"Breakdown" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... must have heard of Lucas's breakdown, and equally, of course, he must have seen them both. What happened at that interview, by what casual attitude he allayed Lucas's probable jealousy and the girl's own nervousness, Bassett had no way of discovering. It was clear that he convinced them both of his good ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... 13. Nervous breakdown. Epilepsy. Tumor or break in brain. Cranial neuralgia. Disease of neck bones. Adenoids. Ear disease. Eye strain. ...
— Camping For Boys • H.W. Gibson
... expression in the lovely Iberian Zarzuela.[EN28] The boy Husayn Gennah, a small cyclops in a brown felt calotte and a huge military overcoat cut short, caused roars of laughter by his ultra-Gaditanian style of dancing. I have also reason to suspect that a jig and a breakdown tested the solidity of the plank table, while a Jew's harp represented Europe. In fact, throughout the journey, reminiscences of Mabille and the Music Halls contrasted strongly with the memories of majestic and mysterious Midian. And, to make the shock ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... impossible at any time," replied Mrs. Burton, "and I shall be only too thankful if he will stay for a while because of poor father. Oh, Katherine, I am afraid this long terrible winter has killed him'" she said, with a quiver of breakdown in her voice. ...
— A Countess from Canada - A Story of Life in the Backwoods • Bessie Marchant
... Dabney discovered that he was computing, at the doctor's request, sundry arithmetical results, which might with greater propriety have been reserved for his "examination." That, too, was the way poor Dick Lee came to make so bad a breakdown. His shining face would have told, even to eyes less practised than those of Dr. Brandegee, exactly the answer, as to kind and readiness, which he would have made to every question put to his white friends. That is, unless he had been directly called upon to "answer out ...
— Dab Kinzer - A Story of a Growing Boy • William O. Stoddard
... like ours, sandy soils may seem very open and friable on the surface but frequently hold some unpleasant subsoil surprises. Over geologic time spans, mineral grains are slowly destroyed by weak soil acids and clay is formed from the breakdown products. Then heavy winter rainfall transports these minuscule clay particles deeper into the earth, where they concentrate. It is not unusual to find a sandy topsoil underlaid with a dense, cement-like, clayey sand subsoil extending down several feet. If very impervious, a thick, dense deposition ...
— Gardening Without Irrigation: or without much, anyway • Steve Solomon
... than Irish, 12 percent Scandinavian, and the Poles, Bohemians, and Italians formed about 5 percent. The strong predominance of the foreign element in American trade unions should not appear unusual, since, owing to the breakdown of the apprenticeship system, the United States had been drawing its supply ...
— A History of Trade Unionism in the United States • Selig Perlman
... and White Lodge and the Indian agency at night. I had a breakdown after going past Talpers's store—a tire to replace. By the time I climbed the hill on the Dollar Sign road it was well along in the morning. I saw a man coming toward me on a white horse. It was my brother, Willard Sargent, or Willis Morgan. He looked much like me. ...
— Mystery Ranch • Arthur Chapman
... idea that this was all going to be rather solemn if she let it be. But she was going to give her very best imitation of undiluted sunshine, the imitation she could give even when her head was splitting or when her mother had a nervous breakdown or when she was particularly romantic and curious and courageous. This brother of hers undoubtedly needed cheering up, and he was going to be cheered up, whether he liked ...
— Flappers and Philosophers • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... the flannels away and trot out the old linen duster, Pack the bob-sled in the barn, and bring forth the baseball and racket, For the spry Spring is on deck, performing her roseate breakdown Unto the tune of the van that rattles and bangs on ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IV. (of X.) • Various
... his cigarette. "Anyhow, we couldn't find anything really wrong," he said. "Three senators retiring because of ill health, one because of old age. And Farnsworth, the youngest. He had a nervous breakdown." ...
— Occasion for Disaster • Gordon Randall Garrett
... factory because of a complete breakdown from long hours of overwork. In one winter she had been at the machine seventy-one hours a week for ten weeks. After this severe experience, she had a long prostration and was depleted, exhausted, in a sort of physical torpor in which she was unable ...
— Making Both Ends Meet • Sue Ainslie Clark and Edith Wyatt
... not to be reassured quickly. It was very seldom that her equanimity was disturbed, only in fact when her deepest feelings were concerned, and this made her breakdown the more complete. She apologised tearfully for her foolishness at rehearsal, which she set down to bodily fatigue. She had been to see poor Squinny that morning, and she thought he really was dying at last. He had cried so, and ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell
... John sat almost silent, and, in spite of their liveliness, the others eyed him a little anxiously now and then, knowing that he had been living on excitement through a physically exhausting day, and they were fearful lest his nerves react and bring him to a breakdown. But the healthy flush of his cheek was reassuring; he looked steady and strong, and they were pleased to believe that the ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington
... threat to build a railroad from Berlin to Bagdad and tap the riches of the East, led the British to form alliances with their traditional enemies—the French and the Russians. Russia, after the breakdown of Czarism in 1917, dropped out of the Entente, and the United States took her place among the Allies of the British Empire. During the struggle France was reduced to a mere shell of her former power. The War of 1914 bled her white, loaded her ...
— The American Empire • Scott Nearing
... a Russian, the Countess Sergius, learning of the presence of the two American Red Cross nurses in the Russian hospital, called at once to see if she could do anything for their comfort. Discovering Nona ill and Barbara on the verge of a breakdown, the American woman insisted that the girls be her guests. They were not able to be of special assistance at the hospital under the present circumstances, while a week or so of rest and change might do wonders ...
— The Red Cross Girls with the Russian Army • Margaret Vandercook
... all in—I let him p-put the noose around his own neck and tie the knot. Then I hung him." His convulsive giggling was terrible, forecasting, as it did, his immediate breakdown. ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... listened with a surge of feeling driving through his heart. His own words, the words he had told to the man whom he knew at the time to be floundering on the edge of a complete mental breakdown, were ringing through his brain. He had lied. He had had to ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... soul for me." She looked out across the country dreamily, before she finished. "I shall never forget when I first saw this," motioning to the sunny prospect. "We arrived here in the dusk, owing to a breakdown, and so I had a long night's rest before Billy first showed it to me. I must tell you I was already tremendously impressed, on the quiet, with my brown, stalwart, khaki-clad husband in place of the decorous, black-coated parson I had parted with; and although the journey had been very ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... subject at which, if necessary, the woman is ready to earn her living. Many a family has been saved from financial ruin by a daughter studying the business or the profession of the father, and, upon his breakdown from ill-health, becoming his right-hand assistant, or, in the case of his death, even taking his place as the family bread-winner. In these days when farming is becoming more and more a question of the farmer's ...
— Practical Suggestions for Mother and Housewife • Marion Mills Miller
... Sir Theodore's all this is lost: Heine becomes a mere prentice-metrist; he sets the teeth on edge as surely as Browning himself; the verse that recalled a dance of naiads suggests a springless cart on a Highland road; Terpsichore is made to prance a hobnailed breakdown. The poem disappears, and in its place you have an indifferent copy of verses. You look at the pages from afar, and your impression is that they are not unlike Heine; you look into them, and Heine has vanished. The man ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... towns behind the lines with gloomy looks, and whose tempers, never of the sweetest, became irritable and unbearable, so that the soldiers hated them for all this cursing and bullying. A certain battalion commander had a nervous breakdown because he had to meet his colonel in ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... fall of Warsaw was sympathetically represented as a masterly operation, and the failure of the Germans to envelop and isolate the Russian armies as proof of the breakdown of their strategy. But all retreats in the war, with the exception of the Turks' before Allenby, were similarly described in the appropriate quarters. It was the common characteristic of the victors that they could not win decisive ...
— A Short History of the Great War • A.F. Pollard
... at his hair, or biting his nails, he is nervous. The mother excuses her spoiled child on the ground of his nervousness, and I have seen a thoroughly bad boy who branded his baby sister with a heated spoon called "nervous." A "nervous breakdown" is a familiar verbal disguise for one or other of the sinister ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... very reticent in regard to the new information which they hold, but it is evident that at last they are confident of establishing a case. Mr. Henry Leroux, the famous novelist, in whose flat the mysterious outrage took place, is suffering from a nervous breakdown, but is reported to be progressing favorably by Dr. Cumberly, who is attending him. Dr. Cumberly, it will be remembered, was with Mr. Leroux, and Mr. John Exel, M. P., at the time that the murder was discovered. The executors of the ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer
... the celebrated literary moralist, was born at Ecclefechan, Scotland, Dec. 4, 1795. He was educated at the village school and at the Annan Grammar School, proceeding to Edinburgh University in 1809. The breakdown of his dogmatic beliefs made it impossible for him to enter the clerical profession, and neither school-teaching nor the study of law attracted him. Supporting himself by private teaching, Carlyle made the beginnings of a literary connection. He fought his way under ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... clamored for war after the Chesapeake outrage. Four long years had been spent in testing the efficacy of commercial restrictions, and the country was if anything less prepared for the alternative. When President Madison penned this message he was, in fact, making public avowal of the breakdown of a great Jeffersonian principle. Peaceful coercion was proved to be ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson
... into St. Ambrose just as the bell for afternoon chapel was going down, and went in. Blake was there, and one look showed him what had happened. In fact he had expected nothing else all day since his breakdown in the Articles. Tom couldn't help watching him during chapel; and afterwards, on that evening, acknowledged to a friend that whatever else you might think of Blake, there was no doubt about ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... always been neat even when it was forlorn there was now the stamp of desolation. The beds which had been seeded or planted a month before, and which should now have been weeded, trimmed, and hoed, were growing with an untended recklessness that had all the proverbial resemblance to moral breakdown. In the cucumber-house the vines had become rusty and limp, sagging from the twines on which they climbed in debauched indifference to sightliness. The roof of the hothouse that had contained the flowers had a deep gash in the glass which it was no ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... Shakespear think that his public would stand anything from him, he has ruled out a far more plausible explanation of the faults of such a play as Timon of Athens than his theory that Shakespear's passion for the Dark Lady "cankered and took on proud flesh in him, and tortured him to nervous breakdown and madness." In Timon the intellectual bankruptcy is obvious enough: Shakespear tried once too often to make a play out of the cheap pessimism which is thrown into despair by a comparison of actual human nature with theoretical morality, ...
— Dark Lady of the Sonnets • George Bernard Shaw
... yourself a few anecdotes. I'll be with you in a moment. I say, I wonder what the cove is doing at Belpher? Deuced civil cove," said Reggie approvingly. "I liked him. And now, business of repairing breakdown." ...
— A Damsel in Distress • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... tore herself free a second later, and Isabel, divining that any further demonstration from her would cause a breakdown, bade her a loving good night ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell
... convincing. It was a very good part. In the First Act she had to coax her papa, and flirt with her cousin; in the second, to respond to a declaration of love with a burst of womanly feeling; and, in the third, to play the hoyden, and dance a breakdown. All this was done to perfection, but not by a young lady of eighteen. Miss ADA REHAN was charming, but looked, and I fancy felt, many years older than her legal majority. I question whether she was an ingenue at all, but, if she were, she was ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, August 16, 1890 • Various
... the doctor hurriedly; "with care, and under favourable circumstances, there might be no further breakdown for another year; but"—with a keen look at his patient—"I will not undertake ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... closed, following the announcement of the failure of several brokerage firms. Stock Exchanges throughout the United States followed the example set by New York. The Stock Exchanges in London and the big provincial cities, as well as those on the Continent, ceased business, owing to the breakdown of the credit system, which was made complete by the postponement ...
— A History of The Nations and Empires Involved and a Study - of the Events Culminating in The Great Conflict • Logan Marshall
... this position were such as to make his success seem almost hopeless. He became obsessed with the idea that the people with whom he had to deal were "out to get him." His fears of the job and of his associates grew to the point where a nervous breakdown ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King
... Buttons, (3) Studs, or (for females) Hooks and Eyes. Now there is an interim in the life of man when he passes away from safety pins, and, for a season, knows them not—save as mere convenience in case of breakdown. He thinks of them, in his antic bachelor years, as merely the wrecking train of the sartorial system, a casual conjunction for pyjamas, or an impromptu hoist for small clothes. Ah! with humility and gratitude he greets them again later, seeing ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... appealed once more to Congress for authority to issue bonds at a lower rate of interest. Carlisle, the Secretary of the Treasury, addressed a letter to the Senate committee of finance, setting forth the great saving that would be thus effected. Then ensued what must be acknowledged to be a breakdown in constitutional government. Immediately after a committee meeting on January 16, 1894, the Chairman, Senator Voorhees, issued a public statement in which he said that "it would be trifling with a very grave affair to ...
— The Cleveland Era - A Chronicle of the New Order in Politics, Volume 44 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Henry Jones Ford
... easily have cabled and caused his son-in-law's arrest. For a month he went about in a sort of daze, speaking to almost no one and sitting for hours alone in his room. The doctor feared for his sanity, but when the breakdown came it was in the form of a second paralytic stroke which left him a helpless, crippled dependent, weak and shattered in body ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln
... the bed talking, Elizabeth telling briefly of her own experiences and her wedding trip which they were taking back over the old trail, and the old man and woman speaking of their trouble, the woman's breakdown and how the doctor at Malta said there was a chance she could get well if she went to a great doctor in Chicago, but how they had no money unless they sold the ranch and that nobody wanted to ...
— The Girl from Montana • Grace Livingston Hill
... Even before this time he had observed a little discrepancy between his father's words and deeds, between his wide liberal theories and his harsh petty despotism; but he had not expected such a complete breakdown. His confirmed egoism was patent now in everything. Young Lavretsky was getting ready! to go to Moscow, to prepare for the university, when a new unexpected calamity overtook Ivan Petrovitch; he became blind, and hopelessly blind, ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev
... deadlock and breakdown would disappear if we had a proper system of provision for our own unemployed civilians (there are no unemployed soldiers: we do not discharge them between the battles). The Belgians would have found an organization ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... in the States with regard to the supposed breakdown of their military organization in France—accusations inspired by generosity towards the Allies. From what I have seen, and I have been given liberal opportunities to see everything, I do not think that those accusations are justified. As a combatant of ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson
... recovered from its apparently complete breakdown of a few years ago to be able to dispose of the largest revenue that had ever been at the disposal of any French Government, and this fact is of interest to us chiefly because it is one of the most definite and most significant proofs of the remarkable inherent strength of the French ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume I (of 8) - Introductions; Special Articles; Causes of War; Diplomatic and State Papers • Various
... night, the Negroes had a "breakdown," often dancing all night long. About twelve o'clock they had a big supper, everybody bringing a box of all kinds of good things to eat, and putting it on a ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Georgia Narratives, Part 3 • Works Projects Administration
... the above, there is in course of construction still more powerful pumps of 40 in. diameter, which will provide against contingencies, and prevent delay in case of a breakdown such as occurred lately on the Liverpool side of the works. The nature of the rock is the new red sandstone, of a solid and compact character, favorable for tunneling, and yielding only a moderate quantity of water. The engineers have ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 384, May 12, 1883 • Various
... of our happy preparations the bad news fell with bomb-like suddenness. The messenger who brought the telegram whistled shrilly and shuffled a breakdown on the doorstep while he waited to hear if ...
— A Versailles Christmas-Tide • Mary Stuart Boyd
... prowess; but all who had taken part agreed that none had so distinguished themselves as Frank Norris, a Sixth Form town boy, and captain of the eight—who, for a wonder had for once been up at fields—and Fred Barkley, a senior in the Sixth. But, grievous and general as was the breakdown in lessons next day, no impositions were set; the boarding-house masters, Richards and Sargent, had of course heard all about it at tea-time, as had Johns, who did not himself keep a boarding-house, but resided ...
— Captain Bayley's Heir: - A Tale of the Gold Fields of California • G. A. Henty
... by, the crews had not completed their work on the Merrimac, but at last a boatload of men, black and tired out, came over to the flag-ship. Last of all, at 4.30, came the admiral. He had been delayed by a breakdown of ...
— The Boys of '98 • James Otis
... another, which wavered and wabbled from the electron-spurts normal to solar systems and which make for auroras on planets. "Mayday mayday mayday," said the second voice. "Call for help. Call for help. Ship Cerberus major breakdown overdrive heading Procyron III for refuge. Help urgently needed." There was a pause. "Mayday mayday mayday. Call ...
— A Matter of Importance • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... centre of the world for some flattering hours to buoy them up on that train journey, with no memories of friends' behaviour, speech, appearance, to chat of with her husband, so as to keep thought away. For Gyp, her dress, first worn that day, Betty's breakdown, the faces, blank as hats, of the registrar and clerk, were about all she had to distract her. She stole a look at her husband, clothed in blue serge, just opposite. Her husband! Mrs. Gustav Fiorsen! No! People might call her that; to herself, she was Ghita Winton. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... author-physician gives full credit to the conscientious physician for the great service he is able to render in all other spheres of his profession, he wholly denies the necessity for medical care in cases of nervous breakdown, and discounts liberally the benefits to be derived from professional advice except in so far as the doctor is the patient's counselor and dictator as to what and how and how much he shall eat and drink, and the way he shall employ ...
— How to Eat - A Cure for "Nerves" • Thomas Clark Hinkle
... this, when brain and nerves were strained and worn almost to breaking-point, that Ste. Marie had occasion to be grateful for the Southern blood that was in him, the strong tinge of fatalism which is common alike to Latin and to Oriental. It rescued him more than once from something like nervous breakdown, calmed him suddenly, lifted his burdens from outwearied shoulders, and left him in peace to wait until some action should be possible. Then, in such hours, he would fall to thinking of the girl for whose sake, in whose cause, he lay bedridden, beset with dangers. ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... Stratton, that dreamlike hero of hers, whose tragic death she had felt so keenly, or of another man who was very much alive indeed. Perhaps she scarcely knew herself. At all events it was only a momentary little breakdown. Pulling herself together, she returned to the living-room, carrying the big six-shooter half hidden by her skirts, and managed to slip it, apparently unseen, on a little stand above which hung the telephone to Las Vegas camp. By this time the ...
— Shoe-Bar Stratton • Joseph Bushnell Ames
... well as you do. In fact, it might be best not to mention business to dad at all. You must remember that this is the third breakdown he has had since we came to Brill, and another ...
— The Rover Boys in Business • Arthur M. Winfield
... briefly stated, is that, owing to bad management, lack of foresight, and the almost complete breakdown of the commissary and medical departments of the army, our soldiers in Cuba suffered greater hardships and privations, in certain ways, than were ever before endured by an American army in the field. They were not half equipped, ...
— Campaigning in Cuba • George Kennan
... There was a hint of hysteric breakdown in the exclamation. "How can I—bear it!" She turned and went back to her writing table and there she sat down and hid her face, ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... the English Presbyterian Church and thus formed the present Presbyterian Church of England. The original idea, at least on the United Presbyterian side, had been that all the negotiating bodies should be welded into one comprehensive British Church; but this, especially in view of the breakdown of the larger Union, proved to be unworkable, and the final result for the United Presbyterians was that they came out of the negotiations a considerably smaller and weaker Church than they had been when ...
— Principal Cairns • John Cairns
... "starvers, bloodsuckers, tyrants, hangmen, rogues and mountebanks." The distress among all classes continued to be appalling; and in March the attempt of the Directory to replace the assignats (q.v.) by a new issue of mandats created fresh dissatisfaction after the breakdown of the hopes first raised. A cry went up that national bankruptcy had been declared, and thousands of the lower class of ouvrier began to rally to Babeuf's flag. On the 4th of April it was reported to the government that 500,000 people in Paris ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... buckled to our partners, an' told 'em to hold on, Then shook our hoofs like lightning until the early dawn. Don't tell me 'bout cotillions, or germans. No sir 'ee! That whirl at Anson City just takes the cake with me. I'm sick of lazy shufflin's, of them I've had my fill, Give me a fronteer breakdown, backed up by Windy Bill. McAllister ain't nowhere! when Windy leads the show, I've seen 'em both in harness, an' so I sorter know— Oh, Bill, I sha'n't forget yer, and I'll oftentimes recall, That lively-gaited sworray—"The Cowboys' ...
— Songs of the Cattle Trail and Cow Camp • Various
... also fed automatically into the boiler, when the engine is in motion, by a pump worked by the engine piston. A hand-pump is also supplied by which the driver can keep the proper amount when the machine is still or in case of a breakdown. A water-gauge in plain sight keeps the driver informed at all times as to the amount of water in the boiler. From the boiler the steam goes through the throttle-valve—the handle of which is by the driver's side—direct to the engine, and there ...
— Stories of Inventors - The Adventures Of Inventors And Engineers • Russell Doubleday
... untenanted bare rocks. They strengthened and fortified the road. Its grandeur in so empty and impoverished a land was a boast or a threat of their power. The Republic succeeded the kings, the Armies succeeded the Republic, and every experiment succeeded the victories and the breakdown of the Armies. The road grew stronger all the while, bridging this desert, and giving pledge that the brain of Paris was able, and more able, to order the whole of the soil. So then, as I followed it, it seemed to me to bear in itself, and in its contrast with ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... profitably on that first question in these very informal days. We are witnessing a breakdown of all external forms of authority which, while salutary and necessary, is also perilous. Not many of us err, just now, by overmagnifying our official status. Many of us instead are terribly at ease in Zion and might become less assured and more significant ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... line in front, sir," he said, addressing nobody in particular. "Waggon broke away from the siding and got on to our track. There's a breakdown gang doing its level best to get us clear. How long? Can't say, I'm sure, sir. Matter of ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan
... misery and despair are replaced by gladsomeness and hope. That is a dream, but no Socialist rests upon the dream merely: the hope of the Socialist is in the very material fact of the economic development from competition to monopoly; in the breakdown ...
— The Common Sense of Socialism - A Series of Letters Addressed to Jonathan Edwards, of Pittsburg • John Spargo
... amongst them; the privileged minority pocketed most, but even the great mass had, at least, a temporary share now and then. And that is the reason why, since the dying-out of Owenism, there has been no Socialism in England. With the breakdown of that monopoly, the English working-class will lose that privileged position; it will find itself generally—the privileged and leading minority not excepted—on a level with its fellow-workers abroad. And ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... gaping at the insubordination. Madden flushed under the implication. He stepped forward to smash the long insolent face and white mustache, but it was plain the Englishman was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. ...
— The Cruise of the Dry Dock • T. S. Stribling
... himself with one vigorous effort from his lethargy, feeling quite ashamed of himself and of this breakdown of his nervous system. He looked with frank admiration on Sir Percy, who stood immovable and silent by the window—a perfect tower of strength, serene and impassive, yet kindly ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... the literature of this propaganda is the appeal to standard modern practice in regard to machinery. "Those to whom the care of delicate mechanical apparatus is entrusted," says the New York Commissioner of Health, "do not wait until a breakdown occurs, but inspect and examine the apparatus minutely, at regular intervals, and thus detect the first signs of damage." "This principle of periodic inspection," says the prospectus of the Life Extension Institute, "has for many years been applied to almost ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... The mother's breakdown was not allowed to stop the Boy's education. Both father and older brother were determined on this. They would use the schools at ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon
... and historians of four early centuries, from the fifth to the ninth, as I lived with them, seemed to throw a partial, but yet a searching, light. I have expressed it in Robert Elsmere. Langham and Robert, talking in the Squire's library on Robert's plans for a history of Gaul during the breakdown of the Empire and the emergence of modern France, come to the vital question: "History depends on testimony. What is the nature and virtue of testimony at given times? In other words, did the man of the third century understand, or report, ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... on the causes of the moral breakdown of the Empire and of the French army do not help us to much that is novel. He lays more than the usual stress on Ultramontanism as an influence. The death of the archbishop of Paris could have been prevented, he thinks, had the Versailles authorities ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... have a few minutes' rest when the clown came on, and perhaps that would help her to go through the rest of the act without an absolute breakdown. ...
— The Hippodrome • Rachel Hayward
... down below where the spring can't get at it.... I had no sleep for two nights. On the second day a doctor at the hospital said that I must take at least three months' holiday. He said I'd had a nervous breakdown. I didn't know I had, and I don't know now. I said I wouldn't take any holiday, and that nothing would ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... of fact, this first duet with la Tinti was spoilt by Genovese's utter breakdown. His excellent method, recalling that of Crescentini and Veluti, seemed to desert him completely. A sostenuto in the wrong place, an embellishment carried to excess, spoilt the effect; or again a loud climax with no due crescendo, an outburst of sound like water tumbling through a suddenly ...
— Massimilla Doni • Honore de Balzac
... reached the foot of the glacier, Lieut. Evans developed symptoms of scurvy. His spring work of surveying and sledging out to Corner Camp and the man-hauling, with Lashly, across the Barrier after the breakdown of the motors, had been successfully accomplished; this sequel to the Glacier and Summit marches was an unexpected blow. Withal, he continued to pull, while bearing the heavy strain of guiding the course. While the hauling power thus grew less, the leader had ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... were engaged in a general retirement all along the River Dvina. The Allies then became interested in the Kaiser's probable choice of a line of defense for the winter on the northern section of his Russian front. The breakdown of the German offensive was attributed by the Allies to three things—the increase in the Russian ammunition supply, a German shortage of munitions, and the weakening of the German line for ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell
... with a foot on the fender and an arm on the mantelpiece, as her grandfather had done when he came in that night of the opera. She was too near a breakdown to care what ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... antiseptics. I rather like that. I spent six weeks in a hospital once. I had a nervous breakdown, and the quiet was heavenly, and ...
— Mistress Anne • Temple Bailey
... helped," her father said. "We've got to go through with it; if the boy has been ill he must certainly have all the change we can give him. But I'm doubtful. Eva says he's had a 'nervous breakdown,' and I rather think it's a complaint I don't believe in ...
— Mates at Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... they could not walk—Martha was terribly tired, and Scylla, even if she could stand up, was not equal to the long tramp back to the ranch, of course. They were dripping wet. The elation that followed their escape, and the discovery of Scylla's great good fortune, was followed by a nervous breakdown on the part of both girls, and they cuddled in each other's arms on the wet grass, sobbing and frightened, to wait for ...
— Southern Stories - Retold from St. Nicholas • Various
... great human instincts, it would be strange indeed when one remembers the long period that man has spent in the agricultural stage of culture. City dwellers in their hunt for stimulation are likely to face either the breakdown of physical vitality or the blunting of their sensibilities. Country joys, on the other hand, cost less in the nervous capital expended to obtain them. The urban worker, in thinking of his hours of freedom in sharp contrast with the time spent at ...
— Rural Problems of Today • Ernest R. Groves
... the logical remark of a disputant in a Socratic dialogue of the Alcibiades type, and Sec.Sec. 31-33 a Socratic mythos to escape from the dilemma; the breakdown of this ideal plus and minus righteousness due to the hardness of men's hearts ...
— Cyropaedia - The Education Of Cyrus • Xenophon
... other animal, it would seem that the addition of this last demand, namely, of satisfying the sexual desires of the husband during the period of pregnancy, might prove "the straw that breaks the camel's back," and result in the more or less complete nervous breakdown of the woman. The author submits this question to all fair-minded men: Is it not due to the wife that she be not asked to satisfy the recurring sexual desires of the husband during the period when her life and its energies are so sacred ...
— The Biology, Physiology and Sociology of Reproduction - Also Sexual Hygiene with Special Reference to the Male • Winfield S. Hall
... great actor hissed off the stage. It was a bad breakdown, and there was no mercy. It turned the women's conversation back ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... now,' he said, 'we will go to the gospodarstwo and you shall give me some nails in case of another breakdown, and I will leave you some of this cordial in return. Mind, if your head or your stomach aches or you are worried and can't sleep, take a glassful of this: all your worries will at once disappear. Take good ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various
... was shy and unhappy. The kind efforts which Sangster made to make her feel at her ease added to her embarrassment. She missed her mother more and more as the moments fled away; she was on the verge of a breakdown when at last the interminable ...
— The Second Honeymoon • Ruby M. Ayres
... under some trying circumstances and never with any hint of breakdown, yet just now he wondered if unexpected good tidings were not about to accomplish what bad news could not—carry out the dam of her own hard-schooled repression on a flood of tears. Her eyes became suddenly misty and her lips trembled. She started to speak, then gulped and ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... you want to mature them fairly early in the fall, it might work all right, because it will withhold the nitrogen in the breakdown of your sawdust. But apparently, it works pretty well. I think it was Mr. Sam Hemming who suggested using it in the rows. Most of our State Forests and Waters nurseries in their seedling beds, plant their seedlings, including chestnuts, make a mixture of sawdust and sand, ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 41st Annual Meeting • Various
... Bacchanal group, after Poussin, sculptured by Marin. I bought it at Lord Breakdown's sale; it happened to be a wet day—much such a day as this—and things went for nothing. This you'll know, I presume?' observed Jawleyford, laying his hand on a life-size bust of ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... he was lukewarm. Nothing seemed to matter since he had lost sight of Caesar's face, since the train whirled his friend out of his life. But he worked hard, so hard that the Head Master bade him beware of a breakdown. ...
— The Hill - A Romance of Friendship • Horace Annesley Vachell
... two bright spots of color in her cheeks: "Resting in the evenings is not going to help mother; Dr. Hawkes says she needs months and months of rest and unless she has it she will soon be having a nervous breakdown or something else; that working for nearly eight years in an office supporting herself and two daughters is enough to tire any woman out. Then to-day a wonderful invitation came from my father's relatives, who have never paid ...
— The Camp Fire Girls at Sunrise Hill • Margaret Vandercook
... appeared, suffered a severe nervous breakdown. The physicians had ordered immediate dropping ...
— Galusha the Magnificent • Joseph C. Lincoln
... fresh hesitations, followed by efforts, as though the engine was pluckily striving to do its duty. And then suddenly came the final failure, a dead stop at the side of the road, a stupid breakdown. ...
— The Teeth of the Tiger • Maurice Leblanc
... little real desire of regaining them. It was even expected that in this year the radicals would lose Louisiana and Florida to the "white man's party." The leaders of the best element of the Republicans, both North and South, looked upon the reconstruction as one of the prime causes of the moral breakdown of their party; they wanted no more of the Southern issue but planned ...
— The Sequel of Appomattox - A Chronicle of the Reunion of the States, Volume 32 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Walter Lynwood Fleming
... they expect from you.... When you get your vehicle re-ammoed, lieutenant, suppose you buzz back to where you machine-gunned that first gang. If there are any more around, they'll have moved in for the free meal by now." This breakdown of the Jeels' taboo against eating fellow-tribesmen was one of the best things he'd heard from the cannibal-extermination project for ...
— Uller Uprising • Henry Beam Piper, John D. Clark and John F. Carr
... Monte Carlo, and took a villa between us for a couple of months at Beaulieu. As for the system, Beckett, who was by no means disheartened, played it himself for many nights in succession, and ultimately admitted that there were defects in it which its late breakdown had revealed rather than caused. Not long afterward he was persuaded into adopting another, commended to him by Butler Johnson, once a prominent Member of Parliament. This system, mechanical rather than mathematical, ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... courses of action open to the Police Experimental Robots are outlined on pages 184 to 213 of the manual." Ned's voice was muffled for a second while he half-dived back into his case and came up with the volume mentioned. "A detailed breakdown of these will also be found on ...
— Arm of the Law • Harry Harrison
... succeeded in France, either after the Reformation, when it ought to have prevailed, nor after the Revolution, when it ought not. The failure to establish the Protestant Church on the ruins of the old regime, to which Quinet attributes the breakdown of the Revolution, and which Napoleon regretted almost in the era of his concordat, is explained by Mr. Flint on the ground that Protestants were in a minority. But so they were in and after the wars of religion; and it is not apparent why a philosopher who does ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... hearing the crack of the long-lashed whip urging the noble steeds to faster speed, turning the rough, ragged, serpent-shaped drive, thundering through clouds and mist with lightning rapidity, and always in constant terror of a breakdown or error on the part of the fearless driver, gave one a sensation that would nearly make his hair stand on end. During the descent a slight error on the part of the horses or driver, would have hurled all to a horrible death; but those mountain ...
— Dangers of the Trail in 1865 - A Narrative of Actual Events • Charles E Young
... theatre, more than any other source of so-called information, has been responsible for the breakdown of the barriers of social reserve in sexual discussions, and that means ultimately in erotic behaviour. The book which the individual man or woman reads at his fireside has no socializing influence, ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... it may sound, it is the eagerness of young India to respond to our educational call that has led to the breakdown of the system in some of the most important functions of education. In its earlier stages those who claimed the benefit of the new system were chiefly drawn from the intellectual elite—i.e., from ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... assumed alarming proportions. The party was not wholly, perhaps not mainly, the product of humanitarian sentiment. The adherence of old-line Whig politicians like Seward suggests that there was some alloy in the pure gold of Republicanism. Such leaders were willing to make political capital out of the breakdown of popular sovereignty in Kansas.[523] They were too shrewd to stake the fortune of the nascent party on a bold, constructive policy. They preferred to play a waiting game. Events in Kansas came to their aid in ways that they could ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... what I was going to say. Oh! it was this. Paul, I think we need never speak about this again; only remember you are not to be sorry. You have not done wrong; you have been very, very kind; and if I see you looking grieved I don't know what I might do;—I might breakdown, you know.' I think she was on the point of doing so then, but the dark storm came dashing down, and the thunder-cloud broke right above the house, as it seemed. Her mother, roused from sleep, called out for Phillis; the men and women from the hay-field came running into shelter, ...
— Cousin Phillis • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... watchful; his eyes were forever flitting here and there; he chose the outer edges of the sidewalks, and he went nowhere after nightfall unattended. The time was past when he could doubt the constancy of his purpose; but he did fear a nervous breakdown, and even shuddered at the thought of possible insanity. Being in fact as sane a man as ever lived, his irrational nerves alarmed him all the more. He could not conceive that an event was immediately before him which, without making his position safer, would rouse him ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... facile imaginative mind and a taste for fancy dress. From his fourth to his tenth year he did the country with his mother in her father's private car, from Coronado, where his mother became so bored that she had a nervous breakdown in a fashionable hotel, down to Mexico City, where she took a mild, almost epidemic consumption. This trouble pleased her, and later she made use of it as an intrinsic part of her ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... without saying that this sort of climate would suit any one in ordinary health, inviting and stimulating to constant out-of-door exercise, and that it would be equally favorable to that general breakdown of the system which has the name of nervous prostration. The effect upon diseases of the respiratory organs can only be determined by individual experience. The government has lately been sending soldiers who have consumption from various ...
— Our Italy • Charles Dudley Warner
... decided to let matters take their course. Assuming that she knew nothing of Emmet's true relationship with Felicity and thought merely that her friend was infatuated with him, it was possible that she might even welcome a moral breakdown on Emmet's part, provided it would open Felicity's eyes to his true quality. He was tempted to believe that Mrs. Parr would willingly let Lena be sacrificed to accomplish this result. The various possibilities that lay concealed behind his companion's ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... and his gang, whose shoes, among other matters, pinched them; and we were comfortably quartered in the one hotel several hours before the arrival of Lady Saffren Waldon and those folk who elected to wait for the breakdown gang and ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... had ever been in the past. Had her father and mother done right by him? Her pulse stirred with unwonted quickness. She did not speak, but she kissed him, which, for her, was an indication of unusual feeling. And when he recovered command over his emotions he made no reference to his breakdown, nor did she. But that scene struck deep into Madeline Hammond's heart. Through it she saw what ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... you've put the question squarely, I'm going to be candid. I'm alarmed about you. The strain on your nerves is too great. This maggot of Socialism in your brain is the trouble. It is the mark of mental and moral breakdown, the fleeing from self-reliant individual life into the herd for help. You call it 'brotherhood,' the 'solidarity of the race.' Sentimental mush. It's a stampede back to the animal herd out of which a powerful ...
— The One Woman • Thomas Dixon
... the first or only driver to complain of the packed course. The Mercury had scarcely departed when the Marathon car came in, its experienced and steel-fibred pilot on the brink of nervous breakdown. ...
— From the Car Behind • Eleanor M. Ingram
... crew sullen and muttering, but Friedrich, the engineer's eldest son, sat at the top of the engine-room ladder, and tears rolled down his face. The great ship still trembled under the shock of the breakdown and was not showing ten knots. The foremost ironclad crept up minute by minute; and before we had realised the whole extent of the mishap, she was within gunshot of us; but her colleagues were some miles away, she outpacing them all ...
— The Iron Pirate - A Plain Tale of Strange Happenings on the Sea • Max Pemberton
... toward children and very bad for children. These young creatures ought to go along through their days rather dreamily and altogether serenely. Every turn of the screw to tighten their nerves makes more certain some form of early nervous breakdown. They ought to have work to do, of course,—enough of it to occupy both mind and body—but it should be quiet, systematic, regular work, much of it performed automatically. Only occasionally should they be required to do things with a conscious ...
— Study of Child Life • Marion Foster Washburne
... two more, to which I did not listen, the proceedings in the Town Hall ended. I drew a breath of relief. No breakdown by Sir Anthony, no scandalous interruption by Gedge, had marred the impressive ceremony. The band in the gallery played "God Save the King." The crowd in the body of the hall, who had stood for the anthem, sat down again, evidently waiting for Boyce and the notables to pass ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... him. His voice had the same sort of influence upon them as the drum and fife on a soldier's march: it quickened their movements. We were often called in by our neighbour manufacturers to repair a breakdown of their engines. That was always a sad disaster, as all hands were idle until the repair was effected. Archy was in his glory on such occasions. By his ready zeal and energy he soon got over the difficulty, repaired the engines, and set the people to work ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... the phases of death yield their full meaning. They are different ways of saying that "correspondence" has ceased. And the scientific meaning of Death now becomes clearly intelligible. Dying is that breakdown in an organism which throws it out of correspondence with some necessary part of the environment. Death is the result produced, the want of correspondence. We do not say that this is all that is involved. But this is the root idea of Death—Failure to ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... $6,000 a year in a government position at Washington, his rise in life due entirely to the opportunities of study offered him at Temple College. A lady who had been brought up in refined and cultured society was compelled to support herself, her husband and child through his complete physical breakdown. She took the normal course in dressmaking and millinery, and has this year been appointed the Director of the Domestic Science work in a large institution at a very good salary, being able to keep herself and family ...
— Russell H. Conwell • Agnes Rush Burr
... verge of another breakdown, and she laid her hand in his for a moment before she went from him hurriedly with a ...
— The Long Portage • Harold Bindloss
... stretched, and grinning faces watched the show. In the excess of his joy the Kid let out a blast on the trumpet that fairly shook the building. As if it were a signal, the boys jumped out of bed and danced a breakdown about him in their shirt-tails, even Gimpy ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... said, "we have our sources. Confidential. Top secret. I'm sure you understand, commissioner." Hurriedly, he added: "What does the breakdown ...
— Out Like a Light • Gordon Randall Garrett
... The Portuguese were nearly successful, but their over impetuosity caused all the scaling ladders to be broken by the crowds of soldiers who tried to mount them at once. Only a small party managed to enter the town, and since they could not be supported owing to the breakdown of the ladders, they were almost entirely cut to pieces. Several officers were killed in this affair, amongst whom were Jorge da Silveira and Garcia de Sousa, who both distinguished themselves by their daring valour. Finding it impossible to breach the ...
— Rulers of India: Albuquerque • Henry Morse Stephens
... better that brought Charity Coe home. It was the breakdown of her powers of resistance. Even the soldiers had to be granted vacations from the trenches; and so an eminent American surgeon in charge of the hospital she adorned finally drove Mrs. Cheever back to America. He disguised his solicitude with brutality; he told her he did not ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... usually rising by annual increments to L120. The maximum is not so high as that for teachers of ordinary subjects, and pensions are not universal, though most councils make fairly adequate provision for retirement, breakdown, and ill-health. ...
— Women Workers in Seven Professions • Edith J. Morley
... miserable breakdown of sobs and tears. Now that help had come—she was sure of it after one glance into this second officer's honest face—her courage collapsed entirely. The sergeant allowed her a moment to compose herself and then said, as he took out a notebook and ...
— Dorothy's Travels • Evelyn Raymond
... that the house of Wormser was shaken. It wasn't a serious breakdown, but among the good things that had to be thrown overboard belonged—at the demand ...
— The Indian Lily and Other Stories • Hermann Sudermann
... 1882 Ireland was in the midst of great troubles, including boycotts and the near breakdown of law and order. In May of that year Lord Frederick Cavendish, the newly-appointed Chief Secretary for Ireland, and Thomas Burke, a prominent civil servant, were assassinated in Dublin. The news stirred Trollope, despite his poor health, to travel to Ireland to see for himself the state ...
— The Landleaguers • Anthony Trollope
... system are absorbed, and the seed diverted through sexual excesses in the marriage relationship, by fornication, or by any other form of immorality, the man's power must decline: that to this very cause may be attributed the failure and breakdown of so many ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... a mother who was very excitable and suffered from hysteria, he inherited a nervous system which was not calculated to bear the strain which his own overzealous efforts in pursuing his studies and his spiritual exaltation put upon it, hence the mental and moral breakdown. This is a very interesting case because it does not fit into the ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy
... scientific truth, the results of scientific tests, can be made of everyday use in all class rooms. State and national headquarters for educators, and all large cities, can afford to engage scientists to apply vitality tests to school children for the sake of discovering, in advance of physical breakdown and before outward symptoms are obvious, what curriculum, what exercise, what study, recreation, and play periods are best suited to child development. It will cost infinitely less to proceed this way than to neglect children ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... and an emphatic: "Wife determined, coming Tuesday's train," from the Maluka was followed by a complete breakdown at the Katherine. ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... "An imminent breakdown in health—due, it would now appear, to quite obvious causes—relieved me from the purgatory of the college dormitory, and I was removed to one of the private houses. These establishments were considered more select and less 'rough.' The social atmosphere was, however, perhaps more unwholesome, ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... given her head in the weeks that followed, for Mrs. Salisbury steadily declined into a real illness, and the worried family was only too glad to delegate all the domestic problems to Justine. The invalid's condition, from "nervous breakdown" became "nervous prostration," and August was made terrible for the loving little group that watched her by the cruel fight with typhoid fever into which Mrs. Salisbury's exhausted little body was drawn. Weak as she was physically, her spirit never ...
— The Treasure • Kathleen Norris
... tons of snow were piled against the bows and port side, where the weight of the drift had forced the floe downward. The lead ahead had opened out during the night, cracked the pack from north to south and frozen over again, adding 300 yds. to the distance between the ship and "Khyber Pass." The breakdown gang had completed its work by lunch-time. The gale was then decreasing and the three- days-old moon showed as a red crescent on the northern horizon. The temperature during the blizzard had ranged ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... of his secretaries were measured. Indeed, to the loss of his sight he had become, in some measure, reconciled; what really dominated every other consideration was the need of being able to meet the peculiar conditions which had arisen through the complete breakdown of his ...
— An Adventure With A Genius • Alleyne Ireland
... get a fortnight off duty, and Martin Kerr, our donnish old cousin, who is arriving from Calcutta in a day or two, may accompany us; he is a bachelor, very well off, and has lived all his life like a hermit crab in his college in Oxford. Lately he had a bad breakdown, and was ordered an immense rest and change; so now he has ventured out to blink at the universe beyond Carfax and the High, I expect he will find us shamelessly trivial and ignorant. How his eyes will open when they look upon this glaring ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker
... prove an alibi. The man who is nervous and knows that he is nervous, realizes that he needs help, but the man who has as yet felt no lack of stability in himself is quite likely to be impatient with that whole class of people who are liable to nervous breakdown. It is therefore well to remind ourselves at once that the line between the so-called "normal" and the nervous is an exceedingly fine one. "Nervous invalids and well people are indistinguishable both in theory ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury
... all, nothing happened. Dane's barely veiled threats seemed to vanish like the man himself into thin air. Beatrice, after the breakdown of her one passionate outburst, had become wonderfully meek and tractable. Sylvanus Power, who had received from Elizabeth the message for which he had waited, showed no sign either of disappointment or anger. After the storm which had seemed to be breaking in upon him from every ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... experience of the world. Its most universal and important propositions must in a certain sense be truisms. The road has been so broadly trodden by the hosts who have travelled along it, that the main rules of the journey are clear enough, and we all know that the secret of breakdown and wreck is seldom so much an insufficient knowledge of the route, as imperfect discipline of the will. The truism, however, and the commonplace may be stated in a form so fresh, pungent, and free from triviality, as to have all the force ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... me in the two sittings I had with Mrs Piper, was the hopeless breakdown of the Thought Transference Theory, as accounting for ...
— Seen and Unseen • E. Katharine Bates
... hundred miles. Between their valleys surface water finds its way underground by means of sink holes. These are pits, commonly funnel shaped, formed by the enlargement of crevice or joint by percolating water, or by the breakdown of some portion of the roof of a cave. By clogging of the outlet a sink hole may come to be filled ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton
... discovered that the breakdown had been caused by a defect in the ignition apparatus which it would take some time to repair. Both he and Harry went to work on it after supper, however, and by midnight ...
— The Boy Aviators' Polar Dash - Or - Facing Death in the Antarctic • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... necessary to this illusion that you should pass under an assumed name, unless you happen to be a very eminent actor, or cricketer, or other idol of the nation, whose presence would flutter the young persons at the bureau. If your nervous breakdown be (as it more likely is) due to merely intellectual distinction, these young persons will mete out to you no more than the bright callous civility which they mete out impartially to all (but those few) who come before them. To them you will be a number, and to yourself you ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... heat cost more for installation, but have many advantages over the furnace. Their chief drawbacks are the space usurped by radiators, lack of ventilation, and the possibility of an occasional breakdown. The ingenuity of the makers, however, is partly overcoming these difficulties, mainly by the device called ...
— The Complete Home • Various
... do? How could I hold back? I was certainly growing stronger every hour, and in spite of my breakdown on the previous night, I felt that it would be absurd to pretend that I was ...
— Gil the Gunner - The Youngest Officer in the East • George Manville Fenn
... with that which he has left us, there would probably have been no question as to the propriety of the means he used. I am fully aware how difficult and often dangerous it is in these matters to argue from a mere fragment, especially in view of the breakdown of so many plays when they come to the unravelling, but it should be borne in mind that in the matter of dramatic construction Jonson stood head and shoulders above all the other writers with whom we have ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... measured for it on a pretence of Corona's that she wanted to discover how much he had grown during his rest-cure. (For I regret to say that, as one subterfuge leads to another, she had by this time descended to feigning a nervous breakdown for him, due to his outgrowing his strength.) Best of all, and when the gown was finished, Nurse Branscome produced from her workbox a lucky threepenny-bit, and sewed it upon the breast ...
— Brother Copas • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... have had to contend. But the very worst feature of the defence is that no one trusts the neighbouring detachment sufficiently to believe that it will stand firm under all circumstances and not abandon its ground; consequently this fear that a sudden breakdown along some barricades will allow of an inrush of Chinese troops and Boxers makes men fight all the time with their eyes over their shoulders, which is the very worst way of fighting I can possibly imagine. And another hardly ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... fully civilised classes, an unduly excessive share of labour tends to devolve upon the male. That almost entirely modern, morbid condition, affecting brain and nervous system, and shortening the lives of thousands in modern civilised societies, which is vulgarly known as "overwork" or "nervous breakdown," is but one evidence of the even excessive share of mental toil devolving upon the modern male of the cultured classes, who, in addition to maintaining himself, has frequently dependent upon him a larger or smaller number of entirely parasitic females. ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner
... saw no difficulties, no dangers, no risks of breakdown in my girlish scheme. Already my husband had got all he had bargained for. He had got my father's money in exchange for his noble name, and if he wanted more, if he wanted the love of his wife, let him earn it, let ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... as it will also contain myself and another civilian in plain clothes. At the psychological moment a white flag will be shown from it, waved perhaps surreptitiously by one of the civilians. In the event of breakdown of the automobile a horsed vehicle will be used and the same signal will apply. For the sake of myself and the other civilian, please instruct all officers to keep a sharp lookout and protect the ...
— Affair in Araby • Talbot Mundy
... the little son in whom so much of his own and his wife's happiness was centred. The suddenness of the blow made it all the more crushing, and the mental strain, intensified by the sight of his wife's inconsolable grief, brought him perilously near a complete breakdown. But the birth of another son, on December 11, gave the mother some comfort; and as the result of a friendly conspiracy between her and Dr. Tyndall, Huxley himself was carried off for a week's climbing in Wales between Christmas and the ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... six feet tall might easily have frightened Mr. Wordsley into a nervous breakdown by staring at him with that gaunt, hollow-eyed stare, but this creature, though manlike, was fully fifty feet tall, incredibly elongated, and stark naked. Its hair was long and matted; its cheeks sunken, its lips pulled back in an expression which might have been anything from a smile ...
— The Marooner • Charles A. Stearns
... those last grueling months in Berlin, when Carl had a breakdown, and I got sick nursing him and had to go to a German hospital; and while I was there Jim was threatened with pneumonia and Nandy got tonsillitis. In the midst of it all the lease expired on our Wohnung, and Carl and Anna ...
— An American Idyll - The Life of Carleton H. Parker • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... was early, they got a seat near the parapet. Tavernake talked clumsily about himself most of the time. There was a lump in his throat. He felt all the while that tragedy was very near. By degrees, though, as she ate and drank, the color came back to her cheeks, the fear of a breakdown seemed to pass away. She ...
— The Tempting of Tavernake • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... of the working of the locomotive, the information necessary to answer satisfactorily the entire list of questions can be easily mastered in the time given. In regard to breakdowns, it is advised that he carefully inspect each breakdown or disabled engine that comes to his notice, see where the parts have given way and in what manner the work of blocking up it done. It is not expected that all the breakdowns which may happen to a locomotive ...
— The Traveling Engineers' Association - To Improve The Locomotive Engine Service of American Railroads • Anonymous
... discarded so quickly. Goldwin Smith asserted[1] that, whoever laid claim to the parentage of Confederation, the real parent was Deadlock. But this was the critic, not the historian, who spoke. The causes lay far deeper than in the breakdown of party government in Canada. Events of profound significance were about to change an atmosphere overladen with partisanship and to ...
— The Fathers of Confederation - A Chronicle of the Birth of the Dominion • A. H. U. Colquhoun
... allows; in short, develop your resolution with every aid you know. This will give your new beginning such a momentum that the temptation to break down will not occur as soon as it otherwise might; and every day during which a breakdown is postponed adds to the chances of ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts
... insanity will surely result from handling the sexual organs. It is true that masturbation is a common habit of certain types of insane people and of some neurotics; but it is probable that the habit is more often one of several factors rather than the direct cause of the nervous breakdown. However, it is scientific to say that the habit may weaken the nervous system and indirectly affect general health, especially in pre-adolescent and early adolescent years. Probably the greatest nervous damage comes because there is often greater excess than is possible ...
— Sex-education - A series of lectures concerning knowledge of sex in its - relation to human life • Maurice Alpheus Bigelow |
