"Maul" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... seem to have been excavated without the aid of other tools than a rough maul or a piece of stone held in the hand, and such a tool is well adapted to the work, since a blow on the surface of the rock is sufficient to bring off large slabs. Notwithstanding the rude tools and methods, however, some of the work ...
— Aboriginal Remains in Verde Valley, Arizona • Cosmos Mindeleff
... clutched the painted casse-tete with which he had aimed a silently murderous blow at the Sagamore. Grey-Feather drew the death-maul from the dead warrior's grasp, and handed ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... Look at Great-heart, with his soldierly ways, garrison ways, as I had almost called them; with his taste in weapons; his delight in any that 'he found to be a man of his hands'; his chivalrous point of honour, letting Giant Maul get up again when he was down, a thing fairly flying in the teeth of the moral; above all, with his language in the inimitable tale of Mr. Fearing: 'I thought I should have lost my man'—'chicken-hearted'—'at last he came in, and I will say that for my lord, he carried it wonderful ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... sorts: one quite heavy, almost like a sledge-hammer or maul, and with a short handle; the other much lighter, and with a longer, more limber handle. This last was used by men in war as a mace or war club, while the heavier hammer was used by women as an axe to break up fallen trees for firewood; as a hammer to drive tent-pins ...
— Blackfeet Indian Stories • George Bird Grinnell
... family. When she turned to call her cubs and give them the meat she slightly removed her weight from him. With a writhe he scrambled to get away. No use. She was after him at once; so were the cubs, as eager as she. They did not mean that their supper should escape. The whole family commenced to maul him. The mother seized him by the shoulder and straddled him; she bit, the two cubs bit and raked. He was only a toy to them, and being rapidly gashed to ribbons he would have died then and there had not his shouts and the growling of ...
— Boys' Book of Frontier Fighters • Edwin L. Sabin
... who made the boxes groan, And shook the stage with thunders all his own! Stood up to dash each vain Pretender's hope, Maul the French tyrant, or pull down the Pope! If there's a Briton then, true bred and born, Who holds Dragoons and wooden shoes in scorn; If there's a critic of distinguished rage; If there's a senior who contemns this age; Let him ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... of it? He had expected to die, and, after all, what might Sheeta have done for him other than to maul a couple of his enemies before a rifle in the hands of one of the whites should ...
— The Beasts of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... why a courageous young woman requires of high heaven, far more than the commendably timid, a doughty husband. She had him; otherwise would that puzzled old world, which beheld her step out of the ranks to challenge it, and could not blast her personal reputation, have commissioned a paw to maul her character, perhaps instructing the gossips to murmur of her parentage. Nesta Victoria Fenellan had the husband who would have the world respectful to any brave woman. This one was ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... it into the cylinder, discovering in the process why the chute Section hands at Base wore that harried look. The mass of slithering, incompressible white-and-yellow ribbon and its shrouds resisted him like a live thing; in the end Johnny managed to bat and maul the obstreperous stuff down the length of the tank. Even so, it filled it to within a couple of inches ...
— Far from Home • J.A. Taylor
... to wrest a new truth from the arcana of science.... We remember hearing a brother artist describe him in his studio at Home, engaged for hours upon a picture, deftly shifting palette, cigar, and maul-stick from hand to hand, as occasion required; absorbed, rapid, intent, and then suddenly breaking from his quiet task to vent his constrained spirits in a jovial song, or a romp with his great dog, whose vociferous barking he thoroughly enjoyed; and often abandoning ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... thee, this third time, Moby Dick! On deck there!—brace sharper up; crowd her into the wind's eye. He's too far off to lower yet, Mr. Starbuck. The sails shake! Stand over that helmsman with a top-maul! So, so; he travels fast, and I must down. But let me have one more good round look aloft here at the sea; there's time for that. An old, old sight, and yet somehow so young; aye, and not changed a wink since I first saw it, a boy, from the sand-hills of Nantucket! The same!—the same!—the ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various
... and serious accident. Spike mauls should weigh not less than nine nor more than ten pounds, and should be on straight handles, not less than 3 ft. long. After considerable use, the face of the maul will become somewhat rounded, and when this takes place it should be sent to the shop to be redressed. The last blow on the spike should be only sufficiently hard to cause its throat to fit snugly on the rail; a harder blow will often fracture the spike ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 794, March 21, 1891 • Various
... are only a joker, yet sometimes you must be ranked among grave authors. You have written sage and learned dissertations on history and other weighty matters. The critics have therefore an undoubted right to maul you; they find you in their province. But if any of them dare to come into mine, I will order Gargantua to swallow them up, as he did the six pilgrims, in the ...
— Dialogues of the Dead • Lord Lyttelton
... life I was much given to abstraction of thought, and I am still down with the same disease. From morning till night, between the plow-handles or swinging the maul, I was absorbed in reflection. My reading and other studies raised many questions that I sought to find out. Natural philosophy and the elements of astronomy were subjects of peculiar delight, and would cause me to become oblivious of all surroundings. This frequently got me into ...
— Autobiography of Frank G. Allen, Minister of the Gospel - and Selections from his Writings • Frank G. Allen
... out on the verge of newspapers and books. Each one does the work of three, and these men sit up late nights, and choke down chunks of meat without mastication, and scold their wives through irritability, and maul innocent authors, and run the physical machinery with a liver miserably given out. The driving shaft has gone fifty times a second. They stop at no station. The steam-chest is hot and swollen. The brain and the digestion begin to smoke. Stop, ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... fell short of my hero in other ways. He looked like a fat man and his fiddling was only middling, therefore, notwithstanding his prowess with the axe and the maul, he remained subordinate to David, and though they never came to a test of strength we were perfectly sure that David was the finer man. His supple grace and his unconquerable ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... is a beauty. An' if he takes a likin' to you he'll love you, play with you, maul ...
— The Man of the Forest • Zane Grey
... Jiminy Gordon. "Romper's got an idea—first he ever had in his life. Come, spit it out, and if it isn't any better than the rest we've been listening to, we'll maul you—won't we, fellows?" ...
— The Boy Scout Fire Fighters • Irving Crump
... scourge, lash, trounce, thrash, flog, maul, drub, switch, spank, bastinado.> (This group limits the field of the Punish group in Exercise A, and extends the list ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... answered in his native Hamburg dialect, "So gehts im Leben! 'S giebt gar kein Use"—Such is life; it gives hardly any use (to inquire?). In much the same way Schubert made reply to one who asked the meaning of the opening subject of the slow movement of his C major symphony: "Halt's Maul, du verfluchter Narr!"—Don't ask such ...
— A Book of Burlesques • H. L. Mencken
... because they were Protestants as we are; but, Gads zoors, had they been Dutch Papists I had maul'd them: but Conscience— ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume IV. • Aphra Behn
... all day long, break his pipe with his teeth and maul his crew. After he had sworn by every known term at everything that came his way he would rid himself of his remaining anger on the fish and lobsters, which he pulled from the nets and threw into the baskets amid oaths and foul ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... singulari iustitia ac probitate praeditus, Jacobus Strimger Comestabulis Deidoni magno animo vir ac insigni virtute, et ad posteros clarus, Alexander Irrvein a Drum ob praecipuum robur conspicuus, Robertus Maul a Pammoir, Thomas Moravus, Wilhelmus Abernethi a Salthon, Alexander Strathon a Loucenstoun, Robertus Davidstoun Aberdoniae praefectus; hi omnes equites aurati cum multis aliis nobilibus eo praelio occubere. Donaldus ...
— An Outline of the Relations between England and Scotland (500-1707) • Robert S. Rait
... at his peril. Breadalbane promised to cut off the retreat of the fugitives on one side, Mac Callum More on another. It was fortunate, the Secretary wrote, that it was winter. This was the time to maul the wretches. The nights were so long, the mountain tops so cold and stormy, that even the hardiest men could not long bear exposure to the open air without a roof or a spark of fire. That the women and the children could find ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... a boy fought the battle of life with ax, hoe, maul, adz, shovel, pick, mattock, drawshave, rake and pitchfork. Wool was carded and spun and woven by hand. The grist was carried to the mill on horseback, or if the roads were bad, on the farmer's back. All this pioneer experience came to James J. Hill as a necessary part ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... Zeus, no longer line by line I'll maul your phrases: but with heaven to aid I'll smash your prologues with ...
— The Frogs • Aristophanes
... customs, wild and extravagant as the expression of sorrow appears to be, everything is regulated by certain definite rules; and a woman who did not thus maul herself when she ought to do so would be severely punished, or even killed, by her brother. Similarly with the men, it is only those who stand in certain relationships to the deceased who must cut and hack themselves ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... Why you maul-headed, misshapen blotch on the face o' nature, what do you mean by callin' this dog a cur! I never saw this dog before to-day; but I'll bet ten to one that I can find out who his great-great-grandfather's great-great-grandfather was; ...
— Happy Hawkins • Robert Alexander Wason
... way. Arbuthnot is no more my friend, Who dares to irony pretend, Which I was born to introduce, Refined it first, and showed its use. St. John, as well as Pultney, knows, That I had some repute for prose; And, till they drove me out of date, Could maul a minister of state. If they have mortified my pride, And made me throw my pen aside: If with such talents Heaven has blessed 'em, Have I not ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... of the still darker companion-way to avoid detection. My alarm was groundless, however; for the newcomer proved to be Joe Maxwell, the carpenter, whom I saw enter the saloon, after a careful reconnaissance of its interior, with several plugs under one arm, and a maul in his hand. Seeing who it was, I followed him, and unexpectedly ran against him as he ...
— The Pirate Slaver - A Story of the West African Coast • Harry Collingwood
... supply which their elders had brought with them; for even the knowing Younkins, scrutinizing the tools for woodcraft with a critical eye, remarked, "That's a good outfit, for a party of green settlers." Six stout wedges of chilled iron, and a heavy maul to hammer them with, were to be used for the splitting up of the big trees into smaller sections. Wooden wedges met the wants of many people in those primitive parts, at times, and the man who had a good set of iron ...
— The Boy Settlers - A Story of Early Times in Kansas • Noah Brooks
... brute was in mid-spring, her cruel claws outspread to maul the unhappy reporter, a great spear whizzed straight at her and buried itself in her heart just behind the left shoulder. With a howl of pain the brute fell short in her spring and, before she could make another ...
— The Boy Aviators in Africa • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... softly about, and his hands fell on a club-like maul which fishermen use for stunning the large fish they catch. There was nothing else near in the shape of a weapon. He passed the maul to Bart, and clutched one of the shoes as a club ...
— Frank Merriwell's Reward • Burt L. Standish
... that the shape was human. It had the head and shoulders of a man, and a torso that could twist with muscular purpose, and massive hands that could maul and maim. It threw the hapless man from it with a sudden convulsive contraction of its entire bulk. I had never seen a human being move in quite that way, but even as its violence flared its manlike ...
— The Man the Martians Made • Frank Belknap Long
... clean. In her bows lay a tiny anchor, two jugs of water, and some seventy fathoms of thin, brown dory-roding. A tin dinner-horn rested in cleats just under Harvey's right hand, beside an ugly-looking maul, a short gaff, and a shorter wooden stick. A couple of lines, with very heavy leads and double cod-hooks, all neatly coiled on square reels, were stuck in their ...
— "Captains Courageous" • Rudyard Kipling
... good-humoured irony, and the toothless mouth relaxes in frank laughter. What was the secret of this gaiety? In spite of his poverty, he had still a corner in which to paint. Beside him stand an easel and an antique bust, perhaps a relic of his former wealth. He holds his maul-stick in his hand, and pauses for a moment in his work. He is happy because he can give ...
— Rembrandt • Mortimer Menpes
... nights and a day, while he would make folks laugh all over the county, he would make us ashamed; for he never failed to give everything a tint of his own color. So I went to him and told him that if he said a word about it, I should maul him into a slop and feed him to the hogs. This was my ...
— Vandemark's Folly • Herbert Quick
... who turn a shop head over heels, maul sixty yards of ribbon and buy six, which being sent home insatiable becomes your desire to change it for other six which you had fairly, closely, and with all the powers of your mind compared with it during the seventy minutes the purchase occupied, let me respectfully inform you that ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... way that her fingers didn't just itch to get at it. He had to pull every ragweed on each side of the road as far as our land reached, and lay every rail straight in the fences. Father had to take spikes and our biggest maul and go to the bridges at the foot of the Big and the Little Hill, and see that every plank was fast, so none of them would rattle when important guests drove across. She said she just simply wouldn't have them in such a condition that ...
— Laddie • Gene Stratton Porter
... fat bawson[315], peace, Seest not this fatal engine of my wrath? Villain, I'll maul thee for thine old offences, And grind thy bones to powder with this pestle! You, when I had no weapons to defend me, Could beat me out of doors; but now prepare: Make thyself ready, for thou shalt not 'scape. Thus doth the great revengeful Appetite Upon his fat foe ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... ice, And hunts in mighty wool-racks after mice; Mornings with buckwheat when the fields did blanch With White Leghorns come from the chicken ranch; Days near the spring upon the sunburnt hill, Plying the maul or gripping tight the drill; Delights of work most real, delights that change The headache life of towns to rapture strange Not known by townsmen, nor imagined; health That puts new glory upon mental ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various
... inasmuch that in each there was work. Here a man was working with his hoe in his pumpkin patch; there another cared for his maize; a third was splitting shingles for the roof of a shed he was building; a fourth was splitting logs with a heavy maul and wedge for fencing rails; a fifth was fixing water-tanks to be ready when the rain came; while a sixth was digging a waterhole in the hard, baked earth also to be ready for the rain. On every selection, as it came into Marmot's mind, there was work ...
— Colonial Born - A tale of the Queensland bush • G. Firth Scott
... set him to elevating the beam across the top of the door leading to the kitchen—quite an easy job. He only had to put in a few hours of patient overhead sawing and split out the chunks with wedges and a maul. ...
— Dwellers in Arcady - The Story of an Abandoned Farm • Albert Bigelow Paine
... iron hammer, used for driving tree-nails or bolts; it has one end faced, and the opposite pointed, whence it is often called a pin-maul.—Top-maul is distinguished by having an iron handle, with an eye at the end, by which it is tied fast to the mast-head. It is kept aloft for driving the iron fid in or out of ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... most obscene, May have designs upon the Dove; Its carrion taste was never keen On the Millennial reign of Love; And I, for one, am stiff with fear About our little friend's career, Lest that disgusting fowl should maul And eat it, ...
— Punch, Volume 156, 26 March 1919 • Various
... jibboom of what must have been a sturdily-built boat, while the broken mast of a cutter fitted in splendidly as a ridge-pole. For the walls I visited an old bean-tree log in the jungle, cut off blocks in suitable lengths, and split them with maul and wedges into rough slabs, roughly adzed away superfluous thickness, and carried them one by one to the brink of the canyon, down which I cast them. Then each had to be carried up the steep side and on to the site, the ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... dead at my feet!" They further testified that the rector was very quick-tempered, and that when angered he did not hesitate to strike out with whatever came into his hand. He had struck a former hand once with a heavy maul. ...
— The Continental Classics, Volume XVIII., Mystery Tales • Various
... an' makes fer th' dure, wid us follyin' um, afther providin' oursilves wid what utinsils wuz layin' handy—a scythe here an' an axe there, an' some wan ilse wid a pitchfork. Rad brung up lasht wid a sixteen-pound posht-maul, bein' in no hurry at all ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx
... goin' to schleep dere? You vant me to come an' fetch you?? You vant anodder schmack on de maul to keep ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... maul upon his chist, the gauge, and the ould claw-bar-r-r, And while the byes do be fillin' up his grave, "Oh, Jerry, ...
— Cowboy Songs - and Other Frontier Ballads • Various
... his head. The frame, of course, goes up without assistance, and then the principal item is the slabs for walls. When you have fallen your tree and sawn off a block of the required length, you have only to split off the slab. Ah! but suppose the timber does not split freely, and your heavy maul does; and the wedges instead of entering have the habit of bouncing out as if they were fitted with internal springs, and your maul wants renewal several times, until you find that the timber prescribed is of no account for such tools; and at best your slabs run off to nothing at half length, and ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... them down, and interlace them one with another. I do not see any of these, however, which are become old. Probably, therefore, they soon die. The women here smite on the anvil, and work with the maul and spade. The people of this country are ill dressed in comparison with those of France, and there are more spots of uncultivated ground. The plough here is made with a single handle, which is a beam twelve ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... the idea of the abolition of slavery, because it would make the slaveholder "so poor, as to oblige him to take hold of the maul and wedge himself—he must catch, curry, and saddle his own horse—he must black his own brogans (for he will not be able to buy boots)—his wife must go herself to the wash-tub—take hold of the scrubbing broom, wash the pots, and ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... boy asleep. On the chair beside his head he had placed his old-fashioned hunting-case watch, as big as an alarm-clock, the kind a railroad man would wind up with a spike-maul. Beside the watch he had laid his huge revolver in its worn leather scabbard. Breathing peacefully, he lay quite at his companion's mercy, and McCloud, looking down on this man who never made a mistake, never forgot a danger, ...
— Whispering Smith • Frank H. Spearman
... rabbits, and they would jump all over him, and bunt him with their heads, and scratch him with their toe-nails, and the dogs would grab rabbits and shake them, and Pa would fall down and rabbits would run over him till you couldn't see Pa at all. Then he would raise up again and maul the animals with his club, and his clothes were so covered with rabbit hair that he looked like a big rabbit himself. He lost his hat and looked as though he was getting exhausted, and then he stopped and spit on his hands and yelled to the rest of the men, ...
— Peck's Bad Boy With the Cowboys • Hon. Geo. W. Peck
... person, but it means more often merely to handle something carelessly and roughly. Literally it means "to hit with a hammer," and comes from maul or mall, the name of a certain very heavy kind of hammer; so that when a child is told not to "maul" a book, it is literally being told not to hit ...
— Stories That Words Tell Us • Elizabeth O'Neill
... from the hillock into the plain. Sancho bawled after him as loud as he could. "Hold, sir!" cried Sancho; "for heaven's sake come back! What do you mean? as sure as I am a sinner those you are going to maul are nothing but poor harmless sheep. Come back, I say. Woe to him that begot me! Are you mad, sir? there are no giants, no knights, no cats, no asparagus gardens, no golden quarters nor what-d'-ye-call-thems. Does the devil possess you? you are leaping over the hedge ...
— The Children's Hour, v 5. Stories From Seven Old Favorites • Eva March Tappan
... which poured out from Murray's barracks, in Brattle Street, armed with clubs, cutlasses, and bayonets, provoked resistance, and a fray ensued. Ensign Maul, at the gate of the barrack yard, cried to the soldiers: "Turn out, and I will stand by you; kill them; stick them; knock them down; run your bayonets through them." One soldier after another leveled a firelock, and threatened to "make a lane" ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... him maul you about. I want a whisky-and-soda, and so does Denison—don't you?" And then the Beast, as soon as his wife with the child in her arms had left the room, began to tell his subordinate of a "new" girl he had met that ...
— Amona; The Child; And The Beast; And Others - From "The Strange Adventure Of James Shervinton and Other - Stories" - 1902 • Louis Becke
... the starboard backstays and the men hauled in the slack of the braces. With the main yard square to check her way the jibs drooped down along the stays. "Mr. Broadrick, you may let go the starboard anchor and furl sails." The mate grasped a top maul and struck the trigger of the ring stopper a clean blow, the anchor splashed into the water with a rumbling cable, and ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... laughs, and sings the rarest songs, and Shorthose, he has so maul'd the Red Deer pies, made such an alms ...
— Wit Without Money - The Works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher • Francis Beaumont
... curtains' 'Man, ye're skailing a' the water' 'Marriage is a blessing to a few, a curse to many, and a great uncertainty to all' Marriage, old minister's address on Mary of Gueldres, burying-place now a railway Mastiff, where turned into a greyhound Maul, Mr., and the Laird of Skene 'May a puir body like me noo gie a hoast?' 'Me, and Pitt, and Pitfour' Mearns, Rev. W. of Kinneff 'Mem, winna ye tak the clock wi' ye?' 'Mending the ways o' Bathgate' Mice consumed minister's sermon Middens, example of attachment to Military rank attached ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... he was!" she said, mockingly, her azure, sunny eyes lighting up with laughter, too, as she leant on the bending maul-stick and looked ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross
... large quantity of smoked venison. He declared that my bread, which was ordinary sea-biscuits and easily broken, was not nutritious as his, which was so hard that I could break it only with a stout blow from a maul. Then he gave me, from his own sloop, a compass which was certainly better than mine, and offered to unbend her mainsail for me if I would accept it Last of all, this large-hearted man brought out a bottle of Fuegian gold-dust from a ...
— Sailing Alone Around The World • Joshua Slocum
... Limpy," asserted Thad, with his accustomed show of confidence, "we'll fix a trap to get the sneaks, should they call in the dead of night. They'll think they've run up against a threshing machine, all right, when Hugh and myself start in to maul them." ...
— The Chums of Scranton High - Hugh Morgan's Uphill Fight • Donald Ferguson
... over and over, lashing out with her feet in all directions. Pausing a moment, she would stretch her body to its extreme length, and, lying upon her side, pound the floor with her head as if it were a maul. Then like a flash she would leap to her feet, and whirl round and round until from very giddiness she would stagger and fall. She would lay hold of the straw with her teeth, and shake it as a dog shakes a struggling woodchuck; then dashing it from ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... desperate and damned. Now that pernicious and pestilent opinion of man's own righteousness, which will not be a sinner, unclean, miserable, and damnable, but righteous and holy, suffereth not God to come to his own natural and proper work. Therefore God must take this maul in hand (the law, I mean) to beat in pieces and bring to nothing this beast with her vain confidence, that she may so learn at length by her own misery that she is utterly forlorn and damned. But here lieth the difficulty, ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James |
