"Mortar" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... young doctor. Well, my dear, young women need never despair. The young doctor gave a certain friend of yours to understand that, if she chose to be Mrs. Glauber, she was welcome to ornament the surgery! I told his impudence that the gilt pestle and mortar was quite ornament enough; as if I was born, indeed, to be a country surgeon's wife! Mr. Glauber went home seriously indisposed at his rebuff, took a cooling draught, and is now quite cured. Sir Pitt applauded my resolution highly; he would be sorry ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... could read his paper without every word stabbing him by some chance association; and there is nothing like the daily and thorough perusal of a newspaper for dulling a man's brain. He pottered about his garden gossiping with the gardener; made little alterations in the house—bricks and mortar are like an anodyne; he collected stamps; played bezique with his wife; and finally, in his mild, gentle way, ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... tinker, turning on his companions with the inquiring look of a man who advances a theory which may or may not be accepted as reasonable, "you see that? What I'd like to know is—is that a recently made gap? It's difficult to tell. If this bit of a stone fence had been built with mortar, one could have told. But it's never had mortar or lime in it!—it's just rough masonry, as you see—stones picked up off the moor, like all these fences round the old shafts. But—there's the gap right enough! Do you know ...
— The Chestermarke Instinct • J. S. Fletcher
... shadowy passages and interiors, speckled with fallen mortar, lay chains, rubble of brick and chipped stone; splinters, flinders and odd ends of timber; scraps of metal, broken implements and the what-not that litters the path of construction. Without, in the ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... families, near which there are usually one or more square box-shaped stone buildings, the property of the chief of the place, which are designated forts, though there is nothing in their artless construction to deserve this name. They are all composed of blocks of coralline, cemented together with mortar ...
— What Led To The Discovery of the Source Of The Nile • John Hanning Speke
... connecting in my own thoughts with a pale tortoise-shell cat), it was but seldom that I enjoyed the happiness of passing an afternoon in his closet of a surgery; reading some book that was new to me, with the smell of the whole Pharmacopoeia coming up my nose, or pounding something in a mortar under his ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... Zanzibar are many feet thick of solid stone masonry; and even the floors and partitions dividing the rooms are of several thicknesses too, all made of wood and stone and lime, the wood being covered over with mortar. The roof is the best part of them, however. It is made quite flat, and it is the principal spot for the family to go of an evening when the sun has gone down and the night-breeze begins to blow. The Arabs and Parsees go on top in the mornings too, ...
— The Penang Pirate - and, The Lost Pinnace • John Conroy Hutcheson
... cannot be otherwise than nutritious, since, as I have said, they form the whole subsistence of many people for months in the year. They can be eaten raw; but the Indians usually roast them. When roasted or parched, and then ground in a mill, or broken in a mortar, they make a species of meal, which, though coarse in appearance, can be baked into sweet and wholesome bread. This tree is called by the Mexicans "pinon," and also by travellers the "nut-pine." The only botanist who has ...
— The Desert Home - The Adventures of a Lost Family in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... in a vessel similar to this that St. Guirec, the great St. Columba, and so many holy men from Scotland and from Ireland had gone forth to evangelize Armorica. More recently still, St. Avoye having come from England, ascended the river Auray in a mortar made of rose-coloured granite into which children were afterwards placed in order to make them strong; St. Vouga passed from Hibernia to Cornwall on a rock whose fragments, preserved at Penmarch, will cure of fever ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... more easily pick them up already prepared. But they, doubtless, have their own reasons for cutting their own timber. Then these are glued to the wall by a saliva which they secrete, so that they carry their mortar in their mouths, and use ...
— Sanders' Union Fourth Reader • Charles W. Sanders
... money to put into Chase's pocket, and all was going well. Maroney could not sleep, so anxiously did he look forward for the coming of the next letter; he paced his cell all night. What would have been his feelings if he could have looked through about a mile of brick and mortar to where ...
— The Expressman and the Detective • Allan Pinkerton
... associates, who generally appear of more use than ornament to the piece." Besides, were it not for them, long and disgusting soliloquies must be innumerable, especially if there be any plot in the piece of either love, ambition, or conspiracy. In short, as he again says, "they are the mortar which forms the proper cement to fix the ...
— The Female Gamester • Gorges Edmond Howard
... time of peace, and that of employing them in time of war. Both their arms and their ammunition are become more expensive. A musket is a more expensive machine than a javelin or a bow and arrows; a cannon or a mortar, than a balista or a catapulta. The powder which is spent in a modern review is lost irrecoverably, and occasions a very considerable expense. The javelins and arrows which were thrown or shot in an ancient one, could easily be picked up again, ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... spreading of fire proposed to cover the floors and stairs of the adjoining houses with earth; Mr. Hartley proposed to prevent houses from taking fire by covering the cieling with thin iron-plates, and Lord Mahon by a bed of coarse mortar or plaister between the cieling and floor above it. May not this age of chemical science discover some method of injecting or soaking timber with lime-water and afterwards with vitriolic acid, and thus fill its pores with alabaster? or of penetrating it with siliceous ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... pagodas, or dagobas, of solid brick, each of them more than two hundred feet high, tower up before one as he enters the town. These structures are covered with verdure, for grasses and shrubs have eaten their way into the mortar on the sides, until the dagobas resemble conical natural hills. It is said that the brick of a single one would suffice to build a wall eight feet high and a foot thick from Edinburgh to London. One of them is being ...
— A Tour of the Missions - Observations and Conclusions • Augustus Hopkins Strong
... were! They preferred being heard, not seen. Unexpectedly I found a hermit thrush's nest set in plain sight in a pine bush. One would have thought so shy a bird would make some attempt at concealment. It was a well-constructed domicile, composed of grass, twigs, and moss, but without mortar. The shy owner was nowhere to be seen, nor did she make any outcry, even though I stood for some minutes close to her nest. What stolidity the mountain birds display! You could actually rob the nests of some of them ...
— Birds of the Rockies • Leander Sylvester Keyser
... until the 18th," he went on, "when I aimed two shots at the cathedral, and only two. No more were needed to dislodge him. One from a 15-centimeter howitzer struck the top of the 'observation tower,' the other, from a 21-centimeter mortar, hit the roof and set it on fire. I used both howitzers and mortars so as to let the French know that we could shoot well with both kinds. I wanted to dislodge the observer with the least possible damage to the fine old cathedral, and the result shows that it is possible to shoot just as ...
— The New York Times Current History: the European War, February, 1915 • Various
... Babylonian history, however, they were generally employed, and we learn from the contracts that a bed of reeds grown for the sake of the brick-makers' trade was by no means an unprofitable investment. Either clay or bitumen took the place of mortar; the bitumen was procured from Hit or from the Kurdish hills, where there are still springs of naphtha; after the conquest of Canaan it may have been brought from the neighborhood of the Dead Sea. Some scholars ...
— Babylonians and Assyrians, Life and Customs • Rev. A. H. Sayce
... all the while. It will be an hour upon the fire before it boil. When it is clear and enough boiled, pour it out into woodden vessels to cool. When you are ready to Tun it, have four Gallons of Black-currants, bruise them in a stone mortar, that they may the more easily part with their juyce to the Liquor. Put them and their juyce into the barrel, and pour the cool Liquor upon them, so as the vessel be quite full. Cover the bung with a plate of lead lying loose on, that the working of the Liquor ...
— The Closet of Sir Kenelm Digby Knight Opened • Kenelm Digby
... island was surrounded by a stone wall, built on the outermost ledges of the rocks, which were levelled to form its foundation. The courses of the masonry were irregular, laid without cement or mortar of any kind. This bold piece of engineering served the double purpose of sea-wall and rampart, and was thus fitted to withstand alike the onset of hostile fleets and the ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 4 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... of night,—then, when it showers its leaves to the ground and stops sprouting, the wood you cut with your axe is least liable to worm. Then remember to hew your timber: it is the season for that work. Cut a mortar [1313] three feet wide and a pestle three cubits long, and an axle of seven feet, for it will do very well so; but if you make it eight feet long, you can cut a beetle [1314] from it as well. Cut a felloe ...
— Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica • Homer and Hesiod
... Page Avenue, too new for wall paper, still exuding the indescribable cold, white smell of mortar in the drying, was none the less—-and with the flexible personality of houses—taking on the print of the family. A mission dining-room set, ordered wholesale through the machinations of one of Mrs. Becker's euchre friends, arriving from Grand Rapids two months late, completed a careful ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... Grin started in to move a small pile of bricks. Next a tub of mixed mortar was carried to the level spot decided upon as the place whereon to ...
— The High School Boys in Summer Camp • H. Irving Hancock
... earlier world are watching me, and that not far away the waters of Neva are gathering, gathering, gathering their mighty momentum for some instant, when, with a great heave and swell, they will toss the whole fabric of brick and mortar from their shoulders, flood the streets and squares, and then sink tranquilly back into great sheets of unruffled waters marked only with reeds and the sharp ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... measured by our plastic power... Bricks and mortar are mortar and bricks until the architect can make them ...
— Heart's-ease • Phillips Brooks
... entrance, called "the gate of the Avenue," which plainly shows the hand of the Great Dauphin (to whom, indeed, Les Aigues owes it), seems to me none the less beautiful for that. At the end of each ha-ha the walls of the park, built of rough-hewn stone, begin. These stones, set in a mortar made of reddish earth, display their variegated colors, the warm yellows of the silex, the white of the lime carbonates, the russet browns of the sandstone, in many a fantastic shape. As you first enter it, the park is gloomy, ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... open window at an ill-designed and partly-erected building, in front of which several idle servants are lounging or sitting. Like Pope's "Visto," the Earl has "a taste," and his taste, interrupted for the moment by lack of funds, is the ruinous one of bricks and mortar. ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... vast arsenals full of all descriptions of warlike stores; while in front of the fortress lies a cluster of rocky islets. The passages between these islets had been carefully surveyed by Captain Sulivan, and on each of those nearest the fortress, mortar batteries were now placed, while the mortar-boats formed in a line outside them. The gunboats and mortar-vessels in different divisions were directed to stand in among the islets, where there was sufficient room ...
— How Britannia Came to Rule the Waves - Updated to 1900 • W.H.G. Kingston
... of an antiquity-hunter, and am fond of exploring London in quest of the relics of old times. These are principally to be found in the depths of the city, swallowed up and almost lost in a wilderness of brick and mortar, but deriving poetical and romantic interest from the commonplace, prosaic world around them. I was struck with an instance of the kind in the course of a recent summer ramble into the city; for ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... down Market street toward Montgomery, Benito paused to observe the new Palace Hotel. Hundreds of bricklayers, carpenters and other workmen were raising it with astonishing speed. Hod-carriers raced up swaying ladders, steam-winches puffed and snorted; great vats of lime and mortar blockaded the street. It was to have a great inner court upon which seven galleries would look down. Ralston boasted he would make it a hotel for travelers to talk of round the world. And no one ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... 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
... were the prototypes of the later ironclads. Not without some misgivings three of these batteries were sent to the Crimea to join the allied fleet under Admirals Lyons and Bruat. The English squadron consisted of six line-of-battle ships, seventeen frigates and sloops, ten gunboats, six mortar-boats and ten transports. The French fleet, besides the three armored batteries mentioned, included four line-of-battle ships, three corvettes, four despatch boats, twelve gun boats and five mortar-boats. The combined fleets prepared ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... important than other branches of the service, nor they braver than their comrades of other units. Nor do I want it to be thought that we undergo greater danger than machine-gunners, grenadiers, light trench-mortar men, or other specialists. But, frankly, I don't know much about any other man's job but my own, and less than I ought to about that. To introduce you to the spirit, action, and ideals of the Australian army I have to intrude my own personality, and if in the following pages "what I did" comes ...
— "Over There" with the Australians • R. Hugh Knyvett
... frailty. Great men and women live in glass houses, and what passer-by can resist the temptation to throw stones? Is it generous, or even just, in scoffers who are safely hidden behind bricks and mortar, to take advantage of the glass? Could they show a nobler record if subjected to equally close scrutiny? Worshippers, too, at the shrines of inspiration are prone to look for ideal lives in their elect, forgetting that the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... course, were of dry stone, without lime and mortar. By what name we call them, "towers," or "cairns," is indifferent ...
— The Clyde Mystery - a Study in Forgeries and Folklore • Andrew Lang
... whole circuit of the hills, but its exact age is doubtful. It looks like a building of the seventh century A.D. Mr. Rea, superintendent of the Madras Archaeological Survey, in an article published in the MADRAS CHRISTIAN COLLEGE MAGAZINE for December 1886, points out that the fact of mortar having been used in its construction throws a doubt upon its being as old as its type of architecture would otherwise make it appear. It is quite possible, however, that the shrine may have been used by a succession ...
— A Forgotten Empire: Vijayanagar; A Contribution to the History of India • Robert Sewell
... new architectural resolves, which caused professional opinions to advance themselves officiously to his lips whenever occasion offered. The building was, in short, a recently-erected chapel of red brick, with pseudo-classic ornamentation, and the white regular joints of mortar could be seen streaking its surface in geometrical oppressiveness from top to bottom. The roof was of blue slate, clean as a table, and unbroken from gable to gable; the windows were glazed with sheets of plate glass, ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... himself to meditate upon the means of avoiding still severer punishment. He soon arose from his bed, much strengthened by the short rest he had had. With an iron bar that he had forced from his bed he hammered into the wall until the stones, around which the mortar had become loosened owing to the dampness of the cell, fell at his feet. He piled them together in the centre of his ceil, and then hastened to barricade the second door he had attempted to force. The lower part of it was still held on by the lock; over the opening at the top he passed ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... the form of some kind of malt-mills, whose stones are firm and hard, which work by turning, and upon this mill are ground the cacaos grossly, and then between other stones they work that which is ground yet smaller, or else by beating it up in a mortar bring it ...
— The Food of the Gods - A Popular Account of Cocoa • Brandon Head
... "I swam round from the other side and got here. Then I threw in a bit of mortar, but I wasn't sure I'd roused you, and I didn't dare shout, so I followed it myself. Lay hold of me a minute while I get on my breeches: I didn't want to get wet, so I carried my clothes in a bundle. Hold ...
— Rupert of Hentzau - From The Memoirs of Fritz Von Tarlenheim: The Sequel to - The Prisoner of Zenda • Anthony Hope
... so long as it distils, and when it begins to slack, then increase your Fire till the Glass begin to glow; continu this heat till no more will distil, then let it cool of it self, take the Receiver off, stop it very close with Wax, take the Matter out of the Glass, beat it to powder in an Iron Mortar, with a steel Pestle; and then grind it on a Stone with good distilled Vinegar, put this Matter so ground into a Pot, poure good distilled Vinegar upon it, that two parts be full, set the Pot into a Bath with a head upon it, distil the Vinegar off, poure fresh Vinegar again ...
— Of Natural and Supernatural Things • Basilius Valentinus
... descend into what proved to be quite a hollow, from which the stream must have leapt into another and again into another, each being a fall of only a few feet. After which there was another great pot-hole, like a vast mortar with a handleless ...
— Cormorant Crag - A Tale of the Smuggling Days • George Manville Fenn
... is built of sticks of wood, the largest at the bottom, and the smallest at the top, and laid up with a supply of mud or clay mortar. The interstices between the logs are chinked with strips of wood and daubed with mortar both outside and in. A double cabin consists of two such buildings with a space of 10 or 12 feet between, over which ...
— A New Guide for Emigrants to the West • J. M. Peck
... as it began. Silence reigns again, broken only by a solitary shot from a trench-mortar—a sort of explosive postscript to a half hour's ...
— The First Hundred Thousand • Ian Hay
... Ffrith farm was troubled by a Ghost; but when the servants were busily engaged in cheese making the Spirit would suddenly throw mortar, or filthy matter, into the milk, and thus spoil the curds. The dairy was visited by the Ghost, and there he played havoc with the milk and dishes. He sent the pans, one after the other, around the room, and dashed them to pieces. The terrible doings of ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen
... it began to rain so fast that all the king's apparel was sore wet. Then said the knight, "My lord, ye have done foolishly, for as much as ye brought not with you your house." Then said the king: "Why speakest thou so? My house is large and broad, and made of stones and mortar, how should I bring then with me my house? Thou speakest like a fool." When this was said, they rode on till they came to a great deep water, and the king smote his horse with his spurs, and leapt into the water, so that he was almost drowned. When the knight saw this, ...
— Mediaeval Tales • Various
... self-educated, drudging for his daily bread in some dreary Glasgow prison-house of brick and mortar, he has seen the sky, the sun and moon—and, moreover, the sea, report says, for one day in his whole life; and this is nearly the whole of his experience in natural objects. And he has felt, too painfully for his peace of ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... built of lava blocks without lime or mortar, the huge stones being jointed most accurately by tenons, mortises, and dovetails which bind them ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... with him two cannon and a mortar; but being light, they had little effect on the wooden wall, and as he was provided with mining tools, he resolved to attack the Outagamie stronghold by regular approaches, as if he were besieging a fortress of Vauban. Covered by the fire of three ...
— A Half Century of Conflict - Volume I - France and England in North America • Francis Parkman
... contrary," said I, "it's the form there. You might say the same of mortar boards or blue-coat dresses. It all depends on ...
— Tom, Dick and Harry • Talbot Baines Reed
... them, every day, in the streets of London, but no one ever encounters them elsewhere; they seem indigenous to the soil, and to belong as exclusively to London as its own smoke, or the dingy bricks and mortar. We could illustrate the remark by a variety of examples, but, in our present sketch, we will only advert to one class as a specimen—that class which is so aptly and ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... should have judged it the best that mine eyes had seen. The ostentation and richness of this empire being evidenced in nothing more than the richness of their pavilions, sumptuous beyond the fixed palaces of princes, erected with marble and mortar.' ...
— A Book of Quaker Saints • Lucy Violet Hodgkin
... God's existence have stood for hundreds of years with the waves of unbelieving criticism breaking against them, never totally discrediting them in the ears of the faithful, but on the whole slowly and surely washing out the mortar from between their joints. If you have a God already whom you believe in, these arguments confirm you. If you are atheistic, they fail to set you right. The proofs are various. The "cosmological" one, so-called, reasons from the contingence of the world to a First Cause which must ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... across the mountain side to the spring. There they found Bill Frank's camping outfit and the few things that Jim and Haney had transferred from the canyon below. They found, also, the pan and the hand mortar, rusty and battered by the storms of many years, with which Dick Winters had slowly and with infinite toil beaten and washed out the gold he was never to enjoy. After an hour's search they found the store of nuggets where Bill Frank had hidden them. Haney and ...
— With Hoops of Steel • Florence Finch Kelly
... islander of St. Kilda did of architecture, when he sagaciously concluded that the great church of Glasgow was excavated out of a rock, because he had never before seen an edifice made of hewn stone and mortar. Thus not only a false taste is circulated among the youth at large, but the very fountain of taste is itself polluted. This is an evil which nothing but a well-regulated body of competent critical authority can prevent. In the prosecution ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... opportunity of being unobserved, he'd been out for nocturnal stroll with a handful of bombs, seeking a little innocent pleasure. The gentlemen opposite, not being cricketers themselves or knowing anything about the slow bowler, had, as usual, mistaken him for a trench mortar and were making a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, January 19, 1916 • Various
... prison, but asked to be allowed to serve his sentence in the trenches. He came out from his punishment a King's sergeant—which means that whatever he did nobody could degrade him. He got this for lifting his trench mortar over the parapet when all the detachment were killed. Carrying it out into a shell-hole, he held back the Hun attack and saved the situation. He got drunk again, and again chose to be returned to the trenches. This time his head was blown off while he was engaged in a special ...
— Carry On • Coningsby Dawson
... shall need Bayard to bring home a sack of lime for my mortar. And you are over thoughtful for Madcap. I walked up to inspect the pasture, and there is enough to last the pair for a week. It is odds, too, we find some burnt lands at the back of these woods, with patches of ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... there is no mortar under the lowest stones. The foundations are simply laid upon ...
— Rollo's Philosophy. [Air] • Jacob Abbott
... the foundation thereof in getting to themselves worldly power, and can make worldly mixtures to accomplish the same, such as their late agreement with their king, and hopes by him to carry on their designe, [they] may know, that the Sion promised and hoped for will not be built with such untempered mortar. As for the unjust invasion they mention, time was, when an army of Scotland came into England, not called by the supreame authority. We have said in our papers with what hearts and upon what accompt we came, ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... London in considerable quantities; and cheese fairs are held in various parts of the county, as at Ashbourne and Derby. A feature of the upland districts is the total absence of hedges, and the substitution of limestone walls, put together without any mortar ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... a staple production in the new world, when the fields were not destroyed by marauding parties. There were windmills that ground it coarsely and both cakes and porridge were made of it. The Indian women cracked and pounded it in a stone mortar and boiled it with fish or venison. The French brought in ...
— A Little Girl in Old Detroit • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... character of the aggregate," says Herbert Spencer, "is determined by the characters of the units." And he illustrates thus: Suppose a man building with good, square, well-burnt bricks; without the use of mortar he may build a wall of a certain height and stability. But if his bricks are warped and cracked or broken, the wall cannot be of the same height and stability. If again, instead of bricks he use cannon-balls ...
— The Teaching of Jesus • George Jackson
... moment and looked at each other in silence. The child had dropped from the beam, and lay fast asleep across his mother's bosom, with his head on a lump of mortar. Without a word spoken, Mrs. Person, picking her way carefully to the spot, knelt down by the dead mother, tenderly kissed her cheek, lifted the sleeping child, and with all the awe, and nearly all the tremulous joy of first motherhood, bore him to her husband. The throes of ...
— A Rough Shaking • George MacDonald
... more ingenious, perhaps, are fashioning buckets or powdering tubs, or weaving skeps, baskets or snowshoes. Some, it may be, sit astride the wooden shovel, shelling corn on its iron-shod edge, while others are pounding it into samp or hoiminy in the great wooden mortar. ...
— The Old Coast Road - From Boston to Plymouth • Agnes Rothery
... calls them the People of Apes; [Greek: ou legetai pithekon oikein demos en mychois tou orous]. Dapper[B] tells us, That the Indians take the Baris when young, and make them so tame, that they will do almost the work of a Slave; for they commonly go erect as Men do. They will beat Rice in a Mortar, carry Water in a Pitcher, &c. And Gassendus[C] in the Life of Pieresky, tells us, us, That they will play upon a Pipe or Cittern, or the like Musick, they will sweep the House, turn the Spit, beat ...
— A Philological Essay Concerning the Pygmies of the Ancients • Edward Tyson
... white mortar ribs of my homestead clean and fair betwixt hewed logs; and brightened the inside of the entrance or hall room. For I saw the door stood open. It had been left unfastened but not ajar. Somebody ...
— Lazarre • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... name of Omm-el-G-aab—"the mother of pots." The tombs there lie in serried ranks. They present for the most part a rough model of the pyramids of the Memphite period—rectangular structures of bricks without mortar rising slightly above the level of the plain. The funeral chamber occupies the centre of each, and is partly hollowed out of the soil, like a shallow well, the sides being bricked. It had a flat timber roof, covered ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... cannot think," the Builder said, "Why people should complain Of mortar made of mud from roads, Or roofs that let in rain, Or sewer-gas that ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, August 27, 1892 • Various
... Pan, loving the woods and waters, and preferring to go to them (when my heart was stirred thereto by that mysterious power which, as I conceive, cares little for worship made stately and to order on certain recurring calendar days) rather than to most of the brick and mortar pens that are supposed to hold in some way that which the visible universe no more contains than the works of his hands contain the sculptor who makes them; for I take it that the glittering show revealed ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... writings of such critics as Bielinski, Dobroliubov, and Nekrasov—a remarkable poet—disproves this statement. Without a Gogol the later novelists would be rather in the air. He first fashioned the bricks and mortar of native fiction. Read Kropotkin, Osip-Luri, E. Semenov, Walizewski, Melchior de Voguee, and Leo Wiener if you doubt the wealth ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... before her Grace. You know, she allows him to sit when he confers with her. But then, she is ever prone to show mercy to bearded persons.... Ah! there is dear Sidney; that is a sweet soul. But what does he do here among the stones and mortar when he has the beeches of Penshurst to walk beneath. He is not so wise as I thought him.... But I must say I grow weary of his nymphs and his airs of Olympus. And for myself, I do not see that Flora and Phoebus and Maia and the ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... even to nations beyond seas, clad Dixie's every gain in light and hid her gravest disasters in beguiling shadow. But suddenly one day the long lane turned. The secret had just leaked out that the forts down the river were furiously engaged with the enemy's mortar-boats a few miles below them and that in the past forty-eight hours one huge bomb every minute, three thousand in all, had dropped into those forts or burst over them, yet the forts were "proving themselves impregnable." The lane turned and there ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... bottom of the gorge, and rather difficult of access. The house group occupied the entire width of a cave, which was eighty feet across, and there was a foundation wall made of stone and timber underneath the front part. The walls were made of stone, with mortar of disintegrated rock that lined parts of the cave and were plastered inside and out with the same material. Lintels of wood were seen in the windows, and rows of sticks standing in a perpendicular position ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... chanting prayers to Kwan-yin for the blessing of a son. There is a pilgrimage to the Kwem-li Pagoda. I can see it in the distance, with its lotus bells that sway and ring with each light breath of wind. One does not think of it as a thing of brick and mortar, or as a many-storied temple, but as a casket whose jewels are the prayers of ...
— My Lady of the Chinese Courtyard • Elizabeth Cooper
... appearance in their popular tales, but perhaps in none plays so remarkable a part as in the story of Yvashka. A little information with respect to her will perhaps not be unacceptable to the reader before entering upon the story. She is said to be a huge female who goes driving about the steppes in a mortar, which she forces onward by pounding lustily with a pestle, though of course, being in a mortar, she cannot wield the pestle without hurting herself. As she hurries along she draws with her tongue, which is at least three yards long, a mark upon the dust, ...
— The Story of Yvashka with the Bear's Ear • Anonymous
... prayer-books, baize-lined pews, Wren-built architecture; and how, in almost all directions, you might have fired a musket through the church, and hit no Christian life. A terrible outlook indeed for the Apostolic laborer in the brick-and-mortar line!— ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... "his fiancee is not yet a senior, being in the class of two thousand and one at Vassar, and so cannot marry him for a year. Not till next June can this sweet girl graduate come forth with her mortar-board and sheepskin to enlighten the world and make him happy. That is, I suspect, one reason why he proposed ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... in the half-century of Guelph dominion, eating up the green fields in all directions, linking itself with little lonely hamlets and tiny rustic villages, and weaving them close into the web of its being, choking up rural streams and blotting out groves and meadows with monuments of brick and mortar. Where {16} the friends of George the First could have hunted and gunned and found refreshment in secluded country ale-houses, the friends of George the Third were familiar with miles of stony streets and areas of arid squares. London was not then the ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... subdivision of the sprawling city. Absorbed, charmed, grimly content with the abominable desolation of it all, he stood and gazed. No evidence of any plan, of any continuity in building, appeared upon the waste: mere sporadic eruptions of dwellings, mere heaps of brick and mortar dumped at random over the cheerless soil. Above swam the marvellous clarified atmosphere of the sky, like iridescent gauze, showering a thousand harmonies of metallic colors. Like a dome of vitrified glass, it shut ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... the bins there was a big deep box. They were mixing clay and water in it, and making a paste. It looked like lime when they're making mortar. The box leaked awfully, and white paste was running down on ...
— Illustrated Science for Boys and Girls • Anonymous
... well-washed, can be fused without evolving much iodine, from the presence of this percompound; nor does crystallization from its hot aqueous solution free it from this substance. Even when a little of the protiodide and iodine are merely rubbed together in a mortar, a portion of the periodide is formed. And though it is decomposed by being fused and heated to dull redness for a few minutes, and the whole reduced to protiodide, yet that is not at all opposed to the possibility, that a little of that which ...
— Experimental Researches in Electricity, Volume 1 • Michael Faraday
... crystallizing in monoclinic prisms, and occurring in various natural waters, as an efflorescence in limestone caverns, and in the neighbourhood of decaying nitrogenous organic matter. Hence its synonyms, "wall-saltpetre" and "lime-saltpetre"; from its disintegrating action on mortar, it is sometimes referred to as "saltpetre rot." The anhydrous nitrate, obtained by heating the crystallized salt, is very phosphorescent, and constitutes "Baldwin's phosphorus." A basic nitrate, Ca(NO3)2.Ca(OH)2.3H2O, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... race downstairs as soon as he was out of ear-shot, he was mistaken, for I hit the sack like the proverbial ton of crushed mortar. It had been literally weeks since I'd had a pleasant, restful sleep that was not broken by fitful dreams and worry-insomnia. Now that we had something solid to work on, I could look forward to some concrete action instead of merely ...
— Highways in Hiding • George Oliver Smith
... dusty city. How I wish I were with you in the land of Goschen, by the rolling waters of the Murray, where everything is bright and green, and unsophisticated—the two latter terms are almost identical—instead of which my view is bounded by bricks and mortar, and the muddy waters of the Yarra have to do duty for your noble river. Ah! I too have lived in Arcadia, but I don't now: and even if some power gave me the choice to go back again, I am not sure that I would accept. Arcadia, after all, is a lotus-eating ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... are taking the journey and you are reminded that not alone workmen and adventurers are leading the procession, but ministers, women with their refining influence, children with their school books, and college men with gown and mortar-board, with books under arms - all moving ...
— Palaces and Courts of the Exposition • Juliet James
... as a second child. The mother buries the afterbirth at the root of a plantain tree, which then becomes sacred until the fruit has ripened, when it is plucked to furnish a sacred feast for the family. Among the Cherokees the navel-string of a girl is buried under a corn-mortar, in order that the girl may grow up to be a good baker; but the navel-string of a boy is hung up on a tree in the woods, in order that he may be a hunter. The Incas of Peru preserved the navel-string ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... on the sides of the cliffs, and these shelves, or the deep recesses between them, were utilized, so that here is a village of cliff dwellings. There are several hundred rooms altogether. The rooms are of sandstone, pretty carefully worked and laid in mortar, and the interior of the rooms was plastered. The opening for the chimney was usually by the side of the entrance, and the ceilings of the rooms are still blackened with soot and smoke. Around this village, on the terrace of the canyon, great numbers of potsherds, stone implements, ...
— Seventh Annual Report • Various
... he threatens me divinely! I am falling to pieces already. I care not, though, like Anacharsis, I were pounded to death in a mortar: and yet that death were fitter for usurers, gold and themselves to be beaten together, to make a most cordial cullis for the devil. He hath his uncle's villainous look already, In decimo-sexto. [Enter Courtier.] Now, sir, what ...
— The White Devil • John Webster
... desolate;" and he accordingly, after viewing the marvels of the locality, pursued his way to Banda, and thence laid a dak (or travelled by palanquin with relays of bearers) to Calpee, "there to sit from nine to four, writing filthy accounts of bricks and mortar, square feet, cubic feet, and running feet, rupees, annas, and pie; squabbling with wrinkled unromantic villains, whose cool-tempered and overwhelming patience amply deserve their unlawful gains—I mean as labourers in ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... Luginsland (Look in the 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 the town was therefore ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume V (of X) • Various
... engaged in forcing its way into the Secunderbagh, and Captain Peel, with the Naval Brigade, brought up the heavy guns against it. He took up his position within a few yards of the wall and opened a heavy fire, assisted by that of a mortar battery and a field battery of Bengal Artillery; the Highlanders covering the sailors and artillerymen as they worked their guns, by a tremendous fire upon the enemy's loopholes. So massive were the walls that it was several hours before even the sixty-eight pounders of the Naval ...
— The Queen's Cup • G. A. Henty
... cannot live apart. The empire builder—engaged in conquering and appropriating territory and in subjugating peoples—must have not only the force necessary to set up the empire, but also the force requisite to maintain it. Battleships and army corps are as essential to empires as mortar is to a brick wall. They are the expression of the organized might by which the empire is ...
— The American Empire • Scott Nearing
... power of love to God, what is the right thing to do? When a man is cold, he will not warm himself by putting a clinical thermometer into his mouth, and taking his temperature, will he? Let him go into the sunshine and he will be warmed up. You can pound ice in a mortar, and except for the little heat generated by the impact of the pestle, it will keep ice still. But float the iceberg south into the tropics, and what has become of it? It has all run down into sweet, warm water, and mingled with the warm ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... objectionable insects which lurk in the corners of Indian houses. The notion that they do damage by gnawing is an erroneous one, the mischief done by mice and rats being frequently laid to their charge; they have not the powerful dentition necessary for nibbling through wood and mortar. In my book on 'Camp Life in Seonee,' I say a good word for my little friends, and relate as follows an experiment which I tried many years ago: "We had once been talking at mess about musk-rats; some one ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... worthy of our homage, may'st thou be in the houses of men [who worship Mazda]. Salvation be to this man who worships thee in verity and truth, with wood in hand and baresma [sacred twigs] ready, with flesh in hand and holding too the mortar. 2. And mayst thou be [ever] fed with wood as the prescription orders. Yea, mayst thou have thy perfume justly, and thy sacred butter without fail, and thine andirons regularly placed. Be of full age as to thy nourishment, of the canon's ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... for it was clumsily built out of odds and ends of boards, secured at the mill, no doubt, together with sods, a heap of stones, some mud that had hardened until it resembled mortar; and, finally, a roof thatched with straw, much after the style the boys had seen in pictures of foreign cottages in Switzerland, ...
— Pathfinder - or, The Missing Tenderfoot • Alan Douglas
... center of the street was unpaved, but the floors of the arcades were cut stone of various shapes and sizes but all carefully fitted and laid without mortar. These floors gave evidence of great antiquity, there being a distinct depression down the center as though the stone had been worn away by the passage of countless sandaled feet during the ages that it ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... himself. The first house he went into was a small country cabin, such as a petty farmer of five or six acres at that time occupied. The door was not of wood, but of wicker-work woven across long wattles and plastered over with clay mortar. The house had two small holes in the front side-walls to admit the light; but during severe weather these were filled up with straw or rags to keep out the storm. On one side of the door stood a large curra, or, ...
— The Evil Eye; Or, The Black Spector - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... stones in building the wall and lay them so as to break joints, that is, so that the joints are never in a continuous line. Hold the wall in place by stakes as shown in Fig. 26. Use the browse, small twigs with the leaves adhering to them, in place of mortar or cement so as to level your bundles and prevent their rocking on uneven surfaces. The doorways and window openings offer no problem that a rank outsider cannot solve. Fig. 27 shows the window opening, ...
— Shelters, Shacks and Shanties • D.C. Beard
... the cistern would believe at once that, as neither the Chimoos nor the Incas could have known how to build under water, there was no use in searching for hidden chambers under this floor. You see, neither of them had any knowledge of cement or mortar. All their bricks and stones are laid without anything of the sort; and whatever amount of labour was available no chamber could be made under water, for as fast as holes were dug the water would come in, and ...
— The Treasure of the Incas • G. A. Henty |
