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Mortar   /mˈɔrtər/   Listen
Mortar

noun
1.
A muzzle-loading high-angle gun with a short barrel that fires shells at high elevations for a short range.  Synonyms: howitzer, trench mortar.
2.
Used as a bond in masonry or for covering a wall.
3.
A bowl-shaped vessel in which substances can be ground and mixed with a pestle.



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"Mortar" Quotes from Famous Books



... my burden to your strong young shoulders. For three days I have borne the agony alone. There were special reasons for Cassius not being told. He is one of the noblest of God's creatures, but he lacks sentiment. I confess I have too much. These old walls are but brick and mortar to him, but to me they are the custodians of the past. Here I had hoped to sit in the twilight of my life and softly turn the leaves of happy memories. But there! Enough! 'The darkest hour oft precedes the dawn!' I will not despair. In your hands and my darling Eleanor's I leave ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice

... p. 230.).—Many things low and vulgar are marked with the prefix "dog"; as dog-rose, dog-trick, dog-hole, as also dog-gerel. When the great mortar was set up in St. James's Park, some one asked "Why the carriage was ornamented with dog's heads?" "To justify the Latin ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 18. Saturday, March 2, 1850 • Various

... our plastic power... Bricks and mortar are mortar and bricks until the architect can make ...
— Heart's-ease • Phillips Brooks

... 30-pounder rifle; but neither of these could be used to fire at an enemy directly ahead, and, in the operations awaiting the fleet, it is within bounds to say that not more than one gun in four could be brought to bear at any given moment. With this fleet were twenty mortar-boats, under Porter, each carrying one 13-inch mortar, and six gunboats, assigned for the service of the mortar-boats and armed like the gunboats of the river fleet. Farragut, with the Hartford, had reached Ship Island on the ...
— History of the Nineteenth Army Corps • Richard Biddle Irwin

... gigantic work, composed of stones from fifteen to eighteen feet long, placed transversely, like those of the centre pier, and in two places still rising to the height of five or six courses (from thirty to forty feet).[440] The blocks are laid side by side without mortar; they are roughly squared, and arranged generally in regular courses; but sometimes two courses for a while take the place of one.[441] There is a want of care in the arrangement of the blocks, joints in one course ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson

... or trifling ornament of any description. The entire side on our right, between the two eastern streets, was occupied by the cracked and roofless walls of an ancient church or convent, which had long been a neglected ruin. The fallen stones and mortar had raised a sloping embankment high up its venerable sides; and the small trees, here and there shooting above the luxuriant grass and running vines which, covered this climbing pile of rubbish, waved their branches over the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various

... ball flew out of the circle like a shell from a mortar. Unfortunately it went directly over Mizzle's head. Before he could wink he went down before them, and the rushing mass of men passed over him like a mountain torrent ...
— The World of Ice • Robert Michael Ballantyne

... as all was quiet, Joe and I set to work, he with a chisel which he had used in making our new instrument, I with my clasp knife. Very gently, so as to avoid noise, we began to scrape away at the mortar between the block of stone we had selected for removal ...
— Humphrey Bold - A Story of the Times of Benbow • Herbert Strang

... have stood for hundreds of years with the waves of unbelieving criticism breaking against them, never totally discrediting them in the ears of the faithful, but on the whole slowly and surely washing out the mortar from between their joints. If you have a God already whom you believe in, these arguments confirm you. If you are atheistic, they fail to set you right. The proofs are various. The "cosmological" one, so-called, reasons from the contingence of the world to a First Cause which must ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James

... 10s.," he said. "Carriage, say L1 10s. The railway companies are robbers. Expenses of erection, say L2. You'll let us have any mortar and cement that are needed for nothing, Doyle; so we'll only have to pay for labour. I'll superintend the erection without charging a fee. Illuminated Address, L4. Bouquet L1 is. That's a good deal to give for a bouquet, but I don't think we'll get a decent one for less. Dresses, ...
— General John Regan - 1913 • George A. Birmingham

... the Chemin de Mantga (see plan), has great walls of clay and conglomerate. The softer conglomerate is quarried and broken up for its sandy dolomitic material, which, mixed with lime, makes excellent mortar. ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black

... and Progress of the Potter's Art.—Chapters I., Bodies. China and Porcelain Bodies, Parian Bodies, Semi-porcelain and Vitreous Bodies, Mortar Bodies, Earthenwares Granite and C.C. Bodies, Miscellaneous Bodies, Sagger and Crucible Clays, Coloured Bodies, Jasper Bodies, Coloured Bodies for Mosaic Painting, Encaustic Tile Bodies, Body Stains, Coloured Dips.—II., Glazes. China Glazes, Ironstone ...
— The Dyeing of Cotton Fabrics - A Practical Handbook for the Dyer and Student • Franklin Beech

... two listeners were conscious of this giant, delicate network that captured every flying thought and carried it streaming through the world. God became a simple thing: He fashioned Rogers's Scheme, even though it never materialised in bricks and mortar. God was behind Mother, even when she knitted or lit the fire in the Den. All were prisoners ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood

... a heap of old stones, bricks, and mortar is there here for the illiterate tourist—he can have six times as jolly a time in Paris for half the money that he pays 'in that old hole where a fellow named Culius Jaesar used ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 2, August, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... twigs, and plaistered up with clay. Barracks and huts were afterwards formed of materials rather more lasting. Buildings of stone might easily have been raised, had there been any means of procuring lime for mortar. The stone which has been found is of three sorts: A fine free stone, reckoned equal in goodness to that of Portland; an indifferent kind of sand stone, or firestone; and a sort which appears to contain a mixture of iron. But neither chalk, nor any species of lime-stone has yet been ...
— The Voyage Of Governor Phillip To Botany Bay • Arthur Phillip

... in my own thoughts with a pale tortoise-shell cat), it was but seldom that I enjoyed the happiness of passing an afternoon in his closet of a surgery; reading some book that was new to me, with the smell of the whole Pharmacopoeia coming up my nose, or pounding something in a mortar ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens

... well. But you are both fanatics, both 'bricks' of the same material; we conservatives, like mortar, will hold you together and ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various

... the melancholy little house We built to be so gay with. God is just. King Francis may forgive me: oft at nights When I look up from painting, eyes tired out, The walls become illumined, brick from brick Distinct, instead of mortar, fierce bright gold, That gold of his I did cement them with! Let us but love each other. Must you go? That cousin here again? he waits outside? {220} Must see you—you, and not with me? Those loans? More gaming debts to pay? you smiled for that? ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson

... by, on the further side of a green valley, could be seen buildings with an encircling wall of flint and mortar faced with ruddy brick, the dark red-tiled roofs rising among walnut-trees, and an orchard in full bloom spreading ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge

... specialties that might be offered black recruits. It also outlined in considerable detail a proposal for converting several organizations to black units, including a field artillery (155-mm. howitzer) battalion, a tank company, a chemical mortar company, and an ordnance heavy automotive maintenance company. These units would be considered experimental in the sense that the men would be specially selected and distributed in terms of ability. The officers, Negroes insofar as practical, and ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.

... little to do but to applaud them. Most wise and sagacious seems to me the determination not to build for the present. It has been my fate to see great educational funds fossilise into mere bricks and mortar, in the petrifying springs of architecture, with nothing left to work the institution they were intended to support. A great warrior is said to have made a desert and called it peace. Administrators of educational funds have sometimes made a palace and called it a university. If I may ...
— American Addresses, with a Lecture on the Study of Biology • Tomas Henry Huxley

... stone trough. Attention had been given to the trees. Below me stood a wall, which, though rough, was not the haphazard thing men pile up in the last recesses of the hills, but formed of chosen stones, and these bound together with mortar. On my right was a deep little dale with children playing in it—and this' I afterwards learned was called a 'combe': delightful memory! All our deeper hollows are called the same at home, and even the Welsh have the word, but they spell it cwm; it is ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc

... "Skunks and rattlesnakes, yea the very bark of trees" they esteemed as delicacies. "They would pick up old bones and cut them in pieces at the joints, ... then boil them and drink up the liquor, and then beat the great ends of them in a mortar and so eat them." After some weeks of starvation Mrs. Rowlandson herself was fain to partake of such viands. One day, having made a cap for one of Philip's boys, she was invited to dine with the great sachem. ...
— The Beginnings of New England - Or the Puritan Theocracy in its Relations to Civil and Religious Liberty • John Fiske

... grouted; the wall should be fourteen inches thick at least; this kind of steep will be found far superior to wood, as not liable to leak, or be worked on by rats; the sides and ends of this steep should be carefully plastered with tarrass mortar; the bottom may be laid with flag, tiles, or brick.[2] Two barley lofts, the whole length of the malt house, will be found highly convenient, as affording sufficient room to different large parcels of barley, and screening the same from loft to loft as it descends into the ...
— The American Practical Brewer and Tanner • Joseph Coppinger

... murder of an Iraqi is not necessarily counted as an attack. If we cannot determine the source of a sectarian attack, that assault does not make it into the database. A roadside bomb or a rocket or mortar attack that doesn't hurt U.S. personnel doesn't count. For example, on one day in July 2006 there were 93 attacks or significant acts of violence reported. Yet a careful review of the reports for that single day brought to light ...
— The Iraq Study Group Report • United States Institute for Peace

... mortar are used in building, but the Abyssinian houses are of the roughest kind, being usually circular huts, ill made and thatched with grass. These huts are sometimes made simply of straw and are surrounded by high thorn hedges, but, in the north, square houses, built in stories, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... the Builder said, "Why people should complain Of mortar made of mud from roads, Or roofs that let in rain, Or sewer-gas that comes ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, August 27, 1892 • Various

... laughed," Pen said. "And as for lobsters, I thought he would have liked to eat me after the lobsters. He shook hands with me, and griped me so, that he bruised my glove black and blue. He is a young surgeon. He comes from Clavering. Don't you remember the gilt pestle and mortar in High-street?" ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray

... has been hanged and left in the air; of real mummy; of human blood, still warm—of each, one ounce; of human suet, two ounces; of linseed oil, turpentine, and Armenian bole—of each, two drachms. Mix all well in a mortar, and keep the salve in an oblong, narrow urn." With the salve the weapon (not the wound), after being dipped in blood from the wound, was to be carefully anointed, and then laid by in a cool place. In the meantime, the wound was washed with fair, ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten

... hod-carrier, who is bringing bricks from the background, has a very good way of carrying them; but those who are bearing a pile of bricks between them seem to make a very awkward business of it. And the man who is carrying mortar on his shoulder, as he ascends the ladder, might very profitably take a lesson from some of our Irish hod-carriers. An earthen pot with a round bottom is certainly a poor thing in which to carry ...
— Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy • Frank Richard Stockton

... of all half a pound of sweet almonds and three ounces of bitter, turn them into cold water for a few minutes; then you must pound them very fine in a stone mortar, if you have a marble one so much the better, and do it in ...
— The Belgian Cookbook • various various

... "Whereby it appeareth," comments Harrison, "that he liked better of our good fare in such coarse cabins, than of their own thin diet in their prince-like habitations and palaces." The timber houses were covered with tiles; the other sort with straw or reeds. The fairest houses were ceiled within with mortar and covered with plaster, the whiteness and evenness of which excited Harrison's admiration. The walls were hung with tapestry, arras-work, or painted cloth, whereon were divers histories, or herbs, or birds, or else ceiled with oak. Stoves had just begun to be used, and only in some houses of the ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... possible; and in my way towards Mr. Jarvie's, whose dinner hour was now approaching, I stopped at a small unpretending shop, the sign of which intimated the indweller to be Christopher Neilson, surgeon and apothecary. I requested of a little boy who was pounding some stuff in a mortar, that he would procure me an audience of this learned pharmacopolist. He opened the door of the back shop, where I found a lively elderly man, who shook his head incredulously at some idle account I gave him of having been wounded accidentally by the button breaking off my antagonist's ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott

... dismissed men on account of work being so slack, and finding himself at the end of his resources, he made up his mind to undertake any job that he might come across on the road. And so by turns he was a navvy, stableman, stone sawer; he split wood, lopped the branches of trees, dug wells, mixed mortar, tied up faggots, tended goats on a mountain, and all for a few pence, for he only obtained two or three days work occasionally, by offering himself at a shamefully low price, in order to tempt the ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant

... kitchen was much infested, not only by them, but by a sort of degenerated cockroach, descended from the better conditioned Blattae, brought in my packages from a tropical country, and which had resisted all efforts for their extermination, such as boiling water, pepper, arsenic-wafers, mortar, etc. At last, a friend, whose house had been cleared of beetles by a hedgehog, made the animal over to me, very much to the discomfort of my cook, to whom it was an object of terror. The first night of its arrival a bed was made for it in a hamper, half full of hay, and a saucer ...
— Anecdotes of the Habits and Instinct of Animals • R. Lee

... center of the street was unpaved, but the floors of the arcades were cut stone of various shapes and sizes but all carefully fitted and laid without mortar. These floors gave evidence of great antiquity, there being a distinct depression down the center as though the stone had been worn away by the passage of countless sandaled feet during the ages ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... Conservatori palace from that of the Caffarellis,—the residence of the German ambassador,—our workmen came upon a piece of a colossal fluted column of Pentelic marble, lying on a platform of squared stones, which were laid without mortar, in a decidedly archaic style. Were we in the presence of the remains of the famous Capitolium, or of one of the smaller temples within the Arx? To give this query a satisfactory answer, we must ...
— Pagan and Christian Rome • Rodolfo Lanciani

... influence on the moral state of the nations of Guiana. It must be observed further, that in North America, between the Ohio, Miami, and the Lakes, an unknown people, whom systematic authors would make the descendants of the Toltecs and Aztecs, constructed walls of earth and sometimes of stone without mortar,* from ten to fifteen feet high, and seven or eight thousand feet long. (* Of siliceous limestone, at Pique, on the Great Miami; of sandstone at Creek Point, ten leagues from Chillakothe, where the wall is fifteen hundred toises long.) ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt

... war-worn and full of half-repaired breaches, enclose a desert, a world too wide for its inhabitants, a vast straggling heterogeneous mass of buildings in every stage of preservation and decay, splendid temples, mossy and ivy-grown, but scarcely injured by time, then wastes of broken brick and mortar; stern dark towers of Savelli, and Frangipani, and Orsini, and Colonna, dominating and threatening whole quarters of ruins; strange small churches built of odds and ends and remnants not too heavy for a few workmen to move; broken-down aqueducts ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford

... of the Pennsylvania Magazine represents the Goddess of Liberty, with a pole and a liberty-cap, holding a shield with the Pennsylvania arms. On the right of the figure is a mortar inscribed "The Congress." In the foreground is a plan of fortifications with cannon balls. In the background are cannon with battle-axes and pikes. A gorget with "Liberty" upon it is hanging on a tree, and ...
— The Philadelphia Magazines and their Contributors 1741-1850 • Albert Smyth

... few where, even after such a lapse of time, one can be sure of finding familiar faces and picking up old threads; where for a moment one can abandon one's self to the illusion that New York humanity is a shade less unstable than its bricks and mortar. And that evening in particular I remember feeling that there could be no pleasanter way of re-entering the confused and careless world to which I was returning than through the quiet softly-lit diningroom in which Mrs. Cumnor, with a characteristic sense of my needing ...
— The Long Run - 1916 • Edith Wharton

... trade whose sorry, pitiable record exists in the Quartiere Nuovo of Rome. About the Porta Nigra is no trace of stucco or rubble. The huge blocks of which it is built stand one upon the other clean-hewn and square. No signs of mortar are left, but we see marks of iron or brass clamps. Its colour is a warm, deep red, softened here and there by streaks ...
— A War-time Journal, Germany 1914 and German Travel Notes • Harriet Julia Jephson

... band making (commencing stage) 2. Ancient Mortar 3. Illustrative Diagram of a Mafulu Community of Villages 4. Diagram of Front of Emone (Front Hood of Roof and Front Platform and Portions of Front Timbers omitted, so as to show Interior) 5. ...
— The Mafulu - Mountain People of British New Guinea • Robert W. Williamson

... egg of the other sacrifices brought during the festival in ancient times, while the horseradish and the salt water represented the bitter work that the Sons of Israel had to do for Pharaoh, and the mush the lime and mortar from which they made brick for him. A small book lay in front of each seat. That was the Story of the Deliverance, in the ancient Hebrew text, accompanied by ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan

... set of men. In every parish you now saw one or two of these apron farmers, gentlemen who knew very well how to handle a yard, so as to make short measure in selling a piece of cloth; men who could acquit themselves well at a pestle and mortar, who could tie up a paper parcel, or "split a fig;" who could drive a goose-quill, or ogle the ladies from behind a counter, very decently; but who knew no more about the management of a farm than they did about algebra, or the most intricate problems ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 2 • Henry Hunt

... touched any of them. The doorways were then, as now, on the ground level, the passages were just as narrow and dusky, the cells had the same little square windows to let in the day. But the stones in that day had a hue that reminded one of the quarry, the mortar between them was fresh, the shingles in the roof had gathered no moss and very little weather stain; the primeval forests were yet within the horizon, and there was everywhere an air of newness, of advancement, and of prosperity about the Dunkard ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston

... thirdly, common wood fire will not melt granite. Another pundit says they are volcanic. O wondrous volcano to spout oblong concentric areas of stone walls! Perhaps the best explanation is that the Celts cemented these hilltops of strongholds by means of coarse glass, a sort of red-hot mortar, using sea-sand and seaweed as a flux. This is Professor Whewell's idea, and with him we had some interesting conversation on that and other subjects." Of this Scotch tour, full of interest, thus very curtly. Turn we now to Ireland in 1835. My record of just fifty years ago is much what ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper

... to bed at last, and dreamed that we two were building houses on the seashore. Carrie's was the prettier, for it was all of sea-weed and bright-colored shells that looked as though the sun were shining on them, while mine was made of clay, tempered by mortar. ...
— Esther - A Book for Girls • Rosa Nouchette Carey

... Virginian met with his mishap. A few hundred yards farther, was the long street of the little old town, where hospitality might have been found under the great swinging ensigns of a couple of tuns, and medical relief was to be had, as a blazing gilt pestle and mortar indicated. But what surgeon could have ministered more cleverly to a patient than Harry's host, who tended him without a fee, or what Boniface could make ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray

... the foliage of the oak rustled, a quantity of mortar and moss fell from the old wall, and a man threw himself at the feet of Diana, who uttered an ...
— Chicot the Jester - [An abridged translation of "La dame de Monsoreau"] • Alexandre Dumas

... my stones and my bricks With mortar I takes from the snobbish? All who can feel for the public weal Likes the ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... caused the corpse of the hapless dead man to be burnt, and the bones which were not consumed by the fire he caused to be placed in some mortar in a part of his house where he was building. Then he sent in all haste to the Court to sue for pardon, setting forth that he had several times forbidden his house to a person whom he suspected of plotting his wife's dishonour, and who, notwithstanding his prohibition, had come by ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. I. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre

... not seen again and again human souls so entangled and opprest by this vast labyrinth of brick and mortar, as never to care to stir outside it and expand their souls with the sight of God's works as long as their brute wants are supplied, just as the savage never cares to leave his accustomed forest haunt, and hew himself a path into the open air through ...
— Town and Country Sermons • Charles Kingsley

... that about the material fabric, the actual stone and mortar, of Trinity College, Dublin, which makes a vivid appeal to the imagination of the common man. The cultured sentimentalist will not indeed be able to lave his soul in tepid emotion while he walks through these quadrangles, as he may among the cloisters and chapels of the Oxford colleges. The amateur ...
— Hyacinth - 1906 • George A. Birmingham

... another and another, cut the stillness, and the earth beneath was aflame with light as the high explosives and shells stored in the concealed ammunition depot were set off. Nothing escaped destruction; flesh and blood, mortar and brick went skyward together, and a great gash in the earth was all that was left to tell the story of the enemy's ...
— I Spy • Natalie Sumner Lincoln

... discernible in the preparation of forcemeats. A common cook is satistified if she chops or minces the ingredients and moistens them with an egg scarcely beaten, but this is a very crude and imperfect method; they should be pounded together in a mortar until not a lump or fibre is perceptible. Further directions will be given in the proper place, but this is a rule which must be strictly attended to by those who wish to attain any excellence in this branch ...
— The Jewish Manual • Judith Cohen Montefiore

... is used for the purpose of pulverizing hard substances, and for mixing fluxes. As this mortar will not yield to abrasion, there is no danger of any foreign matter becoming mixed with the substance pulverized in it. It should be cleaned after use with pumice stone. Steel mortars are very useful for the pulverization ...
— A System of Instruction in the Practical Use of the Blowpipe • Anonymous

... did not reveal his change of feeling so much by neglect as by ceremony, which, sooner than anything else, builds a wall of separation between those who meet every day. For the oftener they meet, the thicker and the faster are the bricks and mortar of cold politeness, evidently avoided insults, and subjected manifestations ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald

... whom he sent to Lebanon ten thousand every month, and when ten thousand went the others came home, and so two months were they at home, and Adonias was overseer and commander on them. Solomon had seventy thousand men that did nothing but bear stone and mortar and other things to the edifying of the temple, and were bearers of burdens only, and he had eighty thousand of hewers of stone and masons in the mountain, without the prefects and masters, which were three thousand three ...
— Bible Stories and Religious Classics • Philip P. Wells

... uncommon strength and tenacity of the ancient mortar used in the Castle was especially conspicuous in the Keep prior to the recent restorations. In one place an enormous mass of masonry remained suspended without other support than its own coherence and adhesion. For security this ...
— The Hawarden Visitors' Hand-Book - Revised Edition, 1890 • William Henry Gladstone

... kitchen grate had been removed and the jambs had been widened on each side of the fireplace; it yawned empty and cold. A little rubble of mortar, newly dried, lay about the bottom of the square recess. The sight of the crude, unfamiliar scraps of dropped lime in the gaping place where warmth should have been, increased the discomfort ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown

... their release at 100 dollars each. During his absence, the Gaffat people had consulted amongst themselves as to the best means of regaining the Emperor's favour, and decided on proposing to cast an immense mortar for him. Theodore was delighted. A foundry was erected, and the "Great Sebastopol," which was destined to be the crushing blow for him, and the means ...
— A Narrative of Captivity in Abyssinia - With Some Account of the Late Emperor Theodore, - His Country and People • Henry Blanc

... quotations from his address at Johns Hopkins are especially worthy of attention as a part of his message to Americans. "It has been my fate to see great educational funds fossilise into mere bricks and mortar in the petrifying springs of architecture, with nothing left to work them. A great warrior is said to have made a desert and called it peace. Trustees have sometimes made a palace and ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley

... replied Ursula, raising her head, "love has inherited leprosy, St Anthony's fire, the Ardennes' sickness, and the red rash, and has heaped up all the fevers, agonies, drugs and sufferings of the lot in his pretty mortar, to draw out therefrom a terrible compound, of which the devil has given the receipt, luckily for convents, because there are a great number of frightened ladies, who become virtuous for fear ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac

... that we had no means of bridging that which lay between. And at this we faced one another to discuss what we should do to effect the rescue of those within the hulk. Yet it was little that we could even suggest; for though one spoke of how he had seen a rope cast by means of a mortar to a ship that lay off shore, yet this helped us not, for we had no mortar; but here the same man cried out that they in the ship might have such a thing, so that they would be able to shoot the rope to us, and at this we thought more upon his saying; for if they had such a weapon, then might ...
— The Boats of the "Glen Carrig" • William Hope Hodgson

... ingredients into a cool oven and let them remain there all night. Next day pound them thoroughly in a marble mortar, and rub through a sieve. Put the powder into a ...
— The Healthy Life Cook Book, 2d ed. • Florence Daniel

... covered with them. The furniture, therefore, was hastily got out and carried into the garden which fronted the windows, on the other side the before-mentioned brook. I was so alarmed that I threw indiscriminately everything that came to hand out of the window, even to a large stone mortar, which at another time I should have found it difficult to remove, and should have thrown a handsome looking-glass after it had not some one prevented me. The good bishop, who that day was visiting Madam de Warrens, did not remain idle; he took her into the garden, where they went to prayers ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau

... and indeed many parts of the town, less than a century back were studded with gardens, but the flowers have had to give place to the more prosaic bricks and mortar, and householders desirous of floral ornaments have now in a great measure to resort to the nursery grounds of the professed horticulturists. Foremost among the nurseries of the neighbourhood are those of Mr. R.H. ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell

... contemplation, etc. There are extant special books in which all that is seriously explained. Who does not know the symbolism of the cathedrals, and the vagaries to which it has given rise? The towers are prayer, the columns the apostles, the stones and the mortar the assembly of the faithful; the windows are the organs of sense, the buttresses and abutments are the divine assistance; and so on ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot

... urging on the workmen). Up, up! You've rested long enough. To work! The stones here, now the mortar, and the lime! And let his lordship see the work advanced When next he comes. These ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller

... rooms are upon it, fronting the principal street; and back of the Exchange is a rough brick and mortar pillar to mark the spot where Sir J. Herschell, the astronomer, ...
— Kathay: A Cruise in the China Seas • W. Hastings Macaulay

... on the evening of the day this great social revolution was inaugurated. It fell out that a group of honest laborers were descending the elevator that carried the brick and mortar to the twentieth story of a certain downtown sky-scraper. While all of them knew of the edict of their King, none had taken it seriously or imagined for a moment that it would be carried into effect literally. On their arrival at the ground floor, a policeman stationed ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various

... farther end of the room, a woman was pounding taro, or bread-fruit, in a wooden mortar; another, apparently very old and infirm, was sitting upon a low stool near the wall, swaying her body slowly from side to side, and making a low, monotonous noise. I observed that Olla frequently looked ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer

... of 300 pounds, and a culverine of 150; and in this second post was a passe-volant like the former, both belonging to the great gallies. In another place was an iron saker of 12 pounds, a small cannon of 16 pounds, a falcon of 6 pounds, and a mortar throwing a ball of 400 pounds. In another post was a culverine of 100 pounds. By this prodigious train of artillery, the Turks had battered down one tower, so that they could easily mount the breach, the ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VI - Early English Voyages Of Discovery To America • Robert Kerr

... whole handsfull of them every where amongst the garden stuff." Brayley mentions in his pleasant History of Surrey, that this artificial mount was levelled in 1810, and its materials employed to fill up a pond. Many human skulls and bones were found intermixed with the chalk and mortar of which it had been formed. Fragments of old tiles were also frequently found, and are still sometimes turned up. No trace even of the "Abbey house" is left; it was purchased in 1809 by a stock-broker, who in the following year sold the materials—and ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various

... flames, I knew that each one of those poor burning towns was the ruin of something more than bricks and mortar. It was the ruin of a people's ideals, fulfilled throughout centuries of quiet progress in arts and crafts. It was the shattering of all those things for which they praised God in their churches—the good gifts of home-life, the security of the family, the impregnable ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs

... the first blow broke the blade without affecting the diamond, yet a piece of bort, or diamond dust, splinters, or defective diamonds (all these being called bort), may readily be pulverised in a hard steel mortar with a ...
— The Chemistry, Properties and Tests of Precious Stones • John Mastin

... was as if he had struggled through a whirlpool or had wrenched himself away from the downpour of a cataract. Virgilia's interest, her enthusiasm, her co-operation had reared itself above him and toppled over on him just like a high, ponderous wall; the bricks bruised him, the dust of scattered mortar filled his lungs and his eyes. "Such a mind!" he thought; "such readiness; such a fund of information!" Never before had anybody offered so panting, so militant a participation in his doings. He doubted too whether Virgilia could ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller

... found another bit of confetti. A little further along he discovered a third and a fourth. By using his walking stick he discovered that they formed a trail to a point in the wall. He examined the wall. There, if his eyes did not deceive him, were evidences of mortar dislodged by nefarious toes. And there, mirabile visu! at the very bottom of the wall lay a little woollen pompon or tassel, just the kind of pompon that gives a finish to a pierrot's shoes. Evidently the scoundrel had scraped it off against ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke

... the Hector; "they are phrases that a gentleman learns about town.—But perhaps you would like a set at tennis, or a game at balloon—we have an indifferent good court hard by here, and a set of as gentleman-like blades as ever banged leather against brick and mortar." ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott

... a nail; a nail thrust lightly into the mortar below the coping stone. For what purpose? His blood beginning to move more quickly Claude asked himself the question. To support a rope? And so to enable some one to leave the town? The nail, barely pushed into the mortar, ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman

... final cause of logicians. Others say it means something in the end or conclusion of the law itself. If it be the latter, an example is furnished from the case of the leprous house (Lev. xiv. 45): "And he shall break down the house, the stones of it, and the timber thereof, and all the mortar of the house." These directions teach that houses made ...
— Hebrew Literature

... would here remind the reader that "'Arabiyyun" pl. 'Urb is a man of pure Arab race, whether of the Ahl al-Madar (people of mortar, i.e. citizens) or Ahl al-Wabar (tents of goat or camel's hair); whereas "A'rbiyyun" pl. A'rb is one who dwells in the Desert whether Arab ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton

... summit are the ruins of a building, known as the Palace, about 25 feet in height, with a front measuring 228 feet by 180 feet deep. In front were, originally, fourteen doorways, with intervening piers, covered with human figures, hieroglyphics, and carved ornaments. The walls are of stone, laid with mortar and sand; and the whole is covered by stucco, nearly as hard as stone, and richly painted. On each side of the steps are gigantic human statues carved in stone, with rich ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston

... they could see Craig's resistance begin to weaken. The tenseness of his form relaxed; Quest's will was triumphing. Slowly in the mirror they saw a little picture creeping from outline into definite form, a picture of the Professor's library. Craig himself was there with mortar and trowel, and a black ...
— The Black Box • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... though he might not have been able to build it himself, he was thoroughly qualified to choose an architect. His choice fell upon Professor Aitchison, now R.A., and he probably hit upon the only man of his generation able to put his feeling into bricks and mortar, viz., the feeling for a beauty sedate, ...
— Frederic Lord Leighton - An Illustrated Record of His Life and Work • Ernest Rhys

... it made him! How prosaic! How it walled-up passion, as one read how a nun who had loved too much was walled-up, in the old fierce days, with bricks and mortar! ...
— Married Life - The True Romance • May Edginton

... in the South of France. The decrepit casements were fitted with the heavy, unwieldy shutters necessary in that climate, and held in place by massive iron cross bars. It would have puzzled you to find a more dilapidated house in Angouleme; nothing but sheer tenacity of mortar kept it together. Try to picture the workshop, lighted at either end, and dark in the middle; the walls covered with handbills and begrimed by friction of all the workmen who had rubbed past them for thirty years; the cobweb of cordage across the ceiling, ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac

... had been threatening all the morning, now came down with sweeping fury; and although not sufficiently cold to freeze, yet it possessed a keenness that appeared to penetrate the skin. The roads being of a clayey soil soon became of the consistency of mortar by the tramping of so many feet, and our march might have been traced for several miles by the old boots, shoes, and stockings, which were left sticking in the mud in the hurry of the march. I have no doubt that we made a very grotesque appearance, and raised many a smile ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various

... good living where there is no life? These (he continued,) are all outward, mere pretences to put off our duty, and the care of our souls. Yea, we may have churches, schools, hospitals abounding—but these are mere lath and mortar, if we have not also within our own hearts, a church where the pure worship ever goeth on, a school where the true knowledge is taught, a hospital, the door whereof standeth constantly open, into which our fellow-creatures ...
— Chanticleer - A Thanksgiving Story of the Peabody Family • Cornelius Mathews

... and Danny Grin started in to move a small pile of bricks. Next a tub of mixed mortar was carried to the level spot decided upon as the place ...
— The High School Boys in Summer Camp • H. Irving Hancock

... but little milk, is a fruitful source of rickets. The same may be said of white bread, the flour having been largely deprived of its food salts. Giving children lime water, with the idea that the body can convert it into bone (as a hen makes her egg shells out of old mortar) is an entire mistake. The human system cannot use such inorganic material. The men of best bone, so far as we can judge, are those who have been nourished in great measure ...
— Papers on Health • John Kirk

... after the Elizabeth was stranded, and more than six hours after the wreck could easily have been seen. When the life-boat did finally come, the beachmen could not be persuaded to launch or man her. And even the mortar, by which a rope could and should have been thrown on board, was not once fired. A single lesson like this might certainly suffice to teach the government, insurance companies, and humane societies, the urgent need, that to every life-boat should be attached ORGANIZED CREWS, stimulated to do their ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli

... shall need Bayard to bring home a sack of lime for my mortar. And you are over thoughtful for Madcap. I walked up to inspect the pasture, and there is enough to last the pair for a week. It is odds, too, we find some burnt lands at the back of these woods, ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch

... all werry fine to say temp'ry insanity, but I tell you it's the contrairy when a beggar comes to his senses and drownds hisself. Wot'd the Pope do if he had to play the same tune over and over and over and over?... Mortar, John! And 'and me up a nice clean cutter. That's your quorlity, my son." And the Court rang musically to the ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan

... that he was allowed to carry on business at all. He spiked Brother McGinnis's guns by informing him that if he was harbouring the idea that he owned a foundry all on his own, he was labouring under a hallucination. All he owned was a heap of brick and mortar and some iron and steel junk arranged in some peculiar way. In fact, there was no foundry there till the workmen came in and started the wheels going round. Old McGinnis sat gasping like a chicken with the pip. Then the ...
— To Him That Hath - A Novel Of The West Of Today • Ralph Connor

... authorities, ancient as well as modern, report that bitumen, which is still plentifully found in the neighborhood of Babylon, was used by the Babylonians as mortar. See, besides the accounts of ancient writers, W. Vaux, 'Nineveh and Persepolis'. Burnt bitumen was used by Assyrians ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... were leaning rocked, and to show what one's mind does at those moments, I remember thinking that when the Cathedral toppled over it would just fit nicely into the Hospital square. Instinctively I put my head down sheltering it as best I could with my arms, while bricks, mortar, and slates rained on, and all around, us. There was a heavy thud just in front of us, and when the dust had cleared away I saw it was a coping from the Cathedral, 2 feet by 4! Notre Dame had remained standing, but the bomb had completely smashed in the ...
— Fanny Goes to War • Pat Beauchamp

... suitable buildings for hospitals, presses and publishing houses, residences for missionaries and native agents, school dormitories, gymnasia and lecture halls; Y. M. C. A. and other societies' buildings—all these represent that power for service, incarnate in brick and mortar, which is invaluable and even indispensable to the great ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones

... railway, by much the same route as did Mr. Pickwick and his friends, and reaches the Medway at Strood and Rochester through a grime and gloom which hardly existed in Dickens' time to the same compromising extent that it does to-day. Bricks, mortar, belching chimneys, and roaring furnaces line the route far ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun

... sudden the lion gave a tremendous roar, and sprang at Tommy, bounding against the iron bars of the cage with such force that, had they not been very strong, it must have broken them. As it was, they shook and rattled so that pieces of mortar fell from the stones. Tommy shrieked; and, fortunately for himself, fell back and tumbled head over heels, or the lion's paws would have reached him. Captain Osborn and Mr Seagrave ran up to Tommy, and picked him up: he roared with fright as soon as he could fetch his breath, while the ...
— Masterman Ready - The Wreck of the "Pacific" • Captain Frederick Marryat

... ounces of raspberry syrup and fifteen drops of muriatic acid. Rub the whole of the acid with two or three spoonfuls of syrup in a porcelain mortar (or, if there is none, in a soup-plate with the foot of a wine-glass, or a tumbler) for a minute or two; then add some more of the syrup and rub again, and thus continue till the acid is well divided and mixed up with the syrup. Of this mixture give the patient ...
— Hydriatic treatment of Scarlet Fever in its Different Forms • Charles Munde

... symbolic decorations. He felt instinctively and because of a long-accepted tradition that those antique symbols were the only way to hide the ugly look of the truth. For certainly he could have used a ball at one end—a cannon-ball—and a mortar at the other. Just as we might use an aerial torpedo at one end, and the image of a mutilated child at the other; or a gas cylinder at one end, and a gas-mask at the other. But the artist is not going to be deprived of his romance through a touch of the actual, any more than the lady with ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson

... graciously exempted from thraldom. It was hardish work for men accustomed to cooler climates to be obliged, in the sunshine of an African summer, to harness themselves to carts like oxen, and lift huge stones and hods of mortar with little more than a ragged shirt and trousers to cover them from the furnace-heat of day or the dews of night. Men who carry umbrellas and wear puggeries now-a-days on the Boulevard de la Republique ...
— The Pirate City - An Algerine Tale • R.M. Ballantyne

... frontal positions as soon as the American soldiers had opened their surprise flank and rear attacks. Then the Bolos were supposed to run away and a French company supported by a section of American machine guns and a "Hq." section that had been trained hastily into a Stokes mortar section, were to rush in and assist ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore

... into a chair with deep arms that stood on the hearth, he lit his cigar and sipped drowsily the glass of brandy she had left on a silver tray on the table. The ceiling was ridiculously high—what a waste of good bricks and mortar!—the room was ridiculously large! On the smooth white walls reddish shadows moved in a fantastic procession, and from the big chintz-covered lounge the monstrous blue poppies leaped out of the firelight. ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow

... or arguments that the atheist is led to say, "that up to this moment the world has remained without knowledge of a God."[73] It is from the folly of his heart; and, as Solomon says, that "though you bray him and his false logic in the mortar of reason, among the wheat of facts, with the pestle of argument, yet will not his folly depart from him."[74] I fully agree with Hobbes when he says, "where there is no reason for our belief, there is no ...
— Was Man Created? • Henry A. Mott

... from the station bring down the life-boat. It was a hard pull through the sand, but the feat was soon accomplished, and the boat was left near the water's edge, to be ready in case the line from the mortar should fail to ...
— The Wreck • Anonymous

... (God); but our hearts are sore for the six youths who were murdered by Bonga." Any hope of obtaining justice on the murderer was out of the question. Bonga once caught a captain of the Portuguese army, and forced him to perform the menial labour of pounding maize in a wooden mortar. No punishment followed on this outrage. The Government of Lisbon has since given Bonga the honorary title of Captain, by way of coaxing him to own their authority; but he ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone

... Whatever accession of comfort the house received within from this addition to its size, its beauty, externally, was not improved by it, and Mr. Rogers stood before the offending edifice, surveying it with a sardonic sneer that I should think even brick and mortar must have found it hard to bear. He had hardly uttered his three first disparaging bitter sentences, of utter scorn and abhorrence of the architectural abortion, which, indeed it was, when Mrs. Grote herself made her appearance ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble

... snow was falling steadily in feathery flakes, hiding the grime of London beneath a garment of shimmering white and transforming the commonplace houses built of brick and mortar, each capped with its ugly chimneystack, into glittering fairy palaces, crowned with silver towers ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler

... tumblers or teacups or tin cans with wet sand and others with clay that has been wet and then thoroughly stirred till it is about the consistency of cake batter or fresh mixed mortar. Take a tumbler of the wet sand and one of the wet clay and plant two or three kernels of corn in each, pressing the kernels down one-half or three-quarters of an inch below the surface; cover the seeds and carefully smooth the surface. In other tumblers plant peas, beans, and other seeds. Cover ...
— The First Book of Farming • Charles L. Goodrich

... now deep in the woods about the library. It lay sleek and drifted upon the paths, a broad-flaked, mortar-like snow, evidently produced on the borderland between ...
— Red Cap Tales - Stolen from the Treasure Chest of the Wizard of the North • Samuel Rutherford Crockett

... times. They were no jerry-builders then. Strengthened at sundry points by great square bastions, the walls of Rajagriha measure in places over seventeen feet in width and eleven or twelve feet in height, and they are faced with undressed stones three to five feet in length, without mortar or cement, but carefully fitted and banded together with a core of smaller blocks not less carefully laid and packed. They merely supplemented and completed the natural line of defences provided by the outer girdle of hills, rising to 1200 feet, ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol

... safest be brief. The literature of prison escapes is already full enough. Working in the soft mortar of so new a wall and worked by one with a foundryman's knowledge of bricklaying, the murdered Italian's stout old knife made effective speed as it kept neat time with the racket maintained for it. When the happiest man in New Orleans warily put head and shoulders through the low gap ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable

... within. One is tempted to say that Shooter's Gardens are a preferable abode. An inner courtyard, asphalted, swept clean—looking up to the sky as from a prison. Acres of these edifices, the tinge of grime declaring the relative dates of their erection; millions of tons of brute brick and mortar, crushing the spirit as you gaze. Barracks, in truth; housing for the army of industrialism, an army fighting with itself, rank against rank, man against man, that the survivors may have whereon to feed. Pass by in the night, ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing

... with green blinds, under the wind-swung elms of a century, or it may be the log-cabin of the wilderness, with its one room,—still there is a spell in the memory of it beyond all conjurations. Its stone and brick and mortar are like no other; its very clapboards and shingles are dear to us, powerful to bring back the memories of early days, and all that ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various

... war were called "black Marias," that being the slang name for the English police patrol wagon. Then they were called "Jack Johnsons," then "coal boxes," and finally they were christened "crumps" on account of the sound they make, a sort of cru-ump! noise as they explode. "Rum jar" is the trench mortar. "Sausage" is the slow-going aerial torpedo, a beastly thing about six feet long with fins like a torpedo. It has two hundred and ten pounds of high explosive and makes a terrible hole. "Whiz bang" ...
— "Crumps", The Plain Story of a Canadian Who Went • Louis Keene

... those which I had formed at the Aru Islands. The poverty of Ternate in articles used by Europeans was shown, by my searching in vain through all the stores for such common things as flour, metal spoons, wide-mouthed phials, beeswax, a penknife, and a stone or metal pestle and mortar. I took with me four servants: my head man Ali, and a Ternate lad named Jumaat (Friday), to shoot; Lahagi, a steady middle-aged man, to cut timber and assist me in insect-collecting; and Loisa, a Javanese cook. As I knew I should have to build a house at Dorey, where I was going, I took ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume II. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace

... realized metaphors or embodied conceits. And the same concrete vividness of imagination is displayed in single scenes and episodes. The Better and the Worse Reason plead the causes of the old and new education in person. Cleon and Brasidas are the pestles with which War proposes to bray Greece in a mortar; the triremes of Athens in council assembled declare that they will rot in the docks sooner than yield their virginity to musty, fusty Hyperbolus. The fair cities of Greece stand about waiting for the recovery of Peace from her Well, with dreadful black eyes, poor things; Armisticia ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner

... a species of vinagrilla, about the size of a billiard ball, which grows in dry and sterile soil. The natives chew it, and throw it into a wooden mortar, where it is left to ferment, some leaves of tobacco being added to give it pungency. They consume it in this form, sometimes with slices of peyote itself, in their most solemn festivities, although it dulls the intellect and induces gloomy and ...
— Nagualism - A Study in Native American Folk-lore and History • Daniel G. Brinton

... distinctive characteristic of Montesquieu's ideas, as it is of the seventeenth century altogether. He was already councillor in the Parliament of Bordeaux when Louis XIV. died; next year (1716) he took possession of a mortar-cap president's (president d mortier) office, which had been given up to him by one of his uncles. "On leaving college," he says, "there were put into my hands some law-books; I examined the spirit of ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot

... sorts-bases, falcons, minions, sakers, culverins, cannons (double and royal), basilisks (long and large); they have six great pieces, whose shot is a yard of height, which shot a man may easily discern as they flee. They have also a great many of mortar pieces or pot guns, out of which pieces ...
— The Discovery of Muscovy etc. • Richard Hakluyt

... Love is founded in rocks of Remembrance In stones of Forbearance and mortar of Pain. The workman lays wearily granite on granite, And bleeds for his castle 'mid sunshine ...
— The Congo and Other Poems • Vachel Lindsay

... head of an old hypocrite, one ounce of Nero's conspiracy, two ounces of the hatred of truth, five scruples of liars' tongues, twenty-five drops of the spirit of Oliver Cromwell, fifteen drops of the spirit of contentment. Put them in the mortar of self-righteousness and pound them with the pestle of malice and sift them through the skin of a Doctor of Divinity and put the compound into the vessel of rebellion and steep it over the fire of Sedition twenty-four hours, and then strain it in ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur

... and without mortar, in form the brochs were circular, and have been described as truncated cones with the apex cut off,[7] and their general plan and elevation were everywhere almost uniform. The ground floor was solid masonry, but contained small chambers in its thickness of about 15 feet. Above the ground ...
— Sutherland and Caithness in Saga-Time - or, The Jarls and The Freskyns • James Gray

... gallant officer was here killed. The troops kept their position during the day, and in the night effected a lodgment within three hundred yards of the southernmost tower, and erected a battery of four guns, together with a mortar battery. ...
— The Pirates Own Book • Charles Ellms

... some thrilling incidents varied the hard conditions of life for the women during 1621-2. Indian corn and barley furnished a new foundation for many "a savory dish" prepared by the housewives in the mortar and pestles, kettles and skillets which they had brought from Holland. Nuts were used for food, giving piquant flavor both to "cakes" baked in the fire and to the stuffing of wild turkeys. The fare was simple, but it must have seemed a feast to the Pilgrims after ...
— The Women Who Came in the Mayflower • Annie Russell Marble

... she answered. "Then you must have thought me of a suicidal tendency. Why, he would pound me up in a mortar if I disagreed with him. You have heard him slam ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand

... all; they merely levelled the space intended to be covered, and, having probably watered it to settle the soil, they at once laid the bricks upon the surface. When the house was finished, the scraps of mortar, the broken bricks, and all the accumulated refuse of the work, made a bed of eight inches or a foot in depth, and the base of the wall thus buried served instead of a foundation. When the new house ...
— Manual Of Egyptian Archaeology And Guide To The Study Of Antiquities In Egypt • Gaston Camille Charles Maspero

... Mortar the Leg of a young Coney (Vulgarly called the Almond) or of a Whelp or Catling, and a quantity of Virgins Wax and Sheeps suet, till they are incorporated, and temper them with clarified ...
— The School of Recreation (1684 edition) • Robert Howlett

... running in strongly; and when the boat was safe he set out to climb the rocks. Up, and up, a dizzy height he went, finding foothold with difficulty, for what looked like solid rock had a trick of crumbling when stepped upon, just as if it were rotten mortar. ...
— A Countess from Canada - A Story of Life in the Backwoods • Bessie Marchant

... the mason's yard hard by, while the men were at breakfast, and brought away a shovelful of mortar. I took it into the outhouse, again shifted the cupboard, and plastered over the mouth of the oven behind. Simply pushing the cupboard back into its place, I waited for the next night that I might bury the body, though upon the whole it was in ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy

... means that Nature keeps on asking for more bricks and mortar to go on building up the works that were begun years ago and not finished—muscle and bone and nerve, sir, so as to get him a sound body; and mind you, a sound body generally means a sound brain. Everything in ...
— Jack at Sea - All Work and no Play made him a Dull Boy • George Manville Fenn

... great number of machines, on the other hand, may be compared to a complete workman. Thus, the action of the mill which grinds grain has very little resemblance to the blowing of the wind or the running of the water, whereas the rising and falling of the pestle in the small mortar for throwing grenades corresponds to the motion of the arm. (Rau, Lehrbuch I, 125.) The infinite number of functions of which our members are capable is related to their inability to attain alone the greater number of their ends. Hence animals which require no tools can undertake ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher

... reward than he who puts the idea into execution? Why should the man who works with his brain have more of the sweets of life than he who works with his hands? Why should the man who lays the brick have more of the world's goods than he who carries the brick mortar to him? These questions do not apply alone to the capitalist, but also to the laborer as well, and as long as the laboring classes champion the cutthroat policy of grading man's allowance according to his ability, of giving more to one than another, owing to a slight difference ...
— Born Again • Alfred Lawson

... leaning heavily on his cane, the bishop's mood grew warm, as if it travelled upward with the sun. His dream, now destined to remain unfulfilled, had not been one merely of stone and brick and mortar. His spirit was akin to that of the cathedral builders of the Middle Ages. They might drive the people in harness to accomplish their purpose, but that purpose was to erect a splendid temple to their God, a symbol of human aspiration ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins

... life-saving mortar with which we might be able to throw a line over the summit of the cliffs; but this plan would necessitate one of us climbing to the top with the chances more than even that the line would cut at the summit, or the hooks at the upper end ...
— The People that Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... summer, cut into very small pieces or scraped into threads, and boiled in water sufficient to cover them until the pieces are soft and easily mashed. By this time the water will be pretty much boiled down, and the whole mass should then be poured into a mortar and beaten up, adding at the same time a few grains of wheat. When done, the paste thus made may be put into an earthen vessel and kept. When required to be used, it should be melted or softened over the fire, adding goose grease or linseed oil, instead ...
— Camp Life in the Woods and the Tricks of Trapping and Trap Making • William Hamilton Gibson

... strongly-fortified gates, and surrounded by a deep and wide moat. The ramparts were built of quarried stone, which, though much harder than sandstone, was far more difficult to bind together with mortar. In view of this fact, we may well be surprised that a place so weakly fortified was able for two long months to withstand the vehement siege operations of the whole Swedish army—an army so brave and so highly trained in the art of war, ...
— The Young Carpenters of Freiberg - A Tale of the Thirty Years' War • Anonymous

... rested upon a dainty figure sitting in the chair by the dying fire, evidently engaged upon some absorbing occupation. It was a woman clad in a sprigged silk gown, the image of my lady of the dining-room portrait. What was she doing? Seemingly pounding some substance in a small mortar. As I gazed astounded a slight knock sounded on the door. My Lady seemed extraordinarily perturbed; she started violently, seemed to shake something white from the mortar as she gathered it hastily to her, moved ...
— Border Ghost Stories • Howard Pease

... cabman is reported to have said of him before the magistrate is quite true. He was always "an arbitrary cove." As a critic, he belonged to the school of Bentley and Gifford,—who would always bray in a literary mortar all critics who disagreed from them, as though such disagreement were a personal offence requiring personal castigation. But that very eagerness made him a good editor. Into whatever he did he put his very heart and soul. During his time the Examiner was almost all that a Liberal weekly ...
— Autobiography of Anthony Trollope • Anthony Trollope

... his quarried viscera—great men lie in tombs, of which the stones once ran liquid down his flames—snuff is taken out of lava boxes—and devotion carves the crucifix on lava, and numbers its beads on a lava rosary—nay, the apothecary's mortar was sent him down from the great mortar-battery above, and the village belle wears fire-proof bracelets that were once too hot to be meddled with. Go to the museum, and you will call it a museum of AEtnean products. Nodulated, porous, condensed, streaked, spotted, clouded, granulated ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLV. July, 1844. Vol. LVI. • Various

... pretext of redressing the wrongs of the poor and weak, seek to promote internal discord, so that thou mayest become only terrible to thyself! And remove from thee the false prophets who have seen vanity and divined lies; who have daubed thy wall with untempered mortar, that it may fall; who have strengthened the hands of the wicked, and made the hearts of the righteous sad. O, do this, and fear not the result, for either shall thy end be a majestic and an enviable one, or God shall perpetuate thy reign ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow

... take from the other, hath no bounds. For that which remains, either great or little, not being comprehended in that positive idea which we have, lies in obscurity; and we have no other idea of it, but of the power of enlarging the one and diminishing the other, WITHOUT CEASING. A pestle and mortar will as soon bring any particle of matter to indivisibility, as the acutest thought of a mathematician; and a surveyor may as soon with his chain measure out infinite space, as a philosopher by the quickest flight of mind reach it or by thinking comprehend it; which is to have a positive idea ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume I. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books I. and II. (of 4) • John Locke

... peculiar to Quebec and must have taken much time in the erection judging from its tenacity, and the hardness of the material still remaining. No doubt the walls, as was the practice in those days, were built of dry masonry, a few feet at a time, and then grouted with mortar in a thin semi-fluid state, composed of quicklime and fine sand poured into the interspaces of the stone-work, filling every cavity, excluding the air, and left to dry before commencing the next course. The wrought stone at the ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine

... cleared and laid open to the sun the pioneer planted his corn, flax, wheat, and vegetables. The corn he shelled on a gritter, and ground in a handmill, or pounded in a wooden mortar with a wooden pestle, or carried on horseback to some ...
— A Brief History of the United States • John Bach McMaster

... manner with the houses joined one to another. Every man has a vacant space quite round his own, whether for security against accidents from fire, or that they want the art of building. With them in truth, is unknown even the use of mortar and of tiles. In all their structures they employ materials quite gross and unhewn, void of fashion and comeliness. Some parts they besmear with an earth so pure and resplendent, that it resembles painting and colours. They are likewise wont to scoop caves deep in the ground, and over them ...
— Tacitus on Germany • Tacitus

... went on, "when I aimed two shots at the cathedral, and only two. No more were needed to dislodge him. One from a 15-centimeter howitzer struck the top of the 'observation tower,' the other, from a 21-centimeter mortar, hit the roof and set it on fire. I used both howitzers and mortars so as to let the French know that we could shoot well with both kinds. I wanted to dislodge the observer with the least possible damage to the fine old ...
— The New York Times Current History: the European War, February, 1915 • Various

... the walls stood except that to the left of this doorway and that had partly fallen and what was left was chin high. We saw at a glance that the people who had built that temple were handy with tools. The stones of the wall were quite big—two feet or more square, and fitted closely. There was no mortar to hold them but the ends had been made with alternate grooves and projections that fitted well. The stone was a kind of red sandstone. But ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... on the morrow a great multitude assembled to see how the matter would go. But I had my eagles and my boys in readiness; and when Pharaoh gave the word, I sent them up, the boys riding on the eagles; and when they were high up in the air, the boys called out, as I had taught them, "Bring us mortar, lime, and stones: we are ready to begin the building!" And the masons and all the people were amazed, gaping at the boys. And I fell upon the masons and beat them, saying, "Why delay you? Make haste, give them what they ask for," and such-like ...
— Old Testament Legends - being stories out of some of the less-known apochryphal - books of the old testament • M. R. James

... the Rock, a complete view was obtainable of all the enemy's operations and, as they were seen to be raising mortar batteries, preparations were made to diminish the effects of a bombardment of the town. For this purpose the pavement of the streets was removed, and the ground ploughed up; the towers and most conspicuous buildings taken down; ...
— Held Fast For England - A Tale of the Siege of Gibraltar (1779-83) • G. A. Henty

... Baba Yaga got up in the morning, the sorry colt was not to be seen! Off she set in pursuit. At full speed did she fly in her iron mortar, urging it on with the pestle, sweeping away her traces with the broom. She dashed up to the fiery river, gave a glance, and said, "A capital bridge!" She drove on to the bridge, but had only got half-way when the bridge broke in two, and the ...
— Russian Fairy Tales - A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore • W. R. S. Ralston

... and stare at their guests, who with great elegance and appetite were stowing away pieces as big as one's fist. The course of meat finished, they spread upon the sheepskins a great heap of parched acorns, and with them they put down a half cheese harder than if it had been made of mortar. All this while the horn was not idle, for it went round so constantly, now full, now empty, like the bucket of a water-wheel, that it soon drained one of the two wine-skins that were in sight. When ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

... more satisfying, more majestic thought of life than this—the scaffolding by which souls are built up into the temple of God? And to care whether a thing is painful or pleasant is as absurd as to care whether the bricklayer's trowel is knocking the sharp corner off a brick, or plastering mortar on the one below it before he lays it carefully on its course. Is the building getting on? That is the one question ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren

... it is written, 'Though thou bray a fool in a mortar, yet will not his folly depart from him,'" interposed Frank, in so sad a tone that no one at the table replied; and few more words were exchanged, till the two brothers were safe outside the house; ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley

... could make: "marchand tart", some now unknown ingredient used in cookery; "galingale," sweet or long rooted cyprus; "mortrewes", a rich soup made by stamping flesh in a mortar; "Blanc manger", not what is now called blancmange; one part of it was the brawn of ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer

... no more together in the ecstasy of unrestraint; but watched and waited in vain—for those who were with us were no longer of us for some weeks to come, and the mouths of the singers were hushed. The next thing we knew a city seemed to spring suddenly out of the plains—a mirage of brick and mortar—an oasis in the wilderness,—and we realized, with a gasp, that we had struck the bull's-eye of the Far West—in other ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains to Alaska • Charles Warren Stoddard

... the exact position which each of the feet of the bricklayer should occupy with relation to the wall, the mortar box, and the pile of bricks, and so made it unnecessary for him to take a step or two toward the pile of bricks and back again each time a brick ...
— The Principles of Scientific Management • Frederick Winslow Taylor

... given orders, for the men came with a load of bricks and mortar, and they set to work and built up a wall in front of the stacked-up bottles, regularly bricking up the passage, just as if it was a bin of wine that was to be left for so many years to mature; after ...
— Begumbagh - A Tale of the Indian Mutiny • George Manville Fenn

... of smoking Manorhouses, a country bristling with no crop but that of Sansculottic steel: these were tolerably didactic lessons; but them they have not taught. There are still men, of whom it was of old written, Bray them in a mortar! Or, in milder language, They have wedded their delusions: fire nor steel, nor any sharpness of Experience, shall sever the bond; till death do us part! Of such may the Heavens have mercy; for the Earth, with her rigorous ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle

... Raxasa prince, placing the sacrificial ground to the S.E. and the fire in the proper situation. They cast the ladle filled with curds and ghee on the shoulder(1157) of the deceased; he (?) placed the car on the feet, and the mortar between the thighs. Having deposited all the wooden vessels, the [upper] and lower fire-wood, and the other pestle, in their proper places, they departed. The Raxasas having then slain a victim to their prince in the manner ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI

... into the market-gardens, which, with the fields behind, are still free from buildings. At the western end of Howard's Lane is a large tennis-ground belonging to a local club, while beyond is seen the advance of bricks and mortar towards the west. Carmalt Gardens leads into the Upper Richmond Road at its best part, for all the houses here are of a good style and size. At the corner of Gwendolen Avenue stands a Wesleyan Methodist church of stone, with a square tower, and south a ...
— Hammersmith, Fulham and Putney - The Fascination of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton

... while by day and takes greater share of night,—then, when it showers its leaves to the ground and stops sprouting, the wood you cut with your axe is least liable to worm. Then remember to hew your timber: it is the season for that work. Cut a mortar [1313] three feet wide and a pestle three cubits long, and an axle of seven feet, for it will do very well so; but if you make it eight feet long, you can cut a beetle [1314] from it as well. Cut a felloe three spans across for a waggon of ten palms' width. Hew also many bent timbers, ...
— Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica • Homer and Hesiod

... lead. To extract the genesis of life from any data that completest acquaintance with the stages and processes of protoplasmic growth can furnish, is a truly hopeless problem. Given the plan of a house, with samples of its brick and mortar, to find the name and nationality of the householder, would be child's play in comparison. Life, as we have seen, is not the offspring of protoplasm, but something which has been superinduced upon, and may be separated from, the protoplasm ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton

... and their singing and noise before day; and do you suppose, sir, that they stop or leave off work at sundown? No, sir, but they work as long as they can see to lay a brick, and then they carry tip brick and mortar for an hour or two afterward, to be ahead of their work the next morning. And again, sir, do you think that they walk at their work? No, sir, they run all day. You see, sir, those immensely long, ladders, five stories in ...
— Clotel; or, The President's Daughter • William Wells Brown

... adjustable, with the prints furnished for its erection, and such baffles should be tight. The setting should be so constructed that the boiler is free to expand without interfering with the brickwork. This ability to expand applies also to blow-off and other piping. After erection all mortar and chips of brick should be cleaned from the pressure parts. The tie rods should be set up snug and then slacked slightly until the setting has become thoroughly warm after the first firing. The boiler should be examined internally before starting to insure the absence of dirt, any foreign ...
— Steam, Its Generation and Use • Babcock & Wilcox Co.



Words linked to "Mortar" :   vessel, bricks and mortar, building material, high-angle gun, cement, masonry, plaster, daub



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