"Mortar" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... all haste to rejoin our companions. And now behold what a miracle of reanimation may be wrought by a few handfuls of bread grain! In a trice the Catawba had found a water-worn stone to serve for a mortar, and another for a pestle. These and the bag of corn were carried back to a sheltered ravine which we had crossed on our late advance; and here the Indian fell to work to grind the corn into coarse meal, whilst Yeates and I kindled a fire to heat ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde
... to life, and that without breath a man would die, and that white powders cured fevers, and black drops stopped the dysentery. At last we arrived in this town, and the other day, as I was pounding the drug of reflection in the mortar of patience, the physician desired me to bring his lancets, and to follow him. I paced through the streets behind the learned Hakim, until we arrived at a mean house, in an obscure quarter of this grand city over which ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Captain Frederick Marryat
... which rules and beautifies it, as a lover adorns his mistress. But it was not the less the most charming city in the universe; and Philip Jocelyn and his wife were as happy as two children in this paradise of brick and mortar. ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... This force may be thus enumerated: ten pieces of field artillery, one mortar 8 inch caliber, and two small howitzers, attached to which were one hundred and twenty cannoneers; three hundred Turkish infantry and seven hundred Mogrebin ditto; the remainder of the army Turkish and Bedouin cavalry, together ...
— A Narrative of the Expedition to Dongola and Sennaar • George Bethune English
... right hahd hit, fo' a fact. He said to me, 'Good-day, seh,' sezee; 'good-day, seh,' he says to me, an' then he starts across the street, an' first thing I know, he falls down flat on his face, seh. Saw that theah brick an' mortar comin' down, an' fell flat on his face. This hyeh pill-man 'lowed 'twuz sunstroke; but a Southern man like I am don't need to be told what a gentleman's feelings are when he sees his house a-torn down—no, seh. If you ever down oweh way, seh, ...
— The Story of a New York House • Henry Cuyler Bunner
... school in winter he shovels paths; in summer he turns the grindstone. He knows where there are lots of winter-greens and sweet flag-root, but instead of going for them, he is to stay in-doors and pare apples and stone raisins and pound something in a mortar. And yet, with his mind full of schemes of what he would like to do, and his hands full of occupations, he is an idle boy who has nothing to busy himself with but school and chores! He would gladly do all the work if somebody else would do the chores, he thinks, and yet I ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... all this building and rebuilding, nothing remains, of the ancient city. A mass of masonry near the Mussulman cemetery, which Chevalier in 1699 saw covered with a mosaic pavement, is still visible, but is Roman work, rubble and mortar. As Pashley says, the modern walls of Canea would have been sufficient to consume all vestiges of the ancient building. The citations he gives ought to put at rest all question, of the identity of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... piazza before San Spirito in Sassia was half filled with masses of stone and brickwork and crumbling mortar. A young girl lay motionless upon her face at the corner of the hospital, her white hands stretched out towards the man who lay dead but a few feet before her, crushed under a great irregular mound of stones and rubbish. Beneath ...
— Sant' Ilario • F. Marion Crawford
... Greek sculpture are very scanty. The statues of gold and ivory vanished long ago. The bronze statues, formerly numbered by thousands, have nearly all gone into the melting pot. Sculptures in marble were turned into mortar or used as building materials. Those which escaped such a fate were often ruined by wanton mutilation and centuries of neglect. The statues which we still possess are mainly marble copies, made in ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... best of all was when he could get in a corner by himself, with no one to disturb him, and build castles and things out of some abandoned clay or mortar, or wet sand if there was nothing better. The plastic material took strange shapes of beauty under his hands. It was as if life had been somehow breathed into it by his touch, and it ordered itself as none of the other boys could make it. His fingers were tipped ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... great number of machines, on the other hand, may be compared to a complete workman. Thus, the action of the mill which grinds grain has very little resemblance to the blowing of the wind or the running of the water, whereas the rising and falling of the pestle in the small mortar for throwing grenades corresponds to the motion of the arm. (Rau, Lehrbuch I, 125.) The infinite number of functions of which our members are capable is related to their inability to attain alone the greater number of their ends. Hence animals which require no ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... Mary descended on the day of her execution, is built into an old inn at Oundle, not far away. Thus the great fortress was scattered to the four winds, but there is something more enduring than stone and mortar,—its memories linger and will remain so long as the story of English history is told. King James, by the destruction of the castle, endeavored to show fitting respect to the memory of his mother and no doubt hoped ...
— British Highways And Byways From A Motor Car - Being A Record Of A Five Thousand Mile Tour In England, - Wales And Scotland • Thomas D. Murphy
... tables, and which is an article of very considerable trade, is but a new manufacture. A respectable seedsman who lived in Pall-Mall was the first who prepared it in this state for sale. The seeds of the white sort had been used to be bruised in a mortar and eaten sometimes as a condiment, but only in ...
— The Botanist's Companion, Vol. II • William Salisbury
... Winifred had lived and died I passed into a new world of horror. Dead matter had become conscious, and for a second or two it was not the human being before me, but the rusty iron, the broken furniture, the great patches of brick and dirty mortar where the plaster had fallen from the walls,—it was these which seemed to have life—a terrible life—and to be talking to me, telling me what I dared not listen to about the triumph of evil over good. I knew that the woman was still ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... but, more considerate than the other attendants of the king, he made some provision for the deserted corpse. He sent for one of the subordinates of the palace, and ordered him to watch by the body. Then, going to his carriage, he saw several hodmen lounging about, who were carrying mortar for some repairs that were being made at the palace. The physician called them, and bade them go tell the lord-Steward that the king's coffin must be saturated with spirits of wine, and his ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... water on them, which will make them peel easily; either roll them with a bottle on the cake board or pound in a mortar, with a little loaf-sugar; they should not be pounded too much or they will be oily; peach kernels make a fine flavoring for custard, but as they contain prussic acid, ...
— Domestic Cookery, Useful Receipts, and Hints to Young Housekeepers • Elizabeth E. Lea
... reached the required height. The chimney is formed by four poles of the proper length, interlaced with a wicker-work of small branches. A hole or pit is dug, near at hand, and, with a mixture of clay and water, a sort of mortar is formed. Large wisps of hay are filled with this thick substance, and fashioned with the hands into what are technically called "clay cats," and these are filled in among the frame-work of the chimney ...
— Wau-bun - The Early Day in the Northwest • Juliette Augusta Magill Kinzie
... and a half by two feet and a half. The foundation was of rock stones, which were also squared; and one of them measured four feet seven inches by two feet four. Such a structure, raised without the assistance of iron-tools to shape the stones, or mortar to join them, struck us with astonishment: It seemed to be as compact and firm as it could have been made by any workman in Europe, except that the steps, which range along its greatest length, are not perfectly straight, but sink in a kind of ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... Her grave was identified in 1875, and her remains were found enclosed in a shroud and in a tomb of solid masonry, 7 feet by 2 feet 5 inches, by 2 feet 5 inches. The covering slab had a cross incised with the words "Mercy, Lord Jhu" (Jesu). The top of the slab had traces of mortar upon it, pointing to the fact that her tomb was built immediately over it. We know from the chronicle that it was a "very handsome marble tomb, exquisitely carved." It was a table tomb bearing an effigy of the Lady Isabelle ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Abbey Church of Tewkesbury - with some Account of the Priory Church of Deerhurst Gloucestershire • H. J. L. J. Masse
... five of his band. The bodies of the culprits were buried in the jail-yard, on the spot where the court-house stands, and old residents identified Smith's skeleton, when it was accidentally exhumed, by its uncommon size. A farmer from an adjacent town made off with a thigh bone, and a mason clapped mortar into the empty skull and cemented it into the wall, ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... streams, until at last a lump of pasty metal remained. This was squeezed again and again, until not a single globule of quicksilver passed through the leather. The ball, which was of the consistency of half-dried mortar was then taken out, and the process repeated again and again until the whole of the quicksilver had been passed through the leather. Six lumps of amalgam about the size of ...
— In The Heart Of The Rockies • G. A. Henty
... their own medicines. In their shops you see an amazing variety of drugs; you will occasionally also see tethered a live stag, which on a certain day, to be decided by the priests, will be pounded whole in a pestle and mortar. "Pills manufactured out of a whole stag slaughtered with purity of purpose on a propitious day," is a common announcement in dispensaries in China. The wall of a doctor's shop is usually stuck all over with disused plasters returned by grateful ...
— An Australian in China - Being the Narrative of a Quiet Journey Across China to Burma • George Ernest Morrison
... sheer wall beneath him. He saw, scrutinizing it intently, that the stone blocks that composed it were not smooth cut, but rough hewn, with the marks of the cutters' chisels plainly in evidence. Also there was a considerable ridge between each layer of blocks where the Rogans' mortar had squeezed out in the process ...
— The Red Hell of Jupiter • Paul Ernst
... tumblers or teacups or tin cans with wet sand and others with clay that has been wet and then thoroughly stirred till it is about the consistency of cake batter or fresh mixed mortar. Take a tumbler of the wet sand and one of the wet clay and plant two or three kernels of corn in each, pressing the kernels down one-half or three-quarters of an inch below the surface; cover the seeds and carefully smooth the surface. In other tumblers plant peas, beans, and other seeds. ...
— The First Book of Farming • Charles L. Goodrich
... to kens of her former captivity, even a burdensome chain of superfluous and superstitious ceremonies, her undefiled garments are stained with the meritricious bravery of Babylonish ornaments, and with the symbolising badges of conformity with Rome, her harmless hands reach brick and mortar to the building of Babel, her beautiful feet with shoes are all besmeared, whilst they return apace in the way of Egypt, and wade the ingruent brooks of Popery. Oh! transformed virgin, whether is thy beauty gone from thee? Oh! forlorn prince's daughter, how art thou not ...
— The Works of Mr. George Gillespie (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Gillespie
... railway, by much the same route as did Mr. Pickwick and his friends, and reaches the Medway at Strood and Rochester through a grime and gloom which hardly existed in Dickens' time to the same compromising extent that it does to-day. Bricks, mortar, belching chimneys, and roaring furnaces line the route far into the ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun
... stepping high, Sam called me behind the counter to assist in reviving Duncan. We found him leaning upon the counter, his forehead resting upon a mortar, very red in the face and breathing stertorously; and when Sam addressed him, to learn what was the matter, he seemed unable to speak, but choked and beat the air feebly with his hands. Sam concluded he had swallowed something, and was, I think, right; he was plainly half strangled, ...
— The Fortune Hunter • Louis Joseph Vance
... but its use is by no means of recent date. It is no uncommon thing in the taking down of heavy walls several centuries old to find that the method of building was to carry up face and back with rubble and stiff mortar, and to fill the interior with bowlders and gravel, the interstices of which were filled by grouting—the whole mass becoming virtually a monolith. Modern quick-setting cement accomplishes this object within ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 643, April 28, 1888 • Various
... her love-story came and the building was abandoned, at Miss Asenath's request the woodland was fenced off. Hence, its name of "Miss Asenath's Woods." She had never gone there since the day when with her own hands she had spread a layer of mortar between two stones "for luck," but she knew every inch of it as it was now, every tree and bush, from Arethusa's vivid description. Arethusa's imagination could for herself, from Miss Asenath's telling, place the little ...
— The Heart of Arethusa • Francis Barton Fox
... adjoining buildings; but every one surrounds his house with a vacant space, [97] either by way of security against fire, [97] or through ignorance of the art of building. For, indeed, they are unacquainted with the use of mortar and tiles; and for every purpose employ rude unshapen timber, fashioned with no regard to pleasing the eye. They bestow more than ordinary pains in coating certain parts of their buildings with a kind of earth, so pure and shining that it gives the appearance of painting. They also dig subterraneous ...
— The Germany and the Agricola of Tacitus • Tacitus
... four feet in thickness, heavily buttressed; the bricks set in mortar tougher than themselves. They enclosed two acres of rich black soil at the mouth of Inniscaw's one valley, where it widens into a marsh beside the shore. Between them and the water's edge stood the Lord Proprietor's new schoolhouse, above a small landing ...
— Major Vigoureux • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... of the boulevard was covered with torn cartridge wads; the sidewalk on the northern side disappeared beneath the mortar torn from the fronts of the houses by the bullets, and was as white as if snow had fallen on it; while pools of blood left large dark patches on that snow of ruins. The foot of the passer-by avoided a corpse only to tread upon fragments of broken glass, plaster, or stone; ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... remnants of their unshed pollen were ground in a mortar with a small amount of water in clear quartz sand. One cubic centimeter of the resulting turbid suspension was added to 10 cc. of warm fluid agar and mixed by rotating ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Thirty-Fourth Annual Report 1943 • Various
... much reading must be for the eyes, until the tinkling of her shop-bell called her away to a customer. At twenty-five minutes to six he put the book back in the window-sill, dashed a few crumbs from his jacket, assumed a mortar-board cap that was lying on the tea-caddy, and went forth ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells
... and do it quite as well."[164] Again, McGee[165] comments on the extraordinary capacity of quite aged women for heavy labour. He tells of "a withered crone, weighing apparently not more than 80 to 90 lb. who carried a kilio containing a stone mortar 196 lb. in weight for more than half a mile on a sandy road without any perceptible exhaustion. The proportion of the active aged is much larger than ...
— The Position of Woman in Primitive Society - A Study of the Matriarchy • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... new homes on the land, and even then they came but a few at a time and only as huts were ready and fully equipped to receive them. Each hut contained a combination kitchen and living-room, with a single bedchamber. A substantial fireplace, built of stone and mortar, with a tall chimney at the back, was a feature in every house. The cracks between the logs, and all chinks, were sealed with thick layers of mortar; the ceilings, made of stout saplings, were treated in a similar manner, while the roof, resting on a sturdy ridge-pole, and securely ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... him to the poor little lodge, and when they had found him, they brought the chief's beautiful daughter to be his wife. Lo, she was the girl who had come to borrow his grandmother's mortar! ...
— Wigwam Evenings - Sioux Folk Tales Retold • Charles Alexander Eastman and Elaine Goodale Eastman
... simply and unaffectedly as ever; and while he talked he made a crowd of little men and women the size of your finger, and they went diligently to work and cleared and leveled off a space a couple of yards square in the grass and began to build a cunning little castle in it, the women mixing the mortar and carrying it up the scaffoldings in pails on their heads, just as our work-women have always done, and the men laying the courses of masonry—five hundred of these toy people swarming briskly about and working diligently and wiping the sweat off their faces as natural as life. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... The outer coating only of the pillars was of good stone. Wren says, "They are only cased without, and that with small stones, not one greater than a Man's Burden, but within is nothing but a Core of small Rubbishstone, and much Mortar, which easily crushes and yields to the Weight." Even the outer casing, he adds, "is much torn with age, and the Neglect of the Roof."[43] Double engaged shafts reached to the clerestory, and supported the springers. ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of St. Paul - An Account of the Old and New Buildings with a Short Historical Sketch • Arthur Dimock
... employ, and it is no more improper to call it the law-making power, although it does not ultimately decide what action is to be performed, than to say that a house was built by one who did not with his own hands lay the bricks and spread the mortar. ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... Rouen close beneath, and the river Seine, broadening and glittering on one side in its course to the sea, and on the other narrowing to a blue ribbon, winding through the green expanse of fertile Normandy. They threw the pebbles and bits of mortar down that they might hear them fall, and tried which could stand nearest to the edge of the battlement without being giddy. Richard was pleased to find that he could go the nearest, and began to tell some of Fru Astrida's stories about the precipices of Norway, ...
— The Little Duke - Richard the Fearless • Charlotte M. Yonge
... husband, who was awaiting her at Berne, and whose letters, both in prose and verse, were her comfort in her exile. This future husband was an apothecary, and the idea that he pounded out verses as he pounded his drugs in a mortar, and rolled out rhymes with his pills, sometimes inclined Jacqueline to laugh, but she listened patiently to the plaintive outpourings of her 'promeneuse', because she wished to acquire a right to reciprocate by a few half-confidences of her own. In her turn, therefore, she confided to Fraulein ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... happened in our first month at sea—events so subtle as perhaps to seem an unimportant part of this narrative of a strange voyage, yet really as necessary to the foundation of the story as the single bricks and the single dabs of mortar at the base of a tall chimney are necessary to the completed structure. I later had cause to remember each trivial incident as if it had been written in ...
— The Mutineers • Charles Boardman Hawes
... the consistent defender. Towards ugliness, hideousness, rawness, whether manifested in life or in letters, he was always implacable; and this sentiment no doubt accounts for much of his hostility to Dissent. Margate was, in his eyes, a "brick-and-mortar image of English Protestantism, representing it in all its prose, all its uncomeliness—let me add, all its salubrity." When criticising the proposal to let Dissenters bury their dead with their own rites in the National Church-yards, he ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... be no doubt of her ardent patriotism; for self-love includes one's country. Clerambault would never have expected to find any sympathy in her for his theories of fraternal pity. She had little enough for her friends, but none at all for her enemies. She would have ground them in a mortar with the same cold satisfaction that she felt when she tormented hearts or teased insects because something or somebody ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain
... In June she began one over a window on the porch where I sleep in the open air. She had the foundation laid when I appeared, and was not a little disturbed by my presence, especially in the early morning, when I wanted to sleep and she wanted to work. She let fall some of her mortar upon me, but at least I had no fear of a falling brick. She gradually got used to me, and her work was progressing into the moss stage when two women appeared and made their beds upon the porch, and in the morning went to and fro with brooms, of course. Then Ph[oe]be seemed to ...
— The Wit of a Duck and Other Papers • John Burroughs
... taking place in this clump of ruins. Huge roan-coloured bouquets of brickdust and ashes leaped from time to time into the air and slowly dissolved into a tawny mist which floated slowly beyond the scarred edge of the hill. It must have been a big howitzer shell, or perhaps a very large trench mortar bomb, which was making them. Gradually most of our artillery in the background to the left of us seemed to be converging upon this village. Suddenly, at a little before 4 p.m., there lashed on to the place the shrapnel ...
— Letters from France • C. E. W. Bean
... exceeding cleanness are sadly at war with the picturesque. To whatever the hand of man builds the hand of Time adds a grace, and nothing is so prosaic as the rawly new. Fancy for a moment the difference for the worse, if all the grim, browned, rotted walls of Rome, with their peeling mortar, their thousand daubs of varying grays and yellows, their jutting brickwork and patched stonework, from whose intervals the cement has crumbled off, their waving weeds and grasses and flowers, now sparsely fringing their top, now thickly protruding from their ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... university. You would think the rules very strict! When the Cambridge men go to chapel, and at other specified times, they are required to wear their gowns and queer little flat caps, called 'trenchers' or 'mortar-boards.' At Oxford, the gates of each college are closed at nine o'clock every evening; a man may stay out later (even until twelve), if he can give a good reason for it. If he remains out all night, though, he is immediately dismissed. How would you like that?" she laughed, seeing John's disgusted ...
— John and Betty's History Visit • Margaret Williamson
... constructed as foundations of the more important edifices of the mound-building people. Many of the great buildings erected on such pyramidal foundations, at Palenque, Uxmal, and elsewhere in that region, have not disappeared, because they were built of hewn stone laid in mortar. For reasons not difficult to understand, the Mound-Builders, beginning their works on the lower Mississippi, constructed such edifices of wood or some other perishable material; therefore not a trace of them remains. The higher mounds, with broad, flat summits, reached by flights ...
— Ancient America, in Notes on American Archaeology • John D. Baldwin
... congregated. It was looked upon as the Gibraltar of the North, and had been considerably strengthened since the commencement of the war. The citadel of this water-surrounded fortress is called Wargon. The allied fleet, consisting of seventeen British men-of-war, fifteen gunboats, and sixteen mortar-vessels, with two French men-of-war, six gunboats, and five mortar-vessels, left Nargen on the 6th of August, and anchored the same night among the islands about five miles from Sveaborg. During the night and next day, some batteries were thrown up on the neighbouring ...
— Our Sailors - Gallant Deeds of the British Navy during Victoria's Reign • W.H.G. Kingston
... than once mistaken Cilix compressa, a little white and grey moth, for a piece of bird's dung dropped upon a leaf, and vice versa the dung for the moth. Bryophila Glandifera and Perla are the very image of the mortar walls on which they rest; and only this summer, in Switzerland, I amused myself for some time in watching a moth, probably Larentia tripunctaria, fluttering about quite close to me, and then alighting ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace
... to be so much fatigued from labor that they could scarcely get to their lodging places from the field at night. And then they would have to prepare something to eat before they could lie down to rest. Their corn they had to grind on a hand mill for bread stuff, or pound it in a mortar; and by the time they would get their suppers it would be midnight; then they would herd down all together and take but two or three hours rest, before the overseer's horn called them up again to ...
— Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave, Written by Himself • Henry Bibb
... "What a waste of time and labor," he mused. "Who would undertake such a thing nowadays? Fancy the patience and delicacy of finger required to fit all these shells in their places! and they are embedded in strong mortar too, as if the work were ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... the corner of the room like a shell from a mortar, but in a moment he was seated at his place at the table again, with a broad grin on his face. "Is it down William?" shouted the old man. "Yes, Mr. Haynes, the durned ...
— Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales • Robert L. Taylor
... for the crowded and irregular character of Old-World cities. They grew, and were not builded. Accumulations of people, who lighted like bees upon a chance branch, they found themselves hived in obdurate brick and mortar before they knew it; and then, to meet the necessities of their cribbed, cabined, and confined condition, they must tear down sacred landmarks, sacrifice invaluable possessions, and trample on prescriptive rights, to provide breathing-room ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various
... except when it is cloudy. Neither need be more than four thousand miles off; so much the larger and more beautiful will they be. If on the old Thornbush moon old Herschel with his reflector could see a town-house two hundred feet long, on the Brick Moon young Herschel will be able to see a dab of mortar a foot and a half long, if he wants to. And people without the reflector, with their opera-glasses, will be able to see sufficiently well." And to this they agreed: that eventually there must be two Brick ...
— The Brick Moon, et. al. • Edward Everett Hale
... confined air, fanned his cheek. He looked up. The current had been set in motion by the swaying of a great bell beginning to get under way. There was a crash of sound, the bell gathered momentum, and now the clapper, like a gigantic pestle, was grinding the great bronze mortar with a deafening clamour. The tower trembled, the balcony on which Durtal was standing trepidated like the floor of a railway coach, there was the continuous rolling of a mighty reverberation, interrupted regularly by the jar of ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... was, strewing upon the surface of the sand a handful or two of white powdered quartz, which, from having been pulverized in an iron mortar, was so oxydized as to turn a deep yellow. This might have ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... masonry, and the pages were ordered to keep under shelter of the wall of the castle unless summoned on duty. Indeed, the court-yard had now become a more dangerous station than the wall itself; for not only did the cannon-shot fly through the breaches, but fragments of bricks, mortar, and rubbish flew along with a force that would have been ...
— By England's Aid • G. A. Henty
... his pachydermic frame draped in his gown, and his mortar-board cap on his head, for the Seniors were required to wear their regalia during Commencement week, was bellowing through a megaphone, as he stood on the steps of Bannister Hall, and Mr. Hicks, with his cheerful ...
— T. Haviland Hicks Senior • J. Raymond Elderdice
... Apparatus, which was being placed in position on the rocks, is an invention by which many human lives are saved on our coasts every year. Like Manby's Mortar Apparatus, it is simple in its action ...
— The Lifeboat • R.M. Ballantyne
... insignificant huts often stand close to a palace having twenty or twenty-five windows in one front. Private dwellings in the mountainous parts are built of unhewn stone, cemented with a very strong calcareous mortar. On the coast the walls are of brick. In the departments of Junin and Ayacucho, I met with the ruins of great villages, consisting of dwellings of a peculiar construction, in the form of a tower. Each ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... the bread. Not that we were not hungry, and not that the bread was uneatable. It was fairly good bread. But we had reasons. My cell-mate had discovered that our cell was alive with bed-bugs. In all the cracks and interstices between the bricks where the mortar had fallen out flourished great colonies. The natives even ventured out in the broad daylight and swarmed over the walls and ceiling by hundreds. My cell-mate was wise in the ways of the beasts. Like Childe Roland, ...
— The Road • Jack London
... post, ready to startle the new-fledged freshmen from their first uneasy slumbers. All these venerable edifices stand as they did when we were boys,—when our grandfathers were boys. Let not the rash hand of innovation violate their sanctities, for the cement that knits these walls is no vulgar mortar, but is tempered with associations and memories which are stronger than ...
— Model Speeches for Practise • Grenville Kleiser
... on the further side of a green valley, could be seen buildings with an encircling wall of flint and mortar faced with ruddy brick, the dark red-tiled roofs rising among walnut-trees, and an orchard in full bloom spreading into a long ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... so, with some slight additions, it had remained to this day, for in those ages men did not skimp their flint, and oak, and mortar. It was a beautiful little spot, situated upon the flat top of a swelling hill, which comprised the ten acres of grazing ground originally granted, and was, strange to say, still the most magnificently-timbered piece of ground in the country side. ...
— Colonel Quaritch, V.C. - A Tale of Country Life • H. Rider Haggard
... converted into grey syenite by a large granular mixture of white quartz and feldspar with the black hornblende. From this rock the people form their sugar-mills, which are made like a pestle and mortar, the mortar being cut out of the hornblende rock, and the pestle ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... downward, But at the wider gallery next below Recognise master-masons with pricked parchments: That builder then, as one who condescends Unto the sea and all that is beneath him, His hairy breast on the wet mortar, calls 'How many fathoms is it yet to heaven!' On the next eminence the orgulous king Nimroud stands up conceiving he shall live To conquer god, now that he knows where god is: His eager hands push up the tower in thought ... Again, his shaggy inhuman height strides down Among the ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various
... TURKEY—Put a dozen or fifteen large chestnuts into a saucepan of water, and boil them until they are quite tender, then take off the shells and skins, put into a mortar and pound them. Put four ounces of shredded beef suet into a basin, stir in one-half pound of bread crumbs, season with salt and pepper to taste, and squeeze in a little lemon juice. Mix in a pound of chestnuts and stuffing will be ready ...
— Good Things to Eat as Suggested by Rufus • Rufus Estes
... the door is located by placing a bowl of food on each side of where it is to be. Likewise particles of food, mixed with salt, are sprinkled along the lines upon which the walls are to stand. The women bring water, clay, and earth, and mix a mud mortar, which is used sparingly between the layers of stone. Walls are from eight to eighteen inches thick and seven or eight feet high, above which rafters or poles are placed and smaller poles crosswise above these, then willows or reeds closely laid, and above all reeds or grass holding a spread ...
— The Unwritten Literature of the Hopi • Hattie Greene Lockett
... winter. Under these circumstances he imitated the backwoodsman's practice of hutting. Trees were felled, and log-huts wore erected, the interstices of which were filled up with earth, moss, and a rude kind of mortar, in order to render them warm and comfortable. Around them, for defence, two redoubts were erected and an intrenchment, drawn with a ditch six feet wide and three or four feet deep. His left was covered by the ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... unpleasant things too, and those who live a hundred years hence will not be troubled with that fool. True, there will be other Berkinses, and there will be other gardens, and other girls, but that doesn't make it the least less sad to see this garden pass into bricks and mortar." ...
— Spring Days • George Moore
... a long, low, old-fashioned one, covered externally with dark blue mortar in French provincial style, and internally presenting every appearance of hospitality and comfort. The parlours in which Germain was shown into the presence of the owner were hung about with mellowed tapestry, and their ...
— The False Chevalier - or, The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette • William Douw Lighthall
... work of the kind there—and there are some fine examples of skill—looks rude and barbarous in comparison." We may imagine the straits to which the advocates of Lo are driven when they point to the absence of mortar or cement of any kind in such walls as a proof of rudeness and ignorance in the builders. But, as Mr. Squier reminds us, Humboldt found a true mortar in the ruins of Pullal and Canuar, in Northern Peru. Humboldt found, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... nine field-pieces, two howitzers, and one mortar were brought down to the brink of the stream as soon as it dark. Working parties were likewise ordered out, by whom was thrown up opposite to the schooner; and having got all things in readiness, at dawn on the 26th a heavy cannonade was opened upon her with red-hot shot. It was ...
— The Campaigns of the British Army at Washington and New Orleans 1814-1815 • G. R. Gleig
... finished their martyrdom at Diospolis, capital of Thebais, in the reign of Numerian, in 284, under the governor Sabinus. After the governor had tried the constancy of the martyrs by racks, scourges, and various inventions of cruelty, he caused Victorinus to be thrown into a great mortar, (the Greek Menology says, of marble.) The executioners began by pounding his feet and legs, saying to him at every stroke: "Spare yourself, wretch. It depends upon you to escape this death, if you will only renounce your new God." The prefect grew furious at his constancy, and at length ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... opposite the collar-maker's shop, with four lime-trees before it, and a waggon-load of bricks at the door. That house is the plaything of a wealthy, well-meaning, whimsical person who lives about a mile off. He has a passion for brick and mortar, and, being too wise to meddle with his own residence, diverts himself with altering and re-altering, improving and re-improving, doing and undoing here. It is a perfect Penelope's web. Carpenters and bricklayers have been at work for these eighteen months, and yet I ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... give a barrage on the frontal positions as soon as the American soldiers had opened their surprise flank and rear attacks. Then the Bolos were supposed to run away and a French company supported by a section of American machine guns and a "Hq." section that had been trained hastily into a Stokes mortar section, were to rush in and assist in consolidating ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... deep in the woods about the library. It lay sleek and drifted upon the paths, a broad-flaked, mortar-like snow, evidently produced on the borderland between ...
— Red Cap Tales - Stolen from the Treasure Chest of the Wizard of the North • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... Roman catapult with a modern trench mortar seems absurd. Yet the only basic difference is the kind of energy that sends the projectile ...
— Artillery Through the Ages - A Short Illustrated History of Cannon, Emphasizing Types Used in America • Albert Manucy
... to build a chimney with a single four-inch thickness of brick between the flue and whatever may adjoin the chimney. Of course no wood should be allowed to come within an inch or two of the brickwork in any event, but with a single thickness of brick, unlined, there is always the danger that the mortar will crumble from a joint and leave an opening through which it would be an easy matter for sparks or flame to do considerable damage. The introduction of a flue lining, however, into the chimney built in this way makes it entirely safe, provided the joints between sections of flue lining ...
— Making a Fireplace • Henry H. Saylor
... represent the lime process, which has been applied to a considerable extent in France. The fact that platforms and boxes used for mixing lime mortar seem to resist decay has repeatedly suggested the use of lime for preserving timber. In 1840 Mr. W.R. Huffnagle, Engineer of the Philadelphia and Columbia Railroad, laid a portion of its track on white pine sills, which had been soaked for three months ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 514, November 7, 1885 • Various
... Thunderer cries; "go plant Thine edifice, I care not how ill; Take notice, earth. I hereby grant Carte blanche of mortar, stone, and trowel. Go Hermes, Hercules, and Mars, Fraught with these bills on Henry Hase, Drop with yon jester from the stars, And ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume XII. F, No. 325, August 2, 1828. • Various
... The Endeavour paid its way, and made just a margin of profit—no more. Spring went on to summer, and then there was a very shadowy margin of profit. But James was not at all daunted. He was waiting now for the trams, and building up hopes since he could not build in bricks and mortar. ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... busy life. There were no mills for cutting timber or grinding corn; no blacksmith shops to repair the farming utensils. There were no tanneries, no carpenters, shoemakers, weavers. Every family had to do everything for itself. The corn was pounded with a heavy pestle in a large mortar made by burning an excavation in a solid block of wood. By means of these mortars the settlers, in regions where saltpetre could be obtained, made very respectable gunpowder. In making corn-meal a grater was sometimes used, consisting of a half-circular piece of tin, perforated with a punch ...
— Daniel Boone - The Pioneer of Kentucky • John S. C. Abbott
... an effort to recover the royal property. The British were on their part greatly disgusted at the loss of the brig, not merely as weakening them, but also as strengthening the enemy. The chief prize on the ship was a thirteen-inch brass mortar, which on its arrival in camp was greeted with acclamation, and by means of a bottle of rum was ...
— The Siege of Boston • Allen French
... the lights and shadows of life are lost. The only good thing I heard this year was an ancient gentlewoman going up to Gunter and asking him for 'the receipt for that white stuff,' pointing to his Roman punch. I, who am a great man for receipts, gave it her immediately: 'One hod of mortar ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... restless throng of Saturday night foot-passengers. The Doctor, abandoning any idea of chasing and securing him, lost not a moment in doing what he could. The short street was a new one, having on one side a neglected piece of waste land, where bricks, gravel, and mortar were flung in confusion; upon the other a row of half-finished houses. A curve at its upper end hid the thoroughfare beyond, although the sound of wheels and the hoarse cries of hucksters were audible to ...
— A Bachelor's Dream • Mrs. Hungerford
... and steeples of Charleston were black with expectant crowds, straining their eyes down the harbor where the silent castle loomed up through the dim morning light. Boom! From a mortar battery to the south a bombshell rises high into the air, describes its graceful trajectory and falls within Sumter's enclosure. It is the signal gun. One battery after another responds, until in less than an hour the stronghold is girt by ...
— History of the United States, Volume 3 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... thigh. The common sort only tie a piece of cloth or skin round the middle. As for their food they boil, broil, or roast, all the meat they eat; honomy is the standing dish, and consists of Indian corn soaked, broken in a mortar, and then boiled in water over a gentle fire ten or twelve hours together. They draw and pluck their fowls, skin and paunch their quadrupeds, but dress their fish with the scales on, and without gutting; they leave the scales, ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Bampfylde Moore Carew • Unknown
... Sherman—who is considered an able man in our parts, though some people think he is kind of careless about fire—that from the ashes he left us in 1864 we have raised a brave and beautiful city; that somehow or other we have caught the sunshine in the bricks and mortar of our homes, and have builded therein not one ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... top of the highest hill frowned in black ruin an old Mahratta fort, covered on the top and sides and choked within by that dense mass of struggling vegetation which always takes possession of old forts in India. The weather-worn stones and crumbling mortar seem to feed the trees to gluttony. First some bird-drops the seeds of the banian fig into crevices of the ramparts, and its insidious roots push their way and grow and grow into great tortuous snakes, embracing the massive blocks of basalt, heaving them up and holding ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)
... prosperous regions of Ohio. They were, to be sure, log cabins of a finer pattern than the first settler reared. They were of logs handsomely shaped with the broadax; the joints between the logs were plastered with mortar; the chimney at the end was of stone; the roof was shingled, the windows were of glass, and the door was solid and well hung. They were such cabins as the Christian Indians dwelt in at Gnadenhutten, and such as ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells
... the final work on the third cell, which itself is shaped like a flattened ovoid. And so the work goes on, cell upon cell, each supplying the materials for the partition separating it from the one below. On reaching the end of the cylinder, the Osmia closes up the case with a thick layer of the same mortar. Then that bramble-stump is done with; the Bee will not return to it. If her ovaries are not yet exhausted, other dry stems will be ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre
... grammes) of this and run through a brass wire gauze having 4,600 meshes to the square inch, taking care that the whole sample selected is thus treated. One part of nitrate of potash and 3 parts of chlorate of potash (dry) are separately ground in a mortar, and repeatedly sifted through another wire gauze sieve, having 1,000 meshes to the square inch, in order that the oxygen mixture shall not be ground to an impalpable powder, as this is very undesirable. It absorbs moisture rapidly, and interferes with the regularity of the combustion ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 288 - July 9, 1881 • Various
... a great deal of enthusiasm in a small, corrugated iron shed which had been erected in the garden, and dignified by the name of laboratory. For, to the boys' great delight, a model furnace had been made, with bellows, and a supply of charcoal was always ready. There was a great cast-iron mortar fitted on a concrete stand, crucibles of various sizes, and the place looked ...
— Sappers and Miners - The Flood beneath the Sea • George Manville Fenn
... supernatural. In one day he often seemed to have done the work of two men, and his building soon assumed the appearance of the walls of a hut, which, though very small, and constructed only of stones and turf, without any mortar, exhibited, from the unusual size of the stones employed, an appearance of solidity very uncommon for a cottage of such narrow dimensions and rude construction. Earnscliff; attentive to his motions, no sooner perceived to what they tended, than he sent down a number of spars of wood suitable for ...
— The Black Dwarf • Sir Walter Scott
... with persecution as a rogue an' vagabond, a-obtainin' money under false pertences for practisin' my lawful an' necessary art. Why, it ain't so long since I cured his mother o' the rheumatiz, as is more nor he can dew, wi' all his drugs, an' the pestle an' mortar o'er ...
— Julia And Her Romeo: A Chronicle Of Castle Barfield - From "Schwartz" by David Christie Murray • David Christie Murray
... workmen employed in the building of hotels and villas between Marseilles and Ventimille. That the Riviera will finally be overbuilt no one can doubt; much of the original beauty of the country is already destroyed by this piling up of bricks and mortar, more beauty is doomed. But meantime work is brisk, wages are high, and the Post Office savings bank and private banks tell their ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... Tervueren and down to Namur, hearing the heavy booming of cannon all the time away to the north. Ruin was all the way—odd farm-houses burned, towns with half the buildings in them, the Grand Place destroyed, etc. The great square at Namur a heap of brick and mortar. ...
— A Journal From Our Legation in Belgium • Hugh Gibson
... not have heard; but, at any rate, he deigned no reply, and went on with his task, which was pounding seeds in a stone mortar. ...
— Fairy Book • Sophie May
... the opening, cutting right through the rear foundation log. Then we gathered from the river a large number of the flattest stones we could find. With these we planned to build the three outer walls of our chimney. But the question of getting mortar to bind the stones together bothered us ...
— The Scientific American Boy - The Camp at Willow Clump Island • A. Russell Bond
... than two hundred years Blake Hall had stood as the one great house in the county—a manifestation in brick and mortar of the hereditary greatness of the Blakes. To Carraway, impersonal as his interest was, the acknowledgment brought a sudden vague resentment, and for an instant he bit his lip and hung irresolute, as if more than half-inclined ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... (for so the painted ornaments were called) were lovelier than the work of the brotherhood of St. Martin's. Gabriel felt very proud even to grind the colours for them. But as he passed over to one of the tables and began to make ready his paint mortar, the monk who had charge of the ...
— Gabriel and the Hour Book • Evaleen Stein
... cross old neighbor could not refuse such a simple request, so he consented to give the old man the tree under which Shiro lay buried. Shiro's master then cut the tree down and carried it home. Out of the trunk he made a mortar. In this his wife put some rice, and he began to pound it with the intention of making a festival to the memory of his ...
— Japanese Fairy Tales • Yei Theodora Ozaki
... to pound rice is to place a bundle of the grain on the ground on a dried carabao hide and pound it with a pestle to loosen the heads from the straw. When they are free they are poured into a mortar and again pounded with the pestle until the grain is separated from the chaff, after which it ...
— Philippine Folk Tales • Mabel Cook Cole
... Italian Alpine detachments surprised and drove the Austrians from their trenches near Castelletto and at the entrance of the Travenanzes Valley. They took some prisoners, including two officers, as well as two guns, two machine guns, one trench mortar and a large quantity of arms and ammunition. An Austrian counterattack against this position was launched on July 15, ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... Windows Wall and Fireplace Tile Roofing Materials Lime Plaster and Mortar Ornamental Plasterwork House Furnishings Furniture Lighting Devices Fireplace Accessories Cooking Utensils and Accessories Table Accessories Knives, Forks, and Spoons Pottery and Porcelain Lead-glazed Earthenware English ...
— New Discoveries at Jamestown - Site of the First Successful English Settlement in America • John L. Cotter
... always falling over on their sides, and yet endeavouring to lift their heads above the water, as if gasping for air. Then more big leather-jackets, some of which shot up from below as if they had been fired from a mortar, and, running head-on to the rocky wall of the pool, allowed themselves to be lifted out without a struggle. It was most exciting and ...
— "Five-Head" Creek; and Fish Drugging In The Pacific - 1901 • Louis Becke
... late the trowels rang; And Thin himself came day by day To push the work in every way. An artful builder, patent king Of all the local building ring, Who was there like him in the quarter For mortifying brick and mortar, Or pocketing the odd piastre By substituting lath and plaster? With plan and two-foot rule in hand, He by the foreman took his stand, With boisterous voice, with eagle glance To stamp upon extravagance. Far thrift of bricks ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a stream, he put his sacks of grain in a canoe and paddled downstream to the nearest mill. In the early days before the mills, the grain was pounded into meal by using a heavy pestle and a hollowed-out stump, a crude mortar which served the purpose. ...
— The Fair Play Settlers of the West Branch Valley, 1769-1784 - A Study of Frontier Ethnography • George D. Wolf
... he was asleep, he dreamt that the dog appeared to him and told him to cut down the fig-tree over his grave, and out of its wood to make a mortar. But when the old man woke and thought of his dream he did not feel at all inclined to cut down the tree, which bore well every year, and consulted his wife about it. The woman did not hesitate a moment, and said that after ...
— The Violet Fairy Book • Various
... their famous ratios of increase between man and the means of his subsistence. Political economy, at the highest, can never be a pure science. You may demonstrate that certain properties inhere in the arch, which yet no bridge-builder can ever reduce into brick and mortar; but an abstract conclusion in a matter of political economy, the premisses of which neither exist now, nor ever will exist within the range of the wildest imagination, is not a truth, but a chimera—a practical falsehood. For there are no theorems in political economy—but problems ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... molasses : melaso, sukerrestajxo. mole : talpo; digo. molest : gxeni, sin altrudi al. monarch : monarhxo. money : mono, "-order," posxtmandato. mongrel : hibrida. monk : monahxo. monkey : simio. monster : monstro. mood : modo. moor : stepo, erikejo; "(—a ship)" alligi. moral : morala, bonmora. mortar : mortero, "(a—)" pistujo. mortgage : hipoteko. mortify : cxagreni; gangrenigxi. mortification : (med.), gangrene. mosaic : mozaiko. mosquito : moskito. moss : musko. moth : ("clothes"—), tineo. motive : motivo. motto : devizo, moto. mould : model'i, -ilo; tero, sximo. mound : altajxeto, remparo, ...
— The Esperanto Teacher - A Simple Course for Non-Grammarians • Helen Fryer
... the material fabric, the actual stone and mortar, of Trinity College, Dublin, which makes a vivid appeal to the imagination of the common man. The cultured sentimentalist will not indeed be able to lave his soul in tepid emotion while he walks through these quadrangles, as he may among the cloisters ...
— Hyacinth - 1906 • George A. Birmingham
... clothes upon best be trust (a humorous Deckerian phrase)—thou'rt great in somebody's books for this!" Did it become Jonson to gibe at the histrionic tribe, who is himself accused of "treading the stage, as if he were treading mortar."[394] He once put up—"a supplication to be a poor journeyman player, and hadst been still so, but that thou couldst not set a good face upon't. Thou hast forget how thou ambled'st in leather-pilch, by a play-waggon in the highway; ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... our plastic power... Bricks and mortar are mortar and bricks until the architect can make them ...
— Heart's-ease • Phillips Brooks
... tales were the most convincing arguments that the hostelry had been named by a whimsical fate not too dignified to stoop to punning. There were times when the hungry boarders thought the name facetious, but they conceded it to be quite exact in a descriptive sense, if its brick and mortar were intended to honor monumentally the tales of the host. His first name, August, was not an adjective of limitation as to time, for the proprietor was A. Stuffer every month and day in the year; and his son Emil, a quiet, inoffensive student of birds, a taxidermist, ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent
... "Fearful things are happening to me..." In the salon beside the pharmacy where she was taking her little nap after supper, Mme. Bezuquet, mere, might hear him, or the pupil whose pestle was pounding its regular blows in the big marble mortar of the laboratory. Bezuquet continued his reading in a low voice, beginning it over again two or three times, very pale, his hair literally standing on end. Then, with a rapid look about him, cra cra... and the letter in a thousand scraps went into the waste-paper basket; but there it might ...
— Tartarin On The Alps • Alphonse Daudet
... to the opposite side of the street, leaned against a stone, and followed the activity of the workman with great attention. The latter had now set up his ladder and made it secure; he climbed it and began to scratch about in the mortar over the main door with a view of taking down the old sign. His efforts filled the ex-manufacturer with interest and also with pain, as he thought of the bygone days, of the many glasses of wine or spirits he had drunk under the now disappearing sign, and ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... area round the square bath. On this lower floor stand rows of pillars composed of square bricks of about 13/4in. thick and 9in. square. These pillars sustain a second floor composed of tiles 2ft. square and 2in. thick, over which are laid two layers of firm cement mortar, each about 2in. thick, which compose the ...
— The Excavations of Roman Baths at Bath • Charles E. Davis
... deceived. By means of a crow-bar I easily dislodged the bricks, and, having carefully deposited the body against the inner wall, I propped it in that position, while, with little trouble, I re-laid the whole structure as it originally stood. Having procured mortar, sand, and hair, with every possible precaution, I prepared a plaster which could not be distinguished from the old, and with this I very carefully went over the new brickwork. When I had finished, I felt satisfied that all was right. The wall did not present the ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... life than this—the scaffolding by which souls are built up into the temple of God? And to care whether a thing is painful or pleasant is as absurd as to care whether the bricklayer's trowel is knocking the sharp corner off a brick, or plastering mortar on the one below it before he lays it carefully on its course. Is the building getting on? That is the one question that is worth ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... effects of the destruction of the forests in ancient Italy may be found in old Roman architecture. In the oldest brick constructions of Rome the bricks are very thin, very thoroughly burnt, and laid with a thick stratum of mortar between the courses. A few centuries later the bricks were thicker and less well burnt, and the layers of mortar were thinner. In the Imperial period the bricks were still thicker, generally soft-burnt, and with little mortar between the courses. This fact, I think, is due to the abundance ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... had foreseen, the mortar that bound the bricks together was all dry and crumbling; it was no great task to work one of them loose, making a foothold from which he might grasp with a gloved hand the glass-toothed curbing, cast his ulster across ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... well-furnished, but the light was somewhat dim, while the atmosphere was decidedly murky, as it is in any house in Mayfair. One cannot obtain brightness and light in a West End house, where one's vista is bounded by bricks and mortar. The dukes in their great town mansions are no better off for light and air than the hard-working and worthy wage-earners of Walworth, Deptford, or Peckham. The air in the working-class districts of London is not one whit worse than it is ...
— Mademoiselle of Monte Carlo • William Le Queux
... greater reward than he who puts the idea into execution? Why should the man who works with his brain have more of the sweets of life than he who works with his hands? Why should the man who lays the brick have more of the world's goods than he who carries the brick mortar to him? These questions do not apply alone to the capitalist, but also to the laborer as well, and as long as the laboring classes champion the cutthroat policy of grading man's allowance according to his ability, of giving more to ...
— Born Again • Alfred Lawson
... something for full measure. His surprises were sausage-shaped missiles which came wobbling toward us, slowly, almost awkwardly; but they dropped with lightning speed, and alas, for any poor Tommy who misjudged the place of its fall! However, every one had a chance. Trench-mortar projectiles are so large that one can see them coming, and they describe so leisurely an arc before they fall that men have ...
— Kitchener's Mob - Adventures of an American in the British Army • James Norman Hall
... Danes been directed to strengthen their own means of defence, they might most materially have annoyed the invading squadron, and perhaps frustrated the impending attack; for the British ships were crowded in an anchoring ground of little extent:—it was calm, so that mortar-boats might have acted against them to the utmost advantage; and they were within range of shells from Amak Island. A few fell among them; but the enemy soon ceased to fire. It was learned afterwards, that, fortunately for the fleet, the bed of the mortar had given way; and the Danes either ...
— The Life of Horatio Lord Nelson • Robert Southey
... street all the trees had been cut off as if by one shell, about ten feet above the ground, but in another, where nothing whatever remained but piles of stone and mortar, a great elm had apparently not ...
— Kings, Queens And Pawns - An American Woman at the Front • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... moment the report of a mortar announces that the prime patron of the festivities, the rich nabob, Master Jock, has departed from his castle. The crowd takes up its position in the cemetery and the gardens adjoining. The wary horsemen stand out in the open; some of them make their horses prance and curvet to show their mettle, ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai
... kraals for their sacred trusts of kine, chipping and carving away at their totem hawks and their crocodiles, breaking limbs and necks over a sky-high tower, with stones for their bricks, and no slime to make them mortar. How they sang over their work, and how it grew! Talk of Troy's walls; if only Kaffirs would start building a Troy, or a Palace of Art, or a Spiritual City, how the work would go forward to the music of them! I could hear all the parts in ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps
... don't set till November, and before that there is October to be considered, the season of the rains. Get you into the woods in October and cut for your needs. And what might these be? Well, a mortar to pound your grain in, and a pestle to pound it withal; an axle for your wain, a beetle to break the clods. Then, for your plows, look out for a plow-tree of holm-oak: that is the best wood for them. ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... the cap more firmly upon his head, spat upon his hands, and once more stooping in the fireplace, gave a leap, and up the chimney he went with a rattle of loose mortar and a black ...
— Otto of the Silver Hand • Howard Pyle
... Furniture Manufacturing Company, from the ugly square brick box that was the nucleus—the egg, so to speak—from which the great concern had been hatched, to the handsome new structures with their great arched windows and red mortar. "Pretty property, very pretty property," thought Armorer; "wonder if that story Marston tells is true!" The story was to the effect that a few weeks before his last sickness the older Lossing had taken his son to look at the buildings, and said, "Harry, this will all be yours before ...
— Stories of a Western Town • Octave Thanet
... crannies, and birds nesting in their eaves, and mason-bees filling the delicate network of their traceries—they still present angles as sharp as when they were but finished, and joints as nice as when the mortar dried in the first months of their building. This immunity from age and injury they owe partly to the imperishable nature of baked clay; partly to the care of the artists who selected and mingled the right sorts of earth, burned them with scrupulous attention, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... arm it with diamond dust. For this purpose it is before all things necessary that real diamond dust should be obtained. The best plan is to procure a bit of "bort" which has been used in a diamond drill, and whose properties have therefore been tested to some extent. This is ground in a diamond mortar—or rather hammered in one—and passed through a sieve having at least 80 threads to the inch. The dust may be conveniently kept ...
— On Laboratory Arts • Richard Threlfall
... land) on the east, and the Fuenfeckiger Thurm, the Five-cornered tower, at the west end (on the left hand as we thus face it). The Luginsland was built by the townspeople in the hard winter of 1377. The mortar for building it, tradition says, had to be mixed with salt, so that it might be kept soft and be worked in spite of the severe cold. The chronicles state that one could see right into the Burggraf's Castle from this tower, and ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume V (of X) • Various
... adventurers in Christ's kingdom visited St. Louis, they found it a place of two thousand inhabitants,—"a tumble-down French village,—built mainly of wooden slabs and poles set vertically, and well daubed with mortar mixed with straw, though there were many log houses." In a school-room they delivered the first Presbyterian or Congregational sermons ever preached on the west side of the Mississippi. They were gratefully received, and had crowded audiences. ...
— A Story of One Short Life, 1783 to 1818 - [Samuel John Mills] • Elisabeth G. Stryker
... victorious guns. If guns decide everything, then let them be trained on other guns. Let the gun that drives farthest and goes surest win. If every siege is decided by the German 16-inch howitzers, then let us put up brick and mortar or steel against them, but not men. The day for the bleeding human body seems to be over now that men are mown down by shells fired eight miles away. War used to be splendid because it made men strong and brave, but now a little German in spectacles can stand ...
— My War Experiences in Two Continents • Sarah Macnaughtan
... the church of St. Peter at Rome. Odo had translated the body of Wilfrid, Archbishop of York, from Ripon to Canterbury, and had "worthily placed it in a more lofty receptacle, to use his own words, that is to say, in the great Altar which was constructed of rough stones and mortar, close to the wall at the eastern part of the presbytery. Afterwards another altar was placed at a convenient distance before the aforesaid altar.... In this altar the blessed Elphege had solemnly deposited the head of St. Swithin ... and also many relics of ...
— The Cathedral Church of Canterbury [2nd ed.]. • Hartley Withers |
