"Staple" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... which they had apparently been ignorant, seemed to give the men much pleasure. Some of them, no doubt, had once been king's men, and knew without any telling the gravity of their offense. I wasted no more words on them. They took me to a wooden shanty standing by itself, tied me to a staple in the wall, shut and padlocked the door, and ...
— Humphrey Bold - A Story of the Times of Benbow • Herbert Strang
... and a picturesque assembly was grouping itself in an expectant semicircle on the sun-baked turf in front of Miss Musgrave's dwelling. She was usually outside to welcome the first comers, and her absence naturally formed the staple topic of conversation. Digger after digger arrived, threw himself down, and joined in the general wonderment as to why Miss Mary wasn't there, and at last some one hazarded a suggestion that she "must be asleep." There was a general epidemic of noisy coughing ...
— Stories by English Authors: Africa • Various
... was slipping right away from me, too. I had come especially to see the man and he had told me that he would buy goods from me if I would make the price right. So I lit in to cut. I sold him the twelve dollar suit for ten dollars. He took a dozen of them. It was a staple. I didn't know anything about what the goods were worth, but he had made his bluff good. I sold him the bill right through at cut prices on everything. The house actually lost money on the bill. I have long since learned that the only ...
— Tales of the Road • Charles N. Crewdson
... to Eastern despots (who utterly ignore them) are a staple produce of Oriental tale-literature and form the chiaro-oscuro, as it were, of a picture whose lights are brilliant touches of profanity and indelicate humour. It certainly has the charm of contrast. Much of the above is taken from the Sikandar-nameh ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... Whilst he was replacing the cupboard, she would glide across the brewhouse, take the key from the top of the copper, run upstairs, unlock the door, and bring back the key again: if he returned to bed, which was unlikely, he would think the lock had failed to catch in the staple. This thought and intention, occupying such length of words, flashed upon her in an instant, and hardly disturbed her strong curiosity to stay and learn the meaning of his ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... many of the Oneida countrymen passing upon the road—the clumsy contrivances of a hundred years ago, on which the gathered loads of hay were going homeward from some of the out-lands—and the long, low wagons on which great pyramids of boxes of cheese, the staple of the section, were being slowly dragged towards Utica and ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... New Orleans, Miss Helena," was my answer, "a city of some three hundred thousand souls, noted for its manufacture of sugar, and its large shipments abroad of the staple cotton." ...
— The Lady and the Pirate - Being the Plain Tale of a Diligent Pirate and a Fair Captive • Emerson Hough
... looker-on, who took no part in affairs, felt like a sober man at a dinner when the rest of the company were drunk. Civil war was often talked of, and the threat of secession, which has become the rhetorical staple of the South, produced solely for exportation to the North, to be used there in manufacturing pro-slavery votes out of the timidity of men of large means and little courage or perspicacity, was then freely made by both divisions of the Union. Had we been of French or Spanish descent, there would ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... moment came to get out of the buggy, Samuel looked at his companion dumbly; a sort of paralysis seemed to hold him in his seat. When he did move, Dr. Lavendar heard him gasp for breath, and in the darkness, as he hitched the sorrel to a staple in one of the big locusts, his face went white. The large manner which had dominated Old Chester for so many years was shrinking and shrivelling; the whole ...
— The Awakening of Helena Richie • Margaret Deland
... of wages is adopted for each trade. This scale is based upon the price of certain staple articles, and within a certain limit it rises or falls with the price ...
— Life in a Thousand Worlds • William Shuler Harris
... 125,000 acres.) At the same period there were about 60,000 acres under wheat alone; for this grain, of which a large white variety is much cultivated, the county has long been famous. To this circumstance the village of Wheathampstead is indebted for its name. Barley and oats are also staple crops. The first Swede turnips ever produced in England were grown on a farm near Berkhampstead. Watercress is extensively cultivated, enormous quantities being sent into London from St. Albans, Hemel Hempstead, Berkhampstead, Welwyn and ...
— Hertfordshire • Herbert W Tompkins
... Life, the game of politics, the contests and reverses of party, literature in its various forms, and the sports of the field, form topics which make the staple of our dinner-talk. Instead of these the Italians have their one solitary theme—the lapses of their neighbours, the scandals of the small world around them. Not that they are uncharitable or malevolent; ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... claims is mainly the discovery of a cheap chemical solvent of the Flax fiber, whereby its coarseness and harshness are removed and the fineness and softness of Cotton induced in their stead. This he has accomplished. Some of his Flax-Cotton is scarcely distinguishable from the Sea Island staple, while to other samples he has given the character of Wool very nearly. I can imagine no reason why this Cotton should not be spun and woven as easily as any other. The staple may be rendered of any desired length, though the usual average ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... all that the active and enterprising merchants of the time exported to Sweden, Norway, Hungary, Russia, and even Asia; and it was from England that they chiefly imported their wool, the primary staple of their handiwork. "All Flanders," says Froissart, "was based upon cloth and no wool, no cloth." On the other hand it was to Flanders that England, her land-owners and farmers, sold the fleeces of their flocks; and the two countries were thus united by the bond of their mutual prosperity. ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume II. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... a recognizable version of the initgame has become a staple of some radio talk shows in the U.S. We had ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... all in all, the very best version of a classic in the language. But though Juvenal has many passages which sufficiently remind us of Horace, some of them light and playful, others level and almost flat, these do not form the staple of his Satires: there are passages of dignified declamation and passionate invective which suffer less in translation, and which may be so rendered as to leave a lasting impression of pleasure upon the mind of the reader. Like Horace, ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... 'I have been bred and reared all my life by this grandfather of whom I have just spoken. Now, he has a great many good points—there is no doubt about that; I'll not disguise the fact from you—but he has two very great faults, which are the staple of his bad side. In the first place, he has the most confirmed obstinacy of character you ever met with in any human creature. In the second, he ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... first announced by heaps of cotton-bales, bound in striped camel's-hair cloth, which had found their way hither from the distant valleys of Turkestan and the warm plains of Bukharia. Nearly fifty thousand camels are employed in the transportation of this staple across the deserts of the Aral to Orenburg,—a distance of a thousand miles. The increase of price had doubled the production since the previous year, and the amount which now reaches the factories of Russia through this channel cannot be less than seventy-five thousand ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... the early dusk, while little ones could see their way home; parties at which there was no "German," only the simplest of dancing, if any, and much more of blind-man's-buff; parties at which "mottoes" in sugar horns were the luxurious novelty, caraway cookies the staple, and lemonade the only drink besides pure water. Fancy offering to the creature called child in cities to-day, lemonade and a caraway cooky and a few pink sugar horns and some walnuts and raisins to carry home in its pocket! One blushes at thought of the scornful contempt with which such simples ...
— Bits About Home Matters • Helen Hunt Jackson
... Suppose you were to submit the question to any son of God,—and has He no children in the nineteenth century? is it a family which is extinct?—in what condition would you get it again? What shall a State like Virginia say for itself at the last day, in which these have been the principal, the staple productions? What ground is there for patriotism in such a State? I derive my facts from statistical tables which ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... builds on a rock." One thing marks the rock founded life, the doing of Christly deeds. The course of conduct, the kind of character He has just outlined in the sermon on the mount gives the established staple character. ...
— Levels of Living - Essays on Everyday Ideals • Henry Frederick Cope
... Bill, indeed, Naseby and a few friends of his, some "gilded youths" like himself, together with some trade-union officials of a long experience, had done wonders. They had been planning out the industrial reorganisation of a whole district, through its two staple trades, with the enthusiastic co-operation of the workpeople themselves; and the result so far struck the imagination. Everywhere the old workshops were to be bought up, improved, or closed; everywhere factories in which life might be decent, ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... a plate is broken the fracture means new business for the district—even this majestic thought had probably never occurred to either of the girls. The fact is, that while in the Five Towns they were also in the Square, Bursley and the Square ignored the staple manufacture as perfectly as the district ignored the county. Bursley has the honours of antiquity in the Five Towns. No industrial development can ever rob it of its superiority in age, which makes it absolutely sure in its conceit. And the ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... to the rescue. "We keep cattle for their milk, as well as for their meat," he explained. "Cow's milk is a staple article of diet. There is a great milk ...
— Herland • Charlotte Perkins Stetson Gilman
... of flannels, stockings, and cloth. The cotton trade, formerly the great staple of the Netherlands, has of late years been greatly on ...
— A tour through some parts of France, Switzerland, Savoy, Germany and Belgium • Richard Boyle Bernard
... they are to be in adjustment and proper conformity with prices outside Germany.[147] But this is not the case. In spite of a very great rise in German prices, they probably do not yet average much more than five times their former level, so far as staple commodities are concerned; and it is impossible that they should rise further except with a simultaneous and not less violent adjustment of the level of money wages. The existing maladjustment hinders in two ways (apart from other ...
— The Economic Consequences of the Peace • John Maynard Keynes
... myself often gave ours away in our hungriest moments; which statement sounds as if we were generous to others, whereas the reason for these donations was that we couldn't eat, let alone stand the sight of this staple of diet. We had to do our donating on the sly, since the chef always gave us choice pieces and we were anxious not to hurt the chef's feelings. There was a good deal of spasmodic protestation apropos la viande, but the Cook always bullied it down—nor was ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... private means and takes to art because he is unfit for anything else. This sort of producer, whose existence tells us less about the state of art than about the state of society, who would be the worst navvy in his gang or the worst trooper in his squadron, and is the staple product of official art schools, is unheard of in primitive ages. In drawing inferences, therefore, we must not overlook the advantage enjoyed by barbarous periods in the fact that of those who come forward as artists the vast majority have some real gift. I would hazard a guess that of ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... poultry, which is probable, for it will eat small birds. Both it and the Cape species will eagerly look out for bees, but it is not to be supposed, as some books would make out, that bees and honey form the staple diet. Its thick and loose skin, the stiffness of the hair above, and the layer of fat below, effectually preserve it from the effects of the stings. The tail glands contain a very strong and ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... entirely done by black boys, and of these the "Chinde" boys from the Portuguese settlements are much sought after, and cannot be excelled as cooks or servants, so thoroughly do the Portuguese understand the training of natives. The staple meat was buck of all kinds; sheep were wellnigh unknown, oxen were scarce and their meat tough; but no one need grumble at a diet of buck, wild-pig, koran,[51] guinea-fowl, and occasionally wild-duck. As regards other necessities of life, transport difficulties ...
— South African Memories - Social, Warlike & Sporting From Diaries Written At The Time • Lady Sarah Wilson
... through the evening, Lady Chaloner felt that she was doing a distinctly good work. It was no small undertaking, however, marshalling her forces and trying to arrange that every one of the stallholders should not be selling exactly the same thing—namely, the small carved wooden objects, the staple commodity of Schleppenheim, made ...
— The Arbiter - A Novel • Lady F. E. E. Bell
... "Complaints." The final word should be spelt with a huge C, so important a place does it occupy in their estimation. The three D's which should be rigidly excluded from polite conversation—Domestics, Dress and Diseases—form the staple of their conversation. And the greatest ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... of us found it here," said the Ohio boy, "and we found, too, a tin cup chained to a staple driven into the stone. See, it's here still. We haven't broken the chain. I suppose it belongs to some farmer close by. The boys brought other tin cups and we drank so fast that the brook itself became dry. The water never got any further than the pool. I suppose ...
— The Sword of Antietam • Joseph A. Altsheler
... absence of cooking facilities, it became necessary in that day to rely chiefly upon such articles of food as did not require to be prepared by heat, such as biscuit (hard bread), butter, cheese ("Holland cheese" was a chief staple with the Pilgrims), "haberdyne" (or dried salt codfish), smoked herring, smoked ("cured ") ham and bacon, "dried neat's tongues," preserved and "potted" meats (a very limited list in that day), fruits, etc. Mush, oatmeal, pease-puddings, pickled ...
— The Mayflower and Her Log, Complete • Azel Ames
... in canine old age, enjoys the sun like his master; now repeating to himself, as he turns over the leaves of his favourite Horace, some of those lines that make the shortness of life the excuse for seizing its pleasures and eluding its fatigues, which formed the staple morality of the polished epicurean; and Violante (into what glorious beauty her maiden bloom has matured!) comes softly into the room, seats herself on a low stool beside him, leaning her face on her hands, and looking up at him through her dark, clear, spiritual eyes; and as she continues ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... orchids, tree ferns, ferns depending with air roots from the steep banks, great arums - I had not skill enough to say if any of them were the edible kind, one of our staples here! - hundreds of bananas - another staple - and alas! I had skill enough to know all of these for the bad kind that bears no fruit. My Henry moralised over this the other day; how hard it was that the bad banana flourished wild, and the good must be weeded and tended; ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of what any young lady might be, appearing perhaps somewhat in advance of her contemporaries, but rather from her training than from intrinsic force of character. The qualities of womanhood well developed, were so entirely the staple of her composition, that there is little to describe in her. Was not she one made to learn; to lean; to admire; to support; to enhance every joy; to soften every sorrow of the object ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... carefulness of diction. There is as voluminous a correspondence with the Brother, and letters to many Cousins; but as these either repeat the same adventures or else are purely domestic, they have been little brought forward, except where any gap occurred in the correspondence which has formed the staple material. ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... a considerable variety in the chances of what we may light upon. Coasters are, of course, the staple, so to speak. If we have anything like luck, we shall not do badly, with them. The others we must look upon as the prizes in ...
— Held Fast For England - A Tale of the Siege of Gibraltar (1779-83) • G. A. Henty
... would be calamitous beyond description." It would "destroy in a great measure the cultivation and production of the great tropical staples, amounting annually in value to nearly $300,000,000." It is a suggestive commentary on Mr. Calhoun's evil foreboding, that the great tropical staple of the South has steadily increased in growth under free labor, and that the development of Texas never fairly began until slavery ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... granted separate government, it was administered by the Governor of Sierra Leone. In 1868 it was again annexed to Sierra Leone, and not until twenty years later was it created a separate Crown Colony with a Governor and responsible government of its own. At present the staple trade of the Colony is ground nuts, but efforts are being made to induce the natives to take ...
— Gambia • Frederick John Melville
... here to try democratic rule in a new way, that is, against the new industrial oppression with a mass of workers who were not yet in its control. With plenty of land widely distributed, staple products like cotton, rice, and sugar cane, and a thorough system of education, there was a unique chance to realize a new modern democracy in industry in the southern United States which would point the way to the world. This, too, if done by black folk, would have tended to a new unity of human ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... F—— to another sphere." He had himself no inconsiderable enjoyment also of Mr. F.'s aunt; and in the old rascal of a patriarch, the smooth-surfaced Casby, and other surroundings of poor Flora, there was fun enough to float an argosy of second-rates, assuming such to have formed the staple of the tale. It would be far from fair to say they did. The defect in the book was less the absence of excellent character or keen observation, than the want of ease and coherence among the figures of the story, ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... The great staple exported from Whitehaven was then, and still is, coal. The town is surrounded by mines; the town is built on mines; the ships moor over mines. The mines honeycomb the land in all directions, and extend in galleries of grottoes for two miles under the sea. By the falling in of the ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... conducting at concerts and writing articles for the press. As a final resort he organized a concert tour through Germany and Russia, the details of which are contained in his extremely interesting Autobiography. At these concerts his own music was the staple of the programmes, and it met with great success, though not always played by the best of orchestras, and not always well by the best, as his own testimony shows; for his compositions are very exacting, and call for every resource ...
— The Standard Oratorios - Their Stories, Their Music, And Their Composers • George P. Upton
... experimenting with type faces of a lighter and more delicate design, had been dissatisfied with the uneven surface of laid paper. Possibly he saw examples of the Chinese wallpaper on wove stock, made from a cloth mesh, which was a staple of the trade with the Orient. Hunter[17] describes the ...
— Why Bewick Succeeded - A Note in the History of Wood Engraving • Jacob Kainen
... in the right hand, the point of the short end below the balancing disc resting on the ground and the long end on her knee, the spinner attaches the end of her staple close to the disc and then gives the spindle a rapid twirl. As it revolves she holds the yarn out so that it twists. As it tightens sufficiently she allows it to wrap on the spindle and repeats the operation until the spindle is full. The ...
— The Grand Canyon of Arizona: How to See It, • George Wharton James
... rocks and sifted the sand that yielded silver and gold, and the soil is ours that is richer than gold mines, whether we offer in evidence South Carolina, whose Sea-Island cotton surpasses the long staple of Egypt; or the Dakotas, matchless for wheat; or the lands of the cornstalk in the Mississippi Valley, that could feed all the tribes of Asia; or Nebraska, whose beets are sweeter with sugar than those that were the gift of Napoleon ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... the staple commodity; but as they will not always be commanded, the black, red, and grey may be admitted as substitutes. Tea, late dinners, and the French Revolution, have played the devil, Mr Listless, and brought the devil ...
— Nightmare Abbey • Thomas Love Peacock
... are reared in the vast forests of the interior, at no expense to the inhabitants, are the great staple of Servian product and export. In districts where acorns abound, they fatten to an inconceivable size. They are first pushed swimming across the Save, as a substitute for quarantine, and then driven to Pesth and Vienna by easy stages; latterly large quantities have been sent up the Danube in ...
— Servia, Youngest Member of the European Family • Andrew Archibald Paton
... of liquid manure, and entirely by hand. Its flora is spontaneous and magnificent, repaying the least attention by a development and profuseness of yield that is surprising. Next in importance to the product of rice, which is the staple food of the people, comes that of the mulberry and tea-plants, one species of the former not only feeding the silk-worm, but also, as has been mentioned, affording the fibre of which paper is made, as well ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... the fastening is quite evident," said he. "An iron bar passed right across at the top and bottom and was secured by a staple and padlock. You can see the mark the bar made in the recess when the shutters were folded. When these bars were fixed and padlocked and the bolts were shot, this room was as secure, for a prisoner unprovided with tools, as ...
— The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman
... improvidence, fall through. But such is the public opinion in favor of personal independence springing from industry, that a native-born American citizen had rather die than go to an Alms-House. Foreigners are our staple paupers. Our charity feeds the poor wretches whom foreign slavery has crippled and cast upon us. But the whole South is a vast work-house for the slave while young, and a vast alms-house for him ...
— Conflict of Northern and Southern Theories of Man and Society - Great Speech, Delivered in New York City • Henry Ward Beecher
... respect, for the sake of birth, calling, or office, so far they are relieved from the necessity of seeking the same by personal qualifications; and accordingly a body of men so protected, will perceptibly fall short of the average, in the staple elements of respectability. ...
— The Growth of Thought - As Affecting the Progress of Society • William Withington
... no great liking for that vulgar edible which bore his name, and which used to form the staple of so many good, old-fashioned suppers. To cheese, in the abstract, he could certainly have borne no forcible objection, since he was wont to steal into the larder, between breakfast and dinner, and help himself—as Martha would grumblingly complain—to "pounds" of it. The state ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood
... a peasant from Northamptonshire, and a better poet than Bloomfield, was one of the visitors. He was thoroughly rustic, dressed in conspicuously country fashion, and was as simple as a daisy. His delight at the wonders of London formed the staple of his talk. This was often stimulated into extravagance by the facetious fictions of Reynolds. Poor fellow, he ...
— Charles Lamb • Barry Cornwall
... to pay honestly for these supplies, but his exactions from the merchant class rested on a deliberate theory of his royal rights. He looked on the customs as levied absolutely at his pleasure, and the export duty on wool—now the staple produce of the country—was raised to six times its former amount. Although he infringed no positive provision of charter or statute in his action, it was plain that his course really undid all that had been gained by the Barons' war. But the blow had no ...
— History of the English People, Volume II (of 8) - The Charter, 1216-1307; The Parliament, 1307-1400 • John Richard Green
... leading authority on the history of the East Indian Islands, wrote of the Dutch in Borneo of the early times — "Their sole object, according to the commercial principles of the time, was to obtain, through arrangements with the native prince, the staple products of the country at prices below their natural cost, and to sell them above it... . The result of these (arrangements) was the decline of the trade of Banjermasin; its staple product, pepper, which had at one time been considerable, ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... escaped north, or, it might be, of free negroes in their place; the advertisements for such runaways, which Dickens collected, and which described each by his scars or mutilations; the systematic slave breeding, for the supply of the cotton States, which had become a staple industry of the once glorious Virginia; the demand arising for the restoration of the African slave trade—all these were realities. The Southern people, in the phrase of President Wilson, "knew that their lives were honourable, their relations with their slaves humane, their responsibility ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... not Pope's best work. It is a theory which Bolingbroke is supposed to have given him, and which he expanded into verse. But "he spins the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple of his argument." All that he says, "the very words, and to the self-same tune," would prove just as well that whatever is, is wrong, as that whatever is, is right. The Dunciad has splendid passages, but in general it is dull, heavy, and mechanical. The sarcasm already ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... then, will you give us the Fifty-first Psalm to sing at the morning service—it always seems to me that it is the soul's staple food; and let us begin with the ...
— St. Cuthbert's • Robert E. Knowles
... powerful incentive to break down the blockade. In Manchester the huge cotton-mills, employing thousands of hands, were shut down for lack of cotton, and the mill-hands were starving for lack of work; while shut up in the blockaded ports of the South were tons upon tons of the fleecy staple, that, once in England, would be worth its weight in gold. It was small wonder that the merchants of England set to work deliberately to fit out blockade-runners, that they might again get their mills running, and ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 2 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... across the Staple Square, and over the long bridge. Only too well did he know the terrible bulk of the "Ark"—and there was no other exit than the tunnel! And the timber-work, which provided the sole access to the upper ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... restless agent, without definite aim; it has a large field of exertion assigned to it, and it subserves those social interests which it would naturally trouble. It is directed into the channel of industry, frugality, honesty, and obedience; and it becomes the very staple of the religion and morality held in honour in a day like our own. It becomes the safeguard of chastity, the guarantee of veracity, in high and low; it is the very household god of society, as at present constituted, inspiring ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... dignity in satisfaction of any demand they chanced to have against her. As for her little old house, the last abode of the last of the great Swiggs family,—that, like numerous other houses of our "very first families," is mortgaged for more than it is worth, to Mr. Staple the grocer. We must, ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... Quadrilles are the staple of the evening—those composed by Monsieur Jullien always, of course, claiming precedence and preference. These are usually interspersed with solos on the flageolet, to contrast with obligati for the ophecleido; the drummers—side, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, September 5, 1841 • Various
... clothing and canned goods, but carried a supply of drugs, stationery and general dry goods, besides liquor in ample quantities, if of limited quality. There was rye whisky, there was gin, and there was some sort of French brandy. The two latter were in the smallest quantities. Rye was the staple drink of the place. ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... trading with the Indians, meagre sport, and scant sun, savages and half-breeds the only companions, and out of all touch with the outside world, letters coming but once a year; with frozen fish and meat, always the same, as the staple items in a primitive fare; with danger from starvation and marauding tribes; with endless monotony, in which men sometimes go mad— he had to ask himself if these were to be cheerfully endured because, in the short summer, the air is heavenly, the rivers and ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... These events were the staple of conversation on deck and in the steerage among the crew; and some of the better boys heard certain indefinite remarks about "the first step" and "the second step," used by "our fellows;" but no real friend of law and order discovered anything which threw any new light upon ...
— Dikes and Ditches - Young America in Holland and Belguim • Oliver Optic
... as like him as pea to pea. He has a tolerable share of his good qualities; and as for his prejudices—oh, they are his meat and drink, and the very clothes he wears. He is made up of prejudices—he is covered all over with them. They are the staple of his dreams; they garnish his dishes, they spice his cup, they enter into his very prayers, and they make his will altogether. His oaks and elms in his park, and in his woods—they are sturdy timbers, in troth, and gnarled and knotted ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... gamut, gay and hearty, satirical and incisive, in turn. We see also the first formal beginning of the dramatic monologue, which, hinted at in Pauline, disguised in Paracelsus, and developed, still disguised, in Sordello, became, from the period of the Dramatic Lyrics onward, the staple form and special instrument of the poet, an instrument finely touched, at times, by other performers, but of which he is the only Liszt. The literal beginning of the monologue must be found in two lyrical poems, here included, ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... Carlyle with his bilious howls and bankrupt draughts on hope." Hawthorne, he learns, though we cannot tell from whence, "thought it inexpressibly ridiculous that any one should notice man's miseries, these being his staple product," and was "swallowed up in the wretchedness of life;" also, "the Concord novelist was a handsome, bulky character, with a soft rolling gait; a wit said he seemed like a boned pirate." From these more ...
— Lippincott's Magazine. Vol. XII, No. 33. December, 1873. • Various
... with the distinctive marks peculiar to the tribe to which belonged the dwellers within, and woven so tightly as to hold water without permitting a drop to pass through. In the bottom of one of these baskets was scattered a little ground meal of the acorn, a staple article of food with all the Indians of California. The other basket, similar to the first in shape and size, but of rougher weave, and lined on the inside with bitumen, was nearly full of water; for though the finely woven baskets of the Southern California Indians were really ...
— Old Mission Stories of California • Charles Franklin Carter
... financial embarrassments of Brazil. Mexico had shown that the political stability which investors had believed it to have achieved was a very thin veneer and a series of revolutions had plunged that hapless land into anarchy. Brazil was suffering from a heavy fall in the price of one of her chief staple products, rubber, owing to the competition of plantations in Ceylon, Straits Settlements and elsewhere, and was finding difficulty in meeting the interest on the big load of debt that the free facilities given by English and French investors had encouraged her to pile ...
— International Finance • Hartley Withers
... some proud rejoicing of the nation, which filled every newspaper and gave food to every tongue. In Eccleston these rejoicings were greater than in most places; for, by the national triumph of arms, it was supposed that a new market for the staple manufacture of the place would be opened; and so the trade, which had for a year or two been languishing, would now revive with redoubled vigour. Besides these legitimate causes of good spirits, there was the rank excitement of a coming election, in consequence of Mr Donne ...
— Ruth • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... the historical mutiny on board, as a result of which the mutineers established themselves on Pitcairn Island, where their descendants remain to this day. Whatever adventures marked its original advent, the bread-fruit has made itself thoroughly at home in the West Indies, and forms the staple food of the negroes. When carefully prepared it really might pass for under-done bread, prepared from very indifferent flour by an inexperienced and unskilled baker. It is the immense variety of the foliage and the constantly changing panorama that gives Bog ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... victuals was the lumber—clean wood out of the mountains—logs, planks, clapboards, and laths, for which we pay such sinful prices in England—all seeking the sea. There was housing, food, and fuel for millions, on wheels together, and never a grain yet shifted of the real staple which men for five hundred miles were threshing out in heaps ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... be, first to agree upon the general amity and commerce between the two nations, and afterwards, if Sweden held it fit, when they sent an ambassador to England, or otherwise, to propound anything concerning the fishing for herrings or the traffic in America, or touching a staple at Narva, Revel, or Gothenburg (which Eric likewise discoursed of at large), that the Protector would give a fair and ...
— A Journal of the Swedish Embassy in the Years 1653 and 1654, Vol II. • Bulstrode Whitelocke
... care in breeding has been greatly improved, insomuch that intelligent judges are of opinion that some of the Vermont flocks are superior to the best in Europe, both in form, hardiness, quantity of fleece and staple. They are too well known to require a detailed description here. Suffice it to say that they are below rather than above medium size, possessing a good constitution, and are thrifty, and cheaply kept. ...
— The Principles of Breeding • S. L. Goodale
... acquiring a new relationship to the industrial order—that of spenders instead of producers. Social welfare demands that the modern woman put into her function of purchasing consumer of staple products the same conscientious standardizing of those products and the same sense of responsibility for the conditions surrounding laborers which she displayed in the old handicraft days of domestic industry. ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... beside the prostrate figure of her husband but a moment, when she was torn away by Hartmann and his assistant, and before she realized their intention, the former had slipped about her waist the broad leather strap he had brought from the room above, and was busy securing it to an iron staple fixed in the wall at one side of the room. Then he stood back and surveyed the scene with ...
— The Ivory Snuff Box • Arnold Fredericks
... hoe the drilled-in wheat. The rice, the staple of the country, is so cared for and tended that it sells for much more than other rice. Imported rice is ...
— An Ohio Woman in the Philippines • Emily Bronson Conger
... to buy after a few days. On May 3d we were able to buy the staple articles of food. Up to that time we obtained what we needed from the Relief Committee, such as canned meats, ...
— San Francisco During the Eventful Days of April, 1906 • James B. Stetson
... entirely—or is it an army? I've forgotten how many comprise a regiment." She went to work with steady fingers. "These lunch cloths of mine are becoming as staple ...
— The Dominant Dollar • Will Lillibridge
... beans form a principal part in the staple articles of food for the working-classes, and indeed for the entire population; it is much to be desired that some effectual means should be adopted, for the purpose of introducing and encouraging the use of this most excellent ...
— A Plain Cookery Book for the Working Classes • Charles Elme Francatelli
... promised to become a staple of the Islands; but a blight attacked the trees and proved so incurable that the best plantations were dug up and turned into sugar; and the export of coffee, which has been very variable, but which rose to 415,000 ...
— Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands • Charles Nordhoff
... sought evasion. He hastened to throw open the outer door and the stranger entered, whereupon the tempest ceased, although the thunder and lightning still lingered among the higher mountains. In passing through the doorway the robe of plaited grasses caught for a moment on the staple and pulling aside revealed that the Being wore upon his left foot a golden sandal and upon his right foot one of iron, while embedded in his throat was a great pearl. Convinced by this that he was indeed one ...
— Kai Lung's Golden Hours • Ernest Bramah
... Seventy-seventh reaped and bound in the fields, while the good ladies worked day and night to make bread and cakes for the veterans, who had so long been accustomed to diet on pork and hard tack. Soft bread, milk, poultry and the staple luxury of Pennsylvania, apple butter, was a glorious improvement on the usual bill of camp fare, and kind sympathizing Union people were much better calculated to render our stay among them agreeable, than the bitter rebels among whom we had so ...
— Three Years in the Sixth Corps • George T. Stevens
... of that winter were the strangest ever witnessed in a farming community. Never had any man known fuel to be so scarce. Cornstalks, which were usually staple articles for fuel in that country, had been eaten almost to the very ground, but the stubs were gathered, the dirt shaken from them, and they were then carted to the house. Rosin weeds were collected and piled in heaps. The dried dung of cattle, scattered over the grazing lands, and called ...
— The Wind Before the Dawn • Dell H. Munger
... before tea, sugar, and flour had come into general use, salt fish was much more the staple article of diet than at present, and, I am told, skin diseases were very common, though they are ...
— The Aran Islands • John M. Synge
... them, and it was voted unanimously that fish should form one of the staple dishes of their stay in camp at ...
— The Outdoor Chums at Cabin Point - or The Golden Cup Mystery • Quincy Allen
... use, and you can't get anybody. Borrow old Susan from The Savins. She isn't good for much but staple commodities, roast beef and things; but I'll help her out. I know something about cooking, not much, but better than nothing; and ...
— Phebe, Her Profession - A Sequel to Teddy: Her Book • Anna Chapin Ray
... comfortable, and the people had a thrifty, prosperous and satisfied air. Beside the farmhouses were immense racks, twenty feet high, for the purpose of drying flax and grain, and at the stations the people offered for sale very fine and beautiful linen of their own manufacture. This is the staple production of Norrland, where the short summers are frequently insufficient to mature the grain crops. The inns were all comfortable buildings, with very fair accommodations for travellers. We had bad luck with horses this day, ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... productions are not quite equal to those that grow on the equator. The coffee, sugar, tobacco, and spices are somewhat inferior to those of Java, Sumatra, and Celebes. Rice is the staple food of the common people, and has been raised from prehistoric periods. Maize, which I believe you Americans call ...
— Across India - Or, Live Boys in the Far East • Oliver Optic
... that all this was doing in the wilderness, and the men were working yeomanly to build a new nation, in King James's court the ambassadors of the French King were being entertained with maskings and mummerings, wherein the staple subject of merriment ...
— Betty's Bright Idea; Deacon Pitkin's Farm; and The First Christmas - of New England • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... protection, and the agricultural work with which they occupied their hands, brought them the corrupting wealth; in England they were the owners of the largest flocks of sheep which produced the raw material for the staple trade of the country. They accepted ecclesiastical dignities; they became luxurious and magnificent in their manner of life; they strove for independence of the ecclesiastical authorities, until in the middle of the thirteenth century one of their own abbots quotes against ...
— The Church and the Empire - Being an Outline of the History of the Church - from A.D. 1003 to A.D. 1304 • D. J. Medley
... and Peruvian cotton yields a long staple and is sometimes used to adulterate silk and other fibers. Some varieties of this cotton are harsh and wooly and are prized for use in mixing ...
— Textiles and Clothing • Kate Heintz Watson
... Hiawatha Legends," has not in it a single fact or fiction relating either to Hiawatha himself or to the Iroquois deity Taronhiawagon. Wild Ojibway stories concerning Manabozho and his comrades form the staple of its contents. But it is to this collection that we owe the charming poem of Longfellow; and thus, by an extraordinary fortune, a grave Iroquois lawgiver of the fifteenth century has become, in modern literature, an Ojibway demigod, son of the West Wind, and companion of the tricksy ...
— The Iroquois Book of Rites • Horatio Hale
... the worst came to the worst, we would try this, and having settled that, went back to have a look at the main hatch. Feeling about round it, we found the points of the staple on which the hatchway bar worked above; they were not fastened with nuts as they would have been with us, but were simply turned over and clinched. We had no means of straightening them out, but we could cut through the woodwork round them. Setting to work at that, we took it by turns till ...
— When London Burned • G. A. Henty
... in four months, and maize in forty days—with irrigation it is easy to grow three annual crops. The time for planting is before the rains, which here last six weeks to two months, September and October. The staple of commerce is now the nguba, or ground-nut (plural, jinguba), which Merolla calls incumba, with sometimes a little milho (maize), and Calavance beans. Of fruits we find trellised grapes, pines, and guavas, which, as at Fernando Po, are a weed. The agrumi, limes, ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... the magic millstones Grotti and the two slaves and put them on board his vessel, bidding the women grind salt, which was a very valuable staple of commerce at that time. The women obeyed, and their millstones went round, grinding salt in abundance; but the Viking, as cruel as Frodi, would give the poor women no rest, wherefore a heavy punishment overtook him and his followers. ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... The ancient staple of our island, in which we are clothed, is very imperfectly to be traced on the books of the Custom-House: but I know that our woollen manufactures flourish. I recollect to have seen that fact very fully established, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... human beings, all that could be done would be to let them loose or send them to the nearest workhouse. But there is nothing new in private enterprise throwing its human refuse on the cheap labor market and the workhouse; and the refuse of the new industry would presumably be better bred than the staple product of ordinary poverty. In our present happy-go-lucky industrial disorder, all the human products, successful or not, would have to be thrown on the labor market; but the unsuccessful ones would not entitle the company to a bounty and so would be a dead loss to it. ...
— Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion • George Bernard Shaw
... the first visible piece of evidence was that some violence had been exercised in forcing open the door on the occasion of some one making his or her escape from the building, for the staple into which the bolt of the lock had been thrust showed that the door had been locked on the inside, and that the person coming from the premises must have used ...
— The Reminiscences Of Sir Henry Hawkins (Baron Brampton) • Henry Hawkins Brampton
... 12-stamp quartz mill with engine and boiler, and all the equipments understood to be necessary for extracting gold from the rock, including mining tools, powder, quicksilver, copper plate and chemicals; also a supply of provisions for a year. The staple articles of the latter were flour, beans, salt pork, coffee and sugar. Then we had rice, cornmeal, dried fruit, tea, bacon and a barrel of syrup; besides a good supply of hardtack, crackers and cheese for use while crossing the plains, when a fire for cooking might not ...
— A Gold Hunter's Experience • Chalkley J. Hambleton
... Switzerland, having distanced both Basel and Geneva in this direction. The manufacturing of silk, woolen, and linen fabrics has flourished here since the end of the thirteenth century. In modern times, however, cotton and machinery have been added as staple articles of manufacture. Much of the actual weaving is still done in outlying parts of the Canton, in the very cottages of the peasants, so that the click of the loom is heard from open windows in ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume VI • Various
... of Gray's Inn, in Dugdale's time, were Staple Inn and Barnard's Inn. Originally the Exchange of the London woolen merchants, Staple Inn was a law-school as early as Henry V.'s time. It is probable that Bernard's Inn became an academy for law-students in ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... bill was introduced into the English Parliament, grounded upon complaints, that the woollen manufacture in Ireland prejudiced the staple trade of England; the matter terminated at last in an address to the King, wherein the commons 'implored his majesty's protection and favour on this matter, and that he would make it his royal care, ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Vol. VII - Historical and Political Tracts—Irish • Jonathan Swift
... than I had believed, the staple of the lock clinging to the hard teak wood of which the chest was made. I must have been ten minutes at it, compelled to use a wooden bar as lever, before it yielded, groaning as it finally released its grip, like a soul in agony. I felt the girl clutch me in terror ...
— Wolves of the Sea • Randall Parrish
... Wiggenhall, St. Mary the Virgin, the following books may be seen fastened by chains to a wooden desk in the chancel: Foxe's Book of Martyrs, in three volumes, chained to the same staple; the Book of Homilies; the Bible, with calendar in rubrics; and the works of Bishop Jewell, in one volume. The title-page is lost from all the above: in other respects they are in a fair state of preservation, considering their {596} antiquity, of ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 216, December 17, 1853 • Various
... whole physical system, by which our spirit is enclosed with all the joys and sorrows, hopes and fears, and wants which form a part of it, are designed as an education to fit the soul for its immortality; and as worldly care forms the greater part of the staple of every human life, there must be some mode of viewing and meeting it, which converts it from an enemy of spirituality into a means of grace and ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... but forced conversation did not flourish. Bourcelles was not fashionable; no one ever had appendicitis there. Yet ailments of a milder order were the staple, inexhaustible subjects at meals. Instead of the weather, mon estomac was the inexhaustible tale. The girl brought in the little Cantonal newspaper, and the widow read out selections in a high, shrill voice, regardless who listened. Misfortunes and accidents ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... promotion depending not upon merit but upon length of service. The younger officers were radically bad, owing to their airs of nobility and licentious garrison life; their manners and principles were equally vulgar. Women, horses, dogs, and gambling formed the staple of their conversation; they despised all solid learning, and, when decorated on parade, in their enormous cocked hats and plumes, powdered wigs and queues, tight leather breeches and great boots, they swore at and cudgelled the men, and strutted about ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... be binding on the United States for ten years, the French Government abandons the reclamations which it had formed in relation to the 8th article of the treaty of cession of Louisiana. It engages, moreover, to establish on the long-staple cottons of the United States which after the exchange of the ratifications of the present convention shall be brought directly thence to France by the vessels of the United States or by French vessels the same duties as on short-staple cotton. This treaty was duly ratified in the ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Andrew Jackson • Andrew Jackson
... butcher of Rouen, who relates the catastrophe. The subject of "The King's Tragedy" is the murder of James I. by Robert Graeme and his men in the Charterhouse of Perth. The teller of the tale is Catherine Douglas, known in Scottish tradition as Kate Barlass, who had thrust her arm through the staple, in place of a bar, to hold the door against the assassins. A few stanzas of "The Kinges Quair" are fitted into the poem by shortening the lines two syllables each, to accommodate them to the ballad metre. It is generally agreed ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... original or copper-colored inhabitants. The difference in environment and climate and conditions, together with the amplified wealth of native supplies, did the rest. In Merrie England, as all travelers know, there are but three staple vegetables—to wit, boiled potatoes, boiled turnips, and a second helping of the boiled potatoes. But here, spread before the gladdened vision of the newly arrived, and his to pick and choose from, was a boundless expanse of new foodstuffs—birds, beasts and fishes, fruits, vegetables ...
— Cobb's Bill-of-Fare • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... it slightly, without result. Then he strolled round to the back, entered his own little abode by the kitchen, and tried the other door which led into the boat-house. It was not only locked, but a staple had been put in, and it was fastened with a padlock of curious design which he did not remember to have seen there before. Again, half unconsciously, he listened, and again he found the silence oppressive. He went back to his room, brought out some of the books which it had been his intention to ...
— The Vanished Messenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... and we know not how long before, he was a sort of staple character, no set of Miracle-Plays being regarded as complete without him. And he was always represented as an immense swearer and braggart and swaggerer, evermore ranting and raving up and down the stage, and cudgelling the spectators' ears with the most furious bombast and profanity. ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... broken up into smaller economic units which retained the name. By the beginning of the eighteenth century the prevailing industrial system in Virginia and Maryland was these small plantations or farms where Negro slaves gradually took the place of white redemptioners and the prevailing staple was tobacco. About the end of the seventeenth century the Jamaican or West Indian type of plantation was introduced on the coast region around Charleston. It consisted of larger estates cultivated by thirty or more slaves, with few or no white laborers, the master ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... creed of the dynasty, capital should own labor, and the labor thus owned can alone successfully produce cotton, he who has must be continually increasing his store, while he who has not can neither raise the one staple recognized by the Cotton dynasty, nor turn his labor, his only property, to other branches of industry; for such have, in the universal abandonment of the community to cotton, been allowed to languish and die. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various
... as quickly as he could, through Paternoster Row, which was full of stalls, where little black books, and larger sheets printed in black-letter, seemed the staple commodities, and thence the burgess, keeping a heedful eye on his young companions among all his greetings, entered the broader space of Cheapside, where numerous prentice lads seemed to be playing at different sports after ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... carpet in the forest here is the uva-ursi or bear-berry. Its beautiful evergreen leaves and bright red berries cover a quarter of the ground in dry woods and are found in great acre beds. It furnishes a staple of food to all wild things, birds and beasts, including Foxes, Martens, and Coyotes; it is one of the most abundant of the forest products, and not one hundred yards from the fort are solid patches as big as farms, and yet when I brought in a spray to sketch it one day several of the ...
— The Arctic Prairies • Ernest Thompson Seton
... "plantation" or grove of palms is attached to the house or field which is rented and sold. In Babylonia, in fact, an estate was not considered complete without its garden, which almost invariably included a clump of palms. The date-palm was the staple of the country. It was almost the only tree which grew there, and it grew in marvellous abundance. Stem, leaves, and fruit were all alike turned to use. The columns and roofing-beams of the temples and houses were made of its stem, which was also employed for bonding ...
— Babylonians and Assyrians, Life and Customs • Rev. A. H. Sayce
... after perils; in him courage was not a sentiment; but a thing simply useful to him, and always at hand upon all mortally practical occasions. Besides, he thought, perhaps, that in this business of whaling, courage was one of the great staple outfits of the ship, like her beef and her bread, and not to be foolishly wasted. Wherefore he had no fancy for lowering for whales after sun-down; nor for persisting in fighting a fish that too much persisted in fighting him. For, thought Starbuck, I am here in this critical ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... time there was made a wondrous garden. It was called the earth. The flowers, the trees, the plants which afterwards became through man's skill our staple products—all these were free, ...
— The Library of Work and Play: Gardening and Farming. • Ellen Eddy Shaw
... Forty to Eighteen Hundred Forty-five), Ireland contained more than eight millions of people. But a very large proportion of them managed merely to exist—lodging in miserable cabins, clothed in miserable rags, and with potatoes only as their staple food. When the potato-blight came, they died by thousands. But it was not the inability of the soil to support so large a population that compelled so many to live in this miserable way, and exposed them to starvation on the failure of a single ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... fires him now. He plants against the wall his feet; his chain Grasps; tugs with giant strength to force away The deep-driven staple; yells and shrieks with rage: And, like a desert lion in the snare, Raging to break his toils,—to and fro bounds. But see! the ground is opening;—a blue light Mounts, gently waving,—noiseless;—thin and cold It seems, and like a rainbow tint, not flame; But by its luster, ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... forms of speech—when ought it to have occurred, and how did I evade it in these letters of mine? For people begin with a graceful skittish levity, lest you should be struck all of a heap with what is to come, and that is sure to be the stuff and staple of the man, full of wisdom and sorrow,—and then again comes the fringe of reeds and pink little stones on the other side, that you may put foot on land, and draw breath, and think what a deep pond you have swum across. ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... good mile away. Every man betrayed his emotion and his misery in some way: here they tugged at the chains which bound them, there they showed their teeth at the Spaniards, snarling and snapping like dogs chained to a staple in the wall. And then the overseers fell upon us once more, and their great hide-whips descended mercilessly upon our shoulders, so that we were forced to tug at the oars with redoubled force, and the galleon shot forward ...
— In the Days of Drake • J. S. Fletcher
... reputed great wealth; but his real name is Christoforo Rischio, which I may again translate, as Christopher Risk. Mrs. Browning refers to him in one of her poems—the "Casa Guidi Windows," I think—and he has also been the staple of a tale by ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... fail, where nothing is to be had, the King himself will be loser, and so will the case be formed here; for such is the poverty and meanness of the people (by reason of the length and coldness of the winters, the difficulty of subduing a wilderness, defect of staple commodity, the want of money, etc.), that if with hard labour men get a subsistence for their families, 'tis as much as the generality are able to do, paying but very small rates towards the public charges; ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 1 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Egerton Ryerson
... rose and pulled aside one of these curtains only to see, just as I expected, the blank surface of a series of unslatted shutters, tightly fitting one to another with old-time exactitude. A flat hook and staple fastened them. Gently raising the window, and lifting one, I pulled the shutter open and looked out. The prospect was just what I had been led to expect from the location of the room—the long, bare wall of the neighboring house. I was curious about ...
— The Mayor's Wife • Anna Katharine Green
... regions. For the valley is the western outlet of the Black-down range, with the Beacon hill upon the north, and Hackpen long ridge to the south; and beyond that again the Whetstone hill, upon whose western end dark port-holes scarped with white grit mark the pits. But flint is the staple of the broad Culm Valley, under good, well-pastured loam; and here ...
— Crocker's Hole - From "Slain By The Doones" By R. D. Blackmore • R. D. Blackmore
... along, making hard work of it in his chaps, boots, and spurs, stopping now and then to drive a staple or brace a post. The country was growing wilder and more broken, with cedar timber on the ridges and here and there a pine. Occasionally he could catch a glimpse of the black, forbidding walls of Tailholt Mountain. But Patches did not know that it was Tailholt. He only thought ...
— When A Man's A Man • Harold Bell Wright
... down, and before evening we had caught enough of that splendid staple of the North American lakes, the whitefish, to supply us with a good meal and leave something over for our ...
— The Big Otter • R.M. Ballantyne
... nailed. Entrance to the cellar was barred by heavy scantlings fastened across the sloping hatch. In the barnyard he found a stout single-tree. With this he succeeded in prying off the two scantlings. The staple holding the padlock was easily withdrawn from one of the ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon
... based on a fallacy, and that all its arguments, therefore, are unsound. The fallacy of the book, it is explained, consists in making cotton and slavery indivisible, and teaching that cotton can not be cultivated except by slave labor; whereas, in the opinion of the objector, that staple can be grown by free labor. Here, again, the author is misunderstood. He only teaches what is true beyond all question: not that free labor is incapable of producing cotton, but that it does not produce it so as to affect ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... son of Philip who planted Greek colonies in Asia as far as the Indies; who formed projects of trade more extensive than his empire itself; who laid the foundations of them in the midst of his wars; who built Alexandria, to be the centre and staple of commerce between Europe, Asia, and Africa, who sent Nearchus to navigate the unknown Indian seas, and intended to have gone himself from those seas to the Pillars of Hercules—that is, to have explored the passage round Africa, the discovery of which has ...
— Dialogues of the Dead • Lord Lyttelton
... Listen to this, 'Mr. Quarrington's wonderful creations are evidently not entirely the fruit of the spirit, since we understand that his staple breakfast dish consists of a couple of underdone cutlets—so lightly cooked, in fact, as to be almost raw.' I'm glad I've learned that," pursued Magda earnestly. "It seems to me an important thing for a wife to know. Don't ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... and enthusiasm about the social and political problems which were occupying the whole world increased every day, until public meetings and private intercourse, and the shallow platitudes which formed the staple eloquence of the orators of the day, proved to me the terrible shallowness ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... must have been considerable, for the British Museum now has thirty-five copies and Bodley's Library sixteen. "Possibly, no work before the age of printed books attained such immediate and astonishing popularity . . . translations, adaptations, and continuations of it formed one of the staple exercises of a host of medieval scribes."[1] A glance at the monastic and academic library catalogues of later date than mid- thirteenth century will prove more clearly than a shelf full of books how enormous was the influence of Aristotle. If such a collocation as the Bible and ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... Bob; "why it is one of their staple talks about how you stood against the night birds who used to play us such cowards' tricks. Why, Gentles remains ...
— Patience Wins - War in the Works • George Manville Fenn
... which this is accomplished consists, first, of a piece of ordnance called a mortar, made large enough to throw a shot of about six inches in diameter; secondly, the shot itself, which has a small iron staple set in it; thirdly, a long line, one end of which is to be attached to the staple in the shot, when the shot is thrown; and, fourthly, a rack of a peculiar construction to serve as a reel for winding the line upon. This rack consists of a small square frame, having rows of pegs inserted ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... convey her from the dungeon. He was at first prevented from doing so by a strong chain fastened round the prisoner's body, and fixing her to the neighbouring Wall. However, his natural strength being aided by anxiety to relieve the Unfortunate, He soon forced out the Staple to which one end of the Chain was attached. Then taking the Captive in his arms, He bent his course towards the Staircase. The rays of the Lamp above, as well as the murmur of female voices, guided his steps. He gained the Stairs, and in a few minutes ...
— The Monk; a romance • M. G. Lewis
... of the lock. To his own surprise and that of Tom, one of the staples pulled out and the door swung open. The place had evidently been forced before, and the lock had not been opened by a key. The staple had been pulled out and ...
— Tom Swift and his Air Scout - or, Uncle Sam's Mastery of the Sky • Victor Appleton
... his former fear, Dick hurried across the cabin floor to the door of the inner apartment. Feeling around in the dark he found a hasp and staple and pulled out the plug which fastened the barrier. In another instant boy and girl plumped into each other's arms in the darkness. Even in that moment of peril Dick could not resist giving Nellie a little squeeze, ...
— The Boy Land Boomer - Dick Arbuckle's Adventures in Oklahoma • Ralph Bonehill
... Chauntry. Palfreyman, or Palfreman, occurs on several occasions, they were of a respectable family in the county, William Palfreyman being Mayor of Lincoln in 1534; Ralph Palfreyman, clerk, was presented to the Benefice of Edlington, by his brother Anthony, merchant of the Staple, ...
— A History of Horncastle - from the earliest period to the present time • James Conway Walter
... English design, and the rest of the house with its later Perpendicular windows is admirable. Not far away is the interesting village of Long Crendon, once a market-town, with its fine church and its many picturesque houses, including Staple Hall, near the church, with its noble hall, used for more than five centuries as a manorial court-house on behalf of various lords of the manor, including Queen Katherine, widow of Henry V. It has now fortunately passed into the care of the National Trust, and its future is ...
— Vanishing England • P. H. Ditchfield
... Cantonese. They are bold navigators; the grand island of Formosa, now ceded to Japan, was colonised by them; and by [Page 15] them also the savage aborigines were driven over to the east coast. A peculiar sort of black tea is grown on these mountains, and, along with grass cloth, forms a staple in the trade of Amoy. The harbour is not wanting in beauty; and a view from one of the hill-tops, from which hundreds of villages are visible, is highly picturesque. Of the town of Amoy with its 200,000 people there is not much to be said except that several missions, ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... Wellington. So it is with civilized races; but the Tartars, as is evident from what I have already observed, have in their wars no need of any commissariat at all; and that, not merely from the unscrupulousness of their foraging, but because they find in the instruments of their conquests the staple of their food. "Corn is a bulky and perishable commodity," says an historian;[3] "and the large magazines, which are indispensably necessary for the subsistence of civilized troops, are difficult and slow ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman |
