"Clockwork" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... rebounded heavenwards, at the vision of the eager dreamy lad whose question had set going all this odd clockwork of association. He wouldn't lose his Shelley for the world! How like twenty! And how many things that he wouldn't lose for the world will he have to give up before he is thirty, I reflected sententiously,—give up at last, maybe, ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne
... a rigid disciplinarian in other respects, suffered no one to be absent, on any plea whatever, except indisposition, from morning and evening devotions; and these were always performed at stated times. In fact, the establishment was conducted with the regularity of clockwork, it being the aim of its master not to pass a single ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth
... simply spoiling for some one to fall in love with, I can tell that from your last letter. The pretty brunette had not intellectuality enough, had she? My dear fellow, as if that had anything to do with it! You were not ready, that was all. You fall in love by clockwork once every year; and it is time now. If you should see the P. B. again to-morrow, you'd be lost directly. As for me—I should think you would be tired of asking. No, I am not in love. No, I feel no inclination whatever to become so. No, there is no 'charmer' (what vile expressions ...
— Geoffrey Strong • Laura E. Richards
... so with Lloyd. Her charges were not infrequently persons whom she knew, often intimately, but during the time of their sickness their personalities vanished for the trained nurse; she saw only the "case," only the mechanism, only the deranged clockwork in ...
— A Man's Woman • Frank Norris
... often wondered how Dickens found time to accomplish so many different things. One of the secrets of this, no doubt, was his love of order. He was the most systematic of men. Everything he did "went like clockwork," and he prided himself on his punctuality. He could not work in a room unless everything in it was in its proper place. As a consequence of this habit of regularity, ...
— Tales from Dickens • Charles Dickens and Hallie Erminie Rives
... Yellowstone National Park and of the Grand Canyon of the Colorado, and of Alaska. Yellowstone Park is perhaps the only region where one can see innumerable geysers shooting high into the air, performing year after year with clockwork regularity. Its opal and sapphire pools and hot sulphurous springs, its bears and wild creatures, remind one that here Nature left a specimen of her earliest creation. Motoring along the roads of Wyoming to the "Devil's Paint Pot" ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... at an appointed hour a voice speaking a thick German would advise that this bridge or that railway crossing had been cleared. At a hamlet among pine woods an unknown man would clamber up beside me and take me past a sentry-post. Smooth as clockwork was the machine, till in the dawn of a spring morning I found myself dropping into a broad valley through little orchards just beginning to blossom, and I knew that I was in France. After that, Blenkiron's own arrangements ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... to me they don't amount to ANYthing. Here I am, at my time of life, up the first one in the house. I ring the bell for the cook at quarter-past six every morning, and the breakfast is on the table at half-past seven right along, like clockwork, but I never see anybody but you till I go to ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... rest after all that. We walked the floor until our legs gave out and we had to sit down perforce. Mother knitted away as steadily as clockwork and pretended to be calm and serene—pretended so well that we were all deceived and envious until the next day, when I caught her ravelling out four inches of her sock. She had knit that far past where the heel ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... of this private government strip also seems to run like clockwork. To be sure the wheels even of a clock grind a bit with friction at times, but the clock goes on keeping time for all that. The Canal Zone is the best governed district in the United States. It is worth any American's time and sea-sickness to run down there, if only to assure himself that ...
— Zone Policeman 88 - A Close Range Study of the Panama Canal and its Workers • Harry A. Franck
... not itself. Sardou is a hard taskmaster; he chains his slaves. Without nobility or even coherence of conception, without inner life or even a recognisable semblance of exterior life, the piece goes by clockwork; you cannot make the hands go faster or slower, or bring its mid-day into agreement with the sun. A great actress, who is also a great intelligence, is seen accepting it, for its purpose, with contempt, as a thing to exercise her technical skill upon. As a piece of technical skill, ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... of the most beautiful description, gay with shining coloured globes and wax lights and paper lanterns; laden with mysterious packages in white paper, tied with ribbon of red, white and blue, and with other things about which there was no mystery—clockwork toys, field guns and ambulance wagons, and a big, splendid Red Cross nurse, difficult to consider a mere doll. Never was seen such a laden tree; it's branches groaned under the weight they bore. And beside it, who but Father Christmas, bowing ...
— Captain Jim • Mary Grant Bruce
... Clockwork Mice, and Coloured Marbles Painted Bird that sweetly warbles, Dolls of every age and size, With flaxen hair ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole
... was no longer a matter of any moment. The stick was laid on with the utmost indifference, and a great fool was made of those who pitied the animals, as if they had any feeling. They said they were only clockwork, and that the cries they uttered when they were beaten were no more than the noise of some little spring that had been moved, and that all this involved no sensation. They nailed the poor animals upon boards by the fore-paws, in order to ...
— Pascal • John Tulloch
... 23d the powder-boat was towed in by a gunboat as near to the fort as it was safe to run. She was then propelled by her own machinery to within about five hundred yards of the shore. There the clockwork, which was to explode her within a certain length of time, was set and she was abandoned. Everybody left, and even the vessels put out to sea to prevent the effect of the explosion upon them. At two o'clock in the morning the explosion took place—and ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... with the accurate grace of the clockwork at Greenwich; Their brassies unswervingly held to the line of the pegs; Their chip-shots came down on the greens and mistook them for spinach, And stopped like poached eggs; Not theirs the desire for the sandpit, not theirs the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, June 3, 1914 • Various
... old, Dear lady. True, deeds densely crowd in him; Turn months to years calendaring his span; Yet by Time's common clockwork he's but young. ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... had no rest. Like clockwork from the Mississippi's banks beyond came the boom and shriek of the coehorns on the barges. The big shells hung for an instant in the air like birds of prey, and then could be seen swooping down here and there, while now and anon a shaft of smoke rose straight ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... have disappeared into the stifle from which the police retreated. There was no haste, no hesitation. Everything moved as smoothly as if by clockwork. Yet we could not see one of the men who had disappeared into the burning building. They had been swallowed up, as it were. For that is the way with the New York firemen. They go straight to the heart of the fire. Now and then a stream of a hose spat out of a window, ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve
... the troop movements went like clockwork, as did also the approach marches to the positions of deployment, and at the appointed time on 30th October, the Divisional H.Q. moved up the five or six miles to the battle stations selected. There was no sign of crowding or confusion—the only indication that there was anything ...
— The Fife and Forfar Yeomanry - and 14th (F. & F. Yeo.) Battn. R.H. 1914-1919 • D. D. Ogilvie
... admirable epigram by picturing the time when, all rational discussion and all beneficial legislation being out of the question, the House of Commons may become a mere mechanical puppet-show, and may present the spectacle of 'a steam Irish Party, an electric Ministry, and a clockwork Speaker.' It is certain that there never was so much talk in the Lower House as at the present moment; but it is also certain that the complaint of 'much speaking' has before now been frequently preferred against both Chambers. Politicians have always been a wordy race, and many a sharp ...
— By-ways in Book-land - Short Essays on Literary Subjects • William Davenport Adams
... should rest upon Lord Plowden's over-arrogant keeper. Then a noise of a different character assailed his ears, punctuated as it were by distant boyish cries of "mark!" These cries, and the buzzing sound as of clockwork gone wrong which they accompanied and heralded, became all at once a most urgent affair of his own. He strained his eyes upon the horizon of the thicket—and, as if by instinct, the gun sprang up to adjust its sight to this eager gaze, and followed automatically the ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... poker after Reginald Maltravers had been stripped of his valuables, and had worn it. They had been dispatched with a bomb each, which they were to introduce into the hold of the Jasper B., retiring through the tunnel after they had started the clockwork mechanism going. It was known that one of them owed the other money; they had been quarreling about it as they entered the tunnel from the cellar of Morris's. It was conjectured that the quarrel had progressed and that the debtor had ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis
... seem to have gone purposely to pick up the mud in the four quarters of the town in order to bring it in here afterwards; and poor Francoise is almost off her legs with the constant scrubbing of the floors, which your masters come and dirty every day as regular as clockwork. ...
— The Shopkeeper Turned Gentleman - (Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme) • Moliere (Poquelin)
... six Confederate prisons of which I saw the interior. With all his alleged brutal severity, of which I saw no manifestation, and his ravenous appetite for greenbacks, for which we could not blame him, Dick Turner seemed an excellent disciplinarian. Everything went like clockwork. We knew what to expect or rather what not to expect, and when! My diary for Wednesday, September 28, 1864, the day after our arrival, ...
— Lights and Shadows in Confederate Prisons - A Personal Experience, 1864-5 • Homer B. Sprague
... with Bertha and Percy. Bertha adored him and delighted in him in reality; Lady Kellynch worshipped him in theory, but though she hardly knew it herself, his presence absolutely interfered with all her plans about nothing, spoilt her little arrangements for order, and jarred on the clockwork regularity of her life, especially in ...
— Bird of Paradise • Ada Leverson
... the rest of his kind, and I put no faith in his story until I investigated. But the well is there and doing a hundred and fifty barrels as regular as clockwork." ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... for you," Selingman declared, as they followed their porters into the shed. "For me, I am a man of affairs. It is different. My business goes by clockwork. All is regulated by rule, with precision, with punctuality. Now I shall be many hours behind my schedule. I shall be compelled to alter my appointments—I, who pride myself always upon altering nothing. ...
— The Double Traitor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... which we had lived previously. The little extra exertion demanded to pass the sentry without creating any suspicions in his mind now told on me. Once I had passed out of his sight the reaction set in, and I fell into a clockwork pace. I was determined to fulfil my mission at all hazards, so plodded along slowly. I could see nothing, and heeded nothing, being only conscious of the fact that I was going to get something to eat and to bring food back for my stranded companions on the field. ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... world which is more mystical, or at least more mysterious. For in the Victorian age the agnostics were not really agnostics. They might be better described as reverent materialists; or at any rate monists. They had at least at the back of their minds a clear and consistent concept of their rather clockwork cosmos; that is why they could not admit the smallest speck of the supernatural into their clockwork. But to-day it is very hard for a scientific man to say where the supernatural ends or the natural begins, or what name should be ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... way," she said, "if I looked after things myself, but I shall expect you, Patty, to take entire charge of the occasion, and then everything will go along like clockwork." ...
— Patty's Summer Days • Carolyn Wells
... by a shrill sound like the creaking of a rusty spring. It startled Don Juan; he all but dropped the phial. A sweat, colder than the blade of a dagger, issued through every pore. It was only a piece of clockwork, a wooden cock that sprang out and crowed three times, an ingenious contrivance by which the learned of that epoch were wont to be awakened at the appointed hour to begin the labors of the day. Through the windows there came already a flush of dawn. The thing, ...
— The Elixir of Life • Honore de Balzac
... became wildly ingenious, and planned to escape, not only by pitching his cap to some distance off so as to distract the bear's attention, and enable him to slip down and run away, but by devising methods of effecting his object by clockwork, fireworks, wings, balloons—in short, by everything that ever has, in the history of design, enabled men ...
— The Prairie Chief • R.M. Ballantyne
... the fire lingered on long after the old-fashioned iron jacks and spits had ceased to be the common method of cooking meat. The meat hastener and the Dutch oven conserved and radiated the heat, the joint turning slowly by the clockwork mechanism of the improved brass bottle jack. As the size of the fireplace narrowed and kitchens were built smaller roasting in ovens became popular; the cooker of to-day with its hot-plates, grills, and steam chests—whether heated ...
— Chats on Household Curios • Fred W. Burgess
... to almost a dead calm, and as she lay she saw little rabbits stealing out to play in the sunshine on the sands. She watched them running in circles like things on wheels and moving by clockwork. Then she closed her eyes, but still she saw them circling, ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... have a witness of the calmness of that function. The girl's luggage had been already packed and sent off before. Her berth on the steamer had been taken. They had timed it all so exactly that it went like clockwork. They had known the date upon which Colonel Rufford would get Edward's letter and they had known almost exactly the hour at which they would receive his telegram asking his daughter to come to him. It had all been quite beautifully and quite mercilessly arranged, by Edward himself. ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford
... reorganizations. The shipping department, first; the correspondence division next; the accounting department third, and he literally swept through the office like the proverbial new broom, caught up all the loose ends, and established a routine like clockwork. So successful was his work that the directors hastened to add ...
— Increasing Efficiency In Business • Walter Dill Scott
... up to shillings. All at once he heard a gentle whirring somewhere amongst them. It made him start and look behind him. There were the sails of a windmill going round and round almost close to his ear. He thought at first it must be one of those toys which are wound up and go with clockwork; but no, it was a common penny toy, with the windmill at the end of a whistle, and when the whistle blows the windmill goes. But the wonder was that there was no one at the whistle end blowing, and yet the sails were turning round and round—now faster, ...
— At the Back of the North Wind • George MacDonald
... directions and commands, issued like clockwork amid the confusion of battle. Our executive officer seemed to be in a ...
— The Monitor and the Merrimac - Both sides of the story • J. L. Worden et al.
... stirring the frying-pan through a veil of smoke, suddenly seemed the only way I had ever really seen her. Here she was at home; in London she became some one concealed by clothes, an artificial doll overdressed and moving by clockwork, only a portion of her alive. Here she was ...
— Three More John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... days at the Vicarage before she found that punctuality was Aunt Sarah's idol, and that nothing offended her more than want of respect to it from others. Certainly everything went like clockwork at Waverley, and though Anna fancied that Mr Forrest inwardly rebelled a little, he was outwardly quite submissive. All Aunt Sarah's arrangements and plans were so neatly fitted into each other that the least transgression in ...
— Thistle and Rose - A Story for Girls • Amy Walton
... man accustomed during a long life to habits regulated by clockwork, the jar must have been especially sharp; yet before his neighbours had fairly begun to wonder how he would take it, he had made for himself a new routine of living, and he might have been observed each day doing the same things at the same hours—smoking his afternoon cigarette as he leaned ...
— Sir Robert Hart - The Romance of a Great Career, 2nd Edition • Juliet Bredon
... instinctive dispositions with their powerful impulses, and the organism would become incapable of activity of any kind; it would lie inert and motionless, like a wonderful clockwork whose mainspring had been removed, or a steam-engine whose fires had ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... was christened the Fortune, and on this the mine was to be exploded by a slow match, cut so as to explode at a calculated moment. The mine on board the Hope was to be started by a piece of clockwork, which at the appointed time was to strike fire from a flint. Planks and woodwork were piled on the decks to give to the two vessels the appearance of simple fireships. Thirty-two small craft, saturated with tar and turpentine and filled with inflammable materials, ...
— By Pike and Dyke: A Tale of the Rise of the Dutch Republic • G.A. Henty
... moderate. The dreaded Boomerang collapsed and was stormed with hardly a casualty. This was owing partly to the two trench mortars lent us by the French and partly to the extraordinary fine shooting of our own battery of 4.5 howitzers. The whole show went like clockwork—like a Field Day. First the 87th Brigade took three lines of trenches; then our guns lengthened their range and fuses and the 86th Brigade, with the gallant Royal Fusiliers at their head, scrambled over the trenches already taken by the 87th, ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume I • Ian Hamilton
... shown is called an equatorial. The convenience of this peculiar style of supporting the instrument consists in the ease with which the telescope can be moved so as to follow a star in its apparent journey across the sky. The necessary movements of the tube are given by clockwork driven by a weight, so that, once the instrument has been correctly pointed, the star will remain in the observer's field of view, and the effect of the apparent diurnal movement will be neutralised. The last refinement in this direction is the application of ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... have had less of the energy of life in its involuntary motions than he, who, nevertheless, went on with the same measured clockwork tread until the door of his own house was reached. And then he disappeared, and the latch fell feebly to, and made a faint and wavering sound, breaking the solemn silence of the night. Then ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... "I have made an infernal machine with clockwork, and hid it in the hold near the gunpowder when we were at Fairhaven. I think it will go off between ten and eleven to-night, but I am not quite sure about the time. Don't tell those other beasts, but jump overboard and swim ashore. I have taken the boat I would ...
— Sea Urchins • W. W. Jacobs
... approaching instead of leaving the danger—and though Tignonville for an instant thought him mad, and snatched at the Countess's rein—his men-at-arms, who knew him, galloped stolidly on, passed like clockwork the end of the street, and, reckless of the stream of persons hurrying in the direction of the alarm, heedless of the fright and anger their passage excited, pressed steadily on. A moment and the gate through which they had entered the previous evening appeared before them. And—a ...
— Count Hannibal - A Romance of the Court of France • Stanley J. Weyman
... and make sure that everything is in order. At ten minutes to twelve, I hoist into place the two arms to which our wires are secured, stretching them tight by means of the winch which we have provided, and then I at once start the clockwork. I then descend, make my way to the tram-station, and take a third-class ticket to Colmar, where I will await you at Valentin's cabaret. If you do not arrive by sundown, I am to go on to Paris to make ...
— The Destroyer - A Tale of International Intrigue • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... water-soaked package in the open yard of the shops of the Swift Construction Company, proved that there was enough explosive in the bomb to blow the shed itself to pieces. But the stopping of the clockwork attachment of course made ...
— Tom Swift and his Electric Locomotive - or, Two Miles a Minute on the Rails • Victor Appleton
... not that wise and ancient cow, Who chews her juicy cud so languid now Beneath her favorite elm, whose drooping bough Lulls all but inward vision, fast asleep: But still, her tireless tail a pendulum sweep Mysterious clockwork guides, and some hid pulley Her drowsy cud, each ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... Gibbons; and the ceiling was all a-sprawl with gods and goddesses, I suppose by Verrio. In the windows, which looked out on two sides, over the river and into a little court, were little tables covered with curious things, for His Majesty delighted in such ingenuities—Dutch figures in silver, clockwork, and the like, and a basket of spaniels lay beneath one of the tables. A second great table stood against the wall on the further side from that on which I entered, covered with retorts and instruments, and behind it a press, and near it ...
— Oddsfish! • Robert Hugh Benson
... me horribly. I wanted to be revenged for that. But after a bit I was sure they were only clockwork. I wanted to stop them. I did stop the devil ...
— Martin Hyde, The Duke's Messenger • John Masefield
... individual liberty. Thus Ouida is right when she maintains that "the State only aims at instilling those qualities in its public by which its demands are obeyed, and its exchequer is filled. Its highest attainment is the reduction of mankind to clockwork. In its atmosphere all those finer and more delicate liberties, which require treatment and spacious expansion, inevitably dry up and perish. The State requires a taxpaying machine in which there is no hitch, an exchequer ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... fuzes depending on the rotation of the shell to give a regular motion to clockwork have been tried, but so far no practicable form of these fuzes ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... were seen engaged in a song and dance. They were about eighteen inches apart, and alternately jumped two feet into the air, alighting always in the same spot. As soon as one bird alighted the other bird jumped up, their time being like clockwork in its regularity, and each "accompanying himself to the tune of 'to-le-do'—'to-le-do'—'to-le-do,' sounding the syllable 'to' as he crouched to spring, 'le' while in the air, and 'do' as he alighted." The performance was kept up for ...
— Little Folks (December 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... was the reply, "and she's enough to keep us goin'. Gits round reg'lar as clockwork once a month to collect the two dollars from Perez. It's her day now, and I told Perez that that was why he sneaked off to Barry's. You see, 'Gusty's after him to buy the history of Methuselah, or some old critter, and he don't like to see her. She's after me, ...
— Cap'n Eri • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... exhausted. With no apparent cause, we see death busy among them. "Suddenly the wasps begin to fall as though struck by lightning; for a few moments the abdomen quivers and the legs gesticulate, then finally remain inert, like a clockwork machine whose spring has run down to the last coil." (9/10.) This law is general; "the insect is born orphaned both of mother and father, excepting the social insect, and again excepting the dung- beetle, which dies full of ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... scans the Barograph, which is an instrument much the same as the Altimeter; but in this case the expansion of the vacuum box causes a pen to trace a line upon a roll of paper. This paper is made by clockwork to pass over the point of the pen, and so a curved line is made which accurately registers the speed of the ascent in feet per minute. No longer is the ascent at the rate of a thousand feet a minute, and the Propeller ...
— The Aeroplane Speaks - Fifth Edition • H. Barber
... my country will start her great war. She will be in Paris in about two months after the commencement of hostilities. Her move on Paris will be but a step to her real object—the crushing of England. Everything will move like clockwork. We will be prepared and others will not ...
— A School History of the Great War • Albert E. McKinley, Charles A. Coulomb, and Armand J. Gerson
... he charged with redoubling thrusts. The Englishman appeared to be enjoying himself, discreetly; he chuckled as the other, cursing, shifted from tierce to quart, and he met the assault with a nice inevitableness. In all, each movement had the comely precision of finely adjusted clockwork, though at times John Bulmer's face showed a spurt of amusement roused by the brigand's extravagancy of gesture and Cazaio's contortions as he strove to pass the line of steel that flickered cannily between his sword ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... black coat and pulled it off, Judy brought a jacket of dingy tweed from behind a curtain in the corner, and stood on a chair to help the figure put it on. All knew their duties; the performance went like clockwork. And Maria sat and watched in helpful silence. There was a certain air about her as ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood
... occasion to record his voyages in this world of storms. So did many a hundred of religious writers. And what wonder should there be in this, when the main qualification for such a style was plain good sense, natural feeling, unpretendingness, some little scholarly practice in putting together the clockwork of sentences, so as to avoid mechanical awkwardness of construction, but above all the advantage of a subject, such in its nature as instinctively to reject ornament, lest it should draw off attention from itself? Such subjects ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... am always to be found, should you ever require my services. I have a masterpiece in my head. I come on to the scene like Bacchus drawn by my two cats. How are the cats to draw my heavy weight? I'll have a noiseless clockwork arrangement that will really propel the car. You must ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... he wants to be liked for his own sake! The latest of him is that the Princess de Rosen will not take the knight, which he has done for the Prince's tomb. It was mentioned every minute in the family, where money is not plenty. 'When we have sold the knight, I am to have a clockwork horse,' said the boy. The poor mother too counted upon the knight for refurnishing her empty presses, and to Vedrine himself the price of the master-piece meant just three months' holiday in a Nile-boat. Well! the knight not sold, or to be paid for heaven knows when, after a ...
— The Immortal - Or, One Of The "Forty." (L'immortel) - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... the party was to stay to dinner. And then instantly the whole household sprang into activity. Above stairs everything would move with the smoothness of clockwork; but downstairs in the servants' quarters it was a serious matter that an elaborate banquet for seven people had to be got ready in a couple of hours. Even Samuel was pressed into service at odd jobs—something for which he was very glad, as it ...
— Samuel the Seeker • Upton Sinclair
... began, "I was put on to Caroline Schimmel; I have found out all about her by this time. She is as regular as clockwork in her duties at least. She wakes at ten and takes her absinthe. Then she goes to a little restaurant she knows, and has her breakfast and a game at cards with any one that will play with her. At ...
— Caught In The Net • Emile Gaboriau
... along the smooth Roman road at a splendid pace, "the ponies going like clockwork," as Vixen remarked approvingly; but poor Miss McCroke thought that any clock which went as fast as those ponies would be deemed the maddest ...
— Vixen, Volume III. • M. E. Braddon
... our little flat on a Hundred and Thirty-seventh Street. We was happy then. It's your success has lost you for me. I ought to known it, but—I—I wanted things so for you and the boy. It's your success has lost you for me. Back there, not a supper we didn't eat together like clockwork, not a night we didn't ...
— Gaslight Sonatas • Fannie Hurst
... which the squadron's machines would leave the ground was remarkable. The twenty Sopwiths took the air at precise intervals, flew together in a V formation while executing difficult manoeuvres, and landed one after the other with the exactness of clockwork. The French pilots flew the Farman and Breguet bombardment machines whenever the weather permitted. Every one knew some big bombardment was ahead but when it would be made or what place was to be ...
— Flying for France • James R. McConnell
... of artillery with the finest equipment ever known were added to his army. The ordnance trains were packed to their capacity. His troops were better equipped than ever before in the history of the war. Every department of the huge, pitiless machine was running like clockwork. ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon
... I could make it out, it consisted of two flat platforms between which, covered over and projected, was a slip of paper which moved forward, actuated by clockwork, and pressed on by a sort of stylus. Then he covered it over lightly with dirt so that, unless anyone had been looking for it, it would ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... MAP, with clockwork attachment, giving apparent motion of heavens, boxed, complete with clamps for binnacle. 36 inch size, only L2. 2. 0. (Invaluable for night work.) With A. B. C. certificate, ...
— With The Night Mail - A Story of 2000 A.D. (Together with extracts from the - comtemporary magazine in which it appeared) • Rudyard Kipling
... basement formed the glass isolating "island" which all of us who have ever seen an electrical machine know so well. The electric machine itself, a battery of Leyden jars was hidden under the altar and connected by a piece of clockwork with that opening covered with metal in which the ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... regular, unchanged, undeviating, unvaried, unvarying. unsegmented. Adv. uniformly &c. adj.; uniformly with &c. (conformably) 82; in harmony with &c. (agreeing) 23. always, invariably, without exception, without fail, unfailingly, never otherwise; by clockwork. Phr. ab ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... administration and the judiciary are equally stripped of power, prestige, and patronage. You smile, Monsieur, but no longer, as formerly, are they the centres of life, of emulation, and of light, civic schools and manly gymnasiums; they have become merely simple, passive clockwork; and that is the case with the rest, Monsieur de Camors. Our municipal institutions are a mere farce, our provincial assemblies only a name, our local liberties naught! Consequently, we have not now a man for a deputy. ...
— Monsieur de Camors, Complete • Octave Feuillet
... Grimaldi, a 'famous and unique Engineer' who, as a matter of actual fact, spent twenty years in missionary work in India, and employed the spare time that missionary work left him in bringing his invention to a workable state. The invention is described as a 'box which with the aid of clockwork rises in the air, and goes with such lightness and strong rapidity that it succeeds in flying a journey of seven leagues in an hour. It is made in the fashion of a bird; the wings from end to end are 25 feet in extent. The body is composed of cork, artistically joined together ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian
... came back to me under that apple tree. It was when our old mare Peggy took fright at a tin peddler's wagon just as she was crossing the bridge at the foot of Smith's hill; what ailed the creature I can't tell, for she's as steady as clockwork generally. Dear me! I've ridden her ever since I was so high! But perhaps it was the sun shining on one of the tins hanging outside the wagon, that reflected into her eyes and scared her out of her wits; at any rate, she gave a sudden ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... and more than Mary, with her young inexperience, could have thought of. She prepared the warm bath, and tried it with her husband's own thermometer (Mr. Jenkins was as punctual as clockwork in noting down the temperature of every day). She let his mother place her baby in the tub, still preserving the same rigid, affronted aspect, and then she went upstairs without a word. Mary longed to ask her to stay, but dared not; though, when she left the room, ...
— The Grey Woman and other Tales • Mrs. (Elizabeth) Gaskell
... was still there, however petty the man seemed now. Dave started to phrase some protest, when he found his legs taking him forward to stop in front of Sather Karf, like some clockwork man whose lever has been pushed. He stood in front of the raised bench, noticing that the spot had been chosen to highlight him in the sunset light from the windows. He listened while the ...
— The Sky Is Falling • Lester del Rey
... had passed out the Adventure and Romance agent wore a queer smile, as he trod down the fire and locked up his desk. "A fine chap, that Major; when one hasn't a touch of the poet one stands some chance of being a poem. But to think of such a clockwork little creature of all people getting into the nets of one of Grigsby's tales," and he laughed ...
— The Club of Queer Trades • G. K. Chesterton
... two compartments within the box. In one was a mechanism which resembled the works of a small clock. There also was a little battery of two dry cells. A wire ran from the clockwork to one of the poles of the battery, and from the other pole through the partition into the other compartment, a second wire ...
— The Beasts of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... the end. Capt. Murray Sueter in his book on submarines gives these and other particulars of the vessel. At either end the boat had a cabin, the air in which remained good for about three hours, and in the middle of the boat was a large paddlewheel rotated by clockwork mechanism, which, it was claimed, would run for eight hours when once wound up. The iron tips at the ends of the vessel were intended for ramming, and the inventor was confident he could sink the biggest English ship afloat by crushing in her hull under water. The boat was duly launched, but on trial ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... evening MacTurk came to see him. His case, thus complicated by a new mischance, was become one of interest in the surgeon's eyes. He regarded him as a damaged piece of clockwork, which it would be creditable to his skill to set agoing again. Graves and young MacTurk—Moore's sole other visitors—contemplated him in the light in which they were wont to contemplate the occupant for the time being of the dissecting-room at ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... had by this time deflected the clockwork rat from the wall to which it had been steering, and pointed it up the alley-way between the two rows of desks. Mr. Downing, rising from his place, was just in time to see Sammy with a last leap spring on his prey and begin ...
— Mike • P. G. Wodehouse
... of chocolates, a basket of peaches and a clockwork train she hurried back to the ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... the fact that the date is somewhere near the end of November. Our life has settled down into serenity, and our singular and enforced partnership is very pleasant. We might be three men living together, but for the unvarying courtesy and consideration which they show to me. Our work goes on like clockwork; the only difficulty which ever arises is that the men do not like me to do anything that they think hard or unsuitable, such as saddling a horse or bringing in water. The days go very fast; it was 3:30 today ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... troubles of her people, which they are sure to tell her about. Around Ozma's throne, on such occasions, are grouped all the important personages of Oz, such as the Scarecrow, Jack Pumpkinhead, Tiktok the Clockwork Man, the Tin Woodman, the Wizard of Oz, the Shaggy Man and other famous fairy people. Little Dorothy usually has a seat at Ozma's feet, and crouched on either side the throne are two enormous beasts known as the Hungry ...
— Little Wizard Stories of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... or greenish hue according to his individual temperament. In short, within a given time the most blooming young man is turned into an "inasmuch" machine—an instrument which applies the Code to individual cases with the indifference of clockwork. ...
— The Commission in Lunacy • Honore de Balzac
... by clockwork one of the lictors approached the girl and removed the unbecoming hat from her head, releasing a living stream of gold which, as it rippled over the girl's shoulders, roused a quick cry of admiration in ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... constantly progressive change going on, the cause of which is entirely unknown. In each of the magnetic observatories throughout the world an arrangement is at work, by means of which a suspended magnet directs a ray of light on a preparred sheet of paper moved by clockwork. On that paper the never-resting heart of the earth is now tracing, in telegraphic symbols which will one day be interpreted, a record of its pulsations and its flutterings, as well as of that slow but mighty working which warns us that we must not suppose that the inner history ...
— Five of Maxwell's Papers • James Clerk Maxwell
... of every genial or vital impulse. The strulbrug of Swift (and Swift, being his horrid creator, ought to understand his own horrid creation) was a wreck, a shell, that had been burned hollow, and cancered by the fierce furnace of life. His clockwork was gone, or carious; only some miserable fragment of a pendulum continued to oscillate paralytically from mere incapacity of any thing so abrupt, and therefore so vigorous, as a decided HALT! However, the use of this dreadful word may be reasonably extended to the ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... we have a new departure. Gill at the Cape, having the comet 1882.ii. all to himself in those latitudes, wished his friends in Europe to see it, and employed a local photographer to strap his camera to the observatory equatoreal, driven by clockwork, and adjusted on the comet by the eye. The result with half-an-hour's exposure was good, so he tried three hours. The result was such a display of sharp star images that he resolved on the Cape Photographic Durchmusterung, which ...
— History of Astronomy • George Forbes
... him. It might prove a labor saver," he said. "Being a little old-fashioned, he has depended on clockwork, which requires a special orderly to wind us when we fun down and nod at our desks." Then he turned solicitous. "The Gray staff will certainly give you an escort beyond the Gray lines, where you will find a place to establish ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... wound a small handle at the back of the windmill to a sound of clockwork, set it down again, and released it. Instantly the sails began to revolve, noiseless and swift, producing the effect of a rapidly flashing circle of light across which span lines, waxing and ...
— The Necromancers • Robert Hugh Benson
... regulating box of the lamp there exists a simple mechanism, the result of careful study and experiment to discover the best and simplest combination of appliances, which would obviate the necessity for the use of clockwork or dash-pots, from which fluids might be accidentally spilled, for obtaining a gradual feeding of the carbon as fast as it is consumed in producing the light, and at the same time to maintain the arc or space between the carbons in burning, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XV., No. 388, June 9, 1883 • Various
... twenty-four hours; especially as our provision consisted of putrid salt beef, to which the sailors gave the name of Irish horse; salt pork, of New England, which, though neither fish nor flesh, savoured of both; bread from the same country, every biscuit whereof, like a piece of clockwork, moved by its own internal impulse, occasioned by the myriads of insects that dwelt within it; and butter served out by the gill, that tasted like train oil thickened with salt. Instead of small beer, each man was allowed three half-quarterns of brandy ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett
... speak, their respective parts; the forming into procession, the parting right and left at the chancel and the re-forming to return to the vestibule, being all gone through with to the sound of music, until every part of the long procession moves like clockwork. ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... came up the pebbled pathway, drawing on his gauntleted gloves. Dicky trotted beside him. Manasseh followed in attendance. Behind them in the porchway the landlady bobbed unregarded, like a piece of clockwork gradually ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... her room. It was bitterly cold there, but she wrapped her shawl about her, and sat down by the window, where the fast falling snow was almost hidden in a heavy wrap of early twilight. Olive did not often pray. To be sure she said her prayers every night, as properly and methodical as clockwork, and was very particular about always kneeling down, as though position could atone for any lacking earnestness; for she was just as apt to be thinking of her account-book, or Mr. Dane's last order, as of anything, in the hurried words that slid over her lips. Yes, she prayed in this way once ...
— Six Girls - A Home Story • Fannie Belle Irving
... smoked silently, knocking out their ashes and refilling with the regularity of clockwork. Lewis was thinking hard, thinking of the bitterness of dashed hopes, of self-confidence clutched at and lost. He saw as if in an inspiration the trend of Marker's plans. He had been given a paltry fictitious errand, like a bone to a dog, to quiet him. Some devilry ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... impossible. First, because men utterly misconceive the matter when they suppose that with direct consecutive succession the judgment would succeed the trespass. Large tracts of time would intervene. Else such direct clockwork as sin and punishment, repentance and relief, would dishonour God not less than they would trivialize the people. God they would offend by defeating all His purposes; the people they would render ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... their tuition,"—as we told them—by sewing for us an hour or two every Saturday. Most of them had rarely handled a needle. They did not make many garments, but they learned considerable about sewing, were as regular as clockwork every Saturday morning, and appreciated better the education which they thus earned. Wasn't this better than ...
— The American Missionary — Volume 54, No. 4, October, 1900 • Various
... divan of the small Japanese room, wedged between two piles of cushions, motionless, so that you could see her from a distance right in the background, looking like an idol, beneath the great fan which her negro waved regularly like a piece of clockwork. These foreign women possess ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... realised that there was another difficulty about the handbag scheme. The dynamite must be set off either by a fuse or by clockwork machinery. A fuse caused smoke, and the moment a man touched a bag containing clockwork his hand felt the thrill of moving machinery. A man who hears for the first time the buzz of the rattlesnake's ...
— Revenge! • by Robert Barr
... the way with love.—Laetitia was a good housekeeper. Everything was punctual as clockwork. I use the word advisedly. If her father, who was punctual to one date,—the dinner-hour,—made any remark to the contrary as he took up the carving-knife, Laetitia would instantly send one of her sisters to question the old ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... by clockwork inclosed between two disks, and would rotate continuously were it not for the catch, G, working in and out of the cogs. Through this catch, G, the wheel is dependent on the movement of electro-magnet. This cogged wheel is a double one, consisting of two wheels coupled together, exactly ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 275 • Various
... reason of electrochemical decomposition. One of these surfaces consisted of a small drum or cylinder of chalk, which was kept in a moistened condition with a suitable chemical solution, and adapted to revolve continuously by clockwork. The other surface consisted of a small pad which rested with frictional pressure on the periphery of the drum. This pad was carried on the end of a vibrating arm whose lateral movement was limited between two adjustable points. Normally, the frictional ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... has been hardly rescued, and is therefore, most akin to minds in whose meanness of structure or culture, even human existence might seem scarce better than nothingness. He knows, few in our nation so well, that of a world of new machinery, the highest king and priest would be the neatest clockwork figure. And in such a world, a being feeling ever towards or somewhat beyond what he can weigh and measure, and looking up to find above himself that which is too high for him to understand, would be an anomaly as lawless and incredible as the ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... stall for mechanical toys and parts of clocks. He has a great many parts of clocks, but the only mechanical toy was his clockwork engine, that was broken ages ago, so he had to give it up, and he couldn't think of anything else. So he settled to help Oswald, and keep an eye ...
— Oswald Bastable and Others • Edith Nesbit
... clock till you couldn't wind no further and it went click. And then the water in the cistern was let run, and the wheels went round; and Dave knew exactly what a water-mill was like, and was assured—only this was a pious fiction—that the water made the wheels go round. The truth was that the clockwork worked the wheels and made them pump back the water as fast as ever it came down. And this is much better than in real mills, because the same water does over and over again, and the power never fails. But you have to wind it up. ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... any other human being. I start from the hypothesis that he alone planned and carried out the crime, so I do not lift my hand and cry 'Impossible,' but I ask myself, 'How was it done?' Well, there are several methods worthy of consideration—clockwork, electricity, even a time fuse attached to the proper mechanism. I haven't really bothered myself yet to determine the means, because when that knowledge becomes indispensable we must have our ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... There are also the figures that strike the quarters of Sir John Bennett's city clock in Cheapside. The automatic movements of these last-named figures would have struck the originators of the Varallo chapels with envy. They aimed at realism so closely that they would assuredly have had recourse to clockwork in some one or two of their chapels; I cannot doubt, for example, that they would have eagerly welcomed the idea of making the cock crow to Peter by a cuckoo-clock arrangement, if it had been presented to them. This opens up the whole question ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... them went back to the barricade which the enemy's artillery had discovered. They sat down in the trench behind it. A German battery was trying for it—putting its four big high-explosive shells regularly round it—salvo after salvo as punctual as clockwork. It was only a matter of time before the ...
— Letters from France • C. E. W. Bean
... question. Fig. 5 shows how the apparatus is theoretically arranged for this purpose. P is the writing style, which is held in the writer's hand in the ordinary way, while he shapes the letters one by one on paper pulled uniformly underneath by means of clockwork. To P are attached, at right angles, two arms, a a, one for each circuit; but as it is only necessary to consider one of the circuits, say that sending up and down motions, we will confine our attention for ...
— Scientific American, Volume 40, No. 13, March 29, 1879 • Various
... war seldom runs with the smoothness of clockwork. The course of circumstances can never be exactly predicted. Unforeseen obstacles may render the highest skill and the most untiring energy of no avail; and it may be well to point out that the task ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... the Republicans stopped firing altogether. But they were waiting for shorter range, and a moment later, at a hundred paces, their reopening volley had all the clockwork dispatch of platoon drill. Yet the Imperialists took the dose as a thing expected, and sprang over their wounded to gain the trenches. They required only the lull of reloading. But instantly a second volley prolonged the first. The column staggered, and ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... their wine, and took her two young friends to chatter chiffons in the tiny parlor. And it said much for Mrs. Jasher's methodical ways that, considering the limited space, everything went—as the saying goes—like clockwork. Likewise, the widow had proved herself a wonderful hostess, as she kept the ball of conversation rolling briskly and induced a spirit of fraternity, uncommon in an ordinary ...
— The Green Mummy • Fergus Hume
... of human ingenuity, strikes hopeless awe into one. These dismal creations look still uglier at sea than in port, and with an added touch of the ridiculous. Their rolling waddle when seen at a certain angle, their abrupt clockwork nodding in a sea-way, so unlike the soaring lift and swing of a craft under sail, have in them something caricatural, a suggestion of a low parody directed at noble predecessors by an improved generation of dull, mechanical toilers, conceited and ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... born, Bradley invented a self-rocking cradle for it. He constructed the motive-power of the machine from some old clockwork which was operated by a huge steel ribbon spring strong enough to move a horse-car and long enough to run for a week without rewinding. When the cradle was completed, he put the baby in it upon a pillow and started the machinery. ...
— Elbow-Room - A Novel Without a Plot • Charles Heber Clark (AKA Max Adeler)
... really late, I'm delighted," she returned to Cora's embarrassed excuses; "for you see, I've just found that I must apologize for a delay myself. What a boon servants run by clockwork would be! But ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... did not say that I did not like her. I was making a comparison. She is an exceedingly pretty little puppet, and she goes through all her little tricks, if I may call them so without disparagement, with a delightful docility. After the clockwork is wound up, it doesn't hitch, or stop, until it runs down. But there is nothing unexpected about her; in five minutes you get to ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1 • Various
... been there and seen. Then evening comes, and the lights change till it's just as though you stood in the heart of a king-opal. A little before sundown, as punctually as clockwork, a big bristly wild boar, with all his family following, trots through the city gate, churning the foam on his tusks. You climb on the shoulder of a blind black stone god and watch that pig choose himself a palace for the night and stump in wagging his tail. Then the night- wind ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... about it. For five-and-twenty years he had lived by clockwork. But it was by Jefferson clockwork, not London clockwork. He had changed his longitude, but not himself. The habits of a quarter of a century were not to be shifted at the bidding of ...
— Sketches in Lavender, Blue and Green • Jerome K. Jerome
... been called to notice the change which a few short hours will bring over a household. A family may have lived on for years with no break in the home circle, and every thing connected with them have moved on with the regularity of clockwork, when some sudden and unlooked-for event will all at once change the very atmosphere of their home. Owing to her advanced age, Grandma Adams' death could hardly be supposed to have been unlooked for, yet ...
— Walter Harland - Or, Memories of the Past • Harriet S. Caswell
... first symptoms of his altered frame of mind was the occasional neglect of his regular letter to Charlie. That ever-faithful young man wrote as punctually as clockwork. Every Thursday morning a letter lay on Tom's plate at breakfast-time, addressed in the well-known hand, and bearing the Randlebury post-mark. And jolly lively ...
— The Adventures of a Three-Guinea Watch • Talbot Baines Reed |
