"Tick" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in his pocket, and having left not many in the pockets of his friends whom he might command, had purchased (on tick doubtless) the whole and sole Editorship, Proprietorship, with all the rights and titles (such as they were worth) of the Albion, from one Lovell; of whom we know nothing, save that he had stood in the pillory for a libel on the Prince of Wales. With this hopeless concern—for it had been sinking ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... name for the ceaseless pulsing or "flowing" of all living things. So deep indeed lies the instinct for rhythm in our consciousness that we impute it even to inanimate objects. We hear the ticking of the clock as tick-tock, tick-tock, or else tick-tock, tick-tock, although psychologists assure us that the clock's wheels are moving with indifferent, mechanical precision, and that it is simply our own focusing of attention upon alternate beats which creates ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... afford sufficient additional room so that each prisoner can have a cell. In these small rooms there are two bunks or beds when two convicts occupy the same cell. The bed-rack is made of iron or wood slats, and the bed-tick is filled with corn-husks; the pillow is also filled with the latter material, and when packed down becomes as hard as a board. When the beds are not in use they are fastened to the side of the wall with a small ...
— The Twin Hells • John N. Reynolds
... thought of that beastly hymn? It had got hold of him now! The measured tramp of the tune fitted itself to the tick of the clattering little tin clock on ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... the lives in peril, and what might have been their fate Had I sprung to the points that evening a tenth of a tick too late; And a cold and ghastly shiver ran icily through my frame As I fancied the public clamor, the trial, and bitter shame. I could see the bloody wreckage—I could see the mangled slain— And the picture was seared for ever, blood-red, on my heated ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... snuffers is prowling about And his shaky old fingers will soon snuff us out; There's a hint for us all in each pendulum tick, For we're low in the tallow and long in ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... which the butler had passed. Stover's glance was riveted on it, trying to remember whether the American Constitution prohibited head masters from the brutal English practice of caning and birching; and,—listening to the lagging tick of the mantel clock, he solemnly vowed to lead that upright, impeccable life that would keep him from such another ...
— The Varmint • Owen Johnson
... sulkily in the great open fireplace, throwing out a pungent, juicy smell. The aggressive tick of an old and pompous clock endeavored to talk down the gay chatter of the birds beyond the closed windows. The wheeze of a veteran Airedale with its chin on the head ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... took it, as he did every thing, very easily. "I don't see why Aunt Selina should make such a fuss. Why need you do anything, Aunt Hilary? Can't we hold out a little longer, and live upon tick till I get into practice? Of course, I shall then take care of you all; I'm the head of the family. How horribly ...
— Mistress and Maid • Dinah Craik (aka: Miss Mulock)
... week ... white flesh at famine salaries. There were all sorts of people there, a moving heap of frayed velvet and shabby plush. Lily passed by with great dignity. Next, she came to the big agent, with offices in Berlin and London ... the ting-ting of telephones, the tick-tack of typewriters all day ... business pure and simple, an exchange for supple loins, swelling biceps, muslin skirts, pigeon's eggs ... a sheaf of stars who, from there, radiated over Australia, America, England, the ...
— The Bill-Toppers • Andre Castaigne
... there?" cried Trina, sitting back on her heels. In the stillness that succeeded, the water dripped from her hands with the steady tick of a clock. Then a brutal fist swung open the street door of the schoolroom and McTeague came in. He was drunk; not with that drunkenness which is stupid, maudlin, wavering on its feet, but with that which is alert, unnaturally ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... said, "and the awful silence. Day after day, year after year, not a sound. I have stood in that street at mid-day and heard a watch tick in my pocket. Think of it, Mr. de Windt. I myself arrived here only a few months ago, but even I shall soon have to get away for a change, or——" and he tapped his ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... "Seven-thirty to the tick," said the C.O. "Reedshires—Get over!" And in an instant the battalion was swarming out of its trench, and advancing over the two hundred yards of broken ground which separated the brigade from the enemy, ...
— With Haig on the Somme • D. H. Parry
... a tick," said he. "Now, Challenger, it's up to you to tell us where we are. We ain't nervous folk, as you know well; but when it comes to makin' a week-end visit and finding you've run full butt into the Day of ...
— The Poison Belt • Arthur Conan Doyle
... strange snatch of heavenly music, heard in the lull of a tempest, this burst of feeling made a moment's blank pause. Legree stood aghast, and looked at Tom; and there was such a silence, that the tick of the old clock could be heard, measuring, with silent touch, the last moments of mercy and probation ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... were furnished, and then silence reigned in the room, broken only by the rapid scratching of pens and the solemn tick of the clock ...
— The Fifth Form at Saint Dominic's - A School Story • Talbot Baines Reed
... at that hour of the afternoon when even the most industrious of grammar-school pupils feels his zeal for learning grow less with every tick of the clock. Isabel and Phebe, however, were never remarkable for their zeal. In fact, their teachers had never been able to decide whether they were more bright or more lazy. Both characteristics were so well developed ...
— Teddy: Her Book - A Story of Sweet Sixteen • Anna Chapin Ray
... of fat old Benny's nonsense," he said. "He wouldn't come in, because you city chaps were coming. He's rigged a tick-tack; I can see the string of it. Wait a minute and I'll just steal 'round the other door and catch him at it. You fellows go on eating, and don't pay any attention. ...
— The Rival Campers Ashore - The Mystery of the Mill • Ruel Perley Smith
... come to see her, because "it made a disturbance;" she couldn't have a kitten, because "animals were a nuisance;" she mustn't talk to her grandmother, because "little girls must be seen and not heard." So she sat there, like a little automaton, and watched the clock tick, and counted the times her grandmother put on and took off her spectacles, and thought of her mother and little sister till she bit her finger nails so that ...
— Little Ferns For Fanny's Little Friends • Fanny Fern
... misprints was the cause of an odd query in the second series of Notes and Queries, which, by the way, has never yet been answered. In John Hall's Hor Vaciv (1646) there is this passage, alluding to the table game called tick-tack. The author wrote: "Tick tack sets a man's intentions on their guard. Errors in this and war can be but once amended''; but the printer joined the two words "and war'' into one, and this puzzled the correspondent of the Notes and Queries (v. 272). He asked: "Who can ...
— Literary Blunders • Henry B. Wheatley
... I said, and which I dare say is better than those which are served at our table (but you never take any notice of such kind of things, Miss Raby), a cake of course, a bottle of currant-wine, jam-pots, and no end of pears in the straw. With their money little Briggs will be able to pay the tick which that imprudent child has run up with Mrs. Ruggles; and I shall let Briggs Major pay for the pencil-case which Bullock sold to him.—It will be a lesson to the young prodigal for the future. But, I say, what a change there will be in his life for some time to ...
— The Christmas Books • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Baker will have to wait for her rent for a time; I can't spare any for that.... I've a good mind, Thomas, to take a whole holiday; a long one. Chuck the envelopes and take to living like a lord, on tick. It's wonderful how far tick will carry you, if you try. Muffins for tea, you see, Thomas, only you can't have any. Well, what's the matter? Why shouldn't I have muffins for tea? You've got milk, haven't you, and I'm not getting ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay
... them," said Dunkerley, ticking his way down the page. "Which (tick, tick) was damned hard (tick, tick) on ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells
... men smoked their cigarettes; Strantz pulling over the switch every five minutes—always to the very tick of the round brass clock—examining the tiny point of light which resulted, and carefully registering the exact amount of current and the position of the ship engaged in paying out the black, insulated line into the bed of ...
— The White Lie • William Le Queux
... than a million pounds of copper wire; and he will invent a finer system of time to fit the telephone, which can do as many different things in a second as a man can do in a day, transmitting with every tick of the clock from twenty-five to eighty thousand vibrations. He will deal with the various vibrations of nerves and wires and wireless air, that are necessary in conveying thought between two separated minds. He will make clear how a thought, originating in the brain, passes ...
— The History of the Telephone • Herbert N. Casson
... sea and sky, shut themselves off, and opened anew. Signals in Morse sparkled with their dots and dashes. From the distant trenches star-shells rose in the air, and seemed to hang suspended for a space, while we caught the rapid tick-tick of far-away ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... murmured something to herself about "an old bald-beaded galoot," but when he told her that to him life without her would be a blasted mockery, and that his income was L50,000 a year, she threw herself on to him and froze there with the tenacity of a tick on a brindled cow, and said, with tears of ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... answer the admiral would plump himself down with a great rattling of scabbard to await the infrequent tick of the little instrument ...
— Cabbages and Kings • O. Henry
... he got into it, and the sweet breath of the mountains came in so cold through the sash he had lifted that he was glad to pull the secondary quilt up over him. He heard the clock tick in some room below; from another quarter came the muffled sound of coughing; but otherwise the world was intensely still, and ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... at him in some consternation, then at the clock itself which was the tall one I had found run down at my first visit. There was nothing unusual in its quiet tick, so far as I could hear, and with a compassionate glance at the old man who had turned breathlessly again to listen, proceeded on ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green
... you understand, but tick. M. de Gandelu has not a sou of his own in the world, so a waiter at Potier's told me, and he knew what was what; but the governor is rolling in money. Yesterday they had a house-warming—the dinner, with wine, cost over a ...
— Caught In The Net • Emile Gaboriau
... the Tosa Maru left Yokohama for Kobe at schedule time on the tick of the watch, as she had done from Seattle. All Japanese steamers appear to be moved with the promptness of a railway train. On reaching Kobe we transferred to the Yamaguchi Maru which sailed the following morning, to shorten the time ...
— Farmers of Forty Centuries - or, Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea and Japan • F. H. King
... for I had no tackle and no hook. I was starving. I sat me down, and rested my trusty, but futile rifle against a fallen tree. Suddenly I heard a tread, turned my head, saw a Moose,—took—my—gun,—tick! he was dead. I was saved. I feasted, and in gratitude named the lake Moosetookmyguntick.' Geography has modified it, but the name ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... Over his shoulders; his forehead was high; and glasses with horn bows Sat astride on his nose, with a look of wisdom supernal. Father of twenty children was he, and more than a hundred Children's children rode on his knee, and heard his great watch tick. Four long years in the times of the war had he languished a captive, Suffering much in an old French fort as the friend of the English. Now, though warier grown, without all guile or suspicion, Ripe in wisdom was he, but patient, and simple, and childlike. He was beloved by ...
— The Children's Own Longfellow • Henry W. Longfellow
... down upon the coast. It was first noticed in the vicinity of Huron by a woman. No sooner had she seen the vessels bearing down towards the coast from the westward, than she rushed into the house, emptied her feather bed and placed the tick on a horse as a pack-saddle; then catching up one child before her and another behind, she rode at the top of the animal's speed, thinking torture and death lay behind her. Whenever she passed a house she raised an alarm, and at two o'clock in the morning, more dead than alive with terror ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... such stirring times as these, never since the first tick of time have the hours been so crowded! Never before did so many men live nobly or die bravely. The young knights from many lands are seeking the Holy Grail, and finding it in forgetfulness of self and in sacrifice for their fellows. You and I are living to-day among the deeds of ...
— "Over There" with the Australians • R. Hugh Knyvett
... sin is, of things the worst of all, And watcheth like a serpent on a wall, Or flyeth like an eagle in the air, Or runs as desperate ships, void of all care, Or, (as great Solomon hath wisely said) Is as the way of wantons with a maid, Who tick, and toy, and with a tempting giggle Provoke to lust, and by degrees, so wriggle Them into their affections, that they go The way to death, so do themselves undo: As it is said, this mischief to prevent, Let all men watch, yea, and be diligent ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... little money—not much—and transformed Camp One. Every bunk was provided with a tick, which the men could fill with hay, balsam, or hemlock, as suited them. Cheap but attractive curtains on wires at once brightened the room and shut each man's "bedroom" from the main hall. The deacon seat remained but was supplemented by a half-dozen simple and comfortable chairs. ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... rough-coated hill steer, wild and fleet as a hare, thin and leggy, with muscles of whipcord. Down went the flag, and the stopwatches began to tick off the seconds. Like an arrow the outlaw's pony shot forward, a lariat circling round and round the rider's head. At every leap the cow pony lessened the gap as it pounded forward on the heels of ...
— Wyoming, a Story of the Outdoor West • William MacLeod Raine
... illusions concerning sinners with engaging smiles and beautiful manners. And with every tick of the clock he deepened the impression of his insolence and levity. His very charm and the flush and brilliance that were part of it went to swell the prodigal's account. The instinct that had wakened in her knew them, the lights and colours, the heralding ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... chance to learn; for the voice of Gazza returning with the key put an end to this conversation. But I doubted if Kitty had it in her to fathom the nature of Hortense. Kitty was like a trim little clock that could tick tidily on an ornate shelf; she could go, she could keep up with time, with the rapid epoch to which she belonged, but she didn't really have many works. I think she would have scoffed at that last languorous speech as a piece of Hortense's ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister
... ground Around and around In the turret stair He clambers, to where The wheelwork is, With its tick, click, whizz, Reposefully measuring Each day to its end That mortal men spend In sorrowing and pleasuring Nightly thus does he climb To the trackway ...
— Moments of Vision • Thomas Hardy
... listener whispered to us when we touched him gently on the leg, so we lay there all three listening for it to start again, the tick-ticking of our wrist-watches and the pulsing of our hearts sounding ...
— From the St. Lawrence to the Yser with the 1st Canadian brigade • Frederic C. Curry
... wished I was like you. But, great Scott! if that's the sort of a chap you are, I'm deuced glad I'm not! I'm going to wake up in the middle of the night and think how unlike you I am and pat myself on the back! Ronny Devereux was perfectly right. A tick's a tick, and that's all there is to say about it. Good old Ronny told me what you were, and, like a silly ass, I wasted a lot of time trying to make him believe you weren't that sort of chap at all. It's no good ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... No verily, there was some supernatural power within that did secretly prompt him on, and strengthen him to this most noble venture. True, there is nothing more common among wicked men, than to tick and toy, and play with this saying of the Publican, "God be merciful to me a sinner"; not at all being sensible either what sin is, or of their need of mercy. And such sinners shall find their speed in the Publican's prayer, far otherwise ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... to speak, only what they had on their backs and a change of clothes. A few things for remembrance were to be sent after them by goods-train: a few books, portraits, the old grandfather's clock, whose tick-tock seemed to them to be the beating of their hearts.—The air was keen. No one was stirring in the town: the shutters were closed and the streets empty. They said nothing: only the old servant spoke. Madame Jeannin was striving to fix in her memory ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... more dreadfully than the rest. It was the ticking of the clock upon the mantelpiece; and I thought how this sound must have been familiar to Abel Slattin, how it must have formed part and parcel of his life, as it were, and how it went on now—tick-tick-tick-tick—whilst he, for whom it had ticked, lay ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... and set the hands at four upon the pale gold dial. Then she drew up the worn gold chain that hung around her neck, under her gown, and, with the key that dangled from it, wound the watch. In an hour or so, probably, it would stop, but it was pleasant to hear the cheerful little tick ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... is determined To make the business stick Or spend that derned old well machine And all he can get on tick. ...
— Cowboy Songs - and Other Frontier Ballads • Various
... and make him send a wire on tick," said my friend, "but that'd mean inquiries for you and for me, and I've got my hands full these days. Did you say you were travelling back along this line ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... went on for a twelvemonth, and at last came the end of the year. That day and night the merry-making was merrier and wilder and madder than it had ever been before, but the great clock in the tower went on—tick, tock! tick, tock!—and by and by it came midnight. Then, as it always happened before, the lights went out, and all was as black as ink. But this time there was no wailing and crying out, but everything was silent as death; the door opened slowly, and in came, not ...
— Twilight Land • Howard Pyle
... midnight, and contrived to make his six or eight shillings a week. I have often sat with him in the darkness that his "cruizey" lamp could not pierce, while his mutterings to himself of "ay, ay, yes, umpha, oh ay, ay man," came as regularly and monotonously as the tick of his "wag-at-the-wa'" clock. Hendry and he were paid no fixed sum for their services in the Auld Licht kirk, but once a year there was a collection for each of them, and so they jogged along. Though ...
— Auld Licht Idylls • J. M. Barrie
... cowls and capes, and midmost glimmers one Like tarnished gold, and what they say is doubt, And what they think is fear, and what suspends The breath in them is not the plaster-patch Time disengages from the painted wall Where Rafael moulderingly bids adieu, Nor tick of the insect turning tapestry To dust, which a queen's finger traced of old; But some word, resonant, redoubtable, Of who once felt upon his head a hand Whereof the head now ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... disordering it with her own hands; but I saw that she was young, and of a fair complexion. Peggotty had been crying. So had little Em'ly. Not a word was spoken when we first went in; and the Dutch clock by the dresser seemed, in the silence, to tick twice as loud as usual. Em'ly ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... waddled— Slowly as the finger of a clock her shadow came— Slowly as a tortoise down that winding path she toddled, Leaning on a crooked staff, a poor old crooked dame, Limping, but not lame, Tick, tack, tick, tack, ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... on their sides, some upside down, and one standing upright. The door by which he had entered was at one side, on the other side was another, and between the two stood a sofa, the shape of which was plainly discernible under the sand. Over this was a clock, which had ticked its last tick. ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille
... watch ticking its little tick on the mantel-piece by the side of the clock, like a pony trotting by a big horse. The clock struck twelve, I got up and looked at my watch by the light of the gas-lit streets; it marked the same. My dream had lasted an hour—I had gone to ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... tick off the seconds of the last minute. The wings of the comet spread out vaster and vaster and its now flaming nucleus blazed brighter and brighter. A low, vague wailing sound seemed to be running through the multitudes which thronged the semicircle ...
— The World Peril of 1910 • George Griffith
... encountered. The traveller cannot avoid these insects coming on his person (sometimes in great numbers) as he brushes through the forest; they get inside his dress, and insert the proboscis deeply without pain. Buried head and shoulders, and retained by a barbed lancet, the tick is only to be extracted by force, which is very painful. I have devised many tortures, mechanical and chemical, to induce these disgusting intruders to withdraw the proboscis, but in vain. Leeches* [I cannot but think that the extraordinary abundance of these ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... down to the levee where the men are working. As long as this flood keeps rising we're safe. Then the other three of us will go for the house. We may be seen that way, but there's no use spending any more time here playing tick-tack-toe on that wood up there. We locate what we want, and if we're cornered we can come out through here ...
— Ralestone Luck • Andre Norton
... admirable view that has been afforded them of their peculiar style of hunting. At this interesting period, a "regular swell" from Melton Mowbray, unknown to everyone except his tailor, to whom he owes a long tick, makes his appearance and affords abundance of merriment for our sportsmen. He is just turned out of the hands of his valet, and presents the very beau-ideal of his caste—"quite the lady," in fact. His hat is stuck on one side, displaying a profusion of ...
— Jorrocks' Jaunts and Jollities • Robert Smith Surtees
... house-dress and went out, determined to speak her mind about that awful mattress! She never thought such a rich man's house would have so common a thing as "combin's"—even if it was in the "help's" tick! ...
— Polly of Pebbly Pit • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... everybody had something to show but Danny. Tommy had his mouse's nest; Patsey had the hawk's nest; Bugsey had a fungus. Danny was the only empty-handed one, but Pearlie cheered him up wonderfully by predicting that he would get the very first wood-tick when the ...
— The Second Chance • Nellie L. McClung
... and found a huge bump on his head, from which thickened blood trickled sluggishly down his cheek. The cavern was flooded with light. On the wall before him, a clock told off the seconds with a metallic tick. He bent down and examined ...
— The Great Drought • Sterner St. Paul Meek
... swear, he has some reservation, Some conceal'd purpose, and close meaning sure; Else, being urg'd so much, how should he choose But lend an oath to all this protestation? He's no precisian, that I'm certain of, Nor rigid Roman Catholic: he'll play At fayles, and tick-tack; I have heard him swear. What should I think of it? urge him again, And by some other way! I will do so. Well, Thomas, thou hast sworn not to ...
— Every Man In His Humor - (The Anglicized Edition) • Ben Jonson
... had the boy been with it all that he nearly forgot about the watch. But when he remembered and the man let him take it in his rusty, brown fingers, that was the most wonderful moment of all. The tick, tick inside was a marvel, almost a thing uncanny to the boy, and when it was explained how the hands went round and round, telling the time of day, it surely seemed ...
— The Boy from Hollow Hut - A Story of the Kentucky Mountains • Isla May Mullins
... deafness must be heeded. Sometimes deafness occurs in reference to some particular sounds while hearing is normal to others. No matter what the degree of deafness may be do not neglect to see a physician about it. Ordinarily the tick of a watch can be heard at a distance of thirty inches. If you cannot hear it at that distance and can hear it say at fifteen inches then you are just one half from the normal in your hearing. The test should be made ...
— Boy Scouts Handbook - The First Edition, 1911 • Boy Scouts of America
... she is rather corpulent, but has a remarkably fine face; the Grecian character is finely portrayed in it; she excels to admiration in deep tragedy. In Mrs. Beverly, in the play of the 'Gamesters' a few nights ago, she so arrested the attention of the house that you might hear your watch tick in your fob, and, at the close of the play, when she utters an hysteric laugh for joy that her husband was not a murderer, there were different ladies in the boxes who actually went into hysterics and ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Samuel F. B. Morse
... beginning to end," and he would be quite right. But if he drew the conclusion that the clock was not contrived for a purpose, he would be quite wrong. On the other hand, imagine another death-watch of a different turn of mind. He, listening to the monotonous "tick! tick!" so exactly like his own, might arrive at the conclusion that the clock was itself a monstrous sort of death-watch, and that its final cause and purpose was to tick. How easy to point to the clear relation of the whole mechanism to the pendulum, to the ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... busy death watch tick'd; A certain sign that fate will frown; The clumsy kitchen clock, too, click'd; A certain sign it was ...
— Translations of German Poetry in American Magazines 1741-1810 • Edward Ziegler Davis
... in the house of the commandant, an insect, well known in the southern country by the name Tampan, bit my foot. It is a kind of tick, and chooses by preference the parts between the fingers or toes for inflicting its bite. It is seen from the size of a pin's head to that of a pea, and is common in all the native huts in this country. It sucks the blood until quite full, and is then of a dark blue color, and its skin ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... rest; I was entitled to the little bit I'd worked for. But now it's different. It's like I'd won the big prize in the lottery. I can't be stingy with it and not blush. I can't sit there like a swollen wood-tick and be rich ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... "The tick of the lock is as well known to the knaves, as the blast of a trumpet to a soldier! lay down the piece—lay down the piece—should the moon touch the barrel, it could not fail to be seen by the devils, whose eyes are keener than the blackest snake's! The smallest motion, ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... a testimony against the spiteful spirits of Rawhide Peak, we slept with our usual profundity. Always, however, before bedtime we had to go through the little ceremony of removing the burs from our clothing, for every plant in this country seems to have a bur or a tick-seed, and we found a new one in every camp. Sometimes they were arrows or needles an inch long, sometimes triangles with sharp corners, sometimes little spiked balls, sometimes long bags with prongs. There was no end to their ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... divines as well as philosophers; the theory which Goethe (to do him justice), and after him Mr. Thomas Carlyle, have treated with such noble scorn; the theory, I mean, that God has wound up the universe like a clock, and left it to tick by itself till it runs down, never troubling Himself with it, save possibly—for even that was only half believed—by rare miraculous interferences with the laws which He Himself had made? Out of that chilling dream of a dead universe ungoverned by an absent ...
— Scientific Essays and Lectures • Charles Kingsley
... Pendrilla and Cliantha clinging to her in an ecstasy of delicious terror. She stepped into the front room, struck a match, and lighted her candle. It was half-past eleven by the small nickel alarm-clock which she carried. Its busy, bustling, modern tick roused strange, incongruous echoes in the old house, and ...
— Judith of the Cumberlands • Alice MacGowan
... forthwith quicken {8a} him. Sooth to say, there is ne'er a buckhound in the county but he treateth him as a godchild, patting him on the head, soothing his velvety ear between thumb and forefinger, ejecting tick from tenement, calling him 'fine fellow,' 'noble lad,' and giving him his blessing, as one dearer to him than a king's debt to a debtor, {8b} or a bastard to a dad of eighty. This is the only kindness I ever heard of Master Silas toward his fellow-creatures. ...
— Citation and Examination of William Shakspeare • Walter Savage Landor
... semblance of a funeral. God shield us all from evil! there is a cold deathlike chill throughout the house. I heard—(though, my lady, I do not believe in such superstitions,) but I heard the death-watch tick—tick—ticking, as plain as I hear the old clock now chime seven! And I saw—I was wide awake—yet I saw a thin misty countenance, formed as of the white spray of the salt-sea wave, so sparkling, so shadowy, yet so clear, come between ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... still that every tick of the Dresden clock could be distinctly heard. When Miss Gorham, Alora's governess, turned a page of her book, the rustle was appallingly audible. And the clock ticked on, and Miss Gorham turned page after page, and still the child ...
— Mary Louise Solves a Mystery • L. Frank Baum
... the established practice both of legislative and judicial bodies. This could not well be otherwise. If the precise moment of actual time were to settle such a matter, it would be material to ask, Who shall settle the time? Shall it be done by public authority, or shall every man observe the tick of his own watch? If absolute time is to furnish a precise rule, the excess of a minute, it is obvious, would be as fatal as the excess of an hour. Sir, no bodies, judicial or legislative, have ever been ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... with Deighton of the Horse Battery, whirling by in a pillar of cloud to a chorus of 'Strong right! Strong left!' or Hogan-Yale of the White Hussars, leading his squadron for all it was worth, with the price of horseshoes thrown in; or 'Tick' Boileau, trying to live up to his fierce blue and gold turban while the wasps of the Bengal Cavalry stretched to a gallop in the wake of the long, lollopping Walers of ...
— Under the Deodars • Rudyard Kipling
... these circumstances, must have compelled her to think, or, at all events, to meditate, however confusedly, upon the present and the future. If she had in her the smallest spark of imagination she must have felt, to an acute degree, the sort of continuous surprise, recurring like the tick of a clock, which haunts us sometimes with the fact that it really does just happen to be ourselves to whom some curious lot, some rare combination of the numbers in life's lottery, has come. For the man whom she was ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... seemed far before us? Do we observe how quickly we shoot by it? Do we mark with what increasing swiftness the line of our life seems reeling off, and how close we are coming to the end? Time never stops! Each tick of the clock echoes our advancing footsteps. The shadow of the dial falls upon it a shorter and shorter tract, which we have yet to pass over. Even if a long life lies before us, let us consider that thirty-five years is high noon ...
— The Crown of Thorns - A Token for the Sorrowing • E. H. Chapin
... it was plain Aunt Elvira wa'n't feeble minded. Behind her comes a couple of station porters, one cartin' an old-time black valise, and the other with his arms wrapped around a full sized featherbed in a blue and white tick. ...
— Odd Numbers - Being Further Chronicles of Shorty McCabe • Sewell Ford
... for it all—heights of glory, depths of tribulation; thanked Him for whatsoever Infinite Love had given in the days of that dark, dark year now ending. The clock gave a warning tick—it was going; a moment, and it would be gone forever. Into his heart came a great purpose—the purpose to leave the past with the past, and in the new year go out to a new life—a life of love for all the world, of ...
— The Transformation of Job - A Tale of the High Sierras • Frederick Vining Fisher
... sense of cruel, unexpected, unmerited desertion. At first Lysbet tried to talk to her; but she soon saw that the effort to answer was beyond Katherine's power, and conversation was abandoned. So for an hour, an hour of speechless sorrow, they sat. The tick of the clock, the purr of the cat, the snap of a breaking thread, alone relieved the tension of silence in which this act of suffering was completed. Its atmosphere was becoming intolerable, like that of a nightmare; ...
— The Bow of Orange Ribbon - A Romance of New York • Amelia E. Barr
... keep doing over what we did in childhood. You thought that long ago you got through with "blind-man's-buff," and "hide-and-seek," and "puss in the corner," and "tick-tack-to," and "leap-frog," but all our lives are passed in playing those old games ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... a-fresh, I'll wave my title to thy flesh, 790 Thy arms and baggage, now my right; And if thou hast the heart to try't, I'll lend thee back thyself a while, And once more, for that carcass vile, Fight upon tick. — Quoth HUDIBRAS, 795 Thou offer'st nobly, valiant lass, And I shall take thee at thy word. First let me rise and take my sword. That sword which has so oft this day Through squadrons of my foes made way, 800 ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... verdure. The church-bells rang, and the children recognised the high towers, and the large town; it was that in which they dwelt. They entered and hastened up to their grandmother's room, where everything was standing as formerly. The clock said "tick! tack!" and the finger moved round; but as they entered, they remarked that they were now grown up. The roses on the leads hung blooming in at the open window; there stood the little children's chairs, and Kay and Gerda sat down on them, holding ...
— Andersen's Fairy Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... finally, worried out, fall to the bottom of the hive, or go forth to die on the outside. Mites are not true insects, but are the most degraded of spiders. The sub-class Arachnida are at once recognized by their eight legs. The order of mites (Accorina), which includes the wood-tick, cattle-tick, etc., and mites, are quickly told from the higher orders—true spiders and scorpions—by their rounded bodies, which appear like mere sacks, with little appearance of segmentation, and their ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 417 • Various
... look by night, With just a clock, — But they could gag the tick, And mice won't bark; And so the walls don't ...
— Poems: Three Series, Complete • Emily Dickinson
... therefore they could not doubt it. I pumped her out, and repaired the little craft as well as I could, and on the third day of being in port had eaten everything eatable aboard, and as there was no chance of resuming the voyage yet I had to get some food on 'tick.' This was all very well for a day or two, but after I had been a week in Braye, with no prospect of getting away, the landlord of the tavern from which I obtained my food, told me that as I was a perfect stranger to him he could not afford, ...
— Jethou - or Crusoe Life in the Channel Isles • E. R. Suffling
... hands. He never was flogged, but it was a wonder how he escaped the whipping-post. When he had money he spent it royally in tarts for himself and his friends; he has been known to disburse nine and sixpence out of ten shillings awarded to him in a single day. When he had no funds he went on tick. When he could get no credit he went without, and was almost as happy. He has been known to take a thrashing for a crony without saying a word; but a blow, ever so slight from a friend, would make him roar. ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... with the blasts. Near-by shells, especially German, broke brilliantly against a background so thick that it swallowed up the flashes of more distant shells in its garishly illumined density. Thousands of officers were studying their wrist watches for the tick of "zero" as the minute-hands moved on with merciless fatalism; and hundreds of thousands of men who had come into position overnight were in line in the trenches looking to their officers for ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... an' bacon's got t' las'," he answered. "Use th' seed ef y' want t', an' don' give thet Injun so much. We shan't ast tick o' no lallygaggin', ...
— The Plow-Woman • Eleanor Gates
... hands tightly. Her eyes never left the sea. The tick, tick of the watch was just audible in the stillness of the May ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... then everything was remembered and rendered significant. Was a dog heard to howl and moan during the night, with his head in the direction of the house where the patient lay; was there heard in the silent watches of the night in the room occupied by the sick person, a tick, ticking as of a watch about the bed or furniture, these were sure signs of approaching death, and adult patients hearing these omens, often made sure that their end was near. Many pious people also improved the circumstance, pointing ...
— Folk Lore - Superstitious Beliefs in the West of Scotland within This Century • James Napier
... out for the undertakin' business, by rights. He took things hard, he did. Every tick of the clock was a solemn moment for him, and me gettin' a stamp on crooked was a case that called for a heart to heart talk. He used to show me the books he was keepin', and the writin' was as reg'lar as if it'd been done on ...
— Torchy • Sewell Ford
... stroll backwards and forwards by the lakeside. Encouragement was all very well; but... "Shall I—shall I not? Shall I—shall I not? Shall I—shall I not?" The eternal question went tick-tack, tick-tack, to the rhythm of his march. He glared at vacancy, and tried hard to make ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... Tick, tock, tick, tock. The only sound in the room was the soft refrain of the old clock on the mantel. Barbara held her breath, but she knew she was foolish to feel ...
— The Automobile Girls in the Berkshires - The Ghost of Lost Man's Trail • Laura Dent Crane
... or no there be any such emphasis as a thing in itself, the listening ear supplies it to meet a need. When we attend to a clock ticking, the tick-tock, tick-tock, however even it may sound at first, soon resolves itself into a rhythm with the accent on either the tick or the tock. So does the beat of an engine, or the hum of a railway train, merge itself ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... clock don't tick no louder than it ust to do— Yit now they's times it 'pears like it 'u'd bu'st itse'f in two! And let a rooster, suddent-like, crow som'er's clos't around, And seems's ef, mighty nigh it, it 'u'd lift me off the ground! And same with all the cattle when they bawl around the bars, In the red o' ...
— The Golden Treasury of American Songs and Lyrics • Various
... resolution find insupportable. To me, trained to a serenity of stoicism, it could make no demoralizing appeal. I had out my matchbox, opened it at leisure, and, while the whole vaulting blackness seemed to tick and rustle with secret movement, took a half-dozen vestas into my hand, struck one alight, and, by its dim radiance, made my way through the building by the passages we had penetrated in the morning. If at all I shrank or perspired on my spectral ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... implicit was the travellers' trust in the vigilance of their mechanical and tireless watch, that they slept on as calmly and unconcernedly as though they had been in their beds at home, while the tick was as constant and regular as a sentry's march. The wires of course did not protect them from creatures having wings, and they ran some risk of a visitation from the blood-sucking bats. The far-away volcanoes occasionally sent up sheets of flame, which in the distance were like summer ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... peels and drops, Wherever an outline weakens and wanes Till the latest life in the painting stops, Stands One whom each fainter pulse-tick pains; One, wishful each scrap should clutch the brick, 45 Each tinge not wholly escape the plaster, —A lion who dies of an ass's kick, The wronged great soul of ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... goodness, virtue, essence in it, past all fellowship with ephemeral things. There is a true, not a laconic, logical, and prophetic inference in it that is apropriately styled, "time"; the finest embodiment of musical equipoise; felt to a "tick"; no faltering, barbaric, or false quantities, but a sustained and equable, uniform tone of chromatic measure, meted out as by a mind imbued by but sacrificing the scale of colour to its own actual, achieved ...
— Original Letters and Biographic Epitomes • J. Atwood.Slater
... hope and trust thy Tick doleru, or however you spell it, is vanished, for I have frightful impressions of that Tick, and do altogether hate it, as an unpaid score, or the Tick of a Death Watch. I take it to be a species of Vitus's dance (I omit the Sanctity, writing to "one of the men called Friends"). I knew ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... sixty wild plants from seed carried in a pellet of mud taken from the leg of a partridge. So on and so on. The imagination delights to picture these floral vagabonds, each with its own clever method of getting a fresh start in the world. But by none of these methods just mentioned do the tick-trefoils spread abroad. Theirs is indeed a by hook or by crook system. The scalloped, jointed pod, where the seeds lie concealed, has minute crooked bristles, which catch in the clothing of man or beast, so that every herd of sheep, every dog, every man, woman, or child who ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... a great lady once," said she, "though I don't look like it, my dear. These fal-lals have been over as dainty a body as your own in their day; and that was fifteen years ago to a tick. She gave 'em all to me when she took to the black, and now they shall go to my son's wife. Think of that, you who come from who knows who or where. If they fit you not like a ...
— The Forest Lovers • Maurice Hewlett
... actually was. It seemed to him that he got up, took a candle in his hand, and went through the passages to the old still-room where Philip Feltram lay. The house seemed perfectly still. He could hear the chirp of the crickets faintly from the distant kitchen, and the tick of the clock sounded loud and hollow along the passage. In the old still-room, as he opened the door, was no light, except what was admitted from the candle he carried. He found the body of poor Philip ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 3 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... fine and free, with no one to obey, No sergeants shouting, "Show a leg!" or "Double up!" all day; No buttons to be polished, no army boots to wear, And nobody to tick you off because you ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, August 18th, 1920 • Various
... tick, tack! the old clock filled the night air with its measured beat. "Surely it does not tick so loudly in the day?" ...
— Garthowen - A Story of a Welsh Homestead • Allen Raine
... other and let go in one tick of the clock, but she had stood a long time seeing his eyes arrested in their ...
— Mary Olivier: A Life • May Sinclair
... alone in the dirt and filth. It was just at the foot of the mountain and no neighbors under half a mile. I say he lived there, but he wasn't there more than a third of the time. The boy will remember how he used to go along the road, full as a tick, and the school children making fun of him and then running before he could get at them. I don't know as he would, though. There never was any harm in him, only he did neglect himself so he was an awful sight. And the only time he was in his little house was when he'd been hired ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... sardonic smile. "Don't," he said, "again allude to any such thing as selling on tick! Some time back a partner in our establishment got several ounces of goods for his relatives on credit, and up to this date the bill hasn't as yet been settled; the result being that we've all had to make the amount ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... wife came in, seated herself, and overflowed the low rocking-chair on the other side of the table with her voluminous skirts. She was tall and very large. Her face was as placid as that of a clock which has just marked the last hour of the day and has nothing to do but tick-tock until bed-time. ...
— The Co-Citizens • Corra Harris
... feel the cruelty of that inexorable clock in the stillness; for the minutes passed too quickly. How could it be else, when each one of them might have heralded a hope and did not; when each bequeathed its little legacy of despair? But was there need that each new clock-tick as it came should say, as the last had said: "Another second has gone of the little hour that is left; another inch of the space that parts us from the sentence that knows no respite or reprieve"? Was it not enough that the end must come, without ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... ler' a lot o' little unpaid bills, didn't you?—if you was able to find anyone to give you tick.' ...
— Between the Lines • Boyd Cable
... insects besides mosquitoes, and with special force to the tick tribes (Ixodes), which swarm throughout Central and South America; for in these degraded spiders the whole body has been manifestly modified to fit it for a parasitical life; while the habits of the insect during its blind, helpless, ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... th' ragin' sea, him bein' a sailor, thin to have his fleet captured be cav'lry. Annyhow, he was willin' to take a chance; an' he says to his sailors: 'Spanyards,' he says, 'Castiles,' he says, 'we have et th' las' bed-tick,' he says; 'an', if we stay here much longer,' he says, 'I'll have to have a steak off th' armor plate fried f'r ye,' he says. 'Lave us go out where we can have a r-run f'r our money,' he says. An' away they wint. I'll say this ...
— Mr. Dooley in Peace and in War • Finley Peter Dunne
... hearing was also exceptionally keen. He could hear a watch tick in the next room, and perceive very high sounds to which ordinary human ears are deaf (this was found out later); and when we played blind-man's-buff on a rainy day, he could, blindfolded, tell every boy he caught hold of—not by feeling him all over like the rest of us, but by the mere smell ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... rocky mountains, we've plodded o'er the plain, We've bid a wild defiance to the drizzling, drenching rain; And yielding to the influence of your coquettish weather, We've grilled beneath the sunshine on thy "tick" infected heather. ...
— The Sunny Side of Ireland - How to see it by the Great Southern and Western Railway • John O'Mahony and R. Lloyd Praeger
... book you handed me, to plight our troth," with ire said she, "you bought from Charlie here on tick? Skidoo! A deadbeat makes me sick! I'll never marry any jay who can't dig up two ...
— Rippling Rhymes • Walt Mason |
