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Trowel   /trˈaʊwɛl/   Listen
Trowel

noun
1.
A small hand tool with a handle and flat metal blade; used for scooping or spreading plaster or similar materials.



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"Trowel" Quotes from Famous Books



... important as modern rationalism. A great deal is said in these days about the value or valuelessness of logic. In the main, indeed, logic is not a productive tool so much as a weapon of defence. A man building up an intellectual system has to build like Nehemiah, with the sword in one hand and the trowel in the other. The imagination, the constructive quality, is the trowel, and argument is the sword. A wide experience of actual intellectual affairs will lead most people to the conclusion that logic is mainly valuable as a weapon wherewith to ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton

... musician, and also a colporteur for the Salvation Army; in fact, of being almost everything but a tiler or plasterer. But this shrewd woman had evidently come to the conclusion that, if I did not work upon the housetops, I must perforce be an artist of the trowel. I assured her that I was as incapable of fixing a tile as of making a ceiling; ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker

... beneficent, unambitious, disinterested guide; and it is the very condition of all great structures that the sound of the hammer and the clink of the trowel should be always heard in some part of the building. With faith in man, hope for the future of humanity, loving-kindness for our fellows, Masonry and the Mason must always work and teach. Let each do that for which he is best fitted. ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike

... with a trowel or heavy knife and find this storehouse of food. It may be in the form of bulb, corm, ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Nature Study • Ontario Ministry of Education

... pull all the old plants which have not flowered. When the fruit is nearly all gathered, examine them again, and cut off the runners; but if you want to make a fresh plantation, leave some of the two first, and cut off all the rest. Then stir up the ground with a trowel, or three-pronged fork, and in August they will be fit to transplant. If you have omitted in July, do not fail in August, that the runners may make good roots, to be transplanted in September; for, ...
— Young's Demonstrative Translation of Scientific Secrets • Daniel Young

... a lilac printed cotton sunbonnet, her skirts pinned up about her, was busy with a trowel, disordering certain flower-beds that presently the gardeners ...
— The Imaginary Marriage • Henry St. John Cooper

... on separate sheets of paper. The simplest form of mounting is to glue little strips of paper here and there across the stems. A botanical collection is more valuable if the roots of the plants are also included; and this will make it necessary for you to have a long trowel. For the collector of flowers a handbook is compulsory. Such a book as Alice Lounsberry's The Wild Flower Book for Young People gives many details of the growth and nature of plants, told with a story that makes the book unusually interesting, and will arouse your ...
— What Shall We Do Now?: Five Hundred Games and Pastimes • Dorothy Canfield Fisher

... with a trowel, upon whose wide silver blade was engraved the date. But His Excellency first delivered ...
— Friars and Filipinos - An Abridged Translation of Dr. Jose Rizal's Tagalog Novel, - 'Noli Me Tangere.' • Jose Rizal

... of the lilac hedge stood two figures, that of a man and a woman. The man held in his hand a trowel and was transplanting in the rich brown soil some tender green things which the woman was handing him from a basket. The presence of a stranger who was apparently so much at home within her boundaries was in itself sufficient to arouse Ellen's curiosity; but what ...
— The Wall Between • Sara Ware Bassett

... pieces of wall and blocks of stonework, rising ten or fifteen feet above the low level clearances. As the excavations progressed, there was an incessant need of planning and recording all the constructions. Professor Petrie always went about with a large dinner-knife and a trowel in his pocket, and spent much time in cutting innumerable sections and tracing out the lines of the bricks. The top and base level of each piece of wall had to be marked on it; and the levels could then be measured off to ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 12 (of 12) • S. Rappoport

... you! So many messages for you! So much for you to do! Look, Miss Felicia!" She held aloft a broad sun-hat and a pair of gauntleted gloves, "Just where she hung them—as if she knew you might want them! These are the things she wore when she worked in the garden—here's her wicker basket with the trowel and the hand fork— and here's the garden book—" She was standing before Felicia now holding out the treasures. "If you'll sit over there by the window I can tell you about the day she ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke

... a great gardener," explained the other with a satisfied smile. "What is the result? He can go there when he likes, so to speak. No awkwardness or anything of that sort. He can turn up there bold as brass to borrow a trowel, and take three ...
— Salthaven • W. W. Jacobs

... a moderate supply of warmth reach its watery cradle, and the plastic matter undergoes changes so rapid, yet so steady and purposelike in their succession, that one can only compare them to those operated by a skilled modeller upon a formless lump of clay. As with an invisible trowel, the mass is divided and subdivided into smaller and smaller portions, until it is reduced to an aggregation of granules not too large to build withal the finest fabrics of the nascent organism. And, then, it is as if a delicate finger traced out the line to be occupied by the spinal ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley

... head; Wishes it were all unsaid. Let me now the vices trace, From the father's scoundrel race. Who could give the looby such airs? Were they masons, were they butchers? Herald, lend the Muse an answer From his atavus and grandsire:[1] This was dexterous at his trowel, That was bred to kill a cow well: Hence the greasy clumsy mien In his dress and figure seen; Hence the mean and sordid soul, Like his body, rank and foul; Hence that wild suspicious peep, Like a rogue that steals a sheep; Hence he learnt the butcher's guile, How to cut your throat and ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift

... in honor of the linden festival. The white dove-house was shining with a fresh coat of paint, and the pigeons were crooning contentedly, flying down often to drink at the drip from the water tank. Mrs. Kohler, who was transplanting pansies, came up with her trowel and told Thea it was lucky to have your birthday when the lindens were in bloom, and that she must go and look at the sweet peas. Wunsch accompanied her, and as they walked between the flower-beds he took ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather

... could not borrow. Shakspeare will never be made by the study of Shakspeare. Do that which is assigned you, and you cannot hope too much or dare too much. There is at this moment for you an utterance brave and grand as that of the colossal chisel of Phidias, or trowel of the Egyptians, or the pen of Moses or Dante, but different from all these. Not possibly will the soul, all rich, all eloquent, with thousand-cloven tongue, deign to repeat itself; but if you can hear what these patriarchs say, surely you can reply to them in the same pitch of voice; for the ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson

... thoroughfares which speculative builders love to raise upon some miserable fragment of waste ground hanging to the skirts of a prosperous town. Brigsome's Terrace was, perhaps, one of the most dismal blocks of building that was ever composed of brick and mortar since the first mason plied his trowel and the first architect drew his plan. The builder who had speculated in the ten dreary eight-roomed prison-houses had hung himself behind the parlor door of an adjacent tavern while the carcases were yet unfinished. The man who had bought the brick and mortar ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon

... matchsafe. She began to utter long cries and lamentations like a hen in distress, raising her hands to heaven. All at once they heard some one rushing up the stairs. It was the butler, in his shirt-sleeves and his enormous apron of ticking, still carrying his trowel in his hand. He was bewildered, his eyes protruding, while all about him he spread the smell of fresh earth. At every instant ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris

... could not well take up the matter with Paddy (being of the same nest), I have;—but I hope still that I have done justice to his great men and his good heart. As for * * *, you will find it laid on with a trowel. I delight in your 'fact historical'—is it ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron

... as indicated in the measurements on the scrap of paper, nudged Harker as the master-mason began to take up the last of the small flags. And suddenly there was a movement amongst the watchers, and the master-mason looked up from his job and motioned Mitchington to pass him a trowel which lay at ...
— The Paradise Mystery • J. S. Fletcher

... tools, used when the furnace needed repairing. He raised one of the slabs with difficulty, turned it over, propped it with a billet of beech wood, and began to scoop out a hole in the hard earth, using a mason's trowel. Beroviero watched him, holding ...
— Marietta - A Maid of Venice • F. Marion Crawford

... deservedly eminent in his chosen lot, is particularly open to criticism on this ground. I cannot emphasize too gravely the importance of preliminary calm—what Hobbes calls "the unprejudicated mind." But this by way of parenthesis.) One may attack the problem with the mortar trowel, or with the axe. Sismondi, ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley

... of the City Surveyor and Mr. Stanley, stone-mason, the worthy Mayor then proceeded to discharge his agreeable duty—the laying of the first stone. He used for the purpose a very elegant silver trowel {59a} with ivory handle, furnished by the Messrs. Etheridge (which had been presented to his worship by Mr. E. E. Benest) bearing the following ...
— Three Centuries of a City Library • George A. Stephen

... critic, "I warned him not to use his colours with a trowel. His theme is not big enough to stand it." He lifted thin eyebrows and to her overheated brain was an unexpected Mephisto. Then the music whirled her away to Italy; the love scene of Palma and Sordello. It should have been the ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker

... has on the race of husbands, and how smoothly it makes the marital wheels go round. I don't mean false, blatant, absurd flattery, such as men often bestow on us when desirous to please, not realising that compliments laid on with a trowel are an insult to one's intelligence. Nothing of that kind, of course, but delicate, subtle, loving flattery. An attitude of gentle admiration toward your Perseus, subdued a little possibly for public use, but none the less markedly appreciative, will not only endear you ...
— Modern marriage and how to bear it • Maud Churton Braby

... Cambridge. In his seventeenth or eighteenth year, probably from a want of means, he had to give up the career of learning, in order to follow the simple calling of his stepfather. It may be easily understood that Ben was little pleased with the use of the trowel; he fled to the Netherlands, became a soldier, and took part in a campaign. After a year, the youthful adventurer, then only nineteen years old, came back to London. He talks of a heroic deed; but the truthfulness ...
— Shakspere And Montaigne • Jacob Feis

... characteristics which you read in it. His hair, beard, and eye-brows were an ebon black, as were his eyes; his features were hard and massive; his nose, which was somewhat hooked, but too much pointed, seemed as if, while in a plastic state, it had been sloped by a trowel towards one side of his face, a circumstance which, while taken in connection with his black whiskers that ran to a point near his mouth, and piercing eyes, that were too deeply and narrowly set, gave him, aided by his heavy eyebrows, ...
— The Black Prophet: A Tale Of Irish Famine • William Carleton

... of your fire, please,' whispered Rogers, something between joy and sadness in his heart, 'for there are hills of leaves that I would burn up quickly—' but the man hurried on, tossing his trowel over the Guard's head, and nearly hitting another passenger who followed too close. This was the Woman of the Haystack, an enormous, spreading traveller who utterly refused to be hurried, and only squeezed through the door because Rogers, the Guard, ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood

... until it touches the brick next below it. It must be recognized that fire clay is not a cement and that it has little or no holding power. Its action is that of a filler rather than a binder and no fire-clay wash should be used which has a consistency sufficient to permit the use of a trowel. ...
— Steam, Its Generation and Use • Babcock & Wilcox Co.

... flattering, and, of course, you must adapt your style to your subject. Some people like it laid on with a trowel, and this requires very little art. With sensible persons, however, it needs to be done very delicately, and more by suggestion than actual words. A good many like it wrapped up in the form of an insult, as—"Oh, you are a perfect fool, you ...
— Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome

... tail, and webbed feet the beaver accomplishes much. The tail of a beaver is a useful and much-used appendage; it serves as a rudder, a stool, and a ramming or signal club. The beaver may use his tail for a trowel, but I have never seen him so use it. His four front teeth are excellent edge-tools for his logging and woodwork; his webbed feet are most useful in his deep-waterway transportation, and his hands in house-building and ...
— Wild Life on the Rockies • Enos A. Mills

... struggle; the mass of the Holy Spirit is solemnly said, if not always devoutly listened to; the ambassadors of the Catholic powers utter their official exhortations to harmony and a single eye to the good of the Church; and when they withdraw, the mason of the conclave steps gravely forth, trowel in hand, to build up a solid wall of brick and mortar betwixt the electors and that world which still looks forward with curious interest, although with diminished faith, to the ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... wood-aisle doth seem Like a lane into heaven that leads from a dream, — Ay, now, when my soul all day hath drunken the soul of the oak, And my heart is at ease from men, and the wearisome sound of the stroke Of the scythe of time and the trowel of trade is low, And belief overmasters doubt, and I know that I know, And my spirit is grown to a lordly great compass within, That the length and the breadth and the sweep of the marshes of Glynn Will ...
— Select Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier

... gravel, and by degrees all the surplus dirt was washed away, leaving only these stones and a kind of fine black sand, in which the gold being heavy, had stayed. This sand was carefully gathered up with a brush and iron trowel into a shallow tin basin, and then an experienced miner carefully manipulated the same with clear water. What with blowing with the breath, and allowing the water to flow gently over it, all the black sand was soon taken away, and the bottom of the tin dish was then covered ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume

... do these things can explain the origin of the Christian Church. For others it must be enough to say, "the Holy Ghost fell on those that believed." No man saw the building of the New Jerusalem, the workmen crowded together, the unfinished walls and unpaved streets; no man heard the chink of trowel and pickaxe; it descended out ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church

... a little afraid of the responsibility of treasure- trove, but he was overruled by a chorus of eager voices, and dispossessed of the trowel, which he had brought to dig up some down- gentians for the garden. While Norman set to work as pioneer, some skipped about in wild ecstasy, and Ethel knelt down ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge

... now dug a hole and worked water and clay together into mortar, then with a trowel cut out of a shingle, and mortar carried in an old bucket, he built a wall within the stakes, using sticks laid along the outside and stones set in mud till the front was closed up, except a small hole for a window and a ...
— Two Little Savages • Ernest Thompson Seton

... should be paw, And beaver-trowel tail, And snout of beast equip'd with teeth Where ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... was now to deposit his trowel of cement on the surface of the lower stone, to seal it to the stone held suspended by the crane ...
— An Eagle Flight - A Filipino Novel Adapted from Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal

... being appointed to the See of Ripon, he once married a young couple with the assurance that he was not only a Carpenter but a Joiner. Only a few months ago he was about to lay the foundation stone of a new vicarage. The architect handed him the trowel, etc., inviting him to become "an operative mason for a ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 25, January 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various

... led to the stables and farm buildings. Her steps made no sound on the turf path, and she suddenly came in sight of Tom and Rhoda standing close to the archway. Rhoda had her gardening gloves and apron on, and a trowel in her hand. She had just been sowing seeds in the bed that ran along the yew hedge. Tom had come through the archway to bid her good-bye before starting on ...
— Miss Merivale's Mistake • Mrs. Henry Clarke

... such a shout in just such sandy gullies, but Sile felt as if he were the first being on earth to whom such an experience had ever happened. He at once began to dig and sift among the gravel fiercely. He took out his hunting-knife and plied it as a trowel. Little bits of dull yellow metal rewarded him every now and then until he worked along to where a ledge (or the edge of one) of quartz came nearly to the surface. On the upper side of that, and lying closely against it, he pried out something that made him shout "Hurrah!" and that then gave him ...
— Two Arrows - A Story of Red and White • William O. Stoddard

... eyes of a newly arrived visitor, for the Egyptians might almost have been said to make a point of doing everything differently from other nation's. The baker, seen at the kneading-trough inside his shop, worked the dough with his foot; on the other hand, the mason used no trowel in applying his mortar, and the poorer classes scraped up handfuls of mud mixed with dung when they had occasion to repair the walls of their hovels. In Greece, even the very poorest retired to their ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 9 (of 12) • G. Maspero

... freezes as hard as stone, and prevents their common enemy, the wolverene, disturbing them during the winter. From the beaver being seen to flap its tail when moving over its work, but especially when about to plunge into the water, has arisen the idea that it uses this member as a trowel. This custom it preserves even when it becomes tame and domesticated, particularly ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston

... July, Athalie had acquired a fat bay horse and a double buckboard; and, in the seventh heaven now, she jogged about the country through leafy lanes and thistle-bordered by-roads long familiar to her childhood, sometimes with basket, trowel, and garden gloves, intent on the digging and transplanting of ferns, sometimes with field-glasses and books, on ornithological information bent. More often she started out with only a bag of feed for Henry the horse and some luncheon for herself, to picnic all ...
— Athalie • Robert W. Chambers

... windows in any of the rooms; nothing but workmen, and the implements of their several trades, swarming from the kitchens to the garrets. Inside and outside alike: bricklayers, painters, carpenters, masons: hammer, hod, brush, pickaxe, saw, and trowel: all at work together, in ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens

... Procession will be formed at 12-15 precisely, in the following order: Two Tylers, with drawn Swords. Visiting Brethren. The Lodges of the Province, according to their numbers, Juniors going first. The W. Masters of the Olive Union and Shakspeare Lodges, with Trowel and Gavel. ...
— A History of Horncastle - from the earliest period to the present time • James Conway Walter

... The trowel rang on. Without command from her mistress the maid was crouching into the hole. In the noise Anna was trying to press an anxious query upon Hilary, but he dropped brick and tool and snatched ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable

... day her nest she moulded, Building with magic, love and mud, A gray cup made by a thousand journeys, And the tiny beak was trowel ...
— The Posy Ring - A Book of Verse for Children • Various

... would have continued it is impossible to say, for at that moment the gentleman returned with a trowel, spade, and basket, and proceeded to remove her from her native soil. In justice to her, it must be confessed that, when the moment came to part for ever from all her old friends, and the surroundings to which, in spite ...
— Parables from Flowers • Gertrude P. Dyer

... sharply, rising from her knees and shaking her trowel at the intruder. "I don't want no apples to-day, an' I don't care how ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume

... "go plant Thine edifice, I care not how ill; Take notice, earth. I hereby grant Carte blanche of mortar, stone, and trowel. Go Hermes, Hercules, and Mars, Fraught with these bills on Henry Hase, Drop with yon jester from the stars, And ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume XII. F, No. 325, August 2, 1828. • Various

... draughtiness of Mr Kibbock's advice. Accordingly, another meeting of the heritors was summoned, and after a great deal of controversy, it was agreed that a new manse should be erected; and, shortly after, we contracted with Thomas Trowel, the mason to build one for six hundred pounds, with all the requisite appurtenances, by which a clear gain was saved to the parish, by the foresight of Mr Kibbock, to the amount of nearly four hundred pounds. But the heritors did not mean to have allowed the sort ...
— The Annals of the Parish • John Galt

... also has a small collection of silver trowels used for laying cornerstones of public buildings. There is an ivory-handled trowel (fig. ...
— Presentation Pieces in the Museum of History and Technology • Margaret Brown Klapthor

... the rest of it?" asked Ethel Brown, on her knees taking up some of the plants with her trowel and placing them in her basket so carefully that there was plenty of earth surrounding each one to serve as a nest when it should be put into Helen's wild ...
— Ethel Morton's Enterprise • Mabell S.C. Smith

... in the garden, which the speculator's trowel had spared by some fancy of the builder's, who believed that he was preserving these hundred feet square of earth for his own pleasure, they were admiring the first green shoots of the lilac-trees, a spring festival which can only be fully appreciated in Paris when ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac

... hard to be met with; but is lately cultivated in some Physick Gardens at Mitcham. It must be kept well weeded, and the top of the Bed, where it grows, must, when we cut it, be pricked up, a little, with a small Fork, or the Earth made fine with a Trowel; because the Runners, of this sort of Mint, shoot along upon the Surface of the Ground, and so at the Joints strike Root, which is contrary to other Sorts of Mint, which shoot ...
— The Country Housewife and Lady's Director - In the Management of a House, and the Delights and Profits of a Farm • Richard Bradley

... rolls of paper were being delivered from a cart at the door; an upholsterer's wagon also stopped the way; nothing was to be seen but workmen, swarming from the kitchens to the garret. Inside and outside alike; bricklayers, painters, carpenters, masons; hammer, hod, brush, pickaxe, saw, trowel: all at ...
— Ten Girls from Dickens • Kate Dickinson Sweetser

... to inhabit it is merely the matter of a walk in the neighbourhood. When removed from her own dwelling, which is turned topsy- turvy by my trowel, and placed in possession of the den produced by my art, the Lycosa at once disappears into that den. She does not come out again, seeks nothing better elsewhere. A large wire-gauze cover rests on the soil in the ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre

... experiment in literature. Afterwards he had left Silliston for a lumber camp on a remote river in northern Maine, abruptly to reappear, on a mild afternoon late in April, in Augusta Maturin's garden. The crocuses and tulips were in bloom, and his friend, in a gardening apron, was on her knees, trowel in hand, assisting a hired man to set out marigolds ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... there was an abundant supply of food and drink, the workmen never left their work; and amidst their continuous laughter the four walls were run up with incredible quickness, until one day Krespel cried, "Stop!" Then the workmen, laying down trowel and hammer, came down from the scaffoldings and gathered round Krespel in a circle, whilst every laughing face was asking, "Well, and what now?" "Make way!" cried Krespel; and then running to one end of the garden, ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann

... Daisy, there must be a hole dug for it, in the first place; you must take a trowel and make a hole for it—But your dress will be the waur!" he exclaimed, glancing at ...
— Melbourne House, Volume 2 • Susan Warner

... quality of her quiet voice sent a chill to Sylvia's heart. "Why, Judy dear, after you are married of course you and Arnold can keep Lawrence with you. That'll be the best for him, a real home, with you. Oh, Judy dear," she laid down her trowel, fighting hard against a curious sickness which rose within her. She tried to speak lightly. "Oh, Judy dear, when are you going to be married? Or don't you want to speak about it now, for a while? You never write long ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield

... market town. Then through an aperture that had been a window I saw three women sitting round a candle. And in the next street I found a man on his knees on the pavement, working with bricks and a trowel. ...
— Kings, Queens And Pawns - An American Woman at the Front • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... to complain of in the matter of supplies," I said. They had been having a kind of high tea on tables laid across trestles on the lawn, and one of them, using his knife as a bricklayer uses his trowel, was luxuriously spreading a layer of apple and plum jam upon a stratum of hard-boiled egg, which reposed on a bed-rock of bread and butter, the whole representing a most interesting geological formation and producing a startling ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan

... -ajxo, (cards) preno. trickle : guteti. trifle : bagatelo, trivialajxo. tripe : tripo. triumph : triumf'i, -o. troop : trupo, bando. tropic : tropiko. trot : troti. trough : trogo. trousers : pantalono. trout : truto. trowel : trulo. tramp : (cards), atuto. trumpet : trumpeto. trunk : (animal) rostro; (tree) trunko; (box) kofro; (body) torso. trust : fidi. try : provi, peni. Tsar : Caro. tuber : tubero. tuft : tufo. tumbler : glaso. tumult : tumulto. ...
— The Esperanto Teacher - A Simple Course for Non-Grammarians • Helen Fryer

... tail,—it would be in its way; while its manner of sleeping is such that it does not need a tail to tuck itself up with, as do the coon and the fox. The dog talks with his tail; the tail of the possum is prehensile; the porcupine uses his tail in climbing and for defense; the beaver as a tool or trowel; while the tail of the skunk serves as a screen behind which ...
— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs

... moment had arrived for each one to place his trowelful of mortar on the face of the large stone lying in the trench, in order that the other might be fitted and fastened to it. Ibarra handed the alcalde a mason's trowel, on the wide silver Made of which was engraved the date. But the alcalde first gave a ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal

... away a heap and a little hole is seen, now hit the ground near it a few times with a stick or stamp on it with your foot and the worm, if he is near the top, comes up. When he is safely out of the way dig carefully down with a knife or trowel so as to examine the hole or "burrow." At the top you generally find it lined with pieces of grass or leaves that the worm has pulled in; lower down the lining comes to an end, but the colour of the burrow is redder than ...
— Lessons on Soil • E. J. Russell

... time in remonstrating with the workmen on their conduct, but, seizing a trowel, lifted a heavy stone into ...
— The Lion of Saint Mark - A Story of Venice in the Fourteenth Century • G. A. Henty

... her hands. Why shouldn't they be pretty?" But not for Abby's hands would she have given up a single hour when she had washed Jenny's little flannels or dug enchanted garden beds with Harry's miniature trowel. ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow

... period when I cease to be a schoolmaster and become a schoolboy, the schoolboy in love with animals. Like a madder-cutter off for his day's work, I set out carrying over my shoulder a solid digging-implement, the local luchet, and on my back my game-bag with boxes, bottles, trowel, glass tubes, tweezers, lenses and other impedimenta. A large umbrella saves me from sunstroke. It is the most scorching hour of the hottest day in the year. Exhausted by the heat, the Cicadae are silent. The bronze-eyed Gad-flies seek a refuge from ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre

... the blue plush frame, Persis passed through the house to the woodshed, found a trowel among the garden tools, and then made her way into the night. The sky was overcast, hiding the stars, but the flitting fire-flies outlined strange constellations against the velvety darkness. Persis groped her ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith

... one of the prohibited Spanish daggers or knives which a traveller may, occasionally get hold of and smuggle out of the country. The blade was broad, trowel-like, but the point drawn out several inches, so as to look like ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... he retorted, "I want my trowel," and, grumbling to himself, the old fellow shuffled off to the other ...
— Malcolm Sage, Detective • Herbert George Jenkins

... taken out on a wooden trowel, consists of distinct grains of soap and a liquid portion, which will easily separate, sufficient salt or brine has been added; the boiling is stopped and the spent lye allowed to settle out, whilst the soap remains on the surface as a ...
— The Handbook of Soap Manufacture • W. H. Simmons

... convenient implement this for a froth-house builder who is compelled to work behind her back—mortar-feeder, trowel, darby, compass, and level all in one! Beginning with the first touch of the cement, the flowing point describes a very small half-circle to the right, again meeting the bark. It is now carried inward and upward, describing ...
— My Studio Neighbors • William Hamilton Gibson

... fireplace, in which, some of the hearth-bricks are rather irregularly disposed; and we said to ourself, perhaps the brick-layer who built this noble fireplace worked like Ben Jonson, with a trowel in one hand and a copy of Horace in the other. That suggested to us that we had not read any Ben Jonson for a very long time: so we turned to "Every Man in His Humour" and "The Alchemist." Part of Jonson's notice "To the Reader" preceding ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley

... to wear himself out and to settle down into a sort of quiet despair," thought Sarah as she looked after him. Then lifting her trowel, she returned with a sigh to the sowing of portulaca seeds in ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow

... not to the artist. In Captain Macklin, the young man's cousin makes her first appearance in a thin gown, and a white hat trimmed with roses, reminding the adventurous captain of a Dresden statuette, in spite of the fact that she wore heavy gauntlet gloves and carried a trowel. The lady had been doing a hard day's work in the garden. No woman outside the asylum ever did gardening in such a costume, and Mr. Davis evidently has the hat and gown sadly mixed with some ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed

... this person at once and ordered the three loads of black dirt to be delivered immediately. I then bethought myself that I required an outfit of garden tools; so I made my way to the nearest hardware shop and purchased a spade, a hoe, a rake, a wheelbarrow, a watering can, a trowel, and a pruning-knife. I trundled the barrow home, with the other purchases ...
— The House - An Episode in the Lives of Reuben Baker, Astronomer, and of His Wife, Alice • Eugene Field

... drawer. "There were two motor rugs, two holland coats, one white, one brown. There were two sets of motor goggles. There was a package of revolver cartridges, from which six had been extracted, a leather revolver holster, a small garden trowel, and one or two other ...
— The Man Who Knew • Edgar Wallace

... 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

... th' garden tools. There's a little spade an' rake an' a fork an' hoe. Eh! they are good 'uns. There's a trowel, too. An' th' woman in th' shop threw in a packet o' white poppy an' one o' blue larkspur when I bought th' ...
— The Secret Garden • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... time to time, which the sportsman supposed to be a bird. It came from behind the great acclivities that ran opposite his place by the pools. Brendon suddenly perceived that it was no natural noise but arose from some human activity. It was, in fact, the musical note of a mason's trowel, and when presently it ceased, he was annoyed to hear heavy footsteps in the ...
— The Red Redmaynes • Eden Phillpotts

... familiars were frightened, and in their disquietude angled to learn what had happened. At last he told them, said he was lost, and that for a few inches the King forgot all his services, which had led to so many conquests; he declared that henceforth he would leave the trowel to the King, bring about a war, and so arrange matters that the King should have good need ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon

... killed of 'em yesterday," he declared, pointing towards the Empty House with a bit of broken flower-pot, "or else it's the ones you killed last week, and who was always astealin' of my strorbriz." He looked very wise as he said this, and his wand of office—a dirty trowel—which he held in his hand, ...
— Jimbo - A Fantasy • Algernon Blackwood

... they would be transported as his personal baggage. The pile grew and grew: a woolly lamb, two Noah's arks, bottles and marbles innumerable, a bag of pebbles, a broken steam engine, two china nest-eggs, an orange, a banana and some walnuts, a fishing line, a trowel, a ball of string. These give an idea of the quality of Peter's effects, but ...
— Mother Carey's Chickens • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... from a plan so bold and sublime that the conception of it places Erwin for ever at the head of the architects of the middle age[1]. In 1276 they laid the foundation of the northern tower; to consecrate the spot, the bishop walked solemnly round it, then took a trowel in his hand and thrust it into the ground, as a sign for beginning the work. They relate that a quarrel having occured between two workmen who both wished to work with the trowel the bishop had held in his hand, one of them was killed. This murder was considered ...
— Historical Sketch of the Cathedral of Strasburg • Anonymous

... the pond and was out of sight behind a grassy point. There he stayed, now and then striking the water with his tail as a signal that the danger was not yet over. It isn't every animal that can use his caudal appendage as a stool, as a rudder, as a third hind leg, as a trowel for smoothing the floor of his house, and as a tocsin ...
— Forest Neighbors - Life Stories of Wild Animals • William Davenport Hulbert

... hundred feet from front to rear, The flexible rise and fall of backs, the continual click of the trowels striking the bricks, The bricks, one after another, each laid so workmanlike in its place, and set with a knock of the trowel-handle, The piles of materials, the mortar on the mortar-boards, and the steady replenishing by the hod-men; —Spar-makers in the spar-yard, the swarming row of well-grown apprentices, The swing of their axes on the ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman

... snuffed at in the house of God, or tolerated with ill-disguised disgust. Can the black man be a mason in New York? Let him be employed as a journeyman, and every Irish lover of liberty that carries the hod or trowel, would leave at once, or compel him to leave! Can the black man be a carpenter? There is scarcely a carpenter's shop in New York in which a journeyman would continue to work, if a black man was employed in it. Can the black man engage in the common industries ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various

... ichneumons, and all such vermin, a design exhibiting either wonderful instinct or sagacity, is carried into execution by the male. As soon as his mate has squatted upon her eggs, he goes to work at the masonic art; and using his great horned mandibles, first as a hod, and afterwards as a trowel, he walls up the entrance to the nest—leaving an aperture just large enough to be filled up by the beak of the female. The material employed by him for this purpose is a kind of agglutinated mud, which he procures from the neighbouring watercourse or quagmire, and somewhat similar to that used ...
— The Cliff Climbers - A Sequel to "The Plant Hunters" • Captain Mayne Reid

... have that antediluvian idea that you can drown it; put in clean sand and gravel, broken stone, making it thin enough, so that when it is put into boxes the thinner portion will run in, filling all interstices, forming a solid mass. A brick trowel is necessary to work it down alongside the boxing plank. One of the best and easiest things to carry the concrete to the boxes is a railroad wheelbarrow, scooping it in with a scoop shovel. Two courses a week is ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 443, June 28, 1884 • Various

... fail to grasp the architect's grave problem? The Osmia is measuring; and her measure is her body. Has she quite done, this time? Oh dear no! Ten times, twenty times, at every moment, for the least particle of mortar which she lays, she repeats her mensuration, never being quite certain that her trowel is going just where ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre

... the trowel has been assigned to the third degree as its proper implement, and the symbolic meaning which accompanies it has a strict and beautiful reference to the purposes for which it was used in the ancient temple; for as it was there employed "to spread the cement which united ...
— The Symbolism of Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey

... old paper being off, Joe washed down the walls with water, and having swept the paper into a heap in the middle of the floor, he mixed with a small trowel some cement on a small board and proceeded to stop up the cracks and holes in the walls and ceiling. After a while, feeling very tired, it occurred to him that he deserved a spell and a smoke for five minutes. ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell

... was a kodak on her bureau. There were snowshoes, too small for a man surely—if you could tell of a thing the size of snowshoes—hanging on the wall. There was a fishing-rod case, with something hanging near it that she imagined was a flybook. There was a little trowel, and a graceful birch-bark basket, as if some one might want to go out and bring home plants. She got up finally, her curiosity stronger than her ...
— I've Married Marjorie • Margaret Widdemer

... and to indicate the existence, somewhere in the immediate vicinity, of a mine of untold wealth. Several days were spent in unprofitable search: then more favorable indications led the shepherds to dispose of their flocks and set out in good earnest to dig for gold. A couple of spades, a trowel and a calabash were their only tools, but our adventurer was a knowing man, and "knowledge is power." His practiced eye knew just where the precious metals would be most likely to exist if at all in that locality—that in the old beds of rivers now dried up gold would more naturally ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various

... of the Queen Marie de Medicis his mother, 1610." Four medals, bearing the same inscription, two of gold, and two of silver gilt, having been placed at the corners of the stone, which was then lowered, the Due de Sully presented the silver trowel, while two of the attendant nobles alternately offered the hammer and the silver ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 2 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe

... took up a brick from the pile, with his left hand, and he generally tossed the brick up a little way in the air, and it turned over before he caught it again, so that he saw all sides of it; and, with the flat trowel which he held in his right hand, he scooped up ...
— The Doers • William John Hopkins

... ones; send your paviours and slaters to the poorest villages, and see that your poor are healthily lodged, before you try your hand on stately architecture. You will find its stateliness rise better under the trowel afterwards; and we do do not yet build so well that we need hasten to display our skill to future ages. Had the labour which has decorated the Houses of Parliament filled, instead, rents in walls and roofs throughout ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin

... where, a few days earlier, I had been observing the labours and the surgery of the Mantis-killing Tachytes. My purpose was to collect a few cocoons of this Digger-wasp. The cocoons were turning up in abundance under my pocket-trowel, when Emile presented me with an unknown object. Absorbed in my task of collection, I slipped the find into my box without examining it further than with a rapid glance. We left the spot. Half-way home, the ardour of my search became assuaged; and a thought of the problematical ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre

... in Ireland, had discovered a rival to Ben Jonson in the person of a poetical bricklayer, one Henry Jones, whom his Lordship carried with him to London, as a specimen of the indigenous tribes of Erin. It was easier for this Jones to rhyme in heroics than to handle a trowel or construct a chimney. He rhymed, therefore, for the amusement and in honor of the polite circle of which Stanhope was the centre; the fashionable world subscribed magnificently for his volume of "Poems upon ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various

... rebuild it failed him. He had never before thought about putting together broken bits: he felt like a man whose house has been wrecked by an earthquake, and who, for lack of skilled labour, is called upon for the first time to wield a trowel and carry bricks. He simply did ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton

... stood in the door of his greenhouse with a transplanting trowel in his hand. He was dressed in clay-colored nankeen, and could get down in the dirt without seeming to get dirty. His small eyes twinkled shrewdly, but not unkindly, as she advanced toward him. He was fond of flowers, and she looked like ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe

... following his trade of a mason, worked on Lincoln's Inn in London with trowel in hand and a book in his pocket. Joseph Hunter was a carpenter in youth, Robert Burns a plowman, Keats a druggist, Thomas Carlyle and Hugh Miller masons. Dante and Descartes were soldiers. Andrew Johnson was a tailor. Cardinal Wolsey, Defoe, and Kirke White were butchers' sons. Faraday was the ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden

... it was these two bits of possibilities that put a happy thought into Sarah's head. For three days she said nothing, but she fell into the way of going often in and out of that door, and always her eyes were hungrily fixed on one or the other of those squares. On the fourth day she bought a trowel and some flower seeds and set resolutely to work. She had dug the trowel into the earth four times, and was delightedly sniffing the odor from the moist earth when ...
— The Tangled Threads • Eleanor H. Porter

... said Lawrence, laughing. "It is not my part to lay hold on a trowel and be a social mason. Still less is ...
— The End of a Coil • Susan Warner

... struggling up the slopes of vast cellars, with loads of distracting rubbish; here stood the half-demolished walls of a house, with a sad variety of wall- paper showing in the different rooms; there clinked the trowel upon the brick, yonder the hammer on the stone; overhead swung and threatened the marble block that the derrick was lifting to its place. As yet these forces of demolition and construction had the business of ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... the builder a little anterior to what he built. Varro and the Capitoline Tables and Mr. Hook will all agree to that postulate. And whatever some of them may say as to the youth of Romulus, when he first began to wield the trowel, at least, I suppose, he was come to years of discretion; and, if we say twenty-three or twenty-four, which I am as much entitled to say as they to deny it, then we are all right. 'All right behind,' as the mail guards say, 'drive on.' And so I feel entitled ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey

... building a little house of red bricks, and it was the tap-tap-tapping of his trowel, or mortar-shovel, that ...
— Uncle Wiggily and Old Mother Hubbard - Adventures of the Rabbit Gentleman with the Mother Goose Characters • Howard R. Garis

... thought very much as old Cato did about them. The Greeks were a very clever people, unrivalled in the fine arts; let them keep to their strong point; they were inimitable with the chisel, the brush, the trowel, and the fingers; but he was not prepared to think much of their calamus or stylus, poetry excepted. What did they ever do but subvert received principles without substituting any others? And then they were so likely to ...
— Callista • John Henry Cardinal Newman

... something new, and Mr. Miller was superintending the building of it. He stood over the workmen who were laying the foundation, watching every brick that was laid down with delighted and absorbed interest. He held a trowel himself, and had tucked up his shirt cuffs in order to lend a helping hand in the operations. There was nothing that Andrew Miller loved so well. Fate and his Caroline had made him a member of Parliament, and had placed him in the position of ...
— Vera Nevill - Poor Wisdom's Chance • Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron

... who owns a gardening hoe Must be sure how he means his strokes to go; But he who owns a gardening fork May make it do all the other tools' work; Though to shift, or to pot, or annex what you can, A trowel's the tool for child, ...
— Harper's Young People, March 16, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various

... The Trowel is an instrument used by operative masons to spread the cement which unites the building into one common mass; but we, as Free and Accepted Masons, are taught to use it for the more noble and glorious purpose of spreading ...
— Masonic Monitor of the Degrees of Entered Apprentice, Fellow Craft and Master Mason • George Thornburgh

... but huckster-like avowal Is made continually, behind the bar. It means—though rather "laid on with a trowel"— A Trade with Public Spirit quite at jar. The "mercenary politician," making A pocket-business of a patriot's task, Recently put your Press in a great taking; But sordid selfishness here doffs all mask! Which with a patriot's conscience plays most tricks? Which most the venal ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, March 25, 1893 • Various

... From this humble position he rose to a situation in the studio of Bubb, the sculptor; and through the counsel of Eugenius Roche, the former editor of the "Literary Recreations," and then the conductor of The Day newspaper, he was induced to lay aside the trowel and undertake the duties of reporter to that journal. The Day soon falling into the hands of other proprietors, Cunningham felt his situation uncomfortable, and returned to his original vocation, attaching himself to Francis Chantrey, then a young sculptor just commencing business. ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume III - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various

... stair-head, gently moving his right hand as if it were a silver trowel with which to spread the cement of his words on the structure of the system and consolidate it for ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens

... them. I remembered the tale of the nun being walled up in a vault of her convent, brick by brick, till the last brick shut off the last glimmer of the bricklayer's lantern, till the last layer of mortar made for her the last sound she would hear, the patting clink of the trowel on the brick, before it was all horrible dark silence for ever. I wondered how many people had been silenced in that way. I wondered how long I should live, if that was what ...
— Martin Hyde, The Duke's Messenger • John Masefield

... ribbon-grass and with a big cluster of radishes at the left side, and each of them carried a bunch of small salad and a darling little crystal-and-silver watering-pot (Portcullis's gifts). The Duke of Southlands gave his daughter away, and Juno insisted on his wearing a smock-frock and carrying a trowel, and just as the dear Bishop said, "Who giveth this woman?" the poor old darling dropped his trowel with a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 20, 1917 • Various

... was spread out with the trowel, it remained still colourless, but after it had undergone the process of pressing, which generally took place immediately before sponging, it presented to the astonished workmen the appearance of one sheet of gold; and when it had been exposed to the sun, it acquired ...
— Another World - Fragments from the Star City of Montalluyah • Benjamin Lumley (AKA Hermes)

... autumn sunlight. Dickie played at houses under the table—it was not the sort of game he usually played, but the neighbors could not know that. The table happened to be set down just over the hole that had held the roots of the moonflower. Dickie dug a little with a trowel in the blanket house. ...
— Harding's luck • E. [Edith] Nesbit

... man of yours is a duffer," she said sharply, pointing a very earthy trowel at the unconscious figure of the gardener, who was busy in the middle distance digging potatoes. "A man," she continued, "who calls a plain, every-day squash a vegetable marrow isn't fit to run a well-ordered truck-patch; though it's no more ...
— His Lordship's Leopard - A Truthful Narration of Some Impossible Facts • David Dwight Wells

... was that he might have more for the needy. He was industrious; not a moment of his day was lost. For many years, he was one of the only two priests in the State; but when his parochial duties left him a little leisure, he was seen to handle the trowel and use the broom. He paid cash for everything he bought, and whoever worked for him received full pay on the day and hour agreed upon: no cutting down of rates. If they wished to give to the church, very well; but they must take their pay from him to the last farthing. He was ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 2, February 1886 • Various

... to a small house near the side of the road, I saw a woman working with a trowel in her sunny garden. It was good to see her turn over the warm brown soil; it was good to see the plump green rows of lettuce and the thin green rows of onions, and the nasturtiums and sweet peas; it was good—after so many days in that ...
— The Friendly Road - New Adventures in Contentment • (AKA David Grayson) Ray Stannard Baker

... world treats its geniuses, they speak unwisely. There is no work of genius which has not been the delight of mankind, no word of genius to which the human heart and soul have not, sooner or later, responded. But the man whom the genius takes possession of for its pen, for its trowel, for its pencil, for its chisel, him the world treats according to his deserts. Does Burns drink? It sets him to gauging casks of gin. For, remember, it is not to the practical world that the genius appeals; it is the practical world which ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell

... are comparatively invisible at a Trades Union Congress. They are fought over with great bitterness, but they are not fought over in the Hall of the Unions-once the Club of the Nobility, with on its walls on Congress days the hammer and spanner of the engineers, the pestle and trowel of the builders, and so on-but in the Communist Congresses in the Kremlin and throughout the country. And, in the problem with which in this book we are mainly concerned, neither the regular business ...
— The Crisis in Russia - 1920 • Arthur Ransome

... recalled, and in the mean time a herald was sent by Parma, highly applauding the courage of the defenders, and begging them to surrender at discretion. They answered the messenger with words of haughty defiance, and, rushing in a mass to the breastwork, began with spade, pickax, and trowel, to add to its strength. Here all the able-bodied men of the town took up their permanent position, and here they ate, drank, and slept upon their posts, while their food was brought to them by the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... intended should be seen, and to emphasise the roughness by filling up the joints with conspicuous pointing. This, however, is not so destructive as much of the work which has been condemned above, because at any time the walls could be recovered with a thin coat of smooth plaster laid on with a trowel, but not "floated,"—that is, not brought to a smooth surface ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: Wimborne Minster and Christchurch Priory • Thomas Perkins

... is carried on through the two years." Indispensable! No degree of proficiency at inserting calories in correct numbers in to Little Sally's stomach could atone for lack of skill at leading Little Sally herself in morning strolls through the "Child's Garden of Verses," with trowel in hand to dig up the gayest plants and reset them in ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine

... At trowel, a knife, fork, and spoon, of artistically painted wood, and a pair of oars, all claim a passing ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood

... piece of slate; I can scrape holes with that,' said Allan. 'Take this old trowel, Marjorie; it hasn't a handle, but I don't ...
— The Adventure League • Hilda T. Skae

... heavily daubed with a mixture of mud and chopped straw that they are strong and durable. In applying this daub, the hand is used, and a simple block of wood of rectangular form, with a projecting edge extending midway of the upper side, is used as a trowel for spreading it, and giving it a smooth finish. The thatchings are thick, and project far beyond the walls; they are of palm, and neatly cut at the edges; a cresting, thin, but evenly placed and firmly pegged down, projects over the ridge, down either slope, ...
— In Indian Mexico (1908) • Frederick Starr

... the slaves return from handling their trowel-shaped iron hoes, and the "gentleman" takes a siesta proportioned to his drink. The poorer classes sit at home weaving, spinning, or threading beads, whilst the wives attend to household work, prepare the meals, buy and sell, dig and delve. Europeans ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton

... shoulder to the wheel everywhere that aid was needed, his boldness in defying those leagued against him, completely changed the aspect of Jamestown. The gentlemen who had refused to wield axe or spade or bricklayer's trowel because of their gentility were shamed ...
— The Princess Pocahontas • Virginia Watson

... said Mark merrily, snatching away his wrist. "I am not going to have my hand used as a trowel to save yours, you lazy beggar. Here, Dean, get hold of Pig and do as I do. Let's give ...
— Dead Man's Land - Being the Voyage to Zimbambangwe of certain and uncertain • George Manville Fenn

... open square, where, surrounded by fluttering flags and streamers, a huge block of stone hung suspended by ropes from a crane, ready to be lowered at the Royal touch, and fixed in its place by the Royal trowel, as the visible and solid beginning of the stately fabric, which, according to pictorial models was to rise from this, its first foundation, into a temple of art and architecture, ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli

... Creek we found that Colonel Rice and his company of the Fifth Infantry, who had been sent there by General Mills, had built quite a good little fort with their trowel-bayonets—a weapon which Colonel Rice was the inventor of, and which is, by the way, a very useful implement of war, as it can be used for a shovel in throwing up intrenchments and can be profitably utilized in several other ways. On the ...
— The Life of Hon. William F. Cody - Known as Buffalo Bill The Famous Hunter, Scout and Guide • William F. Cody

... moderate supply of warmth reach its watery cradle and the plastic matter undergoes changes so rapid and yet so steady and purposelike in their succession that one can only compare them to those operated by a skilled modeler upon a formless lump of clay. As with an invisible trowel the mass is divided and subdivided into smaller and smaller portions, until it is reduced to an aggregation of granules not too large to build withal the finest fabrics of the nascent organism. And, then, it is as if a delicate finger traced out the line to be occupied by the spinal column, ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond

... these words I busied myself among the pile of bones of which I have before spoken. Throwing them aside, I soon uncovered a quantity of building stone and mortar. With these materials and with the aid of my trowel, I began vigorously to wall up the entrance ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... passing quietly through the street, carrying water from the pond, or assisting in some grave procession, no sooner do they hear the rapid beats of a distant drum, than they begin to caper and dance spontaneously. The bricklayer will throw down his trowel for a minute, the carpenter leave his bench, the corn grinder her milling stone, and the porter his load, to keep time to ...
— Chopin and Other Musical Essays • Henry T. Finck

... Saturday of the month. If I could get an introduction to professor Joly or learn up something about his family. That would do to: man always feels complimented. Flattery where least expected. Nobleman proud to be descended from some king's mistress. His foremother. Lay it on with a trowel. Cap in hand goes through the land. Not go in and blurt out what you know you're not to: what's parallax? ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce

... appear in society. The diplomatic impolitely dub them fools. Be they that or no, they augment the number of those mediocrities beneath the yoke of which France is bowed down. They are always there, always ready to bungle public or private concerns with the dull trowel of their mediocrity, bragging of their impotence, which they count for conduct and integrity. This sort of social prizemen infests the administration, the army, the magistracy, the chambers, the courts. They diminish and level down the ...
— The Girl with the Golden Eyes • Honore de Balzac

... cultivators, and by its root feeding and undermining propensities does extensive injury to crops generally. They may be successfully trapped in the following manner: Strike a line between the two most recent earth mounds, and midway between them remove a piece of the sod. By the aid of a trowel or a sharp stick the burrow may now be reached. Insert your hand in the tunnel and enlarge the interior sufficiently to allow the introduction of No. (0) steel trap. Set the trap flatly in the bottom of the burrow, and then laying a piece of shingle or a ...
— Camp Life in the Woods and the Tricks of Trapping and Trap Making • William Hamilton Gibson

... in the far future a little garden of her own, under a hill, full of rare and exquisite things, where she would spend most of her old age on her knees with an apron and stout gloves, with a pair of shears and a trowel, steeped in the ...
— The Marriages • Henry James

... be used, mix it thoroughly with the soil before beginning transplanting. Then prepare the plants carefully. Unless they are very small, cut back the largest leaves about one-half with an old pair of scissors. With a small trowel or an old knife, cut them out of the frame or flat in which they are growing, keeping as much soil as possible with each. (If not in flats, cut them out as you use them in the garden.) If they are in pots, knock them out carefully and pack into flat for convenience in handling. Paper pots, which ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various

... time that word dahlia crept into his consciousness and won the day. It chanced that dahlia-cultivation was the Colonel's most absorbing hobby. The old gentleman's anger had already begun to cool, under the influence of his enemy's persistent politeness, and this liberal application of the flattery-trowel at once set up a counter-current ...
— The Harmsworth Magazine, v. 1, 1898-1899, No. 2 • Various

... about. Miss Mullett wore a wide-brimmed straw hat to keep the sun from her pink cheeks and a pair of Wade's discarded gloves to save her hands. The gloves were very, very much too large for her, and, when not actually engaged in using her trowel, Miss Mullett stood with arms held out in scarecrow style so as not to contaminate her gown with garden mold, and presented a strange and unusual appearance. Every afternoon, as regular as clockwork, the Doctor came down ...
— The Lilac Girl • Ralph Henry Barbour

... picket-fence until it was white as new snow. At odd times Braddish himself painted the little house (it was all of old-fashioned, long shingles) inside and out, and a friend of his got up on the roof with mortar and a trowel, and pointed-up the brick chimney; and my father and Mr. Sturtevant contributed a load of beautiful, sleek, rich pasture sod and the labor to lay it; so that by midsummer the little domain was the spickest, spannest little dream of a home in the whole county. ...
— The Spread Eagle and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris

... them deposited for the historical curiosity of future ages. Antiquity, of course, would be the essence of the value of the coins, except to the thief. The royal hand had covered them with the stone, duly tapped by the silver trowel amidst the hurrahs of the loyal populace, in which the prisoner heartily joined. But in the night he stole forth, ...
— The Reminiscences Of Sir Henry Hawkins (Baron Brampton) • Henry Hawkins Brampton

... eggs. To the left, the wall is covered with climbing plants, wild grapes, Virginia jessamine. In the middle is a sun-dial. There are many plants in pots. Your child is looking at the flowers. She shows them to her nurse—she is making holes in the earth with her trowel, and planting seeds. The nurse is raking the path. The young girl is pure as an angel, but the beginning of love is ...
— Ursula • Honore de Balzac

... that such a thing would be impossible in the North. So strong is the prejudice against the employment of Negro labor that the presence of the Negro workmen on a brick wall would cause every white man to throw down his trowel and quit work. This thing is true in all the remunerative avenues of life in the North. In respect to the South, it is there that the Negro will work out his industrial destiny. He has been and will be the laborer. Such schools as Tuskegee and Hampton will prepare him ...
— Sparkling Gems of Race Knowledge Worth Reading • Various



Words linked to "Trowel" :   turn over, mason's trowel, dig, slick, delve, hand tool, cut into



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