"Tinker" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... course of the hours and minutes, at the same time disclose the whole combination of springs and wheels whereby they are moved." A similar transparency of motive and purpose, of individual traits and spontaneous action, belongs to the Bible. From the hand of Shakspeare, "the lord and the tinker, the hero and the valet, come forth equally distinct and clear." In the Bible the various sorts of men are never confounded, but have the advantage of being exhibited by Nature herself, and are not a contrivance of the imagination. "Shylock," ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... A tinker and a tailor, Had once a doubtful strife, sir, To make a maid a wife, sir, Whose name was buxom Joan. For now the time was ended, When she no more intended To lick her lips at men, sir, And gnaw the sheets in vain, sir, And lie o' ...
— Love for Love • William Congreve
... WEDDING: Rather boisterous comedy of a tinker-woman who upsets ancient custom by insisting on ...
— The Atlantic Book of Modern Plays • Various
... at the drunkard manufacturing machine behind her. That confounded pot, as round as the stomach of a tinker's fat wife, with its nose that was so long and twisted, sent a shiver down her back, a fear mingled with a desire. Yes, one might have thought it the metal pluck of some big wicked woman, of some witch who was discharging drop by drop the fire of her entrails. A fine source of poison, an ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... lazy as Ludman's dog, who leaned against the wall to bark. As lazy as the tinker, who laid ...
— 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue • Captain Grose et al.
... due to Dr. Robert K. Root and Dr. Chauncey B. Tinker of Yale University, and to Dr. Charles H. Whitman of Lehigh University, for examining part of the work in manuscript, and to Dr. Albert S. Cook of Yale University for a careful ...
— The Elene of Cynewulf • Cynewulf
... sentiment to take sides, and the bitterest of feeling was engendered. The raids of passing soldiers was the excuse for the organization, by both sides, of bands who claimed they were "Home Guards"—the Federals under "Tinker" Beaty, and the Confederates under Champ Ferguson. These bands, each striving for the mastery, soon developed into guerrillas of the worst type the war produced, ...
— Sergeant York And His People • Sam Cowan
... was Nathan Perry, with a mechanical instinct that gloried in adjustment. He loved to tinker and potter and patch things up. Now something was wrong with the gearing of his heart action. His theory was that Anne was for the moment crazy. He could see nothing to get excited about over the renomination and election ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... have all de trouble in de world. He boy, Ned, die in de war and William, what name for he pa, drink bad all de time. And after de war dem Ku Kluxers what wear de false faces try to tinker with Marse's niggers. One day Uncle Dave start to town and a Kluxer ask him where am he pass. Dat Kluxer clout him but Uncle Dave outrun him in de cane. Marse grab de hoss and go 'rest dat man and Marse a jedge and he make dat man pay de fine for hittin' Uncle ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Texas Narratives, Part 1 • Works Projects Administration
... such men, who murdered every prisoner that they took, and they took part, as their politics inclined them, with either side. For a long time Ferguson hunted, or was hunted by, a man of his own order and nearly as notorious on the other side, namely, "Tinker Dave Beattie." On the evening of the 7th, we encamped in the vicinity of Livingston. Leaving early next morning, by midday we reached the Cumberland river at the ford near the small village of Selina. Here Colonel Morgan received positive information of the strength and position of the enemy ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke
... why tar supplies all sorts of useful material is because it is indeed the quintessence of the forest, of the forests of untold millenniums if it is coal tar. If you are acquainted with a village tinker, one of those all-round mechanics who still survive in this age of specialization and can mend anything from a baby-carriage to an automobile, you will know that he has on the floor of his back shop ...
— Creative Chemistry - Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries • Edwin E. Slosson
... a flock of geese feeding around him. Next I passed a bare-footed cantonnier breaking stones, and he told me that if I made haste I might reach Neuvic before dark. On the outskirts of a village—Roche-le-Peyroux—a wandering tinker and his boy were at work by the side of the road with fire and bellows, and I felt a trampish or romantic desire to stay with them awhile in the cheerful glow; but thinking of the coming night, ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... to be frightened because he was so angry, and he spoke right out loud! He stood up and shook his fist at the Tinker. His head showed over the top of the wall. ...
— The Irish Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... to puzzle out his philosophy. For the ordinary French philosophy of the war is very simple. They have no high-falutin, altruistic ideas of improving the Boche. They don't care a tinker's curse what happens to the unholy brood beyond the Rhine, so long as they are beaten, humiliated, subjected: so long as there is no chance of their ever deflowering again with their brutality the sacred soil of France. The French mind cannot ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... the great chimney, a very tall old woman clad in a red cloak and a slouched bonnet, having all the appearance of a gipsy or tinker. She smoked silently at her clay pipe, while the doubtful-looking landlady ...
— Red Cap Tales - Stolen from the Treasure Chest of the Wizard of the North • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... PROGRESS, and HOLY WAR, are apparently little aware of the glowing genius, and fervent piety, and strong sense, and picturesque imagery, and racy, vigorous English, that mark the many other writings of the honored tinker of Elstow. These last, if less known than the story of the pilgrimage to the Celestial City, and of the siege and recovery of the good town of Mansoul, yet bear all of them the traces of the same vivid fancy, the same earnest heart, and the same robust and sanctified intellect. ...
— The Riches of Bunyan • Jeremiah Rev. Chaplin
... most popular religious writer in the English language, was born at Elstow, about a mile from Bedford, in the year 1628. He may be said to have been born a tinker. The tinkers then formed a hereditary caste, which was held in no high estimation. They were generally vagrants and pilferers, and were often confounded with the gypsies, whom, in truth, they nearly resembled. Bunyan's father was more respectable than most of the tribe. He had a fixed residence, ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... records, of letters, of printing, of critics; wars, revolutions, factions, and other causes, occasioned these defects in ancient history. Chronology and astronomy are forced to tinker up and reconcile, as well as they can, those uncertainties. This satisfies the learned—but what should we think of the reign of George the Second, to be calculated two thousand years hence by eclipses, lest the conquest of Canada should be ascribed ...
— Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third • Horace Walpole
... ingenuity of analogy, and in his forcible quaintness of style, as completely as he did in social status and in personal surroundings. In complete contrast to the romantic productions of the self-educated tinker of Bedford, the works of Walton and Evelyn were at any rate influenced by, though they can hardly be said to have been moulded upon, the style of the preceding age of old English prose writers ending with Milton. The influence of the latter is, indeed, ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... not unearnestly, with every sort of reverend person I can get to talk to me—from the Bishop of Strasburg (as good a specimen of a town bishop as I have known), with whom I was studying ecstatic paintings in the year 1850—down to the simplest traveling tinker inclined Gospelwards, whom I perceive to be sincere, and your correspondent will perceive that my rapid numerical expression must be far beneath the truth. He subjoins his more rational doubt of my acquaintance with many town missionaries; to ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... he would begin to read the passage, where Mansie, simple soul that he was, was described as going into the byre in the morning to learn if the cow had calved during the night, and finding, on opening the door, the donkey of a traveling tinker, he turned and ran into the house, crying: "Mither! Mither! The coo has calved, an' ...
— The Underworld - The Story of Robert Sinclair, Miner • James C. Welsh
... above all others in advertisements for help wanted. This is the land of hustle. Tinker, tailor, candlestick-maker; lawyer, merchant, priest; if you are not a "live-wire" you are not "help wanted"—"Cook wanted. On dairy farm, twelve miles from town. White, industrious. Must be a ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... the zeal of his adversaries bestowed the surname of the Atheist. His restless and aspiring spirit urged him to try almost every profession of human life. He was successively a slave, or at least a husbandman, a travelling tinker, a goldsmith, a physician, a schoolmaster, a theologian, and at last the apostle of a new church, which was propagated by the abilities of his disciple Eunomius. Armed with texts of Scripture, and with captious syllogisms from the logic of Aristotle, the ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... scared!" said Gribble, kindly. "It's only a broken bone or so." As this consoling assurance seemed not to lessen Jane's alarm, he went on cheerfully to say, "There isn't one in my body hasn't been splintered by these broncos! Tinker 'em up and they're better than new. Here's doc coming lickety-switch! ...
— A Prairie Infanta • Eva Wilder Brodhead
... for John Bunyan—how He made one of the mightiest instruments for good the world ever saw, out of that swearing Bedford tinker. If we had a telescope which would enable us to look into heaven as Stephen did, I can imagine we should see the thief, who believed in Jesus while on the cross, very near the throne. Ask him how he got there; ...
— Sovereign Grace - Its Source, Its Nature and Its Effects • Dwight Moody
... a mass o' blind onreas'ning prejudice from horn to tail. Take hes sense o' colour: he can't abide red. Ef you press the matter, there ain't no more reas'n for this than that hes father afore him cudn' abide et; but how does he act? 'Hulloa!' says he, 'there's a party in red, an' I don't care a tinker's cuss whether 'tes a mail-cart or a milisha-man: I'm bound to stop this 'ere taste for red ef I dies nex' minnit.' And at et he goes accordin'. Ef he seed the Scarlet Woman about in his part o' the country, he'd lay by an' h'ist her, an' you'd say, 'Well done!' an' I don't say ...
— The Astonishing History of Troy Town • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... not sleepy at eight o'clock; he had been flying about while the others had been yawning before the fire. He would like to sit up just to see how much more solemn and stupid it would become as the night went on; he wanted to tinker his skates, to mend his sled, to finish that chapter. Why should he go away from that bright blaze, and the company that sat in its radiance, to the cold and solitude of his chamber? Why did n't the people who were sleepy go ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... the point!" he snapped out. "I don't begrudge the poor devils their soup. What I feel is this: If she'd cared a tinker's damn for me she'd never ...
— The Amazing Interlude • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... play periods, Jimmy took to staying in. The permissive school encouraged it; if Jimmy Holden preferred to tinker with a typewriter instead of playing noisy games, his teacher saw no wrong in it—for his Third Grade teacher was something of an ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith
... with care and anxiety, about this farming project of mine, that my muse has degenerated into the veriest prose-wench that ever picked cinders, or followed a tinker. When I am fairly got into the routine of business, I shall trouble you with a longer epistle; perhaps with some queries respecting farming; at present, the world sits such a load on my mind, that it has effaced almost every trace of the poet ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... matter. Mrs. Hedgehog and I had never seen tinkers, and we resolved to take an early opportunity some evening of sending the seven urchins down to the burdock plantations to pick snails, whilst we paid a cautious visit to the tinker camp. ...
— Brothers of Pity and Other Tales of Beasts and Men • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... hair, and a very peculiar shrill voice and laugh. His most intimate friend at Eton was a boy named Price, who was considered one of the best classical scholars amongst us. At his tutor, Bethell's, where he lodged, he attempted many mechanical and scientific experiments. By the aid of a common tinker, he contrived to make something like a steam-engine, which, unfortunately, one day suddenly exploded; to the great consternation of the neighbourhood and to the imminent danger of a ...
— Reminiscences of Captain Gronow • Rees Howell Gronow
... of the peace; "you can shut up your school at five o'clock every night, and every cheesemonger and tinker in the place can do the same; but we've got no time we can call our own. Pull your chair up to the fire, old fellow. Let's see, what were we saying?" The servant appeared again at this point, ...
— Parkhurst Boys - And Other Stories of School Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... have it sent over here," said Tom, "unless I'll send my own horse and cart to fetch it. And every man and boy I have about the place is desired to leave me at the command of some d——d O'Toole, whose father kept a tinker's shop somewhere in County Mayo, and whose mother ...
— The Landleaguers • Anthony Trollope
... found on the roll of free miners—Garone, Clarke, Wytt, Nortone, Mitchell, Lumbart, Ocle, Barton, Heynes, Arminger, Rogers, Hathen, Miller, Croudfell, Dull, Loofe, Forthey, Walker, Tinker, Witch, Delewger, Doles, Hinde, Tellow, Backstar, Lawrence, Dolet, Caloe, Holt; in place of which names the following now occur—Baldwin, Cook, Dobbs, Hale, Jenkins, Kear, Morgan, Philipps, Harper, Davis, ...
— The Forest of Dean - An Historical and Descriptive Account • H. G. Nicholls
... and Howe must be added the name of a man far below them in station and in acquired knowledge, but in virtue their equal, and in genius their superior, John Bunyan. Bunyan had been bred a tinker, and had served as a private soldier in the parliamentary army. Early in his life he had been fearfully tortured by remorse for his youthful sins, the worst of which seem, however, to have been such as the world ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... desolateness of lonely wolds, with the passion of loyalty to a leader. Read "Deor's Lament," "Widsith," "The Wanderer," "The Sea-farer," or the battle-songs of Brunanburh and Maldon in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. [Footnote: See Cook and Tinker, Select Translations from Old English Poetry (Boston, 1902), and Pancoast and Spaeth, Early English Poems (New York, 1911).] The last strophe of "Deor's Lament," our oldest English lyric, ends ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... eight or ten men, was hardly ever together except at decisive moments, and we were usually scattered by twos and threes about the towns and villages. Each one of us pretended to have some trade. One was a tinker, another was a groom; I was supposed to peddle haberdashery, but I hardly ever showed myself in large places, on account of my unlucky business at Seville. One day, or rather one night, we were to meet below Veger. El Dancaire and I got there ...
— Carmen • Prosper Merimee
... hoped ye'd feel all right this mornin'. Let's see th' bandage—I guess it's slipped." He began to tinker at the wound in rather a clumsy way until ...
— The Red Badge of Courage - An Episode of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... the French clergy as French citizens? How far off are we from a revival of Danton's beautiful doctrine that, in order to consummate the regeneration of society, all conditions imposed upon the eligibility of citizens to act as judges ought to be immediately abolished, so that a tinker, or a butcher, or a bootblack, or a chiffonnier might be made a French magistrate just as well as a trained student of the laws? As you know, one of the first things Danton, as Minister of Justice, did was to carry through the Convention his famous decree making ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... up the shaft for us,—a cunning old beggar, the pere de famille of the encampment; up to every move on the board. He wanted to have a deal with me for Jessy. But 'pon my honor, we had a good time of it. There was the old tinker, mending the shaft, in his fur cap, with a black pipe, one inch long, sticking out of his mouth; and the old brown parchment of a mother, with her head in a red handkerchief, smoking a ditto pipe to the tinker's, who told our fortunes, and talked like ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... in detail, so I will merely bid you note that aristocratic pedigree-tracers confine themselves to one line, or to a few lines. Burke will tell you that one of the great-great-grandfathers of the present Lord Foozlem was the First Baron; he is silent about his great-grandfather, the tinker, and his great-grandfather, the pettifogging country lawyer. Americans are far more apt to push their genealogical investigations in all directions, because they are prompted by a legitimate curiosity rather than by desire to prove a point, ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... shouted Robert Danforth from the forge, in a full, deep, merry voice, that made the roof re-echo. "And what says Miss Annie to that doctrine? She, I suppose, will think it a genteeler business to tinker up a lady's watch than to forge a horseshoe ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... you, Mr. Burns, and the way you go about admiring every tinker-peddler who tosses a rhyme together. Ye've no sense of your own value at times. Do you know," she went on, fair glorious to see in her enthusiasm glowering down at him—"Do you know that when this man Shenstone's grave ...
— Nancy Stair - A Novel • Elinor Macartney Lane
... inexperienced teacher will find a splendid version, "The Story of Beowulf," ready-made in Wyche's Some Great Stories and How to Tell Them. To work from the complete epic, use any of the translations by Child, Tinker, Gummere, or Hall. "Perhaps it is not too much to assert . . . that in its lofty spirit, its vigor, and its sincerity, . . . it reflects traits which are distinctive of English-speaking people ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... very much obliged to you.—You send a brazier to challenge me, and now, I suppose, you have brought a travelling tinker for his second. Where ...
— John Bull - The Englishman's Fireside: A Comedy, in Five Acts • George Colman
... was an Englishman, believed to be the son of a gipsy tinker. He said his youth was very ungodly; but he married a religious woman and early became a preacher. At the same time he began to write books of a religious nature. Because he preached at "unlawful ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... trying to build their own cars," said Ernest. "More accidents come from that than people realize. While the war was going on, no one had time to tinker at building, but now half the chaps I know are studying up and attempting to make ...
— Battling the Clouds - or, For a Comrade's Honor • Captain Frank Cobb
... it for a pony, dear boy," grinned Beaumanoir. "There was a deuce of a shindy when three fat johnnies tried to pull me out of my compartment. I told 'em I didn't give a tinker's continental for their bally frontier, and then the band played. I slung one joker through the window. Good job it was open, or he might have ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... latter fact has indeed obtained a fair amount of recognition since Mr. Froude drew the attention of the general reader to it in his book on Bunyan, in the "English Men of Letters" series, five-and-twenty years ago: but it must have struck careful readers of the great tinker's minor works long before. Indeed there are very good internal reasons for thinking that no less a person than Thackeray must have known Mr. Badman. This wonderful little sketch, however—the related history of a man who is an utter rascal both in family and commercial relations, ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... with dew, and crossed by the shadows of the bare elms, Atherley's little sons, Harold and Denis, were playing with a very unlovely but much-beloved mongrel called Tip. They had bought him with their own pocket-money from a tinker who was ill-using him, and then claimed for him the hospitality of their parents; so, though Atherley often spoke of the dog as a disgrace to the household, he remained a member thereof, and received, from a ...
— Cecilia de Noel • Lanoe Falconer
... day, and when Herbert came back and we had found a bed-room for our visitor in Essex Street, he told us all of it. His name was Magwitch—Abel Magwitch—he called himself Provis now—and he had been left by a travelling tinker to grow up alone. "In jail and out of jail, in jail and out of jail—that's my life pretty much, down to such times as I got shipped off, arter Pip stood my friend." But there was a man who "set up fur a ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol III • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... so constituted not a science but a mystery. So has it always been with chemistry, the most cosmopolitan of sciences, the most secret of arts. Quietly and stealthily it crept through the world; the tinker brought it with his solder and his flux; the African tribes who were the first workers in iron passed it on to the great metallurgists who ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... old saucepan that had been laid by until the tinker's next visit, and gave it to the Hillman. He thanked her ...
— The Child's World - Third Reader • Hetty Browne, Sarah Withers, W.K. Tate
... into a box, intending to carry it off and throw it away in some distant place, so that they might be no more plagued by the goblin. For this day their troubles were over; but, as luck would have it, the tinker who was in the habit of working for the temple called in, and the priest suddenly bethought him that it was a pity to throw the kettle away for nothing, and that he might as well get a trifle for it, no matter how small. So he brought out the kettle, which had resumed its former ...
— Tales of Old Japan • Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford
... to tinker with voting the first thing necessary is to get rid of the constitution. We have had one for a hundred and twenty-five years with a provision for changing it. It has needed change. It needs it all the while, and yet it has never been changed but once. They passed several amendments all in a heap. ...
— Industrial Conspiracies • Clarence S. Darrow
... 'Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, gentleman, apothecary, ploughboy, thief,' said Katie. 'That would only be eight; what should the ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... Frank Brangwyn may fall upon unresponsive ears; yet he has a Continental reputation and is easily the foremost English impressionist. New York has seen but little of his work; if we mistake not, there was a large piece of his, a Gipsy Tinker in the open air, hung several seasons ago at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Mr. Kennedy shows extraordinary etchings of his at the Wunderlich Galleries. We call them extraordinary not alone because of their size, but also because Brangwyn is practically the first ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... because you have never learned to use tools properly," said his father. "Where do you suppose I'd be now if I hadn't started out when I was a boy to tinker round a farm? That's where I got my manual training, and there isn't a course in the country that can equal it. I had to use my brains, too, as well as my hands, for very often the things I needed were not to be had and ...
— The Story of Porcelain • Sara Ware Bassett
... would!" Lady Muriel gaily retorted. "Soldiers, sailors, tinkers, tailors, what a lot of words would fit in! I think 'my tinker-lad sounds best. Don't you?" ...
— Sylvie and Bruno • Lewis Carroll
... book without one word in it of John Bunyan, the tinker, probably the gipsy, who although born only and not made a poet, like his great brother, John Milton, has uttered in prose a wealth of poetic thought. He was born in 1628, twenty years after Milton. I must not, however, remark on this noble ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... game, yes; but a cursed poor game—for a God. The counters don't matter, I know; they'll soon be broken up and flung away; and the sooner the better. It's living hell to be born into a world where there's no justice—none for king or tinker." ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... many myths and portents, that Niebuhr himself could hardly have distinguished between the fable and the truth. It was said and believed that he was a foundling—a Gipsy's son, a wandering beggar, a tinker. Others had seen him in rags, selling pencils at the steps between the Pont-Neuf and the Pont-au-Change. Others, again, maintained that he had for years filled the canine office of guide to an old blind mendicant, whose beat was about the Rue de Bauboug; and were even furnished with a number ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... inevitably retained stuffy old Tom Hingman at seventy-five hundred dollars a year to handle the calendar in Part Five. Yet those on the inside knew why very well. It was because Tom long ago, in his prehistoric youth, had learned that the way to secure verdicts was to appear not to care a tinker's dam whether the jury found the defendant guilty or not. He pretended never to know anything about any case in advance, to be in complete ignorance as to who the witnesses might be and to what they were going to testify, and to ...
— By Advice of Counsel • Arthur Train
... other engineer in all the navies o' the world would take a month to tinker with her, even if he didn't have to send to ...
— Told in the East • Talbot Mundy
... reaping-hook into a sabre, or getting a long pike made with an axe at the end of it; so Michael Stein's smithy is turned into a perfect armoury, and he and his two sons are at work at the anvil morning, noon, and night: they made Annot blow the bellows this morning, till she looks for all the world like a tinker's wife." ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope
... tell 'e this. If you dare to lift up your eyes to my child again, or stop her in the way, or have speech with her, I'll set p'liceman 'pon 'e! For a year and more she 'm not her awn mistress; and, at the end of that time, if she doan't get better sense than to tinker arter a harum-scarum young jackanapes like you, she ban't a true Lyddon. Now be off with 'e an' doan't dare to look same way Phoebe 's walkin', no more, else ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... and suggested the good results of another well compounded punch, which the general ordered without delay. "I tell you, sir," Mr. Tickler resumed, "he is an oily gentleman in very shabby clothes, and might be easily mistaken for a cross between a toper and a tinker. Lacking capacity for any other business, he forms a cheap connection with the press, where his first office would seem to be that of sitting in judgment upon literature. Indeed, I have seldom seen a more shabby gentleman set up for a man of letters. His aversion to water and clean linen is ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... "You saucy tinker's apprentice, if you don't cease your jaw, I'll——" But here she gasped for breath, unable to hawk up any more words, for the last volley of O'Connell had nearly knocked ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous
... countenance, and similarly clad; there were blind mendicants, with patched or bandaged eyes; crippled ones, with wooden legs and crutches; diseased ones, with running sores peeping from ineffectual wrappings; there was a villain-looking pedlar with his pack; a knife-grinder, a tinker, and a barber-surgeon, with the implements of their trades; some of the females were hardly-grown girls, some were at prime, some were old and wrinkled hags, and all were loud, brazen, foul-mouthed; and all soiled ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... not know, indeed, why we troubled our heads about the matter at all,' said the man in black; 'but when you talk about perverting the meaning of the text, you speak ignorantly, Mr. Tinker. When He whom you call the Saviour gave His followers the sop and bade them eat it, telling them it was His body, He delicately alluded to what it was incumbent upon them to do after His death, namely, ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... cried his friend—"the worst of all! Avarice is a gentleman to ambition! Avarice is merely a tinker, a dealer in old metal; but ambition is a chimney-sweep of a passion: a mere climbing-boy, who will go through any dirty hole in all Christendom only to get out at the top of the chimney. But you have not guessed, Wilton—you ...
— The King's Highway • G. P. R. James
... his face, (Silent heart-homage—plant of special grace!) At the lane's entrance, slackening oft his pace, Would Ambrose send a loving look before; Conceiting the caged blackbird at the door, The very blackbird, strain'd its little throat In welcome, with a more rejoicing note; And honest Tinker! dog of doubtful breed, All bristle, back, and tail, but "good at need," Pleasant his greeting to the accustomed ear; But of all welcomes pleasantest, most dear, The ringing voices, like sweet silver bells, Of his two little ones. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... Put a peg in that! Shiver my soul if this is a way to welcome friends! Come aboard all of you and test the Canary we got in the hold of a fine Spanish galleon last week! Such a top-heavy ship, with sails like a tinker's tatters, you never saw! And her hold running over with Canary and Madeira—oh! Come aboard! ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut
... "this wounded leg, these crusted lips, this anxious, weary mind. Come away for a time, until your body becomes more habitable." And so she coaxes the mind away into the Nirvana of delirium, while the little cell-workers tinker and toil within to get things better for its home-coming. When you see the veil of cruelty which nature wears, try and peer through it, and you will sometimes catch a glimpse of a very homely, kindly ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle
... prompts conservative minds to throw every mover for change upon the defensive, when liturgical interests are at stake. So many men are born into the world with a native disposition to tamper with and tinker all settled things, and so many more become persuaded, as time goes on, of a personal "mission" to pull down and remake whatever has been once built up, esteeming life a failure unless they have contrived to build each his ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington
... and a poor, ill-fed beast harnessed to it, happened to be passing, and heard the little girl's words. He stared after her, for she seemed very small to speak so wisely, and the tinker did not, of course, know that she was only repeating what she had heard her ...
— Our Young Folks at Home and Abroad • Various
... the disgusted skipper of the Wireless. "No use in my trying to tinker with the job. It will take a practical machinist to overhaul the plagued contraption. I guess you'll have to give us a tow to Memphis, where I can put a man to work getting this engine ...
— Motor Boat Boys Mississippi Cruise - or, The Dash for Dixie • Louis Arundel
... first father of all religion, is not he stark blind, that he can not himself distinguish of colors, so he would make us as mope-eyed in judging falsely of all love concerns, and wheedle us into a thinking that we are always in the right? Thus every Jack sticks to his own Jill; every tinker esteems his own trull; and the hobnailed suitor prefers Joan the milkmaid before any of milady's daughters. These things are true, and are ordinarily laughed at, and yet, however ridiculous they seem, it is hence only that all societies receive their cement ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... will you gain dragging me to the priest this night, I'm saying, when it's new thoughts you'll be thinking at the dawn of day? SARAH — teasingly. — It's at the dawn of day I do be thinking I'd have a right to be going off to the rich tinker's do be travelling from Tibradden to the Tara Hill; for it'd be a fine life to ...
— The Tinker's Wedding • J. M. Synge
... replied Deaker, "you forget, that you had more vices, and,'hammers, too, in your family, and more brass, than ever I or mine could' boast of. If the memory of that successful old tinker, your grandfather, had not passed out of your mind, you would make no allusion to vices or screws, and take care, my good hot-brained young fellow, that you don't die in your family trade, and come to ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... said Patsy Kenny. "Too hard. He had no right to be carryin' all that tinker's stuff. That man of yours, my girl, oughtn't to be let ...
— Love of Brothers • Katharine Tynan
... "There's a Tinker's boy in the town," said the Innkeeper, darkly, "and he's always looking out for Hedgehogs—I shouldn't be surprised if he ...
— Soap-Bubble Stories - For Children • Fanny Barry
... 'usual crowd': the three young ladies, commonly; one or two young men who understand how to tinker the oil-stove—which usually needs it—and how to prime the pump. They once asked me to do these things; but I've discovered that younger men enjoy it more than I do, so I let them do it. Besides these, a number of miscellaneous ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... twenty, found himself married in 1645 to a "godly" wife as young and penniless as himself. So poor were the young couple that they could scarce muster a spoon and a plate between them; and the poverty of their home deepened perhaps the gloom of the young tinker's restlessness and religious depression. His wife did what she could to comfort him, teaching him again to read and write for he had forgotten his school-learning, and reading with him in two little "godly" books which formed his library. But darkness only gathered ...
— History of the English People, Volume VI (of 8) - Puritan England, 1642-1660; The Revolution, 1660-1683 • John Richard Green
... one rule, that stood in place of many: To keep out of every business which it was possible for human wisdom to stave aside. 'What good will you get of going into that? Parliamentary criticism, argument and botheration? Leave well alone. And even leave ill alone:—are you the tradesman to tinker leaky vessels in England? You will not want for work. Mind your pudding, and say little!' At home and abroad, that was the safe secret. For, in Foreign Politics, his rule was analogous: 'Mind your own affairs. ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... Ship! I've loved and left more of them than I can remember. I've been nearly everything you can think of but a tinker or a soldier; I've been a boundary rider; I've sheared sheep and humped my swag and harpooned a whale; I've rigged ships and skinned dead bullocks and prospected for gold—and turned my back on more money than the old man would have scraped ...
— One Day More - A Play In One Act • Joseph Conrad
... that had been recurring since the world was made, and had been misunderstood from the beginning. He used the simplest means. His experiment was in a different way daily performed for him by nature. He was philosophically daring, indifferently a tinker with nature's terrific machinery; a knocker at the door of an august temple that men were never known to have entered; a mortal who smiled in the face of inscrutable and awful mystery, and who defied the lightning in a sense not merely moral. [Footnote: Professor Richmann, ...
— Steam Steel and Electricity • James W. Steele
... would have fallen down and worshipped him: for the second, John Bright would have clothed his whole company gratuitously in drab. He is fond of fighting, and ready to take up the cudgels with any chance customer; but, somehow or other, he has invariably the worst of the encounter. Tinker, beggar-man, tanner, shepherd, and curtail friar, in succession, bring him to his knees, and his life would have been many times a forfeit, but for the timely assistance of his horn, which brought Little John and the rest ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... I passed the cow and went on, stopping an hour later at a lonely log house, where I found French people, and a welcome that included moose meat, a cup of coffee, and fried potatoes. Leaving, I rode some miles with a travelling tinker, a voluble, well-meaning youth who took a liking for me, and went far out of his way to help me on. He blushed proudly when, stopping to mend a pot for the cook at a camp of militia, they inquired if I was ...
— D'Ri and I • Irving Bacheller
... leaving off like one, when you wish he would give you another touch or coup de grace ... He really sometimes puts me in mind of Gil Blas; but he has not the sneer of the Frenchman, nor does he gild the bad. He has a touch of Bunyan, and, like that enthusiastic tinker, hammers away, a la Gitano, whenever he thinks he can thwack the Devil or his man-of-all-work on earth—the Pope. Therein he resembles my friend and everybody's friend—Punch—who, amidst all his adventures, never spares the black one. However, I am not going to review him now; for I ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... official Bank-paper and State-paper Clothes) into the Man himself; and discern, it may be, in this or the other Dread Potentate, a more or less incompetent Digestive-apparatus; yet also an inscrutable venerable Mystery, in the meanest Tinker that sees ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... The tinker, for such I supposed him to be, without altering his posture, raised his eyes, looked at me for a moment, gave a slight nod, and then once more fixed his eyes upon the table. I took a draught of the ale, which I found excellent; ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... of real good sense and cultured taste objecting to "The Pilgrim's Progress." Why should he not? Millions of people have read the book, but millions have not; and the fact that many of the best judges of style love Bunyan offers no reason why the good tinker should be loved by everybody. As for "Don Quixote," a fine critic once remarked that he would choose that book if he were to be imprisoned for life, and if he were also allowed to choose one volume. Doubtless ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... Ticket Harvey Tiffman Andrew Tillen Jacob Tillen Peter Tillender Thomas Tillinghast David Tilmouse John Tilson Nicholas Tilson Grale Timcent George Timford Jeremiah Timrer Alexander Tindell James Tinker William Tinley Joseph Tinleys Anthony Tioffe Samuel Tippen Jean Tirve Stephen Tissina Michael Titcomb Moses Titcomb James Tobin Thomas Tobin (2) John Todd William Todd Thomas Tolley Francis Tollings Henry Tollmot Thomas Tomay James ...
— American Prisoners of the Revolution • Danske Dandridge
... if Henry Fielding, barrister, journalist, tinker of plays and man-about-town, would ever have turned novelist, had it not been for Richardson, his predecessor. So slight, so seemingly accidental, are the incidents which make or mar careers and change the course of literary history. Certain it is that the immediate cause of Fielding's first ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... indicate that the theme of the taming of a wife is crude and primitive folk-farce, particularly suited to the taste of the drunken tinker ...
— Shakespeare Study Programs; The Comedies • Charlotte Porter and Helen A. Clarke
... no sooner had finger'd the cole, But he hies him abroad with his good Madam Vole- Where, like a true tinker, he managed this metal, And while he stopp'd one hole, ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... a tinker's damn what you've done," he said forcibly. "Remember that! We're brothers, and I'll stick to you. If there's anything in life that I can do to help, I'll do it. If there isn't, well, I won't worry you, but you know you can count on me just ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... All the other outfits have been sent for, and we'll have enough men to make our bluff stand up, never fear. From what I learn, these herds belong to a lot of Yankee speculators, and they don't give a tinker's dam if all the cattle in Montana die from fever. They're no better than anybody else, and if we allow them to go through, they'll leave a trail of dead natives that will stink us out of this valley. Make ...
— The Outlet • Andy Adams
... one of these Wretches to be seen, but in short, if it has been in other Nations as it is with us, I do not see that the DEVIL was able to get any better People into his Pay, or at least very rarely: Where have we seen any thing above a Tinker turn Wizard? and where have we had a Witch of Quality among us, Mother Je———gs excepted? and if she had not been more of something else than a Witch, 'twas thought she had never got so much Money by ...
— The History of the Devil - As Well Ancient as Modern: In Two Parts • Daniel Defoe
... glass; but I can't carry a man a thousand miles in my pocket to put that glass into these frames; and if it is done in New Zealand, ten to one it gets broken on the voyage; whereas, glass by itself will pack well. Besides, a pane gets broken, and then I am in a nice fix. To know how to tinker a bit is a good thing; else your only saucepan or tea-kettle may be lying by you useless for months. In fact, if I had known all this before, I should be just ten times as useful as I am now. If anyone you know thinks of emigrating or becoming ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... we'll try anything ye choose to put us at. I had a brother once who was a sort of tinker to trade, an' great at mendin' pots, pans, old umbrellas, and the like. I wos used to help him when a boy. P'r'aps if yer honour, now, has got a old umbrella as wants refittin', I might ...
— The Battle and the Breeze • R.M. Ballantyne
... for ninety-nine of your qualities I do not care a tinker's curse: but as a man who, after three tumblers of neat brandy, can tell Marsala from Madeira you are to ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 6, No. 5, April, 1896 • Various
... that for ninety-nine of your qualities I do not care a tinker's curse; but for your palate you are to be ...
— I Saw Three Ships and Other Winter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... were in their early and vigorous growth eighty years ago. I rode in our family carriage to church with Sheldon Dibble and Reuben Tinker, who were just leaving Auburn Theological Seminary to go out as our pioneer missionaries to the Sandwich Islands. The Missionary Herald was taken in a great number of families and read with great avidity. Many of the readers ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... letter from Cambridge to the Christian Observer, very feelingly states the case of a Gypsey family, the father of which, being a travelling tinker and fiddler, intimated, he would be glad to have all his children brought up to some other mode of life, and even to embrace some other himself; but he finds a difficulty in it. Not having been brought up in husbandry, he could not go through the labour of it; and few, if ...
— A Historical Survey of the Customs, Habits, & Present State of the Gypsies • John Hoyland
... Warrington emptied his pockets upon the table; silver and gold and paper. "Eh? That's the stuff. Without it the world's not worth a tinker's dam. Count out ...
— Parrot & Co. • Harold MacGrath
... on the stage, but they are not of a sort to reveal Shakespeare's greatest qualities. The induction, the framework in which the play is set, is, however, quite another matter. The story of the drunken tinker, Sly, unfortunately omitted in many modern presentations, is a little masterpiece. A nobleman returning from the hunt finds Sly lying in a drunken stupor before an inn. The nobleman has Sly taken to his country house, has him dressed in rich clothing, has him awakened by servants who make him believe ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... my dear! its ma is making patty-cakes; and put it up there to be out of the way of Tom Tinker's dog. I'll soon hush it up," said the old woman; and, trotting it on her ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... flying, hiking, rock climbing, aviation, target-shooting, sailing, caving, juggling, skiing, skating (ice and roller). Hackers' delight in techno-toys also tends to draw them towards hobbies with nifty complicated equipment that they can tinker with. ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... the baptism of Francois Xavier, tenth son of Pierre Lecour, master-butcher, of this Parish, and of his wife, Marie LeCoq. He had for godfather, Jean LeCoq, tinker, and for godmother, Therese, wife of Louis ...
— The False Chevalier - or, The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette • William Douw Lighthall
... modest damsel, who will be most willing to wait on thee, and be thy bow-bearer.—Only, for her mother's sake, let there pass some slight form of marriage between you—Ye need no license or priest in these happy days, but may be buckled like beggars in a ditch, with a hedge for a church-roof, and a tinker for a priest. I crave pardon of you for making such an officious and simple request—perhaps you are a ranter—or one of the family of Love, or hold marriage rites as unnecessary, as Knipperdoling, ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... was a tailor. Cardinal Wolsey, Defoe, and Kirke White were butchers' sons. Faraday was the son of a blacksmith, and his teacher, Humphry Davy, was an apprentice to an apothecary. Kepler was a waiter boy in a German hotel, Bunyan a tinker, Copernicus the son of a Polish baker. The boy Herschel played the oboe for his meals. Marshal Ney, the "bravest of the brave," rose from the ranks. His great industry gained for him the name of "The Indefatigable." Soult served fourteen years before he was ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... we will allow her time enough, after giving mankind the inspired tinker who painted the Christian's life as that of a hunted animal, "never long at ease," desponding, despairing, on the verge of self-murder,—painted it with an originality, a vividness, a power and a sweetness, too, that rank him with the great authors ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... that the object of all religious observances is better obtained, when the government of the church is confided to the wisdom and experience of the most venerated among the people, than when it is placed in the hands of every tinker and tailor who chooses to claim a share in it. Nor is this the only evil attending the want of a national religion, supported by the State. As there is no legal and fixed provision for the clergy, it is hardly ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope
... Who's your sarvant now?' says the chap, docking up his chin as impident as a tinker's dog. I felt my fingers itching to give the fellow a polthogue[3] in the ear; but I thought I might as well keep myself paceable in a strange place—so I only gave him a contemptible look, and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... the people and the watchfulness of the police prevented the public disorders that such license might have occasioned. These seeming anomalies abounded on every side. From the gaming-table where a tinker might set a ducat against a prince it was but a few steps to the Broglio, or arcade under the ducal palace, into which no plebeian might intrude while the nobility walked there. The great ladies, who were subject to strict sumptuary laws, and might not display their jewels or try ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... perfection of a mari, of whom she had been boasting all the way. The incredulous listeners, whom she had so annoyed, now revenged themselves by sundry depreciatory remarks on the appearance of this phoenix, whom they pronounced to have the air of a tinker or old clothesman, and by no means that of the ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... question, Emma," reproved old Grandma Watterby severely. "Here, Betty, you sit next to me, and Bob can have Will's place. He's gone over to Flame City with a bolt he wants the blacksmith to tinker up." ...
— Betty Gordon at Boarding School - The Treasure of Indian Chasm • Alice Emerson
... here yesterday may deserve the appellation. You may perhaps be more interested to hear that I sprained my foot, and am just recovering from the effects of the accident by means of opodeldoc which I bought at the tinker's. For all trades and professions here lie in a most delightful confusion. The druggist sells hats; the shoemaker is the sole bookseller, if that dignity may be allowed him on the strength of the three Welsh Bibles, and ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... uproar, the Rector entered the village, and was coming full upon Scourhill and his retinue when the ass made a sudden halt before the door of a tinker, its master, and threw its rider upon a large heap of mire. The youth instantly started up, and, without ever looking behind him to thank his attendants for the procession, he ...
— Forgotten Tales of Long Ago • E. V. Lucas
... gentle and painstaking craft that their writers have before now exhibited elsewhere. Here are no sensational happenings; the drama of the tales is wholly emotional. My own favourites are the first, called "The Little Tinker," a half-ironical study of the temptation of a tramp mother to surrender her child to the blessings of civilisation; and how, by the intervention of a terrible old woman, the queen of the tribe, this momentary weakness was overcome. My other choice, the last tale ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 152, Feb. 7, 1917 • Various
... each other, there was ever to be found the fierce wrangle of Remonstrant and Contra-Remonstrant, the hissing of red-hot theological rhetoric, the pelting of hostile texts. The blacksmith's iron cooled on the anvil, the tinker dropped a kettle half mended, the broker left a bargain unclinched, the Scheveningen fisherman in his wooden shoes forgot the cracks in his pinkie, while each paused to hold high converse with friend or foe on fate, free- will, or absolute foreknowledge; losing ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... that, when he got old and found himself poor, not being able to work, but still able to scrape a few airs upon a violin, he had endeavored to procure one, but in vain. At last his good, kind nephew Eustache, who was apprenticed to a tinker, had made him one out of a tin-plate. "And an excellent one, too," he added; "and my poor boy Eustache brings me here in the morning when he goes to work, and fetches me away in the evening when he returns, and the receipts are not so bad sometimes—as, when he was out ...
— Great Violinists And Pianists • George T. Ferris
... You Englishmen take more time to think. The Germans do their work with the most patience and deliberation. We boys desire a holiday. Come on, my men; I will lead you. I, your teacher, desire your success. You, my pupils, are attentive. I called on Tom, the tinker. Friends, countrymen, and lovers, hear me for ...
— Graded Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... be recollected, was born in 1628, at Elstow, near Bedford, where the cottage stood in its original state till within these few years. It has latterly been new fronted, but the interior remains nearly as in Bunyan's time. He was the son of a tinker, and followed his father's trade; and at Elstow are the remains of a closet in which, in early life, he carried on business. During the civil war he served as a soldier in the parliament army; and subsequently ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 368, May 2, 1829 • Various
... I was a cobbler it should be my pride The best of all cobblers to be; If I was a tinker, no tinker beside Should mend an ...
— Childhood's Favorites and Fairy Stories - The Young Folks Treasury, Volume 1 • Various
... explored the house and garden, there seemed nothing left to do for Oliver but to stroll up and down the drive, stare through the tall gates at the motors going by, or to spend hours in the garage, sitting on a box and watching Jennings, the chauffeur, tinker with the big car that was so seldom used. Janet was able to amuse herself better, but her brother, by the third day, had reached a state of disappointed boredom that was almost ready, at any small thing, to flare out into open revolt. The ...
— The Windy Hill • Cornelia Meigs
... very long brown cloak, and a very white cap, without bonnet. Her face was brown, but it had plainly once been fair. She led a little barefooted child about two years old by the hand, and said her husband, who was a tinker, was gone before with the other children. I gave her a piece of bread. Afterwards, on my road to Ambleside, beside the bridge at Rydal, I saw her husband sitting at the roadside, his two asses standing beside him, ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... backwoodsman; he must make his own farm or his immediate community a self-sufficing unit; he must get from his own land bread and meat and clothing for his family; he must be stock-raiser, grain-grower, farrier, tinker, soap-maker, tanner, chandler—Jack-of-all-trades and master of none. With the railroad he gained access to markets and the opportunity to specialize in one kind of farming; he could now sell his produce and buy in ...
— The Agrarian Crusade - A Chronicle of the Farmer in Politics • Solon J. Buck
... half again as much as any of the others, though this was really all his own doing. Besides his usual share of the luggage he had pots and pans and skillets sticking out in all directions, so that he presented the appearance of a traveling tinker. ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts Snowbound - A Tour on Skates and Iceboats • George A. Warren
... a tinker's dam for me," said Farwell bluntly. "That's not saying what I think of her. I'm no ladies' man—don't pretend to be. Let that go. I suppose I'll be blamed for young McCrae's arrest. Well, I didn't know a thing about ...
— Desert Conquest - or, Precious Waters • A. M. Chisholm
... expedition. The gray old strategists do not care for this. It is fair to them to say they are not sordid. They care no more for the financial exhaustion of a nation than for the slaughter of its young men. "An old soldier like me," said Napoleon, "does not care a tinker's damn for the death of a million men." Neither does he care for the collapse of ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... Jason Denor a Doctor of Padua takes notice of the same as a very absurd Error: Aristotle heretofore for a like fault reprehended the Megarensians, who observ'd no Decorum in their Theater, but brought in mean persons with a Train fit for a King and cloath'd a Cobler or Tinker in a Purple Robe: In vain doth Veratus in his Dispute against Jason Denor, to defend those elaborately exquisite discourses, and notable sublime sentences of his Pastor Fido, bring some lofty Idylliums of ...
— De Carmine Pastorali (1684) • Rene Rapin
... the contrary, the censorship, though it learns an awful lot, doesn't care a tinker's hoot about nine-tenths of the stuff it learns. It isn't concerned with Private Jones's morals, with Corporal Brown's unpaid grocery bills, with Sergeant Smith's mother-in-law, with Lieutenant Johnson's ...
— The Stars & Stripes, Vol 1, No 1, February 8, 1918, - The American Soldiers' Newspaper of World War I, 1918-1919 • American Expeditionary Forces
... into common use. One hundred years after Wiclif it yet speaks his language in large part, for that part had really lived. In the Bibliotheca Pastorum Ruskin makes comment on Sir Philip Sidney and his metrical version of the Psalms in these words: "Sir Philip Sidney will use any cow-boy or tinker words if they only help him to say precisely in English what David said in Hebrew; impressed the while himself so vividly of the majesty of the thought itself that no tinker's language can lower it or vulgarize it in his ...
— The Greatest English Classic A Study of the King James Version of • Cleland Boyd McAfee
... the story where his mother had left off; "then he went to a 'fair, thatched inn,' you know, and he sat drinking with the tinker, the peddler, and the beggar, when the two rich brothers from Fountains Abbey came out to start again on their journey to York. Little John thought there'd be some fun, and perhaps some good money for him, ...
— John and Betty's History Visit • Margaret Williamson
... moss-grown; it was worm-eaten; it was broken right in the middle; through its four socketless eyes, neighboured by the nettle, peered the thistle,—the thistle! a forest of thistles!—and, to complete the degradation of the whole, those thistles had attracted the donkey of an itinerant tinker; and the irreverent animal was in the very act of taking his luncheon out of the eyes and jaws ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... all the other things which we have laid out you may bring to me today or tomorrow." And he gave his name and address. Then he went back to the table to finish his beer. Only one of his former companions was sitting there, a master-tinker. ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... gambler. "I don't even know what the fight was about, and I don't care a tinker's whoop either. I got you here to give you a chance to put Van Buren out of commission and make a ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... I call a success. I don't care a tinker's darn for the prizes, but the way you boys built up to the girls last night warmed the sluggish blood in my old veins. Even if Cotton did claim a dance or two with the oldest Vaux girl, if Theo and her don't make the riffle now—well, they simply ...
— A Texas Matchmaker • Andy Adams
... year, have been in search of a particular rock, somewhere on the mountains in the vicinity of Shelburne Falls, which is supposed to contain some valuable ore; but they cannot find it. One man in the bar-room observed that it must be enchanted; and spoke of a tinker, during the Revolutionary War, who met with a somewhat similar instance. Roaming along the Hudson River, he came to a precipice which had some bunches of singular appearance embossed upon it. He knocked off one of the hunches, ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne |
