"Sawdust" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of flame. (Blow lycopodium through a flame.) Feed the coal into a sort of coffee-mill, there let it be ground and carried forward by a blast to the furnace where it is to be burned. If the thing would work at all, almost any kind of refuse fuel could be burned—sawdust, tan, cinder heaps, organic rubbish of all kinds. The only condition is that it be ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 586, March 26, 1887 • Various
... canned peaches and then took a sneak. On one side of the front hall was the hotel parlor, full of plush furniture and stuffed birds. The office and bar was on the other. I strolls in where half a dozen Clam Creekers was sittin' around a big sawdust box indulgin' in target practice; but after a couple of sniffs I concludes that the breathin' ...
— Odd Numbers - Being Further Chronicles of Shorty McCabe • Sewell Ford
... with glass-paper. There were sheets of brass and copper, and bars and lumps of steel, and great poles and planks of timber reared up round the walls of the workshop. The metal filings fell from Nicky's lathe into sawdust that smelt deliciously. ...
— The Tree of Heaven • May Sinclair
... still drunk with the glory of Napoleon, but himself infused with ideas of popular liberty; chained to the chariot of circumstances, and made to swell the sawdust-magnificence of unpopular kings and the ridiculous success of Napoleon III., the greatest impostor of all history, this Marie Joseph Louis Adolphe Thiers went through a life the bare retrospect of which would actually tire the mind. ...
— The Golden Censer - The duties of to-day, the hopes of the future • John McGovern
... brain, we mean temperament, quality and health. This simple principle explains why a great many people who carry large heads are endowed with but little intellectual power. Their heads are filled with "sawdust," in other words, a brain of poor quality, supported by a feeble body, or vitiated by excessive ...
— How to Become Rich - A Treatise on Phrenology, Choice of Professions and Matrimony • William Windsor
... open ground. There are some, like Pleurotus, that grow in trunks of trees, and make their way through openings in the bark. Every dead tree or branch in the forest is crowded with all species of Polyporus, while carpets, damp cellars, plaster walls and sawdust are ...
— Among the Mushrooms - A Guide For Beginners • Ellen M. Dallas and Caroline A. Burgin
... over sidewalk and roadway alike rested a dense, refreshing dark shadow that seemed to throw from itself an odour of coolness. This was rendered further attractive by the warm spicy odour of damp pine that arose from the resilient surface of sawdust and shingles broken beneath the wheels of traffic. Back from these trees, in wide, well-cultivated lawns, stood the better residences. They were almost invariably built of many corners, with steep roofs meeting each other ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... person, who looked not a little like Buster himself, stepped through the doorway. He wore a white patch across his front and his clothes needed brushing sadly, for they showed many marks of sawdust. ...
— The Tale of Buster Bumblebee • Arthur Scott Bailey
... meat means learning day after day," she explained. "However, there are some things you can learn this morning, and one is to be sure you buy in a clean place. Look around the floor and see whether the sawdust is fresh; notice the odor of the place and whether it is disagreeable or not; look at the counter, too, and be sure it is white and freshly wiped off; and above all, see whether the meat is kept in the ice-box at the back of the shop, not hung up on nails, ...
— A Little Housekeeping Book for a Little Girl - Margaret's Saturday Mornings • Caroline French Benton
... strained gaze, packed carefully in sawdust, lay several bars of yellow metal. Rosendo took them out with trembling hands and laid them upon the floor. "Gold, Padre, gold!" he muttered hoarsely. "Gold, buried by ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... used, and for the pecan cions, hardy Indiana and ordinary southern pecan seedlings, whole root and piece root, were used. Part of the grafts were planted outdoors in nursery rows as soon as made and part were placed in soil or decayed sawdust in a cool greenhouse. This was for the purpose of determining whether or not it would prove advantageous to go to the extra expense and trouble of placing the grafts under greenhouse conditions until April or May. Ground beds were used and thus bottom ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Second Annual Meeting - Ithaca, New York, December 14 and 15, 1911 • Northern Nut Growers Association
... told you already, how on the first battlefield of any consequence that was visited by our party I picked up, from where it lay in the track of the Allies' retreat, a child's rag doll. It was a grotesque thing of print cloth, with sawdust insides. I found it at a place where two roads met. Presumably some Belgian child, fleeing with her parents before the German advance, dropped it there, and later a wagon or perhaps a cannon came along ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... into intricate parts of the building. The pipes which I used were of wrought-iron, similar to those used in conveying gas. They could be curved to suit any peculiarity of the situation; and when the pipes were lapped with felt, or enclosed in wooden troughs filled with sawdust, the loss of heat by radiation was reduced to a minimum. The loss of power was certainly much less than in the friction of a long and perhaps tortuous line of shafting. With steam of 50 lbs. to the inch, a pipe of one-inch bore will convey sufficient ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... eyes, came around the corner of the house. By one arm she carried a doll, and the doll was "leaking" sawdust on the porch. Mrs. Brown ...
— Bunny Brown and His Sister Sue on Grandpa's Farm • Laura Lee Hope
... setting off the delicate sinuosities and well-disposed "golden ways" of its folds, with harmoniously tinted flowers. The opulent sunset, blending pleasantly with artificial light, fell across the quiet ancestral effigies of old consular dignitaries, along the wide floor strewn with sawdust of sandal-wood, and lost itself in the heap of cool coronals, lying ready for the foreheads of the guests on a sideboard of old citron. The crystal vessels darkened with old wine, the hues of the early autumn ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume Two • Walter Horatio Pater
... middle of the floor was the ring. It was not really a ring, but a square, with wooden posts at its four corners through which ran a heavy rope. The space enclosed by the rope was covered with sawdust. ...
— The Boy Scout and Other Stories for Boys • Richard Harding Davis
... alternately denouncing the wickedness and deriding the toothlessness of a grim Giant Pope, may be likened, at a distance, to John Bunyan. About the whole—to conclude—is an atmosphere, not too pronounced, of the Newgate Calendar, and a few patches of sawdust from the Prize Ring. May not people well have wondered (the good pious English folk to whom Luck is a scandal, as the Bible Society's secretary wrote to Borrow),—what manner of man is this, this muleteer-missionary, this natural man with a pen ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... be done, but too soft to work well as a pen; and it has to be heated red hot again, and then dropped into cold oil to harden it. Centrifugal force, which helps in so many manufactures, drives the oil away, and the pens are dried in sawdust. They are now sufficiently hard, but too brittle. They must be tempered. To do this, they are placed in an iron cylinder over a fire, and the cylinder revolved till the pen is as elastic ...
— Makers of Many Things • Eva March Tappan
... at his left, the bare floor running away in front of him, sawdust covered, the string of gaming tables stretched along the wall at his right. As by instinct his eyes lighted upon the man whom he sought. First a round topped table where three men cut and dealt at "stud"; then a faro lay-out with its quick-eyed dealer, its quick-eyed look-out ...
— Six Feet Four • Jackson Gregory
... made for. According to the view acted upon at Oldtown, Senaglecouna has been for a century or centuries training up its lordly pines, that gang-saws, worked by Penobscot, should shriek through their helpless cylinders, gnashing them into boards and chewing them into sawdust. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... angry. Orso and Jenny are in the ring practicing some of their feats. Under its canvas roof reigns dust and silence. In the distance, where the seats are arranged, it is totally dark; the greatest part of the light falls through the roof on the ring, with its sand and sawdust covering. With the help of the gray light which filters through the canvas can be seen a horse standing near the parapet. The big horse feels very lonely, whisks the flies with his tail, and often sways his head. Gradually the eye, becoming accustomed to the dim light, ...
— Sielanka: An Idyll • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... sawdust and bark I would stuff in the dark An owl better than that; I could make an old hat Look more like an owl Than that horrid fowl, Stuck up there so stiff like a side of coarse leather. In fact, about him ...
— Little Masterpieces of American Wit and Humor - Volume I • Various
... but whether as a dwelling or a store-house, I could never find. When I used to lie in bed in the morning for a rest—we had no easy-chairs in Silverado—I would hear, hour after hour, the sharp cutting sound of his labours, and from time to time a dainty shower of sawdust would fall upon the blankets. There lives no more industrious creature than ...
— The Silverado Squatters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and holes were now hidden by beaten snow. At one end stood a big smelter, which filled the place with acrid fumes, and the scream of saws rose from sheds beside the river, where rusty iron smoke-stacks towered above sawdust dumps. The green torrent was partly covered by cakes of grinding ice. All round, in marked contrast to the utilitarian ugliness below, dark pines ran up to the glittering snowfields on the shoulders of the peaks. Foster went to ...
— Carmen's Messenger • Harold Bindloss
... Literary Centers Standard Household Effect Co. Notes of a Vanished Summer Worries of a Winter Walk Summer Isles of Eden Wild Flowers of the Asphalt A Circus in the Suburbs A She Hamlet The Midnight Platoon The Beach at Rockaway Sawdust in the Arena At a Dime Museum American Literature in Exile The Horse Show The Problem of the Summer Aesthetic New York Fifty-odd Years Ago From New York into New England The Art of the Adsmith The Psychology of Plagiarism Puritanism ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... to do so. But an image for which the writer of that book was not responsible stood, all the while, clear and immovable in her memory. Before her, in a rude shed, were a boy and a girl. The girl had a basket in her hand, filled with chips, which she had raked from the sawdust; the boy was offering her assistance; but he knew well enough there was no wood to be sawn or split. It was growing dark and cold within the house, and still more dismal without it. The hearts of these two are ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... been? Well, perhaps he had been part of the machinery of justice, a clerk in the office to which the executioner sends in his accounts,—so much for providing black veils for parricides, so much for sawdust, so much for pulleys and cord for the knife. Or he might have been a receiver at the door of a public slaughter-house, or a sub-inspector of nuisances. Indeed, the man appeared to have been one of the beasts of burden in our great social mill; one of those Parisian Ratons whom their ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac
... in the car-seat remembered with a flush of reminiscent misery how the lad turned suddenly in his walk and entered the door of a drinking-room that stood open. It was very comfortable within. The screens kept out the chill of the autumn night, the sawdust-sprinkled floor was clean, the tables placed near together, the bar glittering, the attendants ...
— A Mountain Woman and Others • (AKA Elia Wilkinson) Elia W. Peattie
... She didn't say nothing, so I jest stooped down to help her. I pulled the tongue of the shoe up and tapped the sides together over it, when a perfect chill came over me, for I pressed the lady's ankle, and it felt just like sawdust. Poor woman! I thought some terrible accident had cut off her leg and she had a false one. I looked up into her face, and she looked so pale like and deathly that I was awful scared, then I looked more and more and ...
— The Adventures of Uncle Jeremiah and Family at the Great Fair - Their Observations and Triumphs • Charles McCellan Stevens (AKA 'Quondam')
... of this? He expressed no opinion, but oh, his face was grim. Orders were immediately given to double the sentinels. A barrel was placed in the Queen's Bower. Sawdust was introduced at immense risk into the Lair. A paper containing this writing, "248xho317 Oxh4591AWS314dd5," was passed round and then solemnly burned. Nothing ...
— Sentimental Tommy - The Story of His Boyhood • J. M. Barrie
... grooved, and spring from a wide platform, approached by a flight of steps. At the base, rests a spring-plank or bascule, to which leather thongs are attached to buckle down the victim, and a basket or pannier filled with sawdust to receive the severed head. Between these, at their summit, hangs the shining knife in its appointed grooves, and a cord, which may be disconnected by a jerk, holds it to its position. Two men will be required to work the instrument promptly,—the ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... three long acts without an H in it: as if for a wager. Evven, and edds, and errors, and ands, were as plentiful as blackberries; but the letter H was neither whispered in Evven, nor muttered in Ell, nor permitted to dwell in any form on the confines of the sawdust." With this I will couple another theatrical experience of this holiday, when he saw a Giant played by a village comedian with a quite Gargantuesque felicity, and singled out for my admiration his fine manner of sitting down to a hot supper (of children), ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... for the crowd: "The panic is in full swing. She's a cellar-to-ridge-pole ripper. They're down 40 or over on an average. Anti-People's is down to 35, and still coming like sawdust over a broken dam. Barry Conant's house and a dozen other of Reinhart's have gone under. His banks and trust companies are going every minute. The whole Street will be overboard before the close. The ...
— Friday, the Thirteenth • Thomas W. Lawson
... floor of the barn was covered with sawdust, and all around the sides of the barn were cages containing many animals. There were lions, tigers, wolves, leopards, monkeys, snakes, and many other strange beasts, some of which Tum Tum had seen in his jungle home, and some of which he ...
— Tum Tum, the Jolly Elephant - His Many Adventures • Richard Barnum
... the nearing hour of lunch time, he went about—a scavenger of jobs—sweeping up the refuse of the paper's needs, as the boys in Covent Garden search through the barrows of sawdust for the stray, green grapes that have been thrown out with ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... Portage la Prairie, Brandon with its Experimental Farm, Regina, the headquarters of the Mounted Police, Moose Jaw, and Medicine Hat are passed, and with these the new, raw towns in the tar-paper stage, towns that smell of sawdust, naked stand of paint. Never in the world's history did towns spring into life as these do. To-day the wind on the prairie, to-morrow the sharp conversation of the hammer on the nail-head, next week the implement warehouse, the tent hotel, the little ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... Treason they feel to be their crime; each individual carter feels himself under the ban of confiscation and attainder: his blood is attainted through six generations, and nothing is wanting but the headsman and his axe, the block and the sawdust, to close up the vista of his horrors. What! shall it be within benefit of clergy to delay the king's message on the high road?—to interrupt the great respirations, ebb or flood, of the national intercourse—to endanger the safety ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... cutter—a reg'lar gent's cutter and fitter. He'd 'a' had you all over the floor in another minute; if I hadn't pried you apart they'd 'a' sewed sawdust up inside of you like you was a doll. He had the old bone-handled skinner in his mit; that's why I let go of him. Laughing Bill! Take it from me, boys, you better walk around him like he was ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... day in my life till I was married, and it's been nothing but work ever since, and now to be laid here like a useless log, with everything going hotfoot to destruction! It's a good thing you've come at last, for the children are makin' sawdust and splinters of every bit of crockery in the house, and that Martha Spriggs has no more management than a settin' hen. I don't suppose you'll be much better, though. You never did hev much of a head, an' now you've been up among the clouds so long, you'll be more like ...
— A Princess in Calico • Edith Ferguson Black
... trusses cost little more to make than a pair of good suspenders or garters. A little leather, a few pieces of elastic or web band, a cloth-covered pad with sawdust in it, is about ...
— Cluthe's Advice to the Ruptured • Chas. Cluthe & Sons
... these brushes is closed at the end by the natural pith of the bamboo. I now find them all either open or otherwise tampered with, and the surrounding surface of the table littered with tiny balls, apparently of sawdust. I picked up one of the nearest brushes, and upon inverting it and giving it a slight tap, a tiny green worm fell out of the opening. From the next one I managed to shake out seven of the caterpillars, ...
— My Studio Neighbors • William Hamilton Gibson
... and Phaseolus. Some of the plates were inclined only a few degrees beneath the horizon, but most of them between 60o and 75o. In the latter cases the radicles in growing downwards were deflected only a little from the direction which they had followed whilst germinating in sawdust, and they pressed lightly on the glass-plates (Fig. 21). Five of the most distinct tracks are here copied, and they are all slightly sinuous, showing circumnutation. Moreover, a close examination of almost every one of the tracks clearly showed that the tips in ...
— The Power of Movement in Plants • Charles Darwin
... I was shown into the Editor's room, where again I was struck by the imaginative adequacy of the surroundings. Before coming to the man himself let me say something of these. The floor was not bare or even sprinkled with sawdust, as it might easily have been, but it was covered by a comfortable carpet, probably from Axminster. Comfort was indeed the note. The desk was neither pitch pine nor teak, but mahogany. Upon it were scattered papers—lightly scattered, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 1, 1919 • Various
... of the comparison. Well, well, contagion is as often mental as physical; and I do not think my readers, who have all been under his lash, will blame me very much for giving the headsman a mouthful of his own sawdust. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... genuine, a finer fellow never breathed than this professor let loose from school and giving his heart a holiday—a simple, tender heart, preserved beneath the science of the law like a grape in sawdust. Now he would smile as I sang Jeanne's praises; now he would sit and listen to my objections with a truculent air, tightening his lips till they broke forth in vehement denial. "What! You dare to say! Young man, what are you afraid of?" His overflowing kindness discharged itself in the sincerest ...
— The Ink-Stain, Complete • Rene Bazin
... Huckley how she had suffered for the Cause as a governess in a rich family where they believed that the world is round, and how she threw up her job sooner than teach immoral geography. That was at the overflow meeting outside the Baptist chapel. She knocked 'em to sawdust! We must look out for Winnie.... But Lafone! Lafone was beyond everything. Impact, personality—conviction—the whole bag o' tricks! He sweated conviction. Gad, he convinced me while he was speaking! (Him? He was President of the Geoplanarians, of course. Haven't you ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling
... Lichas. Scarce has the herald gone, ere Deianira is terrified by a strange phenomenon: a part of the wool with which the supposed filter had been applied to the garment was thrown into the sunlight, upon which it withered away—"crumbling like sawdust"—while on the spot where it fell a sort of venomous foam froths up. While relating this phenomenon to the chorus, her son, Hyllus, returns [370], and relates the agonies of his father under the poisoned garment: he had ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... cows with dry basswood sawdust, saving all the liquid manure, keeping the cows clean, and the stable odors down to a tolerable degree. This bedding breaks up the tenacity of the cow-manure, rendering it as easy to pulverize and manage as clear horse-manure. I would say ...
— Talks on Manures • Joseph Harris
... their way, emerging at length upon a gravelly beach where vast supplies of provisions were cached. All about, in various stages of construction, were skeletons of skiffs, of scows, and of barges; the ground was spread with a carpet of shavings and sawdust. ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... tanned by the wind and sun of many climes immediately engaged the three boys to carry water to the animals, in exchange for passes to the evening performance, the memory of which would never, never fade from Lafe's mind, were he to live as long as Methuselah himself. Every detail, the sawdust-covered racetrack around the ring, the acrobats swinging and diving so far, far up in the air that one held his breath till they made a safe descent; the jokes of the clown never too old to evoke laughter, the noises of wild animals which might break through their barred cages and cause ...
— Peggy-Alone • Mary Agnes Byrne
... with muriatic acid will remove the rough coating outside shells and show the mother o' pearl beneath it. They should be frequently dipped in water to remove the burning acid, or it will make holes in the shell. To polish them, dip a rag in hydrochloric acid and rub till clean; then dry in hot sawdust and polish with chamois leather. To paint shells with oil-colours, mix the latter with Siccatif de Courtrai, or with mirrorine, and put on the paints very dry. To paint them with water colours, lay a wash of white of egg over them; mix the paints with Chinese white and white of egg. The ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII, No. 354, October 9, 1886 • Various
... after the foreman came down-stairs to have a smoke and a chat. Among the many anecdotes which he told me was one which had a little of the horrible in it. He said he was once called to a fire in a cemetery, where workmen had been employed in filling some of the vaults with sawdust and closing them up. They had been smoking down there and had set fire to the sawdust, which set light to the coffins, and when the firemen arrived these were burning fiercely, and the stench and smoke were almost overpowering—nevertheless one of the men ran down ...
— Personal Reminiscences in Book Making - and Some Short Stories • R.M. Ballantyne
... by a somewhat complicated arrangement of wires, worked by a confederate, out of sight. These wires were attached to levers, and finally came up through the floor, through small holes hidden from observation by the sawdust strewn there, as is ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... they never get over. Let me say to all my young friends, you can not afford to smoke, you can not afford to chew. You either take very good tobacco, or you take very cheap tobacco. If it is cheap, I will tell you why it is cheap. It is made of burdock, and lampblack, and sawdust, and colt's-foot, and plantain leaves, and fuller's earth, and salt, and alum, and lime, and a little tobacco, and you can not afford to put such a mess as that in your mouth. But if you use expensive ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... large hall, the floor of which was thickly sprinkled with sawdust; but, without pausing, Lord Claud mounted a staircase in the corner, and led Tom into a large upper room, the walls of which were adorned by rapiers with buttons at the end, where a man was sitting polishing the foils and humming a tune to himself. He rose instantly upon ...
— Tom Tufton's Travels • Evelyn Everett-Green
... wondering if it would follow him. When, in the course of weeks, he grew so far accustomed to the fiendish sound that he could go about his hunting within half a mile of it, he found that the saws had worked him an unspeakable injury. They had fouled his beloved fishing-pools with sawdust. ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... and the soul's force must fill all the invisible nerves that guide it, ten hours a day, that it may not err from its steely precision, and so soul and sight be worn away, and the whole human being be lost at last—a heap of sawdust, so far as its intellectual work in this world is concerned; saved only by its Heart, which cannot go into the form of cogs and compasses, but expands, after the ten hours are over, into fireside humanity. ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... Boccaccio he was always faithful; "Burnt Njal" was a late favourite; and he found at least a passing entertainment in the "Arcadia" and the "Grand Cyrus." George Eliot he outgrew, finding her latterly only sawdust in the mouth; but her influence, while it lasted, was great, and must have gone some way to form his mind. He was easily set on edge, however, by didactic writing; and held that books should teach no other lesson but what "real life would ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... suffer terribly from the enormous taxation. I have seen it on my own estate in Poitou, and can make every allowance for them. In many cases the amounts they are adjudged to pay are absolutely greater than their whole income. They are forced to live upon bread made of bran and sawdust, to eat acorns and beechnuts; they are gaunt with hunger; they see their children dying before their eyes. They know not how their sufferings arise, they only know that they suffer, and in their despair ...
— Won by the Sword - A Story of the Thirty Years' War • G.A. Henty
... brain-injury in a man of twenty-two, who was struck on the skull by a circular saw. The saw cut directly down into the brain, severing the superior longitudinal sinus, besides tearing a branch of the meningeal artery. The wound was filled with sawdust left by the saw while it was tearing through the parts. After ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... baskets filling a crate. No good filler seems yet to have been devised for packing grapes in California. The cork dust in which grapes from the Mediterranean are received is not available and a good substitute has not yet been found. Sawdust is sometimes used but has not proved satisfactory in holding the decay and the fruit absorbs disagreeable flavors from the wood. Occasionally, however, grapes from California are sent to eastern markets packed in dry redwood sawdust and these seem to come through in good condition and not to ...
— Manual of American Grape-Growing • U. P. Hedrick
... throw this one away," she said at last, holding out one which had a broken arm, and was leaking sawdust at the elbow; "I don't want ...
— Harper's Young People, December 16, 1879 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... dry sawdust is prepared in readiness for the process of annealing before the speculum is cast. The box must be a sound wooden or metal box, and must be approximately air-tight. For a speculum a foot in diameter ...
— On Laboratory Arts • Richard Threlfall
... neighbourhood for an accurate description of a lock. It happened that the man of science had on one occasion been a trottee, and was glad to have an opportunity of retaliation. "A lock," said he, "is a quantity of sawdust congealed into boards, which, being let down into the water in a perpendicular slope- level, raises it to the declivity of the sea above!"—" Eh?" said the Athenian, "what dun yo' say?" The gentleman repeated his ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... sea begins. Vegetable life is strenuous, so that one may chance to see a lazy turtle bearing on its back a weedy garden. The water is alive. Miles of space are belted with that plant to which Captain Cook applied a significant name, likening it in its myriads to "sea sawdust." Some dare call it "whale spawn," forgetful that the whale is not a fish. Others assert it to be none other than the "coral insect," which does not exist save in the minds of those who ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... size, however, is regulated according to the population of the immediate neighborhood. The seats are raised in a circle, one above another, about a central ring in which the contest takes place. The ground is covered with sawdust or tan. The birds are of a native game breed, and are subject from chickenhood to a peculiar course of treatment. The English game-cock is prized here only for crossing with the native breed. He cannot equal the Spanish bird in the necessary qualities ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... returned to the body of his victim, where it lay both humped and sprawling, incredibly small and strangely meaner than in life. In these poor, miserly clothes, in that ungainly attitude, the dealer lay like so much sawdust. Markheim had feared to see it, and, lo! it was nothing. And yet, as he gazed, this bundle of old clothes and pool of blood began to find eloquent voices. There it must lie; there was none to work the cunning hinges or direct the miracle of locomotion—there it must lie till it was ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... cent of ash, from 1.5 to 3 per cent of volatile oil, and from 3 to 5.5 per cent of fixed oil. There is a large amount of starch. The chief adulterants are rice, wheat, and potato starch, mustard hulls, exhausted ginger from ginger-ale and extract factories, sawdust and ground peanut-shells, and turmeric is frequently used for coloring the product. The United States standard for ginger is not more than 42 per cent starch, 8 per cent fiber, and 6 ...
— Human Foods and Their Nutritive Value • Harry Snyder
... copybook models, found that he had nothing to say and duly said it at length. It was a state of things highly pleasing to the mob. For they said one to another: Look, here is a man who writes beautifully, evidently a Great Writer; and there is nothing inside him but sawdust, just like you and me. For the most part good writing in the nineteenth century was self-conscious writing, which cannot be beautiful. Is a woman ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... wet to no purpose. There was the tool-house and carpenter's shed near the bank; its floor was thickly covered with sawdust and pine-wood shavings, and there was a mouldy buffalo skin which he had once transported thither from the old wagon-bed. There, too, was his secret cache of a candle in a bottle, buried with other piratical treasures in the presence of the youthful Peters, ...
— A First Family of Tasajara • Bret Harte
... It was winter now; and one morning, when all the air was dark with falling snow, he was standing by the parlour window, looking out on it, and wondering whether the angels made it up in the sky; for he thought it might be their sawdust, which, when they had too much, they shook down to get melted and put out of the way; when Tibby came into the room very softly, and ...
— Gutta-Percha Willie • George MacDonald
... whom I cannot rhyme to, One Scherer, dry as sawdust, grim and prim. Of him there's much to say, if I had time to Concern myself in any wise with HIM. He seems to hate the heights he cannot climb to, He thinks your poetry a coxcomb's whim, A good deal of his sawdust he has spilt on Shakespeare, and Moliere, ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... Bub and Rusty, Eck and Dunk and Sid, 'Tumblin' on the sawdust Like the A-rabs did; Jamesy on the slack-rope In a wild retreat, Grappling back, to start again— ...
— The Book of Joyous Children • James Whitcomb Riley
... hospitality, would fain have tempted him to eat. He had a plateful of something brought up to him. In general, he was particular and dainty enough, and knew well each shade of flavour in his food, but now the devilled chicken tasted like sawdust. He minced up some of the fowl for Margaret, and peppered and salted it well; but when Dixon, following his directions, tried to feed her, the languid shake of head proved that in such a state as Margaret was in, food would only choke, ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... a silver dollar. In the book we can smell the sawdust, hear the flapping of the big white canvas and the roaring of the lions, and listen to the merry ...
— The Outdoor Girls in Florida - Or, Wintering in the Sunny South • Laura Lee Hope
... atmosphere hot with naked passion; he is going to rub shoulders with men who walk hand in hand with death. That's the sort of tonic we all want, to remind us that we are human beings with blood in our veins, and not sawdust-stuffed dolls." ...
— The Malefactor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... best he could do, for he might have died,—died instead of dried. O, I should like to prick that man with something sharp, and see if sawdust did not run out of him! Kate, ask the bookseller to let me know if he ever really dies, and then life ...
— Malbone - An Oldport Romance • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... "but we've been looking over the bulletins and as near as we can estimate, it ought not to cost more than $500 for a dairy house alone, but when we build the new dairy house, I think we should abandon this old wooden ice house that keeps the yard all mussed up with sawdust— besides, you have to cut from thirty to fifty per cent, more ice than we really use in order to provide for the great waste in such a poorly built house. Now, if we build our ice house in connection with the dairy house, it will be better protected ...
— Hidden Treasure • John Thomas Simpson
... were duly humble. He accepted a few orders and went to work with a will; he would show them what the old man could do. But it was only a temporary gleam; in a little while he grew homesick for the shop, for the sawdust floor and the familiar smell of oil, and the picture of Lossing flitting in and out. He missed the careless young workmen at whom he had grumbled, he missed the whir of machinery, and the consciousness of rush and hurry accented by the cars on the track outside. In short, he missed the feeling ...
— Stories of a Western Town • Octave Thanet
... wilt and dry out. Store in a cool place. If cellar space permits, place in box of sand, sawdust or garden earth. ...
— Foods That Will Win The War And How To Cook Them (1918) • C. Houston Goudiss and Alberta M. Goudiss
... with a slow smile. "I don't believe I do. I ust to. Lord, yes! I ust to think about folks that was hungry till my stummick clean caved in. I ust to eat my dinner like it was sawdust, for fear I'd get a little comfort out of it, while somebody somewheres was starvin'—little childern, like enough. That was al'ays the hardest part of it—little childern. I ust to think some of foundin' a'sylum ...
— Uncle William - The Man Who Was Shif'less • Jennette Lee
... bearing restored courage. With head erect, the intrepid Tarasconian slowly and calmly made the circuit of the booth, passing the seal's tank without stopping, glancing disdainfully on the long box filled with sawdust in which the boa would digest its raw fowl, and going to take his stand before ...
— Tartarin of Tarascon • Alphonse Daudet
... Long before daylight we were climbing the steep road at Rossie to the inn of the Travellers' Rest—a tavern famous in its time, that stood half up the hill, with a store, a smithy, and a few houses grouped about it, We came up at a silent walk on a road cushioned with sawdust. D'ri rapped on the door until I thought he had roused the whole village. At last a man came to the upper window. He, too, inspected us with a candle. Then he opened the door and gave us a hearty welcome. We put up our horses for a bite, ...
— D'Ri and I • Irving Bacheller
... in what is so called—the stuff being the inferior and cheaper cassia bark; sometimes it is only part cassia; sometimes the humbug part of it is flour and ochre. Cayenne-pepper is mixed with corn-meal and salt, Venetian-red, mustard, brickdust, fine sawdust, and red-lead. Mustard with flour and turmeric. Confectionery is often poisoned with Prussian-blue, Antwerp-blue, gamboge, ultramarine, chrome yellow, red-lead, white-lead, vermilion, Brunswick-green, and Scheele's green, or arsenite of copper! Never ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... lighted cabin, and was followed in by Shorty in answer to the "Come in" of the voice they heard groaning. It was a simple log cabin, the walls moss-chinked, the earth floor covered with sawdust and shavings. The light was a kerosene-lamp, and they could make out four bunks, three of which were occupied by men who ceased from ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... chisel of the young sculptor Antide Pechine, who has perfectly understood his work, and has represented the inventor at the moment at which he observes a flame start from a glass balloon in which he had heated some sawdust. The attitude is graceful and the expression of the face is meditative and intelligent. The statue, which is ten feet in height, was exhibited at the last Salon. It was cast at ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 611, September 17, 1887 • Various
... away, fell forward upon his chest, the too-big paws outspread, and smiled from a vasty pink cavern. Between the stiffened ears could be seen the crooked tail, tinged with just enough of the brown, in unbelievably swift motion. Discovering this pose to bring no desired result, he ran mad in the sawdust, excavating it feverishly with his forepaws, sending it expertly to the rear with ...
— Bunker Bean • Harry Leon Wilson
... only received many impressions, and ordered them with ease and despatch, but his very senses seemed more than ordinarily acute. He could distinguish even by day, when the night stillness had withdrawn its favouring conditions, the borings of the sawdust insects in the logs of the cabin. Only he was very tired. His hands seemed a long distance away, as though it would require an extraordinary effort of the will to lift them. So ...
— The Claim Jumpers • Stewart Edward White
... from crimson to purple to blue on the tassels of cloud-wraith floating in the western sky. At times Linder and Murdoch would visit him to report progress on the Big Idea, and the three would sit on a bench in the half-built house, sweet with the fragrance of new sawdust, and smoke placidly while they determined matters of policy or administration. It had been something of a disappointment to Grant that Murdoch had not considered Phyllis Bruce one of "the family." He had left ...
— Dennison Grant - A Novel of To-day • Robert Stead
... in his keen, quick way to face him. "All wrong in the way he's putting his case, I mean. All these National Service chaps are. Home defence they talk about, nothing but Home Defence. It's like chucking sawdust into a fire—the fire being all the bloody fools who are opposed to military training. Any fool can knock the bottom out of this Home Defence business. The Blue Water fools are champions at it. They say the only defence against invasion is the Navy and that half a million spent on the Navy ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... he thought, "A circus has pulled down its tent, carted off its gaudy wagons, its naphtha lights, and its boxes of sawdust. And a new show is staking ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... occupation of his whole mind, and no object ever held his attention except in connection with it. With a purpose so strict, and a theory of religion so precise, there is usually little play for imagination or feeling. Though we read Protestant theology as a duty, we find it as dry in the mouth as sawdust. The literature which would please must represent nature, and nature refuses to be bound into our dogmatic systems. No object can be pictured truly, except by a mind which has sympathy with it. Shakespeare no more hates Iago than Iago hates ...
— Bunyan • James Anthony Froude
... came that one night, after the conclusion of the performance, Alkali Dick rode out of the corral gate of the Hippodrome with his last week's salary in his pocket and an imprecation on his lips. He had shaken the sawdust of the sham arena from his high, tight-fitting boots; he would shake off the white dust of France, and the effeminate soil of all Europe also, and embark at once for his own country and ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... gorge rose. Spaton sawdust, sweetish warmish cigarette smoke, reek of plug, spilt beer, men's beery piss, the ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... a stock, and a hole cut right through. Into this, after much greasing, a key-hole saw was thrust, and, not without emitting a loud noise, the work of cutting began, the sawdust falling lightly on the lion's skin; but at the end of a few seconds a dull, harsh sound told that the saw was meeting metal, and a fresh start ...
— The Dark House - A Knot Unravelled • George Manville Fenn
... and when it did not finish till one o'clock, how did you get ready for Sunday's meetings?' The sweet spirited old man smiled and replied, 'The hall did get dirty, and it did take some time to sweep up the sawdust and make things fresh for knee-drill, but I just went on till it was finished. Yes, I got tired. But no, I never grudged the work, thank God. I was glad to help the Adjutant, bless her! in my little way. To ...
— The Angel Adjutant of "Twice Born Men" • Minnie L. Carpenter
... and bread, and a confession one to another that if we had won the day instead of losing it, and spent our summer with the monks, we should have grown considerably thinner by the victory. They make their bread, I rather imagine, with the sawdust of their fir trees, and, except oil and wine—yes, and plenty of beef (of fleisch, as your Germans say, of all kinds, indeed), which isn't precisely the fare to suit us—we were thrown for nourishment on the great sights around. ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... no more now, if you please, as I am sleepy, and I know you must be, too. But in case the little girl in Montclair doesn't drop her doll on the sidewalk, and spill the sawdust all over the stick of molasses candy I'll tell you next ...
— Curly and Floppy Twistytail - The Funny Piggie Boys • Howard R. Garis
... comfor'ble dolly?—or why do you fidget? You're hurting my shoulder, you troublesome midget! Perhaps it's that hole that you told me about. Why, darling, your sawdust ...
— Pinafore Palace • Various
... the kind of wife who would have done old Duggie a bit of good. And on her own ground I shouldn't wonder if she might not have made a fight for it. But now she hadn't a chance. Poor old Duggie was just like so much putty in Florence's hands when he couldn't get away from her. You could see the sawdust trickling out of Love's Young Dream in a ...
— A Wodehouse Miscellany - Articles & Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... more about the desert in Egypt than any other part of it, for it was on the desert we trained. There were sham fights galore, but it was mostly squad and company drill, until if some devil had scooped out our brain-boxes and filled them with sawdust we could have carried out the orders just as well. In fact, one fellow must have gone mad with the monotony of it and perpetrated the rhyme, to the tune of "The Red, White, ...
— "Over There" with the Australians • R. Hugh Knyvett
... again he said, 'Good gracious! the ears are too short entirely!' So he had to get a needle and thread and sew on more fur to the ears, so that they might be the right size. But after a time it was all finished, and then he stuffed the fur full of sawdust and sewed it up neatly; after which he put in some glass eyes that made the toy rabbit look wonderfully life-like. When it was all done he put it on the table beside me, and at first I did n't know whether I was the live rabbit or the toy rabbit, we ...
— Mother Goose in Prose • L. Frank Baum
... Field of Mars the pyre had been erected, a great square structure of resinous wood, the interior filled with coke and sawdust, the exterior covered with illuminated cloths, on which, for base, a tower rose, three storeys high. Into the first storey flowers and perfumes were thrown, into the second the couch was raised, ...
— Imperial Purple • Edgar Saltus
... one of the men belonging to the establishment, he desired him to bring one of the rakes with which they levelled the sawdust in the area. ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, XXII • various
... not exhibit the geometric arrangement of those of Bees, are not less interesting. The paper which they employ is manufactured on the spot, as the walls of the cells develop. Detritus of every kind enters into its preparation: small fragments of wood, sawdust, etc.; anything is good. These Hymenoptera possess no organ specially adapted to aid them; it is with their saliva that they glue this dust together and make of it a substance very suitable for its purpose. The dwellings often reach considerable size, yet they ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... conditions, in decent houses and decent streets, and you'll have another sort of attitude toward the company. Quit cheating them at the store, and you'll have more honesty in the mines; quit sprinkling sour beer and whiskey on the sawdust in front of the saloons to coax men in who have an appetite, and you'll have less drinking—but, of course, Sands will have less rents. Let the company obey the law—the company run by men who are pointed out as examples, and there'll ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... sound now. A mental and a vocal paralysis seized upon the inhabitants of Lac Bain. Never had they seen fighting like this fighting of Reese Beaudin. Until now had they lived to see the science of the sawdust ring pitted against the brute force of Brobdingnagian, of Antaeus and Goliath. For Reese Beaudin's fighting was a fighting without tricks that they could see. He used his fists, and his fists alone. He was like a dancing man. And suddenly, in the ...
— Back to God's Country and Other Stories • James Oliver Curwood
... which was packed in boxes of sawdust on deck, afforded one cold drink in which to toast the gallant future governor, and that was the last of it. At night the Tahitian sailors helped themselves, and we bade farewell to ice until once more we ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... side the fire had done no more than scorch the nearer trees; it had failed to secure its footing. In one place the woodmen had been at work on Saturday; trees, felled and freshly trimmed, lay in a clearing, with heaps of sawdust by the sawing-machine and its engine. Hard by was a temporary hut, deserted. There was not a breath of wind this morning, and everything was strangely still. Even the birds were hushed, and as we hurried along I and the artilleryman ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... the coco-nut planters.[1] The larva of one species of large dimensions, Batocera rubus[2], called by the Singhalese "Cooroominya" makes its way into the stems of the younger trees, and after perforating them in all directions, it forms a cocoon of the gnawed wood and sawdust, in which it reposes during its sleep as a pupa, till the arrival of the period when it emerges as a perfect beetle. Notwithstanding the repulsive aspect of the large pulpy larvae of these beetles, they are ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent |
