my makeshift connection replaced by a new wire, and started ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates
... the layers of renewed pain and opened his eyes, he was still floating near his makeshift ...
— High Dragon Bump • Don Thompson
... ranch-house, which to the casual eye would appear the unimportant habitation of some poor jungle-squatter, with beds of various vegetables and fruits growing around it, and guarded against the jungle's animals by what looked like a makeshift fence. The ground inside the fence had been cleared save for a few thick, dead stumps of oxi trees, gnarled and weather-beaten, which made the whole outlay look ...
— The Passing of Ku Sui • Anthony Gilmore
... monotony that he saw in front of him, and were he to meet a woman such as his father seems to have met he might take her to live with him. He thought of himself as her husband, though he was by no means sure that married life was a possible makeshift for the life he sought and was obliged to forgo, but as life seemed an obligation from which he could not reasonably escape he thought he would like to share it with some woman who would give him children. His father desired grandchildren, and since he had partly sacrificed his life for his ...
— The Brook Kerith - A Syrian story • George Moore
... that this supposed connection between the committees and the ministers is only a makeshift, showing by its existence the absolute necessity of close communication between the executive and the legislative, but showing also by its imperfections the great want of some better method of communication. In the first place, the chairman of the committee is in no way bound to hold any ...
— Volume 2 • Anthony Trollope
... are unequal to your work, and want me, and I will come to London straight and do your work. I am quite confident that, with your notes and a few words of explanation, I could take it up at any time and do it. Absurdly unnecessary to say that it would be a makeshift! But I could do it at a pinch, so like you as that no one should find out the difference. Don't make much of this offer in your mind; it is nothing, except to ease it. If you should want help, I am as safe as the bank. The trouble would be nothing to me, and the triumph ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 2 (of 3), 1857-1870 • Charles Dickens
... perversity of inanimate things Found nothing that answered to my indefinable expectations Habit turns into a makeshift of attachment I know not what lost home that I have failed to find When the inattentive ...
— Widger's Quotations from The Immortals of the French Academy • David Widger
... case of active war, foreign or civil, the General Hospital is usually an extemporized establishment, the building a makeshift, and the arrangements such as the building will admit. In Spain, the British obtained any houses they could get; and the soldiers were sometimes crowded into half a dozen of them in one town. In the last war, the great buildings at Scutari were engaged three months before they were wanted for extensive ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various
... said Raffles, sitting on one pedestal of a desk from which the top had been removed, and setting his makeshift lantern on the other. "In broad daylight, when it can't be spotted from the outside, you shall have as much artificial light as you like. If you want to do some writing, that's the top of the desk on end against the mantlepiece. You'll never have a better chance so far ...
— A Thief in the Night • E. W. Hornung
... sheriff as he took the pencil and paper through the bars and returned to his bunk. He drew up the stool and sat upon it. It was a little lower than the bench, so, putting his paper on the bench, he had a fairly good makeshift desk. He began to write steadily, and after a few minutes the sheriff and ...
— The Coyote - A Western Story • James Roberts
... the installation of a thin sheet of steel along the bottom of the body of the craft. This turned aside missiles from below provided the plane were not so near the ground as to receive them at the moment of their highest velocity. But it was only an unsatisfactory makeshift. At the higher altitudes it was unnecessary and in conflict with other airplanes it proved worthless, because in a battle in the air the shots of the enemy are more likely to come from above or at least from ...
— Aircraft and Submarines - The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day - Uses of War's Newest Weapons • Willis J. Abbot
... Republican Convention boldly challenged Democrats to the open issue of protection absolute versus free trade. The best voters on the other side were eager to pick up this gauge of battle, but their leaders, covert protectionists, and makeshift office seekers, bade them nay, and a Democratic "stump speech" in that campaign was a curiosity. Part first would demonstrate the infamy of all "protection" taxes; part second would demonstrate that the orator was in favor of "protection" to a certain degree. Thus handicapped, ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 23, October, 1891 • Various
... of rather low durability but possess good cementing properties. Shale is a makeshift suitable only for very ...
— American Rural Highways • T. R. Agg
... the native appearance of the stone so pleasantly bestows.'[859] Everywhere else the dauber's brush had been at work. He spoke of it with indignation. 'I make little scruple in declaring that this job work, which is carried on in every part of the kingdom, is a mean makeshift to give a delusive appearance of repair and cleanliness to the walls, when in general this wash is resorted to to hide neglected or perpetrated fractures.'[860] The stone fretwork of the Lady Chapel at Hereford,[861] the valuable wall-paintings ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... hamlet seemed to the casual eye, it was at present a vacation-resort—and a decidedly welcome one—to no less than three thousand tired men. The wrecked church was an impromptu hospital beneath whose shattered roof dozens of these men lay helpless on makeshift cots. ...
— Bruce • Albert Payson Terhune
... lent to a comrade for the term of his elegant absence. The comrade was another ingenuous compatriot, to whom he had wired that tea was to await them "regardless," and this reckless repast, and the second ingenuous compatriot, and the faraway makeshift life, with its jokes and its gaps, its delicate daubs and its three or four chairs, its overflow of taste and conviction and its lack of nearly all else—these things wove round the occasion a spell to which ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... lines the enemy succeeded in reaching our trenches, but were quickly ejected. Two of the raiding party were killed, and as many were taken prisoners. One of them met his death in a very tragic manner. A member of the ——th battalion was fast asleep in his makeshift of a dug-out the night the Germans entered our lines. He knew nothing of their visit until wakened by a heavy hand being placed on his shoulder. Great was his astonishment on waking to find himself gazing into the face of a Hun, who gurgled and gesticulated, ...
— Over the Top With the Third Australian Division • G. P. Cuttriss |
