"Piecemeal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... husband—'twas a word She used to slay me with!... Even in sorrow She is more fair than any other fair Met on a holiday. But when she smiled She seemed like Fortune giving away a world. So gracious was her splendor. Thou art revenged, O little demon god so long my scorn! Would I had given my heart by piecemeal out Since I was ten than to have lost it so, For going all at once it takes my life And I must lose my life or follow it. Ah, love should come like waves unto a shore, Soft creeping up and back and up again. Till taught to stand receptive we are firm When ...
— Semiramis and Other Plays - Semiramis, Carlotta And The Poet • Olive Tilford Dargan
... piecemeal, both in their tasks and in the means by which those tasks are to be performed, and very few Governments are organized, I venture to say, as wise and experienced business men would organize them if they had a clean sheet of paper to write ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... condition, as was suspected, the supreme authority would be given to certain lords under the nomination of the pope. In a subsequent examination before the commons, Bedloe added, (for these men always brought out their intelligence successively and by piecemeal,) that Lord Carrington was also in the conspiracy for raising men and money against the government; as was likewise Loro Brudenel. These noblemen, with all the other persons mentioned by Bedloe, were immediately committed to custody by ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part F. - From Charles II. to James II. • David Hume
... new. Tramps' fever kep' me away in the wild country. Tramps' fever will take me back there afore long. Tramps' fever will lay me down, some day, in the lonesome places, with my hand on my rifle and my face to the sky; and I shan't get up again till the crows and vultures come and carry me off piecemeal." ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... delight, Untasted yet amidst immortal bliss, To wed a soul made worthy of my kiss, Set in a frame so wonderfully made? "O wavering heart, farewell! be not afraid That I with fire will burn thy body fair, Or cast thy sweet limbs piecemeal through the air; The fates shall work thy punishment alone, And thine own memory of our kindness done. "Alas! what wilt thou do? how shalt thou bear The cruel world, the sickening still despair, The mocking, curious ...
— The Earthly Paradise - A Poem • William Morris
... curious Eye Over the Curb as I fetched it forth, and besought me to drop that Lie: But all ye who long for Certitude, and who yearn for the Ultimate Fact, Who know the Truth and in spite of Ruth tear piecemeal the Inexact, Come list to my Lay that I sing to-day, and choose betwixt him and me, And choosing show that ye always know the Lie from the Veritee! —The Rime ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... has gained the final victory. One only Arian tribe survives for a time, ever struggling to possess Rome, advancing to its gates, ruining its Campagna, torturing its captured inhabitants, but never gaining possession of those battered walls, which Totila in part threw down and Belisarius in piecemeal restored. And Gregory, too, is chosen to stop the Anglo-Saxon revel of cruelty and destruction, which has turned Britain from a civilised land into a wilderness, and from a province of the Catholic Church to paganism, from the very time of ...
— The Formation of Christendom, Volume VI - The Holy See and the Wandering of the Nations, from St. Leo I to St. Gregory I • Thomas W. (Thomas William) Allies
... this is the way in which the creative artistic imagination proceeds. It has proved that a vast portion of all our thinking goes on unconsciously; and that the results may arise into consciousness piecemeal and gradually, checking each other as they come; or that they may come all at once, with all the completeness and definiteness of perceptions presented from without. The former is the case with the critical, and the latter with the artistic intellect. And this we recognize imperfectly when we ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... check on the slavers across the lake, they hurried on with their work. She was unscrewed at a spot about five hundred yards below the first cataract, and they began to make a road over the portage of forty miles, by which she was to be carried piecemeal. ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston
... for his $5.00, and it was not five minutes before the white gambler had the saddle and $5.00 both. Then, when they had nothing else left to bet, so intense was their love for gambling, they began to put themselves in pawn, piecemeal, saying: 'I'll bet you my whole body.' That means 'I'll put myself in pawn to you as your slave to serve you as you will for ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... me piecemeal gifts I cast, My fleeing self to save; And that's the thing must go at last, For that's the thing ...
— New Poems • Francis Thompson
... rage against the persecutors of the martyr, that in a short time, being carried away from the midst, they nowhere appeared. And some, without confession, or the viaticum, were suddenly snatched away; others tearing piecemeal their own fingers or tongues; others pining with hunger, and corrupting in their whole body, and racked with unheard-of tortures before their death, and broken up by paralysis; others bereft of their intellects; others ...
— Primitive Christian Worship • James Endell Tyler
... the remains it seems probable that the site of the ruins here designated as the Casa Grande group was occupied a long time, not as a whole, but piecemeal as it were, one part being occupied and abandoned while some other part was being built up, and that this ebb and flow of population through many generations reached its final period in the occupation of the structure here termed the Casa Grande ruin. ...
— Casa Grande Ruin • Cosmos Mindeleff
... lay the matter for your decision." "Stay, we've not done with you yet," cried Pope Julius, and madly they engage once more, tooth and nail, until the strokes clashed like earthquakes; the three armies of the damned tore each other piecemeal, and like snakes became whole again, and spread far and wide over the jagged, burning crags, until Lucifer bade his veterans, the giants of Hell, separate them, which indeed was no ...
— The Visions of the Sleeping Bard • Ellis Wynne
... creatures to destruction gave, Tainted the pools, the fodder charged with bane. Nor simple was the way of death, but when Hot thirst through every vein impelled had drawn Their wretched limbs together, anon o'erflowed A watery flux, and all their bones piecemeal Sapped by corruption to itself absorbed. Oft in mid sacrifice to heaven- the white Wool-woven fillet half wreathed about his brow- Some victim, standing by the altar, there Betwixt the loitering carles a-dying fell: Or, if betimes the slaughtering priest had struck, ...
— The Georgics • Virgil
... author of Historiae of the Social and Civil Wars (Vell. Pat. ii. 9). Cicero thought him superior to his predecessors, but childish (Brut. 228, De Leg. i. 7), and Sallust remarks his want of frankness in speaking of Sulla's career (Iug. 95). He avoided a piecemeal and desultory treatment of events; cf. his own words quoted by Gell. xii. 15, 2, 'Nos una aestate in Asia et Graecia gesta litteris idcirco continentia mandavimus, ne vellicatim aut saltuatim scribendo lectorum animos impediremus.' His translation of the Milesiaka of Aristides ...
— The Student's Companion to Latin Authors • George Middleton
... off, not abruptly, but piecemeal, those outward symbols—his sombre clothes. First 'twas his hat he exchanged for a feather-trimmed beaver of more sightly hue; then those stiff white bands that reeked of sanctity and cant for a collar of fine point; next it was his coat that took on a worldly edge of silver lace. And so, little ...
— The Tavern Knight • Rafael Sabatini
... one, to alight on? Vain all its talents for ploughing, hammering, and whatever else; there is no Earth-room for this Nation with its talents: this Nation will have to keep hovering on the wing, dolefully shrieking to and fro; and perish piecemeal; burying itself, down to the last soul of it, in the waste unfirmamented seas. Ah yes, soil, with or without ploughing, is the gift of God. The soil of all countries belongs evermore, in a very considerable degree, to the Almighty Maker! The last stroke of labour bestowed on it is not ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... piecemeal. Probably at the root of all our strange fanaticism about drink was the thought that the saloon had better go; that it was time for such foul places to disappear. The pendulum had to swing all the way. If it would swing back ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam
... cinch me. As I've told you more than once, I'm an engineer and no finance shark. My borrow at the bank was one hundred thousand dollars, and there was a verbal understanding that it was to be repaid out of the surplus earnings, piecemeal. I told Grierson that I should need a year or more, and ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... brought down to the lower heaven (that of the moon) by the angel Gabriel, and thence taken and shown to Mahomet, once every year of his mission, and twice in the last year of his life. They assert, however, that it was only piecemeal, that the several parts were revealed by the angel to the prophet, and that he immediately dictated what had been revealed to his secretary, who wrote it down. Each part, as soon as it was thus copied out, was communicated to his disciples, to get by heart, and was afterward ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... realise the damage done to his car, or listen to a word that passed between Thrush and his chauffeur; he had eyes only for those of his child who had been lost but was found, and not a thought in his head outside the story he extracted piecemeal on the spot. Poor Pocket told it very volubly and ill; he would not confine himself to simple facts. He stated his suspicion of Baumgartner's complicity in the Hyde Park affair as though he knew it for a fact; cited the murders in Holland Walk and Park Lane as obvious pieces of the ...
— The Camera Fiend • E.W. Hornung
... guard, on a "tin-clad" steamer, to wear out the rest of the war in a Northern prison. Forbidden to gather even in pairs, they had yet moved freely about, often passing each other closely enough to exchange piecemeal counsels unnoticed, and all at once, at a tap of the boat's bell had sprung, man for man, upon their keepers and instantly were masters of them, of them, of their arms stacked on the boiler-deck and ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... Without Stanislao and the convicts, I am in doubt what would become of the present regimen in Nuka-hiva; whether the highways might not be suffered to close up, the pier to wash away, and the Residency to fall piecemeal about the ears of impotent officials. And yet though the hereditary favourer, and one of the chief props of French authority, he has always an eye upon the past. He showed me where the old public ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... I thought of having it cut to portable size; but second thoughts determined me to leave it for another visit or for some more fortunate visitor. Lastly, we were informed, a few weeks afterwards, that the Ma'azah Shaykhs had carried it off to their tents—I fear piecemeal. ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... imprudent haste in my career; I am permitted to be rash. Gulfs are bridged in a twinkling, as if some unseen baggage-train carried pontoons for my convenience, and while from the heights I scan the tempting but unexplored Pacific Ocean of Futurity, the ship is being carried over the mountains piecemeal on the backs of mules and lamas, whose keel shall plough its waves, and bear me to the Indies. Day would not dawn if it were ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... through the whole story again. The man was no more astonished at the foot than he had been at the head; he snatched up the leg and threw it out at the door. Before they had finished, the other leg, both arms, the body, the whole murdered traveler, in fact, came down piecemeal. No omelette all this time! The old hemp-seller grew very ...
— The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac
... stories of her poor son and the cruel wars. The family were as gentle as the child, and at length she came to know them so well that she accepted their invitation to pass the last month of her residence abroad under their roof. All this intelligence she wrote home, piecemeal as it came about, from time to time; and at last enclosed a polite note, from the head of the chateau, soliciting, on the occasion of his approaching mission to that neighbourhood, the honour ...
— The Seven Poor Travellers • Charles Dickens
... machine for the purpose of superseding the hand-press, which took hours struggling over the three or four thousand copies of the Times. The pressmen threatened destruction to the new machine, and it had to be smuggled piecemeal into the premises, while Martyn sheltered himself under various disguises to escape the vengeance of the workmen. On the eve of success, however, Walter's father lost courage, stopped the supplies, and the project was for the time abandoned. ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... sturdy democratic fashion, had to be endured. It died hard, but did come to an end, piecemeal. Tom Breeks then retired from the front, and became a unit once more. There were flourishes that indicated a termination of the proceedings, when another fellow was propelled in advance, and he, shuffling and ducking his head, to the cries of "Out wi' it, Jim!" and, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... can. That machinery of life for the use of people who didn't know what they wanted of it, and which was known at the time as State Socialism, was partly put in motion, though in a very piecemeal way. But it did not work smoothly; it was, of course, resisted at every turn by the capitalists; and no wonder, for it tended more and more to upset the commercial system I have told you of; without providing anything really effective in its place. The result ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris
... and the city of God, which is eternal in the heavens, for ever coming down among men, and actualising itself more and more in every succeeding age. I only know that I know nothing, but with a hope that Christ, who is the Son of Man, will tell me piecemeal, if I be patient and watchful, what I am and what ...
— Daily Thoughts - selected from the writings of Charles Kingsley by his wife • Charles Kingsley
... the wing, and was solid and permanent, and bade fair to overflow into the courtyard, and through the entrance-gates, and across the street, and to the very kitchen-garden and flower-garden themselves. Also, it seemed to have been stolen piecemeal from somewhere, and at different periods, and from different localities, and tacked at haphazard on to the walls of the parent erection. Moreover, all the windows of the latter were small, and in their green panes, as they confronted the world, there was a timid and suspicious air, while, ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... had taken on board, and who landed with me, broke the egg with hatchets, and having made a hole in it, pulled out the young roc piecemeal and roasted it. I had earnestly entreated them not to meddle with the egg, but they ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... it would be surrounded by hundreds of small brown ants. It was really very interesting to watch the little creatures. They would saw off a leg, or a part of one, then several of them would drag it away to their hiding-place; and, piecemeal, they would, if given time, carry off the cockroach, leaving not a particle. Now there is a lesson ...
— Scenes in the Hawaiian Islands and California • Mary Evarts Anderson
... the murder of her man by means of the supple splinter her condemnation is assured. The penalty is piecemeal slicing, and in it are involved those of her direct line, in the humane effort to eradicate so treacherous ...
— Kai Lung's Golden Hours • Ernest Bramah
... now—perfectly fitted, no doubt, for them. If they once began to rebel and mutiny against that law, all was over with them. That great, foolish, ignorant multitude would have broken up, probably fought among themselves—certainly parted company, and either starved in the desert, or have been destroyed piecemeal by the wild warlike tribes, Midianites, Moabites, Amalekites—who were ready enough for slaughter and plunder. They would never have reached Canaan. They would never have become a great nation. So they had to be, by necessity, under martial law. The word must be, Obey or ...
— The Gospel of the Pentateuch • Charles Kingsley
... being close to the mainland of Cathay, was visited by the armies of the Great Khan, and that it was his men who had used the arrows and made war upon the natives. It was no good for the natives to show him some of their mutilated bodies, and to tell him that the cannibals ate them piecemeal; he had no use for such information. His mind was like a sieve of which the size of the meshes could be adjusted at will; everything that was not germane to the idea of the moment fell through it, and only confirmative evidence remained; and at the moment he was not ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... Cassivelaunus and some of the Kentish tribes alone opposed them at their first landing, and he was betrayed and abandoned by the tribes on the north of the Thames. It has been the same thing ever since. We fight piecemeal; and while the Romans hurl their whole strength against one tribe the others look on with folded hands. Who aided the Trinobantes when the Romans defeated them and established themselves on that hill? No one. They will eat Britain up ...
— Beric the Briton - A Story of the Roman Invasion • G. A. Henty
... imagine or the tongue relate; a single one of which was sufficient to make the hair stand erect, the blood to freeze, the flesh to melt, the bones to drop from their places—yea, the spirit to faint. What is empaling or sawing men alive, tearing off the flesh piecemeal with iron pincers, or broiling the flesh with candles, collop fashion, or squeezing heads flat in a vice, and all the most shocking devices which ever were upon earth, compared with one of these? Mere pastime! There were a hundred thousand shoutings, ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... Newfoundland, 'where I mean to make clean my ships, and revictual; for I have tobacco enough to pay for it.' But he was powerless, as he confesses, to govern his crew, and no one knows how the heartbroken old man spent the next two dreadful months. His ships slunk back piecemeal to English havens, and on May 23, Captain North, who had commanded the 'Chudleigh,' had audience of the King, and told him the whole miserable story. On May 26,[12] Raleigh made his appearance, with the 'Destiny,' in the harbour of Kinsale, ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... here the mighty queen of good and ill, Fortune; first marry, then enjoy thy fill Of lawful pleasures; but depart ere morn; Slip from her bed, or else thou shalt be torn Piecemeal by fiends; thy blood caroused in bowls, And thy four quarters blown to the ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. II • Edited by Walter Scott
... Whose fire slow-burns me, smiting to the bone. O thou whose glance is beauty and whose heart All marble: O dark-eyebrowed maiden mine! Cling to thy goatherd, let him kiss thy lips, For there is sweetness in an empty kiss. Thou wilt not? Piecemeal I will rend the crown, The ivy-crown which, dear, I guard for thee, Inwov'n with scented parsley and with flowers: Oh I am desperate—what betides me, what?— Still art thou deaf? I'll doff my coat of skins And ...
— Theocritus • Theocritus
... COTTER'S SATURDAY NIGHT should have stooped to write the JOLLY BEGGARS. The SATURDAY NIGHT may or may not be an admirable poem; but its significance is trebled, and the power and range of the poet first appears, when it is set beside the JOLLY BEGGARS. To take a man's work piecemeal, except with the design of elegant extracts, is the way to avoid, and not to perform, the critic's duty. The same defect is displayed in the treatment of Burns as a man, which is broken, apologetical, and confused. The man here presented to us is not that Burns, TERES ATQUE ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... nobles were divided, either deliberately or because the land was conquered piecemeal and parcelled out as it was conquered. (For example, Odo had 473 manors in ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: History • Ontario Ministry of Education
... The populace and peerage both alike Birds—Eyeless, Shagless, and returnless, too— Oh! day of death, oh! chaos of hard times!— And princes, dukes, and lords, they all stood still, Feeling within their pockets' silent depths; And sailors went a-moaning out to sea, And chew'd their cables piecemeal: then they wept, And slept on the abyss without a quid. All quids were gone, cigars were in their graves; The plant, their mother, had been rooted up; Pawnbrokers had a ton of pipes apiece, And "Antis" triumph'd. Then they ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... started at the time proposed there could have been little opposition in the west, for the Franks were then busy fighting each other, but luckily Muza fell into disgrace with the Caliph at this time and his great project was undertaken by less able hands and on a piecemeal plan. ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott
... existed just as she teaches them, that Jesus instituted confession, extreme unction and marriage, and that he taught what was afterwards decided upon by the Nicene and Trent Councils. Nothing can be more erroneous. The Christian dogma has been formed, like everything else, slowly and piecemeal, by a sort of inward vegetation. Theology, by asserting the contrary, raises up a mass of objections, and places itself in the predicament of having to reject all criticism. I would advise any one who wishes to realise this to read in a theological work the treatise on Sacraments, ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... your spouse Hath sent defiance to the king your husband, And, like a tried tall soldier, fled his holds In Marchland, where he knows, despite of him And all the men that he therein can raise, King John could have sent dogs enou' to tear Their ill-arm'd bodies piecemeal, ere his bands Should with base blood have stain'd their noble hands. And whither is this worshipful good earl (This first love, old love, new love, if you will) Gone, thinks your ladyship? forsooth, good man, To Normandy; and there he stirs up coals, And urgeth strong aid for confederates ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... time there seems to be in many sections of the country a strong prejudice against patents, which sometimes makes it difficult to get people sufficiently interested to take hold of any patent; especially is this true when the patentee endeavors to sell his patent piecemeal; that is, by county, township, shop, or farm rights. No matter how important or valuable the invention may be, there seems to be a disposition on the part of the public to look upon such rights as a fraud, and to be very cautious how they invest ...
— Practical Pointers for Patentees • Franklin Cresee
... resist the temptation of one last shot, the boy was gliding noiselessly forward through the rushes, when suddenly he stopped as if rooted to the ground, with hands thrown up and eyes bulging from his head. At his feet lay the corpses of his morning comrades,—scalped, stripped, hacked almost piecemeal! Then the instinct of the hunted thing, of flight, of self-protection, eclipsed momentary terror, and the boy was ducking into the rushes to hide when, with a crash of musketry from the woods, ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... other's shoulders into momentary prominence and prospect of success, and immediately disappearing ignominiously; making frantic grasps and clutches with a hundred long arms and eager outstretched hands, and finally succeeding, by shoulders and fists, in bringing the wreath away piecemeal; and then they give themselves up to mutual embraces, groans, laments, and all the enginery of pathetic affection in the last gasping throes of separation,—to the doleful tearing of hair and the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... rail fence had lain for nearly forty years, renewed piecemeal from time to time as it rotted away, its corners full of brambles, its stakes and riders overrun with poison-vine; where this brown, jointed structure had stretched, like a fossil worm, a great transformation had come. The rails were ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... would see things in statu quo. There were enough of the Indians even to sacrifice one hundred of them to one Spaniard and still maintain the balance of power. Cortes observed that he might fight this way until all of his army had melted away by piecemeal and have taken nothing. ...
— South American Fights and Fighters - And Other Tales of Adventure • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... bear witness truly. They were to bring into court their own knowledge of the case, and of any circumstances that threw light upon it, including the general opinion and persuasion of the neighbourhood. There was no attempt to collect evidence piecemeal, and to rise above the level of local rumour, by a patient judicial investigation. This provides us with something like a measure of the intellectual stage of the public mind in Saxon times, and will perhaps justify these remarks if they have ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... paced the floor or dropped in chairs and fought as they flung off their clothes piecemeal. She had combed and brushed her hair viciously as she raged, weeping the unbeautiful tears of wrath. But he had not had that comfort of tears; his tears ran down the inside of his soul and burned. She goaded him out of his ordinary self-control—knew ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... Lady Harman and her husband which was to be her Great Charter, the constitutional basis of her freedoms throughout the rest of her married life, had many practical defects. The chief of these was that it was largely undocumented; it had been made piecemeal, in various ways, at different times and for the most part indirectly through diverse intermediaries. Charterson had introduced large vaguenesses by simply displaying more of his teeth at crucial moments, Mrs. Harman had conveyed things by hugging and weeping that were afterwards ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... vehicle of thought, for six thousand years, and in that long space has undergone many and strange modifications. At the dispersion from Babel, and the "confusion of tongues" occasioned thereby, people were thrown upon their own resources, and left to pick up by piecemeal such shreds as should afterwards be wove into a system, and adopted by their respective nations. Wars, pestilence, and famine, as well as commerce, enterprize, literature, and religion, brought the different nations into intercourse with each other; and changes were thus produced in the ...
— Lectures on Language - As Particularly Connected with English Grammar. • William S. Balch
... are on duty in the prison, day or night. A few years ago the time of daily duty was reduced to twelve hours, with one hour at noon for dinner. Besides this, at times they must do a good deal of extra duty. Each is allowed ten days annual holiday, but is frequently obliged to take it piecemeal, a day or two at a time, so that he cannot go far away from the scene of his servitude. Their duties require unflagging attention and never-ceasing vigilance, which must be a heavy tax on the brain, and the twelve hours must be passed in standing or walking about. In fact, they are subjected to ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... be a truly scientific philosophy because of its slavery to time, its ethical preoccupations, and its predominant interest in our mundane concerns and destiny. A truly scientific philosophy will be more humble, more piecemeal, more arduous, offering less glitter of outward mirage to flatter fallacious hopes, but more indifferent to fate, and more capable of accepting the world without the tyrannous imposition of ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... we crossed, piecemeal, a deep lake in the canoes, and marching awhile came to a timber-covered rise which our French prisoners named as the Warriors' Island. And from the shelter of its trees we saw the steely lines of a score of low ponds, and over the tops of ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... Through life's short fever-fits of heat and cold; Thy Name will I extol and sing thereof, Will flee for refuge to Thy Blessed Name. Lord, look upon me from thy bliss above: Look down on me, who shrink from all the shame And pangs and desolation of my death, Wrenched piecemeal or devoured or set on flame, While all the world around me holds its breath With eyes glued on me for a gazing-stock, Pitiless eyes, while no man pitieth. The floods are risen, I stagger in their shock, My heart reels and is faint, I fail, I faint: My God, set Thou ...
— Poems • Christina G. Rossetti
... think, Captain,' said Rob, looking round the room, 'that when Mr Gills was going in and out so often, these last few days, he was taking little things away, piecemeal, not ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... lawful and right. I fall certainly by my own sword, but honourably. I go about and am dying piecemeal, like Athens. Did we know that we adorned our statues for a funeral procession? that we were weaving our own shrouds? that the choruses ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... published and from most of his subsequent work. It is not unnoteworthy that the batch of poems called in the later collected editions Switzerland, and completed at last by the piece called On the Terrace at Berne, appeared originally piecemeal, and with no indication of connection. The first of its numbers is here, To my Friends who Ridiculed a Tender Leave-taking. It applies both the note of thought which has been indicated, and the quality of style ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... you ever, Peace, wild wooddove, shy wings shut, Your round me roaming end, and under be my boughs? When, when, Peace, will you, Peace? I'll not play hypocrite To own my heart: I yield you do come sometimes; but That piecemeal peace is poor peace. What pure peace allows Alarms of wars, the daunting wars, the ...
— Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins - Now First Published • Gerard Manley Hopkins
... rests were weakened by the ignorance of early restorers, who cut into them freely, and dug graves in such manner as to imperil their foundations. The most arduous work of Sir Gilbert Scott was the strengthening of these piers, effected piecemeal by partial reconstruction of the piers themselves and by laying a durable substratum of cement right down to the chalk. The fine ring of eight bells was rehung. Visitors will find the ascent of the spiral staircase long and arduous, but ...
— Hertfordshire • Herbert W Tompkins
... ferried Number Six down piecemeal from the special orbital transport ship that had brought it. Only three landing craft sank during the process, and within two weeks Simpson and Barton set bravely off with their dull-witted cohorts to tackle the swamp with a spanking new piece ...
— The Native Soil • Alan Edward Nourse
... about that wonderful adventure for yourselves; but until then I will say nothing about it, not from any wish to disappoint your curiosity, or to make myself important, but simply because the whole story partakes so much of the marvellous, that I am afraid to tell it in a piecemeal, hasty fashion, for fear I should be set down as one of those common fellows of whom there are so many in my profession, who are not ashamed to narrate things they have not seen, and even to tell wonderful stories about wild animals ...
— Hunter Quatermain's Story • H. Rider Haggard
... landed with me broke the egg with hatchets, and making a hole in it, pulled out the young roc piecemeal, and roasted it. I had in vain entreated them not ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments • Anonymous
... camp on the summit of one of the twin hills. He hung over the town of Patusan like a hawk over a poultry-yard, but he devastated the open country. Whole villages, deserted, rotted on their blackened posts over the banks of clear streams, dropping piecemeal into the water the grass of their walls, the leaves of their roofs, with a curious effect of natural decay as if they had been a form of vegetation stricken by a blight at its very root. The two parties in Patusan were not sure which one this partisan most desired ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... days' fit of philanthropy' [the attempt to abolish the slave-trade] which has just sprung up, and which has slept for twenty years together, were allowed to sleep one summer longer, it would appear to me rather more wise than thus to take up a subject piecemeal, which it has been publicly declared ought not to be agitated at all till next session of Parliament. Perhaps, by such imprudence, the slaves themselves may be prompted by their own authority, to proceed at once to a 'total and immediate ...
— The Trial of Theodore Parker • Theodore Parker
... cost over the period during which the public is being benefited. Better prices are obtained on contracts for a large mileage than for smaller jobs, and the community can receive the benefit more quickly than where construction proceeds piecemeal with current funds. The vital consideration is to insure that the term of the bonds is well within the useful life of the road, and that ample provision is made to maintain the roads during that period. Under proper restrictions the bond method of financing is to be commended. The bonds ...
— American Rural Highways • T. R. Agg
... of his liberty-loving ancestry, thus speaks of him in his private life at this period: "Amid the reverses of fortune, harassed by pecuniary embarrassments, during the tortures of a disease which tore away his life piecemeal, hee ever maintained the same manly and unaltered front, the same cheerfulness of disposition, the same dignity of conduct. No humiliating solicitation, no weak complaint, escaped him." At the election in the ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... were the ceremonies complete than there was a rush made to obtain souvenirs. In ignorance of the fact that the "Last Tie" had been taken up and an ordinary one substituted, the relic hunters carried off the substitute piecemeal. In fact some half dozen "last ties" were so taken in the first six months after the roads ...
— The Story of the First Trans-Continental Railroad - Its Projectors, Construction and History • W. F. Bailey
... to one hundred dollars, forming a small suburb of samples. The lumber is floated down the Volga and her tributaries from the great forests of Ufa, and made up in Samara. The peasant purchaser disjoints his house, floats it to a point near his village, drags it piecemeal to its proper site, sets it up, roofs it, builds an oven and a chimney of stones, clay, and whitewash, plugs the interstices with rope or moss, smears them with clay if he feels inclined, and his house is ready for occupancy. Although such houses ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... breaking through, he had to scrape it out piecemeal, wetting the dried mud as he toiled. He measured carefully just how much of the thickness to leave, because the weed stalks in the adobe could not be trusted to hold too thin a crust, and also he had to take care that the ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... which their remains occur was soft enough to permit their under sides to sink into it, and that then gradually hardening, it kept the bones in their places; while the uncovered upper sides, exposed to the disintegrating influences, either mouldered away piecemeal, or were removed by accident. The bones of the larger animals of the basin are usually found detached; and ere they could be reconstructed into perfect skeletons, they taxed the extraordinary powers of the greatest of comparative anatomists. Rather more than twenty different species of extinct ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... could see a frosty valley, reaching to the Mississippi, glinting in the distance. That alluvial stretch was, in the course of years, to be eaten away by the river even to the bastions. The fort itself, built at such expense, would soon be abandoned by its conquerors, to sink, piecemeal, a noble and massive ruin. The dome-shaped powder house and stone quarters would be put to ignoble uses, and forest trees, spreading the spice of walnut fragrance, or the dense shadow of oaks, would grow through the very room where St. ...
— Heroes of the Middle West - The French • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... one object to set against the magnificent remains of the fortress or citadel, the traditional camp of Caesar. Silchester again has the great advantage of being systematically and skilfully dug out, while Jublains has been examined only piecemeal. This again illustrates the difference between the state of ownership in England and in France. Silchester is at the command of a single will, which happily is in the present generation wisely guided. Jublains must fare as may seem good to a multitude of separate wills, ...
— Sketches of Travel in Normandy and Maine • Edward A. Freeman
... and brought out the great key. The church door swung open, and, descending a few steps, they passed through a low-roofed passage into the church. All was in ruin. The gravestones in the pavement were started from their places; the vaults beneath yawned; the roof above was falling piecemeal; there were rents in the old tower; and mysterious passages, and side doors with crazy flights of wooden steps, leading down into the churchyard. Amid all this ruin, one thing only stood erect; it was a statue of a knight in armour, standing in a niche ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... mother, all before his time Was Arthur born, and all as soon as born Deliver'd at a secret postern-gate To Merlin, to be holden far apart Until his hour should come; because the lords Of that fierce day were as the lords of this, Wild beasts, and surely would have torn the child Piecemeal among them, had they known; for each But sought to rule for his own self and hand, And many hated Uther for the sake Of Gorlois. Wherefore Merlin took the child, And gave him to Sir Anton, an old knight And ancient friend of ...
— Famous Tales of Fact and Fancy - Myths and Legends of the Nations of the World Retold for Boys and Girls • Various
... going badly induced a Battalion Commander of another Brigade, whose Battalion had been taken from him piecemeal and scattered to the four winds of heaven, to order A Company, in the absence of Col. Fowler, to go across to the Redoubt to reinforce the troops there. Information, however, was brought by L.-Corpl. ...
— The Sherwood Foresters in the Great War 1914 - 1919 - History of the 1/8th Battalion • W.C.C. Weetman
... and present it to the Elector. By the end of November Spalatin had completed his task (one marvels at the leisureliness of this, in view of the serious condition of the Elector; or was the manuscript translated and administered piecemeal to the noble patient?), and early in December he returned the original, doubtless together with his own translation, to Luther, who had requested its return, "in order to comfort ...
— Works of Martin Luther - With Introductions and Notes (Volume I) • Martin Luther
... earth after that evening. Eagerly watched Hygelac's kinsman his cursed foe, how he would fare in fell attack. Not that the monster was minded to pause! Straightway he seized a sleeping warrior for the first, and tore him fiercely asunder, the bone-frame bit, drank blood in streams, swallowed him piecemeal: swiftly thus the lifeless corse was clear devoured, e'en feet and hands. Then farther he hied; for the hardy hero with hand he grasped, felt for the foe with fiendish claw, for the hero reclining, — who clutched ...
— Beowulf • Anonymous
... German literature of those times so much has been written, and so exhaustively, that every one who takes any interest in it can be completely informed; in regard to it critics agree now pretty well; and what at present I intend to say piecemeal and disconnectedly concerning it, relates not so much to the way in which it was constituted in itself, as to its relation to me. I will therefore first speak of those things by which the public is particularly excited; of those two hereditary ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... brooded, barely managing to keep alive, and the children in school. As spring opened, she shook herself, arose, and went to work. It was not planned, systematic, effective, Bates work. Piecemeal she did anything she saw needed the doing. The children helped to make garden and clean the yard. Then all of them went out to Aunt Ollie's and made a contract to plant and raise potatoes and vegetables on shares. They passed a neglected garden on the way, and learning ...
— A Daughter of the Land • Gene Stratton-Porter
... otherwise, I should have purchased the ticket piecemeal. I cannot endure to travel all night. It fatigues me ...
— Try and Trust • Horatio Alger
... furnished the money for all these things we're so proud of having built, including the Mt. Desert cottages and the Wyoming hunting-lodge. It means that we've got to be able to read our book of the Black Art backwards as well as forwards, or the Powers we've conjured up will tear piecemeal both them and us. God! it makes me crawl to think of ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick
... Indians. Particularly the tale I had related of having seen dead Chinamen in heaps with their heads lopped off. A nightmare of this imaginary episode began to come to me. And another dream I had—of a huge Boxer, with a cutlass, standing over me. And he was about to carve me piecemeal while I lay bound and helpless before him. The dream persisted so strongly that, after I awoke, I still seemed to see him standing in a corner of my room. And I cried aloud. And felt foolish when it brought my father in. So I stopped ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... plainly very much excited and disturbed. He walked nervously up and down, jerking his sentences out piecemeal as ...
— Brand Blotters • William MacLeod Raine
... least, down to the very roots. True, while Sophocles was dancing, Xerxes, the great king of the East, foiled at Salamis, as his father Darius had been foiled at Marathon ten years before, was fleeing back to Persia, leaving his innumerable hosts of slaves and mercenaries to be destroyed piecemeal, by land at Platea, by sea at Mycale. The bold hope was over, in which the Persian, ever since the days of Cyrus, had indulged—that he, the despot of the East, should be the despot of the West likewise. ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... Wilner's wonder-box. The programme on such occasions varied little; the child was permitted to rummage among the treasures in the box until she had satisfied her perennial curiosity; conversation with her absent-minded father ensued, which ultimately included a personal narrative, dragged out piecemeal from the reticent, dreamy invalid. Then always a few pages of the diary kept by the late Herr Wilner were read as a bedtime story. And bath and bed and dreamland followed. That was the invariable routine, now once more ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... noticeable. He walked on at once. But years could not have instructed him more thoroughly than that one second. He had received a revelation. Like all revelations, he received it in its entirety and realized it piecemeal. His thoughts stumbled over each other in confusion.... Desire at John's office at this unusual hour? ... Desire in her prettiest frock and smiling ... smiling, and so lost in her own thoughts that she saw no one ... Desire ... ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... treason, disavowed only by General Cass; a Cabinet, in the last extremity, still essaying to continue its former course by killing with its veto the bill adopted by the Legislature of Nebraska to prohibit slavery in its Territory; a Government falling apart by piecemeal, for fear of compromising itself by resisting some part of the South: do you know of any thing so shameful? Mr. Buchanan will end as he began: for four years, he has been struggling to obtain an extension of ...
— The Uprising of a Great People • Count Agenor de Gasparin
... its present state, with exceptions which need not here be specified, does not discern truth intuitively, or as a whole. We know, not by a direct and simple vision, not at a glance, but, as it were, by piecemeal and accumulation, by a mental process, by going round an object, by the comparison, the combination, the mutual correction, the continual adaptation, of many partial notions, by the employment, concentration, and joint action ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... whole. The draperies are now laid with infinite care on to the living model, and are made to approximate as closely as possible to the arrangement given in the first sketch, which, as it was not haphazard, but most carefully worked out, must of necessity be adhered to. They have often to be drawn piecemeal, as a model cannot by any means always retain the attitude sufficiently long for the design to be wholly carried out at one cast. This arrangement is effected with special reference to painting—that ...
— Frederic Lord Leighton - An Illustrated Record of His Life and Work • Ernest Rhys
... soldiery that they have to face men endowed with the courage of despair in this quarter; and fearing cold steel more than anything else, they have decided that the only way of reaching their prey is by blowing them up piecemeal. That is why they have taken to mining—most audacious mining, carried on under the noses of the French defenders. If you come here at night, and remain until one of those curious lulls in the rifle-fire suddenly ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... finally, because these hill-forts, from some disadvantage of situation, were no longer used as places of strength, and so the beacon-keepers had no motive to attempt consolidating them throughout by the piecemeal application of the vitrifying agent. But the old Highland mode of accounting for the present appearance of Knock Farril and its vitrified remains is perhaps, after all, quite as good in its way as any of the modes suggested ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... forty years later the Liberal party is seeking to apply the principle to Wales. It is highly characteristic of English politics and English psychology that the change should be carried out in this piecemeal fashion. In the other countries of the British Empire the system of Separation prevails; there is no connection between the State and any sect; no Church is anything more than a voluntary society. But secularization has advanced ...
— A History of Freedom of Thought • John Bagnell Bury
... waves. The leprosy gnaws the flesh off a man's bones, and joints and limbs drop off—he is a living death. So with every soul that is under the dominion of these lying desires—it is slowly rotting away piecemeal, 'waxing corrupt according ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... the train to move by daybreak. The pitch-burner, who was hired as guide to Buda, affirmed that the horses could pass everywhere, but as to the wagons, provisions and baggage, it would be necessary in some places to take them apart and carry them piecemeal, and that could not be done without tedious work. But people accustomed to hard labor preferred hardship to lounging in the deserted inn. Therefore they moved on willingly. Even the timid Wit was not scared by the words and presence ...
— The Knights of the Cross • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... 'ee to-all?" he asked, smashing a spider-crab and picking it out piecemeal from the net. "Pretty fair catch to-day, id'n-a? spite of all the weed; an' no harm done by these varmints that a man can't put to rights ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... Jew had deposited upon the table. 'This is the exact sum that was paid to thee four weeks since. It is now returned, and you are a marked man. If seen again in these parts, I will myself have thee cut in piecemeal, and hung at my castle gates. Now, villain, get ...
— The Duke's Prize - A Story of Art and Heart in Florence • Maturin Murray
... exiles,"—the whole mass of the ten tribes, carried away according to prophetic foresight (compare Amos v. 27: "And I carry you away beyond Damascus, saith the Lord, the God of hosts"), as opposed to a piecemeal carrying away, such as had once already taken place before the time of the prophet in respect to Judah, but not in respect to the children of Israel; compare Joel iv. (iii.) 6. That the "Canaanites unto Zarephath"—i.e., the Ph[oe]nicians, ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg
... columns meet, We push them headlong with our arms and feet. The lightning flies not swifter than the fall, Nor thunder louder than the ruin'd wall: Down goes the top at once; the Greeks beneath Are piecemeal torn, or pounded into death. Yet more succeed, and more to death are sent; We cease not from above, nor they below relent. Before the gate stood Pyrrhus, threat'ning loud, With glitt'ring arms conspicuous in the crowd. So shines, renew'd in youth, the crested snake, Who slept ...
— The Aeneid • Virgil
... thus justify contemporary writing, we can but think, that, after long ages of piecemeal and bon-mot literature, we shall at length return to serious studies, vast syntheses, great works. The nebulous world of letters shall be again concentred into stars. The epoch of the printing-press has run itself nearly through; but a new epoch and a new art shall arise, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... cried Danglars, in a tone whose bitterness Harpagon [*] alone has been capable of revealing—"tell me that you wish to despoil me of all; it will be sooner over than devouring me piecemeal." ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... desperate straits to which she was reduced. Though he had loved her well, and sinfully, but truly, for so many years, his love had sometimes seemed an unbearable thraldom, to escape from which he would have given his heart piecemeal, though he should lose all the happiness life held for him, for the sake of a momentary freedom. Possibly, too, she knew that he never longed for that freedom so much as when she had just been most violent and despotic. She was prepared for the ...
— Taquisara • F. Marion Crawford
... supply of oil and alcohol, which Marvin and Borup were to bring to me, was, I felt, vital to our success; but even if they did not come in with it, I could not turn back here. While pacing the floe, I figured out how we should use our sledges piecemeal as fuel in our cookers, to make tea after the oil and alcohol were gone. By the time the wood of the sledges was exhausted, it would be warm enough so that we could suck ice or snow to assuage our thirst, and get along with our pemmican and raw dog without tea. But, though I planned, ...
— The North Pole - Its Discovery in 1909 under the auspices of the Peary Arctic Club • Robert E. Peary
... said, it is less than we won at Porto Bello. Many swore fiercely that, if they had known how small the booty was to prove, they would have seen Henry Morgan in gaol before they 'listed. Why they did not tear him piecemeal, and heave him into the sea, must remain a mystery. They contented themselves with damning him to his face for a rogue and a thief, at the same time praying that a red-hot hell might be his everlasting portion. "But Captain ...
— On the Spanish Main - Or, Some English forays on the Isthmus of Darien. • John Masefield
... was coming out of the drawing-room window to meet the travellers—a lady whose presence diffused that sense of refinement and peace into the atmosphere which has done as much towards the expansion of our piecemeal empire as ever did the strong right arm of Thomas Atkins. It is because—sooner or later—these ladies come with us that we have learnt to mingle peace with war—to make friends of ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... many a strange fulfilment of dreams of other days. For instance, the present writer had been a faithful student of the Scottish ballads, and had always envied Sir Walter the delight of tracing them out amid their own heather, and of writing them down piecemeal from the lips of aged crones. It was a strange enjoyment, therefore, to be suddenly brought into the midst of a kindred world of unwritten songs, as simple and indigenous as the Border Minstrelsy, more uniformly ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... that the clock, having performed its duty, though so long before its time, disintegrated, the works falling piecemeal into the green fluid, there forming a melancholy little heap of ...
— Till the Clock Stops • John Joy Bell
... of Marianne is interesting, though never of so absorbing an interest as to hold the reader's attention more closely than was held that of the writer himself. It is a book to be read by piecemeal, and it may be laid down at any time. Indeed, one is not surprised, nor much distressed, when the author fails to grasp again his fallen pen after the eleventh part. I would not in any way detract from ...
— A Selection from the Comedies of Marivaux • Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux
... crew would drag you piecemeal. No, no, no, Hunston; your fate is sealed. The rope is ready—the noose is waiting for you. In torment and in suffering you shall die the death of a rabid cur, the death of a loathsome reptile, of a poisonous thing of which it is true humanity to ...
— Jack Harkaway and his son's Escape From the Brigand's of Greece • Bracebridge Hemyng
... 1812, he added how sorry he was to give Madame Lacelooper, for whom he entertained the highest regard, so much trouble. Legations were peculiarly situated at times, he said. In reply to an intimation from the gentleman in waiting, he said, gentlemen of the diplomatic corps never paid in piecemeal. Here Thomas would put an end to the comedy by announcing the arrival of the 'Minister for Foreign Affairs,' and politely bowing out the retiring gentleman, who, you may well imagine, maintained a reluctant gravity. There was no end of these little diplomatic comediettas, ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton
... what will happen to you. I tell you that I will take this property and I will pull this old place you are so fond of down stone by stone and throw it into the moat, and send the plough over the site. I will sell the estate piecemeal and blot it out. I tell you I have been tricked—you encouraged the marriage yourself, you know you did, and forbade that man the house," and he paused for breath ...
— Colonel Quaritch, V.C. - A Tale of Country Life • H. Rider Haggard
... her nephew. No relation at all"—Fyne emitted with a convulsive effort this, the most awful part of the suspicions Mrs Fyne used to impart to him piecemeal when he came down to spend his weekends gravely with her and the children. The Fynes, in their good-natured concern for the unlucky child of the man busied in stirring casually so many millions, spent the moments ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... de Nueil to France. His father and brother died, and he was obliged to leave Geneva. The lovers bought the house; and if they could have had their way, they would have removed the hills piecemeal, drawn off the lake with a siphon, and taken everything ...
— The Deserted Woman • Honore de Balzac
... that he kept England from being devoured piecemeal by the Norman barons, who regarded her as a pack of hounds in full chase regard the hare that is on the point of falling into ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... still recall this Reading of "Doctor Marigold" to their remembrance. Those who never heard it as it actually fell from the Author's lips, by turning to the original sketch, and running through that particular portion of it to themselves, may more readily conjecture than by the aid of mere piecemeal quotation, all that the writer of those riant and tearful pages would be capable of accomplishing by its utterance, bringing to its delivery, as he could, so many of the rarer gifts of genius, and so many also of the rarest accomplishments ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... way to the staircase, and hurried on to the drawing-room, with the massive front door being broken piecemeal by the heavy sledge-hammer; but each chain and bolt still held, and there was no way in yet but for light and noise, so that, before they gave way, Frank had time to get a light and ignite the candles in two ...
— In Honour's Cause - A Tale of the Days of George the First • George Manville Fenn
... say something of the sort," his mother said; "but he had only heard it piecemeal from old people, and never heard enough to put the pieces together as you have done. 'What does it matter either?' he used to say; and he said those great lords had been cut-throats on the land and robbers on the ...
— The Waters of Edera • Louise de la Rame, a.k.a. Ouida
... element carbon! Doubtless, with his extraordinary sleight of hand, he had substituted real diamonds for the shapeless mass that came out of the apparatus, in the interval between handing the pebbles round for inspection, and distributing them piecemeal to the men of science and representatives of the diamond interest. We all watched him closely, of course, when he opened the crucibles; but when once we had satisfied ourselves that something came out, our doubts were set at rest, and we forgot to watch whether he distributed those ...
— An African Millionaire - Episodes in the Life of the Illustrious Colonel Clay • Grant Allen
... the despatches giving particulars of the battle of Fuentes d'Onoro—which, by the way, seems to have been rather a confused sort of affair, and the enemy must have blundered into it just as we did; only as they were all there, and we only came up piecemeal, they should have thrashed us handsomely, if they had known their business. Well, luck is everything and, as you have had a good deal more than your share of it since you joined, one must not grumble if the jade has done you ...
— Under Wellington's Command - A Tale of the Peninsular War • G. A. Henty
... with their green jalousie blinds, are so sprinkled and dropped about in all directions, without seeming to have any root at all in the ground; and the small churches and chapels are so prim, and bright, and highly varnished; that I almost believed the whole affair could be taken up piecemeal like a child's toy, and ...
— American Notes for General Circulation • Charles Dickens
... mature, Who found for nature's wane in art a cure. These dames, amidst their joking and caressing The man they long'd to wed, Would sometimes set themselves to dressing His party-colour'd head. Each aiming to assimilate Her lover to her own estate, The older piecemeal stole The black hair from his poll, While eke, with fingers light, The young one stole the white. Between them both, as if by scald, His head was changed from grey to bald. 'For these,' he said, ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... Elasticity drives them about Space vagrantly onward; - I shall unfold: thou simply give all thyself to my teaching. Matter mingled and massed into indissoluble union Does not exist. For we see how wastes each separate substance; So flow piecemeal away, with the length'ning centuries, all things, Till from our eye by degrees that old self passes, and is not. Still Universal Nature abides unchanged as aforetime. Whereof this is the cause. When the atoms part from a substance, That suffers loss; but another ...
— Verses and Translations • C. S. C.
... strike thee dead for this deceit, immediate lightning blast thee, me, and the whole world! Oh! I could rack myself, play the vulture to my own heart, and gnaw it piecemeal, for not boding to me ...
— The Comedies of William Congreve - Volume 1 [of 2] • William Congreve
... had adopted the precaution of taking with him a portable India rubber boat. It was twenty feet long and five feet broad. It was placed in the water, and the carts and the baggage were carried over piecemeal. Three men paddled the boat. Still the current was so strong that one of the best swimmers took in his teeth the end of a rope attached to the boat and swam ahead, that, reaching the shore, he might assist in drawing her over. Six passages ...
— Christopher Carson • John S. C. Abbott
... they looked, a still weirder feeling began to creep over them. The figure, growing fainter, seemed to fade away piecemeal in the remote distance. But it was not in space that it faded; it appeared rather to become dim in some vaguer and far more mysterious fashion, like the memories of childhood or the aching abysses of astronomical calculation. As it slowly dissolved, Frida stretched out ...
— The British Barbarians • Grant Allen
... but we all know that it ought to exist. Bits of it appear from time to time piecemeal and here and there, as for instance in the annotations which modern scholarship attaches to the great text, in the printed criticisms to which sundry accepted doctrines are subjected by the younger men to-day, in ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... wealth and power—for land and its resources in Europe, North Africa and the Near East; for booty, trade and overseas colonies. As the struggle grew more intense smaller and weaker nations dropped out of the contest or were partitioned and gobbled up piecemeal. ...
— Civilization and Beyond - Learning From History • Scott Nearing
... increased autonomy for state enterprises, the foundation of a diversified banking system, the development of stock markets, the rapid growth of the non-state sector, and the opening to foreign trade and investment. China has generally implemented reforms in a gradualist or piecemeal fashion, including the sale of equity in China's largest state banks to foreign investors and refinements in foreign exchange and bond markets in 2005. The restructuring of the economy and resulting efficiency gains have contributed to a more than tenfold increase in GDP since ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... from the edge of Tristram's sword. Then Sir Marhaus flung away sword and shield, and when he might regain his feet, fled shrieking to his ships. "Do ye flee?" cried Tristram. "I am but newly made knight; but rather than flee, I would be hewn piecemeal." ...
— Stories from Le Morte D'Arthur and the Mabinogion • Beatrice Clay
... man than his predecessor. For ten years' space, while Louis XI, that royal fox of France, was destroying feudalism piecemeal,—trimming its power day by day as you might pare an onion,—the new Sieur d'Arnaye steered his shifty course between France and Burgundy, always to the betterment of his chances in this world however he may have modified them in the next. ...
— The Line of Love - Dizain des Mariages • James Branch Cabell
... stated these facts in order that it may be seen what further appropriations are involved in a settlement for all these lands upon the basis which Congress has adopted. It does not seem to me to be a wise policy to deal with this question piecemeal. It would have been better, if a remnant of title remains in the Choctaws and Chickasaws to the lands in the leased district, to have settled the whole matter at once. Under the treaty of 1855 the Choctaws and Chickasaws quitclaimed any ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, Volume IX. • Benjamin Harrison
... all. The other cases were each opened in turn, disclosing to their astounded eyes the veritable treasure of the Incas; and Jim immediately saw that the removal of such a vast accumulation of wealth must necessarily occupy a considerable time, and that the treasure would have to be conveyed away piecemeal on mule-back. He therefore selected from the hoard of uncut jewels as many of the finest as he believed that he and Jose could conveniently carry, wrapped them up in two parcels, and, giving one to Jose to carry, took charge of the other himself. This done, the two ...
— Under the Chilian Flag - A Tale of War between Chili and Peru • Harry Collingwood
... with so many of the statues only being piecemeal, as it were, and so many of the men having kinder women's hair, I declare it seems as if I don't know the ladies from ...
— The Girl with the Green Eyes - A Play in Four Acts • Clyde Fitch
... ROBERT CECIL. He does not quite know what to make of Mr. BALFOUR, who politely represses his honest endeavours to elucidate the situation in Greece, and actually declared to-day that the difficulties of the Allies would only be increased by the hon. Member's attempts to deal with them piecemeal. Mr. LYNCH was not entirely done with, however. "Is that reply," he asked in a "got-him-this-time" manner, "given by reason of freedom of choice or ineludible necessity?" "Sir," replied the apologist of philosophic doubt with Johnsonian authority, "questions of freewill and necessity ...
— Punch, 1917.07.04, Vol. 153, Issue No. 1 • Various
... permanent each individual could buy or sell "shares" in the joint stock, helped to make such "joint-stock" companies very popular after the opening of the seventeenth century. The English East India Company, organized as a regulated company in 1600, was reorganized piecemeal for half a century until it acquired the form of a joint-stock enterprise; most of the other chartered colonial companies followed the same plan. In these early stock-companies we find the germ of the most characteristic of present-day ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... not all. Much of the preciousness was hidden and the place of its hiding forgotten. Bit by bit the churls found the treasure-trove, but they did not tell their lords. They melted down jewels and sold them piecemeal to Jews for Jews' prices, and what they did not recognise as precious they wantonly destroyed. I have seen the marble heads of heathen gods broken with the hammer to make mortar of, and great cups of onyx and alabaster used as water troughs for a thrall's mongrels.. .. ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... of the ball, if he mounted guard faithfully and let no one enter. Birotteau, like the Emperor Napoleon at Compiegne, when the chateau was re-decorated for his marriage with Maria Louisa of Austria, was determined to see nothing piecemeal; he wished to enjoy the surprise of seeing it as a whole. Thus the two antagonists met once more, all unknown to themselves, not on the field of battle, but on the peaceful ground of bourgeois vanity. It was arranged that Monsieur ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... franchise marked "nothing doing." Afterward he put it in the hands of a very near friend, a great capitalist, who had no better luck with it. Finally, here and there, literally by piecemeal, he got together money enough to build and furnish the Hotel Chamberlin, had a notable opening with half of Congress there to see, and gently laid himself down and died, leaving little other than ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... have a powerful reality and relevance for planners. They impose a need for breadth of view, for leaving many future options open, and by the same token they present a danger of piecemeal action, excessive compromise ...
— The Nation's River - The Department of the Interior Official Report on the Potomac • United States Department of the Interior
... by the Irish when the railroad was built. This I hauled up partly on the shore. After soaking two years and then lying high six months it was perfectly sound, though waterlogged past drying. I amused myself one winter day with sliding this piecemeal across the pond, nearly half a mile, skating behind with one end of a log fifteen feet long on my shoulder, and the other on the ice; or I tied several logs together with a birch withe, and then, with a longer birch or alder which had a book at the end, dragged them ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... showed that the second scene came long after the first: my father must by that time have begun to resemble his later self. A weird feeling stole over me. Was I going to relive my previous life, piecemeal? Was the past going to unroll itself in slow but regular panorama to my sleeping vision? Was my First State to become known like this in successive ...
— Recalled to Life • Grant Allen
... 79th and 69th New York. An impact followed that seemed to rock the globe. Wisconsin and New York retired whence they came, and it was all done in a moment. Other regiments took their places. McDowell was making a frontal attack and sending in his brigades piecemeal. The plateau was uneven; low ridges, shallow hollows, with clumps of pine and oak; one saw at a time but a segment of the field. The nature of the ground split the troops as with wedges; over all the Henry Hill the fighting now became from hand to hand, in the woods and in the open, small squad ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... Bay—a large harbour to the northward of Port Jackson. Schoeffer then married a wife, a Scotch woman and a convict, and settled on his farm at Pitt Water, where he lived many years; but old age, poverty, and intemperance induced him to sell it by piecemeal, and he died at last in the benevolent asylum or colonial poor-house. This short history may serve to show upon what mere accidents the foundation of wealth frequently depends, and especially in a new country; for, if the German could only have kept his farm of fifty ...
— Australia, its history and present condition • William Pridden
... to descend with his pack-horse and the first load. All afternoon they went up and down over the hot bare face of the hill, until the baggage, heavy and light, was transported and dropped piecemeal on the shore. The torn-out insides of their home littered the stones with familiar shapes and colors, and Nancy played among them, visiting each parcel ...
— The Jimmyjohn Boss and Other Stories • Owen Wister
... logic, in spite of the show of respect outwardly paid to her, is told to stand aside when people come to practice. In practice identity is generally held to exist where continuity is only broken slowly and piecemeal; nevertheless, that occasional periods of even rapid change are not held to bar identity, appears from the fact that no one denies this to hold between the microscopically small impregnate ovum and the ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler |
