"Makeshift" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... spider-monkeys prefer to use their long tails as hands, plucking fruits with the tips and carrying them to their mouths. The elephant uses his nose as a hand (for his trunk is nothing else but a long nose), and with this makeshift hand he can pick up either a heavy cannon or a sixpence from the ground. The horse uses his tail as a hand to drive off flies which he cannot otherwise reach. On board ship a hen was once seen to use her neck ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... in the little back yard. The window is just a square hole in the wall, closed with a wooden shutter, so that light and air—if not wind and rain—come in together. A looking-glass they have, but a poor makeshift it is, being of metal and rounded; and those who know what a comical aspect your face takes when you see it in a metal teapot, can guess how far anybody could see himself rightly in it. It is nailed up, too, so high on the wall that it is not easy to see anything. ...
— Our Little Lady - Six Hundred Years Ago • Emily Sarah Holt
... stretching out his hand to press an electric button, returned apathetically to the perusal of the Police Gazette. His summons was answered by the appearance of a man in shirt-sleeves, whose rumpled head indicated that he had recently risen from some kind of makeshift repose; to him the night-clerk tossed a key, with the brief comment, "Ninety-seven;" and the man, after a sleepy glance at Woburn, turned on his heel and lounged toward the staircase at ...
— The Greater Inclination • Edith Wharton
... was in space, past the point of no return, all the doubts that I had dismissed fought for attention. The plan that had seemed so clear and logical now began to look like a patched and crazy makeshift. ...
— The Misplaced Battleship • Harry Harrison (AKA Henry Maxwell Dempsey)
... endless winding roads. The men shot at birds and prospected for diamonds along the wayside; and at night they took the hay from the mattresses to give to the cattle. Lolling indolence was in the air and plenty in the larder: big fruits, strange game, which they cooked in a makeshift oven consisting of a few stones. Then they rolled themselves up in a blanket, near the elephants tugging at their chains, and slept under the tent in the cool, ...
— The Bill-Toppers • Andre Castaigne
... not "lily-white," hands does not like to have hers show the effect of housework, when that means scrubbing the floor and cleaning the stove. Gloves? Ah, well, James Nasmyth once wrote: "Kid-gloves are great non-conductors of knowledge." I believe that gloves of any kind are a makeshift in real cleaning of dirty corners; but there should not be ...
— The Cost of Shelter • Ellen H. Richards
... current number either of the Daily Mail, Pearson's Weekly, Answers, Tit Bits, or whatever Greatest Novel of the Century happened to be going.... But, as I hope to make clearer in my later papers, this "Democracy," or Wholesale method of living, like the railways, is transient—a first makeshift development of a great and finally (to me at least) ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... for hours with imminent death. But about four bells in the forenoon watch the gale suddenly broke, the sky cleared, and the wind moderated so rapidly that just before noon, by carefully watching our opportunity, we were at length able to round-to and once more ride to our makeshift sea anchor. Then, the boat riding dry—that is to say, shipping no water—we baled her out, and next proceeded to overhaul our stock of provisions, with the object of ascertaining what damage, if any, it had sustained through the constant drenching of the seas to which we had been exposed. ...
— Turned Adrift • Harry Collingwood
... Honesty is a makeshift. A makeshift for saving time. Whoever wants to save time is not fit for the society ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... Doctor had been willing instantly to abandon this nostrum when the harm done by it was concretely brought home to him. Though this argument had fallen far short of reconciling Hal to the Surtaine standards, nevertheless it had served as a makeshift to justify in part his abandonment of the hard-won principles of the "Clarion," a surrender necessary for the saving of a loved and honored father in whose essential goodness he had ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... the smaller arches to raise their crowns to the level of those of the larger arches was in constant use in Byzantine and early Romanesque architecture, in the kind of manner shown in the sketch, Fig. 99; and a very clumsy and makeshift method of dealing with the problem it is; but something of the kind was inevitable as long as nothing but the round arch was available for covering contiguous spaces of different widths. The whole of these difficulties were approximately got over in theory, and almost entirely in practice, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 647, May 26, 1888 • Various
... John seeing that the wind was in their favor, rigged up the royal-yard in the middle of the raft as a mast. It was stayed with shrouds, and carried a makeshift sail. A large broad-bladed oar was fixed behind to act as a rudder in case the wind was sufficient to require it. The greatest pains had been expended on strengthening the raft to resist the force of the waves, but the question remained whether, ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... Mike went to work again. He showed Thompson how to arrange a mattress of hemlock boughs on the bed frame. It was a simple enough makeshift, soft and springy when Thompson spread his bedding over it. Then Mike superintended the final disposition of his supplies so that there would be some semblance of order instead of an indiscriminately mixed pile in which the article wanted was always at the bottom. ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... nevertheless, was very small, and he fretted at its inconveniences, not in a disagreeable way, but desiring to have a house and home of his own among more familiar scenes and within reach of the sea; he regarded the new move as a makeshift, and settled in West Newton, a suburb of Boston, where his wife's family lived, until he should purchase a place of his own. The change from the winter picturesqueness of Berkshire was marked, but the village was of the usual New ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... and apparently as a yearly office, so that he became Dictator IV. in May 45 B.C. Finally, before the 15th of February 44 B.C., this was exchanged for a life-dictatorship. Not only was this a contradiction in terms, since the dictatorship was by tradition a makeshift justified only when the state had to be carried through a serious crisis, but it involved military rule in Italy and the permanent suspension of the constitutional guarantees, such as intercessio and provocatio, by which the liberties of Romans were ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... inconceivably {250} perfect kind of watch, acknowledging at the same time, that this, its conception of him, was utterly inadequate, although the best its inferior nature allowed it to form. For if, instead of so conceiving of its maker, it refused to make use of these relative perfections as a makeshift, and so necessarily thought of him as amorphous metal, or mere oil, or by the help of any other inferior conception which a watch might be imagined capable of entertaining, that watch would he wrong ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... night was ablaze with countless camp-fires, the day a buzz of busy toil. Everywhere you heard the racket of hammer and saw, beheld men in feverish haste over their boat-building. There were many fine boats, but the crude makeshift effort of the amateur predominated. Some of them, indeed, had no more shape than a packing-case, and not a few resembled a coffin. Anything that would float and keep out the water was ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... slope of the foot of the hills, they had frequently observed parties of roughly dressed men, some with muskets and some without, making their way, by boat and on foot, toward the mountain. Those on the water were in rude, makeshift boats, of which there seemed to be an insufficient quantity at hand, groups waiting on the shore for the return of conveyances in order that they might in ...
— Boy Scouts in Mexico; or On Guard with Uncle Sam • G. Harvey Ralphson
... exhibited in these words of Lowth; but he, as little as any other of these interpreters, has been able to vindicate the assumption of a double sense. When more closely examined, the supposition is a mere makeshift. On the one hand, they could not make up their minds to give up the Messianic explanation, and, along with it, the authority of the Apostle Matthew. But, on the other hand, they were puzzled by ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions. Vol. 2 • Ernst Hengstenberg
... he paused and looked into the next compartment. From the opposite side, he saw another hatch partially open and the outline of Roger's head and shoulders. Between them, a man was bending over a makeshift desk, copying information from a calculator and a set of blueprints. Tom nodded across to Roger and they both stepped into the compartment at ...
— Sabotage in Space • Carey Rockwell
... so little used industrially that as a rule it was not owned in severalty; and even the villages and tribes had little occasion to mark the limits of their domains. For travel by land there were nothing but narrow, rough and tortuous foot-paths, with makeshift bridges across the smaller streams. The rivers were highly advantageous both as avenues and as sources of food, for the negroes were expert at canoeing ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... such a delicate nature, and involves such a disparagement of the sex in a vital point, that the Drawer hesitates to put it in words. It is said that the cap and gown will be used to cover untidiness, to conceal the makeshift of a disorderly and unsightly toilet. Undoubtedly the cap and gown are democratic, adopted probably to equalize the appearance of rich and poor in the same institution, where all are on an intellectual level. Perhaps the sex is not perfect; it may be that there are ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... blessed St. Nicholas to an utter falsehood in order to screen her lover and to aid his cause.... The scenes are laid among that curious mixture of Oriental magnificence and barbaric discomfort, of lavish expenditure and shabby makeshift, to be found in a Russian castle, with its splendid vastness, the immensity of its grounds, the immensity of the forests on all sides of it, and the general scale of immensity on which everything about it, and within it, is invariably conducted. ...
— A War-Time Wooing - A Story • Charles King
... of them had been gamekeepers and hence were accustomed to outdoor life and the handling of guns, all of which aided them in saving the remnant of their command. They had been ordered to take some cottages, occupied by German soldiers as a makeshift fortification. The Cameronians on the way to the attack fell into a ditch which was both deep and wide. It was necessary for them to swim to get across the ditch in some places. In the meantime Highlanders were being slain by German shells and the rifle fire that the men ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... Ordinary brethren of the order would not be lodged there. The magnificence is reserved for a Cardinal (Gregory XVI. who had been a Camaldolese frequently came here), or a travelling Bishop and his suite, or a heretic English or American milord! But not for any daughter of Eve! And the makeshift room over a carpenter's shop, which is called the forestieria, has been devoted to the purpose only in consequence of the incomprehensible mania of female English heretics for visiting the disciples of St. Romuald. And there the food supplied from the ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... of oceans, and, by all tradition, the circumnavigator's gate of entrance to the Pacific, but also it is the temple of the god Terminus for all the Americas. So that, in relation to such dignities, it seemed to me, in the drawing, a makeshift, put up by a carpenter, until the true Cape Horn should be ready; or, perhaps, a drop scene from the opera house. This was one case of disproportion: the others were—the final and ceremonial valediction of Garrick, on retiring from his profession; and the Pall Mall inauguration ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... listening to the young people's remarks with a smile of quiet scorn on her lip, thinking what an advantage was experience, even if it could not make up for the loss of youth and beauty—"The last man in the world to lend himself to such a miserable makeshift and pretence! Without brains enough even to fancy himself able to write a sermon of his own, he flies to the dead,—to their very coffins as it were—and I will not say STEALS from them, for he does it openly, not having even shame enough ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... responded to every movement of her hand by an up-and-down friction upon the ivory pillar, with such effect that, when she sunk back upon the couch after having procured for herself as much pleasure as such a makeshift could afford, I felt the corresponding efforts produce a similar effect upon my own excited reality, which, throbbing and beating furiously, sent forth a delicious ...
— Laura Middleton; Her Brother and her Lover • Anonymous
... This man's home possessed an unique interior. It was such as one would hardly have expected in a bachelor in Barnriff. There were none of the usual impedimenta of a prairie man's abode, there was no untidiness, no dirt, no makeshift. Yet like the man himself the ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... makeshift bed as he spoke; and in a few minutes, worn out after the unwonted exertions of the evening, both men were ...
— The Sorcery Club • Elliott O'Donnell
... of the Lutherans, the final draft of the Confutation, too, was a miserable makeshift. True, its tone was moderate, and, with few exceptions, personal defamations were omitted. The arrangement of subjects was essentially the same as in the Augustana. Still it was not what it pretended to be. It was no serious attempt at refuting the Lutheran ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... and to a rigid "lock-up rule" at twelve o'clock, are absent in Dublin not only at Trinity, but at the University College, where one can only suppose its absence to be due to the unorganised condition of a small and temporary makeshift. Not only, however, for the exercise of disciplinary control, but also because of the close association of men with each other which residence ensures, is this to be regarded as the best means of getting the heart ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell
... direction of their own camp, it was with feelings of far greater relief than they had experienced in many a day. Now at last they saw a feasible plan for leaving the island upon a seaworthy craft. There would be no more hard labour at ship-building, and no risking their lives upon a crudely built makeshift that would be quite as likely to go to the bottom as it would to reach ...
— The Beasts of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... and half-an-hour after the first stroke of the hurricane the schooner was pitching bows under, and shipping increasing quantities of water at every plunge. And now, as we once more bestirred ourselves, we were confronted with a fresh calamity. For our makeshift protection of the damaged companion and skylight, as well as the fore-scuttle, had been swept away, probably at the first stroke of the hurricane, although not one of us had observed it, and already vast quantities of water were pouring into the little vessel's interior, ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood
... unsmiling and waited, as who should invite him to state his errand. She did not offer him her hand but, for that matter, (she might have pleaded), she could not, very well: for one of her hands held her sunshade, and the other held an embroidered silk bag, woman's makeshift ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... The tent, a makeshift affair, consisting of two sculls and a tree branch, which Mr Button had sawed off from a dwarf aoa, and the staysail he had brought from the brig, was pitched in the centre of the beach, so as to be out of the way of falling cocoa-nuts, should the breeze strengthen during the night. The sun had ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... know anything about it," he said. "What are the doings of this silly world, of our makeshift appearances, to the essentials? Antics— filling up time! You speak as if she gave Ingram everything, and lost it. She did, but he never knew it—so never had it. Ingram had what he was fitted to receive. Her impulse, her impulsion were divine. ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... escape into a bundle of straw, which kindling quickly, spread the conflagration over every part of their poor mansion, till it was reduced to ashes. Together with the cottage (a sorry antediluvian makeshift of a building, you may think it), what was of much more importance, a fine litter of young pigs, no less than nine in number, perished. China pigs [Footnote: China pigs. What adjective would we use now?] have been esteemed a luxury all over the East ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... other shall suffer no diminution of the rights and privileges they have hitherto enjoyed. But however necessary such an expedient may have been to tide over the grave emergencies of the situation, it is at best but an unsatisfactory makeshift, which should not be suffered to delay the speedy and complete establishment of the frontier line to which we are entitled under the Russo-American treaty for ...
— Messages and Papers of William McKinley V.2. • William McKinley
... for his breakfast, Hopalong, grouchy and hungry, rode slowly to the place appointed for his meeting with Red, but Mr. Connors was over two hours late. It was now mid-forenoon and Hopalong occupied his time for a while by riding out fancy designs on the sand; but he soon tired of this makeshift diversion and grew petulant. Red's tardiness was all the worse because the erring party to the agreement had turned in his saddle at Hoyt's Corners and loosed a flippant and entirely uncalled-for remark about ...
— Bar-20 Days • Clarence E. Mulford
... Among the Greeks and Romans, sacrifices for propitiation of the Dii Manes, or souls of the dead heroes; for the pious ancients could not invent enough gods to satisfy their spiritual needs, and had to have a number of makeshift deities, or, as a sailor might say, jury-gods, which they made out of the most unpromising materials. It was while sacrificing a bullock to the spirit of Agamemnon that Laiaides, a priest of Aulis, was favored with an audience of that illustrious warrior's shade, who prophetically recounted ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... the feeding of these men, all of whom were more or less badly wounded; and at first, when we heard at the hospital that a train was about to be made up, we took down all the soup and coffee we could manage to spare in big pails and jugs. But this was a mere makeshift, and was superseded very soon by a more up-to-date arrangement. A proper soup-kitchen was established at the station, with huge boilers full of soup and coffee always ready, and after that it was never necessary for a wounded soldier to leave Furnes hungry. All this was due to ...
— A Surgeon in Belgium • Henry Sessions Souttar
... a makeshift, Gaston. Merely a device to gain time wherein England may prepare against the alliance of France and Austria. Your secret treaty will never be signed as long as Paris is given over to rioters. Nay, the Empress may well hesitate to ally herself ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... to her directions began to work Carmichael's arms up and down, after the method of artificial respiration which had brought me round at the outset of our journey, she and I administered oxygen gas from one of our steel bottles to his lungs by means of a makeshift funnel applied to his mouth. In some fifteen or twenty minutes he began to show signs of returning animation, and soon afterwards, to our great relief, he ...
— A Trip to Venus • John Munro
... already passed the House of Representatives and are ready for immediate consideration and action by the Senate. With the deepest earnestness I urge their prompt passage. In them both we turn our backs upon hesitation and makeshift and formulate a genuine policy of use and conservation, in the best sense of those words. We owe the one measure not only to the people of that great western country for whose free and systematic development, ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Woodrow Wilson • Woodrow Wilson
... are boards enough. But you don't want a makeshift thing like that. If you are going to have books and perhaps read or study, you must have something that will stand solidly on four legs. I may be able to root a table out of some corner. ...
— Ted and the Telephone • Sara Ware Bassett
... to guy the headstays, thrusts downward a short spar, at right angles to the bowsprit; it is called the martingale or dolphin-striker. The amateur riggers who had tinkered with the Polly's gear in makeshift fashion had not troubled to smooth off spikes with which they had repaired the martingale's lower end. Captain Mayo ducked low to dodge a guy, and the spikes hooked themselves neatly into the back of his reefer coat. Mr. Marston had bought excellent and strong cloth for his ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... at all that will get me this 'job.' I've got to have it as a makeshift until I can get hold of something better. Let me ...
— Tillie: A Mennonite Maid - A Story of the Pennsylvania Dutch • Helen Reimensnyder Martin
... former; that hers was a life led chiefly for and in her children. Now she knew that it was not so. Her work for them, her absorption in their welfare, their property and education and character—what were these but so much makeshift to fill the empty years until Jacques came ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... least be a novelty to disturb them. They were on the highest shelf, and he stood on a chair to get them down. But he opened the volume which he first took from the shelf: somehow, one is apt to read in a makeshift attitude, just where it might seem inconvenient to do so. The page he opened on was under the head of Anatomy, and the first passage that drew his eyes was on the valves of the heart. He was not much acquainted with valves of any sort, ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... for another.] Substitution — N. substitution, commutation; supplanting &c v.; metaphor, metonymy &c (figure of speech) 521. [Thing substituted] substitute, ersatz, makeshift, temporary expedient, replacement, succedaneum; shift, pis aller [Fr.], stopgap, jury rigging, jury mast, locum tenens, warming pan, dummy, scapegoat; double; changeling; quid pro quo, alternative. representative &c (deputy) 759; palimpsest. price, purchase money, consideration, equivalent. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... delight of the Duke of Cumberland, and to the delight of the King, Rockingham consented to form a Ministry. With the best will in the world Rockingham could not make his Ministry very commanding. It was but a makeshift, and not a very brilliant makeshift, but at least it served to get rid of Grenville and of Grenville's harangues. So long as Grenville was unable to terrorize the royal closet with reproaches and reproofs addressed ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... apprenticeship to it, and that is—build a boat. He can repair a damaged boat, I grant you, put in a new plank, or replace a damaged timber. But to build a boat, as we understand the term, is altogether beyond him. The best that he can do is to construct some sort of a makeshift; and the problem that now confronted me was, what form was ...
— The First Mate - The Story of a Strange Cruise • Harry Collingwood
... all that, but this person will not stay there very long—it's only a makeshift for a night, a mere lock-up house till further examination. There is a small room through which it opens, you may light a fire for yourselves there, and I'll send you plenty of stuff to make you comfortable. But be sure you lock the door ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... confess that I have only heard of it, and the price seems to be such as to discourage almost all the pictorial workers that I know. In my observation of the work that has been done by pictorialists, the very fact that in many instances they use makeshift apparatus has resulted in some of the most beautiful effects in their work. Good apparatus is of course desirable, but there are happy accidents with the other sort. It is the workman, not his tools, that counts. Get the best tools if you can afford them, but remember ...
— Pictorial Photography in America 1921 • Pictorial Photographers of America
... dying for our sins, as taught by the Scriptures, a makeshift, but, rather, a real, full redemption, ransom. Just as a captain can honorably, honestly be given as a ransom for a number of private soldiers in an exchange of prisoners; just as a diamond can redeem ...
— God's Plan with Men • T. T. (Thomas Theodore) Martin
... land I knew the customs of the Mother Church. So I could see the priest in cassock, alb and stole as he would stand before some makeshift altar lit with candles. And as he stands they come to kneel before him; my winsome Margery in all her royal beauty, a child to love, and yet an empress peerless in her woman's realm; and at her side, with his knee touching hers, this man ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde
... heaped on the floor in sight of the pale little Skeezucks, who clung unfailingly, through it all, to the funny makeshift of a doll that "Bruvver Jim" had placed in his keeping. He appeared not at all to comprehend the meaning of the gifts the men had brought, or to know their purpose. That never a genuinely happy Christmas had brightened ...
— Bruvver Jim's Baby • Philip Verrill Mighels
... at the first glance, seems rather complicated. For that matter, it is only a makeshift; but how could one find anything better? The unfortunate horse, who is almost voiceless, has only one way in which to express himself: a clumsy hoof, which was not created to put thought into words. It became necessary, therefore, ...
— The Unknown Guest • Maurice Maeterlinck
... treaty excited reprobation, that permitting a slave to buy his freedom, a recognition of slavery in derogation of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution. The provision was excused as an absolutely necessary makeshift to put off hostilities till the United States had a ...
— History of the United States, Volume 5 • E. Benjamin Andrews
... British held Newport; and all the country south of the Delaware was free from them. The perplexities and discouragements of Washington were great indeed, while he stubbornly held the field with a beggarly makeshift for an army and sturdily continued his appeals to Congress and to the country for men, arms, and clothing; yet only New York City and New Jersey were really in the possession of the enemy. It was one thing for England to occupy a few cities, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XI • John Lord
... delightfully incongruous and a trifle makeshift to Tamara and Jack when they got out of their sleigh and were ...
— His Hour • Elinor Glyn
... produced some spotless white handkerchiefs, which served as a makeshift bandage, till they could reach the cottage. The bullet, as Betty had said, had not much more than grazed the shoulder, yet the wound had bled profusely, and Allen was beginning to feel a little sick and dizzy, ...
— The Outdoor Girls in Army Service - Doing Their Bit for the Soldier Boys • Laura Lee Hope
... has a story of its own, as has the family. In primitive days there was little necessity of a dwelling-place, except as a nest for young or a cache for provisions. A cave or a rough shelter of boughs was a makeshift for a home. Thither the hunter brought the game that he had killed, and there slept the glutton's sleep or went supperless to bed. When the hunter became a herdsman and shepherd and moved from place to place in search of pasture, he found it convenient ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... the sheriff as he took the pencil and paper through the bars and returned to his bunk. He drew up the stool and sat upon it. It was a little lower than the bench, so, putting his paper on the bench, he had a fairly good makeshift desk. He began to write steadily, and after a few minutes the sheriff and jailer ...
— The Coyote - A Western Story • James Roberts
... raft, however, without the means of guiding it, would be of little use. They had, therefore, to construct a couple of paddles and a rudder, and they then found that, with the help of two small spars, they could form a makeshift mast and yard, their shirts and pocket-handkerchiefs fastened together forming a sail. This would carry them to the rock, as the wind was off the shore, and they must trust to the assistance of their friends to get back. ...
— Paul Gerrard - The Cabin Boy • W.H.G. Kingston
... and not a little thought to the problems of the relations between men and women. He is considerably interested in questions of 'matrimonial divergence.' He recognizes that most obvious of all obvious truths, that marriage is not always a success; nay, more than this, that it is often a makeshift, an apology, a pretense. But he professes to undertake nothing beyond a statement of the facts. It rests with the public to lay his statement beside their experience and observation, and thus take measure of the ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... sort of word; but Doggie's cultivated mind disliked it. It was a slovenly word, a makeshift for the hard broom of clean thought. This infernal "practically" begged the whole question. Jeanne would not have sentimentalized to Mo Shendish about ships passing in the night. No, she wouldn't, in spite ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... that the administration of a solid, substantial meal to people in their famished condition would probably have had fatal results. Having satisfied to some small extent their first ravenous craving for food and drink, we got them below and provided them with such makeshift sleeping accommodation as the resources of the schooner would permit, that they might seek in sleep such further recuperation as was to be obtained, pending the production of the meal in preparation for them. Having thus ...
— A Pirate of the Caribbees • Harry Collingwood
... would have had no chance of overtaking us but for the unlucky accident to the tiller, which had made the Fair Maid unmanageable for the moment, and caused her to come up to the wind. They were thus able to draw very near us before the man at the helm had contrived to rig up a makeshift tiller out of a splinter off the gunwale. Just as he began to get the ship's head round again the launch approached within hailing ...
— Athelstane Ford • Allen Upward
... six, with a crew of four men and a pilot, provided with oars, sails, and iron-shod poles for pushing. They continued to carry, in cargoes of five tons, all the merchandise that passed to Upper Canada. Sometimes these boats were provided with a makeshift upper cabin, which consisted of an awning of oilcloth, supported on hoops like the roof of an American, Quaker, or gipsy waggon. If further provided with half a dozen chairs and a table, this cabin was deemed the height of primitive luxury. The batteaux went in brigades, which ...
— Life in Canada Fifty Years Ago • Canniff Haight
... 'curryfavor', 'pinchfist', 'suckfist', 'hatepeace' (Sylvester), 'hategood' (Bunyan), 'clutchfist', 'sharkgull' (both in Middleton), 'makesport' (Fuller), 'hangdog' ("Herod's hangdogs in the tapestry", Pope), 'catchpoll', 'makeshift' (used not impersonally as now), 'pickgoose' ("the bookworm was never but a pickgoose"){162}, 'killcow' (these three last in Gabriel Harvey), 'rakeshame' (Milton, prose), with others which it will be convenient to omit. 'Rakehell', which used to be spelt 'rakel' or 'rakle' (Chaucer), a good ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... so as not to interrupt. The rector looked up and made a grave sign of the head as she entered; her own gesture forbade any other movement in the group; she took a stool beside Willie, whose makeshift bed of chairs and pillows stood on one side of the fire; and the reading ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Weener—miserable, makeshift expedients!" Her unavoidable eyes bit into mine. "What is a fertilizer? A tidbit, a pap, a lollypop. Indians use fish; Chinese, nightsoil; agricultural chemists concoct tasty tonics of nitrogen and potash—where's your progress? Putting a mechanical whip on a ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... later, with a gendarme on either step, we picked up an anxious Adele. Then we filled up with petrol, had my makeshift connection replaced by a new wire, and ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates
... the soggy earth and the reeking walls is almost intolerable, no fire is needed in the coldest season. The cell is lighted by one small window, so heavily grated on the outer side as effectually to bar the ingress of fresh air. A pair of wooden trestles, supporting rough boards, form a makeshift for a bedstead, and a mat (which may be clean or dirty, the ticals of the prisoner must settle that) ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... proxy, representative, agent, lieutenant, delegate, vicar, envoy, locum tenens; makeshift, expedient, shift, resource. Associated ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... The other mill burned down, you know—and as usual, without insurance. We have a makeshift thing set up there now—but it's nothing to what will be needed. I've got to have a good, smooth-working plant—otherwise I won't be able to live ...
— The White Desert • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... three big acetylene headlights from motor cars, and connected them up. There was a little porch at the entrance of the chateau, with a short flight of steps leading up to it, and then we decided that that would make an excellent makeshift theater. Since it would be dark they decided they must have lights, so that they could see me—just as in a regular theater at hame! That was where the headlights they borrowed from motor cars came in. They put one on each side of the porch and one off in front, so that all the light ...
— A Minstrel In France • Harry Lauder
... filling the space between ceiling and floorboards with sawdust or sheets of slag-wool laid on boarding nailed to fillets on the joists. The sawdust should be filled up to the top of the joists; over this a layer of thick felt, and the boarding above. This, however, is only a makeshift when compared with ...
— The Turkish Bath - Its Design and Construction • Robert Owen Allsop
... caught her throat. In spite of herself, the tears filled her eyes. She looked miserably at the cheap, ugly tea things on the makeshift table before her. Her husband watched her gravely. Presently she went on, more to herself ...
— The Land of Promise • D. Torbett
... with you," cried Kate. "Why you should hang around here doing graduate work year after year passes my understanding. I declare I believe you stay here because it's cheap and passes the time; but really, you know, it's a makeshift." ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... whether, in allowing him to love her, she loved him in return or was merely being patriotic; he didn't expect to live to put things to a test. All he wanted was the belief that one woman loved him. You understand, she was very often only a makeshift—a symbol for the woman he would have married if death hadn't been in such a hurry. Well, for some of us Death has had time to spare and we've come back—come back starved, emotional, tyrannic—passionate to possess all the things for which ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... on the spectacle of a foreign commerce in decay and an empire in disorder, if the grand justification for the senate's authority—its government of the foreign dependencies of Rome—were first questioned, then tossed aside? Would not the Individual makeshift have in such a case as this to be invested with military authority? Might not his power be defended and perpetuated by a weapon mightier than the voting tablet? Might not his supporters be a class of men, to whom the charms of civil life are few, whose habits ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... a condition the land is in politically. Cowardice and hypocrisy are slated to win, and makeshift and the cheapest politics are to take possession of national affairs. Better even obstinacy and ego-mania! Cox, I think, has made a gallant fight. He is to be beaten because Wilson is as unpopular as he once was popular. Oh! if he had been frank as to his illness, ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... some sea-power of her own. Nine-tenths of the United States Navy stood by the Union. But, with the remaining tenth and some foreign help, the South managed to contrive the makeshift parts of what might have become a navy if the North had only let it grow. The North, however, ...
— Captains of the Civil War - A Chronicle of the Blue and the Gray, Volume 31, The - Chronicles Of America Series • William Wood
... signs everywhere of capacity, and unstinted expenditure of money. But the haulage of it all. The thought was always in Steve's mind. The great stove in the corner of the long, low room. The carpentered shelvings, and drawers, and cupboards. The counter, too, no makeshift barrier set up for the purposes of traffic, but with every sign of skilled workmanship about it. He felt certain that all these things must have been borne up the slopes of the great table-land, hauled overland, or by water, from the workshops ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... life; in the last few years the shallowness of passion had seemed its crowning insult, and over the absolute sincerity of her own nature the primal emotion she had heard in Christopher's voice exerted a compelling charm. The makeshift of a conventional marriage had failed her utterly; her soul had rejected the woman's usual cheap compromise with externals; and in her almost puritan scorn of the vanities by which she was surrounded she ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... the flag of the U.S. be thirteen stripes, alternates red and white, that the Union be thirteen stars, white in a blue field, representing a new constellation." This was the original of the national flag. The flag at Ft. Stanwix was a hasty makeshift put together under direction of Col. Marinus Willet, who found it difficult to obtain materials because the fort was hemmed in by the British. In his diary Col. Willet relates that "white stripes were cut out of an ammunition shirt; the blue out of a camlet cloak taken from ...
— The Greatest Highway in the World • Anonymous
... question of the box lunch presents a serious problem, when we consider the large number of children who must depend upon it for their noon-day meal. This meal should be so constituted as to make it a real meal and not a makeshift. The same principles which govern the preparation of the meal should govern the preparation of the lunch box. It is said that the school lunch should consist of "something starchy and something meaty, something fat and something ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Household Science in Rural Schools • Ministry of Education Ontario
... seat around the open air platform was occupied. Every bench out of Scout Chapel, the long boards on which the hungry multitude lined up at supper-time, every chair from Council Shack and Main Pavilion, and many a trunk and cedar chest from tents and cabins and a dozen other sorts of makeshift seating accommodations were laid under contribution for the gala occasion. And even these were not enough, for the whole neighboring village turned out in a body, and gaping summer boarders strolled into the camp in little groups, thankful for ...
— Tom Slade on Mystery Trail • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... held only by its ministry to him; he will be there if it is the most attractive place for him. Some parents who are praying for wandering boys would know why they wandered if they looked calmly at the crowded quarters given to the boy, the comfortless room, the makeshift bed, and the general home organization which long ago assumed that a boy could be left out of ...
— Religious Education in the Family • Henry F. Cope
... herself in the open street, more able to cope with Drake while they walked in a throng. She remembered enough of yesterday to avoid even the makeshift solitude of a tea-table in a public room. 'Let us walk on,' she said. 'Can't you explain as ...
— The Philanderers • A.E.W. Mason
... failure of the direct line, was regarded as the 'son of Jeconiah' (1 Chron. iii. 17). He seems to have had no son, and Zerubbabel, who was really his nephew (1 Chron. iii. 19), was legally adopted as his son. In this makeshift fashion, some shadow of the ancient royalty still presided over the restored people. We see Zerubbabel better in Haggai and Zechariah than in Ezra, and can discern the outline of a strong, bold, prompt nature. He had a hard task, and he did it like ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... get a stave six feet in length, then a wide stave three and a half feet long may be used. It is necessary in this case to split it and join the two pieces with a fishtail splice in the handle. Target bows are made this way, to advantage, but such a makeshift is to be deprecated in a hunting bow. The variations of temperature and moisture combined with hard usage in hunting demand a solid, single stave. It must not break. Your life ...
— Hunting with the Bow and Arrow • Saxton Pope
... some wheatmeal biscuits as they had a couple of hundredweights, so I readily accepted twenty pounds of them. We now had soup twice a day, and managed to make it fairly thick by adding sago and a few lentils. Cornflour and hot water flavoured with cocoa made a makeshift blanc-mange, and this, with sago and tapioca, constituted our ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... husband to spend the storm swept months of the year either at one of his other ranches or in the city, and sometimes she had stayed here. This winter she had no particular desire to leave her comfortable home for the makeshift of a San Francisco hotel and Wanda was eager ...
— The Short Cut • Jackson Gregory
... just testing it to see if it works. It does, although the end which I installed down below was necessarily only a makeshift. It is not this red light with the shrill bell that we are interested in. It is the green light and the low-toned bell. This ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve
... vegetables, but to daffodils or carnations or dahlias, or to the plants of sweet scent and pleasant names, like rosemary and lavender, and balm, and mignonette. And not seldom a weekly tenant, desirous of beauty, goes farther, takes his chance of losing his pains; nails up against his doorway some makeshift structure of fir-poles to be a porch, sowing nasturtiums or sweet-peas to cover it with their short-lived beauty; or he marks out under his window some little trumpery border to serve instead of a box-hedge as safeguard to his ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... he pleaded. "The hack-work is only makeshift, and I don't take it seriously. Give me two years. I shall succeed in that time, and the editors will be glad to buy my good work. I know what I am saying; I have faith in myself. I know what I have in me; I know what literature is, now; I know the average rot ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... one-story structure built on the ground with the earth for the floor. Some such buildings have a partition or partial partition running across them, beyond which are the sleeping boards, and there are shelves here and there; but the kat-yu'-fong is a makeshift, and consequently is not so fixed a type ...
— The Bontoc Igorot • Albert Ernest Jenks
... power, the lack of fixed military leadership, the insufficiency of their generals, the total uselessness of their admirals. In part these evils were remedied by energy and good fortune; as was the case with the want of a fleet. That mighty creation, however, was but a grand makeshift, and always remained so. A Roman fleet was formed, but it was rendered national only in name, and was always treated with the affection of a stepmother; the naval service continued to be little esteemed in comparison with the ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... the deficiency of food became the chief facts of the Siege. More than three-score horses were sacrificed daily to provide a meat ration for the garrison. The men slaked their thirst with the turbid water of the Klip River, and munched a makeshift biscuit made of Indian corn and starch. "Chevril" soup and potted horse were luxuries. At Intombi nearly 2,000 sick and wounded were lying without hospital ...
— A Handbook of the Boer War • Gale and Polden, Limited
... Meares told us of his adventures in and about Lolo land, a wild Central Asian country nominally tributary to Lhassa. He had no pictures and very makeshift maps, yet he held us really entranced for nearly two hours by the sheer interest of his adventures. The spirit of the wanderer is in Meares' blood: he has no happiness but in the wild places of the earth. I have never met so extreme a type. Even now he is looking ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... small switch as it flows. In rheumatism and other local diseases the scratching is confined to the part affected. The instrument used is selected in accordance with the mythologic theory, excepting in the case of the piece of glass, which is merely a modern makeshift for the flint arrowhead. ...
— The Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees • James Mooney
... sleeping chambers with their cavernous aisles walled with orderly rows of lockers. Again I came to other barracks where the men were not yet asleep but were straggling in and sitting about on the lowest bunks of these sterile makeshift homes. ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings
... of Confederation established a framework of government for the confederated colonies, which government was to control those matters that experience had shown could be executed only by united action. As a scheme of government it was no better than a makeshift. It was an effort to form a federal power without diminishing the powers of the States—an effort "to pare off slices of state government without diminishing the loaf." That such a union could be perpetual, as the scheme ...
— Government and Administration of the United States • Westel W. Willoughby and William F. Willoughby
... "A miserable makeshift system," said I, harking back to Dunkirk and his blackmailing, for I was not just then in the mood to amuse myself with the contortions of Roebuck's flexible and ...
— The Plum Tree • David Graham Phillips
... the French Canadians, and did not even possess those powers of eloquence—that ability to give forth "rhetorical flashes"—which were characteristic of his reckless but highly gifted brother. In fact the ministry as then organized was a mere makeshift until the time came for obtaining an expression of opinion from the people at the polls. When parliament met in June, 1847, it was quite clear that the ministry was on the eve of its downfall. It was sustained only by a feeble majority of two votes on the motion for ...
— Lord Elgin • John George Bourinot
... Travers. It was in the White Caribou. 'I'm a wolf!' yaps Jones. You know his style, a gun in his belt, fringes on his moccasins, and long hair down his back. 'I'm a wolf,' he yaps, 'an' this is my night to howl. Hear me, you long lean makeshift of a human critter?'—an' this to ...
— The Turtles of Tasman • Jack London
... after the holidays because Hella has lost her money, and nearly all mine was used up in paying the excess fares. And such a leather case will cost 3 crowns. Father has some untearable transparent envelopes, and I shall ask him for two of them. They will do as a makeshift. ...
— A Young Girl's Diary • An Anonymous Young Girl
... disagreed. Had Annette come in? Not that she was any good to him in such a difficulty. Whenever she had questioned him about his first marriage, he had always shut her up; she knew nothing of it, save that it had been the great passion of his life, and his marriage with herself but domestic makeshift. She had always kept the grudge of that up her sleeve, as it were, and used it commercially. He listened. A sound—the vague murmur of a woman's movements—was coming through the door. She was in. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... four aircars, ordinary passenger vehicles equipped with machine-guns on improvised mounts, and ten big lorries converted into bombers, in the attack. All the lorries, and all but one of the makeshift fighter-escort, were shot down, but not before explosive and thermoconcentrate bombs were dumped all over the place. One lorry emptied its load of thermoconcentrate-bombs on the control-building at the airport, ...
— Uller Uprising • Henry Beam Piper, John D. Clark and John F. Carr
... human, and you winced a little; but this was rarely, for you were very nearly, oh, very nearly an animal, your temperament and intelligence were just those of a dog that has picked up a master, not a real master, but a makeshift master who may turn it out at any moment. Dickens would sentimentalise or laugh over you; I do neither. I merely recognise you as one of the facts of civilisation. You looked—well, to be candid,—you looked neither young nor old; hard work ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... and were he to meet a woman such as his father seems to have met he might take her to live with him. He thought of himself as her husband, though he was by no means sure that married life was a possible makeshift for the life he sought and was obliged to forgo, but as life seemed an obligation from which he could not reasonably escape he thought he would like to share it with some woman who would give him children. His father desired grandchildren, and since he had partly sacrificed ...
— The Brook Kerith - A Syrian story • George Moore
... votaries of power, their occasional frantic efforts are more as relief to their feelings than destructive to the tyranny in being. Let us realise this to the full; and seeing the futility in other years of every pathetic makeshift to annoy or circumvent the enemy, put by futilities and do a great work to ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney
... on which more than two hundred men and women worked for the owner. The children had no especial educational opportunities. Few of them were even permitted to attend the makeshift public school located near. For six months only, of the twelve years my father lived on that plantation, did I attend any school, and that a small one taught by a Southern white woman who had owned my father. When I was twelve years of age my father moved ...
— Tuskegee & Its People: Their Ideals and Achievements • Various
... leadership was a moral makeshift. His defeat of Laurier in 1911 was not a triumph for anything that might be called Bordenism. His conduct of the political side of the war was creditable, at times splendid, never consummately wise, never heroic. His exit was as uneventful as his advent. ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... stairs. It was two flights up, however—and the door was unlocked now. Jimmie Dale opened it, and, like a shadow, slipped inside; and, as he locked the door behind him, smiled once more—the door lock was but a paltry makeshift at best, but INSIDE his fingers had touched a massive steel bolt that, when shot home, would yield when the door itself yielded—and not before. Without moving the bolt, he turned—and his flashlight for a moment swept ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... and creek-bed that would hold any concrete structure in the world. And up there at the Jaws you have to contend with shale, full of seams, in places lined with clay. And right there I am going to make a rock-filled dam, and make it fast! It's going to be a temporary job and a makeshift, but it's going to sling the water into a flume that will carry it back into the old cut and down into the Valley. And it will do until Mr. Colton Gray and his ...
— Under Handicap - A Novel • Jackson Gregory
... would come down on one side, and the little mare, with her feet planted resolutely, would wait for me to perform my part by getting that bearskin back in its proper place on the McClellan saddle which I was using as a makeshift pack saddle. The feat of killing the bear the previous day sank into nothing compared with the feat of making the bearskin ride properly as a pack on the ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... impressed. His demeanour suggested that he had met autocrats before but never such a thorough autocrat as I. For the rest of my time there I pressed my trousers in the usual way, well knowing that he would regard the process not as the makeshift of a valetless pauper but as the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 29, 1914 • Various
... what was my own. It then turned out that it was all Petherick's, but he had orders to give me on account anything that I wanted. This being settled, I took ninety-five yards of the commonest stuff as a makeshift for mosquito-curtains for my men, besides four sailor's shirts for my ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke
... for a long time in the dry air of the empty hall. Rynason saw from the corner of his eye one of the dark little scavengers darting out of a gaping window. He could almost hear, it seemed, the noise of the brawling, makeshift town the Earthmen had established a little less than a mile away from the Hirlaji ruins, where already the nomads and adventurers and drifters had erected a cluster of prefab metal buildings and ...
— Warlord of Kor • Terry Gene Carr
... articles is not to deprive the mechanic of any portion of his legitimate occupation, but to assist those who live at a distance too great to be able to employ him, and who necessarily prefer any makeshift to the inconvenience of sending miles, and being without for days, an article which might possibly be set right ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 561, October 2, 1886 • Various
... accommodated themselves to city life; they were liberal patrons of Italian art and industry. Although they introduced a strictly Teutonic form of administration, their rule compared not unfavourably with the makeshift methods of Byzantine statesmanship. In Imperial Italy we see the strange spectacle of a military despotism tempered by the usurped privileges and jurisdictions of the great proprietors, or by the ill-defined temporal pretensions of the bishops. In Lombard Italy matters were ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis
... in keeping with their curtailed income. A job of some kind to keep the kettle boiling was very necessary, so Jimmie reluctantly applied for his old job and became once more a $14 a week shipping clerk. This however was a temporary makeshift, he protested. He was chock full of good ideas, and now he was rid of Stafford, who he claimed, had really paralyzed his efforts, he would be able to give free rein to his inventive genius. Fanny listened patiently. By this time she had few illusions ...
— Bought and Paid For - From the Play of George Broadhurst • Arthur Hornblow |
