"Bolster" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Situation was working its way up into the higher echelons of the Air Force. It got to the late General Hoyt S. Vandenberg, then Chief of Staff, before it was batted back down. The general wouldn't buy interplanetary vehicles. The report lacked proof. A group from ATIC went to the Pentagon to bolster their position but had no luck, the Chief of Staff ...
— The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects • Edward Ruppelt
... to give them a waist. Nothing easier for an obese man than to have a waist; he has but to pinch his middle part a little, and the very fat on either side pushed violently forward MAKES a waist, as it were, and our worthy perfumer's figure was that of a bolster cut almost in two with ...
— Men's Wives • William Makepeace Thackeray
... some very wide windows, and three windows were filled with galleons of cloud—fat, bolster, swelling vessels, white, save where, in their curving sails, they had caught a faint radiance from the hidden sun. In fine procession, against the blue, they passed along. Very faint and muffled there came up from the Square the lingering notes of "Robin Adair." This is a Wednesday afternoon, ...
— The Golden Scarecrow • Hugh Walpole
... Atonement, or for a crucified savior, who would take upon himself the sins of poor, weak human nature. By simply believing on this crucified redeemer, man would be saved, not from sin itself, but from the penalty of sin. To bolster up the belief in original sin and the necessity for an atonement, the allegory of the fruit tree and the serpent in ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble
... beautiful room with hardly anything in it; a large, high, empty room in pure First Empire style. A small yellow sofa with gilded claws, and narrow bolster cushions, was near the fireplace; a light blue curved settee, with animals' heads, was in the middle of the room. There was a highly polished parquet floor with no carpet, a magnificent chandelier, and the curtains ...
— The Twelfth Hour • Ada Leverson
... wooden crosspieces that Mademoiselle used for keeping her jackets in shape; their hands were gloves stuffed out with handkerchiefs; and their faces were the paper masks painted in the afternoon by the untutored brush of Gerald, tied on to the round heads made of the ends of stuffed bolster-cases. The faces were really rather dreadful. Gerald had done his best, but even after his best had been done you would hardly have known they were faces, some of them, if they hadn't been in the ...
— The Enchanted Castle • E. Nesbit
... have given most trouble. One German officer who was sent to Austria to help bolster up her army told me that he didn't worry over the desertion of Bohemians singly and in small groups. He expected that. But he did take serious exception to the increasingly popular custom of whole battalions with their officers and equipment passing over to ...
— The Land of Deepening Shadow - Germany-at-War • D. Thomas Curtin
... Then she drew a sword and thrust it at Thord and gave him great wounds, the sword striking his right arm and wounding him on both nipples. So hard did she follow up the stroke that the sword stuck in the bolster. Then Aud went away and to her horse and leapt on to its back, and thereupon rode home. Thord tried to spring up when he got the blow, but could not, because of his loss of blood. Then Osvif awoke and asked what had happened, and Thord told that he ...
— Laxdaela Saga - Translated from the Icelandic • Anonymous
... have been most agreeably disappointed in that regard; but I can affirm that they have made me many friends, and that I have had encouragement enough from fellow craftsmen, from professional critics, and from casual readers at home, in the colonies, and the United States to bolster up the courage of the most timorous man that ever held a pen. As a set-off against all this, I have received one very noble and dignified rebuke from a Contemporary in Fiction, whom the world holds in high honour, who regrets that I am not engaged in creative work—in lieu of this—and ...
— My Contemporaries In Fiction • David Christie Murray
... announcer burbled downstairs, "a word from Mother Kohler herself, about the brand new special B-Complex Irradiated Bolster you can get at your ...
— Supermind • Gordon Randall Garrett
... words, she walks out into Duke Street, Saint James's. Mr Twemlow returning to his sofa, lays down his aching head on its slippery little horsehair bolster, with a strong internal conviction that a painful interview is not the kind of thing to be taken after the dinner pills which are so highly salutary in connexion with the pleasures ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... for thee," said the Earl at last, still looking steadily at him, "because this afternoon came a letter to my hand which thou hadst written to my niece, the Lady Alice. I have it here," said he, thrusting his hand under the bolster, "and have just now finished reading it." Then, after a moment's pause, whilst he opened the parchment and scanned it again, "I find no matter of harm in it, but hereafter write no more such." He spoke entirely ...
— Men of Iron • Ernie Howard Pyle
... the pillows are much rumpled, are they not? But look under the bolster—it is all smooth, and you find none of those wrinkles which are made by the weight of the head and the moving about of the arms. That's not all; look at the bed from the middle to the foot. The sheets being laid carefully, the ...
— The Mystery of Orcival • Emile Gaboriau
... coverlet made off with it. One of them was aware of the theft, and said to the other, "Get up, and run after the man that has stolen our coverlet." "You blockhead," replied his companion, "wait till he comes back to steal the bolster, and we two will master him." And has "Joe" got this one?—A pedant's little boy having died, many friends came to the funeral, on seeing whom he said, "I am ashamed to bring out so small a boy to so ...
— The Book of Noodles - Stories Of Simpletons; Or, Fools And Their Follies • W. A. Clouston
... tick; she will also be careful to sew up any stitch that gives way the moment it is discovered. The bedclothes are laid on, beginning with an under blanket and sheet, which are tucked under the mattress at the bottom. The bolster is then beaten and shaken, and put on, the top of the sheet rolled round it, and the sheet tucked in all round. The pillows and other bedclothes follow, and the counterpane over all, which should fall in graceful folds, and at equal distance from the ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... host for the time being. He always read in bed, and when he wanted to go to sleep he either extinguished his candle by throwing it on the floor in the middle of the room, and taking a shot at it with the pillow, or else quietly placed it, when still lighted, under the bolster. At Badminton, and other country houses, his habits in this respect were so well known that a servant was ordered to sit up in the passage to ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... suspicion and challenge inquiry. There is no doubt that by day Mr Swiveller firmly believed this secret convenience to be a bookcase and nothing more; that he closed his eyes to the bed, resolutely denied the existence of the blankets, and spurned the bolster from his thoughts. No word of its real use, no hint of its nightly service, no allusion to its peculiar properties, had ever passed between him and his most intimate friends. Implicit faith in the deception was the first article of his creed. To be the friend of Swiveller you must reject all circumstantial ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... Little, Small, Wee Bear came to look at his bed, there was the bolster in its place; and the pillow in its place upon the bolster; and upon the pillow was the little old Woman's ugly, dirty head,—which was not in its place, for she had ...
— The Apple Dumpling and Other Stories for Young Boys and Girls • Unknown
... a scheming Boston banker, gets control of an old, reliable trust company, wrecks it to bolster up another business, and disappears. Police and reporters hunt him in vain. As Ashley, a reporter, is "combing" the neighborhood of Newhall's home for evidence, a young girl draws him inside a house, where he finds the banker dead, a pistol beside ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... single moment during the night; and had I been called, should have said that only a few minutes had passed since I had closed my eyes, when, to my horror, all at once I found myself in a state of suffocation, with my head downwards, pressed closely between the bolster and pillow, and my feet in the air. Every moment I thought would be my last. I struggled as violently as my confined position would allow, unable, in my confusion, to conceive where I was, or what had happened. I in vain tried to shout out; when I opened my mouth, ...
— Paddy Finn • W. H. G. Kingston
... sat endeavouring to shake it off. He also tried to bolster himself up by thinking he might perhaps be able to assist his mother to come out from her narrowness, and discover too how warm and glorious the sun shone outside, where people loved and helped each other. Then he rejected ...
— Christopher and Columbus • Countess Elizabeth Von Arnim
... fathers used to call him) against the nation which has close racial and cultural affinity to our own, just as half a century since the same fatal obsession about the "Balance of Power" led us to fight with the Mohammedan in order to bolster up for half a century ...
— Peace Theories and the Balkan War • Norman Angell
... chamber of Mrs. Wilcox, the mother of the little fellow who occupied the wide bed. He lay there in lugubrious state, the rosy face stained with much crying, just showing above the edge of the counterpane; his tangle of yellow curls crushed upon the bolster. Below these was a white mound, stretched along the middle of the bed, just the length of Robby, aged seven and a half, the youngling of the Wilcox family. Two big blue eyes, glazed with tears, wandered from one to another of the two faces gazing at him from opposite sides ...
— Choice Readings for the Home Circle • Anonymous
... Success's name, unless it be the thought, The inward surety, to have carried out A noble purpose to a noble end, 160 Although it be the gallows or the block? 'Tis only Falsehood that doth ever need These outward shows of gain to bolster her. Be it we prove the weaker with our swords; Truth only needs to be for once spoke out, And there's such music in her, such strange rhythm, As makes men's memories her joyous slaves, And clings around the soul, as the sky clings Round the mute earth, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... used looked, I'm told, rather like a big bolster-case blown full of air, and with a light frame-work of hollow brass tubes strapped to it underneath. In this frame-work was a seat for the man, and near him were two circular fans, which he turned round very fast indeed; one of the fans made ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, October 1878, No. 12 • Various
... gave her happiness. She became gloomy before she reached her new house, and never laid her gloom aside. He would have made a struggle for some domestic comfort, had any seemed to be within his reach. As it was, he struggled for domestic propriety, believing that he might so best bolster up his present lot in life. But the task became harder and harder to him, and the gloom became denser and more dense. He did not think of her unhappiness, but of his own; as she did not think of his tedium, but of hers. "If this be domestic ...
— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope
... with his old mother's principles. His income, as he observed to his widowed sister and solitary companion almost daily in their privacy, was respectable. The descent from an altitude of fifty to five per cent. cannot but be felt. Nevertheless it was a comforting midnight bolster reflection for a man, turning over to the other side between a dream and a wink, that he was making no bad debts, and one must pay to be addressed as esquire. Once an esquire, you are off the ground in England and on the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... dollar and limited the growth in the monetary base by law to the growth in reserves. Inflation fell sharply in subsequent years. In 1995, the Mexican peso crisis produced capital flight, the loss of banking system deposits, and a severe, but short-lived, recession; a series of reforms to bolster the domestic banking system followed. Real GDP growth recovered strongly, reaching 8% in 1997. In 1998, international financial turmoil caused by Russia's problems and increasing investor anxiety over Brazil produced the highest domestic ...
— The 2002 CIA World Factbook • US Government
... what a sense of relief came over the Manchu court when once it could be said definitively that the great rebellion was over. On the other hand, there were not wanting some foreigners who would have liked to see the Manchus overthrown, and who severely blamed the British Government for helping to bolster up a dynasty already in the last stage of decay; for it seems to be an indubitable fact that but for British intervention, the rebellion would ultimately have ...
— China and the Manchus • Herbert A. Giles
... the relief were sympathy for Mike, gratitude to him for having given himself up so promptly, and a curiously dazed sensation, as if somebody had been hitting him on the head with a bolster. ...
— Psmith in the City • P. G. Wodehouse
... neither said a word, but sat there silent, with clasped hands. The bitterness of disappointment wore away slowly, and as the uneventful hours left them in the same helpless condition, they fell again into fitful conversation, merely to thus bolster up courage, and lead their minds to other thoughts. It was maddening to sit there motionless and stare off across the desolate water, seeing nothing but those white-crested surges sweeping constantly toward them, and to feel the continuous ...
— The Case and The Girl • Randall Parrish
... a peculiar growling sound, and, to the astonishment of mother and son, he caught up the pillow and gave Vince a bang with it which knocked him back on the bolster. "Cold pudding!" he cried. "Here! try a shoe-sole to-morrow night, and see if you can digest that. Come to bed, my dear. Look here, Vince: tell Mr Deane to give you some lessons in natural history, and then ...
— Cormorant Crag - A Tale of the Smuggling Days • George Manville Fenn
... displease him? Some word would be wrongly spoken, some garment would be ill-folded, some awkward movement would tell the tale,—and then he would feel that he had done wrong to marry the Quaker's daughter. All the virtues under the sun cannot bolster up love so as to stand the battery of one touch of disgust. Tell my father that, and tell him that I have done well. Then you can tell him also, that, if God shall so choose it, I shall live a strong old maid for many years, to think night ...
— Marion Fay • Anthony Trollope
... on his shoulders. Fortunately she was light. Still, it was no easy matter to get her limp form into his arms. With a desperate effort he got her on his knee; with an inelegant hitch he sent her across his shoulder, where she hung like a limp bolster, as he made for the fence. May and Tottie stood there rooted to the earth in horror. To walk on uneven ground with such a burden was bad enough, but Phil had to run. How he did it he never could tell, but he reached the fence at last, and shot Miss Lillycrop over into the arms of her ...
— Post Haste • R.M. Ballantyne
... uneasiness," she added, slapping the bolster. "You didn't know what to think, now ...
— Green Fancy • George Barr McCutcheon
... money, and are quite independent. You would be surprised at their impertinence. I kicked one of them in the hotel yesterday, and he asked me what the devil I was doing, so I knocked the insolent scoundrel down. He says that he will sue me, but I cannot believe that the law is so servile as to bolster up a black man against ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... to take away. Spotless weather and a dimpled bay adorned this lost seigniory. It was better than any dukedom in France to these first exiled Acadians. Pierre Doucett's widow and another bereaved woman knelt to cry once more over the trench by the powder-house. Her baby, hid in a case like a bolster, hung across her shoulder. Lady Dorinda's belongings, numbered among the goods of the household, were also placed near the gate. She sat within the hall, wrapped for her journey, composed and silent. For when the evil day actually overtook Lady Dorinda, she ...
— The Lady of Fort St. John • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... system of measurements (used principally on criminals) which bears his name. It mattered not that Bertillon had never appeared in a handwriting case before, or that his skill in this line was unknown. He was a man of science, of great renown in other lines, and the government relied on these facts to bolster up its claim that Dreyfus wrote the incriminating papers Bertillon reported in favor of the government's contention, and it was an easy matter to get some alleged experts—weak as to will and ability—and ...
— Disputed Handwriting • Jerome B. Lavay
... the other denizens of the raft. The tow heads of the six little Cavendishes rose promptly from a long bolster in the smaller of the two shanties, and as promptly six little Cavendishes, each draped in a single non-committal garment, apparently cut by one pattern and not at all according to the wearer's years or length of limb, tumbled forth ...
— The Prodigal Judge • Vaughan Kester
... said Lady Bernard, "this is a serious matter you suggest. The man may be honest, and yet it may be of no use trying to help him. I don't want to bolster him up for a few months in order to see my money go after his. That's not what I've got to do with it. No doubt I could lose as much as you mention, without being crippled by it, for I hope it's no disgrace in me to be rich, as it's none in you to be poor; but I ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... eight. They were left orphans, and were obliged to take care of themselves. Many of the articles of furniture left them had been disposed of to supply the calls of urgent want. In the room was an old four post bedstead, with curtains almost worn out, one mattrass with two small pillows, a bolster that was almost flat, three old blankets and cotton sheets, of coarse description, three rush-bottom chairs, an old claw table, a chest of draws, with a few battered band-boxes on the top of it, a miserable bit of carpet before the fire-place, a wooden box for coals, a little ...
— The Pearl Box - Containing One Hundred Beautiful Stories for Young People • "A Pastor"
... flock-beds, chests, guns, pistols, swords, drums, saddles, and bridles. The chamber contains every variety of article in use in the household. One of the rooms in the house of Thomas Osborn contained a bedstead with feather-bed, bolster, rug, blanket and sheets, two long table cloths, twenty-eight napkins, four towels, one chest, two warming pans, four brass candle-sticks, four guns, a carbine and belt, a silver beaker, three tumblers, twelve spoons, one sock and one ...
— Patrician and Plebeian - Or The Origin and Development of the Social Classes of the Old Dominion • Thomas J. Wertenbaker
... in the right direction; and the popular expression of them has always something hearty and human about it. I shall not therefore bring any fine or fastidious criticism, whether literary or musical, to bear upon the little boys who drag about a bolster and ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... removed sooner than anyone had anticipated. The next trip that the captain made was for his hammock (he always slept in one), which was a long unwieldy bundle, like a gigantic bolster. He carried it into the parlour on his shoulder, ...
— The Lighthouse • Robert Ballantyne
... issued in Brussels, a few days after the enemy had entered the town, the French official papers had declared that "The French armies, being thrown on the defensive, would not be able to help Belgium in an offensive movement." I need not recall how, his name having been used at Liege to bolster up this false report, M. Max, the burgomaster of Brussels, found an opportunity of contradicting it publicly and, at the same time, of discrediting ...
— Through the Iron Bars • Emile Cammaerts
... the men who saw the evils and who tried to remedy them attempted to work in two wholly different ways, and the great majority of them in a way that offered little promise of real betterment. They tried (by the Sherman law method) to bolster up an individualism already proved to be both futile and mischievous; to remedy by more individualism the concentration that was the inevitable result of the already existing individualism. They saw the evil done by the big combinations, and sought to remedy it by destroying ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... events he carried his little hatchet with him, and it pulled on his belt so that he had to be continually hoisting it up and tightening his belt so that before the expeditionary forces had gone far he looked not unlike a bolster tied in the middle. ...
— Roy Blakeley in the Haunted Camp • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... soliciting this assistance! The victorious bearer away of University prizes, now bent down to the humiliating desire of keeping a day school, for a morsel of bread! The man, whose genius has scarcely been surpassed, proposing to "attend" scholars, "children or adults," and to bolster up his head, at night, in "cheap lodgings!" Oppressed with debt, contracted by expending that money on opium, which should have been paid to his impoverished friend; and this, at a moment, when, for the preceding ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... all had morals. My poems were about the crystal snow, and the ocean blue, and sweet spring, and fleecy clouds; when I tried to drag in a moral it kicked so that the music of my lines went out in a groan. So I had a sweet revenge when Lizzie, one day, volunteered to bolster up the eloquence of Mr. Jones, the principal, who was lecturing the class for bad behavior, by comparing the bad boy in the schoolroom to the rotten apple that spoils the barrelful. The groans, coughs, a-hem's, feet shufflings, and paper pellets that filled the ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... bit of a room, rude board floor unswept, 2 chairs, unpainted white pine table—void the furniture! Had a good firm bed, solid as a rock, & you could have brained an ox with the bolster. ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... of proof through gross carelessness. All he has to do is to solve a problem and to place his answer before a magistrate, and then a judge and jury to decide whether he's right or wrong. No one but a fool would attempt to bolster up a wrong answer. In this case, too, you must remember that there are finger-prints. They cannot lie. If we get the right man—Grell or any one else—there will be ...
— The Grell Mystery • Frank Froest
... process in Saul's mind, which had begun to sap his confidence that Jesus was a blasphemer, and himself a warrior for God. That view is largely adopted in order to get rid of the supernatural, and to bolster up the assumption that there are no sudden conversions; but the narrative of Luke, and Paul's own references, are dead against it. At one moment he is 'yet breathing threatening and slaughter against the disciples of the Lord,' and in almost the next ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... be a novelty. Amiable and good-looking. That's the kind, my friend, that always fall soft. No matter what they do, always someone to bolster them up, to lend them money, and ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath
... measures the nation's sin. Flagrant injustice and corruption in high places is possible only when society as a whole is corrupt or indifferent to corruption. This prejudging of a case from hatred of the accused as a destroyer of sacred tradition, and this hunting for evidence to bolster up a foregone conclusion, are preeminently the vices of ecclesiastical tribunals and not of Jewish Sanhedrim or Papal Inquisition only. Where judges look for witnesses for the prosecution, plenty will be found, ready to curry favour by lies. The eagerness to find witnesses against Jesus ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... also other objects which must not be forgotten, and above all a mattress, bolster, and counterpane, as the berths are generally unfurnished. These can be purchased very ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... Every fit workman in the United States will be possessed by the ambition to become a member of the favored unions. The Oligarchy will encourage such ambition and the consequent competition. Thus will the strong men, who might else be revolutionists, be won away and their strength used to bolster the Oligarchy. ...
— The Iron Heel • Jack London
... simply assumed he is devoted to me, because all respectable people are devoted to their wives. I can assure you, mon ami, he would be a veritable Othello, if there were any scandal, and would infinitely prefer the bolster to the divorce-court. He would have us followed and torn ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... vowed a vow that I will have him to my husband no more than if he were a crow's son and not a king's; and yet will the thing come to pass, but and if thou standest in the way thereof, and goest against him with an army, and takest me away withal; for verily with no king would I rather bide on bolster ...
— The Story of the Volsungs, (Volsunga Saga) - With Excerpts from the Poetic Edda • Anonymous
... our Grecian and Indian, African and Russian fable-makers have not saddled the animals with a few more faults than they possess—just to bolster up our pride in human nature—I sometimes wonder; but the result has been beneficial. The human rascals and rogues see themselves clearly reflected in the doings of the jackals, foxes, and wolves and may get some little distaste for lying, ...
— The Talking Beasts • Various
... the porter sleeping in his arm-chair: she glides up the staircase, and lies down between the king and queen in their bed-royal: this very night I daresay she will perch upon poor old Goody Twoshoes' meagre bolster, and whisper, "Will the gentleman and those ladies ask me again! No, no; they will forget poor old Twoshoes." Goody! For shame of yourself! Do not be cynical. Do not mistrust your fellow-creatures. What? Has the Christmas morning dawned ...
— Some Roundabout Papers • W. M. Thackeray
... when Madame had paid her final visit to our rooms, and we were safe, did Eleanor creep out of bed and noiselessly lower the upper sash of our window to please Matilda; whilst I sat (sometimes for an hour or more) upon the bolster of the bed in which Matilda and I slept ...
— Six to Sixteen - A Story for Girls • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... clear to himself and his readers, and whom we should mistrust as having an ulterior aim on which he is more intent than on the furthering of our better understanding. We want to know who is doing his best to help us, and who is only trying to make us help him, or to bolster up the system in which his interests are vested. There is nothing that will throw more light upon these points than the way in which a man behaves towards those who have worked in the same field with himself, and, again, than his ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... general collections of voyages and travels. The remainder of this introduction is from the work of Mr J. R, Forster, extracted partly from Ramusio, and partly consisting of an ingenious attempt to explain and bolster up the more than dubious production of Marcolini: But these observations are here considerably abridged; as an extended, grave, and critical commentary on a narrative we believe fabulous, might appear incongruous, though it did not seem proper ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 1 • Robert Kerr
... same bed with the French teacher, who disturbs him for an hour every night in papering and filleting his hair, and stinks worse than a carrion with his rancid pomatums, when he lays his head beside him on the bolster." ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... them lines when I wasn't more'n eleven, and I've never forgot 'em. Next you spreads the sheet just so, and you must be careful not to leave any creases in it. Then you beat up the bolster and pillow, and lay them like that," suiting the action to the words. "Then comes the top sheet, and the blankets. You must tuck each one in at the bottom first, and then at the sides, and leave the top end loose, so that ...
— The Carroll Girls • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... but any that has been used externally has decayed. The abaci of the Early English capitals in the main arcade are of Barnack stone, which is harder than clunch and so more suitable for bearing a weight. The Norman stonework was cut with an axe, the Transition with a chisel. The Early English is bolster-tooled; the Decorated ashlar (including the bays on the south side of the nave) is claw-tooled, the mouldings being scraped; the ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Saint Albans - With an Account of the Fabric & a Short History of the Abbey • Thomas Perkins
... ground a figure rose on to its hands and knees. I pointed my revolver at it, and pulled the trigger. The figure collapsed, and rolled forwards till its progress was arrested by a rocky projection, over which it finally lay, doubled up like a bolster. As it fell my heart gave a sickening leap, either of excitement or ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... exceedingly unpopular, The last acts of the party left a violent resentment. In 1801, after it was known that there would be a Republican President with a large majority in both houses of Congress, the Federalists resolved to bolster up their power in the third department of government. A Judiciary Act was therefore passed, creating new courts, new judges, and new salaried officials. All the resulting appointments were made by Adams, and duly confirmed by the Senate, thus anticipating by ...
— Formation of the Union • Albert Bushnell Hart
... door, and saw a bare feather-bed and bolster, the usual materiel in an unoccupied college chamber. "Seeing's ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... associate General Washington with their principles. But that may have happened in this case which has been often seen in ordinary cases, that, by often repeating an untruth, men come to believe it themselves. It is a mere artifice in this party, to bolster themselves up on the revered name of that first of our worthies. If I have dwelt longer on this subject than was necessary, it proves the estimation in which I hold your ultimate opinions, and my desire of placing the subject truly before them. ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... numberless evil odours. A bed there was in the darkest corner of the room on the floor. It looked as though composed of the refuse raked from a pig-sty, and thrust into a sack which had been used for the conveyance of dust and bones. Bolster or pillow it had none, but against the wall, where the bed's head was supposed to be, were three or four logs of rough wood piled together, over which was laid a faded cloak crumpled into a heap. Such was the only couch which the unhappy sufferer had ...
— Amos Huntingdon • T.P. Wilson
... Sarah, sensibly enough, wants to get it over before dinner, so I've promised to come over right after lunch and sit on your porch so I'll be here no matter how early Hugh gets home. You and I have to bolster up the weak spots ...
— Rosemary • Josephine Lawrence
... agreed on all of life's themes, so existence for us never resolves itself into a dull, neutral gray. He is a Baptist and I am a Vegetarian. Occasionally he refers to me as "callow," and we have daily resorts to logic to prove prejudices, and history is searched to bolster the preconceived, but on the following important points we stand ...
— Love, Life & Work • Elbert Hubbard
... ever to enlarge the stock of things humorous, vivacious, or rousing, if thoughts are to be kept young and eyes bright in this age of restraint. What would Yuletide be without the olden times to bolster it? What would the Christmas numbers do without the pictures of our great-grandparents' coaches snow-bound, of huntsmen of the eighteenth century, of jesters at the courts of the barons? What should we do without the 'Vicar ...
— The Treasury of Ancient Egypt - Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology • Arthur E. P. B. Weigall
... pain in it. We hear Romeo wish to be "a glove upon that hand that he might touch that cheek:" three minutes afterwards he beholds Romeo refresh himself with a pot of porter. We see the Moor, who "loved not wisely, but too well," smother Desdemona with the nuptial bolster: he sees them sit down to a hot supper. We always think of the actor as on the stage: he always thinks of us as in the boxes. In justice to the poets of the present day, it may be noticed that they have improved on their brethren ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... even better argument to bolster the case he was developing. "Christmas mail is to and from Christians, isn't it? Sure! Egypt is a Moslem country. Moslems don't send Christmas cards or presents, and they don't get them, either. The Christians in Egypt are Coptic—anyway, they don't celebrate Christmas the ...
— The Egyptian Cat Mystery • Harold Leland Goodwin
... shouts of congratulation, and the embraces of the crowd. I perceived an elderly gentleman come forward; I knew it was my father, and I threw myself into his arms. I awoke, and found myself rolling on the floor, embracing the bolster with all my might. Such was the vivid impression of this dream, that I could not turn my thoughts away from it, and at last I considered that it was a divine interposition. All my scruples vanished, ...
— Japhet, In Search Of A Father • Frederick Marryat
... but peace and quiet: why hast thou disturbed her rest? How with silly dreams of freedom dost thou dare to fill thy breast? If thou rise against thy rulers, Hellas, thou must fight alone, E'en the bolster of a Sultan, loyal ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... his head on one side on the bolster with contracted eyebrows and dilated nostrils. His pale little face had become whiter than the sheets; and there escaped from his larynx a wheezing caused by his oppressed breathing, which became gradually shorter, dryer, and more metallic. His cough resembled the noise ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... be that he had an equally accurate knowledge of the state of my father's health. That would account for what Cumming says as to his offer to bolster up the bank for a time, and for a retraction of that offer within a few ...
— A Girl of the Commune • George Alfred Henty
... interstice left open between the two flaps permitted a fall view of the interior. A number of large boxes and articles of household use filled up the bed of the waggon. Over these had been thrown some coarse garments, and pieces of bed-clothing—blankets, counterpanes, and a bolster or two. Near the forward end, a chest of large dimensions stood higher than the rest; and upon the lid of this a piece of tallow-candle was burning, in the neck of an old bottle! Between the flame of the candle and my eyes a figure ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... Harrison, presented a striking contrast to the condition the "old men" had been satisfied with in their "yoong daies," "Our fathers (yea, and we ourselves also) have lien full oft upon straw pallets, on rough mats * * * and a good round log under their heads instead of a bolster or pillow. If it were so that our fathers, or the good man of the house, had within eleven years after his marriage purchased a matteras or flockebed, and thereto a sacke of chaffe to rest his head upon, he thought himself to be as well lodged ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... Spain. It was disheartening to find his old publishers dubious about undertaking the republication, and for a time the work went hard. "I am growing a sad laggard in literature," he wrote to his nephew, "and need some one to bolster me up occasionally. I am too ready to do anything else rather than write." For more than a year his time was largely devoted to overseeing an enlargement of the cottage, and a renovation of the grounds, at Sunnyside. At last he got it all ...
— Washington Irving • Henry W. Boynton
... distressing part of the picture is only, "My lord, I fear, has forgot Britain." Her readiness to pardon Iachimo's false imputations and his designs against herself, is a good lesson to prudes; and may shew that where there is a real attachment to virtue, it has no need to bolster itself up with an outrageous or affected antipathy to vice. The scene in which Pisanio gives Imogen his master's letter, accusing-her of incontinency on the treacherous suggestions of Iachimo, is as touching as it is ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... honest gentleman, who, we were told, was then drinking below. Though we could have very well dispensed with his company, we were glad to submit to this disposition, as there was not another bed empty in the house; and accordingly went to rest, after having secured our baggage under the bolster. About two or three o'clock in the morning I was awaked out of a very profound sleep by a dreadful noise in the chamber, which did not fail to throw me into an agony of consternation, when I heard these words pronounced with a terrible voice: "Blood and wounds! run the halbert into ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett
... their broken fortunes, while vainly hoping for a reestablishment of the imperial regimen, as they pinned their fate to this last desperate conflict. Among these, none had been prouder, none more loyal to the Spanish Sovereign, and none more liberal in dispensing its great wealth to bolster up a hopeless cause than the ancient and aristocratic family at whose head stood Don Ignacio Jose Marquez de Rincon, distinguished member of the Cabildo, and most loyal subject of his imperial majesty, King Ferdinand VII. ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... and America. The rage excited in otherwise rational human beings by the dropping of the "u" in "favor," or the final "me" in "program," is one of the strangest of psychological phenomena. The baselessness of the reasonings used to bolster up the British clinging to superfluous letters is very ably shown in Professor Matthews' Americanisms and Briticisms. Let me only put in a plea for the retention of such abnormal spellings as serve to distinguish two words of the same sound. For instance, ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... after he died and confessed, we found a paper of imitation diamonds in his pocket that Larch had ready to use in deceiving his wife if she had agreed to sign the papers he wanted her to, so he could bolster ...
— The Diamond Cross Mystery - Being a Somewhat Different Detective Story • Chester K. Steele
... possibilities, and it's just our part to draw them out. It's the divine foolishness of women's love that serves their need, that makes them feel after better things. No woman ever won a man by despising him. He may be inferior—he is—but he wants real love to bolster him up. I guess the dear Lord thought of that when He ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell
... badly in the country, and the Noncons. and Leaguers in the House ought to have the game in their hands." He wished "they would have the pluck to tell Mr. Gladstone that they will do nothing to bolster up a Ministry which will not give satisfactory assurances upon English education;" and he wanted Mr. George Dixon to go on with his resolution in favour of universal free schools and carry it to ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... on a couch consisting of a frame some three and a half or four feet wide, and some six or six and a half feet long. On this frame or bedstead we place two or three mattresses and a feather bed, a pair of sheets, a counterpane, a pillow and bolster; we then tuck in the edges of these coverings, the person for whom the bed is intended slips in between the sheets, and if his health is good and his conscience clear, and he has not been drinking too much green tea or strong coffee, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various
... is always carried to inordinate lengths. Having abandoned the mediaeval concept of woman as temptress the men of the Nordic race have revived the correlative mediaeval concept of woman as angel and to bolster up that character they have create for her a vast and growing mass of immunities culminating of late years in the astounding doctrine that, under the contract of marriage, all the duties lie upon the man and all the privileges appertain to the ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... branches of a tree, There my bed-fellows and companions were, My man, my horse, a bull, four cows, two steer: But yet for all this most confused rout, We had no bed-staves, yet we fell not out. Thus nature, like an ancient free upholster, Did furnish us with bedstead, bed, and bolster; And the kind skies, (for which high heaven be thanked,) Allowed us a large covering and a blanket; Auroras face 'gan light our lodging dark, We arose and mounted, with the mounting lark, Through plashes, puddles, thick, ...
— The Pennyles Pilgrimage - Or The Money-lesse Perambulation of John Taylor • John Taylor
... Jephson who wouldn't exchange my button-stick for a Field-Marshal's baton—Jephson brought in my morning tea and laid across the foot of my bed a bundle of newspapers as thick as a bolster. ...
— Foe-Farrell • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... shivering sob was the answer. Frances went in, and closed the door. Nola was lying face downward on her pillow, like a child, and Frances found on putting out her comforting hand that the fickle little lady's bolster was wet with tears. She sat on the bedside and tried gently to turn Nola's face toward her. That brought on a storm of tears and moanings, and agonized burrowing of her face ...
— The Rustler of Wind River • G. W. Ogden
... he gave her such a remembrance in the guts, that she began to roar loud enough to be heard all over the house. Adams then, seizing her by the hair (for her double-clout had fallen off in the scuffle), pinned her head down to the bolster, and then both called for lights together. The Lady Booby, who was as wakeful as any of her guests, had been alarmed from the beginning; and, being a woman of a bold spirit, she slipt on a nightgown, petticoat, and slippers, and taking a candle, ...
— Joseph Andrews, Vol. 2 • Henry Fielding
... soldiers, was very well known to the British General. Some of the most sanguinary battles of the Revolution were those in which the combatants on both sides were chiefly natives of the soil, upon which a portion of them but too freely shed their blood in a sincere desire to bolster up that foreign tyranny that mocked the generous valor ...
— The Life of Francis Marion • William Gilmore Simms
... raised it to light a cigarette, and let it fall back immediately. This attitude is particularly favourable to hallucinations. It is sometimes enough to lie down with one's head thrown back to see and to hear imaginary shapes and sounds. That is why I advise you, my child, to sleep with a bolster ...
— A Mummer's Tale • Anatole France
... sickness collects—jostle death about, in short. It was a ghastly thing to enter that attic, where the crumbs of bread from her last meal were still lying in the folds of the bedclothes. I threw the coverlid up over the bolster, like a sheet over the ghost of a ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... Absolute is announced. Cries Lydia: "Here, my dear Lucy, hide these books. Quick, quick. Fling 'Peregrine Pickle' under the toilet; throw 'Roderick Random' into the closet; put 'The Innocent Adultery' into 'The Whole Duty of Man;' thrust 'Lord Aimworth' under the sofa; cram 'Ovid' behind the bolster; there, put 'The Man of Feeling' into your pocket—so, so—now lay 'Mrs. Chapone' in sight, and leave 'Fordyce's Sermons' ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... many things over in his mind to bolster up this conclusion, he was still not at ease. Against his will he recalled certain unpleasant things which had happened within his knowledge under sudden and unexpected stress of emotion. He tried to laugh the absurd stuff out of his thoughts and to the end that he might add a new ...
— The Alaskan • James Oliver Curwood
... was in the game in an effort to bolster up the offense, not because he has anything as an outfielder on Bodie, whose place he took in the batting order, but the switch did not work out just as planned. Fournier made no better use of his stick than the rest of the Sox, ...
— News Writing - The Gathering , Handling and Writing of News Stories • M. Lyle Spencer
... follow its infraction, not to external penalties. Ours is not free; our faith in its natural virtues is not quite so firm as we assert; we are always meddling with it and worrying over its health and anxiously trying to bolster it up. We are not by any means willing to let it rest on the sanction of its own natural or divine laws. Our feeling is, as James Hinton used ironically to express it: "Poor God with no one ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... strange dancer whose acquaintance we made at the wedding in Endringen. He went out to the stable, and presently returned with the white horse already saddled. And as he was fastening his valise to the bolster, a fine, large wolf-hound began jumping up at him ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... Lou cried with her head buried in Aunt Cordelia's new bolster sham; for how could she confess to Hattie and to Rosalie that it was a parlour and ...
— Emmy Lou - Her Book and Heart • George Madden Martin
... (exactly a month since the first shock), the earth had a shivering fit between one and two; but so slight that, if no more had followed, I don't believe it would have been noticed. I had been awake, and had scarce dozed again—on a sudden I felt my bolster lift up my head; I thought somebody was getting from under my bed, but soon found it was a strong earthquake, that lasted near half a minute, with a violent vibration and great roaring. I rang my bell; my servant came in, frightened out of his senses: in an instant ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole
... of the ropes at the same time. Together they dropped down to the hay—and then something happened! The two older Bobbsey children jumped too near the edge of the mow, where the hay was piled in a big roll, like a great feather bed bolster, over the top rail. And Bert and Nan, in their drop, caused a big pile of hay—almost a wagonload—to slip from the mow and down to the barn floor. And directly underneath ...
— Bobbsey Twins in Washington • Laura Lee Hope
... give me, nauseated by all its luxuries. Was it wonderful that I allowed myself to be lured into this affair? It promised some excitement, a certain novelty, difficulties in a path that I had—alas!—ever found all too smooth—for Chatellerault had made your reputed coldness the chief bolster of his opinion ...
— Bardelys the Magnificent • Rafael Sabatini
... resorted to by Haeckel and a few others in their attempts to bolster up a theory which has broken so signally on the rock of heredity. Principal among these is the reference to unlimited time. It is asserted that, after all, such minute differences might, in the course ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner
... sensation, for it was entirely new to me; but in vain I tried to dispel it. I peered beyond the curtain of my bed, but could distinguish no objects in the darkness. Trying to gather up my thoughts, I soon reflected that the door was locked, and that I had put the key under my bolster. I felt for it, and found it where I had placed it. I said to myself that I had probably had some ugly dream, and had waked with a vague impression of it still on my mind. Reasoning thus, I arranged myself comfortably for another nap. I am habitually a good ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various |
