"Clapper" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... times, I wonder how we ever had the nerve to imitate insanity the way we did. Here I am, rubbing noses with thirty, outgrowing my belts every year, and sitting eight hours at a desk without exploding. Am I the chap who climbed up sixty feet of waterspout a few short years ago and persuaded the clapper of the college bell to come down with me? Here you are all worn smooth on top and proprietor of an overflow meeting in a nursery. In about ten minutes you'll be tearing your coat-tails out of my hands because you have to go back home before the eldest kid asks for a story. ...
— At Good Old Siwash • George Fitch
... Savoy; For those who live content with honest state, They're public pests; knock we 'em on the pate! They set a vile example! Quick—arrest That Fool, who ruled and failed to line his nest. Just hit a bell, you'll see the clapper shake— Meddle with Priests, you'll find the barrack wake— Ah! Princes know the People's a tight boot, March 'em sometimes to be shot and to shoot, Then they'll wear easier. So let them preach The ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... hurry and bustle that had passed, of which he had now some curiosity to know the particulars. He therefore applied to his bell, which he rung at least twenty times without any effect: for my landlady was in such high mirth with her company, that no clapper could be heard there but her own; and the drawer and chambermaid, who were sitting together in the kitchen (for neither durst he sit up nor she lie in bed alone), the more they heard the bell ring the more they were frightened, and as it were nailed ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... falling out by a coat of hairs on the upper part of the style. By the time all the pollen has been removed by visitors, however, and the stamens which matured early have withered, the pistil has grown longer, until it looks like the clapper in a bell; the stigma at its top has separated into three horizontal lobes which, being sticky on the under side, a pollen-laden insect on entering the bell must certainly brush against them and render them fertile. But bumblebees, ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... of a bell to the clapper came Pierre Radisson on the third day, well pleased with what he had done and alert to keep two of us outside the fort in spite of Ben's urgings to bring the French ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut
... harmony; the devastation seems organized," said the colonel, pulling the chain of a bell; but the bell was without a clapper. ...
— Adieu • Honore de Balzac
... hundred feet high, which vibrated with every stroke of the great bell hanging midway between his airy perch and the ground. He was sixty years of age, and had white hair, but he was as strong as younger men, and could swing the clapper against the side of the great bell with a boom that could be heard across rivers, and far into the peaceful country, on quiet nights. His eyes were so sharp, that, without the aid of a glass, he could read ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... French cavalry—Burgundy, and Bern, and the Chevalier of St. George flying like the rest. "What is your clamor about Oudenarde?" says another bell (Bob Major THIS one must be). "Be still, thou querulous old clapper! I can see over to Hougoumont and St. John. And about forty-five years since, I rang all through one Sunday in June, when there was such a battle going on in the corn-fields there, as none of you others ever heard tolled ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... in the one same man! you will readily comprehend what a cat-and-dog couple they made! what strife! what clapper-clawing! Oh, the fine dialogue for Lucian or Saint-Evremond to write, between the two Tartarins—Quixote-Tartarin and Sancho-Tartarin! Quixote-Tartarin firing up on the stories of Gustave Aimard, and shouting: "Up and at 'em!" and Sancho-Tartarin thinking ...
— Tartarin of Tarascon • Alphonse Daudet
... doubt! The lamp was beating back and forth like the clapper of a great bell. Where was he? Billy sought a window. He found some little round, glass-covered holes near the low ceiling at one side of the room. It was only at the greatest risk to life and limb that he managed to crawl on all fours to ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... rival heroes came face to face, each made prodigious start, in the style of a veteran stage champion. Then did they regard each other for a moment with the bitter aspect of two furious ram-cats on the point of a clapper-clawing. Then did they throw themselves into one attitude, then into another, striking their swords on the ground, first on the right side, then on the left; at last at it they went, with incredible ferocity. Words cannot tell the prodigies of strength ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... much noise and confusion, they were seated at the antique mahogany, with the dent near one edge where a Yankee cavalryman had rested his spurred foot too carelessly once upon a time. It was then observed that Hen, having silenced her great clapper, was unobtrusively gone from the midst. The circumstance proved of interest to the ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... a man with tongue of wood Who essayed to sing, And in truth it was lamentable. But there was one who heard The clip-clapper of this tongue of wood And knew what the man Wished to sing, And with that ...
— War is Kind • Stephen Crane
... the forecastle struck Eight Bells, and the men were piped down to dinner; the boatswain's mates sounding their shrill calls through the ship as the echo of the last stroke of the clapper on the side of the ship's bell ceased to reverberate in the noisy air, which was filled with the creaking of the blocks aloft and the hum of the wind, the sea breaking against our counter alongside in a sullen fashion as if old Neptune were disappointed at letting us ...
— Young Tom Bowling - The Boys of the British Navy • J.C. Hutcheson
... once by thrusting his left hand in its mouth and holding the clapper; but the little peal he had rung had done its work of setting all the mules in motion, bringing them all up close to the ringer, who found himself in the midst of a knot of squealing and kicking brutes, who diversified ...
— The Peril Finders • George Manville Fenn
... impossible to describe. He knows the brutes are in his rear, approaching, and a feeling like an electric current runs at this exciting moment from one to the other; every man's finger is on his trigger, his pulse throbs at a feverish pace, his heart beats like the clapper of a bell in full swing—all, to take a surer aim, kneel, or place their back against the nearest tree, and each offers up a prayer for aid to his patron saint. This nervous moment has sometimes such an effect upon ardent and excitable imaginations, that I have observed many young sportsmen ...
— Le Morvan, [A District of France,] Its Wild Sports, Vineyards and Forests; with Legends, Antiquities, Rural and Local Sketches • Henri de Crignelle
... and, glancing upward, I saw that the figure which I had already observed lolling in so odd an attitude over the poop rail was that of a dead man, grasping in his right hand the short length of rope attached to the clapper of the bell. His attitude was such that, as the ship swung upon the swell, his body moved just sufficiently to cause the clapper ...
— Overdue - The Story of a Missing Ship • Harry Collingwood
... messmate, minus trumpet, spoke, Informally intrepid,—"Sink her, and be damned!"* [* Historic.] Enough. Gathering way, the iron-clad rammed. The frigate, heeling over, on the wave threw a dusk. Not sharing in the slant, the clapper of her bell The fixed metal struck—uinvoked struck the knell Of the Cumberland stillettoed by the Merrimac's tusk; While, broken in the wound underneath the gun-deck, Like a sword-fish's blade in leviathan waylaid, The tusk was left infixed in the fast-foundering wreck. There, ...
— John Marr and Other Poems • Herman Melville
... open your folded wrapper Where two twin turtle-doves dwell; O Cuckoo-pint! toll me the purple clapper, That hangs in ...
— The Posy Ring - A Book of Verse for Children • Various
... Ah, Philip felt a twinge then. "Touche!" chortled some unseen imp who plied a venomous rapier. Thank goodness, a sailor was standing by the ship's bell, with his hand on a bit of cord tied to the clapper. It would soon be seven o'clock. Even the companionship of the uncouth skipper was preferable to this ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... you not to be, I say; and either, Sedgett, you does woman's work, gossipin' about like a cracked bell-clapper, or men's the biggest gossips of all, which I believe; for there's no beating you at your work, and one can't wish ill to you, knowing what ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... hour at least; it drones along, a rapid flow of words in a high nasal key; from time to time, when the inattentive Spirits are not listening, it is accompanied by a clapping of dry palms, or by harsh sounds from a kind of wooden clapper made of two discs of mandragora root; it is an uninterrupted stream of prayer; its flow never ceases, and the quavering continues without stopping, like the bleating of an old nanny-goat ...
— Madame Chrysantheme • Pierre Loti
... upper, then through the closes of the lower town, followed by the bellman who had been appointed crier upon his disappearance. At the proper stations, Duncan blew a rousing pibroch, after which the bellman, who, for the dignity of his calling, insisted on a prelude of three strokes of his clapper, proclaimed aloud that Malcolm, Marquis of Lossie, desired the presence of each and every of his tenants in the royal burgh of Portlossie, Newton and Seaton, in the town hall of the same, at seven of the clock upon ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... the top, and as he paused for a moment to look round him he saw another headless man cowering in the very bell itself, waiting till Hans should seize the bell-pull in order to strike him a blow with the clapper, which would soon have ...
— The Violet Fairy Book • Various
... February contains a gruesome moral tale by Ricardo Santiago, entitled "The Bell of Huesca". It is proper to remark here, that an important sentence was omitted at the top of page 3. The passage should read "'Sire, thy bell has no clapper!' 'Thy head shall be the clapper'; said the king, and he sent him to the block" etc. Whatever may be said of the aptness of the allegory, it is evident that Mr. Santiago possesses the foundations of a pure and forcible prose style, and a commendable ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... then he went out again; next she took some beef-tea, and towards five o'clock, as the day drew in, the children coming back from school, dragging their wooden shoes along the pavement, knocked the clapper of the shutters with their rulers one after ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... This bell is never tolled but upon the death of some of the Royal Family, of the Bishop of London, or of the Dean of St. Paul's, and then the clapper is moved and not the bell. In the stillness of night, the indication of the hour by the deeply sonorous tone of this bell may be heard, not merely over the immense Metropolis, but in distant parts of the country. The fact is well known of the sentry at Windsor, who, when accused ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... wouldna. I gie yo fair noatice. Soa theer's not enough for t' lad to do, Mr. Ancrum, he thinks? Perhaps he'll tak th' place an try? I'd not gie him as mich wage as ud fill his stomach i' th' week—noa, I'd not, not if yo wor to ask me—a bletherin windy chap as iver I saw. I'd as soon hear a bird-clapper preach as him—theer'd be more sense an less noise! An they're findin it out down theer—we'st see th' ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... after a strange maner a wooing, in comes by chance a clapper-dudgeon [24] for a pinte of Ale, who as soone as he was spied, they left off their roguish poetry, and fell to mocke of the ...
— Musa Pedestris - Three Centuries of Canting Songs - and Slang Rhymes [1536 - 1896] • John S. Farmer
... fled from the town they immediately thought our soldiers might ascend the tower and watch their course, so they burned the staircases. Alas for the little children who had taken refuge in the tower! As the flames swept up the stairways, they fled before them; two of them actually clung to the clapper of one great bell, and there they hung until its frame was burned away and the poor little things fell with the falling bell. Their remains were found later by our soldiers, the small hands still faithful to their hold. The bells were in time replaced and doubtless ...
— An Ohio Woman in the Philippines • Emily Bronson Conger
... then plied with the usual grammatical questions. Being asked to "synopsize'' the Greek verb, he went through the various moods and tenses, in all sorts of ways and in all possible combinations, his tongue rattling like the clapper of a mill. When he sat down my next neighbor said to me, "that man will be our valedictorian.'' This disgusted me. If that was the style of classical scholarship at Yale, I knew that there was nothing in it for me. It turned out as my friend said. That ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... the remotest period of antiquity to which the archives have reference, the hours have been regularly struck by the big bell. And, indeed the case was just the same with all the other clocks and watches in the borough. Never was such a place for keeping the true time. When the large clapper thought proper to say "Twelve o'clock!" all its obedient followers opened their throats simultaneously, and responded like a very echo. In short, the good burghers were fond of their sauer-kraut, but then they were ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... few turbellaria we find otolith vesicles. These are little sacks in the skin, lined with neuro-epithelial cells and having in the middle a little concretion of carbonate of lime hung on rather a stiffer hair, like a clapper in a bell. Such organs serve in higher animals as organs of hearing, for the sensory hairs are set in vibration by the sound-waves. It is quite as probable that they here serve as organs for feeling ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... with his wife. The Wesleyan minister came along and took the younger boy. She is alone in the house. A steamer, probably bound for Cardiff, now crosses the horizon, while near at hand one bell of a foxglove swings to and fro with a bumble-bee for clapper. These white Cornish cottages are built on the edge of the cliff; the garden grows gorse more readily than cabbages; and for hedge, some primeval man has piled granite boulders. In one of these, to hold, an historian conjectures, ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf |
