"Primer" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Helen could have exclaimed with little Frank in the primer, "Oh! that winter would last forever!" And yet there were times when she as well as her parents was oppressed with a weight of anxious sorrow that was almost insupportable, on account of Louis. He came not, he wrote ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... axiom because a Latin poet had said it, but it exactly met the case in point. He would convince the scorners that poetry might be seriously useful, and show Master Bull his new way of making fine words butter parsnips, in a rhymed moral primer. Allegory, as then practised, was imagination adapted for beginners, in words of one syllable and illustrated with cuts, and would thus serve both his ethical and pictorial purpose. Such a primer, or a first instalment of it, he proceeded ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... with its small table and neatly-folded mattress. On the table is a Bible and Prayer-book, and sometimes a third book for amusement or instruction. In some of the cells, where the inmates are learning to read and write, there is a spelling primer and a copybook for pothooks. The female prisoners are not in their cells, but we shortly after find them assembled in a large room above, seated and at work. They all rose at our entrance, and I had a good look at their faces. There was not a ...
— A Boy's Voyage Round the World • The Son of Samuel Smiles
... as reading the alphabet," said Lloyd. "I'll show you. Wait till I find my old music primer. It is ...
— The Little Colonel's Christmas Vacation • Annie Fellows Johnston
... of light, produces this effect. If you look at a straight stick set up in the water, it will appear to be bent, and this is caused by refraction. The learned gentlemen present will excuse me for going back to the primer ...
— Asiatic Breezes - Students on The Wing • Oliver Optic
... told to go and play. I am sorry to say that I was disobedient on these occasions, as on many others. I did not go and play; I looked on, I listened, when Fetchke rehearsed her lesson at home. And one evening I stole the Russian primer and repaired to a secret place I knew of. It was a storeroom for broken chairs and rusty utensils and dried apples. Nobody would look for me in that dusty hole. Nobody did look there, but they looked everywhere ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... sketch of English literature, entitled From Chaucer to Tennyson, published last year for the Chautauqua Circle. In writing it I have followed the same plan, aiming to present the subject in a sort of continuous essay rather than in the form of a "primer" or elementary manual. I have not undertaken to describe, or even to mention, every American author or book of importance, but only those which seemed to me of most significance. Nevertheless I believe that the ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... was connected with a visit to a school. I was getting proud of my ability to spell small words. A primer-maker had attempted to help the association of letters with objects by placing them in juxtaposition, but through a mistake he led me to my undoing. I knew my letters and I knew some things. I plainly distinguished the letters P-A-N. Against them I ...
— A Backward Glance at Eighty • Charles A. Murdock
... fuss and flurry, is a big man. It is not the hurrying, clattering and chattering individual who turns off the most work. He may imagine he is getting over a lot of track, but he wastes far more than the necessary amount of steam in doing it. The fable of the hare and the tortoise would not be a bad primer for a number of us, and the lesson relearned would not only be beneficial in a business-producing way, but it would help us in the ...
— Initiative Psychic Energy • Warren Hilton
... The Riverside Primer and Reader, as stated in its Introduction, "is designed to serve as the sole text-book in reading required by a pupil. When he has mastered it he is ready to make the acquaintance of the world's literature ...
— Verse and Prose for Beginners in Reading - Selected from English and American Literature • Horace Elisha Scudder, editor
... the history of our year Through passing time grow dimmer, We've gathered the choicest bits And put them in a primer. ...
— The 1926 Tatler • Various
... completed Caradoc Smith, and fetched down a furious doubled-handed blow on the primer of the big steel chamber ...
— The Cruise of the Dry Dock • T. S. Stribling
... her the Salve Regina, and when it was ended she bade him go, for she would fain spend some time in prayer upon her primer. ...
— The Gathering of Brother Hilarius • Michael Fairless
... mother's marriage lines; and if the most of that bright assurance came out of an old political skit, the "Germania" of Tacitus, who recked at the time? For along followed Mr Stopford Brooke with an admirable little Primer published at one shilling, to instruct the meanest of us in our common father's ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... alacrity, and in a perfect spirit of recollection, in order to prepare their souls for prayer. No Sister must be absent from the chapel without leave, and all must recite the offices. You see how well our time is divided," continued the lady; "we rise at three a.m.; there are primer, meditation, etcetera, until seven, when we enjoy the Holy Communion. After this we have prayers and self-examination until nine, and from that hour till ten we work. At ten we dine, which is the first meal we partake of ...
— Clara Maynard - The True and the False - A Tale of the Times • W.H.G. Kingston
... York, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine had come a strange company, earnest, patient, determined, unschooled in even the primer of refinement, hungry for something the significance of which, when they had it, they could not even guess, anxious to be called great, determined so to be without ever knowing how. Here came the dreamy gentleman of the South, robbed of his patrimony; the hopeful ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... cheerful breadth of nostril. His teeth were wide apart, and his smile was broad and constant. Not that Emmy Lou could have told all this. She only knew that to her the knowledge of the little boy concerning the things peculiar to the Primer World seemed limitless. ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... Amber instructed and amused; and thus, with nature for his hornbook, and art for his primer, did the little parlour of Edward Forster expand ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat
... Heavenly Father, had begun to inform her of those truths which the human spirit, at whatever stage of immaturity, imbibes with such eager interest. Pearl, therefore, so large were the attainments of her three years' lifetime, could have borne a fair examination in the New England Primer, or the first column of the Westminster Catechisms, although unacquainted with the outward form of either of those celebrated works. But that perversity which all children have more or less of, and of which little Pearl had a ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... replied the wife, examining the substance with a puzzled expression, "I do believe it's the primer!" ...
— The Young Trawler • R.M. Ballantyne
... who has apparently a somewhat elementary knowledge of ancient history, and who seems to rely for information on a primer such as "Little Willie's First History Book," recommends Communism because "In Sparta there were not only common lands, but also a common table, whilst dogs and horses were practically common property ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... of proper age, his father sent him over to the road-side school at Long Benton, kept by Rutter, the parish clerk. But the education which Rutter could give was of a very limited kind, scarcely extending beyond the primer and pothooks. While working as a brakesman on the pit-head at Killingworth, the father had often bethought him of the obstructions he had himself encountered in life through his want of schooling; and he formed the noble determination that ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... Columbus discovered the new world, Martin, a boy of very nearly nine, was sitting at his desk in the school at Mansfeld. Though both diligent and quick, he found the crabbed Latin primer, itself written in abstract Latin, very difficult, and was flogged fourteen times in one morning by {63} brutal masters for faltering in a declension. When he returned home he found his mother bending under a load of wood she had gathered in the ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... or even weddings of revue actresses—are just so much matter for printed and pictorial display. Do you think, if a great and honoured statesman dies, sub-editors care two pins about his public services? Not they. All they worry about is whether he is worth double-column headings, a long primer intro., and a ...
— Our Elizabeth - A Humour Novel • Florence A. Kilpatrick
... woods, how utilized—conservatively or destructively—for saw timber, or other purposes, protection of forests, forest fires, etc. Send to United States Department of Agriculture, Washington, D. C., for Forest Service Circular 130, "Forestry in the Public Schools;" Farmers' Bulletin 173, "A Primer of Forestry," Part I; Farmers' Bulletin 358, "A Primer ...
— Camping For Boys • H.W. Gibson
... The "Primer of Mayan Hieroglyphics" (39) was intended as a summary of what had been achieved up to that time (1895) by students in this branch. It endeavored, moreover, to render to each student the credit of his independent ...
— A Record of Study in Aboriginal American Languages • Daniel G. Brinton
... this play, the death of Agamemnon, at the hand of Clytemnes'tra, is a scene that the poet paints with terrible effect. Says MR. EUGENE LAWRENCE, [Footnote: "A Primer of Greek Literature," by Eugene Lawrence, p.55.] "Mr. E. C. Stedman's version of the death of Agamemnon is an excellent one. A horror rests upon the palace at Mycenae; there is a scent of blood, the exhalations of the tomb. The queen, Clytemnestra, ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... sistem ov speli[n], the Primer iz masterd within tree m[u]n[t]s at most. The children then proseed tu praktis this fonetik readi[n] for s[u]m teim, til they kan read with fluensi from the jeneral luk ov the w[u]rd, and not from konsideri[n] the pouerz ov its leterz. [T]ree m[u]n[t]s ...
— Chips From A German Workshop, Vol. V. • F. Max Mueller
... a loaded French hand grenade, fitted with percussion primer; and it lay last at the end of a long row of similar grenades along the ...
— Special Messenger • Robert W. Chambers
... spoke. The delicate finger of the gypsy moved over the lines of the palm like that of a little school-girl over the pages of a primer. They did not realize how dangerous was that proximity, nor how fatal that touch. Through those two poles of Nature's most powerful battery, the magnetic and mysterious current of love ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... drew out of the roar and commotion with a look of dumb terror on his countenance. He was defeated, puzzled, discomfited, frightened. Other cities had been to him as long primer to read; as country maidens quickly to fathom; as send-price-of-subscription-with-answer refuses to solve; as oyster cocktails to swallow; but here was one as cold, glittering, serene, impossible as a four-carat diamond in a window to a lover ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... what,' cried Harry Brown, commonly known as 'Carrots' from his fiery hair, 'you could 'a done what the goats did in the primer at school—you ought ter have laid flat down and let ...
— Teddy's Button • Amy Le Feuvre
... lobster not a lobster? When it is a crayfish. This question and answer might well go into the primer of information for those who come to San Francisco from the East, for what is called a lobster in San Francisco is not a lobster at all but a crayfish. The true lobster is not found in the Pacific along the California coast, and so far efforts ...
— Bohemian San Francisco - Its restaurants and their most famous recipes—The elegant art of dining. • Clarence E. Edwords
... the first to be exercised by our young men who lead that life; and quite in the spirit of that education which would repeat in the child the history of the race, we are scarce out of the swaddling bands of the primer and catechism before we would remove all questions to the court of our own jurisdiction. The mind is not a tabula rasa at birth, we learn, but, so soon as may be, we will remedy that, and erase all records copied there. The treasure doors of our fathers' inheritance ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... almost every conceivable variety. The sizes most in use for Books, are English, Pica, Small Pica, Long Primer, Bourgeois, Brevier, Nonpareil. The following are ...
— The Author's Printing and Publishing Assistant • Frederick Saunders
... reached the mouth of the coulee, Lite turned into the trail that led to town. All down the coulee the trail had been dug deep with the hoofprints of a galloping horse; and now, on the town trail, they were as plain as a primer to one schooled in the open. But Jean was too upset to notice them, and for that Lite was thankful. They did not talk much, beyond the commonplace speculations which tragedy always brings to the lips of the bystanders. Comments that were perfectly obvious they made, it is true. ...
— Jean of the Lazy A • B. M. Bower
... dignitary of a church; pri'macy; prim'ary; primer; prime'val (Lat. n. ae'vum, an age); prim'itive; primogen'itor (Lat. n. gen'itor, a begetter); primogeniture (Lat. n. genitu'ra, a begetting), the exclusive right of inheritance which in English law belongs to the eldest son or daughter; primor'dial (Lat. v. ordi'ri, to begin), existing ...
— New Word-Analysis - Or, School Etymology of English Derivative Words • William Swinton
... more diligence on this book to-be of mine, that you inform me again and again that my penny tracts are still extant; nay, that, beside friendly men, learned and poetic men read and even review them. I am like Scholasticus of the Greek Primer, who was ashamed to bring out so small a dead child before such grand people. Pygmalion shall try if he cannot fashion a better, certainly a bigger.—I am sad to hear that Sterling sails again for his health. I am ungrateful not to ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... el habra de perder necesariamente las consideraciones y cortesias de que se ve rodeada en la actualidad, fuera de toda lucha directa con el hombre y libre de ser atacada por el como una rival a quien hay que anular y destruir por propia conservacion. En primer lugar, es un error el considerar que la intervencion de la mujer en la vida publica dara por resultado la rivalidad de los dos sexos. La atraccion y simpatia entre el hombre y la mujer nace precisamente de la oposicion ...
— The Woman and the Right to Vote • Rafael Palma
... teacher would copy from his rare and expensive texts lessons to be learned in the subject of arithmetic and other branches, often one copy serving a whole family. In 1798, local school books appeared. The Kentucky Primer and The Kentucky Speller were printed at Washington, the old county seat of Mason county, and Harrison's Grammar was printed at Frankfort in ...
— The story of Kentucky • Rice S. Eubank
... conversazioni around fires, with a woman for queen of the circle,—her Nubian face, gay head-dress, gilt necklace, and white teeth, all resplendent in the glowing light. Sometimes the woman is spelling slow monosyllables out of a primer, a feat which always commands all ears,—they rightly recognizing a mighty spell, equal to the overthrowing of monarchs, in the magic assonance of cat, hat, pat, bat, and the rest of it. Elsewhere, it is some solitary old cook, some aged Uncle ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... systems of breech mechanism generally named after their respective inventors. The Vickers-Maxim and the Nordenfeldt are the best known in America. A new type of the Vickers-Maxim was introduced in 1897 in which a quick working breech mechanism automatically ejects the primer and draws up the loading tray into position as the breech is opened. This type was quickly adopted by the United States Navy and materially increased the speed ...
— Marvels of Modern Science • Paul Severing
... the woods and the tribesmen. It was the better chance, but Geoffrey did not relish it. He scowled as he dropped a primer charge down the rifle's barrel, followed it with a cartridge, took a cooled bullet from Myka, and tamped it down with the ramrod until it was firmly gripped by the collar on the cartridge. He took a square of clean flannel from its compartment in the butt and carefully wiped the ...
— The Barbarians • John Sentry
... leave their beds. Then she washes, much less than ladies nowadays, hands and face only perchance, and says her orisons, and dresses very neatly, for she knows whose eye is upon her, and so goes with Dame Agnes the beguine to Mass, with eyes on the ground and hands folded over her painted primer. After Mass, and perhaps confession, back again to see if the servants are doing their work, and have swept and dusted the hall and the rooms, beaten the cushions and coverlets on the forms and tidied everything, and afterwards to interview Master ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power
... knowledge is little. If in relation to what actually is known by somebody, then we must condemn as "dangerous" the knowledge which Archimedes possessed of mechanics, or Copernicus of astronomy; for a shilling primer and a few weeks' study will enable any student to outstrip in mere information some of the greatest teachers of the past. No doubt, that little knowledge which thinks itself to be great may possibly be a dangerous, as it certainly is a most ridiculous thing. We have all suffered under that eminently ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... country depends upon the people becoming sane on this subject. If we will send to the Legislature pot-house politicans who are chiefly interested in keeping up a supply of liquor instead of water, they should be provided with a little primer giving the condition of lands denuded of their forests. There is scarcely anything in their shifty ways, their blind zeal for what the 'deestrict' wants to-day, regardless of coming days, that so irritates me ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... not be a seamstress; although her sampler, of fifty years gone by, exhibited some of the most recondite specimens of ornamental needlework. A school for little children had been often in her thoughts; and, at one time, she had begun a review of her early studies in the New England Primer, with a view to prepare herself for the office of instructress. But the love of children had never been quickened in Hepzibah's heart, and was now torpid, if not extinct; she watched the little people of the neighborhood from her chamber-window, and doubted whether ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... their white playmates. Others knew their letters, but could not "put them together," as they said. I remember of a summer's afternoon seeing a young married woman, perhaps twenty-five years old, seated on a door-step with her primer before her, trying to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various
... thin brown sticks, and the shell itself, including its central gaine or tube, with the various deadly explosives we have seen prepared in the "danger buildings." The shell is fitted into the cartridge-case, the primer and the fuse screwed on. It is ...
— The War on All Fronts: England's Effort - Letters to an American Friend • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... see. There is 'The Raven,' the first primer, the multiplication table. Is it for your ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... dreams, my delusions, with my fellows. I was weak; I suffered; I died. But God was in me, and the courage, the patience, the love He gave to me, the scenes of the poor human life He inspired, have become by His will the world's eternal lesson—man's primer of Divine things, hung high in the eyes of all, simple and wise, that all may see and all may learn. Take it to your heart again—that life, that pain, of mine! Use it to new ends; apprehend it in new ways; but knowledge shall not take it from you; ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... to the Pope," and what was worse they preferred to be imprisoned than to listen to the archbishop's harangues. From Hereford it was announced that "rebellion is rampant, attendance at church is contemptuous, and John Hareley read so loudly on his latin popish primer (that he understands not) that he troubles both minister and people." In Oxford and amongst the lawyers in the Inns of Court and in the Inns of Chancery popery and ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... go farther, and to begin the study of sonata form. For such children, and certainly for all teachers of music, there can be no better text-book than Hadow's Sonata Form, published in the Novello Primer Series. This book is often described as 'more exciting than a novel'! Somervell's Charts for Harmony and Counterpoint are also most valuable, and will save the necessity of a text-book in these subjects—at any rate for the beginner, who works ...
— Music As A Language - Lectures to Music Students • Ethel Home
... a peculiar little monosyllabic cough; a sort of primer, or easy introduction to the ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... number of guns is twenty-one—a national salute—and on our main deck we had thirty, any part of which could be ready. If one missed fire, the gun next abaft stepped in. If near enough, you might hear the primer snap, but the error of interval was barely appreciable—the effect stood. Laymen may not know that the manner of the salute was, and is, for the officer conducting it to give the orders, "Starboard, fire!" "Port, fire!" the discharges thus ranging ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... how close a parallel to classical training could be made out of that palaeontology to which I refer. In the first place I could get up an osteological primer so arid, so pedantic in its terminology, so altogether distasteful to the youthful mind, as to beat the recent famous production of the head-masters out of the field in all these excellences. Next, I could exercise my boys upon easy fossils, and bring out all their powers ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... Perpenna to death and burned the letters without even reading them." It was hard on Perpenna, but in burning the letters at least Pompey gave us an example of virtue. It is Plutarch's feeling for the beauty of such noble actions that has made his biographies a primer of virtue for all time. None of his heroes are primarily "good" men. There is scarcely one of them who could have been canonised by any Church. They have enough of the weaknesses of flesh and blood to satisfy even the most exacting ...
— The Pleasures of Ignorance • Robert Lynd
... This Primer sketches the history of the books which make up the Bible, in the light of recent criticism. It gives an account of their character, origin, and composition, as far as possible in chronological order, with ...
— The Wallypug in London • G. E. Farrow
... never used it, but it always hung upon the one nail in the one place, as a symbol of his love and of hers. And there, higher up on the end of the shelf barren enough of ornaments, God wot, were a broken toy and a much-defaced primer, mementos likewise of his childhood; and farther along the wall, on a sort of raised bench, a keg, the spigot of which he was once guilty of turning on in his infantile longing for sweets, only to find he could not turn it back ...
— Agatha Webb • Anna Katharine Green
... moment I am doing THE USEFUL at the risk of your anathemas. I am trying to simplify a child's approach to culture, being persuaded that the first study makes its impression on all the others and that pedagogy teaches us to look for knots in bulrushes. In short, I am working over A PRIMER, do ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... pious ancestry, and was brought up by Christian parents in the fear of God. An excellent mother, an invalid in his childhood, sat much in her arm-chair with the Bible on her knee. She used it with her little boy as she would a primer. Before he was four years old he had learned to read it, and read through the New Testament; and that particular volume now remains the best part of his estate. He was ever afterwards a diligent student of the Bible, and never ceased to honor the ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... preach in Cornish down to the year 1678, that being the only tongue well understood by his parishioners. Scawen mentions the MSS. of the aforesaid “Anguin,” as he spells him, and laments their destruction. He also speaks of a “Matins” (possibly a Primer, or Hours of our Lady) in Cornish, which had belonged to “Mr. ...
— A Handbook of the Cornish Language - chiefly in its latest stages with some account of its history and literature • Henry Jenner
... rush for THE NURSERY PRIMER. We can hardly get the books from the binder fast enough to supply the demand. It is no wonder; for no cheaper or better present for ...
— The Nursery, No. 109, January, 1876, Vol. XIX. - A Monthly Magazine for Youngest Readers • Unknown
... never so much abroad in the present age, he can do nothing. Another person, less important, nay, even insignificant in the eyes or some persons, has produced this state of things. 'The schoolmaster is abroad,' and I trust more to the schoolmaster, armed with his primer, for upholding the liberties of this country than I fear lest the soldier, in full military array, should destroy them." Mr. Brougham had no occasion to fear the effects of a military premier, even though the schoolmaster had not been abroad; for no prime minister that ever presided over ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... the length of the room, knelt before the cross or picture, recited a prayer, then tremblingly approached the master, saying, "Your hand, Senor Maestro," when with a grunt the hand would be extended to him to be kissed. Little was taught besides the reading of the primer and ...
— History of California • Helen Elliott Bandini
... see his face Sounds long, until I read the place Where this is said to be But just the primer to a life Unopened, rare, upon the shelf, Clasped yet ...
— Poems: Three Series, Complete • Emily Dickinson
... fourpence, of a Miscellany, to be continued every eighth day, under the name of "The Watchman", by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. This Miscellany will be comprised in two sheets, or thirty-two pages, closely printed in 8vo; the type, long primer. Its contents, 1:—A history of the domestic and foreign policy of the preceding days. 2:—The speeches in both Houses of Parliament; and, during the recess, select parliamentary speeches from the commencement of the reign of Charles I. to ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... always desert his primer to follow the hangman's lumbering cart up Tyburn Hill, and, still a mere imp of mischief, he would run the weary way from Kensington to Shoe Lane on the distant chance of a cock-fight. He was present, so he would relate in after years, when Sir Thomas Jermin's man ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... information. The Histoire elementaire de la Litterature francaise, by M. Jean Fleury, has been popular; it tells much of the contents of great books, and makes no assumption that the reader is already acquainted with them. Dr. Warren's A Primer of French Literature (Heath, Boston, U.S.A.) is well proportioned and well arranged, but it has room for little more than names, dates, and the briefest characterisations. Dr. Wells's Modern French Literature (Roberts, Boston, U.S.A.) sketches French literature ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... the children together, took her Catechism and primer, and went down to the summer-house. She noticed that Polly's expression was sulky, and that she was rolling her eyes at Dilsy. But Polly was always tormenting Dilsy. Dilsy was a little hunchback negro, that everybody but Polly felt sorry for and tried to turn the soft side ...
— That Old-Time Child, Roberta • Sophie Fox Sea
... crossed the Psalter with Brady and Tate, And laid the Primer above them all, I've nailed a horseshoe over the grate, And hung a wig to my parlor wall Once worn by a learned Judge, they say, At Salem ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... literature, but how our phraseology is already amplified by our relations with Spanish-America! The life-blood of Mexico flowed into our newspapers while the war was in progress; and the gold of California glitters in our primer: Many foreign cities may show a greater variety of mere national costumes, but the representative value of our immigrant tribes is far greater from the very fact that they merge their mental costume in ours. Thus the American writer finds himself ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... further entered upon here, and it must suffice us to say that, after many vicissitudes, all the privileges and monopolies had become neutralized by the end of the last century, till it had nothing left but the right to publish a common Latin primer and almanacks, and the right to the latter monopoly was annulled after a memorable speech of Erksine. The Company still continues to publish almanacks, and uses the two Marks or Arms here reproduced. The larger ...
— Printers' Marks - A Chapter in the History of Typography • William Roberts
... was braided and buttoned like an ambassador's, and he was notable throughout the land of cattle and cards as a man who could reach far and hit hard. If Seth Craddock had applied to him for instruction in invective and profanity, veteran that he was he would have been put at the very foot of the primer class. ...
— Trail's End • George W. Ogden
... modern days of quips and quodlibets than in the stirring times of my youth. Then, thank God, it was held more necessary for a page to know his seven points of horsemanship than how to tie a ribbon, or prank a gown, or read a primer. ...
— From the Memoirs of a Minister of France • Stanley Weyman
... primer before each child, and she and Verena retired into the bay-window. They came out again at the end of ten minutes. Verena's cheeks were crimson, and Miss Tredgold decidedly wore a little of her northeast air. Pauline, on the whole, had a more successful interview with her new ...
— Girls of the Forest • L. T. Meade
... Eton Latin Grammar, was compelled to remain among the very last of Dr. Swishtail's scholars, and was "taken down" continually by little fellows with pink faces and pinafores when he marched up with the lower form, a giant amongst them, with his downcast, stupefied look, his dog's-eared primer, and his tight corduroys. High and low, all made fun of him. They sewed up those corduroys, tight as they were. They cut his bed-springs. They upset buckets and benches, so that he might break his shins over them, which he never failed to do. They sent ...
— Boys and girls from Thackeray • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... and greatest teachers were his mother and father. After these, came formal instruction by means of letters and books, classes and schools. Carleton's religious and dogmatic education began with the New England Primer, and progressed with the hymns of that famous Congregationalist, Doctor Watts. When five years old, at the foot of a long line of boys and girls, he toed the mark,—a crack in the kitchen floor,—and recited verses from the Bible. Sunday-school instruction was then in ...
— Charles Carleton Coffin - War Correspondent, Traveller, Author, and Statesman • William Elliot Griffis
... air attack could only mean an atom-bomb attack. And if there was an atom bomb dropped on the Shed, there'd be no use getting outside. It wouldn't be merely a fission bomb. It would be a hell bomb—a bomb which used the kind of bomb that shattered Hiroshima only as a primer for the real explosive. Nobody could hope to get beyond the radius of ...
— Space Platform • Murray Leinster
... after the first spading; the various messes and mashes to be prepared for cows with calf; the use of the stored vegetables and fruits, and meat dried and salted in such generous quantity that she marvelled at it. All the farm woman's primer she learned, bit by bit, seeing how it supplemented and harmonized with that life of the fields that so ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... became at once the predominating spirit of that little group. The interest of all the children, from the shy little beginners in the Primer class to the tall ones in the A class, was centered ...
— Patchwork - A Story of 'The Plain People' • Anna Balmer Myers
... little larger, they obtained the power of speaking articulate sounds by external revelation, hearing and imitating the sounds made by others. Further, upon a memorable day, they had a "book revelation" made to them, in the shape of a penny primer, and were initiated into the mysteries of A, B, C, by "the instructions of another, be he who he may." There was absolutely not the least "insight," or "spiritual faculty," or "self-consciousness" in one of them, by which they then could, or ever to ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... L'Oeuvre, La Debacle, and Le Docteur Pascal. Students of English literature will remember how the doctrine of Furor poeticus was once applied to Ben Jonson by a commentator who, addressing him, pointed out that he was very mad in his primer works, not so mad in his dotages. There was always a good deal of furor prosaicus smouldering in Zola, and it broke out with an opposite result on these occasions, the flames, alas! being rather devastating, but affording spectacles at least grandiose. He kept sane and sordid to his loss ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... put by the Mayor, inasmuch as I hope I may receive it as a token that he has forgiven me those extremely large letters, which I must say, from the glimpse I caught of them when I arrived in the town, looked like a leaf from the first primer of a very ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens
... and a sigh he took up the primer, and began heavily to con over the task which had been assigned him. As if banished from the society of the two others, he sat sad and solitary in one of the deep window-recesses, and after in vain struggling with the difficulties of his task, and his disinclination to learn it, he found himself ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... through the hands of Thurlow Weed and published it on the 14th. It bore date "New York, Saturday evening, November 11, 1854," and was addressed simply to "Governor Seward." Its great length consigned it to nonpareil in strange contrast to the long primer type of the editorial page, but its publication became the sensation of the hour. To this day its fine thought-shading is regarded the best ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... camels and elephants, so I was on hand next day, Saturday, in the ambuscade; and when we got the word we rushed out of the woods and down the hill. But there warn't no Spaniards and A-rabs, and there warn't no camels nor no elephants. It warn't anything but a Sunday-school picnic, and only a primer-class at that. We busted it up, and chased the children up the hollow; but we never got anything but some doughnuts and jam, though Ben Rogers got a rag doll, and Jo Harper got a hymn-book and a tract; ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... persecuting ecclesiastical arm of the British Government. Such of them as had been brought up in any faith at all had for the most part originally professed some form of Calvinism; they had very probably learnt their letters from a primer which in one of its rude cuts represented John Rogers at the stake, surrounded by his wife and seven children, and in their after lives they were more familiar with the "Pilgrim's Progress" than with any other book save the Bible; so that it was natural for them to distrust the successors ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume One - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776 • Theodore Roosevelt
... present writing is mighty well employed in tumbling on the floor of the room and sweeping the sand with a feather. He grows a most delightful child, and very full of play and spirit. He is also a very great scholar: he can read his primer; and I have brought down my Virgil. He makes most shrewd remarks about the pictures. We are very intimate friends and playfellows. He begins to be very ragged; and I hope I shall be pardoned if I equip him with new clothes and frocks, or what Mrs. Evans and I shall ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Goodness exuded from his moist eye, his liquid voice, the warm damp pressure of his trustful hand. He had always struck me as one of the most uncomplicated organisms I had ever met. His ideas were as simple and inconsecutive as the propositions in a primer, and he spoke slowly, with a kind of uniformity of emphasis that made his words stand out like the raised type for the blind. An obvious incapacity for abstract conceptions made him peculiarly susceptible to the magic of generalization, and one felt he would have been at the mercy ...
— Crucial Instances • Edith Wharton
... of Savage[450] I am ready to go upon; and in Great Primer, and Pica notes, I reckon on sending in half a sheet a day; but the money for that shall likewise lye by in your hands till it is done. With the debates, shall not I have business enough? if I had ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... very imaginative Gruithuisen believed that in some instances they represent roads cut through interminable forests, and in others the dried-up beds of once mighty rivers. His description of the Triesnecker rill-system reads like a page from a geographical primer. A portion of it is compared to the river Po, and he traces its course mile by mile up to the "delta" at its place of disemboguement into the Mare Vaporum. From the position of some rills with respect to the contour of the surrounding country, ...
— The Moon - A Full Description and Map of its Principal Physical Features • Thomas Gwyn Elger
... this she pored over her new treasures, until one day Miss Fletcher brought her a primer, and the seventeen-year-old girl grappled for the first time with the alphabet. After that she was loath to have the book out of her hand, going painfully and slowly over the lessons, mastering each ...
— Miss Mink's Soldier and Other Stories • Alice Hegan Rice
... Captain Kittridge, "I've met 'em bigger than all the colleges up to Brunswick,—great white bears on 'em,—hungry as Time in the Primer. Once we came kersmash on to one of 'em, and if the Flying Betsey hadn't been made of whalebone and injer-rubber, she'd a-been stove all to pieces. Them white bears, they was so hungry, that they stood there with the water jist runnin' out ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... slaves got sick they had doctors, and used old herbs. 'Jerusalem Ore' was a kind of herb for children, to build them up, and there was field grass roots and herb roots which was boiled and tea drunk for fevers. And 'Primer-rhine' tea which was drunk, too. Sometimes they would hang garlic around small boys and girls necks to keep ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves • Works Projects Administration
... woodwork to receive one coat of primer, one coat half primer & half enamel & finish coat of ...
— The Fairfax County Courthouse • Ross D. Netherton
... they all did. She studied the Catechism, she could learn easily when she had a mind to, but she didn't understand it at all. She shocked Elizabeth by her irreverent questions. There was the old horn-book primer with— ...
— A Little Girl in Old Salem • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... "hunger and thirst" after righteousness; we "find the Lord a sweet savor;" we "taste and see that he is good." "Spiritual milk for American babes, drawn from the breasts of both testaments," is a sub-title of the once famous New England Primer, and Christian devotional literature indeed quite floats in milk, thought of from the point of view, not of the mother, but of the ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... work on natural philosophy and cosmography written in the present day. The fourth form school boy of our age is acquainted with truths to know which Archimedes would have laid down his life. What would we not give to be able to get a glimpse of some book which will be used as a school-primer a hundred ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... set themselves to combat prejudices with words alone, when the time was ripe for deeds; but while the Government was yet hesitating whether to put the musket into his hand for war, Christian men and women hastened to give him the primer for peace. Not waiting for legislative enactments, they took the freedman as he came all panting from the house of bondage; they ministered to his wants, strengthened his heart, and set him rejoicing on ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... fact," said Bristow in a quiet, calculating way, trying to keep in his mind all the other peculiar circumstances surrounding this crime. "From the way we've put it, the thing reads as plainly as a primer. Now, what are we to do? Even now, we haven't the proof ...
— The Winning Clue • James Hay, Jr.
... shelves yonder—it is the third shelf from the top, fourth compartment to the right—is that old copy of the "New England Primer," a curious little, thin, square book in faded blue board covers. A good many times I have wondered whether I ought not to have the precious little thing sumptuously attired in the finest style known to my binder; indeed, I have often been tempted to exchange the homely ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... of any kind. She is in the Third Reader but does not like stories in books. I am in the Sixth Reader but just because I cannot say the seven multiplication Table Miss Dearborn threttens to put me in the baby primer class with Elijah and ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... miserable apology for a home. Yes, even Maggie, with her watery eyes and thin, unkempt hair, Maggie, who scrubbed floors for a living and could not write so much as her own name nor read the simplest child's primer; even Maggie was far too good for the worn-out drunkard and gambler whom ...
— The Alchemist's Secret • Isabel Cecilia Williams
... freeze Allegeance in them; their curses now Liue where their prayers did: and it's come to passe, This tractable obedience is a Slaue To each incensed Will: I would your Highnesse Would giue it quicke consideration; for There is no primer basenesse ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... Prices range from .50 to .25 About 100 volumes covering literature for high school reading. Send for list. Hooker's Study Book in English Literature 1.00 A handbook to accompany the appreciative study of the greater writers. Howes's Primer of American Literature .52 A brief, satisfactory account of the facts of American literary history. Howes's Primer of English Literature .52 The essentials concerning great writers and important ...
— A Handbook for Latin Clubs • Various
... Dean Swift of St. Patricks, Dublin, edited some curious poetry for "A Royal Primer," sqr. 32mo, published in the Seven Dials, ...
— Banbury Chap Books - And Nursery Toy Book Literature • Edwin Pearson
... I will. Maybe I'll find something like the picture-books Sachiko was talking about. A child's primer, maybe; surely they had things like that. And if I don't. I'll find something else. We've only been here six months. I can wait the rest of my life, if I have to, ...
— Omnilingual • H. Beam Piper
... be asked to take part in government, to unite with honest men in punishing crime. Education makes this more and more easy, and amid all this sorrow and strife and tumult the work of education goes on. The negro pants for the primer and the speller as the hart for the water of the brook. I have taken pains, in some bookstore loungings, to inquire about this. I learned in nearly every case that the negroes were constant purchasers, and almost invariably of school-books—elementary and advanced. ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various
... were a primer, some child's readers, numerous picture books, and a great dictionary. All of these he examined, but the pictures caught his fancy most, though the strange little bugs which covered the pages where there were no pictures excited ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... to say that all of the Bobbsey twins were promoted, and Freddie and Flossie came home very proud to tell that when they went back again, after the Thanksgiving holidays, they would be in the primer reading book. ...
— The Bobbsey Twins at School • Laura Lee Hope
... Affairs in those theaters of commercial effort were as they should be. Things were moving slowly, they must of necessity move slowly, and Storri had grown impatient. The Russian's warmth was expected; Mr. Harley had read him long since like a primer book. Storri was excitable, volatile, full of fever and impulse, prone to go off at tangents. In some stress of nerves he had sent for Mr. Harley to urge expedition or ask for explanations. The thing had chanced before. Mr. Harley would ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... of military science. Amid an environment of unfavourable conditions Soko preached the cult of bushido, and was the first to embody that philosophy in a written system. His books—the Shi-do (Way of the Warrior) and Bukyo Shogaku (Military Primer)—contain minute instructions as to the practice and the morale of the samurai. Soko rejected the Chutsz interpretation, then in vogue, of the Chinese classics, and insisted on the pure doctrine of the ancient sages, so that he found himself out of touch with ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... Literature about 350 B.C., when Aristotle and Demosthenes had reached manhood (being then 34), had attained a considerable mass; as one may see at a glance from Jebb's chronology attached to his Primer. There was a splendid poetical library, including all the great tragedians, with the older and the middle Comedy. There were the three great historians—Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon; and the orators—- Lysias, ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain |
