"Clockwork" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of the clock's nature that it should go on for ever without being again wound up? Would the insect philosopher's dogmatism be one whit less absurd than that of those human ephemera who so positively lay down the law about the clockwork of the universe? Those laws of nature to which unerring regularity and perpetuity of operation are so confidently attributed, may they not, perchance, be but single clauses of much farther reaching laws, according to whose other ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... the old commonplaces with charm. But men with that great gift are not to be met with in every railway-carriage, or at every dinner. The man we actually meet is one whose joke, though we have signalled it a mile off, we are powerless to stop, whose opinions come out with a whirr as of clockwork. Besides, it always happens in life that the man—or woman—with whom we would like to talk is at the next table. Those who really have something to say to each other so seldom have ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne
... discontent between Jack and Flora—or perhaps they sought to keep their countenances before the world; at any rate, they sat on opposite sides of the room, Jack keeping boon company with the lead soldiers, his spouse reposing, her lead-balanced eyes closed, in the broken clockwork motor-car. With the air of performing some vaguely momentous ritual, the children were kissing one another beneath the bunch of mistletoe that hung from the centre beam. In the intervals of kissing they told one another in whispers that Aunt Rachel was not ...
— Widdershins • Oliver Onions
... splendid!" she heard Travers say in her ear. "Things went just like clockwork. Five minutes' conversation got the whole clubhouse out of him, and what you managed in your quarter of an hour, goodness knows. You are a clever woman and ...
— The Native Born - or, The Rajah's People • I. A. R. Wylie
... The clockwork that made the dome keep up with the motion of the stars—of our world rather—had run down, and when Saturn passed out of my sight, as I thought, it was the earth instead which ...
— The Making of an American • Jacob A. Riis
... unaccountable habits, which they always imagine themselves to be on the point of shaking off, but which they always retain to the end; caught in the treadmill of their own maladies and eccentricities, their futile endeavours to escape serve only to actuate its mechanism, to keep in motion the clockwork of their strange, ineluctable, fatal daily round. Such as these was the water-lily, and also like one of those wretches whose peculiar torments, repeated indefinitely throughout eternity, aroused the curiosity of Dante, ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... long and perhaps four inches wide. Through it ran a piece of paper which unrolled from one coil and wound up on another, actuated by clockwork. Across the blank white paper ran an ink line traced by a stylographic pen, such as I had seen in mechanical pencils used in offices, hotels, banks and ...
— The Exploits of Elaine • Arthur B. Reeve
... people cheered him almost as loudly as they did their lovely Ruler. Behind him stalked with regular, jerky steps, the famous machine-man called Tik-tok, who had been wound up by Dorothy for the occasion. Tik-tok moved by clockwork, and was made all of burnished copper. He really belonged to the Kansas girl, who had much respect for his thoughts after they had been properly wound and set going; but as the copper man would be useless in any place but a fairy country Dorothy had left him in charge of Ozma, ...
— Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz • L. Frank Baum.
... with a return to his former embarrassment; 'she does not seem to care for me now at all. Indeed, she positively refuses me. She says—to put it in the dear child's own racy language—that she wouldn't take me on at any price. She says it would be like marrying a clockwork figure without the key. She's more frank than complimentary, ...
— Novel Notes • Jerome K. Jerome
... is that of the Medical Corps, the R.A.M.C., or the Red Cross. It is all the same. It is all run with the precision of clockwork. Its whole aim for the comfort and succor of Tommy. Of this department I speak in ...
— Private Peat • Harold R. Peat
... most exciting stage of the argument, for no reason that Katharine could see, all chairs were pushed back, and one after another the Denham family got up and went out of the door, as if a bell had summoned them. She was not used to the clockwork regulations of a large family. She hesitated in what she was saying, and rose. Mrs. Denham and Joan had drawn together and stood by the fireplace, slightly raising their skirts above their ankles, and discussing something which had an air of being very serious and very private. They appeared ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... convenience of this peculiar style of supporting the instrument consists in the ease with which the telescope can be moved so as to follow a star in its apparent journey across the sky. The necessary movements of the tube are given by clockwork driven by a weight, so that, once the instrument has been correctly pointed, the star will remain in the observer's field of view, and the effect of the apparent diurnal movement will be neutralised. The last ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... crammed with models of battleships,—in wood, clay, porcelain, lead, and tin,—of many sizes and prices. Some of the larger ones, moved by clockwork, are named after Japanese battleships: Shikishima, Fuji, Mikasa. One mechanical toy represents the sinking of a Russian vessel by a Japanese torpedo boat. Among cheaper things of this class is a box of colored sand, for the representation of ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn
... France goes rolling all around, Fledged with forest May has crowned. And I puff my pipe, calm-hearted, Thinking how the fighting started, Wondering when we'll ever end it, Back to Hell with Kaiser send it, Gag the noise, pack up and go, Clockwork soldiers in a row. I've got better things to do Than to waste my time ...
— Georgian Poetry 1916-17 - Edited by Sir Edward Howard Marsh • Various
... companies in operation do not afford us that to our heart's content. It is but a very few years ago since we used to glorify ourselves in the rapidity of the mail-coach, doing its ten miles an hour with the punctuality of clockwork. Now we have arrived at the ratio of forty within the same period, and yet we are not content. Next year, within fourteen hours we shall be transported from Edinburgh to London. That, it seems, is not enough. A company offers to transport us by a straighter line in thirteen; and for that purpose ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... it sounds," responded Max soberly. "It needs careful planning, for it must be done like clockwork if we are not to make ...
— Two Daring Young Patriots - or, Outwitting the Huns • W. P. Shervill
... this here Nature lover. He was quiet enough, but vicious, acting like he'd love to do some dental work on the poet that might or might not be painless for all he cared a hoot. He was taking his own drinks all alone, like clockwork—moody ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... united, exploded spontaneously—were admitted by a clockwork escapement in minute quantities into the cylinders of his engine, and worked the pistons by the expansive force of the gases generated by the explosion. There was no weight but the engine itself and the cylinders containing the liquefied gases. Furnaces, ...
— The Angel of the Revolution - A Tale of the Coming Terror • George Griffith
... whatever, save an uneasy consciousness of a dream about bottomlessness. Of grief or pain, I think, I felt nothing; though I have a sort of memory now that some sound, resembling a sob or groan, though it was neither, came at regular clockwork intervals from my bosom during three or four days. Meantime, my brain registered like a tape-machine details the most frivolous, the most ludicrous—the name of a street, Strond Street, Snargate Street; the round fur cap—black fur for the ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... S'tira's as strong as anybody, when she's well—and he don't put 'em on the green paper work, because it's got arsenic in it, and it makes your head ache, and you're liable to blood poisonin'. One the girls fainted and had spasms, and as soon as he found it out he took her right off; and he's just like clockwork to pay. I think it'll do everything for S'tira to be along 'th me there, where I ...
— The Minister's Charge • William D. Howells
... officer of the General Staff said: "It had to go well today, but how about tomorrow, the main day?" Tuesday evening saw no reason for complaint, no delay, no requests for instructions. All had moved with the regularity of clockwork. Regiments that had been ordered to mobilize in the forenoon left in the evening for the field, fully equipped. Not a man was lacking. There were no deserters, no shirkers, no cowards. Instead, there were volunteers whose numbers far exceeded ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War from the Beginning to March 1915, Vol 1, No. 2 - Who Began the War, and Why? • Various
... he read feverishly, "I have made an infernal machine with clockwork, and hid it in the hold near the gunpowder when we were at Fairhaven. I think it will go off between ten and eleven to-night, but I am not quite sure about the time. Don't tell those other beasts, but jump overboard and swim ashore. I have taken the boat I would have ...
— Sea Urchins • W. W. Jacobs
... change from road-making in that malarial hole, Salonica, gave of their best with the bayonet, in which bright pastime they were capably aided and abetted by the 60th Division. It is the fashion to speak of successful military operations as being carried out "like clockwork." If extreme dash and gallantry in the face of every obstacle that brain of man could devise constitute the "clockwork," then the attack that led to the capture of Kauwukah Ridge merits ...
— With Our Army in Palestine • Antony Bluett
... with riding-whip tucked under his arm, came up the pebbled pathway, drawing on his gauntleted gloves. Dicky trotted beside him. Manasseh followed in attendance. Behind them in the porchway the landlady bobbed unregarded, like a piece of clockwork ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... 'ate the sight of 'im. Every week regular as clockwork he used to come round to me with his 'and out, and then go and treat 'is mates to beer with my money. If the ship came up in the day-time, at six o'clock in the evening he'd be at the wharf gate waiting for me; and if it came up at night she was no sooner made fast than 'e ...
— Deep Waters, The Entire Collection • W.W. Jacobs
... is a nice little life just now, as regular as clockwork. We walk and we keep school, and our scholars kiss and love us, and we kiss and love them, and we read Lamartine and I worship Leighton, good, wise, holy Leighton, and we discourse about everything together and dispute and argue and argue and ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... evening MacTurk came to see him. His case, thus complicated by a new mischance, was become one of interest in the surgeon's eyes. He regarded him as a damaged piece of clockwork, which it would be creditable to his skill to set agoing again. Graves and young MacTurk—Moore's sole other visitors—contemplated him in the light in which they were wont to contemplate the occupant for the time being of the dissecting-room ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... for you," Selingman declared, as they followed their porters into the shed. "For me, I am a man of affairs. It is different. My business goes by clockwork. All is regulated by rule, with precision, with punctuality. Now I shall be many hours behind my schedule. I shall be compelled to alter my appointments—I, who pride myself always upon altering nothing. But behold! One must ...
— The Double Traitor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... connatural[obs3]; monotonous, even, invariable; regular, unchanged, undeviating, unvaried, unvarying. unsegmented. Adv. uniformly &c. adj.; uniformly with &c. (conformably) 82; in harmony with &c. (agreeing) 23. always, invariably, without exception, without fail, unfailingly, never otherwise; by clockwork. Phr. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... bullets striking. As I had the Blessed Sacrament with me I was able to give communion to a number of the wounded. By this time the grey of approaching day began to silver the eastern sky. It was indeed a comfort to feel that the great clockwork of the universe went on just as if nothing was happening. Over and over again in the war the approach of dawn has put new life into one. It was such a tremendous and glorious thing to think that the world rolled on through space and turned on ...
— The Great War As I Saw It • Frederick George Scott
... utilitarian ugliness which, when one reflects that it is the product of human ingenuity, strikes hopeless awe into one. These dismal creations look still uglier at sea than in port, and with an added touch of the ridiculous. Their rolling waddle when seen at a certain angle, their abrupt clockwork nodding in a sea-way, so unlike the soaring lift and swing of a craft under sail, have in them something caricatural, a suggestion of a low parody directed at noble predecessors by an improved generation of dull, mechanical ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... It was bitterly cold there, but she wrapped her shawl about her, and sat down by the window, where the fast falling snow was almost hidden in a heavy wrap of early twilight. Olive did not often pray. To be sure she said her prayers every night, as properly and methodical as clockwork, and was very particular about always kneeling down, as though position could atone for any lacking earnestness; for she was just as apt to be thinking of her account-book, or Mr. Dane's last order, as of anything, in the hurried words that slid over her lips. ...
— Six Girls - A Home Story • Fannie Belle Irving
... Readings every now and then in the Metropolis. The Reader's course in this way seemed to be erratic, but the whole scheme was admirably well arranged beforehand, and once entered upon, was carried out with the precision of clockwork. These thirty Readings, in 1866, began and ended at St. James's Hall, Piccadilly. The opening night was that of Tuesday, the 10th of April, the closing night that of Tuesday, the 12th of June. Between those dates half-a-dozen ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... His time was out some years ago, but that has made no difference. Nothing would induce him to leave me; and I would not part with him for any amount, for a more faithful and trusty fellow never lived, and when I go away I know everything will go along like clockwork. As for his wife, she's a treasure, and she knows how to cook a dinner, as you will ...
— A Final Reckoning - A Tale of Bush Life in Australia • G. A. Henty
... the boat, and clockwork to set the whole thing off at ten o'clock tonight. He didn't come right out and say so, you understand, and I may be making a fool of myself. But if I am—God knows, it won't be the first time ... Anyhow we'll ...
— Mary Minds Her Business • George Weston
... who at Christmastide have no toys. This year they shall not go without; so I am sending them all—the doll's house and the rocking-horse, and all the queer contents of the nursery shelves, and the fairy stories well thumbed, with here and there a loose page, and the boxes of bricks and the clockwork mouse—all, all my treasures. ...
— An Isle in the Water • Katharine Tynan
... time deflected the clockwork rat from the wall to which it had been steering, and pointed it up the alley-way between the two rows of desks. Mr. Downing, rising from his place, was just in time to see Sammy with a last leap spring on his ...
— Mike • P. G. Wodehouse
... made a desperate effort to run away, the Rabbit dealt him a blow on the back which injured the clockwork within his body and quite put ...
— Adventures in Toyland - What the Marionette Told Molly • Edith King Hall
... article came to in substance. The conclusion arrived at was that animals were automata; true, they were probably sentient, still they were automata pure and simple, mere sentient pieces of exceedingly elaborate clockwork, and nothing more. ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... I think I hear the tick-tack all the time since the last attempt. It haunts my ears, it is frightful, to say to one's self: There is clockwork somewhere, just about to reach the death-tick—and not to know where, not to know where! When the police were here I made them all listen, and I was not sure even when they had all listened and said there was no tick-tack. It is terrible to hear it in my ear any moment ...
— The Secret of the Night • Gaston Leroux
... ghost could have had less of the energy of life in its involuntary motions than he, who, nevertheless, went on with the same measured clockwork tread until the door of his own house was reached. And then he disappeared, and the latch fell feebly to, and made a faint and wavering sound, breaking the solemn silence of the night. Then ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... we shall invite Switzerland to dinner and toast her thus: "Colleague, our great aim is to resemble you. Who else can squeeze so much profit out of their mountains? Who else can file at such clockwork? Switzerland, make yourself at home; we don't want to rob you; there are no pickpockets at this table. ...
— Look Back on Happiness • Knut Hamsun
... whose basement formed the glass isolating "island" which all of us who have ever seen an electrical machine know so well. The electric machine itself, a battery of Leyden jars was hidden under the altar and connected by a piece of clockwork with that opening covered with metal in which the crucifix ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... reason of these things. The information I obtained was briefly this: that Nature, in Skitzland, never removes the stomach. Every man has to feed himself; and the necessity for finding food, joined to the necessity for buying clothes, is a mainspring whereby the whole clockwork of civilized life is kept in motion. Now, if a man positively can not feed and clothe himself, he becomes a pauper. He then goes to the Workhouse, where he has his stomach filled with a cement. That stopping lasts a life-time, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... awoke Heritage to the supreme unpleasantness of his position. He was utterly alone on the headland, and his allies had vanished into space, while the enemy plans, moving like clockwork, were approaching their consummation. For a second he thought of leaving the Tower and hiding somewhere in the cliffs. He dismissed the notion unwillingly, for he remembered the task that had been set him. He was there to hold the fort to the last—to gain time, though ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... tyranny and oppression was not discernible in the acts of officers, from general down to corporal, as formerly. Notwithstanding all this grand transformation in our affairs, old Joe was a strict disciplinarian. Everything moved like clockwork. Men had to keep their arms and clothing in good order. The artillery was rubbed up and put in good condition. The wagons were greased, and the harness and hamestrings oiled. Extra rations were issued to negroes who were acting as servants, ...
— "Co. Aytch" - Maury Grays, First Tennessee Regiment - or, A Side Show of the Big Show • Sam R. Watkins
... blue) but before she well knew what she was about, found herself deep in the intricacies of a narration, having reference (if I am not altogether mistaken) to a pink horse (with green wings) that went, in a violent manner, by clockwork, and was wound up with an indigo key. With this history the king was even more profoundly interested than with the other—and, as the day broke before its conclusion (notwithstanding all the queen's endeavors to get through with it in time for the bowstringing), there ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... believe there are few who have not at some period of their life been called to notice the change which a few short hours will bring over a household. A family may have lived on for years with no break in the home circle, and every thing connected with them have moved on with the regularity of clockwork, when some sudden and unlooked-for event will all at once change the very atmosphere of their home. Owing to her advanced age, Grandma Adams' death could hardly be supposed to have been unlooked ...
— Walter Harland - Or, Memories of the Past • Harriet S. Caswell
... the 23d the powder-boat was towed in by a gunboat as near to the fort as it was safe to run. She was then propelled by her own machinery to within about five hundred yards of the shore. There the clockwork, which was to explode her within a certain length of time, was set and she was abandoned. Everybody left, and even the vessels put out to sea to prevent the effect of the explosion upon them. At two o'clock in the morning the explosion ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... somewhere near the end of November. Our life has settled down into serenity, and our singular and enforced partnership is very pleasant. We might be three men living together, but for the unvarying courtesy and consideration which they show to me. Our work goes on like clockwork; the only difficulty which ever arises is that the men do not like me to do anything that they think hard or unsuitable, such as saddling a horse or bringing in water. The days go very fast; it was 3:30 today before I knew that it was 1. It is a calm life without worries. The men are ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... retreating fragments of the beaten army; while on the left a Bavarian battery on the peninsula of Iges, its guns the size of matches, might have been taken for some mechanical toy as it performed its evolutions with clockwork regularity. The victory was crushing, exceeding all that the victor could have desired or hoped, and the King felt no remorse in presence of all those corpses, of those thousands of men that were as the dust upon the roads of that broad valley where, notwithstanding ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... did everything, and more than Mary, with her young inexperience, could have thought of. She prepared the warm bath, and tried it with her husband's own thermometer (Mr. Jenkins was as punctual as clockwork in noting down the temperature of every day). She let his mother place her baby in the tub, still preserving the same rigid, affronted aspect, and then she went upstairs without a word. Mary longed to ask her to stay, but dared not; though, ...
— The Grey Woman and other Tales • Mrs. (Elizabeth) Gaskell
... shuttered windows, like so many half-closed eyelids, gave, when viewed externally, the impression that it was asleep or tenantless; but to ring the front-door bell was to dissipate this impression immediately. The portals seemed to open by clockwork. Heavy curtains were withdrawn by servitors half seen in the twilight, and the visitors were committed to the care of an Austrian groom of the chambers, who, wearing the aspect of a king who had stepped out of the Almanach de Gotha, led the way over soundless carpets to ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... mind in which I found myself as I paced the spacious poop, hour after hour, sometimes accompanied by Polson, sometimes conversing with Tudsbery, and occasionally alone. As I walked, my glances travelled, with the regularity of clockwork, first to windward, then ahead, then aloft, and finally—as I reached the binnacle—into the compass bowl; then away out to windward again, and so on, ad infinitum, until I was fairly bone- weary, and had completely ...
— Overdue - The Story of a Missing Ship • Harry Collingwood
... moved, going in and out among the ruins, rubbing itself against the fallen pillars. And the reason Philip laughed and sighed was that he knew that dragon very well indeed. He had known it long ago. It was the clockwork lizard that had been given him the Christmas before last. And he remembered that he had put it into one of the cities he and Helen had built together. Only now, of course, it had grown big and had come ...
— The Magic City • Edith Nesbit
... born, Bradley invented a self-rocking cradle for it. He constructed the motive-power of the machine from some old clockwork which was operated by a huge steel ribbon spring strong enough to move a horse-car and long enough to run for a week without rewinding. When the cradle was completed, he put the baby in it upon a pillow and started ...
— Elbow-Room - A Novel Without a Plot • Charles Heber Clark (AKA Max Adeler)
... answered. "They frightened me horribly. I wanted to be revenged for that. But after a bit I was sure they were only clockwork. I wanted to stop them. I did stop the devil ...
— Martin Hyde, The Duke's Messenger • John Masefield
... from their influence as discipline. The cabin was swept and aired, the stove cleaned, the fittings dusted, the beds made, the tides, thermometers, and barometers registered; the logs posted up, clothes mended, food cooked, traps visited, etcetera, with the regularity of clockwork, and every possible plan adopted to occupy every waking hour, and to prevent the men from brooding over their position. When the labours of the day were over, plans were proposed for getting up a concert, or ...
— The World of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... present power and wealth and renown. [Cheers.] We rejoice in its multiform manufactures, which weave the woollen or silken fibre into every form and tissue of fabric; in the delicate, dainty skill which keeps the time of all creation with its watchwork and clockwork; which ornaments beauty with its jewelry, and furnishes science with its finest instruments; we rejoice in the 14,000 miles of railway there constructed, almost all of it within forty years; we rejoice in the riches there accumulated; ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... MAP, with clockwork attachment, giving apparent motion of heavens, boxed, complete with clamps for binnacle. 36 inch size, only L2. 2. 0. (Invaluable for night work.) With A. B. C. certificate, ...
— With The Night Mail - A Story of 2000 A.D. (Together with extracts from the - comtemporary magazine in which it appeared) • Rudyard Kipling
... what's menseful same as fowks do. At efter, mebbe cuckoo will begin to shout, an' close behind him will coom t' spinks an' pipits an' lile tits. Eh, deary me! but I've clean forgotten most pairt o' what I've larnt misel about t' birds. They do iverything as reg'lar as if 'twere clockwork. ...
— More Tales of the Ridings • Frederic Moorman
... not that wise and ancient cow, Who chews her juicy cud so languid now Beneath her favorite elm, whose drooping bough Lulls all but inward vision, fast asleep: But still, her tireless tail a pendulum sweep Mysterious clockwork guides, and some hid pulley Her drowsy cud, ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... scans the Barograph, which is an instrument much the same as the Altimeter; but in this case the expansion of the vacuum box causes a pen to trace a line upon a roll of paper. This paper is made by clockwork to pass over the point of the pen, and so a curved line is made which accurately registers the speed of the ascent in feet per minute. No longer is the ascent at the rate of a thousand feet a minute, and the Propeller ...
— The Aeroplane Speaks - Fifth Edition • H. Barber
... Hilary suddenly. There had been bright unclouded skies during the days since his arrival. Only at night had it rained, like clockwork: every night for fifteen minutes immediately after midnight. A light steady shower that ceased as suddenly as it sprang up. It was unusual. This was April in the Spring of 2348 and April was always a month of showery heavens. Had the Mercutians, accustomed to the blazing light of their ...
— Slaves of Mercury • Nat Schachner
... intervals of praying, came to the conclusion that the rector of St. Chad's was a good deal cleverer than the majority of youngish clergymen who endeavor to qualify for prosecution. It may be unorthodox to cross one's arms with the regularity of clockwork on coming to certain words in the service, and young clergymen had been prosecuted for less; but it was not unorthodox to speak evil of the Jews—for did not the Church pray for the Jews daily? and can anyone insult a man more than by praying for him—unless, of course, he is ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... summons to arms. Often, no longer able to keep down his youthful ardor, he would mount his horse, and, galloping up to the town, spend hours there in watching the different companies, as with the precision of clockwork they went through their varied and difficult evolutions. At these sights and sounds, all the martial spirit within ...
— The Farmer Boy, and How He Became Commander-In-Chief • Morrison Heady
... on a very careless usage, speaking of wild creatures as if they were bound by some such limitation as hampers clockwork. When we say of one and another, they are night prowlers, it is perhaps true only as the things they feed upon are more easily come by in the dark, and they know well how to adjust themselves to conditions ...
— The Land of Little Rain • Mary Austin
... at your radiophone to listen to us. I'll keep you informed of developments as long as possible. Everything is running like clockwork so far. How is it ...
— Lords of the Stratosphere • Arthur J. Burks
... something not itself. Sardou is a hard taskmaster; he chains his slaves. Without nobility or even coherence of conception, without inner life or even a recognisable semblance of exterior life, the piece goes by clockwork; you cannot make the hands go faster or slower, or bring its mid-day into agreement with the sun. A great actress, who is also a great intelligence, is seen accepting it, for its purpose, with contempt, as a thing to exercise her technical skill upon. As a piece of ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... broken by a shrill sound like the creaking of a rusty spring. It startled Don Juan; he all but dropped the phial. A sweat, colder than the blade of a dagger, issued through every pore. It was only a piece of clockwork, a wooden cock that sprang out and crowed three times, an ingenious contrivance by which the learned of that epoch were wont to be awakened at the appointed hour to begin the labors of the day. Through the windows there came already a flush of dawn. The thing, ...
— The Elixir of Life • Honore de Balzac
... The world moves. And each day, each hour, demands a further motion and re-adjustment for the soul. A telescope in an observatory follows a star by clockwork, but the clockwork of the soul is called the Will. Hence, while the soul in passivity reflects the Image of the Lord, the Will in intense activity holds the mirror in position lest the drifting motion of the world bear it beyond the ...
— Beautiful Thoughts • Henry Drummond
... the sketch being to scale, particulars as to the making of the revolving wheel need not be entered into, as any mechanic could grasp the whole idea at a glance. The edge of the wheel should, of course, be placed facing the window, and a band on the pulley wheel, A, attached to a clockwork or electric motor would supply all the driving ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1082, September 26, 1896 • Various
... South instrument. The snow was still falling when the domes were opened; but, according to our prearranged scheme, the telescopes were directed, not indeed upon the sun, but to the place where we knew the sun was, and the clockwork was set in motion which carried round the telescopes, still constantly pointing towards the invisible sun. The predicted time of the ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... Ouida is right when she maintains that "the State only aims at instilling those qualities in its public by which its demands are obeyed, and its exchequer is filled. Its highest attainment is the reduction of mankind to clockwork. In its atmosphere all those finer and more delicate liberties, which require treatment and spacious expansion, inevitably dry up and perish. The State requires a taxpaying machine in which there is no hitch, an exchequer in which there is ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... large and each guide was obliged to keep twenty minutes behind the band before him. This was done like clockwork, and yet, such is the uncertainty of such arrangements and the intensity of the human desire to get ahead of one's neighbors that, do as he would, Billfinger was constantly butting his leaders into ...
— A Fantasy of Mediterranean Travel • S. G. Bayne
... distortion of the spring determines the actual force which the wind is exerting on the plate, and this is either read off on a suitable gauge, or leaves a record in the ordinary way by means of a pen writing on a sheet of paper moved by clockwork. Instruments of this kind have been in use for a long series of years, and have recorded pressures up to and even exceeding 60 lb per sq. ft., but it is now fairly certain that these high values are erroneous, and due, not to the wind, but to ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 2, Part 1, Slice 1 • Various
... like monkeys, they dashed recklessly forward, swung about into position, and almost before the muzzles had been well pointed, were hurling canister into that blue, victorious advance. How those gallant fellows worked! their guns leaping into air at each discharge, their movements clockwork! Tense, eager, expectant, every hand among us hard gripped on sabre hilt, we waited that word which surely could not be delayed, while from end to end, down the full length of our straining line, rang out the yell ...
— My Lady of the North • Randall Parrish
... fan-shaped formation, and, with a brave effort, Jess succeeded in bringing forth a bark which ended in something between growl and howl, by reason of the cutting pain it caused her. The three dingoes leaped backward, each three paces, like clockwork machinery. Jess glared out at them from under her thatch of bark, her fangs uncovered, her nose wrinkled, and her short close hair on end. The dingoes watched her thoughtfully, pondering upon her probable reserves of strength. Then, too, there was her shelter; that was endowed with some of the ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... their cabin, we sorter turned into the woods to wait till they'd come out. Then all of a suddent Lance stopped as rigid as a pointer that's flushed somethin', and says, 'B'gosh!' And thar, under a big redwood, sat that slimy hypocrite Bulger, twisting his long mustaches and smiling like clockwork alongside o' little Meely Baker—you know her, the pootiest of the two sisters—and she smilin' back on him. Think of it! that unknown, unwashed, longhaired tramp and bully, who must be forty if a day, and that innocent gal of ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... Hedges' lamp belongs to the same category of electric regulators as the lamp of M. Rapieff, and to one form of M. Reynier's lamp, that is to say, the position of the ends of the carbons, and therefore of the arc, is determined not by clockwork or similar controlling mechanism, but by the locus of the geometrical intersection of the axes of the carbon rods, the positions of which axes being ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 315, January 14, 1882 • Various
... our troubles here. You can't administer thousands of acres, control hundreds of slaves, and run an estate like a piece of clockwork without creaks in the machinery. I've built it all up out of next to nothing. I landed in this country with my little fortune of two thousand pounds. This estate is worth at least a quarter of a million now. I've an estate ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... known at first-hand. They busied themselves at once. While Tim unbuttoned the severe black coat and pulled it off, Judy brought a jacket of dingy tweed from behind a curtain in the corner, and stood on a chair to help the figure put it on. All knew their duties; the performance went like clockwork. And Maria sat and watched in helpful silence. There was a certain air about her as ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood
... he wrote to Bedford, in reply to his letter, "suppose me a troublesome man to deal with, pertinacious about trifles, or standing upon punctilios of authorship. No, Grosvenor, I am a quiet, patient, easy-going hack of the mule breed; regular as clockwork in my pace, sure-footed, bearing the burden which is laid on me, and only obstinate in choosing my own path. If Gifford could see me by this fireside, where, like Nicodemus, one candle suffices me in a large room, he would see a man in a coat 'still more threadbare than ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... the battery to him. It might prove a labor saver," he said. "Being a little old-fashioned, he has depended on clockwork, which requires a special orderly to wind us when we fun down and nod at our desks." Then he turned solicitous. "The Gray staff will certainly give you an escort beyond the Gray lines, where you will find a place to establish ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... the boys, reported that he was beginning to have more faith in the machinery. The work of the last twenty odd hours had certainly been a pretty heavy tax on it and everything seemed to be going like clockwork. ...
— The Aeroplane Boys on the Wing - Aeroplane Chums in the Tropics • John Luther Langworthy
... the sight was not an agreeable one to men accustomed to discipline. The contrast when the TAMERLANE came along an hour or so after was emphatic. Every man at his post; every order carried out with the precision of clockwork; the captain pacing the quarter-deck as if she were a line-of-battle ship—here the airs put on were almost ludicrous in the other direction. Although she was only "a good jump" long, as we say, whenever an order ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... about it," said she, disengaging the covering, "because she knows so much more about it than I do. You see, when the water is poured in at the top and the clockwork is wound up, the mill works and the sacks go up and down, and one has to pretend they are taking grist up into the loft. It was working quite beautiful when mother put the water in for Dave to see. And it doesn't go out of order by standing; for, the last time before ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... hue according to his individual temperament. In short, within a given time the most blooming young man is turned into an "inasmuch" machine—an instrument which applies the Code to individual cases with the indifference of clockwork. ...
— The Commission in Lunacy • Honore de Balzac
... fortunate enough to obtain a copy of that admirable privately printed quarto volume. In the present hall you will see (if permitted) a fine store of plate, four pieces of which escaped the Great Fire, including a curious waggon and tun, the gift of W. Baude in 1573, which moves along the table by clockwork. The entrance colonnade, which occupies the site of the ancient cloister, with its Doric columns, is attractive, and a fine stone staircase protected by a wooden portcullis leads to the hall and court rooms. The hall itself ...
— Memorials of Old London - Volume I • Various
... mighty Emperor of Greece and the chivalrous Knight of Paris had taken place earlier; for reflection on what had passed, had convinced the Emperor that the Franks were not a people to be imposed upon by pieces of clockwork, and similar trifles, and that what they did not understand, was sure, instead of procuring their awe or admiration, to excite their anger and defiance. Nor had it altogether escaped Count Robert, that the manners of the Eastern people were upon a different scale from ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... was finished it was ten o'clock and Nita gave a sigh of utter exhaustion. "If Madeline's rule holds," she said, "this play ought to go like clockwork to-morrow." ...
— Betty Wales Senior • Margaret Warde
... department, first; the correspondence division next; the accounting department third, and he literally swept through the office like the proverbial new broom, caught up all the loose ends, and established a routine like clockwork. So successful was his work that the directors hastened to add supervision of ...
— Increasing Efficiency In Business • Walter Dill Scott
... for us, he but makes our assurance surer. For uncounted centuries before ever hearing of Gravitation men knew of the sun that he rose and set, of the moon that she waxed and waned, of the tides that they flowed and ebbed, all regularly, at times to be predicted; of the stars that they swung as by clockwork around the pole. ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... Though they did not fear the musket, they knew he might possibly let it off and alarm the town, so they stood under the dark shade of a wall, deliberating what was to be done. They watched him for some time, and ascertained that, like a clockwork figure, he always made the same round at ...
— The Three Midshipmen • W.H.G. Kingston
... quaked, and crowds of Moros perambulated the streets in rich and picturesque costumes, varying in design according to the usage of their tribes. Before the departure of the royal visitor the troops were formed up, military evolutions were performed with clockwork precision, and volley after volley was fired in the air. The Sultan declared he could never receive the Governor with such splendour, but he wanted him to promise to return his visit. It was not politic, however, to agree to do so. And the Sultan and his people left, passing once more through ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... methods of the melodrama, which had been elaborated in the theaters of the Parisian boulevards at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and which had been imitated already by Hugo and the elder Dumas. At its best, the "well-made play" was an amusing piece of mechanism, a clockwork toy which had a mere semblance of life, but which did precisely what its maker had ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... work; conscientious in the force of its instinct to carry out everything undertaken by it to the very end, and judging that whatever it undertook was good and worth finishing; having something of the nature of a strong piece of clockwork which being wound up must run to the utmost limit before stopping, whether regulated to move fast or slow, with a fateful certainty independent of will; possessed of such uncommon strength as to make it dangerous if opposed while moving, and at the same time ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... Ireland, were respectively at their height. Her Majesty moves calmly to and fro—even quitting England—her Ministers enjoy their usual intervals of relaxation and absence from town—all the movements of Government go on like clockwork—no symptoms visible any where of feverish uneasiness. But what say you, enquires a timid friend, or a bitter opponent, to the Repeal agitation in Ireland, and the Anti-corn-law agitation in England? Why, we say this—that we sincerely regret the mischief which the one has done, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXIX. January, 1844. Vol. LV. • Various
... the rotation of the shell to give a regular motion to clockwork have been tried, but so far no practicable form of these fuzes has been ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... clockwork, all is order. They make no mistakes. Every third man wears a uniform, and whether he be a marshal of the empire or a brakeman, he is ready and perfectly willing to answer all your questions with tireless politeness, ready to tell you which car to take, yea, and ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... break up so pleasant a party, but the Van Gend household moved with the regularity of clockwork. There was no lingering at the threshold when the cordial "Good night!" was spoken. Even while our boys were mounting the stairs, the invisible household fairies again clustered around them, whispering that system and regularity had been chief ...
— Hans Brinker - or The Silver Skates • Mary Mapes Dodge
... alongside—they offered all he knew and more than he could guess. They offered books and painting, beauty and repose, and all the fine elegance of higher existence. Behind those black eyes he knew every thought process. It was like clockwork. He could watch every wheel go around. Their bid was low pleasure, narrow as the grave, that palled, and the grave was at the end of it. But the bid of the saint's eyes was mystery, and wonder unthinkable, and eternal life. ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... and beyond that? And so on to incomprehensible and overwhelming infinitude. And these many millions of suns and worlds and systems and all their parts are clearly working together, like the most exquisitely designed clockwork. Look at the marvellous mechanism of the human brain, the human eye, the human hand, the human heart, and in fact the whole human structure and composition; they all prove the truth of the affirmation that man is "fearfully and wonderfully made." Nay further, examine ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole
... destination at the head of the thick part of the mast, but about ten or fifteen feet beneath the ball. As it neared the top, Jerry sprang up the chain-ladder to connect the lantern with the rod and pinion by means of which, with clockwork beneath, it was made to revolve and "flash" once every third of ...
— The Floating Light of the Goodwin Sands • R.M. Ballantyne
... we have is a pen drawing a continuous line on a cylinder which revolves once every hour and is worked continuously by clockwork in an exact record of time. It moves in a straight line when there is no disturbance, and it jumps from right to left and back again when there are serious oscillations of the earth. The extent of these movements of the pen measures the grade ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... pick up the mud in the four quarters of the town in order to bring it in here afterwards; and poor Francoise is almost off her legs with the constant scrubbing of the floors, which your masters come and dirty every day as regular as clockwork. ...
— The Shopkeeper Turned Gentleman - (Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme) • Moliere (Poquelin)
... forming into procession, the parting right and left at the chancel and the re-forming to return to the vestibule, being all gone through with to the sound of music, until every part of the long procession moves like clockwork. ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... along the smooth Roman road at a splendid pace, "the ponies going like clockwork," as Vixen remarked approvingly; but poor Miss McCroke thought that any clock which went as fast as those ponies would be ...
— Vixen, Volume III. • M. E. Braddon
... once more to interest in affairs, the morning was well spent. On the river the work was going forward with the precision of clockwork. The six-foot lowering of the sluice-way had produced a fine current, which sucked the logs down from above. Men were busily engaged in "sacking" them from the sides of the pond toward its centre, lest the lowering ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... reason of electrochemical decomposition. One of these surfaces consisted of a small drum or cylinder of chalk, which was kept in a moistened condition with a suitable chemical solution, and adapted to revolve continuously by clockwork. The other surface consisted of a small pad which rested with frictional pressure on the periphery of the drum. This pad was carried on the end of a vibrating arm whose lateral movement was limited between two adjustable ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... are also brought against the institution. Here life for the inmates is made too easy, and little can be known by them of the actual struggles of the world. The life is machine-like, and all is routine clockwork. By the discipline, which is necessary, much of the spontaneity of growing children is destroyed, and the surroundings are pervaded with the spirit of uniformity, "solidarity" and "dead levelism." On the other hand, the children fail to learn many important lessons in domestic ...
— The Deaf - Their Position in Society and the Provision for Their - Education in the United States • Harry Best
... Exhibitions; the remnants of a fleet of sailing-ships from ninepenny cutters to a three-guinea yacht; a prep.-school dressing-gown; bats from three-and-sixpence to twenty-four shillings; cricket and tennis balls; disintegrated steam and clockwork locomotives with their twisted rails; a grey and red tin model of a submarine; a dumb gramophone and cracked records; golf-clubs that had to be broken across the knee, like his walking-sticks, and an assegai; photographs of private and public school cricket ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling
... compartments within the box. In one was a mechanism which resembled the works of a small clock. There also was a little battery of two dry cells. A wire ran from the clockwork to one of the poles of the battery, and from the other pole through the partition into the other compartment, a second wire ...
— The Beasts of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... spoiling for some one to fall in love with, I can tell that from your last letter. The pretty brunette had not intellectuality enough, had she? My dear fellow, as if that had anything to do with it! You were not ready, that was all. You fall in love by clockwork once every year; and it is time now. If you should see the P. B. again to-morrow, you'd be lost directly. As for me—I should think you would be tired of asking. No, I am not in love. No, I feel no inclination whatever to become so. No, there is no 'charmer' (what vile expressions you use, James; ...
— Geoffrey Strong • Laura E. Richards
... a clockwork man and quite a funny sight— He talks and walks mechanically, when he's wound up tight; And we've a Hungry Tiger who would babies love to eat But never does because we feed him other kinds ...
— The Patchwork Girl of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... blows in the China seas as regularly as clockwork from October to April, and is the great trade-wind of the tea- ships, had nearly blown out its course; but still, for a time it was all in the Hankow Lin's favour, and she went through the water at a fine rate. Although ...
— The Penang Pirate - and, The Lost Pinnace • John Conroy Hutcheson
... gemeau, still used by Corneille, and earlier still gemel, Lat. gemellus, diminutive of geminus, twin. From one form we have the gimbals, or twin pivots, which keep the compass horizontal. Shakespeare uses it of clockwork— ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley
... was like a very firstfruits to loving little Inna, in her endeavour to influence this big, strong, wilful cousin for good. Nay, she shamed him into industry and painstaking by her own application to studies, going to and from the Owl's Nest, "like clockwork, you little grinder!" as the boy expressed it, making his awkward admission to her on Christmas Eve, the two wreathing the house with holly and evergreens. This was something which Carlo and Smut the black cat thought it their duty ...
— The Heiress of Wyvern Court • Emilie Searchfield
... have seen it, my lord. The June Bug has been sent up many times, weighted with ballast; the plug was abstracted by clockwork; and in fifty-eight seconds she returned through the open end of the drone, without a hitch. It was beautiful. I have always envied her that plunge. And now I shall have the chance, with the hand of the Jarados ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... these Germans, in their stage management. Of course this was precisely the thing that they desired that he should feel. They had sent their shells at the right moment, the whole performance had gone off like clockwork. Those poor blackened masses of humanity in the house below were the cost that was represented in the performance. And since there is much still left to burn in Verdun, the Germans may repeat this ...
— They Shall Not Pass • Frank H. Simonds
... all industries. Belgium has no longer the cloth monopoly; cloth is made in Germany, in Russia, in Austria, in the United States. Switzerland and the French Jura have no longer a clockwork monopoly; watches are made everywhere. Scotland no longer refines sugar for Russia: refined Russian sugar is imported into England. Italy, although neither possessing coal nor iron, makes her own iron-clads and engines ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... alarms run by clockwork must be wound and set each time. The accompanying diagram shows how to make the connection that will ring a bell by electric current at the time set without winding the alarm. The bell is removed from an ...
— The Boy Mechanic: Volume 1 - 700 Things For Boys To Do • Popular Mechanics
... Kitchener fought with rails as much as with guns rather fixed from this time forward the fashionable view of his character. He was talked of as if he were himself made of metal, with a head filled not only with calculations but with clockwork. This is symbolically true, in so far as it means that he was by temper what he was by trade, an engineer. He had conquered the Mahdi, where many had failed to do so. But what he had chiefly conquered was the desert—a great and greedy giant. He brought ...
— Lord Kitchener • G. K. Chesterton
... astronomical observatory. The building is usually cylindrical in shape, with a very light hemispherical roof capable of being turned round from the interior. The telescope is supported upon a stone pillar in the centre, and a clockwork arrangement compensates for the earth's rotation, and allows a star once found to be continuously observed. Besides this, there is a compact tracery of wheels and screws about its point of support, by which ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... told what was expected of him, and he was waiting on the platform of the Sawyerville station when No. 14 pulled in. There had been no warning, there was no possibility of resistance, and everything moved as smoothly as clockwork. The writs were served, the telegraph office seized, and the M. & T. employees about the station replaced by McDowell's "boys" almost before the dazed incumbents knew what was happening. The new telegraph operator wired to McNally, who had ...
— The Short Line War • Merwin-Webster
... all said, and the man who had brought the clockwork bird received on the spot the title of 'Bringer of the ...
— The Yellow Fairy Book • Leonora Blanche Alleyne Lang
... to-night I have on a ready-made suit of clothes, for which I paid yesterday five dollars. In that large boiler there is a stove which I have invented. In the oven of the stove is beef and various vegetables, and to heat it is a kerosene lamp with a clockwork attached. A young man or a young woman, or a young married couple go to the market and buy the cheap cuts of beef, and then, according to my instructions, they put it in the stove with the vegetables, light the lamp, set the clockwork and go to ...
— My Memories of Eighty Years • Chauncey M. Depew
... with the accurate grace of the clockwork at Greenwich; Their brassies unswervingly held to the line of the pegs; Their chip-shots came down on the greens and mistook them for spinach, And stopped like poached eggs; Not theirs the desire for the sandpit, not ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, June 3, 1914 • Various
... existing system of sluggish and irregular stage-coaches, the property of private persons and companies, by a new system of government coaches, in connexion with the Post-Office, carrying the mails and also a regulated number of passengers, with clockwork precision, at a rate of comparative speed, which he hoped should ultimately be not less than ten miles an hour. The opposition to the scheme was, of course, enormous; coach proprietors, innkeepers, the Post-Office officials themselves, were all against Mr. Palmer; he was voted a crazy ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... blazed as usual, but the deck-house was empty; a very subdued glow indicated where the binnacle was. And, answering these signs of existence, could be distinguished the red and green lights of steamers, the firm rays of lighthouses, and the red or white warnings of gas-buoys run by clockwork. ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... preparations to be pushed in haste, and at once the big bedroom of Mamma blossomed with delicate fabrics, with bright ribbons and frilly laces, and amid the blossoming, the whir of the machine and the feet and hands of the two-lire-a-day seamstress went like mad clockwork, while in and out Mamma's friends came hurrying, at the rumor, to hint of congratulation or ...
— The Innocent Adventuress • Mary Hastings Bradley
... have died for shame; there was no modern cant about your mother; she thought—she said to me, sir—I'm glad she's in her grave, Dick Naseby. Misinformed! Misinformed, sir? Have you no loyalty, no spring, no natural affections? Are you clockwork, hey? Away! This is no place for you. Away!" (Waving his hands in the air.) "Go ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Dickens found time to accomplish so many different things. One of the secrets of this, no doubt, was his love of order. He was the most systematic of men. Everything he did "went like clockwork," and he prided himself on his punctuality. He could not work in a room unless everything in it was in its proper place. As a consequence of this habit of regularity, he ...
— Tales from Dickens • Charles Dickens and Hallie Erminie Rives
... paved passage, which, was evidently not held as sacred as it should have been by the roving fowls; looked in at the great dark kitchen, where beside the Gothic arch of the broad chimney was some ruinous clockwork mechanism for turning the spit, which probably did turn to good purpose when powdered wigs were worn; then ascended the stone staircase, where there was room for four to walk abreast, but which had somewhat ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... popular mind of both continents if we called this strip of sea the Straits of New York, and classed our liners, not as the successors of Columbus's caravels, but simply as what they are: giant ferry-boats plying with clockwork punctuality between the twin landing-stages of the ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... seen engaged in a song and dance. They were about eighteen inches apart, and alternately jumped two feet into the air, alighting always in the same spot. As soon as one bird alighted the other bird jumped up, their time being like clockwork in its regularity, and each "accompanying himself to the tune of 'to-le-do'—'to-le-do'—'to-le-do,' sounding the syllable 'to' as he crouched to spring, 'le' while in the air, and 'do' as he alighted." ...
— Little Folks (December 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... is exhausted. With no apparent cause, we see death busy among them. "Suddenly the wasps begin to fall as though struck by lightning; for a few moments the abdomen quivers and the legs gesticulate, then finally remain inert, like a clockwork machine whose spring has run down to the last coil." (9/10.) This law is general; "the insect is born orphaned both of mother and father, excepting the social insect, and again excepting the dung- beetle, which dies full of ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... loathsome-looking length of a big snake became gradually clear to see, with the tail in the air announcing its owner's nature by keeping up a peculiar skirring sound something like the running down of a distant piece of clockwork. ...
— The Peril Finders • George Manville Fenn
... Her mother's playing Canada. And this is little Sidonia Vavasour—mother out in one of the highest-priced sketches in vaudeville. Know it? 'The Snake.' Every morning that God sends comes her good-morning telegram to this little mite, just as regular as clockwork." ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... I could make it out, it consisted of two flat platforms between which, covered over and projected, was a slip of paper which moved forward, actuated by clockwork, and pressed on by a sort of stylus. Then he covered it over lightly with dirt so that, unless anyone had been looking for it, it ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... moment to press down another key at the other end of the line of wire. Moreover, the key at the farther end of the line could be so arranged as to make an impression on a piece of paper that was slowly drawn under it by clockwork. Now if the man at one end of the line held his key down for only an instant, this impression would look like a dot. If he held it down longer, it would look like a short dash. Morse combined these dots and dashes into an alphabet. For instance, one dash meant the letter "t," and so ...
— A Short History of the United States • Edward Channing
... when we pulled up at the door of the Angel, and were shown into a splendid room, thirty-five or forty feet long by twenty wide, secured bedrooms as clean and comfortable as heart could desire, and had every thing we asked for with the precision of clockwork and the rapidity of steam. The Three Cocks began to descend from the lofty place they held in our esteem, and we resolved for one day at least to rest contentedly in such comfortable quarters, and look about us; so forth ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... beheld the wonders of Yellowstone National Park and of the Grand Canyon of the Colorado, and of Alaska. Yellowstone Park is perhaps the only region where one can see innumerable geysers shooting high into the air, performing year after year with clockwork regularity. Its opal and sapphire pools and hot sulphurous springs, its bears and wild creatures, remind one that here Nature left a specimen of her earliest creation. Motoring along the roads of Wyoming to the "Devil's Paint ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... press all at once, and no brain can stand the confusion." We should steadily cultivate the habit of punctuality. We can cultivate it until it becomes with us a second nature, and we do everything, as the saying is, "by clockwork." In rising in the morning and going to bed, in taking up different kinds of work, in keeping appointments with others, we should strive to be "to the minute." The unpunctual man is a nuisance to society. He wastes his own time, and he wastes the ...
— Life and Conduct • J. Cameron Lees
... five,—were all assembled to prayers at half-past seven, previous to going to breakfast. They dined at one, and had a combined tea and supper at seven o'clock. At nine o'clock they went to bed. Before two months had passed away, everything went on like clockwork. One day passed away so like another, that the time flew imperceptibly, and they wondered that the Sundays came round so quick. They had now time to unpack everything, and the books which Mrs Campbell ...
— The Settlers in Canada • Frederick Marryat
... and I ain't got a quarrel with 'em, the Lord knows. I go to church like clockwork, and pay my pew-rent, too, which is more than some do that gabble the most about salvation. If I pay for the preacher's keep it's only fair that I should get some of the good that comes to him hereafter; that's how it looks to me; so I don't trouble my ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... of this private government strip also seems to run like clockwork. To be sure the wheels even of a clock grind a bit with friction at times, but the clock goes on keeping time for all that. The Canal Zone is the best governed district in the United States. It is worth any American's time and sea-sickness to ...
— Zone Policeman 88 - A Close Range Study of the Panama Canal and its Workers • Harry A. Franck
... narrow escapes. While in California on one of these voyages he found James Hall on board another ship at the same wharf, and in a letter to Captain Faucon written June, 1893, says, "I persuaded him to take the first officer's berth, and what an officer he was!! Everything went on like clockwork. I do not think I ever found the least fault with him during the whole time he was with me.'' Captain Hatch lost his only son, a lad of seven, on a voyage to Calcutta. "The boy,'' said he, "fell from the top ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... shots who were not required at Sandringham, and, as a rule, were not asked again. I, however, was fortunate; being in good practice and cool, I brought down my birds one after the other, as St. Nivel remarked afterwards, "like a bit of clockwork," and I had the satisfaction of hearing our host inquire who I was. We had finished one plantation very satisfactorily, as the heaps of dead pheasants testified, and were moving off to the next when I got ...
— A Queen's Error • Henry Curties
... severity of a hungry man. "It seems to me they don't amount to ANYthing. Here I am, at my time of life, up the first one in the house. I ring the bell for the cook at quarter-past six every morning, and the breakfast is on the table at half-past seven right along, like clockwork, but I never see anybody but you till I ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... stiff and crude, Do not laugh, because it's rude. If my gestures promise larks, Do not make unkind remarks. Clockwork figures may be found Everywhere and all around. Ten to one, if I but knew, You are clockwork figures too. And the motto of the lot, "Put ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... quarters of Sir John Bennett's city clock in Cheapside. The automatic movements of these last-named figures would have struck the originators of the Varallo chapels with envy. They aimed at realism so closely that they would assuredly have had recourse to clockwork in some one or two of their chapels; I cannot doubt, for example, that they would have eagerly welcomed the idea of making the cock crow to Peter by a cuckoo-clock arrangement, if it had been presented to them. This opens up the whole question of realism versus conventionalism ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... you ever seen the work these native jewelers do? And didn't you tell me about a clockwork thing they have at the university, here, to show the apparent ...
— Ullr Uprising • Henry Beam Piper
... no rest. Like clockwork from the Mississippi's banks beyond came the boom and shriek of the coehorns on the barges. The big shells hung for an instant in the air like birds of prey, and then could be seen swooping down here and there, while now and anon a shaft of smoke ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... can be compared to either of the two great ballets of Strawinsky for rhythmical vitality, it is "Daphnis et Chloe," with its flaming dionysiac pulses, its "pipes and timbrels," its wild ecstasy. The same delicate clockwork mechanism characterizes "L'Heure espagnol," his opera bouffe, that characterizes "Petruchka" and "Le Rossignol." A piano-poem like "Scarbo" rouses the full might of the piano, and seems to bridge the way to the music of Leo Ornstein and ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... infrequently persons whom she knew, often intimately, but during the time of their sickness their personalities vanished for the trained nurse; she saw only the "case," only the mechanism, only the deranged clockwork in ...
— A Man's Woman • Frank Norris
... doctor. I suppose I've got no character, or he would talk about that sometimes. I don't understand it—that talking about something inside you, as if it was something separate from yourself; and calling it all kinds of sentiments and virtues, as if it was clockwork you couldn't see. I don't see anything like that in you, Nan—except that you are very kind, you know—but not so different from other people—as ...
— The Beautiful Wretch; The Pupil of Aurelius; and The Four Macnicols • William Black
... brands of the fire smouldered all day in a bank of ashes; there was never any flame in his grate. He went through his day, from his uprising to his evening coughing-fit, with the regularity of a pendulum, and in some sort was a clockwork man, wound up by a night's slumber. Touch a wood-louse on an excursion across your sheet of paper, and the creature shams death; and in something the same way my acquaintance would stop short in the middle of a sentence, while a cart went by, to save the strain to his voice. Following ...
— Gobseck • Honore de Balzac
... man reddened. "If you wouldn't mind examining it—" He drew from his pocket a small, delicately contrived bit of clockwork. "This is ...
— The Green Mouse • Robert W. Chambers
... regulating box of the lamp there exists a simple mechanism, the result of careful study and experiment to discover the best and simplest combination of appliances, which would obviate the necessity for the use of clockwork or dash-pots, from which fluids might be accidentally spilled, for obtaining a gradual feeding of the carbon as fast as it is consumed in producing the light, and at the same time to maintain the arc or space between the carbons in burning, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XV., No. 388, June 9, 1883 • Various
... Capt. Murray Sueter in his book on submarines gives these and other particulars of the vessel. At either end the boat had a cabin, the air in which remained good for about three hours, and in the middle of the boat was a large paddlewheel rotated by clockwork mechanism, which, it was claimed, would run for eight hours when once wound up. The iron tips at the ends of the vessel were intended for ramming, and the inventor was confident he could sink the biggest English ship afloat by crushing in her hull under water. The boat was duly launched, ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... patient eyes. Her own mouth took a slight twist of laughter as she resumed, "I suppose you've seen on the hoardings all about this 'Smythe's Silent Service'? Or you must be the only person that hasn't. Oh, I don't know much about it, it's some clockwork invention for doing all the housework by machinery. You know the sort of thing: 'Press a Button—A Butler who Never Drinks.' 'Turn a Handle—Ten Housemaids who Never Flirt.' You must have seen the advertisements. Well, whatever these machines ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... child to find out the truth," thought Jane. "She looks, anyhow, like she hadn't a friend on earth! I'm going to let her think the money comes as regular as clockwork! I d' know but I'm real glad he don't send it. Makes me feel closer to ...
— A Prairie Infanta • Eva Wilder Brodhead
... burn oil, and although the day was hot, and the noon meal was in preparation, there was no excessive heat and no fumes. The white-clad Chinese waiters did their appointed tasks with the smoothness and lack of confusion of clockwork. ...
— The Log of the Empire State • Geneve L.A. Shaffer
... as clockwork, and the holy presence of God was the loadstar of his soul. One day I was complaining to him of the too great deference which he paid me. "And for how much then do you," he answered, "account Jesus Christ, whom I honour in your person?" "Oh!" I replied, "if you take that ground, ...
— The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales • Jean Pierre Camus
... philosophical objection to steam-engines is not that men pay for them or work at them, or make them very ugly, or even that men are killed by them; but merely that men do not play at them. The evil is that the childish poetry of clockwork does not remain. The wrong is not that engines are too much admired, but that they are not admired enough. The sin is not that engines are mechanical, but ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton |
