"Lath" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... be living next to the room occupied by Mr. Jay. The partition between us is mere lath and plaster. I shall make a small hole in it, near the cornice, through which I can see what Mr. Jay does in his room, and hear every word that is said when any friend happens to call on him. Whenever he is at home, I shall be at my ...
— The Queen of Hearts • Wilkie Collins
... about four leagues in extent; the houses are built with brick, but the Indians use only wood, in the manner which we call lath and plaster. In a few days after I arrived in Madras, and took up my residence with a ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to India; of a Shipwreck on board the Lady Castlereagh; and a Description of New South Wales • W. B. Cramp
... about five feet nine high, was not stout, was as straight as a lath, yet not thin, had very firm but quite small breasts, and a biggish bum. She had Mulatto blood in her veins she told me, and was brown-skinned, had a large mouth and very thick lips, the Negro blood showed there plainly; her hair was dark, and so were her eyes; her cunt was a pouter: it was ...
— My Secret Life, Volumes I. to III. - 1888 Edition • Anonymous
... captain of the Nevski, a brave man, who, it seems, had refused to surrender, and had cut his way through all Sievers's men in the desperate resolve to retrieve the consequences of his own carelessness. Maclean, however, was a practised wrestler, and although lean almost as a lath, the muscles he possessed were as strong as steel bands. Even as they fell he writhed uppermost, and baffling with an active elbow the captain's last effort to transfix him, he dashed his adversary's head upon the boards. A second later he arose, breathless, ...
— Golden Stories - A Selection of the Best Fiction by the Foremost Writers • Various
... quarters if the original coops are at all crowded. And teach the youngsters to roost early, especially where brooders are used, so they will not "pile up" in corners when the heat is removed. When the brood is five to six weeks of age place low roosts, lath tacked on six to eight-inch boards, in the coops. The sturdier individuals will soon learn to use them and educate the rest of ...
— Pratt's Practical Pointers on the Care of Livestock and Poultry • Pratt Food Co.
... quality and make the outline of the kite by tying it securely to the ends of each of the laths. Next take the thinnest unbleached calico you can find, stretch it fairly tightly, and sew it over the strings. (Or strong but light paper will do, pasted over the string.) Make a hole (D) through the upright lath and calico, midway between the cross-piece and the top, and another hole (E) about fifteen inches below the cross-piece, and tie a strong string, two and a half feet long, to these holes, with a loop (F) in it a foot from the top ...
— What Shall We Do Now?: Five Hundred Games and Pastimes • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... as assuredly they would, with that same earnest, uncomfortable, too anxious exhortation, which all saints must address to sinners—he would close his ears hermetically—he would fly for it—he would escape with as desperate haste as from the saddest whine that ever issued from some lath-and-plaster conventicle. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... were, said he, two if not three at Portsmouth, constructed out of old cargo tramp hulls for the mystification of the enemy. They had already done duty as newly completed battleships, but with a little alteration to the canvas of their funnels, the lath and plaster of their turrets and conning towers, and the wood of their guns, they might be made into perfect likenesses—at a distance—of the Intrepid and Terrific. The ships' carpenters, he explained, could make the changes while the dummies were coming round to Plymouth. Seated at the ...
— The Lost Naval Papers • Bennet Copplestone
... lath," the Captain declared; "if it hadn't been for her face, I wouldn't have known whether she was coming bow ...
— An Encore • Margaret Deland
... minimum, and the bear breathes but very slowly. Still, he does breathe, and his heart does beat; and in performing those indispensable functions, all his store of accumulated fat is gradually used up, so that he wakes in spring as thin as a lath and as hungry as a hunter. The machine has been working at very low pressure all the winter: but it has been working for all that, and the continuity of its action has never once for a moment been interrupted. This is the central principle of all hibernation; it ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... and the hare's tail is still the dress of the peasantry of Bergamo. Quadrio, in his learned Storia d'ogni Poesia, has diffused his erudition on the ancient Mimi and their successors. Dr. Clarke has discovered the light lath sword of Harlequin, which had hitherto baffled my most painful researches, amidst the dark mysteries of the ancient mythology! We read with equal astonishment and novelty, that the prototypes of the modern pantomime are in the Pagan mysteries; that Harlequin is Mercury, with his short ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... of a sailor, droop-shouldered, six feet six and slender as a lath, with pallid eyes of palest blue and skin and hair attuned to the same colour scheme, joined Kwaque ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London
... finally saw at the top of that beanpole figure was as long as the moral law. Such a lank, cadaverous visage I don't think I had ever seen before. The man was a human lath. ...
— Swept Out to Sea - Clint Webb Among the Whalers • W. Bertram Foster
... ready to resume for the figure abandoned for another. If the right hand thrusts the flute, it is the duty of the left to see that the alternate and the limiting threads of the warp are properly lifted. First comes a pressure of the foot on a long, lath-like pedal which is attached to the bar holding in turn the loops ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... testify to the skill then attained. In the 16th century bricks were increasingly used, but down to the Great Fire of London, in 1666, the smaller buildings, shops and dwelling-houses, were constructed of timber framework filled in with lath and plaster. In the rebuilding of London after the fire, bricks were largely used, and from the end of the 17th century to the present day they have been almost exclusively used in all ordinary buildings throughout the country, except in those districts where building stone is plentiful and good ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... fall of statesmen, the ebb and flow of public opinion, moved only to a smile of mingled compassion and disdain. It was owing to the peculiar elevation of his character that he cared about a pinnacle of lath and plaster more than about the Middlesex election, and about a miniature of Grammont more than about the American Revolution. Pitt and Murray might talk themselves hoarse about trifles. But questions of government and war were too insignificant to detain a mind which was ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... slap the wainscot fast and furiously with his walking-cane with a clatter like a harlequin's lath in ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 3 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... an hour previously were covered with a finely ornamented paper, now stood out in the bold nakedness of lath and plaster; the relics on the floor showed that the little wretch's fingers had by no means been idle. The pegs were all loosened, the individual peg to which his chain had been fastened, torn completely from its socket, that the destroyer's ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... bullets. How the Canadians in this old frame building escaped the deadly missiles is a miracle, for, strange to say, none were injured, although exposed to a perfect hail-storm of bullets which crashed through the thin boards, lath and plaster, in all directions. After this gallant band had fired their last round of ammunition, they saw that further resistance was useless, and ...
— Troublous Times in Canada - A History of the Fenian Raids of 1866 and 1870 • John A. Macdonald
... reached one of the most squalid parts of the western banlieue. Houses half built and deserted in the middle, perhaps by some bankrupt builder; small traders, bakers, charcutiers, fried-fish sellers, lodged in structures of lath and plaster, just run up and already crumbling; cabarets of the roughest and meanest kind, adorned with high-sounding devices,—David mechanically noticed one which had blazoned on its stained and peeling front, A la renaissance du Phenix;—heaps of rubbish and garbage ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... tremblin'. Every time she goes nigh the bed I expect her to trip over a young one and fall. And if she fell on that poor rack-o'-bones," with a wave of the hand toward the invalid, "'twould be the final smash—like a brick chimney fallin' on a lath hencoop." ...
— Cap'n Warren's Wards • Joseph C. Lincoln
... that in vogue amongst the Japanese to-day, and that bone-ash was used in the construction of the hearths.[232] The houses were mainly built of red clay (on a foundation wall of flint and mortar) filled into a timber frame-work and supported by lath or wattle. The exterior was stamped with ornamental patterns, as in modern "parjetting" (which may thus very possibly be an actual survival from Roman days). This clay has in most cases soaked away into a mere layer of red mud overlying the pavements; ...
— Early Britain—Roman Britain • Edward Conybeare
... of houses on the Marina looked seedy and tottering; the Marina itself was in places under-cut and falling into the water; and above us, overtopping the whole city, the Pacha's palace, built on the still substantial, though time-worn and neglected walls of the old Venetian citadel, reared a lath-and-plaster shabbiness against the glow of the western sky, reminding one of an American seaside hotel in the last stages of popularity and profitable tenancy,—great gaps in the plaster showing the flimsiness ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... and the bar of a 5 added. One could see the broken fibers of the paper on the outline of the curl, and the bar of the five lay across the top of the three and the top of the o behind it like a black lath tacked across two uprights. ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... of a narrow strip of lath or shingle, with a hole bored through it near the large end. At this end the line is attached, and the hook thrown in the water. A branch is now inserted through the aperture, and its ends are rested across the opening in the ice. No sooner does the fish bite than the long ...
— Camp Life in the Woods and the Tricks of Trapping and Trap Making • William Hamilton Gibson
... is to be resumed the 1st of March; it will then soon be done, as it is only of lath and plaster, and the roof and wood-work are already prepared.' My indefatigable superintendent goes every morning for two, three, or four hours to his field, to work at a sunk fence that 'IS to protect his garden from our cow. I have sent Mrs. Boscawen, through Miss Cambridge, ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay
... had the energy to get himself a College of Preceptors diploma, and considering how cheap his charges were, I will readily admit the place might have been worse. The building was a dingy yellow-brick residence outside the village, with the schoolroom as an outbuilding of lath ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... that the playhouse was of timber, the exterior of lath and plaster, the roof of thatch; and that it had a yard, galleries, a stage, a tiring-house, heavens, and a flagpole. Thus it differed in no essential way from the playhouses already erected in Shoreditch or subsequently erected on ...
— Shakespearean Playhouses - A History of English Theatres from the Beginnings to the Restoration • Joseph Quincy Adams
... is that room which one rude beam divides, And naked rafters form the sloping sides; Where the vile bands that bind the thatch are seen, And lath and mud are all that lie between, Save one dull pane that coarsely patch'd gives way To the rude tempest, yet excludes the day: There, on a matted flock with dust o'erspread, The drooping wretch reclines his languid head! ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... gone, sir, And anon, sir, I 'll be with you again, In a trice, Like to the old Vice, Your need to sustain; Who, with dagger of lath, In his rage and his wrath, Cries, ah, ha! to the devil: Like a mad lad, Pare thy nails, dad; Adieu, goodman ...
— Twelfth Night; or, What You Will • William Shakespeare [Hudson edition]
... doorway the beggar sat down opposite to him a little further down the street, his head bowed on his bosom. He watched Leh Shin prowl carefully round and climb with monkey-like agility from the rails to the window-ledge, where he peered in through the shutters, raising a broken lath ...
— The Pointing Man - A Burmese Mystery • Marjorie Douie
... cigar lifted, for there had slid into his eyes the startled look of a man listening. He did not move for a few moments; then he turned his head sharply towards the high, thin, and lath-like paling which fenced certain long gardens and similar spaces from the lane. From behind it there was coming a curious scrambling and scraping noise, as of a desperate thing imprisoned in this box of thin wood. The King threw away his cigar, and jumped on to ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... with Cob for his wals, and Thatch for his couering: as for Brick and Lath walles, they can hardly brooke the Cornish weather: and the vse thereof being put in triall by some, was found so vnprofitable, as it is ...
— The Survey of Cornwall • Richard Carew
... the side plates, and studs on the inner edge. The rafters are sawed, four by four inches, and supported by purlins which are framed into heavy beam rafters at the middle and each end of the roof. The whole building is of pine. There was no lath and plaster; the walls were made of matched boards. The ceiling was finished by the joists and underside of the floor above being planed; the floors were double or ...
— The New England Magazine Volume 1, No. 3, March, 1886 - Bay State Monthly Volume 4, No. 3, March, 1886 • Various
... remarks such as, "Tom's bad again; I can't tell what's the matter with him!" "I suppose Ann doesn't come down in the mornings?"—"What's the name of your doctor, Fanny?" "Stubbs?" "He's a quack!"—"Winifred? She's got too many children. Four, isn't it? She's as thin as a lath!"—"What d'you give for this sherry, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... place. All the skeleton-like ribs of the roof showed in the dim light, naked overhead, and the only floor to be trusted consisted of the few boards which bridged the lath and plaster. A great, mysterious brick tower climbed up through it,—it was the chimney, but it looked like a horrible cell to put criminals into. The whole place was festooned with cobwebs,—not light films, such as the housewife's broom sweeps away before they have become a permanent ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... taken to pieces for the purpose of being conveyed to Londonderry. It was then that the accident happened. My men had the misfortune to allow the end of the engine beam to crash through the floor! There was a terrible scattering of lath and plaster and dust. The glass-cutter was in a dreadful state. He rushed forthwith to the landlord, and called upon him to come at once and ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... says the other, whose physical structure somewhat resembled a fat lath, and whose general contour made it self-evident that he was not given much to frivolity, jauntily-fitting coats and breeches, or perfumed and ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... to view the glad sight the five gave a yet more tragic stanza from the farewell to Jane. The source of their delight was not the great ragged hole just over the intruding heads, in the ceiling's lath and plaster, nor was it a whole corner torn off the grand-piano by the somersaulting shell as it leaped from the rent above to the cleaner one it had left at the baseboard in the room's farther end. It was that third hole, burned in the floor; for there it opened, shoulder ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... for it, an' sure enough they found it in a bathroom. It had been escapin' in a small closet at the end o' the bath, and not bein' able to git out, for the door was a tight fit, it had gone away an' filled all the space between the ceilin's an' floors, an' between the lath, and plaster, and the walls. The moment the door in the bath-room was opened all this gas took light an' blowed up like gunpowder. The whole inner skin o' the beautiful drawing-room, ma'am, was blowed into the middle of the room. The cook, who was in the drawin'-room passage, she was blow'd ...
— Fighting the Flames • R.M. Ballantyne
... 17) is devoted to the smaller physical tests of explosives. It was rendered fire resistant by heavily covering the floors, ceiling, and walls with cement on metal lath, and otherwise protecting the openings. In it are installed apparatus for determining calorific value of explosives, pressure produced on ignition, susceptibility to ignition when dropped, rate of detonation, length and ...
— Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, vol. LXX, Dec. 1910 • Herbert M. Wilson
... reason for this prohibition, the shocking jugglery by which simple-minded persons were constantly deceived. They alluded particularly to the practice of working miracles by means of relics, pieces of the holy cross, bones of saints, and the perspiration of statues. They charged that bits of lath were daily exhibited as fragments of the cross; that the bones of dogs and monkeys were held up for adoration as those of saints; and that oil was poured habitually into holes drilled in the heads of statues, that the populace might believe in their miraculous sweating. For these reasons, and ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... cheap at the Experimental Farm, and the banging of guns filled the air. Redwood, careless of Bensington in his excitement, rushed in pursuit, and was knocked headlong by a mass of brick fragments, mortar, plaster, and rotten lath splinters that came flying out at him as a ...
— The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth • H.G. Wells
... forth and took his playthings with him. [4]His little lath-shield[4] he took, and his hurley of bronze and his ball of silver; and he took his little javelin for throwing; and his toy-staff he took with its fire-hardened butt-end, and he began to shorten the length of his journey with them. ...
— The Ancient Irish Epic Tale Tain Bo Cualnge • Unknown
... Cross of Winchester to set it up at Cranbury, but happily the inhabitants of the city were more conservative than their corporation, and made such a demonstration that the bargain was annulled, and the Cross left in its proper place. He consoled himself with erecting a tall lath and plaster obelisk in its stead, which was regarded with admiration by the children of the parish for about sixty years, when weather ...
— John Keble's Parishes • Charlotte M Yonge
... stone. The upper apartments were so constructed as to project over the lower, and considerable ornament both in carved wood and plaster was introduced about the doors and windows and roof of the building. Nevertheless, timber, with lath and plaster, and thatch for the roofs, constituted the chief materials in the dwellings of the English from an early period till near the close of the fourteenth century and beginning of the fifteenth, when bricks began to be used in the better sort ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 573, October 27, 1832 • Various
... to tell about me," began Grace. "I was the tomboy of Oakdale. I loved to climb trees and play baseball and marbles. I was thin as a lath and like live wire. My face was rather thin, too, and I remember I cried a whole afternoon because a little girl at school called me 'saucer-eyes.' There wasn't a suspicion of curl in my hair, and I wore ...
— Grace Harlowe's Second Year at Overton College • Jessie Graham Flower
... of the English capital, as a part of the legislative and judicial structures, in plain view, and on the most frequented square of the vicinity, were houses actually built of wood, and covered with lath ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... the spaniel); and lastly, in the next sentence, speaks of it as "this lath-like bird"! It is as large as a bantam, but can run, like the Allegretta, on floating leaves; itself, weighing about four ounces and a half (Bewick), and rarely uses the wing, flying very slowly. I imagine the 'lath-like' must mean, like the more frequent epithet 'compressed,' that the bird's body is vertically thin, so as to go easily between ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... of the habitants, tillers of the soil, were small cabins, humble but warm, with wide, overhanging eaves, and consisting at most of two rooms. The partition, when there was one, was of boards. Lath and plaster were unknown. The walls within, to the height of a man's shoulders, were worn smooth by the backs that leaned against them. Solid wooden boxes and benches usually took the place of chairs. A clumsy ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... the brigantine there were many sources of uneasiness and anxiety unknown to me in the whale-boat. True, we had now between us and the deep, five hundred good planks to one lath in our buoyant little chip. But the Parki required more care and attention; especially by night, when a vigilant look-out was indispensable. With impunity, in our whale-boat, we might have run close to shoal or reef; whereas, similar carelessness or temerity now, might ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... Park, with its hill and vale, its oaks and beeches, and avenue of immemorial elms, to be owned by the man who six weeks ago had no better shelter than a lath and plaster villa in a French village, and who had found it a hard thing to pay the rent of that trumpery tenement; and yet Sir Reginald Palliser accepted the change in his circumstances as tranquilly as if it had been but a migration from the red room to the blue. He ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... aided them, by agency of brute instinct. One of the horses threw up its head and neighed, and then both pressed forward eagerly. The low moan of penned cattle came down the wind. They crashed into a fence of lath. They passed its end—a broken, rattling end, that trailed and swept back and forth ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough
... it and so that the two will form a continuous roller about a foot longer than the bed with the edge of the curtain firmly fastened in its center. The center of the curtain is secured to the central ridge of the bed by strips of lath. When rolled up, the rollers are held in place by loops of rope around their ends and when they are down they are held by similar loops to the notched tent-pins driven into the ground or to wooden buttons fastened to the sides ...
— Tomato Culture: A Practical Treatise on the Tomato • William Warner Tracy
... wriggled, and saw a long line of lead pipe disappearing up a triangular tunnel, whose roof was the rafters and boarding of the college roof, whose floor was sharp-edged joists, and whose side was the rough studding of the lath and plaster wall under ...
— Stalky & Co. • Rudyard Kipling
... which they provide them with a basis or point of departure for their combs; and they very naturally pay not the slightest heed to the desires or intentions of man. But if the apiarist have taken the precaution of surrounding the upper lath of some of these frames with a narrow fillet of wax, they will be quick to perceive the advantage this tempting offer presents, and will carefully extract the fillet, using their own wax as solder, and will prolong the comb in ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck
... brick walls and chimneys, and build No. 2 new chimneys with stock and picking bricks laid in cement. No. 2 chimney bars, to cope gable ends with old stone. No. 2 hearthstones. No. 2 plain stone chimney-pieces. No. 2—2 ft. 6 in. Register stoves. To lath and plaster ceiling, side walls, and partitions with lime and hair two coats, and set to slate the new roof with good countess slates ...
— A Week's Tramp in Dickens-Land • William R. Hughes
... living at Bath, As grey as a badger, as thin as a lath; And his very queer eyes have such very queer leers, They seem to be trying to peep at his ears; That old Yellow Admiral goes to the Rooms, And he plays long whist, but he frets and he fumes, For all his knaves stand upside down, And the Jack of ...
— The Haunted Hour - An Anthology • Various
... would'scape; He hates the customary bath That thins his tail and spoils his shape, And turns him to a fur-clad lath; ...
— The Vagabond and Other Poems from Punch • R. C. Lehmann
... interesting subject, and is built from designs of well-known architects of Philadelphia, who have taken up building small, inexpensive modern houses in a practical manner. The house is built with a stone foundation and a wooden superstructure with exterior walls covered with metal lath and cement stucco which is stained a cream color. The trimmings are stained a soft brown and the sashes are painted white. The roof is covered with shingles, and is left to weather finish. The front porch, from which a vestibule ...
— Three Acres and Liberty • Bolton Hall
... proved too strong for even Sir William Crookes and his instruments. In Sir William's presence, in fact, there was a multiplication of mysteries. The instruments registered results which seemed inexplicable by any natural law; a lath, cast carelessly on a table, rose in the air, nodded gravely to the astonished scientist, and proceeded to tap out messages alleged to come from the world beyond; chairs moved in ghostly fashion up and down the room; invisible beings lifted Home himself ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce
... to put insistence upon appeal by imagination. Nothing is built up by lath and canvas; everything has to be created ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... calls for ten thousand laid down at Tabernacle, the first of June. We might do that, but how on earth would we ever keep up with the rest? The boxings, the rough lumber, the two by fourteen's finished, the dropped sidings and groved roofing, and lath and ceiling and rough fencings and all the rest? What on earth will we do ...
— The White Desert • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... woollen manufactures, hardware, arms, and ammunition. Accordingly, we took on board some quintals of dry fish, and barrels of flour, and beef, and pork, and pickled fish, and staves, and shingles, and lath-wood, and hoops, and such like productions of the forest. At that time, however, the country did not produce any large quantity of ...
— Old Jack • W.H.G. Kingston
... The lath-like stripling frowned. "Who be you, then, John Durbeyfield, to order me about and call me 'boy'? You know my name as well ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... the counsellor. "What can it be? What is the matter with me?" He turned back in the full conviction that he must be ill. In walking through the street this time, he examined the houses more closely; he found that most of them were built of lath and plaster, and many had ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... came to this England, o'er say and o'er lands, And what cruel hard walkin' I've had on my hands, Is, at this present writin', too tadious to speak, So I'll mintion it all in a postscript, next week:— Only starved I was, surely, as thin as a lath, Till I came to an up-and-down place they call Bath, Where, as luck was, I managed to make a meal's meat, By dhraggin' owld ladies all day thro' the street— Which their docthors (who pocket, like fun, the pound starlins,) Have brought into fashion to plase the owld ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... the floor. But there were no large pieces of mortar lying around—no bits of lathing. When I mentioned this to Liddy she merely raised her eyebrows. Being quite confident that the gap was of unholy origin, she did not concern herself with such trifles as a bit of mortar and lath. No doubt they were even then heaped neatly on a gravestone in ...
— The Circular Staircase • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... over the bridge and up the other side; first, through a Sahara of dust, then, when the rains began, ankle-deep in gluey red mud. And the building of the finest mansion never gave half so much satisfaction as did that of this flimsy little wooden house, with its thin lath-and-plaster walls. In fancy they had furnished it and lived in it, long before it was even roofed in. Mahony sat at work in his surgery—it measured ten by twelve—Polly at her Berlin-woolwork in the parlour opposite: "And a cage with a little parrot ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... and down the study for hours, smoking furiously and affirming that tobacco was the only thing that kept his nerves quiet'. Green compares him to a restless animal, and Stopford Brooke speaks of his quick-rushing walk, his keen face like a sword, and his body thinned out to a lath, and complains that he 'often screams when he ought to speak'. But this excitability was soothed by the country, and in his own parish he was at his best. He would never have been so beloved by his parishioners, if they had not found him willing ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... Sherman were just preparing to rush up the ladder armed with villainous-looking battle-axes made out of old lath, when Alice ...
— Chicken Little Jane • Lily Munsell Ritchie
... and a string was tied to the end of it, and thence carried along the wall, under the benches, to the seat of a mischievous boy, and fastened to a nail. By pulling the string he could spring the lath, and then let it snap back to its place. He left every thing as it was, and the next day, while engaged in a lesson, he ...
— The Teacher • Jacob Abbott
... at the remains of ancient Arles. But first of all let me observe that the Arles race prides itself on its singular purity of descent. There was, unquestionably, a Gaulish settlement there. The Keltic name Ar-lath, the "moist habitation," tells us as much. So does the legend of Protis and Gyptis, already related. But it was speedily occupied by a large Greek contingent, and the race was formed of Greek and Gaulish ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould
... while hesitating as to the expense and seeking to provide some remedy against the dampness incident to iron beams, Mr. Fowler learned from the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN that Edwin May, of Indianapolis, the well-known architect of our county jail, had taken letters patent on a fire-proof lath for ceilings and inside partition walls, together with a concrete floor for the protection of the upper edge of the joist which by actual test had been demonstrated to be fire-proof. After a critical examination of the invention upon its merits, it was adopted, ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... Ministry. {141} Sir Hector Langevin, the senior of the triumvirate, had been the lieutenant of Cartier, but, in this instance, the mantle of Elijah had not fallen upon his successor. In my experience I never met a man who more neatly fulfilled Bismarck's cynical description of Lord Salisbury—'a lath painted to look like iron.' He was a good departmental officer—but he was nothing more. The moment Sir John Macdonald's support was taken away, he fell. Yet Sir John stood by him against the attacks of his opponents, and generally sided with him in his differences ...
— The Day of Sir John Macdonald - A Chronicle of the First Prime Minister of the Dominion • Joseph Pope
... superior grade of oil paper is manufactured which is suitable even for clothing, and is so used. It has been mentioned how universally a certain grade is used in place of glass; paper is also employed for partitions of rooms in place of lath and plaster; for fans, an immense amount is required; also, for cases and boxes, for twine, letter-bags, purses, umbrellas, and ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... first time he realized that he had been walking on "made ground." The water chugged restlessly against the uneven ends of the lath-like slabs, thousands of them laid, side by side, down to and below the water's surface. They formed a substructure on which the sawdust had been heaped. Deep shadows darted from their shelter and withdrew, ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... jug. He would be a bold man that bid ten shillings for the lot, unless he bought them as a going concern. A cheap and nasty paper covers the wall, excepting where pieces have been torn away, and the broken walls are made of lath and plaster, to provide splendid cover for innumerable insects which remain ...
— London's Underworld • Thomas Holmes
... next day's rations, it isn't seventy millions of revenue the land would be paying—it's seven hundred millions," said he: and as I looked at his mouth and chin I was disposed to agree with him. We talked politics—the politics of Loaferdom that sees things from the underside where the lath and plaster is not smoothed off—and we talked postal arrangements because my friend wanted to send a telegram back from the next station to Ajmir, which is the turning-off place from the Bombay to the Mhow line as you travel westward. My friend had no ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... the Bull. 'Right underneath the castle is a pig-sty, where you are to dwell. When you come thither you'll find a wooden cloak, all made of strips of lath; that you must put on, and go up to the castle and say your name is "Katie Woodencloak", and ask for a place. But before you go, you must take your penknife and cut my head off, and then you must flay me, and roll up the hide, and lay it under the wall of rock yonder, and under the hide ...
— Popular Tales from the Norse • Sir George Webbe Dasent
... a mill were similar in their arrangement to those of a dwelling. Joists connecting the beams supported the floor; and the under side was covered over by sheathing or lath and plaster, thus forming, as in the case of the roof, hollow spaces which were a source of danger. This method caused at the same time an extravagant distribution of material, by the prodigal use of lumber and the unnecessary thickness of such floors, and entailed ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 647, May 26, 1888 • Various
... lacigxo. Lasso kaptosxnuro. Last (continue) dauxri. Last lasta. Last but one antauxlasta. Latch pordrisorto, fermilo. Late malfrua. Late, to be malfrui. Late (deceased) mortinto. Lately antaux ne longe. Lateness malfrueco. Latent kasxita. Lateral flanka. Lath paliseto. Lathe tornilo. Lather sapumi. Lather sapumajxo, sxauxmajxo. Latin Latina. Latter lasta, tiu cxi. Lattice palisplektajxo. Laud lauxdi. Laudable lauxdebla. Laudation lauxdego. Laugh ridi. Laughable ridinda. Laughter ridado. Laundress lavistino. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... yourself liable to an attack of nervous prostration you should never watch a skilful workman nailing on lath. It is the most bewildering spectacle you can conceive of. I watched it for twenty minutes one day—it was when they were lathing the big front room downstairs, the library, and my brain began to reel as if I were intoxicated. I actually believe that if Uncle Si had ...
— The House - An Episode in the Lives of Reuben Baker, Astronomer, and of His Wife, Alice • Eugene Field
... rude-carved crosses near the path: Yet deem not these devotion's offering— These are memorials frail of murderous wrath; For, wheresoe'er the shrieking victim hath Pour'd forth his blood beneath the assassin's knife, Some hand erects a cross of mouldering lath; And grove and glen with thousand such are rife, Throughout this purple land, where law secures ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... falls from the main band-saw, the slabs are carried off by transfer chains, and by another set of five rollers to the "slasher," Fig. 50, which consists of a line of circular-saws placed 4' 1" apart. This slasher cuts up the slabs into lengths suitable for lath or fence-pickets. Fig. 49. Or they can be resawn into 16" lengths for shingles ...
— Handwork in Wood • William Noyes
... rooms it is assorted, counted, and put up in packages of one hundred each, and tied with cords like lath, when it is ready for shipment. Bird's-eye maple veneer is much more valuable and requires more care than almost any other, and this is packed in cases instead of tied in bundles. The drying process is usually a slow one, and conducted in open sheds ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 286 - June 25, 1881 • Various
... heavy rains, and excessive heat. So careful is a creole to provide against these casualties, that his residence serves less as an abode for comfort than as a place of shelter. It has a single storey, and is roofed with Roman tiles. The walls are of lath and plaster, or mamposteria, as it is called, and the beams which support the roof are visible from the interior as they are in a barn. Some of the apartments are paved with marble, while others are paved with brick. In the centre of the spacious reception-room, or sala, is laid a small square ...
— The Pearl of the Antilles, or An Artist in Cuba • Walter Goodman
... blow out in a high wind unless it is protected by braces. I have found it not harmful to a tree to fasten laths to the stock for holding the growing scion, driving galvanized iron nails through the lath directly into the stock. Unless growing grafts are well braced by some method the entire season's work may be lost in two minutes of a gale preceding a thunderstorm in summer. By the slot bark method, in other words, we may catch more grafts and lose more grafts ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Eleventh Annual Meeting - Washington, D. C. October 7 AND 8, 1920 • Various
... done, without loitering to see it float, he swung himself slowly round, and let himself glide over the edge of the roof as far as his armpits, resting suspended by the elbows. Critical moment! If but a lath, but a nail should break—He had no time to make this alarming reflection; he was too much occupied in drawing towards him with his feet the rope, and when at length he succeeded, detaching his left arm from the roof, he seized the corbel firmly, and soon after, ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne
... roofs, or on the tops of his sloping terraces, afterwards to be covered with soil and laid out into gardens. Such, it seems, was that portion of the framework of our great globe which corresponded to the hollow lath and plaster framework of the little globes used in schools; while its uppermost layer,—correspondent with the slips of the map which the geographer pastes on the model and then varnishes,—was formed of earth and water, economically laid out into "most useful and tasteful configurations,"—the ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... witchcraft of rebellion Transform'd t' a feeble state-camelion, 370 By giving aim from side to side, He never fail'd to save his tide, But got the start of ev'ry state, And at a change ne'er came too late; Cou'd turn his word, and oath, and faith, 375 As many ways as in a lath; By turning, wriggle, like a screw, Int' highest trust, and out, for new. For when h' had happily incurr'd, Instead of hemp, to be preferr'd, 380 And pass'd upon a government, He pay'd his trick, and out he went But, being out, and out ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... grew louder in the recall. It surged up to the roof and quivered along the lath and plaster partitions of ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... I come, in manhood's fiery noon, To steal his laurels from the stage buffoon; His sword of lath the harlequin may wield; Behold the star upon my lifted shield Though the just critic pass my humble name, And sweeter lips have drained the cup of fame, While my gay stanza pleased the banquet's lords, The soul within was tuned to deeper chords! Say, shall my arms, in other conflicts ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... strongly and showed greater endurance because he had the beef and had been better nourished all his life than the scrawny young powder boy who was more like a lath. Now and then Jack paused to tread water while his shipmate clung to his shoulder and husbanded his waning strength, with that indomitable grin on his freckled phiz. Of one thing they were thankful, that the tide was bearing them farther away ...
— Blackbeard: Buccaneer • Ralph D. Paine
... away! The light grew, and with it the conviction that he was in no sepulchre. But there the consolation ceased, for the still growing light revealed no sign of ministration or comfort. Above him was a bare, dirty, stained ceiling, with a hole in it, through which stuck skeleton ribs of lath; around him were bare, dirty-white walls, that seemed to grow out of the gray light of a wet morning as the natural deposit from such a solution. Two slender poles, meant to support curtains, but ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... nest as she chooses. These nests may be built by using twelve-inch boards set on edge, so as to form a series of small runways about one by six feet. In one end are built the nests, which are covered by a broad board, while the remainder of the arrangement is covered with lath or netting. The food, grit and water should be placed at the opposite end of the runway. Care should be taken to locate these nests on well-drained ground. Arrangements should be made to close the front of the nest during hatching so that the chicks will ...
— The Dollar Hen • Milo M. Hastings
... the more they fumbled, Till, giving way at last with a scold Of the crazy hinge, in squeezed or tumbled One sheep more to the rest in fold, And left me irresolute, standing sentry In the sheepfold's lath-and-plaster entry, Six feet long by three feet wide, Partitioned off from the vast inside— I blocked up half of it at least. No remedy; the rain kept driving. They eyed me much as some wild beast, That congregation, still arriving, ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... slender as a thread. [in reference to people or animals] emaciated, lean, meager, gaunt, macilent[obs3]; lank, lanky; weedy, skinny; scrawny slinky[U.S.]; starved, starveling; herring gutted; worn to a shadow, lean as a rake [Chaucer]; thin as a lath, thin as a whipping post, thin as a wafer; hatchet-faced; lantern-jawed. attenuated, shriveled, extenuated, tabid[obs3], ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... nearer removing than he was a year ago. Indeed he has said confidentially to several people, that even if his new house were all ready for him, he could not, with his asthmatic tendency, think of entering it for a twelvemonth or so, till the lath and plaster should be properly seasoned. Of all this, however, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... passed over my head, and the scene was somewhat changed. The king and his family migrated from their little lodge into the old and spacious castle. This was about 1804. The lath and plaster of Sir William Chambers was abandoned to the equerries and chance visiters of the court; and the low rooms and dark passages that had scarcely been tenanted since the days of Anne, were made tolerably ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13, No. 355., Saturday, February 7, 1829 • Various
... Clay frae gladius verra likly; an' more 's the Gaelic for great: claymore, great sword. Blin' as my gran'father is, ye wad sweer he had fochten in 's day, gien ye hard hoo he'll gar't whurr an' whustle aboot 's heid as gien 't war a bit lath o' wud." ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... into the improvements and repairs which were to make Stoneleigh habitable for the Hon. John, who, greatly to their astonishment, came suddenly upon them one day when they were ankle deep in brick and mortar and lath and plaster, and all the other paraphernalia attendant ...
— Bessie's Fortune - A Novel • Mary J. Holmes
... at which the whole vessel trembled fore and aft. A crash - a rushing forward - and a shriek were heard, and when they had recovered their eyesight, the foremast had been rent by the lightning as if it had been a lath, and the ship was in flames: the men at the wheel, blinded by the lightning, as well as appalled, could not steer; the ship broached to - away went the mainmast over the side - and all was wreck, confusion, ...
— Masterman Ready • Captain Marryat
... doores, that from the two side iles of the chancell of this church, and two that thorow the head of the chancell (as at this day they doe againe) went into it, were lath't, daub'd, and dam'd up: the faire pillars were ordinary posts against which they piled billets and bavens: in this place they had their ovens, in that a bolting place, in that their kneading trough, in another (I have heard) a hogs-trough; for the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 19, No. 536, Saturday, March 3, 1832. • Various
... to me,' replied Sam, 'for I can't bear it. He's close to the door. I hear him a-knockin' his head again the lath ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... leave' to him, I promise'e. He can look on an' see the coat rottin' off my back in this desert an' watch his darter gwaine thin as a lath along o' taking so much thought. He can look on at us, hisself so comfortable as a maggot in a pear, an' see. Not that I'd take help—not a penny from any man. I'm not gwaine to fail. I'll be a ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... cow-boy band away, Full of revengeful wrath, And Kendall Evans rode ahead Upon a hickory lath. ...
— Love-Songs of Childhood • Eugene Field
... a back room, at the top of the house, sitting by the fire in an easy-chair, wrapped in a blanket. He was as thin as a lath and his face was a bright yellow. The very whites of his eyes were yellow. I would have said you never saw a more miserable object, but that Jevons was not miserable. He was happy. And as far as his devastated condition would allow him, he looked happy. This ...
— The Belfry • May Sinclair
... that the ceilings were of wood. The ceilings were decorated by being put on in panels. The ceiling of the cabinet would not have been like that of the room had the closet been a part of the architect's plans of the house. It was not, but was made by the medium. He simply built a lath and plaster partition from the corner of a wide chimney to the wall, thus inclosing a space of six by four feet. The panel in the ceiling of the closet was twenty inches square. This panel was "doctored" and could be displaced, ...
— The Lock and Key Library/Real Life #2 • Julian Hawthorne
... Rodney got out! How d'you s'pose? One of the old panels, in the music room, slides back, and there's a flight of stone steps down to a cellar that's right alongside our regular cellar, with only a six inch cement-and-lath wall between. It leads out, to the tunnel. Right at that turn where the old-time shoring is. The shoring hides a little door. And we never dared move the props because we thought it held up the tunnel-roof. It's ...
— Black Caesar's Clan • Albert Payson Terhune
... tug at the frail bell-rope sent a shrill alarum half-way through the long lath-and-plaster row of Paradise Place, and left the instrument of the sound in the hand ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... needed that council, surely he did; But the wile has now succeeded—he wanders from his path; The cloud its lightning sendeth, and its bolt the stout oak rendeth, And the arbutus back bendeth in the whirlwind, as a lath! Now and then the moon looks out, but, alas! its pale face hath ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... had got out the tool-drawer from his chest, and was busily attacking the lath which kept in place the sliding-door ...
— Mother Carey's Chicken - Her Voyage to the Unknown Isle • George Manville Fenn
... he rejoined, "look at me! Six feet three, and thin as a lath. I 'm what you might call a walking skeleton, ready to disjoint, as the poet says, and eat all my meals in fear, which I would do if 't wa'n't for this little 'Friend.' I can't eat without it. I miss it more when I ...
— The Hills of Hingham • Dallas Lore Sharp
... dread. But what was the character of the man himself? Was he saint or sinner, or just ordinary, normal man, with a usual allowance of faults and virtues? Was he a man of real force, or was he painted lath? The Chichester episodes seemed to point to the latter conclusion. But Malling was too intelligent to take everything at its surface value. He knew much of the trickery of man, but that knowledge did not blind him to the mystery of man. He had exposed ...
— The Dweller on the Threshold • Robert Smythe Hichens
... Take your independence and be gone. Rush up and down and round the world, and come back as thin as a lath with the bad food. Despise the house that your father built and the garden that he planted, and our dear view—and then share a flat ...
— A Room With A View • E. M. Forster
... each floor. A cut-off half way up is an additional safeguard. The horizontal passages between the floor-joists should also be closed in a similar manner, otherwise the smoke and sparks from a burning lath next the kitchen stove-pipe will come up through the cracks in the floor of the parlor, chamber, or around some remote fireplace, where the insurance agent will be assured 'there hadn't been a fire kindled for six months.' These occasional dampers ...
— The House that Jill Built - after Jack's had proved a failure • E. C. Gardner
... pale woman, was listlessly stringing the warping-bars with hanks of variegated yarn. The grandmother, who conserved a much more active and youthful interest in life, took down a brown gourd used as a scrap-basket that was on a protruding lath of the clay-and-stick chimney, and hunted among the scraps of homespun and bits of yarn stowed within it. The room was much like the gourd in its aged brown tint; its indigenous aspect, as if it had not been made with hands, but was some spontaneous production of the soil; ...
— The Riddle Of The Rocks - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... over the Seine. A tiny garden, reclaimed from the waters, displayed at the foot of this modest dwelling its beds of cabbages and onions, and a few rose-bushes, sheltered by palings, forming a sort of hedge. A little structure of lath and mud served as a kennel for a big dog, the indispensable guardian of so lonely a dwelling. Beyond this kennel was a little plot, where the hens cackled whose eggs were sold to the Canons. Here and there on this patch of earth, muddy or dry according to the whimsical Parisian weather, ...
— The Exiles • Honore de Balzac
... nineteen years of age, the Maid of Arc underwent her martyrdom. She was conducted before mid-day, guarded by eight hundred spearmen, to a platform of prodigious height, constructed of wooden billets supported by occasional walls of lath and plaster, and traversed by hollow spaces in every direction for the creation of air-currents. The pile "struck terror," says M. Michelet, "by its height;" and, as usual, the English purpose in this is viewed as one of pure malignity. But there are two ways ...
— Journeys Through Bookland - Volume Four • Charles H. Sylvester
... gained a convert and I a wife. Hugues and Mathilde came to live on our estate. And Mlle. Celeste, in course of time, was married to a raw young Gascon as lean as a lath, as poor as a fiddler, and as thirsty as a Dutchman, but with moustaches twice as long as those of Brignan ...
— The Bright Face of Danger • Robert Neilson Stephens
... reverse of this. In the present work of men, meanness, aimlessness, unsightliness: thin-walled, lath-divided, narrow-garreted houses of clay; booths of a darksome Vanity Fair, ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... been strongly urged in inner army circles for the place that Westerling had won, but his manner and his inability to court influence were against him A lath of a man and stiff as a lath, pale, with thin, tightly-drawn lips, quiet, steel-gray eyes, a tracery of blue veins showing on his full temples, he suggested the ascetic no less than the soldier, while his ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... beloved of emperors, statesmen and poets—ever existed. But when he is shown the enormous sub-structures lying under water, and the masses of solid masonry wherewith the surrounding hills are over-spread, incredulity gives place to amazement. What towns of lath and plaster are Brighton, Newport and Trouville, when compared with this 'Rome by the sea,' where the materials used for the foundations of a single villa would more than suffice for the construction of a dozen 'genteel marine residences' of ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... ac'rid big'ot blus'ter ca'ter blank'et bil'let cus'tom fla'grant clas'sic blis'ter cut'ler fra'grant crag'gy cin'der cut'ter has'ty dam'sel crick'et sum'mer ha'tred dan'dy fif'ty sun'der la'bel fab'ric fil'let shud'der pa'tent fam'ish lim'pid thun'der sa'cred fran'tic pil'fer tum'bler state'ment lath'er pil'lar ul'cer ...
— McGuffey's Eclectic Spelling Book • W. H. McGuffey
... different as the doctor himself in his broadcloth, among the smock-frocks of his patients. The village residences seemed to have gone to law with a similar absence of consideration, for a score of weak little lath-and-plaster cabins clung in confusion about the Attorney's red-brick house, which, with glaring door-steps and a most terrific scraper, seemed to serve all manner of ejectments upon them. They were as various as labourers—high-shouldered, ...
— Tom Tiddler's Ground • Charles Dickens
... tall, ebony lath, with a bald head and meek eyes, had come out of another family and was treated with condescension. No one knew how often he was reminded of his lower estate; but it was often enough, for he was always in a somewhat ...
— Mam' Lyddy's Recognition - 1908 • Thomas Nelson Page
... corner posts, five-eighths of an inch square, and five inches in length; with a saw, thick enough to fit the glass, cut a channel length-wise on two sides, one-fourth of an inch deep, one-eighth from the corner, for the glass. A small lath nail through each corner of the bottom into the posts will hold them; it is now ready for the glass—10x12 is the right size to get—have them cut through the centre the longest way for the sides, and they are right, and again the other way, five and five-eighths long for the ends. These can ...
— Mysteries of Bee-keeping Explained • M. Quinby
... approaching completion, but still in a state of rawness hideous to George—though, for that matter, they were never to be anything except hideous to him. Behind them, stray planks, bricks, refuse of plaster and lath, shingles, straw, empty barrels, strips of twisted tin and broken tiles were strewn everywhere over the dried and pitted gray mud where once the suave lawn had lain like a green lake around those stately islands, the two Amberson houses. And George's state ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington |
