"Bludgeon" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and in certain hands enjoyed. Polemical literature, if seldom of a high class, was abundant and was much appreciated. The masterpiece of modern Norwegian poetry was, still, the satiric cycle of Welhaven. In ordinary controversy, the tone was more scathing, the bludgeon was whirled more violently, than English taste at that period could endure. Those whom Ibsen designed to crush had not minced their own words. The press was violence itself, and was not tempered with justice; when the poet looked round he saw "afflicted virtue insolently ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... think of was to stand by the entrance and defend it as we best might. Ben with the long musket, and I with a brand, which I still clutched, but which no longer blazed, and could only be used as a bludgeon. Should these weapons fail, we would have to take out our knives, and make the best fight we could; but we knew that if the baboons once got inside, so as to surround us, we should not ...
— Ran Away to Sea • Mayne Reid
... that, and be d——d to you!' cried the fellow, raising a heavy bludgeon, and dealing the poor Doctor a blow on the head which felled him senseless to the ground, covered ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... the faithful Skelt. If, at the ripe age of fourteen years, I bought a certain cudgel, got a friend to load it, and thenceforward walked the tame ways of the earth my own ideal, radiating pure romance—still I was but a puppet in the hand of Skelt; the original of that regretted bludgeon, and surely the antitype of all the bludgeon kind, greatly improved from Cruikshank, had adorned the hand of Jonathan Wild, pl. 1. "This is mastering me," as Whitman cries, upon some lesser provocation. What am I? what are life, art, letters, the world, but what my Skelt has made them? ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... sinking again and again into the savage side. Nor was the man-thing either longer fleeing, or idle. He too, creature of the wild, had sensed on the instant the truth of the miracle of his saving, and turning in his tracks, had leaped forward with raised bludgeon to Tarzan's assistance and Numa's undoing. A single terrific blow upon the flattened skull of the beast laid him insensible and then as Tarzan's knife found the wild heart a few convulsive shudders and a sudden relaxation marked the ...
— Tarzan the Terrible • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... Arbues, covered as usual with a coat of mail under his robes, and wearing a steel skull-cap under his hat—for he was every moment conscious of guilt and apprehensive of retribution—took a lantern in one hand and a bludgeon in the other; and, like a sturdy soldier of his peculiar Church, walked from his house to the cathedral of that same Saragossa, to join in matins. He knelt down by one of the pillars, setting his lantern on the pavement. His right hand held the weapon ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson
... end of his stick for the face of another of the boarding strangers. The fellow strove to protect his face, and would have guarded easily enough, but, instead, the other end of Tom's bludgeon struck him in the pit of his stomach, depriving him ...
— The Motor Boat Club and The Wireless - The Dot, Dash and Dare Cruise • H. Irving Hancock
... course disregarded, for when the man wanted some refreshment, he put him into a country public-house stable, and left him, and to get him out, the roof of the building had to be pulled off. At Rawcliffe, he was always exhibited by a groom with a ticket-of-leave bludgeon in his hand, and few were bold enough to venture into his yard. This animal, whose temper has depreciated him perhaps a thousand pounds in value, I think would be 'the right horse in the right place' ...
— A New Illustrated Edition of J. S. Rarey's Art of Taming Horses • J. S. Rarey
... Californian soil, merely a mass of organized water—was "mashed" over the head of some of his assailants. The Editor, painfully aware of these regular persecutions of his errand boy, and perhaps realizing that a radish which could not be used as a bludgeon was not of a sustaining nature, forebore any reproof. "But I cannot notice what I haven't seen, Li Tee," he ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte
... day remembered him as being utterly unlike himself; he was known to have been at Falmer Park that afternoon about six, and to have driven home along the Falmer Road in his car an hour or so later. And in a copse close by to where the body of the murdered man was found had been discovered a thick bludgeon of a stick, broken it would seem by some violent act, into two halves. On the top half was rudely cut with a pen-knife M. ASSHE ... What was puzzling, however, was the apparent motive of robbery about the crime; it will be remembered that the victim's watch was missing, and that no money ...
— The Blotting Book • E. F. Benson
... clerics have been mostly suppressed, and the few still in existence will probably disappear before long. Colonel Nolan must hold this opinion, for when canvassing in Headford, the parish priest came up and cut his head open with a bludgeon. The gallant militarian submitted to this, and would fain have passed the affair in silence. How many Englishmen would have stood it? This incident, properly considered, should enlighten Britons on the dominant influences ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... opposite party, and yet I never heard anything from him myself but what was diffident and tender. He had acquired, as an instrument necessary to him, an extraordinarily extravagant style, and he laid about him with a bludgeon, which inevitably descended on the heads of all prominent persons if they happened not to be Conservative, no matter what their virtues might be. One peculiarity, however, I noted in him. Although he ought every now and then, when the subject was uppermost, to have flamed out in ...
— Mark Rutherford's Deliverance • Mark Rutherford
... mother—and love him too, though he treats me as an outcast—I will always love you, but I will never more enter my father's dwelling. He has degraded me with his whip—he has attempted my life with his bludgeon. I forgive him, but will never expose myself again to his cruelties or indignities. You will always find me a son, and a dutiful one, in ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... scythe. One of the Russian officers was wounded, fell to his knees and was dispatched. The Englishman was hit by a billet of wood and dazed. Marteau and the other Russian were still unharmed. But it was going hard with them. In fact, a fierce blow on his blade from a bludgeon shivered the weapon of the Frenchman. A sword was aimed at his heart. There was a blinding flash, a detonation, and the man who held it staggered back. The Countess, the last pistol almost touching the man's body, had pulled the trigger. Marteau ...
— The Eagle of the Empire - A Story of Waterloo • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... of filling an office of profit under the Board, threw away all his sins, and obtained grace and a billet as toll-collector or pikeman. In England the pike-man was always a surly brute, who collected his fees with the help of a bludgeon and a bulldog, but Nicholas performed his duties in the disguise of a saint. He waited for passengers in his little wooden office, sitting at a table, with a huge Bible before him, absorbed in spiritual reading. He wore spectacles on his Roman nose, had a long ...
— The Book of the Bush • George Dunderdale
... went up from the black stevedores of the far South when there landed in their midst a mighty band of black infantry, nearly 100,000 strong who, in a few short months had learned the use of powder and shot, of sword and broadsword, of bayonet and bludgeon, of trench knife and battle-ax. Cold steel or blackjack, smooth bore or sawed-off, machine gun or automatic, were all the same to them. It was a great experience for stevedore and infantryman. And the stevedore's heart leaped to his throat as he saw the black ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller
... more primitive society, the strongest held sway until a stronger displaced him. The giant called Ling was by no means the most human-seeming creature there, but he was plainly the ruler and plainly meant so to continue. Parr was no coward, but he was no fool. As the six-foot bludgeon whirled upward between him and the sky, he cast down his own stick in token ...
— The Devil's Asteroid • Manly Wade Wellman
... first seized hold of a good bludgeon, feigned dead. Then the foxes arrived, and spoke thus: "Panaumbe! You are to be pitied. Were you frozen to death, or were you starved to death?" With these words, all the foxes came up close to him, and wept. Thereupon ...
— Aino Folk-Tales • Basil Hall Chamberlain
... to ask favours of fellows whom he hated, and to stand their refusals, and pretend to believe their lying excuses, and appear to make quite light of it, though every failure stunned him like a blow of a bludgeon, and as he strutted jauntily off with a bilious smirk, he was well nigh at his wits' end. It was dark as he rode out by the low road to Chapelizod—crest-fallen, beaten—scowling in the darkness through ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... without keepers be; And such desire of Freedom has been shown, That both the parties wish'd her all their own: All our free smiths and cobblers in the town Were loth to lay such pleasant freedom down; To put the bludgeon and cockade aside, And let us pass unhurt and undefied. True! you might then your party's sign produce, And so escape with only half th' abuse: With half the danger as you walk'd along, With rage and threat'ning but from half the throng. This you might do, and not your fortune mend, For ...
— The Borough • George Crabbe
... its sensuous and lyrical elements and makes up for the loss by the cultivation of point. Above all, it becomes the instrument of satire, stinging like a wasp where the satirist pure and simple uses the deadlier weapons of the bludgeon and the rapier. ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... matter."—Johnson's Dict. "Whurr, to pronounce the letter r with too much force."—Ib. "Flipp, a mixed liquor, consisting of beer and spirits sweetened."—Ib. "Glynn, a hollow between two mountains, a glen."—Churchill's Grammar, p. 22. "Lamm, to beat soundly with a cudgel or bludgeon."—Walker's Dict. "Bunn, a small cake, a simnel, a kind of sweet bread."—See ib. "Brunett, a woman with a brown complexion."—Ib. and Johnson's Dict. "Wad'sett, an ancient tenure or lease of land ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... he was aware that the color sergeant flinched suddenly, as if struck by a bludgeon. He faltered, and then became motionless, ...
— The Red Badge of Courage - An Episode of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... open conflict with the whole trend of public opinion. In February 1795 he was again arrested, and the Tribun du peuple was solemnly burnt in the Theatre des Bergeres by the jeunesse doree, the young men whose mission it was to bludgeon Jacobinism out of the streets and cafes. But for the appalling economic conditions produced by the fall in the value of assignats, Babeuf might have shared the fate of other agitators ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... leading contributors to that periodical habitually entertained towards a young and promising writer were in his case sharpened by political partisanship; and the just and measured severity which he infused into his criticism on Southey's "Colloquies of Society" brought down upon him the bludgeon to whose strokes poetic tradition has attributed the death of Keats. Macaulay was made of harder stuff, and gave little heed to a string of unsavoury invectives compounded out of such epithets as "ugly," "splay-footed," and "shapeless;" such phrases as "stuff and nonsense," ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... known to his friend, who told him, that having left his horse at Tunley's, he was, in his way to the garrison, set upon by three ruffians, one of whom being the very individual person now in his power, had come behind him, and struck with a bludgeon at his head, which, however, he missed, and the instrument descended on his left shoulder; that, upon drawing his hanger, and laying about him in the dark, the other two fled, leaving their companion, whom he had disabled, ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... Crime is made a show. A hundred eager scribes are at their heel To tell the public how they look and feel, How eat and drink, how sleep and smoke and play. Murder's itinerary for a day, Set forth in graphic phrase by skilful pens, With pictures of its face, its favourite dens, Its knife or bludgeon, pistol, paramour, Will swell the swift editions hour by hour, More than high news of war or of debate, The death of heroes or the throes of state. From club-room to street-corner runs the cry After ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, April 23, 1892 • Various
... crying miserably, he drove himself out of the town, for a mile or more, on the desert, then plodded painfully back again, mauling and beating himself with the bludgeon of his awful self-pity. ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908 • Various
... upon its youthful occupant. This individual appeared to be about two years of age, with its mother's eyes and a combative disposition. The latter was indicated by the manner in which it banged its own legs and the sides of its carriage with a wicker bludgeon that had once been a rattle. It looked earnestly at the young man, and gave the edges of its carriage a whack which knocked the bludgeon out of its hand. Lodloe picked up the weapon, and, restoring it to its owner, began to ...
— The Squirrel Inn • Frank R. Stockton
... victim passes, without a struggle or a motion, from the repose of sleep to the repose of death. 3. It is the assassin's purpose to make sure work; and he plies the dagger, though it is obvious that life has been destroyed by the blow of the bludgeon. 4. He even raises the aged arm that he may not fail in his aim at the heart, and places it again over the wounds of the poniard. 5. To finish the picture, he explores the wrist for the pulse. 6. He feels for it, and ascertains that it beats no longer. 7. It is accomplished. ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... great metropolis." It was also resolved, in a flourish of speech utterly unknown in anything ever attempted by Choate, that the mayor, who, though he contemplated himself the greatest of potentates, was famous only for commanding an unruly police to bludgeon the heads of peaceable citizens, should publicly receive us at ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... bit of brutality which enabled her to single out Winton in the throng of workers. He heard the blow, and the oath that went with it, and she saw him run forward to wrench the bludgeon from the bully's hands and fling it afar. What words emphasized the act she could not hear, but the little deed of swift justice thrilled her curiously, and her heart warmed to him as it had when he had thrown off his coat to fall to work on ...
— A Fool For Love • Francis Lynde
... struggle? Can you not see that the task is your task—yours to dream, yours to resolve, yours to execute? That if ever it is carried out, it will be in the face of every obstacle that wealth and mastership can oppose—in the face of ridicule and slander, of hatred and persecution, of the bludgeon and the jail? That it will be by the power of your naked bosoms, opposed to the rage of oppression! By the grim and bitter teaching of blind and merciless affliction! By the painful gropings of the untutored mind, by the feeble stammerings of the uncultured voice! ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... thus indicated is characteristic; Johnson was as a rough but helpful elder brother to poor Goldsmith, gave him advice, sympathy, and applause, and at times criticised him pretty sharply, or brought down his conversational bludgeon upon his sensitive friend. "He has nothing of the bear but his skin," was Goldsmith's comment upon his clumsy friend, and the two men appreciated each other at bottom. Some of their readers may be inclined to resent Johnson's attitude of superiority. The admirably ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... be painful and odious, and cruelly mortifying to the inward vanity. Suppose I am a poltroon, let us say. With fierce moustache, loud talk, plentiful oaths, and an immense stick, I keep up nevertheless a character for courage. I swear fearfully at cabmen and women; brandish my bludgeon, and perhaps knock down a little man or two with it: brag of the images which I break at the shooting-gallery, and pass amongst my friends for a whiskery fire-eater, afraid of neither man nor dragon. Ah me! Suppose some brisk little chap steps up and ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... particularly brutal villain with leery eyes, ugly mouth, with one tooth gone, and an iron jaw like a hull-dog's. He was attired in a fur cap, brown corduroy jacket, with a blood-red handkerchief twisted about his throat, and he carried a bludgeon. When the double-dyed villain proceeded in the third act to pound the head of the lovely maiden to a jelly at the instigation of the base uncle, concealed behind a painted tree-trunk, and the lover rushed in and tried to save her, every pair of hands except Oliver's came together ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... does, is it? I wondered what it was that did it. I hear you fight him still—but with a bludgeon, and he ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... lord. From Janasthan they sallied out With eager speed, and din, and shout, Armed with the mace for close attacks, The bill, the spear, the battle-axe, Steel quoit and club that flashed afar, Huge bow and sword and scimitar, The dart to pierce, the bolt to strike, The murderous bludgeon, lance, and pike. So forth from Janasthan, intent On Khara's will, the monsters went. He saw their awful march: not far Behind the host he drove his car. Ware of his master's will, to speed The driver urged each gold-decked steed. Then forth the warrior's coursers sprang, And with tumultuous ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... collar, he dragged him to the shelter of a big boulder, flung him close to it, and lay down on top of his body. In the next moment the blast went off, and the gust of fire and rocks and earth roared and whistled through the air above them. The sound struck them like a bludgeon, and they lay for a while, stunned and deafened, while pieces of stone slid and tinkled on the boulder that had sheltered them. At ...
— Vrouw Grobelaar and Her Leading Cases - Seventeen Short Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... in a sarcastic mood when he met Mike. That is to say, he began in a sarcastic strain. But this sort of thing is difficult to keep up. By the time he had reached his peroration, the rapier had given place to the bludgeon. For sarcasm to be effective, the user of it must be met half-way. His hearer must appear to be conscious of the sarcasm and moved by it. Mike, when masters waxed sarcastic towards him, always assumed an air of stolid stupidity, which was as a ...
— Mike • P. G. Wodehouse
... the bright moonlight which flooded the scene, and Mark could see the slaver captain making a rush here and a rush there, and at each effort he struck down some poor wretch with a heavy bludgeon he wielded with ...
— The Black Bar • George Manville Fenn
... two combats of Sauroren, and each was, in Wellington's own phrase, "bludgeon work"—a battle of soldiers rather than of generals, a tangle of fierce charges and counter-charges, of volleys delivered so close that they scorched the very clothes of the opposing lines, and sustained so fiercely that ...
— Deeds that Won the Empire - Historic Battle Scenes • W. H. Fitchett
... even at the height of the orgy. They were hard cases, rough, tough fighting men, but they gave the big fellow plenty of sea-room. No ruffling or swaggering in his direction. No gibes or practical jokes. The bludgeon-like wit of the house very carefully passed him by. For he was so plainly ...
— The Blood Ship • Norman Springer
... dropped from his hand on to the pavement with a bump and a rattle. Stooping swiftly, the Kid picked it up, and handed it to Psmith. His fingers closed upon it. It was a short, wicked-looking little bludgeon, the black-jack of the New ...
— Psmith, Journalist • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... you at once, the most hideous creature in the world. His cruel grin was too evil a thing to be described. He carried a great bludgeon. From his lower jaw a yellow tusk arose at either corner of his mouth and projected beyond his upper lip. His ears covered the whole sides of his head. His jaws were as large around as ...
— Everychild - A Story Which The Old May Interpret to the Young and Which the Young May Interpret to the Old • Louis Dodge
... age of Money, and, therefore, an irreverent age; it is also the age of Respectability (with a very large R),—and the policeman's bludgeon. ...
— The Money Moon - A Romance • Jeffery Farnol
... for a good-looking young man to attempt a flirtation with Bessie, in such moments as he was not carefully watching what seemed to be a clumsy mass of wax on the end of a wooden handle. All the long forenoon he kept up his manoeuvers, watching his ugly bludgeon as if it were the very apple of his eye; carrying it to the window one moment and examining it under the microscope; then carrying it back to his wheel and beginning all over again. Late in the afternoon he came to the window for the hundredth time, and brandishing the bludgeon ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... gallantry and courage for their soldiers; though it is noticeable that their principal exploits in our time have been the seizure of friendless colored sailors, and selling them into slavery,—the achievement of that knight of the bludgeon, the representative whose noble deed his constituents could hardly admire enough, but the better part of whose valor was the discretion that preferred to encounter his antagonist sitting and incapable of resistance,—and lastly, that ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... after the "battles of the Pyrenees," Wellington wrote, "I never saw such fighting as we had here. It began on the 25th of Jury, and, excepting the 29th, when not a shot was fired, we had it every day till the 2nd of August. The battle of the 28th was fierce bludgeon work. The fourth division was principally engaged, and the loss of the enemy was immense. I hope Soult will not feel any inclination to renew his expedition. The French army must have suffered considerably. ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... apology or excuse, it was how ample and entire in the case of a man—the only one in our annals—appointed to wear the shining crown of martyrdom before his translation, to get up out of his own blood and recover from the foul assassin's bludgeon after medical tortures of the surgeon's moxa in combustion on his disabled spine, such as Sequard says he never applied to any other ...
— Senatorial Character - A Sermon in West Church, Boston, Sunday, 15th of March, - After the Decease of Charles Sumner. • C. A. Bartol
... west. It has a big enough trunk for a stick to stand upright against it, as was shown by Inspector Snow who had charge of this affair. But we are told that after demonstrating this fact with the same bludgeon which had done its bloody work in the Hollow, the prisoner showed a sudden interest in this weapon and begged to see it closer. This being granted, he pointed out where a splinter or two had been freshly whittled from the handle, and declared that no knife had touched it while it remained ...
— Dark Hollow • Anna Katharine Green
... twisted in a bow. With his huge hands he was choking them, choking them to death, using them as a shield against the other three. Then slowly he worked himself into a sitting position. He hurled one of the dogs to the tent door. He swung bludgeon blows at the others. They fled yelping and howling. He still held the Mackenzie River bitch. Getting his knee on her body, he bent her almost into a circle, bent her till her back ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... gunpowder. One of the "insides," an ancient gentleman in a Ramilies wig, is seen through the capacious window of the coach affectionately hugging a carbine, and a yeoman on the roof is at once caressing a bull-dog, and supporting a bludgeon that might have served Dandie Dinmont himself. Yet all these precautions, offensive or defensive, were frequently of no avail: the gentlemen of the road were still better armed, or more adroit in handling their weapons. Hounslow Heath on the great western road, ...
— Old Roads and New Roads • William Bodham Donne
... the society into which they are thrown is a mere moral wilderness. They are to make such way through it as they can, with egotism for their only trusty instrument. This egotism may either be a bludgeon, as with the most part, or it may be a delicately adjusted and fastidiously decorated compass, as with an Emilius. In either case is no perception that the gross outer contact of men with another is transformed by worthiness of common ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... the court for the time being—a hoarse-voiced man in top-boots with a huge saber buckled to his side, and a bludgeon in his hand. "Silence for the Citizen President!" he reiterated, striking his bludgeon on ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... observations, as the fellow with whom I had interfered, as soon as he perceived that he had only an unarmed man to deal with, appeared determined not to give up his hopes of plunder without a struggle, and, freeing his wrist by a powerful jerk, he aimed a blow at me with the bludgeon, which, had it taken effect, would at once have ended all my anxieties, and brought this veracious history to an abrupt and untimely conclusion. Fortunately, however, for "my gentle public" and their humble servant, I was able, by dodging on one side, to avoid ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... and Magyar bloods so persistently, that in music Gipsy and Hungarian have become practically identical terms. It was a Hungarian gentleman who said: "When I hear the 'Rakoczy' I feel as if I must go to war to conquer the whole world. My fingers convulsively twitch to seize a pistol, a sword, or bludgeon, or whatever weapon may be at hand; I must clutch it, and march forward." It is because of this spirit, scarcely overstated in this story, that the Austrian Government, fearful of the influence of the ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... "The nulla-nulla is another bludgeon which bears a distinctive character . . . merely a round piece of wood, three feet long and two and a half inches thick, brought to a blunt point at the end. The mallee is the wood from which ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... at once. She did not seem to regard him as asking her permission, though he had tried to give his demand that flavour, but rather as acquainting her with an established fact at which she blinked in a curious confusion of moods. The demoniac music in the dancing-hall had begun to bludgeon the walls, and in the whirlpool of the physical vibrations of the noise and the spiritual vibrations of his passion the little woman seemed to bob like a cork. She was resigned and pleased, and ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... try to find the judge before lunch, and at table he did not seem especially devoted to Ellen in her father's jealous eyes. He joked Lottie, and exchanged those passages or repartee with her in which she did not mind using a bludgeon when she had not a rapier at hand; it is doubtful if she was very sensible of the difference. Ellen sat by in passive content, smiling now and then, and Boyne carried on a dignified conversation with Mr. Pogis, whom he had ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... enterprise the danger of mutiny always looms large and the bludgeon of blackmail lies ready to the hand of the mutineer. Therefore the actual handling of the money had been a matter of extreme care to Lute and those in his closest confidence. When the leader had taken most of his men out of the mine he had led away those of whom he had felt least sure—and had left ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... chuckled a hoarse voice behind me with such startling suddenness as for a moment bereft me of speech or motion; then, wheeling about, I came face to face with a rough-clad, villainous-looking man who stood, powerful legs apart, hairy fists grasping a short, heavy stick or bludgeon, and evil head out-thrust to stare beyond me at the prostrate form of my companion who had merely lifted her head to watch ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... do not you see that the Marquise is the tool of that tall lean man who never uttered a word? There is a strain of Cain in him, but of the Cain who goes to the Law Courts for his bludgeon, and there, unluckily for him, we keep more ...
— The Commission in Lunacy • Honore de Balzac
... appreciate its truth, and the even greater truth of its converse, when you are a Queen. But soldiers are stupid creatures, obviously so, since killing is no argument, or the word philosopher would mean a man armed with a bludgeon. If they do away with a tyrant and elect his successor, they are apt to acquire the habit. Soldiers are meant to obey, not to rule, and these Kosnovian Kingmakers were not patriots ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... store-rooms, or anything, rather than for sleeping people in. We have had some experience in this matter and know how utterly defenseless people are when assigned one of these rooms where death dwells. An open attack with a bludgeon is preferable. Cold, fresh air is beneficial, but ...
— Minnesota; Its Character and Climate • Ledyard Bill
... really intended taking him prisoner," replied the rat, "the object of that bludgeon is to me a matter of mere conjecture. However, it is easy enough to see you have changed your mind; and it may be barely worth mentioning that ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)
... in a bloodcoloured jerkin and tanner's apron, a rope coiled over his shoulder, mounts the block. A life preserver and a nailstudded bludgeon are stuck in his belt. He rubs grimly his grappling hands, knobbed ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... celebrate the birth of a child; I had drunk pretty freely and had just fallen asleep, when a cock, I suppose in a greater hurry than the rest, began to crow. I thought it was dawn and set out for Alimos.[223] I had hardly got beyond the walls, when a footpad struck me in the back with his bludgeon; down I went and wanted to shout, but he had already made off ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... have long been the more perilous because of her defiance of the rights of others. Here she runs true to type. She is her father's own daughter. In the light of his character and career, of his use of the bludgeon in business, of his resort to foul means when fair would not serve, of his brutal disregard of human rights in order that his own power might be enhanced, of his ruthless and crushing tyranny, not alone toward his employees, but toward all labor in its struggle ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... was girt against the weather and against exercise. Beneath her chin were firmly knotted the strings of her sober bonnet; a short skirt hid nothing of the stout boots she had donned; her hand grasped the knob of a bludgeon-like umbrella. ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson
... of ingratitude. For I am not a fool; I know my faults, I know they are ineluctable, I know they are growing on me. I know I may offend again, and I warn you of it. But the next time I offend, tell me so plainly and frankly like a lady, and don't lacerate my heart and bludgeon my vanity with imaginary faults of your own and purely gratuitous penance. I might suspect ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... one arm and then at the other, and when he found he was bound hard and fast, his face turned as red as fire and he opened his mouth, whether to swear or yell I know not. I had already closed the door, and before the man had uttered more than a premonitory sound, David had clapped the end of his bludgeon against ...
— The Stories of the Three Burglars • Frank Richard Stockton
... path; but he could not do so quick enough to prevent the stunning blow which brought him on his knees. His hat partially saved him, and he was on the point of rising, when Thady again struck him with all his power; this time the heavy bludgeon came down on his bare temple, and the young man fell, never to rise again. He neither moved nor groaned; the force of the blow, and the great weight of the stick falling on his uncovered head as he was rising, had shattered ...
— The Macdermots of Ballycloran • Anthony Trollope
... at him with contempt. As it was, in spite of the rancor he had nursed, the feeling which had driven him to reprisal, he found himself sorry—sorry for himself, sorry for Betty. He had set out to bludgeon Gower, to humiliate him, and the worst arrows he could sling had blunted their points against the ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... for I expected nothing less then to be engaged in a desperate hand-to-hand struggle within the next few minutes; therefore, I waited in some suspense, straining my eyes to wards the shadows with my fingers clasped tight upon my bludgeon. ...
— My Lady Caprice • Jeffrey Farnol
... conscienceless rapacity, not one prostitution of power on the part of Executive, Legislature, or judiciary, not one tear of patriotic shame over the degradation of the national name, not one blow of the policeman's bludgeon, not a single bullet or bayonet thrust of the soldiery, could have been spared. Nothing but just this discipline of failure, disappointment, and defeat on the part of the earlier reformers could have educated the people to the necessity of attacking the system of private capitalism in its existence ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... most of them were decorated, gave to their physiognomies a manly and determined air, fully borne out by their unrestrained carriage and deportment. To a man, almost all were armed with a tough vine-wood bludgeon, called in their language an estoc volant, tipped and shod with steel—a weapon fully understood by them, and rendered, by their dexterity in the use of it, formidable to their adversaries. Not a few carried ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... was thrown into a ferment by this; meetings were held which attempted some rough organisation for the holding of another meeting to retort on the authorities. A huge crowd assembled in Trafalgar Square and the neighbourhood (then a place of crowded streets), and was too big for the bludgeon-armed police to cope with; there was a good deal of dry-blow fighting; three or four of the people were killed, and half a score of policemen were crushed to death in the throng, and the rest got away as they could. This was a victory ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris
... on to the terrace. The banker's daughter was in a tailor-made gown with a man's cap and a man's gloves, and a man's boots—at least, as Mrs. Belgrove thought, they looked like that—and carried a very masculine stick, more like a bludgeon than a cane. With her ruddy complexion and ruddy hair, and piercing blue eyes, and magnificent figure—for she really had a splendid figure in spite of Mrs. Belgrove's depreciation—she looked like a gigantic Norse goddess. With a flashing display of white teeth, she ...
— Red Money • Fergus Hume
... without a remark, and ran straight at the bear, which stopped on seeing such a big, powerful man running so furiously at him, and flourishing a bludgeon that would almost have suited the hand of a giant. But polar bears are not timid. He rose on his hind legs at once, and paid no attention whatever to the tremendous crack that Sam dealt him over the skull. The blow broke the handspike in two, and the fool-hardy ...
— Fast in the Ice - Adventures in the Polar Regions • R.M. Ballantyne
... Vance, a representative from Ohio, Houston assaulted and severely pounded him. The House voted that Houston should be brought before the bar and reprimanded by the Speaker, which was done, although Mr. Stevenson's reprimand was really complimentary. That night a friend of General Houston, with a bludgeon and a pistol, attacked Mr. Arnold, of Tennessee, who had been active in securing the reprimand, but the latter soon got ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... course, the town—of some four houses, six "groceries," a store and blacksmithery—was aroused, indignant! Impatient for a victim, the posse comitatus "fired up," armed to the teeth with pistol, bludgeon, blunderbuss, gun, bowie-knife, and—whiskey, started up the river to reconnoitre and intercept the ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... Rev. Mr. Brewster. The subject debated was, Whether is moral or physical force the fitter instrument for obtaining the Charter? The Doctor espoused the moral hocussing system, and Feargus took up the bludgeon for physical force. After a pretty considerable deal of fireworks had been let off on both sides, it was agreed to divide the field, when Feargus, waving his hat, ascended into a tree, and called upon ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... more that way. I suppose you can't sit quiet, ma'am?—then never mind!" (This resignation was intended as a stinging reproach.) "Mr. Cibber, with his sneering snuff-box! Mr. Quin, with his humorous bludgeon! Mrs. Clive, with her tongue! Mr. Snarl, with his abuse! And Mr. Soaper, with his praise!—arsenic in treacle I call it! But there, I deserve it all! For look on this picture, ...
— Peg Woffington • Charles Reade
... blows in all senses are a normal part of living. His social habits indulge themselves in knocks, coarse attacks, unseemly abuse, as rather matters of course. He wields a bludgeon where more refined men would cut down with sarcasm or wither one with disdain. Blows are his natural method of instructing others and of getting himself instructed. "Good German blows" are what the Kaiser talked of loudly. To strike as well ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... dear fellow, I wish I could drive the fact into this head of yours that rudeness is not synonymous with wit. I shall not have lived in vain if I teach you in time to realize that the rapier of irony is more effective an instrument than the bludgeon of insolence.' ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham
... a clubman and a motion to the equipment, followed the whites, trailed in turn by his three companions of the forest. The clubman, after a curious inspection of the packs, stood on guard among them, his bludgeon grasped loosely but suggestively, ready to prevent any undue inquisitiveness by the rest. But soon he found himself alone, for the other tribesmen transferred their attention and themselves to the interior ...
— The Pathless Trail • Arthur O. (Arthur Olney) Friel
... than just calling attention to the nondescript gilt monster, with its riveted wings and forked tongue and tail, which glares down on us from its perch above the Town Hall, in the High Street; or to a "cigar" vane (over 2 ft. long and as thick as a bludgeon), large enough to give Verdant Green's famous "smoke" many points, hoisted over an enterprising tobacconist's a little lower down; or to the skewered and unhappy-looking weathercock on the Parish Church; or the blackened griffin in Earl ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 28, April 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... robustness is omnipresent, and takes several forms. A grandiloquence that sways uneasily between rodomontade and mere verbiage, a rotundity of diction, a choice of subjects which can only be described as sanguinolent, the use of the bludgeon where others ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... sharpened, and became a tang that pierced the ear-drums: a sound that shook with hurry and speed, increasing, bringing with it the bursting and crashing of trees, and breaking at last overhead in a yell that stunned the brain like the blow of a bludgeon. In a second the house was torn away, and they were clinging to the roots of the breadfruit, deaf, ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... beetles, and not butterflies, is natural, but far from profitable. They grow none the less vigorously for being trodden upon, like those tough weeds that love to nestle between the stones of court-yard pavements. If you strike at one of their heads with the bludgeon of the law, or of violence, it flies open like the seedcapsule of a snap-weed, and fills the whole region with seminal thoughts which will spring up in a crop just like the original martyr. They chased one of these enthusiasts, ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... drew the finest of fine beads upon a bearded man who carried a glittering truncheonlike club which, by the way it was carried, was more than merely a bludgeon. He pulled the trigger for a ...
— The Fifth-Dimension Tube • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... and make a bonfire of the timber in the middle of Fleet Street. But the wily Whigs, barricading the door, slipped out a messenger at a back door, and sent to a mug-house in Tavistock Street, Covent Garden, for reinforcements. Presently a band of Whig bludgeon-men arrived, and the Whigs of Salisbury Court then snatched up pokers, tongs, pitchforks, and legs of stools, and sallied out on the Tory mob, who soon fled before them. For two days the Tory mob seethed, fretted, ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... murder of George Selby, by shooting him with a pistol, with a revolver, shotgun, rifle, repeater, breech-loader, cannon, six-shooter, with a gun, or some other, weapon; with killing him with a slung-shot, a bludgeon, carving knife, bowie knife, pen knife, rolling pin, car, hook, dagger, hair pin, with a hammer, with a screw-driver; with a nail, and with all other weapons and utensils whatsoever, at the Southern hotel and in all other hotels and places wheresoever, ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 6. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... playwright, who had found himself involved in a dangerous squabble, which might mean his death, over a girl whom he had only seen for a few minutes, had the sense to take it. But it was no easy task to extricate himself. A burly ruffian was approaching him with arm uplifted and whirling a bludgeon. Vane caught the fellow a blow in the waist and he immediately collapsed. Before the prostrate man could get his wind, Vane darted through the Traitors' Gate and racing towards the Borough with a score or so of the rabble after him, darted into the first ...
— Madame Flirt - A Romance of 'The Beggar's Opera' • Charles E. Pearce
... as long as by not taking offence you can wriggle yourself forward in the band of journalistic reptiles. You will be revenged on me, in that case, some day; you will lie in wait for me with a dirty bludgeon, and steal on me out of a sewer. If you do, permit me to assure you that I don't care. But if you are already in a rage, if you are about tearing up this epistle, and are starting to assault me personally, or at least to answer me furiously, then there is every hope for you and for your future. I ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... smile even on the wretched. But let some savage spirits appear among them—let the shebeen house supply the ferocity which religion kept down, and one oppressor is marked out for vengeance, his path is spied, the bludgeon or the bullet smites, and he is borne in to his innocent and loving family a broken and stained corpse, slain ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... for an invalid, breaking down visibly month by month; and one might fancy that the eminent Christian divine might have used his influence to better purpose than in fanning the dying flame, and adding the strokes of his bludgeon to the keen stabs of Pope's stiletto. In the fourteen years which had elapsed since the first Dunciad, Pope had found less unworthy employment for his pen; but, before dealing with the works produced at this time, which include ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... of Pitt, who likened the ejected Chancellor to Lucifer or to a Titan blasted by Jove's thunderbolt. In this age we find it difficult to account for the prestige of Thurlow. His legal learning was far from profound, his speeches were more ponderous than powerful, and his attacks were bludgeon blows rather than home thrusts. Of the lighter graces and social gifts he had scant store. Indeed, his private life displayed no redeeming feature. Everyone disliked him, but very many feared him, mainly, perhaps, because of his facility ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... slouched on, sat in a corner smoking their pipes. They bore the exact appearance of being half poachers, and half tillers of the earth; fellows who, upon a pinch, would have no objections to take the road with a bludgeon—the very models of country blackguards. They were both in liquor—the shorter one so much so, that he had became quite obstreperous, and had once or twice interrupted the other vocalists; and now, as if unable to contain himself any longer, broke out with a strong voice slobbered a little though ...
— Sinks of London Laid Open • Unknown
... with which he aimed at McDermot's head, broke across the bludgeon which was raised to ward the blow. Debriseau closed; and, clasping his arms round his neck, tore him with his strong teeth with the power and ferocity of a tiger, and they rolled together in the dust, covered with the blood ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... humor, quick to turn a laugh on a hostile bungler, but never cruel; prompt in returning a serious thrust, but never venomous. Many of his speeches were masterpieces in their way of handling opponents. An attack which Bismarck would have met with a bludgeon, Bulow parried with weapons infinitely lighter, but in some cases really more effective. A very good example was on an occasion when the old charge of "Byzantinism" was flung at the present regime, to which he replied, not by a historical ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... his shoes, he looked around him, and selected a stout sapling from among the undergrowth that covered the bank of the stream. Taking from his pocket a huge clasp-knife, he cut off the length of an ordinary walking stick and trimmed it. The result was an ugly-looking bludgeon, a dangerous weapon when in the grasp of ...
— The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, and - Selected Essays • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... to his ordinary dress, Jack tied a belt of cocoa-nut cloth round his waist, into which he thrust the axe. I was also advised to put on a belt and carry a short cudgel or bludgeon in it; for, as Jack truly remarked, the sling would be of little use if we should chance to come to close quarters with any wild animal. As for Peterkin, notwithstanding that he carried such a long, and I must add, frightful-looking spear over his shoulder, we could not prevail on him to leave ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne
... brute of a man, his great hard face bearing the scars of battles against pistol, knife, bludgeon and fist. He was a sour and savage brute, hated and feared by everyone for his tyrannies over the helpless poor and the helpless outcast class. He had primitive masculine notions as to feminine virtue, intact despite the latter ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... of the press it slowly but successfully banished from the South, dictated its own code of honor and manners to the nation, brandished the bludgeon and the bowie-knife over Congressional debate, sapped the foundations of loyalty, dried up the springs of patriotism, blotted out the testimonies of the fathers against oppression, padlocked the pulpit, expelled liberty from its literature, invented ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... the door. The key was in the lock, but he didn't have a chance to turn it before all three threw themselves on him. A scuffle followed which Judson brought to a quick stop by striking Jack a stunning blow on the head with his bludgeon. With a million stars dancing before him in a void of blackness, ...
— The Ocean Wireless Boys And The Naval Code • John Henry Goldfrap, AKA Captain Wilbur Lawton
... breeches, with drawers, stockings, and slippers. Though the maid kept coughing all the time, Madame Miot and her gallant did not awake from their slumber, till the enraged husband began to use the bludgeon of the lover, which had also been left in the closet. A battle then ensued, in which the lover retaliated so vigorously, that the husband called out "Murder! murder!" with all his might. The chateau was instantly ...
— Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, Complete - Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London • Lewis Goldsmith
... than Carlyle. In fact, Dr. Johnson might with truth be described as the King Bull of all the Bulls of all the China-shops. There was no subject, however remote from his knowledge or experience on which he would hesitate to pronounce, and if necessary bludgeon forth, his opinion. But in his case, there is one important distinction to be made, a distinction ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... sound of the blow and the sight of the fall both the old man and the young ran out from their place of concealment. Burt was standing over the body, his bludgeon in his hand. ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... done it in a decent manner if I had not lost all control of myself," he said as he walked home. "It was brutal the way I spoke to her; poor child, she looked as if I had beat her with a bludgeon. Well, it is just as well perhaps that I gave her good reason to ...
— An Ambitious Man • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... the full fever of battle seized him. His forward lunge had placed another miner hors de combat, and Jarvis sprang forward and secured the wounded man's bludgeon. ...
— The Fat of the Land - The Story of an American Farm • John Williams Streeter
... earth. Once he returned from New Orleans, whither he had gone to sell his cotton, with the story that he had been knocked senseless and robbed of his wallet, and in proof of this he produced a newspaper account of the midnight outrage, and exhibited a wound on the head, inflicted by the bludgeon of the footpad. And with such drollery did he recite this story that the Major laughed at him, which meant, of course, that his tenure of the old plantation was not to be disturbed. The memory of this rascally trick came ...
— An Arkansas Planter • Opie Percival Read
... to the foot-soldier. But Jackson's partiality for his own arm was as marked as was Napoleon's, and the decisive effect of a well-placed battery appealed to his instincts with greater force than the wild rush of a charge of infantry. Skilful manoeuvring was more to his taste than the mere bludgeon work of ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... fresh-looking and upstanding young man; he had removed his helmet and was carrying it by the chin strap. He had no bludgeon, no revolver, yet he impressed Jones almost as much as he ...
— The Man Who Lost Himself • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... M. of Crookdom. He was an artist in the confidence line. He never saw a bludgeon in his life; and he scorned knockout drops. In fact, he would have set nothing before an intended victim but the purest of drinks, if it had been possible to procure such a thing in New York. It was the ambition of "Spider" Kelley to ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... his seat from not observing that rule. In the open air pitch out a fact or two—not too many—or a couple of round sums of figures first of all, just to give them confidence in you, and then go straight for your opponent. No rapier play—it's lost then—but crack him on the top-knot with a bludgeon. They'll want to hear his skull ring before they'll believe that you have touched him. Phrases! Those are the things to get you in, not arguments. Pin a label on his coat-tails. You'll see them laugh as he squirms round to pull it off. And, ...
— The Philanderers • A.E.W. Mason
... see or be seen after that hour in the rather extreme negligee of the early morning. Also it becomes the universal custom, or perhaps I should say the necessity, to slumber for an hour after the noon meal. Certainly sleep descending on the tropical traveller is armed with a bludgeon. Passengers, crew, steerage, "deck," animal, and bird fall down then in an enchantment. I have often wondered who navigates the ship during that sacred hour, or, indeed, if anybody navigates it at all. Perhaps that time is sacred to the genii of the old East, who close all prying mortal ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... four advanced to knock with his bludgeon at the door of the chamber, and the others followed him, and were bravely beaten back by the knight. Then began a fight which lasted long, and although the two parties were so unequally matched, the good knight vanquished ...
— One Hundred Merrie And Delightsome Stories - Les Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles • Various
... rest-day; Army resting about Krakau, after such a spell through the woody moors. The King, with small escort, rides out reconnoitring, hither, thither, on the southern side or Lacy quarter: to the top of the Keulenberg (BLUDGEON HILL), at last,—which is ten or a dozen miles from Krakau and Quosdorf, but commands an extensive view. Towns, village-belfries, courses of streams; a country of mossy woods and wild agricultures, of bogs, of shaggy moor. ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... themselves evoked more criticism and opposition from the orthodox than this doughty champion of orthodoxy. But Warburton was in his element when engaged in controversy. He was quite ready to meet combatants from whatever side they might come; and, wielding his bludgeon with a vigorous hand, he dealt his blows now on the orthodox, now on the heterodox, with unsparing and impartial force. Judged, however, from a literary point of view, 'The Divine Legation' is too elaborate and too discursive a work to be effective for the purpose ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... that it usually lasted a fortnight or three weeks; that a considerable military force was always engaged (for our Irish law permits this), and which, when nothing pressing was doing, was regularly assailed by both parties; that far more dependence was placed in a bludgeon than a pistol; and that the man who registered a vote without a cracked pate was regarded as a kind of natural phenomenon,—some faint idea may be formed how much such a scene must have contributed to ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... go; and not only the Arcadia, that "vain and amatorious poem" which Milton condemned, but the sonnets which one would have thought such a lover of poetry as Hazlitt must have spared, go down also before his remorseless bludgeon. ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... The bludgeon of a ministerial myrmidon paralyzed his brilliant intellect, and he was not allowed to participate in the scenes of the Revolution which ensued. Just as the white banner of peace began to wave over ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... day with one of the most influential of the Whig party at New York, he was talking about their success in the contest—"We beat them, sir, literally with their own weapons." "How so," replied I. "Why, sir, we bought over all their bludgeon men at so many dollars a head, and the very sticks intended to be used to keep us from the poll were employed upon the heads of the Loco-focos!" So much for purity ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... village. The idol consists of a block of wood with a human face rudely carved on each side; it stands under a gateway composed of two uprights and a cross-bar. Beside the idol generally lies a white rag intended to keep off the devil; and sometimes there is also a stick which seems to represent a bludgeon or weapon of some sort. Further, from the cross-bar hangs a small log which serves the useful purpose of knocking on the head any evil spirit who might attempt to pass through the gateway. Clearly this ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... oath, as he rested his bludgeon in a corner with his hat upon it, and took his seat at the same table with them, 'it does me good to think of. There was a opportunity! But it led to nothing. For my part, I don't know what would. There's no spirit among ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... eight the hall was crowded. Manson was there, sitting in the front row, and leaning forward on his heavy oak stick which seemed a very bludgeon of authority. Beside him sat his wife, small, slight and gentle, the very antithesis of her dark and formidable husband. Manson's eyes roved from Filmer to Clark and back again to Filmer, but the two looked over his head and seemed no whit disconcerted. A little further back ...
— The Rapids • Alan Sullivan
... hand; to encourage the ignorant citizen to ask for instruction and direction, instead of placing upon him the task of making bricks without either clay or straw. There are times and seasons and individuals at which and on whom the bludgeon must be used—the greater good covering the lesser evil; but such cases are less common than present practice ...
— Euthenics, the science of controllable environment • Ellen H. Richards
... to cast a glance into that unbeautiful Hungarian-Bohemian scramble, comparable to an "Irish Donnybrook," where Albert Achilles long walked as Chief-Constable. It behooves us, after all, to point out some of the tallest heads in it; and whitherward, bludgeon in hand, they seem to be swaying and ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. III. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Hohenzollerns In Brandenburg—1412-1718 • Thomas Carlyle
... we must deny the present applicability of the note upon 'Magazines' compiled by Pope, or rather by Warburton, for the episcopal bludgeon is perceptible in the prose description. They are not at present 'the eruption of every miserable scribbler, the scum of every dirty newspaper, or fragments of fragments picked up from every dirty dunghill ... equally the disgrace of human wit, morality, decency, and common sense.' ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... vengeance. Shortly afterwards, Mrs. Squeers, arrayed in the white topcoat and tied up in various shawls and handkerchiefs, issued forth in another chaise in another direction, taking with her a good-sized bludgeon, several odd pieces of strong cord, and a stout labouring man; all provided and carried upon the expedition with the sole object of assisting in the capture, and (once caught) insuring the safe custody of ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... largest ever seen on the farm—and killed it just as it was moving across an old barrel. I cannot now understand why it tried to cross the barrel, but I distinctly visualize the brown and yellow band it made as it lay for an instant just before the bludgeon fell upon it, crushing it and the barrel together. He was thicker than my leg and glistened in the sun with sinister splendor. As he hung limp over the fence, a warning to his fellows, it was hard for me to realize that death still lay in his ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... assailants by the heels. It was a little man, a withered fellow scarcely five feet tall and literally dried up by the tropic heat. He was wrenched from his hold, heaved into the air, and then whirled about the head of McTee like a mighty bludgeon. As the sailors rushed again, that living club smashed against them and flung them back. Even to the herculean strength of McTee it was a prodigious feat, but the danger gave him for the moment the power of a madman. Twice he swung the shrieking little sailor, and twice that body ...
— Harrigan • Max Brand
... length fairly settled himself, and being nothing loath to make inquiry concerning the strange objects around him, which his host was equally ready, as far as possible, to explain, Lovel was introduced to a large club, or bludgeon, with an iron spike at the end of it, which, it seems, had been lately found in a field on the Monkbarns property, adjacent to an old burying-ground. It had mightily the air of such a stick as the Highland reapers use to walk with on their annual peregrinations from their mountains; but ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... turning him loose on the world. Well, be careful. Find out first, while you can. It's all here to see, if you'll open your eyes, but you're all so dead sure that you want life everlasting that nobody's even bothered to look. And now it's become such a political bludgeon that nobody ...
— Martyr • Alan Edward Nourse
... night; locating the guinea-hen, he slipped up stealthily with a stout stick. The bird was pouring out its heart, tearing the moonlight to tatters. Stealing up close, Clemens made a vicious swing with his bludgeon, but just then the guinea stepped forward a little, and he missed. The stroke and his explosion frightened the fowl, and it started to run. Clemens, with his mind now on the single purpose of revenge, started after it. Around the trees, along the paths, up and down the lawn, through ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... that it may open for me at no distant period, provided such be the will of God. My pains were those of the heart, and had something flattering in their character; if in the head, it was from the blow of a bludgeon gallantly received ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... crown of the second hexan, who had already torn one guard apart and was leaping toward Czuv, his hereditary foe. In midflight he was dashed to the floor, his head a shapeless, pulpy mass, and Brandon, bludgeon again aloft, strode deeper into the fray. For a brief moment searing lethal beams probed here and there, chains clanked and snapped, once more that ponderous and irresistible oaken mace fell like the hammer of Thor, again spattering brains and blood abroad as it descended—then again came ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... mirror in which men could read the future; it must have been of other stuff than burning coal; for in all the shapes and pictures that I sat and gazed at, there was never a ship, never a seaman with a hairy cap, never a big bludgeon for my silly head, or the least sign of all those tribulations that were ripe to fall ...
— Kidnapped • Robert Louis Stevenson
... on the tiled floor with his heavy boots, his voice thundered and he smote the furniture, whilst he related how he had whipped some of his pupils that morning, or expounded his moral principles in terms as stern, as uncompromising as bludgeon-blows. Then feeling bored, he suggested that he and La Teuse should have a game at cards. They had endless bouts of 'Beggar-my-neighbour' together, that being the only game which La Teuse had ever been able to learn. Abbe Mouret would smilingly glance ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... glanced at the opposite mirror, and took up a volume; he seemed absorbed in its contents, as a tall fellow, a bludgeon in his hand, a girdle adorned with pistols round his waist, opened the door, and announced two visitors. The one was a young man, said to resemble Robespierre in person, but of a far more decided and resolute expression of countenance. ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... the slow beating of a distant drum. Some natures it startles; some it stupefies. To one it comes like the stroke of an arrow, stinging all the sensibilities to a keener life; to another as the blow of a bludgeon, which in crushing benumbs. We may conceive Murlock to have been that way affected, for (and here we are upon surer ground than that of conjecture) no sooner had he finished his pious work than, sinking into ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... of the thing itself. For, as in an indictment for murder, in order to close every loophole of evasion, the prudent attorney affirms that the accused did the deed with an awfully destructive to-wit,—with a knife, axe, bludgeon, pistol, bootjack, six-pounder, and what not, which were then and there in the Briarean hands of him the said What's-his-name, so Mr. Choate represents the Republican Party to have attempted the assassination of the Constitution ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... sunny room, felt bruised by that bludgeon word—which, as it happened, was not accurate, for Maurice, by this time, had gained a maturity of thought and patience that put him practically out of boyhood. When Eleanor repeated her caller's remarks ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... without a struggle or a motion, from the repose of sleep to the repose of death! It is the assassin's purpose to make sure work; and he plies the dagger, though it is obvious that life has been destroyed by the blow of the bludgeon. He even raises the aged arm, that he may not fail in his aim at the heart, and replaces it again over the wounds of the poniard. To finish the picture, he explores the wrist for the pulse! He feels for it and ascertains that ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... potential cause of failure, namely, the uncertainty, to which perhaps the escape of De Wet at Poplar Grove may be due, whether a battle was to be fought with the Commander-in-Chiefs rapier or with the Chief-of-the-Staff's bludgeon. ...
— A Handbook of the Boer War • Gale and Polden, Limited
... never accepted money or anything but food, he of course made his own garments—and what garments they were! Many years ago I used to see, strolling about St. James's Park, a huge hairy gentleman, with a bludgeon in his hand, and clothed with a bear's skin to which the head and paws were attached. It may be that this eccentric individual is remembered by some of my readers, but I assure them that he was quite a St. James's Park dandy compared with my hermit. He wore a pair of gigantic ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... was a typical cave man—squat muscular, and hairy, and of a type I had not seen before. His features, like those of all the primeval men of Pellucidar, were regular and fine. His weapons consisted of a stone ax and knife and a heavy knobbed bludgeon of wood. His ...
— Pellucidar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... who disagreed with them did so for a bad motive, and exalted their own whims and prejudices into moral principles; both of them irritable and sensitive, both able to give instantaneous and elaborate expression to their vaguest thoughts,—Carlyle himself with eloquence which he wielded like a bludgeon, and Mrs. Carlyle with incisiveness which she used like a sharp knife—Carlyle with too much to do, and Mrs. Carlyle with less than nothing to do—each passionately attached to the other as soon as they ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Crompton, man and boy, these fifty years, and had a good many rough-and-tumbles with that sort, and I have never had the worst of it yet. It prevents bloodshed on both sides; for if you haven't no shooting-iron, there's few Englishmen, poachers or not, who will draw trigger on you; and as for a bludgeon, it's as likely to be in my hand as another's ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn |
