"Boring" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... A man who kept boring people with a mere 'sell' would be scouted; and with the death of the answerless riddle the difficult word 'Rooky' would die. But Mr. Max Muller says, 'Riddles would cease to be riddles if the names had been clear and intelligible.' The reverse ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang
... pulled and jerked. She said her hands were cramped, and no wonder. Pulling double for a four-mile heat is no joke, even if a man's in training. Fancy a woman, a young girl, having to sit still and drag at a runaway horse all the time. I couldn't stop the brute; she was boring like a wild bull. So just as we came pretty close I lifted Miss Falkland off the saddle and yelled at old Brownie as if I had been on a cattle camp, swinging round to the near side at the same time. Round he came like one o'clock. ...
— Robbery Under Arms • Thomas Alexander Browne, AKA Rolf Boldrewood
... diverting than the whole affair. Of course, selon les regles, I ought to have been shocked and horrified, to have shed salt tears, and have uttered melancholy jeremiads over their miserable degradation; but the world is so full of platitudes, my dear, that I think you will easily forgive me for not boring you with a temperance lecture, and will good-naturedly let me have my laugh, and not think me very wicked, ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... untimely visit, but he put me at my ease at once by cordially assuring me that I had done him a favour. "I was going to a boring big dinner this evening when your telegram arrived, and your coming in this way suggested something sufficiently important to detain me, so I sent an excuse, and have had a wholesome chop, and—eh—a real good time," he added confidentially, tapping the novelette. "Extraordinary production ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... a serious accident, which threatened the destruction of the mine, occurred. While boring, to obtain some potash salts, through an aquiferous stratum, a spring was tapped, which poured an immense quantity of water into the lower galleries. The inhabitants feared not only the ruin of the mine, but the falling in of their ...
— The Mines and its Wonders • W.H.G. Kingston
... Waterhouse, and told him to fire into the field. He galloped up to McDowell's brigade, where Barrett's battery was stationed, and told the officer commanding to do the same. In a moment the field was smoking hot, shells bursting in the air, crashing through Ruggles's ranks, and boring holes in the walls of the dilapidated old cabin. The Rebels could not face in the open field so severe a fire. Instead of advancing directly against the church, they moved into the woods east of the field, and became reinforcements to the brigades already well advanced into ...
— My Days and Nights on the Battle-Field • Charles Carleton Coffin
... did, in patches in the wilderness, formed what were called in country parlance 'sugar bushes,' or, in the more elegant language of books, 'sugar orchards.' Early in the spring, when the sun stood high, and the snow began to melt, the maples would be 'tapped,' as the farmers say; sometimes by boring into them, and often by driving in a chisel; then a wooden spout would be inserted through which the sweet sap would begin to trickle down into the troughs placed there to receive it. From these troughs it was collected and carried in buckets and pails to an immense receptacle hollowed ...
— The Story of a Summer - Or, Journal Leaves from Chappaqua • Cecilia Cleveland
... part of Mr. Barlow, to go down to posterity as childhood's experience of a bore! Immortal Mr. Barlow, boring his way through the verdant freshness ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... southward into the Tyrolese Alps. It was a wonderful ride—that ride through the Semmering and on down to Northern Italy. Our absurdly short little locomotive, drawing our absurdly long train, went boring in and out of a wrinkly shoulder-seam of the Tyrols like a stubby needle going through a tuck. I think in thirty miles we threaded thirty tunnels; after that I was practically asphyxiated and ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... clever young engineer at the wheat ranch, who was always studying up these things with his inventions—and that was his opinion. No, Tom was not a well-digger, but it was generally known that he had "located" one or two, and had long ago advised the tapping of that flow by a second boring, in case of just such an emergency. He was coming again to-morrow. By the way, he had asked how the young lady visitor was, and hoped she had not been alarmed ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... feegures which I shall be glad to submit tae ye, in regard tae the cost o' leevin' since last ye fixed the wage. If yere wage was right then, it's wrang the noo." Under the strain Mr. Maitland's boring eyes and increasing impatience the Doric flavour of McNish's speech grew richer and more guttural, varying with the ...
— To Him That Hath - A Novel Of The West Of Today • Ralph Connor
... over the plains north of the Save, on the way to Belgrade, my fellow travellers, too, thought I was bound on a mad and impossible errand. As is usual in the Near East they all cross-examined me about my private affairs with boring persistency, and their verdict was that not even a British passport would see me through. "You will never see Serbia," they declared. I did though. For, being wholly innocent of any plots, all the efforts of all the multitudinous police of Serbia failed to turn me ...
— Twenty Years Of Balkan Tangle • Durham M. Edith
... my colleague was boring upward at the time we last saw him; but the speed of that machine is marvelous. No wonder these foreign spies take the great chances they do, hoping to learn what Uncle Sam is up to. If they could carry back full information ...
— The Boy Scouts of the Flying Squadron • Robert Shaler
... everybody I saw," Jean flared out suddenly, "is the sickening injustice of it. Dad never did that; you know he never did it." She turned upon him fiercely. "Do you think he did?" she demanded, her eyes boring ...
— Jean of the Lazy A • B. M. Bower
... lectures were good. A few fell short of what was required, but usually the discussion which followed such effort made up for any defect in the lecture itself. Occasional flashes of unconscious humour often saved the indifferent performer from boring ...
— The 28th: A Record of War Service in the Australian Imperial Force, 1915-19, Vol. I • Herbert Brayley Collett
... few hundreds of yards from its goal, the protective mirror was punctured and the freight of high explosive let go, with a silent, but nevertheless terrific, detonation. But now another torpedo was on its way, and another, and another; boring on ruthlessly toward the smaller sphere. Fighting simultaneously three torpedos and the giant globe, the enemy began dodging, darting hither and thither with a stupendous acceleration; but the tiny pursuers could not be shaken off. At every dodge and turn, ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... very close together. He caught the deep-drawn breath and looked quickly at her, his eyes alight and narrowed with an expression which was a curious mingling of quizzical humor and grim enjoyment. Her own eyes did not waver, though his were boring into hers steadily, as though he were trying to read ...
— The Trail to Yesterday • Charles Alden Seltzer
... requires a deuced deal of history,' continued Mr. Cassilis. 'One must brush up one's Goldsmith. Canterton used to be the fellow for history at White's. He was always boring one with William the Conqueror, Julius Caesar, and all ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... spirals from the auger blade inside the holes show plainly that the boring was done from Number Six toward Number Seven. Take the ...
— Through the Wall • Cleveland Moffett
... city than their camp. Brayman says that an estimate which placed the Mormon force at five hundred or six hundred was a great exaggeration, and that the only artillery they had was six pieces which they fashioned for themselves, by breaking some steamboat shafts to the proper length and boring them out so that they would receive ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... and accurately, a proper template should be made, by which the ties are marked for the borers, who should be provided with boring machines, by the use of which a hole, square with the face of the tie is bored. The boring machines should be so arranged as not to cut the hole beyond the required depth, which should be slightly less than the length of the spike. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 794, March 21, 1891 • Various
... flat. The words grow cold on the page. It's all a cud of some sort. Do you know, Terekhov was here once, while passing through ... You know ... The well-known one ... I came to him and started in telling him lots and lots about the life here, which I do not tell you for fear of boring you. I begged him to utilize my material. He heard me out with great attention, and this is what he said, literally: 'Don't get offended, Platonov, if I tell you that there's almost not a single person of those I have met during my life, who wouldn't thrust ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... am finding the War a boring business; the glamour has decidedly worn off. Oh, if we could but get through the Boche lines! As things are at present, there is no thrill and not much scope for initiative. It is just a sordid affair ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... the end we think most of the men have been caught, but some may have been near the shaft. The pumping-pipe where Hoover and Young must have been tapping is here, half way between the first and second faults, where it comes down through a boring from the old gallery. It must have been at that point, because we had disconnected two leaking sections just below there only ...
— The Young Railroaders - Tales of Adventure and Ingenuity • Francis Lovell Coombs
... secret service, I wonder?) A delightful book, produced with something like pre-war attention to aesthetic appearance—a pleasant quarto with roomy pages faithfully printed in a fair type. You ought to enjoy the owner's evident enjoyment (he was never bored and therefore never boring), his charmingly ingenuous pride of possession, his shrewd, humorous and excessively didactic utterances about painters, pictures, architecture and female beauty, his zeal for water-colour sketching and his apparently profound contempt of other ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 21, 1920 • Various
... Horn" once upon a time was treated by boring a hole into the horn with a small gimlet and pouring Turpentine into the opening. This treatment is useless and harmful. It produces inflammation of the frontal sinuses of the head and chances are death of the animal ...
— The Veterinarian • Chas. J. Korinek
... talking, a number of shots were heard going off in various directions. This was explained by Captain Jan. All the forenoon the miners employ their time in boring and charging the blast-holes. About mid-day they fire them and then hasten to a clear part of the mine to eat luncheon and smoke their pipes while the gunpowder smoke clears away. This it does very slowly, taking sometimes more than an hour to clear sufficiently so as to let the men ...
— Personal Reminiscences in Book Making - and Some Short Stories • R.M. Ballantyne
... despicable link in the chain of nature, yet, if lost, would make a lamentable chasm. For, to say nothing of half the birds, and some quadrupeds, which are almost entirely supported by them, worms seem to be the great promoters of vegetation, which would proceed but lamely without them, by boring, perforating, and loosening the soil, and rendering it pervious to rains and the fibres of plants, by drawing straws and stalks of leaves and twigs into it; and, most of all, by throwing up such infinite numbers of lumps of earth called worm-casts, which, being their excrement, ...
— The Natural History of Selborne • Gilbert White
... up again at risk of boring you, Miss Campion," he observed. "I chanced to find myself in this direction, so had to yield to ...
— The Keeper of the Door • Ethel M. Dell
... this time! The picture of that court he had seen, with the girl in the witness chair and those many rows of eyes avidly fixed upon her, came back to his mind so vividly they seemed for a moment right here in the room, these eyes of the town boring into his house. Angrily he shut out the scene. And alone in the darkness, Roger said to his daughter all the ugly furious things he had not said to her upstairs—until at last ...
— His Family • Ernest Poole
... brothers, Reuben and Burke And Nathan and Jotham and Solomon, lurk Around the corner to see him work— Sitting cross-legged, like a Turk, Drawing the waxed end through with a jerk, And boring the holes with a comical quirk Of his wise old head, and a knowing smirk. But vainly they mounted each other's backs, And poked through knot-holes and pried through cracks; With wood from the pile and straw from the ...
— The Elson Readers, Book 5 • William H. Elson and Christine M. Keck
... Ranch, it was known that copper existed in the region; several shafts had been sunk and tunnels driven in various places, and gold had been found from time to time, but was kept a secret for many months. Its presence was at last revealed to Maxwell by a party of his own miners, who were boring into the heart of Old Baldy for a copper lead that had cropped out and was ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman
... Phoebe had never felt in such a fever. She could discern character, but love was but an external experience to her, and she could not read the riddle of Mervyn's repudiation of intercourse with their fellow-inmates, and his restlessness through the evening, checking Bertha for boring about her friend, and then encouraging her to go on with what she had been saying. At last, however, Bertha voluntarily ceased her communications and could be drawn out no farther; and when the candle was put out at night, she electrified Phoebe ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... keep you long, gentlemen, if I am boring you," agreed their host, amiably. "Now, I'll go below first and light up. So! Now, come down and take a look. Do you find many yacht cabins ...
— The Submarine Boys and the Middies • Victor G. Durham
... other letters I would like to quote, but for fear of boring my readers I will end with the following, written ...
— My Impresssions of America • Margot Asquith
... that instead of boring us with politics, he should have written about art, and described the picturesque aspects of the country and the local color. Then the critic bewails himself. Politics are intruded everywhere; we are weary of ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... isle of a century back like a Colossus; and I hush as he passes in his gouty shoes, his thunderbolt hand wrapped in flannel. Perhaps as we see him now, issuing with dark looks from the royal closet, angry scenes have been passing between him and his august master. He has been boring that old monarch for hours with prodigious long speeches, full of eloquence, voluble with the noblest phrases upon the commonest topics; but, it must be confessed, utterly repulsive to the little shrewd old gentleman, "at whose ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... don't have to imagine it—I can remember: how we used to sit around the edges of the room behaving ourselves just as hard as ever we could, and boring one another to extinction. I'm afraid some of them do it yet, sometimes; but I won't ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... accustomed to the lawyer's boring glances. He returned Smatt's stare, and experienced more keenly than usual his sense of dislike for the man. Smatt's face was in keeping with his voice, which was rusty. It was bleak and lantern-jawed, ...
— Fire Mountain - A Thrilling Sea Story • Norman Springer
... don't know," said Harryman nervously. Then, seizing Parrington's hands, he continued hurriedly, but in a low voice: "For days I have been living as if in a trance. It is as if I were lying in the delirium of fever; my head burns and my thoughts always return to the same spot, boring and burrowing; I feel as though a horrible eye were fixed on me from whose glance I cannot escape. I feel that I may at any moment awake from the trance, and that the awakening will ...
— Banzai! • Ferdinand Heinrich Grautoff
... art of printing has attained to a marvelous degree of progress. Hoe's printing-press, moved by steam, seizes on the blank paper, severs it from the roll in sheets of the right size, prints it on both sides, and folds it in a convenient shape,—all with miraculous rapidity. Inventions in rock-boring and rock-drilling have made it possible to tunnel mountains. The use of explosives for mechanical purposes is a highly important fact in connection with ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... success; and the forms presented by the smaller ivory vases are also to be found in vases made of those refractory stones. Further, the vases made of stone present not merely such forms as might be made by turning or boring, but there are also bowls with ribs which are as finely polished as the turned bowls. The hardest material used in the objects already found is rock crystal, of which several small flasks and bowls and a little lion are composed. But the lion, it must be confessed, is rather rudely worked. A few ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1178, June 25, 1898 • Various
... unendurable sadness as she listened to the simple sketch. It blended strangely with her past, into which her recollections kept boring ...
— Mother • Maxim Gorky
... and luxurious expeditions that she had made with Sir Aubrey; her own individual tastes were simple, and apart from the expensive equipment that was indispensable for their hunting trips, and which was Aubrey's choosing, not hers, she was not extravagant. The long list of figures that had been so boring during the tedious hours that she had spent with the lawyer, grudging every second of the glorious September morning that she had had to waste in the library when she was longing to be out of doors, had conveyed nothing to her beyond the fact that in future when she wanted anything ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... was too rough for him for one thing, and for another it was too much of a gamble. Opening safes only to find that they contained a few dollars in stamps and the postmaster's carpet slippers vexed him extremely and he then entered into the game of boring neat holes in the rim of twenty-dollar gold pieces, leaving only the outer shell and filling 'em up with a composition he invented that made the coin ring like a marriage bell. While he was still experimenting ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... no insipid Casino, where people only gather for show, where they talk in whispers, where they dance stupidly, where they succeed in thoroughly boring one another, we sought some other way of passing our evenings pleasantly. Now, just guess what came into the head of one of our husbandry? Nothing less than to go and dance each night in one of the farmhouses in ...
— A Comedy of Marriage & Other Tales • Guy De Maupassant
... a pig-pen better nor I do. I gi'en it up," said Jim, with a sigh that showed how painfully Mike was boring him. ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland
... But I knew you wouldn't, so I just had to mess around by myself. Oh, but I was tired—I was tired! But I kept saying to myself it was the last journey before—Jack, if you don't smoke your cigarette will go out. Where was I? I'm afraid I'm boring you. You can go to sleep if you like. Well, it was on the voyage back. There was a man on board that every one said was a private detective. It was at the time of the great Nat Verney swindles. You remember, of course? And ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... a cannon much heat is generated: the longer the boring lasts, the more heat is produced. He argues that since heat without limit may be thus produced by motion, heat ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - Invention and Discovery • Various
... with wire netting. No such windows were necessary in the exit doors, but to them were attached heavy galvanized iron flanges which served to cover the food receptacles. One of these flanges is labelled o in figure 17. The food receptacles were provided by boring holes in a 2 by 4 inch timber securely nailed to the floor immediately outside of the exit doors. Into these holes aluminum cups fitted snugly, and the iron flanges, when the doors were closed, fitted so closely over the cups that it was impossible for the animals ...
— The Mental Life of Monkeys and Apes - A Study of Ideational Behavior • Robert M. Yerkes
... came to their senses, and for half an hour sent over to us what I should think to be, by the noise they made, tea-kettles, cooking-stoves, large cast-iron hats, etc. But our smaller and more active guns soon silenced theirs, and drove the gunners away, when we turned our attention to the boring of holes in their boats with conical pieces of iron, vulgarly called solid shot. I am sure I can recommend them as first-class augers, for they sank the boats in time for all hands to sit down to breakfast at half-past nine o'clock. The repast consisted ...
— Three Years in the Federal Cavalry • Willard Glazier
... would take a great while to draw a line and measure off the distances, and so he went on with his boring, looking up, however, continually from his work, to watch ...
— Stuyvesant - A Franconia Story • Jacob Abbott
... with a low hiss, and speaking through his teeth. "Why, it's as if a red-hot point was boring ...
— The King's Esquires - The Jewel of France • George Manville Fenn
... Fragments of ice sufficiently separate to admit of a ship forcing or boring through them ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... discovery of the kaleidoscope. Goodyear discovered how to vulcanize rubber by forgetting, until it became red hot, a skillet containing a compound which he had before considered worthless. A ship-worm boring a piece of wood suggested to Sir Isambard Brunel the idea of a tunnel under the Thames at London. Tracks of extinct animals in the old red sandstone led Hugh Miller on and on until he became the greatest geologist of his time. Sir Walter Scott once saw a shepherd ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... mother, how are you? I'm O.K. Hope you are the same. Sleeping well, and eating everything I can lay my hands on. The box came; it was sure a good one. Come again. So-long!' That was the style of Frank's letter. 'I don't want this poor censor to be boring his eyes out trying to find state secrets in my letters,' he said another time, apologizing for the shortness of it. 'There are lots of things that I would like to tell you, but I guess they will keep until I get home—I always could talk better than ...
— The Next of Kin - Those who Wait and Wonder • Nellie L. McClung
... no answer, save an uneasy hitch on the part of the person so addressed. He seemed to feel the focus of the sunbonnet boring into his system. The voice in the bonnet went on, shot straight toward him, so ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VIII (of X) • Various
... recent date, chalk. If, on the other hand, it is to be used as a mineralogical term, I do not see how the modern and the ancient chalks are to be separated—and, looking at the matter geographically, I see no reason to doubt that a boring rod driven from the surface of the mud which forms the floor of the mid-Atlantic would pass through one continuous mass of Globigerina mud, first of modern, then of tertiary, and then of mesozoic date; the "chalks" of different depths and ages being distinguished merely ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... twelve thousand years old, and fragments found still deeper in this deposit, and calculated at thirty thousand years, were found to be underlaid by still deeper layers, producing Roman pottery; and in the deepest boring of all, at the foot of the statue of Rameses II., the discovery of the Grecian honeysuckle, marked on some of these mysterious fragments, which they had claimed as pre-historic, proved that it could not be older than the Greek conquest of Egypt. Sir Robert ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... oak or sumac, etc. The direct cause of their growth is that a certain wasp (cynips galles) stings into the leaf and after depositing its egg, flies away. The egg develops into a larva and then into a full-fledged wasp, boring its way out of the gall which has served as a protection and nourisher. This accounts for the hole noticed in almost every gall. The different varieties include Aleppo. It is found upon the same ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 803, May 23, 1891 • Various
... are circumcised, where Mahometanism prevails, between the sixth and tenth year. The ceremony is called krat kulop and buang or lepas malu (casting away their shame), and a bimbang is usually given on the occasion; as well as at the ceremony of boring the ears and filing the teeth of their daughters (before described), which takes place at about the age of ten or twelve; and until this is performed they ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... "Yes, all things, Hubert. All things. But we mustn't talk of that—though I begin to see my way clearer now. You shall be rewarded for your constancy at last, dear knight-errant. As to my chaperon, I'm not afraid of her boring me; she bores herself, poor lady; one can see that, just to look at her; but she will be much less bored if she has us two to travel with. What she needs is constant companionship, bright talk, excitement. She has ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... clean, and the two barrels stood apparently just as he had left them, over thirty years ago. He decided that they must be empty, that their contents must have long since evaporated; but when he tried to tilt one of them over upon its side he found it very heavy. He made further test that day, boring a hole into the top of one of the barrels, with the result that there came forth a fragrance compared with which, to a judge of good liquor, all the perfumes of Araby the Blest would be of no importance. ...
— The Wolf's Long Howl • Stanley Waterloo
... such another gulf I suppose that Egypt was, and that the one ran in towards Ethiopia from the Northern Sea, and the other, the Arabian, of which I am about to speak, 17 tended from the South towards Syria, the gulfs boring in so as almost to meet at their extreme points, and passing by one another with but a small space left between. If then the stream of the Nile should turn aside into this Arabian gulf, what would hinder that gulf from ...
— The History Of Herodotus - Volume 1(of 2) • Herodotus
... it's boring for you, my pet. Marcella, come and sit on the edge of the bed. We can talk better ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... shunned, ignored. To some women it might not have mattered; but she had been used to being sought, courted, feted. She made no complaint—did worse: made desperate effort to appear cheerful, to pretend that our humdrum life was not boring her to death. I watched her growing more listless, more depressed; grew angry with her, angrier with myself. There was no bond between us except our passion; that was real enough—'grand,' I believe, is the approved literary adjective. It is good enough for what nature intended it, a summer ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... Cuba, Porto Rico, and Brazil. About one-half the size of the ordinary flea, it is of a brownish-red color with a white spot on the back. The female lives in the sand and attacks man, on whom she lives, boring into the skin about the toe nail, usually, and laying her eggs under the skin, which gives rise to itching at first and then violent pain. The insect sucks blood and grows as it gorges itself, ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume I (of VI) • Various
... with a belt full of ammunition around you, your rifle bolt biting into your ribs, entrenching tool handle sticking into the small of your back, with a tin hat for a pillow; and feeling very damp and cold, with "cooties" boring for oil in your arm pits, the air foul from the stench of grimy human bodies and smoke from a juicy pipe being whiffed into your nostrils, then you will not wonder why Tommy occasionally takes a turn in the trench ...
— Over The Top • Arthur Guy Empey
... long in discovering that the two motor cycles they were riding were fine machines. With the searchlights boring long holes in the dark, Merry and Clancy seemed fairly to fly over the trail. It seemed to them as though they had hardly started before the mass of deep shadow which marked the location of Loco's adobe lay almost in front of ...
— Frank Merriwell, Junior's, Golden Trail - or, The Fugitive Professor • Burt L. Standish
... themselves at Hymettus, they resolved upon a little trip, partly for the purpose of looking into some small investments of their own, and partly for the fun of the thing. What funny experiences they had! How, in particular, one horrid inquisitive, vulgar wretch had been boring a European fellow passenger who was going to Hymettus, finally asking him where he had come from last, and when he answered "Hymettus," thought ...
— The Three Partners • Bret Harte
... says ice-cream.... I tell you I could put on a play by Halford Bunn to-morrow, and persuade them for a few weeks that it was better than Shakespeare. Ah! you blame us for that, but the public is at fault always. The man who makes a fortune is the man who invents a new way of boring them.... We shall be like the French soon, where the only means of maintaining any interest in politics is by ...
— Mummery - A Tale of Three Idealists • Gilbert Cannan
... of gold and silver, had been discovered twenty and thirty miles back in the mountains. Mining towns had sprung up along the steep and rocky banks. Mining methods had turned a limpid stream into a turbid torrent. Two railways had run their lines, hewing, blasting, boring, and tunnelling up the narrow valley, first to reach the mines and finally to merge in a "cut-off" to the great Transcontinental, so that now huge trains of Pullmans went straining slowly up-grade past the site of old Fort ...
— To The Front - A Sequel to Cadet Days • Charles King
... purpose, shafts carried by the central engine to which we have already alluded, are attached to the walls in various parts of the room, as seen in the engraving. Connected with these shafts are various drilling and boring machines, which can at any time be set in motion, or put to rest, by being thrown in or out of gear. One of these machines is seen on the right of the boiler above referred to, and another in the left-hand corner of the room quite in the back-ground. Near the fore-ground, on the left, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... quantity of rag or tinder. On firing the gun straight up in the air, the rag will be shot out lighted; you must then run after it as it falls, and pick it quickly up. With percussion-caps, gunpowder, and tinder, and without a gun, a light may sometimes be had on an emergency, by scratching and boring with a knife, awl, or nail, at the fulminating composition in the cap, till it explodes; but a cap is a somewhat dangerous thing to meddle with, as it often flies with violence, and wounds. Crushing gunpowder with hard stones may possibly make ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton
... sucked blood and spat poison into the wound at one and the same time. These dreadful insects the Spaniards name mosquitoes. Nor were they the only flies, for hundreds of other creatures, no bigger than a pin's head, had fastened on to me like bulldogs to a baited bear, boring their heads into the flesh, where in the end they cause festers. They are named garrapatas by the Spanish, and I take them to be the young of the tic. Others there were, also, too numerous to mention, and of every shape and size, though ...
— Montezuma's Daughter • H. Rider Haggard
... 'Varsity man is on his feet, for he knows that Shock is about to lead the "screw" and before the scrimmage is well formed the McGill stone wall is broken, and Campbell is boring through it with the bat, gaining a good ten feet and by ...
— The Prospector - A Tale of the Crow's Nest Pass • Ralph Connor
... dust, and dragged about through the streets, until you are well nigh dead. Witness the Japanese Embassy and their visit to this country, where, in some cases, the poor creatures, after hours of unmitigated boring with all sorts of mummery, actually had their pigtails pulled by Young America in the rear, and—as at the windows of Willard's Hotel in Washington—were stirred up with long canes, like the Polar Bear or the ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... I am boring you," said Marigny, leaning back in the chair and laying the cigarette on the mantelpiece. "Yet bear with me a little while, I pray you; these explanations are necessary. A sane man acts with motive, and it is only reasonable that you should ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... without engender pedagogism within. Thus the art of the Rococo became in the eighteenth century poor, sober, squeezed into rules, deprived of every passionate impulse which formerly might have reconciled us to its efflorescence. Mannerists of genius can glitter alluringly, pedantic ones are deterringly boring. The Pigtail is the dried-up Rococo, trimmed according to academic rules. The luxurious Rococo flora, composed of all kinds of plants, poisonous herbs, and weeds is presented to us, in the age of the Pigtail, as ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... engines used in mining, moving, and delivering ores; apparatuses for breaking out ore and coal; for crushing and pulverizing; for reducing metals, for instance the extraction of gold and silver by milling, lixiviation, and fire; furthermore, boring and drilling tools; grinding ...
— By Water to the Columbian Exposition • Johanna S. Wisthaler
... contrivances of England's lawless partisans in these remote valleys. The lower excavations evidently served for stables, as the mangers roughly cut in the rock testify. The horses or mules were led up and down a steep narrow ledge. A perpendicular boring, shaped like a well, connects the lowest chamber with those above, and there can be no doubt that the nethermost part served the purpose of a well or cistern. By means of a hanging rope a man could ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... symptoms of some constitutional disorder and do not in themselves require treatment. The treatment should be applied to the disease which causes the abnormal temperature of the horns. The usual treatment for the supposed hollow horn, which consists in boring the horns with a gimlet and pouring turpentine into the openings thus made, is not only useless and cruel, but is liable to set up an acute inflammation and result in an abscess of ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... addresses them has thoroughly well bored them—especially if they have paid any money for hearing him. My great namesake said, "Surely the pleasure is as great of being cheated as to cheat," and great as the pleasure both of cheating and boring undoubtedly is, I believe he was right. So I remember a poem which came out some thirty years ago in Punch, about a young lady who went forth in quest to "Some burden make or burden bear, but which she did not greatly care, oh Miserie." So, again, all the holy men and women who in the Middle Ages ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... gravity of what might happen to a featherweight became indeed with time and distance less appreciable, and I was not without an impression that Mrs. Meldrum, whose sense of proportion was not the least of her merits, had no idea of boring the world with the ups and downs of her pensioner. The poor girl grew dusky and dim, a small fitful memory, a regret tempered by the comfortable consciousness of how kind Mrs. Meldrum would always be to her. I was professionally more preoccupied ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... importance in industry, the increasing abundance of the foreign supply, and the ever-widening area of production, practical men in England continue to distrust its permanence, and owing to the mystery surrounding its origin, and the paucity of indications where and how to undertake the boring of wells, they hesitate to seek for it in this country, or even to extend the use of it whenever that would involve alterations of existing machinery. The object of this paper is to suggest an explanation of the mystery ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 829, November 21, 1891 • Various
... have paid the difference at once rather than have stood on the pier wrangling. As they waited for the tender that was to convey them back to the ship, Elsa observed a powerful middle-aged man, gray-haired, hawk-faced, steel-eyed, watching her companion intently. Then his boring gaze traveled over her, from her canvas-shoes to her helmet. There was something so baldly appraising in the look that a flush of anger surged into her cheeks. The man turned and said something to his companion, who shrugged and smiled. Impatiently ...
— Parrot & Co. • Harold MacGrath
... we usually are in every place we come to), and very well serenaded, I assure you. But we were very much knocked up. I really think my face has acquired a fixed expression of sadness from the constant and unmitigated boring I endure. The LL's have carried away all my cheerfulness. There is a line in my chin (on the right side of the under lip), indelibly fixed there by the New Englander I told you of in my last. I have the print of a crow's foot on the outside of my left eye, which ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... well and tightly to their feet; but it was found that the want of a joint at the instep rendered it difficult to walk with these soles on, and impossible to run. Roy's ingenuity, however, soon overcame this difficulty. He cut the soles through just under the instep, and then, boring two holes in each part, lashed them firmly together with deerskin, thus producing a joint or hinge. Eager to try this new invention, he fastened on his own "sliders" first, and, running down to the lake, made a rush at the ice and ...
— Silver Lake • R.M. Ballantyne
... drop or dreg of the worldly or ambitious spirit. You will here read the true story of that much-injured, ridiculed man (who perhaps hath been a by-word in your mouth,)—James Naylor: what dreadful sufferings, with what patience, he endured even to the boring through of his tongue with red-hot irons without a murmur; and with what strength of mind, when the delusion he had fallen into, which they stigmatised for blasphemy, had given way to clearer thoughts, he could ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... feet 3 inches in length, which are connected together by internal screws. There is also a central rod within the ram, as an additional security. The ram descends into a very strong cast-iron cylinder, 21 inches internal diameter, which is suspended in a boring 40 inches internal diameter, and carried down to a depth of over 100 feet in the rock. The two iron girders under the frame of the ascending-room or cage cross the entire lift space, and then at their outer ends are attached to four chains which rise over pulleys fixed ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 530, February 27, 1886 • Various
... on them. The enthusiast, when not lyrical, is perilously near to boring. Aminta was glad of Mrs. Lawrence's absence. She had that feeling because Matthew Weyburn would shun talk of himself to her, not from a personal sense of tedium in hearing of the boys; and she was quaintly reminded by suggestions, coming ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... are apt to be overshadowed by those of the general disease from which the patient suffers. At first the gland is swollen, hard, and tender, and the seat of constant, dull, boring pain; later there is redness, oedema, and fluctuation. The movements of the jaw are restricted and painful, the patient is unable to open the mouth, and has difficulty in swallowing. The inflammation reaches its height on the third or fourth day, and usually ends in suppuration. The pus is scattered ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles
... "It's like boring a tunnel through a mountain," said Oscar, "and presently hearing the tapping of the workers from ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... Vajra implies either a hard needle for boring diamonds and gems, or the thunder-bolt. In this sloka the word Vajra is used as associated with the thunder and therefore, as thunder is accompanied by lightning so the bows of the warriors are the lightning-marks ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... was a great powerful man, with bare arms, and blackened face. When they entered, he and two other men were making the axle of a wheel. They had a great lump of red-hot iron on the anvil, and were knocking a big hole through it—not boring it, but knocking it through with a big punch. One of the men, with a pair of tongs-like pincers, held the punch steady in the hole, while the other two struck the head of it with alternate blows of mighty hammers called sledges, each of which it took the strength ...
— Gutta-Percha Willie • George MacDonald
... wishing him to kiss her, Sally found herself aware already of a slight repugnance. As she looked forward to spending days and nights with him her heart sank. She was not shocked. She was not afraid. She knew that there would come a time when, after boring her, Gaga's kisses would become troublesome. And it was too late now to withdraw. She was too deeply into her new scheme of life. But this feverish, insatiably amorous, weak Gaga would get on her nerves. So this was what marriage might be. Sally's jaw stiffened. Yes, ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... made a pilgrimage to it in 214 B.C. Agrippa in 37 B.C. converted it into a naval harbour, the Portus Iulius; joining it to the Lacus Lucrinus by a canal, and connecting the latter with the sea, he reduced the distance to Cumae by boring a tunnel over 1/2 m. in length, now called Grotta della Pace, through the hill on the north-west side of Lake Avernus. After Sextus Pompeius had been subdued, the chief naval harbour was transferred to Misenum. Nero's works for his proposed canal from Baiae to the Tiber ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... after all," she said. "It was rather boring waiting there all alone; but perhaps Sir Archie will kindly fall down again for my special benefit," and she laughed with the innocent, careless laughter, of ...
— Nell, of Shorne Mills - or, One Heart's Burden • Charles Garvice
... bucket and valves are all of brass in modern marine engines, and the chamber of the pump is lined with copper, or made wholly of brass, whereby a single boring suffices. When a copper lining is used, the pump is first bored out, and a bent sheet of copper is introduced, which is made accurately to fill the place, by hammering the copper on the inside. Air pump rods of Muntz's ...
— A Catechism of the Steam Engine • John Bourne
... Some time or other, though, this young shaver shall come along with me when one of the new ships goes out from the dockyard for her steam trials; and then, perhaps, he will be able to have everything explained to him properly, without boring you or bothering me." ...
— Bob Strong's Holidays - Adrift in the Channel • John Conroy Hutcheson
... corner of Cornwall. On a sloping sandy hillside overlooking the picturesque white sand-bay of Harlyn excavations were being made by Mr. Reddie Mallett for sinking a well preparatory to building a house overlooking the sea. The spot selected for boring turned out to be exactly in the centre, not of a tumulus containing but two or three interments, but of a perfect cemetery, with three distinct layers of burials of men, women, and children. The drift sand that is so extensive in this part of Cornwall rose some 8 ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... produced steam through the chemical energy of burning mineral coal. But mineral coal is hard to get and its supply decreases daily. Attention must be turned towards utilizing the heat of the sun and of the earth's crust. The hope is justified that both sources will be drawn upon without limit. The boring of a shaft 3,000 to 4,000 meters deep does not exceed the power of modern, less yet it will exceed that of future engineers. The source of all heat and of all industry would be thus thrown open. Add water to that, and all imaginable ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... kind of day called "weather breeder," When the heat slowly hazes and the sun By its own power seems to be undone, I was half boring through, half climbing through A swamp of cedar. Choked with oil of cedar And scurf of plants, and weary and over-heated, And sorry I ever left the road I knew, I paused and rested on a sort of hook That had me by the coat as good as seated, And since there was no other way to look, Looked up toward ...
— Mountain Interval • Robert Frost
... be mysterious, but I don't quite know how to tell you about Mr. Taggett. He has been working underground in this matter of poor Shackford's death,—boring in the dark like a mole,—and thinks he has discovered some ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... no Cameron or Fordyce blood in me, or any other pedigreed variety. My corpuscles are unregistered. She and Father Bob took Pete and me in when I was a baby and Pete was a mere toddler. I was born in the hotel down in the town there,—Am I boring you?" ...
— The Camerons of Highboro • Beth B. Gilchrist
... head, the hilt in one hand and the button in the other—the old general opposite, bent forward, left hand reposing on his back, his foil advanced, slightly wiggling and squirming, his watching eye boring straight into hers—and all of a sudden she would give a spring forward, and back again; and there she was, with the foil arched over her head as before. La Hire had been hit, but all that the spectator saw of it was ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... dives inside. Hissing softly, "162" comes to rest as level as a rule. From her North Atlantic Winter nose-cap (worn bright as diamond with boring through uncounted leagues of hail, snow, and ice) to the inset of her three built-out propeller-shafts is some two hundred and forty feet. Her extreme diameter, carried well forward, is thirty-seven. Contrast this with the ...
— With The Night Mail - A Story of 2000 A.D. (Together with extracts from the - comtemporary magazine in which it appeared) • Rudyard Kipling
... machine, substantially as described, for effecting the several operations of notching, slotting, boring, and burring a knitting machine needle blank, in the order ...
— Scientific American, Vol. 17, No. 26 December 28, 1867 • Various
... forest," answered Ben. "I'll do my best to serve you, Dick; but there's two hours' more work to be done before we can get the craft afloat." Ben surveyed the boat from stem to stern as he spoke, and then continued boring holes and driving nails ...
— The Rival Crusoes • W.H.G. Kingston
... and arranged; somebody on Mitchell's team had obviously been up all night at the job. Malone admired the work, without being able to get enthusiastic about the contents. Like all technical reports, it tended to be boring and just a trifle obscure to someone who wasn't completely familiar with the field involved. Malone and cybernetics were not exactly bosom buddies, and by the time he finished reading through the report he was suffering from an extreme case ...
— Occasion for Disaster • Gordon Randall Garrett
... year or two. I don't know. I'm not very interested in her. Too much of a female for my taste. Extremely entertaining in the evening and the afternoon, but awfully boring in the morning!..." ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... a matter of fact, precisely nothing. He wished quietly that the Tr'en had seen fit to give him a pack of cards, or a book, or even a folder of tourist pictures. The Wonders of Tr'en, according to all the advance reports, were likely to be pretty boring, but they'd have been better ...
— Lost in Translation • Larry M. Harris |
