"Trowel" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... about. The two children trotted at their heels. She talked glowingly. They stood at a low spot at the foot of the garden and she spoke of the necessity of putting in tile. The prospect seemed to excite her. "It will be the best land on the place when it's drained," she said. She stooped and with a trowel turned over the soft black soil. An odor arose. "See! Just see how rich and black it is!" she exclaimed eagerly. "It's a little sour now because water has stood on it." She seemed to be apologizing as for a wayward child. "When it's drained I shall use lime to sweeten it," she added. She ...
— Triumph of the Egg and Other Stories • Sherwood Anderson
... at Table, let him be always helped first, and to the most elegant Tid-Bit; and when you drink together, offer him always the Place of Toast-maker; whether he be your Inferiour or your Equal, let him always choose before you, and be not ashamed to trowel him well ...
— The Lovers Assistant, or, New Art of Love • Henry Fielding
... in my friend's library. It is a princely copy of Ben Jonson, the Illustrious. Southey lent it, when he possessed the magnifico, to Coleridge, who has begemmed it all over with his fine pencillings. As Ben once handled the trowel, and did other honorable work as a bricklayer, Coleridge discourses with much golden gossip about the craft to which the great dramatist once belonged. The editor of this magazine would hardly thank me, if I filled ten of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... being walled up in a vault of her convent, brick by brick, till the last brick shut off the last glimmer of the bricklayer's lantern, till the last layer of mortar made for her the last sound she would hear, the patting clink of the trowel on the brick, before it was all horrible dark silence for ever. I wondered how many people had been silenced in that way. I wondered how long I should live, if that was what ...
— Martin Hyde, The Duke's Messenger • John Masefield
... implement this for a froth-house builder who is compelled to work behind her back—mortar-feeder, trowel, darby, compass, and level all in one! Beginning with the first touch of the cement, the flowing point describes a very small half-circle to the right, again meeting the bark. It is now carried inward and upward, ...
— My Studio Neighbors • William Hamilton Gibson
... teeth, tail, and webbed feet the beaver accomplishes much. The tail of a beaver is a useful and much-used appendage; it serves as a rudder, a stool, and a ramming or signal club. The beaver may use his tail for a trowel, but I have never seen him so use it. His four front teeth are excellent edge-tools for his logging and woodwork; his webbed feet are most useful in his deep-waterway transportation, and his hands in house-building and especially in dam-building. It is in dam-building that the beaver shows ...
— Wild Life on the Rockies • Enos A. Mills
... Chesterfield, during his administration in Ireland, had discovered a rival to Ben Jonson in the person of a poetical bricklayer, one Henry Jones, whom his Lordship carried with him to London, as a specimen of the indigenous tribes of Erin. It was easier for this Jones to rhyme in heroics than to handle a trowel or construct a chimney. He rhymed, therefore, for the amusement and in honor of the polite circle of which Stanhope was the centre; the fashionable world subscribed magnificently for his volume of "Poems upon Several ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... you can save money by purchasing poor tools. It is quite impossible, because always one has either to buy new and better ones, or mend and remend the poor ones. The lad found out that a good trowel costs at least 50 cents although a smaller one called a transplanting trowel may be had for 15 cents; cast steel rake, 50 cents (10 teeth), 75 cents (14 teeth); hoe, 50 cents; Dutch hoe, four inches, 40 cents; spading fork, ...
— The Library of Work and Play: Gardening and Farming. • Ellen Eddy Shaw
... of conquests; and Napoleon's armies were great makers of conquests; but the modern Guerilla regiments of the hod, the trowel, and the brick-kiln, are the greatest conquerors of all; for they hold the longest the soil that they have once possessed. How mighty the devastation which follows in the wake of these tremendous aggressors, as they march through the kingdom ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... favorite with the Cooper boys. This master-mason took great pride in exact work, with which no trifling was permitted. No stone could be moved but his true eye would detect it in a flash, and wild was the fury with which his fiery trowel flew for the culprit, and with such convincing force that it was wise to avoid further meddling with the "gude mon's" work. Of "Jamie Allen," master-mason and staunch auld kirke mon, many an amusing story is told in Fenimore Cooper's "Wyandotte, or the Hutted Knoll," written ...
— James Fenimore Cooper • Mary E. Phillips
... its place the rude scratching of a palm-branch upon the rock or the plaster. It was the sign of victory, and he who lay within had conquered. The great rudeness in the drawing of the palm, often as if, while the mortar was still wet, the mason had made the lines upon it with his trowel, is a striking indication of the state of feeling at the time when the grave was made. There was no pomp or parade; possibly the burial of him or of her who had died for the faith was in secret; those ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... abounded, gold poured from the most distant dioceses, a rain of gold destined to increase and never end. Then came his happy years: he was to be met among the workmen at all hours, instilling activity into them like the jovial, good-natured fellow he was, constantly on the point of taking a pick or trowel in hand himself, such was his eagerness to behold the realisation of his dream. But days of trial were in store for him: he fell ill, and lay in danger of death on the fourth of April, 1864, when the first procession started from his parish church to the ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... a twenty-story office building in process of construction stood out black and bizarre. It flung up its beams and girders like stern and yet airy music, orderly, miraculously strong, and delicately powerful. From the lower stories, where masons made their music of trowel and hammer, to the top, where steam-riveters rapped out their chorus like giant locusts in a summer field, the great building lived and breathed as if all those human energies that went to its making flowed warm ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... keen interest and satisfaction your success in overcoming the many difficulties that lay in your way. Brooklyn herself has awakened from her sleep of almost ten years, and the sound of the hammer and the saw and the ring of the trowel are heard on every hand. Owing to the enterprise, energy and self-sacrificing efforts of many of the men who are with us to-day, she is astonishing the country by the wonderful increase in population. Brooklyn can no longer be regarded as the bedroom of Manhattan, for Manhattan is rapidly ...
— New York at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis 1904 - Report of the New York State Commission • DeLancey M. Ellis
... sheering off by the lower end of the pond, when, to my horror, I perceived a boy groping on the grass on all fours, apparently digging up the ground with a trowel. ...
— Tom, Dick and Harry • Talbot Baines Reed
... antediluvian idea that you can drown it; put in clean sand and gravel, broken stone, making it thin enough, so that when it is put into boxes the thinner portion will run in, filling all interstices, forming a solid mass. A brick trowel is necessary to work it down alongside the boxing plank. One of the best and easiest things to carry the concrete to the boxes is a railroad wheelbarrow, scooping it in with a scoop shovel. Two courses a week ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 443, June 28, 1884 • Various
... demonstrated by the practice of the most successful cultivators. In Zilla, N. Mooradabad, in April, about six weeks after planting, the earth on each side of the cane-rows is loosened by a sharp-pointed hoe, shaped somewhat like a bricklayer's trowel. This is repeated six times before the field is laid out in beds and channels for irrigation. There, likewise, if the season is unusually dry, the fields in the low ground are watered in May and June. This ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... Uncle William mounted the roof again. His face, under its vast calm, wore a look of resolve. He looked thoughtfully down the chimney hole. Then he sat down on the platform and took up his trowel. He balanced it on his palm and looked at the pile of bricks. His gaze wandered to the sky. It swept the bay and came back across the moors. A look of soft happiness filled it; the thin edges of resolve melted before it. "Best kind of weather," murmured Uncle William, "best kind—" His eye ...
— Uncle William - The Man Who Was Shif'less • Jennette Lee
... bring me that bunch of strawberry plants that lies at the corner of the beds, in the walk?—and my trowel?" ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... there is more spleen than sense in all this, I know—and back I go to the Encyclopaedia.' And back he went—that is the great point—with courage unabated and indomitable, labouring with sword in one hand and trowel in the other, until he had set the last ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 5: On Pattison's Memoirs • John Morley
... reminded me that the shepherdess had once been my ideal. She wore a broad straw hat, with artificial roses which made it hang down on one side, and, as she had been working in our garden, she wore huge gloves and carried a trowel in one hand. As she entered, my grandfather rose hastily from his chair and presented us with impressive courtesy. "Royal," he said, "this is your cousin, Beatrice Endicott." If he had not been present, I think we would have shaken hands without restraint. But he made ...
— Captain Macklin • Richard Harding Davis
... valuelessness of logic. In the main, indeed, logic is not a productive tool so much as a weapon of defence. A man building up an intellectual system has to build like Nehemiah, with the sword in one hand and the trowel in the other. The imagination, the constructive quality, is the trowel, and argument is the sword. A wide experience of actual intellectual affairs will lead most people to the conclusion that logic is mainly valuable as a weapon ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... deep tone of protest. "Not yet! Remember the walk across the fields. Plenty of time to get soil in the Amphitheatre!" And Mrs Garnett put down her trowel with quite a guilty air ...
— A College Girl • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... had none of that detachment, often found among superior minds, which we honour for its disinterestedness, even while we lament its impotence in result. The track in which he moved, the instruments that he employed, were the track and the instruments, the sword and the trowel, of political action; and what is called the Gladstonian era was distinctively a ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... celebrated, towards 1866, at the moment of the great transformations of Paris, when whole blocks were leveled to the ground, and rose again so rapidly, that one might well wonder whether the masons, instead of a trowel, did not make use of a ...
— Other People's Money • Emile Gaboriau
... being off, Joe washed down the walls with water, and having swept the paper into a heap in the middle of the floor, he mixed with a small trowel some cement on a small board and proceeded to stop up the cracks and holes in the walls and ceiling. After a while, feeling very tired, it occurred to him that he deserved a spell and a smoke for five minutes. He closed the door and placed a pair of steps against it. There were two windows ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... a colporteur for the Salvation Army; in fact, of being almost everything but a tiler or plasterer. But this shrewd woman had evidently come to the conclusion that, if I did not work upon the housetops, I must perforce be an artist of the trowel. I assured her that I was as incapable of fixing a tile as of making a ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... transplanting, select a rainy day, if possible, and do not begin until sufficient rain has fallen to moisten the earth around the roots, which will make it more likely to adhere to them when taken up. Take up the young plants by running the finger or a trowel under them; put these into a flat basket or box, and in transplanting set them to the same depth they originally grew, pressing the earth a ...
— Cabbages and Cauliflowers: How to Grow Them • James John Howard Gregory
... a pecuniary point of view, 346 was encroached upon by three uncurtained beds, of most impoverished appearance,—while, exhibiting the ravages of time in divers fractures, the dingy walls and ceiling, retouched by the trowel in many places with a lighter shade of repairing material, bore no unapt resemblance to the Pye-bald Horse in Chiswell-street! Calculating on its utility and probable future use, the builder of the mansion had given to this room the appendage of a chimney, but ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... place, I refused decidedly to do so. The garrison were strengthening their position by plastering and renewed renovation, and I doubt that by this time the original rafters are no longer to be seen. A plasterer's boy, with a fine sense of humor, stood clapping his trowel on his board, inside the house, while we debated retreat, and derisively invited us to enter: "Suoni pure, O signore! Questa e la famosa casa del gran pittore, l'immortale Tiziano,—suoni, signore!" (Ring, by all means, sir. This is the famous house of the great painter, ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... signifies the Lime was not will burnt; for when 'tis well Quench'd, it is Fat and will stick to the Knife; but the quite contrary happens to Mortar, for it is neither well prepar'd, nor well mix'd, if it stick to the Trowel. ...
— An Abridgment of the Architecture of Vitruvius - Containing a System of the Whole Works of that Author • Vitruvius
... is told how, before being appointed to the See of Ripon, he once married a young couple with the assurance that he was not only a Carpenter but a Joiner. Only a few months ago he was about to lay the foundation stone of a new vicarage. The architect handed him the trowel, etc., inviting him to become "an operative mason for ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 25, January 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... but an argument which had sprung up between Brother John and Komba about the former's butterfly net, which Komba suspected of being a new kind of gun or at least a magical instrument of a dangerous sort, attracted my notice. After this dispute, another arose over a common garden trowel that Stephen had thought fit to bring with him. Komba asked what it was for. Stephen replied through Brother John that it was ...
— Allan and the Holy Flower • H. Rider Haggard
... slit open its stomach! And take out all its Directions! And follow 'em! And if it was a Bright Red Celluloid Fish she was to catch it! And take out all its Directions and follow them!—In either case her card said she would need rubbers and a trowel.—It sounded like Buried Treasure to me! Or else Iris Roots! Our Aunt Esta is very much ...
— Fairy Prince and Other Stories • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... seems nothing to complain of in the matter of supplies," I said. They had been having a kind of high tea on tables laid across trestles on the lawn, and one of them, using his knife as a bricklayer uses his trowel, was luxuriously spreading a layer of apple and plum jam upon a stratum of hard-boiled egg, which reposed on a bed-rock of bread and butter, the whole representing a most interesting geological formation and producing a ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan
... man, and is turning out of his way, I believe, on your account. He is going to lay a foundation-stone at Corte. I should fancy the ceremony will be very imposing, and I am very sorry not to see it. A gentleman in an embroidered coat and silk stockings and a white scarf, wielding a trowel—and a speech! And at the end of the performance manifold and reiterated shouts of 'God save the King.' I say again, sir, it will make you very vain to think I have written you four whole pages, and on that account I give you leave to write me a very ...
— Columba • Prosper Merimee
... fatigue-dress, wearing soft, round, visorless caps, were removing the debris of the fatal barricade; soldiers with shovel and hoe filled in the trenches and raked the long, winding street clean of all litter; soldiers with trowel and mortar were perched on shot-torn houses, mending chimneys and slated roofs so that their officers might enjoy immunity from rain and wind and ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... be a hole dug for it, in the first place; you must take a trowel and make a hole for it But your dress will be the waur!" he exclaimed, glancing at ...
— Melbourne House • Elizabeth Wetherell
... never be made by the study of Shakspeare. Do that which is assigned you, and you cannot hope too much or dare too much. There is at this moment for you an utterance brave and grand as that of the colossal chisel of Phidias, or trowel of the Egyptians, or the pen of Moses or Dante, but different from all these. Not possibly will the soul, all rich, all eloquent, with thousand-cloven tongue, deign to repeat itself; but if you can hear what these patriarchs say, surely you can reply to them in the same pitch ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... made a wondrous picturesque figure of himself as, in a raised corner of the crowded and beflagged marquee, he had flourished a trowel, and talked about the great and enlightened public, and about the highest function of the drama, and about the duty of the artist to elevate, and about the solemn responsibility of theatrical managers, and about the absence of petty jealousies ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... of the strange things people do when their ideas are confused. The man stood for a moment or two, as if transfixed, a trowel motionless in one of his hands, and a brick in the other; at last giving a kind of gasp, he ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... Talks whate'er comes in his head; Wishes it were all unsaid. Let me now the vices trace, From the father's scoundrel race. Who could give the looby such airs? Were they masons, were they butchers? Herald, lend the Muse an answer From his atavus and grandsire:[1] This was dexterous at his trowel, That was bred to kill a cow well: Hence the greasy clumsy mien In his dress and figure seen; Hence the mean and sordid soul, Like his body, rank and foul; Hence that wild suspicious peep, Like a rogue that steals a sheep; ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... if not to the artist. In Captain Macklin, the young man's cousin makes her first appearance in a thin gown, and a white hat trimmed with roses, reminding the adventurous captain of a Dresden statuette, in spite of the fact that she wore heavy gauntlet gloves and carried a trowel. The lady had been doing a hard day's work in the garden. No woman outside the asylum ever did gardening in such a costume, and Mr. Davis evidently has the hat and gown sadly mixed with some ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... moderate supply of warmth reach its watery cradle, and the plastic matter undergoes changes so rapid, yet so steady and purposelike in their succession, that one can only compare them to those operated by a skilled modeller upon a formless lump of clay. As with an invisible trowel, the mass is divided and subdivided into smaller and smaller portions, until it is reduced to an aggregation of granules not too large to build withal the finest fabrics of the nascent organism. ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... that he made a solemn contract with this architect to stop the leak and restore the wall in St. Joseph's Chapel for twenty-five shillings. "'Twas too little," said Jem, "but what can you do with a gintleman that doesn't know a trowel from a spade." All materials were to be ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... conspicuous pointing. This, however, is not so destructive as much of the work which has been condemned above, because at any time the walls could be recovered with a thin coat of smooth plaster laid on with a trowel, but not "floated,"—that is, not brought to a smooth surface ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: Wimborne Minster and Christchurch Priory • Thomas Perkins
... days Paris was seized with a building-fever. If Paris is a monster, it is certainly a most mania-ridden monster. It becomes enamored of a thousand fancies: sometimes it has a mania for building, like a great seigneur who loves a trowel; soon it abandons the trowel and becomes all military; it arrays itself from head to foot as a national guard, and drills and smokes; suddenly, it abandons military manoeuvres and flings away cigars; it is commercial, care-worn, falls into bankruptcy, sells its furniture on the place de Chatelet, ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... She began to utter long cries and lamentations like a hen in distress, raising her hands to heaven. All at once they heard some one rushing up the stairs. It was the butler, in his shirt-sleeves and his enormous apron of ticking, still carrying his trowel in his hand. He was bewildered, his eyes protruding, while all about him he spread the smell of fresh earth. At every instant ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris
... but better the old ones; send your paviours and slaters to the poorest villages, and see that your poor are healthily lodged, before you try your hand on stately architecture. You will find its stateliness rise better under the trowel afterwards; and we do do not yet build so well that we need hasten to display our skill to future ages. Had the labour which has decorated the Houses of Parliament filled, instead, rents in walls and roofs throughout the county ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... the stair-head, gently moving his right hand as if it were a silver trowel with which to spread the cement of his words on the structure of the system and consolidate it ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... affairs turns to the last market reports for guidance in his day's transactions; and all have used books, have studied literature. The hammer and the poem, the hoe and the dictionary, the engine and the encyclopedia, the trowel and the treatise on philosophy—these are tools. One and all, they are expressions of the life of the race. But they are not, for that reason, to be reverenced. They are proper for man's service, not man for theirs. Approach books, then, as you ...
— A Library Primer • John Cotton Dana
... and a hoe and a claw and a trowel and a spade and a heavy line with some pegs to ...
— Ethel Morton's Enterprise • Mabell S.C. Smith
... hard material and to break up large lumps; the other end is used as a shovel to throw up the dirt. When used in this fashion the wooden handle is laid aside, the pick end becomes a handle, and the intrenching-tool is used in the same manner as a trowel. ...
— World's War Events, Vol. I • Various
... possession ever since and will be, "Till death us do part." My courtship was rather "at long range;" for Newark, Ohio, was several hundred miles away, and I have always found that a man who would build up a strong church must be constantly at it, trowel in hand. On the 17th of March, 1853, the venerable Dr. Wylie conducted for us a very simple and solemn service of holy wedlock, closing with his fatherly benediction, one of the best acts of his long and useful life. The invalid mother of my bride (for Colonel Mathiot had died ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... his trade of a mason, worked on Lincoln's Inn in London with trowel in hand and a book in his pocket. Joseph Hunter was a carpenter in youth, Robert Burns a plowman, Keats a druggist, Thomas Carlyle and Hugh Miller masons. Dante and Descartes were soldiers. Andrew Johnson was a tailor. Cardinal Wolsey, Defoe, and Kirke White were butchers' sons. Faraday ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... This occupied him and the dilatory Concord carpenter for nearly half a year; and meanwhile chaos and confusion reigned supreme. There was no one whose ears could be more severely offended by the music of the carpenter's box and the mason's trowel than Hawthorne, and he knew not whether to fly his home or remain in it. Not until all this was over could he think seriously of a ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... bundle of clothing near one of the beds, which, on lifting itself up, proved to be a tall slender lady of middle age, who, with her dress tucked neatly round her, a big print hood on her head, and a trowel in her hand, was busily administering such tender little attentions as mothers will lavish on their children, and garden lovers on their flowers. She was not alone in the garden, as we soon perceived. A shorter and stouter and younger lady sat knitting by the side ...
— Mrs. Overtheway's Remembrances • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... declared, pointing towards the Empty House with a bit of broken flower-pot, "or else it's the ones you killed last week, and who was always astealin' of my strorbriz." He looked very wise as he said this, and his wand of office—a dirty trowel—which he held in his hand, gave ...
— Jimbo - A Fantasy • Algernon Blackwood
... (as it were, the Emblem and beatified Ghost of an Apron), which some highest-bred housewife, sitting at Nuernberg Workboxes and Toyboxes, has gracefully fastened on; to the thick-tanned hide, girt round him with thongs, wherein the Builder builds, and at evening sticks his trowel; or to those jingling sheet-iron Aprons, wherein your otherwise half-naked Vulcans hammer and smelt in their smelt-furnace,—is there not range enough in the fashion and uses of this Vestment? How much has been concealed, how much has been defended ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... yellow beam down the wood-aisle doth seem Like a lane into heaven that leads from a dream, — Ay, now, when my soul all day hath drunken the soul of the oak, And my heart is at ease from men, and the wearisome sound of the stroke Of the scythe of time and the trowel of trade is low, And belief overmasters doubt, and I know that I know, And my spirit is grown to a lordly great compass within, That the length and the breadth and the sweep of the marshes of Glynn Will work me no fear like the fear they have wrought me of yore When length was fatigue, and ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... picture she was amidst this quietude, - she who had lived through the Reign of Terror: her mob cap, garden apron, and big gloves; a trowel in one hand, a watering-pot in the other; potting and unpotting; so busy, seemingly so happy. She loved to have me with her, and let me do the watering. What a pleasure that was! The scores of little jets from ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... items of costume as 'Cumberland corsets,' 'Petersham trousers,' 'Brummel cravats,' 'Osbaldistone ties,' and 'Exquisite crops,' should be only sketchily rendered in paint. Of course, Mr. Opie, who affected thorough John Bullism in art, who laid on his pigments steadily with a trowel, and produced portraits of ladies like washerwomen, and gentlemen liking Wapping publicans—of course, unsentimental, unfashionable Mr. Opie denounced the degeneracy of his competitor's style. 'Lawrence makes coxcombs of his sitters, and they make a coxcomb of him.' Still 'the quality' flocked ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... speculative builders love to raise upon some miserable fragment of waste ground hanging to the skirts of a prosperous town. Brigsome's Terrace was, perhaps, one of the most dismal blocks of building that was ever composed of brick and mortar since the first mason plied his trowel and the first architect drew his plan. The builder who had speculated in the ten dreary eight-roomed prison-houses had hung himself behind the parlor door of an adjacent tavern while the carcases were yet unfinished. The man who had bought the brick and mortar ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... beard, and eye-brows were an ebon black, as were his eyes; his features were hard and massive; his nose, which was somewhat hooked, but too much pointed, seemed as if, while in a plastic state, it had been sloped by a trowel towards one side of his face, a circumstance which, while taken in connection with his black whiskers that ran to a point near his mouth, and piercing eyes, that were too deeply and narrowly set, gave him, aided by his heavy eyebrows, an expression ...
— The Black Prophet: A Tale Of Irish Famine • William Carleton
... Aunt Jane, as she laid down her trowel and pushed back her calico sunbonnet, "if I never heard anything funny again in this world, I could keep on laughin' till I died jest over things I ricollect. The trouble is there ain't always anybody around to laugh with me. Sam Amos ain't ...
— Aunt Jane of Kentucky • Eliza Calvert Hall
... needy. He was industrious; not a moment of his day was lost. For many years, he was one of the only two priests in the State; but when his parochial duties left him a little leisure, he was seen to handle the trowel and use the broom. He paid cash for everything he bought, and whoever worked for him received full pay on the day and hour agreed upon: no cutting down of rates. If they wished to give to the church, very well; but they must take their pay ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 2, February 1886 • Various
... of an empire there are two processes—the building up, and the tearing down. The plow is no less essential than the trowel. The period after Boris had been for Russia the period of the wholesome plow. The harvest was far off. But the name Romanoff was going to stand for another Russia, not like the old Russia of Kief, nor yet ...
— A Short History of Russia • Mary Platt Parmele
... she quite done, this time? Oh dear no! Ten times, twenty times, at every moment, for the least particle of mortar which she lays, she repeats her mensuration, never being quite certain that her trowel is going just ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre
... the cupolas of St. Mark's five hundred years hence say, 'This was the work of a conscientious artist.'" A description follows of the scene of the mosaic workers pursuing their calling. "Here was heard abusive language, there the joyous song; further on, the jest; above, the hammer: below, the trowel: now the dull and continuous thud of the tampon on the mosaics, and anon the clear and crystal like clicking of the glassware rolling from the baskets on to the pavement, in waves of rubies and emeralds. Then the fearful grating of the scraper on the cornice, ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... battle spears into pruning hooks. And besides the consumption of wood for fires, no little amount is used for the construction of our houses or huts. Nearly every man has suddenly become a mason or a carpenter, and the hammer, the axe, and the trowel are being plied with the utmost vigor, if not with the highest skill. Many of us, however, are astonished at the ingenuity that is displayed in this department. Large logs, notched at the ends so as to dovetail ...
— Three Years in the Federal Cavalry • Willard Glazier
... happens when something appears that requires not only our eyes to take it in, but involves a deeper kind of perception and takes possession of the whole of our being. A little girl, with fair, reddish hair, who appeared to be returning from a walk, and held a trowel in her hand, was looking at us, raising towards us a face powdered with pinkish freckles. Her black eyes gleamed, and as I did not at that time know, and indeed have never since learned how to reduce ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... how eagerly the ducks carried bricks. To complete the tale, the swallows came flying to the work, their beaks full of mortar and their trowel on their back, just the way little ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... his fortune to build, In his youth would have taught him the trowel to wield, But the mortar of discipline never would stick, For his skull was secured by a facing of brick; And with all his endeavours of patience and pain, The skill of his sire he could ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... venksigno. Tropics tropiko. Tropical tropika. Trot troti. Trot troto—ado. Trouble konfuzi, cxagreni. Troublesome malfacila. Trough trogo. Trousers pantalono. Trousseau vestaro. Trout truto. Trowel trulo. Truant kusxemulo, forkuranteto. Truce interpaco. Truck manveturilo. Truculent kruelega. True vera. Truffle trufo. Truly vere. Trump (cards) atuto. Trumpery cxifajxo senvalora. Trumpet ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... Indispensable! No degree of proficiency at inserting calories in correct numbers in to Little Sally's stomach could atone for lack of skill at leading Little Sally herself in morning strolls through the "Child's Garden of Verses," with trowel in hand to dig up the gayest plants and reset them ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... beaver, whose tail I am convinced is a trowel. I know of no naturalist who has mentioned this, but such negative evidence is of little weight. The beaver, as everybody knows, is a builder, who cuts down trees and piles log upon log until he has ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)
... of the nest, which has a mound-like character, is daubed over with mud, the tail of the alligator being used as a trowel. The first duties of maternity being over, the female alligator acts as policeman until the eggs are hatched. Her office is not a sinecure, for the fowls of the air, and the creeping things upon earth, are ...
— Four Months in a Sneak-Box • Nathaniel H. Bishop
... His father, intending his fortune to build, In his youth would have taught him the trowel to wield. But the mortar of discipline never would stick, For his skull was secured by a facing of brick; And with all his endeavours of patience and pain, The skill of his ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett
... this quite supposititious fact. I believe he had been knighted himself for storming the English grammar at the point of the pen, in a desperate address engrossed on vellum, on the occasion of the laying of the first stone of some building or other, and for handing some Royal Personage either the trowel or the mortar. Be that as it may, he had directed Mrs. Pocket to be brought up from her cradle as one who in the nature of things must marry a title, and who was to be guarded from the acquisition of ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... cultivated in some Physick Gardens at Mitcham. It must be kept well weeded, and the top of the Bed, where it grows, must, when we cut it, be pricked up, a little, with a small Fork, or the Earth made fine with a Trowel; because the Runners, of this sort of Mint, shoot along upon the Surface of the Ground, and so at the Joints strike Root, which is contrary to other Sorts of Mint, which ...
— The Country Housewife and Lady's Director - In the Management of a House, and the Delights and Profits of a Farm • Richard Bradley
... of the linden festival. The white dove-house was shining with a fresh coat of paint, and the pigeons were crooning contentedly, flying down often to drink at the drip from the water tank. Mrs. Kohler, who was transplanting pansies, came up with her trowel and told Thea it was lucky to have your birthday when the lindens were in bloom, and that she must go and look at the sweet peas. Wunsch accompanied her, and as they walked between the flower-beds he took ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... "Milly Splay, who would have matched you with some dull, tiresome squire accustomed to sleep over his port after dinner, the sort of man you are drawing so brilliantly in your wonderful book." A movement of impatience on Joan's part perplexed him. Authors! You can generally lay your praise on with a trowel. What in the world was the matter with Joan? He hurried on. "I understood that I was making enemies. I understood, too, why I was no longer invited to Rackham Park. I was a foreigner. I would as ...
— The Summons • A.E.W. Mason
... Stowbody to set out plants in the tiny triangular park at the railroad station; she squatted in the dirt, with a small curved trowel and the most decorous of gardening gauntlets; she talked to Ella about the public-spiritedness of fuchsias and cannas; and she felt that she was scrubbing a temple deserted by the gods and empty even of incense and the ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... little afraid of the responsibility of treasure- trove, but he was overruled by a chorus of eager voices, and dispossessed of the trowel, which he had brought to dig up some down- gentians for the garden. While Norman set to work as pioneer, some skipped about in wild ecstasy, and Ethel knelt down ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... re-erected by a Roman architect and engineer named Pontius, B.C. 22. When it was taken down in 1879 to be brought to America, all the emblems of the builders were found in the foundation. The rough Cube and the polished Cube in pure white limestone, the Square cut in syenite, an iron Trowel, a lead Plummet, the arc of a Circle, the serpent-symbols of Wisdom, a stone Trestle-board, a stone bearing the Master's Mark, and a hieroglyphic word meaning Temple—all so placed and preserved as to show, beyond doubt, that they had high symbolic meaning. Whether ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... of yours is a duffer," she said sharply, pointing a very earthy trowel at the unconscious figure of the gardener, who was busy in the middle distance digging potatoes. "A man," she continued, "who calls a plain, every-day squash a vegetable marrow isn't fit to run a well-ordered truck-patch; though it's no more ...
— His Lordship's Leopard - A Truthful Narration of Some Impossible Facts • David Dwight Wells
... building, the term applied to constructions made of bricks. The tools and implements employed by the bricklayer are:—the trowel for spreading the mortar; the plumb-rule to keep the work perpendicular, or in the case of an inclined or battering wall, to a regular batter, for the plumb-rule may be made to suit any required inclination; the spirit-level to keep the work horizontal, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... now dug a hole and worked water and clay together into mortar, then with a trowel cut out of a shingle, and mortar carried in an old bucket, he built a wall within the stakes, using sticks laid along the outside and stones set in mud till the front was closed up, except a small hole for a window and a large hole for ...
— Two Little Savages • Ernest Thompson Seton
... things and began to straighten rapidly, rolling up her ribbons with shaking fingers, and carefully folding her clothes into compact squares. Ever since her childhood she had always begun to work at her chest of drawers when any sudden shock unnerved her. After a great happiness she took up her trowel and dug among the flowers of the garden; but when her heart was heavy within her, she shut her door and put her ...
— The Battle Ground • Ellen Glasgow
... Sabrina dropped her trowel on a heap of weeds, and cast her gardening gloves on the top. She led the way to the house, and when they were in the coolness of the big sitting-room with its air of inherited repose, she turned about and spoke again in her round, low ...
— Country Neighbors • Alice Brown
... their house—these and a thousand other wonderings and reveries kept possession of my mind; while the natural pride and hope and confidence of a young man turned to sweet music the sound of saw and hammer and trowel, and even translated the rustling of pine shavings with ...
— Romance of California Life • John Habberton
... with political agitators, and with miserable traitors to the land of their birth and breeding, the poor emigrant starts from the interior, where his ideas have never expanded beyond the weaver's loom or factory labour, the plough or the spade, the hod, the plane, or the trowel, and hastens with his wife and ...
— Canada and the Canadians - Volume I • Sir Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... the northern tribes (as in Alaska, or Cape Breton); the "moss-bag" of the eastern Tinne, the use of which has now extended to the employes of the Hudson's Bay Company; the "trough-cradle" of the Bilqula; the Chinook cradle, with its apparatus for head-flattening; the trowel-shaped cradle of the Oregon coast; the wicker-cradle of the Hupas; the Klamath cradle of wicker and rushes; the Pomo cradle of willow rods and wicker-work, with rounded portion for the child to sit in; the Mohave ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... two, three, and here she did come! And in a trice Polly had the cover up, and out flew the little green tin botany case; and within it being an iron spoon and little trowel, off flew Polly on happy feet to unearth the treasures that were to beautify Phronsie's little garden; a bunch of girls ...
— Five Little Peppers at School • Margaret Sidney
... was hail-fellow-well-met among his associates, though often given over to dreaminess. He belonged to a jolly club named the "Kettle Club," literally, the Company of the Kettle; and to another called "The Trowel," both suggesting an all around good time and much good fellowship The members of these clubs were expected to contribute to their wonderful suppers, and Andrea on one occasion made a great temple, in imitation of the Baptistry, of jelly with columns of sausages, white ...
— Pictures Every Child Should Know • Dolores Bacon
... that world beyond?' Is there any other greater, more satisfying, more majestic thought of life than this—the scaffolding by which souls are built up into the temple of God? And to care whether a thing is painful or pleasant is as absurd as to care whether the bricklayer's trowel is knocking the sharp corner off a brick, or plastering mortar on the one below it before he lays it carefully on its course. Is the building getting on? That is the one question that ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... radical politician's view, my dear," answered the vicar. "Let a man be apprenticed to a skilled trade, and carry a bricklayer's hod, or a carpenter's rule. Let him only wear slops and work in an engine-room, or use a mason's trowel—so long as he does these things and receives his wages weekly, he is a 'working-man;' and, must have the hours of labour made to suit him, the legislation of the country altered on his behalf, the taxation of the public judiciously contrived to steer clear of him. He is the typical 'working-man,' ...
— She and I, Volume 2 - A Love Story. A Life History. • John Conroy Hutcheson
... flesh of citizens, and they never appear in society. The diplomatic impolitely dub them fools. Be they that or no, they augment the number of those mediocrities beneath the yoke of which France is bowed down. They are always there, always ready to bungle public or private concerns with the dull trowel of their mediocrity, bragging of their impotence, which they count for conduct and integrity. This sort of social prizemen infests the administration, the army, the magistracy, the chambers, the courts. They diminish and level down ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... of a mine of untold wealth. Several days were spent in unprofitable search: then more favorable indications led the shepherds to dispose of their flocks and set out in good earnest to dig for gold. A couple of spades, a trowel and a calabash were their only tools, but our adventurer was a knowing man, and "knowledge is power." His practiced eye knew just where the precious metals would be most likely to exist if at all in that locality—that in the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... ravine, digging canals, building mills, and rearing their log cabins. The merchant, the farmer, and the mechanic follow them. The long solitude of the centuries is broken by mill-wheels, the buzzing of saws, the stroke of the axe, the blow of the hammer and trowel. The stageman cracks his whip in the passes of the mountains. The click of the telegraph and the rumbling of the printing-press are heard at the head-waters of the Missouri, and borne on the breezes there is the laughter of children and the sweet music of Sabbath hymns, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... disturbing them during the winter. From the beaver being seen to flap its tail when moving over its work, but especially when about to plunge into the water, has arisen the idea that it uses this member as a trowel. This custom it preserves even when it becomes tame and domesticated, ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... mixture all lumps and stones; the whole may be then worked up with a due proportion of water, observing that this kind of mortar cannot be too much worked or mixed together, nor too little wetted, just sufficient to work freely with the plastering trowel; the whole floor should, if possible, be laid in one day, and for this purpose several hands should be employed; in which case it will dry more equally and firmly. As soon as the floor begins to set, and that it will bear a board on it, without sinking in, you should ...
— The American Practical Brewer and Tanner • Joseph Coppinger
... The trowel cuts them quite in half, It is a bitter cup; They give a sour sardonic laugh And sew the pieces up; They sew them up and wind away With seeming unconcern, But oh, be careful! one fine day I hear ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, December 1, 1920 • Various
... magazine, delighted with what they had found, and loaded with work-tools. Those of the masons,—the chisel, the short hammer, and the trowel, were not to be found, and rarely are taken out to sea; but they had collected a great number of carpenters' tools,—saws, planes, rules, &c. And now that Fritz was a smith, he had no difficulty in making any tool he wanted. ...
— The Swiss Family Robinson; or Adventures in a Desert Island • Johann David Wyss
... demands his money. The excitement spreads like fire. The blacksmith leaves his anvil, the carpenter his bench, and the tailor his goose. The tanner deserts his hide, and the shoemaker throws down his last to save his all. The mason with his trowel in his hand, rushes from the half-finished wall; Pat drops his hod between heaven and earth and slides down the ladder, muttering: "Oi'll have me moaney or Oi'll have blood!" The fat phlegmatic Dutchman, ...
— Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales • Robert L. Taylor
... and warlocks, Smiting the heathen horde,— One hand on the mason's trowel, And one on ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... his seventeenth or eighteenth year, probably from a want of means, he had to give up the career of learning, in order to follow the simple calling of his stepfather. It may be easily understood that Ben was little pleased with the use of the trowel; he fled to the Netherlands, became a soldier, and took part in a campaign. After a year, the youthful adventurer, then only nineteen years old, came back to London. He talks of a heroic deed; but the truthfulness of his account may well be doubted. He pretends having killed an ...
— Shakspere And Montaigne • Jacob Feis
... near the Scots, that amongst the common Persons, in some Parts of Wales, you may meet with a Ploughman that speaks tollerable Latin, and a Mason, like the famous Ben Johnson, with his Horace and a Trowel. ...
— A Vindication of the Press • Daniel Defoe
... little at last. Next moment he was nearly hidden under a continuous stream of earth and dust flying back from his amazing foreclaws, and a whirling, whirring vortex of perfectly demented bees, whose nest, that had been weeks in the building, was dissolving in seconds under the trowel-like scoopings ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... artillery and the cracking of leather thongs. Already the pontoons were beginning to span the river Saar, already the engineers were swarming over the three ruined bridges, jackets cast aside, picks rising and falling—clink! clank! clink! clank!—and the scrape of mortar and trowel on the granite grew into an incessant sound, harsh and discordant. The market square was impassable; infantry gorged every foot of the stony pavement, ambulances creaked through the throng, rolling like white ships in a tempest, ...
— Lorraine - A romance • Robert W. Chambers
... country, could make out from what was being said around them that there was to be a funcion. The foundation-stone of a new church was to be laid in the suburb of San Cosme the chief magistrate of the State himself to lay it—with all ceremony and a silver trowel. The procession, formed in the Plaza Grande, would, of course, pass through the Calle de Plateros; hence the throng of the ...
— The Free Lances - A Romance of the Mexican Valley • Mayne Reid
... the fad. One may go a step further and transplant the wild flowers and the weeds. A busy and successful professional friend of mine, besides having a cabinet shop in his stable, finds (or makes) time to go to the woods with his trowel. He has quite a wild-flower bank in his garden. I cannot give definite directions as to their setting out—I think he just throws them down anywhere—a fair percentage seem to thrive,—I can remember the larger bur-marigold, the red and white bane-berry, ...
— Why Worry? • George Lincoln Walton, M.D.
... said these words I busied myself among the pile of bones of which I have before spoken. Throwing them aside, I soon uncovered a quantity of building stone and mortar. With these materials and with the aid of my trowel, I began vigorously to wall up ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... I do not mean painting and sculpture but every kind of decoration, and most kinds of pictorial representation—the image of a boy's kite or a girl's battledore not less than the design upon a lacquered casquet or enameled vase,—the figure upon a work-man's trowel not less than the pattern of the girdle of a princess,—the shape of the paper doll or wooden rattle bought for a baby, not less than the forms of those colossal Ni-O, who guard the gateways of ...
— The Sex Worship and Symbolism of Primitive Races - An Interpretation • Sanger Brown, II
... defence. The eagle had his imperial plumage, beak, and talons; the elephant his leathern roundabout and travelling trunk, with its convenient air-pump; and the beaver, at once a carpenter and a mason, had his month full of chisels and his tail a trowel. The bipes implumis, on the contrary, was hatched nude, without even the embryo of a pin-feather. There was nothing for him but the recondite capabilities of his two talented, but talonless hands, and a large brain ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... silver sheer or trowel should be used for this purpose; a steel knife applied to fish often spoils the delicacy of its flavor. Great care must be taken to prevent breaking the flakes, which ought to be kept as entire as possible. Short-grained fish, such as salmon, ...
— The Story of Crisco • Marion Harris Neil
... trowel has been assigned to the third degree as its proper implement, and the symbolic meaning which accompanies it has a strict and beautiful reference to the purposes for which it was used in the ancient temple; for as it was there employed "to spread the cement which united the building in one common ...
— The Symbolism of Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... errands, opened the chest, and received his friend with open arms. Grotius declared, that while he was in the chest, he had felt much anxiety, but had suffered no other inconvenience. Having dressed himself as a mason, with a rule and trowel, he went, through the back door of Bazelaer's house, accompanied by his maid, along the market-place, to a boat engaged for the purpose. It conveyed them to Vervie in Brabant: there, he was safe. His maid then left him, ...
— The Life of Hugo Grotius • Charles Butler
... the rest of it?" asked Ethel Brown, on her knees taking up some of the plants with her trowel and placing them in her basket so carefully that there was plenty of earth surrounding each one to serve as a nest when it should be put into ...
— Ethel Morton's Enterprise • Mabell S.C. Smith
... Romulus must have been a little older than Rome, the builder a little anterior to what he built. Varro and the Capitoline Tables and Mr. Hook will all agree to that postulate. And whatever some of them may say as to the youth of Romulus, when he first began to wield the trowel, at least, I suppose, he was come to years of discretion; and, if we say twenty-three or twenty-four, which I am as much entitled to say as they to deny it, then we are all right. 'All right behind,' as the mail guards say, 'drive on.' And so I feel entitled to lay my hand upon my heart ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... measurements on the scrap of paper, nudged Harker as the master-mason began to take up the last of the small flags. And suddenly there was a movement amongst the watchers, and the master-mason looked up from his job and motioned Mitchington to pass him a trowel which lay ...
— The Paradise Mystery • J. S. Fletcher
... of them informed her; "so you are too! Everybody's looking." And they crowded round to examine the objects in her hand—a dirty earth-stained trowel and a fern. They knew she collected ferns on the sly, but never before had they seen her bring home such a prize. Usually she found only crumpled things like old bits of wrinkled brown paper which she called "specimens." This one was marvellously ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood
... to the blue plush frame, Persis passed through the house to the woodshed, found a trowel among the garden tools, and then made her way into the night. The sky was overcast, hiding the stars, but the flitting fire-flies outlined strange constellations against the velvety darkness. Persis groped her way through the ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... struggle; the mass of the Holy Spirit is solemnly said, if not always devoutly listened to; the ambassadors of the Catholic powers utter their official exhortations to harmony and a single eye to the good of the Church; and when they withdraw, the mason of the conclave steps gravely forth, trowel in hand, to build up a solid wall of brick and mortar betwixt the electors and that world which still looks forward with curious interest, although with diminished faith, to the ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... dried, it is very heavy, weighing three or four pounds. I have heard my brothers and some of the Indian trappers say, that the animal makes use of its tail to beat the sides of the dams and smoothe the mud and clay, as a plasterer uses a trowel. Some people think otherwise, but it seems well suited from its shape and weight for the purpose, and, indeed, as the walls they raise seem to have been smoothed by some implement, I see no reason to ...
— Lady Mary and her Nurse • Catharine Parr Traill
... Tower, and what was more, he knew an old mason residing about two miles off who had worked there, and who was, he rather thought, the very man who had told him of it. He would go off at once and fetch John Trowel and his tools, and they would very soon burrow into the molehill if ...
— Washed Ashore - The Tower of Stormount Bay • W.H.G. Kingston
... assailants were recalled, and in the mean time a herald was sent by Parma, highly applauding the courage of the defenders, and begging them to surrender at discretion. They answered the messenger with words of haughty defiance, and, rushing in a mass to the breastwork, began with spade, pickax, and trowel, to add to its strength. Here all the able-bodied men of the town took up their permanent position, and here they ate, drank, and slept upon their posts, while their food was brought to them by the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... From this humble position he rose to a situation in the studio of Bubb, the sculptor; and through the counsel of Eugenius Roche, the former editor of the "Literary Recreations," and then the conductor of The Day newspaper, he was induced to lay aside the trowel and undertake the duties of reporter to that journal. The Day soon falling into the hands of other proprietors, Cunningham felt his situation uncomfortable, and returned to his original vocation, attaching himself to Francis Chantrey, then a ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume III - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... plants, wild grapes, Virginia jessamine. In the middle is a sun-dial. There are many plants in pots. Your child is looking at the flowers. She shows them to her nurse—she is making holes in the earth with her trowel, and planting seeds. The nurse is raking the path. The young girl is pure as an angel, but the beginning of love is there, faint ...
— Ursula • Honore de Balzac
... to be this beneficent, unambitious, disinterested guide; and it is the very condition of all great structures that the sound of the hammer and the clink of the trowel should be always heard in some part of the building. With faith in man, hope for the future of humanity, loving-kindness for our fellows, Masonry and the Mason must always work and teach. Let each do that for which he is best fitted. The teacher also is a workman. Praiseworthy ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... is it. I couldn't remember why I was placed in that chair, and Ardelia couldn't remember. So it occurred to me that I had forgotten my trowel," he said. He put the trowel, absent-mindedly, in the tea basket, and took the seat arranged ...
— Bambi • Marjorie Benton Cooke
... over the reins to other hands just as trustworthy as his—you can give the president a big hand there—they've got to think his work is the basis of our present foreign policy—can't you see the implications? It's got to be spread on with a trowel, laid on skillfully—" ...
— Bear Trap • Alan Edward Nourse
... on her heavy gloves and brought her trowel from under the front porch, and she and the maid began to dig up the fresh, damp earth on the sunny side ...
— John Ward, Preacher • Margaret Deland
... so benevolent and sympathetic for, beguiling a fellow into making a weak-kneed fool of himself? My worries are no greater than those of millions of other people, and here I've been laying it on with a trowel. Forget the whole dismal story, and just give me a bit of professional advice ...
— The Second Violin • Grace S. Richmond
... right hands, rapidly laying the long side-wall, two hundred feet from front to rear, The flexible rise and fall of backs, the continual click of the trowels striking the bricks, The bricks, one after another, each laid so workmanlike in its place, and set with a knock of the trowel-handle, The piles of materials, the mortar on the mortar-boards, and the steady replenishing by the hod-men; —Spar-makers in the spar-yard, the swarming row of well-grown apprentices, The swing of their axes on the square-hewed log, shaping it toward the shape of a mast, ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman
... the plant up again by its leaves, it is not firm enough in the ground. If a man uses brain and eye, he can learn to work very rapidly. By one dexterous movement he scoops the excavation with a trowel. By a second movement, he makes the earth firm against the lower half of the roots. By a third movement, he fills the excavation and settles the plant into its final position. One workman will ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe
... booming of cannon, the loud strains of martial music, and the cheers of her followers, the empress laid the first stone of the city of Caterinoslaw, and after her, the emperor took up the mortar and trowel, and laid the second one. He performed his part of the drama with becoming solemnity; but, about an hour later, as he was taking his customary afternoon walk with the French ambassador, M. de Sigur, ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... the City Surveyor and Mr. Stanley, stone-mason, the worthy Mayor then proceeded to discharge his agreeable duty—the laying of the first stone. He used for the purpose a very elegant silver trowel {59a} with ivory handle, furnished by the Messrs. Etheridge (which had been presented to his worship by Mr. E. E. Benest) bearing the ...
— Three Centuries of a City Library • George A. Stephen
... seemed to be the only inhabitant of what I had known, a short time before, as a prosperous and thriving market town. Then through an aperture that had been a window I saw three women sitting round a candle. And in the next street I found a man on his knees on the pavement, working with bricks and a trowel. ...
— Kings, Queens And Pawns - An American Woman at the Front • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... and in the East Side halls. They were stirring up the minds of the people. They were not merely making them discontented with conditions, but they were offering a programme of reconstruction—a programme that included a trowel as well ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine
... little objects made by the children should be glazed and baked in the furnace. The children themselves learn to line a wall with shining white or colored tiles wrought in various designs, or, with the help of mortar and a trowel, to cover the floor with little bricks. They also dig out foundations and then use their bricks to build division walls, or entire little houses for ...
— Dr. Montessori's Own Handbook • Maria Montessori
... the god Unwinding the roll. And a tale came forth of the woven slain Sequent and whole, Of flint and bronze, trowel and hod, The wheel and the plane, The carven stone and the graven clod Painted and baked. And cromlechs, proving the human heart Has always ached; Till it puffed with blood and gave to art The dream of the dome; ...
— Toward the Gulf • Edgar Lee Masters
... of possibilities that put a happy thought into Sarah's head. For three days she said nothing, but she fell into the way of going often in and out of that door, and always her eyes were hungrily fixed on one or the other of those squares. On the fourth day she bought a trowel and some flower seeds and set resolutely to work. She had dug the trowel into the earth four times, and was delightedly sniffing the odor from the moist ...
— The Tangled Threads • Eleanor H. Porter
... to inhabit it is merely the matter of a walk in the neighbourhood. When removed from her own dwelling, which is turned topsy-turvy by my trowel, and placed in possession of the den produced by my art, the Lycosa at once disappears into that den. She does not come out again, seeks nothing better elsewhere. A large wire-gauze cover rests on the soil in the ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... architects strongly advocate is that the joints shall be struck as the work proceeds—that is, that very shortly after a brick is laid, and while the mortar is yet soft, the bricklayer shall draw his trowel, or a tool made for the purpose, across it, to give it a smooth and a sloping surface. This is best when the joint is what is called a weather joint—i.e., one in which the joint slopes outward. Sloping it inward is not good, as ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 601, July 9, 1887 • Various
... slight sound from the direction of the garden. Marie and the two men turned to look. Trowel in hand Molly Dale was kneeling on one knee between the brook and a row of blue camass. But she was not doing any weeding. She was staring fixedly at Marie. While a man could breathe twice Molly stared at Marie, then she dropped her head and became ...
— The Heart of the Range • William Patterson White
... deservedly eminent in his chosen lot, is particularly open to criticism on this ground. I cannot emphasize too gravely the importance of preliminary calm—what Hobbes calls "the unprejudicated mind." But this by way of parenthesis.) One may attack the problem with the mortar trowel, or with the axe. Sismondi, ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... does not need a tail to tuck itself up with, as do the coon and the fox. The dog talks with his tail; the tail of the possum is prehensile; the porcupine uses his tail in climbing and for defense; the beaver as a tool or trowel; while the tail of the skunk serves as a screen behind which ...
— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... enemy, the wolverene, from disturbing them during the winter; and as they are frequently seen to walk over their work, and sometimes to give a flap with their tail, particularly when plunging into the water, this has, without doubt, given rise to the vulgar opinion that they use their tails as a trowel, with which they plaster their houses; whereas that flapping of the tail is no more than a custom which they always preserve, even when they become tame and domestic, and more particularly so when ...
— Quadrupeds, What They Are and Where Found - A Book of Zoology for Boys • Mayne Reid
... in July, Athalie had acquired a fat bay horse and a double buckboard; and, in the seventh heaven now, she jogged about the country through leafy lanes and thistle-bordered by-roads long familiar to her childhood, sometimes with basket, trowel, and garden gloves, intent on the digging and transplanting of ferns, sometimes with field-glasses and books, on ornithological information bent. More often she started out with only a bag of feed for Henry the horse and some luncheon for herself, to picnic all alone in a familiar ...
— Athalie • Robert W. Chambers
... fully impressed with the value of these archeological discoveries, detailed a man to superintend the exhumation, who proceeded to remove the earth from the mould, which he reached through a layer of charcoal, and then with a trowel excavated beneath it. The clay was not thoroughly baked, and no impression of the corpse was left, except of the forehead and that portion of the limbs between the ankles and the knees, and even these portions of the mould crumbled. The body had been ...
— A Further Contribution to the Study of the Mortuary Customs of the North American Indians • H.C. Yarrow
... console him. "I'll have a love-sick girl on my hands," he complained to Mrs. Richie. "You'll have to do your share of it," he barked at her. He had come in through the green door in the garden wall, with a big clump of some perennial in his hands, and a trowel under one arm. "Peonies have to be thinned out in the fall," he said grudgingly, "and I want to get rid of this lot. Where shall I ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland
... that my only course was to bury the poor animal where he fell, and say nothing about it. With some vague idea of precaution, I first took off the silver collar he wore, and then hastily interred him with a garden-trowel, and succeeded in removing ...
— Stories By English Authors: London • Various
... feeding and undermining propensities does extensive injury to crops generally. They may be successfully trapped in the following manner: Strike a line between the two most recent earth mounds, and midway between them remove a piece of the sod. By the aid of a trowel or a sharp stick the burrow may now be reached. Insert your hand in the tunnel and enlarge the interior sufficiently to allow the introduction of No. (0) steel trap. Set the trap flatly in the bottom of the burrow, and then laying a piece of shingle or a few sticks across the ...
— Camp Life in the Woods and the Tricks of Trapping and Trap Making • William Hamilton Gibson
... guest an equal share of those tidbits should be his maxim. Steel knives and forks should on no account be used in helping fish, as these are liable to impart a very disagreeable flavor. A fish-trowel of silver or plated silver is the proper article ...
— The Whitehouse Cookbook (1887) - The Whole Comprising A Comprehensive Cyclopedia Of Information For - The Home • Mrs. F.L. Gillette
... played at houses under the table—it was not the sort of game he usually played, but the neighbors could not know that. The table happened to be set down just over the hole that had held the roots of the moonflower. Dickie dug a little with a trowel in the ...
— Harding's luck • E. [Edith] Nesbit |
