"Sledge" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... My sledge and hammer lie reclined; My bellows too have lost their wind; My fire's extinct; my forge decay'd, And in the dust my vice is laid; My coal is spent, my iron gone; The nails are driven—my work ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... They were expressions of more than satisfaction. "It's a great many miles to my own cabin, but it's home—all home—after I get into the forests. My cabin is at the lower end of God's Lake, three hundred miles by dogs and sledge from Thoreau's—three hundred miles as straight north as a ...
— The Courage of Marge O'Doone • James Oliver Curwood
... grassy spot, on the long look'd for day, Merry parties of beasts made the best of their way; There were bears, long and short-legg'd, black, brown, grey, and white, From different parts, to enjoy the fine sight. The polar bear came in a sledge, and she said That the journey had caused a sharp pain in her head: For, although well protected from snout to her tail, She thought she had got a slight "coup-de-soleil;" So she hastily called for a gallon of ice, Which a monkey in waiting served up ...
— The Quadrupeds' Pic-Nic • F. B. C.
... laugh at winter when we hear The grim old churl about our dwellings rave: Thou, from that "ruler of the inverted year," Shalt pluck the knotty sceptre Cowper gave, And pull him from his sledge, and drag him in, And melt the icicles ...
— Poems • William Cullen Bryant
... seemed to Snorre that it would be a good plan to kill Bjorn." So, about the time of hay-making, off he rides, with some retainers, to his victim's home, having fully instructed one of them how to deal the first blow. Bjorn was in the home-field (tun), mending his sledge, when the cavalcade appeared in sight; and, guessing what motive had inspired the visit, went straight up to Snorre, who rode in front, "in a blue cloak," and held the knife with which he had been working in such ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... story-tellers there is none like Urda, for she is the daughter and the granddaughter and the great-granddaughter of storytellers. It is given to her to talk, as it is given to John Thorlaksson to sing—he who sings so as his sledge flies over the snow at night, that the people come out in the bitter air from their doors to listen, and the dogs put up their noses ...
— The Shape of Fear • Elia W. Peattie
... he turned his attention to the river-bed where his team of dogs was stationed. Granger, watching him from above, saw that he had halted suddenly and was bending down. Then he heard him calling his dogs together and saw him harnessing them quickly into his sledge. Panic seized him lest Strangeways should drive away without telling him the name of this thing, which was not a man, which Spurling had murdered, and whether the deed had been done in the Klondike. Also he was curious to see for himself what it was that he had found in the ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson
... one bright winter day (Varia had been somehow peculiarly enchanting the previous evening), I dressed myself in my best, slowly and solemnly sallied out from my room, took a first-rate sledge, and drove down to Ivan Semyonitch's. Varia was sitting alone in the drawing-room reading Karamzin. On seeing me she softly laid the book down on her knees, and with agitated curiosity looked into ...
— The Diary of a Superfluous Man and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... the core of the furnace we came upon one cube of cement which was as hard as granite. With the aid of Higgins, and a set of rollers and levers, we managed to get this block out into the park, and attempted to crush it with the sledge-hammers belonging to the forge, in which we were entirely unsuccessful. The more it resisted our efforts, the more certain we became that the coins would be found within it. As this would not be treasure-trove in the sense that the Government might make a claim upon it, there was no ...
— The Triumphs of Eugene Valmont • Robert Barr
... left Annapolis on my way to this city. After travelling eight miles, we passed through a long and dreary wood; here we met two negroes conveying a coffin on a sort of sledge. On inquiry, one of them informed us, the coffin contained the corpse of his mother; that on the death of his old master, his parents were sold to different planters, which his father took so much to heart, ...
— Travels in the United States of America • William Priest
... the stars just beginning to shine over his head, as now they were; or wending the windless woods in the first frosts before the snow came, the hunter's bow or javelin in hand: or coming back from the wood with the quarry on the sledge across the snow, when winter was deep, through the biting icy wind and the whirl of the drifting snow, to the lights and music of the Great Roof, and the merry talk therein and the smiling of the faces glad to see the hunting- carles come back; and the full draughts ...
— The House of the Wolfings - A Tale of the House of the Wolfings and All the Kindreds of the Mark Written in Prose and in Verse • William Morris
... him to succeed in his alleged purpose. Now, my friends, let us suppose Mr. Wolcott and his two associates are in England talking with the rich moneyed men for international bimetallism and Mr. Wolcott is dealing out sledge-hammer argument in favor of international bimetallism, using the same argument in England the Bryan Democrats used in the campaign of 1896 in the United States. The financial men of England would then say to Mr. Wolcott, did you say that bimetallism in the United States meant 50-cent ...
— One Thousand Secrets of Wise and Rich Men Revealed • C. A. Bogardus
... strong eddy setting up-stream just below the chute, if the walls are narrow and rocky. Now, that sort of water is very dangerous. One of those big swells will come up under a boat, and you'd think a sledge-hammer had hit her. Nothing can stop the boat from careening a little bit then. Well, suppose the eddy catches her bow and swings her up-stream. She goes up far enough, in spite of all, so that her nose gets ...
— The Young Alaskans on the Trail • Emerson Hough
... fist down on the deal table with the force of a sledge-hammer. Miss Abigail gave a start, and the ale leaped up in the pitcher ...
— The Story of a Bad Boy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... draught the dog is highly useful in some countries. What would become of the inhabitants of the northern regions, if the dog were not harnessed to the sledge, and the Laplander, and the Greenlander, and the Kamtschatkan drawn, and not unfrequently at the rate of nearly a hundred miles a day, over the snowy wastes? In Newfoundland, the timber, one of the most important ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... and, with a fearful jerk, over they went. It was a dreadful blow, and had it not been for the kindness of the people in charge, both might have been badly injured; but they were picked up and carried to the pavilion, rubbed with snow on their noses and ears, and finally packed in a sledge and driven home. How differently they looked at the glittering crowd, and watched the animated scene! They had gone out full of excitement and daring; resolved as Ivan was to resist authority, he now was full of shame that he had gotten himself into a scrape. His fingers ached, and ...
— Harper's Young People, December 9, 1879 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... with force of fervent heat The hardest yron soone doth mollify, That with his heavy sledge he can it beat, And fashion to what he it list apply. Yet cannot all these flames in which I fry Her hart, more hard then yron, soft a whit, Ne all the playnts and prayers with which I Doe beat on th'andvile of her stubberne wit: But still, the more she fervent sees my fit, The more she ...
— The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, Volume 5 • Edmund Spenser
... his impaired health, physical weakness, and general unfitness for such a desperate journey; as always, he spared not himself when danger threatened. Ohlsen, being the clearest-headed of the sledgemen, was put in a sleeping-bag and dragged on a sledge as a guide. ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various
... which they put it in the lee of the cabin. Meanwhile, when they wished to reach the traps on the farther side of the lake, they crossed it on the ice, and, presuming that the cold might last long, they easily made a rude sledge which they used in place of ...
— The Last of the Chiefs - A Story of the Great Sioux War • Joseph Altsheler
... unexpectedly, with calm determination. "You can't refuse me that now. For God's sake, Kirylo, my soul, the police may be here any moment, and when they get you they'll immure you somewhere for ages—till your hair turns grey. I have down there the best trotter of dad's stables and a light sledge. We shall do thirty miles before the moon sets, ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... once rid of this peril," thought he, "and if any man shall find me playing squire of the body to a damosel-errant, he shall have leave to beat my brains out with my own sledge-hammer!" ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... Christ. Lassalle is a better pupil of the Master than the priests who denounce socialism. You have met Lassalle! No? You shall meet him here one day. A marvel. Me plus Will. He knows everything, feels everything, yet is a sledge-hammer to act. He may yet be the Messiah of the nineteenth century. Ah! when every man is a Spinoza, and does good for the love of good, when the world is ruled by justice and brotherhood, reason and humor, then the Jews may shut up shop, for it will be the Holy Sabbath. Did ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... penitents came a man of vast stature and proportions. He was naked, with the exception of cloth drawers at the left side of which hung a large knife in a sheath, and he bore on his right shoulder a heavy iron sledge-hammer. This man was the executioner. He had, moreover, sandals bound on his feet by cords. Behind the executioner came, in the order in which they were to die, first Peppino and then Andrea. Each was accompanied by two priests. Neither had his eyes ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... of the city an unnatural action struck them with a horror that they still felt in all its force. A mother abandoned her little son, only five years old: in spite of his cries and tears, she drove him away from her sledge, which was too heavily laden. She exclaimed, at the same time, with a distracted air, that "he had never seen France! he would not regret it! but she knew France! she was resolved to see France once more!" Twice did Ney himself replace the unfortunate child ...
— The Two Great Retreats of History • George Grote
... forever terminated the dispute and put a seal upon the earthly hopes and fortunes of unnumbered myriads. The Governor of Astrachan was the first to hear the news. Stung by the mixed furies of jealousy, of triumphant vengeance, and of anxious ambition, he sprang into his 25 sledge, and, at the rate of 300 miles a day, pursued his route to St. Petersburg—rushed into the Imperial presence—announced the total realization of his worst predictions; and, upon the confirmation of this intelligence by subsequent dispatches from many different ...
— De Quincey's Revolt of the Tartars • Thomas De Quincey
... Christian indifference to the trivial divergences between themselves. "Even a one-eyed man," says the proverb, "is a king amongst the blind." Even the shepherd's sling may perchance smite down the Goliath of Gath. The rough sledge-hammer of a rustic preacher may strike home, where the most polished scholar would plead in vain. The calm judgment of the wise and good, or the silent example, or the understanding sympathy, or the wide survey of the ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... marble, On his hand a flint-stone gauntlet, On his brow a stony visor." Then the wizard, Youkahainen, Heeding not advice paternal, Heeding not his mother's counsel, Leads his courser from his stable, Fire outstreaming from his nostrils, From his hoofs, the sparks outshooting, Hitches to his sledge, the fleet-foot, To his golden sledge, the courser, Mounts impetuous his snow-sledge, Leaps upon the hindmost cross-bench, Strikes his courser with his birch-whip, With his birch-whip, pearl-enamelled. Instantly the prancing racer Springs ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... toil; The Greek, the Roman, reared its ancient walls, The silent Arab arched its mystic halls; In that fair niche, by countless billows laved, Trace the deep lines that Sydenham engraved; On yon broad front that breasts the changing swell, Mark where the ponderous sledge of Hunter fell; By that square buttress look where Louis stands, The stone yet warm from his uplifted hands; And say, O Science, shall thy life-blood freeze, When fluttering folly ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... me conclude the history of the Grandmother. Next day she lost every gulden that she possessed. Things were bound to happen so, for persons of her type who have once entered upon that road descend it with ever-increasing rapidity, even as a sledge descends a toboggan-slide. All day until eight o'clock that evening did she play; and, though I personally did not witness her exploits, I learnt of them ...
— The Gambler • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... spread on these places, and a wooden sledge, covered with iron teeth, was dragged over them by oxen until all the grain had fallen from the dry ears. It was a joyful time, the oxen were not muzzled, so they could eat while they worked, and the ...
— A Farmer's Wife - The Story of Ruth • J. H. Willard
... melancholy. A doubt can no longer exist, that the dogs brought to the interior of these wilds by Europeans, engendered with the wolf, and produced these dogs in common use. They have no attachment, and destroy all domestic animals. They are lashed to a sledge, and are often brutally driven to travel thirty or forty miles a day, dragging after them a load of three and four hundred pounds weight. When fat, they are eaten by the Canadians as a great delicacy; and are generally presented by the Indians ...
— The Substance of a Journal During a Residence at the Red River Colony, British North America • John West
... lodge the Queen, and from thence she sent back Helen to bring the rest of the maids of honor and her goods to join her at Komorn. It was early spring, and snow was still on the ground, and the Lady of Kottenner and her faithful nameless assistant travelled in a sledge; but two Hungarian noblemen went with them, and they had to be most careful in concealing their arrangements. Helen had with her the Queen's signet, and keys; and her friend had a file in each shoe, and keys ...
— A Book of Golden Deeds • Charlotte M. Yonge
... will wash more dirt than a slow one. In many claims the pay-dirt is full of large stones and boulders, weighing from one hundred to five hundred pounds each, all of which must be carried away through the sluice. Some are sent down whole, and others are broken into pieces with sledge hammers before they are thrown into the box. These require a swift current and a large body of water. The larger the supply of water, the steeper the sluice is made, other things being equal. Of course economy and convenience of working require that the sluice should be near the ...
— Hittel on Gold Mines and Mining • John S. Hittell
... at twelve punctually, Arthur was informed that the conveyance had arrived to fetch him. He went down, and was quite appalled at its magnificence. It was sledge-like in form, built to hold four, and mounted on wooden runners that glided over the round pebbles with which the Madeira streets are paved, with scarcely a sound, and as smoothly as though they ran on ice. The chariot, as Arthur always called ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... there was more than one example of prisoners making their escape in boxes. The chest however was put into the boat, and Grotius' maid, who was in the secret, had orders to go with it to Gorcum, and put it into a house there. When it came to Gorcum, they wanted to put it on a sledge; but the maid telling the boatman there were some brittle things in it, and begging of him to take care how it was carried, it was put on a horse, and brought by two chairmen to David Dazelaer's, a friend of Grotius, and brother-in-law to Erpenius, having married his sister[112]. When ...
— The Life of the Truly Eminent and Learned Hugo Grotius • Jean Levesque de Burigny
... times, the men dare to go home, but even there weapons are placed ready for use by the bedside, and outside the house sledges are put up right, for the bear is always suspicious of the erect sledge, and she will knock it dawn before she will attack the igloo. The knocking down of the sledge makes a noise that gives warning to ...
— Out of the Triangle • Mary E. Bamford
... better, any more than you do Fay justice now that you do know her better. Wentworth is made of words, just as other men are made of flesh and blood. How would you have kept any respect for him when you had become tired of words? You are too straightforward, too sledge-hammer to ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... Is it just luck, I wonder, or has fate taken a hand in the game? How the Kaiser would frown, if he knew what I am doing to-night; and how Daddy would laugh! But—let's see!—perhaps this is just a wedge, and I'll need a sledge-hammer to crack open the ...
— Mary Louise and the Liberty Girls • Edith Van Dyne (AKA L. Frank Baum)
... shed he found a sledge, and returned to where the major was still arguing with the ...
— Ted Strong in Montana - With Lariat and Spur • Edward C. Taylor
... home in Russia, they were asked to be groomsmen for a friend who was to marry the belle of another village. It was in the dead of winter and the groom's party went over to the wedding in sledges. Peter and Pavel drove in the groom's sledge, and six sledges followed with all ...
— My Antonia • Willa Sibert Cather
... slept. Heavily, I imagine, since for some time a strange booming noise droned continuously in my ears before it waked me. At last I was roused. I listened. The sound was like nothing I had ever heard before. It seemed as if a heavy-sledge hammer, or huge wooden mallet, carefully muffled in wadding, was at work in the room below me. The stable clock struck four. 'No mason,' thought I, 'no mason would commence his day's work at four in the morning. Burglars, perhaps,' ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... three-months' sentence, on the technical charge of vagrancy, in a workhouse somewhere in Indiana, had affected the young man's nerves. His ankle bones still ached where the ball and chain had been hitched; on his palms the blisters induced by the uncongenial use of a sledge hammer on a rock pile had hardly as yet turned to calluses. So it is only fair to presume that his nervous system felt the stress of his recent confining ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... there came a deafening noise of clanging bells and clamping hoofs. A huge sledge, drawn by two horses, was coming. On the front seat sat a young gentleman, in a fur coat and a high fur cap, and his young wife. The gentleman was driving; behind him stood his coachman, holding a burning torch so high that the draft blew the flame backward, leaving in its wake a ...
— The Emperor of Portugalia • Selma Lagerlof
... There had leapt within them, in one great, overwhelming tide, all the old reckless craze for the shadowy creature of Victor's story. At the mere suggestion of a squaw's presence in that valley their blood-tide surged through their veins like a torrent of fire, and their pulses were set beating like sledge-hammers. A squaw! A squaw! That was their cry. Why ...
— In the Brooding Wild • Ridgwell Cullum
... wilderness stretching from sea to sea. I sniff the fragrant odors of snow-clad birch and pine, of marsh pools glimmering in the dying glow of a summer sun. I hear the splash of paddles and the glide of sledge-runners, the patter of flying moose and deer, and the scream of the hungry panther. I feel the weird, fascinating spell of ...
— The Cryptogram - A Story of Northwest Canada • William Murray Graydon
... the reindeer wait; Filled the sledge with costly freight. As the first faint shadow falls, Promptly from his icy halls Steps St. Nick, and grasps the rein: And afar, in measured time, Sounds the ...
— Ballads • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... Presently he took the pencil and made sketches of his own. A boy with a belt like his rode something which vaguely resembled a sledge or a motorcycle. He made a detailed drawing of a runner. This was an air-sled, such as Zani had pictured in more elaborate form. Fran sketched the air-column generator, and it was utterly simple and a boy of fourteen could make it. After painful scrutiny Soames ...
— Long Ago, Far Away • William Fitzgerald Jenkins AKA Murray Leinster
... through the first third of this century. It went on in the Far Northwest in substantially the same fashion that has been here described, until quite recently; and in the great North Land tributary to Hudson Bay the chanson of the voyageur may still be heard, and the dog-sledge laden with furs jingles across the snowy plains from distant ...
— The Character and Influence of the Indian Trade in Wisconsin • Frederick Jackson Turner
... a thing happened before. Never had the tones of a child's voice pierced his dull ears, and made that big sledge-hammer of a heart positively ache with its throbs. It was a new and even a dangerous feeling; for though he made young Chilblain's impertinence the pretext of an outburst, he might just as readily have given a cuff to the hoary-headed ...
— Prince Lazybones and Other Stories • Mrs. W. J. Hays
... though he gained he dug the rowel and plied the quirt, unmindful of what he did. On they came; the chorus of their fear swelled like the voice of a mighty cataract, the pound, pound, pound of their hoofs ringing like mighty sledge-hammers. ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... the shape of strong doors, party-walls, and iron-grates—so that the party blundered on in the dark, uncertain whether they were not going farther from, rather than approaching, the extremity of the labyrinth. They were obliged to send for mechanics, with sledge-hammers and other instruments, to force one or two of those doors, which resisted all other means of undoing them. Labouring along in these dusky passages, where, from time to time, they were like ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... South's Feeling. The Three Union Corps. War in the Wilderness. Rumors North and South. Spottsylvania. Still to the Left! Cold Harbor Again. The "Open Door" Closed. Glance at Grant's Campaign. Cost of Reaching McClellan's Base. Sledge-Hammer Strategy. ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... so depressive and relaxing to those who are not inured to it, that we are again returned to our large chimney and wood-fire.—The French depend more on the warmth of their clothing, than the comfort of their houses. They are all wadded and furred as though they were going on a sledge party, and the men, in this respect, are more delicate than the ladies: but whether it be the consequence of these precautions, or from any other cause, I observe they are, in general, without excepting even the natives of the Southern provinces, ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... feelings about her father, and his mode of attack was almost ludicrously wanting in judgment and discrimination. But that which tact and judgment might perhaps have failed to effect, Maurice's sledge-hammer blows brought home to Lesley's understanding. He was to blame; but he did some good, nevertheless. When the first shock was over, Lesley began to reflect that her own world had been a narrow one, and that possibly there were others equally good. And this ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... "then three shall do it. Hasten; bid Hord the equerry harness the triple team to the strongest sledge, and be you ready to ride with me in a half hour's time. For we shall be in Stockholm ...
— Historic Boys - Their Endeavours, Their Achievements, and Their Times • Elbridge Streeter Brooks
... administered to the imagination. Sometimes he strolled along the banks of the river Inny, where, in after years, when he had become famous, his favorite seats and haunts used to be pointed out. Often he joined in the rustic sports of the villagers, and became adroit at throwing the sledge, a favorite feat of activity and strength in Ireland. Recollections of these "healthful sports" we find in ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... here! He would put the white woman out. She does smell earthy, but I won't part with her. (A knock.) What a devil of a noise! Why don't they use the knocker? What's the use of taking a sledge-hammer? ...
— Stephen Archer and Other Tales • George MacDonald
... wit must certainly have aroused in such a man as his father; and though he suppressed his earliest memories of her because they introduced that other who had shared his nursery, he had many pictures in his mind which showed her brown and red-lipped and subtle with youth, and not the dark, silent sledge-hammer of a woman that she had ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... voucher for this remark. At a great sledging-party, an awkward man has assigned to him a lady who does not like him: comically enough, there befalls him, one after another, every accident that can happen on such an occasion, until at last, as he is entreating for the sledge-driver's right (a kiss), he falls from the back-seat; for just then, as was natural, the Fates tripped him up. The fair one seizes the reins, and drives home alone, where a favored friend receives her, and triumphs ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... for provisions. The dog teams were very interesting with their intelligent well trained Indian dogs. There were usually three or four dogs driven tandem with a simple harness consisting of a collar and a strap around the body of each. The driver always ran or walked by the side of the sledge never sitting on it. We see pictures of dog teams in Alaska, for instance, with a dozen or more dogs, but that would have been impossible in a heavily wooded country as this ...
— Old Rail Fence Corners - The A. B. C's. of Minnesota History • Various
... expression, General Lee did not fight in vain. The essential good he wished has come, while the republic with its priceless benedictions to us all remains intact. All Americans thus have part in Robert Lee, not only as a peerless man and soldier, but as the sturdy miner, sledge-hammering the rock of our liberties till it give forth its gold. None are prouder of his record than those who fought against him, who, while recognizing the purity of his motive, thought him in error in going from under the stars and stripes. It is likely that more American hearts day by day ...
— America First - Patriotic Readings • Various
... wrote and rewrote and copied. But never a line did he have in reply from the gay deceiver. The other boys in the garrison sneered at him, because he sacrificed in this unrequited affection for a politician the time which they devoted to Monongahela, sledge, and high-low-jack. Bourbon, euchre, and poker were still unknown. But one day Nolan had his revenge. This time Burr came down the river, not as an attorney seeking a place for his office, but as a disguised conqueror. He had defeated I know not how many district-attorneys; ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... eating potatoes and meat, making long marches and countermarches, without anything to sweeten existence, and fighting at bayonet-point and under showers of grape-shot, the wounded very often obliged to be removed on a sledge for fifty leagues in the open air. After having destroyed the Prussian monarchy, we are making war against the remnants of Prussia, against the Russians, the Calmucs, the Cossacks, and the peoples of the north who formerly invaded the Roman Empire; we are ...
— Worlds Best Histories - France Vol 7 • M. Guizot and Madame Guizot De Witt
... way. The monster, with you in it, works its way up and feels of it. It is packed like a ledge of marble. Three whistles! The machine backs away and keeps backing, as a gymnast runs astern to get sea room and momentum for a big jump; as a giant swings aloft a heavy sledge, that it may come down ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... shouted the prices of bright truck for tree ornaments, and pushed through the crowd, offering holly and mistletoe. Circles formed around men exhibiting mechanical turtles or boxing monkeys. From a furry sledge above a shop door, Santa Claus bowed and gesticulated, shaking the lines above his prancing reindeer. I had never seen ...
— The Bacillus of Beauty - A Romance of To-day • Harriet Stark
... shown in their chase of the reindeer, the bear, and the fox. Over the boundless deserts of snow they are borne rapidly along by their faithful dogs, which are harnessed to a sledge, six or seven to the team, and which scamper away, often in seeming confusion, but with a precision of aim and object which is perfectly surprising. No country presents a finer specimen of that honest, ...
— Kalli, the Esquimaux Christian - A Memoir • Thomas Boyles Murray
... determined to fit out still another expedition, though already over L35,000 had been spent by private means, mostly from her own personal fortune; and in 1857 the steam yacht Fox was despatched under M'Clintock, who had already shown himself the most capable master of sledge work. He erected a monument to the Franklin expedition on Beechey Island in 1858, and then following Peel Sound, he made inquiries of the natives throughout the winter of 1858-59. This led him to search King William Land, where, on the 25th ...
— The Story of Geographical Discovery - How the World Became Known • Joseph Jacobs
... his lips. Notorious as he was through the northern provinces he was infinitely to be preferred to Chan Heminway, who sat at his left who, a weaker man than either Ray or Neilson, was simply a tool in the latter's hand,—a smashing sledge or a cruel blade as his master wished. He was vicious without strength, brutal without self-control. Locks of his blond hair, unkempt, dropped over his ...
— The Sky Line of Spruce • Edison Marshall
... subject he treats of than any Englishman of equal capacity and acquirement. Mr. Bigelow makes short and easy work of planters, attornies, book-keepers, sophistries, and Stanleys. In doing so, his language is invariably that of a man of education and a gentleman. He might have crushed them with a sledge-hammer, but he effects his purpose as effectually with a pass or two of a sharp ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... and the brush will then be given to it; but the heaviest part of the work is already done and the block has lost much of its original size and weight. Firmly packed with timber, the bull lies upon its side upon a sledge which is curved in front like a boat, or a modern sleigh. Two cables are fastened to its prow and two to its stern. The engineer is again seated upon the stone and claps his hands to give the time, but now he is accompanied ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... pleasant. According to the value of money at that time, my loss was of some importance. I could not but confess to myself that my conduct at the Simbirsk Inn had been most foolish, and I felt guilty toward Saveliitch. All this worried me. The old man sat, in sulky silence, in the forepart of the sledge, with his face averted, every now and then giving a cross little cough. I had firmly resolved to make peace with him, but I did not know how to begin. At last ...
— The Daughter of the Commandant • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... snow and ice; I see the sharp-eyed Samoiede and the Finn; I see the seal-seeker in his boat, poising his lance; I see the Siberian on his slight-built sledge, drawn by dogs; I see the porpess-hunters—I see the whale-crews of the South Pacific and the North Atlantic; I see the cliffs, glaciers, torrents, valleys, of Switzerland—I mark the long ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman
... may ride with me, if you will stand on the runners of my sledge," answered the man, and turned into a side street where ...
— In the Yule-Log Glow, Book I - Christmas Tales from 'Round the World • Various
... however, had just finished dressing when there came a light tap at our door, and Francis entered. Smiling in his self-satisfied way, he announced to me that the manichord had just arrived from the land-steward's lady in a sledge, and had been carried into the Baroness's apartments. Lady Adelheid sent her compliments and would I go over at once. It may be conceived how my pulse beat, and also with what a delicious tremor at heart ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... me; Czapek, Kumelski, and many others also came, and we drove together to St. Veil—a beautiful place; I could not say the same of Tivoli, where they have constructed a kind ol caroitsscl, or rather a track with a sledge, which is called Rutsch. It is a childish amusement, but a great number of grown-up people have themselves rolled down the hill in this carriage just for pastime. At first I did not feel inclined to try it, but as there were eight of us, all good friends, ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... golden plovers, or ptarmigan. The eggs of sea-birds might be found in every crevice of the islets in the fiord, in the right season; and they are excellent food. Once a year, too, Erlingsen wrapped himself in furs, and drove himself in his sledge, followed by one of his housemen on another and a larger, to the great winter fair at Tronyem, where the Lapps repaired to sell their frozen reindeer meat, their skins, a few articles of manufacture, and where travelling Russian merchants came with the productions of ...
— Feats on the Fiord - The third book in "The Playfellow" • Harriet Martineau
... ascent, and marroni, long-handled mattocks, or pick-axes, to prevent their falling on the dangerous declivities of the snow. The journey was formerly made with frightful expedition by means of a kind of sledge—an expedient termed la ramasse—which enabled the traveller, previously to the construction of that extraordinary road, well known to most readers, to effect in a few minutes a perilous descent of upwards of 6000 feet. The ramasse, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 79, May 3, 1851 • Various
... nearer). Have you heard the story of the mother that drove across the hills by night with her little children by her in the sledge? The wolves were on her track; it was life or death with her;—and one by one she cast out her little ones, to ...
— Henrik Ibsen's Prose Dramas Vol III. • Henrik Ibsen
... and all the Old Ladies who had become muscle-bound from wielding the Sledge predicted that Elam would put the Organization into the Ditch, wrong ...
— Ade's Fables • George Ade
... of which I have been writing are combined in a sledge-drive. With an arrowy gliding motion one passes through the snow-world as through a dream. In the sunlight the snow surface sparkles with its myriad stars of crystals. In the shadow it ceases to glitter, and assumes a blueness scarcely less blue than the sky. So the journey is like sailing through ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... fists, and his love of battle was fed. The other man had fought stiffly erect, standing with feet braced to give the weight of his whole body to every punch; Harrigan raged back and forth like a panther, avoiding blows by the catlike agility of his movements, which left both hands free to strike sledge-hammer blows. Presently he heard a chuckling at his side. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the black-haired man come into the battle, straight and stiff as before, with long arms shooting out ...
— Harrigan • Max Brand
... Garten. The pond or basin is completely frozen over, and a Russian Prince, Gallitzin, who is here, has fitted up a sort of Montagnes Russes as they are called. Blocks of ice are placed on an inclined plane to the top of which you mount by means of a staircase; and then, seating yourself in a sort of sledge, you slide down the inclined plane with immense velocity. The Prince often persuades a lady to sit on this sleigh on his lap and descend together; and this no doubt serves to break the ice of many an amorous intrigue. This construction of the Prince Gallitzin ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... course, many Jews on board. Who ever travelled by steamboat, coach, diligence, eilwagen, vetturino, mule-back, or sledge, without meeting ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... 6 A.M. Wind in our faces before noon and the new snow made heavy going. I have Mr. Hubbard's body on my sledge, and also some dunnage, and have four dogs. George Pottle my teamster. Wallace has George Williams for his teamster and six dogs. After noon the wind shifted to the northwest and the wind blew the snow off the crust, ...
— A Woman's Way Through Unknown Labrador • Mina Benson Hubbard (Mrs. Leonidas Hubbard, Junior)
... us—and, abune a', me, mysell, locked up in the tolbooth a' night!" exclaimed the Bailie, in ire and perturbation. "Ca' for forehammers, sledge-hammers, pinches, and coulters; send for Deacon Yettlin, the smith, an let him ken that Bailie Jarvie's shut up in the tolbooth by a Highland blackguard, whom he'll hang up as ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... he crept gently down the stairs. In a corner, at the foot of the staircase, lay sundry matters, a few faggots, and a cleaver. He caught up the last. "Aha," he muttered; "and there's the sledge-hammer somewhere for Walters." Leaning himself against the door, he then applied his eye to a chink which admitted a dim view of the room within, ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... tell you the reason," the minister said; his voice was no louder, but it fell with a sledge-hammer emphasis. He moved a step nearer his companion, and some way caught and held his wavering vision. "God owns one-tenth of all that stuff you call your own. You have cheated Him out of His part all these years, and He has carried you over from year to year, hoping that you will pay ...
— Sowing Seeds in Danny • Nellie L. McClung
... had been tried beyond his strength. Life was sweet. It was easy for men who had never been in danger to say that none but a villain would save himself by hanging his associates; but a few hours in Newgate, with the near prospect of a journey on a sledge to Tyburn, would teach such boasters to be more charitable. After repeatedly conferring with Clancy, Porter was introduced to Fenwick's wife, Lady Mary, a sister of the Earl of Carlisle. Every thing was soon settled. Donelagh ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... I would give them all if I could," returned McTavish, simply. "I would sledge the width of Keewatin for half a day ...
— The Wilderness Trail • Frank Williams
... delightful person, a man of 'inspiration,' as the phrase was then. A very great deal was drunk, and when at last the festive party got ready to depart, Misha, dead drunk, was in an unconscious condition. All the seven seminarists together had but one three-horse sledge with a high back; where were they to stow the unresisting body? Then one of the young men, inspired by classical reminiscences, proposed tying Misha by his feet to the back of the sledge, as Hector was tied to the chariot of Achilles! ...
— A Desperate Character and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... clear as his conscience, he poured forth a petition to Heaven, so loud, so powerful, so full of Christian force, that the blacksmith began to tremble on his knees, the two hands that had been clenched like sledge-hammers clasped themselves, till the palms met and were uplifted to Heaven as a child pleads with ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens
... half a dozen besides had they been there; so, well wrapped up with blankets and buffalo-robes, away they went. Was there ever anything so delightful, so exhilarating? Even Graeme laughed and clapped her hands, and the greys flew over the ground, and passed every sleigh and sledge on ...
— Janet's Love and Service • Margaret M Robertson
... punk," cried the leader, turning savagely on the Colonel, "who's a runnin' this show?" The well-delivered blow of a sledge-hammer could not have been more crushing in its effect on the Colonel than were the words of the leader; he was completely silenced. Greatly to his credit, however, he stood his ground. He was no coward, for he had faced death and been wounded ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... long crook, with which he tries to catch stray dogs and children. In some parts of Bohemia on Whit-Monday the young fellows disguise themselves in tall caps of birch bark adorned with flowers. One of them is dressed as a king and dragged on a sledge to the village green, and if on the way they pass a pool the sledge is always overturned into it. Arrived at the green they gather round the king; the crier jumps on a stone or climbs up a tree and recites lampoons about each house ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... could only believe that we were enemies," continued the other, who, once he had started in to convince an impulsive comrade, believed in delivering sledge-hammer blows in succession, "and we're not aching to be filled with ...
— The Boy Scouts on Belgian Battlefields • Lieut. Howard Payson
... before it was too late, but he would not hear of it. "I have made my nest; I will sit in it to the bitter end," he said. They boarded the midnight train, and in a few moments he was fleeing to the sunny south a great deal faster than ever dog team or sledge had taken him across the frozen plateau. And the farther south he went the more he suffered from the heat, until he was in great danger of melting away. And then the truth dawned upon him; it had never occurred to him before. He was a fish ...
— Skookum Chuck Fables - Bits of History, Through the Microscope • Skookum Chuck (pseud for R.D. Cumming)
... and if one does turn to a jolly girl for a bit of fun, their tongues all go to work, so that you would think the skies were going to fall; and if one goes in for a bit of a spree, down comes the General like a sledge-hammer! I wish you would take ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... European powers would never have consented to such exclusive control. "Well, Sir," said Douglas, "I do not know that they would have consented: but of one thing I am certain I would never have asked their consent."[403] And such was the temper of Young America that this sledge hammer ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... woman who was not thy mother. When from my arms my babe they took, On me how strangely did he look! Through his whole body something ran, A most strange something did I see; —As if he strove to be a man, That he might pull the sledge for me. And then he stretched his arms, how wild! Oh ...
— Lyrical Ballads, With Other Poems, 1800, Vol. I. • William Wordsworth
... The wreck of his vessel made it necessary that fresh supplies should be sent to Niagara; and the condition of his affairs, embarrassed by the great expenses of the enterprise, demanded his presence at Fort Frontenac. Two men attended him, and a dog dragged his baggage on a sledge. For food, they had only a bag of parched corn, which failed them two days before they reached the fort; and they made the rest ...
— France and England in North America, a Series of Historical Narratives, Part Third • Francis Parkman
... Jago," confided the second laborer to Barron, when his companion had turned aside to get some steel wedges and a sledge-hammer. "Er's well-knawn in these paarts—a reg'lar cure. Er used tu work up ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... Patagonians. Thus while the forest dweller, confined to the highway of the stream, devised only canoe and dugout boat in various forms for purposes of transportation, steppe peoples of the Old World introduced the use of draft and pack animals, and invented the sledge and cart. ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... parched mouth and heated brain, waiting till I could sufficiently recover my voice to repeat my cries, when I heard footsteps approaching. The key was again turned in the door, and a light appeared, carried by one of two men armed with large sledge hammers. ...
— Japhet, In Search Of A Father • Frederick Marryat
... their young days, but in after years it will often transfix the solid dumplings that roll out of the silver spoon. So Velpeau found it. He had not what is called genius, he was far from prepossessing in aspect, looking as if he might have wielded the sledge-hammer (as I think he had done in early life) rather than the lancet, but he had industry, determination, intelligence, character, and he made his way to distinction and prosperity, as some of you sitting on these benches and wondering anxiously what is to become of you in the struggle for life ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... their sledge and harnesses for the dogs. Koko and Menie helped her catch the dogs and hitch ...
— The Eskimo Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... hustled into a sled on steel runners, like a hearse with curtains around it and drawn by bullocks— The streets were all of mosaic, thousands of little stones being packed together like corn on a cob. Over this the heavy sledge was drawn by the bullocks while a small boy ran ahead through the narrow streets to clear the way— He had a feather duster made of horse's tail as a badge of authority and he yelled some strange cry at the empty streets and closed houses. Another little boy in a striped ...
— Adventures and Letters • Richard Harding Davis
... breakfasted, Cancut arrived with Birch on an ox-sledge. Here our well-beloved west branch of the Penobscot, called of yore Norimbagua, is married to the east branch, and of course by marriage loses his identity, by-and-by, changing from the wild, free, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... prove useful to them. The place was almost like a museum in the variety of its contents; and they were not long in confiscating a dozen fathoms of three-inch rope, the remains of a coil of ratline, a small ball of spun-yarn for seizings, a sledge-hammer, an axe apiece, a marline-spike, a few long spike-nails, which Lance decided would be capital tools for the ladies to use in picking out the nuggets, and a few other trifling matters. Then, hanging the lantern upon its nail once more, they extinguished it, and made the best of ...
— The Pirate Island - A Story of the South Pacific • Harry Collingwood
... a pair of teamsters, guiding a rude sledge, loaded with food and the equipage of the camp, and drawn by two big, shaggy horses, blowing thick clouds of steam from their frosty nostrils. Tiny icicles hung from the hairs on their lips. Their flanks were smoking. They sank above the fetlocks ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... picturesque, but more melancholy, as they went further East; the somber Carpathians rose from the snow-covered plains and villages, surrounded by white glistening walls, and stunted willows stood by the side of the roads, ravens sailed through the white sky, and here and there a small peasant's sledge shot by, drawn by two ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... the police had immediately become less hostile. Observing this, Daphne had discreetly followed her cousin's example. Before the sledge-hammer blows of their lamentation two gendarmes began to sniff and a third broke down. The girls redoubled their sobs. ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates
... and discovered my young friend—I knew his grandfather years ago—Sledge, a pianist, a bad pianist, and an alleged critic of music. He calls himself "a music critic." Pshaw! I was not wonderfully warm in my greeting, and the ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... of place was it? Yergunov remembered that to the right of the road, three and a half or four miles from the hospital, there was Andrey Tchirikov's tavern. He remembered, too, that this Tchirikov, who had been lately killed by some sledge-drivers, had left a wife and a daughter called Lyubka, who had come to the hospital two years before as a patient. The inn had a bad reputation, and to visit it late in the evening, and especially with someone else's horse, ...
— The Horse-Stealers and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... face, called upon God, struggled to my feet and fell again. So I plunged on, falling and fighting forward. Black madness came upon me. The horrible, sickening after-damp was tearing my heart up through my dry throat. My brain was bursting through my temples. Then a stroke, as though by a sledge hammer, and I knew nothing more. They found me at ten minutes past one Tuesday morning. At first they thought I was dead. Then they saw my head rise and fall while I weakly pounded on a rock with a stick that I had caught ...
— And Judas Iscariot - Together with other evangelistic addresses • J. Wilbur Chapman
... who had been almost holding his breath with suspense while all this pantomime business was going on, "look at that, would you, fellows? A bright thought has managed to get a foothold in her brain. I bet you it needed a sledge hammer to pound it in. Say, she's beginning to smile at you, Elmer. You've won out. She believes you mean all right. Give him the toad-sticker, Mark, and let him get ...
— Pathfinder - or, The Missing Tenderfoot • Alan Douglas
... heard beneath the windows; and, immediately afterward, it became evident that some persons outside were endeavoring to gain entrance into the room. The door was beaten with what appeared to be a sledge-hammer, and the shutters were wrenched and shaken ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... place when he heard the sound of feet coming over the snow. He crouched eagerly down at the edge of the road and said to himself: 'I wonder what would happen if I were to pretend to be dead! This is a man driving a reindeer sledge, I know the tinkling of the harness. And at any rate I shall have an adventure, and that ...
— The Brown Fairy Book • Andrew Lang
... struck Balaam. The Virginian hurled him to the ground, lifted and hurled him again, lifted him and beat his face and struck his jaw. The man's strong ox-like fighting availed nothing. He fended his eyes as best he could against these sledge-hammer blows of justice. He felt blindly for his pistol. That arm was caught and wrenched backward, and crushed and doubled. He seemed to hear his own bones, and set up a hideous screaming of hate ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... his body was laid on a flat boulder in the shelter of a shallow cave in the cliffside nearby—later they would bring a sledge to fetch him into the village. For a long time little Snjolfur stood by old Snjolfur and stroked his white hair; he murmured something as he did it, but no one heard what he said. But he did not cry and he showed no dismay. The men with the snow- shovels agreed that he was ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... with an ensemble and a tactic delightful to behold. At length, obliged to beat a retreat before superior numbers, they formed an intrenchment behind the large table, which they raised by main force; whilst the two others, arming themselves each with a trestle, and using it like a great sledge-hammer, knocked down at a blow eight sailors upon whose heads they had brought their monstrous catapult in play. The floor was already strewn with wounded, and the room filled with cries and dust, when D'Artagnan, satisfied with the test, advanced, sword in hand, and striking with ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... province, and followed as much for the amusement it afforded the young people, as for the destruction of the deadly prowler. The mode of conducting it was this: Every two or three families who chanced to be intimate, when the ice was sufficiently strong and smooth for sledge-travelling, sent forth a party of young hunters, with their sisters and sweethearts, in a sledge covered at the one end, which was also well cushioned and gayly painted; the ladies in their best winter dresses took possession ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... dreadfully long in coming. It did not come until the next morning, when the door of my room flew open with a yet louder bang than before, and the boy entered in a soap-box on wheels, supposed to be a sledge, and drawn by a dog, an Irish terrier, which being red had been called William Rufus. His hat was tied over his ears with a tape from his mother's apron, and he wore a long pair of his father's knitted stockings which covered his boots and ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... thunderbolts; every one of them has gone through him like a lance, two through the limbs, one through the arm, one through the heart, and the last has crashed through the forehead, nailing the head to the tree behind as if it had been dashed in by a sledge-hammer. The face, in spite of its ghastliness, is beautiful, and has been serene; and the light which enters first and glistens on the plumes of the arrows, dies softly away upon the curling hair, and mixes with the glory upon the forehead. ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin
... seal. With the admission, however, of the first detachment, a violent onset was made upon the gate by the whole Spanish force. The townspeople, not suspecting treachery, were not prepared to make effective resistance. A stout smith, confronting the invaders at the gate, almost singly, with his sledge-hammer, was stabbed to the heart by Bossu with his own hand. The soldiers having thus gained admittance, rushed through the streets, putting every man to death who offered the slightest resistance. Within a few minutes four hundred citizens were ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... the shore, the preceding day, a quantity of wood, which I thought would suit to make a sledge, to convey our casks and heavy stores from Tent House to Falcon's Nest. At dawn of day I woke Ernest, whose inclination to indolence I wished to overcome, and leaving the rest asleep, we descended, and harnessing the ass to a strong branch of a tree ...
— The Swiss Family Robinson; or Adventures in a Desert Island • Johann David Wyss
... in the place, dine as well as you can, and some time in the evening my own confidential servant, factotum and majordomo, a Mr. V. S. (I warn you he is of noble extraction), will present himself before you, reporting the arrival of the small sledge which will take you here on the next day. I send with him my heaviest fur, which I suppose with such overcoats as you may have with you will keep you from freezing ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... time, and from Ekaterinenburg, where the rail ended in those days, the journey would have to be performed by sledge. She, therefore, took with her only one servant and a courier, that she might travel as ...
— The Angel of the Revolution - A Tale of the Coming Terror • George Griffith
... Sure I heered the long sailor say, that come from the Aystern Injees, that the ingineers there can a'most live under wather; and goes down looking for diamonds, and has a sledge-hammer in their hand, brakin' the diamonds when they're too big to take them up whole, all as one as men ...
— Stories of Comedy • Various
... light through the blank and pulsating haze. The vibrations of the anvil were all but the only sounds on the air; the alternate thin clink of the smith's hand-hammer and the thick thud of the striker's sledge echoed in unseen recesses ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... have to blast out the channel and blow to pieces all the bigger rocks," Joe replied. "It would take forever to do it with pick and sledge—in fact, it couldn't be done. We shall have ...
— The Boys of Crawford's Basin - The Story of a Mountain Ranch in the Early Days of Colorado • Sidford F. Hamp
... prize—bring him in. Let us have a look at him. He is worth the capture, anyhow, as the Chief will say when he returns. He is not back yet. We have all been out scouring the forest; but you always have the luck, Sledge Hammer George. I said if any one brought them in it ...
— In the Wars of the Roses - A Story for the Young • Evelyn Everett-Green
... idleness. It is permitted to the clerk, the shopman, the street peddler—to all who live by the light employment of keeping the wolf from the door without eating him—to abandon their ignoble callings, seize the shovel, the axe and the sledge-hammer and lay about them right sturdily, to the ample gratification of their desire. And those who are engaged in more profitable vocations will find that with a part of their incomes they can purchase from their employers the right ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... of reckoning to some of the inhabitants of Loudon; the first is, that of the memorable riots in 1780, when this imposing edifice was attacked by a furious mob in the evening of Monday the 5th of June, who by breaking the windows, batter-ing the entrances of the cells with sledge hammers and pickaxes, and climbing the walls with ladders, found means to enter Mr. Akerman's house, communicating with the prison, and eventually liberated three hundred prisoners. The next of these events oc-curred on the 23rd of February, ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... and sinews and the small bones of the wrist, until Russell shrieked through his swollen mouth at the anguish of it and dropped the rock. Pardee, hovering near, seeing all, picked it up and slipped it into his pocket as Mormon pinned down Russell's arm with his left knee and swung left and right in sledge-hammer blows to the jaw of the face that tried in vain to dodge the knockout. As if a galvanic current that had simulated life had suddenly been shut off, Roaring Russell's body lost all energy, it seemed to flatten, lay without ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... is vaster far and more conservative than England. The world moves faster now, and the change-producing forces of the present exceed those of former centuries as a modern steam hammer exceeds a wooden sledge. But China is ponderous, and a few decades are short for so gigantic ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... time appointed I went with a horse and sledge to the wood, but was much surprised to find that my master was not at the spot where he said he would be;—a surprise which was not a little increased by perceiving, from two or three felled sticks that lay around, that he had been there, but had done little—so ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, XXII • various
... English nation has authorized, by a tacit consent, an almost general mitigation of such part of those judgments as savours of torture and cruelty: a sledge or hurdle being usually allowed to such traitors as are condemned to be drawn; and there being very few instances (and those accidental or by negligence) of any persons being embowelled or burned, till previously deprived of sensation ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 34, June 22, 1850 • Various
... the dogs in sledge teams was making progress. The orders used by the drivers were "Mush" (Go on), "Gee" (Right), "Haw" (Left), and "Whoa" (Stop). These are the words that the Canadian drivers long ago adopted, borrowing them originally from England. ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... all. The sledge hammer blow of Froeschwiller, following so close on the heels of the idiotic surprise at Wissembourg, was the lightning flash whose baleful light disclosed to him the entire naked, terrible truth. We were taken unprepared; we had neither guns, nor ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... could almost hear the keen wind rustling through the bending sedges by the pond, where the ice looked quite "safe" now. Madam Liberality hoped she would be able to get out before this fine frost was over. She knew of an old plank which would make an admirable sledge, and she had a plan for the grandest of winter games all ready in her head. It was to be called Arctic Discovery—and she was to ...
— A Great Emergency and Other Tales - A Great Emergency; A Very Ill-Tempered Family; Our Field; Madam Liberality • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... sat down and began eating a doughnut. "If you ever hit anybody take a sledge hammer or a crowbar. It wouldn't be ...
— A Man for the Ages - A Story of the Builders of Democracy • Irving Bacheller
... a coward, whatever other bad qualities he might have been possessed of. Recovering in a moment, he rushed upon his little antagonist, and sent in two sledge-hammer blows with such violence that nothing but the Englishman's activity could have saved him from instant defeat. He ducked to the first, parried the second, and returned with such prompt good-will on the gypsy's right eye, that he was again sent staggering back against the wall; ...
— Freaks on the Fells - Three Months' Rustication • R.M. Ballantyne
... in readiness: in summer the caleche, a one-horse chaise built for two passengers, with a footboard seat for the driver and with the body hung by broad leather straps or thongs of bull's hide; in winter the carriole, or sledge, with or without {20} covered top, also holding two passengers and a driver. The drivers were bound to make two leagues an hour over the indifferent roads, and in midwinter and midsummer the dexterous, talkative, good-humoured driver, or marche-donc, usually exceeded ...
— The Railway Builders - A Chronicle of Overland Highways • Oscar D. Skelton
... officers were not only a little unscrupulous as to the character of their Sunday amusements, but equally indifferent as to the cleanliness of the tools with which they performed the arduous labors of old-sledge, euchre and division-loo. Woodruff cleared away the debris from the table, and flung it into one corner with some petulance which did not escape the notice of his visitors. Finally part of a box of bad cigars was introduced, ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... and armourer, stood at the door of his hut in the valley of the Alf, a league or so from the Moselle, one summer evening. He was the most powerful man in all the Alf-thal, and few could lift the iron sledge-hammer he wielded as though it were a toy. Arras had twelve sons scarce less stalwart than himself, some of whom helped him in his occupation of blacksmith and armourer, while the others tilled the ground near by, earning ...
— The Strong Arm • Robert Barr
... before him, doubles up the cuff of his coat, to give his hand and wrist freedom: he then rises his right arm, coming down with the heel of his hand upon the other fellow's palm, under him, with full force. By jing, it's the divil's own divarsion; for you might as well get a stroke of a sledge as a blow from one of them able, hard-working fellows, with hands upon them like lime-stone. When the fellow that's down gets it hot and heavy, the man that struck him stands bent in his place, and some friend of the other comes down ...
— The Ned M'Keown Stories - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... that he liked to talk of more than his old battles, but he would stop if he saw his little wife coming, for the one great shadow in her life was the ever-present fear that some day he would throw down sledge and rasp and be off to the ring once more. And you must be reminded here once for all that that former calling of his was by no means at that time in the debased condition to which it afterwards fell. Public opinion has ...
— Rodney Stone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... has also threshed, run grist mills, saw mills, and various other sorts of mills, pulled stumps, ploughed snow, and done about everything that a plant of moderate power could do from sheep-shearing to printing a newspaper. It has been fitted with heavy tires to haul on roads, with sledge runners for the woods and ice, and with rimmed wheels to run on rails. When the shops in Detroit were shut down by coal shortage, we got out the Dearborn Independent by sending a tractor to the ...
— My Life and Work • Henry Ford
... water poured over them till they were perfectly smooth and like glass. I cannot say that I liked the notion of rushing down them, but it seemed to fill Annora with ecstasy, and my lady provided her with a sleigh and a cavalier, before herself instructing the Duke of York in the guidance of her own sledge ...
— Stray Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... winter came, and the big white snowflakes once more fell from a gray sky, that Gerda felt loneliest, for Kay now drew on his thick gloves, slung his little sledge across his back, and marched off alone. "I am going to ride in the square," he shouted in her ear as he passed. But Gerda could not answer; she could only think of the winters that had gone, when she and Kay always sat side by side in that same little sledge. ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf (Vol 2 of 17) - Folk-Lore, Fables, And Fairy Tales • Various
... almost unconscious of what they were doing, that the authorities, hitherto so patient, for the first time determined to use force against them.... The scene here altogether appears to have been terrific in the extreme. The violence and ferocity of the ruffians, armed with sledge-hammers and other instruments of destruction, who burst into the houses—the savage shouts of the surrounding multitude—the wholesale desolation—the row of bonfires blazing in the street, heaped with the contents of the sacked mansion, with splendid furniture, books, pictures, and manuscripts ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... Three Kings!" cried the Count Palatine, bringing his huge fist down on the table like the blow of a sledge hammer, "you are a man, and I glory that it is my ...
— The Sword Maker • Robert Barr
... of the two big elephants, when they met, sounded like the report of a pistol. Such sledge hammer blows as these two monsters dealt each other made the spectators of ...
— The Circus Boys In Dixie Land • Edgar B. P. Darlington
... the magistrates and soldiers, who, after a slight resistance, fled for their lives. The foremost of the insurgents dashed into the enclosed arena, to rescue the prisoner. It was too late. The executioner, even as he fled, had crushed the victim's head with a sledge hammer, and pierced him through and through with a poniard. Some of the bystanders maintained afterwards that his fingers and lips were seen to move, as if in feeble prayer, for a little time longer, until, as the fire mounted, he fell into ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... followed her, and became the moon; but being unable to mount so high, he runs continually round the sun, in hopes of some time surprising her. When he is tired and hungry in his last quarter, he leaves his house on a sledge harnessed to four huge dogs, to hunt seals, and continues abroad for several days. He now fattens so prodigiously on the spoils of the chase, that he soon grows into the full moon. He rejoices on the death of women, and the sun ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... no citizen of Suffering Creek would, even when thoroughly drunk, have accused Bill of any leaning towards sentimentalism or chivalry. The idea that he cared two cents for what became of Scipio, or his wife, or his children, it would have been impossible to have driven into their heads with a sledge-hammer. And maybe they would have been right. Who ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... the path that leads us to God, notwithstanding all opposing voices, and all inward hindrances and reluctances; when we are able to go to our tasks of whatever sort they are and to do them, though our hearts are beating like sledge-hammers; when we say to ourselves, 'It does not matter a bit whether I am sad or glad, fresh or wearied, helped or hindered by circumstances, this one thing I do,' then we have come to understand and ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren |
