"Prop" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... vainly seeking to distinguish definite outlines amid the darkness. My groping feet encountered numerous obstructions along the path—here a pile of loosened earth over which I plunged headlong, or a flat stone dropped by the rotting away of its supporting prop, or some sharp declivity, as though softer earth had yielded to rude implements; yet it became evident from the start that the tunnel level rapidly descended, boring deeper and deeper into the bosom of the earth. Finally, my fingers came into contact with small ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... power, It triumphs in the dying hour; Christ is our life, our joy, our hope, Nor can we sink with such a prop." ...
— The Power of Faith - Exemplified In The Life And Writings Of The Late Mrs. Isabella Graham. • Isabella Graham
... existing national government, that it is an insupportable despotism, wielded by a power which is superior to all legal and constitutional restraints—equally indisposed and unable to protect the lives or liberties of the people—the prop ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... in the carriage on the way home, at a shoemaker's, we saw Santa Anna's leg lying on the counter, and observed it with due respect, as the prop of a hero. With this leg, which is fitted with a very handsome boot, he reviews his troops next Sunday, putting his best foot foremost; for generally he merely wears an unadorned wooden leg. The shoemaker, ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... reach'd the destined spot And prop and babes unpacked; They ran about, and stuff'd, and cramm'd, And ...
— The Sketches of Seymour (Illustrated), Complete • Robert Seymour
... for Theophilus to bring around his box of ants, I reckon," he observed, and added seriously after a moment, "Yes, there's no use trying to prop up a fallen tree, Ben. I've had a long life and a good life, and I am willing to draw out. It's a losing game any way you play it, when it comes to that. I've thought a lot about it, my boy, these last weeks, and I tell you the ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... her husband, and his consequent conviction that she regarded the marriage as a mistake, the ceremony itself loomed up as a grim fact, one not to be brushed aside by ingenious arguments. Behind it, as a prop to its stability, was the strict tradition of Christianity, an inheritance of peculiar influence with both the participants in the strange mistake. There was no cause for divorce which either of their respective churches recognised ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... should make such an offer as this puzzled me, but his reason for wanting to prop the bank up was no business of mine, and there was no doubt if he could get fifty or sixty thousand pounds' worth of mortgages taken off our hands, it would enable us to hold on for some time. He did, in fact, get one batch of twenty thousand pounds' worth transferred, ...
— A Girl of the Commune • George Alfred Henty
... enter into these governments, and, by persuasion, by numbers, and by new laws, to establish a new State. Comrades, do not follow this line of march, for we would perish in following it in Belgium or in France as elsewhere. Rather let us leave these governments to rot away and not prop them up with our morality. This is the reason: the International is and must be a State within States. Let these States march on as they like, even to the point where our State is the strongest. ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... shall stir them up—" He pointed to the prisoners asleep in their beds. "They will give me away, and I shall be transferred to the cell in the upper floor. I know my way from there. What I want you for is to unscrew the prop in the door of the mortuary." "I can do that. But ...
— The Forged Coupon and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... all around foresees,—but doubles ill. Each prop thou hast is but a sword to pierce; If Polyeucte hold their heart, the people fierce Will ...
— Polyuecte • Pierre Corneille
... farewell. The Melancholy Tale of Me, he calls them, perhaps because they are not in the least melancholy—a good and sufficient reason. Yet Mr. Sothern strangely neglects the subject of sundials in his book, although they were his prop in how many a play back in the golden Nineties!—the golden, promise-laden, contradictory Nineties, that fin-de-siecle decade when Max Nordau thundered that we were going to the dogs of degeneracy, and we youngsters knew that we were headed not alone ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... take my life and all; pardon not that: You take my house when you do take the prop That doth sustain my house; you take my life, When you do take ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... Bessie put out her arm for the bowl, "you prop up his head. I've got a steddyer hand: you'd just spill it all over ...
— On the Church Steps • Sarah C. Hallowell
... pendulum as a standard of measure, and to establish the third part of the seconds pendulum (then supposed to be every where of equal length) as a 'pes horarius', or general measure, that might be recovered at any age and by all nations, is to be found in Huygens's 'Horologium Oscillatorium', 1673, Prop. 25. A similar wish was afterward publicly expressed, in 1742, on a monument erected at the equator by Bouguer, La Condamine, and Godin. On the beautiful marble tablet which exists, as yet uninjured, in the old Jesuits' College at Quito, I have myself ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... sitting propped up against the stump of the tree, and that for the best of reasons. A length of his own infallible fishing line was twisted and tightened twice round his throat and then twice round the wooden prop behind him. The leading investigator ran forward and touched the fisherman's hand, and it was as ...
— The Man Who Knew Too Much • G.K. Chesterton
... came to a stop after running a few yards further. But finding that no lives were lost, it put on steam and disappeared on its course, and Zene and his trembling assistant were trying to prop up one corner of the wagon when Grandma Padgett brought her spectacles to bear ...
— Old Caravan Days • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... look to the letter and not the spirit; admit the thing, but repudiate the name. Les farceurs! Arnal, of course, follows the fashion of the times, although too sensible a fellow, we suspect, to care a rush about the matter. For the last twenty years he has been the chief prop of the Vaudeville, where he performs for ten months out of the twelve, at a salary of fourteen hundred pounds, with feux or allowances of twenty francs for every act he plays in. His first appearance was in the tragic character of Mithridates, in which he convulsed his audience ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... all he saw for the benefit of his timid homekeeping countrymen, and giving careful measurements of everything measurable—the masts of the steamers, the length of the wharves, the height of the Arc de Triomphe, as if in some mysterious way statistics could prove a prop to the faint-hearted. Of the four lads in the "experiment," two afterwards filled high diplomatic posts. A certain Fang I was made Charge d'Affaires in London and later Consul-General in Singapore, ...
— Sir Robert Hart - The Romance of a Great Career, 2nd Edition • Juliet Bredon
... Provence, by the highway. They are surrounded with high stone-walls, or ditches, planted with a kind of cane or large reed, which answers many purposes in this country. The leaves of it afford sustenance to the asses, and the canes not only serve as fences to the inclosures; but are used to prop the vines and pease, and to build habitations for the silkworms: they are formed into arbours, and wore as walking-staves. All these gardens are watered by little rills that come from the mountains, particularly, by the small branches of the two sources which I have described ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... prop up his credit for a little time longer. The name he made use of was the name of his patron. In doing this, he believed—as all men who commit crime believe—that he had the best possible chance of escaping consequences. In the first place, he might get the long-expected ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... catastrophe, which seemed, in the opinion not only of the victors, but of the vanquished, to have given the finishing stroke to the American Revolution, Lee's force, augmented by the junction of the troops marching down to join him, was the sole prop and stay of the cause ...
— The Campaign of Trenton 1776-77 • Samuel Adams Drake
... and weather-beaten. The front windows, some of them, were shattered and open, and others were boarded up. Trees and shrubbery were growing neglected, so as quite to block up the lower part. There was an aged barn near at hand, so ruinous that it had been necessary to prop it up. There were two old carts, both of which had lost a wheel. Everything was in keeping. At first I supposed that there would be no inhabitants in such a dilapidated place; but, passing on, I looked back, and saw a decrepit and infirm old man at the angle of the house, its fit occupant. ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 2. • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... of Macedon have always been thought to love their kings, but now, as if some main prop had broken, and the whole edifice of government fallen to the ground, they gave themselves up to Aemilius, and in two days constituted him master of the entire kingdom. This seems to confirm the ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... obliged to give myself up for lost and every hope of escaping my horrible fate forsook me. I could no longer shout but it would have been useless, for the ever-increasing din would have prevented others, and me, from hearing anything else. I managed to prop myself up against a rock and with all the strength that was left me, I clung to it with one hand whilst with the other I turned up the collar of my thin, linen jacket and ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... little flock, the loveliest and the last, 'Tis sweet to dream what thou may'st be, when long, long years have past; To think when time hath blanched my hair, and others leave my side, Thou may'st be still my prop and stay, my blessing and ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various
... over with dust, removing the dust and inspecting them at intervals. Discovering nothing amiss, we returned to the old temple, and at its doorway met the mountaineer, Japhet, who throughout all these proceedings had been our prop and stay. Indeed, without his help and that of his authority over the Abati the mine could never have been completed, at any ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard
... letting go a good secure, In hope of future gain, Is but imprudence pure. The fisherman had reason good— The troutling did the best he could— Both argued for their lives. Now, if my present purpose thrives, I'll prop my former proposition By building on a small addition. A certain wolf, in point of wit The prudent fisher's opposite, A dog once finding far astray, Prepared to take him as his prey. The dog his leanness ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... Leipzig; he could not put his finger on a single person remaining with whom he had had a nearer acquaintance. No one was left to comment on what he did and how he lived. And this knowledge withdrew the last prop from his sense of propriety. He ceased to face the trouble that care for his person implied, just as he gave up raising the lid of the piano and making a needless pretence of work. Openly now, he took up his abode in the BRUDERSTRASSE, where he spent the long, idle days stretched on the ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... God is nigh, my faith is strong, His arm is my almighty prop: Be glad, my heart; rejoice, my tongue, My dying flesh shall rest ...
— The Psalms of David - Imitated in the Language of The New Testament - And Applied to The Christian State and Worship • Isaac Watts
... They own teown prop'ty somewhars, and they own all the Neck here, and lays areound on her through the summer. Why, Note's father—he 's dead neow—he and I uster stand deown on the mud flats when we was boys, a-diggin' clarms tergether, barefoot; 'tell he cruised ...
— Vesty of the Basins • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... at her with awakened curiosity. This agreement was an unexpected prop for him. "You, too, think it a perfect likeness?" he asked her. Her old blue eyes, old in the antique tranquillity of their regard, yet still of such a vivid, unfaded turquoise, turned on him and again he had that impression ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... completed the confusion of the wearied ones of Slade—and they of the Schools, accustomed to the culture of Colvin, whose polished scalp I with difficulty collected, ceasing to distinguish between the quick and the dead, will probably prop up our late 'Arry as professor, long to remain undetected ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... would see that he was right in trusting her; Nell would discover that there was no one so clever as Polly; Mrs. Power would cease to defy her; Alice would obey her cheerfully; in short, she would be the mainstay and prop ...
— Polly - A New-Fashioned Girl • L. T. Meade
... Canada {146} had her share in it. As a demonstration of general British superiority in manufactures the Great Exhibition was a great success; but as heralding an era of universal peace it was a mournful failure. Three years later England, France, and Sardinia were fighting Russia to prop the rotten empire of the Turk. Then came the Great Mutiny; then the four years of fratricidal strife between the Northern and Southern States; then the war of Prussia and Austria; then the overthrow of France by Germany. All these events ...
— The Winning of Popular Government - A Chronicle of the Union of 1841 • Archibald Macmechan
... troth Like a maternal angel strain The sinful and the sinless child At once on either breast, and there In peace and promise reconciled Unite them: nor could Nature's care With subtler sweet beneficence Have fed the springs of penitence, Still keeping true, though harshly tried, The vital prop of human pride. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... and never deign to grieve. Ye, sunny shores of France! behold them start Nor shed one teardrop, as your ships depart. Ye love-charmed bowers of Spain! your Houris' eyes Are rayless now—for brighter lustre vies! Ye, boundless plains, and giant hills, that rise In craggy pride, and prop Columbia's skies, Ye view your maddened sons, with guilty haste, Roll from your shores and tempt the watery waste— Forgotten every claim that Virtue knows, Despised the scenes, where early childhood rose, Swift to the land of gold, they, joyful, flee, Nor care the sacred joys of home again to ...
— Lays of Ancient Virginia, and Other Poems • James Avis Bartley
... here, the constable shall take my horse, and I will drive; and then I can look after you, and you can use me for a prop, if you feel weak; but before we start, I must insist on your taking a sip of ...
— A Final Reckoning - A Tale of Bush Life in Australia • G. A. Henty
... details, however, he said, would be matter of future deliberation. The object he had in view was, in the words of Mr. Fox, "not to pull down, but to work upon our constitution; to examine it with care and reverence; to repair it where decayed; to amend it where defective; to prop it where it wanted support; and to adapt it to the purposes of the present time, as our ancestors had done from generation to generation, and always transmitted it not only unimpaired, but improved, to posterity." The measure was supported by Mr. Hobhouse, and opposed by ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... that it was of no use for us to enlarge our markets unless other countries did so also at the same time and in the same way; and in condemning all reduction of import duties that was not based on "reciprocity," he certainly added all the weight of his authority to prop up a system whose injurious influence has affected the very vitality of our social state, and whose overthrow will yet require no small amount ...
— The Economist - Volume 1, No. 3 • Various
... and tears. A prop had been rudely pushed from beneath the empire. The young Emperor would stumble and sway, and fall without this strong guide beside him. Men said this was the first sign of ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... thousand arms extended over the necks of both sovereigns and people. It had become a mighty power in the world, inseparably connected with the education and the religion of the age, the prime mover of all political affairs, the grand prop of absolute monarchies, the last hope ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... than merely helpful. I would lecture for a school when I would not for a distressed author; and would have helped De Marvy to perfect his invention, but not—unless I had no other object—his widow after he was gone. In a word, I like to prop the falling more than to feed ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... Under shelter of ancient authority, of which he retrospectively took possession, he boldly invoked the highest reasons and the most venerated names, in order to justify an arbitrary resolution, and the grasping selfishness which swayed his mind. It was the practice of the French Revolution to prop up its violent and despotic proceedings by the loftiest principles; the Emperor Napoleon had not forgotten ...
— Worlds Best Histories - France Vol 7 • M. Guizot and Madame Guizot De Witt
... up all their lives are seldom good for anything in a crisis. When misfortune comes, they look around for somebody to lean upon. If the prop is not there down they go. Once down, they are helpless as capsized turtles. Many a boy has succeeded beyond all his expectations simply because all props were knocked out from under him and he ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.
... about the purchase of some old furniture in London he wrote: "There is a chair (without a bottom) at a shop near the office, which I think would suit you. It cannot stand of itself, but will almost seat somebody, if you put it in a corner, and prop one leg up with two wedges and cut another leg off, The proprietor asks L20, but says he admires literature and would take L18. He is of republican principles and I think would take L17 19s. 6d. from ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... prop a rose-tree in a viranda, when she hastily turned to her sister, and exclaimed, "it is useless attending either to plants or flowers now: I must give up all my ...
— The Boarding School • Unknown
... and Pteris in abundance. Hymenophyllum, Davallia atrata, Diplazium, Begonia Malabarica? Bambusa spiculis hispidis, Hypni sp. spinivenio prop. Dicranum glaucum, etc. etc. A fine Alpinia occurred ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... milk, gleaming along the wall of Herons' Holt, drew every stray cat within a radius of two miles. Beneath, each armed with a clothes-prop, toiled Mr. Fletcher and Frederick under the ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson
... luxurious vine, Unless to virtue's prop it join, Firm and erect, tow'rd heaven bound, Tho' it with beauteous leaves and pleasant fruit be crown'd, It lies deform'd, and rotting ...
— Clarissa, Volume 5 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... if I had lost a stay or prop," replied Mrs. Seagrave. "So accustomed have I been to look to him for advice since we have been on this island. Had he not been thus snatched from us - had he been spared to us a few years, and had we been permitted to surround his death-bed, and close his eyes in peace—" and Mrs. ...
— Masterman Ready • Captain Marryat
... I should have been, and with no guidance or direction, with that problem of keeping soul and body together, which, after all, is the thing with which all of us are naturally obliged to cope all through our lives. I lived here and there, most of the time looking to Eben Sproule as a prop and support, as a boy must look to some one, or fall into bad and dangerous ways—and even ...
— Vandemark's Folly • Herbert Quick
... monarchy's fixt, By making on't mixt, And by non-resistance o'erthrown; And preaching obedience Destroys our allegiance, And thus the Whigs prop up ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... very well that Kate was merely propping her hope with the statement, but she was glad enough to accept the prop for her own hopes. So they talked desultorily and with that arms-length amiability which is the small currency of polite conversation between two strange women, and Mrs. Singleton Corey laid aside her dignity with her fur-lined ...
— The Lookout Man • B. M. Bower
... going to the restaurant. I am after all this time weary of the waiters, Who scornfully bring us, with their smug grimaces, Dark beer and make us so confused That we cannot find our home And we must Use the foolish street lights To prop ourselves up with weak hands. Today I have bigger things in mind— Ah, I shall find out the meaning of existence. And in the evening I shall do some roller skating Or go at ...
— The Verse of Alfred Lichtenstein • Alfred Lichtenstein
... Quality; And when any comes hither they are won by my complemental and genteel Discourse; my comely presence brings in many a Guest into the House, besides particular Acquaintance: So that I may well affirm I am the Prop of the House. If I didn't introduce Gentleman into your Company, I wonder what you'd do; you might e'en sit still, and be forc'd to make use of a Dildo, before any Body would come to you if ...
— The London-Bawd: With Her Character and Life - Discovering the Various and Subtle Intrigues of Lewd Women • Anonymous
... breast; a hooded kirtle girded around him reaching down to his calves; a straightsword with ornaments of walrus-tooth on his left thigh." "But who might he be?" [LL.fo.98b.] asked Ailill of Fergus. "I know him indeed," Fergus made answer. "He is the prop of battle; [2]he is the wild heat of anger; he is the daring of every battle;[2] he is the triumph of every combat; he is the tool that pierces, is the man who comes thither. Connud macMorna, from the Callann in the north, is the ...
— The Ancient Irish Epic Tale Tain Bo Cualnge • Unknown
... cause could be found in the fact that Lawyer Temple had run through what little money his father and grandmother had left him; additional wise-acres were of the opinion that some out-of-town folks had bought the place and were trying to prop it up so it wouldn't tumble into the street, while one, more facetious than the others, had claimed that it was no wonder it was falling down, since the only new thing Temple had put upon ...
— Kennedy Square • F. Hopkinson Smith
... abolish religion, that it "would try to put laziness, thriftlessness, and inefficiency on a par with industry, thrift, and efficiency, that it would strive to break up not merely private property, but, what is far more important, the home, the chief prop upon which our ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... that to be created does not belong to composite and subsisting things. For in the book, De Causis (prop. iv) it is said, "The first of creatures is being." But the being of a thing created is not subsisting. Therefore creation properly speaking does not belong ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... Tournanche. We set off early on the next morning, and got to the summit of the pass without difficulty. It gave me my first experience of considerable slopes of hard, steep snow, and, like all beginners, I endeavored to prop myself up with my stick, and kept it outside, instead of holding it between myself and the slope, and leaning upon it, as should ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume VI • Various
... just now when, for the moment, I was alone. I felt that all my hopes and prospects were dashed; still I could pray, and God was not far off. I was comforted. Man might fail me, but God would not. If anything, it was good to feel every earthly prop give way, and to cling alone to ...
— Missionary Work Among The Ojebway Indians • Edward Francis Wilson
... can carry messages to the engineer and translate them into Spanish." I ran to and fro, stumbling up or down, forgetting every time I passed that a certain part of the ship had a raised ledge. The effort was to prop the boat with spars that it might not tip as it crunched and settled down upon the coral reefs. We could hardly wait until daylight to measure the predicament. When the light grew clear so that I saw the illuminated waters, ...
— An Ohio Woman in the Philippines • Emily Bronson Conger
... Which England, aeroplaning, now, lets drop By day and night, in bank, press, church and shop, Timed to the minute that it is to burst. List to Demosthenes, if not to Hearst, Sublime Republic! Lest thy great heart stop, Shocked by the blast of Freedom's every prop, And bats and owls in dwellings, ...
— Freedom, Truth and Beauty • Edward Doyle
... was so dreadful but that it would be somewhat alleviated by the fact of his presence: just the sight of him, standing beside her, put her in some vague way out of Ray's power to harm. Exhausted, reeling, he was still the prop of her ...
— The Sky Line of Spruce • Edison Marshall
... in his mother's grief a sufficient prop in the crisis through which he was passing. Besides, what is the affection of others to the egoism of passion ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... most uncomfortable lodging, it being a perfect swamp; and we had nothing to cover us, though it rained very hard. The Indians were little better off than we, as there was no wood here to make their wigwams; so that all they could do was to prop up the bark they carry in the bottom of their canoes with their oars, and shelter themselves as well as they could to leeward of it. They, knowing the difficulties that were to be encountered here, had provided themselves with some seal; but we had not the least morsel ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 17 • Robert Kerr
... head, then slowly and painfully sank to his heart, and was chill as a stone. And so again, again deceit; no, worse than deceit—lying and baseness... and life shattered, everything torn up by its roots utterly, and the sole thing which he could cling to, the last prop, in fragments too. In Litvinov's soul rose, like sudden gusts of wind before a storm, momentary ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VIII • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... shorewise, as shores. 'Schore, undur settynge of a ynge at wolde falle.' P. Parv. Du. Schooren, To Under-prop. Aller eschays, To shale, stradle, goe crooked, or wide betweene the feet, ...
— Early English Meals and Manners • Various
... he answered, "if my Lord Protector were the only prop of the Gospel, it had fallen long ago. The prop of the Gospel is not my Lord or thy Lord, but the Lord of the whole earth. His strength is enough to ...
— Robin Tremain - A Story of the Marian Persecution • Emily Sarah Holt
... of wooden tenements. Some of them were built on piles, and seemed to stand on stilts, holding their draggled skirts out of the mud of their untidy yards: some sagged on rotting sills, leaning shoulder to shoulder as if to prop one another up. From each front door a shaky flight of steps ran down to the unpaved sidewalk, where pigs and children and hens, and the daily tramp of feet to and from the Maitland Works, had beaten the earth into a ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland
... my beloved son, he whose birth made all my happiness, whose infancy and growing years were all my occupation, whose youth was my pride and consolation, and who would, as I hoped, be the prop of my old age, no longer lives. He has been taken from us in the midst of completed happiness, and of the happiest prospects of the future, whilst each day he gained in virtue, in understanding, in wisdom, following the footsteps ...
— France in the Nineteenth Century • Elizabeth Latimer
... could not prop their faith: and yet Many I had known: with all I sympathized; And though struck speechless, I did not forget That what was mourned for, I, ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... three classes: the sporting fraternity, whose business it was to despoil and betray; the business men, drawn more or less into the vortex of dissipation; the miners from the creeks, the Man with the Poke, here to-day, gone, to-morrow, and of them all the most worthy of respect. He was the prop and mainstay of the town. It was like a vast trap set to catch him. He would "blow in" brimming with health and high spirits; for a time he would "get into the game;" sooner or later he would cut loose and "hit the high places"; then, at last, beggared and broken, he would crawl back ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... Science as this remarkable production, in which one of the most exact of observers, most cautious of reasoners, and most candid of expositors, of this or any other age, is held up to scorn as a "flighty" person, who endeavours "to prop up his utterly rotten fabric of guess and speculation," and whose "mode of dealing with nature" is reprobated as "utterly dishonourable to Natural Science." And all this high and mighty talk, which would have been indecent in one of Mr. Darwin's equals, ...
— The Reception of the 'Origin of Species' • Thomas Henry Huxley
... one of our Judges of the Admiraltry, & seconded by another—there is also the Solicitor General (a Wedderburne in Principle but not equal to him in Ability) the Advocate General &c &c. The whole Design of these Addresses is to prop a ...
— The Writings of Samuel Adams, vol. III. • Samuel Adams
... illustrated this proposition. The former had been all his life a good son, and was now a trustworthy partner, to his father, who justly relied no less on his character than on his brains. The latter, since her parents' early death had left her to her aunt's care, had been the comfort and prop of Miss Bussey's life. It is difficult to describe good people without making them seem dull; but luckily nature is defter than novelists, and it is quite possible to be good without being dull. Neither Mary nor John was dull; ...
— Comedies of Courtship • Anthony Hope
... upon the pear-tree, and even in his preoccupation he was struck with the signs of its extraordinary age. Twisted out of all proportion, and knotted with excrescences, it was supported by iron bands and heavy stakes, as if to prop up its senile decay. He tried to interest himself in the various initials and symbols deeply carved in bark, now swollen and half obliterated. As he turned back to the summer-house, he for the first time noticed that the ground ...
— Maruja • Bret Harte
... me were from persons who had once occupied privileged positions (I thus designate those in which people receive more from others than they give), who had lost them, and who wished to occupy them again. To one, two hundred rubles were indispensable, in order that he might prop up a failing business, and complete the education of his children which had been begun; another wanted a photographic outfit; a third wanted his debts paid, and respectable clothing purchased for him; a fourth needed a piano, in order to perfect himself and support his family by giving lessons. ...
— The Moscow Census - From "What to do?" • Lyof N. Tolstoi
... individually than in the mass. If they are giants, few of them are giants who can stand on their own legs. They prop one another up. There are not more than a dozen Elizabethan plays that are individually worth a superlative, as a novel by Jane Austen or a sonnet by Wordsworth is. The Elizabethan lyrics are an immensely more precious possession than the plays. The best of ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... Glasgow and Dumfries, I don't know any other Scotch towns concerned in that traffick. In other respects, I conceive the Scots were losers by the union. — They lost the independency of their state, the greatest prop of national spirit; they lost their parliament, and their courts of justice were subjected to the revision and supremacy ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... in a voice so commonplace that he jumped to hear it, 'the kind creatures have left us half a bottle. One glass, Mr. Armstrong, will do you good. You dress with Berry; hell help you with your make-up. Don't be nervous. You've got the book to prop you till the very end, and there you'll be as right as rain. Here's luck to your ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... plants thirty times magnified. But the mournful looking trees along the coast and all about Hilo are mostly the Pandanus odoratissimus, a spreading and branching tree which grows fully twenty-five feet high, supports itself among inaccessible rocks by its prop-like roots, and is one of the first plants to appear on the newly-formed Pacific islands. {62} Its foliage is singularly dense, although it is borne in tufts of a quantity of long yucca-like leaves on the branches. The shape of the tree is usually circular. The mournful look is ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... marriage-settlements are eminently useful, as searching character and testing affection, before an irrevocable step be taken; and again, that when two very young persons are joined together in matrimony, it is as if one sweet-pea should be put as a prop to another. The essay on Wisdom is elevated and thoughtful, like most of the essayist's papers, but somewhat too heavy for miscellaneous readers. With his wonted clearness he distinguishes Wisdom from understanding, talents, capacity, ability, sagacity, sense, &c. and defines ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 422, New Series, January 31, 1852 • Various
... accident had happened. The dainty roof was crushed in, and the poor little egg, for which such loving preparations had been made, lay pathetically on the ground outside the door. My comrade crept carefully up, raised the tiny roof to place, and with deft fingers put a twig under as a prop to hold it, then gently laid the pretty ...
— Little Brothers of the Air • Olive Thorne Miller
... slipping till it could be more permanently fixed. The derrick, or upright spar used for carrying the tackle to raise the first beam, was placed in such a position as to become useful for supporting the upper end of it, which now became, in its turn, the prop of the tackle for raising the second beam. The whole difficulty of this operation was in the raising and propping of the first beam, which became a convenient derrick for raising the second, these again a pair ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... remote home he found himself, at a very early hour in the morning of the next day, condemned to set forth on foot. He was a young man of a portly habit; no lover of the exercises of the body; bland, sedentary, patient of delay, a prop of omnibuses. In happier days he would have chartered a cab; but these luxuries were now denied him; and with what courage he could muster he ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 5 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... old gentleman had been led tottering into the adjacent parlor, which was fitted up as his bedroom, and placed comfortably on a high prop of pillows, Marcus drew out his watch, made an amiable pretence of very important business down town, and ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... historians. This puts me in mind of what happened at Sinope. {20a} When the Corinthians heard that Philip was going to attack them, they were all alarmed, and fell to work, some brushing up their arms, others bringing stones to prop up their walls and defend their bulwarks, every one, in short, lending a hand. Diogenes observing this, and having nothing to do (for nobody employed him), tucked up his robe, and, with all his might, fell a rolling his tub which he lived in up and down the Cranium. {20b} "What are ...
— Trips to the Moon • Lucian
... play has to do with building character in him Froebel has told us. Through it, he showed us, the child "first perceives moral relations," and he made that the basis of the kindergarten and all common-sense education. That prop was knocked out. New York never had a children's playground till within the last three years. Truly it seemed, as Abram S. Hewitt said, as if in the early plan of our city the children had not been thought ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis
... man shakily heaved himself into a hammock under the trees in that broad backyard wherein, as Valentine Corliss had yesterday noticed, the last iron monarch of the herd, with unabated arrogance, had entered domestic service as a clothes-prop. The young man, who was of delicate appearance and unhumanly pale, stretched himself at full length on his back, closed his eyes, moaned feebly, cursed the heat in a stricken whisper. Then, as a locust directly overhead violently shattered the silence, and seemed like to continue ...
— The Flirt • Booth Tarkington
... Anderson was revived, and it became manifest that the prop upon which she had leaned had been slipped from under her. The spirit which had made her strong to endure the death of her boy failed when the sordid bald truth of a miserable and horrible waste of life gave the lie to the ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... plur. of 'Akkar prop.aromatic roots; but applied to vulgar drugs or simples, as in the Tale of the Sage ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... I've known 'im from a lad; 'Twas me as taught 'im ridin', an' 'e rides uncommon bad; And he says—But 'ark an' listen! There's an 'orn! I 'eard it blow; Pull the blind from off the winder! Prop me up, and ...
— Songs of Action • Arthur Conan Doyle
... thank you," said he, "but my time here is very short, and your well-meant efforts for my relief are not only useless, but they also increase my suffering. You are, I presume, from some ship which has come up with us since those fiends left. Kindly prop me up a little higher on the sofa, gentlemen, if you please, and I will endeavour to tell you what has happened ...
— For Treasure Bound • Harry Collingwood
... found to hold good with respect to thin plates of a denser medium, which is, indeed, not improbable, it will be necessary to adopt the connected demonstrations of Prop. IV., but, at any rate, if a thin plate be interposed between a rarer and a denser medium, the colors by reflection and transmission may be ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... that individuals are nothing in the sight of God. Six emperors have succumbed to the immutable laws of Nature, but the house of Hapsburg is still erect. What, then, if I meet with reverses? The Lord has given me a son, who, if I should be unfortunate, will prop up our dynasty, and ...
— Prince Eugene and His Times • L. Muhlbach
... champion of the men of Ireland, their prop in the middle of the fight; you were the head of every battle; your ways were glad ...
— Gods and Fighting Men • Lady I. A. Gregory
... self-satisfaction, what gives one, like the rich fool, the sense of false security of goods stored up for the years? We are set in life to feel insecure, or at all events to gain stability and security of soul, not to prop up our failing and timid senses upon the pillows of wealth and ease and circumstance. The man whom I entirely envy is the man who walks into the dark valley of misfortune or sickness or grief, or the shadow of death, with a curious and inexpressible zest for ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... ambition at this particular crisis was irreparable. One after one, all the agents and tools by whom he could hope to work upon the counsels of the Klosterheim authorities had been removed. Losing their influence, he had lost every prop of his own. Nor was this all; he was reproached by the general voice of the city as the original cause of a calamity which he had since shown himself impotent to redress. He it was, and his cause, which had drawn upon the people so fatally trepanned the hostility of the mysterious ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... all ideas of world affairs; and having retired into the obscurity of the river Yuan (in Honan), I had no appetite for the political affairs of the country. As the result of the revolution in Hsin Hai, I was by mistake elected by the people. Reluctantly I came out of my retirement and endeavoured to prop up the tottering structure. I cared for nothing, but the salvation of the country. A perusal of our history of several thousand years will reveal in vivid manner the sad fate of the descendants of ancient kings and emperors. What then could have ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... of the wood the track became worse and worse. The rough-hewn runners constantly sank into snow-drifts and the sledge canted over, so that the poor man, trembling with fear and cold, had to prop it up with all his strength. If his twisted foot gave way, there was an end to him ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various
... everything will go. The opposition needs only something like this. Besides, the GG is the one bit of insanity I can depend on in a practical world, the prop for ...
— Question of Comfort • Les Collins
... lavished rings in largesse, When the fights' red rain-drips fell, Bright of face, with heart-strings hardy, Hogni's father met his fate; Then his brow with helmet shrouding, Bearing battle-shield, he spake, 'I will die the prop of battle, Sooner die than yield an inch, Yes, sooner ...
— Njal's Saga • Unknown Icelanders
... greater the truth.' Take that with you. A lie must, somewhere, have a truth to prop it. In the heart of every big successful lie you will find some reality. Of course you cannot build a house on nothing. A pyramid cannot be constructed in the air. Now a lie is nothing, the very definition of nothing. It is what is not. So, of course, ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... bed in the mornings, drummed her lessons into her, formed her opinions, and generally dominated her school career. Fauvette was one of those girls who all their lives lean upon somebody, and at present she had twined herself, an ornamental piece of honeysuckle, round the stout oak prop of Raymonde's stronger personality. She was a dear, amiable, sweet-tempered little soul, highly romantic and sentimental, with a pretty soprano voice, and just a sufficient talent for acting to make her absolutely invaluable in scenes from Dickens or Jane ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... kinds of ovens used for baking bread and roasting meat in outdoor life. The simplest way is to prop a frying pan up in front of the fire. This is not the best way but you will have to do it if you are travelling light. A reflector, when made of sheet iron or aluminum is the best camp oven. Tin is not so satisfactory because it ...
— Outdoor Sports and Games • Claude H. Miller
... curls—yellow curls that wound so softly around her mother's fingers that you would think that they were not curls at all but golden dreams of curls that had for the moment come true and would fade back into fairyland whence they came. And the passing year had to prop the child at a window while the dusk came creeping into the quiet house. There she sat waiting, watching, hoping that the proud, handsome man who came at twilight down the way leading to the threshold, would smile at her. ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... be found a convenient position from which to build a support that shall reach up underneath the volute or under turn of the scroll. Having well tried the parts as to the fitting, the support or prop may be secured or glued in roughly to the lower surface of the peg-box—presuming of course that the pegs have all been removed—and left to dry hard. When so the parts had better be tried for fitting ...
— The Repairing & Restoration of Violins - 'The Strad' Library, No. XII. • Horace Petherick
... stands, as you say, beside the throne, once your father is again seated there. We can afford to bide our time, and assuredly it will not be long before a party is formed against Warwick. Until then we must bear everything. Our interests are the same. If he is content to remain a prop to the throne, and not to eclipse it, the memory of the past will not stand between us, and I shall regard him as the weapon that has beaten down the House of York and restored us to our own, and shall give him my confidence and friendship. If, on the other hand, he ...
— A Knight of the White Cross • G.A. Henty
... road that tumbles down to some Cotswold village. Let an inn parlour lie behind red curtains, and a table be drawn toward the fire. Let there be a loin of cold beef, an elbow of yellow cheese, a tankard of dog's nose. Then may we prop our Bacon's Essays against the pewter and study those mellow words: "Certainly it is heaven upon earth to have a man's mind move in charity, rest in providence, and turn upon the poles of truth." Haec studio, pernoctant ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... chair, pale as ashes. All was lost, then. Cora had betrayed him! But he resolved not to commit himself. Perhaps Madeline had only verbal information. While he was trying to frame a speech, however, she knocked this last prop from under him. ...
— Madeline Payne, the Detective's Daughter • Lawrence L. Lynch
... serve an invalid's breakfast with a refinement of care which Diana herself before that would not have known how to give another, though she appreciated it and took her lesson. Then nobody could so nicely and deftly prop up pillows and cushions so as to make her rest comfortably for the taking of the meal; no one had such skilful strength to enable a weak person to change his position. For all other things, Diana saw no difference in him; nothing told ...
— Diana • Susan Warner
... thatch of hair upon his shrunken skull, and harsh was the thin voice that came from his straight, colourless lips. He walked with a cane, and seldom without the patient, much-berated Wade at his elbow, a prop against the dreaded day when his legs would go back on him and the brink would appear abruptly out of nowhere at his very feet. And there were times when he put his hand to his side and held it there till the look of ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon
... timber,—they couldn't sell 'em, Never an axe had seen their chips, And the wedges flew from between their lips, Their blunt ends frizzled like celery-tips; Step and prop-iron, bolt and screw, Spring, tire, axle, and linchpin too, Steel of the finest, bright and blue; Thoroughbrace bison-skin, thick and wide; Boot, top, dasher, from tough old hide Found in the pit when the tanner died. That was the ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... again, the sufferers telling themselves that it would be madness to go to sleep. But, madness or no, Nature said they must; and almost simultaneously, after seating themselves in the bottom of the boat, so as to prop themselves in the corners between the thwart and side, they glided lower and lower, and at last lay prone in the most profound of slumber, totally unconscious of everything but the great need which would renew with fresh vigour ...
— Cormorant Crag - A Tale of the Smuggling Days • George Manville Fenn
... that sort of thing a rarity? 'Most every window in our house is like this. I prop mine with ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller |
