"Tinkering" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... sure, it was grown to a sauciness that did call for a decenter veil. I do not think they have found out a good cure; and I am of opinion, too, that flagrancy proceeds from national depravity, which tinkering one branch will not remedy. Perhaps polished manners are a better proof of virtue in an age than of vice, though system-makers do not hold so: at least, decency has seldom been the symptom ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume II • Horace Walpole
... I should say," he replied, bluntly. "They are tinkering with the trestle. Buckhurst's ragamuffins have just seized the railroad station at Rose-Sainte-Anne, where the main line crosses, you know, near the ravine at Lammerin. I was sure there was something extraordinary ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... to produce the greatest commercial revival, the greatest access of working prosperity, Britain had ever known. Two main causes were at work here; and the first of them, undoubtedly, was the protection afforded to our industries by Imperial preference. The time for tinkering with half-measures had gone by, and, accordingly, the fiscal belt with which the first really Imperial Parliament girdled the Empire was made broad and strong. The effect of its application was gradual, but unmistakable; its benefits grew daily more apparent ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... Let me a little open that scripture to you: 'As every man hath received the gift'; that is, said he, as every one hath received a trade, so let him follow it. If any man have received a gift of tinkering, as thou hast done, let him follow his tinkering. And so other men their trades; and ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... who has been toughened by experience is one who lets his rational brain have control. He ranks next to the stalwart knight of the eraser, because he has the courage to arrest the endless tinkering of design in order to get something done. He will not let the family freeze while he is thinking up some grand scheme of sawing and splitting ...
— Industrial Progress and Human Economics • James Hartness
... steam turbine is simple in design and construction and does not require constant tinkering and adjustment of valve gears or taking up of wear in the running parts, it is like any other piece of fine machinery in that it should receive intelligent and careful attention from the operator by inspection of the working parts that are not at all times in plain view. Any piece ...
— Steam Turbines - A Book of Instruction for the Adjustment and Operation of - the Principal Types of this Class of Prime Movers • Hubert E. Collins
... protection of Nationalities has been going on, have deepened the mistrust. A frank and courageous statesmanship applied to the honest carrying out of large reforms too long delayed can alone remove it. The time for political tinkering is past; the time for wise ...
— The Case For India • Annie Besant
... a run down to Bluewater Bill's myself to-night," he said to himself as he prepared to go to work on the aeroplane, at which Le Blanc had been busy tinkering during ...
— The Boy Aviators' Treasure Quest • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... abominable, low, cunning craft that ignorance and idleness can devise, they practise. In some instances these things are carried out to such a pitch as to render them more like imbeciles than human beings endowed with reason. Chair-mending, tinkering, and hawking are in many instances used only as a 'blind;' while the women and children go about the country begging and fortune-telling, bringing to their heathenish tents sufficient to keep the family. ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... Hauskuld will tell them all not to meddle nor make with Huckster Hedinn, saying he is a rude unfriendly fellow. Next morning thou must be off early and go to the farm nearest Hrutstede. There thou must offer thy goods for sale, praising up all that is worst, and tinkering up the faults. The master of the house will pry about and find out the faults. Thou must snatch the wares away from him, and speak ill to him. He will say, 'twas not to be hoped that thou wouldst behave well to him, when thou ...
— Njal's Saga • Unknown Icelanders
... the liquor business involves fundamental questions of the function and scope of government, and there is hardly any department of organized human activity that has been the subject of so much experiment and futile tinkering.... The only people who are perfectly consistent are the prohibitionists, whose policy is abolition. Let us, however, try to detach ourselves from any personal interest that we may have in the subject, and consider it impartially as a ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... of this sort of praise, And he longed to be back with his out-o'-door days, With his feet in the grass and his back to a tree, Rhyming and tinkering, fameless and free. He said so one day to the Mayor of Quog, And declared he'd as lief live the life of ...
— The Glugs of Gosh • C. J. Dennis
... half as amusing as the Indian towns," Tucker said. "Last voyage I went to Calcutta, and it is jolly in the natives' town there, seeing the natives squatting in their little shops, tinkering and tailoring, and all sorts of things. And such a crowd of them in the streets! This is a poor place in comparison, and most of the shops you see have European names over them. However, one gets the shade; ...
— A Chapter of Adventures • G. A. Henty
... might well be depths of wood that would never in the life of the world be known or trodden. The thought was not exactly the sort he welcomed. In a loud voice, cheerfully, he suggested that it was time for bed. But the guide lingered, tinkering with the fire, arranging the stones needlessly, doing a dozen things that did not really need doing. Evidently there was something he wanted to say, yet found it difficult ...
— The Wendigo • Algernon Blackwood
... read poetry to him; matters which had seemed to vanish with no trace or sequence. Always she repeated that he had been heroically patient in his desire to join the army. She made much of her consoling affection for him in little things. She liked the homeliness of his tinkering about the house; his strength and handiness as he tightened the hinges of a shutter; his boyishness when he ran to her to be comforted because he had found rust in the barrel of his pump-gun. But at the highest he was to her another ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... Home Department, or Ceres from the Colonies, heard with as rapt attention as powerful Pallas of the Foreign Office, the goddess that is never seen without her lance and helmet? Does our Whitehall Mars make eyes there at bright young Venus of the Privy Seal, disgusting that quaint tinkering Vulcan, who is blowing his bellows at our Exchequer, not altogether unsuccessfully? Old Saturn of the Woolsack sits there mute, we will say, a relic of other days, as seated in this divan. The hall in which he rules is now elsewhere. Is our Mercury ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... be hushed," said the woman, speaking English. "The man is a good man, and he will do us no harm. We are tinkers, sir; but we do many things besides tinkering, many sinful things, especially in Wales, whither we are soon going again. Oh, I want to be eased of some of my sins before I go into Wales again, and so do you, Tourlough, for you know how you are sometimes haunted by devils at night in those dreary Welsh hills. Oh sir, ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... the High Street, past the Town Hall," promptly answered the driver. "And there he crossed the road. I see him cross, because I stopped there a minute or two after he'd got out, tinkering at my engine." ...
— The Herapath Property • J. S. Fletcher
... to mar, the Constitution of the United States, we ought to have regard to every express or implied limitation upon our power imposed by that great instrument. When gentlemen object to amending the Constitution, when they talk sneeringly about tinkering with the Constitution, they do not remember that it is one of the express provisions of that instrument that Congress shall have power to propose amendments to the Legislatures of the several States. Do gentlemen mean, by the logic to which we have listened for the past five days on this subject ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes
... as he worked over it. "It turns as hard as if some one has been tinkering with it." By using both hands he forced it round ...
— The Mutineers • Charles Boardman Hawes
... in the first room he entered, returned to the piazza, sat down on the edge of it, and began his tinkering. The old Captain apparently watched him with profound satisfaction. Presently, after the fashion of the senile, he began endless and minute instructions as to how the ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... dismiss the tariff free from party politics and lay the foundation for a durable system of national taxation, upon which domestic industries may be founded without the hazard which they now encounter every year or two by "tinkering ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... admirably complete and explicit handbook for boys who fall under the spell of experimenting and "tinkering" with electrical apparatus. Simple explanations of the principles involved make the operation ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Life-Savers • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... of impudence! Here am I, who have devoted half my life to the tinkering up of damaged soldiers, and know to a tittle how much a man can bear, all wrong, of course! And you, a young jackanapes of a subaltern, a mere boy, tell me to my face that you know ...
— Trapped by Malays - A Tale of Bayonet and Kris • George Manville Fenn
... it together. When I was thirteen I managed for the first time to put a watch together so that it would keep time. By the time I was fifteen I could do almost anything in watch repairing—although my tools were of the crudest. There is an immense amount to be learned simply by tinkering with things. It is not possible to learn from books how everything is made—and a real mechanic ought to know how nearly everything is made. Machines are to a mechanic what books are to a writer. He gets ideas from them, and if he has any brains ...
— My Life and Work • Henry Ford
... not expect her father's room to be like any one else's; neither did she look for an easy and successful termination to her quest. Sometimes she got what she asked for, but she asked for little. And to-day Francis Madigan had been tinkering at the old house, hammering here and patching there, a process that specially tried his temper, being a threatening indication of change, which he resented by declaring that ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... to the Aegis hangar, where he found Grimshaw tinkering over a broken airplane wing. Mr. King had a desk in one corner of what he called his ...
— Dave Dashaway and his Hydroplane • Roy Rockwood
... slackening. Incoherent snatches of sentences, fragments of words and phrases spoken by Brentwick and the mechanician, were flung back past his ears by the rushing wind. Shielding his eyes he could see dimly that the mechanician was tinkering (apparently) with the driving gear. Then, their pace continuing steadily to abate, he heard Brentwick fling at the man a sharp-toned and querulously impatient question: What was the trouble? His reply came in ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... has resulted, after four and a half years, is a puerile tinkering with three or four small industries—a tinkering that is on the face of it open to suspicion of political corruption. To intelligent Free Traders there is nothing in it all that can give the faintest surprise. They knew their ground. ...
— Essays in Liberalism - Being the Lectures and Papers Which Were Delivered at the - Liberal Summer School at Oxford, 1922 • Various
... "Not that, you good-for-nothing! Get the old one out of the cupboard. It leaks, and the Hillmen are so neat, and such nimble workers, that they are sure to mend it before they send it home. So one obliges the Fairy People, and saves sixpence in tinkering!" ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott
... apothecary. Kepler was a waiter boy in a German hotel, Bunyan a tinker, Copernicus the son of a Polish baker. They rose by being greater than their callings, as Arkwright rose above mere barbering, Bunyan above tinkering, Wilson above shoemaking, Lincoln above rail-splitting, and Grant above tanning. By being first-class barbers, tinkers, shoemakers, rail-splitters, tanners, they acquired the power which enabled them to become great inventors, authors, statesmen, generals. John Kay, the inventor ...
— An Iron Will • Orison Swett Marden
... his digging and returned to the Ford, still determined to carry on the bluff and pretend that much tinkering was necessary before he could travel further. With a great show of industry he rummaged for pliers and wrenches, removed the hood from the motor and squinted down ...
— The Trail of the White Mule • B. M. Bower
... the Gospel for yourselves. You cannot make the tree good, but you can let Jesus Christ do it. The Ethiopian cannot change his skin, nor the leopard his spots, but Jesus can do both. 'The lion shall eat straw like the ox.' It is weary work to be tinkering at your acts. Take the comprehensive way, and let Him change your character. I believe that in some processes of dyeing, a piece of cloth, prepared with a certain liquid, is plunged into a vat full of dye-stuffs of one colour, and is taken out tinged of another. The soul, wet with the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... feeling was deepened by providential escapes from accidents which threatened his life—"judgments mixed with mercy" he terms them,—which made him feel that he was not utterly forsaken of God. Twice he narrowly escaped drowning; once in "Bedford river"—the Ouse; once in "a creek of the sea," his tinkering rounds having, perhaps, carried him as far northward as the tidal inlets of the Wash in the neighbourhood of Spalding or Lynn, or to the estuaries of the Stour and Orwell to the east. At another time, in his wild contempt ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... was spent on his father's farm. He went to Kalamazoo for his schooling, and it was there that I first met him. He worked hard, saved his money, and went to Ann Arbor for his college work. He was ambitious to become a great engineer, and was always tinkering at some kind of a machine. He used to joke with me about becoming a great inventor, and after we were married he did try his hand at a patent coupler and a back-firing device for a gas engine. He was just ...
— Buffalo Roost • F. H. Cheley
... hand and tells us the past, present and future—sometimes with a startling consistency and probability. But few of us would have supposed that this race of vagabonds and outcasts had ever risen much above their traditional occupation of tinkering, far less that any portion of it had displayed original artistic genius. We have, however, from Robert Franz the composer a most interesting account of the wonderful music of the Hungarian gypsies or Tziganys, which he had several opportunities of hearing during a visit to ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... churches and sanitariums, and lawyers, doctors and preachers become necessary, all being the inventions of our lack of wisdom." And the man knew, for he had just been through the alimony court, turned out of church, and was on his way to a winter resort for the tinkering of ...
— Oklahoma Sunshine • Freeman E. (Freeman Edwin) Miller
... from sea-fish to beef, may be bought at the lowest prices, and the people are consequently well-developed and of a high stomach. They demand ten shillings for tinkering a jammed lock of a trunk; they receive sixteen shillings a day for working as carpenters; they spend many sixpences on very bad cigars, which the poorest of them smoke, and they go mad over a prize-fight. When ...
— American Notes • Rudyard Kipling
... declared the young fire worshipper; "and I don't see how I'm ever going to get to sleep to-night for tinkering with it. When I can attend a fire I seem to thrill all over. Funny, ain't it, Thad, how it affects me? My folks say they'll have to send me to the city, and make a ...
— The Boy Scouts' First Camp Fire - or, Scouting with the Silver Fox Patrol • Herbert Carter
... reputation for every morsel of bread, as philosophers have said." He may travel who can subsist on the wild fruits and game of the most cultivated country. A man may travel fast enough and earn his living on the road. I have at times been applied to to do work when on a journey; to do tinkering and repair clocks, when I had a knapsack on my back. A man once applied to me to go into a factory, stating conditions and wages, observing that I succeeded in shutting the window of a railroad car in which we were travelling, when the other passengers had failed. "Hast thou ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... another case like your father, sitting penniless around the house, tinkering on inventions up to the ...
— Gaslight Sonatas • Fannie Hurst
... you! I'm going to pay your dad for those horses that were run off right under my nose while I was tinkering with this airplane. I don't care what you think, or what old Sudden thinks, or what anybody on earth thinks! I know what I think, and that's a plenty. I'm going to make good before I marry you, or ...
— The Thunder Bird • B. M. Bower
... she was getting the diningroom ready for the new carpet. Therefore, although she heard the noise upstairs, she gave herself no concern about it; supposing that Larry was merely amusing himself, for he was continually tinkering at one ...
— Apples, Ripe and Rosy, Sir • Mary Catherine Crowley
... not check his teasing for a car of his own. However lax he might be about early rising and the prosody of Vergil, he was tireless in tinkering. With three other boys he bought a rheumatic Ford chassis, built an amazing racer-body out of tin and pine, went skidding round corners in the perilous craft, and sold it at a profit. Babbitt gave him a motor-cycle, and every Saturday ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... overalls; a short black pipe in his mouth. Three protesting husbands had just left. As the Very Young Husband, following Mrs. Mooney's directions, descended the cellar stairs, Alderman Mooney looked up from his tinkering. He peered through a ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber
... then Montcalm and his regulars were ready, but nothing else was. Every one knew that Ticonderoga was the key to the south of Canada; yet the fort was not ready, though the Canadian engineers had been tinkering at it for two whole summers. These engineers were, in fact, friends of Bigot, and had found that they could make money by spinning the work out as long as possible, charging for good material and putting in bad, and letting the gang plunder ...
— The Passing of New France - A Chronicle of Montcalm • William Wood
... which they were built, would several times over have paid for themselves. But war gave them no time to pay even for their tires. You saw them by the roadside, cast aside like empty cigarette-boxes. A few hours' tinkering would have set them right. They were still good for years of service. But an army in retreat or in pursuit has no time to waste in repairing motors. To waste ...
— With the Allies • Richard Harding Davis
... she ran into a tree and was damaged, and even on the day of her greatest conquest she behaved badly. The test was made on October 1, 1901. The aeronaut had rounded the Tower finely and was making for home when the motor began to miss and threatened to stop altogether. While Santos-Dumont was tinkering with the engine, leaving the steering wheel to itself, the balloon drifted over the Bois de Boulogne. As usual the cool air from the wood caused the hydrogen in the balloon to contract and the craft dropped until it appeared the voyage would end in the tree tops. Hastily shifting his ...
— Aircraft and Submarines - The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day - Uses of War's Newest Weapons • Willis J. Abbot
... want this to happen on my account. I am young; I can wait; I'll take my tinkering elsewhere. You've been very good to me sir, and I should ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath
... moral attitude, of a change in our laws and in our judgments strictly parallel to several we have considered. Once more I am convinced of the poverty, and selfishness, and the immorality of our views. Nor do I find great improvement to-day over yesterday. There is much talk and some tinkering, but though our judgments are less harsh, still we are choked with the weeds of false sentiment and feminine egoism. We fail to attack straight ...
— Women's Wild Oats - Essays on the Re-fixing of Moral Standards • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... strength of will to resist temptation, and had therefore fallen a victim to intemperance. He had lost his place as foreman of the great machine-shop, and what money he now earned came from odd jobs of tinkering which he was able to do here and there at private houses; for Tom was a genius as well as a mechanic, and when his head was steady enough, he could mend a clock or clean a watch as well as he could set up and regulate a steam-engine, and this latter he could do better than ...
— Choice Readings for the Home Circle • Anonymous
... skill in getting the best out of things as they are, in utilizing all the motives which influence men, and in giving one direction to many impulses, that has been a principal factor of her greatness and power. Perhaps it is fortunate to have an unwritten Constitution, for men are prone to be tinkering the work of their own hands, whereas they are more willing to let time and circumstance mend or modify what time and circumstance have made. All free governments, whatever their name, are in reality governments by public opinion, and it is on the quality of this public opinion ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... these three sonnets under this heading. The second one beginning "What is't to live" appears in Butler's Note-Book with the remark, "This wants much tinkering, but I cannot tinker it"—meaning that he was too much occupied with other things. He left the second line of the ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... going to Paris and thence to London, and sets out in a few days. I cannot, of course, resist his request for a letter to you, nor let pass the occasion of a greeting. Health, Joy, and Peace be with you! I hope you sit still yet, and do not hastily meditate new labors. Phidias need not be always tinkering. Sit still like an Egyptian. Somebody told me the other day that your friends here might have made a sum for the author by publishing Sartor themselves, instead of leaving it with a bookseller. Instantly ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... other side of the street. There was the wonted warmth in the sunny squares, and the old familiar damp and stench in the deep narrow streets. But some charm had gone out of all this. The artisans coming to the doors of their shallow booths for the light on some bit of carpentering, or cobbling, or tinkering; the crowds swarming through the middle of the streets on perfect terms with the wine-carts and cab horses; the ineffective grandiosity of the palaces huddled upon the crooked thoroughfares; the slight but insinuating cold of the southern ...
— Indian Summer • William D. Howells
... given to tube-tinkering with tompions, stays, plugs, plates, and wedges, to the distraction of the ship's carpenter and blacksmith, steam was coaxed up; and, at 9.15 a.m. (February 7th), we ran northwards through the deep narrow channel, rounding the upper end of the Pharaohnic islet. Here the encircling ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... playing at—a tinker or a gypsy? But I soon saw that I was not fitted to become either in reality. It was much more agreeable to play the gypsy or the tinker, than to become either in reality. I had seen enough of gypsying and tinkering to be convinced of that. All of a sudden the idea of tilling the soil came into my head; tilling the soil was a healthful and noble pursuit! but my idea of tilling the soil had no connection with ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... in the left shoulder, and again in the left side—both flesh wounds, I think." But the doctor insisted upon stretching him upon the sward, and tinkering with him until the wounds were cleansed and the flow of ...
— The Return of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... everywhere practicable for cavalry, as was well experienced on that memorable day. The cuirassiers, despite their arms of proof, were quite inferior to our heavy dragoons. The meeting of the two bodies occasioned a noise, not unaptly compared to the tinkering and hammering of a smith's shop. Generally the cuirassiers came on stooping their heads very low, and giving point; the British frequently struck away their casques while they were in this position, and then laid at the bare ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... power it is reforming its old, petty, half-hearted ways; its idea of manufacture as a filthy sort of tinkering; of distribution as chance peddling and squalid shopkeeping; it is feverishly seeking efficiency.... In its machinery.... But, like all monarchies, it must fail unless it becomes noble of heart. So long as capital and labor are divided, so long as the making of munitions ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... thought I might as well go below and make a rough draft of my will. Queequeg, said I, come along, you shall be my lawyer, executor, and legatee. It may seem strange that of all men sailors should be tinkering at their last wills and testaments, but there are no people in the world more fond of that diversion. This was the fourth time in my nautical life that I had done the same thing. After the ceremony was concluded upon the present occasion, I felt all the easier; a ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... hard upon Percy as Ritson himself was. They say that he polished "The Heir of Linne" till he could see his own face in it; and swelled out its 126 lines to 216—"a fine flood of ballad and water."[38] The result of this piecing and tinkering in "Sir Cauline"—which Wordsworth thought exquisite—they regard as a heap of tinsel, though they acknowledge that "these additional stanzas show, indeed, an extensive acquaintance with old balladry and a considerable ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... poor girls. It's within the London postal district, and that's all I know about it. Well, now, and did you go to the doctor? Thunder! what's come to the boy? Seems as though he had left his complexion in the carriage! He looks, I do declare, as if he wanted medical tinkering himself." ...
— The Fallen Leaves • Wilkie Collins
... an electric battery. He uses it for rheumatism; but I haven't seen him work it yet. He said it was out of order, and he's tinkering with it ...
— The Moving Picture Girls at Rocky Ranch - Or, Great Days Among the Cowboys • Laura Lee Hope
... his tinkering to join in her laugh. He felt ashamed of himself. The possibility of evil tongues making capital of their enforced position had certainly never entered into the thought of this smiling girl. Yet that such a possibility might exist in Coombe as ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... in on me," she said vehemently, "that in working among my own people as I have been doing I have been only tinkering at things, just tinkering. One has to go to the root of the matter, to abolish unjust laws, to replace them by good ones. Supposing I made my estate, as I hope to make it, a Utopia, still there would be hundreds of estates where the people would be in misery. It ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan
... all that he had done. Perhaps my readers think this matron's eyes Saw, in the tinker, a most likely prize To win, as husband, for her daughter fair; But surely they must be mistaken there! This family's standing was considered good; WILLIAM, amongst the very poorest stood: And, in his tinkering garb, was not a match For that fair girl, whom many strove to catch. Let this be as it might; he left the house Without proposing to make her his spouse. Yet not without the strongest inclination To ...
— The Emigrant Mechanic and Other Tales In Verse - Together With Numerous Songs Upon Canadian Subjects • Thomas Cowherd
... we got the schooner patched up and off the shoal and 'longside Lazarus' old landing wharf by the shanty. There was a little more tinkering to be done 'fore she was ready for sea, and we cal'lated to do ...
— Cape Cod Stories - The Old Home House • Joseph C. Lincoln
... Fourth he had stayed at home, tinkering up his machinery, making ready for haying that was soon to occupy all his waking hours,—and they would be as many as daylight would give him. He had been doing something to an old mower that should have gone to the junk heap long ago, and with the rusty sickle he had managed to cut his hand ...
— Rim o' the World • B. M. Bower
... of consideration must be on a scale commensurate with the evil, which it proposes to deal with. It is no use trying to bale out the ocean with a pint pot. There must be no more philanthropic tinkering, as if this vast sea of human misery were contained in the limits ...
— Darkest India - A Supplement to General Booth's "In Darkest England, and the Way Out" • Commissioner Booth-Tucker
... politician who has seated himself there to ride into office for the purpose of carrying out the object of this unholy combination. The chains of slavery are sufficiently strong, without being riveted anew by tinkering politicians of the free States. I feel myself compelled into this contest, in defence of the institutions of my own State, the persons and firesides of her citizens, from the insatiable grasp of the slaveholding power as being used and felt in the free States. To say that I am opposed to slavery ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... gruel: Grind both well and fast!" said the man, and the mill began to grind fish and gruel. It first filled all the dishes and tubs full, and after that it covered the whole floor with fish and gruel. The man kept puttering and tinkering, and tried to get the mill to stop; but no matter how he turned it and fingered at it, the mill kept on, and before long the gruel got so deep in the room that the man was on the point of drowning. Then he opened ...
— The Younger Edda - Also called Snorre's Edda, or The Prose Edda • Snorre
... trainsmen came with flaming torches to tinker it. There was a great pounding and shouting. When the train went on its way she wanted to get out of her berth and run up and down in the aisle of the car. The fancy had come to her that the men tinkering with the car wheel were new men out of the new land who with strong hammers had broken away the doors of her prison. They had destroyed forever the programme she had ...
— Triumph of the Egg and Other Stories • Sherwood Anderson
... and kind exertions made on their behalf. There are already several families of them within my knowledge, who reside in houses during the winter, and travel about only in the summer. Their means of subsistence are tinkering, and fiddling at feasts and fairs; by which some, I believe, make a good deal of money, which helps them out in the winter, when there is ...
— A Historical Survey of the Customs, Habits, & Present State of the Gypsies • John Hoyland
... returning from a rather hurried excursion to a near-by town when they came face to face with the motorcyclist. His motor had evidently stalled, and he was standing in the middle of the road tinkering ...
— The Outdoor Girls at the Hostess House • Laura Lee Hope
... A.D. 1000, and to have reached Europe in the 14th century, and to owe their name gypsies to their supposed origin in Egypt. They in general adhere to their unsettled habits wherever they go, show the same tastes, and follow the same pursuits, such as tinkering, mat-making, basket-making, fortune-telling. On their first appearance they were mere vagabonds ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... you, monsieur, that I do not expect to confine myself to tinkering forever. I should have abandoned it long since, for hundreds of fine men here in town have said to me, "Herman von Bremen, you ought to be something else." It was only the other day that one of the burgomasters let fall these words in the ...
— Comedies • Ludvig Holberg
... them, fifteen soldiers, a subaltern and a young beardless officer. The officer lay in front of the fire looking intently into the flames. The soldiers were tinkering with the ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various
... at that than anything else," replied he. "You see one of the instruments at the school gave out and they set me to tinkering at it. In that way I got tremendously interested in it. Afterward some of us fellows did some experimenting and managed to concoct a crude one in the laboratory. It wasn't much of a telephone but we finally got ...
— Ted and the Telephone • Sara Ware Bassett
... of the tinker whom the King had cowed with the soldering-iron; they took the boy out on a tinkering tramp, and as soon as they were out of sight of the camp they threw him down and the tinker held him while Hugo bound the poultice tight ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the French windows into the garden. With perilous despatch she set down the tray and rushed out to the gravel path, calling loudly to Flora. Flora, arrayed in a greasy blue overall, came hurrying from the garage where she had been spending the day tinkering with the car. ...
— Men of Affairs • Roland Pertwee
... the wagon-body he was tinkering and waved a wrench toward the window behind Stratton. Turning quickly, the latter saw that it looked out on the rear of the ranch-house, where there were a few stunted trees and a not altogether successful attempt at a small flower-garden. ...
— Shoe-Bar Stratton • Joseph Bushnell Ames
... put them in the wagon when I was tinkering with it," said Scott. "We've only two horses, you know, and I want ...
— Across the Mesa • Jarvis Hall
... had finished his tinkering, "he's paralyzed from the waist down. Let this one try and get away ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... particularly stupid, and he was so willing and anxious to learn, that his ill-success seemed a reason for pity rather than for wrath. Grim Norvold, Bonnyboy's father, was by trade a carpenter, and handy as he was at all kinds of tinkering, he found it particularly exasperating to have a son who was so left-handed. There was scarcely anything Grim could not do. He could take a watch apart and put it together again; he could mend a harness ...
— Boyhood in Norway • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... flopped on the road and died there. Never got to New York at all. Ike Schumann wouldn't let Fillmore have a theatre. The book wanted fixing and the numbers wanted fixing and the scenery wasn't right: and while they were tinkering with all that there was trouble about the cast and the Actors Equity closed the show. Best thing that could have happened, really, and I was glad at the time, because going on with it would only have meant wasting more money, ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... second the old man stood in silence, then with a rush, he stumbled down the hatchway, and in another moment Dave heard him tinkering away at his engines. ...
— Lost In The Air • Roy J. Snell
... had a mysterious quality. "I'm a free trader, but I'm not a Democrat. Tariff tinkering is not free trade, and I don't believe the Democrats would do any more than the Republicans, but that aint the question. The question is whether the farmers should ...
— A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland
... Here we may see to this day that practice carried to a ruinous extent, which, when charged upon tinkers, I have seen cause to restrict. In the present case from Macbeth, I fear that COR. is slightly indulging in this tinkering practice. As I view the case, there really is no hole to mend. The old meaning of the word convince is well brought out in ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... of the wire in its beak, the Phoenix flew up into the darkness once more. The tinkering sounds began again, and a spurt of falling debris rattled in the ...
— David and the Phoenix • Edward Ormondroyd
... with th' gas range? Make an authoreen iv her!' That's it, Kit, it's a poor sort of life at best, no manliness about it. Picture the contrast, girl—those fine fellows who stood at attention by their gun at Colenso when it was all up with them, and your blessed brother tinkering away at a pink and white muslin heroine that never was on ...
— In the Mist of the Mountains • Ethel Turner
... accept the altering of the shapes of workers, the tinkering with the hereditary form of their children, the artificial grafting upon our race of revolting and unnecessary form changes. Your whole science is a degeneration of wisdom into evil, tampering with life itself. You are horrors, and you do not ...
— Valley of the Croen • Lee Tarbell
... should tinkering ply, And I should fortunes tell; For then within our little tent ...
— Romano Lavo-Lil - Title: Romany Dictionary - Title: Gypsy Dictionary • George Borrow
... conduit was for me, and there were twelve feet of conduit; good long strait-jacket, but I've been in it a lot of times now, and feel quite at home. You see, the job couldn't be done in one go, for I had to make the hole under the fountain bigger, and I've been tinkering away for nearly a week, o' nights when the water was stopped. And if I'd come up at last, like a demon in a pantomime, to find I'd had my trouble for my pains, I can't say what I should have turned my ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... job," he interrupted her. "A lot of cars came in that needed tinkering with after the storm, and they were short of hands. I made more than two dollars, and we'll ride in state ...
— Anything Once • Douglas Grant
... till I was nearly mad with tramping, and nothing came of it. I got down into Ecuador, and there it was worse than ever. Sometimes I'd get a bit of tinkering to do,—I'm a pretty fair tinker,—or an errand to run, or a pigstye to clean out; sometimes I did—oh, I hardly know what. And then at ...
— The Gadfly • E. L. Voynich
... increasing, he became less and less sanguine about the value of such efforts as the Working Men's College, and less and less ready to co-operate with others in their schemes. He began to see that no tinkering at social breakages was really worth while; that far more extensive repairs were needed to make the old ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... convalescent. Or I hear a reedy nasal upper note, and I know that an oboe has been mended of its complaint and that in these dark days of winter it yearns for a woodside stream and the return of spring. It seems rather a romantic business tinkering these broken ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks
... swinging stride Helen had learned to know already, came out from the living-room, hat in hand, carrying a pair of spurs he had been tinkering with. ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... good repair. They are carried by the blood into all parts of the body and stop where they are needed to do any kind of work. They may be compared to the men who go around to mend old umbrellas, and to do other kinds of tinkering. It is thought that the white corpuscles turn into red ones when ...
— First Book in Physiology and Hygiene • J.H. Kellogg
... think it or thole it I cannot, That thou, a young fir of the forest Enwreathed in the gold that thou guardest, Shouldst be given to a tinkering tinsmith. Nay, scarce can I smile, O thou glittering In silk like the goddess of Baldur, Since thy father handfasted and pledged thee, So famed as thou ...
— The Life and Death of Cormac the Skald • Unknown
... was no longer possible to parley. Well!—that struck me as a good object lesson. I wanted to say to the secularising folk everywhere—England included—just come here, and look what your policy comes to, when it's carried out to the bitter end, and not in the gingerly, tinkering fashion you affect at home! Just understand what it means to separate Church from State, to dig a gulf between the religious and the civil life.—Here's a country where nobody can be at once a patriot and a good Christian—where the Catholics don't vote for ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... take place unless Morel had some job to do. And then he always went to bed very early, often before the children. There was nothing remaining for him to stay up for, when he had finished tinkering, and had skimmed the headlines of ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... to make; namely, the choice between wealth and a modest competency, when that modest competency is to be combined with a scientific career, and the means of advancing knowledge. I do not believe that all the talking about, and tinkering of, medical education will do the slightest good until the fact is clearly recognized, that men must be thoroughly grounded in the theoretical branches of their profession, and that to this end the ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... by education that the American is trained for such democracy as he possesses; and it is by better education that he proposes to better his democracy. Men are uplifted by education much more surely than they are by any tinkering with laws and institutions, because the work of education leavens the actual social substance. It helps to give the individual himself those qualities without which no institutions, however excellent, are of any use, and with ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... to be a wonderful new process of evolving gas from dirt and city refuse. He had been explaining it gently to a woman in the chair, from pure intellectual interest, to distract the patient's mind. He was not tinkering with teeth this time, however. The woman was sitting in the chair because it was the only unoccupied space. She had removed her hat and was looking steadily into the lake. At last, when the little office clerk had left, the talk about the gas generator ceased, and the woman turned her wistful ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... men say. I do not suppose that I shall be all happy—not even with your love. When things have once gone wrong they cannot be mended without showing the patches. But yet men stay the hand of ruin for a while, tinkering here and putting in a nail there, stitching and cobbling; and so things are kept together. It must be so for you and me. Give me your hand, Julia, for I have never deceived you, and you need not fear that I shall do so now. Give me your hand, and say ...
— The Claverings • Anthony Trollope
... when I happened to see him, he began talking about doctors, and, by Jove, didn't he abuse them! He says they stand more in the way of the development of the spiritual forces in man than any other body of people. He denounced them all as low materialists, immersed in the tinkering of the flesh. 'What does the flesh matter?' he said. 'It is nothing. It is only an envelope. And the more tightly it is fastened together, the more it stifles the spirit. I would like to catch hold of some men's bodies and tear them in pieces to get at their ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... wishing. The Pocohontas was docked some distance away, and by the time the boys could reach her, and start an engine that was never noted for going without considerable "tinkering," it ...
— The Outdoor Girls at Ocean View - Or, The Box That Was Found in the Sand • Laura Lee Hope
... Christ is soon coming into his kingdom. Then the thief will be remembered, be raised from the dead, and be with Christ in that paradise into which he will then introduce all his people. Thus all is as clear as a sunbeam, when the text is freed from the bungling tinkering ...
— Modern Spiritualism • Uriah Smith
... with unsparing energy. He committed afterwards an egregious blunder in reference to this production. He frittered it down into a stupid ode. Indeed, he had always an injudicious trick—whether springing from fastidiousness or undue ambition—of tinkering and tampering with his very ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside
... Warren Hatch, who was standing and frowningly watching the efforts of the one who was tinkering at the automobile. ...
— Frank Merriwell's Pursuit - How to Win • Burt L. Standish
... the year went by before work was begun. Frost came, and the few men tinkering about were chilled by the autumn winds that were wailing through the shutterless doors and glassless windows. Finally the foreman sent the Englishman to M. to help put up the machinery. He was a new man, and therefore was expected to take signals from ...
— The Last Spike - And Other Railroad Stories • Cy Warman
... engine. It was the only thing in the nature of work that I had to do, but, somehow or other, I did not feel like doing it any more than I had the day before. A little of my good spirits were wearing off, like the legs of my "other" trousers, and after an hour of intermittent tinkering I threw down the wrench and decided to go for a row. The sun was shining brightly, but the breeze was fresh, and, as my skiff was low in the gunwale and there was likely to be some water flying, I put on an old oilskin ...
— The Rise of Roscoe Paine • Joseph C. Lincoln
... her up and she'll be all right, eh?" said Chamberlain, but Hand kept on tinkering. The sudden neighing and plunging of Little Simon's poor tormented horse gave warning of the sheriff, crashing from the underbrush ...
— The Stolen Singer • Martha Idell Fletcher Bellinger
... about little else. All of which struck him as not only very tiresome and very silly, but very dangerous. Modern Protestantism might eventuate in Rationalism, in a limiting of human endeavour exclusively to the end of material well-being. But this worship of the pseudo- sciences, this tinkering at the accepted foundations and accepted decencies of the social order, this cultivation of intellectual and moral chaos, could, for the vast majority of its professors at all events, eventuate only in the mad-house. And to ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... "There were more delays—more tinkering. The owner came down for a day, and said she was as right as a little fiddle. Poor old Captain Beard looked like the ghost of a Geordie skipper—through the worry and humiliation of it. Remember he was sixty, and it was his first command. Mahon said it was a foolish ...
— Youth • Joseph Conrad
... say, but nothing that Everard could do would induce the car to start. He examined everything which his rather limited knowledge of motorology suggested might be the cause of the stoppage, but with no result. After half an hour's tinkering, he was obliged ruefully to acknowledge himself ...
— The Princess of the School • Angela Brazil
... knowledge of the habits of Salmon, and superintending a mill driven by water-power which employs nearly a thousand people; so that if a bill like yours could be worked in a satisfactory manner here, on so small a stream as the Ribble, it may anywhere in the kingdom. But if you make a tinkering job of it, and ask for too little, you will rouse your opponents and discourage your friends. By all means go for a free passage for the fish every night from sunset to sunrise in all cases where this does not interfere with manufactories, and then there ...
— Essays in Natural History and Agriculture • Thomas Garnett
... of a fence rail and, her feet hooked around the next bar, was placidly, if precariously, watching Richard Gilbert tinkering with a cultivator that had developed a ...
— Rainbow Hill • Josephine Lawrence
... in its disgusting trade, And botching, patching, leaving still behind Something of which its masters are afraid— States to be curbed, and thoughts to be confined, Conspiracy or Congress to be made— Cobbling at manacles for all mankind— A tinkering slave-maker, who mends old chains, With God and Man's ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... mean it." Leoh said. "This is the first real intellectual puzzle I've had to contend with in years. Tinkering with machinery ... that's easy. You know what you want, all you need is to make the machinery perform properly. But this ... I'm afraid I'm too old to handle a real ...
— The Dueling Machine • Benjamin William Bova
... engine for a toy steamboat, Fleeming made him begin with a proper drawing—doubtless to the disgust of the young engineer; but once that foundation laid, helped in the work with unflagging gusto, "tinkering away," for hours, and assisted at the final trial "in the big bath" with no less excitement than the boy. "He would take any amount of trouble to help us," writes my correspondent. "We never felt an affair was complete till we had called him to see, and he would come at ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... fishing gear and boat equipment to stow, and much cleaning to be done about the fish stage and cabin. Then there was Skipper Zeb's big trap boat to make ready for the voyage up the bay. A mast step had to be repaired, sails mended, and no end of tinkering before it met with ...
— Left on the Labrador - A Tale of Adventure Down North • Dillon Wallace
... Several bills tinkering at the patent laws are before Congress, and one of these (House Bill, No. 3,370) passed the House on the 30th ult. It has one section that may be made to work great harm to inventors, as it prevents infringers being sued for more than one year's damages previous ...
— Scientific American, Volume XXXVI., No. 8, February 24, 1877 • Various
... still tinkering with the record. "Yet it does not mean that because we have new ideas, they abolish the old. Often they only explain, amplify, supplement. For instance," he said, looking up at Edith Atherton, "take heredity. Our knowledge seems new, but is it? Marriages have always been dictated by ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... ashes. My unfortunate workman, having blundered on for certain millions of years tinkering and patching and improving his dismal colony, will give the thing up; and God will laugh and show him the mistakes and then blot the essay out, as a master runs his pen through the errors in a pupil's exercise. The earth grows cold at last, and the herds of humanity ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... good enough. Letters that ought to be postponed until others are written, letters to friends that never dun, books that don't bear on anything, books that no one has asked one to read, calls on unexpecting people, bills that might just as well wait, tinkering around the house on the wrong things, the right ones, perfectly helpless, standing by. Sitting with one's feet a little too high (if possible on one's working desk), being a little foolish and liking it—making poor puns, enjoying one's bad ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... lantern set to work upon the lock again, in the hope that he might be able to complete his skeleton key and let himself out before the Governor returned to carry out his threat. But this was a more difficult matter than he had anticipated; and after about two hours of ineffective tinkering he was compelled ...
— A Chinese Command - A Story of Adventure in Eastern Seas • Harry Collingwood
... fine, my dear fellow. But your cure must begin somewhere, and put it that a thousand things which debase a population can never be reformed without this particular reform to begin with. Look what Stanley said the other day—that the House had been tinkering long enough at small questions of bribery, inquiring whether this or that voter has had a guinea when everybody knows that the seats have been sold wholesale. Wait for wisdom and conscience in public agents—fiddlestick! The only conscience we can trust to is the massive sense of wrong ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... how timid investors are. All this sort of rot is likely to frighten them, and we can't afford to frighten them. The passengers aboard an Ocean steamer don't feel reassured when the ship's way is stopped, and they hear the workmen's hammers tinkering at the engines down below. The old Ark's going on all right as she is, and only wants quiet and room to move. Them's my sentiments, and those of some other people who have to do with ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... 'Excursion' suggested by Coleridge, but luckily quite beyond all the resources of tinkering open to William Wordsworth, is—in the choice of a Pedlar as the presiding character who connects the shifting scenes and persons in the 'Excursion.' Why should not some man of more authentic station have been complimented with that place, ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... teachers, experience, or perhaps more quickly by experimenting a bit with one or two of the simple expedients which I shall try to show are based on the wood fire's way of working. While there are those who would not for worlds give up the pleasure of tinkering with the tongs and poker while the fire burns, it will perhaps not detract from this enjoyment if the tinkering is not actually the result of necessity to keep the logs burning. Fire-mending is a delightful recreation only when it is not imposed upon us by becoming an alternative to having ...
— Making a Fireplace • Henry H. Saylor |
