"Brick in" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... while in the presidential chair, and its construction superintended by William Benton, an Englishman, who served him in the triple capacity of steward, counselor, and friend. The dimensions are about 50 by 90 feet; it is built of brick in a most substantial manner, and handsomely finished; has three stories (including basement), a wide portico fronting south, with massive Doric columns thirty feet in height, and is surrounded by a grove of ...
— History and Comprehensive Description of Loudoun County, Virginia • James W. Head
... their gable ends or fronts turned to the street, as it suited the whim or convenience of the owner, without the least regard to taste or neatness. At that period there were only two stone houses and two of brick in the place. One of these wonders of the village was the court-house and gaol; the other three were stores. The dwellings of the wealthier portion of the community were distinguished by a coat of white or yellow ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... transformation of a similar nature to that effected in Vienna, but it possesses fewer monuments of conspicuous architectural interest. The Synagogue is the most noted of these, arich and pleasing edifice of brick in a modified Hispano-Moresque style. ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin
... months ago, more or less. The German observer, crouched up in the platform behind the trunk of a tree, or in a chimney with a loose brick in it—in a part of the world where the country cottages, peeping over the dog-rose hedges, have more broken bricks in them than whole ones—saw down a distant lane several men in strange hats. The telescope wobbled a bit, and in the early light all ...
— Letters from France • C. E. W. Bean
... for a cat to sit. There are no windows to a Syrian hut, and no chimneys. When I used to read that they let a bed-ridden man down through the roof of a house in Capernaum to get him into the presence of the Saviour, I generally had a three-story brick in my mind, and marveled that they did not break his neck with the strange experiment. I perceive now, however, that they might have taken him by the heels and thrown him clear over the house without discommoding him very much. Palestine is not changed any since ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... and dwindled in order to make room for Mr. Smithson. Here the Parvenu had bought a home mellowed by the slow growth of years, touched into poetic beauty by the chastening fingers of time. His artist friends told him that every brick in the red walls was 'precious,' a mystery of colour which only a painter could fitly understand and value. Here he had bought associations, he had bought history. He had bought the dust of Elizabeth's senators, the bones of her court beauties. ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... see them before he was paid, or giving me good security to restore my money for those that were lean or shorn or scabby, I would be none of his customer. I have heard of a man who had a mind to sell his house, and therefore carried a piece of brick in his pocket, which he shewed as a pattern to encourage purchasers: And this is directly the case in point ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. VI; The Drapier's Letters • Jonathan Swift
... furnace, etc. Finally the landlord and I investigated for ourselves. At the bottom of the chimney we found an inconspicuous loose brick which allowed air to enter the chimney beneath the entrance of the pipe from the stove. We got ten cents' worth of lime and fastened the brick in firmly. A complete cure, where ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... splendour of particular passages, but by the progress of his fable, and the tenour of his dialogue; and he that tries to recommend him by select quotations, will succeed like the pedant in Hierocles, who, when he offered his house to sale, carried a brick in his pocket ...
— Preface to Shakespeare • Samuel Johnson
... captain he found Laban Keeler hard at work upon the books. The sight of the little man, so patiently and cheerfully pegging away, brought another twinge of conscience to the assistant bookkeeper. Laban had been such a brick in all their relationships. It must have been a sore trial to his particular, business-like soul, those errors in the trial balance. Yet he had not found fault nor complained. Captain Zelotes himself had said that every item concerning his grandson's mistakes ...
— The Portygee • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... man who is absolutely sure of his method, for example, in laying brick, will not be tempted to make those extra motions which, after all, are merely an exhibition in his hand of the vacillation that is going on in his brain, as to whether he really is handling that brick in exactly the most ...
— The Psychology of Management - The Function of the Mind in Determining, Teaching and - Installing Methods of Least Waste • L. M. Gilbreth
... me fellow-men. I'll not let anger or jealousy get th' betther iv me,' I says. 'I'll lave off all me old feuds; an' if I meet me inimy goin' down th' sthreet, I'll go up an' shake him be th' hand, if I'm sure he hasn't a brick in th' other hand.' Oh, I was mighty compliminthry to mesilf. I set be th' stove dhrinkin' hot wans, an' ivry wan I dhrunk made me more iv a pote. 'Tis th' way with th' stuff. Whin I'm in dhrink, I have manny a fine thought; an', if I wasn't too comfortable to go an' look ...
— Mr. Dooley in Peace and in War • Finley Peter Dunne
... been the dirtiest of political chimneys, and requires a good burning out. Take care, Master CARLYLE, that from this burning no sparks are wafted England-ward. You, too, will some day have a chimney on fire, and when it burns the heat will be felt through every brick in Britain. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 2, No 6, December 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... snouts, and cheeks, being finely and tender boil'd to a jelly with spices, and the same liquor as is said in the Porker; then take out the bones and make a lay of it like a square brick, season it with coriander or fennil-seed, and bind it up like a square brick in a strong canvas with packthred, press it till it be cold, and serve it in slices with bay-leaves, or ...
— The accomplisht cook - or, The art & mystery of cookery • Robert May
... a brick in each pocket," grumbled the long-nosed man. And halting his operations, despite the other man's resistance he roughly felt of the coat corners. But when he would have thrust in his hand, to investigate further, the other clutched the ...
— Gold Seekers of '49 • Edwin L. Sabin
... that aspired and had true hope of self-effectuation lay as dead, still-born, a dead weight in his womb. Who was he, to hold important his personal connection? What did a man matter personally? He was just a brick in the whole great social fabric, the nation, the modern humanity. His personal movements were small, and entirely subsidiary. The whole form must be ensured, not ruptured, for any personal reason whatsoever, since no personal reason could justify such ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... range of your palatial home ten thousand determined men are assembled, awaiting the word. Once launched upon their work, not one stone of your railway buildings, not a shingle on the roofs of your elevators, not one brick in the walls of your homestead, will be left to show where once they stood. Only my appeals, only my urgent counsels, have thus far restrained them. What will be the consequences if you refuse to listen God alone can tell. Despite my personal wrongs, I have come to you as mediator, ...
— A Tame Surrender, A Story of The Chicago Strike • Charles King
... besides having a heart of steel and nerves of iron, has been lately in the habit of carrying a brick in his eye.] ...
— The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll • Stuart Dodgson Collingwood
... naturally expect from a member of the Society; but he would take upon himself to affirm that his main thesis was now and for ever established on the most irrefragable evidence, and that no assailant could by any possibility dislodge by so much as a hair's breadth the least fragment of a single brick in the impregnable structure of proof raised by the argument to which they had ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... bound up his wounds, though we are not told how he managed to enter the cell. Be that as it may, the next day, when the guards came to open the door, they found Trenck ready to meet them, armed with a brick in one hand, and a knife, doubtless obtained from Gefhardt, in the other. The first man that approached him, he stretched wounded at his feet, and thinking it dangerous to irritate further a desperate man, ...
— The True Story Book • Andrew Lang
... level field to the east of the town of Nieuport in 1914 was a high square weather-beaten tower, somewhat ruinous, built of stone and brick in strata, showing the different eras of construction in the various colors of the brick work ranging from light reds to dark browns and rich blacks. This tower, half built and square topped, belonged to a structure begun in the twelfth century, half monastery, half church, erected by the Templars as ...
— Vanished towers and chimes of Flanders • George Wharton Edwards
... marketing of any product that there is a tremendous amount of waste due to poor sacking, due to a little dishonesty on the part of the people who are selling merchandise. You know, if there is a brick in a bag, the brick weighs a pound, that costs the man who buys the black walnuts money. In other words, out of that pound of brick he intended to get a small quantity of meats to sell, so his cost immediately ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Incorporated 39th Annual Report - at Norris, Tenn. September 13-15 1948 • Various
... this. So many avenues of thought have been opened, so many ideas and angles come to mind. We'll readily admit what you've probably concluded; that you as a carrier have become the one basic factor that we have been seeking for some twenty years and more. You are the dirigible force, the last brick in the building, the final answer. Or, and I hate to say ...
— Highways in Hiding • George Oliver Smith
... remaining when the limestone dissolved, are still imbedded in its surface. The line of demarkation between the limestone matrix, where this still exists in part, and the siliceous filling is as distinct as that between the stone and brick in a building. The loose cave earth shows plainly under the sandstone near the former mouth of the cavern. Plan and section are shown in figures ...
— Archeological Investigations - Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 76 • Gerard Fowke
... there were almost three hundred workmen." A pretty story has come down to us of one of these workmen who fell ill, and when he found that he could not complete his work, begged that he might lay one more brick before he was taken away, and was lifted up by his comrades that he might set the brick in its place. ...
— The Story of Wellesley • Florence Converse
... this world until the period has come when its chief corner-stone can be Humanity. Till then the old creeds in Virginia must wander like ghosts, haunting the old ruins which their once exquisite churches have become. Nothing can be more picturesque, nothing more sad, than these old churches,—every brick in them imported from Old England, every prayer from the past world and its past need: the high and wide pews where the rich sat lifted some feet above the seats of the poor represent still the faith in a God who subjects ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... Somerset. "That brick in your bag must be instantly disposed of. But how? If we could throw ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 5 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... apparatus shown in Fig. 9: bore in a brick a hole about an inch deep and a quarter of an inch wide, put into the hole the piece of bent glass tubing, and fix it in with some clay or putty, then pour some water blackened with ink into the tube, marking its position with a label. Stand the brick in a vessel so full of water that the brick is entirely covered. Water soaks into the brick and presses the air out: the air tries to escape through the tube and forces up the ...
— Lessons on Soil • E. J. Russell
... hand," I cautioned. Larry took off his coat and wrapped his hand and the brick in it. I gazed behind us. The street was still empty. The slight commotion we had made ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... good situation near the Foreign Office, several of the Government departments, and the residences of the ministers, which are chiefly of brick in the English suburban villa style. Within the compound, with a brick archway with the Royal Arms upon it for an entrance, are the Minister's residence, the Chancery, two houses for the two English Secretaries of Legation, and quarters ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... she halted at the entrance to a driveway leading through fine lawns to the intentionally important mansion. It was a pleasant and impressive place to be seen entering, but Alice did not enter at once. She paused, examining a tiny bit of mortar which the masons had forgotten to scrape from a brick in one of the massive gate-posts. She frowned at this tiny defacement, and with an air of annoyance scraped it away, using the ferrule of her cane an act of fastidious proprietorship. If any one had looked back over his shoulder he would not ...
— Alice Adams • Booth Tarkington
... private yachts and big excursion-boats that passed, banging out popular airs and alive with bunting, made Hefty feel very bitter. He determined that when he got back he would go look up the policeman who had assaulted him and break his head with a brick in a stocking. This plan cheered him somewhat, until he thought again of Mary Casey at the dance that night with Patsy Moffat, and this excited him so that he determined madly to break away and escape. ...
— Van Bibber and Others • Richard Harding Davis
... You are the first brick in the line. You bowled over Brenton; now he appears to be bowling over his wife. Yes, I mean it. If Brenton had held steady, she never would have wobbled, much less bolted off to Christian Science. She was keen enough to feel him tottering, ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... in their relation to the condition of the Indian tribes. The Older Period of barbarism, which commences with the introduction of the art of pottery, and the Middle Period, which commences with the use of adobe brick in the construction of houses, and with the cultivation of maize and plants by irrigation, mark two very different and very dissimilar conditions of life. The larger portion of the Indian tribes fall within one or the other of these periods. A small portion were in the Older Period of ...
— Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines • Lewis H. Morgan
... must tell him to put back every brick in its place," said Laura. "I could not bear to have anything happen to that chimney. All the same, I am glad the matter is going to be cleared up. It has been nerve-racking; and I have been all alone, waiting for I ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... the air helps to crumble the stone and brick in old buildings. It does the same with soil if permitted to circulate freely through it. The agent of the air that chiefly performs this work is called carbonic acid gas, and this gas is one of the greatest helpers the farmer has in carrying ...
— Agriculture for Beginners - Revised Edition • Charles William Burkett
... triangular corner of another brick, and by pressing it down upon the soft clay, left behind it the triangular mark which the cuneiform character exhibits. Such marks repeated, and placed in different relations to each other, would readily represent any number. From the use of the corner of a brick in writing, the transition was easy to a pointed stick with a triangular end, by the use of which all the cuneiform characters can readily be produced upon the soft clay. This curious question formed the subject of an interesting paper read ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
... work at the close of the first year, which included many important items not yet enumerated, the general results were so satisfactory that the officers and members of the Solaris Farm Company were very much encouraged. Owing to sales of seeds and brick in such considerable quantities, together with the manufacture at the farm of almost every kind of building material, the sum advanced by Fern Fenwick, the patroness, for farm buildings and equipment was less than one-half the amount ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson
... so to do it the more easily a second time, and on subsequent occasions. Thus we see that everything we express, whether in word, thought, or deed, leaves its mark within us: this impress is, as it were, a brick in our life's edifice, and it has added something to that disposition of ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... might be sent to his relief as soon as the weather permitted. An arrangement for this purpose formed one of the instructions on board of the floating light, but happily no instance occurred for putting it in practice. The hearth or fireplace of the cook-house was built of brick in as secure a manner as possible to prevent accident from fire; but some of the plaster-work had shaken loose, from its damp state and the tremulous motion of the beacon in stormy weather. The writer next ascended to the floor which was occupied by the cabins of himself and his assistants, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... dumfounded and terrified to utter a word. He and all his apprentices stood round and stared while the demolition of the wall proceeded. Before long he recognised Wio-wani with his flowing white beard; it was his handiwork, this pulling down of the wall! He still had a brick in his hand when he stepped through the opening that he had made, and close after him ...
— The Blue Moon • Laurence Housman
... solidify into a mass, and so prevent water or anything else from penetrating through the joints. After this layer is finished, spread the nucleus upon it, and work it down by beating it with rods. Upon this lay the floor, at the inclination above described, either of large cubes or burnt brick in herring-bone pattern, and floors thus constructed will not soon ...
— Ten Books on Architecture • Vitruvius
... hesitation and penny-wise economy inaugurated drainage works. Rates became a common topic, a fact of accumulating importance. Several chapels of zinc and iron appeared, and also a white new church in commercial Gothic upon the common, and another of red brick in the residential district out beyond ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... startled by a man's thrusting into my hand something that felt like a brick, and shouting into my ear, "any knives, matches, or tobacco?" "No, sir," I lied, as lied every man who entered. As I passed downstairs to the cellar, I looked at the brick in my hand, and saw that by doing violence to the language it might be called "bread." By its weight and hardness it ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... hot, it is hotter than in Italy. The over-hanging roofs of the houses, and the quantity of wood employed in their construction (where they use tile and brick in Italy), render them perfect forcing-houses. The walls and floors, hot to the hand all the night through, interfere with sleep; and thunder is almost always booming and rumbling among the mountains." Besides this, though there were no mosquitoes as in Genoa, there was at first a plague ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... of Sweden, on the Sala, 21 m. NW. of Stockholm, the seat of the Primate, and of a famous university with 1900 students, and a library of 250,000 volumes; its cathedral, built of brick in the Gothic style, is the largest in Sweden, contains the tombs of Linnaeus and ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... apartment of brick in the yard of the old gaol, before it was burnt, for debtors, containing ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 2 • David Collins
... roofs. I have seen more than one instance where the adjoining house would have been quite safe, but for this culpable neglect. It is no uncommon thing, too, to find houses divided only by lath and standard partitions, without a single brick in them. When a fire occurs in houses divided in this manner, the vacuities in the middle of the partitions act like so many funnels to conduct the flame, thereby greatly adding to the danger from the fire, and infinitely increasing the difficulty ...
— Fire Prevention and Fire Extinction • James Braidwood
... he agreed. "No man alive has more sound commonsense than I have, if only I were capable of listening to myself. Do you know why I don't brick in that well? Because my wife told me I would have to. It was the first thing she said when she saw it. She says it again every time anything does fall into it. 'If only you would take my advice'—you know the sort of thing. Nobody irritates me more than the ...
— They and I • Jerome K. Jerome
... Brick in a dream, indicates unsettled business and disagreements in love affairs. To make them you will doubtless fail in your efforts to amass ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... your blessednesses. Meanwhile, I sit shrunk together here in a small dressing-closet, aloft in the back part of the house, excluding all cackle and cockneys; and, looking out over the similitude of a May grove (with little brick in it, and only the minarets of Westminster and gilt cross of St. Paul's visible in the distance, and the enormous roar of London softened into an enormous hum), endeavor to await what will betide. I am busy with Luther in one Marheinecke's very long- winded ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... my brother Morse's hous, he showed to me a pece of brick, what had several times come down ye chimne. I sitting in ye cornar towde that pece of brick in my hand. Within a littel spas of tiem ye pece of brick was gone from me I know not by what meanes. Quickly after it come down chimne. Also in ye chimne cornar I saw a hammar on ye ground. Their bein no person nigh it, it was sodenly gone, by what meanes I know not; but within a littell spas it fell ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 4 • Various
... paddled across from Asia(!); the Abbe Brasseur confounds it with Aztlan, and very many have discovered in it a distinct reference to the fabulous "seven cities of Cibola" and the Casas Grandes, ruins of large buildings of unburnt brick in the valley of the River Gila. From this story arose the supposed sevenfold division of the Nahuas, a division which never existed except in the imagination of Europeans. When Torquemada adds that seven hero gods ruled in Chicomoztoc and were the progenitors of all its inhabitants, ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... hundred for mine," said Cherry. "That's about the natural discount for a woman. But I live on it and put a few simoleons every week under the loose brick in the old kitchen hearth. The stage is all right. I love it; but there's something else I love better—that's a little country home, some day, with Plymouth Rock chickens and six ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... the kind impossible. M. Place's explanation seems the best. He thinks the slope was given merely to facilitate the work of the bricklayers. The first course of voussoirs would be sloped in this fashion, and would rest upon some mass of crude brick in the centre of the building. The bricks of the second course would lean against it, and their weight would be brought in to add cohesion and solidity to the whole structure instead of being entirely occupied in adding to the perpendicular ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... Dr. Archie about the window, and he told her that a girl who sang must always have plenty of fresh air, or her voice would get husky, and that the cold would harden her throat. The important thing, he said, was to keep your feet warm. On very cold nights Thea always put a brick in the oven after supper, and when she went upstairs she wrapped it in an old flannel petticoat and put it in her bed. The boys, who would never heat bricks for themselves, sometimes carried off Thea's, and thought it a good joke to get ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... Mark's and in S. Fosca, Torcello.[424] The upper part of the facade does not correspond to the composition below it, but follows the divisions of the internal vaulting. It is in five circular-arched bays, each containing an arched window. The infilling is of brick in various patterns. The cornice looks Turkish. While the masonry of the lower portion of the arcade is in alternate courses of one stone and two bricks, that of the upper portion has alternate courses of one stone and three bricks. Moreover, while the design of the upper portion is determined ...
— Byzantine Churches in Constantinople - Their History and Architecture • Alexander Van Millingen
... agree that the statement about DEMOSTHENES' putting pebbles in his mouth was only figurative, and really meant that, when about to speak in public, he used to put a brick in his hat. The same thing is done by many of our public speakers of the period—such as JOHN B. GOUGH, H. GREELEY, ANNA DICKINSON, and others. Try it moderately, and it may loosen ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., No. 34, November 19, 1870 • Various
... risen with his bettered circumstances from a two-story brick in Degraw street, Brooklyn, by the usual stages to a brownstone "mansion" above the reservoir in New York. When he came to be vice-president of the Bank of Manhadoes, Hilbrough had in a measure reached the goal of his ambition. ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston
... door of which he locked, hiding the key beneath a loose brick in a corner of the passage. "Go into the street, brother, whilst I fetch the caballerias from the stable." I obeyed him. The sun had not yet risen, and the air was piercingly cold; the gray light, however, of dawn enabled me to distinguish objects with tolerable accuracy; I soon heard the ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... into Redesdale Street, out of which opens Tedworth Square. Robinson's Street is a remnant of Robinson's Lane, the former name of Flood Street, a corruption of "Robins his street," from Mr. Robins, whose house is marked on Hamilton's map. Christ Church is in Christchurch Street, and is built of brick in a modern style. It holds 1,000 people. The organ and the dark oak pulpit came from an old church at Queenhithe, and were presented by the late Bishop of London, and the carving on the latter is attributed to Grinling ...
— Chelsea - The Fascination of London • G. E. (Geraldine Edith) Mitton
... own good will,' not to requisitionise bread or wine but for money paid, not to seize any man's horses, and not 'to compel any man to seize and hale another man to prison except in cases of crime or of invasion.' When the great Duke of Guise rebuilt the chateau of brick in the sixteenth century, he put down most of the outer fortifications. Without these the chateau is as much a part of the town of Eu as Buckingham Palace is of St. James's Park. Catherine of Cleves, the widow of the great Duke of Guise, ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... knew.) But go to that roll of land between Valmy and the high road; go after three days' rain as the allies did, and you will immediately learn. That field between the heights of "The Moon" and the site of old Valmy mill, which is as hard as a brick in summer (when the experts visit it), is a marsh of the worst under an autumn drizzle; no one ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... dried brick in his great paw, and now he thrust it forward and broke into a torrent of speech. He accused Kornel of having trespassed in the night and stolen the bricks of the Kafirs. No man, he said, could have made so many by himself, and then ...
— Vrouw Grobelaar and Her Leading Cases - Seventeen Short Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... they came surging on deck, they were not empty-handed. In the forecastle was a bricked oven for warmth in winter and for cooking kettles of soup. This they had torn to pieces and every man sallied forth with a square, flat brick in each hand and more inside his shirt. Those who were first to gain the deck pelted the nearest pirates with these ugly missiles. The air was full of hurtling bricks and the earliest casualty was a stout buccaneer who stopped ...
— Blackbeard: Buccaneer • Ralph D. Paine |
