"Powder magazine" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... you any more with the dread of high tragedy. Now you've had all the declaration you ever need fear. I won't break loose or explode under any provocation. I can't help my love, and you must not punish me for it, nor make yourself miserable about it, as if it were a powder magazine which a kind word or look might touch off. I want to put your heart to rest, for you have enough to bear now, Heaven knows; I want you to feel safe with me—as free from fear and annoyance as Belle is. I won't presume or ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... "this matter is one deserving our most careful study, trivial though at first blush it would seem. As to the danger of this woman's machinations here, there is no question. A match may produce convulsion, explosion, disaster, when applied to a powder magazine. As you know, this country dwells continually above an awful magazine. At any time there may be an explosion which will mean ruin not only for our party but our country. The Free Soil party, twice defeated, does not down. There is a nationalist movement now going ...
— The Purchase Price • Emerson Hough
... of his own body. He felt himself to be a bag full of disconcerting and dangerous mysteries. Or he might have expressed it that he had been smoking in criminal nonchalance for nearly half a century on the top of a powder magazine. He was deeply impressed by the rapidity and assurance of the doctor's diagnosis. It was wonderful that the queer fellow could in a few minutes single out an obscure organ no bigger than a pencil and say: "There is the ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett
... world that the old Spanish spirit of independence was still alive. This war is known to the Spaniards as the Guerra de la independencia and to the English as the Peninsular War. The popular uprising began with the seizure of a powder magazine in Madrid by Velarde and Daoiz (see in Vocab.). These men and their followers were killed and the magazine was retaken by the French, but the incident roused the Spanish ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various
... pardon, sir," said Mr. Spoker. "But what is precisely the difference between shaving in a sinking ship and smoking in a powder magazine?" ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson
... definite. The draft, you know, begins on Saturday of this week. I shall not have any rest of mind till this ordeal is over. Outwardly all is comparatively quiet. So is a powder magazine till a spark ignites it. This unpopular measure of the draft is to be enforced while all our militia regiments are away. I know enough about what is said and thought by thousands to fear the consequences. I wish you would spend ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... a woman at liberty to read the books which her character of mind may prompt her to choose! This is to drop a spark in a powder magazine; it is worse than that, it is to teach your wife to separate herself from you; to live in an imaginary world, in a Paradise. For what do women read? Works of passion, the Confessions of Rousseau, romances, and all those compositions which work most powerfully on their sensibility. They like ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part II. • Honore de Balzac
... found it more advisable not to touch on it. So 'Lizebeth grumbled for a little while, then she went away, since no further chance for outbreaks was offered. But there was no peace during the whole week; all noticed that, and each went carefully by 'Lizebeth as if she were a powder magazine which, at a careless touch, might fly up in the air at any moment. At last Sunday came. 'Lizebeth, after dinner, rushed about the kitchen with such a great noise, one could notice that many thoughts were working in her which she tried to give vent to. But she went into her room only after everything ...
— Erick and Sally • Johanna Spyri
... Judge of my surprise, when I perceived that the ball had hit the piece of the bark immediately beneath the squirrel, and shivered it into splinters, the concussion produced by which had killed the animal, and sent it whirling through the air, as if it had been blown up by the explosion of a powder magazine. Boone kept up his firing, and before many hours had elapsed, we had procured as many squirrels as we wished; for you must know that to load a rifle requires only a moment, and that if it is wiped once after each shot, it ...
— Life & Times of Col. Daniel Boone • Cecil B. Harley
... it? That's the question. I expect that buzzard will be flying around again over this field in a night or so,—the moon is 'most full now, and the nights are light,—and I've got to be able to signal him just how to find the powder magazine and the other munitions. Then he can swoop right over there and drop one of his little souvenirs where it will do the most good and fly away home. I advise you to keep away from that section ...
— The French Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... were quarreling, breaking up, and dispersing. So much for the whisky of the emigrants! Finding themselves unable to drink the whole, they had sold the residue to these Indians, and it needed no prophet to foretell the results; a spark dropped into a powder magazine would not have produced a quicker effect. Instantly the old jealousies and rivalries and smothered feuds that exist in an Indian village broke out into furious quarrels. They forgot the warlike enterprise that had already brought them three hundred miles. They seemed like ungoverned children inflamed ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... Frontenac's unutterable wrath, Valrenne appeared with his garrison. He reported that he had set fire to every thing in the fort that would burn, sunk the three vessels belonging to it, thrown the cannon into the lake, mined the walls and bastions, and left matches burning in the powder magazine; and, further, that when he and his men were five leagues on their way to Montreal a dull and distant explosion told them that the mines had sprung. It proved afterwards that the destruction was not ...
— Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV • Francis Parkman
... Waldron. "But there may be life in the old beast yet. They may yet kick the apple cart over—and us with it. You never can tell. And those infernal Socialists, always at it, night and day, never letting up, flinging firebrands into the powder magazine! Sometime there's going to be one hell of a bang, Flint! And when it comes, suave qui peut! So go slow, old man—go damned slow, that's all I've got ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... a soul on board, and yet from the flying splinters left in its path cause the death of a score; its way may lie through the boilers, still touching no one, and yet the most horrible of all deaths, that by scalding steam, result. It may chance to hit the powder magazine, and sudden annihilation be the fate of both ship and crew; or, passing below the water line, bring a no less certain, though slower fate—that which met the brave little Keokuk at Charleston, not many ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... lake. After this, Cortes made sail to Cojohuacan[4], where he was again attacked by the Mexicans, both by means of their canoes on the water, and from their temples on the land: But Cortes brought four guns to bear upon them, by which he did considerable execution. During this action his powder magazine blew up, owing to some mismanagement of the gunners, by which many of his people were wounded. This unfortunate accident obliged him to detach his smallest brigantine to Sandoval for a supply of ammunition. He remained at Cojohuacan for two days with the flotilla, repairing the injury his ship ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. IV. • Robert Kerr
... whole world is talking and writing about it. A good deal of commotion has been excited in the South because some mustard has arrived there, packed in English newspapers, containing Parliamentary speeches against slavery;—even children's handkerchiefs seem to be regarded as sparks falling into a powder magazine. How much better it would be not to live in the midst ...
— An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans • Lydia Maria Child
... teams volunteered for the service, to accompany the retreat of the army. With a bitter pang, Vincent ordered the destruction of the fort which he had so gallantly defended. When the last man had retired, with his own hand he fired the train which caused the explosion of the powder magazine. When the victorious army marched in, they found only the breached and blackened walls, the yawning gates, and dismantled ramparts of the fort. From the shattered flagstaff, where it still waved defiantly, ...
— Neville Trueman the Pioneer Preacher • William Henry Withrow
... as our men landed they abandoned the forts and ran off in all directions. We have hardly had any loss, I believe; but the French, who blundered a good deal with their gunboats, and then contrived to get blown up by setting fire to a powder magazine, have suffered pretty severely. I fancy that we have got almost all the artillery which the Chinese Empire possesses in this quarter.... This affair of yesterday, in a strategical point of view was a much more creditable affair than the taking of Canton. Our gunboats ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin
... anxiety and uncertainty I had the happiness of seeing the sepoys (troops in the British service) in possession of the city gates in front of our house. We soon ascertained that a party of about 250 men had in the first instance attacked the powder magazine and gun-shed, which were very near our house, but a guard of sepoys had repelled them. This was a great mercy, for had the insurgents obtained the arms and ammunition, our situation would have been most deplorable. A second party of ...
— Lives of the Three Mrs. Judsons • Arabella W. Stuart
... America. Two vessels, the St. Peter and the St. Paul, rode at anchor at Petropaulovsk in the Bay of Avacha on the east coast of Kamchatka. On the shore was a little palisaded fort of some fifty huts, a barrack, a chapel, a powder magazine. Early that morning, solemn religious services had been held to invoke the blessing of Heaven on the voyagers. Now, the chapel bell was set ringing. Monks came singing down to the water's edge. Cannon were fired. Cheer on cheer set the echoes ...
— Vikings of the Pacific - The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward • Agnes C. Laut
... have hoped to accomplish with their diplomacy to keep Italy neutral had been irretrievably ruined by the diplomacy of Grand Admiral von Tirpitz. The smallest match, the scratch of a boot-heel on stone, can set off a powder magazine. The Lusitania was a goodly sized match. If the King and his ministers were waiting for the country to declare itself, if they wanted the excuse of national emotion before taking the final irrevocable ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... prayed for peace at any sacrifice save that of honor. The first bloodshed would be the match in the powder magazine. He pressed his ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon
... friends across the Rhine would say. But I expect, before it's settled, there will be men's bones sufficient, bleaching on the desert, to build another Pyramid. It's so easily started: that's the devil of it. A mischievous boy can throw a lighted match into a powder magazine, and then it becomes every patriot's business to see that it isn't put out. I hate war. It accomplishes nothing, and leaves everything in a greater muddle than it was before. But if the idea ever catches fire, I shall have to do all I can to fan the conflagration. Unless I am prepared ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome
... the virtues. When a man ceases to work he retrogrades; he becomes a stranger to lofty ideals and wholesome activities. The man with an ambition ever finds himself in the ascendency; while he who deplores the exercise of his powers, avoiding work as he would a powder magazine or a pest, is in the descendency toward a state of groveling and low ideals. And the difference between these two men marks the ...
— A Fleece of Gold - Five Lessons from the Fable of Jason and the Golden Fleece • Charles Stewart Given
... the world out of him with the mighty concussion; another, more moderate, makes his comet a kind of beast of burden, carrying the sun a regular supply of food and faggots; a third, of more combustible disposition, threatens to throw his comet like a bombshell into the world, and blow it up like a powder magazine; while a fourth, with no great delicacy to this planet and its inhabitants, insinuates that some day or other his comet—my modest pen blushes while I write it—shall absolutely turn tail upon our world and deluge it with water! Surely, as I have already observed, comets were bountifully ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... August, 1787, treated H. R. Highness to a grand pyrotechnic display. "Prince William Henry and his company, being seated on an exalted platform, erected by the Overseer of Public Works, James Thompson, over a powder magazine joining the end of the new building (Haldimand Castle), while the fireworks were displayed on an eminence fronting it below the ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... they get out of pits dug in the Mountain-sides. Near here, too, is a Burning Mountain they call Vesuvio. It may be mighty curious, but 'tis as great a Nuisance and Perpetual Alarm to the peaceable Inhabitants of Naples as a Powder Magazine. Very often this Vesuvio gives itself up to hideous Bellowing, causing the Windows, nay the very Houses, in Naples to Shake, and then it vomits forth vast Quantities of melted Stuff, which streams down the Mountain-sides like a pot boiling ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 3 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... the fort. He silenced the guns, captured five of the vessels, and destroyed the other three. He then passed down the channel, and near Tricheri fell in with a Turkish brig-of-war, which, after some skilful fighting, he destroyed by shells that exploded her powder magazine. After that he proceeded to Kumi, where he captured a store of grain, and reached Poros within ...
— The Life of Thomas, Lord Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald, Vol. II • Thomas Lord Cochrane
... effective when abandoned by the Mexicans. The cannonade and bombardment continued about six hours, eight thousand two hundred and fifty shot and shells being fired at the fort by the French. The principal injury received by the work was from the explosion of the powder magazine. But very few guns were dismounted by the fire of the French ships, and only three of these on the water front. The details of the condition of the ships and fort are given in the report of the French officer,[22] but it is ...
— Elements of Military Art and Science • Henry Wager Halleck
... 1898 to 1914 there were incidents happening, any one of which might have started the world war. Fashoda, Algeciras, Bosnia, Agadir—each time it seemed as if only a miracle could avert the conflict. Europe was like a powder magazine. No man knew when the spark might fall that would ...
— The World War and What was Behind It - The Story of the Map of Europe • Louis P. Benezet
... engaged at different times in carrying powder in his boat from a powder magazine, and from this circumstance, was ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... bravery was of the sort requiring no artificial stimulus, and proceeded solely from the promptings of a nature superlative in every sense, was shown in the winter of 1757, when the barracks at Fort Edward were consumed by a fire which threatened and almost reached the powder magazine. Seeing the blaze from his aerie on the island, Putnam attacked the fire as he always attacked the enemy, with impetuosity. He at once took the forefront of danger, nearest to the powder magazine, and, mounted ...
— "Old Put" The Patriot • Frederick A. Ober
... Governor's apartments, the Barracks, Powder Magazine, &c. are also pointed out; but to go over the whole works of this venerable monument of antiquity, and give a minute detail of the several parts usually shown to strangers, would be tedious to the reader, though doubtless every spot and fragment ...
— Brannon's Picture of The Isle of Wight • George Brannon
... soften its tone. The visitor, planting himself at the western front, is in a position to gain some adequate idea of the perfection of the noble building. The interior and central parts suffered the principal injury from the explosion of the Turkish powder magazine in 1687. The western front remains nearly entire. It has been despoiled, indeed, of its movable ornaments. The statues which filled the pediment are gone, with the exception of a fragment or two. The sculptured ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... Potomac below that city. Captain Gordon, the commander of this expedition, proceeded with the Sea Horse and several other vessels up the river on the 17th of August, but was unable to reach the fort till the 27th. The place being rendered untenable by the explosion of a powder magazine, the garrison spiked their guns and evacuated it next day. The populous and commercial town of Alexandria, situated higher on the river, thus lost its sole protection; and Captain Gordon, having no obstacle to oppose his ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... Plaster-casts, how to dispose of Plato Pliny Pollius Felix Pontine Marshes Ponza island, megalithic ruin on Portovenere, marble Potter, Major Frederick, discovers Olevano Pottery, index of national taste Powder magazine, explosion of Preccia, mountain Prehistoric races, possible reasons for their extinction Press, the daily, its disastrous functions "Prison, The," ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas |
