"Cobble" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the drosky drivers, with their long beards, small bell-shaped hats, long blue coats and fire-bucket boots, lying half asleep upon their rusty little vehicles awaiting a customer, or dashing away at a headlong pace over the rough cobble-paved streets, and so on of every class and kind. The traveler wanders about from place to place, gazing into the strange faces he meets, till the sense of loneliness becomes oppressive. An invisible but impassable ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... silvery salutation, and the sound of country boots echoing across farm-yard cobble-stones. A lantern flashing in and out among barns lit up my ceiling for a moment, a rough country voice hailed another rough country voice somewhere outside, and the day slowly coughed and sneezed itself ...
— October Vagabonds • Richard Le Gallienne
... branch. While this lasted there were no notes to make, the changes were slower than the hour hand of a clock; still it was interesting to see the tree-climber come every morning at eleven o'clock to the cobble-stone wall and ascend it exactly as he ascends trees, peering into chinks among the moss and the pennywort. He seemed almost as fond of these walls as of his tree trunks. He came regularly at eleven and again at three in the afternoon, and a barn owl went by with a screech every evening a ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... a Yankee horse soon made their triumphant entry into Richmond. They passed through Rockets, by the half-deserted wharves on the river bank where a crippled gunboat lay, then clattered over the cobble stones up Main Street till they reached the Square. On the State House the Stars and Bars still floated; but the travelers did not pause. Northward they turned, then westward again, till they stopped at ...
— The Littlest Rebel • Edward Peple
... closed the book and replaced it in his pocket. His face bore no sign of exultation. His somewhat phlegmatic calm successfully concealed the fact that he had at last obtained information which he had long sought. A cart rattled past over the cobble-stones, making speech inaudible for the moment. The man moved uneasily on the bed. Von Holzen went towards him and poured out more milk. Instead of reaching out for it, the sick man's hand lay on the coverlet. ...
— Roden's Corner • Henry Seton Merriman
... modest luggage inside—and there was ample room to do this, for he was the only passenger—plunged his feet into the straw which covered the floor, and endured for ten minutes such a shaking and rattling as only an omnibus moving over cobble-stones ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... Dread spectre!" The poor spectre, in fact, was only tolerated behind the scenes. If it had ventured to put in the slightest appearance M. Evariste Dumoulin would have given it a severe talking to. Some Genin or other would have hurled at it the first cobble-stone he could lay his hand on—a line from Boileau: L'esprit n'est point emu de ce qu'il ne croit pas. It was replaced on the stage by an "urn" that Talma carried under his arm. A spectre is ridiculous; "ashes," that's the style! Are not the "ashes" of Napoleon still spoken ...
— The Memoirs of Victor Hugo • Victor Hugo
... said the leader, in a very different tone to the one in which he addressed his young guest, 'tout the cobble-colter; are we to have darkmans upon us? And, Beruna, ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... there was reverence in his faded old eyes. "Son," he continued gently, "twenty-five years your brigadier was a candidate for an important job in my employ—and I gave him the Degree of the Blue Vase. He couldn't get the vase legitimately, so he threw a cobble-stone through the window, grabbed the vase and ran a mile and a half before the police captured him. Cost me a lot of money to square the case and keep it quiet. But he was too good, Bill, and I couldn't stand in his way; I let him go forward to his destiny. But tell ...
— The Go-Getter • Peter B. Kyne
... about the worst paved in Europe. They are floored with the cobble-stones rolled down by the diluvium, and torture the feet that walk over them and rick the ankles. There are two melancholy inns in the Place du Forum, and it is hard to choose between them, probably it does not much matter. I was given a bed-chamber in one where neither the ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould
... these startling criticisms, Mr. Tregenza and his daughter pursued their road, and presently stopped before a cottage in one of the cobble-paved alley-ways of Mousehole. A worn old woman opened the door and courtesied to Gray Michael. He wished her good-afternoon, then entered the cottage, first bidding Joan return in an hour. She had friends near at hand, and hurried off, glad to escape the sight of sickness and the ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... eighteen dollars, and it had deteriorated greatly since it had been doing duty as a cobbler's shop, but Stitz liked it. The tiny car stove that stood midway of one of the seats was all he needed in cold weather, and the seats along the sides were a continuous spread of cobblers' seats. He could cobble all the way up one side of the car and all the way back the other, and when he had customers waiting he always had a seat to give them. He and the whole city council could hold a caucus in the car, and all have seats, and in the evenings he could take a stool ...
— Kilo - Being the Love Story of Eliph' Hewlitt Book Agent • Ellis Parker Butler
... forced to drudge at uncongenial toil for a time, but emancipate yourself as soon as possible. Carey, the "Consecrated Cobbler," before he went as a missionary said: "My business is to preach the gospel. I cobble shoes ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... these gentlefolks that come up to Tan-y-bwlch and Festiniog in the summer time like a shoal of herrings: I go with scores of parties to Pont-aber-glas-llyn. Well, now, what should you think there could be to write down consarning a great cobble stone? or consarning a bit of a shaw, or a puddle of water? Yet there's not one of the young quality but, as soon as ever they get sight of the Llyn, bless your eyes! they'll stand, and they'll lift up their hands, and they'll raise the whites of their eyes, and skrike out to one another—that ...
— Walladmor: - And Now Freely Translated from the German into English. - In Two Volumes. Vol. I. • Thomas De Quincey
... succeed, but that every bricklayer should survive and succeed. It sought to rebuild the ruins of any bricklayer, and to give any faded whitewasher a new white coat. It was the whole aim of the Guilds to cobble their cobblers like their shoes and clout their clothiers with their clothes; to strengthen the weakest link, or go after the hundredth sheep; in short to keep the row of little shops unbroken ...
— The War and Unity - Being Lectures Delivered At The Local Lectures Summer - Meeting Of The University Of Cambridge, 1918 • Various
... put the whole in confusion. "Why, harkee, master of mine," cried Peter, turning suddenly upon him with a countenance that almost petrified the patcher of shoes into a perfect lapstone, "dost thou pretend to meddle with the movements of government to regulate, and correct, and patch, and cobble a complicated machine, the principles of which are above thy comprehension, and its simplest operations too subtle for thy understanding, when thou canst not correct a trifling error in a common piece of mechanism, ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... it standing on the narrow apology for a sidewalk, it is in imminent danger of coming to grief at the instance of a broadly laden donkey, which, with his load, veritably takes up the whole narrow street, including the sidewalks, as he slowly picks his way along through mud-holes and protruding cobble-stones. And yet Philippopolis has improved wonderfully since it has nominally changed from a Turkish to a Christian city, I am told; the Cross having in Philippopolis not only triumphed over the Crescent, but its influence is rapidly changing the condition ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... yesterday he should have been galloping around the bases in fantastic costume at the Senior-Faculty game. Monday afternoon, when he should have been before the Chapel site with Her, listening to the glories of the Class as told over its freshly-mortared plate, he was tramping on the wrenching cobble-stones of Market Street with a bunch of roses in his campaign hat and another in his gun barrel, and the city going mad on the curbing. Lord High Ruler of the Senior dance and counsellor in all the affairs of the Class, he was cooped up with a thousand others ...
— Stanford Stories - Tales of a Young University • Charles K. Field
... irregularly, or substitute new ones for those which are worn through. The mechanical action of the washing process on the blocks is of course very rapid and severe, requiring complete renewal of them once in eight to ten weeks. Some miners prefer a pavement of egg-shaped stones set like a cobble-stone flooring, the gold being deposited in the interstices. Most of the sluiceways are, however, paved with rectangular wooden blocks, with or without stones as described. Standing at the mouth of one of the long tunnels in full action, any person unaccustomed ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 455, September 20, 1884 • Various
... wind blew yelling squalls along the streets. At intervals the din of hail on cobble-stones and roofs became a stinging sea of sound. The wavering oil lanterns died out one by one and left the streets in darkness in which now and then a slave-borne litter labored like a boat caught spreading too much sail. The overloaded sewers backed up and made pools of foulness, ...
— Caesar Dies • Talbot Mundy
... fresh paint, the pigeons picking their way across the streets, the grass growing between the cobble-stones, the flowers outside the windows and doors, a cleanliness that adorns the smallest details: all this is so calm and so empty that our life at once settles there as in a frame that takes with equal ease the happy or the sad picture ...
— The Choice of Life • Georgette Leblanc
... her surprise that the matutinal procession of rustics she used to watch from the window of her fashionable domicile in the lower part of Broadway had ceased, so completely had suburban citizens usurped the farmers' old homes. The beautiful pigeons that used to coo and cluster on the cobble stones had no resting-place for their coral feet on the Russ pavement, so thickly moved the drays, and so unremitted was the rush of man and beast. In fact, the one conservative feature eloquent of the past is the churchyard,—the old, moss-grown, sloping ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various
... for Mr Cargrim to venture into, since many sights therein must have displeased his exact tastes; yet two days after the reception at the palace the chaplain might have been seen daintily picking his way over the cobble-stone pavements. As he walked he thought, and his thoughts were busy with the circumstances which had led him to venture his saintly person so near the spider's web of The Derby Winner. The bishop, London, curiosity, ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... French women with faces powdered and painted and scented. Old men with hollow eyes and yellow parchment skins all creased and wrinkled squatted on the cobble-stones, smoking ...
— At Suvla Bay • John Hargrave
... previous day, General Putnam, with a strong detachment, broke ground at Cobble hill, where the M'Lean Asylum now stands. The object was to erect batteries for the purpose of cannonading Boston. It was expected the British troops would sally out of the city and attack them, and that expectation caused Washington ...
— The Military Journals of Two Private Soldiers, 1758-1775 - With Numerous Illustrative Notes • Abraham Tomlinson
... Comptroller, an aged pensioner who wore a white cap, drew her money from the Court, and expended it here, and a feeble, gouty old sailor who had bidden the sea farewell. Out in the street, on the sharp-edged cobble-stones, the sparrows were clamoring loudly, lying there with puffed-out feathers, feasting among the horse-droppings, tugging at them and scattering them about to the accompaniment of a storm of chirping ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... buildings that looked on to the space. Before him rose the pile of churches, and here too, on every platform roof and stair, swarmed the spectators. The doors of the three churches were flung wide, and far within, in the lighted interiors, lay the heads of countless crowds, as cobble-stones, seen in perspective. The whole Place was in shadow now, as the sun had just gone down, but the sky was still alight overhead, a vast tender-coloured vault, as sweet as a benediction. Here and there, in the illimitable ...
— Dawn of All • Robert Hugh Benson
... her own ears had she been told an hour ago that she would end her first fit of desperate naughtiness by darning stockings for the Tennant boys. She did not darn well; but then, Mrs. Tennant was not particular. She certainly—although she said she would not—did cobble these stockings to an extraordinary extent; but her work and the chat with Mrs. Tennant did her good, and she went upstairs to dress for supper in a happier ...
— The Rebel of the School • Mrs. L. T. Meade
... town of Lebanon, an incident occurred which affected us rather more seriously. Turning a corner suddenly, we came upon an old man digging up cobble-stones by the road-side and breaking them in pieces with an axe. "A brother-geologist," was our first impression. At that moment the old man sprang toward us, the axe in one hand and half a brick in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... marching us through street after street, one of them whistling that pleasing tune, Le lendemain elle etait souriante. Dark passage ways intervened between us and our destination: we threaded them. The cobble stones of the underfoot were not easy to walk on for my companion, shod in high-heels from the Place Vendome.... The urchins amused each other and us by capers on the way. They could have made our speed walking on their ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... some forty miles from its mouth. Though the city has a number of fine thoroughfares, straight as though laid out with a pencil and ruler, between them lie labyrinths of dim and evil-smelling bazaars, their narrow, winding, cobble-paved streets lined on either side by stalls in which are displayed for sale all the products of the country. Because of the intense heat these stalls are open in front, so that the occupants work ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... and, consequently, was finer than is generally used in mechanical filters. The second preliminary filter was a Maignen scrubber. It consisted of a cylindrical concrete tank, 4 ft. in diameter and 8-1/2 ft. deep, which contained 12 in. of cobble-stones on the bottom, then, successively, 12 in. of egg-size coke, 12 in. of stove-size coke, 24 in. of nut-size coke, and 24 in. of sponge clippings as the ...
— Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, vol. LXXII, June, 1911 • E. D. Hardy
... the ditch. This is a very cheap and expeditious way of washing, but it is not applied extensively. It is used to the most advantage for washing where the water is abundant for only a few weeks after heavy rains, and where it would not pay to erect large sluices. A few cobble-stones should be left or thrown at intervals in the bed of the ground-sluice to arrest the gold, for if the bed were smooth clay, the precious metal might all be carried off. Quicksilver is not used in the ground-sluice. After the dirt has all been put through the ground-sluice, it is cleaned up ...
— Hittel on Gold Mines and Mining • John S. Hittell
... acts. This bridge has two living piers—Pospischilli acting as one and Martenstine the other. Besides supporting this monstrous structure (weight, 1866 pounds) upon their shoulders, these freaks of superhuman strength allow a team of horses and a wagon loaded with a ton of cobble-stones ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... the Campagna, Virgilia knew that the Christians were gathering to-night, coming from all parts of the city. Some were freedmen and others were slaves; among the figures gliding out on the cobble-stoned Appian Way were members of Caesar's household, and one or two tall Praetorian guards. The religion of Christ had found converts among all classes. Rome was full of Christians, many of whom feared to openly confess their faith, though later, they dared to do so, even in the face ...
— Virgilia - or, Out of the Lion's Mouth • Felicia Buttz Clark
... States. Clothing, medicines, articles of necessary household use were denied to civilians. Cannon, rifles, saltpetre, and other munitions of war were withheld from the Confederate armies. While the ports of the North were bustling with foreign trade, grass grew on the cobble-stoned streets along the waterfronts of Charleston and Savannah. Slow starvation aided the constant pounding of the Northern armies in reducing the South ...
— Aircraft and Submarines - The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day - Uses of War's Newest Weapons • Willis J. Abbot
... year?" replied the cobbler, scratching his head. "I never reckon my money in that way. It goes as fast as it comes, but I am glad to be able to earn it. I cobble on from day to ...
— Fifty Fabulous Fables • Lida Brown McMurry
... find a redoubt on the crest of a cone-shaped hill, which stood alone near the intersection of the present Court and Atlantic streets, and which was known by the Dutch inhabitants as Punkiesberg. As it does not appear to have been called Cobble Hill before this date, the reasonable inference may be drawn that it was so named by Greene's troops because of its close resemblance to the Cobble Hill which formed one of the fortified points in the siege of Boston, but a short distance from Winter Hill, ...
— The Campaign of 1776 around New York and Brooklyn • Henry P. Johnston
... "But I did not want to take all the responsibility from Inez. This is what happened. We were coming along Cobble Lane when Judith espied two messenger boys on the rail fence. They were apparently squabbling about something, and just as we came along by the wild cherry tree, a few hundred yards from them, the big fellow gave the little fellow a punch and sent him sprawling in ...
— Jane Allen: Junior • Edith Bancroft
... the perfume of a garden-full of roses, of a thousand orange-blossoms, and of locusts, honey-sweet, and he begins to think himself enchanted. He feels the dark, old houses are unreal, as if, instead of cobble-stones beneath his feet, there must be the soft and tender grass of Araby the Blest. Such is the magic of a trade, the perfume industry of Grasse that for so many hundreds of years has made her meanest streets ...
— Cathedrals and Cloisters of the South of France, Volume 1 • Elise Whitlock Rose
... side, it was the same phenomenon in music as the Baroque school in architecture: an energetic struggle to enliven organic decay by mechanical oddities and novelties. Meyerbeer was no symphonist. He could not apply the thematic system to his striking phrases, and so had to cobble them into metric patterns in the old style; and as he was no "absolute musician" either, he hardly got his metric patterns beyond mere quadrille tunes, which were either wholly undistinguished, or else made remarkable by certain brusqueries ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw
... peasants (and beautiful many of them are), can't sit on the Spanish Stairs in indolent pose when it rains; the streets are slimy and horrible; the carriages try to run over you, and stand a very good chance of succeeding, where there are no sidewalks, and you are limping along on the slippery round cobble-stones; you can't get into the country, which is the best part of Rome: but when the sun shines all this is changed; the dear old dirty town exercises, its fascinations on you then, and you speedily ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... flash, as of lightning. Then a crash. Then the earth shook, cobble-stones, railroad tracks, anarchists, and soldiers, rose in the air, leaving a great chasm in crowd and street. Into that chasm a moment later, stones, rails, anarchists, and soldiers fell, leaving nothing but a thick cloud of overhanging ...
— The Honorable Peter Stirling and What People Thought of Him • Paul Leicester Ford
... window in the upper floor, there was no light at all in the yard. Clearly, she was in dread of her master's anger, for we stole across like ghosts, and once or twice she whisper'd a warning when my toe kick'd against a loose cobble. But just as I seem'd to be walking into a stone wall, she put out her hand, I heard the click of a latch, and stood in a dark, ...
— The Splendid Spur • Arthur T. Quiller Couch
... hand. On the plains it was built of a core of earth, pounded, and faced with tiles, the top being also covered with tiles and furnished with a parapet. On the mountains of stratified rock the facing was made of masonry, and the core of earth and cobble-stones. Where the rock is such as fractures irregularly, the wall is of solid masonry, tapering to the top, which is sharp. Throughout its whole length it is defended by towers occurring every few hundred feet. Every mountain-pass and weak point was defended by a fortified tower. At ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... timidly, but at the exit her eyes turned to an inscription above, which she had just glanced at when arriving: Surrexit e flammis, and a date. Nancy had no Latin, but guessed an interpretation from the last word. Through the little court, with its leafy plane-trees and white-worn cobble-stones, she walked with bent head, hearing the roar of Holborn through the front archway, and breathing more freely when she gained the quiet garden at the ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... wandered vaguely about in search of them. But I had little success, and I ended by becoming sceptical. Bourges is a ville de province in the full force of the term, especially as applied invidiously. The streets, narrow, tortuous, and dirty, have very wide cobble-stones; the houses for the most part are shabby, without local colour. The look of things is neither modern nor antique—a kind of mediocrity of middle age. There is an enormous number of blank walls—walls ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... probably being their expulsion from the drinking-saloon. Where is the chantant portion of the cafe? I cannot see,—perhaps in some inner recess. With this flash of brilliancy, all sign of life in Reims disappears. We drive on, jolted and rattled over the cobble stones—(if not cobble, what are they? Wobble?)—and so ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, September 5, 1891 • Various
... were paved with small cobble stones, or else not paved at all, and the sidewalk was very narrow and elevated, more like a beach than a walk, and everybody seemed to take to the ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls, Vol. XII, Jan. 3, 1891 • Various
... was a gusty night, With the wind booming, and swooping, Looping round corners, Sliding over the cobble-stones, Whipping and veering, And careering over the roofs Like a thousand clattering horses. Mr. Spruggins had been dining in the city, Mr. Spruggins was none too steady in his gait, And the wind played ball with Mr. Spruggins And ...
— Men, Women and Ghosts • Amy Lowell
... slowly moving people there, the Inspector make a way for himself and his companion through the excited, talkative, good-humored Cockney crowd. "There it is! Can't you see it? Up there just like a little yellow worm." "There's naught at all! You've got the cobble-wobbles!" and then ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy
... eggs,—everything had a Yankee tang, a special quality, and then, the noise! We had thought Chicago noisy, and so it was, but here the clamor was high-keyed, deafening for the reason that the rain-washed streets were paved with cobble stones over which enormous carts bumped and clattered with ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... informed," General Howe remarked, "though, to tell the truth, two thousand fresh men came from the New Hampshire province to take their places. I must say the provincials, thus far, have shown commendable zeal and persistence in maintaining the rebellion. They have constructed formidable earthworks on Cobble Hill, so near my lines that they have compelled the warships to drop down the ...
— Daughters of the Revolution and Their Times - 1769 - 1776 A Historical Romance • Charles Carleton Coffin
... as the laces of her sea-green cambric gown, came slowly up the cobble-paved way and halted at ...
— The Incomplete Amorist • E. Nesbit
... very forcibly the somewhat oppressed spirits of historical association with the healthy grandeur of nature. The books my father wrote here embrace this joy of untheoried, peaceful, or gloriously perturbed life of sky and land. Theory of plot or principle was as much beneath him as the cobble-stones; from self-righteous harangues he turned as one who had heard a divine voice that alone deserved to declare. He taught as Nature does, always leading to thoughts of something higher than the dictum of men, and nobler than their greatest ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop |
