"Mechanic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... been marvelous. As it was, there was a large assemblage to witness the trial of the American reaping machines, and they were regarded with an anxious desire that they might succeed. Indeed, let any ingenious mechanic—he cared not whether he was English, Scotch, Irish, American or German—come before a jury of the farmers of Cleveland with an implement or machine for the improvement of Agriculture, and it would be judged with candor, impartiality and uprightness, and the inventor should ...
— Obed Hussey - Who, of All Inventors, Made Bread Cheap • Various
... palaeolithic life without the spur of palaeolithic hunger. But my own work brought me into contact with an unprivileged class, whose degree of freedom was the special product of modern industrial civilisation, and on whose use of their freedom the future of civilisation may depend. A clever young mechanic, at the age when the Wanderjahre of the medieval craftsman used to begin, would come home after tending a 'speeded up' machine from 8 A.M., with an hour's interval, till 5 P.M. At 6 P.M. he had finished his tea in the crowded living-room of his ...
— Human Nature In Politics - Third Edition • Graham Wallas
... from the haunts of men out to Sandtown-by-the-Puddle we blame them that they do not rush to join us. Most of them would be happier in penal servitude than in the country. The work is as hard and requires as much skill as a mechanic's work, besides personal qualities that are demanded of no mechanic, and commands ...
— Three Acres and Liberty • Bolton Hall
... been a jolly mechanic again, in denim overalls and jumper and a defiant black skull-cap with long, shiny vizor; the tender of the motor-boat fleet at an Ontario summer hotel. One day he had looked up, sweating and greasy, to see Howard Griffin, of Plato, ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... minute a creature had welded wood into a paperlike nest. His state of mind passed to interest, thence to speculation, and finally to investigation. He carried his problem and its possibilities to his friend, Heinrich Voelter, a master mechanic. Together they began experiments. They decided to emulate the wasp. They would have to granulate the wood as she had done. The insect had apparently used spruce; they used spruce under an ordinary grindstone. ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... "are you really come to this pass? I thought that the mere having been born on British earth, though the children of spoilers and invaders, had inspired you with too much pride to brook the yoke of a base mechanic. Or, if you are not courageous, should you not be cautious?—Well speaks the proverb, Wo to him that will trust a stranger! Still mute—still silent?—answer me by word or sign—Do you really call and acknowledge him ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... during the Theban Period, and of a graceful, decorative character, but it was rather monotonous by repetition and filled with established mannerisms. The Egyptian really never was a free worker, never an artist expressing himself; but, for his day, a skilled mechanic following time-honored ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Painting • John C. Van Dyke
... turn, is transmitted to the employers of labor. Your committee is impressed with the belief that this is an utterly vicious system, and that it is responsible for much of the ill-feeling and bad blood displayed by the working classes. No self-respecting laborer or mechanic likes to feel that the man beside him may be a spy from a detective agency, and especially so when the laboring man is utterly at the mercy of the detective, who can report whatever he pleases, be it true or false....[20] Whether assumedly legal or not, the employment ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... in the War Office for the first month or so, and one night about this time, on meeting a disreputable and suspicious-looking character on the stairs, garbed in the vesture affected by the foreign mechanic, I was debating whether to demand of the interloper what he was doing within the sacred precincts, when he abruptly accosted me with: "I say, d'you happen to know where in this infernal rabbit-warren a blighter called the Something ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... the nation is indissolubly bound up in the welfare of the farmer and wage-worker; of the man who tills the soil, and of the mechanic, the handicraftsman, and the laborer. The poorest motto upon which an American can act is the motto of 'some men down,' and the safest to follow is ...
— American Boy's Life of Theodore Roosevelt • Edward Stratemeyer
... grinding toil characteristic of the French-Canadian habitant. But he did get from his father a capacity for the knowing and handling of machinery, which amounted almost to genius. Of the father's steadiness under the grind of daily work which had made him the head mechanic in the Mill, Tony possessed not a tittle. What he could get easily he got, and getting this fancied himself richly endowed, knowing not how slight and superficial is the equipment for life's stern fight that comes without sweat of brain and body. His cleverness deceived first ...
— To Him That Hath - A Novel Of The West Of Today • Ralph Connor
... apostles, professed by their followers during the first two centuries of the church, and which is now followed by the protestant or reformed Christians. I am conscious that neither my abilities nor my education qualify me for this task. A mere mechanic, and possessing but few advantages of education, I find it very difficult to express, as I could wish, the thoughts and feelings which crowd upon my mind. But how great and numerous so ever may be the difficulties which I must ...
— The Village in the Mountains; Conversion of Peter Bayssiere; and History of a Bible • Anonymous
... some allusion to the inventor of the machinery for turning irregular forms adapted to the manufacture of gun-stocks. This was the invention of Thomas Blanchard, then a citizen of Springfield and now of Boston,—whose reputation as a mechanic has since become world-wide,—and was first introduced into the armory about the year 1820. Before this the stocks were all worked and fitted by hand; but the marvellous ingenuity of this machinery made a complete revolution in this department, and contributed to a very large increase in the rapidity ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... after this he overturns again and breaks a pedal, and when we dismount at Indjia, for our noontide halt, he discovers that his saddle-spring has snapped in the middle. As he ruefully surveys the breakage caused by the roughness of the Fruskagora roads, and sends out to scour the village for a mechanic capable of undertaking the repairs, he eyes my Columbia wistfully, and asks me for the address where one like it can be obtained. The blacksmith is not prepared to mend the spring, although he makes a good job of the pedal, and it takes a carpenter and his assistant from 1.30 to 4.30 P.M. ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... I am sorry that you are disappointed at our display. Your slight upon British electrical engineering leaves us unscathed, because this has been done by a foreign mechanic, whom I ...
— A Rock in the Baltic • Robert Barr
... pile up costly and lofty monuments—reaching heavenward; let the artist cut their names and virtues deep into the enduring granite; let the mechanic, with all his skill, set the foundations, yet the lettering will perish and the stone will crumble. Parasitic plants will fasten upon them; beneath their destroying grasp names and dates will disappear, and generations yet to come ...
— Nick Baba's Last Drink and Other Sketches • George P. Goff
... Every mechanic who has had anything to do with the hardening of tools knows how necessary it is to take a cut from the surface of the bar that is to be hardened. The reason is that in the process of making the steel its outer surface ...
— The Working of Steel - Annealing, Heat Treating and Hardening of Carbon and Alloy Steel • Fred H. Colvin
... she assured him. "I am trying hard to be my own mechanic, though, and I have set my mind on changing those ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... replied Jane, politely, "but there aren't any needles in it now. George took them all to do the things with pieces of cork—in the 'Boy's Own Scientific Experimenter' and 'The Young Mechanic.' He did not do the things, but he did for ...
— The Book of Dragons • Edith Nesbit
... shirt-sleeves, his hands in his pockets, was standing, his back against the bench, surveying, with something of a mechanic's eye, the frame of a boat which was set up on ...
— The Village Convict - First published in the "Century Magazine" • Heman White Chaplin
... subjects with young men, turned principally on literary topics, religion, morality, belles-lettres, etc., and to this conversation my mind owed its first bias towards such subjects in which they were all my superiors, I never having attended a college, and being then but a mechanic."[74] According to this account religion was not proscribed, but Professor Traill's assertion is so explicit that probably Watt's recollection errs. It is, however, another sign of the liberal spirit that then animated these Glasgow professors to find them welcoming ...
— Life of Adam Smith • John Rae
... fact, heard this very criticism reiterated by various authorities ever since those prehistoric days when we began to lisp in numbers. Yet somehow we perversely continue to "mosaic" along in the same old way! But then, we have never claimed to possess "true art"; we are merely a metrical mechanic. "A New Point of View In Home Economics", a clever article by Miss Eleanor Barnhart, concludes ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... targets had not even been thought of. And good picked-shots have in common everywhere certain qualities, probably developed by the life in the open, and the unique influences of woodland and upland hunting. They are generous, and large in spirit, and absolutely democratic—the millionaire and the mechanic meet on equal ground—and deliberate in humour, and dry of wit. The quiet chaffing, tolerant, good-humoured, genuine intercourse of hunters cannot be matched in ...
— The Adventures of Bobby Orde • Stewart Edward White
... disputants, these all-knowing doctors, it was to the unscholastic statesman that the governments of the world owed their peace, defence, and liberties; and from the illiterate and contemned mechanic (a name of disgrace) that they received the improvements of useful arts. Nevertheless, this artificial ignorance, and learned gibberish, prevailed mightily in these last ages, by the interest and artifice of those who found no easier way to that pitch of authority and dominion ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume II. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books III. and IV. (of 4) • John Locke
... the girls who amidst poverty and sin has been able to keep her ideals high. Her home is poor because her father, a mechanic, who can earn good wages is a hard drinker. Her mother, an honest, clean, hard working woman, is nervous and fretful, worn out by the hard things she has had to meet. It is a quarrelsome household and ...
— The Girl and Her Religion • Margaret Slattery
... principle involved in sewing by machinery, or in respect to who first constructed a machine that would fulfill that idea; but so far as great results are concerned the world must be considered as indebted to Elias Howe, Jr., a New England mechanic, born and reared in obscurity, and at an early age thrown upon his own resources. He was born at Spencer, Massachusetts, July 9th, 1819. His father was a farmer and miller, but at sixteen he left home, engaging in a ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... marvellous excellence of this, the latest achievement of this remarkable house, thousands who visited the late exhibition of the Massachusetts Charitable Mechanic's Association and saw Messrs. L. Prang & Co.'s, extensive exhibit, can bear witness. Everybody who looked at the two pictures, the original masterpiece by Robie and its reproduction by Prang, side by side, was ...
— The Bay State Monthly - Volume 2, Issue 3, December, 1884 • Various
... of order—steam escaped at a fearful rate. While the mechanic was fixing it he discoursed to me on the laundry. He had been there nine months—big, capable-looking six-footer. Out of the corner of his mouth he informed me, "Once anybody comes to work here they never ...
— Working With the Working Woman • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... Mbati-ndua, the one-toothed lord; a fiend with a huge tooth projecting from his lower jaw and curving over the top of his head. He had bat's wings armed with claws and was usually regarded as a harbinger of pestilence. The mechanic's god was eight-handed, gluttony had eighty stomachs, wisdom possessed eight eyes. Other gods were the adulterer, the abductor of women of rank and beauty, the rioter, the brain-eater, the killer of men, the slaughter god, the god of leprosy, the giant, the spitter of miracles, ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... and a queer little painted manikin inside the cab. There were, moreover, a depot, a bridge, and a frowning mountain range pierced by a tunnel. All in all, the outfit weighed perhaps sixty pounds and required the operating skill of a practical mechanic. ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach
... from defect, but the greatness of their beauties; so should that of men be prized not for their exemption from fault, but the size of those virtues they are possessed of. The scholar may want prudence, the statesman may have pride, and the champion ferocity; but shall we prefer to these the low mechanic, who laboriously plods on through life, without censure or applause? We might as well prefer the tame correct paintings of the Flemish school to the erroneous, but sublime ...
— The Vicar of Wakefield • Oliver Goldsmith
... the truth, and not in combating error. Christ comes into a world lying in wickedness—besotted by it, plagued and tormented by it; full of abominations starting boldly out without pretense of concealment, from every phase of private, social and civil life. But he does not approach these as a mechanic would an old building, saying, "this beam is rotten and must come down; this roof is decayed and must be stripped off; this floor is unsafe and must be pulled up." He does not propose to his disciples to enter upon a wholesale denunciation ...
— Amusement: A Force in Christian Training • Rev. Marvin R. Vincent.
... He came out of the heights and dropped down into Glenn Crossing in the gloom of the second evening. But raisins are meager support for such a bulk as that of Bull Hunter. It was a gaunt-faced giant who looked in at the door of the shop where the blacksmith was working late. The mechanic looked up with a start at the deep voice of the stranger, but he managed to stammer forth his tidings. Such a man as Pete Reeve had indeed been in Glenn Crossing, but he had gone on at the very verge ...
— Bull Hunter • Max Brand
... quite confident, Father, that such a ruffian could not be Prince Roland. He was indeed the rude mechanic he proclaimed himself. No man of noble blood ...
— The Sword Maker • Robert Barr
... is, the highest. "Equal," when two are equal one has everything the other has. You could say one pen is the equal of another if it is just as nice and will write just as well; one mechanic is the equal of another if he can do the work equally well. Two boys are equal in class if they have exactly the same marks at the end of the month or year. You could not have two persons chief. For example, you could not have two chief generals in an army; two presidents ...
— Baltimore Catechism No. 4 (of 4) - An Explanation Of The Baltimore Catechism of Christian Doctrine • Thomas L. Kinkead
... world through the narrow slits. This man had always an air of being profoundly interested in the smallest affairs of life, perhaps because the slits through which he gazed magnified the objects gazed upon, and he peered about him now with profoundest solicitude. This was Watt Brooks, a mechanic, and hanger-on about the mills, where he did an occasional bit of odd work, and employed the balance of his time in gossiping among the women, or lounging at the drinking saloons, talking a great deal about the wrongs of the working classes, and winning to himself some friends from a certain ...
— The Diamond Coterie • Lawrence L. Lynch
... A mechanic in Berlin has invented a balance of extremely delicate construction. Sir Robert Peel, it is said, intends to avail himself of the invention, to keep his political principles so nicely balanced between Whig and Tory, that ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... learned what conquering the desert made of a man. August Naab was close to threescore years; his chest was wide as a door, his arm like the branch of an oak. He was a blacksmith, a mechanic, a carpenter, a cooper, a potter. At his forge and in his shop, everywhere, were crude tools, wagons, farming implements, sets of buckskin harness, odds and ends of nameless things, eloquent and pregnant proof of the fact that necessity ...
— The Heritage of the Desert • Zane Grey
... conditions will the owners of the means of production consent to their being used. The worker who does not own the things necessary to produce wealth must work upon the terms imposed by the other fellow in most cases. The coal miner, not owning the coal mine, must agree to work for wages. So must the mechanic in the ...
— The Common Sense of Socialism - A Series of Letters Addressed to Jonathan Edwards, of Pittsburg • John Spargo
... Hartford. There had been a report of a strange man seen about the Clemens place, thought to be a prospecting burglar, and Clemens went over to investigate. A little searching inquiry revealed that the man was not a burglar, but a mechanic out of employment, a lover of one of the house-maids, who had given him food and shelter on the premises, intending no real harm. When the girl found that her secret was discovered, she protested that he was ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... work is to afford to the student, the artisan, the mechanic, and in fact all who are interested in science, whether young or advanced in years, a ready means of acquiring a general knowledge of physics by ...
— Practical Pointers for Patentees • Franklin Cresee
... most frequent annoyance. In all modern organs there is a panel above the pedals which will come out and admit the mechanic to the bellows, straps, springs, etc.; but in some old instruments the case is made solid, in which case the workman must do his work from the bottom, turning the organ down so as to get at it. Pedal straps are easily put on; generally with screws at either end. If the pedal squeaks examine ...
— Piano Tuning - A Simple and Accurate Method for Amateurs • J. Cree Fischer
... athletic fellows, who showed in all their movements that elasticity and grace of limb which can only be acquired by exercise and which is so different to the deformity with which monotonous heavy work stamps the mechanic. ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... roundhouse, test department, machine shop, air-brake shop, iron foundry, car shop, work of firing on the road, office work in the motive power accounting department, and drawing room; the most competent may be admitted through the grades of inspector, in the office of the master mechanic or of the road foreman of engines, assistant master mechanic, assistant engineer of motive power, master mechanic and superintendent of motive power. The Pennsylvania railway, co-operating with the public ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... practical experience at that establishment, where he was known as the mechanical engineer, by having all his work done over by the pattern maker or others, under the eye of the superintendent or master mechanic, and be subjected all the time to the jealousies and annoyances incident to ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 623, December 10, 1887 • Various
... Because he is blind, and knows, and understands, as no seeing person can know and understand, they will trust him; they will follow where he leads. But behind him has got to be YOU. You've got to be the eyes for—for them all; not to teach the work—we'll have others for that. Any good mechanic will do for that part. But it's the other part of it—the soul of the thing. These men, lots of them, are but little more than boys—big, strong, strapping fellows with the whole of life before them. And they are—blind. Whichever way they turn a big black curtain ...
— Dawn • Eleanor H. Porter
... of them instruction is imparted in reading, writing, arithmetic, and geography. At many of them the boys are initiated in branches of the mechanic arts, and cultivate the soil. At the Tuscarora station, in New York, tuition is imparted on the plan adopted for infant schools, and with marked success. The temperance society contains eighty members, the sabbath school thirty pupils, and fifty are united to the ...
— Impressions of America - During The Years 1833, 1834, and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Tyrone Power
... find him making love in any of his scenes, or endeavoring to move the passions; his genius was too sullen and saturnine to do it gracefully, especially when he knew he came after those who had performed both to such a height. Humor was his proper sphere; and in that he delighted most to represent mechanic people. He was deeply conversant in the ancients, both Greek and Latin, and he borrowed boldly from them; there is scarce a poet or historian among the Roman authors of those times whom he has not translated in "Sejanus" and "Catiline." But he has done his robberies so openly that one ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume III (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland I • Francis W. Halsey
... reliance for influencing the upper classes in favour of Christianity. It is not a question of luxury or self-indulgence, but of bare respectability, of the simple decencies of life which are enjoyed by an American mechanic as distinguished from the poverty which, for a cultivated family, falls below the level of self-respect. But this requires a salary which, save in a very few places, cannot at present be paid by the churches. "Our pastors,'' writes ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... with the deliberately designed works of man, and thus the vague conception of a personal god becomes transformed into that of a creator working according to plan. As we know, this conception of organic creation as the artistic work of an anthropomorphic god—of a divine mechanic—generally maintained its ground almost everywhere, down even to the middle of our own century, in spite of the fact that eminent thinkers had demonstrated its untenability more than two thousand years ago. The last noteworthy scientist to defend and apply this ...
— Monism as Connecting Religion and Science • Ernst Haeckel
... the hospital Built in this city for receiving foundlings. Full of a mother's joy, a mother's fear, I hasten'd there, alas! to disappointment! All clue of him was lost, and should my boy survive, The heir of Guzman's noble house may be Some poor mechanic's slave! (In anguish throws herself into ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat
... people know nothing of Mr. Lessingham, your ladyship, beyond the fact that he did not return last night. They received a message from Hill's Garage, however, about half an hour ago, to say that their mechanic had driven Mr. Lessingham early this morning to Norwich, where he had caught the mail train to London, The boy was to say that Mr. Lessingham would be back in a ...
— The Zeppelin's Passenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... if he exists at all, might be expected to cross the sun's face. But the 'planet of romance,' as Abbe Moigno has called Vulcan, failed to appear, and the opinion I had expressed last October ('English Mechanic and World of Science,' for October 27, 1876, p. 160), that Vulcan might perhaps better be called the 'planet of fiction' was pro tanto confirmed. Nevertheless, I would not be understood to mean by the word 'fiction' aught savouring of fraud so far as ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... of Monsieur Servien, your venerable father," he cried. "He enjoys a green and flourishing old age, at least I hope so; he is a man superior to his mechanic and mercantile condition by the benevolence of his behaviour to needy men of letters. And your respected aunt? She still knits stockings with the same zeal as of yore? At least I hope so. A lady of an austere virtue. ...
— The Aspirations of Jean Servien • Anatole France
... which exist and are revealed to us reach us by the testimony of the consciousness, and are, consequently, facts of consciousness. If I look at a locomotive, and analyse its machinery, I act like a mechanic; if I study under the microscope the structure of infusoria, I practise biology; and yet the sight of the locomotive, the perception of the infusoria, are just facts of consciousness, and should belong to ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... this, when you come to think of the abandoned Roman mines yet deeper in the hill, was a thing of yesterday. The man in the oily overalls had evidently not come to think of it, but he was otherwise a very intelligent mechanic, and of a hospitable mind, like all the rest of our chance acquaintance in Great Britain. I do not know that I like to think of those Roman mines myself, where it is said the sea now surges back and forth: they must have been worked by British slaves, who may be fancied ...
— Seven English Cities • W. D. Howells
... over the remains of mediaeval culture. In 1700 the Middle Ages were not yet so very remote. The nations and languages of Europe continued in nearly the same limits which had bounded them two centuries before. The progress in the sciences and mechanic arts, the discovery and colonizing of America, the invention of printing and gunpowder, and the Protestant reformation had indeed drawn deep lines between modern and mediaeval life. Christianity, however, formed a connecting link, though, in Protestant countries, the continuity between ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... capacity.—Not only time but, opportunity must be wanting to complete female studies:—we mix with the world without restraint, we converse freely with all classes of people, with men of wit, of science, of learning, with the artist, the mechanic, the labourer; every scene of life is open to our view; every assistance that foreign or domestic ingenuity can invent, to encourage literary studies, is ours almost exclusively. From academies, colleges, public libraries, private ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth
... done for us, and we have noticed the same results with others, therefore we speak from personal experience. Attend night schools and mechanic's institutes and ...
— An Analysis of the Lever Escapement • H. R. Playtner
... a dozen men, all in the leather uniforms with caps and goggles to match, were mounting the machines nearest. Blaine, having donned his rig on the run, as it were, was already in a triplane much like the one he had last used. Turning to the mechanic, he asked: ...
— Our Pilots in the Air • Captain William B. Perry
... should not Mantua have a tyrant?" demanded Benedetto. "The freedom of the mechanic is the bondage of the noble, who values no liberty save that of making the base-born do his bidding. 'Tis hell to a man of spirit to be contradicted by his tailor. If I could see my heart's desire on the knaves, little would I reck submitting ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... his mechanic get out one of the safest, though a speedy, double machine, and, with Mary to watch, Tom had taken a trial flight, just to show her how easy it was. It was not the first time she had seen him take to the ...
— Tom Swift and his Air Scout - or, Uncle Sam's Mastery of the Sky • Victor Appleton
... friends, if you would only give me the wages of a middling mechanic, you would have pleasure in my undisturbed work, which ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 1 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... fields, than are the members of this society; every one in the town follows some particular occupation with great diligence, but without that servility of labour which I am informed prevails in Europe. The mechanic seemed to be descended from as good parentage, was as well dressed and fed, and held in as much estimation as those who employed him; they were once nearly related; their different degrees of prosperity is what has caused the various shades of their community. But this ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
... carried a pair of these shoes a mile and sunk knee deep into solid rock at every step. Babe cast a shoe while making a hard pull one day, and it was hurled for a mile and tore down forty acres of pine and injured eight Swedes that were swamping out skidways. Ole was also a mechanic and built the Downcutter, a rig like a mowing machine that cut down a swath of trees 500 ...
— The Marvelous Exploits of Paul Bunyan • W.B. Laughead
... work for all and more than all, but the jigsaw puzzle which industry will have to put together will try the nerves and temper of the whole community. In the French army the peasant soldier is jealous and sore because he has had to bear the chief burden of the fighting, while the mechanic has to a great extent been kept for munition making, transport, and essential civil industry. With us it is if anything the other way. In the French army, too, the feeling runs high against the "embusqu," the man who—often unjustly—is supposed to ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... ground; if so, in returning to my proper path, I will comfort myself with this thought:—the progress of improvement, however slow, is sure, and it is certainly advancing in this country; I require no other assurance than the establishment of Infant Schools and Mechanic's. ...
— The Infant System - For Developing the Intellectual and Moral Powers of all Children, - from One to Seven years of Age • Samuel Wilderspin
... I heard a mechanic say, 'I have a wife and two little children; we live in a very small house; but, to save my life, I cannot spend less than twelve hundred a year.' Another replied, 'You are not economical; I spend but eight hundred.' I thought to myself,—'Neither of you ...
— The American Frugal Housewife • Lydia M. Child
... Agricultural engines, of different makers and styles of workmanship, but not in sufficient detail, nor illustrated on large enough scale to be of practical value as models, forming rather in fact an illustrated catalogue of the manufacturer, than a study for the mechanic. On this account, they have been entirely omitted, and their place supplied by a few illustrations from American workmanship, not only of Steam Engines, of various forms and applications, but also of various machines, ...
— A Catechism of the Steam Engine • John Bourne
... variety of information, and for the felicity and force with which the author applies his facts to his reasoning. The facts and illustrations are drawn from almost every branch of skilful industry. It is a work which the mechanic and artizan of every description will be sure to ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... brave-hearted young mechanic bought this one acre of land, and with his own hands dug and walled a cellar, at times when he had no work to do for others. When he had earned an additional hundred or two dollars he bought lumber and began to build a house. People ...
— Choice Readings for the Home Circle • Anonymous
... measure which has done more for the cause of social progress. Its effects have been far-reaching. Among other things, it was this measure which led to the common-sense system which makes a soldier of every mechanic and artisan employed upon Government work. It introduced the system which enables so many men to devote a part of their time to soldiering, and the rest to various other kinds of Government work. But, of course, its main reason ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... discretion in these solitary countries; rushing out from their stone towers ("walls fourteen feet thick"), to seize any herd of "six hundred swine," and convoy of Luebeck or Hamburg merchant goods, that had not contented them in passing. What were pedlers and mechanic fellows made for, if not to be plundered when needful? Arbitrary rule, on the part of these noble robber lords! And then much of the crown domains had gone to the chief of them—pawned (and the pawn-ticket lost, so to speak), ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... an Irregular Block. Filing a Bar Straight. Filing Bar with Parallel Sides. Surfacing Off Disks. True Surfacing. Precision Tools. Test of the Mechanic. Test Suggestions. Use of the Dividers. Cutting a Key-way. Key-way Difficulties. Filing Metal Round. Kinds of Files. Cotter-file. Square. Pinion. Half-round. Round. Triangular. Equalizing. Cross. Slitting. Character of File Tooth. Double Cut. Float-cut. Rasp Cut. Holding ...
— Practical Mechanics for Boys • J. S. Zerbe
... themselves were the heroes. But they will not relate them, unless there is somebody to hear. Let the young avail themselves of this propensity, and make the most of it. Some may have been heroes in war; some in travelling the country; others in hunting, fishing, agriculture or the mechanic arts; and it may be that here and there one will boast of his skill, and relate stories of his success in that noblest of arts and employments—the making of his fellow creatures wise, and ...
— The Young Man's Guide • William A. Alcott
... the Saints" we behold the prince and the peasant, the warrior and the sage, the rich and the poor, the old and the young, the peasant and the mechanic, the shepherd and the statesman, the wife and the widow, the prelate, the priest, and the recluse,—men and women of every class, and age, and degree, and condition, and country, sanctified by the grace of God, exhibiting to the faithful reader models for his imitation, and saying ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... spirit he knows nothing. He can turn a Greek ode into English, or a Latin epigram into Greek verse; but whether either is worth the trouble he leaves to the critics. Does he understand 'the act and practique part of life' better than 'the theorique'? No. He knows no liberal or mechanic art, no trade or occupation, no game of skill or chance. Learning 'has no skill in surgery,' in agriculture, in building, in working in wood or in iron; it cannot make any instrument of labour, or use it ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... proceeds with the same act of the mind, even when the subject fails him, and entertains a notion of a compleat TIERCE or OCTAVE, without being able to tell whence he derives his standard. A painter forms the same fiction with regard to colours. A mechanic with regard to motion. To the one light and shade; to the other swift and slow are imagined to be capable of an exact comparison and equality beyond the judgments of ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... his nephew! How different a figure did the same prince make in a reign of dissimilar complexion! The philosophic warrior, who could relax himself into the ornament of a refined court, was thought a savage mechanic, when courtiers were only voluptuous wits. Let me transcribe a picture of Prince Rupert, drawn by a man who was far from having the least portion of wit in that age, who was superior to its indelicacy, and who yet was so overborne by its ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... frequented by men who came, not to talk, but to read; the smaller tradesmen and the better class of mechanic now came to the coffee-house, called for a cup of coffee, and with it the daily paper, which they could not afford to take in. Every coffee-house took three or four papers; there seems to have been in this latter phase of the once social institution no general conversation. ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... doth propose unto herself as her end. Others, as many as take pleasure in their trade and profession, can even pine themselves at their works, and neglect their bodies and their food for it; and doest thou less honour thy nature, than an ordinary mechanic his trade; or a good dancer his art? than a covetous man his silver, and vainglorious man applause? These to whatsoever they take an affection, can be content to want their meat and sleep, to further that every one which he affects: and shall actions ...
— Meditations • Marcus Aurelius
... original, sagacious, and inventive, capable of discoveries in science no less than of improvements in the fine arts and the mechanic arts. He had a vast imagination, equal to the comprehension of the greatest objects, and capable of a cool and steady comprehension of them. He had wit at will. He had humor that when he pleased was delicate and delightful. He had a satire that was good-natured or ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... vaunts his connection and sympathy with the rescue. On the third day come the arrests. He finds the Government has learned that he was present. Six months in jail and a thousand dollars fine, is no trifle to a mechanic's apprentice. He becomes alarmed, and offers himself as State's evidence, and becomes a swift, a terrified, and a blinded witness for the Government. He says he was standing in the entry by the recess that leads to the east door ...
— Report of the Proceedings at the Examination of Charles G. Davis, Esq., on the Charge of Aiding and Abetting in the Rescue of a Fugitive Slave • Various
... labor was of minor importance, due primarily to the fact that many thousands of men were without employment and anxious to secure work, and secondarily for the reason that skilled labor was not an essential factor. Most of the work is done by machinery and in a short period of time a mechanic of ordinary intelligence will become proficient in running a machine. The necessary trained labor could be secured without difficulty. Numbers of highly trained employes at Government arsenals are now with private arms and ammunition concerns. The labor problem ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... to put down his mechanic's straw-bag upon the hall-table, which he did with great care, as if it were of priceless stuff and contained fragile articles; having done this, he posed himself with one elbow resting on the post at the foot of the staircase, like a ...
— The Talking Horse - And Other Tales • F. Anstey
... special taste for mechanical pursuits. Not only had he the qualifications of a scientific engineer, but he had the manual dexterity which qualified him personally to carry out many practical arts. Lord Rosse was, in fact, a skilful mechanic, an experienced founder, and an ingenious optician. His acquaintances were largely among those who were interested in mechanical pursuits, and it was his delight to visit the works or engineering establishments where refined processes ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... course, until his brows should be encircled by the insignia of royalty. It required more than mortal courage for a young man to intimate a preference for some more peaceful occupation. A learned profession might be sneeringly tolerated; but woe to him who spoke of agriculture, or commerce, or the mechanic arts! There was little comfort for the luckless wight who, in some unguarded moment, gave utterance to such ignoble aspirations. Henceforth he was, like the Pariah of India, cut off from human sympathy, and the young gentlemen whose tastes ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... destroyed by flames, could not be found. Searching in the debris at the fatal spot, she had found a bunch of keys, that she positively recognized as belonging to her husband, and in his possession when he died. One key fitted the clock in her house, and a mechanic was ready to swear that he had made such a key for the deceased. Another key fitted a chest she owned, and still another fitted the door of her house; while strongest of all proof, she found a piece of cloth which ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... in the same inevitable stuff Discovered an odd reason too for pride In being what he must have been by laws Infrangible and for no kind of cause. Deterred by no confusion or surprise He may have seen with his mechanic eyes A world without a meaning, and had room, Alone amid magnificence and doom, To build himself an airy monument That should, or fail him in his vague intent, Outlast an accidental universe— To call it nothing worse— Or, by the burrowing guile Of Time disintegrated and effaced, ...
— The Man Against the Sky • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... the disadvantage of having the larger portion of the capital of a State locked up in a tool which would do more and better work if recognized as a man and representing no invested capital. How much productive industry would there be in New England, if every laborer or mechanic cost his employer $800 to $1500 before he could be set to work, and if each one who undertook to labor upon his own account, and was not so purchased, were stigmatized and degraded and ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... against herself and every one else. She took up a book again and tried to read it, but soon afterwards sat down and thought again. To become a doctor? But to do that one must pass an examination in Latin; besides, she had an invincible repugnance to corpses and disease. It would be nice to become a mechanic, a judge, a commander of a steamer, a scientist; to do something into which she could put all her powers, physical and spiritual, and to be tired out and sleep soundly at night; to give up her life to something that would make her an interesting ...
— The Duel and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... commodity with farmers everywhere. Most of their income is in the shape of farm produce, and used in the family. Only a small surplus is converted into money, and a dollar, therefore, seems more to them than to a mechanic, whose substantial income is perhaps less. This is the reason, probably, why farmers are generally loath to spend money. Harry knew that if he should hire out to a farmer for the six months the utmost he could expect would be a dollar a week, and it was not ...
— Bound to Rise • Horatio Alger
... had gone to New York City in his early twenties. He had had a good high school education and was a first-class mechanic. But somehow, he could not compete. He was slow and thoroughgoing and honest. He could not compete with the new type of workman, the man bred to do part work. When Little Jim was five, the Mannings had come back to Exham, ...
— Still Jim • Honore Willsie Morrow
... but he was too shrewd a knave to press his point. Honesty was his best policy. He did demand hotly that I should be taken in charge, but I had the better of him in French, and after a moment he let that iron go. He fought very hard for the services of a mechanic, but I was determined that the engine should remain out of action, and, calling for volunteers upon the crowd of unlookers, soon satisfied the gendarme that to push the car to ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates
... broken cisterns wherefore go. While from the secret treasure-depths below, Fed by the skyey shower, And clouds that sink and rest on hill-tops high, Wisdom at once, and Power, Are welling, bubbling forth, unseen, incessantly? Why labor at the dull mechanic oar, When the fresh breeze is blowing, And the strong current flowing, Right onward ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... the unquiet heart and brain, A use in measured language lies; The sad mechanic exercise, ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... tells us somethin' in a minute," said Anderson to her. "These new claptraps are beyond me. I'm no mechanic." ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... n. artisan, one who practices an art: hence, one who practices one of the mechanic arts; ...
— New Word-Analysis - Or, School Etymology of English Derivative Words • William Swinton
... pleasures that are at God's right hand, it is needful to have senses and a taste that correspond thereto. The swine trample pearls under their feet. The elevated discourse of a philosopher is insupportable to a stupid mechanic; and an ignorant peasant, introduced into a circle of men of learning and taste, is disgusted, sighs after his village, and declares no hour ever appeared to him so long. It would be the same to a man who is not regenerated, ...
— Fletcher of Madeley • Brigadier Margaret Allen
... special efforts made by dualists to draw our attention here to the "wisdom of the Creator" and the design visible in his works. As a matter of fact, you will discover, on mature reflection, that on this theory the Creator is at bottom only playing the part of a clever mechanic or watch-maker; all these familiar teleological ideas of Creator and creation are based, in the long run, on a ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.2 • Ernst Haeckel
... fidelity, his gallant shielding of her, his generous conquest of his own wrong and his own pride for her sake, are simply honourable, manly, and true. Nothing less worthy can be seen through the lustre of such qualities in the commonest mechanic, nothing less worthy can be seen in the best-born gentleman. In such a light both aspire alike, both rise alike, both children ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... England will be interesting. At the commencement of the last century, a person of the name of Crochet erected a small mill near the present works, with the intention of introducing the Italian method of spinning into this country. About 1715, a similar plan was in the contemplation of a mechanic and draughtsman named John Lombe, who travelled into Italy to procure drawings and models of the machines necessary for the undertaking. After remaining some time in that country, and gaining as much information as the jealousy and precautions ...
— Biographical Memorials of James Oglethorpe • Thaddeus Mason Harris
... Parisian mechanic, at the time of the Restoration, being married and father of a family, he stole his wife's savings, the fruit of arduous labor; he was imprisoned, about 1828, probably for ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... and mechanic, who are skilled in the works of utility, rather than of luxury, there is, as it has been already remarked, no part of the world, perhaps, which affords an equal chance of success. To any, therefore, who have the means of transporting ...
— Statistical, Historical and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales and its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen's Land • William Charles Wentworth
... steps had begun to sag a little; but Mr. Sherwood had blocked them up. The front fence had got out of alignment, and the same able mechanic had righted it and set the necessary ...
— Nan Sherwood at Pine Camp - or, The Old Lumberman's Secret • Annie Roe Carr
... detective story. The man or woman who can do it can also write a good play (according to modern ideas of plays), and possesses force of character, individuality, and mental ability. He or she must combine the intuition of the artist with the talent of the master mechanic, but will seldom be a poet, and will generally care more for things and events than for fellow creatures. For, although the story is often concerned with righting some wrong, or avenging some murder, yet it must be confessed that the author commonly succeeds better in the measure ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... Once she suggested that he should learn a trade, to which Master Simon always replied, that he was born to be a gentleman, and would never voluntarily demean himself by pursuing a degrading occupation. He was above being a mechanic, and he would never soil his hands with dirty work. Katy began to think he was really a fool. She could scarcely think him "poor and proud"; he was only ...
— Poor and Proud - or The Fortunes of Katy Redburn • Oliver Optic
... the May Party was apt to be poisoned at its source by questions of class; and I think it might have been in the talk about precedence, and who should be what, that my boy first heard that such and such a girl's father was a mechanic, and that it was somehow dishonorable to be a mechanic. He did not know why, and he has never since known why, but the girls then knew why, and the women seem to know now. He was asked to be one of the boys who held the banner-tassels, and he felt this a great compliment somehow, ...
— A Boy's Town • W. D. Howells
... perhaps some bitter solitude has aged him, or the abuse of his gift of comprehension. He scrutinizes the thought of every one, yet without definite aim or system. The pickaxe of his criticism demolishes, it never constructs. Thus his lassitude is that of a mechanic, not of an architect. The eyes, of a pale blue, once brilliant, are clouded now by some hidden pain, or dulled by gloomy sadness. Excesses have laid dark tints above the eyelids; the temples have lost their freshness. The chin, of incomparable ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... innovations and reforms, was vindicated. For breadth of design and statesmanship there was not one sovereign in the coalition who could compare with this man who, Bishop Burnet thought, was better fitted for a mechanic than a Prince—and "incapable of a ...
— A Short History of Russia • Mary Platt Parmele
... of England, of Grenville, and of Tennyson for ever. From the affectation of cosmopolitan indifference not AEschylus, not Pindar, not Dante's very self was more alien or more free than Shakespeare; but there was nothing of the dry Tyrtaean twang, the dull mechanic resonance as of wooden echoes from a platform, in the great historic chord of his lyre. "He is very English, too English, even," says the Master on whom his enemies alone—assuredly not his most loving, most reverent, and ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... long been our cherished view of Imagination. It creates only as a mechanic creates a chest of drawers, a sideboard, a clock, or a watch. It originates not a single material of thought, volition, or action. But, mechanic-like, it works by plumb and rule on all the materials found in the warehouse of memory; and manufactures, out of the same ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... a little boy, three years old perhaps, half frantic with terror, and crying to every one for his "Mammy." This was about eleven, mark you. People stopped and spoke to him, and then went on, leaving him more frightened than before. But I and a good-humoured mechanic came up together; and I instantly developed a latent faculty for setting the hearts of children at rest. Master Tommy Murphy (such was his name) soon stopped crying, and allowed me to take him up and carry him; and the mechanic and I trudged away along Princes Street to find ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... this Experiment is totally neglected in England, where mechanic Genius is so strong. I wish I could see the same Emulation between the two Nations as I see between the two Parties here. Your Philosophy seems to be too bashful. In this Country we are not so much afraid ...
— Aircraft and Submarines - The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day - Uses of War's Newest Weapons • Willis J. Abbot
... alarm and dreading reprimand, started up the track on foot, running as fast as his legs could carry him. A railroad mechanic named Murphy kept him company. To one with a love of humor it would have been an amusing sight to see two men on foot chasing a locomotive, but just then Conductor Fuller was not troubled about the opinion of men of humor; his one thought was to overtake his runaway locomotive, ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... at once of all lawful defence; and, on Sunday, the day after the Chief Justice's departure, Apia was in consequence startled with strange news. Dynamite bought from the wrecker ship, an electrical machine and a mechanic hired, the prison mined, and a letter despatched to the people of Manono advising them of the fact, and announcing that if any rescue were attempted prison and prisoners should be blown up—such were the voices of rumour; and the design appearing ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... them right for leaving me at home and going off with that mechanic. I know why Corrie did it, too; he didn't want us to be together all day. He is jealous of Mr. ...
— From the Car Behind • Eleanor M. Ingram
... going to the communicating door. "Tom Barnum, the mechanic-watchman in charge of our radio plant, which isn't far from the Temples' airplane hangar, says the latter is afire. Frank and Bob already are on the way down, and stopped ...
— The Radio Boys with the Revenue Guards • Gerald Breckenridge
... asked June, perking up her head in quick interest from her task of hammering together the seams of a leaky new tin cup. She had it over a projecting end of one of the trestles, and was going about it like a mechanic. ...
— Claim Number One • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... country from being devastated by war. It is true, you send out your army, but the war will not lay waste the fields of Prussia; it will not trample in the dust the crops of the Prussian farmer, interrupt the labors of the mechanic, or carry its terror into our cities and villages, our houses and families. The enemy is at least far ...
— NAPOLEON AND BLUCHER • L. Muhlbach
... passion for work of the true artist. Until he laid aside his pencil from illness, at the age of sixty-six, he was constantly in his painting-room from ten till four, daily, "laboring" as he himself said, "as hard as a mechanic ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.
... but those which depend on a native vigour of imagination, generally burst forth at once in fulness of beauty." Correctness of drawing and imagination, the one of mechanical genius the other of poetic, undoubtedly work together for perfection—"a confidence in the mechanic produces a boldness in the poetic." He expresses his surprise that the race of painters, before Michael Angelo, never thought of transferring to painting the grandeur they admired in ancient sculpture. "Raffaelle himself seemed to be going ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... theme is historical or realistic; whilst in stories of love and courtship as that of Rose-in-hood, the proportion may rise to one-fifth of the whole. And this is true to nature. Love, as Addison said, makes even the mechanic (the British mechanic!) poetical, and Joe Hume of material memory once fought a duel about ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... Mr. Carpenter," he began at last, "I tink you got hold o' de wrong feller. I'm a verkin' man, de same as any mechanic on my lot. I verked ever since I vas a liddle boy, and if I eat too much now, maybe it's because I didn't get enough ven I vas liddle. And maybe I got more money dan vot I got a right to, but I know dis—I ain't never had enough to do half vot I vant to! But dere's plenty fellers got ...
— They Call Me Carpenter • Upton Sinclair
... officers; and women, even more enthusiastic than the men, urged their "guardians and protectors" to the front to meet and vanquish a foe who threatened to invade the Southern soil. Armories were quickly constructed in a country which knew little of the mechanic arts; guns and ammunition were ordered from Europe and from Northern manufacturers as fast as trusty agents could make arrangements; shipbuilding was resorted to on the banks of the sluggish rivers; and machinists and sailors were imported from the North and from England ...
— Expansion and Conflict • William E. Dodd
... here be remarked, that the mechanic and the labourer were generally contented to be paid the above prices in such articles as they or their families stood in need of, the values of which had not as yet been regulated by any other authority, or guided by any other rule, than the will ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 1 • David Collins |
