"Clocks" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... with people. In the inner courtyard seven piles of wood were flaming. Pianos, chests of drawers, and clocks were hurled out through the windows. Fire-engines sent streams of water up to the roofs. Some vagabonds tried to cut the hose with their sabres. Frederick urged a pupil of the Polytechnic School to interfere. The latter did not understand him, and, moreover, ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... is precisely what one does. He let himself in and shut the door, though it was only striking ten on one of the city clocks. No one can go to bed at ten. Nobody was thinking of going to bed. It was January and dismal, but Mrs. Wagg stood on her doorstep, as if expecting something to happen. A barrel-organ played like an obscene ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... like to exchange flower seeds with any little girl in California or Florida. I have verbenas, mixed phlox, four-o'clocks, sweet-williams, balsams, alyssum, salvia, mignonette, and red and ...
— Harper's Young People, October 12, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... of ridiculing kings and the most portentous events, of calling anything and everything in question with a jest. Then he sauntered along the boulevards. It was an entirely novel amusement; and so agreeable did he find it, that, looking at the turret clocks, he saw the hour hands were pointing to four, and only then remembered that he ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... nothing of the hardships in store for them, and were the least adapted to encounter them of any people in the world, as they were mechanics, whose business had been the delicate work of making watches and clocks. They arrived in 1821, and from year to year, after undergoing hardships that might have appalled the hardiest pioneer, their spirits drooped, they pined for home, and left for the south. At one time a party of two hundred and forty-three of them departed for the United ...
— The History of Minnesota and Tales of the Frontier • Charles E. Flandrau
... are old houses set deep in leafy gardens; creepers hang drowsily in the delicious air; long aisles open upon terraces bright with flowers. It was in an earthly paradise of this kind that Elsie loitered away a golden afternoon; and then, when the clocks were striking six, she went off to rejoin ...
— A Vanished Hand • Sarah Doudney
... subject of public lying, Lalage's portrait and the story of the two bands men would have been quite familiar to all readers. During a general election very few details of particular campaigns can be printed. Editors are kept busy enough chronicling the results and keeping up to date the various clocks, ladders, kites and other devices with which they inform their readers of the state of parties. I was therefore quite hopeful that our performances in Ballygore would escape notice. They did not. Some miserably efficient and enterprising ...
— Lalage's Lovers - 1911 • George A. Birmingham
... native of the same parish, and received his education from Mr. Hopewell. I first became acquainted with him while travelling in Nova Scotia. He was then a manufacturer and vendor of wooden clocks. My first impression of him was by no means favourable. He forced himself most unceremoniously into my company and conversation. I was disposed to shake him off, but could not. Talk he would, and as his talk was of that kind, which did not require much reply on my part, he took my silence ...
— The Attache - or, Sam Slick in England, Complete • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... dwellings are plentiful, the streets are quiet by day and night, and only those who still have something to lose or who cherish very modest hopes of gain, still take an interest in financial affairs. One may dream again, as one dreamed thirty years ago, when all the clocks were set once a fortnight ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... went out as he sat swinging the poker backwards and forwards. The clocks of Bloomsbury and St. Pancras struck twelve, and still Philip Sheldon pondered and plotted by that dreary hearth. The servants had retired at eleven, after a good deal of blundering with bars and shutters, and unnecessary banging of doors. That unearthly silence ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... The clocks were just striking one as Toby entered the inclosure used by the show as a place of performance, and, remembering his engagement with the skeleton and his wife, he went directly to their tent. From the odors which assailed him ...
— Toby Tyler • James Otis
... by what people said than by their way of saying it. He was a good landlord and a kind master. It is told of him that one day, while scolding one of his servants, he turned round with a laugh to a friend standing by. "They are like clocks," said he, "and need winding up now and then".[Footnote: See the medallion given in Vian, and said by the Biographie universelle to be the only authentic portrait. Also Montesq. vii. 150, (Pensees diverses. Portrait de M. par lui-meme, apparently written when he was about ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... hours of leisure by mechanical employments in which he was assisted by one Torriano, who constructed a sundial in the convent-garden. He had a great fancy for clocks, and had a number of these in his royal apartments. The special triumphs of Torriano were some tin soldiers, so constructed that they could go through military exercises, and little wooden birds which flew in and out of ...
— Heroes of Modern Europe • Alice Birkhead
... look at the goods without being aware that the second set was a provision for Fancy, when she should marry and have a house of her own. The most noticeable instance was a pair of green-faced eight-day clocks, ticking alternately, which were severally two and half minutes and three minutes striking the hour of twelve, one proclaiming, in Italian flourishes, Thomas Wood as the name of its maker, and the other—arched ...
— Under the Greenwood Tree • Thomas Hardy
... a table of Russian malachite within the recess of the central window lay, preserved in glass cases, the baton and the sword, the epaulettes and the decorations of the brave Marshal. On the consoles and the mantelpieces stood clocks and vases of Sevres that could scarcely be eclipsed by those in the Imperial palaces. Entering the cabinet, they found the Duchesse seated at her writing-table, with a small Skye terrier, hideous in the beauty of the purest breed, ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... an auditory delusion. Not even two clocks beat in unison. There is always a discrepancy, infinitesimal, perhaps, ...
— The House of the Vampire • George Sylvester Viereck
... after an effort to secure an apartment near the Madeleine, they finally established themselves in the Avenue des Champs Elysees (No. 128), where they had pretty, sunny rooms, tastefully furnished, with the usual French lavishness in mirrors and clocks,—all for two hundred francs a month, which was hardly more than they had paid for the dreary Grosvenor Street lodgings in London. Mrs. Browning was very responsive to that indefinable exhilaration of atmosphere that pervades the French capital, and the little Penini was charmed with the ...
— The Brownings - Their Life and Art • Lilian Whiting
... proud, for it did not vary above a minute a month. Nevertheless its performance was checked every week by the watch of the mail-coach guard, who brought the time from St. Paul's as he started from St. Martin's-le-Grand, and communicated it to the Cowfold mail-cart driver. All round the shop were clocks of numerous patterns, but mostly of two types, one Dutch, and one with oak or mahogany case. Perhaps a dozen or so were generally going, and it was rather distracting to a visitor to see the pendulums of the Dutch clocks wagging at different ...
— Miriam's Schooling and Other Papers - Gideon; Samuel; Saul; Miriam's Schooling; and Michael Trevanion • Mark Rutherford
... is now the prey of devouring flames. Their slaves have all disappeared; their stock, part is taken away, part lies bleeding in the yard, stabbed by bayonets; their elegant furniture, tables, glasses, clocks, beds, all is swallowed up. An army of passing demons could have done no worse. But while with tearful eye they are looking round on the wide-spread ruin, undermined by the fire, down comes the tall building with thundering crash to the ground. The frightened ...
— The Life of General Francis Marion • Mason Locke Weems
... occupied by civilians that we had come to. Most of them were preparing to leave, and roomy French farm carts, piled high with curious medleys of mattresses, chairs and tables, clothing, carpets, kitchen utensils, clocks and pictures, kept moving off. But children played about the streets; girls stood and talked to French and British soldiers; and M. le Maire ...
— Pushed and the Return Push • George Herbert Fosdike Nichols, (AKA Quex)
... upwards, like rockets, to a great height in the anand, after wheeling about for a few moments, pro-cipitate themselves downwards with amazing violence in a wild zigzag, opening and shutting the long tail-feathers like a pair of shears, and producing loud whirring sounds, as of clocks being wound rapidly up, with a slight pause after each turn of the key. This aerial dance over, they alight in separate couples on the tree tops, each couple joining in a kind of duet of rapidly ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... pound, fortie pound, yea a hundred pound of one pair of Breeches. (God be merciful unto us!)" To these gay hose they add nether-socks, curiously knit with open seams down the leg, with quirks and clocks about the ankles, and sometimes interlaced with gold and silver thread as is wonderful to behold. Time has been when a man could clothe his whole body for the price of these nether-socks." Satan was further let loose in the land by reason of cork shoes and fine slippers, of all colors, carved, ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... amazingly witty. She is understood to have a depth of insight that looks through and through the shallow theories of philosophers, and her superior instincts are a sort of dial by which men have only to set their clocks and watches, and all will go well. The men play a very subordinate part by her side. You are consoled now and then by a hint that they have affairs, which keeps you in mind that the working-day business of the world is somehow being carried on, but ostensibly the final cause of their existence is ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... too, we've had quite enough of this place. But there's no keeping you out of the libraries, Caudle. You're getting quite a gambler. And I don't think it's a nice example to set your children, raffling as you do for French clocks, and I don't know what. But that's not the worst; you never win anything. Oh, I forgot. Yes; a needle-case, that under my nose you gave to Miss Prettyman. A nice thing for a married man to make presents: and to such a creature ...
— Mrs. Caudle's Curtain Lectures • Douglas Jerrold
... not, and things went wrong—well, in that case, I should be the innocent means of bringing a great and lasting sorrow upon his house. Hour after hour I turned this question over and over in my mind, uncertain how to act. The clocks chimed their monotonous round, the noises died down and rose again in the streets, and daylight found me only just come to a decision. I would not tell them; but at the same time I would make doubly sure that I sailed aboard that ship myself, and ...
— A Bid for Fortune - or Dr. Nikola's Vendetta • Guy Boothby
... balsams as usual. The clear afternoon sunbeams shone all over what seemed to Daisy all distressing together. The ragged balsams the coarse bloom of prince's feather and cockscomb some straggling tufts of ribband grass and four-o'clocks and marigolds and the great sunflower nodding its head on high over all; while weeds were only kept away from the very growth of the flowers and started up everywhere else, and grass grew irregularly where grass should not; ...
— Melbourne House • Elizabeth Wetherell
... Genevieve-Magdaleine Wattebled, widow of the sieur Leveque. She died in 1770. The only lawsuit which he won "before he was thirty," was that against Lepaute, who claimed as his own invention the escapement for watches and clocks, which Beaumarchais had discovered. The case was decided in favour of Beaumarchais in 1754. Out of his second lawsuit—with Count de la Blache, legatee of his patron Duverney, who died in 1770—sprang his action against Goezman, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... so accustomed to the use of pendulums in our clocks that perhaps we do not often realise that the introduction of this method of regulating time-pieces was really a notable invention worthy the fame of the great astronomer to whom it was due. It appears that ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... Accidents may happen, events may intervene, the clock may get smashed, and all may be prevented. But, bar accidents, it'll strike all right, under ordinary circumstances, when the hour arrives for it. Well, Cyril and I, as I always say, are like two clocks wound up at the same time to strike together, and we strike with very unusual regularity. But that's the whole mystery. If I get smashed by accident, there's no reason on earth why Cyril shouldn't run on for years yet ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen
... her life had Betty met her stepfather's celebrated aunt, and the meeting had taken place nearly twelve years ago. The figure that remained in her memory was of a pale-eyed, grenadier-like old lady, almost entirely surrounded by clocks. It was these clocks that had impressed her most. She was too young to be awed by the knowledge that the tall old woman who stared at her just like a sandy cat she had once possessed was one of the three richest women in the whole wide world. She only remembered ...
— The Prince and Betty - (American edition) • P. G. Wodehouse
... pockmarks? Why is the number of the blind steadily diminishing? Why are mechanisms multiplying so rapidly—the jinrikisha, the railroads, the roads, the waterworks and sewers, the chairs, the tables, the hats and umbrellas, lamps, clocks, glass windows and shoes? A hundred similar questions might be asked, to which no ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... clocks struck the hour, and it had grown quite dark, she gave up all hope, and went away, returning in the direction whence she had come, and revolving plans of vengeance on the ungrateful singer ...
— Stradella • F(rancis) Marion Crawford
... figure riveted my whole attention. It was the painted figure of Time as he is commonly represented, save that, in lieu of a scythe, he held what, at a casual glance, I supposed to be the pictured image of a huge pendulum such as we see on antique clocks. There was something, however, in the appearance of this machine which caused me to regard it more attentively. While I gazed directly upward at it (for its position was immediately over my own) I fancied that I saw it in motion. In an instant afterward the ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... behind Henry, who found himself outside a block of old houses at the lake end of the Rue Muzy, under a setting moon, as the city clocks struck two. The night, which had seemed to Henry already so long, was yet, as ...
— Mystery at Geneva - An Improbable Tale of Singular Happenings • Rose Macaulay
... could read or write. However, he found a teacher in a young man by the name of Robert Cowens, of whom he took three lessons per week in the evening. He earned money for books and instruction by mending shoes and repairing clocks. He was handy with tools, and quick at seeing the relations of things. As soon as he could read and write he learned to cipher, taking a slateful of "sums," set by his teacher, to his work in the morning, to be "done" during odd moments while watching his pump or engine, for he was ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various
... is decreased, We shall be thought to share the feast. The change shall never be believed, A lost good name is ne'er retrieved.' 'Nay, then,' replies the feeble fox, '(But hark! I hear a hen that clocks) Go, but be moderate in your food; A chicken too might do ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... morning, the yellow meadow goats-beard opens; and brides awake, and the stable-boy begins to rattle and feed the horses beneath the lodger. At four o'clock the little hawk weed awakes, choristers going to the Cathedral who are clocks with chimes, and the bakers. At five, kitchen maids, dairy maids, and butter-cups awake. At six, the sow-thistle and cooks. At seven o'clock many of the Ladies' maids are awake in the Palace, the Chicory in my botanical garden, and some ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... Hannah! which made me the more willing to bring de message. So now if you'll jest take de money an' give me de cloth, I'll be off. I has got some clocks and umberell's to mend to-night. And dat minds me! if you'll give me dat broken coffee-mill o' yourn I'll fix it at de ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... The church clocks at West Lynne struck eight one lovely morning in July, and then the bells chimed out, giving token that ...
— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood
... would—oceans," returned Joan. "Laws! I knaws clocks by scores as hasn't gone for twenty year and more. Us has got two ourselves, that wan won't strike and t' other you can't ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... Day (The Sergeant pronounced it as though it were all one word). Sir, my comrade Peterday is a very remarkable man,—most cobblers are. When he's not cobbling, he's reading,—when not reading, he's cobbling, or mending clocks, and watches, and, betwixt this and that, my comrade has picked up a power of information,—though he lost his leg a doing of it—in a gale of wind—off the Cape of Good Hope, for my comrade was a sailor, sir. Consequently he is a handy man, most sailors are and makes his own wooden legs, ...
— The Money Moon - A Romance • Jeffery Farnol
... tight grip on these truths, which were born, one might say, with his blood; his life grew out of them. So much of the world was certain,—but outside? It was rather vague there: Yankeedom was a mean-soiled country, whence came clocks, teachers, peddlers, and infidelity; and the English,—it was an American's birthright ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... of the house ordained that all doors should be locked and lower windows latched at midnight. A night watchman made certain rounds each hour, pressing a key into indicating-clocks at various points to show that he had been alert. Mortimer Fenley had been afraid of fire; there was so much old woodwork in the building that it would burn readily, and a short circuit in the electrical installation was always possible, though every device ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... and terminating in snug little ivy- covered lodges and heavy ornamental iron gates with massive stone piers, moss-grown, and surmounted by time-worn and weather-stained stone sculptures of the arms of the family; the drowsy chime of the church- clocks; the barking of dogs; the lowing of cattle; the voices of herdsmen or field-labourers singing as they wended their weary way homeward after the labour and heat of the day—the sound softened and mellowed by distance; all combined to render that journey one of the most pleasant ...
— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood
... old outhouse they planted asters on one side and four o'clocks on the other. Asters, as all boys and girls know, are better if started inside early. Then they may be transplanted to the outside. In his way one gets a ...
— The Library of Work and Play: Gardening and Farming. • Ellen Eddy Shaw
... astonished at the sight of the elephant; for they had never seen one before. They also wondered much at the clock. In those days there were in Europe no clocks such as we have; but water-clocks and hour-glasses were used in some places. The water-clock was a vessel into which water was allowed to trickle. It contained a float which pointed to a scale of ...
— Famous Men of the Middle Ages • John H. Haaren
... the old times of which I have spoken, they said, "We can make all men think alike." All the mechanical ingenuity of this earth cannot make two clocks run alike, and how are you going to make millions of people of different quantities and qualities and amount of brain, clad in this living robe of passionate flesh—how are you going to make millions of them think alike? If the ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... The town clocks had struck eleven before another footstep on the pavement made de Casimir raise his head. He did not actually expect any one, but a certain surreptitiousness in the approach of this visitor, and the low knock on the door, made him suspect ...
— Barlasch of the Guard • H. S. Merriman
... The clocks struck ten. It was not worth while going back to the drawing-room. All Farlingford was abed in those days by nine o'clock. Barebone took his coat and prepared to follow Turner. Miriam was already lighting ...
— The Last Hope • Henry Seton Merriman
... just been registered by the electric clocks in the famous observatory overlooking the college, when the sound of running feet came down the long corridors. A stentorian ...
— Submarine Warfare of To-day • Charles W. Domville-Fife
... the word "Schamponieren" and a bunch of Empire curls exhibited as a modern trophy. We stopped at a shop and examined its wares, which, indeed, hung chiefly on the shutters. There were Swiss embroidered gowns and blouses to be bought, edelweiss penwipers, wooden paper-cutters, and clocks with chamois climbing wooden rocks. Nothing apparently in that shop had been "made in Germany." When we reached the verandah of the "Nassauer Hof" we were gladdened by bows from the "Assessor" and the student, who with the "cackling geese" were seated at a long table consuming ...
— A War-time Journal, Germany 1914 and German Travel Notes • Harriet Julia Jephson
... of the Kreuzbrunnen was crowded, though the hour of six had just been signalled from a dozen clocks in the vicinity. The crowd, gathered from the four quarters of the globe, was in holiday humour, as, glass in hand, it fell into line, until each received the water doled out by uniformed officials. Occasionally a dispute as to precedence would take place when the serpentine ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... fire buckets, hand grenades, handspikes, shaftings, lubricants, wire coils, rope, sea chests, life preservers, spar varnish, copper paint, pulleys, ensigns, twine, clasp knives, boat hooks, chronometers, ship clocks, rubber boots, fur caps, splicing compounds, friction tape, cement, wrenches, hinges, screws, oakum, oars, anchors—it was no wonder that the force quailed at sight of the work that lay ...
— Doubloons—and the Girl • John Maxwell Forbes
... was, Hetty had really forgotten the difference of the clocks when she told Captain Donnithorne that she set out at eight, and this, with her lingering pace, had made her nearly half an hour later than usual. But here her aunt's attention was diverted from this tender subject by Totty, who, perceiving ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... all a visit was paid to Simpson's Corner, where numerous shelves laden with a profusion of self-recording instruments, electric batteries and switchboards were to be seen, and the tickings of many clocks, the gentle whir of a motor and occasionally the trembling note of an electric bell could be heard. 'It took me days and even months to realize fully the aims of our meteorologist and the scientific accuracy with ...
— The Voyages of Captain Scott - Retold from 'The Voyage of the "Discovery"' and 'Scott's - Last Expedition' • Charles Turley
... lets me know I'm noan so despert thin; If I ate sausages as thou Eats worrms, I'd brust my skin! Howd on! leave soom for t' mowdiwarps(2) That scrats down under t' grund ; Of worrms, an' mawks,(3) an' bummel-clocks(4) Thou's etten hauf ...
— Songs of the Ridings • F. W. Moorman
... some time to recompute the exact Ardrian calendar, Terran day names and Terran weeks were used from the first. The Omans manufactured watches, clocks, and chronometers which divided the Ardrian day into twenty-four Ardrian hours, with minutes and seconds ...
— Masters of Space • Edward Elmer Smith
... the fire was dead, And the snow sifted in through each crevice and crack: As she tossed and turned in her lowly bed, And murmured, "Good Lord, bring my husband back." The clocks in the city had told the hour With a single stroke, for young was the day But no swelling note from the loftiest tower, Could reach that lone cot where a mother lay. All on a Christmas ...
— Yorkshire Lyrics • John Hartley
... The clocks up at the villa must have been all wrong, or else my watch did not go with them, or else I had not looked often enough at it while rambling about the town on my way to the station. Certain it is that ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... maids' room; the official seal has been attached to the doors of the public apartments. Athalie does not wake the sleepers, but dresses alone. How far the night has passed she can not tell; no one winds up the splendid clocks, now that they are to pass under the hammer. One points to eight o'clock, another to three, but it does not matter. Athalie finds the key of the street-door, and creeps out, leaving all open behind her. Who is likely to be robbed? and besides, who ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai
... all this, Dickens shows—through his characters—a deep interest in bells and bell-lore. Little Paul Dombey finds a man mending the clocks at Dr. Blimber's Academy, and asks a multitude of questions about chimes and clocks; as, whether people watched up in the lonely church steeples by night to make them strike, and how the bells were rung when people died, and whether those were different bells from wedding-bells, ...
— Charles Dickens and Music • James T. Lightwood
... was right. On referring to the clocks, it was found that, in truth, the eclipse had commenced some time before, and that we were on the verge of an absolute occultation of Principle, by the basest and most sordid of ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... world's works as some men know clocks and watches. He recognized a fact and based a game on it, with the result that his game endures. And what he clearly recognized was this: That no king matters much as long as your side is playing a winning ...
— Affair in Araby • Talbot Mundy
... and old pictures, and some tolerably fine clocks in Remonencq's shop. He sent for his sister, and La Remonencq came on foot all the way from Auvergne to take charge of the shop while her brother was away. A big and very ugly woman, dressed like a Japanese idol, a half-idiotic creature with a vague, staring gaze she would not bate a centime of ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... a study in brown and gold. Brown satin petticoat embroidered with marsh marigolds; little bronze shoes, with marsh marigolds tied on the lachets; brown stockings with marsh marigold clocks; tunic brown foulard smothered with quillings of soft brown lace; Princess bonnet of brown straw, with a wreath of marsh marigold and a neat little buckle of brown diamonds; parasol brown satin, with an immense bunch of marsh marigolds on the ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... How is it that you find the smallest speck of dust, yet miss the mountain? Does the time seem too short? It would not if you realised that events, not clocks, were the real ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy
... a Danish island in the Baltic is famous for its manufactures of clocks, potteries, and cement; it contains also considerable coal mines, though not worked to any extent. It is fertile in minerals, chalks, potters' clay of the finest quality, and other valuable natural productions; but, on account of the jealous nature of the inhabitants, which deters foreigners from ...
— A Christmas Greeting • Hans Christian Andersen
... hangman's noose The morning clocks will ring A neck God made for other use Than strangling ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... of a few miserable huts, called Hohenlinden. In this forest, on the night of the 3d of December, 1800, Moreau, with sixty thousand men, encountered the Archduke John with seventy thousand Austrian troops. The clocks upon the towers of Munich had but just tolled the hour of midnight when both armies were in motion, each hoping to surprise the other. A dismal wintry storm was howling over the tree tops, and the smothering snow, falling rapidly, obliterated ...
— Napoleon Bonaparte • John S. C. Abbott
... "Take those two clocks, for instance. The one that I saw had a pendulum of ordinary length, which vibrated twice as fast as that"—indicating an astronomical clock at his side. "What about ...
— The Devolutionist and The Emancipatrix • Homer Eon Flint
... cannot say much in vindication of the shortness of the petticoats: it doubtless was introduced for the purpose of giving the stockings a chance to be seen, which were generally of blue worsted with magnificent red clocks, or perhaps to display a well-turned ankle and a neat, though serviceable foot, set off by a high-heeled leathern shoe with a large and splendid silver buckle. Thus we find that the gentle sex in all ages have shown the same disposition to infringe a little upon the laws ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... staggering and stumbling like a creature wounded to death; and heard the clocks strike one, and knew that half the night was gone already—the precious night that was so short. Two, three, four, five—by six o'clock the whole town would wake up and there ...
— The Gadfly • E. L. Voynich
... and letting themselves swiftly down in long slender spirals, like the dandelion curls you make in the spring, each set a tiny little clock on the floor. Then all the wires snapped back to their places on the wall. There were as many as fifty of these little clocks, beautifully made, and no two of them alike, though they all had little brass hands reaching out of the sides of their cases, and they all had little brass feet, on which they hopped about nimbly, and they all ticked together ...
— Harper's Young People, January 20, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... will be said in empty churches at the usual hours. Yet you will see such zealous faces behind counters, as if religion were to be sold in every shop. Oh, things will go methodically in the city: the clocks will strike twelve at noon, and the horned herd buzz in the exchange at two. Wives and husbands will drive distinct trades, and care and pleasure separately occupy the family. Coffee-houses will be full of smoke and stratagem. And the cropt prentice, that sweeps ...
— Love for Love • William Congreve
... house. The principal rooms are paneled to the ceiling, and have large open chimney-places, adorned with the quaintest of Dutch files. In one of the parlors of the Warner House there is a choice store of family relics—china, silver-plate, costumes, old clocks, and the like. There are some interesting paintings, too—not by Copley this time. On a broad space each side of the hall windows, at the head of the staircase, are pictures of two Indians, life size. They are probably portraits of some of the numerous chiefs with whom Captain ...
— An Old Town By The Sea • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... of brain they didn't know they possessed. "I want you to go upstairs and get my pocketbook. Be careful, for there is over a hundred dollars in the roll of bills—Evelina will give you the key to the desk—and go down to the drug store where they keep nice little clocks and buy me the best one they have. Then please you wind it up yourself and watch it all day to see if it keeps time with the clock in your hall, and if it varies more than one minute, take it back and get another. While you are in the drug store, if you have time, ...
— The Tinder-Box • Maria Thompson Daviess
... think what would happen? Houses, churches, skyscrapers, and bridges would fall to the ground. Railroad trains, automobiles, and carriages would become heaps of rubbish. Ships would fall apart and become only scattered planks floating on the surface of the water. Clocks and watches would become empty cases. There would be no machines for manufacturing or for agriculture, not even a spade to dig a garden. Everybody would be out of work. If you wish to see how it would seem, try for an ...
— Diggers in the Earth • Eva March Tappan
... Richard, when he found that the partner of his iniquitous scheme might possibly fail him. He gave the signal whistle with which they were in the habit of calling each other; but there was no reply. The clocks on the churches in Whitestone struck one, and Richard waited half an hour after he heard them—half an hour, which seemed like half a day ...
— In School and Out - or, The Conquest of Richard Grant. • Oliver Optic
... dark corners, and she knew where there was an oak bedstead that was looked upon as a disgrace, and where to obtain the dearest cupboards, one of them in use as the retiring-chamber of a rabbit-hutch, and stately clocks made in the town a hundred years ago, and quaint old-farrant lamps and cogeys and sand-glasses that apologized if you looked at them, and yet were as willing to be loved again as any old lady in a mutch. You will not buy them easily now, the people ...
— Tommy and Grizel • J.M. Barrie
... time to time, changing feet, or taking a step or two up and down as far as the size of the landing would allow. Then came a weary yawn, and the clock chimed and struck twelve, while, before it had finished, the sounds of other clocks striking became mingled with it, and Frank listened to the strange jangle, one which he might have heard hundreds of times, but which had never impressed him ...
— In Honour's Cause - A Tale of the Days of George the First • George Manville Fenn
... clerk looked at her reflectively, but without curiosity; then lifting the trinkets from the square of velvet, he passed behind a green curtain into an adjoining room. After a short absence, in which she nervously examined an assortment of travelling clocks, he came back and told her that they would give her four hundred and fifty dollars ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... bad names when you tell him that "ties pay the dealer"; But this you can't stand, so you throw up your hand, and you find you're as cold as an icicle, In your shirt and your socks (the black silk with gold clocks), crossing Salisbury Plain on a bicycle: And he and the crew are on bicycles too - which they've somehow or other invested in - And he's telling the tars all the particuLARS of a company he's interested in - It's a scheme of devices, to get at low prices, all goods from cough ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... Some clocks wear out, running down with little spurts of life and longer intervals of dumbness; others end with a sudden crashing of the pendulum while in its full swing, and a wild, convulsive whirr of the jarred wheels. One moment the sober tick tells that ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... not seem to cool for a moment. Besides that, we look at the orange house twice a day and the sheep once a day, observe the four thermometers in the room once every hour, set the weather-glass, and, since the weather has been fine, have set all the clocks by the sun and adjusted them so closely that the clock in the dining-room is the only one which ever gives a sound after the others have struck. Charles V. was a stupid fellow. You will understand that with so multifarious an occupation I have little time ...
— Bismarck and the Foundation of the German Empire • James Wycliffe Headlam
... betwixt matter and spirit; or they had recourse, with Leibnitz, to the doctrine of pre-established harmony, which denied any influence of the body on the soul, or vice versa, and compared matter and spirit to two clocks so accurately regulated to keep time with one another, that the one struck when ever the other pointed to the hour; or, with Berkeley, they abolished the "substance" of matter altogether, as a superfluity, ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... disheartened to her path, crossed the bridge, and then endlessly, endlessly, set one heavy foot before the other under the glare of innumerable electric lights staring down on her and on the dismal, wet, and deserted streets. The clocks she passed told her that it was nearly eight o'clock. Then it was past eight. What must they be thinking of her on the Rue de Presbourg? She tried again to hurry, but could force her aching muscles to no more than the plod, plod, plod of her dogged advance over those interminable ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... grey matter in your head. Do not be afraid that you will exhaust or tire out your brains by your self-development. Put into your work all the brains you can waken with your various senses. And keep the alarm clocks wound up. ...
— Certain Success • Norval A. Hawkins
... boat as the officer in command of the expedition. His intimate knowledge of the position of the war vessels would be of use in this murk and darkness. Humphrey took an oar in the same boat; and the little fleet got together, and commenced its silent voyage just as the clocks of the fortress boomed ...
— French and English - A Story of the Struggle in America • Evelyn Everett-Green
... hour of six till the hour of seven. He compared clocks in the hall and the room. He changed the posture of his legs fifty times. For a while he wrestled right gallantly with the apparent menace of the Fates that he was to get no dinner at all that day; it seemed incredibly ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... illness and death are necessary incidents in a regular sequence of constitutional changes beginning at birth, and upon which external circumstances have, on the whole, very small effect. In cases where the maladies of the twins are continually alike, the clocks of their two lives move regularly on at the same rate, governed by their internal mechanism. When the hands approach the hour, there are sudden clicks, followed by a whirring of wheels; the moment that they touch it, the strokes fall. Necessitarians may ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton
... was. This is la fureur des cabriolets; singlic'e, one-horse chairs, a mode introduced by Mr. Child:(579) they not only universally go in them, but wear them; that is, every thing is to be en cabriolet; the men paint them on their waistcoats, and have them embroidered for clocks to their stockings; and the women, who have gone all the winter without any thing on their heads, are now muffled up in great caps with round sides, in the form of, and scarce less than the wheels of chaises! Adieu! ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... The clocks of the city had just struck six for the last time that year. Dr. Vivian, having placed his suitcase and overcoat on the second-hand operating-table in the office, washed face and hands, brushed his coat-collar with a whisk whose ranks had been heavily thinned in wars with dust and ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... it's a long way from my uncle's, and I think clocks are different,' said he, taking out his watch to compare it with the round moon's face that told the time ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. I • Elizabeth Gaskell
... the scene of action was safely reached and the filling process continued. As the gas had to be made from sulphuric acid and iron filings, it naturally took some time, but when the clocks of Paris were striking five on the evening of August 27th, 1783, Charles's cloud-cruiser was ready for the voyage. The bells had hardly done chiming when a cannon-shot was heard. It was the signal for departure. The thousands of spectators ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... were the billows of gooseberry bushes rolled up by the fence, interspersed with rows of quince trees; and far off in one corner was one little patch, penuriously devoted to ornament, which flamed with marigolds, poppies, snappers, and four-o'clocks. Then there was a little box by itself with one rose geranium in it, which seemed to look around the garden as much like a stranger as a French dancing master ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... very near to their hearts, a round of beef and a tureen of pickled cabbage, while Gustavus got up from the what-not in a bemused manner, and proceeded to search dreamily for an armchair. He came upon one by chance in the dining-room, and wheeled it out into the hall just as the clocks in the house rang ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... existence of the order, the lower classes were seized with a panic, and the streets were crowded with women and children running towards the gates, and with people removing their property to more secure quarters. When the clocks struck twelve, the hour fixed in General Guest's message, the noise of the cannon was heard firing upon the principal streets; but the Highlanders were all under shelter, and only a few poor inhabitants were injured. ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume III. • Mrs. Thomson
... blue, with which they are bound, appear one above the other in tiers, a muslin turnover collar, full plaited breeches of fine cloth tied at the knee by garters of floating ribbon, white woollen stockings with worked clocks and light yellow shoes, their flap hats ornamented with a roll of chenille of varied colours. The headdress of the women is singular and most intricate. The hair, in two rolls, twisted round with white tape, forms a kind of coronet across their heads; over this, a piece of net is drawn tight, ...
— Brittany & Its Byways • Fanny Bury Palliser
... the people that it was an absurd proceeding for the irresponsible general of so great a force of Athenians and their allies to waste his time while the court was drawing lots for the jury, and filling water-clocks with water. "Let him sail, and may good luck attend him, and when the war is finished let him return and speak in his defence, for the laws will be the same then as now." Alkibiades saw clearly their ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... great decorative value in a pair of mirrors, a pair of candlesticks, a pair of porcelain jars, two cupboards flanking a chimney-piece. You would not be guilty of a pair of wall fountains, or of two wall clocks, just as you would not have two copies of the same portrait in a room. But when things "pair" logically, pair them! They will furnish a backbone of precision to ...
— The House in Good Taste • Elsie de Wolfe
... and appliances, textiles, apparel, footwear, watches and clocks, toys, plastics, precious ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... of wood—the clocks that wouldn't figure? Who grinned the bark off gum-trees dark—the everlasting nigger? For twenty cents, ye Congress gents, through 'tarnity I'll kick That man, I guess, though nothing ...
— The Bon Gaultier Ballads • William Edmonstoune Aytoun
... persuaded mother to insert some old pink satin, for was not she sixteen now, and almost a woman? There was a pink breast-knot to match, and Humfrey's owch just above it, gray stockings, home-spun and worked with elaborate pink clocks, but knitted by Cis herself; and a pair of shoes with pink roses to match were put into a bag, to be assumed when she arrived at the lodge. Out of this simple finery beamed a face, bright in spite of the straight, ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... and state Of some mean things which here below reside, Where birds, like watchful clocks, the noiseless date And intercourse of times divide. Where bees at night get home and hive, and flowers, Early as well as late, Rise with the sun, and set ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... places. After he had learned his trade he frequently walked thirty miles to a job with his kit upon his back. One day he heard people talking of Eli Terry, of Plymouth, who had undertaken to make two hundred clocks in one lot. "He'll never live long enough to finish them," said one. "If he should," said another, "he could not possibly sell so many. The very idea is ridiculous." Chauncey pondered long over this rumor, ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... on time, each night a trifle earlier than the night before by a definite and calculable amount, due to the march of the earth around the sun. So they had crossed the lines in every observatory since clocks and telescopes had been invented. Heretofore, no matter what cataclysm of nature had occurred, the star had always crossed the line not a second too soon or a second too late, but exactly on time. It was the one positively ...
— The Man Who Rocked the Earth • Arthur Train
... that the grave it were my bed; My blankets were my winding sheet; The clocks and the worms my bedfellows a'; And O sad ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... control of former slaves, led principally by Northern adventurers or Southern novices, known as "Scalawags." The result was a carnival of waste, folly, and corruption. The "reconstruction" assembly of South Carolina bought clocks at $480 apiece and chandeliers at $650. To purchase land for former bondmen the sum of $800,000 was appropriated; and swamps bought at seventy-five cents an acre were sold to the state at five times the cost. In the years between 1868 and 1873, the debt of the state rose ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard
... the match-vendor in his hoarse voice, "be on your guard! Feel her hump, for that is her luggage-van. I'm sure that you'll find boots, and cloaks, and umbrellas, and clocks in it—for I just heard the hour strike in the bend ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... examined this very curious relic, of the beginning of the sixteenth century, I have no hesitation in pronouncing the copy of Montfaucon (or rather of the artist employed by him) to be most egregiously faithless. I visited it again and again, considering it to be worth all the "huge clocks" in Rouen put together. I hardly know how to take you from this interesting spot—from this exhibition of beautiful old art—especially too when I consider that Francis himself once occupied the mansion, and held ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume One • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... clocks. My husband has a watch which strikes. Well, I have stopped his watch because more than once I have been startled by hearing the tick-tack of his watch in his waistcoat-pocket. Koupriane gave me that advice one day when he was here and had pricked ...
— The Secret of the Night • Gaston Leroux
... box Thou dost enclose us, till the day Put our amendment in our way, And give new wheels to our disordered clocks." ...
— The Seaboard Parish Vol. 3 • George MacDonald
... for a proof of this singular proposition, the legate said that the Britons had been converted by the See Apostolic, "not one by one, as in other countries, as clocks increase the hours by distinction of times," "but altogether, at once, as it were, in a moment." The Saxons had brought back heathenism, but had again been soon converted; and the popes {p.168} had continued to heap benefit upon benefit on the favoured people, ...
— The Reign of Mary Tudor • James Anthony Froude
... happened now and then, more than once I'd been tempted to sell the clock, or to pawn it. But I had never done it. Its ticking had kept me company on many a lonely night, and its elegance had helped me to keep my pride and to retain the respect of my neighbors. For in the flood district onyx clocks are not plentiful. Mrs. Bryan, the saloon-keeper's wife, had one, and I had another. That is, I ...
— The Case of Jennie Brice • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... altogether unnecessary. The arts, which are much superior to common trades, such as those of making clocks and watches, contain no such mystery as to require a long course of instruction. The first invention of such beautiful machines, indeed, and even that of some of the instruments employed in making them, must no doubt have been the work of deep thought and long time, and may justly ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... that," said Bob; "in fact, father usually comes home about the same time. But our clocks are all so different that it depends on which room mother is in, as to what ...
— Patty's Summer Days • Carolyn Wells
... him, more than by any other man of the Middle Ages, was the world brought into the more fruitful paths of scientific thought—the paths which have led to the most precious inventions; and among these are clocks, lenses, and burning specula, which were given by him to the world, directly or indirectly. In his writings are found formulae for extracting phosphorus, manganese, and bismuth. It is even claimed, with ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... could ever have seen it as anything but a butt. She wondered how she had been able to sit daily in front of that stout and earnest index without poking it in the ribs and making a fool of it. The office clock, alone among clocks, had never played a practical joke. The sad fire below it, conscious of a Mission, was ...
— Living Alone • Stella Benson
... and heat of his zeal. Since Edison did it, he can do it, and no amount of discouragement can dissuade him from his lofty purpose. He sets his goal high and marches toward it with dauntless courage. If a wireless outfit is his goal, bells may ring and clocks may strike, but he hears or heeds ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson
... felt, and I looked at the ceiling to see if there were cracks which would make it advisable to leave the room. But it lasted only a few seconds, although the chandeliers continued to swing for a long time. At other places clocks stopped, and I read in the papers that the vibration passed from south to north, damaging native villages. In one town the tremors lasted three minutes and were the worst that had occurred in thirty-four years, but when the ...
— Through Central Borneo: - An Account of Two Years' Travel in the Land of Head-Hunters - Between the Years 1913 and 1917 • Carl Lumholtz
... in that hurried tempo of five ticks to the second which has been the habit of clocks since time immemorial. Very small and trivial noises came from the background tape, preventing utter silence from hanging intolerably ...
— This World Is Taboo • Murray Leinster
... railroads in the States were joined by flying rails; and on all the platforms, lined with the same flags, and decorated with the same ornaments, were tables laid and all served alike. At certain hours, successively calculated, marked by electric clocks which beat the seconds at the same time, the population were invited to take their places at the banquet tables. For four days, from the 5th to the 9th of January, the trains were stopped as they are ...
— Jules Verne's Classic Books • Jules Verne
... this time the method adopted in the construction of clocks was not capable of producing a mechanism which measured time with sufficient accuracy to satisfy the requirements of astronomers. Huygens endeavoured to supply this want, and applied his mechanical ingenuity in constructing ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... it was terrible! But the other picture. With my brother's fortune I made aggrandisements and eventually moved to the Rue de la Paix. My scientific genius was at last appreciated, and my watches and clocks became the pride of the haute monde. My son grew into a fine man, much resembling myself, and after learning the profession opened a branch office at Buenos Ayres. I won the ribbon. In short, nothing lacked to make life agreeable ...
— Read-Aloud Plays • Horace Holley
... lived in a house before. Well, I assure you the rooms are perfect in comfort and convenience; not large, but warm, and of a number and arrangement which exclude all fault-finding. Clean, carpeted; no glitter, nothing very pretty—not even the clocks—but with sofas and chairs suited to lollers such as one of us, and altogether what I mean whenever I say that an 'apartment' on the Continent is twenty times more really 'comfortable' than any of your small houses in England. ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... of the amphitheatre, and returned, saying several tramps were loitering about, whose attention it would not be prudent to attract. The day, which seemed the longest I ever knew, at length drew to a close, which we only learnt by my father's watch, for we were out of hearing of the town clocks. He said it would make time pass less heavily if we divided it methodically, and had our set hours for meals, rest, prayer, and mutual improvement, whether by exhortation, discussion, or general discourse, We followed his lead as ...
— Jacques Bonneval • Anne Manning |
