"Pivot" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... we have mentioned, were also breech-loading. They were mounted on a sort of iron wheel, at the summit of a stout wooden staff, fixed in the deck, or in the rails of the poop and forecastle. They were of small size, and revolved in strong iron pivot rings, so that the man firing them might turn them in any direction he wished. They were of especial service in sweeping the waist, the open spar-deck, between the breaks of poop and forecastle, when boarders were on board. They threw "base and bar-shot to murder near at hand"; but their usual ...
— On the Spanish Main - Or, Some English forays on the Isthmus of Darien. • John Masefield
... also, is her intense egoism and her abundant self-assertion under all circumstances. It often seemed to us as if for her the world revolved, with passing show, around a pivot from which she regarded it as existing only for what it meant for her career. These qualities have led to her statements, and perhaps to the actual feelings, that she was the aggrieved one, and had been badly treated on many occasions. This seemed to reach almost paranoidal heights at times, ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy
... on dry land such a dock is impossible. Accordingly turntable sheds have been adopted. The shed is mounted upon a double turn-table, there being two circular tracks the one near the centre of the shed and the other towards its extremities. The shed is mounted upon a centre pivot and wheels engaged with these inner and outer tracks. In this manner the shed may be swung round to the most favourable point of the ...
— Aeroplanes and Dirigibles of War • Frederick A. Talbot
... the Emperors of China in ceremonies of state during the fourth century of our era. It contained a genius in a feather dress who pointed to the south, and was doubtless moved by a magnet floating in water or turning on a pivot. This rude appliance was afterwards refined into the needle compass for guiding mariners on the sea, and assisting the professors of feng- shui or geomancy in ...
— The Story Of Electricity • John Munro
... manner that I have not since repeated. I first of all completed the third act, and in view of the criticism already mentioned of the characters and conclusion of this act, I determined to try to make it the very pivot of the whole opera. I wished to do this, if only for the sake of the musical motive appearing in the story of the Holy Grail; but in other respects the plan struck ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... does that again, Mr. Passford, we must be ready to return her fire," said the captain. "Have the pivot gun ready, and aim for her Armstrong, which seems to be sufficiently prominent on her deck to make a ...
— A Victorious Union - SERIES: The Blue and the Gray—Afloat • Oliver Optic
... no thought of the matter. Before taking off Major Cowan had said no more than, "Look sharp when we get south of la Chapelle; head on a pivot, you know." Shucks! Slim chance for any excitement with a group like this. Even if they sighted a small enemy patrol they would have to go merrily on their way and leave the game to someone else. However, a war pilot with skill enough ...
— Aces Up • Covington Clarke
... be blotted out by any quantity of joy. One single pang is enough to condemn the world as worse than nothingness. This inexplicable fact of suffering takes on a mystical meaning, and becomes thereby the pivot of a new faith. And so, as the altar lights of the old worship of sorrow grow dim, there rises the legend of ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... go downhill) continue to turn it that way. If the change were not effected when the plough was swung round, the furrow would be made opposite. Next he leans heavily on the handles, still standing on the same spot; this lifts the plough, so that it turns easily as if on a pivot. ...
— Nature Near London • Richard Jefferies
... defence was concerned, was lamentable. The regular C. S. naval fleet consisted of the Louisiana (Captain McIntosh) and carrying the flag of Commodore Mitchell; the steamer McRae (Captain Huger), carrying six light 32-pounders and nine-inch pivot gun; the steamer Jackson (Captain Renshaw), with two pivoted smooth bore 32-pounders; the small ironplated "Ram" Manassas (Captain Warley), carrying one 32-pounder carronade in the bow; and two launches, each carrying a howitzer and a crew of twenty men. There were also present, at the time the ...
— The Narrative of a Blockade-Runner • John Wilkinson
... to read that papa has seen and likes another house in Devonshire Place, and that he may take it, and we may be settled in it, before the year closes. I myself think of the whole business indifferently. My thoughts have turned so long on the subject of houses, that the pivot is broken—and now they won't turn any more. All that remains is, a sort of consciousness, that we should be more comfortable in a house with cleaner carpets, and taken for rather longer than a week at a time. Perhaps, after all, we are quite as well sur ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... which all its other proportions are referable, there is in most minds some one governing influence, from which chiefly,—though, of course, biassed on some occasions by others,—all its various impulses and tendencies will be found to radiate. In Lord Byron, however, this sort of pivot of character was almost wholly wanting. Governed as he was at different moments by totally different passions, and impelled sometimes, as during his short access of parsimony in Italy, by springs of action never before developed in his ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... its plain speaking, for as Henley says in language which sounds as if it were borrowed from the writer he is describing, "the stinks and nastinesses are done with peculiar gusto." The idea of the story, as usual a pivot around which to revolve a series of adventures, is to narrate how a certain bachelor, country gentleman, Matthew Bramble, a malade imaginaire, yet good-hearted and capable of big laughter—"the most risible misanthrope ever met with," ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... we generally obtained excellent bread of unbolted wheat flour, rye being rarely used. There were many windmills of clumsy construction, the wheels having but four wings, and the whole concern turning on a pivot to bring its face to the wind. No bolting apparatus has been introduced, and the machinery is of the simplest and most primitive character. It was a period of fasting, just before Christmas, and our whole obtainable bill of fare comprised bread and eggs. As we ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... I would back Our Club against the Sorosis or any women's club in existence. Whenever you see in your drawing-room four or five young fellows lounging in easy chairs, cigar in hand, and now and then bringing their heads together over the small round Japanese table which is always the pivot of these social circles, you may be sure that they are discussing Tom's engagement, or Dick's extravagance, or Harry's hopeless passion for the younger Miss Fleurdelys. It is here old Tippleton gets execrated for that ...
— Short Story Classics (American) Vol. 2 • Various
... had they seen it in their dreams, that dreadful mahogany cylinder turning lazily upon its pivot and rolling in its womb, along with that of a hundred others, the fate of all that was dear to them on earth! How often, too, had their poor brains, racked and fired by doubt, fear and anguish, followed their child as he stood beside it, and grown dizzy as they ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... while was pointing out this thing and that to me—showing how the telephone operated; how his field glasses poised just before his eyes, being swung and balanced on a delicately adjusted suspended pivot; telling me how on a perfectly clear day—this October day was slightly hazy—we could see the Eiffel Tower in Paris, and the Cathedral at Rheims; gyrating his hands to explain the manner in which the horses, trotting away from us as we climbed ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... executed by each rank successively and on the same ground. At the second command, the pivot man of the front rank faces to the right in marching and takes the half step; the other men of the rank oblique to the right until opposite their places in line, then execute a second right oblique and take the half step on arriving abreast of the pivot man. All glance toward the marching flank ...
— Infantry Drill Regulations, United States Army, 1911 - Corrected to April 15, 1917 (Changes Nos. 1 to 19) • United States War Department
... written here; it will fill many volumes. Here an attempt has been made to sketch merely in its broadest outlines some of the activities of British sailors during the greatest of wars. Whatever the future historian will say of the part they bore he will not minimize it, for on this pivot the whole matter turned, on this axis the great circle of the war revolved. He will affirm that, though in respect of numbers almost negligible compared with the soldiers who fought in the long series of land battles, the sailors held the central ...
— Winning a Cause - World War Stories • John Gilbert Thompson and Inez Bigwood
... miserable about everything—they were quite jolly about everything else. I concede that the Christians of the Middle Ages were only at peace about everything—they were at war about everything else. But if the question turn on the primary pivot of the cosmos, then there was more cosmic contentment in the narrow and bloody streets of Florence than in the theatre of Athens or the open garden of Epicurus. Giotto lived in a gloomier town than Euripides, but he lived ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... refugees congregated there, for one of the Offices of the building had been transformed into a benevolent grocery shop, presided over by benevolent ladies. There also did mass some thousands of natives to gather their picks and shovels and pay. The Town Hall was the pivot round which revolved all sorts and conditions of men. Overrun inside and outside by roadmakers, citizen soldiers, and municipal officers (whose military dignity had raised their souls above scavenging), it was bad enough. But when the rich and poor of all classes and sexes ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... as at New Orleans for the stern work in hand, numbered fourteen, and the number of guns carried by the fleet was one hundred and fifty-five, throwing, by added facility of pivot and turret, ninety-two hundred and eight pounds of metal in broadside, from which thirteen hundred and twenty must be deducted through the early loss of the Tecumseh and the ...
— The Bay State Monthly - Volume 1, Issue 4 - April, 1884 • Various
... Johnson's division, the extreme right of the Union line. Immediate success attending this assault, Hardee extended the attack gradually along in front of Davis, hip movement taking the form of a wheel to the right, the pivot being nearly opposite the left of my division. Johnson's division soon gave way, and two of Davis's brigades were forced to fall back with it, though stubbornly resisting the ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... he shall discover them. I will look for them in a way that will lead him to discover them. In drawing a circle, for instance, I will not use a compass, but a point at the end of a cord which turns on a pivot. Afterward, when I want to compare the radii of a semi-circle, Emile will laugh at me and tell me that the same cord, held with the same tension, cannot describe ...
— Emile - or, Concerning Education; Extracts • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... in the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons in London, a mast-pivot, 15 inches in length and weighing between seven and eight pounds, which had passed obliquely through the body of a sailor. The specimen is accompanied by a colored picture of the sufferer himself in two positions. The name of the sailor ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... servants, tools, spies, and even assassins. He who stands in the way of the men who assemble here perishes. He who would oppose them takes his life in his hands. You are, young man, as if I had led you to the center of the earth, and I had placed your hand upon the very pivot, the well-oiled axle, upon which, noiselessly, the whole great globe revolves, and from which the awful forces extend ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... the two northern corps of Sir Henry Rawlinson's army. My instructions to Sir Hubert Gough were that his army was to maintain a steady pressure on the front from La Boisselle to the Serre road and to act as a pivot on which our line could swing as our attacks on his right made progress toward ...
— World's War Events, Vol. II • Various
... of labor,—that is, the classification of laborers into parcellaires and generalizers or organizers,—and in all utopias the distinction of capacities, the basis or everlasting excuse for inequality of goods, is admitted as a pivot. Those reformers whose schemes have nothing to recommend them but logic, and who, after having complained of the SIMPLISM, monotony, uniformity, and extreme division of labor, then propose a PLURALITY as a SYNTHESIS,—such inventors, I say, are ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... printed slips upon the face of the machine, arranged about a circle like the numbers on a dial. They were evidently the headings of news articles. In the middle of the circle was a little pointer, like the hand of a clock, moving on a pivot. I pushed this pointer around to a certain caption, and then, with the air of being perfectly familiar with the machine, I put the pronged trumpet to my ears and pressed the big knob. Precisely! It worked like a charm; so much like a charm, indeed, that I should ...
— With The Eyes Shut - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... dear sisters, that you are of this opinion? Do not you thoroughly understand that if love is absent from marriage it should, on the contrary, be its real pivot? To make one's self lovable is the main thing. Believe my white hairs that it is so, and let me ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... all the circumstances which entered into its formation. Seldom have more nicely calculated combinations entered into the plots of criminals, and never was a plot depending on so many chances more completely successful. Yet the pivot of the whole, as often in more extensive schemes of homicide, is to be found in the reckless daring and utter disregard of personal safety manifested throughout. For this alone she seems to have made no calculations and taken no precautions; her whole mind being bent apparently on the solution ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... utterly instantly as if he had run into a brick wall, pawed, stamped, snorted, and went off once more into furiously insane caperings—a new set—all the time circling, with the little, black-and-gray, erect figure of the surprised ratel as a pivot. ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... ourselves of the Bible Promises on the basis of the Bible teaching, we cannot throw the teaching overboard. As I have said before, if a doctrine is to be rightly interpreted, it must be interpreted as a whole, and in one form or another the doctrine of the Atonement is the pivot point of the whole Bible. To omit it is like trying to play "Hamlet" with Hamlet left out, and you may put your Bible out on the rubbish-heap. How, then, does the ...
— The Law and the Word • Thomas Troward
... to walk round and round the room, while the widow, who stood in the middle, turned as upon a pivot, keeping him always in view. This circus-ring performance lasted some minutes before ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - LA CONSTANTIN—1660 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... exclaimed Miss Melville, suddenly stopping, and turning round on the pivot of the music stool till she commanded a full view of the drawing-room. "I thought you would all be dancing by this time. There is no use in playing to such inanimate mortals. And you," said she, suddenly turning to Ernest, "you remind me of the prince, the enchanted ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... entertained hopes that the passage was clear, and that we should shoot down it without interruption; but in this I was disappointed. The boat struck with the fore-part of her keel on a sunken rock, and, swinging round as it were on a pivot, presented her bow to the rapid, while the skiff floated away into the strength of it. We had every reason to anticipate the loss of our whale-boat, whose build was so light, that had her side struck the rock, instead ...
— Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia, Complete • Charles Sturt
... age, but youth," says the professor. "An electrical current passing through a coil of wire makes a magnet of a bar of iron lying within it, but not touching it. So a woman is turned into a love-magnet, by a tingling current of life running round her. I should like to see one of them balanced on a pivot properly adjusted, and watch if she did not turn so as to point north and south, as she would if the love-currents are like those of the earth, ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... watch!" he enjoined me; and as the words passed his lips I saw the nine warriors throw themselves very cleverly from the backs of their bolting horses, wheel round as upon a pivot, and dash back until they were immediately in the path of the furious buffalo, which seemed now to have marked down as their destined victims the little body of men of whom the king and I formed ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... population go forth with the priest at their head to a place at some distance from the village. Here at sunset they erect a couple of poles with a cross-bar between them, to which they attach bags of rice, wooden models of pivot-guns, gongs, bracelets, and so on. Then, when everybody has taken his place at the poles and a death-like silence reigns, the priest lifts up his voice and addresses the spirits in their own language ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... WALL PIVOT.—One foot is placed against a wall at about the height of the knee. The other foot is thrown over it, the body making a complete turn in the air, so that the free foot may touch the ground in time to sustain the weight before a ...
— Games for the Playground, Home, School and Gymnasium • Jessie H. Bancroft
... merely the outcome of public changes; it was an intensely personal matter, too. Victoria was the Queen of England, the Empress of India, the quintessential pivot round which the whole magnificent machine was revolving—but how much more besides! For one thing, she was of a great age—an almost indispensable qualification for popularity in England. She had given proof of one of the most admired characteristics of the race—persistent ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey
... and the tone being thus determined, I betook myself to ordinary induction, with the view of obtaining some artistic piquancy which might serve me as a key-note in the construction of the poem—some pivot upon which the whole structure might turn. In carefully thinking over all the usual artistic effects—or more properly points, in the theatrical sense—I did not fail to perceive immediately that no one had been so universally employed as that of the refrain. The universality of its employment ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... big mouth, no twinkle about the corners of his little eyes. He looked at Mrs. Moon as much as to say, "What is to be done? The boy has been going the wrong way: must we disown him?" The moon neither shook her head nor moved her lips, but turned as on a pivot, and stood with her back to her husband, looking very miserable. Not one of the star-children moved from its place. They shone sickly and small. In a little while they faded out; then the moon paled and ...
— Ranald Bannerman's Boyhood • George MacDonald
... express; but their loftiness, in his speech, as in the very truth of things, seemed but to add to their immediate reality. They were beaten and inwoven into the facts of the hour; action seemed to turn, on them as on its only possible pivot; it was as though Virtue and Freedom hung armed in heaven above the assembly, and in the visible likeness of immortal ancestors beckoned upon an urgent way. Wordsworth's mood of mind, on the other hand, as ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... serpent was so splendid," Mrs. Greyson laughed, twirling the stand yet faster upon its pivot. "Would I do for Mother Eve, ...
— The Pagans • Arlo Bates
... and then the earth will be overwhelmed by a deluge. Another legend tells us that when the gods and demons took Mount Mandara for a churning-stick and churned the ocean to make ambrosia, the god Vishnu took on the form of a tortoise and lay at the bottom of the sea, as a pivot for the whirling mountain to rest upon. But these versions of the myth are not primitive. In the original conception the world is itself a gigantic tortoise swimming in a boundless ocean; the flat surface of the earth is the lower plate which covers the reptile's belly; the ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... hotel life of the Continent. During two years she had not seen either father or lover; and lovers of the San Benavides ilk are apt to console themselves during these prolonged intervals. Yet Carmela's shattered romance was the pivot on which ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... the centre of his chest, then deliberately shifted the aim to his right shoulder, and, with the thought, "That will put him out of business," pulled the trigger. The bullet, driving with momentum sufficient to perforate a man's body a mile distant, struck Tudor with such force as to pivot him, whirling him half around by the shock of its impact and ...
— Adventure • Jack London
... latter kind are the best. The former kind have for the most part consisted of a circular valve and face, with radial apertures, the valve resembling the outstretched wings of a butterfly, and being made to revolve on its central pivot by connecting links between its outer edges, or by its central spindle. In some of Stephenson's engines the regulator consists of a slide valve covering a port on the top of the valve chests. A rod passes from this valve through the smoke ...
— A Catechism of the Steam Engine • John Bourne
... come to mean the beginning and end of everything—the pivot upon which her whole existence hung. So that if Michael shut her out of his life for ever, that existence would no longer hold either value or significance. From her point of view, then, the primary object of any kind of self-discipline would be that it might make her ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... dear Sir John! I do not remember to have been employed, for some years, in a more interesting litigation. Now this cause, which, no doubt, you think is drawing to a close, has just reached its pivot, or turning-point; and I see every prospect of extricating our client with great ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... necessity be an ellipse. Every moving body circulating regularly around another, describes an ellipse. Science has proved this incontestably. The satellites describe ellipses around the planets, the planets around the Sun, the Sun himself describes an ellipse around the unknown star that serves as a pivot for our whole solar system. How can our Baltimore Gun Club Projectile then escape ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... republic. Here the theme is creative, and has vista. Whatever stagnates in the flat of custom or obedience or legislation, the great poet never stagnates. Obedience does not master him, he masters it. High up out of reach he stands, turning a concentrated light—he turns the pivot with his finger—he baffles the swiftest runners as he stands, and easily overtakes and envelopes them. The time straying toward infidelity and confections and persiflage he withholds by steady faith. Faith is the antiseptic of the ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... duties and obligations; and every tything was responsible for the production of its criminals, and obliged to pay a fine if they escaped. Every householder was liable to answer for any stranger who might stop at his house. "This mutual liability or suretyship was the pivot of all Alfred's administrative reform, and wrought a remarkable change in the kingdom, so that merchants and travellers could go about without armed guards. The forests were emptied of outlaws, and confidence ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord
... seized the Jew Mendoza by the hair, and so ensured that the pugs for ever afterwards should be a close-cropped race. Inside you see the square face of old Broughton, the supreme fighting man of the eighteenth century, the man whose humble ambition it was to begin with the pivot man of the Prussian Guard, and work his way through the regiment. He had a chronicler, the good Captain Godfrey, who has written some English which would take some beating. How ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... more nearly to the place advancing, Descending rather quickly the declivity, Through the waved branches o'er the greensward glancing, 'Midst other indications of festivity, Seeing a troop of his domestics dancing Like Dervises, who turn as on a pivot, he Perceived it was the Pyrrhic dance[178] so martial, To which the Levantines ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... instrument may be constructed as shown in Figs 8, 9, and 10. The three pieces, A. B, and C, united by a pivot, O, in which there is a small hole, are of brass or other metal. Rulers may be easily procured of any length whatever. The instrument is Y-shaped. In the particular case in which [alpha] 180 it becomes T-shaped, and ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 363, December 16, 1882 • Various
... the empress who, pointing to the prince imperial, said, "This child will never reign unless we repair the misfortunes of Sadowa." Such was the ceaseless refrain. The word haunted French imaginations incessantly, and it was the pivot on which the imperial policy revolved; it exercised a spell scarcely less powerful and disastrous upon monarchists like Thiers and republicans like Gambetta. Long foreseen, the dread shock, like all grave calamities, came nevertheless as a surprise, even upon reflective minds. Statesmen ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... moment, the ranger, who held picket on that side of the village, sprang forth from his hiding-place, and challenged the horseman to halt. The challenge was unheeded. Another jerk of the rein spun the mustang round, as upon a pivot; and the next instant, impelled by the spur, the animal resumed his gallop. He did not return by the road, but shot off in a new direction, nearly at right angles to his former course. A rifle-bullet would ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... egoistic conception is quite foreign to our longitudinal antipodes. However much appearances may agree, the fundamental principles upon which family consideration is based are widely different in the two hemispheres. For the far-eastern social universe turns on a patricentric pivot. ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... grievous pangs of heart that Mrs. Mason looked forward to such an operation. Her own house was plenteously furnished from the kitchens to the attics, but still she would have loved to keep that metallic set of painted trumpery. She knew that the table would not screw on; she knew that the pivot of the music stool was bent; she knew that there was no place in the house in which they could stand; she must have known that in no possible way could they be of use to her or hers,—and yet she could not part with ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... course had been changed, so as to bring the wind forward of the beam, which was her best point of sailing, the men were sent to the guns; the first mate placing himself at a long eighteen pounder, which was mounted as a pivot gun aft, a similar weapon being in her bows. All this took but four or five minutes, and shot after shot from ...
— Under Wellington's Command - A Tale of the Peninsular War • G. A. Henty
... had a last gleam of satisfaction in seeing so lucidly the springs of his failure as a human being. Happiness was the child of fixedness—in opinions, in space. Soul and body had need of a centre, a pivot, a home. ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... with you? Step out and let me show you once more." And poor Casey, a meek-faced little man with sloping shoulders, who had been running the elevator in the Chalmers Building up to a week ago, would patiently practise marching without moving, so that the rest of the line could wheel round him as a pivot. The petty tyrant who scolded at him was determined to have his own way; and Jimmie, who had had to do with many such tyrants in his long years of industrial servitude, was glad when this particular one got mixed up in his orders, and ran his squad ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... over to a corner of the room and threw back the corner of a rug. Where the baseboard was mortised at the corner there appeared to have been a patch put in. Ted placed his hand against this, near the top, and it tipped back. It was hung on a pivot, and, as its top went in and the bottom came out, there was revealed a boxlike receptacle about two feet long ...
— Ted Strong's Motor Car • Edward C. Taylor
... disease, and he died in the course of two months after the last fit. The nearer he approached his end the smaller were the circles that he took; and, in the latter part of his existence, he did little more than turn as if he were on a pivot, and, when the time arrived that he could walk no more, he used to lay himself down ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... the fleet of little gunboats were now visible from the battery, advancing against the Cumberland and Congress. The former opened fire upon her at a distance of a mile with the heavy pivot guns, but the Merrimac, without replying, continued her slow and steady course toward them. She first approached the Congress, and as she did so a puff of smoke burst, from the forward end of her pent-house, and the water ...
— With Lee in Virginia - A Story of the American Civil War • G. A. Henty
... baked white clay, and is something like a grindstone, only not half as thick. The grindstone stands up, but this lays flat, with its round side turned up, like the head of a barrel. And it's set on a pivot, like the needle of the ...
— Illustrated Science for Boys and Girls • Anonymous
... over the recovery of his near vision. So happy was he, indeed, in the new possession, that, instead of rising, he sat still in the middle of the floor, running his eyes with rapid scrutiny over the carpet near him. He sat here a long time—even forgetting his discomfort, while he turned as on a pivot as the search required. Though the missing articles did not promptly appear at his side, Bradley felt that he was having a good time, and so he was, comparatively. Of course he would find the glasses presently. He looked at his watch. What a joy to see its face! ...
— Moriah's Mourning and Other Half-Hour Sketches • Ruth McEnery Stuart
... cabin in which Otto made his home, the Indian turned back his head, swinging it as on a pivot, so that the end of the pipe-stem, which, for the moment, he had been holding stationary in his hand, resumed its former place in the comer ...
— The Lost Trail - I • Edward S. Ellis
... the dejection into which this last scurvy villany (which none but wretches of her own sex could have been guilty of) has thrown her, returning love will re-enter her time-pacified mind: her thoughts will then turn once more on the conjugal pivot: of course she will have livelier notions in her head; and these will make her perform all her circumvolutions with ease and pleasure; though not with so high a degree of either, as if the dear proud rogue could have exalted herself ...
— Clarissa, Volume 7 • Samuel Richardson
... voice, like a church-organ; and his notes rose high above the surrounding din. But the remarkable thing about this ballad-singer was one of his arms, which, while singing, he somehow swung vertically round and round in the air, as if it revolved on a pivot. The feat was unnaturally unaccountable; and he performed it with the view of attracting sympathy; since he said that in falling from a frigate's mast-head to the deck, he had met with an injury, which had resulted in making his wonderful arm what ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... or back as the load requires. The three points of lead, or admission and exhaust and compression, are fixed and independent of the changes and cut off. The motion of the main eccentric is given to a rocker arm, the pivot of which is at the bottom, and from the upper end the valve rod transfers the motion to the valve without reversing the motion, as is done sometimes in the slide valve to overcome the effects of the angularity ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 787, January 31, 1891 • Various
... the pivot round which the wrongs of women revolve—her lack of legal status, her voicelessness as regards the laws of her country, the country which is so openly irrational as to count her a "person" when it wants to get a tax out of her, but refuses to do so at any other time when she has something ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... whirled their long muskets in the air and yelled furiously. The riding was cruel, reckless, superb; loose reins and loose stirrups on the headlong gallop; then the sharp curb brought the horse up suddenly, the rein on his neck turned him as if on a pivot, and the pressure of the heel sent him ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... at a dizzy rate of speed. I switched off so as not to catch fire, and a few meters before reaching the trees I nosed up my machine with all my strength so that it would fall flat. There was a terrible shock! One tree higher than the rest broke my right wings, and made me turn as if I were on a pivot. I closed my eyes. There was a second shock, less violent than I could have hoped: the machine fell on its nose like a stone, at the foot of the tree which had stopped me. I unfastened my belt which, luckily, had not broken, and let myself slip onto ...
— Georges Guynemer - Knight of the Air • Henry Bordeaux
... fruit of the capitalist system, there is no doubt about the answer. The special and solid result of the reign of the employers has been—unemployment. Unemployment not only increasing, but becoming at last the very pivot upon which ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... their adversaries. It consisted in enunciating in the most violent and untenable form and the most offensive language the proposition that all slave-holding is sin and every slave-holder a criminal, and making the whole attack on slavery to turn on this weak pivot and fail if this failed. The argument of this sort of abolitionist was: If there can be found anywhere a good man holding a bond-servant unselfishly, kindly, and for good reason justifiably, then the system of American slavery is right.[277:1] It is ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... king bolt," he said, occasionally consulting his notes, "runs a pivot in bevel which is kept in place by a small hair-spring, which spring fits loosely on ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... right to the proceeds of her industry without giving her the power to protect the property she may acquire; she must therefore have the legal and political rights, or she has nothing. The ballot-box is the focus of all other rights, it is the pivot upon which all others hang; the legal rights are embraced in it, for if once possessed of the right to the ballot-box, to self-representation, she will see to it that the laws shall be just, and protect her person and her property, as well as ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... the court from the right (or No. 1) court, advance the L or front foot slightly towards the side-line and shift the weight a fraction of a second sooner. As the weight shifts, pivot slightly on the L foot and drive flat, diagonally, across the court. Do not "pull" your cross-court drive, unless with the express purpose of passing the net man and using that method to ...
— The Art of Lawn Tennis • William T. Tilden, 2D
... up resolution enough to write and tell her he would abide by her decision. Her business in the North had been satisfactorily settled, for which she was, alas! to receive but poor thanks; and the welfare of the child having now become the pivot of her actions, she returned to England. From Dover she sent him a letter informing him that she was prepared once more ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... until she knows something of the world and feels at home in it. Meanwhile I suppose I must be her guide and philosopher! I believe that my acquaintance with Senator North has made me feel like a child. He is so much wiser in a minute than I could be in a lifetime; and as I have made him the pivot on which the world revolves, no wonder I feel ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... genteel tradition has handed down since Socrates; for these systems are egotistical; directly or indirectly they are anthropocentric, and inspired by the conceited notion that man, or human reason, or the human distinction between good and evil, is the centre and pivot of the universe. That is what the mountains and the woods should make you at last ashamed to assert. From what, indeed, does the society of nature liberate you, that you find it so sweet? It is hardly (is it?) that you wish to forget your past, or your friends, ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... addressed, bashful at finding himself the object of attention, swayed backward and forward with his pikestaff for a pivot, laughing vacantly. ...
— The Lady of Loyalty House - A Novel • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... except where our shadow underruns us. Bristol and Cardiff Double Lights (those statelily inclined beams over Severnmouth) are dead ahead of us; for we keep the Southern Winter Route. Coventry Central, the pivot of the English system, stabs upward once in ten seconds its spear of diamond light to the north; and a point or two off our starboard bow The Leek, the great cloud-breaker of Saint David's Head, swings its unmistakable ...
— Actions and Reactions • Rudyard Kipling
... be laid down for the winter. Figure 155 shows a method of laying down blackberries, as practiced in the Hudson River valley. The plants were tied to a trellis, as the method is in that country, two wires (a, b) having been run on either side of the row. The posts are hinged on a pivot to a short post (c), and are held in position by a brace (d). The entire trellis is then laid down on the approach of winter, as shown in the illustration. The blackberry tops are so strong that they hold the wires up from the ground, ...
— Manual of Gardening (Second Edition) • L. H. Bailey
... marked in this point. There is not one Greek lyric devoted to what we should designate love, with perhaps something like an exception in Alcman. In fact, while moderns rarely make a tragedy or comedy, a poem or novel, without some love-concern which is the pivot of the whole, all the great poems and dramas of the ancients revolve on entirely different passions. Love, such as we speak of, was of rather rare occurrence. Women were in such a low position, that ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume III - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... much to gaze on as Jeanie Deans's. So, after spinning round and round his little orbit, and then remaining stationary for a week, it seems to have occurred to him that he was not pinned down to circulate on a pivot, like the hands of the watch, but possessed the power of shifting his central point, and extending his circle if he thought proper. To realise which privilege of change of place, he bought a pony from a Highland drover, and with its ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... position, his eyes fell upon some outbuildings which had an oddly familiar appearance, as if he had dreamed of them. He stood considering them with wonder, when suddenly the entire plantation, with its inclosing forest, seemed to turn as if upon a pivot. His little world swung half around; the points of the compass were reversed. He recognized the blazing building as his ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... drew a black comparison between the tragedy of the hero and heroine, and the situation between Osborn and herself. But at last, when the playwright had ridiculed and denounced what he called the oldest and tiredest convention in the world for long enough, the play seemed to turn on a pivot, and the pivot was the cradle. The playwright gave the playgoers the happy ending for which the world craves ...
— Married Life - The True Romance • May Edginton
... its violence, the hanged man revolved on his own pivot, turning every way at once towards the swarm, as if he wished to run after the birds; his teeth seemed to try and bite them. The wind was for him, the chain against him. It was as if black deities were mixing themselves up in the fray. The hurricane was in the ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... stake. When, worn with fatigue and driven desperate by his vain attempts to get away, the sufferer lies down flat and refuses to do his duty, the fowler is able to stimulate him without stirring from his hut. A long string sets in motion a little lever working on a pivot. Raised from the ground by this diabolical contrivance, the bird flies, falls down and flies up again at ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... there, down upon his knees, and defending himself with his antlers; while one of the dogs lay sprawling on the ground and howling with pain. The other still kept up the fight, endeavouring to seize the elk from behind; but the latter spun round, as though his knees were upon a pivot, and always presented his horny spikes in the direction of ...
— The Desert Home - The Adventures of a Lost Family in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... uninterrupted cannonading for eighteen minutes without casualties, a sixty-eight-pound Blakely shell passed through the starboard bulwarks below main rigging, exploded upon the quarter-deck, and wounded three of the crew of the after-pivot gun. With these exceptions, not an officer or a man of the Kearsarge received the slightest injury. The unfortunates were speedily taken below, and so quietly was the action performed, that at the termination of the fight a large portion of the crew were unaware that any ...
— The Story of the Kearsarge and Alabama • A. K. Browne
... whose cool head made him a good man at that pivot of the field; he was an able assistant to the right-field, a ready back-stop to the short-stop, and a perfect spider for taking into his web all the wild throws that came slashing from the home plate to cut off those who dared to try to ...
— The Dozen from Lakerim • Rupert Hughes
... executed by taking a six-shooter—let us hope not one of those pitiful toys of the East—upon each forefinger, each weapon so hanging balanced on the trigger-guard and the trigger itself that it shall be ready to turn about the finger as upon a pivot, and shall be ready for instant discharge, the thumb cocking the weapon as it turns; yet so that it shall none the less be discharged only when the muzzle of the weapon is pointed away from the operator's person and ...
— Heart's Desire • Emerson Hough
... to persuade them to obey Queen Victoria, or anything else. Effectual arguments to convince the people who need convincing are wanting. Just so, an immense system of credit, founded on the Bank of England as its pivot and its basis, now exists. The English people, and foreigners too, trust it implicitly. Every banker knows that if he has to prove that he is worthy of credit, however good may be his arguments, in fact his credit is gone: ...
— Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market • Walter Bagehot
... rim, about one quarter of an inch broad. On this rim is melted some gutta-percha, upon which the plate is pressed into contact and adhers quite firmly when the gutta-percha is solidified. The stick is perforated at the lower end and revolves on an iron pivot fixed at the bottom of the support, being held in the opening on the platform of the same, as shown in the ...
— Photographic Reproduction Processes • P.C. Duchochois
... adipose school; and, harmonising with this regulation, Mr. Martyn is both sharp and kindly disposed towards himself. He is not of opinion, like one of his predecessors, that he assisted at the creation of the world, and that the endurance of Christianity depends upon his clerical pivot; but he believes that he has a "mission," and that on the whole he is quite as good as the majority of Congregational divines. There is nothing pretentious in his appearance; nothing ecclesiastical in his general framework; and ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... she withdrew that eager gaze, swerved round as if on a pivot, and started at a tremendous pace up the short, windy street that led to the main road. "I'll do it!" she said to herself—young lips tightly pressed, and nails biting into her palms even through her gloves. "I don't care ...
— The Privet Hedge • J. E. Buckrose
... simply willing to relax. Hold your arm out straight from your shoulder. Now—withdraw all power and let it fall. Practise relaxation of the muscles of the throat by letting your neck and head fall forward. Roll the upper part of your body around, with the waist line acting as a pivot. Let your head fall and roll around as you shift the torso to different positions. Do not force your head around—simply relax your neck and let gravity pull it ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... to have been reserved for her own capering—to come. When it does, she throws up her arms and steps upon tiptoe about three paces, looking exactly like a crane with a sore heel. Making her legs into a pair of compasses, she describes a circle in the air with one great toe upon a pivot formed with the other; then bending down so that her very short petticoat makes a "cheese" upon the ground, spreads out both arms to the roues in the stalls, who understand the signal, and cry "Brava! brava!!" Rising, she turns her back to display her gauze ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... position, mid they passed through the open gate and up to the door of the church, where they were received by the clerk—a man in a rusty black cassock, who stood by while they carried the coffin in and placed it on a kind of elevated table which revolved on a pivot. They brought it in footfirst, and as soon as they had placed it upon the table, the clerk swung it round so as to bring the foot of the coffin towards the door ready to be ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... gate still thought themselves abandoned, when her beak, six feet in air, stole past them, and her lean boatmen, prodding the river-bed with their poles, stopped her as easily as a gondola. The yellow steersman grinned, straining at the pivot of his ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... reached the parlor we found Pa and Ma Lovegrove already receiving. About a score of guests had arrived. Most of them were old married couples, which, after paying their devoirs, fell in two like unriveted scissors,—the gentlemen finding a new pivot in pa and the ladies in ma, where they mildly opened and shut upon such questions as severally concerned them, such as "the way gold closed," and "how the ...
— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various
... inst. between the Bahama Bank and Key Sal Bank we were boarded and taken possession of by a small schr. of about 30 tons, having one gun mounted on a pivot and 30 men. She manned us with twelve men, Spaniards, French, Germans and Americans, and carried us towards the Florida coast. Being arrived on the coast nearly opposite to Havana, the privateer went in shore to reconnoitre, and our ship lay off and on. ...
— Piracy off the Florida Coast and Elsewhere • Samuel A. Green
... great political and religious convulsions of the South, the earthquake-like throes of which were felt even in the capital, Nimes has always taken the central place; Nimes will therefore be the pivot round which our story will revolve, and though we may sometimes leave it for a moment, we shall always return thither ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... leaves people abroad with a number of evenings on their hands, unoccupied hours that are generally passed at the theatre. Only the other day a diplomatist said to me, “I am surprised to see how small a place the theatre occupies in your thoughts and conversation. With us it is the pivot ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... Government or to their high ideals. One of his intellectual pleasures, he added, had long been contemplation of the United States as it is and, even more, as its influence in the world will broaden. 'The world,' said Mr. Balfour, 'will more and more turn on the Great Republic as on a pivot.'" ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume II • Burton J. Hendrick
... machinery which grinds the incomprehensible overture, perform a drama equally incomprehensible. At the left-hand corner is Daniel in the lion's den, the lion opening his mouth in six-eight time, and an angel with outspread wings, but securely transfixed through the loins by a revolving brass pivot, shutting it again to the same lively movement. To the right of Daniel is the Grand Turk, seated in his divan, and brandishing a dagger over a prostrate slave, who only ventures to rise when the dagger is withdrawn. Next to him is Nebuchadnezzar on all fours, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 430 - Volume 17, New Series, March 27, 1852 • Various
... bullock stood fast, but by the time Dexter was within half a dozen yards, he flung his cap right in the animal's face, and, with a loud snort, it turned as on a pivot, and dashed off toward the upper part of the field, now driving the whole ...
— Quicksilver - The Boy With No Skid To His Wheel • George Manville Fenn
... the other. And two rings will take care of any motion in three dimensions. These rings were pivoted, too, so that an unbelievably intricate series of motions could be given to the solenoid within them all. But the device was broken, now. A pivot had given away, and shaft and socket alike had vanished. Tommy became absorbed. ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... seized the ring, braced his feet and pulled. The square turned on its pivot with an ease which proved that it was frequently subjected to the same manipulation. As it turned, it disclosed ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... balanced circle which mathematicians call the Horizon. Keeping this idea definitely in mind, if we imagine a line drawn from the northern side of the circumference (N) to the side which lies above the southern half of the axis (S), and from here another line obliquely up to the pivot at the summit, beyond the stars composing the Great Bear (the pole star P), we shall doubtless see that we have in the heaven a triangular figure like that of the musical instrument which the ...
— Ten Books on Architecture • Vitruvius
... aided by some of the soldiers, did so. Her head soon payed off, and amid a cheer from the officers on deck the lugger swept round. She mounted twelve guns. O'Grady divided the officers and non-commissioned officers among them, himself taking charge of a long pivot-gun in the bow. ...
— With Moore At Corunna • G. A. Henty
... pass. Just before the patient's hands reach the ground the man astride the body will grasp the body with his hands, the balls of the thumb resting on either side of the pit of the stomach, the fingers falling into the grooves between the short ribs. Now, using his knees as a pivot, he will, at the moment the patient's hands touch the ground, throw (not too suddenly) all his weight forward on his hands, and at the same time squeeze the waist between them, as if he wished to force something ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume I (of VI) • Various
... would be easy for another kind of a person to get things wrong. Still—"not wanted"—they certainly sounded very plain. And they meant—Bobby gave a faint gasp, and suddenly his thoughts turned dizzily round and round one terrible pivot—"not wanted." He sprang away out of the nurse's hands and darted down the long, bright hall to his mother's room. She was being dressed for a ball, and the room was pitilessly light. She sat at ...
— The Very Small Person • Annie Hamilton Donnell
... one moment of irresolute delay; on that hinge hung Eternity. The gate swung upon its pivot, that should shut out hell, ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... for that now. The big wheels were set in motion, the day was coming nearer and more near. Susan's whole being was tuned to the great event; she felt herself the pivot upon which all her world turned. A hundred things a day brought the happy color to her face, stopped her heart-beats for a second. She had a little nervous qualm over the announcements; she dreamed for a moment over the cards that bore the new name of Mrs. William Jerome Oliver. "It ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... upon us; and then for three days we dress our town in bunting and bang starting guns and finishing guns, and put on fancy dresses, and march in procession with Japanese lanterns, and dance, and stare at pyrotechnical displays. But the centre, the pivot, the axis of our revelry is always the merry-go-round on the ...
— The Mayor of Troy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... life has been The Spectator, and, therefore, as will be seen, I have made The Spectator the pivot of my book, or, shall I say, the centre from which in telling my story I have worked backwards and forwards. But this is not all. Though I pay a certain homage to chronology and let my chapters mainly follow the years, I am in this matter not ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... We left the kind Neilsons yesterday, and as Dick and I were not well, we took drawing-room car seats, which, however, were extremely uncomfortable wicker chairs, which turned round on a pivot with the least movement and made one feel sick! So I sat on a hard bench usually occupied by conductors. This is a fine hotel, and John and E—- came to see me last night after I was in bed; they seem enjoying themselves and are gay, seeing lots of scientific folk at Baltimore ...
— The British Association's visit to Montreal, 1884: Letters • Clara Rayleigh
... smiled there, fixed in her place a hideous griffin's head, which, like the ribbon, was also bright scarlet. While these changes were being effected, others of the crew removed the boat that lay on the deck, bottom up, between the masts, and uncovered a long brass pivot-gun of the largest calibre, which shone in the saffron light of morning like a mass of burnished gold. This gun was kept scrupulously clean and neat in all its arrangements; the rammers, sponges, screws, ...
— Gascoyne, the Sandal-Wood Trader • R.M. Ballantyne
... which again is pivoted at the focus F'; the distance F'G being equal to AB. Through this long socket slides a rod KP, the end P being formed into an eye, by which this rod is pivoted to the block which slides in the long slot, and thus controls the motion of the block; and the pivot at P is centrally drilled to carry the pencil. It is thus apparent that the center line of the slot TT must in all positions be tangent to the hyperbola PBR, which will be traced by the pencil, whose motions are so restricted as ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 530, February 27, 1886 • Various
... more than a mile in length, through which I was enabled to make signals by sounding a bell, (Fig. 7.) The mechanical arrangement for effecting this object was simply a steel bar, permanently magnetized, of about ten inches in length, supported on a pivot, and placed with its north end between the two arms of a horseshoe magnet. When the latter was excited by the current, the end of the bar thus placed was attracted by one arm of the horseshoe, and repelled by the other, ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - Invention and Discovery • Various
... feet square, and five in depth, over which hung a ducking stool for scolding wives. And since the townspeople draw their water from this cistern, 'tis to be supposed they do not fear the infection. A long beam on a pivot hangs out over the pool, and to the end is a chair fasten'd; into which, despite his kicks and screams, they now strapped this poor wretch, whose grey locks might well have ...
— The Splendid Spur • Arthur T. Quiller Couch
... Adam's day to ours, there came an utterance from Mount Sinai that anticipated and answered these questions once for all, and for one and all. In that august revelation of the Divine Mind, every command of the Decalogue swung open upon the pivot of a not, except one; and that one referred to man's duty to man, and the promise attached to its fulfilment was only an earthly enjoyment. All the rest were restrictive; to curb this appetite, to bar that passion, to hedge ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... centre from which the axes are marked (which may be done by setting the centres of the slots true to the lines passing through the axis) and set the pivots as follows: Place the pencil-point G so that it coincides with one of the points as C, and place the pivot E so that it comes directly at the point of intersection of the two slots, and fasten it there. Then turn the arm so that the pencil-point G coincides with one of the points of the minor axis as D, the arm lying parallel to B D, and place the pivot F over the centre of the trammel and fasten ...
— Mechanical Drawing Self-Taught • Joshua Rose
... I told myself, in a premonition of things to come, that I should always remember Captain Riggs and the Rev. Luther Meeker and Trego and Rajah, and the very pattern of the parti-coloured cloth on the table, the creak of the pivot-chairs and the picture of the Japanese girl in the mineral-water calendar which swayed on the bulkhead ...
— The Devil's Admiral • Frederick Ferdinand Moore
... the reader skilful in the antique language of the drama must at once perceive, turned on the same pivot as in the old minstrel tales of the Drinking Horn of King Arthur, and the Mantle made Amiss. But the audience were neither learned nor critical enough to challenge its want of originality. The potent relic was, after such grimace ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... the movements which had preceded it, was possibly extending from here to the vicinity of Verdun, where the Crown Prince was said to be vainly endeavoring to break through, his army acting as a sort of a pivot on which the great advance had swung. I could not help wondering if, as often happens in the game of "snap the whip," von Kluck's right wing had got swung off the line by the very rapidity with which it must have covered that long arc in ...
— On the Edge of the War Zone - From the Battle of the Marne to the Entrance of the Stars and Stripes • Mildred Aldrich
... soon retrieved by the latter's bloody check before Murfreesborough. Yet, despite these back-sets, the general course of events showed that Providence remained on the side of the heaviest battalions; and the spring of 1863 saw our armies extended from the pivot midway between the rival capitals in a more or less irregular line, and interrupted by the Alleghany Mountains, to Vicksburg ...
— The Campaign of Chancellorsville • Theodore A. Dodge
... on ship-board. Its suspending ring is attached by a double hinge of the nature of a universal joint. Its circle is divided into single degrees, graduated from its perpendicular of suspension. The double-bladed index, the pivot of which passes through the centre of the astrolabe, has slits and eyelets in the projecting fights ...
— Voyages of Samuel de Champlain V3 • Samuel de Champlain
... at full length and spinning round and round like a wagon wheel upon its nave. They revolve with great rapidity, using their humped shoulders as a pivot, and their legs as levers. They sometimes continue this motion for half-an-hour at a time. No doubt they do this, as has been said, to scratch themselves; for, notwithstanding their thick hides and hair, they are much ...
— The Boy Hunters • Captain Mayne Reid
... time only three weeks long, to count for anything. It was to be a holiday and no more. And lo! with that inexplicableness, that unforeseenness which is so curious a quality of human life, it had become a turning point of existence, the pivot perhaps upon which Chatty's being might hang. Mrs. Warrender was not so decided as Chatty. She saw nothing final in the parting. She was able to imagine that secondary causes, something about money, some family arrangements that would have to be ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... beyond this glade the day-world turns Upon its pivot of reward and chance; Farther than the first star that palely burns Over the forest's meditative trance. First star of evening, last star of day, The one grows ...
— The Five Books of Youth • Robert Hillyer
... secure for them the gracious freedom of the sky, by descending himself as the suppressing conqueror of death and then ascending as the beckoning pioneer of his followers. The Fathers did not select the one point or act of Christ's death as the pivot of human redemption; but they regarded that redemption as wrought out by the whole of his humiliation, instruction, example, suffering, and triumph, as the resultant of all the combined acts of his incarnate drama. Run over the relevant writings ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... chain was a rather odd charm which Mr. Bangs had possessed for many years. "Twiddling" it was a habit of his. In fact, he had twiddled it so much that the pivot upon which it had hung broke and Martha had insisted upon his sending the charm to Boston for repairs. ...
— Galusha the Magnificent • Joseph C. Lincoln
... slightly superior. It was headed by the flagship "Confiance," a frigate of the class of the United States ship "Constitution," carrying thirty long twenty-fours, a long twenty-four-pounder on a pivot, and six thirty-two or forty-two pound carronades. The other vessels were the "Linnet," a brig mounting sixteen long twelves; and the "Chubb" and "Finch" (captured from the Americans under the names of ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 2 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... he exclaimed, introducing the subject of the Campanile, "it really seems as if the town is waking up! I hear there is a lift in the tower, and the old angel on the top has been actually placed on a pivot, to act as a weather vane as well as a thing of beauty. That's more than could have been expected of slow Venetians. If it were only possible to get in a few automobiles there might be some ...
— Chico: the Story of a Homing Pigeon • Lucy M. Blanchard
... to breathe with apparent difficulty, and his face grew purple. But Mr. Vane did not appear to notice these alarming symptoms. Then the candidate turned about, as on a pivot, seized Mr. Vane by the knee, and looked ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... by the Bavarians, the Mezieres road by the Wurtemburgers. The French have not thought of barricading the railway viaduct; three German battalions have occupied it during the night. Two isolated houses on the Balan road could be made the pivot of a long resistance, but the Germans are there. The wood from Monvilliers to Bazeilles, but the French have been forestalled; they find the Bavarians cutting the underwood with their billhooks. The German army moves in one piece, in one ...
— Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century - Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World • Various
... by us. The latter arrangement had also its rules: on the left, was the town to which the palace, temple, or whatever occupied the middle, belonged; on the right, the open country, landscape, mountains, sea-coast, &c. The side-scenes were composed of triangles which turned on a pivot beneath; and in this manner the change of scene was effected. According to an observation on Virgil, by Servius, the change of scene was partly produced by revolving, and partly by withdrawing. The former applies to the lateral decorations, and the latter ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... until he found a hidden spring. In the seemingly solid stone wall a large block of stone swung around on a pivot, disclosing a larger cellar ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys in the Philippines - or, Following the Flag against the Moros • H. Irving Hancock
... ax and it gave, swinging upward on a pivot. Then a minute later the door swung inward, yielding to ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... speak now from my own observation) stand, as it were, upon a pivot. The touch of a feather would turn them any way. They have looked down the Mississippi, until the Spaniards, very impolitically, I think for themselves, threw difficulties in their way; and they looked that way for no other reason, than because they could glide gently down the stream, without considering, ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... five years: and in those years the boy had proved the warrior blood in his veins; had passed through the searching test of a bitter loss. Together, they could speak of her—gone from them; yet alive in their hearts for evermore. Seen or unseen, she was the link that kept them all united, the pivot on which their lives still turned. There had been none with whom he could talk ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... forbearing, loving wife to set it before him. These would have given to his body and to his mind just what both needed, for the trials and temptations of the day; and they would have saved him, at least for the day, perhaps for life; for the pivot upon which the whole of a man's future destiny turns is often small, and ...
— The Two Wives - or, Lost and Won • T. S. Arthur
... stepped back to Herr Haase's side; as the young man put his hands to the apparatus, he crisped himself with a sharp intake of breath for the explosion. A switch clicked under the young man's thumb, and he began to move the machine upon its pivot mounting, traversing it like a telescope on a stand. It came round towards the fresh yellow mounds of earth which marked Herr Haase's excavations; they had an instant in which to note, faint as the whirring of a fly upon a pane, the buzz of some small mechanism within the thing. ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... this bulb is reflected in a mirror which is moved by the moving needle. When the sound is loudest the two horns are at right angles to the direction whence it comes. So it is only necessary to twist the phonometer about on its pivot until the sound is received most loudly in the horns and the band of light is greatest. I know then that the horns are at right angles to the direction from which the sound proceeds, and that, as I lift my head, I am looking straight toward the source of the sound. I can tell its ...
— The Treasure-Train • Arthur B. Reeve
... patiences in the days when he was not well enough to play at chess. He was hardly well enough now, but he had set his heart upon the first day when he should come down and play chess with Rendel as a sort of pivot in his miserable existence. And now the moment had come. How should he know that for all practical purposes his son-in-law was a different being from the young man who had come upstairs to see him the day before? For yesterday Rendel had come up and talked to him about indifferent things, not telling ...
— The Arbiter - A Novel • Lady F. E. E. Bell
... rapture, "that is Mr. Dodd all over; thinks of everybody, high or low, before himself." There was a grunt somewhere behind her; her quick ear caught it; she turned round like a thing on a pivot, and slapped the nearest face. It happened to be Fountain's; so she continued with such a treacle smile, "Don't you remember, sir, how he used to teach your cub mathematics gratis?" The sweet smile and the keen contemporaneous scratch confounded Mr. Fountain for a second. As soon ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... effect? He decided that "melancholy is the most legitimate of all poetic tones." Why joy or gladness, like that of the birds, is not equally legitimate, he does not explain. Then, to give artistic piquancy to the whole, he decided that there must be "some pivot upon which the whole structure might turn." He found that "no one had been so universally employed as the refrain." The burden of the poem should be given by the refrain, and it should be a monotone, and should have brevity. Then his task was to select a single word that would be ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... formation. I observed further, that in frequent instances there occurred on the surface of the sand, around decaying tufts of the bent-grass, deeply-marked circles, as if drawn by a pair of compasses or a trainer—effects apparently of eddy winds whirling round, as on a pivot, the decayed plants; and yet further, that footprints, especially those of rabbits and birds, were not unfrequent in the waste. And as lines of stratification were, I found, distinctly preserved in the formation, I deemed it not improbable that, in cases in which high winds had arisen ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... of the oar." (The word kaji to-day means "helm";—the single oar, or scull, working upon a pivot, and serving at once for rudder and oar, being now called ro.) The mist passing across the Amanogawa is, according to commentators, the spray ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn
... planned to become the wife of this sad, frail old man ever since she had reached the mature age of sixteen,—for a moment she was impelled to make a clean confession of her own egotism, and to ask his pardon for having, under the tuition of her mother, made him the unconscious pivot of all her worldly ambitions,—then, with a sudden impetuous movement, she swept past him without a word, ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... as balancing the beam of a pair of scales on an upright support. I am now going to show that a great number of difficulties had to be overcome before our heads could be safely poised on our necks. The head had to be balanced in such a way that through the pivot or joint on which it rests a safe passageway could be secured for one of the most delicate and most important of all the parts or structures of the human machine. We have never found a good English name for this structure, so we use its clumsy Latin one—Medulla ...
— A Book of Exposition • Homer Heath Nugent
... insignificant in life. Absalom was only a little floating piece of jetsam on the great waters that divided all these lives, yet he was the factor that had taken the place of the keystone in the arch; the pivot around which the force that guided and ruled the whole apparent chaos had moved. Coryndon wandered a long way in his thoughts from the shop where he sat on the dusty floor, waiting for the return of Leh Shin. He was so still that the cockroaches and black-beetles crept out again ...
— The Pointing Man - A Burmese Mystery • Marjorie Douie
... took is a matter of history,—but the promised result is still in the future. The disfranchisement of the negro has merely changed the form of the same old problem. The negro had no vote before the rebellion, and few other rights, and yet the negro question was, for a century, the pivot of American politics. It plunged the nation into a bloody war, and it will trouble the American government and the American conscience until a sustained attempt is made to settle it upon principles of justice ...
— The Marrow of Tradition • Charles W. Chesnutt
... the way it quakes up through one's pillow so as to be felt rather than heard. It is simply the pounding of the ponderous pestle of the kometsuki, the cleaner of rice—a sort of colossal wooden mallet with a handle about fifteen feet long horizontally balanced on a pivot. By treading with all his force on the end of the handle, the naked kometsuki elevates the pestle, which is then allowed to fall back by its own weight into the rice-tub. The measured muffled echoing of its fall seems to me the most ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... harsh, grating noise as of stone passing over stone; and though he could see nothing with his eyes, mentally he knew that one of the great time-bleached and weathered blocks of granite that helped to form the cyclopean face of the kopje wall had begun to turn as on a pivot. ...
— The Kopje Garrison - A Story of the Boer War • George Manville Fenn
... remained in frozen attitudes as it passed; a grocer's clerk, crossing the pavement, carrying a heavily laden basket to his delivery wagon, halted half-way as the figure came near, and then, making a pivot of his heels as it went by, behaved towards it as does the magnetic ...
— The Conquest of Canaan • Booth Tarkington
... desire to have deeply impressed upon my own mind. None of those soldiers who were in the habit of reading their Bibles can have failed to notice that faith in Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is therein made the great pivot on which the salvation of man hinges; that the whole human race, without distinction of rank, nation, age, or sex, being justly exposed to the wrath of Almighty God, nothing but the precious blood of Christ, which was shed on the cross, can possibly atone ...
— The Loss of the Kent, East Indiaman, in the Bay of Biscay - Narrated in a Letter to a Friend • Duncan McGregor
... would have condemned them in Greece and Rome at that day, but through failings of which Greece and Rome took small account. Charmides pondered and pondered, and saw that this Jew had given a new centre, a new pivot to society. This, then, was the meaning of the world as nearly as it could be said to have a single meaning. Read by the light of the twenty-third chapter, the twenty-fourth chapter was magnificent. 'For as the lightning cometh out of ...
— Catharine Furze • Mark Rutherford
... turgid river to run within the narrow channels hewn by established custom, but, released from the bondage of convention, the soul of Elisabeth Durward was that of sheer primitive woman, and the pivot of all her actions her love for her mate and for the man-child she ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... was or will be, over-powered the burgomaster with her eloquence and her feminine proof of Gerard's purity. His eyes and mouth opened, and remained open: in which state they kept turning, face and all as if on a pivot, from the picture to the women, and from ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... line ran from Neby Samwil to the east of Beit Iksa, through Lifta, to a point of about 1-1/2 miles west of Jerusalem, whence it was thrown back facing east. Thus, our main line had swung forward, circling on its pivot at Neby Samwil, with its extreme right flank refused. The refused right flank afforded protection against the fire coming from the city. The main directions of our advance, however, now menaced, not so much Jerusalem itself, as the main Nablus road a few miles to the north of the city. All the enemy's ...
— With the British Army in The Holy Land • Henry Osmond Lock
... produced peals of laughter, and her ladyship laughed as heartily as any of them. When somewhat composed again, she looked across the table to Mr. Clerk, and offered to let him see it. "It is now set on the pivot of my watch, and a' the warks gae round the flech in place of ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown |
